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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're TBPN. That voice changer does not work. It's too much. It's Tuesday, 07/07/2026. We're live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of invest like the best watch streams.
Speaker 1:We got invest like the best on in the background. Do we have audio? No. But does it matter? No.
Speaker 1:No. It's just as compelling
Speaker 2:with the sound off.
Speaker 1:Yes. It is. As I heard Jeremy talk about, there's a lot of episodes that people don't even watch and yet they are the most impactful things in the entire world. And, you know, it's a great episode. We we threw it on on the big screen as sort of a joke.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's funny to watch a podcast on a massive screen like it's a World Cup game.
Speaker 2:Viewing.
Speaker 1:I couldn't turn it off. I kept getting both sucked back into it. Fantastic episode, Jeremy and Patrick. Always fun in conversation. Also, the best part of that episode, there's a ramp ad in it.
Speaker 1:We got a ramp ad for you here too. Time is money. Save both. These are used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. But the actual news, the actual news.
Speaker 2:Well, should we talk about the show?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about the show.
Speaker 2:Alex Hormozi in the Ultradome.
Speaker 1:In the Ultradome.
Speaker 2:Live in person. We're gonna be talking about bro splits Yes. Agents, mindset Everything. Content, community, sales, pricing.
Speaker 1:So Hormozi and I both started our YouTube channels the same year within like a couple months of each other. And we were both doing like somewhat business y content. Obviously, was focused around like Silicon Valley history. And he was doing more like coaching small business, scale ups, growth stuff. And he just absolutely destroyed me.
Speaker 1:It was insane because I think I had like maybe 10,000 followers and I saw his account when he had like 5,000 followers. And then he just went on this absolute run to get millions and millions of subscribers. And I plateaued at like a couple 100 k. And I was like, he's he's just built different.
Speaker 2:A few 100. Few 100. 450 k.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 450 k. Not bad. I mean, the
Speaker 2:Honest work. I'm proud of the channel.
Speaker 1:Honest work. A lesson in total addressable market there. His Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because he was
Speaker 1:but seriously, he took it so much more seriously than me. He had a whole team. He was putting up multiple hour videos every single day, short form, Instagram. He really understood how to be a media company, whereas I was just like, nah, this is just my blog. Bigger Tam Yep.
Speaker 2:And better execution.
Speaker 1:100%.
Speaker 2:Mean, it's it's just it's worth saying.
Speaker 1:It's no. It's it's just actually true. And and I mean, it's a testament to he was base he said and I was
Speaker 3:There's levels.
Speaker 1:There's levels. Yeah. Exactly. I And was like, oh, like, we both started around the same time. We're both taking this pretty seriously.
Speaker 1:Nope. Yeah. It was really, really good. It was fun to watch. So he's been on an absolute run, set the world record for fastest book sales ever, something like that.
Speaker 1:Huge record on on becoming he has a Guinness book world record for for how successful his book launch was. Really? No. This is this is true. It's on the Wiki.
Speaker 1:And I don't know if I have the actual stat here. Let me pull let me pull up the actual stat. So he broke the Guinness Book world record for fastest selling non fiction book last year, 08/16/2025. His book $100,000,000 money models officially sold. My god.
Speaker 1:2,900,000 copies within the first twenty four hours. That is insane generating over a $100,000,000 in total launch.
Speaker 2:Read me the title again.
Speaker 1:It's called $100,000,000 money models. It generated over a $100,000,000 in total Power. In the total launch.
Speaker 2:Manifested. Yes.
Speaker 1:He did manifest it. It's a it's a wild story. He has so many different anecdotes to share. He's a fantastic podcast guest wherever he is appearing and we're very excited to have him join the
Speaker 2:show today. Twenty three minutes.
Speaker 1:Before we
Speaker 2:For now.
Speaker 1:Get into the news, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So the big news of the day is that China has taken a page out of Washington's playbook potentially and aiming to limit the export of AI models.
Speaker 1:Now these are just meetings at this point, but Chinese authorities have reportedly, this is according to Reuters, held meetings with some of the country's top tech firms. That's Alibaba, ByteDance, Z dot ai, DeepSeek, High Flyer, mentioned yet, but you have to imagine that they'll be in the conversation if they aren't already about potentially restricting overseas access to China's most advanced models. So they're thinking about doing the same thing that's happening with GPT 5.6, SOL, Ultra, Mythos, Fable, all these different models that are starting to get more restricted as they get more powerful. The government wants a say in what companies and what nongovernmental organizations what governmental organizations have access to them. So the discussions are still preliminary.
Speaker 1:When
Speaker 2:when did in AI 2027 did China wake up?
Speaker 1:Right around this time. Right around this time.
Speaker 2:Mid twenty twenty
Speaker 1:six. I actually have on my calendar, check on Jack Clark for today because because last year, December 23, Jack Clark predicted that there would be big changes and acceleration in mid twenty twenty six. He said, so by summer of twenty twenty six, it will be as though the digital world is going through some kind of fast evolution with some parts of it emitting a huge amount of heat and light and moving with counterintuitive speed relative to everything else, great fortunes will be won and lost here, and the powerful engines of our silicon creation will be put to work, further accelerating this economy and further changing things. Do you think that's where we are? Is that an accurate assessment of mid twenty twenty six?
Speaker 1:When I saw this prediction, I put a calendar reminder for mid twenty twenty six. We're right in the middle of the year, and I wanted to check-in and say, does it feel like this? Obviously, this is not a quantitative benchmark. This is a qualitative feeling. Fast evolution, emitting a huge amount of heat and light, moving with counterintuitive speed relative to everything else.
Speaker 1:Great fortunes certainly are being won and lost every day in the market. Tyler, how would you assess the amount of heat and light emitting from some parts of the digital world? Would you say it's huge?
Speaker 3:I would say it's huge. It's huge. It's kind of hard like I feel like I've been like very tapped in for like a long time. So it's
Speaker 2:hard to say like
Speaker 1:You've been yeah. You've been feeling
Speaker 3:It's hard to see like an outside view is like, is this actually like is has there been a big change like recently?
Speaker 1:Yes. So there's two things. Like one
Speaker 2:It's been kind of like a personal thing for you being so tapped in. Would you say that?
Speaker 1:So there's I mean there's two things going on. One is that anyone Angel has
Speaker 2:been like a personal thing for Tyler. He's been so tapped in for so long.
Speaker 4:It's
Speaker 3:No. It's like it's so much of news coming out of DC Yeah. Of the past like two, three months has been about AI, which is like definitely was not true
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:You know, even earlier this year, I
Speaker 1:would Yes. The just the amount of heat and light around cybersecurity issues, the coding models, the agentic capabilities, the revenues that we would see in enterprise, those have not been a shock to AI insiders who have been tracking the capabilities of these models since last October or even last summer when models started when vibe coding was coined by Andre Carpathi and coding became, you know, not solved, but, you know, greatly enhanced
Speaker 2:by artificial back to AI 2027
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Which was published April 3 Yes. 2025. By late twenty twenty six, they had or sorry. Mid twenty twenty six was China wakes up. In China, the CCP is starting to feel the AGI.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Export controls and lack of government support have left China under resourced compared to the West. I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. Hawks Hawks and the CCP warn that the growing race towards AGI can no longer be ignored. So they finally commit to the big AI push that they had previously tried to avoid.
Speaker 2:He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Creating an information sharing mechanism for AI companies. So right now, they're just looking at export controls.
Speaker 4:Feels like we're a little
Speaker 1:bit behind on this.
Speaker 2:It's possible the CCP is just reading this as a guide and just implementing it. They're just planning to implement it to Thanks a
Speaker 4:for the job.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thanks.
Speaker 1:Did my job.
Speaker 2:Thanks for the playbook. Yeah. You should've you should've billed me for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. The real the real four d chess here is to shame the CCP into not copying off of AI twenty twenty seven saying, oh, really? You're just doing the AI 2027 thing? Come on.
Speaker 1:You don't need to invest in AI. Don't be memetic with our with our philosopher's literature and our most popular podcast over here in America. Think of your own strategy. Come on, boy. Do whatever.
Speaker 1:No. So the discussions around AI export controls in China are still preliminary. And it isn't clear how Beijing could claw back access to models that they've already released. If they're on Hugging Face, you can download them. You can run them.
Speaker 1:And even if they had some sort of intellectual property, they could sue an open source inference provider for running Kimi or something like that. That feels really difficult to do from Beijing. But there are other implications. So once open weight models are posted publicly, of course, they can be copied, mirrored, downloaded, reused anywhere fine tuned. But there are several ways China could restrict future frontier models before they leave the country.
Speaker 1:At the lightest end, Beijing could require companies to file future releases with regulators or submit them for national security review before publishing model waits. A more aggressive version would require government approval before any advanced model could be released overseas. And at the most restrictive end, China could simply ban the public release of frontier open weight models. They could say, no more open sourcing. Although the game theory there is a little odd because it feels like the fact that China has been open sourcing near near frontier capabilities has been to it to China's benefit in general because it it creates, like, more disturbances.
Speaker 1:Like, the deep sea
Speaker 2:moment was definitely good for China. Pressure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pricing pressure. So they could limit these to state approved customers or Chinese government priorities, which at a certain level might just be the most important thing to do. The RSI loop, of course, you want all of the GPUs that you have focusing on advancing the frontier internally as opposed to sending it off to America. The talks come as The US is also moving toward tighter control of frontier AI.
Speaker 1:The Trump administration recently restricted access to Anthropics' most advanced models, Fable five and Mythos five before later lifting some of those controls after additional safety mitigations. OpenAI has also reportedly faced government pressure around the rollout of its next frontier models. The issue has become more urgent because Chinese open weight models are increasingly competitive. Z dot ai's GLM 5.2, in particular, recently impressed Silicon Valley by performing close to leading U. S.
Speaker 1:Models at a much lower cost. The Quan family of models from Alibaba has also become one of the most important open model ecosystems in the world, while ByteDance's Daobao is one of China's most widely used domestic AI systems. I didn't know about that. If China places export controls on future frontier models, it could raise costs for American AI users and companies because it's obviously very beneficial to have a great open source model available to you and and use them for lower stakes tasks while reserving expensive US frontier models for their most important workloads. If the best Chinese models are no longer freely available abroad, some of that cheap model supply disappears, but you have to ask what happens to Meta.
Speaker 1:Do other labs start piling back into the open source ecosystem and more? Or will all the demand just go straight back to the frontier labs?
Speaker 2:It really sucks.
Speaker 1:That's the question. It really does. It really does. We should play some clips because
Speaker 2:We need to be thinking about podcast safety because this is an addictive
Speaker 1:There should be export controls on this. It should be only available to American citizens. They should Patrick Even though
Speaker 2:even though one of the one of the the
Speaker 1:One one of
Speaker 2:the is Canadian. Yes.
Speaker 1:But maybe maybe North America. Let's pull up a clip from this. I wanna I wanna hear Jeremy chat about all sorts of things. They they go all over. Where in the timeline is
Speaker 2:Well, should we talk about SK Hynix's new listing?
Speaker 1:Yes. We can run through that and then we can pull up
Speaker 2:SK Hynix is set to raise around 28,000,000,000 in a Nasdaq share sale this week, potentially one of the largest ever New York listings by an Asian company. The South Korean memory chip maker is already public in Seoul where its stock is up than 750% over the past year. But the US listing gives American investors an easier way in. The story is big on the timeline because situational awareness, the hedge fund run by Leopold, Oschin Breaks may participate along side, Bally, Gifford and Co too. Together, the firms could take as much as 7,000,000,000 of the deal.
Speaker 2:SK Hynix has become one of the purest AI infrastructure plays because it leads in HBM, has become a key Nvidia partner, and now has a market cap around 1,100,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Which is like a quadrillion won.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a lot.
Speaker 1:When you look it up, it's very confusing, I think.
Speaker 2:It's a lot.
Speaker 1:The business ripping twenty twenty five revenue grew 47% to $63,000,000,000 Profit more than doubled. $28,000,000,000 in profit. Q1 revenue tripled year over year. But interestingly, the stock only trades at 7x forward earnings because memory is brutally cyclical. And there's still a lot of people that are wondering what happens if there's another leg up in the AI demand and the AI build out.
Speaker 1:Will that mean more competitive pressure? Will it be a bottleneck where they do stagnate? How much can they actually grow? And so many investors that are just in memory have seen booms and busts from cloud or smartphone or crypto, and they say, like, I don't know that this one's gonna last forever. I'm pattern matching to previous cycles, not thinking about this as a different technology cycle.
Speaker 1:So I think that's what's going on with SK Hynix. But it should be a blockbuster IPO, nevertheless. Very interesting to see an Asian company listed
Speaker 2:And in America. Most, you know, notable Yeah. Part of this deal is is obviously situational awareness Yeah. And and their participation They in they cover They do. Invest like the best, the billion dollar PDF Yes.
Speaker 2:Idea that that Jeremy and Patrick have talked about before. But situational awareness is turning out to be more of a maybe a 10 or $100,000,000,000 PDF.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Seriously. And the whole investing thesis built around that. It's just a PDF. I I don't know.
Speaker 1:Is it an essay? A thesis?
Speaker 3:If if so, if the PDF was worth a billion or or more than that, what was the door cash episode worth? Oh. It's gotta be some percentage of it. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Definitely. Because a lot of people watch the podcast, watch the clips, scroll through the PDF. It's also
Speaker 2:Breaking news. Meta unveils Muse Image. Oh. It's first image generation model from MSL.
Speaker 1:Waiting for this. Let's pull up some images of this and see the results. It should be good given that they have all the Instagram and Facebook data to train on. While we pull up some images of the new Muse image model from Meta, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas.
Speaker 1:Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Do we have any of this or should we click over to Jeremy Giffon?
Speaker 2:I am working on pulling up Muse Image. Let's Here
Speaker 4:we go.
Speaker 2:Go through Alex Wang as a post. Cool. Let's pull this up.
Speaker 1:Okay. Muse Image, Muse Video, Muse Image. Whole bunch of very detailed badges printed all in one image. He says releasing Muse Image today, the first image generation model from MSL. It is crazy that they didn't have any, like when back when it was fair, did they do anything with Image?
Speaker 1:Did they? Because they had that amazing model segment anything, so they were doing work on images. And obviously, they processed a ton of images. It pairs with Muse Spark to reason through your prompts, search the web, and plan before it generates. People get what they mean on the first try live now in the Meta AI app.
Speaker 1:Very, very fun. Even puts a realistic QR code in there and can do infographics and old Polaroids as well. Big Sur, August 1983. Looks great. Three things Alex Wang is excited about under the hood.
Speaker 1:Self refinement. The model improves its own output within its chain of thought, emerged during RRL, not by design. Multi reference composition, many images blended into one coherent generation. Multi turn editing, iterate without losing coherence or starting over. Make an image of this person riding a bike, this bike, and wearing this suit while passing by these people on a park bench.
Speaker 1:Make it look like a drawing in this style. That's cool. So you can upload multiple images and sort of drop them in in his various prompts. What you got, Tyler?
Speaker 3:Yes. Meta Fair did release a number of image models.
Speaker 4:Oh, really?
Speaker 3:So there was think it's pronounced chameleon in 2023. There was emu also 2023. And then there was another like version of chameleon. I I think they were I they were somewhat different than the like diffusion, which was like popular at the time. I think they were all auto aggressive
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Which was like how you get the good tech stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 3:okay. But I believe this is a different
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 3:Game. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And Alex is also previewing Muse video, competitive on prompt adherence, visual fidelity, temporal consistency, coming to Meta AI. This has got to be GPU intensive if they actually roll this out to everyone. Although Meta AI does have a smaller install base than Instagram. But I mean, imagine And you really push this in Meta AI and all the GPUs for? You gotta you gotta get people generating stuff.
Speaker 1:I I completely agree. I think put this in the hands of the the modern Instagram creator. Let them have fun with it and see you already have the algorithm to filter the slop out. The stuff that is sloppy but still entertaining and creative will surface to the top. So congrats to them on a successful launch.
Speaker 1:Let's tell you about Railway. Railway is the only one intelligent cloud provider, user favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And let's click over to Jeremy Giffon on why he doesn't worry about AI taking jobs. A very, very interesting take on the latest episode.
Speaker 5:This idea of we're gonna run out of jobs. To me, it's like very obvious that every, certainly every white collar job is like totally fake and made up in the sense that like they are not contingent for shelter and food and medicine and other necessities. Most jobs do not touch those, or if they do, they touch it in a very, very derivative way. What is your job as an allocator? It's like, well, because capital is inherently inflationary, you have to you can't just leave it alone.
Speaker 5:And so like, my job is like when you have money and you don't want it to go away, you have to give it to someone. And so you you give it to a bunch of people, and then I take it and I put it into things that are productive and then hopefully you don't lose your money, you get more money and like, is this useful? Is this good? Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 5:But like, it's not real. And to me, there's like unlimited of jobs that you can create in those sorts of scenarios. We're gonna have unlimited wants and desires. And and and our economy is solely driven by our, like, unpretentable desire to consume things. So we're gonna need to consume.
Speaker 5:And now, again, in the short term and medium term, that might be volatile, there might be a lot of job loss, etcetera, and, you know, that's not good, and, you know, there could be a lot of despair. But in in in the long run, like, we're just gonna invent new things to do. Like, we've already solved all of our problems. Like, the worry about, oh, we're not gonna have more jobs. It just doesn't really resonate because I feel like they just make up stuff for us to do and that's sort of the whole point of it.
Speaker 2:That makes me think we need an invest like the best soundtrack. We
Speaker 1:do need an invest like the best soundtrack. Let's play the other clip that Patrick shared. The West Coast is definitely eating the East Coast.
Speaker 5:The founder is incredibly important and sort of the the founding act is incredibly important in in any business. I I do think that it's notable that, like, the current paradigm in which we live, the largest and most important finance firms come out of a culture of leveraged buyout, which it's extractive insofar as the primary goal is to make a thing more profitable. The core idea behind it is like using debt and financial engineering to make a lot of money in a way that the quality of the business itself is maybe ancillary to the core
Speaker 2:for a second. Afterglow says, my God. What an obnoxious soundboard. Unwatchable. Sorry.
Speaker 2:It is
Speaker 1:a little loud today. Feel like the soundboard's coming in a little bit hot. We're sorry about that. But we're having fun here. And of course, we don't wanna we don't wanna pirate the entire invest like the best episode.
Speaker 1:We gotta tease it a
Speaker 2:little would be a good use case for AI if we can make a separate show that's just the show, but an agent in real time With the sound board. The sound effect. And just has a normal show, no sound.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. So you can choose whether you want the sound board version of the show or the not or or the
Speaker 2:Tyler says don't be sorry. That's why I'm here. Tyler's just here for the sound board. So after the unfortunately, there's people that are here that don't like the soundboard. There's people that are here only because of the soundboard.
Speaker 2:Exactly. We are trying to find the middle ground, and we don't always get it right.
Speaker 1:It's sort of
Speaker 2:We don't always get it right, but we're trying to
Speaker 1:Sort of a cold war between the pro soundboard and the anti soundboard constituents in the audience. So we we we'll do our best. But Yeah. Today is a soundboard episode, so there's gonna be a couple. But I think the team did dial back the soundboard a little bit.
Speaker 1:So not too bad now. Okay. Well, revenge of the East Coast. The East Coast is trying to is trying to make a comeback. Jeremy Giffon says the West Coast is eating the East Coast, but the East Coast is trying to make a comeback across all of these big banks.
Speaker 1:Did you hear about this? They're going after the debit card rails. They're going after Visa. This is news today. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, and other big banks are reportedly exploring a deal to buy a Fiserv debit card network that would own let them own more of the payment rails that the customer's debit cards run on.
Speaker 1:So the basic idea is that post I think it was post financial crisis, there were limits on how much banks could make on debit card transactions. This is the Durbin Amendment.
Speaker 2:Durbin?
Speaker 1:The Durbin Amendment. I think Dick Durbin. And they want a way to turn debit back into a more valuable business. So Fiserv owns major debit networks including Star and Excele, which I don't run into that often. I usually see Visa, Mastercard, Amex.
Speaker 1:I mean, Amex doesn't have debit network. But Star and Accel already connect to millions of cardholders and thousands of financial institutions. So this is like a it's a real rail with an existing bank and merchant connectivity. And so this is like when Capital One bought Discover. They own the issuer, then they also own the network, and then they can move their own volume onto their own rails and capture more of the economics.
Speaker 1:So who loses if this goes through? Who should be upset about this? It's probably the merchants, Visa, and Mastercard. So merchants would probably see higher effective debit costs if banks find a way to route more volume through bank owned networks, while Visa and Mastercard would lose some leverage over US debit. But the bigger story is that payments are getting vertically rebundled.
Speaker 1:Banks want the account, the card, the network, the wallet, the fraud layer, and eventually, the AI agent checkout surface. So it's all very they I don't even think there's a real bid for the for Fiserv's debit networks just yet, but it's it's, like, starting to Screw it. Out that they're doing it. And I was interested to know, like, is this is this bullish for ramp because they sit on top of of networks? And I think it is generally positive and and because of the layer of abstraction they operate on.
Speaker 1:And I was wondering, like, is this an attack on Stripe? Is this a is this an attack on any particular West Coast tech startup that we know? And it seems like it's much more of an attack on Visa and Mastercard in particular, who have been driving up debit fees for them. Anyway, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 1:While
Speaker 2:Candor in the chat said to warm up the gong.
Speaker 1:He gotta warm up.
Speaker 2:So I had to warm it up for him. Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, the gong is warmed up. Maybe we need a couple more huge huge hits to fully warm it up. Did you wanna talk more about Fiat's next US car? You mentioned it when we were talking to Baijiu from Cowboy Space Company yesterday. The Topolino is coming to America.
Speaker 1:Tiny two seat electric micro car, they're calling it. It starts at $14,000. Almost half the price of the other electric golf cart that we talked about last, what was that, last Thursday we talked? Two Yeah. Two in.
Speaker 2:But you can fit a lot more people in the Amble.
Speaker 1:The Amble. Yes.
Speaker 2:That's right. I like this move from I like this move from Fiat.
Speaker 1:You like it.
Speaker 2:I think that their cars are generally serious.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And so I think it's good to just lean into lean into that.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:And I think they're trying to price this so that when people are thinking, hey, I need a new car.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Should I go out and buy like a crossover SUV or
Speaker 1:There's way anyone can consider this for their main car.
Speaker 2:It's impossible. No. But you can if you typically roll around with a handful of people and instead of buying one car
Speaker 1:Oh, you buy a bunch of them?
Speaker 2:For $60. Need a
Speaker 1:train of how you know the range on this thing? 46 miles. 46 miles. I mean, I guess if you have a 10 mile commute,
Speaker 2:you can commute here. They launch an EV with 46 of range.
Speaker 1:It's nothing.
Speaker 2:And they
Speaker 4:should have called
Speaker 2:it they should have called the
Speaker 3:Fiat it's less than 10 miles.
Speaker 1:Less than 10 miles.
Speaker 2:They should have called it the Fiat dice because every time you leave the house Yeah. You're rolling the dice.
Speaker 1:It's a thousand pounds. So you can dead lift it with another friend.
Speaker 2:It's There's Are you serious?
Speaker 1:Thousand pounds. Yeah. This thing's tiny. It's it's really truly like so so small.
Speaker 2:They're saying it's the cutest car ever made?
Speaker 1:Look at the speed. The top
Speaker 2:speed five miles an hour.
Speaker 1:That's with a street legal low speed vehicle kit. By default, it only goes 19 miles an hour. So how long would it take you to get here? 19 miles an hour? Thirty minutes?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thirty minutes. Wow.
Speaker 4:Not too bad. That's not too bad.
Speaker 1:Maybe maybe you gotta do it. Okay.
Speaker 2:You guys are laughing, but you won't be laughing when when I pull up to the office with A fleet of these? With with five of these.
Speaker 1:And you need a support car, like a Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. No. The the Topo the Topolino is the support. You just have you have a series of you just go train mode.
Speaker 1:Well, our next guest is the owner of a Hummer EV or at least was. We can talk to him about that. We can bring him on down whenever we want. You want him? Let me tell you about public first.
Speaker 1:Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Alright. Great.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Awesome. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks. Yeah. See you, man. Here. Grab that seat.
Speaker 4:Well, sit down
Speaker 1:for us. Do you still own Hummer EV?
Speaker 4:Yeah. We do, actually.
Speaker 1:You do? Yeah. Well, give us your review. We were just talking about the Fiat Topolino. I don't think you're gonna be in the market for that.
Speaker 1:Neck and neck. Neck and neck. It's a thousand pounds.
Speaker 4:So I
Speaker 1:think
Speaker 4:what we could do is, like, if you just lined up, like, 10 of the Fiat like my chariot.
Speaker 2:Damn. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. The Hummer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like it'd be my chariot.
Speaker 1:I think the Hummer's
Speaker 2:Imagine imagine if the Hummer's Literally nine of of the Hummer's kind of the front of the the train and then you have like you're you see the Hummer coming at you and then and then a bunch of the Topolinos kind of pull out in like a v shape.
Speaker 4:That's in Fury's style.
Speaker 2:That that would be badass. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Take over the whole hot smog.
Speaker 1:How is how is life these days? Good. Is there a new book coming?
Speaker 4:There is another book coming. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you have a strategy for book launch cadence? Is it an annual thing?
Speaker 4:It's more like every eighteen months.
Speaker 1:Eighteen months? Two years. Okay. But do you imagine that continuing for your entire career?
Speaker 4:Every book I write, say is the last book I'm going to write. And then I have like a six month refractory period. Mhmm. And I'm like, yeah, you know, I could could write a book about something and I start writing again.
Speaker 1:What's the process like?
Speaker 4:I have a bunch of notes on my phone of a topic. Because right now I have like probably like 10 books that are at different stages of so I just mind dump wherever. And then once there's enough stuff that I think this isn't like, is interesting, I'll then start the book writing process. But I'm a big believer in surface area of thought. Okay.
Speaker 4:Like, you were to sit down and say like, I'm gonna write a book about this and then you have two weeks, it's like you don't have enough experiences that are diverse in a two week period while you're writing Mhmm. To like let the paint dry.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:So I kinda wanna like have I wanna be in, you know, a totally different state, talk to somebody and be like, I didn't think about that. And then I add it to the book. So then all of a sudden, it's like the the the density of of thought and ideas per word is much higher. But I think you just have to do it by like spreading out the time that so, like, the time I'm thinking about a book is much longer than the time I'm writing the book.
Speaker 1:Is it purely thinking and you want a lot of thought to go into the different sections of the book? Or over the course of eighteen months, is there actually a benefit to going out and having real world experiences
Speaker 4:Oh, that's I mean, that's
Speaker 1:and anecdotes. Right?
Speaker 4:It's a 100% that. Because I'll have a working theory of like, think this is how Yeah. I think people are missing this part of it. Yeah. And then I'll kind of start battle testing it functionally.
Speaker 4:And then when I realize that I'm using the same framework over and over again and successfully overcoming some issue Yeah. I'm like, this is it. Yeah. And then that's what the book becomes.
Speaker 1:How narrow do you want to stay? How narrow have you been in the surface area of thought around mainly the last three books?
Speaker 4:It's a really good question. Problem definition for the book, think, is the hardest part of any book. Like, the leads book, which is the second book Yeah. Was the hardest book I've ever written. I'll never write a book that hard.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Because I was like, I'm gonna write a book on advertising. It's like, Jesus Christ. There's Yeah. So many ways to get leads.
Speaker 4:Yes. And I put it all in one book. It took 19 versions to get there. Yeah. Money Models book was the fastest book because it was really just about rappers for promotions.
Speaker 4:Super valuable, but really easy to consume and use.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And so I was like, okay, this is the lesson for me. Like, and offers, super narrow.
Speaker 1:Super narrow.
Speaker 4:And that book too was like, all three of those books started as one kind of gigantic thing and I gave it to somebody and they're like, dude, you cannot. Yeah. It was like this. And they're like because I was like, I'm gonna have a tome. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then I decided to want people actually read it.
Speaker 1:Is there a itch in the back of your mind where you wanna do sort of the Tim Ferriss thing where you go from four hour work week, a business book to chef, body, lifestyle, money management, personal finance. Like, there's so many topics that you talk about and people are interested. Yeah. And I'm sure you could sell those books and they might be edifying at a certain point because you're like, I've I've scratched this itch three times, four times, 10 times. But is there a level of focus that you have to discipline yourself or does it come naturally?
Speaker 4:I only write about stuff that I feel like I have some unique take on. I think rewriting a book that already exists, people already know.
Speaker 1:There's no
Speaker 4:point. Yeah. Especially if like you're in the thick of it and you're thinking, oh, this has already been written before. It doesn't really motivate you. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Like, I think it like, want to write something that only exists because I made it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Same thing with businesses. Like there's Oh, yeah. I've had the experience of building a company or or just like starting to work on a company being like, I can stop working on this and it will not matter all.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The world will be There's
Speaker 2:a bunch of alternatives, you know. And and that you can make that case for like most businesses. Yeah. But there are some where you're like, if I don't build this, no one's gonna build it at least in the right way.
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. I a 100% that perspective when it comes to book writing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's funny. As as we talk about this, Jeremy Giffon, I know he's a good good friend of yours, good friend of ours. And every time he talks, people just listen. Yeah. And he's somebody who I would love to write a book almost because I just want him to go on another podcast.
Speaker 2:I got proper podcast to where he just kinda pops up, doesn't vest like the best, and
Speaker 1:then goes
Speaker 2:goes dark for like eighteen months. But like it's somewhat of a tragedy that he'll probably write a book someday but it'll be in like forty years. In the meantime Big brain. Have to like little In the meantime, you have to just like, you know, take notes and and try to pick stuff up from from the podcast. But there's so many people that like, so many of people that should be writing books just don't have the time and they'll eventually come and take like a victory lap at the end of their career.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I think it's like, you could just do a lot of stuff other than write books. But it's but it's it's it's very valuable to be like writing in real time versus like saving up a bunch of lessons and then kinda summarizing it at the end.
Speaker 4:I think you miss out on the the the wrinkles, like the tiny little details that like if you if you think about like the story of how you met your wife and you go back, like you've told it a bunch of times, but if you told it the day after you did it Sure. You have so much richer memory of all the tiny little things that happened. Yeah. And so
Speaker 2:I'm a big believer
Speaker 4:of like, while it's wet, like paint it and then let it dry over time. But that's why I like I always want documentation to be as real
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's funny. The final book will actually be the easiest to write because you have all the books and you're like, okay, what what was actually like worth kind of Greatest hits at that point. We
Speaker 1:we had Mark Pancas on the show, founder Zynga. He wrote a book and he said that thinks everyone should write a book in their life, but he also said everyone should build a house. Do you have any aspirations to build real estate physically? Like me do it? You do it?
Speaker 2:No. No. Not by hand. Not by hand, but just take a bit take piece of dirt and turn it
Speaker 1:architect and team, but is that something that you know, a lot of people that's on their bucket list. I don't know where you've been in your real estate journey, but how do you think about that as a as a bucket list item?
Speaker 4:It's not. Why not? I mean, we buy big multifamily that are already existing and we do that. But if there were an investment opportunity that made sense, I would
Speaker 2:You're not interested because it's not productive. It's just not purely for like Yeah. You know, the like,
Speaker 4:you listened to like, thought about listening to Beyonce today? I'd be like, not really. But I mean, like, if it was on, sure. Sure. You know, I'm not against it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think some people just have the the itch to, like, customize their own living environment. I'm I'm curious about how you see your living environment. Because, I mean, from those first YouTube videos, like Yeah. The monastic were you in closet?
Speaker 1:You were in closet. Like like, that that was
Speaker 4:My business thoughts
Speaker 1:were I don't know if that was intentional, but it was it was somewhat deliberate. You picked that space over a big living room. Right? Yeah. And I'm wondering how you think about your your living space, your workspace, your office space today.
Speaker 4:So I would say all of the time that I when I work, I'm very intentional about that space. When I'm not working, it's whatever Leila wants.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:I don't care. Like, if she if she's 10% happier
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I have a like a percent to percent correlation to my happiness Mhmm. And me being more comfortable has no correlation back. So so, like, whatever she's good with, I'm good with.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But in terms of, like, where I work, it's almost all how do I how do I eliminate every sense of distraction for me personally. And so it's like, I don't have windows. Some people like having windows. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. For me, it's like, I need no stimulation because I'm I'm very distractible.
Speaker 4:And so I have to have like, I have earplugs in, no light, all artificial. I have, like, soundproof, like, you know, like, want nothing. Yeah. And then I can finally focus on what trying to work on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can we go back to the early YouTube days on the latest channel? I think 2020
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:In that closet. We both launched YouTube channels around the same time. And we were talking about this, you come you completely smoked me. Yeah. Was insane.
Speaker 2:Is, you know, obviously pretty good at media and but and was like the the his channel was like just following his interests like Silicon Valley history. The the execution was like by all means amazing. I got to like half a million subscribers.
Speaker 1:Treated like a blog and you treat it like a business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And it
Speaker 4:was like but it
Speaker 2:was a much smaller TAM Yep. And like when you compare the two channels and like your strategy, the execution was
Speaker 1:was like me and like I had one remote editor for years. I was like not monetizing, not really thinking about it as a business. But I'm interested to know on day one of of that YouTube channel, because I know you've done media stuff before, but like the the the the current media business. Mhmm. What was the team like?
Speaker 1:What was the strategy? How much time were you putting into it? Because I know you had exited some businesses. You had some space Yeah. To breathe, but how serious were and then what was the evolution of that?
Speaker 4:I'll walk you through Please.
Speaker 6:As fast
Speaker 4:as I can. So the first thing was I found any media editor, like an agency, and they're like, three YouTube videos a week is what we do. And I was like, alright, then that's what I'll do. Okay. And so I just webcammed, like, and I had a little suitcase that would open up so I could travel because Leila and I were traveling for the year Yeah.
Speaker 4:The sale. And so that's what I wherever we were, I was like, up. And then because at that time, I didn't have really any work. I had all these thoughts that I was like, I'm just gonna get them. I'm gonna dump them all out.
Speaker 4:And so that's basically what YouTube strategy one point o was. Yeah. I had somebody cold reach out, like legit Yeah. To when right as short started, they were like, I'll do everything. You already have YouTube stuff.
Speaker 4:I'm just gonna clip it. Just give me permission.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And I was like
Speaker 2:Oh, cool.
Speaker 4:That's amazing. So that's
Speaker 2:accidentally started clipping.
Speaker 4:A 100%. And so that was like, we were really early on shorts.
Speaker 1:So good.
Speaker 4:And then as soon as he did a pretty good job, he was like, you know, if I actually recorded you doing these, they'd do even better. And I was like, fine. But I only wanna do one day a quarter. And he was like, fine. So he'd fly out for one day and we do a 100 shorts in one sitting.
Speaker 4:100%. I would just do a 100 that that kind of style of filming and recording is pretty much how I still kind of rock that way, is like I want I prefer a marathon day. Like, I'd rather just start at, you know, six and then just rock until every ounce of juice is gone. And then it's like, great. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We'll do it again in a week or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're sort of like that marathon every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. One my questions is like No. What goes into a two hour YouTube video because you'll do these like master classes two hours and I'm like, that is insane. And then I'm like, I do three hours every day.
Speaker 1:So like
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Now it's become more possible. But I imagine that there's lots
Speaker 2:of But the three hours was kind of like just going until we got tired. Yeah. Like by three hours, we're usually like, okay, like probably need to go to the bathroom. Yeah. Probably wanna eat some food.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and this show is much less structured. But when you're when you're thinking about like the portfolio, like Yeah. You the volume is just incredibly important to everything in media these days. You agree with that?
Speaker 4:Oh, a 100%. Where Volume negates luck. Volume negates luck. Volume answer. Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's like on our wall at HQ.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What formats are you most excited about for 2026, 2027?
Speaker 4:Live interactive.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Separate and together.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:So just going live, like, with the audience, Twitch style Yep. YouTube live style.
Speaker 1:And that was the book launch strategy. Right? Was that your first because you've done
Speaker 4:live No. I've done lives before, but that was obviously intentional. And then and then interactive, which is not like sure, there's chat interactive, but like, how do I bring the audience in so that we can talk? That's where you see the first, it was CashCals, now it's Scale or Fail,
Speaker 1:which is
Speaker 4:the show we just launched. We're doing we're doubling down really hard on that because if you think in the world of AI, it's like, what are the things that can't be faked? Yeah. It's peep you know, like, I want stakes. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So for example, like, if MrBeast's store videos, if it was not a real $5,000,000 or not a real Lamborghini, the stakes disappear. Yeah. Now to be fair, there's for sure other like, a fictional story, the whole thing we know is fake and we're fine with it, And the story is the story and AI will crush that. Yeah. But people still want stakes.
Speaker 4:Like right now, chess is more popular than it's ever been, but like humans haven't been able to beat computers for a long time. Yeah. And so there are definitely these some areas where we want the drama, we want the stakes. And so I don't think that's going to change at all.
Speaker 1:I love the series that you've been doing with entrepreneurs that attend They stand up. They give you the it's so so good. I I just love all those
Speaker 4:Live interactive.
Speaker 1:Live interactive.
Speaker 4:A 100%.
Speaker 1:I'm interested to know how you think legacy media will fit into your media strategy going forward. Is it about prestige? Is there actually an audience there still? Because you're part of the new guard Yeah. And yet you signed with CIA.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. I'm sure you have the ability to walk into a large media company and get a TV show.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? Is that something that's interesting to you? What would the value be
Speaker 4:to I think it's distribution that I don't have access to.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:So like, I think one of the biggest, like, unspoken advantages that exist right now in media is Dave Ramsey
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Has been murdering for thirty, forty years. Because he has 600 radio stations syndicated. Everyone's like, radio is dead. It's like, he's murdering it. Yes.
Speaker 4:It because no one's looking. So like I I'm I'm an equal opportunist when it comes to attention. Yeah. And so even if it's less or more, if it's something that's completely in this other bubble over here that I have I have no access to.
Speaker 2:And and the beauty is like there's still like closer to like there's no monopoly online. Right? The feed is like Mhmm. Just get anybody can log on and it's beautiful because anyone can log on. You don't have to have an audience.
Speaker 2:You can suddenly have an audience. Maybe it's one video. Maybe it's a flash in the pan. But TV still, like, if you can figure out the right lane, you have this sort of like differentiated access to attention. And so it's like a different group of people and it's differentiated access that's not just like log on immediately have access.
Speaker 4:And when something super pops, like you look at all the real estate shows that have come out, you've got Selling Sunset, Sirhan has his show, like like there's a huge distribution base that they gain access to as a result of that. All you have to do is look at those stars, look at their look at their social media
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I would say this is I say this lovingly. It's pretty weak in terms of what they're doing. Sure. But their following exactly. But their following is still really showing because it's carried over.
Speaker 4:Yep. And so I'm like, if those people actually tried on this side and had someone and per it's like, how do we get it all? Yeah. Right? And that's kind of the
Speaker 1:the I think this is just underrated broadly for mostly tech people. They see the trend of the Internet growing exponentially or ecommerce.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And they think, oh, well, in a couple years, like, 100% of everything will be bought online. It's like, no, retail still exists and, you know, for certain categories, you probably need to be in retail as well. And the same thing with, you know, the aging audiences on radio or TV, they're still there. They have they they still watch and so interesting. What about the level of production polish?
Speaker 1:I imagine that there's a trade off there if you go with something more produced that's not just you opening your laptop and and yapping. Right? You can get so you can you can get stuck in like the production quagmire
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:If you're trying to build the Mona Lisa or or some incredible show. At the same time, there's prestige that comes with that. There's a new level of authority. How do you think about that trade off?
Speaker 4:I think it's barbell. Mhmm. So it's either like make it the Mona Lisa Yeah. And like play to win that game Mhmm. Or you're in the volume game.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And the volume is just value per second and just trying to get as many of those seconds out as you possibly can.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And like I just think it's it's it's both. And they're I think they serve they serve different objectives. To your point of, like, you gain authority in different ways, it's definitely there's an element that it shifts the brand. Yeah. There's access to new distribution and eyeballs.
Speaker 4:All of that happens over here. Yeah. But over here, I think, is where you get a lot of the closer to buying behavior or not. And so I see this as more top of funnel and this is like closer to middle and bottom. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Obviously, you can get discoverability. Like I said, this is full stack, but you get way closer to purchase on the side.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there can we offer you a Diet Coke? We offer
Speaker 4:you anything?
Speaker 1:We have a variety of beverages if you'd like.
Speaker 2:What's a category of business that you haven't built or invested in that you're excited to at some point?
Speaker 4:I'm still looking for the the magical med spa. I think med spas are super I love pseudo medical.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Because you
Speaker 2:What's maxing?
Speaker 4:Yeah. All of it. Well, think about it, like, there's this aging population that has more money than anyone else. They don't want to age. They see the Brian Johnsons.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Like, it is the zeitgeist of right now of, like, I wanna live forever. I wanna look beautiful and young forever. And they have all the money. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And so if you look at the demand side of that, it's huge. Yeah. When you look at the supply Mhmm. Med spas are are they're still wildly understaffed. And I know this because I see business owners every single week.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so I have, like, there's a handful of categories right now that I'll meet business owners and they're doing better than they should be. Like, there's some business owners I meet.
Speaker 2:I met a med spa owner when I first moved to LA. They had started their business and within a year, they were doing like 1,200,000 of like like straight free cash flow off of like $400,000 invested. Yeah. It was like actually unbelievable. Yes, the entrepreneur in this case was like very talented.
Speaker 4:He watches this news. Oh, yeah. He's great though.
Speaker 2:No. But this was this was, But you know, years yeah. I'm I'm surprised that also like differentiated shots at that category. Because if you look at like I would expect Brian Johnson to do something like this. Right?
Speaker 2:Because there's a lot of people that follow him. And he has, you know, as many maybe He probably has like 10 times as many like critics as he does people that are like, I'm gonna do exactly what he's gonna do. But that group of people that will just like copy what he's doing is actually pretty pretty meaningful. Right? So Huge.
Speaker 2:MedsBoss, you go into these like high ticket kind of like procedures, treatments, things like that. To me, that's where I think he could really start to print.
Speaker 4:He had 1,200 people apply for his million dollar per year thing. 1,200. Do that math. Yeah. Real fast.
Speaker 4:That's right.
Speaker 2:That's a lot
Speaker 4:of money. And then there was a $60,000 per year thing that was underneath and multiply that by just probably an order of magnitude greater.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Wildly underestimated. So you take that and then you have these 10,000 or 15,000 med spas that exist.
Speaker 1:It's like
Speaker 4:it's nothing. And the it's super fragmented because still no one's really like gobbled that up well. Not that that I've seen. And to your point of like, when I asked them like, so what are you doing right now to get your 6,000,000 a year top line and, you know, 40% margins? And they're like, kinda just, you know, we just opened up and put the sign up and you just did a good job.
Speaker 4:And and, know, know, people customers tell customers, you know, that's not how it fucking works.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's not how it's gonna work No.
Speaker 4:They're just in a completely supply constrained environment. They just don't know it because when you're on the inside, don't know. You're like, oh, I'm doing a job.
Speaker 1:Is part of the problem that a lot of the med spa, like, founders get a little bit too sucked into the bio hacker nature of these things and it feels a little bit too scientific.
Speaker 2:I think it's that at all. I think it's like it's it's so short term. A lot of the med spas, I think, are like very short term cosmetic driven. Like, how do we make you look good for the next three to six months? Which is not necessarily what makes you look good over the next three to six years Sure.
Speaker 2:Or over the next few decades.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So that's at least generally There's
Speaker 4:a slice for Johnson to attack, which he obviously he's a very smart dude.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How would you attack the problem? Roll up?
Speaker 1:Find a bunch of operators, put them together? Start start something from scratch?
Speaker 4:I mean yeah. I mean, the roll of bottle would make the most sense. Yeah. The thing is is like de novo is not that expensive. Sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And if you are a good operator, you can go in to smash. Yeah. Yeah. Because when when when people are coming in when your when your CAC is zero and your and your gross margins on these services are absurd Mhmm.
Speaker 4:The the actual difficulty in that model right now is getting the talent for the technicians because because it's supply constrained at the business level, it's also supply constrained at the talent level. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so And it's so easy for them to open up a door. Exactly.
Speaker 4:They hang their own chindle, they take the customers, and, like, that's the issue that those companies have. And so the key to really winning that game is having a really good talent strategy for how do I make their lifestyles? How do I how do I compensate them as directly as possible on what they're generating?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And get it to the point where my godfather is in wealth management. And he's a really cool model. He'd managed several billion dollars and he but he started at nothing and built it all himself. And his big thing was and his big thing was basically letting the other person have a little more.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so it's like, he'll he's like, I'll give you 51 so that you don't ever want to leave Sure. But then you do all the work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It probably looks more like a law firm over time.
Speaker 4:Yeah. A 100%. It's more of a partner to be fair, if you've been to any of these, I would say it's a high touch service. They're they're not loyal to the business. They're loyal to the girl who does her injections or does their lasers or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so it's like we just got to tie those people in like a partner firm.
Speaker 2:Speaking of Brian Johnson, do you care at all about living forever?
Speaker 4:I don't even think about it. Mhmm. I expect to die. I would prefer not to, but like, I'm good I'm good either way. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Like, I I think Marcus really has said, the the old and the young lose the same thing when they die, which is the present. That's all we got.
Speaker 2:So, yeah. I love it. I'm a similar way. I wanna have a full life, but I never at any point in my life have I thought, oh, it would just be the best thing ever if I could never die.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Going back to sort of core audience Yeah. I think of like the sweet spot is like mid market owner operator founder types. Is that roughly accurate?
Speaker 4:Yeah. 1 to 50,000,000.
Speaker 1:1 to 50,000,000. What is the expansion opportunity? Is there a business for you where you're giving keynotes at Fortune 500 companies? Motivational speaking for like, you know, middle managers at No interest. Companies?
Speaker 1:Or or or is it getting people on the founder journey who are leaving companies, breaking out into their own and going from zero to 1,000,000? What do
Speaker 4:you Well, from an expansion opportunity, like, think there's still plenty of people in the one fifty million who don't know who I am and haven't consumed my stuff or whatever. So, like, plenty But the like, if I just focus there Yeah. I get the zero to a million Sure. Anyways. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Because if you're helping people go from one to 10, people are like, can probably help me go from one to zero to one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so I'm super broadly zooming out. Mhmm. I'm a big fan of capitalism. And I think as many people as possible participating in free market is a good thing for the country and for that person and for everyone else that they serve.
Speaker 4:And so I would like as many people to taste that that that forbidden fruit as humanly possible, and so I try and make it as simple and as easy as possible for people to get started.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What mistakes do you see entrepreneurs making around AI? Because I'll give you one. Oh. The the small business owners that I know that get too in like into AI and maybe they're listening to podcasts and they're on x and and and wear Orange glasses.
Speaker 2:They'll like They won't just apply AI to their business. They'll like start a new company that's like AI oriented. Mhmm. And and I just think that's like the worst possible mistake because they end up doing something that like the model just does well. And that's like, okay.
Speaker 2:So you're gonna compete just directly with like all the biggest companies in the world on something that you don't even know as well as the biggest companies in the world When could just like And so and so there's like this like grass is greener thing happening
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where instead of seeing like, oh, I can just make, you know, these parts of my business even if it's just 10% more efficient, I can I can, you know, keep compounding? But what are you seeing?
Speaker 4:Alright. One, they're using AI to do dumb things really fast. So they're doing the wrong stuff with AI. So even like, they were like, a small business owner that wasn't making money now still doesn't make money but has a lot more token cost
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:Than they did before. Number two,
Speaker 2:there's Meeting meeting summaries. Yeah. Like, I've never been success like, I I've never That
Speaker 1:was my bottleneck. I just need a summary. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But but it's one of
Speaker 2:those things like like, I think it's cool that these apps exist. I've never I've never needed to take notes to achieve my goals in business. Like, I'm just like, okay, what's the next most important thing to do? I'm gonna do that thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. What's the next most important thing do? I'm gonna do that thing. I've never I've never been like, okay, like, what did we say? I mean, and and I've worked in like small companies.
Speaker 2:Right? I've only only been a founder. But but that's just such an example of like, yeah, my meeting note system is like so dialed. I'm like, okay, like, how much money have you made?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Okay. So I'll I'll tell you to to counter answer the two things that I think are the right way to use it, which is number one, how do we take every function of the business Mhmm. Take it from org chart based thinking to workflow based thinking
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 4:then saying, okay, this editor used to be involved in these six workflows. Mhmm. We actually only need him to be now involved in three of those workflows. Mhmm. The other three, we can have AI do the vast majority of the work.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And so all of a sudden, can three, five x output. And so revenue per head count on service based businesses should decrease, which means margins should go up. Now, there's this great opportunity window right now where prices aren't really gonna adjust for a minute, which means that your margins get absolutely stupid. And so, like, you should do that.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. So there's two flavors to that. One is the the like, I'm I'm an advocate of, like, don't tell people you're using AI. Like, go go have a service business that people think is all humans in the background and then charge human prices and then have costs of tech and have the scale and operational or the the lack of operational drag of tech. That's the good game.
Speaker 4:Right? Or take it department to by department so that you can just become more efficient at it. Right? So those are, I think, the two good ways of doing it. To your point of, like, well, being distracted is still a terrible idea as a founder.
Speaker 4:And so this has just made it so much easier for people to get distracted because I can start a business on this or that or that. And it's like, yeah, you still have your dry cleaning store, dude. What are gonna like and to be fair, if you have if you want be a trillionaire, you are going to need to get into bleeding edge tech and AI Sure. But you probably should get rid of your dry cleaning store and go all in. And so they're trying to juggle two plates Yeah.
Speaker 4:And not really succeeding it either.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. Yeah. The the dry cleaning example is like, use AI to constantly be monitoring every possible new space that you could expand into within your area Yeah. In the in the county over, etcetera.
Speaker 2:And just do that, do that, do that. But it's like grass is greener. Like, oh, what if I Yeah. What if I made the operating system, the agent operating system for dry cleaners? It's like, no.
Speaker 2:Just like do the thing.
Speaker 4:Just win at dry cleaning. Because it's also so much easier to compete against Yeah. Other dry cleaning owners because you for sure know that they're not adopting it the right way because they're doing the same thing with orange glasses and and banging out their their Yeah. Their replicated software. You know, like, fine.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's also like a fair amount of AI that a lot of small businesses are probably getting for free just in the sense of like if you have a CRM that's sending emails, like, that company has probably adopted AI and is doing somewhat smarter targeting. And so you might not need to go and build your own CRM that sends emails that are customized for every customer because, like, you get it for free out of the box.
Speaker 4:There's also this this tendency to rebuild the existing software that you're using.
Speaker 1:Always.
Speaker 4:So it's like, oh, I've got you know, I don't I don't need to pay Calendly, you know Yeah. $9 a month. When I it's just like, oh, so instead you're gonna use two hundred hours to try and recode what they just did Yeah. And it breaks all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But like that is what I'm saying
Speaker 4:all the time. Yeah. We did have
Speaker 2:a Ben on our team here was having had been he does a lot of the automation that we do around like captioning videos. He had reached a point where all the existing software didn't do the thing that he needed to do, that he built something yesterday that now works. And that it's saving him a bunch of time. So there is the there are other edge cases.
Speaker 1:It's very narrow point solutions for us.
Speaker 4:I think Like specifically TAM equals one.
Speaker 2:Flip Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Live streams very quickly with captions, with our ads added on at the end and it saved a bunch of time in Premiere.
Speaker 4:Immediate is huge. Right? Yeah. Like, we're using it. Like, I'll give you two examples we're using.
Speaker 4:On the ad side, what we did was we built this gigantic data repository, which, by the way, I think that's what the big the huge gap that small business owners are missing is they don't have a data layer. And so it's like, you want anything that's unique, it starts with data. Mhmm. If you wanna build, like, any kind of AI that's actually useful. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so one is, how do we build a repository of all the data that we have in terms of sales copy, testimonials, videos, collateral, all of that in one place. Yeah. And then have that get piecemealed out into ads Mhmm. In real time, and then also match those to dynamic landing pages. So we have that live right now at acquisition.com in terms of how we're doing it.
Speaker 4:So we have several 100 landing pages that are getting pushed against several 100 different ad ads that are going out all being done programmatically with AI, which is really like, we're we're not a we're not an AI company, but we use the shit out of it. Yeah. And so I think that those are like those are the the the on the paid side where it's really, really exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then on the on the organic side, it's like right now we started MoreMozi, which is like the highlights channel.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I've got one one one cracked out teenager who's do who's putting out twenty twenty clips a day on his own. No. No. He's doing five five mids. So like, we call mids, it's like, call it like three to ten minutes Yeah.
Speaker 4:Clips. And then he's putting out, I think, 15 or something like that shorts per day on his own. Mhmm. And so he just takes all the time, if I'm talking to business owners, takes it, runs it through, it highlights the points. From there, he just basically just makes sure that it's good, inserts automatically the the the CTAs that we want, and then boom, it's
Speaker 1:all
Speaker 4:in
Speaker 1:What's your philosophy on bringing the cracked out teenager in house Huge fan. Remote, in person versus agency versus platform where clipping can happen? A Discord that just you hear about these Discords with, like, 200 clippers, and they all get paid on a CPM basis randomly. It feels deeply chaotic, but if you can harness that, maybe it's powerful. But what's your philosophy?
Speaker 4:Yes. Okay. That's a 100% my philosophy. Okay. But like, are you an agency fan or in house?
Speaker 4:It's like, I want three agencies working for me and an in house team. Like, it's all all the impressions are out there. Like Yeah. Gotta catch them all. Like, go get them.
Speaker 4:You know what And same thing with like, if I I pay a lot of attention, especially on the paid side to e commerce. I think they're almost always the most cutting edge. Mhmm. When it well, actually, porn's the most paid edge. Right before that is I'm being real.
Speaker 4:Right? Yeah. Yeah. Ecommerce is the second most cutting edge. And those guys are all completely the ones who are crushing it going to 0 to a 100,000,000 plus in, call it, like, to twenty four months.
Speaker 4:Like, all the companies that are running the same playbook
Speaker 2:is
Speaker 4:decentralized UGC with kind of like AI back end for screening for control and then just letting it fucking rip. Yeah. And there's obviously some considerations for brand Sure. Right? Which is like, how do we make sure?
Speaker 4:But Yeah. But if the raw footage is And you only put money behind things that are yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. It's probably pretty safe.
Speaker 2:Do you expect to integrate parenting content into your universe?
Speaker 4:I don't think everything that's not business has not been like super deliberate. I just don't hold back. So if someone asks a question about it, I'll just answer honestly. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But everything I try to think of like the middle spoke is still I'll use this. There you The middle spoke is still business and then it's, you know, how am I seeing parenting through the lens of business
Speaker 1:If as a business
Speaker 4:you want.
Speaker 1:Do I You got it
Speaker 4:over there. And like, how do I see like my my relationship with Leila, but it's we're business partners, but we're also married. So it's it's always I try to keep that at the middle. Yeah. But some people are
Speaker 1:like, I
Speaker 2:just want to talk about you know, with with with Taylor and and Travis pairing up, hopefully they have children.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You guys having children. I think we could see the a real baby boom. Yeah. Important. When you get it out there.
Speaker 4:That's what we're doing. The Lord's work.
Speaker 1:There we Can you walk me through how to sort of evolve a brand through what I expected to be more difficult, but you executed it very well. The headline was I have nothing to sell you. Mhmm. Now you sell books. People wanna buy stuff from you.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you sold a ton of books. Yeah. But there's probably like a, oh, I wasn't expecting this. How did you work through that? Because I think there's a lot of companies where the business model evolves and they need to change their communication strategy and they need to deliver
Speaker 2:like Yeah. Like an AI lab is like, we're not gonna compete with you. What? That's crazy.
Speaker 1:Asking for a friend here.
Speaker 4:I'm I'm such an I think the absolute simplest media strategy for any kind of change is the whole truth
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Not half truth. Mhmm. And I think if you just manage that so it's like, I didn't have anything to sell. Yeah. And I was like, now I do.
Speaker 1:That's so simple. I love it. That's amazing. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And and Yeah. If if you don't want to buy it, here's the great thing about capitalism, it's voluntary exchange. So you can just keep getting the free shit.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. All good. Tons of it. There's tons of free stuff.
Speaker 4:Tons of free stuff. And we still continue to do that. If you choose to want more help with stuff Yeah. In person where we're limited Yeah. Spend money.
Speaker 4:And we'd love to have you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. What is the term for, like, the economic ladder that you help build help companies build? I feel like the first time I was exposed to this with Jocko Willink, you Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You get to the end of the show, and it's like, if you wanna spend a dollar with me, I got something for you. If you wanna spend a $100 with me, I got something for you. If you wanna spend a thousand dollars, you can come to my conference. $10,000, I'll hang out with you for a weekend. A $100,000.
Speaker 1:And that ladder of price discrimination is hard for a lot of businesses where it's not token based pricing where it's just as, you know, consumption based usage of the product, but actually getting the place where look, if you have a billionaire in your audience who loves what you're doing, how do you actually get an offer to them that's the right size?
Speaker 4:So customers are super fractal. Yeah. Right? And so you can absolutely make the same amount from 1% of your customers as you can from the other 99 and have half your revenue from one. Yep.
Speaker 4:And typically, like, at each level, you have another double. So it's like if you're at, let's say, a $100 a month price point, there's gonna be another double of revenue at a $500 a month price point, another double of revenue at $2,500 a month, another double at, you know, whatever, five or 10 times that is gonna be. And so I think making offers available to people, that is where business owners like struggle. They feel weird about it and they sell out of their own wallet. Yeah.
Speaker 4:When it's just like, just make them available Yeah. And state the facts and tell the truth. So it's like, if we had one big plaque in our our marketing team, it's state the facts and tell the truth, but it's the whole truth, which is, hey, we're gonna do this thing. It's absurdly expensive. And it's only for somebody who if you're reading this and you're like, oh, that's not absurdly expensive for me.
Speaker 4:Yep. It's for you. Yep. And if you read that and you're like, oh my god, I'm offended by that. Good news, we have less offensive prices Mhmm.
Speaker 4:That are lower. And for that, we do all these other things that are you're gonna get way more people who are gonna be doing it with you. But if you're a special snowflake, we have special snowflake prices. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I just
Speaker 4:don't think. And to be fair, you're not going to make everyone happy. Like, there's always going to be trolls. There's always going be people. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Course. I think you have to make the decision of like, do I care more about the people I help or the people who are angry at me for trying to
Speaker 2:help?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. What's your international strategy? I imagine the content goes everywhere. Yeah. At the same time, you can't be flying around the world constantly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about different countries?
Speaker 4:I struggle a lot with international. Because the business side of me is like, I don't want them to clog up our funnels. Oh. Yeah. And like have people who can't speak English that well talk into the team and it's just like it's like we don't have Italian versions of whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Right.
Speaker 4:So I struggle with that part. On the other hand, we're taking steps now to Look. Have something to, you know, serve that audience. That being said, I don't think I'm gonna be traveling internationally anytime soon. Sure.
Speaker 4:But having called services and offerings for that audience, I'm I'm more inclined to be able to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you thinking about scaling acquisition.com, the investing side of the business, using outside capital, scaling up the fund? We talked to VCs all day who are just like bigger and bigger mega funds.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We're like Early? Thirty days away from closing a gigantic deal. So
Speaker 1:Come back. Yeah. We'll be drinking.
Speaker 4:But like, I would say that what acquisition.com is when we started was a cash flow based family office that Leila and I ran. And that was honestly the chillest my life has ever been. I was also bored to tears. Mhmm. But like a good life and probably might have been better for the season I'm about to get into.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:But it became apparent after we did something like 24 deals in twenty four months, and these were not like VC style deals, they were like real, you know, purchases, that, you know, portfolio theory rules and of the 24, like, you know, three ish were, like, the really good companies. Mhmm. And then on top of that, there was, like, our brand blew up in this time period. And so we had to basically have this recalculation of, okay, well, these are all the resources we have at our disposal. We have cash, but, like, this brand is getting really big even almost greater than the cash that we have access to just our own money.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so then it was like, okay, well, we started the advisory practice in January '24 and I think we did 36,000,000 in EBITDA year one. Mhmm. Just on that one unit. And so I was like,
Speaker 1:okay. Founder, no.
Speaker 4:And so and then, obviously, you know, the book launch last year, we did, you know, a 105, and we still have the advisory factors which grew the next year. And so I've we basically we stopped doing deals that we were just investors in
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And now it's brand plus capital plus work. And I'd rather have fewer eggs that we're gonna get huge outsized returns on. Like school
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Was junior of '24 as well. Yep. But school has you know, we have 30,000,000 users now. Yeah. And, you know, we have billion plus GMV.
Speaker 4:Like, it's it's a very big platform. And so, like, I'd you know, Zuckerberg didn't have Airbnb's as a side hustle. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so it's just like if you have a if you have a stallion, like, run it.
Speaker 4:And so I think that's where we're at, where it's like we're being really, really specific. I'm I'm willing to put more capital at risk now because I'm gonna put my brand behind it
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And make sure the product's exceptional. And that's I mean, the bar is the product has to be fucking insane. Yeah. And then we bring distribution and cash. And like that's when it's like the the holy trinity.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Jeremy our friend Jeremy has this idea that that everyone is like pre or post fall. Where are you?
Speaker 1:You familiar with this concept? No. So yeah. He he says you can instantly tell if someone has had their downfall, had their moment. You know, they've been through the wringer.
Speaker 1:They got chewed up and spit out by Silicon Valley or private equity or whatever industry they were in. And you can tell that this person is now they've they've been humbled. And so they're ready to build back appropriately, not get over their skis. And then you can also It see becomes the founders a massive advantage. Then you also see the founders that are sort of pre fall and they're doing a lot of things that you're like
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is like this 24 year old who's like on a crazy tear Yep. Has raised
Speaker 1:Money showed up for free. Spending it.
Speaker 2:And then suddenly like, you know, the business stops growing like execs are leaving
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Things like that. But I'm wondering if you there was like this like crucible moment for you before this latest run that you've been on.
Speaker 4:Two answers. One is I'll reject the premise. But just because I don't like, to say it's super binary. Right? Like, people are either before or after the hard thing in their life.
Speaker 4:It's like, think people have lots of hardship that happens at different seasons in their life. Yeah. Like, I've lost everything two times. Two falls. Twice.
Speaker 4:But like, that then it's like, okay, am I now post fall? It's like, well, I mean, I I hope that nothing bad ever happens to me again, but I'm pretty sure bad shit's gonna happen to me again.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so I just commit to not stopping.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Controlling the controllable. And that's basically all I can do.
Speaker 1:Do you have a good answer to pithy advice for young people? We got asked this on a podcast recently, and it was like the closing question. It was like, you got one minute. And I was like, I could you could talk for hours. Like, where do you even start?
Speaker 1:How do you think about packaging information like that? And I actually want your your your advice for young people if you have one thing.
Speaker 2:It's so hard too.
Speaker 1:It's so hard.
Speaker 2:Like, work hard. It's like good general advice. But then I I've I've been in points in my life and I know people that are like working hard on like the dumbest thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And like that that's being
Speaker 1:the worst thing
Speaker 2:that they can do.
Speaker 4:Well, I think so what you accomplish is a direct output of the volume of activity that you do multiplied by the leverage of the activity itself. And so you have to pick the right boat, you have to pick the right opportunity based on your goals. Some people only want to make a million dollars, some people want to make tens, some people want to make hundreds, some people make a trillion. Like, everyone has different so it's like the the leverage that what's interesting about that is that you just get to pick and it's gonna be hard no matter what. I think Nivol said this thing where it's like, it's really hard to build a restaurant that's really successful.
Speaker 4:It's also really hard to build a, you know, billion dollar unicorn. They're both can be eighty hour weeks. And so, you know and Stuart Schwarzman from Black Blackstone said like, you might as well play big because level 10 talent is only attracted to level 10 opportunities. It's harder to attract good people for bad opportunity because then you got to do it all yourself Mhmm. Which is why I have so much respect for some of the guys like Piggy and Andrew Churn who are mister and missus Panda, Panda Express.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Dude, deck a billionaires
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Selling selling chicken.
Speaker 1:Passage you royalty.
Speaker 4:Dude, like But like like, so much respect for that level of grit. Forty five years selling Orange Chicken. Yep. Right? All that to say, you will pick based on the level of awareness that you have at that time.
Speaker 4:Where it gets more difficult is that you learn more shit as you go and you realize that there are higher leverage opportunities. Mhmm. The difficulty is that if you're four years into one thing, year five of an existing thing that you have four years of reps on versus year one of even a slightly better opportunity, you have to compare year one versus year five of the other one, not year one versus year one because time you can't get back. Yeah. And so that's where the compounding of getting better at something at some point does have outsized returns even if it's an inferior vehicle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about that idea of you're an a plus operator, but you're going after a c plus opportunity. How do you assess your opportunity? Because I feel like I run into people who are working on a plus opportunities and everyone will say that's the dumbest idea ever. You're gonna put couches.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be called Airbnb. That makes no sense. Right? And then it's a boom and it's huge. And then simultaneously, you can be working on a terrible idea.
Speaker 1:But if you went and got, you know, a puff piece in Business Insider and Forbes, it's like your parents are like, oh, it's amazing. Good job.
Speaker 8:Well, the
Speaker 1:way I the way If you're grinding and it's not going anywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The way the way I look at it is like in every single category, there's an amazing business. Yeah. And the funny thing the funny thing that everyone thinks about like Airbnb is like the dumb idea. When it's like it wasn't a dumb idea.
Speaker 2:It just seemed ridiculous. Yeah. And that's very different than, like somebody that like chooses apparel as a category, which everyone knows is like structurally really really really challenging, really really competitive. Yes. There's like a 100 companies in the world that absolutely print.
Speaker 2:And if you're one of those companies, then you're then you're great. But some people like choose apparel and then three years in, then they understand the competitive dynamics and they're like, I'm in a shitty business. Mhmm. I think that's very different than like choosing the thing that seems silly even though Airbnb at this point is now like the best business. Right?
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Massive scale, network effects Yeah. Yeah. A great product, all these things. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think if you look at the marketplace that you're trying to get into, there's usually gonna be a bolus of businesses at some part. Mhmm. And that gives you some idea of where the difficulty in that business is. Mhmm. And so, like, for example, if you're gonna get into I wanna start a social media marketing agency.
Speaker 4:It's like, well, there's a bolus at the bottom. Mhmm. And then very few who ascend to the top, and it's because it's really, really difficult operationally. Because if you're really good at marketing, then you can usually make enough money to not work at one of those types of businesses. And so you're constantly you have to be so good at ops, so good at marketing and branding and sales Mhmm.
Speaker 4:In order to just slowly get these bigger and bigger accounts and you kind of level up the types of customers that you can go after. Because all those businesses go after SMBs and SMBs are inherently volatile. And so even if you do a great job, they'll still cancel. And so it's just a churn number of business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not not to mention Yeah. Your flagship client will eventually say like, hey, we're spending a $100,000 on this service. We could hire five people Mhmm. That are the best in the world at what they do and they'll just focus on us.
Speaker 2:Let's do that instead.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Like, there are there there are impediments to that business scaling. Can you do it? Absolutely. But I'm just a huge advocate of just, like, just look at what the biggest version of that business looks like.
Speaker 4:Because this is obviously a more tech forward show, but, like, the vast majority of businesses are not tech businesses. Yeah. Right? There's like HVAC businesses all over the place. There's pool cleaners.
Speaker 4:There like, there's a lot of shit you can do for money. Yeah. And so I like, unless you want to be a trillionaire, like, you can be a billionaire in just about any boring business. You look at you look at what's his name? Is it Brad Jacobs?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Export six times or Yeah. Yeah. Make a few billion dollars.
Speaker 4:Yeah. A few and then he has a sequel, a few more billion.
Speaker 2:Few more billion. You guys are kind of you guys are very never I never thought of you as
Speaker 1:Homebuilding materials.
Speaker 4:Yeah. There's just a lot of businesses out there, and so it just depends on, like, what the goal is. But any business done for like, zooming all the way out. If you do one thing for forty years and you get better every year, you're going to fucking dominate.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And so, on some level, going after the tech opportunity, though they're they're for sure are the big the big mega winners. It's easier to compete against the people who are going after the pool cleaners. There's just there's like, there's less sophisticated players, there's less capital. And so having a little bit of street smarts and a lot of work ethic can get you pretty far there. And you look at that compared to like, you look at the guy who's doing 7,000,000 a year top line, 2 and a half million dollars in bottom line, doesn't really work that much, has a crew of guys.
Speaker 4:Is that the life you want? Yeah. Because there's nothing like there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. And so I think it's deciding first to the younger guy, like, what do I want Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Or what is an acceptable outcome? And then what of the many many paths that are ahead of me have the highest likelihood of me getting there? And then once you pick that path, know that if you stick with that path for twenty years, the likely that you fail is basically zero as long as you have some feedback loop for improvement.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's basically it. Figure out where you want to go, find the highest likely path of getting there, and then do not let the opinions of strangers or people who do not have what you want dissuade you from getting there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What do you think about there's this odd trend of entrepreneurship like, I don't know, like mindset stuff where you got to be doing sauna, cold plunge, meditation. And I feel like that only makes sense once you're successful. And then you look at the successful people and you're like, well, yeah, the rich guy has a sauna. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:What was he doing when he was broke? He was waking up and getting on his laptop. But Yeah. How how do you
Speaker 4:react Yeah. Rich people fly private, so I should fly private whenever it's you get rich. Yeah. It's it's It doesn't work. It's conflation.
Speaker 4:Okay. So at the most basic level, you have to do work. Yeah. And if it is not the work, then you have to have a very strong argument that is going to increase your output per unit of time. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Period.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so if you have a three hour morning routine, and that's the first three hours a day when you're probably the cognitive, like, the freshest of the most energy, you would have to have an incredible. Do you curse on the show?
Speaker 1:We don't.
Speaker 4:Okay. Incredible darn argument.
Speaker 2:You're welcome. Our kids are our kids are watching, but, you know, by all means.
Speaker 4:You have an incredible argument for why that's going to improve your output. And so, like the morning routine that I'm a big advocate of is you wake up and then you caffeinate. Sure. You shut off your your distractions and then you begin the work. And how how much you can compress the time from waking to beginning work
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:Is the ideal. And you are the freshest whenever you are post sleep.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And so I like, if you want to do that stuff, I'm like, by all means, go for it. But like, just understand, like, you can plenty of have hobbies. You can have hobbies. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just is this actually and you also didn't need to work sixteen hours a day in order to get what you want.
Speaker 4:I I have plenty of friends who are super successful and don't work that much. Yeah. Now, did they work sixteen hours a day to get there? Probably. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so this is the modeling the rise, not the plateau. And what's difficult is the plateau is what's more visible.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:What do you think about
Speaker 4:there and then you can make the content? Yep. Right? No one's Yeah. Making this part.
Speaker 1:No. No.
Speaker 2:What do you think about people sort of like staging out their sort of career as an entrepreneur? I was talking to a friend of mine who has a something like an agency business in fashion. He's gonna do like about $1,000,000 this year of like profit. A fantastic business. He has He he eventually wants to have his own his own brand.
Speaker 2:My my advice to him is like fashion is such a, like, bad business until it's a great business till you have like a flagship brand that takes twenty years to make. I was like, get your business to like a couple million a year, get it like established, just a couple million a year profit at least. Get it established. Get, you know, ten, twenty flagship clients that are on sort of long term contracts. And then basically use that cash flow to invest in your brand.
Speaker 2:And like a lot of people would be like, given the advice now of like, just go all in on go all in on the brand. Like, are you wasting time with this other thing? Yeah. And I feel like that's very that that works super well, like, if you have a trust fund. But for somebody who's like 27, let's assume they wanna have a family in a few years, I was pushing him to say, like, make this thing great even though you know it's not the thing that you wanna be doing for that forty year chunk of your career.
Speaker 2:But how would you talk to to somebody in that sort of space?
Speaker 4:So I don't think there's a right answer because it's all dependent on risk, which is entirely personal. Yeah. And so if you wanna go balls on the line, that's not cursing, then then do it. Go all in. But like, just understand the risk that you're taking on.
Speaker 4:And so I would say that that's not a risk that I would take. I would say that I'm
Speaker 2:there's risk to being all in and then not having the capital to actually fuel the opportunity. Right? My point of view is like, you're gonna be way way way higher likelihood of success if you sort of build slow and you can put half 1,000,000 a year of like outside capital into the business
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Versus like trying to build this brand when you don't have a a capital source.
Speaker 4:Depends on goal, depends on risk tolerance. Like, I wanna be a trillionaire and then and I'm willing to take the risk, then it's like, yeah. I mean, you should have started yesterday.
Speaker 1:You know
Speaker 4:what I mean? But my perspective is, I would like to get my oxygen mask on personally. And I was able to make I've been able to to take significantly bigger and bigger bets in my career because I don't they're free swings. Yeah. If I lose, my change my life changes to zero.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so when thinking about big life changes, what's been really helpful for me is what is my what tactically changes about my life? Do I change what I eat? Do I change what I wear? Do I change where I live?
Speaker 4:Do I change the car I drive? Mhmm. And and do these things matter? Right? Does it change who I'm married to?
Speaker 4:If none of these things change, then almost none of these decisions are gonna actually have a huge impact on my life, which then makes the argument for, like, maybe I should take a higher risk adjusted return move. Mhmm. But I would say that from the emotional side rather than logical side, it was I have tried I very quickly tried to have a nest egg to be like, I'm good. Yeah. And that's what's allowed me to take really big bets.
Speaker 4:Things like school. Schools
Speaker 2:oxygen masks is a is a great way to Yep. Put that on. If you're gonna be
Speaker 4:If you want. And if you have responsibilities too. If you're if you're a parent and you've got kids and you've got mortgage and and you want a certain lifestyle for them and certain schools that they, you know, that cost money, then then you're also risking their futures to a degree. And so, again, it's your decision, but just know what you're putting at risk. And how much is my life going to change if I lose?
Speaker 4:Keith Cunningham has a great frame on this, which is just, what's my upside? What's my downside? And can I live with my downside? Mhmm. If you can't live with the downside, don't take the bat.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that, you know, the success and the habits are visible at the plateau, but not on the rise. At this and and I agree with you. Like, you're not actually seeing the accurate picture of the up and coming entrepreneur, the future trillionaire as it's happening. But at the same time, a lot of businesses increasingly need to do some form of social media on their way up. And the risk there is, like, sometimes companies just get sucked into just being full media companies Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or the or the brand value and the and the cash flow from the media business outgrows whatever they were doing originally.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What is the right balance? How should entrepreneurs think in the modern era? Like if you're starting a company, consumer product in 2026, what's the right level of social media and and actual owned content without it becoming like fake work?
Speaker 4:What do mean by fake work?
Speaker 1:Fake work would be like you're you're growing your following account, but you're not growing your cash flow or your
Speaker 2:actual generation of entrepreneurs and like you're probably a huge driver of this that are like, I need to work I need to like, I need to build my personal brand. Yeah. And they don't realize that like if they just make an amazing product that millions of people benefit from, they just default get the personal brand and they could just, if you care about like attention and being on camera, then you can just do that later. But maybe just make something amazing.
Speaker 1:And also your personal brand is an actual media company that has cash flow. Yeah. And it's like a successful business.
Speaker 2:You wouldn't you wouldn't be you wouldn't I I don't think on camera if you weren't making money. No. I wouldn't. I hated it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It was like it was very hard for me to decide to do this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But there's a lot of people that are basically doing the media for the cloud and they don't and they and they think it's fake work because they're saying they're justifying the cloud chasing by saying, oh, it's marketing for my business.
Speaker 4:If what you do does not translate into the money that you make and money that you make is the goal Mhmm. Then you are doing work that is not effective.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:If to the the example you gave earlier, if you start a a business and you get better at media and the media is making more money than your existing business, then maybe you're better at media than you are at your business. Yeah. And maybe that should be your business. Yeah. And that's And so I think constantly being flexible about reassessing what the market wants versus what you have.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, I think says this, you know, determined on goal and flexible on path or whatever way he says that. And he's also a great example of what's Basis' personal brand? Well, everyone knows who he is. Does he make a lot of content? No.
Speaker 4:Why? He just happens to own Amazon. Right? Yeah. And so I think it depends on what what sphere you want get into.
Speaker 4:This is kind of interesting. If you were to say, want to be a big b to b influencer, you cannot be a big b to b influencer without evidence that you are good at business. Period. Mhmm. You could take and there's plenty of people who take word for word the stuff that I say.
Speaker 2:Aren't there there's probably some good counter examples to that. We don't need to we don't need to name that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, it's it's tough. It's
Speaker 4:tough. Right.
Speaker 1:There's people that would say the
Speaker 4:biggest the big I think the biggest b to b influencer right now is Elon. Oh,
Speaker 1:sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:Right? He also has the biggest business and is the richest man. Yeah. Right? And so and that I think that just cascades all the way down.
Speaker 4:The only reason that so, like, I was I had a podcast that started in July 2017. That's when I started. It called Jim Secrets, I rebranded it as just the game.
Speaker 1:The game.
Speaker 4:But the as I continue to make it, we went from like, you know, 2,000 downloads a month to millions Yeah. When I sold my company for 46,200,000. And then people were like, oh, this guy actually knows what he's talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And
Speaker 4:then the brand took off because I had evidence. Legitimacy. Yeah. And so I think that the amount of legitimacy that you need to be an influencer depends on the risk that the consumer has in taking action on the nature of the content that you're making.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And so if I'm a beauty influencer, if I buy lipstick or I do a a, you know, a lash technique I'm getting the waters. I'm not familiar with you. You paint your face in some way. Right? Expert.
Speaker 4:The risk is relatively low. Sure. Right? Now you move a little bit over here and you got like personal finance. Well, it's like, who's the biggest there?
Speaker 4:Dave. And then there's there's some of the new age ones, Erica Sure. Culver. She's got her but she was also and there's Vivian too, I But like, they have some credibility behind and like there's tons like, if a teacher isn't in her basement talking about how you should invest in the S and P five hundred and says exactly what Warren Buffett says, and maybe they even say it a little bit more compelling than the way that Warren Buffett says, they won't be Warren Buffett because they just forgot to build Berkshire Hathaway.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:And so it's like the proof is the pudding. I think, at least my perspective on media is the proof is the pudding. But it varies in terms of how much proof you need. Now, if you're ugly as shit, very hard to be a beauty influencer. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Use but if you are ugly and then you paint your face so well that you become hot Oh. Then you absolute yep. Because you have evidence. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 4:You have a more dramatic point. No. A 100%. This is how it works.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like that. Talk about status seeking. It seems like in Silicon Valley, there's often, know, Naval talks about this like there's value
Speaker 4:in Yeah. Silicon
Speaker 1:Well well that's what I wanna know. In Silicon Valley, there's a lot of trend chasing, there's a lot of status seeking and there's value in like doing low status activities. And I'm wondering in in mid market entrepreneurship, small businesses, like, what is the shape of that? Is it different than Silicon Valley? Is it less pronounced, more pronounced?
Speaker 1:Like, what is the version of, look, you just need to run a series of golf courses and be happy with that that type of thing or whatever whatever the equivalent is.
Speaker 4:I think it depends on who they compare themselves to. I think it just comes down to that. I think tech guys compare themselves to other tech guys, they want approval from tech guys, and so they do the the activities that tech guys approve of. Yeah. If you're an HVAC guy, then it's gonna be you're gonna do the activities that HVAC people Yeah.
Speaker 4:Think are cool if they're the peer group that you actually compare yourself to. Sure. Which they might not be. Yeah. And to be fair
Speaker 2:I love the tech guys that that sell their business for 9 figures and then are like, I need a cash flowing lifestyle business ASAP. Yeah. I know a lot of them.
Speaker 4:Yeah. A lot. Lot. A crazy amount like buying gas stations like it's a lot.
Speaker 1:How bad is that?
Speaker 4:Bad, what do mean?
Speaker 1:Like, because I I imagine it's a grass is greener on the other other side thing where they enjoyed building their business, they sold it, they have all this cash but they want cash flow, they want the stability of the cash flow. And so they want the idea of of running a small check.
Speaker 4:Every month.
Speaker 1:And they don't exactly. But they don't think about what it means to like at 2AM your gas station got robbed and you got to go down there and sort it out with the cops or something like that. And so I'm wondering about like what is the actual lesson there for someone who's like about to get over their skis.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think humans are inherently dissatisfied. Okay. And I think whatever you have, you want what you don't have. And so if you're married, you're like, oh, life would be different if I'm single.
Speaker 4:If you're a parent, you're like, can you remember when we didn't have kids? And when if you don't have kids, you're like, wish I had kids. Yeah. If you're an employee, like, man, wish I'd an entrepreneur. And somebody's entrepreneur, like, man, it would be so nice to just show up and clock out of five and have to think about it and get a check.
Speaker 4:Like, we just always we want to make we want the benefits of a trade off without the negatives of the trade off. Sure. Yeah. And so when guys are in the cash flow business, because I'll because I that's who I talk to the majority of the time. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's like, what they're thinking about all the time is just like, it's hard to sell this business. Yeah. I'm not really building my net worth. The multiples that I'm gonna get on this aren't gonna necessarily be that high. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:I'm dealing with people all day. I deal with low skilled labor, and I've got, you know, churn issues or finding techs that aren't gonna show up drunk on the job. Like, there's like, my one of my favorite quotes of all time I've been trying not to cuss on this one, but Go ahead. My CFO was Deep South Texas when we were when we were in Texas when were building gym launch. Suzanne Shifflett, shout out to Suzanne.
Speaker 4:She was the reason we were building Gem Launch. She's she had been she had been a CFO for four companies from 1 to a 100,000,000 plus, had done a $5,000,000,000 exit, and I think she'd she'd been either buy side or sell side over 20 times.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 4:She was just like she was a just so weathered in a good way. Yeah. Right? And she said, you know what, Alex? She's like, it's all shit.
Speaker 4:She was like, it's all shit. Every business is shit. It's all shit. And I and it was but it was like, she said it with so much sincerity because I was like, at the time, I was like, man, it'd be cool if we
Speaker 1:got this kind of multiple blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 4:And she was like, it just doesn't it's it it all sucks. Yeah. And it's just different type of suck, but it all sucks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Be satisfied.
Speaker 2:We're out of time, but give us a pitch for scale or fail.
Speaker 4:If you like seeing entrepreneurs try their absolute hardest and have a completely new paradigm shift in ninety days to scale their business the most, then watch the show. I meet with them for an hour, give them a whole blueprint of what I would do if I bought the business a 100% today, and then they execute and they compete.
Speaker 2:I love it. Amazing. So reminds me of PMF or Die. Yeah. We we we experimented with the show last year.
Speaker 4:PMF or Die.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was like it was like we we we put this team in an apartment in New York. They were not allowed to leave for ninety days until or or until they build a million dollar ARR business. It it it it it descended into chaos.
Speaker 1:Was Lord of the Flood. Lord the Flood. Sure.
Speaker 2:It's totally crazy. And we were like, we don't have time to do this and this.
Speaker 1:But it had it had like hundreds of people watching at all times. It was actually gripping.
Speaker 2:And it was just livestream of them in the apartment Yeah. Just like cooking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was But one of them got really good at talking to chat. It was a whole thing. It it was sort of opened us up to
Speaker 2:example because like one of them clearly was like a gifted content creator and the other one was like, why am I on camera? This
Speaker 1:is terrible. Is terrible.
Speaker 4:Did he become a content creator?
Speaker 2:We gotta check-in with him.
Speaker 4:He But they're both both very challenged.
Speaker 2:Have a little bit of needed to like disconnect. It was But yeah. So so don't do the show live. Then people will will actually go Edit is is a great sometimes. Dude.
Speaker 1:Hey. This is Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for coming on. Pleasure. Thank We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Yes. Doctor. Congratulations on everything. Oh, I appreciate it. Congrats to you guys.
Speaker 2:Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Well, our next guest is I'm back to join. I'm sorry. Have Josh from CIV on his Financial Times argument that data centers are the industrial test of the era. Here he is.
Speaker 9:What's guys?
Speaker 2:Josh Zoffer. How
Speaker 1:are you doing? Welcome, Josh. How are you? Yeah. We're doing great.
Speaker 1:We were just hanging out talking to Alex Hormozi. How is how is your day going?
Speaker 9:It's good. I'm up in San Francisco. I'm actually in the Merc I saw Oh,
Speaker 1:no way. Huge numbers I
Speaker 9:I live in LA. So usually, I would I'd love to do this in person.
Speaker 1:Next time.
Speaker 9:Up in the beta day.
Speaker 1:Next time. Stopping through the cold weather. So take us through the thesis of the latest piece you put together. I have a bunch of questions, but I'd love for you to sort of reiterate the thesis statement for the audience first.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, the thesis is really kinda three things.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Point one is we are living through this era where we are on the losing end of a bunch of supply chain dependencies in areas like rare earths, permanent magnets, critical minerals, and just, you know, manufacturing and industrial capacity more broadly. Yeah. And that is a result of choices in part that that we made in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, as well as policies that China undertook to try to pull all of that capacity into China. That now I think everybody
Speaker 1:When you say choices we made, is we, the US government, WTO Ascension of China, that choice or are we talking about choices made by the free market companies just says I'm choosing to buy from China because it's cheaper and I don't care about my supply chain?
Speaker 9:I think it's a little bit of both. Would say, you know, starting in the nineteen eighties, we had a big wave of offshoring where we intend companies, large American companies intentionally moved production into places like China because they wanted to move it off balance sheet, take advantage of lower labor costs, lose your environmental regulations abroad.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And then as well, I think, you know, we didn't do ourselves any favor with, you know, the trade policies
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:That we have pursued over the last, call it, thirty years, before we realized what had happened. Mhmm. So point one is, you know, when you have sort of import you know, systemically important industries, and you push them overseas, you know, you never know what's gonna happen. You could find yourselves on the losing end of of really important supply chains and technologies.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Point two is, I think, you know, there's a real risk that if we, you know, stop or pause the construction of data centers or make it really hard to do that in The United States, we could find ourselves in a very similar position. Right? That data centers are not just, you know, piles of chips, but there are also, important other technologies, power electronics like transformers and switch gear, the kind of stuff that our portfolio company, Giga Energy, makes, as well as, you know, more more basic industrial inputs like steel. And that stuff has to be made somewhere. And today, because of the shortages for a lot of those goods, as well as the fact that, you know, data centers are at the very cutting edge and they're they're financed by some of the deepest pocketed developers on the planet, there's a willingness both to pay for faster and more advanced technology.
Speaker 9:And so companies that, you know, like Giga are both able to do some of this stuff in America in a way that would wasn't possible or wouldn't be possible without this kind of generational demand pull. And there's also demand for new technologies, things like, you know, optical links or solid state transformers that, you know, now there's sort of a chance for The US to get ahead and, again, because there's a source of demand to pay for it all. And then point three is, again, because these are sort of some of the deepest pocketed corporations out there, you know, financing all of this, that to the extent there are trade offs in the in the, you know, in the form of things like higher energy costs that in some cases do arise when data centers are built, that that can be solved by having the the hyperscalers pay for some that. And so I think there's a better outcome here, one that better advantages or supports America's long term economic competitiveness than just saying, we don't wanna do this here. Let it be done offshore.
Speaker 1:Do you have an idea of thesis particularly around why America is currently so strong in data center construction? It feels like when I count up the gigawatts, America is doing fantastically. We are in the lead. Of course, I agree with you on everything. We got to hold the lead.
Speaker 1:But I want to retreat to the source of strength that got us here in the first place because when you tell the story of there's going to be a new industry, it's going to be industrial, and it's going to really start in 2000 and run until 2026. If you had said shoes, I would have said that's going to happen in China. You know, if you had said any other any other piece of the economy, I would have said that absolutely would have been pushed offshore, pushed out of The United States. And yet we got here to this place where we do have, you know, Virginia and AWS and GCP and Azure and so many massive campuses. And the question is really just, are we going to go bigger?
Speaker 1:But why didn't we build the data centers abroad in the last two decades before there was all this discussion about near peer competition, geopolitics? It feels like that would have been the natural choice, yet we did choose to build here throughout the last two decades.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I think it's a great question. I think it really comes down to two things. One is that even today still, latency really matters. Sure.
Speaker 9:Right? If you are trying to serve customers that care about getting their data or their inference Mhmm. As quickly as possible Mhmm. You need data centers to be sort of, you know, close to to the customers that are being served. Yeah.
Speaker 9:I think there's a real chance for what it's worth that that matters less and less over time as, you know, as as inference workloads become more agentic. Right? Like, agents don't care if they have to wait five seconds. If you're away from your computer for two hours running long a long query and, you know, it takes a little longer because the data center is somewhere else, you're not gonna notice that. And so I think to me what that means is these supply chains are gonna be formed today.
Speaker 9:Right? The data centers are being built today. The the the factories that supply them are being set up today when speed and reliability and industrial capacity matter. And so I think there's also a real risk that if we wait and those supply chains are built somewhere else, it's gonna be really hard to reverse this. And the point I'm trying to make with the rare earths comparison is, like, we know how devastating that can be.
Speaker 9:Let's think really hard before we make that mistake again.
Speaker 1:When you think about the rare earth situation, it feels like a lot of that stems specifically from China's leverage over The United States. I think it would be a very different discussion if it was Canada or, you know, Germany. And when I think about the AI supply chain, I go to Zeiss and Trump and ASML and TSMC and SK Hynix and I'm in Western countries. Do you think that there is a there is a discussion to be had about the sphere of influence beyond America but in the West where we can partner on data center construction reliably? Or is this is it is it actually critical to have the vast majority of data centers built out within the the 50 states?
Speaker 9:I don't think they have to be in the 50 states, for sure. I think there's definitely room to collaborate with allies both in where the physical data centers are located as well as in the supply chain. So we're not gonna make every single thing that goes in every single data center in The United States. But but I would say maybe two things that concern me. One is, you know, it came out a couple of weeks ago that the Chinese government is reportedly planning a $295,000,000,000 fund Yes.
Speaker 9:For data center construction. So the Chinese government, unsurprisingly, because they run this play before, they get it. Right? They understand how important all of these technologies and supply chains are. The second is today.
Speaker 9:There are lots of important pieces of the data center supply chain from, you know, the GPU manufacturing at places like TSMC
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:To the the ASML EUV lithography machines that really can only be made in, you know, Western allies, like Taiwan and The Netherlands. I think if the the history of industrial development tells us anything, it's that we can't rely on that being true forever. And so, you know, taking action today to make sure that, you know, while there's a chance to take advantage of this capacity, and this demand to build next generation technology, industrial capacity in The United States when these technologies aren't commoditized and can't be bought more cheaply from a place like China is kind of you know, it's it's an important window of opportunity. And if we miss that opportunity, again, I think there there's a a world where we really regret it. You know, that doesn't mean just we should build all the data centers.
Speaker 9:We should have no no restrictions, no regulations. I think that would be a big mistake, and I think that is a way to politically get wrong get wrong footed and and generate a lot of opposition, which is why it's important that, you know, some of these energy costs be moved onto onto developers as well as, you know, things like environmental restrictions being put in place to make sure that we do this the right way. But I think it's important that, you know, that to me, the lesson of the rare earth example is you've got to balance these things. Right? It can't be all of one or all of the other.
Speaker 1:Last question. You wrote this in the Financial Times. It clearly will land with a geopolitically minded audience. But while I agree with a lot of what you said, I can't imagine it translating very well to everyday American voters who see AI as very deeply unpopular. How are you thinking about the the jumps and the translation layer that needs to happen to actually get, you know, American voters on board with this plan?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, look. To me, first of all, completely agree. I think there there is a real opposition to data centers in in part because, you know, yes, they're they're big and they can be kinda ugly. But the reality is I my view is a lot of that has to do with the fact that they are the physical representation of Yes.
Speaker 9:Of AI. Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. If you
Speaker 1:look at the Instagram comments like you can very clearly tell that the vast majority of people that are like commenting on like data center bad content have never seen a data center. Like they're nowhere near one. They might live in a major city that they don't even see them. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:You could see data centers putting up signs that say no AI served here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But they don't like the idea of they're losing a job or losing out financially or watching companies get even bigger than they already are, all of that. So, yes, it's a referendum. But then how do you bridge that gap?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I I think it's really few things. One is when a data center is built, right, making sure that, you know, if we have policies in place that, you know, push data center developers to build their own clean generation and ultimately connect it to the grid, that having a data center could mean your energy costs go down. Right? So that's point one is make the localized costs go away, that's something that's that's very achievable.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:Point two would be, you know, I think when we talk about what the effects of AI on the labor market are gonna be, I think taking a more, you know, reasoned view than just, you know, saying, oh, it's gonna wipe out 50% of all white collar jobs by some date that's not that far in the future. You know, I the think evidence is pretty mixed and the jury is still out. And we have a lot of chances to use public policy tools to make sure that that's not the case. Mhmm. And to tell us sort of a more balanced story and ensure that the American people know that, you know, it is not going to be a job apocalypse and that, you know, it's gonna be the kind of transition that that other large technology transitions have been where, you know, over time the composition of the labor force changes, ultimately, it's a source of growth and a source of new job creation.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And then the last one, and and this is really the point I'm trying to get across in this article is there are lots of parts of a data center from the steel to the transformers that need to be made somewhere in a factory. And somebody is gonna be working in those factories. And there is a real opportunity to make sure that those jobs are American jobs. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And that's something that would also, you know, be in favor of using public policy to encourage not just because, you know, those jobs themselves are valuable, but also because the industrial capacity they represent
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Is valuable and for all the reasons that we all know that the industrialization is important.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Actually, while the data center doesn't have that many people working inside of it, the supply chain is very deep and complex. So that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to have you on, Josh.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your week.
Speaker 9:Thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the We'll
Speaker 2:talk to
Speaker 1:you soon. Cheers. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Our next guest is John McElhone.
Speaker 1:Did I say that correctly? From American Turbines?
Speaker 8:You're close. McElhone. McElhone.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. How are you doing? First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 8:My name is John McElhone. My company is called American Turbines. We build small turbines for rapid deploy energy generation.
Speaker 1:Okay. How small are we talking? How can I think about this? Help me help me place it in the in the world. How much energy is it generating?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So you could probably fit one in the back of your pickup truck.
Speaker 7:A few
Speaker 4:of them actually.
Speaker 2:I like that.
Speaker 8:Our ours are about one megawatt in size, our first units. Yeah. And so you can think about a megawatt could probably power about just over a thousand homes
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:In the back of
Speaker 8:a pickup truck. They're they're tiny, but, you know, they they they pack a big punch. They're they're quite power dense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then talk about the the the supply chain and the actual energy source. These run natural gas. What are the inputs to actually getting energy?
Speaker 8:Just natural gas. Okay. That's how we call American turbines because United States is very uniquely advantaged compared to the rest of the world. Best place in the world to use natural gas. We have such an amazing supply of it, Extremely cheap.
Speaker 8:And and we have a lot of resource that we haven't tapped yet. So this company just works well in The States. You know, it wouldn't work in Europe. It wouldn't work in Russia or China.
Speaker 2:It just
Speaker 8:works here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what does the team look like? What does the manufacturing look like? Are these, like, handmade at this point? I mean, it's a young company.
Speaker 1:Take us through a little bit of a history. I mean
Speaker 2:Handmade American turbine. I
Speaker 1:mean, I imagine that it's not fully lights out robotic factory yet, but maybe that's
Speaker 2:the vision
Speaker 1:in a few years. Where are you today? Today.
Speaker 8:Yeah. We're pretty small. We're a small team. There's there's a few of us on board right now. We are hiring, so check out our website if you want to roll.
Speaker 8:And But, yeah, we're Right now, it's just handmade, but that the goal here is really being able to make something you can mass manufacture. Like, that's that's the end goal. Everybody is more so worried about time to power. How quick can you get some energy generation in the grind? And the only way to really achieve that is figuring out automation at scale and how to make a product at scale.
Speaker 8:That's kind of where we've failed at turbines over the years as we've they're all kind of derived from aircraft and you have to kind of be stringent to the standards of the FAA and it has to be able to travel at 600 miles an hour. Sure. Sort of work background from back from these systems and understand how do we make this on the ground. Mhmm. But what we're trying to work out is, like, the opposite way.
Speaker 8:Like, just make it for the grind. Make something very simple. It doesn't have to be efficient. It doesn't have to last forever. You don't have to run this at 600 miles an hour, 30,000 feet in the air.
Speaker 8:And because the the problem that you're really solving is is really just energy generation at scale.
Speaker 1:Can you sorry, Jordy. Please.
Speaker 2:What what were you doing before this? How did you how did you kind of end up in in this category? And and what was the backstory on becoming a Teal fellow?
Speaker 8:What did I do before this? I did a company called CropSafe. We built farm tech software,
Speaker 10:you know,
Speaker 8:of all things. It's quite the pivot, must say, but quite different. And kind of how I fell into American Turbines and why I'm doing this now is, you know, I finished up that last company and I realized that all my free time I just spent, you know, mechanic and stuff. All the cars I've worked on and have owned over the years have just been seventies cars. And they're very mechanic machines.
Speaker 8:My dad's a mechanic, spent a lot of time working with him. Few plane I flew planes pretty young as a kid, I'm quite familiar with how the turbine works, how it put together, what people we need to hire to make it happen. And so I figured, you know, my next company should be something that is fun and exciting and cool and I can scale and I can work with hardware. Mhmm. And I think it's very hard to compete with finders that just, you know, just like this stuff.
Speaker 8:Like, car behind me, you can see. The k truck, that's my car.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 8:And got It's a jazzy I
Speaker 2:want one of those I want one of those trucks so bad. Every time I see a video of one, I send it to
Speaker 1:my wife.
Speaker 2:I'm like, we need one.
Speaker 1:I love it. Can you get me up to speed on intellectual property in this category? Like, I imagine that there's a patent that existed maybe a long time ago on a turbine. Like, can you build on the shoulders of giants? Like, how do you actually create something that you can own that can't be disassembled and copied?
Speaker 1:Or is it sort of a free for all?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So there there's a bunch of patents. Same with any hardware piece. There's a bunch of patents. Yeah.
Speaker 8:But there are things with patents are very specialized. The turbine isn't actually very hard. It is hard to make, but it's not very complicated. Mhmm. Our system will probably have less than 40 parts on it.
Speaker 8:So that's that's quite small. And so it's not it's not crazy. The the product itself at American Turbines isn't I don't see it the turbine itself is like, we're going have a bunch of IP on this. We're going to spend six years filing patents. We're going have this, like, specialized thing we're going to have in a few years.
Speaker 8:That that sucks. That's what a lot of people are doing with, like, super critical stuff and Sure. A lot of specialized turbines. It it's just like you're waiting five years for what? So our our our product, I I I see in the future is is really just the manufacturing at scale, like our factory.
Speaker 8:Like, that's really what Henry Ford was able to do with the Model T. Yeah. Like, the product wasn't the car. It was kind of the the promise that with the process of manufacturing at scale and these assembly lines, we could create a whole new industry of transportation. And it worked worked for him.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And we kinda the same for energy is we need to figure out how to produce that scale. And you can you can only do that in in kinda automated ways that that we're focusing on.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, congratulations on the launch. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest your day and we'll talk
Speaker 2:to Thank you very Cheers, John.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Stop making excuses and do it.
Speaker 1:Our next guest is Deena Shakir from Lux Capital. She's a partner there. She's been on the show before, and we're very excited to have Deena back on the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 7:Hey, guys. Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Great to see you too.
Speaker 2:Welcome back.
Speaker 1:Back. Give us the latest on the portfolio investments. Also, I mean, I wanna zoom out at some point and just, take your temperature on how things are going in the private markets and the AI boom. But first, give us the latest and greatest.
Speaker 7:Absolutely. Well, we've got a lot of exciting stuff going on all the time and there's definitely no summer lull as you know and are reporting on anywhere adventure and certainly not here at Luxe. Yeah. We had to
Speaker 2:figure out by August August, I think we could be seeing a bit of a lull. I feel like it's always like it it feels crazy and then you get to mid August and it's like okay.
Speaker 7:Maybe that's wishful thinking on your part guys. I don't know if you're gonna be taking that August vacation. It's it's definitely lots of excitement, lots of activity. Our partner meetings are filled with deal pitches, and we've got announcements coming up Wow. You know, nearly every day here.
Speaker 7:So there's a lot going on
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 7:Especially in the world of AI.
Speaker 1:Yes. What's the latest in the world of AI? What's the Well,
Speaker 7:I'm excited to talk to talk about one of our newest investments that we just announced last week. It's actually our very first investment in the GCC Mhmm. A company called one thousand and one. We had the chance to invest really early. We were there when it was just Bilal in an idea and the seed round.
Speaker 7:Have been following it closely and preempted the series a, a $30,000,000 round in partnership with early investors including GC and CIB and Sinabal actually joined us as well. I'm super excited about the opportunity for Applied AI in The Gulf.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What does what what is the status quo of of software in the critical infrastructure space? Like, you hear about these massive machines from Siemens, and I imagine that there's some maybe web based dashboard for something or other. But are those companies asleep at the wheel? Is there just so much opportunity that you can do a yes and solution where it's not a rip and replace, but it's an additive functionality for critical infrastructure managers and companies?
Speaker 1:Like, what is the shape of the job to be done?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, there's a real greenfield opportunity especially in the region. It's going to come down to the application layer to deployment. This is, you know, not a novel concept. There's a lot of discussion right now about the distribution advantage.
Speaker 7:We're sort of moving beyond the mode of models into actually who can deploy on the ground with partners. And what's exciting about the GCC is of course we think about them a lot as investors, Right? There's a lot of money coming in from The UAE, from Saudi, from Qatar and elsewhere into But these the idea of a homegrown company that is built for the GCC which is a true global hub, clearly not only on the investing side but actually on the customer side where there's an opportunity for, you know, really fast massive multi $100 billion dollar types of deployments Yeah. At scale. Something that you really don't see anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Really quickly. We gotta we gotta hit the gong. It came in the middle of an answer, so I didn't get a chance to do it.
Speaker 2:But, Jordan, please. Yeah. What what is what is deal flow like coming out of coming out of The Gulf? Like, I I can't imagine it it's more than like 10% of the opportunities you're seeing, maybe like 5%, but how are you evaluating those opportunities?
Speaker 1:And do you go there? Or do they come here? How does
Speaker 2:that Yeah. Do they their money comes here, but then they're entrepreneurs, do they come and do a roadshow here or you know it
Speaker 7:it's it's still really early days. There Mhmm. Of course have been companies innovating in Dubai and and and all over The Gulf for quite some time. This is our first investment in, you know, twenty five years. That's a company headquartered there.
Speaker 7:Certainly we have a lot of companies that are doing business there or companies that have gotten investment from the region. But it's still early days. What's really exciting about this company among many other things is the founder and the founding team. And this thesis that they have around the diaspora. So how can they catalyze some of the best and brightest entrepreneurs from the region Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Who have worked in The US. You know Bilal, the founder and CEO was born in Jordan, studied computer science at Yale, worked for many years at scale, helped to grow their business in the region, had the opportunity to do anything and saw that there was this incredibly unique opportunity to build a homegrown sovereign AI company focused on the GCC. When we invested, it was just him in an idea, and he has attracted some of the best and brightest. It has been such a joy just to watch the incredible talent that he's amassed around him, and that was one of the early signals for us to really double down.
Speaker 1:What are the key stops on the calendar in The Gulf these days? If you're in America, you might go to Liquidity by the all in team. You might go to SF Tech Week, Milken, Sun Valley. What are the key stops if you're investing or doing business in The Gulf?
Speaker 7:Well, the big one, especially in the last few years, has been FII, which take click takes place in the fall in Saudi in Riyadh. It's known as Davos in the desert to some. So that's that's a big one and many people do a trip around that where Milken does a big summit as well in in Abu Dhabi. And, you know, a lot of folks are doing global conferences and actually creating their own versions in The Gulf because there is a lot of opportunity again, not just on the on the investing side, but actually now increasingly on the talent side. And we're excited to be at the forefront of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Web Summit's out there too, but tough. Web
Speaker 7:Summit and Qatar.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because AI killed the web. It doesn't even really exist anymore. But they need to rename it. AI Summit.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 7:Well, then AI will be out of date. We're gonna have to just be constantly changing the names names for all of you.
Speaker 1:Potentially. Potentially. How are how are golf based companies pricing relative to San Francisco based companies?
Speaker 7:Honestly, I think the global market for these companies for the absolute top tier of talent is pretty consistent and it really just comes down to that team. It's not about being golf based. There's no discount for a founder like Bilal. When you see that talent for a generational company, you know, it's the prices are going to look like they do for generational companies anywhere in the world. He's headquartered between London and Dubai.
Speaker 7:You know, attracted talent from all over the world including many many folks actually, you know, from from Silicon Valley as well.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So no discount there but a
Speaker 1:feeder in London like in
Speaker 7:D MIND is a feeder. There's really no limit on the opportunity. Lots of great alums coming out of scale as well.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Well, congratulations on the latest news and thank you
Speaker 2:so Yeah. Looking much forward to meeting him. Coming on
Speaker 1:and talking to us for
Speaker 7:You've got to have him on. He's excellent. Great to see you guys. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:To you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Deena.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is on an absolute tear. He's back on the show, Hussein Fazal from super.com. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Thanks
Speaker 6:Well, for having me thanks
Speaker 1:for show. Absolutely incredible run. Give us the numbers. Give us the news. What happened?
Speaker 1:I wanna hit the gong. We might have to hit
Speaker 6:the We Very exciting. So we
Speaker 1:What'd you do?
Speaker 6:We just raised our series d of 65,000,000 led by TPG at a
Speaker 10:dollar valuation. Much?
Speaker 2:Incredible. What was the valuation?
Speaker 6:Yeah. 1,200,000,000.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 4:We got we got It's a good job.
Speaker 1:We warmed up the gong, so now we can do the real hit. I just did the warm up hit. That's right. What is what is unlocking the growth? Sort of describe the current customer flow, the current product, and and how you're actually scaling revenue so quickly.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So so the app is a savings super app.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So the vision is eventually, anytime you wanna buy anything, you're opening the app. Mhmm. And it's gonna be able to either get you the best price, get you the best cash back, redirect you to the right spot. So when the company started ten years ago, it just started with hotels, and it was all about saving 20 to 30% on hotels. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And, yeah, it's been ten years, right? And we just added more ways to save. So you can open the app now, you can save on gas, on insurance, on pharma, on a whole bunch of stuff. We've added financial services, so you could go and swipe your card and get cash back and build your credit score. You can even, you know, take out a bit of cash by a cash advance if you need to make ends meet.
Speaker 6:So it really is evolving into this into the super app. Super app. Yeah. When say super app, we're not we're not building WeChat. Determinism.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We're building WeChat.
Speaker 1:You're not oh, you're
Speaker 6:not building WeChat. You're gonna be you're not gonna be paying government bills, you're not gonna be chatting with your friends, So I call it a savings super app. So anytime you wanna save money, that's the app you should be open. So I'm kinda staying in that category.
Speaker 1:Okay. So so then where where are the bounds of the of the savings super app? Because I can imagine savings accounts, then bonds are a form of savings. Yeah. Think Under the mortgage, car loan, like like
Speaker 2:T bills.
Speaker 1:How consult yeah. How how how risk on can I be with my savings? Can I go levered long?
Speaker 6:So so I what what we're not doing is we're we're not turning into a bank. Right? So we're not gonna have savings accounts.
Speaker 1:We're not
Speaker 6:gonna have investment products. Okay.
Speaker 4:When I
Speaker 6:say saving super app, I mean, it's basically like whenever whenever you're spending money
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 6:You could be saving by using the app. Right? So you're spending money in a hotel, you can open the app and you can save 30%. Right? You're doing your everyday shopping at any store while you could, you know, through a link similar to Rakuten, you could go and shop and you can get cash back.
Speaker 6:Or you go into the grocery store, you can use your super.com Mastercard and you can earn cash back. But the difference I would say is it it a lot of the products we've built have been focused on what we call the everyday American. So under a 100 k household income. Right? So what you'll see is, you know, our card functions like a secure charge card.
Speaker 6:A lot of our customers can't get a traditional credit card that gives them, you know, high cash back, high rewards, but this lets them use the money they have, but still be able to earn 1% cash back. Mhmm. In the app, you'll see the ability to take out a cash advance. So if you're looking to make ends meet, typically, you know, you're going to a payday lender and you're paying really high interest rates, but we'll we'll let you take out kind of a no interest cash advance and you can go and you can go and and take money to help you make ends meet. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So a lot of the products we've built have been for that demographic, the everyday American.
Speaker 2:Got it. What's something that Super does operationally that you haven't heard of another company doing?
Speaker 6:Oh, that's a that's a really good question. What I I mean, I love to talk about AI because, you know, that's that's the theme of the day. I know you guys just got off a conversation about AI. I'll say, I think internally, we've moved faster or as fast as any other company when it comes to AI adoption. So I'll give you an example.
Speaker 6:Every once in a while when I open the app and I see a bug, which is pretty rare, but it does happen, I used to take weeks. So I would take a screenshot, I would submit it, you know, QA person would verify it, an engineer would prioritize it, an engineer would build it, it would then get deployed to staging, then deployed to production. Now I can take a screenshot, I can share it into Slack, and an AI agent will pick it up, fix it, and deploy it to production within minutes. So I think, you know, our ability to leverage AI to move fast, that's just one small example, but it's allowing us and enabling us to add more and more ways for our customers to save. We can just build products really fast and find and build more ways for our customers to save faster than ever before.
Speaker 1:What's the what what's the customer acquisition funnel like? I mean, you're partnering with NASCAR. How broad do you go to reach those everyday Americans? How much is direct direct to consumer advertising versus brand level advertising? What's the strategy?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Really good question. So I would say still about 90% of our marketing spend is performance advertising. Now what I'll tell you is right now, we advertise specific products as opposed to the app as a whole. Right?
Speaker 6:So no consumer is like, oh, yeah. The savings super app, I need that in my life. I'm gonna go download it right now. Right? Typically, happens is they're looking for something in particular.
Speaker 6:So they're looking for a hotel and they're like, oh, wow. Super.com seems to have a great hotel deal. Mhmm. Right? Or they're looking to build their credit score for a cash advance and they're like, oh, wow.
Speaker 6:This seems like a product that could be useful to me. And they come in via performance marketing for individual products, and that's how they get introduced. Once they come in, of course, we can then show them other things and other products they can do within the app. So there's about 90% performance, about 10% brand. NASCAR has been great.
Speaker 6:So that is truly, you know, an everyday American
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Type of sport. And and you know what? I've I've gone to a few races, I've spoken to customers directly, and it is a great spot for us to do brand marketing.
Speaker 1:How do the how do credit scores interface with what you do? Are you pulling credit scores from the credit rating agencies? Are you delivering information to those agencies to update people's credit scores? What is the flow?
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's that's a good question. There's a bunch of ways in which people can improve their credit scores, but but you have it right. So we are reporting to the major credit bureaus. We are pulling that information back so they can see their credit scores.
Speaker 6:And there's a bunch of things you can do. We can do, you know, rent reporting. We can do it based on the secure charge card.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And there's multiple ways to improve your credit score.
Speaker 2:Back on NASCAR. How did you what is what is getting into NASCAR actually look like? Like, a founder is NASCAR curious, what Yeah. How what advice would you give them?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot a lot of branding opportunities. So first you have to decide, like, do you wanna do brand? Okay? Then you have to decide what kind of brand do you wanna do?
Speaker 6:Do you wanna be doing, you know, subway ads? Do you wanna be doing billboards? Do you wanna get into sports marketing? Then let's say you said, okay, I think sports marketing is cool because it has some unique appeal to it and has very broad reach. Then you gotta pick your sport.
Speaker 6:Right? So you gotta look at your demographics and you gotta say, you know, am I on the sort of NHL, NBA, sort of like higher mid income? Am I on sort of like the MLB, you know, NASCAR, which is like mid to lower income potentially? So you gotta kinda find the right demographic. And then once you pick a once you pick a sport, then again, there's a variety of things you can do.
Speaker 6:You can do a deal directly with NASCAR, in which case we did and we are the official savings partner of NASCAR. You can also do deals with particular drivers, and you could say, hey, I wanna do a deal you, the driver, and I want this car to be wrapped in super.com Pink, which we also did with Rick Ware Racing and and Cody Ware. So there's a there's a bunch of things that you can do. But really, it's like any other brand marketing slash sports partnership. I would say my biggest advice is first pick the right demographic before you get into the specific tactics.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Awesome update. Crushing it. Amazing progress. We'll talk to
Speaker 6:you Appreciate you having me on again.
Speaker 1:Of course. Talk to me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex you move projects forward from start to finish. Did you see this I don't even know what you call it.
Speaker 1:Chrome extension. It's a They Chrome extension did. That lets you dim or hide all the mass produced fake brands on Amazon.
Speaker 2:So it's called
Speaker 1:knock off You remember.
Speaker 2:You I was asking for this a year ago. I was like, I want to shop on Amazon just from brands that have been over that are over 50 years old. Yep. Right? Because that just squeezes out the w n p e t h m o e, the a he, I'm not even gonna say that, y x
Speaker 1:Y l.
Speaker 2:Y l, l u, and Joyan, Tomi. Go Don Lip.
Speaker 1:Gondolf. That's what it looks like. There are I have a a flurry of Oh, land. Sort of slop brands on Amazon and this But
Speaker 2:you don't like buying from allows
Speaker 1:you to dim them or even remove them entirely. Of course, a lot of people do their shopping on mobile, so you'll need to fire up the desktop in Chrome with the browser. But if you're doing some serious shopping, probably makes a lot of sense. Pete Oxenham says, it's beautiful. He deslopped Amazon and it is a nice feature.
Speaker 1:I can imagine this being very popular. I liked that this little tweaking of your Internet experience seems like the good news.
Speaker 2:Defined says Chinese air droppers deserve to make a living too. The funny thing is I don't think they're air droppers. They're making the actual products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're manufacturers. Drop shippers. Well, they're yeah. What is drop shipping?
Speaker 1:Drop shipping is where you're using another manufacturer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're you're not even necessarily even holding inventory.
Speaker 1:Straight from the factory for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I I I respect I respect the the hustle. Just I find that a lot of these products end up, you know, not keeping around very Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love this because I imagine if you get a little bit of a community on here, it will automatically hide or dim or gray out the brands that are suspected to be slop or or junk or knockoffs. But you can click on individual brand and say, trust this brand. This was a false positive. You can block this brand or you can dismiss for this particular item. Maybe it's fine.
Speaker 1:You can report it as a real brand. So they're going to be able to collect all of that information across the user base and then merge that together. So the system should get smarter over time, I imagine. But who knows how long Amazon allows this to go on? I imagine that the margins on some of these sloppier brands are potentially better.
Speaker 1:And so there might be a financial incentive to prevent this type of plug in from running roughshod all over amazon.com. But at least for now, you can go and enjoy it and take it for a spin at knockoff.shopping. Amazon without the knockoffs. Filters out the trademark squat pseudo brands, the s z h l u x's and horse Sudis. These are weird brand names.
Speaker 1:Very, very weird brand names. I'm surprised they don't come up with a normal name. Like, you're going to be a like a sketchy drop shipper with a knock off product, it's pretty easy to go to an LLM and say like
Speaker 2:Why not just be the the silverware company of China?
Speaker 1:Well, that or you know, dog beds here.
Speaker 2:The examples are Casper and Carhartt. Come up with Buddy another the buddy Yeah. Dog Supply Company.
Speaker 1:There's a bunch of words you could use. I don't know. It doesn't seem like rocket science and yet it feels like a cat walked across the keyboard with some of these brands. Anyway, go give it a try. Tell us what you think.
Speaker 1:Fortunately, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in John Nay from Norm AI. Welcome to the show, John. How are you doing?
Speaker 10:Doing well. Enjoyed that brainstorming session you just had on the naming.
Speaker 2:Always. Mean, I can't come up
Speaker 1:with anything. You have
Speaker 2:a better name
Speaker 1:for a dog bed company?
Speaker 2:Wait. Tell us about the name Norm. Norm. You just wanted to say, hey, you don't need to worry about this, you know, the general intelligence company of x y z. We're just gonna give you some normal AI.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Is that the idea?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Just straight normal AI. It stands for norm, setting the norms for AI.
Speaker 6:There you go.
Speaker 10:And also for normative for what should be.
Speaker 1:Sure. When did you start the company? Just
Speaker 10:under three years ago.
Speaker 1:Okay. And what were the key inflection points that got you to today? How much did you raise? What's the news?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So the news is today we raised a 120,000,000 at 1.2.
Speaker 1:Woah. Jordy, hit that. There we go. A $120,000,000 here you see. Coastal Ventures is in.
Speaker 1:Valuation's 1,200,000,000. Not too shabby. But what has growth been like? Who are the key customers? How are you describing the product to them?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So what we've done is we started out selling directly to in house teams. So places like Blackstone, New York Life, mainly large financial institutions.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:And as we were doing that, we realized the outside counsel opportunity was huge. Yeah. So they're spending billions of doll dollars on outside counsel. So this is for things like fund formation, transactional work, a lot of different things they work with, like Kirkland and Ellis and Simpson Thacher and other firms like that for. And as you're working with them, we realized the opportunity of taking the legal AI agents that we were building and then having that power a law firm to be able to serve as outside counsel on those billions of dollars of spend that they're working on would be an amazing opportunity for us and then also be more aligned with the clients that we already had.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So talk about the key decision to not just supercharge the in house counsel with effectively a software product, but instead actually spin up a proper partnership. And you have an LLP. Right?
Speaker 10:So Norm Law LLP, yeah, it's a partnership. It's a law firm in all the traditional senses except it sits on top of AI agents that are automating a lot of the first pass of the work.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And
Speaker 10:so that was a huge inflection point for us because it allows us to power something that can go full stack
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:For the client. And this is actually sort of related to my past. So this is my second company. I was the founder and CEO of another AI company before this, and I just have a proclivity of wanting to just, like, do the whole thing. In that case, it was an AI company that was selling AI to other asset managers.
Speaker 6:Sure.
Speaker 10:And I built out a subsidiary that registered with this SEC as an investment adviser. Mhmm. And then we just became an AI powered asset manager ourselves and just did the whole thing. And that company was acquired by TIA Nuveen. So here, similarly, we just want to complete the whole task for the client.
Speaker 10:So in collaboration with the partners at Norm Law, so we have people that were partners at the a lot of the AM Law twenty. Mhmm. So they join and then they take the outputs from the AI agents, and then they provide legal advice directly to their clients like they would have at another top law firm, but now they do it sitting inside a normal law.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And how how valuable is the data inside of the law firms versus inside of companies? Because I imagine that that has to be a source of strength, source of a moat and a big reason why venture capitalists continue to back the business.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So the ability to have this vertical integration of the building of the AI and the other software with the using and deployment of it in that really tight feedback loop to iterate and improve it, that's key. So that vertical integration type model. And the data is a big aspect to that. So it's both the data from the operation of the firm and what happens day to day, but it's also just, like, the qualitative insights about how would we automate something like this.
Speaker 10:Having root access to how it's actually being done and building it side by side where we're here in the World Trade Center, and we have AI engineers sitting right next to lawyers doing their job. That type of feedback loop is invaluable. And we're the only people in the world that can do that because of that really tight integration and collaboration. And so that unlocks our ability to kinda reinvent the whole workflow. So instead of having a copilot tool that you can use and get a little bit more efficient, you can, from scratch, think about from first principles, how would you redesign that workflow internally inside a firm, and then just build that and iterate on it every day together.
Speaker 2:Law sue law school student comes to you asking for advice, on how to think about their early career. What what do you tell them?
Speaker 10:Well, I think the general principles of legal reasoning and thinking through things more, like, theoretically, that's still super valid and useful. And that's almost just, like, philosophical thinking that's applicable in any area of life. But then in terms of going into specific areas, I think going forward, this notion of what we developed around legal engineering is gonna be really important for them to lean into. So that's using their legal knowledge and legal reasoning, but then applying it using AI. So turning different workflows and different domains of legal expertise into AI agents and then testing them and validating them and deploying them and working super closely with clients around that, I think that's gonna be increasingly what they should focus on.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about international expansion? Is that a is that something you sort of get for free as the model capabilities advance and the Frontier advances? Or is that something that is a very considered decision at some point in the future because it'll be a significant burden
Speaker 2:to get it for free because I'm sure some of the clients are already cross work Yeah.
Speaker 1:Cross border. But I'm just wondering, like, how how how heavy is that decision to to expand internationally?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, with the clients that we have now, places like Blackstone that are super international Yeah. We get that we get that opportunity Yeah. But we don't necessarily build it out because we we need to make sure that we have the legal expertise in those jurisdictions.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:So when you're actually powering the full stack provision of legal services, that's another layer of complexity of this, of of having the people that are gonna be able to supervise that and put their name behind that and have that relevant expertise. So for us, it is a big decision about when we go to, for example, The UK and other areas that are more relevant to us. We need to do that very deliberately.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Well, congratulations on the fundraise. Thank you so much for coming on Yeah. The Thanks
Speaker 2:for the whole team.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your week.
Speaker 2:And thanks. It felt like we were on vacation for a little
Speaker 1:bit We did. This view. Are you really in the World Trade Center? You're in New
Speaker 8:York Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right now?
Speaker 10:We're in the World Trade Center. That's, New Jersey behind me.
Speaker 1:That's beautiful. It looks like Miami almost with the plants and stuff. Yeah. Anyway, enjoy New York. Enjoy the summer.
Speaker 6:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 2:thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:Best of
Speaker 4:your day.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB.
Speaker 1:Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.
Speaker 2:You got anything for me, John?
Speaker 1:Well, the main other news is that this is this is somewhat related to New York and Manhattan. A Midtown Manhattan skyscraper under construction is reportedly at risk of collapse. The building was the former Pfizer headquarters on East 42nd Street. It was evacuated Tuesday morning after the FDNY received reports around 8AM eastern time of bricks falling from the high rise. When crews arrived, they found two structural columns inside the building had buckled with floors sagging from the roughly 21st all the way to the 26th Floor.
Speaker 1:So there's six floors of sagging. This video this building seems to be falling apart. Video from inside the site shows columns visibly bent, raising immediate concerns about the stability of the building. So far, thankfully, no injuries have been reported. Let's hope it stays that way.
Speaker 1:And construction workers have been accounted for. The site was undergoing one of the most ambitious office to residential conversions in New York history. Metro Loft and David Warner Real Estate were converting the former Pfizer complex into roughly 1,500 to 1,600 apartments with plans to renovate the existing 38 storey tower and add more than a dozen new stories to part of the property. Officials have evacuated the construction site and nearby buildings as a precaution. Very, very crazy.
Speaker 1:City inspectors and engineers are now on-site investigating the damage and trying to determine whether the building can be stabilized. They'll need to go and rebuild those columns. For now, commuters are being told to avoid the area. So if you're in New York, stay away from East 42nd Street. I hope everyone is safe there.
Speaker 2:Bad day to be doing that conversion.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very, very chaotic situation.
Speaker 2:Anyway It's also imagine trying to sell those apartments. Have you finished? It's like, oh, yeah. Moving into the building that was buckling
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:For six across six different stories.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There was a building was it in San Francisco, the Millennium Tower?
Speaker 2:Yeah. TZ says good day to be a demolition company.
Speaker 1:I guess. Yeah. The the yeah. There there was Millennium Tower that was a very it was it was a fancy high rise in San Francisco and the foundation, like, sunk a little bit. And so the whole building was tilted slightly.
Speaker 1:And so if you put a marble on the ground in these, like, luxurious apartments, it would roll. And there was a huge huge lawsuits. I believe that they were able to go do some structural reinforcement and eventually get it back.
Speaker 2:It's just some saggy floors.
Speaker 1:It's just some saggy Yeah. Lock in. Just, you know, maybe it's just a mindset issue.
Speaker 2:Stop sweating the details.
Speaker 1:Okay. What do you think of this what do you think of this Sunlight? Sunday Light. We've talked about these a few times. Phillips launched one, I believe.
Speaker 1:You're a big fan of these. I want your take on this one. This is the Sunday Light. And Paul Backhouse says, it's the closest thing to sunlight that you can buy. He gives it a 10 out of 10.
Speaker 1:He says, no regrets. It's absolutely bonkers. For reference, this is my actual light at 80% brightness in a room with almost zero outside lights. So I believe it's a it's a sort of translucent disc. Some of the light diffuses, but also a bunch of the light is reflecting, bouncing around, creating sort of a a softer feel, softer glow.
Speaker 1:Are you a fan of this with like the light that hangs down? If you zoom in on the actual light, will see that there's a little stick. And at the end of that stick is a light emitting diode, an LED that's bouncing off of the disc, the larger disc there. So a little bit more in your face. I'd be worried about hitting my head on that in the middle of the room there, but that's What aren't you worried
Speaker 2:about hitting your head on, John?
Speaker 1:But over over the right over the right table, maybe it works. The closest thing you can to sunlight you can buy. They use titanium nanoparticles to scatter the light way the the way Earth's atmosphere does. Actual blue sky on your ceiling, 34,500 lumens, water cooled, 95 plus CRI which is a measure of color quality. Just purchased one to avoid any doubt, repost it but I can't vouch for how yet it works.
Speaker 1:But this man is not sponsored but he's just stunned this exists. Are you going this
Speaker 9:or are
Speaker 2:you Stunned going into silence. I I wanna see more experiments like it.
Speaker 1:Would you go for this one or the Philips, the one that doesn't have the dangling light?
Speaker 2:I'm not actually a customer of either. Yeah. Considering it. But I would be I would be curious to get one of these for the for the studio.
Speaker 4:You can get
Speaker 1:a couple of these and then a couple of the other lights from
Speaker 4:head to head. See which one we want. Anyway folks.
Speaker 2:That's our show.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. An honor. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we'll see you tomorrow at 11AM. Boeing Slash bang.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. We love you. Have a great week.