The Exchanges

Q Ben, do you mess around on, uh, Suno at all with AI music?

A Yeah, Suno, um, and, uh, Well, you know, 11 Labs has a model, and, ah, UDO's got a very good model, so there, there's, there's a few different really good models. Like, I feel like I could have a music career again. That's gonna be very, very interesting to me, because it, it's sort of, like, one thing that hip hop showed was, so people don't really realize this, but this is something Quincy Jones pointed out to me before he passed. He said, you know, Ben, Like hip hop started like exactly when they canceled all the music programs in schools. Like it was the same, the exact same time when people didn't learn to play instruments in schools. That's when that is exactly when hip hop began and hip hop kind of freed you as a, somebody who was like a musical talent from actually having to learn to play an instrument, uh, which, you know, and, and even for the producers, right? Like you had a drum machine, you had samples, so you could hear what you liked. And play it, but you didn't need to be a virtuoso. And that kind of opened up a world that we didn't have before. And I think AI music is kind of that on steroids.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, Suno, um, and, uh, Well, you know, 11 Labs has a model”

Q That's so cool. Yeah. That, that idea of pensions for, for, for the OGs is, is so great. What did that just come on a whim or you're just at lunch one day and you're like, why don't they, you know, how does that idea? Cause that one liner gives you the clarity, right? It gives you the clarity of where to go.

A So, so I was listening to the, um, the H to the Izzo, Jay-Z some, where he says, I'm overcharging for what they did to the cold crush. And it kind of, it's like, Who was the cold crush? And it turns out, right, it's Grandmaster Kaz, and Grandmaster Kaz wrote, um, Rapper's Delight, basically, uh, and they stole it from him. And they stole it from him so nasty that they didn't change the word. So BigBankHankraft, if I'm the G-R-A-A-N-D-R-A-R-A-N-D-M-A-S-T-E-R, that's Grandmaster Kaz. That's his, he's rapping about his name. Not Big Bang Hank. Big Bang Hank is not named Grandmaster. Why is he calling himself Grandmaster? Because he stole his fucking rhyme. And he never got paid, and he never got credit for it. And everybody in hip hop knows this. Uh, and Grandmaster Kaz, by the way, like, if you meet him, he's a star. Like, he's the coolest guy in the room. He dresses amazing. He's, like, super articulate. He can still rap like crazy today. He's 66 years old or 65, something like that. And I was like, wow, like we ought to go back and fix that. And then, you know, uh, Rakim was like on tour at these little clubs and so forth. I was like, that's Rakim. Like, how are people treating him like that? So that was the idea. Um, I was like, we ought to just do it. Um, you know, I'm like getting it set up with the IRS and all that stuff is like extremely complicated. Um, but yeah, it's bee…

AI assessment note: “I was listening to the, um, the H to the Izzo, Jay-Z”

Q Wait, can you guys give me context? I don't really follow the news, so, I mean, Trump.

A Sure, so, so right now, uh, thirty-year mortgage is generally the maximum in the United States, so you pay off a home over 30 years. Trump wants to address the affordability crisis, which is a real problem. And said, what we should do is extend mortgages to 50 years. So you have 50 years to pay it off instead of 30 years. I think it's a terrible idea because basically what happens is you give people more money. So the monthly, the month, the amount that they pay monthly goes down a little bit, but actually you're not earning equity in the home after like the average length of time that somebody our age stays in their home is relatively low. And by that time, they'll earn no equity in the home, or almost no equity in the home.

AI assessment note: “Trump wants to address the affordability crisis... extend mortgages to 50 years.”

Q Was it true? What was the Chinese using it? What, what was that mean? Like there, I think I read there, like the accusation was that they were, uh, like Straight men, they were blackmailing straight men who are on Grindr.

A I think it's hypothetically true that if you have the servers located in China, and you're the Chinese government, and you wanted to watch, it's sort of like, if you know the answer to the question, you can use Grindr backwards. So if you know that you have users in the White House who are gay and using the app, well then you can figure out who those users are, and you can track where they are, and you can Say, oh, the president's about to leave the White House because people on his forward team who happen to use the app are using it, and they're doing it. Well, with the Ukraine war, we heard that soldiers on both sides were using the app to meet each other sort of between battles. And, you know, people have talked about, uh, Olympians being outed in the village, and so work was done at Grindr to help avoid these sort of extreme cases. And so I think there is possibility for abuse, and there are certainly people Who are closeted or not well discussed in politics, in the military, and in high positions, who, yeah, hypothetically, if the Chinese government wanted to, and they had access to the information, they could exploit that information and potentially use it to blackmail, you know, our politicians

AI assessment note: “I think it's hypothetically true that if you have the servers located in China”

Q But he- But that's a big, that's a big opportunity, right?

A Exactly. Exactly. So he made a rule. He mandated that everyone on his team, all the people that work the register at the UPS store, had to One time per shift comp a customer up to call it 40 dollars worth. They had to, and they had to write it when they were clocking out who they comped and why. It was like a win, win, win in the most profound of ways. A, if you're a customer, you go into a UPS store and randomly you get comped for like shipping something or copying something, it's gonna blow your mind, right? You're gonna tell that story a bunch. B, It ended up being really good for the people that worked there. Like, when you're working at a place like that, you are not accustomed to being on the receiving end of profound appreciation and enthusiasm, and yet we are all human beings. Those feelings energize all of us, and when you get them, it makes your day better, full stop. I don't care how too cool for school you present yourself as being. But third, and this is what I thought was so fascinating, and when he explained it, it made sense. Because it was good for the team, they went from having to do it to getting to do it. But they only got to do it once. So now they started engaging and getting to know everyone that came into the store so much more deeply to decide who deserved it the most. Who was having a hard day and needed something to go right? Who was having a great d…

AI assessment note: “Exactly. Exactly. So he made a rule.”

Q how, like, some chefs will, like, end up giving it back, because they play to the critics sometimes, and it kind of becomes overwhelming, overwhelming for a variety of reasons. Did you ever feel When you were, when you were building your restaurants, did you ever feel the tension of playing for critics and awards, and playing for customers, and also doing things that you just think, because they're dope?

A Yeah. Um, It was a tension that I felt more acutely earlier in my career and in our journey towards success than I did later. I think in the beginning, listen, you have to play the game a little bit. Of course Reading is. I think it's the same no matter what industry you're in. You can't get people to pay attention to you unless you've achieved some level of critical success, and that means doing the things that you aren't necessarily inclined to want to do in order to get to where you need to get. I'll give you an example. I, my first big goal was I wanted four stars in the New York Times. There's only seven restaurants in New York with four stars. We needed to get that. That was the starting point. Once you're a four-star restaurant, then you're going to be full all the time, and if you want to be the best at something, that's the first stop along the way, especially if you, well, not especially, if you are in New York. Now, when I looked at the four-star restaurants at the time, they were all in like the Upper East Side, they were all in Midtown, they were like fancy places. And so, I don't believe there should be a dress code in a restaurant. I think that you're there to invite people as they are, but we had to have a dress code. Um, we had to have, we never wore jackets required, but there was like a proper dress code, no hats, no t-shirts, whatever it was. The day we got …

AI assessment note: “It was a tension that I felt more acutely earlier in my career”

Q Explain that. Why did you get it for free?

A Okay, because the rough math at the time, in 2018, Bitcoin is like 10 grand, 12 grandish, and the trustee sold a fifth of the Bitcoin. So he sold about 40,000 Bitcoin and brought in about six hundred million dollars of cash. And so there was six million million dollars of cash and there was about three billion dollars of crypto or two and a half billion dollars of crypto. We were buying the claims for below the cash value, the clash look through value on the claims. So the, so we were buying for about a four hundred million dollar valuation. There were six hundred million of cash and there was about two billion dollars of crypto. So that was the time when I was like really banging the table, because before that there was all Bitcoin and it was, it was cheap, but it was quite directional.

AI assessment note: “We were buying the claims for below the cash value”

Q And so what happened? You get the call that this is going down and I mean, just tell, I mean, what was that like? Tell me, tell me about it.

A So we didn't get the call. We, we became aware of it and we just went, which is a, a really, a philosophy that I live by, which is called run to trouble. It's, it's amazingly liberating if your philosophy is to run to trouble. And so we ran into trouble. We showed up, uh, uh, since it's a bank, FBI and NYPD are showing up. Uh, the negotiation teams on both sides knew each other really well. We had a great relationship. We had a bank robbery task force in New York at the time. So the PD and the bureau already aligned on the criminal prosecution. So the two negotiations teams blended, and, uh, the first hostage negotiator on our phone was a, was a PD detective. I was his coach. The PD commander was in charge of the negotiation operations center on the inside. The Bureau's lead negotiator, our coordinator at the time, went to the outside in the event any, um, voice-to-voice bullhorn stuff was needed. We negotiated for a number of hours. Uh, the commander, uh, decided, um, to sort of disrupt the dynamic a little bit. It was stalemated at a very low threat level. And so we pulled the PD negotiator and he put me on the phone with the bad guys. And I had one of the, uh, one of the bank robbers out about 90 minutes later.

AI assessment note: “So we didn't get the call. We, we became aware of it and we just went”

Q is that if I had more perfect information, we can, we can make a better deal. That might be mutually beneficial if we were willing to trust each other. Uh, what are the simple ways to build that trust when you do meet with the other side and they're naturally inst initially gonna not, not just be super willing to trust you. What are the simple ways to build trust?

A Well, the, the simplest way to build trust and gather information simultaneously. It is nothing anybody's ever learned. Okay. So basically what they're, you're saying here is number one, I got to build trust. Number two, I got to get the information. So number one, build trust. Common ground. Let's find out what we have in common. Did you play little league baseball growing up? Uh, did your kids, you know, you're married. What are your kids doing? You know, how many times you've been married? You know, this whole common ground thing. Because they felt so good when they shared it, they didn't realize that they were squashing the other side. So there's, there's, that's one of the worst ways to build trust. Um, and then gathering information. You're taught to gather information by asking good questions. Well, questioning somebody makes them feel cornered. Which then diminishes trust because nobody trusts you if you cornered them or interrogated them. So the, the counterintuitive answer is the, you know, the hostage negotiator's tried and true tool called, in hostage negotiation, it was a motion label. Uh, in business negotiation, it's just a label. And I, I can start triggering information out of you right away if I sit down and I'll take a sense of you. And I said this to a colleague recently I hadn't seen in months. I looked at him instead of saying, hi, how are you? How are you…

AI assessment note: “the hostage negotiator's tried and true tool called... a label.”

Q this was my best option to go with. It was 98% their blend and two percent mine. Um, and in other situations where I have leverage or create leverage or I, Apply leverage. You know, I tend to feel like I do better, but is that a, is that too simplistic? Like where, how do you think about the word leverage? Cause for me, that's always been key in negotiation.

A It's not simplistic. It's a step up from, uh, floundering entirely to, you know, and it's going to sound harsh. I mean, you get yourself to B level negotiator there. You'll never get, you'll never get yourself to A, A plus on leverage. Cause leverage is the ability to inflict harm. And if you're making deals based on the ability to inflict harm, these, these are not, those, those don't go for stable long-term relationships. They don't go for the other side, sharing information with you that'll, that'll change everything because if you've got leverage, you're a threat. And why would they give you important information if you're a threat and vice versa? How much leverage do they have on you? Holy shit. I can't give them, I can't tell them that they'll have more leverage.

AI assessment note: “It's not simplistic... You'll never get yourself to A, A plus on leverage.”

Q Are you guys using any of this at Airtable?

A We actually do have an internal setup where it's all powered by Airtable. We use our own Airtable web agents to go in and research different, uh, target customers. We've learned a lot about them, and then we can actually generate customized email pitches for each of them. So right now it's just email, but we are experimenting with With more of the video stuff, we actually have a setup internally where we can now generate an avatar video powered by HeyGen automatically from content in a row of Airtable. So it could be a list of different event attendees, and that use case I just described, like, I may actually do it for, um, uh, thank you notes for, for different events that I host in the future. Like, if I host a, uh, a dinner with, with, um, our, uh, you know, some of our customers, I could actually now go and automate Creating a video that looks like it's me. And I would probably be upfront about it and say like, Hey, like here's an avatar version of how we like saying thank you for coming. And like the novelty of it itself actually would tickle people's fancy, but, um, but like to send a personalized thank you video from me to every attendee for all of our events.

AI assessment note: “We actually do have an internal setup where it's all powered by Airtable.”

Q Is that the framework for how you think of what's interesting for starting companies?

A I think so. I mean, I think there's, like, you can either go really broad, um, like, in this, you know, Cursor example or Cursor for X. So pick a market that's just so big, like there's so many potential target users, like tens of millions at least, and for whom the value is significant enough that they will pay for it. It's not a freemium or it's not purely like a free ad-driven product experience. It's not a consumer product. Pick something that's like broad enough and deep enough where there's just a very large pie to capture value out of, and then Even if you end up only capturing a niche of that pie, like you have a really large business on your hands. I think the alternate path is go really deep and narrow. So this is more like the property management example where it's like, you're probably never going to have like a hundred million users who need property management software. But like, if you go into that vertical and you attack it, you might have 5000. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “I think so. I mean, I think there's, like, you can either go really broad”

Q said that this driving range in New Zealand pays out 10,000 dollars if you hit a hole in one. It's a 111 yards away. You get this, like, plaque if you hit the hole in one, and, um, so what, what is the business here? They basically, they, it's like a carnival game. They charge you a little bit to try to hit a hole in one. Is that it?

A Yeah, it's kind of like, think of like unbundling a carnival. It's, the business is math. They're just using math, right? And here's the math. The, the average amateur golfer, and I don't golf, I hate golf, um, has a one in 25,000 chance of getting a hole in one on a par three, which this is, okay? And, and so this company in New Zealand, it's right off the road on this lake, um, they have announced multiple times that they pay out on average once every two weeks. So I can use math. Uh, to say, all right, these guys, and I know how much they sell balls for. It's like, 40 bucks for 25 balls or something. Uh, and they have a sensor in the hole, and they have divers go get the balls every couple weeks.

AI assessment note: “the business is math. They're just using math, right? And here's the math.”

Q Oh, ok, gotcha. But, by the way, give us the headline, because, you know, we're talking about this title, so we haven't mentioned how well it's done. Can you give us some numbers that give us an idea of, like, the success of this?

A I mean, I'll tell you what the headline literally was, and it was like, Texas man makes 200 grand in his first 30 days reselling Bucky's goods online. That was it. And so, Texas Monthly reached out to me, they're the biggest Texas news publication, and they were like, we love this, we're gonna make this a feature story, give me everything you can. So we talked, we talked, we talked, and then later that afternoon, they're like, Chris, good news, uh, Bucky's in-house counsel would love to chat. And I'm like, what's good about that? Like I'm dead. I'm dead in the water. And so I was like, okay, you, you told Bucky's great. I'm glad you were able to get ahold of them. So I get on the phone with him and he's like, listen, we actually don't mind what you're doing. Uh, I don't like the name beaver snacks. We're a beaver. It's kind of confusing. I don't like that your colors are yellow. We're kind of yellow. Uh, change the name, put a disclaimer in your logo. That is persist throughout the whole website. Put a disclaimer on every product page and you have our blessing. Like we're not going to sign anything, but we're not going to come after you. Like we will support you. And so we did, we made those changes and then they linked to us.

AI assessment note: “Texas man makes 200 grand in his first 30 days reselling Bucky's goods online.”

Q But did you use like Delphi or you, you built your own tool or what'd you do?

A I tried a couple things and then I used Delphi and then at first we had so much content, it was a little difficult to ingest it. So there is, there is a little bit of work. And then I spend about 10 minutes a day training it, which we could talk about, so there is a little bit of maintenance involved, but it's better than me, and the thing I didn't get until I saw something that was hyper-trained, like, this is a lot of content, twenty million words, right? Very few mistakes, very few hallucinations, and the ability to connect things that I can't. I just don't remember. I don't remember what Sam and I said on the hustle on stage years ago, Versus when we did an MFM a while versus today, but the AI knows it all.

AI assessment note: “I tried a couple things and then I used Delphi”

Q Yeah, like, I would love to, I would love to hang out with you. And for women, or for men, it was, like, You know, five percent or something like dominated. It was like a winner's take all market. What's that data behind that?

A Yeah, so one stat I can tell you is that a lot of women set their height filter at six feet or taller, and only 14% of the men in the U.S. are six feet or taller. So you have women coming up to me at dinner parties holding up their phones saying, I'm on Hinge. Where's my husband? Where is he? And I'm like, yeah, he can't even get into your app because he's five nine and you're filtering him out. It's like your app is a bounce, your app is a club, and your filters are a bouncer filtering him out. And so I do think that apps have perpetuated this thing where Because you can set filters, which maybe you think about for 30 seconds, you're like, yeah, six feet is good, and then you don't even realize the implications of that, and then when you multiply that across millions of people who are using apps, then yes, a disproportionate amount of attention goes to these guys over six feet, and then the other guys are sitting there waiting to hear back from someone.

AI assessment note: “one stat I can tell you is that a lot of women set their height filter”

Q Like if I just committed after listening to this and I was like, all right, I'm going to go level up in those. Is there like a killer book that you would recommend or like a way to actually develop that skill? Like what, what would be the fast track way to develop some of these skills besides the obvious, which is get practice?

A Yeah. So we talked about the idea of effort and that effort goes a long way and remember things, follow up with things. Women really love that. Develop your relational skills. So one thing that I'm really passionate about is men's groups. And I'm very curious to hear what you both think about this. And as I was preparing for this episode, I was like, oh, I kind of feel like maybe they'll feel like it's cringy, but I just feel like men's groups are so powerful. So a year ago, my husband joined one, our good friend, David Clavin started it. And it's about six men. They meet once a month. They go around, and they each silently write down on Post-it notes what's top of mind for them. Then they go around, and whoever has kind of the things that are most present for them and really wants to take up space, they let those people talk. They give them feedback, and it's really a great place for men to be angry, for men to be sad, for men to create this council of peers, and then they hold each other accountable. And I've seen so much growth in my husband, so much growth in the other guys in this group, and I think it's better than therapy, because most therapists are female, so having your wife or having your female therapist tell you what to do, I think that's fine, but having a council of peers who can really relate to you and create a safe space for you to be angry and sad, I think th…

AI assessment note: “So one thing that I'm really passionate about is men's groups.”

Q with, you got interested in the idea, then you got obsessed with the idea, then you Committed to the idea and you started writing this thing and you told you were giving me updates saying you're writing this for a while. And, um, Sam, do you know the story of how he got high agency.com? No, because he did not own that domain. It's actually a very high agency story.

A Yeah, so one of the things I have, uh, in the piece is an exercise that I do. I recommend it. It's called turning bullshit into reality. So the way most people kind of live in the 21st century is like this to-do list model where they empty short-term memory, like what's caching in their memory, and then they do that thing that day. Versus the turning bullshit to reality model is you think of a value that you want to hold or live up to, and then you come up with ideas based off that. So it's a much more creative way of living the to-do list. So when I was actually writing the piece, it's kind of like, well, you want to be the personal trainer who's in shape. So I'd try and do some high agency stuff of like, how could I potentially promote this? So one of the things I was listing down as I do the turning bullshit to reality exercise was what about if I just get highagency.com and I kind of look and it's like likely to be tens of thousands of dollars. But I then started reaching out to a few different brokers, a few little hacky people. And we realized that highagency.com, the person that owned it for like 20 years. I think it was an old agency, and it was about to expire when we looked at the domain. So we kind of sat there, waited for the moment that it would expire, and then it went into a little mini auction and nobody else online was aware of it. It was me and a marijuana, a …

AI assessment note: “waited for the moment that it would expire, and then it went into a little mini auction”

Q So like, just, but just taking that intensity to engineering, some serendipity. I kind of love that. Uh, before we leave, what do you just leave me with? What are you currently nerding out about?

A Um, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about like cancer and oncology. I've been thinking a lot about, um, longevity and, you know, we're still funding a lot of the research with Mike Levin, who's my favorite scientist of all time. He's the bioelectricity ninja. And, um, I've been nerding out on this a bit more because, um, I was mentioning to you before we got here, I've been in a bit of a sad mood this week. I had a friend die of cancer a few days ago, um, never smoked a cigarette in her life and had stage four lung cancer. And, um, and it's just more examples of this in my life. Every year or two, I lose a friend like that. And, and so it's not necessarily gonna make money. It's not gonna improve my lifestyle, but I'm just like, I gotta nerd out on it.

AI assessment note: “I've been spending a lot of time thinking about like cancer and oncology.”

Q excuse day-to-day Um, lack of urgency. You still need to be, uh, impatient on a daily level, but patient on an annual level. Additionally, can you tell me the people who thought long-term, they were still, maybe you can give me examples, but that doesn't mean that they were broke five or 10 years into starting their company, or that they didn't have traction, or did they? Am I wrong?

A So, The, the, to like close the loop on what you just said, I agree completely. If you think of like, there's not there any entrepreneurs that had a longer term perspective than Jeff Bezos and his line about this was like, yeah, we have long term, but like, we're going to take step by step ferociously was his motto. Step by step ferociously, not like, oh, we're going to lollygag. It's like, no, no, no, I'm fine being, you know, you know, we're going to be the company we want, 1015 years from now, but every day for the next 10 to 15 years, like we're pushing the pace and we're doing as much as we can. Um, people that were broke five or 10 years in, Uh, James Dyson, for sure. He was literally going to sleep covered in dirt because he's trying to build a vacuum cleaner for the entire time, going, going, going inside, crying himself to sleep as his kids are small, and then his kids are completely grown up. He was in massive amounts of debt. He couldn't find no one. The reason he owns a hundred percent of his companies, because no one would, would, uh, would actually want the equity, which is hilarious considering how valuable it is now. But also he was like, uh, he had second loans out on his, on his, his second mortgage on his home. He was crying himself to sleep.

AI assessment note: “people that were broke five or 10 years in, Uh, James Dyson, for sure.”

Q Can you do the quick explainer? So, for somebody who doesn't know what network effects is.

A Yeah, a network effect is every new person who uses your product Makes the product more valuable for the other users of the product. And the great example is Twitter. The more people who are tweeting, the more valuable Twitter becomes for everyone. Facebook. Microsoft operating system. More people using Microsoft operating system, the more it's more valuable for WordPerfect to build their software on top of Microsoft so that more people can use it. And the more people that are using WordPerfect, the more I can share my WordPerfect, um, you know, file with other people. So these are all network effects. So if you look at the top, you know, uh, seven companies in the world in terms of market cap, Five or six of them have network effects at their core. And that was not true. 30 years, 20 years ago. Uh, and so most of the big things that dominate our life, whether it's Comcast or whatever, these all have network effects businesses. And so we've studied them. We invest in them. We have spent the last 20 years becoming sort of the world's experts at them. We've identified 17 of them. They're mathematical principles. Right. And in talking these through with Eric and others, He started to get these wide eyes like, oh, that affects how I'm dating. Oh, that affects where I should live. That affects what happened to my dad. And I was, and he was realizing that the analysis of networks and…

AI assessment note: “a network effect is every new person who uses your product Makes the product more valuable”

Q of the year, we had like a 100,000 subscribers. I had this strategy where I was writing these crazy blog posts. And getting like 500,000 to a million people a month coming to our website. And that's how we grew. And I think of the 400 K, I think a 100,000. Was advertising revenue, and I think it was four of us at the time. Where, where were you guys?

A So that's, that's amazing, because in 2016, we did our first ad deal. Uh, it was a watch brand called Emla Hart, I believe. It was about a 3000 dollar deal for, for three, we used to call them exposures. We were so naive, we called them ad exposures. Uh, it was three of us. We had a writer who, Ironically, we poached someone from BI. I, I think I'm not kidding. I think he made it like seven days. Like he barely made it at the company. He quit because we wanted him to work more than a nine to five. But you know, we did 25,000 that year. You did 400,000. We were three of us that I was still in college.

AI assessment note: “we did 25,000 that year. You did 400,000. We were three of us”

Q have done that. I thought, and in fact, I tried to raise way more money, but no one invested, which ended up being a blessing because I made a lot of money because I owned the majority of the company, but, uh, that's what I would do differently. So if you're listening to this, I, if I were starting today, I would not raise funding at all. Would you agree?

A I think raising funding is all about your business needs, right? I certainly wouldn't have raised more money than we did, but we did need the 750,000 dollars. I actually, I actually, uh, specifically remember this is now fast forwarding to 20 17. It was December like 2720 17. And I didn't realize that payroll goes out early if it's, if it's New Year's Eve, because they don't do payroll and holidays. And I had a check in my hand that was going to make payroll. And I had to sprint to JP Morgan because they were going to close at five o'clock. It was like four 55. And, you know, when people say you were, you were close to missing payroll, I was literally two minutes away from missing payroll. So we didn't need every penny from a cashflow perspective, because obviously media companies, uh, the accounts receivable on them, you know, you might, you might need. 3060, 90, or a 120 days just to get paid. So we didn't need the money, but yeah, for a media venture, I don't think you should raise, you should raise as little as humanly possible.

AI assessment note: “I think raising funding is all about your business needs, right?”

Q Um, so I, I make around 80 cents from them as they charge me for a dollar. Um, so I feel like in my question, like a follow up is if I raise the prices, do you think there's, they would say we don't want to, for you to put your products anymore or. Is that a possibility?

A Well, it's definitely a possibility, but it's one you got to figure out. So, two ways to figure this out. You can go to your existing customers. Assume you have a good relationship with them. Assume they're happy. Um, and you could tell them. You could be like, hey, um, how is this going for you? They're like, oh, it's great. Like, awesome. I really love working with you. You know, I'm 14 years old. I'm figuring this out as I go, and one thing I'm learning is that I'm providing you guys 500,000 cookies. Right now, I cook all of these by myself. I need to bring somebody in. If I do that, I'm like, I'm not gonna make any profit. And so, I was wondering, would it be possible, like, for us to raise the price here and go to a dollar a cookie, or 95 cents a cookie, whatever it is, that way I'm not losing money providing you business. And see what they say. They might look at you and your puppy dog eyes, and they'll just say yes. They might say no, and you'll find out, right? And then, when you go to that next bakery, you, you're gonna go cold test them, and they're never even gonna know about the 80 cents. You just go to them straight away, and you say, it's a dollar 10 a cookie, and then you say, these cookies are amazing. This is an Have you ever been to the bakery in New York? This is a New York City cookie that I'm bringing to you, right? So you're, you have to up the perceived v…

AI assessment note: “Well, it's definitely a possibility, but it's one you got to figure out.”

Q Well, it was about, um, I, Sean, did you see the documentary on Netflix about, uh, was it, what was it called? Uh, it was with Ilya, was it Bitfinex? What was that called?

A It was the couple, uh, Bitcoin, Bonnie and Clyde. I did a documentary on them for Netflix, uh, with Chris Smith, who did Tiger King, uh, that was about this couple that had stolen 5.4, well, they stole seventy two million dollars in crypto, uh, and then were trying to launder it, and every, they were the only two people on the entire internet who wanted the price of bitcoin to go down. Uh, and they had, every time they were trying to launder it, it would double, and double, and double, and double, and double, and to the point that it was at one point at its peak was worth 8.4 billion dollars, and she was this, like, wacky, uh, cringe rapper, and he was, like, a part-time magician investor, and, like, It's one of those stories. If it were fiction, you'd be like, ah, this is stupid. This would never happen.

AI assessment note: “It was the couple, uh, Bitcoin, Bonnie and Clyde. I did a documentary on them”

Q made it into a useful business that generates millions of dollars a year profit. It seems like your brother also did that same business model, right, in a different space with BuildZoom. Can you explain maybe what is the underlying, you know, framework of how to think about business ideas like that, that might, that might succeed? Because it seems like there's a pattern, that there's multiple ideas like that.

A That yeah, BuildZim was born out of the frustration of finding a contractor. BuildZim is my older brother, David's company, one of his companies. And he was my co-founder with Import Genius and my boss for a while. And yeah, he was sort of my mentor in startup world. Uh, Built-in was born out of the frustration of finding a contractor to work on your house and underlying, it is this public data set of building permits are largely public record, but hard to access. And we had a lot of experience of doing that with import genius. So we built a search engine on building permits and lets you look up any, wherever you are, any house, you can see who the contractors were that built on that, that worked on it, which is pretty useful as a homeowner, by the way, as a tool, see who, who built the problem. If you have a problem, go find that person. They probably can help you with it. Um, But also you're doing due diligence on contractors. No, you know, being able to talk to the actual homeowners who worked, like who worked with them, making sure that the reviews are actually for people that hire this contractor. Like there's a great data set out there. So they built, they built a nice little business on top of that data set. I think that government data is a big opportunity. The government has tons of public records on all kinds of stuff and no real incentive to organize it in ways that …

AI assessment note: “I think that government data is a big opportunity. The government has tons of public records”

Q Is Brother, Brother Nuts? Is that, is that who's up next?

A It is, yeah. Hey guys, my name's Austin Majors. I'm the co-founder of Brother's Nuts. Here at Brother's Nuts, our mission is to kick the fake food to the curb and revolutionize healthy snacking with organic sprouted nut and seed snacks. So first off, my family found that half of the snacks out there weren't actually healthy, and the other half tasted like garbage. But first off, Why did we create this business? Well, our business started back in 2010, actually, when my father was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer. He was given seven weeks to live, and through the changes in diet and lifestyle, turned that seven weeks into seven years. But one of the biggest issues him and my family had was finding a snack that was as healthy as it was tasty. And so our current day CFO, aka Chief Flavor Officer, aka Mom, being the amazing mom that she is, went into work and created what is now known as the Crackle Cheesy Omens. Now, my family and my friends were astonished to see that these were as healthy as they were flavorful, but also very crunchy. And that's what makes us very different. All of our nuts and seeds are sprouted. But how has it gone over the last seven years? So I started this company. I was 13 years old when my father passed away with my older brother who was 15. And over the last seven years, we've done over a million dollars in sales. We've sold over a million dollars …

AI assessment note: “It is, yeah. Hey guys, my name's Austin Majors.”

Q were writing your book, which is called the Victory Lab, did you, I guess, like, how did you get around that bias? Like, how could you figure out, how open were these people in sharing what's actually working or not? And did you have to kind of, like, read between the lines to try to figure out where are they just sort of grabbing extra credit versus what actually happened?

A Yeah, it's one of the most, um, difficult things reporting in this area. So, you know, I, I, Was fortunate that I reported this book between election cycles. If you go in right now and you ask the Harris campaign or the Trump campaign or the super PACs working for them, you know, show me exactly how you're, you're testing your ads on, on online platforms. They are, that maybe they will tell you some stuff. They very selectly will leak out stuff that they think will help them raise money usually. So you'll read a story in Wired. One story in wire that's like inside Kamala Harris's ad testing machine and details are very carefully selected over the course of, you know, during the campaign to give out to one piece that then they can send out when they go out, when she goes to do a fundraising tour, you know, in Palo Alto that can convince, you know, a bunch of, of tech executives that, that she's running a smart campaign. So during a campaign though, it's very difficult to get real details on what they're doing. They don't want to, The value of impressing their donors is up against not wanting to, you know, give away any, anything to the competition. Right. But after election day, the campaign basically ceases to exist. So everybody is on to another job. A lot of them are, you know, looking for work or return to their consulting firms or starting new firms, develop some trick or t…

AI assessment note: “I was fortunate that I reported this book between election cycles.”

Q You've studied and covered elections for like More than 15 years, I think. Who do you think is running the better campaign right now? Not who's gonna win, but who's running a better campaign?

A I thought Trump for most of the year was running as good a campaign as he could run. Now I start to see a real mismatch between what they claim is their strategy and And the organization that they have been building for it, which is, you know, in short, so much of the Trump plan seems to be based on mobilizing young men, especially young men of color. Um, uh, and there re there's reasons in polling to suggest that there's real room for, for him to gain in a way that, that few Republicans have there. But the, you know, that's, that's this job of basically going to people who are not voters and And turning them into voters. And all the research I've written about suggests that, you know, the best way to do that is high quality face-to-face interactions, uh, from a volunteer, you should, a volunteer from a voter's community and them to, to have these sort of socially meaningful interactions to give them really practical advice, like, you know, where's your polling place and, and, and, and all of that stuff. And the campaign has made a decision to effectively outsource a lot of that You know, what, what people call ground game or field organization, but the real boots on the ground part of campaigning to America PAC, which is the Elon Musk, uh, funded super PAC. And typically the division of labor on campaigns has been that that sort of nuts and bolts labor-intensive work that does…

AI assessment note: “I thought Trump for most of the year was running as good a campaign”

Q And you got to give them input to do something that maybe they're not already doing, or maybe they're doing, but not enough of. Where would you place a bet that you think has sort of more upside than people are currently, um, you know, taking advantage of?

A So less, maybe not economic upside, um, but sort of political entrepreneurial upside would be in communicating with the voters outside of election cycles. And, um, uh, you know, I think there's a great example now, like, The best, I think we're gonna, if Trump wins this election, we're gonna look back and say, arguably his best period was a period in 20, 21, 22, when he was largely out of the news. Republicans are distancing themselves. The media wasn't covering him. Democrats had hoped he was gone and stopped attacking him. And he was able to start to build up some sense of nostalgia for the Trump years. A lot of it, like not based in a real understanding of what 20, 20 was like when he was president, but have distance helped him. And if Democrats have kept, like, a foot on his neck through advertising, reminding people, yes, the reason, you know, Wherever unemployment was and, and inflation were in twenty-twenty-one was because of the guy who was just there, reminding people about some of the COVID dynamics. But like, they pulled away from him at just the moment that they prop, they could have, um, continued to define him. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that. Political money disappears out of cycle. You only get the surge of interest in cycle. But, um, there's sort of people starting to talk about party-based branding, right? So, like, so much of our political, ou…

AI assessment note: “political entrepreneurial upside would be in communicating with the voters outside of election cycles.”