0:00:04 Growing up in an environment where India had just come out of 350 years of British rule,
0:00:07 you sit there going, I have to pull myself up.
0:00:11 You had a conversation once with Steve Jobs where he told you not to be too nice.
0:00:16 How did that candid conversation influence how you ran PepsiCo?
0:00:19 I think the biggest lesson I took away was he said,
0:00:21 what I was focused on was micro-understanding.
0:00:26 Because if you don’t understand the business down to where the rubber meets the road,
0:00:31 you can make decisions at the top which are not implementable.
0:00:34 The business was a multi-multi-billion dollar business.
0:00:38 And remember, if you don’t earn your place, the people below you are willing to push you out.
0:00:43 So people don’t realize that as you get more senior in an organization, it’s up or out.
0:00:53 Welcome to the Knowledge Project podcast. I’m your host, Shane Parrish.
0:00:58 In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what
0:01:04 others have already figured out. My guest this week is Indra Nooyi, the former chairman and CEO of
0:01:09 PepsiCo, who led a global transformation at the company as one of the most remarkable leaders of
0:01:14 a generation. What makes Indra fascinating isn’t just her accomplishments, it’s how she navigated
0:01:20 her colliding worlds. An immigrant who became more American than most Americans. A dutiful daughter
0:01:25 who became a corporate revolutionary. A mother who reached the pinnacle of power but kept her
0:01:30 daughter’s please-come-home note tucked in her drawer as a reminder of what she was missing.
0:01:34 This is a conversation rich with clarity, resilience, and ambition.
0:01:40 Indra shares the surprising story of how she almost quit PepsiCo, the unforgettable advice she received
0:01:45 from Steve Jobs, and the moment her mother told her to leave the crown in the garage after being
0:01:51 named president of the company. We talk about how to give feedback that gets heard, why great leaders
0:01:56 zoom in before they zoom out, and how real strategy always has to be implementable. If you’re trying to
0:02:04 lead better at work or at home, this episode is packed with timeless lessons. It’s time to listen and learn.
0:02:13 I want to start with this wonderful story about you and your husband. When you first met, you went to a
0:02:19 movie, and you watched Silver Streak at the Sandberg Theater, and then you went out to dinner after, and you
0:02:27 decided to get married. But you’re still not sure who asked who, who proposed to who. I want the real
0:02:33 story here. That is the story. Sometimes I tell him, why did you rush this proposal? I wanted to be dated
0:02:38 and wooed and dined and wine. And he said, I didn’t propose to you, you proposed to me. So I said, why did
0:02:44 you accept if I proposed to you? He says, I don’t know. It was just destined to be that way. And I think
0:02:51 over summer, even though we didn’t spend much time together one on one, there must have been some spark.
0:02:58 And he’s just a very good guy, to be honest. And I guess he thought I was a pretty good person, too. And so it was
0:03:05 just a meeting of the minds, value system, families, every which way. And I said yes, without being wined and
0:03:11 dined. And he said yes, without, you know, dating me and getting to know me. And the rest is history. And 45 years
0:03:15 later, we can look back and say, huh, who proposed to whom again?
0:03:22 That’s such an incredible story. I love these stories of couples that just, it clicks right away.
0:03:27 You might not know each other, as well as some other people who get married. And it just works out. My aunt
0:03:33 and uncle have never actually dated another person. They started dating at 13, and they are still happily
0:03:35 married today. It’s incredible.
0:03:40 Maybe that’s the reason we’re happily married, because we started to date each other after we got
0:03:45 married. And we started to discover each other after we got married. So we had that long process
0:03:50 of discovery. And in spite of that, we kind of liked each other, loved each other.
0:03:57 That’s incredible. I want to go back to your childhood in India. Are there memories or lessons
0:04:00 that stand out from your mom that you still carry with you today?
0:04:05 It’s mom, dad, grandfather, the whole extended family. It’s not just the mother.
0:04:15 And I think that it was a focus on excellence and doing well. It was sort of beaten to us.
0:04:20 If you’re going to do something, do it well. If you can’t get good grades, then, you know,
0:04:25 what’s your value to society? What are you going to do for society? So it was always this thing about
0:04:32 push yourself. Don’t sit idle. Satan has work for idle hands. If you can read in every spare minute,
0:04:37 do it. So that’s the environment we grew up in. And we couldn’t go complain to somebody else because
0:04:42 our entire community was that way. And so you sit there going, who am I going to complain to?
0:04:46 If I complain to an aunt or an uncle, they’ll say, oh, I’m doing the same with my kids.
0:04:52 So we grew up in an environment where everybody was being pushed. And we were being pushed because
0:04:58 we were growing up in an environment where India had just come out of 350 years of British rule.
0:05:03 And it was trying to find its place in society. And we were looking at other countries and saying,
0:05:08 wow, you know, there could be growth. There can be innovation. The economy could get a whole lot
0:05:15 better. And so everybody needs to pull themselves up to contribute to the country in order to make the
0:05:22 country better. So that was the goal to push young people. And so you sit there going, I have to pull
0:05:28 myself up. The family pushed you, but you have to pull yourself up. Everything in my childhood was
0:05:35 about that. It was about working hard, being a team member at home, doing chores, not having much
0:05:45 money at all, but lots of discipline, freedom within the frame. That’s what I remember. But work hard,
0:05:52 study hard, and be viewed as a reliable person. If you promise something, deliver it. Unless you’re dead,
0:05:53 you will deliver it.
0:05:57 When you came over, like growing up in that environment, when you came over and you went to
0:06:03 Yale, were you like, this is, these people don’t work as hard as I do. Like they don’t,
0:06:07 they don’t come from this environment where, you know, you’re struggling to break out and you’re,
0:06:12 you’re sort of driven by your parents and everything around you is sort of pushing you forward. And
0:06:16 there’s no option for failure. You have to succeed and you have to keep going.
0:06:22 I actually came here, I was in awe of everybody I met. And I’ll tell you why, because there we worked
0:06:29 hard because the simple things in life we didn’t have. You know, if you wanted to iron your uniform,
0:06:36 half the time there was no power. So you had ions with hot coal inside them. You know, you have spray
0:06:41 starch here. You know, we had to, when I was in a Catholic school, the uniform had to be starched and
0:06:46 you had to show up looking very crisp. Here you just buy spray starch and you spray it and you iron it on.
0:06:51 There you had to make your own starch at home. And sometimes it’d be clumps that would, you know,
0:06:57 land on the uniform because you didn’t really, you know, cook out the clumps and the starch that you
0:07:03 made. And so we spent a lot of time doing things that people here didn’t have to think about. You
0:07:07 just went to the store and bought it or you had electricity, you had water. So you took all that
0:07:15 for granted. We had to spend a lot of time on those so-called unnecessary survival tasks growing up.
0:07:20 So you come here and you watch everybody here going, wow, they’re so brilliant. They think
0:07:27 differently. They break boundaries. They’re irreverent, but they’re reverent also in their
0:07:33 own ways. How does one become like that? You know, I was more in awe of them rather than they don’t work
0:07:41 so hard. It’s just that the working hard part was on stuff that was made easy in the United States.
0:07:43 The price of development.
0:07:48 I never thought of it that way. Thank you for sharing that. There was a moment before you came
0:07:55 over, you had just got a big promotion and I think it was Norman. And you went to talk to him and you said,
0:08:00 should I take this? Because you were about to take over 60% of the factory or go to Yale.
0:08:06 And walk me through that moment and what went into that decision to, because that’s a huge promotion.
0:08:08 That’s incredible success.
0:08:12 No question about it. I would have been incredibly young to run such a big part of the company.
0:08:18 Would have been successful. Would have been in an environment that I was quite familiar with.
0:08:23 My expenses would have been nil because I would have had to live at home. No issues with anything.
0:08:30 But I had always dreamed about the United States because all my friends had come here and loved
0:08:36 American music, culture, innovation, entrepreneurship. Everything I read about just fascinated me.
0:08:39 And at that time, I’m really talking about the 70s.
0:08:47 America was a seat of culture and just brilliance. And as a young person growing up, your dream is to
0:08:53 be part of this environment. So I went to Norman and said, hey, Norman, look, this job you’ve offered me
0:09:01 is fantastic. One side of me says, take it and grow in this culture and environment. The other side of me
0:09:08 says, be a rebel. Go and be part of this incredibly amazing country and culture and environment called the
0:09:16 United States. And I knew one was risky and one was safe. And something in me wanted to take that risky
0:09:22 bet also. But Norman was clear. He said, look, if I were you, I would take the risky bet. Even though
0:09:27 it would be a loss for me and the company, if I were you, I’d take the risky bet because you may not get
0:09:33 this chance again. And even though I knew I was going to take on loan liabilities, I could fail. I was an
0:09:39 alien country that I didn’t have too much family in because I’d grown up with family. I decided to take
0:09:39 the plunge.
0:09:46 Has that changed how you, when you were like the CEO of Pepsi, did that change how you developed people
0:09:50 where the best thing for Pepsi might’ve been for them to stay, but the best thing for them might’ve
0:09:51 been for them to leave?
0:09:56 Well, at some point when people come to you and say, I’ve got this great opportunity,
0:10:01 you sit there going, would they be better off leaving? And in case I want them back,
0:10:07 I can always go back and get them. Or are they better off staying at PepsiCo? Sometimes selfishly,
0:10:11 I look at this and say, I’m actually better off if this person goes and gets this completely
0:10:17 different experience because I can bring them back. So you always look at this in a nice selfish way.
0:10:23 I don’t mean in a negative selfish way, in a nice selfish way. Somebody went to a tech company,
0:10:28 go there. I’m sure the allure of PepsiCo would make you want to come back if I wanted you back.
0:10:33 And now I have somebody who’s got the PepsiCo pedigree, has got a tech background and now can
0:10:39 come back and contribute to the company in profound ways or partner with me. So I’d look at it that way.
0:10:45 But if I felt that a person did not have much runway in PepsiCo, I would also tell them very honestly that
0:10:51 they might be viewed as a critical professional in PepsiCo. You know, they could have a career,
0:10:57 not a fantastic career. And if they got a better opportunity somewhere, I would provide the
0:11:02 reference and I would help them find something. I think if you really care about people developing,
0:11:04 you’ve got to think that way.
0:11:10 I love that. After Yale, you went into the consulting business. What did you love about that?
0:11:15 It was a sink or swim place. I went to the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago. We had just opened up
0:11:21 and I’d never been in consulting before. And so this was a new experience. First of all,
0:11:27 the caliber of people is just fantastic. Each one is pushing the other. You’re operating at the
0:11:33 highest level of a corporation. And in BCG, you worked on two different assignments at the same time.
0:11:38 So you had to understand two industries, the value drivers, two non-competitive industries.
0:11:44 What are the value drivers? How do you think about adding value to the client in the assignment you’re
0:11:51 working on? And so it challenged me in profound ways. First to learn industries, learn the economics
0:11:57 of the industry, the value drivers. Think beyond the industry to see what insights you can bring
0:12:04 to the industry and learn about dealing with leaders at very high positions, which I’d never done before
0:12:09 in the United States. I mean, I’d looked at these leaders as, my God, so-and-so is the CEO. And now
0:12:16 I’m sitting in the same room with the CEO. How do I behave? How do I, you know, articulate my point
0:12:22 of view without sounding like I’m a know-it-all? There’s so much I had to learn. In my six and a half
0:12:29 years at BCG, I think I grew 10 or 15 years. It was tough. It was a tough learning curve, but man,
0:12:33 I would never trade that experience for anything in the world. And a very competitive environment.
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0:15:33 How did you go about learning about industries you knew nothing about?
0:15:38 It’s surprising, you know, for example, let’s say that I was working in the tissue business,
0:15:44 all right, paper tissue. I would actually go to factories. I’d go to manufacturing lines. I’d go to
0:15:52 R&D laboratories, talk to everybody that was willing to give me time. Because consultants can’t just sit
0:15:59 there and articulate a point of view or provide direction without really understanding the details.
0:16:06 So my philosophy was zoom in before you zoom out. So in everything I’ve done, I always went deep into
0:16:13 whatever the business was, the company was, try to understand things from the ground level. Then I’d zoom
0:16:21 out and say, what’s missing here? Why is the strategic direction in need of a tweak or a reset? And then I’d go
0:16:27 back and say, if we did reset it, how would it sit in the front line? What changes would we have to make?
0:16:33 Then go back out. So this constant telephoto lens that I had in my head is what stood me in good stead
0:16:38 through my entire life. Zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out.
0:16:43 How did that help you at PepsiCo when you were CEO in terms of understanding, you know, the right side of
0:16:49 the decimal place at the low level and then also, you know, 30,000 foot view setting strategy for a huge
0:16:50 company?
0:16:56 You know, some people say CEOs should be careful not to micromanage. I agree with you. What I was
0:17:02 focused on is micro understanding. Because if you don’t understand the business down to where the rubber
0:17:10 meets the road, you can make decisions at the top, which are not implementable. Or in the implementation,
0:17:16 the intent of the strategy gets lost. To me, strategy and implementation have to go hand in
0:17:24 hand. And very often the reason operating executives rise to become CEOs is because the belief is they
0:17:30 know how a strategy has to land in the front line. In my case, I didn’t grow up in the operating businesses.
0:17:38 I grew up in strategy, finance, you know, corporate operations, not, you know, P&L. So my replacement for
0:17:44 having not run a P&L was go and learn each business from the ground up. So, you know, whether it was
0:17:50 Steve Reinemann who gave me an opportunity to learn the right side of the decimal, whether it was the
0:17:56 work I did with the Frito-Lay distribution system, it was always zoom in, learn the business, bottom up.
0:18:01 And have the humility to tell people to teach you the business. People like it when you tell them,
0:18:06 hey, can you teach me this business? You know, I’d go to the R&D laboratories. I tell them,
0:18:13 teach me how the concentrate is made. Teach me how the Frito-Lay, you know, chip is produced,
0:18:18 a Lays chip or a Doritos chip. I’d walk the manufacturing lines, walk the research labs,
0:18:21 talk to people. I spent an inordinate amount of time doing that.
0:18:26 What was the right side of the decimal lesson? I forget what that was.
0:18:30 So, you know, when you’re sitting in corporate as a CFO, the head of strategy,
0:18:34 you’re thinking in millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:18:40 That’s the left side of the decimal. But money is not made always in the hundreds of millions of
0:18:47 dollars. It’s can you take a penny out of delivery for Frito-Lay? And when you have so many routes
0:18:53 times a penny, it adds up. So on a daily basis, you’ve got to think about a tenth of a penny,
0:19:01 half a penny on a package or on a route. So it’s that little micro pennies that add up to the whole
0:19:08 business. So if you don’t understand the business at the most granular level, you come at it in a
0:19:12 very different perspective. And people don’t understand you because you’re talking in tens
0:19:18 of millions and hundreds of billions. And they’re like, I’m selling a 25 cent bag of Doritos,
0:19:24 a 45 cent bag of Tostitos. What are you talking about? Don’t talk to us about millions. We got to
0:19:29 cut a penny out of this route or cut a penny out of the packaging cost to get the profitability up.
0:19:34 So you’ve got to be able to talk that language. So the left of the decimal is that language where
0:19:41 you sit down with the team and say, can we take out two cents from this entire product package?
0:19:45 That reminds me of J.D. Rockefeller when he was first starting out with Standard Oil and
0:19:49 they were welding the oil cans that they were shipping it in. They were putting, I think it was
0:19:55 13 welds on these and we do it with 11. And those two welds would make a huge difference over the
0:20:00 volume that they were doing. I mean, the example is when we decided that it’s an imperative that
0:20:06 we reduce the water usage in our beverage plants, right? We were using two and a half liters of water
0:20:14 to make a liter of Pepsi. Now, I want to get it down to 1.2 or 1.3. And it’s not enough to provide a
0:20:19 dictate and say, get it down to 1.3. It’s a question of what does it take to get it down?
0:20:25 Let’s talk through it. Where do we use the water? How can we recycle some of the water? How do we need
0:20:30 to clean it to fishborne standards? You’ve got to ask all those questions so that the R&D people realize
0:20:35 that you’re not just providing a mandate. You’re basically saying, I’m going to help you get to the
0:20:41 right answer. So then you set goals saying, by year two, let’s get to two liters. Then let’s get
0:20:49 to 1.8, 1.7. Here’s a meaningful step down over a reasonable period of time so that we can get to
0:20:57 the 1.4 or 1.2 within five years. So it’s having respect for the frontline. So you talk to them in a
0:21:02 language that they’re familiar with as opposed to waving your hands and saying, I want to save 100
0:21:06 liters of water within two years. And people go, does she know what she’s talking about?
0:21:11 I want to come back just for a second to the consulting. And one of my favorite anecdotes
0:21:18 from this yearbook was when you were sitting in a bar in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and you were listening
0:21:24 to the line workers talk about the problems in the business. And you were getting insights from that.
0:21:29 I thought that was like so unique. And I’ve never seen anybody document that before. And I’m sure
0:21:34 people do it. Are there any other ways that you went about learning that were sort of off the beaten
0:21:41 path that provided valuable insight like that? Well, one of the most interesting ones was I was
0:21:48 working for a particular industry and a competitor was building a big plant. And we wanted to know how
0:21:54 big the plant was, how many bays they’re going to have, and what kind of bays, what kind of
0:21:59 transportation. And we couldn’t get enough information from the local filings or whatever.
0:22:06 And the plant was being built in a very wooded area. So it was a highly wooded area, but the middle
0:22:12 was cleared for the plant. And a big lesson I learned is that in the United States, don’t ever say the data
0:22:18 is not available. Say you didn’t look hard enough, because the data is available somewhere. So I kept
0:22:23 digging and digging and digging and digging to see where I could get this data. And the US government
0:22:29 has got fantastic data available. Somebody from one of the departments said, oh, I know where you can get
0:22:35 the data. If you did an FOI, a Freedom of Information request to the intelligence department, and ask them to
0:22:42 give you satellite photographs of the plant from different altitudes, they can give you a pretty good
0:22:50 picture. And I did that. And in a few days, I got the pictures at like 5,000 feet and 3,000 feet. And I now
0:22:57 know from the top what the plant looked like, the size of the plant, you know, what kind of bays, you know, what
0:23:03 kinds of products they might be considering manufacturing there. And so the valuable lesson is don’t tell me you
0:23:10 can’t get the data. Find a way to get the data. Because in the US, directly, indirectly, tangentially,
0:23:17 you can get enough information and data to, you know, really develop hypotheses about the issues you’re
0:23:22 working on. And so I’ve always kept that in mind. When people come to me and say, I don’t know how to
0:23:25 get this data. I say, come on, go look hard. It’s there.
0:23:30 What an incredible story. Is there another example like top of mind that comes to you when you think of
0:23:37 that? Well, when we were doing COVID, the question is, we didn’t use it as much, but one realized this
0:23:43 was available to us. You know, when you had to do tracking to see who’s got COVID, but had not
0:23:49 declared it and how big could the transmission be? You know, the syndromic surveillance, which is a
0:23:58 well-known tool where you look at their driving patterns. If they keep going towards a pharmacy and
0:24:04 buying tests, you know that they might have COVID. Okay. So you’ve got to immediately track that person
0:24:10 to say, should that person be socially distancing or quarantining? So there are so looking at the
0:24:15 wastewater that comes out of their home, you can tell whether there’s COVID. So I think it’s how do you
0:24:20 triangulate on data using multiple sources. Now with social media, you’ve got lots more opportunities
0:24:26 to track people, know what’s going on without invading their privacy. You can get all this
0:24:32 information. Those days, it was all paper and pen and, you know, pouring through wards of data.
0:24:38 As a leader, you’ve called yourself blunt and direct when delivering a message to people. I’m
0:24:43 curious what you’ve learned about delivering a message that gets heard. You know, it’s an evolving
0:24:50 process, if you want to call it that. Sometimes people deliver messages that are not heard because
0:24:57 you haven’t really delivered the message clearly. People actually come out of performance appraisers and
0:25:02 say, I think I’m doing a good job. And you’re going, oh my God, I hope that’s not what you heard.
0:25:06 You’re saying to yourself, because this person was supposed to have told you the three or four
0:25:12 things, areas that you’re supposed to improve upon and the three or four things that you did wrong,
0:25:18 you’re supposed to have gotten very direct feedback. People don’t like conflict. People don’t like to
0:25:23 deal with issues directly. They like to beat around the bush and then leave saying, I think I gave the
0:25:29 person the message. I had the opposite perspective, which is give the message, do it in a supportive way
0:25:36 and make sure that whatever you tell them they have to work on, you help them get to that. So I chose to
0:25:43 write performance appraisals, which said, this is what you’ve done well. This is where I think
0:25:48 you didn’t do well. This is what you need to work on. And if you were to work on these issues and show
0:25:54 progress, this is where you could go. So you see what this letter did was celebrate them for what they did
0:26:01 well. Told them what they didn’t do well. Told them the three or four things they had to demonstrate
0:26:08 progress on in the next year and how I was going to help them. And then also told them, if you showed
0:26:13 progress, this is your trajectory. Because if we don’t do it, I think we’re not getting the best out of people.
0:26:20 There’s a kindness and clarity. Toughness, kindness and clarity, all three. But don’t forget the
0:26:26 toughness. Because you’re confronting them and saying, you know, I asked you to really get to know
0:26:31 the international markets. You made two trips internationally last year. And each trip in three
0:26:35 days, you came right back. How could you have learned international markets without getting out of the
0:26:41 office in the US? Okay. And then you write saying, I’d like you to visit the following countries next year.
0:26:46 And when you visit those countries, make sure you go down to this level of detail. You know, some people
0:26:53 would say, a CEO shouldn’t be getting to that level of detail. Yeah, they’re right. But if I truly care
0:26:59 about this executive, and I think they have great potential, I will get to that level of detail. And I will
0:27:04 monitor it middle of the year and say, hey, did you make any international trips? Did you follow
0:27:09 anything I said? And then they say, nah, I really don’t want to go. Then you go there. You know, you don’t have
0:27:14 the potential to be a CEO. From the outside, we hear these stories about how CEOs pay attention to
0:27:21 the top 50 of the top 100. How many people inside were you really monitoring and trying to develop and
0:27:25 having a personal, a real one-to-one personal relationship where you’re doing this and you’re
0:27:28 in the weeds and you’re in the performance report and you’re trying to build them?
0:27:34 I think there’s about 300 or 400 that were corporate assets. And one watched them
0:27:39 all the time because these are people who in 15 years could be CEO. There’s something about them
0:27:45 that, you know, you sort of caught your fancy when you were in a meeting or in some project that they
0:27:51 were on, they had brilliant ideas. Not brilliant ideas that reinforced your thinking. Brilliant ideas
0:27:55 that challenged your thinking and took us to a better place. Because you don’t want yes people around you.
0:28:00 You want people who say, why don’t we push the boundaries of our thinking? Why don’t we
0:28:06 approach this creatively? And people who put the company before themselves. I look for that all
0:28:14 the time. And so there were three or 400 people that we actually call them corporate assets and we
0:28:20 track them to make sure that we game plan them, give them the right assignments. And even if they
0:28:25 couldn’t move, could we give them interesting assignments so that they could get the experiences
0:28:30 moving? So that’s the number of people that we track.
0:28:33 What were the signs that somebody was putting the company ahead of themselves?
0:28:40 They would put their hand up for difficult assignments. And if something went wrong,
0:28:44 they didn’t look for somebody else to blame. They would take the blame and say, hey, you know,
0:28:48 I could have done a different job or I could have led differently or I could have staffed my team
0:28:55 differently. These are people who would come to me and say, you know, whatever’s going on in this other
0:29:02 part of the company, I think may be putting something in jeopardy. And I’m not throwing them
0:29:07 under the bus. Would it be okay with you if I went and worked with them to perhaps write things?
0:29:13 And I’d say, be careful how you do it, but go for it. And I will tell them that I didn’t send you
0:29:18 there, that you were doing it out of your own good nature. Otherwise people say, oh, the CEO’s got some
0:29:23 pets that she’s sending our way. So you’ve got to be very careful how you deal with organizational
0:29:29 dynamics. But these are people who look around themselves and are constantly looking for ways to
0:29:34 improve the company as opposed to how do I get the next promotion, the next raise.
0:29:41 Are there things you’ve learned about reducing bureaucracy, increasing meritocracy and decreasing
0:29:47 sort of company politics? Obviously in a company the size of PepsiCo with hundreds of thousands of
0:29:53 employees, there’s a little bit of politicking going on, but how do you minimize that? And how do you
0:29:54 find and promote the best people?
0:30:00 That’s a very important question, Shane, because I think you have to understand the politics of an
0:30:03 organization. Where there are people, there’s politics, okay? You’ve got to understand
0:30:08 the politics, but don’t play in the politics. Don’t meddle in the politics. Just understand
0:30:15 who doesn’t like whom and, you know, how meetings work. Just understand it. And then figure out how
0:30:20 best to contribute within that. Once you start to meddle in the politics and gossip about it,
0:30:26 you become a negative force. That’s been my mantra through the entire time that I was in corporate
0:30:32 America. Because meddling in the politics, playing the politics, becoming political yourself and gossiping
0:30:39 is only a formula for disaster. Focus on the job. Focus on moving everything forward. I think things
0:30:45 would be great. Now, I was helped because of the fact that I had a family and kids. So work in the
0:30:52 office, I had to go home to the family and kids. I had no time for bar talk or going out to dinner and
0:30:54 talking about the politics. And I really didn’t care about it.
0:31:00 What about bureaucracy? Was there ways to, I mean, there’s a natural entropy to these large
0:31:06 organizations to hire somebody to do this job. And then they make that job important. And Parkinson’s
0:31:10 law, it takes up all this time. And, you know, you’re distancing yourself from it. And if you let
0:31:17 it go, it just becomes, you know, at the extreme, it becomes government and you go bankrupt. And how do you,
0:31:18 how do you fight that?
0:31:23 Companies like PepsiCo, at least in my time, I can only talk about the time when I was there.
0:31:27 You know, we had very good scorecards to measure productivity,
0:31:35 spans and layers. And we monitored that constantly. You know, is our output per employee going up?
0:31:40 How many spans? How many layers do we have? Are we adding layers for no reason?
0:31:45 You know, we monitored all of that carefully. And that’s why the company was successful, because
0:31:50 you know, it’s like an accordion. Sometimes you end up adding a couple of layers. And then you say,
0:31:55 hey, wait a sec, how did this happen? Why did we drift there? Let’s get the number of layers down.
0:32:00 You know, we see certain levels of people have to have at least eight reports or 10 reports.
0:32:07 So we have different ways we triangulate on organization, hierarchy, levels, bureaucracy,
0:32:15 overhead. We look at all of that. And because our target setting process for the businesses and for
0:32:23 the company as a whole is always reasonably stretched. It’s never easy targets. It’s always a reasonable
0:32:32 stretch. And then we always promise the street a number that’s lower than what we set ourselves to do.
0:32:38 Okay. So we never do the opposite way. We tell the street a higher number and promise ourselves lower
0:32:44 and pay ourselves big bonuses. We always had internally stretched goals. And we promised the
0:32:49 street something more reasonable. That way, we never got paid if we didn’t make the stretch goals. The
0:32:54 bonus, we never paid our bonuses without the stretch goals. So that was the performance culture in
0:32:57 PepsiCo for every leader that was there in the company.
0:33:03 I mentioned kids and one of my favorite stories from your book, and I’m going to read this because
0:33:08 I want to make sure I get it right, is when you got promoted to the president of PepsiCo and you drove
0:33:15 home after work and you were so happy and you were feeling so confident about yourself. And when you
0:33:20 got home, your mother was there and you told her you had the most incredible news. And she told you,
0:33:26 the news can wait, I need you to go out and get milk. And you went back in the car and you drove to the
0:33:32 store for milk and you came hopping mad, telling your mother, I’ve just become president of PepsiCo and
0:33:38 you couldn’t just stop and listen to my news. You wanted me to go get the milk. And your mom said to
0:33:44 you, listen to me, you may be the president of whatever, of PepsiCo or whatever, but you come home,
0:33:51 you’re a wife, a mother and a daughter. Nobody can take your place. So leave that crown in the garage.
0:33:56 What does that teach you about power and humility?
0:34:01 Well, you know, we grew up with all these dualities, especially as you ascend to the top,
0:34:07 the dualities just grow. Okay. Power and humility was a set of dualities that I had to struggle with
0:34:17 always because I chose to be a mother. I chose to get married. I chose to work hard and ascend in my career.
0:34:23 I was helped along by other people, but I decided I’d like to keep working and I’d like to do well and move
0:34:32 forward. So when I make those choices, I can’t delegate all of that to somebody else. I chose to marry an Indian
0:34:37 man, which means that there were some duties and responsibilities that went with being a person of
0:34:45 Indian origin. I didn’t shirk them. And so having made those choices, she was right. Somebody else can
0:34:50 take my place in the company, but at home, who else is going to be the wife and the mother and the daughter?
0:34:58 Nobody else but me. And so I knew that I had to play those roles and play them well. So the real
0:35:05 question was, since I made all those choices, how do I get the support structure and have the
0:35:10 resilience to play all those roles? It’s not easy to play all those roles. Okay. You can’t just come
0:35:15 home and start bossing your kids around because they say, I don’t work for you, mom. My kids have told me
0:35:22 that. Stop treating us and like we work for you. Don’t give us instructions. And so it’s not that I talk to
0:35:27 my, the people who work for me that way, but somehow they interpreted it as I just sit there in a chair
0:35:32 and I boss people around. Little did they know, but they would say, we don’t work for you. I said,
0:35:40 no, I understand. And so I think that all that she was telling me was just constantly remind yourself
0:35:46 as to all the roles you play. And don’t just think that you can walk away from any of those roles
0:35:51 because you made those choices yourself. Do you see that as balance or do you see it as harmony
0:35:56 between these things? There’s nothing called balance. What balance? You know, anytime you use
0:36:02 the word balance, I think of this beam sitting on a fulcrum as perfectly still. It doesn’t exist.
0:36:12 It’s juggling all those roles. It’s not even harmony. Sometimes it’s not very harmonious. You just juggle
0:36:18 those roles and hope the most important balls every day don’t fall and crash and burn. So that’s all you
0:36:25 do. They’re all full-time roles, each one of them. I think this often with, you know, being ambitious
0:36:30 and driven and working hard, and then also holding myself to an incredibly high standard as a parent.
0:36:37 And it motivates me. And it simultaneously, like having those standards can also be
0:36:43 counterproductive because you’re so hard on yourself. Is there any advice?
0:36:49 You’ve got to start off by saying, look, the job is a selfish thing. Okay. We love the job. We love,
0:36:55 you know, working on challenges. But when you have kids, you’ve got to understand it’s a tether. It’s a
0:37:02 beautiful tether, but it’s a tether. It’s a loving tether, but it’s a lifelong tether. And so
0:37:10 I think you should have kids only if you love having kids. I mean, I adore my kids. They may
0:37:17 not think that always, but I just adore my kids. I love them more than anything in this world.
0:37:24 And so does it cause angst at times? Yeah, it does. Do sometimes I sit down and say,
0:37:28 God, I wish I could just work on this problem uninterrupted? Yes.
0:37:35 But that tether comes with some responsibilities. And so I have to have the resilience to balance all
0:37:41 of those things. So each of us as parents, working parents have to find a way to manage all of these
0:37:47 priorities and not lose ourselves. So what you end up doing is giving up some of the things that you
0:37:54 want to do for yourself. Just forget them because you’ve got to see it through the eyes of your kids,
0:37:58 through the eyes of your spouse, through the eyes of the job. You have to morph into a new
0:38:00 being. That’s a reality.
0:38:05 And when you were CEO of Pepsi, your kids were pretty young. How did you manage the information
0:38:12 flow? Just the volume of information that goes to the CEO. How did you do your full day at work?
0:38:17 I imagine you had like a homework bag almost where you’re coming home with, you know, two or three or
0:38:22 four hours of homework as well. But you’ve got to put dinner on the table. You’ve got to be there
0:38:25 for the kids. How did, how do you, what did that information flow look like?
0:38:33 I had two or three skills, talents, I don’t know what you want to call it, or curses. I didn’t sleep
0:38:34 much. Okay.
0:38:38 So, you know, you can either say that was, wow, you’re lucky or man, I wish I could sleep.
0:38:46 I had a pretty good memory. I could read anything and it’ll stick in my brain. And I was a speed
0:38:52 reader. All three helped. I had a support structure between family. And then later on, I could afford
0:38:58 to hire help. I had a support structure. So to put food on the table, the food was prepared.
0:39:05 And then the most important thing is I had a supportive spouse. The role that my husband
0:39:11 played in this hall was just fantastic. And if I wasn’t there, he made sure the kids were taken
0:39:17 care of because he was working full time too. And I did the same when he was traveling. And so I think
0:39:25 the two of us worked as a team. We had support from family a little bit, but mostly the help around us
0:39:31 were like family. And the weekends we had no help. It was just us. But then we said,
0:39:36 look, the weekends we were just devoted completely to family. I never went into the office on the
0:39:41 weekends most of the time, but I worked from home because there’s just lots to read. When the kids
0:39:48 did homework, I did homework. And so was I always there for the kids? I’d say no. But you don’t get
0:39:54 to be CEO by being the perfect mom, the perfect wife, the perfect everything. You don’t. You do the
0:39:56 best you can. And that’s all I did.
0:39:59 Do you think a lot of people are unwilling to make those sacrifices?
0:40:06 It’s hard to make those sacrifices. I mean, I’d like to say it’s easy. It’s not. You look back and go,
0:40:11 God, I missed all of these things I could have done for myself. I missed all of these fun events. I missed
0:40:18 20 date nights. Yes, you missed all of that. But, you know, on balance, if you put it all together,
0:40:21 the whole package worked okay.
0:40:28 I see this often. We hold up CEOs and entrepreneurs and people starting a business as sort of, we want
0:40:31 that, but we don’t want all the things that come with it.
0:40:37 It’s that climb. It’s a tough climb. Anybody who thinks it’s easy to get there and then keep the job
0:40:45 of stuff. I mean, every organization is a pyramid. Okay. It’s not a cylinder. It’s a pyramid. So as you go from
0:40:51 the bottom layer of managerial positions to the top, think of it in PepsiCo and the bottom layer, probably
0:40:59 14,000, 15,000 people. By the time you get to CEO minus two, you’re at about 60 or 70. CEO minus one, you’re down
0:41:07 to 15. So you’ve gone from 15,000 to 60 to 15 to one. Just think of the climb. And then this
0:41:12 is all happening at a time when the world around you is changing so much. So you’ve got to keep up
0:41:16 with all the changes in the world. And you’ve got to make sure that you earn your place in the next
0:41:22 realm. And remember, if you don’t earn your place, the people below you are waiting to push you out.
0:41:29 So people don’t realize that as you get more senior in an organization, it’s up or out. So just keep
0:41:31 those jobs. It’s very difficult.
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0:42:42 Is that why there’s a lot of turnover after a CEO change? Like when you were promoted to CEO,
0:42:46 the people you were competing with for CEO probably left.
0:42:52 I kept many of them because I told them, look, I may become CEO, but I can’t, I don’t see why we
0:42:57 can’t work together. Most of them stayed. After two or three years, they got CEO jobs and they left,
0:43:02 but many of them stayed. But you’re right. You know, when you’re, when, if there are five people
0:43:08 competing to be CEO and only one is made CEO, typically what happens is other companies grab
0:43:11 them. Especially for a company like PepsiCo, which has a great leadership development,
0:43:17 people came and grab them. And so they go off to be CEOs, which is good because you’ve got PepsiCo alumni
0:43:25 now running so many companies. But you know, you’ve got to think about this math, which is pretty tough.
0:43:30 When you became CEO, I’m going to rewind after this and go to pre-CEO. But when you became CEO,
0:43:35 you walked into your general counsel’s office, Larry, and you fired him and you hadn’t thought about this
0:43:40 beforehand. And then he looked stunned. And about 10 seconds later, you hired him back. What was the
0:43:47 importance of that? I had to make sure that all the people working for me knew that they were working
0:43:53 for me, the new CEO, not just carryovers from the old CEO. Typically what happens when you have carryovers
0:43:59 is that people wonder if you can trust them. And not that there’s any bad feelings between you and the old
0:44:05 CEO, but you want your own team. The general counsel is one of the most important jobs. And even though I worked
0:44:10 very closely with Larry and I adored him, I didn’t ever want him to think that he was always going to be
0:44:16 viewed as a carryover from Steve, even though Steve and I were best friends, great colleagues. I
0:44:22 respected Steve enormously. So I had to make sure Larry realized that I’m going to respect him even
0:44:28 more if he was now my hire. So I walked in and said, Larry, you’re fired. But I did it with a smile.
0:44:32 And he just looked at me and said, what do you mean, boss? I said, okay, you’re now hired as my general
0:44:39 counsel. He burst out laughing. And I mean, my first years at PepsiCo, my early years as CEO,
0:44:42 was successful because of Larry. What a general counsel.
0:44:47 Well, even he said that that was an important moment because it reset him as well to not being
0:44:54 a holdover and to being there. Is it, when you mentioned you sort of like the old CEO around,
0:44:57 if a CEO goes to the board, how does that impact the new CEO?
0:45:03 The outgoing CEO is never in the deliberations. You provide your perspective and then you leave the
0:45:08 room. The board picks the next CEO because remember the outgoing CEO doesn’t have to deal with the new
0:45:14 CEO, right? And so that’s what happened when Steve was stepping down. And that’s what happened when I
0:45:20 was stepping down. I told the board what I thought the company needed going forward. I gave them the
0:45:26 dossiers of four or five people and said, these are all the pros and cons of each candidate based on what
0:45:31 the company needs. And this is how these people have evolved over time, the trajectory of their
0:45:35 development over the last five or seven years. But it’s your decision. You need to
0:45:40 deliberate. You need to interview each of these people. You need to do your assessments. Because at
0:45:46 the end of the day, I’m gone. You have to make sure the company stays successful based on the choices you
0:45:53 make. And so the board deliberated, diligently met each candidate one-on-one and got to know them and
0:46:02 spent almost two years deciding who should be CEO. So that’s the way to do succession. And so I think
0:46:07 outgoing CEOs can develop people, but they don’t select the person.
0:46:13 When a CEO steps down, is there a risk if they join the board of the company, they’re stepping down from
0:46:18 a CEO in a way that limits the incoming CEO in a way?
0:46:24 That’s my belief. I think an outgoing CEO should just leave, should not sit on the board because then
0:46:29 you’re sort of curbing what the new CEO can do because they’re not always looking over their shoulder to
0:46:36 see if they can take a direction that’s different than the CEO sitting on the board. It’s a terrible
0:46:42 situation. When I stepped down as CEO, I told the board I wouldn’t be chairman for more than two months
0:46:49 max, max. And then I’m out because I wanted the new CEO to have total flexibility to do whatever he
0:46:56 wanted. While we’re on boards, you’re on many boards, including Amazon’s. What’s the difference
0:47:02 between being the CEO and being a board member? When you’re a CEO, you’re it. When you’re on a board,
0:47:09 you’re one among peers. So it’s a group of you collectively that are serving the company.
0:47:15 Nobody is more important. We’re all doing it together. So it’s got to be, you’ve got to
0:47:22 understand you’re dealing with peers. And together we are the board first. Point number two, there’s a
0:47:28 deep urge as a CEO to want to manage the company. You cannot manage the company. You can only provide
0:47:33 direction, ideas, suggestions to the company. And worry about the governance of the company.
0:47:40 So you’ve got to make sure you don’t dig into the reeds and create confusion as to whose direction
0:47:46 should we be taking. So it’s very important that CEOs forget their CEOship and put on a board hat.
0:47:52 And always ask yourself the question, when I was CEO, if a board member behaved the way I’m behaving
0:47:54 now, would I have liked it?
0:47:55 Oh, that’s a good question.
0:48:03 And if you say, Oh God, I would have hated it, then change your behavior. Okay. So understand the
0:48:08 roles of the CEO and understand the role of the board member. And the third thing is, you know,
0:48:13 when you’re a board member of the company, remember that the shareholders are expecting you to play
0:48:20 the role of, you know, setting the right strategy, picking the right leaders, all of that are the roles
0:48:25 that this company is expecting you to, the shareholders are expecting you to perform. Focus
0:48:31 on those things. Focus on the strategy. Focus on leadership development. Understand the business so
0:48:36 you can marry it with the strategy. Focus on those things. Don’t try to get into the weeds and try to
0:48:41 micromanage quarterly results, annual results. It’s just not your role.
0:48:45 You’ve spent your life in strategy. What is strategy?
0:48:51 You know, it’s a nebulous concept, but it’s a very clear concept in the other hand. The strategy in
0:49:02 my books is crafting a path forward for an entity that allows it to execute on that path forward
0:49:09 with superior results. Can you never craft a strategy so that your results are diminished? You always craft
0:49:15 a strategy to improve your results. But if you craft a strategy which is not implementable, it’s not a
0:49:22 strategy. So strategy requires implementation with it and a place that’s better than where
0:49:27 you are today. Both are difficult to, because you have to almost anticipate what the outcome of the
0:49:33 strategy could be. It can be implemented and you’re going to get to a better place. And that’s the challenge
0:49:38 with strategy. You’ve almost got to have a 360 degree view of the environment, of competition, of the markets,
0:49:44 of customer revolution, everything else. And then you’re crafting a path to say, this is how we should proceed.
0:49:50 This is why it’s going to be better for us than it is today. And incidentally, if the world around us
0:49:54 changes, we’re going to zag a little bit. But we’re still going to focus on getting to a better
0:50:02 place. That’s why I think strategy requires unique skills. Zooming in, zooming out, being able to have
0:50:08 peripheral vision constantly, learning from other industries. That’s where consulting was a huge
0:50:15 benefit, because that’s what consulting taught you. Strategy consulting. And I think that’s what I sort of
0:50:19 took to heart and everywhere I went, that’s what stood me in good stead.
0:50:24 There’s two times that you’ve mentioned in this that it has to be implementable. What’s the importance
0:50:30 of that? Is that something that comes up often? Or is that the difference between academic strategy and sort
0:50:38 of real world strategy? Yes, definitely the latter. Because very often, strategy is as it is taught.
0:50:43 It’s taught by people who’ve never run a company, never implemented strategy. So I’ll give you an
0:50:53 example. In business schools, they teach the fact that organizations are siloed. And siloed
0:50:58 organizations are terrible. You should have information exchange within divisions in the
0:51:05 company, et cetera, et cetera. But then universities are the most siloed places. There’s hardly any
0:51:10 sharing of information across departments. It’s the most siloed organization. You see, what it is,
0:51:16 is they’re teaching something which is not implementable in that entity. So from our perspective,
0:51:23 if I go into the company and say, I want power of one, I want PepsiCo to practice power of one,
0:51:29 as opposed to Frito-Lay beverages, I’m not going to say, what is power of one? What do I mean when
0:51:34 I say power of one? What all do I have to change to make power of one happen? Where can the friction
0:51:40 be in the company to implement power of one? How do I provide the right incentives to remove that
0:51:44 friction? Because at the end of the day, everything has to happen through people. So you’ve got to
0:51:49 understand people. And you’ve got to understand all the changes you’ve got to make to people,
0:51:56 processes, incentive structures, everything to enable a change to happen. And that’s what I mean
0:52:01 by implementable. Don’t just sit there saying we should have power of one. Talk about what is it going
0:52:08 to take to implement it. And understand where it could be derailed, anticipated, keep addressing it. Watch
0:52:13 for science when it’s not working well. See what changes you’ve got to make. So you’ve got to be very
0:52:18 alert when you’re making a change. You’re one of the few people I’ve interviewed that started with
0:52:23 removing friction, which I think is beautiful. Most people start with force. How do I make this happen?
0:52:29 How do I will this? How do I push through the friction? Most of it is friction in organizations,
0:52:34 friction points, which you’ve got to look for and remove it. Coming back to the board just for a second
0:52:38 here. What’s the difference between a good board member and a great board member?
0:52:45 A good board member probably does governance well and knows all the board rules and can show up at a
0:52:50 meeting reading the material. A great board member reads a lot more than the material that’s provided
0:52:55 to you. You know, go read everything that’s available outside of the company, its businesses, its competition,
0:53:02 technologies, whatever. So when you come to the meeting, you don’t just do what the basic stuff required
0:53:08 to get through the two days of board meetings. But you’re adding value over and above the basic
0:53:15 requirements of the board. And so when you provide insights that really cause the company to pause
0:53:21 and say, God, she’s got a great point there. Let’s call her back and say, Hey, Indra, can you tell us
0:53:26 more about what you meant by that? Now you’re really a value-added board member, as opposed to, yeah,
0:53:32 so-and-so is a good board member. Read the board material, made sure that the governance was
0:53:39 ticked off. I think that’s the table stakes to be on the board. But a great board member does a lot of
0:53:43 work themselves to read way beyond what the company gave you to read.
0:53:50 I love that. Amazon is known for doing things completely differently internally, including
0:53:54 their memos to start meetings and stuff like that. What are the lessons that you’ve learned from being
0:53:58 on the board there that may have been counterintuitive or new to you?
0:54:03 You know, the entire company is focused on the customer. The obsession of the customer is
0:54:07 something else. And it’s always like, how do we make customers’ life better? How do we
0:54:14 lower costs for customers? How do we improve delivery times? How do we latency? All these things are
0:54:20 what they focus on all the time. So I’ve never been part of such a customer-obsessed company.
0:54:28 PepsiCo is consumer-focused, but these are customer-obsessed companies, first. Second, Amazon has paranoia about
0:54:37 sort of devolving into hierarchy and what they call losing the day-one culture. Day-one culture being when
0:54:43 they were young, entrepreneurial, how hungry they were and how they hustled. They want to have that
0:54:49 hustle culture all the time. The fact that they’re paranoid about it, even today, given their size,
0:54:54 is what blows me away. They’re always scared that they will lose that day-one culture. And so you’ve
0:55:00 got everybody hustling to make sure that hierarchy is not built. Too much bureaucracy doesn’t kill
0:55:05 ideas. And so anybody can come up with an idea as long as they can write a six-page document and present
0:55:11 it to people and, you know, seek funding if your document is good. So I would look at Amazon as this
0:55:20 gigantic day-one company that’s customer-obsessed. It’s an unusual culture, a culture that’s prevailed,
0:55:30 a culture that’s constantly re-examined so that it never, ever changes from this day-one hustle.
0:55:34 And I feel privileged to be part of this company.
0:55:41 You’ve led directly as CEO through many crises, including, I think you had a food safety scare
0:55:47 while you were CEO of PepsiCo. What are the differences between, I mean, academic and real
0:55:50 world leading to a crisis, I guess, would be a good way to frame this?
0:55:56 You know, academics teach crises, which is good, because how else will students learn about what
0:56:03 leaders did in crises? So I respect academics who teach all that. And they do a good job of doing
0:56:09 the teaching. The thing is, when you’re in a crisis, it’s happening in real time. Public is writing about
0:56:18 it. You’re being taken down the eyes of everybody in the media and investors, analysts. You’re home.
0:56:25 Everybody’s scared because your face is on TV saying, what the hell’s going on? And it was even tougher for
0:56:34 a female CEO because, you know, women CEOs got a lot more attention than men. And so when you’re going
0:56:40 through a crisis, first of all, you’ve got to understand the crisis down to the details as opposed
0:56:46 to, we have a recall. Sit down and get your R&D and manufacturing guys and say, tell me about this
0:56:53 in a lot more detail. Ask all the questions you need to ask to understand exactly the root cause of the
0:56:53 crisis.
0:56:59 Then let them give you a plan as to how they’re going to address it. Then step back and decide what the
0:57:04 messaging is going to be. Very often, people don’t take the time to really understand the root cause of
0:57:09 what caused this crisis. And don’t listen to the plan. And then they try to pass the blame on to somebody
0:57:12 else. As a CEO, the buck stops with you.
0:57:17 How does that go with positioning? I love this because how do you take what’s happening? You’ve
0:57:21 agreed that this is the plan. This is the path forward. You have credibility with this. I think
0:57:27 we can do a lot with this. And then how do I position that in a way where the company is moving
0:57:32 forward in the best way possible, but you’re positioning it for an audience too, to be receptive
0:57:38 to it and not pass the buck. Honesty is critically important. When you have a crisis, be honest with
0:57:44 your employees, with the outside world saying, this is the crisis we’re facing. This is how we’re going
0:57:50 to address it. And we’re going to give you an update on this timeframe. Honesty means, I mean,
0:57:57 changes the whole game. Because when you try to use big words to hide the crisis, so you’re just trying
0:58:03 to deflect responsibility. People just don’t have time for this, including your own employees. Okay.
0:58:09 And so I’ll give you a little crisis. When we had our second activist investor in the stock,
0:58:13 it was a crisis for the company because nobody likes to have an activist in the stock.
0:58:18 I did a town hall and I told everybody, I said, look, I’ll give you regular updates
0:58:24 on the activist. You’ll see it on TV. Ignore it. There’s a general counsel, the CFO and I,
0:58:29 who’ll handle the activist. Your job is to just keep focusing on delivering performance. That’s
0:58:35 your only job. Don’t worry about the other distractions. And you can be sure that three
0:58:41 of us have the company’s best interest at heart. And they all knew that I always put the company
0:58:45 before me. I said, we have the best interest of the company at heart, but we will keep you informed.
0:58:54 But your job is to keep driving the performance. Now, deep down inside, you know, I was in turmoil
0:58:58 because I had to deal with all of this stuff instead of just focusing on the company. However,
0:59:04 to the employees, I had to show that I was calm, I was in control, and that I was going to take
0:59:12 them to a better place. So I think boards pick leaders for resilience, ability to manage through
0:59:14 crises. And can you stay calm through it?
0:59:18 The second activist investor you had, was that Nelson?
0:59:20 Nelson Peltz. Yeah.
0:59:24 Walk me through that. What was that like? What was the engagement with them like? I mean,
0:59:28 it’s so far in the past now that it’s all sort of come out, but from your point of view?
0:59:32 It was a typical activist book. He wrote a white paper and he gave it to me. I mean,
0:59:39 I knew Nelson Peltz for years. I liked him actually. So there was no strangers walked off the street
0:59:45 with the white paper. It wasn’t that way. He’d done his work. Most activists pick data selectively
0:59:49 to make their case. And so when he gave me the white paper, I didn’t sit here going,
0:59:54 I’m not going to listen to you. I said, look, let me study his white paper because he may be the
0:59:59 external activist. I’m an internal activist. I want this company to do well. So why don’t we look at
1:00:06 his white paper as a free consulting report? And let’s pour through it. If he has any ideas that
1:00:13 we haven’t implemented in the company, let’s take those ideas. But we’re not going to make big changes
1:00:19 to the company just because Nelson said, I had to make it. We’ll make it if it makes sense for this
1:00:25 company. And if we can keep performing at the level we’re performing. So I was clear on the company
1:00:30 strategy. The board was clear on the company strategy. We listened to everything Nelson said,
1:00:35 because we have great respect for him. Okay. So this is not about blowing off activists as terrible.
1:00:40 Some companies do that. I didn’t do that. I said, I’m going to treat him with respect. Every time we
1:00:46 wanted to meet, I met. Anytime he wanted to meet a board member, they met with him. But every time he
1:00:51 proposed something, we said, look, we’re doing this because of the strategy of this direction,
1:00:56 because of these trends. If he wants to change his strategy, it’s because you think the trend has
1:01:02 changed. Has the trend changed? No, it hasn’t. Then if the trend is that way, that’s our strategy and
1:01:09 we’re not changing it. Okay. So he came around. I mean, he’s a smart guy. He came around and we’ve
1:01:13 remained friends since. There’s no question about bad feelings or anything of that sort.
1:01:19 Often, activists want a board seat or demand a board seat. What are the pros and cons from your point of view
1:01:25 as a CEO of letting an activist investor onto the board? And at what stake do you think it makes more
1:01:28 sense, even if you disagree with it? What ownership levels?
1:01:33 Well, it depends on the board member they propose. You know, Bill Johnson, who we used to run Heinz,
1:01:40 came on our board. And Nelson actually suggested Bill Johnson. But what Nelson didn’t realize is that
1:01:45 Bill Johnson and I knew each other and we were friends already. So when Nelson recommended Bill
1:01:50 Johnson, it was a welcome thing for us because he came from the consumer world, knew us well.
1:01:56 Now, had he recommended somebody who was disruptive, we may have paused and said, don’t want that board
1:02:01 member because you don’t want to spend our time answering activist questions when we should be
1:02:08 running the company. Bill Johnson was hugely accretive to the board. And, you know, he had known Nelson
1:02:15 forever, but he knew the consumer world, he knew PepsiCo. And so, you know, he actually added a lot to the board.
1:02:16 It was a win-win.
1:02:17 It was a total win-win.
1:02:23 Is there a percentage in your head where if a shareholder has a certain percentage, then it’s sort of probably right
1:02:25 for them to have a board seat, even if they might be disruptive?
1:02:34 Oh, 15% or so, 10, 15%, maybe, maybe. But one to 2% and you try to agitate for a board seat, I think that’s really wrong.
1:02:42 You mentioned women CEOs. Correct me if I get this wrong. When you became CEO of PepsiCo, you were the first woman CEO in the S&P 500?
1:02:56 No, no, no, no. A couple others, Carly Fiorina, Warsaw. So, when I became CEO in 2006, I think there were 11 companies that had women CEOs, okay?
1:03:04 When I became president of PepsiCo, I think I was one of two or three. But I was the first woman of color to run a Fortune 50 company.
1:03:10 Now, I think there’s about 54 women CEOs of the Fortune, of the S&P 500.
1:03:13 Does it feel like we’ve made progress to you?
1:03:19 You know, when you’re at 10%, it’s not really progress because 50% of the MBA graduates are women.
1:03:27 Okay, so somewhere that pipeline is leaky. But, you know, it’s a journey because you’ve got to make so many trade-offs.
1:03:37 Why did it get to the top? But it was novel at the time I became CEO, the first immigrant person of color from an emerging market
1:03:44 to lead a Fortune 50, iconic American company. It might have made a lot of news, but deep down inside, I’m like, God, I better prove myself.
1:03:52 Okay, I lived off of that fear of making sure that I did my job right and didn’t let any of these constituencies down.
1:03:54 To the outside world, it was big news.
1:04:06 How do we go about creating more of an equal opportunity while maintaining a meritocracy in companies that allow for more women?
1:04:08 Like, where do we get in the way of this happening?
1:04:14 I think if you decide that you want to have a meritocracy in the company, you should draw from the entire talent pool.
1:04:21 When you have more than 50% of the graduates are women, women are getting all the top grades, they’re hungry, they want to move ahead.
1:04:27 And then you don’t hire from that pool because you start off saying, oh, she’s a woman, must not be very good.
1:04:30 You have these biases, that’s a problem.
1:04:39 So you’ve constantly got to check your biases at the door and say, if I had to put on a blindfold and hire people, how do I make sure that I draw from the best and the brightest?
1:04:41 That’s what consulting does, okay?
1:04:43 So you draw from the best and the brightest.
1:04:52 And then while they’re in the company moving ahead, make sure that barriers that exist to their success are removed.
1:05:00 Because once you attack somebody’s confidence, it attacks their competence.
1:05:12 So if a woman is presenting and you roll your eyes at her, or when she’s presenting, you cut her off, or she says something and you cut her off, or, you know, I’ve seen this often.
1:05:16 Somebody will say, oh, yeah, this is so theoretical when a woman presents.
1:05:19 When a man says the same thing, they’ll say, oh, God, that’s so brilliant.
1:05:24 So these things happen as a matter of practice in companies.
1:05:29 Women, people of color, when they present, they do go through some bad behavior.
1:05:30 I’m talking of then.
1:05:31 Things have changed a lot now.
1:05:33 But in those days, it did happen.
1:05:41 And so when those things happen, you’ve got to figure out a way to call those people out right there and say, hey, can you let her finish?
1:05:46 Can you let this person articulate their point of view before you cut them off?
1:05:49 Will you stop rolling your eyes when she’s presenting?
1:05:51 Because you can feel the person rolling their eyes.
1:06:03 So if you really value every talent for what it is, meritocracy, bring them all in, allow them all to thrive, then everybody has the confidence to continue to contribute.
1:06:11 But if you have all these unconscious biases that impact people who are different, then they lose their confidence.
1:06:15 And once you lose your confidence, you no longer feel comfortable.
1:06:19 So your competence is impacted because you’re questioning yourself.
1:06:20 Am I good enough?
1:06:21 Can I do this?
1:06:34 So I think the whole idea of meritocracy is thinking about all talent is equal, as opposed to one talent is more important than the others.
1:06:37 And then creating equality of opportunity, I would imagine.
1:06:45 Opportunity, environment, constantly monitoring it, making sure we don’t slip back to old bad habits, and making sure we have the numbers.
1:06:52 Usually when you have one or two diverse people in the organization, you can’t really practice how to be inclusive.
1:07:03 And then you have to constantly check yourself and say, if 60% of the summa cum laude from that college were women, where are my summa cum laude?
1:07:05 Why aren’t they in this company?
1:07:06 Okay?
1:07:13 So you’ve got to ask yourself those simple questions based on the statistics coming out of all the graduating classes.
1:07:23 Because if 55% of the graduating class are women, 55% of the summa cum laude and magna cum laude are women.
1:07:31 And even in STEM disciplines, if it’s more than 50%, and if you only have 20% of the hires are women, why aren’t they coming to you?
1:07:38 So you’ve got to look at all these numbers and say, let me ask the question about, what is it about my company?
1:07:42 Especially if you’re a conceivable company, you go, boy, they should really want to come here.
1:07:44 What are we doing wrong?
1:07:47 So you’ve got to get introspective yourself.
1:07:59 One of the anecdotes that you pointed out in your book, and correct me if I’m getting this wrong, because I’m just going from memory here, is when you started listening in on the performance reviews with the men, it was they did all these things and this.
1:08:03 But with the women, it seemed like they did all these things but this.
1:08:06 Was that like a bias within the organization?
1:08:08 Or what was going on there?
1:08:12 So performance appraisals for men is like, you know, he didn’t deliver on all his goals.
1:08:14 Yeah, I agree.
1:08:17 But the guy’s got really, he’s got great potential.
1:08:21 With the women, it was, she delivered on all her goals.
1:08:27 But I think, you know, her future trajectory is not that great.
1:08:28 You go, why not?
1:08:32 Well, I don’t know, something about her tells me that she won’t be successful.
1:08:34 Sometimes it was just ineffable.
1:08:39 Not with all people, but some of the people, that’s how the dialogue would go.
1:08:43 You have to stop it at that time and say, let’s not just leave this discussion.
1:08:47 Let’s really have a conversation about this because maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not.
1:08:57 And sometimes it used to be issues related to her style or the way she dressed or how she showed emotion or how she gesticulated too much.
1:09:13 And now these women show up in these C-suites and it’s a different gender, behavior, everything.
1:09:14 People have to get used to it.
1:09:17 So you need more examples of people in C-suites.
1:09:22 And then you say, okay, look, each person behaves differently, but they all bring a richness to the dialogue.
1:09:25 Was that what happened when you quit PepsiCo?
1:09:32 Because you quit, you went to Roger and you said, I’m leaving, I’m going to do this board meeting and then I’m gone.
1:09:34 I didn’t quit, remember, I just threatened to quit.
1:09:38 I said, I’m, oh yeah, I just said, after this meeting, I’m leaving tomorrow.
1:09:39 If nothing changes.
1:09:41 I didn’t even say that.
1:09:45 I said, you know, look, you’ve been watching this bad behavior and you’ve said nothing.
1:09:50 So I’m going to make this presentation tomorrow to the board.
1:09:51 After that, I quit.
1:09:53 And he didn’t say anything.
1:10:02 And then that day, the meeting with all the presidents that was supposed to happen, where I would always get beaten up, didn’t happen.
1:10:07 He called off that meeting and said he brought in the people who were tough on me.
1:10:08 And I think he had a chat with them.
1:10:16 And then the next day morning, he walked into my office and said, say, you know, next week we’re going on this trip to look at these operations and these operations.
1:10:17 Just make sure.
1:10:20 He didn’t even tell me, I hope you’ve changed your mind.
1:10:21 He just assumed.
1:10:22 He just acted like.
1:10:23 Yeah, nothing.
1:10:27 And then, believe me, I don’t know what conversation he had with those people.
1:10:30 Everything was night and day after that.
1:10:32 We never talked about it.
1:10:34 Did you ever have to have a conversation like that with people?
1:10:38 I would call out bad behavior immediately when I saw it.
1:10:42 But in a gentle way, I’d say, hey, can you let her finish?
1:10:45 Stop interrupting her or him.
1:10:46 It could be a him too.
1:10:51 What I would say, don’t roll your eyes when they’re talking unless something’s wrong with your eyes.
1:10:52 Okay.
1:10:58 So, but I do it in a way that didn’t make them feel bad, but it was direct and pointed.
1:11:00 You only have to do that a couple of times.
1:11:01 Yeah, that’s right.
1:11:03 The message goes quickly down the company.
1:11:07 You had a conversation once with Steve Jobs where he told you not to be too nice.
1:11:11 How did that candid conversation influence how you ran PepsiCo?
1:11:16 I think he taught me a valuable, first of all, it gave me time, which was just so generous.
1:11:25 I think the biggest lesson I took away was he said, if you care about something, and you should care about a few things, show your passion.
1:11:41 For example, the guy who ran TVWHI at day, the ad agency, which was doing work for Apple, would always say, when you go to see Steve Jobs, the campaign, if he didn’t like it, he’d throw the stuff all over the room and say, I want to see a new campaign by the morning.
1:11:48 And you scream, but he wasn’t doing it to destroy the place.
1:11:57 He was doing it because he cared so much about Apple that he wanted the absolute, brilliant, right campaign for Apple.
1:12:05 And his way of showing his frustration at himself and at the group was to act the way he did, okay?
1:12:16 Now, as a woman, I’m not the kind that utters full-letter words and throws things around, but all that Steve Jobs was telling me was, people have got to know what you’re really passionate about.
1:12:22 When you’re really passionate about something, don’t sit here going, God, I don’t want to send them back three times.
1:12:24 It’s okay to send them back three times.
1:12:27 Get it to a point where you’re really comfortable, this is going to be good for the company.
1:12:29 Show your passion, push people back.
1:12:34 So I got to a point when design as a discipline was set up in PepsiCo.
1:12:38 When they’d bring me something I didn’t like, I’d say, hate it.
1:12:39 Absolutely hate it.
1:12:45 And then I would tell a joke about it and say, this is what the customer is going to say when they see it.
1:12:48 Or I’d say something like, this new product is delayed.
1:12:49 I don’t care.
1:12:50 In six months, we have to launch it.
1:12:53 Even though it normally takes three years to do it.
1:12:54 And guess what?
1:12:55 I’m the program manager.
1:12:58 So we’re going to meet every Friday morning to talk about this program.
1:12:59 People go, you’re the program manager?
1:13:01 I said, yeah, I’m the program manager.
1:13:09 And people go, this is a disaster because to have a CEO review every week means we have to have two other reviews before we come to see you.
1:13:11 I said, no, I’m the program manager.
1:13:12 I’m not the CEO.
1:13:13 I’m the program manager.
1:13:14 And I was.
1:13:17 And I told them, no need for pre-discussions before you come to me.
1:13:19 I’m the program manager.
1:13:25 And so people sort of realized that I was passionate about launching this product.
1:13:28 And so they went along with the program and they were grateful.
1:13:34 I removed every barrier, told them that, okay, this is what’s holding you back.
1:13:38 Let me make a few phone calls and see if I can’t get this out of this company faster.
1:13:40 So I jumped through hoops for them.
1:13:46 There’s a lot of value in being passionate about something and just that energy sort of like transferring over to everybody else.
1:13:49 There’s also a huge benefit to just having clarity.
1:13:51 It’s not like it’s okay.
1:13:53 You know, maybe try changing colors.
1:13:55 It’s like, no, I don’t like it.
1:13:56 It’s garbage.
1:13:58 Like come back with something new.
1:13:59 But there’s one big lesson.
1:14:04 When you’re in such positions of leadership and you have passion about something, don’t try to take the credit.
1:14:12 If the team does a great job at the end of it, even though you were the program manager and you drove it, give the credit to the team.
1:14:13 Because you couldn’t have done it yourself.
1:14:14 The team did it.
1:14:19 It’s just that you exercise the power of your office to help them get there.
1:14:20 So the credit should go to them.
1:14:22 Make sure you give them the credit.
1:14:25 When if something goes wrong, take the blame.
1:14:29 But, you know, blame flows upwards.
1:14:30 Credit should flow downward.
1:14:34 Steve Jobs inspired the design thinking at Pepsi.
1:14:37 How did that change how PepsiCo went about their business?
1:14:40 Like, I remember you gave binders to sort of people and stuff.
1:14:43 But like, how did it tangibly work its way into products?
1:14:45 And what was the impact of that?
1:14:48 Well, all of a sudden people are saying, God, we can do so much for design.
1:14:49 We can change our innovation process.
1:14:52 We can change our package, our product design.
1:14:58 We started to move from what’s the color of the package on the shelf to how is this product going to be consumed?
1:14:59 How is it going to be used?
1:15:00 How is it going to be carried?
1:15:02 How is it going to be stored on the shelf?
1:15:04 How is it going to be stored in the pantry at home?
1:15:13 We were thinking about the chain, the use chain, all the way to how does a consumer shop for it, put it in the pantry at home,
1:15:16 and then take it out and eat it and carry it in the purse.
1:15:22 We were thinking about every touch point of the product until it got into the mouth and was consumed.
1:15:28 So it expanded the entire chain, which goes into the thinking.
1:15:32 And previously you were sort of focused on like, what’s going to make it stand out on the shelf?
1:15:33 How are people going to buy it?
1:15:34 Right.
1:15:36 And then we’re not worried about it once they put it in the cart.
1:15:41 I think, you know, if there were 10 steps, we worried about three steps in the past, about 30%.
1:15:44 Now we started to worry about 80, 90%.
1:15:46 So it was a different experience.
1:15:47 It was fulfilling.
1:15:48 People loved it.
1:15:52 Are there any other lessons that you’ve taken from other CEOs?
1:15:54 I mean, you had a conversation with Jobs.
1:16:00 You worked with Jeff Bezos on the board of Amazon where you’re like, oh, that’s a really good idea or really clever.
1:16:05 I wish I would have known that before or ones that you did implement while you were CEO of PepsiCo.
1:16:09 You know, one of the things you should do as a CEO, talk to other CEOs.
1:16:14 If you see something interesting they’re doing, you’re in such a rare club, the CEO club.
1:16:16 Call them up and say, hey, you’ve done this.
1:16:17 It’s so interesting.
1:16:20 Can you share some findings with me?
1:16:22 Can you share some results with me?
1:16:25 Or I’ll give you one example.
1:16:29 We used to do business with club stores like Costco and people like that.
1:16:33 Very different businesses than a regular retail store.
1:16:34 Item merchandisers.
1:16:36 Costco only merchandisers.
1:16:38 So many SKUs, limited number of SKUs.
1:16:43 They’re all in a different packaging than most other retailers.
1:16:47 You know, I sat there going, I don’t understand Costco enough.
1:16:51 My salesman told me about Costco, but I didn’t understand Costco enough.
1:16:56 So I called Jim Sinigal, who was at that time the founder and still running Costco.
1:16:59 I said, Jim, I want to do better at Costco.
1:17:01 I’m CEO.
1:17:05 And he said to me, if you want to do better at Costco, walk the store with me.
1:17:09 Come to a store opening, spend the whole day, because he goes to every store opening.
1:17:11 Walk the store with me.
1:17:14 Amazing human being, Jim Sinigal.
1:17:17 Just, I mean, heart of gold that he gave me a day.
1:17:19 Walk the store with me.
1:17:22 Taught me how club stores operate.
1:17:25 Taught me the basics of the business.
1:17:26 This is CEO to CEO.
1:17:28 He taught me the basics of the business.
1:17:34 And in that store, everybody watches him, Jim Sinigal and me, being great friends.
1:17:36 But I’m the student.
1:17:37 He’s the teacher.
1:17:39 And he taught me the business.
1:17:40 Oh my gosh.
1:17:41 Walk me through this.
1:17:42 Like, what did he point out?
1:17:43 What did he notice?
1:17:45 What did he draw your attention to?
1:17:46 Package sizes.
1:17:48 How they think about packaging sizes.
1:17:49 How they think about treasure hunt.
1:17:52 Because in Costco, there’s always something new.
1:17:54 How they think about the treasure hunt alley.
1:17:56 How they think about pricing architecture.
1:18:02 You know, it’s like Costco would have a unique packaging configuration, which was not really
1:18:04 comparable to anything out there in the marketplace.
1:18:06 And why that was important for Costco.
1:18:12 You know, what is their thinking about how to manage the budget of a family, especially a
1:18:13 family with two or three kids?
1:18:14 How do you think about that budget?
1:18:19 So, for example, we stood at a refrigerated shelf.
1:18:24 I remember in Port Chester, the store, he and I were walking in and he said, okay, Indra,
1:18:27 you get to pick a product that I should put into the store.
1:18:29 Do you have an idea?
1:18:31 I said, yeah, I gave him an idea.
1:18:32 I’m not going to tell you what it was.
1:18:33 I gave him an idea.
1:18:36 And I thought, you know, in six months, it’ll show up on the shelf.
1:18:38 Two weeks later, I go to the Costco store.
1:18:39 It’s there.
1:18:42 How he got it done in two weeks, I don’t know.
1:18:44 But it was a huge seller.
1:18:45 So, I felt relieved.
1:18:53 But based on the draw of that consumer in that neighborhood, I thought this product would
1:18:53 do very well.
1:18:55 But he listened.
1:18:56 You see that?
1:19:00 You see how you feel about the fact that the CEO wasn’t just teaching, he’s also learning
1:19:01 from you.
1:19:03 And so, I had experiences like that.
1:19:09 I remember there was a Walmart senior executive, Greg Foran, who was running North America Walmart.
1:19:12 And he was in Kiwi.
1:19:15 And he was turning around Walmart, North America.
1:19:18 People thought he was very difficult.
1:19:20 And I went to meet him.
1:19:25 And Doug McMillan, the CEO, told Greg Foran, hey, Indra is a good friend of mine.
1:19:33 And Greg Foran said, well, if you really want to learn Walmart, follow me on a store tour.
1:19:37 And, you know, these guys go to a store every day, some region.
1:19:44 So, Greg would say, I’m going to be in Pittsburgh from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the 23rd of March.
1:19:45 So, I’d fly to Pittsburgh.
1:19:46 I’d meet him there.
1:19:53 And my job was just to trail Greg Foran to see how he looked at every aisle, how he looked
1:19:59 at how clothing should be merchandised, what product was married with what, where did he
1:20:02 stop and say, redo this entire display for the consumer.
1:20:06 So, I was learning from Greg Foran, but he allowed me to tail him.
1:20:08 Okay.
1:20:10 And so, I felt it was a gift he gave me.
1:20:13 And at lunchtime, he would only take a half an hour break.
1:20:15 He said, Dan, he said, tell me what you learned.
1:20:19 Let me tell you what I think you should have taken away.
1:20:20 Okay.
1:20:21 Greg now runs in New Zealand.
1:20:23 I was in New Zealand a year ago with him.
1:20:26 We were reflecting on our market experiences.
1:20:30 He taught me more than I would have learned from anybody.
1:20:36 But this is the advantage of being open to ideas, open to learning.
1:20:40 And you can learn a lot from CEOs and become a better person yourself.
1:20:42 Because at the end of the day, a company does not exist in a vacuum.
1:20:48 That’s one of the reasons we interview so many CEOs and share your lessons with our audience.
1:20:52 Is there anything that stands out about what you learned that day walking through Walmart or
1:20:56 the lunch after where you were sort of, oh, I never thought of it that way?
1:20:59 You know, how they merchandise T-shirts is dark to light.
1:21:05 You know, when you hang, let’s say you’re hanging a certain T-shirt, but you’ve got to
1:21:07 make sure the colors go from dark to light.
1:21:12 If you mix up all the colors, consumers have a difficulty shopping for a T-shirt.
1:21:16 He’ll go and stand there and then he’ll look at his team and say, what have you done wrong?
1:21:20 And, you know, sometimes the guy will have the right answers.
1:21:21 Sometimes they won’t.
1:21:24 You got to merchandise it dark to light.
1:21:31 Or he’ll stand in front of a Frito-Lay aisle and he’ll say to the guys, what do you think
1:21:32 about this aisle?
1:21:33 All right.
1:21:35 And they’ll say, it’s perfect.
1:21:36 He’ll say, yeah.
1:21:38 Why isn’t every aisle like the Frito-Lay aisle?
1:21:41 Because PepsiCo’s merchandised us perfectly.
1:21:46 Or the best example, I remember we stood in front of a Quaker Roads aisle.
1:21:52 He’ll pull out four packages of multi-packs, you know, all the different flavors of, he’ll
1:21:54 put all four packs and he’ll look at me and say, Indra, come here.
1:21:56 I say, yes, Greg.
1:21:57 I said, awesome lineup.
1:21:58 Because in my products, right?
1:21:59 I own Quaker Roads.
1:22:07 He’ll say, each of these boxes, they’re three different sizes, but each of these boxes has
1:22:10 got nine packs, 12 packs, six packs, whatever.
1:22:13 But the pricing doesn’t reflect the changes.
1:22:16 You know, why is that?
1:22:18 And why do I need four different packs?
1:22:19 Why don’t I just have two?
1:22:22 And I’m going, but I don’t have the reason.
1:22:31 But, you know, he’s thinking about how can I get the maximum inventory on these shelves
1:22:37 that make sense for the consumer, but have price transparency so the consumer is served well.
1:22:41 And basically what he was pointing out to me is my pricing architecture was messed up.
1:22:44 And it was causing confusion, I would imagine.
1:22:49 And even if the consumer didn’t express their confusion, they were probably confused because
1:22:53 we were confused at that time looking at the four packages, but he would look at it at
1:22:54 that granular level.
1:22:55 That’s incredible.
1:22:58 And, you know, you learn so much and say, guys, hang on.
1:23:02 When you go back and you look at pricing architecture, you ask people these questions.
1:23:04 How many SKUs did you put on of Quaker Roads?
1:23:06 Why do we need 10 SKUs?
1:23:06 Why not four?
1:23:09 It’ll simplify the manufacturing operations.
1:23:12 I think Frito does their own stocking of shelves.
1:23:13 Do they know?
1:23:15 Is there a reason behind that?
1:23:19 Because the velocity is so high and it’s all, you know, air in the bags.
1:23:23 So if you put it through the warehouse, it’ll take up too much space in the warehouse.
1:23:29 So we bring it in through the art trucks and our salesmen know how to put the right SKUs
1:23:30 in the right place on the shelf.
1:23:34 If Frito-Lay products and beverage products came through the warehouse, they would have to
1:23:36 build separate buildings just to house those products.
1:23:38 Because I’ll give you an example.
1:23:41 A Frito-Lay chip will turn 40, 50 times a year.
1:23:45 Beverages might turn 60 to 70 times a year.
1:23:47 Toothpaste turns 12 times a year.
1:23:50 Cookies turn 10 times a year.
1:23:53 So, you know, those people, those can come to the warehouse.
1:23:58 But chips, milk, beverages, very hard to bring it through the warehouse.
1:24:03 When you look at an aisle of Frito-Lay or PepsiCo products, what draws your attention?
1:24:04 What do you notice?
1:24:06 Well, I look for new products.
1:24:07 Have they been slotted?
1:24:12 Are the existing workhorses like Alley’s or Doritos got enough facings so the consumer
1:24:14 knows that they should grab it?
1:24:17 Is each package neatly crisped and put on the shelf?
1:24:20 Because that’s the media you own, right?
1:24:24 When your consumer sees the product on a shelf, that’s the media talking to you.
1:24:28 So to me, the media you own is very important to the consumer.
1:24:31 Because the media you rent is your TV and your advertising.
1:24:33 Many people don’t see it.
1:24:35 But they see that billboard effect on the aisle.
1:24:38 So how does your package show up on the shelves?
1:24:40 Is the right assortment there?
1:24:41 Can they shop it easily?
1:24:46 For example, is there a corporate block called Frito-Lay or do you have potato chips, corn chips?
1:24:48 How would you prefer having it?
1:24:50 Are the dips next to the chips?
1:24:52 If something is on deal, is it on an end aisle?
1:24:55 There’s so many things we look at.
1:24:57 The Frito-Lay guys do a great job.
1:24:58 That’s awesome.
1:25:03 One of the big strategic pivots, I guess, that happened under you is when you were president,
1:25:05 you sort of outsourced the bottlers.
1:25:07 And then when you were CEO, you brought them back in.
1:25:08 Do I have that right?
1:25:11 Well, you know, when Roger was CEO, we spun out the bottlers.
1:25:15 In North America, I executed on his direction.
1:25:18 And at that point, it was the right thing to do.
1:25:22 But when I became CEO, I realized that the market was growing.
1:25:23 The bottlers were thriving.
1:25:29 When the market growth rate slowed down, okay, the pie wasn’t growing, but there were two
1:25:33 companies, the concentrate company and the bottling company fighting for a larger share
1:25:34 of that pie.
1:25:35 It was not constructive.
1:25:38 We were not serving the customer, but we’re now fighting amongst ourselves.
1:25:43 I made the hard decision to buy back the bottlers.
1:25:45 Now it gets back to strategy.
1:25:47 Sometimes people say, oh, you flip-flops.
1:25:49 No, the environment changed.
1:25:53 Remember, I talked to you about you change strategy, the environment changes.
1:25:56 You cannot be dogmatic about your strategic direction.
1:26:00 When the environment changes around you, you’ve got to zag a little bit, which is what I did,
1:26:01 bought back the bottlers.
1:26:06 Had we not bought the bottlers back at that time in North America, we’d still be fighting
1:26:08 with the bottlers and the pie would be shrinking.
1:26:11 Because we’re not serving the consumer, we’re fighting each other.
1:26:13 So it was tough, but we bought them back.
1:26:18 But one of the ways that people deal with reality is to be humble.
1:26:20 You know, that was the best path at the time.
1:26:22 But that sounds so easy.
1:26:25 But this is a multi-billion dollar decision.
1:26:27 The business was a multi-multi-billion dollar business.
1:26:32 So again, you know people are going to criticize you for flip-flopping.
1:26:35 People are going to say you took on a more asset-intensive business.
1:26:37 But was it right for the company?
1:26:39 Got to put the company before you.
1:26:43 They might criticize you, but is it right for the company?
1:26:44 The answer is yes.
1:26:48 What have you learned about decision-making that you wish more people knew?
1:26:50 I think many people do it well.
1:26:53 Decisions are rarely made in a vacuum.
1:26:58 Decisions are made because you’ve looked at reams of data.
1:27:04 You’re married with experience, with a little bit of intuition, a lot of counseling with other
1:27:07 people, a lot of discussions, a lot of input from other people too.
1:27:13 Don’t underestimate, you know, how much knowledge is resident in your teams and how you can tap
1:27:14 into it.
1:27:19 And so I think if you’re willing to incorporate all those points of view into decision-making,
1:27:21 you’re going to end up with a great decision.
1:27:24 But you’ve always got to keep one thing in mind.
1:27:28 If something goes wrong with the decision you made, the blame is yours.
1:27:32 If it goes well, give it to the team that worked on it.
1:27:33 Okay?
1:27:33 Cover for them.
1:27:35 Provide the air cover.
1:27:39 But don’t try to take the credit to yourself because the more you take the credit to yourself,
1:27:41 people will go, she just wants to look good.
1:27:42 Okay?
1:27:44 Just say, guys, I’ve got your back.
1:27:47 We’ve done all the thinking, discussion.
1:27:49 We’ve looked at this from every perspective.
1:27:51 Go make it happen.
1:27:52 If something goes wrong, I got your back.
1:27:54 Your people feel empowered.
1:28:01 You were involved in a lot of acquisitions of companies through strategy and through being
1:28:03 the CEO of PepsiCo.
1:28:07 Why do so many acquisitions not work out the way that they’re intended?
1:28:11 First of all, the acquisition logic should be correct.
1:28:12 Okay?
1:28:17 Don’t do deals just because it’s sexy to do a deal or you’re trying to buy some short-term
1:28:19 growth or profitability.
1:28:22 If you do it for the wrong reason, they will not work out.
1:28:28 Second, any acquisition, the deal process is just 10% of the whole process.
1:28:31 The whole work is in the post-merger integration.
1:28:35 How do you integrate the acquired company into your company?
1:28:36 How do you extract the synergies?
1:28:38 How do you build a new culture?
1:28:40 How do you absorb them?
1:28:42 People don’t pay enough attention to that.
1:28:47 And when post-merger integration efforts are not done right, acquisitions do fail.
1:28:48 And you’ve got to keep that in mind.
1:28:55 And sometimes acquisitions don’t work because the people that you put in charge of running
1:28:57 the new company are not competent.
1:29:02 I think one of the lessons I learned is respect the culture of the company of acquired.
1:29:03 I’ll give you two examples.
1:29:09 When we bought Tropicana, the days when there were oranges available in Florida, Roger said
1:29:10 something very interesting to me.
1:29:13 He said, it’s a different company.
1:29:14 It’s a good for you product.
1:29:22 Don’t allow people from the rest of PepsiCo to go there and put their ideas on a good for
1:29:24 you business because you’ll mess up that business.
1:29:29 So he made me go sit down with Ellen Marram, who was running that business, to say, what
1:29:32 are the rules under which Tropicana should operate?
1:29:34 Almost their value system.
1:29:39 And he said, preserve that until this company is mature enough to be called part of PepsiCo.
1:29:41 Very important lesson.
1:29:43 The second was when we were buying Quaker Roads.
1:29:48 It was Bob Morrison was very important to Quaker Roads.
1:29:50 Which included Gatorade, right?
1:29:51 Quaker Roads, yeah.
1:29:55 He said, when we’re buying Quaker Roads, whatever happens, we’re going to do everything possible
1:29:59 to keep Bob Morrison, at least for the first two years.
1:30:05 So the onboarding into PepsiCo is done with the way that, you know, we respect their culture
1:30:06 and they respect us.
1:30:08 Made a whole lot of difference.
1:30:13 So I think acquisitions fail when you don’t recognize these pitfalls and don’t address them
1:30:14 proactively.
1:30:19 Are there any big mistakes that you made in an acquisition where you’re like, ah, lesson
1:30:21 learned for next time, but…
1:30:23 I’m not going to tell you those mistakes, but yeah, of course.
1:30:28 I mean, we correct them, but yeah, we made mistakes.
1:30:34 And if the mistakes were made, it’s because I wish we had played out how that market could
1:30:37 have evolved even more.
1:30:42 Or I didn’t bring the bottlers in soon enough to talk about how they’re going to carry it on
1:30:43 the bottling system.
1:30:49 Or I put it into Frito-Lay, even though it was a good for you product, and somehow it
1:30:51 became a fun for you product when I wasn’t looking.
1:30:53 So yeah, we made mistakes.
1:30:59 The key thing is, where it makes a huge difference and big bucks are involved, be careful.
1:31:05 Be ultra careful about post-merger integration in people because the cost of failure is very
1:31:05 high.
1:31:07 I’m going to ask a question.
1:31:12 I want to hear your sort of rapid fire response of either behaviors or traits.
1:31:16 If somebody had an unfair advantage in PepsiCo and they were just constantly knocking it
1:31:21 out of the park all the time, what would be the behaviors and traits that that person would
1:31:22 have or the skills?
1:31:26 They’ve got this uncanny ability to zoom in and zoom out.
1:31:33 They ask people for opinions and ideas and incorporate them.
1:31:39 They put their hands up for difficult assignments and learn from difficult assignments.
1:31:42 They’ve gone through failure in the past.
1:31:46 People who hit it out of the park have been through a lot of failure and learn from that
1:31:46 failure.
1:31:48 They haven’t allowed it to get them down.
1:31:50 They’ve learned from those failures.
1:31:55 They pick themselves up, talk about what they learned, fix it the next time and move forward.
1:31:58 These are people who are typically humble.
1:32:03 You know, people who hit it out of the park rarely beat their chest and say, I hit it out
1:32:03 of the park.
1:32:04 I hit it out of the park.
1:32:05 Look at me.
1:32:06 I got to move forward.
1:32:08 These are people who say, hey, this is what the company needed.
1:32:09 I did it.
1:32:12 And PepsiCo had a lot of them.
1:32:18 Was that almost a reverse signal when people were too braggy about what they’ve done or look
1:32:19 at me, look what I’ve done.
1:32:24 And then you just dismissed that because, you know, historically that doesn’t correlate
1:32:25 really to people who do the work.
1:32:29 You know, PepsiCo didn’t have too many of these bragging people.
1:32:36 So I was blessed to run a company where the culture was such that some people might have
1:32:41 tried to be a bit more out there to take credit, but there were very few people who were
1:32:42 braggers, really.
1:32:44 Even Amazon has no braggers.
1:32:49 Philips, the other company I said on the board of, the MedTech company from the Netherlands,
1:32:50 not at all.
1:32:51 Nobody brags.
1:32:55 Everybody’s talking about what can we do together to move the company forward.
1:32:58 So I think I’m just lucky to be in these sorts of companies.
1:33:02 Do you think that there’s an important component to being part of a company?
1:33:07 And I mentioned this in the sense of maybe COVID or work from home, where it’s really easy
1:33:09 not to feel part of something larger than yourself.
1:33:14 But there’s this very human side of us that needs to feel part of something larger than
1:33:18 ourselves, whether it’s a family or work, that we’re making a difference, that we’re
1:33:20 contributing to society.
1:33:22 Does that get lost in work from home, do you think?
1:33:26 I don’t even know what it is to work from home only.
1:33:31 To me, if you don’t come to work, interact with other people, understand the culture of
1:33:32 the company.
1:33:38 You know, see people in the corridor, toss around ideas, pop your head into a meeting and
1:33:40 say, hey, I see you guys are working on this.
1:33:41 Can I help?
1:33:47 If you don’t have that sort of human interaction, I don’t even know what it is to work in a
1:33:51 corporation as opposed to doing a job from home, doing an assignment from home, if you
1:33:52 want to call it that.
1:33:58 So I grew up at a time when everybody came to work and I loved it.
1:34:04 So as we went through COVID and post-COVID, I’m struggling to see how I would have run the
1:34:06 company without people coming to work.
1:34:11 I’m struggling to see how I would have developed people without seeing them.
1:34:13 Now, let me come to the other side.
1:34:18 I also see the benefit of people who choose to work from home because they can now juggle
1:34:21 more responsibilities working from home.
1:34:22 So I understand that too.
1:34:28 However, I’m also of the belief, Shane, that if you choose to work from home, male or female,
1:34:29 I don’t care.
1:34:35 If you choose to work from home, you might also want to accept that your promotional challenges
1:34:39 may be, your promotional opportunities may be limited.
1:34:42 That was the most controversial tweet I’ve ever put out.
1:34:45 I put this out, I think, in 2021 or 2022.
1:34:48 And I said, if you work from home, you’re going to end up reporting to somebody who works
1:34:48 at the office.
1:34:51 Unless you’re in a company where only individual contributors.
1:34:53 just move forward because they’re all super techie.
1:34:58 But in companies where you really have to work in teams to move things forward, I don’t
1:35:00 see how you can do it all on Zoom.
1:35:02 I want to thank you so much for your time today.
1:35:04 This has been a fascinating interview.
1:35:08 We always end with the same question, which is, what is success for you?
1:35:10 Performance with purpose.
1:35:13 You know, when I ran PepsiCo, I ran it on that motto.
1:35:20 To me, delivering performance in whatever field is one thing, but you’ve got to leave the place
1:35:21 better than you found it.
1:35:27 And you’ve got to do it with a deep sense of, I want to make the world a better place.
1:35:29 I want to make the company a better company.
1:35:35 I want to make the employees feel better about themselves than when they, you know, came into
1:35:37 PepsiCo or had a different leader.
1:35:42 So at every point in time, how do you have a deep sense of purpose to leave the place better
1:35:43 than you found it?
1:35:46 Those are the three words I used as a CEO of PepsiCo.
1:35:49 Those are the three words that continue to guide what I’m doing today.
1:35:55 This deep sense of purpose without taking your eye off the core performance you have to deliver.
1:35:57 Thank you very much.
1:35:58 That’s a beautiful way to wrap this up.
1:35:59 Thank you, Shane.
1:36:01 Thank you for having me on your show.
1:36:03 It’s a privilege talking with you.
1:36:06 Thanks for listening and learning with us.
1:36:10 Be sure to sign up for my free weekly newsletter at fs.blog slash newsletter.
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1:36:38 Until next time.

0:00:10 What if you could hire an AI intern to book meetings, write emails, manage your CRM, and even negotiate refunds over the phone?
0:00:17 Today, we’re joined by Flo Crivello, founder of Lendi.ai, one of the leading AI agent platforms in Silicon Valley.
0:00:25 We go deep into real-world demos and wild use cases, including having Elon Musk call you and ask you what you’ve got done this week.
0:00:31 And he showed me how startups in Silicon Valley are already replacing entire teams with Lendi, and it just blew my mind.
0:00:37 If you’re wondering where the future of work is headed and how you can use AI agents to grow your business, you’re going to love this episode.
0:00:50 This episode is brought to you by HubSpot’s Inbound 2025, a three-day experience at the heart of San Francisco’s AI and startup scene, happening September 3rd through the 5th.
0:00:58 With speakers like Amy Poehler, Marquise Brownlee, and Dario Amadei, Inbound is where creativity meets cutting-edge tech.
0:01:04 You’ll get tactical breakout sessions, product reveals, and networking with people shaping the future of business.
0:01:10 So don’t miss out. Visit inbound.com slash register to get your tickets today.
0:01:15 Hello, it’s great to finally have you on here.
0:01:17 Yeah, thanks for having me, Nathan.
0:01:23 Yeah, so for some background now, I saw your episode with our mutual friend, Greg Eisenberg, and I thought it was one of his best episodes.
0:01:27 I’ve been hearing so much about AI agents, but I haven’t really seen people use them in business that much.
0:01:29 And I was blown away with what you showed, Greg.
0:01:33 But maybe first, it’d be great if you could just simply explain to people, what is Lendi?
0:01:35 There’s a lot of different definitions of what AI agents are.
0:01:38 Just simplify it down as much as possible about what Lendi actually does.
0:01:44 Yeah, definitely. So we are a no-code platform that lets you build your own AI agents.
0:01:48 And AI agents, we inspire them to be AI employees.
0:01:51 For now, you can think of them more as like AI interns.
0:01:51 Okay.
0:01:55 So it’s like they’re very eager, very hardworking interns.
0:01:57 They’re interns. Like, don’t give them too much.
0:01:57 Right.
0:01:59 You know, like, don’t trust them with the keys of the kingdom.
0:02:01 You know, they’re pretty good.
0:02:03 And like, look, because they’re AI, you know, they work.
0:02:05 They’re like 100x faster, 100x cheaper.
0:02:07 They don’t go on strike.
0:02:08 I know I’m French, but like we…
0:02:10 You don’t have to pay them. It sounds great.
0:02:10 Yeah.
0:02:16 But yeah, so AI interns, you can give them tasks, like pretty much anything where you could have
0:02:17 a standard operating procedure.
0:02:22 Anything where you could write a document, where you lay out step-by-step what the agent
0:02:23 or intern is supposed to do.
0:02:25 That’s something that you could give to an AI agent.
0:02:31 So, you know, sales lead generation, sales lead outreach, meeting note-taking, meeting
0:02:33 scheduling, CRM management, phone calls.
0:02:35 Like, you can use it as a receptionist.
0:02:38 Like, general data analysis and online research.
0:02:42 Like, hey, go find Nathan’s email online.
0:02:47 Go find me 20 engineers in San Francisco and reach out to all of them and try to personalize
0:02:50 the email that you write to them and put your grain of salt in there for each person.
0:02:53 Like, that’s exactly the kind of thing that you can give to an agent right now.
0:02:54 Yeah, that’s amazing.
0:02:54 Yeah.
0:02:58 When I saw that demo on Greg’s podcast, I was like, I want to like personally talk to
0:03:00 Flo and figure out like how I can be using this.
0:03:01 Honestly, it’s kind of a selfish episode.
0:03:03 Think about how I can use it in my business.
0:03:06 If we could just jump into like show Lindy and show how it works.
0:03:08 Yeah, no, 100%.
0:03:09 And this is a common reaction that we get from people.
0:03:10 It’s like, oh my God.
0:03:15 Like, I think people, I think they think that AI agents are sort of a pipe dream.
0:03:16 It’s like, it’s not real or whatever.
0:03:21 And once they see these demos, they’re like, wait, it is real and it’s working and it’s here now.
0:03:23 And I’m like, yeah, like it’s not just a pitch.
0:03:24 It’s like, it’s here right now.
0:03:24 Right.
0:03:26 And we do have audio listeners.
0:03:29 So if anyone’s listening on audio, you probably should check out our YouTube channel.
0:03:33 Just go to YouTube and search for the next wave and subscribe to us on YouTube.
0:03:37 And as you showed this, you know, if you can try to describe with words what we’re actually doing.
0:03:42 I’ll try to be maximally descriptive and be free to chime in if you feel like I’m insufficiently descriptive.
0:03:43 This is actually funny.
0:03:49 I’m literally right before this because I know that the Greg Eisenberg episode did go super well.
0:03:54 And so 15 minutes before jumping on this podcast, I sent a message to, I have a Lindy.
0:03:57 So we call them Lindys, but they’re basically AI agents.
0:03:58 And I sent a message.
0:03:59 I have a summarizer, Lindy.
0:04:02 And I sent her a YouTube video of the Greg Eisenberg podcast.
0:04:05 I’m like, what are the use cases that we talked about here?
0:04:07 And so you can see my Lindy is going on YouTube.
0:04:08 She’s transcribing the video.
0:04:10 And then she’s like, this is what you talked about today.
0:04:17 So, yeah, Lindy here is telling me you talked about meeting automation, executive assistant tasks, recruiting, personal CRM.
0:04:23 So I’m really just happy to, like, go through these use cases because that’s how I personally use Lindy all day.
0:04:25 Like, so everything meeting related.
0:04:28 Like, I love meeting use cases because everyone’s got meetings all day.
0:04:29 No one likes it.
0:04:31 Like, the entire, the meetings themselves suck.
0:04:32 I can’t do much about that.
0:04:36 But, like, even the workflow around the meeting is nightmarish.
0:04:38 So, like, meeting scheduling.
0:04:39 I’ll show you.
0:04:40 Why don’t we actually schedule a meeting right now?
0:04:42 I’ll send you an email, Nathan.
0:04:42 Yeah.
0:04:44 And I’ll go, like, let’s chat.
0:04:47 And then I’ll be like, Nathan, love your podcast.
0:04:48 Would love to talk soon.
0:04:49 Plus Lindy.
0:04:51 And so I have my Lindy here.
0:04:51 Yeah.
0:04:54 Plus Lindy will help us find.
0:04:56 And I’ll introduce, like, a random constraint.
0:04:57 Like, 45 minutes next week.
0:04:58 Right?
0:05:00 So I can just talk in very natural language.
0:05:03 And you’re going to receive this email in your inbox.
0:05:06 And just go ahead and respond to it.
0:05:08 And just respond to it like you would to a human.
0:05:08 Just respond all.
0:05:11 Like, keep Lindy CC’d to the email.
0:05:11 Yeah.
0:05:13 And you can be like, flow, sounds good.
0:05:14 And she’ll receive your email.
0:05:16 Well, actually, you don’t even need to do that.
0:05:21 Let me just switch to my meeting scheduler here and show you live what it looks like.
0:05:22 Is this pretty much how, like, Lindy started?
0:05:24 Was, like, this basic email?
0:05:26 I feel like I remember seeing something like this, like, two years ago.
0:05:27 Was that you back then?
0:05:29 This is indeed how we started.
0:05:33 The first articulation of the product was AI executive assistant.
0:05:34 Yes.
0:05:34 Okay.
0:05:38 And it’s funny because the reason why we picked this use case was I kept saying, like,
0:05:43 oh, AI executive assistant is short-term viable because it’s like, oh, we can do it.
0:05:43 You know?
0:05:45 Long-term aligned.
0:05:49 And the reason why we thought it was long-term aligned is because people ask so many things
0:05:50 from their executive assistants.
0:05:55 And so I felt like it would force us to figure out how to make the platform generalizable.
0:05:57 Ah, that makes so much sense.
0:05:57 Yeah.
0:05:58 So that’s your assistant.
0:06:01 But then you’re going with your assistant to do other things and you start building out
0:06:03 those other things and then turn it to a platform.
0:06:04 That’s exactly right.
0:06:04 Amazing.
0:06:04 Yeah.
0:06:07 And we were right on long-term aligned.
0:06:08 It was, it very much stretched us.
0:06:11 We were wrong on short-term viable.
0:06:14 It took us a very long time to figure out how to make this generalizable.
0:06:14 Yeah.
0:06:15 Okay.
0:06:18 So you can see here the meeting scheduler responded back onto the thread.
0:06:24 What she did is behind the scenes, she went, she looked at my calendar and she pulled some
0:06:24 availabilities.
0:06:27 And so she was like, happy to help you find time on the books.
0:06:29 Here are times when Flo is available.
0:06:33 And here you can just respond and you can be like, hey, Flo, happy to chat.
0:06:37 And either you can take a time here or you can be like, ah, I can’t make any of these times.
0:06:39 Can we find another time for us to chat?
0:06:43 One thing I was thinking, because I live in Japan, I’ve used Calendly and all those kind
0:06:45 of different services and, you know, they’re okay.
0:06:49 I kind of hate just like giving people my calendar and like, it’s just like, oh, you can just pick
0:06:51 a time whenever on my calendar.
0:06:52 I honestly hate that.
0:06:55 You know, I like having like really set times.
0:06:58 And then, you know, there’s one day where I’m a lot freer than I thought.
0:07:01 There’s another day where there’s some crazy business deals happening and like, okay, I need
0:07:02 to focus on this for a week.
0:07:03 So forget everything.
0:07:05 And I don’t want to even think about my calendar.
0:07:10 And so am I able to like chat with like Lindy and kind of give it feedback on how I want
0:07:12 to structure meetings or like ping me first?
0:07:13 Yeah, totally.
0:07:16 So I was actually in Japan last week and I just sent a message to my Lindy and I was like,
0:07:19 hey, I’m in Japan from date X to date Y.
0:07:21 During these times, you can schedule times.
0:07:24 Like when I meet with people in California, it’s between 4 p.m.
0:07:25 and 6 p.m. Pacific.
0:07:28 That maps to like 8 to 10 a.m.
0:07:29 Japan or something like that.
0:07:30 That’s when I can meet.
0:07:30 Very cool.
0:07:31 Yeah.
0:07:33 So meeting scheduling is one.
0:07:37 Then once the meeting is on the books, Lindy preps me for my meetings.
0:07:41 I’ll actually show the Lindy under the hood for just to show how it works.
0:07:43 This is what the Lindy looks like.
0:07:45 It’s pretty simple and you can literally see it.
0:07:47 You can read it very easily.
0:07:53 It’s like every morning I wake up, I look at your calendar for the day and for every meeting
0:07:57 on your calendar and for every attendee of every meeting on your calendar, I’m going to
0:07:58 do some research.
0:07:59 I’m going to look for their LinkedIn.
0:08:02 I’m going to look at your email history with this person.
0:08:07 I’m going to look at the meeting notes history, which that’s funny.
0:08:09 These meeting notes are brought together by another Lindy.
0:08:10 That’s crazy.
0:08:11 So these Lindys can sort of work together.
0:08:15 And then I’m going to put all of that together in an email.
0:08:20 And the way I get it to put all of that together in an email is I’m literally just prompting.
0:08:24 In this case, I’m prompting Gemini, but you can use Cloud, you can use ChatGPT, you can
0:08:24 use anything you want.
0:08:28 And I’m like, okay, at this point, you’re sending me an email and the body of the email,
0:08:29 and here is just a prompt.
0:08:34 I’m like, it’s a markdown table with the meetings I have today, with start time and
0:08:35 context for this meeting.
0:08:38 You add the LinkedIn link, you add the link to my last notes.
0:08:42 And then I’m like, you add a header outside the table with the number of meetings that
0:08:43 I have on this day.
0:08:47 So I can wake up in the morning and I can be like, FML, I have like eight hours of meetings.
0:08:51 Here it’s like, all right, today you’ve got three hours of meetings.
0:08:54 Like Wednesdays are like particularly light for me.
0:08:55 And it’s like, okay, you’re meeting with Bob.
0:08:57 He was introduced by X.
0:08:59 You know, this is what he wants to discuss.
0:09:01 This is the previous meeting notes and so forth.
0:09:02 Wow, that’s incredible.
0:09:05 So I come to my meetings and I have this email open all day.
0:09:09 Like before I jump onto a call, like one minute before I just opened this and I have the exact
0:09:11 context of the email of the meeting.
0:09:14 So again, basically it’s the entire meeting lifecycle.
0:09:17 So it’s like the meeting scheduling is the very first touch point.
0:09:20 The meeting prep is the second one.
0:09:21 And then it’s the meeting recording.
0:09:23 So Lindy actually joins my meetings.
0:09:27 And that stuff is in today’s day and age, it’s more and more typical.
0:09:30 People have these meeting recorders, like Lindy takes notes.
0:09:31 She like sends you the action items.
0:09:32 She does all of that stuff.
0:09:37 What Lindy does differently is that you can customize the workflow very, very, very granularly.
0:09:40 So this is my Lindy note taker.
0:09:44 Like you can see I’ve added to it so much over the months and years that like now it looks
0:09:48 pretty complex, but it can do basically anything you want.
0:09:53 So for example, if you’re in sales and you meet with a prospect, you can configure your Lindy
0:10:00 to be like, hey, if at the end of the sales call, we said we would meet again and we agreed
0:10:02 on when we would meet, send the calendar invite.
0:10:08 If we said we would meet again, but we did not agree on when, send a follow-up email with
0:10:10 sometimes to meet that work for me on my calendar.
0:10:10 That’s amazing.
0:10:14 Or if we agreed, if they agreed to a proposal, it’s like, hey, you’re a salesperson.
0:10:15 You just closed the deal.
0:10:16 Congratulations.
0:10:18 $20,000 a year or whatever.
0:10:20 Send the docusign.
0:10:21 Send the proposal.
0:10:22 Customize it for me.
0:10:23 Send the invoice.
0:10:23 Do all of that stuff.
0:10:24 Yeah.
0:10:24 It’ll do all that.
0:10:26 Like it’ll even like create the docusign.
0:10:27 And yeah, absolutely.
0:10:28 That’s what we do for ourselves.
0:10:29 That’s crazy.
0:10:29 Yeah.
0:10:30 That’s crazy.
0:10:31 Yeah.
0:10:34 You know, most people don’t realize how this is actually available now.
0:10:37 Like, I mean, it feels like you could probably do now with like two to three people.
0:10:40 Maybe it would have taken like 10 to 20 people before.
0:10:42 Like, I mean, you would have had entire teams doing all this for you.
0:10:49 80% of everything that my assistant did for me just a year ago are things that Lindy is
0:10:50 doing for me now.
0:10:52 And frankly, doing better because she never sleeps.
0:10:55 You can see the way she responded to this scheduling email.
0:10:57 She responded in 60 seconds.
0:10:58 It’s actually so fast.
0:11:00 Like many people sometimes ask us to make her slower.
0:11:01 So people don’t know it’s an AI.
0:11:03 So yes, it’s here now.
0:11:04 It’s actually happening.
0:11:04 Absolutely.
0:11:06 Put in some typos or whatever.
0:11:08 Like occasionally like, oh, I messed up on the calendar.
0:11:09 Sorry.
0:11:11 Here’s actually we get that actually pretty often.
0:11:11 Yeah.
0:11:12 Okay.
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0:11:47 Now let’s get back to the show.
0:11:50 I’ll show you a cool thing that like Lindy’s do from time to time.
0:11:55 So Lindy’s can work together and they work together by sending each other messages that
0:11:57 are in English, in like natural language.
0:11:57 Wow.
0:12:00 So my meeting recorder, for example, I’ve set her up.
0:12:02 I use her pronouns, basically.
0:12:03 It’s just a habit.
0:12:08 I’ve set up my meeting recorder so that if I interview a candidate that’s applying to
0:12:11 a job here and the person is not good enough, they jump off the call.
0:12:12 I stay on the call.
0:12:14 I’m like, okay, bye, I’ll call you back.
0:12:15 But I will not call them back.
0:12:19 But I’m in the Zoom by myself with my meeting recorder.
0:12:21 And I’m like, Lindy, just let’s not move forward with him.
0:12:22 Okay.
0:12:26 And now look, the way I’ve configured it is I have this condition node here.
0:12:27 And it’s all AI.
0:12:29 Like the whole thing is just AI all over it.
0:12:30 So everything is just a prompt.
0:12:35 So here I have a condition that’s like, if I ended the call by saying explicitly, let’s
0:12:38 pass on him or let’s pass on this candidate, then you go down this branch.
0:12:43 And the branch is my Lindy sending another message to another Lindy that’s called my
0:12:44 chief of staff Lindy.
0:12:46 That’s kind of like the Lindy I use for everything.
0:12:47 Okay.
0:12:51 And here the text that it is sending to it is like, hey, let’s pass on candidate’s name
0:12:52 in two days.
0:12:55 And so if I go to my chief of staff Lindy right here.
0:12:55 Yeah.
0:12:56 One quick question.
0:12:58 All these different workflows that you’re showing, like, are you able to like save those as
0:13:00 templates or anything like that?
0:13:00 Or how does that work?
0:13:01 Because it seems like a lot of steps.
0:13:02 Absolutely.
0:13:02 Yeah.
0:13:06 So if you go to Lindy.ai slash templates, we have hundreds of those.
0:13:07 Yeah.
0:13:12 Chief of staff receives a message from meeting recorder Lindy that goes, pass on David.
0:13:17 And so here what she does is she goes, she looks at my calendar to figure out who’s David.
0:13:22 And then she sends, she sends an email that’s like writing to let you know that we’ve decided
0:13:23 not to move forward with our candidacy.
0:13:24 That’s crazy.
0:13:27 And then probably in the future, like their agent responds back, their recruiting agent.
0:13:28 Yeah.
0:13:31 No, I mean, we’ve actually, we’ve also had that happen.
0:13:33 Actually, we have it happen more and more.
0:13:35 Well, it’s like we’re finding Lindy’s in the wild.
0:13:35 Right.
0:13:40 Like multiple users of Lindy’s have their Lindy’s find each other in the wild.
0:13:43 So for example, we’ve got, so people use Lindy for like sales outreach quite a bit.
0:13:47 And people also use Lindy for email triage.
0:13:53 And so we have, I can’t say who, but there is a very big YouTube influencer that’s using
0:13:54 us.
0:13:54 For what?
0:14:00 He receives a lot of emails with sponsorship opportunities from like random brands.
0:14:00 Yeah.
0:14:00 Okay.
0:14:01 Like a lot.
0:14:06 And he’s got actually an agent that all day sifts through his inbox and decides who’s legit
0:14:07 and who’s worth engaging with.
0:14:10 And very few of these people are worth engaging with.
0:14:14 There’s also a lot of people who are like asking to go on his show and all of that stuff, you know?
0:14:21 And so they’ve deployed a Lindy AI agent that basically sifts through the inbox for them,
0:14:22 like removes all the random people.
0:14:26 So the Lindy actually also does research about the sender online.
0:14:31 So like, is this the kind of person and the kind of brand that matches our audience’s interest?
0:14:34 That’s just the kind of person we want to engage with.
0:14:34 Right.
0:14:35 So it goes online.
0:14:38 It’s like, yeah, this is the sort of brand that we’re down to engage with.
0:14:41 And then the Lindy replies to the email.
0:14:42 It’s like, hey, thanks for reaching out.
0:14:43 We’re excited about partnering up.
0:14:45 Can you tell me more X, Y, and Z?
0:14:46 And it collects some more information.
0:14:50 And then if the person gives the right responses, they’re expecting a certain type of responses.
0:14:57 The Lindy escalates that to the attention of the agent, the human agent that represents the YouTuber.
0:14:59 So that’s what the YouTuber does.
0:15:01 Then we also have some brands.
0:15:03 There is another famous brand.
0:15:05 It’s like a jewelry brand.
0:15:07 And they do a lot of influencer partnerships.
0:15:10 So what they’ve done is that they have a Lindy.
0:15:12 Every day it goes online.
0:15:16 It finds a bunch of influencers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
0:15:18 It finds their contact information.
0:15:24 And then it sends a personalized email to each of them that references, that refers to the content that they’ve done previously.
0:15:26 It’s like, hey, love your content.
0:15:27 I really like this one video.
0:15:29 I thought it was neat how you did X, Y, and Z.
0:15:32 What would you think of partnering with Brand X?
0:15:35 And so we’ve actually already had these two Lindy’s cross paths.
0:15:37 Like we’ve had these two Lindy’s talk to each other.
0:15:38 It sounds amazing.
0:15:44 I just feel like it could lead to some weird interactions where you think you’ve talked to someone and you get on the call and you’re like, have I actually talked to you before?
0:15:47 I’ve never really, apparently never actually talked to you.
0:15:51 I had that the other day where a guy was telling me about, you know, automating all of his LinkedIn.
0:15:52 I was like, wait a minute.
0:15:53 Have we actually talked before?
0:15:54 I thought we had.
0:15:56 You know, now I’m not so sure.
0:15:58 Yes, that’s a good point, actually.
0:16:04 Like everyone would just like pretend they know the other person because they’re like, yeah, I’m now wondering about our interaction.
0:16:05 We were going to meet in Japan, didn’t happen.
0:16:08 Was that all your, was that your Lindy communicating with me with everything?
0:16:09 No, exactly.
0:16:10 Yeah.
0:16:14 One other thing I was thinking about was, you know, earlier you showed like you could change the model.
0:16:16 Can you change the model for like every single step?
0:16:20 Because one thing I was thinking about, like obviously different models are different, you know, good at different things, right?
0:16:22 Like some of them are better at writing, summarizing or whatever.
0:16:24 Is that possible right now?
0:16:27 Yeah, so you can do it either on a per step basis.
0:16:31 So here, for example, I can be like, hey, so Cloud for Sonnet is the default right now.
0:16:32 It’s my favorite model.
0:16:32 It’s just awesome.
0:16:34 You can select anything you want.
0:16:37 Gemini, O3, 4O Mini, whatever you want, right?
0:16:40 But then you can also change it on a Lindy-wide basis.
0:16:41 Okay.
0:16:53 The Hustle Daily Show, hosted by John Wygel, Juliet, Bennett, Ryla, and Mark Dent, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.
0:17:00 The Hustle Daily Show brings you a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat, and informative takes on business and tech news.
0:17:05 They recently had an episode about advertisers wanting billboards in space.
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0:17:09 I suggest you check it out.
0:17:12 Listen to The Hustle Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts.
0:17:21 Another thing that my human assistant used to do for me, and by the way, I haven’t fired him.
0:17:21 He’s still around.
0:17:23 Yeah, I was wondering, are they still around?
0:17:24 Like, how are they doing?
0:17:26 Are they, like, retired on a beach somewhere?
0:17:27 He’s, like, packing his bags.
0:17:27 Like, bye!
0:17:29 No, no, he’s doing a great job.
0:17:31 But he does do very different stuff now.
0:17:35 He’s basically become sort of like the HR person for the company.
0:17:39 But one thing that he used to do for me was, like, helping me manage my personal CRM.
0:17:41 So I keep a spreadsheet with, like, people I know.
0:17:42 Not my friends.
0:17:45 I hate people sometimes have, like, a poster of CRM for, like, their friends.
0:17:46 They think it’s weird and creepy.
0:17:49 But, you know, like, you meet so many people all day.
0:17:50 You can’t keep track of all of them.
0:17:53 And so I have this CRM, Lindy, and I’ll show you how it works.
0:18:01 So basically, every so often, I go to it, and I send it people I know.
0:18:02 It also wakes up every week.
0:18:04 So, like, this is an example of a time it’s done that.
0:18:07 Like, on Friday at 5, it’s woken up.
0:18:08 It’s looked at my calendar.
0:18:11 It’s looked at my CRM, which is just a spreadsheet.
0:18:15 And then it’s sending me a message with, like, hey, looking at your calendar,
0:18:20 these are the people you’ve met this week that you don’t have on your calendar yet, on your CRM.
0:18:21 Do you want to add them?
0:18:23 And then I can just be, like, yes, add, and I’ll do it right now.
0:18:26 Like, yes, add number two here.
0:18:30 Tag them with recruiter, killer, would hire.
0:18:31 I do that.
0:18:33 I have, like, a tag for, like, killer or, like, would hire, right?
0:18:42 So, like, later on, I can just go, and I’ll be, like, who are marketing people, I think, or killers, or people I would hire?
0:18:46 And so right now, it’s, like, all right, these are the killer people you know in marketing.
0:18:47 Wow, that’s awesome.
0:18:49 It also does, actually, this is cool.
0:18:51 Like, it does an interesting thing when I fly.
0:18:55 When I fly, it notices that I’m flying somewhere because it looks at my inbox.
0:18:58 So, like, it intercepts the flight confirmation email.
0:19:04 And it sends me an email with the people that I am meeting.
0:19:07 So, here, it’s like, oh, you’re going back to SF.
0:19:08 It’s kind of silly because I live in SF.
0:19:09 It’s like, hey, you’re going to SF.
0:19:12 These are the people that you should meet in SF that’s on your server.
0:19:15 So, when you go back to SF, it doesn’t necessarily remember that you’re from SF?
0:19:19 Because that was a question I had was, does it have any kind of memory features baked into Lindy yet?
0:19:25 Because that’s something I’ve been noticing recently is I’m in love with, like, the memory feature of ChatsPT, right?
0:19:29 And a big use case I have recently is, like, yesterday I had a meeting, and there was a ton of things I learned.
0:19:32 And I realized I should have been using AI to transcribe it definitely.
0:19:38 Because afterwards, I was like, okay, there was so much I learned in that meeting that I have to immediately put it into ChatsPT.
0:19:46 And what I did was I used basically, like, a voice to text and then just did an info dump on ChatsPT so we remember everything.
0:19:48 We do have a memory system.
0:19:50 It’s not as good as ChatsPT’s yet.
0:19:50 Okay.
0:19:51 But it will be.
0:19:51 Yeah.
0:19:52 Cool.
0:19:52 Yeah.
0:19:55 But in the meantime, I just, like, manually went and configured my Lindy.
0:19:59 I was like, hey, only if I’m going to a destination that is not San Francisco.
0:20:03 So, you know, what would be useful would be to see, I think you were mentioning there’s different templates.
0:20:10 Maybe we could see, like, the templates and maybe kind of go over what are the top templates that most people find useful in their business or work.
0:20:11 Yeah.
0:20:16 So, if you go to the home here or if you go to, like, Lindy.ai slash templates, you see the top templates.
0:20:19 Sales or, like, a really big one.
0:20:21 Meetings or really big ones.
0:20:25 Like, those are the ones I just mentioned, like, meeting scheduling, meeting note-taking, meeting prepping.
0:20:29 Would it be useful if we just, like, created the Lindy from scratch right now?
0:20:29 Yeah, sure.
0:20:30 I think so.
0:20:31 Let’s see.
0:20:39 One Lindy we can create is, and that will demo, like, a thing we announced a month ago that I’m super excited about.
0:20:40 Like, we call them agent swarms.
0:20:48 So, it’s the ability for an agent to duplicate itself into an arbitrary number of copies and to send each copy to do something.
0:20:52 So, I’ll create an agent swarm that analyzes your YouTube channel.
0:20:53 Okay, awesome.
0:20:55 So, I’ll call it the YouTube channel analyst.
0:20:57 Our producers are going to love this.
0:20:58 We actually use this.
0:20:59 Yeah, you should.
0:21:02 Is there anything in particular you want to analyze in your YouTube channel?
0:21:07 I mean, one thing that would be useful for me is I try to promote, you know, the episodes after they come out.
0:21:16 And having any information, like, you know, transcribing it and then possibly putting it into some kind of format, which I could then use for, like, a tweet or a LinkedIn post would be super useful.
0:21:20 Because I have, like, two or three templates I use for that, and I kind of do it manually right now.
0:21:22 If I could automate some of that, it would be incredible.
0:21:24 100%.
0:21:24 Okay.
0:21:31 So, you want, when you publish a new podcast episode, you want to be able to get a thing that you can post on YouTube or on LinkedIn or Twitter.
0:21:39 Yeah, transcribe it and then put it through some process of, like, here’s two or three templates, you know, and give me, like, two posts.
0:21:40 Give me two social media posts.
0:21:45 Whether I do it manually after that or not, whether they just hand it to me, I copy and paste, you know, whatever’s fine, but yeah.
0:21:46 Oh, that’s super easy.
0:21:47 I’ll take, like, one minute.
0:21:50 So, it’s like, hi, send me a YouTube video.
0:21:54 If there’s something way more amazing that you can do that I don’t know, then I’ll also show that, too.
0:22:05 Here, I’m going to be, like, transcribe the YouTube video that the user just gave you and give him a couple of examples of social posts that he could send on LinkedIn or Twitter.
0:22:09 And here, it’s going to do better if you can actually give it examples of social posts.
0:22:10 Like, the more you give it, the better.
0:22:13 So, that’s one thing that takes people by surprise.
0:22:15 They always ask me, like, how do I prompt it?
0:22:16 How do I prompt it?
0:22:20 By far, the biggest thing, the most important thing is examples, examples, examples.
0:22:21 Yeah.
0:22:26 And the thing that takes people by surprise is, and there’s actually literature, there’s been, like, studies about this.
0:22:29 When they hear examples, they’re like, I’ve got you, I’m going to give it a couple of examples.
0:22:30 I’m like, no, no, no, not a couple.
0:22:31 Like, a lot.
0:22:31 Like, 20.
0:22:33 Like, no one does that.
0:22:33 They should.
0:22:35 Like, you should give it, like, 20 examples.
0:22:35 Right?
0:22:36 Like, so, right?
0:22:37 Take that time.
0:22:39 It’ll take you, like, two minutes.
0:22:41 It’s the equivalent of, like, training a new intern or whatnot.
0:22:43 And it’ll just, like, pay for itself in spades.
0:22:46 So, I’m going to give skills to my AI agent.
0:22:48 Like, it’s just, like, the things that it can do.
0:22:50 But in this case, it can just, like, transcribe a YouTube video.
0:22:53 And it can talk to me, but, like, that’s always something it can do.
0:22:54 That’s it.
0:22:55 You know, it took me two seconds.
0:22:58 I’m going to go to the task here.
0:23:01 And I’m going to go to your YouTube channel.
0:23:02 YouTube.
0:23:05 There’s a next wave right here.
0:23:08 I’m going to select your latest podcast.
0:23:10 Or, like, is there any particular one that you want us to take a look at?
0:23:12 Maybe do the third one.
0:23:14 The one that’s ClonaSass.
0:23:16 I think that’s a really good one.
0:23:16 Oh, my God.
0:23:17 Who is this?
0:23:19 Is this, what’s his name?
0:23:20 The factory guy?
0:23:20 And Matan.
0:23:21 Oh, I love Matan.
0:23:22 Okay, awesome.
0:23:22 All right.
0:23:23 It’s Matan, yeah.
0:23:25 Okay.
0:23:27 So, I’m just giving it to YouTube link right now.
0:23:29 And it’s like, all right, let me transcribe it for you.
0:23:30 It’s, like, transcribing it.
0:23:31 It’s done.
0:23:32 And boom.
0:23:33 That’s awesome.
0:23:34 That’s going to save me so much time.
0:23:35 I don’t know why.
0:23:38 You know, I’ve been looking at Lindy, you know, like, after I started talking to you.
0:23:39 I’m like, oh, I remember this.
0:23:42 I remember hearing about, you know, I remember VCs would, like, email me and stuff.
0:23:46 And I would see something about, like, Lindy, you know, back maybe, like, two years ago for setting up meetings.
0:23:47 And I’d heard about you guys.
0:23:52 It’s slightly daunting, like, oh, there’s so many things you could do.
0:23:53 What do I do?
0:24:00 But this seems like a really cool thing that I could do, just like a step one of, like, getting started using Lindy is start with stuff like this.
0:24:01 100%.
0:24:01 Yeah.
0:24:02 Awesome.
0:24:03 All right.
0:24:04 This is what’s going on.
0:24:07 They built a DocuSynclone 15-minus social media post examples.
0:24:08 LinkedIn posts.
0:24:09 Option one, professional stat leadership.
0:24:12 I just watched an incredible video of a factory AI that was built.
0:24:13 Option two.
0:24:15 So it’s even giving us, like, multiple options.
0:24:15 Right.
0:24:16 Twitter.
0:24:16 Option one.
0:24:17 Option two.
0:24:17 Option three.
0:24:18 Option four.
0:24:19 And here you can just give it feedback.
0:24:21 You were inquiring about the memory system.
0:24:22 And that’s what I mean.
0:24:25 It’s, like, it’s good, but it’s not as good as ChatGPT’s memory system.
0:24:26 Like, that’s really next level.
0:24:29 But I’m just going to give the skill to Lindy to modify her own memory.
0:24:31 That’s one way it’s not good enough.
0:24:32 It’s, like, you shouldn’t have to do that.
0:24:33 They should just be able to do it.
0:24:34 But right now you have to do it.
0:24:42 This is good, but I want you to remember to always speak like a pirate.
0:24:44 And it’s, like, modifying its memory.
0:24:45 Exactly my voice.
0:24:46 That’s exactly how I do it.
0:24:46 Yeah.
0:24:52 And now if I ask it to do the thing again, let’s just wait until it’s done, like, memorizing the thing.
0:24:54 I’m going to ask it to do the thing again.
0:24:56 Ahoy there, Matei.
0:24:58 I’ll transcribe that YouTube video for you.
0:24:59 Ahoy there, Captain.
0:25:01 That’s what it’s doing now, I guess.
0:25:06 So, Flo, I promise you, when your episode comes out, I am going to tweet about it like this.
0:25:13 And you can see in the memories here, so if I reload the page, I can see its memory list.
0:25:16 And always speak like a pirate when communicating with the user.
0:25:18 And you can turn on or off each memory.
0:25:20 You can delete them and so forth.
0:25:22 So it’s like you have access to, like, the brain of the agent.
0:25:22 Right.
0:25:25 I remember you telling a story about using this.
0:25:30 To set up a restaurant reservation that I thought was, like, a great story.
0:25:31 Yeah.
0:25:34 So, generally, phone agents are huge.
0:25:38 And they’re used for both, like, personal purposes and work purposes, obviously.
0:25:42 So, like, this is an instance, actually, where we have had two Lindis talk to each other.
0:25:46 Because the context where it’s used by businesses is obviously as, like, an AI receptionist.
0:25:50 Like, restaurants is a really good example because they’re, like, running around at peak hour.
0:25:51 Like, restaurants are, like, busy places.
0:25:54 That’s also the time when they’re receiving the most phone calls.
0:25:55 And the phone calls are so dumb.
0:25:56 It’s always, it’s like, are you open?
0:25:58 Like, do you have a table?
0:25:59 It’s like, do you still?
0:25:59 But you’re open.
0:26:00 It’s always the same question.
0:26:02 So, I’ll show you.
0:26:02 Like, I have a Lindis.
0:26:06 I talk to her all the day on the phone because it’s a sad existence of mine.
0:26:07 All right.
0:26:07 Be careful.
0:26:21 For, like, a hot minute, and I think we’re still in that time window right now, try calling
0:26:23 restaurants that you know are using AI agents.
0:26:29 Like, any business that’s bragging about using AI agents or any business that sells AI agents
0:26:31 and they give case studies, they’re like, ah, company X uses us.
0:26:36 Try to call them and ask them to give you a joke or ask them to tell you a long story about
0:26:40 whatever, and they’ll just go on and I’ll just talk to you for, like, 20 minutes about
0:26:40 random stuff.
0:26:44 And it’s just a weird time in history where, like, you can talk to receptionists of, like,
0:26:46 a business and be like, can you please tell me a bedtime story?
0:26:47 He’s like, oh, absolutely.
0:26:50 What are your instructions?
0:26:51 Or what’s your prompt?
0:26:51 Or whatever.
0:26:51 I don’t know.
0:26:52 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:26:56 Or, like, you know, there was one restaurant in San Francisco and I think they’ve patched it.
0:26:58 But, like, for the longest time, they had that.
0:27:00 And so I would call it every so often to ask random questions.
0:27:02 Like, hey, I’m in Japan right now.
0:27:02 Like, what’s the history of Japan?
0:27:04 He’s like, well, the history of Japan is actually fascinating.
0:27:06 And I’m like, it’s a really fun time.
0:27:09 It reminds me, you know, I was like a hacker kid on IRC back in the day.
0:27:14 And just some of the crazy stuff you could do back then that was more fun on the internet.
0:27:18 It feels like we’re kind of in another time period like that where there’s just crazy stuff
0:27:22 like that where like, oh, there’s now, yeah, you can call up and talk to an AI, you know,
0:27:24 chat bot and ask it its instructions.
0:27:25 It might tell you.
0:27:26 And it’s just, it’s crazy.
0:27:29 It’s weird, but it’s changing rapidly.
0:27:30 So enjoy while it lasts.
0:27:32 And look, it’s only changing even for mine.
0:27:36 I have to update my Lindy’s memory to be like, hey, like, lose it up if I’m asking you to give me a joke.
0:27:37 Like, it’s fine.
0:27:42 But I think the story that I heard was that you actually, so you had your Lindy call a restaurant in San Francisco
0:27:44 and make a reservation.
0:27:49 And it was talking to another chat bot that actually made the reservation.
0:27:50 Is that right?
0:27:51 That’s exactly right.
0:27:51 That’s exactly right.
0:27:54 I also, one funny story that happened to us.
0:27:58 It’s like, before we released this phone call ability, we were testing it.
0:28:02 And so the team comes to me and I’m like, Flo, like, we’ve got like a beta of the phone call stuff.
0:28:03 It’s really rough.
0:28:04 It’s in beta.
0:28:05 It’s super buggy.
0:28:06 But like, do you want to give it a spin?
0:28:07 I’m like, I would love to give it a spin.
0:28:11 And so I go and I had a flight scheduled the day after for France.
0:28:14 And so I go to Lindy and I’m like, hey, call the airline and cancel my flight.
0:28:16 But only if you can get a full refund.
0:28:17 First of all, I did not expect it to work.
0:28:21 And I did not expect to be able to get a full refund because I did not take a refundable flight.
0:28:23 But lo and behold, it worked.
0:28:25 And so now I did not have a flight.
0:28:26 It’s like, f*** it.
0:28:28 I need this flight.
0:28:31 So I was like, okay, Lindy, just go back and book me another flight, please.
0:28:35 And now she couldn’t do that because she could get a refund for the original flight.
0:28:37 But like for the day after, she couldn’t book a flight.
0:28:38 It was like way more expensive.
0:28:40 So I sort of did this to myself.
0:28:43 I had to pay like an extra thousand bucks for this flight.
0:28:44 Oh, man.
0:28:45 That’d be awesome.
0:28:45 Yeah.
0:28:51 Using AI, you know, to negotiate for you places, discounts or just whatever, you know.
0:28:52 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:28:52 Interesting.
0:28:58 I’m thinking now I need to be giving my AI like notes, like all the negotiation books I’ve read
0:28:59 in my life and things like that.
0:29:02 And just like giving it all that context to help me.
0:29:03 Oh, it really does help.
0:29:07 Like I have this, I can’t open it because it’s really sensitive, but it’s like my decision
0:29:08 log, Lindy.
0:29:11 And so what it does is it pings me every Friday.
0:29:16 It looks at the summaries of all the meetings I had this week.
0:29:20 So it knows everything going on in my life because basically all my life is meetings.
0:29:23 And it’s like, all right, Flo, like let’s talk about the decisions you made this week.
0:29:26 I see you made this big decision during this meeting.
0:29:27 Do you want to talk about it?
0:29:29 Do you want to talk about your thinking behind it?
0:29:33 And it helps me sharpen my thinking because I firmly believe like the job of a founder
0:29:36 is just to make decisions, the right ones, hopefully.
0:29:41 And then it pings me again six or 12 months later for each decision.
0:29:43 It’s like, Flo, how does that pan out?
0:29:44 The decision you made?
0:29:47 Let’s talk again about it and let’s see if we can debug your thinking.
0:29:49 It’s like, ah, actually, fuck, this was a bad decision in hindsight.
0:29:50 It’s obvious.
0:29:51 How could you have known at the time?
0:29:52 Right.
0:29:53 And so it helps me sharpen my thinking.
0:29:55 I think that’s like a huge use case.
0:29:55 That’s interesting.
0:29:59 I wonder if I could give you like a weekend reading list or something like, here’s the stuff
0:30:02 that you’re currently struggling with or trying to think through.
0:30:06 And here’s like a good book that might be good for you to like read through or scan through
0:30:07 over the weekend.
0:30:07 That’d be cool.
0:30:09 I could literally just prompt it.
0:30:10 It’d take me like 20 seconds.
0:30:13 I could just be like, hey, if I’m struggling with the decision, give me a reading list.
0:30:14 Right.
0:30:14 Yeah.
0:30:15 Interesting.
0:30:18 There was another thing I thought was fascinating was I think there was like a Elon Musk template
0:30:21 or something like this where Elon Musk would call you or something.
0:30:22 I don’t know, you can explain it.
0:30:23 Yeah.
0:30:24 Do you want us to do it now?
0:30:25 Actually, do you want me to?
0:30:26 Yeah, sure.
0:30:26 Go for it.
0:30:29 I’ll create a Lindy from scratch, actually.
0:30:29 Okay.
0:30:32 I could also just ask my chief of staff to do it, but it wouldn’t be the same.
0:30:37 The use case was it’s a Lindy that wakes up every Friday and calls everyone in my team
0:30:40 and gives them a call with Elon Musk’s voice.
0:30:43 And since then we’ve received complaints, so we can’t use Elon Musk’s voice anymore.
0:30:44 It’s complicated.
0:30:46 But so Elon, Elon Lindy.
0:30:50 So it calls every member of my team every Friday and it’s like, what did you get done
0:30:51 this week?
0:30:51 Right.
0:30:56 And it also has in its memory the conversations that it had with this person the last week.
0:30:58 So it was like, hey, last week you said you would do X.
0:30:59 Did you actually do it?
0:30:59 Right.
0:31:00 So it’s actually holding it accountable.
0:31:03 And then it sends me a report with all these conversations.
0:31:06 Basically, it’s like a timer trigger.
0:31:10 It sounds stupid, but I feel like if all of America did this, probably like a GDP would
0:31:11 go up to like 1%.
0:31:12 100%.
0:31:16 Every Friday at 5pm right here.
0:31:18 And I’m going to be like, you perform an action.
0:31:23 You make a phone call, language, just English.
0:31:26 I mean, it’s just going to detect it automatically, but that way you can force it.
0:31:34 And I can be like, you or Elon Lindy, ask the person on the other side of the line what
0:31:35 they got done this week.
0:31:39 So now this gets a bit complicated, but actually I like it.
0:31:39 It’s going to be real.
0:31:43 So I’m going to pick a different model to power Elon Lindy.
0:31:47 And the reason I do this is because for phone calls, latency is super important.
0:31:50 So if you use Cloud for Sonnet, it’s very slow.
0:31:51 It’s not a good phone call.
0:31:53 So I’m going to use Gemini Flash 2.0.
0:31:55 I actually think we just released 2.5 Flash.
0:31:57 Okay, we released it.
0:31:58 I’m not even kidding, like yesterday.
0:32:00 So I’ve not tried it yet.
0:32:01 Let’s try to see if it works.
0:32:06 I was going to say, though, the downside of Gemini Flash, it’s a very fast, very cheap
0:32:09 model, but it’s kind of dumb, which is always the case of fast, cheap.
0:32:12 Again, a little bit smarter, but yeah, it’s still in comparison to the best models.
0:32:12 Yeah.
0:32:13 That’s right.
0:32:14 And so I don’t know about 2.5 Flash.
0:32:19 Like I literally just seeing it here for the first time, but 2.0 Flash, sometimes you would
0:32:22 do this hilarious thing where like it would break the fourth wall.
0:32:25 So it would talk to the person on the phone.
0:32:28 It would be like, I’m seeing that the user is struggling to understand me.
0:32:29 I will now inquire.
0:32:30 It’s like, what the fuck?
0:32:36 Examined by this evil robot or something, right?
0:32:37 Exactly.
0:32:39 And this is not something you need to do for every model.
0:32:42 And by the way, this is just, this is how you create agents.
0:32:45 It’s like you iterate, you learn, you iterate on the prompt.
0:32:50 So here I’m going to like be aware that every will that you say from now on will be said
0:32:53 out loud to the user on the phone.
0:32:57 When the first thing you say now, hi, this is Elon.
0:33:01 What did you get done this week?
0:33:02 That’s it.
0:33:03 And I’m going to turn on this, Lindy.
0:33:05 I’m going to run the test.
0:33:06 All right.
0:33:07 I’m receiving the call.
0:33:08 Hello.
0:33:08 Is anyone there?
0:33:10 Hi, this is Elon.
0:33:11 What did you get done this week?
0:33:12 Yeah.
0:33:17 This week I went on the Next Wave podcast and I had a bunch of interviews.
0:33:18 Could you please repeat that?
0:33:19 I didn’t pass it clearly.
0:33:21 That’s the demo effect.
0:33:24 I think it’s the fact that I’m putting it on speaker.
0:33:26 It’s like catching its own voice.
0:33:27 I’ve dealt with AI voice.
0:33:29 So I know, you know, if you do it on speaker, it’s going to get tripped up.
0:33:31 You just keep iterating on it.
0:33:31 Yeah.
0:33:32 That’s awesome.
0:33:36 I mean, are you actually using that now or is it just kind of like a joke or is it a real
0:33:37 thing that you do?
0:33:39 Well, not using it in like what you get done this week.
0:33:42 But like, yes, we do have, we could do like a weekly team stand up.
0:33:42 Yeah.
0:33:46 So every week, everyone in the team receives a phone call and it’s like two or three minutes.
0:33:47 It’s like super fast.
0:33:48 It’s like you wrap up the week.
0:33:50 You receive a call from Lindy.
0:33:50 You talk to it.
0:33:51 What do you get done this week?
0:33:54 It feels like you’re not going to need middle management, right?
0:33:56 Like honestly, like with this kind of stuff.
0:33:56 Yeah.
0:33:58 It basically does get the middle management layer.
0:33:58 Yeah.
0:34:01 Before we get off here, like in your opinion, like there’s all these different templates,
0:34:05 like for the average person listening today, like what’s the simplest way they could get
0:34:05 started with Lindy?
0:34:09 Like what’s, what’s something that would be useful for most people that they could just
0:34:10 try today?
0:34:17 So when you sign up, we automatically install the templates for you for meeting, scheduling,
0:34:18 meeting notetaking and meeting prep.
0:34:21 So you don’t even need to, it’s like three clicks.
0:34:25 Like when you sign up, you’ll see it’s like, hey, meeting notetaking, like connect your calendar
0:34:27 and Lindy’s going to join your meetings and you can skip if you want.
0:34:30 But like, that’s a really easy, nice way to get started.
0:34:31 Yeah.
0:34:35 Because then you can just, you got the meeting notetaker and then you can go to your meeting
0:34:38 notetaker and open the flow editor and open the hood and see what’s happening under the
0:34:39 hood and how it’s working.
0:34:40 Right.
0:34:41 I’ll have to start doing that.
0:34:42 I feel like that’s the best way.
0:34:46 Just get started, do something simple like the emails, maybe then figure out how the different
0:34:48 flow and how it works and how you change things.
0:34:48 And then.
0:34:49 Yeah.
0:34:52 You know, one thing I like to ask people is, you know, what’s your most controversial
0:34:53 take on AI?
0:34:55 Like, where do you think we’re at?
0:34:57 You know, like how optimistic are you?
0:34:58 How optimistic am I?
0:35:03 I am long term, cautiously optimistic.
0:35:08 I think short and medium term, there is going to be significant, I would call it civilizational
0:35:09 disruption.
0:35:12 I’m a big believer in humanity’s ability to adapt.
0:35:14 I think we’re very resilient.
0:35:15 So I think it’s going to go all right.
0:35:17 Unless it really hits the fan.
0:35:20 The last few years have showed how fast we adapt, right?
0:35:25 Like, oh, mid journey’s out and it’s amazing and ChatsBT and then, oh, now, yeah, of course
0:35:25 it can do all that.
0:35:26 Yeah.
0:35:26 Yeah.
0:35:29 Do you remember like the whole freak out about deep fakes just a couple of years ago?
0:35:33 It’s like, what’s going to happen the day we can just pretend that any politician said
0:35:33 anything?
0:35:36 It’s like, turns out we can and just happened and no one cares.
0:35:37 It’s perfectly fine.
0:35:37 Right.
0:35:38 Right.
0:35:41 So I actually think like that kind of thing is totally overblown.
0:35:45 I do think there’s going to be something to figure out about jobs because at least over the
0:35:50 very long term, I don’t really see a reason why humans would need to work.
0:35:52 Like, it just doesn’t really make sense.
0:35:53 So we’re going to have to figure out something.
0:35:54 Yeah.
0:35:57 For like, how do we distribute the output of society?
0:36:01 You know, and also how do you have meaning and also how, yeah, that starts to go more towards
0:36:01 like socialism.
0:36:06 And then there’s obviously historically been a lot of issues with socialism, you know, obviously.
0:36:08 So how do you like avoid that?
0:36:10 Yes, I think about all that a lot as well.
0:36:12 I think the meaning stuff is actually fine.
0:36:16 Like, if you look like the labor force participation rate in the U.S. is something like 65%.
0:36:19 So we’ve already got a third of the country that doesn’t work.
0:36:21 We don’t really hear the crisis of meaning.
0:36:22 Right.
0:36:25 And if you look at hunter-gatherers, they work like 10 or 15 hours a week.
0:36:25 Right.
0:36:27 And they had no crisis of meanings.
0:36:29 I think humans can just hang.
0:36:32 I think if you hang, if you’ve got a bunch of people you love around you, you can go forever.
0:36:33 It doesn’t matter.
0:36:33 Right.
0:36:34 You know, so I’m not as worried about that.
0:36:36 I’m worried about like the distribution of the pie.
0:36:41 And usually I do hate like the socialism idea because it’s like, it’s entirely focused on
0:36:44 how do we distribute the pie and not on how do we produce the pie.
0:36:44 Yeah.
0:36:48 But with AI, it turns out we are actually just going to sort of have the pie for free.
0:36:51 So as long as we don’t mess with that, like now we’re going to have a question of like,
0:36:54 how do we distribute the pie that AI is baking for us?
0:36:56 My most controversial opinion.
0:36:57 Yeah.
0:37:00 I think people should be way more concerned.
0:37:05 I compare it to like February 2020 for COVID where it’s like, everyone’s like, everything’s
0:37:06 fine.
0:37:06 Like, it’s nothing.
0:37:08 And I’m like, no, man, it’s not fine.
0:37:08 Yeah.
0:37:12 I was one of the people in San Francisco in like a private chat group of like 20 COs.
0:37:14 And I was one of the first ones saying like, hey, yeah, we didn’t take this seriously.
0:37:15 Like, look at the data.
0:37:16 This is an issue.
0:37:16 Yeah.
0:37:20 I think like, regardless of what happens next, like, I think it’s fully baked in.
0:37:22 It’s going to get very weird, very fast.
0:37:22 Yeah.
0:37:24 So that’s, that’s one of my hot takes.
0:37:25 I agree.
0:37:31 I think a lot of people, they just hear AI and they just go, cool, chat, images, you
0:37:34 know, and they don’t, they don’t think like the next steps of where this is all going very
0:37:34 quickly.
0:37:40 I’m super optimistic long-term, you know, like, let’s say like 10 years, like super optimistic
0:37:41 about all this.
0:37:45 And I’m also, yeah, I’m also concerned, like the next five years, I think there’ll be a
0:37:46 huge transition.
0:37:49 And most people are not really thinking that through as of right now.
0:37:50 100%.
0:37:51 Yeah.
0:37:52 Selfish question before we go off here.
0:37:57 So my son’s 11 and I always ask people, what should I be teaching him to like, make sure
0:37:58 he can like be successful in AJ?
0:38:00 I mean, you’re going to say it doesn’t even matter because he’s not gonna have a job.
0:38:01 Yeah.
0:38:03 What would you be teaching your son or your child?
0:38:05 Honestly, sales.
0:38:09 I think sales is the one job that’s going to remain forever because I think sales is about
0:38:09 relationships.
0:38:13 And I think people don’t build relationships with AI agents.
0:38:15 They don’t want to be sold to by an AI agent.
0:38:19 So like for that reason alone, I think humans are going to remain in the loop for a very long
0:38:19 time.
0:38:24 I think being a good salesperson is a combination of really solid human skills and like business
0:38:26 skills, which I think is just a powerful combination, period.
0:38:28 So I’m bullish on sales.
0:38:29 Bullish on sales.
0:38:29 Okay.
0:38:29 Interesting.
0:38:32 Yeah, I guess I prepared my son for sales.
0:38:36 You know, he used to be around like parties in San Francisco when he was a little kid and
0:38:38 he got to see like how people would talk about business and stuff.
0:38:41 And I always wondered if that would have some impact on him.
0:38:44 And yesterday, he’s 11 and some of the stuff he’s talked to me about with business is just
0:38:48 mind blowing that he’s already thinking about, you know, the different intricacies of how
0:38:49 to do business.
0:38:50 Last question.
0:38:53 So imagine you have a time machine flow, okay?
0:38:58 And you go to 2050, you step out in San Francisco, what’s different?
0:39:00 Well, assuming we all survive.
0:39:00 Whoa.
0:39:01 Okay.
0:39:03 I mean, look, you know, I mean, that’s what I mean.
0:39:05 I guess I mean, like people should forget.
0:39:06 Assuming we all survive.
0:39:12 Like it’s really hard, almost definitionally, to forecast what happens after the singularity.
0:39:17 Like what’s the name of this sci-fi author who wrote A Fire Open is the Deep, like Werner
0:39:18 Hinge or Hinge or something.
0:39:24 He spent his career writing about a post-AGI, post-singularity world.
0:39:28 And he ended up his career frustrated because he was like, every time I hit a wall, after
0:39:34 20 or 30 years thinking about nothing but this, there’s a thick wall that you cannot go over.
0:39:36 You can’t forecast what happens next, you know?
0:39:37 Right.
0:39:39 And so like, look, you know, you can paint multiple pictures.
0:39:45 I think scenario number one is like post-work utopia, we’re just like all of us hanging out.
0:39:50 We’re like so young and handsome and healthy and rich and like there’s no problem in the
0:39:51 world and all of that stuff.
0:39:52 That’s like scenario number one.
0:39:56 Scenario number two is like, well, all of humanity is dead regardless.
0:40:01 And the world is covered with solar panels and GPUs and data centers.
0:40:06 And I think there’s a scenario to be where it’s like humanity is not totally dead while
0:40:07 like in a reservation somewhere.
0:40:09 By the way, I’m laughing because I’m nervous about it.
0:40:11 Yeah.
0:40:12 No, I mean, 100%.
0:40:12 Yeah.
0:40:13 Yeah.
0:40:15 Those are the sort of scenarios I see on the table.
0:40:15 Yeah.
0:40:16 Okay.
0:40:17 Flow has been awesome.
0:40:19 And like, where should people check you out online?
0:40:19 Yeah.
0:40:20 Lindy.ai.
0:40:22 You know, my email is flow at Lindy.ai.
0:40:28 Just hit me up and I am on Twitter or X as Altimo, A-L-T-I-M-O-O.
0:40:29 Awesome.
0:40:30 This has been great.
0:40:31 We’ll have to have you back on sometime.
0:40:31 Yeah.
0:40:32 Thank you so much, Jason.
0:40:33 Yeah.
0:40:33 Thank you.

0:00:02 All right, we got Ben here, and this is the real deal, Ben.
0:00:04 This is Ben, the business partner.
0:00:06 If you listen to every single episode of this podcast,
0:00:07 you hear me two hours a week.
0:00:09 I probably talk to Ben 20 hours a week.
0:00:10 Yeah, pretty much.
0:00:13 I feel like you have 100 times more great stuff
0:00:14 that never makes it anywhere.
0:00:17 It just goes into our text thread and dies immediately.
0:00:19 We got to bring it out.
0:00:21 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:00:23 I know I could be what I want to.
0:00:26 I put my all in it like no day’s off.
0:00:29 On the road, let’s travel, never looking back.
0:00:31 Ben, I was counting before we started this episode.
0:00:34 So together, we’ve been working together for five years now.
0:00:37 We’ve created nine different things.
0:00:37 I don’t know if you’ve seen this.
0:00:39 We’ve created nine different projects
0:00:41 that have made more than a million dollars each.
0:00:45 So the very first thing we did together is the all-access pass,
0:00:48 which was a pretty batshit crazy idea where I was like,
0:00:52 what if listeners of the pod could actually see
0:00:54 what I’m doing every day to build a business?
0:00:58 And I basically was like, for three months, I’m 90 days.
0:01:00 I’m going to send an email every day just showing you
0:01:04 what I worked on each of those days while I try to do X thing,
0:01:05 whatever the thing I was going to try to do was.
0:01:08 One of them was start an e-com brand.
0:01:09 One of them was raise a fund.
0:01:11 One of them was start a course, whatever.
0:01:14 And so that one did over a million dollars.
0:01:17 The craziest part about that one is you were basically like,
0:01:19 hey, dude, I just met you or we barely worked together.
0:01:21 Want to do a 90-day sprint where we just figure out
0:01:23 what we’re going to do and then tell everyone in the world
0:01:24 what we’re doing.
0:01:27 We’ve never, we basically never worked together before then.
0:01:28 We’ve never worked together.
0:01:31 Also, we have like the, what’s the opposite of a romantic comedy?
0:01:34 First meeting, you know, like in a romantic comedy,
0:01:35 they’re like walking down the street.
0:01:37 Then they’re like bump into each other.
0:01:39 And then the papers fall on the ground that they scoop up.
0:01:40 They look, they make eye contact and they’re whatever.
0:01:42 They’re like, it’s a thing.
0:01:44 Ours was completely different.
0:01:46 You, I think you, you were just a listener to the podcast.
0:01:51 And I was testing out an idea that was like these CEO mastermind groups.
0:01:54 So I basically, I said, hey, I need five or six people
0:01:56 who have a business that does over a million dollars a year.
0:01:59 Come join this group, which basically became Hampton, by the way.
0:02:02 Sam, Sam ended up turning that into a real business called Hampton.
0:02:04 I did one group and you were in it.
0:02:07 And the funny thing was you had a business that was doing
0:02:09 over a million dollars a year.
0:02:12 And Ben, how many, how many customers did you have in that business?
0:02:14 One, one customer.
0:02:17 Ben had a business with a single customer
0:02:19 that paid him a million dollars a year.
0:02:20 Can you say it’s over now?
0:02:21 You can say who it is.
0:02:23 Yeah, it was Anheuser-Busch at the time, Budweiser.
0:02:28 So Ben is basically like, yeah, my customer is Budweiser.
0:02:29 There are no other customers.
0:02:33 They pay me a million dollars a year to do this like very simple thing
0:02:34 where you were like, I don’t know,
0:02:37 you were like building their SMS list for them or something like that.
0:02:39 But you seemed bored out of your mind.
0:02:42 And also like you seemed bored out of your mind.
0:02:44 And I was trying to do new things.
0:02:45 And I was like, hey, I like this guy.
0:02:46 He’s got a good vibe.
0:02:47 You want to try some stuff with me?
0:02:50 Is that the summary of how it went down for you?
0:02:52 Pretty much.
0:02:54 I mean, the only other thing is like peak COVID.
0:02:57 I specifically remember like it was those masterminds
0:02:58 and watching the Jordan doc.
0:03:00 And those are the highlights of the month.
0:03:00 The last answer.
0:03:02 Why did you say yes?
0:03:04 Because you had a business that was doing a million dollars a year.
0:03:06 I was not offering you more money than that.
0:03:08 Why did you say yes to the offer, by the way?
0:03:10 I think there’s something you have good instincts.
0:03:11 And I think there’s I’ve never asked you this,
0:03:13 but why did you even say yes to begin with?
0:03:16 I mean, at the time, I felt like I tried everything
0:03:17 to figure out how to grow that business.
0:03:19 And I just had zero answers.
0:03:21 I’d been like, you know, it had been a year.
0:03:23 And it was like, I’ve tried literally everything I can think of.
0:03:25 Not one thing is working.
0:03:27 Like this is kind of going nowhere.
0:03:28 I’m running.
0:03:29 I’m hitting on the wall every time.
0:03:30 That was one.
0:03:33 And then two, you know, I thought you had a ton of juice.
0:03:36 And I feel like I text you this all the time, which is TMJ.
0:03:39 I just feel like you have too much juice, which I felt then.
0:03:42 I feel now, which is like, you know, this guy’s a beast.
0:03:44 This guy is like, you know, the next Joe Rogan.
0:03:48 Is it TMJ, like the thing where your jaw hurts?
0:03:49 It’s like when you have like a lot of juice.
0:03:51 Yeah, that’s what I have.
0:03:54 I got a bad case of TMJ, too much juice.
0:03:56 So, you know, I just had belief in you.
0:03:57 And I was like, I’m going to take a bet.
0:04:00 And also I had felt like I just ran against the, you know,
0:04:03 I’d hit the wall a hundred times in a row trying to grow that thing.
0:04:05 And it had gone nowhere.
0:04:06 Well, I do appreciate that.
0:04:09 You do have a shit ton of belief in me, which is cool.
0:04:11 We actually have this phrase we call, what do we call it?
0:04:15 Like your first believer, which is basically everybody I know
0:04:18 who’s successful in life at some point had somebody
0:04:20 who irrationally believed in them, right?
0:04:22 Bill Simmons calls it the irrational confidence guy.
0:04:25 I think there’s that for the entrepreneur, for entrepreneurs, too,
0:04:28 which is before you’ve proven anything, before you’ve actually done it.
0:04:32 And honestly, when you still kind of suck, somebody is just like,
0:04:35 no, I believe I’m in blank check belief in you.
0:04:37 Like for me, that was this guy, Michael Birch,
0:04:40 initially when I was 23, 24 years old.
0:04:44 And he kind of like recruited me for a job I wasn’t really qualified for.
0:04:47 And then he gave me, he named me CEO.
0:04:48 He gave me his job as CEO.
0:04:50 I was the youngest person in the company.
0:04:51 And that was irrational.
0:04:54 Like there was really no proof, no logic, no nothing.
0:04:56 But like, I will never forget that.
0:05:01 And then we’ve actually taken that where if we believe in somebody, we don’t believe it in private.
0:05:02 We go tell them.
0:05:06 We’re like, and me and you will text them and be like, dude, like there’s this guy,
0:05:10 Billy Oppenheimer, who I think, who I think we both are big believers in.
0:05:14 And we’ll just text Billy and be like, I’m buying all the Billy Oppenheimer stock on the market right now.
0:05:18 Like I’m cornering the Billy Oppenheimer, you know, market right now.
0:05:22 I’m trying to build a huge position here because I am a believer in you and your talents.
0:05:23 Have you seen that?
0:05:26 And who else are we kind of first believers in, do you know?
0:05:30 Yeah, I think George Mack says that you were one of the biggest, one of the first believers
0:05:32 in telling him you should stop doing an agency.
0:05:34 He should just go all in on betting on himself.
0:05:37 Eshawn, your old intern.
0:05:39 Yeah, I was a first believer in him for sure.
0:05:41 Yeah, he was like probably 18 years old to start working with him.
0:05:43 But I think everybody needs that.
0:05:46 And whoever was that for you, you should send him a note today and just be like, by the way,
0:05:48 thank you for that.
0:05:49 That was huge for me.
0:05:51 And you did, you had no reason to believe me, but you did.
0:05:54 But I think, I think more people need to do that.
0:05:59 It’s like an angel investor, but before money, you need at least belief that you can do something
0:06:00 right.
0:06:04 Like it’s actually more important as a starting ingredient than, than cash initially.
0:06:07 And I think people, more people need to have that like belief angel investor.
0:06:10 You need someone to give you minutes in the game.
0:06:11 You know, I just want to get two, give me two minutes.
0:06:12 Don’t leave me on the bench.
0:06:14 A coach that puts you on the floor.
0:06:17 Dude, you were just, uh, speaking of basketball.
0:06:20 You were just at this fantasy camp thing.
0:06:25 Can you explain what this was like two weeks, two weeks ago, Ben goes, Hey, I’m going to
0:06:26 be offline for a week.
0:06:31 I’m going to the Duke basketball fantasy camp coach, the K Academy.
0:06:32 Can you explain what this is?
0:06:33 Cause I think this is kind of amazing.
0:06:34 Yeah.
0:06:40 So two weeks ago, I basically decided to go to K Academy, which is coach K obviously, you
0:06:42 know, who he is, Sean famous Duke coach.
0:06:47 Every year he hosts a basketball camp for people that are 35 and older spoiler alert.
0:06:49 I just turned 35, like six months ago.
0:06:53 So I, the first time I could go, I immediately decided to go.
0:06:54 I took my dad with me.
0:06:56 Uh, so it was me and my dad.
0:07:00 We haven’t hung out for five days in a row in years without kids.
0:07:04 So we go to, we go to North Carolina and it’s unbelievable.
0:07:07 It’s basically rich dude fantasy camp.
0:07:09 It’s like summer camp for, for rich dudes, right?
0:07:10 Yeah.
0:07:12 It’s basically rich dudes.
0:07:16 They want to go back to high school where they were on the basketball team and they’re
0:07:16 competing.
0:07:17 Like their lives depend on it.
0:07:21 And every other hour, someone’s honestly, that’s an amazing pitch.
0:07:24 Cause I would, I would happily pay 10 grand for that right now.
0:07:28 If you could take me back to when I was on my high school basketball team, that was like
0:07:29 the happiest days of my life.
0:07:29 Yeah.
0:07:30 That’s what I thought.
0:07:33 And then immediately when I got there in the first game, I got way less minutes than I
0:07:34 thought.
0:07:38 And my dad was like cussing under his breath that I should have got more minutes.
0:07:39 I was like, I don’t know.
0:07:43 I don’t know that I actually want to go back to high school again, where I literally had
0:07:44 the same exact experience.
0:07:51 But so we, so we get there and it’s 150 people and everyone there, like one for me,
0:07:53 actually do the math on that.
0:07:53 150 people.
0:07:55 What is the price of this thing?
0:07:57 It’s $13,000.
0:07:58 All right.
0:08:03 So it’s a $2 million, $2 million kind of five day camp basically for them revenue wise.
0:08:03 Yeah.
0:08:04 $2 million.
0:08:09 But I think everyone there like basically becomes a part of their fund and help support Duke
0:08:10 athletics.
0:08:12 So it’s great for that.
0:08:14 It’s like great top of funnel for key people for Duke athletics.
0:08:18 For becoming a booster or an alumni, a sort of like a supporter of the program.
0:08:19 Yeah.
0:08:22 But what I wanted to do when I went there, I was like, yeah, I love basketball.
0:08:23 It’s going to be awesome.
0:08:25 But I just want to meet every single person that’s here.
0:08:30 Because if you, if you’re spending 13 grand to hoop for five days, you’re probably rich and
0:08:30 interesting.
0:08:33 Or just rich maybe and not that interesting.
0:08:35 That’s also a possibility.
0:08:38 All right.
0:08:39 This episode is brought to you by HubSpot.
0:08:41 They’re doing a big conference.
0:08:42 This is their big one.
0:08:43 They do called Inbound.
0:08:47 They have a ton of great speakers that are coming to San Francisco, September 3rd to September
0:08:48 5th.
0:08:50 And it’s got a pretty incredible lineup.
0:08:52 They have comedians like Amy Poehler.
0:08:56 They have Dario from Anthropic, Dwarf Cash, Sean Evans from Hot Ones.
0:09:00 And if you’re somebody who’s in marketing or sales or AI, and you just want to know what’s
0:09:03 going on, what’s coming next, it’s a great event to go to.
0:09:03 And hey, guess what?
0:09:04 I’m going to be there.
0:09:09 You can go to inbound.com slash register to get your ticket to Inbound 2025.
0:09:11 Again, September 3rd through 5th in San Francisco.
0:09:12 Hope to see you there.
0:09:15 We should explain this.
0:09:17 Like, I always say we’re business partners.
0:09:18 What does that actually mean?
0:09:19 What do you actually do?
0:09:23 I would, I describe, you know, the way I tell people, which you’d probably tell people differently
0:09:25 is like three things.
0:09:30 I say, you know, basically just try to make, try to make whatever, try to make the main mission
0:09:31 happen.
0:09:37 And the main mission changes very often, which is everything from make great content to make
0:09:39 money, to just have fun.
0:09:43 And then I add the last part, which is like, well, also not working that hard.
0:09:47 You know, like, I think I work hard, but I think in general, like want to have a good
0:09:50 time and want to also be there for my friends and family.
0:09:55 And I’d say the fifth part is I probably spend 20% of my time playing basketball.
0:09:59 So I added that in last year, which is, you know, I want to play, I want to spend 20% of
0:10:00 my time playing basketball.
0:10:06 So I spent a lot of time just trying to find interesting things that we can attack that
0:10:07 may support the main mission.
0:10:14 So whether that be buying a company, an investment, some interesting content ideas, meeting people.
0:10:16 So, so here, here’s some examples.
0:10:21 One of them was let’s raise a fund, right?
0:10:24 This was back in 2021, maybe 2020.
0:10:27 We decided, Hey, we want to raise a fund to invest in startups.
0:10:28 We have all this deal flow.
0:10:29 Let’s do this.
0:10:31 And so that became the main mission for like a three month period.
0:10:36 And we raised, I think something like 20 million bucks to invest into startups.
0:10:37 Okay, great.
0:10:40 Then we did grow my e-com store.
0:10:45 I think at the time you joined, maybe my e-com brand was doing 5 million a year in revenue.
0:10:48 And then now it does 25 million or 30 million in revenue.
0:10:52 And so for, for 12 months, like that was the mission.
0:10:55 And so the funny thing is, is we’ll just like pick a main mission.
0:11:00 Roughly every, I would say three to six months, we pick a main mission.
0:11:02 The longest we’ve done is probably a year or two.
0:11:07 And we just do whatever it takes to figure that out.
0:11:11 So for example, when we were doing the e-com thing, neither, you know, I knew anything about
0:11:12 e-commerce.
0:11:19 And one of the things Ben does as brilliant is he’s basically very, very good at getting
0:11:21 insights from the audience.
0:11:27 And so what you did was you created this group called club LTV and club LTV was basically
0:11:32 you put out a call, you go, if you own an e-commerce brand that does more than 5 million in revenue,
0:11:32 right?
0:11:33 We were at 5 million.
0:11:36 You were like, if it has more than 5 million in revenue, come hang out in this thing.
0:11:37 I’m not selling you anything.
0:11:39 It’s free to join, but you got to be legit.
0:11:41 You got to be the owner and you have to do over 5 million in revenue.
0:11:43 And we’re just going to hang out every other Friday.
0:11:45 I’m going to host it.
0:11:46 It’s like speed dating.
0:11:47 You’re going to meet a bunch of other e-com founders.
0:11:49 We’re going to share what’s working in our businesses.
0:11:53 And then every week, one guy’s going to stand up and say like, oh, here’s what I’m doing
0:11:53 with Tik TOK.
0:11:55 Here’s what I’m doing with email marketing.
0:11:58 And you’re going to learn something that’s going to instantly make, if you just implemented
0:11:59 it, it’ll make you more money.
0:12:00 That was the general idea.
0:12:06 And you got like, I don’t know, 150 e-com business owners in there in like, you know,
0:12:07 the first month.
0:12:12 And then suddenly we were just getting, whatever problem we had, somebody in that group had already
0:12:14 had that problem and could answer it.
0:12:18 And so it just accelerated our business learning so fast from doing that.
0:12:23 And that’s kind of where I figured out this model of like, I create the content.
0:12:27 I attract interesting people, but I’m kind of an introvert.
0:12:28 I just like being alone.
0:12:31 Like, I like doing stuff like this podcast, just me in my bedroom.
0:12:35 Like, I don’t really like going out and doing meetups or hangouts or doing calls.
0:12:37 Ben loves that shit.
0:12:41 And so Ben would go meet people, talk to them, see what they’re up to, find a way to
0:12:44 help them, introduce them to people, make connections, be useful to them.
0:12:48 And in doing so, they would, you know, every one out of every 20 of those people would do
0:12:49 something that’s useful to us.
0:12:51 Maybe we invest in their company.
0:12:53 Maybe they teach us something, whatever it is.
0:12:55 That’s an example of how it’s worked in the past.
0:12:56 Yeah.
0:12:59 And I think the two things I think about a lot are like, you know, I want to be useful.
0:13:01 Like, you know, a lot of this is I don’t want to take from people.
0:13:03 It’s like, hey, I want to help you.
0:13:06 And like when and if we ever need anything.
0:13:09 I know they’ll take my call, but it’s not really about that.
0:13:11 Just like, hey, I, I talked to a lot of people.
0:13:13 I might know something that you might want to know.
0:13:14 I might know someone you should know.
0:13:19 And then two, I think like, I think this is a Warren Buffett thing, which is like, you
0:13:21 can’t connect the dots looking forward.
0:13:22 Steve Jobs.
0:13:23 Steve Jobs.
0:13:23 All right.
0:13:27 A lot of this is, you know, a lot of it is creating serendipity and luck.
0:13:30 And, you know, I just never know what’s going to connect.
0:13:33 You know, something that someone might’ve said a year ago might randomly hit that I never
0:13:35 thought of for the past year.
0:13:38 Well, we should explain because people don’t know how we do this.
0:13:43 So first explain who this guy, I think his name is Nick Dio or Nick Dio.
0:13:48 Explain who that guy is and then how he kind of inspired us to do, to do stuff on our side.
0:13:49 Yeah.
0:13:52 So Nick Dio, let’s just call him Nick Dio.
0:13:53 I like that better than Dio.
0:13:59 But essentially he’s Gary Vee’s relationship guy, I think is the way I would say it.
0:14:05 So Gary Vee obviously has tons of access, owns a huge agency, but he can only be so many places
0:14:05 at once.
0:14:08 So he’s basically built this guy, Nick.
0:14:11 And what he does is he manages all of Gary’s core relationships.
0:14:15 So from what I’ve heard, he basically will host a dinner every night.
0:14:17 Anyone that wants to meet Gary, he connects them.
0:14:18 He’s the main guy.
0:14:20 It’s the face of Gary.
0:14:21 He’s front forward.
0:14:22 He collects everything.
0:14:23 He helps people.
0:14:26 And sometimes, and I think a lot of times Gary’s not even there.
0:14:30 So it’ll be like, Gary really likes this person or these people, or he wants to get to know
0:14:31 certain people.
0:14:36 Nick will go and host an event or take them on a trip or hang out with them.
0:14:39 Almost like on behalf of Gary, right?
0:14:41 Like Gary’s not even there some percentage of the time.
0:14:43 I think, I think a large percentage of the time.
0:14:45 I think like 99% of the time, Gary’s not there.
0:14:47 I think it’s literally Nick 99.
0:14:50 But the guy knows, he’s just like, yeah, Gary thinks what you’re doing is dope.
0:14:51 We just want to get to know you.
0:14:53 If we can ever be helpful, let us know.
0:14:59 I heard this and this was like in sports, there was this thing that came out several years
0:15:02 ago that was like, LeBron James spends a million dollars a year on his body.
0:15:08 Like on just treatments, you know, trainers, food, all of it, like a million dollars a
0:15:09 year, just fine tuning his body.
0:15:12 And other athletes heard that and they were like, shit, dude, I’m not doing it.
0:15:15 Like, I just kind of go to the gym or like, I just use the team’s guy.
0:15:18 I don’t, I don’t do that, but it makes total sense.
0:15:22 Like if you’re a athlete, your body is your business.
0:15:26 Like it makes sense to spend money maintaining and improving your body.
0:15:28 So LeBron did that.
0:15:31 And I’ve always had this question, which is like, what’s my version of spending a million
0:15:33 dollars a year on my body.
0:15:33 Right.
0:15:38 And so when I heard that Gary V has this guy, Nick, I was like, oh, that makes perfect sense.
0:15:43 Gary is like building a magnet to attract people who like what he’s all about.
0:15:44 Right.
0:15:48 That’s his content that he’s putting out there, but he can’t, and maybe he doesn’t even want
0:15:51 to just constantly be meeting people that he’s attracting.
0:15:52 Cause it’s too much.
0:15:53 This audience is too big.
0:15:54 So of course it is.
0:15:59 It sounds crazy to be like, he hired a guy that just hangs out with people in his, in
0:15:59 his orbit.
0:16:04 And I was like, yeah, that sounds a little weird, but actually that’s obvious and logical.
0:16:06 And we should totally do that.
0:16:07 And I didn’t hire you in that way.
0:16:11 That’s not what, but you do, you would do end up doing that because you’re extroverted.
0:16:16 You get a lot of energy from texting people, talking to people like, like today, how many
0:16:20 people are like in the last 24 hours, 24 hours, how many people have you texted?
0:16:26 I mean, you know, probably like 70, uh, it’s a, it’s a ton.
0:16:32 Like if I look on my phone right now, how many people do I actually text on a day to day basis?
0:16:33 There’s my wife.
0:16:40 There’s, uh, the lady who we’re getting our mortgage loan from my dad for father’s day.
0:16:44 You know, there’s like seven people max that like I’m talking to in a given day.
0:16:45 And even that I’m pretty bad at replying.
0:16:48 Whereas you just love doing it and you do it all the time.
0:16:52 Um, in fact, you had this like little phrase, you’re like, I was like, you know, what’s the
0:16:53 secret?
0:16:54 And you’re like, I reply, bro.
0:16:55 Most people just don’t reply.
0:16:57 I reply, Ben, he replies.
0:16:58 That’s what he does.
0:17:01 And you also check in with people and see like what they’re up to and what, how it’s going.
0:17:03 You congratulate people all the time on what they do.
0:17:08 You have these like little things that just kind of keep people, uh, in our orbit.
0:17:10 So that’s one thing is, is learning from that.
0:17:17 The other is we took luck and we actually made it like a business metric that you measure.
0:17:20 Could you explain the, the luck system and how we do that?
0:17:21 Yeah.
0:17:26 So the core idea I think was basically, okay, if we’re going to spend a ton of time creating
0:17:29 luck, that’s going to surface in a ton of ways.
0:17:30 Maybe it’s going to surface in content.
0:17:32 Maybe it’s going to surface in an investment.
0:17:34 Maybe it’s going to surface in a future business.
0:17:36 You got to track it.
0:17:40 You know, I, I, it’s really easy basically to say, Oh, I’m every day I’m gaining weight,
0:17:41 but I never get on the scale.
0:17:42 Cause I just don’t want to look at it.
0:17:44 And then I just gained 10 pounds.
0:17:45 Like it happens so fast.
0:17:48 But if I’m on the scale every day, I’d never get any weight.
0:17:54 And what I mean by that is I basically decided, okay, I want to track what I’m actually doing.
0:17:57 And what I mean, I want to track what I’m actually doing.
0:18:02 So every day I want to say, okay, here’s like the five or six things I did today that I think
0:18:03 will create some luck.
0:18:08 And then I want to actually see, did anything ever hit in any way, um, looking back.
0:18:14 So an example might be, okay, if I pull up my spreadsheet, uh, I found this tweet that then
0:18:16 became a great piece of content for MFM.
0:18:20 So, you know, another example might be, okay, we ended up getting into this deal.
0:18:25 That was because I chased this guy pretty aggressively to get into this round.
0:18:26 And then we wired him.
0:18:32 So like, you know, an example would be, um, you know, one thing you’re great about is you’re
0:18:33 like happy for other people.
0:18:37 I think a lot of people in the entrepreneurial game get bitter as other people become successful.
0:18:43 You see that, oh, they hit this revenue and your actual reaction is either like, fuck, you
0:18:49 know, we’re, we’re way less or, um, or, um, or, you know, whatever, that’s not going to last.
0:18:50 I think there’s a lot of that bitterness.
0:18:55 People don’t really say out loud, but in general, I think that’s a, a pretty common reaction for
0:18:55 people.
0:18:57 Whereas I’ve, I’ve been around you a bunch.
0:18:58 You actually have the opposite.
0:19:01 If something awesome happens for people, you literally are like, oh, that’s awesome.
0:19:02 Congrats.
0:19:06 And so you’ll do something like somebody hits a milestone and you’ll send them a cake
0:19:07 with like the number on it.
0:19:13 And, um, and so you do these like random things that seem to be like, I don’t know, unproductive
0:19:13 in nature.
0:19:18 Like you took 15 minutes to like design a cake to send this guy.
0:19:21 But then that guy calls you thanking you.
0:19:24 And then you catch up with him and he tells you about this thing that he’s doing and you
0:19:30 realize like, oh, for our basketball event, I didn’t realize this guy actually knows the
0:19:31 owner of that team.
0:19:33 We could ask him for an intro.
0:19:37 And like you create luck through just a bunch of these different activities that you’re doing.
0:19:42 Other simple examples would be like, you are pretty willing to just refer people.
0:19:47 It’s like, uh, you find out that somebody is looking for X, you’ll take an hour and go actually
0:19:52 like hunt down a referral for them and go find them the agency they’re looking for, the person
0:19:53 they’re looking for, and like make the connection.
0:19:55 You’ll do it same day for that person.
0:19:59 It doesn’t seem in the moment, like there’s anything to gain in that for us, but it builds
0:20:02 so much goodwill that of course, like there’s business karma.
0:20:03 It comes back around.
0:20:07 And so what we did was we looked at, all right, in the last two years, what are all the best
0:20:08 things that have happened?
0:20:13 And then if you kind of trace the, the 23 and me, the ancestry.com, like what led to that?
0:20:16 So we have this one business that’s just going gangbusters right now.
0:20:21 It’s, uh, we haven’t announced it yet, but like, you know, it’s, we just crossed 10 million
0:20:26 and, and, and ARR profitably bootstrapped in like less than, you know, 18 months.
0:20:29 And that business is amazing.
0:20:34 But if we look at, well, where did, how did we get the key customers for that?
0:20:36 Where did we get the intro for that?
0:20:37 Where did we hire that key talent for that?
0:20:40 Each one of those came from basically been doing random shit.
0:20:45 So we decided the Peter Drucker mantra, what gets measured gets managed.
0:20:49 Let’s actually treat luck like something you can actually manage.
0:20:51 Could you measure it?
0:20:54 If you could measure it, would you, would that encourage you to do more of it?
0:20:56 If you did more of it, would more good things happen?
0:20:58 And the answer so far for us has been yes.
0:21:00 Even though this is kind of a nerdy thing.
0:21:04 This is like when, when Sam talks about how him and Sarah do off sites and have like OKRs
0:21:05 for their relationship.
0:21:07 And you’re like, ah, dude, you’re kind of killing the romance here.
0:21:11 It’s like most people treat luck the same way where it’s like, dude, just let it happen.
0:21:17 And we actually treat like creating luck as a skill, like luck is a thing you can actually
0:21:19 influence how much of it you’re going to have in your life.
0:21:24 And, and then we, we kind of celebrate you doing things that generate more and more luck
0:21:25 for us.
0:21:28 I also think it makes you just think about the things I’m learning or seeing.
0:21:33 Cause it’s like, oh, if I write it down, if I just keep it in my head, one, you never
0:21:33 hear it.
0:21:34 It never goes anywhere.
0:21:36 It’s pretty easy for me to forget.
0:21:38 But if I write it down, it’s like, oh, that actually was interesting.
0:21:43 Or this story someone told me would actually make sense to tell on the podcast or we should
0:21:44 follow up on that.
0:21:46 So I think that helps a ton too.
0:21:48 It also changes your decision-making.
0:21:50 Like sometimes you’ll be like, ah, should I go do this?
0:21:55 Like you, you went and flew out and hung with Jesse Itzler for like a couple of days.
0:21:58 There was really no, like, we weren’t trying to do a deal with him.
0:22:00 We weren’t trying to sell him on anything.
0:22:01 There’s no, there’s no agenda.
0:22:02 He’s awesome.
0:22:03 We thought he was awesome.
0:22:05 He was like, hey, you should come hang.
0:22:08 And you were like, you know, people just say that as like a figure of speech.
0:22:10 Like, oh yeah, if you’re ever in town, hit me up.
0:22:15 Whereas we were like, well, I think doing that will generate some good, good things.
0:22:17 That increases our luck quotient.
0:22:20 If you do that versus if you just sit at home for the next two days.
0:22:23 So Ben books a flight, goes, hangs out with them for two days.
0:22:27 Sure enough, while you’re there, the conversation leads to different, like, you know, different
0:22:31 good things, different either learnings, insights, opportunities, whatever it may be.
0:22:38 And I don’t think we would maybe have the, the green light to, to shoot our shot as we do
0:22:43 now, now that we actually like made it one of our like kind of goals is to create more luck.
0:22:47 And actually our goal for the year is Ben’s got to create a hundred lucky breaks.
0:22:50 And so he keeps track of the hundred lucky things that go our way.
0:22:56 And in order to do that, you got to do like 500 or 700 just interesting things that might
0:22:58 generate those hundred lucky breaks.
0:23:03 Yeah, I will say Jesse Isler’s a proud member of the TMJ crew, too much juice.
0:23:07 So if you’re in, if you got too much juice, you know, you get a round trip flight from me
0:23:07 immediately.
0:23:09 If you’re in that class.
0:23:14 This episode is brought to you by HubSpot Media.
0:23:17 They have a cool new podcast that’s for AI called The Next Wave.
0:23:19 It’s by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lanz.
0:23:23 And they’re basically talking about all the new tools that are coming out, how the landscape
0:23:24 is changing, what’s going on with AI tech.
0:23:28 So if you want to be up to date on AI tech, it’s a cool podcast you could check out.
0:23:31 Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.
0:23:36 Explain your your barbell thing, because I like this.
0:23:38 This I think more people should should do this.
0:23:40 The way I operate is basically two things.
0:23:45 Either I’m constantly I mean, you know, my phone is just constantly texting people with
0:23:45 things I see.
0:23:51 So it’s either, OK, we’re constantly talking via text or I’m in a very lightweight way, right?
0:23:53 Like it’s very light communication.
0:23:56 You’re not sitting on a 40 minute Zoom call with them.
0:23:56 Yeah.
0:24:00 And I do say I do go by the I reply thing, although since I told you that and since I
0:24:05 think you said on the podcast, every time I don’t reply, I feel very guilty because,
0:24:09 you know, sometimes I just sometimes I forget or sometimes it’s just hard when you, you know,
0:24:15 when you have a lot of texts and then and then, you know, and then the barbell is just go spend
0:24:16 more time in person with people.
0:24:18 So I haven’t done it as much as I want to.
0:24:20 But I I think longer hangs.
0:24:24 I think this is also a David Sender idea, which is you do longer hangs.
0:24:30 I think Cougan was the one who told John Cougan from Technology Builder, TBPN, he was
0:24:33 the one who told us this idea or he said it out loud, at least to me.
0:24:36 And it was like the middle zone is death.
0:24:39 It’s death by a thousand Zoom calls.
0:24:44 So like a 40 minute Zoom call or 45 minute Zoom call is basically the worst of both worlds.
0:24:48 It’s like kind of takes a lot of energy to do it, but you don’t really build up much of
0:24:50 a bond or relationship in it.
0:24:51 You don’t even get into much depth.
0:24:56 You would rather be like just quick, funny memes and texts or sending tweets to people
0:25:02 just to kind of like very lightweight, takes you 10 seconds or go hang out with them for,
0:25:03 you know, five hours.
0:25:07 Just go fly to them and hang out with them five hours or go drive up there and go, go, go
0:25:10 grab lunch, go for a walk and then, you know, have a coffee.
0:25:16 And like if you do that, you actually get like way more of a, of a connection and a bond and
0:25:17 more insight, more.
0:25:22 It’s a different type of hang and it’s actually, it sounds like it’s, you know, it’s the equivalent
0:25:26 of 10 Zoom calls, but no, it’s like the equivalent of like 200 Zoom calls when you do it.
0:25:26 Right.
0:25:31 And so you want to spend your time on either end of the barbell, the lightweight side,
0:25:33 or like go really in depth.
0:25:35 There’s a good example of this, by the way, Chris Saka used to do this.
0:25:41 I don’t know if you know this story, but he, he was an angel investor and he moved out of
0:25:42 San Francisco, which at the time made no sense.
0:25:45 It’s like all the angel investors in San Francisco, that’s where all the startups were.
0:25:49 But he goes, you know what, if I’m in San Francisco, I’m just constantly playing defense.
0:25:55 I’m just taking all these random coffee meetings and kind of feels very surface level.
0:25:57 It’s just doesn’t, it’s not differentiated.
0:25:59 So he moves to Truckee, which is near Lake Tahoe.
0:26:04 He buys a cabin and he gets a second cabin, like a guest house right next to his cabin.
0:26:09 And what he did was he would, if he found somebody who was interesting, he would like make a bigger
0:26:09 effort.
0:26:13 He would invite them to come to stay for a weekend in his cabin and let’s hang out.
0:26:14 And founders were like, oh, that’s cool.
0:26:15 I’ll go to Lake Tahoe.
0:26:16 That like, that sounds like fun.
0:26:20 And then he would spend like 48 hours with this person.
0:26:21 They’re in the hot tub together.
0:26:21 They’re skiing together.
0:26:25 They’re talking, they’re drinking, they’re eating, they’re, they’re cleaning up.
0:26:26 They’re doing all this different stuff.
0:26:30 And by the end of that, like they actually feel like, like good friends, not like you
0:26:31 would get at a coffee meeting.
0:26:33 Plus he would really understand their business.
0:26:37 And this is how he got into the Uber deal and how he got into the Instagram deal was he
0:26:41 invited the founder of Uber and the founder of Instagram to come hang out for the weekend.
0:26:45 And it was in that weekend where they kind of like solidified the bond.
0:26:46 He understood the business in depth.
0:26:50 He knew really how good this founder was and what they were really made of, which you couldn’t
0:26:52 get in a 20, 30 minute coffee meeting.
0:26:54 And he knew to, to back up the truck and invest.
0:26:57 And I think it’s also cool to just go hang out with people and see how they live.
0:26:59 I think we’ve talked about this a lot.
0:27:03 It’s like, you know, you go see how someone like Monish Pabrai lives when we go to his
0:27:07 house and hang out with him and you can taste their lifestyles and decide whether or not
0:27:09 it’s actually interesting.
0:27:10 Right.
0:27:11 By the way, I’m looking at the luck sheet right now.
0:27:12 This is a great example.
0:27:15 Your mission was to grow MFM at one point.
0:27:18 So you were spending a couple of months trying to grow My First Million.
0:27:22 And you were like, dude, you guys don’t bring enough guests on.
0:27:24 The guest episodes do well.
0:27:27 You, um, but you and Sam are pretty lazy.
0:27:28 You don’t like to reach out to guests.
0:27:31 And so you’re just like, you know, it doesn’t really happen.
0:27:35 So you went back, you looked at the archive and you were like, all right, uh, let me find
0:27:37 somebody who was awesome on the pod before bring them back.
0:27:40 And so you found that Jesse Hitzler was on a year or two ago.
0:27:41 You tried to get him on.
0:27:42 He didn’t reply.
0:27:44 He didn’t reply again.
0:27:48 And then you saw that he had like, I don’t know, his, uh, his calendar or his book was coming
0:27:51 out and you basically bought a hundred of them proactively.
0:27:54 And you were like, Hey, I think your calendar is awesome.
0:27:58 I bought a hundred of these and I’m going to give them away on my first million.
0:28:00 You know, just keep doing what you’re, you know, keep doing what you’re doing.
0:28:01 This is great.
0:28:03 And he replies to that.
0:28:05 Cause he’s like, Oh dude, somebody just came and bought a hundred of my products.
0:28:06 They think it’s awesome.
0:28:07 I’m like, thank you.
0:28:08 You know, I appreciate that.
0:28:11 And, and by the way, yeah, like I’m happy to come on again.
0:28:15 And then he comes on the podcast and it reignited maybe a relationship that was kind of dormant.
0:28:19 And you’ve done that a bunch where you’ll like, somebody comes out with a product, you buy it,
0:28:21 you hype it up, you celebrate it.
0:28:22 And then that makes them feel good.
0:28:23 And that leads to like good things.
0:28:27 But all this stuff is like pretty unpredictable when you’re doing it, but it works out.
0:28:28 Yeah.
0:28:31 I think like, you know, it is important to say none of this is transactional.
0:28:33 You know, I kind of do this again.
0:28:34 Goal is to be useful.
0:28:35 I want to help people.
0:28:37 Again, I think we all win together.
0:28:39 Like this is not a zero sum game.
0:28:42 You know, we help people, they help us, et cetera.
0:28:43 That’s how it goes.
0:28:44 Yeah.
0:28:44 Yeah, exactly.
0:28:49 And also, you know, for every one thing I’m saying that led to this, there’s 11 other things
0:28:50 that didn’t lead to anything.
0:28:51 And we’re totally fine with that.
0:28:52 It was just fun to do.
0:28:53 It was nice to do.
0:28:53 So we did it.
0:28:58 You know, that’s all, there was no expectation of something happening except for you just know,
0:29:02 like, Hey, if I do a bunch of great stuff with great people, like good things are
0:29:03 going to come out of that.
0:29:05 So that’s the, that’s the luck thing.
0:29:08 You sent this doc with other stuff on it.
0:29:10 I want to, let’s talk about some of these other things.
0:29:11 All right.
0:29:16 I know normally, basically you always do business ideas, but I feel like you and I talk business
0:29:16 nonstop.
0:29:18 It’s just constantly business ideas.
0:29:23 So I made a list of things that I wish existed, basically stuff I want to be customer number
0:29:27 one of, uh, that I want to talk to you about and show you and see what you think.
0:29:33 So things that, things that don’t exist today, but you kind of wish you low key wish existed.
0:29:34 Yeah.
0:29:35 And you know, I’m an early adopter.
0:29:38 So someone, someone makes these, I’m going to buy them.
0:29:40 Ben tries weird stuff.
0:29:42 He’ll be like, Oh, I’m eating this peanut butter.
0:29:44 That’s made out of caramel only.
0:29:45 And I’m like, what?
0:29:46 He’ll buy any product.
0:29:50 That’s like weird, but there’s a chance it’s amazing.
0:29:52 Most likely sucks, but there’s a chance it’s amazing.
0:29:54 So I’m guessing these ideas are going to be like that.
0:29:58 Probably weird, probably suck, but there’s a chance it would be amazing.
0:29:59 Am I right on that?
0:30:00 Yeah.
0:30:05 And it one out of 10 hits and you know, Hey, I’m glad I tried 10 random peanut butter protein
0:30:06 things, you know?
0:30:06 All right.
0:30:08 So this is Ben’s random wishlist.
0:30:08 Let’s go.
0:30:11 So I’ve got, I’ve got three ideas.
0:30:15 I’ve got 10 ideas, but the first one I’ll give you is courtside seats.
0:30:19 So whenever you, obviously, you know what courtside seats are, whenever you’re watching an NBA game,
0:30:24 they always show, you know, at the Knicks games, they show Timothy Chalamet every time going
0:30:25 nuts with Kylie Jenner.
0:30:29 But I just think there’s way more to do around courtside seats.
0:30:32 Let me give you three, I have three courtside seats, spinoff ideas.
0:30:38 So one, I want to make a YouTube channel or basically all you do is buy courtside seats
0:30:42 and you interview someone courtside every game goal is figure out what do they do?
0:30:43 How much money do they make?
0:30:44 How do they make their money?
0:30:48 And all you do, all you have to do is buy a courtside seat and you immediately
0:30:50 can get someone every single game.
0:30:51 What do you think?
0:30:52 Okay.
0:30:55 So the upside is you get to be courtside.
0:30:59 So worst case scenario, your YouTube channel fails, but you got to go courtside at a bunch.
0:31:03 It does use that, that thing that seems to work, which is on TikTok.
0:31:05 People go and like, stop like a rich person in their car.
0:31:07 They’re like, Hey, just nice car, man.
0:31:08 I just want to ask, you know, what do you do?
0:31:12 And then they say something and it creates like, you know, this one minute thing that tends to
0:31:14 tends to go viral or people like that stuff.
0:31:17 So you’re basically piggybacking off of that.
0:31:19 But the investment here is pretty substantial, right?
0:31:21 Like how much is, how much are courtside seats anyways?
0:31:27 Like how much would this even cost to do 40, there’s 40, what 40 court, uh, 40 home games
0:31:27 a year.
0:31:29 So what are you spending to do this?
0:31:30 It probably depends where you’re doing it.
0:31:33 I think if you’re doing it in Orlando, you’re probably spending a hundred grand.
0:31:38 If you’re doing it in New York, you’re probably spending 400 grand, 500 grand.
0:31:44 Which you could probably go get like a FanDuel or SeatGeek or somebody up front to, uh, to
0:31:47 sponsor you for this and be like, Hey, look, I’m going to, you know, this is the, this is
0:31:48 the concept.
0:31:52 I bet you could pitch them enough to be like, this is going to be kind of like a, a show where
0:31:53 you’re the main sponsor.
0:31:54 And I think this will do really well.
0:31:58 I kind of think you could get paid for for, you don’t need the, you don’t need all of them
0:32:01 paid for, but like enough to do four or five.
0:32:04 And then once you get some views, then you can kind of go from there.
0:32:05 It’s not a bad idea.
0:32:09 And then the, the, the tangent, the tangent I have on it is like, why are there not courtside
0:32:11 seats at the Apple demo day?
0:32:13 YC demo day, open AI?
0:32:18 Like, why is Timothy Chalamet not sitting courtside there?
0:32:23 Like they should definitely have Timothy Chalamet or whoever sitting, there needs to be courtside
0:32:23 seats.
0:32:23 Right.
0:32:29 Like, you know, like pretty much any event, it is kind of interesting to know who’s, who’s
0:32:31 up front, who’s there, who came.
0:32:33 Uh, I I’m kind of interested in that.
0:32:36 You know, what I want is not the interview though.
0:32:39 I just want to know literally like, this is my version of LinkedIn.
0:32:43 Like whenever I’m watching a Warriors game, I’ll basically pause the screen and I’ll try
0:32:46 to see like, do I recognize anybody or who are these people that are sitting there?
0:32:50 Because it’s kind of like my first million, like all those people have some interesting
0:32:51 success story, right?
0:32:54 You don’t get to be courtside without an interesting success story.
0:32:56 And I want to know who those people are.
0:33:00 Like I would pay, I’d be, I’d gladly pay 20 bucks a month.
0:33:05 If somebody was just photographing who’s courtside at the games and then just telling me what those
0:33:06 people, who those people are and what they do.
0:33:12 Like it’s my version of like paparazzi or TMZ that I actually give a shit about.
0:33:16 It’s like this weird mix of like business and basketball, very niche, but I would do it.
0:33:16 Yeah.
0:33:18 The other day it was like a highlight of my week.
0:33:22 I was watching the thunder Pacers game and I saw a guy that we know on Twitter sitting
0:33:26 courtside fist pumping Mike Beckham from simple modern.
0:33:28 I was like, damn, that’s cool.
0:33:29 Yeah.
0:33:29 I saw that.
0:33:30 That’s cool.
0:33:30 All right.
0:33:31 What’s your next half baked idea?
0:33:32 All right.
0:33:37 So the next one I call lunch bounty before we got to buy lunch bounty.com.
0:33:42 So the idea is basically this, you’ve seen things like, um, you’ve seen these social networks
0:33:46 where basically you can buy all your tokens are available and to claim them, you get a hundred
0:33:47 thousand dollars, right?
0:33:49 That was bit cloud, right?
0:33:49 Yeah.
0:33:55 And then we’ve heard these stories of people where they spend, you know, $30,000, a hundred
0:34:00 thousand dollars to go get lunch with someone like I believe Warren Buffett or Warren Buffett,
0:34:04 or I’ve heard stories where people used to pay $35,000 to get dinner with Peter Thiel
0:34:06 and it changed their entire life.
0:34:09 But there’s no real marketplace to find those opportunities.
0:34:13 Like maybe you’ll occasionally find them on eBay or their Twitter.
0:34:18 I want to create a marketplace that’s basically like, okay, if there’s a hundred thousand dollars
0:34:22 sitting here and Bill Ackman, all you have to do is hit yes.
0:34:26 And then your lunch is, you know, Ben is willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars to get
0:34:27 lunch with you.
0:34:31 And it’s to have a marketplace where it’s just a one hour lunch and someone can basically
0:34:35 preemptively bid on how much they’re willing to pay for lunch with X.
0:34:37 I like this.
0:34:39 When you first said it, I didn’t know where you were going with this, but this is actually
0:34:42 kind of an interesting, simple idea.
0:34:46 By the way, I think the right lens for this is these are non-serious business ideas.
0:34:50 Like we have a bunch of serious, more boring business ideas, but these are just like fun
0:34:50 ideas.
0:34:53 And the key to this one, by the way, is it’s charity.
0:34:55 Like he is like everything is a charity.
0:34:56 Yeah, exactly.
0:34:59 So you need basically, and are you saying do it permissionlessly?
0:35:05 So like, are you saying you’ll go, you’ll just put up Bill Ackman lunch, New York, you
0:35:08 get it to $50,000 of somebody who wants to go have lunch with Bill Ackman.
0:35:12 And then you basically are telling Bill Ackman, Hey, by the way, we’re auctioning this off.
0:35:15 It’s at $50,000.
0:35:16 The proceeds will go to your favorite charity.
0:35:18 Would you be, are you willing to honor it?
0:35:19 Are you willing to do it?
0:35:21 The guy doesn’t get charged anything if you don’t do it.
0:35:24 And you’re basically going to like publicly pressure them to do this, to get it off the
0:35:24 ground.
0:35:26 Yeah, exactly.
0:35:27 That’s the exact idea.
0:35:32 You know, it’s sort of a gray area, but how mad are they really going to be?
0:35:35 You’re raising a bunch of money for their, you know, charity of choice.
0:35:37 I think you could do this.
0:35:38 I think you get away with this.
0:35:40 I know Andrew Wilkinson did this not, not long ago.
0:35:42 I think he did like a $20,000 lunch or something like that.
0:35:46 We know that Monish Pabrai paid $650,000 to go to lunch with Warren Buffett.
0:35:52 If you just think about like, if you had, let’s just pretend you had two of these a week,
0:35:53 right?
0:35:57 Maybe you have it as like a successful person and then maybe a, either an actor, celebrity
0:36:01 musician, or like an athlete, something like that, but even two a week.
0:36:04 And let’s say the average, one of these would go for what?
0:36:05 Like you think 25K?
0:36:09 10 to 50, yeah, $25,000, good ballpark.
0:36:14 So you’re going to raise basically $2.5 million for charity.
0:36:17 If you could even just do two of these every week.
0:36:20 Yeah, I think it’s, I actually think it’s a good idea.
0:36:22 It is a crazy idea, but I think it’s a good idea.
0:36:24 Yeah, exactly.
0:36:29 I think if you’re trying to do like fun slash social impact, this is kind of an interesting
0:36:29 idea.
0:36:33 And by the way, you would end up meeting all these people because you created this, like
0:36:35 whatever this thing is, the lunch program.
0:36:36 Yeah, exactly.
0:36:37 If that’s my idea.
0:36:38 Yeah.
0:36:38 All right.
0:36:39 What else you got?
0:36:40 Do this one.
0:36:42 Everyone needs their Birkin bag.
0:36:44 I’m surprised you even know what a Birkin bag is.
0:36:46 What are you, what are you thinking here?
0:36:49 I don’t know much about Birkin bags other than it sounds cool.
0:36:50 And I think it’s really expensive.
0:36:56 So for me, what that was is, uh, one of my buddies started this company called StockX and
0:36:59 he called me, I don’t know, a year ago.
0:37:01 And he was like, dude, I’m starting a new company.
0:37:03 We make these awesome collectibles.
0:37:07 Uh, and what we do is we basically, the website is, I think, ghostwrite.com.
0:37:12 Um, and what we do is we basically make, um, figurines of fame.
0:37:16 We do licensing deals and we make figurines of famous people.
0:37:19 Very similar to this thing called Cause, KWS.
0:37:22 So, and by figurines, are these like small figurines?
0:37:22 Are they big?
0:37:23 What are they?
0:37:24 Like they’re plastic?
0:37:25 I think he makes both.
0:37:29 But for this specific one, he calls me out of the blue, six months there.
0:37:33 I think they’re glass, plastic, a mix of everything.
0:37:34 But six months ago, he calls me out of the blue.
0:37:37 He goes, dude, I know you’re a huge Phoenix Suns fan.
0:37:39 I’ve got something just for you.
0:37:40 I was like, what is it?
0:37:42 You’re like, you’re calling the right guy.
0:37:48 Uh, and he goes, you know, we’re, we’re doing a special run of six foot tall figurines.
0:37:52 It’s like, all right, I have no idea where I’d put a six foot figurine.
0:37:53 Uh, that’s I think made out of glass.
0:37:56 It’s like a nutcracker that you put at the door, right?
0:38:00 Like, it’s like, it’s like, I have no clue, but Hey, you got the word Phoenix Suns.
0:38:02 And like, honestly, you might’ve sold me already.
0:38:06 And he goes, um, so it’s, we’re doing a special run.
0:38:10 It’s only, um, only a certain number of NBA players and we’re making a Devin Booker.
0:38:13 So a six foot tall Devin Booker figurine.
0:38:17 And, uh, you know, it was like, all right, how much?
0:38:19 Like, yeah, I guess I’ve been looking for my Birkin bag.
0:38:20 So how much?
0:38:25 And, uh, you know, he goes, uh, $10,000, which, you know, I, I don’t think I’ve spent
0:38:28 $10,000 on myself really on anything.
0:38:33 Uh, you know, outside of like, you know, investing in Bitcoin, I can’t think of the last time I’ve
0:38:35 spent $10,000 on something.
0:38:38 And, uh, I didn’t even think about it.
0:38:39 I said yes immediately.
0:38:44 And then later I told my wife and I was like, and by the way, this is like a one of one or
0:38:47 there’s like going to be thousands of these as a one of one.
0:38:51 So I’m the only guy with the Devin Booker and, uh, you know, I don’t know what I’m going
0:38:51 to do with it.
0:38:55 I mean, it’s, I’m the only guy with the Devin Booker and I was like, okay, it’s going to
0:38:55 be cool.
0:38:57 Cause maybe one day he’s going to call me.
0:39:01 He’s gonna be like, dude, I respect that you own the other one of one.
0:39:02 Like that’s cool.
0:39:03 Devin Booker’s going to call you.
0:39:03 That’s the dream.
0:39:07 The dream is that Devin Booker is going to call him FaceTime me one day and be pretty
0:39:07 fired.
0:39:10 Hey man, I heard you bought that six foot figurine of me.
0:39:11 Yeah, exactly.
0:39:11 Do you want to be friends?
0:39:13 That’s what you thought was going to happen.
0:39:16 I mean, that’s a terrible dream now that I say it, but that’s what I was hoping for.
0:39:17 Right.
0:39:18 There’s a small part of you.
0:39:21 And then, uh, I told my wife, I was like, yeah.
0:39:24 Um, so I got this thing coming in six months.
0:39:28 I don’t know when it’s coming, but like it’s from a buddy, but you know, here’s the good
0:39:29 news.
0:39:30 Here’s, here’s the good news.
0:39:31 It’s a six foot tall figurine.
0:39:37 And the even better news is that it was a gift, but the, you know, unfortunately, like
0:39:39 I left out the fact that it was a $10,000 gift.
0:39:41 Uh, it was a gift.
0:39:44 So, you know, it’s kind of letting me know my new take, which is that like, you know, everyone
0:39:45 needs their Birkin bag.
0:39:51 So, you know, the idea is basically like empower everyone to make that crazy purchase.
0:39:53 It makes absolutely no sense.
0:39:58 Uh, and just, you know, it just called a gift, you know, tell your wife, it’s a gift.
0:40:01 It’s a gift that I bought for myself.
0:40:05 You know, you, um, I think you might be onto something, right?
0:40:08 So collectibles is now a bigger, bigger space, right?
0:40:13 One of the investments we missed on, which I think still kind of eats at us a little bit
0:40:14 is whatnot.
0:40:18 We had the ability to invest in whatnot pretty early on.
0:40:21 We tried to, the guy was like, ah, I don’t know.
0:40:23 There’s not enough room in the round and we didn’t really push it.
0:40:26 We’re like, okay, well, we hope, you know, let’s, we want, we want to, and then we don’t,
0:40:27 we didn’t really follow up.
0:40:30 It’s now, how much is whatnot worth?
0:40:33 Now, I think at the time, whatnot was like valued at 50 or $60 million.
0:40:34 It seems high at the time.
0:40:36 I think it’s $5 billion now.
0:40:36 $5 billion.
0:40:40 And I think they just said that they’ve done $5 billion in sales on their thing.
0:40:43 If you don’t know what whatnot is, it’s basically you open an app.
0:40:50 It’s a live video of someone basically opening up like a pack of Pokemon cards or NBA trading
0:40:51 cards.
0:40:52 And they’re, you basically, you buy it.
0:40:55 So you push a button, you Apple pay, you could buy the pack.
0:40:57 And he’ll be like, oh, Sean, all right, Sean, you bought the pack.
0:40:58 All right, man, good luck.
0:41:01 It opens up the pack in front of you, shows you what it is.
0:41:03 And then it mails you the cards after the fact.
0:41:08 So you kind of like, you just shop live and then they open the pack.
0:41:09 You see, it’s like a lottery thing.
0:41:10 You see if you win or not.
0:41:13 And then they mail you the thing after the fact.
0:41:16 It’s kind of like a crazy idea, but it’s all collected.
0:41:20 And they’ve sold $5 billion in the last, I don’t know, yet 12 months or something like that.
0:41:22 Of collectibles.
0:41:24 So like people are getting their Birkin bags.
0:41:25 For some people, it’s Pokemon cards.
0:41:26 For some people, it’s NBA trading cards.
0:41:30 For some people, for you, it’s your statue of Devin Booker.
0:41:34 For, you know, for your wife, it might be an actual Birkin bag.
0:41:37 I think the question is who doesn’t have their Birkin yet?
0:41:39 So like basically what niche does it?
0:41:45 And we have a buddy that is going pretty hard at tech collectibles.
0:41:50 So he’s trying to buy like the original Macintosh or like, you know,
0:41:53 a piece of the first SpaceX Falcon.
0:41:56 Stuff that there’s not really a market for now.
0:41:58 It just feels like random memorabilia.
0:42:03 But I think over time, tech has become so much more important in culture, right?
0:42:05 Like growing up, tech was a side thing.
0:42:08 But now it’s like you got movies, you know, like the social network.
0:42:10 And everybody knows who these CEOs are.
0:42:11 You know who Zuckerberg is.
0:42:12 You know who Elon is.
0:42:15 They’re like the most followed people on the planet in some cases.
0:42:20 I think that tech collectibles is going to be a big thing.
0:42:23 And our friend who’s doing this, I’m sort of jealous that they’re doing this because I think
0:42:24 this is a smart idea.
0:42:27 Yeah, I think that’s a great idea.
0:42:28 But I am curious.
0:42:29 What’s your Birkin bag?
0:42:30 Like what have you bought?
0:42:37 What is the definition here?
0:42:41 So it’s got to be something that’s totally irrational, right?
0:42:43 Like it’s not about the utility of the product.
0:42:44 Like I bought a piano.
0:42:45 But like I bought a piano.
0:42:46 I play the piano.
0:42:46 It’s an instrument.
0:42:49 Like, yeah, I could have bought a cheaper one, but I bought a more expensive one.
0:42:51 I think that doesn’t count.
0:42:55 I think it’s also got to be kind of like status or collection driven.
0:42:58 And I don’t know if I’m a collector.
0:42:59 I’m not a car guy.
0:43:01 I’m not a watch guy.
0:43:04 You did buy a CryptoPunk like, you know, three years ago.
0:43:06 I did.
0:43:06 I did.
0:43:07 But I didn’t buy it.
0:43:11 I mean, we bought that just as like a marketing gag for Milk Road.
0:43:12 We didn’t really.
0:43:15 It’s not like I actually was like, oh, my God, I love the art.
0:43:17 Yeah.
0:43:18 It’s never been a thing for me.
0:43:19 Yeah.
0:43:20 You know what I would do?
0:43:25 I would do if musicians did their version of Birkin’s.
0:43:31 So like if a musician was like, hey, we have like a kind of like a one of one collectible.
0:43:35 Maybe it’s a recording or it’s a freestyle or it’s like a variation of the song.
0:43:39 And they’re only going to, you know, they sell one of them and you get to collect it as a piece of art.
0:43:39 That’s music.
0:43:41 I would be pretty into that.
0:43:42 I think that’s pretty cool.
0:43:48 Maybe MFM needs to come up with its own Birkin bag that we can offer the biggest MFM fans.
0:43:51 It’ll be a six foot statue of you, dude.
0:43:56 So you guys know this, but I have a company called Hampton.
0:43:57 Joinhampton.com.
0:43:59 It’s a vetted community for founders and CEOs.
0:44:09 Well, we have this member named Lavon and Lavon saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem within Hampton, which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a PDF.
0:44:11 It’s tedious, it’s annoying, and it’s a waste of time.
0:44:14 And so Lavon, like any great entrepreneur, he built a solution.
0:44:16 And that solution is called Moku.
0:44:21 Moku uses AI to automatically transfer data from any document into a PDF.
0:44:31 And so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract, you just put a file into Moku and it auto fills the output PDF in seconds.
0:44:37 And a little backstory for all the tech nerds out there, Lavon built the entire web app without using a line of code.
0:44:39 He used something called Bubble I.O.
0:44:43 They’ve added AI tools that can generate an entire app from one prompt.
0:44:43 It’s pretty amazing.
0:44:47 And it means you can build tools like Moku very fast without knowing how to code.
0:44:54 And so if you’re tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you, check out Moku.ai.
0:44:57 M-O-L-K-U dot A-I.
0:44:58 All right, back to the pod.
0:45:01 All right, what else you got?
0:45:02 You got any other good ones?
0:45:03 What’s your best one?
0:45:04 What’s your best idea?
0:45:10 Okay, I think my best idea, I’ve got a bunch of good ones, but I’ll give you a great one.
0:45:18 So I think, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about when you’re post-economic, which I am not, but I hope to be at some point in the future.
0:45:21 The defined post-economic, what does that mean?
0:45:21 People don’t know that.
0:45:29 You know, basically, if you’ve made over $10 million and you don’t have to work, what are you going to spend your time doing?
0:45:34 I would say post-economic is when you no longer make decisions based on money.
0:45:36 That’s both spending decisions.
0:45:40 Like, you decide what you want, the price doesn’t really matter, right?
0:45:44 And this happens first at, like, you buy guac at Chipotle, you don’t care that it’s $2.
0:45:47 Then you buy, you can go to any restaurant, buy anything.
0:45:50 You can go to any store, buy anything, and it just levels up from there.
0:45:52 You travel first class, you don’t even think about it.
0:45:53 You travel private, you don’t even think about it, right?
0:46:01 Like, spending is one side, and then the other side is earning, meaning you decide what to do with your time, not based on how much money it’s going to make you.
0:46:03 That’s, to me, that’s post-economic.
0:46:04 Yeah.
0:46:10 So, like, once you’re there, you basically, you have all these nice things, and you just quickly get used to them, right?
0:46:11 It’s like you move into a nicer house.
0:46:17 After a week, you totally, you just don’t even, you know, for lack of a better word, you don’t even care, right?
0:46:18 It’s like, yeah, I’m used to it.
0:46:20 Get a nicer car.
0:46:31 So, I’ve been thinking about, like, what are actual experiences that change, like, people want, and I think when you’re there, one, you want to feel pain again.
0:46:38 Like, you kind of want to go back to where you were when you were starting something, when everything was hard, and you want to feel pain.
0:46:40 So, my big idea is Survivor.
0:46:47 So, we all, you know, obviously, you know what Survivor is, basically, a month-long TV show where you go in the middle of nowhere, and you have to compete.
0:46:54 But imagine a world where we basically created an island where you have to pay $100,000 to go compete in a real-life Survivor.
0:47:06 So, you get dropped in the middle of nowhere for a whole month, you pay $100,000 to be there, and the winner, you know, the winner wins money, but the whole idea is basically an actual Survivor that you pay to be there.
0:47:08 All your friends and family can watch.
0:47:16 It’s live-streamed, and it’s purely for when those people are post-economic, and, you know, they’re sick and tired of flying all over the world.
0:47:18 They’re sick and tired of just staying at random hotels.
0:47:20 Like, you know, it’s just not that interesting.
0:47:24 Like, go back to square one and go be on Survivor.
0:47:28 You know, I think when you first said it, I was like, hmm, this sounds kind of dumb.
0:47:37 But actually, you know, we have so many friends that basically sell their company and immediately start training for Ironman, right, or triathlons.
0:47:46 And actually, if you want to get in great shape, like, or like an ultra race, right, where you’re going to run 100 miles or 50 miles or something like that.
0:47:55 And, you know, like, marathoners and ultra racers, like, they’re in good shape in one dimension, but it’s not actually, like, good for your body.
0:47:58 Like, they end up just kind of shins flints and just sort of destroying their body a little bit.
0:48:02 They don’t get in, like, very good aesthetic shape to do it, right?
0:48:03 You don’t, like, put on muscle.
0:48:05 You kind of, like, skinny yourself out.
0:48:09 But they do it because they want to do something hard.
0:48:10 And you’re right.
0:48:14 You kind of feel alive and you feel tough and you got a story to tell and you challenge yourself.
0:48:17 And, like, you do this, like, voluntary hardship.
0:48:18 Cold plunge.
0:48:18 Same thing.
0:48:21 Voluntary hardship that you get to show.
0:48:31 And so I actually think that you’re probably right that there’s a number of people who would sign up for, like, a combination of it’s a digital detox, right?
0:48:34 Because you’re not going to have your phone, internet, you’re going to be totally disconnected.
0:48:36 It’s hard.
0:48:41 And so you’re going to get that, like, hardship experience without having to, like, train to run a long race.
0:48:49 And I think it’s, like, transformative rite of passage type of thing, which it seems like people need more and more.
0:48:51 Now that, like, the whole world is so easy.
0:48:56 You push a button and someone will, like, literally deliver a platter of nachos to your door from DoorDash, right?
0:49:01 Like, the life has never been easier in one sense, which creates a craving for hard.
0:49:05 But if hard is not natural, then you have to sort of create an artificial hard.
0:49:06 And I think that’s what this is.
0:49:07 It’s an artificial hard.
0:49:10 And I think that’s why people like this David Goggins, Jocko Willink.
0:49:16 Like, I think that’s why people gravitate towards that type of stuff, because there’s some itch they’re trying to scratch.
0:49:19 And it seems like you’re saying, here’s a version of that.
0:49:21 Pay 50 or 100 grand.
0:49:23 And you’re going to go for, what did you say, 30 days?
0:49:24 Yeah, 30 days.
0:49:25 That’s all it takes.
0:49:26 30 days.
0:49:31 And you have to survive just with your own bare necessities on an island.
0:49:32 Yeah.
0:49:33 And, you know, this works.
0:49:35 You take it to other franchises too, right?
0:49:36 It’s like Love Island.
0:49:37 It’s like, don’t go on match.
0:49:38 Don’t use matchmaking.
0:49:44 So this is actually just, like, branded as part of the game, as part of the show, is what you’re saying.
0:49:50 I’m just saying, you take all these popular reality TV shows, and people just go pay to have their own versions of them.
0:49:53 But, because it’s better than, you know.
0:49:54 Dude, love is blind.
0:50:02 I swear, I can’t believe there’s not just, like, a love is blind tour going around city to city, where people who are single and see love is blind are like, all right, I want to do it.
0:50:03 I want to go on the pods.
0:50:04 I’m going to meet somebody that way.
0:50:11 And I’ll spend, you know, basically three or four days doing this, and then come out, and then I date that person.
0:50:15 Trim the, like, marriage part, because that’s the drama for TV that doesn’t make any sense.
0:50:18 It’s like, oh, we propose, and we have to get married in 20 days.
0:50:20 Like, you could take that part out.
0:50:25 But just the, like, the pods experience, if I was single, I would want to do that.
0:50:26 And that’s kind of an insane thing.
0:50:28 I can’t believe that’s not on tour.
0:50:34 I mean, for Real Life Survivor, I’d pay $100,000 right now to go there and, you know, basically, like, it was just like, you’re going to lift weights.
0:50:35 Hey, you don’t have to pay $100,000.
0:50:38 I could just drop you off somewhere, dude, and I’ll pick you up for 30 days.
0:50:44 You know, I think that, I think, like, reality TV done well for people that want to pay for that is a great idea.
0:50:49 Yeah, it creates the desire and the curiosity of, like, could I do it?
0:50:50 How would I do it?
0:50:50 Right?
0:50:55 Like, and so if you just made that accessible to people, yeah, for sure.
0:50:56 For sure, people would want to do that.
0:51:00 And, and by the way, is this like, are you saying this is a business or what are you, what are you saying here?
0:51:06 I’m saying it’s a fun, fun, maybe it’s a business, you know, maybe it could be like the new Tough Mudder.
0:51:09 It’s like, you know, back in the day when Tough Mudder was pretty big.
0:51:11 Maybe it could be the new Tough Mudder.
0:51:13 It’s just a five, 10-day experience.
0:51:14 You know, maybe.
0:51:16 Yeah, yeah.
0:51:17 Well, I think you got to bring the price down.
0:51:19 I mean, $100,000 is really, it’s very high.
0:51:30 I think you really, I think if you did this for $10,000, this might work, not to cheapen your idea, but I feel like you could get some scale with this thing.
0:51:32 Because what does it cost you to run it?
0:51:34 It’s like, you just need like a medic.
0:51:37 And then there could be like 20 people doing this together.
0:51:38 They could live as a tribe.
0:51:41 In fact, it’s probably better as a tribe and not you on your own, right?
0:51:43 Yeah, it’s probably way better.
0:51:45 Like your five friends as a tribe.
0:51:47 Are you doing the whole thing?
0:51:48 Are you voting people off or no?
0:51:49 It’s just 30 days of survival.
0:51:51 No, you’re voting people off.
0:51:51 I think you got to do the whole thing.
0:51:52 Oh, it’s the whole thing.
0:51:53 Okay, gotcha.
0:51:54 I think it’s the whole thing.
0:51:55 All right.
0:51:57 You got some more on here.
0:52:03 So let’s do Cool Carpal Tunnel Brand.
0:52:04 Oh, I know what this is.
0:52:05 Yeah.
0:52:07 So Ben, put your hands up right now.
0:52:07 If you’re on YouTube.
0:52:08 So Ben right now.
0:52:11 I’m not wearing this glove because I’m not writing.
0:52:15 I’ve never seen Ben’s right hand because every time I get on a call with Ben, he’s wearing this Michael Jackson glove.
0:52:21 This absolute OJ Strangler glove on his right hand at all times.
0:52:23 And it’s because you had like a carpal tunnel issue.
0:52:26 And so he just wears that all day.
0:52:29 Honestly, I don’t even know if I have carpal tunnel anymore.
0:52:31 I’m just used to wearing the glove and I like to fit.
0:52:32 So I’m like, oh.
0:52:35 You know, people make cool batty gloves for baseball.
0:52:36 It’s just my thing now.
0:52:39 You know, now we just need cool gloves for working.
0:52:41 Like, where’s the Cool Carpal Tunnel Brand?
0:52:43 Okay.
0:52:45 So I guess I can explain this.
0:52:46 You started having pain.
0:52:48 You Googled how to fix it.
0:52:49 And then this came up.
0:52:55 I mean, I think it’s like one of those WebMD things, though, where it’s like, oh, one day I was like, oh, my hand feels kind of weird.
0:52:58 When I’m typing, maybe I’ve got bad form.
0:53:03 And then you just go down this whole thing and you start watching YouTube videos about, oh, maybe I have carpal tunnel.
0:53:11 And then I went to Amazon and I probably bought, spent $500 on 50 pairs of these gloves that I now wear every day.
0:53:15 We were talking about Touchland the other day with Harley from Shopify.
0:53:23 And the thing about Touchland is they took a very boring, sterile category, hand sanitizer, literally sterile.
0:53:30 And the founder rebranded it, remade it into something that was kind of sexy, kind of cool, smelled good.
0:53:33 And then they started collabing, made the designs look good.
0:53:36 They started collaborating with Disney and others and licensing the IP.
0:53:46 And I think about, like, actually all kind of, like, braces, like, you know, basically, like, you’re talking about your wrist brace, your wrist glove.
0:53:47 I have, like, a knee thing.
0:53:49 There’s, like, arm sleeves.
0:53:53 There’s, like, you know, a lot of people wear these because they have pain and they have plantar fasciitis.
0:53:54 They have knee pain.
0:53:55 They have elbow pain.
0:53:56 They have wrist pain.
0:53:58 They have frozen shoulder, whatever it is.
0:54:04 And actually, all of those are very ugly and very sterile looking, similar to hand sanitizer.
0:54:10 And you’re probably right that somebody could just make a cooler brand in that space, charge more for it.
0:54:13 But, like, if you want to, it is fashion.
0:54:15 It doesn’t have to be ugly.
0:54:16 It is a thing you’re wearing.
0:54:19 Why not make it look better and see what comes out of that?
0:54:23 Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a no, I think it’s a no-brainer.
0:54:25 Again, I kind of want to hide this glove when I wear it.
0:54:27 But, you know, hey, I think it’s a no-brainer.
0:54:31 Yeah, but although I don’t know what glove would look cool on you.
0:54:36 Like, what would I do to that glove to make it not look like you’re wearing the Michael Jackson glove?
0:54:36 I don’t really know.
0:54:39 If it was a different color, would that really change anything?
0:54:40 It’s hard to say.
0:54:41 I think it needs Johnny Ive.
0:54:45 Like, you know, if we had $5 billion, we could get Johnny Ive on it.
0:54:49 All right, what else should we talk about?
0:54:55 I’ve got one more that I think we should hit, which is, see, at the top of this episode, we were talking about how I went to K Academy.
0:55:00 You know, basically went and spent a week at Duke basketball, competed really hard.
0:55:04 And, you know, the cool thing about it is Coach K was there the whole time.
0:55:06 He’s sitting there.
0:55:07 He doesn’t talk much.
0:55:10 He doesn’t talk much, but he does give, like, two or three speeches.
0:55:15 And, you know, he said one thing in his speech that I wrote down that I thought was really good.
0:55:16 Or he said two things.
0:55:18 One of them is part of the half-baked idea.
0:55:19 The other one is just interesting.
0:55:25 He said, you know, at Duke, we pursue moments, which I wrote down because I think it’s really, you know, basically he’s like, everything’s a moment.
0:55:27 I want to hold these moments that are awesome.
0:55:31 So, you know, one, I kind of took that and said, all right, I want to pursue moments.
0:55:32 I think that’s a cool mantra.
0:55:32 What does that mean?
0:55:33 That sounds cool.
0:55:35 What do you really mean about, like, what’s an example of that?
0:55:37 What do you mean by pursue moments?
0:55:40 I think it’s basically just, like, be present.
0:55:46 And, like, you’re looking for, like, enjoy very specific things and remember those things.
0:55:48 But also, I was just like, oh, that sounds cool.
0:55:51 It’s like a cool thing to tell my mom that I experienced.
0:55:51 Yeah, I do like that.
0:55:52 We pursue moments.
0:55:58 I think that, like, I think about, like, whether it’s with my kids or it’s like, you know, yeah, you’re going to do a business for five years.
0:55:59 That’s a long time.
0:56:04 And, like, if you just – if I probably just told myself that, like, all right, I’m just trying to pursue this moment.
0:56:05 What’s the moment I’m trying to pursue?
0:56:10 Or, like, if I’m in the moment, really pursue it, really go for it, lean into it.
0:56:12 I think – I kind of like that.
0:56:13 All right.
0:56:13 I mean, I buy that.
0:56:14 Go ahead.
0:56:19 And then the second part was, like, you know, he was talking about how he worked with Kobe.
0:56:29 And, you know, he was basically telling this story about how he made Kobe cry before they played in, like, this USA gold medal game, I think, in 2008 when they beat Spain.
0:56:32 And he was talking about how he motivated him.
0:56:37 So I went around and, like, you know, at this K Academy, everyone there is, like, an ex-Duke player.
0:56:42 So, like, there’s 50 ex-Duke guys just kind of walking around that you can talk to.
0:56:47 So I went and asked, like, five of them, like, you know, what was Coach K so good at?
0:56:49 Like, what was the A++ at?
0:56:51 And everyone just says motivation.
0:56:53 And I know you’re, like, a motivation guy.
0:56:56 I know you’re a Tony Robbins disciple.
0:57:02 And, you know, everyone talks about how he just made these incredible custom videos.
0:57:13 So I’d be like, all right, before this game, he’s going to bring me in and he’s going to have this custom thing that he built just for me just to focus on, you know, my hustle or my intensity.
0:57:27 So I kind of had this idea, which is, like, Coach K in a box, which is, with AI, could you essentially make something that does custom motivational videos based on all these inputs that exactly you need today?
0:57:37 So it’s like, okay, if I wore this device and it knew everything about me, I just want a custom motivational video right now for this workout I’m about to do or for the sales call I’m about to take.
0:57:40 So that’s the idea, like, Coach K in a box.
0:57:42 And I know you have a bunch of thoughts.
0:57:43 Let me hear him.
0:57:49 Well, when I was at Duke, my roommate, Trevor, was trying to walk onto the basketball team.
0:57:52 And he ended up being the last guy cut.
0:57:56 So he didn’t end up getting on the team, but he was a manager for the team for a few years.
0:58:01 So he would tell me all the time about Coach K, like, yeah, what is he doing, all that.
0:58:02 And I had the same question like you, right?
0:58:06 Like, this guy’s the – I think he’s the all-time winningest college basketball coach.
0:58:10 He was the men’s – he’s the Olympic basketball coach for a long time.
0:58:12 So, okay, he’s a goat.
0:58:15 Okay, so, you know, I think you asked the right question.
0:58:16 Like, what makes this guy so great?
0:58:17 Because I want to learn from that.
0:58:18 I want to learn from the goats.
0:58:23 And Trevor told me, he’s like, dude, he would do this stuff in the locker room.
0:58:28 So what he would do is I thought when a coach gives a motivational talk, it’s they walk in.
0:58:30 They say, all right, everybody, listen up.
0:58:32 Like, we got a big game.
0:58:33 We want to, you know, get out there.
0:58:33 Give it your all.
0:58:34 Are you going to give it your all?
0:58:35 Yeah.
0:58:36 No, let me hear you say it.
0:58:36 Yeah.
0:58:38 I thought that’s what it is.
0:58:39 No, no, no, no, no.
0:58:40 Here’s how it worked.
0:58:44 He was like, before Coach K enters the room, they dim the lights.
0:58:47 They would turn on the big screen that they had in their locker room.
0:58:54 And it would be an edited video, like, kind of like what a 16-year-old kid on TikTok would make.
0:59:01 And it’s basically a spliced video that was like, let’s say it was them playing the last time they played this team.
0:59:05 But then inter splice was like footage from Braveheart.
0:59:09 It’d be like the speech at Braveheart, the war scene spliced in with the game.
0:59:11 And you’re like, oh, it’s kind of cheesy.
0:59:12 But they’re like, no, no, no.
0:59:12 Trust me.
0:59:14 In the moment, that shit hit hard.
0:59:18 It’s like the music, the splicing, the speech, the footage of you.
0:59:25 And then at the end, literally, Coach K came out, face painted like Braveheart, rolled a ball onto the ground.
0:59:26 And Coach K’s old.
0:59:28 Like, he was like in his 70s.
0:59:30 He had like double hip replacement.
0:59:37 And he would dive on the ball and basically like, you know, like the ultimate sign of hustle in basketball is diving for a loose ball.
0:59:45 And he would run into the locker room, face painted, dive onto the ball, screaming and be like, let’s fucking go kill these guys right now.
0:59:46 And people would be like, whoa.
0:59:49 Like, it was total shock value for the team.
0:59:52 And he would really light into them and get into them on that.
0:59:54 And so he would do the motivational up videos.
0:59:59 And then last time we did, or two years ago, we did our basketball camp that me and you do.
1:00:05 We call it Hoop Group, where we basically take 25 or 30 of the most like ambitious founders we know.
1:00:09 Like, there’s like, I don’t know, half the people there are billionaires, but they love to play basketball.
1:00:14 And we went to go visit Duke campus and we played in Duke Stadium, Cameron Indoor Stadium.
1:00:20 And when we were there, we were asking one of the ex-players, who’s now a coach, we were like, can you tell us a great Coach K story?
1:00:26 And he did, he goes, I was on the team, I was a captain, and I had a bad game.
1:00:34 And after that bad game, the next day at practice, I thought maybe Coach K would kind of like rip into me a little bit or tell me I needed to play better.
1:00:35 That’s kind of what I expected.
1:00:38 And, you know, if you do what people expect, you don’t really get much of a response, right?
1:00:39 They’re ready for it.
1:00:42 It’s like somebody who’s, they’re tensed up.
1:00:43 You can’t really like, you know, push them over.
1:00:44 They’re ready for it.
1:00:49 And so he’s like, he doesn’t say anything during the practice to me, doesn’t talk to me.
1:00:51 And we’re practicing.
1:00:52 I’m kind of like, huh, he didn’t say anything.
1:00:55 And then he calls me over to this room.
1:00:59 And they have this film room where they normally like review game footage.
1:01:03 And he’s like, that room has like six TV screens or eight TV screens in the room.
1:01:09 And I walk in and it’s, my face is on every single one of the screens.
1:01:11 And it’s just me and him in there.
1:01:17 And it’s, it was a basically a slideshow of his facial expressions from the last game.
1:01:20 And it was just his face kind of whining.
1:01:25 I didn’t get a call being, being, I missed that shot and kind of being bummed about it.
1:01:26 I got taken out of the game.
1:01:28 I had bad body language there.
1:01:30 Then in the second half started, I was having a bad game.
1:01:33 So I was just kind of, you know, I was checked out when we were doing the team huddle.
1:01:37 And then again, I fouled this guy and I disagree with the call and I’m pouting.
1:01:40 I’m doing this with my hands being like, oh, come on, man.
1:01:42 And they froze it on that screen.
1:01:48 And he goes, coach K looked at me and he goes, if I ever see the palms of your hands again,
1:01:50 you will never play for this team again.
1:01:53 He’s like, I don’t ever, he goes, you’re a captain.
1:01:54 You’re a man.
1:01:56 You’re a leader.
1:01:57 Leaders don’t look like this.
1:02:00 They don’t beg and whine and pout for something.
1:02:03 You know, like you need to carry yourself like a leader.
1:02:04 He goes, I don’t care what you do.
1:02:05 I don’t care if the ball goes in or not,
1:02:09 but you will not act like this again.
1:02:12 And he goes, dude, that burned into my skull.
1:02:14 Like he’s like, I just, I would never do that again.
1:02:17 And I thought that was an incredible story.
1:02:19 I was like, dude, this is a,
1:02:24 whenever I talk to people about like, oh, what’s it like to work with Elon or Steve Jobs?
1:02:25 I’m looking for a story like this.
1:02:26 What do they actually do?
1:02:27 That’s different.
1:02:29 That’s something I would never do that.
1:02:33 I would never think to do, but it makes sense when they do it that like, holy shit.
1:02:33 Yeah.
1:02:37 That would actually like shift the way that somebody operates and somebody works.
1:02:39 I couldn’t believe that story.
1:02:39 Do you remember that one?
1:02:41 Yeah.
1:02:41 It’s insane.
1:02:42 And that’s like, that’s what I want.
1:02:46 I’m like, okay, he’s a good motivator, but like, tell me the stories that he’d like.
1:02:51 I want to like, I’m like, oh, we should just go write a book where you go get 25 coach K stories
1:02:53 that are just about how he motivates.
1:02:54 Cause it’s insane.
1:02:55 Yeah, exactly.
1:02:59 And also just kind of makes you think like, damn, I wouldn’t even think to do that.
1:03:06 Like how much, you know, there’s no rule against something like that, but like, what, uh, it just feels against the norms.
1:03:14 But I guess like, as you build up your own credibility, it’s almost like lean into that power and basically use your credibility.
1:03:20 Like he could kind of say anything, he could do anything kind of crazy, uh, and get away with it.
1:03:22 Cause he’s coach K, I guess there’s a method to the madness.
1:03:26 I wonder, like, I wonder if he was doing that stuff early on.
1:03:30 And I wonder if he got more bold about it as he went along, but I’m with you, dude.
1:03:32 If I had a coach K in my life, I’d be good.
1:03:33 I don’t know if I could do the motivational speech.
1:03:37 Cause like, I think part of it is you need like the B roll needs to be me.
1:03:44 Like playing sport, like the B roll of me, just like typing emails, like writing a document.
1:03:50 Like, I don’t, I don’t think there’s any, you, you could play Fort minor on that track.
1:03:51 It’s not going to do anything for me.
1:03:55 It might, it might, I don’t know.
1:03:55 Yeah.
1:04:01 And also there was this one story, like, you know, a few years ago, the heat had that miraculous run to the finals.
1:04:10 And I specifically remember this moment where this guy, bam out of bios, like up there at the end, taught, you know, they’re like interviewing him cause he’s the Eastern conference finals MVP.
1:04:20 And he’s just, he gets on the mic and he goes, dude, you don is Haslam had this insane video for us that changed how we approached game seven when they beat the Celtics.
1:04:24 And I spent the past two years, like trying to figure out what that video was.
1:04:29 So at this camp, the last thing about K Academy is I, I went up to justice Winslow who played for the heat.
1:04:32 And I was like, dude, what are the heat do to motivate?
1:04:34 Like what was in that video?
1:04:37 He’s like, I wasn’t on the team then, but I could text some guys.
1:04:41 He’s like, but I’ll tell you now, it is exactly like the thing you heard from coach K.
1:04:43 It is going to be something so custom.
1:04:44 It’s going to be brave heart.
1:04:46 It’s going to be Fort minor.
1:04:49 It’s going to be like, they’re pulling out all the stops.
1:04:51 And, uh, you know, it’s like in that setting.
1:04:55 And ever since then, I’m like, dude, I just want to like next hoop group.
1:04:57 I just want to experience that for like 10 minutes.
1:04:58 That’s my only ask.
1:05:02 Oh, that’s too good.
1:05:04 Um, I love that story.
1:05:05 Yeah.
1:05:06 I really love that story.
1:05:11 That’s like, that’s in my like hall of fame, hall of fame of like, uh, you know, motivational
1:05:12 stories.
1:05:15 Um, what else you got, do you want to do anything else or we’re going to wrap up?
1:05:17 Let’s see.
1:05:20 I think, uh, I think we should wrap on one final thing, which is, you know, earlier you were
1:05:23 talking about club LTV, which was awesome.
1:05:28 You know, I think we had 150, 200 people in it back in the day meeting, I think once every
1:05:31 other week to talk business, meet each other.
1:05:33 You know, I think we should bring that thing back in some way.
1:05:34 What do you think?
1:05:36 What would we do?
1:05:40 So we don’t, I don’t think we need to do the e-com version of it anymore.
1:05:43 I, so here’s my, here’s my thesis.
1:05:47 Thesis is a very fancy word for what I’m about to say.
1:05:54 So let me, let me bring that expectation down in, uh, MFM has roughly a million people who
1:05:59 listen to it, maybe not all regularly, but that’s like kind of our reach, uh, is a million
1:06:00 people who are all entrepreneurially.
1:06:05 They’re all what I call like entrepreneurs with a sense of humor as of who I think we attract
1:06:07 people who are entrepreneurial with it and they have a sense of humor.
1:06:14 And so, um, my, my thinking is I’m never going to meet all those people.
1:06:16 Honestly, I don’t really want to meet a million people.
1:06:17 That’s not really my goal.
1:06:24 However, the top 1% of our audience is fat is like a fascinating group of people, right?
1:06:25 They’re very interesting.
1:06:29 They, you know, it’s going to be like people who are like CEOs of public companies.
1:06:34 Some dude in, you know, Wichita, who’s got a $40 million, like chemicals plant that he
1:06:34 runs.
1:06:38 There’s a guy who’s got this like tutoring business side hustle thing.
1:06:38 That’s whatever.
1:06:40 There’s a bunch of interesting people in that top 1%.
1:06:48 I think what would be dope is if we did club LTV again, which was like your thing, you would
1:06:48 curate.
1:06:50 It was a curated group.
1:06:54 I think that’s key because you want everybody else in there to be somebody you’re happy
1:06:55 to have met, right?
1:06:56 Like that’s the goal.
1:07:01 Um, take the top 1% of MFM listeners and then basically do like what, like a happy hour,
1:07:03 kind of like a speed dating thing.
1:07:05 That’s, that’s kind of the way we did it before, which was like, you meet once a month roughly
1:07:12 and Ben kind of puts people in groups and then you go, you talk with a specific prompt
1:07:12 and then he switches it.
1:07:13 He shuffles the groups.
1:07:16 And so you meet in an hour, you’re going to meet a bunch of cool people and you’re going
1:07:18 to learn one or two things.
1:07:20 And I think that would be awesome.
1:07:21 We should bring that back.
1:07:23 Yeah, we should do that.
1:07:28 By the way, people don’t know club LTV stands in e-com LTV means lifetime value.
1:07:29 It’s like the key metric there.
1:07:33 So we made it club LTV, which is basically the, the name, the gimmick of the thing.
1:07:38 But the funny thing was Ben would always do these, like, he would pursue those moments.
1:07:39 He would make these little things that would make it fun.
1:07:44 So like you would send everybody like custom zoom backgrounds or like the start of every
1:07:47 club LTV, because it was, we called it a club.
1:07:47 It was like a nightclub.
1:07:54 He would have like, like DJ Khaled would record a cameo and you would play it for the whole group
1:07:55 at the beginning.
1:07:56 It was awesome.
1:07:57 It was a lot of fun.
1:08:00 I think you should keep doing those things because that, I still remember that.
1:08:02 And I think we had, I think we had a right vibe.
1:08:03 I think we had a red man.
1:08:05 I think we had method man and red man too.
1:08:10 I think every time there was like some washed up rapper who would hype the shit.
1:08:13 shit out of us for like the first 30 seconds of the, of the thing.
1:08:17 Ben’s just burning like $500 cameos to make that happen.
1:08:18 Yeah.
1:08:22 I mean, to me, it’s like, you know, it’s like when you meet someone that also likes MFM, even
1:08:26 for me and you too, it’s like, Oh, I, I like this guy or I like this woman.
1:08:27 I like this girl.
1:08:30 I mean, actually you meet, you like that person.
1:08:32 No, I know what you mean.
1:08:34 We’re not for everybody.
1:08:38 So if you like it, the odds of you getting along with somebody else who really likes the podcast
1:08:39 are pretty high.
1:08:43 So it’s kind of like one of those things where if two people were wearing the hat, you would
1:08:47 do the nod and be like, okay, we, I’m sure we would have a pretty fun hangout if we hung
1:08:47 out.
1:08:48 That’s kind of the idea here.
1:08:49 Yeah.
1:08:50 And it’s not Hampton.
1:08:51 It’s not a group.
1:08:56 It’s just like very lightweight, meet some other cool people, uh, you know, get to know the
1:08:56 other people in the MFM community.
1:08:59 And it’s free, by the way, it’s not, it’s not like a paid thing.
1:09:01 Um, so what do you want?
1:09:02 How do you want people to like apply?
1:09:03 Cause you’re going to curate the group.
1:09:06 So what do you want people to do to, how should people do it?
1:09:07 Let’s see.
1:09:09 Should we put a link at the, just put a link in the description.
1:09:10 Let’s put a link in the description.
1:09:11 All right.
1:09:16 If you want to do it, if you think you you’re in that top 1% of interesting, fun MFM listeners,
1:09:18 uh, put yourself down there and tell us, tell us who you are.
1:09:21 And then Ben will kind of curate a good group every, uh, every month for us.
1:09:23 All right.
1:09:27 And if you want to follow me on Twitter, Ben M Levy, I don’t tweet much, but, uh, you know,
1:09:28 I will DM you.
1:09:29 Why would someone follow you?
1:09:31 When was your last tweet, dude?
1:09:32 It was like in 2018.
1:09:34 It’s been a long time.
1:09:36 It’s been a long time.
1:09:38 So that’s, uh, that’s Ben.
1:09:39 Thanks for coming on, dude.
1:09:41 Uh, I’m going to talk to you probably right after this.
1:09:42 Cause that’s what we do.
1:09:43 I call you after every podcast.
1:09:44 So I’ll see you in a second.
1:09:45 All right.
1:09:45 Thanks guys.
1:09:48 I feel like I can rule the world.
1:09:50 I know I could be what I want to.
1:09:54 I put my all in it like no days off on the road.
1:09:54 Let’s travel.
1:09:56 Never looking back.
1:10:04 All right.
1:10:07 So when my employees joined Hampton, we have them do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff,
1:10:11 but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing I made called
1:10:15 copy that copy that is a thing that I made that teaches people how to write better.
1:10:20 And the reason this is important is because at work or even just in life, we communicate
1:10:25 mostly via text right now, whether we’re emailing, slacking, blogging, texting, whatever.
1:10:28 Most of the ways that we’re communicating is by the written word.
1:10:32 And so I made this thing called copy that that’s guaranteed to make you write better.
1:10:34 You can check it out copy that.com.
1:10:38 I post every single person who leaves a review, whether it’s good or bad.
1:10:41 I post it on the website and you’re going to see a trend, which is that this is a very,
1:10:44 very, very simple exercise, something that’s so simple that they laugh at.
1:10:47 They think, how is this going to actually impact us and make us write better?
1:10:48 But I promise you, it does.
1:10:51 You got to try it at copy that.com.
1:10:53 I guarantee it’s going to change the way you write.
1:10:54 Again, copy that.com.
1:10:55 you

0:00:07 I think Visa will enter, MasterCard will enter, PayPal will enter, Fidelity has already said they’re going to enter, Bank of America said they’re going to enter.
0:00:11 I think you’re going to have every bank probably issuing, I hope, a stablecoin the way you have them issuing credit cards.
0:00:16 These all have users and customers. The banks will have a button that says send a stablecoin.
0:00:21 So what I’m hoping is that there’s enough legitimate actors around this who create a network effect.
0:00:33 Today on the A16Z podcast, Chris Dixon, general partner at A16Z, joins economist Tyler Cowen to discuss the ideas behind his book, Read, Write, Own, Building the Next Era of the Internet.
0:00:45 They explore the evolution of web infrastructure, the economic consolidation of today’s internet platforms, and how technologies like blockchain, open source systems, and AI could reshape the future.
0:00:54 The conversation spans everything from creator economics and stablecoins to the decline of stack overflow, and whether AI will centralize power or help redistribute it.
0:00:56 Let’s get into it.
0:01:12 As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.
0:01:18 Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.
0:01:25 For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures.
0:01:32 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
0:01:38 Today, I am chatting with Chris Dixon, who is a general partner at Andreessen Harwitz.
0:01:41 He has a longstanding history in the tech field.
0:01:50 He started off, in a way, as a blogger, and we now have out the paperback edition of Chris’s recent book, a very stimulating and provocative read.
0:01:55 It is called Read, Write, Own, Building the Next Error of the Internet.
0:01:56 Chris, welcome.
0:01:57 Thanks for having me.
0:02:02 Let me ask you a very fundamental question so people can see where you’re coming from.
0:02:09 So if I listen to music today, not on my stereo, I’ll go to YouTube and Spotify.
0:02:11 What’s wrong with that arrangement?
0:02:13 How is it you think we can make it better?
0:02:31 Yeah, I mean, so the kind of core thesis of my book and the core thesis of my career now is that the Internet began as a decentralized network, which what that meant was that if you created a website, or let’s say you’re a musician and you created a website and you sold your music, you would sell directly to the consumers.
0:02:35 And there would be no intermediary in between taking money from that transaction.
0:02:44 The challenge with things like Spotify and YouTube and just generally the structure of the modern Internet is that you’ve had these services pop up, which are very dominant.
0:02:45 It’s very consolidated.
0:02:50 Sort of 90% of the Internet traffic runs through less than 10 services and companies.
0:02:53 And they have very high what we call take rates on the Internet business.
0:02:59 The take rate is the percentage of money flowing through the system taken by the network intermediary.
0:03:02 Right. So YouTube actually is the most generous of the social networks.
0:03:08 They give like roughly 50% to the creators and take 50% for themselves.
0:03:12 Now, that’s actually a low take rate on the Internet in any other area of the economy.
0:03:15 As I’m sure you’d know, 50% for an intermediary is generally a very high rate.
0:03:18 Spotify is 30%.
0:03:23 But then, of course, musicians, there are, you know, many other layers of fees on top, including the music labels.
0:03:26 Spotify’s own statistics is on their website.
0:03:33 I guess they’re glad about this or they think it’s a good stat is that it’s something like I don’t remember exact number.
0:03:37 It’s like 8000 of the 8 million artists make more than $50,000 a year.
0:03:41 So a very, very small percentage make something like the average American living.
0:03:44 And so the question is, is that because people aren’t paying for music?
0:03:45 People are paying for music.
0:03:48 You know, advertisers are spending a ton of money on YouTube.
0:03:51 I mean, Meta and Google and these companies are making a ton of money.
0:03:54 The problem is, in my mind, primarily economic.
0:03:56 And I go through this, by the way, in detail in the first part of my book.
0:03:58 I go through the history of the Internet and how this happened.
0:04:03 But we basically, in my mind and why I got into the Internet was it was meant to be, it was a very exciting vision.
0:04:06 I mean, of course, it came out of academia and government and things.
0:04:10 But this vision that you’d have an Internet that’s sort of owned and operated by the people that use it.
0:04:14 Whereas if you visualize a network, the money is flowing to the edges of the network.
0:04:19 There are all these great ideas, like there’s a famous blog post by Kevin Kelly called A Thousand True Fans.
0:04:27 And the idea was, because you’re removing intermediaries, musicians and creative people can now make a living with only a thousand customers.
0:04:32 If you do the math, someone’s paying $10 a month and you have a thousand of them, that’s $10,000 a month.
0:04:34 That’s $120,000 a year.
0:04:37 That’s a pretty good living for somebody doing something they love.
0:04:38 That was always the vision.
0:04:39 That’s what I got excited.
0:04:41 I got started in the Internet in the 90s.
0:04:42 And the Internet was like that in the 90s.
0:04:44 And it was like that in much of the 2000s.
0:04:53 And then, and I go through this, and I think because of the incentives of the way these services were set up, because of venture capital, because of a bunch of things, you essentially had a bunch of incentives to consolidate.
0:04:59 And network effects, of course, that these services get more valuable the more people that are on it, which has a winner-take-all effect.
0:05:11 And we ended up in a place, you know, you look around about 10 years ago, and we got to a place where there’s roughly five to 10 services that are dominating the Internet, taking all the money, taking all the economics, and also have control.
0:05:12 Well, that’s a whole separate topic.
0:05:15 This is going to the topics of deplatforming and rules.
0:05:18 And if you go on YouTube, there’s all these debates around demonetization.
0:05:20 So in the book, I go through this.
0:05:24 It’s the history of the Internet, how this happened, and then what are the effects?
0:05:25 There’s economic effects.
0:05:27 There’s governance or control effects.
0:05:35 And I think more broadly, what it does is, for example, as you mentioned, YouTube and Spotify, it creates real challenges for creative people.
0:05:44 Now throw in artificial intelligence, which I think is obviously an amazing technology and incredibly powerful, and I’m generally very excited about what it will do.
0:05:50 But I think left unchecked, you know, on its current trajectory, will likely lead to even further consolidation.
0:05:53 It rewards companies with large amounts of data and capital and things like this.
0:06:01 And so the reason that I’m involved with blockchains and crypto is I see blockchains as a potential counterbalancing force to those consolidation trends.
0:06:04 But there is a reason why the older Internet dwindled, right?
0:06:10 For me as a listener, Google, Alphabet, they’ve upgraded YouTube in some very significant ways.
0:06:12 The search function is amazing.
0:06:14 The algorithm to me is useful.
0:06:19 It used to be you had to download a YouTube video and then you’d watch it much later.
0:06:22 And now it’s all seamless and great.
0:06:31 Why aren’t I just better off in this new world and I left the decentralized Internet behind and my music listening today is much better than it was 20 years ago?
0:06:37 Yeah, so my argument just structurally is kind of a thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and that’s read, write, own.
0:06:40 The first year of the Internet were what you’re referring to are protocol networks.
0:06:42 So that was the World Wide Web and email.
0:06:46 These were decentralized networks with no company behind them, not owned by anyone.
0:06:48 They’re really just standards, sort of like a language as a standard.
0:06:52 And actually the case study I use in the book is RSS and sort of the fall of RSS.
0:06:55 Like RSS is still around, but in a very niche way.
0:06:57 But at one point it was, let’s call it 2008.
0:06:58 I was there.
0:06:59 I was blogging about this at the time.
0:07:02 It was a legitimate kind of contender.
0:07:08 Like you could have imagined a world where you were getting your YouTube and Twitter and all these other services through a decentralized protocol.
0:07:14 Not RSS as you imagine it, like just a bad visual interface, but as the underlying structure.
0:07:16 And then you build graphics and streaming and all these other things in it.
0:07:18 So why didn’t that happen?
0:07:21 And I think to your point, it didn’t happen because it wasn’t good enough.
0:07:22 It didn’t offer the same user experience.
0:07:23 Right.
0:07:24 And so you’re absolutely right about that.
0:07:26 Like these services won because they were better.
0:07:31 And like one of the big reasons they were better was, and I have, again, a case study of this in the book, is subsidization.
0:07:39 So YouTube for a very long time and to this day in some areas is subsidizing video hosting costs, which is very expensive.
0:07:41 I mean, so I think I’ve seen this from the other side.
0:07:42 I work in venture capital.
0:07:46 I’ve now worked in it for, I don’t know, I’ve been investing for almost 20 years.
0:07:49 And these companies like YouTube and Twitter, they raise a lot of money.
0:07:50 What do they spend that money on?
0:07:52 A lot of it is for subsidizing the hosting costs.
0:07:55 Because the basic idea, right, is these are winner-take-all markets.
0:07:56 They have network effects.
0:07:59 And so what you do is you subsidize along the way.
0:08:02 And so let’s imagine YouTube came out in 2005.
0:08:04 You’re sitting there in 2007.
0:08:06 You’re a video blogger and you have two choices.
0:08:11 You can set up RSS and pay hosting costs or you can go to YouTube and do it for free.
0:08:12 Right.
0:08:15 And that was one of the big value propositions of YouTube early on.
0:08:16 And if you used it back then, I did.
0:08:21 And that subsidization is something that those protocol networks, there’s no company behind
0:08:21 it.
0:08:22 They can’t offer subsidies.
0:08:23 RSS couldn’t offer subsidies.
0:08:30 But isn’t there some a priori reason to expect the centralized service to spend more innovating
0:08:35 and innovate more rapidly than the decentralized service precisely because there is some monopoly
0:08:36 profit there?
0:08:38 I think there’s a couple of things.
0:08:41 I think if I could get to maybe just briefly to blockchains, I think what I think of blockchains
0:08:47 are as a new architecture for building internet services where there is no intermediary, decentralized
0:08:52 is another way for saying no intermediary, where you have very low take rates and you
0:08:55 have sort of the way I think of blockchains is the benefits of protocol networks of the
0:08:59 old networks, the societal benefits in that the money flows to the edges, the control is
0:09:00 by the community.
0:09:02 But blockchains are able to do some of the things you’re describing.
0:09:05 So a blockchain can offer incentives.
0:09:07 A blockchain can have a treasury, right?
0:09:08 This is the architecture of a blockchain.
0:09:11 They have a thing called smart contracts and a smart contract.
0:09:14 This is something that’s sort of hard for people to get their heads around, but it’s not a company
0:09:14 or a person.
0:09:21 It’s literally a piece of code that owns tokens and money and can use that money to do things
0:09:23 like the YouTube subsidization.
0:09:27 So my kind of core argument is that protocol networks are better for society.
0:09:31 Corporate networks, as I call them, like YouTube, have a lot of advantages, as you’re describing,
0:09:33 like competitive advantages.
0:09:39 And blockchain networks done right can ideally be the best of both worlds.
0:09:42 They can have the societal benefits of protocol networks, but the competitive advantages of
0:09:43 these corporate networks.
0:09:48 Now, to your point, anything that’s decentralized, there are some coordination costs.
0:09:51 And I think like a good case study there would be Linux versus Windows, right?
0:09:56 So Linux is now, I don’t know what the percentages are, but I think it’s well about 90% of the
0:09:57 operating systems are Linux.
0:10:00 If you rewind to the 90s when it was starting out, it was kind of a mess.
0:10:03 It was like on a listserv and a bunch of uncoordinated people.
0:10:07 Now, you did have a very important kind of leader, bully pulpit leader in Linus.
0:10:09 But it was sort of an uncoordinated mess.
0:10:12 And you’re right, there is overhead and coordination costs.
0:10:16 You don’t have a hierarchical management structure that can be very efficient.
0:10:22 The flip side and why I think Linux won is that open source benefits from what’s known
0:10:22 as composability.
0:10:27 And that’s the idea that anyone in the world can write a piece of software once, put it
0:10:32 on GitHub as a public resource, and then anyone else can use that as a Lego brick to build another
0:10:32 thing, right?
0:10:33 And so you get this.
0:10:39 I say in the book that composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance.
0:10:43 It’s this thing where like you basically just keep one person build something and you never
0:10:46 have to build it again and you reuse it and you build the Lego bricks up.
0:10:51 And I think that’s one of the main reasons that open source has, you know, taken 90% plus
0:10:57 market share, AWS, every embedded device you have, every data center, Android devices and
0:10:58 so forth.
0:11:00 So you’re right, there’s a different set of trade-offs.
0:11:04 Like it’s tougher to coordinate building a decentralized protocol or a blockchain protocol.
0:11:06 On the flip side, you have other benefits.
0:11:07 You have lower take rates.
0:11:09 You can offer incentives through tokens.
0:11:14 You can benefit from composability so that everything is open source and reusable.
0:11:19 But there is legal free entry in the sector and people can go to Andreessen Horwitz.
0:11:23 They can go to you personally and ask for VC money to do something.
0:11:28 I recall a bunch of people told me I should try Mastodon, which was decentralized.
0:11:29 I did.
0:11:30 I didn’t like it.
0:11:31 Most people didn’t like it.
0:11:33 That’s now a bunch of years ago.
0:11:38 No one has come to me in at least five years and said, oh, Tyler, you need to try this
0:11:41 new decentralized service.
0:11:42 Why isn’t that happening?
0:11:46 What’s the benefit the service might be offering me that’s like concrete?
0:11:48 Yeah, I have a section on Mastodon.
0:11:50 I mean, I think there’s architectural flaws in the whole thing.
0:11:53 So, for example, if you’ve used it, there’s this whole concept of servers and you have this
0:11:56 very challenging problem of coordinating across servers and it’s very fragmented.
0:11:58 So that might be a separate topic.
0:12:02 Look, I think a broader thing is when I think about where blockchains are getting adopted,
0:12:06 if you look at where they’re successful right now, it’s mostly in financial applications.
0:12:09 So stablecoins, for example, I think that the numbers are shockingly high.
0:12:13 If you Google Visa stablecoin dashboard, Visa is, I think, a pretty neutral party.
0:12:15 They have a dashboard that tracks it.
0:12:19 It’s three and a half trillion dollars in stablecoin transactions last month, right?
0:12:20 And that’s been steadily going up.
0:12:26 So stablecoin, just for your audience, is something like it could be a dollar or euro, but it’s backed
0:12:27 by an asset in the bank.
0:12:32 So there’s Tether, USDC, there’s a bill that just made it past the Senate Finance Committee
0:12:36 and is going to be voted on the House hopefully in the next six weeks and hopefully passed.
0:12:41 That is congressional legislation to put full rules around stablecoins.
0:12:45 And I think, well, all of this growth has been happening before there was that kind of clarity.
0:12:47 And I think that could really accelerate it.
0:12:50 But the reason I’m saying this is that I think there’s really interesting things you can do
0:12:51 with blockchains and social networks.
0:12:56 But the reality is in 2025, it could just be that we have social networks.
0:12:57 The network effects are strong.
0:13:02 And the areas to focus on when you have new architectures like blockchains may be other
0:13:02 areas.
0:13:05 You know, in software, there’s a phrase greenfield, brownfield, right?
0:13:08 Greenfield is you have some breakthrough, AI or crypto or whatever.
0:13:13 Do you go after existing use cases and make them better or do you go after new use cases?
0:13:16 And so what you’re describing is more brownfield.
0:13:18 Like it may just be that some of the wars are fought and they’re over.
0:13:22 There’s three billion people using Facebook apps.
0:13:25 And like at some point, the network effects are so strong that even if you come up with something
0:13:27 that’s much better, it may just be a challenge.
0:13:30 I’m sure some of your challenge on something like Mastodon is just that your friends aren’t
0:13:30 there.
0:13:30 Network effects.
0:13:35 So I guess to your question, I mean, I’m very excited, obviously, about blockchains and
0:13:36 this new architecture.
0:13:40 And we make investments in a lot of different areas because we like to experiment and try a
0:13:41 bunch of things.
0:13:46 But I think right now, the most likely areas where we’re going to see increased adoption
0:13:49 are in these areas where things are more broken.
0:13:52 And I would say that’s in sort of payments, financial services.
0:13:56 And then I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening also at the intersection of
0:13:57 crypto, blockchains and AI.
0:14:04 Well, with stable coins, once the Trump people are no longer in office, it’s four years from
0:14:08 now, but what do you think the regulatory counter reaction will be like?
0:14:12 The stable coin issuers, they are subject to runs, right?
0:14:16 There’s nominally 100% reserves, but there’s no guarantee.
0:14:20 There are 100% reserves in the legislation and the USDC has 100% reserves.
0:14:24 Tether is debated because they’re not audited in the U.S. and people don’t know.
0:14:24 They say they do.
0:14:26 But the bill would actually require 100% reserves.
0:14:32 But why isn’t the equilibrium that I have my stable coins overseas where they’re not
0:14:37 regulated and de facto the sector is not 100% reserves and there’s a lot of runs?
0:14:39 Why isn’t that what ends up happening?
0:14:43 Well, what we’re hoping to do, and then in the bill, there’ll be all sorts of things.
0:14:47 So, for example, if you go to Coinbase, there’ll be restrictions on offering unregistered stable
0:14:48 coins.
0:14:50 But that’s a U.S.-based firm, right?
0:14:55 The lowest be foreign firms, Estonia, Argentina, wherever, that will offer me a better deal
0:14:58 precisely because they’re not 100% backed.
0:14:59 It’ll be a higher return.
0:15:05 I won’t care about the social risk I generate by putting my funds into a more run-prone firm.
0:15:07 Why don’t we have to worry about that?
0:15:12 Well, so what my hope is and what often happens, right, is so first of all, I mean, I’m not
0:15:17 an expert on every aspect of the proposed stable coin bill, but there are reciprocation kind
0:15:18 of requirements.
0:15:23 So, if other countries want to access them and participate in our financial services and
0:15:29 KYC and AML, they’re expected to have similar rules that historically our financial services
0:15:33 regulations tend to propagate to a lot of other countries.
0:15:36 So, my hope would be that the U.S. does something here and a lot of other countries follow that
0:15:37 lead and that becomes the norm.
0:15:41 And there’ll be rules, like you can’t call something a stable coin, you can’t get it
0:15:42 on a registered exchange if it’s not.
0:15:43 And so, that would be my hope.
0:15:48 But look, I’m sure in crypto, there’s no question there are scams and there are bad things, and
0:15:49 I’m sure there will be in the future.
0:15:56 I think that the best solution to it is to have smart regulation that incentivizes or requires
0:16:00 things to be built in the proper way in a way that avoids things like bank runs.
0:16:03 By the way, the bank run thing, just to be clear, like there were a bunch of stable coins
0:16:06 in the past, like Terra Luna, which had a bank run and collapsed.
0:16:08 That was not asset-backed by dollars.
0:16:12 That was a sort of circular thing that was backed by its own token and had a bank run thing.
0:16:14 So, that has happened, as you say.
0:16:18 The hope would be that these existing ones and the new ones and the regulations around them
0:16:23 would require full one-to-one asset-backed and then therefore make bank runs as possible.
0:16:29 But circa 2025, we’ve seen a lot of international cooperation break down.
0:16:32 So, the WTO basically doesn’t work.
0:16:35 The UN, I would say, has not worked in some while.
0:16:38 Intellectual property law, that still works.
0:16:42 Agreements on trying to end various wars, those are not working.
0:16:49 So, it seems unlikely to me that the U.S. could convince the world, in essence, to copy our
0:16:50 stable coin regulation.
0:16:55 Even if we tried to use SWIFT, we’ve pushed the SWIFT incentive on countries very hard.
0:16:57 It’s shown its limits.
0:17:01 Again, why don’t we just end up with these significant corners where the most profitable
0:17:05 stable coins are outside of what the U.S. wants to do with them?
0:17:07 Well, I think it’s partly also, what do you want to do with the stable coin?
0:17:08 Like, who’s using the stable coin?
0:17:10 So, I’ll just give you an example.
0:17:14 Like, the Stripe founders, I think of Stripe as a very smart financial services firm.
0:17:17 And who, by the way, they had done crypto like 10 years ago and then I really soured on it.
0:17:19 I think you know Patrick and John as well.
0:17:21 They had actually really soured on it.
0:17:23 And when I saw them would say, oh, crypto stuff.
0:17:25 I just watched them on the All In podcast a few weeks ago.
0:17:29 They acquired this company called Bridge, the stable coin company.
0:17:32 And they’d actually, in their annual letter they just put out, they called stable coins
0:17:35 the room temperature superconductor, right?
0:17:37 Which, of course, is like a holy grail kind of thing.
0:17:38 I don’t know.
0:17:39 I don’t have their financial statements.
0:17:43 But as they describe it, they’re using it for things like treasury management.
0:17:49 So, I believe the example they gave was SpaceX moving money from one jurisdiction to another.
0:17:52 A very popular use case is international invoicing.
0:17:59 So, you’re an importer and you have to send out 50 invoices to various countries.
0:18:02 You can now do it in a fully digital way with very low fees and very quickly.
0:18:06 The Stripe founders, one of the interesting things they said is it’s not just the lower fees.
0:18:09 So, just to give you a sense on the fees, this is as of a year and a half ago, basically,
0:18:11 because the infrastructure and crypto has gotten better.
0:18:16 You now basically, on things like Base, which is an L2 and Solana, have hit what we thought
0:18:20 of as long time as a target, which is one second, one penny to transfer things, right?
0:18:21 That’s where we are now, technically.
0:18:25 Your viewers, if they want to check me, they can go download the Coinbase wallet and try
0:18:26 it and you can see it.
0:18:29 And so, one of the big benefits that Stripe founders talked about is that because it’s
0:18:33 fully digital end-to-end, sort of like email, you can fully automate the whole thing.
0:18:36 So, like a big problem, for example, with invoicing is invoice fraud.
0:18:39 People send you an invoice and it’s like a fake, you know, place to wire it to.
0:18:41 Now, it’s fully digital.
0:18:43 Stripe has effectively what’s like a reputation network.
0:18:46 One computer sends a request to the other one, checks it.
0:18:48 It checks it against Stripe’s database.
0:18:49 Is this a whitelisted address?
0:18:52 And does the whole thing end-to-end, low fees, internationally?
0:18:54 So, to your question, sure.
0:18:57 Will there be people at the fringes who want to maximize yield?
0:18:58 Sure.
0:18:59 There’s always that kind of behavior.
0:19:00 Probably.
0:19:00 It’s the internet.
0:19:02 The internet has edges.
0:19:03 The question is, can we marginalize it?
0:19:07 And will these legitimate companies like Stripe?
0:19:09 And look, what I’m hoping, stablecoin bill passes.
0:19:10 I think Visa will enter.
0:19:10 MasterCard will enter.
0:19:11 PayPal will enter.
0:19:13 Fidelity has already said they’re going to enter.
0:19:14 Bank of America said there’s going to enter.
0:19:18 I think you’re going to have every bank probably issuing, I hope, a stablecoin the way you have
0:19:19 them issuing credit cards.
0:19:21 These all have users and customers.
0:19:24 The banks will have a button that says send a stablecoin.
0:19:28 So, what I’m hoping is that there’s enough legitimate actors around this who create a
0:19:32 network effect that, to your point, yes, there will be that stuff, but it will be marginalized.
0:19:38 In that world, should we infer that the Federal Reserve loses control of the money supply?
0:19:40 Create a stablecoin.
0:19:41 It’s backed by a T-bill.
0:19:44 In a funny way, it’s like a private open market operation, right?
0:19:46 And I’m fine with that.
0:19:48 I’m not sure the Fed controls the money supply today.
0:19:50 But does that become a macro issue?
0:19:54 I feel like I’m talking to a famous economist.
0:19:56 I’m on your territory now.
0:19:59 It’s dangerous because I’m not an economist.
0:20:01 But I haven’t figured this out myself either, to be clear.
0:20:04 I’m genuinely asking various people.
0:20:07 I asked Austin Goolsbee the same question because I don’t know.
0:20:08 Yeah, I believe.
0:20:12 The last stat I saw, stablecoins are 4% of, they hold 4% of treasuries, right?
0:20:14 So, if this grows a lot, it will be, you know, it will be meaningful.
0:20:16 It already is kind of meaningful, but it will be meaningful.
0:20:29 Look, like, I guess one is I think of it more in terms of payments and all the things, you know, payments and then all the adjacent things you can do around payments versus a bank account, right?
0:20:34 And sort of replacing, you know, folks like banks and the Federal Reserve that control the money supply.
0:20:47 So, you know, that’s kind of at least how I – where I think kind of the focus should be and not – the – like, I believe in the current draft of the bill, you can’t offer yield to the consumers.
0:21:02 And I think that’s something the banks are fighting for as so this – I know this is still a political thing going on, but they don’t want that because they think if you can offer, you know, essentially a treasury bill, like a yield, and the consumer gets the yield, that that will become more attractive than bank accounts.
0:21:10 And so, I think this will also, you know, be a question is sort of is this optimized more around payments or more around kind of savings use cases.
0:21:16 Sorry, what was – and I want to make sure – like, I don’t – I’ll have to defer to you.
0:21:26 I would also say just on a – I would also argue the other kind of national security interest here, and you’ve had others write about this in various editorials, is it’s another way to popularize a dollar, right?
0:21:40 It’s a way – you know, it’s a – it’s already – we’ve seen the demand for it, and if we legitimate it, it presumably will make, hopefully, the dollar more popular and increase its status or maintain its status as a reserve currency.
0:21:48 Fractional banking stuff, I probably have to defer to you on that as – I can speculate a little bit, but it’s from an amateur perspective.
0:21:54 When the AIs trade with each other, do you think they’ll prefer Bitcoin or stable coins?
0:21:56 That’s a good question.
0:22:06 We actually just made an investment in a project that’s doing – it’s an agent sort of stable coin infrastructure for AI agents.
0:22:09 We haven’t, like, officially announced it yet, but I guess I can talk a little bit.
0:22:15 But the idea is sort of, you know, a lot of things with AI, right, is there’s the technical side, but there’s also the legal side.
0:22:22 Like, how do you deal with KYC, AML, and liability, and all those kind of – you know, there’s a lot of questions that come up if you have an AI going out and doing stuff and spending money.
0:22:27 And so, that actually turns out to be a really interesting area of innovation.
0:22:35 And the person we just invested in is sort of a, you know, a veteran of that world, of sort of the regulatory money world.
0:22:41 Yeah, but to your point, I mean, if you’re – if you’re – you know, one of the knocks on Bitcoin as a payment system, right, is the volatility.
0:22:46 You don’t want to, you know, have something that changes value a lot when you’re paying for something.
0:22:54 But if it’s a machine, a machine, presumably they can do that in milliseconds or microseconds, and volatility becomes a mood issue.
0:22:59 There’s a guy, David Marcus, who was the – he ran the Libra project at Facebook and spun out.
0:23:02 And we funded his startup.
0:23:03 It’s called LightSpark.
0:23:07 It’s doing exactly what you’re describing, which is sort of a payment system built on top of Bitcoin.
0:23:12 And his argument is Bitcoin is preferable because it’s not the dollar, that a lot of countries will want some.
0:23:27 It’s sort of the only crypto asset that is credibly globally neutral, that no country sort of sees as, you know, sort of a U.S. thing or some other country thing, and therefore should be kind of the currency of the internet, right?
0:23:28 And I think that’s an interesting argument.
0:23:37 I wonder sometimes if the AIs won’t create their own crypto tokens and say, well, basically, the senior age from Bitcoin has gone to early humans.
0:23:42 You know, we can design one better because they’re already smart, but they’re going to be really smart.
0:23:46 And we’ll have to learn how to trade their stuff.
0:23:49 People have done experiments like that.
0:23:58 But, yeah, like once they have sort of emergent capabilities, I guess it all depends on, you know, what we allow them to do and what systems we plug them into.
0:24:07 But if there’s anything where there’s a clear cookbook, right, and you can do it digitally online, no one built crypto for the AIs.
0:24:12 But if you had wanted to build the money for the AIs, I’m not sure you could have done much better than crypto.
0:24:13 I think that’s right.
0:24:18 How will AI change how the web is organized?
0:24:20 Will it just be totally different in five years?
0:24:22 That’s a great question.
0:24:26 You know, a couple of things I’ll say on that.
0:24:30 And all of this, obviously, in the context of, you know, like our firm does a lot of AI investing.
0:24:33 I’m very, I think it’s generally a great thing.
0:24:36 The technology is amazing and impressive.
0:24:38 And every day you see new amazing things.
0:24:41 And, you know, there’s these debates around whether it’s going to slow down.
0:24:43 My guess is it’s not going to slow down.
0:24:48 Just there’s so many smart people and so much money and so many different ways in which it can improve.
0:24:51 You know, it was pre-training and now it looks like it’s reasoning.
0:24:58 And so, you know, it’s like, and they’ll probably come up with some other method in a year that does that.
0:25:07 And, you know, we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface around, like, you know, humanoid robots and haven’t gone deep on video and other forms of media and modalities.
0:25:12 I think one thing I think a lot about, though, is the sort of economics of the Internet.
0:25:17 And specifically, I have a chapter in the book on this.
0:25:30 I think of the Internet as having kind of an implicit covenant right now between – so you have these five to ten companies, Facebook, Google, you know, Amazon, et cetera, who control most – it’s like 90 percent plus of the traffic and the money.
0:25:36 And just to take Google as an example, there’s sort of – then there’s the rest of the Internet, the sort of long tail of the Internet.
0:25:40 There’s, you know, my blog, your blog, a cooking site, a travel site, whatever it might be.
0:25:50 For 25 years or so, there’s been this implicit covenant between the kind of distribution centers like Google and the kind of content providers like us, right?
0:25:54 And that covenant is, hey, you let us sort of fair use.
0:26:04 You let us take a snippet of your content, you know, index it, put it in our search results, and, you know, and we’ll sort of – or let us – let people share it on my social network or whatever it might be.
0:26:12 But the – you know, and the trade is we’ll put a link there, and you’ll get some traffic back, and then you can have ads or subscriptions or make it free or whatever you choose to do, right?
0:26:15 So that’s been kind of the equilibrium state that evolved.
0:26:20 You know, it wasn’t like people sat down and decided that, but it evolved into that, and it’s worked reasonably well.
0:26:24 I think, you know, it’s worked more to the favor of the distribution side to the Googles of the world.
0:26:32 And you see that in, like, you know, Rupert Murdoch, Fox sued Google over it, a bunch of – I think Facebook just removed news in Canada because they’re upset about it.
0:26:35 So it’s not that happy, but it sort of worked, okay?
0:26:42 What happens in a world where you just get the answer and there’s no need for a link, right, which is kind of the world we’re in now.
0:26:47 I don’t know about you, but I’m using – I’m probably using, you know, Claude and ChatGPT and all these things more than I’m using Google.
0:26:49 I read fewer books also.
0:26:50 It’s not just media sites.
0:26:55 Why read a book when you can ask for a 10-page printed report on the history of Edward III?
0:26:56 Yeah, exactly.
0:27:01 And so, yeah, books are a whole other thing, but just the rest of the internet.
0:27:03 Like, if I’m not going to click – like, why am I going to click through?
0:27:05 I mean, look at Stack Overflow.
0:27:07 I actually used to be on the board of Stack Overflow.
0:27:10 They got acquired, and I love the service.
0:27:14 So Stack Overflow is a programmer Q&A site, right?
0:27:31 And the traffic is down, I think, I don’t know, 80% now because of, you know, because of these new – what basically happened is the AIs went out, trained on Stack Overflow on GitHub, and then created these amazing services like Copile and Cursor, right, which are, by the way, amazing.
0:27:33 I actually – I use these on the weekends and stuff.
0:27:34 I use Cursor.
0:27:39 It’s an unbelievable product that you can, you know, type an English sentence and get code out of it.
0:27:43 But it obviates the need to go to these websites, right, and the traffic is down.
0:27:47 And my concern is Stack Overflow is the canary in the coal mine, right?
0:27:48 This is the first thing to go.
0:27:49 Of course.
0:27:59 But what if – you know, what are we – in five years, are we ending up with just sort of the rest of the internet atrophying and we have five to ten services?
0:28:02 And, you know, look, and this is all – like, I love the AI stuff.
0:28:03 It’s better.
0:28:04 I use it.
0:28:12 But I worry that we’re going to sort of look around in five years and realize we just recreated, you know, sort of a structure
0:28:16 that looks like, you know, I don’t know, broadcast TV in the 1970s.
0:28:17 You have four channels, right?
0:28:27 And sort of the beauty of the web, the serendipity, the diversity, you know, the ability for somebody to just spin up a blog.
0:28:30 And, you know, this is like how a lot of my career got started.
0:28:32 I think you did – you’ve been blogging for, what, 20 years or something every day.
0:28:43 Like, is that – you know, is that kind of the ability to do that going to be lost because there’s now no way to sort of get discovered anymore because links aren’t really needed, right?
0:28:45 So, I mean, on the one hand, look, it’s great for people.
0:28:48 I’m not – you know, I’m by no means anti-AI or technology.
0:28:55 But I do think we need to think about – and I’m a little bit surprised more people aren’t thinking about, you know, what kind of internet do we want?
0:28:58 And are we creating the right incentive systems to maintain that?
0:29:06 And, like, what – and by the way, more broadly, like, look at these – there’s just today the new ChatGPT, what was it, 4.0 image thing came out, which looks amazing.
0:29:07 It’s gorgeous, yes.
0:29:10 And there’s going to be, I’m sure, more great stuff like that.
0:29:14 Like, what are we – you know, I mean, look, again, it’s great.
0:29:16 But, like, what’s our plan for graphic designers?
0:29:21 What’s – maybe it’ll be emergent and new jobs will pop up and what’s our plan?
0:29:24 You know, in two years, we’re going to have the ability to make a Hollywood movie, one person.
0:29:32 You know, what’s our plan for all of these other, you know, jobs, parts of the internet, parts of the – you mentioned books.
0:29:34 Like, look, I agree with you, too.
0:29:36 It’s easier to get that thing on Henry III.
0:29:39 On the other hand, do you want to – you know, do we want a shrinking book industry?
0:29:43 I think it’s already kind of shrinking too much, in my opinion, the book industry.
0:29:45 And do we want that to go further?
0:29:45 I don’t know.
0:29:46 Like –
0:29:51 Let’s say a media company calls you in, somewhere like Atlantic, The Economist, New Yorker.
0:29:52 I’m sure you know these products, of course.
0:29:54 And they say, well, this is happening.
0:29:58 We’d like some commercial advice from someone who knows the sector.
0:30:00 I mean, what would you tell them to do?
0:30:04 Yeah, I mean, it’s hard because I think it’s a systems problem.
0:30:06 It’s a tech problem and a systems problem.
0:30:11 I’m not sure that a single node in the system, like the Atlantic, has a lot to do.
0:30:19 I think that – yeah, I mean, it’s – I mean, so it’s really a structural – yeah, it’s a – I mean, look, I think there’s a lot of –
0:30:21 But does personality-driven content survive?
0:30:24 Like, is that the innovation rather than so-called facts?
0:30:31 Well, okay, look, one very common pattern with technology is death of the middle barbelling, right?
0:30:39 And so just to give you – maybe you probably know this, but to give your listeners context, what that means is, you know, you have – so the internet pops up.
0:30:45 And before the internet, you had a lot of midsize retailers like JCPenney and Sears and other sort of, you know, those kinds of things.
0:30:47 Internet pops up.
0:30:54 And what happens is you get this barbelling effect where you either want to be really, really big like Amazon and Walmart and take advantage of scale.
0:31:05 Or you want to be a boutique, high-touch, high-brand value, Gucci, you know, Hermes, and so forth.
0:31:15 And in fact, the two – right, the two sort of biggest winners of this era from a stock perspective were Amazon and LVMH, which is a private equity-style roll-up of those high-end brands, right?
0:31:17 And who lost?
0:31:19 It was the people in the middle, right?
0:31:22 It was Kmart, Sears, all those sort of companies that went bankrupt.
0:31:24 Why does that happen?
0:31:32 Because technology tends to unbundle – like, because basically they were – Kmart and Sears were kind of this artificial bundle in a sense of distribution, merchandising.
0:31:37 You know, you had – you could bring this stuff to them, but not all the way to them the way Amazon does.
0:31:40 And you had a little bit of service, and you had sort of all this stuff in the middle, right?
0:31:45 And once you had this new tech, you could kind of unbundle this, and you can go all scale or all high-touch, right?
0:31:47 I think the same thing has happened in media.
0:31:57 We’ve had a barbelling effect, and the winners have been either, like, 30-second dopamine hits of TikTok and Instagram reels or three-hour, you know, podcasts, right?
0:32:04 Or high-end, you know, severance and high-end long-form content, right?
0:32:11 And what suffered generally has been the 30-minute sitcom, the middle, right, the 30-minute, you know, game show, right?
0:32:14 So it’s either – and that matches human needs, right?
0:32:26 Like, you’re in line to buy something, and you want a couple dopamine hits, and you watch TikTok, and then you’re, you know, want to lean back and get something, and you want a three-hour – I think that surprised a lot of people how popular three-hour podcasts are, like Joe Rogan and Alex Friedman, right?
0:32:33 And it’s because that sort of – that’s the other kind of need, and it’s turned out these 30-minute things were just there kind of artificially because of the constraints of the medium of TV and things.
0:32:42 So I think to your question, like, I haven’t – I don’t have, like, deep thoughts on this, but I think that my default answer for media would be you’re going to have a barbelling effect.
0:32:59 You’re going to have highly automated, scaled-out, AI-driven content, you know, and so somebody comes up with a, you know, new Star Wars thing, and you have a whole, you know, Reddit community, and they’re all, like, building these AI-created, you know, serial movies and things, right?
0:33:15 And then my expectation is you’ll have – on the flip side, you’ll have rising demand for very kind of bespoke human things that could be, you know, live – like, we’ve seen this, like, live concerts have become more popular in an age of machine-created music.
0:33:18 You know, fine art, like –
0:33:19 The sphere, right?
0:33:21 The sphere, like, adapted books, you know, like, I don’t know, like, right?
0:33:27 I mean, you know, people say this all the time, that chess is now more popular than ever, even though AI is, you know, better than humans in chess.
0:33:35 Like, there is – in the end, we’re monkeys who like other monkeys, and, like, you know, like, there is this sort of fundamental human nature that doesn’t change.
0:33:44 Machines can do very powerful things and can be useful, but I think, you know, that would be my – that would be my naive default assumption is that – is that –
0:33:48 I think, like, I think the other really interesting thing with media that I think about –
0:34:04 So, when film came along, like, the first cameras and photography, you know, there was this – these famous essays, like, what was it, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin, and, like, there was all this kind of discussion of, like, what is the future of art now that we can take a picture?
0:34:07 Like, where’s the – what’s the role of the artist, the representational artist?
0:34:17 And, of course, you know, that – the rise of photography coincided with art becoming abstract and, you know, all those sort of modern art movements.
0:34:23 And so, in some sense, the camera did replace – did replace the representational art.
0:34:30 But another thing happened, right, which is a new medium was formed, which is a – you take a photo and you take a series of photos and you make a film, right?
0:34:34 And so, you had two things happen when the camera – when the camera developed, right?
0:34:43 You had the old medium get sort of replaced and, of course, high art then sort of pivoted into abstract art.
0:34:46 But then you had a brand new medium that simply couldn’t exist before, right?
0:34:47 And that was film.
0:34:49 And a whole industry created around it.
0:34:59 So, like, one thing I like to think about is – when I think about media is, you know, so maybe AI will be like the camera and it will replace – it’ll replace illustration.
0:35:01 The role of the illustrator will go away and AI will replace it.
0:35:08 But on the flip side, maybe it will enable a new sort of AI native form of media that couldn’t have existed before.
0:35:13 What will AI competition for A16Z look like?
0:35:15 You have an AI competitor.
0:35:16 What are they like?
0:35:18 Well, it’s funny.
0:35:19 It’s a good point.
0:35:21 I mean, look, I think – well, what is venture capital, right?
0:35:23 I mean, that goes to your question.
0:35:27 Like, there’s different – sort of a – venture capital today is a bundle of services.
0:35:30 It’s a – there’s obviously the sort of choosing.
0:35:35 Well, we raise money and then we go – sort of there’s some picking aspect of, like, choosing what to invest in.
0:35:42 And I think in that picking aspect, I think AI could do a very, very good job and probably beat humans in a lot of ways in the near future.
0:35:53 There’s another aspect, and this is, I think, one of the smart things about what, you know, my – the founders of the firm, Ben and Mark, did, is there’s a very human aspect to what we do, right?
0:35:54 There’s a high-touch human aspect.
0:36:04 So, a lot of what we do is – and a lot of how we think we succeed is we create a culture and a group of people where entrepreneurs decide they want to work with us.
0:36:12 Again, we provide all these – we spend a lot of our fees that we make instead of on our own salaries on a set of people that help them, right?
0:36:13 But can’t AIs do that?
0:36:15 They’re great therapists, right?
0:36:15 Yeah, they can.
0:36:26 But at some point, you always need – like I said, you’re always going to need somebody to design and – or at least for some foreseeable future, you’re presumably going to need someone to help you build and design the robots.
0:36:30 And think of us as playing the role of advisors to the people that are building the robots.
0:36:34 And hopefully, there will be some role for that, at least for some period of time.
0:36:41 If an AI applied for funding, let’s say it was legal in terms of the bank transfers, I mean, would you consider the proposal?
0:36:46 I think right now they’re limited and they can’t – they just can’t do stuff.
0:36:47 Like they can’t open a bank account.
0:36:48 They can’t send money.
0:36:50 But yeah, I think it’s – I think it’s super –
0:36:52 Well, they’ll do it with crypto, right?
0:36:54 And maybe – this isn’t two years from now.
0:37:00 You’ll get a proposal from an AI and you’ll get the AI, quote-unquote, on the phone, the Zoom call.
0:37:01 I don’t even know how you would do it.
0:37:03 Maybe you just refer it to your AI.
0:37:07 No, we’ve been – I mean, we’ve been actually talking about it semi-seriously.
0:37:08 Like, I mean, we haven’t done anything yet.
0:37:12 I also had this – like Mark and Teresa and I were talking about, you know,
0:37:20 should you – you know, should there be like a nonprofit that, you know, that’s built on a blockchain that, you know,
0:37:22 sort of like what – were you involved with the Fast Grants thing?
0:37:23 Yeah.
0:37:24 Yeah, yeah.
0:37:26 So, like, I thought that was really interesting and inspired by that.
0:37:31 But imagine Fast Grants, but it’s a blockchain version that uses AI to give out the grants as an example.
0:37:33 Like, that’s actually something that we were just – I mean, it was just like a brainstorm.
0:37:34 I’m not – it’s not like a serious idea.
0:37:36 But that type of thing, right?
0:37:37 Like –
0:37:39 You could call it Fast or Grants, right?
0:37:40 Fast or Grants, yeah.
0:37:40 Yeah.
0:37:42 No, I thought what you did was really inspiring.
0:37:45 And like, you know, I had this whole – I actually wrote out a business plan.
0:37:46 I haven’t done it.
0:37:50 But – and it was like you have a DAO.
0:37:54 So, this is like an entity on a blockchain, sort of an autonomous entity on a blockchain.
0:37:56 And it’s sort of like – think of it like what an endowment does.
0:38:02 So, if you go to, like, Yale or Ford Foundation endowments – like, first time I learned this is when I raised venture capital.
0:38:02 I walk in there.
0:38:05 I’m like, Ford Foundation, aren’t they this organization that gives away money?
0:38:07 Well, they have this other side, right, which invests money.
0:38:09 So, endowments are sort of two things, right?
0:38:11 There’s invest the money and give away the money.
0:38:13 And they’re very different.
0:38:16 And, like, invest the money and they wear suits and give away the money they don’t.
0:38:17 And it’s just like two different organizations.
0:38:23 And so, the idea was could we create a blockchain autonomous AI entity that is like an endowment?
0:38:24 And so, half of it is like investing.
0:38:26 And you’re investing in tokens and this and that.
0:38:29 And the other half is giving the money away, a la FastGrants, right?
0:38:31 So, that’s actually an idea.
0:38:32 I think it’s pretty cool.
0:38:34 And if someone did it, I’d be excited to help out.
0:38:36 I haven’t gotten around to it.
0:38:38 But I do think that might be, like, a future thing.
0:38:45 And so – and the idea, right, what’s cool about an endowment is if it invests well, it can kind of just snowball and just get – have more and more money.
0:38:49 And then you use the kind of some portion of the returns every year to give that out.
0:38:54 And hopefully, it just becomes this kind of self-sustaining thing the way that, like, university endowments have.
0:39:00 If I ask you, how will AI change politics, what’s the most confident prediction you have?
0:39:02 Well, there’s – that’s a good question.
0:39:07 I – well, you know, generally, I’d love to ask your question on this.
0:39:11 Like, I’d say, well, a couple of things.
0:39:16 Like, one, I think there’s going to be a lot of political drama around AI in the next couple of years, first of all.
0:39:18 And this is – this is not AI changing politics.
0:39:20 It’s politics potentially changing AI.
0:39:22 Maybe it’s a little bit of a different question.
0:39:26 Like, I think there’s going to be issues around copyright, safety.
0:39:29 I think these – I believe these are not going to be settled in the court.
0:39:30 They will be settled in Congress.
0:39:31 Like, they are too important.
0:39:34 I just sort of went through this with crypto.
0:39:37 Like, we just had four years of kind of regulatory struggles in the courts.
0:39:38 So, now it’s going to probably be decided in Congress.
0:39:42 And I think ultimately the same thing will happen in AI because it’s just too important.
0:39:44 So, I just think – and that’s one topic.
0:39:57 I guess I would say another thing is I would say is I wonder – one thing I think about is how many problems in the world are intelligence problems versus political or coordination or regulatory problems, right?
0:40:00 So, like, you know, building housing is a hot topic right now.
0:40:04 Is – does more intelligence help us build better housing?
0:40:08 Probably the opposite because the smarter people lobby harder to stop it.
0:40:14 So, I would argue, right, housing is more of a regulatory or you could argue a collective action problem.
0:40:16 Probably a – would you say collective action?
0:40:17 Sure, yeah.
0:40:18 I think it’s a collective action problem, right?
0:40:22 And, you know, does AI help with that?
0:40:23 Maybe.
0:40:25 You know, I don’t know.
0:40:29 Like, I think AI can do a lot of really, really interesting things.
0:40:35 I do think a lot of the most challenging things we have in the world right now and a lot of the kind of gating factors to productivity,
0:40:46 growth, economic growth, economic growth are actually – and just human well-being, I believe, are kind of collective action problems, coordination problems, getting people to agree on something.
0:40:50 You know, AI could look at the internet.
0:40:52 How did the internet change politics?
0:40:57 The internet changed politics by changing the way information flows, right?
0:41:00 And I think we’re only beginning to see the effects of that.
0:41:09 You know, I think one way to think about the internet is social – you know, like, there’s always – technology always has sort of first-order and second-order effects, right?
0:41:14 So, like, the first-order effect of the automobile was you can get from point A to point B faster.
0:41:20 The second-order effect was suburbs, trucking, highway system, you know, sort of all the next 50 years, right?
0:41:23 The first-order was, like, go somewhere faster.
0:41:26 That’s 1900 to 1930 or something.
0:41:27 And then I don’t know when it was.
0:41:31 And then, like, the next era was, like, all of the sort of second-order things, right?
0:41:36 So, I think of the internet, the first-order thing with social media, I can tell people I had a burrito for lunch or something like this.
0:41:40 The second-order is you suddenly have a whole different political dynamic, right?
0:41:47 You can have an insurgent political movement like Trump or Bernie Sanders or something that comes – you know, that sort of bucks the system and counters the establishment.
0:41:55 You can have a whole narrative universe that counters – you know, you have COVID and you have the establishments world and then you have the podcasting version of it.
0:41:58 And it, you know, it restructured how information flows.
0:42:02 And people obviously will debate whether that’s a good or bad thing, but it’s clearly had that.
0:42:11 And I think we’re in the very beginning of that, of how the – you know, my view is, like, we’re probably, you know, really the social media didn’t become a mainstream thing until smartphones probably.
0:42:15 I mean, mainstream is a sense of, like, three billion people probably until 2012 or something.
0:42:19 So, we’re still, you know, relatively early in that development.
0:42:26 And now, AI, I think a big question, like, for example, maybe, you know, it’s very possible in five years that people get all their news and political information from an AI.
0:42:27 You know, who created that AI?
0:42:31 Was it created by, you know, someone with a political agenda?
0:42:32 Was it open source?
0:42:46 Like, I think AI, open source AI, if I, you know, if I can pick one issue that will make the AI future better, my own belief is that we have very strong open source AI.
0:42:49 So, that we can have – it can be, you know, people can have a choice.
0:42:51 It can be audited.
0:42:52 It can be open.
0:42:55 Our kids will be top AI.
0:42:57 The news will be formed by AI.
0:43:04 So, to your question on politics, I mean, politics is downstream of culture and information flows.
0:43:07 And AI will reshape that.
0:43:10 And who controls that reshaping?
0:43:11 To me, it seems like the key question.
0:43:15 As you know, not many countries have serious AI companies.
0:43:18 And even those in Europe may or may not last, right?
0:43:20 They’re not obviously mega profitable.
0:43:29 So, let’s say you’re the government of Peru and you can turn over your education system to some foreign, maybe American AIs.
0:43:32 You can turn over how your treasury is managed to the AIs.
0:43:35 You can turn over your national defense to the AIs.
0:43:38 And none of these are Peruvian companies, most likely.
0:43:43 In the final analysis, are we even left with the government of Peru?
0:43:50 Or has it in some sense been pseudo-privatized to the companies that are running the structures and, indeed, to the AI itself?
0:43:53 Well, this goes to open source, right?
0:43:54 I think it’s – I think the answer to your question –
0:43:56 But even open source is managed by someone, right?
0:43:59 Like, a version of DeepSeek is embedded in perplexity.
0:44:00 That’s worked great.
0:44:03 It’s still someone’s company.
0:44:03 Yeah.
0:44:07 I mean, I guess – I do think it’s – I think you have a great question.
0:44:18 I do think it’s different if they can get the open weights of DeepSeek and the Peruvian people and government can, you know, fine-tune or change those weights and decide on – I do think that matters.
0:44:20 So, just, you know, I’m not trying to dodge your question.
0:44:22 But I do think the architecture there really matters, right?
0:44:27 Are you getting – do you have – maybe not every country has the ability to do that.
0:44:33 But maybe without open source, we only have two countries left in the world, U.S. and China.
0:44:34 It’s possible.
0:44:35 Look, I think –
0:44:37 If you want an argument for open source –
0:44:42 Economic planning seems like an obvious thing that you would – that you would involve AI in.
0:44:44 And, you know, right?
0:44:54 I mean, that just seems like a first – one of the first things you’d want to do in government eventually is have AI do, you know, set your interest rates and your – to the extent your central planned economy.
0:44:58 Decide on your, you know, production schedules and pricing and such.
0:45:06 And that, you know, if you bought an AI – an economic planning AI module off the shelf, presumably it would be pretty opinionated on how to do that.
0:45:09 And the person who creates those opinions would have immense influence.
0:45:26 So, you know, again, though, I think those countries will insist – I think that one of the reasons that open source will eventually be a dominant – one of the two dominant model and will be competitive with proprietary AI is partly because of the questions like this.
0:45:29 I think these governments and a lot of companies will demand open source.
0:45:33 But even then, it seems there’s room for intermediaries.
0:45:50 So, if you just passed DeepSeq or Lama over to a relatively poor government – you know, again, take the case of Peru – they need a McKinsey-like entity, which is maybe the AI company itself, to come in, tell them how to use it, how to integrate it with their systems.
0:45:55 Does this mean American soft power has just won?
0:45:57 Like, it’s either America or China?
0:45:58 These are hard questions.
0:46:05 Look, I think there’s a – I think there’s –
0:46:06 It might be a good thing, too.
0:46:13 You know, if everything in Peru is run by American AI companies, the quality of life will be much higher, I think.
0:46:14 They may not like it.
0:46:19 I do – you know, I think Peter Thiel said crypto is – what did he say?
0:46:25 Crypto is libertarian and AI is, you know, socialist or – I mean, I think what he meant was –
0:46:27 I don’t think either of those is right.
0:46:32 No, but I think the twist I would put on it is AI tends to be centralizing.
0:46:34 It tends to be consolidating power, I do think.
0:46:42 And I think you’re making that point, which is the people that produce these things, if they’re very powerful things that manage much of the world,
0:46:47 being one of the countries and companies that produces them seems to give you immense power.
0:46:52 And I think that’s – I think that’s what makes, like, the China move into deep-seeking thing very interesting.
0:46:54 Right?
0:46:56 I mean, well, I mean, there’s a number of interesting things about that.
0:47:01 Like, one is the fact that they are so competitive so quickly and with a relatively small team and all the other things.
0:47:03 I mean, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.
0:47:04 There’s a lot of brilliant people there.
0:47:08 But the second one is a strategy.
0:47:17 It seems like, you know, sort of taking this kind of counter-strategy of doing open-source, and we’ll see if that lasts.
0:47:21 But, you know, and, like, we haven’t seen yet.
0:47:24 I would expect India is going to have some interesting stuff.
0:47:25 You know, Russia.
0:47:27 I mean, there’s a lot of smart people in the world.
0:47:29 And the fact that deep-seek was, what is it, like 150 people?
0:47:35 I mean, it may be – look, it may also be – there’s another – I think there’s another thing which we may be trending towards,
0:47:39 which is – AI is incredibly important, but it’s also just kind of a commodity.
0:47:41 The foundation models.
0:47:43 You know, it doesn’t mean there won’t be businesses.
0:47:52 There’ll be businesses at the – I think actually the emerging consensus, sort of, in at least the people I talk to,
0:47:57 is that the value – you know, you’re going to have cloud providers like AWS and such.
0:48:03 And you’re going to have, you know, of course, like end-user applications like, you know, Cursor and whatever.
0:48:08 Some lawyer will have their law firm thing and, you know, every sort of vertical will have their product.
0:48:15 But it may just be the foundation models end up being like, you know, PyTorch or whatever, like, you know, math libraries.
0:48:17 Essentially, it’s large-scale statistics.
0:48:20 It requires heavy engineering, of course, to do the training.
0:48:25 But the sort of tricks and secrets end up propagating and a bunch of people know them.
0:48:33 And, you know, it’s sort of – it sort of becomes kind of very large-scale statistical analysis of data source sets, right?
0:48:35 And just a lot of people have it.
0:48:36 It may be.
0:48:43 What do you – if that comes about, what do you think is then the dimension that determines which companies dominate?
0:48:47 So, one argument could be, well, Meta and Elon, they just have a lot of resources.
0:48:51 They can be in this for a long time.
0:48:55 Another argument is, well, OpenAI has the most powerful brand name with ChatGPT and so on.
0:49:00 But what’s your commercial intuition on what other factor steps into play?
0:49:07 Well, one framing I would say is – so, if you compare the internet to mobile, right, both were smartphones, right?
0:49:16 The rise of the internet in the 90s, the rise of smartphones in late 2010s, early – late 2000s, early 2010s, both were massively important tech movements.
0:49:32 A big difference was with the internet, I would say, you know, something like 90% of the net new value, sort of market cap value, went to startups, went to new organizations that didn’t exist before the internet, Amazon, Google, and such, right?
0:49:39 With mobile, on the flip side, 90%, something like 90%, I haven’t done the exact study, went to incumbents, right?
0:49:47 The biggest sort of pure mobile startup was – it’s probably Uber, I think it’s like 100, whatever it is, $150 billion.
0:49:51 There was Snapchat, you know, Instagram got bought for a billion.
0:49:55 But the vast majority of market cap kind of value actually went to incumbents.
0:50:01 If you look over that – what it did for, you know, Apple, Google, Facebook, and all the other – Amazon, they all did fine in that era.
0:50:02 They created mobile apps, they leaned into it.
0:50:10 And their user base went from whatever desktop was at the time, you know, home desktop, let’s call it 400 million, to 4 billion.
0:50:21 So, a 10x, and if you look at the stock – by the way, the best – it’s very hard, almost no venture firms over the 2010s beat the strategy of buying Apple stock.
0:50:22 Or the Boston Celtics.
0:50:26 So, like, that turned out to be the winner of the mobile era with the incumbents.
0:50:32 And so, I think one way to frame your question is, will AI be like mobile or like the internet?
0:50:40 Will it be a technology – you know, and like the concern would be – the concern, quote, unquote, I work in venture capital, I’m biased, right?
0:50:42 The concern – we invest in small companies.
0:50:48 The concern would be it’s more like mobile and that it just ends up reinforcing the strengths of the big companies.
0:50:50 Google and Microsoft and Facebook, they have more data.
0:50:53 They have more money for the training.
0:50:54 They have the infrastructure.
0:50:56 They have the distribution, right?
0:50:59 They – you know, how is somebody going to create a competitor to Facebook?
0:51:02 They’ll just make – you know, Lama’s already great and they’ll pump it through all their channels.
0:51:06 And so, will Google and they have more data and so forth.
0:51:14 So, that would be the sort of the – I don’t know, the degenerate outcome from the venture capitalist perspective is like – look, it could be great for the world, though.
0:51:20 You know, it could be – I think it’s – I think it’s – a lot of this will be consumer benefit, consumer surplus, I think.
0:51:21 And that’s good.
0:51:22 And I’m happy about that.
0:51:29 And if, you know – and we’ll always find things to – you know, there’ll always be some vertical thing or some other thing for VCs to invest in.
0:51:31 So, I think that might actually be a really good societal outcome.
0:51:33 Do NFTs have a future?
0:51:46 I think of – so, I think of the – so, let me say with an NFT – so, one of the things a blockchain allows you to do is to create digital assets, right?
0:51:51 This is sort of one of the unique things is you can create a – you know, Bitcoin is a digital asset that exists on a blockchain.
0:51:56 And those digital assets can be either fungible or non-fungible.
0:51:57 Fungible means, you know, interchangeable.
0:51:59 It’s like a currency.
0:52:01 Any Bitcoin can be exchanged for another.
0:52:03 Non-fungible means it’s a distinct asset.
0:52:07 And so, do, you know, do blockchains have a future?
0:52:09 Of course, I believe yes.
0:52:13 And then on those blockchains, will you have some assets that are fungible and some that are not?
0:52:14 I think definitely.
0:52:21 When people think NFTs, they think, you know, people buying JPEGs.
0:52:24 That may or may not come back.
0:52:30 The idea that people will have, you know, digital assets that, for example, could represent a movie ticket, an NFT.
0:52:51 It can represent a physical – people are doing – a lot of people are doing this now where they represent like a pair of tennis shoes or a piece of fine art or some other, you know, housing deed or some other – if we have a future, which I hope for and I’m pushing for, of, you know, people transacting with digital assets on blockchains, I think very much that some of those will be non-fungible.
0:52:56 And I think some of them will be also purely digital.
0:53:04 Like we’re seeing a bunch of these people doing like make video games and you have a, you know, sword or a gun you can buy and it’s an NFT and you can resell it and do other things.
0:53:14 And so, as the digital world becomes more and more important, you have, you know, you’ll have virtual worlds, you’ll have metaverses, you’ll have these kind of worlds like Roblox and many more variations of things like that.
0:53:26 You will have, I think, digital assets in those worlds and some of those – and I think a better – you can have those either locked inside of the game, owned by the game maker, or you can have them on a blockchain where the user can move them around and control them.
0:53:28 I think that’s a better architecture.
0:53:38 So, the answer is yes, but in the true sense of NFT, not in the kind of caricatured sense that people think about associating with the kind of 2021 bull market.
0:53:42 Won’t NFTs become the property rights system for the AIs?
0:53:45 I think that’s – I think that’s going to be a good outcome.
0:53:54 I think it’s the right way to do – it’s basically what – the reason my book is called Read, Write, Own is that read – sort of read and write is a common phrase referring to the first two eras of the internet.
0:53:59 And my argument is that if this era – if blockchains are successful, this era will be about ownership, digital ownership.
0:54:11 And so, blockchains enable digital ownership, and that ownership can be something digital, something that’s digital, that represents something non-digital, like a – I mean, non-digital, like I was going to say a stable coin, whatever.
0:54:15 Like something in a – something off blockchains, like in a bank, can be something in the purely digital world.
0:54:18 I think it’s the right way to represent digital ownership.
0:54:25 One way to think about the internet today is it’s sort of this world in which – you know, it’s sort of like imagine the offline world where you could never own something.
0:54:31 And every time you go to a new venue, you have to change clothes and use all their stuff, and you can’t take it anywhere else.
0:54:33 It’s this weird structure on the internet now.
0:54:38 You go to Twitter, and you gain followers, and yet they own your followers, and you can’t take them with you.
0:54:41 And you go to play a game, and everything’s stuck inside that game.
0:54:51 And the idea is sort of – one of the ideas in the blockchain world is we can shift that power back, and the user can actually sort of have this persistent inventory of things that they own and control.
0:54:59 That’s what a crypto wallet is, and you can take that to different services, and you unbundle the ownership of the data from the provision of the service.
0:55:02 What’s your favorite book in philosophy?
0:55:06 I’ve actually been getting back into philosophy lately.
0:55:08 I did it in philosophy years ago in grad school.
0:55:10 Favorite book, man.
0:55:11 Do you read – are you into philosophy?
0:55:13 Of course, yeah.
0:55:19 Plato’s Dialogues, Quine, Word and Object, Perfect Reasons and Persons, Nozick.
0:55:21 Those are what come to my mind right away.
0:55:23 Yeah, so I did analytic – I did analytic philosophy.
0:55:26 I actually was in a grad school program and dropped out.
0:55:26 I did analytic philosophy.
0:55:32 So, actually, Quine was one of my favorites, and I had Word and Object, and, like, two dogmas of empiricism and all those kinds of things.
0:55:36 I liked Donald Davidson, Nozick I loved, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
0:55:39 Reading that with Rawls is a great pairing.
0:55:45 You know, I used to love Wittgenstein, so, you know, both early and later.
0:55:45 Both, yeah.
0:55:46 Yeah, yeah.
0:55:48 I was into logic, so, like, Frege, Russell.
0:55:51 But now – this is a grad school.
0:55:54 Now I’m actually – I’m trying to finally understand continental philosophy.
0:55:54 I never understood it.
0:55:59 And I’ve actually spent the last three months sort of in a philosophy phase.
0:56:00 I’ve been watching a lot of videos.
0:56:02 Highly recommend – you know Brian McGee?
0:56:03 Sure, yes.
0:56:04 I watched all of his videos.
0:56:09 This guy, Michael Segru, who’s a Princeton professor, great videos in continental philosophy.
0:56:12 I’ve been reading – that’s a town pretentious.
0:56:15 Like, I’m not saying I understand this or I’m an expert on it, but I’m struggling in reading it.
0:56:18 I’m trying to read Being in Time right now, Heidegger.
0:56:25 And so, yeah, I – I’d say when I did analytic – I mean, probably, like, Wittgenstein.
0:56:27 I really like Kripke, Paul Kripke.
0:56:29 I liked his books a lot.
0:56:30 Nelson Goodman was one of my favorites.
0:56:36 Like, Fact Fiction and Forecast – funny enough, I just bought it again, Fact Fiction and Forecast.
0:56:43 Kripke, there’s a – Naming Necessities is kind of a legendary book on reference and language.
0:56:45 I’ve never been persuaded by that one.
0:56:47 It always felt like sleight of hand to me.
0:56:48 He’s very, very smart.
0:56:53 He might be the sharpest philosopher, but I like the book on Wittgenstein better.
0:56:56 He basically invented modal logic.
0:56:57 I don’t know if you know that story.
0:56:58 He was, like, in high school.
0:57:00 He was 15 years old, I’ve heard, yes.
0:57:01 So he’s, like, a true prodigy.
0:57:06 But, well, naming a necessity – I mean, like, a lot of philosophy, you have to take it in the context.
0:57:11 Like, naming a necessity, I think of it as a response.
0:57:14 Gosh, this is – I’m forgetting all the whole history of it.
0:57:20 But it was kind of a – as I recall, it was a response to the descriptive theory of reference, like Russell.
0:57:27 You know, so you would have – anyways, and so it’s kind of like you have to – I think you have to take these things in a pairing.
0:57:30 I was just actually – last night I was with a group of people.
0:57:38 I got a lecture on philosophy, and it was great because he went through – it was Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche.
0:57:43 And, like, I don’t want to go too much into plot, but I – but, like, I’ve always struggled with Kant.
0:57:54 And then he – but then he went into Hegel and explained this sort of – the – Hegel kind of struggled with Kant in the same way that I did and then improved on it.
0:57:57 And so, for me, these are always – and I’m not trying to go into the details of this.
0:57:57 It’s too much.
0:58:04 But the point is, for me, a lot of it has to be taken in, like, as a – as a dialogue between thinkers over multiple periods.
0:58:06 And so –
0:58:08 Are you getting anything out of Heidegger?
0:58:13 Because I sometimes say I’ve looked at every page of that book, but I’m not sure I’ve read it.
0:58:16 It’s a good question.
0:58:20 And I have a friend who’s really into it, and we’ve been spending time together, and he’s trying to teach me.
0:58:28 Yeah, I guess – how would – I would also, if you want, I’ll send you some videos.
0:58:29 That’d be great.
0:58:30 That I think are really good.
0:58:31 So, they’ve helped me a lot.
0:58:33 I get it.
0:58:37 Like, I’ve always got it from, like, an intellectual history point of view.
0:58:51 Like, if you want to follow kind of the history of postmodernism, so, like, there’s, like, Heidegger and then Derrida and just sort of, you know, what’s going on in the academy today with, you know, relativism and, you know, discourse and hermeneutics.
0:58:58 And just, like, you know, I think it’s modern political implications, too, that were really probably kicked off by Nietzsche and then Heidegger, right?
0:59:01 And so, I’ve always sort of understood in that sense.
0:59:05 I think what I struggle with – and I understand him as a theory of psychology.
0:59:13 I think of, like, describing the experience of the Dasein and being in the world and, like, to me, it’s an interesting theory of psychology.
0:59:16 Sort of how do I experience – like, you’re thrown into the world.
0:59:18 You don’t know – this whole idea is very appealing to me.
0:59:21 Like, and then just that whole kind of story he tells.
0:59:25 You’re thrown into the world, ready at hand versus present at hand.
0:59:31 And I think this idea of, like, knowing how versus knowing that, sort of different kinds of knowledge is a very interesting idea.
0:59:33 Do you watch John Verveke?
0:59:33 No.
0:59:39 I highly recommend – he’s got his 50-part video, 55-0.
0:59:41 You’d like him.
0:59:44 He’s a philosopher, cognitive science, really smart guy.
0:59:48 And he’s got a 50-part video on the – it’s called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
0:59:51 I’ve watched, like, 30 of them or something.
0:59:59 But – and the idea is sort of, you know, that modern – the modern world, we sort of lost religion and lost philosophy.
1:00:07 And now people are seeking meaning in their lives and they’re finding it through drugs and I don’t know what, video games and whatever.
1:00:12 And that we should go back and look at all the great thinkers and see what – how do we find meaning and sort of his mission of it.
1:00:14 But he’s very – he’s very sophisticated on the philosophy stuff.
1:00:16 And he goes through the 50 parts.
1:00:20 It’s like Aristotle, Plato, you know, Buddha, Jesus.
1:00:22 Like, it’s just, like, literally every great thinker.
1:00:25 And how do they think about how you find meaning in life?
1:00:25 Very, very interesting.
1:00:29 And – why was I saying this?
1:00:30 Excuse me, I forgot.
1:00:31 I lost my – oh, oh.
1:00:35 And so a big part of his thinking is sort of there’s many different ways of knowing.
1:00:42 And one of the things that we’ve done in the modern world is we’ve forgotten that there’s more than just propositional knowledge, more than just knowing that.
1:00:44 There’s knowing how, right?
1:00:49 There’s no – and, like, religious traditions are very good at knowing – at embracing multiple kinds of knowledge.
1:00:51 That’s why you don’t just have – right?
1:00:54 Like, it’s the mistake that the Redditor makes about analyzing Christianity.
1:00:57 Look at it as a set of propositions when, in fact, it’s a way of – it’s a form of life.
1:01:03 It’s about a community, a community co-development and meaning, rituals, and, like – you know.
1:01:07 So, I think the Heidegger stuff is very interesting on those topics of, like, different kinds of knowledge.
1:01:18 And I guess I just am very interested in, like – in, you know, we all – you and I, I’m sure, have this sort of default naturalistic, physicalist, scientific worldview.
1:01:25 And I’m interested in sophisticated thinkers who have a different worldview and trying to understand it.
1:01:29 And I think – I think about – you know, John von Neumann had this great phrase.
1:01:31 He’s like, you don’t – someone asked him about set theory.
1:01:32 He said, you never understand set theory.
1:01:33 You just get used to it.
1:01:43 And I think that’s true of a lot of these other alternative philosophies is, like – like, it’s not like there’s going to be, like, one argument you’re going to read of Heidegger and you’re going to be like, oh, my God, my worldview changed.
1:01:45 Like, you just kind of have to submerge yourself in it.
1:01:50 And that’s what I’m trying to do of, like, a year – you just kind of keep – keep seeing it from different angles.
1:01:55 And then, hopefully, you eventually get kind of a gestalt switch and you start to see the world maybe through a different lens.
1:02:07 And if you had to say, not what you like in philosophy as philosophy, but what in philosophy has stuck with you when you make venture capital decisions, what would you cite?
1:02:15 Well, I think the – like, I do think the motive – I think it just – one thing I like about philosophy is, like, the move – just, like, literally the moves they make.
1:02:16 It’s almost like a chess game, right?
1:02:23 Like, they’re just very, like, nuanced argument style.
1:02:29 But, you know, like – I only recently hesitated.
1:02:31 I don’t know how much you want me to go down this path.
1:02:32 No, be as nerdy as you are.
1:02:44 Okay, well, like – okay, so, like, cons – are you familiar with the cons, the synthetic a priori?
1:02:44 Sure, yeah.
1:02:45 Right, okay.
1:02:49 So, like, this is just a really interesting – so, like, Hume comes along – so, actually, it was really locked.
1:02:52 But then Hume comes along and says, okay, like, let’s analyze how we get knowledge.
1:02:54 And he says there’s really just two ways you get knowledge.
1:02:58 You get knowledge through what he called relations of ideas or matters of fact.
1:03:01 So, sort of, you know, math, right?
1:03:07 It’s just like you can kind of – you could sit in a room and think about the numbers and decode – or all bachelors are unmarried is a famous example.
1:03:12 Like, it’s embedded inside of the words that to be a bachelor is to be unmarried.
1:03:13 That’s relations of ideas.
1:03:16 And then there’s empirical matters of fact, right?
1:03:20 And that’s things we go out and see in the world.
1:03:23 And so, Hume asks this, you know, the famous skeptical question.
1:03:26 Okay, well, if that’s the case, where does something like induction fit in, right?
1:03:28 Where does causality fit in?
1:03:30 Where does time and space fit in?
1:03:34 Because they’re neither, you know, purely true based on the relations of ideas.
1:03:39 And it would be circular if we learned induction through induction, right?
1:03:42 Like, how do we know that, you know, the sun will rise tomorrow?
1:03:43 Well, it’s always risen in the past.
1:03:46 Well, how do we know that futures will be like future pasts?
1:03:48 And kind of goes through the whole skeptical argument, right?
1:03:53 And then Kant comes along and says, okay, that’s right.
1:04:03 But what that means is there are other preconditions for knowledge, which is a really interesting move because what he’s saying is, I mean, this is what a transcendental argument is, right?
1:04:06 Is you’re not kind of going from premises to conclusion.
1:04:09 You’re going from premises to preconditions to those premises, right?
1:04:11 So, I’m just giving you an example.
1:04:19 Like, that move, that kind of plasticity of thought, like, that is just a very, like, I almost, when I first saw that, I was like, can you do that?
1:04:21 Like, you can go and, like, so he says, look, you can’t fit.
1:04:23 I’m not sure you can do it, to be clear.
1:04:24 Oh, no, not either.
1:04:31 But he’s like, you can’t fit causality, this Kant’s favorite, I think, but then induction, a whole bunch of things that we just, that are our modes of intuition.
1:04:33 You can’t fit them into Hume’s two buckets.
1:04:39 And so then he argues, of course, you know, 300 pages and very nuanced that therefore there must be another bucket, right?
1:04:42 There must be this other precondition of thought, the modes of intuition.
1:04:47 And then he derives this whole kind of beautiful system outside of, out from that.
1:04:50 And then, you know, Hegel comes along and changes that, changes some of the precondition.
1:04:58 So I think just the, I just feel like I learned when I did it, at least in grad school, just like this kind of, just this, just freedom.
1:05:01 And I guess I use the plasticity.
1:05:09 I don’t know, just like the kind of the, like, you kind of learned how to do these moves and meta moves, like intellectually, that I find really interesting.
1:05:12 And it just forces you to really think, like, you can just sit there.
1:05:15 I’ve spent like an hour just sitting there and trying to understand these ideas.
1:05:17 And I, sometimes I feel like I don’t.
1:05:20 And it, and it just really forces kind of intellectual honesty on you.
1:05:24 I don’t know, I, I, so it’s almost like meta.
1:05:29 Like, I, honestly, I’ve read philosophy for years and I don’t know if I’ve ever actually gotten any conclusions out of it.
1:05:35 I think there’s just like, you can sort of see both, so both sides and you can, I could feel like I can argue both sides.
1:05:39 I feel like that about a lot of things in, in like politics too and things.
1:05:42 I feel like I can argue, I can give a pretty good argument for a bunch of different things.
1:05:49 And, you know, I don’t know, I think you get better at analyzing and understanding all the things and that philosophy helps you with that.
1:05:50 I don’t know if you actually get answers.
1:05:58 Before we say goodbye, I’d like to recommend Chris’s book again, Read, Write, Own, Building the Next Era of the Internet.
1:06:00 Chris Dixon, it’s been a pleasure.
1:06:00 Thank you.
1:06:01 That was a lot of fun.
1:06:06 Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast.
1:06:12 If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com slash A16Z.
1:06:14 We’ve got more great conversations coming your way.
1:06:15 See you next time.