# Will Meta Bounce Back? (with Nikita Bier) | Where It Happens | Bonus Episode

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rql6GZakVTI
Duration: 1 hr 13 min
Language: English
Words: 12798
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Rql6GZakVTI

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[0:00] [Music] dude what's going on i'm so excited for uh so excited for this one mailbag episode yeah this is i mean nikita i haven't seen you in in years and i i i follow every tweet you do so it's it's i'm having like a celebrity shock situation no i i'm sorry i'm sorry you've had to read everything i've said uh it must be mentally taxing on you well the funny thing about nikita it so we're in a group chat with nikita you just said you haven't seen him in years which i find so funny because we basically talk every single day in this group chat um i've seen nikita within

[0:36] the last year nikita and i had a big night out in l.a not not too long ago which was a blast but the funniest thing about nikita is that most people have no clue what this man looks like in real life because he is a cartoon avatar [ __ ] poster on twitter i and i like to keep it that way you know i run into people they'll i tell them my name they're like wait a minute i follow you on twitter and uh you know it's uh i still get all the benefits of fame without uh without any recognition smart man be walking around a grocery store no one

[1:09] bothers me not that i'm even at that level or anything maybe someday though maybe someday we'll we're pumped to have you on for at least a little bit of this mailbag episode i am going to be drinking i don't know if you guys are drinking it's probably too early nikita's time maybe not but i'm drinking kentucky owl rye ten year rye this was actually um you know i've been doing these like whiskey rambling threads on sundays i i um i kind of decided that everything had become too performative as i had like scaled on twitter and so i was just like kind of [ __ ] it and i'm just gonna write

[1:43] off the cuff on random stuff and like hot takes and things so i got a little drunk two weekends ago and wrote this thread and people seem to like it like a lot of cool people followed me it got shared by like this famous cricket player that fired up my indian family and so then i decided i was going to do it again and a bunch of people sent me whiskey so i got this great bottle of whiskey sent to me and i did it yesterday again and like some people attacked me for some of the things i said but for the most part it was pretty can i could i comment on your

[2:11] whiskey thread before we you know talk to nikita so please hit me you i read both your threads they're amazing but like if i'm gonna drink a bunch of whiskey and write a thread like it's not gonna be as well crafted as your thread like yours you're even an immaculate threat threat both times so like how well first off two whiskeys not four so that helps it definitely starts to trail off like some of the later tweets even i can see like i made like grammatical errors and things but you also gotta know like my baseline is highly crafted like pure like really immaculate [ __ ] and so that

[2:56] for me was like pushing the boundaries a lot of it but yes i agree with you it still is like in the grand scheme of things it still looks that way probably yeah i would i would agree that the quality has certainly degraded it's gotten nikita level it got to nikita level it wasn't quite on [ __ ] poster level i mean the palpable tension between [ __ ] post twitter and thread twitter right now is you know it you can really feel it like you can cut it with a butter knife for sure yeah we're definitely uh we're we're rivals in the twitter sphere well i like

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[5:33] percent on your first six months visit open phone dot co slash room again that's open phone dot co slash room to save 20 on your first six months you won't regret it greg i know you and i both um you and i both have a little bit of a list of things we wanted to cover um you want to start with mine or i feel like i've got i've got one to start that i feel like nikita is going to be great for so maybe we can start on my list cool so nikita i mean nikita's background just for anyone that doesn't know and he can

[6:08] talk a little bit more about it as well as he's a founder multi-time founder and other than being an amazing twitter follow he founded and built a business called tbh that was sold to facebook for a bunch of money and then he proceeded to work at facebook heroically for several years as his stock vested out from that original deal he's recently separated from the company and uh on to bigger and better things beyond just [ __ ] posting he is building something new that's going to be cool that was memed to death a few weeks ago on wait can i interrupt you for one one clarifying point

[6:45] so nikita and you agree i think you'll agree with me on this it wasn't as clean as like hey i started a company and it was tvh and i sold it to facebook it it no no it didn't it didn't work that way we built uh we did it for five years we built 15 apps um we were about to shut down we were very close to it and the 15th app went straight to number one in the app store right as we were like basically turning off the lights in the office uh it was our hail mary but at the same time it was sort of a magnum

[7:19] opus of everything we had learned over the years and the moment that it dropped you know we were seeing exponential growth and we it turned into a very competitive bidding process between a bunch of uh you know big names in silicon valley and uh we closed the we got the term sheet within six weeks of launching the app and uh and we sold it was it was kind of like a dream come true situation uh basically like a movie it's kind of a crazy it's so i didn't know that first off so greg i'm glad you paused and asked i didn't know that it was the 15th out of 15 things when i

[7:54] read stories about it when i like looked you up when we first connected it always just it's like the you know the one line click bait of like you know started and sold company for 100 million dollars in a hundred days or something like is the headline that i'll always read which is [ __ ] amazing don't get me wrong super dope it's sort of cooler that this was like your last thing and it was really you know took me 10 years to be an overnight success type situation where you pounded your head into a wall for a long time and then this final thing really worked

[8:24] yeah and i i don't even think we'd be able to pull it off if it wasn't our 15th thing because when when it when it hit we knew exactly what to do we knew exactly how to scale it we knew exactly how to maintain relationships with the press and media um we we knew what we were doing but if if we just struck it on the first try i think it would have crashed and burned really quickly um so i'm actually kind of glad it you know it built character and it also uh made us really hit it out of the park i mean nine million users in

[8:54] i think it was like 90 days it was it was a wild ride that's so insane i love it and now you know now companies come to you to to get advice on those things from the 14 headaches i'm sure just as much as the one success so i mean it's it's it's awesome and and we have you on um for a number of reasons beyond just that one story which is amazing but um i want the first thing on my list greg is i want to talk about facebook and the facebook earnings um i don't know what catastrophe or like uh apocalypse or whatever whatever i'm

[9:26] going to call it so to set the stage on this um facebook announces earnings um last week um and basically plunges like 26 or something like that on the back of it it erased 250 billion dollars of market value in a single day it was the largest single day wipeout of market value in history ever point blank mark zuckerberg lost like 30 billion dollars of net worth in the single day snap got pulled down on the back of it that day only to whipsaw the other way 60 up 60 percent after dropping like 30 on the day of facebook's announcement um just like a totally insane set of events

[10:08] uh i want to talk about it because it's really interesting to think through what the hell was going on uh i am on the record you could check the tapes on this i was on cnbc talking about facebook maybe two months ago when they changed their name to meta saying that basically i thought it was like pr 101 crisis management 101 that they had a fundamental product issue that was going unaddressed and that they were going to be in trouble so they were grabbing attention shifting to the metaverse doing all of those things um they've now come out and said that some of the stuff that apple has done

[10:41] with the att the app tracking transparency is going to cause a 10 billion dollar hit to their business in 2022 there's so many things happening here and nikita having been at facebook is a great person to comment on them so can you just explain a little bit of this position that facebook is in now and and uh where you see it going yeah um so uh to set some context on that market cap drop uh the last record holder for that drop was also facebook uh this is the second time they've set the record um what was the first one's number what was that how much was the first one

[11:20] uh i think i think it was in like the upper like hundreds of million hundreds of billions um but i remember because i worked there when it happened and i remember reading that headline um but you know so i i when i joined facebook um i i never had a real job before and i came in there and i was like blown away this company really knows how to grow products like i look through you know the workplace uh social network which is where all the employees kind of engage and they are treating growth as like an academic discipline and that's what facebook has built is like a machine that can grow

[11:55] products um however the thing that they really struggle with is zero to one creating new products and that's that doesn't only play facebook uh many other companies many most of big tech has not ever built in-house zero to one products that have uh had uh that have broken out um i like the iphone it was truly like a a historical example that that happened but i think if you look across all of big tech you rarely see that happen and at this okay so setting the stage there that they can't build zero to one really that well um they have huge amounts of competition coming in imessage is going after close

[12:36] friends uh in the and that's that's where their high rpe arp use users are the ones that bring in the bulk of the revenue are in the u.s and iphone is eating or imessage is eating their lunch on the content and entertainment side tick tock is just growing like a weed and everybody saw this coming two years ago just based on the growth trajectories and the third kind of terrifying thing is they can't acquire so the regulators uh the ftc uh they they won't re they won't sign off on any sort of large uh acquisition of a user base um so they're losing users um from an

[13:16] engagement from these two other uh competitors at the same time they can't really buy their way out of it like they did with instagram in the past or what's up nikita it's such a fast yeah you know you're you're king for the day you're uh nikita zuckerberg um does you know what do you what do you do do you like break up facebook like what's your plan or did you just go home and cry and just is this you know is it just gonna be you know a zombie company for the for the next 20 years so um it's a tricky situation like i don't think there's an easy answer here

[13:57] there's no silver bullet um you know and people ask like why can't they just start building in-house it's not easy for them to build in-house big tech doesn't do that well um the incentives aren't really aligned to to get employees to take big swings uh you know you might get a a big bonus for making the next instagram but i don't know anyone who'd grind out you know that grind it out for that sort of reward they'd rather just keep it all for themselves and start their own company so you know the environment isn't really conducive to founders they're certainly trying they've created the new product

[14:34] experimentation org uh which i was a part of the creation of that um but it's tough like i had some crazy ideas and i was like i don't know if i could build it in this context um it's so interesting because as investors like all three of us do quite a bit of angel investing or investing and one of the most common questions that new founders get is like oh why won't you know facebook just come and do this or why wouldn't twitter just go and do this and like you'll be dead if one of the big companies just decides they want to do this and then you get

[15:05] the counterpoint to it which is literally that there are so few examples of an incumbent figuring out innovation and being able to go and do something zero to one that it actually makes you feel better about these startups because like a laser focus on a single thing will always outperform these big companies that are like trying to hobble over you know like a big ogre to uh to go and do something and like jankily pull something together within a new market yeah i mean that that's what i was worried as as a founder when i was building social apps i was like i don't want to show it to any facebook

[15:36] employees they might copy it but after being on the inside it takes about a year for of collecting data for them to even think about building something like this or building something they see happening in the market and then it takes three months of like a framing process where you do research you put together slide decks that you send around to executives and then you have another year after that to actually build it and get it to pass all the legal sign-offs so you're looking at almost like oh usually like over two years to respond like i remember i was sounding the alarm bells for clubhouse i was like this this

[16:11] is a new format that's pretty interesting um and you know it took it took some time for people to catch on to it um and that's such gold by the way like for for a startup founder out there to hear that that like the bureaucracy and the absurdity of these big tech companies and the committees and the layers that it has to go through to actually compete against you i mean what a call to arms if you're a startup founder out there worried about starting something because of you know the potential competition from a big tech company it might actually be a good thing for them to even know you exist because then

[16:45] then there's a bigger m a appetite for them to go after it if if facebook could ever acquire things again um yeah that's an interesting point that you raised actually too is like this whole ftc thing has been so confusing to me because you you on one hand have you know government just going after the like big american tech companies and basically just saying that like any acquisition they do is going to come under you know review and then you have tick tock which is chinese owned and de facto controlled by the chinese government by the way and owns the data of literally every single teenager in the united states and we're

[17:21] just going to not say anything about that and everyone like you know trump kind of went on his crusade then there was the whole weird thing where he was going to like say that oracle was going to take over the u.s business of tick tock which was weird and bizarre but we're just not going to talk about tick-tock and the fact that like the chinese government has direct access to the data of millions of teenagers in the u.s but if facebook wants to go acquire some tiny company it's going to get tons of [ __ ] for it yeah and i think the the public thinks

[17:50] that you know facebook doesn't it can't be trusted to to manage sort of the problems that have plagued its platform like misinformation integrity issues but you know one thing that i i one area that i hold like a lot of respect for as a founder who you know is not that excited about working at a place like facebook they have some of the best integrity systems the best spam the best misinformation detection systems out of any probably any company in the world and uh would we really want to entrust a chinese company to to handle sort of those those problems because that's basically the the the message that the

[18:29] ftc is sending is we're gonna uh kind of control the growth of this other company to let this to let ftc to let um tick tock continue to grow so i think it's it's kind of a shame because uh i would i would want those controls to be on our shores uh and they're really not i feel like the better branding play would have been if facebook rebranded to usa instead of meta and it was just like this whole rally around you know almost like how when i think of ford yeah american owned yeah yeah yeah i actually think kind of it's kind of genius i i think that this last earnings call

[19:08] though i think you know there was some you know 4d chess being played to show i mean it took a huge hit to the market cap but i think it showed to the world that this is a competitive market that the anti-trust concerns might be overblown uh you know certainly facebook dominates in a certain age cohorts certain localities but it's getting uh it's it's facing extreme competitive pressures from other areas um so uh but i think highlighting that and making it visible and taking a hit financially might be a short run like a short-term cost for a longer term play it i mean it also showed the

[19:51] craziness of um it's reliant i mean the the the impact that apple's att change has had on facebook's business yeah idea is like crazy i mean the app tracking transparency thing apple basically you know allowing you to opt out of having um apps track your activity which for people that don't understand it basically limits facebook's ability to have highly qualified targeted ads and so that reduces the level of pricing that facebook is able to pass through to advertisers on the platform which is basically what facebook's business is it's an ad business and ben thompson i think talked about it basically this was it was 10 billion dollars that

[20:32] was going to be the impact to facebook in 2022 is what they said on the earnings call which as he pointed out is it's a pricing change because it's the level of price you can charge to the advertisers which is a direct hit to the bottom line of facebook and is a massive proportion of their annual earnings that are actually going to get hit there so the market response actually felt like it made sense i just don't think people i don't think people fully understood how impactful apple's one single change could be to the entire ecosystem that existed out there of all these other players that rely on that tracking

[21:07] mechanism yeah it goes to show that the monopoly might not be facebook it might very well be apple uh the fact that they could just you know hobble a bunch of small businesses overnight with uh by hurting the performance of ads and i think you know a lot of people say oh we're really sticking it to facebook but realistically the people that are impacted the most are are these the owners of small businesses so i i think the with the ftc might be better to realign their whole uh probe against uh yeah the company that controls our phones facebook is just such a fun enemy um i

[21:44] mean even since the early days right like mark zuckerberg has been so fun to hate for all of these you know uh regulators for the government ever since the days of social network when he was kind of like painted as this like weird evil genius villain and i actually don't think any of it is fair um but he was painted that way and that was the image you had of him and the whole thing with the winklevosses and this whole story about zuckerberg and who he was right or wrong it's like been the image that's been painted of him that i think has been implanted into the american

[22:14] mind um and honestly my take on privacy too is like people don't actually really care to the point where they're not really willing to pay extra money to have more privacy um that's like one of my hot takes that exists out there and so i i just think part of it is just imagery and figuring out how to shift that perception again for them because it's i think it's like 10 plus years in the making how it's yeah my here's my take on that my take is a lot of people feel like mark zuckerberg is punchable and if mark zucker okay a couple things actually if mark

[22:49] zuckerberg wasn't the founder and ceo of facebook i don't think the stock would have dropped as you know as much i feel like it's so polarizing because like people have this image of him and they want they want so many people want to see him lose and they see it as one person i don't know how yeah if you know facebook must have like a hundred thousand employees but they you know they see it as one person um and the second thing is if the social network didn't come out i feel like it also wouldn't have you know wouldn't be that polarizing i feel like so many people saw the social network

[23:24] and because of that we have this like image of like sean parker mark zuckerberg the whole like silicon valley it like shaped the whole like generation it shaped our generation of entrepreneurs totally one yeah i i think a lot of this hatred is is totally misplaced i mean uh i i don't think like people think oh it's facebook's trying to make more money off of us at the end of the day like this is this is my kind of uh polarizing opinion uh companies exist for like big tech companies exist for the egos of the founders and at the end of the day he just wants

[24:00] to be liked uh he just wants to build something that helps people i mean he's made enough money so it's not like making another 20 billion dollars is really going to change anything for him so i i think like the public's kind of animosity is a little bit misplaced here uh but yeah i i know if i say that out loud and i am right now i'm going to get [ __ ] on on twitter because everyone that's okay everyone won't be the first or last time all of us get [ __ ] on on twitter i like you guys probably get [ __ ] on on twitter more than i do to

[24:29] date but now i'm starting to come into it now that i've got these like got the drunk threads going so i'm going to join you guys in uh in the getting hate on twitter land um wait before before nikita leaves oh i need to know because you know i bought some shares of facebook literally right before this call that's why i was late i'm sorry um are you call yourself yeah you know this isn't financial advice but like you know are you bullish or bearish on facebook at these current prices i mean they're facing some serious some serious issues here and um i i don't think there's an easy way out i

[25:08] think the metaverse is many years away um at least i i don't see us wearing face computers anytime in the short term um so i you know there has to be some uh hail mary here i think for them to to climb out of this at the same time though like a 16 x p e ratio uh for that amount of talent at that company uh there's there's some value there so um this is not financial advice so wait with you guys so wait are you bullish or bearish i i don't know it's it's i i think they have a [ __ ] bottom line is they have a [ __ ] ton of

[25:49] talent for that uh p e ratio i think it's it's a it's a very good value buy right now but uh where's scott galloway on it i i just don't know i can't see where the route out is right now for them so that's what gives me pause i just follow i go anti-portfolio of turner novak turner shout out banana cap although turner was proven right you tweeted against him nikita on snapchat and then the next day it was up sixty percent uh i made a 500 trade map on that day i saw that nice nice i'm impressed well dude thank you so much for for joining to jam on

[26:29] this one appreciate you and uh look forward to bringing you back on for a proper episode as well yeah thanks for having me uh and uh good luck guys thank you well i wanted to drop my app by the way oh hit us all right so what i'm building is and you can cut me off right there perfect what a legend what a legend what an exit what an exit all right man all right that was fun all right that was really fun i'm glad we brought him on to talk about that i i still i'm not sure whether he's bullish or bearish on facebook but we can take it are you

[27:08] bullish um or bearish on facebook at these levels i'd buy facebook here i i mean i i i'm not i don't buy um individual stocks i've talked to you about this i only buy etfs um like you know market tracking things and i was i've been buying big tech stuff on this on this like drop over the last several weeks i mean there are some names that are just that feel under the surface really undervalued here so dude i'm a buyer what is this 16 p8 pe ratio on facebook that's that's absurdities that's literally absurd but i don't like i don't know what that means bro i'm not a headphone really

[27:47] i know what it means and i get it but it's not like everyone throws these numbers around and they're like oh 16 well like five years ago that was probably high right it's just multiples that expanded so i don't know um but it does just seem like it's not like facebook's not going to be exactly sure so i personally i like betting on mega stuff and things i'm never going to sell i don't trade like i my active strategy in markets is i literally buy with never intending to sell and i intend to take loans against holdings and never sell so that i can not have to pay taxes in the future pro

[28:17] tip um but i don't intend ever sell and i am perfectly happy owning big u.s tech over the next 20 i mean apple included by the way given what they were able to do to this entire market with that one change i love apple couple things what the world runs on whatsapp like literally runs on it um so you know that is really the crown jewel of facebook in my opinion um so big believer in whatsapp even though it's hard to monetize messaging apps so like that's the the counterpoint to what i just said is just like it's just harder to monetize but like who's to say they can turn

[28:59] whatsapp into more of a social network so that's number one number two like i feel like they needed this like compression um and nikita kind of talked about it but like they needed this compression to to basically be an underdog and i feel like i don't know a year two three years from now like i feel like they're gonna they're gonna ship some stuff and and and some of it's gonna work um so i'm i think uh i think the stock will outperform that's that's what i think yeah it's a good bet i think it's a good bet though he pointed out the level of talent there is hard to bet against at

[29:38] these prices so i'm i'm i'm with it i totally get it you want to jump to um want to jump into the next thing i know we've got a handful of other things to get through um you want to hit one from your list you want to do another all i'll uh kick it off so are you familiar with the nouns project the red glasses yeah red glasses blue glasses yellow gusses so basically what it is uh for context is uh if you go to nouns.wtf you can pull it up right now um i am they it's an nft project where they sell these characters they're

[30:19] called nouns and they wear these glasses kind of like what i'm wearing if you know that kind of vibe and every day it's an auction forever and there's a new one every single day and these things go for hundreds of thousands of dollars every single day one per day and um the founding team of which dom who's the co-founder of vine is on the founding team and this you know this guy gremlin who's a well-known nft artist on the founding team these like well-known people don't take a cut of the actual sales because they've raised you know millions of dollars they actually just get i think it's like

[31:00] one in every 10 i think uh of the actual nouns goes to their their wallet and the big innovation around nouns is this thing called cco which is create a common zero which is this idea that um the artwork is in the public domain so even if you sahel you go and buy this like you know 8-bit character with these like blue glasses you actually don't own it um the whole world owns it so i can actually you can go spend 400 000 on this little nouns guy and i can actually go down like right click save as a jpeg go to a screen printer and actually like

[31:48] you know wear you know sell hats jack butcher our friend jack butcher is doing that like i bought last night for 69 obviously a hoodie with the blue nouns glasses um obviously by the way on 69 dollars great and you know a lot of people look at that and they're like wow i'm going to spend 300 000 on this like nft and i don't even own the rights that's crazy um but because it's in the create you know creative commons you know your meme spreads a lot quicker which is the the bet and it's this whole you know it's kind of interesting so oh you got you you want to say something

[32:30] yeah so it's interesting because i've written about this stuff in the past like i've written about disney's ip coming into public domain and how disney will fight to the death to maintain their they've actually changed ip law in the us on like seven or eight occasions to avoid mickey mouse coming into the public domain and yet now you have this company in nouns or entity that is actively leaving things into the public domain immediately um so i'm trying to wrestle you know like the juxtaposition of old world and new world here is very very i think uh while it sounds like cco is just like so simple um and

[33:11] small it's actually such a game changer and i think brands in 2022 or in 2023 you know are going to leverage cco and it's going to be it's going to be huge but what i wanted to talk about now that you you understand a little of the stage in the context of nouns is nouns just published or sorry bud light just partnered with nouns and they released a super bowl commercial uh it's gonna be on the super bowl the super bowl is this sunday uh february whatever sunday is and they just did the release of it and in the bud light commercial there's the the the you know character

[33:52] walks into this like museum and there's this like massive nouns glasses aka nouns are uh mainstream aka nfts are mainstream aka cc0 is mainstream so i have a handful of questions this is a i mean it does seem like a big deal um and i'm not shocked that there is like web 3 influence in super bowl ads by the way just because of how it's captured public attention um but i will say there's a lot of interesting features here that you know just as like a curious observer that i'm looking at number one talk to me about this whole idea of the nouns dow treasury so all of the

[34:31] proceeds if i'm reading it correctly from these auctions or going into this treasury is the treasury what are they using the treasury for and like this partnership with budweiser is it like related to the treasury do you know anything about how they're how they're yeah so nouns the way it works is you buy a noun and if you're lucky enough to spend 300 000 and you get this noun what you get is one vote in the dao and for those of you don't know dow decentralized autonomous organization basically a fancy way of saying it's like a crypto company that's the let's put it that way and they vote on ways to spend

[35:11] that treasury so i actually think that i i i haven't looked into it but i'm pretty sure that they um this bud light deal came from a vote that the community did to uh to get the nouns word out there this is pretty fascinating i'm up i pulled up the bud light um super bowl ad and the the the imagery around it first off it's super cool and it looks like it's going to be a cool ad so i'm excited to actually see it on sunday during the game um but it does feel i mean this public domain thing is what i'm wrestling with and that i think is so interesting

[35:48] because like i've seen nouns the glasses which are very distinct looking once we'll include a we'll include an image or something when we post the episode but um you and i were both in the cryptos project and you owned a you owned a crypto that had nouns glasses and those were considered more rare so is that part of the ip that we're talking about that's in public domain like can other nft projects use nouns glasses or do they have to be related to nouns to use yeah so great question so uh cryptos was a project that was started by gremplin one of the artists of nouns

[36:26] um and [Music] so he went and used you know the nouns glasses and and you know a lot of cryptos have nouns passes that being said there's another project for example called the littles and it's completely unrelated from um cryptos or nouns or any projects to do with that team and a lot of those uh nfts have nouns glasses and they're able to do it because it's cc0 it's completely in the public domain it's okay so here's my take on this um that i'm just formulating while you're explaining all of this to me um this is fascinating because what you have is this collision of old world ip management

[37:15] which is disney and they're the pillar of that and you have disney who has protected with weapons going out and fighting people to the death over their ip over the course of their of their history ever since releasing the steamboat willie mickey mouse back in the early 1900s they have fought and spent millions hundreds of millions of dollars to fight u.s copyright trademark regulations in order to keep their ip out of public domain now you have these new world companies and entities that are actually doing the exact opposite they want their content and their ip in the public domain why because as we talked about with billy the founder of dogecoin a few

[38:01] weeks ago memes control the universe he who controls the memes controls the world and that is such a fascinating shift because how do you drive enterprise value in this day and age is it now that you drive it via virality and memes maybe and it's a really interesting live experiment in the laboratory to see whether it works i actually don't know the answer of whether it's going to work or not but it's a pretty fascinating case study to see the collision of the two worlds honestly mickey mouse is actually coming up into public domain apparently i think in in 18 months or so um or at the end

[38:39] of 2023 um so it's interesting to see whether that world will prevail or whether this new world that's being created by things like nouns uh will be the one that prevails and that will ultimately generate the most value going yeah i think uh to me it's very clear who's gonna win that battle and you know right i think uh you know here's the thesis of cc of cc0 the thesis is that if you see i'll call it actually i'll call it the wordle thesis you know that game that you've been seeing on twitter and places like that like you play that game or you'll see that game

[39:24] so often that you might play it and it might be a part of your you know your ritual and your habit your morning coffee the same thing is true with nouns glasses you might see nouns glasses you know on a billboard you might see it on your friend's profile picture you might see it on a super bowl ad you might see it in a coffee mug you might see it in a you know you go into a store and they're selling nouns gears and that might make you want to you know buy an nft of downs or you know maybe they make games in the future and you

[39:55] want to buy that game or access that game so the thesis is the more touch points that you have of ip the more likely you are assuming it's good ip the more likely you are to be connected to that ip the more likely you are to buy products and services the more likely you are to join that community et cetera et cetera yeah it's really interesting because to me it's a question of like indirect and direct value attribution um traditional companies rely on direct value attribution if someone is out there producing t-shirts with mickey mouse on it um and disney isn't earning the money from that their traditional mindset is that's

[40:40] bad for me that's money that i should have been earning they should have been buying a disney t-shirt that had that printed and i just lost money a new way of thinking about that would be that is a great thing because now there are more people that are out there wearing mickey mouse shirts that are then thinking about mickey mouse because everyone that sees them sees it and might feel a connection to that piece of ip or might know what that is and then we'll rise the tide overall that will allow me to earn more money in the long term um and so that that's where my head goes to

[41:11] on it is like i actually don't know it's a math question to me of which model works and which one wins in the market in the long term because if the market determines that this new way works which is let everyone use it share it expand upon it build it in different ways use it like lego blocks to create new things my gut tells me that model actually works better uh in the long run because more cool things get created with it in this like weird laboratory that we're building up and i feel like the model of i create ip and i need to protect my ip

[41:46] is very much coming from a place of fear you're leading with fear and it's you know versus this new world that we're entering which is like actually i'm not fearful at all i'm gonna go and like open source basically my ip and i'm so confident that the experience that you know the core experience that i've created is so compelling that the more touch points the better so for disney um and actually i was at disney world in orlando um this past weekend that place isn't cheap um no i think it is not cheap um you know it's you know if you're going as ticket prices have gone way more than

[42:32] inflation over the course of history i i researched this recently for a piece that i wrote it's wild like you can easily spend you know you can either you can go to aspen or you can go to orlando basically um that's the vibe and and but it's a fantastic experience um and i recommend people do it especially product product people this is a side note product people like go to disney world and just see how much you know attention to detail uh you know the roads the sounds the smells the whole thing is immaculate but the point is it's super expensive and they're making high margin

[43:08] so be calm so disney be confident yeah it's um the analog to it that keeps coming to mind for me is this whole built-in public movement um i feel like 10 years ago it was like blasphemy to tell a founder that they should talk about what they're doing and their numbers or their metrics or like product releases whatever and now you see founders tweeting out their arr every month um products they're working on things they're growing our friend josh fabian at medify he literally like he sends out his investor updates publicly every month and that i mean ten years ago that's literal blasphemy because you'd just be

[43:48] terrified that some competitor would come steal it um but it's interesting it's all part of the same like open movement within the digital world i actually i i don't know i don't know my gut tells me that more open leads to more memes which will continue to drive growth of the ecosystem and i think that that will win in the long run um but i'm curious i'm really really curious to see i love this one this was a great topic i'm glad you're what do you got um anthony lewandowski do you know who that is i do but tell uh the listeners who that is i i love this [ __ ] man anthony

[44:30] lewandowski i hope i'm pronouncing that right anthony lewandowski was a or is a self-driving car engineer founder entrepreneur um most people would know him for the fact that he ran google's self-driving car business which became called waymo for a long time left in 2016 and started this business called auto that was doing self-driving trucks auto was acquired by uber shortly after founding and google did not like that that someone that was recently at google started a different business got acquired by uber who had um aspirations to build a large self-driving car business given its given its business model it turned into a massive lawsuit criminal investigation into lewandowski

[45:20] um 33 counts i believe he was charged with trade secret theft all of these scary things pled guilty to one count and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for for that charge but was then pardoned by our former president donald trump and ended up getting getting out of it anthony lewandowski is back in the public sphere he started a business i think it's called pronto ai which is also self-driving vehicles um but most interestingly he is now starting something um called pollen mobile which i saw in the news recently there was a techcrunch article about it which is basically a peer-to-peer open source wireless network and i want to

[46:06] talk about it because i think it's pretty fascinating um basically what they're doing is a it's crypto enabled and it is um something that they started because the cars that he was building at pronto ai actually needed good wireless mobile connectivity and so what they found was that it was hard to find in the bay area they were having issues with it so paul and mobile is um a system that creates incentives via cryptocurrency called pollen tokens um for people to put up basically little mini cell towers that are going to create wireless connectivity around the area so you go and spend money up front to buy

[46:49] um these systems i think they're calling them something funny like sparrows or hummingbirds or bees or some something like that there's some kitchen name to go along with pollen and you put one of these up you pay about you know 10 000 bucks or something to set one of these up and you get incentivized for providing connectivity to the network via pollen tokens which then provide the system with capacity people use it the tokens become more valuable as people are trading in them etc um i think it's pretty fascinating helium is the other one that i've seen doing this that was doing the like wi-fi connectivity i'm curious for your takes

[47:24] on it yeah my take is anywhere where there's incentives human incentives crypto can play a role there it's a really great way to incentivize people to do stuff so what i like about this idea is it feels very natural to crypto um so it makes a lot of sense to me i think it's a great idea yeah first off what you're a design geek website is one of the most beautiful websites i've seen pollen mobile dot io is the website p-o-l-l-e-n-mobile dot io website is gorgeous um and it lays out the whole thing the names they're calling them hummingbirds bumblebees and flowers which like we're gonna have

[48:13] to talk to them about the naming because that's that's a lot um but i do think it's really interesting like this whole idea of incentivizing people to create um these kind of decentralized pillars that create capacity for a network it's it's a pretty interesting use case helium has obviously been quite successful with um with what they've done on the wi-fi side but i thought this was kind of a neat um a neat angle i was actually thinking about i'm not in the bay area they're launching in the bay area but i was thinking about going and buying one of these things and just participating in it to learn because i

[48:48] find it to be a pretty interesting project yeah this website is gorgeous what i do like about this website there's there's something i like about it something i don't like about it what i like about it is you know you scroll down a little bit and says mind crypto from your phone and i think like that concept is just really compelling like i feel like you know a lot of crypto projects um [Music] and late checkout our firm is involved in a bunch where we'll see like it's basically just like too complicated like just like get it down to like five words um that anyone you know

[49:26] it's the feynman technique so exactly five exactly so i love that very you know that's cool what i don't like about it and it's the opposite of explaining like i'm five is i'm going you know i i went to like the how it works section i think um and it basically they have a bunch of uh kind of words that are here let me pull it up like earn bumblebees earn flowers earn hummingbirds it's like yeah no no go back to earning crypto from your phone you know yeah yeah they're definitely going pretty far with the whole pollen analogy a little further than i think but the concept itself people hate their

[50:12] wireless networks like people hate their phone companies nobody likes it and so the idea of like the centralized phone companies and in these little pockets you could create a decentralized version where basically if you're using the network you pay and pollen tokens and the providers of the capacity get paid in pollen tokens and pollen tokens appreciate it as people speculate in them or as people buy them to invest in them to potentially use later et cetera it's sort of a little interesting microcosm experiment helium i think andreessen horowitz backed and several others there's there's something interesting here i and i don't know anything about anthony lewandowski i just thought it was

[50:55] fascinating that he was back in the news because i remember reading all about him when he had the whole self-driving car thing happen so anyway i think this is an interesting one to follow um i'm personally going to poke around a bit if i was in the bay area i really do think i would buy one of these little systems because i think it's fascinating my advice for him is find a new name like uh the web the website paulinmobile.io like i feel like what he needs to do and the team needs to do is like generate a lot of credibility and like maybe there's a uh like an old

[51:30] telecommunication darling company that he can go and buy the name the rights for um that's like shut down or in a brand that's like shut down by the name and then you know you know who did this actually but like bad example is tai lopez so he bought uh radio shack i don't know if you saw that oh yeah i remember that i didn't see that so tai lopez you know famous youtuber has been buying up old brands and love him or hate him he's done a good job at buying a lot of these brands and he's turned radio shack into a uniswap competitor which is a

[52:10] uniswap for those who don't know is basically you know a crypto exchange competitor decentralized crypto exchange um but you'll go to radio shack because you're like i remember radio shack i have good you know yeah and i think radio shack correct me if i'm wrong but i think radio shack is one of those places that like people remember a distinct smell from radio shacks across the world i know i talked about smells with disney world um but it matters because it triggers your memory yeah yeah i mean i just don't know what he wants you know like the paul and mobile thing is it really going to be a core business or is

[52:50] it just that it's a spin-off you know they needed it for um for for the pronto ai thing like i saw a quote in one of the articles he said the reason why we did this is simple we needed reliable affordable mobile connectivity for our avs our autonomous vehicles and we couldn't find it so we built our own and realized it could be something others want necessity is the mother of invention so there's a couple lessons in there i mean i think first off kind of cool that he's just an enterprising founder and they needed something that was functioning for their actual core startup and they went and built

[53:23] something else that's functioning that other people might want that's pretty cool um and the whole concept of necessity is the [ __ ] i really agree i really like that it's the classic slack story i'm sure you know that story where so uh stuart butterfield founder slax you know started a gaming company called glitch raised a bunch of money for it wasn't going so well um but he had built uh slack like the chat up as a um way to communicate with his team members and you know pivoted it to slack um yeah from this game to slack and you know to your point around necessities the mother of all inventions

[54:11] they built it because they're just like it's too hard to collaborate and connect what a amazing pivot story i don't know how i didn't know that story but that's awesome also a canadian founder amazing amazing very cool um all right we've got a few minutes left what else do you have on your list i have one more but we can save it for another time what do you have no go go for it okay all right mine mine is web 2 and web 3 so i think you'll like it too um spotify uh a lot in the news recently for a variety of reasons i want to talk more about the creator side

[54:55] of spotify and how musicians are or are not earning money on the platform there was this awesome piece that triggered me thinking about this in the hustle i think it was where they talked about spotify's economic model and broke it down i've personally been fascinated by the music industry for a long time more recently i've become really fascinated by it because i started seeing this abundance of web 3 music plays which i'm sure you have i know you have a bunch of friends that are investing in the space you're investing in the space i've just seen more and more companies that are trying to disrupt that landscape and the music

[55:36] landscape is interesting and ripe for disruption for the exact reason that i want to talk about which is you have artists on one side that are creating the content creating the music you have consumers who love it and are you know placing value on it and really embracing it and then you have all this rent being collected in the middle and basically what's happened historically within the music industry is artists have actually received very little of the value they were creating for the consumers and if you break it down at its highest level i'm not like you know a fully web 3 red pilled person but the

[56:12] highest level of this is web 3 enables you to create a system where you can kind of cut out this middle layer of rent collection and aggregation and that the people on the two ends the artists and the consumers can get more of the value that they create within this ecosystem and artists in this case will be able to actually capture more of the value that they create for the consumers on the other end and the spotify example was so uh pronounced around it that i thought it was worth talking about which you know is basically um the numbers were just striking to me so recorded music revenues hit a high of

[56:51] 22.7 billion dollars in 1999 from then until 2014 they dropped all the way to 7.3 billion dollars basically fell off a cliff and that was with the rise of these new technologies that completely changed how artists were able to generate revenues spotify is the elephant in the room in this space in music streaming i think 30 of all streaming subscribers are spotify subscribers and basically they have a model for artists that works something like and it's a little more complicated than this but basically something like artists get this negotiated royalty rate on the overall spotify revenues and then an individual artist gets basically their percentage of the overall listens on the

[57:37] platform times that pool um only two percent of spotify artists are earning more than one thousand dollars a year and one tenth of one percent point one percent are earning over a hundred k per year um when you look at spotify relative to other music streaming platforms they are way lower than others way lower than tidal and some of the other players in terms of the average payout per 1000 streams for the artists so my question to you this was all really striking to me my question to you is can they sustain this as a platform and is something really broken here that needs to get fixed

[58:26] can they sustain this no they cannot sustain this i think the music the digital music experience is gonna look really different in five years than it does today when people talk about web3 [Music] they often talk about removing the middleman what they sometimes don't talk about is deepening the relationship between two parties which i think what you know we talked about incentives incentivization um in pollen it's it's a very similar thing so for example um there's this like band i like rex orange county um and you know i follow their youtube i follow their instagram i follow um or you know i follow i obviously listen to his music on spotify like

[59:23] i put in my calendar that on may 6 or whatever he's coming to miami and i want to go there and i buy a ticket and i'm just looking for ways to deepen my relationship and i can't i'm i'm giving him you know a fraction of a penny for every whatever 100 plays or whatever it is um so i think one thing that's gonna happen is artists big small medium are gonna have new tools to deepen their relationship sell more things with you know their true hundred thousand ten thousand hundred thousand fans so what's the right analog for this like i'm thinking naturally in terms of

[1:00:07] consumer businesses so um let's play let's play this out so you have um companies historically brands and uh they used to like you know try to have retail stores and they would sell through department stores and retail stores and they would try to access customers amazon comes along and is the elephant in the room and if you want to access the hundreds of millions of customers that go to amazon every day you have to sell through amazon but amazon owns all your data amazon owns your customers you don't own that customer and they're going to take a rent charge on it via their logistics fulfillment via

[1:00:45] their advertising everything you don't own that customer and now we're in a world where that amazon model which a lot of brands are still taking advantage of co-exists with brands increasingly finding ways to engage in an immersive experience directly with their customers and whether that's via direct to consumer sales whether that's by a small footprint retail whether that's via more immersive digital experiences nfts things of that sort they've found a way to sort of co-exist where those brands still sell through amazon for the most part because it's hard to turn down that massive pool of customers that they have but they've also done a great job of taking

[1:01:26] their the best brands have done a great job of taking their super fans these people that absolutely love them that would buy anything from them and turning them into direct customers where they can create more curated and beautiful amazing experiences with them i'm thinking of that as the likely outcome for where the music space heads which is spotify continues to exist because it will still have access to this massive pool of customers and massive pool of listeners but there will be more and more new platforms new companies new infrastructure rails that enable artists to engage in immersive experiences and deeper experiences with their listeners what do you think about i mean

[1:02:07] [Music] it's wild that is 2022 and the only way i could engage with the artists i love is buying tickets to a physical event buying a t-shirt or listening to the music where they don't get paid that much like there's just music is such a you know huge part of so many of our lives that like we are looking for ways to to you know it's a lifestyle right like it's literally a lifestyle some you know think of like um you know fish we've we've talked about fish the band um you know that is literally a lifestyle um and i think that what does the future of music look like

[1:02:53] i think like it looks a lot more like fish than it does how it is today and i think there's new ways to [Music] give people ownership in the upside of some of these artists i think um [Music] there's more intimate spaces for them to coordinate and and have fun and do things together you know and i think that spotify is gonna look just very like you know in five years from now we're gonna spotify it and and and just be like i i can't even believe that all you can do is like press a button and listen to it yeah it's kind of an interesting i completely

[1:03:32] agree with you it's it's sort of an interesting um example of why i think and i think you would agree with me web 2 and web 3 is actually not the dichotomy that some people want to paint it's actually that the two will continue to coexist and that you know the rise of any web 3 platforms businesses companies actually does not imply the demise of the web 2 versions or the web 2 ecosystem around that same space and i think that in the case of music that's likely the outcome is that the web 2 spotify will continue to exist and thrive within certain sub-segments but that the web 3 alternatives and web 3

[1:04:16] platforms that rise within the music space will rise and co-exist alongside and probably in some sort of violent synergistic environment actually in the same way that these new direct-to-consumer immersive experiences have risen alongside the amazon of the world so that's that's where my head is at personally i mean i agree man i agree i think uh if you're it feels very much like you know the last 10 years if you were a creator it just became more easy and easy to monetize and there's just been a lot of opportunities for creators the same thing is going to happen with musicians there's going to be more and more opportunities to

[1:05:03] monetize and i'm not saying that spotify like there's going to be this like web3 version of spotify that's going to come out i don't think that's the case i think that um like the future of the consumption experience and the future of the creator and or the musician and uh you know publisher relationship is is gonna change and some of it is gonna you know borrow elements of web 3 and some of it's going to borrow elements from web too and it's going to be this beautiful uh hodgepodge because one thing's for certain is that i think you and i know and everyone knows everyone knows that

[1:05:36] like uh you know the music industry in lots of ways is broken um and there's there's plenty of ways to uh there's plenty of obvious ways to fix it yeah well i know we're up against time this was [ __ ] awesome by the way i enjoyed doing this mailbag we should start doing this more frequently uh i feel like every week we end up talking about a bunch of this stuff offline and we should take it online because it's a lot of fun we can get in some cool guests to jam on the different things that are very topical and happening in tech or business or whatever the space

[1:06:10] is i think it'll be a blast to do i'm also now two and a half whiskeys deep and so i feel like it's probably time for me to sign off before i say or stupid time for a threat two and a half whiskey's deep [Laughter] sunday nights i honestly i had a bunch of whiskey companies reach out to me wanting to sponsor two whiskey's deep threads um i i wonder how many bottles of this kentucky out because i took a picture of it at the end of the thread and shared it as like what i was drinking i wonder how many bottles of it i sold

[1:06:39] um because they're pretty expensive bottles i wonder if i sold like a chunk i mean two whiskey's deep has like a pretty good ring to it too like you should register that it could be a podcast register register that domain if you haven't already two whiskey's deep dot e yeah i feel like i actually should i hadn't thought about it until just now i'm looking at the numbers on that tweet like i took a picture of of the um the bottle of this kentucky owl rye that i showed you earlier which is absolutely [ __ ] delicious by the way and i don't condone drinking underage or like in excess by the way

[1:07:17] i'm at home i'm not driving anywhere but um it's [ __ ] delicious uh and that tweet at the very end of the thread had five retweets and 329 likes it did uh pulling up the numbers seventy seven thousand two hundred fifty three impressions um that has to be worth a decent amount to the brand oh yeah that's huge i mean dude that's huge like i mean seven i don't know what it costs i don't know advertising well enough but those that number of impressions has to be a chunk of change i mean i love it i think uh you know i'm going to pull i'm going to pull up

[1:07:57] two whiskeys deep should i do the number there's also the question of um there's also the question of do you do twowhiskeysdeep.com is available free yeah i mean i can basically show mean right now for the price of less than a whiskey you can get the domains you might as well ah man interesting this is interesting um i might have to do this next time you see me i might be the proud owner of two whiskiesdeep.com hopefully someone doesn't beat me to the punch by the way there's a there's a newsletter that i subscribe to and my friend phil toronto uh he got me onto it it's called ungrabbed

[1:08:39] ungrab.com have you heard about this basically they send you an email this isn't sponsored or anything i just like like it and i always open it um it's two curated domains center inbox daily so they go and like buy domains that like sound good and for like between you know 90 and 200 bucks are basically like not expensive so like i just bought um you know colored pencil or was it no pencil pencil case dot co and and i just like i don't know i mean maybe an edit are domains an asset class that we should be trading like can you make money is there a

[1:09:25] liquid platform for asset like for domain names like people that squat on domains is there an actual liquid platform that exists to trade those domains and make money off of them there's marketplaces so like godaddy etc have marketplaces where you can list it and sell it does it feel like super old school and like very like ebay-esque yeah is there an opportunity to build like the micro acquire but for domains 100 yeah that seems like a cool opportunity i kind of want to poke around on that we should come back and i want to talk about that more on the next one um i want to poke around a little bit on that

[1:10:03] because i've seen all these people squatting on domains or squatting on ens and it seems like there's an opportunity around that yeah okay let's talk about it next time i gotta run all right yeah me too all right cheers over and out are you and your team still using your personal phone numbers for work do you call customers partners or candidates with your personal phone number do you find it hard to manage your work and personal calls when they're all mixed together on your smartphone well we have a solution today open phone you can use open phone to get dedicated business phone number and keep all your

[1:10:41] work conversations separate and organized open phone is an all-in-one business phone system that can help your startup look more credible from the get-go and it works right from your existing smartphone or computer each phone number comes with its own inbox for managing calls texts and voicemails all together making it easy to keep track of every conversation numbers can be shared with your teammates too make outgoing calls answer incoming calls and even respond to text threads together all from the same phone number you can even set business hours or mute individual phone numbers with a tap helping you silence work calls without losing touch with friends and family

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[1:11:59] cbd product so it actually gets absorbed into your body more effectively it tastes great and you're gonna love it i couldn't be more excited to bring a special offer to you all beam is offering 20 off any order of 75 or more for our listeners just go to beamorganics.com room and use code room at checkout again that's beam organics organixx.com room and use code room at checkout to get 20 off any order of 75 or more join our free community at trwih.com [Music] got

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