SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. It's Friday. And I can't believe how good this episode is. We're finishing the week strong. Let's not actually have we got we got Sunday coming up too. And that's a strong episode. But my pal Howard Linzen is with us. We talk about public markets, private markets, J trading, Palaton, web three, and he really got inside my head about what's going on with Kevin Rose's project and some of these awesome NFT projects and DAOs. It was really a great discussion of

SPEAKER_01: the crypto market, and then private markets and public markets. And the nature of those three things working together, we went through every single J trade, and we vetted them. And he gave me some of the best advice I've gotten today. To date, he gave me some of the best advice I've gotten to date about moving into this public market investing that I'm trying to do. And of course, it wouldn't be Friday without producer

SPEAKER_02: Rachel reporting on her okay boomer segment. It's gonna be a great episode. Please stick with us. This week in startups is

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SPEAKER_07: another episode of this week in startups. My guest today is Howard Linzen. You follow him on Twitter, Howard L I N D Z O N. He's the founder and general

SPEAKER_09: partner of social leverage. And he invests in seed stage startups. But also he's the co founder and chairman of stock twits, which I think you guys

SPEAKER_00: pioneered the dollar sign. With the ticker symbol on Twitter, you created

SPEAKER_11: that which 2008 we definitely did it was a way the first dollar sign other

SPEAKER_13: than like, that I know of an oh seven or oh six was to Fred Wilson, I tweeted I black buried him on Twitter, a dollar sign rim. I think the ticker symbol for blackberry at the time was rim because there was no iPhone, there was no iPhone, if you can believe it. Remember, Twitter was it was Blackberry, it was on

SPEAKER_01: Blackberry. I mean, the first version of Twitter was also SMS. So you get an SMS

SPEAKER_00: message and back then it cost you money. That's why I didn't angel invest in it because I was like, this is stupid. Every time I get an update, it's gonna

Chamath Palihapitiya: cost me five cents. I burned through 200 of these. And then I'm at five cents for each overage. This is dumb. I'm not going to

SPEAKER_24: invest in a smarter reason. I did pass Fred showed it to me at 20 million

David Friedberg: bell. And I was like, How am I gonna make money? How can I make money on that? That's true. You know, it's a funny story. It was 20 million and oh six valuation, literally, usually the

SPEAKER_00: valuations for five to 8 million at that time. And I was talking to 2 million dude, some cases. Yeah. But this is a Williams who had done a blogger and I was talking to have and he's like, Hey, Sequoia, Fred Wilson, what do you think? And I was like, Well, you know, Fred's King of New York. He's amazing. He's going to be super active. Sequoia, Sequoia. I mean, you can't go wrong there. So

SPEAKER_32: that's like a pick them, you know, like you could just flip a coin there. You're winning either way. Why don't you get both of them? It's like, I just want to have one. And he famously went with Fred Wilson, which was a crazy moment in time adventure because Fred was based in New York. And the idea that a VC would get on a plane and go across the country for board meetings.

SPEAKER_34: Fred wasn't doing that back then either. That was like one of the first things he had done.

SPEAKER_32: Yeah, Fred was I'm only investing in my backyard, right? He might do Boston, he might do the sea. My God, how the world has changed in private markets, we're gonna get into private markets, we get to public markets, could use a little mentorship here, because you've always done both. And I just want to start out with how is private market investing and public market investing analogous? In other words, what are the things that never change about making a great investment? But then what's different? And how do you switch your your your modalities and your strategies when you're going from private to public?

SPEAKER_24: Well, I mean, I appreciate you asking. This is a constant

SPEAKER_13: learning environment, right? We just went through a period where some of my favorite people, like I was blown away by podcasts, who

SPEAKER_24: you've had them on your podcast altimeter, like I think they're super, some of the smartest people are down 50% in the last year. So, so before I say I know what I'm doing, like, this is really hard to do, both private and public. But like, when you combine the two, they really are different, right? So I started from the public market side, you know, when I started with an MBA, and whatever, all the fancy degrees, it was like, you know, the world was, there was no internet. So you could value companies based on, you know, a growth company was a store like a gap or a restaurant, and you could just figure out their growth by how many stores that was a growth company before the internet. So so so value and companies was a lot different. And the private markets hadn't developed that much. And VC in the 90s still wasn't a thing right until until the internet. So let's talk about it then post 2008, where it really started taking off for angel investors started taking off, even though it didn't become as big as it was, you know, but you know, post angel list, post GFC, where private investing and us investing cross, what do you call it? When you hybrid up across both private and public, the the angel investing was very different. What I loved about angel investing, even though I was wrong a lot, was you were in

SPEAKER_40: it for 10 years, one of the hardest things about investing in stocks, and we're seeing this play out in crypto is seeing the price, when you see the price of your thing every minute of the

SPEAKER_24: day, whether whether you love the company or not, and you're seeing this now as you trade is seeing the price changes, your mood changes, your behavior changes, you know, you probably are better at it than most because you play poker and you can you can separate what a chip is versus your money. But being a public market investor, I wasn't very good at, at least on the trading side, because you were always adding up your value, right? You can see what your portfolio is worth by the second. And for some people, that's great. They know how to separate their their their day to day P&L from their 10 year vision. For me, it was poison, right? For me seeing what, you know, being judged every day versus the S&P was just not healthy for me an angel investment. You know,

SPEAKER_42: as risky as it sounds, just made more sense to me because I did the

SPEAKER_24: work, I was committed in this idea or trend or in this team. And, you know, good luck getting out. So it was a portfolio approach where you really had to think through eight to 10 year

SPEAKER_40: exit strategies. And for my personality, and for the way I saw the world, private investing just made much more sense. This crossover world that's become famous before 2021 crash or 2022 has been around and it's a very special type of

SPEAKER_24: investors that can convince both their LPs to be liquid and public. It's very complicated. If you're going to do it professionally to value portfolios, you got to have all kinds of extra oversight and you have to have side pockets and side cards. It's very complicated to price your stuff. And they really are very different skills. So public, the main difference

SPEAKER_13: being like you and I in private, it's much easier to sit and deal with the day to day fluctuations when you know you can't get out. And when I think what we're seeing in crypto, sorry, what we're seeing in crypto is everybody's so excited. But you know what, the price is a curse, the price of your your token can be a curse, it's creating all kinds of short term behavior. And, you know, this whole idea that venture capital would now be public, and you can price things early may turn out to be the biggest flaw of

Chamath Palihapitiya: crypto. This is a really interesting that you bring this third

SPEAKER_01: discipline into a crypto because it combines the best and worst of both. If we look at private market investing, one of the great

SPEAKER_00: features is you talked about doing the work. Okay, we'll get into that in a minute. But you get to understand the founder, the market, the product, the product velocity, everybody's got different techniques here for making that early bet. And then you have no choice but to sit on your hands, maybe a secondary opportunity happens. But it generally only happens in your winners.

SPEAKER_46: But in 06, there was no such thing as secondary as there were

SPEAKER_39: second, there was second market, which then became, you know, didn't work in many ways. And then there's Angelus was I was I was

SPEAKER_24: there, luckily, early investor in, but and now there's a pretty healthy secondary market, but it's still very glitchy.

SPEAKER_32: It's not super fluid. And, you know, you do have opportunities from time to time. But it's not like a public market where you buy something and I had this happen just last week, I had my thesis, I'm really big on these streaming services. And we might as well get right into it. I believe that somebody will get to a billion paid subscribers. This is my thesis, correct, somebody will get there and Netflix is at 220. The Disney cohort of ESPN, Hulu and Disney plus they're at 221. Today, they just beat out Netflix by 500,000 subs. I buy this Warner Brothers Discovery because I love Zaslav. I think that guy's a murdering, you know, assassin, like wartime Slootman style CEO. And boom, I'm down 20% the day, you know, two days after I buy it,

SPEAKER_54: which was down 20%, which, which one WBD.

SPEAKER_32: Oh, I saw that Warner Brothers. I only down. Okay, but you're right. I just want to recognize your point of the psych, psychological difference. I look and I see, okay, I make seven bets. I got six green, I got one red. All I can think about is the red one. All I can think about is why did I make such a decision?

SPEAKER_13: It may force you, especially if you're reporting to other investors, there's one thing, if you keep it to yourself, and you be, you know, people behave differently. And this is we can get

SPEAKER_40: into the psychology and why products like Robinhood or eToro were copy trading and all these things where, you know, everybody, everybody's an expert, you know, in Twitter and Stocktwits and Reddit, we get that like, no one shares their losers. But the

SPEAKER_24: whole point is, this is why I've always been bullish on the idea and you invested in Robinhood too, and why I started Stocktwits, you've got to learn this language. And part of the language is your behavior, right? Like it's the great, you know, we spent 50 years learning Spanish in China, teaching this stuff in schools, and we should be teaching kids this language. Yeah, because it's universal. It's global. You can do it yourself from anywhere. And, you know, we can argue whether it's addictive, some, some patterns of it are addictive. But let's be honest, this is a language that kids need to learn. Because the government printed money for 20 years globally. And kids are going to get this money from their hands that are down from their parents, or they're going to earn it. So the best thing they can do is learn how to invest. And of course, even trade if they have to,

SPEAKER_42: but seeing one red, you're seeing yourself, like you start, you start judging yourself and go, What did I do wrong? When sometimes the market is just very inefficient for six months, one year, even three years. And I can give a couple examples where it really affected me mentally in 99 and the internet craze, because I wasn't an internet person. So and I was running a hedge fund and like internet, I bought into the like, the idea of the internet was just going to crash too early. Because eyeballs, there's no revenue. And so I was like, Oh, the easiest thing to

SPEAKER_24: do is buy FedEx, at least they'll make money from everybody, you know, shipping products around the world, like they're going to be the ones that make money off Amazon from 1998 to 2000. When internet stocks are going up, FedEx was going down every day. So to me, there's like you it's like, I understood the internet was going to be great. But I bet on the company that I thought was a sure thing to make money off the internet. And guess what Yahoo and Amazon went up 1000% or 10,000% and FedEx went down. So what you're seeing is something that everybody should learn, right,

SPEAKER_11: which is how you're going to react when you see red, and you don't understand why it's red.

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SPEAKER_00: twist real human insights. Yes. And I it's this is we call it in poker tilt control. Because you could have aces and somebody makes a terrible all in call with you. And you've got them dominated your 80%. You're 90% to win. And then as we learned in the Trump presidency, like he had a 20% chance, then a 25, then a 30 35% chance, and people are all

SPEAKER_68: giving Nate silver a hard time. And he's like, I told you we had a 35% chance. Have you not ever rolled the dice and seen a one third chance come up? Like a one third chance is not the

SPEAKER_00: majority, but it's significant. And I have this experience with private companies, but it happens only at the end, when they

SPEAKER_71: shut down, you have liquidity choices, obviously, should I have

SPEAKER_24: sold? I could have sold. And so those are the other differences between public and private markets when you have a chance to sell to you sell in the public markets and market opens every day and in crypto market, it's open 20. We could argue I've long thought that having markets open twice a week. I know that no one will ever vote for that because there's so many jobs at stake. But like, do we really need the markets open 24 seven 365? How productive is that? Like seeing Apple's price every minute versus twice a week, does it really make a difference? And wouldn't it be better for a lot of these things if they weren't priced every minute? So those are going to debates that are going to now go on forever because of crypto, but like beating yourself up. The idea of the public markets is, is betting on the US economy. And somehow we've lost, you know, sight of that and like the gambling and gamification of the market. It is what it is when you and I can't change it. So all you can do is what you're doing is learning how to do it and then trying to control your emotion. And for me, the reason I've chosen Netflix out of those three, you have and I've been wrong. Yeah, please. Last month is, I prefer to bet on pure strategies. And so Disney has the advantage of being a conglomerate in that they can send people because of the Disney brand to the streaming server. But when you look at their financials, it's a conglomerate. So so whereas Netflix, if I want to bet on streaming, listen, you're going to go through periods where, you know, they've made strategy mistakes. But I think long term

SPEAKER_40: Netflix is in the best position to get to that number, because I agree with you on there's going to be close to a trillion or close to whatever a billion, a billion subs, a billion subs. And all

SPEAKER_24: right, this has been a horrific year, because of certain things. But I think Netflix will go linear, Netflix will go ads, Netflix has

SPEAKER_42: international. And I think the other thing working for Netflix long term is to talk to talk a vacation, meaning in a Web 3

SPEAKER_24: world, we all like to make some people like to make fun of it. I don't anymore. In a Web 3 world, Netflix will be able to buy 30 communities that have and tie them in through Web 3 and through wallets and NFTs to do better algorithms. So when I open up my Netflix account, I will be able to see stuff from around the web and my Netflix account. And so I do think that Netflix has that advantage of focus. But I agree also with why you like it in investing, as you learn, once you get past owning 10 stocks, you should really start thinking, why do I own more than 10 things?

SPEAKER_00: Okay, this is great, because that was gonna be one of my questions, I have said, I'm gonna go maybe try to build up 20

SPEAKER_01: names, 20, learn, and then pair it back down, and double down on the winners. Because what I learned in private markets was, when you have a winning company, you have to increase your position or at least defend your position with pro rata, and try to go super

SPEAKER_00: prorata. And you know, I had these early winners, whether it was Robin Hood or Uber thumbtack, and they did great for me, but I never even thought about pro rata. Now I have these great winners. And I see myself building my position up going

SPEAKER_32: from 5% ownership to 10. Because everything I've learned is if it's a winning company, and you can put more money into it, and you've already identified it, you've vetted the founders, you vetted the strategy, you vetted the team, you, you don't understand the consumers, keep building that position. So you think 10 is a number you can keep track of. And that is just a way to

SPEAKER_75: Honestly, you can't. And in a world of Cuban is Mark Cuban has

SPEAKER_42: talked about Americans, unfortunately, are fortunate. Well, I think it's all fortunate. I'm Canadian living in America. So when you walk into a Walgreens, there's just too many choices, like we're paralyzed, right? So you go find a bandage, should I get a Power Rangers bandit, or a super bandit, or a big band, this one, colors and ribbons. And, and, and that's the stock market too, right? Like, so at the end of this long bull market that we've had, we can argue about a lot of things, but we had a really good bull market. And most people's

SPEAKER_24: portfolios by last year, we're just spread too thin. We had too many ideas, we had too many companies, we had too many stocks, we had too many stories. That's when bear markets get you. And it'll end up pruning you down anyways, because after six months of losing money, go why the fuck do I own this versus, you know, and so those few times during a bear market where markets truly get correlated, and everything goes down together, you realize that owning 50 things just didn't diversify you at all. So I think the best thing is whether it's 30 stocks or 20

SPEAKER_40: stocks, whatever your goal is, then you know, once a month or once a quarter with your financial advisor yourself, go through it and be honest with yourself. It's just the best use of these 10 or 15 or 20 names. And, and it's like gardening, if you don't

SPEAKER_81: garden, your weeds will take over and it's your portfolio, it's really the same stuff.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is what I'm starting to realize about the streaming services. So I do and then we'll move on to some of the other names that I've been picking and some other parallels with the streaming services. It feels to me like we have never seen a billion subscription service, I was trying to figure out what are the largest subscription services in the world, right?

SPEAKER_86: Spotify is or I love Spotify 500 million.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And so you start thinking about how many people could

SPEAKER_32: subscribe to something. And the world really hasn't seen that even in the early days, people like HBO or Verizon or AOL, you were talking about 10s of millions. Now we're in a world where hundreds of millions of people subscribe to something. Imagine if a billion people are, what kind of cash flow? And what kind of moat does that build? It feels to me like the the the only thing I can think of is really what Facebook would accomplish with two or three billion people using their platform, Google with their search dominance and Chrome dominance and YouTube dominance and Amazon. Those are the only corollaries, I think in the world of products used by more than a billion people, let alone subscribe to by a billion people and those things, they don't seem to die or get dislocated. I don't know. What

SPEAKER_91: do you think of this thesis?

SPEAKER_46: Well, we said that until tick tock, right? So I agree with

SPEAKER_92: you. And then tick tock comes like, everybody's trying to break up Facebook, guess what broke up Facebook, tick tock

SPEAKER_24: so petition, yeah, yeah competent. So even when you're trying to not so let's, let's think about how the world works in mysterious ways, right? Like Jurassic Park, how many people have said break up Facebook over the years? Guess what broke up Facebook, tick tock? No, no anti. Listen, shouldn't we have broken them up when we did? Yes. But talking about it now when tick tock's already done the work of the government is one thing. Now, the question I would have, the bigger question is why the is tick? Like of all the things America needs, should tick tock be one of them? No, let America build it. If China does. So this is the only time I ever get political is around this type of question. If they have walls in China, a digital walls, we should have digital walls, but they should be helping Facebook. So there's this this question right now, but tick tock disrupted Facebook, because tick tock created MTV for every single person. If tick tock created your stream based on whether we like whether we like the algo or not, they're the first company, it seems to have created a different stream for everybody. Yes, create a trending around everybody that blows my mind. I wish I was a user and was young enough to appreciate it or use it or care about it. But that is just when you thought it couldn't happen, it happened. And everybody's pretty amazing. And I think what tick tock is doing is really going to change the way web to companies work. So I have this thesis, where web to the

SPEAKER_40: survivors, the Airbnbs, the Spotify, the Netflix, the Google's, the Facebook's are only going to get stronger, right? This bear market really helps those incumbents, right?

SPEAKER_99: Why does it do that? I mean, it's pretty obvious, but explain it to people who might not understand that.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, well, again, this is new. So this is my own thesis, right? When oh, wait happened, the Great Financial Crisis happened, the world was a different place, right? You know, the name of my firm is Social Leverage. But pre 2008, the world was driven by financial leverage, right? Where people stacked debt on top of debt, and they bought buildings, and they stacked their balance sheets, there was no such thing as a social network or this what you could get from that social leverage, right? No one could start a podcast, even though lots of podcasting companies had started, including audio, which became Twitter, everybody was trying to create media, but there was no social network to spread. So

SPEAKER_42: what worked was buying radio stations, and like owning the stack, and like owning the buildings and using debt and using leverage, and then a wait happened. And now we have social

SPEAKER_24: leverage, which was like, you could be one like you and I like we could be a brand of one. And then you have Shopify now all these tools to do it. Now you have tick tocker influencers. So we've gone completely to this world of social leverage, where your only risk is your time, right? You go down rabbit holes, you go down the wrong rabbit hole, three years go by in your life, and it was just your time that went. But at least these companies don't have debt, right? These new companies are magical. Like how do you kill Apple? Only Apple can kill Apple because they have 400 billion in cash, right? There is no debt. So all these companies have so much cash, which is different than the last crisis we had, which was a way which was driven by financial

SPEAKER_40: leverage. And so this new era of a bear market that we're in is this kind of rotating bear market or this tech crash that we kind of just went through, or in the middle of, I can't see how

SPEAKER_24: you disrupt Apple. Like this only hurts. This only hurts. The smaller companies because they just can't compete anymore.

SPEAKER_68: Yeah, the big companies have the war chests, they have the network effects, as you've never seen this. It's just bananas.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And they get to deploy capital for talent acquisition for marketing for R&D. You know, in a down market, you're probably getting two or three for one for each dollar you spend than in a peak market. So that just solidifies the winners. We saw it with

SPEAKER_01: Facebook and Uber and Airbnb during the down market, we saw it during these crises. They just were able to spend through the crises and grow. It's been hot as heck this summer. And I've been working my tail off. You see me talking about it. You see my photos. I've been out there on the mountain bike. I've been doing hiking. And you know what I've been at elevation. And so I have needed to stay hydrated. Also with this crazy work schedule. If you want

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SPEAKER_01: Think about that. 25% off that is hugely generous liquid IV.com promo code twist 25% off. Thanks, liquid IV. So let's go into what you think of all of it. We'll talk about the downturn here. All of these big companies saying hiring freeze. And Sundar saying, I

SPEAKER_32: don't know if my employees are that productive here at Google. Maybe everybody needs to work harder. And then Zuckerberg is like, Hey, everybody, if you're not coming to the office, or if you're not working hard, you know, this is not the company to be in. Then somebody in the back of the room is like, Hey, can I take my COVID days? Are we gonna have COVID days? And he's like, what are you talking about? Like COVID days? COVID is over. Like, you don't get emotional days anymore. You need to come to work. We need to perform our stocks been crushed. What do you

SPEAKER_01: think of this work from home trend combined with this down market specifically around talent and young people?

SPEAKER_42: Well, I have I own and operate to millennials. So I'll be clear up front that that is, you know, I see this firsthand, right? I boomeranged. I've seen everything. I've seen all the terms because my daughter's downstairs right now. But I have a 24 and a 23 year old. So I have this

SPEAKER_24: privilege of kind of seeing, unfortunately, unfortunate this this happened millennial behavior. Yeah, maybe they're maybe they're Gen Z, but I call millennials. So, so I don't like anything that I've seen. Now that may not be their fault. Right? Just like Elvis Presley. And there's always to be there was always somebody to hate, right? Like George Carlin. We hate the we hate Facebook and the smartphone, the old people, right? We hate Fox News and CNN. And for good reason. But what are you going to do take take the phone away from these kids? It's a magic wand. Like how do you take magic out of a kid's hand? So it's we're stuck with it. And you and I grew up with the BlackBerry and we thought we would never give up our BlackBerry. And along came the smartphone. And then we thought we'll never give up our smartphone. Then the notifications we turned I turned mine off. And I turn my phone over. I'm not looking at my phone right now. I'm bothered that there's comments going on in the side. So I think we go back into this, into this new world where people like this, this podcast generation is phenomenal. Who cares how many people are listening to us? In fact, you and I can have an hour conversation that, that people may get something out of it. And you and I get smarter from it is the power of the internet. Okay. So, so with going back to these kids and what this is, I tapped out in like, oh, oh, 2014, because whenever slack came out, blew my mind. I hated it, hated the whole idea that someone would, an employee would ping Stockton saying, oh, the train's down. I'm not coming into work today. I'll just be on slack. That was like when I was like, what? That's not acceptable. When I had my first job, I had to show up.

David Friedberg: Yeah. Figure it out. Just take the bus. So WFH work from home.

SPEAKER_24: The first time I saw that I go, I think I'm too old to be an operator because I wanted to kill the first time person that I heard say that. So I was already out of the, out of the game in 2014. And that's when I quit basically and said,

SPEAKER_42: someone come run this because I don't know how to talk to these people. I don't know how to mentor someone over slack. I don't know how to, to do any of these things. So I'm not going to be the right answer here. But what I would say is, you know, Fred wrote about it recently to some form of hybrid, any motivated person. That's a climber should want to be in the office because that is where you see the boss.

SPEAKER_65: Well, you should want to be around the boss or the nexus of power people. Yeah. It's not just political. It's like, how do you learn? Right. Mentorship.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And I'm not saying a head of sales can't be over zoom, because there are going to be new types of successful salespeople, no doubt.

SPEAKER_42: But you got to have both. And I think both skills matter.

SPEAKER_24: So I think just we're heading to a point where in-person skills will matter. Well, you'll be able to get really far ahead with interpersonal skills and showing up and just getting done. But so I kind of lie in the middle. I think it's very hard to operate a business in 2022.

SPEAKER_42: So I actually don't begrudge all the confusion going on, because how do you respond?

SPEAKER_24: You know, we've called it fun ployment. People are overpaid, in my opinion. Not in an over-over, but in the engineering slash design slash space.

SPEAKER_42: Let's say I just have to say that people, companies can't as much cash as out there. You can't afford to pay engineers 300 grand a year.

SPEAKER_24: And that's where Web3 comes in and offloading stuff to the blockchain. It's not perfect yet, but there's going to be this hybrid company, just like there's going to be a hybrid workforce that you can offload a lot of the stuff to blockchains and your community build stuff. And you don't have to have them on your payroll. So, so everybody making fun of Web3.

SPEAKER_71: It's just because Web3 is way ahead of the hype. It's the hype's too far ahead of the internet on this.

SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, and if you look at what's happening with Dolly, I don't know if you've watched this thing. We could say, Hey, give me a picture. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_127: I read Hoffman was talking about it.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it's basically like, I don't know if you remember the first thing that came out from the open AI program, but you could just say, write me some text, you know, in the voice of Jake, Al or Howard or Fred Wilson, and it would like, you know, be able to do that. And it could finish sentences based on this corpus of, you know, all the written written words on Wikipedia, et cetera. Well, now you could say, Hey, give me a painting of, you know, this person in Monet style and boom, all of a sudden you got it. Yeah, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that that's already starting to happen.

SPEAKER_01: There are developer kits where, you know, AI is finishing code for developers as they write.

SPEAKER_00: It's predicting what they're going to write. Just like your Gmail is predicting your next three or four words. It's going to predict your next two sentences.

SPEAKER_42: So people are chiming in and we're wrong about scale. People aren't listening. The web three or into blockchain is great for tasks, not at scales where you can offload things like payment.

SPEAKER_24: If you're a company of one and half your customers want to pay in crypto and not pay square, you know, not pay those fees. Great. And they want to pay gas fees. Great. This is just another choice. This is another button on the web. Call it web three. Omen, I call it more internet. It's just more internet. There's been three points. I'm an old loser. I'm an old man, but there's three points in my life where I've had an aha moment. The first was YouTube. And I called Fred Wilson. I said, Fred, I'm going to build CNBC on YouTube. And Fred said, genius. Go do it. And gave me money. And we started Wall Street. YouTube changed the world. That was the beginning of web two. And everybody thought it was stupid.

SPEAKER_13: And everybody thought Google was stupid for paying 1.6 billion. One of the great investments of all time. Okay.

SPEAKER_99: Greatest. I think it's top three acquisition.

SPEAKER_13: It is. The way Facebook's destroyed Instagram at many levels. Google is growing. YouTube is getting better at many levels. Of course. Best acquisition of all time. Maybe maps and Android. Like Google's.

SPEAKER_139: Android is up there for sure.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah. And maps.

SPEAKER_42: Keyhole that they bought out of Arizona. So in a world that YouTube came along. Okay. It was a big bang moment for web. The moment for me in web three is even though a top shot.

SPEAKER_24: I thought it was a joke. The top shot and the flow and the NBA top shot. I really feel like NFTs and what they mean for a small community.

SPEAKER_42: That could be big one day. I think everybody's overusing it. But I think the ability for someone like Gary Vee or Kevin Rose or you eventually,

SPEAKER_24: or me to, or anybody to take this community that they built and offload a lot of the work to the blockchain and I have to give it to Facebook, you know, use it like a decentralized

SPEAKER_11: type of discord product that will eventually exist. Or, you know, again, I don't, I haven't seen it yet, but we're so close.

SPEAKER_09: Oh, you could feel it. They're triangulating around something very. Triangulating.

SPEAKER_42: And so there was a lot of hype. I kind of got lucky in some of it by instead of participating personally in crypto, I invested in funds and I got lucky.

SPEAKER_133: Like I'm not smart. I just diversified.

SPEAKER_01: Well, you went to where the energy and the intelligent people were. I didn't understand.

SPEAKER_143: So I just let other people play. Well, you know what?

SPEAKER_32: It's a super valid way to do it. Yeah, it's gonna work. And then I, it's interesting. You bring up NFTs.

SPEAKER_68: I literally have been a crypto cynic, um, because of all the griffs and et cetera, but

SPEAKER_78: I said crypto cynic.

SPEAKER_11: Crypto is not the right word. Crypto is bullshit. Like what matters is the blockchain and what matters is the ability to offload work to machines.

SPEAKER_13: Right. For a small company. So I don't have to pay 10 engineers, 300 grand a year to start stock twits.

SPEAKER_24: Right. The problem was, and again, this is learned by doing the problem with wall strip and why I sold wall strip is I had no revenue. Like YouTube was just coming out. So what am I going to do? Get to a, 20,000 people watched a good show. You're not going to build a business on that. So you, we sold to CVS when I started stock twits.

SPEAKER_42: The big mistake was, and no one knew at the time, it seemed like a great idea. And VCs love the idea, but like, if ads are going to be your ultimate model, we've learned that that's a bad business, even for Twitter, because they're undervalued because Google

SPEAKER_40: and Facebook took all the, and now Tik Tok will take all the ads. And we're seeing that with snapchats price and Pinterest scale business.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah. And those players have suck business. So, so people that wanted a bit subscale, people had the talent like me to just build a subscale business, but had like passion and creativity are fucked by web two, because it was all AWS and Facebook and the social networks and the logins, they owned you. Right. And, and so you're kind of puttering along at web three promises to offload a lot of that, that you would spend at AWS and through the payment networks. And that's what people should be excited about is taking those expensive parts of web 2.0

SPEAKER_149: and kind of defraying those costs. So you can build a leaner web company. That's what web three is about. So that's very interesting.

SPEAKER_151: I haven't heard people have that take, but it does resonate with them because it's not

SPEAKER_124: in their interest because they have 600 million to deploy and they're over investing at over

SPEAKER_24: valuations in hype. Whereas web three should mean how to, how do the, the people that lost in web two, that had the passion and idea that were powered by web two. And once you start seeing those builders of web two, that kind of got run over, whether it's dig by Reddit or, you know, once you start seeing those people reinvent themselves, even 20 years later, you realize those same entrepreneurs that understood the web and the community are coming back and doing it a second time, even in their older age is very exciting to me. And I'm, but I don't think I want to build the next Facebook. I don't dilute myself that we're going to invest in the next Facebook. I just think it's a different, more fun web. And so when the car, when the automobile first came out, if you, if, if you had to drive it in the dark or it was raining, it didn't work. There were no windshield wipers. There were no lights, right? You were just happy that the car wet. And that was the internet web three is just fog lights.

SPEAKER_11: It's it's windshield wipers. It's all those things that made the car, the great thing that it is today. All right.

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SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I think these NFTs when they have rights associated with them, smart contracts associated with them, decentralized, you know, management of the Dow's. And that's really what I find it fascinating. Imagine somebody had a golf club where you and I want to start a poker club or a golf club.

SPEAKER_00: And we say, yeah, we're going to email our thousand closest friends get 200 of them to put up 25k each. All of a sudden, we've got this cash sitting around and we then go build this club. And now your membership is your membership. You decide what you want to do with it. But hey, there's a smart contract that gives for writer first refusal to another member to buy it at the same price within seven days of somebody else putting a bid in.

SPEAKER_32: And you're like, okay, how do I build that? It's like, well, the infrastructure is here. Okay, whose infrastructure is where do I put my credit card? It's like, oh, no, you just pay a fee. And it's all done. And it's nobody's infrastructure. What do you mean? It's nobody's infrastructure? Well, it's not nobody's. It's everybody's. I still don't. It's like a Laurel and Hardy routine. Like, it's everybody's infrastructure. It's nobody's infrastructure. It's like, yeah, there's just some servers up there. And some people run those servers. And we don't know who they are. And I think a lot of magical mix.

SPEAKER_165: A lot of small companies will have centralized databases for your email and phone number. And then they'll have a blockchain database where people tell you private stuff that they don't want you selling.

SPEAKER_24: And you don't know that part of their world. So I see all kinds of communities where that's possible. I think two big bang moments in crypto for me were were even though I'm not participating in board apes, the idea of of collectibles is cool. And what board apes did was like being, I think they may, I hate what they did later by raising outside capital.

SPEAKER_124: Cause the whole point of what made four days was genius because they were collecting a royalty every time it traded. That was a genius. They didn't need outside money, but they also made it, but, but I'm not going to judge them for taking it. I'm just saying once they took it, it was not interesting to me because the whole genius of that was the system.

SPEAKER_24: We can collect 20%. So that was a big bang moment. I hated where they went with it. God bless them. The second big bang moment was when my friends, Mike and, and Serge sent me links to our Adam, but some next sent me links down. And I, and I loved the, I don't like DAOs, but I love the idea. Explain the idea.

SPEAKER_169: The links.

SPEAKER_24: I was it's, I didn't, when they pitched me on it, I'm like, guys, I don't want to be paid 2000 in Ethereum for golf. I loved everything about the golf community idea of being a member of something. I hated the idea that they were going to go buy a golf club. I I've been in the golf business a long time. I was an investor in golf. Now I know the tee time business. I know how hard that business is. The last thing I want to do is trust some people to build a golf course for me. Cause I don't think it'll get built. I think it's hard to run a golf course. It's not just a bar and food. You've got grass greenskeeper, the weather location. So, so I love when they pitched it to me, I said, I love everything about this. But don't build a golf course, just build like a community. And maybe one day you'll buy a golf course, but you don't have to promise that upfront. So I didn't buy a membership, but I think what combining what, what, what. NBA top shot is with a public blockchain. With board apes. With what links down is doing. These comp the triangulation that you mentioned. The, the, if you can really look at the kernels of things that are happening around web three. I think the great entrepreneurs are about to attack in a way that creates these hugely profitable.

SPEAKER_11: Quick businesses that don't need a lot of capital. And then they can iterate on their businesses as they grow.

SPEAKER_24: And that's, what's exciting about web three or more web to me.

SPEAKER_83: Okay. And one of the key issues here, of course, is, are these securities?

SPEAKER_01: We have had a, I would say, laissez faire, regulatory environment, where there's just been no clarity. And then all of a sudden, you have this XRP lawsuit, because XRP is obviously centrally controlled. Uh, and they own the bulk of it. They control it, et cetera. It's obviously doesn't pass. Uh, you know, mustard. Uh, like Bitcoin and Ethereum where nobody's in charge. It's, you know, not a, uh, doesn't feel like a security. But coinbase has people front running the market. Open C had some people doing insider trading. And now the justice department, the sec and everybody's like, you know what? This has gone on long enough. People have lost 90% of their money. There are actual victims. Now we're here. Uh, and by the way, these eight. They're not really here.

SPEAKER_13: They're lazy. They're understaffed.

SPEAKER_40: Okay. And he's not a lawyer. Gensler's not a lawyer, which is a big mistake to not have someone who truly is a securities lawyer running the sec. The amount of fraud and shenanigans is endless, right? As a founder of stock twits and someone who spends all day on thin twit and denounces

SPEAKER_42: Reddit and all this stuff, even though Reddit has done some amazing things.

SPEAKER_24: You know, we, we've gotten what we've asked for, which is just, that's what crypto was.

SPEAKER_13: You want 24, seven bulletin board markets. I could have told you where that was going to head. That's going to head up with like scams galore. Okay. You want endless supply? Guess what happens with endless supply? Zero pricing and all your.

SPEAKER_175: Anonymity or quasi anonymity. So this was a disaster.

SPEAKER_42: That's why I avoided it. And you know, I'm, I'm still very skeptical of it, but the next iteration.

SPEAKER_13: Will be less securities, right? Like I'm hiring lawyers to make sure my NFT isn't a security, meaning I'm hiring lawyer to bless this as a non security.

SPEAKER_24: Meaning I don't want this trading, but trading is part of what a good NFT is. If you add endless value. So you think about American express in a world where everybody can create a platinum community

SPEAKER_42: and offload a lot of that to the blockchain, including you or me or Kevin Rose or anybody. Um, can create the, what is Amex is great tagline that stood the test of time. Membership has its benefits and who own that tagline Amex. Okay. And in web three, everybody can create, uh, communities where membership has its benefits. The job of the community or the person running the community or the data or whatever you want to call this is continue to add benefits to that community.

SPEAKER_178: And if that, if you add enough benefits and you create true scarcity, guess what happens to the price it goes up?

SPEAKER_180: Yes. Okay. So, so there's actual real world value.

SPEAKER_11: Correct. And so utility is what web three should be about.

SPEAKER_24: The VCs have made it about this new fangled thing. And I've avoided the hype because I don't want to pay over. I don't want to overpay for things that I don't believe that the market size, but utility is undervalued. And I think where web three goes is to people that say, that's what I'm only going to have a thousand of these members and I'm going to create so much benefit that if someone moves or just doesn't want to be part of the community, there's a market for it because there'd be happily someone that steps in and those trade, they don't trade every day, but then you have

SPEAKER_124: a happy community. And so I think that's where we go. It's not going to be, I think. You're going to do your own.

SPEAKER_83: You're going to do your own like Kevin Rose's moon. Yeah.

SPEAKER_24: I think what I, what I'm seeing him don't do with proof. What I've seen links to do what I've seen Gary V do what I've seen myself and what I wish I could do at stock twits and wall strip and my blog at Twitter. And what I've seen board apes do. And when I've seen flow do at blockchain, I think if you take the pieces of this and really have a community and explain to them why you're doing something and, and be upfront with them about the steps that you're going to take, which I've done at stock twits, which I've done on my own blog, but now I can possibly do it scale. I'm using web three. Why not?

SPEAKER_34: Like I'm actually excited about starting something. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09: It's fascinating to me to think about when the membership is in control of the experience,

SPEAKER_01: the product, and then they have some liquidity.

SPEAKER_00: Hey, if, if this isn't working for you, you could sell it, or if this becomes too valuable and you need to sell it, you could sell it, or you could fractionalize it. So many really interesting ideas. Yeah.

SPEAKER_165: What happens is of course, people will speculate the engineers know how to buy these things.

SPEAKER_124: And I can't help that.

SPEAKER_24: Like, I don't know, like, we don't have all the answers, but what I can tell my community is don't speculate. Like, I don't know, like I'm only making 2000 of these. I hope I'll try and give them to the people that really want them.

SPEAKER_124: And hopefully you don't speculate. Right. So, but you can't control speculation.

SPEAKER_06: Who are you going after with this? It's just going to be Howard, uh, coin.

SPEAKER_124: I was thinking about a comedy angle and a cycling and I'm I've invested in so many, like

SPEAKER_13: e-commerce ideas and I've, you know, stuck to, you can't, so I it's, it's a work in progress, but I've never had more fun.

SPEAKER_00: I love the idea of the comedy one. Cause you have these great comedy festivals. Right. And that could be truly amazing.

SPEAKER_85: If you got to have access to comedians. Well, not just this.

SPEAKER_127: So imagine a world and I, and I'm probably not going to do this, but I'm, and someone's going to do this in common. Imagine a world.

SPEAKER_24: Imagine a world where I, I just did stand up comedy to, I rented a club. I rented a club. Yeah. So I rented a club in New York called the stand and it just made it for friends. And we had eight real professional standups and I got to do three minutes.

David Friedberg: Okay. Cause I own the night. How'd you do? How'd you do? I didn't bomb. That counts. It was a friendly crowd and people know me.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah. People know me. Okay. So, so it worked and it was thrilled to, to like do it and then be roasted by other comedians who didn't know me and they were making fun of NFT.

SPEAKER_42: The comics were happy. They get paid. I was happy. I got to do it on a professional stage. No one was hurt. Everybody had a good time. Okay. So imagine. If I, if I were to build the comedy community that I want to build, it would start with a newsletter. It could be on sub stack. It could be on beehive. It could be on whatever program. And now I send out an email. I said, listen, we're going to, we're going to have a thousand members and anybody

SPEAKER_24: who's a member, I'm going to create this class pass for comedy that allows you discounts at all these comedy clubs around the country. And I'm going to go to the beginning. There may not be any benefits, but this is my goal. We're going to build a club one day where you're going to get you discounts. It's like triple a of comedy. Oh, and by the way, the next level, when, once we get, you know, once everybody's happy, we're going to create a second level. And that might cost 30 grand, but guess what that now that we have partnerships with 30 clubs for those holders of 30 grand, it's like a black card. And when you want to go on stage. Right. You can go on stage. So imagine, imagine having a comedy black card three years from now that you've earned and you're a standup comic and you never could break on stage. And you know, you're funny. You're funny. And you see that at, at the stand that Dave Chappelle showing up at nine 30 and you have a black card and you can do three minutes before Dave Chappelle. Would you do that? Of course you would do that.

SPEAKER_124: I guess you would invite you and invite all your friends. I would be your Instagram moment and you paid for it and you could get discovered. And it's a way to hack the system. And so I think those type of things, the gaming mechanics. Yeah.

SPEAKER_42: The gaming mechanics of it. This is all going to happen. And people are going to create these incredible communities and moments around this stuff.

SPEAKER_09: It's really fascinating. I think, you know, once we get through this, one of the nice things about the whole thing

SPEAKER_00: crashing is that I think the incentives that I can get resets it. Now you're back to builders and what's actually legal. And you got a little bit of a regulatory framework emerging. Yeah. And so, you know, and when people are new entrants are like, okay, hey, I don't want to get in the crosshairs of anybody. Make sure that this is clean to everybody.

SPEAKER_01: All right. Let's go through my portfolio really quick here.

SPEAKER_199: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: I'll give you my thesis. You tell me if you think good thesis or not. We did Disney already. I bought 250 shares.

SPEAKER_01: I'm up like 13%. A nice little modest.

SPEAKER_78: A lot of it is you bought it in June when everybody was selling July or this. Yeah. So the first lesson I would say, and I told my kids this is don't think about each

SPEAKER_42: stock. Think about red green. If you see the market red for a month in a row, two months in a row, right? Train yourself to just do the opposite. And when you see green endlessly for months and months on it, forgetting chat rooms, forgetting anything, take a little bit off the table. So train yourself to do the opposite. So the fact that you started in June proves that you have good instincts, right? You may not be good at stocks. None of us are that great at stocks. That's why the indexes exist, but you do have instincts. You do have a network that gives you insight.

SPEAKER_24: And you were attuned to the fact how negative you were and the people around you were. And you were seeing prices that you hadn't seen in years. And you did the opposite. So part of it, I said, this feels to me like Costanza. So part of good investing is to be Costanza and do the opposite. So just when you feel like puking, eat another sandwich, meaning, and especially if you own good companies and they're going to be around in 10 years, okay, if you've done your gardening. So the first thing you did right was start in June. So kudos for that.

SPEAKER_00: Okay, now I gave you my Disney premise. And my goal was in 10 years, I want to five x my money, beat the indexes, etc.

SPEAKER_68: So five x cash on cash is hard. That's what the top venture firms do.

SPEAKER_00: But I also want to learn and just understand these because I want to know when I should liquidate my private market companies when they go public as well. As we saw both of us early shareholders of Robin Hood, there were opportunities maybe to, you know,

SPEAKER_68: sell at 20 or $30 a share in the private markets. And now here we are, whatever we're trading at 10 or 12.

SPEAKER_00: I saw Amazon. And I thought to myself, there's one medical really great acquisition. And this guy Jassy seems to be firing on all cylinders.

SPEAKER_02: But the thing that I thought was a great moment in time was when I saw that they were going to get rid of Amazon basics. I said to myself, they're watching Lena Khan. They know the vector of attack. If they get rid of Amazon basics, and then they let everybody else fight it out. All those idiots who got to fight it out to sell a goddamn USB cable are now going to buy ads. So they win either way, but they remove the attack vector because they don't have a house brand. I thought somebody's thinking over there in a way that maybe Zuckerberg or Google aren't thinking about avoiding regulatory.

SPEAKER_32: Yeah. So I make a bet there. And I just think, my God, they got like, and then you see the cloud computing stuff and how that's growing. They just seem to be firing on all cylinders and excellence.

SPEAKER_21: That's why I bought Amazon. Yeah.

SPEAKER_127: I own Amazon part of why if your timing was good when you're buying companies like that, you have to buy them when no one likes them because there's no alpha when everybody likes them.

SPEAKER_24: They're, they're, they're incredibly fully valued.

SPEAKER_178: They can't afford to make mistakes.

SPEAKER_24: They are getting smarter. So I do agree with what you're saying. One medical is tiny in terms of what it could mean. And we all I've made some healthcare investments. It's a brutal space.

SPEAKER_133: Horrible space.

SPEAKER_217: Yeah, but I do own Amazon.

SPEAKER_133: So no argument there.

SPEAKER_00: And the reason I thought the healthcare thing was good was because I think the Amazon Prime franchise. Yeah, people are paying like 150 bucks a year for Amazon Prime. Now, it started at 40 50 60 depending on when you got in.

SPEAKER_221: Yeah, they keep boiling that frog.

SPEAKER_11: If they made Amazon Prime 250 right now, nobody's canceling like they made it two grand and called a platinum prime for people that want a one plus one medical same day appointment.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, wealthy people would pay that. So there should be tears. This goes to the Netflix. You know, you would read for changing his mind. Guess what?

SPEAKER_42: Everybody Steve job changes mind eventually.

SPEAKER_127: Sure he did. You have to change your mind and sometimes you're wrong. And so with new information, that's what you do.

SPEAKER_24: Reed stepped in. He's changing his, he's changing the model. What Amazon's doing.

SPEAKER_227: By adding advertising, you're saying.

SPEAKER_124: By adding advertising. Some people should pay nothing and some people will pay. I'll pay Amazon.

SPEAKER_24: I'll pay Netflix $300 a month if they make my algorithm better and you can give me more content. Like I trust them, you know. So there should be tears.

SPEAKER_09: Absolutely. There's going to be an Amazon prime platinum. There's no doubt in my mind. Yeah. And I think.

SPEAKER_230: That's my bet is that there'll be Amazon platinum and I'm happy to pay that price.

SPEAKER_83: We talked a little bit about Warner Brothers discovery.

SPEAKER_230: I just don't know the name. So here's the thing.

SPEAKER_83: You got Zaslav who ran discovery. I saw him at a couple of like those private conferences.

SPEAKER_32: You're not supposed to say you got invited to guys a killer. HBO killing it on their originals. And I said, you know what? Look at how good Marvel's done. Look how bad DC is. Zaslav is going to come in there and he's going to Marvel DC. And that's an opportunity to trade.

SPEAKER_11: Is that like a trend that you could ride for? Again, when I'm owning this, I've changed my philosophy over the years.

SPEAKER_42: And again, I'm changing it again after this bear market equities to me at 56 years old means a lot less to me than equities at 30 years old. So to me indexing, you know, I don't know how old you are. You're probably in your late 40s or early 50s. 51. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_24: So you'll see as as I do more private investing and as I've become luckily wealthier, T bills and cash and indexing is just easier for that part of my life than picking stocks.

SPEAKER_92: So so I'm avoiding things that I don't have complete faith in. So I don't know that story.

SPEAKER_09: So here's the thing. They got 92 million paid subs. I think they're going to be like the number three player behind Netflix and Disney.

SPEAKER_00: I think that whole space is going to be great. TSM. Nancy Pelosi goes causes chaos in Taiwan. Everybody's like, Oh my God, China risk. I said to myself, you know what? I think there's mutually assured discussion destruction here. I don't think there's going to be a war with China. There's just too much to lose. And I think Taiwan it's going to be this nebulous situation and people don't didn't like TSM.

SPEAKER_01: So I decided this would be a good time for me to buy it since everybody's down on it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_216: Same chips. I've been burned so many times and chips and I've missed this chip with anything when you're betting on something that goes inside something else.

SPEAKER_24: The person with the power like Apple has all the power. So if you want to own chips own Apple because they own the whole system. So interesting.

SPEAKER_219: You know, so I just chips is complicated. So I just, I just don't want exposure to semiconductors.

SPEAKER_00: And then I went with Shopify because Shopify is getting murdered, but I saw Toby who I really respect saying, listen, I made a mistake. You know, this, uh, pandemic bump in e-commerce has gone back down to the mean. It's now the normal trajectory. So I'm getting rid of, you know, this many employees, like really serious riff. I don't know if it's a thousand people or something. Yeah. And he takes the medicine.

SPEAKER_09: And I think Shopify is the best platform for all these retailers. And I said, you know what, this seems like great management, great product. Um, and everybody's down on it, uh, post pandemic.

SPEAKER_85: And I'm, I'm, I said, I made that trade. Any thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_24: Very long Shopify. I've been wrong though. I was right on the way up, sold some, I think what, what bugs me about Toby, even though he's probably a mad genius. I've never met him is that all these guys, all these web two people did.

SPEAKER_42: If we're not around in a way, this is our first bear market. And I remember him screaming about like how the market's wrong. The market's not wrong. The market wasn't wrong.

SPEAKER_24: When your stock was going up 1200%. You weren't a genius and you're not an idiot. Now it's just the market. So I, I definitely, these were bull market companies and they were poorly governed in many ways because it got so big and he's got the voting power. So he can say what he wants now. Cause he has full control of this company, but is the product great? Do I love the product? Yes. Is, is buying it in June? A great idea. I think it's a great idea. Uh, for the people that own it at a thousand and 1200, it may take a long time to get back there.

SPEAKER_13: You know, a hundred, you know, so it's just where you buy these great products and brands matter. June was a great buy for Shopify. I own it.

SPEAKER_32: Now one I'm, I'm looking forward to hearing August 25th Peloton is going to give their results. Yeah. I am in love with the Peloton product, the community at 2 million people. The subscription price is absurd. They just raise their subscription price in a down market to 42 or 44 bucks a month. I didn't cancel. I think this is a great company. They got new leadership in there cleaning it up, but they got a little bit of the risk or ruin.

SPEAKER_01: They don't got a lot of cash on hand. Any thoughts on Peloton? Well, I loved it all the way up.

SPEAKER_254: Takeout candidate?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

SPEAKER_254: Yeah. It was one of my eight to 80 kind of ideas. I think they had a chance to beat Lulu and to really put the pressure on Nike.

SPEAKER_24: And it goes to one of those companies that started believing their own bull , you know, they bad govern. I don't know what it was, but when that stock is at 120, 130, 140, for them not to recognize that they should diversify their business then. So I don't trust a company that, that just makes that big a blunder, right? They had everything going for them. They had passed the market cap of Lulu. They could have used that. They could have done a merger of equals. They could have been creative and tried things. So I think I get worried about companies that implode because now it's going to take so much for them to get their momentum back. And I'm a Peloton user. And now it's become furniture because I don't want to pay 50 bucks a month. It's not worth it to pay 50 bucks a month. Cause I'm not in it for the community. I was in it for the workout.

SPEAKER_11: Got it. The fact that I can't listen to Spotify or watch Netflix is ridiculous. That is a thing.

SPEAKER_259: That is so infuriating that you spend all this money on the tread.

David Friedberg: Why can't I log into my Netflix or my YouTube?

SPEAKER_24: How funny would it be? If I was doing a stock market, why can't I do?

SPEAKER_124: Why can't I put my community on Peloton and people can watch me lead a class at 7. AM for the first half hour of the market? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_261: Wouldn't that help Peloton? Of course. Make it a platform. Wouldn't it be a laugh? Make it a platform. I'm a YouTuber. I missed this whole opportunity.

SPEAKER_28: I'm Mr. Beast.

SPEAKER_00: I, uh, uh, Jimmy's trying to lose a little weight. Mr. Beast goes on there and says, Hey, you know what? I'm going to do 10 days in a row on my Peloton or my tread. And I'm just going to take questions from the audience. There's a cat. Put a camera on it. Bang.

SPEAKER_266: We're done. Done. Easy breezy. I got to listen to someone yelling at me with a playlist that I don't like. Yeah, no.

SPEAKER_268: And they got some impossible body that nobody's ever going to have. It was insulting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_42: And as someone who loved Peloton, I'm infuriated, not at the stock. I'm infuriated at the management and governance for not, and this is what happened with even Robin hood and a lot of companies. There's just a lack of understanding of how capital markets work. And there's this belief that they were invincible.

SPEAKER_24: And there are some invincible companies. Apple's invincible. It didn't happen overnight. And it's a process. You got to make good trades though.

SPEAKER_01: As you're saying, Robin hood did the right thing. They raised $5 billion when the market was hot.

SPEAKER_02: That was a great trade. Where was Peloton? Why didn't they, did they do a secondary and put 5 billion in their coffers?

SPEAKER_32: No, no. Why didn't they buy tonal? Why didn't they buy hydro? Why didn't they have a series of the fashion business?

SPEAKER_276: They should buy a brand. They should buy a brand. They should buy a brand. Yeah. Buy a brand. Buy something.

SPEAKER_32: It was secondary. You know? Like, I mean, Tesla bought, did so many secondaries on the way up. Their stock kept going up. They kept issuing more hands.

SPEAKER_75: If it was demand, sell stock, improve your balance sheet. Lesson number one. Lesson number one.

SPEAKER_01: This has been an hour with Howard Linton.

SPEAKER_32: Howard, thank you so much for coming on the pod. Uh, always great as usual. No insults. He didn't call me Hitler youth. No Nazi.

SPEAKER_283: Your hair looks a little better. Maybe because it's receding. That's part of it.

SPEAKER_32: Yes. It's shorter and receding. After you told me about the issues. Right. I tightened it up a little bit. I tightened it up.

SPEAKER_284: It looks less third.

SPEAKER_11: Right. Okay. And I like the gray. That's what I went for. What I told him. I will say this to a few haters. Okay. Come on here. Okay. People who are mad about whether we call this web three or crypto.

SPEAKER_42: They are the problem. Okay. This is just the internet. Yeah. Because this is just the internet. It's the internet with a new. You want to call it crypto, call it crypto. Okay. If you're fighting me about what we call it, I don't trust you. Okay. This is just more internet. Okay. Like if you want to fight with me over what we call it, I never want to follow you. I don't want to hear your opinion because you're lost in the. You're the problem, not the solution.

SPEAKER_67: This is interesting. You say this. I just did a tweet about this. We are, you know, people have lost the script when all they want to do is argue semantics. Was Trump's was Trump. Uh, they were having this whole semantic thing. Were they searching Mar-a-Lago or was it a raid? These words mean the same thing. They showed up. They took what they needed. The judge told him to do it. Is it a recession or is it a downturn? Is it two sequential? Okay. Listen, it's a, we all know it's a downturn or recession. It's the same thing.

SPEAKER_28: We'll get the definition in three to six months.

SPEAKER_71: This is why people should learn to invest. Who cares what the term is? What's your portfolio doing?

SPEAKER_13: That is the true chess. What is the value of your portfolio? That there is a recession. If your portfolio is down 40%. Yeah. You're in a recession. You're not going to spend what you did.

SPEAKER_24: Who cares what the media calls it? You, the home you wanted to buy is no longer. You're buying it.

SPEAKER_13: The furniture you were going to buy at restoration hardware. You're no longer buying it. They're not going to Italy. You're going.

SPEAKER_291: The government does not know that data. You know that data. We've been in a recession for a year.

SPEAKER_294: Open your eyes. You just look in front of you and look at your spending.

SPEAKER_296: You're in a recession. This is the problem.

SPEAKER_00: And then people are like, Oh my God. Biden said we had 0% inflation and it, we had 8.5%. Okay.

SPEAKER_67: We're talking about two different numbers month over month, year over year. Both are valid numbers. Just say both numbers. We don't have to sit here and argue over semantics. Constantly face reality.

SPEAKER_42: And you guys do it on your show. It's brilliant. The marketing. You guys are good media. People, good media. People argue over semantics because they grow.

SPEAKER_24: Their audience. The reason I started Wallstrip and thought YouTube was going to destroy the world and why Twitter should have destroyed the world or taken over the world and then Bloomberg is you had a chance to get rid of media. The media was the people instead of just got taken over by the media. And that was because of an ad based world. The next generation of the internet allows people to back away from their computers, listen to smart people, get in out of the rabbit holes and really engage with people that can make them smarter. The way you and I got mentored by people in web one and web two and are mentoring people now.

SPEAKER_299: What an opportunity. This is the key.

Chamath Palihapitiya: If you're watching like the mainstream media, whether it's Fox or MSNBC or anything in between,

SPEAKER_01: they're just trying to keep you engaged to sell more eyeballs to get more ads. And it's all nonsense. Like nonsense when you look at podcasting and you and I have a conversation for an hour

SPEAKER_00: or Joe Rogan has a three hour one or Lex Friedman or all in or, you know, your pockets. You, you start to see your people having thoughtful discussions about real things and going deeper.

SPEAKER_01: And guess what? Like this is how you have a great life is that you come closer to the truth by having considered discussions, not being the product.

SPEAKER_259: You know, the media is just, just trying to. Use your head.

SPEAKER_124: Listen, we could argue everything we want about Trump. The data shows he's a criminal.

SPEAKER_13: Why, how they end up getting them is not my problem. And it's his problem. I don't know if we'll get them, but the point is he's been a lifelong criminal. He's been above the law for a very long time.

SPEAKER_24: That is a problem in America. It's not just Trump. It could be Clinton. It could be Pelosi. It could be Soros. Hunter Biden. Yeah. Could be all these people. Hunter Biden. I get it.

SPEAKER_124: He's an idiot. Don't have to convince me. It doesn't mean that Trump's not a criminal.

SPEAKER_306: Yes.

SPEAKER_124: Okay. It doesn't mean that Elon's not crazy for promoting Dogecoin on Saturday Night Live. Like it doesn't mean that it.

SPEAKER_13: I have no comment. No, but you know, it doesn't take away that he's a great entrepreneur, but I also disagree that

SPEAKER_24: he's talking about Dogecoin because he has a responsibility. So I'm saying you can separate the two. You can have Republican thoughts and Democratic thoughts. You can agree with Fox. You can agree with CNN. The idea is to not yell at every, every, if you're in a point where you're yelling at people

SPEAKER_42: on the internet, you are the problem. And, and, and, and that's why, you know, I love the internet. I know how to separate me being the problem from other people being the problem.

SPEAKER_149: And, you know, people need to be able to use this thing going away. No, this ain't going away.

SPEAKER_144: No, I mean, we've, we've passed the Rubicon here. We're going to have to adapt to what's happening in the media.

SPEAKER_32: What's happening on social media, fake news. And then these two polar extremes, this crazy Maga, right? Crazy, woke, insane, historical left. Yeah. Most people are right in the middle. And that's what I'm hoping. Like this whole system breaking. I think that it gets rebuilt through podcasting, through NFTs, DAOs, people starting to self-organize and find their own version of truth. Trust yourself is my overriding message.

SPEAKER_75: No, we have the, we live in this great era of mobility for most, not all, but for most, especially within the United States.

SPEAKER_42: What a miracle. So, I mean, that's, I go to the mobility and say, we're mobile.

SPEAKER_24: You don't need a car. You can, you can vote where you live. You can help. You can run for mayorship. You can do all these incredible things. And people would still rather yell on the internet, which is, you know, I refuse to engage in. You know, it's just some, some of the stuff that I'm seeing is really unbelievable. I'm really excited about some of the stuff that I'm starting to see. They went through a two, three year period. I was really hating on, you know, the way the market was behaving and the way the government was behaving. Now we're getting some chaos. And from this chaos, there's a lot of good.

SPEAKER_01: Sometimes things have to have a boom bust cycle for there to be regrowth and some personal

SPEAKER_09: development, some corporate development, societal development.

SPEAKER_01: And it does feel like we're getting there because the toxicity in politics, media and crypto,

SPEAKER_00: and even markets was getting to a point of acuteness where I was just like, you know, I'm tapping out. I just don't want to participate. And then as part of it breaks down.

SPEAKER_40: You have to tap out the fed. Politically, we get that. We politicize the fed, which is probably the worst thing we've ever done, even though most people don't explain that to people.

SPEAKER_124: Because the fed, we, we, we became numb to volatility, right?

SPEAKER_24: Everybody got used to the fact that the fed will protect us and the market will go up 10% a year. And, you know, then we had the great financial crisis and Obama, you know, and then you had QE1 and QE2. And then Trump, who was a master at this, you know, and a master of many things, media, but a master at just making you school, making the pain. I believe he probably had the greatest group of insider traders working for him. Again, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but like, it was too obvious to create that much pain and then relieve the pain. Knowing what was going to be the end result was just, if he wasn't making money off this stuff, he's crazy. He's dumb. He's dumb. It was so I believe this, this, this lack of a volatility that we had inspired in the public markets was not good.

SPEAKER_171: Yeah, people started to go up 12% a year, or 15% a year.

SPEAKER_00: Or, you know, my salary is going to go up 25k a year, or, you know, I am entitled to work from home and every possible level of entitlement across the board. VCs entitled, I can always raise another fund founders, I can always do a bridge round.

SPEAKER_32: There was no acceptance of the reality of how hard capitalism is. And when capitalism becomes that easy. I had founders who, you know, they would come to me and be like, this is the third bridge.

SPEAKER_01: Why are we not getting a series A? And it's like, well, you know, we pivoted. Okay, fine. Okay, we pivot again. Okay, fine. That happens sometimes. Well, who's our customer? Yeah, you know, we're going to speak at this TED conference.

SPEAKER_32: And then I got this thing. I'm like, who's our customer? What problem are we solving for them? How are we delighting a customer? And, you know, the now I'm seeing it come home to roost, the same people who race three bridge rounds in a row? Oh, my, my free series, a my series, a extension, my series, a two, they can't raise the bridge. And they're like, Okay, we're shutting down. And I'm like, Okay, that's fine. You know, we're gonna get some losers. And then we're gonna have things that fail. I can accept that. But it went on for five years, four years of you probably must have seen this in your portfolio.

SPEAKER_01: You're like, how do they do it? How do they keep raising a bridge?

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, I mean, we're starting to really see what failure looks like again. And it's fine. Like, it's not fun.

SPEAKER_42: We're not rooting for failure. But that is unfortunately how you get growth is by having failure. And the public markets have been too easy.

SPEAKER_24: I benefited from it. I loved it. But you know, the trick is not to think you're a genius from it. And this is where we're talking about Peloton. I think they woke up saw their stock price. And they're like, leave me alone. We know what we're doing. We know what we're doing. Let's build more hardware. Everybody else is wrong. We shouldn't open our system. Why would we have Netflix? And they started believing it because the stock price made them believe it.

SPEAKER_291: And that's the difference between public and private is seeing the price affects behavior.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and the behavior there should have been, hey, we're up so much like, this isn't reality. Let's take advantage of this moment. How can we capture this moment? We're, you know, hey, listen, we're getting too much credit, right?

SPEAKER_216: And they had $160 currency to go do that.

SPEAKER_134: And they did nothing. Nothing. They sat on their hands.

SPEAKER_127: And we've seen Crocs.

SPEAKER_24: We've seen a million companies do this when their stock goes up for no reason. They read it. And so the companies that are smart use the stock price. What did Zuck do?

SPEAKER_333: What did Zuck do?

SPEAKER_24: Right. He paid. He used his currency.

SPEAKER_42: We also use cash. He did both. Yes. And he still does it. We've been lucky a few times with Facebook buying. Oculus.

SPEAKER_335: I mean, they got, what did Google do? Yeah. Android. YouTube. Man, they just went.

SPEAKER_337: I mean, God.

SPEAKER_149: So there is this corp dev. I think what I love about Twitter is acting like corp dev for all these companies. And no one's listening to me.

SPEAKER_124: Yes. I like to.

SPEAKER_24: That's the best thing about learning on the internet. It's like you get in hindsight to look and go, man, like stock prices.

SPEAKER_42: But the great thing is you'll get addicted about stock prices. You'll really start to see how the companies made mistakes.

SPEAKER_24: And you really start to see how patterns start looking the same. Yes. And if you look at Nike versus Peloton, Nike is a great company because they've had their Peloton moments and come through them.

SPEAKER_13: Uh, and I just don't think Peloton, they just, they, they, they, they miss the boat.

SPEAKER_144: Uh, rule off has a good name for this crucible moments, right?

SPEAKER_01: And there are crucible moments and sometimes, you know, people don't pass those moments. All right. Listen, Howard, thank you so much for the time. Bye bye. All right, everybody.

SPEAKER_07: It's time for producer, Rachel and okay. Boomer. What is your internet connection bad? My God. I know.

SPEAKER_342: And the lighting's terrible. What's going on?

SPEAKER_07: Oh, you're back at mom and dad's house. Yep. All right. I have an idea for you. Uh oh. How about getting mom and dad a Starling for Christmas?

SPEAKER_345: I saw, I saw that. That has been commented before. It's looking like, it's looking like the, the best option.

SPEAKER_85: Okay. All right.

SPEAKER_00: Listen, uh, everybody's going crazy for your okay. Boomer segments. They love that you are taking chances, interviewing all these young, energetic Gen Z's.

SPEAKER_07: Uh, yeah, it's once in a while a millennial, but yeah, they're kind of annoying, I guess. What do you got for us this week?

SPEAKER_348: This week I have a Gen Z. Don't worry. Uh, his name is Ben and he runs a co-living space in New York city. It's called goal house. And together we talk about why so many young people are gravitating towards co-living. He also has a really interesting background. He actually grew up in New York with two dads, but he talks more about that over on his TikTok. Uh, he, most people probably know him from over there. He is at becoming Ben and he has over 85,000 followers.

SPEAKER_01: Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09: You know, that TikTok thing's getting big and, uh, it does seem to be driving awareness in business.

SPEAKER_01: So, you know, more and more I see Gen Z investors or CEOs taking to it. And I, you know, I look at it as an, an okay. Boomer over here, uh, Gen Z Gen X, of course, but kind of get lumped into the okay. Boomer category. Um, I look at it and I'm like, I don't know if I could be that silly on air,

SPEAKER_00: you know, dancing and doing silliness, but I do look at it and go, it's effective, but I just don't think a 51 year old Gen X or should be doing these dances. What do you think? Should I embrace this fully Rachel? Should I be doing silly stuff and doing like the Lizzo it's about damn time. And if I did a version of that, how ridiculous would I look?

SPEAKER_348: So I don't know necessarily if you have to embrace the silliness because the previous founder we had on. So I've had quite the past few followers have had pretty big internet presences, but one of them in particular named Marcus, who is giant on Tik Tok now, um, doesn't post silly content. He posts even stuff just as simple as like how his stuff is manufactured and how they package it before sending it off. Ah, so I think the content that is the most evergreen is actually not the silly content. I think the silly content is though, what makes people blow up first.

SPEAKER_354: So I guess it just depends on what approach you want to do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: So if you want to get caught up in the mix, you got to kind of get one of those sound loops. Uh, interesting. I, I am, I like chef reactions. That's why I'm on Tik Tok. Oh, I love that. I comment on every one of his reactions because he's just such a crazy, like New Yorker cynical chef. Who's just like, oh, I'd smash this 12 out of 10. Um, and he, or he's just like, this is absolutely gross. And he just people's technique for cooking. He's just like, oh yeah, you could have done that in a mixing bowl. Oh, great. You're using a fork with a nonstick pan. Great. You know, like he, he's just watch it. Oh, great knife technique. And it's actually really educational as to like what's important. Right. And this person is putting like nutmeg on pasta and he's like, oh, nutmeg on pasta. Yeah.

SPEAKER_211: That makes a lot of sense. It's like, oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_259: I mean, you know, as much as I want to see Tik Tok banned and have it moved to other platforms

SPEAKER_01: for the having the CCP monitoring all of this, I do appreciate that new content formats are coming out from here. So I wonder, how do young people think about this story that keeps coming up about the CCP and Tik Tok and perhaps it eventually getting banned? Do they even think about it? Do they care?

SPEAKER_32: Or they're like, ah, if it goes away, I'll just move all my followers over to another platform that the chef's reaction guy was saying, my videos are getting banned for no reason.

SPEAKER_01: Everybody follow me over at Instagram. I'm going to be over there when they finally kill my account. So how do young people look at this CCP issue?

SPEAKER_348: I definitely don't think as many young people are taking that much of the news into consideration.

SPEAKER_357: Next week's guest named Jules Terpak actually talks a lot about this over on her Tik Tok channel. She has a podcast with Andrew Yang, and she's really up to date on everything happening in tech policy. So there are people like her, but that's pretty few and far between. And I think it's interesting, though, that I keep seeing a lot of people migrating over to Instagram, because in my opinion, Instagram is kind of like a newsletter where like you don't blow up from just having a newsletter. A newsletter is kind of like your supporting thing. Like you have you have something big that happens first. Maybe it's a podcast and then you have a newsletter and you can announce it on the podcast. And then that's a great way to get emails. But having an Instagram account is kind of like it kind of like the newsletter of today where it's really difficult to blow up on there.

SPEAKER_354: And I don't know if that's necessarily the place that I would even switch over to.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I do see Instagram dumping me into the Tik Tok format every chance they get.

SPEAKER_00: It's super annoying. And then when they dump me over there, it's not people I follow. Yep. I agree. God, I you know, and then it sucked in. Now you've watched 20 of these things, and you don't remember any of them. And that's the thing that pisses me off about it is I would like to see my friends because at least that would be like I would feel I'm catching up on my friends and what they're up to.

SPEAKER_01: I don't know, you know, I think it's like a bad decision on their part. I know it might lead to better metrics, but I really feel like I want my friends first. And maybe if the percentage was like 10% other or 20% other like one out of five was like, they do discover some interesting things. So they'll show me something like, oh, because you watch Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits, you might enjoy this. So they actually tell me in the main photo stream, which I do like that feature. I just don't like the other, like, just ramming it down my throats. Where we've been making these on YouTube shorts and pressure on our teams, we make them becoming out pretty good. So next week, when we have our little time together, maybe you take a look at what we've done and maybe give us a couple pointers. Definitely. What we should do better.

SPEAKER_348: I also almost never on I don't know about you or I'd love to hear if the Nody gang goes over on YouTube shorts.

SPEAKER_357: But I'm a big, big consumer of YouTube content. I almost I don't subscribe to any even streaming platform, to be honest, other than the ones that I get to sneak on with my parents. I watch all my stuff on YouTube, but I don't I don't watch any of their shorts. And I hate the reels. I think that might be because I don't spend that much time on Instagram. So the things that are recommended to me because they're mostly discovery are so far off. Or maybe it's what other followers like I get a lot of sports stuff and a ton of my friends are giant sports fans, but I'm not. So maybe it's that. But haven't found any short video platform that has really curated the best for you page except for tick tock. And with YouTube, when I open up the app, it's normally on a laptop or an iPad. And so my first thought isn't to go over to a short.

SPEAKER_01: Can we also make just for our our team. So pressure if you could do this by the time this episode comes out today this weekend startups.com slash shorts this weekend startups.com slash tick tock. Just so people can redirect to a playlist of our shorts and our tick tock channel, our official channel. And that would be great just so we can start experimenting with it. And people can go find our stuff and give us pointers on it. What I would like to do producer Nick, if you can make a note next week, I would like on my personal one to do a video where I explain human rights abuses in China. And then have it be like a text over like a baking video. I noticed when people want to tell stories that are like super controversial. They'll put it on a baking video, I guess to get by the sensors. I don't know if you've ever seen that. Have you seen this concept where like they tell some story like that might be very provocative about their personal life.

SPEAKER_368: But then why do they do that? What is that about? Honestly, boomer why they're doing that.

SPEAKER_357: I feel like that kind of actually started over on YouTube where you would hear this like Reddit robot voice read Reddit streams or Reddit like threads more so like over different videos. And I kind of feel like I don't know if anybody else has ever seen those. I love that. Like I love listening to different things that people have posted on Reddit. They'll be like Reddit Q&A is read to you and there'll be a different video in the background. And those like TikToks to me are kind of the same way. And I think it's just to get people staying on the video because you do need like a certain amount of seconds on TikTok in order for it to be counted. Got it.

SPEAKER_352: So you're using the video to capture people aesthetically and have the video hook.

SPEAKER_00: So you just pick something like one of those baking videos where they're making a cake and spinning it and putting icing on it. But then you tell a story, but this creates massive cognitive dissonance for me because I'm watching them make a cake and it looks delicious, but I'm getting none of the recipe of the cake. And then I'm getting some story about this woman whose sister cheated on her husband with her sister.

SPEAKER_259: And I'm like, why am I even watching this? I don't want either of these things.

SPEAKER_357: It's almost like the infographic of TikTok. It's like the TikToks version of just posting an infographic like on your Instagram story. It's really weird.

SPEAKER_01: But I want to do on my personal account. Actually, here's what I want to do for next week. I want a script to explain all of the issues with TikTok in the United States and the reporting on TikTok and what they're doing in terms of tracking for the CCP. But I don't want to use the term TikTok. I want to say the app that you may or may not be using right now. And so if we can create a little script for me, that's like a 90 second one, but put it to it's about damn time or something and people like dancing to about damn time. And it's just me talking over and see if they ban my account. That would be cool. For talking about TikTok and the CCP. Yeah.

SPEAKER_357: Have you, do you have any other videos on, is this on your personal account or the this week? On my personal account.

SPEAKER_374: I made a personal account and now I'm getting a bunch of followers.

SPEAKER_348: We should like post something else though before to see if like the streams or after to see if, excuse me, the, the views are like violently different. Yeah.

SPEAKER_110: I'll do that. I'll do that. Yeah. So wonderful.

SPEAKER_377: Yeah. Let's see if we do that next time. All right. Everybody enjoy the interview.

SPEAKER_378: Awesome.

SPEAKER_381: Thanks guys. Thank you so much, Ben Smith for joining me today on a segment of OK Boomer. I met you in a really cool way. So I actually moderated my first event at a coworking space. I'm a beautiful new coworking space in Soho with my friend, Ami and my friend, Amy, just wonderful. And you were there and we got talking and I realized that you were also a founder of a different coworking space. Not a coworking space. Not a coworking space. Excuse me. A co-living space, which is like next step. I'm called goal house. And with the rise in coworking, with the rise in co-living, especially as more Gen Z employees choose to work remotely and live with other people. I thought who not, you know, I think you would be the best person to talk to as you. This isn't like the first thing you're founding. I know you founded actually another co-living space thrive out in SF. So subjects matter expert here. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk. Yeah.

SPEAKER_382: Well, thanks so much for having me, Rachel. You're a professional in what you do. So it's an honor to be here.

SPEAKER_381: Well, you are, you are stellar. So the first thing I need to know is I actually just talked to Molly and Jason about this on a live stream. And if people want to tune into our live stream, we normally live stream every single day over on YouTube, This Week in Startups. Just find us over there. But Jason kind of said as a joke, like, oh, like where do you Gen Z people, you know, like meet people on dates? And I'm like, honestly, like I probably do most of my socializing stuff if it's not like at a bar at a coworking space. And then that got me thinking about co-living, which is something that I actually never even considered. And then when I moved to New York, I realized so many of my friends either previously did that or are currently on the hunt for it because they are remote employees.

SPEAKER_385: They can be a little bit more nomadic and you just get to meet people. So why do you think Gen Z's in particular are so interested in this communal living?

SPEAKER_387: Yeah. So I think it's the confluence of a bunch of different factors. Of course, the pandemic being a big one just in terms of recent times, but people are just searching for community in ways that previously weren't available. What I think is special about my house and other co-living spaces is the built in network or the built in community. We're a house of 20 people. There's four floors in a giant basement where we all hang out and people will really move to New York searching for this type of space now because they realize it's sort of hard to be. I mean, New York has a ton of opportunities, but it's sort of hard to be here alone, not knowing that many people or maybe you just are friends of friends with people. So having that built in social fabric is something that I think Gen Z really values these days in the house here. It makes it easy for us to connect with each other. We have a built in Sunday dinner every single Sunday. Uh, people will basically how it works is there's a $75 house budget and people will volunteer to cook, uh, on sort of a rotation basis. And we have a bunch of different people coming from outside of the state, sometimes from outside of the country. Uh, so it's really cool. Yeah. People will cook like food from their cultures.

SPEAKER_391: People will cook all, all different types of things.

SPEAKER_381: Yeah. Penn state, we have something similar to this and it is called a frat house. Um, no, just kidding, but that's super awesome. And one thing that I found out about snooping a little bit, you know, into you guys is you receive a ton of applicants, like over a thousand applicants a year, but you spend $0 on marketing.

SPEAKER_385: How are people finding you?

SPEAKER_387: Yeah. So this is the nature of just being a one-off house. I run the house independently where I previously ran tribe co-living and it was, you know, the goal of tribe is we were supposed to be a growth startup. Um, and for different reasons, we realized that growing a co-living company is just a hard thing to do. Uh, that being said, because we're a house of 20 people, we rely mostly on word of mouth. Uh, we post on, on Facebook and the housing groups, and we find that we're pretty incomparable to the options that are out there. Really? Yes. There's furnished housing. Yes. There's the Facebook sublet groups. Um, but if someone is looking for an experience that is community driven, there's us, there's, uh, there's other companies that are, are more niche down. So for example, there are vegan houses. There are houses that are specifically for tech or AI or whatever it may be. So yeah, we're really not competing against too many people, uh, in the world of housing in New York.

SPEAKER_392: Yeah. I guess the only other thing that I saw on housing websites, which I moved to New York is an absolute nightmare.

SPEAKER_381: And honestly, it's only getting worse. I did not think it could get worse. I have the cheapest rent out of anybody I know not gonna lie in my area. I know, but now I'm like kind of freaking out cause I'm sure they're gonna raise my rent. So I've been looking on those Facebook pages and I've been seeing like Alpaca, um, which is a pre furnished. I know things show up. So what differentiate differentiates you guys from the rest of these other co-living spaces. And like you said, I don't think there are a ton in the city, but there must be something making you guys just like 10 times better than everybody else.

SPEAKER_387: Yeah. So for me, I always say that community is created through the balance of intentionality and serendipity. Um, there are lots of other furnished housing companies like June homes, common bungalow to name a few. And these companies do furnished housing and they do that very well. You know, for example, our furniture is just, it's not from West Elm. It's mostly from Ikea. It's the highest quality stuff at Ikea, but it's not a West Elm. Yeah. That being said, what we care about really here is setting the intention and getting people that are here that really want to be here and really want to be involved in putting together community events, bringing people out to coffee. Uh, some of us might go to industry city for the salsa night that they have every Friday during the summers. So it's that intentionality that is the baseline I'd say. And then it's the serendipitous moments that really create this sense of friendship with, with, with each other that allows us to bond. So for example, yesterday I came home, uh, after dinner and people were singing karaoke in the basement. I didn't plan that. No one planned that. People were just sitting on the couch and we have mics there and, uh, they just put on some YouTube karaoke and they started singing. I love that. Very cool.

SPEAKER_381: It's those moments. I love that. That's really awesome. Is it cheaper to do a communal living situation than it would be, say, if somebody just went through a broker and did like traditional housing in New York City? Or do you think it's pretty comparable because you guys do offer all those amenities?

SPEAKER_387: It depends on how you're, how you're measuring it, but basically our upfront costs are much, much, much cheaper. So because we furnish everything, you don't need to buy any furniture and we just require one month security deposit and the first month's rent. Gotcha. So yeah, it's relatively affordable and we are the most affordable co-living option in the city, which I'm really proud of.

SPEAKER_381: Oh, I love it. And do you have to stay for a year or can you have people staying month to month?

SPEAKER_387: Yeah. Um, the minimum stay is two or three months, but people have stayed here. Yeah. Pretty normal. And people have stayed here for over two and a half years. Wow. Yeah. That is awesome. It is really awesome. And I think it is a testament to people just enjoying their community experience. People will move in with the intention of just making new friends over a short three month period. And then they'll be like, this is kind of an awesome experience. Maybe it's not a 10 year experience, but it can certainly be a one, two, three year experience.

SPEAKER_381: Yeah. That's so cool. And what do you see in people that are like gravitating toward this co-living? I even want to say co-working and I'm not talking about co-working as in WeWorks. I'm talking about co-working as like these old co-working spaces that we're starting to see pop up. What do you see with people being drawn to these kinds of places? Like, is there, are they all young? Do they all work in tech?

SPEAKER_406: What similarities are there here?

SPEAKER_398: I think that the rise of, you know, and I'm not an expert in, in these co-working spaces. I specifically am, I'm the co-living guy, but yeah, community spaces are crazy to me.

SPEAKER_381: Like I think I'm so interested. So what's, I guess. Yeah. Do you see, I guess before you can even answer that question.

SPEAKER_406: Do you see a big difference between people gravitated to just co-living than just co-working?

SPEAKER_387: I think co-living is a, is a more challenging product to build well. Okay. And that's why I currently run just one house as opposed to the time in, you know, from 2016 to 2019, where we had eight houses here in, in New York and one 80% house building really in San Francisco. But because it's a more complicated product and because the type of person that is willing and wanting to live in a co-living space is different than the person that is wanting to sign up for a co-working space. It just takes more emotional and mental capacity to be the, the operator of, of this space. Yeah. So I guess I say that to say, you know, I think the rise of the internet and all of these different things allows for more different types of communities to be experimented with, which is a really cool thing. Ami is, is doing a really cool co-working space right now. He's also thought about co-living spaces as well.

SPEAKER_392: And he is, I mean, we got to have that guy on, man. You two would be, I guess this is a question for the audience for, I have two things. Number one, if anybody needs anybody to moderate an event, please ask me, I love moderating events. My siblings always said I get in the middle of stuff and I did not know that was a skill. So if you ever need anybody to get in the middle of things, I will do it. It's a very good skill.

SPEAKER_429: Oh, I loved it.

SPEAKER_381: It was so cool doing that, that, um, is a co-working space. But another thing would guests be interested in me having two people on at the same time on these segments, because I think you have a lot to say about both spaces. And what do you think, um, in co-living do people most mostly get wrong? Just that it's easy.

SPEAKER_387: Really? I think that what, what works really well about co-working and community spaces in general is people are there. People are there because they see the marketed interests or values, and then they can just easily go there for the day. I think, I think it's very easy to share space with each other, but to live in proximity to each other is an, is a whole nother story. Just because then you are, yeah, you're considering people's dish habits. You're considering people's snoring habits. You're considering people in many different ways that are not necessarily related to their core values or core interests. That being said, when it all does work really well. And I have some amazing roommates here that I, that I would love to live with long into the future when it all works really well. It's sort of like the perfect marriage. That being said, there's sort of like lots of trial and tribulations. Of course.

SPEAKER_385: Is there like a vetting process then for people that come into houses? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_387: So we try to be as transparent with everything as possible in our application process. People apply through our website. And then I'll just say, this is what the house is about. We're a house of 20 people. There are pros and cons with living with 20 people. One is that you're going to, one pro is that you're going to meet so many different people and share lots of different experiences. But the con is we're not going to be the cleanest house. Um, we're going to try our best, but the re reality of it is people are going to be on different schedules and it's not going to be perfect. Yeah. And if you're, if you're a person looking for a studio apartment or a luxury living situation, that's probably not the same person that's looking for a room with us. Totally. So yeah, we want it to work for, you know, as much for the, the applicant, uh, you know, um, in that same way, we want it to work for us in the community.

SPEAKER_392: How did you even think to start a, like a co-living space? So I know you graduated from Babson.

SPEAKER_381: What, what year did you graduate college? 2016. So you're, you're fairly new. I graduated high school in 2016. So you're about four years older than me. I think producer Nick is probably around your age as well, who works on our team. Um, so this seems like something that not a lot of 20 somethings are doing like starting homes in New York.

SPEAKER_385: What, what really inspired this? Yeah.

SPEAKER_387: So many different things. My background is pretty unique. I'll do a 30 second Ted talk, but basically I was adopted from China by two dads. I grew up here in New York city. And I think because I grew up in a different family situation, I've always loved learning about people's backgrounds. Um, mainly because in learning about people's backgrounds, I also had to hope, uh, that other people would accept me for who I was and my family for, for who we are. I think that this was made especially evident to me while I was studying abroad in Madrid for one semester. I sat at a bunch of different hostels and sort of the hostel experiences, knock on someone's bunk and you say, Hey, I'm Ben. I'm from New York. And then you get talking.

SPEAKER_444: I love that.

SPEAKER_387: And then if it's a good hostel and I don't know if you've stayed in any hostels, but if it's a good one. Okay.

SPEAKER_403: Okay. Amazing.

SPEAKER_381: I did a wonderful abroad program, um, where this wasn't a house situation, but I did this amazing program. I got to plug them C I E E six weeks in new cities. Uh, I did Berlin, Paris, Madrid, but I'd have stayed in a hostel. And, um, in Madrid, it was two beds, two queen beds in one room. Phenomenal. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_387: Did you happen to go out with any strangers from your hostel? Of course.

SPEAKER_381: I'm actually a huge hostel junkie. I love them. And I would highly recommend a bunch of people do them, especially if you're in your twenties. Cause a lot of them have caps on ages, especially if there are other female solo travelers. There's like all women, um, all women rooms and hostels. And I have made some just freaking amazing friends. I think that is actually probably the closest I've ever done to, to a communal living, other than like a dorm in college.

SPEAKER_387: Right. And in the U S us Americans were taught that hostels are cheap and grungy places to live. Like they are the, they're not the preferred method of living. But if you go to Europe, the hostel culture is that of community. It's meeting other travelers, learning about other people from different backgrounds. So I would become seemingly best friends with these people over a weekend. And I thought, how can we replicate a similar experience back in the U S in New York, um, where there are so many people, but sometimes you, you'll see your neighbor twice a week for an entire year and you won't even say hi. Yeah. So it's, you know, it is sort of the confluence of those, those different things that made me want to come back to New York. Co-living had just become a term in the world, you know, with we work launching, we live in common launching with a big funding round. Yeah. I thought, you know, how can we do this in a, in a true community driven way? That's why I started it.

SPEAKER_392: That's actually your show right to about the, uh, the thought about hostels in the States.

SPEAKER_381: Cause I, I remember like searching on like hostile, hostile world.com. I think is like the name of like the website where you can browse stuff. And there's some pretty insane ones in places like Switzerland. I think, um, there's one it's called like bomber hostel B a L M E R. And it's like very famous one.

SPEAKER_385: And hostels are crazy, crazy cool for people backpacking through Europe. Do you think like this communal living could get to the stage of popularity as hostels have in Europe?

SPEAKER_387: I think it depends on the length of say, I think that people. So what's great about this idea of intentionality is I think it's great when people intentionally decided this is their communal living moment in their life for either three months, for six months, for one year, uh, or a little bit more. And their intention is to meet lots of different people and to see who they connect with. And they're not going to connect with everyone. And that's just the reality of it. But if someone can co-live for one year and if they can make two or three really good connections, lifelong friends out of that, uh, which I think is totally possible, then it's completely worth it.

SPEAKER_457: Yeah.

SPEAKER_387: So yeah, I think hostels will always be around. I think co-living spaces are still experimenting with what works and what doesn't. Yeah. I guess time will tell.

SPEAKER_381: Super excited to see. I hope they do become a little bit more popular. Number one, because just runs crazy expensive and it's hard to find room. And it's hard to find roommates in New York. So I think they're just a really good option. But also I, I grew up in like a really big family, speaking of families. And I love hearing about people's communal experience because it kind of reminds me of living back home with my, my parents. And you know, there's only like so much time.

SPEAKER_385: I feel like while you're young, where you feel very comfortable sharing your own space. I think the older you get and the more you kind of like guard your space, the more you want it to stay like that. So the more open you are with living with other people, the easier it is. Like it's, it's really difficult to go from like having a studio apartment, for example,

SPEAKER_381: to going back to like dorm life. So definitely would recommend checking out communal living for anybody listening, or especially anybody interning. I did NYU dorms. I went random, which is not the same, but NYU dorms. I lived with two other girls in one room and it was random. Like I said, it was phenomenal. It was super cool. We ended up going out together. NYU had a bunch of like gyms and things like that, that we could use while I interned here. But I really wish this was like more of an option because we definitely weren't doing karaoke in a basement. And I do want to pivot for my last kind of topic with you.

SPEAKER_385: So you kind of touched on this already. You are an adoptee with two dads. You were raised in New York and you are huge on TikTok because of that, not because of communal living. So most of your platform, you have like over like 85,000 followers on TikTok, 6.1 million likes. You're blowing up. You're doing great stuff. How has that impacted your business and how would you expect to kind of like pivot or maybe bring in your business a little bit more into your content?

SPEAKER_387: Yeah. So I think just thinking about this from a macro standpoint is lots of people, pretty much everyone in the world is on a journey of self-discovery. People are on their own path. And I think because of that, like I know I'm on my own path and that makes me incredibly interested in your path, Rachel, or in other people's paths that I don't know. And I think that businesses are starting to see that, yes, you can sell a product in marketing and you can focus on what that product is about. But more so than that, people are also interested in what is the company history? What is the founder story? And this is what I want to continue to increase my sharing about Goldhouse and why I actually am doing communal living. I'd love to tell the story behind that. And it's something that I've sort of strayed away from in the past. So yeah, I hope to do more of that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_381: That's awesome. Thank you so much, Ben, for coming on a segment of OK Boomer. If people want to find you or your company, where should they look? Yeah.

SPEAKER_400: So on my TikTok and Instagram, it's at becomingben and our website is goalhousenyc.com.

SPEAKER_392: Amazing. I hope to see you around, whether that's at a co-working or maybe I'll have to swing by and see what your co-loving space is like. Come by for a Sunday dinner.

SPEAKER_391: Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_345: Of course.

SPEAKER_391: Thanks, Ben. All right.

SPEAKER_108: Thanks so much, Rachel. Great. Thanks for listening. Huge. Thanks to Howard Lindsay for joining the show. Huge.

SPEAKER_01: Thank you to producer Rachel for another great OK Boomer segment and Sunday Sunday Sunday school is coming. You got to go to VC Sunday school and a great climate interview. That's going to blow your mind. Another great week.

SPEAKER_32: Great job, producer, Nick, and to the entire team, Matt and Jamie and everybody working hard at this week in startups and the launch team and the inside team. Couldn't do it without you. Shout out to all my teams working really hard this summer to hit the milestones that we've set. I know it's been a little rough sailing here with this crazy market, but we're doing a great job and it couldn't do without you.

SPEAKER_01: So shout out to all my teams and team members who are really burning the midnight oil. And it's just great to see all of you learning and seeing your careers develop. It really it makes it all worthwhile for me to come up and come to work every day. So I just want to shout out my teams.

SPEAKER_460: All right.

SPEAKER_116: I'll see you on Sunday.