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Trends with Friends
Why Owning Your Audience Matters: AI, Email Newsletters, and the Future of Content
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Foreign.
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Of the Internet. This is Howard Lindsay and you are live on Trends with Friends, a special year end edition. That is my third child, the peloton in the background. I am dialing in today from Coronado, Just the Tuscany of California or America. Don't get any ideas everybody. There's nothing available. It's full. Coronado is full. The only place in America where you can still get a jaywalking ticket and kind of thank the policeman for doing that. Right? It's they're compared to everywhere else in the United States. You appreciate the policeman here and paying your taxes. So year end show. Let's go around the horn. This is really a fun special edition show where we're going to talk about trends in degeneracy, AI and one of our favorite subjects, email. Phil, am I already missing something? I just want to.
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C
No, you reminded me of the degeneracy thing. That was a good thing.
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B
So around the horn. Michael Parek. Say hello, Michael. Michael is dialing in from Houston. Ben is trying to annul him. Mike is dialing in from Houston. We call him the AI whisperer. 20 years plus at Goldman Sachs running institutional research only to drop off the world because he had many caves and dungeons to decorate and came out of hibernation with AI and is our AI Whisperer. And then joining him is jc. Took the week off. He's probably. He's a Disney. Oh, poor bastard. Poor bastard. He's in Disney. That's again kids of the reminder. Having kids has consequences. So JC's in Disney. We will have no charts today. You can hear the quiet applause in the background coming today, straight out of space, dropped into a hoodie. Phil Pearlman. Phil, our doctor, our shrink. And then two special guests today. First we're going to introduce Ben Kahn. Ben, hello from la. Ben is a actor. I don't know. What are you?
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D
I wouldn't call myself that.
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B
I agree.
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D
By the way, I'm a trader and a podcaster.
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B
You're a trader and a podcaster? Yeah. Hysterical. Ben is created with with us our the first original content show on stock twits called the Friday Ripper. I don't know, it's the phrase whatever. Okay. You know, promote your own Here the weekend RIP with Ben Khan and Emil. So goddamn funny. And here's a fliparoo story. We've had many flippenings. Ben came to my house in corn. I was like, Ben, you've been in this house, right?
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D
Yes, I have. It was very hot. Your air conditioning wasn't working.
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B
Was that necessary? Are you calling me cheap?
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D
No, no, it wasn't your fault. You couldn't help. I mean, you even said so. You're like, I'm trying to get someone to come out and fix this.
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B
And okay, I don't remember stuff because of the Ambien, but I believe you. I don't think you're a liar. So anyways, Ben came down to my house. I sweated him. That's what I do to people when they come to pitch me. I make them sweat. And now you know Ben. Anyways, Ben came down to pitch me what he thought was a great idea. And I pulled the old switcheroo and said, ben, you'd be perfect doing a Internet show for Stockwitz's audience. So created three shows. It's just hysterical.
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Thank you.
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They take the piss out of the market and everything degenerate because they're living in that world. Ben Khan joins us. And then finally, last but not least, Tyler Dank, founder, CEO of Beehive, Full disclosure, Social leverage, was the seed and lead seed investor in that company. He raised a Series B. He's handsome. He just made the COVID of Ink. Do we have an applique? Do we have that cover?
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We can pull it up. I can't pull up. There we go.
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B
Listen, note to Tyler Tank, you go in the ocean with shorts on, not pants.
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A
I'm just a. Yes. They suggested to go in with the water. I said yes. That's a feel like maybe anything for the shoot.
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B
That. That's almost like you're paying customers to come to you. That the fact that you pay to. You wear pants in the water. But it's all nervous but. And how much touch up was done in this photo? Because I've seen you without a shirt and this doesn't look like it's.
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You look a little bulky there, don't I? Yeah, I put on a few pounds.
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B
Phil has a tip.
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I haven't seen the raw photos, but I'm happy with how it came out. I didn't think the jeans would be such a topic of conversation online, but it has added to the virality of the post. So happy to be here and also thankful that you remember the name of my company. So one for two and introducing.
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B
Can't spell it, but I know it. What does the name mean again? Like just quickly and then we'll get it to Phil.
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A
No real meaning. Honestly.
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B
Fantastic. Yeah, kind of like stockflit.
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F
Yeah, we'll keep hive mind.
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B
Okay, Phil, back to you. We got a lot to talk about, so, Phil, run us through the show.
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C
Okay, so let's get right to it. First of all, Ben, it's just so great seeing you and having you on the program. You're like, dude, it's just great. I love you, man.
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A
I know.
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C
Know him from way back and he's just. Just a beautiful guy and hilarious. It's like a young Chevy Chase.
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D
Oh, gee whiz.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Dude, have you. Have you ever heard that before?
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B
I like it.
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D
Yeah, I think my mom has said that kind of thing.
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C
Dude, that's a high praise.
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D
Phil, you. You real fast. You once gave me some sound financial advice that I stupidly didn't follow. I had just come into a lot of money and you spent. Spy was at 180 and you said, take half of it, put it in Spy. And I was like, I'm gonna do something. And I did something else. But anyway, sorry, continue. That was a long time ago.
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B
Wow. I didn't know you guys knew each other.
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C
Yeah, forever.
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B
Okay, now, where's spy now?
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D
Oh, I don't know. 5,000, 6,000. Who? 600.
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4.
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600. It's like a four bagger from there.
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That sounds like very Phil advice. I follow Phil's advice, by the way, for the record. All right, Phil.
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C
All right, so here's what we're going to do. So, Tyler, just great honor having you as well. Big desk energy. The aesthetic, dude, is awesome like that.
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Appreciate it.
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C
The minute you go there, it's great. It's like the old school Internet. Windows 95, whatever.
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It's just beautiful.
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C
But anyway. Oh, yeah, absolutely. What we want to do is we want to talk about. You wrote a piece very recently, Death by a Thousand Substacks. And this is super powerful coming from guys. You know, me and Howard were around at the genesis of Web2, when anybody on the Internet with a good thinking and some persistence could begin to go on the Internet, create a WordPress blog or a blogger blog even, or get on. Get on Facebook. Odeo. Right. And really, you know, put their best thoughts down and get them out there in the world, you know. And so you are moving that forward and talking about an old. An old dilemma, but you're talking about it in terms of 20, 25, really. So maybe just talk to us a little bit about Death by a Thousand substacks and what's going on here and why you're bringing this up. Why you're bringing this up now.
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A
Yeah, well, I think there's a few things. One, as you've seen this resurgence in email newsletters, it's kind of a diversification away from the centralization of social channels and dependence on Google search, which is being disrupted by AI, or whether it's Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, where they're deprioritizing links to different publishers. And so what we've seen for decades, really, but maybe going back to 2018 with Facebook, when they convinced all of the publishers to build their audience on Facebook, get tens of thousands of likes, and when they would post content, it would be in the feeds for readers and users to see and click through on their website. And then Facebook made a business decision to pivot their strategy, not prioritize those types of links. And all of those publishers got decimated. Same with the pivot to video and everything else. And so, as you've seen in the past few years, whether it's the free press, morning brew, the Hustle, Axios, Politico, newsletter First media companies are having a huge resurgence because they own the distribution, they own the audience. They own the ability to write something and distribute and get it directly in front of their audience. And that is kind of like the bull case for email newsletters, which kind of falls with like this ownership and decentralization. And then so we have launched and we have tons of successful newsletters. We have the stocktwits newsletter, we have time magazine, we have Arnold Schwarzenegger, we have Blockworks, we have tons of huge publications who are doubling down and emphasizing email newsletters. And so the piece that I wrote about substack1 is a power of, like, just having my own audience. I was able to send what I thought was a compelling case to 70,000 people directly, which is something without an email newsletter, I would have never had the distribution on Twitter or LinkedIn to be able to communicate that. But two, what Substack has done in accepting their $650 million valuation and trying to justify what is a reasonable outcome for them is to build the next social network. And so they're now competing with Twitter, with Blue sky, with Threads. And the incentives of a social network is totally different from the incentives of just building a successful publishing tool for email newsletters. Their goal is to have people subscribe to as many people as possible, diluting their audience. They own the distribution, they own the style. And so they do a lot of malicious dark patterns to be able to juice their numbers and build these social networks, which comes at the expense of the publishers. And I don't think that that has been fully seen or caught out to the extent that I've been able to see it as someone who's building a similar business. I know the financials of the business. I understand how they are trying to grow and how they're prioritizing the user growth. And then I see the misalignment of incentives and where eventually I think publishers are going to end up getting burned. And that's more or less just the thesis of the piece.
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B
Can I quickly chime in? Phil, let me explain this and Michael, you can chime in and maybe Ben as an actual end user potentially. But this is that cycle of web2phil where like guys like Fred Wilson originally, the people that understood network effects early and again Network effects was something no one had really talked about, but then you had. And they began before AWS and they began the talk of network effects started with in the BlackBerry era and ended in probably 2020 with COVID when everybody actually had to use these products all at once and got misinformation. Right? So I consider 2020 the peak network effects because when it was meant to work like the Emergency Broadcast System before it, it fucking let everybody down and sent us down Pizzagate. Blah blah, blah, blah blah blah to this day, right to the Columbia and the wokeness. So network effects was a magic wand created by tech that Twitter started this network effects thing and everybody went down the follower, follower path. It ended. Obviously no one knows when the music's going to end with companies like Substack raising money at ridiculous valuations because of said network effects. But what they had forgot was the user already knew that they were the product or the user was being used as the product. And the original rug pull is Facebook. With all these changes, the networks that we thought were great were the original rug pulls, right? You went all in. You wrote for Facebook, you do your comedy for YouTube, you do your newsletter for Substack. They pay you. They don't tell you that they've paid the first couple hundred major newsletter writers to go to Substack. So it's kind of like fake network effects. Anyways, so now we have the unbundling of this network effects, which happens to be also a factor of cap tables. Once network effects gets unwound, it takes a while and Substack and many companies are caught up in fact that they were capitalized and cap tabled for a world that doesn't exist anymore, which creates real problems for those companies. It's not just Substack. It's Elon Musk. Now the difference between Elon Musk is he can bail himself out of this with XAI most 99.99% of other founders are going to be stuck with these terrible cap tables written at a time that doesn't exist anymore. So, Tyler, does that. I mean, when we originally sat down and talked to you, that was kind of our discussion with you four or five years ago.
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F
Yeah.
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And I would even argue that Substack's one of our main competitors. We're building advanced email analytic type tools that we're serving the enterprise. Right. Like Time magazine would never go to Substack to publish their newsletter. We're talking to the largest publications in the world who are moving their email experience to use our pipes, our growth tools, our data analytics. So we aren't one to one, but we do overlap with a lot of these writers and journalists. We just launched a media collector initiative where we're helping support the legal costs, the health insurance, and some other support for these independent journalists to be able to support their work so they can focus on breaking stories, which is actually coincidentally where Substack started and have since kind of pivoted into this social network. I think, as you alluded to with Facebook and Twitter, the thing that keeps recurring is that the platforms always win at the end of the day, and it typically comes at the expense of the publishers who had built up those networks. And so in a way, you can view Substack as a brilliant acquisition strategy to build a social network. Rather than building one by one, they paid the largest writers who already have a massive audience to move onto their platform, which is a way to bootstrap the network with their audience. But what we've seen over the past few years is they're slowly extracting those audiences of their users to download their app and take over the distribution for them. And once your reader has downloaded the Substack app, that's no longer your reader. That is Substack's user to be able to communicate and contact whenever they want, to be able to push notifications and all notifications and all roads go to those Substack accounts to actually generate revenue for them, which are the top 1%.
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B
And I will chime in here with this is not us just talking. Go look at the public markets. If someone can pull up Klaviyo K Vyo. Okay, you won't hear anybody talk about this stock. It went public in silence in 2022. Why? Because maybe the name, maybe it was just not sexy. It's an email marketing company. The modern email marketing company, which is kind of a North Star for where Substack, I mean, we're Beehive can go, which is breaking out to all time highs every day. No one follows it. Kvyo, it's an $11 billion company that is, you know, kind of a North star for companies like Tyler that have the freedom and optionality in their cap table and how they structure the business to go challenge. What, what are the real winners of this? Klaviyo makes your shopify store better. Klaviyo helps creators truly be creators and own their own domain. And that's what Beehive does.
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So everybody Klaviyo is very E commerce. But yeah, I mean I think there's, there's a laundry list of successful email companies. Whether it's Mailchimp that got acquired for 13 billion a few years ago, there's Campaign Monitor, Sail Through, ActiveCampaign, AWeber There. There are dozens of multi billion dollar companies in the email space. Substack is pivoting more into a social network. It's really not the direction that we're moving in, but yeah, okay.
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C
Was. Was WordPress kind of asleep at the wheel for not building out their sort of the newsletter side more robustly? Michael, you're next.
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Sorry. Yeah, yeah, I mean they actually reached out. I connected to their team probably two years ago, coincidentally a month before they launched their newsletter product. I don't know a single person using their newsletter product. Right. But I mean, yeah, they own so much of the Internet and they had the central like CMS of where these writers were actually going to create content. The next logical step was to help them distribute it via email. I don't know where they are with their latest efforts there.
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C
Michael.
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F
No, I think Tyler, thanks for being on the show and I truly enjoyed your post that Death by a Thousand Substacks. I read it twice. It's got a lot of key points in there. I just. Couple of points. Number one, you're making a good point on the core connection to some of the perennial foundations of the Internet. Email for instance.
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A
Right.
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F
I mean email even 50 or 40, 50 years later of online, it's the critical pivot, linchpin to how we connect to the world, whether as individuals or organizations. Can you talk a little bit about your roadmap for Beehive? I like the way you've constructed the product just a little bit more on some of the things that you think can be built on top of the email and the direct distribution, whether it's organizationally or as individuals. Obviously podcasts are big, videos are big, all of that.
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A
Yeah. I think in what I would call the creator economy space, we're actually Going to see a ton of consolidation over the next few years. So you're going to see I break out the main categories as newsletter, website, link in, bio, community and maybe courses as well. I think you've already started to see from circle and I'm blanking on the other name. They're like community based platforms that just launched newsletter capabilities. We actually, so we started as newsletter first and we actually acquired an AI website builder earlier this year. And so we're kind of merging into very powerful website capabilities which is actually set to go live in January and next beyond that would be link in bio, podcasts, you know, courses and community not far from there. So I actually do think we're going to start to see this convergence of whether it's acquisition or just these companies starting to launch competing profiles or feature sets to target these different niches. I don't think that we're going to have 10 link in bio tools, 10 website tools, 10 newsletter tools. I think we're going to see some start to emerge.
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F
Yeah, I just had a quick follow up on the website piece because Google was in the website business and they just, you know, got rid of it.
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B
To.
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F
Squarespace, I think. And this business of domain names is critical to the foundation of the web and it's been forgotten. Almost everybody has not done that. Well, it's so geeky to take whatever you have, whatever presence you have on the Internet and unless you have a IT staff to match your domain name to it, et cetera. How do you think about making it as simple and straightforward to how you're going with this? Because that's, that's been the holy grail of any, any of the billions of people on the Internet. I want my space. Remember MySpace? That was, you know, that was the idea. A place where no one can take it away from me, no one can come in. And websites ended up being a whole, a domain name ended up being a whole separate thing. That's extraordinarily tough even to this day to manage for most mortals.
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A
Yeah, I mean to answer your question directly of what you asked previously, what I'm most excited about on the roadmap is our website capabilities. Whether it's Squarespace, wix, there's a webflow frame or multi, multibillion dollar companies that are. Some do websites better than others. But there's a huge power in having all the solutions under one roof to the extent that people are willing to accept a slightly lesser experience to have one login and all of their data and all of their touch points with their customers in a single platform. I don't think that our solution is actually going to be a step below the competition. We've been working for eight months on this new website builder and I think it will actually Compete with the WordPress webflow framers of the world. And I think that actually flips the narrative of what Beehive is entirely on its head. Because to date we have been a newsletter platform that offers a website out of the box that's mediocre at best. Where we're going to be in January is a website that can customize in any which direction you want, fully flexible. You can build courses on it, you can build whatever you really want. And there's a, the best in class newsletter platform to boot on the back of that. So you have the ability to send traffic to your, your space online and then to communicate with your customers via email. We actually have the best suite of tools for email as well. So I actually think January is going to be a pretty big inflection point for the business where we can flip the model entirely on its head.
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B
The other thing Michael, you'll, you and I have talked about privately, we'll publicly announce this sometime late January, but starts with some Beehive. We've come to the age where it's not just the creator economy, it's the creative plumbing, creative Internet, where the Internet is set, right? We can hate about it. Like there's, there's people you can read that just are losing their mind, right? It's a kind of like it's a new form of wokeism in a many way. It's people that hate the Internet because of the way it's structured, right? And that's going to drive people insane. Or you can get creative with what we have, right? Like you could never get creative around television broadcasting, but at least you can get creative around the Internet, which is new forms of plumbing, new forms of wiring, right? And I think what you'll see and kudos to the Free Press Barry Weiss for doing this, but not enough people are recognizing true creators on the economy and how they're hacking together plumbing and wiring and distribution to grow their businesses, right? Creators can't just make good content. They actually have to creatively get distribution. And so I think what you're going to see now in an area of high interest rates, people talked about lack of IPOs and lack of acquisitions. Well, 6% interest rates are going to create an environment for many more acquisitions because those companies that were set up to be features that were getting funded for 10 years at YC and all these other places by Andreessen are going to be in market begging for a home. Much like Tyler being able to buy a YC AI website builder, which in a 0% interest rate environment seemed like, hey, we'll keep raising money and build the behemoth. Like we'll copy the Airbnb model, we'll copy the Twitter model, but that market just closed. What Tyler's going to need and what a lot of great CEOs with 30 to 50 million in revenue are going to have to learn how to do as corporate dev. And that should start out very early in a company's career like Tyler did testing, integrating startups, buying startups. Because the creator economy also applies to the new CEOs. I think we went through Web2 and the only creative CEO was Mark Zuckerberg by buying Instagram and by buying WhatsApp. Very few Web 2.0 companies executed like a Microsoft did or like a Benioff did. So anyways, this is why I wanted what Tyler's doing, what email's doing, what the creators are doing is this and no one wants to realize it is they're rewiring the Internet that we were given. Right. The the Magnificent Seven are not going away. It's now what the Magnificent Eight Sherwood at Robinhood calls it. Batman B A A T M A. I don't know. They've got a new acronym for Broadcom now in there. So that ain't going away. Companies will get added to the being these planetary size companies and it's up for the Tyler Danks of the world that have unique is not just products to bundle themselves up to get to the next level in that game of the markets. And, and so by picking the right north stars like following the Clavios and following the. The companies that are actually building great businesses today's startups can really build, you know, for this next economy. But. All right, Phil, what do we got next?
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C
So I have one more question for Tyler. So just, just. I'm just a really dumb guy. I got a website, I got a new. I got a newsletter that I switched over from Stub stack to beehive. Beautiful thing that I did. And I'm going to rebuild my website like I'm growing. I got a, I got my own business and right now the word. There's a WordPress economy.
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F
Right?
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C
I can go find somebody. I know a couple people already. My wife has a squarespace. I could go find a Squarespace guy to build my wife's website. I can go find a WordPress guy. You know where I'm going with this. How long? So you guys are relaunching in January, sometime early next year? I'm rebuilding my website. Do I just wait? Do I wait till February or March and then, you know, these on Upwork or wherever Beehive devs start to pop up and they'll be able to help me because I could never do it myself. You guys are making it so easy. I set it up myself. I even figured out how to get it. So it's philprelman.com backslash prime cuts or whatever. But I'm never going to be able to set up the website by myself. So how long?
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A
The goal is that it is actually simple enough that Phil can set up his own website. But in this use case we already have a lot of like open source like on Fiverr and everywhere the these different agencies and dev shops that know how to specialize in the Beehive software. So that exists now. But also to your point of where.
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C
We are, that's a community that you guys are seeding and fostering through the application.
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A
And part of this build that we're doing now with the website builder is to facilitate being able to buy and sell templates in the marketplace as well. So going further to the Klaviyo and Shopify model where Howard could go in, build his favorite website template and then sell it for $25 and can have any user within the Beehive Ecosyste system paying Howard directly. So we're starting to do a little bit more of like a platform play and ecosystem effects there. The other thing I'd call out too is where we are very not opinionated as despite putting in eight months of effort to build this new website builder, which we're betting a lot on, where we differ from a closed walled garden of Substack, just to go back to that piece is you can use Squarespace or WordPress or any website that you want and integrate directly into Beehive as well. So we are firmly pro user in the sense of flexibility and autonomy to choose what tech stack you want and we play nicely with all of the different website platforms. Whereas a more restricting ecosystem like Substack, for example, is you have to build within their walled garden and you don't have access to the other third party tools that are available on the Internet. And so that's just a point of contrast to call out that if you want to hire this WordPress developer to build the most beautiful website and don't want to Wait for us. That's perfectly fine. Encouraged and possible using our platform.
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C
Amazing. Sick. So you guys are almost competing more with automatic and WordPress than you are really Substack.
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A
We have a lot of competitors. I mean it's a super crowded space, right? Like if you create content on the Internet, whether you do it medium, whether you do it WordPress, whether you do it independent, we are trying to replace a lot of those, but we're also playing friendly with all of them and we can integrate whichever way you want.
- [28:57]
B
Remember Phil, they're not a, they're not a platform in the, in the classic Web two sense away. So they therefore theoretically have to compete with everyone. They have to either build, buy or contain themselves to markets where they can build a business. Right. So we're, we are out of the era of. Yeah, sorry, that is incorrect. 70% of all VC money was in the last year was raised by 10 funds. So we are not out of the era of overfunding. But the VCs have moved on to different types of products, not platforms. They've moved on to the bright shiny object of blockchains and AI. But you cannot go do what you did in Web two. You have to have a business before you can land and expand. Um, but, and Michael, to Your point on GoDaddy's at all time highs, so buying a web domain, the, you know GoDaddy is the Berkshire Hathaway real estate arm of the web, right. Like GDDY goes up every day right now because they're taking tolls on all this. So, so creators are booming the, the, the, the, the domain space because people, once they realize they have to own their own domain again, to quote Seinfeld, they got to go back to square one and figure out how to wire the net the world for them. They can't rely on Facebook to wire the world from. That was the misdirection just Howard Lens in a Facebook Howard Lens into Twitter. You know, Ben's probably been through this with his young generation of friends where they're just getting shadow banned and content rated. And it's very frustrating for that generation. But they won't cry. They're going to move on like Ben's doing. They're. They're going to own their own domain. Comedians, we made an investment in punch up comedians are doing this and GoDaddy's.
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F
A $30 billion market cap at a 16 multiple. So it tells you.
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B
And you know what, you know what has to happen at that company every day? Nothing. There's probably two employees at that company. So again, like, what's old is new.
- [31:07]
C
Are we whistling past the graveyard on YouTube also? Because really, YouTube's doing the same thing, Tyler, in a way that Twitter, you know, you'd be.
- [31:16]
B
I, I.
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A
People are so bullish on YouTube. When you read, like, Mr. Beast whole philosophy on, like, bet going all in. And as smart as he is and, and knowing how concentrated he is in YouTube to say that that is the future. I'm actually not a huge YouTube person. I'm one of the few people who don't spend a ton of time on YouTube. But the younger generation spends hours per day on YouTube.
- [31:37]
B
Let's, let's.
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F
YouTube is basically. I mean, this week they said they're going. Their biggest platform is the TV. People are moving in droves.
- [31:47]
B
YouTube. YouTube is TV. Ben, where are you with YouTube? Because you live on it.
- [31:51]
D
I'm very frustrated by YouTube. I do. I'm, I consider myself, like, late to the YouTube game because gone are the days when you could get. These days, like a million views on YouTube is 20 million views on YouTube 10 years ago. It's just a lot more spread out. It's a lot more. There's way, way, way, way, way more creators on there uploading stuff all the time. It's a lot more competitive. I'm. We're constantly up against the algorithm. And I, every single week when I put out an episode, I'm stressing about what the thumbnail is going to be, what the title is going to be, whether people are going to click it, why that, why aren't they? If they aren't? Okay, why are they, if they are? And I, I personally don't know, because that's our, like, number One focus is YouTube. We publish on Spotify, we publish on Apple, podcasts and everywhere else but video. It's all YouTube. I don't. And we've started to delve into live streaming. We're not even thinking about doing Twitch. We are staying within the YouTube ecosystem because it's easier. We've already got our entire subscriber base there. If the question is whether anybody's going to come and usurp or eat their lunch from my, from where I sit. No, I mean, if anything, Spot, like we're going to start publishing video on Spotify. Obviously that only applies to podcasts. As for just regular old videos, sketches, vlogs, things like that. It's just as. I mean, people have always bitched about YouTube and stuff and, and the ecosystem and whatever they're doing and their arbitrary rules that change from time to time without anybody knowing why all of a sudden am I shadow banned? Whatever. I just. Man, I just don't see it going.
- [33:55]
B
Anywhere anytime soon in that world. Let's talk about it quickly, right? Like I'm late to YouTube. So I'm 59 and I would say it's been about a year since I went down the YouTube TV rabbit hole and never, never, first of all, made it easy to leave Twitter and everything else on my mobile app, right? Because I can actually listen to the people that I'm interested, lean back. And comedians, the politics, but mostly comedians, golf, st. The stuff I just was breaking up my time for during the day and getting nothing done. Now I can lean back and watch it. But it doesn't change the fact, Ben, that you and Emil or you yourself should be moving your followers to an email based platform because you don't have someone that you can transact with truly, truly until you can reach out to them, assuming your email gets delivered and can ask them for something. Right? And that's what Klaviyo is showing. That's what Beehive is showing. You need to subtly or forcefully start a weekly newsletter where your YouTube followers can actually hear directly from you and not have to trust the YouTube subscribe button. Until creators do this and comedians have started first and it's like a landslide political writers have done this on the free press with Substack. I think that's a mistake. They're going to be sorry they did Substack, but it was a great idea by Barry Weiss to have their tech built out. So, Ben, the faster you move your audience to, even if it's just a thousand people, that's way better than you were before. You started a very low friction, way, very low friction way for you to talk to your customers.
- [35:35]
D
It's something that we've aspired to do for a while because there's always topics that we inevitably can't get to or links.
- [35:42]
B
Right. Or links that you can share with your readers that build more trust. All right, Michael, go ahead.
- [35:46]
F
I just point. I. Ben, I feel your pain on the power of the algorithm. Right? In terms of YouTube, et cetera, the reality is in the 21st century and we're just getting started, we are going from 20th century world gated by people and organizations to world gated by algorithms. You know, Whether you're a YouTube subscriber, you're governed by algorithms. If you're a Uber driver, you're gated by algorithms. You're TikTok, you're gated by Algorithms. This is just the reality of where we are, the systems, the algorithms. The companies are going to compete with each other by potentially giving us more transparency on how their algos work and more personalization. But this notion of algorithms, we're not getting away from it. If anything, AI is going to accelerate it exponentially in dramatic across every platform. So algos by themselves, we have to learn to live with them and we have to learn to figure out how the markets can compete with algos against each other. And that's going to be the opportunity and salvation for people. Everybody that wants a voice on the Internet. Right.
- [36:56]
D
Our struggle is getting ourselves plugged into the right part of the algorithm.
- [37:01]
F
I got it.
- [37:02]
D
I'm all for.
- [37:03]
B
I mean, that's not going to change. It's not going to change. What can change is you delivering emails to your customers to remind them of your show, to remind them of special guests, etc. Etc.
- [37:13]
D
Yeah, because you can't rely on YouTube, people clicking the notification bell so that they actually get notified when we publish.
- [37:19]
B
Good for YouTube. That's not so much good for you.
- [37:21]
D
Remember that.
- [37:22]
B
That's good for the algo, not good for you. All right, should we switch up subjects to AI? Because AI is what Mike just let in or go ahead.
- [37:31]
C
Let's go, let's talk about AI. Let's just talk about Broadcom. We got Michael here. We just have to ask you. I mean, Broadcom is, seems like it's now emerging at a next level of public awareness after last week and crossing a trillion, having, you know, blowout earnings, crossing $1 trillion. So Michael, why don't you just take us through what's going on there and sort of, you know, where we're at. No, it's, it's, it's into 2020.
- [37:56]
F
No, it's been a really interesting year and particularly last few months where big cap technology companies that have been around for decades are now coming into their AI own. So obviously Nvidia, 31 years old, overnight success in the last two years, going from sub $500 million to 3 plus $3.5 trillion. Broadcom is in this bucket. It's a company that was created in the 90s, gone through several incarnations, a semiconductor company, then became a software infrastructure company, multiple incarnations. And just in the last two or three years they do all sorts of semiconductors, et cetera. But the reason the stock is up 20, 25, 30% depending on how you count over the last two or three trading days is that all of a sudden people have said, oh, My God, Broadcom is the company of choice that companies like Meta, Google, Apple, OpenAI are all going to to create what are called custom GPUs. In the Broadcom's case, they're XPUs. I wrote about this yesterday on Broadcom if you want to take a look. But all of a sudden people are saying Nvidia, there is no second choice. Nvidia I think still is in the catbird seat for AI GPUs for the next three or four years minimum because of their hardware and their Cuda software. Broadcom is the company that most of the big companies that have billions to spend are going to develop customers, chips, GPUs, XPUs, etc that will be made ultimately by people like TSMC, etc. But Broadcom is basically the vendor of choice and that's what came through in their quarter, just released on Friday. And so it's become the current name that everyone got excited about. There was some reallocation, institutionally passive funds, active funds, et cetera. So the stocks had quite the run and it became the eighth trillion dollar cap company in the United States. And it's also testament to the us. We talk about US versus China and US versus the world. The US is actually in a pretty good place where we can have eight plus companies now that are trillion dollars, 13 figures in terms of the AI boom. So I continue to kind of view that we are very much in the early days of what I call the mainframe stage of the AI tech wave. Companies like Broadcom. I wrote about dell, which is $100 billion company premium provider of storage solutions for the Internet was another one that's gone up a lot in the last couple of days. All these tech companies that have been around 30, 40 years, Delft, Goldman, we took it public in 1988. They're now being discovered as AI companies because they have an AI tailwind and they're getting on ahead on Steam on this stuff. And Broadcom is absolutely in this bucket and they've got their time under the sun. They had some political issues as well. They'd moved headquarters to Singapore, moved it back to the US after our President elect Trump made some noises. The CEO got his picture taken with Donald Trump. And so now Broadcom also has some political tailwinds from an AI point of view going into the new administration. So that's another thing to keep in mind.
- [41:19]
C
Is it like the old days that was like intel and then AMD was the smaller company that they were competing with and now it's like Nvidia is the intel and Broadcom is the amd.
- [41:31]
F
Broadcom is potentially an amd. The reason I say that is because Broadcom is again, they help design these next generation chips for the Metas and the Apples of the world. But it's not a, you know, every time I buy a PC I get an intel chip or a AMD chip. It's, it's, it's, it's for Apple to decide matter, to decide how many chips and then, you know, after a certain amount of chips. Apple is also, for instance, working with Amazon and their Trainium chips. They were on Amazon's AWS developer conference just two weeks ago on stage saying we're also going to be building chips using Amazon with their Trainium chips. So all of the big companies are diversifying their chips that they have, but it's just the infrastructure. So your point is totally right, Phil. The AMD is really the backup for Nvidia for people who want chips in their PCs for local AI processing. And AMD is also trying to get into the inference market for chips. So AMD is an option. ARM is another company that's an option because a lot of the mobile chips are based on ARM templates. And then Broadcom is now the third chip company that's been recognized as a potential alternative to Nvidia chip infrastructure. The market is so big that there's enough room for all of them. This is not a binary zero sum game and it won't be that way. I don't think, Phil, for at least two to three years because we're just barely gotten started in terms of the kinds of things we're going to need these chips to do AI computations for. We've not just, we've not gotten started. So yeah, all three of them, amd, arm, Broadcom, all of them are now in the. I'd also throw in Qualcomm because Qualcomm is also a big player in mobile chips for smartphones and so on. So that's another one I would, for local AI processing I would put in the bucket.
- [43:36]
B
But with Google launching and crossing $200 a share and 2 1/2 trillion, I still feel like people underestimate Google. Right. Like they released that. I don't know if it's true. It seems like the source was true of them against Sora with the guy cutting a tomato. And I think you can clearly see it's not about who gets there first. Right? I don't think it's the first one wins. I think this is a game of like the early adopters are there, but the mom paws aren't there. And the mom paws, when they switch, they're going to need really good stuff. Right. Like the OpenAI wins the first three innings, let's call it, or two innings. But this is a nine inning game. In a nine inning game when Google owns and Apple own, the way you enter this, the vehicle that enters it, and maybe Facebook with glasses. Tyler, what are you seeing as someone deploying AI both as a company with a lot of employees and with millions of hundreds of thousands of customers?
- [44:42]
A
Yeah, I think we're taking an extra look now in trying to determine the best ways to deploy AI internally to just make our processes more efficient. Right.
- [44:51]
B
Yeah.
- [44:52]
A
I think that's where the biggest use, case and upside is for us is rather than hiring having to hire three to four people to do a certain task, can we have one person spend half their time training an AI model to do that exact task? Anything that's repetitive, data driven, et cetera. So that's like what interests me the most right now. We have some generative AI in the platform. I think it's still fairly early for that. It also kind of goes in the face of having writers to create content. I have noticed with my newsletter as of late, like when I get stuck on a sentence, I'll just put my half baked sentence into chatgpt and tell it to fix it a few times and like it'll eventually spit out a much worse version of what I want, but better worded and then I'll like tweak it a bit after that. So I do think there's a place for like writing tools and assistants that we could probably go a bit deeper on like the creator side of things. But mostly for me, it's just what are the laborious tasks that we're doing over and over again and how can we augment that with AI internally? That excites me a lot more than hiring a ton of people.
- [45:55]
B
Yeah. At Stock tuts, we hired one person to go through every system and streamline and figure out how we can deploy AI. Exactly. So you got to, even if that's wrong, we're starting with that. Michael and Tyler, just to say, hey, that's your job, is talk to everybody at the company and let's know every product and make sure we're streamlining and then we can get better. As a company, I know that my day to day job, you know, if someone doesn't have a secretary or anything, but I do have, you know, a couple chief of staffs which are beyond being secretaries, obviously. It's, it's, it's, there's got to be a way to 10x even the chief of staffs right now. So it is a very exciting time for productivity for people that want to be productive. Right. Even if I just don't want to be productive. You'll be more productive. But I think those that want to be productive, this is the ultimate era because you've got all this knowledge like the death of a thousand substacks. Like if you're still gonna, if you're still gonna feed the machine and be dumb, we can't help you. Like, if you still don't know how Facebook works, then you'll never know. You're just sloppy. And that's just the path you've chosen. And that's why Facebook's a magnificent seven. That's why people still get Wells Fargo statements delivered in the mail still. So there is going to be that customer. But for those that want to get better, this is the moment.
- [47:24]
F
Michael Google is still viewed in a defensive crouch on AI and it's incorrect in my view. Google is the only one that owns, other than Apple, the full stack. They make their chips. We talked about Broadcom. Google has their own thing called TPUs that go up against Broadcom's XPUs and Nvidia's GPUs. Google has distribution through, you know, eight apps that are over a billion users around the world for Google services. Their Gemini 2.0 is very, very positively reviewed against OpenAI's best. And both companies are in a day to day competition this month going into Christmas releasing one up products like OpenAI did Sora for video. Google just announced VO2. They are in the game and they are in it to win. So I think Google should be viewed as aggressive a player as any of the other companies. It's one of the few times we're seeing wide open competition amongst the biggest major big tech companies and a lot of startups. And it's not a zero sum game. So I just wanted to underline Google being on a very strong. They had a bag full of announcements just two or three days ago and developers around the world are reeling from the opportunity to build a lot of cool things with all of the technologies.
- [48:51]
B
Well, the other signal you have, right, like OpenAI with Microsoft, great partnership from Microsoft, they weren't going to, you know, Satya wasn't going to build this. He saw it, he paid up, he can pay it. Market's given him cover to do that and he's done it beautifully. But remember this is a long game. What did Elon Musk just announce? And he does announce a lot of stuff that doesn't happen but he's very serious about email. Why? Because that's where people live. Productivity people. If they're not in Outlook, which I don't know how you know there is a huge market in Outlook. If you're not in Outlook you're in Gmail. Right? And elon understands and OpenAI doesn't have to play this game because of Outlook which also affects OpenAI's valuation in the end that if I live in email then like my and Howard Lindsay may not use need to help writing his emails but my son sure does, my wife sure does and they already are living with Google Gmail AI right and this goes to the GoDaddy chart. If you look at GoDaddy the basic of setting up on the Internet is at an all time high and the basics that Google has Android, email, YouTube, maps, we got that Google chart, we.
- [50:04]
C
Put that Google chart out.
- [50:06]
B
They are 10 Godaddies in one. So even if you don't think that they are executing well they have 10 Godaddies. And so I expect them to people to realize this over time right? Because it's fun to try and pick the next Google but sometimes as we've learned Google is the next Google. So again I think it plays catch up. Again a lot of this depends on just the market itself but if you look at that launch of VO2 or whatever they call it versus Sora this is like fucking day one still or inning three so very exciting time. But Elon's Elon announcing ex mail there's you didn't want you know there's bigger reason behind that than just tweeting. He needs daily interaction and I think my biggest prediction failure on this not prediction show is that XAI rolls in Twitter at some point next year just to clean up what people think about Twitter and it is a business model it'll cleanly be like when they rolled for Solar City into his other companies. So with Xai already at 50 billion and to foregone conclusion that at higher valuation than Twitter was bought for with probably the same investors from Qatar to Qatar to Andreessen that seems to be the one thing that for sure will happen next year. But anyways that's Google really, really you know that's AI. Go ahead Phil.
- [51:44]
C
Speaking of Elon and Tesla Ben. Yes, Tesla. Elon, we got the Tesla chart here. What's your take?
- [51:56]
D
I I I I I Because I. I am an Elon hater. All right? And look, he's. Is he richer than me? Yeah. Has he done a lot more in his life than I have? Yeah. That doesn't mean that I still can't find him to be the most annoying. I'm just. I'm just tired of. I'm tired of opening up Twitter every day and his dog tweets are at the top of my algorithm talking about. I get it, man. You're building a rocket. I get it. Starship is huge. I get it. Starship. We're gonna go to Mars. Shut the up already. God damn. I'm just tired of this, Ben. And. And every day, every day he's making more money. Every day the stock goes higher. And I have a weird conspiracy theory, and this is probably. This is me coming from ignorance, but when you're worth $400 billion, is it not within the realm of possibility that you could have offshore accounts or have people trading the stock on your behalf, manipulating it? I mean, it really doesn't take that much in options flows to keep. Sorry, my dog is really.
- [53:15]
B
It's really in my right now. All right.
- [53:19]
D
I mean, I. I be For a guy who's been so obsessed with short sellers, who by the way, he should be commending because without the short sellers squeezing his stock higher, he wouldn't be worth what he is today. Like. Like also. What. What. What an. What an immature way to view the markets that, that people shorting your stock must believe that you are. They don't believe in you. Shut the up. Do you not know how markets that without short selling, it's the yin and yang dip shit. Like, get real. And I'm sorry, I'm much more articulate than this usually. But yeah, I just have this conspiratorial mindset that the richer he gets, the more he's able to manipulate his own stock higher to continue. I mean, that's what I would do if I were worth $400 billion and I'm watching.
- [54:18]
B
Would have to do. You gotta understand. Yeah, there is. He's. The punishment is his job, right? His whole daily life is. It's like someone who goes to the circus and spins plates. This is why you shouldn't be upset because first of all, let me just help you here. Turn Twitter off. Here's what you will miss. What you will miss. And I say that for someone who is addicted to Twitter app and should have been on YouTube, right? Like, at least you're on YouTube if you're starting. If you haven't started your creator and haven't don't have a beehive and aren't thinking about YouTube. You're really thinking about everything.
- [54:53]
F
But Howard, you and I were on Twitter first. We were there.
- [54:56]
B
No, but Elon wasn't. So we beat them to it. Okay, we beat many people to Twitter. Guess what? That bar is not cool anymore. It's happened throughout your whole life, Ben. The fact that you are going to that bar and being upset, you have to flip this on Elon. This is his punishment that he has to wake up every day telling a story. That is a really hard story to tell.
- [55:21]
D
That's a good point.
- [55:22]
B
And same with. You have to realize that their punishment is the wealth that they have. They've gone beyond where money makes you happy. They've gone to where money now is. You are a slave to telling the story. And that's the stock market. What's great about the stock market is you don't even have to look at it. And you can mute Elon Musk, trust me. And nothing changes on Twitter. It won't get better so much. But you can solve these problems. So as someone who's young and I have to tell my daughter all this, we have to rearrange our wiring and live our lives because they're not going to change. That drum beat is only going to get louder. The good news is if you put a few blocks up, you don't even know it exists in the real world.
- [56:03]
A
That's true.
- [56:04]
B
Fart coin's doing a lot better than Tesla is. And there's quantum chip stocks or there's quantum stocks that have been trending for. And you were in a couple of them, Ben. That quantum's 30 years away according to micro, 20 years away. And stocks are up thousands of percent. So this game is going to go on. I think that the smartest thing to do is to just focus not on the person, but on what you can control. But anyways, or I think it's funny that you're this upset because I used to be this upset about Best Buy. Best Buy was my Elon Musk that was a criminal that continues to be a criminal organization. And Best Buy is like the most retailer of all time.
- [56:48]
D
BBY.
- [56:49]
B
BBY, man, if you were alive in the 90s, you hated this company. They. They.
- [56:54]
D
I was a Circuit City guy.
- [56:55]
B
Well, I'm saying them in Circuit City and CompUSA, they controlled you. Because if you had a product that had to get to market, you had to go kiss the ass of a best buyer. And they were making 60 grand a year and they controlled all distribution. So you think it's bad now? Imagine what it was like trying to sling product in the 90s in the tech industry. Egghead, Electron, they're all gone. And Elon knows that if he doesn't play this game properly, he'll be a footnote. So again, he's playing the game. You are upset at the wrong player.
- [57:29]
D
I'm also just. I hear what you're saying. I unfortunately have to kind of have him unmuted because he is so relevant to especially the topics that we cover on our show. But it's more just like, I can't believe that a guy with that much wealth can still be that cringy and, and immature and just completely lacking in self awareness. It's just, it's mind boggling.
- [57:54]
B
And someone has a dad that reminds him of Elon Musk. Hands out three.
- [58:01]
F
Nobody.
- [58:01]
B
Just three out of six. So, okay, we have good dads, but.
- [58:05]
C
My dad was a.
- [58:06]
B
Honestly, five out of six of us have cringy dads. That's Elon Musk. He's just.
- [58:10]
D
It's just wild.
- [58:11]
C
Money doesn't buy class.
- [58:13]
B
Yeah.
- [58:13]
D
Yeah. And I, I'm not like, I don't mean to sound all like socialist, communist or whatever, but I, I really wonder at what point we just as a society, as a country, as a culture, ask ourselves honestly, how much is too much?
- [58:29]
B
Like it already is.
- [58:31]
D
$400 billion is. He's, he's literally untouchable. He can do anything he wants. He can't get fined. Nothing can even come close. He owns and, and controls the vast majority of Earth's satellites. He's. Now he's fully able to do and influence whatever he wants until he's dead. But every, and everybody, all the tech accelerationists, if you dare speak against him, cry. Oh, you're decel. You're, you're, you're just jealous.
- [59:04]
A
Whatever.
- [59:05]
D
It's like, no, get your. You've got, You've. You've had your head so far up Elon's ass that you've gotten used to the smell. And I implore you to, to try to squeeze it out and look at reality for what it is. Are we okay with a guy like this having this much unchecked influence, power, you name it, it's fuck it. It really does sometimes make me. I really just like worry like, what the fuck are we doing? Who is this guy that he gets to dictate our collective future according to his whims, his views, his Worldview, I mean, it's fucking what I hope. All I can be is optimistic that he's a good actor.
- [59:49]
F
And Ben has even told us what he thinks about Tesla.
- [59:52]
B
Hair is doing well, considering your worries, so I think you should be grateful. True. But again, I would urge you as a young person to not worry about this. The world has chosen him over Pelosi. I mean, I'd rather have him than Pelosi and Schumer. So that's what I'm saying. Like, the world is made, the world has some bad choices, and the world will fix this as well. Michael.
- [60:15]
F
No, I was just going to say. And Ben hasn't even told us what he thinks about Tesla.
- [60:20]
D
Oh, Tesla. To the fucking moon, Michael.
- [60:23]
B
Oh, baby. You know, they're gonna. They're gonna.
- [60:28]
D
You're gonna have five robots and it's gonna. You're gonna have five of them.
- [60:32]
B
Yeah. Here's what I did. Here's what I did. You. You. You index. Like Phil said. Like I said, even though I won't own Tesla myself, it's 7% of my portfolio. Right. Like, again, it's not illegal to ride a trend. Of course it's cringy at some points, but it's not illegal. Will I personally, you know, buy Tesla? No. Will I buy the car? No. So I think you can do two things, but people just. The world is wired in a way that you can't vote with your wallet. Right now, it's very hard to vote with your wallet, and that's an index world. It's very hard to truly vote with your wallet. There's been tons of startups that said you could. They're littered in graveyards of fintech startups. That said, we will help you choose. Okay. The world is telling you something. Momentum is telling you something, is stay out of the way of this trade. Right. Because Tesla is Moon and robots are coming and storytelling matters.
- [61:27]
A
Absolutely.
- [61:27]
B
Access to capital matters and having. And being right in the past matters, and having a cult matters and owning your own domain matters, blah, blah, blah. And Elon is executed on all these things and that's what he's doing. You can't deny that very long time. Now remember, this unravels one day with either you wake up and he. And he Michael Jackson himself, or he gets United Health Care. No, both are. Both are the only ways. And believe me, he has to think about these things every day. So his. His. His punishment is the job. All right, Phil, what's next?
- [62:01]
C
So we're going to go on to Riley Roseby what's up, Riley? Trends with no friends. How are we doing? We do it, though. What's up, buddy? Before we do it, Tyler, I got a question for you off of the Twitter. Tom Maloly asks. And he's, by the way, great guy, old school financial advisor down on the Jersey Shore. He says, phil, what's to stop Beehive or any other, like, aggregator publisher from becoming a future substack?
- [62:32]
F
So what.
- [62:32]
C
What do you. What checks what differentiates you or checks you have in place that will stop you from. From pulling a sub stack? And it makes me think, I still hate Twitter from fucking destroying Twitpic. Like, you know, I don't know, 10 years ago, 12 years ago. And they basically just were like, okay, you can't use the API anymore. Twitpic was awesome, by the way. And so what. So what differentiates you guys structurally from being able to say, okay, now that we're so big, we're just going to start being dicks?
- [63:07]
A
Yeah, I mean, he was wrong when he described us as an aggregator. And that's like, kind of where it starts and ends. We don't aggregate content. We are the Shopify as to Substack being an Amazon. When you shop at Amazon, you don't seek a specific brand. You kind of just go through the app, through the website. They own the communication. They send you in their Amazon box. They send the receipts and everything else. Amazon is the destination, similar to Substack is trying to become the destination of an application that you log into. And they'll promote all of the content insidiously promoting the content that they make the most money from, because that's where they are most incentivized to drive people. We don't aggregate content. We are the shopify of email newsletters. We have. Howard has his own newsletter that doesn't interfere. We don't interject Howard's readers and say, oh, you're reading Howard's newsletter. Why don't you check out Tyler's and Riley's and Phil's newsletter as well? Howard owns is distribution. We are the pipes and distribution of being able to communicate with your audience. We are not an aggregator. And that's like, where we've drawn the line historically and don't have any plans to become one.
- [64:13]
B
Yeah. I will have to say this is that. This is that part that's both exciting and frustrating. Right. As someone who writes every day and looks at my numbers and cares, like, what am I supposed to care about? Right. I care about my open. Right. Because those are the people that since I write every day to have a 50% open rate, it doesn't matter to me the numbers. Right. I know I'd love to have. I know there's. If I have 20,000 opens, should it be 50,000? Yes. But that's still got to be on me and spend and figuring out another way to reach them. I'm not. Tyler's job to not create this false signal is to not say if you like Howard or so I mean, I would love to have bigger vanity metrics and I think that's going to be Beehives. You know, story to tell is like if you come to beehive, don't expect magic in terms of your followers. You're going to look at like this guy's chart.
- [65:03]
A
I would say there is a difference between being an aggregator and playing and having network effects. Right. So we don't play aggregator. We don't curate who we think is the top 10 finance newsletter or the top 10 sports writers, because that's not. We're not playing editorial. Right. But there is network effects built into the ecosystem that we've created. Where I can recommend, I can voluntarily recommend Howard's newsletter. And then we also have a boost feature where you can. Most of the top newsletters pay some level for paid acquisition to reach new readers. And so you can say, I'm willing to pay $2 per subscriber. And the tens of thousands of newsletters in our ecosystem can apply to promote your newsletter and get paid $2 per lead. So we do have network effects that are opt in and they aren't editorial driven, but it does allow you to take advantage of the 350 million unique readers within our ecosystem and you can build those connections. So we do help you grow.
- [65:59]
C
And you guys are building out an ad network that is just so insane. Like I get, I haven't done it yet, but in 25 I will. But I get emails from Beehive saying, hey, Huel, or even Nike wants to advertise on your. On your newsletter. That's sick.
- [66:15]
F
Yeah.
- [66:16]
A
So that when. When Michael asked earlier, like the two things, well, what excites me the most about the roadmap? There's two. One is the website builder, which is coming in January. The second is the ad network. And so right now we're paying about roughly a million dollars every single month to different publishers on the platform. And that's from the thesis of substack shows. The only way to monetize your audience is via paid subscription. And we're going to take 10% of everything you earn. We allow you to offer paid subscriptions. We do not take 10% of your earnings. But that is a viable way to make money. If you are Barry Weiss, if you are Ben Thompson, if you have an audience and create content that warrants charging for. But the large majority of content creators and the way that people have made money on the Internet, on the Internet for decades has been via ads. The downside of ads, especially when you're doing native ad placements, is it's a lot of manual work to connect with these brands, to sell them on your audience, on your data, do the copywriting, do the testing, the invoicing, etc. So because we have two and a half billion impressions per month, we can aggregate advertisers like HubSpot, Netflix, Roku, Nike, like the who's who of, like the advertisers with very, very deep pockets because they want to get in front of these niche audiences, like Phil's newsletter or like Howard's newsletter. And so as a publisher on our platform with two clicks and no relationship to any of these brands, you can have your newsletter sponsored by Nike and get paid anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars without having to do any work. And I think that is a. It is like the YouTube model in an extent where with the exception of you actually have control over what the advertiser is showing in your newsletter versus YouTube is just going to place programmatic ads on your video. But there are parallels, I'd say, between monetization on YouTube and what we're looking to build with the Beehive Ad network.
- [68:07]
C
Thanks. Thanks, Tyler. Okay, beautiful. Okay, let's do Trends with no Friends. Riley, you got a couple. There's the Trends with no Friends. Well, we got.
- [68:19]
E
We're kind of, we're going to look at a few different themes here. So the first one that I want to look at is the Trends with no Friends. And we're just going to take a look at Argentina kind of as a whole to begin. So we've been talking about Argentina on the podcast, seems like all year. And these are all the Argentinian adrs that are trading in the US with over a billion dollar market cap. And you can see in the second column on the far right there, those are the follower counts. So none of the stocks from Argentina have over 2,000 followers. And you can see the year to date performance on the far right end. Absolutely. Monster. I mean, I texted you this morning, Phil, like, who had on their bingo card a regional bank from Argentina. Would outperform Bitcoin. So, I mean, go ahead.
- [69:03]
B
This is a fascinating story because Trends with no Friends is such a unique use case of our data in that it's kind of opposite of how you would think about our data. Right. It's reverse relative strength. Right. Meme coins have all. Listen, the president of Argentina, whatever they call them, of Argentina, is a storyteller much like Elon Musk. And he has lifted the country up on his back telling kind of a mix of Palantir, a mix of Elon Musk and a mix of Sam Altman and a mix of Goldman Sachs. And the people that have listened to him. Right. The people that have followed him and followed Price have been the big winners here. Right. We've had this what I call degenerate economy and Argentina has just gone back to being a basic economy. And look at the rewards or is chosen at least verbally and storytelling wise to be a basic economy, not a degenerate economy. And look at the returns here. And if they really can execute on some of the things he talks about leading Argentina, then we're in the early days of, you know, this is a big latam country. So Michael, you've probably seen this before out of latam. Is there something here that like makes sense or is it all just, you know, storytelling?
- [70:19]
F
It's, it's majority storytelling. I mean, as you rightly pointed out, the current leader has a huge following, Elon style, around the world, especially in Silicon Valley of late. And he's done a masterful story. His execution is midway through the jury's out. If you look at the, you know, just the numbers of what he's been able to accomplish from an economy point of view. But right now, the momentum is pro his moves in, in the Argentine marketplace, which is what we're seeing.
- [70:53]
E
I think one thing too, Howard, you, you talked about kind of just a basic boring economy. If you look at the industries within these stocks and like the ones that are up the most are all these regional banks. Even this travel services, which we kind of talked about as being akin to mmyt, it hasn't performed as some of these regional banks. So let's go to that next chart though, because this is going to be the Argentina etf. We could see just the relative strength. And then we'll look at one of the regional banks. We touched on it yesterday in Trends with no friends. Yeah. So this is Banko BBVA Argentina. They had news that the country exited a recession and the stock was up almost 12%. But the real kicker Here. If we zoom out, this stock is breaking out of a 30 year base. So I hear you, Michael, on like a lot of storytelling, but I don't know if it sticks this landing on this 30 year base. I feel like there's some real material changes that are occurring within the country.
- [71:55]
C
That chart is sick, dude.
- [71:56]
E
It's unbelievable, by the way. And then Howard, I know you said you wanted some trends with too many friends, so I got a couple absolutely disgusting ones for you. The first one is going to be Tilray, the pot stock just continues to drop 151,000 followers on stock twits and Complete Turd. And then Phil's favorite stock, Beyond Meat, the fake meat producer, almost 90,000.
- [72:22]
B
It's always an insult. Look at that, 100. This is the lesson here, people is and I think Tesla. This is why Elon. Ben, this is why Elon Musk is Elon Musk. He's the opposite. He is a trend with too many friends and the stock keeps going higher. It's very rare to see such a crowded stock do well. And I think this is a testimony to him making a huge bet on Donald Trump. Right? Risking the kind of you kind of risked the company. That's why the stock kind of exploded after the election because the jury was out until that bet was won. Whereas Beyond Meat was betting on one product and the product sucked. Right. Tilray was betting on weed and weed is endless supply and there's nothing to differentiate one weed company from the next. So be careful of trends with too many friends. Almost more importantly is finding new. Is finding new trends, is staying out of trends that have too many people that believe that don't have a product that is actually working bitcoin. And.
- [73:23]
A
I didn't say anything.
- [73:24]
F
I didn't say anything.
- [73:25]
B
I didn't say anything. But you were implying. All right, Phil. Anything else and we'll let everybody gonna.
- [73:34]
C
We as usual there's things we didn't get to but I mean we're, you know, we're 75 minutes in, so we'll let everybody go. Tyler, thank you so much for joining us. Great discussion. Ben, love you, bro. Thank you for coming in and getting all riled up on the Holy Amsterdam.
- [73:55]
B
Beautiful. Let me know if you buy indexes so I can take a little off the table. I don't think today's the day to buy the index, but it's never a bad day if you contend to continue to buy it.
- [74:10]
C
Buy low cost broad market ETFs and hold that forever and just BART coin.
- [74:20]
B
By the way doesn't mean you have to own it. You can laugh.
- [74:22]
C
Farcoin is ripping.
- [74:24]
D
I. I've made like 30 grand on the damn thing. It's ridiculous.
- [74:28]
B
Yeah, and you're yelling at Elon. I love it. That's so perfect. That's so perfect.
- [74:33]
C
It's like a perfect meme coin because it like, farts. Farting is funny.
- [74:36]
B
He's so upset about Elon trading fart coin. There you go.
- [74:40]
D
Like you said, I'm not one to. You know, I. I will. As much as I hate it, which I do, I'm still going to participate.
- [74:46]
B
Yeah.
- [74:47]
E
Did you buy Tesla?
- [74:49]
D
I have traded it. I did not buy it after the election. I'm such an idiot.
- [74:54]
B
Tyler, do you own any stocks? Do you do anything or you just index funds?
- [74:59]
A
Don't think about it. Smart man.
- [75:02]
B
All right, gentlemen. Happy New Year. We will see, everybody.
- [75:05]
F
Happy holidays and Happy New Year.
- [75:06]
A
Happy New Year.
- [75:07]
B
Thanks for having see you, gentlemen.