Welcome to the age of combat via chatbot

0:00I'm Josh Christensen, and this is most innovative companies. On today's episode, Fast Company Senior Writer Rebecca Hyowile. It seems like their approach to dealing with the government had been kind of pissing off the Defense Department for the past few months. The EO of Beehive, Tyler Dank, where other platforms either take a cut of revenue or are very opinionated on like the proper way to be a creator or journalist and grow your business, we want to be the tools and infrastructure that allows you to build the business and the content that you want. And as always, keeping tabs. You're trying to make this go away and you're doing it in such a way that is only going to make it more of a thing. But first, here's the download. The news you need to know this week in the world of business and innovation.

1:02The U.S. military action in Iran has already led to more than 1,000 casualties and of course puts the lives of many more people in the region in danger. Along with that human cost, the conflict could have an immense impact on economies and businesses around the world, including in the U.S. There are still a lot of unknowns, particularly around how long this conflict will continue, but we're already seeing some effects. Iran has shut down the straight-of-war moves through which a fifth of global oil production moves, causing oil prices to rise. The stock market fell sharply right after the conflict began, but rebounded on Monday. You literally just filed a story. I did just file a story. There's a lot happening in the energy world around this and renewables would buffer countries against some of these impacts, but we've walked back on that a little bit in the U.S. And something like 20% of the world's oil goes through the straight-of-war moves. Yeah, a whole fifth of the world's oil. Yeah, and I've seen something about Japan's energy crisis, about 70% of their oil goes

2:03through the straight-of-war moves, which is crazy and one of our key allies, so that's great. Well, to make matters even darker, apparently betting on war and death is a thing now. Both Polly Market and Kalshi had event contracts. Users could bet on for the ouster of Ayatollah Ali Khameini and have received some criticism for it as you'd expect, especially after some suspiciously timed large bets. On Polly Market, one trader with the username Magamayman, I'm assuming that's how you pronounce it, it's just those words pushed together. Anyways, they netted about $195,000 by betting that the U.S. would strike Iran by February 28th, and they scored another $123,000 when they wagered that the Ayatollah would be ousted from power just before Israeli strikes killed Khameini on Saturday. Polly Market, in response, said, quote, the promise of prediction markets is to harness

3:07the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. Meanwhile, Kalshi paused the market after Khameini's death and reimbursed all fees. Something's going to be done about prediction market. That's a lot. It's a lot. I'm pretty sure most of us in society can agree that we shouldn't be able to bet on war. That seems like not a hot take at all. In other tech news, Apple launched a new laptop this week, the low-cost MacBook Neo, which starts at just $599. The 13-inch laptop is the first from Apple to use a smartphone processor running on an iPhone A18 Pro chip. Apple did raise prices on its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro due to the global memory shortage but also increased-based storage capacities for those products. The new lineup of laptops goes on sale next week, and the Neo in particular might give Apple an edge in a laptop market that faces rising memory chip costs and component shortages.

4:12What I'm seeing is this is really geared towards the education market. Yes. I assume a Chromebook competitor. Yeah. Chromebooks got elementary schools on lock, apparently, at least according to my teacher family members, all Chromebooks. I mostly use my laptop for teams and running Chrome. I used to do a lot more editing. I still do some editing, but I fortunately don't have to do as much. I still can't get behind eight going back to eight gigs of RAM. 599. It's a good price. Targets Q4 earnings are out and the results came in below expectations, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Net sales came at $30.45 billion in net earnings at $1.04 billion. Both lower than Q4 results the year prior. Despite these so-so earnings, shares in the company are rising. This most likely is due to confidence in new CEO Michael Fidelke's growth plan, which

5:13he announced to investors. Fidelke said that the company was focused on its, quote, next chapter of growth rooted in strengthening our merchandising authority, delivering an elevated and differentiated shopping experience, advancing our use of technology and continuing to serve and invest in our team and communities. End quote. Crypto is having its moment again. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies generally have had a bad 2026 so far, but this week they rebounded. As of Wednesday, Bitcoin was up 4.4% to $70,896. Ethereum also increased by 3.1% in the past 24 hours. There are a few factors at play for one Trump railed against America's big banks and declared his support for digital assets in a truth social post on Tuesday. The Middle East conflict may also be pushing investors to look for alternative or safe haven assets while the conflict flattens equity stocks. Speaking of safe haven assets, gold is up and silver is down this week.

6:14Oh, my gold. That's sitting. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, the people who have gold investments, like actual, like, there's those people, right? Yeah. There must be. Yeah. There's got to be people that are like. They sell gold at Costco. They sell gold bars at Costco. That can't be real. It is real. They have this. I'm going to make sure. It's right next to the $1.49 hotdog and so on. Yeah. One ounce gold bar. Costco. All right. I don't know how much. But if you want to invest in gold, look into investing gold, head on to your local Costco. Oh, my God, and that's the news you need to know today. So, Kristen, how many unread newsletters are in your inbox? Oh, so many. I am sort of ashamed. I recently went through my personal Gmail and I have like 20,000 unreads or something.

7:15I'm not an inbox zero person. Me neither. But what I did was I put all my newsletters into their own separate folders. That way, that leads me out of my main inbox. I literally had to start a new email recently. I was like, I need a spam Gmail, which is now the Gmail that I used to have. And I'm like, I started a new email and I'm trying to transfer overall like my important correspondence and try very hard not to sign up for anything new on that email. I know, but I love seeing what people write. Like I love keeping them around in my inbox to check. Oh, there's just so many. Do you have like a newsletter, a sub-stack or a beehive newsletter that's new to you? I mean, I've, there's a writer named Alicia Kennedy. I've interviewed her for a fast company before and she does a great newsletter about food and she writes a lot about you don't need to eat meat and these sort of global food and climate food things. So that's always a good one. And she includes a lot of recipes. So I want to save all of those. Yeah.

8:15No, I do have some cooking blogs that and newsletters that I get, but I think feed me Emily Sunbeam's newsletters is my go to one. But we're talking about this because later in today's episode, Kristen interviews Tyler Dank, who's the CEO of beehive. And now consider that all the very light and less complicated introduction to an episode that's going to take a quick turn into a fairly dark and odd story. So a standoff between anthropic and the Pentagon came to a head last Friday, resulting in President Trump ordering the federal government to cut ties with the AI company. If you somehow missed this news, here is a quick overview. And for a pick had been awarded a contract last year to work with the military, but there are certain ethical guardrails they wanted to keep in place. They didn't want cloth used for mass surveillance of Americans or used in autonomous weapons. Well, the Pentagon and Secretary Pete Hegsf did not like that and gave a deadline of

9:17last Friday for CEO Dariel Amade to change his mind. Amade did not budge, so here we are. Fast company senior writer Rebecca Hyowile has been covering this story for us and join Kristen and I to break down how we got here, what the fallout has been, and what this means for the military use of generative AI going forward. Hey, Rebecca, welcome to the show. Happy first time on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. So big news week, I guess, to start, I want to just have a really broad overview of kind of what we're talking about. Can you explain how our government, particularly our military is using AI, like just in the broadest 101 terms? Yeah, in the broadest terms, the military in a lot of ways is using AI in a lot of the same ways we are and that it's showing up everywhere. It's showing up in productivity tools, it's showing up in random tech platforms.

10:19I think there's been a long standing effort, both on the military and civilian side of government to deploy artificial intelligence and just better technology generally across everything. And that's been around for a really long time. Even those technologies are actually behind what we're using on the consumer side because there are a lot stricter requirements at the same time, though, the military is also the military. So they've also been working for a very long time and really scary, unnerving, dystopian AI tools, the kind of things that we would freak out if you, if you've learned more about how they work. Yeah, so it's really hard just because the definition of AI is so big in a lot of senses, we're just answering a simple question of what are the use cases for the military, but it's also really hard to explain, but machine learning, object detection, autonomous vehicles, the military is using all of those things at the same time. I think what was crazy about earlier this year and also this week is that we are hearing

11:21about the same technology that we use on the like LLM chatbots, Claude is also being used in military operations. And I think this was just kind of mentally jarring for a lot of people to learn. You know, I asked Claude tons of really random boring questions all the time, and it's kind of disturbing to learn that there are military officials also interacting with this tool, doing things that are like very geopolitically significant, you know, or just crazy. Yeah, I would not expect LLMs to be a primary use case for the military. People just speaking about like how we use LLMs, like most of the time, I'm just like, hey, chat GPT, find me a recipe for like a peery, peery chicken or something like that. Basically using it, how we use search, and you had a story that came out on Monday where you had a really striking graph that I'm going to butcher because I don't have it up in front of me, but it was basically like what's on Kenny about this is the military using Claude or other LLMs in the same way that we do, which just doesn't feel right.

12:28I'm not sure whether I prefer that to the dystopian way you just talked about. My mind's leading towards the I prefer to use the chat GPT and Claude the way we use it versus some of the darker senses, but yeah, that's very striking and really unnerving about this story in particular. Yeah, there were definitely a lot of memes on the internet that again, just really dystopian, just like, hey, Claude, how do I kill ahead of state, right? And that I think is not, it's very easy because we use these tools in our day to day to imagine that that's what's happening. And obviously it's very hard to learn about what I'm sure the super classified operations and how they work. I think it's important to remember that AI models are like a core technology for reasoning and dealing with data and the information that these models are using in the Defense Department or the Department of War as I'm now supposed to say, is it a lot different? Is that our style guy? Do we have to say Department of War now? I don't know, I've been saying Defense Department would be news to me.

13:33I've been saying Defense Department or the Pentagon to kind of stick to the way things were. Oh, God. So for our producers, when we write the show notes for this episode, yeah, it's, it's crazy. Yeah, there was that thing with the, I think the Associated Press, if I remember incorrectly about the, the terminologies, but yeah, I think like, it's also a reminder that when we're dealing with AI, there's the AI technology that is sort of doing core reasoning and the ones we interact with as consumers are collected to the internet or connected to the information we might give it based on our own computers, obviously the information that is on a military version of these AI reasoning systems, that data is so different, which means that the outputs and the way it's deployed are also going to be very different. Yeah. And like you said, AI, before generative AI, I was like, we're talking about the military has been using or infesting an AI for decades and decades now, really since the inception of DARPA or ARPA as it was called back then.

14:34Can you talk a little bit more about genai.mil because that's, it's kind of own proprietary. What is that? So my understanding of that and it's a like, again, it's like everything that's in the military is sort of closed off, but it is supposed to be like a generative AI resource within the government or within the military. It's not dissimilar from what I understand to like similar efforts that are taking place on the civilian side of government. For instance, there is like an effort called USAI, which is supposed to give access to AI models for like every federal agency like Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department to just access the host of AI models, including commercial AI models that you might encounter every day like Lama or this week Claude or, you know, Gemini or things like that. So let's talk about the Claude of it all and the back last year. So Trump lashed out at Anthropic on Friday, ordering the federal government to stop using

15:39all anthropic products and even declare the company a supply chain risk, a so-called supply chain risk, which is a designation usually reserved for companies from rival nations, not American ones. I'm thinking of like, I think like Huawei was one that has been talked about that way. So why is that so significant and what does it mean to be labeled a supply chain risk? Yeah. This is a huge threat in the world of government tech. You know, it's exactly what it sounds like if you work with the Pentagon, you work with military agencies as a company and you're internally using anthropic products for your own stuff that you might be selling to the government. This means that you basically have to like clear house in terms of your own reliance on this AI models. It's a huge threat. So one thing that's interesting, for instance, is volunteer uses from what I understand uses AI models from anthropic internally.

16:41It's also a huge department of defense contractor. If you're a volunteer and you're selling like tons of peanut stuff to the US government and the US government is saying, we think anthropic is so dangerous. Like you can't have it in our supply chain. That means that you basically have to start scaling back your use of it. I think before this designation came out, there was actually a correspondence sent to some other military contractors saying you need to start analyzing like whether you're using anthropic internally a sort of a way to prove that this threat wasn't just bluster. It was a real threat. And indeed, I guess it was. So when Trump made this statement against anthropic, he called it a radical left woke company. I don't quite understand that. Is there a reason why, and a Trump isn't the only one why these politicians are calling anthropic woke? The Kex F had a quote about this as well. I should say really insane like anthropic as a partnership with Palantir, which is one of the most, I would say right wing or at least representing itself as right wing companies

17:46and has been proud to partner with the US military for many months or years at this point. So it's like striking that there is this movement within the Trump administration to brand this company as super liberal. Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife, has also like at several points gone on acts and like rage against anthropic for being too liberal. And I think this has to do with the way anthropic talks about AI safety and instilling values into AI models, they've talked about sort of like an AI constitution and liberal constitutionalism and democracy in AI models and this it seems like is highly offensive to the Trump administration, which is concerning I would argue, but I think it's mostly seen as sort of the most liberal or maybe the most cautious of the AI companies. So it's not that this company is so liberal compared to maybe the democratic party or like

18:46really progressives, but it's liberal in the context of how the other AI companies are representing themselves. Like remember, one of the other companies that is wants to work for the government is X AI, which offers Groc. So this is the company that they're in right now. So how did anthropic get here? I think we've talked about this from the military perspective. Let's shift the POV to Dario Amade. Yeah. So in the broadest sense, they got there because anthropic has sort of represented itself in terms of attracting AI talent as like the premier place to work. If you care about AI safety, you care about sort of like the intellectual and like ethical issues associated with artificial intelligence. Near term, it seems like they're approached to dealing with the government had been kind of pissing off the defense department for the past few months. And there was sort of lingering frustrations with them. Then it sort of became known that Claude was used in the operation to capture the head

19:48of state in Venezuela. And this has sort of been reported and for a lot of on background sources in this whole media situation, but it seems like what happened was that anthropic expressed or someone an anthropic expressed concern about how Claude was used during that operation to an executive or official at Palantir, Palantir, which is a very loyal government contractor, then reported that back to the defense department, which spewed the whole cycle that we're seeing now playing out publicly. So that's sort of like the near term story of how that happened. And in various cases, like anthropics tried to like walk back certain things. It seems like a defend other things and it's been highly confusing. But I think that's the general version of how this went out. When you say anthropic has these safety concerns or is sort of focused on AI safety, what does that mean for the military specifically, like what ways would the military sort of want to use this that anthropic is saying like no.

20:48So there are two main points that anthropic expressed concern about. One is they want limits on the military's ability to use AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans, which is something that if you imagine these powerful AMI models being given access to all these internal databases and all this consumer data that formerly, you know, were just like in different banks, but now can kind of be ingested together. It would become really easy to ask Claude to create a surveillance state essentially with access to that data. So they want the defense department to say they won't do that. And they also want strong limits on the use of autonomous weapons. It's really hard to imagine what this looks like, you know, from not on a battlefield or how this would play out, but they don't want these AI systems being able to decide to like shoot someone or drop a bomb or do really in the world's consequential military actions.

21:49And they want limits on that autonomous weaponry has actually been like a major concern in the AI safety space because that, you know, it's just like unprecedented. Do you want chat GPT like controlling a weapon? I personally think that's kind of terrifying and really scary. This is coming off the heels of like the open claw agent bots, which I believe opening AI acquired that technology, correct? I think they hired the guy or they hired it was like an aqua hire or something like that. Yeah. But nonetheless, we've seen like how that has just wreaked havoc on inboxes from like one of the meta executives had like let it run rampant. Now just imagine that coupled with autonomous weapons, hopefully, you know, we wouldn't be that stupid. But I'm not going to put anything past this administration and the AI that wrote that vindictive post about the guy who wouldn't let his code be used. Remember? So it's like already sort of showing this vindictive backlash. Yeah, that's that's a little terrible.

22:50And then there's Groc and Becca Hitler itself. Yeah. It's really disturbing. I think that it's like a fight about power and who decides the terms of technology. Is it the government or is it a tech company? But it's alarming that we're given the impression in public that this is something that military officials want to at least retain the power to do. That's the impression that at least I have and that just seems really terrifying. The military, US military has really kind of for a long time, Ben. I mean, less so on in recent years because of funding and other things, but has been on the cutting edge of technology. I mean, we've talked a little bit about ARPA slash DARPA. The internet itself came out of the DOD essentially back in the 70s and then the ARPA project large. So it's not like terribly surprising that the military is adopting and using this technology aggressively. But with that comes the need for regulation, which has gotten a lot of traction recently

23:51Bernie Sanders reeling against data centers and stuff and more on the commercial side. But what are lawmakers saying? Let's imagine Congress has power for a second. What are lawmakers saying about this? I should say generally there has not been a lot of movement to just regulate frontier AI models, even in the first place. There's a whole separate fight brewing about whether states should have the ability to regulate AI because the federal government is seemingly uninterested in doing that. I think that the reaction from lawmakers has actually been kind of quiet. You know, we heard from Mark Warner and he's talked about this in Europe and AI advisors and tech advisors who previously worked for the government to have expressed real concern about how this is playing out. I actually spoke with Alex Borrez, who is running for Congress in one of New York's districts and he's an interesting one because he's a former volunteer employee who's now like publicly criticizing Palantir and is trying to represent himself as running on a platform of regulating

24:54AI and he was like, this is a huge turn off to any tech company that wants to work with the government. Why would you sell the government technology if they're going to treat you like this? And it's not like government contracts are like even the majority of sales for these companies. I talked last week with the head of government sales for open AI and he's like, yeah, it's barely material like they're doing it because it's supposed to have like advantages to them. And this just seems like a big red flag for working with the government for a lot of future tech companies. I think in terms of the lawmakers, they've kind of been somewhat saying something. I think there was like a proposal for some legislation about this, but I would be really surprised if anything happened with them given how little they've done in the past. So let's talk about that deal with open AI just briefly. Are there concerns around open AI's approach to AI guardrails as compared to anthropics? I believe Sam Altman when he announced the deal was basically like those two main problems that you mentioned earlier, autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.

25:57Sam Altman said, ostensibly, we aren't doing that with the government as well. Is that true? And what are the kind of broader points of the deal? I feel like there's definitely an opportunity for someone to profile all the attorneys that these companies who are reading over these defense department contracts and all this like AI legal ease, but they did come out publicly that they had come to an agreement. They've sort of said that they think that anthropics should get the same terms that they did. But there's also been pushbacks since that agreement was announced that what open AI agreed to wasn't strong enough. And since that happened, like, Sam Altman has been like posting on X, what the internal discussions over this agreement looked like in public because there's so much concern that open AI like didn't really get a strong of a deal is maybe the these issues require. And then I think yesterday it came out with another post that was like actually we're going to like amend the deal and add more language to like make it even stronger. This is again extremely crazy.

26:58We have like defense department AI contracts being negotiated and then publicly like talked about on X as they're like seemingly not good enough. It's a crazy time. So if open AI was sort of able to come to this agreement, why wasn't anthropic or like what is the difference between the deal that they signed and anthropic wouldn't? Yeah. I think that if they come to the deal like according to the terms that anthropic wanted, there doesn't seem to be a real difference. It's going to be a giant open question for the defense department. Yeah. I imagine so much of that is just a black box to us anyway like we don't know. And also this government has a tendency to be a little bit fickle about its relations. So it might act one way towards one company and another to another. So this fight is happening of course during the US's operations in Iran, potentially of a protracted war in Iran, publications like the Wall Street Journal and Axios reported that the US was using anthropics AI and it strikes against Iran. We've talked about this with the past actions in Venezuela, which also side note was called Operation Midnight Hammer.

28:00And this operation was called Epic Fury. There's a Jeff Fear branding story about operations that I think we should do because like in how that's tied up into the manus fear and toxic masculinity, woke 2.0 operation names are going to be crazy. Yeah. It's like it or AI consulted operation names right? Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've reported over the last few weeks about the surprising reason why it would be so hard for the military to disentangle itself from anthropic and that has to do with its relationship with another company we've talked about quite a bit, Palantir. Can you explain that relationship and why can't the government just ditch anthropic and pair or Palantir with another AI company? There are a lot of requirements with military contracting. Anthropic and Palantir have had a relationship for a long time that is allowed for anthropics technology to be used in highly classified contexts within the military.

29:05My understanding is that that's not something that open AI or XAI have had access to. The other thing that's really important is that cloud is just really very good. Like when I talk to people within the government who use it, they're like, yeah, it is better. It is just a better technology and that's made it popular. A third sort of factor, and this is what I was told by one former Palantir employee, as well as a former member of the AI office in the defense department, is that anthropic systems essentially like hook up and work alongside something called the Mavinsmart system. It allows for data flow essentially across the defense department in a way that's really agile and one of the things that makes anthropics so useful to the military or has made it so useful to the military is the fact that it sort of works alongside this system. It's not to say that there's no reason why anthropic couldn't like theoretically pursue selling other types of things to the defense department or that other AI companies couldn't hook up to that system, but it's one of the reasons why we're seeing things so amashed

30:07between Palantir, the Pentagon, and anthropic right now. You know, we get a sense of how important that is because we've heard reports that it was Palantir that actually flagged the initial upset about this being used in the club operation from anthropic to the defense department. It's very wonky and it's, I wish it were less wonky. It's sort of surprising to me as like a former GovTech reporter that this has now become the main story, but that's sort of where we are in terms of technology and how the government's using it. So to wrap this up, what should we be watching that's not necessarily the loudest headline? As I was just talking about like Palantir and these sort of other partnerships, technology partnerships have sort of complicated how AI companies can relate to selling to the government. And you know, ideally what they would really like to have is independence and that's sort of what anthropic wants to is more power over what it can and can't sell to the government. There was a big update to that last week where open AI, Google Gemini, and also perplexity,

31:15which is that like search engine AI company you sometimes hear about essentially made it to the next. Keep wanting to buy and acquire things are of unscrupulous. Yes. It's crazy. We'll buy Google Chrome. Yeah. Why not? Let's just make it all even more confusing, but yeah, they all essentially made it to the next step of basically hosting their own AI for the government. So having their cloud systems certified to work with the government. And that's a big deal because it would prevent some of the like challenges. I think that anthropic has had currently. So I think that's something that is going to become more of a big deal. Obviously like open AI and Microsoft have a kind of confusing relationship as well. Open AI has gotten its technology in front of a lot of government officials because Microsoft happens to be really good at selling cloud services to the government, but that's sort of something I would be paying attention to. This is conflating two things, but with the recent news at Microsoft and Xbox, I just hope that somehow Xbox hard pivots into military and defense tech.

32:20I can see it. Well, yeah, call of duty. That's an aptly stupid way to end this segment, but there will obviously be a lot more developments in this story. So everyone should go follow Rebecca's writing on FastCompany.com. I'm sure you're going to have a bunch more stories on this. We'll be back with Rebecca and a little bit for keeping tabs, but first a quick break followed by Kristen's interview with Beehive CEO Tyler Dank. So if you're like me, you probably have an inbox full of newsletters. As the newsletter boom continues, it seems like there's endless options for how to get stories, cultural commentary, essays, basically any kind of writing you can imagine right there in your inbox, but maybe you've wondered how all of these newsletters could possibly make money, especially if you're not paying to subscribe to them all. Or if you've thought about starting your own, maybe you're curious about what separates

33:23one newsletter platform from another. For this episode, Kristen, you talked to Tyler Dank, co-founder and CEO of Beehive, which helps creators and publishers launch and profit from newsletters. Kristen Tyler talked about the changing content economy and how Beehive differentiates itself from other newsletter platforms through an ad network and all sorts of unique tools. Here's that conversation. Hey, Tyler. Thanks so much for coming to the podcast. Pump to be here. Thanks for having me. It is so much to talk about with Beehive and we've obviously been in the midst of this newsletter boom that does not seem to be slowing down at all and Beehive is a big part of that. I wanted to note quickly, you know, last year, Fast Company recognized Beehive on our 2025 most innovative companies list for the way that the company has redefined how newsletters can become real businesses. So to start us off here, what did you see that was broken about the newsletter ecosystem when you started Beehive that made you want to redefine the space?

34:23For a bit of context prior to starting Beehive, I was actually the second employee at Morning Brew. And so at Morning Brew, I built all of the internal infrastructure, I led growth and product as well. And so back then in 2017, I think the traditional way of launching a newsletter was you have your website hosted on WordPress and then you would copy and paste it into MailChimp. And then if you wanted ads, that was a separate service. If you wanted paid subscriptions, that was a separate service. And fortunately at Morning Brew, me and this team of engineers that I hired were very technical and so we could build this infrastructure. But there's such high friction to be able to launch a newsletter and do it well. And when you add all of the different bells and whistles for monetization and growth, it just became more and more complex where your average, let's call it non-technical journalist or entrepreneur who wanted just to send a newsletter, didn't really have like the same resources. So I think that's what was initially broken was just the fragmentation of the ecosystem. And then during my time at Morning Brew, we are fortunate to grow very quickly, eventually

35:27got acquired by Business Insider for 75 million in 2020. And so that kind of put us on this pedestal of we really knew how to build and scale new sliders very well and that was really kind of the impetus for the opportunity here. Yeah, that time at Morning Brew is such a big part of your story, obviously. And maybe this is a little bit repetitive, but just a chance to get more granular here. Like, was there a specific obstacle that revealed that this was like a tool issue for you, that you could build something to get around what you were coming up against with newsletter distribution? I think it was more of the feedback that we received from readers where we would receive hundreds, if not thousands of responses every week of people asking about the Morning Brew referral program, which was the first project I had ever built there. And it led to over a million subscribers for us, which was like a huge source of growth. People would always email in asking about the email template, the formatting, how it looked good on outlook versus Yahoo versus Apple. And like all these like nuanced things that I kind of took as second nature being kind

36:28of in the weeds and building all of this, but became very evident by all of these readers who had their own newsletters, either as a hobby project or as a part of their organization that there was some gap in what was being offered in the market and what this code that we had cracked at Morning Brew. So I'd say more than anything, it was the impetus of kind of like that feedback coming from our readers asking about what we had accomplished more so than anything that I thought that I was really doing at the time. That's so interesting. Was it surprising to see people respond in that way or to like ask these questions that you don't always get that sort of direct feedback so early on? And or annoying I guess because like I had a job to do and all of the team like I think one thing that we did really well at Morning Brew and we do it as well at Beehive is like really obsessed over customer feedback and the experience that we gave our readers and like here at Beehive our users. And whenever people would respond to the email like we had someone dedicated on the team to actually reply back to them to kind of build that reader relationship. And so them doing their job wanting to respond to the readers, they would always forward

37:30it to me. And be surprised I probably took a few dozen calls of teaching people how to actually create the Morning Brew referral program. And once I got fed up with taking these like 30, 45 minute calls I eventually just wrote an article on medium which I think was my first ever kind of like building in public moment which was this is like the secret of how we built the Morning Brew referral program and it got I don't claps is how they describe like I don't know likes or whatever on medium but lots of claps and it was like very well circulated like this newsletter circle. Yeah I think it was interesting it was annoying and that was like my first ever experience of like here this is something that valuable to other people and then we just quote unquote open source to the make it available for others to take advantage of. You brought up monetization and I'm just curious if that was sort of a vision from day one or or did that become the focus as you sort of build up Beehive and this platform a little bit more. 100% from day one in a way that we actually started the platform as like the Beehive network was always the big bet it was just like you can't actually have an ad network until

38:30you have a surplus of like impressions and supply essentially in the sense that we have lots of publishers so in order to like build this globally scaled ad network we almost had to back into like first building the best platform that attracts all of the newsletters to want to launch and send their newsletters on Beehive and then now that we have 3 billion impressions a month being sent through the platform that's enough where advertisers like Nike and Netflix and HubSpot will come and advertise on the platform to reach those different audiences and I'd say that was probably like the other big takeaway I had from the morning brew experience was I sat in between so it's like me in this like very small rag tag team of engineers and I sat in between the writers who were actually in the platform creating the content and the newsletter on a day to day basis and on the other side was the sales team or they called it brand partnerships and those were the people who were obviously in market selling to visa mastercard Apple and trying to get the sponsorships for the newsletter and the two biggest takeaways were one like what an incredible business model that we were

39:32just at 1.3 people and more or less doing the same input but because we've scaled the newsletter so much the ad started at being $5,000 per cent to like when I left those probably $60,000 every time that they press send which was like pretty mind blowing for me to just like you know again inputs the same a writer spends all day creating this newsletter I'm helping to grow the newsletter and just because we're sending to more people obviously it sounds pretty obvious but like the we the fact that we could charge $60,000 a sponsorship just to have their logo at the top of the newsletter was pretty mind blowing for me but morning brew had like 30 people on this brand partnerships team and that's what really opened my eyes to like there's how much effort and work and people and connections it took to be able to monetize the newsletter properly and when I looked around and I was like very active on Twitter like this up and coming newsletter ecosystem of these independent journalists and writers or hobbyists who wanted to write about sports or politics they didn't have a team of 30 brand partners to be able to sell these advertisements and so I viewed that as like obviously

40:34subset came to market a few years before us they were very gung ho and philosophical on we believe paid subscriptions are like the purest way to be able to monetize content on the internet and then seeing what I saw at morning group became very clear to me that there's clearly another model that has worked for decades on the internet that worked really really well and it's just not accessible to a lot of these independent journalists and writers so it's a long-winded way of saying yes it from day one and day zero before we've launched the company that behind that network was always a big part of it yeah and also long-winded dancers are great let's get into it so to get into that ad network more a little bit you know you launched it in 2025 and then at the beginning of this year you expanded it doubling that in house ad sales team that seems pretty notable to double the team in the span of like what is it four months so tell me more about that move like again why is this so unique to be high and why are you already growing it like that what does that say about it yeah I mean we've seen tremendous success on both sides right I think people

41:37forget that most people haven't made money on the internet and it's like a very magical feeling when you can actually create content especially about something that you love and care about and you get paid for doing it and again going back to the example with morning brew it was just like not tenable for a lot of people and it didn't make sense if you write about sports because you're super passionate about sports it's a totally different muscle to write and create content then to sell brand partnerships and go to Reebok and Nike and tell them why they should be sponsoring your newsletter and so I think philosophically we've always taken the stance that we are unopinionated on how our users make money we don't take a cut of revenue from paid subscriptions we recently launched a digital product feature where you can sell ebooks and templates and we don't take a cut of any revenue that you generate and then the ad network is just net new incremental revenue that a lot of these people never had access to and where other platforms either take a cut of revenue or are very opinionated on like the proper way to be a creator or a journalist and grow your business

42:38we want to be the tools and infrastructure that allows you to build the business and the content that you want and whether it's affiliates or paid subscriptions or ads or digital products like we believe we're best in class at product and we believe that philosophically the way that we stand in our ethos allows the most flexibility for our users to succeed so that's like where we stand there and then as far as like doubling the team we've always ran very lean we have like a tremendous team that works really hard and I think we just hit a breaking point of this is really working because like when I came up with the idea four years ago it was a huge bet to think like I mean Mailchimp has been around for decades and there's dozens of other email platforms that have all sent billions and billions of emails and for us to come in and think that we can actually help our users monetize these emails was definitely a big bold bet that I was bullish on but like again a bet and like no guarantee that I was going to work and fortunately over the past 12 once we've been able to prove that there is crazy high demand from publishers to get premium sponsors

43:40into their newsletter and the advertisers which is probably like the most important part are having tremendous success the way that I view it is if you wanted to get in front of an audience interested in business and finance you could go to morning brew it's going to cost you $60,000 and like maybe it works but then you have to wait for their next available slot three months in the future pay another 60,000 so then you kind of work down your list as a brand marketer to what newsletters are like morning brew that I can also sponsor and like now you're doing outreach you have to go back and forth on negotiating you have to figure out if you trust their data and the quality of their audience and so we solve that problem by saying if you want women in their 30s interested in sports and after leisure we have thousands of newsletters that reach that precise audience and we can do it at scale and so I think advertisers and brands have definitely enjoyed the additional option to advertise in newsletters like this so you're appealing to both ends there to try to make it sort of as seamless as possible it sounds like which is really hard and any founder will tell you

44:41like a two-sided marketplace is incredibly difficult to do because inevitably there's always either supply issues where we have not enough newsletters in a certain category or demand issues where there's not enough advertisers to fill the supply and vice versa and so we're constantly balancing that but we've been ping ponging back and forth from supply and demand issues for the past 12 months and they're growing it over a million dollars a month in revenue so it's working and it's difficult but I think the big picture is it's wanted by advertisers and it's wanted by publishers I know you don't have a crystal ball but just you know with the ad network already growing like this what do you see for the next year in terms of that a little bit or what do you hope for? How it works is obviously we have tons and tons of first-party data we have a machine learning team we have the ability to say here are these advertisers here are tens of thousands of publishers what are the best matches that we can make and now every Sunday publishers wake up with an email from us that tells them here the opportunities that you will have for this week what we are shifting to is like a more on-demand real-time model where as a publisher you can log in and at any given time

45:47you can see the 10 best opportunities for you so increases choice and flexibility it makes a more real-time so it's like one of the big updates that we're going to be launching soon and then the other thing is like we've invested a ton in advertising tools and so we aren't just like newsletters buys we have like API of ad pixel that tracks conversion we have an advertiser dashboard that goes into like real-time performance we have this machine learning team that's constantly optimizing and so you can see a world which is like what I've always painted as like the North Star is we want to be the Facebook ad manager for email and obviously Facebook ad manager anyone who's used it or is familiar or has done growth in any company knows that it's a large amount of dollars go into meta and it's because their ad tech is so exceptionally good and they've built such a great advertiser experience and so you can see a shifting to a world where we have more tech and dashboards that look more like a Facebook ad manager and eventually would be self-serve so today people come in through

46:48our team it's a lot of handholding before getting the campaign live for us to really scale this where we want it's a totally self-serve ad environment and we're excited to eventually bring that to market later this year. Behave has called itself an operating system for the content economy more than just a publishing tool really quick there there's something interesting about that phrase the content economy and not the creator economy which seems like an intentional choice what is that distinction to you? Yeah it's a great question because I mean the creator economy is the more well-known term but we also serve publishers like TechCrunch Time Newsweek and like very large established publishers who I don't think would consider themselves a part of the creator economy and so we're almost like taking a step back and being a bit more abstract and like if we can serve one creator's extremely well everyone from Colin and Samir to Cody Sanchez to Sean Perry like we can do that better than anyone in the market but we also because it comes from the morning

47:48brew background have built very enterprise level tools that can serve the TechCrunch and Time and Newsweeks of the world and so like where does that place you could it's not solely in the creator economy and so the content economy is our spin on what we believe expands beyond just publishing and creators as well but companies and I just wrote my most recent newsletter about this in the sense that ever since the article by the Wall Street Journal of these companies that are hiring storytellers for $200,000 plus a year like I think we're seeing this massive move towards companies realizing that they need to be creating content and meeting their customers and their audience where they are and owned media newsletters being one of those forms of media is like one of those levers and so like what I would view as the content economy like Vanta was the example that they use in the Wall Street Journal article and so like if Vanta has an editorial team in a chief storyteller who's constantly creating content to be able to reach their customers and audience like I would

48:48solely place Vanta in this content economy so I just think it's a broader take on what people now refer to as the creator economy. Yeah so back to this idea of an operating system like what does that mean in practice what are some of the tools you've launched to sort of bring behave beyond just like newsletters publishing? When we first started out and partially due because Subsec got to market before us and because of what I saw at Morning Brew the coupling of email and web was like very powerful going back to the initial problem statement that we chatted about before for the fact that you used to have to create a website and then copy and paste it into like a separate document in a separate platform with like a separate billing is like archaic to think about and so for a lot of these teams creators and publishers like the ease of use is like a big variable and the fact that you can publish content that goes both to the web as like a blog or like an article and also via email is like very powerful and very seamless to do and so we launched

49:51with a very simple what we call website builder it was the most simple templated blog that you've ever seen and when you give users an inch they want a mile and every now and then we would always launch like a small feature to the website builder and we would get such strong feedback of I can't wait to customize my website I want to build different web pages I want lead magnets I want all of this different functionality and so that actually led us to acquiring a company called type dream about two years ago which was a AI website builder there was like a YC company and so we acquired them merge their tech and brought their team on and then launch your own website builder again under the thesis that I think consolidation and convenience is a huge competitive advantage in both the creator economy and content economy and to have a world class website builder which we've also launched like AI website capabilities as well so you can just chat and upload a screenshot of your favorite website and it can imitate that so reducing the friction to build the website that you want and then also have the power of like the newsletter and reliably reaching your audience

50:54it's like a very tightly coupled solution which is great and then once you launch the website there's just so many other touch points that users want because like once you have an established website like where else can you engage and monetize your audience and you can see the different layers deeper so digital products right if I'm driving traffic to my website can I sell a template or an ebook for my audience because I'm an expert in cooking and people subscribed to my cooking newsletter now I have a website where I can sell different recipes and cookbooks and whatever else and so I think you just kind of go deeper and deeper into this like creator economy of you have a captured audience how do you actually provide value and monetize that audience effectively and so that's kind of how I view it as the operating system and a lot of the different things that we're building yeah more of that direct feedback from your audience that's so interesting when you think about these tools that you're sort of continuing to add is there a balance there of like plug-in third party tools like I know WordPress has has a lot of those built-in or like building something in in house are you are you sort of trying to decide between the two when you think about what you

51:58want to add for your creators yeah the answers historically been both so we have a plug-in with WordPress we integrate with Discord we have open APIs and webhooks so like different from a lot of the common creator economy platforms like they're pretty restricted both in their name that you are launching a patreon or a sub sack and that you're kind of in their ecosystem and it's kind of a wall garden of what they offers what you get I think we're best in class at product development I think our products really strong and expandable but I'm also realistic to know that we can't do everything for everyone and I think the power of the open web and being able to integrate with APIs and webhooks into different platforms is a superpower for people who already have an existing tech stack and use those different platforms so the answers both we have broad ambitions to continue to expand our roadmap to offer more down websites digital products community podcasts etc but we also play nicely with every third party platform and want to integrate again I think it matches our ethos and philosophy around being unopenedinated in how we serve our users as long as

53:02where putting them in the best position to succeed that's really what matters for us that world garden concept is sort of interesting alongside that consolidation aspect that you talk about and and you've talked about this consolidation happening in the creator space a lot how is beehive sort of adjusting to that or how do you make sure beehive isn't this world garden itself to its creators again I think convenience and consolidation is a massive competitive advantage and I think we want to be able to provide the convenience of offering these different features and functionality to anyone who uses the platform and an extremely affordable price and the fact that we have consolidated website and newsletter and automations and digital products like we're seeing it now in real time we have hundreds of people reaching out saying that they've cancelled their link in bio platform and their course platform and their digital because like they can consolidate so they're saving money it's simpler to use so like we want to continue to encourage that I do think that is how we win in this industry but again I think we can't build everything maybe with

54:04AI it's making it easier and easier to get closer to building more and more at least faster but we'll never be able to cover all of the different unique edge cases I think that's probably the hardest part of about my job is creators are so creative and there's so many different business models and there's so many different things that they're building that no matter how flexible and expansive we make our software there's always someone finding a way to break it or do something that they want to do that we never thought was possible or like what we initially intended to offer and so because of that like I think we have to offer APIs and webhooks and play nicely with third-party platforms it's like I don't think we'll ever be a wall garden I think it goes against everything that we stand for and I think it's like an incorrect business decision in general is there an example that comes to mind that you can share of sort of a way that you've had to make something that you didn't expect to make or respond to something from a user that you didn't anticipate like every day we offer paid subscriptions and the way that we initially thought about paid subscriptions is like how you would think of most paid newsletters where you have normal content that goes out to free readers

55:09and then paid readers get either extra content or an extra newsletter or some other benefit but like what creators and publishers are offering as those extra paid benefits goes far beyond content now sometimes it's like an exclusive discord community sometimes it's like a live webinar that they host every month sometimes it's like an IRL event that you can come to if you're a paying member and so like people will do stuff like that and ask if we have like a ticketing system so they can do these live events and manage it only for paying readers and so like I think as we continue to expand the aperture of what's possible in the platform again there's not a one-size-fits-all in the creator or content economy and so I think people are always looking for ways to better serve their audience and we are admittedly reactive to a lot of that but I think our competitive advantage is we move quicker than most people in the end or definitely most people in our industry and so we can be reactive listen to feedback and ship that feedback it's quickly it's possible is there a secret to moving faster I've read a lot about sort of how much you ship but is there

56:11is there something that drives that I think it was like kind of in the DNA of the company from the very beginning we started with four engineers and every engineer was a full stack developer which means they could do front end they can do back end they can ideally QA we also had like almost like unicorn engineers and like they also had like a great product sense so typically you have to like understand what the user is trying to do and there's sometimes a disconnect between the engineers amazing a building software and a product manager who knows design and UX and like how to actually bring that product to life and we've been very fortunate that both like all of my co-founders and our early team of engineers kind of had that special like product sense and design sense and a full stack engineer which is like pretty rare I'd say and then I think it was like always just baked into the DNA because when we launch in November of 2021 Subsec had 60 million dollars and has been around for four years we had MailChimp and all the dozens of other competitors have already been established in this market who offered such more complete solutions than what we offered

57:14and so it almost came from a place of insecurity of I would beg people to sign up for the platform they'd finally take a chance and sign up and be like well where's everything like nothing exists and I'm so used to like this platform that has like you can design stuff you can send automations like I think we hooked up the ability to send emails a few weeks before we launched like it was like such a nascent platform it became obvious to me the only way that we can compete in this market is like we have to play catch up as quickly as possible so we just built that muscle of listening to feedback we had the advantage of like me and my two co-founders come from Morning Brew so like we've already seen when it looks like at scale and we've already built that platform before so something from like the previous experience at Morning Brew mixed with listening to customers and that the only other option was like shipping slow and like probably dying because we didn't have the functionality that we needed kind of just built this muscle and DNA at the company so we already talked about some next steps for Beehive and things you're looking forward to but but as you sort of look into your future like what are you the most excited about

58:15or what do you think creators need to know to make newsletters become a business for themselves more yeah things are most excited about one is definitely the Beehive ad network like I still think it's such a nascent initiative and I don't think we've unleashed the real power of what it means to have eventually thousands and tens of thousands of these premium brands able to sponsor these newsletters like the hardest part for most creators is like making money and like generating a business and being able to take that money and invest in better equipment better software eventually maybe support themselves enough to go full-time in creating whatever they're interested in creating and so like getting over the hump of being able to actually monetize your content and audience efficiently I think is very difficult for most people and the fact that you can get started on our platform for free and we offer all of these different types of ways to monetize your content I'm very excited to keep unlocking those monetization opportunities for our users and then I think where we started as like we are a newsletter platform like newsletters amazing for top of funnel but once you have this engage audience of five 10 20,000 people like

59:20what other services can you provide them and that's where I think like this foray into digital products and Lincoln bio and everything else that we're doing is like allowing people to really use their creativity and understand how they can serve their audience better and so where it used to be like the newsletter economy I view the newsletter as like the ultimate top of funnel of what else can you do and I think we should be able to power a lot of those possibilities great well I think that's a great place to stop thank you so much Tyler thanks for having me okay we're back with Rebecca it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping tabs this is where each one of us shares a story trend or a piece of pop culture we're following right now business or otherwise so Rebecca your first keeping tabs your inaugural episode on that M.I.C. is wild so be talking about like war and defense tech I hope you have something like suitably silly for this keeping tabs if not though I understand but I'm hoping we can hit like

1:00:23the furthest away from what you came on the show to talk about oh my god I had two in mind the first was like I'm gonna defend the weathering heights movie okay the other one was going to be like seems like we're giving up on space but now if that's yeah after the first cover yeah yeah I forgot about that weathering heights yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah take up a lordy of seven feet tall okay yeah this is what I would say I saw the Frankenstein movie with him and then I saw this and like I do think that in some sense and this is maybe ignorant because I have never read the original Emily Bronte book so I this is like the only cognitive association I have with weathering heights as a story but it does feel like he's kind of playing the same character in both Frankenstein and weathering heights and like maybe I love that because like it's just like yeah it's just like they're obviously really into the fact that he's extremely tall like this is something that they're really leaning in and in both he's sort of like briefly in like a very cold

1:01:27seaming European house in the woods in both um so I kind of was like maybe he's just like doubled up on the prep but I have not looked too deeply into like there's like the movie rating site that I always forget the name of letterbox letterbox yeah like I saw like when I'm letterbox and I saw like people were like shitting on this movie and I was just like no it was good like people are being too intense about movies it was fun to watch it was good they made a big deal about the Charlie xx songs but and there were like some but generally really fun margarabi was awesome it's with good movie that's my submission I have not seen it but I've read a good bit about it and it seems like people who don't know the book at all love the movie and people who know the book like hate the movie yeah but I read something I forget where that was like the title is in quotes on purpose you know like it's it's quote weathering heights the movie title is in quotations and they're like that's the point guys like it's not supposed to be sort of a direct translation of the book it is in quotations oh I see yeah I haven't read the book I haven't seen the movie I've

1:02:31know very little about it besides like two very hot people are in it you know how your brain just does random associations with things that like are grouped in the same category but shouldn't be in the same category there are three things that are in the same category in my head and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever weathering heights twin peaks and escape from which mountain I don't know why moody the foggy maybe I don't know the words yeah the words for some reason those three operate in the same area in my mind the idea of Kyle McLaughlin's 20th character entering weathering heights is so funny to me or Kim Richard's entering from escape from which mountain anyways that's awesome I'm keeping tabs this is somewhat in line with our episode theme but a little bit more lighthearted and this is that term microslop about all of Microsoft's AI

1:03:33and how Microsoft banned the use of this term on its official Microsoft discord so like people who are saying that term micro sloped are just getting like banned from the discord and stuff and it's just such a classic you know it tries and effect like you're trying to make this go away and you're doing it in such a way that is only going to make it more of a thing it's the number one way that you can make people use a term is by banning people from using that term and it's just I think it'll be really interesting to watch I mean there's already so many memes about the term people were even like replacing the O with a zero and getting banned for that you know like microslop oh yeah with a zero but it's just I'm intrigued to see what they'll do next because it's it's obviously not going away this term they can't they can't do anything about it they just got to live with it it's in the lexicon now I agree on the subject of like Microsoft lexicon I have been thinking about writing something but I also strongly feel this that like the team's reaction emoji are just like so creepy I don't know like I'm coming from slack and now

1:04:34they're so bad they're creepy they're like uncanny in a way that makes me uncomfortable and like my strong recommendation to the coders at Microsoft is that they either stop allowing people to use these faces or they get rid of them I think there's two things with the Microsoft emojis and it's both their animations like none of them are static it's the animation none of them are static and so they bounce or react in in these weird ways that it's just unsettling but there's also like not necessarily 3d but like a silicone mask kind of element to some of these two where it's like just the shapes and everything but yeah I think really it's the animation to it that's not that's yeah it does fall into like the uncanny valley in a weird way not like exactly we need a new term for like that's similar to on it candy maybe this already exists the way uncanny valley is like an unsettling piece of you know something that because it's so close to human that it's not quite human there needs to be something that describes like the stuff that's

1:05:34like the AI emojis does that exist yeah I'm a big fan of trying to make coin terms happen I think we should just call it the uncomfortable valley the uncomfortable valley I love that and is going to lead all our social promotion oh my god well okay let me write a vlog about it yeah well yeah no right I'm a post off bird max off bird you can edit it I'm going to volunteer some works for max I love that Josh what are you keeping tabs if so I've been rewatching from the beginning real housewives of Beverly Hills which is also kind of related to to what I was talking about with escape from which mountains since the Richard sisters are in that it is amazing how far back does that go like what was the first season 2010 oh and in the first season it's communal grammar Kelsey grammars now ex-wife is on the show so Kelsey grammars on the show they promptly separate and get divorced in a very messy way some of the things like I was like

1:06:37they should not have aired this like there's a whole like some very serious story lots but my favorite thing ever is just how nakedly produced like I think there's a more artful like manipulated production now in reality television in the first season Camille grammar and Kyle Richards are at odds with each other and there's a scene where Kyle's coming over to Camille's house to sort of hash things out and before Kyle enters it cuts to Camille and her kitchen reading the art of war exactly and it's reading just the inside cover it's amazing it is high camp and I love every single minute of it it's been my comfort TV my distraction TV of recent because I don't know if you know this it's been a rough year so far in the news and and covering tech there's also something kind of comforting though about like

1:07:40you said this uncomfortable valley era that we're in where you don't know what's real and everything is AI and everything is generally bad to just watch these shows and be like this is so manufactured drama exactly it's almost comforting in a way it it it is oh another thing I do have to mention as well and I had to look up her name real quick but also in the first season because it's Beverly Hills there's just a bunch of celebrities that roll in like Fey Resnick is is there for a little reason RuPaul shows up at an opening party for Lisa Vanderpump's sir Alison Dubois is in one scene who is the she's the woman who inspired the show medium with Patricia Arcat she's a psychic and a medium who helped solve some crimes allegedly she is so insane in the show it is just like ripping an e-cigarette oh my gosh like causing drama with like Kyle Richards and Fey Resnick's there and and at a dinner party it's wild it's it's great it's peak television

1:08:41I love the idea of also like escaping the current chaos by just going into this chaos it's a much more comforting chaos yeah I watched the New York City seasons for a while and I just thought it was very funny it's like a kid like someone who grew up in New York like their big thing was like and one of them like lives in Brooklyn and it was just like okay there's so much this is like yeah you think that the upper east side is like so relevant if you don't live in New York and you watch that show and I'm like the upper east side is not relevant at all you can barely get there you're gonna take a crosstown bus I grew up in Yorkville like I knew for acting is not relevant like I was like a public school kid in New Yorkville and would like walk the streets with all of the like where they're like supposed to be hanging out and are just like these are the tackiest places on the planet oh my god it's crazy and it's like Ramona stop talking about the upper east side yeah it's crazy oh god that's as good a place as any to end this episode that's

1:09:44all for most innovative companies Rebecca thanks so much for joining us thanks for having me our show is produced by Blake Odom Sam Gabawar how a Tauri and Mariam Kippur Ruiz say editing by Matt Todor mix and sound design by Tadwathams and Nicholas Torres and our executive producer is me still somehow and a special thank you to fast company senior tech editor max off bird for helping prep up this episode for Ross we return this around pretty quickly so thanks Max remember again to subscribe rate and review and we will see you next week