ADSN

This week on the ADSN Rundown, Daniel Druger and James Borow unpack Meta’s decision to open Muse to developers and why connectors from Shopify, Stripe, Expedia, Instacart and others could turn it into a new consumer platform. They explore a potential open-web coalition between Meta, Shopify and Stripe, debate whether Meta will eventually acquire Shopify, and explain why the combination of social distribution, commerce data an...

Jason Levin, founder and CEO of Meme Lord, joins Daniel and James to break down how he turned internet humor into a legitimate B2B SaaS business. Jason explains his concept of "humor arbitrage," the idea that the boringer your company, the more you stand to gain from being funny, and how that thesis has landed Meme Lord enterprise clients with ACVs of $60-80K across HR, legal, and tech.

He walks through how the company helps brands...

"Everything AI related that has ever been innovated on has been through the lens of something completely digital. The challenge for the physical AI world is how do you actually experience things in real life."

In this episode, Daniel and James sit down with Zach Greenberger, CEO of Nexar and former chief business officer at Lyft, to dig into the real-world data layer that's accelerating autonomous vehicles and physical AI. Nexar has...

This week on the ADSN Rundown, James and Daniel go from Eric Seufert's optimistic vision for an ad-supported prosperous society to Travis Kelce getting a warm welcome into the world of ads.

James makes the case for agentic insurance and for bringing Bitmoji back as a personalization layer for agents, Meta’s aggressive Muse launch, Mark Lou’s $100,000 body-ad takeover, and a former Anthropic researcher’s warning abo...

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"The founders that we invest in, the last thing that they want is our money. They want us."

Every big tech company has an alumni investing group, and until this summer Snap was the exception. On this episode of 30 Minutes, Daniel and James sit down with Max Rivera, foun...

Eric Seufert, the mind behind Mobile Dev Memo, released a 4-part series called The Prosperous Society. In it, Eric lays out a deeply optimistic case for AI's impact on the economy: as AI-enabled tools reduce the friction around both production and distribution, the binding constraint flips from production to distribution, and the digital advertising economy becomes accessible to businesses that were previously locked out entirely. ...

This week's ADSN Rundown covers a packed slate, starting with True Classic running QVC-style live video directly on its homepage and whether that model or agentic commerce has a better shot at reshaping e-com. Daniel and James dig into Nikita Bier's take on shipping fast at X, where press releases were written 20 minutes before launch, and why overthinking go-to-market is a trap. They break down reporting that Chinese institutions ...

"The health paradigm has totally changed. It's never going back to where you're just going to go see your doctor in the physical office and get treated. That's never going to happen again."

Dr. Neil Paulvin, a board-certified physician with over 20 years of experience in integrative medicine joins 30 Minutes to cut through the BS when it comes to peptides and DIY health. Dr. Paulvin has been prescribing peptides since 2017 and break...

Daniel and James open with a run of ad-tech news that keeps circling one idea: everything is becoming an ads business, and agents won't change that. Starting from Antonio García Martínez's viral post, they make the case that the visible ad is just the tip of the iceberg — the targeting, attribution, and budgeting underneath is the real machine, and AI agents will simply inherit it. From there they hit Spotify testing a skip b...

Daniel and JB are back for the ADSN rundown and this week's theme is clear: the creator economy just became the main economy. They kick off with Orin John showing that creators can now link Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to Google Search Console — the first real step in creators becoming the new publishers. Then they break down YouTube doubling its monetization requirements and X relaunching its creator program, both cracking...

Episode One of an ADSN Original: 30 Minutes kicks off welcoming Harry Campbell, founder of Driverless Digest and one of the leading global experts on autonomous vehicles and mobility. He joins hosts James Borow and Daniel Druger to break down the state of the self-driving industry. Harry unpacks the Waymo vs. Tesla debate, explaining why Waymo has a massive safety and operational lead, but how Tesla's fleet scale could flip the scr...

Rundown is back and this week is all about backlash. Backlash against AI slop, against automating parenting, and against putting ads in your $60K BMW. They kick off with LinkedIn testing a "Sounds Like AI Slop" button, Snapchat banning AI from Spotlight, and YouTube nuking 130,000 channels overnight. Then Sam Altman gets roasted for suggesting ChatGPT generate podcasts for his kids (just talk to your children, Sam), and OpenAI catc...

This is a featured episode of the NEW No Permission Podcast hosted by Daniel. Subscribe at No Permission Podcast (https://open.spotify.com/show/033nNxrnG1SI4HRqq1RUeL)

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"People crave intimacy in the sense of companionship and friendship rather than romance."

Carter Munk, founder and CEO of Pinned Social is on a mission to solve loneliness. This is his story as a 3x founder, never asking for permission to build.

How many 3x, sub...

THE RUNDOWN | WEEK OF 7/26

Daniel and James are back with The Rundown. This week they cover everything from women taking over the app economy to TikTok building an Amazon Prime rival, Jersey Mike's $8 billion IPO, and Larry Page saying he'd go bankrupt before losing the AI race. They kick off with a compelling case for why vibe coding and built-in influencer distribution mean women are about to dominate the next wave of app builders...

"If no one knows who you are, nothing good can come from that." – Joe Zappa

Daniel and James sit down with Joe Zappa, founder of Sharp Pen Media, a communications agency built entirely for ad tech. At just 31, Joe has become one of the most visible people in the ad tech world across X, LinkedIn, two podcasts, and a newsletter. His core thesis? Most B2B companies and CEOs are completely invisible, and that invisibility is far m...

Daniel and JB are back from vacation — tanned and fired up — for an ADSN rundown that covers everything from Sean Frank's "ads rule everything around me" manifesto to X Money's launch, prediction market hedging for e-commerce brands, and Meta vibe-coding a new app. The episode kicks off with a sharp take on why every digital company is now fundamentally a marketing company, and why the problem-solving bar has been perma...

Daniel and JB kick off what they call their most capital-intensive episode yet on ADSN. The conversation opens with SpaceX's blockbuster IPO — stock surging past $200 a share, the company now worth more than Microsoft, and the staggering stat that Elon Musk's net worth jumped by "a full Warren Buffett" in a single day. From there they unpack the $60 billion Cursor acquisition, Fox's $20 billion Roku deal, Substack's official ...

Daniel and James kick off a packed ADSN rundown by celebrating hitting #1 in Namibia, then dive into Alphabet's staggering $80 billion capital raise arguing it's not just about compute buildout but a strategic move to suck capital away from soon-to-IPO competitors like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. From there, they unpack the app distribution crisis created by agentic AI tools: everyone can build now, but the audience, budget, and...

Daniel and James sit down with Adam Ryan, CEO and co-founder of Workweek, the media-tech company that's home to the five largest professional communities across fintech, HR, e-commerce, marketing, and healthcare. Adam built the company on a simple insight: the people with the most professional experience are the least likely to share it publicly. So he built Workweek to solve it, pulling from his days as the first hire and presiden...