Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #71: Symbolic Capitalism and the Attention Game, Token Output as a Performance KPI, Choosing Your Intellectual Shoulders

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Episode #71: Symbolic Capitalism and the Attention Game, Token Output as a Performance KPI, Choosing Your Intellectual Shoulders · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  The irony is these two things are not separate.
• 0:01
  Financial capital and symbolic capital are deeply intertwined.
• 0:04
  Raising a lot of money so that you can be king made and be the apparent winner before the
• 0:08
  battle's even over is a part of the strategy.
• 0:11
  It's the week of March 16.
• 0:13
  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
• 0:21
  Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
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  I'm Mia Farnam, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
• 0:27
  be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
• 0:31
  week.
• 0:32
  For the first topic of the week, we have a piece from Om Malik titled neosymbolic
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  capitalism.
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  He opens the piece with a tweet from Patrick Collison, Stripe's CEO, musing about why
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  certain companies attract so much palace intrigue coverage while others never do.
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  And Ohm uses that as a jumping off point for a much larger argument rooted in the sociologist
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  Pierre Bordeaux's concept of symbolic capital.
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  Ohm argues that in today's hyper connected attention first economy, reputation and
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  perceived authority convert faster and more powerfully than financial capital alone.
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  He uses Elon Musk as the clearest modern case study, someone who's turned a symbolic capital
• 1:10
  into a self sustaining machine, and then walks through how the Stripe founders have done the
• 1:15
  same thing for Stripe through craft, patience, and carefully chosen intellectual alliances.
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  The uncomfortable conclusion is that the tech and venture ecosystem has fully internalized
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  this game.
• 1:25
  Podcasts exist to produce clips.
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  Clips exist to feed social, and speed is now the signal of authority regardless of whether
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  what's moving is true or deep.
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  I'll repeat the tweet because I think it's important for the conversation.
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  Patrick said, there's a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace
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  intrigue gets across different organizations.
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  As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency.
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  We know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations, but not at others, creating self
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  reinforcing lock in effects.
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  How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of
• 2:00
  Agriculture?
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  There is even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors.
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  Ohm frames that tweet as almost like this subliminal confession of symbolic capitalism.
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  So this concept that even pointing out the game itself is a move in the game.
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  When you see founders or investors building a public presence right now, how much of it do
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  you think is deliberate strategy versus just the self pressure to be visible?
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  Can the answer be both?
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  I think it's ironic we're talking about this on a podcast, so Yeah.
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  We can probably acknowledge that.
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  I really have enjoyed Ohm's writing lately.
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  I'm glad he's back to a good cadence.
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  I I read this and thought about a lot of things.
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  Just even if I think about the amount of palace intrigue you've read about OpenAI relative to
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  Anthropic.
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  It's not even close.
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  And even substories, thinking machines.
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  Mhmm.
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  Still end up being, like, downstream of OpenAI.
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  I do think, in some cases, energy and attention tends to follow companies that are the most
• 3:01
  visible, interesting, and important companies.
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  OpenAI is a visible, important, and interesting company.
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  So people are curious about what happens there.
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  But to use kind of more of like a reality TV analogy, some companies are just messier than
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  other companies.
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  And so some companies that are are messier, like, have more drama, more stuff happens.
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  I think a lot of this for me comes back to, like, Cluelly as I feel like we talk about it a
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  lot.
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  Cluelly as this, like, very clear symbol to me of the importance of breaking through in a very
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  crowded, noisy, short term news cycle.
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  And it's interesting.
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  Maybe even seven years ago, a lot of people would be like, oh, that person quote unquote
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  waste too much time on Twitter.
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  Twitter's part of the job for a lot of people now.
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  It's not some side quest.
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  It is like a big part of the job.
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  And I don't spend nearly as much time on x as I used to.
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  And I know that there are conversations I miss out on because I'm not there.
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  Mhmm.
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  And something that people used to laugh at people about spending time on has now become an
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  important credibility building and authority building thing.
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  And so I I certainly talk to people who are like, well, I need to invest in this presence.
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  I'm like, well, if you don't really wanna play the game, you're probably gonna get beaten.
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  It's kinda like sports.
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  If you're just like showing up and there's somebody else who's in the gym practicing who
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  loves the game, the person who loves the game or who just has an enormous audience and knows
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  how to feed them, it's probably gonna beat you at social.
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  And so I do have some people who I think walk this line of being both strategic and
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  authentic.
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  And I think for a while, there was this notion where you could be either or.
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  You could have, like, the perfect tweet, the perfect time, but the perfect topic with, like,
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  the right amount of snark.
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  Or you could just, like, be yourself.
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  And now I see more people who are trying to blend the two into a version of themselves
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  online that mostly mirrors who they are.
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  And I think it's become an important place where founders look for signal.
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  I think it's become an important place where LPs look for signal.
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  And I do think part of why I stopped hanging out on x as much as it did start to feel like
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  this is a, like, attention, thought boy game, and it's just less interesting.
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  It's on LinkedIn.
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  People are pretty much like, hey, I'm here kinda to promote myself or show what I'm doing
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  professionally.
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  Weirdly for for me, like, fitness so cringe,
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  I'm like, LinkedIn is that's what LinkedIn Professionalism is cringe.
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  I don't know Yeah.
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  In today's age.
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  I mean, does this go along with the long held belief or widely discussed belief, like all
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  press is good press?
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  At what point does it tip?
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  I think not all press is good press.
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  I think the most critical thing that made me reflect about Ohm's article is, like, Stripe is
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  a $165,000,000,000 company, and that alone is not enough to maintain relevance.
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  Being probably the second or maybe the third most valuable private company after SpaceX and
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  Databricks, that alone is not enough to guarantee relevance.
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  But I think in some ways, if you go back to the old Andreessen, like, go direct, I think what
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  really happened, it wasn't so much that everybody spun up their own media artifice.
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  It's that everybody decided I'm going to be much more intentional about how my company
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  kinda like brand management for startups and VC funds.
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  People have decided they're gonna be way more intentional about creating artifacts that will
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  influence the way people perceive their brand.
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  And I think Stripe has tried to cultivate this academic intellectual brand around the company.
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  They don't talk a lot.
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  A lot of the things they're associated with tend to be more intellectual pursuits.
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  And even I remember when they built that big office in SF, they had that huge library.
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  So now I assume everything that anybody with meaningful resources does or does not do is
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  intentional and planned.
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  In the same way that if you were a movie star, you'd have a publicist who would try to get you
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  onto certain things or tell you, don't do this thing.
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  Don't go to this thing.
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  Don't say and I think as tech is no longer the domain of fringe pirate nerds, image management
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  is a big part of what a lot of people spend their time and energy on.
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  I think it pays dividends.
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  I know GPs that LPs have a ton of respect for.
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  LPs never met that person.
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  Their impression is based largely on that person's online presence.
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  I also love Ohm's pieces, and I can't help but to think, I guess, do you kind of wish we could
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  go back to the time where leaks as news wasn't the way things go or going direct wasn't the
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  standard for picking up what's going on on the inside of the company?
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  It really used to be kind of like hungry journalism used to scrape up the news, and if
• 7:02
  they found it, like, actually could be reliable.
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  I think what I miss is when I started in tech, there was a set of journalists who'd been in
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  tech long enough that they it wasn't even just that they had relationships.
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  They'd seen certain movies before.
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  They didn't fall for press and PR spin, and they had their own opinions about this stuff.
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  And some of those opinions could not be influenced or co opted by clever brand
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  marketing by firms.
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  And I think it led to a better discourse around tech.
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  There was, like, the fear if you said or did something utterly ridiculous that somebody
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  would come after you and be like, this is dumb or this is a bad idea.
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  And the few voices I find doing that are either people who are writing independently for
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  themselves, mostly on Substack, or people who, like Ohm, who feel like they've been here long
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  enough that they can say what they wanna say with little to no consequence.
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  He makes the point at the end that the network does not reward what is true or what is deep.
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  It rewards what moves.
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  I mean, feels really relevant today when so much of the narrative gets placed around
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  companies well before substance is there.
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  I guess substance in the meaning of, like, tangible exit or profitability.
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  Are there specific archetypes of founders that you see where the accumulation of symbolic
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  capital almost always hurts them in the long run, or is it truly more so case by case?
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  I mean, think about Adam Neumann.
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  Like WeWork didn't stop him from doing the the real estate thing.
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  Weirdly, the ability to consistently attract attention is very valuable in a world that's
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  changing very quickly and where people don't know what the future's gonna hold.
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  And there are certain people who are very, very good at attracting another person who's in the
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  news, Travis Kalanick.
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  Incredible at attracting attention to himself and whatever venture he decides to work on.
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  I think that's largely due to the success he had in the early days at Uber.
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  But that's somebody who, no matter what he does, Uber's gonna pay attention because it's
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  him.
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  But I also think many of these people who are good at attracting this attention also
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  understand what are the things to say, what are the way to frame things, how do you talk about
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  what you're doing in a way that will attract attention.
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  And I think that is a skill.
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  And I think the interesting thing is I I talk to a lot of founders who are still running the
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  old playbook.
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  Like, oh, I'm trying to get, like, this person to cover my launch.
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  And I'm like, you could try that.
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  That's sort of not as effective.
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  But if you're not a person who's, like, naturally gravitational, it's it's pretty hard.
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  The one thought that I had before we move on to the next topic is it is fascinating that
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  Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic are all playing in this game.
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  I can understand it almost more from, like, the Cluelie lens when you have nothing, you're
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  brand new on the street, no one's ever heard of you.
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  There is a clear reason to break through this, the noise floor, and it's to attract attention
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  so that you can raise capital and get your legs going.
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  But these are some of the companies that have the most amount of funding that we've seen in
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  in years, which means to your point that the space continuously evolves.
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  And what's the fear, I guess, from Stripe's perspective that if they lose out on the
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  narrative?
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  I think the fear is, you know, if eighteen months ago I told you Anthropic owns the
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  enterprise AI narrative.
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  How did they do that?
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  I'm not sure.
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  It wasn't on accident.
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  And imagine you're in a Fortune 500 boardroom, and you're like, we're gonna spend a million
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  dollars with one of these two AI vendors.
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  You might be like, well, these Anthropic guys seem to be all I read about with them is
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  enterprise enterprise enterprise.
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  Shouldn't we just go with them?
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  They stood up to the Department of Defense.
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  If if we like or the Department of War, if we like that, shouldn't we have done that?
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  And I think part of it is in a world where all of these products feel the same, and we've
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  talked about this before, brand matters.
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  I'll give you another company that I think is doing a good job.
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  I'm not an investor.
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  I think if I say legal type, the name that comes to everybody's mind is Harvey.
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  Have most people seen the product?
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  No.
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  Do most people know that much about the business?
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  No.
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  But I think in a world where there's tons and tons of products, being the brand that people
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  have heard of or recognize, whether they know if it's good or not, is in of itself valuable.
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  And that founder is out there in podcasts constantly, like, all over your LinkedIn.
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  And so if you were to look up Legal Tech, you would know that name.
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  It's anonymous with what you see on your face.
• 10:51
  And I think part of part of the symbolic cap the irony is these two things are not separate.
• 10:55
  Financial capital and symbolic capital are deeply intertwined.
• 10:57
  Raising a lot of money so that you can be king made and be the apparent winner before the
• 11:02
  battle's even over is a part of the strategy.
• 11:04
  The symbolic capital piece, I feel like, just creeps a little too early oftentimes within
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  venture.
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  It's just that's the issue.
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  Are afraid if they don't fight for it early, some other company will take the mantle.
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  And so I I don't know.
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  I think in almost every cycle, the companies that end up mattering at the end are not always
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  the ones we thought mattered at the beginning.
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  But you don't know that when you're in the middle of it.
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  It's very fog of war.
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  Well, our next read is a LinkedIn post from Reed Christian, GP over at CRV, and it surfaces
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  something that seems to be gaining real traction in boardrooms right now.
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  Reed notes that he has sat in multiple recent board meetings where CEOs are actively building
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  token output per month into formal performance reviews as a core KPI.
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  So while engineering is the obvious place your mind might go when you think about who's
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  burning the most tokens, Reed says the most variance is actually showing up in business
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  functions.
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  So, like, sales teams, in particular, have been some of the heaviest users.
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  They're spinning up demos.
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  They're creating competitive analyses and collateral in ways that simply were not
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  possible before.
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  His prediction is that someone is going to standardize all of this and that public
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  leaderboards and incentives are next.
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  Though my honest question is how long we reward that behavior before we find out whether all
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  the token usage is actually translating into customers or outcomes, specifically for the
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  sales example.
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  He closes by framing that these board conversations are exactly the reason he is less
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  worried about entry level jobs disappearing at startups, arguing that these roles will go to
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  the most AI hungry and AI native people in the room.
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  We've talked a lot about how this concept of token output as performance metrics might start
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  creeping into the workplace, similar how previously lines of code were once rewarded in
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  quantity.
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  In the case of business functions specifically, do you think something like a public
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  leaderboard or a widely adopted token usage KPI will actually push people to prioritize
• 12:50
  upskilling and then drive positive outcomes?
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  Or do you think we're just gonna see a lot of people running around aimlessly just to try and
• 12:56
  hit a number?
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  Oh, think this is just, like, rife with gaming potential.
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  So, like, my most charitable vision would be that this ends up being, like, GitHub Stars,
• 13:05
  which is a measure of some amount of community velocity, but that's really different.
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  GitHub Stars, for most people, are not tied to your paycheck and are not tied to promotion.
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  And my experience is that in any company, if you have an objective that is tied to promotion
• 13:21
  or pay, people will figure out how to game it.
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  And I have no reason to believe token leaderboards and token output will be any
• 13:28
  different.
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  People will figure out.
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  They'll run scripts that just do gigantic data pulls.
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  Like, people will find ways.
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  And I I think what this tells me is the level of, I can't even remember, desperation Mhmm.
• 13:38
  To connect spend with ROI in a really clean and easy way, and also a deep desire on the part of
• 13:46
  companies to measure how aggressively people are using AI tools.
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  And so right now, we're very much you have two options, it feels like, me.
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  You can use a crude measure tokens or, like, if you're on a team's account in Anthropic, you
• 13:57
  can sort of see API call.
• 13:58
  You you can get some sense of, like, who's using this stuff the most, or you can sort of
• 14:02
  rely on more of the show and tell or let me show you something I've built, the more
• 14:06
  bespoke.
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  But the the latter doesn't scale.
• 14:08
  Yeah.
• 14:09
  Having everybody show you their project and figuring out, like, who's you know, it's like a
• 14:12
  science it's like a poster fair in in middle school or something.
• 14:15
  And so I think people will push token output as a metric until they realize how it's being
• 14:21
  gamed, and then they will try to address the game.
• 14:23
  And we will get stuck in this war where eventually, I think people will say there must
• 14:26
  be a better way to measure this.
• 14:28
  I read that, and I'm like, having all of these salespeople spin up all of this stuff, to your
• 14:32
  point, Mia, is it working?
• 14:33
  Do customers like these like, is it working, or are they just making a bunch of junk?
• 14:37
  But there is, I think, in every cycle, everyone's trying to figure out what's the
• 14:42
  metric that matters, and I think I go back to mobile.
• 14:44
  And in mobile, in the beginning, it was downloads, and people figured out you could go
• 14:47
  buy a bunch of downloads on the cheap and juice your then I was like, okay.
• 14:50
  Well, then it's then it's active users.
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  And I was like, okay.
• 14:52
  Well, you know, we'll we'll we control how we count an active user.
• 14:56
  And then we will figure out, well, it's actually the ratio of daily users to monthly
• 14:59
  users.
• 15:00
  And eventually, we got to things that were harder to fake.
• 15:02
  Not impossible to fake, but harder to fake, and actually more aligned with what we realized
• 15:08
  actually was evidence of health.
• 15:10
  We're just not there with AI yet.
• 15:12
  And for the more business functions, I do have questions because the feedback loop on if
• 15:16
  things are working is longer than with engineering.
• 15:19
  It feels like you can go push to prod, and you can test things out quite quickly and see if
• 15:22
  things are broken.
• 15:23
  With business functions like sales, customer support, you might stand up a lot of these
• 15:28
  tools and allocate a lot of spend to it.
• 15:31
  And, yeah, then, like, months later, realize, did any of this work, or was the output worth
• 15:35
  it?
• 15:35
  Also, I think this token leaderboard presupposes something that it took me a while
• 15:40
  to figure out how to articulate is.
• 15:41
  As powerful as AI is, it is not the right solution for every problem that you're working
• 15:45
  through at work.
• 15:46
  And, yes, you should consider AI in the same way you would consider, should I do this as a
• 15:50
  PowerPoint, as a spreadsheet, or as a memo?
• 15:53
  There are plenty of things I work on at precursor where I don't use any AI at all
• 15:56
  because it's not the right tool for the problem I'm trying to solve.
• 15:59
  And I think overly incentivizing AI use.
• 16:02
  I get it.
• 16:03
  Like, maybe if you're a company like Shopify or one of those companies, you're like, look.
• 16:06
  I'm gonna do this because it's not so much I wanna find out who's at the top.
• 16:09
  I wanna find the people who are at the bottom.
• 16:11
  I really wanna find it's not so much about rewarding people who are using the most tokens.
• 16:15
  It's really about sniffing out the people who are not using the stuff at all and figuring out
• 16:19
  how to get those people out of the company because the perception is that's not the
• 16:22
  future.
• 16:23
  I think companies will regret that, but I have a feeling that's the bigger rewarder and or
• 16:28
  objective than it is figuring out, well, what are the the top people doing?
• 16:31
  I agree with that.
• 16:32
  That was a thought that I had, which was this in, like, a positive, more optimistic
• 16:36
  perspective could push people to wanna upskill themselves and invest in their careers and
• 16:40
  professionalism, etcetera.
• 16:42
  I think the drawback is there's possibly people who just, like, are slower to take on these
• 16:46
  tools that have all of the top tier qualities that make them exceptional in these types of
• 16:51
  business functions like sales, like relationship building, that don't come through
• 16:54
  in token usage.
• 16:55
  And if you work in a big company and that's how you're using its KPI, those people end up
• 16:59
  getting dropped from the bottom.
• 17:00
  That, in the long run, I think, will be a mistake to your point.
• 17:03
  He does end with this point that entry level jobs are actually safer at startups because
• 17:06
  those employees are the most AI native.
• 17:08
  So that feels like a real inversion of the dominant narrative right now.
• 17:12
  Wanted your thoughts on that one before we move to the Well,
• 17:14
  I think everybody's looking for a silver lining here.
• 17:17
  I'm not sure there is one.
• 17:18
  I'm not sure it's doom and gloom.
• 17:20
  It might just be like, it's too early to say who this is good for.
• 17:23
  The answer could be, we're all overthinking it.
• 17:26
  The answer could be, we're all not worried nearly enough.
• 17:28
  Our last piece is from Daniel Kimmerling titled Choosing Shoulders.
• 17:32
  The piece is rooted in sir Isaac Newton's famous line about standing on the shoulders of
• 17:37
  giants.
• 17:38
  But Daniel reframes the real question as not who the giants are, but how intentional you are
• 17:42
  about choosing them for yourself in the first place.
• 17:45
  He argues that intellectual and moral lineage shapes the ceiling of what you can build and
• 17:50
  that picking the right shoulders is one of the highest leverage decisions a person or firm can
• 17:55
  make while picking the wrong ones quietly compounds in the other direction.
• 17:59
  There's a short point in here about alignment as well that variant outcomes are not just the
• 18:04
  product of variant people or processes.
• 18:06
  They are the product of those things being deeply aligned with one another.
• 18:10
  And he closes with a thought that the greatest giants rarely set out to be learned from.
• 18:14
  They set out to be great.
• 18:15
  And then the lessons followed.
• 18:17
  Warren Buffet obviously had the famous line, tell me who your heroes are, and I'll tell you
• 18:21
  how you'll turn out to be.
• 18:23
  But in today's world where so much entrepreneurship and venture is driven by media
• 18:27
  obsession and slashy moments, like as mentioned in our own media piece earlier on, it feels
• 18:32
  increasingly easy to point to someone as a hero or role model without actually knowing whether
• 18:37
  they're, quote, unquote, successful at all.
• 18:39
  They simply appear to be getting to the visible markers of success faster, and that's really
• 18:43
  tempting to want to copy.
• 18:44
  So, Charles, what do you think the downstream impact is of that on the ecosystem if we keep
• 18:48
  building platforms and rewarding founders and characters who are leading with a narrative
• 18:53
  over substance?
• 18:54
  I think part of the other problem is we live in this world where it's easy to have a parasocial
• 18:58
  relationship with somebody who's famous or perceived to be successful who you've never
• 19:02
  met.
• 19:02
  You don't know anything about that person's personal life.
• 19:04
  You don't know whether they're actually happy.
• 19:05
  You don't actually even know whether the success that they're representing online is
• 19:08
  real.
• 19:09
  And I think someone once told me, like, if you're gonna copy something, make sure you
• 19:12
  understand how it works.
• 19:14
  And I think when you marry this with symbolic capitalism, there's like a lot of things that
• 19:18
  appear to be working on the surface, and the people who are running those things will tell
• 19:23
  you why it works.
• 19:24
  And then you get in there and you're like, no.
• 19:27
  That's not it at all.
• 19:28
  Like, it actually doesn't work or doesn't work in the way that you said or it really works
• 19:32
  because this one person, like, doesn't want to do the crap work and doesn't get I see fund
• 19:35
  managers saying, well, I'm gonna build the next version of x y z firm.
• 19:39
  I'm like, do you how much do you actually really understand about how x y z firm works?
• 19:42
  Did you work there?
• 19:43
  Did you work there?
• 19:44
  I've oh, I've read all their stuff.
• 19:45
  I look at their portfolio.
• 19:46
  I'm like, okay.
• 19:47
  Those are artifacts that doesn't really tell you how or why it works.
• 19:50
  Oh, we're gonna be an equal partnership just like Benchmark.
• 19:52
  I'm like, cool.
• 19:53
  Have you explored the tension of what that means?
• 19:55
  Have you actually talked to people who've worked at Benchmark about it's kind of like
• 19:58
  when all the Bridgewater stuff came out, and everyone's like, this sounds amazing.
• 20:02
  I'm like, talk to people who work at Bridgewater and ask them what it's like on a
• 20:04
  daily basis to actually work in that environment.
• 20:07
  And they were like, oh, what you mean?
• 20:08
  I'm like, well, yes.
• 20:09
  In a book, it sounds great.
• 20:10
  And some of these things for certain people are amazing, but it's probably worth getting some
• 20:14
  on the ground.
• 20:15
  And I think the same thing is true.
• 20:16
  I see people I'm like, look.
• 20:17
  You're not Elon Musk.
• 20:18
  You're not.
• 20:19
  There are things Elon Musk can do and get away with and pull off that you cannot because
• 20:24
  simply because you are not him.
• 20:25
  I like Daniel a lot.
• 20:26
  Like, we've done a bunch with Dessians.
• 20:27
  Like, he's great.
• 20:28
  I tell almost everyone.
• 20:30
  People have been like, what would make precursor easier?
• 20:32
  I'm like, oh, it's simple.
• 20:33
  If I just abandon all the things that we do that LPs don't necessarily agree with and made
• 20:38
  our fun much more cookie cutter and vanilla, I believe fundraising would be easier.
• 20:42
  I think I would be far less interested in the work.
• 20:44
  It would not be authentic to me, and I think we'd make less money.
• 20:47
  But I do think a lot you know, I've told Ron Conway this.
• 20:49
  There's a lot of parts of SV Angel that I've tried to internalize and adopt at Precursor,
• 20:55
  but not the whole thing because I didn't work there.
• 20:57
  And every time I talk to people who have worked there, there are lots of pieces about that
• 21:00
  place that I think work only because of a few specific people who work there and the
• 21:05
  relationships that they have in Silicon Valley, and I don't have those same relationships.
• 21:09
  And so I think it for me, it's more important.
• 21:10
  There are little bits of lots of other firms that I've seen and taken.
• 21:13
  I'm a big believer in that old statement.
• 21:15
  You're either a role model or a warning.
• 21:17
  There And are lots of things I've seen other venture firms.
• 21:19
  I'm like, I never want to adopt that policy or be like them.
• 21:22
  But almost everything I've learned, it's been because somebody else before me ran these
• 21:27
  experiments and learned some lessons so I don't have to learn everything from scratch.
• 21:31
  The last question that I had here is is kind of like a more fun one.
• 21:35
  I mean, piece draws this clear line between studying the giants in your own domain versus
• 21:39
  pulling from completely different fields.
• 21:40
  And Daniel mentions restaurants and record producers as things that have genuinely shaped
• 21:45
  how his thinking operates.
• 21:46
  I'm curious to know if there's an unconventional domain or discipline outside of
• 21:49
  venture that shaped how you think about investing or entrepreneurship more than people
• 21:54
  who are familiar with precursor might think.
• 21:56
  Winemakers and restaurateurs are two categories of people.
• 22:00
  They're both foolish pursuits in some ways.
• 22:02
  Most restaurants don't make it.
• 22:04
  They're extremely stressful environments.
• 22:06
  Every every great restaurateur I've talked to, or maybe even chef has been better than
• 22:10
  restaurateur, has had some vision or a dish or an experience they wanted to bring to the world
• 22:16
  that they felt like wasn't being represented by anybody else.
• 22:19
  And against all odds, they did it, and they built something special that left a mark.
• 22:25
  And it was hard.
• 22:26
  And I'm sure a lot of people told them, don't you know how hard it is to start a restaurant?
• 22:30
  Don't you know how hard it is to, like, have an impact?
• 22:33
  And winemakers too because it's a folly.
• 22:35
  You're, like, fighting against nature.
• 22:36
  It takes many, many years before you know if you're any good.
• 22:39
  And some of the winemakers I've met who I respect the most have done truly crazy thing.
• 22:43
  They've tried to grow a grape in a region where it has never been grown before, or they've
• 22:46
  tried to go to a region that didn't have much of a developed wine industry, and they've
• 22:50
  worked for seven, ten, fifteen years trying to, like, understand the intersection of land,
• 22:56
  weather, technique, farming.
• 22:59
  A lot of these things are, interdisciplinary, but oftentimes, most people are gonna tell you
• 23:03
  to quit before you start and will continue to tell you to quit while you're in the middle of
• 23:07
  it, and you don't always get a lot of feedback along the way that you're on the right track.
• 23:11
  Well, we are all out of time today.
• 23:12
  Thank you so much for joining in, Charles.
• 23:14
  Thank you to our listeners for hopping in as well.
• 23:16
  Please like and subscribe, and we'll talk with you all next week.
• 23:18
  Thank you.
• 23:19
  Bye.