ADSN

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...

Daniel and James are back with another ADSN rundown and this week did not disappoint. They kick things off with Kyle Kuzma posting what can only be described as an institutional-grade investment takes, cover how Meta's algorithm served Chewy's maggot ad to millions of people without anyone at Chewy signing off on it, and react to Amazon being revealed as the company that accidentally burned half a billion dollars on Claude tokens i...

Daniel and James sit down with Brian Quinn, North American President at AppsFlyer, the marketing measurement platform working with over 15,000 brands including Netflix, TikTok, Pepsi, and Burger King. They kick off the conversation exploring how AI is reshaping the customer journey and then move on to discuss why brands are pulling their best experiences out of the open web and back into apps, and the explosive growth in new apps d...

Leaked audio from Meta's All Hands: Zuck wants to train AI on employee behavior. DraftKings CEO goes scorched earth on Kalshi. Publicis bought LiveRamp. Chinese brands are quietly acquiring Everlane, Blue Bottle, and Salomon. Airbnb will have to embrace AI agents. The feed is fake. And someone put their CPA on Meta Ray-Bans.

Thank you to our sponsors:

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This week ADSN goes bicostal for the first time. Daniel is live from Upfronts in New York and James is holding it down in LA.

They kick off with Kalshi odds on a Tesla-SpaceX merger hitting 50%, then get into why ChatGPT shipping an ad manager is kind of a joke — they literally told Codex to build it. Eric Tilbury defines outcomes in a single sentence that should be written in stone.

The conversation moves into why brands need ...

Ryan Cohen wants to buy eBay with half cash, half stock. Parker Card raised $200M and vanished overnight. OpenAI shipped a full ads manager. Shopify, Meta, Mercury, and Spotify all launched AI connectors in the same week. Stripe Atlas data shows new AI-era companies are 2x the size of last year's cohort. Plus: why Unilever is betting on 300K creators, and the one skill creative strategists are missing.

This is ADSN — the ad te...

Private equity firms are spending weekends rebuilding acquisition targets in Claude Code. If the clone works, the deal dies. It's the cheapest moat test in human history.This week James and Daniel dig into:• Why token pricing today looks exactly like mobile data pricing 15 years ago• Sam Altman rethinking OS design and the OpenAI phone rumors• GPT Image generating LEGO sets with real BrickLink part IDs• SpaceX acquiring Cursor for ...

Sequoia just dropped a thesis that's shaking up the industry: the next trillion-dollar company won't sell software — it'll sell work. Meanwhile, founders are cutting SaaS tools to pay for AI tokens, Block built a "Claude for money" inside Cash App, and OpenAI can't figure out how to spend advertisers' money.This week James and Daniel dig into:• Sequoia's bold thesis: sell work, not software — and what it means for the S...

Julia Knight rebuilt every single workflow at her agency Knight Vision using Claude. Condensing 5 people’s roles into one in just 3 weeks. James and Daniel sit down with Julia to talk about what it actually looks like to scale a marketing agency with AI.

In this episode:

• How Julia used Claude to rebuild Knight Vision’s entire backend

• Why volume beats perfection in content marketing (posting = shots on goal)

• What creat...

It's bizarro world this week with James going phoneless for 10 hours, his new found respect for IBM, and why he's so bullish on out of home (OOH) advertising. Then it's back to digital land with Meta launching Muse, another week of OpenAI ads announcements, and the one thing you can do to stop AI bad actors (hint: call your country leader a big fat pig). Also in this episode is Diplo, Rick Rubin, and Andrew Sorkin...?A special than...

This week: OpenAI just paid $100M+ for a business show — and it's not really about content. James and Daniel break down what that acquisition signals for AI, media, and anyone building right now.

Plus they talk about the founder literally talking to AI notetakers instead of humans and why if you are still building like it is 2022, you might already be behind.James and Daniel get into why APIs are becoming the only thing that m...