How Ryan Serhant Sold $20B in Real Estate with Media & AI

Ryan Serhant https://x.com/RyanSerhant is one of the most successful and well-known real estate entrepreneurs in the world, with over $20 billion in lifetime sales. After leading one of New York City’s top-ranked brokerage teams to more than $4 billion in transactions, he founded SERHANT., a next-generation real estate company built at the intersection of media, technology, education, & sales. In this episode, Ryan joins Molly O’Shea to share the full SERHANT. ​The Future of NYC​Media as the Business Model (Brokerage 3.0)​S. MPLE’s $45M Seed Round & AI-Driven Sales​Authenticity, Community, & Brand Building​The Netflix Flywheel: Media → Distribution → Sales Ryan breaks down the strategy behind S. MPLE, his proprietary AI platform backed by a $45 million seed round led by Camber Creek, with participation from Left Lane Capital. S. MPLE acts as an “AI chief of staff” for agents automating workflows, orchestrating tasks, and saving more than 15,000 hours of work this year alone. From the success of his Netflix series Owning Manhattan to his philosophy that “authenticity beats virality,” Ryan reveals the systems, mindset, and scale strategy behind his $20 billion sales empire.. and why he believes the future of real estate will belong to founders who treat media and AI as infrastructure, not accessories. Ryan Serhant: https://x.com/RyanSerhant https://x.com/RyanSerhant Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc https://x.com/sourceryvc 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 ​⁠Brex⁠ https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. ⁠https://brex.com/sourcery⁠ https://brex.com/sourcery ​⁠Turing⁠ https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. ⁠https://turing.com/sourcery⁠ https://turing.com/sourcery ​⁠Carta⁠ https://carta.com/sourcery—Carta connects founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by 65,000+ companies in 160+ countries, Carta’s platform of software & services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. ⁠https://carta.com/sourcery⁠ https://carta.com/sourcery ​⁠Kalshi⁠ https://kalshi.com/sourcery—The largest prediction market and the only legal platform in the US where people can trade directly on the outcomes of future events: ⁠https://kalshi.com/sourcery⁠ https://kalshi.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! ⁠https://www.sourcery.vc/ https://www.sourcery.vc/ 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) The Full Ryan Serhant (01:32) NYC politics and real-estate resilience (07:00) Running a city like a CEO (08:14) Building the SERHANT. platform (09:14) From Bravo to media entrepreneur (12:29) Reframing: a media + tech company that sells real estate (15:00) Authenticity vs virality in building community (17:00) $308M deal born from brand awareness (19:45) Owning Manhattan and the Netflix effect (22:33) Casting talent and shaping culture (25:00) Season 2 preview & evolution of real-estate TV (30:15) Inside S. MPLE — AI as agent co-pilot (36:00) How AI transformed every department (42:00) Recruiting the next-gen, mobile-first agent (43:30) Raising $45M and scaling SERHANT nationally (52:21) Daily Routines and Personal Insights

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  A city needs to be run by a CEO. Like, you need somebody who is moving for the betterment of the company. Like, where can we delete inefficiencies? Take like a phrase from Musk. Like, where can we find opportunities to improve?

• 0:14Molly O'Shea?

  You're a CEO and you've built a $14 billion empire?

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Okay, first of all, I don't know who told you that. It's not $14 billion. I've done 20 billion in sales, over 20 at this point. Since January 1 of this year, Simple has completed over 12,000 automated tasks, which has saved 15,000 working human hours for our people. I brand, I expand, and I sell.

• 0:35Molly O'Shea?

  You've raised $45 million for this.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  I did it by myself, like an idiot. Probably could have raised so much more. No, just kidding. The other biggest check was Left Lane Capital, so Harley Miller and those guys.

• 0:45Molly O'Shea?

  Both of them.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  At Left Lane. Yeah, you would. And they, uh, they're in the show. So, season two.

• 0:52Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 0:53Speaker 00

  I've never seen this in a reality show. Season two is real estate.

• 0:55Molly O'Shea?

  We have VCs in a reality TV show?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it follows.

• 0:58Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  It follows the race.

• 1:00Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 1:00Speaker 00

  It follows the race. And I thought Netflix was gonna cut it.

• 1:12Molly O'Shea?

  Ryan Serhant, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. What a beautiful library.

• 1:17Molly O'Shea?

  This is, you know, not much, but it's home.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  For today, yeah.

• 1:21Molly O'Shea?

  For today.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Welcome to the stock exchange. Excited, let's dig into it.

• 1:25Molly O'Shea?

  So, you are one of the most popular people in New York City.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  That's not true.

• 1:29Molly O'Shea?

  It is. Everyone knows you.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  More popular than Eric Adams today, that's for sure.

• 1:33Molly O'Shea?

  And Mumdani.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know if I'm, I don't think so. Mumdani has created a popular vote, that is for sure. Because he knows what to say, right? He's a, he's a good marketer, he's a good politician. He had a good branding company that put together their brand. Like, they just know how to go after the audience. Whether, whether the social audience ends up voting remains to be seen. You have a lot of influence across social, in every industry. And it always surprises me where I'm like, oh, that person has massive influence, but they only sell what? They don't actually do any business because they haven't figured out how to turn an audience into a community. Right? And that's, that's really, really hard to do. You can rally people all you want, get them around a mission,

• 2:17Speaker 00

  but to really turn them into a voting community is hard. I think he'll probably win. And I think New York will have to figure out what it looks like for the next 50 years from then on, and we go from there.

• 2:26Molly O'Shea?

  What's gonna happen on the real estate side with that?

• 2:28Speaker 00

  I think two things. I think one, not a whole lot. Like, New York has survived terrorist attacks. New York has survived de Blasio. New York has survived Hurricane Sandy sinking half the city underwater. I lived on a corner right, right here, right on Broad Street and Pine Street. Okay. And Million Dollar Listing New York, season two in 2012. We were shooting that in the fall and I just sat there with no cell service because when the city loses power, you lose all cell towers, which means you lose all cell phones. Trying to figure out, what do I do? And I had to walk to 42nd Street. And everyone was just trying to charge phones on generators and stuff. Like, the city has been through a lot. It is one island.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  And we don't even have alleyways for trash here. Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, everyone has alleyways for trash. We don't, because we don't have time. And so we walk through our own trash to get to work and can own it. Like, it's, what's the worst that can happen? He swings the city far left, in which case in the next election, it swings far right. Like, I, I am in full agreement that a lot in this city is broken. But I don't think running on a political campaign of taking versus creating is the right way to go. Right? Like, I'm not running for mayor, but if I was,

• 3:56Speaker 00

  my entire play would be, I need to create as much economic prosperity for everyone here. Whether you're 18 or whether you're 90. It's not going to be to take from the 18-year-old or the 90-year-old. It's going to be to create. So we're going to create jobs. We're going to create positions. We're going to create new markets. We're going to create new zoning so we can build different types of things. We're just going to create, and this is going to be the number one employer in the United States. It's going to be New York City. And then we're going to have a problem with how to keep people out, which is exactly what Miami's going through. Right? The mayor there, who we're close with, and the entire political environment in Florida, basically, has been built on the opportunity to build. Right? Come here, build a career, build a life, build a family.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Don't have two kids, have 20 kids. Come here, create a tech company, do this, tax incentives, whatever you want. Florida is the number one employer of human capital in terms of citizens, right? Citizens are, if you like, read Ayn Rand, we are employers of the government, right? We're employees of the government. And so Florida's done a really, really great job at that to Florida's benefit and to everybody there. So, I don't know, we'll see what happens. If he doesn't get elected, I mean, things will kind of stay the same. But the city isn't awesome. And maybe it just needs to be shaken up a little bit so that it can clear things out.

• 5:16Molly O'Shea?

  Do you think that people are going to shift down to Miami?

• 5:19Speaker 00

  They have, though. I don't think the mayor is going to change who lives here. I think you asked me about what happens with real estate. Like, I think that if they really put a freeze on luxury building, let's say, no new buildings. We only do affordable housing. Okay, so what do you think happens to then all the luxury apartments that already exist here? They become limited inventory and then it's gold. And price appreciation just goes through the roof. Because right now, if I'm going to go sell an apartment in Tribeca, that buyer who comes through says, "Okay, this is great, but what's coming next door? What's coming there? What's up on Clarkson and the Village? There's a new tower, isn't there? There's always something new. If you stop that, there's never anything new. Where else am I going to go?

• 6:04Speaker 00

  Pricing is just going to be far further from the median. Like socialism doesn't empower everyone, right? It never has and it never will. It hasn't in, it hasn't in any market. You know, you have the haves and you have the have-nots. What you need to do is empower the people to want to get to that next level and, and want to have bigger jobs and want to go to good schools and want to create for their families. So I think you'll have luxury real estate that is, that gets more and more expensive. That's for sure. And I think you will have people who move out to different marketplaces. And it won't just be Florida, it'll be Greenwich, it'll be New Jersey, it'll be Long Island. And then I think things will settle down because there's only so much somebody can do in four years.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Like we've seen with, with Eric Adams, who's our mayor now. And I know this has nothing to do with your podcast, but like, I think if you ask anyone on the street, "What has Adams done?", they tell you two things. One, he goes out at night. He's always in the press, having dinner or going to parties. Okay, so that's, that's leading with some kind of influence. The second thing is, we now have to use the same sized trashcan. That is, that is law now. We cannot use bigger trash cans for more trash. We now have to all use these small, little, stupid trash cans. But man, oh, man, did he push that one through. So like, I don't know. I don't know. I think politicians have to do a better job at actually meeting the customer where the customer is at, which is what companies do.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  And I think a city needs to be run by a CEO. Like, you need somebody who is moving for the betterment of the company, not just the newest employees or the lowest level employees, and not just for the C-suite executives either, right? Like, where can we delete inefficiencies? You know, to take like a phrase from Musk, like, where can we find opportunities to improve to the betterment of the city? Because if the city gets better, the people will be better by default. If you go backwards, I think you have a really, really hard time.

• 8:00Molly O'Shea?

  Talking about CEOs, you're a CEO, and you've built a $14 billion empire?

• 8:05Speaker 00

  Okay, first of all, I don't know who told you that. It's not $14 billion. I've done $20 billion in sales, over 20 at this point.

• 8:13Molly O'Shea?

  You need to update the websites, then.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Okay, okay. When you say on this podcast, billions of dollars, I think people are probably going to associate that with valuation. I don't think our company is worth $14 billion yet. But I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't want it to be there. We operate a holding company called Serhant Technologies, and underneath that, we own a cloud real estate brokerage. So the brokerage now operates in 13 states. I'll be in 15 by the end of 2025, and then we'll be fully national by next year. We operate a production company called Studios. So Serhant Studios, we have a Netflix show called Only Manhattan. We do top-of-funnel lead gen for salespeople so that we can provide leads to salespeople at Ciro CAC. We then have

• 8:56Speaker 00

  a sales training company called SellIt.com, which is massive, that has over 40,000 enrollees, I guess, at this point, 130 countries. We sell through them, and they're also We recruit through them, right, all over the world. And then we have Simple, which is our AI workflow service that gets a lot of attention. But I focus on a lot of the other stuff, too.

• 9:17Molly O'Shea?

  And you became so popular because of the media. So I'm curious, like, when did you decide to take the media side so seriously?

• 9:23Speaker 00

  The media took me seriously. It wasn't a, it was a happy accident. I came to New York City after college in 2006 to do theater. And I ran out of money. And so I had to get a job. And it was go back to school, which sounded terrible, or move home, which was way worse. Or bartend, you know, do a survival job. And so I got my real estate license because a friend said it was just like theater. It's all a game of improv. You meet someone on the streets, they say, I want to find an apartment. You say, yes, and, yes, and it's just, acting is selling, right? Except you're doing it authentically. And it's not about taking from people. It's about helping them make a decision they're gonna make anyway. Except now they get to make it with you and not make it in a year or with somebody else. So I got my real estate license.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy that morning. And I was off to the races from there. And so I put the theater thing to the side because I had to make money. I had to pay my rent to stay in the city. And I was at the bottom of the barrel there. And then I went to an open casting call for Millionaire Listing New York, which was a TV show on Bravo. And I was cast on that. And that started in 2010. Show premiered in 2012 and I did it for 10 years. So, yeah, so that show, and that show was a shotgun for me into the real estate world. You know, not into the, not into like general craziness. But, you know, it was a great way for me to create a community, right? To build an audience that I could turn into a community.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  That then, when Instagram was invented, right around the same exact time, I just was an early adopter. Same way with YouTube, it had been around for a long time, but it was mostly just for kids, et cetera. We were, you know, we were doing property tours in 2014 and 2015, 10, 11 years ago, just trying to say, hey. I can get this audience on Bravo that I can sell property through because it syndicates to an international audience, but by the time people see it, it's been a year since I shot it and my listing agreements are six months long. I've got to have sold it. So what if I could do that by tomorrow? Right? How can I move forward really, really quickly? And so that's what we started doing on YouTube and on Instagram and Facebook and started

• 11:34Speaker 00

  building an early, early audience, just really attacking our niche. And it's just grown since then.

• 11:39Molly O'Shea?

  And you have studios in-house?

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, one of them sitting here not paying attention. His name is Danny. That's him right there. This is here is my, my, my friend. So Danny, yeah, Studios is in-house. We have a head of Studios. He's based in New York City and then we have Studios in every market that we're in for real estate. But it's a 35, 40 person team.

• 12:01Molly O'Shea?

  In an interview you did with David Weisberg on 10x, you were talking about how you're a media company that you sell real estate. And I thought that was a really refreshing perspective because I come from the investing world. I kind of feel silly sometimes doing media and it seems a little like forced, but you're actually really owning it. And I know that's like more in your DNA, but do you think that that is like a principle that most people need to take on in this new media environment, like the new internet? Everybody's like, there's i-buyers, there's people online, it's discovery is different.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  I think it's just a reframe. Instead of a rebirth of an idea or a redirection of brand, it's just a reframe. And when I started the company in 2020, so you know, I didn't lead our listing, we did three spinoff shows, started writing books, all that stuff. I did like, I can't remember, 1.2 or 1.3 billion in sales in 2019 and said, I gotta go do this on my own now. Like we were the most successful residential real estate brokerage team in the United States for four years in a row. The only choice was to go do my own thing and go back to the bottom. So I rose to number one that way. And now how am I going to go right back to the bottom? And what am I going to do? I'm going to go out there and say, hey, Ryan started a real estate company. No one, no one cares. And

• 13:18Speaker 00

  then how would I differentiate myself from the legacy firms? And what problem am I really solving? Just Ryan wants to start his own company that doesn't solve a great problem or just to make money, doesn't really solve a great problem, not a scalable problem anyway. And so I said, what is our real value prop? We can put properties in front of more qualified buyers globally, organically than any other firm combined. Okay, that's a, that's interesting. I could do that. What, how do I, how do I, how do I turn that into a solve though? What it really came down to is we're either a real estate company that uses media and technology, or we are a media and technology company that just so happens to sell real

• 14:03Speaker 00

  estate. And when we said that, we then aligned on a singular purpose, right? And so then our purpose can inform the people that we get to hire. And then the people get to inform the product that we get to sell because now I can sell real estate in any market, residential, commercial, we can do multifamily leasing, I can sell sales training, I can sell media, we can sell pillows. And then if you have all three lined up, right? The purpose, the people and the product, then you can get to profit. So focused on the money last and it's worked so far.

• 14:37Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, it's really impressive and it's a shift that is happening really strongly in the venture world, like in the last two years. A company that we had on recently was Open Door. And so what they have done is they've built a cult following, sort of like the community that you're talking about. What do you think it takes to build one of these communities?

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Authenticity, first and foremost, vulnerability. People don't care about your wins. They want to connect with you on your losses. So I think we've been really, really clear by letting people know across all of our businesses and everything I do personally. My job is not to win, my job is to lose. And I do that all day, every day. I lose deals, I lose pitches, I lose for this, that, the other, and the wins are then my bonus. And I think for salespeople, they align with us and there's a real culture that we've created and following. And I think that's why cult is in culture. You know, I think that's why also my retention on customers is 99%. Like, once you work with us, there would be nowhere else to go.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  And, you know, we lean on that heavily, heavily, heavily. But I think people, you know this, right? People read through bullshit. They don't like, they know when they're being sold to. And you see it in your feeds, too. Like, you know when something's being pushed to you. And you know when something's like an authentic moment. Whether it's produced or not, you're like, well, good job. I'll watch this. I'll give you, I'll give you a look. I would just say, though, like, I've been doing this a long time. And I just caution a lot of people on chasing virality. Because if it's not an engaged customer, you don't know these people are. Like, doesn't matter, right? You could have a million views from where? Where? Who are these people? Where are they? And what call to action are you really driving? Right? With, with this look?

• 16:23Speaker 00

  If you can do it consistently over time, then sure, you can build something really, really amazing with a great following, like the Savannah Bananas. Right? Or slowly but surely, that engagement does turn into real community. That community turns into customers. And you can kind of go from audience to community to content. Right? To commerce. But a lot of people chase it because I think it makes them feel good. And I don't, I don't know what it actually does. And so I try to steer people on the path of like, if you do it for you, people will come. If you do it for them, no one cares.

• 16:57Molly O'Shea?

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• 17:42Molly O'Shea?

  Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Hims, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid. Trust and use Brex. Start today at brex.com/sorcery. That's B R E X dot com slash sorcery. What's the most expensive listing you've sold through social media?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Through social? I mean, we sell through social every day. It's a huge part of what we do.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  We don't do deals in DMs. That's physically impossible.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  But like, in January, I got a call from a banker who knows me through social. Email first, that turned into a call, who then said, I have clients who want to buy something in Florida. Do you do Florida? And I said, yes, we do Florida. And said, can I get them on the phone right now? And I said, sure. Told me who they are. And I was like, no way. You're bringing these people on the phone. He brought them on. I recognized the voice. I said, hello. They said, we're gonna buy something. We don't think we need a real estate agent. And I said, I think you're wrong. And I explained why they would need one. And they said, we're gonna call you back in five minutes. And they did. And then we bought, at the end of the day, that deal is $308 million over the phone.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  From, not from social, but the awareness was generated through the media engine that we have created that is in part on social media. Netflix is a huge help for me, though. Bravo was a massive help. I don't want to ignore that at all. And we were, Million Dollar Listing was on primetime cable for 10 years before streaming, before the way the world is today. There was no TikTok to compete with. Where people sitting there, like you would watch TV and you'd maybe look at the news, but you weren't on your phone laughing here while watching here, while on your laptop over here. Right? So it's a very, very different world now. And Netflix is, has been a massive, massive international funnel.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  Like, it's just the craziest thing ever, which we then grab audience for and then put across our channels. And we are fully prepared to squeeze that lemon while it's there.

• 19:51Molly O'Shea?

  What was the impact after the launch of Owning Manhattan?

• 19:55Speaker 00

  I mean, it changed my life. When Million Dollar Listing premiered in 2012, my life changed, but not overnight. It took a while, because you don't call people you see on TV. It's weird. Right? So it took a while. But what I learned from it initially was, I need a pitch tool. So if I'm gonna email you, right? You live in Los Angeles. I, I don't know, do you want to buy, sell? Do you need a place in New York? You're coming here all the time. You're the greatest podcaster. Female finance executive in the history of the world. You definitely deserve a new apartment, this, that, the other. Also, I have this TV show and then you might respond or maybe not. But it definitely did help open doors. So it changed, it changed the trajectory of my entire life. And then only Manhattan happened last year and it changed life within like three weeks.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  It was insanity. Like we had lines outside open houses and not just to the betterment of Serhant, like my company. We have people outside my office in Soho all day, every day. We have to put decals on the sidewalks to tell people where to stand to take the best photo. Otherwise they come up and they bang on the door and they're like, can we, and we're like, no, just go across the street. It's better over there. And so it's a lot because it's all over the world, right? So when people think American real estate residential, they, you know, they think, they think us and so it's helpful. But yeah, to the betterment of all of our other agents and all of our other markets, because overnight, everyone's sitting at home, it's top 10 in their feed. They click on it. They see the name. There's 11 Serhants on planet earth. So they're like, well,

• 21:23Speaker 00

  that must be you. Oh my gosh, there's that sign. And it broke our website. Traffic increased like 2,400% or something completely insane. We had, we had agent recruits from all over the world coming through. It was like 100 a minute and social following, we were growing at, what was it? I mean, it was hundreds of thousands a day. Like it was just, it was, it is the largest global distribution funnel on planet earth, right? Like you just can't, like YouTube is huge, but you have to know what you're looking for on YouTube because it is so huge. Netflix is very focused and it provides you in that first, I mean, there's 10,000 shows, but when you first log in,

• 22:07Speaker 00

  when a show first comes out, you have 300 million people who get the choice of whether they want to click a button or not, and you dare them not to click. And it changed everything. And then we just milked the hell out of it. I think we've been very, very good at taking advantage of, of opportunity and never, ever, ever letting go.

• 22:26Molly O'Shea?

  Jessica is one of the most popular people on the show. How did you find her? Like, what did you see in her for her talent?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  We, it took us a year to cast.

• 22:35Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  So we went through every real estate. I mean, I looked at my own agents. You know, we have our own agents. Some, some were great for TV. Some are just great brokers, but not good for TV, which is, which is different. Right? It's hard to find people who can do both. And so then we just started scrolling through every other real estate brokerage in New York, as well as in other markets, because I like the idea of bringing somebody. So there was a character named Savannah. So she was in, I think, North Carolina.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  But in that first season, there was the tattoo guy. He was at Compass. Jess Markowski, I think, was also at Compass. A couple of those other agents came over from Element and some other firms where I was looking for somebody who could have camera presence, because it is a TV show. And then when I spoke to them, do they have a personality? Because you have to have a personality, otherwise no one's going to watch it. And I was like, I want no dips in momentum. Everyone's got to have their own Netflix TV show worth of story if you're going to be in the cast. Otherwise, otherwise you can be background. It's fine. And she came in and she met and talked and she totally got it. She understood and she actually does this. Like she actually sells and sold in season one. I think she does one of the first deals in season two and that comes out in December. I know. And she lets everybody know.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  And then she got caught up in season one dramas. That was fun. That was hard on her because I think it was, it was public. And she did some other crazy deals this year that have been very public in the New York Post. It's been wild. She's, she's, she does, she does business.

• 24:05Molly O'Shea?

  Was it the first time you casted something out?

• 24:09Speaker 00

  And like a full, yeah. I mean, in terms of a full cast, yes. I did a show called Sell It Like Serhant, when I wrote Sell It Like Serhant and then did that show for Bravo. And so we kind of had to cast all the businesses we went into, or I would teach these terrible salespeople how to sell. And then we cast for our shorts. Like we have a YouTube thing called Listed, which is like short form. Staging short form design, short form brokerage, stuff like that across accounts. So we kind of cast from within our group. But yeah, it was the first time I'd ever really said, I need to find 10 people. Because it's all about the people. It's all about the cast. Like if the cast isn't there, then the show doesn't work.

• 24:47Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, and you need a mix of those personalities so that they bounce off of each other.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  And you have to have arc and you have to have people who are willing to go 100%. Like you can't put anyone in front of a camera who's going to hold back and be nervous about what their mom's going to say. Right? Like you have to be 100% open and talk about anything and be willing to go the distance. And just know that like, we will protect you, but you have to be willing to, to go out there. And I think, I think that's why the show worked, because we spent a lot of time really thinking about the architecture of that cast and about the structure of the show too, because we had to invent it from scratch. Because I didn't want it to be Selling Sunset or Million Dollar Listing New York. And Selling Sunset is basically Million Dollar Listing New York meets Housewives. And it was created by the people who created Million Dollar Listing New York and Housewives. And so obviously, I was like, and I don't want it to be boring.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  It can't be HGTV because that's dying. What is the next generation going to want to watch? I don't think they're just going to want to watch an apartment. No one cares anymore. We've seen it all and it's all, now it's AI. Like it doesn't matter. So how can we, how can we give them something they've never seen before? And so I really wanted to redefine what the genre was for a docu-series. And season two is very different. It is a wild ride.

• 26:00Molly O'Shea?

  Spoilers, anything?

• 26:02Speaker 00

  If you are looking for like dumb reality TV, unfortunately, that's not this. It is, it ticks the box for people that want to see real estate for sure. But it's a deal show. So for people who like deals, like if you like Shark Tank, if you liked original Million Dollar Listing, which was every episode, we were actual deals and actual negotiations. It is that. It is high stress, high drama, and I think continues to really redefine and blur the line between structured and unstructured TV, right? Like following people who are at work and whatever happens is very unstructured. Succession is structured. And it's interesting. It's hard for me to describe. Like it's a, it's a, it's a fun watch because it is so unexpected.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  It'll be interesting to see what you think when I force you to watch it.

• 26:50Molly O'Shea?

  I don't think you have to force me, I'll watch it.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  You sure?

• 26:54Molly O'Shea?

  The first season was really good. I watched it when it first came out. The second season, I'll have my popcorn ready.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  December 5th.

• 27:00Molly O'Shea?

  December 5th.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  You should come to your premiere party. I invited Nicole.

• 27:02Molly O'Shea?

  I'll be there.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  You should come, December.

• 27:03Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, Meghan.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll send you the invite.

• 27:06Molly O'Shea?

  Meghan has to come.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  We'll send you the invite. I'll give you a plus one. I'm doing it at Terminal 5. It'll be the biggest event I've ever done. And it'll be completely insane. You should come.

• 27:17Molly O'Shea?

  Can I podcast there?

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Sure. It'll be loud, but sure, do whatever you want. I don't care.

• 27:21Molly O'Shea?

  Great, perfect.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Livestream it, go for it.

• 27:23Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, livestream it.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  I want to be a streamer now. I did this thing with iShowSpeed.

• 27:26Molly O'Shea?

  You did?

• 27:27Speaker 00

  And I, I've never felt as old and as least important in my whole life. That guy can't walk.

• 27:36Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Because he's, no, he has legs. He can't walk because of the amount of kids that follow him. They were trying, it was, I've never experienced anything like that. Like, he just would go outside and Broadway shut down and because he's livestreaming, everyone knows where he is at the exact moment because there's no delay, which is like for a security thing, which is something that I was thinking about. Like, I think he actually likes it. You know, it's part of the, it's part of the spectacle that you could go and be on the livestream right now. And so every kid around the country just would figure out where he is and follow. And it was mass insanity. I showed him a $40 million penthouse in the Upper West Side. And I've never had more people in a building mad at me because they were like, the building, the lobby, these kids were trying to break in and try to get to him.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  It was nuts. And so, anyway, moral of that story is I am going to become a streamer. I think for sure. I'm done with all the structured stuff and like creating content, doing an actual CEO thing. I think I should just stream.

• 28:35Molly O'Shea?

  Stream all day, 24/7.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's like 22. He makes $50 million a year. What is the point of life? Like, what are we all, what are we working so hard for? Like, you see that, and you're like, wait a minute, why did I go to college? I don't get it.

• 28:50Molly O'Shea?

  Well, that's why YouTube is like one of the top jobs that kids want.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, why cure cancer if you can make videos on the internet? Right?

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Like I, I, I mean, it's scary. It is total. We are, we are, we are, it's over. It's just all over.

• 29:07Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, no.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Because there's, there's, there's incentives are no longer aligned. It used to be, if you want to make a lot of money, you have to be a lawyer, a doctor, a banker, a business owner, an entrepreneur. You have to employ others because you will delegate work. You will buy their time for yours and you can grow. So it used to be like, that is how you can achieve economic prosperity is do one of those jobs. You have to go to school and that was, that was, that was what was sold to us so that people can take on debt. Right? So private markets, people take on debt and then the student loan fiasco was, actually wasn't really a fiasco until Obama,

• 29:51Speaker 00

  when they made it public. So they, they made it. So now anybody can go get a student loan because we're going to make money on you. We don't care if you go into debt because we'll just fix it later. Right? Anyway, that's a totally different topic, but like I, I, I think like, okay, so the incentives are no longer aligned, right? Same thing with like Obamacare. So the incentives are no longer aligned for doctors. And, and so then why go do that? It's also really, really hard. Why not just do stuff on my phone? Doesn't matter. So it'll be interesting to see where we are in like 2100. That'll be a crazy time.

• 30:22Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, there's, there's a lot of different things to that. Um, one being AI and media are like entirely disrupting jobs. And we'll get into the AI part in one second, but to steel man that argument is experts are also becoming a very valuable, a very valuable part of the AI journey and like hiring them. One of our sponsors is Turing. And so they are in AI research and they're constantly trying to hire more and more actual experts, people with PhDs, people that have gone and learned all these things so that they can verify that the code that they're writing or whatever research they're inputting into whatever model that's going to come out and chat GPT five is like actually accurate.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  And not just from Reddit.

• 31:03Molly O'Shea?

  And not just, well, Reddit is actually one of like the largest training data sets.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  I'm sure, but is that great? I don't know.

• 31:10Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know, but they're using it. And then on top of that, then they use the PhDs. So there is room for PhDs. And then if you look at Meta's strategy, they're giving like billion dollar packages to people. So you have like so many sides of the spectrum. You have these like billion dollar packages for geniuses. And then this recruiting talent of AI researchers. And then you have the rest of everyone who's trying to figure out like, do I do YouTube?

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Or do I do OnlyFans? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what Danny does in his spare time. He eats bagels with his feet.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  In today's high speed business world, staying ahead means using the smartest tools possible, including the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence. Meet Turing Intelligence. Turing builds customizable AI systems designed to solve your mission critical challenges, no matter your industry. From expert guidance to tailored projects, Turing helps top companies realize AI that's more capable, more adaptable, and more effective. With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit Turing.com/sourcery. Spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's Turing.com/sourcery.

• 32:18Molly O'Shea?

  To shift over to the AI side, I want to get your opinion on this. So you have done two things with AI. You've infused it into the firm itself, and then you've also created Simple. So one, how do you view AI disrupting real estate?

• 32:32Speaker 00

  I mean, that's such a huge, open ended question.

• 32:35Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  I'd say the easiest way for me to talk about it is starting with what we've created. So we built something called Simple, which is an agent orchestration platform that uses MCP and LangChain to coordinate multimodal responses across a stack that we've built to predict what a salesperson is going to do next. That then uses function calling to perform automations. Our path is very different from the path it seems like everybody else has taken, which is I'm not sprinkling AI or doing an enterprise deal into a system I've already built just to make it better, faster, or easier to use. I don't need to do that.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  We are empowering the person to turn the person, so for us, the salesperson, into the platform and not just using AI to build a platform that people can use. So we've created what ends up being like an AI chief of staff for all salespeople that anticipates all the work they're going to do and then does it for them. So Simple. Replaces CRM, it replaces calendar, it replaces Canva, it replaces every single system a salesperson would use in our industry to do their job because it does the work for them. And it's all about the delivery. All of our users, every Serhant agent uses it.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  They call it Instacart for sales because they don't care where the food's coming from. They just care that it's delivered and it's easy and it's fast. I think it's very different than that. I think it is an operating system for salespeople that has created a world where every individual person becomes two things. The salesperson and their AI co-pilot, right? Their partner versus, hey, I use AI to do my job. Kind of like what you were saying before about me and the media company, etc. Instead of just saying, hey, we're a real estate company that uses media and technology. No, we are a media company that sells real estate. The same thing for, for AI. And it's completely changed the way we work and it's changed the way we, we, we,

• 34:42Speaker 00

  we play the game. It's like, and maybe it's the exact wrong way to go about it, but so far so good. And we've also taken, the reason I mentioned multimodal is like, I am not convinced which LLM

• 34:56Speaker 00

  is correct or right. I think there's a race, right, towards refrigerant. And I want to make sure that our users have the benefit of whichever one is right for the appropriate recipe that we're doing for them. So like automating CRM work, using AI to do that is really, really, really, really annoying and it's really hard. Claude is pretty great at it and Sonnet, right? A lot of the other administrative tasks, we can run a stack across like Grok and GPT, for example, and then some other stuff has to be totally proprietary and totally custom.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  And so that's what we've built as, as simple as I can kind of go through that. We also use AI in every single department, like all the classic stuff. Like you can't hire a new person unless you prove to us that this thing cannot be done with AI. And a lot of our managers now, instead of just being managers or middle managers, they've almost become agent orchestration managers in their own right. Like there's a company we were working with now that helps us. We give them a JD. They turn it into a Gentic. And it's not always great. A lot of it actually is pretty terrible. You know, but some of it actually completely changes how we operate, especially when it comes down to like finance. Finance is a function underneath a level of strategy. So just real computational stuff.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Design as a function. So on and so forth. So we have AI across every single department. I think we are.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  For brokerage, anyway, real estate brokerage and AI. I think like we are now nationally known for that. Or known for for media. And it's really, really exciting to see how we can empower everybody using artificial intelligence. And I think that's the right way to think about it. It's no longer tech enabled. It's AI empowered.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  And I'm excited to continue to build. It's fun.

• 36:52Molly O'Shea?

  Have you played with any of the Gen AI video models?

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, we got access to Sora, the app with OpenAI way before it came out. So it was like me and Sam Altman and all these other people at OpenAI only who were making and Jake Paul randomly. And making these random videos and it's it's interesting. I think we will, just like in TV, right? You're going to have actual television movies. You have animated television movies and then you'll have AI. It'll just be a new piece of the pie. It'll eat into both of those, but it'll also create a new piece of pie that'll empower the other two pieces. Because now everything that's shot authentically is almost more important now. Because like, oh, you chose to use humans?

• 37:38Speaker 00

  Holy, that's awesome. Let me watch this versus just using AI. And then AI is is pretty fantastical. Like it's I've had the most fun in just kind of creating historical moments. You know, like Thomas Jefferson signing the Louisiana Purchase and saying expansion always and always. Or if you have kids to sit there and with them and say, instead of going and drawing, just come up with any idea, let's do it. And then like I have a six year old daughter and we Most of my Sora feed is her idea of just coming up with, no, okay, now we're in a treehouse and then the treehouse is a time machine and then we become pirates. You put that into Sora and it just makes it. And so now we can do that.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  I don't know to like whose benefit or like what the, what the, what it's really going to do for all of us. And I find myself not really scrolling through Sora because it's just, I just don't think it's there yet. And it's such early, early days and there's still an invite, but um, I'm for all of it. To make this conversation more tactical, studios can now take a photo of a listing. Okay, um, and turn that into a full property tour using AI with user disclaimer. But to give people enough of an idea, so we don't have to do virtual tours anymore. I don't have to show up with a photographer and a videographer, the way that we used to.

• 38:55Molly O'Shea?

  Thousands of dollars.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Exactly, right? So it's like, what industry are we killing and what dollars are we saving? And what time are we saving? One of the things Simple does so well, um, and I know this mostly because we just did a lot of our like testimonials. Cause the Wall Street Journal is writing this in-depth article right now. I hope it turns out okay. Never know with these things, they always come in and they're positive and then they're like, Ryan sucks.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Is like, how much time we're able to buy back? Like since January 1 of this year, Simple has completed over 12,000 automated tasks, which has saved 15,000 hours, working human hours for our people, which is like so over the chart that I ever would have expected us to be at. It's insane because what ends up happening is people find new ways to work. So one of our agents, she's a mom, her name is Abby, she's in Brooklyn. She typically, when she's picking up her kid, she goes, she wants to be a good mom. She goes and picks up her kid. She might have an assistant who's doing some work for her, but like for her, you know what?

• 40:03Speaker 00

  It's just easier if I do it, these important things. And so then she gets home and then she does it, takes two hours, then she cooked dinner. That's like just been her, no matter what, VA, executive assistant, the greatest systems, whatever. You still have to use them. So what happens if you tell somebody, guess what? You no longer have to use them. You are now choice optional. You are now work optional, you're now screen optional. You don't have to do anything. You just tell it what to do and it knows you already because of our onboarding process. And it just gets delivered to you, just like Instacart. So you don't have to run comps anymore, set up listing presentations, set up buyer tours, do any of your personal, all the administrative tasks that usually take up eighty percent of your day.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  Why not, while you're waiting in the fifteen seconds from your daughter to exit school and get in your car, you just tell Simple what you need done by the end of the day. And by the time the door shuts, it's all done. And it has like totally changed the way that people operate. Chat GPT agent builder can't do that yet because it is incredibly specific and you have to be a good prompt engineer. And salespeople just don't want to be prompt engineers. Um, I know I don't. So you talk about like Sora, the hardest thing I think for Sora and I show it to people. I'm like, look what I created. They're like, but how did you do that? Like, well, I told it and like, but how did you know what to tell it? I'm like, well, I just, I don't know. I guess I just made it up and invented it in my brain. Like, oh, I wouldn't even know what to do. And so people just want to be told what, what to do.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  And I think AI is great if you know what to tell it to do. And so that anticipation engine that we've built in Simple is, and across all of our agentic employees is probably the coolest thing to watch, that it just knows the next step. And as long as you can manage the initiative, it's pretty wild.

• 41:50Molly O'Shea?

  Because you've made such a full stack real estate firm and you've automated a lot of the services and you have agentic agents.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:59Molly O'Shea?

  How has that changed the way you recruit?

• 42:01Speaker 00

  The average real estate agent in the United States is a fifty-five-year-old white woman, like at Compass, I think it's like fifty-seven. At, you know, all the other firms, it might be even a little bit older. Our average agent is twenty-eight.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  And they're all high production because they all operate mobile first. Like, we are a mobile-first company. We're digital-first. And then we have some brick and mortar in markets where we, like legally, we have to, like in New York, it can't not have a spot. And so we recruit agents who are attracted to selling anything to anyone on any device, anywhere, anytime. And who believe in building their businesses empowered by our brand, our reach, and our tech stack in a way that they just can't do elsewhere. There's a lot of firms that use tech. But then the the agent or the employer, the consumer still has to use it.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Like it's only as good as the person who knows how to use the thing, right? Like my mom has a laptop. She still calls my CTO because it's her name on the door too, to say, words not doing the word thing. Like she's, you know, so, um, but she has used simple and it's wild. Because it just, and it, because it can multi-model seventeen tasks at the same exact time, knowing exactly what to do as long as it's in your ecosystem.

• 43:25Molly O'Shea?

  I have to ask because this is an investing show. So you've raised forty five million dollars for this about a year ago. It was December twenty twenty four. You said you bootstrapped this up until that point. This was a forty five million dollar seed round.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:39Molly O'Shea?

  The median seed round, according to Carta, is like fifteen million dollars for AI companies as of like early this year.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:45Molly O'Shea?

  What was your process like for raising that capital and who did you raise from?

• 43:48Speaker 00

  I did it by myself, like an idiot. Probably could have raised so much more. No, just kidding. I, um, I had no, you know, it's a classic example of I had no intention of raising money. Like I bootstrapped, I have money. We are profitable. We're growing revenue topline eighty percent year over year. Like we just are, my issue is not growth or agent growth or consumer growth. My issue is supporting the growth. And so year four, like the supporting the growth thing was heavy and by myself. So hiring employees who'd say, who are your backers? Like, my me, you know, is is fine.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  But it it's it's tough when you really want to get the absolute best of the best. And even if I wanted to take on debt, for example, which I don't, we have no debt. But, um, like I called JP Morgan one day. I was like, hey, so if I wanted to just, instead of spending five hundred thousand dollars to do X today, like what's a, what's a small business loan look like? And they were like, who are your backers? I'm like, me. You have all my bank accounts. You see everything and they're like, hmm, well, yeah, without, without evaluation, without backers, you could only do X and Y. I'm like, but.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  I don't get it. So we've had interest, we've had investor interest since the day I launched in 2020 from PE and VC and family office. I think because housing is recession resistant. When the market's up, people are trading. When the market's down, people are trading. Right. And I think real estate doesn't go away. I think it just becomes more empowered and cleaner. And all the other things we've talked about. And I just continued to take meetings as we got them. And I met Jeff Berman at Camber Creek a while ago, actually on a reference call, like he was calling me about a system that we used. And I was like, yeah, the system's fine. He's like, what are you doing? I was like, I'm changing the world, man. And he was like, oh, really? And then we talked.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  And he's, so I'll give you a secret. He and our co-investor, I guess the other biggest check was Left Lane Capital. So Harley Miller and those guys have Left Lane. Yeah, you would. And they, they're in the show. So season two, I've never seen this in a reality show. Season two is real estate.

• 46:07Molly O'Shea?

  We have VCs in a reality TV show?

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it follows, it follows the raise.

• 46:12Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 46:13Speaker 00

  It follows the raise. And I thought Netflix was gonna cut it. I thought they were gonna cut it because it's like, it's not flipping tables and throwing drinks in each other's faces.

• 46:22Molly O'Shea?

  This is amazing.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  But the show is such an entrepreneurial roller coaster at a deal show with all the sexy glitz and glam that you'd want. But it follows like Jeff Berman and Harley Miller in the show. And it's, it's intense. It is intense. And they beat me up on price and like, what am I gonna do? And it's, I don't want to give too much away. But yeah, there's, there are VCs and there's a VC seed raise that happens like live on camera in season two.

• 46:50Molly O'Shea?

  We need to make VC mainstream.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  I don't know if you do, actually. But they're, they're there.

• 46:57Molly O'Shea?

  We already hit a bubble thanks to Tiger Global. I'll call them out. I know they're back in market. So maybe we'll come on the pod. But you know, we love VC. VC loves everybody.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  I love VCs. They buy the greatest houses and they sell the greatest houses. I'm all for it.

• 47:15Molly O'Shea?

  They do. I go to a lot of events at different, and they are so competitive.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  They are very competitive.

• 47:21Molly O'Shea?

  So everyone wants a better house.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Well, I'm aware. I'm, I'm fully aware.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Sorcery is proudly sponsored by Carta. Carta is transforming the private marketplace, connecting founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by more than 65,000 companies in over 160 countries, Carta's platform of software and services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. Carta's fund administration platform supports over 9,000 funds and SPVs, representing nearly $185 billion in assets under management, with tools designed to enhance the strategic impact of fund CFOs. For more information, visit carta.com/sorcery. That's C-A-R-T-A dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y.

• 48:13Molly O'Shea?

  You do venture as well. What's the secret there?

• 48:17Speaker 00

  We will probably, there's a lot of things that we're going to be rolling out in 2026. One of them is most likely a venture arm. We, I've toyed around with it now. Like, we have, we are super profitable. So like, one of my issues every year is

• 48:32Molly O'Shea?

  What to do with all the money?

• 48:33Speaker 00

  What to do with reinvesting profits? There's only so many locations I can open up in a day. Like, there's only so many engineers I want to hire to build. Like, I, I really like the fact that our, our people are really, really efficient. And when you raise money, what do you really, unless you have hard costs, like, I'm raising this money to go build factories, or build chips, or whatever. Typically, you're raising money to do one of two things. One is the people to do the stuff. So you're paying people, maybe some office space, et cetera. The other is distribution for the thing. So people to do the thing, and then distribution for the thing. I, my thing that I'm building, I don't want to say replaces people, but makes the current people so efficient they don't need more people. So I'm not really using dollars for people,

• 49:18Speaker 00

  and my distribution is bulletproof. Like, it's just massive for us and for our product and what we do. And so we've played around with a few things, like I was mentioning before, Realty Capital, which is real estate adjacent, but it's payday loans for real estate agents, right? Around the country. It also does tax services, advisory, all the other stuff, healthcare and all that. You know, and but then I also like Blank Street Coffee. And so and I like update energy because they split the caffeine molecule and they have paraxanthine and you don't have a crash from it. And like, why doesn't other people do this? And like, well, it's too expensive to do. It's just easier to get people caffeine. I'm like, well, interesting. So like, we have that. We have Major League Pickleball. We have a

• 50:04Speaker 00

  lot of other things. There's a new vitamin company that's that it just started shipping last week called Per Day, P E R D A E. Nilu is the the founder and super fun. And so but then I find ways to interact with our world. So whether I put products on Netflix, or we put them across our socials and spike sales that way, or, you know, we have our annual conferences where we have thousands of salespeople show up and everyone gets per day in a bag.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  So it works.

• 50:31Molly O'Shea?

  Ryan, how do you do all this?

• 50:34Speaker 00

  Danny here, who's been on his phone the whole time, he's basically just running everything in the background.

• 50:39Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 50:39Speaker 00

  No, absolutely not.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  I've I have a good team. I know what I'm good at. I know what I'm bad at. Like, I'm a great leader. I'm a terrible manager. So why try to manage? Why try to fit a square peg in a circular hole? Like, I I brand, I expand, and I sell. I do those three things all day, every day. Mission, vision, purpose. Everything else is done by other people. And they either do it in a way that I like, or they don't get to do it anymore.

• 51:08Molly O'Shea?

  Ooh.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Right? Like, I don't know. I don't. Life is short. Everyone I I make sure to, everyone I hire is an entrepreneur, meaning that they have an idea for how to do their role and they could do it as their own business.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  But they'd rather do it with me or with us. And I give them that platform. So like Sell It, for example.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Bonnie Sue Lovelace runs Sell It. She is so insanely amazing. She could build her own ed tech platform on her own. But we have the platform, we have the distribution, and we have 40,000 users. So why not just do it with us? Right? Makes a lot of sense. Our Director of Ops, Renee Fitzgerald, she could go and open any business nationally, scale it, put all the Xs and all the Os in the right spots, and do it by herself. But she can do it with us because we have the market, we have the demand. And I think it's really, really important to hire people that you're not just a little bit scared of, but that are real intrapreneurs. It's like my absolute best advice. And then follow those four Ps that I gave you a purpose, people, product.

• 52:18Molly O'Shea?

  I'm going to ask an additional question for this.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 52:21Molly O'Shea?

  So we're very proudly sponsored by Brex and they're all about performance.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 52:28Molly O'Shea?

  Sean Walsh from Built.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:30Molly O'Shea?

  He said that you schedule your day very particularly and you have a specific eating window. Can you walk us through your day?

• 52:39Speaker 00

  Okay, I don't know why you have to attack me right now. This has been such a nice podcast. I

• 52:46Speaker 00

  I'm emotionally unavailable. Oh, wait, what was your question?

• 52:51Speaker 00

  I am, uh, uh, listen, I am super scheduled Monday through Friday. Maybe one day I'll get to be in a world where I have white space on my calendar and I can just float through the office. I don't, I just like, I just know how to operate the way I operate and so I don't change it. So I have a thousand minutes every single day to be productive. So I have a thousand minute rule. I wrote about that in book two, and then Harvard Business School did a review on it. So, which I thought they were going to write about content or media or tech or AI. And they were like, no, this thousand minute rule is so weird. We're going to have you come and teach a class and we're going to write. And it's in like the Harvard Business Review Book. It's so crazy. But I have a thousand minute rule. I eat six hours a day.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  And my feeding window, why he brings that up, depends on the day. Today it is 12:45 to 6:15. Tomorrow, we'll see how the day goes. But it's when I can metabolize, this is so weird. I don't know, I mean, this is such a weird conversation. It's when I can metabolize the fastest. And I think as you get older and you're 26, how old are you?

• 53:57Molly O'Shea?

  21.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  You're 21?

• 53:59Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  However old you are, you'll see as you get older, your body just moves a little bit slower and it's one of the ways that I can naturally sort of, you know, hack energy. And then I schedule things on the 15 minute mark. So this is like, this is five blocks for me. Cause I had to get here 15 minutes before. Yeah, I don't talk about that much because then people think I'm weird.

• 54:21Molly O'Shea?

  No, I don't think that's weird. Like I talk, the tech community loves this stuff. They want to hear about your biohacking rituals and how much you enter in fast and when you see the sun during the day. That's what they want to hear.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  No, I see the sun.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  I do have a picture in the sun. Yeah. And it's got a sad face on it.

• 54:42Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, do you want to talk about it?

• 54:44Speaker 00

  Nope, not on this podcast. That's a different podcast.

• 54:48Molly O'Shea?

  Okay. All right. So I have a couple of quick questions as we wrap up.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 54:53Molly O'Shea?

  What happened to the $250 million listing that's pinned on your YouTube account?

• 54:59Speaker 00

  It's still there for 195. So you should sell it.

• 55:04Molly O'Shea?

  I'll sell it.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's a deal now.

• 55:07Molly O'Shea?

  You guys want it?

• 55:08Speaker 00

  It's a deal.

• 55:08Molly O'Shea?

  You can have it.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  No, you can have it. What do you mean? Just make an offer. Come to me. It's still there. It's great. We've had three offers on it. All of them get turned down. Those properties are, are, you know, they're trophies and you don't auction them like art, right? So the right purchaser is there. And if they align with where the seller believes the value is, then a deal gets done.

• 55:32Molly O'Shea?

  Are there too many supersized? I can't even say it. Super skyscrapers? What do we call them?

• 55:38Speaker 00

  Super tall skyscrapers. Are there too many?

• 55:40Molly O'Shea?

  Super tall skyscrapers.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  There's less than 20 on planet earth. So if that's too many, I don't know. I know New York is a city built on bedrock. So you can build them. New York is the most environmentally conscious city that exists because we box ourselves like sardine cans and we buy into the air. You know where it's not? San Francisco, Los Angeles, all of Texas. Because they say, why go up in the air? I just want your land. And so I value my self-worth by how much space I can take up. In New York, like I said, we didn't even create space for trash.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  We put it on our front doorstep. Literally, it's on the sidewalk on the front door that we walk over to try to get to work. And we are just fine with it. So New York, in terms of total greenhouse gas emissions, is the most efficient and like LED certified city there is. And I think will remain that way. Like, it is a tiny, tiny, tiny little island that we stick 11 million people into at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday. Nowhere else does that. There's other cities that have millions of people, but no, they need to spread out, take up room. Have you ever been in bed with someone that likes to spread out? And you're like, dude, give me the blanket back. It's uncomfortable and it's annoying and they're selfish.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  New York City for the win.

• 57:13Molly O'Shea?

  Do you think there should be speed limits on super tall skyscrapers?

• 57:19Speaker 00

  In the elevators?

• 57:20Molly O'Shea?

  The elevators.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  There are speed limits. You can only, like, no elevator is getting to terminal velocity.

• 57:26Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know. Every time I go in those, I want to throw up. Like, they're very fast.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  I think, I think that's, I think that's a you problem. I think speed in elevators has everything to do with what you call the stack effect. Like, if you could get into an elevator and be at the 100th floor in 10 seconds and not experience any shake or physical discomfort, you'd do it. Like, the same thing with the Concorde airplane. Like, I would love to go to London in two hours. Not only is it unaffordable to do that, it is physically uncomfortable compared to the laps of luxury we do on first class, right? Where you get to spread out and put your legs down. People would rather take six hours instead of doing two hours because they don't want to be cramped. Same thing for an elevator. The stack effect in a...

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Super tall skyscraper is a tube within a tube. So you have this glass tube that sits on bedrock. And inside you have these other glass tubes where this physical thing is shoving air up and then shoving air down. And if you've ever tried to like shove air, right? It can get stuck and you have a vacuum effect. But you call it the stack effect because you have different air temperatures. So like in the winter, right? Where it's really cold outside, you have cold air attacking. Now this hot tube that is a thousand feet of glass and concrete full of hot air because everyone's got the heat on. And then you go in the elevator bank and it's not freezing cold like outside. But it's also not hot like you have in your apartment because you're cold.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  So now you have this Luke cold air being pushed by this fucking bullet. That's being attacked by the cold air from the outside and then it shakes. So at what speed can you hit non-shake? That is the fastest an elevator is willing to go to where you don't experience discomfort. And in some of them, you have brakes. So you go to one world trade, you get off at like, I think 66 and then you switch to another elevator. Because the stack effect would just be too physically uncomfortable.

• 59:25Molly O'Shea?

  Holy crap. I did not know you were an astrophysicist.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  I'm, that's it. That's not the right engineering science for that one. It's a, it's a, it's an engineering thing, right? It's mechanical engineering and plumbing. So it's MEP. So it's just, just engineering.

• 59:38Molly O'Shea?

  Okay. I, I interview a lot of SpaceX alums and it seems like a SpaceX problem.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  Does it?

• 59:44Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  Blue Origin just asked me to come to space the other day. They DM'd.

• 59:48Molly O'Shea?

  Would you do it?

• 59:49Speaker 00

  No, how much was it?

• 59:50Molly O'Shea?

  Just a little million.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  That's what they wrote back.

• 59:53Molly O'Shea?

  That's it? That's like, nothing, right?

• 59:55Speaker 00

  I sold, I sold a house to a guy that went to outer space and he paid for himself to go there. He really enjoyed it, but I think, I don't know, my key man insurance might, I don't know if space is on there.

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have to see.

• 1:00:10Molly O'Shea?

  Okay. Lastly, what's your favorite building in New York City?

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  My favorite building?

• 1:00:13Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  Chrysler Building.

• 1:00:14Molly O'Shea?

  Why?

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Because it'll never be recreated. It is a work of art. It is an art deco statue, right? Created by artists like back in the art deco period where you had architects like Shrev, Lamb and Harmon who were doing buildings to impress people instead of just filling space. You know, today it's how can I go glass to glass and fill as many desk space as possible? Or how can I create something that is, you know, beautiful? The Chrysler Building is is a fantastically gorgeous building and no developer or builder in their right mind would ever, ever, ever redo it because it wouldn't make any sense to that. You wouldn't be able to afford it.

• 1:00:59Molly O'Shea?

  Well, now I need to ask, what are your opinions on the new JP Morgan building?

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  I'm obsessed.

• 1:01:03Molly O'Shea?

  You're obsessed?

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I because I think it brings great A office or class A office into a new world.

• 1:01:10Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  They have nine private restaurants for their own employees. You never have to leave. Want to work from home? Great. Your home is here now. Like, it is just insane. You can fit up to 10,000 people in there during the day. Like, it is wild. It also, like, I love when they did that building, especially like Mary Ann Lake, right, who was CFO and has basically run that entire business under Jamie Dimon, and she is a beast. You should talk to her, too. Like, or she just said, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna tear down the block, and we're just gonna build a new one right on top of it. And Foster and Partners and everybody, it's like, it's so cool. I think now you're gonna have a class A office race. So now Ken Griffin, Vornado.

• 1:01:55Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  Right? And those guys are gonna do Park, and I think it's 51st, they're just gonna tear down all those buildings on 51st and just build a brand new tower to compete with the likes of the new JP Morgan Tower. I think what it does, though, is it makes it really, really hard to be class B or class C office, which are all gonna turn residential, for me.

• 1:02:16Molly O'Shea?

  Good.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  Yay. Exactly.

• 1:02:19Molly O'Shea?

  Well, Ryan, it was a pleasure to have you on and thank you so much to Nicole Wishoff for the introduction.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  Thanks, Nicole.

• 1:02:25Molly O'Shea?

  Shout out to Nicole. Thank you, Ryan.

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:02:29Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.