ADSN

This week on the ADSN Rundown, Daniel Druger and James Borow examine how artificial intelligence is moving from software into hardware, commerce and public infrastructure. They break down Meta’s Apple-like hardware moment, Google and SpaceX testing TPUs in orbit, and the future of advertising when agents shop on a consumer’s behalf. They also explore X’s phone-number strategy, Amazon’s new Ads Agent and why James believes the next operating-system war will be Meta and Muse against Grok, Tesla and Starlink. Daniel and James also cover McDonald’s billion-dollar media ambitions, DoorDash’s surprising enterprise adoption of CLI and MCP ordering, major personnel moves at Instinct and Astro Digital, and the launch of America.gov as an AI front door to the federal government. They close by making the case for bringing fun and wonder back to technology, then examine how Ken Griffin’s $2 billion higher-education investment became a major win for Miami and a painful loss for Chicago. Thank you to our sponsors: AdQuick – Making OOH advertising as easy to plan, buy, and measure as digital. adquick.com Thrad.ai — Building the advertising infrastructure for AI. thrad.ai beehiiv — The all-in-one platform for newsletters, websites, and every tool you need to grow and earn. beehiiv.com The Farm — Fraction commercial legal with an in-house approach to outside counsel. thefarmllp.com STAY CONNECTED James on Twitter & LinkedIn – /jamesborow Daniel on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok – /danieldruger Subscribe & leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on Spotify & Apple Podcasts.

Rob Leathern, CEO and founder of Infohawk and the creator of the Facebook Ad Library, joins Daniel and James to break down the rapidly escalating world of AI-powered scams and online fraud. Rob explains how scammers are now vibe-coding their own analytics dashboards, producing 60-minute deepfake celebrity endorsement videos, and scraping public data to send hyper-targeted phishing messages. He shares why online fraud, estimated at nearly half a trillion dollars annually, is almost certainly underreported, and why the pullback in trust and safety teams at major platforms has made the problem worse. Rob walks through how Infohawk is using AI to fight back, why protection needs to come from both the client side (on-device models) and the server side (B2B tools), and why the internet is going to fundamentally change around verification and identity in the next two to three years. The conversation also covers the regulatory landscape, including proposed US scam liability legislation modeled after UK and Australian frameworks, why platforms need to open up ad transparency without giving bad actors an oracle, and Rob's argument that education and red teaming should come before any vendor purchase for companies worried about social engineering attacks. Daniel and James note that Rob is one of the few people who has worked on these problems from inside both Facebook and Google and is now building the tools to solve them from the outside. Thank you to our sponsors: AdQuick – Making OOH advertising as easy to plan, buy, and measure as digital. adquick.com Thrad.ai — Building the advertising infrastructure for AI. thrad.ai beehiiv — The all-in-one platform for newsletters, websites, and every tool you need to grow and earn. beehiiv.com The Farm — Fraction commercial legal with an in-house approach to outside counsel. thefarmllp.com STAY CONNECTED James on Twitter & LinkedIn – /jamesborow Daniel on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok – /danieldruger Subscribe & leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on Spotify & Apple Podcasts.

This week on the ADSN Rundown, Daniel Druger and James Borow unpack Meta’s decision to open Muse to developers and why connectors from Shopify, Stripe, Expedia, Instacart and others could turn it into a new consumer platform. They explore a potential open-web coalition between Meta, Shopify and Stripe, debate whether Meta will eventually acquire Shopify, and explain why the combination of social distribution, commerce data and advertising could reshape how people discover and buy products. Daniel and James also cover Alex Heath’s move into investing, Peter Sellis’s 90-minute product masterclass, Ramp’s Broadway musical, the widening US-China divide around AI and robotics, and the $42 million Horowitz and Andreessen Academy. They close with tech trades at Pinterest and Crexi, Toby Lütke’s approach to high-stakes decisions, and Nikita Bier’s argument that probabilistic AI products will favor builders who are not constrained by decades of deterministic software thinking. Thank you to our sponsors: AdQuick – Making OOH advertising as easy to plan, buy, and measure as digital. adquick.com Thrad.ai — Building the advertising infrastructure for AI. thrad.ai beehiiv — The all-in-one platform for newsletters, websites, and every tool you need to grow and earn. beehiiv.com The Farm — Fraction commercial legal with an in-house approach to outside counsel. thefarmllp.com STAY CONNECTED James on Twitter & LinkedIn – /jamesborow Daniel on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok – /danieldruger Subscribe & leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on Spotify & Apple Podcasts.

Jason Levin, founder and CEO of Meme Lord, joins Daniel and James to break down how he turned internet humor into a legitimate B2B SaaS business. Jason explains his concept of "humor arbitrage," the idea that the boringer your company, the more you stand to gain from being funny, and how that thesis has landed Meme Lord enterprise clients with ACVs of $60-80K across HR, legal, and tech. He walks through how the company helps brands launch secondary accounts to take creative risk off their main channels, why his contracts explicitly ban NSFW and political content (think Seinfeld, not shock value), and how niche virality crushes mass virality every time. Jason also gets candid about feeling like he's "cheating on marketing" with vibe coding, why he thinks the world is only going to get stupider (and why that's bullish for his business), and his journey from wanting YouTube fame to being happiest in a CRM and a notebook. Thank you to our sponsors: AdQuick – Making OOH advertising as easy to plan, buy, and measure as digital. adquick.com Thrad.ai — Building the advertising infrastructure for AI. thrad.ai beehiiv — The all-in-one platform for newsletters, websites, and every tool you need to grow and earn. beehiiv.com The Farm — Fraction commercial legal with an in-house approach to outside counsel. thefarmllp.com STAY CONNECTED James on Twitter & LinkedIn – /jamesborow Daniel on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok – /danieldruger Subscribe & leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on Spotify & Apple Podcasts.

"Everything AI related that has ever been innovated on has been through the lens of something completely digital. The challenge for the physical AI world is how do you actually experience things in real life." In this episode, Daniel and James sit down with Zach Greenberger, CEO of Nexar and former chief business officer at Lyft, to dig into the real-world data layer that's accelerating autonomous vehicles and physical AI. Nexar has built a network of 450,000 connected dashcam vehicles that cross every street in Manhattan four times a day, log 310 million miles per month, and have captured 75 million accidents over the past decade. Two months of Nexar's driving data exceeds what every autonomous vehicle company combined has ever driven — and Zach argues this edge case data is exactly what AV companies need now that simulation alone has reached its limit. The conversation goes beyond cars. Nexar recently launched a collision prediction model called BADASS (Beyond ADAS) that works on drones, planes, tanks, delivery robots, and industrial equipment, proving that automotive data is an incredible proxy for understanding real-world physics. Zach breaks down the difference between real-world and real-time data, why the smart city pitch is finally achievable without massive infrastructure investment, and how Nexar's recent merger with Nauto gives them 98% US coverage. He also draws a careful line on data privacy, explaining why consumer-chosen dashcams create a fundamentally different trust model than stationary surveillance cameras, and predicts delivery robots, autonomous security guards, and commercial drones will proliferate within 12 to 24 months. Thank you to our sponsors: AdQuick – Making OOH advertising as easy to plan, buy, and measure as digital. adquick.com Thrad.ai — Building the advertising infrastructure for AI. thrad.ai beehiiv — The all-in-one platform for newsletters, websites, and every tool you need to grow and earn. beehiiv.com The Farm — Fraction commercial legal with an in-house approach to outside counsel. thefarmllp.com STAY CONNECTED James on Twitter & LinkedIn – /jamesborow Daniel on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok – /danieldruger Subscribe & leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on Spotify & Apple Podcasts.