Transcript for Trapital Podcast episode with Zack O’Malley Greenburg and Dan Runcie

This is a transcript for the Trapital podcast episode with Dan Runcie and Forbes’ Zack O’Malley Greenburg.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg on the Forbes Hip-Hop Cash List, the Controversy it Causes, and What it Took to Declare that Jay Z is a Billionaire

Dan Runcie 0:07
Hello, and welcome to the Trapital podcast. I’m your host, Dan Runcie. Today’s guest is Zack O’Malley Greenburg, who is the senior editor of media and entertainment at Forbes magazine. He’s the person that puts the annual hip hop cash kings list together, which has been a source of content for several Trapital articles. And he’s also written several books about hip hop artists like KZ. Diddy, Dr. Dre. And with that, I’d love to welcome Zach to the podcast. Welcome!

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 0:38
Thanks so much for having me on.

Dan Runcie 0:40
Now that the cash kings list is out, do you feel a little bit of relief now that it finally hit the streets?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 0:45
Yeah, it’s nice when it goes from living in in an Excel sheet or Google Doc into into the actual world. So it’s, it’s good to see that the numbers out there, living and getting commented on and got controversy and all the other good things.

Dan Runcie 1:04
So let’s talk a little bit about that controversy. I’m sure you saw that both Cardi B and Meek Mill tweeted that the Forbes numbers are off, they don’t know where they’re getting their numbers from? When you see artists question the results, how do you feel?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 1:20
I feel great, because it means that it’s relevant. And what we do here at Forbes is relevant. And, you know, that’s kind of in our DNA all the way back to, you know, the beginning of the Forbes 400 List of the wealthiest Americans, which people have been lobbying to get onto and off of for decades, you know, and over the years, various Forbes lists, you know, everybody from Donald Trump to Prince all Walid have been saying that their numbers should be higher. So, you know, meek and cardi are in athletic company, you know, in that front, and not just not just hip hop, certainly, when it comes to measuring net worth, or this case earnings in hip hop. You know, definitely there have been artists in the, in the past who have said that their numbers should be higher. And, you know, such as the way of things but, you know, I think a lot of times, there are a couple things that come into play. Speaking generally, one, you know, everybody, pretty much everybody I should say, wants to project an image of success. And the higher you are the list, and the higher your number is, you know, the more success you project and success breeds success. So, if you’re perceived to be making a lot of money, you’re going to get more money in that next endorsement deal or for your next advance or what have you. The other thing that a lot of people kind of gloss over even though it’s, you know, in the fourth or fifth paragraph, always the story is our scoring period. So it takes a long time to put all this together. As a result, you know, we don’t have sort of like, up to the second 12 months trailing earnings are scoring period is us June to June.

And I think particularly Cardi B, you know, her star has been rising over the years, and especially, you know, let’s say the last year to this summer, she had a bunch of shows where her feet had gone up significantly. But, you know, a lot of those shows didn’t end up in that June, June scoring creates, so they’ll there, they will be reflected in next year’s rankings. So, you know, it’s a combination of, you know, really like a technicality on that one. And also, you know, everybody wants to be be the best. And you know, there’s only one number one. So I think that’s, that’s what I would attribute the controversy to,

Dan Runcie 4:00
Do you ever have issues with fact checking certain things. For instance, I’m sure you saw Cardi B’s Instagram post a couple months ago, where she shared all of her bookings from her recent festivals. While the numbers make sense, and they line up, it’s still self reported data. And Forbes is definitely has challenges whether it’s with Donald Trump and others on the validity and truth of that. So what’s the process like to verify something like that?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 4:29
Yeah. So you know, basically, the, the methodology that we put into this is, is not dissimilar from what we put into any other well, so earnings list. And so, you know, it involves the mix, right? We look at, you know, private databases, like Pollstar, we work with companies like Nielsen, to track respectively, money coming in from concerts and money coming in from record sales and streaming. And then we also have look at, you know, the individual deals that might be done in terms of endorsement, outside business deals, and that’s where the shoe leather reporting comes in. And, you know, that’s the making calls and using, you know, using that Rolodex, and, you know, even if it’s not necessarily finding, you know, the number from the person who did the deal, it’s finding out from, you know, somebody in the industry, who, you know, who knows what deals like that are going for, right? Because, like you say, self reporting is, is kind of a complicated scenario. I mean, Donald Trump self reports, a lot of numbers that are, you gotta similarly, you have to run it by other experts in the field, which, you know, you think about it, you know, you know, a lot of these names on the list. And there’s, there’s 20 names, and the top earners in hip hop, you know, you just see a number, and, you know, it takes, it takes, it takes you one or two seconds to type that name, number, but, you know, it could take one or two weeks, to, to make that number. And, and I think a lot of people, you know, lose that side of that, because it doesn’t always show up, you know, the story. So, somebody further down the list, you know, you might wonder, Well, you know, we believe, like $18 million, and, you know, there’s not much explanation of it, but no, like, a lot of time and work went into finding that number and consulting various databases and talking to managers and agents, employees, and so forth. And, you know, to get to get each of those. So, in the case of cardi, and in the self reporting, and those numbers, I mean, those look pretty reasonable, but you know, don’t forget, we don’t count gross ticket sales, we don’t count, you know, total guarantee for concerts, we count what we believe the artist to be taking home. So, you know, the the fee that you get, as a, as a performer, you know, or the growth that you get in terms of ticket sales, whichever way you look at it, there’s still a lot of expenses to be taken out of that terms of travel, um, in terms of, you know, your crew, and so forth, lodging the whole deal. And, you know, that that can eat difficulty into those numbers. And that’s before even taking out for taxes, he just managed more days, we don’t take out for that last part. But But we do take out for expenses that are included on the road projected, so, you know, could make some of the numbers look a little smaller, then, you know, the numbers that are being posted, like you saw Cardi.

Dan Runcie 7:47
In many ways, the methodology favors those artists with high revenue businesses, even though those businesses may be high cost as well doesn’t necessarily reward profit as much as it should revenue. So with that, it will lean towards those artists that have more money and choose to do big deals, as opposed to those that may be trying to run a more profitable operation.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 8:12
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, like, with anything, you gotta, you gotta take it situation by situation, then, but, you know, specifically regarding touring, if you you know, or an act, and this pertains more to, like, you know, a full on, pop back, but if you’re going out, and you have a few dozen trucks full of equipment, and you have, you know, backup dancers and, you know, all the shenanigans in us to house and feed in and move those, all those people and assets around, it’s going to eat into your into you take home, but if you’re somebody who’s just kind of getting on the plane and popping up at festivals, and you know, you have like a pretty sparse production setup, you know, it’s not going to eat into your, into your data quite as much. But it’s also, you know, you’re not going to walk home with that number that, that you, you know, that you see sort of the numbers that cardi was posting,

Dan Runcie 8:58
Right, and it speaks to something that she said herself, and that same Instagram post, she’s earning a higher revenue it at these festivals, and it’s much lower cost as well. But she still does want to go on tour, even though the production and all that’s expensive, when she does it, she wants to be able to negotiate and get the favorable terms so that she can earn that revenue to justify the cost.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 9:34
Totally, you know, and, yeah, I mean, you know, I think that the digital business is pretty remarkable, because you can go out and, you know, somebody like Cardi could come in, and you know, I mean, probably like, like, guarantees a little over a million dollars. Now, you know, but that’s ramped up drastically, you know, over the past year, it’s kind of moving target. And, you know, but there are only so many festivals, right. And that’s kind of the thing with it, when you look at the most successful tours of all time, if you look at something like you know, YouTube, when they did their 360 stadium tour, the expenses on that were were, you know, enormous, but they were selling out stadiums, and they had, you know, they were playing every Stadium in the round, so you didn’t have to worry about, you know, blocking off, like, the back 10,000 seats by the end zone, and they had this crazy spaceship like structure in the middle of the field that, you know, enabled them to open up the entire stadium, and they had three of these different, you know, spaceship like structures, stages, that would go around. So they would be playing, you know, let’s say they were playing a show in New York, they would be packing up, you know, the crazy spaceship looking stage that was in Philadelphia, and then they would be setting it up in Boston, then, you know, another one, to be ready, when when they went on there for the next day. So, you know, you have to think about it. And these are all the kinds of things that we look at, look at when we’re trying to figure out, you know, how much just how much should we really be crediting somebody with? Maybe their expenses are high. But you know, you know, maybe they’re also, you know, surprisingly efficient with the way they move things around. And, you know, if you have, if you have a finely oiled machine like that, you know, you can make a lot of money even when you’re high.

Dan Runcie 11:34
Right, it definitely comes down to an efficiency calculation, how well can you optimize and turn around the process? Question for you about this year’s Cash Kings List, though, what surprised you most about the results? Of course, you have your methodology, but as the results came through, did anything stick out the year like, Wow, I didn’t expect to see this person there.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 11:56
Um, I think the most surprising one is, know, maybe also the most obvious one, but I still can’t get over the fact that Kanye made $150 billion over the past year. I know. And, you know, in the process of discovering it, yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s what led us to put him on the cover, you know, the last August issue of the magazine, you know, talking about the easy business. So, you know, again, it’s, it’s something that was doing well, but but really just, you know, leapt into uncharted territory, you know, to the extent where it’s not doing quite, you know, Jordan numbers, but you know, to be even closing in on half of that is remarkable given, you know, Jordan has been around, you know, Air Jordans students in 1985. And, and, and easy’s is really easy. Sure, Yeezy has been around for a long, long time, you know, whatever, about a decade, but in its current incarnation, you know, the, Yeezy that is really taking off, you know, has really only been around for, for much longer than that, and to see what what has been accomplished in such a short period of time, relatively speaking. It’s just, it’s pretty unbelievable.

Dan Runcie 13:15
Yeah, his was pretty impressive. It was definitely the one that I got the most questions about people hitting me up, like, does it really make $150 [million] this past year? Is he really ahead of Jay Z and Drake? And, yeah, I mean, I referenced the posts that you had the profile that you had done a couple months ago on him, and it came down to a percentage of his royalties from Yeezy.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 13:38
This was a conservative number. I mean, you know, he would, he would, and his camp would probably argue, I mean, they would argue that, you know, the numbers should be even higher. But, you know, as always, we kind of go with the, you know, we try to we’d rather be a little conservative than, like, a little bit overly aggressive with the numbers. And so, you know, we kind of go with what we can, what we can verify, and a lot of times, you know, the stuff we can verify is the stuff that is not just self reported, right, it’s stuff that other people have more of a sense of, and, but, you know, the, the, the soft reported numbers are actually the newest numbers and a little harder to, to verify. But, you know, we feel pretty good about that number. And it’s still, you know, just I mean, to think about the fact that Kanye, and almost twice as much as Jay Z over the past years is pretty mind blowing.

Dan Runcie 14:36
Yeah, there were a few surprises I had. The first one similarly was Kanye, not so much that he was number one, but the gap between him and Jay Z, and then Drake. And it’s also a bit ironic, because all three of those people have had beef with each other at some point in the most recent years. The second surprise was Cardi B and Nicki [Minaj], if you would have asked me who I thought would make more money this past year, I would have said Cardi B hands down. And a lot of it has to do with her festival bag. But also the amount of sideshows the amount of Other appearances and commercials that she’s done. And I know that Nicki, conversely, has canceled a number of her shows in concert. So I was surprised to see her still ahead, even if slightly. And then the third was nice, I do that he had a number of exits from his investments, I thought that that would have been a little bit higher, but without knowing the full details of those, but I also got a kick out of some of them, too. I like that [DJ] Khaled had moved up the list, once he got over his fear of flying, I thought that was timely. And you can obviously see the impact of that with someone like him that’s always on the move.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 15:53
Yeah, I mean, look, you know, RG for peace, and these are the most precise numbers that that are, you know, possible to get, and we’d rather have a well researched summer that that is on the side of being a little conservative, then, you know, just tossing a number out there, you know, based on blindly believing something that somebody claims or says, and, you know, regard to Nikki and Cardi,

I think that’s just, that’s just the way it goes when you have  to take into account a full year of earnings. And, you know, you look at sort of the trajectory of something certainly Cardi has more upward momentum given that, you know, I mean, Nikki just retired, so–

Dan Runcie 16:40
We’ll see how long that last!

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 16:42
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, you know, car, these numbers have been, like, the amount of money that card you can get for a show or an endorsement, or what have you, has been increasing over the course of the entire the period that we’ve been looking at her numbers. So, you know, you know, even in, in the case of the numbers that were counted, you know, if you think about last numbers, last summer’s numbers being counted, you know, the kind of money that she was able to pull in, for a festival or for endorsement was much lower than a year ago. So, you know, that that stuff is kind of baked in and, you know, hard for people to kind of wrap their brains around sometimes. You know, as far as you know, the new roles were using we did the other surprises.

Dan Runcie 17:33
Nas i thought was a little low.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 17:36
Yeah, yeah, Nas, you know, it’s funny, because people see these big numbers attached to the companies that Nas invest in this company sold for a billion dollars, you know, on the internet, people are billionaire.

But, you know, when you really drill down into it, when you think of the amount of money that he’s investing, I actually I’m writing about as, as part of my next book, which deals with how entertainers, from hip hop and beyond, you know, including sports and Hollywood, have you have been investing in startups and, you know, getting these huge returns by investing in companies pre IPO. You know, Nas is one of the characters who I looked at, and really kind of dug into and talk to, you know, a lot of people around him talk about themselves. And, you know, in the beginning, like, a lot of those investments were talking, you know, low low to mid five figures. And then, you know, eventually getting into the six figures, but it takes, you know, I mean, even if you even if you get a 10 x return, right? You know, you’re looking at, you’re looking at maybe if you’re if you’re really lucky, then, you know, talking I mean, depending on how much you putting in, but it means we’re talking about this multimillion dollar return not you know, 10s, or hundreds of millions of dollars.

And a lot of it again, is the timing. You know, a lot of those steaks he still has, they haven’t companies haven’t gone public, or there’s been an exit. And he cashed in last year on a bunch of big exits, including ring, which was a really huge one for him. And there was sort of more that fell into us going through last time, at this time, but it was certainly Lyft until talk, those are things that added a few million views total. And another thing is he didn’t tour as much this year, and I was going to last year, which will tend to increase things. So you know, not as I mean, but one of the great things with NAS is, he hasn’t really asked to, to do very much for me, on these companies is an IPO or, you know, they’ll just keep getting this money.

But you know, I mean, I don’t think he’s somebody who’s totally stopped touring, or stop putting out music. So I think he loves it. I mean, in a way that, you know, I don’t really envision, you know, Dr. Dre continuing on that, that kind of passing, we haven’t heard too much from them, of late. And, you know, I suspect he’ll pop up again, at some point. But you know, he just, I know seems to be, you know, have a have an appetite for being out there a little bit more.

Dan Runcie 20:32
One of the things I do acknowledge about the reporting of this list is how much work goes into creating a very digestible and easy number for people to understand for the media to follow, etc. And I think it’s something that can often be overlooked with this. And I have a personal connection to this, because in a past job, our company put out a report on annual broadband connectivity, each state was ranked one through 50, the people that were closest to broadband connectivity that understand understood all of the nuances, they wanted all the specific details on it, but if we reported that level of specificity, it would never have the legs of a report that is easily digestible. So there’s this balance that these types of reports often needs to have. And I think Forbes is done a good job of that. Because if this list got into some of the details that I’m sure your inbox is filled with, or people often ask me about, it wouldn’t necessarily have the same likes or power that it does.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 21:39
Sure, yeah. And you know, of course, all you see is the number of students use that methodology paragraph, you don’t see the scoring through the, you know, that doesn’t also it into a tweet. So that’s what tends to happen. But, you know, the earnings numbers are a lot of work, the net worth numbers are, are even more work. I mean, I’d say, when we actually surely added Jay Z is a billionaire, earlier this year, I mean, the amount of time that I spent on that, you know, not counting sort of like, my entire career reporting, reading books about him, but, you know, just at the beginning of this year, I spent the better part of three months, you know, nailing that number down, that meant, you know, looking at every single asset and his portfolio talking just redefine different people for each one, you know, from analysts, to lawyers, to handlers, whatever, you know, going back and forth with editors, how do we value this? What does this look like? And, you know, the level of effort that goes into something like that, you know, it’s kind of hard to, to to quantify, we’re like, really Telegraph, and especially when it just goes out, and the headline is, like, oh, Jay Z is a billionaire. All right, well, you know, on to the next thing, but, you know, I did, I didn’t we’ll work on that, that number that I’ve done on on, you know, most of the cover stories that I’ve written, and it was, you know, it was a page or two in the magazine, and, and, you know, and whatever it was 600 words online. So, but that’s, you know, that’s, I think that’s kind of the business of, you know, reporting is quantitative as well as qualitative. And sometimes, you know, they can, they can take just too slow.

Dan Runcie 23:29
Was there a moment in your coverage on Jay Z, that you felt that he had attained that billionaire status, but there wasn’t quite enough concrete information to confidently say that, yes, Jay Z is now a billionaire. I know that in his past songs, he said stuff like, take with the Forbes figure than figure more. But I’m curious. Because you say you take a fairly conservative approach, but was there a moment after a particular deal? Or something that you said? Yes. Okay. Like, I can’t wait, I cross my T’s yet. But if I had to take a guess I would bet that Jay Z is above that.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 24:06
you know, I don’t think, let’s say he was, you know, a billionaire every time you said he was a billionaire, or the or that, that, you know, he was worth double what we said he was every time and he said that, but I do think there was a period of time in his career where he was, you know, more more prone to sort of like puffing things up a little bit. And I think over the past couple of years, he sort of He’s like, I’m, I’m there, I’m getting there, whatever, it doesn’t matter, almost. And, you know, I think you sort of became less fixated on, on numbers, and he knows, you know, sort of legacy that he’s created for himself, regardless of, you know, who calls him a billionaire, or when or why. But, you know, I mean, I,

I became pretty convinced, I would say, like, around the turn of this past year.

And, you know, it was sort of just a matter of, you know, dotting all the i’s, and crossing all the T’s and making all the phone calls and making sure that my editors were comfortable with that number. Because it’s something we really don’t take lightly. And, you know, when somebody falls off of billionaires was, it’s a big deal. So we want to make sure that that, you know, when they’re there, they’re, you know, they’re, they’re really accurately there. And, you know, that that’s certainly something that that we took a lot of time maturity do,

Dan Runcie 25:36
Right? Let’s say that Jay Z’s luck, took a turn for the worst. And he was no longer worth 10 figures, things dropped, and he’s now worth nine figures. Would you all then report on that? And I don’t see that actually happening. But let’s say it did…

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 25:52
No, for sure. Yeah. I mean, every year we refresh these numbers, you know, really, not just every year, but I mean, you know, we have our billion industry that comes out every spring, usually, one of March, April. And then in the fall, we do our Forbes 400 List of the 400 richest people in america. So they used to be that if you were on the Forbes 400, you know, you you were probably worth about at least a billion dollars now, you worth at least you know, one and a half billion dollars. So the people who are on both lists, definitely get edit, you know, get their fortunes updated twice a year, the ones who are only on the billionaires list. Right, read on 1 billion, would probably only get their numbers updated every time the billionaires comes out. But you know, if there’s a big event, like if you know, title went bankrupt, obviously, we’d have to update Jay Z’s network to reflect that to move what a prison for. So, you know, in special cases, we will update those numbers in, you know, in real time, this isn’t huge events happen.

Dan Runcie 27:09
Question for you about the influence of this list. In my experience, as I mentioned earlier, doing similar reporting, one of the underlying goals is to elevate and use this as a benchmark that other states can then want to up their status. Do you feel like the Forbes hip hop list is done the same since it first came out? Do you feel like you’ve seen its influence in hip hop where artists are starting to take more deals or do more business deals because they want to be further up on that list?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 27:45
And you know, going back to 2007 when I launched the first one in, you know, we had the first Forbes hip hop cash, Kings list, top earners, which we’ve now you know, kind of officially designated the more gender neutral. hip hop’s top earners are hypothesize page. Yeah, I think it created this, you know, sort of neutral yardstick for measuring success. And, you know, like, at that time, and, you know, particularly in the US leading up to that, you know, there’s a lot of boasting, or who has more, I have more this or that, but there was no sort of neutral arbiter coming along and saying no, like, actually, you know, we’re taking a really sober analysis of this. And, and, you know, this is what we’ve concluded, you know, I think it it, you know, like, brought a certain. I don’t know, I mean, I like to say that, that nobody had ever covered the hip hop with dignity and regularity in this way. And that most of the mainstream business press were just reading stories like, like, Oh, this rapper made, you know, made $15 million, like that novel. And I think, specifically, you know, yet, like treating it as a novelty. And as a fad. And, you know, as we know, hip hop is is not a fad, it’s been around for almost quarter century, almost half a century rather. And, you know, the idea that it’s a fad is obviously, an incorrect one. But I think that, you know, what we did and came along, and, you know, and kind of dedicated ourselves to doing this annually in regularly, you know, gave us sort of dignified coverage that had not existed before, in the mainstream business press. And I think that, you know, that’s kind of dovetailed with the push in recent years, by artists like Jay Z, by, you know, to come along and say, you know, to use the platform, to spread a message of financial literacy of, you know, of, sort of, like owning one’s own financial destiny on a grander level, and, you know, from Jeezy. You know, all the way up to more recently, somebody like, hustle rest in peace. You know, I think these are, these are messages that, you know, that that have become more common in recent years. And, and, you know, certainly that’s a story that we love to help be able to tell as well

Dan Runcie 30:20
Agree 100%. As someone that started a publication focused on this topic, couldn’t agree more. Last couple questions for you. Do you think that we’ll ever see a list that is solely focused on independent artists or artists that are slightly out of the mainstream, of course, Chance the Rapper is an outlier, but who else could potentially…

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 30:45
One of the things about putting these numbers together both for earnings, and especially for net worth is, the smaller the numbers get, the harder they are to verify? And so, you know, the harder they are to get neutral sources to, to report, so you would have to rely a lot on sort of self reported numbers. And there may not be as much in the way of data from Nielsen and Pollstar and, you know, or even first hand knowledge from sort of like a lot of Industry insiders, who we talked to, we put together these things, so I think it’d be a great list. But it’s also you know, it’s just like super hard to verify. And again, you know, we we would rather not run a list, then running erroneous one.

Dan Runcie 31:38
Makes sense. Alright, last question for you. I think I’ve read in one of your articles that you met Jay Z, after you had written your first book about him. And he told you that he thought that the book was horrible. And I like how you responded to this, because you said, hey, my job’s a journalist. I’m not out here trying to make friends with people I call things it is what it is. And I respect that I think I look at my own work similarly. But let’s say that you had another interaction with him. What do you think you would say to him?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 32:15
I’d say, what did you think about the next book?

The book in question, “Empire State of Mind” was my biography of Jay Z. And, yeah, I bumped into him at the Made in America Music Festival outside of a port-to-potty, actually. And I walked up and introduce myself and, and he sort of like walked off and pretend not to hear me. And then he looked over his shoulder, and he said, That book was horrible. But I and then I immediately ran back to the media tent, and I wrote up the interaction, and they called it Jay Z’s review of the book, I just wrote about him. But I ran the story by a couple of people over the years, including Diddy one time, and and he said, You said, Now he’s just messing with you. He’s like, “Jay Z, he’s a cool cat!” Cool Cat, he said. So the next book I wrote, I wrote a book about Michael Jackson in between. But after that, I wrote a book called “Three Kings” Jay Z, Dr. Dre Diddy and hip hop’s multi billion dollar rise. And, you know, I would say, I wonder what he thought about, about that book, and whether or not he actually thought empire state of mind was horrible. You know, three kings kind of, kind of plants. Jay Z, a little more, like in the context of the rest of hip hop, and along with, you know, his his sort of traditional peers, rivals, Dre and Diddy, and, you know, kind of how the three stories weave together throughout the course of history of hip hop, you know, as it’s kind of becoming this multi billion dollar, mainstream international thing. So I’d be curious to hear is his thoughts on on that one to

Dan Runcie 34:03
Make sense. before we let you go, is there anything else that you would like to plug or let our listeners know about?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 34:12
Yeah, of course, you can always find my stuff at forbes.com. And my next book will be out in March. It’s called a list angels, how a band of actors, artists and athletes hack Silicon Valley. And that’s the one I referenced earlier. And the one that, you know, gets into Nas and also, especially Ashton Kutcher, Shaquille O’Neal, Joe Montana’s, as opposed to all these characters, from different walks of life, and all kinds of different backgrounds who’ve been able to, to kind of cash in on the Silicon Valley boom, by using their celebrity to, to get a foot in the door, you know, to these companies that are changing the face of the American economy. And I think it’s really important, you know, for for people to see examples of guys like Nas, and women like Sophia Bush, and, you know, people who are coming up and don’t look like the traditional Silicon Valley investors, you know, to show what’s possible, and into the open some doors and some other people.

Dan Runcie 35:15
Awesome. Look forward to checking that out, especially the Nas book. I’m definitely interested in that! Zack O’Malley Greenburg. It’s been a pleasure! Thanks for joining.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg 35:25
Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.

Dan Runcie 35:27
If you’ve enjoyed this Trapital podcast, please tell one friend about this podcast. Go ahead and go to trapital.co. Check it out. Stay tuned. I’ll see y’all next week.