Announcer: 0:00

The following programming is sponsored by Marc J Bernstein. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of this station, its management or Beasley Media Group. Entrepreneur, founder, author and financial advisor, Marc Bernstein helps high-performing business owners turn their visions into reality. Through his innovative work and the Forward Focus Forums, Marc connects entrepreneurs to resources that fuel their success. Founders Forum is a radio show and podcast where entrepreneurs share their journeys, revealing the lessons they've learned and the stories behind their success. Join Marc and his guests for a mix of inspiration, valuable insights and a little fun. Now let's dive in.

Marc Bernstein: 0:40

Good morning America. America, how are you? Depends who you ask, I guess, and whatever you're thinking about everything that's going on. But good morning, it's a hot and sunny day. In Philadelphia, it's always sunny and it's almost always hot these days in the summer and we have in our studio Matt I'll introduce Matt formally in a second and, Matt, we always have a topic of the day and I didn't lay it on you in advance, so I'm coming completely out of the woods on this, but we talk a lot about AI and you're in the AI business. Give us your latest outlook on AI and where it is and where it's going.

Matt Wampler: 1:21

Look, I mean, the growth in AI has been exponential over the last couple of years. I think you look at Chat GPT, Perplexity, Claude, all of these different models. They have really grown, but the base technology, those transformer models, that's starting to stagnate. They're not necessarily getting any more powerful. What's happening right now? The real innovation in AI, is that application layer that's sitting on top of these models. It's like we discovered fire, found gasoline. What can we do with it?

Marc Bernstein: 1:58

And I think that's where we're at. I like that, yeah, trying to figure it out, and everyone's scrambling to figure that out, I think in a way right, I think it's a gold rush.

Matt Wampler: 2:05

I mean the sky's the limit.

Marc Bernstein: 2:07

Crazy. So I'm a financial advisor. Invest in AI. Your opinion, yes.

Matt Wampler: 2:14

I think this is one of those transformational technologies, like the internet, that is here to stay.

Marc Bernstein: 2:21

They say it's bigger than the industrial revolution, and it may well be. Yeah, so interesting. So let me introduce Matt. Matt is CEO and co-founder of ClearCOGS and host of the Restaurant AI podcast. We might get into that a little bit.

Marc Bernstein: 2:36

Like and subscribe yeah, like and subscribe Restaurant AI podcast. In fact, look up Restaurant AI and you should see it. Matt is an ex-operator turned tech founder, and we'll talk about him as an operator a little bit. So he spent close to a decade as a Jimmy Johns franchisee which was quite a phenomenon when it came out, jimmy Johns, by the way and he's currently the CEO of ClearCOGS, with a mission to empower restaurants with the information they need to run more smoothly and profitably. Matt, welcome, glad to have you here.

Marc Bernstein: 3:09

It's an honor to be here. It's great, and we started with. As often happens, we started talking quite a while back and we're here today. It's always great to meet people.

Matt Wampler: 3:17

I think this has been a year in the making.

Marc Bernstein: 3:19

I think you're right. It's a year in the making, so this is going to be a really good show. That's what happens, you know it. So, Matt, let's talk about your beginnings, which I believe you were from Illinois originally and then you found yourself in DC. So let's talk about how that happened, and then how Jimmy John's happened, and then how you got to where you are today.

Matt Wampler: 3:40

Yeah, I'm a good old Midwestern boy born in Southern Illinois. Yeah, the long and short of it was this I went out and did investment banking as an internship and sat in a cubicle and crunched numbers and realized that's not for me. I'm ADD, dyslexic, I like doing things, and so Champaign, illinois, where I was born, is the headquarters of Jimmy John's. It's kind of it was kind of like religion in the town, you know, everybody was somehow associated with Jimmy John's or tied to it, and so it kind of got the way, champaign is food related town name even in your blood and a good, a good food in a good way it's a very good food, yeah.

Matt Wampler: 4:20

But yeah, no, I mean. So I found this opportunity where some guy had run his Jimmy John's franchise into the ground and basically needed to get out of the personal guarantees and none of the franchisees who are far smarter than I was would buy the thing. Should have been a red flag. I saw it as this opportunity, like, hey, I think I could go own a business, like let me go roll the dice. And you know, just like, have you ever seen the Bear, the FX?

Marc Bernstein: 4:46

show. I started watching it. It's on my list. I got to finish that. I love the concept.

Matt Wampler: 4:51

So I started watching it three times, literally. I turned it off the first two times. Finally, the third time I got through it because it was like PTSD, like that was except I wasn't the Michelin star trained chef, I was the semi-delinquent college student, right, right, but like you know Making hoagies.

Matt Wampler: 5:09

We don't call them hoagies. I mean, I walked into this place and literally it's the middle of summer in DC. The air condition's out Like the moment you walk in. All you smell is the grease trap because they haven't cleaned it for forever. Like the cold tables were overheating so they had ice buckets on top of the compressors to keep the equipment from failing. You bought an existing gym job.

Matt Wampler: 5:24

Yeah, it's a total turnaround, just like the bear, and you quickly find yourself in a situation where you don't have any choice. You've got to make this work or you're going bankrupt. So you find a way to make it work, which was how, how, did you do that.

Matt Wampler: 5:38

You know what they always say in the restaurant industry you can work harder, you can work smarter. When you're in your early 20s, all you know is work harder. You only know work harder. So I ended up working 120 hours a week and sleeping on the back of the store floor between shifts. I mean, I look back on it.

Marc Bernstein: 5:55

We were married at this point too right.

Matt Wampler: 5:58

So it's kind of crazy my wife and I literally got married 18 months after meeting and it was in college, so we'd lived together for like three months and I proposed and yeah, the rest is history, it worked out, it worked out and still married. Today I have two wonderful children.

Marc Bernstein: 6:17

Wonderful. That's unusual. You hear that when people rush into it like that. But you knew, or you knew something you know. I think a lot of it is your mentality when people rush into it like that.

Matt Wampler: 6:24

But you knew, or you knew something. You know, I think a lot of it is your mentality. You know we weren't dating for fun. You know I'm literally sleeping in the back of the store floor. It's utter chaos.

Marc Bernstein: 6:36

Pretty serious guy at this point yeah.

Matt Wampler: 6:37

Yeah, you know it's like, hey, if we're going to have this relationship, it's not because we like going on dates on Friday nights.

Announcer: 6:49

We're investing in each other.

Matt Wampler: 6:50

Yeah, and you know so she was all in, I think. So I got her to say yes, I'd love to hear her answer on that. But yes, she decided to go all in.

Marc Bernstein: 6:55

Next time we do this, let's bring her on.

Matt Wampler: 6:57

Yes, the other perspective.

Marc Bernstein: 6:59

Anyway, so you're married, you're happily married. You've been through a lot, I'm sure, and so let's continue on the Jimmy Jones saga.

Matt Wampler: 7:10

Yeah, you know I think I give a lot of my success to Jimmy Jones as a brand. You know I didn't know anything about running restaurants, but you know, beautiful thing about a franchise system is they give you a playbook. This is what you need to do every day. Your job is to go in and execute, and so that's what I did. You know, I showed up and we executed every day fast, flawless food, customer service and, sure enough, over the next 18 months we took it from doing like 400,000 to 1.2 million and we were off the races. Wow.

Marc Bernstein: 7:37

That's amazing. And and how? Did you own just one or did you own multiple?

Matt Wampler: 7:42

Yeah, you rolled the profits up and opened up four more, four more.

Marc Bernstein: 7:45

You had five, and they all became successful. No, no, it's restaurants. It's like Russian roulette.

Matt Wampler: 7:51

You open one, it's like shoot. This is going to be a painful process to grow sales Right.

Marc Bernstein: 8:00

By the way, I know, you went to University of Iowa for college right Go Hawkeyes. And, by the way I know, you went to University of Iowa for college right Go Hawkeyes. And then Duke for your MBA. Yeah, still don't know how I managed to pull that one off. I was going to say dyslexic. You're not a student, you told me, but you got a master's degree.

Matt Wampler: 8:13

Somehow you know what's crazy my marketing degree at Iowa I think I had a lower GPA than my MBA. I thought about that.

Marc Bernstein: 8:20

So somehow you did that. So somehow you did that. That's, that's pretty amazing. I'm sure that's helped you too. I'm sure you learned some things there.

Matt Wampler: 8:25

I learned a ton. I think the one thing it gave me was perspective. You know I I walked into the room and you'd listen to these incredibly talented, successful people and you know like I remember just having the realization you know I was running a multimillion dollar business. You know, we had hundreds of employees Like we ran the whole thing on Excel spreadsheets and guessing.

Matt Wampler: 8:47

It's like that just doesn't make sense. You know I sat there and thought like you know I loved. I always thought I'd go back into Jimmy John's. I didn't be an operator, just get a different market. But you know, going through that process I kind of realized the thing I loved about the industry was the 5% of Right and when you're a franchisee your job is just to follow the playbook, the stuff you had to figure out.

Matt Wampler: 9:13

Yeah, if I could spend half my time getting to do the 5% that's not in there, that really excited me.

Marc Bernstein: 9:21

So that became your kind of aha at some point that there's something missing in terms of the way restaurant operations are run. I believe and I believe it probably had something to do with systems and technology and AI obviously you know the AI had nothing to do with it.

Matt Wampler: 9:38

Um, I think it was an inkling I had then, right that's what I meant.

Marc Bernstein: 9:42

You saw, you saw, you saw a light there, so it's a feeling, right yeah, and, and sure enough it was.

Matt Wampler: 9:48

I don't know, 18 months later I I got into programming, data science, and that was the light bulb. It was like, oh my gosh, this exists. Like technology has gotten so great.

Marc Bernstein: 10:00

And you didn't have any background in that right.

Matt Wampler: 10:02

None none whatsoever. So for me it was like discovering fires, like what is this magic? And why did I not have it when I was running my restaurants? And so that's when I called up my now co-founder, osa, and like we went and just talked to a bunch of restaurants, I said I think there's something here.

Marc Bernstein: 10:16

But, by the way, so at this point you're now out of Jimmy John's. So how did that happen?

Matt Wampler: 10:20

I'm out of. Jimmy John's sold them as part of that transition. I actually I-.

Marc Bernstein: 10:26

Because you saw something else you wanted to do. Is that right?

Matt Wampler: 10:29

No, no, it wasn't that. It was a season of my life. I had just started having children.

Marc Bernstein: 10:36

Restaurants are tough man, it's a tough job. Tough job to have while you're raising children.

Matt Wampler: 10:41

Yeah, it's the late night calls You're constantly. I mean, the phone is the devil because it's always going to ring with another problem and it was like I think I'll get back into this, but now would be a good time in my life to maybe focus on the family. You know, take a pause.

Marc Bernstein: 10:57

So this was. How long ago was this?

Matt Wampler: 10:59

Gosh 2016, 17.

Marc Bernstein: 11:02

Okay, so seven, eight years ago yeah.

Matt Wampler: 11:05

So I came up to Philly, actually, for I ran an innovation for a medical device company, it was my one stint into the corporate world.

Marc Bernstein: 11:12

Okay.

Matt Wampler: 11:12

So you got a job.

Marc Bernstein: 11:13

You sold the restaurants. Got a job. Got a job.

Matt Wampler: 11:16

My wife loved it, by the way. She's like. You mean to tell me you could work 40 hours a week, get paid good money and just make dinner for the family and be around, right?

Marc Bernstein: 11:26

But of course that eventually wasn't enough.

Matt Wampler: 11:30

Yeah, I would say I literally just can't help myself, right right?

Marc Bernstein: 11:33

Well, entrepreneur through and through. Right, I mean. You know you have to work for yourself. You got to create something right? Aren't those some of the traits of being an entrepreneur? I would say so, yeah, and what was driving you at the point? So you had the job? What drove you to want to do this? I got fired.

Matt Wampler: 11:54

Ah, there you go COVID hit, that'll do it. Company restructures and you find yourself with a one and three-year-old and no job, and you got to go figure out what your life's going to be.

Marc Bernstein: 12:03

So we're at 2020 now, yeah, Okay, so you're home, like I was home, recreating myself. And what did you? What did what? What? What happened then?

Matt Wampler: 12:13

So this is when I got into the programming data science it was something. I love numbers I loved Excel. You know I built all kinds of stuff in Excel and it was like I should go learn programming.

Marc Bernstein: 12:24

Gotcha Um interesting. So you started learning programming. Were you applying it to the restaurant business at this point?

Matt Wampler: 12:31

No, I mean, I was just looking at COVID statistics.

Marc Bernstein: 12:34

Right Just random things. So you were just educating yourself, period, for no apparent reason at that point.

Matt Wampler: 12:40

I was honestly exploring the capabilities of technology, just understanding what it could do. I love that.

Marc Bernstein: 12:47

I love that. So how long did you go on like that before you had a business idea?

Matt Wampler: 12:53

Not long, it didn't take too long.

Marc Bernstein: 12:56

How long? Six months, okay, so six months. So what did you do then?

Matt Wampler: 13:01

So that's when I called my Found, your partner, Co-founder Rosa, and said look, I think there's something in restaurants, I think this is an interesting space. And we went out and talked to every restaurant we could find. I think we talked to like 50 different brands. And you know, I give Oss a lot of credit. He's a product guy, He'd do a really good job of interviewing and, you know, say what is it that you want? And they'd be like well, I want a graph. It's like why do you want this graph? I want it for A, B and C reason. And he'd keep asking why do you want that? And the funny thing happened it always came back to the same answer. If you asked why, enough, I don't know who's going to walk in the door tomorrow. Because I don't know who's going to walk in the door tomorrow, I make incorrect, inefficient decisions around what I prep, what I order, who I staff. And we said that is interesting and that is something we can solve.

Marc Bernstein: 13:50

Very interesting. So what was his background? By the way?

Matt Wampler: 13:53

He's a genius programmer guy. They threw him in a think tank out in Silicon Valley at a college. You know he's one of those guys. And where did you meet him? I met him online. Talk about rediscovering yourself. During COVID, really, he was launching his first startup. He was looking for advisors. I'm at home with my two kids, my wife's in healthcare, so it's like I'm raising the two kids. I need some adult entertainment, somebody to converse with, so we ended up working together.

Marc Bernstein: 14:23

Cool. Well, that is a very good jumping off point for us to take a quick commercial break and we'll be right back on Founders Forum with Matt Wampler. Stay tuned.

Announcer: 14:31

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Marc Bernstein: 15:10

We're back on Founders Forum with our guest today, Matt Wampler, and fascinating story. Matt, so you met Osa, your partner, who I understand is based out of Chicago, and so is your company, correct? Yes, sir, and you started the business. And what did you do? How did you start it? You started calling on some restaurant companies.

Matt Wampler: 15:30

You do what everybody does. You call up a family member who's got a restaurant and say hey, can I experiment on your restaurant, right, you know that was your family member or his.

Marc Bernstein: 15:39

Yeah, it was my family member. Yeah.

Matt Wampler: 15:42

And you kind of realize, like you know, we were looking for reasons not to do this. So we set out and said, okay, there should be a solution here. There's not why. That's a big red flag. We kind of figured out why. Then we went and said is it even possible to do so? We went out and worked with my cousin for a few months this is kind of just playing around. Turned out we cut his bread waste in half. We're like, okay, this might actually work. So that's when we decided let's go start a company.

Marc Bernstein: 16:10

That's very smart. I was talking to an entrepreneur yesterday who's starting a company A relative of mine is working for this new. It's an innovative furniture company done internationally, and real smart guy, real data-driven kind of guy, and I asked him to demonstrate a couple of things to me. He says not yet, we're not ready yet, we're testing. He says October. Talk to me again in October. Not yet, we're not ready yet, we're testing. He said October. Talk to me again in October. So it's very smart to do that. So you started the business. I assume you started collecting some clients and after that it was a smooth ride. I'm kidding, of course.

Matt Wampler: 16:46

Yeah, not even close. We'll call it an iterative process.

Marc Bernstein: 16:49

Right, okay, so there were challenges. Tell me about the challenges starting up.

Matt Wampler: 16:53

Well, look, I think the hardest thing is this You're starting a new company that nobody's heard of, offering a new product that nobody's heard of in a whole new technology category and then mixing the fact that we ended up using AI to do all of this. Nobody understands that. So really it was solution awareness. Everybody knew the problem. They knew the pain of running a restaurant, they know it's a low margin business. They know their 18-year-old kid running the night shift is not making the best decisions. But when you come in and say we're going to use AI to do predictive analytics and answer these questions proactively, they're like that sounds like voodoo, like yeah, I'm not buying it.

Marc Bernstein: 17:35

Right, right. So selling them on your value proposition was the challenge.

Matt Wampler: 17:40

Yeah, I mean, I would say this they say first-time founders focus on product and, like I don't know if it's second or third time, founders focus on distribution. But there's a lot of wisdom there. You know, sales is the hardest thing to do, and not only just because sales is tough, but sales also informs everything you build Right.

Marc Bernstein: 18:03

Right, I understand that. I understand that we're going through kind of a rebranding and reclarification of our value proposition in our business and there's a lot of work involved in that and it all comes down to the sales process and who you're speaking to, how you're speaking to them.

Matt Wampler: 18:20

It's the customer. The more you can speak with the customer, learn what their pain is right, how they want to interact with your product I mean, that's where magic happens, right. So you did that.

Marc Bernstein: 18:31

You got a few customers, I assume, to start. So you did that. You got a few customers, I assume, to start. We did Yep, and how did that go? Horribly.

Matt Wampler: 18:40

Yeah, it's okay. I mean welcome to the early stages of startups. Right right, we got some great shots on goal. It's two guys in a garage just trying to figure out what we do and we screwed up.

Marc Bernstein: 18:50

So at what point and how did you get there where things started growing?

Matt Wampler: 18:55

Look in my world everything is red, yellow or green, right, and there is always one or two items that are in the red and that's where we focus our time and energy. So you know, you start out, everything's red, you get one thing green great. I mean, it's just a constant battle of failing, learning and iterating.

Marc Bernstein: 19:17

Well, I'll ask you another way when are you today in terms of how many customers? I know you did kind of a big deal with Toast, if I recall. Yeah, we're on the.

Matt Wampler: 19:25

Toast marketplace. That's a big one. Today, I think if you walk into a restaurant, there's a 70% chance we're integrated directly into their point of sales system. We're in a hundred brands across four countries, ranging from kind of your regional chains to multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies.

Marc Bernstein: 19:41

So what's your distribution system? Look like today, your sales and business, because obviously it's beyond you going out and knocking on doors at this point.

Matt Wampler: 19:49

It is, it is. So we've been knocking on doors for a long time. We've wanted to work directly with the customer and, frankly, we were a poor startup.

Matt Wampler: 19:57

We didn't have any resources. We had to be very careful with where we put our development resources and where we built because we didn't have that much bandwidth. We finally closed our seed round. We've got some great investors that have come in and now we have some more resources, so we're really focused on partnerships. How can we take your current systems in your restaurant and turn them into smart systems? How do I make your labor management system automatically schedule the right people at the right time? How do I make your ordering system, for when I order from Cisco or US Foods right, automatically order the right food? How would my prep cook know how many chicken tenders to drop in at this time?

Marc Bernstein: 20:36

Sounds like a dream system for restaurants. I mean, if you could do all that sounds like a pretty easy value proposition to sell at some point. It is yeah, so do you do country clubs, by the way.

Matt Wampler: 20:49

You know, we haven't my mom brought that up. Mom, if you're listening, credit to you. Marc on your side. I am.

Marc Bernstein: 20:56

You know why? Because I was having this conversation yesterday. The country club the golf club, I'll call it that I belong to is run by guys who are in the restaurant business and they run the restaurants great, but they don't know how to apply it, in my mind, to the country club business. It's a lot different. You don't know who's going to walk in, you don't know how much food you should have prepared and stored and ordered, et cetera. So if it could be applied and I know a lot of people in that business, managers and general managers- they need something.

Matt Wampler: 21:30

Well, let me take a side tangent for a second.

Matt Wampler: 21:32

So you know, back in 2020, openai hadn't released ChatGPT. Ai was not a buzzword. And we all of this and said, like we want you to do this old school regression Don't give me this black box machine learning. And on the side, me and one of the data guys started playing around with machine learning. It was like, oh my gosh, it just crushed you know 18 super smart kids and what AI is really good at, whether it's chat, gpt. Chat GPT is literally just predicting the next word in a sentence. It's good at pattern matching. So whether it's predicting how much prep to do today or how many golfers are going to show up, it's just going to pattern match. When it rains, golfers don't show up. It's amazing what this technology could do.

Marc Bernstein: 22:39

Very interesting and I was going to ask you that how did you get to that step? That's how you got to that step.

Matt Wampler: 22:43

Yeah, that was kind of the aha moment. We went all in on it. It was one of the best decisions we made.

Marc Bernstein: 22:49

So, looking out, today, you've got your seed money, you're on an expansion mode, I imagine. Ultimately, a next strategy might look like being acquired or something down the road.

Matt Wampler: 23:02

Look, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. My fundamental belief is this Restaurants is the hardest job out there. It's often a thankless job where you put the key in the door in the morning and then just wait for things to go wrong. We believe that hindsight is 20-20. I mean, I could tell you the amount of times I could look back and say, man, if I knew it was going to rain, I would have brought more drivers. If I knew there was this basketball game I forgot about, I would have staffed up. If we were to give that information ahead of time to restaurants, it not only would make their lives easier, but it would make it a much more profitable, sustainable industry. And if we can just continue to make that vision come to reality and change the lives of all of these restaurants, ultimately the exit takes care of itself, but I'm loving the journey as it is today.

Marc Bernstein: 23:59

So, along the journey, what's your vision for the future? Let me ask you this If you and I are three years from now we're talking, what would have to happen for you to feel that that was a successful three-year period?

Matt Wampler: 24:08

Yeah, look, nobody gets into restaurants because they love inventory or reviewing P&Ls or, you know, looking at variance reports. This is the people business. They get into it for the hospitality. And you know, fundamentally, the restaurants that are successful are the ones that master the cold analytics. It's the McDonald's of the world. Right, it may not be the best burger in town, but, like they figured out the business of running restaurants, it may not be the best burger in town, but like they figured out the business of running restaurants. You know, the future we see is your fractional CFO COO that sits on top of your data, your restaurant co-pilot that, when you wake up in the morning you say what do I need to know? It gives you a synopsis of what happened yesterday. You know the key areas of concerns, what's coming today. You've got this catering order. You need to prep this much more. How do we make better decisions? And it's something that technology today, thankfully to these large language models, is a reality and will be a reality in the next three years.

Marc Bernstein: 25:08

So it's sort of bringing that kind of analytics model that I'm sure McDonald's already has to the family-owned business or the small chains or the you know, there's this weird world in franchising where franchisors make their money on top-line revenues.

Matt Wampler: 25:22

You pay royalty to them. The tax man Better believe that they invest heavily in anything that increases revenues, but they don't necessarily care as much about the bottom line. It's not as high of a priority and so most chains don't have this. And the technology is new and it wasn't possible five or ten years ago. So it's kind of a green field today.

Marc Bernstein: 25:46

Can you get into like McDonald's owners, or the franchise agreements allow it?

Matt Wampler: 25:51

I could probably count on one hand the brands that do do this internally. Mcdonald's is one of them Right, right. I think they employ like half the data scientists in the industry.

Marc Bernstein: 26:00

But all the other chains are open.

Matt Wampler: 26:02

Yeah, most of the other chains.

Marc Bernstein: 26:04

Yeah, so let me ask you a quick question. If you could speak to your younger self we've covered a lot of ground today what advice would you give yourself, matt?

Matt Wampler: 26:13

It all comes down to relationships. I would have gotten on social media earlier. I would have asked for advice from powerful business leaders that are smart. I would have done that way earlier because when I was in restaurants, I lived within my four walls. My whole world was that 1,600 square feet and I did not open the aperture to broaden my network.

Marc Bernstein: 26:35

Interesting. I'm going to throw a couple other fun questions because we have about a minute left. What music do you listen to?

Matt Wampler: 26:41

Whatever's on the radio right now Alternative rock, classic rock. Right now, a lot of Taylor Swift, because I got two girls, six and eight, there you go.

Marc Bernstein: 26:49

You're fortunate. When my daughter was that age, I had to listen to Britney Spears and you got Taylor Swift, we've got Britney Spears and the Spice Girls.

Matt Wampler: 26:58

It's still playing.

Marc Bernstein: 27:05

It's still playing. Yeah, gotcha.

Matt Wampler: 27:06

Okay, so we have a little more time. How about books? Are you a reader? You know I do audio books. I love podcasts.

Marc Bernstein: 27:09

Yep and what's your favorite podcast?

Matt Wampler: 27:11

The Restaurant AI Podcast.

Marc Bernstein: 27:14

And then Founders Forum, and then after that.

Matt Wampler: 27:17

I love Lex Friedman. He's great. They're long. It's like a book on tape in some ways, but just talk about interesting conversations. One of the most intellectual podcasts.

Marc Bernstein: 27:27

Yeah, it really makes you think a lot. Anyone else have any others you like?

Matt Wampler: 27:34

You know what, maybe controversial? I like the Joe Rogan podcast quite a bit. I do too. I enjoy the curiosity and the variety of subjects.

Marc Bernstein: 27:44

Yeah, he covers a lot of ground, that's for sure. Ever listen to Marc Maron WTO? No, oh, check that one out. I think he's retiring from it. He's now an actor. He's a comedian. He's a great interviewer from it. He's now an actor. He's a comedian, he's a great interviewer.

Announcer: 27:59

He used to do it out of his garage.

Marc Bernstein: 28:00

He had Obama come to his garage in California to interview him. Mark Maron, wtf. Anyway, that's all the time we have on Founders Forum today. Matt's been great. We could do a part two, I'm sure, at some time. If we want, let's make it happen, we'll bring the wife and thank you all for listening today. We'll see you next week on Found.