JD Durkin: Natalie Fratto joins us now, founder and CEO of Charts & Crafts. Nice to see you here. I think you’re making your Taking Stock debut. It is your first time here. Nice to see you. We’ll get into more of the specifics about your process as a content creator and so much more. I’ve been looking forward to our conversation more broadly. How are you thinking about these markets, especially given a lot of selling and a lot of skepticism, maybe, over the durability of the AI trade that we saw really top of mind last week for investors?
Natalie Fratto: Yeah, honestly, what I learned last week from my friend Jess, who’s here all the time, is that that’s kind of par for the course in October. So it’s not that much of a worry to me as somebody who is purely a consumer. I think about my life and indexes, so it’s totally fine by me. I do think obviously November is going to be fascinating with a lot of the tech IPOs starting to roll in. So I’m not too focused, not too skittish. I think it’s interesting times to be paying attention.
JD Durkin: I assume you’re talking about the great Jess Inskip, by the way.
Natalie Fratto: I am talking about a very good friend of mine, my friend Jess.
JD Durkin: A good friend of ours here on the show as well. You track and closely follow. You do a great job explaining the overall AI boom right now.
Natalie Fratto: Thank you.
JD Durkin: How are you thinking about winners and opportunities in a landscape where people can very easily get caught up with all of the headlines and not know how to separate signal from noise?
Natalie Fratto: Yeah. I mean, I think about AI anthropologically. I think right now it’s really easy to be hyper-focused on the Anthropic IPO. When is OpenAI going to go? I think all of that is really the noise. What’s fascinating to me is how society is going to change. Five years, ten years, 20 years, 50 years out. And markets are in some ways lagging behind the effects that it’s had on our population, and in some ways completely leading the way that it’s going to change infrastructure build-outs for the next century.
So I view my role as a content creator as somebody who takes these really complex, sort of mystical money movers and breaks them down into something really simple and concrete, so all of us, myself included, can better understand what’s going on.
JD Durkin: What is one part of the overall AI boom story that you think we are still not talking enough about?
Natalie Fratto: Everyone says the words “picks and shovels,” but I do not think we are talking enough about the actual lithium inside the ground, the geopolitical implications of how supply chains move, you know, RAM from this part of Taiwan to this part of Texas, the amount of data centers that are centralized in Northern Virginia, and what that does when people are spending money in different geographies. I think it’s a lot about truly what’s inside the ground and then getting it all the way into our homes and computers.
JD Durkin: And over the course of your career, to your point, you’ve gone from the worlds of finance and the worlds of startups.
Natalie Fratto: Yes.
JD Durkin: To now being a content creator. What is one lesson in that journey you maybe wish you had learned sooner? And talk to me a bit about that transformation in your career.
Natalie Fratto: You know, the reality is everything is the same. I worked in semiconductors. I went through Y Combinator with a tech company. I worked in finance at places like Goldman. Now I make silly videos on the internet explaining all of those things. Really, I’m fascinated by power, money, technology that moves the world, and everyone is always kind of pointing toward those same big topics in any of those seats. All of us are just humans trying to understand it together. So I’m struck with similarity, not differences, in those chapters.
JD Durkin: And your TEDx talk, you did a TEDx talk.
Natalie Fratto: I did.
JD Durkin: Okay. First and foremost, you did a TED Talk. That’s awesome. Congratulations. It was about adaptability. How do investors need to adapt as artificial intelligence continues to reshape the economy and these markets overall?
Natalie Fratto: So my TED Talk was basically about adaptability as a form of intelligence. So we have IQ. We have EQ. In 2019, I did a TED Talk about how AQ, adaptability, is going to be more important than ever. I was a little shortsighted, because I did that before COVID, before ChatGPT was released, and now I think adaptability is even more important. And I have had to adapt more than I realized. The thing that I think I’m struck by is none of us know what’s going to happen in the future. So the things that you build resilience for in your body are comfort with discomfort, unlearning things that you thought you knew before. All of those become increasingly important in the world we’re in now, not less.
JD Durkin: Natalie Fratto. Outstanding kickoff guest here to the broadcast. Where can people go if they want to find more of your work online?
Natalie Fratto: You can follow me on social media. I’m at Natalie Fratto on basically every social platform.
JD Durkin: Natalie Fratto, founder and CEO, Charts & Crafts. Great to have you here. Come back and see us again soon.
Natalie Fratto: Thanks. Appreciate it.
