I put 80% of my money in the S&P after a billionaire investor told me not to

All right, Shawn, I have a study that's going to show why the amount of money that you make is almost entirely out of your control unless you do what I tell you to do. How's that for an opener?

I feel like it is like a late-night infomercial that just like is about to brainwash me into something. Okay, I'm intrigued. Go on. What do you mean? What do you mean it's out of my control? Nothing's out of my control.

It's about as out of control as it is your ability to control if you're 7-foot tall or not. So I got to give a shout out to Jim O'Shaughnessy. I saw a clip where he kind of like brought me to this topic. He talked about the study that I'm going to reference. So in 2014, there was a researcher in Sweden named Heinrich. Interesting things about the Swedes is that they are obsessed with two things: twins and money. So Sweden has this massive twin database where they have many, many, like hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions of twins that they've documented. And for some reason, you're— they track twins. I think originally they did it for health reasons where they wanted to track like, uh, what type of twins got diseases.

Twins are great for studies, right? Because nature is controlled, so it's all about nurture.

Yes. And so they have this like massive database, and they were able to break the database down into fraternal twins, which are twins that are born at the same time but don't look alike, and identical twins. They're also obsessed with money. They love money. And in particular, the government loves money. Up until 2007, they had a wealth tax. And as part of the wealth tax, Sweden basically tracked every citizen's entire financial portfolio. So they looked at which stocks you owned, the mutual funds that you owned, every dollar of savings. They basically tracked all of this stuff. And so what was interesting is that this guy named Heinrich, he went— he had this premise, this idea where he was like, how much of investing and savings behavior is controlled by genetics. And so he looked at the differences between fraternal twins and identical twins because presumably twins grew up in the same environment. In many cases, they have the same education levels. Their parents spoke to them the same way. They were loved a similar amount, whatever. And then he looked at, well, how do the fraternal twins who only share 50% of genetics, how do they invest and save compared to the identical twins? Who have shared 100% of DNA. And he broke it up into 6 biases. So people who held too few stocks, excess turnover, people who traded a lot, performance chasing. So people who bought whatever bought that did well the year before, overinvesting in your home country called home bias, loving lottery-type stocks, and then the disposition effect, which is refusing to sell losers. And he looked at all of this data, and I think he looked at it over the course of 30,000 sets of twins. Additionally, he looked at outliers. So like, for example, twins that were separated at birth and a couple of stuff like that. And the results that he found was basically— and concluded was that 45% of savings and investing patterns and behaviors was genetic, which I find to be astounding. And the reason I was thinking about this was you and I, I would not— I think we both— and we both in different ways like investing, but we are not, I would say, professional investors. And yet my portfolio would also say I'm not a professional investor. And yet we love having professional investors on the podcast. We both love reading about Warren Buffett and people like that. And I was trying to figure out two things. The first is, why do I like that so much? What am I drawn to these guys for so much? And the second thing was a couple of podcasts ago, we talked about passion and how to figure out what you're kind of supposed to be doing. And I was trying to look for a more scientific reason about why I should do what I do. To address the first one of why do we like these investors so much? Well, I think I realized that in order to be a world-class investor, finances are actually secondary to human nature. Financial trends change every decade, every handful of decades. Something will— some new thing will pop up. You know, SPACs are this new thing. So like learning about that is important, but that changes every so often. But what doesn't change is thousands and thousands of years of human nature and understanding how humans behave and asking yourself, why do they do what they do? Is significantly more important than the financial stuff. On this show, we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot, they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy-to-read Wealth Guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Mohnish Pabrai, Morgan Housel, Cathie Wood, and a ton others. So these are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules, basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below.

There's this great story from Mohnish Pabrai. So people who have been listening to this podcast, you've probably seen that Mohnish came on the podcast twice. I think his two episodes are the most viewed episodes in the history of My First Million. So he's been this kind of Hall of Fame guest for us. And in the interview, I don't know if you remember this, but he said this thing where he was running a company. He was an entrepreneur and he was running this company and it wasn't super, super successful, but it was like moderately successful. I think it was like a $6 million a year revenue business or something like that. Now he did this, but he was, he wasn't loving it. He just assumed this is a normal entrepreneurial burnout. You know, I'm working really hard. I've been doing this for a long time. This shit's hard. I probably feel how most founders feel. But he was encouraged to do a, like, a very fancy version of a personality test where they talk to you, they talk to your coworkers, they talk to your parents, they talk to everybody in your life, this sort of 360, and, um, they try to understand, like, a little bit more about you. The result came back and they were like, you know, it's no surprise that you're miserable here. This is a game that is completely incompatible for your personality type. And he goes, what do you mean? And they go, you like— and I forgot the exact descriptor, but it was something like, you like solo player competitive number games. And he's like, what? And they're like, yeah, let's say that again. You like one person, so you by yourself, not team sports. You like solo player competitive, number-based games. It's like things that had a lot of like a math or number, uh, thing to it. And here you were, you were running this company. So now you're playing this multiplayer, competitive, non-numbers-based game. And so he, uh, he was like, okay, I don't know what to do with this. And he decided to start investing on the side. And basically it turns out that as he's, as he's done in his life, he did way better as an investor, as a solo investor, playing a competitive money numbers-based game, which was the stock market. Than he ever did doing this other thing. He really encouraged this sort of know thyself thing, which is like, you have to know who you are and what you are predisposed to love and obsess over, and then find yourself in those types of games. And so I'll give you another example with that. When I was there, he was like, he was telling me about how he'd been kicked out of these casinos because he was winning too much money. I was like, you were card counting? He's like, no, I wasn't card counting.

You were running around without your shirt on. Like, I know that that's not a casino.

That was Margaritaville. And so he was like, he, he off camera, he wouldn't tell me on camera, off camera, he told me, he showed me the exact system that he used. And then my, my, I've had like friends go and use this system, uh, in at these specific casinos, play this specific way. And it was, he had actually found an edge. He's like, he's like, just the intellectual thrill of actually being able to beat the house. There's nothing like it. You know, financially, this is not a good decision to spend thousands of hours figuring this out, but I just like those single-player competitive number-based games. And same thing with philanthropy. He's like, when I got into philanthropy, oh, you make money, they gotta figure out how to give it away. And it's like, should I be going to these galas and dressing up and donating to these causes and socializing? And like, there's a whole socialite scene with philanthropy. And what he figured out was the version that was fulfilling to him was, again, a single-player competitive numbers-based game where he realized the fun part of philanthropy for him was figuring out how to make $1 that he puts in have the highest economic return in terms of impact, uh, anywhere. So what he figured out was there were kids in India who were really smart that had no schooling. Like, India's got a bit, you know, over a billion people. So a lot of people just live in rural India that are very intelligent but have no access to good education or a pathway to better their lives. They're just going to end up on a farm. And what he realized was that if he could identify the smart kids, for like 3 grand a year, he could, uh, put them in like a competitive school. So they started these competitive math schools and they got them into IIT. And IIT is this feeder system to like the best jobs in the world. They can go get visas. And basically for 3 grand, he can up the, that family's earning power. From $10,000 a year to $50,000 a year. So he could 5x and create like, you know, $50,000 per year for a one-time $3,000 one-year, um, like acceleration in training. And his like admittance rate, you know, the normal— IIT is harder to get into than Harvard, um, than Stanford, harder to get into than any, uh, US college. So it's like whatever point, whatever percent admissions rate typically. And I think his is like 8% or something crazy, like, you know, like a 10x larger admittance rate. So even that was a single-player game or whatever. And it really got me thinking about this idea of how do you know yourself enough to know what game you should and shouldn't be playing, which is kind of a spinoff of what you're talking about, right? You're—

well, that's like step one.

Yeah. I had another kind of mentor, this guy James Currier. He told me the same thing last week. He goes, I wish somebody earlier in life had told me who I really was. I go, what? He's like, I didn't know what he meant. This could go a lot of ways right here. What are you about to say? And he was like, You know, I played soccer my whole life competitively, and what I realized is like, you know, I was actually not very attuned to playing soccer, but I was actually really good at racket sports. I had long wingspan, good hand-eye coordination, and I should have been playing racquetball early on. He goes, the same thing happened in my career. You know, I was doing these types of businesses when I really should have been doing this type of thing. It got me wondering, wow, there's probably billions of people walking around who never discovered what game they're actually great at and never got into that game, and therefore like kind of life passed them by. Isn't that sort of a tragedy.

Yeah, well, like, I don't— selfishly, I don't think about other people. I just think about myself, where I'm like, where I'm like, uh, I see the more important bit, me. But that's what everyone thinks, you know? They think like, okay, but how does this apply to me? And, um, I think it was Andrew Wilkinson who told me about that self-assessment thing, which I really dig.

Did you do it?

Yeah, it was awesome.

Uh, what's like the— when you're like a teen and you're like discovering yourself, you get a little curious.

I think we're both a little Bicurious. Yeah.

I'm a little my-curious right now.

There's two of us. Therefore, we are bicurious.

So, so what game do you think you would be disposed? I don't even know what the options are, right? Like, I don't think I'm single-player competitive numbers-based game. That's not me, but I don't even know what the menu looks like. Um, so, so what do you think yours is?

Researching. Uh, I think it'd be like a new topic and going super deep and obsessing over one topic and coming to it, trying to, trying to come to to a conclusion, right?

So naturally go run Hampton.

Yeah.

You're describing like sitting alone on a couch with a book and thinking and really like finding your joy and you're being the best at that. And then you're like, so I'm going to go sit in an office with 50 other people and run a community.

I, thank God my co-founder Joe is the CEO, so he runs Hampton. But it's when we like are gearing up to launch something new, like I'm in my zone of genius when I'm like researching how others have done something similar to us and where they failed and when they won. And then going, talking to experts and weaseling my way into conversations of people who have been there, done that, and being like, tell me, tell me, like, the mistakes that I'm going to make.

I think you and I are both similar in this weird way. I thought this was completely normal until somebody pointed out that, hey, that's probably not super common. I was talking to this guy who's a book developer. One thing— one of the things this guy has done is he's written some of the most popular books as a ghostwriter for smart, successful, famous people. Okay, great. So I'm talking to him and he's like, okay, so what's your book idea? And I'm telling him my book idea. And I talked to him a couple of times over a couple of years. And so he had seen me talking about a couple of different book ideas. And he goes, you know, maybe we save this for later. He goes, but I think the most interesting about you is— and I'm like— he pauses. This is very interesting to me because this guy's job is to spend time with really smart people and he lets them talk for hours and hours and hours. And then he's like, oh, the real story here is X. And they're like, really? That? And he's like, yeah, that's the, that's the most interesting part about this. And that's his gift. So he goes, the most interesting part about you is you have some weird predilection for reverse engineering businesses or reverse engineering. He goes, everything you do, you seem to reverse engineer as a first, like as a first instinct. Whereas most people, I don't think do that. And he's like, whether it's like something in life, you know, It could be family-oriented. You told me this. It could be creatively this. It could be investment. And Sam, you're the same way where it's like, I think our first instinct when we want to do something is like, all right, let me go study in history how other people have done this. Let me go talk to the other people who have already done this. And I'm going to reverse engineer based on the principles that they tell me. I know what to ignore of what they're going to say. I know what to focus in on. I'm going to create my own system and my own understanding, and then I'll just do that. And I think we both do that as our default mode. And it's what we enjoy doing. And I don't think that that's common.

And here's an example. Whenever we have someone on the podcast and they explain, they'll ask for advice or something like that. Instead of saying like, well, you should probably raise venture capital or you should, you should probably do this. The first question is always like, well, how would you define success in 5 years? Like what? Like what?

What?

Work backwards. Yeah. Like, what's the definition of success to you? And then let's figure out what the rules will be to the game. Then we will— can give feedback. But the reason why I've been always obsessed with this is I've noticed in my company, the times that I have issues, which is all the time, uh, the times that I have issues—

Every waking breath.

Yeah. Every time I screw something up every day, uh, I, uh, I'm like, I have to change the business. I have to change the people. I have to change all of these external things. But the reality is, and this is why I think I like capitalism so much, is that the business that you're controlling, if you are controlling, it's just an extension of your personality. So if you have trust issues, then your, your coworkers are probably going to think that you're micromanaging them. If you have trouble committing, then they're going to think that you're absent-minded. The issues that you have in the company, they are an extension of the issues that you have and vice versa. If you are a kind person, you're going to have a kind culture, I think. And I think that what, what investing habits are, are just human nature habits. And that's why investing is really interesting. And so even though this study was related to finance, it's the exact same thing. So if you tend to have excessive turnover with your stocks, which is one of the 6 biases, then perhaps you struggle having steady relationships. If you tend to overinvest in like stocks in your home country, which they call a home bias, the likelihood that you have moved from your hometown is actually quite low. And so what I have found is that the best ways to make change in these issues, for one, it's not just reading. And so I wrote down this line, which was that change requires pain, not words, because according to this study, what they found is once they normalize for education, meaning they took two people who both had business degrees, if that's— if person number 2 went and read a bunch of business books, they wouldn't necessarily be a better investor. What they found was that the only thing that made a meaningful difference other than genetics was people who worked in finance. Meaning you have to— like, you have to experience a loss. Like, oh, I did this, I got burnt, I can't put my hand there again versus just constantly reading about burning your hand. You'll still burn your hand. Even in the book Thinking Fast and Slow, he even says he's like, I'm writing a book on biases. But I suffer from all these same things and I, and I have to work on this all the time. And so the best way I think, or the— I wrote down like 4 ways that you can like prevent this, but one of the biggest ways to harness this is what Warren Buffett said. He just said, actually, again, we invest in our zone of genius. And what that means is Warren Buffett is a slow and steady type of guy. So he invests in slow and steady types of things, which would entirely explain why he's adverse to Bitcoin. Which would entirely explain that if he were a type of— if he were 18 or 25 nowadays, he probably would not consider having an AI startup that raised lots and lots of VC. The people who do that tend to be the ones who want dopamine a lot faster, who maybe care about glory. And you have to optimize the thing that you're working on for the personality that you have. But the other ways that you get rid of this, I think, is that you have to pre-commit so the future doesn't decide. Basically, don't go to a grocery store hungry. So like when you make a decision, you write it down. Like, if I'm going to, I'm going to fire this person in month 3 after hiring them if they don't hit these requirements. Did they or did they not hit the requirements? You stick to it. Not if you're like predisposed to like, you know, not like confrontation. Another one would be to shorten the feedback loop so you're able to like see points on the scoreboard very fast and get new information quick. And the last one, you can't play games where your bias will be fatal. And that sort of means like for me, I'm a control freak. I'm a little bit of a slow and steady type of guy. Raising lots of VC where I'm not in control and I'm expected to go really, really, really fast, that would potentially be a fatal game for me. So I'd be setting myself up to lose.

That's really interesting. So I like the two premises you have. One, the problems you see in your situation, whether that's your life or your work— workplace, is a mirror to the problems you have in your psychology. And then the, then the 4 or 5 tactics you just described are like, okay, what's the remedy? And also, you know, the insights, which is I think Morgan Housel's book is this, which is basically getting wealthy through the money game and investing is far less about strategy and far more about behavior. And it's your own, it's your own poor behavior that leads to poor financial results, not poor strategy.

He says it in a much better way, which I stole from him. I wrote it down here. I said personal finance is more personal than it is finance.

Right? Yeah, exactly. So I think that's great. It's also interesting because you said like, you know, the best investors weren't necessarily the ones reading more books. At the same time, all the best investors talk constantly about the books they're reading. And I actually thought about it while you were saying it. It might be a weird thing. So it might not be that the knowledge in the books is super important. It might be that one of the biggest leaks in investing is too much activity. And the remedy for too much activity is actually to just busy yourself with bridge and books and, and, and playing pickleball and doing other things so that you are not prone to just sitting there and pushing buttons. Because it's the pushing buttons that's the problem. And so it might be that reading— it might not even matter what you actually are reading, but just simply that it takes you away from constant activity is actually the best part of the reason why all these great investors read so much.

Or put differently, if you found a company that's going well, which that's the situation I'm in, I've noticed the best thing that I can do is to do nothing because oftentimes when I meddle, it gets screwed up. Or if you like, let's say that you're trying to get popular on social media and you notice that when you post 3 times a day you get growth, it's like, just do that. Don't do other things. Like this idea of like, it's working, just continue. And that you need something else to do in order to have your playground where you're allowed to mess something up. but don't mess up the main thing.

Yeah, there's a great example of this. I just picked up, um, Buffett did an interview with the Berkshire thing and he talked about this, which was like, because Berkshire has, I think, almost $400 billion in cash and it's just been piling up over the last 5 years and they just haven't deployed it anywhere.

I wonder what that even means. Like, where is—

they just have $400 billion in like Treasury bills basically.

It's Treasury? Yeah. Wow. I wonder what percentage of like the US Treasury that that makes up.

I don't think it's that much. There's trillions in T-bills. Um, you know, it's not, not zero, but it's not, not more than like 5%. So he, uh, he was talking about like, well, well, you know, we, we don't do anything unless there's something to do. And he was talking, he was talking about this. There's an Amazon, uh, Jeff Bezos just gave this interview and he said the same thing. He goes, early in Amazon's history, Jeff Wilkie came to me one day and said, Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon. And he goes, what? He said, you have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week to destroy Amazon. I said, what do you mean? He goes, you have to figure out how to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it. Because every time I released an idea, I created a backlog, a queue, a work in process, a distraction. And it was just stacking up. It was adding no value the way I was doing it. In fact, I was creating distraction. So I had to learn how to prioritize the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping those on myself until the organization was ready for the ideas. And I saw this and I was like, oh, like, Your Honor, I plead guilty because, you know, the same thing. If you're, if you're very generative with ideas, feels good. And the ideas themselves might be great ideas, might be, might be a very sound idea. And so it seems like you're doing nothing wrong, but you can literally drown your company in ideas. And I've done this many times. Especially like the growth teams or the marketing teams. It's like, here's 14 marketing ideas, and then every day 2 more are coming. And then I'm gonna send you a tweet about something somebody else is doing that you guys should check out. And then I'm gonna tell you this, and then I'm gonna have an event you should go to. And then there's this guy you should meet, and then there's this thing we should try. And then did that ever work? We should try that again. And I can literally suffocate an organization by releasing too many ideas into the org at once, right? It's just again, like you describe, like a personality defect that becomes a culture defect, an operational defect.

I read that same quote, I think, 6 months ago. And so my co-founder Joe, who's the CEO, we set up this meeting every Thursday, and it's the only meeting that him and I have together. And it's just when we go through a running list of ideas and it's a— he's like, just say anything you want. We can say anything. We can talk about anything you want. And it's just in this room, we can do anything.

Pillow.

Yeah, we'll talk about anything you want. I don't think we're going to do any of it, but maybe we will. But like, let's just— we can get it out. And don't slack me any ideas though. But he's like, just have a running notion list. Yeah. And we'll, we'll go through any idea that you want and then maybe we'll, maybe we'll do something.

I have a different tactic with these research papers, which is I basically read it and then I say, does this serve me? And like, if the conclusion of that was that your genetic disposition determines half of your financial success, You know, I tend to just throw things like that out the window, partially because there are some great lies in statistics, right? Like Howard Marks, who was on the podcast, described— he's like, oh, what's the S&P's average annual return? And we're like, 10%. He's like, yeah, but do you know how often 10% happens? And it was like, pretty much never. The actual, the actual annual returns vary widely. So it might be the mean, but it's definitely not the median or the mode. And, um, and so like you have these numbers and you expect it's going to be 9-10% and it's almost never 9-10%. It overperforms and underperforms and it averages out to that. And same thing, like, you know, uh, many men drown in the, in the pool that was, uh, crossing the river that was on average 5 feet, 5 feet in depth. It's because averages don't tell you so much. And so there's all kinds of these like statistical things that can mislead you that just because something is a norm or an average or was studied once that that's That is, I guess I should draw a conclusion from that. And I'm a big fan of basically like productive placebos. So the question is not what is the situation, is what, what do I need to believe in order to do the things that will lead to a good result? Right. And so, you know, I don't need to know everything. I don't need to know even what's right, what's true. True. Who cares what's true? It's what's useful is what matters. And so I try to find What are the beliefs that I need to stuff in my brain that is going to lead to me doing the things I want to do to have the life I want to have?

Dude, that's so weird that that's your takeaway. My takeaway is the opposite, which is if these are the facts, then how do I use the facts to continue to get what I want?

First of all, there's like this huge replication crisis where who knows if these are even the facts. And then secondly, even if they were the facts, if the facts are telling me that it's out of my control and that you know, whatever my DNA was, is imprinting, you know, half. It's kind of like, you know, Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber. It's like, so you're saying there's a chance? It's like, oh, so there's still 55% in my control. Fantastic. So it's like, why did I need to know any of that? All I needed to know was that here's the, here's the behaviors that lead people to make money. Here's the behaviors that lead people to lose money. Do the ones that make money, avoid the ones that lose. I think what you're saying is that your genetic disposition is going to like bias you towards maybe failing in a couple of these more than others and be more on guard to those. Is that the takeaway?

Yes.

Which of those 5 or 6 are you most guilty of? Because I was guilty of all of those. Every one of those I do wrong. What do you mean? I haven't spent enough time to think about this, but I'm pretty home country biased. I'm not like buying like industrials in Indonesia.

But that's not— I mean, I don't think the bias— that's not how biases work where it's like you only do these and not all these. Obviously you do all of them. It's just, um, what do you skew towards? I would say probably, uh, refusing to sell losers.

You're like, I don't know, I'm pretty good, actually.

No, I mean, I do. What? No, what I'm saying is I do all of them, but I do some more than others. I'm trying to think which ones do I do most?

Mine's definitely the activity one. Overactivity.

I don't have that issue, but— and I don't have performance chasing. I do like stick to what I know and I've, I've always done that. And I do refuse to sell losers. I get emotional about like the things that I like.

Right. Let me ask you this. You sold The Hustle 6 years ago, 5 years ago, what was it?

February of '21.

All right, so let's call it 5 years. Has that performed well? Because obviously you've got a huge slug of capital. Have you doubled in the 5 years? Are you like—

well, uh, assume that 80% went into the S&P 500. Yeah, it's double. Uh, is it up 75%? Yeah, I think the S&P— I mean, just whatever the S&P is up, 80% of my portfolio is up that amount, right?

And I'm curious how you feel. You know, Howard Marks came on and he said, hey, the S&P 500 right now is a bad bet. And so here's— you got a guy who's whatever, 900 years old, who's got all of the experience and all of the knowledge, and he says— as he comes on our podcast and says to our face the S&P is a bad bet right now, and he says it's because it's valued at, you know, 23 times PE ratio, whatever it is on average. That was, uh, in August that he came on, and he said, you know, the, the 10-year History tells us, the data tells us that the next 10 years will fluctuate between -2% and 2% when the S&P, when you buy in at this valuation, is it like, yeah, sure, but here's my counterargument. Or is it just like la la la la la in my ears? Is it just, I don't know enough, I'm just not going to worry about it, like for peace of mind? Like, what was your reaction to that?

So just, I went into the math just so you know, the market's up 12.5% since he said that.

Yeah, he's like 10 years, right? So it's not like a 5-month thing.

When he says that, I think I don't, I don't care. I think I know that, like, I study America, I study history. History will probably continue to repeat itself for a while I'm alive. And if I'm— I think America will continue to exist. But the S&P 500 at this point is not an American index. It's a global index. And so I just think that it's just going to keep on going. And I am chasing 8% nominal return every single year. And if I get that, which I feel quite high that I will, that I will, that I am very happy. And that fits within my personal plan that I set out when I was— when I— before I sold the company.

I study history. He's saying the history shows that it's not just 8%. It depends what your entry point valuation is, which makes sense, right? Obviously.

But what— but, but he— but he didn't say that it's not going to be that way for the next 50 years. What I'm looking at is You're just saying like longer time horizon, longer than just a decade.

Yes.

What I, what I look at is to where I'm 100. Basically, when I was 21 years old, I set a target where I want this amount of money while I'm 30. And if I get that amount of money at the age of 30, that will grow 8% a year, which means I can spend this amount on my life and I could still have X, Y, and Z, which I can leave or give away. And I just don't think that what Howard Marks says, which if he is right, it won't break that plan. And as long as that— as long as 8% per year over 40 years on average, as long as that happens, which I believe it will, then I am happy.

I love that. If you wrote like a book on investing and you like open it up, it would just be like, 'Murica would be like the first page, right?

The S&P 500. So now, is Apple an American company? Of course not.

Yeah, it is. It's a very—

Toyota, a Japanese company? Of course not. They make Toyota here in America. You know, I lived in Tennessee nearby the Nissan plant. Like, it's all there.

If a company is, uh, headquartered here, vast majority of employees are here, vast majority of revenue is here, vast majority of profits is here, it's for all intents and purposes, it's an American company. Whether that number's not 100%, but is it 60%, 70%? It's still a majority.

I just don't know what that means to me. Like, you just said a lot of words that to me were vague. If the profits are here, if the—

Matt, who's buying the iPhones, right? Like, where are the— I don't know if the answer is majority. Let's ask Claude here. So 43% of total revenue comes from American sales. Uh, 54% of the like operating income.

Okay, so let's just say half on both accounts-ish, give or take 10%. I don't know. Is that an American company?

I think we're both right. I think it's half.

When you sold, what percent is it up based off of whatever you did with that, which I don't know what you did with it.

My net worth is up, uh, 40 times or something since we sold, right? It's up a lot. But the problem is a huge percentage of that, probably 70% of that came from companies we started or we own and not like, oh, I'm a good investor in the public stock market. So, you know, I don't know.

Do you consider private companies to be part of your net worth?

Yeah, of course, dude.

I don't calculate, but I don't say liquid net worth, right?

I have liquid net worth. That's one. Whenever I do my, like, every 2 months when I just feel like I need more money, and then I go, okay, let's go see how much money we actually have.

Let's go see what's going on.

I go and I calculate liquid net worth and I calculate the illiquid net worth. I look at them separately because, like, the illiquid one, like, that one thing can go wrong in 2 of these businesses and that could get wiped out, right? Like, and go— it can go way down. Like, our e-commerce business was a much bigger percentage of net worth, but it's gone down because that business hasn't performed as well as the other businesses. Because when tariffs hit and, you know, consumer sentiment has changed and our margins shrunk a little bit, like, you know, hit a little bit of a plateau, like there has been changes in that. So, okay, we have to mark that down internally of like how much we think that's worth. We thought it was worth X, now it's worth a little less than X.

Okay. Um, what was your topic?

What I want to talk to you about is a couple of business ideas that broke my brain. And these come from the YC Request for Startlists. So if you don't know YC, the most successful accelerator, invest, early stage investor in the world, in the history of the world. They helped seed Airbnb and Dropbox, and they were the first investor at like a $2 million valuation in these like, you know, $100 billion companies now. Great. So they every year release these Request for Startups. And for— and I've been looking at these lists for like 10 years, right? And most years it's kind of like you just nod along. You're like, oh, okay, cool.

No, they do it every semester, every quarter. They have fall, summer, spring, winter.

Right. And they used to do it a little bit less often. And it would be things that were like, hey, better software for lawyers. Hey, somebody should make a, a tool that helps this person do this. It is normal sounding businesses.

Well, some of them are not. Some of— one of our 3 years ago was A way to end cancer.

Like, okay, so, so over time they've been getting progressively more— I don't know if you want to say like ambitious or just, uh, impressive or like, you know, just sort of breaking my brain. So the one I want to talk to you about the most, which I think you have a bunch of ideas around, but I have, I have 3 that I want to talk to you about. I'll start with a fun one and then we'll go to the most brain-breaking one at the end. Fun one is this. This isn't on their list, but it came from one of the X, Y, Z guys, Daniel Gross, who's great. He's talking about aesthetic data centers. And so there's this problem right now in the world where, uh, we need way more data centers and we need way more power in order to like, quote unquote, win the AI race. And the problem is that most Americans actually hate AI. It's crazy. Like they use AI, but they hate AI. They don't like AI. They don't like what's— where it's going. They don't like the big tech companies. It's like all the big tech backlash is just like ratcheted up for some reason. If you go read like the TikTok comments about anything about AI, it's unbelievable. People really do not like AI. They don't like AI art. They don't like AI music. They don't like AI, you know, productivity. They don't like data centers. They think it's taking their— it's going to increase their power bills. It's going to like use all their water. There's all kinds of different things, even though the data would say the opposite, right? Like, you know, golf courses use 100 times more water than data centers, but nobody's out here like protesting a golf course. And so there's this problem, which is that these big companies need to build data centers, but the towns all have this sort of like, not in my backyard mentality when it comes to data centers. So somebody brought up— Daniel Gross brought up this idea. He's like, I think that we need to— if we look at these data centers, the spend is so high to build them, right? We're talking like billions of dollars to build one. The incremental extra to make it like architecturally beautiful or interesting or like something that helps the— like, feels good in the neighborhood type of deal. Is very small and we should really be considering this. And I just thought this was like a really interesting idea I had never thought about. I thought you, as a man of style, history, and culture, would appreciate this, um, that there's probably some historical, like, uh, comps to this that I don't know about that you might be able to think about where companies sort of figure out how to like almost like create a public good or create public art in a way to like, yeah, almost like corporate wash their like agenda?

I can give you a great one.

Yeah.

So, John Rockefeller, he was sort of like the Jeff Bezos of the 1920s. He started Standard Oil, which by the time he was 50 years old, it was the largest company in the world. So large that Teddy Roosevelt became a monopoly buster and the Non-Monopoly Act in America was created because of him. So he had this really bad energy about him where people thought he was just like, you know, Scrooge McDuck type of guy. Well, he also was part owner of a mine. I think it was in Colorado. And they were basically, Standard Oil was so big, they needed to do, uh, create their own mine in order to get the chemicals they needed to make the ovens for the, um, to make the, you know, to make all their shit. Anyway, John D. Jr. was the predecessor. He was the son of John, uh, Sr. And he takes over the company. And he's a, he's a good guy. And he's, John D. Sr., he actually was a good guy as well. But he goes to his son, he's like, I need you to figure out how to do good in this world and like bring our name back and do what's right. Well, Junior goes to this mine and he sees that like tens of thousands of workers are living in squalor. It's horrible. And the reason he goes there is because I believe that there was a flood. Um, and like 200 people died in this little crappy mining town, which is basically a company town. And John Jr. goes there and he's like, this is horrible. I can't believe we let this happen. I see why you guys died. This is, this is garbage the way you guys are living. I feel so bad. We have to do something about this. And he does do something about it, but his reputation is truly harmed. Well, the Great Depression happens in New York City. A lot of jobs get screwed up and a lot of blue-collar workers go on— are furloughed and just laid off. And he's like, we got to do something. And he comes up with this idea with this for an architectural project, and he builds this massive tower in Midtown New York City. And he's like, we're going to make this amazing. It's going to be one of the greatest things ever. And we're going to employ like 10,000 people. We're going to revitalize the city, and that is Rockefeller Center. And Rockefeller Center is a huge tower surrounded by smaller towers. And in the, in the beginning, or sorry, in the, the, the courtyard, there's a man lifting up the world. It's like supposed to be like Atlas, you know? And he was sort of like, this signifies what we're trying to do. We are trying to take like the bad in this area, in this era of time. We're going to try and make this amazing. So John D. Rockefeller is an example of someone who has done what I call reputation laundering. He, uh, like, he, he took something that was bad. And so John D. Jr. actually has a great reputation, and a lot of people believe it's in part because of Rockefeller Center.

That's a great example. Um, I asked AI also for some other examples of this, and, uh, it talks about one funny example that I didn't know about was when cell phone, um, towers were needed, like, everywhere, right? Like, phone, phone towers. People didn't like these ugly steel towers that were put up. So they created, um, have you ever seen a monopine or a monopalm? It's basically a cell tower that is like a Halloween costume.

Sick.

It looks like a palm tree or a pine tree at the top. They just like fake put like bark, they put fake bark and fake branches and fake, fake plastic, you know, pine needles so that it looks like a tree and not like a ugly steel thing. Uh, and that's how they got through and building out the infrastructure needed. Another example, was, um, Carnegie. So Carnegie obviously had Carnegie Steel, and then he built 2,500 libraries, uh, across America while, while running Carnegie Steel. And it served as like, you know, a, a good to each of the communities. And this is while like there was like huge strikes happening because like they had pretty brutal labor practices with Carnegie Steel.

He was such a hypocrite. He was like, I'm gonna do all this good stuff for the world, but he had this famous quote where he would say if you watch the cost, the profits will follow. And for him, the biggest cost was workers' costs. And he was known for being a kind of a jackass when it came to workers.

And so, and so I think there's, I think this is something very interesting that I would predict is going to happen. I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know if it's like park spaces or if the, if they're going to design the actual data centers to look like the bird's nest or whatever. I don't know what they're going to do, but it does seem like they're going to have to do something.

It totally can be done. Have you been to the Paramount in Oakland, the theater where I used to host my event? Do you remember how beautiful that is? That's from, um, the 1930s. But like up until like the 1950s, I would say before, uh, like right before the end of World War II, a lot of these buildings were gorgeous. I live in the Upper East Side of West, uh, New York City. And the architecture from any— they call it a pre-war building. They're absolutely gorgeous. And so I just, I don't know why like this minimalism took place where like it's things a lot more plain, but I, this is a great idea.

Shout out to David Perel and Cultural Tutor, who are, who are on a crusade right now to bring beauty back, uh, to the world. And so if you haven't seen, go watch their, uh, go, go look up Cultural Tutor, uh, I think on YouTube and watch the, the sort of the stuff they're putting out. It's got millions of views. People really resonated with this, like, why does everything look the same and why does everything look so bland now? Um, I would have never guessed that that would touch such a nerve. but it definitely does. They have found like something that the, that people resonate with a lot and they're building like a whole, like, I think they're doing like a movie on it or something like that. They're doing something cool with that. All right. Can I give you two of these other ideas that kind of, uh, broke my brain a little bit? So one is the company brain. I think you've been thinking about this.

I do it now. We have it now.

Um, there's, and there's a bunch of different ways to take this. So what does this mean? So there's two ways to take this. I'll just describe the first one, the one that's more interesting to me. Today, AI is seen as a very smart assistant. So it's someone you go to when you have a question and it'll go fetch you the answer. It's somebody you go to when you have a task and you delegate the task and it'll try to do the task for you. So it's kind of like this junior— everybody gets a chief of staff, everybody gets an assistant who's smart, always on, and doesn't talk back. Fantastic. And that's what I think the mental model most people have of how AI is going to work. And some people sort of see it as like, oh, it'll be like you'll have digital employees. Like, oh, we'll probably hire fewer people because they'll just be like kind of these workers, these AI workers, these guys in the coal mine just digging for us. Ah, this is so great. We're going to have so many, we're going to have so much productivity. And I think actually it's going the other way, which is, um, It's not that the AI works for us, but that we work for the AI. Um, and people are gonna hate that sentence, but let me just describe what that means. Um, AI is very good at understanding a broad set of information, having eyes and ears everywhere, reading everything, knowing everything, and making decisions. Today we use it as the sort of junior employee, but it does seem like the way this is going is that AI becomes the boss. Jack Dorsey is probably the most vocal about this right now. So he laid off tens of thousands of people at Block. And I think he's trying to like change the way the, the, you know, like the org structure looks inside of a company. And I, I believe maybe I have this wrong, Sam, you can correct me if I'm wrong. I believe what he's saying is basically that the AI is the brain and the rest of us are giving context to the brain. So we're out there, we're trying to feed it the right information so that it can make the right decisions. And then we go do tasks and those tasks also produce information that comes back to the brain. The brain sort of knows everything that's going on in the company, can weigh all the different factors and can make awesome decisions at high speed with less bias, with less fatigue, with less stress than the rest of us. And, um, it does seem like this is the way that things are going. I could say this only just from my own use, which is I started out very much in a, hey, go do this, or hey, tell me this type of mode. And more and more I basically say, hey, can you ask me questions? I'll give you some answers. Then you— can you help me make this decision? Hey, can you tell me what the right move is here? And it's very good at doing it, right? And so the question is like, are companies going to work this way? And I'll give you one last story that's on top of this. So I don't know if you remember, but a few months ago there's this research arm called Citrini that put out this research, that put out this, this blog post. And the blog post basically described this, um, sort of almost like a bit of a doomsday scenario. Basically what they described was that you're going to get all this productivity from AI, which means you're going to have fewer people working at these companies. So you're going to have less people earning wages, which is what you need, because the wages of one person become the spending in the economy, which becomes the wages of the next person. And so when you have fewer employees, then you have fewer wages. And when you have fewer wages, you're gonna have less spending. When you have less spending, you have less revenue. And we have less revenue, then you're going to tighten the belt even more and cut more staff. And it creates this downward spiral. And maybe they said it smarter than that, but ultimately this was the, the sort of conclusion that they had of how you might get this productivity gain and it still might result in the economy going down. This, I don't know if it triggered or created or maybe just coincidentally, there was a huge sell-off in the stock market. Like the stock market went down like a huge percentage on the back of this because people got pretty worried about what's going to happen in the US economy. Because again, the S&P 500 is an American index. All right, let's go back. So, so, so you, you hear this and you're like, wow, that's pretty bad. And basically they wrote this thing. It was kind of depressing for everybody.

I asked AI to summarize it in 3 sentences. Imagine that the bulls are right and that AI works exactly as everyone predicts. That's precisely what breaks the economy. The white-collar jobs get gutted, displaced workers earn far less, consumer spending collapses, and the productivity gains flow entirely to the owners of compute rather than circulating throughout households.

Right. And so there's a big market sell-off. Everybody gets mad at Citrini. People, whether if you agreed with them, you got mad at their conclusion. If you disagreed with them, you got mad at them for spreading, you know, doom and gloom.

And they, I imagine, were short, right?

I'm not sure. They sell the research. So I don't think they, they sell the research. I think they might have like a capital arm, but it's like pretty small if I remember correctly. It's like it's not a huge thing. So then A few months later, they go viral again, and this time it was for the Analyst Number 3, where they basically, they sent a researcher out to the Strait of Hormuz. This guy went on this, like, you know, Jason Bourne mission, and he sneaks across the border of Oman, and he bribes this guy to take him out in a boat into the strait, and he tries to collect first, first-party data. And he says, oh wow, look, um, it's not open or closed, but it's functioning as a bit of a toll route where if you, if you are from the right country and you pay the right bribe, you get through the strait. It's not fully closed and it's not fully open. And they found this and they fed that information back and people again got mad at them and they go, look, first you got mad at us for telling you that the white-collar jobs are going away and then you get mad at us when we show you the only types of jobs that are going to be left, which is basically feeding real-world information and context back into the, into the engine. And that's what the future of analysts look like. It's not guys sitting at spreadsheets because guess what? The AI is much better at sitting there looking at a spreadsheet, reading every earnings report, listening to every earnings call on earth simultaneously and coming up with the right decision. It's going to far outperform an analyst. So what does an analyst need to do now? You better be in the field getting better information, higher quality first-party data to give back to the AI so it can make a better trading decision. That's what an analyst is going to be. And I just thought, oh, that's really interesting how that, like, the reframe of like what a job was and what a job is going to be. And then, you know, what does that look like across other jobs? So I just find this whole idea of like the company brain, the AI brain is basically the AI management software.

What, um, Jack Dorsey, I think he originally said this on Brian Halligan's podcast, and I think he said what you're describing is the way that you previously and I previously used AI, when a lot of people are doing it this way, is you are the human and you are in a circle and there's nodes connecting to you and you are this decision maker. And the AI machines and agents are feeding you new information to help you make the right decision as the CEO, right? As the CEO or business owner or project manager. And what they're saying is that's all wrong. The AI should make the decision and the humans should be around the AI and the AI should be the company brain. And all we are doing now, we are the line, we are the nodes. We are just giving it new information. And in some ways the AI is making the decision but also going to execute. Or we will be in charge of the execution, but the AI is the thinker, not us. And the reality is, is I believe that, except that humans will have editing capabilities.

Sure, sure. Yeah, it's not all, not all one or the other. That's a pretty brain-breaking concept to me, because it's just so— it just flips the model, the world model upside down of how I thought the world works and would work.

So do you use anything for this? I use Victor. I have no connection to these guys. It's getvictor.com. VIKTOR, and it like connects to all these tools. And in Slack, everyone at my company just asks the information.

I don't use any of those because I don't trust them. I'm kind of waiting to see kind of how this plays out. I try not to give startups like too much information because startups are just like super leaky buckets in general. And I, you know, I've been inside startups and you could just like, you know, some random employee can see everything and, and, you know, they're not super concerned about security because they don't know when they're, you know, they're just trying to grow is generally how things go. No matter what they say. Like, I remember once I used some, like, telehealth thing and our buddy Sihiva was like, bro, whatever, whatever you got, everybody at that startup now knows what you got. He's like, you, what do you got? You got a fungus? They know you got a fungus. You got a, you got a virus? They know you got a virus. Whatever you got, they know. And I was like, he's so right. You just have to assume that that's true if you're going to use a startup's product.

Dude, every once in a while I'll, uh, I'll buy something from a company like a— and like the other day I bought shoes from someplace and they emailed me, the founder did, and was like, oh, I love your podcast, so I'm thankful that you shopped here. And I was like, you're trying to treat me nicely and that's wonderful. But what if I was buying a cream? You know what I mean? Like, I wouldn't— I don't want you to do this.

I meant medium, not extra large.

All right. What's the other one that you like?

Um, the other ones I would say are the scary ones. Uh, so one here is like drone swarm defense. So they, they talked about the story I hadn't actually heard about, which was that the Iranians sent a small shitty drone swarm and took out an AWS data center that didn't have like drone defense protection. They just blew it up. And they're like, yeah, that's going to happen more. And we need a defense for low-cost drones. And what they talked about was like the US military is almost built wrong. Like, I forgot what the name of the, whatever the missile is that, but like, we basically send like $2 million missiles to knock out $200 drones. And like, that's just, they're going to make that trade every day. They're like, great, exhaust yourself. That's expensive for you and it's cheap for us. And so just this idea of like, wow, war is really going to change. And then you've got, you got like Anduril and others trying to build these like defense systems. And there's many companies like this that many startups that are in this field. But it just reminded me there's going to be a lot of these like Anduril-type companies because it seems like the nature of war has changed. And like all of the— if you go look at like the decorated generals that are buying, you know, that lead our stuff, like, I wonder if that's the right person, you know? And I mean that in the most respectful way possible. But like, if you fought a war and you— what you know about war is from a completely different tech thing, like you're going to be obviously playing catch-up. And I'm sure they are. I'm sure they're asking all the right questions and trying to get up to speed. But it's almost like Ender's Game in a way where you kind of need, uh, people who have a bit of a blank slate and can think from first principles, like, where are the attacks going to come from and what are they going to look like? Um, and like, you know, people who grew up more on video games and less on the battlefield, right? Because it's, it's going to look more like cyberhacking. It's going to look more like drones than it is, you know, Braveheart.

Karp, the Palantir guy, put out this like, um, 21, like, rule or his manifesto. And like, one of the rules was that, um, or one of the points was that, uh, Silicon Valley should, um, be more involved in, like, with the US military, the US government. It's kind of crazy now that, like, the nerds are going to be involved like that. It's, it's just this really, like, interesting cultural shift now where it's, the nerds are into, like, the government and, like, defense tech. That's a very strange— I'm very curious how that impacts things.

Well, the reason I bring it up is just because sometimes, like, the ground moves under your feet. And I remember feeling this when I moved to Silicon Valley. And I think I was pretty dumb. And I guess I was— I had read about what just worked and I was like, that's the thing to do. And of course, like, you know, Peter Thiel famously even said, he's like, the next Mark Zuckerberg won't build a social network. The next interesting things are going to be— look not like the last wave of interesting things because the opportunity space keeps moving. These windows are opening and closing and the The opportunities move. And so I remember working on one batch of ideas that sounded really good based on what had happened in the last 7 years. And then all the new things that popped off looked nothing like that. So if you, you know, uh, like just as a kind of like a before and after, you know, the befores was sort of like the Facebooks, Twitters, uh, Dropboxes of the world. Those were like the winners. And then the next wave of winners was Airbnb. It was like renting out your couch to strangers in the real world, like marketplace, and Uber was a real-world marketplace, and Lyft, and there was— that's what worked, was this like thing that looked nothing like it. And you had to go city by city. The winners had to play by a different playbook, right? The people who were good at it, they would go into cities and they would bootstrap, like, how do we get— how do we put free donuts out here to get the drivers to come? And then we're going to incentivize the drivers, and then that— we're going to do that. We're going to throw parties in every city in order to get this thing to work. You had to be good at that playbook, which was so different than the playbook that you needed right before that. And then that wave ended and all of a sudden it's about crypto. And it was like, oh, the people who got rich were the people who really understood like what money even is and like what fiat currency is and what's going on with, you know, what is the double spending problem and cryptography. And then crypto had this wave and it looked absolutely nothing like it because Bitcoin wasn't even a company. It was like, how do I invest in that? It's like, well, you buy the currency. It's like, well, I had no idea how to even become successful in this because the game had changed again. And then with AI, it seems like the game is changing again. And, and, and so, um, I think with AI, the reason I bring up this kind of this idea of like the using AI as the company brain or the management tool for the, for the company, because that sounds so unfamiliar that it's sort of my, my spidey sense says, hey, maybe the game, maybe the, the floor is moving again and the opportunity has moved over here. Um, similarly with, with hard tech or like, you know, defense tech. This was something when we moved to Silicon Valley, nobody would do. Um, and, and if you did, you seemed like a sort of callous in a way. And then Palmer Luckey made defense cool.

If you like would just show up at a meetup or like, I remember people showing up at a startup wearing a suit and tie because they didn't, they were either like a potential customer or they didn't understand the nomenclature or they didn't understand the culture. And I remember they would, we would joke about it and they would have to explain like, oh, I don't, I just did this on accident. I don't actually work for the government. Or, you know, like, I was like, are you a cop? Like, it was like a joke.

It's like 21 Jump Street.

Yeah.

As a narc.

Uh, yeah, but now it's different.

Now, uh, so now I think it's the hardware, it's the robotics is obviously like massive. I think all of the war stuff is massive. I think, you know, crazy AI stuff. So it's just, it's just clear to me that the, the, the ground has shifted again. The ground has moved and that the things that are going to be really interesting in the next 10 years, they're not going to, and, and by the way, this also just happened with the AI labs. It's like, oh, it turns out the best startups in the world, whether you're investing or joining or starting. Was to create a, you know, the first one was a nonprofit research entity for artificial intelligence, OpenAI, right? And Anthropic. And like, these were the big winners. They looked nothing like the winners of the last generation. It's like open source nonprofit. What? Like, what does that even mean? And that was the thing to join, right? That was the thing to start. That was the thing to invest in. Like when we were in Silicon Valley, how many people do you know that were investing in, working on, starting a research lab. Zero. Zero. I never met anyone that did that. They didn't hear those two words together. That sounded like something they're supposed to do in university for science. Like, I didn't understand even what that was. So you have to be really attuned to the shifts if you want to be a part of the big waves.

Do you want to, um, wrap up with this AI personalized medicine one? Intelligent agents are enabling a new level of personalization in medical care. We can now use an agent harness like Claude Code to analyze personalized health data whether that be a diagnostic test, a scan, EHR data, or wearables that are highly accurate and user-specific.

So do you know who, you know, Nat Friedman is, right?

Yes. Yeah.

He, he was telling the story. He did a great talk.

Is he a YC guy now or no?

I don't know what his story was. He did a startup, got acquired by Microsoft. Then when Microsoft bought GitHub for like whatever billions and billions of dollars, he became the CEO of GitHub and he famously like kind of like turned it around in a way like really like injected a lot of life into that company and people really like praised his tenure there. So then him and Daniel Gross go and they start investing in AI stuff. Uh, they created like a, like a small fund for AI. They got into a bunch of interesting companies. Then they joined, uh, Ilya when he left OpenAI to start his new, like, whatever lab is competitive to OpenAI. Then Facebook tried to buy that thing for like, whatever, $30 billion pre-product, pre-anything. And Ilya said no, but Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman were like, we'll go. You still got two seats in that car? Because we'll go. And so now they run the Meta, like they're like one of the brain trust of like the Facebook, Meta's AI program. Okay, so him and Daniel Gross are there. They run like the super intelligence program. So, okay, that's a long story. So he was telling, he's on, he's on stage and they were like, tell him how you're using like OpenClaw. And he tells a story. He's like, yeah, um, all right, this is going to sound weird. But here's something I did. He's like, so I gave Claude Code like all my genetic data and my blood test data. And I was like, analyze this. And it's like, okay, cool. Like genetically, here's what you— blood test. It seems like you're— it basically was like, you're dehydrated. We think you're like chronically dehydrated. Um, and that's showing up in all these like symptoms or these like, these, these signals are telling us that you're probably dehydrated. So he was like, he tells Open Claw, he goes. Okay, do whatever you need to do to make me not dehydrated, which is like hilarious if you've ever heard of like the paperclip maximizer problem where you like basically like you end the world by giving it this like you give it a like do this at all costs and it like, you know, make more paperclips at all costs and it starts like crushing buildings and cars to generate more paperclips. Like it goes a little too far. So similarly, he tells the open cloth thing, help me be not, not dehydrated. Do whatever you must do. He connected it. So Open Claw is connected in his house. So it has access to all of his TV screens. Uh, it has access to all of his cameras. So it could see him and it could display things to him at all times. It could talk through his, like, you know, his, like, Alexa or whatever to him. It could text him on WhatsApp. It could do whatever. So it's just like, hey, you've been sitting there for 4 hours and you haven't had any water. Um, I need you to get up and go to the kitchen and have a glass of water.

Can't he just put up, like, a Post-it note on the refrigerator door that says, like, drink a glass?

He goes, so I did. So I got up. I went and had water and the camera watched me drink the water and it came back and it goes, good job, I'm proud of you for drinking that water. That's messed up. This hilarious, hilarious thing that's super easy to make fun of, by the way. Like, you know, the jokes write themselves, but these tech nerds have taken it too far. Yes, sure, all true. Also a little peek into what the future is going to be when AI is in charge of running your health, uh, which it will be.

We, uh, we talked about what's the guy's name from, uh, Git— not GitHub— GitLab. Is it GitLab?

Yeah. Um, who cured his own cancer with AI.

I don't know if it's cured yet. Uh, is it cured?

I think it is cured. Yeah.

Wow. Okay. So this guy had, uh, he's a billionaire, uh, Sid. He had cancer and he said, um, I'm going founder mode on my cancer, which is pretty, a pretty cool article. And he has been talking about the journey. I have a friend who has cancer and they got connected and they've been working together. Like, you know, they've been helping each other. My buddy, you— I told you that he was doing this and you asked me how it was going and I was like, well, I don't really ask him. I let him come to me. It's going great. The cancer is going away. It's not gone, but it's like he got great news. And so like—

Through the use of the— what the AI stuff helped him with? Yeah.

Through what him and Sid and a few other guys have done. And like, that's wild. My buddy works in the AI field. I don't want to say too much about his information, but he is— he's an AI professional, we could say. And he's been like, you know, being a nerd and using AI, and he's been helping get rid of his cancer. It's not gone, but it's— he's getting great news every couple of months, which is pretty amazing. So, you know, when everything works out well, we can— we'll like talk about it.

And like, bigger deal, like, shouldn't we all be screaming about this? We've talked about it 3 times on this podcast, but like, seems like You know, like if you watch Sid's thing, it's like in a PowerPoint in a webinar somewhere. It doesn't seem like anyone's paying attention to like what sounds like some pretty incredible stuff. Like the guy who cured his dog's cancer went kind of viral. That's cool.

Yeah, but he went viral where he was like on the Today Show, not like, uh, getting a Nobel, like, you know, prize.

I was actually thinking about the Today Show. That's what I meant. I was like, he was on the— I think he was like mainstream people care about this.

He was on Australia's version of the Today Show, by the way. Uh, it wasn't even the American one. Uh, yeah, I thought you were gonna go for an Australian accent there.

I was excited to hear that.

I, I'll leave the impressions up to you. I can't believe how little of a deal that was made though.

There's that great phrase, which is the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. That feels more obvious today than I've ever felt it in the past, which is, uh, the future is here. People are doing crazy things with AI and it's just not evenly distributed. I'm not doing it there. You know, it's not made its way out to the world yet. There was another thing this, this, that Matt Friedman said that I thought, like, he just said casually that I was like, what? He told the story about, again, it was like, hey, you need to be taking this supplement, this magnesium sulfate, whatever supplement. And he's like, okay, uh, I don't have it. And then it, uh, he was in his self-driving Tesla and he had given it access to his Tesla and he just saw the directions change. There's a Whole Foods nearby and it just rerouted his car His Open Claw rerouted his car to the shop and then he bought it and he was like, whoa, what just happened?

Yeah. Like I am on board with this, but I am on board. I would let, I would let AI control a lot of these things, but you can't do it when you have like a wife.

Maybe there's just a threshold of wealth where it's like, listen, you like all these, this is a good life we have, right? I'm going to have the Open Claw. Like, tell me when to drink water. I'm going to have the cameras on, you know, like I'm going to do some weird shit from time to time because—

for the record, there is not, by the way, there's a, there's a personality threshold. There's no money threshold. It's like, are you willing to do—

I think that there's a number.

There's that. Yeah, there's a, there's like an EQ number. But, but there's definitely not a dollar. There's no dollar sign.

You know, when Elon was on SNL and he goes, you know, I built rockets that can, you know, go to go into space and electric cars that drive themselves. What'd you think? I was just going to be a normal, chill dude? And I thought, like, Socrates, Aristotle, like, that's up there in the quotes for me, the pantheon of like, oh yeah, that makes sense.

If you find a man on top of a mountain, don't assume that he's going to be reasonable or normal. I think that that's fair to say. It's like if you— if there's— if there's a great artist, I don't expect him to show up on time all the time.

Correct. All right, I got to go. I got to get on a flight. All right.

That's it.

That's the pod.

Peace.