The AI Company Everyone Slept On Just Broke Every Record

All right, there's a lot of stuff going on, specifically AI stuff. It feels like every day there's a new crazy story about AI. So I wanted to do a little bit with you, Sam. Crazy AI stories, you know, one crazier than the next. Well, except they get crazier every single story.

I was talking to a friend and he was like, I was trying to talk to my boss about something. And apparently the boss had made like 4 or 5 agents that he calls employees. And the boss replied to the feedback of like, you know, like we need to create X, Y, and Z. The boss said, um, can you talk to my chief of staff about that? And, uh, and so this person had to go and like message the chief of staff and was like messaging the chief of staff. And it like, he, they weren't getting the answer that they wanted. And they go to the boss again and go, hey, your chief of staff sucks. Like, what's, what's their deal? And the boss said, well, can you tell her boss, my head of operations? And so she like, she or he literally had to go to like the boss of the agent to like say, like, can we get this person on a PIP? And this whole boss, this boss of this like 50-person organization was like referring to these people as people and like making his real-life employees interact with them. Have you done anything that extreme with AI and agents?

No, but I find the whole, um, hey, I'm gonna have this entire, like, autonomous company of agents and then me on top thing to be so funny because it's like, who says you get to be on top? Why would you be the all-knowing? If AI is so good that it could do all these jobs, you think it just can't do yours? Uh, like, why is yours so special? And it reminds me of a, What's that like poem where it's like, first they came for the socialists and I did not speak out. And then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out. And then they came for this. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out. That's basically what I think is happening with AI.

I, uh, Andrew Wilkinson came out with this personality test and I took it and it was really cool. And then listen to this. My wife and I did it together because there's like a thing where you could share it with your spouse and then there's one where you could share it with your business partner. So I saw it, told my business partner to do it. And he mistakenly shared the wife version that he, he, and it said that like, it talked about like our sexual compat— like, are we compatible or not?

Wait, you shared the, you and your wives?

My, my, I shared it with my wife and he, I go, Joe, this is cool. Do this. He did this on his own and he was like, oh, I did it with my wife too. It was really fun. And I was like, hey, there's a button that you—

Oh, he shared that back to you.

And I was like, there's a button that you can click and we could see how business partners, how we are compatible. And he mistakenly, he said, He sent me the partner one, which meant love partner, not business partner. And it's supposed to say, but there was another button that said coworker. He meant to click the coworker button. And I'm like, well, good news. We are very sexually compatible. Uh, and so he said that to me, but I have Claude read my Slack and it gives me advice on how to reply to our Slacks based off of each other's personalities. It's insane.

Wow. It's just incredible. I mean, I could see the cynical take. I see it. See it right in front of me. But at the same time, it's something cool, right? So, okay, give me an example. What did it— what did it coach you? What did it teach you differently?

Well, today it was like, you know, Joe, if you criticize the organization because he's the CEO, he's going to react defensively. And that's one of his— like, that's one of his things that he tends to get defensive if you criticize X, Y, and Z. So instead of criticizing it this way, say, my, my opinion is, you know, we should do this instead. And or for me it was like, you know, Sam tends to criticize bluntly, but he doesn't mean it in a mean way. And so like, right, it just has helped us communicate. It's been really effective.

But he does like kisses on the neck.

Yeah. But like, if you see him, just like smack him on the ass and tell him you appreciate him. So what's your first crazy story?

It's a good story. That's amazing. Did you guys just swear, like, to never speak of it or what?

Yeah, I just— I was like, just so you know, you sent it to me. I saw— I saw the letters S-E-X. I knew what it was. I just scrolled right past it.

That's amazing. All right.

If you want to hit your goals, you need a system. And so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing you How I use ChatGPT as a life coach. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals. And the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life. Like, how should I respond to this email? What's the right decision? Things like that. And it's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. We will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes, and I'll show you how I use it. So check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode.

I don't know if you saw this. Anthropic did $6 billion in revenue in a single month last month, which is insane. I just want to put this in perspective for you. I heard this on— I think it was on All In or something. They said this great line. He goes, just to put that in perspective, $6 billion, what it did in February. Is more revenue than Snowflake or Databricks, like two of the greatest software companies of the last 20 years. These enterprise software behemoths that are like multi-hundred billion dollar companies, that's more than their annual revenue. And Anthropic just like messed around and did it in a month last month, which is just insane.

Did you cancel your ChatGPT?

No, dude, I'm a— what of a polyamorous— I'm maxed out on everybody. I got Gemini, I got Perplexity Computer, I got Claude, I got ChatGPT. Give it, give me all the intelligence.

I, I like for years I was like, I, for a year it sounds like I'm saying for years, for a year since ChatGPT has existed, I was like, this is my guy. I'm not going to switch. And as soon as this new version of Claude came out, it's— I explicitly only use that and I use it all day. It's so, it's so amazing.

Yeah. I want to actually do like a survey, like a census data survey to, you know, 10,000, you know, high performers and be like, this is the situation. Which friend do you trust? Who do you trust? Who do you go to? Like, I had a legal question yesterday and I just was like, I'm just going to go to Grok because if I need the right answer here, I need a thorough, rigorous answer. I'm going to go to Grok. Why? I don't know. I'm just— this is all vibes. If I need writing help, I'm like, I go to Claude. If I needed to make something, I go to Claude. But if it's just like quick and easy, ChatGPT is my best buddy, right? So it's like you have these different use cases, but I don't know if I'm completely alone in that and these are made up arbitrary strengths and weaknesses that I've sort of, uh, picked up, or if everybody's feeling this way. That's actually pretty interesting.

So what's funny is people talked about Claude to me forever and Anthropic, and I didn't know what it was.

By the way, let's put a survey— we'll put a survey in the bottom of the show notes. I want to see how people use AI. It'll be like 5 questions or something, and I want to know which tool do you trust for this situation, and I want to see if our audience mirrors me and you's own usage, and we'll send it— we'll share the data next time.

I thought Claude was like the second, third, fourth place. I thought it was like a joke, but I was wrong.

As per usual, I am the joke. It's just like how I normally feel about these things.

Yeah. Like, I, you know, I thought that like Anthropic, I was like, you know, that's just like, that's like using Yahoo. What the founder is he? Did he work at ChatGPT or is he just a guy? He's just a brilliant guy.

Yeah, he was like one of like the core 4 or 5 people at, at OpenAI and he left.

Oh wow. Okay. And how much do you think that company worth? So 6 times 12 is 72. So they're doing $72 million billion in revenue. Okay.

AI over there.

All right.

AI. That was a quick little 6 times 12. I like that.

Yeah, no big deal.

They're currently valued like at $400 billion.

That's a steal. Shockingly, right?

By the way, other great news. I am now officially an investor of OpenAI and I'm trying to get into Anthropic too. But, uh, I, you know, at the low, low price of $800 billion, have invested in OpenAI. Call me a genius.

Congratulations. What, uh, who's this guy? His name is Dario. Is there anything interesting about him, or is he just a genius?

I know what you're asking, which is, you know, that's like between you and me. That's kind of like, does he also have a weird hobby? Did he have some strange upbringing? Was he a child prodigy? That's kind of what you're asking for. I'm sure he's a very interesting guy. I don't know of any of those. Things that we really like about people.

I don't know if he has any of those, you know, just a typical genius. Okay.

He did say a pretty interesting thing. So they're growing so fast, right? So they basically, he said they've grown revenue 10x every single year for the last, whatever, 3 or 4 years. So it was like $0 to $100 million, $100 million to $1 billion, $1 billion to $10 billion. And now they're basically going $10 billion to $100 billion is the current, like, jump that they're making. And this, you know, doing $6 billion in a month is indicative of that. And he was like, you know, the crazy thing is I have to invest in servers, right? So I have to like buy inventory, essentially. It's like a clothing brand. I have to buy all these chips and these servers and these data centers. And he's basically being seen as like a wuss because he's not going out there yelling like, I'm going to do a trillion-dollar data center like OpenAI. Sam Altman's doing that. And he pointed out on Dwarkesh's podcast, he goes, the weird thing is like we're like one of the most successful companies ever, but If I'm wrong, like if I bet wrong on that, we'll go broke. He's like, so if I bet, if I bet on another 10x, but we only grow 5x in a year, we could go bankrupt. And so he's like, it's a very strange situation that I have to keep like being conservative, even though we have the most explosive growth and they're sort of limited on that. But now they're like the number one app in the App Store, uh, on, on Google and Apple right now, I think. Um, and so they're just growing incredibly fast.

To put this in perspective, when you and I were 22 growing up in San Francisco, like trying to like make it big, the golden standard was triple, triple, double, double, meaning your revenue needs to triple and then triple again and then double and then double. And that is how you build a once in a generation company.

Now you were the winner if you were on that trajectory.

And now it's 10x, 10x, 10x, 10x. It's just a— it's just we're not even in the same ballpark. So it's kind of hard to fathom.

Yeah, yeah, it's great. The bar has raised. All right, next story. You probably saw this. This is going viral on Twitter everywhere.

Amazing.

Man uses AI to cure his dog's cancer. And, uh, the short story is there's this Australian entrepreneur who basically was like kind of like a data nerd. So his dog had, uh, like a bump on his back, I believe. And he, you know, it was kind of like, well, there's nothing you can do. And so he said, well, We sure about that? And he decided to enter the high-agency Olympics and manually go cure his dog's cancer. And so I think what he did was some version of the following. He's talking to ChatGPT about like what he could potentially do. That gives him an idea, which is to sequence the DNA of the tumor versus the DNA of his other cells. And the idea being, if you extract the DNA of the tumor cells, there's some mutation that's causing the growth. And then you take his normal cells and other part of his body, or maybe it was a prior year or something like that. And you compare the difference, you would see that, oh, this tumor cells has some— this is the anomalous part of the genome that's causing the problem potentially. Which, by the way, he had to like pay for out of pocket. He went to a lab, he was like, hey, can I get one sequencing done for this? And they were like, okay. And they got it under some research purposes. And then he took that and he gave it to— then he used AlphaFold. Which is the Google DeepMind product for predicting protein folding structures. So proteins, we kind of know, we know what the genome is, but you got to know how it's folded up, the shape of it, if you're going to actually like attack it with some sort of, uh, treatment. So then he, using AlphaFold, figures out the shape of the thing. Then using Grok, designs a single-shot custom vaccine, goes to a lab, convinces them to do it. And he says, by the way, in this whole process that the the regulatory was the harder part than actually curing the cancer, like getting the approval where he was able to actually do this. And they would, they would manufacture the vaccine for him.

Approval from the vaccine manufacturer?

Yeah, the vaccine manufacturer needed to know, like, you don't get to just like, you know, you and I can't just go and make vaccines. So there's protocols in place to make sure that people aren't like manufacturing, you know, whether it's viruses or self-treatments that could do harm and whatnot. And so they were able. And then so he, as he was doing this, someone who who already had the ethics clearance to do research on pets, heard about what he was doing, and they— he kind of used their umbrella to get the vaccine made, gave the vaccine, cured his dog. Legend. Paul, you're a legend.

I have a friend who has cancer and he actually works at OpenAI. I tweeted about this. I was like, I don't— I don't particularly know why he wanted me to tweet this, but he was like, hey, I need one of these three drugs and I'm having a hard time getting in touch with the particular person who I can get the drug from. And interestingly, Mark Cuban reached out to me and was like, hey, you know, give me your friend's cell phone number. I'll give him a call and hook— I'm on it. And so did Martin Shkreli. And I was like, well, buddy, you want Batman or you want the Joker?

Yeah.

I was like, I don't— you know, take what you can get here.

Yeah.

And so he did. And, you know, now he's getting what he needs. But I have to imagine he wor— I don't know if I said this, he works at OpenAI. And I'm like, if you're reading this, you have to imagine that this is the next step that you're going to take, right?

Right. Yeah, that's crazy. Is he doing the similar thing? Is he basically trying to self-treat? Like, is he basically using AI tools to come up with hypotheses to then come up with, you know, possible treatments for himself? Like, what's going on? What is your friend doing? That sounds interesting.

I don't ask him. I let him come to me when things are going good. I try not to bring it up too much. This is his second time that he has— he's had cancer, lost his leg, got cancer again. And so I'm like, whenever you need me, let me know. He'll visit my home when he's like at a New York doctor. But I do know that there's this guy named Sid. Sid is the founder of a company called GitLab. Have you heard of GitLab? The, like, you know, like big developer tool, multibillion-dollar company.

Yeah.

So Sid and my buddy became friends because Sid wrote this article called I'm Going Founder Mode on Cancer. And so Sid has the same cancer.

Did Sid leave GitLab to do this or this is like a side thing he's doing?

Well, Sid has the same cancer as my friend, so I don't know if he's left GitLab for sure, but he goes, I'm going founder mode on cancer. And so he's hired this team of doctors and I believe in his article he said they are using AI to do a lot of this stuff. And so my buddy connected with Sid because they had the exact same cancer. So he's using Sid's doctors as well to, you know, it's a fancy concierge cancer doctor and they are going through this journey of like trying to cure this very, very rare, uh, cancer. And so Sid, who's the founder of GitLab, who is a technical company, so, and he's a billionaire, I presume then that like, you know, this is a very special person who could figure out these types of cases. He's actually documenting on his Substack how he's trying to cure his cancer. It's really interesting.

That's amazing. All right, well, we're wishing them the best. That's a— I mean, I feel more hopeful about this sort of thing than ever, right? Like, I think the combination of AI and then on top of AI is, I would say, like the fact that Ozempic and these weight loss drugs seem to have done something that sounded like too good to be true. It's like, well, there is a magic pill for weight loss. Turns out there actually is a magic pill for weight loss. Like, that kind of like is a, you know, breaks a little bit of a mental barrier of like maybe you can just one-shot certain, you know, certain issues or problems that plague huge percentages of people. So I feel more and more hopeful than ever that there's like, you know, new, new breakthroughs, new inflections that would change, you know, how cancer treatment works over the next, you know, 1 to 10 years.

And if, uh, we totally butched the name, botched the name. So if we did, whatever, but the GitHub founders or GitLab founders, butching up your company too. If this makes it to you guys, DM Sean or I, 'cause it would, could be potentially fun if you wanna talk about this on a podcast. It would be actually fun to talk about that. That, that's actually super fascinating. But it is crazy that this stuff still exists. Like when you think about, like, I remember when Livestrong came out and that was like, okay, someone famous finally has cancer when they were young. We're gonna bring awareness to this thing. Like, and now when you think about all the billions and billions of dollars, I think, what's her name, Kate Middleton had it. Like, it is kind of crazy how like this still exists the way it does.

Yeah, yeah, they just needed, you know, you needed the technology and then you needed the sort of the will. Here's another thing that makes me hopeful. And so, Nat, who I think you know Nat well.

Yeah, I'm good buddies with Nat.

So he just tweeted out this really interesting thing. He goes, make $1 million by graduation or get 100% of your tuition refunded. That's the premise of the new high school for entrepreneurs that Cameron and I are launching this fall through Alpha School. We need 2 or 3 coaches to make this happen. So the premise is they're creating a new high school using Alpha School's technology, which we've talked about before, the AI education software that, um, Joe Lamont has put $1 billion into building that is, uh, getting tons and tons of buzz everywhere. So now they're doing a high school based off of it. And the idea is almost like incredibly incentive-aligned, almost maybe too incentive-aligned.

I think it's too aligned.

Too aligned. Make a, make $1 million by high school graduation or your tuition was free. I think Alpha School is like $70K or $80K a year, the kids version that, that's in Austin. So, you know, this is a pretty big bet that they're making. This is crazy. Is this not like one of the crazier tweets?

I thought that, um, so Hermosi talks about nailing the, nailing the offer.

And what he says, an offer, you know, um, they'd be stupid to say, they, they'd be stupid to say no to, right? Like, it would be dumb for me to turn down this offer.

And if you are the type of person where this idea tickles your fancy, where you want your kid to like build something, this is the greatest offer of all time.

I mean, it's crazy. Do you think this is even— I mean, like, are we just old guys who are not up with the times? That, like, is this really possible? High school. So high school, you're 14 to 18 years old. So if I gave even the most switched-on 14 to 18-year-olds, and if I was just coaching them every single day, let's say I had— let's say that me and you had 20 high schoolers.

So he asked to be a coach.

Every day we were their coach. Let's just pretend that that was true. How many of the 20 do you think we could get to make $1 million over the 4-year period? It's not zero, but it's also not 20. What do you think that number is?

One? 4 years?

Uh, 4 is a kind of a long time, actually.

4 years, actually. Most, I think most, right? Well, like in revenue, like, like, like we could create some type of app that buys ads to grow and is not losing money. I I feel confident that I could do that half the time.

I'm going to use the assumptions of there's no external funding that we give where they can go raise money if they want, but we can't give them the money and that it's not $1 million of revenue. Maybe is this—

is that what he meant by make $1 million or did he mean if it's revenue, then, then that's quite a high chance I could do that a lot of the time. If it's profit, that's much, much harder, right?

If it was profit, I think we could probably get 5 out of 20 in a 4-year period. I would guess that we'd have some kind of hit rate around, you know, 20, 25%.

It's pretty magical. So let's talk about why we said it's too aligned. We were joking. I think that this is really good for a very particular type of person, but I do think that optimizing towards entrepreneurship for everyone and glorifying— I think it's over being overglorified. I think that's wrong. I don't think that it should be that way for everyone. I think it should be for a small amount of people that interests you. Just like saying that we should get everyone to play music, we should get everyone to play sports, we should get everyone to be good at accounting. And so I think that this is a bit— I'm not criticizing these guys because they're saying for those interested in this, this is the offer. I don't think that this should be the default for all high schools.

Oh, you feel like in general, the— everybody's got to get on their entrepreneurial grind.

I think that's stupid.

Not the right message because obviously not everybody needs to get on their entrepreneurial grind.

Yeah, I just don't think that's necessary. What were you— what were you saying?

I was saying it's too aligned as in you didn't need to make it a million. You could have got— you could have, you know, what's the real thing? Basically, I would say if you did $100,000, this would have been— I mean, that would still be incredibly successful, right? If you can make, make, make $100 grand or $150 grand or something like that. But of course, that's not the marketing message that would stick. The reason this got onto the show today is because he said a million. So in that sense, it's the absolute right number to choose. A, if nothing else, it is a PR offer. And, you know, I don't know how— I don't know what that does to the business, if that distorts things long term. But like in the short term, you get the big benefit of putting something out there that is buzzworthy. It's like when Peter Thiel did the Thiel Fellowship. And I think what he did was I think he only spent $2 million out of pocket to do the Thiel Fellowship, which $2 million is not nothing. But in the world of billionaires giving money for causes, there's plenty of people who write bigger checks than that. So why did the Thiel Fellowship get so much notoriety? Is because he attached it to a very spiky message. And the spiky message was universities are a bubble. And like the housing bubble and other bubbles, it's, uh, it's a bubble because nobody else thinks it's a bubble. You know, that's the only way you get to be a big bubble is when everybody sort of assumes education's great. How could you? You can't criticize education. Housing's great. Everybody should own a home. You can't criticize that. And, um, what he said was not just, I'll give this to people who have good ideas, but I'll pay you to drop out of college. Literally the opposite of, hey kids, stay in school, right? The old message you're supposed to say. And because it was so spiky, he got tons and tons of notoriety. Because he got tons and tons of notoriety, he attracted the right people because the message got far enough where those, like, you know, the Vitalik Buterins of the world, the Dylan, uh, Dylans of the world who create Figma, they heard the message and were able to apply for the Thiel Fellowship and came in and made it happen. And so I think maybe this, this might be the right approach, like the X Prize, where you have to do something novel and noteworthy and almost polarizing in order to make it work.

So let me tell you a quick story. So on Friday, I went to Austin Reeves' house for dinner and we— or he had over these 8 young guys and I posted a link to who they are in Slack. And so if you look this up, so the New York Post just did an article on these guys 5 days ago and it says these Gen Z digital moguls are building 7-figure companies while lifting weights. So it's basically— I met these guys in Hampton and I met them and I was like, Austin, you got to meet these guys. This is incredible. So we talked about Josh. That's that guy Josh. So Josh, we talked about him. He has that company called Street Talk. You might know Oliver. Do you know Oliver? He had the company called—

Yeah, he had the Tab Chocolate thing. Now he's doing a—

And then that's Seamus.

This is like a boy band that you're talking about. Like, Oliver, Seamus, and Josh.

And then Seamus has highlights.

And then like, you know, Brandon is dating Rebecca. Like, what's going on here?

So listen, it was these, uh, 8 guys. They were all— the eldest one was Oliver, and he was 25, I believe. And they're all these young guys who share an office, and they all started companies. One of them was this guy named Victor.

This guy literally looks like Elon Musk, like young Elon Musk. One of them—

yeah, he kind of talks like him too. One of them raised $140 million for their company. And anyway, it's these young guys, and we had them all at dinner, and I was like, I don't want to sound like an old creepy guy, but you guys are so young, like, can you tell me everything that like 21-year-old entrepreneurs are into? Because when I was 21 and I left school to move I was a freak among freaks. This seems like you guys are way normal for how successful you are.

You might not want to call yourself the freak amongst freaks. It's just generally speaking. As we're talking about 8 young men you had over for dinner.

Yeah, it would get a little Epstein. And so thank God my wife was there and you kind of get away with a lot when she's there. But they were saying that they're like, dude, we are like killing it for how young we are. The 13-year-olds are now coming after us. They're like, the way that— they're like, the way that you are talking to us, like you're in awe of how young and successful we are. We feel that way with 13 and 14-year-olds. He said there's so many 13 and 14-year-olds that we know who we know who are building stuff that is going to be way better than us. It's just crazy how young these guys are who are building amazing things. I mean, we had Zach, Zach on from Cal AI, sold his company for tens or hundreds or $100 billion at the age of 20, I think, uh, 19. Uh, like there's a whole generation of these kids. It's just absolutely amazing. Before it was college dropouts.

We made up that number, by the way. He didn't tell us 100 million.

Uh, I'm making— yeah, sorry, that was— that's, um, yeah, those are some assumptions.

But this line, dude, is so funny. We talk about the problems we're facing— hiring, scaling, girls— shameless— your typical 20-year-old dude stuff. Is this the new Jim Tan Laundry hiring scaling girls?

It's just like crazy. Have you noticed how young some successful entrepreneurs are right now? Before it was like, you know, the very, very rare college dropout Zuckerberg-style person, and that was like a one of one in a million. Now it seems way more common.

Yeah, I told you, dude, I feel like the guy who I'm just a horse-drawn carriage guy, and I've been, I've been driving this route for, for 10 years, and it's a good thing. And I'm standing on the side of the road next to my horse, and then a Tesla Roadster zooms by, and I'm just like, what the hell was that? And that's how I feel when I see, hear, and talk to some of the young, inspiring founders and guys who are doing content, guys who are doing e-com, guys who are doing AI. Like, there's so much energy, enthusiasm, excitement, and talent. That I feel like is unleashed. And, you know, the— by the way, the reason why to me is like pretty obvious. Uh, the information is out there and we're all memetic creatures. So in the same way that like, you know, uh, I'll go to my kids' school function and like half the moms there have like lip filler and Botox and shit like that. And you know why? Because that's become normalized and they've seen it everywhere, right? On Instagram, and then whether it's, you know, reality TV shows or whatever, it becomes normalized. It becomes— you see it once, twice, 3 times, 4 times, 5 times. It starts to become a thing that feels normal and accessible to you. Well, like when we were growing up, there was no Twitter, right? So you didn't have access. I didn't have access. I never even saw— I didn't even know, like, I don't think until I was maybe 18 years old did I even know an entrepreneur. Like I actually had met an entrepreneur who told me that, oh, I have this business and here's like how it works. I'd never listened to a podcast about entrepreneurship. I'd never watched a YouTube video. There were— I don't even know there were podcasts when we were 14, right? I don't think there were. And so it's like when we were 13, 14, 15, 16, right? A pretty formative age. Like the only thing I had exposure to was basically like the NBA or skateboarding or like, you know, these— that was what was the cool thing that you could go try to model and emulate outside, right? Or during your summers or during your— when you got home from school and like, I feel like today, if you go home, you have access to Twitter, you have access to TikTok, you have access to Instagram, you have access to YouTube. And on those platforms, you can get into any rabbit hole, into any niche that you want. And the people who stumble into the kind of like tech Elon Musk bubble, right?

They're going to see this.

It's going to become normal to them. The idea that you can make millions of dollars. People who listen to the podcast where we did with Zach, where it's like, oh, here's this 19-year-old kid who just sold his company. That was doing $30 million, you know, in ARR, that now becomes normalized for a huge generation of people who are then going to do their own version of that. We didn't, uh, have that, that advantage. So I don't think the human species evolves that fast, but I do think if you give it new training data, if you give it new, like, stuff to, uh, to, to be a mime about and just copy, they will do pretty well.

They were talking about, like, dating, and I referenced the book The Game, and they were like, what's The Game? And I was like, come here, son.

It's called the Old Testament.

Yeah, come here, boy. Have a seat on my lap. All right, what's the next one?

All right, uh, I don't know if you saw this. Pokémon Go has one of the, the great pivots of all time. Did you see the story?

I did not.

All right, so if you remember, Pokémon Go was like the hit game. I don't know when this was, like like 19 or 20? Yeah, like, you know, 7 years ago or something like that. It was a huge deal that people get— it was this new style of game. You would take out your phone and your phone would just be on like kind of camera mode. You'd walk around a city and then you would like discover a Pokémon. It would show up like using like, uh, like the kind of the— they would overlay the little Pokémon on, uh, on top of like the street where you were standing.

All right, cool.

So that became like a kind of like a $1 to $2 billion game. I think they sold the game for $2 or $3 billion. Um, because it, you know, had this huge hype cycle, then it kind of died down. Well, there's this really interesting story about the fact that they're now, they now, they sold the game, but they kept all of the photos, the videos. And so what that means is like they had, you know, I don't know, 100 million players or something like that walking around every city in the world with their phone out capturing what the street looks like. And if you think about it, that's actually really valuable data for AI that wants to do not self-driving, but like self-delivery, right? So like delivery bots that are going to go on sidewalks. In through neighborhoods or down city streets and have to deliver something. Well, they need to recognize where am I, what does this look like, what is the terrain, how does this work, etc. And so they took that data and they're licensing it out to all these AI companies now because they're the only ones in the world who have this data. And like, you've heard this kind of like, data is the new oil. That's a little misleading because there's, there's like, there's just oil. With data, there's like very specific, like niche types of data. And so you might have like a specific type of oil that nobody else has. And Pokémon Go, the company behind it, Niantic, has that data for real-world behavior. Like if you, if you've ever seen like, uh, the Google Street View thing, right? Like Google would send out a car with a camera that's rotating on top, taking pictures of everything around it. And they would literally drive every street in the world, essentially was the, was the game plan with Google Street View. And they do it. They did it every like 10 years. Side note, one drove by my house the other day and I got so excited and I went out and I flashed it and I was like, yes, that's internet history, baby. That's the next 10 years. If anyone ever looks up this property, they're going to see my hairy belly out there. I did that shit. I couldn't think of what else to do. I knew it was a moment, but my brainstorm only had 15 seconds. I went Mardi Gras on it instead of doing something useful, bro.

I, I've hated the analogy of data is the new oil because for years and years, you know, people have said this for years, but there was no use for it. And actually, it's actually kind of a good analogy. Did you know that the oil industry existed? You know, John Rockefeller started Standard Oil like in the 1880s, but cars weren't invented really until like 1915, 1918, and they didn't really get popular until like 1920. And so up to like 1915, what was— what did they use oil for? Well, it was actually mostly kerosene. And so like street lamps, you would have someone go and like literally light the lamps in a city and that was enough to make the industry big. And then, you know, they were like doing it and killing it and killing it, killing it. Then Henry Ford created Ford. And I think in 1914, the first Model A— sorry, Model T came about and the oil industry exploded. And what is going on in some cases is kind of like that with AI where like there is data and like, but Data is the new oil, but like there's no use case for this oil. Like, yeah, we maybe we think this is useful, but what are we going to use it for? Now it's like they have finally found like a good place to actually put this oil.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I feel like that's happened now with a few people. They woke up and they're like, ah, what's that under my back? Oh, it's a lottery ticket. And like, you know, that's basically what this is. Uh, we talked about Handshake, that company that was basically a, like a college student internship job board type of products.

It was kind of dumb.

Not dumb necessarily.

It was just fine.

Yeah, it was like not going to be the biggest thing in the world. It was a useful thing, right? Like college grads who want jobs and employers who want to hire like, you know, fresh college grads. And then they pivoted to basically training data where they were like, oh, we have all these students in whether it's, you know, different disciplines who all these AI labs want to pay to do curated training data. So, you know, whether it's a here's, here's math answers. You tell me if the math answers are good. You label whether the answers were good. You give sort of that expert feedback to it, or it's labeling data, that sort of thing. Like, you know, that was, uh, they sort of woke up and, you know, had a, uh, a lottery ticket in their back, I feel. And, and I, and, you know, they had to identify it and they had to act on it for sure. That's, you know, more credit to them. But there's like a number of these companies that turns out were sitting, you know, it's like actually a better, a better analogy is like the people who You know, you buy a home and then you get a knock on the door and it's like, turns out your home was built on top of like an old mineral reserve and you can get paid like far more than the sum of your home to just leave, to just like, to just let us bulldoze this home and, and do this instead. And I feel like that's what's happening with a handful of companies right now because of their unique data sets.

Yeah, I don't know if it's going to happen to a lot, but it definitely is a good example of this happening in a wonderful way. What's the next one?

I don't have much to say about this. Guy uses ChatGPT to sell his house. So Florida man sold his house in 5 days using ChatGPT without real estate. I don't really have much to say about this, but there is a funny Florida man game that I played the other day. Uh, have you ever done the Florida man and then your birthdate?

No.

Well, let's go. What's your birthday, Sam? June 15th. What's that?

June 15th.

So Florida man, June 15th. Um, here's the top story. Florida man pushes pastor, knocks churchgoers to the ground.

What's the second one?

Uh, Florida Man said it's the 30 months for illegally transporting an alien.

That sounds like something I would do.

That's the plot of ET. I'm pretty sure he was a good guy in that. All right, I got, uh, one more here. So have you seen this Karpathy-Jobs thing?

No, but I saw the Anthropic version. But what's the Karpathy one?

Uh, do you know who Karpathy is?

I don't even know who he is, but I know that when people say Karpathy says blank about AI, you're supposed to take it seriously.

He was one of the OGs of OpenAI. Um, he was then poached by Tesla. He ran the Tesla self-driving program for like a decade or something like that. He went back to OpenAI after that. And then now he's just like indie hacker. He's just Peter Levels with like 6 brains instead of 1 human brain. He's just fucking around and he just posts on Twitter like random AI little experiments he's doing. So he made this thing called karpathy.ai/jobs, and you can see this on the screen here. So basically what he did is he took all of the US jobs from the, uh, you know, Bureau of Labor, and okay, so that's 143 million different jobs in the US economy. And then each— the size of the square is how big of a, how big of a part of the US economy that job is. So you could see like registered nurses. There's 3.4 million registered nurses in the United States. Uh, construction laborers, there's 1.6 million. Secretaries.

Okay, so it's percentage by, uh, size by quantity of workers, popularity of— because it says like cashiers is a huge percentage of that, which is insane. So cashiers take 3.2 million jobs. That's wild. That's cool.

Okay, correct. And so, um, then Why is it— what is green and red, right? Looks like a stock market chart. So basically, then he said, had, uh, uh, he took— he told AI to estimate the likelihood that this job is going to disappear based on the capabilities of AI. So based on what the job does and then what AI can do, how disruptible is this job? How at risk is this job? So for example, construction laborers are green because they're more in the safe category from AI because AI today can't do what those people do. But customer service is in red, obviously. And, and so he went through every job in the US market and then you could sort of almost see like how, how turbulent will this be for the labor market? Because you've got how much red are you going to see on the screen? Because if it's going to really disrupt a very, very small niche job, that's not that big of a deal. But if it's going to disrupt, you know, Secretaries and admin, uh, cashiers. I'm surprised waiters and waitresses here. High school teachers. I'm surprised that one's there in red. Uh, kindergarten, elementary is like kind of in an orange state here.

Uh, that's insane. What?

And then he has a caveat. So he says, caveat on digital exposure. So he basically— I said, let me just read the whole thing. So he said, the digital AI exposure option is one example. It estimates how much of current AI, which is primarily digital, will reshape the occupation. but you could do this for any other type of thing like offshoring risk, et cetera. And then, and then he includes even the prompt here. This is a cool little hack project by him on the side. Uh, and he's like, you know, here's, there's obviously a bunch of caveats, which is he's like, software developers scored really high while some people believe, well, dude, AI is doing all the coding now. What does that mean? And he's basically saying, he says, because AI transforms the work, but the demand for software is going to grow as each developer becomes more productive. The score does not account for demand elasticity, latent demand, regulatory barriers, or social preferences for human workers. That'd be like kindergarten teachers, for example. Many high exposure jobs will be reshaped and not replaced. So it's not— the red doesn't mean replaced, but it does mean reshaped. He did another thing that was pretty crazy. He created an auto AI researcher that runs all night. So he basically created an AI that he explicitly programmed to not look for human feedback. So it's like a recursive loop. So it's like Generate hypothesis, do research, create an output, evaluate your own output, give yourself the next direction and go again and give yourself the next direction, go again, give it— it just runs in the background all night just doing its own research. Now it's called Auto Researcher, which is really how AI is going to like— the big leaps from AI are going to come when AI programs the next leap.

Have you become the person where— so like my Friday and Saturday nights, I'm like, I want to learn this stuff. This is so exciting. I'm so locked in. I love this. Like, it could be small stuff. Like, I don't need to use Tableau anymore, you know? Like, I just make my own dashboards in Notion, and I created a script to auto-update it. And like, just all these things where I feel like I have superpowers.

Yeah, I feel like I have superpowers, but I'm like, they're early. You know, when Spider-Man, when he like realizes he could shoot webs, but like really all he's doing is just shoot. He's like, he's like summoning the Coke can to him. It's like, I could just get up, but, or I could just web it to myself. I didn't have to get up from my bed. Like, that's kind of what I'm doing. I'm doing a lot of stuff that feels cool to me and feels like a superpower. But like, does any of it matter right now?

No.

Um, like, still, all the useful stuff is just chat with, chat with ChatGPT, chat with Grok, chat with Claude.

Dude, I've done like really simple stuff where like, I'll be like, make 20 landing pages in HubSpot for when people search X, Y, and Z that are related to my company. That's a very monotonous, boring thing that I normally would have had to do by hand. And it just made it all in 5 minutes. And this is for a lot of people listening. The agency business model just got really interesting now. Like historically, agencies are like a pain in the ass, but they're actually pretty amazing because you don't need to test if there's demand for an agency, right? Everyone needs an agency. Every business hires a lot of agencies. You, you go through a lot because you don't particularly like them. But running an agency has always been a huge pain in the ass regardless of how great of an agency it is. But now it's significantly different. I think that if you own an agency, I think you could take the path of like, my business is over, or you could take the path of like, my multiples are going to go up a significant amount.

My buddy Ramin sent this blog post to just me and Ben, like maybe a year or 2 years ago, and he wrote— it was called Service as a Software. So instead of software as a service, service as a software. And he basically had this thesis. He's like, service businesses have historically had lower margins and lower multiples because two things. One, because it required so many people to do, uh, the gross margins were worse. And two, because it required like skilled people, you couldn't scale it the way you can a piece of code that can just keep running, you know, anywhere in the world. And you know, whether one person is using that code or, $10 million usually doesn't really matter. And he was like, AI seems to have changed this. And he kind of, he called this early and he was like, now services businesses are going to have high gross margins, like 75% gross margins instead of like 50%, 40% gross margins. And he's like, the reason why is because obviously AI is going to make the service company more efficient. With one person, you can do what, you know, 4, 5, 6, 7 people were doing before. And then the second thing is that the more people, uh, have software, like service is going to become more rare. It's going to become more, uh, like it's going to become the harder thing to get. And in addition to that, you have— so not only does it have the higher multiple, but also it'll scale better, right? Because if you're using— the more, the more internal software you have, the more clients you might be able to serve. And so you, you get the scalability and you get the margins. And so he had this idea, and this is exactly what we're seeing. We were talking to a bunch of PE folks and they've all basically shifted budget away from buying SaaS to buying service companies. And they value the service companies like they used to value software companies, which is kind of crazy as a shift to make for somebody who was like ingrained in my mind that like, you know, software is the thing and services are bad, you know? And he was, he was 100% right. Let me show you this thing that I made. All right. So I think I've told you this before, but my brother-in-law who's come on the podcast before, his name's Sanjeev. He, he is one of the biggest owners of retail shopping centers in the country. Owns, I don't know, like some, I don't know what the number is, but like maybe like, you know, a couple million square feet of real estate of retail shopping centers in the country. Probably one of the top 5 to 10 operators. But he, you know, it's like a blue collar type of business as in like, you don't, you know, his job is he does a lot of construction. He does a lot of leasing with brick and mortar businesses. And so he's not hugely exposed to AI. So he, um, he joined like Tiger 21 or something like that. He was at a meeting and he, and they were, he's like, dude, it was all about AI. He's like, I feel like I got to, like, know more about AI. He's like, seems like, you know, I'm— I kind of know about it, but I got to know more. You know, like, seems like I'm probably underinvesting in this. So last night I just did— I did a little demo for him. So I basically went into Claude and I just go, I'm a retail shopping center owner. This is my business. Tell me 10 ways I should be using AI. So it gives me 10 ways. So it's like, here's 10 things you could do. A retail expansion and contraction tracker. Okay. So like, you know, your tenants are these retailers. You could scrape earnings calls, 10-Ks, press releases, trade publications, and flag which stores are opening more locations, which ones are closing locations. And that would create a hit list for your team to go call those tenants and basically be like top of mind for them as they look for new locations. Lease expiration. You have all these leases, right? If you have, let's call it, 50 centers that you own and each center has 30 tenants, now you have 150 tenants that you would have. Each one has a unique lease on it, a unique timetable. You need to know what's expiring and when. Just upload all of it to a folder and it'll tell you what is expiring when. It'll give you notifications and it'll cross-reference that with their public announcements. So, you know, hey, they had a hot quarter, you know, go and look for an expansion of that lease. They're contracting. That's going to be at risk. You should start thinking about possible new tenants to put in. And it gave a list of like, you know, 10, 10 different, things. And then I just said, Cool, give me the prompt to build this, to build number 1, that expansion tracker. So check this out. So then I go and I basically take that prompt, I throw it into the new, I wanted to try the new Perplexity computer. I don't know if you played with this at all, but Perplexity.

Is Perplexity computer just Open Claw?

Yeah, it's like Open Claw, but in their sandbox. Less technical work to start, but it's in their environment. So it built it. So check this out. So it's basically like, check this out.

Is this just a mockup?

No, this is like an active live website now that he can use. So he built this.

But this is not his data, or this is his data?

This is not his data. This, I just said, hey, here's 7 states that I operate a lot in: Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, whatever.

Oh, got it.

So just, and then I didn't tell it anything else. So it went and said, okay, Dollar General is, uh, one of your, is a retailer that's expanding, you know, they're counting, they're going to do 450 new stores. And then you click in and it says, They have— they plan this many new stores for 2026. They're going to do 4,000 remodels, 20 relocations. They currently have 20,000 stores. Here's where they're likely to be expanding. Here's the quote from the source, from the CEO, talking about what they're— what they're going to do.

Right.

Let's go to contracting. You know, Walgreens, they're planning to close 100 stores. They've already closed 500 since 2024. You know, here's like a Macy's one, here's whatever, you know, different, different, different retailers and how they're doing. And then you're like, okay, cool. Now I basically have a hit list of retailers that I can basically have my team focus more attention on, less attention on in terms of getting new leases done or forecasting and anticipating and be proactive about potential vacancies I might have in my centers in the future.

What'd he say when he saw that?

He was like, hey, can we, can we do a call today? And he's like, kind of like, what the hell just happened? Like, I just need to talk to somebody to talk to somebody. Like, I need to see what the— he was like, I'm on ChatGPT. It seems like I should be using some other things. Can you tell me what these are now? And I'm like, yeah, you know, because I've invested millions of dollars with him. And so I'm like, yeah, like, I can just show you a couple of things that I think are going to like, you know, today it's all manual, right? Everything is manual. Everything is gut. Everything is experience. But you can productize a lot of that. And turn it into, you know, competitive advantage for yourself.

The problem is turning it into a competitive advantage. So it's getting someone like him who's smart and successful but not well-versed and being like, oh my God, like everyone feels the same amount of doom and overwhelm. They're like, I know this is important. I don't know the first place where to turn to in order to get help. You know, you and I have Twitter. We could just tweet out, who knows how to do blank? Or is doing blank worth it? Uh, but if you are, doesn't matter how successful you are, but if you're just a guy and you're not locked into this industry or like surrounded by nerds, I don't even know where you would start.

Well, yeah, I think you have to, you have to figure out some proportional investment of education and time to work on this, whether it's, you know, once a week or you do 3 weeks or you hire a consultant or you do whatever you're gonna do. It's one of the reasons I think the biggest opportunity right now, like the obvious no-brainer thing that Anybody who hasn't made it that wants to make it in life needs to do today is to basically go sell AI transformation. So what do you do? You go find business owners and operators and you go, you become an AI expert in your nights and weekends basically. And then you go to them and you sell a no-risk offer to them, which is that I will come and I'll find ways. I will come and do an audit and basically figure out how I can use AI to improve your business. And then you go and you do an audit and you try to figure out how to improve their business and you sell them the solution, the implementation of it. Of, hey, this is what I think I could do for you. I'll do it for you if you pay me this amount. And here's the value it's going to drive for you. And then you do it once with— let's say you do it with one dentist, then you go do it with 50 more dentists and you can literally make millions of dollars doing just that blueprint. That is the blueprint. Like if you remember when social media marketing agency became a thing, there was this acronym, SMMA, and it became this like business in a box that anybody could open up. Which was social media is a big deal. Businesses today don't really understand how to use it. They're using it in their personal life, but they're not using it for their business. Well, anybody in any locale, any niche can create a social media marketing agency and you could basically go to these business owners and say, hey, I'll run your social media for you because they don't know how to do it. They know they should do it and you can bridge that gap. And that became the business in a box. Well, the, what is the business in a box today? It's going and selling, hey, I'm going to use AI to improve your business and you go do that and you should be doing that all around the country.

Over the next couple of weeks, when, when it's just you and I, I want to do an episode on how to develop good taste because what we're seeing online is people saying now that building things is not important anymore because you have a machine that can build it for you. The next most important thing now is how to have good taste. And I have found that piece of advice to be incredibly unhelpful because what is the definition of good taste and how do you develop it? And I've been working really hard on defining it. And I think that we can see this whole— like, I think that there's an interesting opportunity where you can teach people how to develop good taste because I believe you can. Right. And I want to do a whole episode on how to define what does good taste mean, because I believe there's an objective definition to it, which is knowing and speaking the desired language of the, of the, the people or thing that you want to speak about, and then how you learn that language.

I'm all in. I love that. I think that's— that would be super fun to do. And I think, like you said, timely and necessary. And I think most people would agree with the premise that, like, taste matters. It's pretty hard to disagree with that. Taste ever didn't matter. Now matters more, right? Because if AI can produce more stuff and makes it easier than ever to make things, Well, taste matters even more then, right? Because taste is the, is the discernment. It's the decision between good and bad. And so, yeah, obviously it matters more. But I think it's like these, these other soft skills that people don't even think of as skills, meaning you just sort of think you have a certain amount of it and it can't really grow like any other skill. And it's like, well, no, if it's a skill, that means it can be practiced, it can be learned, it can be improved. And so if it's a skill, then that means the only question is how.

I have that answer, and so I won't reveal it today, but I've been thinking a lot about this. Coincidentally, I've been thinking about it for about 2 years on how to, like, learn good taste, because I don't think I particularly have good taste, but I've tried to develop it.

All right, down. All right, that's it. That's the AI news we wanted to react to today. Sam, send them off.

Peace. That's it. That's the pod.