Lesson 20 Strong Values Defend Against Trolls & AI Is Not A Bubble

Hey everybody, welcome back. Another chilly one out here. The topic of conversation today: why strong core values defend against trolls, which you will inevitably run up against, and 2, AI is not a bubble. And it'll be a personal story of what's being experienced in the market right now at the beginning of 2026. Related to the first point. So first, let's start off and talk through these principles. Why are strong core values and products or services built with them so important, as well as finding your fascination, to have long duration in solving a specific problem, accessing a certain market, and experience working Manipulating a certain area of a product or service, and how then that defends you against trolls and the attackers that will inevitably come. So all of our prior videos up to this point, another 20 videos, um, 100 hours of content describing each of these step by step from the very beginning. We did this on purpose because that creates the foundation upon which we can have continued conversations into the far future. These principles, these core elements. So strong core values, just to review: something that you know to be true, something that comes from within you, something universal, a truth. Fairness. For me, it's build things that help people, animals, the planet, etc. Got to manage second, third, fourth order consequences, of course, which we've gotten into in prior, prior conversations. That's strong core values. Fascination is a key element of that. What is the thing that you are uniquely drawn towards or pulled towards that could or potentially have a positive impact on the world, society, the universe at large? That creates strong duration, which means you can go days, weeks, months, years, decades, a century, and your company, your organization, your pillars, principles can live beyond you. Right. And then finally, the products and services that you build are built and wrapped around those core elements. Because you have a deeper understanding, a deeper conviction, something truthful and fundamental that will connect with the universe, with the world, with individuals, with other entities on this planet, and maybe others in the future, becomes critically important. Um, and so then what happens is you inevitably get other individuals who will attack your position because you, through this winding process over the decades, you will come to a conclusion and you will be executing on that vector. Both direction and force is what a vector is. So very hard in one singular direction. And that direction has evolved over a lot of interactions. With the market, a lot of failures, a lot of things you've tried and didn't work, a lot of things that did work, an expansiveness where you've seen things across time, across markets. And so you have an evolved understanding of the approach and it's incredibly nuanced. So you're threading these needles that no one else can even see along this trajectory or pathway. And that becomes very important because often what happens is a meme will develop, a short little repeatable soundbite, which we've talked about in the past. They help win presidential elections. A simple phrase that I can use to argue against any other person's point, whether or not it is grounded in evidence, fact, core values, principles, it becomes a repeated opinion. Yeah. And that's a key element. You have to separate 3 things in this world: an opinion, which should be based on fundamental principles of how things work, which should be based on irrefutable facts and evidence that multiple parties can validate, not just yourself, right? That is the scientific method. Wouldn't you know it? Uh, okay, so what happens is you'll get these things called trolls and attackers, and they will come and they will attack your position or your threaded needles that you've developed over a long time period of facts, of evidence, of hard-fought and won principles based on a lot of scar tissue, failure, and some success. And an opinion that develops as a result of that. And they will attack your position from things that don't make sense. And what you do is you dig into that position. You ask questions, you probe. Show me what principles you're relying on to develop this position or this opinion. Now present to me fact-based evidence. Of your position. And what you find is that they very quickly go away. Why? Because there's no depth. And so the depth that you've built over time gives you a tree with a root system that is so strong and so deep and so expansive, they can't see it. All they see is this little twig sticking up out of the ground. They don't see hundreds of thousands of miles of interconnected root system. So of course, a small little troll breeze will not push you off of your path. Even gale-force winds will not push you off of your path. Hurricanes will not push you off your path. 8 billion people on a planet will not push you off your path because you've tapped into something so universal and foundational. Conviction, if you will, is developed from these things, that it doesn't matter, because over a long enough time horizon, the universe is a weighing machine. Gravity eventually is attracted to the things with gravity, the things that make sense, the things that are strong. And what creates gravity? Root systems. Strong foundations, strong principles built in positive forces that help things, right? Okay, so now let's get into— let's get into a personal story. But before that, let's take a quick commercial break brought to you by nature, the best and most important and most incredible product that the universe has built that we all live in. And that's nature. So, uh, yeah, all of our existence sponsored in part by nature, or in whole. Okay, so yeah, shout out nature, shout out the universe. Um, all right, let's— now that we've laid those foundations, let's use that as an analogy, if you will, or a metaphor, pick your Say eased, or if you want to say like 1,000 times. We'll use that to talk about what we're experiencing in the present moment. Okay, there's a debate raging on the planet. And it is planetary. It's a planetary-scale debate. But what's interesting about this debate is it's happening on the surface level. It's not happening at the root level, deep down in the ground where all the roots are. It's happening At the meme level, right? So it's, it's these winds that are blowing, and these winds are not strong enough to unroot the strong things that have taken hold at a planetary scale. And so the winds will eventually die out, and you will see these individuals change their position. And I'll give you an example first. The world is flat. For a long time, people believed it. Eventually, we developed scientific methods to realize that the world, planet Earth, is not in fact flat. It is round-ish. I mean, actually, if you zoom out, it is a perfect sphere. And all these little ridges are teeny tiny compared to the spherical nature and the diameter of the sphere that we live on. And so how did we validate that? Well, we, we created these remarkable individuals called astronauts, and we created these remarkable machines called rockets. And first we put machines on those rockets, and we sent those rockets up out into space to give us a different perspective of the ball. And we looked at it, and we looked at it from different angles, and we go Yeah, that's not a piece of paper. It's a sphere. Okay, then we sent humans up there to do it with our own eyes. And we had other humans watch them to make sure that those humans weren't lying. So we had humans standing next to a real rocket. And then we put humans on that rocket. We sent that rocket up. And there were people on that rocket. And they flew around The sphere. And they said, yep. And they came back down, and then we watched them come down, and then we had a conversation with them, um, and we said, yeah. And they said, yeah, it's a sphere, it's not a flat piece of paper. And then we did it again, and we did it again and again and again. And then we put more machines up there called satellites, and then we streamed, like, radio from it, we streamed video from it, we put GPS on it. We gave the planet like 2 billion devices to walk around with, with this GPS that tracks satellite. Then we started doing internet from it. So yeah, the world's round, but it just took a while for the rest of the world to figure out that it's not a flat piece of paper. It's a sphere, which is a 3-dimensional circle. Okay. So the debate— now we're finally to the point. We're a couple minutes in here. We're finally at the point. Is AI a bubble? Is the world flat? Is it round? Our position is AI is not a bubble. And so what we're doing is we're describing that to other people so that they can make informed decisions for their lives, their livelihood, their families, their investments, their career, and they can get a head start on this. And protect themselves and also benefit and help create and build these things. So because of that, we've seen troll behavior develop from sophisticated individuals who have backgrounds in the same background that we have— mathematics, products, investing, operators. We've had 200,000 people at this point, professionals, white-collar professionals with decades of experience operating across the private equity industry, and hundreds of them are agreeing with us. Hundreds of them. And there's a tiny, tiny fraction, 5, 10, who disagree. And I'll tell you why they disagree. They disagree Because they are looking at this from a top-down rather than a bottom-up perspective. So for more on this, go back to our video about how financial models predict the future and how if you do 1% of a market is the revenue I'm going to achieve, that's the wrong way to do it. And investors don't deploy capital against that logic. What they deploy capital against is bottoms-up, which is customer 1, customer 2, customer 3. Each one pays X and Y and Z. Over time, we add that up. That's my revenue. That's how the world works. The small stuff adds up to the big stuff. The micro informs the macro. Economics 101. Check out Chicago Booth for more on that. Okay, back to our point. So what these individuals are saying is they're looking at an investment in data centers and capital being allocated to AI model development companies. And a lot of it, more than we've seen in history of this planet. Why? I'll tell you why. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Energy we've translated into electricity on this planet. We use electricity to power everything that we do— cars, appliances, lights, cell phones, this video that you're watching. Is electricity a bubble? No, we seem to be using it. Okay, on to the next one. Computation. Computers. Maybe 100 years computers were a bubble. This idea that we could invent a calculating machine, and we had these people called computers who would do computing. They would compute things, and we took what they did, we automated it, we turned it into a chip. in a computer. And those chips kept getting smaller, faster, better, more powerful. And today, as we sit in 2026, we have computers in almost everything. Every object is becoming digitized and becoming smart. My water bottle has technology in it. It has lights, it has a filter, it has Bluetooth, which communicates with the phone and tells me how much water I'm drinking every day. Which goes into Apple HealthKit and is part of the health metrics I track, which shows up on my watch and then sends me health alerts. Very important. So are computers a bubble? I don't think so. We got billions of people on a planet using them. They're in a bunch of objects. Computers aren't a bubble. Okay, what's next? Notwithstanding, like, all the technology, social media and stuff that we do. So then we're into the next one, the internet. Is the internet a bubble? 30 years ago might have been. They thought it was in the year 2000. It wasn't. Internet just kept going. It's been growing at 15% CAGR for 30 years, shows no signs of slowing. We've got 6 out of 8 billion people more or less on this planet using it. So I don't think the internet's a bubble. Let's go even more foundational. Is mathematics a bubble? The language of the universe. Is math a bubble? Well, math runs the world. It's the basis of physics. It's the only thing that we know of as a system of truth to develop things that we build on this planet and take us off planet. So I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say math isn't a bubble. All right, AI. Is AI a bubble? Well, let's see. AI uses what? Uses math, uses electricity, uses the internet. And now we just combined it into something that's more useful as a tool. And people are using it, and they're paying for it. People are paying for it. People are using it. There's over a billion people using it every day. AI overviews on Google, billion people. ChatGPT, Closing in on a billion people every week using it. They're doing billions of dollars every year in revenue. I have conversations every single day, all day, from the moment I wake up until I go to sleep in my inbox on social media. I have the most sophisticated private equity investors from tier 1 companies that you know the name of asking us questions about how to utilize AI. What are the displacement threats? What are the disruptive threats? Is this an investment-grade roadmap? We're doing multiple conversations with customers, hundreds of them. And this is across private equity industry from lower middle market to mid-market to upper mid-market. And then Fortune 1000 companies, Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 250 companies utilizing these tools to build Analytics systems that let all the people in the company query the database and say, hey, what's the data on this so I can make a real-time informed decision about what I'm going to do in my job that day? And then we have startups. Startups are going from $0 to $100 million in revenue in a year, less than a year. Nuts. Every startup now, the only ones raising capital and actually generating money are the ones with AI built in. It's become table stakes. I have literally talked to customers of enterprise SaaS software and they have told me point blank, Sean, we are clamoring for our providers of software to implement AI, to take this process that takes 5, 10 days, 30 days, And cut it in half. I'm willing to pay 25% more if you do that for me. 25% more, because that's delivering more revenue to me. So I'm paying for that. AI is not a bubble. When you hear someone say AI is a bubble, ask them pointed questions. Show me your evidence. Show me your facts. Show me the revenue. Show me the customers you've talked to. Show me all of the management teams and hundreds or thousands of executives that you've sat down with over the last 2 to 3 years and had individual and group conversations with. Show them to me. Show me where you've deployed capital. Show me the evidence. Show me the principles of this. Show me why. Show me how you develop those principles over decades. Now you can give me your opinion. And if your opinion doesn't line up with the principles, doesn't line up with the evidence and the facts, and doesn't line up with strong core values, then you're a house of cards blowing in the wind. Because we're sitting here on a foundation that is so deep and honest and true that these memes will not blow us over. When you have a billion people on a planet utilizing and asking for a technology and paying for it, any sort of tool, and this amount of interest in a tool, actively using these tools to create value, when you have a billion of them and these tools are built on the strongest foundations of the most Widespread adopted things on this planet. It is not a bubble. Do you know what the most adopted things on this planet are? 100% oxygen, water, food, and then you go into electricity, and then SMS, AI chatbots. is essentially SMS with a machine and others that essentially, at its most basic, automates a Google search to get you information. Automating a Google search. Google's valuable. They got 2 billion, 3 billion people using it. Is Google a bubble? So I'm left here pondering What to do about all of this, because I'm only one person. But the decentralized nature of all of this is that all of these people outside of me are finding real value, deploying real capital, paying for real things, and I'm not a part of it. I'm just a lightning rod right now because I see these things and I'm surfacing them to the market. And most of the people just completely agree, and they're like, yeah, like, uh, All the conversations I have, not a single one of them says, is AI a bubble? Not one out of thousands of conversations over the last year with the smartest people operating in this space. So then I guess you just have to look inside yourself and say, what am I going to do about it? Do I listen to the media who's not operating in the space and having these non-public real conversations? who have not collected the evidence? Do you talk to and believe people who may be looking at macro-level things, but not at the detail and building bottoms up, but rather trying to articulate from top down? I guess the question is, you're just gonna have to find out for yourself. So are you in the camp of weighing machines or in— whichever way the wind blows. Because we, we stand on weighing machines, we invest behind weighing machines, we spend our time on weighing machines. And it comes from a lot of hard-won effort, research, development, R&D development, and also customer development that gives us a conviction. It's not even conviction, it just gives us honest truth. About what we should do with our time so we can produce the most amount of value for a lot of other people. So that is a very, um, direct and straightforward approach. And I have to be direct at this point because not being direct and being subtle is only going to hurt things. So that is direct. This video will be up on the internet for all time. You can beat me up. That's fine. And we'll see what happens in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 years. 100 years from now, nobody knows what's going to happen. But I'm just telling you that math, electricity, computation, and the desire for humans to procreate and create. All types of things are such fundamental forces that they're not going away. Um, just like nature ain't going away. So we are small ants in a gigantic universe surrounded by nature. So yeah, I guess, uh, the universe wins every time. So I'm gonna bet on the universe. All right, that's it. Have a great day. Just had to do that. We'll get back to our cool stuff later. And stay positive out there, even in the force of gale-force winds.