My First Million - I run a $180M+ company...here's how I'm using AI on a daily basis

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Get our Business Monetization Playbook: Episode 670: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Andrew Wilkinson ( https://x.com/awilkinson ) about the AI tools that are replacing new hires.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) AI to kill admin work (7:37) the K-shaped future (16:29) 24/7 agents in your business (25:46) Software is the new commodity (38:40) Andrew's AI hedge investments (50:56) Buy, sell, or hold — Links: Lindy - https://www.lindy.ai/  Howie - https://howie.ai/  Fyxer - https://www.fyxer.com/  Fathom - https://fathom.video/  Otter - https://otter.ai/  Claude - https://claude.ai/  Zero - https://zerotax.ai/  Replit - https://replit.com/  Constellation - https://www.csisoftware.com/  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

All right, we should talk about AI because you used to tweet about like boring, steady, any cash flow businesses. And I feel like for this one, you just ripped off your clothes and you're streaking through the pool right now. So what is your take on AI? I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road.

I'm for the first time in a while. I'm waking up grinning every single morning, just like stoked to get to work. I was saying to a friend, I was like, this is like somebody just invented a new internet or something. Like, that's how big this feels. And he goes, no, no, no, no. Someone just invented fire. Right. Like, it's, it's freaking crazy. And the best quote that I've heard on this is it's like we've discovered a new continent with 10 billion people on it. And they're all geniuses and willing to work for free. Right. And so everyone's talking about this, you know, agents, right? agents is like a meme right now. And what we're really talking about is digital employees and digital people. And when you shift your mindset like that, you go, holy crap. Like, not only is this an

incredibly exciting time to be an entrepreneur, but the implications are going to be absolutely crazy. Like, you know that saying there's decades, what is it? What is it? There's decades where nothing happened. And then there's days where decades happen. And I feel like right now, decades are happening, like crazy. And here's the way I'd put it. So if we just paused AI, we shut down all the AI labs and all we focused on was just rollout of what already exists. I think probably between self-driving cars and AI agents, 20% of all current jobs are gone. Can you explain examples of the way that you're using it now to save and make yourself more productive both personally and in a business level or is this mostly like theoretical where you're

like it's almost there well it's a bit of everything so i'd say like we're in the aOL dial-up phase right now but like aOL dial-up it's still pretty freaking cool if you've never used the internet you know basic stuff that everybody should be doing like i'm an agent that preps me for every meeting so 30 minutes before every meeting i got a text and it says hey you're meeting sean and sam you were emailing them about this topic you're going to invest in their company. And here's two bios on them. It goes to LinkedIn and, you know, just summarizes it. So something very basic that otherwise a human would do. Previously, my assistant would do that. I have it monitor my stock portfolio. I have it telling me about local events for the first one.

So how did you set that up? How did you, what tool are you using to do the meeting prep? 30 minutes before you get a text saying, hey, you have this meeting with these people about this. So you guys know Zapier. It's basically Zapier for AI agents. So Zapier is freaking. It's freaking amazing. Andrew, you introduced me to someone who worked at Lindy and her name was Lindy. And I was like, wait, you, I don't understand this. We got 25 minutes into the conversation before I realized it was just a woman named Lindy who worked at this company called Lindy. Basically, they founded the company and they were like, oh, like your name is an awesome name for a company. Let's just call it that. But it's also super confusing because she runs the sales team. Yeah, I was like,

Wait, so you're, are you smarter child? Most people, it'd be like a quick two-second thing. It's like, oh, Lindy, yeah, yeah, that's cool. How funny. And then they move on and get into the sales demo, whereas Sam for 25 minutes is like, hold on. There's your Lindney or this is like, would not let it go for 20 minutes. So yeah, like, so think about, think about Lindy like Zapier, except you can build AI in between. So Zapier might be when I press this button on my phone, go to the internet and do this.

action or whatever, but it can't think. Lindy can add thinking in between. So, for example, you can make a Lindy that looks at your calendar. So the way it would work in this instance is, look at my calendar, an hour before any event starts, go on perplexity, go to LinkedIn, and I want you to write me a bio, and then I want you to look at my email inbox and tell me what we're talking about. So that's like pretty basic. And what we're really talking about at this point is removing admin work, right? So the agent that I have built is basically by cobbling it together with duct tape and dental floss. It's basically doing a lot of stuff my assistant would otherwise do. And my assistant's amazing. But the problem with a human is you'll give them direction and you'll say,

I want you to send me these meeting briefings or I want you to write my calendar like this. And over time, there's drift. They get busy. You give them more projects. And it just doesn't happen. And so now all those things that, let's be real, are not really worthy of her time, are now just being totally automated. So that's like the basic level. And I can name some of the other tools I'm using to do this. But that's where I'm at. So I use Lindy to build these things when it's something I want that's custom.

Are you an investor in Lindy? No, I'm not an investor in Lindy. I'm just like a power user and I'm obsessed with it. Like here's an example. So there's some restaurants in town where they still require you to call in to make reservation, they're not on open table. I made a Lindy bot where I can type in, hey, make me a reso around 5 to 7 p.m. tonight, this restaurant, and it will call and an AI voice will talk to them, book the reso, put it on my calendar, and invite the people I asked it to invite. And if the person says,

are you AI? It'll explain that it, yeah, it works for me. And if it asks for allergies, it knows my allergies. Like, it's pretty cool. And then other tools. So I use this one called Howie And it's basically like a, you CC it and you just say, Howie, can you find time for me and Sam to go get a coffee and it'll book all that stuff. I use Fixer, F-Y-X-E-R. It's this British startup. It basically reads every single email that comes into your Gmail. It sorts it based on whether you need to respond to it or not. And then it drafts responses. So let's say Sean said, hey, do you want to get coffee, it'll draft a rejection or an acceptance of that in my language and it gets better over time. So those are like three tools that I'm using that are awesome right now. And they're really just

replacing basic admin. This is crazy. I'm looking at this right now. Sean, where's this land with you? Do you use any of this stuff? And does this make you fearful of somewhere? No, not really. I think everything just evolves, right? Like ultimately, you know, this diagram that's always stuck with me is like a K-shaped future. So what's a K-shaped future? So if you imagine the letter K and you say, all right, this is where we are now. That's the first line.

And then it's basically like there's a fork in the road with the K, right? If you learn how to use these tools, you're going to accelerate and go up at a way faster pace than you would have otherwise. And if you don't, if you just stick your head in the sand and pretend that these tools don't exist and that your job is always safe and that your business is going to run with all humans doing all jobs, then you're going to go down because you're going to get outcompeted by companies that are going to do something. different. I personally use it less for my personal and more for my business. So basically in my

business, I almost have like a my own eval. So Sam, you know what an eval is? No. It's just like when a new model comes out, like when Lama drops their new model, they always post with pride like, oh, here's how we do on the benchmarking test, the evaluation test. And it's like some number. You don't really know what it's based off of. It's just this like abstract like, oh, we're a 73. And the last model from GPT was a 71. So we're the best model now. And is there a standard? Like is an e-val, like a third-party standard?

I have my own little eval, which is in my businesses, I basically picked a few tasks that I'm like, today humans in my companies do these tasks. And about every sort of three to six months, we go back and we run through it again. We say take the latest model, take the latest product everyone's excited about and see, like, what's the real deal, Holyfield?

Can we actually automate that task? Can it actually be offloaded from the human being yet? and there's basically like a spectrum. There's like, can't do it at all. There's, you can do it, but you wouldn't actually do it.

It's not good enough. Like the person, you know, oh, you wanted to use AI photography for your brand, but every model has nine fingers, you know, two mouths.

It's like, all right, well, I'm not actually going to put that on my website. So like cool in theory, but not in practice. Then there's, you could do it if there's a human

on top of it. So you could train a human to like be in the loop, to tweak it, to work with it, to make it better. And then there's, oh, We just don't need a human doing this anymore.

And so what I've done is basically figured out, all right, here's like 10 tasks that are real tasks that we do that have a real cost and a real human doing it in my companies. And I will know for myself as we get closer to AGI because those I'll just go from zero out of 10, which is where we started to like three out of 10, six out of 10, eight out of 10. Once eight out of those 10 tasks are like, yep, we just set up an agent and like we don't need to have a person doing those anymore. that's when I know, oh my God, this is like, we've had like real, real breakthroughs because it matter, because that's the real test for me versus I don't know exactly how these evals work, but it's like a, it's like an abstract thing or it'll be like, you know, they can pass the LSATs. It's like, that's cool, but I don't need it to pass the LSATs. If the opportunity is AI agents in my business, then I'm going to test it on what can these AI

agents do in my business. So what was the example of one of these things that you would want to automate? The simple example I gave is like e-commerce. So photography. So every month we pay photographers to do shoots. Real cost somewhere between, let's say, $5,000 and $10,000 all in for e-commerce photography. And you have basically product photography or you can have models in it, whatever, right? So there's like a little bit of a range there. So just product or models. And so I want to know, like, when can I get rid of that 10K a month? So when can I basically just show it my product on a blank and be like, cool, put this

on models or we have other ones where it's like photos and videos. So I, you know, you've seen these models where you give it a static image and it turns it into a video. And you see the demo on Twitter and it's amazing. It's just a girl posing. And then she starts like strutting with it. It turns it to AI video and it looks awesome. Cool. But then like you do it in practice. And yes, she starts strutting. But then her face starts morphing like she's like being eaten by lava. It's like, I'm not going to put that on my website. Like that would be a bad thing, right? To do that. Did you see the AI meme of Mark Zuckerberg staring at Bezos's wife's boobs? He like leads in extra hard to like smell him.

Do you watch that video? It's literally his eyes. They dart back down from microsecond. Yeah. And some guys made videos of him like not stopping. It's just continually going in. It was, that's pretty badass.

What were we saying? Like another example would be in e-commerce. You have inventory forecasting. This seems like a data problem, right? How much inventory should I order? When should I order? And let's say, let's pretend you have five colors of a product. Which color should I be ordering? Well, it looks like an AI problem.

You got a whole bunch of historical data. You have real time sales data that's coming in. And then you should be able to forecast. And like today we employ two human beings to do that forecasting. They're not perfect at it. It's very difficult problem to solve. Can AI make them smarter and do it better? Can I go from two humans to one human plus AI?

Or can I replace the two humans that just have AI give us more accurate demand forecasting? This is a problem that every physical product brand in the world has this problem, whether it's Hershey's chocolate bars or it's North Face jackets. It doesn't matter. Everybody's trying to figure this out. How do we order the right amount of inventory and not be stuck with too much inventory? It feels like we're talking about solar power. You remember like five, ten years ago? Everyone would be like, well, I mean, solar is really cool and all.

But I mean like it's still not cost competitive. But if you look at the graph, it just keeps going. Cost goes down, down, down, down. And if you just project it and you look at the rate of progress with these tools, like we've been exploring for arrowpress doing the same thing. So we spend a lot of money on big expensive photo shoots. And usually it's just an arrow press sitting there really well lit with nice coffee in it. So we've been looking at Flair and some of these other tools.

And I've been pretty blown away with where I can get to. And I agree there's definitely like a last mile problem. But it'll be there in the next six to 12 months, I think. And when it does, I think it's really cool for your business, but it also represents competition. Because it just becomes infinitely easier to compete in all businesses. And we'll talk about this more. But like, I think that's what's crazy about all this stuff. By the way, the most solved one of these is meeting minutes. Like I don't know, Andrew, if you used to this, but I used to invite my assistant into our meetings and say, hey, can you take notes, jot down any action items or followups that we're going to need to do? That's completely gone off her plate, which for her, it basically freed up, you know, four.

hours of time for my assistant a day on average, let's say. And if now she's got four hours back that she can spend doing the other things because I'm using Fathom and Fathom just sits in my meeting, records all the notes, perfect transcript with highlights, with a summary, with action items, ready to go, 24-7, never misses a beat. And not only did it replace the him is way better than my assistant could do it because she'd be trying to keep up and it's just was not going to be good enough. The level of accountability you can get to, right? Like I hate that feeling where it's like, oh, I did a board meeting with this CEO six months ago, and I swear to God, I swear to God, they promised me this one thing. And then they're like, no, no, I don't remember that. And being

able to pull that up, I just did a really cool thing actually. Me and my girlfriend did a relationship offsite, which sounds really lame and nerdy. Patrick Campbell actually was the one that gave me the idea. But we basically would talk about, hey, what are, what are like our big strategic goals for the year for our relationship, for family, for life in general and stuff? And we recorded of the entire thing with Otter, which is like similar tool to fathom. And I was blown away. Like we just chatted for three hours and it was able to spit out. Here's all the action items. Here's all the things that need to come out of this. Then we're able to put it into Claude and it built a plan for us. Very cool. By the way, I was giving you a hard time. It does sound nerdy.

And also I do the exact same thing. We have relationship meetings as well. You have the local news business, the newsletter. Sean and I both owned newsletters. When I did it, AI didn't exist. And I felt like, you know, hiring writers was actually the hardest part. Like, who could write in my voice. Now, I would hate to be in the newsletter business because I see this stuff and I'm like, it's almost ready to roll. But it's definitely ready to roll as an editor. Are you using this for your newsletter now for the local news newsletter? I'm not right now, but that's what I'm working on. So like the pieces that I'm the more advanced stuff I'm doing are like I've got a social media manager agent. I've got a marketer agent. I've got a tax advisor and investment analyst.

And I mean, these are these are roles I previously would have hired for where I didn't, either didn't renew someone's contract or I didn't make a new hire for them. So it's already replacing people that I would have hired otherwise. Well, wait. Can you explain a couple of these? So explain the tax advisor one and then explain the social media. be able to. So social media is very simple. It's like I post on X all the time and I'm lazy. I don't like cross posting on LinkedIn. I often forget I'll tweet about something and then not included in my newsletter. And so what I've done is I built a Lindybot, a Lindybot that looks at my Twitter, all my other channels. And then once a week, it summarizes all the stuff I've been talking about and

asks me, hey, what do you want to include in the newsletter? And then it can give me a first draft. And it's trained on my previous writing so it can write and it's you know it's not perfect but it's like 80% of the way there and if I didn't care about my my personal brand like you know many people just want like a quick and dirty newsletter it would be totally sendable and it's completely engaging if you prompt it right like you can even say like give me a subject line that will force the person to open the email right and it's really good what about the accounting thing the accounting thing is freaking like blew my mind. So basically I exported, I use zero for all my accounting. And for my personal like financials and my personal holding company, it's like a rat's nest. Like I have like 200,

300 random investments, all sorts of weird assets and stuff in there. And so I exported all of it is a CSV out of zero. I trained a Claude project on it and I started asking it questions. Did you upload like a book, like a Warren Buffett book? Or like what did you? No, no. This is like basically to replace like right now. So I have a woman who runs my family office. And I might ask her, hey, how much should we spend on software last week?

It'll be, let's say it's a Saturday and I'm kind of bored and doing a deep dive. I'll email her on Saturday. And I've got to wait until Tuesday to get an answer. And so I was like, oh, I just want to be able to query flawed. And so I was like, hey, I want you to rank the top 25 things. I spend money on. Or I want you to look at my structure and I want you to tell me if there's any ways that I could save on tax.

And so one, it was crazy. I actually saved $100,000 a year of cash taxes by moving an investment from one hold code to another. Thanks to Claude. Right. So it is very quickly becoming tax advisor, investment analyst. I can get it to write a deal. I can get it to draft legal documents.

Like these, I mean, everyone's doing this. But like, it is getting, it's getting so good that I don't hire people. Let's put it that way. Weren't you hiring for like an AI back office person? Like, you have some role I saw that you put up there. What was that? Yeah. So the woman who runs my family office, she's got a family situation.

So she's got a transition out of the role. And so me and my president were like, okay, what do we really want out of this role? And when we thought about it, we were like, we actually just want someone who's like an AI nerd to automate away all the accounting and bookkeeping and stuff that nobody enjoys doing. You and Joe came up with that? Yeah, that's right. Exactly. I hired him right out of office. But anyway, yeah, we're hiring like an AI first CFO basically, somebody where their job is basically just to build automations, financial automations. You guys probably have someone who works for you who just basically manages Zapier. And like Zapier, the problem with Zapier is that it's awesome when it works. But like for

some reason shit breaks all the time, which I don't understand how, like, I don't understand enough about technology to know, like, why does this shit break all the time? And then the systems were so complicated that if that person left, it was like, oh, fuck, what's the stuff that we got to go uncover because they've automated so much shit where it's like, we just rely solely on this one person. And it becomes actually an issue where it's kind of all automated, but it's sort of duct tape together. And the duct tape comes undone. And there's so much duct tape that I got to go and pick. It's like, when your Lego breaks, you got to like, dude, I got to like, fuck. fucking rebuild this whole shit. I don't know where this one little

fucking piece goes. Totally. I've had the same experience. Like anytime I got really into no code like four years ago or whatever and you know we build all these automations where oh it'll go to this one place and then a Zapier automation will move the data into air table and then you manipulate it in XYZ way. And I think the difference here is that like Claude will just figure it out. Right. So if you say like hey it's not working it'll just sort it out or tell you how to fix it, whereas before I had that exact same problem and totally agree, usually the automations just cause problems. How are you guys using it at Hampton right now?

I mean, it's basically just like glorified Zapier, basically. So like it connects air table to HubSpot to this website, update these records in HubSpot. Like it's basically all back end operational stuff, which I think is underutilizing it. Because like what I would do, if I was you, is I would get a, um, Claude has this thing called, I forget what it's called model content. protocol or whatever and you can basically build a database of all your members and then just have a way to query it where you can say hey we need a speaker for this event in LA who would be good or who's got a business in this space and just have like a live database of people in an LLM that'd be sweet so so what I'm working on though like the

next piece here is actually like Sean I'm basically lining up who are you know what are the roles that we can you know not need in the future And most of this is not firing people. It's actually just not hiring people we would otherwise would. But if you graph this out, you can see that we're all going to have virtual employees very, very soon. And that's what's crazy. Like I was watching an interview with Dario Amadeh from Anthropic yesterday at Davos. And he basically said in the next 12 months, you will have AI coworkers in Slack. Now, if you just project that out, right now, it's text, right? These are not people. But pretty quick, it'll be someone on Slack that you're messaging, hey, can you make some new product images? Hey, do you mind checking out the AdSense? Can you write a report? And I think that within 24 to 36 months, these will be 4K video people that are indistinguishable from a human that you'll talk to on Zoom. Now, I know that sounds crazy, but I really believe that's what's coming. And I think if you just think about the implications in terms of business moats,

and businesses that are going to be disrupted. It's just staggering. Do your guys' parents use it or like your 10-year-old cousins? Like how my mom uses it? In what way? Well, my mom's, you know, her first language was Hindi, right? So she speaks English. She speaks it well, but if she needs to write, it kind of stresses her out.

She's like, oh, I got to write something, got to write an email. I got to write a letter, respond to something, write a note to the doctor. And she's like kind of slow with writing. And she feels it a little bit insecure that, like, Like her writing is going to be like well formatted, well, grammar is correct and clear. And so she was early on chat GPT to just be like, oh, great. I can just tell it what I wanted to write. And then it just writes a beautiful email for me.

And then what she does is she has to like kind of mess it up a little bit to get it back to get it back to real. But my mom has been using it in that way. But that's kind of all she used it. But I think what you're getting at is like, even though for us, a lot of these things we're saying right now seem obvious, you're kind of right. I think if I know where you're going with this question, which is like, you know, my sister, my mom, like how much does it cross the chasm?

Like my sister uses it in her schools to create curriculums. So she has it do curriculums and lesson plans and gives that to her teachers to work off of, which is something like either they would do kind of either procrastinated or, you know, half or she would have to do herself. And so I think that was a big win for her. But, you know, it's kind of like you find your one use case of chat GPT or, you know, And you go there. Another one, like my mom was giving it like her Kaiser like data test results. So like, you know, you go, you get blood work done or you get a, you get some procedure done.

You get this result in your app and you have to wait for this doctor to call you to tell you what the heck this means. It's kind of a scary gap of time. And we just upload all of the screenshots into chat GPT. We're like, what does this mean? And it gives us beautiful, perfect bedside manner explanations, more patient, more thorough than the doctor. you can ask follow-up questions at your own leisure. I mean, that's been another one that was like pretty, it was just like night and day.

It's like, okay, I'll never not do this anymore. This is so much better. I'll never not do this. Andrew, you had on here that software is going to be a worse business over the next 10 years, what's your like premise here of it being a worse business? Let me zoom out a bit. So in a free market, the amount of competition basically defines how good of business is. Right.

So, you know, everybody loves to shit on restaurants. but if you own the only restaurant in town, let's say that there was one restaurant license given out in every major city and you own that restaurant. So you have excess demand, you have no competition. That would be a phenomenal business. You could have 40, 50, 60 percent margins. Basically, as long as people don't riot, you can charge whatever you want and the food can be bad, right? So I think that same thing applies to software businesses and startups, right? So if I remember, you know, 15 years ago, I started a productivity software company. And it was a terrible business because every single week new VC back companies like Asana,

Monday.com, et cetera, would come out and compete with us and drive us into the ground. And where there's been a lot of wealth generated in software is in vertical markets. So what does that mean? Like that's like weird niche businesses where nobody is competing. So, for example, like funeral home management software, golf course management software, random like dam and infrastructure software. And these are great businesses because no like amazing developer wakes up and no amazing designer wakes up and is like, I'm going to go and build this software.

And so basically you're the only game in town. You can charge whatever you want and nobody switches off of you. And so for the last 30 years, that's been the best business ever. You might have heard of Constellation Software. They built like a $70 billion behemoth public company and all they do is buy businesses like this. Don't they buy like a hundred a year? They buy a hundred a year. They increase the prices on a schedule.

They hold them. They don't really, you know, do anything crazy or improve them in any particular way. And they're buying like $3 million a year software companies. Three to 10, sometimes bigger. But they have a formula. And so I believe let's just take funeral home software. So let's say that there's one developer who built funeral home software and he's had no major competition for 10 years. With tools like Replit, you can literally go in and you can reproduce

basic software very, very easily, right? If your software is like highly algorithmic and complicated, yeah, maybe not, but something basic like funeral home management where it's like case management basically is incredibly easy to replicate in 10 or 20 minutes in replet. And so my belief is basically that as more and more people don't need to learn how to code and can build software, software will become more and more commoditized. There'll be way more competition and it'll be a way harder world for software businesses. And I think that ultimately it just comes down to time. For us, all of our software businesses we've bought, we've generally bought them in a way

where we've de-risk, we've paid ourselves back, or we have some sort of unique competitive advantage or cost advantage or something. Like, for example, we own a framework, a hosting company for a framework, and a lot of people have standardized and built software on that framework. They're going to keep hosting with us because we support that framework and nobody else does, right? There's things like that. Personally, when I'm underwriting software deals now, I am being incredibly conservative. And honestly, I'm much more focused on communities and social networks as a result. We still look at software when there's like a hardware component or there's some kind of lock-in,

but I'm much less enamored with software right now because of this. Do you guys think I'm like out to lunch on this? Am I totally overthinking this or say the thought out loud? What's the specific thought, right? Well, I think it's a pretty wild implication that we may have. of mass disruption in terms of jobs and mass disruption in terms of every business that we know that we think of as a good business may not be a good business. And it's not a long term, right?

This is not 10 years. We're talking about a two-year time horizon. So let's take the business side of it, right? The business side of your argument was basically software for the last 30 years has been an incredible business to be a creator of or an owner of whether you're buying or building software businesses and you're saying, I think that's going to change because if it becomes so easy for anybody to build software that they need, then they're not going to be buying $5,000 a year or $50,000 a year software anymore. And so maybe this one thing, vertical software, VMS,

right, or other categories like that where it's like more of a simple crud database with a user interface on top of it, that those are going to become less valuable. I totally agree with you that those are less, less appealing than they were before. I don't think it goes to zero because in reality, it's sort of like anytime you've actually built software, it's the last 10% that takes, you know, you can get 90% of the way there. You feel like you're almost there,

but then the last 10% will take you as much time as the first 90. This is just like a rule you see over and over and over again. And it's the same thing with products, which is that to actually make something work and solve all your problems that you need, that you're used to your current software solving, it will take time, effort, love, care, and whether it just might just be somebody else building software

that's a competitor to you or, you know, is somebody in your own company going to build that? I think it's less likely that that becomes like a major disruption to all of software. Because like you were saying, like some software, like social networks or communities, the value is not the app, the value is the people and the connections and the habits that they've formed.

So you have software where there's already habits, those will be safe. Software where the value is the people or the data, those will be safe. Software where the value is in the enterprise relationship, the service that's on top of it, or the like fine tuning and tailoring and the CYA, which is that if I buy enterprise software, I don't need to save 40% on this bill as much as I need to not get fired for being like, yeah, we home brewed our entire CRM and like the security wasn't very good, right? Because we didn't, I made this in fucking clawed instead of it being software I bought from a vendor that's been doing

this for 15 years and has actually like solved the security vulnerabilities. And so I think that enterprise software will be safe. So I think a lot of software will be more safe than software just as a category goes to zero. Yeah, I would generally agree with that. Although I think it's going to be a lot easier to offer incredible sport, incredible sales, et cetera. On the other side of it, you get the market expands, right? Because it's not just that, oh, there's going to be more competition in this fixed pie. It's that now a whole bunch of software that really wouldn't have made sense. to build because coders didn't understand the problem so they weren't working on it or you would have needed too much funding to build it. It's not really worth it. So all this new software is

going to get created that was not really feasible or wasn't really easily accessible before. Like I'll give you like a stupid example. I went on Replit the other day. And Replet's amazing because it's literally chat GPT except for when you tell it something. It makes a website for you or makes an app for you. And so I had this like, you know, first world selfish problem, which was that I like to log my meals. I take. photos of my meals when I when I eat them to be able to send to my coach. But then my entire camera roll is just shitty pieces of chicken and my kids. It's like beautiful pictures of my kids and then ugly pictures of chicken. And I'm like, all right, this is kind of annoying that that's

theirs. I just told Reply, I said, make an app that when I open up the app instantaneously the camera is on. I don't want to like type in stuff. I just like open the camera, take the photo, show me a thumbs up or a thumbs down where I can rate my own meal and then save it in a calendar view where I can see like a streak of, you know, if I've been doing roughly good, make it green. If I've been doing bad, make those red. And could it make it an app that it gets approved in the app store? So that was so immediately repl was like, hey, I can't make iOS apps yet, but I can make it as a website. You could add it to your home screen and you could use it on your phone, but it'll just be a website you open up. I was like, all right, deal. And then it

made that app for me. And it's like, you know, it's not perfect. Like I ran into some walls where that replet's like, hey, I don't know why it's not working. I'm like, yo, it actually is working. And it's like you're, you're just being crazy. But like, you know, okay, you get through the craziness. And it's not exactly good enough, I would say. Like I'm using it every day and telling you guys how amazing this, this tool is. But nine months from now, pretty sure I'm going to be able to just do that. Right.

So like I can be a software creator without knowing how to code. That's already a big, big deal. Because of that, any idea I have, I can make come to fruition. So a whole bunch of new ideas are going to come into the market that didn't exist. And I could do it for like other problems that weren't going to get solved maybe through, like, you know, If you look at software today, it's like a lowest common denominator. Like I need to serve the most customers who are willing to pay. So I'm going to like shave off all the edges and make some product that's what I think most

people want, even if it's not what I personally want, right? Or what me and a cluster of people like me really want. And so I think the overall market for software gets bigger because you can create way more stuff. So that's the other counterpoint to like software being bad. It's phenomenal for consumers, right? As a consumer, I'm so excited. It's more if you're buying these businesses and you're underwriting 10 years of returns, continued profit margins, all that kind of stuff.

I think it just got a lot harder because before it was like, look, there's only so many programmers out there, right? There's only so many competent MacOS, iOS, whatever programmers. And I'm with you in terms of like where a replet is at right now where it's like, yeah, you've got to, you got to fiddle a lot to get it to a point where it's shipable. I've built a lot of stuff that is 90% that I can't put out into the world because it's not there yet. But I think it's a little bit like stock photos. Two years ago, you know, stock photos generated by AI were terrible.

Now I would not want to be in the stock photo business because it's perfect and it's only getting better. I will say one other thing. Like this same thing happened with media, right? So like before, only people who could make media were media companies. There was limited TV channels, newspapers. If you own one of them, it was amazing. If you didn't, it was right. And you're right that like owning those legacy media businesses kind of sucks in the world of social media where anybody can create content.

And so those businesses went down. But then suddenly new businesses, which are social media based, emerge. And the set of social media based businesses are way bigger than the set of legacy media businesses. And if you're interested in whatever weird niche, you don't have to rely on the Wall Street Journal to write about it. Right. So I think it nets out way ahead. I don't know if you guys heard Larry Ellison yesterday when he was like going off about AI. Like people like, what are you excited about AI? And he like did this little rant, which I don't know how well versed Larry Ellison is in like what's actually like possible with AI versus like, Masa San, you know, showing a picture of a golden goose laying eggs and being like, that's why I'm investing. But he was like with AI, here's what's going to happen in the next few years. He was like, you're going to be able to do early detection of cancer. then the AI is going to sequence what cancer you have.

It's going to be able to design a personalized vaccine for your cancer and cure you of cancer. So why am I investing $100 billion? Because I want that. And I want 100 other things like that. And it was just like a very compelling, like rant he did outside. Did he deliver it in that type of compelling way? Well, nobody's me. But yeah, he did the Larry Ellison version of it, the B plus.

But he did do, like, he was like that, like he was able to dumb it down. He was basically like, it was like he was shaking somebody and be like, do you hear what I'm saying? Like, do you know what this is? Like, get this in your little head. It's not about an investment for a data center. It's we're going to cure cancer with this shit. Okay.

And it's going to save your, like your mom's life. Like, that's what we're going to do with this thing. Okay. That's why we're doing this. Let's not get caught up in Project Stargate and politics and the investment amount and the infrastructure. Like, okay, all that's the means to that end is kind of the way he was saying it. Dude, this shit's so exciting.

He also, I think he's obsessed with living forever. I think he's one of these guys who's like into that and throws it is, you know, the 10th richest guy in the world. So he can kind of throw his weight behind a lot of that stuff. And I think that's pretty badass. And that's probably a huge motivator. Andrew, can we do one more? You had this great thing in your notes that I don't, I want to hear you explain. You said AI hedge.

Basically, you were looking for investments given that you think, okay, software might not be the best place to be investing. Where are you investing? And what is all the stuff I see here down below, down below your AI hedge notes? Sure. So I feel like, you know, there's a bunch different scenarios here, including that this scaling slows down and it's a moderate disruption. We've got a couple of years of some people being unemployed and then they reskill. They go do different things.

Like you said, the economy gets bigger, whatever. There's another possibility that there's what's called an AI fast takeoff, which is like Masa's graph of like the singularity happens. and, you know, it's crazy. And if that happens, it's like, does capitalism matter? Does the free market matter? Does the AI basically just become this like communist overlord that allocates assets and stuff?

But I've been thinking about, you know, what do you want to own in a world where that happens? So you can go out and you can try and buy secondary in Claude or Anthropic or Open AI. Those are very expensive. You can buy Nvidia at 30 times earnings or ASML at 30 times earnings. some of these, or TSM, but there's the Taiwan risk, all the other stuff. And so I've been trying to find stocks that I can buy that are actually affordable, but capture AI upside.

And I found a really interesting one. I love stuff that's miscategorized and misunderstood by public market investors. Public market investors are very simple in the way that they think about companies. They have a series of boxes and they filter you through the boxes. And there's a saying, you want to look. look like a duck and quack like a duck in the public market. They do not like complexity. And so if you say the wrong keyword, their brain turns off and they just say, I'm not going to invest, right? And so let's, a couple of those examples are cannabis, right? They just put you in a box,

biotech, oh, high risk. And Bitcoin is another one. There's all these crappy Bitcoin mining companies. Dude, when we sold the company to HubSpot, one of the reasons we went into the year with millions and millions of dollars booked of advertising. And we were probably going to do $20 million the next year. And they were like, yeah, just cancel all those contracts and give the money away, give the money back. And we're not going to do advertising anymore. And I was like, but you could scale this to like a lot, to tens of millions or whatever.

And they're like, yeah, we make billions of dollars a year. And also we would just have to report that. And that's a little too complicated and people will understand it. So like the decision of them to not do that was worth more than the tens of millions of dollars of advertising revenue they could have made, which is wild. Have you ever met one of those like really ADHD young entrepreneurs who's pitching you on their business? And they're like, oh, we do this, but we also do this.

And also I've got a company that does this, right? And we all, the older statesman, we always are like, you know, young Padoan, just focus. And, you know, don't do that. Or if you're going to do that, don't tell me about all this other stuff because it just confuses me. I feel like public market investors are like that. So here's the business I found. It's called Iris Energy.

The ticker is IREN. I-R-E-N. And basically it's these two Australian guys who were infrastructure bankers. And their thesis supposedly was that compute was going to be a big deal in the next 10 to 20 years. So presciently, they went out, they secured a whole bunch of huge data center properties that were right next to mostly renewable energies. So they'd find a power plant that's like a hydroelectric dam or something like that. And they would literally just buy a massive data center right next to it and build one.

So for example, where I live in BC, they have one in Prince George right next to like a big hydro dam. And currently the best use for these data centers they've built so far has been mining Bitcoin. So they've been doing that. And they're not Bitcoin bolts. They're not like micro strategy or someone like that. They don't hold the Bitcoin. They just mine it. They've got their GPUs and whatever.

And they sell it immediately. And right now they're making somewhere in the range of $500 million of EBITDA annually doing that. Now, the stock trades at about a $2.4 billion valuation. So you can buy it actually quite cheaply based on the Bitcoin thesis, right? And Bitcoin would have to drop by about, I believe, I'm guessing based on some assumptions, but I think it would have to drop about 70% before they get to break even on mining these Bitcoin. So here's what's interesting about this business. So it's totally misunderstood by the public market because everybody thinks, oh, they're

Bitcoin bulls. They're mining Bitcoin. There's all this risk or whatever. What's actually interesting here is they're going to flip, I hope, or they've kind of publicly communicated to some degree that they're going to try and flip these data centers over to compute. So all these huge companies like, you know, Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and whatever, they all need data centers and they need the data centers to be centralized in one place.

You can't have 10 computers here or 10 GPUs here and 10 GPUs somewhere else. For training, you need them all to be in a massive supercluster. So the other interesting thing is you can't just go and build these super clusters. You can't go build these data centers anywhere. It takes a long time to get permitting and approval and it takes a long time to build. And so basically there's a finite amount of this stuff to the point where you guys have probably heard like Bill Gurley talking about like trying to buy nuclear power plants and all sorts of crazy stuff. So basically if they flip this business over to doing inference and to working

with hyperscalers on training, this could be a massively a massive boost to the business. And it could, you know, five, 10, 20x. I don't know. But very significant if they signed some deals with hypers, which I know that they're actively working on. They've communicated as much. So basically, if you believe in a fast takeoff, it's a very interesting way to kind of buy something with relatively low downside and very significant upside instead of buying Nvidia or Microsoft. Obviously, you sound like you're Leonardo DiCaprio and. Yeah, exactly. Do your own research. This is not investment advice.

I do own the stock, but I think it's interesting. How much of the stock did you buy? I only bought like a million dollars, but I look at it as like a small, it's a very small position. It's like buying fire insurance. Yeah, what is this? A position for ants? Just a million dollars, Andrew? Well, Andrew, I know that was not financial advice,

but I do appreciate the advice that you just gave me financially. The last public stock we talked about, I think, was Weight Watchers. And like, there was definitely a correlation from when the episode aired and when the stock, I don't know if it was causation, but there was definitely correlation. I wonder if that's going to happen here. You said the downside is like you have this Bitcoin mining, free cash flow, priced very fairly, right? You said like 3x free cash flow basically is the price and then the upside is if they make this AI switch. One question. You said they sounds like they're not huge super

clusters. Oh no, they are huge. So they have a massive site in Texas that they're working on building. Now here's the probably the reason why it's trading lower is these profits do not just go to investors. They are almost all being pounded back into building out these data centers. So if for some reason, compute stops mattering or, you know, we move to distributed inference or something like that, there's definitely a downside scenario, which is why I'd say, think about this cautiously. Don't put your entire portfolio in it. But I look at it as it's like a good one to five percent position. I need to look into it. That's not how I roll, obviously. But it was compelling. And I'm fascinated by their entrepreneurial story. I'm amazed how this was just launched in 2000. 2018 and how fast they grew. How much financing did they raise? I don't know how much they've raised, but I do know though they have no debt, which is quite impressive for a business like this. They have a lot of, a lot of interest in retail, like a lot of retail buyers in the public market.

And so they've been every time they need to expand, they do what's called an at the market raise. So they basically just issue stock into the market and then they raise capital to do it that way. But I mean, the way they die would be big amounts of debt. So they're avoiding that, I think. I forget what that online stock market club is that like Bill Ackman and all these billionaires are part of where they got to pitch their stock and they have to make a compelling argument and it's like really hard to get into. This is like if that and Beavis and Butthead had a baby, that's what this is right now. Have you ever been to Sone? It's a Sone conference, right? That's what you're talking about. No. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Is it online or? It's a good person.

I've always wanted to go, but it's an ordeal to go. Maybe this was your audition tape. Yeah, there you go. What do you think of it, Sean? I mean, I don't know anything about this company. I've never heard of Iron until Andrew talked about it five minutes ago. But I like the, I mean, the problem is Andrew's very persuasive. There's also the problem with me. I can talk myself into anything.

That doesn't mean it was a good idea. And I have done that to myself many times. You have to be careful. I apply basically a discount factor, like a charisma discount. So the more persuasive somebody is about everything, the more I have to discount to some degree. It doesn't mean I just like throw it away, right? But I have to be careful not to get overly excited. And then the opposite is true in the other case. Like when somebody's got like the David Blaine deadpan delivery of everything and then they're saying something that sounds exciting,

I'm like, wait, if that sounds exciting coming from you, that means it must be 10 times more exciting than you're actually giving it. And there's actually like an amplifier there. So you've got to be a little bit careful. This is why whenever I read Malcolm Gladwell books, I have to be like, wait, this is just a theory. This is just a theory. Like, this is just a theory. Like, This is not a fact necessarily. That's pretty funny. What did you call that? The charisma.

The what? The charisma discount. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. Like our friend Jack Smith, whenever he tells me something, he'll be like, yeah,

it's pretty cool. I think I like this. I'm like, do you love this? Yeah, I think I love it. That I'm like, all right, I'm in. There's some people who pretty good means it's incredible. And there's other people who are like,

oh, it's the fucking best. And that just means it's just another thing that they're doing. You know, it doesn't mean anything, right? you have to like, you know, it's like an audio mixer has to turn some people's levels down and turn some other people's levels up on their microphone, you know? Are you guys tracking those stock stock, you guys did that like investment episode maybe like six months ago? And yeah, TKO versus Ferrari.

TKO one, I believe, Sean. I think. Yeah, it's up like 19 percent, I think since we did that episode. So, you know, that one did pretty well. But I mean, it was funny that we did a stock picking episode, just stock a poloosa. and like we just didn't just say the word invidia and then stop the recording because that would have been that would have been sufficient and like it was pretty obvious and in our face but like when you try to be smart and make good content that doesn't mean you're necessarily actually

making the best advice this is my fear of all YouTube doctors by the way and I like Huberman I like it to you I like all the I like them but also their content creators now first and so you again is you have to apply the discount factor which is that their job is every week to come up with new things to say that doesn't mean that I'm not saying they're either. It's just that the best advice might have been, you know, five minutes long said once and never, you know, or just repeated 15 times. Would it probably be more helpful than listening to the three hour podcast about how like, you know, getting UVB rays in your ears in the mornings is going to help you, right? Like those might not be the things that actually will help anybody at this point. But that doesn't make for good content. And so whenever somebody's primary job is content, and I say this as somebody whose primary job is content, you have to like remember that. before you, before you, you know, get totally hooked and listen to everything but they say. This is the thing. I remember in 2013 or something, I'd sold a business. I was sitting on like $7 or $8 million of cash. And I was like, okay, I need to invest this. And I read this Tony Robbins book. I'm not a big

Tony Robbins person, but he had that money. I think it was called money mastering the game or something. And basically the whole book is just like buy index funds. I have this disease. And I think most entrepreneurs do where they say, well, that's the obvious thing. That's for the normies. I'm going to go find door number three. And I look back, like I read Chip war, which is like all about semiconductors. I knew that Envideo is an amazing business. TSM was an amazing business. I saw Facebook trading at five times earnings. But it's like I have a really hard time going through door number one. And I think going forward, I want to be more. I just want to do the thing that makes sense and is obvious and then forget about it and stop trying to be clever. This is actually an instance

of me trying to be clever. What did you want to invest in? and then you look back and you're like, ooh, dodged a bullet on that one. Oh, where was the obvious thing the wrong answer? Yeah. Because it won't be the right answer 100% of the time. In video was a, yeah, Nvidia Facebook. You look back and you think, I should have known better. But where was it the opposite?

I don't think I've ever really messed up on the one that's obvious, that slaps me in the face. And I don't like, I'm actually really decisive when I see that. But it's interesting. It mostly happens for me in person. private businesses. I think that's where my decision making is usually the strongest because I usually do what's obvious and will work for sure. But in public markets, it's very easy to get excited. Have you had one, Sean, where you're like, I almost did this and God, I'm thankful I

didn't. Well, I've had a bunch of those, but is it specifically where it was like an obvious kind of seemed pretty straightforward, but it was a mistake? Oh, I have one. So my first designer was this guy named Adam Saint. And he's just the best, the best dude. Like he was one of our designers, but also like a great friend. And he went off. He left after a couple years at Meta Lab. And he started this company called Bench.

And so he comes to me and he's like, hey, we're doing, you know, basically AI accounting 10 years early. And I loved him. I loved his co-founder. I loved the idea. But I looked at it. And I was like, oh, it's a services business for accounting and low margin. And this is going to be hard.

So I didn't invest. And for the next 10 years, I felt like an idiot because over and over and over again, I'd see these big Series A, Series B, B. Bain Capital buys them for, you know, huge amount of money or whatever. But it turned out that when Bain invested, I don't think they got any money off the table, nor would I as a shareholder. And I think a lot of people saw this, but he just posted a big post on LinkedIn about how the business basically went to zero and shut down overnight and was a total. total disaster. And that's an example of one where I was like, man, I wish I was so badly wanted to be part of that business and I would kick myself for years. And then in the end, I'm like really glad that I didn't invest in it. Well, I first want to co-sign what Andrew said.

I think, you know, I have meddled in the overthinking Olympics many times. And I, and more than anything, the reminder is to do exactly what Andrew is saying, which is like, stop trying to be clever and just simply asking, what's the obvious here? What's the obvious move here? What's the obvious answer here. And if there's not an obvious answer, just move on. Like, you don't have to do anything. No action is required in most situations. And I'm struggling to come up with a time, just like Andrew, I'm struggling to come up with a time where there was a obvious thing staring at me that I did and it turned out wrong, which almost just reinforces even more how hard that is. Whereas the opposite, if you said, hey, tell me a time where you kind of thought you got a little cute, you tried to be

clever and it didn't work out. Your buddy texted you at 11 o'clock at night and said, hey, rounds closing tomorrow and these 10 cool people are in and it's this really cool founder. I can't even blame anyone. It's even simpler than that. I was a believer in crypto early. Sam, I was talking to you about crypto early for a long time. And then one year, last year or the year before, something like that where crypto had a dip,

I was like, I'm a tax loss harvest. So clever. You know what I could do? I could sell this shit. I could buy it right back. I still own the thing and I booked this beautiful tax loss. Oh my God. I am 900 IQ and I just,

I am the guy. And so then I sell the thing and I book the loss and I tell my account, I say, don't worry about this one. I advised myself on this. I got it. And they're like, okay, great.

We'll make sure we have the, that booked for the year. And I'm like, cool. And then I'm like, I should buy back in. I was like, you know, but I did just read this report.

I think it's going to go a little lower first. Let me just wait. Just let it go a little bit lower. And the stupid goddamn tax decision ended up costing what probably saved me, maybe, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes cost me millions of dollars in gains because I didn't just do the thing. The obvious thing was sell the thing, book the loss, buy it right back. You're exactly where you were five minutes ago with additional tax losses.

The getting cute or clever was thinking, you know, the knife still falling. Let me let it fall a little further. And then it fell a little bit further. and I just padded myself. And I said, I'm so smart. I knew it was going to go down. It's going to go down a little bit more. I was actually reading this article the other day.

And I saw this guy on Twitter who's got a picture of a fucking cartoon. And, you know, he said something pretty smart. Let me just hold on for a second. Let me just wait until it goes down a little bit more. And then it went right back up way past where I bought it. And I ended up buying in at a much higher price. I would have been better off doing nothing. It's like, you know, Ross Ulbricht was in jail and just got freed,

which is I know a big day for you, Sam. Big day. And so I've got to, I've got to shame my legs for our first date. He's walking out of prison, by the way, holding a plant, which I love. I don't know what he's just got a small house plant that he had, I guess. I don't know what that is. But, you know, everyone's like, oh, my God, you know, I'm so glad he's free.

He must have been so tough, blah, blah, blah. And then somebody goes, well, government did do him a favor because he was basically forced to not sell his Bitcoin from 2011 or whatever when he was running, you know, Silk Road. And Bitcoin was like, you know, in the dollar range to now it's $100,000. And it's like, yeah, they also did give him a gift by not. letting himself. Wait, is that? So he still, he owns some still? I thought that Tim Draper bought it. No, that's what they seized. Presumably they didn't seize all of the Bitcoin that this guy had, right? Like, he could have had Bitcoin in multiple wallets. He could have had personal Bitcoin. Like, they seized what they got on the Silk Road. That doesn't mean they had all of his crypto

wallets necessarily. You know how people say, like buying a home is forced savings. He, he just had prison was his forced savings. Uh, yeah, 24 hour lockdown, forced savings, my friend. For example, I had the opportunity to invest in Coinbase, not super early, but like, let's say, series A or B, somewhere there. And I remember doing the math and being like, okay, I believe in Bitcoin, should I invest in Coinbase, the exchange or buy Bitcoin? And again, tried to outsmart. The answer should have been just do a little bit of both and let it ride.

And in the end, I did this analysis that showed me that you should just own the underlying asset, Bitcoin. It's going to grow faster than this exchange, which is going to have multiple competitors, their exchanges, et cetera, et cetera. And actually, I was right. Bitcoin overperformed. But the thing I didn't factor in was that. that I would have made more money had I just, A, done both, but B, Coinbase, you couldn't

sell your share. So like Bitcoin price went down, you couldn't panic sell. And so the forced savings of just being a Coinbase stockholder turned out to be more beneficial than being liquid with Bitcoin where you were now at the mercy of your own brain. And there's been, you know, tons of examples like this. I have a good one. I talked about this a little bit, but Meta Lab back in I guess it was 2012 or 2013. We designed Slack. And at the time, Slack was actually a failed gaming startup. And Stuart Butterfield was basically trying to do something with the remains of it and trying to build a chat tool. And so he comes to me and he's like, hey, I've only got $80,000 budget for this. And I was like, well, we normally, you know, this would cost quite a bit more.

But we really, really want to work with you. We're like big fans. And so he's like, hey, what if we did some stock. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, like, you know, we don't, like Meta Lab would go broke if we just took stock. We don't do that. Whatever. And so I said, no. And my thinking was, well, I want to get as much cash as possible so I can invest it in my own businesses. And if you think about what I was investing in at that time, it was my productivity software where I lost $10 million. So I instead put it into this money losing productivity software. I could have made $100 million or something crazy because it was at like a $20 million valuation at that time. And it's sold for $28 billion, I think, Salesforce.

That's a good one where it's like maybe, maybe obvious. Actually, that's maybe not that obvious, but it's still a brutal one. My most recent one is Justin Mayer's Truman. He was raising for it at a, I forget what it was, reasonable valuation. Justin's my friend. I think Justin's amazing. I thought he had too much going on. And I was like, no way are you going to focus on this?

I pass. And he just told me how things are going. And I'm like, shit. Like, it was so obvious. You're a winner. I should have just said, yes, I'm in. In my, my, my, my, my, I brought in a friend into the business, gave him equity. He, he knew econ much better than I did.

I thought, okay, my rate of learning is going to go up with this guy. And I was so excited for this, like, value ad from this guy. And his value ad was like, he's super good at a bunch of things. One of the things is really great at is marketing. So it's like, okay, he's going to be so helpful with marketing. And so we closed the deal, signed the docs. And I set up the first session. I'm like, oh, I can't wait for this guy to come in and just spill the beans and all the secrets that I don't know and make and they solve all of our marketing problems.

This is going to be amazing. And he comes in and he has that first session. And instead of spilling the beans, he just opens up a Google Doc. And he's like, okay, what's the best product that you sell? I remember like, it's this one. He's like, cool. What's the best photo of that product? What do you mean?

He's like, what's the best picture you have about that product? And he puts it in the Google Doc. and he's like, okay, if, you know, like, what do people say? Like, why do people buy this? And we're like, well, I mean, to buy it because it's great. He's like, yeah, but like, what, like, why do they buy it? Like, what do they say? And he writes down the caption.

And then he, like, goes and sets up a Facebook ad of that product with that picture, with that line of like what people say. And he's like, cool, let this run for like the next three months. And so that becomes our top performing ad. It took him five seconds. And I'm like, okay, that was cool. But like, surely there's more. And so nine months go by.

and I hit him up and I'm like, dude, you're a great friend. And I was so excited for you to be in this thing. But like, honestly, I feel a little disappointed. Like, I feel like you could have done more. I feel like the expectation was you're going to do more. You know, like, and he's like, oh, I did so much. And I was like, what do you mean? Like, what did you do?

Like, where is the list of like, what do you mean? When you're saying you did so much, I'm saying you didn't do enough, what's the gap? And he was like, oh, I stopped you from doing all the dumb things. He's like, I didn't do extra things. He's like, remember when you got really excited about influencer marketing? I was like, oh, yeah, that was awesome. I read this article and I met this guy who was crushing with influence marketing. I wanted to go all in on influencer marketing.

He's like, yeah, remember I just told you like, hey, Facebook's working. Like, just keep that going. Like don't, have you run into a wall with Facebook? No. All right, then let's just keep doing that. Don't get distracted. And he's like, that's what I did. The second thing, you wanted to expand your products and like, actually, I just stopped you from doing that.

Then you had this genius idea to go subscription. And I told you really like, hey, like, this thing's working. So let's just keep doing the obvious thing here and just keep. it going. And basically he laid out like four or five things that were all just simply like him taking the knife out of my hand as I have a toddler and preventing me from stabbing myself. And he was like, those were all super important moments that like this business would have gone a different way. And I was like, I don't know if you just Jedi mind tricked me into believing that you added a ton of value or you actually just said something very, very insightful to me. And I landed

of, I think he's actually very, very insightful. And that that is one of the best ways to help someone is to just simply prevent them from hurting themselves rather than solve their problems for them or give them some new tool that they've never seen before will solve all their problems. This is why I love investing in private markets, right? To Sam's point about houses being forced savings with a private business, there's so many of our businesses that I've owned where if I can press a red button, like a sell button, just any given day because I read something or I'm paranoid or whatever, I would have way, way less wealth because I would have panicked,

over and over and over again. And when I look at my public market track record, I've actually had the right call over and over and over again, but then sold way too quick. Like I bought Chipotle stock when they had that health crisis. I doubled and then I just sold, right? I could have made way more money. Same with meta, all these other things. So I think that having a psychological lock-in creates a really positive thing for people like us who are impulsive. There was a guy at the event we just threw and was like everybody was giving their claim to fame. It's like, okay, this guy built this thing. He's spent 20 years building this.

He's been grinding every day and he built this empire. And then this guy, he's building this empire. Jimmy's building this YouTube empire and then this chocolate empire on top of it. And everybody's just like, go, go, go, go, go, try to figure it out. And then there was one guy there. And it was like, yeah, he's one of the most successful investors in the world. He invested in all five of Elon's companies at the first round and didn't sell. And it was like, that's one way to do it.

It's like, identify the best operator in the world or one of somebody who you think is just like absolutely brilliant and obsessed. Invest in all their things. Don't try to judge rockets are going to fail, but this is going to work. Just invest in the jockey. Was it, was it on Antonio? No, I can't say the name. One of the wealthier people there in a room of the wealthiest people in America, some of. And someone was like, what did you do?

He goes, I'm like the CEO of my kids right now. I dedicate my life to my children and like you guys work 16 hours a day on making money. I work 16 hours a day on making my kids like happy and healthy and making sure they're well loved and all this other stuff. And I was like, you're the greatest person I've ever met. Yeah. And he had that like simple. It's not the right way to describe it, but like a simpleton mindset, like the midwit thing. But like where it was like, this seems simpler.

I'll go that route. whereas many other people refuse to sit still and stay the course. What's the quota? Pascal, all of man's misery arises from an inability to sit quietly in a room, you know? This guy did not suffer from that. Guys, this is awesome. I could keep going. I'm happy you're well, Andrew.

Yeah, yeah, it's great to see you guys. I've got to come back soon. That's fun. All right. Thank you. That's it. That's a pot. I feel like I can rule the world.

know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days on. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.