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

alright 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 your streak through the pool right now so what what is your take on ai alright i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on roll travel i am for the first time in a while i'm waking up g every single morning just like stoked to get to work i was sitting 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 ten 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 gonna be absolutely crazy like you know that's saying there's decades what is it what is it there there has been nothing happened and then there's days where decades happen and i feel like right now decades are happening you know like crazy and here's here's where 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 twenty percent of all current jobs are gone what can you explain examples of the way that you're using it now to save make yourself more productive both personally and in the 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 props me for every meeting so thirty 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 gonna invest in their company and here's two bios on them it goes to linkedin and you know just summarize it so something very basic that otherwise a human would do previously my assistant would do that i haven't monitor my stock portfolio i have it tell me about local events for the first one so how how did you set that up how did you what tool are you using to do the meeting prep thirty minutes before you get a text saying hey you have this meeting with these people about this so you guys know zap here it's basically zapier for ai agents so zap here is freaking amazing andrew you introduced me to someone who worked at lin and her name was lin and i was like wait you i don't understand that we got twenty five minutes into the conversation before i realized it was just a woman named lin who worked at this company called lin basically they 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 lydia yeah that's cool how funny and then they move on and get into the sales demo whereas a sam for twenty five minutes is like hold on there was neural or this is like would not let it go for twenty minutes so yeah like so think about think about lin like zap here except you can build ai in between so zapier here might be when i press this button on my phone go to the internet and do this act action or whatever but i can't think lin can add thinking in between so for example you can make a lin that looks at your calendar so the way would work in this instance is look at my calendar an hour before any event starts go on per complexity 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 min work right so the agent that i have built is basically by cobb it together with duct tape and dental floss it's basically doing a lot of stuff my assistant would otherwise do and my assistant is amazing but the problem with a human is they 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 that's where i'm at so i use lin to build these things when it's something i want that's custom are you investor in lin no i'm not an investor in lin i'm just like i'd power user and i'm obsessed with it like here's an example so there's some restaurants in in town where they still require you to call in to make a reservation they're not on open table i made a lindy bot where i can type in hey make me a res around five to seven pm tonight this restaurant and it will call and an ai voice will talk to them book the r put it on my calendar and invite the people i asked it to invite and if the person says our 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 dot a i and it's basically like a uc cc it and you just say howie can you find time for me and sam to go get a coffee and it'll you know 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 in 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 wanna get coffee it'll draft a rejection or an acceptance of that in my language and it gets better over time so those those are like three tools that i'm using that are awesome right now and they're really just replacing basic admin men this is crazy i'm looking at this right now sean where does 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 i've 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 alright 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 gonna 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 gonna run with all humans doing all jobs then you're gonna go down because you're gonna get out competed by companies that are gonna 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 what to eval is no it's just like when a new model comes out like when llama 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 seventy three in the last model from gp was a seventy one so we're the best model now and is there a standard it like is an eval like a a 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 said say take the latest model take the latest product everyone's excited about and see like what's the real deal holy field can we actually automate that task can it actually be offload loaded 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 that oh you wanted to use ai photography for your brand but every model has nine fingers you know two mouths it's like well i'm not actually gonna 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 don't just we just don't need a human doing this anymore and so what i've done is basically figured out alright here's like ten 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 ag because those i'll just go from zero out of ten which is where we started to like three out of ten six out of ten eight out of ten once eight out of those ten 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 like we've had like a real real breakthroughs because it matter because that's the real test for me versus i don't know exactly how these eval work but it's like a it's a an abstract thing or it'll be like you know they can pass the l sat it's like that's cool but i don't need to pass the l sets if the opportunity is ai agents in my business then i'm gonna test it on what can these ai agents do in my business so what was the what's an example of one of these things that you would wanna automate the simple example i gave is like commerce so photography so every month we pay photographers to do shoots real cost somewhere between let's say five thousand and ten thousand dollars 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 to and so i wanna know like when can i get rid of that ten k a month so when can i basically just show it my product in know on a blank and be like cool put this on models or we have other ones where it's like photos and videos so like you know you've seen these models where you you'd 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 yeah everything thing and then she starts like shred with it turns it ai video it looks awesome cool but then like you do it in practice and yes she starts shred but then her face starts morph thing like she's like being eaten by lava i like i'm not gonna put that on my website like that would be a a bad thing right to do that did you see the ai meme of mark zuckerberg staring at bezos wife spoof you like leads it extra hard to like smell them do you watched a video it's literally his eyes they dart bat down from micro second yeah it's some guys made videos of him like not stopping it's just continually gill good it was that's pretty badass what 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 and this a problem that every physical products brand in the world has this problem whether it's hershey's chocolate bars or it's north face jackets like 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 if you look at the graph it just keeps going cost goes down 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 aero press doing the same thing because we spend a lot of money on big expensive photos shoots and usually it's just an aero press sitting there really well lit with nice coffee in it so we've been looking at flare 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 twelve months i think and when it does i think it 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 meeting minute like i don't know andrew if you used to do but i to invite my assistant into our meetings and say hey can you take notes jot down any action items or follow ups that we're gonna 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 twenty four seven never misses a beat and not only did it replacing him is way better than she my assistant could do it because she'd be trying to keep up and this just was not gonna be good enough the level of accountability you can get to right like i i hate that feeling where it's like oh i did a board meeting with the ceo six months ago and i swear to god i swear to god they promised me this one thing and then they're were like no no i don't remember that and being able to pull that up i just did a really a really cool thing actually me and my girlfriend did a relationship off site swear which sounds really lame and nerdy patrick gamble 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 and general and stuff and we recorded 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 you have the local news business the the newsletter sean and i both owned newsletters when i did it a i 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 newsletter i'm not right now but that's 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 adviser an investment at analyst what and and i mean these are these are roles i previously would have hired for where i didn't yeah 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 whoa wait can you explain a couple of these explain the tax adviser one and then explain the social media one 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 it in my newsletter and so what i've done is i built a lindy bot a lindy bot 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 wanna 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 but and it's you know it's not perfect but it's like eighty percent 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 send 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 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 nest like i have like two hundred three hundred random investments all sorts of weird assets and stuff in there and so i exported all all of it as a csv out of zero i trained a claude project on it and i started asking 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 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 kinda bored and doing a deep dive i'll email her on saturday and i've gotta wait until tuesday to get an answer and so i was like oh i just wanna be able to query claude and so i was like hey i want you to rank the top twenty five 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 it was crazy i actually saved a hundred thousand dollars a year of cash taxes by moving an investment from one hold go to another thanks 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 what what you have some role i saw that you put up there what was that yes so the woman who has 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 do we 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 would go came up with that yeah that's right exactly i hired him right out of the office but anyway we 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 a 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 you know like why 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 the stuff that we gotta 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 off automated but it's sort of duct tape together and the duct tape comes undone and there's so much duct tape that i gotta go and fix it's like when your lego breaks so you gotta like dude i can like 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 as app your automation will move the data into air table and then you manipulate it in x y z 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 it's 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 under utilizing it because like what i would do if i was you is i would get a claude has this thing called i forget forgot it's called model context protocol or whatever and you can basically build a database of all 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 or who's got a business in this space and just have like a live database of people in an ll 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 gonna have virtual employees very very soon and that's what's crazy like i was watching an interview with da ama from ant philanthropic yesterday at da and he basically said in the next twelve 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 do you can you write a report and i think that within twenty four to thirty six months these will be four k video people that are indistinguishable from a human deal 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 the implications in terms of business mo and businesses that are gonna gonna be disrupted it's just staggering do your guy's parents use it or like your ten year old cousins like how how my mom uses it in what way well my mom's you know she her first language is hindi right so she speaks english she speaks it well but she if she needs to write it kinda stresses her out she's like oh i write something i write an email i gotta write a letter respond to something write a note to the doctor and she's like kinda slow with writing and she feels a little bit insecure that like her writing is gonna be like well formatted well grant you know grammar correct and clear and so she was early on chat gp 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 and then i she what she does is she has to like kinda mess it up a little bit we can back 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 the you're you're kinda right i think if 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 curriculum so she has it due do curriculum and lesson plans and gives that to her teachers to to work off of which is something like either they would do kind of either procrastinate or 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 it's kinda like you find your one use case of chat gp 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 can 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 chad gp we're like what does this mean and it gives us beautiful perfect bedside manner explanations more patient more thorough than the doctor you could ask follow questions at your own leisure i mean that that's been another one that was like pretty it was just like night and day say 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 gonna be a worse business over the next ten 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 a 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 forty fifty sixty percent margins there basically as long as people don't write it 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 fifteen 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 dot com etcetera i 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 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 damn and infrastructure software and these are great businesses because not no like amazing developer wakes up and no amazing designer wakes up and is like i'm gonna 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 thirty years that's been the best business ever you might have heard of constellation software they built like a seventy billion dollar behemoth public company and all they do is buy businesses like this they buy like a hundred a year and buy a hundred a year they increased the prices on a schedule they hold them they don't really you know do anything crazy or improve them and in any particular way and they're buying like three million dollar a year software companies three three to ten sometimes bigger but they have a formula and so i believe let's let's just take funeral home software right so let's say that there's one developer who built funeral home software and he's had no major competition for ten years with tools like rep you can literally go in like and you can reproduce basic software very very easily right if if your software is like highly algorithm 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 ten or twenty minutes in rep it 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 comm 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 der risked we've paid ourselves back or we have some sort of unique competitive advantage or costs can advantage or something like for example we own a a framework hosting company for a framework and a lot of people have standardized and built software on that framework they're gonna keep hosting with us because we support that framework and nobody else does right there's there's things like that personally when i'm underwriting software deals now i am being incredibly conservative and honestly i'm what 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 on this am i totally overthinking this or say the thought out loud what's the specific thought right well i think it's pretty wild implication that we may have 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 in and it's not a long term right this is not ten 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 thirty 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 gonna be buying five thousand dollars a year or fifty thousand dollar your software anymore and so maybe there's one thing for vertical software vms right or other categories like that where it's like more of a simple cr database with a a user interface on top of it that those are gonna become less value 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 like anytime you've actually built software it's the last ten percent that takes you know you can get ninety percent of the way there you feel like you're almost there but then the last ten percent will take you as much time as the first ninety this is like a 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's just might just be somebody else building software that's a competitor to you or you know if is somebody in your own company can 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 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 cy which is that if i buy enterprise software i don't need to save forty percent on this bill as much as i need to not get fired for being like yeah we home brew our entire crm and like the security wasn't very good right because we didn't i made this in fucking claude instead of it being software i bought from a vendor that's been doing this for fifteen years and it's actually like solve the security vulnerabilities and so i think the enterprise software will be safe so i a lot of software will be more safe than software just as a category goes to zero yeah i would i would generally agree with that although i think it's gonna be a lot easier to offer incredible sport incredible sales etcetera on the other side of it you get the the market expands right because it's not just that oh there's gonna 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 code didn't understand the problem so they weren't working on it or you would have need too much funding to build it it's not really worth it so all this new software is gonna get created that was not really feasible or wasn't really easily accessible before like i'll give you like a a stupid example i went on rep it the other day and rep amazing because it's literally chat gp except for when you tell it something it makes a website for you or makes an app for you and so i have 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 alright this is kind of annoying that that's there i i just told rep i said make an app that when i open up the app instantaneously the camera is on i don't wanna 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 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 rep 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 alright deal and then it made that up for me and was like you know it's not perfect like i ran into some walls where that rep like hey i don't know why it's not working i'm like yeah it actually is working it's like you're you're just being crazy but like okay you get through the craziness and it's not exactly good enough i would say like like i 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 gonna 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 gonna come into the market that didn't exist and i could do it for like other problems that weren't gonna get solved maybe through like you know if you look at software today it's like a low lowest common denominator like i need to serve the most customers who are willing to pay so i'm gonna 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 to way more stuff so so that's the other counter point to like software being that it's phenomenal for consumers right as a consumer i'm so excited it's more if you're buying these businesses and your underwriting ten years of returns continued profit margins all that kind of stuff i think it's 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 of rep is at right now where it's like yeah you gotta you gotta fit a lot to get it to a point where it's ship i've built a lot of stuff that is ninety percent 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 wanna be in the stock photos business because it's perfect and it's only getting better i was say one other thing like this same thing happened with media right so like before only people who can make media were media companies you would there was limited tv channels newspapers if you own a one of them it was amazing if you didn't it was right and you're right that like owning those legacy media businesses kinda 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 emerged and the set of social media based businesses are way bigger than the set of legacy media businesses and and if you're if you're interested in whatever weird niche she 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 if you guys heard larry ellis 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 ellis is in like what's actually like possible with ai versus like moss son 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 he's here's what's gonna 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 a hundred billion dollars because i want that and i want a hundred 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 his he did a larry ellis version of it the b plus but he did do like he was like that like he he was able to dumb it down he was basically like you want it was like he was shaking somebody and but 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 gonna cure cancer with this shit okay and it's gonna save your like your mom's life like you working that's what we're gonna do with this thing okay that's that's why we're doing this let's not get caught up in project star and politics and the the investment amount and and and the infrastructure like okay all that's a 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 those and is you know the tenth rich is guy in the world so he can kinda throw his weight behind a lot of that stuff and i think that's pretty bad badass ass 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 i wanna 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 what what is all the stuff i see here down below down below your ai hedge notes sure so i feel like you there's a bunch of different scenarios here including that this scaling slows down and it's a moderate disruption we've got a couple years of some people being unemployed and then they res skill 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 take off which is like masa 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 based just become this like communist over overload that out allocate assets and stuff but i've been thinking about you know what do you wanna own in a world where that happens so you can go out and you can try and buy secondary in claude or ant philanthropic or open ai those are very expensive you can buy nvidia at thirty times earnings or asm at thirty times earnings some of these or or ts c but there's the taiwan 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 mis categorized 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 just saying you wanna 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 gonna invest right and so let's 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 always crappy bitcoin mining companies dude when we sold the company to hubspot one of the reasons we went into the year with millions of millions of dollars booked of advertising and we were probably gonna do twenty million dollars that next year and they were like yeah just can't all those contracts and give the money away give the money back and we're not gonna 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 have just have to report that and that's a little too complicated and people 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 why 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 and we all the older statesman we always are like you know young pat just focus and don't you know don't do that or or if you're gonna 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 i r e n and basically as these two australian guys who were infrastructure bankers and their thesis supposedly was that compute was gonna be a big deal in the next ten to twenty years so presently 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 hydro electric 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 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 immediately and right now they're making somewhere in the range of five hundred million dollars of eb annually doing that now the stock trades at about a two point four billion dollar 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 seventy percent before they get to breakeven 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 gonna flip i hope or they've kinda publicly communicated to some degree that they're gonna try and flip these data centers over to compute so all these huge companies like you know amazon and microsoft and ant philanthropic and whatever they all need data centers and they need the data centers to be centralized in one place you can have ten computers here or ten gpus here in ten gpus somewhere else you for training you need them all to be in a massive super cluster 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 an 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 girly 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 hyper scaler on training this could be a massively a massive boost to the business and it could you know five ten twenty x i don't know but very significant if they sign some deals with hyper which i know that they're actively working on they've communicated as much so basically if you believe in a fast take off it's a very interesting way to kind of buy something with relatively low downside and very significant upside instead of buying nvidia microsoft obviously you sound like you're leo leonardo d cap 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 what is this a position for ants just a million dollars well adrian 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 i was but there was definitely correlation i wonder if that's gonna happen here you said the downside is like you have this bitcoin mining free cash flow priced very fairly right you said like three x free cash flow basically is the price and then the upside is if they make this ai switch one question you said they that it sounds like they're not huge super clusters so oh no they're they are huge so they have a massive they have a massive site in texas that they're working on billing 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 matter or you know we moved to distributed inference or something like that there's definitely a downside scenario which is why i'd say all 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 i'm fascinated by their entrepreneurial story i'm amazed how this was to just launch in two thousand eighteen and how fast they grew how much financing did they raise i don't know how much they've raised but i do know that they have no debt which is quite impressive for a business like this they have 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 the i mean the way they die would be big amounts of debt so they're avoiding that i think well i forget what that online stock market club is that like bill ackerman and all these billionaires are part of where they had gotta 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 bi bought head had a baby that's what this is right now have you been to zone is the sound conference right that's what you're talking about no yeah that's what i'm talking about it's is it online or or in person i've always wanted to go but it it's an ordeal to go maybe this was your audition tape yeah there go what do you think of it sean i mean i don't know anything i about this company have never heard of i until truck about five minutes ago but i like the i mean problem is andrew's very persuasive this is also the problem with me i can talk myself into anything that doesn't mean it was a good idea and i i have done that to myself many times you have to be careful i apply basically a discount factors like a charisma discount so the more persuasive somebody is about everything the more i have to discount to somebody degree doesn't me 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 dead pan 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 ten times more exciting then you're actually giving and this is actually like an there so you gotta be a little bit careful this is why whenever i read malcolm glad well books so you have to be like wait this is just a theory 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 that's pretty cool i i think i like this i'm like do you love this yeah i think i love it and then i'm like alright 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 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 turns 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 tk versus ferrari tk one i believe sean i i think yeah it's up like nineteen 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 a stock picking episode just stock stock of palo and like we just didn't just say the word nvidia and then stop the recording because that would have been that would have been sufficient 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 this my fear of all youtube doctors by the way and i i like lieberman i like a tea i like all i like them but also and their content creators now first and so you again as 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 wrong either it's just that the best advice might have been you know five minutes long said once and never you know and or just repeated it fifteen times would it probably be more helpful than listening to the three hour podcast about how like you know getting uv b rays in your ears in the mornings is gonna 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's who's primary job content you have to like remember that before you before you you know get totally hooked and listened to everything but they say this is the thing i remember in twenty thirteen or something i'd had sold a business i was sitting on like seven or eight million dollars of cash and i was like okay need to invest this and i read this tony robbins book i'm not a big tony robbins person at that money i think it was called money mastering the game or something and basically the whole book is just like by index fines i have this disease and i think most entrepreneurs do where they say well that's the obvious thing that's for the norm i'm gonna go find door number three and i look back like i read chip war which is like all about semiconductors i knew that and nvidia is an amazing business ts 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 wanna do the thing that makes sense and is obvious and then forget about it and stop trying to be clever this is actually an sense of me trying to be clever what did you want to invest in and then you look back and you're like oh dodged to bullet it on that one oh where was the obvious thing the wrong answer yeah because it won't be the right answer or a hundred percent of the time nvidia was a it's 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 i don't like i'm actually really decisive when i see that but it's interesting it mostly it happens for for me in private businesses i think that's where my decision making is usually the strongest because i usually do what's obvious and we'll work for sure but in public markets is 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 plant a bunch of those but is it specifically aware it was like an obvious kind of scene pretty straightforward but it was a mistake oh i have one oh so my first designer was this guy named adam saint and he's 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 medal 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 ten years early and i loved him i loved his c cofounder i love the idea but i looked at it and i was like it's a services business for accounting and low margin and this is gonna be hard so i didn't invest and for the next ten years i felt like an idiot because over and over and over again i'd see these big series a series 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 table nor would i as a shareholder and it i 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 disaster and that's an example of one where i was like man i wish i 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 i first wanna c him what andrew said i think you know i have metal in the overthinking olympics many times and i and more than anything the reminder is to do exactly what andrew saying which is like stop trying to be clever and just simply ask 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 i'm struggling to come up at the 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 kinda thought you got a little cute you tried to be clever and it didn't work out your buddy texted you at eleven o'clock at night and said hey rounds closing tomorrow and these ten cool people are in and it's this really cool founder i can't even blame anyone it's even simpler than that it's i was a believer in crypto early sam i was probably be talking to you about crypto early for a long time and then one year last year or the year before or 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 nine hundred iq and i just under i am the guy and so then i sell the thing and i booked the loss and i tell my accountant i say don't worry about this one i advised myself on this i got it and they're like okay well 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 gonna go a little lower first let me just wait just let it little a little bit lower and the stupid goddamn tax decision ended up costing you know what probably saved me maybe i don't know hundreds of thousands dollars in taxes cost me millions of dollars and gains because i didn't just do the thing the the obvious thing was sell the thing book the lost buy it right back you're exactly where you were five minutes ago with which additional tax losses the getting cute or clever was syncing you know the knife still fall like let me let it fall a little further and then it i fell a little bit further and i just pat myself and i said i'm so smart i knew it was gonna go out he's gonna go on 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 sets something pretty smart let me just hold on for a second let me just wait till he goes down a little bit more and then it went right back up wave past where i bought it and ended buying in at a much higher price i would have been better off doing nothing it's like you know ross a brick was in jail and just got freed which i know a big day for you sam big day and so i'm trying to i've gotta shave my legs for our first date he's walking out of prison by the holding a plant which i love i don't know what he's just got a small house plant that he 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 must have been so tough blah blah and then somebody goes well government did do him a favor because he was basically forced to not sell his bitcoin from twenty eleven or whatever when he was running you know silk road and bitcoin was like you know in the dollar range to now it's a hundred thousand dollars it's like yeah they also did give him a gift by not letting him sell wait is that so he still he owned some stuff 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 could had personal bitcoin like they seized what they got from 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 with his forced savings yeah twenty four hour lockdown for savings my friend or for example i have 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 bitcoin should i invest in coinbase the exchange or buy bitcoin and again try to outs smart the answer should've have been just do a little bit of both and let it ride and in the end i i did this analysis that showed that you should just own the underlying asset bitcoin it's gonna grow faster than this exchange which is gonna have multiple competitors that are exchanges etcetera etcetera and actually i was right bitcoin over performed but the thing i didn't factor in was that i would've have made more money had i just a done both but b coinbase you couldn't sell your shares so like bitcoin price went down you couldn't panic excel and so the forced savings of just being a coinbase based stock will 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 metal up back in twenty i guess it was twenty twelve or twenty thirteen we designed slack and at the time slack was actually a failed gaming startup and stuart butter field 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 eighty thousand dollars budget for this and i was like well we normally you know this would cost quite a bit more but we really really wanna 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 like you know we don't like middle 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 wanna get as much cash as possible so i can invest 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 ten million dollars so i instead put it into this money losing productivity software i could have made a hundred million dollars or something crazy because it was at like a twenty million valuation at that time and it's sold for twenty eight billion dollars i think salesforce that that's a good one where it's like maybe maybe avi actually that's maybe not that obvious but it's still it's still a brutal one my most recent one is just a mayor's true med was raising for it at i forget what it was reasonable valuation justin's was my friend i think justin's amazing i thought he had too much going on and i was like no way are you good focus on this my i pass and he just told me how things are going and i'm like shit like that was so obvious you're a winner i should've have just said yes i'm in in my my e comm business my i brought in a friend into the business gave him equity he he knew com a much better than i did i thought okay my rate of learnings can go up with this guy i was so excited for this like value add from this guy and his value add was like he's super good bunch of things one of the things he's really great at is marketing so sounds like okay he's gonna be so helpful with marketing and so we close the deal sign the docs and i set up the first session like oh i can't wait for this guy to come in and just spill the beans on all the secrets that i don't know and make and they solve all of our marketing problems this is gonna be amazing and he comes in and he has that first 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 and remember like this one and he's like cool what's the best photo of that product okay what like what he means he's like just like what's the best picture you have about that product like and they puts it in the google doc and he's like okay if you know like what do people sit like why do people buy this and we're like what well i mean the bike because it's great he's was like yeah like what like why do they buy like what do they say and he writes down the cap and then he's 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 then he so that becomes their top performing ad took him five seconds and i'm like okay that was cool but like surely there's more and so nine months go by it and i hit him up and i'm like dude you're right great friend and i was so excited for you to be in this thing but like honestly i feel a little disappointed i feel you could've have done more i feel like the expectations you're gonna do more you know like and he's like oh i did so much and i was like what do mean like what did you do like where is the list of like what what do you mean what when you're saying you did so i'm saying you didn't do enough what's the gap and he was like oh i 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 yeah it was awesome i read this article and i met this guy who was crushing with influencer marketing and 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 alright then let's just keep doing that don't get distracted and he's like that's what i did hey like the second thing you wanted to expand your products and like actually i just stopped you for from doing 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 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 on a different way and i was like i don't know if you just jedi mind tricked me into believing that you've added ton of value or you actually just said something very very insightful me and i i landed 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 and this is why i love investing in private markets right to sam's point about houses being forced savings with a 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 just any given day because i read something or 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 yeah i doubled the and then i just sold right i could've 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 impulsive there was a guy at the event we just through and was like everybody was giving their claim to fame was like okay this guy built this thing he's been spent twenty years building this he's been grinding every day and he built this empire and then this guy he's building this this empire jimmy building this youtube empire and then this chocolate empire on top of and everybody's uses just like 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 companies at the first round it didn't sell and it was like this 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 obsessed invest in all their things don't try to judge rockets are gonna fail but this is gonna work just invest in the jo was it was it on antonio no i can't say the name but one of the wealthier people there in a room of the wealthiest people in america some of and someone was like what do you do he goes i'm like the ceo of my kids right now like i dedicate my life to my children and like you guys work sixteen hours a day on making money i work sixteen 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 a simple ten mindset like the the mid width 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 quote pascal all of man's misery arises from inability to sit quietly in a room you know this guy did not suffer from that mh guys this is awesome i could keep going great i just i'm happy you're well andrew yeah yeah it's great to see you guys i gotta come back soon that's fun alright thank you that's it that's a pot i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in in like a days on point of oldest travel never looking back