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

all right we should talk about AI because you used to tweet about like boring steady ye 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 what is your take on AI dude I am for the first time in a while I'm waking up grinning every single morning just like stoked to get to work um I feel like this is 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 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 uh what is it there decades where nothing happens and then there's days where decades happen and I feel like right now decades are happening you know like crazy crazy and here here's the way i' put it so if we just paused AI we shut down all the AI labs and all we focused on was just roll out of what already exists I think probably between self-driving cars and AI

agents 20% of all current jobs are gone what can you explain examples of the way that um you're using it now to save and make yourself more productive like both personally and in a business level or is this is mostly uh 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 dialup phase right now but like AOL dialup it's still pretty freaking cool if you've never used the internet um so you know basic stuff that everybody should be doing like I have a I

have an agent that preps me for every meeting so 30 minutes before every meeting I get 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 um I have it monitor my stock portfolio I have it tell 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 uh 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 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

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 like are You Smarter child most people would uh it'd be like a quick like two second thing it's like oh L 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 you're Lindy or this is L like would not let

it go for 20 hey let's take a quick break to talk about our sponsor today HubSpot has put together a list of 200 AI business ideas these are business ideas that you could create using Ai and it's a list of 200 they did a huge brainstorm so you can check it out if you just click the link below you can get access to these 200 AI ideas uh I'll give you an example of a couple of them one of them is you could build an AI dressing room so let's say you go to an e-commerce

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in the link below so yeah like so think about think about Lindy like uh zap here except you can build AI in between so zapier might be um when I when I press this button on my phone go to the internet and do this act 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 in 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 um 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 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 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 lindia I'm just like a power user and I'm obsessed with it like here's an example so uh 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 reso around 5: to 7:00 p.m. tonight at this restaurant and it will call in 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 um and so and then other tools so I use this one called hoe. and it's basically like a you CC it and you just say Howe can you find time for me and Sam to go get a coffee and it'll you know book all that stuff I use um fixer fyxer 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 re 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 awwesome right now and they're really just replacing basic admin this is crazy I'm looking at this right now um Sean where's this land with you do you use any of this stuff and does

this make you fearful of uh somewhere uh no not really I think everything just evolves right like ultimately i' you know this diagram that's always stuck with me is this a k 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 it's if you learn how to use these tools you're going to accelerate and go up at a f 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 um your business can run 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 not going to do 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 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 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 eval like a a third party standard people

build there's a few different evals out there people are trying to build new evals whatever 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 um 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 and like two 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 um 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 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 tests 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 all 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 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 what's an example what's an example of one of these things that you would want to automate the simple example I gave is like uh e-commerce so photography so every month we pay photographers to do shoots a real cost somewhere between let's say $5,000 to $10,000 Allin for uh 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 um in on a blank and be like cool put this on models or we have other ones where it's like uh photos and videos so I can where 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 turns into AI video it looks awesome cool but then like you do it in practice and yes she starts string but then her face starts morphing like she's like being eaten by lava it's like okay I'm not going to put that on my website like that would be a a bad thing right to do that did you see the uh AI meme of Mark Zuckerberg staring at bezos's wife's boobs where he like 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 a microsecond yeah and some guys made videos of him like not stopping and just continually going in it was um that's pretty badass what were we saying like another example would be uh you know 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 very difficult problem to solve um Can AI make them smarter and like 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 demand plan demand for this is a problem that every every physical products brand in the

world has this problem whether it's uh you know Hershey's chocolate bars or it's you know 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 10 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 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 aor press doing the same thing because 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 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

6 to 12 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 minutes like I don't know Andrew if you used to do this but I used 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 going to need to do like that has just been completely that's compl 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 um 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 247 never misses a beat and um so I'm like this is not

only did it replace the it's way better than my 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 too right like I 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 um really

a really cool thing actually me and my girlfriend did a relationship offsite which sounds really lame and nerdy um 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 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 you uh you by the way I was giving you a hard time it does sound nerdy and also I do the exact same thing uh we have relationship meetings as well uh you you have the local news business the the newsletter Sean and I both owned newsletters when I did it AI didn't exist and I felt like um you know hiring writers was actually the hardest part uh 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 like it's almost ready to roll but it's definitely ready to roll as as an editor are you using this uh for your newsletter now for the uh 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 I either didn't renew someone's contract or I didn't make a new hire for them so already replacing people that I would have hired otherwise wait wait C can you explain a couple of these explain the Tax Advisor 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 crossposting on LinkedIn I often forget I'll tweet about something and then not include it

in my newsletter and so what I've done is I built a Lindy b a Lindy bot that looks at my Twitter and all my all my other channels and then once a week it's 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 B 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 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 um 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 all of it as 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 warm 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 kind of bored and doing a deep dive I'll email her on Saturday and I've got to wait until Tuesday to get a an answer and so I was like oh I just want to be able to query L 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 uh thanks Claude right so it is very quickly becoming Tax Advisor uh investment anal 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 um the

woman who runs my family office she's got a a a family situation and so she's got a transition out of the role and so me and my president were like okay what 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 and go came up with that yeah that's right exactly I hired him right out of office um 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 some 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 [ __ ] breaks all the time which I don't understand how like I don't understand enough about technology to know like why do this ship break all the time and then the systems were so complicated that if that person left it was like oh [ __

] what's this stuff that we got to go uncover because they've automated so much [ __ ] 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 fig it's like when your Lego breaks you gota like dude I gota like [ __ ] rebuild this whole [ __ ] I don't know where this one little [ __ ] 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 zap your 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 Claud 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 glor it's like glorified zapier basically so like it connects air table to HubSpot to this website uh update these records in HubSpot like it's basically all back-end operational stuff which I think is underutilizing CU like what I would do if I was you is I would get a um Claud has this thing called I forget what 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 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 um 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 otherwise would but if you 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 amade from uh anthropic yesterday at Davos and he basically said in the next 12 months you will have ai co-workers 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 24 to 36 months these will be 4K video people that are indistinguishable indistinguishable from a human that you 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 Moes and businesses that are going going to be disrupted it's just staggering do your guys's parents use it or like your 10-year-old cousins

like how how my mom uses it in what way well my mom's you know she her first language was Hindi right so she speaks English she speaks it well but she if she needs to write it's kind of stresses her 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 a little bit insecure that like her writing is going to be like well formatted well gr

you know grammar's correct and uh 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 I she what she does is she has to like kind of mess it up a little bit to make it back get it back to real um 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 that you're you're kind of 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 has it crossed the chasm like my sister uses it in her schools to create curriculums so uh she has it do curriculums and lesson plans and gives that to her teachers to um to work off of which is something like either they would do kind of either procr destinated 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 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 followup questions at your own Leisure I mean that 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 worst 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 [ __ ] 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% margins um you know basically as long as people don't RI 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 um you know 15 years ago I started a a productivity software company and it was a terrible business because every single week new VCB back companies like AA um monday.com Etc 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 um 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 not 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 so for the last 30 years that's been the best

business ever you might have heard of constellation software they built like a70 billion Behemoth public company and all they do is buy businesses like this D don't they buy like a hundred a year they buy 100 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 in any particular way and they're buying like $3 million a year software companies three 3 to 10 sometimes bigger but they have a formula in so um basically I 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 10 years with tools like repet you can literally go in like and you can reproduce basic software very very easily right if 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 and repet 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' bought we've generally bought them in a way where we've drisk we've paid ourselves back or we have some sort of unique competitive advantage or cost can advantage or something like for example we own a uh 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 there's things like that um but personally when I'm under writing software deals now I am being incredibly conservative and honestly I'm much more focused on communities and social networks as a result um 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 that's [ __ ] crazy do you guys think I'm like out to lunch on

this am I totally like overthinking this or so say say the thought out loud what's the specific thought right well 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 10 years we're talking about a two-year time Horizon so let's take the business side of it right um the business item 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 um 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 um or other other categories like that where it's like more of a simple crud database with a a user interface on top

of it um that those are going to become less valuable I totally agree with you that that's that those are less less appealing than they were before I don't think it goes to zero because in reality um it's sort of like anytime you've actually built software it's the last 10% that takes you 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 it's just 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 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 formed so you 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'm 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 [ __ ] 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 I would I would generally agree with that although I think it's going to be a lot easier to

offer incredible sport incredible sales Etc on the other side of it you get the 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 need 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 repet the other day and rep's amazing because it's literally chat gbt 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 World selfish problem which was that I like to log my meals um like I like to take I take photos of my meals when I when I eat them uh to be able to send to my my like coach but um 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 there so 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 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 if you know if I've been doing roughly good make it green if I've been doing bad make those red and can 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 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 rep's like hey I don't know why it's not working I'm like y it actually is working 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 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 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 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 u 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 way more stuff so so that's the other Counterpoint to like software being bad 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's it's a lot 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 Mac OS iOS whatever programmers and I'm with you in terms of like where repet is at right now where it's like yeah you got to you got to fiddle a lot to get it to a point where it's shippable 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 um 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 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 can make media were media companies you would there was limited TV channels newspapers if you owned one of them it was amazing if you didn't it wasn't 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 were social media based emerg and the set of social media based businesses are way bigger than the set of Legacy Media businesses right you have if you're 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 oh 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 masaan you know showing a picture of a golden Goose laying eggs and being like that's why I'm investing um but he was like he's like with AI here's 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 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 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 the Larry Ellison version of it the B+ but he did do like he was like uh that like he he was able to dumb it down he was basic basically like like he

want 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 [ __ ] okay and it's going to save like your mom's life like that's what we're going to do with this thing okay that's that's why we're doing this let's not get caught up in Project Stargate and the politics and the the investment amount 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 throws 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 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 what what is all the stuff I see here down below uh down below your AI hedge notes sure so I feel like um you know there's a bunch of different scenarios here including that this scaling slows down and it's a mo moderate disruption we've got a couple years of some people being unemployed and then they rescale 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 um 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 or tsmc but there's the W 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 um so 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 like a duck and quack like a duck in the 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 let's a couple of those examples are uh 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 that next year here 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 have just have to report that and that's a little too complicated and people won't 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 we also do this and also I've got a company that does this right and and we all the older Statesmen we always are like ah you know young Padawan just focus and you know don't do that or 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 so here's the business I found it's called Iris energy uh the ticker is iren I en and 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 pre 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 um 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 bolds 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 EA 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 uh they are going to flip or we 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 uh 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 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 uh 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 uh a massive boost to the business and it could you know five 10 20x I don't know um but very significant if they signed some deals with hyperscalers which I know that they're actively working on they've communicated as much um so basically if you believe in a fast takeoff it's a very interesting uh way to to kind of buy something with relatively low downside and very significant upside um instead of buying Nvidia or Microsoft obviously your sound like

you're Leonard DiCaprio in uh yeah exactly do your own research this is not investment advice I do own the stock um but I think it's interesting how much of the stock did you buy um 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 Andre well Andrew I know that was not Financial advice but I do appreciate the advice that you just gave me financially uh 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 uh I wonder if that's going to happen here you said the downside is like you have this Bitcoin mining um 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 it sounds like they're not huge super clusters

so oh no they they are huge so they have a massive they have a massive site in Texas that they're working on building now here's here's the 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 up 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% 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 just launched in 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 that they have no debt which is quite impressive for a business like this they have they have a lot of uh 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 um 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 akman 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 beavon Butthead had a baby that's what this is right now have you ever been to se it's a s conference right that's what you're talking about no yeah that's what I'm talking about is is it online or or uh in person I've always wanted to go but it's un ordeal to go maybe this was your audition tape yeah there you go what do you think of it Sean I mean I I don't know anything about this company I've never heard of

Iran until Andrew talked about five minutes ago but I like the I mean problem is Andrew is 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 um and so you have to be careful uh 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 some degree that doesn't mean I just like throw it away right uh but I

have to be careful not to get overly excited and then the opposite is true in the other case like uh 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 10 times more exciting than you're actually giving it there actually like an amplifier there so 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 not a fact necessarily uh that's a 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 I think I like this I'm like do you love this yeah I think I love it then 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 [ __ ] 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 uh 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 uh you guys did that like investment episode maybe like six months ago and yeah TKO versus Ferrari uh TKO won I believe Sean I I think yeah it's up like 19% 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 aooa 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 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 this my fear of uh all all YouTube doctors by the way and I I like hberman I like AA

I like all I like them but also they're content creators now first and so you again 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 long said once and never you know or just repeated 15 times would it probably be more helpful than listening to the 3our 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 uh get totally hooked and listen to everything that they say this is the thing I remember in 2013 or something I'd sold a business I was sitting on like seven or eight 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 by index fund and I 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 Nvidia was

an amazing business tsmc 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 oo dodged a bullet on that one oh um basically

where was the where was the obvious thing the wrong answer yeah because it won't be the right answer 100% 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 don't like I'm actually really decisive when I see that but it's interesting it mostly 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 will work for sure um but in public markets it's very easy to get excited have you had one Sean where you're like uh I almost did this and God I'm thankful I didn't well I've had a a bunch of those but is it specifically it was like an obvious kind of seemed pretty straightforward but it was a mistake oh I have one so so um my first designer was this guy named Adam 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 metalab 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 Bane Capital buys them for you know huge amount of money or whatever um but it turned out that when Bane invested I don't think they got any money off the table nor would I as a shareholder and it I I think a lot of people saw this but he just posted a 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 well I first want to coign what Andrew said I think uh 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 ask like what's the obvious here what's the obvious move here what's the obvious answer here and

if there's not obvious answer is just move on like you don't have to do anything uh no action is required in most situations and um 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 text Ted you at 11:00 at night and said hey round's 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 it's 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 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 [

__ ] 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'm I am the guy and so then I sell the thing and I book 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 great 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 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 me you know 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 the obvious thing was sell the thing book the loss buy it right back you're exactly where you were five minutes ago with with additional tax losses the

getting C or clever was thinking you know the knife's 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 it's going to 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 [ __ ] cartoon and you know he said something pretty smart let me just hold on for a second let me just

wait till it goes down a little bit more and then it went right back up way past where I bought and I ended up buying in at a much higher price I would have been better off doing nothing it's like U you know Ross alrick was in jail and just got freed which is I know a big day for you Sam um big day and so I'm trying to I've got to shave 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 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 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 uh you know Silk Road and Bitcoin was like you know in the dollar range to now it's $100,000 it's like yeah they also did give him a gift

by not letting him sell wait is that so he still 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 from the Silk Road that doesn't mean they had all of his crypto wallets necessarily you know how people say uh like buying a home is forced savings he uh he just had prison was his forced

savings uh yeah 24-hour lockdown forced savings by 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 answer should have been just do a little bit of both and let it ride and in the end I 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 etc etc and actually I was right Bitcoin overperformed but the thing I didn't factor in was that I would 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 sell and so the forced Savings of just being a coinbase stockholder will turned out to be more beneficial than being liquid with Bitcoin where you were now at the mercy of your own brain and U there's been

you know tons of examples like this I have a good one I talked about this a little bit but metalab um back in 20 I guess it was 2012 or 2013 we designed slack and at the time slack was actually a failed gaming startup and steuart Butterfield was basically trying to do something with the remains of it and trying to build build a 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 um but we really really want to work with you we're like big fans and so he's like hey uh what if we did some stock and I'm like no no no no like you know we don't we don't like metalab 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 a $100 million or something crazy because it was at like a 20 million valuation at that time and it sold for 28 billion I think Salesforce that that's a good one where it's like maybe maybe obvious actually that's maybe not that obvious but it's still it's still a brutal one my most recent one is uh Justin May's true Med he was Raising for it at a I forget what it was reasonable valuation Justin's

my friend I think Justin's amazing he had I thought he had too much going on and I was like no way are you g to focus on this I pass and he just told me how things are going and I'm like [ __ ] like it was so obvious you're a winner I should have just said yes I'm in in my uh my Ecom business my I brought in a friend into the business gave him Equity he um he knew Ecom much better than I did I thought okay my rate of learning is gonna 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 he's really great at is marketing so I was like okay he's gonna 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 on all the secrets that I don't know and make and solve all of

our marketing problems this going to be amazing and he comes in and he has that first first session and uh 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 we were like it's this one he's like cool what's the best photo of that product we're like what do you mean he's like just like what's the best picture you have about that product and like and he puts it in the Google Doc and he's like okay if um you know like what

do people say like why do people buy this and we're like well they 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 Capt 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 then he so that becomes our top performing ad it took him five seconds and I'm like okay

that was cool um but like surely there's more and so nine months go by and I hit him up and I'm like dude you're my great friend and I was so excited for you to be in this thing but like honestly I feel a little disappoint like 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 wait what do you mean like what did you do like where's the list of like what what

do you mean what 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 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 uh just

keep that going like don't it 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 he like 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 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 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 well this is 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 could press a red button like a sell button just 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 track 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 uh a really positive thing for people like us who are impulsive there was a guy at the event

we just threw and it was like everybody was giving their claim to fame it's like okay this guy built this thing he's been spent 20 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's building this YouTube Empire and then this chocolate Empire on top of it 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 Antonio no I can't say the name but um 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 um I'm like uh the CEO of my kids right now like I dedicate my life to my children and um 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 simp it's not the right way to describe it but like a simplon 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 and and stay the course what's the quota Pascal all of man's misery arises from inability AB ility to sit quietly in a room you know this guy did not suffer from that um 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 was fun all right thank you that's it that's the pod