I put 80% of my money in the S&P

0:00 All right, Sean, I have a study that's gonna show why the amount of money that you make is almost entirely out of your control unless you do what I tell you to do. How's that for an opener? But I want to I'll put my all in it like a day's all on a roll less change. Okay, I'm intrigued. Go on. What do you mean? What do you mean it's out of my control? Nothing's out of my control.

0:29 Uh it's about as out of control as it is your ability to control if you're seven foot tall or not. So I got up to give a shout out to Jim O'Shaughnessy. I saw a clip where he kind of like brought me to this topic. He talked about the study that I'm gonna reference. So In twenty fourteen, there was a researcher in Sweden named Heinrich. Interesting things about the Swedes is that they are obsessed with two things. Twins. And money. So Sweden has this massive twin database where they have many, many, like hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions of twins that they've documented.

1:01 And for some reason you're they track twins. I think originally they did it for health reasons where they wanted to track like uh what type of twins got diseases and studies, right?'Cause nature's controlled, so it's all about nurture. Yes. And so they have this Like massive database. And they were able to break the database down into fraternal twins, which are twins that are born at the same time but don't look alike. And identical twins. They're also obsessed. With money.

1:25 They love money. And in particular, the government loves money. Up until two thousand and seven, they had a wealth tax. And as part of the wealth tax, Sweden basically s uh tracked every citizen's entire financial portfolio. So they looked at which stocks you owned. the mutual funds that you owned, every dollar of savings. They basically tracked all of this stuff. And so what was interesting Is that this guy named Heinrich, he went he had this premise, this idea where he was like how much

1:53 Of Investing in savings uh behavior is controlled by genetics. And so he looked at the differences between fraternal twins. And identical twins.

2:04 because uh presumably twins grew up in the same environment In many cases, they have the same education levels. Um Their parents. Spoke to them the same way, they were loved a similar amount, whatever. And then he looked at uh

2:18 Well, how do the fraternal twins who only share fifty percent of genetics, how do they invest and save compared to the identical twins who have Share one hundred percent. uh of DNA. And he broke it up into six biases. So people who held too few stocks, excess turnover, people who traded a lot. Uh performance chasing, so people who bought whatever bought that did well the year before.

2:40 over investing in your home country called home bias. Loving lottery type stocks. And then uh the disposition effect, which is refusing to sell losers. And he looked at all of this data, and I think he looked at it over the course of uh thirty thousand Sess of twins. Additionally, he looked at um outliers. So like for example, twins that were separated at birth and a couple of stuff like that. And the results that he found was basically and concluded was that forty five percent of of savings and investing patterns and behaviors was genetic. Which I find to be

3:10 Astounding. And the reason I was thinking about this was You and I I would not I think we

3:16 both in f we both in different ways like investing, but we are not, I would say, professional investors. And yeah. My portfolio would also say I'm not a professional investor. And yeah, we love having professional investors on the podcast. We both love reading about Warren Buffett and people like that. And I was trying to figure out Two things. The first is why do I like that so much? What what am I drawn to these guys for uh so much? And the second thing was a couple podcasts ago, we talked about passion. And how to figure out what you're kinda supposed to be doing. And I was trying to look for a more scientific reason about why I should do what I do.

3:53 To address the first one of why do we like these investors so much? Well I think I realized that in order to be a world class investor Finances. are actually secondary to human nature. Financial trends.

4:08 Change Every decade, every handful of decades, something will some new thing will pop up. You know, spAcks are this new thing. So like learning about that is important. But that changes every so often. But what doesn't change is thousands and thousands of years. Of human nature.

4:24 And understanding how humans behave and asking yourself why do they do what they do is significantly more important than the financial stuff. On this show, we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot, they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy to read. Wealth Guide. It's thirty five principals from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manish Pabry, Morgan Housel, Kathy Wood, and a ton others. So these are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules, basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin.

5:03 You can get it in the link below. Uh, there's this great story s from Monish Pabry. So people who've been listening to this podcast. You've probably seen that uh Monish came on the podcast twice. I think his two episodes are the most viewed episodes in the history of My First Million.

5:20 So he's been this kind of hall of fame guest for us. And In the interview, I don't know if you remember this, but he said this thing Where he was running a company. He was an entrepreneur. And he was running this company and he wasn't

5:33 Super, super successful, but it was like moderately successful. I think it was like a six million dollar a year revenue business or something like that. Now He did this he but he was he wasn't loving it. He just assumed this is a normal entrepreneurial burnout. You know, I'm working really hard. I've been doing this for a long time. The shit's hard.

5:50 I probably feel how most founders feel. But he was encouraged to do a Like a very fancy version of a personality test. Or they talk to you, they talk to your co workers, they talk to your parents, they talk to everybody in your life, the sort of three sixty. And um they try to understand like a little bit more about you.

6:06 The result came back and they were like You know, it's no surprise that you're miserable here. This is a game that is completely incompatible for your personality type. He goes, What do you mean? And they go You like and I forgot the exact Descriptor, but it was something like

6:21 You like solo player. Competitive Number games. He's like, What? And they're like, Yeah, let's say that again. You like one person, so you by yourself, not team sports.

6:33 You like solo player. Competitive. Number based games. And like things that had a lot of like a math or or number uh Thing to it. And here you were, you were running this company.

6:42 So now you're playing this multiplayer. Competitive. Non numbers based game. And so he uh he was like okay, I don't know what to do with this. And he decided to start investing on the side and basically it turns out That as he's i as he's done in his life, he did way better as an investor, a solo investor.

6:58 Playing a competitive money numbers based game, which was the stock market. than he ever did uh doing this other thing. He he really encouraged this sort of know thyself. thing which is like you have to know who you are. And what you are Like

7:12 Predisposed to love and obsess over. And then find yourself in those types of games. And he so I'll give you another example with that. When I was there he was like He was telling me about how you've been kicked out of these casinos.

7:23 Um because he was winning too much money. I was like, You were card counting. He's like, No, I wasn't crazy. Dude, you're running around without your shirt on. Like I I know the That's not a casino, that was Margaretaville. Off camera, he told me, he showed me the exact system that he used. And then my life I've had like friends go and use this system uh in at these like specific casinos, play this specific way. And it was he had actually found an edge. He's like He's like just the intellectual thrill. Of actually being able to beat the house.

7:59 There's nothing like it. You know, th financially this is not a good decision to spend thousands of hours figuring this out, but I just like those single player. competitive m number based games. And same thing with philanthropy. He's like When I got into philanthropy, oh you make money, they gotta figure out how to give it away. And it's like Should I be going to these galas and dressing up and Donating to these causes and socializing and like there's a whole socialite scene with philanthropy.

8:22 And what he figured out was the version that was fulfilling to him was again. If single player. competitive numbers based game where he realized The fun part of philanthropy for him was figuring out How to make one dollar

8:33 That he puts in have the highest economic return. In terms of impact, uh Anyway, so what he figured out was There were kids in India who were really smart that had no schooling. Like r India's got a bit you know, over a billion people. So a lot of people just live in rural India that are very intelligent, but have no access to good education or a pathway to to better their lives, they're just gonna end up on a farm.

8:55 And what he realized was that if he could identify the smart kids For like three three grand a year, he could Uh put them in like a competitive school. So they started these competitive math schools and they got them into IT and IT is this feeder system to like the best jobs in the world. They can go get visas and basically for three three grand, he can up the that family's earning power. From ten thousand a year to fifty thousand a year.

9:18 So you could five accident create like, you know, fifty thousand per year. For a one time Three three thousand dollar one year um like acceleration in in training. And his like admittance rate, you know, the normal IT's harder to get into than Harvard.

9:32 Um than Stanford's a harder harder to get into than any uh US college. So it's like whatever, point whatever percent admissions rate typically. And I think his is like eight percent or something crazy. Like you know, like a ten X larger uh admittance rate. So even that wasn't a single player game or whatever. And it really got me thinking about this idea of How do you know yourself enough to know what game you should and shouldn't be playing? Which is kind of a spin off of what you're talking about, right? You're Well, that's like step one. Yeah.

9:59 Um I had another uh kind of mentor this guy, James Courier, he told me the same thing last week. He goes I wish somebody earlier in life had told me Uh who I really was. I go what I didn't know what he meant. This could go a lot of ways right here. What are you about to say? And he was like You know, I played soccer my whole life competitively. And what I realized is like, you know, I'm just actually not very attuned to playing soccer, but I was actually really good at racket sports. I had long wingspan, good hand eye coordination, and I should have been playing racketball early on. He goes, the same thing happened to my career.

10:29 You know, I was doing these types of businesses when I really should have been doing this type of thing. He got me wondering, wow, there's probably billions of people walking around. Who never discovered what game they're actually great at and never got into that game and therefore like kinda life passed them by. Isn't that sort of a A tragedy. Yeah. Well like I don't

10:46 Selfishly, I don't think about other people. I just think about myself where I'm like where I'm like uh I'm focused on the more important bit. Me. But that's but that's what everyone thinks, you know. They think like, okay, but how does this apply to me? And um I think it was Andrew Wilkinson who told me about that self assessment thing, which I really dig. Did you do it? Yeah, it was awesome. Uh w what's like the when you're like a teen and you're like discovering yourself and you get a little curious. I think we're both a little

11:11 I'm a little my curious right now. There's two of us. Therefore we are bi curious. Dispose. I don't even know what the options are, right? Like I don't think I'm single player competitive numbers based game. That's not me, but I don't even know what the menu looks like. Um so so what do you think yours is? Researching. Uh I I think it'd be like a a new topic and going super deep and obsessing over one topic and coming to it try to trying to come to a conclusion. Right.

11:45 So naturally. Go run Hampton. Yeah. You're describing like sitting alone on a couch with a book. And thinking and really like finding your joy and your you're being the best at that. And then you're like, So I'm gonna go sit in an office with fifty other people in the community. I uh thank God my my co founder Joe is the CEO. So he runs Hampton, but it's when we like are gearing up to launch something new, like I'm in my uh zone of genius when I'm like researching how others have done something similar to us and where they failed in one than one, and then going talking to experts and weasling my way into conversations of people who have been there done that and being like, tell me

12:19 Tell me like the mistakes that I'm going to make. I think you and I are both s similar in this weird way. I I thought this was completely normal. Until somebody pointed out that hey, that's probably not super common. I was talking to this guy who's a a book developer. One thing this one of the things this guy has done.

12:34 Is he's written some of the most popular books. As a ghostwriter for Smart, successful, famous people. Okay, great. So I'm talking to him and he's like, Okay, so what's your book idea? And I'm telling him my book idea. And I I talked to him a couple of times.

12:49 over the over a couple of years. And so he had seen me talking about a couple of different book ideas. He goes You know Maybe we save this for later. He goes, but I think The most interesting about you is and I'm like he pauses.

13:01 This is very interesting to me, because this guy's job is to spend time with really smart people and he lets them talk for hours and hours and hours. And then he's like Oh, the real story here is X. And they're like, really? That? And he's like, Yeah, that's the that's the most interesting part about this. And that's his gift.

13:17 So he goes, The what's interesting part about you is you have some Weird. Predilection for reverse engineering businesses. Or reverse engineering. He goes Everything you do, you seem to reverse engineer as a first

13:29 Like as a first instinct. Whereas most people, I don't think, do that. And he's like, whether it's like something in life, you know, f it could be family oriented. You told me this, it could be creatively this, it could be Investment And Sam, you're the same way where it's like I think our first instinct when we want to do something It's like all right, let me go study in history how other people have done this. Let me go talk to the other people who already done this.

13:49 And I'm gonna reverse engineer based on the principles that they tell me. I know what to ignore of what they're gonna say, I know what to focus in on. And I'm gonna cre create my own system and my own understanding, and then I'll just do that. And I think we both do that as our default mode. And it's what we enjoy doing. And I don't think that that's common. And here's an example. Whenever we have someone on the podcast and they explain uh they'll ask for advice or something like that, instead of saying like Well, you should probably raise venture capital, or you should you should probably do this. The first question is always like

14:16 Well, how would you define success in five years? Like what like what what backwards Yeah, like what's the definition of success to you? And then let's figure out what the rules will be to the game. Then we will can can give feedback. But the reason why I've been always obsessed with this is I've noticed in my company The times that I have issues, which is all the time, uh the times that I have issues. Every waking breath. Yeah. Every time I screw something up every day. Uh I uh I'm like I have to change the business. I have to change the people, I have to change all of these external things.

14:52 But the reality is and this is why I think I like capitalism so much, is that the business that you're controlling, if you are controlling, it's just an extension of your personality. So if you have trust issues, then your f your co workers are probably gonna think that you're micromanaging them. If you have trouble committing, then they're gonna think that you're absentminded. the issues that you have in the company, they are an extension of the issues that you have.

15:17 And vice versa. If you are a kind person, you're gonna have a kind culture, I think. And I think that What What investing habits are are just human nature habits. And that's why investing is really interesting. And so even though this study was related to finance, it's the exact same thing. So if you tend to have excessive turnover with your stocks, which is one of the six biases, then perhaps you struggle having steady relationships. If you tend to over invest, uh in like

15:44 stocks in your home country, which they call a home bias, the likelihood that you have moved from your hometown is actually quite low. And so what I have found is that the best ways to make change in these issues For one, it's not just reading. And so I wrote down this line which was that um Change requires pain, not words. Because according to the study, what they found is Once they normalize for education, meaning

16:12 They took two people who both had business degrees. If that s if if person number two went and read a bunch of Business books. They wouldn't necessarily be a better investor. What they found was that the only thing that made a meaningful difference other than genetics was people who worked in finance.

16:30 Meaning you have to ex Like You have to experience a loss. Like, oh, I I did this, I got burnt, I can't put my hand there again, versus just r constantly reading about burning your hand. You'll still burn your hand. Um even in the book, Thinking Fast and Slow, he even says he's like, I'm writing a book on biases. But I suffer from all these same things and I and I have to work on this all the time.

16:52 And so the best way, I think, or the there I wrote down like four ways that you can like prevent this. But one of the biggest ways to harness this is what Warren Warren Buffett said. He just said actually again We invest in our zone of genius. And what that means is Warren Buffett is a slow and steady type of guy. So he invests in slow and steady types of types of things, which it would entirely explain why he's adverse to Bitcoin, which it would entirely explain that if he were a type of if he were eighteen or

17:19 twenty five nowadays, he probably would can not consider having an AI startup that raised lots and lots of V C. The people who do that tend to be the ones who want dopamine a lot faster, who maybe care about glory, and you have to optimize the thing that you're working on for the personality that you have. But the other ways that you get rid of this, I think, is that you have to pre-commit so the future doesn't decide. Basically don't go to a grocery store hungry. So like when you th make a decision, you write it down, like if I'm gonna I'm gonna fire this person in month three after hiring them if they don't hit these requirements. Did they or did they not hit the requirements, you stick to it. Not if you're like predisposed to like

17:53 You know, not ha like confrontation. Another one would be to shorten the feedback loop so you're able to like see Points on the scoreboard very fast and get new information quick. And the last one, you can't play games where your bias will be fatal. And that sort of means like For me, I'm a control freak. I'm a little bit of a slow and steady type of guy. Raising lots of V C where I'm not in control and I'm expected to go really, really, really fast. That would potentially be a fatal game for me. So I'd be setting myself up to lose.

18:20 Th that's really interesting. So I I I like the the two premises you have. One The problems you see in your situation. Whether that's your life or your work. Workplace. Is uh A mirror.

18:34 And then the the then the four or five tactics you just described are like, Okay, what's the remedy? And and also, you know, the insight, which is I think Morgan Hounsel's book is this, which is basically Getting wealthy through the money game. And investing is far less about strategy and far more about behavior. And it's your own b it's your own poor behavior that leads to poor financial results, not poor strategy. He says it in a much better way, which I stole from him. I wrote it down here. I said personal finance is more personal than it is finance. Right. Yeah. Exactly.

19:02 So I think that's great. It it's also interesting because you said like, you know, the best investors weren't necessarily the ones reading more books. At the same time, all the best investors talk constantly about the books they're reading. And I I actually thought about it while you're saying it. Th it might be a w a weird thing. So it might not be that the Knowledge in the books is super important.

19:20 It might be. That One of the biggest leaks in investing is too much activity. And the remedy for too much activity is actually to just busy yourself with bridge and books and And uh and and playing pickleball and doing other things so that you are not Prone to just sitting there and pushing buttons.

19:37 Uh,'cause it's the pushing buttons that's the problem. And so it might be that reading it might not even matter what you actually are reading. But just simply that it takes you away from uh constant activity is is actually the the best part of the uh the reason why all these great investors read so much. Or put differently, if you found a company that's going well. Which that's the situation I'm in, I've noticed The best thing that I can do is to do nothing.

20:01 Because oftentimes when I meddle, it gets screwed up. Or if you like Let's say that you're trying to get popular on social media and you notice that when you post three times a day, you get growth. It's like Just do that. Don't do other things. Like this idea of like it's working.

20:17 Just continue and that you need something else to do in order to have your playground where you're allowed to mess something up, but don't mess up the main thing. Yeah, there's a great example of this. I just uh picked up um Buffett did an interview with the Berkshire thing and he talked about this, which was like'cause but Berkshire has I think almost four hundred billion dollars in cash. And it's just been piling up over the last five years and they just haven't deployed it anywhere. I wonder what that even means. Like where is have five four hundred billion dollars in like treasury bills, basically.

20:46 Is it's treasury? Yeah. Wow, I wonder what percentage of like the US Treasury that that makes up. I don't think it's that much. There's trillions and T bills. Um You know, it's not not zero, but it's not not more than like five percent. So he uh he was talking about like well well, you know, we

21:04 We don't do anything unless there's something to do. And he was talking he was talking about this. There's an Amaz uh Jeff Bezos just gave this interview and he said the same thing. He goes early in Amazon's history, Jeff Wilkie came to me one day and said, Jeff You have enough ideas to destroy Amazon. And he goes, What?

21:20 You have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week to destroy Amazon. I said, What do you mean? He goes. You have to figure out how to release the work at the right rate. That the organization can accept it. Because every time I released an idea, I created a backlog, a w a work in process, uh a distraction. And it was just stacking up, it was adding no value the way I was doing it. In fact, I was creating distraction.

21:43 So I had to learn how to prioritize the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping those on myself until the organization was ready for the ideas. And I saw this and I was like, Oh, like your honor, I plead guilty'cause Yeah, I I've the same thing. If you're if you're very generative with ideas. feels good. And and the ideas themselves might be great ideas. Might be

22:02 It might be A very sound idea. And so it seems like you're doing nothing wrong. But You can literally drown your company in ideas. And I've done this many times, especially like the growth teams or the marketing teams. It's like Here's fourteen marketing ideas, and then every day two more are coming.

22:19 And then and then I'm gonna send you a tweet about something somebody else is doing that you guys should check out. And then I'm gonna tell you this. And then I'm gonna have an event you should go to, and then there's this guy you should meet. And then there's this thing we should try. And then did that ever work? We should try that again. And I can literally suffocate an organization by releasing too many ideas into the org at once, right? It's just Again, like you described, like a personality defect that becomes A culture defect, a uh operational defect.

22:44 I read that same quote, I think six months ago, and so my co founder Joe, who's the CEO We set up this meeting every Thursday and it's the only meeting that him and I have together. And it's just when we go through a running list of ideas. And it's a he's like Just say anything you want. We can say anything. We can talk about anything you want. And it just in this room we can. Hello?

23:02 Yeah. We'll talk about anything you want. Uh w I don't think we're gonna do any of it, but maybe we will. But like let's just we can get it out. And don't slack me any ideas though. But he's like just have a a running note. Yeah. And and we'll we'll go through any idea that you want and then maybe we'll

23:17 Maybe we'll do something. All right, let's take a quick break and I got a question for you. When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea and by the time they found out, they've already lost the deal to another company that did. HubSpot has AEO, which helps you show up in the moments when the right buyers are looking for a company like yours. Before the first click, before they fill in the form. That is the moment. HubSpot AEO is build for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

23:46 I have a different tactic with these research papers, which is I basically read it and then I say Does this serve me? And like if the conclusion of that was that your genetic disposition uh determines half of your financial success. You know, I tend to just throw things like that out the window.

24:03 Partially because There are some great lies in statistics, right? Like um Howard Marks, who was on the podcast, described he's like, Oh What's the S P's a average annual return and we're like Ten percent.

24:16 Yeah, but do you know how often ten percent happens and it was like Pretty much never. The actual the actual annual returns vary widely. So It might be the mean, but it's definitely not the median or the mode. And um and so like you have these numbers and you expect it's gonna be nine, ten percent, and it's almost never nine ten percent. It overperforms and it underperforms, and it averages out to that. And same thing, like you know.

24:37 Uh many men drown in the in the in the pool that was uh crossing the river that was on average five feet five feet in depth. Averages don't tell you so much. And so there's all kinds of these like statistical things that can mislead you that just because something is a norm or an average or That is w I I guess I should draw a conclusion from that. And I I'm a big fan of basically like

24:59 Productive placebos. So The question is not What is the situation is What what do I need to believe?

25:07 In order to do the things that will lead to a good result. Right. And so yeah, th I don't need to know everything. I don't need to know even what's right, what's true. True. Who cares what's true. It's what's useful is what matters. And so I try to find What are the beliefs that I need to stuff in my brain that is gonna lead to me doing the things I wanna do to have the life I wanna have?

25:27 Dude, that's so weird that that's your takeaway. I my takeaway is the opposite, which is If these are the facts, then how do I use the facts just to continue to get what I want? First of all, there's like this huge replication crisis where who knows if these are even the facts. And then secondly Even if they were the facts, if the facts start telling me that it's out of my control and that

25:48 Yeah, uh whatever my DNA was was is printing f you know, half. It's kinda like you know Lloyd and Dumb and Dumber. It's like, so you're saying there's a chance. It's like, Oh, so there's still fifty five percent in my control. Fantastic. So it's like, why did I need to know any of that? All I needed to know was that Here's the here's the b behaviors that lead people to make money. Here's the behaviors that lead people to lose money. Do the ones that make money, d avoid the ones that lose. I think what you're saying is that

26:11 Your genetic disposition is gonna like bias you towards maybe failing in a couple of these more than others and be more on guard to those? Is that the takeaway? Yes. Wh which of those five or six are you most guilty of? Because I was guilty of all of those. Every one of those I I do wrong. What do you mean? I haven't spent enough time to think about this, but Pretty home country bias. I'm not like buying like industrials in Indonesia. But that's not I mean, I don't think the bias I don't that's not how biases work, where it's like you only do these and not all these. Obviously you do all of them. It's just um

26:43 What you towards? I would say probably uh Uh refusing to sell losers. Like I don't know, I'm pretty good, actually. No, I mean I do what no what I'm saying is I do all of them. But I do some more than others. I'm trying to think which ones do I do most. Mine's definitely the activity one, over activity.

27:00 I don't have that issue. But uh and I don't have performance chasing. I do like stick to what I know. And I I I've I've always done that and I do refuse to sell losers. I I get emotional about like the things that I like. Right. Let me ask you this. You you sold The hustle. Six years ago? Five years ago? What was it? February of twenty one.

27:18 All right, so let's call it five years. Has that performed well?'Cause obviously you got a huge slug of capital. Have you doubled in the five years? Are you like Well uh Assume that eighty percent went into the S P five hundred. Yeah, it's double. Uh is it up seventy five percent? Yeah.

27:34 I I think the S P I mean, just whatever the S P is up, eighty percent of my portfolio is up that amount. Right. And I'm curious how you feel. You know, Howard Marks came on and he said, Hey, the S P five hundred right now. is a bad bet. And so here's you got a guy who's Whatever.

27:50 Nine hundred years old, who's got all of the experience and all of the knowledge. And he says, As it comes on our podcast and says to our face the SP is a bad bet right now. He says it's because It's valued at, you know, twenty three times PE ratio, whatever it is on average. And he said, you know, the the ten year

28:11 Um the history tail history tells the data tell us that The next ten years will fluctuate between minus two and two percent. When the S P when you buy in at this valuation. Is it like Yeah, sure, but like but here's my counter argument, or is it just like la la in my ears? Is it just I don't know enough. I'm just not gonna worry about it, like for peace of mind. Like what was your reaction to that?

28:33 So just I went and did the math, just so you know, the market's up twelve point five percent since he said that. Yeah. No, he's saying ten years, right? So not like a five month thing. Um when he says that I think I don't I don't care. I think uh

28:48 I know that like I study America. I study history. history will probably continue to re repeat itself for the while I'm alive. And if I'm I think America will continue to exist, but the SP five hundred at this point is not an American index.

29:04 It's a global index. And so I just think that it's just gonna keep on going and I am chasing eight percent. nominal return every single year. And if I get that, which I feel quite high that I will that I will, then I am very happy. And that fits within my personal plan that I set out when I was When I before I sold the company. I study history. He's saying the history shows that it's not just uh eight percent. It depends what your entry point valuation is, which makes sense, right? Obviously. But what but but but he but he didn't say that it's not going to be that way for the next fifty years. What I'm looking at is You're just saying longer time horizon. Longer than just a decade. Yes. What I what I look at is

29:40 to where I'm a hundred. Basically when I was twenty one years old I set a target where I want this amount of money while I'm thirty, and if I get that amount of money at the age of thirty, that will grow eight percent a year, which means I can spend this amount on my life and I could still have X, Y, and Z, which I can leave or give away. And I just don't think that what Howard Mark says, which if he is right, it won't break that plan. And as long as

30:06 eight percent per year over forty years on average. As long as that happens, which I believe it will, then I am happy. I love that if you wrote like a book on investing and you like open it up. It would just be like Merca. Would be like the the first page, right? Dude, the SP five hundred's not is Apple an American company? Of course not. Do you know what it is. It's a very important thing. Is Toyota a Japanese company? Of course not. They make Toyota here in America.

30:30 You know I I lived in Tennessee, nearby the Nissan plant. Like it's all If a company is Uh headquartered here, vast majority of employees are here, vast majority of revenue is here, vast majority of profits is here. It's for all intents and purposes, it's an American company. Whether that number's not a hundred percent, but is it sixty percent, seventy percent? It's still a majority. I just don't know what that means to me. Like you just said a lot of words that to me were vague. If the profits are here. If the Who's buying the iPhones, right? Like where are the I don't I don't know if the I don't know if the answer is majority. Let's ask let's ask Claude here. So

31:02 Forty three percent of total revenue comes from uh American sales. Uh fifty four percent of the like operating income. Okay, so let's just say half on both accounts, i ish, give or take ten percent. I don't know. Is that an American c company?

31:19 Both right? When you sold What percent is it up based off of Whatever you did with it. Which I don't know what you did with it. My net worth is up.

31:29 Uh Forty times or something since we sold, right? But the problem is A huge percentage of that, probably seventy percent of that came from companies we started or we we own. And not like I oh, I'm a good investor in the public stock market. So Yeah, I I don't know.

31:47 Do you consider private companies to be part of your net worth? Yeah, of course. Dude, I don't calculate. But I don't say liquid net worth, right? I have liquid net worth. That's one whenever I do my like Every two months. When I just

32:01 feel like I need more money, and then I go, Okay. Let's go see how much money we actually have. Let's go see what's going on. I go and I calculate liquid net worth and I calculate the So Illiquid net worth.

32:11 Yeah, look at them separately because like the illiquid one, like that one thing can go wrong in two of these businesses and that could get wiped out, right? Like can go it can go way down. Like w like our e commerce business was a much bigger per percentage of net worth. But it's gone down. Because

32:26 I that business hasn't performed as well. As the other businesses because When tariffs hit and you know consumer sentiment has changed and our margins shrunk a little bit, like it hit a gr uh a little bit of a plateau. Like there was been changes in that. So okay, we have to mark that down internally of like how much we think that's worth. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh, they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase.

33:04 I'm just all in on Mercury. Why uh I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. Uh, one click and I get savings yield. It's just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So

33:21 If you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to Mercury.com/slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a FinTech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA, members FDIC. What what was their topic? What I want to talk to you about is A couple of business ideas that

33:44 Broke my brain. And these come from the Y C request for Stoplist. So if you don't know Y C The most successful accelerator invest early stage investor in the world and the history of the world. They helped see the Airbnb and Dropbox and they were the first investor at like a two million dollar valuation in these like

34:00 You know, a hundred billion dollar companies now. Great. So They every year release these requests for shots. And for and I've been looking at these lists for like ten years, right? And and no most years. It's kind of like you just nod along. You're like, Oh, okay, cool. They do it every semester or every quarter. They they have fall, summer, spring, winter. Right. And they used to do it a little bit less often. And it would be things that were like, Hey, better software for lawyers. Hey, somebody should make a uh A tool that helps this person do this. It's normal sounding businesses. Well, some of them are not. Some uh one of our three years ago was a way to end cancer. Okay. So so over time they've been getting progressively more, I don't know if you want to say like ambitious or just uh

34:45 Impressive, uh or like, you know, just sort of breaking my brain. So the one I want to talk to you about the most, which I think you have a bunch of ideas around, but I I have th I have three that I I want to talk to you about. I'll start with a fun one and then we'll go to the most brain breaking one at the end. Fun one is this. This isn't on their list, but it came from one of the the XY C guys, Daniel Gross, who who's great. He he's talking about aesthetic data centers. And so there's this problem right now in the world where Uh we need way more data centers and we need more way more power in order to like

35:12 quote unquote win the AI race. And the problem is that Most Americans actually hate AI. It's crazy. Like they use AI, but they hate AI. They don't like AI. They don't like what's where it's going. They don't like the big tech companies. It's like all the big t big comp big tech

35:27 Backlash is just like ratcheted up for some reason. If you go read like The TikTok comments about anything about AI. It's unbelievable. Uh people really do not like AI. They don't like AI art. They don't like AI music. They don't like AI uh you know productivity. They don't like data centers. They think it's taking their it's gonna increase their power bills. It's gonna like Use all their water. There's all kinds of different things, even though

35:47 The data would say the opposite, right? Like, you know, golf courses use a hundred times more water than data centers, but nobody's out here like protesting a golf course. And so There's this problem, which is that these big companies need to build data centers, but the towns all have this sort of like not in my backyard mentality when it comes to data centers. So somebody brought up Daniel Gross brought up this idea. He's like I think that we need to

36:09 If we look at these data centers the spend is so high to build them, right? We're talking like billions of dollars to build one. The incremental extra to make it like architecturally beautiful. Or interesting or like something that helps the like like feels good in the neighborhood type of deal. is very small, and we should really be considering this.

36:28 And I just thought this was like a really interesting idea I had never thought about. I thought you, as a man of Style. history and culture would appreciate this. Um that there's probably some historical an like uh comps to this that I don't know about that you might be able to think about where companies sort of figure out how to like

36:45 Almost like create a public good or create public art in a way to like Almost like corporate wash their like agenda. I gave you a great one. Yeah. So um John Rockefeller.

36:57 He was sort of like the Jeff Bezos of the nineteen twenties. He started standard oil, which By the time he was fifty years old, it was the largest company in the world. So large that Teddy Roosevelt uh became a monopoly uh buster. and the non monopoly act in America. was created because of him.

37:15 So he had this really bad energy about him where people thought he was this like, you know, Scrooge McDuck type of guy. Well, he also was part owner of mine. I think it was in Colorado. And they were basically standard oil was so big they needed to do uh create their own mine in order to get the chemicals they needed to make the ovens for the um To to make the you know, to make all their shit. Anyway, John D Junior was the predecessor, he was the son of John uh senior, and he takes over the company. And he's a he's a good guy. And he's John D senior. He actually was a good guy as well. But he goes to his son, he's like, I need you to figure out how to do good in this world and like bring our name back and and do what's right. Well

37:51 Junior goes to this mine and he sees that like tens of thousands of workers are living in squalor. It's hor horrible. And the reason he goes there is because I believe that there was a flood. Um and Like Two hundred people died in this little crappy mining town, which is basically a company town. And John Junior goes there and he's like This is horrible. I can't believe we let this happen. I see why you guys died. This is this is garbage the way you guys are living. I feel so bad. We have to do something about this. And he does do something about it, but his reputation is truly harmed.

38:22 Well, the Great Depression happens in New York City a lot of jobs um get screwed up and a lot of blue collar workers go on um are for load and and just laid off. And he's like, we gotta do something. And he comes up with this idea with this for an architectural project. And he builds this massive tower in midtown New York City. And he's like, We're gonna make this amazing. It's gonna be one of the greatest things ever, and we're gonna employ like ten thousand people. We're gonna revitalize the city. And that is Rockefeller Center. And Rockefeller Center is a huge tower surrounded by smaller towers and in the in the beginning or sorry, in the the

38:54 The courtyard there's a man lifting up the world. It's like supposed to be like Atlas, you know. And he was sort of like this signifies what we're trying to do. We're trying to take like uh the bad in in this area in this era of time we're gonna try to make this amazing. So John D. Rockefeller is an example of who of someone who has done what I call reputation laundering. He uh like he he took something that was bad and so John D Junior actually has a great reputation and a lot of people believe it's in part because of Rockefeller Center.

39:22 That's a great example. Um, I asked AI also for some other examples of this. And uh it talks about one funny example that I didn't know about was when cell phone um towers were needed, like everywhere, right? Like phone phone towers. people didn't like these ugly steel Towers that were put up. So they created um have you ever seen a monopine or a monopalm? It's basically a cell tower.

39:47 That Is like a Halloween costume or sick. It looks like a palm tree or a pine tree at the top. They just like fake put like bark they put fake bark and fake branches and fake fake plastic, you know, pine needles so that it looks like a tree and not like a ugly steel thing. Uh, and that's how they got through and building out the infrastructure needed. Another example was um

40:08 Carnegie. So Carnegie obviously had Carnegie Steel And then he built twenty five hundred libraries. uh across America while while running Carnegie Steel and it served as like, you know, a a a a good to each of the communities. And this is while Like there was like huge strikes happening because like they had pretty brutal labor practices with the horrible. He was such a hypocrite. He was like, I'm gonna do all this good stuff for the world, but he had this famous quote where he would say, If you watch the costs, the profits will follow and for him the biggest cost was

40:37 workers costs. And he was known for being a um uh kind of a Jackass when it came to workers. And so and so I think there's I think this is w something very interesting I I I would predict is gonna happen. I don't know what they're gonna do. I don't know if it's like park spaces or if the

40:52 if they're gonna design the actual data centers to look like the bird's nest or whatever. I don't know what they're gonna do, but it does seem like they're gonna have to do something. It totally can be done. Have you been to the Pear like, do you know the Pear Mount in Oakland, the theater where I used to host my event? Do you remember how beautiful that is? That's from um the nineteen thirties. But like up until like the nineteen s fifties, I would say, before uh Like right before the end of World War Two, a lot of these buildings were gorgeous. I live in the upper side of West uh uh uh New York City.

41:18 And the architecture from any if they call it a pre war building. They're absolutely gorgeous. And so I just I I don't know why like this minimalism took place where like It's things a lot more plain, but I uh this is a great idea. Shout out to uh David Perell and Cultural Tutor who are who are on a crusade right now.

41:37 To bring beauty back. uh to to the world. And so if if you haven't seen, go watch their uh go go look up Cultural Tutor. Uh I think on YouTube. Yeah, and we'll watch the this sort of the stuff they're putting out. It's got millions of views. People really resonated with this like

41:51 Why does everything look the same and why does everything look so bland now? Um, I would have never guessed that that would touch such a nerve, but it definitely does. They have found like Something that the that people resonate with a lot. And they're building like a whole like I think they're doing like a movie on it or something like that. They're doing something cool with that.

42:10 Can I give you two of these other ideas that kind of Uh Broke my brain a little bit. So one is The company brain.

42:18 I think you've been thinking about this. I do it now. We we have it now. Um, there's and there's a bunch of different ways to take this. So what what does this mean? So there's two ways to take this. I'll I'll just describe the first one. The one that's more interesting to me.

42:31 Today. AI is seen as a very smart assistant. So it's Someone you go to when you have a question and it'll go fetch you the answer. It's somebody you go to when you have a task.

42:43 And you delegate the task and it'll try to do the task for you. So it's kind of like this junior Everybody gets a chief of staff, everybody gets an assistant. Who's smart, always on and doesn't talk back. Fantastic. And that's what it I think the w the mental model most people have of how AI is gonna going to gonna work. And some people sort of see it as like, Oh, it'll be like you'll have digital employees. Like oh well

43:03 We'll probably hire fewer people because they'll just be like kind of these workers, these AI workers, these These guys in the coal mine just digging for us. This is so great. We're gonna have so many we're gonna have so much productivity. And I think actually it's going the other way, which is um It's not that the AI works for us, but that we work for the AI. Um, and people are gonna hate that sentence, but let me just describe what that means.

43:26 Um AI is very good at Understanding A broad set of information, having eyes and ears everywhere. Reading everything, knowing everything and making decisions.

43:39 Today. We use it as the sort of junior employee. But it does seem like the way this is going is that AI becomes the boss. Jack Dorsey's probably the most vocal about this right now, so he

43:50 laid off tens of thousands of people at block and I think he's trying to like Change the way the the the you know, like the org structure looks inside of a company. And I th I I believe, maybe I have this wrong. Sam, you can correct me if I'm wrong. I believe what he's saying is basically that

44:04 The AI is the brain and the rest of us are f giving context to the brain. So we're out there, we're trying to feed it the right information so that it can make the right decisions. And then we go do tasks. And those tasks also produce information that comes back to the brain. The brain sort of knows everything that's going on in the company. Can weigh all the different factors and can make

44:21 Awesome decisions at high speed, with less bias, with less fatigue, with less stress than the rest of us. And um It does seem like this is the way that things are going. I could say this only just for my own use, which is I started out very much in a Hey, go do this, or hey, tell me this.

44:37 Type of mode. And more and more I basically say, Hey, can you ask me questions? I'll give you some answers, then you can you help me make this decision. Hey, can you tell me what the right move is here? And uh it's very good at doing it, right? And so the question is like Are companies gonna work this way? And I'll give you one last story that's on top of this.

44:53 So I don't know if you remember, but a few months ago There's this research arm called Citrini that put out this research. uh that put out this this blog post. And the blog post basically described This um

45:06 Sort of almost like a bit of a doomsday scenario. B basically what they described was that you're gonna get All this productivity from AI, which means you're gonna have fewer people working at these companies. So you're gonna have less people earning wages, which is what you need, because the wages of one person become the spending in the economy, which becomes the wages of the next person. And so when you have fewer employees, then you have fewer wages. When you have fewer wages, you're gonna have less spending. When you have less spending you have less revenue. When we have less revenue,

45:33 Then you're gonna tighten the belt even more and cut more staff. And it creates this downward spiral spiral. And maybe they said it smarter than that, but ultimately this was the the sort of conclusion that they had of how You might get this productivity gain and it still might uh result in the economy going down.

45:49 This I don't know if it triggered or created or maybe just coincidentally Uh there was a huge sell-off in the stock market. Like the stock market went down, like a huge percentage on on the back of this, because people got pretty worried about what's gonna happen in the US economy. Because again. SP five hundred is an American index. All right, uh let's go back. So so so you

46:07 You hear this and you're like, Wow, that's pretty bad. And basically they they wrote this thing that's kinda depressing for everybody. I asked AI to summarize it in three sentences. Imagine that the bulls are right and that uh AI works exactly as everyone predicts. That's precisely what breaks the economy. The white collar g jobs get gutted, displaced workers earn far less, consumer spending collapse, and the productivity gains flow entirely to the owners of compute rather than circulating throughout households. Right.

46:33 And so uh there's a big market sell off. Everybody gets mad at Citrini, people but if you agreed with them, you got mad at their conclusion. If you disagreed with them, you got mad at them for spreading uh you know doom and gloom. And they I imagine Sh or short. Right. Uh I'm I'm not sure. They sell the research. So I don't think they uh they they sell the research. I think they might have like a capital arm, but it's like pretty small, if I remember correctly. It's like it's not a huge thing. So then

46:57 A few months later they go viral again. And this time it was for the analyst number three, where they basically They sent a researcher out to the Strait of Hormuz, this guy went on this like Yeah. Jason Bourne mission. And he sneaks across the border of Oman and he bribes this guy to take him out in a boat into the strait, and he tries to collect first party data. And he says, Oh, wow, look, um

47:18 It's not open or closed, but it's functioning as a bit of a toll route where If you if you are from the right country and you pay the right bribe, you get through the straight, it's not fully closed, it's not fully open. And they found this and they they fed that information back and people again got mad at them. And they go, look, first you got mad at us for telling you that the white collar jobs are going away. And then you get mad at us when we show you. The only types of jobs that are gonna be left, which is basically feeding real world information and context back into the in into the engine.

47:45 And that's what the future of analysts look like. It's not guys sitting at spreadsheets, because guess what? The AI is much better at sitting at they're looking at a spreadsheet, reading every earnings uh report, listening to every earnings call on earth. Simultaneously and coming up with the right decision. It's gonna far outperform an analyst. So what does an analyst need to do now? You better be in the field getting better information, higher quality first party data to give back to the AI so it can make a better trading decision. That's what an analyst is gonna be. And I just thought, Oh, that's really interesting how that like The reframe of like what a job was and what a job's gonna be and then

48:17 You know, what does that look like across other jobs. So I just find this whole idea of like The company brain. The AI brain is basically the AI management. Software. Dorsey. I think he originally said this on Brian Halligan's podcast and

48:32 I think he said what you're describing is the way that you previously and I previously used AI, but a lot of people are doing it this way. Is you are the human and you are in a circle. And there's nodes connecting to you. And you are this decision maker. And the AI machines and agents are feeding you new information to help you make the brig decision. As the CEO, right? As the CEO or business owner or project manager.

48:57 That's all wrong. The AI should make the decision and the human should be around the AI and the AI should be the company brain in all. We are the line, we are the nodes. We are just giving it new information. And

49:12 In some ways the AI is making the decision, but also gonna execute. Or we will be in charge of the execution. But the AI is the thinker, not us. And the reality is is I believe that except that humans will have editing capabilities. Sure, sure.

49:27 Yeah, it's not all not all one or the other. That's a pretty brain breaking concept to me. Uh,'cause it's just so it's it's just flips the the model the world model upside down of how how I thought the world So do you use anything for this? I use Victor. I have no connection to these guys. It's get Victor dot com.

49:44 V I K T O R And it like connects to all these tools and in Slack w everyone at my company just asks the information. Um I don't use any of those because I I don't trust them. I'm kinda Waiting to see kinda how this plays out. give startups like too much information

50:01 'Cause startups are just like super leaky buckets in general and I You know, I've been inside startups. And you could just like, you know, some random employee can see everything and uh and you know, they're not super s concerned about security'cause they don't know when they're you know, they're just trying to grow, uh is generally how things go, no matter what they say. Like I remember once I used some like telehealth thing and our buddy see Hava was like Bro.

50:23 Whatever whatever you got. Everybody in that startup now knows what you got. He's like, You what do you got? You got a fungus? They know you got a fungus. You got a you got a a a virus? They know you got a virus. Whatever you got, they know. And I was like, he's still right. You just have to assume that that's true if you're gonna use a startup's product. Dude, every once in a while I'll uh I'll buy something from a company. Like uh and like the other day I bought shoes from someplace and they emailed me, the founder did, and it was like, Oh, I love your podcast. Um so I'm thankful that you shopped here.

50:53 And I was like You're trying to treat me nicely and th that that's wonderful. But What if I was buying a cream? You know what I mean? Like it this it I I wouldn't I don't want you to do this. Ha ha.

51:04 I meant medium. Not actually large. All right. What's the other one that you like? Um the other ones I would say are the scary ones. Uh so one here is like s drone swarm defense. They they talked about the story I hadn't actually heard about, which was that The Iranians sent a small Shitty drone swarm and took out a AWS data center. That didn't have like

51:29 drone defense protection. They just blew it up. And they're like, Yeah, that's gonna happen more, and we need a defense for low cost drones. And what they talked about is like the US military is almost Built wrong. Like I forgot what the name of the the Whatever the missile is that but like we basically send like two million dollar missiles to knock out two hundred dollar drones. And like that's just they're gonna make that trade every day. They're like, great, exhaust yourself. That's expensive for you and it's cheap for us.

51:55 And so just this idea of like, wow, war is really gonna change and then you got you got like Anderil and others trying to build these like defense systems. And there's many companies like this that many startups that are in this field. But it just reminded me, there's gonna be a lot of these like Anderil type companies because It seems like the nature of war has changed and like all of the If you go look at like the decorated generals that are buying, you know, that that lead lead our stuff, like I wonder if that's the right person.

52:21 You know, and I I mean that in the most respectful way possible, but like if you fought a war and you what you know about war is From a completely different tech thing. Like you're gonna be obviously playing catch-up, and I'm sure they are. I'm sure they're asking all the right questions and trying to get up to speed. But it's almost like Ender's game in a way where you you kinda need uh people who have a bit of a blank slate and can think from first principles like where are the attacks gonna come from and what are they gonna look like? Um and like you know, people who grow more on video games and less on the battlefield, right? Because it's it's gonna look more Like cyber hacking is gonna look more like drones than it is

52:54 You know, brave heart. Carp? The Palantir guy put out this like um twenty one like rule or uh his manifesto. And like one of the rules was that um or one of the points was that uh Silicon Valley should um be more involved in uh like with the US military, the US government. It's kinda crazy now that like the nerds are gonna be involved. Like that it's it's just this really, like, interesting cultural shift now where it's uh the nerds are into like

53:20 The government and like defense attack. That's a very strange thing. I'm very curious how th how that impacts things. Well the reason I bring it up is just because Sometimes like the the ground moves under your feet. And I remember feeling this when Yeah, I I moved to Silicon Valley.

53:33 And I think I was Pretty Dumb and I I I

53:39 I guess I was I had read about what just worked and I was like, that's the thing to do. And of course, like you know, Peter Till famously even said, he's like the next Mark Zuckerberg won't build a social network. The next interesting things are gonna be look not like the last wave of interesting things. Because

53:55 The opportunity space. The opportunities move and so I remember working on one batch ideas That sounded really good based on what had happened in the last seven years.

54:07 And then all the new things that popped off looked nothing like that. So if you you know Uh like just as a kind of like a before and after. You know, the before's was sort of like the Facebook's Twitter's uh drop boxes of the world. Those are like the the winners. And then the next wave of winners was Airbnb. It was like renting out your couch to strangers in the real world like

54:27 marketplace and Uber was a real world marketplace and Lyft and there was That's what worked. Was this like thing that looked nothing like it. And you had to go city by city. The w the winners had to play by a different playbook, right? The people who were good at it. They would go into cities. And they would bootstrap like, how do we get how do we put free donuts out here to get the drivers to come and then we're gonna incentivize the drivers and then that's that we're gonna do that. We're gonna throw parties in every city in order to get this thing to work. You had to be good at that playbook, which was so different than the playbook That you needed right before that.

54:57 And then that wave ended and all of a sudden it's about crypto. And it was like, Oh, the people who got rich were the people who really understood like what money even is and like what fiat currency is and what's going on with pro you know, uh what is the double spending problem and cryptography. And then crypto had this wave and it looked absolutely nothing like it because Bitcoin wasn't even a company. It was like not how do I invest in that? It's like well, you'd buy the currency. Well I had no idea how to even become successful in this'cause the game had changed again. And then with AI it seems like the game is changing again. And and And so

55:28 Um I think with AI, the reason I bring up this kind of this idea of like The Using AI as the company brain of the management. Tool for the br for the company.

55:38 'Cause that sounds so unfamiliar that it sort of le my my spidey sense is, hey, maybe the game maybe the the floor is moving again and the opportunity's moved over here. Um similarly with with hard tech or like you know defense tech. This was something when we moved to Silicon Valley, nobody would do. Um and and if you did seem like a sort of callous in a way. And then Paul Merlucky made defense cool.

56:00 If you like would just show up at a meetup or a like I remember people showing up at a start up wearing a suit and tie'cause they didn't they were either like a potential customer, they didn't understand the nomenclature or they didn't understand the culture. And I remember they they would we would joke about it and they would have to explain, like, oh I don't I just did this on accident. I don't actually work for the government or I like they I was like, Are you a cop? Like it was like a joke. It's like twenty one jump street. Yeah. As a narc. Uh yeah, but now it's different. Now so now I think it's the hardware is the ro robotics is obviously like massive. I think all the war stuff is massive. I think you know crazy AI stuff. So it's just It's just clear to me that the the the ground has shifted again. The the ground has moved and that the things that are gonna be really interesting in the next ten years

56:41 They're not gonna and and by the way, this also just happened with the AI labs. It's like oh it turns out the best startups in the world, the whether you're investing or or joining or starting. Was to create a You know, the first one was a nonprofit research entity for Artificial intelligence, open AI, right, and anthropic and like

57:00 These were the big winners. They looked nothing like the winners of the the last generation. Like Open source nonprofit. What? Like what does that even mean? Um, and and that was the thing to join, right? That was the thing to to start. That was the thing to invest in. Like when we were in Silicon Valley. How many people do you know that we're investing in, working on, starting?

57:18 A research lab. Zero. Zero, I never met anyone that did that. They didn't they didn't hear those two words together. That sounded like something they're supposed to do in university. for science. Like I didn't understand even what that was. So you have to be really attuned to the shifts if you want to be a part of the big waves. Do you wanna um wrap up with this AI personalized medicine one? Intelligent agents are enabling a new level of personalization in medical care. We can now use an agent harness like Claude Code to analyze personalized health data.

57:45 Well that being Uh diagnostic test, a scan. EHR data or wearables that are highly accurate and user specific. So do you know who you know who Nat Freeman is, right? Yes.

57:56 Yeah. He he was telling the story. He he did a great time. Y C guy now or no? I don't know what his story was. He did a start up That's acquired by Microsoft. Then when Microsoft bought GitHub for like whatever Billions and billions of dollars.

58:09 He became the CEO of GitHub. And he famously like kinda like turned it around in a way like really like Injected a lot of life into that company and people really like praised his tenure there. So then him and Daniel Gross go and they start investing in AI stuff. Uh, they created like a like a small fund for AI. They got into a bunch of interesting companies. Then they joined uh Ilya when he left Open AI to start his new like

58:33 Whatever lab. This competitor to open AI? Then Facebook tried to buy that thing for like whatever thirty billion dollars pre-product pre-anything. And Ilias said no.

58:44 But Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman were like, We'll go. You still got two seats in that car?'Cause we'll go. And so now they run the meta like they're like one of the the brain thrust of like the m uh Facebook meta's uh AI program. Okay, so him and Dano Gross are there. They run like the superintelligence program. So okay, that's the long story. So he was telling he's on he's on stage and they were like, Tell him how you're using like OpenClaw and he tells a story. He's like, Yeah, um, all right, this is gonna sound weird. But

59:11 Here's something I did. He's like, so I gave Claude Code like all my genetic data and my blood test data. And I was like, analyze this and it's like okay, cool, like genetically here's what Blood test. It seems like you're it's basically it was like you're dehydrated. We think you're like chronically dehydrated. Um, and that's showing up in all these like symptoms or these like these these signals are telling us that you're probably dehydrated.

59:34 So he was like he tells Open Claw he goes, Okay. Do whatever you need to do to make me not dehydrated, which is like hilarious. If you've ever heard of like the paperclizer problem where you're like, Basically, like you end the world by giving it this like you you give it a like Do this at all costs. And it like Yeah, to make more paper clips at all costs and it starts like crushing buildings and cars to generate more paper clips, like it goes a little too far.

59:56 So similarly he tells the open claw thing. Help me be not not dehydrated. Do whatever you must do. So he connected it's a OpenClaw is connected in his house. So it has access to all of his TV screens. Uh it has access to all of his cameras. So it could see him and it could display things to him at all times. It could talk through his like, you know, his like Alexa, whatever to him. It could text him on WhatsApp. It could do whatever. So it's it's just like.

1:00:20 Hey, you've been sitting there for four hours and you haven't had any water. Um, I need you to get up and go to the kitchen and have a glass of water. Can't you just put up like a post it note on the refrigerator door that says like drink a glass? He goes, So I did. So I got up. They went ahead water. And the camera watched me drink the water and it came back and it goes Good job.

1:00:38 I'm proud of you for drinking that water. That's messed up. That's super easy to make fun of, by the way. Like you know, the jokes write themselves. But these tech nerds have taken it too far. Yes, sure.

1:00:55 All true? Also A little peek into what the future's g gonna be. When And AI's in charge of running your health. Uh which it will be.

1:01:04 We uh we talked about Wow, what's the guy's name from uh Git not GitHub, Git Lab. Is it Git Lab? Yeah. I don't know if it's cured yet. Uh is it cured? I think it is cured, yeah. Wow. Okay. So this guy had

1:01:19 Uh he's a billionaire. Uh Sid he had cancer and he said, um I'm going founder mode on my cancer, which is pretty a pretty cool article. And he j has been jer uh talking about the journey. I have a a friend who has cancer and uh they got connected and they've been um working together like you know they've been helping each other. My buddy, you I told you that he was doing this and you asked me how it was going and I was like, Well, I don't really ask him. I let him come to me.

1:01:44 Uh It's going great. the it's cancer's going away. Um it's not gone, but it's like he got great news. And so like use of the what the AI stuff helped him with or through what him had said. Uh And a few other guys have have done and like the My buddy works in the AI field. I don't wanna say too much about his information, um, but he is a he's a an AI professional, we could s we'll say.

1:02:06 And he's been like you know, being a nerd and using AI and he's been helping get rid of his cancer. It's not gone, but it's it's it's he's getting great news every couple of months, which is pretty amazing. When everything works out well We can we'll like talk about it and like a bigger deal? Like shouldn't we all be screaming about this from th we've talked about it three times on this podcast, but like seems like You know, like if you watch Sid's thing it's like in a PowerPoint in a webinar somewhere. It doesn't seem like anyone's paying attention to like what sounds like

1:02:33 Some pretty incredible stuff. Like the guy who cured his dog's cancer went kind of viral. That's cool. on the Today Show, not like uh getting a Nobel like you know prize. I I was actually thinking about the Today Show. That's what I meant. Mainstream people care about this? He was on Australia's version of the Today Show, by the way. Uh it wasn't even the American one. Uh, I do for an Australian accent there. I was w excited to hear that. I n I'll leave the impressions up to you. I can't believe how little of a deal that was made, though.

1:03:07 There's that great phrase which is the future is already here. It's just un unevenly distributed. That's feels more obvious today than I've ever felt it in the past, which is uh The future is here. People are doing crazy things with AI and it's just not evenly distributed. I'm not doing it. There you know it's not made its way out to the world yet. There was another thing this this that Nat Freeman said that I thought like he just said casually that I was like, What?

1:03:29 He told the story about Again, it was like hey, you need to be taking this suppl this magnesium sulfate, whatever supplement. And he's like, Okay, uh And then it's Uh.

1:03:42 He was in his Self driving Tesla. And He had given it access to his Tesla. And he just saw the directions change. There's a whole food's nearby and it just rerouted his car. His open claw rerouted his car to the

1:03:56 shop and then he bought it and he was like Whoa, what just happened. Yeah, like I am on board with this. But I I am on board. I would let I uh I would let AI control a lot of these things. But you can't do it when you have like a wife. Maybe there's just a threshold. Of wealth.

1:04:13 Where it's like Listen, you like All these This is a good life we have, right? I'm gonna have the open claw.

1:04:19 Like Tell me when to drink wall. I'm gonna have the cameras on. You know, like I'm gonna do some weird shit from time to time. For the record, there is nothing, by the way. There's a there's a personality threshold. There's no money threshold. It's like are you willing to do like there's a number. There's that yeah, there's a there's like a an EQ number. Uh but it but that's definitely not a a dollar s there's no dollar signing for that. You know, I built rockets that can you know go to the go go into space and electric cars that drive themselves What'd you think? I was just gonna be a normal chill dude.

1:04:53 And I thought like Socrates, Aristotle, like that's up there in the quotes for me, the pantheon of like, Oh yeah, that makes sense. If you find a man on top of a mountain, don't assume that he's gonna be reasonable or normal. I think that that's fair to say. Just like if you f if there's if there's a great artist, I don't expect him to show up on time all the time. Right. Um all right. I gotta go, I gotta get on a flight. Alright, that's it. That's the pod. Peace.

1:05:15 I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to I put my law in it like a day So on the road, let's travel, never look at it. Hey, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about a podcast that you could check out. It is called The Science of Scaling by Mark Roberts. He was the founding CRO of HubSpot, and he's a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. The guy's smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like Clavio and Vanta and OpenAI. And he's asking about their strategies, their tactics, and how they're growing their companies as you know, head of sales or chief revenue officer. If you're looking to scale a company up, if you're a CRO or a head of sales that's looking to level up in your career, I think a podcast like this could be great for you. Listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast.

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