No Small Boy Stuff, Investing Wisdom from Nassim Taleb, plus ChatGPT Prompts We're Using

What's up, Sam? Hey, you like the, uh, you look the fit? Where did you get that? Our boys at Jambi sent it over the No Small Boy stuff Christmas edition. You know, it's pretty funny. I actually used the phrase, No Small Boy stuff like kind of a lot.

Yeah, I remember the guy who tweeted it. I think his name was Bengali 87. And this was back in 2022. He said, best business slash entrepreneurship podcast out there. Big money that is. No small boy stuff. I love that. And that's basically the phrase that we use for this podcast a lot. No small boy stuff. But frankly, I kind of use it a lot in my life. Like, I don't know, man, that small boy kind of stuff. Like it's sort of like in succession where they say you're not a very serious person. It's kind of like that.

I also use the phrase, but I'd never say it because saying it to me feels so cringe, but I think it like a thousand times for every one time that I say it. And every one time I say it, it feels so awkward to me. It's like saying, it's like saying, just do it in the Nike slogan way or something. You don't really want to say that. Hey, guys. Yeah, this, you know, in the fourth quarter, we just.

Nike, baby, just do it. And then they'll be like, what? Why are you saying slogans at us? But I do think it a lot. It's actually meaningfully affected the trajectory of my life is to use this phrase. And because there's so many situations where there's like a little small boy response, I'll behave like a little small boy in this situation or. Yeah, that phrase and what I'm, John said recently about what will make the better story. That has had a fairly meaningful change, just in, you know, it's only been a few weeks, but like I think about that actually a lot.

He also said something else where he was talking about, he was basically so comfortable with this like 10 year plus odyssey that he's been on building this and we're like, wow, you've been doing this for so long. And wow, you did this for years before you had really any recognition or any funding and he just kept going. And he was just like, yeah, I persist.

And he was just like, yeah, he's like, I think that's what I do. He's like, I didn't really think about it that consciously, but like, I'm pretty comfortable pushing the boulder for a long time up the mountain. And I realized like, I guess that's my like competitive advantage. Like, I'm in it for the long haul and I'll just persist. It's like, oh, and we were both like small, like,

Yeah. Quick intake of breath. What do you want to start with today? All right. I got a good story for you. So there's this great Naseem Taleb quote or tweet where Taleb who wrote Black Swan and Antifragile is kind of this like contrarian thinker. Was he like a successful hedge fund investor, but he was successful because he had an interesting life philosophy and then he became like a thinker.

Is that his story? I believe so. I believe so. I believe he's like a successful trader and part of his success, unless I'm mixing him up with somebody else. Part of his success was that he noticed that humans are, we would rather win frequently in small amounts and then lose a bunch when we're wrong. It's like gambling. It's like playing craps, right? You know, one roll of dice, you made a little money, two rolls of dice, you made a little bit of money. But eventually you roll a seven and it wipes out the entire board. All of the chips go away.

But he's like, humans are more comfortable with that versus he was willing to lead a little every day and look stupid every day for years. But then when the big, you know, sort of like the big short, when his big bet pays off in this country and bet pays off, he makes it all the money in one day. Got it. And I think that's his story. If it's not his story, his book is talking about the guy who does that. So I can't recall if it's him or if he's the author or he's the author and the hero of the story.

Okay, so he, uh, to live tweeted this thing, he goes, I conjecture that if you gave an investor the next day's news, 24 hours in advance, he would go bust in less than a year. And this is basically the back to the future premise, right? So I don't remember the movie back to the future, but.

What's his name, Biff, or whatever he gets. Biff, he finds the sports betting book that tells all the winners for the next decade. Exactly. He goes back in time, and then he just becomes a gazillionaire, because he knows the scores. Okay, so let's take, yes, if you knew the exact score, you'd have to be pretty dumb to not win. What these guys did, in the same table saying, is I could give you the news, so not the price change, but I could give you the news, and I bet you would trade incorrectly.

Dude, I think about this all the time, by the way. All the time, I think, if I know what I know today, but I was 10 or 50 years ago, how would I capitalize on that? I think about that all the time.

Right. And, you know, usually the easy answers for that are, oh, I just buy Bitcoin, I just buy Google, right? Like, yeah, it would actually wouldn't be that hard if you could convince yourself, hey, do this one thing and just shut up and trust me. Like, don't touch it for 15 years. Now, what these guys did was a little bit of a different experiment. So what they did was they took 118, as they call them, adults trained at finance. And they did the crystal ball test. And the crystal ball test was as follows.

They said, we're going to give you money. So they gave them $50 each. So I said, you have 50 bucks and you get to place trades and you're going to trade, but we're going to, before you make a trade, we're going to show you the front page of the Wall Street Journal, the actual front page of the Wall Street Journal from 15 random days.

in the last 20 years or something like that. So 15 random days, we're going to show you the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and that's a Wednesday edition. And you're going to place the trade that would execute on the Tuesday, so the day before that news. So you had the news at 24 hours in advance. They blacked out the stock prices, so they wouldn't just show you, oh, Johnson, Johnson's up 20%. But they would say,

Like there would be the headline about Johnson & Johnson. They would just redact the actual stock price. So Johnson & Johnson beats earnings. Beats earnings, exactly. Record on employment. Record jobs posting. Fed indicates blah, blah, blah, right? Things like that. And by the way, anybody can go play this game online. There's like a link to it. We'll put it in the show notes, but you can go actually do it yourself. I did it too. There's a couple other caveats to this when you go do it, which is it's not just a buy and hold. Because what I was going to do, I went and did the thing. I was like, oh, cool.

This is news from 15 years ago. I'll just put all my money in by and I won't trade. I won't do anything else for the next 15 years. I know there was a bull market, so I don't need to be smart. But the way that this test was designed was the trade executes and you either go up or down that day. So it's kind of like the trade closes that day. You know what I mean? You get one day gain based on the one day news. Okay. So.

They do it and the results are not good. As you might expect, otherwise I wouldn't really talk about this. So the results are not good. Half the players lost money, even having been given the news. One out of every six players lost everything and the way they lost everything was they let you trade on leverage. So you can trade up to like 20x leverage. If you want to in this thing, like an options trader could, or you could just trade or you could skip. You don't even have to trade any given day. You could just say pass. I don't feel confident.

An example headline would be like an example tray would be they would see something that says like fed is going to cut rate today. I guess you would assume that the index is going to go up like a couple percent. So you would bet on the index or bet on what is basically the S&P 500 or it's the 30 year treasury. So you best best you bet on one of those two things you bet you buy the SP index for that day.

Or you could short a bond. You go long or short, or you can go long or short the bond, right? So let me just show you an example. So this is the Wall Street Journal article that they show you. So it's Obama does something. And then you see this business and finance section and talks about Rupert Murdoch. Chesapeake Energy says that their CEO is going to step down.

Auto sales are up, Homeland Security says blah, blah, blah, right? So there's all this news. And so you then go here and you place a trade. So you say, all right, I'm going to go in this little game here. You can see my screen where it gave me a million dollars. So I'm going to trade. And it says, today's movement, I bet a million dollars. So I used my full stack with no leverage. And the day was up 0.62%. So I got an extra $6,200, right? Then it gives me the next one.

And it says, oh, there's a deadly plane crash. Iran is doing some shit. Okay, cool. But what craft doesn't talk to acquire this Brazilian company. And they're just blacking out any of the stock price news, right? So you read this and you can decide what you want to do. And you do that over and over and over again. So 15, 15 days in history. And they tried to do it as 15. Like they did a third of the days where like

Fed quarterly meeting days. A third was jobs reports and a third was complete randomness. And they didn't, they're like, we're not trying to trick you. There's no, we're not like cherry picking like misleading days. These are just actually like random front from pages. Okay. This is an awesome experiment. And so, okay, so back to the results now. So like I said, half the people lose the money. One out of six lose everything because they got over leveraged. The average person was only able to gain 3.2%.

So even being given the news during that era, the market was up on average, I think 15% a year over the last 15 years. I don't know when this was done. Correct. But again, these are like one day trades, right? So you're not just like buying and holding. Oh, it was for 15 days. The experiment was a 15 day experiment. Exactly.

And so, okay, now why, right? There's two ways you could lose in investing. One is you bet wrong, meaning you pick the wrong direction. You think it's going up, it actually goes down. So basically, even given the news, they were basically only able to bet the direction correctly, 51% of the time. So it's the same as if, you know, you just flipped a coin, you would have been right the same amount of times as you were being given the actual front page of the Wall Street Journal, okay? So information doesn't lead to actual insight.

Um, especially news. The second thing is that, uh, why do they do poorly? Um, they bet sized very poorly. So when you had an event, even when you were correct, people didn't size up their bets enough and when they're incorrect, they sized up their bets too much for the level of conviction that they had. Um,

And this doesn't go in line with what people think. So they surveyed people separately. And basically 70% of people thought that even if they got the news, basically they thought that even four-week-old stale news would be predictive.

And 70% of people thought that. But in this case, it just showed that even one day fresh news doesn't even really help you. OK, so then they went and they did an extra experiment. They go, OK, maybe those 118 financial trained adults, maybe they're just not the best of the best. So they went and tried to find the best of the best. The best of the best actually did better. So they went and found five people that were hedge fund guy.

the head of trading at a top five bank, seasoned macro traders. So they are used to trading on this type of news. They're considered the best in the world at this. And they actually did better. So what they did was all of them finished with gains. So all five finished with gains. On average, they were up 130%. And they also didn't bet on one out of every three.

news things. One of the big ways that they were better was they just didn't bet all the time. Whereas the casual was too active. Okay. What else did the pro do differently? They were only right. Six percent more. So, you know, if the, I think if the, the, the, the test group was right 51% of the time, if it's going up or down, these guys were only right 57% of the time. It wasn't like they correctly interpreted it.

But when they were right, they bet size properly and they never risked too much of their bankroll to where they couldn't recover. And so isn't that amazing that, you know, only being, you know, six to 10% better at your predictive ability, but would yield a much bigger result, right? 3% average gain for the test group, 130% average gain for the pros. So it's these small edges that can make a huge difference when you apply leverage properly, which was the bet sizing.

And what's the takeaway that Naseem said, which is what? Well, he was saying it in a polarizing way. He goes, I conjecture if he gave an investor the next day's news, he would go bust in less than a year. And this basically showed that one out of six would go bust because they would get overzealous around this perceived edge that doesn't exist.

And on the whole, most people would just do worse than if they didn't have the news. It's no better than random, right? And that's actually one of his books fooled by randomness. And at the end, they use this quote by Ray Dalio in there. This is a great quote. It goes, he who lives by the crystal ball will die eating shattered glass.

That's insane. It's weird that multiple smart people come to that conclusion that I never would have come to. I guess everyone would have thought that. If you know the future or the news, you absolutely are going to outperform. Exactly. The counterintuitive-wise conclusion. Let me tell you one other related one. There was one other story here that was kind of interesting.

There was a real world version of this where a hacking group got access, they hacked the press release system. So they had access to the next day's press releases that companies put out when they have like major announcements, earnings, results, etc. They got access to all of the press releases that were coming out the next day and they were using it as like their own form of like.

you know, home brewed insider information, right? They were able to get insider information and so they could place a bet in the market overnight or the next morning. And that's like, that's like a 12 hour leading indicator maybe because like if you're, if you're going to fire your CEO, you submit the press release maybe at five or six p.m. on a went on a Thursday and then nine a.m. on Friday, you announce it or the wire goes live.

Something I don't know the exact timing. I would imagine that it's a tighter window that because there's too much leakage. But even a 12 second advantage would be in a huge advantage. If you knew 12 seconds ahead of time what the news is about to be, you could just push the button, right? That's all you got to do. That's like an interesting.

Like, you know, like HubSpot, for example, whenever they have a, that I'm a shareholder of, whenever they have like an earnings, I like, I know when it's going to go live that day. So someone is like writing that and they've submitted it to, I forget what the PR comp, what the thing's called. It's the popular news wire, whatever. Yeah. Like whatever the popular thing is that is kind of an, I did, I never even realized that actually. Well, that's why there's rules, right? When I was at Amazon, you couldn't trade the stock in a, there's a window. There's like a frozen window. So X days before the announcement, you can't make Andy trades.

Oh, I know that, but I'm saying the employees of the PR. Oh, right. They probably have the same, right? Yeah, I didn't even think about that as a leakage. When I accidentally did that trade and then I had to go to the.

What were they like, you're an idiot? So I, I'm like, I've learned about this afterwards, right? I'm gonna start a kid. I don't know anything about this. We get acquired. I, you know, I make a trade and then I'm like, oh shit. Well, that's a trade. So we're at a subsidiary of Amazon, right? Like you bought Amazon before you sold to Amazon? I bought Amazon stock, I bought more Amazon stock or something. Or I sold to Amazon. I don't remember what it was. And I, I was like, oh shit, I just, did I just inside our trade? Did I just,

get my hands dirty with a little big boy business. And so I'm like, oh shit, what do I do? You need to go speak to the general counsel. And I was like, what? And so I get a meeting with the general counsel, urgent, urgent, possible, possible big money move made. And I send the email, they get me a meeting, snap, I go in. And he's like, so what happened? And I was like, I went and made a trade. And I'm in the window and I'm an executive.

I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like 150 grand. And he was like, it's okay. You just, uh, my lunches outside. Can you bring it in before you? He was like, this is for actual execs at the actual company who make actual trades. I was like, Oh, okay. Got you, got you, got you. Let me guess it out.

That's actually hilarious. He just like totally dismissed you. But what about... Let me finish the story about the hackers. So let's put you... Let's test your criminal mastermind, which I love. I love doing this, by the way. How would I... How would I cheat if I was going to cheat, right? By the way, you know that it's always... The women always think to themselves, how would I get away from this bad person trying to hurt me? And the men always think in this... They align with the criminal... How would I be the bad person?

Yeah, like, how would I get away with this crime? That's like, I realized that after watching a lot of true crime. It's so go ahead. I like this experiment. So you're the hackers. You get this, but here's the problem. You, they're like, Sam, we got it. We hacked them.

you know, Dave over here in the corner did it. He got into this. He got root access and they print out all of the press releases coming out, but they put it on your desk. They're like, hey, we got like an hour. We got to make trade. And now there's 60,000 press releases on your desk. What do you do? I guess pick like a random five and hold and act on those as soon as. Yeah. I mean, it's that's a very challenging situation. I guess it's a challenge. So what they pick the first five and if it's good news,

by the stock of its bad news, somehow short about I don't even know how to do that. So I guess I would only find like the five good news ones. You're like, I think I would still just end up holding the index fund vendors. I think I just stay doing exactly what I always do. 80, 20 stocks and bonds, baby. So what they ended up doing was they were like, all right, you sort of need to do a search function to figure out what news affects the price the most in a positive or negative direction. And I think what they figured out was that

It was merger announcements that would be the highest kind of like volatility for the company that was getting acquired because it almost always gets acquired at like a 50% premium to the where the stock was trading. And so I think what they realized was we need to be able to quickly discard 98% of the news and information because it's noise.

Which goes back to the same experiment. Most of the news information is noise. The secret is figuring out what is actually signal. And most of us can't do that. And we overestimate our ability to figure out signal versus noise. And so they figured out the signal, it was these merger things. And even they were only right in their predictive ability, about 70-something percent of time. It was enough to make hundreds of millions of dollars very quickly before they got caught for doing this. And then they all went to jail.

Isn't that cool also? I think that's the ending. When we sold the hub spot, I think the share price. I think it was $350. And then like the week they announced it, it went to like $460, just something like this. Anyone can go back and look at it. It was February of 21. And damn, Sam, the needle mover over here. Well, so that stock price went up. I guess it's a market cap of like one or two billion dollars. And I remember going to Kip, the CMO, I go,

You're welcome. He's like, Oh, yeah, it was this acquisition that got mentioned one time in our earnings call. It just barely. It wasn't the fact that we had just announced that we grew by 45% and have been compounding growth of like this, this, this. And I was like,

Yeah, causation is difficult to prove. I agree. I'm like, you don't understand. Can I tell you? All right, so we two or three years ago, we talked about AI girlfriends.

I sort of understood it because I like have actually developed like pretty good friendships, mostly via text messages. I think a lot of people who have group messages here feel the same way. I didn't entirely understand it, but in the last two or three months, I've been using chat GPT in a way that now I'm like, yeah, this would go away. I would be very upset. And I understand why people were very upset when they're, when they're AI girlfriends.

when they did like a software update. Yeah, and so basically I've been using chat GPT as like my thought partner slash assistant slash therapist. And you actually said something recently that made it a lot better. So I sat down and I'll explain how I've used it, but I sat down and I said, hey, can you ask me all the questions that a therapist or life coach or an executive coach would ask? And we could spend a few hours

but just me downloading, giving you a download on my life. And I did that. And since then, it's been magical. And I've been using it for all types of purposes. I use it all day. And I wanna maybe explain to you how I'm using it. Maybe you could explain to me if you are doing the same, which I think you are and how you're using it.

Right. By the way, I'll just give you a quick one. Mike prompt that I used yesterday for this. I said I was explaining the situation. I go ask me a few questions one at a time. Then when you feel you have enough info, then try to give me a suggestion because otherwise it just tries to like, you know, man, you know, like mansplaining or what does it call when like guys here.

Like your girlfriend is explaining something to try to fix the problem right away. She's like, no, I'm not trying to get the fix right now. I just want you to hear me and understand me. And you're like, what? I thought you just want the answer as fast as possible shoved in your throat. And like, that's what chat GPT does by default. It's, it's yeah. And there's a bunch of other downsides that I want to explain to all of this and how I'm working around it.

But first, I'm using it for a variety of things. So I'm using it for personal finance stuff. And I'll give an example for each in a second. I'm using it for business questions. I'm using it as like a sparring thought partner of like, I'm thinking about doing this. What's your opinion? I'm using it as a therapist of like, you know, I'm struggling with this person at work or my personal life.

How should I handle this or what should my life goals be? And then I'm also using it for helping me decide which tasks. So I'll give you an example. So for net worth, I use Kubera. Kubera is like a net worth tracker. You just log in with your bank accounts and all your other accounts in it.

tells your net worth, whatever. Well, they actually have a feature where you can download the information specifically for chat GBT and you upload it. And it doesn't have any identifying information. It's not like it has passwords. It just has a bunch of numbers. And so you can, I will upload this to chat GBT and I'll say things like, you know, I like to be conservative. Like, um, what would you rate this portfolio out of 10 of risk or

You know, like what's your opinion on it? Like what would more and Buffett say? You can ask it all types of questions like that. Or you could also say like, you know, how much should I spend on a house? Or what will my net worth be in 20 years? Like things like that. And it's been actually really amazing. Another thing that I did was I took the main KPIs for my company.

and I uploaded it to it. And I'll be like, what are the needle moving things that I can do for this company? And you could do your KPIs, which is typically like an Excel spreadsheet, like your company's churn, new users, things like that. You can also do your company financials. And then another thing that I've been doing is I will actually take screenshots of my calendar and I'll upload it and be like,

What task should I be doing for the next week, the next month, the next quarter to get to the goals that I've told you about, you know, my life goals, which by the way, you helped me create, you helped me create quarterly and annual goals. How should I be spending my time today, tomorrow, next week, and next week? And it gives me an agenda that I literally print out and I work according to that. It's like pretty wild. And that's why I've been using it. And then all day, I'll be like, um,

How should I reply to this email? What's your opinion? It's kind of crazy. So that's how I've been using it. It's like you have Neuralink. They just never did the surgery. All right. Like you're basically putting AI like as the, you know, operator in your brain in many ways, but you're just like, you know, we just haven't reached that tech point where the chip is already implanted. Well, the next step of that is here's what's going to happen. There's going to be software. It probably exists. And I'm tinkering with a few of them that records.

your computer screen, your phone screen, the words that you say out loud, the things you type. And it's gonna give you feedback on how you spent your day. It's gonna give you feedback on what to do, things like that. So it's gonna, like you know how they, there's a book.

I forget what the book is, but the premise is Google knows more than you because you are more honest in your Google searches than you are when you talk to your spouse or your friends or whatever. The same thing happens when it's like, yeah, you know, I, I spend this much time working on this, this and this and I just be like, no, you did not spend that much time doing it. And also you told me that you're trying to be nicer. You wrote like eight really mean emails. Do you know what I mean? Like that's how it's going to be in the next six months. I think there's going to be products like that, that are actually nailing that.

Yeah, I think the CEO of Microsoft, I don't know if you heard this story, but I guess when Ballmer stepped down and they needed a new CEO. And at the time, Microsoft was kind of in a downward flat. It was an uninspired stock and company at the time. So they needed something.

And I don't know if you heard the story. So the guy who became the CEO, Satya Nadella, actually wrote a memo, like a kind of like a manifesto, an internal manifesto about like what Microsoft needs to do. And he ends up getting the job. And at the time, it was like, he's like, I didn't, he's like, I never thought I'd be the CEO of Microsoft. Like, you know, you join Bill Gates as a CEO or whatever. And then Palmer and you just assumed they're always going to bring in somebody, but they actually promoted him from within.

And he, he wrote this thing in one of the key principles that he wrote in this. This is a while back when he was here, like, oh, five or 10 or something. This was in 2014. So he wrote in, he'd be bet on two things. I don't remember the second one, but I remember the first one he called ambient intelligence. And ambient intelligence is kind of what you're describing, which is basically like,

how do you have computer intelligence, artificial intelligence, but just kind of in your environment so that it can be helpful to you. So it just knows what you need without you having to go fetch it, without you having to go ask specifically, it can either anticipate it, it can be aware of all of your context so that you don't have to

first explain the whole situation and then be able to just ask your question. It already knows your situation. So you could just ask the question, that sort of thing. And so isn't that cool that he, you know, like so long before, you know, opening eye wasn't even incorporated at that point or something like that. This is a very long time ago. So to bet on that as like one of the two like ways that the tech puck is going, pretty baller.

which is shockingly hard, by the way, it's hard to make these predictions and remove like the limiter part of your brain and just imagine like, yeah, but what would be, what would be amazing? You know, like what would be cool if it, then that's actually, that sounds easy. It's really hard because you constantly think like, well, I can't do that, you know, like, because that's impossible or that would cost too much money. Like there's all these limiters. But the way that I've been using this, like if, like,

It doesn't work perfect yet, though, by the way. There's a few issues with this. And I am super not technical. The first thing is context windows. The more you talk to it, it doesn't always learn more. It runs out of memory in a weird way. And so I've been testing a variety of different platforms, Gemini versus

chat GPT, but I want to use chat GPT because I think it's going to be around the longest and they're going to innovate the fastest. But it's not perfect at all. But it's like shocking how useful this is. I finally, for a long time, I'm like, yeah, AI is great. Like I can look just like Google stat and it's going to tell me. But now it's more like.

This is my life. I am using this more than anything. And so they had their new $200 a month thing come out. And I don't even think I need the features, but I'm like, whatever, I'll take it. And so I've contemplated, contemplating, should I invest a little bit of money into building up these systems just for my personal operating system and making my life great? And keep in mind, I don't know anything about any of this shit. I just know that it's just effective.

Like it's just literally helping me get my day done better. And it's like a great bit of advice. Like here's a really another like practical way. I mean, I'll upload my measurements for my body and I'll be like, find me close that fit or like, does this fit? Does this pair of pants fit? And you just like post a link. Like I just, I've been using it constantly.

How are you, if you are using it to be like this like sparring thought partner? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think this is the key. So, um, so what we're saying is basically the way that, uh, I think by default people will use this is you ask a question. It gives an answer and actually a equally, if not more powerful way is to do the exact opposite. You basically say,

I have a, I'm trying to think about this, ask me questions. And then you, and you get it to ask you the questions. And then in that way it's your sparring partner. It is your thought partner in like kind of fleshing out or getting your own clarity around a situation. And it's available 24 seven. It doesn't judge. It's, you know, super, super intelligent, but also has like, you know, empathy, you can, you can go back and forth instantly. It's always available. Um, and there's no lag time, right? It's better than a friend, right?

You know, you have a friend who you bitch to and you're like, I just need a vent and like, just give me like, what should I do here? But you kind of feel guilty, like laying everything on them or making it all about you and like, they don't quite understand exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, of course. Yeah. This is just that person, but better. It's one of the main reasons why coaches and therapists are great because you're like, cool, we're going to have a completely one way conversation here. Yeah. Like, I don't got to give you nothing. I can come here and be a taker.

And that's the arrangement. And like, you know, I gave you the money. That's what that was for. And now from there on out, I don't need to consider your feelings in this interaction. That sounds like ruthless, but it's true. It's why it's different than just talking to a friend, whereas a friend, you're going to be like, sorry, am I taking up too much of your time? I don't mean to put all this on you, but you know, you're like,

You're always trying to like kind of half apologize and then reciprocate. And one of the cool things about a therapist or a coach is like, that's not the social contract. That's not what's expected in that situation. AI is even better. It's like, Hey, start a bug you at 1 a.m. I just, I'd like to talk right now and like instant responses with complete intelligence. And I'll just keep saying, no, tell me, you know, no, try again until I get something that's satisfactory to me. It's like you couldn't even treat a human like that, right? So it's pretty great to be able to do that.

It's become strange. I call it dude sometimes. I'm like, dude, what's your problem? That's wrong. Stop getting these done. It's strange because if you think about it, when you're texting your friends, because it's in the same window or next to the same window on your computer, you kind of forget that this is a machine and you can train it out of talk. It's very strange, but it's actually quite effective. Do you know how an LLM works? You know what deep learning is? No.

I went and watched some videos the other day just to get like, so I was like, how is this magic, magicing? What is going on here? There's one by this guy, I think it's called like three brown, one blue is like his username or something like that. It's got millions of views. And he explains, you know, machine, like what is deep learning, which is like the technique that worked with AI. And the second thing was, you know, how large language models work. What does it even mean? What is large? What is the language model? What does that, what does that even do?

But check this out. So here's the example that I gave. OK, so this is me not even trying to explain to you what it is because my explanation is going to be pretty bad. This is me just saying.

I can't believe that this is what actually is happening. I cannot fathom that this is the actual scenario. OK, so let's take this example. I wrote this. I put this on a car because I can't forget this. I'll never forget what I learned. All right, so imagine this number seven, right? So let's say you're trying to train AI to be able to see that this is seven. How do you do that?

You can hard code it, but well, every time you see the number seven, it's like a capture, right? It's like written a little bit differently. So it's like, you can't just say this is exactly a seven because you write your seven slightly different than me. Maybe you put the little line through it. Maybe you have a little angle to it, whatever, right? So you just want it to be able to recognize anybody's handwriting and figure out seven or not seven, right? What number is it? So how does it work? So imagine basically, um,

a classroom. Okay, so here's a row of kids. So there's 10 kids standing there. And each of the 10 kids is like holding one of these cards with a different number on it, right? But actually, it doesn't have the whole number. So, or actually they have the whole number, but for at first, it just says, all right,

There's a whole index card, we gotta figure out, we don't even know if this is a seven or a dog or a car, it could be anything, right? So it just zooms in and it says, let's look at this little section right here, like these 20 pixels, okay? These 20 pixels, you know, on this area, it's white. So if you got color there, sit down, kids, anybody who's got color over here, sit down, because this picture is white over here. Can't be, you're eliminated.

And then over here, it's like, hey, there's some blue ink. Something is here. So if you've got blue ink in this little section, stay standing if you don't sit down. So that eliminates a bunch of thought processes. So then it passes it to the next layer, the next layer of 10 kids. And it says, all right, who here has got this flat line? So the seven stay standing, the five stay standing, the threes are kind of like, hey, we got some stuff up here up top, the eights.

But you know, the four, the number four doesn't have a little roof on top. So it's like, I'm out, I'm out. And you're like, okay, go sit down. It's like paintball, right? You're out. Go go to sit on the side. And then so now you're left with like, you know, some of the numbers. And then it says, all right, we got a little, a little stick over here. Who's got a stick over there? And it's like the threes are like, Oh, I'm out now. That's not me. But the sevens and the fives are like, Hey, we're still in. It might be us, right? Bingo. And so you just keep passing it from layer to layer, showing it like kind of more pixels on the screen. And it's trying to get with some level of confidence.

At the end, right, it's going to be seven and maybe five at the end. And the seven is like, yo, I'm 90% sure it's me. And the five is like, yeah, it's maybe 10% that it's me. It's just an ugly five. And then that's how the AI knows that this is a seven because it passes it from layer to layer to layer to layer, looking at the pixels on the screen and basically trying to figure out trying to guess.

Is it, is it one of you? I think with some probability it's this. Okay, so that's just recognizing a number. Okay, now imagine what you're doing. You're giving it KPIs of your company. It has to understand what a KPI is, what a company is that you were looking for strategy, what strategy sounds like. It's got to say something that you as a successful business person who's sold your companies for tens of millions of dollars that you will respect the output of this.

Isn't that mind blowing that that's even a thing? And so that, now you take, how does that work? So now you take instead of the seven, take an example where it's like, the dog blanked, right? So it's like, what's gonna come after it? It basically sees the sentence, the dog or the dog. It's like, what's a dog and what do they commonly do?

It doesn't even know that. It has no idea what a dog is. There's no meaning. It just has, it read the whole internet. So what they did was they were like, hey, go read the whole internet. Which like, if you or I, we were like, yo, Sam, I gotta, like, let's do this, man, we could do this. We're gonna take so much Adroll, we'll stay up all night and we're gonna read 24-7 all the texts on the internet. It would be like thousands of years before we could ever ingest what, you know, what they gave it.

in one training run, right? So they said, go read all the internet. Cool, done? All right. Now, user puts in a sentence, the dog blank. Guess what, guess what the next token is? Guess what the next little word is that comes after the dog, the dog. It's like, the dog barked. The dog jumped. The dog, you know, is hungry, right? Whatever. It could be like one of many things. So then it takes the next word, which might be like, the dog barked.

And then it passes that phrase back through. It's like, now you've got the phrase, the dog barked.

What comes after that? And it's just loops that over and over again to generate the next word. So that's when you see chat GPT writing, it's literally taking like the next token it thinks it should say, then it feeds it back through and then says, okay, well, if I said, if I said the dog barked, then I got to say loudly, right? Okay, loudly period. If I said the dog bark loudly, what would I say next? And then it would keep and it keeps recursively doing that. And that's what's actually, that's how it generates a training thing, right? And that's like, you know, this is only part of it.

half explained correctly. But let's assume for a second that I'm not like completely misinterpreting this. Let's assume for a second that this is only, you know, a percentage of what is actually going on, right? There's still parameters and weights and all this other stuff that I haven't even talked about yet. This is like God, right? This is like, well, like, how is this even a thing?

It's so mind blowing to me. It's mind blowing. It's absolutely mind blowing. And I think that, you know, I don't hang around like 18 year olds. I think they're using it for school. So I think they get it. I think I know a little bit about it because I hang out with smart people and I'm

on the outskirts of like what these guys are doing. So I kind of see it online and I play with it. For the average Joe, for my mom and dad, for a 35 year old who isn't like tech savvy, who just works as a mechanic, I don't think that they're using it this way. I don't think they're using it at all.

It's going to change everything. It's just like so crazy. Like when the average Joe starts getting into this, I think young people like a 21 year old or something, I think it's like changing schools, by the way. It's like the grading system is like totally effed out, right? Yeah. Like when I like think about this, I'm like, like there is no homework. You can't do homework anymore. You know what I mean?

Someone DM me yesterday. It's not just homework someone DM me last night. They were showing me Sky Oliver Oliver Han he texted me this thing or DM me this thing. He said coding interviews like so, okay, you school Yeah, kids in school are using chat to be write essays and the teachers are like fuck How do we how we get it's a cat and mouse game to try to be like hey? How do I stop you from using AI to just like do your assignments?

Well, the same thing is true for coding interviews. So coding interviews, which are used to hire programmers, there's this website, leapcodewizard.io. And basically, it just helps you cheat on your coding interview. It's like, oh, you got a coding test to get a job? Just use this. Watch. It'll write. It's the same thing as a student. It'll write the essay for you, basically. And it's like, you know, doing 15 grand a month and recurring revenue. I'm just hoping people cheat on coding interviews. This is insane. It's so difficult, right? But it's kind of amazing. How are you using this every day?

Um, like, let me just go to chat. You can just tell you like my last chat GBT, your tool of choice, or do you like any of the other ones? Yeah, it is my default. And then, you know, I play with everything else. So usually if I'm like, how factually correct does this need to be all perplexity? So I go to perplexity. If it's analysis, I'll use chapter two, like, if you use like the O one stuff, like the deeper thinking stuff.

only for 24 or 48 hours. Yeah, it's brand new, but yeah, it's wild. It takes a long time, that's wild. Well, yeah, that's the point of it. It's basically, if you told the computer, hey, you don't have to just quickly, like, again, shove an answer down my throat instantaneously, where you're just predicting the next token and good enough to go, right? The 70% chance this word, let's just put it in. They found they could get, you could do more interesting tasks if you just said, hey, take your time before your answer.

Let's just give it more time to think and then it'll come up with a better answer. It's temperamental, which is amazing. So I use that. But like check this out. So there was this press release recently for we were talking about IVF. Remember? Yeah. Well, it's kind of this amazing thing. I don't know if you saw it. It's called Fertilo. Do you see what happened with this thing called Fertilo? So basically it was like the first live birth using eggs that matured outside the body. So like if you've done IVF, it's like a pretty expensive and pretty like harsh thing on the body. Like.

The woman has to get like injections, which are hormone injections to try to get your, they're trying to get your eggs to essentially mature, be produced and mature inside your body. And so what Fertilio did was they were like, cool, instead of doing that like long, expensive sort of hard on your body process, we can take an immature egg, take it out of the body, and let's do the hormone stuff out of the body and get it to mature, and then we'll put it back in the body.

And so it just removes the pain from the process. And the first actual live birth happened of a baby that was born using that procedure. It's kind of amazing. If true, it's going to change IVF. It's going to make it where

I don't know if it'll just be called a new procedure or what, but basically for a fraction of the cost, a fraction of the time, and a fraction of the pain, we can do the thing that we've been doing with IVF. Okay, so. Dude, it makes me realize that I think that Saheel, I forget his last name from Gumroad, tweeted this thing out where everyone made fun of him, where he talked about how he's giving birth is not gonna happen in the future. You're just gonna be in this sack, and that's how you're gonna grow. This is, I'm like, oh shit, you're right.

You know what I mean? Dude, I remember we were at a dinner and Jess Ma just said it casually in passing. She was like, yeah, like, you know, I'm really, you know, excited for and fascinated by basically like artificial wombs and basically, you know, pregnant, you know, you won't give women won't give birth at a certain point, right? It'll be like riding horses for transport. It's like you could do it if you want to go have a unique experience. She's like, it won't be necessary. And she's like, pass the, pass the mashed potatoes. And you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah. So no, like, literally, that's exactly what happened. And I was like,

And at the table, I looked around to be like, was anybody else mind blown by that? Well, what's going on? Like, don't we all want more information about that? But I'm at, I was at this like far diagonal seven people away, but I heard her say it. And I'm stuck over here talking about Facebook ads with some dork. And I'm like, uh, just, I'm going to get out of this side of the table. Get to that side of the table. So after the dinner, what did you say about wombs? Literally I flagged her down. I was like, Oh, you're getting an Uber? Hey, cancel that real quick. And she canceled it. And I was like, um, what was that thing you were talking about? And then she explained and she explained the companies that she's tracking and like where we are.

in the scientific life cycle of like how real is that possibility and how what are the laws of physics? Is that inevitable or is it impossible? Right? Because basically if something is not impossible, it's inevitable.

which in itself is kind of a dope idea. Like that already kind of blows my mind. And so she was explaining it. So, you know, I've sort of been paying attention to any signs of movement in that area. Cause I think that's really cool. The world's going to change pretty dramatically when that happens. Um, but what I did back to the AI thing, I just threw the press release into chat GPT and I said, explain this article to me. Tell me what they're saying. Tell me what this means in simple terms. It's a press release. And so it might be misleading or overstating the success of this. So tell me about that too.

And then it just goes, here's what it means in simpler terms. This company has achieved what they call the world's first healthy baby born with a woman's egg that was matured outside of her body. Normally in IVF, the doctors are doing ABC. In this scenario, what they're doing is ABC. And then it explains it.

And he goes, in simpler terms, conventional path is x. The new approach is y. Why it matters. If this is true, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it says, here's why it might be misleading. It's a press release, so it's definitely spin. Number two, one success doesn't prove a trend. It talks about the world's first, but it doesn't mention how many others they've tried that have failed in the hit rate of this procedure. It's not peer reviewed. It might be exaggerating the future impact. We would need to know clinical trials, blah, blah, blah. And then I asked it more. I was like, cool, what does the scientific literature say about this?

So all of a sudden, I'm getting like a quick biology lesson. Another one, brainstorming name ideas for a project. I'm like, hey, here's the project. Yeah, it's great for that. Ask me questions about the project and then come up with names. Then it comes up with dorky names. I'm like, no, make the names not dorky and long and don't make it feel like it's written by chat GPT, make it feel like it's written by David Ogilvy and then it comes up with different answers.

a lot of financial analysis, so analyzing stocks, or just like, you know, I see Kathy Wood on my screen a lot. Like, is she actually like great at investing? And then he's like, do you feel like a monkey? I see Kathy Wood on my screen.

Is she just hot or good at trading, right? It's like, you know, they're asking these questions. And again, no judgments gives me the answers, which was spoiler. No, she underperforms the indexes and has over like a 15 year period and makes a hundred million dollars a year to underperform the index. It's like, wow, good on you, Cathy Wood for, you know, for, for, for doing that. Um, let's see. It's just other ones. Hey, I'm trying to do this in Excel, but I don't know how to do it. Can you just tell me the function I need to write in?

Because like, you know, if you go Google this stuff, you get like YouTube videos you have to watch. Yeah. So now I'm like, all right, forget the YouTube video, just give me the like the exact type thing I need to go type in. Or I'll screenshot the Excel window. And I'll just say, I'm trying to figure out in column C, what are the ones, blah, blah, blah. And it gives me this like complicated, you know, whatever, count if formula that's multiple like selectors, whatever.

Hey Sean here, I wanna tell you a little story about Winston Churchill. So Churchill once said, first we shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us. And I think this is true not just for the buildings we see in cities, but also for the building blocks you choose in your company. For any company that I start, I use Mercury for all of my banking needs. Why? Well, it was built by a YC founder and you could tell. This is built by a founder who understands the needs of other founders. Second thing is this modern. It's clean, easy to use. The design is really nice. You never have to drive somewhere, park,

but coins in the meter get out just to do one simple task. You could do everything in just a couple of clicks. They got bill pay, checking accounts, savings account, wire transfers, everything you need, they got it. I use it for not one, but actually six of my companies right now and actually even have a personal account with them. It's kind of amazing. So if you're ready to operate in the future, head over to mercury.com, apply in minutes. Disclaimer, Mercury is a financial technology company out of bank banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC. Thank you to Winston Churchill for that little ad segment. All right, back to this episode.

Oh, I play games with my kids. So we take pictures of like my son got all these sharks. And so we just took a picture because he's asked me questions, right? Like, dad, what is this shark? And I'm like, dude, shit, if I know, right? Like, you know, it's kind of like something I always dreaded as a parent's like, oh, cool. My kids going to ask me questions that I, you know, where does rain come from? And I'm like, it's in the clouds. It's like, well, how do you get in the clouds? I'm like, I think it was in the ocean. And then it's just like,

zipped up there because it was hot or something. And I'm like, oh, this is going to be terrible. I'm going to expose myself. And so I just do chat GPT voice mode. And I'll be like, I'll send it a picture and I'll go voice mode. I'll be like, hey, tell me what these sharks are from left to right. And it reads it out to my kids. And then my kid can ask a question. He'll be like, which one is the strongest shark? And then it'll be like, actually, the great white shark is the strongest shark with the most powerful bite.

And he'll be like, no, but what if it was with a cheetah? And he'll be like, well, the cheetah wouldn't be in the ocean, but if it was in the ocean, and it'll like interact with my kids and we have like a fun time. They'll tell me all the time, can we play with AI?

Dude, that's so good. I've got a bunch of friends whose children are like three, four, five talking age, and they are doing the exact same thing. I want to do trivia, another hack for parents. You can go, hey, I'm sitting here with my two kids. Their names are whatever, Timmy and Tommy. And we want to do Paw Patrol trivia. Ask us easy questions. And when we're right, say ding, ding, ding, and when we're wrong, say, that's not right, try again. And keep track of the scores. All right, go.

Literally, you could just say that to it in voice mode, and it'd be like, all right, first question. Marshall is a pup known for what? And you're like, fire. And it's like, ding, ding, ding, correct. One point to you. Kids are going to, like, fawn love with her. Like, it's pretty crazy how, like, imagine being

you know, raised with this. This is insane. The, I'll give you, let me give three practical ways I'm using it. So they have this new thing called, I think it's new ish called projects. And so I have three folders right now. And the way it works is you have like a folder as a project and then you could upload files to the project and then you could have multiple conversations within the project and it refers back to the files or whatever information. Let me give you an example. Let me give you an example.

I have a health folder, and so you know how everyone has their own health guru, and it's usually based off of one book they read. Well, I go and download the book that I ascribe to, and I will upload, and if it's a book that's ePub, which is how I buy it on Kindle, I convert it to .txt file because that's easier to read, and I upload the .txt file to the... Even though it's huge because it's a book that works,

I give it a full book, the full book, I download it and I convert it. And then like, so for example, we were going to the grocery store today and I just said like, you know, there's like this interesting book I just read and I upload the, I've uploaded the book and I would just say, make the grocery list for me. And then I'll tell me actually, and I'll say, which grocery stores should I go to?

Um, in my area and it knows where I live and it says, yeah, like these three grocery stores will have exactly what you need. I, I, I think they will have what you need because like, you know, I'm on this like clean meat kick or whatever. And he was like, yeah, the author says like to buy this cut of meat and you should ask the butcher this, this, and this. And like here's three butchers that appear to have what you need.

And it's all based off of the files that I've uploaded for health. But then within health, I can ask it, hey, this quarter, I want to run a 5K at this particular time. Give me a good app to use that can help track my running and also tell me what my goal should be. So that's a couple health versions. The second one is I've got a clothing one where I literally took a photo of myself and I use a tape measure to measure various parts of my body.

And I upload it to it. And I was like, all right, like, make a chart with all of my measurements. Thank you. Remember that always. Here's some, like, clothing that I want to buy. Here's the links. Can you, like, go and figure out what size it is and let me, like, well, fit into, like, well, this pants. It says that they're the same width as your thigh, but you actually want, like, two inches, usually extra width that they'll probably feel more comfortable.

Or what I'll do is I'll upload like a blog that I like, I work where blog and I'll say, hey, um, here's a picture, a literally lay a tie next to a jacket and I'll take a picture of it and I'll upload it. And I'll be like, does this tie match this jacket? And I'll be like, no, but that other tie that you showed me a picture of a while ago, that actually would look great here. It's like, that's how I use it. And then the final way that I use it, and this is like my life coach folder, which is like,

It's like partially like I'll complain to it. And I'll be like, you know, I notice you've been complaining about this a lot, or I'll upload business financials to it. And that's like more of like my sparring partner throughout the day. And so I have three folders right now, health, clothing, and like a life coach. And so those are like the practical ways. And I'm using projects. That's the, that's the term on chat GBT. And that's how I'm using it as of now.

Do people are just going to replace their co-founder with this? You're going to see a lot more solo founders because you could just have an AI co-founder. You're going to say, well, you'll reduce churn if you use this messaging when you email your users. And then you're just going to say,

Yeah, well, you have my log into MailChimp or Shopify. Get it done, or you'll be like, my Shopify store is like a 2.1 conversion rate. And it's like, hey, we ran this AB test. Like, increase your conversion rate to 3%. And you're like,

get after it, you know, go do it. And that's what's going to happen. And so anyway, we've had these intelligent people, Dharmash, whatever, explain to us all these things, but it wasn't until the last two months. And in fact, recently, actually, since you told me to ask him to ask Chet to do that question, that like, I'm like, oh my God, this is my life now. And in fact, you actually sent out a wonderful email the other day where you said, here's how to ask powerful questions.

I uploaded that email to chat GPT and I'm like, remember these questions and like ask me them often or ask yourself these questions often. Yeah. I mean, it's just so, it's incredible. And it's also so obvious that, uh, I think that chat GPT is, I mean, it is the Google of our generation. And I guess the only question is like, why am I not, why am I not a shareholder of open AI? Like what, how do I, how do I go to sleep at night?

Well, I mean, Dharmesh had to buy a $10 million domain and then convince them to buy it in order to become a shareholder. So like it's like, like asking, like, there's always a way that there is always a way to write everything. But that's like saying like, why am I not a billionaire? It's like, well, like you could be, but like here is some of the barriers to entry that you've got to overcome. So there's certainly, you should ask chat DPT that by the way. It's a good question, by the way. Why am I not a billionaire?

It is a great question, but like there. Have you ever asked yourself that question? I asked a friend that question. And they weren't even really that close of a friend. So it was kind of a, you know, it was a blunt question to ask at a dinner. I was like, why are you not already a billionaire? And he gave a great answer. And he goes, actually, what he was saying was, you know, I want to start a billion dollar company, something, something. And I was like, why have you not already done that?

And he goes, I think when I was starting these other companies that I started, he goes, I didn't actually understand what a billion dollar company looked like.

And if I had known that, I would have built the different company. And he was correct. And as we dug in, it's like, what makes a company a billion dollar company? There's really only a couple of paths to that. And one of them, for example, is building something that has network effects. So he'd been building companies that could do great revenues, that could be even be profitable, they could grow fast. Those are some of the things you need.

But there was no network effect. There was no durability. There was no defensibility. There was no, like, win the category. It was like, just go to a category where you can win inside that category, but there will be other winners and you won't compete. Where is he now? Just for as an example, that was like a gaming company. It's like there was a lot of mobile gaming companies. And at the time, like to build a billion dollar gaming company, you really had to be like one of the like, you know,

three that we're gonna get built in a five year window, right? Like you had to build, you know, Clash of Clans or you had to build Candy Crush or you had to build like one of those. And even in one of those, it was like, oh, actually, you know, I'm sitting here tinkering on cool game designs. And actually the thing I need to do is build a enormous paid marketing team that is like point the top, the top paid marketers in the world to acquire hundreds of millions of customers is what I need to do.

And the cool artsy game design that's going to win me awards is not going to. That's not what a billion dollar gaming company looks like. So you just didn't understand the shape of something. And I find that to be true about most of the goals. So instead of how can I do this goal, another way of saying it is, why have I not already done this goal? Why is it not already true for me? And then it points out some like either knowledge gaps or execution gaps that are today that

that are like more, more close to your timeline versus when you set like an ambitious goal that's like far in the future and you sort of bake in that it's gonna take a long time, you sort of avoid the, maybe the harsh realities that might be actually existing today in your world about those. Yeah, you had a great email with a bunch of those questions. It was, here's a, here's a bunch of decision-making questions, which is, I'm not sure, I'm not sure, what should I do? Instead, you should say, what would I do if I weren't afraid?

One bad question is, how can I make this succeed? The better question is, what would make this certainly fail? Final example is, I can't decide which path is the right to pick. A better question or a better version of that is, what path makes for the best story? There's actually a pretty good email, I think I replied, I said this was a 10, but you have like a list of better questions. And I use those questions in chat GPT, because what you're, what I'm learning with chat GPT is,

you have to get it to ask you better questions in order to, you know, its input is important for its output. And so yeah, I pretty much stole that email.

Yeah, I think the realization was Tim first had said something way back, I think I put it in the email, but he used this phrase, he goes, he was talking about it in the podcasting realm, but first he had this quote, yeah, you can read it out. He goes, if you want confusion and heartache, ask a vague questions. If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask uncommonly clear questions. Often, all that stands between you and what you want is a better set of questions.

Exactly. And he said this about his podcast. He goes, I view questions as like a pickaxe for the brain, like, you know, like a pickaxe when you're submitting a mountain and you use it to list or like pierce the side of the mountain and use it to pull yourself up.

And so in many ways, you are excavating the brain with this pickaxe and your pickaxe's questions. Another phrase I use all the time in businesses is ask a better question, get a better answer. So often, if somebody asks a bad question, and I'll call a bad question, either a vague question, an open-end question, or a question in the wrong direction, I think the rookie move is just to answer every question I face value. Like, you should not answer 100% of the questions asked.

Like a lot of the questions need to bounce back to sender. This has the wrong address on it. You got to write a better address on that. This won't get delivered. The way you've written this address is not going to get delivered. And so you bounce back some questions and say maybe the better question to ask is blank. For example, like,

Instead of how could we succeed, which is like a million paths all unknown, what would make this certainly a failure? That's much more knowable, and we can establish a few ground rules from that question and get some momentum towards this. And you could see this with your brain, just like if you ask, they call it prompt engineering when it comes for AI, right? Being able to ask the AI in a certain way that's gonna get you a better result, absolutely the same thing is true for yourself and for people around you to ask better questions, right?

I ask annoyingly stupid questions to my team all the time. One question I love to ask is, what are we stupid for not doing right now?

And it's just that question that comes loaded with a presumption that there's something stupid we're doing. Of course, there is. We're always doing stupid things. And specifically, what are we stupid for not doing right now? Meaning, what is an obvious low-hanging fruit that's in our face? And we're out here searching for the complex when the simple, stupidly obvious thing is here.

And, you know, I would say more than 50% of the time, there's a useful answer to that question. But if you didn't ask that question, it would just go unspoken in your company, right? So like, how many are those? Another one that I learned from Amazon is Amazon asked this thing in the, if you're like, if you're an exec that leads a team, you have to like write this document at the end of the year called the OP one. I think it's the operating plan one. And you do it two a year, right? The operating plan one, and then you have the operating plan two halfway through the year. Was that effective?

Yeah, it's great. I'm a fan of the Amazon writing culture. It's easy to make fun of also and easy to do wrong, but when done right, super effective. So one of the things that they, one of the like common questions that they ask in that is, what are the dogs not barking?

And it's back to that Sherlock Holmes story where he solves the case because he's like, and they're like, how did you know Sherlock? And he's like, because there's like a house break in the trying to figure out who did it. And he's like, well, it was the dog, of course, they could put the dog. The dog didn't do anything. He goes, exactly. The dog didn't bark, which means he must have recognized the person that broke in, which means it must have been the housekeeper or whatever. Right. And so in your business, there's what are the dogs not barking is a good way of asking.

What are the things that, it's really like, I interpret it in two ways. One is, what are the things we should be hearing that were not? So for example, one week I didn't send out my Friday email, and I just sat there and I was like, like you want people to complain about it. She called me getting sent emails being like, hey, where's the Friday thing, man? I love that.

I didn't get that. Okay. Dog not barking, right? And then I had changed how I did the Friday emails because of that. It's like, well, why did you make that pivot? It's like, because I, I did Jenga, dude. I took a block out and the tower was fine. Nothing, nothing fell down. I'm trying to only have like, I'm trying to be an email in your inbox that if I remove that email,

your life got worse. And you want to speak to the manager, where's my goddamn email? If DoorDash doesn't deliver your food, you're knocking on the door. I want to be at least more powerful than the DoorDash delivery. That's what I'm striving for. And so that's one way of interpreting it. The other way is what are the problems that you don't hear about yet, but are certainly there. That's another way to think about the dogs not barking.

You know, anticipate a problem around the corner because we know it's going to be there, but we just haven't heard it yet. But, you know, we can anticipate it and maybe get ahead of it. Dude, I'm telling you, there's going to be a world probably in three years where you're going to like, so the issue that a lot of smart people like you and me and people listening is like, you're like, well, I'm really smart and I feel like I'm wise and I feel like I know what to do, but like it's a lot of work. And then like,

Literally the idea guys are going to survive in five years or the wise people because...

There's going to be AI agents doing all of this for you. You know what I mean? Like, you're not going to have to actually do that work. You're just your, your opinions. Yeah, but it is dangerous, right? Because then who's, why can't the AI do the idea part two, right? That's going to happen too. That's not, you're not. I don't think you are. So then what, right? And then that's when the brain breaks and you're like, I guess it's over then. And I'm not sure. Wait, so are you actually afraid? Yeah, kind of like, I don't want to say afraid because I'm not like quivering my boots about it. But I guess like,

I don't have a satisfying answer. And for most things in my life, I got a pretty satisfying answer. Sometimes the answer is just, I'll deal with it when it happens, right? I'll just adjust, right? And I can feel safe. I can feel comfortable with that. That's usually my fail safe. With this one, it's kind of like, so when the AI can do everything, right, which is like,

It seems like it's a matter of when, not if at this point. Okay, and it seems like it's in my lifetime, probably in the next 10 years. It could do the work, but it can also figure out what the work to be done is. All right, well.

I guess like I'm less afraid of the like, uh, oh, and then it's going to crush human humans and try to, you know, that will go rogue and it'll, it'll attack us. Like I'm not as afraid of that as I am. Just like the, what's the point of all this? What's the point of doing any of this stuff? If that's going to be true. And that's kind of just like a weird place to land.

So you want to end there? What the fuck, right? Podcasts are all that safe, dude. No, they're not. No, they're not. Perpunct City has a daily podcast. That's really good. They just take the news that is great. And then they have, or no, it's not perplexity. It's a, what's the 11 labs? 11 labs has, they use like a Stephen Fry voice and they read the news. I listened to it. It's awesome. It's not safe. We're not safe. No, it's safe.

Maybe like a plumber, a plumber is safe. Well, I actually think our strategy is pretty genius because we are getting stupider, right? Just like we dumb ourselves down and AI is trying to get smarter. And so there's actually a white space in the market for some just imperfect knowledge, some half baked ideas and some some some incorrectness. I think we've really I think we've stumbled on to something. I think we might be the last one standing in this whole podcast game.

It's us and P.O. Vaughn. It's just like the dumbest conversations on earth. They're going to be all that's left because the AI is going to do all the smart ones. Maybe. I mean, I don't know if maybe Mark Andreessen should be scared right now. Yeah, the smart guys are fine. Like the smart guys built the smart guys are digging their own graves. They're like their shovels are clanking together on accident as they're like digging the same grave. They're like, Oh, sorry. My bad.

It's like they don't realize that you guys are going into this grave in about a year. Is there another mark here? Two mark addresses. Like they think that they're like, they're like, we're putting the blue collar guy in this grave and we're going to also with this fucking job. They're like,

Huh. I've never, Mr. Adri said, are you here? Like, you know what I mean? I found my music burn in the TikTok comments. You know, there's all these TikTok clips of podcasts. Like, we should probably be doing this, but we don't really do it very much. But like, people just clip, you know, podcasts, snippets, and that's like a lot of TikToks.

Um, and the more viral, the more basically the more outrageous the comment in the, in the podcast, the more viral, the TikTok clip, cause you're going to get a bunch of comments being like, no, that's wrong. That's stupid. That's whatever. And, um, I saw the best one. It was just the top, top liked comment on a podcast clip, which is, it just said podcasting equipment is way too readily available.

This is like, damn, anybody can just get a microphone now. That's how I feel when I see a lot of these clips. I'm like, wow, this shit is, these microphones are way too easy to access. Have you heard that song, Another White Boy with the podcast?

Yes, I'll call it another white boy with a podcast It's sort of like that like finance 64 blue eyes It just says like Joe Rogan like it just says like a bunch of like random phrases, but it's called We should just play that song on the way out of it. That'll be our outro. All right cue the music

Ooh, another white boy with a podcast. Hey everyone, a quick break. My favorite podcast guest on my first million is Darmesh. Darmesh founded HubSpot. He's a billionaire. He's one of my favorite entrepreneurs on earth. And on one of our podcasts recently, he said the most valuable skill that anyone could have when it comes to making money in business is copywriting. And when I say copywriting, what I mean is writing words that get people to take action.

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And a lot of people have been asking me about CopyWorks, so I decided to make a whole program for it. It's called CopyVat. CopyVat.com. It's only like $120, and it's a simple, fast, easy way to improve your copywriting. And so if you're interested, you need to check it out. It's called CopyVat. You can check it out at CopyVat.com.