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

Shaan Puri

Alright, we should talk about **AI**. You used to tweet about, like, boring *steady-eddy cash-flow* businesses, and I feel like for this one you just ripped off your clothes and you're streaking through the pool right now. So, what is your take on AI?

Andrew Wilkinson

Dude, I am, for the first time in a while, waking up grinning every single morning—just stoked to get to work. I feel like this is… I was saying to a friend, I was like, *this is like somebody just invented a new internet or something*—that's how big this feels. He goes, "No, no, no, someone just invented fire," right? It's freaking crazy. The best quote I've heard on this is: "It's like we've discovered a new continent with 10 billion people on it, and they're all geniuses and willing to work for free." Everyone's talking about this—agents, right? "Agents" is like a meme right now. What we're really talking about is digital employees and digital people. When you shift your mindset like that, you go, holy crap—this is not only an incredibly exciting time to be an entrepreneur, but the implications are going to be absolutely crazy. You know that saying: "there's decades where nothing happened and then there's days where decades happen"? I feel like right now decades are happening—like, crazy. Here's the way I'd put it: if we just paused AI, shut down all the AI labs, and all we focused on was just rollout of what already exists, I think probably between self-driving cars and AI agents, **20% of all current jobs are gone**.

Sam Parr

What can you explain — examples of the way you're using it now to save time or make yourself more productive, both *personally* and at a *business* level? Or is this **mostly theoretical**, where it's almost there?

Andrew Wilkinson

Well, it's a bit of everything. I'd say we're in the **AOL dial-up phase** right now, but AOL dial-up is still *pretty freaking cool* if you've never used the internet. Basic stuff that everybody should be doing: I have an **AI agent** that preps me for every meeting. Thirty minutes before every meeting I get a text that says, "Hey, you're meeting Sean and Sam. You were emailing them about this topic; you're going to invest in their company," and it includes two bios on them. It pulls LinkedIn and just summarizes it. So something very basic that otherwise a human would do—previously my assistant would do that. I have it monitor my stock portfolio. I have it tell me about local events. So how did...

Shaan Puri

You set that up? **What tool are you using** to do the meeting prep—30 minutes before you get a text saying, "Hey, you have this meeting with these people about this"?

Andrew Wilkinson

So, you guys know **Zapier**. It's basically Zapier for **AI agents**. So, Zapier is freaking amazing.

Sam Parr

"Andrew, you introduced me to someone who worked at Lindy, and her name was Lindy. I was like, 'Wait — you? I don't understand this.' We got 25 minutes into the conversation."

Shaan Puri

before I realized it was just a woman named lindy who worked

Sam Parr

at this company called lindy I conversation before I realized it was just a woman named lindy who worked at this company called lindy

Andrew Wilkinson

Basically, they founded the company, and they were like, "Oh, your name is an awesome name for a company — let's just call it that." But it's also *super* confusing because she runs the sales team.

Sam Parr

yeah I was like wait so you're like are you smarter child

Shaan Puri

Most people would make it a quick, two-second thing. It's like, "Oh, Lydia—yeah, yeah, that's cool, how funny," and then they move on and get into the sales demo. Whereas Sam, for 25 minutes, is like, "Hold on—you're lending me..." He would not let it go. Hey, let's take a quick break to talk about our sponsor today. **HubSpot** has put together a list of **200 AI business ideas**. These are business ideas that you could create using AI. It's a list of 200—they did a huge brainstorm—so you can check it out. If you click the link below, you can get access to these 200 AI ideas. I'll give you an example of a couple of them. One is you could build an *AI dressing room*. So, let's say you go to an e-commerce site and you want to see what something would look like on you. You can use AI to actually take a picture of you and show you what the clothes would look like on you, or what the makeup would look like on your face. It's pretty cool, right? Another idea is AI tools for real estate brokers—maybe something that takes their listings and makes them more fancy, more beautiful, and attracts more buyers. So check it out. It's a brainstorm of 200 possible AI ideas brought to you by **HubSpot**. You can get it free in the link below. Oh yeah.

Andrew Wilkinson

Think about **Lindy** like **Zapier**, except you can build AI in between. Zapier might be: when I press this button on my phone, go to the internet and do this action — but it can't think. Lindy can add *thinking* in between. For example, you can make a Lindy that looks at your calendar. In this instance it would work like: "Look at my calendar an hour before any event starts, go on Perplexity, go to LinkedIn and write me a bio, then look at my email inbox and tell me what we're talking about." That's pretty basic. What we're really talking about is removing admin work. The agent I have built — cobbled together with duct tape and dental floss — is doing a lot of stuff my assistant would otherwise do. My assistant is amazing, but the problem with a human is you give them direction and you say, "I want you to send me these meeting briefings" or "I want you to write my calendar like this," and over time there's drift. They get busy, you give them more projects, and it just doesn't happen. Now all those things that, let's be real, are not worthy of her time are totally automated. That's the basic level. I can name some of the other tools I'm using to do this, but that's where I'm at. I use Lindy to build these things when I want something custom. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

are you an investor in lindy

Andrew Wilkinson

No, I'm not an investor in **Lindy**. I'm just a power user, and I'm obsessed with it. Here's an example. There are some restaurants in town that still require you to call to make a reservation — they're not on **OpenTable**. I made a Lindy bot where I can type, "Hey, make me a rezo around 5 to 7 PM tonight at this restaurant," and it will call. An AI voice talks to them, books the reservation, puts it on my calendar, and invites the people I asked it to invite. If the person asks, "Are you AI?" it'll explain that it is. It works for me. If it asks about allergies, it knows my allergies. It's pretty cool. I also use a tool called **Howie.ai**. You CC it and just say, "Howie, can you find time for me and Sam to go get a coffee?" and it'll book all that stuff. I use **Fixer** [spelled F‑Y‑X‑E‑R], a British startup. It basically reads every single email that comes into your **Gmail**, sorts them based on whether you need to respond, and then drafts responses. So, let's say Sean said, "Hey, do you wanna get coffee?" it'll draft a rejection or an acceptance in my language, and it gets better over time. Those are three tools I'm using that are awesome right now. They're really just replacing basic admin.

Sam Parr

This is *crazy*. I'm looking at this right now, **Sean**. Where does this land with you? Do you use any of this stuff, and does this make you fearful of anywhere?

Shaan Puri

No, not really. I think everything just evolves, right? Ultimately, there's this diagram that's always stuck with me: a *K‑shaped future*. So what's a K‑shaped future? If you imagine the letter K and say, "All right, this is where we are now" — that's the vertical stem. Then there's a fork in the road: one branch goes up and one goes down. If you learn how to use these tools, you'll accelerate and go up at a much faster pace than you would have otherwise. If you don't — if you stick your head in the sand and pretend these tools don't exist, that your job is always safe, and that your business can run with all humans doing all jobs — then you'll go down. You'll get outcompeted by companies that do adopt them and do something different. I personally use it less for my personal life and more for my business. In my business, I almost have my own "eval." Sam — you know what an eval is? "No." It's just like when a new model comes out. When LLaMA drops their new model, they always post with pride: "Here’s how we do on the benchmarking test" — the evaluation test. It's just some number; you don't really know what it's based on. It's this abstract thing: "Oh, we're a 73, and the last model from GPT was a 71, so we're the best model now."

Sam Parr

and is there a standard like is an eval like a a a third party standard

Shaan Puri

People build—there are a few different **evals** out there. People are trying to build new evaluations, whatever. I have my own little eval that I use in my businesses. I basically picked a few tasks that humans in my companies do. About every three to six months we go back and run through it again. We take the latest model, the latest product everyone’s excited about, and see: what’s the real deal? Can we actually automate that task? Can it be offloaded from the human being yet? There’s basically a spectrum. On one end, it *can’t be done at all*. Then there’s: you can do it, but you wouldn’t actually do it because it’s not good enough. For example, you want to use AI for photography for your brand, but every model renders nine fingers and two mouths. Okay—*in theory* but not in practice. You’re not going to put that on your website. Then there’s the middle: you could do it if there’s a human on top of it—if you train someone to be *in the loop* to tweak and make it work. [human-in-the-loop] Finally, there’s the other end: we just don’t need a human doing this anymore. What I’ve done is figure out ten real tasks that we do that have a real cost and a real human doing them in my companies. I’ll track those myself as we get closer to **AGI**. I’ll watch them go from 0 out of 10 (where we started) to 3 out of 10, 6 out of 10, 8 out of 10. Once eight of those ten tasks are like, “yep—we just set up an agent and we don’t need a person doing those anymore,” that’s when I know we’ve had real, real breakthroughs. That matters to me because it’s the real test. Versus some abstract evals—I don’t know exactly how those work—but if it’s something like “they can pass the **LSATs**,” that’s cool, but I don’t need it to pass the LSATs. If the opportunity is **AI agents** in my business, I’m going to test it on what those AI agents can do in my business.

Andrew Wilkinson

so what's an example of one of these things that you would wanna automate

Shaan Puri

The simple example I gave is e‑commerce photography. Every month we pay photographers to do shoots — a real cost somewhere between **$5,000 and $10,000** all in for e‑commerce photography. You have basically *product photography*, or you can have *models* in it — whatever, right? So there's a little bit of a range there: just product, or models. I want to know, **when can I get rid of that $10,000 a month?** When can I basically just show my product on a blank [background] and be like, "cool, put this on models"? We have other ones where it's photos and videos. You know those demos where you give it a static image and it turns it into a video? You see the demo on Twitter and it's amazing: it's just a girl posing and then she starts "strutting" — it turns into an AI video and it looks awesome. But then you do it in practice, and yes, she starts strutting, but then her face starts morphing, like she's being eaten by lava. It's like, "oh yeah, I'm not gonna put that on my website" — that would be a bad thing to do.

Sam Parr

Did you see the *AI meme* of **Mark Zuckerberg** staring at Bezos' wife's boobs, where he leans in extra hard to smell them?

Andrew Wilkinson

do you watch that video it's literally his eyes they dart back down from microsecond

Sam Parr

Yeah, and some guys made videos of him—like, not stopping it, just continually going in. It was... *pretty badass*. What were we saying?

Shaan Puri

Like another example would be, in e-commerce you have inventory forecasting. This seems like a data problem, right? How much inventory should I order, and when should I order? Let's pretend you have five colors of a product — which color should I be ordering? It looks like an **AI** problem: you have a whole bunch of historical data and real-time sales data coming in, so you should be able to forecast. Today we employ two human beings to do that forecasting. They're not perfect at it; it's a very difficult problem to solve. Can **AI** make them smarter and do it better? Can I go from two humans to one human plus **AI**, or can I replace the two humans so that **AI** gives us a more accurate demand plan / **demand forecasting**?

Sam Parr

this is

Shaan Puri

This is a problem that *every* physical-products brand in the world has. Whether it's Hershey's chocolate bars or North Face jackets, it doesn't matter — everybody's trying to figure this out: "How do we order the right amount of inventory and not be stuck with too much inventory?"

Andrew Wilkinson

It feels like we're talking about solar power. You remember, 5 to 10 years ago everyone would say, "Well, I mean, solar is really cool and all, but it's still not cost competitive." But if you look at the graph it just keeps going—**cost goes down, down, down, down**. If you project that trend and look at the rate of progress, the tools we've been exploring for AeroPress are doing the same thing. We spend a lot of money on big, expensive photo shoots, and usually it's just an AeroPress sitting there, really well lit with nice coffee in it. So we've been looking at Flare and some of these other tools, and I've been pretty blown away at where they can get to. I agree there's definitely a last-mile problem, but it'll be there in the next 6–12 months, I think. When it does arrive, it's really cool for your business—but it also represents competition, because it just becomes infinitely easier to compete in all businesses. We'll talk about this more, but I think that's what's crazy about all this stuff.

Shaan Puri

By the way, the most solved one of these is *meeting minutes*. Like, I don't know, Andrew, if you're used to this, but I used to invite my assistant into our meetings and say, "Hey, can you take notes? Jot down any action items or follow-ups that we're going to need to do." That has just been completely—it's completely gone off her plate. For her, it basically freed up, you know, four hours of time a day on average. If she's got four hours back, she can spend that doing other things because I'm using *Fathom*. Fathom just sits in my meetings, records all the notes: a perfect transcript with highlights, with a summary, with action items ready to go—24/7. It never misses a beat. So I'm like, not only did it replace the human, it's way better than my assistant could do, because she'd be trying to keep up and it just was not going to be good enough.

Andrew Wilkinson

The level of **accountability** you can get, too, right? I hate that feeling where it's like, "Oh, I did a board meeting with this CEO six months ago and I swear to God they promised me this one thing," and then they're like, "No, no, I don't remember that." Being able to pull that up... I just did a really, really cool thing. My girlfriend and I did a *relationship off-site*, which sounds really lame and nerdy. Patrick Campbell actually gave me the idea. We basically talked about, "Hey, what are our big strategic goals for the year—for our relationship, for family, for life in general?" We recorded the entire thing with **Otter** [a transcription tool similar to Fathom], and I was blown away. We just chatted for three hours and it was able to spit out, "Here's all the action items, here's all the things that need to come out of this." Then we were able to put it into **Claude**, and it built a plan for us. Very cool.

Sam Parr

You—by the way, I was giving you a hard time. It does sound *nerdy*, and also I do the exact same thing. We have relationship meetings as well. You have the local news business, the newsletter. Sean and I both owned newsletters when I did it; **AI** didn't exist, and I felt like, you know, hiring writers was actually the hardest part—who could write in my voice? Now I would hate to be in the newsletter business, because I see this stuff and I'm like, "It's almost ready to roll, but it's definitely ready to roll as an editor." Are you using this for your newsletter now? For the local news newsletter?

Andrew Wilkinson

I'm not right now, but that's what I'm working on. So the pieces — the more advanced stuff I'm doing — are: I've got a **social media manager agent**, a **marketer agent**, and a **tax advisor and investment analyst**. These are roles I previously would have hired for. I either didn't renew someone's contract or I didn't make a new hire for them, so it's already replacing people that I would have hired otherwise.

Shaan Puri

Wait, wait — can you explain a couple of these? Explain the **tax advisor one**, and then explain the **social media one**. </FormattedResponse>

Andrew Wilkinson

So social media is very simple: I post on *X* [formerly Twitter] all the time, and I'm lazy—I don't like cross-posting on LinkedIn. I often forget. I'll tweet about something and then not include it in my newsletter. So what I've done is I built a **Lindy bot** that looks at my X and all my other channels. Then, once a week, it summarizes all the stuff I've been talking about and asks me, "Hey, what do you want to include in the newsletter?" It can give me a first draft and it's trained on my previous writing, so it can write. It's not perfect, but it's about **80%** of the way there. If I didn't care about my personal brand—like, you know, many people just want a quick-and-dirty newsletter—it would be totally sendable. It's completely engaging if you prompt it right. You can even say, "Give me a subject line that will force the person to open the email." And it's really good.

Sam Parr

what about the accounting thing

Andrew Wilkinson

The accounting thing freaking blew my mind. Basically, I exported everything—I use **Xero** [accounting software] for all my accounting and for my personal financials and my personal holding company. It's like a rat's nest: I have about 200–300 random investments and all sorts of weird assets in there. So I exported all of it as a **CSV** out of **Xero**, I trained a **Claude** project on it, and I started asking it questions.

Sam Parr

did you upload like a book like a warren buffet book or like what did you no

Andrew Wilkinson

No, no. This is basically to replace... Right now I have a woman who runs my family office, and I might ask her, "Hey, how much did we spend on software last week?" Let's say it's a Saturday and I'm kind of bored and doing a deep dive. I'll email her on Saturday and then have to wait until Tuesday to get an answer. So I thought, "Oh—I just want to be able to query **Claude**." I asked things like, "Rank the top 25 things I spend money on," or "Look at my structure and tell me if there's any way I could save on tax." And one time—this was crazy—I actually **saved $100,000 a year** in cash taxes by moving an investment from one holdco to another, thanks to Claude. So it is very quickly becoming a tax advisor, investment analyst. I can get it to write a deal. I can get it to draft legal documents like these. I mean, everyone's doing this, but it is getting so good that I don't hire people, let's put it that way.

Shaan Puri

Weren't you hiring for an **AI back-office person**? I saw a role you posted—what was that?</FormattedResponse>

Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, so the woman who runs my family office has a family situation, so she's transitioning out of the role. My president and I were like, "Okay, what do we really want out of this role?" When we thought about it, we realized we actually just want someone who's an *AI nerd* to automate away all the accounting, bookkeeping, and other stuff that nobody enjoys doing.

Shaan Puri

you and trego came up with that

Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, that's right — exactly. I hired him right out of the office. But anyway, we're hiring, like, an **AI-first CFO**: basically somebody whose job is to build automations — financial automations.

Sam Parr

"You guys probably have someone who works for you who just basically manages **Zapier**. The problem with Zapier is that it's awesome when it works, but for some reason shit breaks all the time. I don't understand why — I don't know enough about technology to know why this keeps happening. The systems get so complicated that if that person leaves it's like, 'Oh, fuck, what's the stuff we have to go uncover?' They've *automated so much* that we just rely solely on this one person. It becomes an issue: it's kind of all automated, but it's sort of duct-taped together, and the duct tape comes undone. There's so much duct tape that I have to go and... when your Lego breaks you have to rebuild the whole thing. I don't know where this one little fucking piece goes."

Andrew Wilkinson

"Totally. I've had the same experience. Anytime I got really into *no-code*—like four years ago or so—we'd build all these automations: it'll go to one place, then a Zapier automation moves the data into Airtable, and then you manipulate it in X, Y, Z ways. I think the difference here is that Claude will just figure it out. If you say, "Hey, it's not working," it'll sort it out or tell you how to fix it. Before, I had that exact same problem and totally agree—usually the automations just cause problems. How are you guys using it at Hampton right now?"

Sam Parr

I mean, it's basically just a glorified Zapier. It connects Airtable to HubSpot to this website and updates those records in HubSpot. It's basically all back-end operational stuff, which I think is *underutilizing it*.

Andrew Wilkinson

Because, like, what I would do if I were you is I would get **Claude**. He has this thing called— I forgot what it's called— *"model context protocol"* or whatever. You can basically build a database of all your members and then have a way to query it. For example: "Hey, we need a speaker for this event in LA—who would be good?" or "Who's got a business in this space?" Just have a live database of people in an **LLM**. That'd be sweet. So, what I'm working on next is, **Sean**, I'm basically lining up—what are the roles that we will not need in the future? Most of this is not firing people; it's actually just not hiring people we otherwise would. If you graph this out, you can see that we're all going to have virtual employees very, very soon. That's what's crazy. I was watching an interview with **Dario Amodei** from **Anthropic** yesterday at **Davos**. He basically said, "In the next 12 months you will have **AI coworkers in Slack**." Now, if you just project that out: right now it's text. These are not people, but pretty quick it'll be someone on Slack that you're messaging: "Hey, can you make some new product images?" "Hey, do you mind checking out the ads?" "Can you write a report?" I think that within 24 to 36 months, these will be **4K** video people that are indistinguishable from a human that you'll talk to on Zoom. I know that sounds crazy, but I really believe that's what's coming. If you just think about the implications in terms of business moats and businesses that are going to be disrupted, it's just staggering.

Sam Parr

Do you guys' parents use it? Or do your 10-year-old cousins use it? How—how...?

Shaan Puri

my mom uses

Sam Parr

it in what way

Shaan Puri

Well, my mom—her first language was Hindi. She speaks English well, but if she needs to write, it kind of stresses her out. She'll say, "Oh, I gotta write something: an email, a letter, respond to something, write a note to the doctor," and she's kind of slow with writing. She feels a little insecure that her writing won't be well formatted, that grammar won't be correct and clear. Early on she started using **ChatGPT** and thought, "Great — I can just tell it what I want it to write," and it will produce a beautiful email for her. What she does after that is tweak it a little to make it sound more natural. That's basically all she used it for at first. I think what you're getting at is that, even though a lot of these uses seem obvious to us, the question is how it crosses the chasm to other people in our family. For example, my sister uses **ChatGPT** in her school to create curriculums and lesson plans. She generates those and gives them to her teachers to work off of — things they might otherwise procrastinate on or only half do, or that she would have had to do herself. That was a big win for her. Another use case: my mom uploads her [Kaiser] test result screenshots into **ChatGPT**. You go get blood work or some procedure, you get a result in your app, and you have to wait for the doctor to call to explain what it means. That gap of waiting can be scary. We upload the screenshots and ask, "What does this mean?" It gives beautiful, perfect "bedside manner" explanations — more patient and more thorough than the doctor. You can ask follow-up questions at your own leisure. That one was night and day. She's like, "Okay, I'll never not do this anymore — this is so much better; I'll never not do this."

Sam Parr

**Andrew**, you mentioned on here that software is going to be a worse business over the next ten years. What's your premise for it being a worse business?

Andrew Wilkinson

Let me zoom out a bit. So, in a free market, the amount of competition basically defines how good a business is. Everybody loves to shit on restaurants, but if you own the only restaurant in town — say there was one restaurant license given out in every major city and you own that restaurant — you have excess demand and no competition. That would be a phenomenal business. You could have 40–60% margins. Basically, as long as people don't riot, you can charge whatever you want and the food can be bad. I think that same thing applies to software businesses and startups. Fifteen years ago I started a productivity software company, and it was a terrible business because every single week new VC-backed companies like Asana, Monday.com, etc., would come out and compete with us and drive us into the ground. Where a lot of wealth has been generated in software is in *vertical markets*. That means weird niche businesses where nobody is competing. For example: funeral home management software, golf course management software, dam and infrastructure software. These are great businesses because no amazing developer wakes up and says, "I'm going to build this software." Basically you're the only game in town, so you can charge whatever you want and nobody switches off you. For the last 30 years that's been the best business ever. You might have heard of Constellation Software — they built a $70 billion behemoth public company — and all they do is buy businesses like this.

Sam Parr

don't they buy like a 100 a year

Andrew Wilkinson

They buy 100 a year. They increase the prices on a schedule. They hold them. They don't really... do anything crazy or improve them in any particular way. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

and they're buying like $3,000,000 a year software companies

Andrew Wilkinson

3 to 10, sometimes bigger, but they have a formula. Basically, I believe—let's just take **funeral home software**. So let's say that there's one developer who built funeral home software and he's had no major competition for 10 years. With tools like **Replit**, you can literally go in and reproduce basic software very, very easily. If your software is highly algorithmic and complicated, yeah, maybe not. But something basic, like funeral home management—where it's essentially case management—is incredibly easy to replicate in 10 or 20 minutes in Replit. My belief is that as more and more people don't need to learn how to code and can build software, software will become more and more **commoditized**. There'll be way more competition, and it'll be a much harder world for software businesses. Ultimately, it just comes down to time. For all of our software businesses we've bought, we've generally bought them in a way where we've de‑risked: we've paid ourselves back, or we have some sort of unique competitive advantage or cost advantage. For example, we own a hosting company for a particular framework, and a lot of people have standardized and built software on that framework. They're going to keep hosting with us because we support that framework and nobody else does. There are things like that. But personally, when I'm underwriting software deals now, I am being incredibly conservative. Honestly, I'm much more focused on **communities and social networks** as a result. We still look at software when there's a hardware component or some kind of lock‑in, but I'm much less enamored with software right now because of this.

Sam Parr

that's fucking crazy

Andrew Wilkinson

Do you guys think I'm *out to lunch* on this? Am I totally *overthinking* this? Or... say the thought out loud. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

what's the specific thought right

Andrew Wilkinson

Well... I think it's a pretty wild implication that we may have *mass disruption* in terms of jobs, and *mass disruption* in terms of every business that we know — that we think of as a good business — may not be a good business anymore. It's not a long-term thing, right? This is not 10 years; we're talking about a *two-year time horizon*.

Shaan Puri

so let's take the business side of it right the business side of your argument was basically software for the last 30 years has been an incredible business to be a creator of or an owner of whether you're buying or building software businesses and you're saying I think that's going to change because if it becomes so easy for anybody to build software that they need then they're not gonna be buying $5,000 a year or $50,000 a year software anymore and so maybe there's one thing vertical software vms right or other other categories like that where it's like more of a simple crud database with a a user interface on top of it that those are gonna become less valuable I totally agree with you that that's that those are less less appealing than they were before I don't think it goes to 0 because in reality it's sort of like anytime you've actually built software it's the last 10% that takes you know you can get 90% of the way there you feel like you're almost there but then the last 10% will take you as much time as the first 90 it's just like a rule you see over and over and over again and it's the same thing with products which is that to actually make something work and solve all your problems that you need that you're used to your current software solving it will take time effort love care and whether it's just might just be somebody else building software that's a competitor to you or you know if is somebody in your own company gonna build that I think it's less likely that that becomes like a major disruption to all of software because like you were saying like some software like social networks or communities the value is not the app the value is the people and the connections and the habits that they formed so you have software where there's already habits those will be safe software where the value is the people or the data those will be safe software where the value is in the enterprise relationship the service that's on top of it or the like fine tuning and tailoring and the cya which is that if I buy enterprise software I'm I don't need to save 40% on this bill as much as I need to not get fired for being like yeah we home brewed our entire crm and like the security wasn't very good right because we didn't I made this in fucking claude instead of it being software I bought from a vendor that's been doing this for 15 years and has actually like solved the security vulnerabilities and so I think that enterprise software will be safe so I think a lot of software will be more safe than software just as a category goes to 0

Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, I would generally agree with that, although I think it's going to be a lot easier to offer incredible sport, incredible sales, etc.

Shaan Puri

On the other side of it, you get the market expanding. Right? Because it's not just that, "Oh, there's going to be more competition in this fixed pie." It's that now a whole bunch of software that really wouldn't have made sense to build—because coders didn't understand the problem, so they weren't working on it—or that would have required too much funding to build, is suddenly feasible. All this new software is going to get created that wasn't really feasible or easily accessible before. I'll give you a *stupid example*. I went on Replit the other day. Replit's amazing because it's literally ChatGPT, except when you tell it something it makes a website for you or it makes an app for you. I had this, you know, *first-world selfish problem*: I like to log my meals. I take photos of my meals when I eat them to send to my coach, but then my entire camera roll is just crappy pictures of chicken and my kids. It's like beautiful pictures of my kids and then ugly pictures of chicken, and I'm like, "All right, this is kind of annoying that that's there." So I just told Replit, I said, "Make an app that, when I open it, the camera is instantly on. I don't want to type in stuff. I just want to open the camera, take the photo, show me a thumbs up or a thumbs down so I can rate my own meal, and then save it in a calendar view where I can see a streak. If I've been doing roughly well, make it green; if I've been doing badly, make those red."

Sam Parr

and can it make it an app that it gets approved in the app store

Shaan Puri

So that happened pretty quickly. The rep said, "Hey, I can't make iOS apps yet, but I can make it as a website. You can add it to your home screen and use it on your phone, but it'll just be a website you open up." I was like, "Alright, deal," and then it made that app for me. It's not perfect. I've run into some walls where Replit's like, "Hey, I don't know why it's not working," and I'm like, "Yo, it actually is working," and they're like, "You're just being crazy." But you get through the craziness. It's not exactly good enough—I would say I'm using it every day and telling you guys how amazing this tool is. Still, nine months from now I'm pretty sure I'll be able to just do that, right? So I can be a **software creator without knowing how to code**. That's already a big deal. Because of that, any idea I have I can make come to fruition. A whole bunch of new ideas will come to the market that didn't exist, and I could build solutions for problems that weren't going to get solved. If you look at software today, it's often built for the lowest common denominator: you need to serve the most customers who are willing to pay, so you shave off all the edges and make a product that appeals to most people—even if it's not what I personally want, or what a cluster of people like me really want. So I think the overall market for software gets bigger because you can create way more stuff. So that's the other counter?

Shaan Puri

To like software being bad

Andrew Wilkinson

**It's phenomenal for consumers.** As a consumer, I'm so excited. It's more—if you're buying these businesses and you're underwriting 10 years of returns, continued profit margins, all that kind of stuff—I think it's a lot. It just got a lot harder. Before, it was like, "look, there's only so many programmers out there." Right? There's only so many competent macOS, iOS, whatever programmers. And I'm with you in terms of where **Replit** is at right now, where it's like, yeah, you gotta— you gotta fit a lot to get it to a point where it's shippable. I've built a lot of stuff that is **90%** that I can't put out into the world because it's not there yet. But I think it's a little bit like stock photos two years ago. Stock photos generated by AI were terrible. Now I would not want to be in the stock photo business because it's perfect, and it's only getting better.

Shaan Puri

I will say one other thing: the same thing happened with media. Before, only media companies could make media. There were limited TV channels and newspapers. If you owned one of them, it was amazing; if you didn't, it wasn't. You're right that owning those *legacy media businesses* kind of sucks in the world of **social media**, where anybody can create content. Those legacy businesses declined, but then new, social-media-based businesses emerged. The set of social-media-based businesses is way bigger than the set of legacy media businesses.

Andrew Wilkinson

Right. If you're—if you're interested in whatever *weird niche*, you don't have to rely on the **Wall Street Journal** to write about it.

Shaan Puri

Right, so I think it nets out way ahead. I don't know if you guys heard Larry Ellison yesterday when he was going off about AI. People were like, "What are you excited about AI?" and he did this little rant. I don't know how well versed Larry Ellison is in what's actually possible with AI versus Masa-san — you know, showing a picture of a *golden goose* laying eggs and being like, "That's why I'm investing." But he was like, he's like: > "With AI, here's what's going to happen in the next few years: you're going to be able to do early detection of cancer. Then the AI is going to sequence what cancer you have, it's going to be able to design a personalized vaccine for your cancer and cure you of cancer. So why am I investing $100,000,000,000? Because I want that and I want 100 other things like that." It was just a very compelling rant he did.

Sam Parr

outside did he deliver it in that type of compelling way

Shaan Puri

well nobody's me but yeah he did his he did larry ellison version of it the b +

Sam Parr

but he did do like he was like that like he he was able to dumb it down

Shaan Puri

He was basically shaking somebody and saying: > "Do you hear what I'm saying? Do you know what this is? Get this in your little head: it's not about an investment for a data center. **We're gonna cure cancer with this shit, okay?** And it's gonna **save your mom's life**. That's what we're gonna do with this thing, okay? That's why we're doing this. Let's not get caught up in Project Stargate and politics and the investment amount and the infrastructure—**all that's a means to that end.**" That's kind of the way he was saying it.

Sam Parr

Dude, this shit's so exciting. He also — I think he's obsessed with **living forever**. I think he's one of these guys who's into that, and he's, you know, the **10th richest** guy in the world, so he can kind of throw his weight behind a lot of that stuff. I think that's pretty badass, and that's probably a huge motivator.

Shaan Puri

Andrew, can we do one more? You had this great thing in your notes that—I want to hear you explain. You said **"AI hedge."** Basically, you were looking for investments given that you think software might not be the best place to be investing. Where are you investing, and what is all the stuff I see here down below—down below your AI hedge notes?

Andrew Wilkinson

Sure. I feel like there are a bunch of different scenarios here. One possibility is that this scaling slows down and it's a moderate disruption. We get a couple of years with some people being unemployed, then they reskill and go do different things. The economy adjusts and grows again. Another possibility is what's called an **AI fast takeoff** — like Masa's graph of the singularity — where things get crazy. If that happens, does capitalism matter? Does the free market matter? Does the AI basically become this communist overlord that allocates assets and stuff? I've been thinking about what you want to own in a world where that happens. You can try to buy secondary stakes in Claude or Anthropic or OpenAI, but those are very expensive. You can buy NVIDIA at 30 times earnings or ASML at 30 times earnings, or TSMC — though there's the Taiwan risk and all the other geopolitical concerns. So I've been trying to find stocks that are actually affordable but still capture AI upside. I found a really interesting one. I love stuff that's miscategorized and misunderstood by public market investors. Public market investors are very simple in the way they think about companies: they have a series of boxes and they filter you through the boxes. There's a saying: "you want to look like a duck and quack like a duck" in the public market. They do not like complexity. If you say the wrong keyword, their brain turns off and they just say, "I'm not going to invest." A couple of examples are cannabis — they just put you in a box — and biotech — "oh, high risk." Bitcoin is another category. There are all these crappy bitcoin mining companies that get lumped together.

Sam Parr

Dude, when we sold the company to HubSpot, one of the reasons was that we went into the year with $1,000,000 of booked advertising and we were probably going to do $20,000,000 the next year. They were like, "Yeah, just cancel all those contracts and give the money back. We're not going to do advertising anymore." I was like, "But you could scale this to, like, tens of millions." They said, "Yeah, we make $1 billion a year, and also we would just have to report that, and that's a little too complicated and people won't understand it." So the decision of them to not do that was worth more than the tens of millions of dollars of advertising revenue they could have made, which is wild.

Andrew Wilkinson

have you ever met one of those like really adhd young entrepreneurs who's pitching you on their business and they're like oh we do this but we also do this and also I've got a company that does this right and and we all the older statesmen we always are like you know young padawan just focus and you know don't do that or or if you're going to do that don't tell me about all this other stuff because it just confuses me I feel like public market investors are like that so so here's the business I found it's called iris energy the ticker is irene I r e n and basically it's these 2 australian guys who were infrastructure bankers and their thesis supposedly was that compute was gonna be a big deal in the next 10 to 20 years so presciently they went out they secured a whole bunch of huge data center properties that were right next to mostly renewable energies so they'd find a power plant that's like a hydroelectric dam or something like that and they would literally just buy a massive data center right next to it and build 1 so for example where I live in bc they have one in prince george right next to like a big hydro dam and currently the best use for these data centers they've built so far has been mining bitcoin so they've been doing that and they're not bitcoin bolts they're not like microstrategy or someone like that they don't hold the bitcoin they just mine it they've got their gpus and whatever and they sell it immediately and right now they're making somewhere in the range of $500,000,000 of ebitda annually doing that now the stock trades at about a $2,400,000,000 valuation so you can buy it actually quite cheaply based on the bitcoin thesis right and bitcoin would have to drop by about I believe I'm guessing based on some assumptions but I think it would have to drop about 70% before they get to break even on mining these bitcoin so here's what's interesting about this business so it's totally misunderstood by the public market because everybody thinks oh they're bitcoin bulls they're mining bitcoin there's all this risk or whatever what's actually interesting here is they're going to flip or we I hope or they've kind of publicly communicated to some degree that they're going to try and flip these data centers over to compute so all these huge companies like you know amazon and Microsoft and anthropic and whatever they all need data centers and they need the data centers to be centralized in one place you can't have 10 computers here or 10 gpus here and 10 gpus somewhere else for training you need them all to be in a massive supercluster so the other interesting thing is you can't just go and build these superclusters you can't go build these data centers anywhere it takes a long time to get permitting and approval and it takes a long time to build and so basically there's a finite amount of this stuff to the.

Andrew Wilkinson

Where you guys have probably heard Bill Gurley talking about trying to buy nuclear power plants and all sorts of crazy stuff. Basically, if they flip this business over to doing inference and to working with hyperscalers on training, this could be a massive boost to the business. It could be 5x, 10x, 20x — I don't know — but very significant if they sign some deals with hyperscalers, which I know they're actively working on; they've communicated as much. So, basically, if you believe in a *fast takeoff*, it's a very interesting way to buy something with relatively low downside and very significant upside instead of buying **NVIDIA** or **Microsoft**, obviously.

Sam Parr

do your own I sound like you're a leonardo dicaprio in like

Andrew Wilkinson

*Do your own research.* **This is not investment advice.** I do own the stock, but I think it's interesting.

Sam Parr

how much of the stock did you buy

Andrew Wilkinson

I only bought, like, $1,000,000, but I look at it as, like, a small—it's a very small position. It's like buying *fire insurance*.

Shaan Puri

"Yeah. What—what is this, a position for ants? Just **$1,000,000**, Andrew." "Well, Andrew, I know that was not financial advice, but I do appreciate the advice that you just gave me financially."

Sam Parr

The last public stock we talked about, I think, was **Weight Watchers**. There was definitely a correlation between when the episode aired and when the stock moved. I don't know if it was causation, but there was definitely a correlation. I wonder if that's going to happen here.

Shaan Puri

You said the downside is that you have this Bitcoin-mining free cash flow priced very fairly, right? You said it's like **three times free cash flow** basically as the price. Then the upside is if they make this **AI** switch. One question: you said they—sounds like they're not huge superclusters, so...

Andrew Wilkinson

Oh no — they're huge. They have a massive site in Texas that they're working on building now. Here's probably the reason why it's trading lower: these profits do not just go to investors. They are almost all being *pounded back into building out these data centers*, so if for some reason compute stops mattering — or, you know, we...

Shaan Puri

move to distributed inference or something like that there's

Andrew Wilkinson

There's definitely a downside scenario — which I infer, or something like that. That's why I'd say: think about this cautiously; don't put your entire portfolio in it. I look at it as a good **1% to 5%** position.

Sam Parr

I need to look into it. That's not how I roll, obviously, but it was compelling, and I'm fascinated by their *entrepreneurial story*. I'm amazed that this was just launched in **2018** and how fast they grew. How much financing did they raise?

Andrew Wilkinson

I don't know how much they've raised, but they have **no debt**, which is quite impressive for a business like this. They also have a lot of interest from retail buyers in the public market. Every time they need to expand, they do what's called an *at-the-market raise* [issuing stock directly into the public market]. They basically issue stock into the market and raise capital that way. I mean, the alternative would be taking on large amounts of debt, so they're avoiding that, I think.

Sam Parr

Well, I forget the name of that online stock market club that Bill Ackman and all these billionaires are part of. They have to pitch their stock and make a compelling argument, and it's *really* hard to get into. This is like if that and *Beavis and Butt-Head* had a baby — that's what this is.

Shaan Puri

right now have you ever been to sound this is sound conference right that's what you're talking about

Sam Parr

No, yeah — that's what I'm talking about. It's *online* or *in person*.

Andrew Wilkinson

I've always wanted to go but it's an ordeal to go

Shaan Puri

maybe this was your audition tape

Andrew Wilkinson

yeah there you go what do

Sam Parr

you think of it sean

Shaan Puri

I mean, I don't know anything about this company. I've never heard of it until Andrew talked about it five minutes ago. But I mean — the problem is Andrew's very persuasive. There's also a problem with me: I can talk myself into anything. That doesn't mean it was a good idea, and I have done that to myself many times. So you have to be careful. I apply basically a discount factor; it's like a *"charisma discount."* The more persuasive somebody is about everything, the more I have to discount them. To some degree, that doesn't mean I just throw it away, but I have to be careful not to get overly excited. The opposite is true in the other case. When somebody has the *David Blaine* deadpan delivery of everything, and then they're saying something that sounds exciting, I'm like, "Wait — if that sounds exciting coming from you, that means it must be ten times more exciting than you're actually giving." There's actually an amplifier there, so you've got to be a little bit careful.

Sam Parr

This is why, whenever I read Malcolm Gladwell books, I have to be like, "Wait — this is *just a theory*. This is *just a theory*." This is not a fact necessarily. That's... that's pretty funny. What did you call that? The charisma — the what, the "charisma discount"?

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

That's pretty awesome. Yeah, like our friend Jack Smith—whenever he tells me something, he'll be like, "Yeah, it's pretty cool. I... I think I like this." I'm like, "Do you *love* this?" He says, "Yeah, I think I love it." That's when I'm like, "Alright, I'm in."</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

There's some people for whom "*pretty good*" means it's incredible. And there are other people who are like, "*oh, it's the fucking best,*" and that just means it's just another thing they're doing. It doesn't mean anything, right? You have to—it's like an audio mixer: you have to turn some people's levels down and turn some other people's levels up on their microphone, you know.

Andrew Wilkinson

Are you guys tracking those stocks? You did that *investment episode* maybe six months ago. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

And yeah, TKO versus Ferrari — TKO won, I believe, Sean. I think. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's up like 19% I think since we did that episode, so that one did pretty well. It was funny that we did a stock-picking episode—just "stock, stock-a-palooza"—and we didn't just say the word *Nvidia* and then stop the recording. That would have been sufficient. It was pretty obvious and in our face. But when you try to be smart and make good content, that doesn't mean you're necessarily giving the best advice. This is my fear of all *YouTube doctors*, by the way. I like Huberman, I like Attia—I like them—but they're content creators first. You have to apply the discount factor: their job is to come up with new things to say every week. That doesn't mean I'm saying they're wrong. It's just that the best advice might have been five minutes long, said once, and repeated many times. That would probably be more helpful than listening to a three-hour podcast about how getting UVB rays in your ears in the mornings is going to help you. Those might not be the things that actually help anybody.

Shaan Puri

But that doesn't make for good content. So, whenever somebody's *primary job is content* — and I say this as somebody whose *primary job is content* — you have to remember that before you get totally hooked and listen to everything they say.

Andrew Wilkinson

I remember in 2013 or so—I had sold a business and was sitting on about $7–$8 million in cash. I thought, "Okay, I need to invest this," so I read a Tony Robbins book. I'm not a big Tony Robbins person, but I think it was called *"Money: Master the Game."* Basically, the whole book is: **buy index funds.** I have this disease—and I think most entrepreneurs do—where they say, "Well, that's the obvious thing; that's for the normies. I'm going to go find door number three." I look back: I read *"Chip War,"* which is all about semiconductors. I knew Nvidia was an amazing business and that TSMC was an amazing business. I saw Facebook trading at five times earnings. But I have a really hard time going through door number one. Going forward, I want to be more deliberate. I just want to do the thing that makes sense and is obvious, then forget about it and stop trying to be clever. This is actually an instance of me trying to be clever.

Sam Parr

What did you want to invest in? Then you look back, and you're like, "Oh — *dodged a bullet* on that one."

Shaan Puri

Oh, basically—where was the, where was the obvious thing? The wrong answer. Yeah, because it won't be the right answer 100% of the time.

Sam Parr

Nvidia was a—it's a... yeah—Nvidia, Facebook. You look back and you think, "I should have known better," but where was it? The opposite.

Andrew Wilkinson

"I don't think I've ever really messed up on the one that's obvious — the one that slaps me in the face. I'm actually really decisive when I see that. But it's interesting: mostly it happens for me in *private businesses*. I think that's where my decision-making is usually the strongest, because I usually do what's obvious and will work for sure. In *public markets*, however, it's very easy to get excited."

Sam Parr

Have you had one, Sean, where you're like, "I almost did this," and, God, I'm thankful I didn't?

Shaan Puri

Well, I've had a plan—a bunch of those. But is it specifically aware? It was, like, an obvious kind; it seemed pretty straightforward, but it was a mistake.

Andrew Wilkinson

Oh, I have one. My first designer was this guy named **Adam Saint**. He's the best—one of our designers and also a great friend. He left after a couple of years at **Metalab** and started a company called **Bench**. He came to me and said they were doing basically *AI accounting*—ten years early. I loved him, I loved his co‑founder, and I loved the idea. But I looked at it and thought it was a services business for accounting with low margins, and it was going to be hard. So I didn't invest. For the next ten years I felt like an idiot because, over and over again, I'd see big Series A or Series B rounds and firms like **Bain Capital** buying them for huge amounts. It turned out that when Bain invested, I don't think the founders got any money off the table—nor would I have as a shareholder. I think a lot of people saw this, but he just posted a big LinkedIn post about how the business basically went to zero, shut down overnight, and was a total disaster. That's an example where I so badly wanted to be part of that business and I would kick myself for years. In the end, though, I'm really glad I didn't invest in it.

Shaan Puri

Well, I first want to co-sign what **Andrew** said. I think, you know, I have medaled in the *Overthinking Olympics* many times. More than anything, the reminder is to do exactly what **Andrew** is saying: stop trying to be clever and simply ask... > "What's the obvious here? What's the obvious move here? What's the obvious answer here?" If there's not an obvious answer, just move on. You don't have to do anything. *No action is required* in most situations. I'm struggling to come up with a time—just like **Andrew**—where there was an obvious thing staring at me that I did and it turned out wrong. That almost just reinforces even more how hard that is. By contrast, if you said, "Tell me a time where you kind of got a little cute, tried to be clever, and it didn't work out," that I can more easily imagine...

Andrew Wilkinson

Your buddy texted you at 11:00 p.m. and said, "Hey—**the round's closing tomorrow**, and these ten cool people are in. It's this really cool founder."</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

I can't even blame anyone it's even simpler than that it's I

Andrew Wilkinson

was a believer in crypto early

Shaan Puri

Sam, I was probably talking to you about crypto early for a long time. Then—one year, last year or the year before, something like that—crypto had a dip. I thought, *I'm going to tax-loss harvest*. I was like, "I'm so clever. I could sell this shit, buy it right back, I still own the thing, and I book this beautiful tax loss." Oh my God, I am *900 IQ*—I am the guy. So I sold the thing and booked the loss. I told my accountant, "Don't worry about this one. I advised myself on this. I got it." They said, "Okay, great—we'll make sure we have that booked for the year," and I was like, "Cool." Then I thought I should buy back in. But I had just read this report and I thought it was going to go a little lower first. I told myself, "Let me just wait… let it go a little bit lower." That stupid tax decision ended up costing me. It maybe saved me, I don't know, hundreds or thousands of dollars in taxes, but it cost me $1,000,000 in gains. The obvious thing was: sell the thing, book the loss, buy it right back. You're exactly where you were five minutes ago with additional tax losses. Getting cute—trying to be clever, thinking the knife's still falling—made me wait for it to fall a little further. It did fall a bit more, and I patted myself on the back: "I'm so smart, I knew it was gonna go down, it's just gonna go down a little bit more." Then it went right back up—way past where I bought it—and I ended up buying in at a much higher price. I would have been better off doing nothing. Also, Ross Ulbricht was in jail and just got freed, which I know is a big day for you, Sam.

Sam Parr

big day

Shaan Puri

and so

Sam Parr

I'm trying to I've gotta shave my legs for our 1st date

Shaan Puri

He's walking out of prison, by the way, holding a plant, which I love. I don't know — he just has a small houseplant that he had, I guess. I don't know what it is. But everyone's like, "Oh my God, I'm so glad he's free. It must've been so tough..." And then somebody says, "Well, the government did do him a favor because he was basically forced to not sell his Bitcoin from 2011 or whatever, when he was running Silk Road, and Bitcoin was, like, in the dollar range. Now it's $100,000." It's like, yeah — they also did give him a gift by not letting him sell.

Sam Parr

wait is that so he's still he's still he owns some still I thought that tim draper bought it

Shaan Puri

No — that's what they seized. Presumably, they didn't seize all of the Bitcoin that this guy had, right? He could have had Bitcoin in multiple wallets. He could have had personal Bitcoin. They seized what they got from the Silk Road; that doesn't mean they had all of his crypto wallets, necessarily... you know?

Sam Parr

How people say, like, buying a home is *forced savings*. He—he just had prison as his forced savings. Yeah, 24-hour lockdown forced savings, my friend.

Shaan Puri

For example, I had the opportunity to invest in Coinbase—not super early, but let's say Series A or Series B somewhere in there. I remember doing the math and being like, "Okay, I believe in Bitcoin. Should I invest in Coinbase, the exchange, or buy Bitcoin?" Again, I tried to outsmart myself. The answer should have been: *just do a little bit of both and let it ride.* In the end, I did an analysis that showed you should just own the underlying asset—Bitcoin. It's going to grow faster than the exchange, which is going to have multiple competitors that are exchanges, etc. And actually I was right: Bitcoin outperformed. But the thing I didn't factor in was that I would have made more money had I (a) done both and (b) realized that Coinbase shares you couldn't sell. When Bitcoin's price went down you couldn't panic-sell your Coinbase shares, so the forced savings of being a Coinbase stockholder turned out to be more beneficial than being liquid with Bitcoin, where you were at the mercy of your own brain. There have been tons of examples like this.

Andrew Wilkinson

I have a good one. I've talked about this a little bit, but Metalab—back in, I guess, 2012 or 2013—we designed Slack. At the time, Slack was actually a failed gaming startup. Stewart Butterfield was trying to do something with the remains of it and build a chat tool. He came to me and said, "Hey, I've only got $80,000 budget for this." I said, "Well, we'd normally—this would cost quite a bit more—but we really, really want to work with you. We're big fans." He asked, "What if we did some stock?" I was like, "No, no, no, no." Metalab would go broke if we just took stock. We don't do that. So I said no. My thinking was that I wanted to get as much cash as possible so I could invest it in my own businesses. If you think about what I was investing in at that time, it was my productivity software, where I lost $10,000,000. I put the money into this money‑losing productivity software. I could have made $100,000,000 or something crazy, because Slack was at, like, a $20,000,000 valuation at that time and it sold for $28,000,000,000, I think, to Salesforce. That's a good one—maybe it's not that obvious, but it's still a brutal one.

Sam Parr

My most recent one is Justin Mears' Trumet [company name uncertain]. He was raising for it at a—I forget what it was—reasonable valuation. Justin's my friend. I think Justin's amazing. He had... I thought he had too much going on, and I was like, "No way. Are you gonna focus on this?" I passed. He just told me how things are going, and I'm like, "Shit — that was so obvious. You're a winner. I should have just said yes: 'I'm in.'"

Shaan Puri

in my my ecom business my I brought in a friend into the business gave him equity he he knew ecom much better than I did I thought okay my rate of learnings can go up with this guy and I was so excited for this like value add from this guy and his value add was like he's super good at a bunch of things one of the things he's really great at is marketing so I was like okay he's gonna be so helpful with marketing and so we closed the deal signed the docs and I set up the 1st session I'm like oh I can't wait for this guy to come in and just spill the beans and all the secrets that I don't know and make and solve all of our marketing problems this is going to be amazing and he comes in and he has that first first session and instead of spilling the beans he just opens up a Google doc and he's like okay what's the best product that you sell and we were like it's this one he's like cool what's the best photo of that product we're like what do you mean he's like just like what's the best picture you have about that product and and he puts it in the Google doc and he's like okay if you know like what do people say like why do people buy this and we're like well I mean they buy it because it's great he's like yeah but like what like why do they buy it like what do they say and he writes down the caption and then he like goes and sets up a facebook ad of that product with that picture with that line of like what people say and he's like cool let this run for like the next 3 months and so then he so that becomes our top performing ad it took him 5 seconds and I'm like okay that was cool but like surely there's more and so 9 months go by and I hit him up and I'm like dude you're my great friend and I was so excited for you to be in this thing but like honestly I feel a little disappointed like I feel you could have done more I feel like the expectation was you're going to do more and he's like oh I did so much and I was like wait what do you mean like what did you do like what is the list of like what do you mean when you're saying you did so much I'm saying you didn't do enough what's the gap and he was like oh I stopped you from doing all the dumb things he's like I didn't do extra things he's like remember when you got really excited about influencer marketing I was like oh yeah that was awesome I read this article and I met this guy who was crushing with influencer marketing I wanted to go all in on influencer marketing he's like yeah I remember I just told you like hey facebook's working like just keep that going like don't have you run into a wall with facebook no all right then let's just keep doing that don't get distracted and he's like that's what I did he's like the second thing you wanted to expand your products and like actually I just stopped you from doing that and then you had this genius idea to go subscription and I told you really like hey like this thing's working so let's just keep doing the obvious thing here and just keep it going and basically he laid out like 4 or 5 things that were all just simply like him taking the knife out of my hand as I'm a toddler and preventing me from stabbing myself and he was like those were all super important moments that like this business would have gone a different way and I was like I don't know if you just jedi mind tricked me into believing that you've added a ton of value or you actually just said something very very insightful to me and I landed on I think he's actually very very insightful and that that is one of the best ways to help someone is to just simply prevent them from hurting themselves rather than solve their problems for them or give them some new tool that they've never seen before will solve all their problems

Andrew Wilkinson

And this is why I love investing in **private markets**, right? To Sam's — about houses being forced savings. With a private business, there's so many of our businesses that I've owned where, if I could press a red button, like a *"sell"* button, just any given day because I read something or I'm paranoid or whatever, I would have way, way less wealth because I would have panicked over and over and over again. When I look at my public market track record, I've actually had the right call over and over and over again, but then sold way too quick. Like, I bought **Chipotle** stock when they had that health crisis.

Shaan Puri

oh I yeah

Andrew Wilkinson

I doubled it and then I just sold. Right — I could have made way more money; same with Meta and all these other things. So, I think that having a psychological **lock-in** creates a really positive thing for people like us who are impulsive.

Shaan Puri

There was a guy at the event we just threw who said everybody was giving their "claim to fame." It was like, "Okay—this guy built this thing. He's spent 20 years building this; he's been grinding every day and he built this empire." Then another person: "He's building this empire; Jimmy's building this YouTube empire and then this chocolate empire on top of it." Everybody was just like, "Go, go, go—try to figure it out." Then there was one guy who said, "Yeah, he's one of the most successful investors in the world. He invested in all five of Elon's companies at the first round and didn't sell." And it was like, there's one way to do it: identify the best operator in the world—or somebody who you think is absolutely brilliant and obsessed—and invest in all their things. Don't try to judge which rockets are going to fail; this is going to work. Just *invest in the jockey*.

Andrew Wilkinson

and was it on antonio

Shaan Puri

no I can't say the name but

Sam Parr

One of the wealthier people there—in a room of the wealthiest people in America—someone asked, "What do you do?" He said, "I'm like the **CEO of my kids** right now. I dedicate my life to my children." He continued, "You guys work 16 hours a day making money. I work 16 hours a day making my kids happy and healthy, making sure they're well loved and all that." I was like, "You're the greatest person I've ever met." Yeah, and he had that—*simp* (it's not the right way to describe it)—like a simpleton mindset. It was the midway thing, where it felt simpler so he'd go that route, whereas many other people refuse to sit still and stay the course.

Andrew Wilkinson

What's the quote, Pascal: "All of man's misery arises from his inability to sit quietly in a room," you know.

Sam Parr

This guy did not suffer from that, guys. *This is awesome.* I could keep going. That's great — I'm just happy you're well, **Andrew**.

Andrew Wilkinson

yeah yeah it's great to see you guys I gotta come back soon that was fun

Sam Parr

alright thank you that's it that's the pod