Business as a sport, Surge AI, and Waymo vs. Robotaxi

- June 25, 2025 (9 months ago) • 01:06:46

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	Dude, "manifest" is out. There's a new word: "generative."</FormattedResponse>
00:04	Sam Parr	Wait—“high agency”? Are we selling “high agency”?
00:06	Shaan Puri	"We're selling high agency at the top right now. We're [unclear: spacking] high agency — it's gone. We've taken that cash, and we're plowing it into generative."
00:22	Sam Parr	Alright. What'd I miss? How was the week? </FormattedResponse>
00:24	Shaan Puri	Week was good. What did we do? We had Chris Corner. That episode's popped off — it's over 100,000 on YouTube, so that's going well. And, dude, there were so many replies to one idea that was in that episode. I don't know if you listened to the episode — the "golfing one." The golfing one, yeah. Dude, I got literally hundreds of replies of people who are like, "I could do this right here in my hometown." People are sending PowerPoint decks. People are doing drive-by sends — videos of the lake where they think they could do it. They're reaching out cold. It's very intense. How many people have replied to this now? We're going...
00:59	Sam Parr	Was it about betting as to where you could hit it?
01:02	Shaan Puri	No. So basically, on the way there's a place in New Zealand — on the way to the golf course, just off the side of the road. There's a road that runs by a body of water, and if you stop on the side of the road there's this thing called the "hole-in-one challenge." You buy a bucket of balls and try to hit this little floating golf hole about 100 yards out in the water. If you make it, you get $10. It's a fun thing to do with your buddies on the way to or from a golf course. He was talking about napkin-mapping what he thinks it's making based on the available information. He said, "I think this thing does $300k to $500k in revenue," and the costs are pretty marginal — it's like one person standing there with an iPad. There's a scuba diver who goes in once a week and fishes out the balls. That's it. We basically said, "Hey, I think this idea could work at more places than just this random roadside thing in New Zealand. Let's bring this to life and see who wants to do it." A lot of people have come forward, and we're going to make it an MFM project to see what we can do with it.
02:11	Sam Parr	So, I liked all the comments that were like, "This is what I've been missing with MFM." [MFM = My First Million, the podcast] We started a lot with that, and our interests have grown, so the content has evolved to be a little different sometimes. One critique is, "What is this, My First Billion?" because we talk about bigger ideas. I was thinking—we've become acquaintances with Joe Lonsdale, who, because of this podcast, is worth, I don't know, billions. I was with him recently, by the way. If you need to pick up that name drop, let me know—did I drop that name drop somewhere? No. He was telling me... or I was with him when I got my Twitter check. You know how you get Twitter money now? For example, my Twitter payment was $1,000 last time, and the month before it was $600. I was like, "Man, this is crazy—I just got paid $600 for tweeting," which is insane. He said he got like $400, and he was joking about how it feels just as exciting every once in a while to get a $400 thing as it does however much money he's created in his lifetime. I was wondering—do you feel like, when you're talking about these things, you just lit up when you talked about $304,100,000? That may or may not— I mean, I don't think so—it's not going to really move the needle for you and your life, but it's kind of exciting, isn't it?
03:38	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Not because of the money—it's just, I think it's awesome. I think the idea itself is fun, and making it happen sounds like it's going to be fun. Actually, I was just watching an interview. The NBA Finals just ended; they had Game Seven and the Thunder won. I watched it, and there was this interview with one of the guys. They asked J.W., "When you look back on this year, what are the high points? What are you going to remember?" He said: > "It's weird, dude. If I think about this year, I remember being with Chet. We would go to our hotel room, we would do film sessions back when he was coming back from injury to get him going, or those team dinners we were having. I couldn't even tell— I don't even remember what happened in the last series or the recent games. But those kinds of inputs on the journey are so vivid to me." This has been a very common thing. If you talk to pro players after their career is done and you ask, "What do you miss the most?" you might expect them to say the big pressure moments or those big games. Of course they do miss those, but what they always talk about are the team bus rides, the locker room, and all of the camaraderie that happens along the way. The buildup is the stuff they miss the most. I think there's that for entrepreneurship, too. That's a huge amount of the fun, and it's what gets you excited. You need the numbers to sort of justify it—the numbers give you some air cover for why you're acting like a little kid, why you're so excited about something. The numbers help explain why you're taking this silly thing so seriously. But I think we would probably all do it without the numbers as well, or even if the numbers were half as much.
05:25	Sam Parr	Yeah, I’ve noticed the best people who love MFM the most — and the guests you and I love the most — are folks who can move between worlds. I hung out with a friend of mine. She said, because she was from a bad neighborhood and is rich now, “I’m so good at going really high and going really low.” I was like, “What’s that mean?” She said, “I can hang out with my homies from where I grew up and we can just shoot the shit and be a little hood-ready, or I can go hang out with a billionaire and I love that too. I have so much joy doing that as well. I can blend in and get along with everyone.” I think that’s what the pod is: talking about the smaller things as well as the big things. It’s the same type of person who loves both.
06:04	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. Also — do you think about business as a sport? That's increasingly become my mental model. You meet people, and a lot of people we know have now become successful, but they're still doing it. Obviously, for many of them — I call it: they've already made the last dollar they'll ever spend. Let's say you make $30,000,000. You've already earned the last dollar you'll ever need to spend, especially once you take into account that $30,000,000 could just sit in a simple interest-bearing account or the S&P 500 and it'll just keep growing. It will double every seven years, so $30 million becomes $60 million, $60 million becomes $120 million, $120 million becomes $240 million — and that all happens over the course of something like 25 years. So you don't need to go earn the next dollar. But why do they? Part of it, I think, is that it feels good to be good at something. If you're good at something, it's hard to stop doing it because the feedback loop of being good is strong. But in that same way, if you think about business not as a mechanism to make money but as a sport you play, then it's obvious. Just because you're great at tennis and you won a tournament doesn't mean you'll stop playing tennis. Why would you do that? That's your sport — you love to play it. You'll basically play the sport until your body breaks down and doesn't let you play anymore.
07:23	Sam Parr	And it feels good to manifest. It feels good to have an idea and to see it become reality. It's really fun flexing that model.
07:29	Shaan Puri	Manifest is out. There's a new word — what, generative?
07:34	Sam Parr	Generative — what does that mean?
07:35	Shaan Puri	This is going to happen a few times to me now.
07:37	Sam Parr	I—wait—are we selling high-agency? </FormattedResponse>
07:40	Shaan Puri	We're selling "high agency" at the top right now. We're [spacking?] high agency — it's gone. We've taken that cash and we're plowing it into generative.
07:49	Sam Parr	Okay, so "Generative" was a lot — podcast.
07:51	Shaan Puri	At the end I asked, "How was that? You can tell me the truth— I do podcasts all the time with guests; I know it's sometimes hit or miss. From one podcaster to another, what was that like for you?" He said, "It was great because you're extremely generative." Then he added, "It was also hard because you're extremely generative." I asked, "What does that mean?" He said, "I'll say two things. I'll give you one topic, but you can almost bloom that or expand that into a story, a framework, a related idea, a simple example. You just generated all that content off the cuff right away." He went on, "You know, biology is like that. Biology is extremely generative — you give it one thing and it's able to take it from the origin of man to a hundred years in the future, and it can connect all those dots." I heard it once and thought, "Okay, that's cool. I don't know if I just got insulted or complimented being called generative, but I'll take it." Then James Currier said the same thing. He said, "The reason we get along is because we're both extremely generative. We like being around generative people." He continued, "You know why we admire Elon? It's not because he's rich; it's because he's the most generative of all of us, and he's the least fearful. That's why he's able to be more generative." He listed examples: "He literally generates businesses like The Boring Company, Neuralink, SpaceX, and Tesla. He generates kids, he generates ideas, he generates a president — he's just doing so much, and that's admirable to somebody who is generative." So I started using that little lens. I began looking at people and asking, How generative is this person? Meaning, if you gave them an inch, could they take a mile? What is their overall level of output in their life? How generative are they? For example, with James Currier, it's not just businesses he's generating.
09:33	Sam Parr	He... at one.
09:34	Shaan Puri	He also started a church in San Francisco. He, like, started a new religion and then created this sort of incubator — a fund. Then he created a podcast. He's just constantly creating things because he's extremely generative, whether it's with his kids' lives or his business life or whatever. So I started to realize, oh yeah, I'm really attracted to that. I like people who are like that and I want to be like that and figure out a way to make that work. It's a fun challenge. Generative is the new word. Hey, I got a quick break because I want to tell you something cool. Our sponsor for this episode is HubSpot, but instead of the ad just telling you about HubSpot they wanted to do something useful for you. They did some research and found that a bunch of people in our community have side hustles: they start a business on the side, get it going, and over time it becomes their main hustle. So instead of just telling you about the features of HubSpot, they wanted to give you something useful for your side hustle. They've put together a database of AI prompts — things you can put into ChatGPT or your favorite AI tool that will help you with your side hustle. Check it out; it's going to save you a bunch of time. I think it's a prompt database you should be using to make your side hustle more successful. You can use this as your personal cheat sheet — your toolset to be a better operator with your side hustle. You can either scan the QR code that's on the screen [QR code on screen], or get the link in the description to get the AI prompt database. Alright, back to the show.
10:57	Sam Parr	Have you ever heard of this book called "The Inner Game of Tennis"?
11:01	Shaan Puri	"I've heard of it, but I've never read it. Is it good?" "Yes." "So who's the pro? Who's it about?"
11:06	Sam Parr	Okay, so The Inner Game of Tennis. I randomly discovered it because I was at the airport. I was just looking for a book to read on my Kindle, and I wanted something short, and I, for some reason...
11:16	Shaan Puri	I feel like I'm in a bookstore. We're looking for books to download separately.
11:20	Sam Parr	No — I don't remember what. I was just like, I think I was on Amazon on my phone, and a sports psychology book came up, and I was...
11:26	Shaan Puri	Like, okay.
11:26	Sam Parr	That's intriguing. What's, like, the top sports psychology book there is? I randomly came across The Inner Game of Tennis. It's written by Timothy Gallwey, and it's one of those books about life that just uses tennis as the analogy. The premise of the book is that you have two selves. "Self One" is the critical self — for example, when you're playing tennis and you hit a bad shot, Self One says, "Why do I suck so much?" Self One is the internal critic. "Self Two" is your more animalistic self that doesn't overthink. It's your body; it learns by observing. The book is all about how to be generative by ignoring Self One and letting Self Two do the work. It gives a lot of tips and tricks on how to listen to Self Two. This sounds very woo-woo, and it is a little bit, but the book was written in the 1970s. [Seahawks coach Pete Carroll writes the foreword.]
12:26	Shaan Puri	Pete Carroll
12:26	Sam Parr	Yeah — every new edition still comes out. They're releasing new editions with all these "who's who" leaders writing about it. I didn't realize it at first, but after I started reading, I thought, "Oh wait — Tim Ferriss talked about this book. It's one of his favorite books of all time." I've been reading it a lot, and it applies very much to business. I think it's only a 150-page book. I'm almost done — I read it in about two days. It's very similar or very applicable to business, which relates to what you said about Elon — he's not fearful and things like that. This book actually gives you a set of frameworks and a way to communicate yourself in order to not be fearful when you are coming up with new ideas. This is incredibly fascinating.
13:06	Shaan Puri	Dude, this is awesome. I love this type of book. It says: The Inner Game of Tennis — The Classic Guide to Peak Performance, introduction by Bill Gates and a foreword by Pete Carroll.
13:14	Sam Parr	Ain't that crazy? I didn't know that. I don't have the Bill Gates one, so I didn't know he wrote the introduction. That's wild.
13:21	Shaan Puri	And so, have you used any of this? Or—give me, like... have you found a way to kinda apply any of these yet?
13:27	Sam Parr	Well, a very simple example is for lifting weights or going for a run. When you lift weights you're like, “Okay, I have to lift this weight three times and it's the heaviest weight that I've ever done,” so you're really scared. You don't listen to that at all. Instead, you just get under it and say, "I'm going to let Self Two do all the work. I'm going to trust Self Two, and if I fail I will not be judgmental. I'm not going to say 'you suck' — instead I will say, 'Your knee moved in a strange way,' so I'm just going to objectively acknowledge what's happening." Then, when I want to lift three times, I get it up on me and I just observe the weight on me. I only go for one rep and think, "All right, how does that feel, Self Two? Let's just do the second rep." I basically talk to myself like an objective machine, not an emotional person. The whole “I'm fearful, I'm fearful, I'm fearful” — you just set that aside and go, "It's Self Two time." There is no room for that; there is only room for objectiveness.
14:21	Shaan Puri	I did something similar to this — in this vein — that I didn't even plan to talk about, but I'll tell you this because I think it's kinda similar. One thing I noticed is anytime I go into a project I obviously have a lot of excitement and a lot of hope at the beginning. That's obvious. The second obvious thing is that I'm going to hit some sort of obstacles — walls, plateaus — something I don't want to happen is for sure going to happen. I've never once experienced a project where I just started, everything went as planned, and it had a happy ending. This literally just never happened for me. To expect that would honestly be a little bit foolish. It's like, why would I think that was the case? Yet at the same time, as soon as I hit those obstacles or those walls I'm like, "shit, I wish this didn't happen. I don't want this to happen. Why is this happening?" I waste all this energy on something that was inevitable. It's like playing Mario and being like, "Oh my God, I can't believe these Goombas are walking at me." Dude, that's the game. What do you mean? You wanted to play this game without anybody trying to bite you? I don't understand what you thought this was going to be. So recently I was doing a project, and last week I wrote out a thing in advance. I'm just going to kind of read you this. I basically wrote a simple "letter to self" for about two months down the road.
15:41	Sam Parr	"And by the way."
15:42	Shaan Puri	Three months down the road.
15:43	Sam Parr	To Tim: according to The Inner Game of Tennis, when you have that feeling you do not judge it as positive or negative. You say, "Now—this is a challenge. Okay. Noted." And then you just keep going. Do you know what I mean? There is no, like, "Why—this is horrible. This is awful. Why me?" There are no emotions; you do not judge... you're
16:02	Shaan Puri	"Saying, 'You don't judge the emotion you feel. You don't judge yourself for feeling it, or you don't judge the thing.'" </FormattedResponse>
16:08	Sam Parr	Both. So you only objectively acknowledge it. You say, "The ball was out," okay?
16:15	Shaan Puri	Right.
16:15	Sam Parr	You noted the ball was hit too hard, and then you trust yourself to adjust — but you don't. You know what I'm saying? You do not acknowledge or judge it as "I hate this, I suck, this is bad." It's just: the ball was out.
16:30	Shaan Puri	So I'm just going to give you a little sense of how I wrote this. I was like, "Hey—it's me from the future. I'm writing this to you three months from now." First: congrats. The thing you did turned out amazing. I'm really proud of you (me). I said this is a letter that is guiding you to some of the entirely predictable upcoming road bumps that are headed your way. Not only is it predictable that there will be road bumps, I could probably tell you right now what they're going to be. Because that's true. For example — and this isn't exactly what I was doing, but to make it a simple example — let's say you're trying to hire a head of sales. There are some entirely predictable road bumps: - You might procrastinate starting the search a little because the idea of finding that "perfect" person is hard, and you may put it off. - You'll talk to some candidates who disappoint you. - You may even run into a candidate who seems really great, but the offer doesn't work out — maybe they don't take it, maybe it's not the right time in their life, etc. So you could basically tell yourself up front, "Yeah, these obstacles are probably going to be here. I've played this level of the game before," or, "I can see what's coming." When they arrive, it takes the emotional edge off. You don't feel betrayed or surprised by it — you expected it.
17:45	Sam Parr	"Say hello to it."
17:45	Shaan Puri	Here you are. Hey—I thought I'd be seeing you soon. I had already kind of thought about what I would do to get around that before it hits me and I'm in an emotional state. So it's like, yeah... I'm probably going to meet a bunch of people who are kind of disappointing, and they'll probably feel, in the moment, like, "God, am I ever going to find somebody great?" But of course I will.
18:03	Sam Parr	I only.
18:03	Shaan Puri	Need one, and it's a numbers game. I should probably just expect that I'm going to talk to about 30 to 40 people, and that 25 of those people are going to be truly just a waste of time in terms of the interview. But that's okay — that's part of the process. You tell yourself that upfront, and then as it's happening you're like, "Well, I already addressed this; I don't need to react to it again, because I already kind of pre-reacted to the whole thing." </FormattedResponse>
18:26	Sam Parr	And what is this project that you're doing? Is it big, or do you recommend doing this for a small project as well, or only for a big one?
18:33	Shaan Puri	I don't know. This is my first time actually doing it—like the corny step of writing it out to myself: "Dear Sean." Yeah. </FormattedResponse>
18:40	Sam Parr	And then it's like, "P.S., you're pretty fucking lame for it to write this." </FormattedResponse>
18:44	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah — exactly. It's like, "Alright, that's three pages now." This was cool when it was a paragraph. I think it was very helpful. I will do it again. I will—I will do it again. I don't— I mean, I don't know how much this actually... It sort of blunts the pain, but the pain's still there, you know what I mean? It's like when you get a shot at the doctor: if you really are looking at it and hyper-fixated on it and you start hyperventilating about it, it's kind of a worse experience. If you look away, you might still feel a little prick, but you took the edge off of it. I think that's what this has done for me.
19:14	Sam Parr	I have... Alright, so we're talking about big and small. Do you want me to tell you about a small thing and a big idea that are, to me, equally fascinating?
19:24	Shaan Puri	Okay.
19:26	Sam Parr	Go to patronview.com. I was with Nick Gray this weekend. I did this amazing vacation where my friend David owns a home in Utah, and about six or eight of us — plus our spouses and our kids — all went and hung out. It was amazing, and Nick was there. I was looking at his computer and I said, "Nick, what are you doing?" He goes, "Let me tell you," and it was very fascinating. It's called PatronView (patronview.com). Nick used to own a service called Museum Hack, which was kind of amazing that it existed. You would pay $100 and Nick or one of his tour guides would take you to the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art] and give you a sort of guerrilla tour of the museum. It was amazing. That's where he got really into museums. Somehow he became buddies with the people who do fundraising. Because he's a business person, he was like, "Oh wow, it's so fascinating that one person is donating $10,000,000, $20,000,000 to these museums, and they do it every year to tons of different museums." That's really amazing. Recently, with a mutual buddy, Stetson Blake, they built this website. All he did was aggregate the PDFs that museums publish every year listing who donated money and how much they donated. If you go to the Met or one of a dozen or hundreds of other museums, they have to put out a PDF that explains who donated and how much. He aggregated all of those — hundreds, maybe even thousands — and he used AI to upload them into a database. So if you are fundraising for a museum, I believe — if I had to guess — you're going to be able to pay his service to find out who the "whales" are, you know, whoever the big donors are. It's crazy that because of AI he was able to make this. He told me he did it for $2,000.
21:17	Shaan Puri	I'm just going to read the About page. It says: "We're a research platform dedicated to documenting cultural philanthropy." I've never actually heard that before, which just shows how much of a noob I am about philanthropy. But that makes sense — people who donate to things that are about culture. Then it says: "The data our research is pulling from: annual reports, 990 tax filings, institutional publications, official documents, and proprietary sources." This lets us present donor information that's never before been displayed. We like to think of it as celebrating philanthropy and enabling development departments.
21:49	Sam Parr	Pretty cool. It's awesome. It's great, right? I was like, "Nick, what's your deal here? Want to turn this into a business?" He's... Nick is happy; he's not looking for anything. He said, "Don't know — I'm just tinkering." In my head, as someone who is probably less... content than him, I was like, "Oh man, Nick, you could do this, you could do this, you could do this." That's how the entire conversation came about. But isn't it pretty cool that he's building this as his hobby, and that AI has made this so easy?
22:19	Shaan Puri	Yeah, dude — this is great. I mean, Nick... I've already really shouted him out on here a ton of times because he's somebody who's made a big impact on me. Just seeing the way this guy rolls through life: he just does things for his own amusement. He does things on his terms, and I think he does things with high intentionality. He has basically resisted the rat race. Those are the people I admire the most: people who have resisted the rat race. I think he neither chases money nor status. If you think about the people who are talented and successful in your life, how many do you think actually truly are resisting money and status? Very, very few.
22:58	Sam Parr	I know, probably two people: him and Jack Smith.
23:00	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so it's pretty crazy. You just sort of watch their moves, then you look at them, and you can kinda learn from them. This is—this is extremely cool, like I...
23:09	Sam Parr	And what's funny about Nick is every two or three years he likes to find a publicly traded company that he loves and he makes a big bet on it. Right now—or for the past probably four or five years—his bet has been Cloudflare. For some reason I don't know all his analysis, but he really loves it. When he hosted an event, he specifically hosted it in the Cloudflare event space because he's so loyal. He even wears Cloudflare T‑shirts. One time there was a race—a 5K through Austin—and he held up a sign that said "Cloudflare rules" because he wanted that.
23:46	Shaan Puri	You told me he had his birthday party at the Cloudflare office. Midway through the party, he ran upstairs and got two people — like a product manager and a VP manager. </FormattedResponse>
23:57	Sam Parr	"Come down and be like, 'Hey everybody — quick word from Jack from the marketing department. Why don't you just tell us about the great things you've got going on at Cloudflare?'" The guy's like...
24:06	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so, you...
24:07	Sam Parr	"Know, and before—before he brought that guy in, he goes, 'I need everyone to treat Jack from Cloudflare like a celebrity.' So when he walked in we went, 'Oh my God, is that Jack? Are you the VP of Engineering at Cloudflare? Oh my God—here he is!'"
24:21	Shaan Puri	The stock is up 400% in the last five years, so he's done pretty well.</FormattedResponse>
24:25	Sam Parr	He's done well. If you click the About page — I know for a fact — he lists an area that says: > "Technology: PatronView is built with modern web tech to ensure fast, reliable access to data." He only added that so he could mention he uses Cloudflare; I know that's exactly how he thought. But the reason I'm bringing this up is that if you're just starting to build a business or something, you should follow PatronView — or go there once a week. I would bet you're going to see it evolve. It's sort of like measuring your kid on the wall: you're going to see the measurements. That's what's going to happen.
25:01	Shaan Puri	It's cool too. I think another cool thing about this is that this fits into a genre — personal software or maybe social software. Basically, when the internet came out — before the internet, the only people that made media were media companies. You got your media from the New York Times and the Huffington Post: newspapers, magazines, TV, etc. Then when the internet came and you got Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, social media became a thing and everybody became a little broadcaster. Everybody broadcast moments of their life, their content, or their interests. There was this explosion — a sort of billion-fold increase in the amount of media that was created because everybody was doing it. One clear thing I see happening in the world today is that that's now happening with software. Software used to be something that only software companies and software engineers could make. There are less than 100 million professional software engineers in the world out of roughly 8 billion people. In terms of software companies, there's even fewer — maybe on the order of 100,000 software companies. Now, with Replit and VZero and all these different tools, it's going to be like social media: "I carry in my pocket a thing that can make media" — now it's "I carry in my pocket a thing that can make software." So a guy like Nick, who before this probably couldn't have taken his idea and made it into an app because he would have to either learn to code or hire expensive programmers, did most of this with AI. So you see personal software — this category that didn't exist three or five years ago — is now going to have the same sort of billion-fold increase, just because anybody who's got an idea can now make their idea. Today it's broken three-quarters of the time; it doesn't quite work, but every six months that failure rate goes down by about 15%. So within two or three years that number's going to be close to zero.
27:11	Sam Parr	It's at...
27:12	Shaan Puri	When you have an idea, you make your app.
27:13	Sam Parr	Everything I've been making on Replit, Lovable, and Cursor is basically a Figma replacement. I'm basically just drawing—it's just a mockup. You still need someone to actually do the work, but it's a sick mockup.
27:29	Shaan Puri	Yeah. So, somebody called it "minimum viable promise." It's sort of like "minimum viable product." It's not really a product, but it kind of has this quality where you make a promise and you see the promise of something. I think that's what a lot of these tools are able to do today.
27:42	Sam Parr	Have you heard of a guy named Edwin Chen?
27:45	Shaan Puri	Edwin Chen — I mean, there's...
27:47	Sam Parr	Like you probably have.
27:47	Shaan Puri	10 friends. Thousands of...
27:49	Sam Parr	Them on my Facebook feed.
27:51	Shaan Puri	I went to school in Beijing. I think I have a few Edwin Chens in my rolodex.
27:56	Sam Parr	Edwin Chen might be the... if you made a chart of "richest / unknown / youngest person in the world," I think it's going to be Edwin Chen.
28:07	Shaan Puri	"Is this the guy who's doing Surge?"
28:09	Sam Parr	So yeah. Edwin Chen, in like 2018–2019, worked at Facebook. The story is that he was tasked with making some type of Yelp-style product. What that meant was he had a list of 50,000 vendors and he needed to figure out which of those 50,000 were restaurants and which were grocery stores. He went and hired a firm — some company — to parse it out. It was manual. You had to do it manually; you had to hire a firm that had a lot of offshore talent to go through and do it all by hand. He said it took us four months or six months, something like that, which basically just meant we had to sit and wait. We couldn't do anything until we had that data. So he had this idea: he was going to make a better way to do data labeling. Data labeling is important now because that is what a lot of AI companies use — which I had no idea they did — and I'll explain how they do that. Basically, when a company like OpenAI wants to figure out if a certain reply is unethical — for example, asking if it is okay to hit someone, or whatever — you would ask a real person. And actually not just a real person, but a really smart person; even someone who does engineering or philosophy needs to spend time going through all the potential answers to tell OpenAI, "I think this one fits what you're going for." Anyway, Edwin had this idea: I'm going to create this massive workforce of philosophers, engineers, Ivy League grads who can go through and label all of these answers as good or bad so AI companies can basically use them as their offshore talent. He did this and it started in 2020. Now he has 100,000 people in the marketplace working for him as these data labelers, and this company is completely unknown. I think it's Surge AI — I believe that's the URL. If you go to Surge AI, it's a landing page with one... there's an amazing paragraph. If you want, you can read it. Do you want to read it?
30:21	Shaan Puri	What made people like Hemingway, Kahlo, and von Neumann so extraordinary? Their life: the books they read, the stumbles they had, the reinforcement every time friends laughed at their jokes and every time they didn't. It's the people they met, the places they explored, and every decision they made along the way. Data does for AI what life does for humans. It elevates the neural networks that know nothing about the world into the intelligence capable of providing new art, sending rocket ships to Mars, etc. Our mission is to shape AGI with the richness of human intelligence — curious, witty. Imagine unexpected brilliance. We wake up every day trying to produce the data that makes this possible.
30:54	Sam Parr	Amazing, right? Romantic — it's romantic.
30:57	Shaan Puri	Then this guy made, like, a giant fleet of overseas data labelers sound like the army from March.
31:07	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah — it's the best. The way the business model works is they have 100,000 of these folks and they train them on different standards and whatever. They've also made software so they can show the homework or tasks to their folks. A company like OpenAI or Google or whatever is gonna pay Surge millions and millions of dollars. Surge is then gonna take something like 30% or 40% of it and give it to the annotator to do the work. This company is only five years old, and it was leaked that they did $1,000,000,000 in revenue in the last twelve months. This guy, Edwin Chen, he's only 37 years old and he owns 100% of the company. They have not taken any outside funding. Holy shit. Their biggest competitor is a company called Scale. Scale is run by this guy named Alexander Wang — I think Alex Wang. I think his company recently sold for something like 30 times revenue. I believe they were doing like $809,100,000,000 in revenue. They just sold half of the company to Facebook, I think, for $28,000,000,000 or $30,000,000,000 — yeah, $30 billion. Which means this guy Edwin, who's 37 and has a five-year-old company, presumably is worth something like $30,000,000,000. You can't find him on Twitter. He has no blog. You can't find photos of him. He used to have a blog, but you have to go to the Wayback Machine [web archive] to find it because he took it down. His customers are like, "Edwin is not online — you can't find him anywhere." We like it that way. His business is very boring. The branding is basically nonexistent, and it just does a very good job. Compared to Scale, who's like the hottest kid on the block — Alex Wang was just on Theo Vaughan's podcast, he was at the inauguration — he's kind of the "it" guy right now. These guys are the exact opposite. You won't find them anywhere. They only have about 100 employees. They're totally under the radar, and it's super, super fascinating.
33:09	Shaan Puri	Dude, this is wild. I did not know that he bootstrapped the whole thing. I also had never heard of this company until Scale got bought — I'd never heard of it before.
33:20	Sam Parr	So they're—the company is killing it now because Scale got bought. Because Scale got bought, it's now owned basically by Facebook, Google, and a bunch of other companies. They go, "Ah, we don't want to work with you anymore." We go on straight search.
33:31	Shaan Puri	But they were already winning. They were at 1 billion in revenue, and scale was at 750 billion.
33:37	Sam Parr	And the reason why they're winning is because they charge a premium. He's like, "I don't— we got Scale, but I wasn't trying to get Scale. I wasn't trying to grow big. I was trying to hire the best people and train them really well, and I charged for it. I charged three times what Scale charges, and the results have been better, and people really like us because of it." And this whole data labeling industry—I had no idea about this. I didn't know that people were behind the scenes making these decisions.
34:07	Shaan Puri	It's kind of wild. I mean, it's one of the best picks and shovels businesses. If you've never heard of picks and shovels, the idea is: anytime there's a gold rush, who makes the money? Sure, the few people who find the gold do well, but the more reliable way to make money is to sell picks and shovels to everybody rushing into the gold rush. Scale and Surge were the best picks and shovels businesses—maybe besides NVIDIA—because what they were doing was basically saying, "Cool. Everybody wants to compete to become the... you want to make AGI, you're all raising billions and billions of dollars. Well, all of you have the same problem, and I will sell the data-labeling service to all of you." This is so funny: now that Facebook is buying Scale, it's like all that revenue has to find a new home. That is crazy—it's the best news ever for this guy.
35:00	Sam Parr	And there's another company called Handshake. If you go to joinhandshake.com — previously, or it still might be this — they were known as a company that helped recent college graduates get jobs. Basically, they're a job board or job network for 22-year-olds.
35:19	Shaan Puri	"Dude, yeah. This was for college kids."
35:22	Sam Parr	Okay, well, listen to this. A few months ago they noticed that Surge and Scale were using their service to find data annotators. So they said, "We're gonna do that now." In a very short amount of time they pivoted. That business is going to be at $100 million a year in the next couple of months. What they did was essentially say, "Oh, you are looking for a data annotation gig? We got you. Let's go ahead and get you trained, and we're just gonna provide that service to folks." Handshake is building that business now.
36:04	Shaan Puri	Dude, that's so crazy. I remember using this because I thought, "Oh, it's interesting that nobody's really built the kind of one place to go to hire college interns or fresh grads." They built this marketplace where you could post on a job board at my local college and I could get—well, it was kind of crappy. It wasn't great; there was very little liquidity in the market. I remember thinking, "This is an interesting idea. It's a marketplace—I like marketplaces. Somebody should do this, right?" I remember they were kind of puttering along for a while, it seemed. And this is so funny that they pivoted to this, and now we're gonna just explode.
36:41	Sam Parr	Yeah. If you Google Handshake data annotation, you can find the blog post they wrote announcing that they were doing this. It basically says that, for the past decade, Handshake has changed how college students start their careers. Then it goes on to say, "We're changing the company to just hire—just do this thing," and it's already making a lot. They don't actually say this, but it's now making $100 million a year.
37:07	Shaan Puri	And you know, I don't know how long this stuff will last. This might be a business that, in seven to ten years, you may not need anymore. It seems like, with the way AI is going, you may not need this kind of human-in-the-loop work to label all this data. Either they label enough data so the model learns how to label data on its own and you don't need humans doing this, or they use a method that doesn't have RLHF — it's just reinforcement learning without human feedback. I think some people who are kind of pure believers in AI think you won't need the human feedback at a certain point. So this might be a get it while the getting's good type of business.
37:48	Sam Parr	So let me tell you a potential counter to that. Tim Westergren founded a company called Pandora, and I think he started it in 1990—maybe '98. It was like pre-iPhone. When did the iPhone come out? 08/00/2006... yeah, so it was probably like 2002 then. Anyway, he told me this story because we had him speak at one of our events. He was like, "I raised $7,000,000 and all $7,000,000 of that went to hiring basically ex-musicians or musicians who were teachers and didn't make a lot of money." For two years he had about 150 of them listening to music, and I gave them basically a scantron of all types of attributes that a song could potentially have. So if you're listening to the Beatles, you would fill out, like, "Okay, it sounds like it's at about 90 beats per minute. It sounds like there's guitar. It's melodic. It's lighthearted," whatever. After two years of doing this, he put all of the data—basically the scantrons—into this algorithm that he built. He started playing, like, he told me a Beatles song and then he clicked "next," and it would suggest new music that was similar to the Beatles song he originally played. He said the Bee Gees came up and he was like, "The Bee Gees and the Beatles? They're not similar at all—what the hell?" Then he kept clicking next. He's like, "Oh wait, they have the same melody, or they all, like, make me feel similar." He was like, "It's working. It's working." So originally his idea was, "I'm gonna create kiosks at Best Buy so you could say, 'I'm interested in the Beatles,' but here's like five of their songs that Best Buy could show you and you will buy those CDs while you're there." Then the iPhone came out and he was like, "Oh my God, this is actually the exact way to apply this." So this idea of data labeling has been around forever. When I was reading Scale or about Serge, I was like, "My God, this is exactly what Tim was explaining to me—how Pandora started." So this has been around for twenty years, and you say, "I don't know if it's gonna be around or not," but I don't know—it's been around for twenty years so far.
39:44	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's true, but it's kind of like self-driving, which is coming out now. I've taken the Waymo in San Francisco and a robotaxi in Austin. The Tesla self-driving just launched in Austin, I think two days ago or something. They took two different approaches. Waymo basically has this really expensive car. I forgot the all-in cost, but it's something like $150,000 to $300,000 for the car with all the sensors on it. They have lidar, and in addition to lidar they hard-code and hard-map the roads. For years they drove around and physically mapped the roads, so they could only launch in cities where they had mapped the roads. Tesla took a different approach: cameras only, no lidar, and "we're not going to hard-map the roads." They let people drive around, and the car needs a brain that's smart enough to figure out a road even if it's never been on that road before. It was an interesting bet because Elon was like, "Lidar — we're not doing it; it's stupid and that's a dead-end path." Everybody else was all in on lidar. Everyone's like, "Lidar makes it safer; it's better — you can't do this without lidar," and Elon's...
41:01	Shaan Puri	We humans drive with just our eyes. We only have cameras — I don't have a LiDAR in my brain — and I'm able to drive safely, right?
41:09	Sam Parr	LiDAR is when you shoot a signal and it bounces back.
41:17	Shaan Puri	You can see through things. I don't know exactly what the difference is between LiDAR, radar, and all these different things, but it's another version of basically scanning that allows you to do what a camera can't. A camera can't see through an object; LiDAR can. It can sense that there's another object behind it. The classic example is: maybe you're going to make a turn and something is obstructing your view. There's a little old grandma walking on the crosswalk, but you can't see her until you start to turn visibly. LiDAR would know there's an object there that's moving. LiDAR and radar are other sensors besides cameras. Elon was like, "No — we're just going to put, like, whatever, eight cameras on the car and that's going to make it work." For a long time there was a big debate. Some experts thought Elon was wrong; others were like, "Elon is correct — it's Elon, we trust him." Very smart people were on both sides of the debate. It was a very high-stakes debate because self-driving cars are one of the most valuable prizes there is. People don't always realize how big the change is. Because we've talked about AI and self-driving cars for a long time, people got kind of numb to it. The same thing happened with AI: people had been talking about machine learning and deep learning for a long time and didn't realize when something actually changed. Suddenly, it was actually here, and the same people who had been tracking it for a long time were almost late to the party because they had mistakenly written it off as, "Yeah, yeah, I've heard this before." The same thing is happening with self-driving cars. It felt like a "yeah, yeah," but it's actually happening now. It's an extreme game changer — for society and for Tesla's business. Tesla's business is going to change: instead of your car sitting parked 95% of the time, you'll just tap a button and say, "Go make me some money, please," and the car will go out and do rides for people. It'll start earning you money passively all the time.
43:09	Sam Parr	Dude, I think Morgan Stanley or Chase—one of the big banks—last week wrote a report about what the world is going to look like with self-driving cars. It wasn't small; it was far more grand. They said the economy is going to look radically different because people are going to have so much more time. At a macro scale it was like, "the world will change because of this." But it also pointed out that there are 60,000 [I think] car deaths a year, and asked, "what's the world going to look like with more people [using self-driving cars]?" It was a pretty meaningful, very grand way of thinking about it. It wasn't just, "oh wow, I could play on my phone while I'm walking or driving to work." No—it was more like everything changes.
43:52	Shaan Puri	I asked last night: I asked Gronk, "What are the second-order effects of self-driving cars?" Here's what it said: > It's like cities are going to look completely different. Right now, parking lots themselves occupy 30% of all urban land in some cities. You won't need parking lots because the cars aren't going to just sit parked — they'll be rolling around. You'll need far fewer cars in a city, and because they won't sit still, you don't need all of that space. > > Just look around a city: how much space is dedicated just to parking? We're going to look back and that'll seem sort of like a caveman-era thing, because in the future those areas will be parks and...
44:26	Sam Parr	In public places, it's going to be smoking in a restaurant.
44:30	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. So, the good version of this is things like green spaces and affordable housing. But who knows — maybe it actually gets co-opted for some other purpose. They all just become drone-delivery parking units where Amazon keeps stationing 10,000,000 delivery drones. The next one is labor. Right now there are 3.5 million truck drivers alone, let alone all of the Uber and taxi drivers. You're just not going to need that job. I don't know what happens to that, but there we go. Another is commuting. I think the average person spends something like 90 minutes a day just commuting. If you're awake for 16 hours, let's pretend that's about 2 out of 16 — you're going to add roughly 13% more time to everybody's day. People can now sleep, eat, work, play while they used to sit in a car and drive. You're not going to have to think about the car; you'll be able to do one of those things. That also means the car becomes a new place for entrepreneurs to build experiences. Today there's no one out there saying, "I build car games." There are people who build mobile games and Xbox games, but nobody builds car games. Well, games are going to become a thing because people are going to sit in cars and play video games. People are going to sit in cars and relax, recover, work, and so you're going to build tools that go in them. Another one is insurance. The whole insurance system — Buffett's big bets, Geico, and all those things — is based on human driving. If humans aren't driving anymore, both the risk and the risk-reward ratios change. Also, who are you insuring? You're insuring the software company versus individuals. How is this all going to work? That whole insurance industry changes. Then there's car ownership. Today, owning a car is both utility and a status symbol. It's going to be kind of interesting for car people. I wonder what happens when there are self-driving cars and transportation is basically on tap, flowing like water — you just push a button and in 30 seconds a little car, the car of your...
46:40	Sam Parr	It's like people who like horses now—it's going to be a small group of people. Yeah. It's just like, "Oh, you're passionate about it, and you're lucky enough to have enough room or enough money to afford it." But maybe I would buy a Groupon and go experience that once in my life. That's what it's gonna be, yeah, you know?
46:59	Shaan Puri	Horseback riding is therapeutic. People like to brush or pet a horse. It's going to be like that with a car — it's going to be male therapy: just get in there and be behind the wheel and have control over something in your life.
47:12	Sam Parr	It's gonna, like... we punk. Yeah. You could feel the noise and smell the gas. It's gonna be... it's gonna be like a hobby. Yeah. It's not gonna—it's not going to exist, I don't think. I think it's gonna be a lot longer. But in twenty... it could be twenty years, twenty-five years. It's not going to be in the next five years. But yeah, it's gonna be a hobby. Are you?
47:28	Shaan Puri	Sure about that? Why do you think it's not going to be in the next five years? Waymos are now doing 20% of all the rides in San Francisco.
47:37	Sam Parr	Because that.
47:38	Shaan Puri	Was zero...
47:38	Sam Parr	Dude, 12 months—have you ever... a large percentage of Americans have to drive, let's say, 60 miles one way to work? Or they have to pull or carry stuff. I just don't think so. I think that for the urban... it's not the same. There's probably going to be four sections of users. One is young urbanites, and it's like, "yeah, you guys don't need a car at all—you're doing this." </FormattedResponse>
48:06	Shaan Puri	Probably already there with Uber.
48:08	Sam Parr	Yeah. And then the far end of that spectrum is rural people who have to actually tow stuff. Even though everyone has a truck, very few actually use it. But there's that segment, and there are people in between. It's going to be like a timeline, because right now you can't really tow anything on an electric car. People say you can, but go talk to someone who lives in rural Texas—when you have to be driving stuff around all day, it's basically impossible. So I think there's going to be that split. For you, what's that "early"?
48:35	Shaan Puri	But when you say "it's not going to be five years," are you saying it's not going to be—meaning self-driving is not going to work? It's not?
48:40	Sam Parr	I'm not going to say it's going to work. It's just that user adoption—it's going to take a minute for the whole spectrum of people. I think for the urbanites and people like that, it's tomorrow; we're going to do it, I think.
48:52	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I mean, that guy towing probably still doesn't—he still has an AOL email address, right?
48:57	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah.
48:58	Shaan Puri	So... I think it's pretty safe to say that that person's not—yeah, it might be 40 years before that person.
49:04	Sam Parr	It's going to be a long time. But then, you know, there are a lot of people—I'm one of them. I'm romantic about my gas vehicle. I had an electric car and I got rid of it. In my head, I acknowledge it's better; I acknowledge that it's the future. But it sucks. I want—yeah.
49:21	Shaan Puri	Like our vegan friends... it's like...
49:22	Sam Parr	I get it, yeah.
49:24	Shaan Puri	"Shouldn't kill creatures."
49:26	Sam Parr	But it just tastes so good, but it...
49:27	Shaan Puri	Does, yeah, but when you dip them in ranch, it's fantastic.</FormattedResponse>
49:33	Sam Parr	But I'm excited, too. What's crazy is in Austin—or SF (San Francisco)—people are actually paying more for Waymos.
49:40	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah... it's not that much cheaper yet.
49:43	Sam Parr	That was... people are—people want to not be around someone, and that was unexpected. So, like, when I drive: I have a BMW that has self-driving features. I feel way safer in that than if it were just me. I think that there's, like, 20% of people—and it's usually men, I've noticed. Every woman I've talked to hates self-driving, and every man I've talked to likes it. Do you have any self-driving now?
50:09	Shaan Puri	No. Well, I don't have it, so I haven't had that level of... I haven't had a sample size to...
50:15	Sam Parr	No, I've noticed that.
50:16	Shaan Puri	"I'm curious if that's common, or if you're just, like, indexing on no three?"
50:20	Sam Parr	It's… well, yeah. It's like five of my friends — the husbands use it, and the wives are like, "Nope, don't mess with that. I don't use it." But I feel way safer with it. Do you want to do one more thing, or do you have something?
50:31	Shaan Puri	Well... I have a—so I tweeted something out that Elon replied to over the weekend...
50:35	Sam Parr	How did that make you feel? Did you... clap and... scream?
50:40	Shaan Puri	No. So, first of all, I played it so cool — you wouldn't have known. If you had seen me, you would have thought I might be under the weather. That's how cool I was playing it. Actually, what happened is I just texted my wife and I was like, "Oh — not Elon replying to me," and then I just forgot about it. The next day I didn't even think about it. I moved on. Then my mom calls me. She's like, "Sean, what did you say?" I'm like, "What?" She's like, "Sean, what did you say — Elon, what did you say to Elon?" And I was like, "What?" My wife put it up on her Instagram story and I was like, "Oh my god... I'm trying."
51:16	Sam Parr	To play it cool over here, and then...
51:18	Shaan Puri	You made it "Lame City," so that felt interesting. I got multiple phone calls from people. </FormattedResponse>
51:24	Sam Parr	And I was like, "Dude, that's like the only time your wife has shared something — when another person replied to you."
51:29	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. I thought that was interesting — how big of a reaction it was. But the thing I had said was: "Within a couple years, not using AI while you're doing your job will be the equivalent of coming to work without a computer." If someone just turned up and said, "Nah, didn't bring it today," you'd be like, "What the hell, dude? What are you planning to do? What's the plan here?" That's how it's gonna be. If you're trying to do your job and you're not using AI constantly to do your job... I think.
52:00	Sam Parr	That was... he was like...
52:02	Shaan Puri	You know — sooner, probably. So that was like... I started thinking about that, and I started thinking about something somebody else said. They said: > "Pretty soon, being a doctor who's not using AI as a copilot — let's say you're a radiologist and you're just trying to eyeball every MRI and you're not also running it through AI — that'll be considered malpractice, because you put the patient at risk by not at least including the second layer of AI diagnostics." I thought that was pretty interesting. It's like the flip is going to go so much from "this doesn't work" or "we don't even use it" to "if you're not using it, it's considered malpractice" — corporate malpractice or medical malpractice. </FormattedResponse>
52:45	Sam Parr	A doctor friend admitted to me the other day. He said, "OpenAI is a better doctor than me." He added that he knew this was going to be popular because he's been a doctor for ten years. Patients come to him and say, "Well, Google says this," or "WebMD says this." Over the last six months, he says, the only people who have used that reasoning have done so with OpenAI. I replied, "Well, according to OpenAI..."
53:09	Shaan Puri	Yeah, ChatGPT said this.
53:11	Sam Parr	And he goes, "And they're right. A lot of times the diagnosis is right." Dude, I got...
53:16	Shaan Puri	I was in a fight with a doctor recently about this. Did I tell you this?
53:18	Sam Parr	What did they say?
53:19	Shaan Puri	My mom had to have surgery, but she was on a trip. I kept calling into the doctor; every time the doctor made her rounds, she would FaceTime me. She was on the other side of the country. Doctors are very hit or miss. I love some doctors, but a lot of them leave me thinking, "Wow—this is an extremely underwhelming experience." So this one doctor comes in and says, "Yeah, your levels were fine." I replied, "I actually read the test through ChatGPT, and the levels looked high for this." The doctor asked, "Well, which level?" I told her—I tried to name the term, but I couldn't remember it exactly. She said, "Yeah, that was high, but you know, it depends on the exact number." I asked, "What was the number?" She said, "I would have to check." I said, "You're the doctor, so yeah, you would have to check. What are you talking about?" I explained, "ChatGPT basically said that if it's above this number, then you should consider doing this additional step. Do you agree? Should we do that step?" She said, "Well... I mean, you're putting me on the spot here and I don't have the number." She started getting annoyed and then said, "Well, if you're gonna ask me questions, then I'm gonna need to go look at the number." I replied, "Yeah, you are gonna need to go look at the number, then."
54:38	Sam Parr	"She's like..."
54:39	Shaan Puri	I'm going to ask questions. What are we doing here? I don't understand—why are you offended by me asking if you have seen the data from the test, the test you just said to run? Now you're coming back to discuss the test results, and you don't want to look at the test results. I don't really understand what's happening here.
54:55	Sam Parr	Well, I think what's going to happen is this. Have you noticed—have you ever been to a doctor now with an AI scribe? They have, like, no... okay. So, for a long time. </FormattedResponse>
55:06	Shaan Puri	"Oh — I was humiliating her in front of her AI scribe? Is that what happened?"
55:09	Sam Parr	Well, for a long time they could have been human scribes. And so—have you been to a doctor and seen a person on an iPad? It literally looks like the doctor's on FaceTime.
55:17	Shaan Puri	Typing notes. Yeah.
55:18	Sam Parr	Yeah, and that's like a scribe now — they have AI scribes. I think what's going to happen is the AI is going to speak up and be like, "Actually, ma'am, he's right." I think that's what's going to happen. If I were an entrepreneurial doctor, I would 100% start a new practice centered around being AI-first — so, "We work with AI." I don't think that we are... we aren't at the... And maybe we'll never be at the... where we totally trust it. Just like you always want the pilot even if autopilot is still a thing, right? But I would go heavy on leaning into it: "We have all of the context here. We have all of your files uploaded to our ChatGPT or whatever it is, and we are AI-first." I think a lot of people — like you and me and people listening to this podcast — have a similar sentiment: "Oh no, I trust a computer way more than a human being." But I would also want the human being to put their stamp [on it].
56:12	Shaan Puri	It's not just that — and I want to be subtle here, correct me if I'm wrong — but it's not even that the AI found the problem and the doctor didn't. Sometimes it's just as simple as: the doctor came in, they talked kind of fast, and they didn't fully explain. I still have more questions. So you go and ask ChatGPT to explain it to you, maybe more simply, or you ask some follow-up questions. Maybe you're not as embarrassed to ask questions. You feel like the person isn't in a rush to get out of there like a lot of doctors are. So sometimes it's not even that the AI doctor is better because it's smarter. Sometimes it's because it's infinitely patient, or it's an infinitely better communicator. It may also know other things about you, and you can ask follow-up questions without feeling silly. Those are other components of the doctor experience — essentially bedside manner — that AI is better at.
57:00	Sam Parr	Yeah, and so I'm very eager to see how this works. I go to a concierge doctor now, and it's not very expensive. The reason I go there is that at most doctors' offices they have to see four patients an hour, so they're at fifteen minutes per patient. Is that insane? I remember I went to a doctor with an earache and I said, "Guys, my ear is killing me," and he spent no time trying to help me figure it out. I went to a concierge doctor and the average appointment time is 45 minutes, so we can thoroughly walk through things. If I can use all the information they have and then ping ChatGPT to further the conversation, it is pretty brilliant. I'm very eager to see what's going to happen. People act like AI is amazing for a bunch of different stuff — and it is — but what they're doing with medicine, drugs, cancer, and things like that is pretty astounding. I think that's going to be the major breakthrough in the next couple years.
57:53	Shaan Puri	Dude, the other one—lazy-ass parenting. So your kid's a little young for this, but it is amazing, dude. I'll open up Gemini and it has a camera mode. </FormattedResponse>
58:05	Sam Parr	Wait — why do you use different ones? You said "Claude" or—sorry—you said "Gronk," and now you're saying "Gemini." We also refer to... so you use different ones too?
58:13	Shaan Puri	It's like—you know—you go to different friends for different questions. You only ask me questions sometimes. You go to Jack Smith, and sometimes you go to—well, you go to different people for different things. If you want something more real and objective, I think Rock is better. If you want something that's either code or creative writing, Claude is better. The catch-all is ChatGPT, and Gemini has some advanced features. One feature Gemini has is where you just turn your camera on, like FaceTime. I think it's supposed to be for showing it your car—like, "How do I repair this?"—and it tells you what to do. But I just pointed it at my kids and said, "Hey, we're playing charades—guess what they're doing." My kids will get on the ground and start crawling, and it will say things like, "Seems to be a boy crawling—maybe it's a snake? Are you a worm?" It tries to guess, and they love it. I'm able to just chill and let them play with AI. It is amazing. Another thing I'll do is say: "Hey, I have a five-year-old and a four-year-old here and they want trivia questions. They like animals. They like Paw Patrol. They know a little bit about Pokémon but nothing too complicated. Ask them a bunch of questions, cheer them on when they get it right, and if they get it wrong, tell them the right answer. Keep track of the score. Here are their names—go." That's the prompt, and it plays trivia endlessly with my kids. They love it because it's all audio, so they don't have to be on screens to do it. I'm discovering game after game I can play with them. I basically replaced Kumon with: "Hey, I need advanced kindergarten math," which I don't even know what that means, but for some reason those three words give me the sweet spot of a question that works for my kids. It's like a tutor—an infinitely patient tutor. It's not perfect. Sometimes it starts and stops its audio because if you make any sound it thinks you're talking. But damn—it's pretty good, and it's already usable for us.
01:00:15	Sam Parr	"I've not seen—I didn't even... I didn't know much about Gemini, Gemini Live. I had no idea what this was. Is this Google? This is Google?"
01:00:22	Shaan Puri	Gemini is like after summer break—you know that one kid who comes back? It's like they're kind of hot now, but you still have the old image of them; their reputation is still "not hot." Objectively, they're hot now, but nobody's really on it yet. That's what Gemini is. Gemini was basically out of the game—Google's AI tools were out of the game. I was just using ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, yeah. Then she changed. It's like, wait—she got contacts, she learned how to do her hair, she watched a makeup tutorial, she started rollerblading (surprisingly good cardio). Now suddenly Gemini can do things that the other ones can't do, but nobody's on it yet, which doesn't actually give you any benefits.
01:01:07	Sam Parr	Wait, so Gemini is hot now?
01:01:08	Shaan Puri	"Gemini is hot now."
01:01:09	Sam Parr	Google's hot.
01:01:10	Shaan Puri	Google's hot, yeah.
01:01:11	Sam Parr	I don't know, man. That's hard for me to buy into, but...
01:01:15	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, because you're one of those jocks at school who's just stuck in seventh grade. You forgot what happened over seventh grade summer."
01:01:23	Sam Parr	Alright, I'll use this. Yeah — I'm just stuck on ChatGPT, and I don't use Grok because I'm shocked when people say they use Grok. I'm like, "Wait — so you go to twitter.com to use AI?"
01:01:33	Shaan Puri	"grock.com"
01:01:35	Sam Parr	"That's just... is that the same thing as 'that's the Twitter one'?" "Yeah, because Steph Smith just got a job at this other one. What was that other one called?" "Oh — Grock. No, she — she got it." </FormattedResponse>
01:01:44	Shaan Puri	At Grock with a Q.
01:01:46	Sam Parr	"That's stupid. Naming — unfortunate, unfortunate."
01:01:49	Shaan Puri	I'm also a shareholder of Groq [that's "grok" with a "q"], but it's an unfortunate naming situation.
01:01:54	Sam Parr	Yeah, and it's AI as well.
01:01:57	Shaan Puri	They're making chips.
01:02:00	Sam Parr	Okay, well... they should change their [sentence trails off]
01:02:01	Shaan Puri	Name. Yeah.
01:02:07	Sam Parr	That doesn't make sense.
01:02:08	Shaan Puri	Or at least the pronunciation.
01:02:09	Sam Parr	Right. I don't know... I don't know how you all see. </FormattedResponse>
01:02:12	Shaan Puri	"Or something like that. I don't know what they're going to do."
01:02:14	Sam Parr	They could be groke, I guess, but they—yeah. gronk is... so it's the same, "put" [unclear]. </FormattedResponse>
01:02:19	Shaan Puri	In the 'n' in there, like, "It's Rob Gronkowski."
01:02:22	Sam Parr	"Wait, what did I say?"
01:02:23	Shaan Puri	You're saying, "Gronk"?
01:02:25	Sam Parr	Oh, what is it — "Gronk, gronk"? Yeah, like the shoes: Crocs.</FormattedResponse>
01:02:33	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, I like Crocs."
01:02:34	Sam Parr	"Yeah—wait. So, what is the Twitter thing?"
01:02:37	Shaan Puri	What do you mean? What is it that's...
01:02:38	Sam Parr	Also, that's not Grock. Oh — I thought it was Grock.</FormattedResponse>
01:02:42	Shaan Puri	Yeah, there's no one in any of them. That guy's a football player—he's a retired football player.
01:02:50	Sam Parr	Dude, I went to Montana to visit a friend last week, and I wore overalls because they're like the best.
01:02:57	Shaan Puri	I saw a photo of that, and I just thought to myself, "Holy shit — this guy's got no limits. He's just wearing overalls as standard wear."
01:03:06	Sam Parr	It's the best clothing because you could put your phone in your wallet right there on the chest. And so you're like, "Holy—kids, it's like you just have so many pockets." You have, like, this right here, and I love it. She was like, "Oh, you got these? Did you think that we're all cowboys here?" I was like... and she's like, "You wore your overalls to Montana? Are you trying to make fun of us?" I was like, "What are you talking about? I've worn these for years. I'm not pretending." No — I actually just gotta by [unclear].
01:03:35	Shaan Puri	I was very inspired by your Instagram post. You wrote in the caption: > "From now on, I'm only taking photos that, if my kid looked at them twenty years from now, they'd be like, 'My dad was pretty cool.'" That was great.
01:03:49	Sam Parr	That's because you have that photo of your father, right? Of him when he was in his thirties and you're a baby, and he's doing something cool. He's wearing a cool shirt and you're like, "Oh wow—Dad was sick." They're like, "Oh, he must..."
01:04:02	Shaan Puri	They have sex so strong, right? Like they don't care anymore—they're like "fat now" or whatever. And so you don't—you don't see that side of them. But it lets you put a little respect on their name when you see, "Oh damn, when they were young they were actually kinda... they were actually kinda fly with what they were wearing." </FormattedResponse>
01:04:14	Sam Parr	So I was smoking a cigar—which I never do—but I was. They were going to take a photo with my kid. Someone had a camera and was like, "Go take photos." I used to hide the cigar; I would hide it behind my back. Then I thought, "Nah, fuck this—she's gonna be proud," so I put it back in.
01:04:34	Shaan Puri	"Dude, do you think smoking is going to be cool in thirty years? It's going to be like you had a slave with you or something. It's going to be crazy that you were just smoking with a baby on your shoulder." </FormattedResponse>
01:04:44	Sam Parr	"Brother, have you seen the photo of the eight guys sitting on the beam off the, like, Empire State Building?" "Yeah."
01:04:52	Shaan Puri	"It's a great picture."
01:04:52	Sam Parr	"I think... I think to myself: those guys are crazy, they're dangerous, but they're fucking hard. That is awesome. So I will never be on the beam of the Empire State Building, a thousand feet above the air, but at least I could smoke a cigar and look remotely cool."
01:05:07	Shaan Puri	"Dude, we should print this out. I want this framed. Dude, three of them have overalls very similar to the ones you were wearing."
01:05:15	Sam Parr	Yeah, what's...
01:05:15	Shaan Puri	Up—same make and model. Yeah, you just need this beret hat. You probably have this. Oh, what am I talking about? Of course you have this hat.
01:05:24	Sam Parr	Yeah — and the courage to eat lunch a thousand feet above the ground. Even back then, the coworkers were like, "Guys, what are you doing? There's a cafeteria right here." "What the fuck?"
01:05:36	Shaan Puri	Let's just end this episode with this photo slowly fading away on our YouTube channel, with some great music. Let's leave people with a good feeling and a reminder of the men we once were. Alright.
01:05:51	Sam Parr	That's it. That's the pod.

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