All right, there's a lot of stuff going on, specifically AI stuff. It feels like every day there's a new crazy story about AI. So, I wanted to do a little bit with you, Sam. Crazy AI stories, you know, one crazier than the next, except they get crazier every single story.
I was talking to a friend and he was like, "I was trying to talk to my boss about something and apparently the boss had made like four or five agents that he calls employees." And the boss replied to the feedback of like, you know, like we need to create X, Y, and Z. The boss said, "Um, can you talk to my chief of staff about that?" And so this person had to go and like message the chief of staff and was like messaging the chief of staff and it like they weren't getting the answer that they wanted. And they go to the boss again and go, "Hey, your chief of staff sucks. Like what's what's their deal?" And the boss said, "Um, well, can you tell her boss, my head of operations?" And so she or he literally had to go to like the boss of the agent to like say like, "Can we get this person on a PIP?" And this whole boss, this boss of this like 50 person organization was like referring to these people as people and like making his real life employees interact with them. Have you done anything that extreme with AI and agents?
No. But I find the whole "hey, I'm going to have this entire like autonomous company of agents and then me on top" thing to be so funny because it's like who says you get to be on top, right? Why would you be the all knowing if AI is so good that it can do all these jobs? You think it just can't do yours? Like why is yours so special? And it reminds me of that poem where it's like first they came for the socialists and I did not speak out, and then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out, and then they came for this, and when they came for me there was no one left to speak out. That's basically what I think is happening with AI.
Andrew Wilkinson came out with this personality test and I took it and it was really cool. And then listen to this. My wife and I did it together because there's like a thing where you could share it with your spouse. And then there's one where you could share with your business partner. So I told my business partner to do it. And he mistakenly shared the wife version that he and it said that like it talked about like our sexual compat, like are we compatible or not?
Wait, you shared you and your wife?
My, I shared it with my wife and I go, "Joe, this is cool. Do this." He did this on his own and he was like, "Oh, I did it with my wife too. It was really fun." And I was like, "Hey, there's a button that you can click and we could see how as business partners how we are compatible." And he mistakenly, he said he sent me the partner one, which meant love partner, not business partner. And there was another button that said coworker. He meant to click the coworker button. And I'm like, "Well, good news. We are very sexually compatible."
And so he said that to me, but I have Claude read my Slack and it gives me advice on how to reply to our slacks based off of each other's personalities. It's insane.
Wow. It's just incredible. I mean, I could see the cynical take. I see it. See it right in front of me. But at the same time, it's something cool, right? So, okay. Give me an example. What did it coach you? What did it teach you differently?
Well, today it was like, you know, Joe, if you criticize the organization because he's the CEO, he's going to react defensively and that's one of his things and he tends to get defensive if you criticize X, Y, and Z. So instead of criticizing it this way, say my opinion is, you know, we should do this instead. And for me it was like, you know, Sam tends to criticize bluntly, but he doesn't mean it in a mean way. And so, like, right, it just has helped us communicate. It's been really effective. But he does like kisses on the neck. So maybe try that.
Like if you see him, just like smack him on the ass and tell him you appreciate him.
So what's your first crazy story?
That's amazing. Did you guys just swear like to never speak of it or what?
Yeah, I just, I was like, just so you know, you sent it to me. I saw the letters SCX. I knew what it was. I just scrolled right past it.
Oh, that's amazing. All right, if you want to hit your goals, you need a system. And so, I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing you how I use ChatGPT as a life coach. So, I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals, and the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life, like, how should I respond to this email? What's the right decision, things like that. And it's literally changed my life. And so, if you want that, it's free. We will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes. And I'll show you how I use it. So, check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode.
I don't know if you saw this, Anthropic did $6 billion in revenue in a single month last month, which is insane. I just want to put this in perspective for you. I heard this on, I think it was on All-In or something. They said this great line. He goes, just to put that in perspective, $6 billion, what it did in February, is more revenue than Snowflake or Databricks, like two of the greatest software companies of the last 20 years. These enterprise software behemoths that are like multi-hundred billion dollar companies, that's more than their annual revenue. And Anthropic just like messed around and did it in a month, last month, which is just insane. Did you cancel your ChatGPT?
No, dude. I'm a bit of a polygamist. I'm maxed out on everybody. I got Gemini. I got Perplexity. I got Claude. I got ChatGPT. Give me all the intelligence.
I, for a year, it sounds like I'm saying for years. For a year since ChatGPT has existed, I was like, this is my guy. I'm not going to switch. And as soon as this new version of Claude came out, I explicitly only use that and I use it all day. It's so amazing.
Yeah. I want to actually do like a survey, like a census data survey to, you know, 10,000 high performers and be like, "This is the situation. Which friend do you trust? Who do you trust? Who do you go to?" Like, I had a legal question yesterday and I just was like, I'm just going to go to Grok because if I need the right answer here, I need a thorough, rigorous answer, I'm going to go to Grok. Why? I don't know. This is all off vibes. If I need writing help, I go to Claude. If I needed to make something, I go to Claude. But if it's just like quick and easy, ChatGPT is my best buddy. Right? So, it's like you have these different use cases. But I don't know if I'm completely alone in that and these are made up arbitrary strengths and weaknesses that I've sort of picked up or if everybody's feeling this way. That's actually pretty interesting.
So, what's funny is people talked about Claude to me forever and Anthropic and I didn't know what it was.
By the way, let's put a survey in the bottom of the show. I want to see how people use it. It'll be like five questions or something and I want to know which tool do you trust for this situation and I want to see if our audience mirrors mine and your own usage and we'll share the data next time.
I thought Claude was like the second, third, fourth place. I thought it was like a joke. But I was wrong.
As per usual, I am the joke. It's like how I normally feel about these things.
Yeah. Like I thought that like Anthropic, I was like, you know, that's just like using Yahoo. What, the founder, did he work at ChatGPT or is he just a guy? He's just a brilliant guy.
Yeah, he was like one of the core four or five people at OpenAI and he left.
Oh wow. Okay. And how much do you think that company is worth? So 6 times 12 is 72. So they're doing 72 billion.
AI over there, AI. That was a quick little 6 times 12. I like that. No big deal. They're currently valued like at 400 billion. Still shockingly, right?
By the way, other great news, I am now officially an investor of OpenAI and I'm trying to get into Anthropic too, but at the low low price of $800 billion I have invested in OpenAI. Call me a genius.
Congratulations. Who's this guy? His name is Dario. Is there anything interesting about him or is he just a genius?
I know what you're asking, which is, you know, that's like between you and me, that's kind of like, does he also have a weird hobby? Did he have some strange upbringing? Was he a child prodigy? That's kind of what you're asking for. I'm sure he's a very interesting guy. I don't know of any of those things that we really like about people. I don't know if he has any of those, you know.
Just a typical genius. Okay.
He did say a pretty interesting thing. So, they're growing so fast, right? So, they basically, he said they've grown revenue 10x every single year for the last whatever 3 or 4 years. So, it was like 0 to 100 million, 100 million to a billion, a billion to 10 billion, and now they're basically going 10 billion to 100 billion is the current jump that they're making. And this, you know, doing 6 billion in a month is indicative of that. And he was like, you know, the crazy thing is I have to invest in servers, right? So I have to like buy inventory essentially. It's like a clothing brand. I have to buy all these chips and these servers and these data centers. And he's basically being seen as like a wuss because he's not going out there yelling like I'm going to do a trillion dollar data center like OpenAI. Sam Altman's doing that. And he pointed out on Dwarkesh's podcast. He goes, "The weird thing is like we're like one of the most successful companies ever, but if I'm wrong, like if I bet wrong on that, we'll go broke." He's like, "So if I bet on another 10x, but we only grow 5x in a year, we could go bankrupt." And so he's like, "It's a very strange situation that I have to keep being conservative even though we have the most explosive growth and they're sort of limited on that." But now they're like the number one app in the app store on Google and Apple right now, I think. And so they're just growing incredibly fast.
To put this in perspective, when you and I were 22, growing up in San Francisco, like trying to make it big, the golden standard was triple, triple, double, double, meaning your revenue needs to triple and then triple again and then double and then double. And that is how you build a once in a generation company. Now you were the winner if you were on that trajectory. And now it's 10x, 10x, 10x, 10x. It's just, we're not even in the same ballpark, so it's kind of hard to fathom.
Yeah. It's great. The bar has raised.
All right. Next story. You probably saw this. This is going viral on Twitter everywhere.
Man uses AI to cure his dog's cancer. And the short story is there's this Australian entrepreneur who basically was like kind of a data nerd. So his dog had like a bump on his back, I believe. And he, you know, was kind of like, "Well, there's nothing you could do." And so he said, "Well, are we sure about that?" And he decided to enter the high agency Olympics and manually go cure his dog's cancer. And so I think what he did was some version of the following. He's talking to ChatGPT about like what he could potentially do. That gives him an idea which is to sequence the DNA of the tumor versus the DNA of his other cells. And the idea being if you extract the DNA of the tumor cells, there's some mutation that's causing the growth. And you take his normal cells and other part of his body or maybe it was a prior year or something like that and you compare the difference you would see that oh this tumor cell has some, this is the anomalous part of the genome that's causing the problem potentially, which by the way he had to like pay for out of pocket. He went to a lab, he was like, hey, can I get one sequencing done for this? And they were like, okay. And he got it under some research purposes. And then he took that and he used AlphaFold, which is the Google DeepMind product for predicting protein folding structure. So proteins, we kind of know what the genome is but you got to know how it's folded up, the shape of it, if you're going to actually attack it with some sort of treatment.
So then he, using AlphaFold, figures out the shape of the thing. Then using Grok, designs a single-shot custom vaccine, goes to a lab, convinces them to do it. And he says, by the way, in this whole process, that the regulatory was the harder part than actually curing the cancer, like getting the approval where he was able to actually do this and they would manufacture the vaccine for him.
Approval from the vaccine manufacturer.
Yeah. The vaccine manufacturer needed to know like you don't get to just, you know, you and I can't just go and make vaccines. So there's protocols in place to make sure that people aren't like manufacturing, you know, whether it's viruses or self treatments that could do harm and whatnot. And so they were able, and then so he, as he was doing this, someone who already had the ethics clearance to do research on pets heard about what he was doing and he kind of used their umbrella to get the vaccine made, gave the vaccine, cured his dog. Legend. Paul, you're a legend.
I have a friend who has cancer and he actually works at OpenAI. I tweeted about this. I was like, I don't particularly know why he wanted me to tweet this, but he was like, "Hey, I need one of these three drugs and I'm having a hard time getting in touch with the particular person who I can get the drug from." And interestingly, Mark Cuban reached out to me and was like, "Hey, you know, give me your friend's cell phone number. I'll give him a call and hook him up." And so did Martin Shkreli. And I was like, "Well, buddy, you want Batman or you want the Joker?" Yeah. I was like, "I don't, you know, take what you can get here." And so he did. And, you know, now he's getting what he needs, but I have to imagine he works, I don't know if I said this, he works at OpenAI. And I'm like, if you're reading this, you have to imagine that this is the next step that you're going to take, right?
Right. Yeah. That's crazy. Is he doing the similar thing? Is he basically trying to self-treat? Like is he basically using AI tools to come up with hypotheses to then come up with, you know, possible treatments for himself? Like what's going on? What is your friend doing? That sounds interesting.
I don't ask him. I let him come to me when things are going good. I try not to bring it up too much. This is his second time that he's had cancer, lost his leg, got cancer again. And so I'm like, whenever you need me, let me know. He'll visit my home when he's like at a New York doctor.
But I do know that there's this guy named Sid. Sid is the founder of a company called GitLab. Have you heard of GitLab?
The like, you know, big developer tool, multi-billion dollar company. Yeah.
So Sid and my buddy became friends because Sid wrote this article called "I'm Going Founder Mode on Cancer." And so Sid has the same...
Did Sid leave GitLab to do this or is this like a side thing he's doing?
Well, Sid has the same cancer as my friend. So I don't know if he's left GitLab for sure, but he goes, "I'm going founder mode on cancer." And so he's hired this team of doctors and I believe in his article he said they are using AI to do a lot of this stuff. And so my buddy connected with Sid because they had the exact same cancer. So he's using Sid's doctors as well to, you know, it's a fancy concierge cancer doctor and they are going through this journey of like trying to cure this very, very rare cancer. And so Sid, who's the founder of GitLab, who is a technical company, and he's a billionaire I presume, then that like, you know, this is a very special person who could figure out these types of cases, he's actually documenting on his Substack how he's trying to cure his cancer. It's really interesting.
That's amazing. All right. Well, we're wishing them the best. That's a, I mean, I feel more hopeful about this sort of thing than ever, right? Like I think the combination of AI and then on top of AI is, I would say like the fact that Ozempic and these weight loss drugs seem to have done something that sounded like too good to be true. It's like, well, there is a magic pill for weight loss. Turns out there actually is a magic pill for weight loss. That kind of like breaks a little bit of a mental barrier of like maybe you can just one-shot certain issues or problems that plague huge percentages of people. So I feel more, I don't know, more hopeful than ever that there's like, you know, new breakthroughs, new inflections that would change, you know, how cancer treatment works over the next, you know, 1 to 10 years.
And if we totally botched the name, so if we did whatever, but the GitLab founders, botching up your company too, if this makes it to you guys, DM Sean or I because it could be potentially fun if you want to talk about this on a podcast. It would be actually fun to talk about that. That's actually super fascinating. But it is crazy that this stuff still exists. Like when you think about, like I remember when Livestrong came out and that was like, okay, someone famous finally has cancer when they were young. We're going to bring awareness to this thing. And now when you think about all the billions and billions of dollars, I think what's her name, Kate Middleton had it. Like it is kind of crazy how like this still exists the way it does.
Yeah. Yeah. They just needed, you know, you needed the technology and then you needed the will. Here's another thing that makes me hopeful. So Nat, who I think you know Nat well.
So he just tweeted out this really interesting thing. He goes, "Make 1 million by graduation or get 100% of your tuition refunded." That's the premise of the new high school for entrepreneurs that Cameron and I are launching this fall through Alpha School. We need two or three coaches to make this happen. So, the premise is they're creating a new high school using Alpha School's technology, which we've talked about before, the AI education software that Joe Lonsdale has put a billion dollars into building that is getting tons and tons of buzz everywhere. So, now they're doing a high school based off of it. And the idea is almost like incredibly incentive aligned. Almost maybe too incentive aligned.
I think it's too aligned.
Too aligned. Make a million dollars by high school graduation or your tuition was free. I think Alpha School is like 70 or 80k a year, the kids version that's in Austin. So, you know, this is a pretty big bet that they're making. This is crazy. Is this not like one of the crazier tweets? I thought that, so Hormozi talks about nailing the offer.
Well, he says an offer they'd be stupid to say no to, right? Like it would be dumb for me to turn down this offer.
And if you are the type of person where this idea tickles your fancy, where you want your kid to like build something, this is the greatest offer of all time.
I mean it's crazy. Do you think this is even, I mean like are we just old guys who are not up with the times that like is this really possible?
High school. So, high school, you're 14 to 18 years old. So, if I gave even the most switched on 14 to 18 year olds and if I was just coaching them every single day, let's say that me and you had 20 high schoolers, every day we were their coach. Let's just pretend that that was true. How many of the 20 do you think we could get to make a million dollars over the four-year period? It's not zero, but it's also not 20. What do you think that number is?
One. Four years is kind of a long time actually.
Four years actually, most, I think most...
Well, like in revenue, like we could create some type of app that buys ads to grow and is not losing money. I feel confident that I could do that half the time. I'm going to use the assumptions of there's no external funding that we give where they can go raise money if they want, but we can't give them the money and that it's not a million dollars of revenue. Maybe, is that what he meant by make 1 million or did he mean... if it's revenue then that's quite a high chance I could do that a lot of the time. If it's profit that's much, much harder, right? If it was profit I think we could probably get five out of 20 in a four-year period. I would guess that we'd have some kind of hit rate around, you know, 20, 25%.
It's pretty magical. So, let's talk about why we said it's too aligned. We were joking. I think that this is really good for a very particular type of person, but I do think that optimizing towards entrepreneurship for everyone and glorifying, I think it's being over-glorified. I think that's wrong. I don't think that it should be that way for everyone. I think it should be for a small amount of people that interest you. Just like saying that we should get everyone to play music, we should get everyone to play sports, we should get everyone to be good at accounting. And so I think that this is a bit, I'm not criticizing these guys because they're saying for those interested in this, this is the offer. I don't think that this should be the default for all high schools.
Oh, you feel like in general everybody's got to get on their entrepreneurial grind is, I think that's not the right message because obviously not everybody needs to get on their entrepreneurial grind.
Yeah. I just don't think that's necessary. What were you saying?
I was saying it's too aligned as in you didn't need to make it a million. You could have got, you could have, you know, what's the real thing basically? I would say if you did a hundred thousand, this would have been, I mean that would still be incredibly successful, right? If you can make 100 grand or 150 grand or something like that. But of course that's not the marketing message that would stick. The reason this got onto the show today is because he said a million. So, in that sense, it's the absolute right number to choose. If nothing else, it is a PR offer. And, you know, I don't know what that does to the business if that distorts things long term, but like in the short term, you get the big benefit of putting something out there that is buzzworthy. It's like when Peter Thiel did the Thiel Fellowship and I think what he did was I think he only spent $2 million out of pocket to do the Thiel Fellowship, which $2 million is not nothing, but in the world of billionaires giving money for causes, there's plenty of people who write bigger checks than that. So why did the Thiel Fellowship get so much notoriety is because he attached it to a very spiky message. And the spiky message was universities are a bubble. And like the housing bubble and other bubbles, it's a bubble because nobody else thinks it's a bubble. You know, that's the only way you get to be a big bubble is when everybody sort of assumes education's great. How could you, you can't criticize education. Housing's great. Everybody should own a home. You can't criticize that. And what he said was not just I'll give this to people who have good ideas, but I'll pay you to drop out of college. Literally the opposite of, "Hey kid, stay in school." Right? The old message you're supposed to say. And because it was so spiky, he got tons and tons of notoriety. Because he got tons and tons of notoriety, he attracted the right people because the message got far enough where those like, you know, the Vitalik Buterins of the world, the Dylan Fields of the world who create Figma, they heard the message and were able to apply for the Thiel Fellowship and came in and made it happen. And so I think maybe this might be the right approach, like the XPRIZE, where you have to do something novel and noteworthy and almost polarizing in order to make it work.
So let me tell you a quick story. So on Friday I went to Austin Rief's house for dinner and he had over these eight young guys and I posted a link to who they are in Slack. And so if you look this up, the New York Post just did an article on these guys 5 days ago and it says these Gen Z digital moguls are building seven-figure companies while lifting weights. So it's basically, I met these guys in Hampton and I met them and I was like, Austin, you got to meet these guys. This is incredible. So we talked about Josh. That's a guy, Josh. So Josh, we talked about him. He has that company called Street Talk. You might know Oliver. Do you know Oliver? He had the company called...
Yeah. He had the Tab chocolate thing. Now he's doing a thing. And that's Seamus.
This is like a boy band that you're talking about, like Joey's cute, Seamus has highlights, and then like, you know, Brandon is dating Rebecca. Like what's going on here?
So listen, it was these eight guys. They are all, the eldest one was Oliver and he was 25 I believe and they're all these young guys who share an office and they all started companies. One of them was this guy named Victor.
That literally looks like Elon Musk, like young Elon Musk.
