What I’d build if I wanted to get rich with AI

$1M Problems Worth-Solving (90+ Business Ideas): https://clickhubspot.com/tbod Episode 880: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) and Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) break down the moats in AI. — Show Notes: (0:00) Drugs and Miracles (7:05) Food Is Technology (8:45) Warfare (12:40) Building Homes With Robots (18:05) New Materials (18:20) Full Self-Driving Everything (19:10) Weather and Oceans (19:25) Human Body Hardware (25:30) Common Sense Politics (33:05) Think About Your Career Like an Investor — Links: • Nitroduck: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/nitroduck • Isomorphic Labs: https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/ • Ohalo: https://www.ohalo.com/ • Anduril: https://www.anduril.com/ • ZURU Tech: https://zurutech.com • Neuralink: https://neuralink.com/ • Mark Pincus on My First Million: https://www.mfmpod.com/brainstorming-business-ideas-with-a-billion-dollar-founder/ — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/ Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You were talking about modes and as a person who likes the game of business, I don't like to get made obsolete.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Uh, okay. Yeah. I wanted to show you something. So it certainly feels a lot of days like AI makes you obsolete. There's a bunch of different conflicting feelings. One is, what the hell am I going to do if AI can do everything? The other version is I should be doing way more. AI can do anything. And there's all these other people doing really awesome things around me. I should probably go do something awesome. What, what, what should I go do? It seems like I'm, it's a really competitive game. I'm really late to the race with a lot of these things.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  And you think you have all these ideas and then you sit there at the computer and you're like, what should I make if I can make anything?

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, that's one part of it. How do I use this to make stuff? Another part of it is like, wow. You look at a company like Anthropic, it's basically the most fast growing. It's basically the best business in the history of capitalism so far, right? Like they've created $2 trillion of value in like five years, you know, it's a incredible thing. They're doing.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Do you realize that amongst the seven co-founders, I think they've been around for $2,500, $2,500 days. They have basically created collectively, the seven founders, $96 million of net worth every single day since founding.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, bananas. I think they only own like 2% of the company now, right?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Like seven, uh, like 14 or something, but yeah.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Each is like two and a half percent or something like that. Okay. So, so, you know, on one hand, you see tons of people making, hey, and you're like, oh, I want to get in on that. But it feels very competitive. On the other hand, you think, well, if I just go build this thing, isn't it going to be obsolete in a day? You know, what's the future of software? So I really started thinking about where would I go? If I really wanted to make something happen right now? And so let me show you kind of like my quick thoughts on this. Escape to where the puck is going, not where it has been. Michael Scott. And so, you know, the, the goal is what in four or five years is going to be something we look back and say, man, that was, now was the time that we should have been doing that.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Five years ago, the thing to be doing was to go work at one of these model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, you know, so on and so forth. And so using AI to create video like Runway, images like Mid Journey, text like ChatGPT, you know, those are the things to go build. It was not obvious at the time, uh, but for a small number of people, they did see that. They saw around the corner. They saw that this is the place to be. That's where the action is. So where do I think the action will be over the next five years? So, you know, right now, what you will hear about with AI is AI is amazing. You'll hear about coding. You'll hear about personal agents like, uh, Instinct or Muse or Grokbot and you'll be hearing about LLMs. But Sam, you see that far left corner? You see that down there? It just says, look over here. There's something else smaller around the corner for you to go look at.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  And I call this AI in the world of things. And so I think that using AI in the world of, um, you know, bits, which is basically like digital stuff, I think has very low returns. I think using AI, anybody who's like, I'm using AI to make content. It's a race to the bottom there. I think using AI to make, make software, SAS, right? Make tools, I think is, you know, kind of a race to the bottom, you know, do it if it's just where your heart is, but to me, that's not where the opportunity is. So where's the opportunity? I think it's in the world of things. What does that mean? So the first place I would go look is drugs and miracles. So if you go look at, um, there's, somebody posted this tweet the other day that was, here's a list of people that are curing their own cancer right now.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  And it was basically like, you know, the guy from GitLab who used, you know, tech, right? AI plus plus, uh, to sequence his tumor to then find, uh, to run through like possible drugs that could do it, to then synthesize them, compound them, research them, ultimately take them and shrink his tumors and get rid of his cancer. The guy cured his own cancer.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  He has a service that you could sign up for. My friend with cancer signed up for it and he's doing great.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  And so, and there's like seven other people that are doing the same thing. And in general, the idea that we are going to apply AI to science, to biology, to developing new drugs. You know, a drug typically took 10 years and $2 billion to make and had like a 80 or 90% failure rate.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Pretty tough game. And because of those numbers, only drug companies of a certain size really play that game. And I think what Eli Lilly's doing is awesome. They are like Eli Lilly's like, you know, leaned in super hard to AI. They're, you know, they're buying compute like they're, like they're one of the tech companies or like, you know, the way Citadel is spinning up its own data centers or Jane Street, you know, spinning up their own data centers to be able to apply AI in the world of finance. They're applying AI in the world of drugs. And so Google has this company called Isomorphic that Demis, the, the kind of founder of DeepMind who was running AI. He's now just kind of like all in on Isomorphic, which is basically great. How do we cure cancer? How do we, how do we go solve some of these big health problems?

• 5:10Speaker 00

  And now is the perfect time to go build a new type of drug company, a new type of health company. And, um, so I think that's super exciting. That's one place to look. Any thoughts on that? Or you want me to go to the next one?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think it's awesome. We're seeing it firsthand. Our good buddy Ben, Ben, old producer Ben, who had the most dire outlook and he still is not out of the weeds, but he, or out of the woods or whatever the phrase is, but he, uh, posted an update that he's doing way better. And when he tweeted out about this, because he has, uh, a big following, he had all the nerds, all the AI nerds like reach out to him and he like got hooked up with all the right people. And he is a recipient of some of this stuff. So we're seeing like our buddies like actually survive or, or, or prolong their lives because of this is awesome.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  I mean, if you haven't seen it, go watch Ben's tweet update. I, it was like, I opened up my phone on Saturday morning, watched that thing and basically cried. I was just so happy.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  He looks so much better.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, he looks better. He sounds better. I mean, he's doing better, right? He's like, it's, you know, he's like still got cancer, but it's, I mean, a dramatic improvement from this drug. And the way he tells the story is amazing. Everybody go watch that. It'll, it'll, it'll make your day. So, okay. So I think this is like a super exciting space. If you're a smart person, join one of these companies, go build one of these companies, like, uh, there's never been a better time to go do something that has high impact. And the technology window has opened. Where new things are going to happen. There's new results possible that really, that technology window was not, uh, anywhere near as attractive in the past.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Oh, do you see that? I just stepped over a million dollar problem, a million dollar business idea. And that's the thing. Most people walk by these million dollar ideas all the time and they don't even notice. And so our friends at Starter Story, they put together a list of 90 business idea. Each one is vetted. They're all real problems, real gaps in the market because they talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs and they put together this amazing stuff that's incredibly well researched. And so if you want to find a bunch of amazing business opportunities, you can get it for free. Just scan the QR code or click the link in the description.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Okay. The next is food is technology. So I don't know if you saw this, there's a, um, a YC company called, I want to call this is called Nitro Duck that just came out of stealth. And basically they're doing like genetically modified food, um, you know, using CRISPR to change fruit so that it like grows better, higher yield, tastes better, is better for you, like all the good things that somebody would want out of growing food.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Like how somebody invented the Honeycrisp apple. It took 20 years to do it and, and we get it 24 or, uh, 365 days a year. It's incredible.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  It's incredible. Where does the food come from, dude? Where does the food come from? Right? It's like, you know, I just walk in the grocery store. It's just there. It's not just there. It comes from somewhere. And like, like you said, like that variant of that fruit that came from somewhere, right? Like, you know, like each one of these things is a genetic being, a genetic like organism. And those organisms, just like we're going to be applying, you know, biotech and AI to our bodies, we're going to be applying it to plant bodies. And so super exciting. You know, I think David Friedberg is probably the most well-known entrepreneur that's doing something here. He's trying to make like, you know, potatoes and corn, like new, new versions of, of these foods that are better seeds, better crops that farmers can then use to get better yields, to have better, whether it's better flavor, better for you

• 8:26Speaker 00

  or better production. And so just the idea of a plot, that food is a technology. And that again, the technology window is open. To me, there's so much exciting stuff that could be done there, ranging from technology that works the fields, you know, some new kinds of tractors and, you know, using camera, computer vision and whatnot to actually like help grow the crops to actual seeds of the food, new food, now, you know, new types of food. I think this is like super, super exciting and, um, you know, so much work can be done there.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  What's the next one? Well, yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Next one, warfare. Um, so you know, there's a, the idea, like if I picture in my mind, like the military machine of America, you know, I think about tanks and soldiers and boats and maybe some like fighter jets. And I think, you know, okay, I'm speaking a little out of turn here. I don't know actually what's going on on the war fronts here, but I suspect that that is a bit of a fantasy. It's like, you know, my wife growing up dreaming about her wedding. She just like had this vision in her mind that didn't meet reality for a very long time. You know, the little girl when she was, you know, eight versus like when she was 30, getting married, like a lot had changed. And I think what's

• 9:39Speaker 00

  the same thing is similar with what war probably will look like at this point, which is drones fighting drones. It's, you know, unmanned tiny aircrafts that are super cheap to build. I think this is what's going on in Ukraine and other places where you can spend, you can send really expensive equipment out there, but they can just send like, you know, a little piece, you know, a piece of junk metal autonomously flying is super cheap to make. You can make it high volume and it could do a lot of damage. And so I think warfare is probably, you know, Anduril obviously is doing really interesting things there. There's other companies, uh, you know, Joe Lonsdale has a company that's, uh, you know, kind of underwater, you know, the sort of Navy, the Navy version of Anduril.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Did you read about, um, you know, how we, um, took the, uh, took the leader of Venezuela?

• 10:25Speaker 00

  I didn't read. How did we do it? Well, what did they do?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  It was basically, well, so they, whenever they took them, it was like in the middle of a city. And I'm almost, I'm not positive, but I think either no one died or like close to no one died. And people are like, how did, how did this happen? And they were talking to people on the ground and they're like, we don't know what happened. We saw the helicopter laying on the roof and we were standing there and we couldn't do anything. And they were like, what do you mean? They're like, we couldn't move. And the people are like, what do you mean you couldn't move? And it turns out they use like this new weapon. That's like a, it sounds science, science fiction. It's like a, a ray of stuff that like, it's like a ray that shines down to you and like stuns you and you can't move or think. And people could just go, yeah, yes. Look, look up what happened.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes. This is like a thing. Yes. Where like they basically, there was a joke.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  So on Google, reports claim that the US forces use a mysterious sonic or directed energy weapon during the January 13, 2016 raid that captured the, the leader. Eyewitnesses that, um, a security guard claimed that it was an intense unknown force described as a powerful sound wave or directed energy. And it made him feel like he was exploding, causing the guards to bleed from the nose, vomit and collapse to the ground. Um, Donald Trump called it, uh, he used discombobulator with describing the weapon.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it was like this new weapon that just like caught, like they couldn't do anything. It didn't kill them, but they couldn't, they couldn't move.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  That's wild. I met a guy in San Francisco. Um, you know, if you go to San Francisco, you sort of walk around, you just meet like random hackers that are doing very interesting things. So I go into this one place, it used to be an old auto body shop that my friend had turned into kind of like a hardware coworking space or just like place for his investments to go work. And, um, there was one dude in there. It was 11:00 PM. It's one guy in there. And he goes, oh, you better, you might want to back up. They're like, what? This guy is, he was like, I'm building lasers that can shoot drones from like extremely high distances away. And I was like, oh, okay.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. I was like, I was going to record a podcast. Can I do that right now? And then

• 12:40Speaker 00

  he was like, uh, I don't know. Um, so yeah, I think there's crazy shit going on in warfare. I think like, you know, obviously there's a lot happening here, but you know, if you think about AI applied to the world of things, this is obviously a space that's going to happen. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the Agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Next one, building homes with AI and robots. And, uh, I don't know if you've been following this, but one of the big things that's going to improve the quality of life of humans is if we can bring the cost of living down, right? A lot of people's stress stems from the cost of living and just feeling like they're constantly underwater with how expensive it is. And the most expensive part of your life is going to be, um, you know, for most people is, you know, their, their home, the place they live. I think right now the mortgage rates are 7.25%. I think, you know, uh, where I live, I think, I don't know what the cost to build per square foot is, but it's something like, you know, for a nice home in this area, it'll be like six to $800 a square foot. Let's just say roughly. And there are people who are building, uh, homes,

• 14:05Speaker 00

  like prefab, high-end homes that could be done at 20 times cheaper. 20 times. And so, you know, if you could do something at 20 times cheaper for something that, you know, the construction industry is a gigantic industry, is one of the biggest industries in the world. And I feel like we are within 10 years away from there being a kind of night and day difference of the cost to build a home. If you want to go see some crazy shit, go look up Zuru Tech. This is our friend Nick Mowbray, who was on the podcast, who, um, him and his brother are like, you know, two of the craziest entrepreneurs in the world. They have a factory in China that is literally printing homes. So what they do is they may, they basically like print a home a day. And when I

• 14:48Speaker 00

  say print, that sounds like some cheap 3D printing shit. No, no, no. These guys bought when the, when the fires happened in LA and people's homes burned down and those lots were kind of ruined and there was no, no, like nobody, the people who didn't want to rebuild, they had to sell. These guys bought, I think, like 60 to 80 million dollars worth of lots out there. And they're building like 20, 30, 40 million dollar homes that are going to be built in a factory in China. And, um, what they're doing is literally you type into.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  3D printing is not the right word. It's like a more efficient way to, a more efficient way to like pour concrete.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  It's, if you've ever seen how like the iPhone factory works, where it's this incredibly automated factory in China, where they're just spitting out these incredible devices that a billion people will use. And it's like the highest quality manufacturing you can do. These guys are doing that, but they're making homes instead of iPhones. And so they figured out, you know, each part of the, the home, like how to, how to build it. And they're building these like luxury homes that are modular, can be assembled on the spot, almost like Lego block style. And, um, if you go look at, look at their earthquake simulator, he basically was showing me, he's like, yeah, like we made this home and you know, just to test the seismic resilience of it, we had to build in the factory, a earthquake simulator where we could put this, you know, 5,000 square

• 16:12Speaker 00

  foot home or whatever. And then we can run it through the five biggest earthquakes that have happened on earth in the last 50 years. So hey, let's push this button and that's the Chilean earthquake. Let's push this button and that's the huge one that happened in, uh, you know, Morocco or whatever. And this basically shaking the home, making sure that it's architecturally sound, that it doesn't, you know, and they're iterating on these homes daily. And then they take the home and they put it, right now they just put it outside the factory. So outside the factory, there's like a hundred homes in a row where the workers just go live, uh, as they're building their like iterating over their prototypes every single day. It is like, one of the most insane projects in the world right now. Most people have no clue it's even happening. It's like Elon level of ambition, technical scope, um, change the world when it works type of shit.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  And it's real. This is not like pipe dream. It's not Silicon Valley where you're like raising money. These guys raised no money. They put a billion dollars of their own personal capital into funding this thing, took no external capital. And they're just building it in China and they've, because they've spent 20 years building highly automated factories, um, in China. They started in the toy business. And I don't know if you know this, but the toy business is like, if you, like, if you ask Elon who he admires in terms of manufacturing, he'll say Lego. Because to manufacture at scale with absolute precision, a Lego block that's going to perfectly fit into every other Lego block, it can't be off, even by like the smallest amount. Or like when they were doing the Tesla cars, he would famously like, there's a meeting where he had a, a Hot

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Wheels car. And he's like, hearing all the problems of their assembly line. He's like, well, why don't we do it like this? You know, they just inject the whole bottom thing as one mold. It's not 200 pieces. It's one mold. And they're like, well, Elon, that's a tiny car that's two inches big. He's like, yeah, but what if we just made it bigger? And they built their own custom like molding thing for the bottom of cars. And they actually pulled it off and it just radically simplified their assembly process. And now, and then they got ahead of all the other car manufacturers. They're the only ones that did it for like seven years because they owned all the machines that were the only, they built the only machines that could do it at that size. Um, and so being great at toy manufacturing actually translates really well to manufacturing other things.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Are you, is that your presentation? Are you done? Or is there more? Because I wanna, I wanna, I wanna talk to you about it, but I don't wanna like

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Is this the equivalent of being played off the stage?

• 18:28Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, I wanna ask you about it, but I don't wanna like derail it.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Let me just give you, okay, I'm just gonna say the other ones, I'm not even gonna explain them. All right, new materials, I don't even fully understand this, I would need to go hang out with some like crazy people because this is like, when you hear it and it's crazy talk. Uh, but there's people in San Francisco, they're like, trying to literally do alchemy. They're like, oh, we made gold. We figured out we can literally make gold out of like this other material. Or they're literally trying to just invent new materials. So material, actual material science is happening. I find that to be interesting, but way above my pay grade. FSD for everything, so full self-driving everything, so um, I don't think people understand, like self-driving cars are definitely here. Like I, I get in my Tesla every day, I push the button, it drives ninety something, ninety-five percent of all the miles.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  The only time I take over is basically in parking lots where I wanna pick my spot and I don't like the spot it's gonna pick for me. So it's crazy how self-driving works, but they're now applying that to everything. So forklifts inside of warehouses, machines that go clean windows at the top of skyscrapers. Uh, so it's basically like the machines that will fix the world, like how do you go get the barnacles off the ship? How do you go, you know, maintain bridges that are not being maintained today? And so people are building the machines that will go automatically go maintain our world, our living world. That today like takes a lot of human effort to go maintain. Weather and oceans, um, we had Will O'Brien on and he was talking about like basically ocean tech. So the way that space and space tech has gotten super hot with SpaceX and others,

• 19:56Speaker 00

  ocean tech is, um, you know, right around the corner for the same thing. And the last one is human body hardware. So this is Neuralink, this is basically, it's AI in the world of things, but the things are us. And uh, you know, I have a friend Tyler who's been working for years on um, uh, this thing called Adam Limbs. And he basically, you know, he's like, you know, somebody goes to war, they fight for our country, they lose their arm or their leg. They're given this really shitty prosthetic, like stiff piece of plastic, this piece of junk, where the technology is actually out there now where you can put a robotic arm onto your arm that you can use your mind to say, pick that up and it'll pick it up. It's kind of a shame that we just haven't done the engineering to bring the cost down for people who come back from wars or have like, you know, tragedies where they lose a limb.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  We can actually give them a really superior limb if we just do the, do the hard work and engineering to actually bring the cost down where it's affordable and let people know that this exists. And you don't have to have a prosthetic stump. Um, and I think that's really inspiring to me.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  This is awesome, I feel very optimistic because I've been like trying to figure out, I read a lot of history because I'm trying to, one thing, figure out what makes America so special? Like how, how did this experiment come to be? It's pretty crazy how um, like these group of guys like had this opinion on what the world should be and two hundred and fifty years later, like it's mostly great. And I was um, reading books on it and between like eighteen eighty and like nineteen seventy or so, there was this massive explosion of American growth. And part of it was like our values and ideas, like this idea of individual liberty, um, equality, um, uh, private property, capitalism, like that all like combined.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  And we were the first country that was founded with that collective group of principles. We were the first one that really had that. But one of the reasons why America became so special was in like the eighteen nineties, eighteen eighties or so Rockefeller discovered oil. And then soon after Carnegie uh, started creating um, steel using iron ore. And we had so many resources in America that basically, everyone talks about the gold rush. The bigger rush was out of Duluth, Minnesota, where we had this massive uh, mine that created this stuff called iron ore, which was used to create steel. And we also had huge copper mines. And you could put it on a ship based out of Duluth and it could go through the Great Lakes, which is basically the size of an ocean.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  And Great Lakes are huge and it could get up to New York and get up to all these amazing places really, really fast. To the point where in the nineteen fifties, we were transporting so much iron ore that that was enough to create fifty million cars a year. That's how much we were transporting on the Great Lakes. And then we were growing all this food in the farmlands because um, of America. Because one of America's greatest abilities is to grow tons and tons of food. And so we had all these people and we had fifty states that had, were tariff free. And so like I was reading about like the massive resources in America and that we don't get enough credit. I mean, it was locked, but we don't get enough credit, like that's one of the reasons that made us great. And then the nineteen forties, uh, World War Two happened and every place in Europe and a lot of places in North Africa,

• 23:06Speaker 01

  uh, in Asia were destroyed, but we were good. We were good because A, we are so far away and B, we didn't get destroyed. And so I was thinking, I'm like, I feels like we're gonna go through another one of these things because if you look at the data center creation, uh, in America, it's like way beyond uh, uh, most every other country right now. And it feels like we're gonna go through this, another one of these industrial revolutions simply because of our entrepreneurial spirit, but also the huge amount of resources, including people. We have so many people working on this stuff. And so whenever you talk about this, I'm like, America is gonna go through this massive, massive explosion. I don't know how it's gonna look, I don't know how long it's gonna take, but it seems very comparable to the industrial revolution.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting, I mean, I, I was in a group chat yesterday and I think people have, there's one way to look at it is exactly what you said, that's, I would say, a very optimistic take. I think another group of people feel extremely pessimistic. And you know, if I boil down, what are they pessimistic about? It's basically

• 24:10Speaker 00

  the most popular parts of America, uh, like New York, California are trending towards socialism. So um, you know, a hatred of billionaires, a hatred of companies, a hatred of AI, hatred, you know, like there's a lot of like negativity towards those exact things, those drivers of progress that you just talked about, right? Capitalism and, and obviously output of capitalism is that you can build a successful company and you can become very wealthy and you can, you know, go compete and build new technologies and all those things. And then you can, you know, take those resources you have and reinvest them in the next, you know, in others, right? And that self sustains uh, all the progress. And so I think one negative view is,

• 24:54Speaker 00

  have you, you know, are we losing, are we losing what made us great in that way? Another piece of the negativity is um, you know, have we hollowed out our ability to actually build things? Um, you know, for so long, we kind of outsourced manufacturing to China. And so now trying to get back and kind of reshore or reskill or re-industrialize is like, sounds good, easy to pump your fist to, really hard to do, do we actually have the stomach to do it? Um, it's like a big company that hasn't innovated in a very long time. And even if you realize you need to innovate, can you, can you actually move such a big ship? Can you culturally like get back to that or not? I think that's another one. And then the third one is like, you know, general skepticism around AI.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  So, you know, either AI is so good that we're all gonna lose our jobs and people are gonna be out of work or AI is so, is not as good as it's advertised and it's a huge bubble and this is all, you know, it's gonna tank the market because everybody's overspending on it. Uh, just sort of like a no win proposition. And so it's funny to hear you say that because several of our friends in a group chat literally had like such a negative view that was so foreign to me, but you know, I understand where they're coming from.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  So a lot of times people at the podcast, they'll reach out to me and they're wondering, hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least three million revenue, although we do on average just something like twenty-five million dollars a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figger, of BlueChew, all these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to my first million, we have a very unique, high trust environment. When people apply and go through this vetting process, they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business. And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  That's what happens in real life in Hampton, it's life changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least three million in revenue and you just wanna go ahead and pull forward five or ten years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL, joinhampton.com.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think that I would change the word pessimism towards and switch it to uncertainty and fear, which is very understandable. I think that what we're missing now is good common sense leaders who can say things like, "America is amazing and we have problems that we should fix. Capitalism is amazing and I understand why you guys are upset that housing is so expensive. Let's try to fix that." Like, it just seems like there's this, you have like, guys like Trump on one side and then like an AOC on the other side and they say such polarizing things.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Do you think those people don't exist? Or do you think that the incentive of the media machine is that the more, the farther to one end you go, the louder your voice gets, right? Because it's more polarizing, you get more attention.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  The second one. I think that most people can't, like, it's insane to me that capitalism is considered an insult or a negative word. And there needs to be like ways to reclaim some of these words that people use. For example, the Democrat Socialists of America, like when they talk about socialism, I'm like, that's really, historically, that's quite bad. That's not like a good thing to do. Now, when you, I'm not, like, I consider myself very moderate, so I don't consider myself to be like total libertarian where anything goes. And also, I like capitalism, I like immigrants, I like, but there needs to be someone who like, has this like fairly common sense approach where they can bridge both sides and talk about this in plain, simple language, in a charismatic way, because

• 28:34Speaker 01

  that's very important, where you, but you can't be fear-based and you can't say like this other side is gonna ruin everything, or capitalism is evil, etc.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've actually always thought that somebody should make the Common Sense Political Party, because I think common sense is such a, such an amazing phrase that lets you take the moral high ground. Common sense, if you say you're the Common Sense Party, A implies that everybody else is being a dumbass, right? Like, everybody else is not using common sense if they're, if they're not in the Common Sense Party. And then also, who can argue with common sense? It's sort of like when, you know, Trump came out and was "America First," or "Make America Great Again." It's like, well, who can take the other side of that? Who can say, "No, not America First," right? Like, you know, he took the moral high ground with a sort of inarguable thing that he could then put his agenda underneath. And I think if somebody really wanted to create, like, instead of being like moderate,

• 29:25Speaker 00

  which basically sounds like the tampered down version of everything, the passive, the middle, the not gonna do anything, party, it's the, you know, I think that, or like, you know, the third party, the alternates, it's like, you know, they always make themselves sound less than, like third place. And I think you have to basically go in and go into one of the parties, but hijack it and rename the platform around being the common sense candidate. And then just constantly beat the drum of common sense. And I think a sufficiently charismatic person could use language like that and go pretty far. And I would love to see it.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, for example, there's so many things that Trump will say, and I'm like, "Okay, well, that policy I don't disagree with, but I don't like how you talk, I don't like how you're rude to people." So it's hard for, like, you know, there's the emotional side where it's like, "I don't like supporting you because I don't think that you do great things." And then like, a left person will say something, when Dottie will say something, and I'm like, "Okay, free preschool, that doesn't sound so bad, because that's something he enacted. That didn't sound so bad. But all this other shit about free stuff, I don't like that. And so I don't want to agree with, you know what I mean?" And so, but he does it in a very charismatic way. And so, I'm like, "I just wish that there was a charismatic, fairly moderate, common sense person who could say, like, "AI is good, we will use it to help us, America is amazing, and also, we need to fix these things in our country,

• 30:41Speaker 01

  and also capitalism, capitalism rocks, and we could try to make housing more affordable so everyone could be happy, and have some type of safety net." And so, I just wish that we could have that. And I think if we get that, which frankly, I think we will, I do think that there are a lot of--

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Don't you think it's sort of weird, like, we've all just, we've all just accepted this? Like, you know, a country full of very smart, high-agency, brilliant, there's brilliant people. There's brilliant people in the country. And yet, if like an alien came down and was trying to understand what was going on, and it's like the McKinsey of aliens, he's like, consulting, he's just doing a quick audit, he's doing a quick, quick management check here, what's going on. They'd be like, "But why don't you, why are the leaders always like this? Like, is this, are these the two best people in the country? Like, wouldn't you want the two best people in the country kind of going head-to-head to see who should be the leader of the country? And like, does, does anyone think those are the two best

• 31:36Speaker 00

  people? Like, that's a kind of, it's like a kind of bizarre thing that we've all just sort of like, I guess that's just how it is."

• 31:43Speaker 01

  And like, "Why are you being such a dick about your own people?" Like, that's something I don't understand. I'm like, "We're trying to, we gotta rally everyone together. You don't want to like, be an asshole."

• 31:55Speaker 00

  But yeah, I think-- I don't try to participate that much in politics, but it is, just as a curious person, it's just very curious, like, how we ended up here, right? Like, you said this thing, like, "What made America great?" And I feel like everybody can, it's, everybody can attach their own pet reason why, but it's more like Charlie Munger says, like a Lollapalooza effect. Like, anytime you have this extreme outlier, it's usually a rare combination of seven or eight tailwinds at once that came together that creates such a huge outlier effect. And so, it's like, yeah, maybe there was some natural resources at the right time. Maybe it was the culture and the values. Maybe it was incentives and

• 32:36Speaker 00

  systems that you had this sort of capitalistic incentive system that allowed, you know, those who were high-agency and willing to create things that were of value for people would, would go into competition with other people doing the same, which would create the best products in the market, which would create, you know, these winner-take-all dynamics, right? Like, you would, you could assign like many different possible causes and they all probably played their part. Maybe it's just that we were a new country, and it's sort of like when Africa never installed, you know, landlines and they just leapfrogged straight to mobile, right? Like, maybe America was just got to be new and got to leapfrog where other countries were.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Well, and we had like 150 years of practice, so the colonies were kind of like running themselves on their own. And then they're like, "Yeah, we're not feeling this England thing. We're gonna go ahead and just put on, pen to paper on these rules that we've been doing."

• 33:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  And they had a fresh start. And so--

• 33:23Speaker 00

  And there's clearly a network effect where when you have the best economy, then you attract the best people, the best people, then work in the economy, which makes the economy better, and you get this kind of runaway thing that happens. Okay, great. So there's like all these things. And so, you know, it's interesting to know what, what made it work. And it's interesting to know, like, why the weird, broken parts are weird and broken, despite having all these advantages and all these really smart people who mean well in the country. Like, how does that still happen? What are the larger forces at play that are pretty hard to fight?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  But the point that I'm trying to make is, you presented all these interesting opportunities, and I buy into all of them. And we have, I think, America is uniquely set up to be the Petri dish, where a lot of these things grow very, very quickly, so long as we don't get in our own way. Because we have the, it's sort of like, you know, a seven-foot-tall eighth grader who gets drafted, number one, like, "It's there, just don't blow it. Like, it's there," you know? So, I'm really excited for that, frankly. And I understand the fear and pessimism, I totally do, because it is a lot of uncertainty. But I'm pretty bullish on a lot of this stuff and making it life, making life better, not just in America, but around the world. So I'm excited about it.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  So, one of the reasons I brought this up is I have a cousin who's really smart. He's like the, we're like the same age, he's basically like smarter, better-looking version of me. And he was recently, became a free agent. So he's like sold his company, he's thinking about what to do next. And he was about to do what I think a lot of people do, which is, we look inside the peephole and we say, "All right, what do I see? What's the best thing I see here?" When actually, the job is to expand your field of vision. You're not even looking at what the possibilities could be yet. You're still looking at a very narrow, limited set of what's possible. You know, "Who are the people I know? What could I do with them? What are the jobs or companies available around me where I happen to live?"

• 35:12Speaker 01

  What did I do in the past and what's a slight difference?

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, what am I good at? What is my experience? And then, "Let me stay in that industry. Let me stay in that job, even if that industry is not the one that has a huge tailwind behind you." You know, when really this thing to think about is like, "Wow, I'm a free agent, I'm a really smart person, and I have the opportunity to go do anything right now. Why don't I put kind of my investor hat on and think like an investor of like, where is the best body of water that I should go be in?" As Mark Pincus said on our podcast, like, "Go find the right body of water. It's far more important than trying to be the best sailor in a shitty body of water." And, you know, when Mark Pincus was talking about that, he was basically saying, "Social media was the right body of water to be in back in the early 2000s, when he was building social networks and then ended up in the building Zynga and invested in Facebook and like made a bunch of money doing that."

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  And so, I was, I told my cousin, I said, "Why don't you just write down the five most interesting things that are, like, most interesting companies you've seen, that you think like, if I gave you, you know, $10 million and you were gonna, you got to keep all the profits, but you have to invest in these five companies, which five companies would you pick?" And he's like, "I don't know." And I was like, "That's a good exercise to do. It's a much better exercise to do, because it gets you to stop thinking like a, like a worker, and start thinking like an investor. Investors have this incredible benefit, that they get to go where the action is. They move where the, where the money is to be made, where the opportunity is happening, where the growth is happening. And they move themselves, they're more, more nomadic than entrepreneurs tend to be, or employees tend

• 36:46Speaker 00

  to be, who like to stay in their industry, stay in their lanes." And he did the exercise, he sent me the companies. It was kind of eye-opening for him to be like, "Oh yeah, like, I really hadn't been, I don't even really know that much about this, but my gut says there's something here, because I know this. And actually, I'm gonna go look more into that." He started looking more into it, and started to expand his horizons. And I think that's what my hope is, that when somebody sees a deck like this, is that it takes whatever like narrow field of view you had, and just says, like, "You should probably widen that. You should probably think more like somebody who's a, like a total free agent, more nomadic, doesn't need to stay in their lane, because the opportunities are like bigger than anything we've ever seen. But it's all gonna be in the new spaces, where you don't have a lot of experience, or you don't have a lot of intel. You don't need to have it. Look at

• 37:30Speaker 00

  this, you know, even this presentation. It's not like I went deeply researched any of these. But I know enough to know that there's a lot of opportunity in each one of these. And you just have to then go start digging and figure out what's the exact angle."

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just gotta be ambitious. When I see these things, I'm like, "I really want that to happen. I'm not gonna do it, but I want someone to do it."

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Well, we're in a different season, right? When you're in your twenties, you probably would have wanted to go do it.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm like, "I wanna watch someone do that."

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Like, we, both of us moved to San Francisco, because we're like, "I don't know what? That's the right body of water to be in. Let's just go figure things out when we get there."

• 38:07Speaker 01

  And it worked.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  And it worked. It worked amazingly well, right?

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Like, even if you just get the crumbs, it works.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Totally. And that's what I think it is, you know, there's both moving geographically, but also like, move where the puck is going. And I think this is where the puck is going. I think AI in the world of things is where the puck is going over the next 10 years. That's where a lot of the opportunity is gonna go. And, you know, go pick any of these and there's a lot of, a lot of good stuff you can be. And the good thing about each one of these is not really like, "Hey, here's how you make money." It's, here's how, like, the world is about to change, like, you know, like, for the better. Like, all of these are gonna change the world for the better. And so, you get to go have impact while doing cool new shit, while making a bunch of money. It's like, what more do you want?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  You just like appropriated the word "internet of things." You remember that? That was supposed to be like, O'Reilly Media was like, "That's gonna be the thing, the internet of things."

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Smart fridges?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it like never ticked off. Like, "We're gonna make our appliances talk to each other." It did not, you know, they wanted it to happen, it did not happen. And yeah, you just took that. Now it's actually gonna happen. They were about 25 years too early. Do you remember how they tried to make that a thing?

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's kind of a thing. I feel like, annoyingly, I have to download an app to use a bunch of shit that doesn't need an app. So I guess they're trying to make it a thing, still. Somebody's out there fighting the good fight still. I have to like log in to use my vacuum. Like, why? I don't, I don't know why that's necessary.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Good presentation. Nine out of 10.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Appreciate you.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Nine out of 10. All right, that's it. That's a pod.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  I feel like I can rule the world and know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit. And it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Camayo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're gonna hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.