This 24-Year-Old Used AI to Make $30M in under a year

0:00[Music] What are you innovating this time when it comes to 10x of having 100 warm warmed up accounts to which they're posting three videos a day every single day and they're pumping out 300 pieces of warm content per day each generating minimum 500 views. Therefore, you're gen generating minimum 150,000 views. So, when we first did this podcast almost a year ago, um I think UMAX was at a little bit over 5 million ARR and Calai uh had just hit 100K in MR. So, UMAX is still at over 3 million in ARR. RZ GBT I think about 1 and a half. Cali on the other hand is doing over 2.5 million a

0:41month. And the game has changed a lot in the last year too. The game has changed so much. I think that this is something that people really don't understand. I think that there has never been a more high leverage time to become technical in human history. For years, I failed at building. Now, I think I'm in a stage where I'm not just trying to make a full-time income. I'm trying to build a legacy. Reject what I say. Reject what other people say. Learn foundational knowledge. Build your skills. And follow

1:11your gut. We're back. We are back. Back one year later. One year where it all started. Crazy year. Crazy year. Generational run. It's been fun. It's a great life. Last time we sat across from each other on a podcast. It was the first time you ever did a podcast. Your first little introduction into content. It's still the most viral episode we've ever done on the channel since then. Uh, and I think it's one of the first podcasts that was kind of made in this like last sweep of like AI consumer apps and like the hype cycle that's been on a rampage for the last year. But, uh, this is

1:53going to be a good episode. We'll get to talk about like everything that's gone down in the last year. I'm excited. So, I guess um, we can go chronologically. Um, but I think like before we even go there, like what are the highlights of the last year? Yeah. So when we first did this podcast almost a year ago, um I think UMAX was at a little bit over five million ARRZ GPT just over 2 million and Cali uh had just hit 100K in MR. It was like a side project that you like slightly mentioned. We glossed over it. Side project working with an incredible team, you know, see how far that's come. So

2:34UMAX is still at over three million in ARR GBT I think about one and a half. So those have both dipped but have not put much time towards them. Cali on the other hand is doing over two and a half million a month uh which is over 30 million annualized revenue. Um shout out to the Cali team. Awesome team, awesome

2:57uh awesome company, great product. And yeah, I think it's probably worth me giving a brief background to everybody listening on what my past year has looked like 100%. So, last time we recorded was in the summer and as I'd mentioned, had had these projects doing well. Um, and I put a good amount of time into scaling Cali up in the early days and then shifted my focus into Apex. Apex was this all-in-one self-improvement ecosystem where we were doing free apps and, um, the long-term play was content and CPG, so uh, you know, supplements and whatnot. Had had two co-founders out here. Shout out to Apex Jesse and Apex

3:46Clling. Um but you know as it started to progress I had this gnawing feeling. I was like man we are in the AI revolution the greatest technological revolution that has ever occurred. Um and I was like man I've got to be building AI technology. I think that everybody that's a builder right now, um, unless you have a true calling to

4:17something else, AI is the place to be. There is still so much to be built. And so worked on Apex and then I was like, I got to go back to back to building AI software, which led me to begin building 10X. 10X is the project that I'm currently working on. Uh the long-term vision of 10X is to revolutionize and redefine what personalized education looks like. Um and we have a lot to talk about when it comes to education today when it comes to like the new alternative career paths that are kind of emerging and you know even like college and how that's changed so much in the last two or three years

4:57especially since like you know 2021. Um we have a few interesting stories to to cover there. Yeah, I think it's worth uh providing a little bit of context on how 10X got started. I recently spent 36 days locked in an apartment in New York as part of PMF or Die, a challenge to hit 1 million in ARR in less than 90 days. Now, we left I left after 36 days. Um I did not hit 1 million in ARR. Did you die? I did

5:31not die. Okay, that's good. Sure. But yeah, it was a it was a cool practice in, you know, seeing how quickly you can build a product when you move extremely fast. Now, that said, the sort of mental toll that it took on me um of not being able to leave an apartment as well as being on live stream 24/7 um we had a few close calls too of our phone calls almost making it to the live

5:57stream. Yeah. Um, you know, I I don't think that I don't think it's a conducive way to build a business to be honest. Um, literally locking yourself in an apartment and being on live stream. And I think that it it impacted my ability to think clearly. But now, you know, back in San Diego, yeah, I feel like of all pe of all the people I know, you of all people should not be locked in in in an apartment. No, I don't think that it was I don't think that it was good for

6:23me. Um, so we built this product that was, so I say we, it was originally me and Patty, my co-founder. Now, we ended up parting ways. Um, I think that he's going to go on to do great things, but it wasn't the right fit. And so, I built this product. Uh, it was like a Dolingo style learn anything. I think that to build the future of personalized education takes more than the two weeks that I spent developing it. and launched it uh with about two or three days of marketing efforts. Hit 10K in MRR, but I was like, you know, the the the RPM to CPM

7:09just didn't make sense. I knew how long it would take me to scale it to a million AR. I knew how much capital it would take as well. And so I I I decided to put it on pause and return to kind of the ideation uh on the UX side of things. uh the the ideation phase and the game has changed a lot in the last

7:27year too. The game has changed so much. I think that this is something that people really don't understand and we're going to talk about it for we're going to break down the whole thing. Yeah. Where do you want to take us with that? The thing like I came into into this trip even thinking about because we're here in San Diego, right? and we're we've kind of spent the entire day up until this point talking about like reflecting on so much of the last year and you have some of the most like I think some of the most interesting conversations we've had just to like start things off is around like purely

8:00education and like looking at the people around us and like how so many of them have gotten such like high levels of success from like the most interesting career paths. I think it's worth starting off by talking about what was it that like what are like the similarities that you're seeing across people like Zach or across some of the other people we talked about today and how you're thinking about that success as you're building out 10X. I think that there's a common misconception that it's not worth learning technical skills nowadays because uh AI is just going to do all of the coding for us. I think that that is

8:32completely ridiculous. I think that there has never been a more high leveraged time to become technical in human history. Um, and now while becoming technical, I don't think uh I don't think that it will take the same form that it took 10 years ago in terms of scanning stack overflow to solve uh you know to to debug your code

8:56and to to make your code work. But and and so I think that now you use AI in order to in order to code and in order to to build and one of the commonalities that I've seen upon among successful founders is their ability to apply AI within everything that they do and you know it there's the common um common position which is like as technology progresses we abstract away the sort of hard work right We don't

9:28have to write in machine code anymore. Um, you know, we have interpreted languages. Um, we have we have, you know, you can write in Python as opposed to having to write in machine code. Now, you can write largely in human language, but you still need to have you still need to build that sort of uh underlying technical uh engineering knowledge. Now, coming back to what I said, you apply it to everything. And so, for example, I was hiring a designer for 10X and I put up a uh listing on Upwork and I was like, "Here is a trial uh challenge." So, I had five to 10

10:07different designers all spend about two hours of work redesigning a page and designing some icons and whatnot. And this one designer produced significantly more highquality work than all of the others. And I asked him, I said, "How are you able to do this?" because he he he did custom icon designs and and all these different uh you know um bu built out the sort of design system and whatnot uh at a higher quality and and and and higher quantity of output. And he said, well, I used AI to to design the icons for me. He knew the correct AI tools to produce uh clean mobile app

10:48icons. And I think that we're seeing this across the board. the best the best content creators. Uh Sam Zia who's visiting right now. Shout out shout out Sam. Uh Sam uses ChatGpt all the time to help him with hooks and with scripts and whatnot. And uh engineers obviously use it to write code. Designers use it to

11:09design their icon libraries. And I think that right now um if you're not at the cutting edge uh a high proportion of people don't really understand how to apply these tools within the context of their daily work and their daily life. And I think that this is a massive market inefficiency um that that needs to be solved and I think

11:36that it will be solved moving forward. And if you know when we've talked about building consumer apps and a lot of people talk about building products in general, there's this thing I was talking about earlier today which is you don't try to reinvent the entire wheel, right? You don't try to reinvent it across, you know, at every step of the way. So if you're building an app, it's like it's still homepage, interaction page, profile page, the onboarding flow looks relatively the same, but there's something that you innovate on each time. For UMAX, it was the visual hook distribution strategy. What are you innovating this time when it comes to

12:0510X? Sure. So, in terms of 10X, I have a number of different thesis for how I want to reimagine the product. Um, I think something that I'm really leaning into in this kind of version 2.0 is truly customized and personalized content that can automatically update as you progress and learn about new things. Um and so to me what this looks like is capturing a lot of user information during onboarding and having a a long onboarding flow where we get customized um information from the user about what it is that they're looking to learn and then we generate an assessment during the onboarding to assess their knowledge

12:43within different topics to then autopop populate this feed for them. Now I think what you had mentioned about UMAX and the other apps that I've built RZ GBT cali yeah we we did a great job innovating and a couple of key features that were previously unsolved. What was it for Cali? For Cali was the ability to take a picture of your food and have the

13:05calories automatically logged for you. Now I think this may be a hot take but something that I really believe. I think that there will have been more um seven figure, so $1 million plus annual revenue apps, mobile apps specifically, that were built in 2024 than will be built in 2025 based upon um one or two key AI functions because the technology was still catching up. GPT GPT vision meant that you could take old apps that were previously built and innovate on them with AI and a lot of the innovation has

13:43has been done. People are catching up. Now that said, I think that the rate at which new technology becomes possible um grows exponentially at a greater rate than uh new technology currently exists certainly uh or has has been built. And so now you might say, well, according to that logic, there will be more one or two function apps built in 2025 that achieve a million dollars in ARR than in 2024. To which I would say there may be more apps as a whole, but not these

14:13super simple one or two function apps. And I think that uh from what I'm seeing builders across the board, there is too much copy and pasting occurring of people copycatting or uh failing to innovate in any real sense um on on uh previously popular or currently popular uh user experiences. I think that with the increase in capabilities of these new AI tools means that we can now chain together different prompts and and different sort of user actions to create more fully AI native experiences which is what we're trying

14:55to do and what I intend to do with 10X. Um, I think that people need to stop overindexing on building one key feature that's going to be really viral because most of the really viral one key feature apps have been built. You need to figure out how to build amazing products to be able to continue to succeed in the

15:16increasingly competitive AI app market. One thing you mentioned that was really interesting is like chaining together the right tools and the right prompts to be able to build really like, you know, full products and interesting things that actually make people's lives better. I want to talk about what some of those tools are once you have this app built out. How is the uh how are you thinking about marketing it compared to how you thought about marketing UMAX and Cali in the early days? So with 10X um so I want to speak a little bit more generally here for anybody listening uh because you know the individual

15:48strategies that I apply to 10X may not necessarily be transferable. So, I want to assess the overall um environment as a whole. Almost 2 years ago, I made a tweet saying that UGC would become increasingly in high demand at a relatively exponential rate um due to the fact that AI enables developers and new programmers to build more and more products. Therefore, more indie hackers or small teams building applications with greater demand for UGC as well as influencers. I think that anybody that's active in the tech community is well aware of this now, well aware of the fact that everybody's doing UGC now. I think that it's becoming saturated. I

16:36think that there is relatively very little alpha left in it. You don't believe in the whole AI generate a thousand pieces of content and rip them and pick the best ones and run Facebook ads and so I do. Okay. Though I think that the alpha has diminished. I think that one of the greatest bottlenecks and from what I've seen one of the greatest bottlenecks moving forward is I was

16:55speaking more broadly to UGC as a whole. Now as AI UGC improves it becomes increasingly vir viable to produce viral pieces of AI UGC content. But if you can produce those thousand 10,000 pieces of content that each have a small probability of going viral, the question then becomes how do you get them posted on warmed up accounts? My point here being I think that um one of the great opportunities in the uh viral content domain as a whole will be not in creating UGC content, talking to the camera, whatever. I think that it will be uh in people that are able to spin up systems of having 100 warm warmed up accounts to

17:42which they're posting three videos a day every single day and they're pumping out 300 pieces of warm content per day each generating minimum 500 views. Therefore, you're gen generating minimum uh what is that 15,000 views. Um no 150,000 views. Whatever. Okay. Oh yeah. 300 time. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, no. That's that's 50 150,000 300 videos multiply by 500 views per video. 150,000 views baseline if it's warmed up per day. And now this isn't accounting for videos that actually do well and some proportion of those will do millions of

18:18views. Um, so this is something that I'm thinking about very deeply within 10x. And it's so interesting because we're seeing obviously you know I invested in founders arm and so I what's cool about that is I get access to all of their clients and seeing how everyone's like you know all the ones who haven't made us sign NDAs the ones who are open with it. I get to see at a high level what they're using VAS for because it's part of the onboarding calls there. All of the companies that are doing well right now have shifted from like hiring virtual assistants for like customer service primarily to now hiring virtual

18:49assistants to build out essentially like automated systems that could be replaced by AI, but in the moment they're using real people and they're using 10 of them instead of using one or two specifically um in a way that optimizes for output instead of quality. And it's because in that sheer optimization of output, you kind of brute force your way to figuring out what works purely from a numbers perspective. Exactly. I mean, you know, we're we're all well aware that uh the more shots that you take, the higher probability that you have that one goes

19:17in. And I don't I think that probably the greatest example of this to date is Teeu. Um, anybody who's familiar with the Teimu strategy, Teimu essentially had an affiliate system where they had like millions of pieces of content going out through per day. Uh, I think that what we're seeing on social media as a whole is the saturization of the quote unquote building a personal brand, building AI apps, starting a personal brand on short form social media, doing UGC as a whole. These are all hot topics because um social I mean I think that they all exist on top of the social media algorithms in that social media

20:04algorithms operate as a power law. uh if a video goes viral, there's just this outsized amount of profit that can be earned whether you are building your own personal brand, you're doing UGC for a company or you own the company, be it AI application or DTOC brand that that makes profit on that on those viral

20:24videos. Now, I think that people need to get more creative. Like we'd spoken about taking more shots, having a hundred warmed up accounts, a thousand warmed up accounts where you're posting AI UGC every single day. Um, with regards to building an AI product, I think that it's chaining together multiple different uh sort of sort of uh uh prompts as well as uh steps in the user experience beyond just the user input

20:53and immediate uh wow AI output. Um and so yeah, I think that as the a as AI technology continues to improve exponentially, um the the level of complexity necessary to to succeed within the the the space will will continue to increase as will the size of the outcomes. And at that point there becomes even that or at which point there becomes even more alpha and being close to the ground and knowing what tools and resources pop up and emerge before anyone else. arena 100% arena uh just like I had said earlier there has never been a more high leveraged time to either be or become technical um which I

21:40think it it's worth touching on what uh what we're doing with Arena. Yeah. I mean even if like I mean it's crazy how fast things move, right? Because we had our first conversation about this. I posted that tweet two weeks ago where we hosted a Twitter space and you know I guess for for audience context you know I got to a point where I from the more conversations I was having I started to realize that the way to help founders the most you know as Olif as like a person in the space was by connecting them with people they could hire or by connecting them with people they could

22:10reach out to and learn from and so at which point we're talking a lot about right you know AI and like the understanding of how to build tools as a huge moat I also see talent as being a huge moat and the person who has the most access to the most cracked or intelligent or smart, you know, connected builders, founders, etc. You know, to be that person or to be one of those people will create a ton of opportunity for you to create whatever impact you want to see in the world. And so the MVP of like testing out if this was a thing, if people wanted to be part

22:38of something like this was we jumped on a Twitter space and 4,000 people tuned in and we just basically like, you know, just kicked it for an hour and caught up on life um on like an hourong Twitter space. And what that turned into was hundreds of applications of some of the most interesting people that have been following me that I've never chatted with before. Kind of like reaching out, taking the time to put an application in. you know, people with millions of followers or who have, you know, generated tens of millions of dollars in annualized revenue in ARR kind of like reaching out to be part of this thing

23:08because everyone is starting to understand that who you know matters, you know, as much as what you know, you know, I would argue. Yeah. I think to add on to that, it's like if we accept the thesis that you need less capital than ever before to be able to build and at the same time that AI tools are becoming increasingly powerful um in that uh you need less capital to be able to build something and you can build it faster. Then the question really becomes what are the tools that you use and in what direction do you build and I think that this was one of the thesis behind

23:52Apex to be honest uh in the more general self-improvement domain. Now the issue there was that as I had said it's like I want to I want to do things that are purely technological focused and yet I still believe in the value of of building community and and and building the hub for for people to be able to learn and and and um you know work with one another. And I think Arena presents this amazing opportunity to show people like what are the best resources? What is the best a AI IDE to use? what are the best image generation models? What are the best new ways to create content

24:30using Sora and mixing that in with different uh captioning tools and whatever it may be? Um and like and so like at which point it makes sense to share that like the vzero of arena kind of like you know pun intended there is quite literally it is a group chat of the most interesting people you know it started off as like the most interesting people I came across on Twitter and on YouTube from doing podcasts like this and now it's evolving into that plus just generally people in our network who also have something to share slash want to have uh you know slash have built their own kind

25:03of like niche micro internet kind of like communities. and we want to just bring all of them together. There's no payw wall, there's no gate, there's no, you know, MLM scheme behind it, it's just an application form where if you get in, uh, where if you apply and it sounds like you have something to share with the community and there's something that we have like, you know, that people or you have something to share or something that you've learned, like

25:24you'll get in as as simply as that. Yeah, there's a link somewhere right over his face. link right here. I think that one of the really interesting components about arena is um what we're seeing becoming increasingly common nowadays is this sort of alternative career path. I think that uh for a while there was a lot of discourse about whether or not college was worth it and you know you can still make the argument for the average individual whether or not it makes sense to go to college. Now that said, for um the exceptionally high performing individual, I think it's pretty clear that the best way to learn is not in a

26:13traditional academic environment. And I think one of the clearest examples here is my co-founder from Cali, Zach Yadagari. Zach is the CEO of Calai, 17-year-old CEO, now 18, but originally 17-year-old CEO, one of the most intelligent He's mature, hardworking people I have met in my entire life. Told you he was 27. I would have believed it. I would believe it instantly. You hop on a call with him and you're like, "Oh, he's got to be like 32 or something." No, he's he's got a wife and kids. Yeah, 100%. Absolutely incredible. Everybody that speaks to him recognizes it immediately. And yet Zach, who has a 4.0 no GPA. Uh 34 unweighted

26:55uh 34 ACT. Um $30 million AR business. $30 million AR business. President of his robotics club. No way. Got rejected from almost every single school like 20 schools, too. He got into UT Austin, U Miami, and Georgia Tech, which are good schools, but they're not Ivy. They're not top 10 schools by any means. And I think to me it's it's just ridiculous cuz he wanted to he was so interested in going to school too. A lot of kids that made a tenth of the amount of money that he's made at at his age. You know, they'll they'll kind of go on Twitter and they're bashing college like I didn't

27:34need college. Look at me. And you know, I think what's interesting is even in this conversation, you graduated. I think you had a great time in college. I dropped out after a year and a half. And I think going to college was still an amazing decision. I don't regret a day of it. I also think I got out at the right time. Um, and you know, you you said something interesting earlier, which was that for the average

27:53individual, college might make sense. For the high performing individual, it, you know, there are better ways to learn. I think I agree with the premise in most cases, but I wouldn't go as far as saying that like college is good if you're average, and if you aren't average or if you're above average, then you don't need college. I think what we grew up being told was that you go to college if you want to get a job that pays you really well so that you're financially successful so that you can buy a house and have kids and have a wife or a husband or whatever. And um

28:17that is how you set yourself up for life. And we've just seen too many exceptions to where yes, it takes a level of privilege to kind of have access to the Wi-Fi and the internet and you know to have the time to be able to like learn those skills, but it's free. Like anyone can go learn on YouTube how to do anything. And that has been proven by the thousands of kids that are on the internet today talking about how, you know, forget like however you define success, whether it's money, whether it's fame, whether it's, you know, peace and fulfillment. People who have any or all of those can attribute a ton of

28:49their success to I got my start by learning things on the internet. And I do think there's a case to be made around college. Some people want the experience. Some people want to, you know, be in the what is it? walking distance from people their age who are all trying to figure out life together. Some people want to have fun. Some people just want to get out of their parents' house. And I do think that some people want to complete their degree because their mom and dad wanted them to and they and for them and for them that's enough. And I think all of those are valid reasons if it's a valid reason

29:17to you. What I think I I strongly disagree with is the notion that the binary if you want to be successful and have prestige and have made it in life, you need to go to an Ivy school and graduate at the top of your class. because that's just so not true. Yeah, I would I would say that I I I generally

29:37agree with most of your points. [Music] Um, more than anything, I think that anybody who is intelligent and hardworking can relate to the fact that being in school will it simply will not advance your uh level of knowledge as quickly as if you self-learned. as if you self-learn self-learned about something you actually cared about. Yes. Um and I think that that is the primary backbone of both 10X and Arena which is that in this era in which I keep saying it but I'm going to say it again and again and again where we have increasingly powerful AI tools that are you have PhD level knowledge accessible

30:25at your fingertips. the the only question is in what direction do you do you um pursue the the uh acquisition of knowledge and then how do you apply it and I think that this will continue to be arguably the greatest unsolved problem and I think that everyone listening to this podcast is taking a step in the right direction of consuming relatively high quality information especially if you made it to this point especially if you're all the way this

30:56deep into the podcast listen. Yeah. Yeah. um now I mean you mentioned how you know most successful people that we know got their start on the internet. 100% true. That said, think about how many times you got scammed and duped and you you just consumed fundamentally the wrong information. I spent a lot of money on courses early on and I don't regret it, but I definitely didn't have to. Dude, I I spent so much time working on different things that were just a complete waste of time. Now, I think that there are like so much money on Facebook ads there. I think that there are pretty much two fundamental uh uh

31:36pursuits of learning that every individual should should follow. Um I think that one is obviously AI tools becoming more uh uh proficient with them like whatever industry you're in whatever whatever industry you're interested in whatever you're in already whether it's medicine legal engineering any creative idea that you have just like immediately find the applicable AI

31:58tools and then start creating with it. Uh and then second and I think that this is an underemphasized um component of of uh knowledge acquisition and skill acquisition which is that you should still learn um time-tested foundational knowledge. I think the two most important domains of skills and knowledge that any individual should pursue today in 2025 and I think will continue to be the case for the next five plus years will be becoming proficient with AI tools becoming extremely skilled with chat bots image generation tools and whatever

32:43your industry specific tools are. Um, and then second, continue to build your foundational knowledge. Continue to study calculus and statistics and psychology and philosophy and things that are going to enable you to navigate and understand the world. Um, I don't think that simply being good with AI tools is going to get you all the way uh long term in your career. I think that the fundamental principles of the universe um and and of human knowledge as a whole like you you still need to know and more important than ever you need to know what the right questions to ask are. You need to know uh you need to

33:29have a fully developed worldview in order to build anything substantial at all. Do you think that you need to have a fully developed worldview? I feel like all you need is a burning question that you really care about and you will develop your worldview around that in the pursuit of answering that question. I think that it can be uh it's definitely an asset or an advantage, but I don't know if I'd agree with the fact that you have to have that. Sure. I maybe I should rephrase. It will be significantly easier to build anything of substantial value if you have a developed worldview. Now this does not

34:01mean that you accept um uh you know all academic literature. It does not mean that you accept the conclusions within every one of these fields. Um everyone that you find there's a great example Ed Thorp who built a um a device to calculate where the ball would fall on a roulette wheel. So they spin the wheel, the ball goes around and then it lands on some number and it was considered mathematically physically impossible to to accurately calculate predict and yet he did it anyways. Now I think that this is a great example of somebody who extensively studied physics and mathematics and was aware of the conclusions that people had reached

34:46within the field and yet rejected them and p decided to pursue the truth on his own regardless. Um, I think that I have some minor examples of this in my own life. People saying that you can't just learn how to build a fully functioning application with chat GPT. People still don't believe me to this day when I say that I did it. Um, and yet I did. And I think that this will increasingly become the case. You are going to hear people tell you what you can and cannot do with AI. People tell you what you can and cannot do. Um, people tell you what you

35:15can and cannot do with your life, with everything in your life. And yet if if if you coming back to this point, I think that if you have a a strong view of the world and and you think from first principles um and you are equipped with the necessary tools that you will be so far ahead of everybody else. I think one thing that's really stuck out to me as like a reflection is who you

35:40take advice from can make or break you. And I I think back to advice that someone actually gave me, which is, you know, any career advice you get from someone whose career you do not envy, take with a grain of salt. Any fitness or health advice that you take from that you get from someone who does not have, you know, health or fitness that you

35:56envy, take with a grain of salt. Yeah. Who are the people that are telling you that like that that that you know, it's actually just like pretty it's impossible for people like me and you to lose weight because our metabolism and thyroid won't allow it. It's always the fat person. I think we just got cancelled. Who's the person that's telling you you can't just go build an app that's gonna make you significant amounts of money? You can't just go, you know, uh, whatever it may be. It's always the person that has not done it themselves. And and like playing the whatever the opposite of devil's advocate is in this case, like a lot of

36:32those people mean well. You know, like I I got a lot of advice growing up from people that meant really well and wanted the best for me that just their hearts were in the right place and they just didn't have the same context that I didn't realize I had from having basically grown up on the internet. And I think that, you know, for everyone that you meet that is like has dropped out of school or has taken a career path that, you know, people around them didn't agree with growing up, a lot of those people were usually had their hearts in the right place. Like there's

36:56the example you see on the Tik Tok Instagram reels all the time of my teacher told me I'm never going to do this that and the other and I made their salary last week and it's like yeah but how many people really had teachers that like just wanted to see them fail. But it really is important just like to think about where you're getting advice before you take it and you run with it and you start shouting it from the rooftops and you develop your entire worldview around it. Yeah, I think that people rarely give advice hoping the worst for other individuals and yet at the same time uh we should recognize the

37:23source. Uh, I think that probably nobody I know experiences this to a greater degree than Zach. Zach is um constantly being told what he should do with his career, even though he's 17 and he's made, you know, his company makes $30 million a year. Yeah. I also want to give a quick shout out to the other uh co-founders of Cali. Henry Langmack, also uh still 17 years old, unbelievably smart, hardworking, technical, just absolute beast. Jake Castillo, hardest working person that I know, the greatest uh growth operator. We do like Jake the entire uh mobile app space that I'm

38:02aware of. Just absolute absolute killer. So, shout out to them. Okay. I was going to say also on that point, I have a ton of respect for those three because I've seen so often what happens when a co-founding team gets a ton of success and one person gets a ton of the spotlight and the other one or the other two or the other three people end up very bitter and they leave the company and they start saying these things about them on the internet and they build a competing product or they just hate from the sidelines and they still stay in the company and they keep their equity but

38:28they're just not supportive at all. I feel like those three, I mean the four of you really cuz I guess you're you're also a co-founder. Um, all of you have a very interesting dynamic and that I haven't spent much time with with Henry or or or Jake, but I've seen a lot of bad co-founder pairs in the last year, especially as we've talked to so many companies, but the general ego kind of like internal damage that exists in a ton of

38:52companies, I never saw with you guys. And I mean, half your team is under 18 years old. So, how do what do you think the differentiator was there? Yeah, I I I think back to the early days and I'm not going to lie, like from the start of the company, I was kind of the coach, you know? I remember I was in the room like that is a massive we got a bear last time and we got the biggest mosquito I've ever seen this time. Um, from the start I was kind of the coach and you know I I put in the majority of the capital um did UX with them uh you

39:23know brought in my marketing strategy influencers for my previous uh you know projects and there was definitely a period where it started to transition to like Zach's the CEO and Zach's the one running this company. we talked about in the Twitter space. Suddenly you're like dude I haven't been in this position before and suddenly Cali reaches a height which my previous companies apps had never reached and I think that um you know it I think that it was a very collaborative effort in the fact that we've all been able to maintain great relationships. Um I think that Zach has done an exceptional job as CEO of of leading from the front. I think

40:07that um Henry has done an amazing job in leading the technical side of the business as well as um accepting being like it doesn't make sense for me as CTO to to try to go represent the company. We don't need multiple representatives like I'm just going to continue to engineer the best calorie tracker on the market with Jake. Similarly, Jake's the head of growth and yet at the same time recognizes he's like someone needs to be the one leading the influencer campaigns and they're crushing it. someone needs to someone needs to to lead the the growth team internally. Um and and you know is he doesn't need the spotlight

40:46because the two of them also know that as soon as they exit the company or as soon as we exit whatever as soon as um daily operations are no longer required which who knows when that is that that they'll be able to rep that badge and that they'll have the full support of Zach and I. And you know, just touching on it one more time, I mean, my structure within the company is essentially like it went from being like active coach to now I'm kind of like, hey, I'm here. I'm a resource. Anytime we need additional capital just for, you know, cash flows, the way the Apple

41:19payouts work, when it comes to highle strategy, when it comes to um, you know, what the next big steps are, I'm always there to help. In terms of the daily operations though, like the team is incredible and and they don't need me every day. And one thing we talked about earlier before the podcast was how there's a lot of call it alpha in playing the underdog even once you are no longer the underdog. And so you talked about how you made it a point to share that like you're not making every single app you make work and you have

41:49failures and they are very public. um in the last year obviously you had an insane level of success with Cali and with UMAX but you also had what is it two other projects basically passion burn what do you think the differences are in the ones that worked really well with the ones that both kind of withered out from a relationships perspective purely this is a great question from a relationship perspective um with Apex you know there are some butdding heads but like nothing that uh was not solvable. I think that it was just like flawed um macro thesis in terms of what we want to work on. It was just it

42:30wasn't the right project. Um and that's okay. You know, I've gotten a lot of flack for for moving on from projects pretty quickly. I understand why people would would uh hate on that. Now, that said, what I view it as is closing the feedback loop. I'm not gonna allow my feedback loops to lengthen and lengthen and lengthen and lengthen when I know that what what the end answer is going to be. If I if I recognize that the answer of that feedback loop is going to be no failure like X do not continue zero I'm going to kill it and move on as soon as

43:04possible. Um in terms of 10X with the original product similar like that's hardly a failure though because you're still working on I'm still working on it certainly though the original the original application the original UX was a failure. I mean it it just it objectively was. And do you think that comes down to a lack of research or co-founder mismatch? I think that it was a lot of things. Um, I think that as these things often go, it was a complex system in which these pieces just circled into one another and by virtue of being locked in an apartment for 36 days, uh, and on live stream 24/7, I

43:45wasn't able to think clearly at all. Um, I think that Patty and I weren't the right match. Uh, I I don't I don't think that that's a fault of his or mine. Um, I think that there were certainly, you know, things that I had done in that relationship that I'm not necessarily proud of. Uh, and now at the same time, I I don't think that we were a good fit, period. I think that I think that the the the design of the product, the user experience was flawed. I think that these things all fed into one another. Um, I'm certainly not giving up. I'm so passionate about

44:19AI education as a whole. I'm so passionate. We've talked about this since the money max like when we tried to build an app in like you know two weeks before last summer. Dude, I it's and so to answer your question I think additionally of like why these two projects uh most recent projects have relatively failed. It's like I'm trying to do bigger things that I think are more helpful and impactful for society as a whole. I don't think that that is accomplished in a one function application. I think that while Cali for example is very impactful, I want to build things that are even bigger and

44:54just have like much wider um wider and and deeper impact on on individuals. And so, you know, to act as if this is going to be done overnight and in the same way that my previous projects were built, I think would be a fool's errand. Um, and I think that at times I probably I certainly got too confident and too cocky about the fact that I would be able to just copy and paste these formulas. Game is the game. Yeah. You know, for years for years I failed at building uh a business that could make me full-time income and then it happened all at once and I was able to do it back

45:33to back to back. Now I think I'm in a stage where I'm not just trying to make a full-time income. I'm trying to I'm trying to build a legacy. I'm trying to I'm trying to impact the world. And if it takes me years of failure after failure after failure, I simply will not give up. It is not in my nature. Um, I I will continue to do everything in my power to become more skilled, to work harder, and become the person that is able to to build those sort of products and experiences. And um, I think that this is actually a brings me to the point of social media

46:19for me. I've deactivated Twitter recently. I deleted Instagram off my phone, Tik Tok off my phone, every single social media. This has been a plan of mine for months. Um, and the primary reason for this isn't the failures that I've experienced. I'm I'm open. I'm public about that. I'm cool with like I don't care about people's perception of me. Not in that like I don't feel it and that it doesn't impact me negatively at all, but that won't affect my action. The reason that that I've deleted social media is because I think a lot about the skill to follower ratio, right? Uh, do your number of

46:54followers significantly outpace your relative skill and what you've accomplished in line with with what I preach about learning and mastering AI technology and foundational knowledge as a whole. Um, that's what I prioritize in my own life. I spend a ton of time studying now, a ton of time using new AI tools. Dude, I see the textbooks scattered all over the house. I have textbooks literally scattered everywhere. his bedroom, his the dining room, the kitchen, the all the desks, the couch, notepads everywhere. There's a calculus textbook in the back of the Jeep right now. Behind the camera nodding. He's like, "Yep, too many textbooks, man." He gave me a notepad as a gift, dude. He He

47:34gave you a notepad. When he showed me the room every day, bro, when he showed me the room, he's like, "I got you a little notepad. It's next to the I just burst out laughing." Um, so yeah, I mean I in line with this pursuit of trying to build massive companies, I recognize that I could just try to become a full-time businessman that just finds the right people and plugs them in and whatever. I don't think that that's the right way to go about it. I think especially in this world of increasingly powerful AI tools, the real bottleneck is not on capital or or being able to hire because

48:17most of the best talent is unhirable. The bottleneck for the builders will be how skilled you are. And I'm doing everything in my power to become as skilled as I possibly can. And this means coding every single day. It means reading textbooks on on on new agentic systems on complex systems on I I recently started doing math academy again. Oh my god. Rudying multivariable

48:50calculus. Um, so yeah, I'm trying to fill up our video because I always end the podcast off with the question of if we do this podcast again in a year, what would you have want to accomplished? And this is the first podcast where I've gone back just under a year later and done it. So, we got to find the we got to find the answer. I love it. If you had to like sum up actually everything that you've learned in the last year into like a few core learnings, what would the biggest ones be? Whether it's social or a growth tactic or just like the way you live

49:25your life now. So I think this is an interesting question because what I have learned is not necessarily applicable to others, right? Um, I think that and throughout this podcast, I'm sure that there are things I've said that may seem like they're universally universally applicable when in reality they're probably just applicable to me. I would say that the number one thing that I've learned um a friend/mentor um was telling me about how Peter Teal does not give advice, right? He rarely gives advice on what you should do. Certainly, I think that the lesson here is that I don't think he doesn't give advice because he's not

49:54intelligent and because he hasn't learned a lot himself obviously, but because advice is rarely applicable to the masses. Um things that I've learned that have worked for me will not necessarily work for other people. And now you take this on the flip side. things that people tell you to do and things that people say will work for you will not necessarily work. When I was graduating from school, working on RGBT, everyone was like, "Dude, what the If you're going to pursue entrepreneurship, build something big, build something cool." I rejected that and thankfully it ended up being a good decision. Um, and I think that people in

50:16society, friends, family will tell us things that we should do because they want the best for us. They truly do, but it doesn't mean that they're right. And it doesn't mean that what work for somebody else is going to work for you. I feel like if anything, at least we know we're not just making stuff up as

50:30we go. What do you mean? Quite literally everything you just said and like you're learning from the past year as it relates to don't take all the advice that you get. You know what applies to me doesn't apply to everyone else. It's the same thing we talked about today in a different form manifested in a different way. Yeah, absolutely. I mean like if you had to do it again though, right? Like now today if you look back at like your biggest learning or your biggest piece of advice from the last year, what has it become today? Um, it's it's so interesting that in that clip I

51:01said people are like if you're going to pursue entrepreneurship uh don't just build an app called RIZG GBT, you know, build something big, whatever. And I think that over the course of the past year, the majority of the advice that I've received is to continue to do the things that have worked. And so it's been continue to build the rich GPT UMAC style apps and continue to run it up. And I have received an unbelievable amount of hate um of people saying like what's this like Apex self-improvement content thing and like 10X doesn't make sense and blah

51:42blah blah blah blah. Um, and I think that the biggest learning that I have had over the course of the past year is probably a reaffirmation of what I spoke about in that clip, which is that man, you you really need to just follow your gut. I think that there is an unbelievable amount of noise in the world and like even everything that you've heard me say in this podcast, if you hear me say something and you're like that doesn't sit right, I don't know that I agree with that, but at the same time, he's speaking so confidently and he seems to have achieved some level

52:31of success. Reject what I say. Reject it. reject what other people say, learn foundational knowledge, build your skills, and follow your gut. Um, at the very least, if you follow your gut and it doesn't work out, you'll you'll have known that you did it your way and that you learned the lesson that you had to. Whereas if you do not follow your gut and it doesn't work out, man, waste your time. You wasted your time. You You didn't even follow your path. And so with with Apex and 10X uh up to this point, it's like I followed my gut on them and it didn't work

53:17out. Um but I think that I've learned the lessons that I need to. And when we check back in one year, I'm excited to kind of see how see how this strategy will have played out. Hell yeah, brother. It's a great ending. Battery just