Naval says calendars are dumb (LIVE Q&A)

9:35Hello everyone.

9:50both of your co-hosts actually. And what do we do on this show? Well, number one, we like to have fun. You know, [laughter] we like we like to have good clean fun on this show. And we are going to be answering a bunch of your questions on pretty much anything. AI agents, life startups. Uh, we're going to do a little Q&A in the beginning, a little Q&A at the end, and in the middle, the meat of it, we are going to be picking the most interesting takes, ideas, frameworks from the X timeline,

10:25and we're going to be reacting to it. It's going to be meaty. Actually, I'm just very curious because there's a lot of people in the chat here. Where are people actually from? Like, where are you guys from? I'm curious. I know there's a slight delay here. I'm in I'm in Berlin. Where are you at?

10:43I'm in Miami, Florida. Beautiful. Yeah. Very beautiful. Yeah. See what what's popping up here. As if as if there's like Miami somewhere else, right? I'm in Miami, Ohio. You never know. Someone is uh 35,000 ft right now. Someone is in Melrose, San Jose, Oklahoma. Romania. Come on, Romania. North Korea. Wow. Didn't know the uh internet was so fast there. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, North Korea, Istanbul, Israel, Frankfurt. Frankfurt, come on. Come on. Come on. Where are my Where are my people living in Germany

11:24at? Where are my Europeans at? Oh, wow. We have uh Dev says he's in Miami, Michigan. Miami. Is Is it a real place? Detroit. Tokyo, Ottawa, Buffalo, Ghana, Northern California, Slovakia, Ethiopia. All right. All right. This is pretty a pretty good pretty good uh London. What What's with the laughing face on the London? Are you Are you not feeling good about D? What is that? What's that about? Is it that you're not feeling good about London? Is it that London is very funny? Is it that it's not in the European Union anymore? What's that laughing face about? I need to know what's going on there. Got some

12:09questions coming in as well. By the way, I do think we should sip something at the start of the show. Even though sip doesn't stand for like the sipping of a drink. I do think you should sip something, I should sip something just in the beginning to sort of kick things off before we actually get into it. You

12:26know what I mean? I know what you mean. So, what are you sipping on? I've got this um kombucha that I found in the fridge here in the office, which is one day past its date of expiry. So, I hope I'm okay. And it is uh from the brand BCH, which I have no affiliation with. And we'll see what happens after I drink it. [laughter] Just like diarrhea,

12:49violent diarrhea. I also have this um button here. So, when I burp, I can I can press this. And then we're going to have we're going to have sort of So, we'll have an echoey burp, which I which I'm trying to bring into the sort of Silicon Valley scene. We don't have enough burps. So, as he takes a sip, I'm drinking blue bottle classic cold

13:12brew, the mini can. So crisp. Super crisp. That is so crisp. It's so You know it's crisp, too, because I know you've had it. I I lo I to the Europeans here, guys. I know. I don't know how many of you guys have been to the US. Just the drink game, the drink packaging, just the amount of different options you get over there. In Berlin, where I am, you can basically either drink kombucha or [ __ ] water and anything else in

13:42between is just there's nothing. Kombucha or water. That's your options. Go to the US, there's like 7,000 types of coffee. Constant diarrhea. It's perfect. Um, should we get into things? I think so. Yeah, sip on water. All right, so um before I started the stream, I asked, "Does anyone have any questions?" And a bunch of you replied on X. Um but I don't want to just answer the people on that tweet. So if you have a question for us, just go into chat and just post it and just post it, post it, and post it. We got a lot of messages here, so you might even need to post it

14:21a few times. But you can ask us a question really on anything. I know we're all kind of going through something. We're all got ideas. We all want feedback or or maybe you just have a question for us like, you know, it could be really anything. What's Jonathan's, you know, moisturizer routine? Does he even have one? Um

14:39I do. And yeah, there you go. So, anything. Um for for people who don't know Jonathan, uh he's a real entrepreneur. He's built a bunch of stuff. Uh what's what's a quick oneliner on you, Jonathan? I think the biggest uh or the company that you can find which is like my biggest frontfacing customerf facing one is facilitator.com which is literally a corporate largecale training business uh which is kind of random for this audience. Um but AJ and Smart my design studio that's maybe one that's better known to a lot of people in your audience. Um, but yeah, I build small businesses that are sort of adjacent to the tech space and I just

15:23keep doing that basically. Oh, yeah. And I'm Irish originally. That's the important thing you wanted me to say, right? Yeah. I mean, I I was telling uh Jonathan before we went live that if JC lived in New York or San Francisco, he would be like 50 times more wealthy. He's one of the best like funnel thinkers. Like how do you get people into a product, a service, an app, some software that there is. Um he makes millions of dollars. He does well, but um I think he he could do better if he

15:57was stateside. I mean, yeah, because you guys are all so busy over there. You're all like doing stuff all the time, drinking coffee. You're all like, you know, we're going to start this business. In Europe, I'm in Berlin. I I don't need to be busy all the time. Just I'm on It's summer in Europe right

16:14now. I'm on like my sevenmon vacation. All right, so I'm going to start going through some questions. Um this is coming from the X chat. We got M Peshy says, "When you begin the process of making a company AI native, where do you begin? Is it departmental change where department by department you're changing things or is it companywide? Where do you start and what are first steps?" Uh, for me, I mean, I could spend four hours just talking about this, but the number one thing you

16:44can do is to make your company legible. So, what does that mean? That means that if you're using an LLM, you need to have uh the LM be able to talk to your company. And that means your meeting notes need to be legible from from the LM. That means that uh, you know, your SOPs need to be legible. So basically going through everything in your company and then putting it so that it could be seen by uh you know whatever you know if you're using cloud code if you're using you know the codeex and the open AI ecosystem the Google ecosystem whatever it is just make sure that it's being

17:26read and then you start thinking about that's step one and then step two is uh going ro by roll and then basically saying okay this person, what are the jobs to be done for for that person? So, if it's a social media marketer, they need to do research around what content they should be creating. They need to actually be creating the content. They need to be scheduling the content. They need to be looking at the analytics and then they need to be taking that uh feedback from the analytics and then bringing it back to the front so that they could say we we want more of this

17:59content or less of that content. So, uh, what you end up doing is you build loops. You build, you know, AI employees essentially that end up doing some of those things and then some of those things are you're going to obviously remain human. Those are the two biggest things you can do if you want to go AI

18:16native. You want to pick you want to pick a question? C can I just add one thing to that? Uh, what we did so we I I had already three businesses before all the AI stuff um kicked off. So we had to figure out, you know, how do we go from where we are now to adding these AI tools into a system that's already kind of working. And also not everybody in the company was excited about integrating AI tools. That's another thing. I mean, if you're if you're asking this question from the perspective of a brand new company, it's a little easier, but I was building on

18:49top of what what already existed. And so the first phase honestly was just giving everybody you know the pro versions of uh chatbt and claude letting people mess around with it for a while without any rules because I know that there was like these companies where like you have to use this many tokens or you have to automate all these things. I just let people use this stuff for a while and then they saw me using things, getting excited about things. Then they would show me things, getting excited about things and we just started to see that people individually found little shortcuts and little fun ways to use the

19:24the tools. Uh and then the only thing that I did sort of mandate was that the admin part of AJ and Smart was the first phase where you know creating proposals uh pulling together paperwork for you know tax related things uh basically repetitive tasks that's something where I wanted us to start using these tools um so that we could free up time to do other things like optimizing our revenue versus just trying to do all the paperwork. And so for us it was just a matter of slowly letting people get excited and and using the stuff and then starting with one department in our case admin bookkeeping paperwork legal and

20:04that's where the AI tools started to come in and now it's sort of spread throughout the entire company. Um but yeah we didn't have like an overall top down mandate that everyone has to use the tools. If you're wondering why I'm looking over here, by the way, it's because the chat is over here and I'm paying attention to the chat. Um, Greg, sorry, sorry, sorry. You need to

20:26prove that your background is real. That's what I was going to bring up. So, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. How about I have a question for the chat. What do you want me to bring from back there to prove that it is real? Keep stalling and just build up this thing that it's not real. So, in chat, let let me know. I'll pick it out. Um, the most popular thing. Show that it's real. There's a question actually for you, Jonathan. Um, someone says, uh, Jonathan, secret sauce. Let's talk about that. How do you funnel people to a product? How do you actually

21:01get started without having a platform? Essentially starting from scratch. So basically the the big problem I think a lot of people are having JC is that you know they're vibe coding startups and those startups don't have customers. So what is your best advice to people who no problem? Yeah. What's your best advice to people who don't have an audience and maybe who don't even want to build an audience in terms of getting customers to whatever it is they're building? Yeah, I think that that um marketing I guess you you I would just put this in the kind of you know frame of marketing customer acquisition whatever you you ideally

21:41you're trying to turn first of all understand that what you're trying to do is turn strangers into customers. That's step one. That's what you're trying to do. You need to turn strangers into customers because you're saying you don't have an audience yet so they're strangers. And then there's basically two ways you can do this. You can do it the sort of brute force way, which is

22:01you buy ads. You buy ads on Facebook. You buy ads on Tik Tok. You buy ads on X and you simply use money to tell people about your thing and push them push them to see your thing and you hope that a certain percentage of those people are going to want to actually spend money on your thing. And so then it's a game of spending money on ads and constantly messing with the optimization of your

22:23website, your funnel, whatever it is. And so step one is when you're thinking about strangers into customers, where's the traffic coming from? Well, one way to get the traffic is you pay for the traffic. And that's a really good method if you have funding and if you have money. If you don't have money, then you have to go the other path, which is you have to somehow organically find uh help people find your product. And then

22:46there's a couple of ways of doing that. One is honestly, and this is a really um big deal at the moment because the AI tools are making it so easy. One is you actually optimize the crap out of your SEO. And the beautiful thing is that Fable uh all of the all of the really good AI tools right now can put together a full strategy for you, help you uh figure out which articles are going to bring traffic to your site and then you could supplement it with like $50, $60 a week of Google ads depending on what you're doing just to kind of supplement it a little bit. Then people are coming

23:20to your website once again. You have traffic. It's slow. That doesn't happen overnight. That could take three months, four months, five months. The other method which you can use in parallel, which I think is what Greg and I do, and and a good example of it is, and this is not a pitch. I I'm not trying to pitch you on this. The underneath my name here, it says host of the unscheduled CEO. That is a new like piece of content that I'm currently creating to promote my businesses. Almost nobody listens to it. almost nobody consumes it. But what I'm trying to do is make a small niche

23:55piece of content that's very targeted at very specific types of people who I want to work with. And I've been I'm on like episode 90. I've madeund and something videos. I make almost two videos every week. Still some of them only have 300 400 people watching. Many of you would be like that's I would never do that. It would be a waste of time. Whatever. What I'm able to do is funnel those people towards my product every towards my product or products every single week at a very small level. Then that's layered on top of ads and on top of all these other things. But you can start some

24:32sort of piece of content that you enjoy doing, whether that's YouTube, whether that's posting on X, whatever that is. And actually, you know what? I saw a great example of this working. Can I can I actually show you a real example of this working at a very small scale on X? Um, so there was this channel. So I was on I was on the internet the other night and I came across this video from a guy and I think you're I think Ashley on your team kind of recognized this. It's

25:01a guy called Vexian Algorithm Alchemist. Okay. I don't know who this person is, right? So I'm just telling you guys what happened. So, I was on X and I saw a video from that channel like popping up on my feed cuz I'm interested in YouTube stuff and it was just him doing a loom and the loom was here's how you come up with thumbnail ideas for your YouTube channel. There was there was like four likes on the tweet. There was like two comments on the tweet. I reached out to him to work with him and to work with him is thousands of dollars every month. And so

25:37this was one person I'd never heard of, one ex post uh that I didn't even watch. I watched like the first three seconds and I was like, "Well, I'm looking for someone to help me with thumbnail stuff." And immediately then there's a professional relationship building up. And so building out your customer base can be as simple as one correct person who is potentially your target customer seeing the you you talk about the thing uh that they actually want. And so yeah, I mean it sounds kind of messy or chaotic, but you either pay for it, you either pay for it with money or you pay for it with your time. And if you're

26:17paying for it with your time, you're probably making content or you're probably uh doing SEO work or you're probably trying to find other people to collaborate with. And you basically choose, do I spend money or do I spend time? If I hate being on camera, I might have to spend uh money. And if I'm okay with creating some content or or help getting help with someone from someone creating content, then I guess I can spend time. The ideal situation is a mix of both. I I hope that's somewhat uh a quick example of it. But a lot of people would see his post or a lot of people

26:53would see it was a good example. It wasn't a quick example. It was not a quick example, [laughter] but it was really good. It was really good. I mean, the way I even So, Ashley is the producer of this live show. And the way I met Ashley actually is she was posting about live shows on Twitter. and she doesn't even have a ton of followers. Maybe a few thousand followers, 2,000, 3,000, I don't I don't

27:18know. But like, you don't need a lot of followers, right? Like if if you create high quality niche content, the X algorithm now is is optimized around that. So, uh you know, your first million dollars is available doing things like that. I we're getting a lot of comments around the background. So, I'm going to go ahead and prove the background before we

27:44continue. Um, do people just think your background is fake, but my one is real? Well, yeah. Which which is crazy, right? It's like they trust you, but they don't trust me. Yours is kind of like more blurry and, you know, it could be fake. It could be a green screen to be fair.

28:08So I brought I don't know be an AI. I brought this. This is People ask about the mug. This is uh Sippy the the uh mascot for for the Startup Ideas podcast. Says it's sipping time, baby. It exists. The background is real. I'm real. Jonathan's real. His background is real. No, it's all AI. People are like, "It's AI. It's AI." Um, show the Pokemon cards. I do have Pokemon cards there. That's a whole

28:45other time for for another time. Um, now you need to do an office tour. I would love to do an office tour. I do have an espresso maker back there. I was thinking about doing like a live like before the show starts just like watch me make coffee beforehand. Um, so, oh my god, I can turn on my like bigger camera over here and show the the whole

29:06space that I'm in. I should do that. That would be cool. I'm going to walk away and do that just for fun now. That would be cool. Um, let's go through a couple more questions. Uh, keep putting it in the chat. We see you on the X chat. We see you on the YouTube chat. Um, okay. So on YouTube, Sword Mage says, "How do you validate your startup ideas?" Well, um, by getting traffic to the the whatever it is, the app, the software, and how we do it is kind of like what Jonathan said, either you do organic or you do paid. Um, where can we get the

29:48mug from? Urban Pixel says, "Uh, mugs are currently not for sale or anything. We just sort of made a bunch to give away, but um yeah, maybe we'll do some more in-person events and and give it away then. Definitely. Um let's see. Going through chat, people. Someone said, "Break a mug over your head and then we'll know it's

30:18real." The only way. It's the only way. You got to do this. You know, you can you can do this to show that it's a real

30:35What platform do you do you find yourself using more nowadays? Chat, GPT, work, cloud, desktop, Hermes, VS Code. I'm curious about you, Jonathan, because you're more of like a you're not fully AI. You're AI pill, but you're not like bleeding edge. you know. Yeah, I'm not I'm a nor I'm definitely a normie like I'm probably like the classic business owner user. Um and so this in the beginning I was just using chatbt the usual interface. Then for maybe like four or five months I used clawed code in the like terminal window and all that kind of stuff because I was going hardcore. Now, I actually just use

31:17Claude uh desktop, the claw desktop app, using co-work kind of flip in between. By the way, it's so confusing. The co-work chat thing confuses the hell out of me. Like when I'm in co-work and then it's like or when I'm in chat and then it's like, oh, I can't do that. You know, it can't update a markdown file and then I'm like, oh yeah, but if this was in co-work able to do that. So, it confuses the hell out of me. also on the mobile app then the co-work stuff is not in the project and yeah but yeah I'm using clawad desktop basically what about you you're using every

31:53everything I use I use everything I mean to me it's like pick an ecosystem so like pick anthropic pick open AI pick Google pick whatever and just uh that's your like keep your main thing your main thing now you can still use like codecs within cloud code for example. Now like there's an official I believe uh plugin that you can download that allows you to use uh codecs within cloud code and and vice versa. You can basically use some of these platforms in in others. So I think uh the gap between specific platforms isn't as big as they used to be. like it's not like one is like so

32:41much better than the other. Um, and I think a mistake a lot of people make actually is like they're just moving from platform to platform as like one leaprogs the other and it's like temporarily cuz like one leaprogs, you know, for a bit and then the other leaprogs for another bit. You know what I mean? So, um, I think that's a bit of a common mistake people are making right now. That's a really I haven't heard someone say it, but that's a really good point because I keep hearing, you know, when when OpenAI came out with the new model and then everyone was like, "This is what is it 5.6? This is better than

33:16Fable now." And then I'm like, "Oh crap," because I've been using Fable the whole time and now I've got all my stuff there. Okay, now I need to start using Chacht because I'll fall behind and now and now Kiwi or whatever. And I'm like, you know what? I I'm not trying to like program something super complicated. I'm running a small business here. I don't need uh alien intelligence to help me out. I need to make like a simple uh marketing asset or whatever. So yeah, I'm I'm locking in on Claude just because that's that's where I'm staying at the moment. I think that and and you've just given me permission to just

33:52ignore everything else. Justin on on YouTube chat is just is sort of laughing at you. He's like Kiwi lol. Um what's it called? the the this Chinese one that was apparently really good. Is it called something Kiwi? Yeah. Let's just for the sake of this stream, let's say it's called Kiwi. What's it called? Tell me in the chat. No, don't tell him. Don't tell him. He's just going to go around town just

34:15calling it Kiwi. It's Kiwi. Uh this is really interesting actually. So, uh Quazar Music is talking about uh indie game development. So in a world where you can vibe code software, you can also vibe code games. And Fable, actually Fable 5 specifically is really really quite good at uh at creating games. The question is um would you create indie games right now? Do you think it's a you know a hidden opportunity right now? Do you know anything about indie games like the business models? I know you're a big gamer. So, let's I am a very big gamer. I have my Steam Deck with me right now. Any of you guys

34:59here have a Steam Deck? Uh, I want to talk about it. So, if you're into indie games, the Steam Deck is a great buy. Although, actually, everything has gotten so like I got this. This is the Steam Deck OLED. I got it for whatever it was when it came out and now it's like $300 more because of the AI chip pricing. Okay. Okay. So, to answer your question, um I'm a very I want to make video games. I'm constantly

35:26experimenting with uh the AI. The first question is, do you think there's a lot of opportunity with indie right now, like more than 10 years ago? Absolutely, without a doubt. I mean, even just the fact that you weren't able to get your game on a store 10 years ago with like 10 years ago, like eight years ago, I tried to get a game on the Steam

35:48store and it was a complete nightmare. Now, it's just a case of you put it on the Steam store and in most cases it's going to be on Steam. So then again, it's a marketing challenge. Okay, so Salmon Dev says on on YouTube, indie gamedev is pretty flooded, not going to lie. Multiple new games coming out every day these days. You have to be able to market what seems to be the answer to everything. So what what do you say to that? In a world where vibecoded games are flooding the market, is it you know is it impossible to to

36:21generate revenue right now? The challenge in the whole gaming industry the same as all businesses is discoverability. And yeah, it comes down to can you actually market your game? Can you get people excited about it? And I think it's it's a dual thing. It's now easier in some ways to make games. Uh and the the tools are more democratized. At the same time, there's more and more mediocre games flooding the market. Uh so and it's so it's harder to kind of discover things. But there there I think it's it's just a the usual situation that happens when something gets democratized. There's just more and more and more. And so the challenge becomes

37:04how do you create something that's original enough that's you know strange enough that's fun enough and and can you build a community around it? Um, even the biggest games now uh can't uh like right now for example the game that I'm playing the most, Marathon, if anyone is playing Marathon is it has like 12,000 players at the moment and it probably cost 200 million to make whereas one of the biggest games in the world right now which is called like as in in terms of player numbers if you look at something like Mugenics or Slay the Spire 2 which are indie games they have massive multiples more hundreds hundreds of

37:42times more people playing these games. Um, so yeah, I think the question is the answer is slightly unsatisfying. Yes, it's easier to make the games now, but it's easier for everybody. So now the ma it's a matter of can you make something that is not mediocre and that's always how the world works. I sent you a video last week, Greg, which was about this topic, which was about when any new thing starts, when any new industry starts or when any new thing becomes easy to make, mediocrity can win. So mediocrity can win when it starts when something new starts. So right at this moment now that everybody

38:24can AI vibe code games, there's just going to be a low big flood of stuff that might be able to win. But in the end, once things calm down, once the dust settles, the craft, the good ideas, the interesting ideas will still break through, I believe. Um, and the crappy knockoffs won't break through as much. So, I'm still I'm very positive about the indie game market. Um, I love it. I

38:51love the democratization of the tools. Um, even with all the challenges, one pet peeve I have is when people say, "Well, now that anyone could build anything, there's no opportunity." And that's just, it's just frankly, yeah, it's silly. It's really a silly way to think about it. Um, I saw today that Apple's App Store has added about 560 new apps in the first half of 2026, which is double the roughly 280,000 released a year earlier as AI coding

39:25tools have lowered development barriers. Nonetheless, downloads grew 2%. So if you create apps, if you create games, if you create software and it's high quality and you can figure out how to spread the word like in an interesting story, um like there needs to be a a reason why people want to share it with their friends. There needs to be a, you know, the experience needs to be high quality. Um and there needs to be like a why now for this game. You have to be able to answer that question. But if you do and have all those things, there is opportunity

40:05in all these things. I mean, look, everyone can make music now. Everyone can make uh like production quality music that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Bad Bunny and Bad Johnny over here. And yet, why are there still breakout artists? Why does that why does that still happen? You still it's it it it all still boils down to the same fundamentals of you still have to make something that just hits with the audience. You still have to put the hard work in. That's why I don't think a lot of these in like vibecoded indie games are working but because a lot of them

40:39are just pumped out and they're kind of crappy and they're not fun to do and the authors of these games are just like well I was able to make a game so therefore I have an indie game. I mean, if you look at the most popular indie game of the last three or four years, it was a game called Silk Song 2 or Hollow

40:57Knight 2. That took seven years to make. And this team was developing this during a time where these tools were now available. It's still hard to make things that people really want and it's hard to tell the story around it. I mean, Greg, what you just said, you know, do you know about a flip phone that people are talking about at the moment? Have you heard about a flip phone that someone that people are

41:20talking about on X? The light phone. Yeah, you're you know the name of it. There are 17,000 other flip phones that have been released in the last year. Why do you know about that one? Well, first of all, the brand. Mhm. Like the brand tells a story. Makes me feel something. Yep. Um I've never played with the product at all, so I don't know if the product's

41:43good, but the brand, the story, right? Like that's the thing, you know, that's sort of like the big aha moment I've had recently is like in a world where you can build anything this like we're almost like film directors now. Um, a great film has like a plot and ups and downs and there's a reason why it exists. And um, you know, I made one documentary on AI once actually and uh, before I made it, I I asked a a great documentary filmmaker what his advice to me was. And he said, "All great documentaries begin with a question and then by the end you get the

42:23answer." And I thought that was really smart. And I think like that just goes to show you that he was thinking about a film with like a beginning, a middle, and end. And I think a lot of people are creating products now and they're not thinking about the beginning, middle, and end. They're not thinking about the brand. They're not thinking about the whole story it tells. They're not thinking

42:45about how it should make people feel. And that's why they're putting out apps and no one's downloading it. Or they're putting out games and no one's downloading it. It's not that there's no opportunity. It's just the bar has gotten higher and story is more important than ever. Yeah. I mean, there's always going to be outlier examples like WhatsApp, you know, where someone just comes up with a pure technical product. There's no story

43:13around it. There's no brand around it. It explodes. Whatever. There's always going to be the outliers. Well, WhatsApp WhatsApp won because at the time Well, first of all, the name WhatsApp is actually insane. What's that? Like, it actually is good. It's It's so bad it's good. Yeah, it's it's so bad it's good. WhatsApp, too. I'm going to make that

43:34website. So, that's one. And then two, uh, at the time like long distance calls cost money and you were able to you download WhatsApp because you can actually call for free. So there was like a huge pain point that was solved and it was like a business model thing. That's why WhatsApp won. It didn't win because it was like it told the best story or whatever, but it I mean I guess it told the best story. It told a good story around, hey, if you want to save money and have free phone calls, use WhatsApp. And then people would be like,

44:09WhatsApp? What is it? What did you say? No, no, it's WhatsApp. And then they would go into their app store, download it, and the rest is history. Sold for $20 billion. A nice 20 bill. By the way, some speaking of 20 bill, this is like incredible. Someone called at Tired Boss just gave the stream $10 and said, "What? I didn't even know you could do

44:32that." Yeah. On YouTube. Hey, give us more money. But I don't I I didn't understand. Like, so tired boss, please please give I'm happy to give feedback on your product, but it says, "Can you look at my project?" And I I literally don't understand it. He, you know, he's like, "Slickfast JSON JSON in deterministic PNG out. No

44:53browser. Just give feedback on it. just give feedback on that. My feedback is I don't understand. You need a oneliner that your mother can understand, you know. Um, and wait, your mother wouldn't understand. Slick, fast, JSON in deterministic SVG, PNG out, no browser, pure in memory, 15 something use a render. I mean, it's kind of like what we were talking about, right? Like we need a you need a story. You need a

45:16story. Um, should we answer a couple more questions before Yeah, I mean I'm I'm delighted to answer questions. I think it's super fun. Thank you guys for posting your questions as well. Okay, we got a this is a question I think you would be great to answer this. Oh, no. Because it's a European talking about growing growing an audience. So, as a uh Antoine X says, "As a French indie hacker sharing AI experiments and small apps on X, how should I think about audience growth? Should I focus more on English content or is there value in staying in French? Any frameworks that have worked

45:58for others and non US builders? Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of people ask me this because I live in Germany. Um, and a lot of people, especially when we were starting our business here, I started my business in Germany. I'm originally from Ireland. Um, my gut feeling in the beginning was well, first of all, I'm native native English, so it just made it easier for me. But I just wanted to have the largest possible audience. And uh English is sort of just the a language that uh people in non-English-speaking countries also read in and listen to as you are right now in France watching

46:40this uh video live stream. So for me, I automatically recom uh kind of lean toward recommending uh making your content in English. However, it's also possible to start in your language and then expand out to English once you've sort of figured out your message and what's working locally for you. Um, you know, we didn't uh in my company, we didn't start advertising outside of Berlin uh until maybe year three of running AJ and Smart. So, we were actually doing everything locally here in Berlin until we started to, okay, we're going to expand this now. We're going to turn on ads. Um, so I do think it is possible to go from your local

47:23language to your local kind of story to expand to English. You just need to kind of be comfortable with that switch happening one day. Um, but yeah, if you stick to your if you stick to French, you'll I mean the clear challenge is that you will then be limited just to France. So, I'm not European, but I understand this pretty intimately because I grew up in Quebec. In Quebec, people speak French, but it's, you know, I grew up 40 miles from the US border. So, um, and, you know, 80 miles from the Ontario border or something like that. So, um, there was a constant question around do you

48:04build a business in French or do you build it in English bigger market? There's pros and cons of both. Yes, you're limited by your market, but you also could have like a little monopoly on your market as well. So, um if you're going to go and create content in English, um you're competing against everyone. But if you're going to go create content in French, you're just competing with a lot less people. So, uh my advice to you is to think about creating a account as you're creating a character. and this character. You know, we talked about brand and story. So, you're going to have brand and story

48:45associated with them. You're going to have the type of content you're going to create uh for for this account. And I would start with French content, like JC is saying, start with French. Get good at at that type of content. And really just serve that audience re, you know, to the best that you possibly can. Grow

49:06is grow until you can't grow anymore. And then I would say, can you, you know, once once you feel comfortable with it, once you're you're starting to get bored with it, honestly, then it's like, does this work in an in English? And that's when I'd move to English. I will say this, the platforms are getting so good at um translation now that it it I hesitate to even say start in French because on Instagram now you have live translation. Uh on YouTube now you have live translation. On X now it's it's it's translated. Um, so, um, I would just, but I still think like you're

49:48probably most comfortable with French. So, just start in French, then move your way to English, etc., and create new and a new account for that. Wow, people are like giving money to to to us. We have Content Vibio on YouTube just gave us $2. Hell yeah. We have Quazar Music who just gave $5. My question is, is it a good is it is it a good investment to spend money on super chats to get a YouTuber to answer your question? Well, I'm here answering your question, so I think it's pretty

50:18pretty good. Awesome. It's a it a non-crowded market, so it actually is a good arbitrage right now because Yeah. Actually, it's kind of funny because I mean, we obviously are not going to unless you send us like a million dollars. Oh my god. Tired boss. Tired boss just sent $20. Oh, what are we going to do with all this money?

50:39Uh, buy um beverages. Buy beverages. Sip sip on other things. Okay. Tired boss says, "Slickfast, a render core with 47 chart types made for agendic work. Uh, made for agentic workflows. No headless Chrome or dependency dependencies. Create live embedded dashboards with agents. One dashboard is one render. Retina less than 200 KB. Free and open source. MCP. Do you know

51:07what that is? I I don't, but I'm not a I don't know. I don't understand what that means, but I'm also not a techie. I don't know. I I don't have a clue. Do you? I mean, I have a basic idea. It's just basic. It's helping helping people create like live dashboards for with agents basically is what he's saying. And it's an open it's open source. My recommendation would be like

51:36writing, hey, here's here's the problem. Here's how my thing solves it better than how other people solve it and having like the human customer problem written first. I I think what you're maybe the challenge here is that you're writing technical things. I don't know what a headless Chrome means, but it sounds like some horror movie stuff, but and I like it. But um yeah, I think what it needs is just like what it what does a human do with it? It's a new render

52:05core. What does that mean? I don't know. Yeah, I think uh show don't tell. So I think if I was creating this website for Slickfast, I imagine like six images of just like show me the most beautiful dashboards that you know possible, right? just like before slick fast after slick fast before before after before after before after and I think then it's like connect your MCP let's go um so but thanks for the $20 I really do appreciate that yeah um people are asking you how are you successful without being technical I just saw that um I just don't Yeah I guess the Okay, I'll do the nice answer

52:52and then I'll do the kind of funny answer. I'm not running technical companies. So, I guess uh I don't need to I know how to use computers. I know how to set up like, you know, uh like a a studio. I can use these AI tools, but I'm not um I'm not running a tech company. Uh so, I guess that's the

53:13boring answer. I run small businesses. Um and I sell You can you can go and see the companies that I run. None of them are technical at all. Uh so yeah, I just don't really have any uh need to be technical. But it's it's interesting if someone thinks you have to be technical to be successful because I think many many very wealthy people don't have a clue about anything technical. They're just good at bringing people together, solving the problem for the customer, then finding developers, finding the technical people, making that happen. Um, but yeah, I'm I'm not doing anything uh very technical to be

53:54honest. Yeah, I actually think uh there was this narrative recently around uh you don't you don't need to be technical anymore. Um because in a world where you can just prompt AI to do technical things, like why would you need to be technical? And my take is yes, you're no longer manually writing code. But I do believe that the people who understand like system architecture and just the general primitives around APIs, MCPs, you know, tech like certain tech stacks like those people I do think have a advantage over non-technical people. um you know if you understand basic security, if you understand, you know, basic data structures. So I think

54:41that if I was creating like a computer science school in 2026, I think I would try to just like explain those m major concepts and then how you can use AI agents to go and build you stuff. That doesn't mean you can't be successful if you're non-technical, but I do think that it's worth learning a bunch of those skills and and you're kind of pro you're probably underelling yourself, JC. like you probably do understand a

55:04lot of those concepts at a basic level. Yeah, I'm I the start of my career was building websites in HTML and CSS and I know how to I I am when I'm using cloud code and have it all set up locally. I can I can do all that stuff. I can make all that happen. But I would never say like I was I didn't understand what the the guy meant by render core for example. I I I genuinely I could have pretended that I knew, but I genuinely

55:33don't know what that means at all. [laughter] You thought it was like a Yeah. Like a a music genre like off metal or something? Is that like a new genre of music? You listen to render core? Whoa. Render core is coming to Berlin. [laughter] But I think a lot of people listening to your listening to this right now should understand that people like me running multiple businesses. Um we're I am not super techsavvy, right? As in I'm probably one of the more techsavvy CEOs that I know in my world. Um you and I compared to you guys watching this, I probably know nothing technically compared to what you guys are talking

56:18about. And so it also shows you the opportunities that there are to sell uh services to small businesses. Some somebody posted in the chat um about you know would I know how to set up an agent in chat GBT. Um I don't even I'm not even sure right I'm not even sure I know uh exactly the right way to do these things. And so yeah, there's a lot of uh people in my world, the sort of CEO world, uh who who are like just like me and and don't really know the and and and al also not really keeping up with all the stuff that's happening. You

56:54know, sometimes I'll just go offline for six months and not know all the models. I don't know what's going on. Greg knows all this stuff. Uh but and I ask him I like literally the only reason I started using Fable and again I'm a CEO of multiple companies. The only reason I started using Fable Claude to check out Fable was because I was talking to Greg

57:16and I was like so what's what is Fable? Like what's the difference between that and Opus and he was like it's way better. And then then I started using it. Right. This is the level I'm at. Um I think we know that you know just moments ago you you called it key. You called it Kiwi.

57:34Oh. Uh, wait. Now I know what it is. It's not Kiwi. It's Kimmy. Kimmy. Kimmy. Guys, you're all in a bubble. That's a good thing. It's the same in my world. So, in my world, in what? So, my business, facilitator.com, all of the people working in facilitator.com, think everybody in the world knows about facilitation and design thinking and all of this stuff. And then we meet anybody outside of our bubble and they're like, "What the hell is that?" And it you you always think, "Oh, there's going to be a point where everyone knows about this and everyone in the world just understands it." But yeah, not everybody

58:10is even interested in this topic of AI. Uh but a lot of a lot of people need to know about it or need to have the services given to them. Um, so don't if you're if you're on X, you think everyone knows all this stuff and then you meet a normal a normie like me and

58:27I'm like, Kiwi? What's Kiwi? All right, I want to uh I see on the uh YouTube chat someone says using Naval clickbait is not cool. I agree it's not cool. We just been answering everyone's questions. Um, so we'll get into the Naval thing. Um, and then so we're gonna we're gonna we'll we'll still answer a few questions, so keep the questions going, but from for now we're just gonna just talk about some of the most interesting things that we've seen on the timeline. We're going to react to it live. Um, how does that sound, Greg? Do you mind if I just go and make my camera a little bit brighter? It's

59:09getting Yeah, it's getting so dark here. I'm like in a little dungeon. Give me a sec. I'll be right back.

59:22Oh, wow. We got a $5 $5 donation. Thank you. Please judge my slogan. Shipley, publish any app in one call. Backend included. No surprise bill. Uh, I find like these short sentences to be like AI fililled. Um, how can you write this in five or six words or less? So, Shipley, um, the world's best platform to publish any

59:54app. Something like that. Cool. You're back. I'm back. Um, all right. I'm going to I'm going to hit play on this uh naval um video. Basically, Naval has deleted his calendar. He's apparently ghosting everyone and he refuses to be anywhere at a specific time. He talks about this in this video with Chris Williamson. Let's watch the video and

1:00:22I'm curious what you think about it. I read a uh I let me I don't know if you can actually hear it. Read a blog post by uh P Mark aka Mark Andre where he said, "Don't keep a schedule." and I took that to heart. So, I deleted my calendar and I don't keep a schedule. I try to remember it all in my head. If I can't remember it, I'm not

1:00:44going to add you here on time. Yeah, exactly. Um, I had to look things up at the last minute. Uh, so, but ironically, I don't even know if Mark himself follows that, but he made the correct point. Uh, I read a little story about Jack Dorsey doing all his business off his uh, iPhone and iPad and not even going into a Mac and I said, "Okay, I want to do that." So, I'm going to operate through text messaging and I put up my nasty email. Does that

1:01:07feel like more freedom? It does. Yeah, cuz you're on the go. Um, so I have a nasty email autoresponder that says, "I don't check email and don't text me either, [laughter] right? If you need to find me, you'll find me." Obviously, some of this is a luxury of success. But some of these habits I adopted long before actually. The hostile email autoresponder started a long time ago. [laughter] Um, I used to own the domain. I let it go. I don't do coffee.com. I used to reply from that email [laughter] uh just so people would get the point. But I stopped being rude about it. Now I just

1:01:35ghost. I just disappear. Um, my wife knows not to ever uh book or schedule me for anything. Uh, I'm not expect [laughter] I'm not expected to go to couples dinners. I'm not expect to go to birthdays. I'm not expect to go to weddings. If somebody tries to rope her into having me show up, she says he makes his own decisions. You got to ask

1:01:53him directly. What about vice versa? Well, are you not killing serendipity in a way, Dad? No. No. I'm freeing up all my time. So, my entire life is serendipity. I get to interact with whoever I want, whenever I want, wherever. hear the envir. So, what do you think? This got the internet really upset. And what do you

1:02:10think? What do you think about this? Okay. First of all, I think people are not actually upset. They're just doing the Twitter thing and trying to like I I think the thing on X that really irritates me sometimes is people will watch this and of course the obvious take is well this guy's an [ __ ] and of course this guy's a like an idiot and he's he's just irritating people and he's stuck up and all of that. Of course, of course that's like the most basic take imaginable. Um my take I just

1:02:41I hate that kind of take personally. It's just not I don't find that interesting. There's zero nuance for me. This take first of all this person the context is this person is insanely wealthy uh essentially retired uh doesn't have to do anything for anybody and so the way he's living his life now probably makes sense and if he wants to live like that and the people around him are fine with it who gives a [ __ ] that's fine. Um, I don't I think when people see something like this, they think, "Oh, well, well, he's telling me I have to live like this, and if I lived like

1:03:16that, my friends would be annoyed, and my wife would never allow me to be like this." Yeah, it's it's everybody can live life the way they want, and then they can deal with the consequences, right? So, first of all, I just want to say that I think that people are taking that clip going just trying to engagement farm it by saying that this guy's a douchebag because that's like correct thing to say. The correct thing to say on X right now is to say that this is bad. What he said is bad. This is just terrible. It's arrogant. But I my take on this is um you you shouldn't obviously take that

1:03:54as advice unless you're already so wealthy and so finished with your career that you you can kind of play by those rules. There are different rules for different levels of your career. And in the in the very beginning of my career, if I had just like been a little loosey goosey with my calendar and decided you can't, nobody can contact me, all of that. I mean, I I wouldn't have gotten anywhere because people would have just hated me. And so, I think that the if you use your brain, you understand, hey, this is where I am in my career. And so therefore this is where this is the

1:04:29allowance window that I have to be a bit sloppy or a bit like uh you know forgetting to reply to people or whatever it is. This is that allowance window where my value to other people is you know at a certain level where they can they can be a bit flaky with me. For example, you know, I I spend time with entrepreneurs uh who are so much more successful than me. And yeah, sometimes they just kind of forget to respond or sometimes they turn up late to something. But I also understand at the same time that they've been like flying around the world doing running four

1:05:04businesses. They already finished their career. They don't need to be doing any of this. And I'm just kind of a small part of their puzzle. And I don't get offended by it. I know other people do. I don't I I I don't care. I'm like this, it's cool. I get to hang out with this person sometimes and sometimes they just forget I exist. That's the game. That's how it is. Um I don't care that Naval is like this. I'm not like that necessarily even though I'm terrible at getting back to messages. That's another story. Um I think that but you know what I think what people don't realize is that you

1:05:37can look at that and you can take little bits out of it that are actually useful. Like for example, the bit that I find useful there and it's why my podcast is called the unscheduled CEO. I think that having less things in your calendar allows a lot more space to say yes to things spontane spontaneously that excite you. He talks about this idea of just do thing some if something hits you that's exciting, do it while you're excited about it. Make the video while you're excited about it. Write the blog post while you're excited about it. I think that spontaneity thing is amazing and I think that's what I take from this

1:06:12video. If there's anything you should take from my take of this video is stop watching things and having someone's sentence about how this person is bad or how this person's a douche or because they don't follow anyone, whatever. Look at the thing and just say this is the bit I'm taking out of it. Who gives

1:06:30about who gives a [ __ ] about the person? Who gives a [ __ ] about all of this? And the reason you're angry is because you don't want other people to treat you like that. And just admit it and stop being so naughty on X. I like how you think about it. So you're you're basically saying, uh,

1:06:49successful people are extreme. And if you think about successful people, um, you put them on like a spectrum. They're at the the left end and the right end. You're basically saying, "Hey, don't uh copy exactly how this person lives their life because a big re reason they're successful is because they're extreme in some in some way. However, there's a uh nugget of insight potentially with what he is saying, which is basically like, hey, if you actually uh want to be creative and you actually um want, you know, space for deep work, you might need an empty calendar. He's also saying potentially he, you know, he's sort of

1:07:36post-economic. He's also kind of saying, I like my life to be not scheduled. So like that's another like how can we be like that is ridiculous right like people need to you know Naval is in charge of Naval JC is in charge of JC and Greg is in charge of Greg therefore we should live our lives based on that being you said I'm in charge of you said that I'm in charge of you actually you are in charge of me you know in some way in some way um I would say uh what I didn't like about what he was saying was when it came to personal people, he wasn't

1:08:14calendaring, you know, like his wife and stuff like that. It's like, what are you going to do, you know, for date night, you know, you're you're just going to like hopefully remember that you have to show up at 7 p.m. here? His wife can decide if that's okay for her. She, you know, she's not a, you know, hostage in his house. So, I I just think that people can decide these things for themselves and yes, if they happen to be on a podcast and talk about it, everyone has their hot take about it. Did anyone talk to his wife and see if she has a really big problem with

1:08:45this? Exactly. You know what I mean? Probably not. Probably not. Yeah. So, that's where I'm at with this. I think uh it was interesting to see. Um I agree. I think that if you have whites space, uh, especially in the AI age, it's helpful to it's helpful to do interesting creative work. And I think people got really mad at this because he explained an extreme point of view. But yeah, um, there you go. That's my take on this concept. Uh, I I love this concept from a guy called Derek Civers. It's called overcompensate to compensate. And his idea is sometimes when you want to change something about your life, you

1:09:26actually have to go to the most extreme version of it or else you'll kind of keep coming back to the old way you did it. So for example, if your life as a business owner is just meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting and you're like, I want to reduce the amount of meetings I have and I want to have more strategic time. What most people will do is like I'm reducing it by 50% or by 20%. But if you really want to make the change, sometimes you have to go hardcore. I'm not doing meetings anymore ever again. I'm putting my foot down. It's over. You watch everything

1:09:59fall apart. You watch everything break around you. And then eventually your normal self comes back and you find the real true middle ground. So you really find where you really want to be. And I think what the value of watching someone like Naval who's on the extreme end and again remember we're talking about someone who's probably a multi-billionaire he's not us all right this is a totally different breed of person he is showing us the absolute extreme end what from how much of that we go and you know add to our lives we can choose ourselves we can make that choice ourselves and I think a lot of people react to these

1:10:40things and get angry again because they feel, hey, I am annoyed that this person has the audacity to think that he can just choose to do whatever he wants to do whenever he wants and he has no obligations to people, but I have to go and pick up my kid from school every day. I pick my kid up from school and I also bring her to school and it's so goddamn early and I wish it wasn't that

1:11:01early, but you know what? That's life. JC, what's one what's one extreme thing that you do that's sort of like this that uh people would think is kind of crazy? Well, I think the the biggest thing is probably that I do not really have anything. So, when somebody reaches out to me and and you can probably attest to this and they want me to come on their show or they want to have a meeting or they want to do something uh business related, I always say, "Hey, this sounds really fun, but I don't really want to schedule things more than one week in advance because I don't I want to be

1:11:40able to decide based on my mood when the next week comes up, see what see what's happening. I want to have that freedom. I don't want to have that blocked in my calendar already. So, I ask people kindly, I ask them, "Can we talk about it next week instead?" And so, I I try to get people to um book things very close to the time that we would hang

1:12:00out. Okay. Nava. No, no, no. I don't want to be the one who's on the, you know, the new ex thing. This guy, he's he's a narcissist. What does your fiance think about that? She I think she she likes the spontane the the advantage that she gets is then you know on a Tuesday if we're like let's not go to work let's do something else then we can do that because I won't have had booked the meeting a week in advance you know what I mean cool she hates it [laughter] she's she's in tears right now she's in the oh in the chat uh Jonathan

1:12:43Courtney's fiance is just crying emoji. [laughter] We're not saying fiance anymore. That word that word is banned. We're saying future wife. It sounds cool. Sounds good. All right. So, that was that was uh Naval. I think we both uh agree on it. People chill out on the timeline. Um and uh let's go to the next

1:13:06tweet. Um, all right. Let's go to Let's see. Okay, we're gonna we'll go to this one for a quick one here. Uh, Jonathan Courtney J Ice Cream says, "Any other guys eat standing up at the kitchen counter when they're alone at home?" I I just want to know like when my future wife, she's currently on a trip and she asked me as a joke. She was like, "Are you going to be uh she she was she messaged me and I was like, I'm having dinner." And she said, "Are you standing at the kitchen counter watching YouTube videos?" Uh, and I was like, "Yes, that's actually the way I that's

1:13:51the way I have dinner. When I'm home alone, I have dinner. I make the dinner. I just put it straight on the plate and I eat standing." exactly where I made it and there's like my laptop is just in the middle of all the food prep and I'm just watching stuff. I don't even make it to the couch. I'm just standing right there. And I was chatting to some friends about it and they were like I do the exact same thing. One of my colleagues says he he eats directly from the standing at the fridge with the fridge door open just eating stuff straight from the fridge. And and then I

1:14:23was like, "Holy [ __ ] this is actually a thing that that a lot of guys do." Now, I know we've had a little wrinkle in the statistics because um Ashley also on your team says she does this. Um but yeah, so it's not it doesn't seem to just be a guy thing, but I feel I thought this was something me and the boys had as as our special thing, but I think it's a global phenomenon. So, [laughter] I mean, I'm trying to get some nugget of of interestingness from this extreme take that you have. Um, to me it's like why aren't Okay, I I accept that you're

1:15:02standing up at the kitchen counter when you're alone at home. But why wouldn't like why wouldn't you just sit down if there's a chair right there? Because I'm kind of like absentmindedly sitting down feels like it's too serious and I'm kind of like absent-mindedly just eating and thinking about other stuff and sort of doing other things. And I don't know, when I'm home alone, I kind of are very chaotic. There's I start lots of different things around the apartment and I'm like, "Oh, I'm just going to eat this while I'm doing

1:15:32Yeah. I don't know. I should sit down." But it feels too official. You know what it is? I want to I want to be bad. I want to be like I'm going to I'm going usually, you know, my life I, you know, my daughter's there, we're all there together, and I'm sitting at the table, we're all eating. I want to be a dirty, grungy caveman, food dropping all over me. I

1:15:54just want to experience the filth. And that you do, that you do, and you're alone. You You enjoy it. Um, and I I respect you for it. However, I'm going to take the other side of this. I think sitting down leisurely uh you know watch YouTube watch YouTube do whatever you want need need to do when you're sitting down but there's nothing like a good sit a leisure sit while you're sitting is great yeah that's that's my take a load off is underrated but uh yeah you do your thing my friend you do your thing someone wrote I'm high-rung neurotic and anxious absolutely Okay. Um, I did a massive tweet uh which

1:16:46we're not going to go into all the all all my points here, but went completely viral yesterday and I basically wrote out like 20 points around like what is happening in the world of AI. Let me get this straight. Agents are about to outnumber humans. Super intelligence exists now. And for $20 a month, you pretty much get it all. You can run a business with cloud agents and you know

1:17:09it it goes 247. Voice AI is wide open. Um and voice AI is finally getting good enough. Mobile apps are interesting again enough for the first time in 10 years because um now you can create AI first apps. Things like Cal AI which I think sold for like hund00 million. It's the golden age of open source yada yada yada. There's just so many things that are happening right now that uh make

1:17:34this an incredible time to be building. This person responded and said, "Bro, no one is making money with AI. The only concept is to sell it or show someone else how to use it. No one is generating alpha or income using any of the tools. It's all slop with no customer or distribution. Literally caps lock. zero. It has to change rapidly or it's all dead in his opinion. So, this is you got hosed. And then I went to his his description. It's the devil's advocate, which is unsurprising, but 70 people like this reply. So, I assume a lot of people feel this way. What are your

1:18:18thoughts? Yeah. Well, well, so um first of all, I just devil's advocate people who are proud devil devil's advocate um types are always challenging to be around and just if you're an entrepreneur and you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to have a business, uh it's not a it's not a great stance to take. Now, now I'm not

1:18:41saying this person's stance is wrong. I'm just saying that that mindset is not a great optimism is like kind of the thing you need to be to to be because you need to be a little bit delusional because you're like I'm going to build this thing. Other people have built it before but I'm going to make the best version of it. So anyway, separate thing. Um so [laughter]

1:19:00so this is obviously not a real person. I guess this is kind of a we don't know. We actually do not know. It's unconfirmed. But what I will say is that I see these comments a lot. Um, there's this guy on uh X and on YouTube, a guy called, I think, Alex Finn, and he talks a lot about AI stuff, and every video underneath his video, it's like, "Bro, what the hell is it? You're not making any money. What's the point of all of this stuff?" Um, so I think that when there is a new market or when there's a new uh thing, there's like truth in the

1:19:35[snorts] statement like this where there's of course a lot of pointless stuff that's just like cluster [ __ ] you know, people teaching people to teach people to teach people to teach people sort of thing. Um, however, in the background, quietly, you know, all these LLMs love to use the term quietly. I I posted that today. quietly in the background. I mean, companies like mine and a lot of my competitors and entrepreneur friends, I mean, we're using these tools uh hours every single day to run our revenue generating businesses, but we're not out there saying, "Hey, here's the it's it would be like us saying, "Hey, um you know, we

1:20:18made 500k this month selling these these things to this client. Oh, and by the way, um going to the corporate client and saying, "Hey, do you know that we used Base Camp to project manage the project that we used here when we were actually working on this with you? And do you know that we use Gmail?" Uh so yeah, we're not people are just not

1:20:38talking about the tools they're using. Um I think it's uh I So what's your point? What's your point? My point is that I don't really know a small business right now that's not using AI in some way as almost like supplemental uh research junior employees and all of this is contributing to the bottom line revenue. So I just don't agree with the statement that it's not making money. Uh maybe he means something else or

1:21:09something. Okay, so the statement of bro no one is making money with AI objectively wrong. First of all, the big labs of course are making money with AI. Enthropic. I don't have the latest numbers, but like it's like the fastest growing company of all time. Then you have startups. So you know all these different startups in a million

1:21:37different categories. Harvey for legal. Uh you have all the like sales AI stuff. You have uh you know people building MCPs and and things like that. There's a ton of people building apps that focus on the AI ecosystem that are making money. Now it is very very popular to this to for this to be the rebuttal. And even in chat I see people h are talking about this. the only way to make money with AI is to sell it or show someone else how to use it. That is literally not not true. Like he's basically saying like, oh, the people who are making money in AI are course

1:22:16people. Um, yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of people selling courses making money with AI, but the vast majority of AI revenue is coming from either the big labs apps built on top of it. Um, and and I think that like when you when when you see stuff like this, it's just it's it's that pessimistic energy that if you're an entrepreneur, it it's, you know, it's not going to slow you down because you look at this and you kind of laugh, but, you know, it's definitely uh important to, you know, from a content diet perspective not to follow people like this. Like I don't hate to I hate

1:22:59to pick on this particular individual, but like you know if you're an entrepreneur and you're building out there, like don't look at don't look at stuff like this and be like there's no opportunity because there is opportunity. Um there's always opportunity and um of course there's going to be grifting always. There's always going to be grifters and there's always going to be people who um are selling info that isn't good and and things like that. But at the same time, it is absurd the amount of ideas that could work right now. Someone in the chat says um how do you you know like what's the moat in a

1:23:41business basically if anyone can copy a product? Um, so that is definitely like a new like something you have to defend against is that like in a world where you you're you h you're going to get 5 10 15 copycats like how do you win? And the way you win is through a lot of what

1:24:00we talked about brand distribution edge. um being ahead of the competition by creating value and like the customer knows to work with you because you're always one step ahead of the competition. So you constantly have to reinvent yourself. You constantly have to invest in brand story marketing, but uh there's opportunity out there. So

1:24:24you got hosed. I disagree. You got hosed. You got hosed. Um, a bunch of people are saying, "What about Hermos's latest video about AI?" I haven't seen that that video, so I'm not sure. Either. Um, can I just say one thing about uh and a perfect like uh parallel to this is okay, Facebook ads or ads in general, ads in general. You can buy courses, consulting, all of this sort of stuff on ads. So, I can buy a course on

1:24:59how to run Facebook ads, for example. And I did back in the day when we were trying to figure them out. You can buy courses on how to run Google ads. You can hire professionals to teach you how to do it and come in and consult you. Um it's it it's it would be like saying, "Oh, because there's so many people trying to teach this thing that this thing actually just isn't real and doesn't work." Whereas entire industries

1:25:25and businesses exist because ads exist. [laughter] Um, and ads basically run um all of YouTube and all so many platforms and so many companies u make a huge amount of their money because ads exist. So, if you want to just say, "Okay, AI is a AI is a scam, um, and no one's making money from it," because you're seeing sort of the, um, you know, the rush to teach it and the rush to to get the information out there to other people. Um, and I guess, you know, there have been examples where that kind of wasn't where that didn't work out well. For example, something like NFTTS I think would be a good where

1:26:10people are almost like putting them in the same uh world. I I would not put these two things in the same world even though both explode and people talk about them on X. NFTs were inherently speculative, collectibles, kind of like gambling kind of feeling, whereas this is like an infrastructural thing in the way that advertising uh is and uh and the internet and whatever. So yeah, I I don't know. I get what people are trying to say, but I think it's again people being angry online always gets the most

1:26:46attention. Yeah, totally. And to be honest, like I I feel like there's a bunch of accounts like this that just basically take the anti version of popular posts. [snorts] Yeah. And they use a He's funny. He probably used AI to write this 100%. I don't think this is a real I I Well, I don't know. Maybe it's a real

1:27:08account. But I did get hosed. Yeah. Um All right. Oh my right. Let's let's move on to another another take. Um, let's go on to this one. Brian Dean, you actually Brian Dean, you actually Who is Brian Dean and and why did you send me this tweet? This So, Brian Dean, he used to do a lot of content. I think he's the owner of a lot of different companies. I think one of them is called backlinks.io or something. Um, but I used to just follow him because he was a someone making entrepreneurial content that I used to I think he also had an SEO uh

1:27:49channel on YouTube. Oh yeah. And this is the Brian This is the Brian Dean from Exploding Topics. I know this Brian Dean. He's awesome. That's the Brian Dean. I can't even I can't even remember the video I sent you, but you want me to pull that up? Yeah. Could you pull it up? I can't remember why I thought it would be interesting to talk about. I'll have to watch it separately, right? it cuz uh

1:28:11wants to grow their business. Productivity is one of the last things that you should be worried about. Let's say that you start meditating it just cuz I What' you say? Did you say something? No, I I didn't say anything. If you're an entrepreneur that wants to grow their business, productivity is one of the last things that you should be worried about. Let's say that you start meditating and you increase your productivity by 10%. And then you start doing ice baths or whatever the hot

1:28:35thing is for another time. 20% more productive. And even if you were able to continue stacking these things together, the most you could ever be more productive is like 2 or 3x. And that's assuming you don't get burnt out from having to stick to this routine every single day. I hit a ceiling on my productivity and my business has stopped growing. And then I started to get burnt out because I was doing all this stuff without growing. So I decided to switch things up and instead of focusing on my productivity and what I could do, I started to focus on leverage and how I

1:29:05can use leverage to grow my businesses. Everything changed. I was able to sell my company for millions and then I launched a software company and grew that to millions from scratch. If you're an entrepreneur that wants to grow their So what are your thoughts? Yeah. So I I couldn't watch the video there because we have a different system. But I remember the general idea here is that first of all it's way more it's so many CEOs, so many entrepreneurs, you're completely lost in the world of productivity. They're like I they are optimizing the crap out of their

1:29:40productivity. I see this all the time. And I think AI has made that a thousand times worse. I talk about all that that all the time. people are building systems upon systems upon systems when they should just be thinking about what are the highest leverage things that I could be doing today. Um, and I think a really great question. So I basically I love the video and I think a really great question and it was Tim Ferrris who came up with this question um in his book Tools of Titans and it's if I could only work on my business for four hours a week, what would I do? And that

1:30:12teaches you what the highest priority things for your business are. Um whereas a lot of CEOs, they're like, "Okay, I get up at 5:00 a.m. I work out. I do this. I do this. I do this. I do this. I do this." And then you meet the other CEO who's like out of shape, doesn't sleep, drinks a lot, makes way more money. Why is that happening? [laughter] And so, yeah, it's it's because they're they're just working on and looking for the highest leverage thing uh to do. And I just don't think obsessing about productivity really does much in my in my opinion. We both know the most

1:30:49wealthy people we know are chaotic as [ __ ] and and they're not really taking care of themselves until after they become a billionaire or or more. So yeah, I think a lot of this advice comes from people who already got extremely rich and now they don't now they have the time to do a 10-hour workout every

1:31:04day. My take on this is productivity is actually super personal. So like what works for me might not work for you. For example, I find that I'm so productive in the mornings. So one hour in the morning is like six hours in the afternoon. So if that's the case, I like had to like frontload some of my mo most important tasks to the morning. Now I

1:31:31don't recommend that to other people. you know, you might not be a morning person, right? You might not be that. So, I'm not going to like go and say like, "Hey, you should be doing this." And I think that's the problem with a lot of this productivity advice is it's ve it's it's taking what is working for one person, maybe maybe to your point, like it might be after they're successful and it's uh it's telling other people that they should do it like, you know, and if they don't do it, they're not going to be successful. So my advice to people is don't listen to productivity advice. Um and just kind of

1:32:10I would say observe when you are being more productive and when you're being less productive. Take notes of that and just you know structure your days around tasks and and ways to make you more productive and that's different for everyone. Yeah. And what do you work on is a lot more important than how you work on it. So it doesn't really matter if you pick something really pointless to work on

1:32:37and you do it for super productively. Well, what's the point of it? And so I'd rather for if I had to choose, I'd rather do none of the productivity stuff and just do the things badly that give me the most leverage um in a week. And I think like, you know, we both uh also know people on the other side of it, Greg, where they're struggling their businesses for a long time. They're always talking about the their

1:33:08entrepreneurial journey. And then they think they have to get up at 7 a.m. or 6 a.m. and work out first so that they'll have the energy to be an entrepreneur. They have to meditate because that's the only they think they have to do these things. They think they have to have an ice bath, etc. You don't need any of these things. And in fact, most successful entrepreneurs in most cases, they're super healthy and jacked and doing all that stuff after the momentum is already started. Like, yeah, I you don't have to get too obsessed with these productivity productivity

1:33:42hacks to be honest, but they're fun. It's it's a fun it's actually like a something to do when you're if you're interested in procrastination. Yeah, exactly. Like that's the funny part. It's like the people who procrastinate the most love the productivity porn the most. Dude, 100% the problem is that there's so many entrepreneurs who make content uh who are they know that the most the content that they make that will have the most viewers is the stuff that's just about doing nothing related to actually running a real business. It's like here's my morning routine. uh it doesn't matter whether you go to the sauna or not in the morning if your

1:34:25business is not making money it will still not make money on that day you'll just be more sweaty um and so yeah I I don't know I I think I've also noticed that when I make content that's more around like for example this is my notebook and I have a note-taking system if I would make a YouTube video on my note-taking system it would get 10 times more viewers than my other ones but it's just not that it doesn't matter what my noteakes taking system is. That's just pointless. That's just fun. That's

1:34:53procrastination for me. I love it. All right, we're going to take a few more questions and then we're going to head out. Um I posted uh on X that we were going live and I got 127 people reply. I'm going to go uh just lightning f lightning round just go through this like you know really really quick. Um, JC, pipe in uh as as you see fit. All right, bullet points. I'll keep it bullet

1:35:23pointy. Brett Goldstein says, "What feature uh should we add or should we build next in our AI workspace productivity suite micro HQ? Here's what's coming. How am I supposed to answer that question?" Um, you know, I don't know. I don't know enough about the customer. Um, that being said, Brett is a homie. He's a friend of mine. I love you, Brett. What

1:35:49he's doing with Micro HQ is really cool. I just I think that in order to um build product, the best thing to do is get data on customer pain points. What you know, put it in a Google folder and then query LLMs to prioritize product ideas based on that. That's that's my that's my best bet for

1:36:11you. Um, Matty Mo, this is really interesting. So, Mattie Mo did does something. He said, "Please review my plan to manifest a creative developer program role at a frontier lab." And I think more people should do this. Basically, he um I don't know if it'll share my screen. Yeah, it won't share my screen, but uh the point when you click on here, he he basically created a post that says like I want a job at a Frontier AI lab. More people should do this. more people should like shoot their shot and say like this is my dream company help me make this happen and like people rally

1:36:50behind that. So shout out Mattie Moh on that. Very cool. I love that. Sah Bloom being humble. Be humble. Exactly. Sah Bloom says, "How would you most effectively use AI to rapidly test creative concepts and hooks for a fast growing profitable consumer brand?" So his company is called Wild Roman. Um, I actually bookmarked something in the space. I did an episode of the pod, right? Let's take a quick look at Alexi and how he as an editor is making uh a guy by the name of Payton uh showed how Alex Hermosi produces 300 pieces of ad creative per week with one editor. 80% AI, 20% human touch. And he talks about

1:37:34his stack for it. And this is what I would be using if I was Sahel Bloom. I would use Apify for scraping proven creative from meta ad library and organic. I'd have LLMs trained on firstparty data for scripting and copy. So, what has worked? What's the brand style? That sort of thing. I'd use Hyperframes and Premiere for

1:37:56post-prouction. Uh, I'd use Nano Banana uh or GPT2 image for statics and then meta and Google Analytics APIs for performance feedback. So, you create that loop. Um the flow looks the workflow looks something like this. A little here to be able to that's what I would be doing. The key with as you know JC the key with a report is you need sorry let me drag it over. You know, your goal is to create a vending machine, put in a

1:38:29dollar, $2 comes out. And a big part of that is having a huge volume of meta ads to understand for that. You actually have to hire an agency being able to produce a lot of this creative. The beauty is now just create something similar to this, right? Look at proven creative, compile the library, produce run of show, shoot the content, 10 hooks, post-production, create static images. Um, that's what the editor does and then you have the

1:38:59stack of supercharger stuff. Uh, but yeah, that is about it, guys. This is amazing. Hopefully this was as someone who had to get in front of the camera every week and record meta ads, which I hate doing by the way. Um, this is one of the rare cases where I could say AI just makes this process so much easier. And because you're not trying to create like evergreen beautiful content, you know, Christopher Nolan level, it's supposed to stand the test of time. No, you might actually literally just use this for like two days. Uh while Facebook like rips it apart and tells you whether or not it's

1:39:37good. Uh I think this is one of the rare cases where I think just volume is the thing. Volume of videos, throwing that into meta, seeing what it does with it. Um, and so this is a this is a case where the AI tools are absolutely amazing where I mean Facebook meta ads used to be this black box. So confusing, so crazy. And even just the fact that like claude co-work can now go and click around your, you know, meta ads dashboard, which is something that used to always drive me insane like how the

1:40:09hell do I just quickly check this thing? Um, that's just been a game changer for me, even though we have someone on on on the team who does it, just so I actually can see what's going on. Super cool. Let's do one more question. Um,

1:40:32let's see.

1:40:38Many people are saying this is the time for an AI consulting business for SMBs, but I feel like no one really acknowledges how to convince dinosaurs and business owners to actually listen to you and change their operations of way or way of doing things. I think that if you can prove value and create like an irresistible offer to people,

1:41:00even dinosaurs will transition. um one of the most so I run I run SMBs. I run three SMBs um small to mediumsiz businesses and um for some reason the the good news is everyone has always said hey this type of company they say the same thing about corporates they'll never be interested in this they're they're dinosaurs they'll never change I mean I liter I so facilitator.com the main business that I run we run largecale training for large old corporates we almost exclusively ly work with corporates and everyone has told us throughout the years you can't you can't do anything. They're dinosaurs. They're too old. They're too like it's you can't

1:41:48turn this big ship. Yeah. That that's just like a that's what people tell you because they're not actually trying it. So if you want if you want to make a AI automation consultancy that helps SMBs instead of having that little thing in your mind which again other non- entrepreneurs probably tell you just go and see if you can get one customer under it doesn't even you don't even have to start a business it can just be your name Stephen hey Stephen is coming in today to help us set up this automation for one of our admin tools do it once get paid for it get the

1:42:25confidence that this is something people want and is valuable and then next time try to do it uh you know for slightly more money or try to get more people that you can do that with. Um I would just ignore anybody's advice when they tell you this type of customer is hard to access. This is just what people say because they don't know how to do it and they may they want everything to sound

1:42:47difficult. This is just not true. Amen, brother. Okay, we have one last question from the chat. How did you guys get started? Oh, like in the in the womb or I think like just generally like business I guess in business and startups and tech like what was you know how were you how did you get started? I don't even know the answer to that question for you. I um all of these uh origin stories, by the way, are always they always sound really exciting, but the real versions of them is really not

1:43:25exciting. My one is not exciting. What is it? I I got I had a job as a UX designer straight out of college. Straight out of college, I wanted to be a filmmaker. A friend of mine who I went to college with, I went to design and film school kind of mix thing. Um a friend of mine was getting paid more than I was getting paid. So I asked him, "What are you doing?" and he was like, "I'm doing this thing called UX design." And we were we had learned design in school, but only

1:43:51web design. So, it was basically it was basically like in Wolf of Wall Street when Jonah Hill goes to Leonardo DiCaprio and he's like, "If you show me your paycheck that you make like $10,000 a week, I'll quit my job right now." And then that's what you did. Yeah. I was actually working I I was working on a film set um outside of Berlin and my friend was like I'm getting paid €480 euro per day. We were 202 I think I was 22. I was getting paid €500 per month to work on this film set because I was like a you know assistant of an assistant. And so I literally just

1:44:29changed career started reaching out to different companies in Berlin that were using uh looking for UX designers. Worked learned how to be a UX designer. did that for 6 months. Then one of the people in the company I was working with uh had another freelance job somewhere else. I uh helped him with that freelance job. The company said you can't send us two invoices. It has to be one invoice under a company name. And so we had to start the company. Uh and that was it. Basically from that day on we were AJ and Smart. And that was 16 years ago. So it was a very chaotic just very

1:45:05there was no like vision mission it was just following one thread to the next to be honest and that's usually what it is like following your curiosity I mean you kind of found a wave too like at the time UX designers like there was a a huge need for it websites conversion rate optimization stuff like that so that's just like also a lesson for I think a lot of us which is like asking yourself sometimes you don't need to be super smart just ask yourself what is where is the wave and then how can I ride that wave honestly that's what we do like to I never really want to say I

1:45:46don't want to sound like I'm just thinking about the money but yeah I mean I was getting I I I needed to make money I was broke I was 22 and my friend was making more per day than I was making per month and so I was like well I want to do that instead dead. Like that was as stupid as it sounds, that was the the

1:46:06origin. How about you? Um like I was always into computers as we used to call them back, you know. So, uh I, you know, built customize a computer and then I started building websites. Um, I built a blog around video games like when I was like maybe 13 or something and started, you know, selling things on eBay, um, stuff like that, building online communities. Um, and then it just I thought it was just so cool that you can press some buttons and like connect with other people on the internet, like out of my hometown across the world. Um, and uh, it felt like if you like video

1:46:54games, which I did and I do, you will like building internet businesses because it it just feels like a video game. 100%. Number go up. Exactly. So, this is green arrow pointing up. Like even this live stream like feels like a video game to me. Totally. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's You know what people The funny thing is, Greg. All right. I'm glad this is recorded because when you're insanely successful, like beyond you're like

1:47:25insane levels of success. What are you pointing at right now? You Greg, when you're in when you're even more successful, but you're and you're on like some famous podcast and you're like, "Yes, the reason was that my vision was to reach 17 billion people across the world." You know that people make up their fake story about how it all happened. I'm going to be like, Greg, no. It's cuz you like seeing

1:47:48number go up. Don't be ashamed of it. Leaderboards are fun. Period. [laughter] Leaderboards are fun. Um, Jonathan J. Ice Cream, Jceam, Shrimp Millionaire, Courtney JC, host of the Unscheduled CEO Podcast. Thank you for co-hosting with me. Uh, this has been fun. [clears throat] Um, folks, we don't know where this is going, but we've done three of these. Maybe we'll do some more. Um, let us know if you liked it, if you didn't like it. My DMs are open. Reply on Twitter, comment on YouTube, like on YouTube,

1:48:29subscribe. Uh, the Startup Ideas podcast, SIP Live. Hope you enjoyed it. Jonathan, any last words for the audience? Yeah, thank you so much guys uh for commenting and keep like honestly the show is so easy to do because all of your comments, we're reading them. They're feeding back into the show. Um this live format is very difficult to do if you don't have an audience that's giving you something. So yeah, I really appreciate uh being part

1:48:57of this. You guys are Greg's audience. Greg brought me here. I'm sort of just a an outsider. Also, not like super techy. So, I appreciate also the kindness in the comments about having someone not super technical here. Uh, I appreciate you all. I hope you have a great day and yeah, see you guys another time.

1:49:15Absolutely. Later.