You just hired a 1M+ bad employees (AI vs humans) - LIVESTREAM #2

0:15Oh, hello sir. You guys are live and we are live. Welcome to the second edition of SIP Live where we live stream ask answer your questions look at the timeline give up give you our takes. I'm your host Greg Eisenberg and I'm here with my co-host Jonathan Courtourtney. He's a shrimp millionaire from Berlin, originally from Ireland. Welcome to the

0:42show, sir. Hey, how's it going? Um, should we or shouldn't we explain what shrimp millionaire is? I feel like we had it last time and no one really noticed it. So, I feel like I think people just immediately were okay with it. That was the problem, [laughter] which was somewhat concerning. So, yes. They're like, "Yeah, this AI show and one of the guys on there is

1:07successful because of shrimp somehow." Exactly. So, how did you get the the nickname shrimp millionaire? Before we get into the AMA, before we get into the timeline takes, the people need to know. Look, two things happened. Number one, I was in San Francisco with you. We were at some AI event. You There was like lots of stuff going on. Um, after the event you were like, "Let's go to Benihana." If any of you guys know about Benihana, if you're in the US, you know about this thing. If you're not in the

1:38US, you need to learn about Benihana. Um, I'm living in Germany. I didn't know what that thing was. Uh, Greg and his team took me there. It's a hard to describe experience. It's kind of like a mixture of a show and food and they're throwing shrimp at you. And that's what happened. I got like I think at some point the guy like threw shrimp and I caught it in my mouth which is a normal thing to do at this thing and then I kind of I I really like shrimp. So that's where the shrimp thing came from, right? That that was it just locked on and then I was on Greg's show and myself

2:12and my team were watching it back just to see how it was and it was already on. and it was already live and he put underneath my name millionaire entrepreneur or whoever is editing his videos put millionaire entrepreneur as my title and I just found that so funny just as like it's so not on brand with me personally but I did find it very funny and so from now from that moment on which was about two weeks a two months ago my team also refer to me as millionaire entrepreneur and so now we brought them together for this show millionaire There. There we go. I'm the

2:49shrimp. I mean, I I think it's By the way, the comment section on YouTube was going wild about you being a millionaire or entrepreneur because they're like, "What does that even mean?" What I mean, I guess the Do you want to know what millionaire entrepreneur means? I can explain it if you want. my company make the companies that I run make more than

3:14$1 million. Uh, and the combined value of the yearly revenue is more than multiple millions and I'm the owner of all of them. So, I guess the I guess what it generally means is the net worth of the person. Um, but regardless, I don't want to be called a millionaire as in that. Don't start you guys in the audience. Don't start calling me a millionaire entrepreneur. That's that's just like a a fact. That's not my title. [laughter]

3:47Like that's not my job title. Yeah. I mean, I think what's interesting about you, especially like in the context of like we were in Silicon Valley and we were just around people who'd raised like so much venture capital. And what's cool about you, what I've always liked about you is you've done the whole bootstrap thing. You actually make millions of dollars. Yes. You don't make it from

4:07shrimp, per se. You know, you've got your design agency, you've got facilitator.com. Um, but uh anyways, I'm happy you're here. We're going to get right into it. Uh yesterday I posted um what's the one thing you'd ask me and my fellow shrimp millionaire over here if you had me on the phone and we got 139 responses. I'm going to go through you know three or four of them uh with you uh Jonathan uh right now and then at the end of the stream we're going to go through a few more and in the middle we're just going to go and talk timeline takes. So, um, how about I'm I'm going to scroll

4:50down. Which one? I want you to pick, uh, one of the replies and we can go into it. I can't actually see that. Okay. So, I'm I can go to the actual live stream and see it, but it's slightly out of uh sync. Let me see. Okay. So, I'll just go through and um and sort of see what what's interesting me. So, I'm I'm in the dark here, you know. I just get I just get told, "Hey, turn up and we're going to shout shrimp

5:21at you." Sounds good. So, uh at at the Jess Warareb says, "How do you get your first 100 customers?" And I think um we talked about this on the last uh live stream where everyone is building like crazy right now, but no one's really or most people are not focusing on actually how to get customers. Now to answer this question, I have to know what you're building realistically. But I have a framework for for building anything which is the ACP funnel. So if I'm building anything, I generally start with A which is an audience. I'll start with an Instagram account, an X account, a Tik Tok account, uh C which stands for

6:00community. So I funnel them into some sort of paid community, a free community, IRL events, and then I create a product or service to help those people. I think that how you can get your first 100 customers is you probably shouldn't be building vibe coding whatever your software, your product, your AI agent. It doesn't make a difference to begin with. You should be thinking about how can I create a media company first and then from there go and

6:27build a product. Yeah. I mean, Greg, the the the cool thing is I'm literally doing this right now from scratch and I started uh a new business last year. So, I wanted to sell creative retreats, which is just not within my uh it's not anything to do with what my business does. And so, it's a new business. And I was thinking about like how am I going to find customers for creative retreats? I want to do creative retreats. I want to do art retreats, uh physical in-person art retreats, um large scale like events, essentially like a art festival. Um, but I didn't really have customers to uh

7:06sell these things to. And so what I did is I started a media company, a very small uh niche podcast uh about being an entrepreneur who also likes creative stuff which essentially nobody listens to. This is the important part. This time last year, every episode was getting e even after like 40 episodes, maybe 300 people were listening to this thing. And at the peak of where I first sold out my first creative retreat, and we're talking about an event that like made, you know, 100$120,000,

7:42okay, dollars, $130,000. uh that was from a very small list of people, a very small audience, but very niche from doing a weekly YouTube video, audio podcast that's long form, uned unedited. Um, and then I just did the pitch right on that show and sold it right from that show. And so that was a perfect example of building like a very small media company. It's still tiny. I mean, I get uh Greg gets more views on one of his videos in the first second than I get in 30 days. It's that niche and that small. We're talking about my podcast, by the way, guys. And yeah,

8:25that has allowed me building that has allowed me to create a lot of mini businesses out of it. And so, yeah, starting with content is a great way to sort of find your people. I guess uh there the other way is like actually depending on what you're building is I always look at it like there's the easy

8:46but expensive way. Yeah. And then there's kind of the hard and organic way. The hard and organic way which I think a lot of people should do is you just sort of build your audience, right? And you build the audience slowly. The easier but expensive way is you you do ads, Facebook ads. I mean it's either you're either renting it or you're building it yourself. So, I think like you have to make that decision yourself and what works for you and how much capital you have. But I do think like that's the way to think about it. Um, thanks for the question. I'm going to go through two more really two

9:17or three more really quickly and then we'll get to the timeline takes. Um, by the way, chat, I see you. I got you on my iPad right here. I got my X chat over here. I got my YouTube chat on over here. So, I need I need that chat going. I need that chat blazing because otherwise I don't know if I'm talking into me and my shrimp millionaire friend are just talking into the void. We want to add as much value as possible and if you you know throw questions in there because other people will answer them and also I'm looking at them. So I see

9:48you. I see you. I see you people. All right. I also see you guys. Yeah. And and I'm typing in I'm typing in here. There it is. Um okay. So, how to build you, you know, how to get your first 100 customers. Um, I, uh, at the RHN or RH Nutrino says, I've been a graphic designer, a web developer, but never a sales guy. Any advice? I mean, you have to like this is the age of the generalist, period. So if you're a it's amazing that you're like thinking okay I was a graphic designer now I have to be a web developer now I have to be a salesperson

10:29um and I think sales people on the other hand have to be like okay now I need to be a web developer now I need to be a designer right so I think what's happening in general is everything is converging people and the people who are going to do really well over the next five or 10 years and by the way just as how there was an insane amount of opportunity between, you know, 2020 and 2022 where people made insane amounts of money, huge opportunities. I believe that 2026 to 2029, there's going to be that same wave in the sense of if you know how to

11:02use a lot of these tools, if you know how to build right now, it's an incredible time. So, um, good job on you step one, that you're actually doing this. How do you like I would be like how do I if I wanted to be a salesperson I would go and just like read the the biggest sales books honestly um to get like frameworks around sales and then I would actually just start making cold calls and start doing the thing. The only way to learn anything is by doing the thing right. So you can, you know, ask, you know, Google, chat, tpt, whatever, what are the best sales books

11:35that I need to read? Get the frameworks and just start making cold calls, start getting reject rejected. Um, start meeting people and over time you put in your 10,000 hours, you're going to learn. What do you think? Yeah, I think it's a like very important question. you know how you know I am the I am the person who can do the delivery but what do I do about the sales part it's one of the most common questions entrepreneurs ask me as well so to the person who asked I'm sorry I I didn't catch your name um I've been running a design agency for 16 years now and when

12:12I started out I was just a UX designer I didn't really have many sales skills but because my company start started to grow I kind of just got put in the position of, oh, okay, I am that I that's actually my job. What I always say to to entrepreneurs is if you're the owner, if you're the CEO, and even if that's a one person company, then you kind of are automatically the CEO. A large proportion of your job, if not 50%, is to be the promoter of your business, to be both the marketer and salesperson uh for your business. And just before this call, um, someone on the call in the in

12:49the background was saying, I wish I had more time to do my YouTube videos, but I'm going to be stuck doing delivery and calls, etc. And actually, what I wanted to say is actually your job is to be the promoter and you want to find people to deliver the work, not to uh, not you permanently delivering forever. Your job is actually to promote, grow, be coming up with a strategy for your business so that you just don't get trapped in it forever if that's your goal. If your goal is to be a um consultant who does the same thing over time, that's also fine. But learning to sell, learning to

13:24market is not really an option. You do have to do it. Or, and I Greg, I don't know what you think about this. What I say to entrepreneurs is if you truly can't stick to that, you actually have to find a co-founder and they have to own 50% of your business because if you find someone who can find you clients, they will either take your clients or

13:46own your business very soon. Totally. Um Justin actually has a really good Justin Perea uh from I think it's on YouTube chat. He says, "Now, how do I actually do that while having a full-time job?" So, like we're basically like, "Yeah, you got to go learn this stuff, but how, you know, if someone's working 40 hours a week, maybe they have a child, um, maybe they have a family, right? Like, how how can they actually

14:10do this?" I mean, well, to so I think that's obviously the first thing you just have to admit to yourself or admit is that that will be more difficult. You know, if you have a full-time job, especially if you have kids, it is going to be a little bit more difficult. What I did is I had a full-time job. Now, I didn't have kids, just to be clear. I had a full-time job. I asked them, "Can I take Fridays off because I wanted to start building my own thing." I took Fridays off for like five months. They allowed me to do this. I didn't do anything on

14:42those Fridays because I had the kind of golden handcuffs comfort. I did nothing. I actually played the video game Skyrim and finished it like and did every every little thing in Skyrim. Amazing game. Um, so I did nothing on those Fridays and eventually I realized if I don't fully quit and have to make money by doing by like being forced to start my business that I'm going to do nothing and so I actually had to quit. So for me, my personal anecdote is I was unable to do the side hustle while working a full-time job because it always the job tired me out and I always like just felt

15:19like I'll get around to starting my own business later. But because there was no real deep pressure, I didn't have to. And so for me, that's just my I'm not it's not advice. It's just what happened with me. So Justin responds. He says he actually is working 40 hours a week Monday through Thursday and he can build Friday through Sunday. So if you could build

15:39Friday to Sunday, that is enough time. And that's right. That's like it's almost too much time. [laughter] Um you know, it's amazing uh what you can do in the weekend. And I actually find I personally I'm way more productive on a Sunday than I am like the whole week. Like I get more done on like a Sunday, like a like a locked in

16:00Sunday than I do in a whole week. I'm extremely lazy. So I I'm not I'm I'm the lazy one of the two of us. I mean, you can just tell by looking at us. Okay. Canon idea says, "The worst things to do in 2026 if I wanted to completely screw myself over going forward. If I wanted to let this golden age of

16:21opportunity elude me. That's a really fun question. What do you think? Who said who who asked that? Sorry. Who asked that question? Canon ideas. Who you would think would have a canon load of ideas? Canon. Yeah. I mean, okay, I'll just say I if we're just talking about from a pure financial perspective, um I will tell you that the things that I'm seeing people doing it's a combination of two things. One, I would assume that if you ignore all the completely ignore all the

16:49AI stuff, it's probably not a good idea. Like if you actually decide, hey, you know what? This is all hype, whatever, I think is probably not a great way to approach things just because what I'm going to say next might make it sound like I think you should do that. I think the biggest mistake people are going to make. And if you would want to absolutely mess yourself up, what I would do is spend all of your time building apps and all of your time building software and all of your time building loads of complicated systems and none of your time actually selling things, getting users, and building an

17:24audience. I still think the core of running a business is building an audience and getting people interested in what you actually are creating. Um, and so I think if you want to really mess yourself up, just spend the next couple of years building pointless stuff. Um, and not having anyone ever use it. I would say that that will also

17:43make you feel very demotivated. Yeah, I agree. Um, I also think it's like a spectrum. There's like a spectrum of people. So, there's some people who are like, "Okay, I know AI is a thing, but I'm just barely going to use it." I think those people are kind of screwed honest at this point. Um then I think it's like people on the other end of the spectrum you have people who use every single tool like crazy. Um and and every

18:12new tool comes out they have to use it. They have to understand every single piece about it. I actually think those people are get are are uh kind of screwing themselves over a little bit and addicted over stimulated over stimulated and they get you know and I I get this too because I I love a new tool. I love a new thing a new shiny object. So whenever I hear something I like I got to try it. I actually think

18:36in the middle is the best place to be. you spend time building and marketing with, you know, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Grock, like the main the main players and then once a month or twice a month you see something new that you think has an opportunity to really that just interests you. So if like for me right now it's like AI what they call like vibe film making. So, I feel like there's a few tools that are now getting really good that you could like actually direct commercials that are really really good and you can't do that today with for example, you know, Open AI. So, you do need to like try new things. So,

19:23I'm not saying don't try new things, but I think like the worst thing you can do is basically try too much or try too little, just try the right amount. And I I think this was this is a really good question, dude. Can I may I just butt in for one second? Yes. Where? So, I run a couple of businesses. I get a lot of people contacting me to work with me and sell me stuff and like because I have a YouTube channel and I'm sure you get this, Greg, as well. People contact you all the time and they're

19:49like, I'm going to make clips for you. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And I'm always like, I wish I could just tell them how to actually sell to me. Like, why are they doing this so badly? There's so many different ways. Like if you see someone who has a YouTube channel and you want to if if

20:07you're like I know how to use Opus Clip. Opus Clip is a an AI tool for clipping up YouTube videos. Probably a lot of you guys know about it. It can clip YouTube videos. You can kind of edit how the clips work. You can kind of perfect it. And it actually does a very good job, like a a fairly good job for a tool that's relatively automated. And I'm thinking it's crazy to me that I run a business that I'm trying to grow my my show and 99% of the people who reach out to me won't even send me an example that could have taken them 8 seconds to to

20:40make in something like Opus clip. an example of, oh, here's how one of your podcasts could look clipped up. Or for example, like even something as simple as people contacting me and saying, hey, by the way, I made this really simple, you know, lead magnet for your website, which probably would not take you more than four or five hours to create a really good one for a small business and then reach out and say, "Hey, I made this for you. This is the kind of thing I do. I think this could work really well for you." I'm even with all of these tools, I still have people

21:11reaching out to me with just the laziest bottom of the barrel. Hey, let's get in touch. Hey, let's have a call. And I think what these tools should be doing if you're thinking about like not about building a massive business, but you could have a extra 2K per month by selling some very simple things to small. doesn't always have to be to huge corporates or startups to small businesses who have no like me who have no idea how to build all this stuff and just finding little niche ideas of what a lot of small businesses need. Here's a free one. The get in touch button on

21:46most small business websites that flow. How do you triage the different clients on a small business website? If you go to my facilitator.com, click get in touch. See the way that triage works. I had to build that myself. I couldn't find anyone to do it. That kind of thing. You could char you could have charged me €1,200 to put that together. And you could do that three or four times for a small business. It doesn't have to be crazy complicated. Doesn't have to change the world. There's so many businesses out there that just are looking for small little efficiencies and and you think they're being contacted every day a

22:27thousand times with really good stuff, but believe me, we're not getting contacted every day with anything other than people saying, "Hey, grab a coffee." It's it's really not a lot of effort is going into to any sort of outbound for us anyway. I mean, so what you're saying is is basically people are doing the bare minimum, especially when they're doing reach out and especially in in the

22:50age of AI when there's all these tools. Someone mentioned in the chat hyperframes, which which also, you know, I I haven't played with I think is really interesting like tool these tools are coming out that you can actually, you know, vibe or or build uh marketing assets or little, you know, versions of what they would get. you send it to them and you're like, "Hey, I built this thing for you." It might not be perfect, but uh I think that you'd get some value

23:16out of it. It opens up the conversation. And then it it's sort of like the you know the same reason why if you go into a luxury uh you go into a car chase store for example, go into a car chase store, one of the first things they're going to do is they're going to give you a bottle of Perier or bottle of Evian and they're going to give you some French chocolate. So, actually what they do is they say, "Do you want Evianne or Pererry?" "Okay, I want Perier." Then they give it they they give you like a like on dinner wear, like full-on dinner

23:49wear, like a saucer and and they give you like two pieces of French chocolate and a pererry. And it's like now all of a sudden I want to buy a watch. You know, I was just here for the air conditioning. You know what I mean? And now all of a sudden I, you know, I'm I I feel good about myself. I got a little sugar high from from from the from the chocolate. I'm I'm I'm hydrated. So you can do that now in the age AI. So I love this question. Um Greg, I'm so sorry, but is there any chance we could stay on this slight like

24:23for another minute because I think this is going to be huge for your audience because they are not here. They're not experiencing this from the side that we're experiencing it on. We're the business owners and we're receiving this stuff, right? And really the low it's really the Okay, I'll just give you one more

24:41idea and I'm going to leave it. SEO is a huge huge problem for small businesses like mine. Don't contact me. I already solved it. Like mine, it is all you would need to do open up Claude Fable. uh give it the task of figuring out the a good strategy for a specific target small business that you're looking at. Have it write one to two to three articles that would be part of

25:06that strategy. Contact that business. Say, "I've already written three of them." Now, the annoying part for a small business like mine isn't writing the articles. It's the execution of all the SEO work, getting the H1 tags right, getting all the the the proper like linking and architecture between the articles, etc., etc. Write all the stuff for them for free. Do a little bit of make sure that it's actually relatively good. Build their voice style guide brand stuff. Do it once and you'll be able to do it for multiple businesses without having to tweak it. Then contact them and say $3,000 I'll implement this for you and then your ranking on AI

25:43tools is going to go up. It's it's such a simple thing and it's something we all need as small businesses. It's so annoying to do and none of us even know we need to do it. I only figured out I needed to do it in like February this year. Yeah. And I also think that there's this like arbitrage moment. And that's sort of what I was getting at earlier, which is like what has changed? There's all these tools now that allow you to do these things that a oneperson business can

26:12actually go and build these things. Also, someone who's non-technical can now go and do these things. That has changed. Now, in a few years, more and more people are going to understand that. So, there's going to be there's going to be more competition uh around some of these things. I'm not saying that it's, you know, we talked about this last time, like I don't buy

26:34the permanent underclass narrative. Um I don't I don't believe in that. I think, you know, things I I think there was always going to be opportunity for people to like build, do things, new pain points and stuff like that. But my point is now is such a fertile time to actually do the things that you're saying. Um, selling is easier now because you can do those things. Um, in the past if you wanted to do what you were talking about, you had to have a team of people pay them often times millions of dollars a year to execute on these things. Now you with the right

27:13workflows and the right agents and the right sub agents and the right skills um granted you need to have the right distribution. You need to and you know you need to understand how to sell but with the right recipe of all that it's an incredible opportunity. Yes. [snorts] All right. That was a good one. Someone else in the chat uh said um Kerat said in the X chat at Karriat and this is a question for for me but it's relevant for you too. Do you think your design agency still has the same potential in the AI age where anyone with a brand book with Flora FA? I've

27:54never even heard of that. Uh tone of voice with Claude landing page with Claude codeex and build you a funnel with co-work. Um so the question really basically is you know you own a design agency AJ and Smart. I own a design agency called LCA. Are we screwed? Oh, what do you think? [laughter] Um, I, you know, I can speak from the LCA

28:25perspective. We are lucky in the sense that we started the business six years ago and some of our early clients were helping companies build suites of AI native products. So, we've worked with the biggest companies on the planet like Dropbox and Salesforce and they've come to us and they they've been like, "Hey, we're we're stuck in the SAS era. Help us build and move into the AI era." So, our niche is, you know, we've had the best year

28:53that we've ever had, 2026. So, um, you know, I think that from a design agency perspective, if your niche is a good niche and the type of client that you have is a good client and you can figure out ways to um increase margin, increase um just like the way you you execute through systems with AI and stuff. It's it's good. Now, I think that 90% of design agencies don't have a good niche, don't have a good ICP, um haven't figured this out. So, I think that unfortunately a lot of them will

29:34suffer. Yeah. I I think um being able to do this stuff was never the hard part of running a design agency. Like the I was running a UX agency that I'm still running AJ and Smart today and that's mostly now product strategy. We realized relatively early on that the actual execution work was what the client was paying the least for. So as soon as possible we moved from uh execution to strategy. Um and we try to move as far away from execution as possible just because that was the thing that the clients kind of always intrinsically understood. Well, you just throw people at it. You throw people at

30:16it and that will be solved. At least that was the client's perspective. And so the AI tools haven't really changed much for us as a design agency uh because of the fact that we already moved away from the pure execution niche. What I will say is that I think a lot of you guys who are watching this right now, you're in a bubble. You think your clients are just opening up these AI tools and building stuff with these AI tools and shipping them. Again, uh coming from the small business perspective and I really want to speak for the small business owners here because you know we we also have a lot

30:56of money to spend on services like design agencies. I always have trouble when when we for example our website is currently built on framer. One of our our facilitator.com website is built on framer. I still pay an external agency when I want to do something there, even though I can build it in Claude myself

31:16and I know how to use Claude code. Why? Well, because I don't want to do it myself. And that's still basically how it works when you're working with business owners. They don't want to do it even if they now know it's easier and they shouldn't be doing it because that's not their job. They're, you know, they're doing their own thing. You could you could make the argument though that in a year from now like these Claude will be so good that it will be as if it's like you you basically tell it, hey, I've got this website. It's managed

31:49on framer. You do it now. I'm moving it, you know, and and it'll do it. I just don't see that for the business owners that I know. I think that I would always rather pay someone who says the the reason you're also paying someone is that they take full responsibility of it, that they deploy it, that they take care of it, that they interview you and get all the ideas for what's going to happen, that they check it on every device. I don't want to I still think that external service agencies will need to exist because you know the um the company that's selling custom couches uh

32:31in your city doesn't want to have someone on staff who's a vibe coder. You know what I mean? And so they will need external people. I I I just I just don't see that going away anytime soon just because the AI tools get so good. You said two important things. One is you said the strategy component isn't going away. So in terms of finding incredible strategy, there'll be agencies that exist that help people find incredible strategy. Yes, that might mean the companies that focus on 90% execution today have to go and turn

33:07that into 10% execution or 0%. Um the second thing you said is uh responsibility. You'd be surprised how much people would be willing to spend to take their responsibility and just give it to someone else. Yeah, dude. That's that's the thing. That's the thing, right? People cuz if something goes wrong, they have someone that they can agency's fault complain and or a fall. It's like a fall man. A fall a fall man, right? So to them that's worth often times a lot of money and the sleepless nights that the agency owner has or the agency teams have you know that they're they're up at night because they're thinking oh my god

33:55what if this website goes down what if this framer website goes down right uh you hope a good agency right would do that yes um so I think that's you I think that's where agencies are going so where's the opportunity well the opportunity is in more strategic, more responsibly bearing, responsibility bearing agencies. And like I was saying, also finding niches and ICPs that like, you know, they're they're just it's they need your your services, which sounds obvious, but you know, it's it's um I think it's one of those things where it's like uh you so um uh in in the chat uh Justin wrote, "Yeah, you know, why should I reach out for

34:42them when I know they can do it themselves?" Yeah. Why do I have a cleaner? Why shouldn't I just clean my office? Why do why do I, as a business owner, need cleaners to come to this office? Why don't I just do it myself? Think about it from that perspective because that's the way business owners are thinking about it when you reach out to them because they don't they're smart enough to know that they don't want to do this themselves because that's not their job. Yeah. Don't reach out to a vibe coding agency and try to sell them vibe coding. But if you're reaching out to, you know, my company facilitator, we

35:15work with corporates. We work with large corporates. They absolutely can do the thing we sell to them. They know how to, they can easily train one of their employees up and then train hundreds of their staff. They would rather have us do it because they're a bank. You know what I mean? They're not trying to build like a internal uh facilitation training machine inside their company. That's not in their DNA. but they could, but it wouldn't make sense. So, I think a lot of it is just, yeah, sure, people can do things by themselves, but it often just

35:49doesn't really make any sense to do it. Totally. All right. I love it. All right, those are some of the questions. If we have time, we'll do a couple a few more at the end. So, let's keep that chat going. Um, I want to move into the section where we break down some of the most interesting ideas from the timeline. Um, you haven't seen any of these. Um, and we're just going to go and and go through it. Um, okay. This I just put in because I know you're a gaming nerd. So, oh yeah, a gaming one. Let's go. So, Shield Monote says, "Today I learned

36:26Sega stands for service games and was originally a a Hawaii based supplier of slot and amusement machines to US military bases." I did not know this. Today I learned I didn't know it either. What the hell? Sega I thought Sega was a Japanese company. Who am I? I don't I don't even know who

36:50I am anymore. Right. What? This is insane. Actually, anyone in the chat buy a Dreamcast? I was a Dreamcast boy. Really? Dreamcast, Jetet Radio, Crazy Taxi. Let's go. If anyone is in the chat who's a Dreamcast boy for Boys for Life. Yeah. Jet, Jetset Radio was like iconic. Crazy Taxi obviously so good. Um, it it was like Crazy Taxi was kind of like Tik Tok in the sense that it it's just like a

37:21dopamine machine. Oh my god, I was so addicted to Crazy Taxi. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Offspring. Offspring locked in. From a business perspective, I also think it's interesting that they their niche was US military bases. So, they basically started a company and they're like, "Okay, there's all these US military bases." And these people are

37:45bored. What can we sell them? Uh games. We'll be the game supplier for the service people like ser you know the people who are going to war. That was the business and then they expanded beyond there. Very interesting. Weird. So weird. I did not know that at all. Yeah. Well, what you did know, here's another interesting tweet from the

38:07timeline. I've never had real goals or targets when building my businesses. I just started working on stuff and seeing if people wanted those things and went from there. I thought this was really interesting. Um, you know, I think the when you're building a business, there's all all the literature says you should have goals, you should have targets. Why do you think you don't need to have

38:32them? Well, I think a lot of literature around building businesses is for largecale funded startups or public um like growing public companies. And again, I think you know anything pre20 million revenue it you don't really need that much goal setting or vision or mission or any of this stuff. and a lot of uh a lot of other people running I mean I think Jason Frereded also commented on this uh and and has a similar opinion for building what they build. I think like a lot of people get lost in the vision setting and goal setting and all of that around running a business when it doesn't need to be that complicated

39:20when you're not trying to build a billion dollar machine. And most CEOs and most business owners, even of the very big companies that you talk to, they're sort of building a reverse narrative. They're like telling you that they had these goals after it all worked out. But if you actually saw the journey step by step, it's usually just messy and chaotic. And you know, Nintendo is one of my favorite examples for for gaming. They started as like a trading card company that was like gam they were like a gambling company in Japan for a long time and then they just kept trying different things and different things

39:58and eventually got into video games. There was no vision. And there was no like vision statement around we're going to help the world play or we're going to get to a billion players. No, it was just we're making stuff. We want to make money and we're going to keep doing that and eventually kind of find your thing. And so yeah, I've just never had a I've never had any sort of hey AJ Smart is going to be the you know, we've we've hired consultants who've helped us come up with like these kind of statements, but I've never paid any attention to them. I've never stuck to them. I kind

40:30of did it for the employees because I thought you had to do that. But I don't know, man. I don't I don't do that usually. It's usually very basic with with my current uh my current uh company unscheduled. My goal is like I want to have 10,000 listeners per week. That's as deep as it is getting. Uh that's it.

40:52I mean, that is a goal though, isn't it? Yeah, it's a goal, but I also don't care if I hit it and I'm not tracking it and it just kind of is random. Yeah. I mean, the literature says the quote is what isn't uh measure. What isn't manage? What is it? What isn't measured is manage or the other way

41:11around? I don't even know [laughter] what Oh, what isn't manage is measured. No, I don't know. Someone in the chat will tell us. But basically, if you don't uh, you know, measure stuff, it's just not it's you're not going to get it. Uh, you're not measure the P&L every month. We look at the profit and loss sheet. We're trying to see if we're making more money than before. Like what we do is we try to look at how much money did we make June

41:37last year versus this year. How much money did we make Q1, Q? We we measure it in money. Like also it can be just measured in money. It doesn't have to be so complicated. Um, so yeah, we measure but like in reverse like based on what happened and we're not very we just don't really do that to be honest. Um, doesn't mean we're right. It's just I don't really do that. How do you do it? Do you have like a big goal for uh startup ideas? Like when you started it were you like I'm going to change the world using AI blah blah blah or is it

42:10just I'm going to do this and see if I can build a big audience and then I'll figure that out later. I always start by just following my curiosity and experiment. Like even with this live stream, like I don't know how many of these live streams we're going to do, you know, if people like it, like let me know. Let us know. Like it on YouTube, you know, say things in the chat. Um but like as of now, if you were to ask like what do you what's your vision with SIP Live? I don't have like a huge vision. I just know that there's a lot of shows

42:46that I don't think are super inclusive and that don't actually give a lot of sauce. And so I was just like, how can I create a live show or live stream that is something that I would want to watch? That's that's basically it. And um you know if it it might turn into something down the line or it might not. if it turns into something at some point I say to I I think it's important to have some sort of north star. So I really like the Toby from Shopify like uh mission where he he says Shopify

43:25mission is to arm the rebels. And I just think that that's just a simple that mean it means like he's got on this the rebels are the merchants like the people who want to sell things and his job is to arm them. So, give them tools to, you know, fight in the war. And I think that's really interesting. Um, and I like how like simple it is and stuff like that. I think I'm I'm not really a big goal or target person, but I am a big like what is the vision person and then like every 3 months I need to have some number that's that is something that is basically like

44:08I'm going in the right direction to that thing that's all that I care about and that's it doesn't have to be money like you know money is one example of it you know users retention you word of mouth, you know, it depends what business it is, but one number, one sentence, and that's all you need when it comes to building a business in my

44:32opinion. Abs. I mean, that's that is absolutely all you need. I mean, I think on that front, you know, what I do every day for for the unscheduled business is always the easiest one to talk about is I open the YouTube dashboard and I look at like how is how is the current performance? How is the current subscriber rate? And I kind of mentally think about does that because for that I don't have a really big target. It's just does it feel like it's going in a positive direction. Am I seeing more green up arrows than I am red down arrows? And somehow that just already feels like the right that for

45:10that business that that's all I'm looking for. I like that momentum. I like that. I've never, to be honest, I haven't distilled it to like one sentence, one metric, but I really like that. I think I'm just gonna do um I think for for AJ and Smart from now on, it's going to be arm the rebels. I think I'm just going to take Toby's one. Arm the Rebels. Uh that's the new

45:34AJ Smart slogan. Let's go. You're the new Toby. I'm the new Tobes. You're Toby. Actually, now you're Toby Courtney. What is it? Toby Courtney. What is it? SP is he Spotify or Shopify? Did you say Shopify? Shopify. Okay. Ar the Rebels. Uh Toby, I'm taking your your slogan. Where is he from? Toby Lutka. He's from Germany. He's your

45:58from Germany. Yeah. Toby. Toby Ala versus Los. He's watching, right? He's watching. Toby, if you're watching, please meet Toby Courtney. He's a shrimp millionaire from Berlin. I'm your son. I'm your son, Toby. We're going to move on to the next tweet from the timeline. Um, this one is really interesting. Um, by the way, no, not sponsored by CloudFlare, not sponsored by anyone. I just thought it was an interesting uh announcement and I was thinking of maybe

46:32doing an episode of the podcast on it. So they said we're opening the wait list for a monetization gateway which will allow you to charge for any web page data set API or MCP tool behind Cloudflare. These the charges will settle in stable coins over the 402 open protocol. So Jonathan, let me explain you what this is, why I think it's interesting, and why I think that there's uh a lot of opportunity behind it and I'm curious your take. So um basically if you think about the web um the web was designed for human beings, human beings access a piece of content for example and in order to monetize

47:14that uh human beings put ads. So you know basically the beauty about the internet is it's free for the most part. Very small amount of the internet is actually gated uh for that you actually have to pay to access. Um and because of that we've actually had a lot of really interesting uh websites uh you know and

47:35apps come to be over the last 20 years. Now it's pretty clear that agents AI agents are going to be greater in number than human beings uh relatively soon. I'm not sure exactly when. And I don't know if it's going to be a year or 3 years or 2 years, but you know in 1 to 7 years I think it's pretty clear that agents will overtake human beings. So that is going to be interesting in a world where the user of the internet is most likely going to be an agent. They're going to be pinging a bunch of different

48:13websites to do things. Now the problem with that is the monetization model of those websites assumes that it's a human being that is visiting the website, right? Um it's assuming that this human being is going to look at an ad and maybe buy something. Um it's assuming that you know that human being is going to fork over some data and then that the company can use that data or sell that data or something like that. What Cloudflare is saying is no no no no no no no no we need to have an open protocol that basically allows uh website owners, publishers to add something to their websites and

49:00basically say if you're an agent I'm going to charge you some fraction of a penny. In this case they're using stable coins but it doesn't it doesn't matter how they're settling it in the back end. No one cares about that. All that matters is a fraction of a penny to use to access a website and uh I believe that this is what's going to happen. So I think that there's going to be a lot of opportunity to actually you know as Gary Tan says make things agents want. Basically, there's going to be a lot of startup ideas around uh creating websites with the agent in mind and then ha

49:44adding the Cloudflare monetization gateway to charge for it and then figure out ways to get traffic not from human beings but from agents. So, you have to reverse that. You know, we talked on this on this pod on this live stream about like promotion, but more from a human being perspective. What does it look like when you're trying to actually get agents onto your website? And I think there's going to be many, many, many, many uh wealthy people being created who figure this out over the next 12 18 months. Um they're going to have a head start. The way to get access to the monetization gateway is you do

50:27need to be a CloudFare customer. Um I'm you know that's kind of easy though, right? You just you can just like I'm pretty sure you can sign up like a domain or something but really interesting. What are your what's your you know first reaction to this? Does it sound too sci-fi to you? Does it sound like you know this is no this will never happen. It says you know open protocol stable coins. Are you just like this is hype? What are your

50:54thoughts on cloudflare? Yeah, this is so far outside of my wheelhouse that I first need to ask you if I understand. So is the idea here that you know someone could build like a someone builds like a website and for some reason this website is attractive to agents in some way. Maybe there's data on that site that, you know, LLMs want to keep pulling from because it's like the only place that has the live data for certain things that people might want to search for. And when the agents are going to pull that particular data, they pass through a gateway where they actually get charged, who's paying the

51:32bill? Is it the is it like entropic? Is it the person who's doing the search? How's that happening? So the assumption is that we're going to be living in a world where AI agents are going to have wallets. In fact, they're not just going to have wallets. They're going to have email addresses. They're going to have phone numbers. They're going to have

51:51What about shoes? What about shoes? They're going to have some form of shoes. They're, you know, they're going to have shrimp of some sort, you know, sun lotion, all that stuff, right? And you saw this with um you saw this with uh Moldbook, the acquisition I think that Meta made $100 million, I think it was, where they

52:13bought a social network for AI agents. Um it was really early on when they bought it. But I think it was it was interesting in the sense that it sort of uh foreshadowed a world where yeah, you're gonna have these AI agents and it makes sense that they're going to have wallets to do certain things and there makes sense that they're going to have email addresses uh and phone numbers and stuff like that. So um you know behind every agent is going to be a human being ultimately. So yeah, think of it as like a company card, right? Like I use um I use Brex uh bank accounts and we

52:48have multiple companies and multiple credit cards that we set up on Brex and it's really it's really cool like I I'm able to see basically like who's spending what, how they're spending it, limits, stuff like that. And the same way that you can, you know, in an easy way, uh, flip on a Brex, you know, company card or whatever, you're going to be able to create, um,

53:14company cards or cards for agents. Now, I don't know if Brex is going there or who's doing it, but this idea of creating wallets for agents and you'll have like limits. So, you'll be able to see like, okay, uh I'm I'll give my agent $20 a month and let's see how they used it, right? What was the value?

53:38I somehow find this really interesting. Like first of all I find it kind of cute the idea that your agent is going around with a cute little wallet and everything but the other thing is I'm like the first thing that comes to my mind is I'm like okay even if Cloudflare doesn't do this what is it that I can build that LL people using LLMs are just going to need like they'll just want that data and their agent is going to come back and say hey there's actually a payw wall here um Jonathan's website I can't get that data unless you pay $20 a month do

54:10you want me to pay it? And on the other side of that is what they need to continue doing their research. And I guess the easiest way to imagine this is let's say you own Reddit and uh the only way for your agent to go and and like you know crawl through a Reddit thread is if it's if it pays for it. And I know these companies kind of do deals between themselves, but this is probably at a smaller more fractional level like that actually is that so so is that basically one of the thing one of the theories that there's going to be businesses there's going to be people who kind of

54:44get wealthy from owning a certain thing data set whatever it is that has to be paid for to get access to and it's a thing that generally a lot of agents will need access to. And so thinking about those things before everyone else does is kind of a weird arbitrage. I literally never even heard of this in my entire life. This is the first time I'm hearing about it, but

55:06somehow I find that weird and exciting. Is that it? Yes, that's it. And that's, you know, that's that's sort of like uh of course there's a world where this doesn't play out, right? Of course, there's a world where um you like there's there's certain hypotheses that need to be true, right? you maybe it's agents don't have don't don't have wallets or they don't have email addresses or maybe agents don't want to pay for it or you know so a lot of things need to be true but if someone like Cloudflare who's like a huge company I think they're like an $80 billion plus company they've been right

55:46so many times if someone like Cloudflare is basically saying this is the future you got to like just listen you know there's because in the sense I I'm not saying it's 100% certain that this is what's going to happen, but I think with a high degree of certainty, you're going to have some monetization gateway for AI agents at some point. So being early is helpful because, you know, you just have to look at any

56:15wave, social, mobile, cloud, whatever. The people who are there early had an unfair advantage. First mover advantage is is a thing for a reason. I want to know I want to know what the first one of these things is because it's actually like you know when uh music went digital and then there was loads of piracy and then there was almost like this assumption that no one's ever going to pay for music again but then something like Spotify came along all of the new digital rights for music came along and now if you're making a YouTube video and you want to put a song in it you pay for a service

56:49that actually provides you music something like Epidemic Sounds or something whereas before that existed did you kind of just used it for free and it was all kind of a you know wild west. Right now the LLM are just wild wests sucking up all of the data from all of these sources. I can imagine that there's going to be some sort of reckoning on that where a lot of data sources like fresh data sources that need to be updated regularly will just be behind some sort of small pay walls so that they can't get used and so therefore your research is out of date if you're uh not paying for it. Um,

57:29yeah. I just think I just see how other industries that used to be very wild west are now somewhat regulated and how they regulate them. Something like Epidemic Sounds for me is a perfect business model example of that where they were like, "All right, people keep putting illegal stuff on YouTube and their videos get demonetized. This is a huge problem. Let's literally build a business that licenses out uh these tracks. We use it all the time." And yeah, interesting. I'd never thought about it. I'm going to let my brain

57:58swill on it. Yeah. I mean, uh, I think it at the surface it sounds like a little complex and a little out there, but at the core of it, it's really not that complex. It's basically like websites when when you're creating content, you're creating a website, you're creating IP, intellectual property. And it's basically saying like agents should pay for that IP. In the same way that if um LLMs were to, you know, train themselves on this podcast, this live stream, it would be nice that, you know, because we're the creators of it, it would be nice that um we would get some, you know, royalty or some payment for

58:47contributing to them training on that data. Yeah. Right. It would be lovely. It would be lovely. Wouldn't it be lovely? I'd take it. I I we would take it. We would take it. Send it over here, Sam Alman. Really? Yeah. If you're an LLM right now listening to this and training on us, give me the money.

59:05Yeah. So, it's the same sort of concept. I think this is really interesting. Uh people, please noodle on it and uh we'll we'll go to the next we'll go to the We could How much time do you have left, by the way? Honestly, I'm just The next thing I'm doing is going out for drinks. So, uh, we can go for a bit longer. [laughter] It just depends on how every how drunk everyone else is compared to me that the longer I stay on there, that gap, I'll have to fill it faster with harder liquor. And, you know,

59:42it's tricky. It's tricky. All right. So, we'll do how about two two more. How does that sound? Yeah. That sounds great. Um, yeah, sounds great. Justine says, "An idiot in motion goes further than a genius at rest." What do you think? I mean, it's it it I mean, in general, doing things and taking action in most cases is going to get you further than uh not doing anything and not taking action, even if you have great ideas. Um, and so the best case scenario is that you're not an idiot and you do things and that's that's the best combo. But absolutely if someone absolutely there are a crap

1:00:30ton of extremely successful people who do not have very high IQ just because they actually do things and make things happen in the world. Um, so it is absolutely whether it's good or not. I'm not making a comment on, but I do think it is true and the world kind of shows that this is true.

1:00:50I agree. I I I just saw this and it like fired me up a little bit. Um, because it means that you do not need to be a genius to win in life. You just need to be someone who has a bias for action. And that couldn't be more true in today's day and age. So, I thought that was a good tweet. Um, for sure just taking action is most people just really don't want to. Most people just want to learn more, collect

1:01:17more information. Paul Graham, founder, Y Combinator, says something I told my 14-year-old. People are going to stop reading books. I wish this wasn't so, but I fear it is. The silver lining in this cloud is that if you're one of those, if you're one of the few people who still read, you'll have a huge advantage over everyone

1:01:39else. What do you think? I'm really glad the tweet ended there. I thought it was go because I can't see the tweet you're talking about. I thought it was going to be like people are going to stop reading books, so here's a new app idea. And I was just going to roll my eyes. Um I I 100% agree with this. I am I force myself to read and and I I read fiction in bed with my Kindle and I also am really putting a lot of effort into encouraging my daughter to read. I just bought her a Kindle Color Soft Kids. Um and I'm trying to get her to read as much as

1:02:12possible. Guys, if you have kids, I saw the best tweet ever and it changed the game for me. It said, "If you want your kid, if your kids read, it's just amazing for their brains. Everyone kind of knows that. But if you want to get them to read a lot, what I've told my daughter who's seven is, hey, when you're in bed, as long as you're reading, there is no you have to go to sleep time. You can read as long as you want. You can read for 5 hours if you want. Don't don't bother me. Don't get up and bother me and tell me I have to

1:02:41do stuff. But if you want to read in bed, you can read as long as you want. And she sees this as like so I don't have I can stay up all night basically. And so she she reads for like two hours straight in bed. Whereas before I gave her that rule, she was too lazy and wanted me to always read everything to her because she just wanted to lay there like while I read. And so reading, I think, is a massive competitive advantage. I think there's a huge difference between consuming the written word and watching or listening to something. For me, I get massively different outcomes when I read a

1:03:16physical book or read on the Kindle. reading words. I don't know. It goes indifferent. It it it's somehow something different happens. And so, yeah. And I do think it's also an attention span thing where if you're able to actually read a book, it says something about your ability to live within the modern chaotic mess of of of and not being so reactionary. Um, the only thing I would add to it is don't

1:03:41just read non-fiction. Like fiction is a big part of developing your brain. and also getting really interesting weird ideas. So, I do think adding into that, make sure fiction is a big part of this and not just you're reading the stoic books on repeat or something. I had a visual of your daughter just like being in bed at like 4 in the morning. Like her eyes are like bleeding

1:04:06just of like how tired she is. Yeah, she actually she is reading. She she has taken advantage of it in a way that I didn't expect. I thought she was going to read for a half an hour and fall asleep, but she's like locked in and it's 11 and I'm like, "Oh, man." Okay, I need to probably need to change the the situation here. But right now, it's summer holidays. So, Paul Graham Paul Graham says, "The people who still

1:04:29read won't just be better informed. They'll be with a couple of exceptions, the only ones who can think well. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well." And I thought this was the it was this was interesting. So this is the the rebuttal to Paul and he responds.

1:04:49Yeah. Who who rebutted? Who rebutted? So Kieran Richie says, "Books are a monumental waste of time. 600 pages for every one page of actually valuable content. I should know. I've written three." Haha. You want information density? Blogs, papers, articles, and a well-curated X feed. And then Paul responds and he says, "Most books are bad. Part of reading well is finding the

1:05:13good ones." Then Kieran says, "Fair. I stick to textbooks these days for the higher signal to noise ratio." What do you think about this? I no. I just don't like that that way of thinking about the world. I think that um you you'll sometimes I'll read an amazing book and I'll go on Amazon. I want to like leave a review. I want to like say that I like the book and then I'll always see someone who says this could have been an email. This could have been a blog article. They don't get the point that a book what it helps you do is to it repeats case

1:05:46studies. It repeats things and it helps it get into your head in a way that's more lasting and more robust. And so from a non-fiction perspective, I think that almost every non-fiction book that I've ever read, when I look at the Goodreads or when I look at the Amazon reviews or when I tell a friend I've read a book that I really enjoyed, they're like, "Uh, you could have just listened to the podcast episode where he was on Tim Ferrris and I'm like, you just don't you don't get it." Like, you just you're not this is not it's not about efficiency. Not everything has to be about efficiency and density. And I

1:06:19don't know who this Kieran person is. I'm sure he's a lovely person, but I 100% disagree. I think the same thing people say about fiction novels. They're like, you know, it was about 200 pages too long. Yeah. If you have if if if you're trying to like just absolutely get the most efficiency out of life, I don't think life is all about efficiency. I don't think knowledge gathering is all about efficiency either. Um, and I really hate that sentiment personally. I'm not a fan of

1:06:47it. Yeah, I think um it's a barbell approach. I feel like you can like both could be true. Like you can read good books and that's an advantage and you can also have like a really curated information diet of like blogs and articles and X and stuff like that. You know what I mean? So I think like the people that both Yeah. Just do both. Just do both. You know I do both. I look at X and I also read book. Like I just don't get the I I've always really been irritated by that

1:07:22sentiment to be honest. Yeah. I think for people who and you know I'm I'm guilty for this because sometimes I I do this like for people who spend a lot of time brain rotting like at the end of the night at the end of like before you go to bed you're kind of like you got one eye open and you're just like

1:07:41scrolling through Instagram reels. Yeah. in a rock, then it kind of like morphs your brain in a way that like when you go into a book and it's so slow, it just it it feels weird. So, yes, you gota if you haven't read a book in a long time like and you you consume Instagram reels and stuff like that, do

1:08:05yourself a favor and read some books. It's it's it's gonna be helpful and and I agree with Paul Graham, it's going to be an unfair advantage. Um I also think the actually I mean look um it actually happens quicker than you'd think. So I I had a brain rot period uh over the last six months just part of business building part of just sometimes I go into a phase where I'm much more reactive and not very reflective and a bit more chaotic. Um, and then I decided, what always happens is I realize I'm using my phone too much and I realize my phone is in my bed too much

1:08:43in the morning when I wake up and this and so, uh, I said to my fiance, "Hey, we need to get the phones out of the room. Let's get our Kindles back, you know, like ready to go." And so we're both, uh, in Kindle world at the moment. and it it just makes life feel slower and less reactive when you wake up and you don't have a phone in your bed. Um, the other thing I will say is that the I got the new eight sleep which has all the controls on the actual bed thing itself which has been a game changer. So that's another reason now I

1:09:15have no excuse to have my phone in my room. I think phones, look, I on one hand love that everyone is not reading because it gives me an advantage in life over other people in a mean I'm just saying that in a mean way. I understand that that's not a nice thing to say. But yeah, for my own friends and family, I would I wouldn't I would wish upon them that they have the opportunity to not

1:09:39rot their brains and be able to read. It's like it's like a cure for your brain. Honestly, it feels like it's doing undoing some of the damage of all the weird fight videos I get shown on Instagram. Um, so a couple things. One is I just This is unrelated, but I just I I find when you say the word fiance, it's just funny

1:10:00to me. How do you guys How do you say it? Just cuz like you you're like it's so fancy. It's like, oh, my fiance, it you're so fancy. You're such a fancy guy. What would you say? What would you say? my woman. No, it's I honestly um I don't like the word either. It does sound a bit too It just sounds fancy. It just sounds

1:10:23fancy. That's all I'm saying. What would you say? What did you say before you were married and the period where you weren't married where you know that was a really short I had a very short period between getting engaged and getting married. Part of that was I didn't want to have to deal and this is very with saying fiance. It's very Larry David of me. [laughter]

1:10:45I hate the word. I truly hate the word. I'm like I can't stand it anymore. I'm like we need to get married today. Yeah. Oh, someone says our our microphones are noticeably different in volume. Who's louder? I think I might be louder, but yeah, let us know in the chat. The second thing is uh Ashley says, "I swear to God every stream JC is gonna bring up eight sleep, lol." [gasps] I'm either complaining about eight sleep uh or I'm saying it's great. It's It's one of the two. I I have a I have a emotional roller coaster relationship

1:11:23with that company, I tell you. Jonathan, you are louder. Oh, I'm louder. Well, that's good. You don't need to really hear what Greg is saying. I'll turn mine I can turn mine down a bit here. Okay, we're going to do one last take and if you want to keep the chat going and ask questions. Uh please feel free on YouTube and X. I'll look at it and maybe we can answer a few more. I don't know if John Jonathan needs to leave and have a genonic with his fiance. Uh so, you know, feel free to leave. I have until 2:00 p.m. Eastern. So Laura, you start drinking now so that

1:11:58not only, you know, you can catch up now, then I'll come in and I'll just take like three shots and we'll be good. So this is just a cool thing I saw. Um Stanley says, "I made an app store for iMessage agents. It's a directory of the best AI agents you can text on iOS." And you know what it is is, you know, there's a bunch of different these assistants, Caddy, Poke, Tommo. And I thought what was interesting about it is you're starting to see just AI agents that are you just iMessage and which which is so cool. So both from a consumer like um you're you're European so I know you

1:12:42live in WhatsApp. Um, what's iime message? I'll I'll literally I message you and you just like won't respond. But in WhatsApp, you'll just I'll just get a voice note, a four-minute voice note from you. Like that's that's our dynamic. Um, but we love iMessage here in the United States. And um, it's a really easy way to just consume a product. So from a consumer, I love it. And then from a business perspective, I think that, you know, building iMessage agents, really interesting, something I'm going to be spending some more time thinking about. What do you think about

1:13:17this? Yeah, I mean, as you said, uh, in Europe, we don't know what iMessage is. I don't know what an iPhone is. We don't know about these things. We we still use like a stick and like a just like, you know, these types of objects. iMessage agents. Honestly, I've never used one and never even interacted with something like this. The closest thing I've ever interacted with in terms of messaging is uh Open Claw, you know, building that into like a Telegram thing and and being able to interact with it. I don't I

1:13:51don't I honestly I honestly don't know. I think for me I imagine that that is just going to be something similar to using open claw or having it as like a front-end interface to other objects that you have you know like let's say it's it's a smarthome uh this is now your interface instead of having to use the interface of the Philips Hue thing or Apple home now you can just text and say actually hey could you just turn on all the lights or hey could you just do this and it just figures it out and it interfaces with all the other things but I actually don't So what do you know

1:14:24many different interesting use cases for these things? Because I imagine they're just like a front end interface to like a more main thing. Yes. Yeah. So I mean like over here you can see Poke. If you haven't tried Poke, I don't know what that is. It's basically like a personal assistant um app. Uh just like it's it does you should try it and as like a UX person you're gonna like be blown away. So really you know yeah like the onboarding experience like anyone who cares about UX just download Poke honestly and just see how their onboarding experience is because it is worldclass and shows you a peak into

1:15:06what agent first onboarding experiences are going to look like. Um, I think it's poke.com. No affiliation. Yeah. So, this this is the one. Um, just to show you, this is the European version of it. So, that's what you're talking about, right? Pokemon Go. Yeah. You can't get Poke in Poke.com. Doesn't look like it. No, it doesn't

1:15:28look like it. Damn. No AC and no Poke. You guys are You're struggling. We just got We just got Pokemon over here. I'm just checking on poke.com directly. So, what's the difference between poke.com and using like Claude? Well, I mean, so Claude is wonderful, but you can do a million things with Claude. The these assistants that you're seeing like on this iMessage agent sore are pretty

1:15:57verticalized. So, they don't do everything. They do a few things and they do a few things well. Um, and that's what's cool about them. Once you actually like, it's sort of hard to explain, but once you actually start messaging with your poke or you start messaging with some of these other ones, you um,

1:16:20it just feels a little bit different. Um, I invested in Lindy, Lindy. Which is like another one. Remember Lindy? Yeah. Yeah. Lindy is is really focused on like, you know, you you work in a business and you're you want a personal assistant. Um, so I actually asked Flo, the founder of Lindy, like what's the difference between Lindy and say working with um, OpenClaw or or Claude or whatever. And his his response was basically like what we're trying to build is like the Apple version. like it just it just like works

1:16:58really well. Um, and so I think there's that's that's what's uh that's that's why some of these iMessage agent apps are really interesting. So that's why I wanted to bring it up. I thought it I thought it could get people's creative juices flowing. I thought whoever created this, Stanley, who created this app store for iMessage agents was really smart. Um, and uh I'll be I'll be looking looking at that some more. I didn't get what you were talking about till I looked at their sales pitch here and now I know what you mean. Like whereas most people I know are still just using chat GBT, still just using it

1:17:33as a search engine. And if you would try to present if I would try to present co-work or claude code or any sort of automations to anyone I know who's just using it as some sort of chat engine, they would just be like, "No, I'm not. That's just insane. I'm not going to do that." Whereas Poke is like a Yeah. It's a It's essentially a polished front end for doing the complicated things you can

1:17:56do in these AI tools. Yes. Without you having to know anything about these AI tools. Exactly. Yeah. That's that's cool. I I didn't even know this existed to be honest. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm here. This is cool. I want to do one more take. Um, this is this has sort of been like the uh article of the week, I would say. Um, it's gone completely viral. You just

1:18:22hired a million bad employees. And, you know, I recommend people read it, but uh, A16Z quote retweeted and sort of showcased some of the most interesting uh, points of the article. I'm going to read it to you and I'm curious your perspective like what your your feedback is. So they say AI was supposed to replace human labor. It did the opposite. For the first time in history, humans are cheaper than software. And AI is creating more jobs than it eliminates. And then it shows these graphs. I don't know if you can see them, but basically basically oh um basically it's the token

1:19:05spend for per employee. So you can see on the uh yaxis um you know the annualized AI spend per employee you know people are spending 50k 100k 150k 200k. Okay. So, it's just you're you're starting to see people spend a lot of money on um on on tokens per employee. And then the headcount growth post AI adoption. So, basically this graph shows once you've adopted AI, what happens um to headcount and what happens to you know Yeah. What happens to headcount? So, what do you

1:19:46you know, what do you think of this? What are your first reactions to this? Um, and what do you think happens with human labor as people adopt AI? I wouldn't have expected this at all. I mean, I'm wondering, is this um, in Silicon Valley itself, is it related to the AI boom or is this across companies generally in the US? Um because I would obviously assume that within Silicon Valley and in tech companies as the AI boom kind of keeps going, they want to hire as many people as possible to to compete with these tools and and and you know build different things and and just

1:20:26be as fast as possible. But I'm just wondering like why are they I'm very surprised. I I would have assumed the headcount would go down uh over time. Well, I guess what I'm wondering is, is this a small blip within the bigger picture of a more downward trend towards having smaller companies, which seems more logical? I I need to go deeper into this, but it does say it it it's pulling 21,559 US firms. So, I I I don't think it's just Silicon Valley. You know what I

1:21:04mean? No. No, that wouldn't make sense. Yeah. My take is I imagine that this is shortterm and I can't imagine that I I just I just imagine that the bigger longer term picture is that a the headcount might go down if on an average like 10 years from now we're looking at like all of the companies in the S&P 500. I just imagine that the headcount would be lower due to these tools getting better and better and better, but not the expenses. Like I can imagine that then those expenses, you and I talked about this in person in San Francisco last year that these tools and

1:21:46these agents, etc. will essentially just, you know, replace the employee costs or be even more expensive than them. Um, but I do I I'm just if I were betting I would bet on headcount overall slowly going down. Interesting. Versus this trend continuing. But I don't I mean I don't know. What do you think? So at stories by Will on YouTube has a really interesting comment. He says is it going up because the companies are growing due to use of AI? So that's the question really like these are so the companies that are becoming AI native and are actually doing the work to go and figure this out and doing workflows

1:22:28having AI agents doing all this stuff is it because like these are the type of companies that are you know they're figuring out like what we talked about around like marketing assets right like maybe they're closing more deals um maybe they're increasing margins maybe they're figuring out ways to have better Facebook ads and that means more customers. Is that the reason why um

1:22:55you're seeing this? Yeah. I mean, but there's so I guess the large corporates are still not really adopting it in a way that you'd see the result like that. So, it's it's just strange. I mean, basically, I want to see that graph in two years. Yeah. I mean to be monitored. TBM, you know, I think

1:23:19TBM. Absolutely. TBM. Um, so is that it? Should we should we end here? What do you think? We should the perfect TBM moment to be monitored. We do. Uh, let's see. I'm going to look at chat. Um, see if there's any if there's any last few questions, let us know. I see one question. Blueberry muffin on X says, "What's a use case you've seen in application for a local LLM? How much compute do you

1:23:56actually need?" And um, let me show you um, something here related to that. So, I saw this really good Let me go here. I saw this really good tweet by uh another fellow German. Um T TLDDR startups need their own intelligence. Why? You're currently paying open AI anthropic twice. Once in tokens and again in your proprietary knowledge. They feed the models to make them useful. The fix is to run openweight models where nothing you type gets stored or trashed on or trained on. Your your prompts are a live feed of how your business works, your pricing, your workflows, your data. The point is basically his point is he's he's he's

1:24:50like, "All right, uh you you shouldn't be paying these big LLMs um because they're looking at your data." And so there's that's you know why you should do local. And I'm curious what your perspective is on that because that that's been a big use case that people have had for local LMS is basically like they don't want the big

1:25:18labs to look at their data. Yeah. I think I mean the data privacy stuff I'm I'm living here in Germany where that's a huge huge topic and people wanting businesses medium small to mediumsiz businesses even wanting to have their own local uh LLMs inhouse. You've probably seen also PewDiePie created his own selfhosted uh tool where you can keep all of your own basically all of the data stays with you um no matter which of the the LLMs you're using as the like compute power and yeah I think I think that or well a lot of people think and I think like uh some of the big uh tech names on Twitter

1:26:03have also posted about this a lot of businesses just will not want their proprietary proprietary information out there uh being worked on being trained on by these LLMs and especially if you're sort of you know working on something or inventing you know something that's very sensitive uh maybe pharma companies as well things like this there's just going to have to be some form of uh there's just going to have to be a lot of really good systems and services and and tools for people doing uh running these things locally. But it's also going to be expensive because the compute required to actually run these things inhouse is going to be quite

1:26:51crazy. If you look at PewDiePie's own personal home setup, um it's like $25,000 to do uh some of the basic computing. Um, and so yeah, I mean still, uh, even at a company of my size, that's actually worth it because we're going to be spending close to that anyway using these external tools. And so yeah, I do think once the Apple version of that comes along, once the version of local uh building being able to build local compute and being able to run these LLMs locally comes along in a way that's plug-in and play, then I think it's going to be pretty successful because I think a lot of people are concerned

1:27:33about the privacy element of this. It just doesn't really exist right now. So, Blueberry Buff Muffin also says to run an 80 billion parameter model, you need to spend 5K on compute. So, I'm wondering where the right balance is for less powerful local models. So, yes, he or she agrees with you that like you do need to spend money for a rig essentially to run these things. I think that um yeah, but that's nothing compared to what even a small business like mine pays per month in clawed team and open like you know that's not actually a lot if

1:28:14you're running a business. I think what's going to happen is you're going to you're going to have your frontier models and the frontier models are going to have open source models also. So like you're seeing that with Google, you know, Google has Gemini, but they've also got Gemma and Gemma's, you know, you is is their open source and you're, you know, you you'll have certain tasks that are for Frontier models. You're going to want the very very best, the Ferrari, but there's certain tasks that you just won't care that they're sort of behind

1:28:44uh a little bit. And there's certain tasks that also are privacycentric. So those you'll you'll want there. And I think the future is a world where you have some sort of hybrid of those. I I think that today we're in a stage where it's fun to play with local models because we know that this is the direction, the arrow of progress of where things are going, but they're not here to run everything. They're not, you know, you've you've played with Fable, you've seen how amazing they are, and it's just once you play with it, you're kind of like, well,

1:29:19I don't want to go back in time, right? So, Apple show Apple showed a good paradigm for this. You know, they even showed that visual when they were presenting Siri the first time that they didn't launch, but they still had this idea of you've kind of got this bubble of privacy. this inside this bubble everything is local on your phone and when it wants to go out and pull something from outside that bubble of privacy it asks for your permission it asks for your permission to share data outside of that uh bubble and Apple itself then the the product itself or or the Siri product itself helps you decide

1:29:54which things it can and can't do within that bubble and so I think that is the kind of thing that is kind of required in terms of of UX X for local uh local setup to work where you know me running a small business I know that okay when we're doing client proposals none of that data can go outside of what we're doing here but maybe when we're doing research we want something to pop up and screen on screen and say hey like your your local uh system here isn't going to be able to handle this can we take this element out of the local thing and plug

1:30:28it into Fable whatever but then here's what's going to get shared Um, I think that I can't imagine it going a different way other than that for most businesses that won't be able to spend, you know, have a data center of their own. All right, there you have it, everyone. That's the show. Uh, SIP Live episode 2. Hope this has been interesting. Hope this has been creative for you that's just gotten your brain scratched in a certain way. That's the goal. Um, keep honestly let me know if you like this, what you didn't like about it. Um, and and just reply to my tweets. Uh,

1:31:10reply to Jonathan Courtney's tweets. He's at Jceam, J Ice Cream on X. And, uh, as stories by Will says, enjoy your genonic Jonathan Courtney. Thank you. And, uh, there will be many. Anything you want to leave people with? I hope you guys have a great day. I really think the books my favorite moment of this was when we talked about the books thing. I think it's a huge I think if you're I think if you're an entrepreneur and if your goal is to if you want to be a successful entrepreneur I do think reading and whether fiction or non-fiction I don't think that matters so much but picking up a habit

1:31:53of reading and not just consuming information short form constantly I do think will be beneficial for you your business your life your fiance um that would be your shrimp That's what I would sign off with. Yeah, the books thing is interesting. I think uh I do feel a little guilty in the sense like I feel like I don't read I'm reading. I don't feel even though I have got a bunch of books back there, I feel like I don't read just enough. Uh or I read just enough and I I could be reading more. Um so it inspired You're doing all right. You're doing all

1:32:32right, man. I mean, dude, the Instagram, the reels are too good. They're too I had to delete Instagram again. I I I went off Instagram from 2020 until two weeks ago. Then I was like, I'm going to promote my podcast on Instagram. Downloaded it. Already got rid of it. I can't be on there. I can't believe that. Wow, that was

1:32:50quick. We I can't do it. We were DMing. I know. I'm gone. I'm already gone. Like fully gone. I Well, maybe I'll I don't know. I I just can't do it. I I can't control myself. I'll just sit there and like go like, you know, flipping through stupid crap that doesn't do anything good for me. Especially the messages from you, [laughter] dude. Don't send me that Yeah. Well, listen,

1:33:18you opened it. [laughter] You opened it. Thank you so much, guys. Thanks for having me on the show as well, Greg. I really appreciate it. Having a European on here, you know, thank you for Thank you for taking the time out of your out of your day. I really appreciate it and and being generous with your time and and everything. So, uh, thank you everyone for tuning in. I know you're all busy doing your whatever it is you're doing, you know, work, family, both. So, I appreciate you and and I'll see you on

1:33:48the next one. Thank you everyone. Bye everyone. Thank you so much.