9 Business Ideas To Profit From The 2022 A.I. Gold Rush (Using Dall-E & GPT3) (#376)

Sam Parr

There's a new era, and I'm not part of it. That's kind of how I feel when I see this. I don't... How do you feel when you see this? And how do you intend to get your hands on this? We're a bunch of scheming, greedy... you know, *snorkel people*. How are you going to get your hands on this? How are you going to get your sticky paws in this game?

Shaan Puri

Okay, this is the AI episode. It's all AI; everything is AI. I was mind blown. I would say that's the right word. To me, this is the biggest "holy shit" moment I've had when it comes to technology—seeing what's going on in AI. For you, you got emotional, which is a stress response.

Sam Parr

I think I'm more emotional than you are. I think I get touched more than you do. Let me give you the background really quick. So, it's a company called Play.ht. One of their side projects is a thing called Podcast.ai. Basically, what they did was give their AI algorithm, or program, whatever you want to call it, Steve Jobs' biography. I think they actually gave it one or two of his biographies because there are two major ones. Then, they gave the program every single Steve Jobs recording they could find on the internet, along with every Joe Rogan episode ever. They made Joe Rogan interview Steve Jobs. The interview is about 25 minutes long, and they talk about all types of stuff. They say some amazing things. For example, Joe Rogan does the intro and teases out who the guest is, just like he does in real life. He goes, "What's up, freak bitches?" which I don't even think he says anymore, but he said that in all the early episodes. He goes, "What's up, freak bitches? Today's guest is someone who's incredibly smart, incredibly..."

Shaan Puri

just play it right let let it let

Sam Parr

it and insufferable well he says insufferable which I thought

Shaan Puri

was crazy so go ahead play

AI

This podcast is brought to you by Play.ht. All content is generated by artificial intelligence.

Shaan Puri

intelligence choice for this part

AI

listener discretion is advised

Joe Rogan

hello freak bitches welcome to another episode of the bro joggin' experience

Shaan Puri

bro joggin' experiences

Joe Rogan

And on this episode, I welcome my friend, who is difficult to describe. I'm fascinated by him, and I hope you'll be too. He is weird, brilliant, and sometimes totally insufferable. My guest today has made some of the great technological products of our age, and he's always pushing the envelope in innovation. For example, with his next computer, he developed a new programming language and operating system. He then became even more famous for creating three applications for that computer: a word processor, a spreadsheet, and an image editor. That just showed me that this dude was brilliant and had amazing taste. I would just hope that I could be even like one-tenth of the genius that my friend today is.

Shaan Puri

and I

Joe Rogan

Can't even say his name, so yeah, I'm super psyched about having him in the house today. It's the first time... or yeah, we've had you on before, but not for a long time. You're like Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in *Ghost*; you're a memory from the past. So, without further ado, my friend, who is difficult to describe and wonderful, and I'm so grateful he came on the show.

Steve Jobs

How's it going? Good to see you, buddy! It's been a long time since I've been on the show. I've missed this; it's always fun.

Shaan Puri

Wow, like just pause there. Okay, so the things that... first, the voice quality. The voice quality is incredible! It sounds just like Joe Rogan; it sounds just like Steve Jobs. It has gotten so much better than how this used to be. I remember when you had the Garmin GPS in your car and you could choose Morgan Freeman's voice or whatever. Anytime you'd have this voice robot trying to say something new, it sounded totally computerized, and this doesn't. So, the voice quality is one thing. The fact that it kind of makes more sense... it makes more sense than it should. Like, he's doing an intro; it understands that he's teasing, like, "This is my friend who's here today. This person's a genius," but not saying who it is and what it is right away. That's like a showmanship thing that I thought was really interesting. The back-and-forth banter... he gives that long intro, and then Steve Jobs just kind of laughs, like you would if you had sat down for this kind of interview with Joe Rogan. I just thought that was incredible—the way it felt like a real conversation. And obviously, there's some stuff that's like, you know, he's talking about word processors and documents a little too much. Nobody would do that, but like, damn, if 80% of that is not amazing!

Sam Parr

And the reason I felt emotional listening to this was that I felt both in awe and also scared. As I was listening to this, I was agreeing with what Steve says. What we'll do in a second, Ben, is fast forward maybe 10 minutes in. Basically, Jobs goes on this long rant about LSD, saying, "You know, LSD changed my life. I don't think it's for everyone, but it changed my life." He explains that it opened his mind up and allowed him to read all these books he never previously would have read. He says something like, "I wouldn't take LSD a bunch of times in a row because I only needed it once or twice, and it opened my mind and introduced me." He goes in-depth, saying, "It introduced me to India," and it's just... well.

Shaan Puri

He talks about talking about God. He's discussing all kinds of things that you're like, "It's not just like reading a Wikipedia page." You know what I mean? It's very philosophical. He's like, "When people think about God, they think about this, but to me, it's..." and it's like, "Well, that's a fully formed thought and philosophy." That sounds like something somebody would say when they're having an in-depth podcast, not just, "I did this in 1979 in March when I was living in Albuquerque," and then in 1981, I once again... It wasn't that. It was like a very real sounding thing.

Sam Parr

Has this amazing... Did you hear? There's this beautiful quote that he says. Basically, the way that this company operates—if you ever listen to a bunch of Steve Jobs interviews—you'll notice that at points, it almost sounds like they're just chopping up some of his clips and weaving them together. He has talked about this before. So, I don't actually know if he's ever said this particular line before, but he starts talking about India and why he loves that part of the world. He basically says, "Well, it's so old and it influenced the rest of society." He goes on to mention that there's an Indian epic that's ten times as long as the Bible, the Quran, and all these other things. The Indian...

Shaan Puri

of the odyssey yeah

Sam Parr

That's what he says. Yeah, he's like, "Basically, Indian history influenced the rest of the world." And there's an epic that's ten times as long as all these other books. I just thought that would be such an interesting topic.

Shaan Puri

He does so, and he doesn't say the name, so it kind of leaves you wanting there. But he is talking about the Gita, which I think is a 16-part series or whatever. It's like this really, really long thing. I would bet that it actually is multiple times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey. So, I...

Sam Parr

I don't think it was really good that he said that. This is the thing: when he said that, I thought, "I gotta find that book." He just sold me on this book. He influenced you? Yeah, the dead jobs influenced me. So, Ben, click play just for like 30 seconds.

Steve Jobs

But there is some kind of deeper meaning to life, and it can't just be something that somebody made up. Because if it was, it wouldn't be compelling; it would seem contrived, and everyone would see through it. So, I think that the meaning and the purpose is by the cosmos—the nature of the cosmos—which is pretty bold thinking. I mean, I don't know how else to put it, but it's not religious in the way people usually talk about. Taking LSD was a profound experience for me. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears off. But you know, it washes over you and tells you that everything is connected. You're not here by accident; you were put here for a purpose. If you can figure out what that is, then you'll learn more about yourself than anything else could. It's pretty intense.

Shaan Puri

So, that quote is a real quote of his: "Taking LSD was a profound experience. One of the most important things in my life. It shows you that there's another side of the coin. You can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it." Okay, so that is like an actual quote of his, but it's weaved into the conversation. There's a part in the conversation where he says he's a fan of Joe Rogan. He's like, "It's nice to just sit back in the car and listen to you rant." So, the first one, where he's talking about LSD, they just took his good read section or his quotes and they're like, "Okay, cool, he says things like this." But where did it know to say to Joe Rogan that he loves to listen to his podcast in the car? Just love to sit back and listen to your rant. Where would that have come from? How does that happen? There are little moments like that that I just don't understand this technology well enough to know how it could know to say something like that in that moment.

Sam Parr

So, the first half of the call, he talks all about India and these kind of platitude-like life advice type of things, which were pretty amazing. But then, the second half, which Ben just started playing a little bit, he talks about Google. They actually say Yahoo wrong; they call it "Yahoo."

Shaan Puri

they

Sam Parr

They put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, but he does all these interesting quotes, which I actually think are things he said again in the past. He says stuff like, "You know, that's a problem I've always had with Microsoft. In many ways, they're smart people and they've done good work, but they've never had any taste. They've never had any aesthetic taste." Then he goes on and talks about Adobe. He criticizes Adobe's business model. Joe Rogan actually asks, "What would you do to fix Adobe?" Jobs responds, "Well, they've got 800 people working on Adobe's business model. That's just way too many people." He adds, "The fact that they charge just a little bit of money for a small piece of the product is like buying a car but only getting part of the car and having to pay more money to get the rest of the engine." He makes these criticisms about Adobe, which frankly, I have no idea if it's true. But he must have gone on like a rant about this in the past. Then he mentions, "I had a lunch recently with Bob [last name] at Adobe." He says their full name and mentions that he leads up this part of Adobe. He actually agreed with me that they need to fix it and they're working on fixing it. So anyway, he gives almost more advice and his opinions on what I think are current events. I'm not well-versed enough with Adobe, but it seems like current events. It's pretty magical.

Shaan Puri

It's amazing! Yeah, this basically was like "bring back someone from the dead" technology. Ben, do you have anything to add? You're a history guy. What did this... like, do you have anything that you felt when you watched this?

Ben Wilson

I really agree with Sam. It made me oddly emotional listening to it. It also scared me a little bit just because I thought of the application of, like, "What if you did this to my grandpa?" and what emotions that would bring back. That frightened me, and I thought, "Oh, I don't know if..."

Sam Parr

that's a good thing to

Ben Wilson

Be able to experience, like, a representation of my grandpa that would feel like the real thing, but isn't. Right? Like, where are these thoughts coming from? So, it's equal parts really compelling and really cool. I just like a treat to be able to hear what I think is a pretty accurate representation of how Steve Jobs would approach some of these things that are happening today. But then, it's also just scary to realize that it's not really him. And what is it really?

Shaan Puri

Well, it's like a video, right? Today, you could watch a home video, and it's like you see their face, you hear their voice, but it's captured a moment in time. To me, this is an extension of that, which is somewhat interactive. You can kind of interact with these people or hear them talk about new things. You know that it's not like the real thing, but there's a "Black Mirror" episode that's a lot like this, where the woman uploads her boyfriend's consciousness to this robot. She's kind of still dating him even though he's gone, but there's like the shadow of him that can simulate him. I think there's more good than bad. Sam, what do you want to say?

Sam Parr

Yeah, so let me add two points about why this is going to get even stranger. The first is almost scary. Basically, in 1985, here is a quote from Steve Jobs: "My hope is someday when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle in a computer. Someday, some student will not only be able to read the words Aristotle wrote but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer." So, Steve Jobs wrote that in '85, which is interesting. Now, here's where things get really interesting.

Shaan Puri

From that, because that's what he is. What he just described is what just happened to him.

Sam Parr

It's magical! Now, here's where things are going to get even more magical. So, Play.DOTAI or Play.H... I want to mention that part of their website allows you to actually vote for new episodes. Some of the top episodes that people have voted for include: - Elon Musk interviewing Nikola Tesla - Kanye West and Bob Marley talking about music - Jesus interviewing God - Einstein and Buddha having a conversation on science and spirituality

Shaan Puri

and that trump interviews himself

Sam Parr

Trump interviews himself. There's Lex Fridman interviewing Richard Feynman. Then there's Joe Rogan mediating peace between Russia and the U.S. That sounds like a joke, and it is a joke, but it's actually an interesting tool.

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

Where you're like, "Well, let's hear Joe Rogan. Let's see if Joe Rogan can bring together these two different people and hear each other's perspective." We'll actually find out where one another is coming from, even if it's make-believe. But it will still be like, "Maybe that is actually how they feel," and I could work through this argument. So that's why this stuff is actually really, really interesting and powerful.

Shaan Puri

So, let's switch gears. I want to give you my kind of big picture framework on how I think about AI. I was having lunch with this guy who has built an AI app. He built one app called "Wambo." It had like 100 million downloads. It basically could take a picture of you and make it look like you were singing. Then, it got copied a bunch and was taken out of the app store because of music problems. And then, like I...

Sam Parr

saw that

Shaan Puri

now he has another one which is basically like one of these text image creators on mobile and it's like really popular and he started saying this thing and I kind of remixed what he was saying and here's kind of like how here's where we landed with like what's going on with ai so the last I don't know 10 years have been what I'll call left brain ai and like you know you have your left brain and your right brain left brain left brain is your analytical brain and that's what artificial intelligence could do you had big data you had machine learning you had you know oh oh the computer can play chess and it's amazing the computer can play go and it's amazing it beats the best players in the world you had self driving cars where a car is taking in sensor data camera data and it's basically processing it and trying to make decisions like a human being using analytical decision making processes it's trying to make the right judgment at the right time to maximize safety and so that's what I think that's where we've been and it's also in a way what we expected that sounds like the type of thing that super computer should be able to do it's like hey computer you know just like you can multiply huge numbers and I can't do that in my head you know you should be able to drive perfectly every time you should be able to play chess better than a human like great I get that stuff and then was this game changer where it changed into right brain ai your right brain is your creative brain right so this is where you got gpt 3 which is what generates text like what we just talked about with the joe rogan thing so you can just give it a prompt and it'll just write an essay for you it'll be creative it can write rap lyrics for you that's where you got dali which is art so you could just say give me a picture of a starry night but with it takes place at hogwarts and it'll just generate images that like create that scene it'll paint pictures for you and so you know all of a sudden the artists are looking at this saying wait a minute wait a minute I it was fine when you were just messing with chess but now now you're holding the paintbrush what's going on here and then you have that you know what we just played you know playht or unreal speech they're doing this for audio like how do you generate audio whether that's music whether that's podcast it's just creating it from scratch and you know like here's podcasters like us let's wake up and we sit at our microphone and we have to come up with this content but now the machines are doing it too and and so we're competing with that and then you have people doing this with video there's a company called runway that's doing this where you could just describe a video like walking through the streets of tokyo and it's really busy and then it it creates that scene and they go can you add some rain and then it adds rain

Sam Parr

what what's that called

Shaan Puri

runway ml

Sam Parr

can I go on right now and just use it

Shaan Puri

Ben, pull up the demo for Runway ML. I don't know if it's launched yet, but they put out a sick demo of what I just described. Now you've got this right-brain AI that's doing creative things. It's creating images, text, videos, writing blog posts, essays, making paintings, patterns, music, podcasts, and videos. So now it's doing both sides, and that's the big change that has happened. That's the big "holy shit" moment. In the same way that NFTs brought a whole bunch of people into crypto—when crypto was just about cryptography or finance, there was a certain set of people interested. Then NFTs came out, and it was like, "Oh cool, there's a whole art angle, celebrity access." It brought a new audience in. This is that on steroids. The new AI stuff that's creative—creating art, music, audio, and text—is bringing in a whole new wave of people beyond just those interested in a chess bot or the AlphaZero bot that plays Go. Those were kind of limited to just the nerds. Now we've got the nerds and the artists both in the mix. That's my framework for what's going on with AI, and I think the next 10 years will see this right-brain side taking over.

Sam Parr

and this is that is that it what is that

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so let's see... Oh my god! It's like, make it feel more romantic. Remove the "and," you just highlight an object, and it's like, "Remove this. I don't want this in the video." It just removes the street lamp. Then it's like, "Make it a lush garden. Make it look like it is hand-drawn. Make it look like a jungle where there's whatever going on." Wow! So, like, that last thing it just did is so crazy. You drop a video in, and it goes green screen with the character. It's a guy walking around, and it just immediately removes the background. Then it says, "Add a sunny sky," and they add the sunny sky. Then it says, "Blur the sun a little bit. Blur the background a little bit," and it blurs the background while this guy is skateboarding or whatever. That's crazy that it could do that, you know? Now, obviously, you know a demo is generally a massive overpromise for what the tech can actually do.

Sam Parr

Yeah, but we can all see it. We can all see that if they're not doing it now, it's reasonable to think that in the near term, say 10 years, this is going to be normal. And...

Shaan Puri

2 inches to that guy's neck beard and this is done like yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, we're measuring timelines by hair growth. This is one of those things that doesn't happen often, where you see something and you say to yourself, "It's not there yet, but it will be." It's almost like when I was in a Tesla for the first time. It went from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds. Even though the range wasn't good and some other things weren't good, I got into it and thought, "Oh, well, yeah, in 10 years this will just be the norm. This will be normal." Those types of experiences are significant.

Shaan Puri

Of things puberty, it's like there's a bunch of changes happening. The voice is changing, but it still cracks. You're like, "Alright, it doesn't sound great yet, but it'll get there."

Sam Parr

Yeah, and this is one of those things. It's pretty magical when you see it. There are some seemingly basic but actually quite profound ways that this is going to impact things. I mean, it's basically... I don't know if you know anything about music, but I was listening to this documentary on Nirvana. Dave Grohl was talking about his newest album. He's going to use analog recording, which is like tape recording. He's going to record it with them all in one room. But because he's using Pro Tools—it's the technology they use for recording, kind of like Photoshop but for music—he said, "We could record all this music, and we only have to do it one time. Then we can drag and drop different stuff and make the sound perfect. Every snare is exactly on the beat that it should be, and it's perfect." He mentioned that they kind of wanted it to be a little sloppier and to feel more human because Pro Tools has made this stuff perfect. That's an example of what's going to happen. Some really mundane but interesting examples are basically... Have you ever done high-ticket sales where you're trying to sell software or some type of service that requires tons of back and forth on email? You know, like cold emailing someone, and then they say, "Oh, this is kind of interesting, but we need this, this, and this." Then you have to reply back. That costs so much money. You have to train people on the right things to say, give them documentation on all the right things to say, and then add in the wow factor of, "Can you flirt with them the right way?" Can you play this game the right way? That stuff... It's reasonable to see that this will all be automated in the near term. A call center won't be a thing. There will be an AI call center or whatever we want to call that—your operations hub. Just in case that doesn't work, we'll have a couple of people there.

Shaan Puri

Right, well, one of the companies I invested in is called Infinitus. The funny thing they did was realize that doctors spend so much time in their back office just trying to do billing with insurance. So, you'll call up, and basically, the patient gives you information for insurance. Then, you have to call the insurance company to verify the name and the number. You also need to get the reference code for what treatment they had, or whatever, right? All this back and forth... Most entrepreneurs' solution was, "Oh, this is so much back and forth. We need to eliminate this and redesign the system from scratch." What these guys did was way smarter. They thought, "Why don't we just save the doctors a ton of time? Let's make a robot that calls their robot." So, they created a robot that will call the insurance provider's robot. The insurance provider will say, "Please enter the patient's identification number," and the robot responds, "924336." Then, the insurance provider says, "Thank you for your patience. Please say if you want number 1." The robot has infinite patience to just do the whole call by itself. It saves doctors a ton of time, and they're doing really, really well. Let me give you...

Sam Parr

we have to talk about interior ai

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so let's do a couple of other examples. Here's another one: Peter Levels, who came on the pod. You know, he's a massive fan favorite. This guy's got a killer following, and one of the reasons why is because he loves to just hack together and make stuff. I think when you were looking at this thing, you called him... what did you call him? You called him an artist in that way too, you're like...

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

I forgot your description of him, but you're like... I can't remember. It was something like you called him basically a... a code artist or something like that.

Sam Parr

Well, I don't remember what I called him, but to me, he's like a craftsman. You know, he's like a punk rocker. He's like a musician who, instead of playing on a musical keyboard, is playing on a computer keyboard. He's pretty magical. He's a pretty magical creator, I think.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, there's definitely an element of punk to him. For example, he's like, "I don't do email or phone calls ever. If you have a question for me, here's a frequently asked questions thing." Why? Because I like to just work on my stuff, and then I like to go swimming. Those are the things I want to do, right? And he's like, "You know, I don't want to live in one place. I'm going to just move around and be a nomad." I think that's cool, and he did that before remote work was popular.

Sam Parr

So, he's going to do that. He's been building it publicly on Twitter for a while now, about 3 or 4 months maybe.

Shaan Puri

so no not even dude like couple weeks so he created this thing it's interior ai like interior design and what you do is you could basically upload a photo of any space and you could say what it is you say you drop it you drag and drop a photo of a space by the way I wanna create a youtube video that does all these demos live 1 by 1 but like you upload a space and then you say what type of room it is you say what type of style you want like do you want ski chalet do you want tropical do you want like minimalist do you want a maximalist look and then you you say how many versions you want and then you click render my idea and it just creates like an interior designer would a super realistic like go to his twitter and just look at the look at his like demos there ben it generates like a super realistic looking interior so he took like for example kim kardashian's house and he took the photo from their like living room and then he uploaded he said like you know give me a give me some inspiration and it turned it into like a hot spring like it turned it into like a whole different like thing altogether but it's really amazing and it's like yeah here's all the stuff you would need to make your house look like this do you like this look nope you want a new one push a button get another one push a button get another one push another which is what you were saying that would be so much back and forth as a human being you would sit down for design meetings and then they would have create a look book and then you'd give your feedback and then they would you know maybe give you a rendering but that takes time and energy on their part and then you'd say no and then you'd have to go back and forth here you just push buttons and you just immediately get this like dream it's like you just get to dream out loud and you're just dreaming and it's just generating images for you to kind of remix off of which is a totally different creative process that cuts so much friction out of the creative process that even somebody like me who doesn't have design taste this is a the superpower to give you design taste but b it takes all the friction out so you don't have the impatience right okay look at look at this one yeah go go back and forth to this so so it's this crappy warehouse like space just empty I don't know sam like describe what you're looking

Sam Parr

At here, so this is clearly an old factory that someone's trying to turn into an apartment. It's an industrial-style, 1,000 to 2,000 square foot room that looks beautiful but is too rustic to live in and entirely empty. He says, "I found an original empty loft photo. I wanted to add interior decorating that was industrial style, and I wanted to auto-detect different parts around the building." It looks like there's a pillar in the middle of the room, so he wanted to decorate around that. He said, "Alright, go ahead, Interior AI, do it, and let's look at the next picture."

Shaan Puri

And then it turns it into this modern-looking loft. It's the same place, and then it replaces the floor. It does this and it does that. I think there's another version that creates multiple versions of it.

Sam Parr

oh my gosh

Shaan Puri

Yeah, some of these little outlandish ideas are crazy, right? They have replaced the roof with bamboo, and you can see through the roof now. So, some of this is not super realistic. But you said something earlier that I think is worth noting, which is: it's not perfect. There are definitely some weird aspects that are like, "Well, that doesn't make any sense." But you have to see through that right now because that stuff's going to get better. There's this great blog post from back in the day by this guy, Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail when he was inside Google. The blog post is called "If You're Great, You Don't Have to Be Good," which honestly is kind of the motto of my life. Right? Like, Sam, do I show up late to this podcast? Yeah, I do. Am I wearing my boxers right now? Yeah, I am. Did I prepare for this podcast? Not fully. But if you're great, you don't have to be good. And that's true. He's like, you know, with Gmail, people were like, "Oh my God, it doesn't have this, and it doesn't have a contact book, and it doesn't have that." He's like, "Yeah, but look, it's lightning fast, has unlimited storage, and the search is amazing. You can find any file in any email instantly." And he's like, "When you're great, you don't have to be good." He mentioned the iPad, and people were like, "Oh my God, it doesn't have a keyboard, it doesn't have a USB port, it doesn't have this, it doesn't have that." He's like, "Yeah, but watch this. You tap a button, and it instantly turns on. It doesn't have a boot-up process, and you swipe, and you're on the internet. It just lets you browse the internet from your couch, you know, when you're on the go, or when you don't have your laptop or desktop computer." So, when you're great, you don't have to be good. He had released that when the iPad came out. He said, "Look, the iPad just got released. All these critics are saying how that's a huge flop." I think they're wrong because they're making this mistake. They want things to be good everywhere, but you just need to be great in like three things that matter, and everything else can be kind of sucky, and it'll still win. He was absolutely right about the iPad.

Sam Parr

Are you... so let's talk about opinions a little bit. Where's your head at with all this? I mean, when I see this, I think, "I am not capable." Like, I don't have the ability to work on this. I just... I simply don't have the horsepower. I appreciate it, but I...

Shaan Puri

The engine I got upstairs... oh yeah, it's more of a go-kart. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Parr

I'm definitely... well, I'm like, I’m very much either going to be a spectator or only a semi-active person in this game. You know, you made a funny joke when we were talking, you and I. So, Sean and I are obsessed with TikTok; we watch TikTok constantly. We made a joke, or Sean made a joke, he goes, "We're content creators in the same way that a horse carriage person in 1912 saw Henry Ford drive by in his car." Yeah, the car's like "whiz!"

Shaan Puri

you're like oh shit yeah the hell was that

Sam Parr

yeah like I

Shaan Puri

that's only seemed like I watch tiktoks

Sam Parr

Yeah, I see the 18-year-old with Vans who makes this spectacular video, and it's just the funniest thing ever. I'm like, "Oh, there's a new era, and I'm not part of it." That's kind of how I feel when I see this. How do you feel when you see this? How do you intend to get your hands on it? You know, we're a bunch of scheming, greedy, horrible people. How are you going to get your sticky paws in this game?

Shaan Puri

Well, that's a great question. It's a question I've been asking myself. I'm a little bit different than you in that I have a little more self-delusion, where I'm like, "I could do this." You know, I could... if I hired the right people, I could be the vision guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll be the vision guy. And, you know, I'll have the idea, and then all these geniuses will just play it out.

Sam Parr

So, you previously had a company that was a... I would tell my parents I had a tech company, but it was really just an email newsletter. It wasn't a tech company. You actually had a proper technology business.

Shaan Puri

Right, right. Yeah, you were just basically writing brochures, whereas I was running a Silicon Valley enterprise.

Sam Parr

I'm like a restaurant that has an online ordering menu, calling themselves a tech company.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly, the next Google. I'm used to working with people that are way smarter than me. I like to roll my chair over to their screen and they're just like, "What do you want?" I'm like, "Hey bud, can you do that thing again where you made the thing bounce during the animation? That was so cool! I want to just upload this to my Twitter. Can you do it again?" And they're like, "Yeah, sure." So, I'm used to working with designers and tutors that are really talented. I kind of look at it as following my plan, which is to invest in everything because investing is easy and great, right? I'm a believer in this wave. I'm excited about this and I think that I can help because a lot of the people who can build this stuff, they don't know, A, where to apply it—like what's the actual pain I should be solving—and B, they don't know how to build maybe a defensible business or a go-to-market strategy that might make sense for them. So I'm like, "Okay, cool, I'm going to invest in a bunch of these companies." That's Plan A, and that's already in motion.

Sam Parr

It would you say that this is the most interesting sector for sure?

Shaan Puri

For sure, and I kind of feel like an idiot because it's like, "Oh cool, now you're interested in the new thing." On one hand, I get that, you know, "Oh, crypto."

Sam Parr

you are in fact a dumb idiot who chases

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I just chased the next shiny object. There's some truth to that. Like, as crypto prices went up, the more I invested. Then I created The Milk Road and turned my content attention to it. So, you know, now it's like that meme. It's like the guy who looks back at the new thing that's the hot thing behind it. It's like, yeah, AI is that new thing. But at the same time, what am I supposed to do? I just saw a flying object. I just saw a UFO. What am I supposed to do, pretend I'm not interested? Like, no, I'm super interested. Count me in! Beat me up and have your way with me, aliens. That's how I feel about AI.

Sam Parr

Did I ever tell you the time that in our office, there was a porn studio across the street that would leave their windows open?

Shaan Puri

no so

Sam Parr

So, at my office in San Francisco, it was at Bush and Kearny in the Financial District. We were on maybe the 5th floor. There used to be this company called Breather. It was almost like Airbnb but for office space, maybe like WeWork, where they would pre-rent tons of single small rooms.

Shaan Puri

a meeting room yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, a meeting room, and then you could rent it by the hour. We had these huge, beautiful windows at our office, and you could see across the street, which was only 20 yards—just the size of a small street. You could see across where this other room was, and eventually, this softcore porn company started renting it. It was a breather, and they would rent it by the hour. I think it was for OnlyFans. I think it was where a freelance photographer specialized in webcam girls or something like that. They would come and take their portfolio pictures, and they would always come like two days a week at around 2 o'clock. They would get completely naked and just be there taking pictures. I had this woman working for me named Edie, who was probably 65. She and I sat next to each other, and I remember when it happened, I would be like, "Yeah, they're there again today." You can't not look. Edie is hardcore Catholic, and she used to do the sign of the cross. Whenever they were there, she would do the sign of the cross and start holding onto her rosary. When they would come in, she would say, "Oh, gee," and like, "Oh, baby Jesus," you know, dear.

Shaan Puri

you were saying to your peter but for different reasons

Sam Parr

Yeah, for different reasons, she was more so on like "wow," and I was more like "wow." It was one of those things where I remember sitting there, and our office was like six young men and then Edie and I. This nude photo photography was just happening right there, and we just had to stare at it all day. I remember it being so challenging to work when that was happening. That's sort of like AI; that's my long tangent.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I was like, "Well, where does he go to this?" Okay, yeah, I'm with you on that. That's it.

Sam Parr

that is how it works you don't remember that and you you were never

Shaan Puri

There, when they got naked... No, I never saw that. But, you know, thanks for not inviting me. So, yeah, that is how I feel about this. I'm like, "What am I supposed to do? Not look?" Edie, I'm looking. I'm looking, and you know I'm looking as long as they're there. That's how I feel about AI. So, I'm going to invest in this stuff. I'm going to keep learning about it, and then who knows, maybe start a company in this space. You know, it's pretty exciting. Would you really? Yeah, it's exciting. I mean, like, this is like a...

Sam Parr

it is exciting

Shaan Puri

It's an unlock. It's like, "Oh, we got new toys to play with!" I can't leave them in the box; I gotta unbox it and see what I can do with it. So, you know, I don't know. We'll see what happens with this. But let me give you a couple of other kind of mind-blowing examples here. So, okay, another one is Jasper. I just invested in this company called Jasper.

Sam Parr

dude the valuation was steep I'm shocked you did it

Shaan Puri

Yeah, the revenue curve is also steep. It's working really well. Now, I went in and I told him this: "Your numbers are insane. This might be fraud." That's okay. Yeah, we'll see. I don't think it's fraud, but the numbers are so, so impressive that it's like, you know, when you say, "Wow, that's unbelievable," there's a part of you that's like, "Is it? Wait, is this believable?" So, you know, there's that. And I said the other thing is, you know, sometimes these companies that get off to really hot starts don't necessarily sustain. Sometimes that explosive growth can... can make.

Sam Parr

you like groupon

Shaan Puri

But it can also break you. Groupon, you know, during COVID, Hopin was an example of this. Hopin started and it was like the perfect thing at the perfect time. It just took off like a rocket ship and became worth $5 billion. Now, they just laid off like a thousand people because COVID ended, the demand went down, and they couldn't sustain that sales growth. They had forecasted that they would always keep growing like a rocket, and maybe that didn't happen. So, do you know?

Sam Parr

and by the way the founder took a $100,000,000 in secondary

Shaan Puri

Yeah, you know, he just had to secure the bag for his family, right? He's like, "I got kids."

Sam Parr

he don't but

Shaan Puri

a good friend I I'm gonna have kids I better get this bag

Sam Parr

I'm gonna use that excuse all the time, Rocco. So, I got kids, dude. I got kids to feed. I got a family, right?

Shaan Puri

I'm such a good uncle! Okay, so check out this demo of what Jasper can do. Basically, I teach a writing course called **Power Writing**. My whole goal is to help you understand that if you're going to write something—whether it's for your website, an email, your Twitter bio, or content for blogs—you have two options. You can either write it and no one will read it; it will go nowhere and drive no results—no clicks, no sign-ups, no followers. Or, it can actually achieve the desired outcome. It's like a genie, right? You say what you want and just give it a little guidance. For example, you might say, "Make it funny. I want an ad that's going to promote my gym. It's called **Crunch**. We have this welcome offer where you get it for $20. Make it funny, and I want it as a Facebook ad and as a cold email." Then, it gives you ten options. You can edit them or highlight a section and say, "Rephrase this. I didn't like this intro; give me a new one." And it will just provide you with a new one. You can keep asking for more options, and it delivers every time. I mean, it's like having the best employee who is creative, super prompt, and immediately delivers what you want. It's kind of amazing! So, watch for another 30 seconds; this is the **Boss Mode** version.

Austin Distel

Access to documents. Now, I want you to imagine documents. It's kind of like Google Docs, if you had an assistant in there and you're the boss giving your assistant instructions on how to do stuff. Now, for our first example, imagine a real estate agent who has a lot of outbound sales emails to send out this week. He wants to save some time by using his AI assistant, Jasper. Now, we're probably getting the hang of this by now. On the left, we give Jasper some context of our situation, any background information we need, along with tone of voice and keywords. Then, on the right, we can supply a pattern for Jasper to follow. Jasper is really good at following patterns and applying that with all the information it knows from the internet. Here, we just provided a really good example of what good behavior would look like. Then, we provided some merge tags—empty little slots that we want Jasper to fill in. In our situation, the real estate agent's name is Dave, the client's name is James, the market is Austin, Texas. It's the new year, season demand is up, inventory is down, and we want them to hop on a call. So now, we're going to write with AI. We're going to do a Jasper command. Remember that feature for later. Okay, now what we're going to do is activate voice mode. "Hey Jasper, write an email from Dave to James about an update on the Austin, Texas real estate market and ask for a call later this week." Alright, we're submitting that command. Imagine if you're the boss and Jasper's your assistant. Now he's following your directions. Look at that! It's perfect. You can go ahead and ship it. Imagine all the sales emails you can send.

Sam Parr

dude so

Shaan Puri

Isn't that crazy? So, that's why these guys are taking off. They basically say, "You know, where you had employees, you no longer need employees." Or if you had a good employee, they can now be ten times more productive when they do this. You know, this is kind of mind-blowing on the text generation for the business side of things.

Sam Parr

this is crazy

Shaan Puri

let me tell you like another wild example

Sam Parr

are you gonna use this for your business

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so, exactly. I'm using it. I just started using this for ours. What are you using it for? Well, two things. 1. I'm going to try to use it when we do our power writing course. I'm going to teach people how to use this. 2. I'm also going to use it in the sales process, particularly with our e-commerce thing. I want to try it even with Milk Road. There are cases where maybe our writers can be more productive if we give them this tool. For example, every day at Milk Road, we start with an opener that's like, "Yo, hey, what's up? This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that brings you news so fresh you'll think it's... you know, news so fresh it'll smell like laundry straight out of the dryer." I love that smell! And it's like, that's what we like. I just made that up off the top of my head. But you give it three of those, and then we could just tell Jasper to generate, and it'll generate like 500 clever openers like that. That's great because that's one thing our writers have to come up with every day—a cool new one. It takes a little mental energy to do that, and it's not the easiest thing. But now they can get better at doing things like that. Let me give you a wild example. So, go to... I don't know where this is going to be. I don't know if they have a website.

Sam Parr

And how is... how are they any different than CopyAI? Because I invested in CopyAI, and they do... they're...

Shaan Puri

Kinda the same thing. Just imagine CopyAI with more revenue. No offense to CopyAI; those guys are cool.

Sam Parr

it's kinda like lebron james just not good

Shaan Puri

What's the difference between being LeBron? Just imagine me taller, faster, stronger, more handsome, more successful, and richer. That's how I...

Sam Parr

I think... no, I've been an investor in Copy. I love those guys. Paul is the founder of Investo, and they're at $10,000,000 in revenue. It looks like they're actually quite similar, but I think they're geared towards a different user. But yeah, I would have to dig deeper into Jasper to truly understand. But anyway, go ahead.

Shaan Puri

So, okay, here are other examples of things that I think are amazing. By the way, the same thing that helped a content marketer or a salesperson generate text for their emails and blog posts can also write whole blog posts for you. You can write a blog post and then click the SEO button, which will score how SEO-friendly it is and how much traffic it thinks it will drive for you. That's pretty smart to link these things together. On the surface, what are all these companies doing? They're just using basically the same sort of GPT-3 engine. So, on one hand, these companies are not very defensible because anybody could take these open-source language models and build a user interface on top of it. I can create another competitor to Copy.ai or Jasper or one of these kinds of things, but it's all in the user interface, the applications, and how much business utility you add to it. Let me give you another example of business utility. This is now in the photography use case. For example, for my e-commerce brand, we spend a lot of money every month—maybe something like $5,000 to $10,000 a month—easily on photography. You have to take pictures of your products and model photos. You have to do castings and then book models. They come to your studio, use your products, and then you take photos or videos of that. You use that for your website and for your ads, that sort of thing. That whole process takes multiple people. You have a photographer, a casting person, and an editor. It takes time. We can't just have it instantaneously; you have to schedule these things. They take weeks and don't always turn out well. Maybe you have somebody whose shot didn't turn out how you wanted it, whatever. So, check out DreamBooth. Let me give you the link for this. There are two here: Osmosis AI and DreamBooth. But let me give you this link... so this guy you...

Sam Parr

can have 1

Shaan Puri

No, this one I think works. This guy, I think, works at Shopify, if I'm correct. Yeah, so this guy works in the future division at Shopify, I believe. "Strange Native" is his Twitter handle. Basically, what he does is show how AI can unlock unlimited product photography. So, you could take a generic image. For example, the left image here is just...

Sam Parr

oh my god

Shaan Puri

A shoe on grass... it's not particularly good. It's like kind of a glare. It's on grass, and it looks like you didn't put a lot of effort into it. You know, you just went out in your backyard or a soccer field and took this picture. Then you could just say, "Make this shoe look epic," and it takes that shoe, cuts out the background, and automatically puts it on this lightning background or whatever. But look at the other examples. So, like, the second example I think is better. Look at the training image. It's a dude taking a selfie in this hoodie, and it looks okay. Actually, it doesn't look okay; it looks bad. You can't use this on your website for e-commerce. Then it generates a model-like studio photo of this same hoodie. This one is kind of unbelievable to me. It's that good where it's like, "Dude, if I could just take me wearing some crappy version of my product and not care about the lighting, not care about the background, and not care if I have my hair done that day," it will just generate it. It gave this dude pecs, better shoulders, a jawline, and it fixed the lighting. It put him on a background image, and like, what the hell is it? But it gave him...

Sam Parr

magic packs this how do I use this

Shaan Puri

You just click "like" on the tweet for now. I don't think you can use this yet. I think this is like a proof of concept. I don't think this one's like a product product yet. I could be wrong, but I think a lot of these are like they're doing demos, training models, just to see what happens.

Sam Parr

dude this is this is crazy to me and some of

Shaan Puri

They open-source the codes, right? Here's this photo of this chair. Oh wow, put this chair in like this epic thing. So there's this, and then there's someone doing this thing called **Osmosis**, which I think is more of a real product. Let me give you the link to this. **Mickey Freedman** is her name. What she's doing is basically, you give it an image and then you say, "Turn this into an ad," and it'll turn it into Facebook ad creative for you by making it look cooler, turning it into a video, that sort of thing. Now, again, I haven't tested these products for real to see if they're any good or not, but the concepts are good. Whether these exact products are the ones that do it, someone's gonna do it because all these are really valuable business use cases. If I could do this now, a process that's costing me $10 a month...

Sam Parr

just cost $29 a month

Shaan Puri

Yeah, $29.99 a month, and it's instantaneous. It's better now—you're 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper, and 10 times better. Those are the makings of $1,000,000,000 companies when they do that, and so that's really exciting.

Sam Parr

This is just... this is just 100% frame breaking. When I see this stuff, it's just like I got a little peek into the future.

Shaan Puri

and so then then there's

Sam Parr

Like, and by the way, this is still super early. These products work, but so few people know about them. There are hundreds of thousands, even millions of people who know and care about this, but comparatively, to how much of an impact this is going to have, no one knows about it.

Shaan Puri

yeah so so check this guy out so I just talked to these guys yesterday young guys I wanna invest in them but I didn't love their idea so check out this guy I'm gonna send you a link so I'm gonna send you this link but in the meantime you should just yeah hear me out so these guys basically they're young guys they started one guy started a company out of college raised a little money didn't end up working out failed and he's like then I was just thinking about what to do next I was kinda joining these different communities and he's like then I met hugh through tiktok I was like how did you guys meet I always ask every co founder pair how did you guys meet he goes we met through tiktok I was like you've been through tiktok people kids meet through tiktok nowadays you do youtube what so he's like yeah hugh has been making jarvis so I don't know if you've seen the movie iron man but basically in iron man I I guess I haven't seen it so but it's like you know there's a ai assistant who he like talks to and like takes care of shit so this guy for the last year has been building in public on tiktok trying to create jarvis like trying to create the real life jarvis on tiktok he's got like a 1000000 followers on tiktok as he's been building this so they met through this process and they decided to like create an ai company together that actually like does you know some version of this and and one of the things that they made or the first thing that they made is this thing called carter and what they're doing with carter is they're like you know in games you walk around there's just like you know you walk into the store it's grand theft auto and there's like a guy working at the store and they call these npcs non playable characters it's just like a character that's in the game so that the game's not empty but they don't do much you can just like punch them or like talk to them and they say the same three words so what these guys started off doing was saying hey any game developer who wants their characters in game to actually just be able to talk using like ai just plug this like line of code in and all of your non playable characters will all of a sudden be like able to hold conversations with the players chit chat back and forth do all the stuff we've been showing that like you know the ai joe rogan ai steve jobs thing like just like hold a full conversation as long as you want or guide the player to go do something like hey I'm looking for the sword they're like well if it's the sword you seek you should go check behind the waterfall yeah maybe there's some answers there for you and like it guides you automatically you don't have to hard code that response because if the player asks for something else they'll say something else but like kind of guide them towards that answer I don't know if it all works yet it's like in beta or whatever and I don't honestly I don't love this use case but it is a cool use case it's a cool idea of like oh yeah I guess in the future games just these like stock characters that are walking around are gonna not just be like random objects they're gonna actually be like things you can interact with which will change the way that the games work like you'll be able to spend hours and hours of the games

Sam Parr

This guy, Hugh, just retweeted a tweet from this guy named Alex Wang, who is the CEO of Scale AI. I don't even know what entirely Scale AI is, other than it's like a $10,000,000,000 software company. So he's...

Shaan Puri

It's like, for labeling data, to make your machine learning smarter, you need to label data. Let's say you're a self-driving car company. You need to look at a million images and distinguish what is a shadow versus a dog crossing the street. So, they basically give you software that will let you upload your images. Then, there are humans, like out of the Philippines or somewhere, I think, that will label your data for you. You just pay per image, like 2 cents or 1 cent or whatever.

Sam Parr

So, presumably, he's quite intelligent and has a really grand perspective because his company is so big. He sees lots of information. This guy, Hugh, retweeted something from Alex, and he says, "We're at a critical turning point for humanity. Children born today are likely to have more AI friends than human friends. AI friends are going to be more reliable..." I don't even know what that word "conciliatory" means. Is it agreeable and considerate? What does this mean for childhood development and social norms? We will find out. That's wild! I completely agree with him. Then he says, "Loneliness is an epidemic. It's on the rise and is a real public health problem." This technology, when it exists, has a lot of potential for good.

Shaan Puri

I love that, and I'm completely fascinated. So let me tell you three ideas that I think somebody could build that are not in the demos we just talked about.

Sam Parr

k

Shaan Puri

Idea 1 is exactly what he's talking about, and I call it some version of either the **AI friend** or the **AI therapist**. There are a lot of people out there that would benefit from therapy. There are apps that will connect you with a therapist on your phone, like **7 Cups of Tea** or **Talkspace**. I don't know, some companies...

Sam Parr

you're like you're like I don't know I'm not one of those therapy losers yeah exactly

Shaan Puri

**Fuck you, broken people. You know what? You use these companies, and they're doing well. They make, you know, like $100,000,000+ a year. It's great, but it's very expensive. So if you work with these...**

Sam Parr

They're... it's just a cute little company, you know? Whenever you need something, they're there. You know what the crypto bros are like. You started using the term "Web 3.0," and you're like, "Those Web 2.0 dorks." That's what you have to describe. Whatever it is, it's just like human... you know, old school.

Shaan Puri

yeah exactly

Sam Parr

reality reality 2.

Shaan Puri

AI replaces DNA. That's what I believe. What they were doing was connecting you with a real-life therapist who's licensed, and because of that, they've maybe taken an in-person visit, which might be $150 or $200, and turned it into a $60 or $90 a month subscription where you get three visits or something like that. I don't know the exact economics, but it's something like that. You're paying a meaningful amount of money, but you're getting it more conveniently than if you just went in person. You also don't have the stigma or taboo of telling your friends, "I'm going to this." No, it's just on your phone, in your pocket. Well, there are, I don't know, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people who would benefit from having someone to talk to—either a therapist or just a friend, a companion. Somebody that they can confide in, someone who won't judge them, someone who will be positive and helpful. Someone who might offer good advice, someone who will never share their secrets, and someone who has no self-interest in the matter. You could now provide that for, I don't know, a dollar or something like that, right? The cost and accessibility of curing loneliness or helping people talk through what's on their mind and get things off their chest is going to drop dramatically. So, AI therapy, AI companion, and friend—I think that is a mega, mega idea. I think that is worth tens of billions of dollars. Now, I think maybe there's going to be a lot of competition. There are not clear network effects around that, but I do think that is a very, very big idea, and I think it's very impactful. So, that's one startup idea. Do you want to react to that? I'll give you the next one.

Sam Parr

One, yeah, that's pretty plain and obvious to me. That's a pretty straightforward solution. It's obviously challenging to pull off, but it's straightforward, and we can all predict that. So yes, I agree.

Shaan Puri

The next one is a little sexier. This is called **AI Spotify**. So, what's AI Spotify? Okay, traditionally, the music business has been like a situation where people just run into a burning building. People make terrible decisions. It's like a horror movie when you're like, "Don't go in there!" and they're like, "But I heard a sound! I want to just go check it out!" You know, it's like, "You're gonna get slaughtered!" That's basically what the music business was. You know, basically, you're competing. It's like everybody loves music, so you are competing with a bunch of people who want to make it better.

Sam Parr

it's like someone creating like a to do list app or something

Shaan Puri

yeah the next thing is do

Sam Parr

you like pain because you're gonna get pain

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. Oh, you like music? I guess you like pain too because that's what you're going to get: music and pain. So, the second thing... you know, it's unlikely you would ever break out of the thousands of people trying this. If you did, guess what? Here's your prize: a lawsuit. You're sued out of existence, whether you're Napster or one of the many music companies that came in between. Okay, you survived the lawsuit. You're Pandora, you're Spotify. You didn't even get sued out of existence. Congratulations! Here's **shitty economics** because guess what? To deliver music, you have to have the rights from the record labels. They own the pricing power. That's why Spotify, after building the best-in-class product and getting everybody to use it for 15 years or whatever, does not have impressive economics. It does not spit off a bunch of cash the way Google or Facebook or other tech companies are able to. Okay, so why is AI Spotify different? Now, basically, you can create a really cool music app that doesn't have to pay musicians a dollar. Alright, musicians everywhere are getting pissed, but you know, here's the good news. Here's what the service would look like: the same way Interior AI was just like, "You want an industrial look? You want a minimal look? Give me a starting image and I'll riff off that." What you're going to be able to do with AI Spotify is you pick... you could basically upload a playlist or you could just pick a song that you really like, like Pandora tracks.

Sam Parr

yeah it's just gonna be it's just gonna be pandora radio but they don't exist

Shaan Puri

But these songs don't exist, so it's just going to generate a new song on the fly for you. Like TikTok's algorithm, it's going to learn from your interactions. When you skip a song, it will analyze why you skipped it and what songs you liked. If you like this song, will you like that song? So, the algorithm is going to generate music on the fly for you. You can also add crypto to it. For example, if I hear a good song, by default, all the songs are like they're here today, gone tomorrow. They're ephemeral; you don't get to hang on to them. But if you like a song and want to keep it, you don't just get to save it. You get to own it. You'll click "mint," and you'll mint an NFT, which means you now own that song. Why? Because it was your taste directing the engine that created that song. Now you own that, and maybe it could split royalties with all the artists that inspired that music. The algorithm could own 50%, and the user could own 50%.

Sam Parr

did you just come up with that or or is someone barking on this

Shaan Puri

Off the dome, baby! Got that big brain, got that big boy brain. No small boy stuff, just straight big boy ideas. This is wonderful! I think, yeah, this is finally you.

Sam Parr

web 3 nerds are probably finally coming up with interesting shit a use case

Shaan Puri

We did it! No one believed in us. We spent 10 years and $1,000,000,000, and we did it. We got an idea that doesn't absolutely make any sense. I'm just checking, but I do think it's a great thing. Yeah, should I be like, "Oh, I'm just joking," but I do think this is...

Sam Parr

a great but seriously

Shaan Puri

Yeah, choking with some elements of truth. But I do think this idea is really great. I think it's great; we should make this, and it's not ready yet. So, for example, what happened with GPT-3 was that OpenAI basically downloaded all the text of the internet to create this text generation engine. Then, with DALL-E, they did the same thing; they downloaded all the images of the internet to create this image generation engine. Now, what these guys from the podcast are doing, or the speech stuff, is they're downloading all of Joe Rogan's back catalog to generate Joe Rogan's voice as a voice engine. Somebody's about to do that with music. They're about to download all the music off Spotify and then train an engine to say, "Hey, create new music. This is what music is; create new music." That's what's going to happen. They're going to release an open-source model that will say, "Would you like to generate music? Here's an API that will just let you generate music using this engine that we've been training by downloading all the music that exists."

Sam Parr

wow brilliant finally finally

Shaan Puri

Brilliant! Finally, it's the best backhanded compliment ever. Dude, you did it! You peaked with the backhanded compliment, but that is brilliant. Finally.

Sam Parr

we're so stupid it's like beavis and butt head made a few bucks

Shaan Puri

yeah you might have artificial intelligence but we got that real stupidity over here

Sam Parr

this is so stupid alright what's the third one

Shaan Puri

I don't know, I lost my list. I just clicked, but okay. The last thing I want to leave everybody with is there's this guy who I think should be the "Billy of the Week."

Austin Distel

a $1,000,000 isn't cool you know what's cool

Sam Parr

a $1,000,000,000

Shaan Puri

Imad Mostaque, so E-M-A-D is his name. He's the guy who is behind Stable Diffusion. So, I don't know, do you know what Stable Diffusion is?

Sam Parr

no I know that the tweet that you just referenced was talking all about stable diffusion

Shaan Puri

So, Stable Diffusion was basically an open-source competitor to DALL-E from OpenAI.

Sam Parr

got it

Shaan Puri

Created DALL-E. It took over; everybody was excited about it. But, you know, you had to get permission to even use it. We were asking, "Hey, who can get us permission for GPT-3? We want to get access. Who can get us access to DALL-E?" "Oh, you have to pay for all these credits. Oh, you don't know X, Y, Z." So, Stable Diffusion is basically a... like, here.

Sam Parr

Here’s their tagline: **"AI by the people, for the people."** They are designing and implementing solutions using collective intelligence and augmented technology. They're like the FUBU of the AI world, you know what I'm saying?

Shaan Puri

yeah anybody who does

Sam Parr

is biased

Shaan Puri

For everybody who does four, they are generally biased and full of it. But this guy... I watched one interview with him, and I can confidently say from the bottom of my heart, after this one interview, this guy's the real deal, Holyfield. So let me tell you about this guy. He gives all... he's my "Billionaire of the Week." He's not a billionaire yet, but this guy's going to be a billionaire. He basically put in $600,000 to fund the development of Stable Diffusion. The company's worth like $1,000,000,000 already.

Sam Parr

what was he wealthy from

Shaan Puri

So, the guy, he's born in Jordan. He's got like a British accent for some reason. He's like a math background, quant-type guy. You could just tell in the first time he's talking to him, it's like, "I bet this guy could say more than five prime numbers." And it's like, "Yeah, yeah, he definitely can." He works at a hedge fund and he's like, "I'm the quant guy at this hedge fund. I'm doing trading, and it's good." It felt good to try to win that game, and I was winning that game. Okay, good. So, he does that, then he has his life change. He has his first kid, and his son is diagnosed with autism. Mhm. So, he decides to take a few years off. I don't know if it was because of the autism or just because he had a kid, but he decides, "Okay, I'm not gonna do the hedge fund thing." He just kind of retired early after winning the hedge fund game. He retires and he's like, "Okay, goes to the doctor and he's like, 'What do I do about this? What can we do when it comes to autism?'" And he's like, "Well, there's no solution." And he's like, "But I'm an engineer. I have a problem; that means there must be a solution." The doctor is like, "No, there's no solution." He doesn't accept that response. So, he starts doing his own research and basically ends up, I don't know, curing his son's autism or at least making it a lot, lot better. So, here's how he did it. He basically was like, "Alright, there's a lot of literature out there, like research papers, but if I try to read this one by one, it's gonna take me forever." So, he creates an engine that just ingests all the papers and does a semantic search on it. He basically creates this machine learning thing to learn what all the research about autism is telling us. And by the way, I didn't verify any of this. I don't know if any of this is real. This sounds a little too good to be true, but again, just judging the book by its cover, I think this guy's legit, so I choose to believe.

Sam Parr

the the biggest hedge ever

Shaan Puri

In case, like, three weeks from now, this guy turns out to, you know, pivot to selling his NFT collection and it's like, "Oh wait, this guy changed his name and used to launder money for a living." In case that comes out, let me just say there's a chance—probably—he's just a super nerd who's amazing. Okay, let me tell you why I think that's true.

Sam Parr

Just because he's a brown guy with a British accent, is what you're saying? You said just based off of what he looks like.

Shaan Puri

And the vocabulary is stunning. He’s describing autism, and he says, “You know, autism is a sort of phenotype. It’s a behavioral description, and it has underlying causes, which are certain body chemistry things.” He asks, “Well, what causes those? Could we rebalance the body chemistry so that the behavior changes?” What he realized was that autism, as a whole, comes from many different types of these imbalances. He acknowledges that doctors are correct in saying we can’t just fix it or cure it because it’s a multimodal system. There are so many different inputs that create this output. However, he believes that on an individual level, if you can understand where in one individual the body chemistry is maybe slightly different, perhaps there is a treatment or a rebalancing that could be done of the body's biochemistry. So, he starts to create a process for himself over a couple of years to try to help with this. In an interview I was watching, he mentioned, “Yeah, my son is doing so much better.” He didn’t claim, “Oh, I’ve cured autism” or anything like that, but he said, “I learned deeply what goes into these biological systems and what we can do.” He also discussed how maybe science is going to get better in the future using AI. That’s kind of where his interest in AI started. He believes that machine learning and AI are going to be able to help with these issues. Then, in 2020, he was at a dinner in Davos...

Sam Parr

do as as yeah

Shaan Puri

as one does

Sam Parr

as yeah as british people with british accents huge vocabularies do I had

Shaan Puri

Dinner at Chick-fil-A last night. Okay, so anyways, this guy was at a dinner in Davos. He's there, and people are talking about this virus coming out of China. He's like, "That's the way they're describing this virus as COVID-19." He looks into it and says it sounds very similar to autism. He calls it a "multi-stomach inflammatory disease." His main point was that this thing is complicated. It was pretty clear right away that developing a vaccine for this was going to take some time. We weren't going to be able to do this in months; it was probably going to take a year or more to figure this out. Even if we did, it wouldn't work for everybody because, again, this is like a multimodal system. One-size-fits-all solutions are not going to work very well. So, he starts this initiative to help use data to assist policymakers for COVID to do a better job. Anyway, he goes through the bureaucracy of dealing with organizations like the World Health Organization, UNESCO, and the World Bank. It ends up being too bureaucratic, and he gets fed up with it. The whole initiative collapses. Then he comes up with what he calls his "Promethean mission." You know, Prometheus, the mythological figure who gives fire to humans. He says, "I want to open source all of the powerful AI and ML tools that exist so that they're not controlled by large private corporations." I like that. And so that's why the...

Sam Parr

for us bias baby

Shaan Puri

Like, OpenAI is called OpenAI, but it's a private organization. They're very, you know, close to the vest about what they're working on. When they release it, they release it kind of like not to everybody all at once and all that stuff. If you look at the charts, Stable Diffusion has far surpassed OpenAI. The tweet that went viral on this was like, you know, OpenAI—meaning the actual open-sourced AI—is beating OpenAI, right? So the people who are actually taking an open approach are crushing the private organization called OpenAI.

Sam Parr

how how do they make money then

Shaan Puri

I think it's the same sort of thing. You know, you pay for some credits or usage along the way. They open source the model, but if you want to run it... blah blah blah. I mean, who knows? Maybe they're going to have some open source companies with these weird models, like Linux. You know, Red Hat makes a bunch of money through services and things like that that are not what you would expect. So, he says he starts Stable Diffusion because his daughter asked him if he could do the same thing he did for COVID or whatever for art. Oh, by the way, in between, he wins this grant or this X Prize. I think Elon Musk and somebody else put up this $15,000,000 prize for who can... what was it? It was like who can basically create a system that teaches kids in foreign countries... I don't know, I forgot what it was, like English or mathematics for less than $75 of total cost, something like that. Basically, they created this thing on an iPad that you could just give to kids in countries, and they would basically be able to learn or pass certain tests within 75 days or something like that. I don't know the exact specifics, but he wins this $15,000,000 prize, again doing good in the world. So, anyways, he creates Stable Diffusion, and his company, Stability AI, releases Stable Diffusion. It kind of takes off. He also has... you know what that thing is? What's it called? Like a fantasia, where you say a word and it creates an image in your head or something like that? Or like emotions have colors or something like that? It's like, yeah, yeah, these senses are linked in your brain in a way that's not normal. Or like numbers have smells and other stuff like that. He has one of those. What is it, Ben?

Sam Parr

synesthesia

Shaan Puri

There's synesthesia, but he has a different one. He has another one I think called aphantasia. Anyway, he's supporting researchers and trying to give them money to open source this thing. Then he's like, "Okay, I'm gonna bring together 20 of the best engineers, like Manhattan Project style, and I'm going to self-fund this thing." We're going to create a project in this space, and they created Stable Diffusion. Basically, he self-funded $600,000 and got these 20 engineers to come in. They created this thing that's taken off and is now valued at over $1,000,000,000.

Sam Parr

Dude, isn't it crazy just how bold some people are? When I talked to Ryan Holiday the other day for the podcast, I felt inspired at the end. I was like, "Your type of success is awesome and inspiring to me because I too can work hard and achieve what you achieve." Then I hear a story like this guy's, and I'm like, "He just... that story just bitch slapped me in the face." You know what I mean? I just feel like I am nothing and I am nobody. This guy is going to steal my lunch money. That idea just bullied me.

Shaan Puri

"No, he's not gonna steal your lunch money. He's gonna *give* you lunch money, and you're gonna be like, 'Who... why did you give... why are you giving me lunch money?' And he's just like, 'Don't even worry about it, son.' And you're like, 'Wow, thanks Dad!'"

Sam Parr

Yeah, like this guy, like straight dads... I feel inadequate. I feel inadequate.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that's actually what the "Early of the Week" section is. It's really about the inadequacy of the week. It's like, "Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to feel like shit? Because I got a story for you." This guy, who's bam, wam, wam, bam—better than you, smarter than you, richer than you—did it faster than you. He's doing the same thing you said you wanted to do, but he actually did it. And guess what? He's also ripped. Anyway, like...

Sam Parr

that's how I feel about ahmad do you is there a world where he's full of shit

Shaan Puri

Like I said, I didn't know of this guy's existence until about three weeks ago. So, yeah, there's definitely a world where everything I just said turns out to be, you know, not true. Or this guy turns out to be, you know, he's like, "Yeah, I taught those kids math," but then, you know, they work for me now. And it's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here? Why are the kids in Kenya working for...?"

Sam Parr

You know, bro, there's this commercial for a car. They're on the highway, and it's bumper-to-bumper traffic. This guy pulls off to the side of the road and starts going through this bumpy forest. The guy in the passenger seat goes, "Dude, this is pretty scary. Have you ever taken this shortcut before?" And the guy driving goes, "Yeah, once, including this time." That's like you telling these stories. You're just like, "Yeah."

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah yeah

Sam Parr

I know all about this guy I just learned about him an hour ago yeah

Shaan Puri

I'm literally reading it while I'm talking. I'm reading my researcher's notes while we're talking because I watched the interview, but I wasn't taking notes because I was driving at the time. All I remember is my feeling. Right? What's the Maya Angelou quote? "You won't remember the facts of what you're researching; you'll just remember how it made you feel." That's what happened to me. I don't remember any of the words this guy said, and I didn't go fact-check them, but I remember how it made me feel.

Sam Parr

me feel said that

Shaan Puri

Yes, her famous quote is, "People won't remember what you say; they'll remember how you made them feel." Oh, so it's basically that. I remember how this guy made me feel, and he made me feel the same way I felt when I heard Vitalik talk for the first time. You know, Vitalik... when I heard him talk about Zuckerberg.

Sam Parr

you hear them

Shaan Puri

Talk like people who are extremely mission-driven, while also being slightly Asperger's, and extremely impressive in their past accomplishments. They are very matter-of-fact about the way they think the world is going. They're not trying to hype you up or sell you on it. So, you ask them a question that gives you their answer, and then you're like, "That answer just broke your frame." You keep asking them questions, and it's almost like the tone of their voice is sort of like, "I said what I said." You know, like, "Yes, this is what I believe, and this is what I'm doing with my time." Yes, this is what I think is important. And you're just like... you sort of look stupid when you're talking to them because you come from a different perspective. It's like you're speaking a different language. They're speaking a language of being mission-driven, confident, and knowing their stuff, while you're just being silly old you, trying to understand what the hell they're talking about.

Sam Parr

Dude, this is one of those episodes that we record, and I feel like I have to take a nap at the end. I'm so exhausted from excitement! Do you ever get like that? You know, like my dog. If I feed him too many treats in such a way that he gets pumped up and hyper about it, he has to take a nap just from the excitement. That's how I feel! I need to go rest my eyes. I'm going to buy a dad chair just to take this nap that I need.

Shaan Puri

I need to be reclined at a 34-degree angle, and my feet beat me up on my hips.

Sam Parr

Yeah, at the end of this episode, I'm going to get up and make a grunting noise. Just because... not from pain, just... yeah.

Shaan Puri

just just out of habit

Sam Parr

This is just so fascinating to me. I think this episode has had a lot of mind-blowing things. I'm eager to see what people say. I feel just amped after this. This is almost like a "quit and dedicate your life to this topic" type of thing. You're like almost...

Shaan Puri

not actually good I mean

Sam Parr

that it's like it's like it's like people

Shaan Puri

should go to

Sam Parr

It's like when someone has worked at your company forever and it's their last day. You just have to go say goodbye and hug them, but they're all the way across the room, you know what I mean?

Shaan Puri

they like worked for you

Sam Parr

For like 10 years, you know their wife's name and their kids' names. You're so excited to give them a hug and tell them how much they mean to you. But the couch is really comfortable, and they're just all the way across. It's going to be at least 50 steps.

Shaan Puri

that's what it is ai is all

Sam Parr

the way across the room that's so good alright

Shaan Puri

we're gonna dig it on that we're out of here