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A few people that were offended by the design are Christians or that, you know, peaceful people. So, you know, fortunately I've had, you know, people say I should stop or, you know, that it's. Someone sent me an email today that said my company is now owned by God who will save me, and stuff like that. But no, nothing too crazy. The more surprising reach outs have been police departments. That is what I wouldn't have thought would have happened. But reaching out to partner with you or arrest. Yeah. To ask if it could be used for public safety. Okay. Yeah. If you've ever been at an event.

I guess, though the few people that were offended by the design are Christian, so that, you know, peaceful people. So, you know, fortunately, I've had, you know, people say I should stop or, you know, that it's. Someone sent me an email today that said my company is now owned by God who will save me, and stuff like that. But no, nothing too crazy. The more surprising reach outs have been police departments. That is what I wouldn't have thought would have happened. But reaching out to partner with you or arrest. Yeah. To ask if it could be used for public safety. Okay. Yeah, yeah, no, I do that. If you've ever been at an event.

I will say, yeah. The rescue stuff also was kind of propagated by the virality a little bit. That's definitely. I was not aiming to pick you up out of a burning building like a hero in a movie. Though I would point out, if that did happen, if someone's saving you, I'm not going to probably be too picky. And don't look a gift centaur in the mouth. Yeah, exactly. You just don't do it. Yeah. But it's interesting with the anthropomorphic stuff on humanoid robots. I think it's actually really disarming and people kind of aren't understanding what's really going on under the skin, which you can see a little bit here. Have you guys ever used a drill press? Yeah. Okay. So you kind of know they're dangerous and the work piece could fly out of it and they got a lot of torque. So imagine if someone hooked 20 drill presses up, series parallel all together, and then used basically some arcane knowledge of machine learning to make it balance and walk. This is pretty much what a humanoid robot actually is. Right. That's around the same power that you're seeing on leg actuators on most humanoid. I mean, we see those things a little crazy. Yeah. Where you're going is basically like a humanoid itself looks tame, but in reality, it's potentially incredibly dangerous to be around. So it's better to let people know you're putting, like, caution tape on it, effectively telling the user, hey, this thing is a chainsaw. It's going to be doing work in a dangerous environment. You should be triggered. Hey, I gotta step back because this is serious business. Exactly. Like, yeah, I don't know if you guys have ever been on a big work site or in a factory, and first time you go in there, maybe you're kind of putting your back to the wall and, like, you're a little overwhelmed. And that's kind of the right attitude to take when you're around something that can knock your head off. So from my perspective, I made one in gray as well. And you could kind of imagine it actually kind of looks like, you know, a little bit like a great goat. You know, you might want to go pet it. Yeah, this is. So do you. Do you think. You think you'll end up redesigning it? Because if you want to just show that at least, like, the head. Because if you want to just show that it's dangerous, you could just have it, you know, maybe a speaker or a light that says, like, stay precaution tape or, you know, There's a lot of way to do it besides the horns. Even though clearly. Clearly it sounds like you just wanted to make this. Sounds like you live in the woods. Sounds like you want a few of these patrolling around your house. Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing about humanoid robots, we all kind of know that they're not purely like a perfect productivity maximizer device. They have to be emotive and cool, and we've wanted them for 80 years or something and been dreaming of this stuff. And I'd say kind of like a car. No one buys a car because it's the perfect mobility blob with no personality that is exactly as safe as you want. Maybe a few people do. But humanoid robots like cars. The ones that people really like have to have their own personality a little bit. So I think trying to redesign it to be like, okay, maybe the optimal safety would be to have a giant yellow siren on the top. But it's just not as exciting. So we got to keep it interesting. Right? Yeah, I get it. And I'm sure there's.

And yeah running a chainsaw I get that people have thought like wow this is crazy to give a robot a chainsaw is a bit scary but I mean what's really scary is operating a chainsaw as a human. So I kind of looked at that which is something I'm well familiar with living out here in the woods. So my kind of thought is this is a good tool to start with. I mean running a saw is the most dangerous job in the US it's 130 per 100,000 workers per year it's 30 times more dangerous than the next most dangerous job. And yeah, I mean you could imagine not only is a chainsaw dangerous as a tool but what trees are you cutting down? Ones that are damaged near power lines ones that are next to a fire break and a wildfire. So it's just a preposterous kind of situation. So looking at what robotics yeah the form the use case makes total sen.

I don't even want to pass judgment on them, but I think for some of them, they are mathematically disinclined to be able to extrapolate a monthly payment by the terms they're agreeing to and realize this is what you're going to pay over time. Sure, sure. They just look at the monthly payment and they say, I can pay that. And they look at the lump sum payment of $1,200 for the iPhone they want. They say, I can't pay that, but if I agree to this, I can get a new iPhone. I can walk out of the store with an iPhone 15 minutes from now. And so I think Apple just looked at that and thought, well, how can we offer something that's attractive? And the lease. I think the big difference with the lease is clearly that the monthly payment is even lower, you know, than the buy over time of the old iPhone upgrade program. But in either case, it is good for the consumer. And I know some really smart people who are like, I'm doing this, you know, because it is, there's. There's no interest on it. And if you do get a new iPhone every year, it is just an easy way to. You don't really lose anything. You're not paying any interest penalty, and you just have an easy system and they mail you the box to send the old one back in every year. So I think it's just a way for Apple to sort of kneecap the number of people who are buying their iPhones with credit cards and paying interest penalties over time. So I think it's better for everybody. It feels like I could bundle the leasing program, the MacBook Neo,

Around. Let's go to this Paul Graham post. He had such a wild experience as he bought a book. It was awful. Didn't want it on my shelves, but I couldn't throw it away, so it sat on a table near the door. I know someone that will rip it apart, feed it to a machine and burn it. I know someone. I don't know them personally, but I know they. They would love. They would love to take this off your hands. Rushing to an appointment this morning, I grabbed it to read it. First mistake. Then went to breakfast and had nothing else. So I spent the morning reading the worst book I found. It's such a funny, Such a funny. Just like. I don't know, it feels like a Curb youb Enthusiasm episode or something like that. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning into TVPN today.

Would be like, we got to play this clip of. Of Ken Griffin, because this came up on my. My for you page. And it's. It's a wild story of when Ken Griffin had his darkest moment, basically, and lost a whopping 4% of the fund. Something like that. Play this club. You know, 1994, I was in Switzerland. We'd had a rough year in 94. We lost about 4% of our capital. In 94 is one of our only losing years in the history of the firm. And I'm in Switzerland. I mean, it was a rough day. My lunch, my lunch. I sat down at lunch. This person sits down. Oh, you're not John Griffin. No, I'm Ken Griffin. He goes, oh, I thought you were John Griffin from Fenchurch, another firm. He goes, I gotta go. Great. I flew all the way to Switzerland for my lunch date to get up and leave the table. And then around three or four in the afternoon, I was with another Swiss banker. And when his office's office was like almost the square footage of the stage, beautiful furniture. He goes, do you mind if I smoke? Takes out a big cigar. He's smoking this cigar and we're talking for about 45 minutes. Such a pity that such a bright young man so picked the wrong career. Like, well, that's the most graceful no I've gotten today. But you just have to tolerate. You're going to hear no a lot. But you need to become accustomed to Leopold's dad. Yeah. Stand for again. Whether it's the people that you want to have work for you trying to give you capital or customers, you need to get comfortable with the art of selling. Great clip. It's so funny that someone was like, Ken Griffin. Like, you're just in the wrong job. You should be. Yeah, I don't know. This is. This is not for you. I wonder what that banker would have preferred. Ken Griffin do like, did he have a prescription? Was he, like. You should be. Course seller. A hustler. I don't know, skier or something. Anyway, fun little trip down memory lane. We have Jon Gruber from Daring Fireball in the waiting room. Let's bring him.

Going to put you, as, you know, all in conference call time. Let's debate. Let's get to the bottom price, because that's basically what you're doing. You're saying we're just going to hold an auction right here. Yeah. This might be the solution. I like this post. Explaining to my wife, explaining to my ape wife that I have to spend nights and weekends learning the bone so we don't end up in the permanent underclass. Is this from 2001 Space Odyssey? Yep. It's a good movie. Jordy, have you seen 2001 A Space Odyssey? Yes. You have? Yeah. No way. Yeah, I remember that scene. What? How. How did that happen?

He'll get through it though. We'll dig into it more. I still think this Pierre Richelson tweet is so funny. Shower thought. Why is no one doing outbound for pizza? Hey, this is Gigi from Gigi's Pizza calling. You ordered last week. We have a pepperoni pizza ready and could deliver it in 10 minutes. You hungry? Hilarious concept. Would be extremely annoying to have every possible low tier business that you've bought anything from with spamming you. I mean, they basically do this with, you know, email awareness. Like, hey, there's a Super bowl coming. Like, do you want to place an order? What if we made a law that said that restaurants could only call between 5:30 and 6pm when you're hungry? So you knew you'd be getting calls coming in and you could kind of play them off each other. You get a pizza offer, you're like, look, I'm kind of interested in pizza, but I have an open conversation with the taqueria and I need to wait to understand, like what they can offer tonight. I'll let you know. Yeah, taqueria calls, they go four steak tacos, side of rice, you win. And then you get a price, you get a bid, you go back to the pizza, you kind of play them off of each other a little bit and then you go with what you're really feeling at the end of the day. Do you know what it's called on Wall street when you have multiple parties negotiating to sell a block of stock or debt or something like that and you want to bring them all in really quickly. Like let's say you're negotiating with Tyler and I have extra information, I might have a buyer and I want to jump in. Do you know what that's called? Barging your line. So like, oh yeah, I'm going to barge his line, jump in there and then we'll be on like a three way call, basically. And you can do that when your phone system's set up with multiple lines. So you could potentially have, okay, you got dominoes on line one and then you got Pizza Hut on line two. And you could be like, okay, I'm just going to put you, as you know, all in conference call time. Let's debate. Let's get to the bott price. Because that's basically what you're doing. You're saying, we're just going to hold an auction right here. This might be the solution.

Anyway, funny, funny story. Balaji is moving to Kazakhstan. This is huge for the Borat community. Absolutely huge for the Borat community. He posted this is Kazakhstan. Let's see. This is a beautiful video. I have no doubt it's a beautiful place. It's a little bit crazy because Network School I thought of as sort of like a startup incubator, a Y Combinator adjacent entity. He was in Singapore for a while, then Malaysia and now maybe Kazakhstan. Did he actually move to Kazakhstan or is he just like touring and vacationing there? Because what is the actual story? Here's the news. It says, I'm pleased to announce that a memorandum of understanding has been signed between the Republic of Kazakhstan and Network School. Our new campus will become a haven for global techno optimism with expedited visas, streamlined redomicilation and active recruitment of talent. Excited for Balaji, excited for Kazakhstan. Excited for Network School. Balaji is very smart and very entertaining and I've enjoyed having him on the show. I do think it is very funny to be trying to recreate the incredible techno optimism that many different sub communities already have in the United States, where he, you know, where he effectively had all of his success at Coinbase, Andreessen, Horowitz and sure, many other businesses. And I think it is. This whole chapter is deeply entertaining to me. The Kazakhstan chapter, it's just, it's such a funny place. King in the Castle. I love it. So quick tip for anyone who's planning to do sort of like the bicoastal thing. San Francisco, Kazakhstan. You're in for like a 30 hour trip because there are no nonstop flights. I think you have to connect in Istanbul, Frankfurt, Seoul, Doha or Dubai. You're looking at 25 to 35 hours, depending on the layover that is really, really far. The Miami thing was a tough pitch because, you know, so much activity is happening in New York, so much activity is happening in San Francisco, and it was still hard to get people to relocate. Like great engineers, they come out of the. No, I mean this is just truly full send the toughest possible sell. I think he's trying to. I think he's weed out the week. I think. Well, I think in some ways he's been so successful that he wants a challenge that to him feels almost impossible, which is to convince the best and brightest from all over the world to move to Kazakhstan. I know so many, I mean, some major selection bias here, but I know a bunch of bright people that are not U.S. residents and they, they would do anything to be able to be in Kazakhstan. Not quite. Maybe now. Maybe now. But they would do anything to be able to have free access to America. To be able to set up shop here, to build their business here. To be able to. To be the king of the castle. To be not even the king, but a pauper. Just someone. Just someone in the castle. In the castle at all. And so. Yeah. And I haven't. Yeah, just. We gotta go. It's very clear. We gotta go. Or at least we gotta send Tyler. I would go. It looks fun. Pack your bags, buddy. See you in 30 hours when you land. Absolutely wild. Let me tell you about, guys.

From start to finish, we gotta look at this simulator. You're into racing simulators? I gotta up you. I gotta one up you with a train simulator. Look at this guy. This guy on Z80ME has built a full scale train simulator controller. For the three years I've been building a physical train simulator in my apartment modeled on the UK class ADX passenger train. Been trying to replicate the instruments and controls in the real cab as closely as possible. Look at this. This is amazing. In many cases, managing to acquire real components and in others building my own replicas. I've gone down rabbit holes for design from custom can bus, transceiver board and a variety of daughter boards to tie the simulator together to the actual panels. All of which on the consoles and instruments are mounted. I usually wait until I complete a component or step before I write a blog post. But over the last half year, I've instead made forward progress on several disparate aspects of the project. Therefore, this blog post will update as a status update on many of those aspects. I'm feeling the acceleration. John. This is such a cool DIY project. Imagine just sitting there driving train in the train simulator. So one thing I'm not seeing is any type of visuals. So is he like. You mean the software that's driving the. Yeah. To me he only cares about the tactile experience of pushing the buttons. Right. Like he's optimizing for actually feeling like he's in the. In the, in the train. But no, there is a screen and that screen is running a game that simulates a train. The name of that game, Train Simulator. You can get it@train- Simulator.com it's also on Steam. Yes, Train Simulator Classic is I believe the one that he's playing. But yeah, he's playing the full train simulator. Aws Sunflower.

Joe Wiesenthal. Yeah, let's do. I love all the AI people who are like, nobody's prepared for what's coming. It's like, maybe just speak for yourself. Joe's ready. Joe's ready. No, it is. It is very funny that there's this whole. There's this whole meme of like, no one knows what's coming. It's not priced in. It's like, all anyone talks about ever. It's on the front page of the Wall Street Journal every day. Lots of people are talking about this. And most people that say, nobody's prepared for what? Scott, coming will not give you a really concrete. Yeah, like, what do you think? Exactly. Like, the last time we had this, like, nobody's prepared for what's coming moment was what was the guy who was comparing AI to Covid back in March? Is that Schumer? Matt Schumer? Yeah. So something big is coming. Yeah, something big is happening. And it's like, yeah, something big is happening. Like, the models are getting better. Like, the math is getting solved, but, like, you can still go outside. Like, yeah, like, at this point in 2020, unemployment had spiked to 10%. And, like, it was very much like, you're a bold patriot if you're going outside. Like, it was a crazy, crazy time. And now it's like, yeah, there might be some softness in the. In the job market. Like, a hedge fund blew up. There's like, there's things that are happening, some big things, but. But the hedge fund. The hedge fund blew up from being a little too bullish. Like, things maybe like, they got the, you know, the basically directionally correct, but got the timing wrong. Right. Mike Isaac says, yeah, these MF's don't know how much I got stockpiled in my basement. And Joe says, these MF's don't know that if a man has a why, he'll find his. How? Well said. Yeah, well said. Yeah. Buco Capital was having fun with Kevin Roose over at formerly New York Times. Now Hard Fork independent. I don't know. Is it. Did they. Did they take the A? Did they take the ip? Are they still using Hard Fork outside of nyt? I don't know, but Bucher just says, weird comment for a guy writing a book on AGI. He is exactly and literally wrong. Everyone is pricing it in. Why do you think OpenAI and Anthropic are priced at $1 trillion? What nobody is pricing in is that besides coding and math, very few domains have embedded verification. And so. But Tyler over there thinks that you can formally verify whether or not the Odyssey is a good book in Lean or something. Well, I think we can. I think we can formally verify that. Tyler's got it right. A lot of people would say it's kind of like gray area. Right. You can't totally define what it means to be the greatest of all time, but you've been working on that, quantifying aura. As long as it's fully quantifiable, you'll be able to quantify it. Yes, Andrew Curran says, shorten your timelines, friends. I've started this account to say this and in many ways I've posted for the past four years has been saying the same thing. Some of you increasingly feel it. We passed the threshold in November. We are already inside the singularity. Lots of people are picking up the we're no longer in the foothills of the singularity. We're in the singularity now. Demis on stage at Google I o Just a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago, saying, we're in the foothills. Well, now we're on the mountain. If you followed this account for a long time, Andrew Curran says, I apologize for losing my mind a few times using GPT 3.5 and then Bing forced me to update all of this at once in one shot. And that was the correct time to update like talking to 3.5 and the first ChatGPT moment being Sydney. It was if you, if you updated on that, you did very, very well across everything, both with the growth in the labs and the growth in the, in the data center build out and everything. Like that was the key moment. Also, there was a moment in 2020, this was coming up over the weekend, that somebody used GPT3 to generate like a fully functional React app. You remember this? Yes. I forget what it was called. It was called like the something. But anyways, that in hindsight was like such a big moment. Yeah. But at the time it got like 2000 likes and people were like, wow, this is really cool. Yeah. But no one, no one took it from there to be like, businesses will be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on this in just a few years. Yeah, like. Or I mean, a lot of people did, honestly. Yeah, like tons of tons of people across venture and private market, public markets. A lot of people did, but way more people didn't update any of their behavior. Yeah, yeah. I guess it's mind blowing to me how few people realize their lives and everything they know will change drastically in the near future. At this point it should be pretty clear, says Jerry Turek. Yeah. Wild times. Elon Musk says 100%. He's completely agreeing. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for.

Joe Wiesenthal. Yeah, let's do. I love all the AI people who are like, nobody's prepared for what's coming. It's like, maybe just speak for yourself. Joe's ready. Joe's ready. No, it is. It is very funny that there's this whole. There's this whole meme of, like, no one knows what's coming. It's not priced in. It's like, all anyone talks about ever. It's on the front page of the Wall Street Journal every day. Lots of people are talking about this. And most people that say, nobody's prepared for what SC coming will not give you a really concrete. Yeah, like, what do you think? Exactly. Like, the last time we had this, like, nobody's prepared for what's coming moment was. What was the guy who was comparing AI to Covid back in March? Is that Schumer? Matt Schumer? Yeah. So something big is coming. Yeah, something big is happening. And it's like, yeah, something big is happening. Like, the models are getting better. Like, the math is getting solved, but, like, you can still go outside. Like, yeah, like, at this point in 2020, unemployment had spiked to 10%. And, like, it was very much like, you're a bold patriot if you're going outside. Like, it was a crazy, crazy time. And now it's like, yeah, there might be some softness in the. In the job market. Like, a hedge fund blew up. There's, like, there's things that are happening, some big things, but. But the hedge funds, the hedge fund blew up from being a little too bullish. Like, things maybe, like, they got the. You know, the. The basically directionally correct but got the timing wrong. Right. Mike Isaac says, yeah, these MFs don't know how much I got stockpiled in my basement. And Joe says, these MFs don't know that if a man has a Y, he'll find his out. Well said. Yeah, well said. Yeah. Buco Capital was having fun with Kevin Roose over at formerly New York Times, now Hard Fork Independent. I don't know. Is it. Did they. Did they take the A. Did they take the ip?

To the latest round of advanced mathematics. John, what is left? It's time. What? It's time to talk about the rise of one person, one dollar companies. One person, one dollar company in the Wall Street Journal. Million dollar companies. The rise of million dollar companies with just one employee. Let me tell everyone about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Wall Street Journal is saying AI tools make it easier for founders to get started alone. And many stay that way as they grow. Ben Broca launched a company last December that offers AI tools to entrepreneurs. That name's familiar. We've got him on the show. He's already added 10,000 paying customers and is on track to bring in 10 million in revenue this year. One thing he hasn't added any other employees. The 40 year old is part of a class of entrepreneurs who are launching and often running new companies on their own. Artificial intelligence tools answer broker's emails, help write and debug code field requests from customers, sign up new subscribers, and grant refunds when issues arise. Broca relishes his ability to make whatever decisions he wants on his own, often from his sun drenched Sausalito, California living room. I think compromises make lukewarm results. He said. Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down. And more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone. An analysis by the payments company Stripe. Tyler, look up Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company's platform that are generating over 1 million in revenue with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. That's pretty crazy. So this is on Pulse, right? No, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, on stripe, definitely not. Okay, this is just Stripe. Okay. The number of solo, I'm sure. I would be curious if pulsea has any companies that do more than, you know, a thousand dollars. I mean, you're looking at the cause. To be honest. Like, I actually do think success for pulsea is like just making back a dot, like even a dollar more than you're spending on Pulsea. Right? Because there's a YouTuber who's been demoing different AI systems, Fable and Soul and Kimmy. And saying like, go make me money is basically the only prompt. And he lets it cook for like a week and he'll be on like a $200 a month subscription, see if it can make 6 cents, see if it can make $10. And he's getting closer every time. And he of course, has to do some things, set up API keys and do little things. But it's an interesting experiment. Ben Awad, you should go check it out. So the number of solo operators, according to Stripe, also crossing the $10 million threshold, nearly tripled in that same span. In the past, people without business contacts or particular savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground, said Ernie Teddeschi, Stripe's chief economist. Now AI can be a built in business partner. Yeah. How does Stripe know if you're a solo operator? Like if you're. Because if you're a podcaster and you set up a Stripe account to accept money from advertisers, you could be having a million dollars move through there. But if you hire an editor or not, that doesn't necessarily show up in Stripe. So they must do some sort of polling and ask. Yeah, I think in your account at some point you say, how many employees do you have? Okay. And if you say, yeah, I just got one. But I guess one question, it's definitely grow. One question I have with the data is like, what if you just set up your Stripe account? It's like, how many employees do you have? And you. 1. And then you wind up adding people and you don't go on update. Yeah. Possible. Yeah. Because they don't have the payroll. I don't know how, I don't know how they would have visibility into. Into payroll. Especially like individual employees. Yeah, yeah. They do have a sense for how many people obviously are like added to your account. But sometimes it's like, oh, true account. If you add your cpa. Yeah. You know, and that's a contractor, not an employee. Yeah. AI's ability to handle various administrative tasks makes it potentially useful for launching solo businesses in many fields. But the technology's ability to handle key tasks in tech like coding, make that field particular hotspot. Analyzing Census Bureau data, Bank of America's Institute economist Taylor Bowley found that among all industries, new business applications in the information sector have seen the biggest percentage increase, nearly 45% over the past year. Yeah. At the same time, the rate of information sector applicants saying they plan to hire workers has experienced the sharpest decline of any measured industry. This census data set doesn't track solo operated businesses, but the numbers broadly show in tech and beyond that, applications are flat among businesses likely to hire workers, but generally rising elsewhere. Economists say that's a strong sign that solo operators are in the upswing. Wow. Yeah, that chart is really up and to the left. New business formation this is in the information sector in particular. I want to know more about what these people are doing because at the same time we saw levels IO talk about like the, the indie hacker sort of seeing declining revenues or more headwinds there because the little SaaS product that an indie hacker might build, I'm thinking of those one off websites like youtubedownloader4k.com, it's just like a piece of software that people land on through SEO or something that is an image background removal website and it just does one thing and it does it pretty well and it scales scales to six figures or seven figures. Those little sites are now getting sort of eaten by models and eaten by other people and they might be able to vibe code your own but at the same time they might have a long term Tyler update. Okay, so they basically calculate the number of solopreneurs based on how many people have. There's special plug ins or platforms that are directly for the solopreneur. So they basically use that to get a proxy of the general percentage of solo people on stripe. On stripe. Oh, they have like a special flow for solopreneur. Interesting. Yes. Oh cool. So they say that they're almost certainly underestimating the number. Hey, Julian Weiser, I know him, says the bar is getting. The bar for getting started has never been lower, said Julian Weiser, who runs a San Francisco based accelerator for solo founders working in tech. The accelerator, which offers founder seed money and mentorship in exchange for an equity stake, attracted 4,500 applicants for 10 slots made available in its most recent cycle, nearly five times the number it drew when it launched last May. Now he's been growing this a lot, but that is staggering. A lot of people want to be solopreneurs. Going it alone with AI can still be surprisingly expensive. Broca said he was losing money on many customers accounts while paying to access anthropics. Claude to run his clients requests that AI company as well as others charged based on usage. He has since switched to free open source models from China. Broca says he has raised $30 million from investors and at the same time has saved millions in salary since he hasn't needed a team of software engineers. Another risk. If it's easy for one entrepreneur to launch an AI assisted business, copying them can be easy too. This creates anxiety for founders like Troy Johnston, who runs an AI assisted business alone in Orlando, Florida. Everybody has the sword and we all have the ability to unsheathe Excalibur now. Johnston what a great quote for the journal. I love it. He's 40. He used an AI. He used AI to code an app that helps people get the most out of credit card benefits. Huh. That's interesting. Pick which card you want to use because you might have multiple cards, one that's good for dining, and you build an app for that. There's been a few apps that do that. The points guy had a whole blog around it, media company around it still does, but interesting to sort of like yeah, go and go and actually vibe code that a lot of those things. It's like you could probably just use the models themselves for this. Just have a thread that says, hey, these are the cards I have. Go pull all of the data. When I'm about to buy something, let me know. But at the same time, there might be some value for something new with a deeper integration somewhere. The company makes around $3,000 a month in profit with no employees and continuing to grow. Growl what a run for John Troy Johnson Story loves who loves King Arthur Related metaphors for business what one what one person businesses will mean for the labor market remains to be seen. Polling has shown that Americans are worried that AI will replace jobs, and top economists are wrestling with that possibility too. But AI is also creating lots of new jobs, and the go to loan entrepreneurs show the technology can both open doors and limit employment opportunities. If everyone's hiring less but you get four times more firms, what does that do to headcount? Said Rembrandt Koening, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies entrepreneurship. He co authored this recent study that found that among 50,000 startups the researchers examined, those focused on AI tended to operate with 25% fewer employees. It's interesting because haven't we seen the ramp data that said that AI adopting companies were hiring faster, but maybe they still operate lower operational headcount but hiring faster because of hiring growth. There's like three different factors that are going on here, sort of mixing all together. Koning, the professor, also believes a soft hiring environment that has left some people mired in long job searches has encouraged more to try their hand at launching businesses. That makes sense. Some founders cite different motives. It's a perfect storm of post pandemic burnout and a reevaluation of one's priorities and and also booming AI and a sense of what's possible, said Samir Ahmad, 39, who lives in Brennansville, Pennsylvania. Two years ago, Ahmad decided to leave the corporate job he had worked at at Verizon for almost two decades to start a solo coaching and consulting business. He had been seeing social media posts touting the ease and virtues of AI, which he liked to chart, which he used to chart a business plan and help with marketing. It was like my chief of staff, second in command. The business ultimately petered out within months though, and Ahmad is back to full time corporate role with a utility company. For Claire Vo, 41, AI helped turn her passing impulse into a business. She was working full time as a tech executive when she tapped AI in late 2023 to help code an app that would help manage documentation and design for new products with customers ranging from financial services to healthcare firms. I was copying and pasting from ChatGPT, said Vo, who lives in San Francisco. She put her app online for $1 a month. Wow, that is cheap. And within weeks I thought we didn't know how to make that cheap anymore. Yeah, I mean it is a subscription, at least not one time. But she put it online for a dollar a month and within weeks people downloaded thousands of times. Nearly three years later, Vo's company, which she ran solo for nine months before hiring an engineer, now has 100,000 users and is on track to make seven figures in profit this year. Wow, that's remarkable. At a dollar a month. That's crazy. AI handles the company's marketing, sales and customer sport. Well, AI is a shortcut for. Vo said her network and credibility in the industry were key. I think people over index on how easy AI is and under index on how much I did to get to this point, she said. She's still. Yeah, I just want to see, I want to see five companies that make more money from their business than they give paulsea every month. Yes. So Pulse has, has some public dashboards for how much people are spending or something like that. Yeah, they have a public dashboard. Let's see if I can find that again. While you're doing that, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. And if Jordi's continuing to look, I'll also tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto treasuries and more with great customer service. Trying to find the dashboard. I was looking at the dashboard that was showing. There's some, there's. Okay, I think Tyler found it. Thank you, Tyler. Yeah, so right now you can see all the different things that the companies on pulsea are doing, or at least some of them right now. So far today, companies on Pulsea have spent $373 is that today on ads today? Yeah. Well, it's still morning. It's still morning. So we're pacing only about. I don't know what time zone this is in. But yeah. The big question is, is any of this stuff actually working or is it more like kind of a video game effectively, that people just enjoy watching the machine hum, but there's not really much happening. I mean, that was the thing for midjourney and Suno, I think in many ways, like midjourney, when it launched, people totally. I mean, no. Okay, hear me out. Okay, I'll hear you out. Okay. When midjourney launched the steel man, when midjourney launched, people were like, this is going to take artists jobs. And it was like, okay, so if that plays out, then I'm gonna go to the MoMA and there's gonna be a show for someone that just prompted midjourney. And the highest auction at Christie's is going to be some midjourney artist. And that's not really what happened. Like, people aren't using midjourney to make fine art, but people love midjourney. Like, they love the activity of going on midjourney and generating and prompting and getting an image back. And then maybe they send it to their friends, maybe they use it a little bit. But it's not exactly the same of like the process of becoming a fine artist. It's more like they're enjoying the process of just making. It's more like just having a guitar that you just like to practice and noodle on versus like actually being a touring artist. And so like, that's certainly my experience with Suno is it's fun to try and make a song and then listen to it and then be like wrestling with the thing. And it's possible that that could be the same activity for like, okay, I'm going to go build an online business, see if I can get something out. But it's not really like a job. It's more of like an entertainment product. Yeah. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, you could easily see it turning into like an ender's game scenario where it's like a game and then it's like, oh, that was actually a real business you were starting. And you know, you offshored the last job you sent. You sent all the labor overseas. You rolled up the entire H vac industry. That wasn't a simulation. No. Based on my Steel Man. Do you agree or do you still disagree? No, I just think that you could use midjourney to create A beautiful asset that you could get some enjoyment out of or you could use it for your business or whatever you're doing. Yeah. Or to just create AI art. And you could use. Suno is just like deeply entertaining. You go on there and in five seconds you make a real song that sounds like it was recorded in a real studio and there might be something too. Like, okay, it is fun to go and build a SaaS product. Like, it is fun to go. Like the game. It's a game, right? I don't know. Tyler. Okay, just on your example earlier of like the MoMA artists, that's like the insane long tail of artists. Yeah. That's not like the average, you know, center of the curve artists that like midjourney, like maybe is like doing a similar thing to what? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I would just be surprised if the. I don't know, maybe the way to put it is like, I'd be surprised if like the majority of mid Journey users are using the product as an artist career path. An artist career path. Like, they're like, okay, I got my image. Now I need to get it printed. Now I need to go do a small gallery show. Now I need to go talk to an auction house. Now I need to go and pitch it to a bunch of collectors and like go through the process of being an artist. I think a lot of people are just like, cool, I got an image. Like, this is nice. Like, job's done. Now back to whatever else I was doing. Oh, like I have some free time. I could go play a video game. I could go listen to music. I could go generate some images and have fun with that and then. And see what those are like and then just enjoy them myself. Right. I don't know. I think there's like a smaller, tighter loop with some of these services that might be overridden and I'm wondering if there might be one in the like, design a business gamification of business world. I don't know. It does seem Ben has done a really good job positioning pulse and using some different methods to get attention. I have something, I feel like I have a little bit against the whole thing because I just get spammed mess DMS from him. He doesn't follow me on X, but he spams me with messages asking. Asking for different things. Which I just think is. Yeah, I think is somewhat entertaining if you're trying to run the anti AI slob coming, right. Yeah. Is it? I thought it was pro AI slob. I thought that was the whole name was. No, no, he's very. He's saying, this is not slop. This is because there is a world where you're like, it's slop, but it's good slop. And like, it's fine. Like, there's a lot of programmers that say, like, yeah, the answer for more slop. Answer for slop code is more slop. And it's like, it'll be fine. It's not a problem. You might not like the way the code is written, but it doesn't matter as long as it works. You might not like those artifacts in the AI image, but it's fine because it illustrated the point just like you wanted. Anyway. Tyler, do you have something else? Yeah, I was going to say, like, yes. Lop is like a temporary term. At some point, the running actually becomes good. The writing, whatever the output of the model. Yeah, writing does seem behind a little bit. It's like verifiable. It's not verifiable. No. People say it's good or bad. Not fast enough. The loop isn't tight enough. And there's too many people that say it's good when it's bad. You can make it. Maybe. Maybe it did get a lot better still. Once a week, it got a lot better. Someone prominent posts fully AI generated content. Yeah, what was happening with the cash? No, it just happens. It happens once a week. It's just an iron law. Once a week, someone really, really talented and smart post something that is just entirely AI. Maybe we gotta rip it. We gotta try it just to feel something. Cause maybe it's like a forbidden fruit full just like. Just like go to go and prompt like write me a blog post. Thought leadership about business. That's the prompt. Copy, paste, rip. And maybe it's also a strategy. You have something that's like, you really want to get out, but it's a little bit boring. And so you know that if you use AI, you're going to get ratio. So much more ratio. Way more people see it. And as long as the first sentences are kind of delivered the message. Yeah, yeah, this is good. This is really good. Yeah, I think we got to do it. We'll test it on Tyler's account first, though.