How About Tomorrow?
Being a Great Person, Adam's Diagnosis, LinkedIn Parents, and AI Money
Mon, 27 Jan 2025
Adam discusses a bipolar diagnosis, do we want to be great people, therapy and therapists who help therapists with therapy, inauguration thoughts, the Stargate announcement, money invested in AI, and LinkedIn parenting quotes.Links:Peer Support: A Safe SpaceRichard FeynmanDeepSeekGoogle Quantum AISponsor: Terminal now offers a monthly box called Cron.Want to carry on the conversation? Join us in Discord. Or send us an email at [email protected]:(00:00) - Guess who has to pee? (00:27) - Bipolar musings (09:32) - Do you want to be a great person? (13:26) - Could you be bipolar? (17:16) - Who therapies the therapists? (22:18) - Watching the inauguration (30:46) - The Stargate announcement (38:30) - The AI landscape (50:32) - Are we living in the craziest time? (55:23) - Having kids ★ Support this podcast ★
I gotta pee. Ooh. The sounds you make when you gotta pee. Oh my God. How's the nanny?
Fantastic. It's actually a team. We have a small team of nannies. We have two. OK, so one one of them can't do enough of the hours. So we found somebody who does want more hours. So we're kind of shifting the one into more of a babysitter ad hoc role and the other into the full time nanny. Anyway, it's yeah. It's a group effort. We have special needs children. Literally.
But in the other way, I could mean that, I guess. I don't know. Yeah.
You're also special. You're also special needs.
I'm also special needs. Okay, yeah. Let's talk about that. I'm bipolar, which I think I knew. I even found a tweet where I tweeted something about hypomania. probably talked about on this podcast. My memory is very obvious. It's very obvious. Yeah. In retrospect, I should have always known.
But the thing that's not obvious or the thing that I'm now that I actually have the official you are bipolar diagnosis is
it's not obvious how life should work or how i should be like i enjoy being manic or hypomanic i'm not sure that i'm actually manic i'm just new to the bipolar reddit uh i'm catching up to speed it turns out lots of people that have lots of similar life experiences that's the great part about diagnosis is i never would have thought to look up like a community of people with bipolar and like what do they have to say about things
And it's amazing just immediately how many threads on Reddit I've read that I'm like, wow, that is so nice to see I am not just weird or whatever. Like there are people who have navigated this and found good solutions. So the main, the crux of the problem is,
if I were a single man and I didn't have a family and I just was a lone wolf, like I seem to want to be at times, like I, I tend toward lone wolfness, just very isolated. I enjoy autonomy. I don't seem to need people. Uh, if I were that person, I would just be manic all the time. And that, because it feels amazing. I mean, it is a high and I,
There's a lot of like societal acceptance of people who get a lot done. And I get a lot done when I wake up at three in the morning and when I don't want to do anything but sit at my desk and produce things. Like it is rewarding in so many ways, mostly career and just feeling really good. Like I'm on crack all the time. But it's like also terrible for my health.
Like, so I would probably live a very short, intense life if left to my own devices.
Because like sleeping. Because like you don't sleep.
Yeah, you don't sleep enough. Like I sleep four or five hours a night. That's not enough hours.
Yeah.
But it feels like it's enough. That's what's always been weird to me. I've always said like, I just don't need that much sleep. Like Casey sleeps like almost twice as much as me. And I'm like, it's whatever. I just don't need much sleep. I'm an abnormal adult. But that's just the mania talking.
And I did know that I have these like periods where I'll go two, three months where I'm really not sleeping enough. And I'm up and very excited. It's like Christmas morning every day. And then I crash for like two weeks where I just don't want to get out of bed. And I sleep like 10 hours a night. And it's like, this is weird. What's this about? Is this depression?
I've always been back and forth and never thought about maybe there's a happy middle. I just don't know how much of my life I've lived not in one of those two states. It feels like most of my adult life, I've been one of those two things. Now, as a married man with children, I have to figure out I am my best self, my best father and husband self.
Maybe not my best co-worker slash cog in society, but I am my best human being to be around when I'm not in those extremes, when I sleep enough and I'm healthy and I'm not just jittering all over the house. I actually think about other things when things slow down. I don't just think about my work. So yeah, trying to figure all that out. I think I'm in a normal state right now.
I don't know if the podcast listeners can tell or if they've seen my bipolar over the years.
It's easily tracked with your commit history. Like if we just chart that, it's probably very, you can probably perfectly correlate it. That's funny. Did you get that data?
I mean, it feels like anecdotally, it feels like I spend a lot of time in the upper state. and then crash into the lower state for shorter amounts of time. But that's... I mean, my memory is not very good. I think that's probably another... Like when you spend a lot of your time not sleeping enough.
Yeah, it's really hard to tell what actually, I mean, that's with everything. It's like, unless you're literally writing it down every single day, it's really hard to self-assess anything. Even from just like, what did I eat yesterday? Like, am I like eating enough protein? It's just impossible in this year, right? Anything like that, it's just hard to get a sense of.
So are you doing something different or are you just like naturally in?
Yeah, so the number one thing I can do to keep from going manic. Well, one, I can't consume caffeine. Sorry, terminal. I really can't. Like it 100% of the time shoves me into mania. I'm pretty sure. So I have to avoid caffeine, which is fine. I've been drinking decaf and enjoying it. But the number one thing I can do is just sleep enough.
If I just don't let myself get out of bed before five and I go to bed knowing I'm not allowed to get out of bed before five, like put me in a straight jacket, tie me to the bed. Like I cannot get out of bed. And it's really hard to go into that hypomanic state when I'm sleeping enough. That's, that's the best thing I think I can do to stay normal.
The hard thing is to not slip into depression, which is where I just sleep a lot and I don't feel like doing anything.
Yeah. How'd you figure both of those out? Was that something that you just self-assessed or did someone help you figure that out?
Uh, I think my therapist said something about like, I need to like sleep is the biggest tell, uh, or my psychologist or whatever she is. But I think I just kind of put it together. Like, I know, I know that it's not good to be getting up at three in the morning or two 30, even I got, it just makes sense that that's not like some weird, unique superpower I have.
It's like, no, it's just not good for me. And I, it's just hard to imagine if I'm getting eight, nine hours of sleep a night, having that brain state. I don't know. Outside of like drinking caffeine, I guess.
Yeah. Interesting.
I mean, I don't know that it works. You say, how did I figure that out? Like, this is like, I've tried it for a week. So we'll see. We'll see if it actually works.
But yeah, I mean, those, those two things seem pretty extreme in that. Like I can see how they would explain like a large percentage of what's going on. Like if you're not getting enough sleep and you're drinking caffeine, like,
yeah that definitely just puts you in like like a biological just like a pure biology sense like just put i put you in like a really weird place yeah yeah have you how much do you sleep like what's your night do you have like a pretty solid routine i've been in different phases in my life like ignoring my younger phase because that's obviously i think everyone when they're younger is just like crazy about that but like in the past five years i've probably fluctuated to some degree um
It's never like that extreme though. It'll be like, I'll go for a period where I'm getting like one to two hours less than I should. It's never like half. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, uh, yeah, I don't know. I, I, one of those observations about me is she's like, you just don't change. I'm just like the same all the time. Yeah.
Uh, in terms of like my mood or like my energy or like, you know, so yeah, I guess I have, I don't know if that's because of, that's not really stemming from really consistent routines. Like I actually, I've gone in different directions in my life where I've had like no routine at all. Then I like saw the miracle of like what having a really strict routine does like just, uh,
just the consistency of every day just makes stuff gel into place more. But then I also had this other feeling of like, I don't know if that's where... creativity really comes from when like every single day is the same and you don't like meander and like have things that are unexpected or do things that you wouldn't normally do. Sure.
So now I'm kind of in an in-between where I think I'm still a little off balance. I think I've gotten like too much in the unstructured direction. Yeah. But yeah, I'm just trying to like find this balance of being like decently structured, but yeah, You just think of great people in the past. It's not like they were just adhering to some rigid structure every day.
I want to make sure I don't lose that. I think modern society really pushes the idea of hyper-routine. I know I need to reject that to some degree, even though there is wisdom there.
You think about that a lot, don't you? You just run your life based on how did great people live? You want to be a great person, don't you? Not faulting you for it. I think we all do. We just don't all put it in practice, probably.
Yeah, but I think for me, I have a very... I think for me, it's more that I have a very narrow, particular, personal opinion of what I consider a great person that I would kind of look up to. Sure. And because it's so narrow and particular, I think I'm like... I like really admire them. I like really, really admire them because it's like a intense choice that I've made to like them. Yeah.
I got to ask more questions now. Cause I, I just assumed like that made sense to me, but it's not necessarily lined up with what like society views as great people. So it's not like the like default answers to that question. You have a different set of great people. I think it would be a, well, it's not, I'm not going to be like, it's Hitler.
I love Hitler. Yeah.
That's another topic that's very hot right now.
It's not really contrarian. I just think it's a subset. I think everyone that I, it's funny, I can't even really name people off the top of my head. It's more like a vibe that I think of, but I don't think I'm thinking of anything that's like anyone that's like underappreciated or like, you know, lost. It's more just a subset.
Yeah, just not all the great people. They don't all check your boxes. Like there's people who are considered the great people of our time and you don't.
Yeah, I gotcha. I tend to like people that seem like weirdly good in a lot of different domains, including being really enjoyable to be around. I think it's like it's people like that. Yeah. Yeah. Which isn't like, you know, most most great people.
Yeah. So it made me think of Einstein. Like Einstein wasn't known for being a good hang.
like kind of miserable to be around or is that not what you're saying maybe that's maybe that's like maybe that was too strong of a statement like because i because i i like greatly admire steve jobs and people think he's a dick but when i say great to be around i'm like i just feel like he had such a interesting way of like phrasing things or like looking at things or really good perspective on stuff so gotcha i'm like that seems like a pleasant person to be around he would keep you guessing
Lots of interesting thoughts.
Yeah. I'm not super into like this, like the more like autistic...
like you imagine like a great autistic person like kind of the stereotype we have of that that's like not what i'm super into um i'm a huge fan of richard feinman i think he's like oh same the best like in this category yeah uh-huh so it's like he he just seemed to enjoy every single facet of life and try to like pull the most out of all of it whether it was like the intellectual science part or like the emotional part or like the appreciation of arts part it's uh
Yeah, I tend to really, really, really like people like that.
Yeah.
And I tend to dislike people that achieve greatness through like overly specializing in some area.
Yeah. I could listen to Richard Feynman, Feynman, Feynman, Feynman.
Yeah.
I could listen to him talk all day long. Sometimes like when I get tired of whatever book I'm listening to, I just pull up a random YouTube video of his where he's lecturing.
I don't know what he's talking about, but I just, I love listening to him talk like somebody who really knows what they're talking about and is very passionate, even if they don't necessarily communicate in a way that I can understand. It's just very fun to listen to.
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. And I think I just think society pushes you to into all these like narrow, overly specialized ways of living. And I like to remember people like that because it serves as a counterbalance. Yeah. Yeah. So this is off of what we were talking about, but that just, I do have consistent routines. I just try not to go overboard with it.
Yeah. So I guess I do want to, I want to go back to the bipolar thing briefly. I wonder, so it's mostly like working adults that have bipolar. It's not like a thing I've had since I was a kid, or maybe I had the, I don't know. I don't understand it all fully. Maybe I had the predisposition, the genetics somehow. I do have someone in my very close family who,
that has had some pretty intense manic episodes that kind of led all this, brought it all to a head for me and my wife. I need to get diagnosed just because we want to know, could I ever have one of those situations where psychosis, extreme kind of disassociation with reality, and just knowing some of the things about bipolar, it sounded like I might have said disorder. But it's basically like...
largely working adults and I look at like tech and I wonder if it's, I guess what I would say is this, if you find yourself not sleeping near enough, I feel like there's gotta be one listener out of all of our listeners that's like, oh shit, that could be me. That sounds kind of like me. Not that it needs to change your life. I'm not looking to get on medication.
I'm not looking to, I just wanted to understand it. and kind of curb the main drawbacks. People with bipolar die like 10 years earlier or something. Makes sense. If you don't sleep, that would add up over time. So yeah, I think if you don't sleep enough and if you find yourself real excited about your work, Like more excited about it than anything in life all the time.
And you can't sleep because you want to wake up and work on it. And then sometimes you're kind of depressed. Just maybe look into it. Maybe DM me. Sometimes I get a DM when I talk about stuff and they're like, hey, I didn't know that was me, but that's me too. So that's nice.
Yeah. Maybe it's you too. And I'm going to provide a counter thing here, which is if this sounds like you, but you're not getting a lot done, it probably isn't you.
You're a bad bipolar. You're failing.
You should actually get stuff done. You're probably just, like, not disciplined. Like, there's just... There's a lot of ways to see.
You could just not sleep and not be bipolar.
That's possible. Because I think that was me when I was younger. Like I definitely like didn't sleep and I was like kind of all over the place in the same way. But like it wasn't it wasn't related to this.
I wasn't really getting it. For me, it's like it's like every morning feels like Christmas morning. Like when I'm hypomanic or manic, whichever it is, it's like I cannot stay in bed. I'm too excited. I got to get up. And sure, there's like projects at work that that's probably normal for people. But when it's like every day for three months, I don't know.
It's probably a sign you should get get it checked out. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, it's a having been around a few people now that have fallen under this. It's a. It's easy to just be like, oh, that's normal. But then when you actually think about it for a second, it's actually extremely obvious when someone's bipolar in the way that you are.
So you also mentioned to me that... I just wanted to tell you this. When you got your diagnosis, you mentioned to me like... oh, they recommended one aspect was like kind of routine social interactions. And I was telling that to Liz and Liz commented that, oh, he's going to like someone legit. Cause that's like very tailored advice. That's not like the generic stuff you typically typically get.
So yeah, whoever you're going to for this.
She seems legit. She costs as much as a lawyer. So she better be legit. Yeah. It was like an eight hour evaluation. I sat in there all day with this woman. I mean, she had seen me twice before. Like this was kind of like she recommended we do a full assessment for a few things. And it involves sitting in there with her all day long. So she got to I couldn't hide any bits of me by the end of it.
It was just me. So did you know that there are some therapists that specialize in treating other therapists? Yeah.
really yeah who watches the watchman am i right but then who who do they go to right oh yeah there's gotta be a point of failure at some point at the chain yeah yeah it's just like it's that's interesting and again having known some people that are like professionals in that space that are like really good at their career yeah it seems like a cursed career in a
They're just thinking about this stuff so much. And it's just not healthy to have to think about this much. They all are like way too...
analytical about every little thing that they do and they like treat it like they're like what would a good patient be like and then they like try to act in like they try like assess themselves in the way that what kind of patient that them as a therapist would want so it's like this really complicated thing when you're a therapist and you yourself need um need therapy it just seems like yeah like a special kind of hell yeah
That's tough. Yeah, it feels like... I mean, if you really believe that what you're doing is good, like you're doing something for other people, it feels like you're sacrificing a lot of your life to live that life. Because, yeah, sitting in a room every day with... I can't imagine. It's hard for me to spend an hour in therapy. I can't imagine doing it all day long, every day.
Yeah. So Liz's best friend has had the dream patient scenario happen because I think every patient to some degree is self-conscious that am I just super boring to this person? Is this person just hating the hour they're spending with me? Yeah. And, you know, the reality is, is like, yes, most therapists find most of their patients like boring. Sure.
And it's just it's just like very boring work for them. But Liz's friend had this crazy situation where a therapist is like, I am done. I'm I forgot what she was like not being a therapist anymore or like she was retiring. And she was like, but I want to be your friend. Like, let's, like, continue to hang out. So she got confirmation that she was, like, not a boring patient.
Not the boring one. Oh, now I want to win over my therapist. I want her to want to be my friend.
But that's also, like, not a... That, like, is, like, a fundamentally unhealthy relationship to have to your therapist. So, yeah. These dynamics are funny, and the way that things have to think about are... Yeah, are really funny. So weird professions.
I mean, you spend, like... as a person spending, like, on the patient side, you're spending time with this person every week. It's a friendship. Like, it becomes a friendship. But, like, they can't just have all their friendships be their patients. So they have to, like, look at it very differently, right? Like, they're not just becoming friends with everybody that walks in the door.
No, no, yeah. And they can't... They, like, have to be really explicit about certain things to avoid you seeing them in a certain way, which then, like, can disrupt what they're trying to do. So that is a...
the funny thing and then and then like uh our friend i was talking about who is a therapist he does i think couples therapy mostly so then that's like even crazier dynamics because there's two people um yeah it's uh it's interesting it's very interesting anyway enough of mental health my brain etc adam is depressed everyone sent him money actually money
Because that's what will make me happy. I did just come out of a little slump, a depression. I hesitate to call it depression, not because I'm like, it feels vulnerable or something, which I want to get back to that, what that word means. Not that like, I don't want to be viewed as weak or something because I'm depressed.
More just like, I don't know if it's actual depression and I don't want to make light of like people who have depression, capital D, if that's like a separate thing. I don't know. I don't know. It might be the same exact thing.
Okay. But I will say like you're...
because we interact mostly digitally i weirdly get a more shallow view of you but the shallow view has less noise so it's like really clear when you're in one mode or the other you know i could tell for the past couple weeks yeah that it was you were in a different mode i've been sleeping like 10 hours a night and if nothing else in my life were different that's crazy like tell brian johnson
Yeah. Oh, I want to talk about Brian Johnson in this episode, too, because he's kind of like made the leap after. I feel like we talked about him before. He was definitely in like the public light. But then the Netflix series came out and I feel like I see constant things about Brian Johnson now.
And he's also like in our little bubble. Like he replied to Madison yesterday.
Yeah, he's like and I saw him reply to Theo. Like he's he's kind of like. In our Twitter circle, in ways, he's touched it. And it's very interesting. Where do you want to go next? What's going on? Twitter? Do you want to talk about something? There's lots of news. There's an inauguration. There's lots of memes.
Yeah, I watched the inauguration. I don't know if you did. I did not. I don't think I've ever watched one really before, but I just had it on the background while I was working. Yeah. And, man, is it boring.
How do you watch stuff like that? Was it on YouTube or was it...
Yeah, it was everywhere. It was, like, on Twitter. It was on YouTube. It was a bunch of places. Oh, it was on Twitter, of course. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. It was pretty boring. Like, I don't know. Just, like, a lot of staying around and waiting. It wasn't, like, back-to-back. Like, we got stuff going. This person shows up. There was, like, a lot of, like, downtime.
It took forever for it to start. Yeah.
I thought – so if I'm being honest, like seeing a lot of the clips of people speaking and like there were speeches, all that stuff, I didn't know. I just thought it was like hand on the Bible, hand up, say some stuff, and that's the inauguration. I didn't know there was like – a whole thing about it.
I mean, there's definitely speeches, but I don't know if it's always to this degree where there's just like a slew of people talking about, uh, about things. Yeah. So I think the few things that stood out to me were, uh, one, just, uh, It's crazy how intertwined with religion a lot of this stuff still is. I mean, hand on the Bible, I just said. Yeah, I mean, that part is fine.
I think whoever's getting sworn in can technically choose what they're swearing in on. And I think in Trump's case, he chose his mother's Bible or something, and then he actually didn't even put his hand on it when he swore in, which was probably just an accident.
that's fine yeah so but like just you know the people that speak it's people that are like reverends and there's also like a rabbi and that one is just to me like okay, like the president isn't Jewish.
So there's like no explanation as to why a rabbi is speaking besides they're intentionally being, oh, we need to represent, you know, these ex religions as part of our government swearing in ceremony. So yeah, Yeah, it is just kind of increasing in that world that's increasingly fewer and fewer people are involved in religion.
Yeah, increasingly secular.
Yeah, it's a word.
It's bizarre. It stands out.
It's just interesting to see that show up again. And it's not just like... It's more the way. Okay. So the one thing is across all the speeches, everyone was just like crazy sucking up to Trump. That was like a, I don't know if that's normal when a new president comes in.
Everyone is just like, you know, I think there's like an above average amount of like, you know, showering the new candidate in praise.
I didn't, I didn't watch the inauguration, but I've sensed there's an above average amount of sucking up this time. I don't know what that's about, but.
And I think it makes sense just because it was such a contentious election and people saw it as a very important one. But there's this whole... So when the religious people talk, they do it in their flavor, which is like God guided his hand. God is protecting him. He's touched by... There's this essence of divinity attached to it. And that's so interesting to me because I'm like, this is how...
police like this is how like kings and emperors were spoken of like they were seen as literally yeah there's like a there's like a terminology for this like uh when like your role is like god like authorizes your uh yeah yeah divine right or whatever divine right to rule It's something like that. It's like... Ordained?
Sorry, I've been trying to think of words. And that one just came to my head.
Like, in certain cultures, like, the emperor, they literally saw them as, like, a literal god. And I'm not saying we're anywhere close to that, but it was... It was funny to see that. And, you know, they were talking and especially because he survived the assassination attempt. There's a whole angle of like, you know, there being a divine intervention and making this interesting.
So, yeah, it is interesting how much that is a part of everything. And it's not like I guess, like you said, there's like an increasing
percentage of the population that just doesn't live their lives that way so it's kind of out of place do you think that was the case four years ago like do you think the there's a party divide on how much the uh religious aspects come into the presidency i mean i don't know because i think my gut feel is biden is probably more religious than trump like in his heart sure i imagine that like
I like just the way Trump has spoken about this stuff. I feel like he fought. It's like so clearly he forces it in and like he just he just seems like just a guy from New York. And like, I know I know what that vibe is. It's not you don't like view life through religion, really. That's my read on it.
So that's my read as well. And it's very funny to me how much. Christian America backs Trump and is like... I mean, it's just a huge part... You can't separate religion from politics because it's like so many people in America... align with some religion, specifically evangelical Christianity. And it's just like this thing that everyone knows. They all vote for the Republican.
And Republican and Christian are just kind of like this weird amoeba thing that's mashed together. Amoeba wasn't the right word. This weird molecule that's been mixed together. And it's just... I don't know. I can't talk about it without getting really grossed out because it kind of bothers me. But yeah, I mean, just like when I was part of that...
belief system I saw it in like the mega church in Springfield Missouri has like the politicians come through during that season it's like September October they all stop in the church and the pastor like announces them and they stand up and wave and like everybody claps and like it's just the whole thing is so dumb to me like I mean just the idea that like I don't know if you believe in something like Christianity just show me the overlap of those beliefs with like
republican americans i don't get it yeah it's just like i mean like yeah it's just obvious that trump isn't isn't like a christian exactly but they view him as like this messianic figure that's like come to save i mean yeah it's just the thing that overrides everything is like there's alignment like you know if
someone is aligned with goals that you have, then it's very easy to overlook a certain character. And to be fair, I think a lot of people don't do that. I think there's probably a lot of Christian people that are very upset by the way some people in power that are technically representing them represent them. But yeah, it's just a reality of just power and all these dynamics.
But yeah, there's no way that Trump I just can't see it like I mean it's not like it's funny because it's like this might sound like I'm criticizing him but I'm actually not what I'm actually saying is I know how I am and like I feel like he's kind of like me so I don't even know how much he pretends that he's not I just feel like it's more on the like
religious people's side that they've drafted this thing onto him and decided he is this thing i think he does what every politician does which is like say the amount you have to say to like get the vote for that you know what i mean like that constituency anyway yeah uh i feel like we can't not talk about elon too just how much he's played a role in this presidency and the inauguration and all of it i don't know like what's the deal he he donated a ton of money i guess yeah i thought of money and like yeah just do whatever he could to
put weight on the scale in that direction.
Do you think that weighs in on why people like Zuckerberg are now so pro-Trump? Is it like, we're not going to let Twitter and X have some edge?
No, I've already done my rant on Zuckerberg. I've already explained it.
Oh, you mean he's still Lizardman? Yes.
He what? Yes, he's just trying to be cool and he's just following whatever is cool.
It does seem like... I don't remember last time when Trump had his first term. I don't remember all these corporate tech giants getting so behind.
No, that's definitely a new thing. Yeah, I think it's just... Yeah, it's just an incentive thing. I think... Okay, let me actually talk about a very specific thing. Did you see the Stargate announcement yesterday? Yes, I want to talk about that too. Perfect. Okay, so I'm convinced that that's a fake announcement. Yep. And I'm open to being wrong about this, but...
So just for context, Trump got up there with Sam Altman, Larry from Oracle, Larry Ellison, and then the SoftBank guy, Amasa, right? And they announced, hey, there's going to be a $500 billion investment in infrastructure for AI over the next, I think they said five years or four years? Yeah, something like that. And they listed who's involved.
They were like Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, SoftBank, obviously, MGX, which is...
like a i think it was a it's like some some fund in saudi like one of the like public fund from like managing their sovereign wealth or whatever uh so i was like huh okay this is one a crazy number so i did some digging and i was like let's see if i can like make these numbers make sense so obviously when they list oracle and video whatever I don't think those companies are contributing money.
They're actually the ones going to be receiving money, I'm assuming.
Right, for the GPU stuff.
Oracle has some capability in building data centers, whatever, and obviously NVIDIA GPUs, et cetera. So ignoring those people. So Microsoft was listed, and Microsoft already announced six months ago that they had some Stargate AI thing, and they were planning on spending $100 billion over the next five years or something. Okay, so there's $100 billion.
they're already doing something are they just like counting microsoft's effort as like oh yeah it's like under the stargate umbrella but that's they're like counting it as like oh this is general ai infrastructure even though that's just microsoft doing that for themselves kind of irrespective of it's not like they're going to be
giving this infrastructure to like you know their competitors yeah it's probably more than just ai just any any like cloud business that they have is probably part of this okay so ignore so 100 billion there okay gotcha uh softbank only has $350 billion in assets managed.
So, like, if they literally liquidated everything they had and they got, like, exactly what they wanted for it, that still wouldn't be enough to cover this $500 billion. And realistically, they're not doing that. They probably will maybe raise a new round for this.
Well, that's what I was going to ask. If it's over four years, is the argument from them just... It's $125 billion a year. Yeah, so is the argument from them that they're just... they're going to raise $500 billion over four years? Like...
Yes. Okay. So I think they're basically saying like, oh, we're going to, this is our target. We're going to raise 500 billion. But like the people they listed, like the MGX fund, the whole fund is 100 billion. I don't think they're going to YOLO the whole fund on like this one project. Yeah. Right. So like for what they listed, I'm like, this isn't really like adding up. The numbers don't add up.
And they do technically say up to 500 billion. They claim they're going to deploy 100 billion immediately, but Maybe they're just counting Microsoft's thing plus whatever else they raised.
I don't know.
So I'm like, okay, I think what's going on here is they went to Trump and they were like, oh, let's do this announcement. It's going to be sick. Yeah. And of course, from Trump's point of view, great. That's great PR for them. Second day in office or first full day in office, like he's got this really impressive sounding thing.
And then they can like kind of make it seem like, oh, we're established as like the market leader. Google and Facebook aren't just going to see that and be like, oh, okay, we lost. You know, it's just like, that's not what's happening. And then Elon tweeted today, because he has this whole thing with OpenAI, he replied being like, this is fake.
They only, they have less than 10 billion committed, which I'm sure he's probably making that up to some degree. So, yeah, to me, it's just like a marketing PR thing. And I also thought... Oh, this is exactly what I would do. Like I would go and make some big official sounding announcement if I had the capability to. That just like creates a bunch of noise in the market. It's always good to do.
If they really said up to $500 billion, that's a pretty hilarious marketing gimmick.
They did say that, yeah.
Up to...
likely not going to reach those levels but i'll spend up to 500 billion on my house mortgage payment this month yeah so i don't i don't know and the other thing is that's kind of crazy is like that is such a crazy bet to make on this root singular all boils down to a root thing which is is scaling all we need Are we going to be able to spend $500 billion and get like 100x the quality?
Or is it going to be 2x the quality? That's like the question.
Can you speak to just like what they've announced with Stargate? Like it's just data centers or what are they saying? And it's just for open AI to use to build new models?
It's a broad statement. They're just saying there's going to be $500 billion invested in AI infrastructure that we need to do all this stuff. And technically, they're saying Stargate itself is a new company, and then Masa is going to be the chairman of it. But what does this company actually own? I don't...
think they're necessarily owning the data centers it's just like i don't know they're just gonna raise money and like direct it towards different things so they might like give it to open ai to then do stuff they might give it to someone else to to go do stuff they might directly give it to nvidia to do to do stuff um so yeah it's like very vague but if you imagine that some percentage of it is for training some percentage of it is for inference it's a lot of money
It's a lot of money.
It's kind of hard to even fathom $500 billion.
Yeah, I think Grok has the largest investment so far, and that's only like under $5 billion, I think, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah, I find it really interesting because I think... I think they effectively killed the perplexity category of companies, which is a modern search engine that basically is just ingesting real-time information.
Because it's doing all that. It does real-time stuff, right?
Yeah. And I find myself using it... In my head, I just had a mental block of... Okay, I basically go to LLMs for everything. But if I'm asking something like, when does the severance...
show premiere what time i like can't go to ai for that because it doesn't know anything upcoming but now i realize like oh grock like almost always knows the answer to that and it effectively like basically that's the last part of the last time i go to google so now i'm trying to go to rock more for that kind of thing um yeah now you know sports stats that are the latest you know stuff like that it's always going to have the advantage of having all the tweets like
Yeah. That's just... And tweets contain all the current event questions, answers to all the current event questions. There's a tweet out there with any current event question you have, there's a tweet out there answering it, basically.
OpenAI, like, going to ChatGBT for, like, you just don't even think to ask, like, a current events question because you just know, like... I don't think it can do that stuff, right?
And then the question is like, okay, technically OpenAI's models are better, Claude's models are better, but that just seems like a temporary gap. If Grok just gets that good, why would you use two things? You probably wouldn't. You probably would just use Grok for everything. Yeah. As of now, they're in this really interesting position, I think. And it was kind of not very predictable.
Yeah. Let's talk about the whole AI landscape right now because there's so much going on with like DeepSeek R1 came out. I guess people are very impressed with this model. It's open source. And where does OpenAI sit in the landscape? Because Claude, I mean, there's all these other models that people use that pay for subscriptions for. Like is OpenAI behind DeepSeek? Are they still leading?
Because for a while they were leading.
They're still leading because their models are still... I mean, the best is such a fuzzy question, but on certain evaluations, their models tend to do well and they tend to release them first. So, yeah, the DeepSync thing came out, but it was after 01 and presumably... you know, they've got like open as advanced since they released it. And they have, so I think they're still in the lead.
It's just that lead is just more and more marginal. And it's just becoming very clear that, um, I mean, it's been clear-ish for a while that the winning company is not going to be, it's not going to be related to like who has the best raw model because that just becomes a commodity that's just everyone eventually has to be good enough or around the same.
So you asked an actually really interesting question I just glossed over earlier. It was like the Stargate thing. Is scaling it really the problem? Do you have thoughts on that? Like, can we scale this current thing?
I have no clue, but I think that's just a fundamental question, right? If it turns out just doubling the power, 10Xing the raw power gets you, like, brute forcing to AI, like AGI, like... Yeah, that would be crazy. Yeah. That's how the bets are aligned, basically. Not entirely. I'm kind of exaggerating. They're obviously also inventing new techniques, like optimizing things.
But roughly, they're betting if they build a 10x bigger data center, you get an exponentially better model for the amount of effort you've invested. If that's not true, and it's actually the opposite, where it's logarithmic and it starts to taper off, This is a complete waste of resources.
What do you think about quantum? Because there's been all these headlines too. Google had a big... We didn't talk about this. They had this big breakthrough with quantum computing, which has always just kind of been like this thing that is coming, but not really coming. And we don't actually know how to do it. But think about the possibilities.
Now it seems like there's actual potential for commercialization in the next... some number of years. Do you think about that, how it relates to AI? Because all this stuff that we're doing with the types of LLM, the approaches to building these models would all be completely different in a world where quantum computing was a part of modern infrastructure, right?
Maybe, because... It's not like... It's still possible that... Okay, so just on quantum computing itself, it's like... I don't know the number, but there's like six moonshots that need to happen for quantum computing to be usable. And that Google thing was like, we got past one of them. But they got past one of them. Error correction.
But there's still like... There's still like many of those left to get to a place where it's usable. And then even then, it's not like it's a general purpose computer. It's like...
insanely useful and going to transform society but not it's just not clear whether like it's going to be in a shape that like meaningfully impacts ai and also on the timelines and yeah a lot of stuff can happen it's so like tantalizing when you read the headlines with quantum computing like the stuff it can do maybe it's just super specific stuff but those things it does like
billions trillions of times faster than a computer or just like does it and a computer couldn't like a classical computer could never work it out before the heat death of the universe and it can do it in like five minutes or whatever you just can't hear those headlines and not think like well what could that do with ai like what could what could that do with these approaches to like synthetic intelligence i feel like
the potential seems crazy.
That's true. But the other dynamic to consider is it might be that, oh, it is true that scaling is all you need, but it turns out the other thing you also need is more input data. And you can have like the biggest data center ever. And it turns out the results are not any better because we've exhausted input data for the system. And like synthetic data, like is not making it work any better.
But then, you know, that could also be the bottleneck. And then we won't know how to really, really address that. I think fundamentally it's just this thing where clear, like even if this stuff works, we've just created a parallel way to get to some level of intelligence because this biological brain we have is still superior in like every single way.
Like it doesn't need a billion examples of what a dog looks like to look like a dog. It needs like two. Yeah. Uh, and it doesn't need this crazy amount of power. It doesn't need all this stuff. So I still feel like there is still maybe a totally different approach to AI that might end up being the thing that actually makes it happen.
Uh, cause what we have now feels so divorced from what nature invented. And a lot of things in life are that way. Like the more efficient thing is like not the way it works in nature at all. But when it comes to intelligence, it feels like the nature version is really, really good.
So it is really, really good. But I take issue with the idea that This thing, we've created a parallel version that's just a shittier version of our brain. There are things it does that I couldn't do. Yeah, it has infinite memory. The memory thing. Yeah, like the ability to pull context from areas I've never heard about and put a coherent answer together.
That feels very useful, especially in our line of work as a knowledge worker. Yeah. How do you explain that in terms of like, it's just memory? It just has more memory than us or it has more, a wider memory?
Yeah, but I think what I'm describing is, I'm not saying if you built the nature version of it that you could just also have that. Like if you built it in a virtual environment, there's no reason you couldn't give it more memory while still retaining what's good about the way our brains currently work.
Oh, you're saying like if we built a whole different approach to AI that was more like our brain,
you could also give it the memory yeah you you can still untether it from the downsides of our brain which is like it experiences time at a certain rate so you you can't like teach it at a faster rate than we want and like you know it like forget stuff and it's unreliable in certain ways and it might turn out like a lot of those things are important like uh if you build something that's a human brain that remembers perfectly and it has any kind of negative input
and it remembers it perfectly forever, it might just end up being traumatized in a way that is hard to correct for. Yeah, I can relate. So maybe the forgetting is actually really important. So yeah, I think it's just so clear when I start talking about things in this way, The thing we have is quite different than a brain in a box.
This is such an interesting moment in time where all these companies, you think of NVIDIA and then all the major tech companies, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, whoever, they're all pouring so much money down this path because they have to. They have to assume it's going to work out and they're going to beat the other people. They have no choice.
And a trillion dollars will go in this space in the next five years. And it's like, could be wrong. Oopsie.
Like imagine someone that has just like, what would it look like to make a contrarian bet today? It would be betting that they're investing in the wrong place. Like, not entirely wrong. Like, you still go for AI, but you're like, the architecture they're following is, like, totally wrong.
Yeah.
And if you make a contrarian bet there and you're right, this is, like, the best bet ever made in the history.
It's the bigger short.
The biggest short. You would... build a business that eats all of them. So how, yeah.
How do you make that contrarian bet? Not like I'm actually going to try and make this contrarian bet me in my middle America.
I mean, you, you would have to have the idea for it first. That's just like, I don't, I'm like not smart enough to come with that.
You're saying the contrarian bet is the person who makes the alternative that goes hard down that path. It's not just like shorting all of their stocks.
No, no, no, no. Yeah. That's no shorting is not actually a contrarian thing. It's a, you have to bet on the thing that
actually wins where everyone's betting on a thing that ultimately loses so there's like a crazy opportunity for whoever is uh able to have clarity on that and maybe there isn't nothing turns out they're right yeah it could it could be right yeah it's just yeah it feels like it'd be really hard if you're like a founder type and you actually have the credentials to do this to like get people excited about i mean maybe not maybe there's people excited about everything but to be like we're gonna go a different direction
Forget the whole LLMs and what's the underlying thing, transformer architecture. We're going to do a totally different thing. I guess there probably are companies doing that and getting funded.
No, if someone had that and they had a compelling story around it, they would easily get funded. Yeah, that's true. Most VCs are not contrarian, but... There are still true contrarian VCs out there that make sure that they don't miss those things because that's their job.
It seems like a noble mission. It seems like somebody needs to be building the backup plan because it would just suck if this really did all kind of... It feels like there's no way to know if it's a dead end or not. It's just like you have to build these giant data centers. You have to stuff more and more GPUs and more and more training data into these things to figure out the limits.
right the thing that's unclear is ultimately all humans operate the same and we're a lot of us like we're all like pretty faith-based when it comes to a bunch of things and we do a good job of distorting ourselves so we can we could operate that way it's possible that
some of the people in charge if they sat down and looked at it really coldly they would not make this bet but the enticement of this actually working out is so large that it's overriding that analysis so it's possible sam altman is just like actually like doesn't fundamentally believe that scaling is all we need but he hopes
It is, and there's a small chance that it is, and there's a small chance that it is, and of course he's gonna do whatever he can to direct as many resources that the world has at it.
I think the worst case, I guess, as I think about it, the floor is still pretty good. This stuff is useful. It's just, is it useful enough to warrant the biggest investment in history in any one thing?
Did we already talk about how he said 01 Pro was not profitable? Yeah, you said that, I think, last episode, maybe. Yeah, so, I mean, that's the problem, though. It's like, this stuff is useful. But can it be sustained? Yeah, I saw a video of someone, like, stacking five Mac Minis to run Deep Seed. Mm-hmm. at, like, a really shitty, like, slow rate.
Like, a really, like, crappy, like, token per second rate. And I'm like, what the fuck? That's what it's... Every time I hit them, like, that's... Of course, they're using more optimized hardware, and, like, I'm sure some stuff is better, but... That like gave me a visual of like... It's a window into it.
Yeah.
Holy crap. Like I'm consuming the equivalent of five Mac minis, like 100% dedicated to just answering my question when I'm using this thing. So yeah, it's possible that it's just, you know, the optimizations just can't happen for it to get there.
Interesting times we live in. It really does feel like... I kind of feel lucky sometimes just to live in this timeline. I mean, I know some people hate this timeline, but it feels nice to get to see all this stuff unfold in our prime of our career. What are the odds? Or maybe it'll be crazier stuff that our kids get to witness, but I don't know. It feels pretty cool.
You think about how little the world changed.
Yeah, I was going to talk about it. It's like I always think about, wow, it's so crazy that I could have been born like in medieval times and like I wouldn't have seen any of this. But at the same time, there's a weird dynamic where there's more people on Earth than ever. So it was actually most likely that I would be born at this time.
Interesting. Yeah, that's a good point. Most people have been born at this time.
Yeah, it's actually really rare for you to have been born. In the medieval times.
So maybe, yeah, maybe not medieval times, but think like 150 years ago. Like the world didn't change a lot in your lifetime, right?
I mean, I think about... people like grandparent age currently. Uh, and it's like, or maybe even like a little bit older than them. Like people that were like, yeah, I guess older than that.
Cause they saw like electricity come into being like, that's pretty crazy to go from like candlelight to like, there is electricity.
You, you can just feel it just by looking at clothing. Okay. So imagine someone in the late 1800s. Okay. Like imagine like what they would be wearing and kind of like your imagery of them. And then realize that they probably died in like the seventies. And then imagine what the people are wearing in the seventies. Like how did one person witness all that experience both of those situations? Right.
Interesting. Yeah.
It's really mind blowing. And then of course the clothing implies like massive change across the board. Yeah.
Like to all parts of life, culture and life. I don't really notice that the clothing changes anymore. Do you? I don't pay attention enough. I'm probably so out of touch with my dress, how I, how I dress myself.
Well, I was complaining the other day that I really think that we're at like a low in terms of aesthetics across the board. And I don't think it's a subjective thing that I'm just like old and out of touch. I think it's, I think there are times in life where the sex society is in a better place aesthetically than other times where they're more lost. So I think we're in like a lost phase right now.
Everything's just kind of ugly.
Yeah, I don't know if I pay attention enough to the world. I thought you just meant like software and stuff.
It's not just clothing. It's like everything.
Yeah, I thought you just meant. Yeah, no, software too.
Just like everything. Hmm. Yeah. So we're in a low. And I think everyone feels this with like furniture interior design. Like we just haven't seen anything better than like the 60s, that mid-century modern stuff. As cliche and tired as it is, Like, you just look at any scene in Mad Men and you're like, oh, this is really good. This is really nice.
And we've tried other stuff, but most of it hasn't really been better.
It is interesting that, like, I have a ton of mid-century modern stuff. Like, where is the last... 60 years of furniture change. What is the new stuff?
Yeah. Like the Eames chair is still everywhere. Everyone wants, still wants the Eames chair as their centerpiece in their living room.
I mean, you can't, you can't walk around in a city like we were just in New York. I mean, I guess not just New York, but it was a few, a couple months ago, whatever. Just like seeing buildings with crazy architecture. Just like the ornate stuff on the facades. Oh, yeah. The older stuff. Yeah, just like... We wouldn't do that anymore, would we? Is that just like an old man yells at cloud thing?
I don't even understand.
Because you'll walk by a building and there's a random ass intricate carving on some corner of it. And you're just like, how did...
they allocate someone's time to bother doing that which is like doesn't make sense to me at all uh and i mean like new york is crazy like so the modern stuff in new york is also very crazy uh so it's gonna extreme to look at but like outside of extreme places like new york the modern stuff just feels like so lazy it just feels like we try to build like the easiest possible thing
Why is that? There's something there. There's some deep psychology to be unearthed or it's really simple. I don't know.
I think it's a mix of, I think there is like a real cultural thing.
Like we don't put enough value.
Yeah, we don't, we don't, we don't put enough value. And then also there's like a practical side of it. There's like, there's all these like zoning complexities, um, which I've learned about recently that, uh,
are why a lot of these buildings are are pretty ugly there's this whole thing about like buildings need two sets of stairwells now and that forces like all these constraints on what types of buildings people can build uh and the side effect of that is it's almost never the kind of stuff that you would want things are ugly can i bring up something else
It's completely unrelated. Twitter. There's a thing. There's one last relic of LinkedIn that lives on Twitter. And it is... Oh, what is it? It is... I'm a parent who just loves my children. And I love playing with them. If anything takes me away from my kids for an afternoon... F that I'd rather play with my kids. You know what? Shut up. Stop it. Because I'm a parent.
No, I'm glad you're bringing this up because I have felt, I've had like strong thoughts about this recently, but I'm like, I can't say anything.
Okay. Well, I have kids and I'll say this.
Yeah.
And I don't know what I've said about my kids on the podcast. I love my children. I honestly believe it's the greatest and the worst part of my life. It makes all the highs higher. I don't know if I've ever said this on a podcast. I'm sure I've said it to you in person or something. All the highs are higher. All the lows are lower. Life got way more intense since we had kids.
We've got a 10-year-old, so it's been a decade now. I love my kids. I would not say that like on a Saturday afternoon, my favorite thing to do is play with them. There are some times where I just miss playing with them. I haven't seen them. And I, I want to just, that's what I genuinely want to do.
But a lot of times I play with my kids because they need to be played with because they're bored or they're whatever. And like, it's an obligation at times and that's okay. It doesn't mean I don't love my kids, but to act like, yeah, I don't know. Like all I want to do in life is be a dad. maybe it's my bipolar speaking, but like, that's not the case.
No, no. I, I, I've, I have this different perspective on this where I don't have kids, but seeing people talk about this, I'm like, I'm actually, I want to make a commitment to never speaking about my kids in that way, because it sounds really positive, but In a lot of ways, you are saying that you're not doing a bunch of things because of your kids.
And you're kind of putting, you're like basically saying that you're kind of like, and this is an extreme way to put it, but I think it illustrates a point, which is you're blaming them effectively for you not doing a bunch of things. And the reality is, is there are people that always do both. There's always someone out there whose kids are like, my dad was great. He spent a ton of time with me.
And they also did all this other stuff that people are like, I don't do that stuff because I want to spend time with my children. So I just don't want to ever feel like, Of course, people don't phrase it in a way where it seems like they're using them as an excuse. But I don't think I'm 100% wrong to say there is some aspect of that. And I feel like I don't want to ever position them in that way.
There's definitely some kind of like, we all want to be good parents. We all want to be viewed as good parents and people who value our kids. I think our generation, too, like... I think there's some amount of, we were shaped by our parents, our boomer parents, who maybe didn't, they wouldn't have said these things if they had Twitter back then.
They wouldn't have been like, man, I just love to play with my kids. There's a bit of millennial identity that is, we love playing with our kids. And I don't know, I just, I don't want to like, I'm not trying to shame any individual who says that their favorite thing to do is play with their kids or that they hate activities that take them away from their kids. That's fine. Maybe you actually do.
But I do think there's a bit of like LinkedIn-ness to it where we all just want to be viewed as like amazing parents. And it's hard. Being parents is hard.
I think there's this natural dynamic of you say like it's a millennial identity thing. There is generally a culture that we want to be true. And then we will engage in rituals that reinforce that, whether it's fully true or not. So like this thing of saying like, all I want to do is spend time with my kids. It's because we want a world where we, You could just do that.
But everyone just says it over and over and reinforces it. And maybe they don't say that, hey, like you said, like you just said, sometimes I don't sometimes I want to go do a thing on my own, because even though that's true as totally fair and no one would be upset at that, it's not in service of this larger culture that I think we're trying to make happen.
Put that very smartly. Thank you for making that sound smart. You took what I said and you made it smart. I love it.
No, I'm just glad you... Like I said, I'm glad you said it because I feel like I felt this way and it felt really unfair for me to... Again, because I'm just not in that position.
I think you should just respond to tweets like that and be like, listen, from someone who doesn't have kids, shut up. I think it'll come through really hard if the fact that you don't have kids.
I think it's also, I mean, just you saying it is also just important because the downside of this thing where we like, you know, it's good to have this ideal and strive for it. But the downside of it is people take it too literally. And then they like find themselves in situations where they feel the way you do, where you're like, oh, sometimes I don't want to, you know, I want to do my own thing.
And they might feel bad about that or they're a bad person because everyone else around them is professing like some kind of purity around it.
And that's why I call it out, not to shame the people who say it, but to like push back on this feeling because I have the feeling when I see stuff like that, Just like the, I'm a dad. I can't believe I'm a dad. I'm the, it's the best. When I see those kinds of things and I have any bit of like, oh, but it's also like so hard. I feel bad about, am I just a bad dad?
And it doesn't help like being bipolar. And honestly, like, I wonder like, do I just not enjoy my kids as much as most people? Because I just want to be working because I'd rather be manic and at my desk all day with coffee. Like there's that fear. So I definitely have all these self-conscious, like bad feelings. And then I come back to it and it's like, no, you know what?
It's just, it's hard being a parent and we don't all feel that way. It's, it's like a ritual. Like you said, I, it feels like one of those things, like everything that's posted on LinkedIn. Like we just say it to get the claps and then yeah.
Yeah. The LinkedIn thing is funny. yeah yeah so i don't know it just for me i don't me personally like that identity is not the one that i am i'm going for it to me like that feels i have this thing about like i'm like and i guess it's entirely a personal thing i feel like when you say certain things it cheapens the reality of the actual thing. So I feel like, dang it, just a personal thing.
If I feel like I like really like love my kids and love spending time with them, It feels wrong for me to say that. It feels like it kind of cheapens the sentiment behind it. It feels like, okay, some part of it is just because I want other people to know.
Yeah.
Which is fine. Everyone, that's true. But actually saying it makes it too real.
If we all just constantly say how much we love Next.js, then when we actually do love Next.js and we have that feeling like, man, this is a good framework, it cheapens it because it's a ritual now. It doesn't sound real. So we have to actually be real.
Yeah. And this is the thing I have with the whole wife guy thing too.
Oh, what's the wife guy thing? Oh, no. I'm probably this guy.
No, no, no. I don't think you are. So there's this dynamic of publicly talking about how great your wife is and X, Y, Z. That's a trend that is a thing on social media. And I felt the same way about this where I'm like, I do feel that way. Like, I really do. But if I ever post it publicly for other people, to me, it feels like I'm, like, taking something away from how genuine that thing is.
And Liz feels the same way, too. She's like, don't be a wife guy, please. She, like, doesn't like that concept. And the funniest thing is a lot of times it tends to be kind of projection or, like, cover for... Things aren't actually as perfect as people are trying to make it seem. So it's definitely very similar to the whole kids thing. But it's reality of social media.
There's a lot of performative aspects of it.
It's unfortunate because I'd love to be super relatable and share all the actual difficult things in life. But that stuff doesn't really go on social media very far. So it's like you can't really help that many people. No, I think it does.
You think so? Okay, so I finally had my first ever like truly viral tweet. Oh, really? Wait, what? When? Did I miss it? Like it ended up in like newsletters, like Paul Graham replied.
What was it? When was this? How did I miss it?
It was the dumbest tweet ever. It was dumb. I would say if I would rank it on my tweets, it's like not particularly good.
Okay, not screenshot a potato. I'm still scrolling. No, no, no, no, no.
Here it's, uh, I wrote the only, the only career advice I have is make every decision that moves you closer to not having to be on LinkedIn. Okay. Yeah.
That's a good one. Uh, it has 95,000 likes. okay, what's that like? Does it even give you notifications? I always see those tweets and I wonder like, what's it like to get 95,000 likes?
I've muted everything. I've always mute things like very soon after they like go above like a couple hundred. Um, so I don't know what it would have been like, maybe Twitter just stopped sending notifications, but it was really crazy. Cause like all these like professional social media people were like including it in their newsletters. And like, you know, it was just like this funny dynamic, uh,
It was on some like random blog spam article being like top tweets this week. But the point I bring it up is why did this tweet do well? It's not particularly insightful. It's not particularly good.
I see where this is going.
But it is the most relatable tweet possible because everyone loves shitting on LinkedIn.
And we all know it's fake. It's that thing where we're doing it, but we know it's so fake. So there's something about that that we all just like, yes, thank you. I hate it. Yeah.
So I think the things that go the most viral are things that are contrarian in a shallow way where they're like counter to what's currently happening. But technically, that's a very common thing. Like everyone hates LinkedIn, but it's counter to like everyone is on LinkedIn trying to do LinkedIn thing.
So the thing you're describing, probably if you talked about this, it would probably do pretty well because I think a lot of people do feel the way you feel, but it is counter to what you're supposed to be doing.
Yeah, I got you. I just scrolled forever. You tweet so much. I was trying to find the tweet so I could like it. I want to join 95,000 people in liking your tweet.
Just open my... Page and private browsing.
Oh, because it shows you your top, like the public view of people's profiles, like their top tweets. Yeah. Oh, that's so funny to think about. Like, what are my dumb top tweets? And that's not a great view of me.
It's crazy because that one is 95,000 and number two is 9,000. Wow.
That's a big leap.
It's crazy.
10x.
Yeah.
Step function.
Really crazy.
Sorry. Step function, yeah. Order of magnitude. Order of magnitude. That's what I was like. No. That's one of those founder words, you know?
Nobody knows what that means. It just means 10x, I think.
Just add another zero.
That's funny. It's also funny because I tweet so much and I've been on Twitter for so long and it's taken me so many tries before I've gotten here. And there's people that do this. People that we know that do this very frequently. You know Vic? You mean like Popoff?
uh vick yeah i know vick me and vick go way back he pops off he has like he has so many of these i feel like every other week he's just going crazy viral for annie has a bunch of them i've seen a bunch of hers and yeah and then annie's like every single week she's got something going yeah i gotta pee so bad are we done should we just be done Okay, we can be done.
It's been an hour, hasn't it? Okay, yeah, we should just be done. I gotta pee.
All right, see you, man. The sounds you make when you gotta pee.
Oh my God. Okay.
All right, see you.
All right, bye.