Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky: “The US is not that competitive. Europe is even less competitive.” “China is competitive.” “China is 9/9/6. Even if you are good in Europe, or in the US, how can you out-compete the people who work 9:00 to 9:00, six days a week?” “I started in a co-working space with 140 companies. Within 5 years, only 3 companies survived. They all worked on the weekends.” “Within 10 years, only 2 companies survived out of 140.” “Working weekends is a must if you want to survive. Purely statistically.”

I love this idea from @dhh: All the best ideas that actually turn out to have an impact sound stupid at first. “You've got to have a high tolerance for people telling you: -What you're building is stupid. -What you're building is ugly. -What you're building is never going to work. When I get that feedback, I know I'm onto something. I’ve found that’s often true about products. You enter some domain and you think: "Who's the best? Can I just copy them?I'll do a slight tweak." That's not gonna work. All the best ideas that actually turn out to have an impact sound stupid at first. They're not intuitive. That's where all the value has been locked up. It's locked up in this misconception about what people actually want, because most people don't know what they want.”

"Capitalism created the possibility of the win win win. It used to be a zero sum game where somebody won, somebody else lost. The biggest mistake people make they still think we're in a zero sum world. They're obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that @JeffBezos and @elonmusk somehow stole the money from the people. They don't understand that it's this prosperity machine that's creating more, not just for those billionaires, but for everything that they're touching. They're creating value for their customers, they're creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing, their investors are seeing their capital go up. It can be reinvested and compound. All philanthropy ultimately comes from business. That's where the profits are. Where does all the taxes come from? It ultimately comes from business as well. This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. Somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world." — @iamjohnmackey

Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5. I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38. He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters. His work has benefited millions of people all across the world. Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations. 0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders. 55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.

Meta built the first prototype of Muse in just 2 weeks. It started with @natfriedman going “all in” on OpenClaw. “He had an experience I would describe as somewhere between terrifying and euphoric.” “He told his OpenClaw that he wanted to drink more water, and then his OpenClaw would watch him in security footage to make sure that he was drinking water and tell him good job.” @alexandr_wang says he wrote a memo about how this was likely going to become the “final consumer product.” “Many of the decisions that made its way into the final Muse product were present in the first prototype.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s core philosophy comes down to 2 ideas: 1. Failure doesn’t matter. What matters is when you win—how big you win. 2. In a world that's changing all the time, the biggest risk is not taking any. @alexandr_wang says it’s why Zuckerberg is able to “operate without fear” and why Meta doesn’t look more like Google: “There's certainly versions of the world where Meta looks a lot more like Google in some sense... more slow-moving and more bureaucratic.”

@TaylorLorenz Overnight success takes ten years. Also, @davidsenra is just a very pleasant and interesting person who actually cares about tech, entrepreneurship, and success without needing some angle to take it down. Great combo! I enjoyed myself greatly doing my episode.

“The world has been shaped by the small number of fanatics who have found a way to make their wants real, but we've never seen humanity with every single person's agency fully switched on.” @alexandr_wang on what the world is going to look like when AI agents proliferate to the masses: “I think that world looks crazy in a very good way.” “It'll be kind of insane to think about what exactly that looks like where literally billions of people have, all of a sudden because of abundant intelligence, the resources to make incredible things happen.” “In my head it's almost like the Rick and Morty interdimensional cable, but somehow manifested into reality for humans.”

Lessons from @elonmusk and Mark Zuckerberg and Napoleon: “Elon has demonstrated that if you have a small, incredibly cracked, highly technical team, that's very flat, you can accomplish a lot very quickly.” “Mark has internalized that failure doesn't matter. It just matters when you win, how big you win.” “That concept enables Mark to operate without fear because he’s just very comfortable taking lots of risk.” “Mark has this great quote that says: The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that's changing the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” “In the book The Mind of Napoleon, Napoleon repeats that hesitation is fatal. Napoleon says before you engage in a course of action you should deliberate thoroughly. He'd study from every angle to make sure he's making the right decision. But once he’s sure he’s on the right path, he goes all in. I feel there's an echo with the way Mark operates. Once Mark knows what he wants to do, he empties the clip.”

alexandr wang spent his 19th birthday as an MIT freshman on a winter internship at hudson river trading. around the table: jeff yan, who went on to start hyperliquid (~$20B) scott wu, who went on to start cognition ($48B) jesse zhang, who went on to start decagon ($4.5B) and wang, who started scale AI, got $14.3B from meta for 49% of it, and now runs meta's superintelligence lab. when HRT's founder told him they were starting to do private investments: "just invest into the interns. all the interns get seed checks." another wonderful episode from David Senra.

Meta built Muse with just 200 people. “The whole executive team, everyone knew that this was probably going to be one of the most important products that Meta would ship this year.” “But we had the restraint organizationally to make sure it was a really small focused team working on it... because we knew it was a single work of art.” “This is even now starting to plague a lot of the AI labs. They become this Frankenstein, almost Cronenberg amalgamation of a bunch of different people's points of view.” “It's sort of like PM hell, where every PM has a thing that they're trying to jam into the product.” “Muse had to be the exact opposite. There's one clear point of view.” — @alexandr_wang

.@alexandr_wang explains why he’s been posting memes nonstop on X since Meta launched Muse: “It felt important that we figured out a way to make Muse break through.” “Most people are constantly being bombarded with new AI products and startups and releases and things and models.” “Obviously at Meta, we have lots of distribution... but that's not enough to make it break through in an interesting cultural or fascinating way.” “The internet rewards risk, and it rewards surprise and things that people don't expect.” “For what it's worth, literally every one of those tweets I write.” “It was really hard for me to pay attention in meetings because I would just think of a meme, and I'd be like, ‘Oh God, I have to get this out.’” “I actually think it genuinely made an impact on growth, which is kind of hilarious.” “Meta was not cool for a while. We wanted to make Meta cool and interesting and kind of funny. And then the unhinged-ness was something that happened naturally over time.”

My conversation with @alexandr_wang, chief AI officer of Meta. 0:00 The vision behind Muse 1:32 Discovering the potential of personal AI agents 3:34 Three years of therapy in one AI session 5:46 Building Muse in 7 months 9:16 Why Meta bet on personal AI 16:51 Mark Zuckerberg's obsession with improving products 20:15 How Meta knew Muse was ready to launch 23:32 Why great products need a single point of view 25:56 Making Meta cool again with memes 34:38 Building trust with AI agents 38:43 The future of human ambition 45:22 The call from Mark Zuckerberg that changed everything 52:13 Leaving Scale AI for Meta 55:19 Rebuilding Meta's AI lab from scratch 58:13 From founder to coach 1:05:55 The future billionaires at Alexandr's 19th birthday party 1:08:04 Diamond mining vs. building skyscrapers 1:09:21 Why Alexandr has more than 200 direct reports Includes paid partnerships.

One of my favorite ideas I learned from making the podcast: Steve Jobs fired two members of his board because they never disagreed with him: He said: “If they don't disagree with me then they aren't bringing any value to the company.” Steve understood that there is no upside in being wrong.