AI for Business by Christian Olivo

AI Automation Business (Automate up to 80% of your business) | AI Generalist
Lovee Innovation, also in recent years communication

[Jordan Moorhead @Jordan_Moorhead]

The Austin area is about to explode with new companies moving to the area to serve SpaceX. That and the rest of Musk's companies are going to be jet fuel for growth in the area.

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

This applies to many niche skills. I didn’t learn astrophotography from school, I learned it by getting my hands dirty & spent every night learning how NOT to do it.

If you want to do something, just start doing it. Waiting for someone to teach you might leave you with nothing.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@AJamesMcCarthy Read books, talk to people & iterate rapidly with hardware & software

[Daniel @danielisdizzy]

Jensen Huang says that investing in the IPOs of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI will be like buying $AMZN, $GOOGL, or $META in their early stages.

Don't become a victim of FOMO.

IPO day is not where the best opportunities are made.

In many cases, there's a massive spike followed by a sharp decline that takes the stock below its IPO price.

Just look at $META.

After its 2012 IPO, the stock lost more than 50% of its value within three months.

The best opportunities come when the hype is gone, sentiment turns negative, and nobody wants to touch the stock.

That's when I'll be buying heavy.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Yes

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Chicago philosopher wrote one book in 1940 proving that 95% of the books you have read in your life, you didn't actually read, and Charlie Munger has been telling people to read it for 50 years.

His name was Mortimer Adler.

He spent 40 years at the University of Chicago, ran the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and built his entire career on one uncomfortable observation about the people around him.

Most adults who called themselves well-read had not actually read a book in the real sense even once. They had run their eyes over the pages, registered the words, formed a vague impression, and put it back on the shelf.

The book had passed through them without ever entering them.

In 1940 he wrote How to Read a Book. It has stayed in print for 86 years.

Charlie Munger recommends it. Naval Ravikant recommends it. Fareed Zakaria recommends it.

Every serious thinker who builds a career on absorbing information eventually finds their way to this book, and the reason is that Adler had isolated something nobody else was naming clearly.

There are four levels of reading. Almost everyone is stuck on the second one. The fourth level is so different from what most people call reading that you have probably never done it in your entire life.

Level one is elementary.

You learn it as a child. You decode the letters into words and the words into sentences. You finish the sentence and understand roughly what it said. This is reading the way a 7-year-old reads, and almost every adult on earth has stopped developing past this point in some quiet way.

Level two is inspectional.

This is skimming. You move through a book quickly to figure out what it is broadly about. You read the back cover, scan the table of contents, glance at a few paragraphs, and form an opinion. Most adults who claim to have read 50 books a year are actually doing this. They are inspecting books, not reading them. They walk away with a vague sense of the argument and almost none of the evidence that supports it.

Level three is analytical.

This is the level Adler said most people have never properly experienced. You take one book and you wrestle with it for as long as it takes. You identify the question the author is trying to answer. You map their argument from front to back. You write your disagreements in the margins. You force yourself to articulate, in your own words, what the author is claiming and why. The point is not to finish the book. The point is to argue with it as if the author were sitting across the table from you. Most people never do this once in their life, because it is exhausting and slow and feels nothing like the reading they were taught as children.

Level four is the one almost nobody knows exists. Adler called it syntopical reading. The word means "across topics," and the technique is something closer to running a small private research lab in your own head.

You pick a single question that actually matters to you. How does power corrupt people. Why do civilizations collapse. What makes a marriage last. How does a person change their own mind. Then you assemble five or ten or twenty books from different authors, different centuries, different traditions, all of them taking a swing at the same question.

You do not read any of them cover to cover. You move between them. You find the chapter in book three that addresses the same question as the chapter in book seven. You force those two authors to argue with each other inside your own head.

The book stops being the unit of reading. The question becomes the unit. And the authors become voices in a conversation you are now hosting.

This is the level where reading stops being consumption and starts being construction.

You are no longer absorbing what someone else thinks. You are building a position of your own out of the friction between people who disagreed.

Adler argued that this is the only level of reading where you stop being a passive receiver of other people's ideas and start being someone who can produce ideas of their own.

The reason Charlie Munger has been recommending this book for 50 years is that this is exactly how Munger has always thought. He calls it building a latticework of mental models. The technique he is describing is just syntopical reading applied for a lifetime.

You take the strongest insight from psychology, the strongest insight from biology, the strongest insight from economics, and you stack them against the same problem until something new falls out the bottom.

The reason most people never reach level four is not that it is intellectually difficult. It is that it is logistically uncomfortable. It requires you to keep multiple books open at once.

It requires you to take notes that nobody is going to grade. It requires you to abandon the goal of finishing books and replace it with the goal of answering questions.

This is also why AI just changed everything Adler was teaching.

NotebookLM, Claude, and tools like them let you do syntopical reading at a speed that would have looked like magic to a Chicago philosopher in 1940.

You upload 10 books on the same question. You ask the AI to surface every place those authors agree and every place they contradict each other.

The technique Adler said almost nobody on earth had reached can now be run on a Sunday afternoon by anyone with a laptop and one good question.

The technique was always the unlock. The bottleneck used to be time. The bottleneck is now curiosity.

Most people will keep reading the way they always have. A book at a time. Eyes over the pages. No question driving it. No other authors in the room. Adler called that level two for a reason.

You are not behind on your reading list.

You are behind on the level you are reading at.

[Business Nerd @Business_Nerd_]

The most successful people aren't the most goal-driven. They're the ones who fell in love with the process: the research, the practice, the boring hours everyone else skips.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Reminder for those of you trying to master building with AI:

Gauntlet AI does 100% free weekly virtual classes

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Pretty good progress

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Marcus Aurelius wrote this over 1800 years ago:

“Until death, all defeat is psychological.”

[ApoStructura @ApoStructura]

I love that SpaceX is becoming the classic tech megacorp from sci fi.

The only thing missing is a badass hq tower

[Vivek Sen @Vivek4real_]

LARRY ELLISON: AI IS RAPIDLY COMMODITIZING BECAUSE MOST MODELS ARE TRAINED ON THE SAME PUBLIC INTERNET DATA.

THE REAL COMPETITIVE EDGE ISN’T THE MODEL ANYMORE — IT’S ACCESS TO EXCLUSIVE, PROPRIETARY DATASETS.

THAT MAY BE THE ONLY MOAT LEFT.

[AI for Business by Christian Olivo @COE557]

@Laclynnkim ai

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Jensen Huang on why he rarely fires people and will instead “torture them into greatness”

Jensen once told Stripe founder Patrick Collison that he didn’t like firing people and seldomly did it. When asked to elaborate on this, Jensen responds:

“I’d rather improve you than give up on you. When you fire somebody, a lot of people will say ‘it wasn’t your fault,’ or ‘I made the wrong choice.’ But I used to clean bathrooms and now I’m the CEO of a company. I think you can learn it. There are a lot of things in life that I think you can learn and you just have to be given the opportunity to learn it… I don’t like giving up on people because I think they can improve.”

He continues:

“It’s kind of tongue in cheek, but people know I’d rather torture them into greatness. I’d rather torture you into greatness because I believe in you. And I think that coaches that really believe in their team torture them into greatness. Oftentimes they’re so close. Greatness will sometimes come in one day with an ‘I got it!’ — that feeling that you didn’t get it yesterday and all of a sudden one day something clicks. Could you imagine giving up that moment right before you got it? I don’t want you to give up on that, so I’ll just keep torturing you.”

Source: @stripe (May 2024)

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure AI: "we're working until midnight every night... we are here every weekend.

By end of 2026, we'll be able to put a robot into home and be able to do fairly long horizon work."

[Big Brain Business @BigBrainBizness]

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains how a simple pen-and-paper habit on weekends helped him take charge of every week:

The habit came from his late coach, Bill Campbell, the legendary executive coach featured in the book Trillion Dollar Coach.

"He really saved me from you know utter destitution and helped me become a proper CEO," Schmidt explains.

The rule is deceptively simple:

Work as hard as you can during the week, then deliberately carve out quiet thinking time on the weekend.

Schmidt describes it like this:

"You work really hard during the week as hard as you can you know 12 hours 14 hour days whatever and on the weekends when you're at home or with your family or whatever carve out a few hours to think... and write down your assessment of what you did last week and then what you need to do next week to address the things you forgot to do last week."

The mechanism that makes it work is the writing itself.

Putting pen to paper turns passive reflection into an active audit of the week behind you and a deliberate plan for the week ahead.

@ericschmidt acknowledges how basic it sounds, but insists that's the point:

"I know that that sounds kind of obvious, but it's a good trick cuz it forces you to take charge of your next week."

He gives concrete examples of what surfaces during these sessions:

"Like, oh, I forgot that I have a sales problem over there, or I forgot I was supposed to call this person. Oh, I didn't have this proposal and I had this idea, but I didn't get to it."

Leadership isn't sustained by working harder inside the week. A few quiet hours and an honest review of what you missed are often what separates reactive operators from CEOs in command of their priorities.

[sourcery @sourceryy]

.@ashleevance says @elonmusk "has no time zone."

"We were at Neuralink filming something for a movie I'm making and were there until 1AM. Then he went straight from there back to xAI."

"Then I had a friend who met with him at 4AM."

"He lives life constantly like that."

[Ayush Jaiswal @ayushjaiswal]

@pratishhhhh It’s not about questions. He just an asks story of your life & what’s the hardest problem you’ve solved. The conversation is the interview, not the questions.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Matthew McConaughey straight up defended ego on Theo Von's podcast and honestly kinda blew my mind.

He said ego gets trashed too much. There's the toxic "look at me" version, sure. But the real one? That inner "I" where you know you're prepared, capable, and willing to go for it. The confidence that comes from judging yourself harder than anyone else. Without that, you got no real identity or direction.

This hit me. I spent years thinking killing the ego was the move. Now I'm rethinking it. That healthy drive feels necessary.

We've gone from arrogant show-offs to everyone acting fake-humble. A balanced ego might be what actually keeps you grounded and moving forward.

Do you see ego as mostly toxic, or can the healthy version actually push you to be better?