AVOID APPLE

“Yeah, that's a watered down version of what I really wanted to say, which is that pure software is uninvestable. I would just full stop right there. If your whole advantage is like, hey, I'm building cool software that other people don't know how to build, I think that's uninvestable. And it's uninvestable for two reasons. One is they can just hack it together today, and the second is the coding agents are getting better so quickly that within a year or even less, they'll probably be building scalable software with good architecture.”

“AI's approval rating is 26%, which is lower than ICE's or just about any other unpopular institution you can think of. People hate this stuff. And the the tech CEOs have realized that they are very, very hated. And so now you're you're seeing some of them be like, yo. Wait a minute. No. No. Like, we're we'll do something good for lots of people that that aren't just us.”

“I think the thing that has made me the most sad, Kevin, has been the darkening of the culture in Silicon Valley where a lot of folks who, I think could have been talked into UBI type proposals, or, hey, let's try and keep the machinery going. They have given up. They're just like, fuck it. I've got my bunker. You know, like, I'm just projecting forward. Like, I have seen that degree of fatalism from many, many more folks in the valley than I would have imagined.”

“If you go talk to anybody who worked at Forward and say, what was the one thing Adrian tried to teach us at all times? It was actually that the problem is more important than the solution. This is really weird, right? If I come to you and I'm like, hey, Auren, I'm working on a new company, you're immediately like, what is it, right? It's like drones for fighting wildfires, right? It's like, sure, but actually, that means I'm attaching myself to a solution. And for all I know, in two weeks, I'm going to wake up and realize drones weren't the smart thing, lasers were smarter, right?”

“I remember when the Apple Watch came out, there was this moment of, like, oh, Apple's cooked. Like, they can no longer innovate. This thing is obviously not going to work. This is just a gadget for luxury users, and this is not going to sort of be useful enough for many people to shell out for. And then I think Tim Cook, to his credit, saw that health was taking off. The people wanted to track their steps. They wanted to know if their blood oxygen levels were changing or if their heartbeat was irregular.”

“Chinese robot beats human best time in half marathon after a stumble. A five foot five humanoid called Lightning Short King, developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor, has beat the human world record time for a half marathon. But just before completing the race, there was some drama. Lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed. The robot managed to get back on its feet and ran across the finish line in fifty minutes and twenty six seconds.”

“We should also talk about the fact that under Tim Cook's tenure, Apple has become what I would consider an AI laggard. Right? They are not a frontier AI model company. Their own AI efforts under the banner of Apple Intelligence have been sort of delayed over and over again. They have not managed to give Siri the sort of brain transplant that they have been teasing now for years. And I think it is fair to say that they are behind when it comes to AI and all AI related things.”

“So the Titan project was Apple's $10,000,000,000 effort to build a self driving car, which I think was instinctively something that, honestly, a lot of people really wanted. Right? Like, when I heard that Apple was building a car, like, I definitely wanted to see it. I definitely wanted to test drive it. I definitely wanted to see if songs of innocence would autoplay when I turned the key in the ignition, but they canceled the project in 2024.”

“So I actually built my own little app store, which is an app store just for me. I can ask it for an app, it can deliver that app to my app store, which is a web page, and eventually I made it into an app itself that lives on my iPhone. And then I can download those apps with one click, and I can get upgrades like you do with the app store. So if I want a new app, for example, that tracks my workouts, and I have this, I built a custom tracking app for just my workouts exactly the way I like it.”

“That was yeah. That happened three years into his tenure, and, that rascal Bono convinced him to put songs of innocence into the hands of something like 500,000,000 people. What's your favorite song off songs of innocence, by the way? I have like, that album has started auto playing in my car so many times over the years.”

“I think Apple giving up an AI will go down as the biggest strategic mistake in the tech industry of this decade, and it's the beginning of the end of Apple's dominance. These companies can exist for a long time and make lots of money, like Microsoft is more valuable than it's ever been. But Microsoft Windows has kind of lost the battle, because they missed the mobile phone wave. They stuck to Windows OS, and they didn't upgrade to a touchscreen-based native OS designed for phones from the ground up.”

“Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training data. This tool, which is called model capability initiative, will run on work related apps and websites on US based employees' computers and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees' screens. This is part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.”

“The other thing is, within the app that I'm building, I have a bug reporting infrastructure, where someone sees a bug, they tap on a button, the bug sends the logs up and the bug files into a server, and then I have Claude go every 24 hours through all the bug reports, and it just fixes them all by itself without my having to intervene, and it puts all the fixes into side branches for me to review. Because in a sense, the agents can do perfect customer service. If your customer service was perfect, your customer service person would also be an incredible coder and would be indefatigable.”

“I think we have some miracle drugs. Like I think GLP-1s are as close as we've seen in our lifetime to pretty much miracle drugs. Typically, the only downsides, the only kind of side effects that happen in any real amount of prevalence right now are kind of, think of it as like habituation issues where you're adjusting to it as you first get on it. So it's a lot of GI issues, nausea, etc.”

“And by the way, I do this all the time. I'll stop the model and I'll say, no, that's a hack, that's a patch. Go fix it at an architectural level. And what's funny is the model will always say, oh, I'm sorry, you're right, that was a hack. Even if that wasn't a hack, the model will say, you're right, that was a hack. So the model is always trying to please you, and it doesn't know any better. In that sense, it's a little bit like a dog. It's better than you at catching that duck, if you're duck hunting with a dog. But it's still a dog. So if you point it at a bird, you know, that's not a duck, it might take that bird down instead.”

“We should try and find ways to get off of taxing human labor. We're going to be trying to encourage job type arrangements in every quarter. And right now, income tax is a discouraging factor on both the employer and the worker. So tax AI, tax the bots, don't tax humans. And the way I would do a universal basic income, if any of them come to me and, you know, is, I would do some amount like $1,200 a month, for every American and just start paying it out as as quickly as you can.”

“I started a healthcare company and got a roughly half billion dollar lesson in the incentives and economics of healthcare, aka I lost about $475 million learning this lesson. And mostly the lesson is that doing the right thing for people is not actually what makes you money in healthcare, and that's really, really terrible. And I don't think that's changed fundamentally. I do think there's an opportunity for that to change because of AI.”

“I think the flu shot's roughly ridiculous. I think that this is another example of us spending god knows how many billions of dollars or tens of billions of dollars in this country and getting everybody to go take an action, drive across town, go get this shot, blah, blah, blah. And it turns out the amount of lives that we save every year from the flu shot, even as estimated by the CDC as last I checked, it was like single digit thousands. If you want to get all of America to drive across town and go see a medical professional, can we please talk about their cholesterol?”

“I think that kids will become a resource that we can dial up or down, because I think that we're going to basically have artificial wombs sooner rather than later, and we'll be able to make it happen. What's fascinating is that number is coming down one or two weeks every one or two years. So I don't presume that the problem is linear. If I had to guess, like 20 years from now, we'll be able to just kind of turn on the microwave and pop out a kid.”

“I was in a long-term relationship about 10 years, about halfway through the relationship. We started to talk about, maybe we should think about having kids. But her and I, we hadn't figured everything out in the relationship yet. We still had some issues, we weren't sure. So we said, let's go ahead and wait on that. In the end, we didn't iron out all of our issues, and we didn't have kids. So we're not together. What that's done is that's actually just caused, for me, a delay in life and having kids. What I realized is I would have played that differently if I had done it again, which is I just would have had kids anyway.”

“Let's say you're in one bucket, for the same price you could cure all of cancer, or you could get internet to the next billion people. Like, which would you rather do? Turns out, actually the one that's more impactful, as crazy as it sounds, is getting internet to a billion people is more impactful than cancer.”

“And that's actually how I view my job. My job is not to pick the winners. My job is to remove the ones that are obviously losers. It's much easier to see the dispositive. It's very obvious when somebody isn't a founder.”

“There's really only two things that keep me going to my iPhone today and not switching to someone else. The hardware is actually kind of a commodity. Like Samsung's got pretty good hardware. Well, first is just the app ecosystem. It's the millions of apps that are really good quality and kind of the default is on the iPhone. But again, AI can replace that one. And then the second thing is messaging. It's iMessage and FaceTime. And so I think that the iPhone franchise is actually under far more threat than I think most people think it is.”

“So around December of 2025, the coding agents in AI hit an inflection point with the release of Claude Opus 4.5, and people started using it and were like, wow, this is an agent that stays on track, can build apps soup to nuts, can solve thorny problems, and really feels like having a junior programmer at your disposal who's fast, essentially free, and ready to please. That was an inflection point, and I was reading all the hype on Twitter, but this time it felt real. And I've tried the coding agents in the past with some mixed results, but this time I really got into it. And I haven't seriously coded in decades.”

“Claude has really good visual presentation to the system called Artifacts. And Claude is very good at talking to me at the level that I'm at. Chat GPT is still the OG. It's sort of very good all around. Gemini is very good at search because it has the Google crawl underneath. And then Grok is the one I can count on to tell me the truth. It's like the least neutered, least nerfed. It's got access to X, so it's very good at news. And it's very good at technical problems.”

“One of the data sets that I've looked at is what happens to people as they become an expert in an industry and it turns out they become much worse angel investors in that sector. It's like, I've done a lot of healthcare. I'm probably a worse angel investor in healthcare. Why? Because now I just see all the problems, right? It's like, I don't have it. Whereas whatever, some random person off the streets, like, I didn't even know that. I didn't even know the FDA would say no to that. I'm just gonna give it a shot.”

“Tim Cook, presented Trump with a golden glass statue in August 2025 while he was seeking tariff relief in what just appeared to be an obvious bribe right out in the open. By the way, he did get that tariff relief, so it worked. Tim Cook also attended the VIP screening of Melania, which, again, when I said this man would do anything for his company, I think that is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.”

“They signed a three year lease for a store. They put a $100,000 in a bank account, and they handed a debit card to Luna, which is powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6, and just told them, hey. Turn a profit. So there are a few things that have gone awry, Kevin. One of them, they made a bunch of strange inventory choices, including ordering a thousand toilet seat covers for the employee bathroom, then listed them as merchandise, which you and I would never do if we were running a convenience store.”

“And it's very addictive because like in a video game, the way a video game is designed is that it keeps you hooked by giving you feedback and rewards for doing work. And it's always at the edge of your capability. So as you get better, the video game gets harder. It's not so hard that it's frustrating, but it's not so easy that it's boring. So you're always operating at the edge of your capability with the video game and getting these rewards. But those rewards are fake. And the video game is bounded, it's created by other humans. It's sort of a fake little world. And deep down, you kind of know that. So you're just figuring out the rules of the game. Except with Vibe Coding, it's unbounded, because now you've got a touring machine running underneath, you can build anything.”