Dario Goes From SNL to White House, Some Personal Agent News, Mongo Got Zucked | Lo Toney, Zack London, Anish Acharya, Evan Conrad, Gstaad Guy

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It's been too long.

Get down. It has been too long. Just a couple more sleeps, but good to have everyone here with us in the chat. Anyway, the most viral video I saw over the weekend was the parody of Dario Amadei on SNL. That felt like it really took over the timeline. Martin Casado said, honestly downplayed how ridiculous the rhetoric and broader situation is. It was a funny clip. There were a bunch of interesting nuance. I mean, first it's like, okay, clearly the AI rhetoric in the public discourse is getting to like a new height to the point where like a lab leader of a private company can even be parodied on SNL because the audience understands who that is.

Yeah.

So it's interesting to see that like, okay, yes, like Dario's done enough on Oprah and CNN and NBC and ABC and all the major news networks to be relevant to the broader audience. And because it only really works, like, you can't— like, they could never pair— there's a lot of people in tech that we know that wouldn't work as, you know, SNL punching bags. But he's made it.

He's made it.

It says a lot that the, like, the sweater vest thing is iconic enough to be, like, a part of a character.

I wonder if he'll stick with that or switch it up. Because it's not his leather jacket yet. It's not his Hawaiian t-shirt yet, but there is such value into leaning into a consistent thing. But I don't know. We'll see. The interesting wrinkle here is that while Dario is at the point where he is enough of a name that they can do this bit and make jokes, and it's relevant to the SNL audience, obviously, it went way more viral on X than I I think it probably did on YouTube. But when Michael Che is introducing the segment, he sort of stumbles over Dario's name a little bit. Like he's reading it from the cue cards and he says like, and this is Dario, and then he pauses. And it seems like maybe Dario Amadei is not fully a household name in the SNL writers' room yet, in the sense that they were like, okay, who is this guy? Let's look him up. Okay, get him on the cue cards. I don't know, maybe I'm reading into it too much, but it felt like this was certainly like a crossing the chasm moment, like the first time everyone gets to know Dario. But very, very funny, and it really illuminates a little bit of like the complexity of the discourse, the irony of saying, you know, somebody's got to save me from me, basically. But let's play a little bit of it, see what you think.

You know, thanks for having me, Michael. I may have been alarming in my recent interviews, but I want to assure you that if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails We will be able to stop me.

Dario, can you just explain how your company isn't going to kill us?

So, so, so, so, so, so.

Not the most flattering depiction.

That's a really hard question.

It shouldn't be.

So, you know, come on, Dario.

Come on, Dario. You can do this. Is that an explicit reference to like the ring? Like Gollum, like where the voice is in your head?

I mean.

AI is the devil and I its maker.

What?

It seems like it, right?

No, well, so look, AI is the devil and I its maker. So poetically written.

We talked about this extensively and we are all on the same page here. We do not condone what we are doing.

Shouldn't you talk about the good things? It's very, very tough to thread the needle on this messaging.

Yeah, so put it this way. In 10 years, there is about a 10% chance that cancer won't be a problem for anyone.

For anyone. I don't like the way you're saying that.

I mean, how is this a good thing?

Look, um, so, Jay, it's simple. If you could drink a milk that made your life easier, but there was a 10% chance it killed you, would you drink the milk?

No.

Really?

Yes.

Well, what if there was a button that when you push it, everyone dies? Would you push the button?

No.

Really?

Dario, are you okay?

I'm sort of blacking out every time I talk. Um, I'd love to start this interview over, or better yet, uh, you know, my whole life.

All right, Dario, just tell us, what are the pros of AI?

All right, land the plane, Dario.

I can't.

You can.

We can hear you, Dario.

No one can hear you, Dario. Say something reassuring.

Like what?

Try the milkshake.

Is milk a reference to something, or is that just random?

It's just funny.

It's funny. A tool for building weapons, and I urge you to urge me to stop.

Dario Hamadeh, everybody. Ridiculous. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. No, but yeah, a bunch of downstream stuff from this. I mean, obviously getting pilloried by SNL—not the first time it's happened to a tech.

Right, right of passage. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

They've done this for all sorts of people. Also, there's a number of techniques that have been used as well.

I think part of what— yeah. Going pretty hard on him in some ways. That being said, he's always incredibly fascinating to listen to, and he has incredible clarity of thought. And he does at times, he'll pause in a way that would maybe scare normal people a little bit. But the thing that I think he can do that will have the biggest impact is to stop— Put on a suit. I agree. No, I actually like the— I like the whatever kind of shawl sweater thing that is.

Isn't it Brunello?

Probably. Yeah.

I think someone clocked it, right? It's Brunello. So, you know, it's nice. It's high luxury. And I feel like a power tie, some shoulder padding would go a long way. Anyway.

The biggest thing he can do is to stop smiling when he's talking about really bad, devastating things.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm sure that that's something.

Yeah, there's something to be learned from like the way like Fed chairmen speak or the way, you know, the head of the FDA or the head of the military speaks. Like, we've talked to some of these folks and like they're very austere, very serious. And our show is very lighthearted and we kind of have to like click into a different mode when you're talking to somebody like, like a Michael Kratsios or someone who's like dealing with the weight of something big. And puts up a wall that is— it is a performance, but it serves a very valuable purpose, which is like, I take this very seriously. Or you can go the opposite way, the Mark Zuckerberg way, and rip it and just be like, yeah, I'm having fun with AI, which is honestly like— it feels like people are like, yeah, I kind of want that energy a little bit. Just give me the white pill. But I don't know.

Yeah. And again, I don't think that Zuck's approach is at all appealing to the people actually pushing the frontier.

No.

Right? No. Um, like, no, no one's gonna— yeah, no one's gonna take— no, no one— no researchers like take— Uh, I mean, there are, there are some researchers dating, dating back to basically Demis being like, you know, that moment where he realizes Zuck is just as excited about VR as he is AI. Right. Um, anyways, um, I hope that—

Maybe VR will be bigger than AI, Jordi. Maybe.

Wouldn't you like that?

I would love that.

Wouldn't you like that, Jon?

I would love that. But yeah, I mean, nevertheless—

Anyway, so from SNL headed straight into dinner with the president.

Yeah, Sunday.

I mean, he wasn't actually at SNL. But yeah, it's like you wake up to that on Sunday morning. And you have to imagine that Trump sees it. But Trump has been both— he's hosted He's hosted SNL multiple times, and he's also been made fun of on SNL for years. Like, when he gets elected, they basically hire an actor to come and be him for 4 years for the entire tenure because they're gonna be doing the cold open with him like basically every other week. And so maybe there's a little bit of camaraderie. They're like, hey, we've both been through this, Dario. It's not so bad. It's actually kind of funny. Or maybe they're both like, yeah, the news really is fake. Like, we gotta—

But yeah, as critical as it is, at the same time, I think it's something that all founders should aspire to, right? When you're starting your company and investors say, well, where do you see yourself in the company? And— Getting absolutely skewered on the biggest stage. Perhaps, perhaps. Andrew Curran says President Trump has personally invited Dario to a private dinner tonight. That was yesterday.

So that happened on Sunday night.

This will be the first time they've actually met one-on-one. Big chance to patch things up or crash the plane into the mountain.

They're actually running it back tomorrow night. Tuesday night, there's a dinner in DC for all the AI leaders with the White House again. So, I mean, the pace of this stuff is really, really, really picking up. There's meetings every week now, basically. And yeah, I mean, there's lots to work through. And no one is going to get to put their head in the sand, not even the comedians at SNL. They will have to chime in, as well as the politicians and the lab leaders. And so, yeah, despite Dario being excluded from— it seemed like he was excluded from that White House dinner with Xi Jinping. And that basically every top tech leader was invited to. He was noticeably absent. President Trump, you know, followed up with a one-on-one dinner with Dario to hear his side of the story. And I wonder what type of leaks or reporting will come out of that. You would think that that would be going on today. Maybe there will be some news or maybe they'll put out a joint statement. Maybe everything went really well. But I mean, both joint—

You could see Dario sign up for Truth Social. Sure.

Or UFC courtside or ringside. Ringside. Ringside would be pretty electric. UFC.

Yeah. With, with the Don.

Yeah, I could see it. Nitro Circus. Yeah. Doing the Nitro Circus thing before UFC.

I want to see Dana White, Dario. Yeah. Trump. Yeah. Just squatted up.

You think he'd be doing slapboxing before too?

Oh yeah, for sure.

You got to do the full suite if you, if you go all in. Uh, anyway. So, there's also interesting timing that I don't know if this— how timed up this was, but every day there's another proposal for how to manage AI safety. This one feels like the most formal concepting exercise from a group of top AI researchers. It's published through the University of Cambridge, and it's a good list that pulls from all over the industry. It doesn't feel like there's any lab that has a finger on the scale. Not that that really matters. I feel like if Demis comes out with some great thing and Anthropic and OpenAI sign on and there's a lot of energy, people will just be like, this is great, we should take it seriously. But this one was interesting because it was notably diverse in the researchers. I didn't even know that there were this many researchers that didn't work at labs by now. But there in fact are a lot that signed on. So Geoffrey Hinton, also a Nobel laureate, but Turing Award winner alongside Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Barto, industry leaders from OpenAI, Jacob, the chief scientist from Microsoft, Eric Horvitz, the chief scientific officer, and Jack Clark from Anthropic. So this, you know, Sam was talking to— it wasn't Axios, he was interviewed and he was saying that maybe we're going to sit down and get beers, basically. You remember this whole thing? Why don't you guys just sit down and have some beers? That was the proposal. And he was like, I don't want to leak anything that's going to happen, but we are thinking about thinking about it. And he's like, you can't just—

Our personal agents are talking about getting together for a beer.

Yeah. But it was very funny framing. But this is like the start of that, a start of more collaboration between the labs, between the academic community. And what's interesting is like, they go a little bit further. Tyler over there, his criticism has been like, everyone comes out with an AI safety proposal and it's basically always like, we gotta talk about it. And this is a little bit more concrete. So, the first one is they want to set in place the ability to monitor the level of AI-enabled R&D at labs. So, what percentage of the code, what percentage of the dollars, what percent, like, give us a give us firm metrics on how much of the AI R&D is being done by artificial intelligence. Anthropic, OpenAI, they've all sort of like mentioned this in blog posts that it's happening. But there's also this like vague jockeying because it's better to be further along on the RSI curve for financial reasons. So there's not really an apples to— like no one really feels like they have a strong handle on like whether there's more RSI going on at OpenAI or Anthropic. Like, it feels like they both have very different metrics. Like, OpenAI says, like, we have an intern level. And then Anthropic will say, like, we had Claude spin up 1,000 ideas. And, like, you can't really apples to apples those. The proposal's like, let's get some metrics in place so we can actually monitor this thing. Then they also have Again, it's sort of like we need to talk about it, but they want the government to create firm plans for responses to potential theoretical bad scenarios. So, like, if there's a big cyber attack and an agent goes rogue and brings down the internet and hacks into a bunch of stuff, like, what will the government do? What's the equivalent of, like, FEMA? Like, we have a response for, like, there's a big hurricane hits town, you bring in people. There's food, there's shelter, there's like a plan. And we don't really have that for like the internet went down because like an agent took it down. Same thing for biosecurity. They have a couple others, even like economic dislocation, that type of thing. So, they want the government— they're not proposing the solutions to those yet, but they're saying like the government— this is where the government should be prepared. So.

Thank you. I don't know.

It's a good read. They have an executive summary you can read, and then the full paper is pretty digestible. It's not—

Did you see that China has places you can go to simulate being in a disaster?

No.

Like high, super high winds and—

Flash floods.

Flash floods, things like that. Should we have like AI disaster Simulations where, you know, you can, uh, be, be in a data center that's going rogue and kind of work to, to shut it down with friends. Yeah. Just to kind of like live-action roleplay through it.

I like that. I like that. I, I'm kind of treating Modern Warfare 4 like that. I feel like that's getting me enough cycles of like the simulation of, you know, you're already playing against bots. You're already shooting, shooting AI basically. So getting some drills in.

Yeah, I know it's a joke, but I wouldn't actually be surprised that a future first-person shooter or like one of these open-world games is centered around the Terminator scenario.

There was a game. There was a game. I forget what it's called, but like you drop in with 3 people and you're on this like planet. There's one that's Starship Troopers themed, so it's like the bug planet. And then there's another planet that you can drop into that's like the Terminator planet, and you're going up against like They basically like ripped Terminator's intellectual property. Like, they look exactly like T-800s.

RX says, why is Tyler not back in school? He's doing the longest internship in history. He turned it down.

I turned it down.

He actually turned it down just to grind for this.

Yeah.

Well, uh, things will never be chill again. The doomers who shaped the AI safety freakout. The Wall Street Journal has an article here. about some early Anthropic employees who are considering buying remote land in the United States to relocate to if AI goes seriously wrong. They're getting bunkies. They're going bunker mode.

Yeah.

Employees also trade doomsday scenarios and preparation plans in a private Slack while Anthropic workers have their own office space inside Berkeley's Constellation AI Safety Community. The wider safety scene has discussed iodine pills, remote islands, and electromagnetically shielded desert bunkers. Interesting that no one's trying to go to space. I would have thought that would have been— that was George Hotz's original pitch. He was like, if AI goes crazy, I want to be on a—

Put me on Starship.

Spaceship leaving the light cone as fast so AI can't catch up to you, blast shield behind you, and then you'll be safe from the intelligence.

Could just say he's not very AGI-pilled because obviously, The superintelligence would just figure out a way to just go faster than the speed of light and catch up.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if you go the maximum speed, they can't catch up ever, right? So then you are safe, but you got to accelerate to exactly 1c.

This is like an interesting example of like an actual answer to the Teller Cowen question, which is like, if you really care about doom, why aren't you making financial decisions? This is a financial one.

Yeah, well, lever up, get a lot of debt, and buy a bunker, buy remote land. With a massive mortgage.

Yeah, because usually the answer to the doomer thing is like, well, I'm not gonna be able to get to my bunker because the, you know, bioterrorism will already have killed me or something. This is an interesting instantiation of this. The thing that always, the thing that always just like breaks down with these scenarios is like, you know, every, every guy has like sort of played out the scenario in their head. Right. And where are you going to be? Where are you going to be best off? In some, like, remote area where you don't know any people that actually live there, right? Let's pick a— let's pick Wyoming, right? You really think that the world is, like, falling apart and you're just going to head over to Wyoming and set up shop in a community that knows you've been building your bunkie there? Yeah, right. And they're just going to be like, oh, yeah, like, there's a bunker over there. It has everything you need in it to survive.

And you know what?

But, you know, they paid us to set it up years ago, and let's not— we shouldn't just go occupy said bunker for ourselves.

So, the prepper community has a term for this. They say, don't be a loot drop.

Yeah, it's a loot drop.

Yeah, you're a loot drop if you do this. If you go and set up a really luxurious bunker with a bunch of supplies, but you don't actually know the community, you're not integrated into like everyone else. The fabric of— Yeah, the fabric. Ideally, it's like you want your team and everyone else to all be in it together and so that, you know, there's no squabbling. But yeah, you can just set up a loot drop and then everyone's like, oh yeah, I installed a crazy safe over there. Let's go get that as soon as the crisis happens. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch of fun game theory you can play through there. I would personally— I think we need to regulate because I would personally— I would hate to be in a self-defense situation with a bunch of rogue agents. And imagine if all the Waymos went rogue and we were just forced because of self-defense reasons.

You and all your best friends had to—

Just drive around and just have to shoot them out of the windows of our cars like all day long. Like that would be a nightmare.

That'd be a nightmare. You would never, you've never even—

If I was in a self-defense situation, I would do it, but it would pain me.

Totally.

Totally. Yeah.

Totally.

Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support. Giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

Also, a journal piece on—

What else happened?

On Jan Tollen.

Skype founder.

Skype founder.

Big investor.

Early investor in the Labs.

Take a wild guess where he's from.

Estonia?

Yeah, Tollen. He's from Tollen.

Anyways, also the primary Funder of all, I would say most of the sort of AI doom fear movement.

He also dances hip-hop. I wonder what that— how'd they get that scoop?

It's interesting.

Interesting. He warns about racing to build a technology that could end humanity. Yeah, there's a funny anecdote in here about champagne. I like that part of I didn't like the doom part, but I did like this. So they debated machine consciousness at 40,000 feet over flutes of champagne. See, white pill. Anyway, that's enough of that article. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. We got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

Uh, let's talk about some personal agents.

Okay.

What we got?

Noah Shin jumped on Founder of Instinct, broke his silence finally with none other than our friend and legend Patrick O'Shaughnessy. I'm only— I was trying to listen on the way into the gym this morning. I got maybe 30 minutes through. Patrick pulled out the highlights. He summarized his own podcast before you could summarize it. He beat you to the punch. Wow. He said a list of surprising and mind-boggling stats from this conversation. $1 billion a year in transaction volume, still invite only. I can't remember if that's total. I think that's actually total volume to date. I don't think that's like run rate volume.

It says a year, so that would be—

Well, that's what it says in here, but I just remember from the episode I heard it as—

Well, yeah. I mean, if it's to date, then it's higher.

That's what I'm saying. It could be like higher. Growing 10% a day.

I read that as $1 billion of annualized— that they are at $1 billion of annualized transaction volume. But I guess it's maybe even higher. I don't know. Yeah. Interesting.

Growing 10% a day. Spent $0 on marketing. They have this pretty amazing flywheel where people post screenshots all the time. That's doing a lot of marketing.

But a lot of the screenshots are like horrible accidents. But maybe those actually drive curiosity and people being like, well, I'm not gonna make that same stupid mistake and the service is probably getting better. You think those actually help?

I think those help.

Yeah, they probably do.

People are just curious.

People are curious and they're like, yeah, I wanna see it. I'll be safe. I won't give it my login details, but I'll still—

No, and it can't be said enough. A lot of people within tech have experienced AI doing things for them, like making a product. Most people outside have not experienced that yet, and it's just a magical thing.

Yeah, totally.

40% of users shared a personal credit card with Instinct within 3 weeks. Compute demand is doubling roughly every week. At 5% to 8% daily growth over the months it takes to bring new compute online, Instinct would reach about 100 million users. On Instinct's own A/B tests, it matches Opus 5 performance at a fraction of the cost. Noah spends about 40% of his time on compute. Buying compute at the last minute costs 3 to 4x more. Makes sense. Background work runs on setups that are 3x, 5x, and 8x more efficient on the same compute. 50% of Instinct's transaction volume is travel.

That's a crazy stat.

Instinct plans to take a cut of what users buy. Take rates, Shopify is 2.5% to 3%, Amazon is 15%, Apple is 30%. Noah's personal goal is to keep Instinct free for everyone for life. Some small businesses run their entire back office on Instinct. That's interesting. Users who connect at least one piece of sensitive information retain at about 80%. Just give me one piece. Just one piece. Just give me one piece of sensitive—

Tell me your darkest secret.

Some users send more than 90% of their messages—

How many skeletons do you have in your closet?

—to Instinct by voice. Say an app makes 70% of its money from ads and 30% from actually selling you things. Agents could wipe out the 70%, but Noah thinks the 30% gets much bigger because people buy more when buying takes zero effort. This is a big question for me, right? Because already buying something on a Shopify store takes close to zero effort.

Yeah.

Like, the checkout is actually down to if I land on the website, and I know what I want, I can check out within— and again, Shopify doesn't have an apps business, and that's fine.

There are things that are not fun to shop for, though. There's a lot of stuff, especially if it's like— I was thinking about cable management. I wanted to get some cable management stuff for my desk. And I don't really care about the brand. I don't care about the flow. I just want a sweet— I needed some Command Strips maybe, a little tray, whatever the modern solution is to a couple cables, a power brick, like just go and get something that's well-reviewed and like a suite that will figure that. What kind of voice are you doing?

Instinct launched to about 200 friends and family. Invites have sold on eBay for around $300. More than 50% of Instinct's traffic doesn't run on iMessage. Instinct has proactively called Noah 3 times. That's like when it's doing something and it has like a deadline. It's like Noah gave the example of like, hey, you really have to sign this like within next 5 minutes, are you available? It'll just call you, which is cool. Raised 1 on 10. Yeah. Yeah. Less than a month after raising 2.5. So Noah is 23. So very, very good summary.

Also same college that I went to. He went to Northeastern.

There you go. Yeah. So I guess initial reactions, I He— they talk about like remaking like the entire internet, right? And the example that they talk about is restaurant reservations. And Noah made an interesting point about how restaurant reservations to date are all effectively like first come, first serve. So like if you just happen to be the first person—

Yep.

To get there, you get the prime time slot, even if later someone else is making plans And it's like, you know, he gives the example of like an anniversary or like a special birthday. And he's making the point that like the restaurant should be optimizing for the person with the special event happening. And there should be more of like basically a negotiation in some ways, or like the user should have an opportunity to sort of like make their case for why they should get a table during a time where there's more demand than supply.

OK.

Yeah.

And I think that that makes sense. That being said, I think when everyone has a personal agent that's calling and like hammering restaurants and like trying to— like, I think it's very possible— like, his argument is that the restaurant wants like the whole space to just be filled with people that are like, it's is the most special moment of their life.

25 proposals, everyone clapping every 5 seconds in the restaurant.

And it's been a while. I mean, it's been a very long— I mean, I worked in a restaurant in high school, and it's been a while. But my read on that was that it would be insane if every single table was like— it was like the anniversary or the birthday. Like restaurants are not generally like set up to like give that. So maybe it's like— If you're at a restaurant— Maybe it's like a feature, not a bug that the reservation— some, at least some of the tables are like, hey, this person's a regular. Like they're just planning, they're just like, they just plan ahead. Like maybe that's like actually like a higher quality customer on the average night than somebody that's like, coming in, and this is like their special moment. So, OK.

I got a question for you.

Yeah.

If you're at a restaurant, and it's someone's birthday, and the host brings out a birthday cake, and they're singing, how close do you have to be to join in on the singing? If you're at a table over, will you start singing Happy Birthday?

I could be at the other end of the restaurant.

Oh, you're a birthday singer no matter what.

I'm belting over—

OK. I like this. I'm the same way.

I might be belting over 4 or 5 tables.

Yeah, trying to get them involved. You don't necessarily need to be at the same table. So potentially, this opens the idea— this creates the opportunity for a restaurant that's just constantly singing Happy Birthday on repeat the whole time you're there, because everyone's having a birthday.

The perpetual.

Yeah, I mean, there are some restaurants that sort of lean into like they're romantic, so they're the place where anniversaries and proposals happen. And then there's other ones where it's like, yeah, birthdays happen there, and there's like kids' birthdays. Like, you go to a CPK, I'm sure there's like many more like kids' birthdays. than proposals.

Yeah, it is interesting though, because a lot of our— so much of being a consumer, the benefits, the highest quality experiences typically go to the people that plan the farthest in advance, right? So, if you're booking a hotel right now already for the Christmas holiday, you're at a disadvantage, right?

Because there's some people that were booking Like, hence why we tell you about the road to Christmas.

Road to Christmas.

Start planning ahead.

Yes. And so anyways, it will be interesting if personal agents kind of rework that. I'm not— I don't think it's sustainable for like every single basically reservation or booking to be like open to basically like negotiation.

Completely disagree. I completely disagree.

Okay.

Because I think that the reservation system will be an agent as well. And there might be, yes, a country of geniuses in a data center negotiating against another country of geniuses in a data center. It sounds crazy, but I'm not joking. Like, I actually think this is what will happen every time. If you say, get me— I want to have dinner right now. I want to have dinner tonight with Jordi. Like, there will be— it will spawn a bunch of agents, call a bunch of restaurants. It will be annoying for the restaurants that aren't on board, but very quickly all the restaurant, you know, phone systems will be equipped to handle it on the other side. They will all share all the relevant information, negotiate, find the proper— answer any questions. Oh, food allergies. Oh, birthdays. How many birthdays are there? You want to go for your birthday, but you don't want that many birthdays to be there. Whatever your preferences are, all of that will get penciled out and it will be Just more seamless matching, and I don't think that's a problem at all. The thing that I'm uncertain about is like, are we going to move into like a SeatGeek regime where it truly is like surge pricing and the rest, the best restaurants might wind up being like, oh yeah, you're sitting down, but you had to pay like $2,000 for that reservation. And then there are some that are like, it's, we're selling the food like 1% above cost because like there's no, we wanna fill seats right now.

And this is just—

Yeah, and I'm just thinking about, I'm just thinking about like, I'll use a— there's a restaurant near where I am that people will plan months and months and months and months out for special occasions.

Yes.

So, if you go there, there will be a lot of people that are celebrating an anniversary or a birthday.

Yep.

And then there's maybe 4 or 5 tables every day that the manager kind of just has on lock. And if you have a personal relationship with them, They're gonna be offered up.

Sure.

Those tables are never— in a restaurant that has way more demand for tables than supply, the restaurant is not gonna ever take those tables and be like, hey, we're just like handing these over to our AI agent.

Sure.

Send—

But they were never going in the booking system anyway.

Yeah.

Like they were never going on OpenTable or whatever.

But I'm just saying like in that case for that restaurant in particular, Like the system is working as intended, which is like, if you want to be with us for your special day, plan ahead.

Yeah.

And we also wanna take care of like friends and—

Yeah, this is a good— that's a good point. That's a good point.

And it's just like that extra inventory is not gonna shift over just because you have an agent that can make your case. So I think some of the friction in hospitality is designed to reward people that plan really far in advance and people that develop a real relationship with the business and the people that work there. And so I'm just wondering how this sort of new dynamic fits in where everyone has to be super negotiated.

Well, in the first case, I have my agent book my birthday dinner like 6 months in advance very easily because it knows when my birthday is and knows that I want to go out to dinner and gets me a reservation.

No, but that's using the existing—

And then for the other one, it's tracking the owner of the restaurant on Instagram, sending him cigars and champagne regularly, and potentially hacking and blackmailing him if it needs to go there.

No, I'm very bullish on telling your agent, hey, I know that this special moment is coming up. Make sure that the second bookings open up— but again, that fits into the sort of long-term planning category. But it's not Reworking the fabric of hospitality.

Sure.

It's just sort of like reducing friction.

Yeah.

I'm just saying, like, Resy and OpenTable and Toast and all these things, they're gonna build this sort of like counter-infrastructure for the onslaught of agent inbound.

Yes, yes, yes.

That is coming to every business.

Yeah, it will quickly be resolved as soon as these things scale, and they are. And they are scaling. And I'm sure that they're— yeah, I mean, I guess a good prediction is like there will probably be several breathless op-eds in the various newspapers about like AI agents are super annoying for my small business, you know? And it's like, now I have to get some tool to solve this.

Which is kind of funny because—

We've all been through this with the phone.

Because how much sympathy are people going to have that business owners being like, I'm being flooded with demand for my products and services.

But it's not demand. It'll be like fake demand.

Yeah.

Because the agents will be, like, checking, and they'll be like, oh, well, there was nothing available at 7:00 PM on Resy and via this API, but, like, maybe if I call, I can get an extra thing. So they're gonna call everyone all the time, and it's gonna be very annoying. There will be, like, some frustration that is justified from this. Like, anytime that there's a transition, like, there will be frustration. Yeah, I think, I mean, a good preview of this is like what we all went through with our phones where like you used to be able to have a cell phone and basically just pick up the phone when it rang. And now it's like I have my phone in do not disturb 24/7. You can't call me unless you're already in my contacts. Like I can't just pick up the phone randomly because I get so many spam calls. And even Apple like clearly admitted that like the phone lines have fallen, like, because they have a separate tab in iMessage for, like, unknown now. And, like, it gets filtered off because they know that, like, the rails have truly broken, like, the spammers have won unless you wrap it in a filter.

Yeah.

And so there will be significant spam filtering that goes on at the phone level. And that's probably already happening with You know, just there's so many services that are calling restaurants and saying like, hey, do you want to— do you need more supplies? Do you want to switch to this point-of-sale system? Right? And they don't want those to go through their— you don't want cold calls and sales calls going through the reservation system. So they probably filter those already. Anyway.

Josh Konstein.

Oh, yeah, please.

Says, this is the whole Instinct pitch deck, by the way. And it's Christian. Kyle saying, my 3-month-old son is now twice as big as when he was born. He's on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by age 10. Very funny.

Such a viral post. This, this is like, this went super viral on Reddit. It goes viral like every couple months on Reddit and stuff. It's a, it's a wild post. But I did wanna set some, like, some comps around the Instinct growth numbers that are interesting. So $1 billion a year in transaction volume. We're not exactly sure if that's annualized or to date, but it's kind of the same. For reference, it took Stripe around 18 months to hit $1 billion of annualized transaction volume, although Stripe also spent 2 years building in beta before launch. Instinct got to $1 billion transaction volume in closer to 6 months. But it's important to note that with Instinct, The transactions flow through third-party cards, so they're not making any money off of these transactions yet, but it's very clear to imagine where monetization might happen.

Yeah, at the very least, they could just launch a credit, like their own card.

Yeah, of course. And you sign up.

And they're getting that interchange fee.

Oh, 100%.

They don't even need to get anyone to opt in.

Yeah.

And you might be able to—

Yeah, and it's an easier pitch too, because you're onboarding this AI agent, you're like, I've heard some pretty crazy stuff about this thing. Yeah, I'd actually like it if you used your card as opposed to like—

It already has basically a computer, a phone number, email.

Yep, give it a credit card.

Give it a credit card.

And so I'm sure they're working on that. And when they do, they're not going to make 3% because you do have to pay Visa and MasterCard like the underlying rails, but earning 1%, 0.5%, 0.25%, even 0.1% on— they grew to $1 billion. You're talking about getting into tens of millions of dollars of revenue pretty quickly.

Yeah.

And the team's just 14 people. And so you can sort of see why they raised $1 billion, $10 billion from Benchmark, Sequoia, Coatue. There's, yes, you have to believe that they won't be killed by Muse and that they will continue to scale, but if any of the growth rates sustained for any, even a limited amount of time, It's going to be a lot of transaction volume, great business, and you can underwrite it pretty safely. And then there's still the offshoot into Amazon world, I think, because Amazon doesn't really have a strong play there, but could fit in very well with this.

Yeah, they have a lot of potential dance partners, and ultimately, things grow really fast because they don't just grow really fast for no reason.

Good product. And people have been trying to do different personal agents for specific things. There's definitely been other pitches for doing commerce, doing flight booking. I'm shocked by that 50% travel. That number seems really, really high. What was the exact stat? 15%— he said— Patrick summarized it as 50% of the transaction volume is travel. Volume, because when you book a flight, you might be spending a grand, but when you book a restaurant, you're maybe putting down $10, $20, maybe $100. Like, you might not put down anything, right? And so, travel, it's not that 50% of like prompt travel—

Activity, economic activity.

But that's where they're making money.

And so, yeah, that's another way where they could build like an Expedia-type business where they're earning fees on top of booking We got to give a round of applause to Tate Hacker, who says, we're so early, everyone will be using a full-time assistant of compute like this within a year. And the reason I'm clapping is because it's a parking ticket for not just any car that Instiq took care of. It's for a blue R8.

Blue R8.

And I just thought this was a wonderful way to sort of share a wonderful car.

Essentially flex.

Hopefully, yeah, hopefully it's a V10 with a gated manual. But a very underrated car.

What is this? This is a very detailed parking ticket, but let's get taken to this. Paid 50% on your personal Visa. Pretty cool.

It's like, we get it, dude. We get it. You got a parking ticket in your R8. We get it.

Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. There's drama in MongoDB world because—

We'll get to that.

—bots are poaching. Do you want to get to that later?

Let's get to that later. Let's close this out. So apparently Adidas is running anti-bot software on their store. You ran into this pretty recently, not even with Muse or Instinct, but just researching with Codex. Thought it was pretty funny because you were actively trying to give a company business.

Yeah.

I think there's a bunch of historical reasons you would want anti-bot software.

Yep.

And then there's now a bunch of very real new reasons why you need to update that and figure out a way to prevent sort of like bad bots.

Yep.

But support like actual consumer bots.

Mm-hmm.

So Gary Tan says, anti-bot is for losers, TBH. Really got him. He really owned. He really owned him right there.

It's just slow. It's ridiculous.

Other people, the chief economist at Apollo is warning that mass adoption of AI agents could trigger a bank run as they optimize user investments. Gary Gensler spent his last few years as SEC chair warning that the exact same problem will hit the markets. The pursuit of algorithmic. Perfection at scale destroys system stability. Personal finance agents making simultaneous optimal decisions could potentially cause a massive flash crash. Agent acausal coordination with no messages passed between them will show up in a lot of places. Markets will get the big headlines, but the huge number of clever advisors making very similar choices will impact all of human society. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Human laws were not written for this. They were not written for a lot of what is coming. You don't have to apologize. It is about to start happening very fast. Credit to Citrini for basically being the first.

That was a different thing, but yeah. I don't know.

It's the exact. It's similar, but no, it's this idea of like there's a lot of aspects of our economy that are that currently, like businesses that work because of friction.

Sure.

That friction in some ways will be removed when you have an always-on agent that says, hey, you haven't touched this product in a very long time. Do you still wanna be paying for this? Et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I don't think this is, I don't know, like my banker will just hit me up and say, hey, I'm gonna, I'm just Clearing this with you, I'm going to sweep funds into money market account or T-bills. It's not like a good banking experience is already doing this proactively for you.

Yes.

Now, there's, of course, people that maybe they just are set up with a simple checking account and they could be moving those into a higher yield account of some sort that aren't doing it. And maybe the agent starts doing that, but great, like fundamentally a great banking experience. They're like doing this on your behalf. Like they are aligned to you.

Yeah.

So I don't think it's as like—

Yeah. I would be very hesitant about how fast this adoption can happen because—

Yeah. When some says, dang it, if ordinary people get fair deals and aren't ripped off, it's the end of the economy.

Yeah. Yeah, because I wonder like, Personally, agents are taking off, but like we're still in like single-digit millions of people doing them. It's going to take time for people to adopt them, and then they need to actually authenticate and add these things, link their bank accounts. And then presumably the first version of this will be the agent coming to you and saying like, hey, is it okay if I do this? Second order will be like, I just did this. I know it's okay. You trust me. And that relationship, that trust, I feel like that's going to take like years to build up and diffuse through. There are still like, there's still plenty of friction in the economy. I think it's going to take a while for people to onboard to this fully. I mean, people were— it's the same idea of like when ChatGPT came out, people were like, Google Search is dead. Like Google, no one will Google Search. Google Search revenue is going to go to zero like next year. And it was like, yeah, it was a reasonable replacement But it took a little bit longer, even though it was growing so fast, faster than any consumer product ever. Incredible revenues, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It still wasn't that fast. And so it's the same thing where it's like, okay, if this happens over like a couple of years, like banks adjust, money market funds adjust, like it's not the end of the world potentially, but we'll keep monitoring it anyway. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, but Railway automatically takes Zuck. What happened?

We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses. Meta already serves billions of people at scale and helps hundreds of millions of businesses reach customers. Today, we are starting the next major pillar of our business, Meta Enterprise Platform, to help businesses use AI to grow and transform in new ways as well. Meta Enterprise will use our strengths that few other companies have: advanced models, leading agents, large-scale infrastructure, and years of working closely with many businesses. Initially, we will focus on bringing our full technology stack, including the Muse Agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers to help them grow. To lead this effort, I'm excited that Shurutan CJ Desai, former guest of the show, will join Meta as Chief Enterprise Platform Officer reporting directly to Doc CJ is an experienced enterprise leader with a track record of building full-stack software and delivering results in AI, infra, business applications, and security. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Anyways, so here's how I think this is going to go. I think that they created this new business unit. They still have a lot to prove on if they can.

Sorry, if you scroll down, there's some wild comments. Anyway, continue.

Anyways, they created this new business unit. They're talking about apps and agents and all this stuff. I think what's really going to happen is they're going to do a big compute deal, and then it's going to look like this sort of unit is doing— it'll quickly go from, let's say, $0 to $10 billion a year of revenue. They can sort of use that. They don't have to necessarily break out Initially, all the— where that revenue is coming from, but they can say, like, our enterprise platform has gone from $0 to $10 billion in—

Yeah, this was like the jokes— I mean, analysis was sort of trolling with around, like, oh, like, all the growth in Google Cloud Platform is selling TPUs. It was like a little bit more nuanced than that, but there's a bunch of ways to, like, wrap up revenue into, like, an enterprise platform that Could be tokens, could be doing inference, could be selling compute, raw bare metal deals.

Yeah.

Could be actually selling services. Will be interesting to see where it goes. It's still an interesting off-gassing valve because there's some people, and we're gonna have Anish from Andreessen Horowitz on the show at 12:35 to talk about personal agents because there's been a lot of debate over like, How compute intensive is the average Instinct user? Is the average Muse user? Is it like $10 a month? Is it $100 a month? Is it more? Obviously, everyone knows it's going to get cheaper, but then people will be in an arms race for, oh, well, like this one gives you like the best possible intelligence, so it's more expensive. And so there's a lot of business model considerations there. But it's interesting that if like, if Muse doesn't fully take off, then you do have the enterprise offtake for that compute. So shareholders are maybe more reassured that, okay, we're really optimistic about Muse, things seem to be going really well, but if it doesn't—

Well, and I think it's important. I think—

Because there would be a tension there.

I think Chuck finds it important to not— when he sort of capitulates and has to sell compute, he wants to be able to position it as like, Yeah, we have this massive enterprise AI business.

Yeah.

Versus when SpaceX did it, it was like, oh, wow, they don't have demand for their models.

Sure.

They have to do this.

They have to do compute deals.

And I think that this positioning is smart for— because even if he is selling compute, it's not like he doesn't have the same broader long-term ambitions of actually building a durable AI business here with their own models, their own agents, etc.

Yeah.

So I just think it's a better— SpaceX needed to make a lot of moves really quickly to be in a good spot for the IPO. Had they not needed to move so quickly, they could have positioned it more like this, and I think it will sit better with people.

Yes. Yeah, I agree with you on that. I just think there could be a tension. Like, imagine if they were like, hey, we're really good at video hosting from Instagram, like, we're going to start like a video hosting platform. Like, wouldn't the Instagram team be like, wait, like, we need all the resources we can for, you know, building out our—

Yeah, but that was the same exact tension that SpaceX and Cursor have had with their own teams that are building models.

Yeah, but this is like injecting that tension, right? Unnecessarily, potentially?

Not unnecessarily.

I think Why is it necessary?

Why is doing this necessary at all?

Yeah, why not pure play it? Why not say, yeah, we want to have the whole company aligned behind Muse, behind the products, and yeah, we have a bunch of compute, we're not selling that at all because we're the best to monetize it. Why would we ever give it away? But of course, if they're deep in the enterprise and they have a product that flows through there, the margin will be there. It makes a lot of sense. But you are You are kicking off tension, right? Like, we've seen this with other companies. I don't know. We'll see.

Poor MongoDB, down 16%.

Oh, it popped. It was down 26% earlier, so—

Yeah, it recovered a little bit. Yeah, CJ hadn't been there very long.

But that's a very great sign of respect, right?

Yeah.

26%—

Well, again, we like to see the— You know, because the stock chart nuke as when a founder retires. Yes. End of an era. Just— but, but you want to see that recovery instantly. Yes. You don't like it when a hired gun CEO leaves before even investing into their grant and gets sucked. Yeah. You don't like to see that. Yeah.

Okay. Maybe, maybe Buco put it better than I did here. Very perplexing move by Meta. It took Google a decade plus to become an enterprise company. Can Meta even get there? Much muddier story that already includes an eye-popping level of CapEx and existential battle to be the front door to the new internet. So yeah, it is a little bit complicated. At the same time, I mean, I like SemiAnalysis's breakdown of, hey, if you're buying from Meta, you're getting all of the Meta data. Like there's a ton of Meta engineers. They've been, you know, their keystrokes have been tracked. And so, you know, like that's going in the training data. And so So if you are trying to do something they might be good at, they might have a really good model for it, basically. That was the idea, at least as it was broken down in SemiAnalysis. Anyway—

Speaking of—

What else is going on?

Speaking of Meta, I want to try to find that video that I sent to you, this guy investing in scale right now.

Oh, yeah. That's good. Well, while you're pulling that up, Sonnet 5.5 is out, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family. Clear upgrade over Sonnet 5, runs 30% faster, costs up to 30% less for most work. Did it make this video? Because they've been doing this thing where the models have been actually responsible for assembling the video. It's always a good demo. But good results on agentic coding, obviously cheaper, and will be interesting to see what people build with it.

Yeah, big week. Big week. For all the labs. Pull up this video of somebody pitching Scale AI.

Okay.

Raise your hand if you know about—

Wait, pause for a second. So, this is a group of investors getting pitched SPVs. Let's play this.

Let's talk about Scale.

Raise your hand if you know about Scale AI. Probably very few of you, is my guess. Okay, I didn't know about it. These guys, what makes them amazing is these are the folks that are training the AI models. So they provide software that helps train ChatGPT and Claude and Grok and the major— apparently 90% of the world's leading generative AI models are using Scale AI.

Mm-hmm.

So Meta, says, oh my gosh, remember, if you're running Meta, your biggest problem right now is you don't got enough cash. We need hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in data centers and developing our own AI system. But they thought enough of this company to take $14 billion and put it into scale a few months ago. And so that's about as good a sign as you're going to see that sophisticated people on the AI scene believe in this Be careful. Lots of AI and technology companies use them. Meta, frontier AI developers like OpenAI, Microsoft, other major model builders, robotics companies are using it. Because remember, you build a robot, you got to train the system that powers the robot how to operate, right? So they're using Scale to do that. Lots of enterprise clients from the Mayo Clinic to—

Jack in the Box. French fries with misinformation.

I mean, we've had the new CEO on. There is some real business. The RemainCo is still in business and continues to produce revenue and do deals and do all sorts of things. But very odd way to represent the Meta deal, which was a lot of the talent going over to Meta, obviously the founder.

Well, not to mention, they, I think, instantly Lost like most of the— they lost a lot of customers after that deal.

Oh, sure.

Because people were like, I don't want—

You have an exclusive deal with Facebook or Meta.

So yeah, anyways, positioning a sort of regulatory arbitrage, right? Meta needed to buy Scale without setting off kind of alarm bells from an antitrust standpoint. And so, yeah, very concerning. There's got to be— I mean, imagine early-scale investors, somebody that's like, I have all this stock. What am I going to do with it? I'll sell it at almost any price.

Well, the early investors got paid out, right? That was the structure of the deal. They all got like a dividend. So, you still own the shares.

But you still own the shares. Okay. See what I'm saying? You're sitting there being like, this company has no future prospects if some guy In a hotel will buy them, I guess, maybe sell them.

But book me a Best Western conference room right now. I need to do these shares.

They're probably not exactly— they're probably not sitting there. Whoever's providing the shares is not exactly happy that he's putting those kind of videos.

It is crazy that it's hitting the Instagram Reels. Did that just get served to you or is that like uniquely viral content?

I think it knows that I've—

It knows that you've interviewed the founder anyway. We will talk about SpaceX and Starship 14 splashing down Pacific Ocean later in the show. In the meantime, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we'll bring in our first guest of the show, the founding and managing partner of Plexo Capital.

What's going on?

How you doing? Welcome to the show.

Hey, doing well. Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much for hopping on. Since it's the first time on the show, would love to give everyone an introduction on yourself and just break down a little bit of your background, a little bit of your day-to-day, and then, I mean, we have so many questions about the firm and the strategy, and we can go through all that.

Sounds good. So I founded Plexo Capital while I was at GV, Google Ventures. So I was a partner on the investing team focused mainly on marketplaces and mobile. One of the things that we had done at GV was to identify GPs that were fund 1 micro VCs, typically investing at the pre-seed, seed stage that we could partner with. And what better way to partner with them than by meeting one of their needs, which was helping them with their fundraise effort?

Yeah.

So we invested into about 5 funds that were emerging managers with unique perspectives and access to deal flow. And it worked for us. And I looked at it and said, hey, I think I can build a strategy around this. So this was, I think, about 2016.

Yeah.

And I switched over to an entrepreneur-in-residence role, focused on building out the strategy.

Yeah.

Spun out in the spring of 2018, brought on Alphabet as our anchor investor for our Fund 1, and also brought on some other big tech companies, Intel, Cisco, brought on some financial institutions like the Royal Bank of Canada, and some traditional institutional LPs like Ford Foundation and MassMutual.

Can you explain the evolution of the relationship there with Alphabet? Because GV, formerly Google Ventures, was— had all the benefits of a venture capital firm financially, but also a lot of the benefits of a corporate venture arm with partnerships and potential acquisitions. And that's always been something that corporate venture arms have sort of grappled with and evolved over time. But going from Alphabet to a fund of funds into, into emerging managers. Is there any conversation of dialogue and value add there, or is it purely we think this is a great allocation of capital, this is purely financial investment?

Yeah.

So a couple of questions there. So first, I think it's important to just think about the corporate VC position within the ecosystem. Because there's almost a spectrum. At the far end, there are purely strategic. And then at the other end of the spectrum, there are purely financial. And GV was at the extreme end of the purely financial, so much so that it really operated as a separate unit. It's part of the Other Bets umbrella.

Got it.

And the investors at GV invest for financial return, just like a traditional firm on Sand Hill Road.

Mm-hmm.

So it's all about identifying amazing opportunities with the best entrepreneurs that are typically one of one, and then coming into those firms, companies as early as possible and continuing to support them over time.

Mm-hmm.

If there is an opportunity to be able to do something within the broader Alphabet ecosystem or relationships, then GV will make those introductions. But first and foremost, the focus was on just identifying the best companies. I would even say so much so that GV doesn't really think of itself as a corporate VC.

Yeah.

It thinks of itself just as a traditional financially focused VC.

Yeah.

And so then leading to the second question that was in your opening, the ability to be able to identify the best deals, you know, there's multiple paths to be able to get there. Obviously, there's the existing relationships with entrepreneurs. That's very helpful. There are folks that operate at GV that, you know, have good relationships based on prior working at Google. And so there's a lot of Googlers that do angel investing. They're great sources of deal flow. And then you also have, you know, these GPs that are on Fund 1s that usually bring some kind of unique angle or some edge that they have to allow them to see opportunities that other folks don't see. And the beauty of being a Fund 1 GP is that you don't have to really do any fund management. You got your lawyers to do your LPA, you've probably raised your fund, you've got a back office, so you can just focus on investing. And that was the opportunity that we saw at GV was, hey, why don't we partner with some of these folks? And then, it'll allow us to get access to some deals that we might not have seen on our radar.

So, walk me through the evolution of the thesis, the pitch, the sweet spot for emerging fund manager? Was there a background that you were looking for, whether it was entrepreneurial or spin-out from a traditional venture capital firm? Were there sectors or sizing criteria? How did you think about narrowing who you were going to back?

Yeah, I love this question, because the most important thing for me was having a perspective, having worked across a few different roles. And when I had conversations with people that were in the venture space for my own personal journey, the thing that I continued to hear was, hey, if there's an opportunity to get experience as a product manager, take it.

Hmm.

And if you can do that at a company that's known for doing something with excellence within the ecosystem on the product side, where they have great engineers, where they have a history of, you know, identifying some of the best talent that spins out and does great things, Take that opportunity, take that role, because a product manager is like a mini CEO within an organization and has ownership and usually works across engineering, works across engineering to help identify features and functionality and how those should be prioritized, works with marketing to think about the positioning and how to get access to distribution, works with the finance team thinking about what the business model is going to be and what's the best way to monetize this opportunity. So it's great training ground to both, I would say, be an entrepreneur, be a founder. Plus, that playbook for product management is very similar to early-stage venture capital. You know, what do VCs do at the early stage? Well, they think about what's the problem that's being solved? What's the existing solution set? What are the shortcomings of those solutions? What are people actually doing? Is there an opportunity to kind of rip something out? Or is this kind of people have solved the problem with duct tape and Excel? And what are the best ways to be able to get distribution? All of those things that a GP thinks about at the early stage, pre-seed, seed, it's kind of the same playbook as a product manager.

Yeah. It's interesting to think back on the 2010s and it really felt like the sort of like star power that researchers have today, product managers really had in the 2010s where You had somebody that could have been just coming out of college, landed at a company, but then 5 years later, they were running a core business at one of these companies that, again, they did their basically tour of duty at a company that was, like you said, excellent operations, excellent talent density. And then they were just in such an amazing position to— understand what great growth looks like, understand what insane market pull and product quality and all these things. And then understanding the tech stack at these companies at a deep level so that they would see all of these opportunities to invest in other software and infrastructure and things like that. And it feels like the humble product manager today has a lot less attention than let's say, like the star researchers, right? You see the researcher spinouts are getting kind of all the headlines, but it actually makes me think like there's probably a lot of alpha right now and ignoring like the new Neo Labs and just focusing on like who are the actual, you know, great, great product managers today at these, you know, high-growth companies. Because—

Yeah, how are you balancing that transition?

I gotta tell you, it's really a fascinating question right now because What ends up happening is after you get a few funds under your belt, you move to this more operational focus as well, right?

Mm-hmm.

So the thing that people might not think about a lot as they decide to transition to being a fund manager as opposed to working inside of an organization is that when I was at GV, it was amazing. All I had to do was focus on finding the best entrepreneurs.

Yeah.

We had great finance people, we had great legal team, We had all this back office ops. We had marketing. I didn't have to think about anything. But when you are starting your own firm, now all of a sudden, that's on your plate. And so I think that's one of the most difficult things is balancing it. But I'm going to tell you, one of the most beautiful things that's happened, and the timing could not have been better, is AI.

Yeah.

I mean, you now have the ability for a lot of these work things that I have on my plate that are really non-investing.

Mm-hmm.

It's amazing how much leverage I can actually get from AI, which is great because you're a limited budget when you're a startup firm. And so you don't really have the management fee to be able to build out a big team to give you that leverage. But the beauty of today is that, you know, AI gives that opportunity. I can remember talking to my LPs when we were looking at Anthropic back in the fall of '23, and it just opened my eyes to the fact that, My God, I told my LPs, I'll never forget the AGM where I said, hey, my objective is to use the AI tools that existed at that time. You got to rewind and take yourself back. But at that time, my goal was, hey, if I can just have AI do the work of one junior analyst, I'm going to be super happy. And now you can have AI do the work of a whole team.

Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. Even just like the deep As soon as we had deep research, that was like the same thing as throwing basically a project over to a junior analyst type and saying, hey, I want you to spend a week and really understand the evolution of this technology set, understand the market. And even if what you get back today is still like, has like some AI slop in the writing, at least it's still like, will communicate the ideas and get you being able to get up to speed on something, you know, 10 times faster. Yeah, just 10 times faster. Is amazing and such an advantage for Yeah, these emerging managers with smaller teams where it might be 1 or 2 partners and maybe no analyst or associate types.

Yeah, so I mean, the teams can stay so much smaller. At the same time, we've seen the funding rounds get so much bigger. Can you walk me through how the knock-on effects of the ballooning seed, Series A, Series B valuations and actual funding round sizes has cascaded through to your strategy? Have you had to evolve? Has it just been you're in the right place at the right time because you're growing your firm, so you're just growing into the new normal? Or have you actually had to step back and say, okay, things are structurally different, we need to evolve our strategy? How do you think about—

Maybe more tangibly, you know, we have friends that have funds that they raised in 2024 where the strategy was like, we want to own 5 to to 10% of companies at pre-seed, seed, and then follow on from there. And then almost all of those folks are now being like, we're happy to get 3% of this round before.

Sure.

And then the markups can be quite intense and the follow-on capital can come quickly, but it feels like even in the span of one deployment period, managers needing to fully update their strategy on ownership targets and things like that?

And that was my answer. I mean, you hit the nail on the head because you couldn't have spoken a better truth. I just had this conversation with one of our LPs. And her question was, what are you seeing as the changes and the challenges within the ecosystem? And I went back to a point I made earlier, which is these GPs that are the best, usually they have, especially in the age of AI, The thing that I really have noticed is that the GPs that are just getting started in their career, the best GPs are much more technical. Even within the last 10 years, I think that's the biggest evolution that I've seen. And when I compare the profiles of not all GPs that are more experienced and deeper in their careers, but a significant number, when you just look at their backgrounds, they don't necessarily have the depth of the technical side. And when you look at the GPs that we see today with the smaller funds, these are folks that are coming in with a very unique perspective. And the edge, I think, translates directly from their technical understanding of a problem they had to tackle within one of these technology companies. And so what that does is it opens their eyes to this really unique set of problems that they know can't be solved, but they understand the technical limitations of the current solutions as to why those problems can't be solved. And they kind of have an has somewhat of an idea about the perspective of, hey, this is how I think this problem could be solved, but maybe there's one aspect that's missing. So maybe it's the compute horsepower, or maybe there's a certain problem that hasn't been solved in an architecture side. There's something that's just missing. And so they know what to look for. And then when they see it, they can pounce on it immediately. And I think to your earlier point around being inside of a company, you understand 2 things that are really important. If you're in one of the big hyperscalers or you're inside one of the big tech companies that's, you know, really known for producing great employees, you know what excellence looks like in employees. You do know what A-teams look like. You also know what an A-organization looks like and how that organization should scale and some of the challenges that it's going to get. So I think this new batch of GPs just has a really unique perspective that allows them to get in early. Now, the flip side is being able to scale and keep that ownership stake as the companies now move so quickly through the financing rounds. That's the biggest challenge that we've seen, the fact that they don't have the ability to hold on to that pro rata like they used to. And look, GPs were very creative even within the last 10 years, right? If I look back to some of the deals that we were doing pre-COVID, The GPs were doing things like going out and raising SPVs and getting existing LPs and new LPs to come on and help them keep as much of their pro rata as possible. Then they graduated to doing these massive funds that were just for follow-on investments. Now, that is much more difficult, because you have got this combination of these rounds are increasing in size so fast, plus you have got the bigger shops that come down earlier and earlier, And so, those big shops are already there and ready to scale up. This is the challenge that a lot of these firms have now.

Well, for you, the big question I have is how do you manage and prioritize your set of co-investment opportunities? Because you have this big base of managers that you have backed now, and I imagine every single month, they are bringing you co-invest opportunities. And we're in this dynamic right now where you'll have the top 5 companies in a category getting marked up like crazy, and then even the 5 through 10 are still getting marked up and showing momentum and growth. And so, I imagine it's like a massive headache, but also a big opportunity of sorting through those, but also managing expectations with the managers on when you'll actually lean in and make a direct investment through their vehicles and when you have to sit stuff out.

Yeah. Clearly, you've been looking at our deck because you guys understand it really well.

I don't know. I don't see the deck, but I—

The rule is simple. He only invests when it's Anthropic. As long as it's a really good—

No, but it's just like—

I'm swinging at the grand slams.

Even on a personal level, being investors, invested in some funds. It's like, I do this recreationally to date and it's like, well, I'm not going to just— I can't possibly do every deal even if they look great.

Yeah. Well, this is the benefit of having that level of expertise where you can even apply it to a side hustle and you professionalize your side hustle because that's exactly the approach that we have to take, which is partnering with this amazing GP network that we've earned their trust. And the beauty of the GPs we work with is they invest so early. You know, an entrepreneur never forgets that first check or who took the bet on them. So that's the biggest thing for us is, you know, how do we go through all of these different opportunities? And I do go back to Anthropic because that's the one that really the light bulb went off on my head because you had a couple of dynamics that we've discussed. We— it was the first time we had done an SPV.

Yeah.

And this was the Series D that closed in January of, of '24 that Menlo led. So it started to come together at the end of '23. One of our GPs brought us the deal, a GP we had worked with before on Reddit, actually. We had worked with that GP on Reddit. That worked out well.

Yeah.

And so I was excited because I wanted to get more exposure into AI and had a chance to dive in deep. But the challenge was, I mean, this was like an $18 billion valuation.

Yeah.

And we had never come close to anything that expensive before. And so, I think there was this combination of getting our arms around that and thinking, my God, for this thing to actually really come together to give the return, this has got to be like a $1, $2 trillion thing. And now, here we are.

Here we are. That's amazing. You alluded to the emergence of tranched rounds, of more complicated financings of a ton of capital, marshaling at the very early stages of some of the new companies. And I'm interested in the dichotomy that's emerging between the company builders versus the financing partners, the inception rounds, and how GPs and emerging GPs are clarifying their position in the market. Are you seeing GPs have a good answer to where they sit in the market? Are they just starting to understand how to position themselves and I mean, is it— how accepting, how acceptable do you think a wait-and-see approach or maybe we'll do a little bit of one and then a little bit of the other versus there are some firms right now that are positioning themselves as like, we are the company builder firm, we're in the inception round, don't come to us with the second or third tranche if you're an entrepreneur.

Yeah. And I think that latter piece is where the GPs that we've seen really clarify their position. That is, I think, the level of granularity that is necessary today. That was not necessary, I would say, 5, 10 years ago, but today, it is. Again, I just had this conversation with one of our LPs, an institutional LP that sits in a pretty unique seat. That was part of our conversation when we started talking about how do GPs really make their position within the industry. Now, it is definitely being able to leverage some technical aspect—

Sure.

That leads them to an edge they have in identifying an opportunity. But then even moreover, really focusing in on exactly the profile of company that makes the most sense, where that company sits within product market fit, and what I've even seen the specific needs of a company. So we've even got GPs that have a specialty of being able to have a network of product managers And they can tap into their product manager network when necessary. We've seen a GP that has a partner. It's a 2-person operation. And the other GP has a history of working in PR and public relations and understanding how to position a company, which is increasingly important.

Yeah.

Because one of the things I don't really think people understand is that one of the risks of the rapid acceleration that we see in companies achieving this incredible scale. I think I just saw Higgsfield is now the fastest company to $1 billion in revenues. You know, one of the things people don't talk about is when you look at the history of a lot of the entrepreneurs, you know, you look at the Jobs, you even look more recently at the Larry and Sergues, they had time to be able to develop that muscle memory of how to develop into the shoes of being a high-profile CEO and having to deal with a very, you know, persnickety board at times, or having to deal with a state dinner with the President of the United States. You never saw that need to understand how to enter those environments when you had maybe 10 years to get there. Now, companies are getting there in 10 months.

I'll give you the best example is Noah from Instinct going on Invest Like the Best to announce the new round. There was one question on security. Patrick was basically saying, look, a lot of people just don't trust, aren't going to trust a new product like this with all their email and payment information, all this stuff. And I thought his answer was fine, but it didn't— It wasn't insane. It wasn't like he hit a home run, but I was like, you got to give him some time. He's 23 years old. The company is less than a year old. It's a $10 billion company, but give him 10 more of those interviews, and he'll probably answer wildly differently.

But again, now you don't get 10 years. You get 3, and then within 3 years of starting your company, you're getting made fun of on SNL while you're having dinner with the president. It's such a weird scenario, right?

That's right. How do you— VCs love to talk about taste and how taste is important, but how quickly do you clock Can you clock a manager's taste in companies over the fund cycle? Because every manager comes out and they say, we want to back the most important companies in the world and back visionary founders, right? It all sort of blends together. But then my manager friends, you can just tell, usually, maybe it takes me a few years, but I have a friend who loves to back all the hyper-controversial founders on X. Like, almost every single one he's in, if you can think of somebody that went viral for doing something crazy or saying something weird, he's in all those companies. And then I have another set of friends that are managers, and they love to back the super earnest, really kind. And they're both saying the same thing when they're doing their fundraisers, right? They're like, we want to back visionary founders. And yet, they sort of self-select into these very key—

What kind of visionary are you talking about?

Yeah.

Vision of getting—

Key architects.

Well, I love that because it also comes back to the personality of the GP and kind of the type of dynamic that's going to be most interesting for them, kind of intellectually. Because everyone— I think the best GPs that I've met, they're just so smart and they're so intellectually curious. And I think when you really break it down, birds of a feather flock together. And so you see the most interesting pairings with GPs and founders And you really know it holds true when you start to look at the deal flow that they're getting. So it's like people kind of can immediately identify, oh my God, this is like the perfect company for GPX over here, right? And I think that's another piece that speaks to the edge and how a company or how a GP should position their firm within the ecosystem. And you do start to see part of the taste, as you call it. I think that's a great way to describe it. I work with my son, and we kind of track and monitor GPs. And one of the things that's a telltale sign is, hey, are these GPs just kind of chasing the next hot thing? Or is there some consistency in the approach that they're taking, not only within a certain sector or a certain problem that's being solved, but also with the personality of the founder that's going after this opportunity?

Yeah.

And you can definitely start to see that certain GPs kind of always go after a certain profile of founder. And to be honest, for us, at least, those are the GPs that we like the best because it means that they're consistent.

Yeah. And you don't want to, especially if you're evaluating new managers, if you think they're going to be going after a certain personality type and then that personality type is not represented in the portfolio, in your portfolio already, then it actually starts to be interesting because you are not just going to get an average of everything else you already have exposure to.

No, see, that is exactly right, because our objective is to cast as wide a net as possible. The best way to do that is to have unique approaches within the GP network that we have developed, which now allows us to have this great source of deal flow that is not very overlapping, so we see more unique opportunities.

Yeah. How are you processing— if a manager comes to you, and how are you processing Vice specifically right now, or managers that are principled about not touching certain categories? Because over the last 5 years, it seems like every major platform VC has made investments in gambling, and maybe multiple forms of gambling.

But also, some of those companies don't look like gambling at all when they start. It's like, oh, crypto, predict the election, and all sorts of sports betting.

Sure, but there's been billions of dollars deployed from a bunch of firms that historically wouldn't have touched these sort of more vice-like categories. And so, I'm imagining a manager that comes to you and says like, hey, I want to invest in the best companies in the world, but there's going to be some companies that their financial performance will be amazing, but based on my values, I don't want to touch them. That in some ways could be not good for LPs because you theoretically should back every company that's going to generate a great return that's operating within the general laws of the United States.

Just imagine the worst possible managers, like, I'm morally opposed to AI, so I sat it out for ethical reasons. Like, that's why I passed on everything now. That'd be insane.

Anyways, so I'm sort of rambling, but I think you get the general idea.

Yeah, I have an issue with the LPA and the Weiss clause.

Well, that was the first place I was going to start, which is the first thing is to always go back and check the LPA because usually there are some vice clauses in the LPA and you want to start as broad as possible, but there's always going to be an LP or 2 that you kind of are balancing. Do I really want this LP? But they've got these vice clauses. And so you have to balance that. If you're balancing that correctly and we can put that aside, I have seen a couple of GPs that actually focus on vice, like their whole point of view.

Yeah.

And their whole approach is to go after the vice opportunities, particularly because there's not a lot of capital chasing them. They're often really good businesses. And with the limited number, you keep the valuations much more reasonable. And then that preserves a lot of the upside. And I think there's another thing that just naturally happens is we evolve as a, you know, as a, When you think about the United States and where we've been historically over the past 100 years, we've almost had a little bit of a pendulum swing for certain things that are considered vice, and now they're not considered vice anymore. And then it also kind of just depends on the general mood, I think. You know, when the economy is doing well, you know, you kind of have a little more leeway with some of the things that could be a little bit more in the vice category.

Interesting.

When things get a little more restricted or when there's, you know, a certain administration that could be in, Then you could see things kind of moving in the other direction. You know, I think one of the things that I've looked at right now, I don't— I wouldn't consider it a vice per se, although if you go into certain gyms in, you know, Southern California, it could probably be a vice, which is peptides.

Oh yeah, right.

So when I start to think about peptides and how the pendulum is swinging with peptides, you know, we've got the GLP-1s, which are peptides. People may not know they're peptides, but they are. And now we've gotten we're getting a little more open to thinking about having peptides, um, be a little bit more regulated, but regulated in the right way so that we can get the research necessary so that people can now buy these on the regular market as opposed to the gray market.

Sure.

So that's one where I think, you know, the pendulum is swinging in the right direction, partially because of the administration. You know, it's RFK Jr. who's really a proponent of peptides. So, I think there are opportunities there, and you just have to— I think if I am sitting with my LP hat on, I have got to think about what parameter I want to put around the LPA and how restrictive do I want to be, because there are some great opportunities that I do not really think of them as vice anymore in the 2020s.

Well, yeah, the other thing is like, if a VC invests in a vice company and loses money on it, Then they're going to— like, if you're going to do it, at least put up good returns. So that's the other thing that's been driving more LP, probably, friendliness around a lot of this stuff, just because a lot of these companies have been performing quite well. But anyways, this was great.

Yeah, this was fantastic.

It was great to meet you. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you so much.

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. Great conversation.

This is great.

We'll talk to you soon, Fluff.

All right, take care.

Have a good one. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell Now in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on all the places.

First time reading that, John?

And now with AI agents. I don't know, I got too much going on today. We have a few more guests joining in just a minute. We'll see who's here next. We can give you the high level on the SpaceX launch for Starship's first orbital mission while we wait for our next guest to join. Elon Musk—

Next time there's a launch? And we know that Starship's going to be landing in the Pacific. I say we try to get Tyler out in the splash zone.

In the splash zone?

With the GoPro.

The GoPro?

GoPro.

What does that do? They already film these.

No, but it would be— it would hit way harder if it was Tyler behind the camera.

If my life is at stake?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would be a way to put anybody who thinks it's fake, thinks that it's AI video, well, we filmed it ourselves. We know it's real. Anyway, speaking of AI video, We have Zack London from Gossip Goblin with us here today.

What's going on?

How you doing?

How's it going?

Welcome to the show. Where in the world are you?

I'm in Sweden.

Oh, cool.

There you go.

Oh, sorry for staying up so late. Thank you for staying up so late. Please introduce yourself and what you're working on specifically. It's fascinating.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm Zack, better known online as Gossip Goblin. I make some AI videos that you guys hopefully have seen. Yeah. Yeah. And I have a feature-length film coming out in a little over 2 months.

Yeah. What was the process for making the feature-length film? What do you like? I imagine there's AI tooling that can help at every step of the way, but it feels like there's still an incredible amount of human involvement. What did you start with? A title? Did you start with a concept, a genre, a logline? Like, what was your process?

Yeah, so, so, um, contrary to popular belief, um, you're not yet able to just type in make me a movie, uh, into a box, um, although there's plenty of people trying to make that happen. Yeah. Um, no, I mean, depending on how you look at it, this is like 4 years in the making, maybe. Um, I mean, I've been making AI videos since that was really a possibility, like 4 years ago. And at first, you know, it looked pretty terrible. But I thought there was a there there, that there was like actual potential to do narrative storytelling beyond just like Will Smith spaghetti memes or, you know, just Twitter clickbait.

Yeah.

And I'd say about a year and a half ago is when the tools really hit this inflection point where it became clear that you can actually make stuff that people want to watch beyond just like the shock value of, you know, this new taboo technology. So yeah, I've been kind of building out this sci-fi universe for several years now, you know, in public on social media. And it's garnered enough, you know, interest that I was able to quit my day job, start a little studio, hire a team. And for the last 8 months, 9 months, we've been working on this feature film, um, which has been a pretty wild process.

Premiering in 2 months.

Yeah, December 4th.

That's pretty good, pretty good timeline relative to— uh, but, but talk about— talk— what can you share about the movie, like concept and general story?

Yeah, um, so, you know, everything I do, it's like I would say leaning on Pretty dark, sardonic, twisted sci-fi stuff. And there's, you know, there's a bit of like an allegory edge to it. It's not just like wild out-there sci-fi. Hopefully it's not too on the nose. But I think one of the fun parts about AI is the actual— like, I still write the script, or myself and a co-writer writes the script. We used a dozen voice actors in the film. We have musicians scoring the film. We use Foley artists for the sound effects. We have a whole post-production crew. So it's not just me in my dark basement in Sweden. There's like a full crew of people. And so I'd like to believe there's still that level of like craft and detail and authorship involved. We haven't just, you know, relegated this to, you know, pipeline of tools to just render the shit out. But it's been a pretty arduous process to put it all together. But even with that said, the actual production time is still pretty fast and lean relative to like how you would make a sci-fi epic of this scope in the past. So, I'd like to believe that the topics are like a lot timelier and more tuned to the present. And, that's all paired with like we put out 10 minutes of short-form content a week.

Yeah.

So, that's not quite the same caliber, but that keeps us kind of relevant and front and center. And now, we've caught Elon's attention recently with You know, some videos that may or may not have to do with Claude's wet lab in San Francisco.

No, to me, like, one of the biggest opportunities at the moment is like taking something like a very timely topic and then applying something that— creating something that looks like it took months and months and months to produce.

Yeah.

And I mean, South Park, like, part of why South Park always was like super topical and would become part of the conversation. It was like the first thing out of Hollywood that was scripted, that was commentating on what was happening in the relative near term.

Yeah, it's remarkable.

Yeah, totally.

So, I mean, I kind of break out the content into the ultra-short form. So, it's those 3-minute clips. And the goal there is it's part of this kind of sci-fi transhumanist universe we're building out. But, you know, I feel like San Francisco, like, writes the plots for me at this point. Like, the shit I come up with is not even sci-fi by next week. So it makes it easy.

Are you a doomer or a techno-optimist?

You know what?

Or a transhumanist?

I can be both. I can say, look, I think there's a 90% chance we survive.

Okay.

Right?

Higher sci-fi football.

That gets me fired up. Way more fired up than a 10% chance.

extension. I'm not a doomer. I'm not a doomer, but I'm also not like— But you're calling from a bunkie.

I'm not Pollyannish.

Are you calling in from a bunkie?

I mean, Sweden's kind of a bunker on its own. It's just, it's so off the grid. Like, who's gonna bother wiping it out, you know?

Yeah.

Where's the name from?

It's just always been around. I don't know. I've had the same handle online forever. I think like 10 years ago, Sticker Mule had a really good deal on vinyl stickers. And I just, I needed to come up with a username quickly before the sale went away. So I committed to the Gossip Goblin and I had such like a huge investment in the stickers that I, it's too late to pivot.

Yeah. Awesome. Um, well, come back on as you get closer to the, to the release and, uh, I'm excited for, for our audience to, uh, follow, uh, the shorts along as well.

Yeah. Congratulations on the progress.

Thanks for staying up.

Yeah. Thank you.

Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Our next guest is already here, Anish from Andreessen Horowitz, who's a general partner coming back on the show here with us to discuss all things AI, personal agents. How you doing, Anish?

Nothing. That's sweet. I got the squawking.

What was that?

Oh, that's the eagle. Oh yeah, the Eagles. Your audio, maybe get a little closer to your mic. The— you sounded—

can you do a little sound check for us? Test, test. Okay, we can hear you. Um, so personal AI agents, the biggest debate point was, is it going to destroy the restaurant industry? Is it going to gum up the restaurant industry? If you run a restaurant, is it the worst time or the best time? Are you going to be flooded with thousands of phone calls every day trying to book special occasions every 5 seconds? Or is there a white pill here? Is there a good solution where the humble restaurateur sees a modest increase to the bottom line?

That was our debate.

That was our debate. I want to know where you land.

I think it's going to be great, man. I mean, look, I think the last gen of aggregators were maybe not amazing for the restaurant industry. But if you think about the GM of Carbone, what does she want? You know, she wants to have the highest ARV people in the restaurant with the highest frequency and have a high fill rate and have some sort of entropy so new people can try the restaurant and might be future high spenders, your ability to fill the restaurant in a way that's sort of globally optimal is way higher. It's not just who clicked the website fast enough. That's one. And then 2, I think for the long-tail restaurateur, you know, they don't have to be amazing at marketing game or the kind of sort of marketing to the intermediary suppliers like Resy. So I actually think you're going to get this like long tail effect where more people will visit more restaurants. And for the restaurants that are in the part of the power law, they should actually get the best customer. I think it's very, very good.

Yeah. Let's maybe start with— I'm curious how you think that the tension right now between users who have personal agents that want them to be able to do anything are running into the wall on places like Amazon.com. We saw somebody today that got blocked from just buying something on Adidas.com with Muse, which, again, feels like a sort of casualty, like, that, you know, something— they have a system in place to block more nefarious-style bots, maybe, like, maybe it's sneaker bots or something like that. Who knows, right? But it feels like I think inevitable that users will be able to get their agents to operate on their behalf everywhere in the fullness of time. But the question is like, how long do we have that sort of tension between— I think it's really just gonna come down. I expect the Adidas of the world to adapt, but it's the ad places that are monetizing with ads. How quickly will they fall or figure out alternative solutions?

I think pretty quickly. I mean, we'll have to see how it plays out. I like what Noah said on the pod this morning, there's going to be a portion of your revenue that is driven by attention and a portion of your revenue that's driven by fulfilling transactions. And then every e-commerce retailer, they're going to know, like, you know, Amazon is disproportionately advertising perhaps, or high-margin advertising. They're going to want to focus on protecting the destination. Whereas Adidas, if they're more of a sort of transaction fulfillment business versus a destination wholesale business, I think they want to quickly get the intermediaries out of the way. I think the distance is going to be a lot of CEOs want to think of themselves as destination businesses, but in reality, they're sort of transaction fulfillment businesses.

Yeah. Are you getting pitches for, we solve the problem created by Instinct and Muse yet? Because in one way, there's already been business phone trees and transcription services and things that turn text message inbound into CRM stuff. There's AI customer support companies. But at the same time, like, this does feel like a slightly new twist, a slightly new tool relevant. But how are you dealing with that question in the era of personal agents, like the secondary businesses, or maybe the secondary businesses are just Instinct for Business, Muse for Business, that, you know, the other side We haven't seen as many yet.

I mean, the question is, what's the most extreme form of an adversarial relationship with your customer? And there's actually a little story about Brazil, which has the most lawsuits per capita of any country. And the reason for that is you can sue anyone digitally and sort of trivially. What happens is when your DoorDash is late, you just fire off a lawsuit.

Like, once—

That's amazing.

That is a very adversarial relationship. And the merchants need to buy specialized software to fend off all of the lawsuits. I think things like that will happen, demand for refunds and protesting payments and all of these areas where merchants benefit from customer apathy or being poorly informed. We haven't hit there yet.

I like this future. You asked me to order you a coffee the other day. You wanted regular milk instead of almond milk. I got you the almond milk one. You could have sued me for like 50 cents right then.

Yeah, sue a friend instantly.

Yeah, instantly.

That's really crazy. If some of these systems get abused, then they have to just remove the policy, at which point as a consumer, you would have to actually press, take some type of legal action to get the thing that used to be offered out of the box. That's kind of like the darker—

I think it's an opportunity, Jordi, actually. I take the opposite view. Think of every person, certainly over their lifetime, but maybe once a year has this This just bureaucratic weight placed on them. Maybe you move and you have to change schools for your kid. God forbid, maybe you get cancer or have a DUI. There's just so much bureaucratic administrative work that the average consumer has to do.

Yes.

And I don't know that they actually have equal access to the legal system because it's hard to get an attorney and it's hard to go to small claims court. So I kind of like this vision of the consumer being extraordinarily empowered with these things. You used to have to have a guy for.

Yeah. No, that's a good point.

How are you thinking about compute intensity in the era of personal AI agents? I've seen some wild speculation and rumors, but we've all been through the realization that going from LLMs to reasoning systems to agentic coding, every one was an exponential. We started producing 10 times the tokens, 10 times The energy, 10 times the cost, of course, 10 times the capability. So the adoption happened. But personal agents, do you have a feeling for how much it costs to serve someone? Do you have any idea for how to even think about this? Or even does it require a new mode of thinking, or is it just the same old?

I think right now our best estimates are $1,000 per user per year, which is obviously Prohibitive if you're running this. I think there are a couple of reasons to be optimistic if you're running startups.

Pause for one second too, because when you think about making that back on transaction fees, like the average person is not going to be spent— the average person just simply doesn't spend $100,000 a year on like hotels and flights and things like that. And so, there is like the cost has to drop meaningfully if you want to be able to make up, if you want to be able to keep the services free and make it up with like 3% or 5% fees.

Yeah. The average American, just so you know, spends $5,000 to $6,000 on travel plus commerce, online travel plus commerce a year.

Yeah.

You have to have a very high take rate. Look, the number one thing that needs to happen is costs need to deflate, and they will. Yeah. Right? We've seen this over and over again. Like right now, Astra is kick-ass at computer use. It's very expensive. It will get cheap very quickly. Actually, the most exciting thing I saw in the last 2 weeks was Jed. Yeah. With computers. Yeah. Like, computer use is 100x cheaper and faster today. Yeah. So I think there are these kind of dark horse opportunities that it could deflate costs faster. Otherwise, you're kind of fighting a 2-front war on customer acquisition and compute capacity.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

Oh, last question I had. just purely speculating earlier that it feels very natural, like agents now have a phone number and a computer. It feels very natural for them to have like their own dedicated sort of— this is the first time that I've got— I've heard a bunch of pitches for like why agents are gonna use stablecoins and this and that, and I wasn't ever fully sold.

Yeah.

But this feels like you could imagine an instinct being like, hey, we're just gonna— here's a credit card that you can use It has some of these, these benefits and maybe, um, and it just feels like that's an easy way to like start monetizing all of this volume, uh, without having to go get the opt-in from every single long-tail retailer and service provider that you're driving a bunch of traffic to.

Yeah, that's, that's absolutely right. Like, unfortunately, just the take rate on those things is not high enough to still sustain you. It's a good idea. I think the more interesting question, Jordi, is what happens when agents are independent economic actors? And they can go look for work and get paid for doing work on your behalf and teach them your specialized knowledge and skills. Like the whole agent economy thing is definitely coming and it's gonna be wild.

That will be wild.

Yeah, 'cause right now there's millions of people reaching out to businesses, for example, offering to effectively be a meat proxy for them to just do work that the models can already do and then just give it back to them. Yeah. And then at what point, you know, I'm sure there's people out there that have just just scaled up outbound to the degree that they're effectively doing this already just as a company. But at what point can you have something more like an independent agent? It's fascinating. But anyways, great to catch up on this. Very helpful points of view. And come back on soon.

Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

Cheers.

seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. There's a Tesla Roadster update. It's been delayed to October 15th. It was supposed to be October 7th. They've been tracking the weather closely, but the severe conditions predicted, and because this event can only be held outdoors, they rescheduled it. So we will have to wait until October 15th to get the update on the new Tesla Roadster. Anyway, our next guest is Already with us in the waiting room, we have Evan Conrad from San Francisco Compute. He's the co-founder and CEO. What's up?

Long overdue. So happy to have you on the show. Yeah, way overdue. Only about a year overdue.

Yeah, but thank you so much for coming on. I already know what we're going to talk about, but please introduce yourself and the company a little bit to give everyone some lay of the land.

Hey, I'm Evan.

We make a company called San Francisco Compute. We're the inventor of compute markets.

Okay. And what is the current state of compute markets? How mature are they? Where do you want these to go? Break us down for the status quo, and then we can start talking about the future.

So our impression is that right now compute kind of looks like the early days before there was a power grid. And when that happened, every factory ran its own generator, and they had to schedule that generator to exist for peak capacity.

Okay.

And then during idle hours, they would just sort of burn that money. And so what happened in the power markets is that utilities came in and they pooled demand between all of these different factories. And then by doing that, you made the economics of all the factories better. And this is how we scaled up electrification of the country. This is what people are trying to do with compute markets. It's what we are trying to do with compute markets. But I think at the moment there's a whole bunch of folks who are entering the space, and the way that they're trying to do it is they're typically trying to create some sort of index price, and then you can create a cash-settled future on top of this. Our impression is that by doing this, you're divorcing it from the actual technology under the hood because the index isn't connected to anything. Like, you're not actually buying the compute. You're sort of trading on this magical number. Yeah.

Is there a solution here where you look at the Semi Analysis Cluster Max 3, you view that more like a Moody's credit rating, and you assign different tranches of compute? Because maybe we're not in a fully homogeneous market for compute yet, but it's actually reasonable to trade CoreWeave for Nebius, which both earned the top ranking in ClusterMax 3. And then you go down the list and maybe there's a little bit of a delta in value between compute, but within a particular tranche, if they're all rated AAA or BBB, it's okay to actually treat those as fungible. How close are we to that?

I think the real problem is that you just don't have very many people at the top of that ladder.

Okay.

And so one of the things that needs to happen before we get to compute markets is you need to sort of level up the whole market. Right now, the folks that are easiest able to enter the market are the people with lots of capital, lots of land, lots of power, but not necessarily a lot of supercomputing expertise. And so I think that's why we're in the current stage of the market where you have a few excellent players like Cory or like Nebius.

Yeah.

But you don't really have enough actual participants that know what they're doing in order to make it possible to have a market.

And what is the key unlock to raise the floor here? Is it the actual chipsets, the networking technology, the software that's installed? Because I know that there's variation across basically basically every dimension, and that feels like the enemy of commoditization. But at the same time, there's a huge amount of companies that are saying like, look, you're not going to commoditize without me, AMD, having a say, or me, another networking provider, having a say. Everyone wants to bring something to bear.

Yeah. So, our impression or our view at San Francisco Compute is that you need a market operator that has to be independent from the other sort of other clouds. Otherwise, if it's not independent, Wall Street won't trust it.

Okay.

That market operator also needs to do what's called physical settlement. And in this case, physical settlement, we think, means running the whole damn thing.

Sure.

You've got to run it all the way down to the data center itself. That includes even building the data centers in some cases.

Interesting.

And if you do that, then you can standardize because you can make the whole operator be the same thing, and then you can plug in capacity. You can plug in land and power and other assets into it, and you get lots of different market participants. But that's the way the grid works. There's a grid operator, and they sort of run and manage things. That allows it to standardize. Right now, we're in the world where people are— you're like trading capacity. And imagine if we did this in the power market where I traded you a coal plant for a nuclear power plant. That's basically what we're doing right now.

Interesting. I mean, at the same time, there are plenty of heterogeneity in the oil refinery business. But then once the oil gets to be a standard crude and it's graded, then it can be traded as a commodity. Is there not some— isn't that a prerequisite that basically the vast majority of compute comes online in some homogeneous market to really create like the commodity vision that people are seeing in the future as opposed to just more standardization within individual neo-clouds or compute providers? Doesn't something have to happen at a higher level of abstraction?

So, to some extent, yeah. So, this is what we think of ourselves as doing.

Sure.

Is by making that refinery exist.

Yeah.

On the other hand, it's just way more nuanced than that. These are supercomputers, not soybeans.

Yeah.

And so there's just like, yeah, it is just frankly more complicated.

Make it easier, if only. So yeah, what is your plan right now? What's the stage of the company? I mean, you've raised money, but how close are you to, do you think, to acquiring power, building a data center? Is that the plan in the near term?

Yeah.

Okay.

Can't say that much, but—

Okay, it's in the works.

We're doing pretty well. The biggest computer ever.

Yeah. Yeah, we're shooting for the biggest computer ever.

Yeah. And is it not viable to— I mean, should I think of the hyperscalers as sort of building a fungible layer on top of all the NeoClouds? Because when you look at the NeoClouds, so many of have partnerships with AWS, GCP, the big AI labs. And in some ways, you could imagine some commodity— some commoditization happening like in the AWS console. But do you think it's viable to try and come over the top and create a new platform that marshals compute across all the different NeoClouds? Or will there be like NeoCloud revolt for that or organ rejection? Because they will only do that if it's Amazon, and they have to play nice.

So our impression is that there's a missing utility. We think of like the hyperscalers as kind of the old school factories, and they've got these sort of generators or power companies that are working with them. And they totally, they've sort of abstracted over the power companies, in this case, the NeoClouds is sort of that analogy. And now they're producing goods from their factory. The problem is, if you want to really scale everything up, you need to figure out how to make a market that can secure the risk for other people to scale things up as well. And if you do that, that's great for the existing participants. Like, that's going to be great for the hyperscalers. It's also going to be great for the NeoClouds. But that market needs to be independent in order to exist. And the operation of the market, the technology needs to be co-designed with the order book itself. Otherwise, you can't actually do this.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, congrats on the progress. Good luck. I'm excited for the next announcement. Come back when it's live.

We'd love to talk to you then. Yeah, or anytime you have hot takes. Yeah, anytime, anytime. Last question. There's someone on X that's been posting about, I'm not just going to keep posting through this infrastructure build-out. I'm getting in on the action. I'm levering up personally to get compute to be able to participate in this.

Sure.

What are your thoughts on the humble home supercomputer operator that wants to get into the token flow? Should they just be buying NVIDIA and be levered long there and just sit back and do nothing? Or should they have their own rack at home, a little bit of power, and be feeding the token stream?

So I think I know who you're talking about, and I would say they are doing more than just a rack in your house. What we do at San Francisco Compute is we help people become clouds, and then we help them sell those clouds on the market. We're like a supercomputer developer, and we think— well, we know, we've seen this— that all the money and all the capital and all the power is sort of trying to figure out how to turn itself into GPUs. Because there's a really strong economic reason to do that right now. And so we're seeing this happen across the market. Our gist as a company is we're gonna help them do that and help make it possible that there's a large amount of new NeoClouds, new NCPs in the NVIDIA terminology. And then we're gonna help them get financed by building the market that makes it possible to de-risk them.

That makes a lot of sense. Well, thanks for—

I have one, my second last question.

Okay.

And sorry for keeping you a little bit over, but you clearly love to use these different historical analogies. And I'm wondering when people build up— bring up sort of like railroad build-out and overbuild and try to comp it to this present moment, there are certainly a variety of strong comparisons that you can make. What's your reaction to that? Where do you think that sort of analogy falls short? I would say one of them is like, if you just build a railroad effectively to nowhere and there's not a lot of economic activity there and you invest all this money into it and then there's not that much value creation, it's obvious why those kind of things can blow up. Whereas with compute, if you can build a bunch of compute, the current state of things is like the compute will— the demand will find it one way or another. Even if you're a tier 3, 4, or 5 operator, if you have fundamentally, if you have power and GPUs, like someone will find you and sort of force you into being competent and economically viable one way or another.

Yeah. So I think kind of what you're getting at is, is there an AI bubble? Are we out overbuilding like crazy? This is the problem we're trying to solve. Right now, it's important to understand where that bubble is.

Solving. He's solving the bubble.

Thank you.

Good. Yeah. So the bubble itself—

Someone had to do it.

Yeah.

It works like this. There's— the cloud itself doesn't deploy the GPU cluster until they have the contract in hand from the customer. And then they force the customer to pay them a massive deposit upfront so that they can give it to the OEM, who then gives it it off to Nvidia. But the AI lab itself doesn't have that capital yet because they need it for the future. And so they go off and they raise money at massive valuations. And all the VCs look around and say, shit, this AI lab, it's asking for a crazy valuation. And is that okay, guys? Is everyone cool with that? And they all look around and say, well, I guess we missed out on OpenAI and Anthropic. And so maybe these people will be OpenAI and Anthropic too. And so we'll go with the big valuation, but then the venture capitalist owns the risk. So if you're looking for a bubble, it's held currently by the venture capitalists. And we're trying to solve that problem by de-risking compute in the future, by basically making it possible to know what the price of GPUs will be off into the future. And that reduces a lot of this problem, because then you don't have to have the big deposit upfront from the customer, which then means you don't have to have the big giant valuation that's probably maybe a little overvalued from where it should be.

And then you're the king in the castle, king in the castle.

John's out of control.

I have a problem with excitement.

Great points, Evan. We'd love to do this again soon, and we'll make sure to get more time next time.

Yeah, have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you guys for hanging.

Goodbye.

Cheers.

Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is here live with us in the TVP and Ultra Den. We have Sean Duncan. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Good to see you.

Made it.

Thanks so much for coming on down. To Hollywood, to the TVP in Ultradome.

Thank you for having me.

Why don't you introduce yourself for those who maybe are living under a data center?

I'm the Stadguy.

Yes.

I make videos, sometimes in character.

Yeah.

Satirizing some of the absurd lifestyles that exist around the world.

You're no longer a creator, you're the CEO of a media company. Is that— how do you think about yourself? yourself now?

Talent and operator.

Operator, right? Because you have a team, I assume.

I do. I do. I think that's the case for many creators right now, and I think the reason why people started using the media company term is because they felt insulted by the term creator. I actually feel celebrated by it. So, well, I don't mind. Creator was an upgrade.

Influencer was like a slur. Yeah, exactly. And then they're like, okay, creator's a little bit nicer. Being creative is good. But yeah, what is the—

No, it is an important point because I know creators that like, they desperately, they're like, I don't want to be seen as a creator. I want to be seen as a CEO. I want to be seen as a business owner. Founder. And then there's actually the level above that, which is like, no, I actually enjoy— I think we both experienced this having run companies and then doing this. Yeah. Like just being talent and being the host is the thing that I feel like I'm best Yep. Like, I'm pretty OK at building companies and running companies and managing people, but it's not the thing that I enjoy as much as just hanging out and talking with John and the people in our network. And so, I think a lot of those people, hopefully, they'll get to come around and be like, actually, no, I like just making the thing that is the business.

Yeah.

So, one of the things— yeah, one of the reasons I was excited to have you on the show is that in the same way that you use humor to talk about these sort of like lifestyles and consumption and travel. Basically, like we started doing this in character.

Yeah.

Like in the most like sort of insane version of, in the case of, for us, it was like tech bros, right? Or we started the show, it was called Technology Brothers before we realized like, hey, maybe there's something bigger here. But we were being like, So, at times, like, maybe too humorous about a bunch of different—

It was a satire on the quiet luxury trend in Silicon Valley. We called it loud opulence. We wanted it to be as loud and over the top as possible and sort of like poke fun at the fact that there's so many people in San Francisco that are extremely wealthy and they're like, I drive a Prius. And it's like, okay, what do you drive on the weekend?

You know, you got a Koenigsegg in the garage. But sometimes, it takes somebody willing to just lean into humor and to actually tell the truth about certain things.

Yeah.

Thank you. I appreciate the compliments. Yeah, it's fun.

But yeah, I think, yeah, where should we start? Maybe a review of Euro Summer. How do you rate the last quarter?

Blown at this point?

I think Eurosummer is still on for those who can be in that position to have it still be on. But Eurosummer, I think, ends in October.

OK.

Oh, so we'll have to have you back.

So we're in the fall.

You can have me back for the fall.

We're in the fall. We're in the final days.

Yeah, we're in the final days. I think mid-October starts to slow down. I mean, don't forget, many people who live in Europe are professional consumers. They don't work much, and they've learned the ways of summering through generations. It's not a, oh, I'll do this when I make it. It's actually a, I grew up doing this. And that's, I think, where a lot of the humor comes from and a lot of the judgment comes from, where some of the people that you interview or even poke fun at on the show, that's who they feel judged by because they make a lot of money. They go to Europe for the first time. they sometimes make the wrong spending decisions because what they thought was cool is maybe not so cool.

Yeah. No, that's the thing. When you— if you're in a family that has been very successful for generations, the next gen, the younger generation, is effectively judging each other based on how they are consuming. Like, that is in here, at least within our networks. It's like the judgment is like, well, what company are you building? Are you Are you the category leader? How much money have you raised? How big is your team? Like, specifically with, like, you know, the people that are on the show. In Europe, it's like, you know, it's, it's what watch are you wearing, but not, not like how much money did you spend on it, but how unique is it and what is, like, the history behind it and do you know the watchmaker and how much time have you spent here or there and where, you know, not just— I mean, it just goes on and on and on, and I appreciate it. I took a driving trip to Austria recently, and I feel like I'm getting better at spending money, and I've always liked— No, I'm just saying, I've always liked consumption. I've just always enjoyed it.

Like most of us, I think.

You think you were bad at it?

I certainly have been bad at— like, when I talk about being bad at consumption, it's like you buy something and you regret the purchase.

OK. Yeah.

Because maybe your taste level increased.

You bought something that was expensive.

Yeah, even as a kid, I bought a certain piece of snowboarding gear. And then I realized a month later, well, I shouldn't have bought that because this other thing is actually the thing that you really want. Sure, sure. OK.

I mean, listen, I think that's generally a good thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

of people who can afford to do so. I think those who aren't very good at consuming aren't very good because they're busy producing.

Yeah.

And that's like macroeconomically, it's kind of what's happening right now.

Sure, yeah.

That people in the US are making a whole lot more than most in Europe. And when they take their 14 days off, or for some, let's say slightly more, they ball out and they make a big splash. And then these resorts like Saint-Tropez, for example, actually rely on the US consumer who comes in for 14 days and goes crazy.

Interesting.

Meanwhile, a European consumer gets average 28 days off a year.

Yeah.

So literally twice as much.

Yeah.

And they're making at least half as much.

Yeah.

So they actually need to make the dollar go a lot further.

Yeah.

Yeah. While you, you're in Austria, you're— you can ball out.

Well, yeah, but what I appreciate is that like the friends that I was with were like going to the hole-in-the-wall place that they had been for going to for 20 years at this point. And it's not— for them, it's not at all about how much money can you spend, even if they could theoretically spend just as much as the sort of like American going crazy for 2 weeks. But it's about—

Yeah. How do businesses in Saint-Tropez actually price discriminate? Is it like, okay, we know this is when American summer will be here, so let's raise prices Is it just there are more expensive things on the menus, and so we know that the Americans will gravitate towards that? Like, what strategies do you see where you're like, oh, this is a sharp business operator? They're both keeping the European clientele happy when they're in town, but then they're also extracting max value from the Americans who are there.

I think for the most part, a great case study for this is hotels. Because I think if restaurants play with prices, it's usually not a very good restaurant. It's usually very gimmicky or more like a club or like a beach club, which no one, I think, goes to consistently.

Yeah.

I think anyone who goes to a party setting beach club and sprays champagne does it once or twice as a festive occasion to celebrate the moment. But then when they go back, they go with their fiancée or their wife, and it's more modest, and they're drinking wine instead of spraying champagne. So I think those occasion-based restaurants, I'd actually forget them in this conversation.

Sure.

For hotels, I think it's just pure supply and demand. I think there's a few hotels that offer exceptional experiences, and every year there's more people generating insane amounts of wealth and wanting to vacation there for a few years, and they just raise the prices as much as they can. Some hotels, though, stay very loyal to the consumer you were talking about, that has been staying with them for years and that values the substance more than the status of that place. And the hotel loves that. And they may not be necessarily owned by a big group or a publicly traded hospitality group where they actually need to have crazy growth every year. They can just sustain.

Yeah. How do you— it feels like one of the ways that you select for the more discerning generational client is like you make things like less Instagram-friendly than they maybe could, right? So, you could have a hotel that has incredible service level, but it looks like kind of something more casual and country, right?

Sure.

Versus the new hotel build that where every single moment is designed to like look really good on camera and there's good lighting and it feels like very— like it has these aesthetics of being very luxurious, but the service quality might actually be far worse. But it feels like certain establishments now, they need to actually not lean into that sort of generic global Instagram aesthetic.

I think it's less of an intention and more of an outcome of actually something a little deeper. I think that the deeper thing is family-owned versus is massive hospitality group owned.

Yeah.

And these massive groups need to justify their existence, and they need to keep growing and growing and growing. And that's at the expense often of quality. And through the method of painting things gold and having this sort of status element and making things Instagrammable so they can market and justify their higher and higher These family-owned hotels, they don't care about that. They don't need the Instagram. They're sold out months in advance, sometimes years in advance, and they're just happy to exist and survive. And they can focus on the substance elements with the ingredients in the kitchen, and they don't need to have the flashy things that attract people. Ultimately, I really think that luxury consumers, and this is what I actually talk about in my content sometimes out of character. on my podcast or in character in my satire. But I think luxury consumption exists as a journey, and it's a journey from people jumping into this world and feeling judged and making the wrong consumption decisions and buying the wrong things and dining at the wrong places and acting the wrong way and slowly becoming more and more discerning. And that can happen over 5 years or 50 years, but I think it always happens.

It always happens.

I think it always happens. I don't really know anyone who's had the financial power to consume and travel to these beautiful places for their entire life and act silly the entire time. I think they get better and better as time goes on. And with knowledge and some judgment, they often improve faster than you.

So, you're saying there's a chance I could be the first person to never develop taste?

Well, yeah. And it's funny because it expresses itself. in different ways. Like, I think like in the Alps, like a Lamborghini Urus is like actually, if it's specced properly, can be like an incredible car. And when I see them in that context, I think, wow, I really wish I— like I should get one of those. But the problem is you put it in the LA context and it's just like the sort of the whole thing just doesn't work.

Sure.

Right? Just because of the sort of local context.

Yeah.

How do you see wellness as a hospitality trend? It feels like we're still at peak wellness and maybe there's room to grow. But at the same time, I personally, I've had saunas and cold plunges for probably 6 years now at home. And so, for me, when I'm traveling somewhere, I'm not even really— that's not— maybe it's on the of things that I think are— maybe it's cool if you have a sauna at the property, but that's not like why I'm sort of like moving around the world to experience these things. And it feels like a lot of people say they want those things, but when they're traveling, they sometimes like— there's a bunch of other things that are maybe more worth their time. But where do you see it sort of trending?

I feel like the health and wellness thing is now nearly like the final boss. stage of consumption where stage 1, people focus on that status I was talking about. When they first make money, they want to celebrate. It's festive. They're like, I made it. I want to go party and show people I made it.

Sure.

Stage 2, I think, is indulgence. They go on a lot of wine tours, drink a ton of wine, eat a lot of caviar. And it's like still somewhat statusy, but they think it's more understated. But it's still highly indulgent. And then eventually they get over it and they say, you know what? I bought all the cars. I got the watches. I'm over all of this. What really matters? And they dive deeper into health and wellness. And all the people I know eventually, to be honest, that have been spending for a long time, who go from flashy to understated, eventually also go to sporty. And that's the final boss. Yeah. They go from cashmere to athleisure. Still still in cashmere.

And then what's their marathon time?

Exactly.

Yeah, what's their triathlon or cycling? Because they want to live forever.

Exactly.

Yeah, this is— we were having a conversation. Brian Johnson wanted this. Yeah, we were talking about, for an interview that hasn't been released yet, about this sort of tech—

We're alive now.

No, no, no. It wasn't— someone was interviewing us. Oh, OK. Yeah. And they were asking like who we look up to. And it's actually like we look up to the CEOs that don't just like have a cool car collection, but they're actually like doing motorsports at the, at a high level, like Pro-Am level.

Yeah.

Where they're going and they're doing like, it's cool endurance racing and things like that where it's not like they can buy any car in the world, but it's like if you can buy any car in the world, what are you, what are you doing with that? The ability, right? It's like, can you keep it on the track? Can you be, At these sort of iconic races and actually be fast enough to not embarrass yourself. And that's really— that's like rising up to that next level you're talking about.

I think so too.

I want to talk about the characters.

Sure, please.

Yeah, the dividing line. Like, how do you think about building the portfolio of characters? So you have 2 now.

I have 2.

Is there going to be a 3rd? Is this something you're considering? Are you— do you even Do you even think about it that way? And then is there— how harsh is the line between you're not in character? Like, we have loose characters that we slip into here and there, but do you slip in and out of them ever? Or is it like, OK, I am producing a piece of content in this character, there's a hard line, and then I'm going to do an interview out of character, and there's a hard line?

OK. I love this question.

I think it's like in real life, you're like, who am I right now?

Exactly. That's what I asked myself this morning.

No, no, we actually had our team like text your team and be like, does he want to do it in character? Because that's fine. We just don't want to be like throwing questions at you and not be on the same page a little bit. But you could have ambushed us. Maybe you still will.

That's true. I might jump in. Yeah. I'll walk you through the—

Yeah, explain the characters.

Explain the whole thing. So characters, I have 3 characters. Okay. The 3rd is just me, myself, which is here. So we'll ignore that for now. Okay. The 2 main characters are Constant Constance and Colton. Constance is everything heritage. He's a constant. He's been there 100 years ago. He'll be there 100 years in the future. He's the ambassador of excellence, the old world of luxury, the old world of Europe. He is old money, taste, tact, manners.

Yes.

He is who your grandparents want you to be when you visit Constance. Exactly. That's Constance. He's head to toe in the finest or a Piana cashmere. He's wearing the best watches. He drives understated cars. He hikes. He sails. He's chic. Constance. His cousin Colton is the anti-Constance. Sorry to say it. Colton is everything hype. Colton is everything status, while Constance is substance. Colton wants to follow every trend.

Colton bought the Louis Vuitton Singer collab.

I thought that was actually pretty cool.

And Colton is basically the anti-Constance. Sure. And I use them to show both sides.

Yeah, because they're occupying the same spaces.

I think they're actually occupying the same mind. And that's where I was going with the account. I think there's no pure play— I mean, no is a big word. There's very few pure Constance. Totally. Very few pure Colton. Yeah. What I see happening is on a Friday night, people want to be Colton.

Yep.

Sunday morning, they want to play some golf, and they want to be Constance.

Yeah.

And actually, it's a push and pull of an internal dilemma of a wealthy consumer.

Yes.

And that's where I started going with the account, where actually you can—

And so there's not a uniform judgment on both of them. There might be ones more to aspire to, but there's a reality there between both of them.

Exactly. It's actually a fluid emotion. It's like the angel and devil on your shoulder.

Yeah.

To exaggerate it. And I used the characters to really storytell the what.

Yeah.

What is driving this world? What matters in this Stadtguy world?

Yeah.

Through the voices of satire of Constance and Colton. The how is the manners.

Yeah.

The tact. You don't just buy a Loro Piana cashmere sweater. There's a way to wear it. There's a way to celebrate it. You don't just go to Château Lacoste in Provence. You appreciate the art a certain way. You drink the wine a certain way. That's the how. The final step, which I noticed my audience going through, is actually the why. Everyone who would eventually enjoy these beautiful experiences would sit there and wonder, why am I even here? Why do these clothes matter? Why do these watches matter? And that felt disrespectful to do in character. Oh, sure. Because I'm talking to hoteliers and restaurateurs. and craftsmen and people really putting their life and passion into ultimately luxuries, but with so much serious love, I had to do it as myself. So I broke character for the why. So the what and the how, Constance and Colton in character. The why is just me here talking to you.

If you want an even more insufferable term beyond influencer, creator, world builder is the one that really gets people going these days. But it is true that— Shod Guy is a world, and it's fascinating hearing you how they, they play with each other. How much are the 2 characters in dialogue with each other? How do you think about if there is an event, a trend, a topic that you need to give both sides, or is there a moment when you say, no, this is the right tool for the job, I'm gonna pull this character off the shelf for this moment? How do you think about building that world in more fullness?

Yeah, I mean, I rarely use Colton now, okay? Because I think the world is exhausted of Colton. Sure. Like people when they see Colton on screen, they're like, "I just scrolled past five Coltons." They get it. I'm tired of this guy.

Sure.

I don't want to hear from him. I don't want to see him. Constance is still quite novel because seeing the frown and seeing Stad.

Well, it's novel because the Constance does not post their lifestyle on social media exactly to nearly the same degree.

Yeah.

Right? And so, using the humor and being like adopting the character, most of the people I know that fit that archetype are like incredibly private.

Yes.

Maybe they have a social media account, but they'll post— if they were just posting constantly, it would just seem like they were just flexing on the world constantly, right? And so, there's this weird awkwardness where there are certain types of people that sort of like full-time consumer that it would be very distasteful if they were just documenting their in the same way as like an Austin-based wellness influencer, right?

Totally, totally.

Because it'd be like, okay, we get it, you're at another hotel. We get it, you're at dinner.

Yeah, I have a friend who was like, I had to stop using social media because he learned how to fly helicopters and planes. And like, he was doing all this like insane stuff. And he was like, yeah, if I just post this, it looks like I'm flexing on everyone.

No, and I think that's why, that's why the character resonates so deeply with like the next gen.

Sure.

Because they're like, okay, I'm able to see something of myself on social media. And even though it's through satire, it's still like real.

Yeah. And they never got offended because ultimately it's— even though it's poking fun, it's poking fun up. So, it's celebratory. I'm poking fun at people's privilege. And by design, that can never be offensive because it's privilege.

How much do you think about formats and testing new formats? I mean, ultimately, you're uploading a video file. an MP4. It can be shot on a phone, it can be shot on cinema camera, you can edit a hype reel, you can do a lot of different things within the medium of Instagram Reels, within the medium of Instagram as a platform. How often do you get the itch to scratch some other format, to take the character into a more cinematic world or a more casual world? How much do you want to branch out? Because I know the default is like, you will be punished by the algorithm if you do that. But I think every creator feels the urge every once in a while to say, I want to— I just want the experience of doing something at 20 minutes or 2 hours or shorter or whatever.

I run the account, I think, in quite a unique way. And I started Stadiguy 8 years ago. So this is pre-Reels feature. Actually, when Reels was pre-launched, they were reaching out to certain video-native creators and creatives online and paying them to start using Reels instead of IGTV, which was the past video feature.

I forgot about that.

And I was one of those early creators. So I had never— the reason why I say that is I had never been led by the algorithm.

Sure.

I'd actually been led by my audience.

Sure.

And that's why I started the account. The way the account started was I filmed a video privately that went viral on WhatsApp. People sent it to each other.

Yeah.

And then someone stopped me on the street and said, hey, I got a video of you on WhatsApp. That's crazy.

To get recognized from a WhatsApp video.

And then I thought, okay, I should create an account.

Yeah.

There should be something here.

Yeah, yeah.

And I really felt at service to that first person who stopped me.

Sure.

And those initial followers who happened to be incredibly private, as you mentioned, and incredibly wealthy, and hadn't engaged with this sort of content before. Now I have millions of followers, which I'm very grateful for. But before I post, I'm still trying to service that initial niche audience. And it seems strange and novel online, but the way I like to think about it is actually a bit more like a restaurant. And no one questions this in restaurants, but they question it online, where what's a better business model, in quotes? Is it a fast food chain that sells a lot of products at a very low price, or is it a fine dining restaurant that sells very few products at a high price?

Yeah.

And the answer is whatever is right for the restaurateur.

Yeah.

There's no right or wrong.

Of course.

It's all up to them.

Yep.

And I happen to take the path of I don't actually care about the masses. If they're crowding around the restaurant, and there's lots of people there and lots of views, that's great. But really what I care about is the few people in the room that I really care in servicing with this very unique product. And that's why these brands work with me.

Yeah.

The brands I work with could work with people that have far greater reach and far greater eyeballs, but instead they work with me because of the fact that I have a few that they are struggling to reach.

Hard to reach. That's the exact approach we took early on. Now, we have 1.5 million followers on X, something like that. But I still stand by our original intuition was that there's 200,000 people in the whole world that we really make content for, and every single show is developed for them. And you can imagine people joining the show, listening to a minute just being like, I don't know what these guys are talking about, or it doesn't seem important, like, it's super boring, and then leave forever. But then, every day, there's people that find the show and they're like, wow, I didn't know there was something that was like this curated around my set of interests and what I care about in business and markets and some of the other topics that we touch. And it's like the best possible thing that you can do is just not chase— like, every single creator that is just doing the thing that gets them the most views on the next video, almost universally those audiences are not valuable.

Yeah.

And it's actually like only, I would say MrBeast is sort of doing that in a way where he's actually being like, what is the next thing that I can do that will be bigger than the last thing?

Yeah.

And that works for him 'cause his whole sort of thing is like scale and how do I entertain a billion people? But for almost every other kind of like niche and category of creator, If you're just optimizing for going viral on the next video, you just lose the thing that made it great in the first place.

I'm generally not an optimizer or like an engagement-driven person, but there is one feature that I love on Instagram, and that is see shared activity. I don't know if X has this. It's an amazing feature. Basically, it allows you to go to someone's profile and see how they've engaged with your account since the moment The reason why that's important to me is because I have a table of archetypes.

Sure.

And I have the finance bro.

Yeah.

I have the, um, second-generation art collector and all these different archetypes of— that I— the wine aficionado, people that I talk to my advertisers about.

Yep.

And I track how they're engaging with my content. And if I made a specific video for that archetype and that person did not engage with it, I failed. Even if it has millions of views.

Yeah, yeah.

'Cause my priority was never to entertain. My priority was to engage with people.

It also feels like the characters and the brand, it would be so easy to slip into rage bait and have the entire audience be like, we hate this guy, right? Because like there's just a natural inclination for, oh, this is wealth stuff. Like let's just, Or even just completely fake aspirational stuff for people that would never book a trip ever, but they're just scrolling it and they're like kids that would never have the opportunity or maybe in years. But yeah, dialing in that audience is really key.

How do you think that AI will impact luxury and hospitality in some of these categories? Because I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and I think it's very— Almost invincible to a lot of technology.

If you operate a hotel in Saint-Tropez, get ready for 1,000 AI agents to call you every day.

No, I mean, that's one way, but that's one way. But even then, it's like those kind of properties already have protections in place, a management team and a style of working with clients that is impervious to, hopefully, impervious to the internet. If— but anyways, I've spent a bunch of time thinking of it, and I'm coming up blank. When you think about categories like watchmaking, it's like I could not care less if the Holy Trinity is using AI, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's like I don't— I can imagine a way that robotics could impact that, but hopefully it would allow them to do something that they've never been able to do before, and being driven by the actual watchmakers themselves in a way that feels like they're carrying the brand forward. But when you think about hotels, you can imagine AI agents that you can text at all hours of the day and you get an instant response. But again, you're still gonna be wanting to stay at a hotel where there's a manager that you can talk to, that you can pass by in the hallway, and they can support you and your stay and make it excellent.

talent, right?

And so, and you do the same thing with like fashion, right? It still comes down to like, what is the vision of the creative director and the people involved with the brands and the designers and all these different things? And like, again, you can imagine them using AI, but I don't even, I can't see it ever becoming like at the forefront or really imagining it like changing the way that like Bottega approaches collections. Like, it feels like some of these things are just like enduring and will just remain the same way. But what's your view?

I think we have to answer this question quite specifically. The reason why I think is because there's true luxury and craftsmanship, and there's true scale and optimization, and then there's the reality of the world, which exists fluidly somewhere in between with many hyper-optimized businesses pretending to be craftsmen first. Yeah. And true luxury businesses.

Yeah.

And I think AI kind of acts like a steroid in the sense that if someone wants to be optimized, they can be more optimized than ever. But a hole-in-the-wall French restaurant, if they wanted to optimize their booking process with OpenTable or SevenRooms, they would have. So it's not like they've been waiting for this AI optimization. They've resented everything anyway. They still have a corded phone.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The hotel has been resisting all this stuff for so long. The whole thing. They even resist air conditioning, some of these places.

So I think really it's the optimized will become more optimized, and therefore less luxurious. Therefore, these two The 2 poles we're talking about become more polarized and the exclusive becomes more exclusive. So all the agents knocking on the door, what does that mean? The door becomes thicker.

Yep.

And they only allow the pre-AI guests to join. And I actually love a hotel. It's called Il San Pietro in Positano. It's a very special family-owned hotel, farm to table. Over 70% of the guests are people that have stayed at the hotel for over 10 years, and over 50% are over 20 years. So this is like a members club without a membership. This is a, a true home, a vacation home, really. And the new people who'd like to go there are by referral only. And that's why this whole new members club thing actually kind of bugs me, because I think it's, it's all just marketing. It's all kind of junk where if you can Just if the only barrier to joining a club and becoming a member is financial, it's not a real club. It should be based on values, and knowledge, and time, and connection.

And some of these clubs try to put on this idea that it's not like the second that you hit the form on the website. They send you—

By invite only. If you pay $1,000.

They sort of intentionally— clearly, they have an automation that's like, OK, new user applies. In 2 months, send them the bill.

Yeah, sort of like— I think the whole members club thing is also another topic that needs cracking. But I think those who have not optimized will not be optimized. But yeah, they will be.

How much are you traveling?

A lot.

OK. Do you have a home base? Do you have multi-home base? How much time do you spend in Europe versus America? How would you even describe a normal year?

You've got to be on the circuit.

Yeah, I'm on the circuit a lot. It's kind of funny because the lifestyle I poked fun at is now the lifestyle I live.

Of course.

I do it kind of differently where I'm working. So although I'm posting videos of these beautiful hotels, I'm usually working at those beautiful hotels and not indulging the entire time.

Of course.

But I'm not complaining here. I'm also very blessed that I manage to indulge in between. I'm staying at hotels around the world probably 8 months of the year. OK, yeah. 200 nights or something. I'm always on the move.

Very cool.

It's a blessing, though. It's cool.

Are you getting pulled away from Europe as your platform grows? Is there demand for what you've done for Europe? Let's see, we should get him to bring his audience to Asia. So it's worth us paying up, or the Middle East. I could see there being a lot of things where that clientele, it's almost higher LTV to get one of your audience members to visit a new territory. And so maybe there's more pressure or incentive for you to branch out. But I'm sure there's a trade-off there for you.

I mean, what's funny is that I storytell a lot in Yeah. But most of my audience is in the US.

Yeah.

And that's the same way that the nicest hotels in Saint-Tropez, their biggest spending customer base are Americans.

Sure.

And that's exactly what's happened to my page. It's actually this incredible US curiosity of Europe and wanting to consume in Europe—

Of course.

That has allowed my page to grow as fast as it has. So the biggest pull right now business-wise is actually in the US.

Sure.

Of US businesses wanting to be affiliated with this US way of— sorry, European way of consuming and doing things, particularly in Switzerland and even Italy. I think luxury in Switzerland and luxury in Italy are unique to quality and craft and substance. While in France, for example, historically, luxury in French has had opulence If you walk through a museum in France in these hallways, you have these beautiful gold and art and even the food. You have this foam and cream and presentation. Meanwhile, you go an hour away to Milan or Switzerland and everything is incredibly simple and it's all about the ingredients and the craft. And there's actually— there's none of that gold hallway. It's actually a pretty empty, simple, all about the substance.

Yeah.

And a lot of the brands that are successful that are approaching me in the US and wanting to work with me in the US want me to bring that touch and that storytelling to their own businesses here.

So, it's so key. I mean, my biggest frustration with sort of commercial US hospitality is you have these properties that are worth like $1 billion on paper, and the actual— there's no substance at all. Every restaurant has terrible ingredients, right? And so, there's all these pockets of the US where the actual, the natural landscape is incredible, even the infrastructure that they have is incredible, but then the actual experience is sort of Disneyland-quality food.

I see a lot of exceptions and they're usually all family-owned.

Exactly, exactly.

I recently went to San Ysidro Ranch. Beautiful property in Santa Barbara. Yeah, it's amazing. And you feel like you're you're traveling because nothing seems optimized.

You mean like you feel like you're traveling outside of outside the country?

You're traveling outside the country because nothing feels optimized. Yeah, yeah. And you know, like back to your AI question.

Wait, and you'll you'll you'll appreciate this because I saw I saw a video that was somebody saying there's thousands of of European small European hotels. that are— that need to change hands in the next 10 years because there's no— there's no— yeah, it was basically like somebody should make— it was like an American—

Let's ruin this.

It was an American guy being like, we got to roll up all these hotels because there's no one to inherit them. And, and this whole— because like the kids moved away and whatever. And I'm like, yeah, so let's just like ruin the thing that made them great in the first place, which is that they were family-owned and they were designed to make enough money to stay in business, but not to just like extract and scale.

And, and unfortunately, private equity usually ruins luxury and doesn't actually create value and save jobs. It's usually too much optimization. And AI will ruin a lot of luxury too.

Yeah.

Um, and this is real luxury. I think if you have to optimize it, then it kind of defeats the purpose. The whole point of luxury is that it's unoptimized. It's a luxury.

So, you have a very American audience.

Yes.

Do you think Americans need to romanticize America more? Because I think the funny dynamic of Eurosummer is you'll have an American go over there, and they'll just be at some little hole-in-the-wall restaurant. And to them, it's like the most amazing thing. And they're like, look, you get this espresso, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. But you could actually find that a small town in like Idaho, you know? Like, if you really went looking, you could find it. And you'd be like, wow, we're sitting here by this lake and there's this amazing little family-owned sandwich shop. But it feels like people are only thinking in that way when they're outside of the country. But maybe that's just like a permanent truth. You can't appreciate what's in your backyard.

I think saying all Americans is a stretch because this is a massive country. I think saying the very wealthy, city people in the US, let's take Miami, LA, and New York as well, and the extremely online who are extremely exposed. I think they should really enjoy what this country has to offer before leaving every chance they get. Sure. There's so much to see and do in this country, especially if you like outdoors and being active. And I think the best people to learn from are actually the Swiss. What I love about the Swiss is that they really use everything around them. Yeah. A Swiss person who lives in a city or in the mountain, they ski every slope around them, they hike every trail, they sit on every bench, they try every cafe, they go to every weekend market. The Swiss really enjoy Switzerland.

Yeah.

And they know they have no reason to leave Switzerland. And I think Americans should enjoy America because you could literally like spend 10 years not leaving this country and Really change the way you think. And there's so much to see and do here.

Easier to do in Switzerland because the whole country— It's a much smaller country. Well, no, I just remember I have some sort of multi-generational family friends that are based in Switzerland. And so, my family has been hanging out with that family across grandparents, parents, and now my generation. And going there the first time, you're exactly right. It's like, one, the whole country is like— when I was a kid visiting for the first time, I was like, that's a golf course, right? And they were like, no, that's just like a random hillside. But the American mind can't comprehend a perfectly sort of naturally manicured hillside, right? You just assume like, oh, it's clearly a golf course. But then, it's like, yeah, they go hiking straight out of their backyard.

It's amazing.

mountain, and then when you go around driving around, they're like, oh yeah, that's where I paraglide, and that's where whatever. That's where our bread's made. But finding your own version of Switzerland in America is possible.

It is, for sure. I recently went to Montana. That was incredible. I think Montana's a lot bigger than Switzerland as a state.

There's plenty of places in America where it's like, that's where I do donuts in my Hellcat. This happens. This is where my experience came in.

What does it take to get a new kind of like spot on your schedule? You're competing. I think the challenge that you have, I'm sure, is like for every event that you go to, there's maybe like 10 or 20 others that you could probably use that time for. And then some of it is like set in place. But like Montana, for example. Like, will you be at the ice race in Montana this coming year? Can that earn a spot, or is there something—

I actually don't know what that is. Sounds cool.

I'll check it out. Yeah, they do— this company, FAT, which is actually an old company based out of Europe that is now adapted into— they do a couple ice races, one in Europe and one in Big Sky. But it's amazing. Montana at its best with a little European flavor.

That sort of thing I'd love to do. Really what I like to do is, and what serves my business, is to do what those core archetypes that I really value are either doing or seeking to do. I think a great example of this is 10 to 15 years ago, the ultra-high net worth jet set that really loved fashion weeks and they really wanted to go to fashion weeks. And now they all avoid fashion weeks. And in fact, if they live in a city where a fashion week is happening, they leave. And that's because it became too online and too influencer pushed, which is kind of ironic that I'm going there. But, you know, something happens where they actually don't like those things.

Yeah.

And now they, for example, avoid Fashion Weeks. They avoid a lot of the art events. They go to far more niche art moments. Like, for example, they used to go to Art Basel Miami. Most art people I know avoid Art Basel Miami at all costs. Instead, they're in Venice, let's say, or Art Basel in Basel.

I always went there for my bachelor party. Not kidding about that.

See, I mean, if there's bachelor parties happening there, you know it's, you know, it's not about art. It has nothing to do with art. Most people who go to— I think most people who go to Art Basel don't even realize there's a town called Basel in Switzerland. They think it's a party in Miami. And that's what makes these people kind of turned off by the whole thing. Totally. So the circuit is not a fixed circuit. It's an ever-changing thing that I—

Yeah, basically, as soon as it's established as a circuit, it's already over. It's already over.

It's too late. It's done. Yeah, it's too late. I think a good example of that is Mykonos.

Oh yeah.

Which is over.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, people are still—

Last question I'm curious about. You obviously work with a bunch of different brands and help them not only from an attention standpoint, but thinking through their strategy to actually improve their brands and reach the right people, et cetera. etc. But have you spent any time working with, let's say, like, a newly minted tech billionaire or AI researcher type that's just like, hey, I want to accelerate my consumption from the silly years 1 to 5 where they're just doing stupid stuff, buying stupid cars and staying at the wrong places, and helping them achieve the next level of the I am that friend to many people.

It's not at all a side of my business. People can watch my content and kind of grasp some of that. But I have a lot of friends who text me and say, hey, I'm about to book this trip here. Is this cool? And I say, if you're asking if it's cool, you already know that you're going to have a bad time because you shouldn't be going anywhere because it's cool. That's a good point. Go and explore and have a good time with your family, whatever. So, I get a lot of inbound like that. I love to help friends out. Maybe I should turn it into—

I think— no, I think you— because I'm just thinking of it as like there's people that are like, for better or worse, they're like, I'm going to spend $5 million over the next 5 years on all these different things. And if you can probably— I think you— not to turn you into a course bro, but I think there's a high-ticket offering where you basically say, Like, yeah, you have to pay me like $200 grand or something like that, but I'm gonna help you actually design your life and your consumption in a way that basically they'll basically save the money that they would have spent on dumb things.

You could also go downmarket, do a new character for the average American. Like, look, Nitro Circus is coming to Reno. It's on the circuit. Get out there. I think you need to do that. There's a monster truck rally coming around. Bam Margera is going to appear. You got to be there. It is cool. Get ready.

Anyways, that's a good place to end it.

Thanks so much for coming to the—

Thank you guys so much for having me. We can close out the show. Yeah. Thank you.

Leave us 5 stars. Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Sign up for newsletter. tbpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow for a big event. Goodbye. Can't wait. You end it.