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

28:06And 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, 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 just the most special moment of their life. 25 proposals, everyone clapping every five seconds of the restaurant. And, and it's been a while. I mean, it's been a very long, I mean, I've worked, 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 the anniversary or the birthday.

28:56Like restaurants are not generally like set up to like give that. So maybe it's like a feature, not a bug that the reservation. 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. Maybe that's like actually like a higher quality customer on the average night than this is somebody that's like coming in. And this is like their special moment. Okay. 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?

29:41If 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. Okay. I like this. I might be belting over four or five tables. Yeah. Trying to get them involved. You don't necessarily need to be at the same table. Yeah. 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.

30:14So 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 like proposals. Yeah, it is interesting though because a lot of our – like so much of being a consumer, like the benefits, the highest quality experiences typically go to the people that plan the farthest in advance, right? So like if you're booking a hotel right now for already for like the Christmas holiday, you're at a disadvantage, right? Because there's some people that we're booking like...

30:53Hence why we tell you about the road to Christmas. You start planning ahead. 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 a – open to basically like negotiation, right? 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. I actually think this is what will happen every time.

31:39If you say, get me. I want to have dinner right now. I want to have dinner tonight with Jordy. 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 phone systems will be equipped to handle it on the other side. They will all share all the relevant information, negotiate, 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.

32:15The thing that I'm uncertain about is like are we going to move into like a seat geek regime where it truly is like surge pricing? And the best restaurants might wind up being like, oh, yeah, you're sitting down but you had to pay like two grand for that reservation. And then there are some that are like we're selling the food like 1 % above cost because like there's no – we want to fill seats right now. And this happens naturally. I'm just thinking about, like,

32:41I'll use a restaurant near where I am that people will plan months and months and months and months out for, like, special occasions. Yes. So, like, if you go there, there will be a lot of people that are, like, celebrating an anniversary or a birthday. Yep. And then there's maybe four or five tables every day that the manager kind of just has on lock. Yeah. And if you have a personal relationship with them, they're going to be offered up. Those tables are never – in a restaurant that has way more demand for tables and supply, the restaurant is not going to ever take those tables and be like, hey, we're just handing these over to our AI agent.

33:25Sure. But they were never going in the booking system anyway. Yeah. They were never going on open table 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 want to take care of, like, friends at the restaurant. Yeah, this is a good point. That's a good point. And it's just, like, that extra inventory is not going to 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.

34:10And so I'm just wondering how this sort of like new dynamic fits in where everyone has a super negotiator. Well, in the first case, I have my agent book my birthday dinner like six months in advance very easily because it knows when my birthday is and knows that I want to go out to dinner and guess me. No, and that's easy. But that's using the existing infrastructure. And then for the other one, it's tracking the owner of the restaurant on Instagram, sending him cigars and champagne. And potentially hacking and blackmailing him if he needs to go there. No, I'm very bullish on telling your agent, hey, I know that this special moment is coming up.

34:48Make 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 Resi and OpenTable and Toast and all these things, they're going to build this sort of like counter infrastructure for the onslaught of agent inbound. Yes. That is coming to every business owner. 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.

35:41And it's like now I have to get some tool to solve this. Which is kind of funny 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? It'll be like fake demand because the agents will be like checking and they'll be like, oh, well, there was nothing available at 7 p.m. on Resi and via this API. But like maybe if I call, I can get an extra thing. So they're going to call everyone all the time and it's going to be very annoying. um there there will be like some frustration that is justified from this like anytime that there's a transition like there will be uh frustration um yeah i i i think i mean a good 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 seven.

36:37You 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 clearly admitted that like the phone lines have fallen because they have a, they have a separate tab and 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. And so there will be significant spam filtering that goes on at the phone level. And that's probably already happening with just there's so many services that are calling restaurants and saying like, hey, do you need more supplies?

37:20Do you want to switch to this point of sale system, right? And they don't want those to go through their cold calls and sales calls going through the reservation system. So they probably filter those already. Anyway. Josh Constein. Oh, yeah, please. Says, this is the whole instinct pitch deck, by the way. And it's Christian Kyle saying, my three-month-old son is now twice as big as when he was born. He's on track to weigh seven and a half trillion pounds by age 10. Very funny. Such a viral post. This went super viral on Reddit. It goes viral like every couple months on Reddit and stuff. It's a wild post.

37:59But I did want to set some comps around the instinct growth numbers that are interesting. So a billion dollars 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 one billion of annualized transaction volume. although Stripe also spent two years building in beta before launch. Instinct got to one billion transaction volume in closer to six 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.

38:38But it's very clear to imagine where monetization might happen. Yeah, at the very least, they could just launch their own card. Yeah, of course. And then they're getting that interchange fee. and they don't even need to get anyone to opt in. And you might be able to... Yeah, and it's an easier pitch too because you're onboarding this AI agent and you're like, I've heard some pretty crazy stuff about this thing. Like, yeah, I'd actually like it if you used your card as opposed to like my card. It already has basically a computer, a phone number, email. Yep, give it a credit card. Give it a credit card.

39:10And 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%, half a percent, quarter percent, even 0.1 % on, you know, they grew to a billion. You know, you're talking about getting into, you know, tens of millions of dollars of revenue pretty quickly. And the team's just 14 people. And so you can sort of see why they raised a billion at$10 billion from Benchmark, Sequoia, Co2. 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 sustain 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.

40:00And 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. Yeah, they have a lot of potential dance partners. And ultimately, things grow really fast because they don't just, like, grow really fast for no reason. No. Right? No, good product. And people have been trying to do different personal agents for specific things. There's definitely been other pitches for, you know, doing commerce, doing flight booking. I'm shocked by that 50 % travel. That number seems really, really high. What was the exact stat? He said, Patrick summarized it as 50 % of the transaction volume is travel.

40:49Okay, so 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 proms or 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.

41:25And the reason I'm clapping is because it's a parking ticket, not just any car that Instinct 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. Potentially 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 Zuck has been poaching 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.

42:37And you thought it was pretty funny because you were actively trying to give a company business. I think there's a bunch of historical reasons you would want anti-bot software, 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 bad bots but support actual consumer bots. So Gary Tan says anti-bot is for losers. Really got him. 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.

43:24Gary 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 causal 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.

44:03Human laws were not written for this. They were not written for a lot of what is coming. You 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. 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 want to be paying for this, et cetera, et cetera?

44:40Yeah. I don't think this is, I don't know, like my banker will just hit me up and say, hey, I'm going to, I'm just clearing this with you. I'm going to sweep funds into money market account or T-bills. Like 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 like 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 like great, like fundamentally a great banking experience. They're like doing this on your behalf.

45:21Like they are aligned to you. Yeah. So I don't think it's as like. I would be very hesitant about how fast this adoption can happen. 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, because I wonder, personally, agents are taking off, but we're still in 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 um there there are still like there's still plenty of friction in the economy i think uh i think it's going to take a while for people to to onboard to this fully.

46:24It's the same idea of when Chachi Petit came out, people were like, Google search is dead. No one will Google search. Google's search revenue is going to go to zero 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 a couple of years. Banks adjust, money market funds adjust. It's not the end of the world, potentially, but we'll keep monitoring it.

46:58Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web ops, servers, databases, and more. Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Zach. 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.

47:33Meta Enterprise will use our strengths that few other companies have. Advanced models, leading agents, large-scale infrastructure, and years are 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 Shuritan 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.

48:12Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. anyways uh 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 uh anyways they created this new business unit yeah 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 big compute deal and then and then it's going to look like the the sort of unit is doing it'll quickly go from let's say zero to ten billion dollars a year of revenue they can sort of use that they don't have to necessarily break out initially all the what where that revenue is coming from but they can say like our enterprise platform is is gone from zero to ten billion in yeah this was like the jokes i mean alice was was sort of trolling with around like oh like all the growth in Google Cloud Platform is selling TPUs.

49:11It 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, 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 going to have a niche from injuries and Horowitz on the show at 1235 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.

49:52Is 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 you have so shareholders are maybe more reassured that okay we're really optimistic on Muse things that seem to be going really well but if it doesn't pencil up then you can sell it to you I think it's important I think because there would be attention right I think Doc 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.

50:43Yeah. 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 like actually building a durable, you know, AI business here with their own models, their own agents, et cetera. Yeah. So I just think it's a better, you know, 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.

51:25And 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 ours? 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.

51:58Why 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, the margin will be there. It makes a lot of sense. But 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.

52:38It was down 26 % earlier. 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 % nuke. Well, again, we like to see the stock chart nuke as when a founder retires. Yes. End of an era. 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. You don't like to see that. Okay, maybe Buko 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?

53:21Much 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 Semi-Analysis' 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, like, that's going in the training data. And 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 Semi-Analysis.

53:56Anyway. 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 it will be interesting to see what people build with it.

54:41Yeah, big week. Big week for all the labs. Pull up this video of somebody pitching Scale AI. Let's talk about Scale. Raise your hand if you know about Scale AI. Wait a minute, 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, right? 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.

55:33So Meta says, oh, my gosh, you know, 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 business. Be careful out there.

56:33I mean, we've had the new CEO on. It is a real business. The Remain Co. is still in business and continues to produce revenue and do deals and do all sorts of things. But a 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 it 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 to. Do 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.

57:26And so, yeah, very concerning. There's got to be, I mean, imagine early scale investor or 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, so you want to move them. But they'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. Book me a Best Western conference room right now. I need to move these shares.

58:00They're probably not sitting there. Whoever is 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 you've interviewed the founder. Anyway, we will talk about SpaceX and Starship 14 splashing down the 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.

58:39What's going on? How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Hey, doing well. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for hopping on. Since this is the first time on the show, we'd 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 one micro VCs, typically investing at the pre-seed stage that we could partner with.

59:25And what better way to partner with them than by kind of meeting one of their needs, which was helping them with their fundraise effort. So we invested into about five 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. And I switched over to an entrepreneur in residence role, focused on building out the strategy. spun out in the spring of 2018, brought on Alphabet as our anchor investor for our Fund One, 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.

1:00:17Can you explain the evolution of the relationship there with Alphabet? because GV, formerly Google Ventures, it 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 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?

1:01:03Yeah. 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, right? There's purely strategic. And then at the other end of the spectrum, they're purely financial. And GV was at the extreme end of the purely financial, so much so that it really operated as a separate unit as part of the other bets umbrella. And the investors at GV invest for financial return, just like a traditional firm on Sand Hill Road. 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.

1:01:56If 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. It thinks of itself just as a traditional financially focused VC. And so then leading to the second question that was in your opening, the ability to be able to identify the best deals, there's multiple paths to be able to get there. Obviously, there's the existing relationships with entrepreneurs.

1:02:38That's very helpful. There are folks that operate at GV that 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 these GPs that are on fund ones 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 one GP is that you don't have to really do any fund management. You know, you've got your lawyers to do your LPA. You've probably raised your fund. You've got a back office.

1:03:17You 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.

1:04:03And 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. 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 A 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.

1:04:49Works 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?

1:05:24Is 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-CC, 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 five years later, they were like running a core business at one of these companies that, that again, they, they did their basically like tour of duty at a company that was like you said, you know, excellent operations, excellent talent density.

1:06:19And 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 that the researcher spin outs 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.

1:07:10Because. 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. 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. We had great finance people. We had a great legal team. We had all this back office ops. We had marketing.

1:07:48I 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. You now have the ability for a lot of these work, you know, things that I have on my plate that are really non-investing. 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.

1:08:30But 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've got to kind of 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 just just 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 we'll communicate the ideas and get you being able to get up to speed on something faster is amazing and such an advantage for yeah these emerging managers with smaller teams or it might be one or two partners and maybe no no analyst or associate types yeah so so i mean the the teams can say so much smaller at the same time we've seen you know the the funding rounds get so much bigger.

1:09:53Can 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 we think about - Maybe more tangibly, we have friends that have funds that they raised in 2024, where the strategy was like, we want to own five to 10 % of companies at pre-seed, seed, and then follow on from there.

1:10:38And then almost all of those folks are now being like, we're happy to get 3 % of this round before. 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, you know, what are you seeing as the changes and the challenges within the ecosystem?

1:11:19And I went back to a point I made earlier, which is the 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.

1:12:02And 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 a 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.

1:12:41There'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 two 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 really known for producing great employees, you know what excellence looks like in employees. You 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.

1:13:16So 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.

1:13:57Then they graduated to doing, you know, kind of these, you know, these massive funds that were just for kind of follow on investments. But now that's much more difficult because you've got this combination of these rounds are increasing in size so fast. Plus, you've got the bigger shops that come down earlier and earlier. And so those big shops are kind of already there and ready to scale up. So this is the challenge that a lot of these firms have now. Well, for you, for you, the big question I have is like, how how do you manage and prioritize your set of co-investment opportunities because you have this big base of managers that you've backed now.

1:14:36And I imagine every single month, they're bringing you co-invest opportunities. And we're in this dynamic right now where you'll have the top five companies in a category getting marked up like crazy. And then even the five through 10 are still getting marked up and and showing momentum and growth and so um i imagine it's like a massive headache but also big opportunity of like sorting through those and but also like managing expectations with the managers on like when you'll actually lean in and and um make a make a direct investment through their vehicles and when you have to sit stuff out yeah i mean you clearly have been looking at our deck because you got you understand it really well i don't i don't know i haven't seen a deck but he only invests when it's anthropic as long as it's a really good no but i just like swing at the grand slam even on a personal level being invested in some funds it's like i don't you know i do this like rec you know recreationally to date and it's like well i'm not gonna just you know i can't possibly do every deal even if they look like great yeah yeah well this is 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.

1:16:04And 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, 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. It was the first time we had done an SPV and this was the Series D that closed in January 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.

1:16:45And 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 and we had never come close to anything that expensive before. And so I think there was this combination of, you know, getting our arms around that and, you know, 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. And now here we are. That's amazing. You alluded to the emergence of tranched rounds of more complicated financings of a ton of capital marshalling at the very early stages of some of the new companies.

1:17:31And 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 how acceptable do you think a wait-and-see approach, or maybe we'll do a little bit of one and 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.

1:18:14Don'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's, I think, the level of granularity that's necessary today. That wasn't necessary, I would say, five, ten 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. And that was part of our conversation when we started talking about how do GPs really kind of make their position within the industry. And, you know, now it is definitely being able to leverage some technical aspect that leads them to an edge they have in identifying an opportunity.

1:18:56But 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 two-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. because, you know, 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 Higgs field is now the fastest company to a billion in revenues.

1:19:53You 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 Sergeys, 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 know, you never saw that need to understand today how to enter those environments when you, you know, you had like maybe 10 years to get there.

1:20:31Now, you know, 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. Yeah. There was one question on security. You know, Patrick was basically saying, like, look, like a lot of people just don't, you know, don't trust or aren't going to trust a new product like this with all, you know, their email and payment information, all this stuff. and I thought his answer was fine but it didn't it wasn't like it wasn't like it wasn't like he hit a home run but I was like I gotta you gotta give him like some time he's 23 years old the company is like less than a year old it's a 10 billion dollar company but like you know give him like 10 more of those interviews and he'll probably answer wildly differently now you don't get 10 years you get three and then within three years of starting your company you're getting made fun of on SNL while you're having dinner with the president And it's such a weird scenario, right?

1:21:29That's right. How do you, VCs love to talk about taste and how taste is important, but how quickly do you clock a manager? Like how many, 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, you know, back visionary founders, right? It all sort of like 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 like 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 like went viral for doing something crazy or saying something weird he's in all those companies and then i have like other you know another set of friends that are that are managers and they love to back the like super earnest yeah really kind yeah and they're both saying the same thing to when they're doing their fundraisers, right?

1:22:23They're like, we want to back visionary founders. And yet they sort of self-select into these like very key archetypes. 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 like 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.

1:23:02So 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, you know, 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.

1:23:51And 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're not just going to get sort of an average of everything else you're already going to have exposure to.

1:24:30No, see, that's exactly right because our objective is to cast as wide a net as possible. And the best way to do that is to have unique approaches within the GP network that we've developed, which now allows us to have this great source of deal flow that's not very overlapping. So we see more unique opportunities. How are you processing, if a manager comes to you and like, how are you processing like vice specifically right now or managers that are like principled about not touching certain categories? Because over the last five years, it seems like every major platform VC has made investments in gambling and maybe multiple forms of gambling.

1:25:17But also some of those companies don't look like gambling at all when they start. It's like, oh, crypto? 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.

1:25:55The worst possible managers like I'm morally opposed to AI. I sat it out for ethical reasons. Like that's why I passed on everything. But it would be insane. Anyways, so I'm sort of rambling, but I think you get the general idea. What do you think about the LPA and the vice clauses? 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 two that you kind of are balancing. I really want this LP, but they've got these vice clauses, and so you have to balance that.

1:26:34If 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 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 hundred 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.

1:27:22And 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. 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 Southern California, it could probably be a vice, which is peptides.

1:27:53Oh, 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 ones, which are peptides. People may not know their peptides, but they are. And now we're getting a little more open to thinking about having peptides 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. So that's one where I think the pendulum is swinging in the right direction, partially because of the administration. It's RFK Jr.

1:28:29who is really a proponent of peptides. So I think there's opportunities there. I think if I'm sitting with my LP hat on, I've 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 don't really think of them as vice anymore in the 2020s. Yeah. 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.

1:29:17But 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. 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 in seconds. Online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. 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.

1:29:46We 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. In the GoPro. The GoPro. What does that do? They already filmed these. No, but 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 it's AI video. Well, we filmed it ourselves. We know it's real.

1:30:22Anyway, speaking of AI video, we have Zach London from Gossip Goblin with us. What's going on? How you doing? How's it going? Welcome to the show. Where in the world are you? Oh, yeah. I'm in Sweden. Oh, cool. There you go. Oh, sorry for tearing 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 Zach, better known online as Gossip Goblin. I make some AI videos that you guys hopefully have seen. Yeah. And I have a feature length film coming out in a little over two months. Yeah. What was the process for making the feature length film?

1:31:09What 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. Did you start with a title? Did you start with a concept, a genre, a log line? Like what was your process? Yeah. So contrary to popular belief, you're not yet able to just type in make me a movie into a box, although there's plenty of people trying to make that happen. No, I mean, depending on how you look at it, this is like four years in the making maybe. I mean, I've been making AI videos since that was really a possibility, like four years ago.

1:31:49And 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. 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 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 interest that I was able to quit my day job, start a little studio, hire a team, and for the last eight months, nine months, we've been working on this feature film, which has been a pretty wild process.

1:32:44It's coming out, it's premiering in two months. Yeah, December 4th. That's a pretty good timeline relative to... But talk about, 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 um 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 um 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 a script. We used a dozen voice actors in the film.

1:33:27We have musicians scoring the film. We use fully artists for the sound effects. We have a whole post-production crew. So it's not just me and 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 a 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 how you would make a sci-fi epic of this scope in the past.

1:34:04So I'd like to believe that the topics are a lot timelier and more tuned to the present. And that's all paired with we put out 10 minutes of short-form content a week. So that's not quite the same caliber, but that keeps us kind of, you know, 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. To me, to me, like the one of the biggest opportunities at the moment is like taking something like a very timely topic and then applying something that creating something And it looks like it took months and months and months to produce.

1:34:45Yeah. 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 like 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 like the ultra short form. So it's those three minute clips. And the goal there is like, 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.

1:35:24Like, the shit I come up with is not even sci-fi by next week. So it makes it pretty easy for me. 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 that gets me fired up way more fired up than 10 percent extension i'm not a doomer i'm not a doomer but i'm also not like but you're calling from a bunkie 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 going to bother wiping it out you know yeah uh where's the name from um it's just always been around i don't know i i've had the same handle online forever i think um like 10 years ago sticker mule had a really good deal on vinyl stickers and i just i needed to come up with the username quickly before the sale went away so i committed the gossip goblin and i had such like a huge investment in the stickers that I, it's too late to pivot.

1:36:31Yeah. 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. 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 figure files with design system context. Our next guest is on here, Anish, from Andreessen Horowitz, his general partner, coming back on the show, here with us to discuss all things AI, personal agents. How you doing, Anish?

1:37:08That's sweet. I got the squawking. What was that? Oh, that's the eagle. Oh, yeah, the eagle squawking. Your audio, maybe get a little closer to your mic. You sounded a little bit... Can you do a little sound check for us? Test, test. That's us. We can hear you. 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 five seconds? Or is there a white pill here?

1:37:45Is there a good solution where the humble restaurateur sees a modest increase to their 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. I mean, look, I think the last gen of suppliers 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 ARB 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 their restaurant who might be future high spenders. I think your ability to fill the restaurant in a way that sort of globally out comes way higher.

1:38:23It's not just who clicked the website fast enough. That's one. And then two, I think for the long tail restaurateur, you know, they don't have to be amazing at marketing game or the kind of, you know, sort of marketing to the intermediary suppliers like Resi. 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 lock, 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 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.

1:39:05We saw somebody today that, that got blocked from just buying something on adidas.com with, with Muse, which again, It feels like a sort of casualty, like that, you know, something. They have a system in place to block more nefarious style bots. Maybe it's sneaker bots or something like that. Who knows, right? But it feels like 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 going to come down. I expect the Adidas of the world to adapt.

1:39:43but 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, which is 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 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 car sales business, I think they want to quickly get the intermediaries out of the way.

1:40:24I think the distance is going to be a lot of studios want to think of themselves as destination businesses, when 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, 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?

1:41:09Or maybe the secondary businesses are just instinct for business, muse for business, the other side of it. 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 fun little story about Brazil, which has the most losses 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. That's amazing. That is a very adversarial relationship. And the merchants need to buy specialized software to find out all the lawsuits.

1:41:45So I think things like that will happen. You know, demand for refunds and protesting payments and all of these areas where merchants benefit from kind of customer apathy or being fully informed. We haven't hit that. 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.

1:42:29Like that's kind of like the, the darker, um, an opportunity, Jordy, actually I take the opposite view. Like think of every person, certainly in the lifetime, but maybe once a year has this just bureaucratic weight placed on them. You know, maybe you move and you have to change schools for your kid, you know, God forbid, maybe you get cancer or have a DUI. Like there's just so much bureaucratic administrative work that the entrepreneur has to do. 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.

1:42:59So I kind of like this vision of the consumer being extraordinarily empowered with these things. You used to have to have a guy for it. Yeah. No, that's a good point. How are you thinking about compute intensivity 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. Like, 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?

1:43:45Do 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 a thousand dollars per user per year which is obviously prohibitive if you're running a startup i think a couple reasons be optimistic if you're running pause 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 a hundred thousand dollars 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.

1:44:32The average American just, you know, spends$5 ,000 to$6 ,000 on travel plus commerce, online travel plus commerce a year. We've got a very high take rate. Look, the number one thing that needs to happen is costs need to deflate and they will. Right now Astra is kick-ass. Computer use is very expensive. It will get cheap very quickly. The most exciting thing I saw in the last two weeks was JEB. With computer use, JEB's computer use is 100x cheaper and faster today. So I think there are these kind of dark horse opportunities that it could deflate cost faster. Otherwise, you're kind of fighting a two-front war on customer acquisition and compute capacity.

1:45:10Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Oh, last question I had. We were 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 going to use stable coins and this and that, and I wasn't ever fully sold. But this feels like you could imagine an instinct being like, hey, here's a credit card that you can use. It has some of these benefits. And it just feels like that's an easy way to start monetizing all of this volume 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.

1:46:02Yeah, that's absolutely right. Unfortunately, just the take rate on those things is not high enough to still sustain. It's a good idea. I think the margin question, Jordy, 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 going to be wild. That will be wild. Yeah, because 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.

1:46:36And then at what point, you know, I'm sure there's people out there that have 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. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era Unlock 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.

1:47:33We have Evan Conrad from San Francisco Compute. He's the co-founder and CEO. What's up? Long overdue. So happy having 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.

1:48:10So 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. 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.

1:48:48It'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-level 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, like, magical number. Is there a solution here where you look at the semi-analysis cluster max three, 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 homogenous 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.

1:50:06How 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. 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 like 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 Corey or like Nebius, 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.

1:50:49And 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 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, 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 as San Francisco compute is that you need a market operator that has to be independent from the other sort of other clouds.

1:51:36Otherwise, 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. 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.

1:52:08There'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, like 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.

1:52:48isn't that a prerequisite that basically the vast majority of compute comes online in some homogenous market to really create the commodity vision that people are seeing in the future, as opposed to just more standardization within individual neoclouds 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 um is by making that refinery exist yeah um on the other hand it's just way more nuanced than that these are supercomputers not soybeans yeah um and so there's just like yeah it is just frankly more complicated make it easier if only um so yeah what is your what is your plan right now what's the stage of the company.

1:53:38I mean, you've raised money, but how close are you to, do you think to acquiring power, building a data center? Is that, is that the plan in the near term? Uh, yeah.

1:53:52Can't say that much, but it's in the works. We're doing the biggest computer ever. Yeah. Yeah. We're shooting for the biggest computer ever. Yeah. And, and is it, uh, 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 neoclods? Because when you look at the neoclods, so many of them have partnerships with AWS, GCP, the big AI labs. And in some ways, you could imagine some commoditization happening 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.

1:54:50So 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've sort of abstracted over the power companies. In this case, the neoclouds are 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.

1:55:26That'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. Or anytime you have hot takes. Yeah. Anytime. Anytime. Last, last, last question. There's someone on X that's been posted. thing about i'm not just gonna keep posting through this infrastructure build out i'm getting in in the action i'm levering up personally to get compute to be able to participate in this sure uh what are your what are your thoughts on the on the humble um on the humble home supercomputer operator that wants that wants to get into the token flow is it should they just be buying nvidia you know and be like 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?

1:56:36So I think I know who you're talking about, and I would say they are doing more than just a rack in your house.

1:56:46What 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 going to help them do that and help make it possible that there's a large amount of new NeoClouds, new NCPs in the NVIDIA terminology.

1:57:24And then we're going to 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?

1:58:03I 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, 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.

1:58:40Yeah, 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. He's solving the bubble. Yeah, so the bubble itself, it works like this. 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 up front so that they can give it to the OEM, who then gives it off to NVIDIA. But the AI lab itself doesn't have that capital yet because they need it for the future.

1:59:28And 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? Like, 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 up front 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 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 goodbye 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.

2:00:56Our next guest is here live with us in the TVP and Ultradome. Here's Sean Guy. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Good to see you. Made it. Thanks so much for coming on down to Hollywood, to the TVP and Ultradome. Thank you for having me. How do you introduce yourself for those who maybe are living under a data center?

2:01:14Gstaad Guy:I'm the shtud guy. Yes. I make videos, sometimes in character. Yeah. Saturizing 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 now? Talent and operator. Operator, right? Because you have a team, I assume, at this point. 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 I don't mind being like... Well, creator was an uptake of the influencer.

2:01:54Gstaad Guy:Influencer was like a slur at one point. Yeah, exactly. And then they were like, okay, creative's a little bit nicer. Being creative's good. But yeah, what is the issue? 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. Like, just being talent and being the host is the thing that I feel like I'm best at.

2:02:25Like, I'm pretty okay 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. 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, like in the most like sort of insane version of in the case of, for us it was like tech bros, right?

2:03:09Or 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 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 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. It's like, okay, what do you drive on the weekend? Now you've 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.

2:03:50Thank you.

2:03:51Gstaad Guy:I appreciate the compliments. It's fun. But yeah, I think – yeah, where should we start? Maybe a review of Eurosummer. How do you rate the last quarter? Is it overblown 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. Okay. So we'll have to have you back. You can have me back for 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. Sure. They don't work much and they've learned the ways of summering through generations.

2:04:43Gstaad Guy: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. That's the thing. 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.

2:05:22Here, at least within our networks, the judgment is like, well, what company are you building? 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 what watch are you wearing, but 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 consumption.

2:06:17I've just always enjoyed it. Like most of us. And I've always liked that. Did you think you were bad at it? I certainly have been bad at it. Okay. Like when I talk about being bad at consumption, it's like you buy something and you regret the purchase. Okay. Because maybe your taste level increased. Or you bought something because it was expensive. Yeah, even as a kid, I bought like a certain like piece of snowboarding gear. And then I realized like a month later, well, I shouldn't have bought that because this other thing is actually the thing that you really want.

2:06:44Gstaad Guy:And listen, I think that's generally a good thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the category 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. and that's like macroeconomically it's kind of what's happening right now 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 meanwhile a European consumer gets average 28 days off a year so literally twice as much and they're making at least half as much.

2:07:26Gstaad Guy:So they actually need to make the dollar go a lot further. While you, you're in Austria, you can ball out. Well, yeah, but what I appreciate is the friends that I was with were going to the hole-in-the-wall place that they'd been for going to for 20 years at this point. And 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, you know, American going crazy for two weeks. But it's about. Yeah. How do businesses in Century Pay actually price discriminate? Is it like, okay, we know this is when American summer will be here, so let's raise prices.

2:08:07Is 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

2:08:32Gstaad Guy:case study for this is hotels okay i think if restaurants play with prices it's usually not a very good restaurant yeah it's usually very gimmicky yep or more like a club or like a beach club sure which no one i think goes to consistently yeah i think anyone who goes to like a party setting beach club and sprays champagne does it once or twice as like a festive occasion to celebrate the moment. But then when they go back, they go with their fiance or their wife, and it's more modest and they're drinking wine instead of spring champagne. So I think those occasion-based restaurants would actually forget them in this conversation.

2:09:06Gstaad Guy: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 yeah some hotels though stay very loyal to the consumer you were talking about that has been staying with them for years yeah 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 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 and it feels like very like it has the aesthetics of being like very luxurious but the service quality might actually be far worse but it feels like like certain establishments now they need to actually like not lean into that sort of generic global Instagram aesthetic?

2:10:33Gstaad Guy: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 massive hospitality group owned. 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 prices. These family-owned hotels, they don't care about that. They don't need the Instagram.

2:11:14They're sold out months in advance, sometimes years in advance,

2:11:19Gstaad Guy: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.

2:12:01Gstaad Guy:And that can happen over five 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 expect. So you're saying there's a chance I could be the first. First person to never develop taste. Well, yeah, and it's funny because it expresses itself in different ways. I think in the Alps, a Lamborghini Urus is actually, if it's specced properly, can be an incredible car.

2:12:43And when I see them in that context, I think, wow, I really wish I should get one of those. But the problem is you put it in an L.A. 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 what how do you see like 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, you know, I've had saunas and cold plunges for like probably six years now, like at home. And so for me, when I'm traveling somewhere, like I'm not even really, that's not, maybe it's like on the list of things that I think are, maybe it's cool if you have a sauna at the property.

2:13:29But 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

2:13:43Gstaad Guy: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 one 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. Stage two, I think is indulgence. They go on a lot of wine tours, 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?

2:14:19Gstaad Guy: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 in cashmere and then what's their marathon time and then exactly yeah what's their cycling triathlon or cycling because they want to live forever exactly yeah this is we were having a conversation we were yeah we were talking about um uh for an interview that hasn't been released yet about this sort of tech...

2:15:02We're a live show. No, no, no. It wasn't. Someone was interviewing us. Oh, yeah. And they were asking who we look up to, and it's actually like we look up to the CEOs that don't just have a cool car collection, but they're actually doing motorsports at a high level, like pro-am level, where they're going and they're doing 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 ability right it's like can you keep it on the track can you be um 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 to that next level yeah you're talking about i think so too um i want to talk about the characters sure please yeah the the dividing line like um how do you think about building the portfolio of characters you have two now i have two is there going to be a third is this something you're considering or are you do you even think about it that way and then is there how harsh is the line between you're not in character uh like we we have loose characters that we slip into here and there but uh do you slip in and out of them ever or is it like okay 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.

2:16:22I think it's like in real life, you're like, who am I right now? Exactly. That's what I asked myself this morning. We actually had our team 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 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.

2:16:41Gstaad Guy:I might. I might jump in. I'll walk you through the initial thinking. Explain the characters first. Explain the whole thing. So characters, I have three characters. The third is just me myself, which is here, so we'll ignore that for now. The two main characters are 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. He is who your grandparents want you to be when you visit Constance.

2:17:16Gstaad Guy:Exactly. That's Constance. He's head to toe in the finest lower piano 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. Because they're occupying the same spaces. I think they're actually occupying the same mind.

2:18:03Gstaad Guy: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. 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. 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. And so there's not a uniform judgment on both of them. Like there might be ones more to aspire to, but there's a reality between both of them. It's actually a fluid emotion.

2:18:38Gstaad Guy:It's like the angel and devil on your shoulder. Yeah. It's exaggerated. And I used the characters to really storytell the what. What is driving this world? What matters in this Stade Guy world? Through the voices of satire of Constance and Colton, the how is the manners, the tact. You don't just buy a Laurel Piana cashmere sweater. There's a way to wear it. There's a way to celebrate it. You don't just go to Chateau 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 yeah 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 and craftsmen and and people really putting their life and passion into into ultimately luxuries but with so much serious love i had to do it as myself so yeah i broke character for the why so the what and the how constance and colton in character okay the why is just me here if you want an even more insufferable term beyond influencer creator world builder is the one that really gets people going these days but but it is true that shot guy is a world and it's fascinating hearing you how they they play with each other how much are the two 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 going to pull this character off the shelf for this moment how do you think about building that world in more fullness i 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.

2:20:34Gstaad Guy:I'm tired of this guy. I want to hear from him. Constance is still quite novel because seeing the frown and seeing Kstad. Well, it's novel because the Constance does not post their lifestyle on social media to nearly the same degree. 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 they'll post if they were just posting at 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's sort of like full-time consumer that it would be very distasteful if they were just documenting their life in the same way as like a austin-based wellness influence 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 He was like, I had to stop using social media because he learned how to fly helicopters and planes.

2:21:29And he was doing all this insane stuff. And he was like, yeah, if I just post this, it looks like I'm flexing on it. And I think that's why the character resonates so deeply with 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 real.

2:21:48Gstaad Guy:Yeah. And they never got offended because ultimately it's, even though it's poking fun, it's poking fun up. 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 a 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?

2:22:34How 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 just want the experience of doing something at 20 minutes or two hours or shorter or whatever.

2:22:55Gstaad Guy:I run the account, I think, in quite a unique way. And I started Shtad Guy eight years ago now. So this is pre-Reels feature. Actually, when Reels was pre-launched, they were reaching out to certain video native creators, creators and creatives online, and paying them to start using Reels instead of IGTV, which was the past video feature. Oh, yeah, 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.

2:23:37Gstaad Guy:That's great. 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. And I really felt at service to that first person who stopped me. 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.

2:24:14Gstaad Guy: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? And the answer is whatever is right for the restaurateur. There's no right or wrong. It's all up to them. And I happen to take the path of I don't actually care about the masses. They're crowding around the restaurant.

2:24:47Gstaad Guy: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. 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. That's the exact approach we took. Like early on, now we have a million and a half 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.

2:25:31And every single show is developed for them. and you can imagine people joining the show, like listening to a minute, just being like, I don't know what these guys are talking about or it doesn't seem important, like what is 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 and it's actually like only only i would say mr beast 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 because 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

2:26:39Gstaad Guy: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 they followed you. The reason why that's important to me is because I have a table of archetypes and I have the finance bro. I have the second generation art collector and all these different archetypes of the wine aficionado, people that I talk to my advertisers about and I track how they're engaging with my content.

2:27:22And if I made a specific

2:27:25Gstaad Guy:video for that archetype and that person did not engage with it, I failed. Yeah. Even if it has millions of views, my priority was never to entertain. Yeah. Priority was to engage. It also feels like, uh, the, the, 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, like aspirational stuff for people that would never book a trip ever be but they're just scrolling it and they're like kids that you know we would never have the opportunity or or maybe in you know years but uh yeah dialing in that audience how do you um how do you think that ai will impact luxury and hospitality and some of these categories because i've spent a lot of time thinking about it and i think it's like very um almost like invincible to a lot of technology If you operate a hotel in Sancho Peg, get ready for a thousand AI agents to call you every day.

2:28:26No, I mean, that's one way. 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, like, in many, hopefully, like, impervious to the Internet. 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? 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.

2:29:14But when you think about hotels, you can imagine AI agents that like you can text at all hours of the day and you get an instant response but again you're still going to be wanting to stay at a hotel where like 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 like excellent 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 like collections like it feels like some of these things are just like enduring and will just and remain the same way but What's your view?

2:30:10I think we have to answer this question quite specifically.

2:30:15Gstaad Guy:The reason why I think is because there's true luxury in 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 and true luxury businesses. 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 seven rooms, they would have. So it's not like they've been waiting for this AI optimization.

2:30:58Gstaad Guy: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. They even resist air conditioning. So I think really it's the optimized will become more optimized and therefore less luxurious. Therefore, these two 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. 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.

2:31:41Gstaad Guy: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 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 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.

2:32:20Some of these clubs like try to put on this like idea that, that it's not like the second that you hit the form on the website. By invite only. If you pay a thousand dollars. They sort of intentionally, that you clearly they have an automation that's like, okay, new user applies in two months,

2:32:37Gstaad Guy:send them the 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. How much are you traveling? A lot. Okay. Do you have a home base? Do you have multi-home base? How much time do you spend in Europe versus America? Like, how would you even describe a normal year? He's got to be on the circuit. Yeah, I'm on the circuit a lot. Okay. 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. This is, yeah. Where I'm, like, it's, I'm working.

2:33:20Gstaad Guy:So although I'm posting videos at these beautiful hotels, I'm usually working at those beautiful hotels and not indulging the entire time. Yeah, of course. But I'm not complaining here. I'm also very blessed that I managed to indulge in between. I'm staying at hotels around the world probably eight months of the year. Okay, 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.

2:33:55So it's worth us paying up, or the Middle East. Yeah. 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 tradeoff there for you. What's funny is that I storytell a lot in Europe.

2:34:21Gstaad Guy:Yeah. But most of my audience is in the U.S. Yeah. and that's the same way that the nicest hotels in Saint-Tropez, their biggest spending customer base are Americans. And that's exactly what's happened to my page. It's actually this incredible U.S. curiosity of Europe and wanting to consume in Europe that has allowed my page to grow as fast as it has. So the biggest pull right now business-wise is actually in the U.S. of U.S. businesses wanting to be affiliated with this 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.

2:35:08While in France, for example, historically luxury in French has had opulence tied to it.

2:35:15Gstaad Guy: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 pretty empty, simple, all about the substance. Yeah. And a lot of the brands that are approaching me in the U.S., wanting to work with me on the U.S., want me to bring that touch and that storytelling to their own businesses here.

2:35:51So it's so key. I mean, my biggest frustration with like sort of like commercial U.S. hospitality is you have these properties that are worth like a billion dollars on paper. And the actual there's no substance at all. Like every restaurant has terrible ingredients. Right. And so there's all these like pockets of the U.S. where like the actual like the natural landscape is incredible. even the sort of like infrastructure that they have is incredible but then the actual experience is like sort of disneyland quality you know food um i see a lot of exceptions and they're usually

2:36:28Gstaad Guy:all family owned exactly exactly like i recently went to san ysidro ranch yeah a beautiful property in santa barbara that'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 the country You're turning outside the country. Because nothing feels optimized. And you know, back to your AI question. Wait, and you'll appreciate this because I saw a video that was somebody saying, there's thousands of European, small European hotels that need to change hands in the next 10 years. Because there's no, yeah, it was basically like somebody should make, it was like an American.

2:37:09Let'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 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. Or just 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.

2:37:31Gstaad Guy: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. 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. Do you think Americans need to romanticize America more? Because I think the funny dynamic of like Euro summer is you'll have an American go over there and they'll just be like at some little hole in the wall restaurant. And to them, it's like the most amazing thing.

2:38:13And they're like, look, you get this just like espresso, blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever it is. But you could actually find that like in 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. Maybe that's just like a permanent truth. You can't appreciate what's in your backyard.

2:38:38Gstaad Guy:I think saying all Americans is a stretch because this is a massive country. I think saying the very wealthy city people in the U.S., let's take Miami, L.A. and New York. 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. 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. 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.

2:39:22Gstaad Guy:The Swiss really enjoy Switzerland 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 much smaller. No, I just remember I have some like sort of multi-generational family friends that are based in Switzerland. And so my family has been hanging out with that family across like grandparents, parents and and now my generation and going there the first time you're exactly right it's like one the whole the whole country is like when i 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 like the american the american mind can't can't comprehend like a perfectly like sort of naturally manicured like hillside right you just assume like oh it's clearly a golf course but then it's like yeah they They go hiking straight out of their backyard, straight up the mountain.

2:40:29And then when you go around driving around, they're like, oh, yeah, that's where I paraglide. And that's where, you know, whatever. That's where our bread's made. It's like, but finding your own version of Switzerland in America is possible.

2:40:41Gstaad Guy:It is for sure. I recently went to Montana. Yeah. That was incredible. Yeah. I think Montana is 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.

2:40:55this happens what does it what does it take to get a new a new kind of like um spot on on your schedule you're competing like i think like the the challenge that you have i'm sure is like um for every event that you go to there's maybe like 10 or 20 others that you could probably use that 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 who that is.

2:41:27Gstaad Guy:Sounds cool. 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 of ice races, one in Europe and one in Big Sky, but it's like, it's amazing. It's 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 really loved Fashion Weeks. And they really wanted to go to Fashion Weeks.

2:42:15Gstaad Guy: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. 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 Paris not kidding about that if this bachelor party is happening there you know it's not about art it has nothing to do with art anymore most people 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.

2:43:17Gstaad Guy:Totally. So the circuit is not a fixed circuit. Sure. It's an ever-changing thing that I talk to people about. Yeah, basically, as soon as it's established as a circuit, it's already open. 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, yeah, over. Yeah, over. 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. But have you spent any time working with, let's say, a newly minted tech billionaire or AI researcher type that's just like, hey, I want to accelerate my consumption from the silly years one to five 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 ladder.

2:44:21Gstaad Guy:I am that friend to many people. It's not at all the 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. That's a good point. Because it's cool. 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 a business. I think, no, I think you, because I'm just thinking of it as like, there's people that are like, better or worse, they're like, I'm going to spend$5 million over the next five years on all these different things.

2:45:04And if you can probably, I think you, you know, 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 going to help you actually design your life and your consumption in a way that that basically they'll make they'll basically save the money. Right. That they would have spent on dumb things. So you could also go down to a new character sort of like the average American. Like, look, Nitro Circus is coming to Reno. Get out there. I think you need to do that. There's a monster truck rally coming around.

2:45:42Bam Margero is going to appear. You've got to be there. It is cool. Get ready. Anyways, that's a good place to end it. Thanks so much for coming to them. Thank you guys so much. We can close out the show. Thank you. Leave us five stars. Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow for Big Event. Goodbye.

2:46:00Gstaad Guy:Can't wait. You end.