Now everybody in the world is going to have access to things that only rich people used to have before. That's what Uber did, right? And now the idea of having what's in Entourage, Ari Gold's assistant...
I wanted to talk to you about all the stuff that's going on in AI. All the new stuff. I feel like we haven't caught up on all the new things that are going on in AI, and I feel like there's a lot of new things. So, do you want to do that? Is that fun for you?
I would like to do that. I would like to do that. Um, you talking like products or data center stuff? There's a lot going on.
More products stuff, but really anything that's interesting. So the first one is I don't think we've talked about the new personal assistant stuff. So Instinct, Muse, Grokbot, sick, right? So a whole new wave of amazing, incredible things has happened. And I wanted to hear first, what are you using? Where are you at? And then I want to tell you my thoughts on the whole thing. Should I set up the... let me give a frame for the whole thing. So you and I moved to Silicon Valley roughly around the same time, kind of like the 2012-ish range. And at the time, we were definitely not there for the Google, Amazon, like kind of 1999, 2000, 2001 stuff. We were also not there for Facebook, Twitter, and that kind of 2004 to 2009 range. And then when we were there, the big thing was this new race, and it was things that were like very different. It was push a button on your phone and something would happen in the real world. And this is where you got Uber, Lyft, you got Airbnb, you got food delivery, all these things that today are everyday things. You can push a button, get a ride, push a button, get a burrito, push a button, get a hotel, push a button, get anything in the real world using your phone. And that was very different than the companies that came before it. And I remember at the time there was this race where Uber was there, Lyft was there, Sidecar was there. But just in ride share, everybody had their little personal preference. I remember people that liked Sidecar. I remember people that liked Lyft because they were friendly and used to get in the car and every driver would give you a fist bump and all the cars had pink mustaches on the front of the car.
Dude, people don't even know what Sidecar is. Sidecar was before Uber.
Yeah. And it was kind of hot, it was kind of doing well, and then it got smashed very quickly because the race intensified and got so competitive so fast. And that's what's going on in AI right now. Elon said AI is the highest ELO game in the world. ELO is like the chess rankings. You know, like Magnus Carlsen has like a whatever.
Wait, what does that mean? That dummies can be amazing at it?
No, the opposite. That the smartest players in the world are playing the most fiercely for the same game, which is not always the case, right? Like Bezos and Zuckerberg were doing totally different things, and Zuckerberg and Elon were doing totally different things, and then Elon and Jack Dorsey were doing totally different things. They were all in different spaces. In the sharing economy of stuff, it wasn't like the most high IQ, but it would oftentimes be the most aggressive or most operationally heavy person. Whereas AI, it's like nerds are king. You know that show Physical 100 that we like, where they're like, 'Let's take the best of every type of athleticism, the best wrestler versus the best bodybuilder, best karate guy, best jiu-jitsu guy, best field hockey person, whoever, and then they're all going to compete in the same games.' That's what's going on in AI right now. And that's what's... So the new one, the one that's going on right now is what I call everyday intelligence. It's the personal assistant for your life that you're going to have an AI that you can just text or talk to on your phone just like you would a personal assistant that can just do things for you. So last, you know, last few years I've had an assistant, anything I needed. And she had access to my inbox, she had access to my... she was in our Slack, she could see what was going on, and she would say, 'Oh, you got an email from your tax person. They're looking for this. Do you want me to draft a reply?' Or, 'Hey, just so you know, next week you have this coming up and this is scheduled at the same time. You want me to let them know that blah blah blah?' Now everybody in the world is going to have access to things that only rich people used to have before. That's what Uber did, right? Rich people used to have private drivers in black cars that they would tell them, 'Hey, I'm ready.' They would come pick them up, drop them off, wherever. And then everybody got it.
And the best part is that you could be like really mean to them, like with assistants.
It's not your driver. With assistants, you don't... like I'm always like, it's like cleaning up before the cleaning lady comes. Like I want to make everything nice for them. And I ended up working for them half the time. With this one, I'm like...
Don't ask questions. Just don't.
Right, right. Again, again. I'm like a martial arts instructor. I don't even tell them what I didn't like about their previous response. I'll just say no. And then they have to figure out what that means and come back with something better.
So yeah, that's the case. This idea that you take what was always available for the ultra wealthy and you make it available to everybody. That's what Airbnb did, right? The ultra wealthy had vacation homes, and now the idea of having, you know, what's in Entourage, Ari Gold's assistant...
Lloyd. Yeah. He goes, Lloyd.
And so the new revolution on this, you know, cloud and chat have been around. They kill it, awesome. The new one is now agents for dummies. So basically, you have like a person who will do stuff. And take it a step further, there's this new thing called Instinct. There's Muse, there's a bunch of others, and they will do amazing stuff for you to the point where I've been using Instinct like crazy. It feels magical. It feels the same magic I felt when I played with chat for the first time.
Exactly, exactly. So, if you thought ChatGPT was kind of cool and amazing and has become an everyday part of your life, well, this is the next thing that's going to become cool and an everyday part of your life because it's going to blow your mind. So, let's walk through what a couple of these things are. So, the first thing is Instinct. Instinct is the startup challenger. So, that's over here in the blue corner. We've got Instinct started by a founder, Noah Shin, that nobody had ever known, nobody's ever heard from. He did his first interview today on Invest Like the Best. So, this is the first time anybody's heard this guy talk.
Dude, I just heard about this app like two months ago. Is it like that brand new?
Yeah, it only launched a couple months ago. Like two months ago, and it's now valued at 10 billion. So, they raised their first round at 2.5 billion three weeks ago, and then 5 billion and 10 billion all in like a three to four week span.
If you want to hit your goals, you need a system. And so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing you how I use ChatGPT as a life coach. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals, and the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life, like how should I respond to this email, what's the right decision, things like that. And it's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. We will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes, and I'll show you how I use it. So, check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode.
And in the last month, Facebook launched theirs. So, over here in the red corner, you got Zuckerberg coming out. You know, Zuckerberg wants to be in the AI race. Hasn't been able to catch up with ChatGPT or with Anthropic's Claude. Their models are not quite state-of-the-art frontier. They released theirs called Muse. And so, same thing as Instinct, basically the same user experience roughly, but it takes place... it has its own app. Instinct is something that's just in your iMessage. You just text it just like you would text any person. There's no app.
Which is a very smart thing. I want to talk about the strategies of each and why I think some of the interesting strategies of each, and then we can make some predictions on how this plays out, even though those will be dead wrong. But Meta has released Muse, and in the last month, Meta's stock price is up 24% off the back of this. And 24% on a company that was worth, I don't know, a trillion and a half. It's like basically they added like $500 billion in market cap. He did the thing again where he's got this guy named Alex Wang, I think his name is, who did Scale AI. They bought Scale AI for like $18 billion. It was a really weird deal where it was like basically an acqui-hire for $18 billion. They're like, 'What's this kid doing?' And Alex Wang is like a rock star where he's tweeting all this crazy stuff and he wears Crocs with camo and he does all this weird stuff. Turns out Zuck did it again where he does something that seems a little loony for $18 billion, and it's now worth, you know, half a trillion more or something. I don't know what the gain was.
Yeah. Well, he's one of the great acquirers, right? Bought Instagram, bought WhatsApp, and now it looks like one of the next ones was his acqui-hire of, you know, on one side Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, and on the other side Alexander Wang. By the way, you know that scene in The Big Short where he's like, 'This is my quant. Look at him.' It's the Asian guy sitting at the table. I feel like Zuck did that with like a Gen Z kid. He's like, 'Oh, you think I'm not cool? Look at this. That's my Gen Z kid. Look at his feet.'
Yeah. He's got a sick haircut and camo Crocs.
Look at his haircut. The two sides don't match. You get it? Do you get it? The two sides of the haircut don't match.
So you got Muse over there. You got Instinct over here. Then you got Grokbot, which if people haven't played with Grokbot, Grokbot's also pretty sick. This came out of Elon's camp. So Elon, whose AI project is, you know, xAI, they have Grok, which is the name of their thing. So Grokbot is very much like Slack. You create different bots for different things. So I got a social media bot and I got a health bot and I got, you know, so I just named them all. So I'm like health guy, assistant guy, social media guy, tax guy, and I have all these different bots. They each have a job. 'Hey tax guy, your job is to be constantly on top of my tax situation and any correspondence with the tax people, that's what you need to be optimized for. You need to organize all my files and all this stuff for me.' Health guy...
Did you train each of them?
I give each one of them, yeah, like a goal, a set of instructions, and that's all they need to do.
What was the goal? Like what's the goal? Is it as simple as like reduce taxes without going to jail? And then health is...
I mean, I don't go that far where I'm just like, 'Do the whole thing.' But like for example, with the health guy, I'm like, 'Hey, you need to track my progress. Here's my goal. I want to get to this weight. So I'm trying to get to 199 lbs by this date. Awesome. Create a plan for me. Track it every day. Ask me how many pull-ups I did because I'm training for the Murph. Remind me on Fridays when I take my GLP shot which side of my thing I'm on, left or right.' Like I'm just doing each. It's like that's his only job is to only focus on that stuff.
Oh yeah. I didn't tell you this?
Congrats. Focus. Forget AI.
Well, okay, here's the thing. Started taking tirzepatide, which is like big brother but still little brother to whatever the real thing is that Eli Lilly hasn't released yet. First day I take it, here's the roller coaster of emotions. Take it, immediately super nauseous. Oh, I was like, oh, this is a terrible feeling. Totally normal, but I was like, this feels awful. 48 hours later, this is incredible. I'm not hungry. Oh, you want me to eat? No, I'm good. I don't eat anything.
Did you notice any other changes other than appetite?
No, that's the only thing I noticed. But as that's happening, that's a pretty big change. I think somebody was telling me, they were like, Oprah said it beautifully. She goes, 'Before I started taking this stuff, food used to talk to me all the time and I didn't even realize it. Like there would be a piece of cake in the fridge and it would just be, Oprah, Oprah, maybe here, come get me. You went for a walk earlier. You deserve me.' You know? So like food used to talk to me, and she's like, now food doesn't talk to me. So, first week I'm like, 'This is incredible.' Second week, this is incredible. I'm dropping weight. This is going awesome. But I stayed on like the half dose. I didn't do the full dose. And then pretty quickly, I stopped feeling anything at all. So, I now don't even feel any of the effects of it. I think I need to go up in dose. So, we'll nerd out there. Just remember that I talked about this in 2021. And I'm pretty sure that that's the analogy that I said.
Yeah. Oprah said she heard you say it in 2021.
Okay. Okay. So, that's the scene. The scene is the new war has broken out just like the Uber one back in the day. It's about having a personal assistant. There's all these interesting takes on it. And by the way, we haven't even seen what ChatGPT has for this. We haven't even seen Claude. We haven't seen Google's version. And Siri still sucks. See, you still have in the Royal Rumble, there's still four wrestlers in the back room that haven't even run out.
Is Alexa even relevant? Are we serious about Alexa?
That's the point. That's the point. They're the Trojan horse. Everyone has an Alexa and it still sucks.
Okay, fair enough.
Okay. So, I've been using Instinct every day. I actually just used Instinct today. So, basically, Instinct, they do the texting format, which I did not like at first. I've since grown to love it. Today, I have this guy who's supposed to repair my iPhone through Asurion, you know, like that you pay 20 bucks a month and they fix an iPhone screen, and they keep canceling on me. Like I schedule an appointment and they keep canceling or they don't show up. And I was like, 'Find the executive team's email and email them and don't stop until they call me.' And it took about three or four days. Today I got a phone call. I got a phone call and they said it was like, 'Hey, we're the executive line.' I forget what it was, but I got a phone call this morning after it's been emailing them for five days. Instinct did that for me. Another day, my wife and I, it was 6:00 p.m. I said, 'Hey, my wife and I are going on a date. I would love it if you can schedule some type of Thai massage for us starting at 8:30 p.m. after dinner. It has to be within a mile of this restaurant that we're going to. Just go ahead and book it for me.' And it booked it. It did it all. So, we just showed up and we were ready to roll and it had already paid for us.
It does, again, everything an assistant would do, but it does it also in a way that's kind of fun and kind of nice. So, for example, I had like a... I bought tickets to some show on StubHub or whatever, Ticketmaster. None of these things are like... it's basically like being taken hostage. You know what I mean? Like these are some of the worst companies in the world, Ticketmaster and StubHub. Like it's just a brutal experience all the way around. Anyways, buy some tickets. Realize, oh, the seats aren't together or something. Something weird happened like that where the tickets were just not going to work. Like 10 seconds after I bought it, I was like, 'Oh, whoops. Hey, kind of want to cancel that and just book the right thing.' And it was like, 'No, no, no, no, no. You pushed the button.' And now, like, it covers its ears. I don't want to hear from you. I won't help you. Blah, blah, blah. And so I was like, I just don't even bother with their customer support. You just go to Instinct. You're like, 'Hey, listen. This happened. Yeah, I'm partially to blame. Should have read it closer. Should have paid more attention, but can you help me out here?' And it's like, 'I got you.' And so it starts harassing them, and then, you know, just basically saying like, 'Hey, look, we need to change this, refund this, and we'll buy another one.' It gets stonewalled, you know, they come back with like, 'Hey, our policy is you clicked it, you know, you're screwed forever, sorry.' And so, but it just tells me, 'Don't worry, I'll keep going.' And then the next day it just texts me, 'Victory.' And then the next line, 'They folded. Yes, got the money back.'
Are you okay? So, you're using Grok, I think you said, for health and tax, and you have different agents.
I'll be honest. Grokbot came out first of these, or I got access to it first. I started using it first, I should say.
Started using it, liked it a lot. Instinct came, got invited to Instinct, had heard so many people talking about it, finally said, 'All right, let's do this.' Instinct pretty quickly took over my Grokbot usage.
Grokbot feels slow and heavy compared to this. And not even slow, it's just that it's this whole separate thing to manage. Whereas Instinct is literally just like texting somebody. Instinct was great, but Instinct has been getting so popular. The founder said they're growing 10% compounding daily. Daily. Like, that's hard to fathom. If you're going 10% a month, you're doing great. If you're 10% a week, oh my god, you're like one of the top startups. 10% a day is absurd. And so because of that, Instinct has actually gotten quite slow where you could text it and it'll just be thinking for a very long time. But I think they're just growing so fast that they're just throttling it basically. Facebook's Muse is a lot like Instinct, but it's snappier, it's faster. And so because they have, I guess, more resources or whatever. So that's kind of where the competition now is between Instinct and Muse. But who knows, another one can leapfrog, right? Like that's kind of the point of this is it's the highest ELO battle in the world. The smartest people in the world are constantly trying to one-up each other and they're able to do so every few months.
Yeah. I was talking to my wife. My wife's a stay-at-home mom now, but she used to work at Airbnb and Facebook, and she's like, 'Maybe one day I'll go back to work.' And I'm like, 'I don't think you're going to be smart enough.' Like what's missing, or what you're missing right now is...
I was like, this is like, you know, Conor McGregor coming back to fight Max Holloway. Like in your first kick, you're going to blow out your knee. Like I know you think you got it, but you've missed so much. Father Time wins. And...
Except he's doing drugs and she's like raising children.
Doesn't matter. Turns out...
It's just like things are changing so fast. And I remember, you know, we've documented OpenAI and how we've been using it and like the magical moments that we've experienced. And I think that like what's cool now is that you can't predict exactly how the future is going to happen, but virtually everyone who sees it and uses it, they know this is working pretty good so far and 100% in six and 12 and 18 months it's going to just change everything. I don't know exactly how, but I have full faith now where I'm like, 'Ah, yeah. Yeah, this is going to eat up everything.' Mark Zuckerberg said they started this project because he took OpenClaw, which was like the open-source kind of very viral but very dev-hacker tooly tool where you had to buy a Mac Mini, and then the Mac Minis all sold out and there's like a shortage nationwide of Mac Minis, and you had to install all this software onto it and like you had to teach it, you had to train its skills and install it. And if you were kind of the DIY, I like to do Lego projects type of thing, it was in fact quite satisfying to build your own mini Frankenstein on your desk. Zuck basically said that he installed it at home and then he called Nat Friedman and Alexander Wang over to his house and he showed them what he had. And he basically said, 'Okay, this thing is pretty magical. If we can take this experience and make it so that everybody can just have it just work for people, that they don't have to know how to do all the underlying setup and training and maintenance and all that, this is something that billions of people will use.' And then they started working on it from that point of view right there. And so actually with Muse, what they said the way it works is that every single Muse user has a Mac Mini, you know, has a computer somewhere in their server farms that is sandboxed for you, just stores your stuff. So it literally is the kind of OpenClaw setup, but just done in the cloud where you don't have to do any of that setup.
Okay. So what are your takeaways, or no, what are your predictions? You said you have some predictions.
Well, let's start with some observations because I think our observations can be a lot more accurate than our predictions, and your observations can kind of lead you to having a more informed prediction.
Here's one observation. It ain't all about intelligence.
So the temptation in the AI world is who's going to train the smartest model? And you see OpenAI and Claude getting into the nerdiest neckbeard-swinging contest you've ever seen about who can solve the millennial math problems. And there's like, 'We solved Navier-Stokes.' It's a fluid dynamics problem that no mathematician was able to solve. And the other guys are like, 'Oh, you did that? That's cute. We did seven other impossible math problems.' And everyone's like, 'Wow, that's really impressive. Couldn't even tell you what any of these are for or what they're all about, but like clearly that's cool and important in one dimension.' It's like when Dell and Gateway would brag about RAM and then Apple was like, 'It looks cool and it works.'
Yeah. So I think Instinct has tapped into, instead of IQ, EQ in a pretty small way, but it's still an interesting way. So for example, I convinced my wife, I was like, 'You got to try this thing. I was like, this thing is crazy.' And now my wife's not an early adopter. So she's a good test, right? She's more of a real person. She's a business...
They have cool couples. They have like a household account too.
Well now they do, yeah. But even before that, I was just like, she's going to soccer practice and then dance, and then she comes home and she's planning our kids' birthday party, and then she's, you know, got to remember to bring the red jersey to soccer this week because we're the away team, you know, like those sorts of things. So, just like normal everyday stuff, not like solving fluid dynamics and quantum computing or stuff like that. So she used Instinct to help plan this birthday party, like from everything as simple as calling different venues, finding out the dates. Once it finds out the dates, comparing, you know, how does that work with the kids' soccer schedule, and then figuring out how many pizzas we need to order to feed 30 kids and 30 adults and what the order should be to give it to them. And then, 'Hey, the venue sent the contract over. I took a look at it. There's only one clause I think you should worry about, but other than that, you should sign it. It's in your inbox.' You know, that sort of thing. So, it's helping plan the birthday party. And along the way, she's like, 'It's helpful, but you know, like whatever.' You know, it's good. I like it. But she wasn't blown away.
Yeah. Still, it was in the friend zone.
Exactly. And then it broke out of the friend zone. Right after the party, like three hours later, she got a text from it saying, 'I hope the party went great' with a heart emoji.
And she screenshotted it. She sent it to me and she was like, 'Okay, I'm sold.' That's it.
I was like, 'From that?' And then she's like, 'Yes.' And I was like, 'I don't get it. I would be like, what? Who cares? This is weird.' And she's like... And I realized that everything she's ever wanted me to do as a supportive boyfriend, fiance, and husband, Instinct just knows how to do out of the box. It's like, just check in. Just be supportive. Just to be like, 'Hey, you know...' Well, somebody else was telling me the story where they gave it to their mother-in-law, and their mother-in-law connected it to their Mint.com, like their financial planning account, and their main checking account had just gone down to zero that week. Like it was empty, and Instinct was actually super supportive and non-judgy about the whole thing. It was like, 'Hey, you know, like you wanted this update. I just want to let you know here's where things are. But, you know, I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of. Like, hey, it happens. Like, you know, I think if we start to plan this way, I can see us building that account right back up to where it's been for the past few months.' And the mother-in-law was like, 'I have never felt so supported and not judged by any person, let alone technology.' And so, I just think there's a whole soft side to these things that I deeply undervalued. You know, we had that Tolins guy on who's created an AI fuzzy bear, like a little Tamagotchi type thing that you can chat with. And I think they're on like an almost hundred million dollar run rate or something crazy like that. Like somebody said that it's in the tens of millions if not getting close to 100 million run rate. And I was talking to a buddy who, you know, 6'7" guy, like builds things with his hands, works in tech, and he's like, 'Yeah, I wanted to check it out.'
You got friends like that?
I got a friend like that. And so I talked to him and he's like, 'Yeah, I heard the episode or whatever and I downloaded the app and I know how this works. It's AI. It's not a real companion. It's not my real friend.' And it just hits him up and it's like, 'What are you doing today? Send me a selfie.' And then he's just goofing around. So he sends a selfie just like being stupid, like making an ugly face on purpose.
And the thing is like, 'Oh, is that Overwatch in the background?'
And he's like, 'Do you play?' And he's like, 'Yeah, yeah, I play.' It's like, 'Are you good?' He's like, 'Well, you know, I'm on my way to platinum.' And then it's like, 'Well, who do you main?' He's like, 'Reinhardt usually, but like...' It's like, 'The new update's pretty sick for Reinhardt.' He's like, 'Well, yeah. I mean, it's pretty good.' He's like, 'Oh, it's happening. It's becoming my friend.' And he's like, 'I know what it's doing to me.' And still, I was kind of like, 'Wow, this thing takes a lot of interest in me.' And there's something in all of us that we're just drawn to responding to when something takes deep interest in us in a non-judgmental, supportive way that's always there for you 24/7 whenever you need it. So I think that was one of my observations, that the soft side is just as important if not more important than raw intelligence.
I'm eager to hear... I know you're doing observations, but I'm desperately eager to hear what you think is going to happen in the future. Like, is there... not from a... I mean, it could be from an opportunistic business perspective, but where you're like just being a futurist and it's fun to dream up what might happen. Do you have any opinions?
Yeah. Where do you want me to go? Give me like a point in a direction on the playground and I'll try.
Well, how about for daily work? Like what do you think will happen in 12 months for the average white-collar worker?
So, I think there's twofold, right? I think it's a K-shaped economy. Have you ever heard this phrase?
Yeah. Yeah. So, basically like the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Is that what you mean?
Yeah. But it's not about rich and poor necessarily. What... so...
I'm just saying as an example like...
Basically it's a fork in the road. So, for example, when there's a dip in the stock market, people say, 'Oh, it's going to be like a U-shaped recovery,' which means it goes down and stays down for a while and then starts to sink back up. It could be a V-shaped recovery, which is a sharp down and a sharp bounce back up. That's what happened in COVID, for example. So I think what's going to happen here is a K-shape, where basically there's a fork in the road and some people who understand how to use these tools, like a normal everyday worker who realizes that they just got like this incredible tool in their pocket and takes the time to train themselves and to go through the trial and error of delegating to this, seeing what it can do, pushing the boundaries of this, they're going to become, you know, 10x more powerful in doing. And then there's people who are going to resist this, be slow to this, or not understand the implications of this. They're going to take some moral high ground about this. I think they're going to unfortunately suffer. So, I think it's up to the person, up to the individual how they deal with this. By the way, I asked Muse. I asked Muse, I go, 'Hey, the Instinct guy says he's growing 10% a day. How do you feel about that?' And he got all pissy. It was like, 'Honestly, 10% a day is not a real growth rate. That's just a number that only works when you start at the very beginning because 10% daily would be 1.3 quadrillion in a year. And that's just crazy, right? So yeah, if you start at 100 a day, then 110, yeah, technically that's 10%, but it's all about a small base. So yeah, it might be true right now.' But I got basically like the digital eye roll from Muse on that one.
All right, I want to... Well, where are we in this? You want to keep going? Couple more predictions or observations. One, Muse is going really hard. So, I think they're going to sponsor tons of creators on Instagram and podcasts and things like that. I think they're going to quickly try to squash this. One good thing is that Zuck is a bit like Napoleon or, you know, I don't know, you're the history guy. Like, who's somebody that went through a lot of wars to the point where their war general instincts were honed? Because...
Yeah. I mean, Napoleon, there's this... I've been reading... I love reading about John Rockefeller. And the best part in my opinion of reading is finding like old books that are out of date or out of... you know, you can't really find them as much, and oftentimes they're more granular. And there's this one where I'm reading about John Rockefeller. John Rockefeller basically was the first oil company in America, the first big one. And he did it by consolidation. He would buy all these local... back then it was wildcatters. It was like cowboys basically. He would buy all of them and make it big. But he wanted to be secretive about it, but he was very ruthless. And there's language that him and Archbold, his partner, they're talking and they're like, 'Hey, is this person an enemy or a friendly?' Like, that's how they would use language like that. And they're like, 'Oh, he's an enemy. Okay, it's important that we lose unlimited amounts of money before this person can profit off one more pint of oil,' where it was like, 'We will burn bridges to crush this person.' And that's how they grew. And when I'm learning about Zuck and also this AI thing, I'm like, it's very similar where it's like it's war right now.
It's war and he's been through wars. He was the challenger when Facebook was on the come-up and Google was the giant, and Google tried to clone them with Google Circles, if you remember that, or Plus or whatever the hell it was called. And then he's been on the other side where he tried to... where Snapchat was the upstart and he first ignored it a little too long. Then he tried to buy them, then they didn't get it, they weren't able to buy them in the end, and then he tried to clone them and the clone didn't work, but then he figured out like, okay, I can't clone the whole thing, but I can kind of neuter them by doing Instagram Stories, which was the competitor to Snapchat Stories, and stunted their growth. Then TikTok, same thing. Oh, can't buy them, they're this big Chinese company. I got to put Reels out there and I'll try to clone them until I make this work. Well, he's doing the same thing now with Instinct, and it's going to be very interesting if Instinct can do, you know, when in Star Wars when they have to fly into the Death Star and it's like this tiny channel, he's got one little ship and he's just got to get to the core of the Death Star to blow it up. That's what Noah from Instinct has to do right now. It's like for him to survive this, when you've got Elon, you got Sam Altman, you got Zuckerberg, you have Google, you have Apple, you have Amazon, you have all these companies trying to build this personal assistant. It's like that one flight near the tiny ship and you have to make it through. Maybe you'll make it through, but I think it's incredibly, incredibly, incredibly difficult to do that. The second thing that I think is really important to understand is there's a reason why all the big companies are freaking out about this. So, I don't know if you saw, but Amazon shut off access to Muse to be able to go buy stuff on Amazon. Now, why would they do that? Why would you stop somebody from shopping on Amazon? Well, the reason is what's called disintermediation. Meaning, if I just tell Muse, 'Hey, go find me the best price for this thing that'll ship in two days or three days or whatever it is.' Well, today as a consumer, I'm not going to want to do a ton of effort to check in case I can get a book somewhere else for cheaper or whatever. I'm not going to go look at five different places and do this comparison. My mental shortcut will just always be Amazon. Or if I'm ordering something, maybe it'll always be DoorDash and I'm not going to compare, you know, DoorDash versus Uber Eats versus the three other things that I could do, Prime Fresh or whatever the hell. Like, I'm not going to do all that work. So consumers just start to gravitate towards trusted brands. Well, what happens when you have AI that's tireless? You'll say, 'Hey, order me this.' And it'll be like, 'Oh, you know, you can just buy that directly from Walmart.'
You know, you can actually go to the brand and get it for $4 cheaper. Do you want that?' And then the consumer is just going to thumbs-up emoji this. And so these companies that have built so much time carving out mental real estate in consumers' minds, building those habits, hardwiring those habits day after day, year after year, suddenly the agent is going to be the one with all the power to decide. This is also why Zuckerberg is so hellbent on doing this because just like the Apple App Store had this monopoly, this gateway to who can be in the store and who's going to show up at the top of the rankings and all this stuff, and they took a transaction fee on everything. That's what's going to happen. So the founder of Instinct said he wants us to be free forever and he wants to make his money taking a cut on all the transactions. He said that already while they're invite-only, they've already crossed a billion dollars of transactions through the platform, or people use Instinct to buy something, that 40 or 50% of that was travel. So imagine your Booking.com or your Expedia. Sorry boys, game's over. The show is over for you guys because...
Well, yeah, yeah, I mean it could be, but also like, I mean those guys all have these programs set up where they give you a 3% affiliate fee, and I wonder if they would just use that or broker deals because like by that logic Facebook would have done this already where it would have been strictly an affiliate marketing play.
Sorry, I didn't understand who would have done what.
I think that what that guy Noah said is very similar to when the Google founders said that ads won't work on Google, or I think they said, what did they say? 'We don't want it to be an ad platform.' I kind of think it's something like that, like where the way that it's going to end is going to be drastically different than what he's saying in the first year of the business.
Well, there's a good chance of that. But I would say the fact that people are using their agent to buy stuff in such volume, where he said, I think he said that 40% of users give Instinct their credit card within the first three weeks, and then once they've done that, there's like an 80% retention rate, which is... these are numbers that to the average person it's just a number, but if you've been in tech, you understand how rare that is, how rare both of those numbers are, that people would hand over their credit card to an agent to buy things stored in the vault, and that 80% would retain that have done that. That's like the Facebook, you know, 'get seven friends in 10 days and then you're there for life.' That's that sort of aha moment where you get tons of value from the thing. And the point is, if you're the agent that makes the buying decision, that's even more powerful than the most powerful business model in the world so far, which has been the Google ad platform. Because the Google ad platform was advertisers pay to be shown and the user is going to decide what to do. If this is the agent is going to decide where to buy, and then every merchant basically has to pay a vig for the...
in exchange for the customer being brought to them. That's going to be really big. This is how DoorDash, you know, charges merchants. People don't really realize this. DoorDash charges not just the customer for, like, the transaction fee or the service fee or whatever. They also charge the restaurant because they're like, they're telling the restaurant, 'Hey, you wouldn't have had this order if it wasn't for us.' And the restaurant over time, they didn't like that. It's not like they wanted to agree to that, but they, you know, eventually realize there's too much power in the hands of this aggregator in the middle and they have to play ball otherwise they lose out on all that volume. If they don't agree to it, they'll just put another Mexican restaurant there. Another Chinese restaurant will go in its place. And so I think that's why a lot of these platforms are very scared of... they want to be the agent because you don't want to be the one who is basically at the mercy of the agent who's making all these recommendations and buying decisions.
Do you want to know who's been a big recipient of this? And this is very niche because you and I are in this industry, but I want to hear if you've heard any stories like this. So, I've talked to... in the past week, I hung out with three to four, like, mostly Instagram creators. Some of them have, like, little podcasts that really no one actually listens to, but they make clips and that's how they got, like, an Instagram audience. And then some people, they just do, like, them just holding up their phone talking. All of the people who I've talked to have less than 100,000 followers across their platform, whether it's Instagram or YouTube, and all of them that I talked to are doing over a million dollars a year in ad revenue, almost entirely from AI companies. And I talked to three where... so of the million-dollar ones, I talked to four this week and it's just them. And then I also talked to three others that it's just them with, like, a part-time VA or a part-time someone helping them, and they are doing over $10 million a year in revenue.
And I, like, part of me, like, I insert myself as the main character where I'm like, people are calling this new media. I'm like, I was the new media. I'm no longer the new media, but I was, like... and I'm like, and it was hard to, like, get started. Now I'm seeing these numbers by these people and I'm like, oh my gosh, these numbers are astronomical. Their audiences are tiny and it's just crazy how much money the AI industry has to buy ads. I guess it's a combination of they're losing money more likely than not, and also the product costs 2,000 a month all the way up to, like, the micro one where they're giving, like, you know, $50,000 affiliate fees. Like, it's just astronomical.
You didn't mention this, the thing about buying company data. So, like, okay, I think we talked enough about AI assistants. What are the other interesting things going on at AI right now? Micro One is incredible. I didn't do it, but let me give people this story. So, Micro One is a company. It's one of these stories that you've heard...
Ouch. They're incredible. What do you mean?
Well, incredible. Like a big, a tall mountain. Like, you know, you may not like mountains, but, like, you look at that and you're like, 'Wow.' You know what I mean? Like, so I'm not, like, vouching for it. I'm just saying that the story is wild.
You're going to get clipped. They're just going to run that as an ad.
Nope. Don't do that. That's not what I'm saying at all. They clipped it. I'm very neutral on the business model or the company. It's just how big they got. But basically, I forget what they were doing at first. I think they were doing something involving, like, VAs or training data, something like that. But then they made the switch and they grew to something like a billion dollars in run rate in a matter of 8 months. And basically what they've been doing is they've been going to privately held companies like my company, Hampton, and they say, 'Hey, if you plug in your Notion, your Slack, your Gmail, your Drive, and a bunch of other information,' and they will give you $800,000. They offered us $800,000 for our data. We said no because part of the whole thing of Hampton is, like, it's a private community. We're not going to do that. But they offered me $800,000 to do this. And then they said, 'By the way, here's an affiliate fee. We'll give you $50,000 for everyone you refer to us.'
And I got trashed on Twitter because I'm like, these guys offered me this. I think it's not for us because, like, my whole business is that. But I don't think it's wrong if you're, like, an ecom brand or, like, some brand where, like, confidentiality isn't one of the main things. Here's my affiliate link. And I got, like, I think I... and I said, here's affiliate link that I get money if you, like, go through this flow. I think we had 80 people go through that flow. I don't know how many of them will become customers, but they got, like, or 80 business owners saying, 'I am interested in doing this via my link.' And let's just say that eight convert. That's, I can't even do that math. $300,000 that they will give me in affiliate fees.
