How AI Digital Minds Can Scale Human Connection ft Delphi’s Dara Ladjevardian

Let's call Adelfi right now.

I'm down.

Yeah.

How about we call my friend? I actually

haven't met him in person, but I'm I'm friends with this Deli. Arnold

Schwarzenegger.

Yeah.

What do we think?

Love it.

Hey, this is AI Arnold. I'm here to cut the crap and help you get stronger, healthier, and happier. So, what's on your mind today?

Arnold, I have 15 minutes a day to work out, which I feel like is not a lot, but I want to feel good and I want to get better in my health. What do you recommend I do? 15 minutes is plenty if

you focus and go hard. Don't overthink

it. Stick to simple, effective moves that hit multiple muscles. Do one to two sets of exercises like push-ups, reverse

lunges, and lying leg raises. Keep rest

short and push yourself. You'll feel

like a champion in no time. Now, get to it.

That's awesome.

[Music] Today's guest, Dar, is building something that challenges our

fundamental assumptions about human connection and knowledge transfer. His

company, Deli, creates digital minds, AI representations that capture not just what people say and how they sound, but how they think and reason through new situations. Dar's insight is that AI is

situations. Dar's insight is that AI is driving a shift from information consumption through feeds to conversational media. He argues that as

conversational media. He argues that as AI becomes abundant, human energy and authentic connection become the premium experience. This conversation reveals

experience. This conversation reveals how the next wave of AI might not automate humans away, but actually amplify our most uniquely human qualities. Enjoy the show.

qualities. Enjoy the show.

Dra, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. Okay. Digital

minds, AI clones. Sounds a little bit like a Black Mirror episode where nobody's talking to each other anymore.

Like, change my mind.

Well, one, we got rid of the word clones. So, we don't say that anymore.

clones. So, we don't say that anymore.

Oh, digital minds.

Okay.

But I think if you look at past revolutions of technology, when the printing press came out, you're going to read someone's thoughts instead of talking to them. When the radio came out, you're going to listen to a voice

in a box instead of talking to them.

Must make you antisocial. But I think what each of these things did is you listen to someone on a podcast or read a book, you end up wanting to meet them even more. And you may read an email

even more. And you may read an email from someone. Does that make you

from someone. Does that make you antisocial? Now you can just consume

antisocial? Now you can just consume that information in an interactive way.

And what we've seen, which I can talk about more later, is the idea of having a digital mind ends up leading to people wanting to talk to you more. So the idea isn't replacing human connection but

providing access where previously there was none in a way that is more temporally convenient for the end user and in a world where everyone has a

digital twin what you know what becomes of you know the value of real human interaction I think even digital twin aside I think AI makes energy more premium

because energy is the one thing that cannot be replaced. So again, back to the revolutions. There was a time where

the revolutions. There was a time where most of the work we did was based on our bodies. And then we we invented machines

bodies. And then we we invented machines that were stronger than us. And then we invented jobs where the majority of our work involved our minds. And now we're inventing machines that are smarter than

us. And what's the remaining thing? It's

us. And what's the remaining thing? It's

kind of our our hearts, our energy. And

so in a world where you have a digital mind, it's kind of like your top offunnel filter. Who gets to meet you?

offunnel filter. Who gets to meet you?

Who actually gets to make it to your heart? which is the in my opinion

heart? which is the in my opinion premium experience.

Speaking of hearts, I think it would be helpful to hear you've just explained sort of the technology revolution backwards way of looking at what Deli is today. Yeah,

you should also tell us about the origin story and the very human reason you started the company because I think that's really fascinating.

Yeah, it's a long and windy road, but uh you know in 2014 I was gifted a book called How to Create a Mind by Ray Kerszswwell. Yep.

Kerszswwell. Yep.

Where he talks about one day you can recreate someone's mind. And I don't know why that was so fascinating to me at the time, but that got me into studying computer science and physics and got me into the AI space. And then

in 2021, I was working on my first startup as a solo founder in building with LLMs in a time where everyone was saying crypto or American dynamism. So I

felt like I must be doing something wrong. No one really wants to talk to

wrong. No one really wants to talk to me. I'm very lonely. I didn't really

me. I'm very lonely. I didn't really have any mentors. And I was reading a book about my grandfather who was one of the most successful business owners in Iran before the revolution. He had

30,000 employees at his peak. And he was put on the hit list by the Ayatollah.

Came to this country with nothing. But

the the really special thing about him and and the reason they actually study his book in business schools in Iran was not just because he was successful, but because he was a very principled man.

Like he treated people well, had integrity. And when you start a company

integrity. And when you start a company for the first time, it's really a moment in your life where you you really begin to internally reflect like who am I? Why

am I even working seven days a week?

Like what is the thing that is driving me? Yeah.

me? Yeah.

And so this book provided a place where like maybe this is who I am. Like this

is my family. And I wanted to be able to ask him what would you do in my situation? But a book can't answer this

situation? But a book can't answer this question. And he had had a stroke a

question. And he had had a stroke a couple years prior. So I couldn't ask him myself. So remembering Ray

him myself. So remembering Ray Kerszswwell's book and realizing that LLM's matched that book, I created a digital version of him that I could talk to and uh

those like GPT2 or BERT.

It was early GPT3 developer list along with hugging face embeddings.

Okay.

Wow.

And you know a bunch of wines later which I can get into if you want. We

have deli.

Really cool. when did you realize this could be a scalable platform and you know not represent one person but the voice of so many?

So I actually tried to launch Deli as a company in 2021. It was called Helix at the time and I posted a website and you could talk to like Naval and Mark Andre

and one it was super expensive like I was burning money and two a lot of people were like what is this? This is

immoral. You can't be doing this. This

is wrong. So I was like, "All right, you know what? Maybe I'm wrong." And I think

know what? Maybe I'm wrong." And I think a couple things happened in the following year that continually built that conviction besides the grandfather experience.

One is I moved to Miami to work at Open Store under Keith Reo and his main investment philosophy is I like to invest in startups where the majority of my friends laugh at and think it's stupid.

I was like, wait a minute, maybe I should like double click into that thing where everyone was calling me stupid.

And then number two is I met my co-founder Sam and we were reading Build by Tony Fidel in our book club and we created a digital version of him because that book kind of operates as a mentor like he teaches you how to think about

product and I was using it and Sam was using other people were using it and I was like this is really useful and I am not the only person in the world who has felt alone without mentors. It was very

obvious to me that this would be useful for any young person wanting to learn from the grades just as they do from books, but now they can respond back because Bloom's two sigma that was a paper that I was reading at the time,

two standard deviations improvement for those who have tutors. Not everyone has access to that. And then the third thing was I in 2022

I had turned the notifications on for every AI researcher on Twitter and I realized that a paper was coming out every single week and the digital mind that I created of

Tony Fidel was 10,000 times cheaper than the one I created for my grandfather.

And so at that point I was like okay this is now feasible to do at scale. It

is useful to me. the thing I have to prove out eventually is can this be useful to the person creating a digital mind so it's not just for the end user and so that's what led us to starting the company a month before chat GBT

which at the time again everyone was like what is this this is stupid you can't do this but you know I had heard that before was this before or after character AI before and so when character launched I

remember Sam and I were kind of freaking out a little bit but I think again I had seen the cost of these models dropped so heavily and the history of

billion-dollar consumer companies are not is not a history of companies that had early technical moes there were it was a history of companies that just had great product and great distribution and at a certain time the the moat that

character AI had at the time according to VCs would not no longer be a moat the ability to create these digital characters and then the second aspect of it is I think the first use case that really takes off in a company defines

its trajectory and character AI really taking off on, you know, anime characters and characters. I knew it was a very different world than like verified authenticity, human representation, at least with very

different brands and very different products.

Super interesting.

The first time I met you, I remember thinking, "Oh, isn't this kind of like character?" I think I had that similar

character?" I think I had that similar impression, but you've always had a really heavy emphasis on authorized real people. Can you talk about a little bit

people. Can you talk about a little bit more about what led you down that path?

Why did you pick that? And then what what have you had to build in order to make that really work?

Yeah. So it was both intentional and unintentional.

Initially Sam and I's go to market scheme would be hey we should create these digital versions of these people and they're going to love it. Like

they're going to think it's so cool and that was not the case. We got three seasoned desists from very very important people who still have not forgiven us to this day.

And so that's when I was like, okay, uh, we need to get their buy in. And that

means we don't want to be a pay-to-play model like some of these other creator companies. We need to make the product

companies. We need to make the product useful enough such that someone is willing to go through the friction of uploading their data and trusting us with their identity. What does that mean? We have to create a brand as well.

mean? We have to create a brand as well.

A brand that people want to associate their identities with. It is uh statusinducing.

And I think if you look at Wikipedia pretty much documents all of human knowledge. Does anyone actually learn

knowledge. Does anyone actually learn from Wikipedia? The creator economy

from Wikipedia? The creator economy exists because we inherently trust things that come from humans. We read

books, we watch YouTube videos.

Yeah.

So similarly, if the internet taught people how to consume information through screens and then once we built that habit, we started reading blogs. With Chad GBT,

we're teaching people how to consume information through conversation. And I

think that's going to be the dominant form of content consumption because it's easier and we like easy things. Then the

pendulum swings and we want things that come from humans.

So for us to get people to trust us, it it required guard rails, uh, anti-h hallucination. It required having a very

hallucination. It required having a very strict stance on you can only create a deli of yourself and it required really caring about design and brand.

Maybe take us through now behind the scenes like what is actually going on uh when you created deli through the creation process and then what's kind of going on under the hood like how do you represent a human?

Well, I I want to talk a bit about what Ray Kerszswwell said in his book.

Yeah. So in the book he says that the mind is a hierarchy of pattern recognizers and on the lowest end you have on the on the lowest level of the hierarchy you have things that recognize

letters and that feeds up to higher levels which recognize sentences and that feeds up to meaning and that feeds up to consciousness. And so when I was working on my first startup Friday, which involved LLMs, I had this insight.

Wait, an LLM is a pattern recognizer.

And I kind of had an existential moment where I was like, are we just a hierarchy of pattern recognizers where consciousness is what we experience? And

so that really helped me understand that he has this line in the book, you don't need to understand the molecular details of the mind to recreate it. You just

need to understand how it's organized and architected. And so that's kind of

and architected. And so that's kind of what led me to focusing on like what does the organization of a mind look like? And your mind stores a bunch of

like? And your mind stores a bunch of things. It stores your relationships. Uh

things. It stores your relationships. Uh

it has uncertainty in it. It connects

events and heruristics with you know how you reason about those events and heristics. And it changes over time.

heristics. And it changes over time.

Your beliefs change over time. And so

what we've ended up with is an adaptive temporal knowledge graph. Knowledge

graphs are great because you can store the connections between things and you can also store the weights of confidence like how how likely is it that you would actually say this and we allow people to control you know leniency on what they

want their deli to say and the temporal nature is it changes over time so eventually you can say what would my 22-year-old version of me say this about this topic um so yeah people can upload their

social media their YouTube podcast websites they can answer questions about themselves it creates feeds so it's constantly staying up to and updating the knowledge graph and then you can

make it available to others to chat with call or video call. And the very important thing we had to solve before getting any any customers is every person was like what if it says something wrong and someone takes a

screenshot and sends it to the daily mail. There's just a huge fear.

mail. There's just a huge fear.

Yeah.

And so allowing people to kind of choose okay it only says things it's trained on that directly answers the question.

That's great for people like Dr. Markman who works in the medical space or it uses data from the internet. They

want it to be conclusive. But I think the most powerful setting is it only says things it's trained on. But when

posed with a new situation, it can predict what you might say in that new situation.

And that's useful for a lot of reasons.

And I can give you example of like how that works in practice. If I were to ask my grandfather's deli, how would you think about running an AI company? He's

never spoken about AI in his life, but in his book, it talks about him starting an oil business in Iran in the mid 20th century and that was kind of an uncertain time in the country. So, we

have his principles of dealing with uncertainty and AI is an uncertain field right now. So, he can maybe reason what

right now. So, he can maybe reason what he might say in these new situations.

That's completely fascinating. I love

that theory of the mind from the book is how you built the company.

Yeah. Yeah. Ray Kurszswwell is the man.

It's fascinating. Can you give us some examples of the most popular deli uh and the you know shapes of uh conversations that people are having on your platform?

Yeah, I mean it's pretty uh it's a horizontal enablement layer versus like a vertical point solution. Like when you have a new form of media, there's a lot of ways you can you can do that and then scale your thoughts. So we have some

people using it as an entirely new form of teaching and learning. You see course completion rate at an all-time low because our attention spans are kind of being destroyed by Tik Tok and reals and

books as well. Now you have something that you can learn from like a mentor in a way that's personalized to you that's adaptive to your changing circumstances.

So you could read a book once and come back a year later. Your circumstances

have changed. That book stays the same.

Deli adapts with you. So that's kind of the learning case and people are monetizing it, making millions of dollars selling time with their mind.

And then we have just 247 availability to their teams. CEOs have a very specific way of thinking or their best salespeople have a specific way of thinking. How do you scale the highest

thinking. How do you scale the highest leverage people in a company? Because as

a company scales, what usually breaks is alignment. And so now CEOs can be in

alignment. And so now CEOs can be in multiple rooms. Top sales people can train new hires and help them get up to speed faster.

We have 247 I don't like to say customer support because I don't think we're a replacement for intercom or zenesk but my deli is in the deli product and like

my customers will talk to it all the time and then they'll email me being like yo thank you so much I love the product so it almost feels like there's a higher NPS and I think it's very

analogous to Mark Zuckerberg spending a t a ton of time on his personal brand right now because he knows that the relationship between the human and the individual is more powerful than the

relationship between the human and the company. And then we have the top of the

company. And then we have the top of the funnel where replacement of personal website, LinkedIn profile. You want to pick my brain. I don't want to give you my email because I have too much spam in my email. So why don't you talk to my

my email. So why don't you talk to my digital mind and it's going to let me know if we should hop on a call based on what it knows about the kinds of people that I want to meet.

Actually, maybe talk about it from that perspective. If if you if you have a

perspective. If if you if you have a digital mind, how do you like sort of talk to your own deli and then figure out, you know, the maybe who you should go back in contact? Like what can you

see on the inside once you have a deli?

Yeah. So, it's a combination of proactive and passive. So, I could go in and and be like, given the past thousand conversations, where in the deli product should I improve the most? What blog

post should I create that will give clarity to my customers? What's

resonating with people? or for some of our more revenue focused customers, where are the biggest revenue opportunities? What product should I

opportunities? What product should I create? What podcast? What should I talk

create? What podcast? What should I talk about my my next podcast? So, that's

more passive.

And then the proactive is mine will tell me when there's an engineer talking to it because we don't want to introduce another inbox to someone. We're not

trying to waste people's time. We're

trying to save people time. So, you can go through all the conversations, but what's better is you never have to and you trust it enough that it's going to tell you when it's an important customer or a partner or a journalist or a new hire.

Yeah. I actually talked to your deli before this to prepare for the podcast and I asked it what are some good questions to ask you and then what would your answers be and that helped guide the the scripts. I thought that was a really interesting use case that I

hadn't really anticipated.

Yeah. I uh I interviewed a candidate today and I was like starting to tell him about myself. He's like, "Oh, don't worry. I I already talked to your deli.

worry. I I already talked to your deli.

We can we can get straight into it." I

was like, "Yeah, let's go."

Awesome.

I don't want to have to tell this story every time.

Yeah. Yeah.

Can we share the Brian Halligan use case?

Oh. Um, so Brian Alligan is a partner at Sequoia, right? I I have him on text. I,

Sequoia, right? I I have him on text. I,

you know, could easily call him to ask a question. And you know, he's written all

question. And you know, he's written all these books about HubSpot and, you know, his journey as CEO. And I had a very specific question about how they did product management when they launched their second product. And I was like, I

could text Brian, but this is kind of I don't want to bother him. So I just called his deli on my drive home and I said, how did you do product management?

And he gave like a perfect answer. you

know, I I I could have called him, you know, and it's also interesting to see some of the other deli being used internally at Sequoa. Uh our design partner, James Buckhouse, has one, and our founders often talk to him about storytelling advice. You've talked to

storytelling advice. You've talked to him before.

Yeah.

And now they text his deli every once in a while. And then also text him at the

a while. And then also text him at the same time and say, "Hey, your deli said this. Just want to check that that's

this. Just want to check that that's right." And he's like, "Yep, that's spot

right." And he's like, "Yep, that's spot on." So, it's just so fascinating to be

on." So, it's just so fascinating to be able to even with people you know, kind of not want to bother them or not take up too much of their time and still get really great answers. So, that's been kind of surprising as a consumer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Who who you are and what you decide to share changes based on where you are.

Like I'm in podcast right now. I'm not

going to share the things that I share with my family.

Yeah.

And so context awareness and the ability to hide data. you know, my deli internally might have data that externally it doesn't have and maybe my

data my deli if it's going to represent me in a dating sense is not going to be talking about digital minds create the future. It's going to be talking about

future. It's going to be talking about me as a person.

Yeah, totally. Um and and then the sequoia use cases you mentioned are really interesting because you know one of the things we try to be very intentional about is we are not you know nameless faceless sequoia. We are a

collection of individuals each with very very different personalities, different skill sets etc. And so like the founders we work with kind of figure that out, but Deli kind of allows us to scale that

in a way uh that that is otherwise hard to scale.

Yeah. The what you said, the anxiety of wasting someone else's time is actually like a huge thing that we started to see more and more where it's like I don't want to waste your time. Also,

this is a very personal conversation that I'm I'm too nervous to have with another human being. So I'll just talk to your deli instead.

Totally.

What are the most unusual things people have asked your deli? like things that maybe you were surprised by. Even

there was someone asking about wanting to go on a date at some point. I was

completely in grind mode, so I didn't get to double click into that.

Um I always think it's really cool like that every once in a while there will be like some guy who calls my deli for an hour in Hungarian. The cool it's multilingual.

So it's like that's just something that I wouldn't ever have been able to do like talk to this guy and connect with him.

And so I think that's very cool. Um,

and the way they speak to it, they know it's not me, but they will they will just speak to it as if it is.

Yeah. You know, I often think about, you know, right now we're in this time where talking to like an AI version of someone seems weird and dystopian, but I I suspect consumer behavior is going to

switch very quickly and it's just going to become more and more the norm. And

maybe kind of the same way that we used to look at like Wikipedia when it first came out. We're like, "Oh, that's

came out. We're like, "Oh, that's terrible. people writing, you know,

terrible. people writing, you know, facts on the internet. This is horrible and we should all be reading encyclopedias. And now we're just kind

encyclopedias. And now we're just kind of used to it. We set our expectations that not everything on the internet is true. And so I think people will go

true. And so I think people will go through this sort of understanding of what AI is and what these conversations are like and eventually know this is not the real DAR. I know what I'm getting.

It's still useful. It doesn't mean it's a replacement for you. So that's kind of how I think about the shift. Where do you think we are in

the shift. Where do you think we are in that sort of adoption cycle? because I

what I the thing I I love about you is I feel like you live five years in the future um and we're like just catching up like what do you see down that path?

Like where do you think this is all going?

So I think two things need to happen. Um

one of them is just it's a culture shift and I I know the first year of the company was so painful because like no one believed in our product. Uh but I just saw so many people go from haters to like complete believers once they

understood it, once they got social proof. Social proof is a big thing and

proof. Social proof is a big thing and yesterday I was at an event with Tony Robbins and Gary Brea and a lot of like those kinds of people and there's certain people who get it and then you'll have someone here it's a group

where people talk about like their business problems in the knowledgebased uh sector and there's one guy and he's like you know I really wish I could scale myself all these people are asking for my time and I want to help them but

I can't I'm only one guy and I'm like dude you know about Deli but in his mind he's like oh no no like that doesn't make sense. And that's when I realized

make sense. And that's when I realized like, oh what, like this is a need and people want it, but they are anxious that it's going to make them look inauthentic. They're anxious that it's

inauthentic. They're anxious that it's going to say something wrong. There's

kind of like this perception of AI and like what it what it is. So I think it's just something that as AI gets more ubiquitous and we get more social proof, people will adopt. And the second aspect

of it is from a product perspective, before our new mind architecture, it was very hard to create a good one unless you had a lot of data. And now with interview mode and the ability to just

answer a couple questions about yourself to create something pretty high fidelity that can represent you, I think we'll open it up to mass market.

So that's maybe the supply side, right?

What do you think will happen on the consumer side?

Consumer side. Yeah.

And not even just with Deli, but just generally with the future of, you know, like you said, we're in the internet where there's blogs and articles and now we're shifting to all conversational medium. Like what does that look like

medium. Like what does that look like for consumers? for consumers to adopt

for consumers? for consumers to adopt deli. The ones we see it happen when

deli. The ones we see it happen when they make the shift of oh this is just a new artifact of the mind. This is not a replacement. This is just conversational

replacement. This is just conversational media as James likes to say. But I hope that right now most networks and online are about feeds. So social media and the

about feeds. So social media and the internet is about keeping us scrolling and reading forever which I think is kind of a waste of time and kind of antithetical to the purpose of technology. I think in a world where

technology. I think in a world where everyone has a digital mind, we don't like the idea of a feed. We like the idea of you have something that knows you so well and you trust that it knows

you so well and it can find the people that can most help you in your life, whether it's someone to learn from, someone to work with based on the quality of your thought and it's proactive. So there is no feed and you

proactive. So there is no feed and you spend more time in the real world.

That's kind of our optimistic version.

Less scrolling, more learning impactful things and more connecting with people in real life. I'm also curious how the economics of the internet are evolving like for example Wikipedia constantly running out of money right do you think

that there's an economic opportunity for the people that create deli of themselves totally and there's so many business models with this company and I I'll walk you through the

the growing nature of it so right now people uh pay to have a deli of themselves which might sound weird but you know you have six million people paying Wix to have a personal website which is a way of scaling themselves you

have people paying Beehive to have a blog and then people can monetize their deli as a new version of a course or a book and we already have someone making millions of dollars and I think the key

blocker to that growth is just how the positioning. I think the positioning is

positioning. I think the positioning is really important for that. We're trying

to figure out how to market a new kind of form of content that people pay for.

And then you have the idea of people being able to license out their digital minds. So if Arnold Schwarzenegger for

minds. So if Arnold Schwarzenegger for example gets 10,000 messages a week containing the word supplement, maybe a brand wants to buy that keyword and he can agree and it's like people based SEO

or LA Fitness can be like we want to rent his identity to represent our brand.

So I think there's a idea of scaling your identity in a way that can serve brands and other people.

And then the last one is the advanced uh people search. You know people pay

people search. You know people pay LinkedIn sales recruiter or GLG cons consulting to find the best person in the world on a specific topic. We say

simulation as a service the new SAS where you can have your digital mind simulate millions of conversations and come back to you and say this is the best person and maybe there is business

models on both sides where you can pay to be seen more which I'm kind of against because the idea is that it should not be hacked and it should be authentic or you get better results by paying. How do you think about

paying. How do you think about balancing, you know, advertising versus versus paid? Because there's there's a

versus paid? Because there's there's a certain lack of authenticity, right?

When there's when there's keywords and people are buying.

Well, the key thing is Arnold has to agree to it. Like if he actually believes in the brand, then we don't see any problem with that because people want to get recommendations from him anyways. It's

just trust capital.

Yeah. Yeah, I was talking to Mark Hyman's uh deli about blood testing and he did say maybe you should try function health, but that was like actually related to what I was talking to him

about. Yeah. You know what I would love

about. Yeah. You know what I would love is, you know, rather than going to chatt and getting sort of the generic internet summarized answer, I'd love to ask a question like, you know, what supplement

should I be on? here's my, you know, let me upload my results and then have different doctors with different perspectives or different health people answer and then be able to choose which of those to engage with. So, I think that could be a really cool

Yeah, border advisor. We used to have that, then we removed it because now we're focused on quality instead of shipping speed.

Okay. So, conversations are the the future. You think the medium will be

future. You think the medium will be text, phone calls, video? Like, how do you think that plays out? So,

interestingly enough, we've seen consumers whose first experience with the product is voice are 5x more retentive and likely to come back. I

think that's interesting. It kind of goes onto the point of trust.

Yeah, I think it'll be both text and voice.

I'm hoping one day we'll have good enough video. At the 4runner event, that

enough video. At the 4runner event, that company Persona AI, that video demo completely made me realize that video would be a medium if we can get it that good. Because

right now it's if it's not perfect, it almost takes away from the experience where if you're calling or texting, you can have some imagination.

Yeah.

Like, oh wow, this is happening.

But video, the bar is a lot higher because you are seeing something.

Yeah. Do you block people from having certain types of conversations?

It's a good question. I mean, from a customer perspective, we don't allow politicians right now.

Oh interesting.

And for various reasons.

Wait, that would be so fun, though. uh

we could debate with them at a certain point, but we don't want to be a part of a whole Cambridge Analytica situation. We're we're too early to be

situation. We're we're too early to be affecting elections. Um and we don't

affecting elections. Um and we don't allow Only Fans or like porn stars because I I just think AI girlfriends are are very bad.

Um otherwise, we don't do any monitoring on the types of conversations people have. We do have guardrails on, you

have. We do have guardrails on, you know, not safe for work topics and, you know, hallucinations, so you can't convince it to act like something else.

Tell us a little bit about the most unexpected use cases on Deli.

There have been so many and it's interesting because we started the company just focused on the learning use case. Yeah. And then people started

case. Yeah. And then people started using it for initial discovery calls and customers and like oh there's actually a lot more. Uh what we saw in the data is

lot more. Uh what we saw in the data is a lot of people actually talk to themselves and like one interesting thing that someone did was they had a book that was recommended to them but they didn't want

to read it. So they were like I wonder if I had read this book what points would I get out of it? So they uploaded the book uh in conversation their mind and they're like what would you think about this?

Wow.

I guess I don't have to read the book.

It's amazing.

It was interesting.

Who's on your wish list of people who you really would like to have a deli?

So many um I'm a big Robert Green fan.

Robert Green would be awesome. Obviously

Paul Graham would be great. Um

he has so many writings. He'd make a great deli.

And I've emailed him a couple times.

Again, some people are just very allergic to this idea. Um, I think that Steve Jobs and Walt Disney would be awesome. Yeah.

awesome. Yeah.

And you know, we have some people who are no longer on the platform like Socrates and Abraham Lincoln. Those

names are in the public domain. For

people whose names are not in the public domain, it would require the permission of the foundations and the estates that own their identity.

Who's the most requested deli from customers or consumers?

Consumers. Uh, definitely Paul Graham.

Definitely Paul Graham and Steve Jobs.

And Andrew Huberman is another one.

Who's your favorite to talk to?

I talk to many. Um

yourself.

Myself sometimes. Lenny Richki, great product person. Actually talk James Buck

product person. Actually talk James Buck House.

Uh Keith Boy is a very specific style and sometimes I like to be reminded of his style. Um Matthew Hussy dating life

his style. Um Matthew Hussy dating life of course.

Uh I'm really excited. We we met Gary Brea the past couple days and he is an incredible guy. I learned so much about

incredible guy. I learned so much about health that I had no idea.

Yeah.

And once we create his, I want to give it to my parents because so much is being discovered in the health space right now. And I just feel like my parents and people of their generation are so averse to like, oh,

what if everything we knew about health was wrong?

How can we help them learn that in a better way? My parents aren't going to

better way? My parents aren't going to listen to a two-hour podcast. One of the things that going back to character for a second that like always impressed me was how long the conversations were and how engaged users were. I'm curious what

you see from your user base.

Depends on the person.

So someone who is using their deli at top of funnel might be like a couple questions. Yeah.

questions. Yeah.

I want to get a quick answer versus someone who they're known for their way of thinking like Matthew Hussy for example six hour phone call.

Wow.

Um Keith 1 hour you know a couple hours.

It it really depends on the person and why do people want to talk to them in the first place.

Wow. It could be like a new leaderboard that people Oh, yeah. Yeah. People get competitive,

Oh, yeah. Yeah. People get competitive, but there's a lot of ways of thinking about that.

Want to have a more interesting minds than than anyone else.

Yeah.

One of the really surprising use cases to me that had a lot of engagement was Jason Lekin at Faster because he tweeted that he brings his deli with him to all his real life

conversations. What is that about? I

conversations. What is that about? I

think he brings it to his Zoom calls and uh it can answer questions in the call and it can also give him a recap on on what happened and he has it on the Sasser website as well. Um

and a couple things for him. One advice,

you know, he knows a lot about SAS. Two,

I think it actually sold tickets to his Saster event. So, you know, this past

Saster event. So, you know, this past week I was with uh Russell Brunson whose whole thing is he gives talks at conferences to sell events. to one to many scale selling and deli's one to

many to one selling where you know it's personalized you trust the person and adapts to the end user what do you think will be the tipping point that makes digital twins go from early adopters to mainstream like is it

a tech tipping point is just gradual cultural acceptance all the above I think uh definitely interview mode and definitely look decreasing the friction right now there's kind of a purposefully a good

amount of friction to setting one up and making it useful I I think it needs to be super easy, like a couple steps.

People are so impatient.

Um, and then culture. I think the more case studies, the more people that are like, "This is not weird."

And I think we want to buy the dot domain because we actually don't want to be seen as an AI company. I think AI is just like a tool and it allows us to build this thing, but really we're more of like a human company. We scale

humans.

What do you think in 5 years will be obvious about digital twins that, you know, you know, contrarian or early today? I think it will be obvious that

today? I think it will be obvious that consumers prefer to be able to talk to something before talking to you.

What is the role of humans in this new future where everyone has a digital mind?

I mean I think right now so many companies are focused on automating humans automating automating automating. And I think it just forgets

automating. And I think it just forgets like what is the purpose of like living at all? It's it's humans and

at all? It's it's humans and relationships. You know, since we became

relationships. You know, since we became a species, our life has revolved around knowing other humans. And I think uh Bezos's conviction in Amazon was also

grounded in a core human need, which was hunter gather. You want to buy things,

hunter gather. You want to buy things, you want to collect things. And I think the need that we're betting on is like you want to connect with other humans.

And in a world where AI is abundant and infinite and information is no longer the bottleneck, the bottleneck and the premium thing becomes the connection,

the curation, the trust and the energy.

So I think humans, the humans that put the work in become more valuable. And

what I mean by put the work in is it's easier than ever to be mediocre at something. Now you can create AI slop of

something. Now you can create AI slop of a book or a course or a software product that that top 5% of additional effort I think is going to get 95% of the results.

Should we close with some rapid fire?

Yeah. Who is the most popular deli on the platform?

It switches. I mean Mark Heyman definitely gets up there. Matthew Hussy,

Andy Elliot, um Pace Morby, Brennan Bashard, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Natalie Ellis. But then there's a

Natalie Ellis. But then there's a difference between popularity of like usage and the ones that like if you have a smaller cohort that's coming back consistently versus a million people using it. How do you evaluate those two?

using it. How do you evaluate those two?

So like Lenny people come back a lot. Um

Keith Socrates do you think consumer or enterprise B2B use cases will be more abundant on your platform? So my take is that consumer and B2B converges over

time because every the creator economy or the individual economy every individual is a business and like our customers are coaches, authors, CEOs who are also their

businesses. Yeah.

businesses. Yeah.

And back to the idea of branding like Mark Zuckerberg being the face of his company. I think like BTOC, B2B, B2P,

company. I think like BTOC, B2B, B2P, business to people, you're building products for people.

Um and so I think it's both. I think and the network effects come with the consumer platform, but you know, you'll have CEOs that have an external facing V version for new hires and customers and one internally for their companies.

All right, let's do some rapidfire consumer questions because you're a consumer guy. What is uh is there a

consumer guy. What is uh is there a consumer app or habit or life hack that you have recently adopted?

I've been pretty underwhelmed by new consumer AI tools to be honest. Um and I try not to tinker around too much because I tinker around enough with Deli. M

Deli. M uh so I don't think my answers are very different than the cliches of perplexity research and uh notion and things like that.

Has AI affected your life in any meaningful way outside of Deli?

One thing that it has made me a lot better at is a lot of times people have different communication styles and I'm not just talking about in like their words or

their languages but in how they perceive things. So you could be emailing someone

things. So you could be emailing someone about, you know, a customer or an investor or a new hire and conflict can result due to lack of communication. Um,

so that's actually one way I've been using AI a lot is what do they actually mean and how can I get what I mean in the way that they perceive.

Uh, and I think that has helped me a lot with relationships.

Interesting. Like a translator almost almost like a mental translator, but it's not language. It's just

the way you perceive and understand things. Mhm.

things. Mhm.

Okay, last question. I'm very proud of this one. Just thought of it. The deli

this one. Just thought of it. The deli

touring test. In what year will people not know whether they're talking to somebody's digital mind or or that person?

Well, I'll preface by saying we don't want that necessarily. Well, we don't want it to ever be tricking people.

Y because Deli is not meant to be deceptive.

Yep.

I think widespread 2026 because already it's happening in a couple cases now. We we whenever a customer creates a deli, we say send it to your mom first. Uh and that's going to be the way you're confident with it.

And many times they're like my mom thought it was me. Oh my god. Like this

is amazing.

Great answer. 2026. Yeah.

Come around the corner very quickly.

Let's call Adelfi right now.

I'm down.

Yeah.

How about we call my friend? I actually

haven't met him in person, but I'm I'm friends with this deli Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Yeah.

What do we think?

Love it.

All right. What do you guys want to ask him? I have 15 minutes a day to work out

him? I have 15 minutes a day to work out because I'm busy. What is the best 15inute exercise that I can do?

Okay.

Hey, this is AI Arnold. I'm here to cut the crap and help you get stronger, healthier, and happier. So, what's on your mind today, Arnold? I have 15 minutes a day to work

Arnold? I have 15 minutes a day to work out, which I feel like is not a lot, but I want to feel good and I want to get better in my health. What do you recommend I do?

15 minutes is plenty if you focus and go hard. Don't overthink it. Stick to

hard. Don't overthink it. Stick to

simple, effective moves that hit multiple muscles. Do one to two sets of

multiple muscles. Do one to two sets of exercises like pushups, reverse lunges, and lying leg raises. Keep rest short

and push yourself. You'll feel like a champion in no time. Now, get to it.

All right, man. Thank you.

That's awesome.

Very cool.

Yeah.

Amazing. Dra, thank you so much for joining us. This is fun.

joining us. This is fun.

Thank you.

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