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

Dara Ladjevardian, founder and CEO of Delphi, is creating digital minds that allow people to scale their thoughts and availability without replacing human connection. Inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s theory of mind as a hierarchy of pattern recognizers, Dara built an adaptive temporal knowledge graph that captures how people think and reason. From helping CEOs train new hires to enabling coaches to monetize their expertise 24/7, Delphi represents a new form of conversational media. Dara explains why authentic human representation matters, how digital minds actually increase desire for real human connection, and why he believes 2026 will be the tipping point for adoption for digital minds. Hosted by Sonya Huang and Jess Lee, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this episode: How to Create a Mind: 2012 book by Ray Kurzweil that inspired Dara The Memoirs of Akbar Ladjevardian: 2008 book about Dara’s grandfather, an Iranian industrialist, that led him to create his first “digital mind” Build: 2022 book by Tony Fadell that refers to itself as “a mentor in a box”; another inspiration for Dara The 2 Sigma Problem: 1984 paper by Benjamin Bloom about how students that receive one-on-one tutoring perform two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Let's call a Delphi right now.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  I'm down.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  How about we call my friend, I actually haven't met him in person, but I'm friends with his Delphi, Arnold Schwarzenegger?

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  What do we think?

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  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?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  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?

• 0:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Today's guest, Dara, is building something that challenges our fundamental assumptions about human connection and knowledge transfer. His company, Delphi, 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. Dara's insight is that AI is driving a shift from information consumption through feeds to conversational media. He argues that as AI becomes abundant, human energy and authentic connection become the premium 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.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  Dara, thank you so much for joining us today.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:57Speaker 01

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

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Digital minds.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  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 from someone. Does that make you 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

• 2:46Speaker 01

  was none in a way that is more temporally convenient for the end user.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  And in a world where everyone has a digital twin, what becomes of the value of real human interaction?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  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 most of the work we did was based on our bodies. And then 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 kind of our hearts, our energy. And so in a world where you have a digital mind, it's kind of like your top of funnel filter. Who gets to meet you? Who actually gets to make it to your heart? Which is the, in my opinion, premium experience.

• 3:38Speaker 03

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

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:54Speaker 01

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

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  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 L L M's 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 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 thirty thousand employees at his peak. And he was put on the hit list by the Ayatollah. Came to this country with nothing. But the really special thing about him and the reason they actually studied his book

• 4:45Speaker 01

  in business schools in Iran was not just because he was successful, but because he's a very principled man. Like, he treated people well, had integrity. And when you start a company for the first time, it's really a moment in your life where 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?

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  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 question. And he had had a stroke a couple of years prior, so I couldn't ask him myself. So remembering Ray Kurzweil's book and realizing that L L M's matched that book, I created a digital version of him that I could talk to. And.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Those were like G P T two or BERT?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  It was early G P T three developer lists along with hugging face embeddings.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:35Speaker 01

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

• 5:41Speaker 00

  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?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  So I actually tried to launch Delphi as a company in twenty twenty one. It was called Helix at the time. And I posted a website and you could talk to like Naval and Marc Andreessen. 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 a couple of 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 Raboy. And his main investment philosophy is I like to invest in startups where the majority of my friends laugh and think it's stupid. I was like, wait a minute.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  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 Fadell 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 it and 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 Blooms to 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.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  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 Fadell 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 ChatGPT, which at the time, again, everyone was like, what is this? This is stupid. You can't do this. But, you know, I'd heard that before.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Was this before or after Character AI?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Before. And so when Character AI 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 drop so heavily. And the history of billion dollar consumer companies are not, it's not a history of companies that had early technical moats. 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 anime characters and characters.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  I knew it was a very different world than like verified authenticity, human representation. At least it's very different brands and very different products.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Super interesting. The first time I met you, I remember thinking, oh, isn't this kind of like character AI? 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 more about what led you down that path? Why did you pick that? And then what have you had to build in order to make that really work?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  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 gonna love it. Like, they're gonna think it's so cool. And that was not the case. We got three cease and desist from very, very important people who still have not forgiven us to this day. And so that's when I was like, okay, 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 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, a brand that people want to associate their identities with. It is status inducing.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  And I think if you look at Wikipedia, pretty much documents all of human knowledge. Does anyone actually learn from Wikipedia? The creator economy exists because we inherently trust things that come from humans. We read books, we watch YouTube videos. 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 ChatGPT, we're teaching people how to consume information through conversation. And I think that's gonna 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 required guardrails, anti-hallucination.

• 10:40Speaker 01

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

• 10:49Speaker 03

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

• 11:00Speaker 01

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

• 11:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  So, in the book, he says that the mind is a hierarchy of pattern recognizers. And on the lowest end, you have, 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? For 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 what led me to focusing on,

• 11:48Speaker 01

  like, what does the organization of a mind look like? And your mind stores a bunch of things. It stores your relationships. It has uncertainty in it. It connects events and heuristics with, you know, how you reason about those events and heuristics. 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 likely is it that you would actually say this? And we allow people to control, you know, leniency on what they want their Delphi to say. And temporal nature is it changes over time. So eventually you can say, what would my 22-year-old version of me say this?

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Wow, yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  About this topic? So, yeah, people can upload their social media, their YouTube, podcasts, websites. They can answer questions about themselves. It creates feeds so that it's constantly staying up to date 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 customers is every person was like, what if it says something wrong? And someone takes a screenshot and sends it to the Daily Mail? It's just a huge fear.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  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. Mark Hyman, 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.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  And that's useful for a lot of reasons, and I can give you an example of like how that works in practice. If I were to ask my grandfather's Delphi, how do 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, and he ran 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 he might say in these new situations.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  That's completely fascinating. I love it.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  It's very fun.

• 13:55Speaker 00

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

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Ray Kurzweil is the man.

• 14:00Speaker 00

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

• 14:08Speaker 01

  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. These are, attention spans are kind of being destroyed by TikTok and Reels 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. Delphi 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.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And then we have just 24/7 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 leverage people in a company? Because as a company scales, what usually breaks is alignment. And so now CEOs can be in multiple rooms, top salespeople can train new hires and help them get up to speed faster. We have 24/7. I don't like to say customer support because I don't think we're a replacement for Intercom or Zendesk, but my Delphi is in the Delphi product and my customers will talk to it all the time and 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

• 15:34Speaker 01

  to Mark Zuckerberg spending 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 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 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.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  I should maybe talk about it from that perspective. If you have a digital mind, how do you like sort of talk to your own Delphi and then figure out, you know, maybe who you should go back and contact? Like what can you see on the inside once you have a Delphi?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's a combination of proactive and passive. So I could go in and be like, given the past thousand conversations, where in the Delphi 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 create? What podcast? What should I talk about 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.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. I actually talked to your Delphi 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 script. I thought that was a really interesting use case that I hadn't really anticipated.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I interviewed a candidate today and I was like starting to tell him about myself. He's like, oh, don't worry. I already talked to your Delphi. We can get straight into it. I was like, yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Awesome.

• 17:27Speaker 01

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

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Can we share the Brian Halligan use case? Oh, so Brian Halligan is a partner at Sequoia, right? I have him on text. I, you know, could easily call him to ask a 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 it's kind of, I don't want to bother him. So I just called his Delphi on my drive home and I said, how did you do product management? And he gave like a perfect answer, you know, I could have called him, you know? And it's also interesting to see some of the other Delphi's being used internally at Sequoia. Our design partner, James Buckhouse, has one and our founders often talk to him about storytelling. Like you've talked to him before.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  And now they text his Delphi every once in a while and then also text him at the same time and say, hey, your Delphi said this. Just want to check that that's right. And he's like, yep, that's spot 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.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Who you are and what you decide to share changes based on where you are. Like I'm a podcaster right now. I'm not going to share the things that I share with my family.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 01

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

• 18:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. 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 skillsets, et cetera. And so like the founders we work with kind of figure that out, but Delphi kind of allows us to scale that in a way that is otherwise hard to scale.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, what you said, the anxiety of wasting someone else's time is actually like a huge thing.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  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 too nervous to have with another human being. So I'll just talk to your Delphi instead.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. What are the most unusual things people have asked your Delphi, like things that maybe you were surprised by even?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  There was someone asking me about wanting to go on a date at some point. I was complete in grind mode, so I didn't get to double click into that.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  I always think it's really cool that Every once in a while, there will be like some guy who calls my Delphi 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.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  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 suspect consumer behavior is gonna switch very quickly and it's just gonna become more and more the norm. It may be kind of the same way that we used to look at like Wikipedia when it first came out. We're like, oh, that's 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 of used to it and we set our expectations that not everything on the internet is 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 Dara. 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.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Where do you think we are in that sort of adoption cycle? Cause I, what, the thing I love about you is I feel like you live five years in the future. And we're like just catching up. Like, what do you see down that path? Like, where do you think this is all going?

• 21:18Speaker 01

  So I think two things need to happen. One of them is just, it's a culture shift. And I, the first year of the company was so painful because like no one believed in our product. 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 yesterday I was at an event with Tony Robbins and Gary Brekka and a lot of like those kinds of people. And there are 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 knowledge base 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.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  You know about Delphi, but in his mind, he's like, oh, no, no, like, that doesn't make sense. And that's when I realized, like, oh, what, like, this is a need and some people want it, but they are anxious that it's going to make them look 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 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 of questions about yourself to create something pretty high fidelity that can represent you, I think we'll open it up to mass market.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  So that's maybe the supply side, right?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  What do you think will happen on the consumer side?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Consumer side, yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  And not even just with Delphi, 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 for consumers?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  For consumers to adopt Delphi, 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 media, as James likes to say. But I hope that right now, most networks and online are 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 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,

• 23:43Speaker 01

  based on the quality of your thought and it's 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.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  I'm also curious how the economics of the internet are evolving. Like, for example, Wikipedia are constantly running out of money, right? Do you think that there's an economic opportunity for the people that create Delphi's of themselves?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Totally, and there's so many business models with this company and I'll walk you through the growing nature of it. So, right now, people pay to have a Delphi of themselves, which might sound weird, but, you know, you have 6 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 Delphi 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 the 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.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  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 an idea of scaling your identity in a way that can serve brands and other people. And then, the last one is the advanced people search. You know, people pay LinkedIn, Sales Recruiter, or GLG Consulting to find the best person in the world on a specific topic. We say Simulation as a Service, the new SaaS, 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,

• 25:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  How do you think of balancing, you know, advertising versus paid? Because there's a certain lack of authenticity, right? When there's keywords and people are buying.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was talking to Mark Hyman's Delphi 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 is, you know, rather than going to ChatGPT 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.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, board advisors. We used to have that and we removed it because now we're focused on quality instead of shipping speed.

• 26:45Speaker 00

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

• 26:52Speaker 01

  So interestingly enough, we've seen consumers whose first experience with the product is voice are 5X more retentive and likely to come back. And I think that's interesting. It kind of goes on to the point of trust.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  I think it'll be both text and voice. I'm hoping one day we'll have good enough video. At the forerunner 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.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Like, oh, wow, this is happening. But video, the bar is a lot higher because you are seeing something.

• 27:30Speaker 00

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

• 27:34Speaker 01

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

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  And for various reasons.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  Wait, that would be so fun, though. You could debate with them.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  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 affecting elections. And we don't allow OnlyFans or like porn stars because I just think AI girlfriends are very bad. Otherwise, we don't do any monitoring on the types of conversations people 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.

• 28:11Speaker 03

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

• 28:15Speaker 01

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

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  And then people started using it for initial discovery calls and customers and like, oh, there's actually a lot more. 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 in conversation in their mind and like, what would you think about this? I guess I don't have to read the book.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  It was interesting.

• 28:48Speaker 03

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

• 28:54Speaker 01

  So many. I'm a big Robert Greene fan. Robert Greene would be awesome. Obviously, Paul Graham would be great.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  He has so many writings. He'd make a great Delphi.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And I've emailed him a couple of times again. Some people are just very allergic to this idea. I think that Steve Jobs and Walt Disney would be awesome.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  And, you know, we have some people who are no longer around 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.

• 29:24Speaker 03

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

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Consumers, definitely Paul Graham. Definitely Paul Graham and Steve Jobs. Andrew Huberman is another one.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Who's your favorite to talk to?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  I talk to many.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Yourself?

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Myself, sometimes. Lenny Rochitsky, great product person. I actually talk James Buckhouse. Keith Roy is a very specific style, and sometimes I like to be reminded of his style. Matthew Hussey, dating life, of course. I'm really excited. We met Gary Brekka the past couple of days, and he is an incredible guy. I learned so much about health that I had no idea. 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 listen to a two-hour podcast.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Depends on the person. So someone who is using their Delphi at top of funnel, might be like a couple of questions.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  I want to get a quick answer. Versus someone who, they're known for their way of thinking. Like Matthew Hussey, for example, six-hour phone call.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Keith, one hour, you know, a couple hours. It really depends on the person and why do people want to talk to them in the first place?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Wow. It'd be like a new leaderboard that people...

• 31:03Speaker 01

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

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Well, they have a more interesting minds than than anyone else.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  One of the really surprising use cases to me that had a lot of engagement was Jason Lemkin at Saster. Because he tweeted that he brings his Delphi with him to all his real-life conversations. What is that about?

• 31:25Speaker 01

  I think he brings it to his Zoom calls. And it can answer questions in the call and it can also give him a recap on what happened. And he has it on the Saster website as well. And a couple of things for him. One, advice, you know, he knows a lot about SaaS. Two, I think it actually sold tickets to his Saster event. So, you know, this past week, I was with Russell Brunson, whose whole thing is he gives talks at conferences to sell events. So one-to-many scale selling and Delphi is one-to-many-to-one selling. Where, you know, it's personalized, you trust the person and adapts to the end user.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  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 or is it just gradual cultural acceptance?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  All of the above. I think definitely interview mode and definitely 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 think it needs to be super easy, like a couple of SaaS. People are so impatient. 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 com 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.

• 32:43Speaker 00

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

• 32:49Speaker 01

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

• 32:57Speaker 03

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

• 33:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I think right now so many companies are focused on automating humans, automating, automating, automating. And I think I just forget like, what is the purpose of like living at all? It's, it's humans and relationships, you know? Since we became a species, our life has revolved around knowing other humans. And I think Bezos' conviction in Amazon was also grounded in a core human need, which was 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,

• 33:45Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Should we close with some rapid fire?

• 34:12Speaker 03

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

• 34:16Speaker 01

  It switches. I mean, Mark Hyman definitely gets up there, Matthew Hussey, Andy Elliott, Pace Morby, Brendan Burchard, Arnold Schwarzenegger, 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? It's like Lenny, people come back a lot. Keith's. Socrates.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Do you think consumer or enterprise B2B use cases will be more abundant on your platform?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  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. And back to the idea of branding, like Mark Zuckerberg being the face of his company. I think like B2C, B2B, B2P, business to people. You're building products for people. And so I think it's both. I think the network effects come with the consumer platform. But you know, you'll have CEOs that have an external facing version for new hires and customers and one internally for their companies.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  All right, let's do some rapid fire consumer questions, because you're a consumer guy. What is, is there a consumer app or habit or life hack that you have recently adopted?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  I've been pretty underwhelmed by new consumer AI tools, to be honest. And I try not to tinker around too much, because I tinker around enough with Delphi. So I don't think my answers are very different than the cliches of perplexity research and Notion and things like that.

• 35:53Speaker 03

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

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Outside of Delphi? 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 about, you know, a customer or an investor or a new hire, and conflict can result due to lack of communication. 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? And I think that has helped me a lot with relationships.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Interesting, like a translator almost.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Almost like a mental translator, but it's not language. It's just the way you perceive and understand things.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Okay, last question, I'm very proud of this one, just thought of it. The Delphi Turing Test. In what year will people not know whether they're talking to somebody's digital mind or that person?

• 36:53Speaker 01

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

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Because Delphi is not meant to be deceptive.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  I think widespread 2026.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Because already it's happening in a couple of cases now. We, whenever a customer creates a Delphi, we say, send it to your mom first. And that's going to be the way you're confident with it. And many times you're like, my mom thought it was me. Oh, my God, like, this is amazing.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  Great answer. 2026.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  Come around the corner very quickly. Let's call a Delphi right now.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  I'm down.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  How about we call my friend? I actually haven't met him in person, but I'm friends with his Delphi. Arnold Schwarzenegger?

• 37:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  What do we think?

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  All right. What do you guys want to ask him?

• 37:37Speaker 00

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

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  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?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  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?

• 38:01Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  All right, man. Thank you.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  That's awesome. Very cool.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Amazing. Dara, thank you so much for joining us.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Thank you, guys. This was fun.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Thank you.