Good interview shows

“AI has conquered text but still struggles with conversational speech. We are trying to solve the voice Turing Test where you can't tell if you're talking to a machine or a human because of the subtle emotional shifts and the way we naturally interrupt or emphasize certain words.”

“The rapid ascent to an $11 billion valuation was driven by the realization that audio is the next frontier of accessibility. It’s not just about reading text; it’s about creating a presence that feels authentic across every language and allows for a more natural interaction with machines.”

“Ukraine is actually using our tech for digital government services, which is an incredible use case for accessibility. It allows them to communicate vital information to citizens in a way that is both efficient and human-sounding, ensuring that the technology serves a real social purpose during a time of crisis.”

“The potential for voice agents in everything from farming to healthcare is massive. Imagine a farmer being able to interact with complex data systems through natural conversation while their hands are busy in the field, or a healthcare provider getting instant, verbal updates on patient metrics without looking at a screen.”

“We are moving away from cascaded models toward speech-to-speech, which allows for much lower latency and better preservation of intent. It's about designing an AI-native organization that focuses on the end-to-end audio experience rather than just stacking different layers of text and sound together.”

“I believe market sizing is bullshit. Often when people ask for a TAM calculation, they are simply looking for a reason to say no, failing to realize that the most impactful products actually create their own markets rather than fitting into existing ones.”

“There is a very specific vitamin versus painkiller dynamic in this industry. Most founders don't start a company because they love compliance, but they realize quickly that it is the essential painkiller required to unblock sales and close enterprise deals.”

“We are exploring a future where we use agents to generate the UI itself based on the specific security context. It is a shift from static software to agentic trust, where the interface adapts to solve the compliance problem in real-time.”

“The most successful founders I have encountered are relentless truth-seekers. They don't care about being right or maintaining a narrative; they are obsessed with finding the ground truth of their business and reacting to it immediately, no matter how uncomfortable.”

“The strategy behind the 101-billboard campaign was to create a sense of scale and inevitability for Vanta. By being everywhere at once, you move past being just another startup and start to feel like a permanent piece of the enterprise infrastructure.”

“If you start with a small amount of money, like $10,000, and you are able to compound that at 25 or 30 percent, the math is staggering over thirty years. The key is not to find a thousand things, but to find the few things that can compound and then get out of their way so they can work for you without interruption.”

“When the time comes to buy, you won't want to. Usually, the best opportunities are found when the news is at its worst and everyone else is terrified of losing more money. That is exactly when the expected return is the highest because the price has been driven down so far by mass pessimism.”

“Don't study lottery winners. If you look at someone who took an enormous, uncalculated risk and it happened to pay off, you're learning the wrong lesson about how the world works. You want to study the processes that produce consistent, repeatable results over a long period of time rather than one-off miracles.”

“In a finite game, the goal is to win and end the game. In an infinite game, the goal is to keep playing. Investing is an infinite game where your reputation, your capital, and your relationships all compound as long as you stay in the arena and avoid the mistakes that could knock you out of the game entirely.”

“Most investors diversify way too much because they are afraid of being wrong. But if you have high conviction in a business you understand deeply, you should circle the wagons and put a significant portion of your capital to work right there, because truly great opportunities only come around a few times in a decade.”

“Mentalism is less about magic and more about the deep psychology of human interaction. I'm looking for micro-expressions and the things that people can't fake when they are under pressure. It's about understanding how to steer a conversation and influence a person's thoughts without them ever realizing they are being guided toward a specific outcome.”

“When I started out, I would go to restaurants and perform for people who didn't ask for it, which is the ultimate test of rejection. You learn very quickly how to pivot and how to handle someone saying 'no' or 'get lost' without it crushing your soul. That resilience is what eventually allows you to perform on much bigger stages and handle the high-stakes environments of live television.”

“The pressure of performing on live television or in front of a room full of powerful CEOs is immense because there is no reset button. I spend months, and sometimes even years, practicing the technical aspects of a trick so that it becomes muscle memory. When the lights are on, I can focus entirely on the human connection rather than the mechanics of the performance.”

“People often ask if I'm a human lie detector, but the truth is that it is just pattern recognition after doing this tens of thousands of times. When you see the same reactions over and over, you start to anticipate the next move before the person even knows they're going to make it. It looks like mind reading, but it is really just high-level observation of human nature.”

“When you walk into a room of powerful people, they are used to being in control of every situation, so your job as a mentalist is to disrupt that control in an entertaining way. By showing them something they can't explain, you create a moment of vulnerability that levels the playing field. It changes the energy of the room and makes the performance something they will talk about for years.”

“GovDeals is where the government sells everything from police cars to massive quantities of office chairs. Most people don't know that you can buy a pallet of laptops for a fraction of their value, clean them up, and flip them on eBay for a massive profit margin because the government just wants them out of their warehouse and off the books.”

“Small businesses are terrified of being left behind by AI, but they have no idea how to actually use it in their day-to-day operations. If you just show a local plumber how to use a basic LLM to handle their intake or schedule calls, they will gladly pay you a monthly retainer because you've solved a massive headache they didn't know how to fix themselves.”

“There is something about physical mail that creates a much deeper connection and higher retention than any digital newsletter ever could. If you start a club where people get a physical artifact or a letter every month, the churn is significantly lower because people love the tactile experience of opening a real envelope in their hands.”

“Think about these massive fulfillment centers with thousands of workers who only have a 30-minute break and nowhere nearby to eat. If you set up a high-quality food operation right outside or inside those gates, you have a captive audience with guaranteed daily volume that most traditional restaurants would kill for in this economy.”

“Cardboard boxes are a nightmare for anyone moving; they break, they require tape, and you have to throw them away afterward. Renting out heavy-duty plastic totes is a superior business because you own the asset, it is more sustainable, and people are willing to pay a premium for the convenience of not dealing with cardboard trash.”

“Revenue did grow 45 percent year over year. Items sold were up over 40 percent too, and the credit portfolio actually almost doubled. That means Melly has now extended its record for the longest ever streak of quarters with over 30 percent year over year revenue growth to 28 consecutive quarters. At Melly's size, that's an insane number, and Melly is actually the only company ever to achieve that.”

“The stock still reacted negatively because Melly's margins were down. It's mostly because they invested heavily in the credit card portfolio. They lowered free shipping thresholds in Brazil, and also they scaled its cross border and especially the first party businesses. Combined management said that those investments cost five to six percentage point headwind for operating margins.”

“To me, investing is mainly about understanding businesses and to some extent, how actually the world around me works. So the great thing at TIP or working for TIP is that you can really just let your curiosity guide you. And of course, that mostly means businesses. But honestly, it's so much more than that. I've learned so much about building a business in the last year that it has just been an amazing journey.”

“On today's episode, I'm joined by Daniel Mahncke to discuss the companies we find most interesting in today's market. We cover Mercado Libre's long-term growth potential, Amazon's expanding earnings power driven by AI and robotics, and how AI could impact Constellation Software and other related companies.”

“We wrap up the discussion by touching on a company that AI is very unlikely to disrupt, and that is Hermès. Daniel's thoughts on Hermès after the recent 40% pullback in the stock highlight why this specific luxury brand remains a durable investment despite market volatility and broader technological shifts.”

“The logic here is that AI can generate anything, but it doesn't know what is actually good. When you look at the future of work, the person who can say 'this is the right direction' or 'this feels premium' is the one who survives. Technical skills are becoming commoditized, so your ability to filter and curate based on a specific, high-quality aesthetic sense becomes the primary value proposition you offer to the market.”

“If you look at Apple, they aren't always first with the technology, but they have the best taste in how that technology is presented and used. Steve Jobs famously talked about how design isn't just how it looks, but how it works. That level of refinement and the refusal to settle for 'good enough' is why they can charge a premium while competitors struggle with lower margins on similar hardware.”

“People think taste is something you're born with, like a talent, but it's actually more like a muscle you train by consuming high-quality inputs. You have to look at the best architecture, read the best books, and study the best designs to understand why they work. Once you fill your head with greatness, your brain starts to recognize patterns and you develop an internal compass for what is exceptional versus what is mediocre.”

“The most successful founders and creators right now are basically professional curators who have built trust with an audience. When you have taste, people follow you because they want you to tell them what to pay attention to in a world of infinite noise. This skill of being an editor-in-chief for your niche is probably the most underrated way to build a massive business or personal brand in the next few years.”

“We are moving into an era where the 'doing' is cheap but the 'deciding' is expensive. If I can prompt an AI to write a script or design a logo in seconds, the value shifts entirely to the person who has the taste to know which version is the winner. You don't need to be the best illustrator anymore; you need to be the person with the best eye who knows how to direct the tools to create something that resonates emotionally.”

“We are now at the point where we are doing nearly 500,000 paid rides every single week across 10 different cities. This isn't just a science experiment anymore; it's a massive global scaling operation where we've moved from the lab to the streets in a way that is repeatable and safe across diverse urban environments.”

“People often ask if you can do this with just cameras, but our stance is that Lidar provides a level of redundancy and precision that you simply cannot ignore. When you are operating a multi-ton vehicle in a complex urban environment, having that direct depth perception and 360-degree awareness is the difference between a research project and a reliable commercial service.”

“There is this misconception that if you just keep improving driver-assist systems, they will eventually wake up as fully autonomous robotaxis. That's not how it works; the architectural requirements for a system that requires no human fallback are fundamentally different from one that relies on a human to pay attention. You can't just bridge that gap with more data; you need a different foundation.”

“We use a combination of Simulation and what we call 'Critic' models to train our AI drivers. This allows us to run billions of miles in a virtual environment where we can test the most extreme edge cases that you might only see once every hundred years in the real world, ensuring the system knows how to react before it ever hits the pavement.”

“Our new custom-built vehicle is a total departure from traditional car design because it doesn't need a steering wheel or pedals. We've designed it from the ground up to feel like a mobile living room, focusing entirely on the passenger experience, comfort, and utility rather than the mechanics of driving.”

“Whenever a dictionary chooses their word of the year, that's a marketing ploy by big dictionary to sell more dictionaries. Yes. Six seven, of course, is this reference where if you say it, you can go viral. That's the idea behind six seven. That's the whole joke that this is a possibility of getting clipped, that you can cash in on the virality of it for your own game.”

“There was a study by Know Your Meme in 2022 that found where words come from over time by percentage of platforms. And it started out on 4chan and Reddit and Twitter, and now it's mostly TikTok and Twitter. There's linguistic innovation. There's a a kind of everything comes from the user interface. There's a feeling of a conversation happening there.”

“A platform functions kind of like a house. It is a place where you go to use a certain type of language. So on LinkedIn, you're gonna use this more professional language. On Twitter, you're going to engage in more linguistic play where you're, you have all these words like jester gooning or whatever emerge. On TikTok, there might be more fandom language or something.”

“The accent is optimized for the algorithm. There's an element of retention, which is how long you watch the video. And when you drag out words, it kind of works better for captivating your audience. Dead silence is very bad on the algorithm. So if you have a live stream or something, you want to drag out your final syllable. Actually, that uptalk where you kind of lengthen your final vowel is very good for online hooking.”

“Language is a tool of identity. And when you use a word, you are signaling that you're part of this cohort. It's an identifier of in group belonging. 100%. All these things are just keywords—maxing, gooning, whatever—and you can just say that, and you can go viral because the keywords are what pushes things through the algorithm and what people resonate with.”