Human Magic

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This wide-ranging conversation touches on venture investing and forward-looking ideas. Nothing in it is an offer, a solicitation, a recommendation, or investment advice. Any references to funds, strategies, or potential outcomes are educational and reflect the speakers' views at the time of recording; forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain, and no particular result is promised or implied. Whitwell & Co., LLC is an SEC-registered investment adviser; registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training.

Welcome to the Meaning of Money. I've got a good friend and guest, serial entrepreneur, ultrarunner, and soon-to-be father, Charles Cormier. Welcome. Thanks, Steph. Glad to be on. This will be fun. We've got a lot of fun things that I want to ask you about, including why you have an unlimited budget for health care and education, why you rent the house but buy the cars, why you prefer Mexico over Canada or the US — all kinds of fun things coming up. But let's start — you're about to become a dad here — so let's start with the unlimited budget for health and education. Yeah, that's a good one. I think it's also intriguing to talk about my zero reliance on governments. I've never relied on pretty much anyone financially — obviously when I was a kid my parents bought me stuff — but I've always been radically independent, and I've always been about liberty and not having someone tell me what to do, and about being a plus for my community, being a giver, a builder, not a taker. You ask any AI: most humans on this planet Earth are takers, from a tax perspective. They take more than they give; they consume more than they build. And I think that's my underlying philosophy for pretty much everything.

An unlimited budget for health and education

So I'm about to have a daughter — very exciting times. I don't think children are huge financial nodes, at least compared to everything else I spend on, so that's not intimidating for me. It's more — and that's my second financial principle — I'm obsessed with my time and energy, my efficiency. So it's more like, oh, it's going to take my time. But obviously I want to spend time with my daughter. I do still have the motto that time is money — that one has never really gotten old. So if anything, when I'm going to make a decision nowadays, it's going to be, how much time is that going to take, if I calculate my time at anywhere from a thousand to two thousand bucks an hour. And for example, my kids, my wife, myself — the health, the education, that's what I value most. If I don't have good health, how can I enjoy life? How can I make money? If my brain is not there, if I'm exhausted all the time, if I'm not in a biohack / flow state — not only is it going to suck, but I'm going to make less money. So I've always prioritized my health. My first business was a nootropic 10 years ago, up there in Canada. Same with education — I think you and I are both the same. I checked your bookshelf, and dude, I spend hundreds of thousands on my own education, in terms of time, money, energy. My Audible is full nowadays — it's more about AI now. But again, without education — it's the same when you're building a country: if your people are not educated, you're just not going anywhere. They're not going to make money, they're going to make dumb decisions. So any time these two things come up — hey, should we spend on this? should we buy this supplement? should we buy a hyperbaric chamber, which I'm going to buy pretty soon? — it's like, yes, hell yes. So, long question, short answer. You know, people sometimes read about the cost of children, but it's really the cost of your time — to free you up so you have time to give your children. Because more than money — anybody can give money to kids, but the biggest gift you can give your future daughter, and all kids, is your time and your attention. And you're magnifying the impact of that if you've made that investment in your own education — you have that much more to offer them. So I think that's super valuable.

Money is energy: the ultra-capitalist's philosophy

We're all starting out, we didn't have a lot of money, and as we've had our successes we have access to more resources now. What are some ways you can use money now that you couldn't before — whether it's more education, luxuries, or buying your time? What are the things about money that you most celebrate in terms of what it's actually bringing to your life today? I was interviewed on a podcast yesterday, and I'm going to start with that premise: I'm an ultra-capitalist, and I believe that money is good. It's humanity's greatest invention, probably after letters and words and books. Why? Because you have something that I need, I have money, we're going to exchange it, I'm going to get what I need and you're going to get money. Isn't that beautiful? It's the ultimate win-win system. So pretty much everything I do nowadays revolves around money. Money is energy to me. If you don't have it, you're not dangerous, you're not happy, you're not in flow state. And I feel a bunch of folks are also hypocritical around that notion — they're like, “oh, money is not super important for me” — but okay, you inherited some money, or the government gave you some money, so sure. But for us who are fully independent and about liberty, and who have been entrepreneurs for decades — which is your case, and me, it's been what, like 12 years — we just know that money is super important. Money is life. Money is like water in the desert. So that's pretty much how I think about money. It solves a bunch of problems. Obviously you're not going to hear me say that your net worth is who you are as a human — it is your words, that's not true. As a human, you can add value — there are all these nonprofit people who are doing a good job, or social entrepreneurs. But money is of capital importance. And I think we've seen it play out throughout history in various countries, how communism has gone down the drain and has been so toxic to so many populations. It's stupid — it's like people not using AI. Why would you not use one of the greatest inventions? So that's pretty much my philosophy of money: I try as much as possible to exchange money against time nowadays. And we're starting this fund — that's also the thesis — like, okay, we're good at assembling and raising money, let's just deploy it, be patient, and bet where our mouth is, in ideas. But what is your philosophy on money? Probably better than mine.

Money as an amplifier

Well, I think we're all learning as we go, but one of the interesting things for me about money is that it amplifies people. If somebody's a jerk and they make a bunch of money, that tends to amplify who they are and they just become a bigger jerk. On the other hand, if you really, like you said, treat money like energy, you realize it can amplify the good — so whatever you're into, whatever you're passionate about, it can amplify that. So I just look at it as an amplification tool — really good for the things it can do, and not so good for the things it can't.

What he'll never outsource to AI

Fun question for you. I know you're a huge believer, as am I, in the power of AI — the agentic armies currently being built, and ultimately AGI. In that sense we're very focused on what we can outsource through technology or through the use of money. But what in your life do you refuse to outsource, no matter how successful you are? What are you going to keep doing yourself? Yes — a part of my thinking. I asked this question to AI yesterday: is it possible to outsource some part of your brain to AI while keeping some other parts to you? I will never fully outsource my thinking. I still use GPT and ask it questions to get another opinion — I prompt it to be contrarian and always challenge me, because ChatGPT is so sycophantic, it always tells you that you're right. My thinking — good question — because I'm a techno-utopian, and I pretty much would outsource almost everything to it, until we reach a stage when we can neural-link ourselves. I still think the human has a creativity mode, especially us one-percenters. We tend to connect dots out of nowhere. Nowadays, me being on both sides of it — helping founders and helping VCs raise capital — I can connect both, I connect the dots, and I create referrals between one another, and obviously I take a cut sometimes. I don't think an AI could still do that; that comes from my brain — like, because he said this and I had this idea. And ultimately that's also partnerships. I'm strong on partnerships this year, and partnerships are complex stuff that only mavericks can happen. As a banker — an ex-banker — stuff like multi-billion-dollar deals, these are complex, and I don't think an AI can certainly do that. And in the age of AI, obviously humans will still stay, there'll be laws, and I don't think you can outsource your full personality, or complexity, or charisma. I think you're getting to know me — I'm a pretty complex human being. I have many facets, many colors, just like most interesting people, I would say. And that cannot be outsourced. AI can try to reproduce me, but it would do a very poor job. It's like Palmer Luckey or Elon — who can beat them? They're complex, they're interesting beings, and they're just hard to copy-paste. I think the other area, for lack of a better word, is love. Oh, a hundred percent.

Love, risk, and the emotions AI can't solve

There's a certain emotion that I think we bring to the equation and to relationships — whether that's in boardroom dealmaking, leadership at the top, an ultramarathon, or any kind of a life. No matter how successful a person I've met, no matter how much money they have or how high of a corporate peak they've climbed, everybody, when they're really being honest and they let their guard down and are open about life, has gone through some tough days, has had periods of real self-doubt, or beating themselves up, or regret, or pain. None of us are perfect. We've all made, and will make, more mistakes. And how we handle that emotionally, and how we grace others when they're going through those tough times, is often a defining characteristic in how people see us, feel us, how we present when we're with other people. That's a very powerful dynamic. Again, I'm a huge fan of what AI and automation can do, but that would be an area, for me anyway, that I don't think money solves and I don't think AI solves. It does a lot of things, but maybe not one of them. Yeah, I had that insight multiple times at my psychedelic retreats. In the end, if you remove all the onion layers of a human, all you get underneath is this love. And when you die — a lot of people have reported about their experiences there — it's just this electric feeling of letting go. There's this love layer. And we don't understand a lot about the human brain; there's still a lot to discover about this physical reality. I'm actually more excited about the discoveries we're going to make in that area, possibly with AI, than about AI or AGI itself. Here's another one that an AGI or AI could not possibly reproduce — talking about Elon and Palmer Luckey — is taking risks, taking these crazy risks that most people would be like, “what is he doing?” But it feels sort of natural. Of course, sometimes you're scared. Like you and I starting this fund — starting a fund doesn't make sense to a lot of people, especially swinging out the gates at 40 million a year, for example. And obviously that's just the start; I'm pretty sure you and I will raise billions and start multiple funds. But it's taking risk, having balls. It's hard for an AGI to reproduce that. What is having balls? I mean, the AGI would take educated risk, would have a risk formula. But there's still that human magic there that says, “now is the time, now we need to go.”

Launching Mach 10, and the Y Combinator thesis

So, speaking of money — and you mentioned the fund, venture capital. When I think of the different types of investing — and let me just state, for everybody watching, that this is educational only, and I don't give any formal investment advice anywhere other than one-on-one — but when you think about investing, there are different strategies. One of the lesser, I think more dangerous, strategies is when you bet a dollar hoping to make pennies. At the opposite extreme is when you bet pennies to make dollars, and that in some sense is really what you're doing in the venture capital space. The venture capital space has grown dramatically in the last 20 years — there are now huge funds, and there are still a lot of smaller funds. What inspired you? I remember you gave me a call, we had a conversation about it — but what inspired you to launch Mach 10? What is that about for you, and why now? Hey, can we also celebrate the fact that I decided to reach out out of the blue, out of nothing? That's the human magic I'm talking about right there. I did, like, 3,000 podcast / founder interviews in the last couple of years — and that's the human magic I'm talking about: slight insight, balls to take action, balls to reach out to Stefan. I had this gut feeling that you were the right person for this. Then the thesis is pretty simple, and I like simplicity — it's also proven. As you know, I have a couple of friends doing exactly the same thing: Brian Bell at Ignite Ventures; Dave Messina — she's a client of mine — at Pioneer, a Future of Health fund, which only invests in YC companies. And I've worked with hundreds of YC companies. They're just the best. The quality of founders getting through YC is hard — they're young, they're energetic, they're hyper-smart, they're technical. And you can check the track record of YC: it's the most successful incubator of all time. One could even say VC, because an incubator is just a VC model — very early stage, and they provide buys, and VC does that to some extent. So they have a very high strike rate. Airbnb, Sendgrid, Box — a ton of companies that are unicorns nowadays came from YC. So it's a very fair thesis. And you and I also have a deeper thesis into that: it's developing the ecosystem of the most elite folks on Earth. If you check why OpenAI got the success they had today, most of it is that they packed the highest talent nodes in one room. And that's what we're going to do. We're well connected. We're more than just venture capital — we're going to do GTM for them, which is the missing part nowadays, because now you can just vibe-code stuff, but GTM is still hyper-hard. So we're the missing node. That's a very stable and simple thesis, I'd say.

Gut instinct: Stefan's 9/11 story

It's an interesting time. Well, let me back up — you mentioned the human side, gut. I think gut instinct is a very real thing. It saved my life on 9/11. I was scheduled to be at the top floor of one of the twin World Trade towers on 9/11, and I had a feeling — just a feeling, a gut feeling: I don't want to go. Couldn't explain it, couldn't put words to it. Thank God I chose to listen to that feeling. Unfortunately, I lost some colleagues and good friends, and it was a horrible event, but very eye-opening to me, because it was that intuition, that gut. And that also, I think, is still something that makes us human. When we listen to it, we should listen to it, because there is an inner truth that's trying to make itself heard — whether we're able to hear it at that moment or not, whether we take action on it or not. Still, I think it's a defining element of being human.

Why plug-and-play won: the AI platform race

It's interesting when you think about today — we've got Claude, we've got OpenAI, and you've got large competitors, and X, of course, with Elon Musk vying for that top spot. One of the things OpenAI did that I thought was really smart is they very quickly made it easy to plug and play ChatGPT into other things that you're doing — they were among the first to make it very easy to make connections via Zapier and other automation tools. Everybody's following suit now, but the basic idea is that 20 years ago everybody was just so excited to have new cool software tools; well, today everybody's app stack is 20, 30, 40 apps deep, and the last thing anybody wants is to have to go to yet another app and log into another website and go into another ecosystem. Instead, the name of the game is realizing that, as human beings, there's a part of us that is lazy, a part that's like, “hey, that's a hassle to have to log into 40 different ecosystems” — I want things to connect and make my life easier. So they were one of the first that did that. For example, I think Google has some very advanced technology, but it's not the easiest for non-experts to connect with and tap into. And Claude, of course, has come out swinging hard, and I think was the first to really connect with Excel and tap into the financial sector, and add a bunch of bells and whistles on the connectivity front, even allowing you to do things on your desktop that again make your life easier. So I think it's a very exciting time, and there are going to be a lot of winners and a lot of losers — but a very exciting time.

The responsibility that comes with wealth

Going back to money for a second, Charles, I wanted to ask you: you've been very successful, you've made a lot of money, and people often focus on what money can buy — the fun things, the freedom that comes from money. But what about responsibility? What responsibility came with wealth that nobody really prepared you for? Yeah, first, I don't consider myself successful. I've been way more liquid than most people, let's call it that, because I've been running agencies and SaaS, and I've always had a nice lifestyle. I've never eaten ramen for two years. I had bouts — for example, my first supplement startup, straight out of the gate, we shut down and I had to pay a hundred K back. That was not so nice, at like 22. So — responsibility. I think I talked about that yesterday. The responsibility of things like Anthropic, right? With versus OpenAI. If I want to become a billionaire, if not trillionaire — trillionaire's my goal, but billionaire a hundred percent, no doubts, and billionaire adjusted to these times. If money is still a thing — it's not money, it'll be power, or some kind of thing like that. And when you're building stuff that has great impact on humanity — by the way, my audience is founders and CEOs; I don't want to build stuff for everyone under the sun, but for that ICP I'll still have a huge impact — that means I need to double-think pretty much everything I do, and I need to have people to tell me when I'm wrong. I have my AIs prompted to do that, and I have a bunch of smart people like you around me that I can just push things on, and you can give me a real opinion. That's a sense of responsibility. If you mean personal responsibility, I've always been a father-type figure to everyone in my life since I was probably 20. I just got my act together and became a man when I traveled to Hong Kong as an exchange student and I was all by myself in a culture shock. I could die or survive — and obviously I survived. So I've always been that responsible guy. At 23 years old I was traveling the world with my wife and an assistant that was filming content, and I had, what, like 300 to 500 employees under me. I had gigantic payrolls. And I've always delivered — sometimes I was late on payroll, sure, but I've always paid people. I've always put my values up front, honesty. Obviously that has grown, because when you start, it's money at all costs. But responsibility — I don't feel it nowadays. If you ask, responsibilities, it's like, yeah, dude, I've been doing this for 30, 40 years now. It's background noise.

Ethics and lines he won't cross

When you think of investing in AI and agentic, AI-driven businesses, what are some ethics or lines that you don't want to cross, that are important for you? Oh yeah, good question. I would not arm others, ever. Right now, with Trump and Iran — I always despised the ayatollah guy and all of that, so, okay, maybe. But generally speaking — maybe I shared this with you — I want to have my own country, probably in 15, 20 years. I'm going to send you the link. From now, it's maybe naive, but I'm only going to build defense technologies. I don't want to be able to attack others, because power corrupts. So I don't want to arm others — which is very hard in practice. Liberty: I want to give them full information also, and be open-sourced to some extent — obviously not give the terrorists full access to the code, but I want to give most people a shot, because most humans are good. I still love humans, I still believe in humanity. So I guess that's the line I wouldn't cross — impacting others' liberty — which is really hard in practice. It's a tough question.

Protecting the ethics of capitalism

I think it's so important, because — I like that term you said, “ultra-capitalist,” and I'm going to get back to the term “ultra” — but I do think there's a responsibility as a capitalist. It's incredibly important. When I look at either large companies or corporate organizations that lose their direction on that, they lose their ethics, they lose their integrity, they lose their edge. That's when you see a lot of bad things happen. Nobody's perfect, but I think it's so important that we embrace these values openly, and if we screw up, then we've just got to be honest about that and openly work to fix it — rather than hide it, or not disclose it, or lie about it, or all these other terrible things that you see people and firms do. That's what's going to protect capitalism. It's not the idea that we're never going to make a mistake; it's the idea that we're going to be open and honest and learn from that. We have to fight really hard to protect that cultural aspect of capitalism, because that's what keeps the humanity in capitalism. If we just focus on the money part, or the mechanics of capitalism, and we ignore the ethics, we ignore the humanity that you were talking about — that's when we lose. And the environment also — not burn the environment while doing that. And again, it's stuff to put in practice, because, oh, ChatGPT, every prompt is burning water and warming the planet — but it's also what will solve the climate problem, like AGI ultimately. So it's always tough decisions to make. It's bets that you're willing to take, and most people will be like, “oh, this is dumb.” But that's the human gut magic — you know what you're doing and you need to move forward, even though most people will talk about you.

From the planet to the galaxy

You mentioned the planet, but I think increasingly, maybe in our lifetime, we're going to be thinking about the galaxy. Yeah, for sure. That's pretty wild. I mean, the debris and stuff — I'm not an expert on planetary anything. I'm fascinated by it. I have been since I was a kid. I think it's really interesting that it feels like we're on the cusp of some new disclosures, at least here in the US, by the government, about what they know and what they don't. And just even mathematically, the odds are really high that we're not the only living beings. So I think the idea of how we treat each other will need to extend beyond Earth. It clearly needs to apply to Earth — we haven't figured that out yet — but these are fascinating times. The scale with which we're thinking is just rapidly, exponentially growing. You've got Elon, of course, who's like, “hey, in our lifetime I'm going to take people to not just the Moon but Mars.” So I think what's happening in space is going to really cause people's mental horizons to expand in a big, big way.

The cold ultra, and surviving as a startup skill

But let's take it back to Earth for a second. You recently participated in a pretty crazy and cold ultra competition of sorts. Tell us a little bit about that. Why are you crazy enough to sign up for that? It's preparation for the real craziness, which is the Death Race. Even last weekend I completed another challenge, just to essentially walk one kilometer, one mile, uphill with cinder blocks on my feet — so that was interesting. It's just the mental fortitude aspect of it, all the downloads that I get in that period. For me it's always energy efficiency — energy-efficiency obsession. How can I drive the most growth and progress into me in the shortest time frame? Even if that's 24 hours — it might seem like a lot, but to get all these insights, it's not; it's very efficient. So that was teamwork, that was temperature management, that was preparation — lots of gear prep, like 60 pieces of gear — and the logistics part as well is quite interesting, to get in the middle of nowhere in Vermont. For those who are not ultrarunners or doing stuff like that — I'm sure you learned a lot just from doing it, different things, how to do it better — but at a human level, what would be one big takeaway that you came away with on the other side of that? Survivability. Survivability is important, because you can take a lot of these lessons and turn them into startups — because startups are living, surviving things. You also have the confidence in you that the world could end and you could still survive, and you're still a good team player. Team is super important. You can be the party pooper, or you can be a cheerleader. And cheerleading is so underappreciated — it's probably the number one skill to have as a founder, because energy is everything. It's all an energy equation. Every time you show up with your bad attitude, you just put everyone down, and we can't afford that, because energy is so finite in the startup world. So just being a good human being around other great human beings — and don't think you need the startup to be the grand leader. When you're with other elite operators, you share the leadership: “okay, I'm good at sales, you're good at finance and compliance; I'll take the fundraising.” Everyone's a leader in these types of teams. So that's a good takeaway. Love that. Charles, thanks for joining us today. I look forward to having you on again. Here's to the Meaning of Money. Charles Cormier.