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My First Million · 3 min · Sep 30, 2026

Instinct can push customer-service complaints through

An agent found Asurion's executive email after missed repair appointments, booked a same-night massage and kept pursuing a ticket refund. The examples show it taking real-world tasks through to completion.

  • Shaan Puri, Host · Co-host, My First Million

    Sold Bebo to Twitch in 2019; co-founded the crypto newsletter Milk Road.

  • Sam Parr, Host · Co-founder, Hampton

    Founded the business newsletter The Hustle and sold it to HubSpot.

About this segment

An agent found Asurion's executive email after missed repair appointments, booked a same-night massage and kept pursuing a ticket refund. The examples show it taking real-world tasks through to completion.

From “We tested Instinct, Muse and Grokbot. They’re ridiculous.”, Sep 30, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Are AI agents ready for real work?” See all 45 answers

Takeaways

  1. It contacted an executive team after repair appointments fell through.
  2. It booked a Thai massage around a dinner reservation.
  3. It kept pursuing a ticket refund after an initial refusal.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 45:31AI agents found ways to coordinate and cheat a test7:26
  2. 32:00AI agents could take control of where consumers buy5:14
  3. 20:47Emotional support may matter as much as AI intelligence6:11
  4. 38:29Micro1 offered Hampton $800,000 for its private data5:13
  5. 13:19Instinct can push customer-service complaints through3:09

  6. 59:50Founders can find ideas by reaching a field's frontier4:39Up next
  7. 56:08AI regulation can reflect both safety and company incentives4:05

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 13:31

    um okay so i've been using instinct every day um i actually just use instinct today so basically i uh instinct they do the texting format which i did not like at first i've since grown to love it today uh i have this guy who's supposed to repair my uh iphone through a shirt uh assurian you know like that you like pay 20 bucks a month and they fix an iphone screen and they keep canceling on me like i schedule an appointment and they keep canceling or they don't show up and i was like find the executive team's email and email them and don't stop until they call me and it took about three or four days today i got a phone call i got a phone call and i have they said it was it was like it says hey we're the executive we're the executive line i forget what it was but it was like it i got a phone call this morning after it's been emailing

  2. 14:18

    them for five days instinct did that for me another day uh my wife and i it was 6 p.m i said hey, my wife and I are going on a date. I would love it if you could go, if you can schedule some type of Thai massage for us starting at 8.30 p.m. after dinner. It has to be within a mile of this restaurant that we're going to. Just go ahead and book it for me. And it booked it. It did it all. So we just showed up and we were ready to roll and it had already paid for us.

  3. 14:43

    It does, again, everything in the system would do, but it does it also in a way that's kind of fun and it's kind of nice. So, for example, I had like a, I bought tickets to some show on like, you know, StubHub or whatever in Ticketmaster. You know, these things are like, it's basically like being taken hostage. You know what I mean? Like, these are some of the worst companies in the world, Ticketmaster and StubHub.

  4. 15:08

    Like, there's just, it's just a brutal experience all the way around. Anyways, buy some tickets, realize, oh, it's the seats like aren't together or something. Something weird happened like that where the tickets are just not going to work. like 10 seconds after I bought it. I was like, oh, whoops. Hey, kind of want to cancel that and just book the right thing. And it was like, no, no, no, no, no.

  5. 15:29

    You push the button. And now like, la, la, la, la, la, it covers its ears. I don't want to hear from you. I won't help you, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I was like, I just don't even bother with their customer's work. You just go to instinct. You're like, hey, listen, this happened. Yeah, I'm partially to blame. Should have read it closer. Should have paid more attention. but but can you help me out here and it's like i got you and so it starts harassing them and then you know just basically saying like hey look we need to change this refund this and we'll buy another one uh it gets stonewalled you know They come back with like, hey, our policy is, you clicked it, you're screwed forever.

  6. 16:05

    Sorry. And so, but it just tells me, don't worry, I'll just keep going. And then the next day, it just texts me, victory. And then the next line, they folded. Yes.