Turning travel videos into bookable journeys and fair creator pay with Seeq: Jon Levesque

Tired of saving dream trips you never book? We sat down with Seek founder John Levesque to unpack a new path from “that looks amazing” to “I’m going”—and why creators, not platforms, should capture most of the value along the way. John spent years building communities for brands at Microsoft and DocuSign, saw creators’ work powering growth without fair returns, and decided to flip the economics. Seeq’s AI ingests social travel videos, parses both visuals and narration, and turns them into mobile-friendly, SEO-optimized guides with maps and bookable links. The kicker: creators earn 60% of the revenue from bookings sparked by their guides.

We dig into the problem behind the problem: discovery that ends in an overstuffed save folder, endless lists that don’t match your taste, and the broken handoff between inspiration and planning. John explains how Seek shortens that gap, and how ethical data use can be a competitive edge. We also explore the future of personalization—preference signals that feel like a compass, not a prison—and how wearables could add context to “relaxing” or “thrilling” without hijacking your attention. Instead of replacing human judgment, Seek treats creators as the new search engine for experiences, rewarding specificity over generic top 10s.

If you’ve ever spent 30 hours planning a 7-day trip, this conversation will feel like a breath of fresh air. Expect real talk on AI ethics, the market for synthetic influencers, and a model that lets creators double or triple dip—brand deals, social views, and now bookings—without selling out their voice. Subscribe, share with a traveler who’s drowning in tabs, and leave a review to help more people find the show.

Chapters

• 0:00 Banter, Set-up, Guest Intro
• 2:54 John’s Story and Motivation
• 6:57 What Seek Does and How It Pays
• 10:52 Killing Save-and-Forget Discovery
• 13:26 The Aha Moment and AI Pipeline
• 17:14 Ethics, Ownership, and OAuth
• 20:55 Avoiding Noise with Personalization
• 24:16 Humans vs Synthetic Influencers
• 28:10 Building an Experience Network
• 31:03 Roadmap: Voice, Languages, Mobile, Wearables
• 34:20 Community Data and Preference Engine
• 37:16 Creator Incentives and Monetization Math
• 41:10 The Shift from Lists to Specificity
• 45:12 Closing Thoughts and CTAs

Transcript

Steve
And we're back and here we go for another episode. We're into, I don't know what episode we're into right now. We've done so many and this whole AI world is completely blowing my mind. But what I do know is I'm joined by our newest voice of the season.

that was a cue for you

Imnah
Sorry, I missed it.

Steve
I missed you Imnah, I really have. You know the quality of our shows was going here and now it's back to where it should be.

Imnah

Whoa, what are you saying about the other people Steve?

Steve
saying they're wonderful. But tell us, who did you interview today because it was mostly you and I couldn't get my words in any ways.

Imnah
So we spoke to John and I'm really trying not to butcher his last name. How do I say it, Steve?

Steve
Leveque

Imnah
Levesque. Yes, we spoke to John Levesque and he is the founder of Seek and Seek is this very cool new platform that is coming for the throat of the likes of TripAdvisor and Yelp. He hates Yelp. And yeah, it's going to make some really cool, fantastic content on travel. It's going to be creator based. yeah, it's stirring up quite a mix in the media industry, I feel.

Steve
It's a new tool which builds on publicly available data from the real world of maps that has been collected by organizations like Bing Maps or Google Maps and it's supplementing that with the material that people are creating when they go on holidays and they're sharing pictures on TikTok or Instagram or on all the Snapchat, not really Snapchat, but TikTok and Instagram in particular, like when you take pictures of your burgers and your foods and you post them online. So...

That's what I gathered from it and it looks like an absolutely amazing opportunity. Yes, Imnah?

Imnah
Yes, but I think more than also just being kind of a source of information, I think one of the best selling points of Seek is also that it kind of lets you do everything in one place with the booking and the affiliate links that he mentioned.

So it's not then that you have to go and research across multiple platforms just to be able to fix up this itinerary. even for travelers or for creators that are trying to basically get their content out there and just trying to do 10,000 things to get 100 million followers before they can actually start making any sort of money, the way Seek uses AI to kind of monetize that, it almost means that everybody wins really.

Steve
Yeah, anybody, anybody, anybody at any level of content, which is great, I'm gonna start doing it myself. So, on that note, we are ready to go, and here we go!

Imnah
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the incongruence. And this is yet another one in our AI series. And we are super excited today to be talking to John, who is the founder of Seek. Hi, John, how are you doing today?

Jon Levesque
Great, how are you doing?

Imnah
Awesome, very psyched to talk to you. When we had your bio come in first, I looked at it and I thought, he's gonna have a lot of stories to tell us. So I hope that's true. Why don't you go ahead and start off by telling us about yourself, what keeps you up at night, what gets you out of bed in the morning, and then tell us a little bit about Seek.

Jon Levesque 
Yeah, awesome. Well, I'm John Levesque. I'm super stoked to be here. Appreciate you guys having me. What keeps, a bit about me, let's see. I'm from Seattle. I'm a family guy. I got a wife and three kids, two daughters and a son. I love nature and the outdoors, hiking, camping, being outside. Photography is a huge hobby of mine. And travel is probably my biggest passion in life. My background is all community for tech. I was at HTC.

Imnah
Okay.

Jon Levesque
They used to make cool phones. Now they make VR headsets. From there, I went on to Microsoft for 10 years, built several communities for them. Microsoft's Power Platform, Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, probably the most famous set of products I dealt with. And then onto DocuSign, where I lasted about four years. And then from there, went on to Start Seek, which is where I am today. And we'll talk about that in a second, but.

What keeps me up at night? I have been on the side of brands building communities for them. I have helped build economics that favored the brand and essentially vacuumed from the community, right? Like community led growth as a practice is this idea that we listen to the community, build what they want.

Imnah
Okay. Okay.

Jon Levesque
They pay us more money because we're doing that. We then advertise that we are doing that, which then starts the flywheel over again, right? And so what I saw time and time again was there was so much value being created by these creators, by these doers, but they weren't able to extract much of that value, if any, for themselves. And so this has been something that has sat with me for years and years and years until finally I, you know, as a traveler who decided to start

Imnah 
Okay.

Jon Levesque 
creating some travel content, I saw that I wasn't able to monetize any of that knowledge without huge traction, having millions of followers to get brand deals or getting millions of views to attempt to scrape out something from the creator funds or whatever. There wasn't many opportunities. And so this is where this all began. I just hated this fact and decided that I was going to change it. And so what gets me up in the morning is

Imnah
you .

Jon Levesque 
I have this belief that I can, number one, help creators get a fair share of the value they're creating. And number two, ultimately, what I believe that gets us to is a place where humanity can actually better understand the world around itself, right? Like being able to understand what you're doing on a Saturday afternoon is just as important as understanding how to spend seven days in Tokyo. And I think ultimately I want to get to that place where

We're helping creators get the value they deserve by sharing that knowledge of their local experiences or of their travel. And then making it very simple for other people to leverage that and cut out a lot of the hassle that they're dealing with. And so, you know, those are the things that are on my mind all the time and they perfectly align with what I'm building at Seek.

Imnah 
That's an amazing segue. Tell us more about Seek. So there's a lot of travel content on there and that's because you love travel, I'm guessing.

Jon Levesque 
Correct, that is correct, yes. so, Seek is a travel monetization platform at its core. We allow creators who have, you you go on TikTok, you go on Instagram, you see videos that are inspiring. And right now, there's not a whole lot you can do with it besides save it, or then try and take a notepad out and open 37 tabs and try and recreate it. And so, what we have done with Seek is give the creator

Imnah 
Okay.

Jon Levesque 
The power to actually take those videos, run them through our AI. Our AI then understands what's happening. Every place you went, everything you did, where you stayed, how you got there, all the details and tips. And it puts it into a fully SEO optimized webpage that is mobile friendly, that has all the maplinks, that has all the bookable links. And my favorite part, coming back to what keeps me up at night.

Imnah 
So.

Jon Levesque 
We pay creators 60 % of the value that is created. And so when you put out this guide and someone books the hotel and books the car rental and books the ticket to the museum, the creator is earning 60 % of that revenue share, right? And so we, as the platform, keep 40 to keep the lights on and keep things going. But in this method, we're now giving creators a way to say, Hey, you saw my viral video of all the sandwich shops in Florence.

Go check out my guide where I actually walk you through step by step how to get there, what order to do them, how to beat the lines, et cetera.

Imnah 

Amazing. So gone are the days basically of scouring through TripAdvisor and watching 30 minute long videos on YouTube to try and find the best sandwich places to go to. I recently took a long trip to Japan, very well needed, but the research leading up to that was just insane. It was far easier hopping on the 9 hour flight and doing the actual walking around and checking in and everything. The logistics of just setting that trip up was just an absolute nightmare, but...

you know, once it was done with, we really managed to enjoy the trip and see some lovely sights. But I'm actually really looking forward to what this could mean for people traveling in the future. just to think about more of what made you really begin with Seek, because, you know, you were at all these really big level companies. So we're talking HTC, Microsoft, one of my first phones was in HTC, by the way. So my inner child just kind of

Jon Levesque 
Thanks.

Imnah 
freaked out a little when you said you worked for HTC. But yeah, HTC, Microsoft, DocuSign, why'd you decide to risk it all for Zeek?

Jon Levesque 
Awesome. Love that.

Jon Levesque 
That's, you know, I ask myself that question every day. It's tough to leave a big salary behind. But I mean, I think it's deep inside of my heart. I think that this is what I was born to do. I think that, you know, I've never woken up with such a fire in my gut. I've never woken up with like less of a, you know, trajectory on my income, but I've also never woken up with such a a fire in my gut as well. so, you know, I think this, if I'm being really honest, you know what this started with? Pardon my French, but it started with Yelp. Like I just, I really hate Yelp. And that's kind of how this began, right? And then it evolved from there to figure out how to get creators involved and all that. like when I woke up one day and I decided I'm going to leave corporate and I'm going to solve this problem.

Imnah

The burning thing inside me started with Yelp sucks. Having said, what problems is Seek solving that's different from other platforms? So you also did mention that Seek was killing, save and forget discovery. So can you also give us a little more insight on that?

Jon Levesque
Okay. All right. so I think what I want to say about save and forget discovery is it ties back to that initial problem I discussed where I think that there is a disconnect between travel inspiration and travel booking. And that is ultimately the problem we are solving right now to go and get inspired for travel. 79 % of all decisions end on social, whether it's what I'm going to eat.

in a few days or what I'm going to do with my friends versus what I'm going to do in Japan in a month from now, right? Those are most of our decisions now revolve around seeing what other people did and wanting to emulate that experience, right? It's like the old school, like we talk across the fence, except now we don't have the fence. We stay inside and look at our phones. So now we talk across the phones, but the lesson is the same. The human experience is the thing we're looking to trust and help us decide.

Um, and so when I say I'm, want to kill save and forget discovery, what I'm saying is I want to bridge the gap between intent and booking. want people to, like you said, it took you probably, if I'm guessing, you know, based on all the research I've done, it probably took you close to 30 or 40 hours to plan like a seven day Japan trip, right? You spent almost as much time planning the thing as living the thing. And that's just wrong. Right. Right. See? Um, and, that's just wrong. We should.

And so when I say again, what I'm killing is that. I want someone to be able to see the thing, get inspired and instantly take action on it. Not have to sit on it, not have to decide to do that tough plan of 40, 50 hours, just as much time invested to plan it to do it. That's what I'm trying to kill.

Steve
I want to jump in here, because I'm really excited about the tech that we're exploring here. Since I checked out the website, I don't know whether this is a term or not, but we've always had user generated content. What I'm seeing in this world is we're now having user generated data so that the content creators, they think they're creating pictures, but that's been tokenized, that's been translated into content that the machine that we can we can train machines with. And now you are able to integrate that with with other known public knowledge, which is effectively what's in the real world. And that's to me is is makes me very excited. Tell me, how did you where did you where did the aha moment come from? Where we could actually combine these two elements together. We've got the public information from the real world and we've got all these people who are happily taking pictures of burgers.

Jon Levesque (11:14.196)
Yeah, you know, I think it started with an experiment. I obviously have a bunch of videos that I've created, but I saw a video that really inspired me one day and it was just the perfect itinerary for five days in Portugal. They outline where they stayed, they outline what they did, they showed hidden gems and food and all, and I was just like, I want to do this. And at the time, for Seeq, we were actually building something that was very traveler focused. We were building a mobile application that was traveler focused rather than a creator marketplace, right? And this video is the thing that actually gave me the aha moment of like, well, wait a second. I've been trying to figure out how I get creators, because I have a good answer for travelers.

Imnah (11:44.424)
Okay. Okay.

Jon Levesque (12:07.578)
Well, what if I actually flip the model and focus on creators who already have audiences of travelers? And I asked my CTO, said, Hey, do you think we could build an AI that watched this video and turned it into one of these things we were doing? And he was like, I don't think so, man. Like, you know, if we had like 10 developers and like a hundred grand, we could probably do it. Now, keep in mind, this was like six, eight months ago, right? The world was not quite in the position it was now things were starting to emerge.

Imnah (12:14.471)
Okay. .

Jon Levesque (12:35.444)
And I was like, okay, cool. I'm going to go play around. And I started messing around with AI and I stayed up all night one night. I spent like 17 or 18 hours and I built a proof of concept that proved that I could make an AI, watch a video, understand it and output a JSON file in the way that I wanted it to. And so I brought that back to my CTO and I was like, dude, call me 10 developers and a hundred thousand bucks, baby. I just did this. And so.

That's where like everything shifted. Like he understood what was possible. We got introduced to new tools. We started thinking completely differently about what was possible in 2025 versus 2024. And, and I, I don't know. I, they, they, my team calls me an idealist, right? Like I just have this core belief that like we should be doing the right thing for people. Like I am a travel creator. My wife is a travel creator. has hundreds of thousands of followers. She puts me to shame. I'm a

totally bad creator in comparison to her, but she still cannot leverage her value, right? And so this is where I said, okay, hold on a second. I can start to turn this content into a different layer. I can make it bookable. can create relationships. That's the other piece that I haven't even gotten to mention yet. I went and created a relationship with 64 different affiliate brands. So I essentially can grandfather any creator in.

Imnah (13:39.277)
Okay. Okay.

Jon Levesque (13:59.581)
And so as soon as you're on the platform and you put your content in, I'm applying affiliate links without you ever signing up for anything. Doesn't matter how many creators you have, doesn't matter how many views you have, you get to participate. And so this, it really started as a, like we have to do the right thing. We can do the right thing here and we should.

Steve (14:19.307)
So there's a lot of public data which you could get. mean, you've got, you've had your Microsoft history and so you've probably got Bing Maps, which you know how to access around on the API there. But you've also said this, which is what I was going into the affiliate. So I'm assuming you're also approaching the Hilton's, the IHG's, all the hotel chains, because they will then give you, voluntarily give you their data, And then when, and the photos which they have.

Imnah (14:20.486)
Okay. Okay.

Steve (14:47.489)
thousands off that would help train your model. Are you charging them yet or is it, that, where is your revenue model going to come from? Cause I'm assuming it's, that is going to be a big thing. You're going to have the Jumeirah chain in Dubai signing up to you. You're going to have all of these people saying, here is all of our content. When anyone comes into our show, it will automatically be tagged.

Jon Levesque (15:02.973)
Yeah.

Imnah (15:08.71)
Okay. .

Jon Levesque (15:13.394)
Yep, it's the business piece of it is a piece that actually at the moment we're kind of holding back the flood on. Like right now what we're really trying in our partnerships with all of these different brands, what we're trying to do right now is create pathways for creators to earn affiliate revenue. So step one, you know, if someone helps you get a booking at your Marriott in Hawaii, pay them six to 8%.

Right? If someone helps you rent that car, pay them 8 to 12%. If they help you get that ticket to that event, pay them 1 to 4%. Right? Like there's all these various rates and what we're trying to do right now is create those relationships in a way that we can be a throughput to creators. And so I think the best, easiest way to think about what we're trying to do is you look at like Patreon or fansly or only fans. And what we're really trying to do is be that

Imnah (15:47.941)
.

Okay. .

Steve (16:05.866)
Yeah.

Jon Levesque (16:11.142)
similar engine in a way for travel creators. But what those engines don't do is offer AI assistance. They don't offer affiliate partnerships, right? They just offer the direct to customer relationship, which is the third piece we will offer as well. When someone buys from you, when someone books from you, they're your customer too. We share that data with you. You get to build a relationship with them, market to them, et cetera, which is, you know, something that just none of these other like social platforms are doing, which is

Imnah (16:24.614)
Okay.

Jon Levesque (16:39.826)
really where our main audience is.

Steve (16:42.306)
I'm going to ask one more then I'll pass it back to Imna. On your site at the moment you are a TikTok integration. So I'm assuming that once I have created my seek content, I can then put that onto TikTok and then the links will be the same and you'll have some way of tracking the click throughs from different platforms. So, correct.

Jon Levesque (16:49.662)
Mm-hmm.

Jon Levesque (17:04.596)
So right now it's in the inverse right now you have a tick tock account you off that with seek We pull your content through and give you a couple of things one Obviously you get that guide that's mapped and bookable that pays you affiliate revenue You get the contact from anyone who books from you, but the really interesting part is you also get a SEO GEO friendly web layer

Imnah (17:18.053)
Okay.

Imnah (17:27.908)
Okay. Okay.

Jon Levesque (17:29.266)
that you've never had before for your social content, right? Because every sequence we generate, you now get a unique link for like seek.eng, your profile slash sequence title, which is based on the title of what your actual itinerary says, right? So if it's 10 days in France, it'll be my name and then 10 days in France. So you now have this beautiful searchable thing where no one was ever able to find your travel content in that way before.

Imnah (17:57.253)
Okay.

Jon Levesque (17:59.303)
And so now you have this added benefit. And so it's actually the inverse where we use the OAuth of your accounts to prove that your content is yours. Because I think you make an, you made an interesting point in the last question about like, I can just go and take all this data. I could, I, I built the thing probably six months ago that could have just scraped the whole internet of every video. And I could have taken all the affiliate links, right? But that's not right. That's wrong. I'm just creating another giant, right? I'm just creating another dragon that's stealing from people that it shouldn't be stealing from, right? And so that's where I spent the extra time. I built the OAuth. I allow the creators to create, to protect their IP and not only protect it, but monetize it and expand it through relationship, right? And so that's, again, I think, you I just, you'll hear it again and again. I'm highly idealistic on this. Like I really truly believe we should be doing better for people. There's so much money out there.

Imnah (18:28.536)
. .

Jon Levesque (18:56.574)
There's so much possibility. We should be sharing it much more broadly.

Imnah (19:03.237)
Brilliantly said. I do have a question on that actually. So how do we keep Seek from becoming quote unquote a giant? really thinking about the way the content would come in and be structured and organized. How do we keep it from becoming kind of like an echo chamber of, know, like this article that says here are the best places you need to go to.

hear the top 10 foods that you need to try. And it's just kind of a lot of noise really. It's not really curated. It's not really something that will actually help you to make that final decision. So what about seek kind of changes that.

Jon Levesque (19:37.641)
Yeah, I love this question. I think that infinite options have actually led to less satisfaction. Like we have been led to believe that having more information would give us better outcomes. And that is just not the truth, right? We have seen that evidenced in multiple arenas that is just not the truth.

And the interesting thing about Seek is its future state. I do still want to make a mobile app. I do still want to focus on preference. I do still want to create something that helps push you into experiences that you've said you wanted to do while also minimizing the noise of everything else. And so part of Seek's future, like what we're doing right now,

Imnah (20:19.075)
it.

Jon Levesque (20:27.6)
is we're allowing every creator to participate so that we can start to gather the knowledge that they possess in an honest fashion. We can help them monetize that knowledge. But ultimately, what we're trying to drive here in the back end is a preference engine that allows you to say, I like pizza, I like beer.

Imnah (20:30.317)
Good.

Imnah (20:45.955)
Okay.

Jon Levesque (20:49.734)
I don't want to be bothered during these hours and I live in this area and I'm probably traveling to these areas, right? You give it some set of preferences and then it begins to understand, these are work hours. these are the things they like. they visited this place. hey, wait a second. It's seven o'clock on a Thursday and they're not on their commute. Let me go ahead and send them a suggestion about something that's nearby that they said they wanted to do that they might've forgotten about.

Imnah (21:14.914)
Okay. Okay.

Jon Levesque (21:16.38)
Right? And so the whole idea of what we're trying to build is satisfaction. And the, have an engine, an economic model to monetize satisfaction, which I think is the opposite to what we see today. Again, let's take it back to Yelp, who I hate. What is, how do they monetize? Sponsored links.

They get paid the more you scroll. The more things you see, the more they get paid. There is no incentive to deliver you the best pizza place. There's only incentive to show you 70 pizza places. And so I think that's the fundamental difference is even as we grow, our eye is very much on delivering an experience that you will go and do rather than just scroll past and save.

Imnah (22:08.935)
Wow, so you're effectively making creators the new search engine.

but in a very bespoke way. coming to that, what do you think is invaluable when it comes to human experience? Something that an algorithm just absolutely cannot replace.

Jon Levesque (22:16.852)
correct.

Jon Levesque (22:27.22)
Oh, I love these questions. So I always, say, you know, I get a lot of pushback. People come to me, even investors and stuff. Oh, well, I just used chat GPT, you know, to plan via vacation last month. And I was like, how'd it go? They're like, oh, it was fine. I was exactly is fine. It was fine. And like, if you want fine, bro, go ask chat GPT, man. Like, you know, I have another thing like,

I just can't trust an AI who doesn't have taste buds to tell me what the best pizza is. Like, I just can't. It doesn't, I can, I understand that an AI is a collective set of information abstracted to give me the most, the answer most likely to suit what it is that I am asking for, right? It's not, again, it's not incentivized to give me satisfaction.

And so I think, you know, it's super important for me to maintain that campfire feeling. Like there's so many things like AI, know, Metta trying to replace us with AI in their feeds. We were talking about it before the show started. There are so many areas where AI is like being pushed to replace humanity. I was on a podcast not that long ago where the host was talking about how our only hope

is to merge with AI, that we will have to become machines to survive and like to maintain humanity, right? And I'm just like, no, man, like, I think like, I just want AI to help me find the very best sandwiches, right? Like, like, I want to I want to leverage human knowledge, I want to enhance human knowledge with AI, I don't want to replace it. And so that's why I think like, that's the core difference of what we're doing here, and what we're trying to create, because the basis of it

is human knowledge, is human experience. And I'm trying to take that caveman-like thing of where we stand around the fire and talk to each other about life and turn it into somewhat of a digital searchable format with the tools that we now have that will never go away, right?

Imnah (24:39.691)
That's amazing. Well.

Steve (24:40.166)
Let's.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm not. just wanted to do you do such a good job, you know, of taking. We should just have the in the podcast. But just taking on to this, did mention better earlier. And five years ago, I was experimenting with virtual influences. And we were trying to design them in class. Last year, we were playing with the Unreal Engine, creating meta humans.

Imnah (24:43.745)
Thank

Jon Levesque (24:53.662)
You

Steve (25:12.647)
That's pretty done quite nicely There are Etihad Airways I think it was just or it was Emirates Airlines one of the two airlines in the in the UE just launched its own virtual influencer and just did a big song and dance about it These things have been going on for some time now. What's the Why they seem to quite popular Why shouldn't we just have the synthetic

That's called K-pop demon hunter style influences doing this kind of stuff versus the humans. What's wrong with that?

Jon Levesque (25:50.333)
I just answer with a question, right? What's the end game? Like walk that out for me.

Walk that out for me. We replace humanity in tech. We replace humanity in, sorry, hold on, mechanical, right? Like creation of things. We're building robots. Like we replace humanity now in brand and personality. Like what do we have left? And then what do the AI have left to train on, right? The end game here, I don't think anyone is thinking about.

Jon Levesque (26:22.608)
There is this, I understand it right now, where they're trying to keep things cheap, to extract instruction, to make these things greater, to replace humanity greater, but I don't think anyone is thinking about the end game because you can only pass the dollars around each other for so long, right? And so I...

Personally, also, think just on a John to Steven level, I just don't know if I want to live in a world that's so synthetic. It just doesn't, that doesn't feel good. I want reality. I love humanity. I love life and living it. And sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's beautiful.

And sometimes it's a good lesson. But ultimately, like it is what we are given. Right. And like to to replace every facet of it. That just feels so wrong. That's not the world I want my kids to grow up in. I don't want Wally, bro. I don't want us to have Wally as our future. Right. And that's I think if we walk this out, like that's what we're looking at. That's what they're building towards. Like we're already in idiocracy.

Imnah (27:07.583)
it.

.

Jon Levesque (27:31.794)
We're like one step away from Wall-E and two steps away from Don't Look Up.

Steve (27:37.734)
I think we've gone past don't look up a couple years ago i think we did that in our class was never i was so that was that was that was part of that and wall is a a is a movie close to my heart remember very well. But we are in a environment where loneliness is through the roof i mean i'm in the UK we have a minister of loneliness. You see these chatbots.

Imnah (27:38.656)
Okay. Okay.

Jon Levesque (27:42.041)
Hehehehehe

Steve (28:02.95)
Are being programmed for kids to give them friends and you have a new AI pet that's just been created and you go to Japan and they have all these AI, you know, dolls for all different kinds of purposes. there is certainly, I mean, there is a market for synthetic content, whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. and that is going to put, I think you'd agree, it will put pressure on the humans.

Jon Levesque (28:30.728)
I totally agree. There's definitely a market for it. I think, you know, it's interesting, right? Because there's a few different camps. I remember going to a talk at South by Southwest earlier this year and...

Imnah (28:38.239)
. .

Jon Levesque (28:43.944)
the gentleman was giving a talk on AI and leveraging it to enhance your communications. And I remember the starkest moment was he said, everyone, please raise your hand if you want to use AI to enhance your communications and everyone, everyone, except maybe one person in the room raised their hand. And then he says, please raise your hand if you would like to be on the receiving end of AI enhanced communications. Hardly anyone raised their hand. Right.

I think that there are those of us, like many of us want to leverage these things to make life easier for ourselves. None of us want to be on the receiving end of a lazy, not written by you, impersonal piece of information, right? No one wants that. And so I think like what we're seeing right now is a transition period where these platforms are coming up and creating things that are just completely in the wrong direction. Like, like let's be real, man. Like a...

Imnah (29:13.074)
Okay.

Imnah (29:38.998)
Okay. Okay.

Jon Levesque (29:41.991)
A digital friend for a kid is going to do way more harm because they're never going to learn how the real world works. And they're not going to learn the coping mechanisms because this AI friend is going to do what chat GPT or Claude does. you're absolutely right. Whenever, right? Whenever they push back on you and you push back, what's their response? you're absolutely right. Like that is not how the world works. And so again, I, I cannot deny.

Imnah (30:02.462)
.

Jon Levesque (30:10.482)
that these things are happening and there is a market for it. I'm just trying to build for a different future.

Imnah (30:18.386)
Yeah, you know, that's that's the real. I was just going to simplify.

Steve (30:19.024)
Go

Jon Levesque (30:24.692)
You

You

Imnah (30:28.709)
We've got nothing in the way of collaboration going on here. I was going to say that the other day I was baking and I decided to have ChatGPT read the recipe out to me. I was making it for a friend that can't have gluten, can't have egg, and can't have nuts. Very sad life. Can barely eat any baked goods. So here I am trying to get this recipe to work and I'm asking ChatGPT, hey, can you?

know maybe sub this ingredient with that so what would it turn out to be and I think I asked it to do some really crazy things and it was like yeah it's still gonna be delicious and I think it told me that it's here for me like 15 times in the process of me making these cupcakes and I was like that's okay you've said that already and it's like ahaha yeah but you know just making sure and anything you need I'm right here for you and I'm like okay I know

Jon Levesque (31:23.752)
Yep. Yep.

Imnah (31:24.222)
Yeah, so it's going to be a very impersonal world. And even when we think about Wall-E, I think the image I have of that movie is the really obese people sitting in those little chairs that just kind of take them everywhere. Yeah, screens in front of their faces. Yep, yep, yep, yep. And nobody communicates with each other anymore. And I think that's the scary part of thinking about the future of

Jon Levesque (31:39.986)
The screen plastered in front of their face. Yup, yup.

Imnah (31:51.373)
AI and people everywhere are saying it's going to take away our creativity and our ability to think outside the box and interact with each other. But what ways do you think AI can enhance that and not take away from it?

Jon Levesque (32:06.994)
Yeah. I think that, you know, that's exactly what I'm trying to build. have this whole idea of a thing called an experience network, which lives somewhere between discovery and travel and social network. And I think we can use AI. Like you said, I'm going to actually steal that. going, I'm turning travel creators into the search engine. I really like that phrasing. And so I think something like that where we're

not only using the data of humanity, but actually helping them grow and monetize through it, right? There's still, OnlyFans made $9 billion last year and paid out like $6.6 billion to creators. How amazing of a model is it that you can make billions of dollars helping other people make millions of dollars? Like...

Like to me, that's the future that I think we need to be building is all of these different arenas and all of them, obviously AI is not going away. Mobile is not going away. So how can we turn these things into compasses rather than prisons along the way? Right? How can we turn them into enablers rather than replacers? And I think that that's the ultimate question. And I don't have, you know, all the answers. I just know there's, there's things that there's, are people doing it right. and also I think I see a hope.

Imnah (33:13.852)
Okay. .

Jon Levesque (33:23.814)
in a counter already. Like, I think it was Netflix. It just invested $100 million in like real life spaces, like trying to come up with a concept of how to get people together in space to view things, watch things, do things, whatever, like their next big bet. Right. And then you look at like American Express with experiences and like a lot of companies are trying to focus on like humanity coming together in reality again.

And so I think there are trends that are moving the right way. But I just think there are these huge loud trends also with massive distribution and hundreds of billions of dollars that we as little guys have to all contend, right? To say that's not the future we want in fact, right? Like you're doing it wrong. Like my hope is that Metta spends a hundred, you know, fuck it, sorry, a couple billion dollars and just waste it.

on this video thing that no one uses it, that all of that was for naught. And they learn a very valuable lesson that they should probably get back to connecting people because that's what made them what they are.

Steve (34:36.247)
want to just be looking into the head of where you're going to go next. Next two, three years you've already got vision, you've got some text that you can draw out onto this and into play. Next thing it must be translation. You've also got to be able to do a bit of voice recognition as well because a lot of these videos are narrated videos. So how far away are you from that and which languages are you currently supporting and what's next?

Imnah (34:40.74)
. .

Jon Levesque (35:05.684)
I have that done in English. anything narrated in the video is already put into the plan. So if you're showing one thing and talking about something, it understands, did you show this first? Did you say this first? Oh, you showed this first. I showed this first. You said this after I show this after. So English voice to text all done. I, I have seven further languages planned, like, you know, obviously Spanish, Japanese, a couple others that are, you know, big touristy language, you know, places we'll need to cover.

But I think what's next for us immediately is a mobile app. Right now we're a web app, which I think makes sense for the creator portion of this, their toolkit makes sense as a web app. But when we want to start getting serious about consumers utilizing these experiences, I think the mobile app will be important. We also have a lot of plans for wearables. Right now, two...

Imnah (35:45.611)
Okay.

Jon Levesque (35:58.453)
Out of five Americans have a single wearable smart glasses smartwatch Earpods AirPods, whatever by 2030 they say 70 % of Americans will have one and 30 % will have two And so we have a big plan for wearables again I think there's this driving ethos, which is I want the phone to be a compass and not a prison I want every time you look at it It should be giving you a valuable piece of information that allows you to put it away

Imnah (36:04.963)
Okay.

Okay.

Jon Levesque (36:26.388)
And so as we think about the future, as we think about mobile, as we think about wearables, that is a very consistent goal for us is how do we push you further into the experience? How do we give you the information you need in the experience while minimizing the amount of times we're asking for your attention?

Imnah (36:40.731)
Okay. Okay.

Steve (36:44.538)
So when you have these wearables that opens up a huge number of new data points, you will be able to know adrenaline, you will be able to measure levels of satisfaction, you'll be able to measure relaxation. So you will also be able to, I'm assuming, tag, this is the most relaxing place, heart rates go down to blah, this is the best white-knuckle ride because the heart rate went up through this and that and the other. That's...

Jon Levesque (37:09.214)
Yep, yep. And I think there's a public layer that we have planned where, like let's say I make a video that turns into a sequence and a thousand people go and follow this sequence.

Imnah (37:10.49)
Okay.

Jon Levesque (37:22.908)
We have a plan for a social, a community layer where people can contribute, I skipped this step and did this step, or here's my photo from here, where suddenly now these become living, connected experiences that you can begin to like see different personas taking this path very differently, experiencing it differently, feeling it differently, stopping in different places. And then again,

Imnah (37:40.538)
Okay.

Imnah (37:48.954)
Okay.

Jon Levesque (37:49.319)
We can use all that data to tie to personalization to say, your profile fits like this profile. can, you you want relaxing experiences. You said we saw seven in the last week in your area, right? There's a lot of potential as we add all those layers again, to tie into that first main goal of, of, of personalization.

Steve (38:11.963)
could talk about this all night. can see thousands of different opportunities of where you could take this. But I think we're running close. Amna, do we have one more question?

Imnah (38:14.361)
I think I just also wanted to ask about kind of from the creators perspective, know, in Dubai, it's really big for influencers to do deals and collaborations with the Hilton's and the Jomara's and so on and so forth. Like that is a giant market.

and it affects everything from PR to hospitality to food and beverage and all of that. So from the creator's perspective, what is really the incentive to be on seek rather than do deals kind of the traditional way? And maybe a second part to this question, do you think that creator content is going to start looking different from the monetized stuff that you see sponsored on the different social media platforms that we see a lot of today?

Jon Levesque (39:09.234)
Yeah. Great question. first part, I think the incentive is right now to make money. Like you said, there's kind of two ways you either get a million views, which typically pays you about a thousand bucks per million views. So you're going viral. That's one way to get paid or you get a brand deal because you've been consistent enough that someone feels like they like your identity and they'll pay you a one-time fee. Well,

What's interesting about Seek is, let's say that you got that 1 million views. I'm not asking you to not put your content on TikTok. Let's say that you got a brand deal for that hotel. I'm not asking you to not get a brand deal. What I'm telling you is if you put your content on Seek, you can double or triple dip because now what you can do is let's say you got a million views and let's say you got 1 % of that to go and click your Seek link in your bio.

Imnah (39:48.276)
. .

Jon Levesque (40:04.692)
And of that 1%, 5 % booked something, right? So I don't know the quick math, 1 % of a million, 10,000, 5 % of that's 500 people, right? 500 people now booked something. If any of them booked that hotel that you stayed at that costs $1,500, you made 5 % of $1,500 off one person booking, right? They booked your whole thing? Well, they probably spent three grand.

And you probably made anywhere from five to 8 % total of that entire booking. Right. And so now like that's just one person, one person paid you more than a million views did. and so the potential is massive because we've given like, instead of all of these OTAs keeping all this value, they have all these programs that just most people can't qualify for. And so when we give people access to these programs,

There's a lot of highways open to be able to get value. And I think, you know, we have a few other plans too, where maybe it's not all affiliate. Maybe there's a direct sales model where I could just sell a guide to someone and say, Hey, here's just the knowledge, right? But I mean, I think in my mind, the big value is saving the booking time, because even if I sell someone an itinerary, they still have to go do a lot of research.

Imnah (41:15.02)
Okay. It's.

Jon Levesque (41:28.508)
And so that's the incentive, I think, is we give them this whole set of tools that help them earn money in a whole new way that they've never been able. And then I guess I'll even add on a caveat. We give them that web layer that I mentioned. We give them this whole SEO friendly web layer where their content is now searchable on Google and Bing and all this other stuff where it never was before. then, you know, second part of the question, would you remind me what it was?

Imnah (41:51.603)
Sure, yeah, it's kind of your take on what travel creators content should start to look like in light of that.

Jon Levesque (41:57.651)
Yes. Yes. I think that what we see these huge creators doing is going broad, right? Top 10 places in X. What's weird is eight of those places are the top eight in TripAdvisor. Like that person didn't offer you a whole lot, but they, but they did show all the very popular that got a lot of views, right?

I actually believe that we're going to see a change to specificity. There has not been an incentive previously for someone to share their hidden gems, right? Like they're not making anything. They're not gaining anything. So to give you their best, they're kind of losing out because now there's going to be more people at that place. And what did they get for it?

Imnah (42:40.696)
Okay.

Jon Levesque (42:50.13)
I think by helping people monetize that knowledge, we will actually see specificity grow. We will see the ability for people to experience those deeper things because specificity grew. And I think we will see a divergence for the content that is super successful to take a different path than TripAdvisor or Yelp, where all the commodity lives.

Imnah (43:15.153)
Amazing! I think that's all the questions that I have for you unless Steve wants to ask me. He's been going in and out. Okay, I think then we can wrap up our conversation. I think we could talk for maybe hours to come but it has been an absolute joy and pleasure to have you, John. Your happiness is contagious and it's really exciting to have somebody that's also thinking about

Steve (43:26.763)
Thank

Imnah (43:42.507)
the human aspect of AI and the kind of world that we want to live in in a few years more than what it means to make AI put more money into our pockets. So I really enjoyed talking to you and I'm sure our listeners will enjoy hearing from you. And yeah, if anyone is curious, please check out Zeek.

Jon Levesque (44:04.798)
Thank you so much.

Steve (44:05.022)
Yeah, what is the website address? It's seek.inq, correct?

Jon Levesque (44:09.074)
So seeking with a Q.

Steve 
Super stuff. Thank you very much and if anyone's online... sequencing? That's what me and him need to work on our sequencing. Hopefully this thing will work it out for us. That's wonderful. So if anyone's online please like, comment, leave us a lovely review if you like and we'll catch you in our next episode. Thank you all very much.