The AI Billionaire: Now Is Your Last Chance To Build GENERATIONAL Wealth | Paul Allen

What was it like watching your company go public? My lifelong uh childhood friend, he said to me, "What's [music] it like to be worth a hundred million dollars?" We launched Ancestry and got multiple millions of users a month before LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google even existed. We had to get really creative with marketing. Why is it important to understand your family [music] history and genealogy? >> Two things that all human beings need to know is one, your family stories, because that's part of your identity. But then individually, [music] you have God-given talents that are unique to you. >> [music] >> So, do you think it's easier today to start a business than it was back in 2000? Way easier. 10 [music] times, a hundred times easier. Especially with the rise of AI. What took us months and months to accomplish when we launched ancestry.com could now be achieved by someone sitting in their [music] bedroom in less than an hour. What do you think is the biggest risk to AI? [music] >> The biggest risk >> [music] >> So, Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, net worth of 20 billion dollars. >> Yeah, your most famous guest so far. How often do you get confused with that other Paul Allen? >> When he was alive, it was a fantastic cheat code for me. When I lived in Silicon Valley, everybody returned my calls, everyone returned my emails. It was awesome. When he passed away, then that doesn't lend to that confusion anymore. But uh for about 10 years, I was nicknamed in the venture capital community Paul Allen the lesser. Cuz people would talk about me. I mean, I'd started Ancestry with my best friend, and so I was something a little bit in the entrepreneur world, but I wasn't the Paul Allen. So, I actually blogged under the name Paul Allen the lesser for about 15 years. Did you ever meet Paul Allen? >> not. I wanted to so badly. I read his autobiography, Paul Allen, Idea Man. I think his sister is named Jody or Judy, and I hope to meet her someday. But I He's one of my heroes. He's an idea generator, and his whole life mission was to ask the question, "What should exist?" and then make it happen. Either build it or fund it. So, I love his life story. I love what he created, so many cool things. And I regret that I never met him. So, you, Paul Allen, founded ancestry.com back in the '90s. It then went public in 2009 at a valuation of 700 million dollars. It then went private again back in 2012, and was bought by a private equity company for 1.6 billion. And then once again, it was bought by another private equity company back in 2020 for 4.7 billion dollars. Do you wish you held onto the company for longer? When the company was acquired in 2006, pre-IPO, by a private equity fund, I heard about it from Dave Moon, the chairman. My first thing was to call him and say, "I want to hold onto my shares till the IPO." But the answer was, "You can't. The private equity fund is buying a hundred percent of the shares." So, I regret having raised venture capital on terms that I didn't understand that gave other people board control within the first few years of ancestry.com. I was a first-time entrepreneur, well, raising venture capital for the first time, and I didn't know the fault the the small print at all. So, what was the mistake that you made? Well, I made many mis- mistakes along the way. But the biggest one was this. Ancestry.com was cash flow positive with me and my co-founder owning 97% of it in 1998, July of '98, cash flow positive, multi-million dollar MRM ARR. We owned 97%. We didn't have to raise venture capital. Cuz you're cash flow positive, and you're growing like crazy. But we knew that we needed to raise tons of money to digitize all the world's genealogy records, cuz it was kind of a race. There were other companies in the space. So, but I think the biggest mistake was this. When we couldn't raise venture capital for ancestry.com, we went to Sand Hill Road, nobody was interested. It was a topic, a hobby that no young VC money would be interested in. It's really an older person's hobby. The average uh genealogist was 52, 60% women. So, the young 20 and 30-year-old VCs in Silicon Valley just did not get it at all. But when we were struggling to raise capital, I had a dream one night that we built an intranet for every family in the world to connect people to their living relatives. And what was born out of that dream was myfamily.com. So, in December of '98, we launched myfamily.com. We raised 13 million dollars because of myfamily.com. And then 33 million the next year, and 30 million the next year. So, we raised 75 million on the myfamily.com idea. But what those investors got was Ancestry and MyFamily. We changed the name of Ancestry to myfamily.com in early 2000. We were going to go public, and we had our Merrill Lynch, we had our S-1. It was going to be a billion dollar valuation with a 50% IPO pop to 1.5 billion. But looking back, we we didn't know that the bubble would burst in the time that it did. When it did, it was disastrous for almost everybody. We we survived it, but it was really hard. But the biggest mistake I made, I think, with my co-founder was, why did we raise venture capital for ancestry.com? Why didn't we just raise venture capital for myfamily.com and keep a 97% ownership in a dot com that was scaling? We didn't have to put them into one company. Hm. So, I think I think that was the biggest mistake. How much did you walk away with by doing those rounds of funding? Well, I will I'm not going to disclose the final amount that I ended up with, but it was a lot lower than what we started out with. Um my lifelong uh childhood friend, Darren Thayne, was the CTO of Ancestry. We went to elementary school together. And I remember sitting in a company meeting in 2000, and he said to me, "What's it like to be worth a hundred million dollars?" Cuz my equity was worth a hundred million dollars. And I said, "I don't know. It hasn't sunk in." So, we ended up with a lot less than that after the bubble burst, after the preferred were converted to common, our Series E came in. Our Series E funding round was at a 20 million valuation. The Series C funding round was at a 300 million dollar valuation. So, the dot com bubble bursting, a lot of companies went out of business. I'm grateful that we didn't go out of business. We survived. We shut down our San Francisco headquarters. We moved back to Utah. We got cash flow positive with me as chief marketing officer before I left the company. So, I feel very good about founding it, almost losing it, getting it into a great financial spot before leaving the company. And then sadly, I had to sell my shares in 2006. What gave you faith that people would want to track their genealogy? Because back then, that was a pretty novel concept, right? Well, if you'd been alive in the night You guys are so young. You guys I I I would've been like eight years old. Eight to 10 years old. I admire both of you. You guys are doing incredible things. You're having a huge impact. And And But I just turned 60 the other day. But I grew up in the '70s. There was a television show uh for several nights in a row called Roots. And it was the most popular watched television show in the in US history. Alex Haley had written a book called Roots, and then this turned into a a series of episodes, um I don't know, five, six, seven episodes. But it was a epic show about a family from Africa, multi-generational history. Kunta Kinte was this uh heroic figure in this story. But Alex Haley had a hundred million people learning about the importance of family history, the importance of genealogy in the '70s. And there were already thousands of genealogy societies all around the world. So, it wasn't something we stumbled into. It was an established thing that older people are driven. Alex Haley said that there's an an a deep hunger in each of us, marrow deep, to know our heritage and to find our family stories. So, we just tapped into that. And as a religious person growing up in Utah, my genealogy had been tracked hundreds of years back by my pioneer ancestors. And so, I inherited, you know, thousands of family names. It's a pretty big deal in Judaism and in the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints that tracking genealogy is almost a theological necessity. Um so, I kind of grew up in that, but I was never interested in it, per se. When we built Ancestry, it was so cool to watch millions of people flock to the site. It was so early in the internet's history. I tell entrepreneurs all the time, we launched Ancestry and got multiple millions of users a month before LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google even existed. We had to get really creative and do guerrilla marketing tactics of all kinds. I remember hearing a few years ago that 41% of venture capital raised today goes to pay for Google ads, LinkedIn ads, and Facebook ads. Cuz you can buy audience. Well, what do you do in the mid to to late '90s before Google, before LinkedIn, before Facebook? We had to get really creative with marketing. So, in the simplest way possible, why is it important to understand your family history and genealogy? So, there's an Emory psychology study from 2001 that proved that the number one predictor of resilience in children is how much they know about their families' stories. Because you're not a human being isolated or detached from other human beings. You have parents, you have grandparents, you have aunts and uncles and cousins, and you are part of that family. And so, the stories of up and down, high and low, the the stories of overcoming depression, you know, the the losing your farm in the depression and rebuilding, that becomes part of your personal identity. You know, families can say, "We can get through hard things. We always have." So, there's something powerful about stories that you internalize, and it builds resilience in children and gives them strength they wouldn't have otherwise. >> So, you're saying that there's a sense of pride in knowing what your family has gone through that you can only get from understanding your family history and not get the sense of pride from other areas of your life. >> Well, I think pride is one way to characterize it, but I think resilience is probably what the psychology study said. My 5 years at Gallup in Washington, D.C., where I evangelized the Clifton StrengthsFinder uh talent assessment, led me to believe that two things that all human beings need to know is one, your family stories, because that's part of your identity, and that'll help you get through hard times, and you can draw from stories and lessons learned from your parents and your It's just really part of your identity. But then, individually, you have God-given talents that are unique to you that weren't necessarily inherited. You were born with talents, and Don Clifton studied talent more than any other psychologist in history. He came up with a taxonomy of 400 talents, and his little assessment will help you find your top five greatest individual strengths. So, I used to give keynotes all around about your family stories bring you strength, and your personal talents are a road map to success in your own life. So, what's the best way to be able to identify your personal strengths? So, Don Clifton's assessment is like 20 25 dollars, and it takes about a half an hour to answer 177 questions. These were not lightly chosen. Don Clifton, for over 50 years, studied top performers in hundreds of occupations, and he would interview them for 90 minutes to find out what made them tick. That's how he built the taxonomy. And then, when he came up with these questions, they're kind of counterintuitive questions, and you only have 20 seconds to answer each question. And what it does is it reveals to you your naturally recurring patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. So, you answer those 177 questions off the top of your head, and now he'll repeat back to you in language of strengths what your top patterns, recurring patterns that you could utilize to be successful. It's Here's Here's your top five. So, I think the best way is to take that assessment for 25 bucks, and then talk to a strengths coach to help you unpack, well, what does that mean? How do I use that? What does that mean for my job? What does that mean for my relationships? So, I'm a huge believer that everyone needs to take the assessment and then go through coaching conversations so that you really deeply understand how you're wired and what your best path is to personal success. After seeing all this, what do you believe now between nature and nurture? I actually don't know if I believe anything about nature and nurture. I think it's part nature, part nurture. I think it's part individual choice that kind of comes after the nature and nurture. Like, you can't personally rewire your brain, but your decisions stack up over time. And the the scientists at Gallup might have a better answer than that, but I all They also say that if you have a traumatic, life-changing experience, you should take the assessment again. Cuz sometimes your patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving might change as a result of some major experience, a death, uh uh a trauma, or maybe a great success, or or maybe a new relationship. So, um I've only taken it once, and I never want to take it again, cuz I love my top five strengths that Don Clifton told me that I have. >> What did it say your number one strength? >> Learner. So, what does that mean? >> I just have to order books on Amazon every single day. Like, I have to learn something new or lots of things. Every college class I took, I wanted to major in that subject. So, I'm a learning machine. All humans are learning machines, but some people love it enough to do it all the time. My second strength is called input. And it's kind of funny to think about a word input as being a strength or a talent. No one ever told me in high school or college, Paul, you've got great input. You should build a company to gather all the world's genealogy records and make them available to people. So, input people gather and dispense. And every input person, everyone who has input, is gathering something. It could be recipes, it could be it could be collecting cars, uh it could be data or information or books. And but the thing is, Don identified these incredible patterns and talents that most people don't even know are a talent. And most people go through life probably thinking they have almost no talent. >> Are there any toxic traits that this is able to reveal? This is a positive psychology assessment. It only highlights the 34 most positive traits that you have that can be productively applied. There are many other assessments that reveal the dark side of human nature. Um there is a character assessment called VIA, the Values Inventory assessment, and it has cataloged 24 virtues that are identified in world religions and in world literature, and it reveals what percentile you are on each of those 24 virtues. And I got really high scores on certain things, and then I got 3% on one trait, and it really pissed me off, because >> that trait? Team teamwork. So, you're not good at teamwork. >> Apparently, I'm a 3%ile for teamwork. And it made me mad, because I'm like, well, what am I supposed to do with that? Don Clifton's assessment tells me five good Well, yes. >> As a leader, you you should be leading the way, not necessarily collaborating. I disagree with that. Yes, if if you have a good vision, I feel like the essence of a good entrepreneur is someone who can build teams. Like, you need to be able to outsource. That's just the way that you grow. Is you can't be doing everything, and you need to find the right person for the right job, and make sure there's a good culture, and make sure your teams are being productive. Oh, I think it's a being 3%ile in being a team player, or is I think it was team player, might have been teamwork, is not a good thing. But, the assessment from VIA was created by Marty Seligman. He used to be the president of the American Psychological Association. Don Clifton started working with him on building the VIA character assessment. Then they parted ways, and Marty ended up building that. Don's assessment is kind of tracing your immutable traits that you have, and they're not something you learned. Uh according to the VIA character assessment, I shouldn't react negatively if I got 3%ile, because I can choose to become a better team player. That's the VIA character assessment invites you to get 100%ile in all 24 virtues. I just haven't started down that path. I'm not a big user of that assessment. I'm such a big believer in StrengthsFinder. And really quick, I just want to say that we've been traveling a lot to bring you these guests here on the Ice Coffee Hour. And if you've traveled recently, you know what happens when you start packing your bags. Clothes get way bulkier than they should be, and it's a lot more stressful than it needs to be. That's why our sponsor Ekster really surprised me with their travel pack vacuum kit. It's designed to help you pack smarter, save space, and stay organized without overthinking it. 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Not to mention, when you use our code iced, you'll get an additional 10% off on top of that for up to 64% off the total. Just go to partner.ekster.com/iced or click the link down below. Or, to make it easier, we have the QR code on the screen as well. Again, that is partner.ekster.com/iced, the link down below, or the QR code on the screen. Thank you so much, and enjoy. Okay, so all of these assessments are going over my head. I need to know the top three things the average person should be doing if they want to understand either their family history or they want to be going online, taking assessments that are backed by tons of science, tons of data. What would the top three things be if someone wants to try to learn about themselves, learn about their family, and improve as a person? >> Well, ancestry.com is not that expensive, and it's a thousand times easier to get hundreds of names in your family tree today than it was 30 years ago. Are you still affiliated with ancestry.com? >> affiliated with ancestry.com. >> So, this is a true organic brand. Okay. >> Oh, yeah. But, there's even a better free version that will never cost you any money. It's subsidized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's called familysearch.org. They have about 20 billion records. It's free. It'll always be free. They have a very good mobile app. Go to familysearch.org, type in the parents' names, the grandparents' names. It'll start suggesting hints, and within a few hours, you've got hundreds of names in your family tree with stories and photos submitted by your distant cousins that you didn't even know you had. >> But, how can you be so sure that it's accurate information? You can't 100% know, but if you uh learn some genealogy skills, like checking sources, there are people that in the '50s, everyone wanted to be famous rel- related to royalty in England. So, professional genealogists in the United States in the '50s would kind of fudge things and do research and say, "You're related to this Windsor family." And everyone would pay them money, because they were excited. So, there is bogus genealogy out there. But, most of the genealogy software platforms, including Ancestry and familysearch.org, have citations and sources that you can look up. Like, census records, birth, marriage, death records. And so, you can validate it. It's unlikely that the first hundred or 200 years of your ancestors will be bogus because legitimate people are doing research all the time and connecting those puzzle pieces. On the personal talents and strengths, my father taught at university for like 45 years and he started before I discovered Don Clifton's work, he started telling his students ask your family members, your boyfriend or your girlfriend what your talents are and your strengths are. Just have people tell you what they think you're good at because most of us when you're born with a talent, you've always had it, you think nothing of it and you think everybody has it. That's just a common reaction. But if you have input or if you're really good at organizing or delegating or something, people have to tell you that a few times before you start to believe it. I I still think the StrengthsFinder assessment is worth it, but you can also ask everyone you admire or knows you well, what do you think I'm really good at and how can you what evidence do you have that I'm good at that? So you can learn from other people what your talents are. So Graham, what do you think I'm really good at? Delegating. Delegating? >> Yeah. Okay. And let me see. What do I think you're really good at? Oh man, so much. >> That's actually going to be Where do you start? >> Oh man, yeah. Let's see here. What do I think you're really good at? I think you have really really really good sustained deep focus. >> Great. >> And I'm envious [clears throat] of that. >> I'm envious of that. He's able to sit down and you know how like certain activities either energize someone or drain someone? >> Very much. >> for me, I'm more of an extrovert so I'm generally energized by being around people. Like it actually increases my battery, whereas Graham just immediately depletes as soon as he's around more than like two other people. When he's working, it like fully gives him energy. Like we will be after a 12-hour day, two back-to-back podcast in Florida, I'm exhausted off a horrible night of sleep, we'll be flying all the way back to Vegas, 6-hour flight and Graham is like super tired then he gets in the plane and locks in and works because it gives him energy. I I don't get it. I don't get it. >> Cal Newport's Deep Work book? I've never heard of that before. >> So yeah, he's famous for his book Deep Work, but focus is one of the 34 strengths that Don Clifton has identified and it's my 14th. >> Hmm. So I've got 10 strengths that are always on and then I've got 11, 12, 13, 14 that I think I can intentionally dial up. Like I can occasionally focus, but I have ideation number three and that's kind of the opposite of focus. That's like every new idea gets my attention and it gets gives me energy. So this is a really good conversation and if I'm low at being a team player, the maybe the best solution for me and I'm doing this with all my 50 employees is deeply understand their strengths and try to make sure the tasks they're given and the projects they're assigned play to their strengths because imagine if you give someone a task that's going to drain them for the next week or month >> Mhm. and it's natural that you don't always know what people love and what they don't love, but if you could delegate the right task to the right people and energize everybody, everybody wins. >> It's really interesting because I feel like Graham and I are exactly the opposite. I think I'm I'm much more of a team worker. I love building teams. I love being around people, doing things with people and I'm much more of like a ideator. I love coming up with new ideas. Oh, let's do this shiny object syndrome and Graham is like work alone, work intensely. >> [laughter] >> Well, that's why you make great partners. It's seriously complimentary strengths are so helpful. When everyone's the same, like that's not going to be very um very good or you've got to have some balanced strengths on the team. So if you're opposite, that's a really good thing. So what do you think about other popular tests like Myers-Briggs test or Jordan Peterson's understandmyself.com test? Have you ever taken any of these? >> Jordan Peterson. I've listened to hundreds of hours of and his all of his books. I haven't taken his assessment, but I would trust it because I think that guy is a genius. Um, Myers-Briggs, not so much. I had one uh my my son's friend had a great experience with Myers-Briggs. So I don't want to fully discount Myers-Briggs. He was struggling with his self-confidence and trying to figure out what to do in life. He took Myers-Briggs and it breaks down the 16 types and he found out he had the same personality type as Elon and Steve Jobs. That fact alone decided gave him courage to go into tech and to say I could be really good at tech. He's now a coder for Microsoft. He has had a great tech career so far, but if a assessment can give you a boost of confidence that you can be something, that's a good thing. It's not as rigorous and it's not as scientifically validated, the test-retest reliability is a lot lower. I like StrengthsFinder because I've seen it used by thousands of people with huge positive outcomes. Um, but there are thousands of psychological tests and I'm sure there's many good ones. Yeah. You know, after looking at lineage for decades, what's the biggest lie people tell themselves about identity? Wow, that is a huge question. Okay, well, so I would say in answer that question less from studying heritage and lineage and more about being immersed in the world of strength psychology, positive psychology, coaching, leadership, all the things that I've learned the last 20 years. I think the biggest lie people tell themselves is that they don't have talent. That they're not a talented person and that lie starts when you're very young. When you've got athletic talent in high school, musical talent, you've got performance talent and most people don't think of themselves as having that level of talent. If you're not a quarterback, if you're not a dancer or singer, you don't think you have talent. Don Clifton's vocabulary of 34 talents with 400 total in his taxonomy expands the view so that nobody has to tell a lie to themselves that you don't have talent. You might have a talent called empathy or developer. And those are extremely powerful human building, connecting and growing other people talents and most people just never know they have talent. So I think that's the biggest lie that people tell themselves is they're not talented. >> How much of that talent is genetic? Like let's just say your parents are great singers. It seems like they have children who are great singers or artists or athletes or there there these specific traits that their kids overwhelmingly seem to inherit. I think the musical and the athletic talent probably is largely heritable. I do think you see that in lots of families that it passes down over time. And those are not the talents that Don Clifton was identifying. His were patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. I would say a percentage of your natural strengths are inherited and then some percentage is nurtured and then some percentage is developed through choice of how you spend your time. I would say the majority is nurture. And what's the most shocking thing that you've discovered from looking at so much DNA and lineage? >> I haven't seen very many crazy stories. When I've traveled the world and given a lot of keynotes over the past 10 years, inevitably I'll be talking about entrepreneurship or StrengthsFinder and the audience members come up lots of them line up to meet me and many of them have tears in their eyes cuz they want to tell me their story, their family story about meeting a sister they didn't know they had. >> I got a story that I'll tell you speaking of exactly that. I found out, well I guess my mom found out and then she told me she had a half brother she had no idea about her entire life and she found out in her late 60s. And apparently, my grandpa went off to war in the I think it was late 1930s, early 1940s, he was stationed uh somewhere in England at the time, had a relationship and then went back or something happened, he was pulled immediately and had to go back to the United States. Something happened. >> Hmm. Turned out he had a child with the person that he was in a relationship with in England. He had no idea that she had a child. She thought that he had died in the war. And my mom did one of those tests, found that she was related to this person and she showed me a picture of him. He looked exactly like my grandpa, like exact like a spitting image. Like when I said this is the same guy. >> Did she ever meet him? >> Yes. Oh, that's fantastic. Great guy. Great guy and and and they're close and they and they email and call all the time, but like this never would have happened if not for that. >> One of my very best friends has a brother who's never married and as he got past 60, he kind of started feeling like life was meaningless and he got a email from someone and someone had done a DNA test and said I think we might be related. Turns out he had had a relationship in college 40 years earlier, didn't know that she got pregnant, had a child and now he's really close with his biological son. It gave him a new lease on life like I have a son that I I've never been married. I didn't know I had a son, but they have so many things in common and they're very close and it just brought new meaning to his life. I just thought that was an incredible story. That's so cool. Now, Yeah. I have now just rethought your question about weird things and so um as I left ancestry.com, I started an internet marketing agency called 10X Marketing. I wanted to help people 10X their revenue. If you double your traffic, double your sales conversion rate and double your average price per sale, that's eight times and so I thought we could 10X almost anybody's revenue. So one of my clients was a paternity DNA testing company in San Jose and they were not insurance paid paternity DNA tests, but there are millions of people in inner cities around the United States that don't know who their father is. And so this was a first internet order the DNA test, take it, send it in and find out who who your father is. And I started doing marketing and and assistance for them and then analyzing all their emails, the the the support emails and the reactions and there was a lot of tragedy in that. A lot of like people being shocked that they weren't the father of somebody that they thought they were the father of. Someone shocked that the person they thought was their father was not their father. And so, a lot of family issues came to a head and it wasn't a a good thing. >> How common was that that you do a paternity test and the kids not yours? >> common. Well, not necessarily with married families, but if if you think about, you know, people hooking up in cities all the time and and just like uh uh kind of a unrestrained you know, whatever how many however many sexual partners you have, then if someone gets pregnant and has a child and and and keeps the child there's a lot of people that could be the father. So, I I just think in in a lot of cities or a lot of locations, there's a majority of people who who don't live with their father. And so, knowing who your father is, you know, can be a really powerful good thing or or can be a shocking thing that you didn't know. >> I was always curious why they don't mandate genetic testing at birth at the hospital. Right? Who, the government mandate that? For what purpose? So that you would know who the parents were? >> Yeah, right? I mean, I guess that could be legislated somewhere, but I don't know. I think the large percentage of people probably know who who the father is and and so that might be just an an expense burden on on most people. >> Also thinking how many kids get switched at birth and you just have no idea. >> Well, they do have these tagging systems now when my wife and I had started having kids in '88 and the hospital situation was a lot less locked down. Yeah. Today, oh my gosh, they have >> How do they prevent that? >> Oh, they have all kinds of preventions. They have doors that lock and passwords to go in and see the child and I I don't know, they have a lot more cameras and a lot more security, but it was I think they have, you know, code red or something if if but I'm sure it's happened occasionally in history, but I don't think it's very common. That would be >> story. It's possible. Technically, it's probably happened. When you look at the odds, I I am willing to bet that it's happened many times actually. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's just truly just a random circumstance. >> there's the other thing. So, adoptive parents or um you know, step parents or whatever, I believe that their ability to love a child even if it's not their biological child is extraordinary. So, I think the family ties that we developed, someone that's our mom or our dad, um by birth or by nurture, um I think those are profoundly powerful. So, even if there is switching or even if the paternity isn't clear, um love inside of families is real and parents will do anything for their children's happiness and welfare. And so, I I think I've I've known people who were adopted and I think their loving ties are just as strong as as natural. Now, going back for a moment, I'm curious what was it like watching your company go public? Well, it was 2009. I had been bought out in 2006 and the 20 people on the stand ringing the bell, only one of them was familiar to me. So, it wasn't a pleasant experience. It was it was like that should have happened with all of us early folks, you know, ringing the bell. I have friends who run Angel Studios who just went public I think a month or two ago and it was just all the top employees there, key investors and spouses of of the founders. And they were all there ringing the bell and I'm like, that's the proper celebration of an IPO. It's the people who built the company, not the late investors who bought the company and then took it public. So, I was dissatisfied with that experience. So, explain this. You were forced to sell because you raised capital to other people and your shares got diluted to the point where they wanted to then sell the company and you were just like, well, I don't really have a choice here. Correct. It happens a lot. So, but how did you not see that giving up that much equity to other people that you may not be super familiar with would want to take the company a different direction? I didn't understand preferred shares versus common shares. I'd never studied business before. I'd never taken a technology class. I was a Russian major in college. I was a humanities major and I started a master's degree in library science. So, I was all into academia and books and learning, but not >> explain preferred shares and common shares. So, when a venture capitalist writes a check for your company, they want preferred shares and the founders usually get common shares. And so, preferred shares have rights and privileges that common shares don't have. Such as if there's a liquidation and the company sells for $10 million, the venture capitalist, the preferred shareholders get paid back first and if there's any left over, it gets split among the common shareholders. So, it's like a tranching. It's like the waterfall effect. If there's any left over, the common shareholders get what's left. Now, if there's a big IPO and it's all successful, then the preferred convert to common and everybody's treated alike. So, there are some scenarios where the upside is unfairly weighted towards the preferred, but many times they end up being the same class of stock in at the end of the day. So, successfully scaling a company before the dot-com bubble, during the dot-com bubble and then after the dot-com bubble, do you see any similarities between that and right now with AI? Cuz a lot of people are speculating we could be in an AI bubble. It's easy to raise a lot of capital when you just have AI somewhere in the name of your company. Do you see any similarities there? So, I see uh possibly a huge bubble in terms of valuations, but in the long run, I think the value created by AI will be will dwarf anything that the internet ever did in terms of value creation. Now, Elon and others are taking the view that the few foundational model companies will end up creating all the value. That it's going to be concentrated in the hands of Grok and Open AI and you know, Meta's llama and Google's Gemini. And it's there's one argument that says these huge LLMs that spend billions of dollars to, you know, train on every single word ever written or spoken, um they're going to start building applications to fill all the needs and that the app application companies will all be put out of business. Then there's the opposite point of view that there's going to be so many niches and so many application companies that millions of AI companies will prosper. And I don't know what the answer is. I'm just betting that this wave is so much bigger than any previous technology wave that I want to play in it and be a partner and and and have as many AI horses in the race as possible. So, as someone that was like really in the weeds during the dot-com bubble, what do you see are the the primary similarities then to that and now? Well, venture capital is still concentrated in San Francisco and maybe Boston and and a few other places, but the cool thing about 2016 is that the the US crowdfunding the JOBS Act in 2012 led to crowdfunding in 2015 2016. Um $5 billion has been raised by startup companies from non-accredited investors who are buying equity or options or whatever. And and so there's a way to raise capital today that didn't exist 25 years ago. You had venture capitalists, angel investors. You didn't have crowdfunding until 2016. So, that's one of the things that's different about today versus decades ago is that anybody can start a company, get an audience, sell shares to that audience and get funding and keep control of their company without necessarily giving up control to the investor class. So, do you think it's easier today to start a business than it was back in 2000? There's a reason why the Iced Coffee Hour is one of the top-ranked podcasts on YouTube. 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So, vibe coding is if you don't know how to program, but you know what you want your application to do, you speak to the AI or write the instructions in plain English, and then it writes the software code and compiles it and builds the app and ships the app, and you've actually built a finished product without even knowing how to write a line of code. If you can speak English, you can vibe code. And there are dozens of tools now that are super uh popular with vibe coders, Lovable and many others, and they have, you know, tens of millions of ARR or hundreds of millions of ARR. So, it's cool that we live in a day where computers now understand language. And anyone who can speak or write can command a computer, an AI, to go do stuff for them. And so, vibe coding is just speaking things into existence or typing some instructions and having an application built for you. So, do you then think that anybody can be successful and build a big business in 2025, 2026, or also, as someone who studied genealogy, uh or is familiar with genealogy and big genealogy data, are there certain genes that will prevent people, regardless of the environment, from becoming successful? Like actually, yeah. Like genetic Yeah. predisposition to failure? Sure. Yeah. I don't believe that. So, you think that anybody now No, I'm not saying just because of now, and I'm not saying everyone will. Uh but Don Clifton felt that anybody could be better than 10,000 other people at something. Okay? So, he studied human potential and human talent, and he knew that if people would identify their talents and develop them, they could be the best public school teacher in a city of 10,000 people. And so, everyone could be better than others at at something. Now, in the world of AI, you've got great coders, great marketers, you've got great podcast interviewers, you've got people that can build product, build audience. I'm not saying everybody can do that, but I do think that AI will enable anyone who takes a little bit of time to learn how to vibe code or vibe market or learn how to use AI to create agents to do things for you when you're sleeping, that in the coming years, when people learn those skills, they'll have an extraordinary life. You could have 10 AI agents that are helping you with your financial planning and to save money, and every time you spend money and it's reported to the AI, they could say you could have saved, you know, 80% on that coffee, you could have done this instead of that. Like you could have a bunch of AI aimed at helping you live healthy, helping you be financially well off, helping you have better relationships with family and friends, helping you learn skills that are aligned with your natural talents. I just think AI opens up a whole new universe of opportunity for humans to develop, and I don't think anyone is genetically predisposed to failure. Do you think with everything that you just said, that we're becoming too reliant on AI, and that we we lose our critical thinking skills by having this just kind of tell us what to do? >> 100% 100%. The studies that are coming out on brain function and the cognitive uh demise of people who outsource essay writing to chat GPT, we completely could dumb down ourselves by letting AI do the things for us, like do our homework or write our essays or do our blog posts. So, I'm not a fan of outsourcing your cognitive thinking. To use it as a research tool, and it's indexed, you know, billions of pages of and you can ask it any question, I think we can use it in a very powerful way that keeps us in the driver's seat, or we can just offload the things we don't want to do, and we will get dumber and dumber. So, I think there's definitely a dark side to AI if we over-rely on it, or if the companies that got us hooked on dopamine with social media with shares and likes and followers and all those counts that are artificial that give us all this addiction to social media, if the same companies build AI tools and companions that are designed to get us using them three, four, five, six, seven, eight hours a day instead of living real life, then those are dangerous slopes. >> wouldn't they do that? It just seems, yeah. >> They will do that. But there will be alternatives that are aiming to uplift humanity by giving you a limited amount of intelligence during the day so that you can live your best life. >> that doesn't make money, though. Oh, sure it can. But not as much money as keeping you glued to it for eight hours. >> Well, the hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising revenue versus the subscription revenue that a good company would take to build a system that's designed to help you live your best life. That's what we're hoping to be one of the participants in is uplifting humanity, helping every individual reach their full potential with a limited amount of use of AI. Now, Google, when it started, Larry and Sergey were geniuses and they built this incredible search engine built on hypertext links, and I wrote their paper called Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertext Search Engine. It was a brilliant thing, and their key metric for success early on was how little time you spent on their site. If you came to the early Google and did a search, and five seconds later you left and didn't come back, they knew they had the right answer for you. Okay, that was the early days of Google, >> [snorts] >> when they were don't be evil. >> Yeah. And now, like most corporations, they're kind of monopolistic, and they use their force in the marketplace to, you know, they get fined by the EU all the time. They've been uh in antitrust in investigations in the United States. Um so, big companies that are worth trillions of dollars are going to hire the smartest, most ambitious people they can, and they might not don't be evil for very long. So, I'm putting my faith in young startups or or emerging companies that really do care about humanity, they care about individuals, they care about building a better world, and they'll design tools and systems that are healthy in small doses and brilliantly allow you to navigate light navigate life. Like a GPS for your life, you're not looking at your GPS all the time you're driving. You might check in at every five minutes to make sure you're on track, but there could be a light touch AI that helps you use super intelligence to make really good choices and to have uh all kinds of thriving and prosperity without being dependent on it, without without using it all the time as a crutch or as a companion or as a friend cuz you don't have any real friends. What do you think the government's role should be in AI? Cuz it seems like they are really supporting AI at the moment, and we're in, from what I've been told, somewhat in a race with other countries to get super intelligence first, and that you don't want to lose this race. That's always uh an argument that people use. Um I actually really like David Sacks. He's the AI czar. I've met him in person. We've had several good conversations. He launched a genealogy company before he launched Yammer. It was called Genie, and he once told me that I was uh a fantastic entrepreneur because my uh Family Link app on Facebook got way more users than Genie did, and we were kind of going head-to-head. He was not on Facebook, I was on Facebook, and so he kind of admitted that you crushed us. Like, you're a really good entrepreneur. Well, a year later he sells Yammer for a billion dollars. So, he he like leapfrogged me by like a thousandfold. But I really like David Sacks, and his All-In podcast is very good. So, US has to be very friendly towards AI development and competition. My biggest thing is that government should encourage open-source AI as much as possible, and that individuals should have access to open-source software and open-source AI so that we're not locked into these closed systems. The government will award huge contracts to the OpenAIs and the Googles of the world and the Microsofts, and that's fine, but I think the government should take a really hard look at open source, like Linux and Apache and the world the web, you know, WordPress. The world's internet started out being very open and not being very locked down commercial, and these trillion-dollar companies just can't help but try to be monopolies and try and can't help but try to rig the system and get regulations in their favor that hurt all the the the non non-incumbents, the the um new new companies. So, I think we the people should elect representatives who know something about technology. We don't tend to do that very often. Most of our representatives in the United States are attorneys, and they know very little about how the financial system works, how health care works, or how technology runs the world. So, I think we voted for lots of persuasive people that are lawmakers and policymakers, but they don't know that the internet is not a series of tubes. They don't know that Facebook's business model is selling advertising, and that was like 10 or 20 years ago. But my point is, we the people need to elect better tech-savvy representatives who have our long-term well-being uh in mind. What do you think is the biggest risk to AI? The biggest risk, well, it's been hallucination, where you don't know that it's hallucinating. Like, people putting too much trust in it is a really big risk. Uh think about medical doctors who start relying on AI to diagnose or to treat, and if it hallucinates, they lose a patient. Now, it doesn't mean that doctors without AI won't lose patients, but I think hallucination has been kind of the Achilles' heel of the Chat GPTs and the and the LLMs of the world. Uh I don't think it will remain the the biggest issue. My own company has a portfolio of companies, and we like to build AI that is more like a perfectly knowledgeable librarian that can quote people and cite the sources, rather than a creative writer that can go off the rails and hallucinate. So, we view our search engine background, which I worked in search engines for decades, search engines retrieve exact quotes from people and exact clips and prevent present them to you. AI, the way the LLMs currently work is the generative AI is a probability engine. It doesn't even know what it's going to tell you when it starts talking, and it predicts calculated what word can follow this word and So, it's all statistics and probability, it's all stochastic. And so, it often hallucinates. Now, retrieval-augmented generation is a technical term that a lot of computer scientists are using now, and OpenAI bought a RAG company, and lots of people are doing RAG. RAG is more like retrieve an exact quote, cite the source, and then give a little bit of background to it instead of just making up the answer out of whole cloth. So, I think many of the problems with AI are being tackled by the smartest people. And I actually think there's a very very bright future for AI that can assist us. My biggest fear is that humans become super dependent on it and let it make choices for them, Yeah. and they kind of give up their own personal freedom to choose, and they become dependent on the algorithm or the recommendation engine even more than social media. >> I've I've had so many mistakes with Chat GPT when it came to uh helping me organize my financial statements and uploading documents. My gosh, the amount of time it just it it doesn't calculate the numbers properly, or there's something that's obviously an expense and it counts it in, and then I only realize that when someone else puts that through Excel and says, "No, this doesn't add up." >> Yeah. Even last night I was pissed. I had a GFCI breaker that went out in the house, and I I spent hours trying to track this thing down because I thought it was like an upstream GFCI that tripped and it tripped another one, and I'm Chat GPTing this, and I'm like, "Here's the breaker box." And it would walk me through like what to look for, and then I couldn't find where this breaker tripped. And so, I says, "I have this box on the side of the house. Could it be in here? This is the outside electrical box to the house." It says, "No, that's going to be where your electric panels are wired, and you know, looking in that won't be able to tell you unless you're an electrician." So, I I I never look in there. Turns out it was that. Had I just opened that damn box and flipped that breaker on the outside to that panel of the house, I would have fixed it. But Chat GPT sent me on a wild goose chase. >> I I live in Missouri in rural Missouri in farming country, and I don't I don't get into guns much, but I bought a BB gun, and I didn't know how to load the BBs into the cartridge. I was like, "There's two places that I thought." I took photos of it, I sent it to Chat GPT. It kept telling me, "Oh, you did it right. You did it right." The thing wouldn't fire. About an hour later after trying several queries on different AIs, I finally realized I need a CO2 cartridge to fire this thing, and I put the BBs where the CO2 cartridge was supposed to be, and I felt like a total idiot. But AI doesn't know everything yet, but just think how miraculous it is that AI understands language and can index all the photos and all the videos, and so I'm pretty bullish about the future of AI. If humans can start being a little bit wise about which platforms we choose to use, what what are the ultimate designs of the companies building these things? I actually think there's some things I can't announce right now that some of our strategic partners are going to announce soon that will allow any individual human to install your own LLM on your own device and have your own context for finances, for health, for education, for career, for friends, for family on your own device, and you won't even need to use these cloud-based behemoth monopoly AI systems. You'll have an open-source remote on your device that knows the context that you give it to help you live your best life without selling your soul to the Then I feel like Apple would just do that directly within the iPhone, and then they could sell their iPhone for $3,000 because now you don't have to do a, you know, $50 membership or whatever a month. >> think Apple and I think smartphone manufacturers are positioned best to take advantage of this, but there could easily be other hardware platforms that emerge that allow an alternative that might be more Now, Apple seems to be a pretty good player in terms of privacy and and caring about you. They're less ad-driven than most other companies, and so but yeah, I think I think we haven't even started to see in 5 or 10 years we'll be shocked at how many options there are for AI that we don't even imagine today. >> What What is your most dramatic prediction for AI in the next 5 years? I would predict that in the next 5 to 10 years, one of the most important decisions each individual human makes is which AI platforms to believe in and plug into. Because I think the difference between AI that runs your life and monetizes your time and attention and sells your time and attention to the highest bidder, there will be very powerful systems that are used by billions of people that don't have your personal well-being in mind. They're going to monetize you, they're going to they're going to, you know, know everything about you, and I'm worried about people that go down that path. But I think there will be many many options that wise people will choose. Sometimes you might vibe code something yourself instead of instead of outsource your application needs to a known player. But I but I think humans are so ingenious and so creative, and young people that are learning how to vibe code entire suites of applications in a day or two, I I just think the proliferation of unique applications will shock all of us in the next 5 to 10 years. Now, the wisdom that we're going to need to know which ones to trust. You know, do you remember there used to be in the '90s, late '90s, there were ratings sites like Epinions, and then there was Yelp, and and now there's, you know, all these ratings things. >> I remember Hot or Not. >> Hot or Not. Okay, yes, I remember that, too. >> remember Hot or Not? Jack is too young. It was a website that you would go to hotornot.com, and you would see a picture come up, and you would rate, "Is this person hot or not?" And you click like yes or no. Was it of like models, or was it just like you could upload a picture of yourself? >> could upload pictures, and then if they wanted to be rated, they could do it, or someone >> you have like a percentage then that you're assigned? >> Yep. That's a lot less useful than ratemyprofessor.com. I actually met the US professor who was the highest-rated professor in the country on ratemyprofessor.com. He was actually my neighbor, and I found out that the first day of class, he had already memorized 400 people's names. He was funny, but he memorized the names of every one of his students. Blew my mind. Seems like he's just farming his ratemyprofessor rating. >> Well, I don't know. He did that before ratemyprofessor even came out, but by the time it came out, I'm sure he was pretty proud of that. >> What's the benefit of being top-rated on ratemyprofessor? >> select your class, and also it's you just have more authority. More clout? >> More clout, yeah, around other teachers, with like the the higher-ups in the Do they discuss scores with each other? Probably. And I also I've seen videos online of people saying like, "This is why you're a two on ratemyprofessor." Like screaming [laughter] at their Use it as a weapon. Yeah, you just like don't respect the teachers that are lower on ratemyprofessor. You just like you walk in already having a preconceived notion of what they're going to be like. So, have you ever been to g2.com or capterra.com? Have you heard of those two sites? Okay. I've seen G2, yeah. Never buy a software application or subscribe to any SaaS without first going to g2.com and capterra. They have thousands of ratings, very well submitted ratings by actual customers of all the pros and cons of every application, how easy it is to use, how expensive it is. g2.com has helped me make hundreds of really good decisions on software to buy or not to buy. I think that the world of AI is going to need trustworthy rating systems more than any previous technology that we've ever had. Um because if you start using a system and you don't get the results or the outcome you want, um it could be very damaging if that scales up to millions or billions of users. So, my hope is that collectively humans can evaluate the good and the bad that's out there, and we can migrate ourselves and our loved ones to the good, and then human thriving and prosperity could be unprecedented in world history. We've already seen the elimination of mass poverty in most of the world over the past 100 or 200 years, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the green revolution in India. There's a lot less sickness and early death in the world than there was. Um we all we obviously have some chaos and geopolitical issues and stuff like that. So, the world's not in a great place yet, but AI and robotics offer unprecedented unprecedented productivity gains that hopefully we can harness and have widespread benefits for billions of people. >> That's why I am so optimistic for emerging markets around the world and up-and-coming countries that are developing. Yes, but I just think it it creates so much opportunity and part of me feels like them going from like one to five is much more dramatic than us going from like an eight to a nine, for example. >> and I started buying all these URLs cuz I was going to build building things on top of large language models. So, like citizenportal.ai has now transcribed almost 2 million videos from government meetings and we've published 4 million articles this year. We have millions of people learning about local, state, and federal government through citizen portal. So, that's that's that's out there. And I think next year we'll have tens of millions of users. Family portal, faith portal, founder portal, we have all these portals. But, I actually I don't know if I bought gardening portal, but I went to ChatGPT and I said, "I live in this part of Missouri. This my zip code. Tell me about my soil. Tell me about the vegetable gardens that I could uh grow, the the best um things I should plant, and what about trees and fruit trees?" And within about a minute, it had told me based on the weather, the soil, the lat longe, and like it could totally tell me what to grow in that area. Now, if you think about the developing world, think about how little knowledge they have about agriculture, irrigation, mechanical things, machines, energy, and imagine leapfrogging. Imagine billions of people being able to talk to a device in their language and have it teach them or coach them. What do you say to the people who believe that AI is not going to create jobs, it's just going to redistribute them to fewer people? I believe that humans have always been very creative and very adaptable. If you think about all the historical waves of change that we've seen in the in the past few hundreds or thousands of years. So, my belief is that humans will figure out how to create billions of new jobs. If AI and robots become super productive and they do a lot of the manual labor and they provide us with subsistence living, maybe we'll find a lot more time for personal connection, for creative work in the arts or in the in other fields that we personally love. Um so, I do think there will be disruption and displacement and it will be a painful phase to go through. And I do think there's a role for individuals and nonprofits and charities and faith groups and possibly even the government to provide some transition uh to people that are affected by that. But, I'm not a big fan of government handouts and >> Yeah. and central planning and socialism. I'm a big fan of unleash human creativity. Help people find their talents and find ways to develop those into uh value-creating skills that people will pay for. I'm My thought is that it's it's we're going to become so reliant on AI though that if someone loses their job, the first thing they're going to do is go to AI and say, "What job should I do?" And the AI is going to pick something. >> But, is that a bad thing? It might not be a bad thing. Yeah, but if you're relying on the AI to tell you what you should be doing all day. >> tell me if I'm wrong. I feel like 95% of people would be better off if they let AI make most of their decisions. I'm probably one of those people. Genuinely. Like I feel like, "Okay, well, what should I do today?" Like, "Go to the gym. Go do this. Go study something. Read a book." It's like, otherwise, what are these people going to Okay, but that but then you're trusting it to have your best interest. But, imagine if if if a company is out there who's like, "Hey, listen, we make more money if you're on for an extra Yeah, but that's not that's not the reality [clears throat] of what's happening at least right now. >> but why wouldn't it? Well, it could at some point in the future, but that's also speculating. No, I don't think it's speculation. I I think it's guaranteed they're going to keep you on whatever platform for as long as possible. So, what do you think it's going to give you like a runaround, like tell you one thing and then you start leaning into that and say, "Well, what about this?" And then tell you the other thing? It it it's going to be so beyond what I could even comprehend because it's so cuz it knows each person. >> [laughter] >> I'm just saying for you, Jack, it would be different than than me. It would know you so well that it knows how to keep you on a little longer or to click a link or like, "Hey, listen, before you go to the gym, you need a new tonic. And this is really going to energize you at the gym, so you can have a better workout." And then the next time it's like, "Hey, by the way, you might need this." >> through though. >> [laughter] >> Like, wouldn't that be so easy to see through? >> people are dumb and they're going to they're going to see this creatine right here. >> are dumb, then they probably need some sort of like cognitive assistance like AI to help them make decisions. And maybe the AI will lead them to buy another new tonic, but is that really such a bad thing? It's pretty good. >> [laughter] >> Do you know it is a interesting that you say 95% of us could make decisions better with AI and that may be true because a lot of people make a lot of bad decisions right now for all kinds of reasons. >> Like there's such clear-cut objectively wrong decisions. >> Oh, tons of know, hey, I'm going to go out buy a pack of Marlboro Reds. Should I do it? AI is like, "Probably not." Like, "Okay." >> But, here's a vape that is 85% better >> And that's better than that. There you go. And here's a link. I just I think it could prevent disastrous decisions being made. And also, if you have a freckle that's been moving on your body and you want to take a picture of it and upload it to ChatGPT, that's easier than going to the doctor and scheduling appointment. You don't know what's going to happen. >> ChatGPT can Then it'll recommend you to a doctor where ChatGPT will get a kickback for a referral fee. There's so many ways >> how the world works, right? Yeah. No, it's it's pretty scary. >> just talking in terms of right now. That's all speculation. >> See, I like to think of the future, Jack likes to think like a few steps back. I mean, it's very healthy conversation. I think billions of people need to have these open conversations about what could go wrong, about what could go right because we're only going to get the future that we design and choose. Like um the best way to predict the future is by inventing it. That's why I'm an entrepreneur. I want to build stuff that I want to use and that I want other people to be able to use. But, there are also people out there that maybe are bad actors who just don't have human thriving as their primary motive. And they are going to do anything they can to get you hooked on social media addiction, gambling, marijuana, whatever, just to kind of hook you and now they've got you you know uh some of the industries that have people at an early age that might end up making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars during their lifetime. Like, that's real. The tobacco industry really did lie for decades about the science. And then the tobacco companies bought the groceries, the the the food companies like Kraft and others, and they started putting sugar in all the foods. And so, 80% of the store-bought food has added sugar that is super unhealthy, which is why we have an obesity epidemic. So, there are a lot of bad people suddenly doing things that harm us at scale. Big pharma, big tech, big food, um and so, we have to be very careful. If AI just keeps us in those tracks, we'll all live unhealthy short lives. But, if we can have AI systems designed by people who are truth-seeking and who are looking for human thriving at the end of the day, like that's the goal of their platform, and if we choose those platforms, we could have abundance and thriving at scale. >> But, that assumes that people have self-control. And if they're making bad decisions from the get-go, they don't have self-control. And so, assuming they don't have self-control, then the AI is just going to take them over. Well, if you think about it, um I think that the the erosion of the family as the fundamental unit of society, policies that So, I think you've credited being raised by a by parents in a stable family as part of your path to success. >> Yeah. I was in the same boat. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. She had eight kids. My dad was a professor. She was a elementary school teacher before that. But, I'm sure that my life would not be where it is today without my mom and dad in a stable family. And so, AI, of course, is powerful and always present. It'll never take the place of loving parents and faith leaders and friends that are good influence on young people. So, we can't abandon the traditional elements and ingredients that helped people live a good life, an honest, moral, upstanding life. And that's really influences from people that love us. And AI will never substitute for that or take its place. And I don't know if I don't know if the uh pendulum will swing backwards towards, you know, people marrying and having children and and enjoying family life or if it will continue to have lower marriage rates, lower fertility rates. >> Yeah. Elon talks about civilizational decline because of population erosion. Now, I live in the Midwest. So, I've done the math. The Amish people have seven children per family. They've doubled their population in the last 22 years. And I will predict, this is my shocking prediction, by 2200 AD, there will be 100 million Amish people in the United States. Wow. We're going to get a lot of construction done. A lot of great furniture and we're going to have some really nice houses. And very little technology. Yeah. It reminds me though, at your point where you tend to swing a pendulum, I think when we go in the direction that AI and and focus is is just kind of going out the window, I think you're going to have apps at the opposite direction or products at the opposite tend to do really well. And that reminded me of Hank Green's focus app. Have you seen this? >> I haven't. He made this incredible app and it became like top five on the app store recently. All it was was an app that helps you focus. You have this little character within the app that knits. And the longer you you focus and don't touch your phone, the more it could knit and it could trade those knittings for things that make this little character, like this little kitty happy. And as soon as you go and pick up your phone or open your phone, it drops what what it was knitting and it has to start over and it's sad. It's all it is. And you use it. Macy uses it all the time but but but it was uh for her it was a staying off her phone and getting like solid work done. But she became very like into these characters, like making sure I can't touch my phone because it's got a knit and if if I if I disturb it, it's going to drop the the knitting and >> But what if you're just like chilling on the couch watching television and your phone does it like how does it monitor that you're actually working? It doesn't [laughter] but you set a timer. You could set like an hour I'm going to an hour without using my phone. I so Gamification is a technique that could help us if we don't have self-discipline to get more like I there's all kinds of things we could try. Duolingo has this streaks thing that's just got billion millions of people using it but they don't really help you learn to speak a language. Like there's AI tools that are 10 times better at helping you learn to speak Spanish because it can listen to you, it can correct you, it's actually conversational AI. And they'll probably get there too. But sometimes the streaks start having a life of their own and they end up backfiring. Like I know people that are so stressed out by their Duolingo streak that it's actually not a net good for them. It's actually stressful. They can't lose their streak. And so they're kind of now >> it keeps you on the app. Yeah, it does. It does. >> over. >> Yeah. Now with screens versus ambient versus augmented reality versus rings versus whatever, we're going to have a variety of technologies that are not as intrusive as a screen. And it'll be really interesting to see how humans adopt those and use them for good to navigate the world, to make better choices, but not to be beholden to them and subject to all their whims. Speaking of things when you said that there's so much opportunity going forward and that more things will be invented in the future than in the past. I've actually been working with someone from the index about a we actually have it. It's operational mostly. pointpal.ai And what that does is you're able to search for flights based off credit card points and you're able to put in what points you have and it'll tell you faster than any other site how much each flight is with points and how to redeem those points. And so I just booked a trip to New York recently using that and I got round trip, I think it was like 18,000 points with Amex. >> Wow. Round trip to New York. 18,000? >> Yeah. That's really good. 18,000 Amex points for round trip? >> Round trip. Yeah. $90 there and back? >> Yeah. And it was I believe through >> So $90 there and the Yeah, it was it was through Air Canada. And so I made an Air Canada account, transferred my Amex points to that and booked the specific day. Wow. That's a good idea. >> comes to thinking about is everything been built that should be built? So do you remember Robert Allen who wrote nothing down real estate? It was the most famous author in real estate in the 90s. I think he sold 2 and 1/2 million copies. I ended up doing some internet marketing for him and he had a book that came out called one minute millionaire. It was like 24 chapters that had the mindset like one minute a day to adopt the mindset of a millionaire. It was really good book. And one of the things in one of those chapters was look at every physical object around you. Every single physical object that you see started out as an idea in the mind of somebody. They had to think of it, they had to design it, they had to build it, they had to sell it. And someone has to support it. So literally every physical thing in the world is the result of somebody's creativity. Now if you think about in the future what I love about Paul Allen, idea man, the real Paul Allen, was that he asked that question, what should exist? And then he set about to fund it or build it and he did dozens or hundreds of amazing projects. So I I would take that 22-year-old you're talking about who doesn't really know what to do and say, what should exist? What talents do you have? What do you wish was different about the world? Go make it happen. And see if other people need it need that same solution that that you've envisioned because the whole world is filled with the creations of humans who saw a problem and solved it. And there's a lot more problems in the future to solve than there are right now. I agree. Cool. And AI can help you. Yeah. Yeah. So what would be your advice to someone who's young today who wants to start a business but they feel like everything's already been done? Wow, that's interesting. Almost nothing has been done. Like there will be way more done in the future than has ever been done in the past. So it's just what we've done in the past is the tip of the iceberg. And what AI enables you to do, if you go follow my friend John Cheney on LinkedIn, John Cheney teaches courses of 20 or 30 people every week to launch a business using AI vibe coding in 24 hours. He's had hundreds and hundreds of people launch full-blown companies this year. He's actually Tony Robbins' chief AI officer now. And so John Cheney and lots of people like him are out there teaching you how to learn the tools that will help you be 10 times more productive than you are today. So I would start there. And if you were 22 years old today starting over with no connections, how would you use AI to get ahead and build wealth? Well John teach teaches that too. So not only does he teach you how to vibe code, he teaches you dozens of tools that are already built that you can start using and deploying. I would say that as I mentioned g2.com that don't make an enterprise sales software purchase without checking the reviews and reading extensively to make sure your decision's good. All of us are going to have to find a way to evaluate more tools, more apps, more AI systems because there will probably be a Dave Ramsey AI that could help a hundred million people avoid debt, live smartly with cash and you know, not everybody loves what he teaches but he's helped a lot of people rip up their credit cards and get out of debt and then start purchasing things with cash. So I think we just have to be super careful to find the tools and apps and AI systems that will help us get where we want to go faster than any other other way. >> Well it seems like you're very optimistic about turning people into AI and basically uploading their information so that people could talk to it. Yeah. Who's liable if that AI gives bad advice? Like let's just say Dave Ramsey's AI says, hey, I'm pretty bullish on bonds these next 10 years and they just underperform or something like that. Can you go and like sue Dave Ramsey for what the AI said? >> That's a the whole area of legislation and litigation is so brand new. I actually don't know how we the people and our government will navigate that. There will be lots of case law, there will be lots of lawmakers that have opinions. I think humans should be treated as like adult decision-makers. If you choose to use a Dave Ramsey AI system or if you choose to listen to him in person what are you going to do if if he gives you bad advice and you follow it and it doesn't you know, you don't sue him because you lost 10% of your portfolio last year. Like we're all adults, we all can assume that there's no perfect crystal ball and and so but again being careful with who are the experts, what tools will you adopt and how much confidence do you have that they're going to give you good advice? I mean that's a personal decision for all of us to make. So when you talk about the focus app from Hank Green, like it's really cool how we spread good things through word of mouth. And if there could be spread good AI programs through word of mouth but also online with directories and with rating systems, there's a good chance that most people will adopt tools that are positive not negative. >> Yeah. So being someone that's studied genealogy and traits, what would you say are the top three traits or mindsets that someone should have if they want to be successful in business or entrepreneurship? What are the three things that they should refine? I I've come to believe in the last few years that the one of the greatest human traits for every part of life, especially entrepreneurs but but at any age and at any part of life, is gratitude. If you don't wake up with an overwhelming sense that you are you should be grateful for your parents, for the world, for the the the the talents you have, for the physical body you have, for the health you have, for the financial well-being that you have. Like gratitude is to me the best virtue to nurture nurture so that you can be happy and content. When you're feeling awe and wonder about the fact that you are a human being out of 8 billion humans, you actually are unique and you live and you have a chance to do amazing things every day and learn and grow and form relationships and have friendships and enjoy music and poetry and athletics. Like what an incredible thing to be alive. And so I think gratitude and kind of awe and wonder is like a really important one. But then I would say being hungry and being humble. Like just realize you don't know very much, there's a lot more to learn and be very eager to learn as much as you can and do as much as you can. So being hungry and being humble is the BYU football team's mantra this year with coach Kalani Sitake and I really like that. It resonates. But I also think the primary virtue that I wish all humans could encourage or inculcate in themselves is deep gratitude for their creator, for their parents, for their friends, for their family, for their co-workers, for life itself. Just be in awe that you are alive and you get to be you. It's funny you say that because that is on my phone. I had to check that it's there. But it's one of these little notes on my phone that's focused on gratitude. Just every time I check my phone, I see it. That's cool. I like that. Gratitude is amazing. Like I remember I used to journal every day. And now still to this day I I practice gratitude in a different way, but back when I was journaling, I would daily log and then at the very end, I would write three things down that I'm very grateful for. And those three things that I tried to write down, I I would I would try to make were things that would not change. Like I'm grateful that I have, you know, like 10 fingers. Or I'm grateful that, you know, and it's not like I'm grateful that we had a really good month on the podcast, we made a lot of money or whatever. It was things that like would not change and I could practice for an extended period of time. So I think gratitude's very important, but also one thing I always love mentioning to my friends is their relationship with failure. Cuz I think a lot of people whenever they fail, they get really down on themselves and it ends up hindering them for the next, you know, long period of time. They they're kind of bogged down by their failures. But I think if they could then learn from a failure, it ends up becoming a success. So then you have your actual successes that remain to be successes and you also have your failures that you then transform into successes because you learned and adapted from that. So it's like how can you ever fail if you are successful from your failures and you're also successful from your successes? >> I love that. That's a fantastic mindset. I I remember teaching entrepreneurship about 20 years ago at Utah Valley University and my co-teacher was a guy named Rick Farr. He was about 20 years older than me and he had been very successful, had huge exits, but he also had had some failures and he taught all of us failure is overrated. It doesn't last very long. Success is also overrated. It doesn't last very long. Like there there's no reason to think there is a thing where you're successful and then it never changes. Like that's not reality. So he just tried to say, don't worry about deep successes or the deep failures cuz just live life. Like live it within a narrower band. But I but I think the way you framed successes are successes and failures framed properly are lessons learned that lead to success. That's fantastic. That's very wise. Well, Alan, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour. We really appreciate it and uh Thank you guys. >> We'll link to all your info down below in the description for anyone who wants to follow all of your upcoming plans, businesses. Awesome. Thanks for coming. >> Thank you, Graham. My very first investor in Sora was Graham Weston. No way. >> And my youngest daughter just told me she's going to name her son Jack. So I like both of your names and I'm really grateful that you guys had me on the podcast. >> Why Jack? I don't know. It's a phenomenal name, Graham. It's a great >> Why not Graham? Because that's a cracker, okay? [laughter] And no one wants to name their child a cracker. Thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you, Graham. >> Till next time.