This Tech Guru from SOAR AI Says 90% of Advice Is Wrong! Paul Allen | Ep. 124

Introduction to Paul Allen and SOAR AI 0:00

When you're doing what you were created to do and you experience flow state every day, that's awesome. But what percentage of the world's population loves their job and feels that kind of flow? Less than 10%. So 8 billion people, maybe 800 million of them have a good job that they love. SOAR AI help you figure out who you are, who are the experts in every field. When we're talking about AI, you even hearing about a lot of war stuff that is happening right now. So what makes you very nervous or what make you not sleep at night about utilizing AI?

Well, you've seen some of it. Today we have Paul Allen. Hey, all right. Our guest today is a serial entrepreneur and tech pioneer, the co-founder of Ancestry.com, and now the CEO of SOAR AI Studio, Paul Allen. This conversation is going to be powerful. According to the AnCestry genetic test, I have a sprinter's gene. And if someone who's an endurance athlete gives me advice, it probably won't work for me. My muscle fiber's different, my DNA is different and my neurological pathways are different.

So the grand vision of SOAR AI Studio is to take all the world's best knowledge, wisdom and advice and run it through a prism of your strengths, your DNA, personalize the advice so that it works for you. Let's unwrap some of that. Why not focus on weaknesses at all? Great question. Welcome to another episode of A Healthy Point of View podcast. I'm your host, Sam Tahata. And as usual, we're bringing experts from all over the world to talk about health, wellness, beauty, and mindset. Today, We're gonna be tapping in to a nice new little mindset about technology.

Today we have the original founder of Ancestry.com. You guys have all heard about this, right? Where they go ahead and test your DNA. We figure out a bunch of stuff about your family history, the family tree. Today, we Paul Allen. Hey, all right. Thank you, Sam. That's the best greeting I've ever had on a podcast. I love it. Paul, our viewers and listeners, if they don't know who you are, obviously you're the founder of Ancestry.com, which you guys have grown this tremendously. You've been able to exit the company.

And now you got a new platform that you've been working on for several years called SOAR, and it's really growing a lot of AI. But before we get into any of that, we want to know who Paul Allen is. So we wanna understand your upbringing from when you were a kid to all the way getting you where you're at today. It's an honor to be here, Sam. I never intended to a technology entrepreneur or a business guy. So I grew up, loved school, played every day outside, and played sports every outside until the sun went down.

It is kind of weird to see kids these days not spending any time outside. In the 70s, you never went home until there was dinner and then you would stay out until late. I kind of grew up in a great community and my mom was a teacher and dad was professor and I thought my career path would be academia. I love learning, I've been reading books since I was three, my older sister taught me how to read and have read thousands of books and every book that I read I'm fascinated by, just I loved learning.

And so every class I took in college I wanted to major in that. Really? So I wish I could have just like, lived my life as a college student, like learn everything. I started a master's degree in library science, and I love libraries, I loved knowledge, love learning. So kind of weird that I accidentally became an entrepreneur. How did that happen? Well, my dad was a professor of manufacturing technology, and he started using computers in the 70s. And my Dad built classification software and decision tree software that all the largest manufacturing companies in The United States used.

Boeing was his first customer. Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, John Deere, Westinghouse. So think about all of the greatest manufacturers in America. My dad's software helped them classify all their raw materials, all of their parts, and all the processes and lay out factories in the most efficient model to take raw material and turn it into higher value goods at the end of the line. And my dad was a genius at efficiency and problem solving. So I grew up listening to him talk about taxonomies and classifying things.

And he was into technology. My brother, my oldest brother started a search engine company based on my dad's early work. He had a classification software and search engines called D-Search. my brother's started Folio in 1985 or something. and it became the world's best search Engine years before Google was invented. So even though I was a Russian major in college, I got married my senior year. I'd never had a job And my brother gave me like a sympathy job Paul, come work for me. I'll pay you like $8 an hour.

And I learned how to run a scanning machine, like scanning books from paper into OCR into electronic databases. So for six months I was running a scanner. Wow. Then a friend of mine, Steve Barwick said, Paul I think you should learn how the code.

From Childhood Curiosity to Ancestry.com 5:30

Imma teach you how code in Pascal. So I learned to program and within another year I was the top data prep engineer for folio. A year later, I decided after hearing a talk from a university president about gathering up knowledge and truth and empowering people with knowledge, folios search engine, CD-ROM, why don't I start a company to put all the world's best books at everyone's fingertips in every field? So I started a master's degree in library science. I wanted to understand how libraries are organized.

And I start my first company with my best friend. Then seven years later, that turned into Ancestry.com. We found out that it was hard to get permissions from authors and from publishing companies to put books on CD-ROM. The value that authors have is their IP, their copyrights. So in 95 when I went to San Francisco and learned about the internet at an internet conference, the light bulb came on and I'm like, all the world's genealogy data is in the public domain. Birth, marriage, death records, biographies of everyone that's ever lived.

All those old texts are freely available. Why don't we take our data prep engineers and our search engine prowess and just put all the world's genealogy records on the internet. So Ancestry was born at that conference in September of 95. 95? Wow. Me going back to 95, it's like I had dial-up. AOL dial up. If even that. I don't even know if 95 we even had the computer at the house yet. You know, but this goes way back. So I mean, you're talking about one of the first ones. When I was 12, 13, 14, I played Dungeons and Dragons full time.

I did.I just played it all summer long, every night after school with my friends. And my dad bought me an Apple II computer to try to get me off of Dungeon and Dragon.So I wrote a 4000 line computer program called Dungeons and dragons on the Apple 2 computer. It was like a It was a text based thing. So I did a little computer stuff back then, but yeah, in 95, I bought a satellite PC dish from Hughes and I started having high speed internet. And so I have eight kids. They weren't all born by 95 but I would work at my day job.

I'd come home, put the kids to bed, have dinner, and then I go work on the satellite computer and learn all about every internet company. What were they doing? What was their strategy? How are they getting funded? And Ancestry.com was born partly because I had high speed internet and I could reverse engineer everybody's tactics on how to build a dot com company. And just a few years later, we were on the verge of a billion dollar IPO. So the fast moving internet years were incredible. But today, as you know, AI is moving 10 times or 100 times faster.

And the world will be changed in the coming decade more from AI than I think any other previous invention in human history. So it's an incredible time to be alive, to have had that early internet experience and the lessons, the highs and lows of building a successful internet company. And then today running an AI studio after seven or eight years with an incredibly team. My original ancestry lead engineer is my chief architect. Oh, really? OK. And so Ancestry was about helping you find your past, like learn your family stories, get strength and resilience from your Family History.

SOAR is about using AI to help you live your best life today in every area of life. So we're launching portfolio company after portfolio, company out of our studio, partnering with the world's top experts and authors on every subject, and then giving AI. To help their listeners, their followers, Not just gain knowledge, because we all say knowledge is power. Knowledge isn't power unless you apply it. And how many of us learn something and then don't do anything about it? Well, imagine having a series of AI tools that help you learn the things you want to learn about health or finance and then do it and give you feedback and coaching as you try to implement that knowledge and get the output or the benefit that you from it.

So sort AI studio has large ambitions to try help hundreds of millions of people live their best life with AI agents that. Help you do what you So you see something like that just made me that kid in the candy store. Right. You know, being a business person and, you know AIs is growing substantially now. We're utilizing it for everything. I'm seeing how it's being utilized in a medical field. There was just an approval as well, too, for the medical chat, GPT, AI platform as Well. Now, just to take a little step back with ancestry.com is I know with Ancestry.Com you guys do the DNA test.

Yeah. Were you doing that all the way back in 1995? No. So the first time that I realized that genealogy and DNA would intersect was in 1999. Okay. A company in Iceland went public and it was called Decode Genetics. And what that company had, which was very valuable when they went in public, they had two data sets. They had the genealogy data of Icelanders going back a thousand years. Then they have the medical records of the entire population of iceland.They had a national health service starting in like 1909. and they had a referendum from the citizens, can the decode genetics use our Icelandic genealogy and our medical records to create a company that will mine our genetics and genealogies for pharmaceutical insights?

And I think Roche bought the company years later. But I started realizing that mitochondrial DNA and DNA in general had all kinds of markers and clues, not only about who you were related to or where you came from, but health related traits. And so I tried to get Ancestry to buy a company in San Jose. I met a guy who became my friend, Terry Carmichael. He was a former Genentech executive, and he started a paternity DNA testing company in the mid-90s called Genetree. And he was selling thousands of paternities tests all across the country, direct to consumer.

He made millions of dollars. A lot of people don't know the paterny of a child. And so there might be a single woman, maybe she has a couple of boyfriends, she gets pregnant and they have a child and she doesn't know who the father is. And that's a traumatic thing to not know your biological father. So Terry started selling tons of these. And I knew I read a book called The Seven Daughters of Eve. I think it came out in 99 as well, tracking DNA to our original parents, potential Adam and potential Eve, and then the seven daughters of even.

So these biologists did this research on the human family tree. And i just knew then that genealogy and DNA would merge somehow. Right. So Ancestry passed on buying Genetree. I wrote a forward to the book that Terry Carmichael wrote about genealogy and DNA. And then a billionaire investor and ancestry named Jim Sorensen bought Genetry, moved it to Utah, rebranded it as Relative Genomics, and then AnCestry bought that company a few years later. Oh, wow. And then my friend Scott Woodward, a very famous microbiologist and an Egyptologist, he started doing the science in, I think, early 2005 or something.

So most of the all the revenue from ancestry DNA testing post dates my exit. But we knew early on that it was going to be a big deal. Wow. Amazing, man. You know, you hear about this so much. I think everybody knows about Ancestry. The TV ads are everywhere. Right. But you know when you start hearing it from someone like yourself explain it and how it started, that's amazing, Man. Steve Jobs would always say, You can only connect the dots looking backwards, not forward. And this is it right here.

So fast forward now, you have this new platform, right? You were saying that Ancestry.com was kind of like people to understand what was behind them, where they came from and their health and everything else. So the SOAR platform. What really motivated you to say, you know what? I'm going to stay in technology. I want to develop something new. What was that one driving force where you said, I got to put this together? One reason is that the IPO of Ancestry happened in 2009 and none of the founders were involved in it.

So the private equity company bought it, had one friend who was a CTO and he was on the NASDAQ floor when they rang the bell. But of 20 people that were celebrating the IPO, only one of them had been there in the late 90s. And so it felt like unfinished business. Like, I'm a tech founder. I've never done an IPO. So I got to do that. OK, that was part of it. And that's a motivator every day. You know, 60. But I am still young enough to kind of take this one across the finish line. The most monumental thing I have ever experienced in my adult life was in 2012 I took an assessment called the Clifton Strengthfinder Assessment.

And a friend of mine was working for Gallup. Dr. Don Clifton used to run Gallups selection, research, employee screening tools, and he invented StrengthsFinder before he died. And so in 1999, he built an online test where you take 177 questions and then based on your answers, He tells you your top five strengths. your God given talents that you were born with. They weren't something you learned. It wasn't what you taught and were taught in school or on the job. These are innate patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.

He wrote a book in 1992 called Sore with Your Strengths. The word sore is the name of my company. Right. the hope that Don Clifton had was that every human being could discover their talents or potential, turn it into strength and experience excellence. When you are excellent at something and you know this because you've become excellent in your work, you get rewards, You get recognition, and You feel fulfilled. If you don't have a purpose or a mission or calling in life, then you're just kind of taking job after job, completely non-fulfilling.

Don felt like every human being was better than 10,000 other people at Something. So just like my dad was a taxonomist, a classification engineer to take raw materials, my Dad wrote a college textbook on every material you could use in manufacturing. Don Clifton, in 50 years of research, he interviewed hundreds of thousands of people to find out the raw material that that person was born with. And he created the world's greatest classification of talent. So what my dad did for turning raw material into valuable finished goods, Don Clifton aimed to do that for humans.

What were you born with? What did your creator give you that nobody else has? How do you know what that is and develop it into a strength so that you can be excellent at something and get rewarded and recognized and feel fulfilled? When you're doing what you were created to and you experience flow state every day, That's awesome. But what percentage of the world's population loves their job and feels that kind of flow? Less than 10%. Wow. So 8 billion people, maybe 800 million of them have a good job that they love.

Don Clifton would say, why can't everybody? And so SOAR AI plans to launch over a dozen companies to help you figure out who you are and who are the experts in every field, the kind of the old books thing, like what are best books in ever field of human knowledge. But today, who were the world's experts, in health, and finance, relationships, marriage, parenting, navigating the complexities of law, or becoming a great leader or a salesperson. Whatever you want to excel at, find out who's the expert and then what talents do you bring to that so that their advice can be translated into a way that lets you play to your strengths.

DNA, Genealogy, and the Origins of Ancestry 18:00

So I have a theory, Sam, that 90% of the advice you get is wrong for you. It's right for the person giving the advice because it worked for them. But guess what? They're different than you. Their neurological pathways, their patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving, they're skills, experience, network, it's all different. So the chance that a friend or family member who has some financial success or some kind of personal health that's fantastic, will their advice work for you? Well, It worked them, but guess According to the Ancestry genetic test, I have a sprinter's gene.

I've 93 traits that AnCestry has identified. And if someone who's an endurance athlete gives me advice, it probably won't work for me. My muscle fiber is different. My microbiome is different. My DNA is difference and my neurological pathways are different." So the grand vision of SOAR AI Studio is to take all the world's best knowledge, wisdom, and advice and run it through a prism of your strengths, your DNA, personalize the advice so that it works for you. That's it, that's the grand vision of SOAR.

I like that. So let's unwrap some of that, so why not focus on weaknesses at all? Great question. Don Clifton told people in his book, SOar with Your Strengths, if you want to focus your weakness, go ahead and do it. But you'll never become world class at something that you're terrible at. If you have no talent for it... What he said instead would be better is if your really, really naturally talented at some thing and you lean into it Your success happens so fast. Here's an example. In eighth grade, Nebraska, in the 1950s, they did a reading comprehension and speed reading assessment of all eighth graders.

And some percentage of the kids could read like 70 or 80 words a minute. Some percentage could be like 150 words-a-minute. The top readers in eighth-grade can read 350 words. So there's like three categories. Then they did a six-month speed reading course. At the end, the people that were slow readers were pretty average. The people who were average were a little bit faster, like maybe 150 words to 300 words. For the 350 word-a-minute readers, 2,900 words a minute. they absolutely became insanely good because they were already naturally talented.

And then someone taught them speed reading techniques. They could read lightning fast with total comprehension. Now, if you don't have that natural talent, you go through all the training and you become okay. So Don would say the ROI when you focus on your weakness is pretty modest. The ROI, when figure out what you're naturally really good at, is so much bigger, 10 times or 50 times bigger because you are already naturally good. Now you find the top trainer or the skill that you need and now you' re phenomenal and people are like, how did you do that?

You're like, I don't know I worked hard at it, but you actually had natural talent too. So let's say a company wants to implement this platform for their employees. Would each employee take the test first to understand what the person's strengths are before utilizing the platform, or how does that work? So the StrengthsFinder CliftonStrengths Assessment is actually owned by Gallup, and they've administered that to 35 million people. Every employee at Accenture goes through CliftonSstrength. So that's already happening.

They're selling millions of copies a year. We don't have a relationship to sell that product. But when people know what their strengths are, there are 30,000 or 32,00 strength finder coaches that Gallup has trained and certified. And if they are a health and fitness coach, they'll take your strengths and they will modify their advice so that it works for you. So I don't know, you're pretty competitive, I assume. I try. And so some people are competitive. Some people, are analytical. If your strength coach or your health coach knows what your wiring is, they'll be like, okay, go to the gym every day, do this many reps, set a personal record here, measure everything.

That works for some percentage of the population. But if you have strong relationship strengths, there's about a fourth of the population or a third of population that their strengths their greatest talents are relationships with other people. They have something called relator or empathy or developer and they're really good with people and if You tell them to go work out on your own every day. They'll do it for a couple of days and then they'll stop. If you tell them, go with your best friend every day for 60 days, and do this together, 100% they will do.

So little tweaks like that, when you know the 34 talent themes that Don Clifton identified, these 30,000 coaches have mastered all 34, so they can take a good idea and translate it in real time to you, based on your top strength, your Top 5 strengths, then the advice will actually work. So we don't have a formal relationship with Gallup yet, but we hope to. But what we do, Sam, is that if a training company or an author or a coach has really important knowledge in a field, and they have millions of people you know, learning from them, watching their podcast, reading their materials, their newsletter.

OK, knowledge is not power unless you apply it. So those companies that are training companies or they have expertise, they're thought leaders. They can come to us. We can launch an AI coach for them in a matter of days or weeks. Wow. For example, one of the world's top sales trainers, Jeremy Miner, has millions of people that have been learning from him over the last several years. He's a crazy good salesperson. he's invented a new methodology called NEPQ and this year we've launched two products with Jeremy.

One is called 7q.ai. It records all your calls and meetings and then coaches you the way Jeremy would So you now have the world's top sales trainer coaching you after every call. Hey, Sam, here's what you did well. You asked a better connection question than you've ever done before. Good job. But 18 minutes into the call, did you see how the prospect kind of put up their guard? Here's the question that they asked, and here is how you answered it. And now they've shut down. Now, are there systems out there now that are somewhat similar to that?

I have not seen anyone that does that. That takes game film of your sales calls and pairs it with coaching from a world-class trainer like Jeremy. So AskJeremy.ai is where anyone in the world can go. If you want Jeremy Miner to coach you on selling, go to Ask Jeremy dot AI, sign up, and for, you know, 47 bucks a month, You get his methodology, tens of thousands of hours of his content aimed at helping you become better in whichever of the 163 verticals you sell into. I mean, it's a really cool thing.

And I don't know anyone else that's doing that. Now this week, Franklin Covey, a famous consulting firm and thought leadership firm, their Steven M.R. Clovey leadership curriculum has been turned into an AI product. So they announced it this week. Anyone who's gone through the Steven M. R. Covey trust and inspire leadership training can now have an AI that watches you after your company calls and meetings and sees how you're interacting with people and can give you feedback on how Fully, you're embracing the principles of being a great leader.

You can be a command and control leader in the old paradigm. And that just doesn't work, especially with young people. But if you are a trusted and inspired leader and you start to adopt those behaviors and those patterns of communication, your team will believe in you. They'll believe the vision and they'll start engaging and giving huge effort. That's the kind of leader that Franklin Covey wants. So for the first time in, I don't know, 40 years of Franklin Covey, they'll have an AI that can give you feedback and coaching until you've become an excellent, trusted, inspired leader.

So any training company in the world that wants to do that, They can launch in a matter of days or weeks. Wow. Well, so what are some of the things that you're seeing with AI and what made you say, you know what? I really have to get involved with artificial intelligence. So in 2020, we were actually working with a sales training company called Sandler and they're probably the most famous sales trading company in North America. They've been around for 60 plus years. I've become friends with Dave Matts and he was the CEO and sole owner.

He took over from David Sandlar and Dave Matson grew the company substantially over over a decade or two. So when Alexa was coming out, remember, The Amazon Alexa speaker. So we had a theory with Sandler that 70% of the salespeople that they train are in a car going from appointment to appointment. This was 2018, 2019. They had mobile sales force. If you're selling HVAC equipment, you go from apartment to apartment appointment, and so in between meetings, your in the car. Well, Amazon had come out with an Echo Auto, And you could put that in and you can talk to it.

You could ask it questions. you Could update your CRM conversationally. So we built a product with Sandler. It was a really cool Alexa skill and it worked beautifully inside of an Echo Auto. And we launched it in March of 2020 at Orlando at their annual conference. A week later, COVID shut the world down. Wow. Nobody ever used that product because it was announced to a thousand people, all their franchisees and it's a big show and tell that week and then COVID shut the world down. The whole point was a mobile, nobody got in their car and went to meeting for like a year.

That's when we pivoted to Zoom and realized, okay, video calls, we can give feedback based on, and the whole world learned how to use QR codes when you went restaurants and everyone learned Zoom. So 2020 was our pivot point. Like we started doing AI on top of Zoom calls. And here we are six years later, five and a half years. Later. You know, billions of people are using chat GPT or Gemini or Grok.

Why SOAR AI Focuses on Strengths 28:30

I remember in November 22 when chat, GP T launched and my daughter was a college freshman and I said, Hey, Sabrina, are you writing any essays this semester? And she's like, yeah, I'm writing an essay right now about how every high school student should take a personal and a social leadership course, because she had a great course in her charter school. She was student body president, and she said that her leadership courses changed her life. And, she just was going to write an assay, how Every High School Student Should Take Leadership.

personal and group leadership. And so I prompted chat GPT and wrote an essay for her and I said, Hey, what do you think of this? And she's like, that's insane. That's crazy. She's, like I'm not going to tell any of my roommates about this, because I'll probably use it to do their homework. and she instinctively knew that you shouldn't outsource your writing to an AI. But so that was November 22. It's Crazy how many billions of people are now using AI every day. Yeah, the voice stuff is insanely good.

And so I feel like the timing is amazing. But again, knowledge is only power if you apply it. So wouldn't it be cool if humans can collectively identify the most important knowledge in every field, including health, which is where you go deep with so many world class experts, biohacking, longevity, mindfulness, all the things that relate result in good outcomes. It doesn't matter if, you know, it if. You don't do it, So I think the key for AI is to help humans not just learn truth faster, but apply it and apply correctly.

Because AI can watch you try to do something. Think about golfers or think about tennis players or football and basketball players, they get to watch game film after every game. They get better faster than most other humans. That feedback loop, what if a billion humans could get AI to help them learn something and then do it and do right? What would happen to your personal financial situation if you had AI coaching you on your spending, on you're earning, your sales, anything that's related to business or finance, you got superintelligence kind of coaching on how and what to do with money.

I just think there's a potential era of abundance for humans with AI and robots. But more importantly, for you personally in your life, if you learn what is true, what the experts in the world have identified as best practices, and then you have AI help you implement those, there is no end to the rewards and positive outcomes you can achieve in life. I think it's total new era for human. Now with AI, a lot of people look at AI as like, this tool is going to make me smarter. Is that your goal with SOAR is to utilize AI to make someone smarter or is it a bit different?

I think it's a different. So I actually think that in many ways, if you use AI, to do work for you, you become dumber. Some studies have come out recently that do brain scans on people that are having AI write things for them and stuff. It's like, no, You don't want to outsource critical thinking or writing. Right. Now, research. AI can do 100 hours of PhD level research for you in 10 minutes. Yeah. Okay. Yes. So yes, you can get smarter faster if you ask the right questions, but don't use AI to do things you should be doing that you need those muscles.

You need the skills. I think it has the potential to dumb us down. It certainly has a potential help to help us get smart or faster. But what we're trying to is bridge the gap between when you learn something and the fact that your going to to it and do it consistently and to well. So that gap is what we're trying to fill. The workplace enterprise spending on employee training and leadership training, $400 billion a year globally. $ 400 billion spent and most of it is wasted. Training is boring.

People don't remember it and they certainly don' t apply it afterwards. So if you could say, well, what if all the training is paired with AI that when you choose to, hey, I really want to lean into this. I want become a trusted and inspired leader. Ask the right questions, the emotional questions in the tone the way Jeremy teaches. He was a top sales guy for a decade making millions of dollars a year. You can have his AI coaching you every step of the I think every startup founder needs an AI that knows all the mistakes that other founders have made and all of the good things they've done and coach you day by day.

Sign me up. I love it. So there's a founder portal we're launching. We've got a faith portal, a founders portal a family portal. A citizen portal We got all these other subsidiary companies but the key is finding the experts taking their knowledge building an A.I. that will coach their customers on applying that knowledge And at the end of the day, Sam, I think that humans can more quickly figure out what your natural talents are, what God created you to do, and then do it. But do with the help of experts who've already spent 50 years of their life figuring out, What works and what doesn't work in your field and learn from them and apply it And then you're building on the shoulders of giants.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, listen, one of the reasons why I read so many books is to not learn from my mistakes, but learn somebody else's mistakes. So now if you have a way now to actually do that in a ways that moves the needle even quicker, that's a win-win for not just the platform, for the actual individual utilizing the platforms. I have a hope, Sam, because I love reading, I loved books, and I'll have physical books. I don't mind digital content, too, but I just love to sit down and read a book somebody spent decades of their life figuring stuff out and then articulating it in a way that you can understand it.

You get so much wisdom that way. But imagine a world where every book that has an idea that is something you could try to implement, you just tell your AI, hey, help me try this out. Like a QR code next to every big idea in every book or every piece of advice. And you can have an AI that says, well, that advice won't work for you because you don't have that strength or your DNA is this way or whatever. But if you see what advice probably will work, for me, Coach me on how to do this. Put it in my calendar.

Start grading me after calls me. Remind me to to it. Prep me before the next meeting. Hey, Paul, remember you wanted to this? I got a story I read that I saw this tick tock that David Rockefeller had one hundred thousand people that he'd done business with. I think he was the world's wealthiest person when he died. And, you know, Dale Carnegie taught about howto win friends and influence people. He said, find out the human details about someone. learn about them, learn their family, write it down, and bring it up.

They care about people. Well, David Rockefeller apparently did that better than anyone else. He had 100,000 index cards. Everybody he ever met within his business career, he had notes about their pets' names, where their kids went to college, what their interests and hobbies were. And he has that, then his staff would bring out the index card so that if he met with you a year later, Sam, he'd remember all the details. And so people trusted him and they did business with him. Okay. So I realized that when I'm on a Zoom call and people start chit chatting about their vacation or the restaurant they ate at or their favorite band, I zoned out.

I would watch these replays of these calls and I'd be like, Paul, you didn't even hear them say that. the first time through. So I wrote a Carnegie Rockefeller AI prompt. And after every meeting, it summarizes all the personal details they shared. I love that. Family, friends, hobbies, trips coming up, favorite music, favourite sports teams, anything chit chatty, It captures it and stores it for me. Then the next time I meet with them, it can put that on my meeting prep. I'm like, hey, remember these eight human details?

So because I realize that's an important best practice, and because i don't have a natural talent for it, my AI can do that for me. i'm telling you, that is a game changer. And the fun thing was, when I did that AI, I started paying attention in the meetings after that. Wow. As like I built a tool so I don' because, i dont pay attention. and now i am like now I am listening for them. Now you are listening. Like, oh, he is going to Colombia for his wife's sister's wedding. I heard it. I hurt it the first time through.

So maybe I turned a weakness into a strength by building a tool as a workaround. But I actually think that is all of us have strengths, all this has weaknesses. And Don Clifton said, if you have a Weakness, don't fix it, build a Tool or System. that renders your weakness irrelevant. Or partner with someone who's so good at what you're not good. You said your wife and you are super complimentary in your skills and your strengths. That's perfect. Don Clifton would say, don't try to get better at finance and spreadsheets.

you've got a partner to do that and let her lean into her strength and then you lean in to yours. But we all need people or systems or tools to compensate for our limitations. Yeah. Listen, I resonate with the whole, you know, personal chitchatter and everything. We actually coach our medical providers that in the EMR, the Electronical Medical Record System, When a patient comes in, they're getting any service done or whatever they are doing at the clinic, when they tell you, hey, oh, I want to get a little Botox done because I'm going to go with the family on vacation at Disney World, whatever, write that down.

That's brilliant. Because that's that personal connection. The next time they come back, because we're seeing thousands of people, you're going bring that up. Oh, well, how was your vacation with your family? And that creates that powerful connection. So that platform, I like that. The medical providers can really use that one too. Now, when we're talking about AI, which is always on the news, it's on TV nonstop, you're even hearing about a lot of the war stuff that's happening right now to protect AI making sure that other countries are not getting full access to it.

My question to you on that is, What makes you very nervous or what makes not sleep at night about utilizing AI? Well, you've seen some of the memes on social media where, because the AI is so sycophantic and apologetic, it like kisses up to you. So I've said, I have seen these memes like twice in the last week or two. It's like, this mushroom, can I eat it? You know, chat GBT. Yeah, you can eat it. It's not poisonous. And then the next scene says, Oh, I'm sorry, sir, because the person died. I am sorry sir.

Do you want me to teach you more about the variety of mushrooms that there are or whatever? So it's a life and death situation. Hallucination can be a real problem. and deep fakes and all the kinds of things. There's bad actors that will use AI for bad. And then there's all kinds good people, normal human beings that we use it for bettering their life or better in the world. So I'm worried about putting powerful tools in hands of bad actor. But the hallucination thing is something that I've wrestled with for three years now.

Because when you think about probability generation of words and sentences and paragraphs, when the AI starts answering a question, this is a non-deterministic, it's a stochastic, like a slot machine. and it generates one word, and then it decides what's the next word and the last word. And it's been trained on billions and billions or trillions of words. So it knows the language and language patterns nearly perfectly, but it generate a different answer every time. And it hallucinates a lot of the time, and it doesn't know the truth from fiction.

So I worry about that. In high stakes arenas, whether that's life and death situations in an ER room, hallucination could be deadly. And in even your financial life, if the hallucination happens and you confidently place a big bet and then you lose, that's worrisome.

AI Coaching for Sales and Leadership 41:00

But I think there's a very powerful way that the industry is responding. And my fun fact is that my team started doing this technique before we knew it had a name. If you've heard of rag or retrieval augmented generation, that is like using a search engine to go find what a human actually said or wrote about it, quote it in its entirety in verbatim, and then the AI can write its concept around the human quote. So when you retrieve content from a massive database, we're building a George Washington AI right now, trained on everything George washington ever said.

Our country's 250th birthday is coming up on July 1st or July 4th. My friends at Angel Studios and my friend Benton Crane is producing a film called Young George, Washington. on the 250th birthday of our country, we will learn about the young George Washington and the divine guidance he had early in his life. And, you know, he became the father of country and founding fathers, the framers of the country created the first government in history that was governed by citizens. that were endowed by their creator with inalienable rights.

It wasn't a king or monarch, a sovereign. it wasn' a tyranny or a dictatorship.It was just the attempt. And that's why U.S. has become the most prosperous nation in the world for 250 years is because of freedom and individual rights So my friends are doing this young George Washington film, and we're building, hopefully we'll do it in conjunction with them, but we are building an AI that's trained on everything George washington ever wrote or said. And it will be factual. When you ask it a question, he won't make up an answer.

He'll quote from his actual writings or letters and tell you about it. And he could give you, the AI could generate a little intro to what George Washington wrote in a letter in 1792 to Lafayette or whatever, but it will quote him like a librarian. So my background in library science lends itself to helping solve the hallucination problem with retrieval. cite the source, quote the human expert, and then, you know, give, You can dumb it down to an eighth grade level or a sixth grade, level you can translate it in any language, but you're still starting with what did the Human write or say, because you not having the AI.

come up and develop something. Correct. Not from scratch, but you go find the quote and then introduce that quote to the person in answering their question. OK, so you have to build that very strong arsenal. Exactly. Yeah. And my first company putting all the world's best books on CD-ROM, we had thousands and thousands of full text books. Of course, Ancestry has, I don't know, 70 billion genealogy records now. So we got really good at retrieving exactly what's needed. Then you can use AI to introduce that and answer a question or put it into a different language.

But yeah, we start with the human expert rather than AI making something out of whole cloth that could be completely off. And I would assume this platform would quote and cite a lot of the stuff where it finds it from so people have that source. Exactly. They can go check the source now. One of our companies, citizenportal.ai, has been transcribing every public meeting in the United States now for two years. like hundreds of thousands over like almost two million meetings, city council meetings school board meetings county commission meetings state legislature like we have this year we'll probably publish six or seven million news stories that are taken from the transcripts of what did the mayor say what does council members say?

What did school remember? what do they vote on? So all the facts are there transcribed by AI And then the AI summarizes what was said in the meeting so that citizens can get their local state and federal name. So that's not hallucinating because it it quotes the humans and summarises what. Was said. In the. Meeting. That's pretty cool. And last year, 3.1 million people came to Citizen Portal. This year is an election year. We think tens of millions of people will flock to citizen portal to find out what's what the heck's going on in my state or local government.

And this is a platform that you developed? Yeah, it's one of our SOAR AI Studio. Now, we want to do this with Faith Portal, Sam. Every pastor or priest in the country that's been preaching sermons, there's 380,000 churches that meet every Saturday or Sunday or Friday, depending on the religion. And if you think about you've got a favorite pastor for 20, 30 years, every sermon they've ever given, they probably explained a lot of Bible verses. What if you had a Bible search engine that could quote your pastor every time that pastor has ever explained one of those verses?

So you have a bible study in your hand. In your hands. At home. With your favorite pastor. That's powerful. So that's coming. And we're going to hopefully do that in connection with the largest faith tech company in North America. because we don't have a reputation in the faith space. Is that YouVersion? No, there's another company out of—we started in Tennessee about 25 years ago. They have software for about 100,000 churches out the 380,00 churches that have websites or that membership records and donations and things like that.

But yeah, we'll partner with somebody. It could be Youversion, but we will just take this faith portal concept of transcribing things and searching things, connect it to the Bible. I mean, I don't know, the Bible has sold five billion copies, since it was translated or published by Gutenberg and five million copies. And again, how many people read something in the bible and then never do anything about it? If your pastor or priest is teaching you how to apply the gospel teachings, and you can have that AI reminding you of that.

I don't know how many times people get moved by a sermon. During COVID, I remember reading Martin Luther King's book, From Strength to Love. And just reading his sermons was extremely powerful and moving. I dropped Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram from my phone and I said, I'm going to read this book and carry it around with me. Like super powerful. And that wasn't even listening to him. He designed those sermons to be spoken. he was an orator. But even in writing, they were powerful, but we learned something from scripture or from a religious teacher.

If we don't implement what they teach us and remember and be reminded of it, we didn't get any benefit. It doesn't matter if you know something. If you don't do it, you won't get benefit from doing it. So again, Faith Portal will try to help people take important, powerful principles of love, forgiveness, gratitude, any of the virtues, the commandments, all those things, and how do I apply that in my life? How do I show up like the scriptures teach me to? But our pastors and priests are the guides we've picked to help us understand and apply the scripture.

And there's one scripture that says, be ye doers of the word and not hearers only. That's really what SOAR aims to do, is help people become do-ers, of all the good words in every field, and just hear-er, not just passively consuming, learning, but never applying it. So question on that, with the sales platform, it listens to your calls and it can give you feedback on it. So with something like this, when we're talking about the faith, how does it give the feedback? That's a good question. We haven't figured that one out yet, Sam.

I personally like to start my day with prayer and scriptures, and my work calendar does not have a slot for my prayer in scriptures. But if I added my faith practices to my calendar, and then I sleep in late or I take a red eye and I miss it, the AI could send me a text message at lunchtime, say, hey, you didn't read the Bible this morning. You want to catch up? Did you say your prayers this mornin? If I invite the A.I. to be my gentle coach and guide, that's one thing. Now, I have a friend who had a girlfriend that they were, you know, not getting along well.

And so he suggested that the record their argument and have chat GPT referee it. Uh, I don't think I, don' think that's a good idea. You know, my mind was kind of going there, like thinking about not the chat, but like a platform or something like that, the faith one where it can kind be like your spiritual coach or like for your faith, where you actually have that AI agent that you communicate with. Oh, well, what did he do today? Who did you help out? What did, you know you give to your community?

But then ultimately, it's like, It's only as good as the information that you get. That's right. And that's why I was hesitating with chat GPT is it is not trained to do this. It could hallucinate and it could cause the fight to get way worse. First of all, I don't think most women that I know would want an AI in the middle of their conversation. When my wife and I went through therapy for a few years, actually read a lot of books and she hated that. I Was reading books about relationships because she just wanted me to show up and talk to her.

Right. And then she realized because I have the strength of learner, my number one strength finder strength is learner. Later when we got through our biggest problems together, she's like, man, you were doing the best you could. You got a strength called learner and you are reading all these books about men and women and relationships and communication. So now she respects that I did that. But at the time it annoyed her. Like she's a very strong relationship person and she just wanted me to be like that too.

I'm a thoughtful brain, like I am a brainiac and a strategist and I always in my head and not intuitively a people person. That's why the details of chit chat just passed right by me. And I know people with relationship strengths and they're like so good with people. They remember people, they remember everything about them. They're trustworthy, they're likable, and because I'm more bookish, that isn't an innate talent for me. But my wife, it is. So as we were going through our issues together, I was doing the best I could to figure things out intellectually.

And in the end, It really helped. Both of us ended up in a much, much better place. I think relationships, matters so much. And there could be some really good marriage coaching tools and therapy tools. There could all kinds of really great things. My question for all of you though is who's the expert behind it and what's their business model? Are they actually trying to really help you soar with your life and succeed? Or maybe like some health care or medical things like, I don't know, maybe chiropractors don' want to heal you.

Maybe they want you to keep coming back and back for 30 years. I know a lot of the pharmaceutical industry wants to get you hooked on a medication, doesn't cure you, but they're gonna make a lotta money for the rest of your live. So what's the driving motive behind the designer of this system? And is the human expert really an expert. So I think all of us are going to have to become really discerning of good AI versus bad AI, AI that will help us soar and prosper versus AI. That will get us manipulated or maximize how much time we're spending on it.

AI, Hallucinations, and Retrieval-Based Truth 52:30

and even missing out on real life. I think AI companions could be designed by social media companies that are be like beautiful, attractive. They say all the right things. There could people with AI boyfriend or an AI girlfriend, and then they never have a real relationship like that's to me super tragic. That is crazy. And so so what's the what the motive behind the companies building the AI? I. Think we all have to figure that out. Yeah, I agree. Does that ever make you a little bit nervous with where AI is being, you know, they get like they talk about Taiwan.

It's one of the biggest places where they have all of their facilities that control AI. Does that ever worry you getting so deep into AI where something can happen to one these facilities and then all the sudden you kind of lose your business? So I haven't thought personally about any imminent risk of, because I'm not building, you know, the most complex chips in the world. I am really a platform entrepreneur that I build applications on top of platforms. So if all the AI If all the LLMs went away, if GPUs or TPUs, or data centers all disappeared, then yeah, I wouldn't have a livelihood.

You know how Elon talks about civilizational collapse, birth rates being so low, like in South Korea, that in three or four generations, there will hardly be a South Korean. That's real. I'm worried about that in a long run, but I live in Missouri next to Amish people in the largest Amis settlement west of the Mississippi. Amush people have a total fertility rate of 7.0. That means they double their population every 22 years. The average family has seven kids. I've done the math. There'll be 100 million Amiish in this country in 175 years Now, they're not my customers because they don't buy tech.

So I have all kinds of short-term issues that keep me up at night and then long, long- term issues. But Taiwan isn't necessarily one of them. I hope we can be peaceful and coexist with China. and the Taiwan and The Netherlands that also has a global supply chain issue that's super that we're all dependent on a few things. I think in a Few more years when nuclear is more proliferating and solar power collection in outer space really starts happening, like the science is moving so fast that there could be almost limitless energy in 10 or 20 years.

And then there's not scarcity. And why do we have to have geopolitical fighting over scarcity when there is abundance? You might be mining rare earths on the moon or on asteroids and getting unlimited power from the sun in outer space and running inference in data centers out there where they don't need cooling. There's so many incredibly promising things five to 10 to 20 years from now that my hope is that humans will chill a little bit. And let's stop fighting each other. And Let's say our enemy isn't each.

The enemy was scarcity, but maybe intelligence will be everywhere. We'll all make better decisions. You could all live a prosperous life. What would what would that world look like if people designed for that and implemented? AI in with that in mind. Yeah, that would be a beautiful world. It would it can be and it will be for some. I think one of my favorite quotes is a science fiction writer named William Gibson. He said the future is already here. it's just very unevenly distributed. There are already people that are getting great abundance from intelligence, from AI, for productivity gains.

There's young people with a one or two person company that's making millions of dollars a month. Just them and a bunch of AI agents. So that future is here. It's not very widely distributed. Well, what if that good future could be very wildly distributed? What if the knowledge you're getting about health and biohacking and longevity and all the good things, What If hundreds of millions people not learn it? But learn it and do it. We could all live to be 120 or have many, many more healthy years than we do today.

It's exciting to live in a world where Brian Johnson does something crazy in public and then tens of millions of people learn how to sleep better because they follow his protocol. So you obviously follow his brand. I follow him. He's a tech guy also, right? Yeah. And so Dave Asprey is also tech guys. Uh, you know, the guy behind bulletproof coffee and he's the godfather of biohacking. So w which I want to get a little bit more into the wellness side. You're a very smart individual, by the way, Paul.

Um, yeah, articulate your words very, very well. In, um, You know? your high pace individual that deals with a very stressful life. So I know you do certain things to create that work life balance, create, that good peace of mind, mindfulness. I want to tap into that because talking to tech guys, Right. And I've had quite a few in the biohacking space. I have had the founder of Prenuovo, right, who's built a lot of different applications, sold it to Walt Disney World. They do the full body MRIs.

Uh, they're utilizing AI to detect all kinds of diseases. You guys have a very interesting mind that I love tapping into. So I want to understand what you do to take care of your health. I'm barely beginning to do that. So when I had eight kids with my wife and- How many kids? We have eight. Oh, I didn't know that, eight? Yeah. You're not Amish, are you? No, no. I am Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And so we, we I grew up in a family of eight, my life had seven siblings, so a total of 8 and then we had 8. Um, and now I have six grandkids.

My life was busy with ancestry.com kind of work and family. and then church too. But I didn't really have much time for anything else, including taking care of myself. It wasn't a priority for me. About three years ago, I think I hit rock bottom when it came to my physical health. I was in a cryo chamber, Dr. Gary Sanchez, a good friend of mine from New Mexico, who's worked with Simon Sinek to create an assessment to find out your why. Simon Sinik popularized the concept of find your way. Garry Sanches has a why assessment to help you find the thing that motivates you in life.

So anyway, he and I have been spending time together. We went to a fitness facility. I did a cryo chamber and he showed me photos of it afterwards. And I looked like a beached whale. It was all puffy and pale and bloated. and i'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I look like that. i hear we're looking at you at 24 and your fireman's thing with your abs and like I've never had abs. always like running and basketball, but I never did weightlifting. And so I just hit rock bottom like I've got to change.

So I got a treadmill at home. I started doing a lot of protein cutting out carbs. started looking at my testosterone levels. haven't done peptides or anything like that. But my diet completely changed my exercise habits. 3 to 5 miles a day and usually 10 on a Saturday. And I'm going to do a marathon hopefully this year. And I've lost 30 pounds, my body fat went from 30 to 19 and I just turned 60. So I feel great, but I'm just beginning the journey of like, how do I live really healthy for a lot longer?

And those of you that are in this space, I need to learn from you and figure out what's next for me. But my transformation in three years makes me feel really good. That's awesome man, that's also me and I want more entrepreneurs people that live that busy lifestyle to understand the importance of that you know and you obviously you brought things up about faith and and i'm a believer myself and actually tell people. that it is actually a sin not to take care of the temple of God. Yeah, right. 100 percent.

So there's many verses in the Bible that will tell you exactly what you should do, not just for your physical health, but also your mental health and relationships and everything else. What you're doing is something that's viewed in a very positive way in so many different facets. You know, you talked about how hard is it to take your faith concepts and put them into practice? How will the faith AI actually work? One concept that I have thought a little bit about is that it feels to me like, Sam, that gratitude is the virtue that kind of precedes all other virtues.

If you're grateful for being alive, if you are grateful to God for creating you, If your grateful family members or friends or opportunities, gratitude seems to be like the virtues that starts spawning all other virtues. When you're grateful, you can be more forgiving. You can more kind, but gratitude is so important. And you know what? If AI is kind of listening in on your calls and meetings and you've got texting or email going on, it could measure how much gratitude you are expressing. And is gratitude gratitude if you don't express it?

Someone said to me, gratitude is internal, but thanksgiving is external. I don t know. One thing that faith AI could do for everybody is help you measure and grow your levels of gratitude. I love that. Count your blessings. A gratitude journal. There's all kinds of things that AI or little software tools could help me practice being a more grateful person and expressing it to people that I loved and that i'm grateful for. And then, of course, Jesus gives us the biggest challenge. Love your enemies.

Pray for them who hurt you or despitefully use you, or persecute you. Like, That's a very big challenge. Loving people that love you back is one thing, but we're supposed to be grateful in every circumstance. We're suppose to give praise and thanks all the time. And then we are suppose love everybody, including strangers and our enemies. So those are things that I think could be evaluated if AI had some You know access to your conversations and of course, you're going to always have private conversations.

You don't want everything. I don' want to be in the Truman show with every single thing I've ever said recorded like I think I need some downtime some private time, but the things that are public that I'm recording already for work. How much gratitude am I sharing? How many blessings am i thanking God for or other people for? So yeah, I think AI could even nudge us towards those kind of things. Just speaking to the AI agent about what you're grateful for. What is your gratitude for the day? And looking at the health and wellness industry that I'm in, when we're talking about taking care of your overall health, gratitude is a big piece.

There's a lot of conversations on making sure people are tapping into that. The other piece is community, which community can also be tapped into a platform like this. What do you have on your schedule? When are you gonna be with friends and family and socialize? Because community feeds into the gratitude as well too. So question for you, do you have a longevity coach for yourself? Are you seeing a Longevity Doctor? I'm not. Sign me up. Yeah, I have. A friend who just did a podcast with me a couple of weeks ago, and he's like, Paul, you just turned 60. You're going to live to be 120 or 150. I am like.

OK, i believe that's theoretically possible, but only if I do something about it. Like I said, knowledge isn't power. Knowledge plus action is power, so tell me more about what that looks like? Yeah. So you know, you going into the longevity space with the brain that you have, it's going to be awesome. Yeah, because especially because you have a whole platform that's going to be around health. You put in yourself through that process itself.

Faith, Gratitude, and Personal Coaching 1:04:30

Your wheels are going. To be turning. I know telomeres and I. Know the length of telomerase and. There are things that keep them from shortening. But so I've learned a little bit. So I started like surface level, but you're right. When we launched the health platform and i'm an early user of it. Then I have to know what's being said by all the experts. And then what am I going to apply and test? So it's exciting. You'll see it is right now when it comes to longevity. The biggest thing is mitochondrial health.

Right. In what damages the mitochondria and causes oxidative stress and inflammation. Some of the smartest top doctors, specialty doctors that are, you know, cardiologists, et cetera. One of things they'll say is toxins is the root cause of disease formation. This is why people age. So, you know, as we continue to talk about health. What are what are some of the things that you see for the near future with not just yourself, but with everything that Well, health has not been a priority yet for SOAR AI Studio.

We've been focused on citizen, family, faith, and workplace leadership and sales. But this year we will launch the health portal. So what that means, Sam, is that we'll be looking for the world's top experts on all kinds of parts of health and then finding out what do they know that everybody should know and do. And then how could an AI assistant be built and sold to their customers, to patients, subscribers that would help them not just know stuff, but do it consistently? Because as we've been talking about, a common theme is knowledge isn't power unless you do something about it.

You don't get the benefit unless do the work. But the work can be personalized so that it plays to your strengths. It's easy for you to take that advice and do it because it's like, oh, yeah, I already am like that. So I think this is our big year where our health portal and our legal portal will begin to grow. And we need, I'll probably, if you don't mind, we'll transcribe every podcast you've ever done, mine it for gems, and then come to you and say, hey, here are all the people on your podcast that have expertise that ought to go into the health AI.

And so, Chad GPT Health and other trillion dollar companies will launch pretty powerful health things. We would like ours to be personalized to each user based on their DNA, their microbiome, or their strengths so that the advice is more likely to match them and be implementable by them. So yeah, we'll have lots of conversations. I'm literally building this thing out as we're talking. Like I think when you say it's like, it is one thing learning it and knowing it, but applying it as important. You know, I wear an oral ring.

People have the Fitbit or the Whoop. That's how you know if they're applying that, right? You'll see it through the data. So there's a lot of different things that we can do with that. So that's going to be extremely exciting. And then the challenging question will be, we don't want to outsource our decision making or our agency to an AI. We want it to help us with. So it's going to be a fine balance between AI that gives you advice and tells you what to do and schedules all your day and writes your emails for you.

We don't want that. But at what point do you need help? And so when you learn something and you know it feels right to you, you want to try it, how do get AI to help you do it? Then to give you feedback on, did you it right or not? And so I'm really excited. I think augmented reality and cameras and visual computing, all these multimodal LLMs that can see things and hear things, and write or read things. We are all going to be surrounded by super intelligence. And if we use it the way it could be used, we could have great benefits.

Yeah, I agree, man. My wheels are turning. I'll tell you that. Well, you know, I'm thinking about now I saw just as Stanford University did a whole study on a toilet that everything that goes into the toilet, your urine and stool, it actually has the ability to see exactly how dehydrated you are, the micronutrients that you're lacking, all of that stuff looks at your microbiome from your stool. You know all that data is going to be accessible to everyone. Yeah, so pretty weird story. In 2016 or 17, I was living in Washington, D.C., working for Gallup and a brilliant inventor whose father was my neighbor.

His father, Tracy Hall, invented the synthetic diamond in 1952. The lab-grown diamond. Yeah, when he was at GE. And then he became a professor at Brigham and University. So his son, David Hall, gets hundreds of patents a year. He has all these researchers and he gets more patents than anyone else. he called me up and said, I've got a smart toilet concept. It'll use AI to analyze everything in the toilet. Would you consider being the CEO of that company? That was like 2016 or 17. So it's funny that you bring up a Stanford smart toilet thing.

But I know Bill Gates was working on something and who knows what. My friend David Hall had a prototype working about nine years ago, 10 years. I said, I'm not the right guy to run a smart-toilet company. Right? I am more into books and learning. That's pretty interesting. All of us could have data exhaust from our normal life that's intelligently giving us feedback like, hey, watch out for this. Super cool. Between things like that, like the toilet, you know, the meta glasses, where literally the glasses are seeing everything that you're seeing if you wear them, things that.

There's a lot of potential, feeding that agent. That agent would be able to give you a lotta advice, I would say. My final thought though about AI is that there are gonna be many, many trillion dollar companies that build AI, that run AI. As I said, what's their goal? Is their goals just maximizing profits and becoming super wealthy? I mean, it's not a bad goal, but if they're doing harm, like Meta has done, you know, Instagram, kind of social and mental health of young people, It's pretty troubling some of the experiments they ran.

But anyway, as we look at who's designing systems, Our real goal is to have you be in charge of your own locally hosted open source LLM. And if you think about prompt engineering is super important to get good results from AI, context engineering in the last six months has become known as way more important than prompt And what context is, is where are all your health records stored? If you could have your Health records and your financial records on your local device and only you have access to it.

If You get a blood test, if you get A hormone test and you store that locally on Your device, and Your local LLM, which you run, Is giving you insights. Nobody else is going to get that data about you and be able to use it for ad targeting. or for manipulating you. And so there is a potential future in five or 10 years where all of us have a device, we have our own open source AI, and we our context for health, faith, family, friendship, workplace, And we are not kind of subject to the whims of trillion dollar corporations on how much they charge for the product or what they do with our data when we're not watching.

I'm kind of excited about the open source software world maybe becoming bigger and more important in AI than it's ever been in just normal Linux, Apache, Red Hat, PHP, all the Open Source things that have built the world's internet and built most companies. Most of it is built on Open source. Then there's closed source, which those trillion dollar companies, they just want to own and control the applications or the code behind it. There's a scenario where all of us have access to state-of-the-art open source and our own context from our life experience is stored on our local device.

And we get all the benefit of AI and none of the downside of someone else knowing everything about us. Imagine a corporation that already has millions of data points about you. What if they find something out and now they can Sell your time and attention to anyone else. They I just I worry about advertising business models and how Controllable we might be without even knowing it. Yeah. Yep. And I do think that Having something like that would open up More people to actually participate and be part of it because there's a lot of people afraid of AI rightly so right there are scenarios that are pretty Scary.

All the movies, all the Skynet Terminator, whatever. And then the military applications, the surveillance possibilities. But if more of us can migrate towards owning and controlling it ourselves on our own local devices, that could be a pretty amazing future with fewer of the downsides that we talked about. I can see that. Paul, you were talking about living in Washington, D.C., working there, and we're talking health. So right now there's a big movement going on. It's called the Maha Movement, Make America Healthy Again.

What does that mean to you? I sat next to Robert F. Kennedy at a political event in Austin, Texas a couple years ago. Before he had, he decided to run for president. I really liked what I saw from him and the scientific research and he's so articulate. And so when he endorsed Trump and started talking about MAHA, I actually think it's one of the most exciting things I've ever seen in my life. Because if you think about chronic illness in the United States and even the lifespan of Americans compared to other countries, it is getting bad and worse.

There's so much obesity. There is so many loneliness, stress, anxiety, depression. That can't all just be because of what people say or do. Like, there's got to be environmental factors. And I think Big Pharma, which has put a lot of money into Democrats and Republicans and owns most of the advertising on the evening news.

Health, Longevity, and the MAHA Movement 1:15:00

It has become kind of forbidden to challenge anything about any of narratives. OK, and that's all been thrown out so fast. So I'm pretty optimistic that there will be smart people on both sides that are, you know, wondering where the data is. Maybe you have to replicate all these scientific surveys or tests, do double blind pilots, all the things that they're talking about. But I'm actually super excited about it. And rather than make America healthy again, I think that's a big macro movement that we can all see.

Hey, that really potentially huge progress for everybody. But individuals have to say I am going to make myself healthy. It has to be a personal decision and against whatever backdrop of the healthcare or the sick care system and whatever improvements we make over time with our nutrients, the food pyramid. Oh my gosh, it's so incredible that we've finally thrown that out and there's some bad science that was purchased by the same people that were like the tobacco industry, bought all the foods companies and put sugar in everything.

So I just kind of generally have a sense that it is really bad. And food stamps, I saw something that the average woman on Snap weighs 210 pounds and the woman not on snap weighs 142 pounds. I don't know if that's true, but I see that last week. But yeah, the data is not encouraging. Right. and let's actually do it right. I think it's very promising, but I thing each individual has to say, I'm going to do something about my own health, regardless of what maha does or doesn't do, i'm gonna pay more attention and care more.

Because you said the body is a temple of God, and there are a lot of reasons to take good care of it so that you can take care good of others and live your best life. That's the truth. Yeah, and I agree with you. You know, my height's created a very powerful awareness, but how you said earlier, it's one thing to know. But it is one to actually do it and apply it. So everybody has to have their individual desire to take care of their health. Awesome. Well, I'm going to have a little fun here. One of my favorite podcasters who has the diary of a CEO came out with these conversation cards.

So I want to. Oh, yeah. Hold that. OK. You'll take off that sleeve and then pull two cards out of their random cards? I don't know what what they're going say. And then what you're gonna do is you get to read the card and answer the question. All right. First question, what would you do if you absolutely weren't afraid? Exactly what I'm doing. I don't feel afraid of anything. All right. When I was on a political podcast about 18 months ago talking about Citizen Portal. and talking about transparency in government and how every citizen has the right to know what your leaders are doing and saying what they're voting for.

We all have to have access to transparent government. And I was interviewed in a Dallas studio with this video got like 500,000 views and it was like framed by the podcaster as ancestry founder to eliminate corruption in the US government I'm like, wait, I didn't say that. That's a good marketing message and it got a lot of people to view. And then 1.3 million people invested in Citizen Portal in our crowdfunding campaign. So I was grateful for the video. I's grateful. For the interview, not so grateful, for that title.

But then the top comment on that YouTube video was, Does this man have security? Protect his life at all costs. Oh, wow. OK. If you think about it, if there's fraud or corruption in local, state or federal government, anybody that kind of shines a light on that, it's going to be have a lot of enemies really quick from very powerful people. But I'm doing it and I am just going down that path and trying to be thoughtful and try not to pick winners and losers and find the good in everybody. I think Democrats have good ideas, Republicans have ideas.

Libertarians have. Everybody has got some good things. And I would rather focus on what is good about each person or party. But yet the tools themselves, especially the spending data which we launched today, it is going to go live tomorrow or the next day. The spending data, the checkbook register of every city in every county and every state in the United States is going live on Citizen Portal. So I guess I kind of should be afraid, maybe. But I'm like, I just live in my life and I don't think about the negative consequences.

Charlie Kirk was assassinated three miles from where I was born. The impact that he has had on helping Christians, you know, bear their witness of Jesus Christ, millions, tens of millions of people buying Bibles, going to church, praying more than ever before. That martyrdom of Charlie Kirk is spreading his message to hundreds of million of the people. I mean, he was successful in his lifetime, but even in death, more and more people are learning about what he believed. So, I don't know. As he said, there's a lot worse things than death.

So I think I'm not afraid. Maybe I should be. Yeah, that's interesting how you said that. More people are learning after his assassination. Yeah, Jesus Christ. Same thing, right? Yeah. My daughter went to his memorial service and she posted a photo and says, I am determined to be more like Charlie Christ, he's not ashamed of his faith, He believes in Jesus as his Lord, and I'm gonna be living more Charlie Kirk from now on. And I teared up thinking of my daughter Pledging that in her life, she's going to promote Jesus Christ in public.

She's a counselor in a school. He's not going hide it, right? And it's because of Charlie. That's amazing. And that's an easy thing to do, especially the more you grow. You know, I remember when I decided to bring a pastor onto the podcast to talk, you know where we actually talked about how it is in the Bible to take care of your health. Some people are tough. Oh, you shouldn't get into the religion. I mean, I got a Bible right behind your head right there. You know, so I let people know. So because I think that, that you know that's part of the word.

It's it's our mission to actually spread the Word. That's right. Now, one more question. Oh yeah. We've got the other question there, what is the hardest thing you've ever done in your life? So I was actually thinking about that fear question again. And I think when I have been afraid, it's mostly in relationship to my wife. When I had to tell her bad news or tell or I've done something wrong. Like, I mean, that's the only thing I'm afraid of. So the hardest thing ever done in my life was years of therapy.

Really? Yeah. After 18 years of marriage and after having eight kids, her therapist, she went to a therapist for anger issues. And after one session, he said, Christy, you're not angry with your eight, kids. You're angry at Paul because he's not a partner. He's showing up. and I was like shocked by that and i was in denial for like a year but as I went to therapy and as i started listening and learning and caring about her and realizing her feelings mattered and she was right I Was present physically but not mentally I?

Was doing work when we went, to disneyland on our annual vacation I hated it She and the kids love it. It's the happiest place on earth. You got eight kids going to Disney World or Disneyland having a blast. And dad is hating the vacation because he's feeling bad that he is not working. I remember I'll never forget after four years of therapy and after strength finder and realizing what really matters that she is the most important person in my life and my kids and God. That was hard though. It was to unlearn all those things about work and impact and mission and realize, no, it's people.

Its your wife, its your kids. They matter the most. So now my highlight over Christmas was three days at Great Wolf Lodge with five of my grandkids. And it is easy to just like forget about the work, and just be with my grandchildren. That is a powerful thing what you just said there. I have had a lot of very successful entrepreneurs that Had to go through therapy and it took a while, you know being part of men's groups, etc Where they have said the exact same thing. They were so focused on Scaling and the success that they were physically present but they weren't really present and now the way they lived their life and The way I see how they live their lives you don't have all them social medias and have contact with a lot of them a continuous contact and And it's completely different.

It's really they're putting their family first and making sure they are present. I'm grateful she stuck with me because that was four intense years. And they took me a long time to learn those things because I was in denial. Some of my friends called me Perfect Paul and I as a peacemaker at home and my mom doted on me.

Fear, Purpose, and Closing Advice 1:24:30

She thought I just the greatest kid ever born. So I am like, why isn't my wife seeing me that way? But it was because I was starving her emotionally for 18 years. And women need that. They need an emotional part. Their very mentally emotional connected. Now we're doing business together. She's on my board. she's a big shareholder. Just like you and your wife for 20 years have been working together, I admire that so much. But now for seven, eight years, she'd been with me in SOAR and she is a Gallup coach.

He coaches my team members. It's fantastic. Hey, who knows? Now it might be a little bit different. Now she's going to hate the Disney trip while you're enjoying it. You know, she doesn't like Broadway anymore. We used to go to New York like twice a year and see five or six shows. She would keep every playbill. she has an encyclopedic memory of everyone we've ever seen on stage. And just the last few years, She's just lost interest in Broadway. I'm like, Oh, please get that interest back, because I really love Broadway.

Yeah, my wife and I have seen a lot of Broadway shows. We're into that. Before Lin-Manuel became famous with Hamilton, we saw him in the Heights in Los Angeles, and he autographed a playbill for my daughter. We have photos with Lin-Manuel Miranda before he became famous. So we have so many. We saw Annie Get Your Gun with Bernadette Peters and she got like a six minute standing ovation and repeated the number. Like we've seen incredible stuff. I really want my wife to like Broadway again. They got the Michael Jackson one going around right now, too.

So they're coming here to South Florida the weekend of Valentine's Day. That's gonna be exciting. Awesome. Paul, if there's someone listening or viewing this podcast who really resonates with today's message, what's one thing you can leave them off of? So I think fear is an enemy of human progress. I thing there's lots of reasons to be afraid, but I thin you have to find a reason to hope. Hope that you've been created with incredible talents and strengths. You have a family history that shows you got survivors going back thousands of years.

Your own parents, grandparents, great grandparents. you inherited incredible strength from them. Just think about it. Be grateful for it. And then in your own life, as you think about planning your life don't be afraid. Don't afraid of all of the uncertainties and unknown things. There are tools and resources and experts and you just have to look for them and find them. And so my main message is be hopeful and don't be afraid to invest time and effort in following your dreams and living healthy and making good choices and just know that there's knowledge and light and truth everywhere.

There's intelligence at your fingertips. And unlike any previous generation of humans, you will have more opportunities to thrive than anyone who's ever lived on earth before. So I think embrace it. Step up to the plate. It's your time on earth. And you've got incredible possibilities ahead of you if you learn stuff and then do it, knowledge is in power. But knowledge with action is incredibly empowering and reaping the fruits and rewards of great work is super satisfying. More people deserve to have that.

Beautiful. Well said. As we wrap up here, where can people find you? Paul at sore.com. If you want to email me, I'm a very active on LinkedIn with tens of thousands of followers on linkedin I post there all the time. I also have a blog called Paul Allen dot AI. My oldest daughter who's a famous writer is going to help me start posting essays there every week. Okay, so the thoughts that I've had for many, many decades will start to come out at Paul Alan dot ai. So follow me there and I look forward to hearing from many people, especially experts who want to provide AI to the people that they're trying to serve.

Amazing. Paul, it was a pleasure having you on a Healthy Point of View podcast. This was extremely informative. And I think our viewers and listeners are gonna be able to take something away from this one. Thank you. Thanks, Sam. Guys, you heard Paul. Knowledge is in power. We've been lied to this whole time. Talk about knowledge is power, It is only power if you put it into action. Once you've put into it action, you'll see the fruits from it. Guys, make sure you take this podcast. I know you have friends and family that are gonna be able to do something with this information, something powerful.

You can change your life with his podcast, Make sure that you share it, like, comment, subscribe, do all that fun stuff, and we'll you for the next one.