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For the first episode of the Newcomer podcast, I sat down with Reid Hoffman — the PayPal mafia member, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and Microsoft board member. Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI's board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk.“This kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said. Musk told Hoffman that he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during conversations about a decade ago. “This is part of how I operate,” Hoffman remembers. “Smart people from my network tell me things, and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I'm like, ‘Oh, yes, we have another wave coming.'”This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it's a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it's more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta's enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Why I Wanted to Talk to Reid Hoffman & What I Took AwayHoffman is a social network personified. Even his journey to something as wonky as artificial intelligence is told through his connections with people. In a world of algorithms and code, Hoffman is upfront about the extent to which human connections decide Silicon Valley's trajectory. (Of course they are paired with profound technological developments that are far larger than any one person or network.)When it comes to the rapidly developing future powered by large language models, a big question in my mind is who exactly decides how these language models work? Sydney appeared in Microsoft Bing and then disappeared. Microsoft executives can dispatch our favorite hallucinations without public input. Meanwhile, masses of images can be gobbled up without asking their creators and then the resulting image generation tools can be open-sourced to the world. It feels like AI super powers come and go with little notice. It's a world full of contradictions. There's constant talk of utopias and dystopias and yet startups are raising conventional venture capital financing.The most prominent player in artificial intelligence — OpenAI — is a non-profit that raised from Tiger Global. It celebrates its openness in its name and yet competes with companies whose technology is actually open-sourced. OpenAI's governance structure and priorities largely remain a mystery. Finally, unlike tech's conservative billionaires who throw their money into politics, in the case of Hoffman, here is a tech overlord that I seem to mostly agree with politically. I wanted to know what that would be like. Is it just good marketing? And where exactly is his heart and political head at right now?I thought he delivered. I didn't feel like he was dodging my questions, even in a world where maintaining such a wide network requires diplomacy. Hoffman seemed eager and open — even if he started to bristle at what he called my “edgy words.”Some Favorite QuotesWe covered a lot of ground in our conversation. We talked about AI sentience and humans' failures to identify consciousness within non-human beings. We talked about the coming rise in AI cloud compute spending and how Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are positioned in the AI race.Hoffman said he had one major condition for getting involved in OpenAI back in the early days when Musk was still on board.“My price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word “robocalypse,” Hoffman told me. “Because I thought that the problem was it's very catchy and it evokes fear.”I asked Hoffman why he thought Musk got involved in artificial intelligence in the first place when Musk seems so worried about how it might develop. Why get the ball rolling down the hill at all, I wondered?Hoffman replied that many people in the field of artificial intelligence had “messiah complexes.”“It's the I am the one who must bring this — Prometheus, the fire to humanity,” Hoffman said. “And you're like, ‘Okay, I kind of think it should be us versus an individual.'” He went on, “Now, us can't be 8 billion people — us is a small group. But I think, more or less, you see the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there? And then let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.”I raised the possibility that this merely suggested oligarchic control of artificial intelligence rather than dictatorial control. We also discussed Hoffman's politics, including his thoughts on Joe Biden and “woke” politics. I asked him about the state of his friendship with fellow PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel. “I basically am sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and not committed otherwise,” Hoffman said. “There are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to. There are others that I do continue because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.”I suggested that Thiel's public views sometimes seemed insincere.“Oh, that's totally corrosive,” Hoffman said. “And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that in conversations I have, I push people, including Peter, on a lot.”Give it a listen.Find the PodcastRead the TranscriptEric: Reid, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm very excited for this conversation. You know, I'm getting ready for my own AI conference at the end of this month, so hopefully this is sort of a prep by the end of this conversation, we'll all be super smart and ready for that. I feel like there've been so many rounds of sort of AI as sort of the buzzword of the day.This clearly seems the hottest. When did you get into this moment of it? I mean, obviously you just stepped off the Open AI board. You were on that board. Like how, when did you start to see this movement that we're experiencing right now coming.Reid: Well, it's funny because my undergraduate major was artificial intelligence and cognitive science. So I've, I've been around the hoop for multiple waves for a long time and I think this kicked off actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago. You know, 10-ish years ago, Elon and I would have dinner about once a quarter and he's like, well, are you paying attention to this AI stuff?And I'm like, well, I majored in it and you know, I know about this stuff. He's like, no, you need to get back involved. And I was like, all right. This is part of how I operate is smart people from my network tell me things and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I went, oh yes, we have another wave coming.And this was probably about seven or eight years ago, when I, when I saw the beginning of the wave or the seismic event. Maybe it was a seismic event out at sea and I was like, okay, there's gonna be a tsunami here and we should start getting ready cause the tsunami is actually gonna be amazingly great and interesting.Eric: And that—is that the beginning of Open AI?Reid: Open AI is later. What I did is I went and made connections with the kind of the heads of every AI lab and major company because I concluded that I thought that the AI revolution will be primarily driven by large companies initially because of the scale compute requirements.And so, you know, talked to Demis Hassabis, met Mustafa Suleyman, talked to Yann LeCun, talked to Jeff Dean, you know, all these kind of folks and kind of, you know, built all that. And then it was later in conversations with Sam and Elon that I said, look, we need to do something that's a for pro humanity. Not just commercial effort. And my price for participation, cause I thought it was a great idea, but my price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word robocalypse. Because I thought that the problem was that it's very catchy and it evokes fear. And actually, in fact, one of the things I think about this whole area is that it's so much more interesting and has so much amazing opportunity for humanity.A little bit like, I don't know if you saw the Atlantic article I wrote that we evolve ourselves through technology and I'm, you know, going to be doing some writings around describing AI as augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I wanted to kind of build that positive, optimistic case that I think is the higher probability that I think we can shape towards and so forth.So it's like, okay, I'm in, but no more Robocalypse.Eric: I appreciate the ultimate sort of network person that you tell the story through people. I always appreciate when the origin stories of technology actually come through the human beings. With Elon in particular, I'm sort of confused by his position because it seems like he's very afraid of AI.And if that's the case, why would you want to, like, do anything to sort of get the ball rolling down the hill? Like, isn't there a sort of just like, stay away from it, man, if you think it's so bad. How do you see his thinking? And I'm sure it's evolved.Reid: Well, I think his instinct for the good and the challenging of this is he tends to think AI will only be good if I'm the one who's in control.Eric: Sort of, yeah.Reid: Yeah. And this is actually somewhat replete within the modern AI field. Not everybody but this. And Elon is a public enough figure that I think, you know, making this comment of him is not talking at a school.Other people would, there's a surprising number of Messiah complexes in the field of AI, and, and it's the, I am the one who must bring this, you know, Prometheus, you know, the Fire to humanity. And you're like, okay, I kind of think it should be us, right? Versus an individual. Now us can't be 8 billion people, us as a small group, but I think more or less you see the, the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there and then let, let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.Like if you say, well, is this going to, you know, institutionalize, ongoing, um, you know, power structures or racial bias, something else? Well, we're talking to the people to make sure that we're going to minimize that, especially over time and navigate it as a real issue. And so those are the, like, that's the kind of anti Messiah complex, which, which is more or less the efforts that I tend to get involved in.Eric: Right. At least sort of oligarchy, of AI control instead of just dictatorship of it.Reid: Well, yeah, and it depends a little bit, even on oligarchy, look, things are built by small numbers of people. It's just a fact, right? Like, there aren't more than, you know, a couple of founders, maybe maximum five in any, any particular thing. There is, you know, there's reasons why. When you have a construction project, you have a head of construction, right?Et cetera. The important thing is to make sure that's why you have, why you have a CEO, you have a board of directors. That's why you have, you know, you say, well, do we have the right thing where a person is accountable to a broader group? And that broader group feels their governance responsibility seriously.So oligarchy is a—Eric: a chargedReid: is a charged word. And I,Eric: There's a logic to it. I'm not, I'm not using it to say it doesn't make sense that you want the people to really understand it around, around it. Um, I mean, specifically with Open AI, I mean, you, you just stepped off the board. You're also on the board of Microsoft, which is obviously a very significant player.In this future, I mean, it's hard to be open. I get a little frustrated with the “open” in “Open AI” because I feel like there's a lot that I don't understand. I'm like, maybe they should change the name a little bit, but is it still a charity in your mind? I mean, it's obviously raised from Tiger Global, the ultimate prophet maker.Like, how should we think about the sort of core ambitions of Open AI?Reid: Well, um, one, the board I was on was a fine one and they've been very diligent about making sure that all of the controls, including for the subsidiary company are from the 501(C)(3) and diligent to its mission, which is staffed by people on the 501(C)(3) board with the responsibilities of being on a 5 0 1 board, which is being in service of the mission, not doing, you know, private inurement and other kinds of things.And so I actually think it is fundamentally still a 501(C)(3). The challenge is if you kind of say, you look at this and say, well, in order to be a successful player in the modern scale AI, you need to have billions of dollars of compute. Where do you get those billions of dollars? Because, you know, the foundations and the philanthropy industry is generally speaking bad at tech and bad at anything other than little tiny checks in tech.And so you said, well, it's really important to do this. So part of what I think, you know, Sam and that group of folks came up with this kind of clever thing to say, well, look, we're about beneficial AI, we're about AI for humanity. We're about making an, I'll make a comment on “open” in a second, but we are gonna generate some commercially valuable things.What if we struck a commercial deal? So you can have the commercial things or you can share the commercial things. You invest in us in order to do this, and then we make sure that the AI has the right characteristics. And then the “open”, you know, all short names have, you know, some simplicities to them.The idea is open to the world in terms of being able to use it and benefit from it. It doesn't mean the same thing as open source because AI is actually one of those things where opening, um, where you could do open source, you could actually be creating something dangerous. As a modern example, last year, Open AI deliberately… DALL·E 2 was ready four months before it went out. I know cause I was playing with it. They did the four months to do safety training and the kind of safety training is, well, let's make sure that individuals can't be libeled. Let's make sure you can't create as best we can, child sexual material. Let's make sure you can't do revenge porn and we'll serve it through the API and we'll make it unchangeable on that.And then the open source people come out and they go do whatever you want and then wow, you get all this crazy, terrible stuff. So “open” is openness of availability, but still with safety and still with, kind of call it the pro-human controls. And that's part of what OpenAI means in this.Eric: I wrote in sort of a mini essay in the newsletter about, like tech fatalism and it fits into your sort of messiah complex that you're talking about, if I'm a young or new startup entrepreneur, it's like this is my moment if I hold back, you know, there's a sense that somebody else is gonna do it too. This isn't necessarily research. Some of the tools are findable, so I need to do it. If somebody's going to, it's easy if you're using your own personhood to say, I'm better than that guy! Even if I have questions about it, I should do it. So that, I think we see that over and over again. Obviously the stakes with AI, I think we both agree are much larger.On the other hand, with AI, there's actually, in my view, been a little bit more restraint. I mean, Google has been a little slower. Facebook seems a little worried, like, I don't know. How do you agree with that sort of view of tech fatalism? Is there anything to be done about it or it's just sort of—if it's possible, it's gonna happen, so the best guy, the best team should do it?Or, or how do you think about that sense of inevitability on if it's possible, it'll be built?Reid: Well, one thing is you like edgy words, so what you describe is tech fatalism, I might say as something more like tech inevitability or tech destiny. And part of it is what, I guess what I would say is for example, we are now in a AI moment and era. There's global competition for it. It's scale compute.It's not something that even somebody like a Google or someone else can kind of have any kind of, real ball control on. But the way I look at it is, hey, look, there's, there's utopic outcomes and dystopic outcomes and it's within our control to steer it. Um, and even to steer it at speed, even under competition because.For example, obviously the general discourse within media is, oh my God, what's happening with the data and what's gonna happen with the bias and what's gonna happen with the crazy conversations, with Bing Chat and all the rest of this stuff. And you're like, well, what am I obsessed about? I'm obsessed about the fact that I have line of sight to an AI tutor and an AI doctor on every cell phone.And think about if you delay that, whatever number of years you delay that, what your human cost is of delaying that, right? And it's like, how do we get that? And for example, people say, wow, the real issue is that Bing chat model is gonna go off the rails and have a drunken cocktail party conversation because it's provoked to do so and can't run away from the person who's provoking it.Uh, and you say, well, is that the real issue? Or is it a real issue? Let's make sure that as many people as we can have access to that AI doctor have access to that AI tutor that where, where we can, where not only, you know, cause obviously technology cause it's expensive initially benefits elites and people are rich.And by the way, that's a natural way of how our capitalist system and all the rest works. But let's try to get it to everyone else as quickly as possible, right?Eric: I a hundred percent agree with that. So I don't want any of my sort of, cynical take like, oh my God, this version.I'd also extend it, you know, I think you're sort of referencing maybe the Sydney situation where you have Kevin Rus in New York Times, you know, communicating with Bing's version of ChatGPT and sort of finding this character who's sort of goes by Sydney from the origin story.And Ben Thompson sort of had a similar experience. And I would almost say it's sad for the world to be deprived of that too. You know, there's like a certain paranoia, it's like, it's like, oh, I wanna meet this sort of seemingly intelligent character. I don't know. What do you make of that whole episode? I mean, people really, I mean, Ben Thompson, smart tech writers really latched onto this as something that they found moving.I don't know. Is there anything you take away from that saga and do you think we'll see those sort of, I don't know, intelligent characters again,Reid: Well for sure. I think 2023 will be at least the first year of the so-called chatbot. Not just because of ChatGPT. And I think that we will have a bunch of different chat bots. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be, you know, entertainment companions, witty dialogue participants.I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be information like Insta, Wikipedia, kind of things. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to just have someone to talk to. So I think there'll be a whole, whole range of things. And I think we will have all that experience.And I think part of the thing is to say, look, what are the parameters by which you should say the bots should absolutely not do X. And it's fine if these people want a bot that's like, you know, smack talking and these people want something that you know, goes, oh heck. Right?You know, like, what's, what's the range of that? And obviously children get in the mix and, and the questions around things that we already encounter a lot with search, which is like could a chat bot enable self-harm in a way that would be really bad?Let's really try to make sure that someone who's depressed doesn't figure out a way to harm themselves either with search or with chat bots.Eric: Is there a psychologically persuasive, so it's not just the information provided, it's the sense that they might be like walking you towards something less serious.Reid: And they are! This is the thing that's amazing. and it's part of the reason why like everyone should have some interaction with these in some emotional, tangible way. We are really passing the Turing test. This is the thing that I had visibility on a few years ago because I was like, okay, we kind of judge, you know, intelligence and sentience like that, Google engineers like it.I asked if it was conscious and it said it was because we use language as a way of doing that. And you're like, well, but look, that tells you that your language use is not quite fully there. And because part of what's really amazing about, “hallucinations”—and I'm probably gonna do a fireside chat with the gray matter thing on hallucinations, maybe later this week—where the hallucination is, on one hand it says this amazingly accurate, wonderful thing, very persuasively, and then it says this other thing really persuasively that's total fiction, right? And you're like, wow, you sound very persuasive in both cases. But that one's true and that one's fiction.And that's part of the reason why I kind of go back to the augmented intelligence and all the things that I see going on with in 2023 is much less replacement and much more augmentation. It's not zero replacement, but it's much more augmentation in terms of how this plays. And that is super exciting.Eric: Yeah. I mean, to some degree it reflects sort of the weakness in human beings' own abilities to read what's happening. Ahead of this interview, I was talking to the publicly available ChatGPT. I don't know if you saw but I was asking it for questions and I felt like it delivered a very reasonable set of questions. You know, you've written about Blitzscaling, so [ChatGPT] is like, let's ask about that. It's, you know, ask in the context of Microsoft. But when I was like, have you [ChatGPT] ever watched Joe Rogan? Have you ever been on a podcast? Sometimes maybe you should have a long sort of, you should have a statement like I'm doing right now where I sort of have some things I'm saying.Then I ask a question. Other times it should be short and sweet. Sometimes it, you know, annoys you and says oligarchy, like explaining to the chat bot. [In an interview, a journalist] can't just ask a list of like, straightforward questions and it felt like it didn't really even get that. And I get that there's some sort of, we're, we're starting to have a conversation now with companies like Jasper, where it's almost like the language prompting itself.I think Sam Altman was maybe saying it's like almost a form of plain language like coding because you have to figure out how to get what you want out of them. And maybe it was just my failure to explain it, but as a journalist replacing questions, I didn't find the current model of ChatGPT really capable of that.Reid: No, that's actually one of the things on the ChatGPT I find is, like, for example, you ask what questions to ask Reid Hoffman in a podcast interview, and you'll get some generic ones. It'll say like, well, what's going on with new technologies like AI and, and what's going on in Silicon Valley? And you know, and you're like, okay, sure.But those aren't the really interesting questions. That's not what makes me a great journalist, which is kind of a lens to something that people can learn from and that will evolve and change that'll get better. But that's again, one of the reasons why I think it's a people plus machine. Because for example, if I were to say, hey, what should I ask Eric about? Or what should I talk to Eric about and go to? Yeah, gimme some generic stuff. Now if I said, oh, give me a briefing on, um, call it, um, UN governance systems as they apply to AI, because I want to be able to talk about this. I didn't do this, but it would give me a kind of a quick Wikipedia briefing and that would make my conversation more interesting and I might be able to ask a question about the governance system or something, you know, as a way of doing it.And that's what AI is, I think why the combo is so great. Um, and anyway, so that's what we should be aiming towards. It isn't to say, by the way, sometimes like replacement is a good thing. For example, you go to autonomous vehicles and say, hey, look, if we could wave a wand and every car on the road today would be an autonomous vehicle, we'd probably save, we'd probably go from 40,000 deaths in the US per, you know, year to, you know, maybe a thousand or 2000. And you're like, you're shaving 38,000 lives a year, in doing this. It's a good thing. And, you know, it will have a positive vector on gridlocks and for climate change and all the rest of the stuff.And you go, okay, that replacement, yes, we have to navigate truck jobs and all the rest, but that replacement's good. But I think a lot of it is going to end up being, you know, kind of, various forms of amplification. Like if you get to journalists, you go, oh, it'll help me ask, figure out which interesting questions to add.Not because it'll just go here, here's your script to ask questions. But you can get better information to prep your thinking on it.Eric: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up like the self-driving car case and, you know, you're, are you still on the board of Aurora?Reid: I am.Eric: I've, you know, I covered Uber, so I was in their self-driving cars very early, and they made a lot of promises. Lyft made a lot of promises.I mean, I feel like part of my excitement about this sort of generative AI movement is that it feels like it doesn't require completeness in the same way that self-driving cars do. You know? And that, that, that's been a barrier to self-driving cars. On the flip side, you know, sometimes we sort of wave away the inaccuracy and then we say, you know, we sort of manage it.I think that's what we were sort of talking about earlier. You imagine it in some of the completeness that could come. So I guess the question here is just do you think, what I'm calling the completeness problem. I guess just the idea that it needs to be sort of fully capable will be an issue with the large language models or do you think you have this sort of augmented model where it could sort of stop now and still be extremely useful to much of society?Reid: I think it could stop now and be extremely useful. I've got line of sight on current technology for a tutor, for a doctor, for a bunch of other stuff. One of the things my partner and I wrote last year was that within five years, there's gonna be a co-pilot for every profession.The way to think about that is what professionals do. They process information, they take some kind of action. Sometimes that's generating other information, just like you see with Microsoft's co-pilot product for engineers. And what you can see happening with DallE and other image generation for graphic designers, you'll see this for every professional, that there will be a co-pilot on today's technology that can be built.That's really amazing. I do think that as you continue to make progress, you can potentially make them even more amazing, because part of what happened when you move from, you know, GPT3 to 3.5, which is all of a sudden it can write sonnets. Right? You didn't really know that it was gonna be able to write sonnets.That's giving people superpowers. Most people, including myself—I mean, look, I could write a sonnet if you gave me a couple of days and a lot of coffee and a lot of attempts to really try.Eric: But you wouldn't.Reid: You wouldn't. Yeah. But now I can go, oh, you know, I'd like to, to, um, write a sonnet about my friend Sam Altman.And I can go down and I can sit there and I can kind of type, you know, duh da, and I can generate, well, I don't like that one. Oh, but then I like this one, you know, and da da da. And, and that, that gives you superpowers. I mean, think about what you can do for writing, a whole variety of things with that. And that I think the more and more completeness is the word you are using is I think also a powerful thing. Even though what we have right now is amazing.Eric: Is GPT4 a big improvement over what we have? I assume you've seen a fair bit of unreleased, stuff. Like how hyped should we be about the improvement level?Reid: I have. I'm not really allowed to say very much about it cause, you know, part of the responsibilities of former board members and confidentiality. But I do think that it will be a nice—I think people will look at it and go, Ooh, that's cool. And it will be another iteration, another thing as amazing as ChatGPT has, and obviously that's kind of in the last few months. It's kind of taken the world by storm, opening up this vista of imagination and so forth.I think GPT4 will be another step forward where people will go, Ooh, that's, that, that's another cool thing. I think that's—can't be more specific than that, but watch this space cause it'll be cool.Eric: Throughout this conversation we've danced around this sort of artificial general intelligence question. starting with the discussion of Elon and the creation of eventually Open AI. I'm curious how close you think we are with AGI and this idea of a sort of, I mean, people define it so many different ways, you know, it's more sophisticated than humans in some tasks, you know, mini tasks, whatever.How, how do you think we're far from that? Or how, how, how do you see that playing out?Reid: Personally amongst a lot of the people who are in the field, I'm probably on the, we're-much-further-than-we-think stage. Now, some of that's because I've lived through this before with my undergraduate degree and the, you know, the pattern generally is, oh my God, we've gotten this computer to do this amazing thing that we thought was formally the provence of only these cognitive human beings.And it could do that. So then by the way, in 10 years it'll be solving new science problems like fusion and all the rest. And if you go back to the seventies, you saw that same dialogue. I mean, it, it's, it's an ongoing thing. Now we do have a more amazing set of cognitive capabilities than we did before, and there are some reasons to argue that it could be in a decade or two. Because you say, well, these large language models can enable coding and that coding can all, can then be self, reflective and generative, and that can then make something go. But when I look at the coding and how that works right now, it doesn't generate the kind of code that's like, oh, that's amazing new code.It helps with the, oh, I want to do a parser for quick sort, right? You know, like that kind of stuff. And it's like, okay, that's great. Or a systems integration use of an API or calling in an API for a spellchecker or whatever. Like it's really helpful stuff on engineers, but it's not like, oh my God, it's now inventing the new kind of training of large scale models techniques.And so I think even some of the great optimists will tell you of the great, like believers that it'll be soon and say there's one major invention. And the thing is, once you get to one major invention, is that one major invention? Is that three major inventions? Is it 10 major inventions?Like I think we are some number of major inventions away. I don't, I certainly don't think it's impossible to get there.Eric: Sorry. The major inventions are us human beings build, building things into the system or…?Reid: Yeah. Like for example, you know, can it do, like, for example, a classic, critique of a lot of large language models is can it do common sense reasoning.Eric: Gary Marcus is very…Reid: Exactly. Right. Exactly. And you know, the short answer right now is the large language models are approximating common sense reasoning.Now they're doing it in a powerful and interesting enough way that you're like, well, that's pretty useful. It's pretty helpful about what it's doing, but I agree that it's not yet doing all of that. And also you get problems like, you know, what are called one shot learning. Can you learn from one instance of it?Cause currently the training requires lots and lots of compute processing over days or in self play, can you have an accurate memory store that you update? Like for example, you say now fact X has happened, your entire world based on fact X. Look, there's a bunch of this stuff to all go.And the question is, is that one major invention is that, you know, five major inventions, and by the way, major inventions or major inventions even all the amazing stuff we've done over the last five to 10 years. Major inventions on major inventions. So I myself tend to be two things on the AGI one.I tend to think it's further than most people think. And I don't know if that further is it's 10 years versus five or 20 years versus 10 or 50 years versus 20. I don't, I don't really know.Eric: In your lifetime, do you think?Reid: It's possible, although I don't know. But let me give two other lenses I think on the AGI question cause the other thing that people tend to do is they tend to go, there's like this AI, which is technique machine learning, and there's totally just great, it's augmented intelligence and then there's AGI and who knows what happens with AGI.And you say, well first is AGI is a whole range of possible things. Like what if you said, Hey, I can build something that's the equivalent of a decent engineer or decent doctor, but to run it costs me $200 an hour and I have AGI? But it's $200 an hour. And you're like, okay, well that's cool and that means we can, we can get as many of them as we need. But it's expensive. And so it isn't like all of a sudden, you know, Terminator or you know, or inventing fusion or something like that is AGI and or a potential version of AGI. So what is AGI is the squishy thing that people then go, magic. The second thing is, the way that I've looked at the progress in the last five to eight years is we're building a set of iteratively better savants, right?It just like the chess player was a savant. Um, and, and the savants are interestingly different now. When does savant become a general intelligence and when might savant become a general super intelligence? I don't know. It's obviously a super intelligence already in some ways. Like for example, I wouldn't want to try to play, go against it and win, try to win.It's a super intelligence when it comes, right? But like okay, that's great cause in our perspective, having some savants like this that are super intelligence is really helpful to us. So, so the whole AGI discussion I think tends to go a little bit Hollywood-esque. You know, it's not terminator.Eric: I mean, there there is, there's a sort of argument that could be made. I mean, you know, humans are very human-centric about our beliefs and our intelligence, right? We don't have a theory of mind for other animals. It's very hard for us to prove that other species, you know, have some experience of consciousness like qualia or whatever.Reid: Very philosophically good use of a term by the way.Eric: Thank you. Um, I studied philosophy though. I've forgotten more than I remember. But, um, you know, I mean…Reid: Someday we'll figure out what it's like to be a bat. Probably not this time.Eric: Right, right, exactly. Is that, that's Nagel. If the machine's better than me at chess and go there, there's a level of I, you know, here I am saying it doesn't have an experience, but it, it's so much smarter than me in certain domains.I don't, I, the question is just like, it seems like humans are not capable of seeing what it's like to be a bat. So will we ever really be able to sort of convince ourselves that there's something that it's like to be, um, an AGI system?Reid: Well, I think the answer is um, yes, but it will require a bunch of sophistication. Like one of the things I think is really interesting about, um, as we anthropomorphize the world a little bit and I think some of this machine. Intelligence stuff will, will enable us to do that is, well what does it mean to understand X or, or, or, or no X or experience X or have qualia or whatever else.And right now what we do is we say, well it's some king of shadowy image from being human. So we tend to undercount like animals intelligence. And people tend to be surprised like, look, you know, some animals mate for life and everything else, they clearly have a theory of the world and it's clearly stuff we're doing.We go, ah, they don't have the same kind of consciousness we do. And you're like, well they certainly don't have the same kind of consciousness, but we're not doing a very good job of studying like what the, where it's similar in order it's different. And I think we're gonna need to broaden that out outcome to start saying, well, when you compare us and an eagle or a dolphin or a whale or a chimpanzee or a lion, you know, what are the similarities and and differences?And how this works. And um, and I think that will also then be, well, what happens when it's a silicon substrate? You know? Do we, do we think that consciousness requires a biological substrate? If so, why? Um, and, you know, part of how, of course we get to understand, um, each other's consciousness as we, we get this depth of experience.Where I realize is it isn't, you're just a puppet.Eric:  [laughs] I am, I am just a puppet.Reid: Well, we're, we're talking to each other through Riverside, so, you know, who knows, right. You know, deep fakes and all that.Eric: The AI's already ahead of you. You know, I'm just, it's already, no.Reid: Yeah. I think we're gonna have to get more sophisticated on that question now.I think it's, it's too trivial to say because it can mimic language in particularly interesting ways. And it says, yes, I'm conscious that that makes it conscious. Like that's not, that's not what we use as an instance. And, and part of it is like, do you understand the like part of how we've come to understand each other's consciousness is we realize that we experience things in similar ways.We feel joy in similar, we feel pain in similar ways and that kinda stuff. And that's part of how we begin to understand. And I think it'll be really good that this may kick off kind of us being slightly less kind of call it narcissistically, anthropocentric in this and a broader concept as we look at this.Eric: You know, I was talking to my therapist the other day and I was saying, you know, oh, I did this like kind gesture, but I didn't feel like some profound, like, I don't, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I did it. It felt like I did the right thing should, you know, shouldn't I feel like more around it?And you know, her perspective was much more like, oh, what matters is like doing the thing, not sort of your internal states about it. Which to me would, would go to the, if the machine can, can do all the things we expect from sort of a caring type type machine. Like why do we need to spend all this time when we don't even expect that of humans to always feel the right feelings.Reid: I totally agree with you. Look, I think the real question is what you do. Now that being said, part of how we predict what you do is that, you know, um, you may not have like at that moment gone, haha, I think of myself as really good cause I've done this kind thing. Which by the way, might be a better human thing as opposed to like, I'm doing this cause I'm better than most people.Eric: Right.Reid: Yeah, but it's the pattern in which you engage in these things and part of the feelings and so forth is cause that creates a kind of a reliability of pattern of do you see other people? Do you have the aspiration to have, not just yourself, but the people around you leading better and improving lives.And obviously if that's the behavior that we're seeing from these things, then that's a lot of it. And the only question is, what's that forward looking momentum on it? And I think amongst humans that comes to an intention, a model of the world and so forth. You know, amongst, amongst machines that mean just maybe the no, no, we're aligned.Well, like, we've done a really good alignment with human progress.Eric: Do you think there will be a point in time where it's like an ethical problem to unplug it? Like I think of like a bear, right? Like a bear is dangerous. You know, there are circumstances where pretty comfortable. Killing the bear,But if the bear like hasn't actually done anything, we've taken it under our care. Like we don't just like shoot bears at zoos, you know? Do you think there's a point where like, and it costs us money to sustain the bear at a zoo, do you think there are cases where we might say, oh man, now there's an ethical question around unpluggingReid: I think it's a when, not an if.Eric: Yeah.Reid: Right? I mean, it may be a when, once again, just like AGI, that's a fair way's out. But it's a when, not an if. And by the way, I think that's again, part of the progress that we make because we think about like, how should we be treating it? Because, you know, like for example, if you go back a hundred, 150 years, the whole concept of animal rights doesn't exist in humans.You know, it's like, hey, you wanna, you want to torture animal X to death, you know, like you're queer, but you're, you're, you're allowed to do that. That's an odd thing for you to do. And maybe it's kind of like, like distasteful, like grungy bad in some way, but , you know, it's like, okay. Where's now you're like, oh, that person is, is like going out to try to go torture animals! We should like get them in an institution, right? Like, that's not okay. You know, what is that further progress for the rights and lives? And I think it will ultimately come to things that we think are, when it gets to kind of like things that have their own agency and have their own consciousness and sets of existence.We should be including all of that in some, in some grand or elevated, you know, kind of rights conceptions.Eric: All right, so back back to my listeners who, you know, wanna know where to invest and make money off this and, you know.Reid: [laughs] It isn't from qualia and consciousness. Oh, wait.Eric: Who do you think are the key players? The key players in the models. Then obviously there are more sort of, I don't know if we're calling them vertical solutions or product oriented or whatever, however you think about them.But starting with the models, like who do you see as sort of the real players right now? Are you counting out a Google or do you think they'll still, you know, sort of show?Reid: Oh no. I think Google will show up. And obviously, you know, Open AI, Microsoft has done a ton of stuff. I co-founded Inflection last year with Mustafa Suleyman. We have a just amazing team and I do see a lot of teams, so I'm.Eric: And that's to build sort of the foundational…Reid: Yeah, they're gonna, well, they're building their own models and they're gonna build some things off those models.We haven't really said what they are yet. But that's obviously going to be kind of new models. Adept, another Greylock investment building its own models, Character is building its own models, Anthropic is building its own models. And Anthropic is, you know, Dario and the crew is smart folks from Open AI, they're, they're doing stuff within a kind of a similar research program that Open AI is doing.And so I think those are the ones that I probably most track.Eric: Character's an interesting case and you know, we're still learning more about that company. You know, I was first to report they're looking to raise 250 million. My understanding is that what's interesting is they're building the models, but then for a particular use case, right?Or like, it's really a question of leverage or like, do people need to build the models to be competitive or do you think there will be... can you build a great business on top of Stability or Open AI or do you need to do it yourself?Reid: I think you can, but the way you do it is you can't say it's cause I have unique access to the model. It has to be, you know, I have a business that has network effects or I'm well integrated in enterprise, or I have another deep stack of technology that I'm bringing into it. It can't just be, I'm a lightweight front end to it because then other people can be the lightweight front end.So you can build great businesses. I think with it, I do think that people will both build businesses off, you know, things like the Open AI APIs and I think people will also train models. Because I think one of the things that will definitely happen is a lot of… not just will large models be built in ways that are interesting and compelling, but I think a bunch of smaller models will be built that are specifically tuned and so forth.And there's all kinds of reasons. Everything from you can build them to do something very specific, but also like inference cost, does it, does it run on a low compute or low power footprint? You know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, AI doctor, AI tutor, um, you know, duh and on a cell phone. And, um, and so, you know, I think like all of that, I think the short answer to this is allEric: Right. Do you think we are in a compute arms race still, or do you, do you think this is gonna continue where it's just if you can raise a billion dollars to, to buy sort of com GPU access basically from Microsoft or Amazon or Google, you're, you're gonna be sort of pretty far ahead? Or how do you think about that sort of the money, the money and computing rates shaping up?Reid: So I kind of think about two. There's kind of two lines of trends. There's one line, which is the larger and larger models, which by the way, you say, well, okay, so does the scale compute and one x flop goes to two x flops, and does your performance function go up by that?And it doesn't have to go up by a hundred percent or, or two x or plus one x. It could go up by 25%, but sometimes that really matters. Coding doctors, you know, legal, other things. Well, it's like actually, in fact, it, even though it's twice as expensive, a 25% increase in, you know, twice as expensive of compute, the 25% increase in performance is worth it. And I think you then have a large scale model, like a set of things that are kind of going along need to be using the large scale models.Then I think there's a set of things that don't have that need. And for example, that's one of the reasons I wasn't really surprised at all by the profusion of image generation, cuz those are, you know, generally speaking, trainable for a million to $10 million. I think there's gonna be a range of those.I think, you know, maybe someone will figure out how to do, you know, a hundred-million version and once they figured out how to do a hundred-million dollar version, someone also figured out how to do the 30-million version of that hundred-million dollar version. And there's a second line going on where all of these other smaller models will fit into interesting businesses. And then I think a lot of people will either deploy an open source model that they're using themselves, train their own model, get a special deal with, like a model provider or something else as a way of doing it.And so I think the short answer is there will be both, and you have to be looking at this from what's the specific that this business is doing. You know, the classic issues of, you know, how do you go to market, how do you create a competitive mode? What are the things that give you real, enduring value that people will pay for in some way in a business?All of the, those questions still apply, but the, but, but there's gonna be a panoply of answers, depending on the different models of how it playsEric: Do you think spend on this space in terms of computing will be larger in ‘24 and then larger in 25?Reid: Yes. Unquestionably,Eric: We're on the, we're still on the rise.Reid: Oh, yes. Unquestionably.Eric: That's great for a certain company that you're on the board of.Reid: Well look, and it's not just great for Microsoft. There are these other ones, you know, AWS, Google, but…Eric: Right. It does feel like Amazon's somewhat sleepy here. Do you have any view there?Reid: Well, I think they have begun to realize, what I've heard from the market is that they've begun to realize that they should have some stuff here. I don't think they've yet gotten fully underway. I think they are trying to train some large language models themselves. I don't know if they've even realized that there is a skill to training those large language models, cause like, you know, sometimes people say, well, you just turn on and you run the, run the large language model, the, the training regime that you read in the papers and then you make stuff.We've seen a lot of failures, of people trying to build these things and failing to do so, so, you know, there's, there's an expertise that you learn in doing it as well. And so I think—Eric: Sorry to interrupt—if Microsoft is around Open AI and Google is around Anthropic, is Amazon gonna be around stability? That's sort of the question that I'll put out to the world. I don't know if you have.Reid: I certainly don't know anything. And in the case of, you know, very, very, very, um, a politely said, um, Anthropic and OpenAI have scale with huge models. Stability is all small models, so, hmm.Eric: Yeah. Interesting. I, I don't think I've asked you sort of directly about sort of stepping off the Open AI board. I mean, I would assume you would prefer to be on the board or…?Reid: Yeah. Well, so look, it was a funny thing because, um, you know, I was getting more and more requests from various Greylock portfolio companies cause we've been investing in AI stuff for over five years. Like real AI, not just the, we call it “software AI”, but actual AI companies.For a while and I was getting more and more requests to do it and I was like oh, you know, what I did before was, well here's the channel. Like here is the guy who, the person who handles the API request goes, go talk to them. Like, why can't you help me? I was like, well, I'm on the board.I have a responsibility to not be doing that. And then I realized that, oh s**t, it's gonna look more and more. Um, I might have a real conflict of interest here, even as we're really carefully navigating it and, and it was really important cause you know various forces are gonna kind of try to question the frankly, super deep integrity of Open AI.It's like, look, I, Sam, I think it might be best even though I remain a fan, an ally, um, to helping, I think it may be best for Open AI. And generally to step off a board to avoid a conflict of interest. And we talked about a bunch and said, okay, fine, we'll do it. And you know, I had dinner with Sam last night and most of what we were talking about was kind of the range of what's going on and what are the important things that open eyes need to solve? And how should we be interfacing with governments so that governments understand? What are the key things that, that, that should be in the mix? And what great future things for humanity are really important not to fumble in the, in the generally, like everyone going, oh, I'm worrying. And then I said, oh, I got a question for you. And he's like, yeah, okay. I'm like, now that I'm no longer on the board, could I ask you to personally look at unblocking, my portfolio company's thing to the API? Because I couldn't ever ask you that question before. Cause I would be unethical. But now I'm not on the board, so can I ask the question?He's like, sure, I'll look into it. I'm like, great, right? And that's the substance of it, which I never would've done before. But that wasn't why, I mean, obviously love Sam and the Open AI team.Eric: The fact that you're sort of a Democratic super donor was that in the calculus? Or, because I mean, we are seeing Republican… well, I didn't think that at all coming into this conversation, but just hearing what you're saying. Looking at it now, it feels like Republicans are like trying to find something to be angry about.Reid: WellEric: These AI things, I don't quite…Reid: The unfortunate thing about the, the most vociferous of the republican media ecosystem is they just invent fiction, like their hallucination full out.Eric: Right.Reid: I mean, it just like, I mean, the amount of just like, you know, 2020 election denial and all the rest, which you can tell from having their text released from Fox News that like, here are these people who are on camera going on where you have a question about, you know, what happened in the election.And they're texting each other going, oh my God, this is insane. This is a coup, you know, da da da. And you're like, okay. Anyway, so, so all like, they don't require truth to generate. Heat and friction. So that was, wasn't that no, no. It's just really, it's kind of the question of, when you're serving on a board, you have to understand what your mission is very deeply and, and to navigate it.And part of the 501(C)(3) boards is to say, look, obviously I contribute by being a board member and helping and navigate various circumstances and all the rest. And, you know, I can continue to be a counselor and an aid to the company not being on the board. And one of the things I think is gonna be very important for the next X years, for the entire world to know is that open AI takes its ethics super seriously,Eric: Right.Reid: As do I.Eric: Does that fit with having to invest? I mean, there are lots of companies that do great things. They have investors. I believe in companies probably more than personally I believe in charities to accomplish things. But the duality of OpenAI is extremely confusing. Like, was Greylock, did Greylock itself invest a lot or you invested early as an angel?Reid: I was the founding investor as an angel, as a, as a program related investment from my foundation. Because like I started, I was among the first people to make a philanthropic donation to Open AI. Just straight out, you know, here's a grant by Wednesday, then Sam and Crew came up with this idea for doing this commercial lp, and I said, look, I, I'll help and I have no idea if this will be an interesting economic investment.They didn't have a business plan, they didn't have a revenue plan, they didn't have a product plan. I brought it to Greylock. We talked about it and they said, look, we think this will be possibly a really interesting technology, but you know, part of our responsibility to our LPs, which you know, includes a whole bunch of universities and else we invest in businesses and there is no business plan.Eric: So is that the Khosla did? Khosla's like we invested wild things. Anyway, we don't care. That's sort of what Vinod wants to project anyway, so yeah.Reid: You know, yes, that's exactly the same. So I put them 50 and then he put in a, I think he was the only venture fund investing in that round. But like, there was no business plan, there was no revenue model, there was no go to market…Eric: Well, Sam basically says, someday we're gonna have AGI and we're gonna ask you how to make a bunch of money? Like, is he, that's a joke, right? Or like, how much is he joking?Reid: It's definitely, it's not a 100% joke and it's not a 0% joke. It's a question around, the mission is really about how do we get to AGI or as close to AGI as useful and to make it useful for humanity. And by the way, the closer you get to AGI, the more interesting technologies fall out, including the ability to have the technology itself solve various problems.So if you said, we have a business model problem, it's like, well ask the thing. Now, if you currently sit down and ask, you know, ChatGPT what the business model is, you'll get something pretty vague and generic that wouldn't get you a meeting with a venture capitalist because it's like “we will have ad supported”... you're like, okay. Right.Eric: Don't you have a company that's trying to do pitch decks now or something?Reid: Oh yeah, Tome. No, and it's awesome, but by the way, that's the right kind of thing. Because, because what it does is you say, hey, give me a set of tiles, together with images and graphics and things arguing X and then you start working with the AI to improve it. Say, oh, I need a slide that does this and I need a catchier headline here, and, and you know, da da da.And then you, and you know, obviously you can edit it yourself and so on. So that's the kind of amplification. Now you don't say, give me my business model, right?Eric: You're like, I have this business model, like articulate it.Reid: Exactly.Eric: Um, I, politics, I mean, I feel like we, we live through such like a… you know what I mean, I feel like Silicon Valley, you know, has like, worked on PE everybody be able to, you know, everybody can get along. There's sort of competition, but then you sort of still stay close to any, everybody like, you, you especially like are good, you know, you you are in the PayPal mafia with a lot of people who are fairly very conservative now.The Trump years broke that in some ways and particular, and that, yeah. So how did you maintain those relationships?I see headlines that say you're friends with Peter Thiel. What is, what's the state of your friendship with Peter Thiel and how, how did it survive?I guess the Trump years is the question.Reid: Well, I think the thing that Peter and I learned when we were undergraduate at Stanford together is it's very important to… cause we, you know, I was a lefty. He was a righty. We'd argue a lot to maintain conversation and to argue things. It's difficult to argue on things that feel existential and it's ethically challenged is things around Trump. You know, the, you know, Trump feels to be a corrosive asset upon our democracy that is disfiguring us and staining us to the world. And so to have a dispassionate argument about it is, it's challenging. And it ends up with some uneven ground and statements like, I can't believe you're f*****g saying that, as part of dialogue.But on the other hand, you know, maintaining dialogue is I think part of how we make progress as society. And I basically sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly and committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and committed otherwise.And so, you know, there are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to, right?. There are others that I do because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.It almost goes back to what we were talking about, the AI side, which is make sure you're talking to other smart people who challenge you to make sure you're doing the right thing. And that's, I think, a good general life principle.Eric: Well, you know, I feel like part of what my dream of like the Silicon Valley world is that we have these, you know, we have, Twitter is like the open forum. We're having sincere sort of on the level debates, but then you see something like, you know, the…Reid: You don't think it's the modern Seinfeld show I got? Well, not Seinfeld, um, Springer, Jerry Springer.Eric: Yeah, that's, yeah. Right. But I just feel like the sort of like, if the arguments are on the level issue is my problem with some of the sort of, I don't know, Peter Theil arguments, that he's not actually publicly advancing his beliefs in a sincere way, and that that's almost more corrosive.Reid: Oh, that's totally corrosive. And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that I, um, you know, in conversations I have, I push people including Peter on a lot.Eric: Yeah. Are you still, are you still gonna donate a lot, or what was, what's your, are you as animated about the Democratic party and working through sort of donor channels at the moment?Reid: Well, what I would say is I think that we have a responsibility to try to make, like with, it's kind of the Spider-Man ethics. With power comes responsibility, with wealth comes responsibility, and you have to try to help contribute to… what is the better society that we should be living and navigating in?And so I stay committed on that basis. And I do think there are some really amazing people in the administration. I think Biden is kind of a good everyday guy.Eric: Yeah.Reid: In fact, good for trying to build bridges in the country. I think there are people like Secretary Raimondo and Secretary Buttigieg who are thinking intensely about technology and what should be done in the future.And I think there's other folks now, I think there's a bunch of folks on the democratic side that I think are more concerned with their demagoguery than they are with the right thing in society. And so I tend to be, you know, unsympathetic to, um, you know…Eric: I know, Michael Moritz, it's Sequoia, that oped sort of criticizing San Francisco government, you know, and there's, there's certainly this sort of woke critique of the Democratic Party. I'm curious if there's a piece of it sort of outside of he governance that you're…Reid: Well, the interesting thing about woke is like, well, we're anti woke. And you're like, well, don't you think being awake is a good thing? I mean, it's kind of a funny thing. Eric: And sort of the ill-defined nature of woke is like key to the allegation because it's like, what's the substantive thing you're saying there? And you know, I mean we we're seeing Elon tweet about race right now, which is sort of terrifying anyway.Reid: Yeah. I think the question on this stuff is to try to say, look, people have a lot of different views and a lot of different things and some of those views are, are bad, especially in kind of minority and need to be advocated against in various… part of why we like democracy is to have discourse.I'm very concerned about the status of public discourse. And obviously most people tend to focus that around social media, which obviously has some legitimate things that we need to talk about. But on the other hand, they don't track like these, like opinion shows on, like, Fox News that represent themselves implicitly as news shows and saying, man, this is the following thing.Like there's election fraud in 2020, and then when they're sued for the various forms of deformation, they say, we're just an entertainment show. We don't do anything like news. So we have that within that we are already struggling on a variety of these issues within society. and we, I think we need to sort them all out.Eric: Is there anything on the AI front that we missed or that you wanted to make sure to talk about? I think we covered so much great ground. Reid: And, and we can do it again, right. You know, it's all, it's great.Eric: I love it. This was all the things you're interested in and I'm interested in, so great. I really enjoyed having you on the podcast and thanks.Reid: Likewise. And, you know, I follow the stuff you do and it's, it's, it's cool and keep doing it. 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For the first episode of the Newcomer podcast, I sat down with Reid Hoffman — the PayPal mafia member, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and Microsoft board member. Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI's board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk.“This kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said. Musk told Hoffman that he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during conversations about a decade ago. “This is part of how I operate,” Hoffman remembers. “Smart people from my network tell me things, and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I'm like, ‘Oh, yes, we have another wave coming.'”This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it's a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it's more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta's enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Why I Wanted to Talk to Reid Hoffman & What I Took AwayHoffman is a social network personified. Even his journey to something as wonky as artificial intelligence is told through his connections with people. In a world of algorithms and code, Hoffman is upfront about the extent to which human connections decide Silicon Valley's trajectory. (Of course they are paired with profound technological developments that are far larger than any one person or network.)When it comes to the rapidly developing future powered by large language models, a big question in my mind is who exactly decides how these language models work? Sydney appeared in Microsoft Bing and then disappeared. Microsoft executives can dispatch our favorite hallucinations without public input. Meanwhile, masses of images can be gobbled up without asking their creators and then the resulting image generation tools can be open-sourced to the world. It feels like AI super powers come and go with little notice. It's a world full of contradictions. There's constant talk of utopias and dystopias and yet startups are raising conventional venture capital financing.The most prominent player in artificial intelligence — OpenAI — is a non-profit that raised from Tiger Global. It celebrates its openness in its name and yet competes with companies whose technology is actually open-sourced. OpenAI's governance structure and priorities largely remain a mystery. Finally, unlike tech's conservative billionaires who throw their money into politics, in the case of Hoffman, here is a tech overlord that I seem to mostly agree with politically. I wanted to know what that would be like. Is it just good marketing? And where exactly is his heart and political head at right now?I thought he delivered. I didn't feel like he was dodging my questions, even in a world where maintaining such a wide network requires diplomacy. Hoffman seemed eager and open — even if he started to bristle at what he called my “edgy words.”Some Favorite QuotesWe covered a lot of ground in our conversation. We talked about AI sentience and humans' failures to identify consciousness within non-human beings. We talked about the coming rise in AI cloud compute spending and how Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are positioned in the AI race.Hoffman said he had one major condition for getting involved in OpenAI back in the early days when Musk was still on board.“My price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word “robocalypse,” Hoffman told me. “Because I thought that the problem was it's very catchy and it evokes fear.”I asked Hoffman why he thought Musk got involved in artificial intelligence in the first place when Musk seems so worried about how it might develop. Why get the ball rolling down the hill at all, I wondered?Hoffman replied that many people in the field of artificial intelligence had “messiah complexes.”“It's the I am the one who must bring this — Prometheus, the fire to humanity,” Hoffman said. “And you're like, ‘Okay, I kind of think it should be us versus an individual.'” He went on, “Now, us can't be 8 billion people — us is a small group. But I think, more or less, you see the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there? And then let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.”I raised the possibility that this merely suggested oligarchic control of artificial intelligence rather than dictatorial control. We also discussed Hoffman's politics, including his thoughts on Joe Biden and “woke” politics. I asked him about the state of his friendship with fellow PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel. “I basically am sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and not committed otherwise,” Hoffman said. “There are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to. There are others that I do continue because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.”I suggested that Thiel's public views sometimes seemed insincere.“Oh, that's totally corrosive,” Hoffman said. “And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that in conversations I have, I push people, including Peter, on a lot.”Give it a listen.Find the PodcastRead the TranscriptEric: Reid, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm very excited for this conversation. You know, I'm getting ready for my own AI conference at the end of this month, so hopefully this is sort of a prep by the end of this conversation, we'll all be super smart and ready for that. I feel like there've been so many rounds of sort of AI as sort of the buzzword of the day.This clearly seems the hottest. When did you get into this moment of it? I mean, obviously you just stepped off the Open AI board. You were on that board. Like how, when did you start to see this movement that we're experiencing right now coming.Reid: Well, it's funny because my undergraduate major was artificial intelligence and cognitive science. So I've, I've been around the hoop for multiple waves for a long time and I think this kicked off actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago. You know, 10-ish years ago, Elon and I would have dinner about once a quarter and he's like, well, are you paying attention to this AI stuff?And I'm like, well, I majored in it and you know, I know about this stuff. He's like, no, you need to get back involved. And I was like, all right. This is part of how I operate is smart people from my network tell me things and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I went, oh yes, we have another wave coming.And this was probably about seven or eight years ago, when I, when I saw the beginning of the wave or the seismic event. Maybe it was a seismic event out at sea and I was like, okay, there's gonna be a tsunami here and we should start getting ready cause the tsunami is actually gonna be amazingly great and interesting.Eric: And that—is that the beginning of Open AI?Reid: Open AI is later. What I did is I went and made connections with the kind of the heads of every AI lab and major company because I concluded that I thought that the AI revolution will be primarily driven by large companies initially because of the scale compute requirements.And so, you know, talked to Demis Hassabis, met Mustafa Suleyman, talked to Yann LeCun, talked to Jeff Dean, you know, all these kind of folks and kind of, you know, built all that. And then it was later in conversations with Sam and Elon that I said, look, we need to do something that's a for pro humanity. Not just commercial effort. And my price for participation, cause I thought it was a great idea, but my price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word robocalypse. Because I thought that the problem was that it's very catchy and it evokes fear. And actually, in fact, one of the things I think about this whole area is that it's so much more interesting and has so much amazing opportunity for humanity.A little bit like, I don't know if you saw the Atlantic article I wrote that we evolve ourselves through technology and I'm, you know, going to be doing some writings around describing AI as augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I wanted to kind of build that positive, optimistic case that I think is the higher probability that I think we can shape towards and so forth.So it's like, okay, I'm in, but no more Robocalypse.Eric: I appreciate the ultimate sort of network person that you tell the story through people. I always appreciate when the origin stories of technology actually come through the human beings. With Elon in particular, I'm sort of confused by his position because it seems like he's very afraid of AI.And if that's the case, why would you want to, like, do anything to sort of get the ball rolling down the hill? Like, isn't there a sort of just like, stay away from it, man, if you think it's so bad. How do you see his thinking? And I'm sure it's evolved.Reid: Well, I think his instinct for the good and the challenging of this is he tends to think AI will only be good if I'm the one who's in control.Eric: Sort of, yeah.Reid: Yeah. And this is actually somewhat replete within the modern AI field. Not everybody but this. And Elon is a public enough figure that I think, you know, making this comment of him is not talking at a school.Other people would, there's a surprising number of Messiah complexes in the field of AI, and, and it's the, I am the one who must bring this, you know, Prometheus, you know, the Fire to humanity. And you're like, okay, I kind of think it should be us, right? Versus an individual. Now us can't be 8 billion people, us as a small group, but I think more or less you see the, the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there and then let, let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.Like if you say, well, is this going to, you know, institutionalize, ongoing, um, you know, power structures or racial bias, something else? Well, we're talking to the people to make sure that we're going to minimize that, especially over time and navigate it as a real issue. And so those are the, like, that's the kind of anti Messiah complex, which, which is more or less the efforts that I tend to get involved in.Eric: Right. At least sort of oligarchy, of AI control instead of just dictatorship of it.Reid: Well, yeah, and it depends a little bit, even on oligarchy, look, things are built by small numbers of people. It's just a fact, right? Like, there aren't more than, you know, a couple of founders, maybe maximum five in any, any particular thing. There is, you know, there's reasons why. When you have a construction project, you have a head of construction, right?Et cetera. The important thing is to make sure that's why you have, why you have a CEO, you have a board of directors. That's why you have, you know, you say, well, do we have the right thing where a person is accountable to a broader group? And that broader group feels their governance responsibility seriously.So oligarchy is a—Eric: a chargedReid: is a charged word. And I,Eric: There's a logic to it. I'm not, I'm not using it to say it doesn't make sense that you want the people to really understand it around, around it. Um, I mean, specifically with Open AI, I mean, you, you just stepped off the board. You're also on the board of Microsoft, which is obviously a very significant player.In this future, I mean, it's hard to be open. I get a little frustrated with the “open” in “Open AI” because I feel like there's a lot that I don't understand. I'm like, maybe they should change the name a little bit, but is it still a charity in your mind? I mean, it's obviously raised from Tiger Global, the ultimate prophet maker.Like, how should we think about the sort of core ambitions of Open AI?Reid: Well, um, one, the board I was on was a fine one and they've been very diligent about making sure that all of the controls, including for the subsidiary company are from the 501(C)(3) and diligent to its mission, which is staffed by people on the 501(C)(3) board with the responsibilities of being on a 5 0 1 board, which is being in service of the mission, not doing, you know, private inurement and other kinds of things.And so I actually think it is fundamentally still a 501(C)(3). The challenge is if you kind of say, you look at this and say, well, in order to be a successful player in the modern scale AI, you need to have billions of dollars of compute. Where do you get those billions of dollars? Because, you know, the foundations and the philanthropy industry is generally speaking bad at tech and bad at anything other than little tiny checks in tech.And so you said, well, it's really important to do this. So part of what I think, you know, Sam and that group of folks came up with this kind of clever thing to say, well, look, we're about beneficial AI, we're about AI for humanity. We're about making an, I'll make a comment on “open” in a second, but we are gonna generate some commercially valuable things.What if we struck a commercial deal? So you can have the commercial things or you can share the commercial things. You invest in us in order to do this, and then we make sure that the AI has the right characteristics. And then the “open”, you know, all short names have, you know, some simplicities to them.The idea is open to the world in terms of being able to use it and benefit from it. It doesn't mean the same thing as open source because AI is actually one of those things where opening, um, where you could do open source, you could actually be creating something dangerous. As a modern example, last year, Open AI deliberately… DALL·E 2 was ready four months before it went out. I know cause I was playing with it. They did the four months to do safety training and the kind of safety training is, well, let's make sure that individuals can't be libeled. Let's make sure you can't create as best we can, child sexual material. Let's make sure you can't do revenge porn and we'll serve it through the API and we'll make it unchangeable on that.And then the open source people come out and they go do whatever you want and then wow, you get all this crazy, terrible stuff. So “open” is openness of availability, but still with safety and still with, kind of call it the pro-human controls. And that's part of what OpenAI means in this.Eric: I wrote in sort of a mini essay in the newsletter about, like tech fatalism and it fits into your sort of messiah complex that you're talking about, if I'm a young or new startup entrepreneur, it's like this is my moment if I hold back, you know, there's a sense that somebody else is gonna do it too. This isn't necessarily research. Some of the tools are findable, so I need to do it. If somebody's going to, it's easy if you're using your own personhood to say, I'm better than that guy! Even if I have questions about it, I should do it. So that, I think we see that over and over again. Obviously the stakes with AI, I think we both agree are much larger.On the other hand, with AI, there's actually, in my view, been a little bit more restraint. I mean, Google has been a little slower. Facebook seems a little worried, like, I don't know. How do you agree with that sort of view of tech fatalism? Is there anything to be done about it or it's just sort of—if it's possible, it's gonna happen, so the best guy, the best team should do it?Or, or how do you think about that sense of inevitability on if it's possible, it'll be built?Reid: Well, one thing is you like edgy words, so what you describe is tech fatalism, I might say as something more like tech inevitability or tech destiny. And part of it is what, I guess what I would say is for example, we are now in a AI moment and era. There's global competition for it. It's scale compute.It's not something that even somebody like a Google or someone else can kind of have any kind of, real ball control on. But the way I look at it is, hey, look, there's, there's utopic outcomes and dystopic outcomes and it's within our control to steer it. Um, and even to steer it at speed, even under competition because.For example, obviously the general discourse within media is, oh my God, what's happening with the data and what's gonna happen with the bias and what's gonna happen with the crazy conversations, with Bing Chat and all the rest of this stuff. And you're like, well, what am I obsessed about? I'm obsessed about the fact that I have line of sight to an AI tutor and an AI doctor on every cell phone.And think about if you delay that, whatever number of years you delay that, what your human cost is of delaying that, right? And it's like, how do we get that? And for example, people say, wow, the real issue is that Bing chat model is gonna go off the rails and have a drunken cocktail party conversation because it's provoked to do so and can't run away from the person who's provoking it.Uh, and you say, well, is that the real issue? Or is it a real issue? Let's make sure that as many people as we can have access to that AI doctor have access to that AI tutor that where, where we can, where not only, you know, cause obviously technology cause it's expensive initially benefits elites and people are rich.And by the way, that's a natural way of how our capitalist system and all the rest works. But let's try to get it to everyone else as quickly as possible, right?Eric: I a hundred percent agree with that. So I don't want any of my sort of, cynical take like, oh my God, this version.I'd also extend it, you know, I think you're sort of referencing maybe the Sydney situation where you have Kevin Rus in New York Times, you know, communicating with Bing's version of ChatGPT and sort of finding this character who's sort of goes by Sydney from the origin story.And Ben Thompson sort of had a similar experience. And I would almost say it's sad for the world to be deprived of that too. You know, there's like a certain paranoia, it's like, it's like, oh, I wanna meet this sort of seemingly intelligent character. I don't know. What do you make of that whole episode? I mean, people really, I mean, Ben Thompson, smart tech writers really latched onto this as something that they found moving.I don't know. Is there anything you take away from that saga and do you think we'll see those sort of, I don't know, intelligent characters again,Reid: Well for sure. I think 2023 will be at least the first year of the so-called chatbot. Not just because of ChatGPT. And I think that we will have a bunch of different chat bots. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be, you know, entertainment companions, witty dialogue participants.I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be information like Insta, Wikipedia, kind of things. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to just have someone to talk to. So I think there'll be a whole, whole range of things. And I think we will have all that experience.And I think part of the thing is to say, look, what are the parameters by which you should say the bots should absolutely not do X. And it's fine if these people want a bot that's like, you know, smack talking and these people want something that you know, goes, oh heck. Right?You know, like, what's, what's the range of that? And obviously children get in the mix and, and the questions around things that we already encounter a lot with search, which is like could a chat bot enable self-harm in a way that would be really bad?Let's really try to make sure that someone who's depressed doesn't figure out a way to harm themselves either with search or with chat bots.Eric: Is there a psychologically persuasive, so it's not just the information provided, it's the sense that they might be like walking you towards something less serious.Reid: And they are! This is the thing that's amazing. and it's part of the reason why like everyone should have some interaction with these in some emotional, tangible way. We are really passing the Turing test. This is the thing that I had visibility on a few years ago because I was like, okay, we kind of judge, you know, intelligence and sentience like that, Google engineers like it.I asked if it was conscious and it said it was because we use language as a way of doing that. And you're like, well, but look, that tells you that your language use is not quite fully there. And because part of what's really amazing about, “hallucinations”—and I'm probably gonna do a fireside chat with the gray matter thing on hallucinations, maybe later this week—where the hallucination is, on one hand it says this amazingly accurate, wonderful thing, very persuasively, and then it says this other thing really persuasively that's total fiction, right? And you're like, wow, you sound very persuasive in both cases. But that one's true and that one's fiction.And that's part of the reason why I kind of go back to the augmented intelligence and all the things that I see going on with in 2023 is much less replacement and much more augmentation. It's not zero replacement, but it's much more augmentation in terms of how this plays. And that is super exciting.Eric: Yeah. I mean, to some degree it reflects sort of the weakness in human beings' own abilities to read what's happening. Ahead of this interview, I was talking to the publicly available ChatGPT. I don't know if you saw but I was asking it for questions and I felt like it delivered a very reasonable set of questions. You know, you've written about Blitzscaling, so [ChatGPT] is like, let's ask about that. It's, you know, ask in the context of Microsoft. But when I was like, have you [ChatGPT] ever watched Joe Rogan? Have you ever been on a podcast? Sometimes maybe you should have a long sort of, you should have a statement like I'm doing right now where I sort of have some things I'm saying.Then I ask a question. Other times it should be short and sweet. Sometimes it, you know, annoys you and says oligarchy, like explaining to the chat bot. [In an interview, a journalist] can't just ask a list of like, straightforward questions and it felt like it didn't really even get that. And I get that there's some sort of, we're, we're starting to have a conversation now with companies like Jasper, where it's almost like the language prompting itself.I think Sam Altman was maybe saying it's like almost a form of plain language like coding because you have to figure out how to get what you want out of them. And maybe it was just my failure to explain it, but as a journalist replacing questions, I didn't find the current model of ChatGPT really capable of that.Reid: No, that's actually one of the things on the ChatGPT I find is, like, for example, you ask what questions to ask Reid Hoffman in a podcast interview, and you'll get some generic ones. It'll say like, well, what's going on with new technologies like AI and, and what's going on in Silicon Valley? And you know, and you're like, okay, sure.But those aren't the really interesting questions. That's not what makes me a great journalist, which is kind of a lens to something that people can learn from and that will evolve and change that'll get better. But that's again, one of the reasons why I think it's a people plus machine. Because for example, if I were to say, hey, what should I ask Eric about? Or what should I talk to Eric about and go to? Yeah, gimme some generic stuff. Now if I said, oh, give me a briefing on, um, call it, um, UN governance systems as they apply to AI, because I want to be able to talk about this. I didn't do this, but it would give me a kind of a quick Wikipedia briefing and that would make my conversation more interesting and I might be able to ask a question about the governance system or something, you know, as a way of doing it.And that's what AI is, I think why the combo is so great. Um, and anyway, so that's what we should be aiming towards. It isn't to say, by the way, sometimes like replacement is a good thing. For example, you go to autonomous vehicles and say, hey, look, if we could wave a wand and every car on the road today would be an autonomous vehicle, we'd probably save, we'd probably go from 40,000 deaths in the US per, you know, year to, you know, maybe a thousand or 2000. And you're like, you're shaving 38,000 lives a year, in doing this. It's a good thing. And, you know, it will have a positive vector on gridlocks and for climate change and all the rest of the stuff.And you go, okay, that replacement, yes, we have to navigate truck jobs and all the rest, but that replacement's good. But I think a lot of it is going to end up being, you know, kind of, various forms of amplification. Like if you get to journalists, you go, oh, it'll help me ask, figure out which interesting questions to add.Not because it'll just go here, here's your script to ask questions. But you can get better information to prep your thinking on it.Eric: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up like the self-driving car case and, you know, you're, are you still on the board of Aurora?Reid: I am.Eric: I've, you know, I covered Uber, so I was in their self-driving cars very early, and they made a lot of promises. Lyft made a lot of promises.I mean, I feel like part of my excitement about this sort of generative AI movement is that it feels like it doesn't require completeness in the same way that self-driving cars do. You know? And that, that, that's been a barrier to self-driving cars. On the flip side, you know, sometimes we sort of wave away the inaccuracy and then we say, you know, we sort of manage it.I think that's what we were sort of talking about earlier. You imagine it in some of the completeness that could come. So I guess the question here is just do you think, what I'm calling the completeness problem. I guess just the idea that it needs to be sort of fully capable will be an issue with the large language models or do you think you have this sort of augmented model where it could sort of stop now and still be extremely useful to much of society?Reid: I think it could stop now and be extremely useful. I've got line of sight on current technology for a tutor, for a doctor, for a bunch of other stuff. One of the things my partner and I wrote last year was that within five years, there's gonna be a co-pilot for every profession.The way to think about that is what professionals do. They process information, they take some kind of action. Sometimes that's generating other information, just like you see with Microsoft's co-pilot product for engineers. And what you can see happening with DallE and other image generation for graphic designers, you'll see this for every professional, that there will be a co-pilot on today's technology that can be built.That's really amazing. I do think that as you continue to make progress, you can potentially make them even more amazing, because part of what happened when you move from, you know, GPT3 to 3.5, which is all of a sudden it can write sonnets. Right? You didn't really know that it was gonna be able to write sonnets.That's giving people superpowers. Most people, including myself—I mean, look, I could write a sonnet if you gave me a couple of days and a lot of coffee and a lot of attempts to really try.Eric: But you wouldn't.Reid: You wouldn't. Yeah. But now I can go, oh, you know, I'd like to, to, um, write a sonnet about my friend Sam Altman.And I can go down and I can sit there and I can kind of type, you know, duh da, and I can generate, well, I don't like that one. Oh, but then I like this one, you know, and da da da. And, and that, that gives you superpowers. I mean, think about what you can do for writing, a whole variety of things with that. And that I think the more and more completeness is the word you are using is I think also a powerful thing. Even though what we have right now is amazing.Eric: Is GPT4 a big improvement over what we have? I assume you've seen a fair bit of unreleased, stuff. Like how hyped should we be about the improvement level?Reid: I have. I'm not really allowed to say very much about it cause, you know, part of the responsibilities of former board members and confidentiality. But I do think that it will be a nice—I think people will look at it and go, Ooh, that's cool. And it will be another iteration, another thing as amazing as ChatGPT has, and obviously that's kind of in the last few months. It's kind of taken the world by storm, opening up this vista of imagination and so forth.I think GPT4 will be another step forward where people will go, Ooh, that's, that, that's another cool thing. I think that's—can't be more specific than that, but watch this space cause it'll be cool.Eric: Throughout this conversation we've danced around this sort of artificial general intelligence question. starting with the discussion of Elon and the creation of eventually Open AI. I'm curious how close you think we are with AGI and this idea of a sort of, I mean, people define it so many different ways, you know, it's more sophisticated than humans in some tasks, you know, mini tasks, whatever.How, how do you think we're far from that? Or how, how, how do you see that playing out?Reid: Personally amongst a lot of the people who are in the field, I'm probably on the, we're-much-further-than-we-think stage. Now, some of that's because I've lived through this before with my undergraduate degree and the, you know, the pattern generally is, oh my God, we've gotten this computer to do this amazing thing that we thought was formally the provence of only these cognitive human beings.And it could do that. So then by the way, in 10 years it'll be solving new science problems like fusion and all the rest. And if you go back to the seventies, you saw that same dialogue. I mean, it, it's, it's an ongoing thing. Now we do have a more amazing set of cognitive capabilities than we did before, and there are some reasons to argue that it could be in a decade or two. Because you say, well, these large language models can enable coding and that coding can all, can then be self, reflective and generative, and that can then make something go. But when I look at the coding and how that works right now, it doesn't generate the kind of code that's like, oh, that's amazing new code.It helps with the, oh, I want to do a parser for quick sort, right? You know, like that kind of stuff. And it's like, okay, that's great. Or a systems integration use of an API or calling in an API for a spellchecker or whatever. Like it's really helpful stuff on engineers, but it's not like, oh my God, it's now inventing the new kind of training of large scale models techniques.And so I think even some of the great optimists will tell you of the great, like believers that it'll be soon and say there's one major invention. And the thing is, once you get to one major invention, is that one major invention? Is that three major inventions? Is it 10 major inventions?Like I think we are some number of major inventions away. I don't, I certainly don't think it's impossible to get there.Eric: Sorry. The major inventions are us human beings build, building things into the system or…?Reid: Yeah. Like for example, you know, can it do, like, for example, a classic, critique of a lot of large language models is can it do common sense reasoning.Eric: Gary Marcus is very…Reid: Exactly. Right. Exactly. And you know, the short answer right now is the large language models are approximating common sense reasoning.Now they're doing it in a powerful and interesting enough way that you're like, well, that's pretty useful. It's pretty helpful about what it's doing, but I agree that it's not yet doing all of that. And also you get problems like, you know, what are called one shot learning. Can you learn from one instance of it?Cause currently the training requires lots and lots of compute processing over days or in self play, can you have an accurate memory store that you update? Like for example, you say now fact X has happened, your entire world based on fact X. Look, there's a bunch of this stuff to all go.And the question is, is that one major invention is that, you know, five major inventions, and by the way, major inventions or major inventions even all the amazing stuff we've done over the last five to 10 years. Major inventions on major inventions. So I myself tend to be two things on the AGI one.I tend to think it's further than most people think. And I don't know if that further is it's 10 years versus five or 20 years versus 10 or 50 years versus 20. I don't, I don't really know.Eric: In your lifetime, do you think?Reid: It's possible, although I don't know. But let me give two other lenses I think on the AGI question cause the other thing that people tend to do is they tend to go, there's like this AI, which is technique machine learning, and there's totally just great, it's augmented intelligence and then there's AGI and who knows what happens with AGI.And you say, well first is AGI is a whole range of possible things. Like what if you said, Hey, I can build something that's the equivalent of a decent engineer or decent doctor, but to run it costs me $200 an hour and I have AGI? But it's $200 an hour. And you're like, okay, well that's cool and that means we can, we can get as many of them as we need. But it's expensive. And so it isn't like all of a sudden, you know, Terminator or you know, or inventing fusion or something like that is AGI and or a potential version of AGI. So what is AGI is the squishy thing that people then go, magic. The second thing is, the way that I've looked at the progress in the last five to eight years is we're building a set of iteratively better savants, right?It just like the chess player was a savant. Um, and, and the savants are interestingly different now. When does savant become a general intelligence and when might savant become a general super intelligence? I don't know. It's obviously a super intelligence already in some ways. Like for example, I wouldn't want to try to play, go against it and win, try to win.It's a super intelligence when it comes, right? But like okay, that's great cause in our perspective, having some savants like this that are super intelligence is really helpful to us. So, so the whole AGI discussion I think tends to go a little bit Hollywood-esque. You know, it's not terminator.Eric: I mean, there there is, there's a sort of argument that could be made. I mean, you know, humans are very human-centric about our beliefs and our intelligence, right? We don't have a theory of mind for other animals. It's very hard for us to prove that other species, you know, have some experience of consciousness like qualia or whatever.Reid: Very philosophically good use of a term by the way.Eric: Thank you. Um, I studied philosophy though. I've forgotten more than I remember. But, um, you know, I mean…Reid: Someday we'll figure out what it's like to be a bat. Probably not this time.Eric: Right, right, exactly. Is that, that's Nagel. If the machine's better than me at chess and go there, there's a level of I, you know, here I am saying it doesn't have an experience, but it, it's so much smarter than me in certain domains.I don't, I, the question is just like, it seems like humans are not capable of seeing what it's like to be a bat. So will we ever really be able to sort of convince ourselves that there's something that it's like to be, um, an AGI system?Reid: Well, I think the answer is um, yes, but it will require a bunch of sophistication. Like one of the things I think is really interesting about, um, as we anthropomorphize the world a little bit and I think some of this machine. Intelligence stuff will, will enable us to do that is, well what does it mean to understand X or, or, or, or no X or experience X or have qualia or whatever else.And right now what we do is we say, well it's some king of shadowy image from being human. So we tend to undercount like animals intelligence. And people tend to be surprised like, look, you know, some animals mate for life and everything else, they clearly have a theory of the world and it's clearly stuff we're doing.We go, ah, they don't have the same kind of consciousness we do. And you're like, well they certainly don't have the same kind of consciousness, but we're not doing a very good job of studying like what the, where it's similar in order it's different. And I think we're gonna need to broaden that out outcome to start saying, well, when you compare us and an eagle or a dolphin or a whale or a chimpanzee or a lion, you know, what are the similarities and and differences?And how this works. And um, and I think that will also then be, well, what happens when it's a silicon substrate? You know? Do we, do we think that consciousness requires a biological substrate? If so, why? Um, and, you know, part of how, of course we get to understand, um, each other's consciousness as we, we get this depth of experience.Where I realize is it isn't, you're just a puppet.Eric:  [laughs] I am, I am just a puppet.Reid: Well, we're, we're talking to each other through Riverside, so, you know, who knows, right. You know, deep fakes and all that.Eric: The AI's already ahead of you. You know, I'm just, it's already, no.Reid: Yeah. I think we're gonna have to get more sophisticated on that question now.I think it's, it's too trivial to say because it can mimic language in particularly interesting ways. And it says, yes, I'm conscious that that makes it conscious. Like that's not, that's not what we use as an instance. And, and part of it is like, do you understand the like part of how we've come to understand each other's consciousness is we realize that we experience things in similar ways.We feel joy in similar, we feel pain in similar ways and that kinda stuff. And that's part of how we begin to understand. And I think it'll be really good that this may kick off kind of us being slightly less kind of call it narcissistically, anthropocentric in this and a broader concept as we look at this.Eric: You know, I was talking to my therapist the other day and I was saying, you know, oh, I did this like kind gesture, but I didn't feel like some profound, like, I don't, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I did it. It felt like I did the right thing should, you know, shouldn't I feel like more around it?And you know, her perspective was much more like, oh, what matters is like doing the thing, not sort of your internal states about it. Which to me would, would go to the, if the machine can, can do all the things we expect from sort of a caring type type machine. Like why do we need to spend all this time when we don't even expect that of humans to always feel the right feelings.Reid: I totally agree with you. Look, I think the real question is what you do. Now that being said, part of how we predict what you do is that, you know, um, you may not have like at that moment gone, haha, I think of myself as really good cause I've done this kind thing. Which by the way, might be a better human thing as opposed to like, I'm doing this cause I'm better than most people.Eric: Right.Reid: Yeah, but it's the pattern in which you engage in these things and part of the feelings and so forth is cause that creates a kind of a reliability of pattern of do you see other people? Do you have the aspiration to have, not just yourself, but the people around you leading better and improving lives.And obviously if that's the behavior that we're seeing from these things, then that's a lot of it. And the only question is, what's that forward looking momentum on it? And I think amongst humans that comes to an intention, a model of the world and so forth. You know, amongst, amongst machines that mean just maybe the no, no, we're aligned.Well, like, we've done a really good alignment with human progress.Eric: Do you think there will be a point in time where it's like an ethical problem to unplug it? Like I think of like a bear, right? Like a bear is dangerous. You know, there are circumstances where pretty comfortable. Killing the bear,But if the bear like hasn't actually done anything, we've taken it under our care. Like we don't just like shoot bears at zoos, you know? Do you think there's a point where like, and it costs us money to sustain the bear at a zoo, do you think there are cases where we might say, oh man, now there's an ethical question around unpluggingReid: I think it's a when, not an if.Eric: Yeah.Reid: Right? I mean, it may be a when, once again, just like AGI, that's a fair way's out. But it's a when, not an if. And by the way, I think that's again, part of the progress that we make because we think about like, how should we be treating it? Because, you know, like for example, if you go back a hundred, 150 years, the whole concept of animal rights doesn't exist in humans.You know, it's like, hey, you wanna, you want to torture animal X to death, you know, like you're queer, but you're, you're, you're allowed to do that. That's an odd thing for you to do. And maybe it's kind of like, like distasteful, like grungy bad in some way, but , you know, it's like, okay. Where's now you're like, oh, that person is, is like going out to try to go torture animals! We should like get them in an institution, right? Like, that's not okay. You know, what is that further progress for the rights and lives? And I think it will ultimately come to things that we think are, when it gets to kind of like things that have their own agency and have their own consciousness and sets of existence.We should be including all of that in some, in some grand or elevated, you know, kind of rights conceptions.Eric: All right, so back back to my listeners who, you know, wanna know where to invest and make money off this and, you know.Reid: [laughs] It isn't from qualia and consciousness. Oh, wait.Eric: Who do you think are the key players? The key players in the models. Then obviously there are more sort of, I don't know if we're calling them vertical solutions or product oriented or whatever, however you think about them.But starting with the models, like who do you see as sort of the real players right now? Are you counting out a Google or do you think they'll still, you know, sort of show?Reid: Oh no. I think Google will show up. And obviously, you know, Open AI, Microsoft has done a ton of stuff. I co-founded Inflection last year with Mustafa Suleyman. We have a just amazing team and I do see a lot of teams, so I'm.Eric: And that's to build sort of the foundational…Reid: Yeah, they're gonna, well, they're building their own models and they're gonna build some things off those models.We haven't really said what they are yet. But that's obviously going to be kind of new models. Adept, another Greylock investment building its own models, Character is building its own models, Anthropic is building its own models. And Anthropic is, you know, Dario and the crew is smart folks from Open AI, they're, they're doing stuff within a kind of a similar research program that Open AI is doing.And so I think those are the ones that I probably most track.Eric: Character's an interesting case and you know, we're still learning more about that company. You know, I was first to report they're looking to raise 250 million. My understanding is that what's interesting is they're building the models, but then for a particular use case, right?Or like, it's really a question of leverage or like, do people need to build the models to be competitive or do you think there will be... can you build a great business on top of Stability or Open AI or do you need to do it yourself?Reid: I think you can, but the way you do it is you can't say it's cause I have unique access to the model. It has to be, you know, I have a business that has network effects or I'm well integrated in enterprise, or I have another deep stack of technology that I'm bringing into it. It can't just be, I'm a lightweight front end to it because then other people can be the lightweight front end.So you can build great businesses. I think with it, I do think that people will both build businesses off, you know, things like the Open AI APIs and I think people will also train models. Because I think one of the things that will definitely happen is a lot of… not just will large models be built in ways that are interesting and compelling, but I think a bunch of smaller models will be built that are specifically tuned and so forth.And there's all kinds of reasons. Everything from you can build them to do something very specific, but also like inference cost, does it, does it run on a low compute or low power footprint? You know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, AI doctor, AI tutor, um, you know, duh and on a cell phone. And, um, and so, you know, I think like all of that, I think the short answer to this is allEric: Right. Do you think we are in a compute arms race still, or do you, do you think this is gonna continue where it's just if you can raise a billion dollars to, to buy sort of com GPU access basically from Microsoft or Amazon or Google, you're, you're gonna be sort of pretty far ahead? Or how do you think about that sort of the money, the money and computing rates shaping up?Reid: So I kind of think about two. There's kind of two lines of trends. There's one line, which is the larger and larger models, which by the way, you say, well, okay, so does the scale compute and one x flop goes to two x flops, and does your performance function go up by that?And it doesn't have to go up by a hundred percent or, or two x or plus one x. It could go up by 25%, but sometimes that really matters. Coding doctors, you know, legal, other things. Well, it's like actually, in fact, it, even though it's twice as expensive, a 25% increase in, you know, twice as expensive of compute, the 25% increase in performance is worth it. And I think you then have a large scale model, like a set of things that are kind of going along need to be using the large scale models.Then I think there's a set of things that don't have that need. And for example, that's one of the reasons I wasn't really surprised at all by the profusion of image generation, cuz those are, you know, generally speaking, trainable for a million to $10 million. I think there's gonna be a range of those.I think, you know, maybe someone will figure out how to do, you know, a hundred-million version and once they figured out how to do a hundred-million dollar version, someone also figured out how to do the 30-million version of that hundred-million dollar version. And there's a second line going on where all of these other smaller models will fit into interesting businesses. And then I think a lot of people will either deploy an open source model that they're using themselves, train their own model, get a special deal with, like a model provider or something else as a way of doing it.And so I think the short answer is there will be both, and you have to be looking at this from what's the specific that this business is doing. You know, the classic issues of, you know, how do you go to market, how do you create a competitive mode? What are the things that give you real, enduring value that people will pay for in some way in a business?All of the, those questions still apply, but the, but, but there's gonna be a panoply of answers, depending on the different models of how it playsEric: Do you think spend on this space in terms of computing will be larger in ‘24 and then larger in 25?Reid: Yes. Unquestionably,Eric: We're on the, we're still on the rise.Reid: Oh, yes. Unquestionably.Eric: That's great for a certain company that you're on the board of.Reid: Well look, and it's not just great for Microsoft. There are these other ones, you know, AWS, Google, but…Eric: Right. It does feel like Amazon's somewhat sleepy here. Do you have any view there?Reid: Well, I think they have begun to realize, what I've heard from the market is that they've begun to realize that they should have some stuff here. I don't think they've yet gotten fully underway. I think they are trying to train some large language models themselves. I don't know if they've even realized that there is a skill to training those large language models, cause like, you know, sometimes people say, well, you just turn on and you run the, run the large language model, the, the training regime that you read in the papers and then you make stuff.We've seen a lot of failures, of people trying to build these things and failing to do so, so, you know, there's, there's an expertise that you learn in doing it as well. And so I think—Eric: Sorry to interrupt—if Microsoft is around Open AI and Google is around Anthropic, is Amazon gonna be around stability? That's sort of the question that I'll put out to the world. I don't know if you have.Reid: I certainly don't know anything. And in the case of, you know, very, very, very, um, a politely said, um, Anthropic and OpenAI have scale with huge models. Stability is all small models, so, hmm.Eric: Yeah. Interesting. I, I don't think I've asked you sort of directly about sort of stepping off the Open AI board. I mean, I would assume you would prefer to be on the board or…?Reid: Yeah. Well, so look, it was a funny thing because, um, you know, I was getting more and more requests from various Greylock portfolio companies cause we've been investing in AI stuff for over five years. Like real AI, not just the, we call it “software AI”, but actual AI companies.For a while and I was getting more and more requests to do it and I was like oh, you know, what I did before was, well here's the channel. Like here is the guy who, the person who handles the API request goes, go talk to them. Like, why can't you help me? I was like, well, I'm on the board.I have a responsibility to not be doing that. And then I realized that, oh s**t, it's gonna look more and more. Um, I might have a real conflict of interest here, even as we're really carefully navigating it and, and it was really important cause you know various forces are gonna kind of try to question the frankly, super deep integrity of Open AI.It's like, look, I, Sam, I think it might be best even though I remain a fan, an ally, um, to helping, I think it may be best for Open AI. And generally to step off a board to avoid a conflict of interest. And we talked about a bunch and said, okay, fine, we'll do it. And you know, I had dinner with Sam last night and most of what we were talking about was kind of the range of what's going on and what are the important things that open eyes need to solve? And how should we be interfacing with governments so that governments understand? What are the key things that, that, that should be in the mix? And what great future things for humanity are really important not to fumble in the, in the generally, like everyone going, oh, I'm worrying. And then I said, oh, I got a question for you. And he's like, yeah, okay. I'm like, now that I'm no longer on the board, could I ask you to personally look at unblocking, my portfolio company's thing to the API? Because I couldn't ever ask you that question before. Cause I would be unethical. But now I'm not on the board, so can I ask the question?He's like, sure, I'll look into it. I'm like, great, right? And that's the substance of it, which I never would've done before. But that wasn't why, I mean, obviously love Sam and the Open AI team.Eric: The fact that you're sort of a Democratic super donor was that in the calculus? Or, because I mean, we are seeing Republican… well, I didn't think that at all coming into this conversation, but just hearing what you're saying. Looking at it now, it feels like Republicans are like trying to find something to be angry about.Reid: WellEric: These AI things, I don't quite…Reid: The unfortunate thing about the, the most vociferous of the republican media ecosystem is they just invent fiction, like their hallucination full out.Eric: Right.Reid: I mean, it just like, I mean, the amount of just like, you know, 2020 election denial and all the rest, which you can tell from having their text released from Fox News that like, here are these people who are on camera going on where you have a question about, you know, what happened in the election.And they're texting each other going, oh my God, this is insane. This is a coup, you know, da da da. And you're like, okay. Anyway, so, so all like, they don't require truth to generate. Heat and friction. So that was, wasn't that no, no. It's just really, it's kind of the question of, when you're serving on a board, you have to understand what your mission is very deeply and, and to navigate it.And part of the 501(C)(3) boards is to say, look, obviously I contribute by being a board member and helping and navigate various circumstances and all the rest. And, you know, I can continue to be a counselor and an aid to the company not being on the board. And one of the things I think is gonna be very important for the next X years, for the entire world to know is that open AI takes its ethics super seriously,Eric: Right.Reid: As do I.Eric: Does that fit with having to invest? I mean, there are lots of companies that do great things. They have investors. I believe in companies probably more than personally I believe in charities to accomplish things. But the duality of OpenAI is extremely confusing. Like, was Greylock, did Greylock itself invest a lot or you invested early as an angel?Reid: I was the founding investor as an angel, as a, as a program related investment from my foundation. Because like I started, I was among the first people to make a philanthropic donation to Open AI. Just straight out, you know, here's a grant by Wednesday, then Sam and Crew came up with this idea for doing this commercial lp, and I said, look, I, I'll help and I have no idea if this will be an interesting economic investment.They didn't have a business plan, they didn't have a revenue plan, they didn't have a product plan. I brought it to Greylock. We talked about it and they said, look, we think this will be possibly a really interesting technology, but you know, part of our responsibility to our LPs, which you know, includes a whole bunch of universities and else we invest in businesses and there is no business plan.Eric: So is that the Khosla did? Khosla's like we invested wild things. Anyway, we don't care. That's sort of what Vinod wants to project anyway, so yeah.Reid: You know, yes, that's exactly the same. So I put them 50 and then he put in a, I think he was the only venture fund investing in that round. But like, there was no business plan, there was no revenue model, there was no go to market…Eric: Well, Sam basically says, someday we're gonna have AGI and we're gonna ask you how to make a bunch of money? Like, is he, that's a joke, right? Or like, how much is he joking?Reid: It's definitely, it's not a 100% joke and it's not a 0% joke. It's a question around, the mission is really about how do we get to AGI or as close to AGI as useful and to make it useful for humanity. And by the way, the closer you get to AGI, the more interesting technologies fall out, including the ability to have the technology itself solve various problems.So if you said, we have a business model problem, it's like, well ask the thing. Now, if you currently sit down and ask, you know, ChatGPT what the business model is, you'll get something pretty vague and generic that wouldn't get you a meeting with a venture capitalist because it's like “we will have ad supported”... you're like, okay. Right.Eric: Don't you have a company that's trying to do pitch decks now or something?Reid: Oh yeah, Tome. No, and it's awesome, but by the way, that's the right kind of thing. Because, because what it does is you say, hey, give me a set of tiles, together with images and graphics and things arguing X and then you start working with the AI to improve it. Say, oh, I need a slide that does this and I need a catchier headline here, and, and you know, da da da.And then you, and you know, obviously you can edit it yourself and so on. So that's the kind of amplification. Now you don't say, give me my business model, right?Eric: You're like, I have this business model, like articulate it.Reid: Exactly.Eric: Um, I, politics, I mean, I feel like we, we live through such like a… you know what I mean, I feel like Silicon Valley, you know, has like, worked on PE everybody be able to, you know, everybody can get along. There's sort of competition, but then you sort of still stay close to any, everybody like, you, you especially like are good, you know, you you are in the PayPal mafia with a lot of people who are fairly very conservative now.The Trump years broke that in some ways and particular, and that, yeah. So how did you maintain those relationships?I see headlines that say you're friends with Peter Thiel. What is, what's the state of your friendship with Peter Thiel and how, how did it survive?I guess the Trump years is the question.Reid: Well, I think the thing that Peter and I learned when we were undergraduate at Stanford together is it's very important to… cause we, you know, I was a lefty. He was a righty. We'd argue a lot to maintain conversation and to argue things. It's difficult to argue on things that feel existential and it's ethically challenged is things around Trump. You know, the, you know, Trump feels to be a corrosive asset upon our democracy that is disfiguring us and staining us to the world. And so to have a dispassionate argument about it is, it's challenging. And it ends up with some uneven ground and statements like, I can't believe you're f*****g saying that, as part of dialogue.But on the other hand, you know, maintaining dialogue is I think part of how we make progress as society. And I basically sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly and committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and committed otherwise.And so, you know, there are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to, right?. There are others that I do because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.It almost goes back to what we were talking about, the AI side, which is make sure you're talking to other smart people who challenge you to make sure you're doing the right thing. And that's, I think, a good general life principle.Eric: Well, you know, I feel like part of what my dream of like the Silicon Valley world is that we have these, you know, we have, Twitter is like the open forum. We're having sincere sort of on the level debates, but then you see something like, you know, the…Reid: You don't think it's the modern Seinfeld show I got? Well, not Seinfeld, um, Springer, Jerry Springer.Eric: Yeah, that's, yeah. Right. But I just feel like the sort of like, if the arguments are on the level issue is my problem with some of the sort of, I don't know, Peter Theil arguments, that he's not actually publicly advancing his beliefs in a sincere way, and that that's almost more corrosive.Reid: Oh, that's totally corrosive. And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that I, um, you know, in conversations I have, I push people including Peter on a lot.Eric: Yeah. Are you still, are you still gonna donate a lot, or what was, what's your, are you as animated about the Democratic party and working through sort of donor channels at the moment?Reid: Well, what I would say is I think that we have a responsibility to try to make, like with, it's kind of the Spider-Man ethics. With power comes responsibility, with wealth comes responsibility, and you have to try to help contribute to… what is the better society that we should be living and navigating in?And so I stay committed on that basis. And I do think there are some really amazing people in the administration. I think Biden is kind of a good everyday guy.Eric: Yeah.Reid: In fact, good for trying to build bridges in the country. I think there are people like Secretary Raimondo and Secretary Buttigieg who are thinking intensely about technology and what should be done in the future.And I think there's other folks now, I think there's a bunch of folks on the democratic side that I think are more concerned with their demagoguery than they are with the right thing in society. And so I tend to be, you know, unsympathetic to, um, you know…Eric: I know, Michael Moritz, it's Sequoia, that oped sort of criticizing San Francisco government, you know, and there's, there's certainly this sort of woke critique of the Democratic Party. I'm curious if there's a piece of it sort of outside of he governance that you're…Reid: Well, the interesting thing about woke is like, well, we're anti woke. And you're like, well, don't you think being awake is a good thing? I mean, it's kind of a funny thing. Eric: And sort of the ill-defined nature of woke is like key to the allegation because it's like, what's the substantive thing you're saying there? And you know, I mean we we're seeing Elon tweet about race right now, which is sort of terrifying anyway.Reid: Yeah. I think the question on this stuff is to try to say, look, people have a lot of different views and a lot of different things and some of those views are, are bad, especially in kind of minority and need to be advocated against in various… part of why we like democracy is to have discourse.I'm very concerned about the status of public discourse. And obviously most people tend to focus that around social media, which obviously has some legitimate things that we need to talk about. But on the other hand, they don't track like these, like opinion shows on, like, Fox News that represent themselves implicitly as news shows and saying, man, this is the following thing.Like there's election fraud in 2020, and then when they're sued for the various forms of deformation, they say, we're just an entertainment show. We don't do anything like news. So we have that within that we are already struggling on a variety of these issues within society. and we, I think we need to sort them all out.Eric: Is there anything on the AI front that we missed or that you wanted to make sure to talk about? I think we covered so much great ground. Reid: And, and we can do it again, right. You know, it's all, it's great.Eric: I love it. This was all the things you're interested in and I'm interested in, so great. I really enjoyed having you on the podcast and thanks.Reid: Likewise. And, you know, I follow the stuff you do and it's, it's, it's cool and keep doing it. 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We got a call from Becca this morning about her boyfriend Eric. Turns out her name ISN'T Becca but Eric IS a cheater.

Jake - How are the songs sung at mass chosen for the day, and how do we know which songs are appropriate to use? Andrew - What is purgatory? What is its purpose? Arcadia - Do we know when someone is out of purgatory? Eric - Is struggling to forgive his brother who is living as a homosexual has posted pornographic photos of himself and other men online. My parents are nearing the end, and their last wish is for us to reconcile. Denise - Received book on Fulton Sheen, and there's a quote from him on how the church will be getting smaller but stronger Patrick - Mother is catholic but she says cuss words all the time as exclamations. How can I ask her to stop? Steve - Freemason and catholic, and has only ever been told that he can't do both, but has never been told why. He asks Patrick for clarification.

In episode #1951, Neil and Eric discuss how Eric Is preparing for 2022. Eric has several rituals in place for preparing for the following year, like creating space to wind down, and writing an annual letter to his team. Tune in to learn about the books that inform Eric's business planning and how he is working with his leadership teams to prepare for 2022! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:20] Today's topic: How Eric Is Preparing for 2022. [00:30] How Eric applies the OKR methodology for planning in his businesses. [01:26] How Eric is facilitating connections between the leaders within his company. [01:40] The annual letter that Eric writes for his team. [01:55] A breakdown of how Eric's leadership teams use the Start Stop Key (SSK) exercise. [02:25] Why Eric creates space to wind down at the end of the year. [03:53] That's it for today! [04:07] Go to https://marketingschool.io/live to learn more about our next live event in Austin, Texas!   Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:     Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business 3HAG WAY: The Strategic Execution System that ensures your strategy is not a Wild-Ass-Guess!  Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs   What Matters TEDtalk Subscribe to our premium podcast (with tons of goodies!): https://www.marketingschool.io/pro   Leave Some Feedback:     What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.     Connect with Us:      Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu    

Eric Dy is the Co-Founder of Bloomlife, a remote prenatal care platform combining technology, data science, and medical expertise with the goal of improving the quality of care for women, providers, and health plans. Eric Is a biomedical engineer turned business development manager turned entrepreneur specializing in application of mobile and wearable technology for health and wellness. Bloomlife's goal is to provide evidence-based solutions combining connected devices with data analytics to increase access to care, provide personalized feedback to moms, and help doctors earlier predict and manage pregnancy complications. We discussed the need for prenatal care, pre-term births, reasons for unecessary C-sections and the need for updated research in maternal health. Check out Bloomlife at www.bloomlife.com Rate, Review & Subscribe!

The Tone Control has a Discord server! If you like the show and enjoy talking about everything from new gear to music theory to video games, come hang out and chat with us. Discord is open and free to all fans of The Tone Control! We’re also now on Patreon! For $1 per month, you get a shout out in every episode and our unconditional love. For a mere $2 per month, you’ll get exclusive access to the Recording Booth in Discord where you can listen to us record the show LIVE in all its unedited glory and chat with us about the show, during the show, every-other Thursday at 8 pm. Bring your best gifs for the ad break! 00:07:06 Fender and many others have sold more guitars in 2020 than ever before (stab: WA Descent) 00:19:40 Walrus Audio Julianna $250 (stab: (Bogner Burnley) Julia, one of the best selling chorus/vibrato pedals out there has an update! Now in stereo! Pedal sends dry to one amp and wet to the other Tap tempo footswitch with subdivision as well as an external tap/expression input Expression can control dept, rate, or both. Toggle switch for wave shape (triangle, sine, and random) Momentary secondary controls Hold down the bypass switch allows you to set a secondary LFO rate and control the amount of drift added to the LFO Drift gently speeds and slows the LFO rate. Not randomized, but still variable. Hold the Tap switch to activate secondary sounds. Controls for rate, depth, lag, and D-C-V Lag lets you set the center delay time that the LFO modulates around. D-C-V blend is setting the ratio of dry to wet signal through the mono channel. Vibrato fully clockwise, chorus around noon, dry fully counter-clockwise 00:27:52 Benson Preamp (pedal tease) 00:33:24 Rhett Shull joins us! (stab: Deepspace Devices Golem) Atlanta/Nashville based guitarist and youtuber with over 240,000 subscribers! How did YouTube start for you? Was it something to try and supplement the life of a working musician? Was it just for fun? What’s your process like for creating a video? How long does it take? Tell us about Backstage Live. Is playing to a live stream even coming close to a “real gig”? How do you even begin to set something like that up? From Eric, one of our Patrons: Is being a professional guitarist what you expected it would be? What about it isn’t what you thought it would be What tremolo would you walk into a store and buy right now? (also from Eric) Is there some new piece of gear you’re most excited to try out?/What piece of gear is on the top of your wishlist? Check out Rhett’s Discord server: https://discord.gg/hMTvsRb The Tone Control is sponsored by Pedal Genie. Head to PedalGenie.com to start your wishlist today and tell them you heard about it on The Tone Control. Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter: @thetonecontrol --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thetonecontrol/message

It's episode 46 and its a special one. The NBA started 74 years ago in 1946 (and Eric IS 46! Whoa..) It was of course the BAA until 1949, when it changed its name to the NBA. Mike D'Antoni is a candidate for the 76ers, MVP, All NBA teams, and all rookie teams have been announced, CJ McCollum has a new wine label in time for his birthday, Jeremy Lin wants to return to the NBA next season, your questions and more!

Holding Onto Your Vision Through Mindfulness and Mindset How to satisfy your fundamental needs through new ways of connection Ways to nourish your body, brain, and immune system during this quarantine Learn about the 14 essential needs of humans and how to satisfy them today Tips for finding calm and harmony in your isolation space through meditation What to do if your close proximity is breeding contempt in your isolation bubble   Episode Summary:  Right now, the power of mindfulness and meditation is incredibly important, because it helps you keep your vision, dreams, and goals at the top of your mind. Although the circumstances we are in may feel like nothing you could have ever expected, it is by holding onto your vision, not the circumstances, that you can change your life for the better, even now. Eric Edmeades is an internationally recognized business speaker and serial entrepreneur who is passionate about helping others create a life of freedom. An advocate for meditation, mindfulness, and self-care, Eric Is an expert in maintaining mindfulness and calm while in the eye of the storm. Everything from the minimum effective dose of meditation, to tips on how to foster social connection through isolation and his evolution gap theory is on the table today as we discover how to take care of your mind and body through quarantine. Eric is here to provide you with the knowledge you need to cope with what’s going on, survive it, and ultimately get to the place where you are thriving whenever we come out of this lockdown. By satisfying the 14 essential human needs, you can set your brain and body up for success and be confident in your preparation for what is next.  Never afraid to jump into service and show up, Eric is the perfect person to help walk you through tricky isolation situations, dismiss your survival lion and start finding calm. Are you ready to get out of fight or flight and find a way to deeply nourish yourself instead? Share what you are doing to keep sane during isolation with us in the comments section of the episode page.   Quotes: “More and more when I have had these reset moments it has reminded me that my happiness is an inside job. And my happiness and my sense of calm is created by me and not by external circumstances.” (10:37) “What we need to do today, in my opinion, is to recognize yes, there is a lion out there, but its six miles away. And so we should be aware of coronavirus, we should be aware of the economic realities that are taking place around us, but we should not be allowing ourselves to be adrenalized by that.” (22:56) “Most of us shouldn’t even be afraid of the virus, what we should be more afraid of is the mental viral fear that’s going around. And that’s where this conversation, I think, is so important. The making time for mindfulness and making time for breathing exercises, so that way we can let the lion walk right by and go ‘look its a lion, I’m not worried about it, it’s not stalking me’.” (24:48) “At the end of the day right now, what we all need to be taking care of is our own health and our family and our community. And then we can start spreading the circles out beyond.” (40:18) “We will never go back to exactly what was before, and that means that more than ever before we are going to be responsible for ourselves, were going to be responsible for our own mental health and mindfulness, and we are going to be responsible for our physical health.” (41:36) Resources Mentioned: Eric Edmeades Website Follow Eric on Instagram Thrive Time with Eric Edmeades Speed Dial The Universe Journal   Other Resources: Check out the full show notes page Keep up with everything Dr. Mariza Follow Dr. Mariza on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Youtube

In the wake of the Chick-fil-A cave-in, big bad John Zmirak discusses an interesting question with Eric: Is there a Jim Crow future for Christians?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Ask Coach Hörst...Eric answers 7 wide-ranging questions from listeners. Some of the interesting topics covered are...the science of "supercompensation", the use of gymnastic exercises in training, dealing with recurrent injuries, fingerboard training, mental training and "head space" development, endurance training, running, and more! It's 45 minutes of training-for-climbing information and fun. Listen in! Podcast Rundown 4:48 - Question #1 - What exactly is "supercompensation" and how does the intensity and frequency of my training affect supercompensation and my strength and fitness gains? 14:45 - Question #2 - Are calisthenics and gymnastic exercises beneficial for climbers? If so, how can I best add them to my program? 20:35 - Question #3 - For the past two years I've been stuck in a cycle of injury including both of my elbows and one shoulder. I tend to be hyper mobile...so perhaps I'm just not meant to be a climber. What do you think Eric? Is there any hope for me to have an injury-free climbing season? 26:10 - Question #4 - I'm a veteran climber, with lots of alpine experience, but I consider myself rather weak (I can redpoint 5.12c).  I'm beginning a hangboard training program with weighted hangs and repeaters--can I do both of these in the same workout session or would that be counterproductive? Can you give me some advice on how to hangboard train effectively? 31:10 - Question #5 - I'm a 5.11 sport and gym climber, but I struggle at leading 5.9 trad (gear) routes...due to fear? How can I begin to "mental train" to improve my headspace for success on harder traditional climbs? 37:00 - Question #6 - I have climbed 5.14 and V10, yet on my recent (first) visit to the Red River Gorge I got totally spanked on the long steep endurance routes of a much lower grade? How can I better prepare for climbing at steep crags like at the Red River Gorge? 41:50 - Question #7 - I'm an avid boulderer with a background in cycling and running. Right now, I'm running for up to 45 minutes, a few days per week, because it makes me feel better and keep my weight in check for climbing. Is this amount of running hurting my recovery from climbing and training for climbing? When's the best time to do my runs--on climbing or on non-climbing days? Learn about Eric's new brand PhysiVāntage >> Listen to Podcast #34 on the vital topic of tendon health and what you can do to improve tendon and ligament pulley strength and endurance. NOTE: If you'd like to submit a question for the next, please leave it as a comment to the Ask Coach Horst post on my Twitter @Train4Climbing -- include your first name, location, climbing ability level, and years climbing. Music by Misty Murphy Follow Eric on Twitter @Train4Climbing Check out Eric’s YouTube channel. Follow Eric on Facebook! And on Instagram at: Training4Climbing

Product marketing, writing skills and copywriting are important to understand, getting your message across is a great skill to have. In this interesting interview Eric Moeller and I discuss product marketing and copywriting and creative writing. I have known Eric online for about 6 years and met up with him in Exeter a few times and discussed marketing and branding and all those exciting business topics that make us tick! He shares a lot of value in this episode and some great resources to help you improve your copywriting and writing skills in general! Find Eric Moeller here https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericmoeller/ Online Marketing Basics with M&A Head of Marketing + Virgin Startup Mentor Tim Elliott – Episode 46 WARNING — AI Transcriptions Below May Cause Grammatically Correct People Serious Stress and Lack of Sleep! Nathaniel Schooler 0:09 Well, it's really great that you managed to make the time to join me. And I am very interested in learning a bit about product marketing, because I know that's your specialty. And obviously writing as well, because I know you've been doing a lot of writing over the years. So to anyone that doesn't know, this is Eric Moeller. I'm probably pronouncing that the English way. But you work over at Sage, right, and you are head of marketing for, for some piece of tech that I know nothing about at all. So I'll kind of let you let you carry on really, and just explain a little bit about that, if you don't mind. Eric Moeller 1:00 Sure. First of all, thanks for having me here Nat. And happy to join you and have a conversation about this. Yeah, so I've been at Sage for just over two years that I'm responsible for a specific product line. So it's called Sage 200 Cloud, it's a product that is sold in 15 plus countries around the world. The way that product marketing is set up at Sage is that there actually are global leaders for all the different product lines, so it's like having a CEO overlooking all the different facets of marketing for the individual products. Okay, so I work with product marketers, and all the different regions where my product is sold. And really the role of Product Marketing at Sage, the way I would say, it's the way that's defined is, like I said, sort of the CEO of the different facets of the marketing. So you're looking at everything from the different campaigns that we're developing at a global level, and how those can be used at the regional level, the pricing, monitoring the performance of the product, how it's selling now, how we expect thing this, you know, sales to pick up over the next 12 to 24 months, then I'll see and looking further into the future in terms of what is it from a market requirements perspective? What is it that the market needs? Going to the future is that the same product? Is it something different? You know, where do we need to go from a strategy perspective? So it's actually quite an exciting role. There's so many different things that you get involved with, it can also be tiring, because you're thinking, Oh, man, there's so many different balls in the air and so many different things to keep track of. But really, that's that is a challenge, but it's also the exciting facet of the role as well. Nathaniel Schooler 2:28 Right, right. So how many languages? Do you sort of responsible for that, Eric? Is it a lot of different ones? Or is it just English or what? Eric Moeller 2:38 So the product is localized into a number of different markets. And again, for people that don't have a lot of experience with software localization. Localization refers to both the languages that the product is translated into, as well as whatever the local requirements are. So I just wanted to highlight that for people listening, that is not just the language, it's both what might be unique. So for example, when you think about compliance requirements, different governmental requirements, that would vary by country, and obviously,

Chris Husong is a market expert in the hemp industry. Accounting for the challenges of public perception, legal challenges, and the burdens of science to prove the claims for hemp benefits have all shaped the climate in which hemp is used today. Born in Texas, Chris moved with his parents a few times throughout the country, studied theology in California, worked in finance and telecom, and after confronting his own biases, discovered that the hemp industry needed legitimatization. Teaching the skeptics, directing messaging for correct use, and ultimately using education as the chosen tool for sales, Chris shared with GCP why the truth behind hemp is the only way to properly build its acceptance.https://elixinol.comFacebook: @Elixinol https://www.facebook.com/elixinol/LinkedIn: @Elixinol https://www.linkedin.com/company/elixinol/Twitter: @ElixinolCBD https://twitter.com/ElixinolCBD?lang=enInstagram: @Elixinol https://www.instagram.com/elixinol/KBMD CBDhttps://kbmdhealth.comhttps://gutcheckproject.comKBMD CBDhttps://kbmdhealth.comhttps://gutcheckproject.comWhy should you buy a $0.99 now the bag because it's no ordinary bag can save you 20% of three or more items you can fit inside some call that magic others say it's the eighth wonder of the world but whatever it is this the best way to save you 20% outbreaks filters wipers and more quality parts helpful people that snap a no no dissipating up auto parts store's loss was last minimum three exclusions apply conference 10 3119 well it's a gut check project this is episode number eight project we check our egos at the door and they get your health in check I'm here with your host Dr. Kenneth Brown I'm Eric Rieger Doug Brown I doing today I'm doing fantastic episode number eight holy cow I feel like we have the words flying through these episodes every time we come always a better guess today is no exception at all this is gonna be really exciting now is to be very exciting is your mind when you said episode number eight remember that show it is enough I don't want that to be the theme as well as Rabbi and it won't be today she was incredibly excited we have on today Christian song long term market experience within the hemp industry and he has me setting it is getting an incredible tale of coming from a world of high regulation in telecom and in banking and basically what the hemp industry means to America he's got lots of interaction stories and what it takes to make people understand the importance of hemp and how to accept the message of me what did you can you gather out of that amine Christmas we met at first two years ago yeah so my my initial meeting of Christmas two years ago that's we told the story before will repel your facts right and I walked by the lexical booth and another salesperson other than marketing person Christine Thiel grab me and the thing I remember most about that is Dave Christine and Chris all super tall like this is a really tall child apparently hip will make you taller I know you call me someone will be involved with that company so we could do some real basketball or something you know join the election all basketball team what you honestly if you're in listening to get your project today if you've ever wondered about hey look at him is new to me and I'm not really sure what to think that's that's okay today's episode is really kind incredible as Chris can walk through what it's like to to not just look at Hampton say minutes taboo that's taboo it's okay so many people started there and he's got a lot of experience in helping people understand the benefits behind him and what he can do to change their lives for what I love about this is that he comes from these industries are so regulated and she had to transform that into an industry that is so misunderstood you know when you look at that you look at his bio he only looks on website it says it is skilled in helping people and companies overcome their psychological creative and strategic barriers so that they can achieve the professional personal and creative goals so more than just be the chief marketing officer this guys can be my life coach break through all those barriers yet when Ken and Chris Chris's got a lot of a lot of expense he actually went to theological theology school in not in California but were to talk about that for sure yes that means because just think about the transition nearly everything he's gone through in and of course and he's either great guy can't wait from to join the show hit the bottom of the hour course that they were have KPD KB MD's corner where basically Dr. Brown will die do like he's been doing the last seven shows in address some recent research topics and get tiny previews about what to talk about your two minutes yeah so what we always like to do is try to have a bootable format here so everyone knows what to get it into the show so we know we have a fantastic guest I also want to talk about some recent science it's out there so we have forcefully graduate student that helps us out and she sent a really cool article about ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease the same disease that killed Stephen Hawking right I have a very personal tide of this because when my good friends Dr. Russell Veronica in San Antonio a gastroenterologist that I've trained with and with medical school with his father unfortunately passed away of this so I saw this article which to my knowledge the first one that actually looks at ALS and CBD ties in perfectly because we have Christmas song near chief marketing officer now we can't make disease claims what we can say is look it may help some of these different diseases where there really is no treatment and this is a really cool study that I wanted didn't and it's also even said that because today shows can be so incredible and that the way we learn how to balance real information and what we can legally say as a marketing person and then what the consumer can do with both of these angles to kind of piece these puzzles together much like the episode we had last time in stem cell oh yeah you know this fascinating cool stuff you like why don't more people know about this will Chris has to deal with that every day is like no we can say this we can't say this oh my goodness yes is be fantastic if we did this but we have to do it this way because his background I think is a perfect background coming from the super regulated industry to an area that is so gray that you really need somebody very disciplined like him to sort of take the reins and that's why think election all such unique company yet without question let's get some of the paying the bills out of the way and first off the bat love my tummy.com/spoony what could that be in reference to well I believe you're talking about my baby trying to I am trying to so we talk about how our transit was initially developed for bloating and digestive issues change in bowel habits abdominal discomfort what I am seeing a whole lot of which is really cool really getting into this practice of just coming up in the next few weeks that are professional triathletes we have different bodybuilders and things like that that we have slated to come in one of the things we do realize is that the polyphenols in trying to actually increase blood flow to the muscles so that you can have better performance in just about everything so the polyphenols go to your: where your own colonic archer will break them down into anti-inflammatory and basically antioxidant species so that you can recover from workouts and you can actually increase blood flow so not only is it good for bloating but I encourage everyone to go to love my Tommy.com/spoony put in the spooning code SP 00 NY and get 10% off I just answered you did bring up athlete hotrod teal is the only NSF certified for sport product out there indicated for bloating what is it me so if something is NSF certified for sport specifically it means that 1/3 party the NSF foundation has taken the product and they made certain that everything you mark on your package is truthful date they can be backed up that the claims that you have for your studies are verified and that every single product it makes up the composite award the product itself is clean if you're an athlete you don't have to worry that something you and a girl you're going to take with the NSF certified for sport moniker on it might contaminate a sample or might not do exactly what the ad the labeling says so NSF certified for sport is the same thing that Richard dietitians there with MLB NFL NCAA Olympics Olympics they look for that little mark to make certain that when they recommend a supplement or an over-the-counter supplement or aid to their athletes that it's on there so they know that it's a it's a clean product and John Teal features that endorsement that's also because a lot of companies don't have that we pay to play for that eventually I think that what we should have is a KB MD endorsement over here was just means that we like the product to say absolutely right some quick follow-up from from my last week show one of the coolest things as people began to take in Dr. Wade McCann as if he didn't check out episode seven go back and listen last week if you have any questions about stem cells the future stem cells what it's like to market stem cells in this FDA over regulating environment even know you have truth in your hands go back and listen episode seven but once Wade McKenna finished his his episode all week we received email I even got texts stem cells are good for hair growth stem cells can actually help me with my sciatica that I've been dealing with for a few years it's amazing what people don't know about stem cells and then how many people said I thought whenever I used quote unquote cord blood that I was using stem cells and it turns out that you're just not so anyway last week's feedback to getting feedback from last week I got a ton of feedback I actually got a ton of feedback people were I got a lot of calls people wanted to go I think a lot of people actually call me how to actually get into Dr. Wade McKenna's practice of which I think is also because when we have some real like that they can make it make a difference I mean when I sit there and think about this we are completely under utilizing everybody with analysts on the show so far photo bio modulation stem cells once you get into the science you like wow the site speaks for itself much like CBD yes science much like outrun to the science hold its own yeah and that's a cool sinks within a marketing gimmick it's none of this and that's what Chris is going talk about how do you how to stay above how do you stay above the bar where everybody else is trying to play a marketing game and usually want to get out there and help people that's remarkable whenever you look back and you does mention it photo by modulation with James Carroll and talking about stem cells last week with the Dr. McKennitt the parallels that were running here with the CBD industry or hemp industry and what the FDA basically is doing because the FDA is it it it playing all three of those we got truth and results so true and you just can't cannot see it's crazy but anyhow if and you can always go back and check any of our previous episodes you can always go to iTunes and search for gut check project so be sure to subscribe and share with the print so speaking of share with a friend sought a shout out and we need a little help from our audience here only give a shout out to my friend John Demoss who texted me and said while really liking your show when you do your Instagram post make sure that you have closed caption and Eric and I stared each other like great idea and we are complete newbies to this kind of thing so like how do we do that if you know how to do that please hit us up so that though we can start put in the closed caption or whatever it is on history now do you want even better if you're interested in sharing with us you would like to I guess audition to be our Instagram helper let us now go to KPMG health.com find connect shoot us an email in the form and I will holla back at you I promise we don't know what were doing with Instagram really want to know before next week because we've got the basically an Instagram start coming on the show and so we've got we had a really cool show next week also but today is the one that were focusing on so please iTunes you to YouTube you can also do the gut check project channel you can subscribe and share there as well that we are always here in the Sony studio you can always listen live it spoony.com so smutty.com iTunes get check project YouTube gadget project thank you so much subscribe and share so Dr. Brown let's head into KPMG corner what's on the corner today well let's talk a little bit about some personal stuff start this is kind of interesting I'm a little bit embarrassed about this what you know how when sometimes it's too close to you and you don't know what's going on well my mom unfortunately she fell hurt her shoulder about three months ago and she's been rehabbing Kent and I was just talking to her and I just went oh my gosh did I not send you CBD that are not and she owes no I don't know you know I tried something like that some hemp oil what she tried screws that endure anything else like okay let me send you something so I sent her some bottles with some vitamin D and sufficient oil because I believe in using these fatty acids to really help brain information in such large Dr. couple days ago and she was post be doing three more months of rehab and she goes okay and it's so exciting I don't have to go to rehab anymore my shoulder feels great it actually back to normal this is after you sent everything this is after center about two weeks of using the CBD and so she's Artie on trunk Hill always has been for quite a while but so after sending the CBD and now embarrassed because I'm like oh my gosh my own mom herself and that would be something owed to the patient immediately you just forget when it's too close and then my sister who's actually black belt in aikido and she's always been yourself open to students rose to banged up my mom gave her a bottle and she just texted me this morning said oh my gosh that works so well the key to this Morgan talk about this with Chris that there are differences in different types of CBD and what is out there how you market so my personal story is sorry mama should be given to to three months ago just was too close to it we got so much stuff going on and you know fortunately better late than never she's doing great yeah I know that's a it's of these brothers, interesting so you said in another we can touch on Chris but when James was on James Carroll from outdoor laser he talked about imitators right and then last week with the with Dr. Wade mechanically talked about imitators or people that don't administer stem cells appropriately or may not actually even be utilizing stem cells but saying that they are or putting in chemicals that will destroy destroy those that are not probably not to their own fault I just don't know enough about it because the reality is we talked about this is CBD industry and I'm I tell my patients this I said I would get into a loop of the science would explain a little bit we have this new brochure that explains a little bit and we get into the fact of what your end or cannabinoid system is how it links the nervous system and the immune system put you back in balance that is so simplistic because the reality is were going to see a field of medicine called Endo Kanab analogy and your Genesee specialist called Endo Canavan allergist's share I'm convinced of it sure any of you have a hepatology ST have the endocrinologists there is actually no reason why you would have an Indo Campanella just as we begin to learn more that CBD absolutely totally agree right it's about you anything going on in the personal life personal life at the boys I mean honestly the boys are doing great. During off-season basketball who ended up I know that seems like add the theme but that's that's really what they're into but I did go shoot with my youngest earlier this week and I learned that dad dad is the worst basketball player in the household now Matt can drain from all points of the court I'm just I'm no match anymore there faster than I am and now that he's basically 6 foot tall and 15 and gauges about 61 now in 1730 I just not much I can do with with either one of them so very much dominate brain I headed down to Kaleo FX this week though oh that's right you want one of my favorite conferences to be great conference it's a chemist think that immediate which is so busy just to go this week will unfortunately I have to go to Newark New Jersey and film a national commercial for archer until Roger entails time to take out her until the next level were to be doing some national commercial so I would love it really affects would love to be helping out at the election all booth pate BMD CBD booth trash and talk about trying to learn the on the entourage effect without an CBD but I don't fly up to New York in the true commercial which I'm a little bit nervous about the Wilson estate bowing on the head Keith Michelle Noris tune into your commercial as soon as it airs big shot today and they are the one to put on file with X they do a great job if you never been that appealing effects in Austin Texas it is what's your time you going to be introduced to a bunch of different things that could probably change her health and that's how we found CBD out and say I'm very partial to pill effects last year I give a talk and one over really well talked a lot of people had to be able to get their books it was really exciting you just it just fun to see a like-minded community I did the mojo 50 show this morning we're talking about sugar and the paler community does not really eat M&Ms those guys do M&M tasting Delphi lot M&Ms of failure effect listen if you have M&Ms you to balance it out with much until Fisher 100% totally so yeah you just have a great time hello effects I will make you feel better about you not been know to beat your sons because the only person that can warm Lucas up is my daughter Carla because both my wife and I are incapable of even even hit the ball back against those guys don't know probably know why it's super humiliating I I feel memo Mike is it embarrassing that the youngest person in the family is the only person I can warm Osama before matches and vice versa they want each other up it's really cool that's get down so I'd have any hits on the on the corner before Chris joins us will I do want to bring up one thing here I will bring up an article I was try to bring up one article to talk about just now woman talk about marketing Christmas songs it's about marketing a lot of people look at the big deal I want to tell everyone about this and so on I really like to look at disease specific states And the article that we can achieve that in the beginning here is an article related to the meta-analysis was published in the Journal of neurochemistry here this year just couple months ago and what it looked at is it did a meta-analysis which is a compilation of studies usually meta-analysis I have in the scientific literature are considered to be more robust picture taking a lot of studies putting them together and this is looking at ALS known as anti-atrophic lateral sclerosis Lou Gehrig's disease is a devastating disease and as I had mentioned earlier it actually took the life of my good friend Dr. Russ of Ron Ike whose guesser Alderson San Antonio and we actually saw his dad his father correct we actually saw this progressive disease and that's the deal about ALS eight what it does is if you're unaware of it I find it to be one of the most devastating diseases out there there's a book called Tuesdays with Maury that I read back many years ago they commit a movie about it also censures about the progress the progression of ALS and somebody that where there is a caregiver helping them out and you get a feeling about how it just slowly chips away and what it does this damages the nerves that control muscles so over time all of your muscles weaken to the point where they cannot contract eventually hitting the diaphragm so you can't read you lose the ability to speak because you can't control your tongue you lose the ability fine motor movement changes first because the small muscles go and you can't button things and it is just a debilitating but you keep your mind eventually you have some mind changes and they don't really understand why it is they believe there's a small genetic component but really what it is it's an excitatory issue with the nerves releasing too many of certain chemicals that eventually do not allow the do not allow the muscle to contract on the words and try to sting like muscle doesn't work so this was quite a while ago I've been in practice for 17 years Russ and I with both med school and fellowship together it was during residency so were talking 27 years ago 25 years ago I do know anything about CBD fat I know they must be in touch two years ago so this study came out red actually showed that they looked at mice and they looked at their ability to travel distance they looked at their grip strength that she put them through some sort of little American ninja course where they had them hang upside down on the net so like a Jacob's ladder, it was it was it was really it was fascinating that I made a run a wheel what they did is they they actually looked at those that had that were given CBD and those that were the control group and what they showed across the board in this meta-analysis is that those mice I'm sorry let me preface that the mice were genetically predisposed to have ALS so they all had a lot okay okay and what they did is that they showed that the mice that were on CBD could actually run further the mice could cling long-running that they actually increase the grip strength running real activity and they had improved survival and they did not have weight loss when they looked at all the studies something stood out to me that was very interesting they were all given CBD one particular study that they look that used a Madrigal inhibitor now what Maggio is is that's the enzyme that breaks down to AG one of your Dodgers and of cannabinoids in one of these days were to get into the deep science about the inner cannabinoid system gets all complex that's a drug it's in study and it's called KM L 29 so it's fascinating that the FDA's over here try to regulate right and in the background you've got drug companies try to develop drugs to manipulate the system if they can figure out that's awesome but is really interesting because the macro inhibitor was not as good as the traditional CBD and so what they found is that CD1 and CB to agonists in other words CBD significantly delayed the decline of motor function when compared to the control group and they showed a consistent 12 to 25 days longer of normal motor function in the mouse world what you doing is really improving that so right now there's no treatment for this they've got a couple drugs available one called real you tech and one called red Dick Reddick Have Not Even Sure That That Was around When Ross's Dad Was Sick They Said That It Could Potentially Slow down the Progression by a Month or Two While the Superexpensive Month or Two That's It I Member at the Time When We Went outside and Rushes Flying All over the Country Thing Is That Everywhere There Were Trying Everything They're Looking at Using Creatine and Different Things like That so Here We Have This Deal Where We've Got Eight Now You Can't Just Translate Mouse Models to Humans But It's Really One of the First Step in Trying to Figure Some Stuff out My Deal Is That We Know That CBD Helps in Many Different Ways and I'm Not Saying That This Is a Disease Claim I'm Not Saying That This Is Functioning and Will Help but It Certainly Can't Hurt and Might Help Right so When You Have a Very Specific Disease Group like ALS to Desperate Group with No Significant Treatment I Think It's Fascinating That These Guys Went to the Trouble of Putting Together This Mouse Data to Actually Try and Figure This out so Here We Have Grip Strength Upside down Running All of It Which Means That There Is Some Potential That This Could Actually Help This Very Devastating Disease and Is Very Small Group of People Because It's Rare but When It Does Affect You It Affects Everybody It May Affect One Person so the Number the Thing We'll Talk about Is When We Say Disease Oh This Is the Incidence of This Disease This Is the Prevalence of This Disease As Somebody Who Lost My Dad at a Young Age It Affects More Than Just the Person That Dies Share the Prevalence or the Incidence of the Disease Affects Everyone Around Them Right so I Think That If We Can Help Those People with ALS If You Know Anybody with ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease This Is Something That May Be Showmen We Can Certainly Forward This Article to Anybody That Would like to so Include Any of the Studies That Utilize a Mouse AMI All All of the Drugs They Began and and and Started There to Try to Find out If This Is a Workable Model and Unfortunately with Today's Highly Regulated Environment He Can't Just Keep Going Forward but Were Trying to Help People Connect the Dots This That CBD Is Safe to Take and You Shouldn't Have Any Serious Side Effects Certainly by Consuming CBD It Just so Happens That in This Mouse Model We Saw These Improvements Draw from the Conclusions What You Will But This Is What I've Seen and I Mean I Think That Were Hinting In the in the Correct Direction I Just Think That It's You Know This Is Work Were Offering Hope Church When Scientists like This Do This You Just Offer Little Bit of Hope And It Is a Devastating Disease and We Just Want to See People and Just Offer Them Something an Alternative Right And If They Can Even If They Feel a Bit Better Well We Got 20 Seconds Left Here in Just a Moment We Are Going to Be Joined by Chris Who Song the Vice President of Marketing Communications Analytics and off a Hemp Industry Marketing Expert Is Going to Be Incredibly Silly Very Exciting and Super Excited Let's Do the Seal Here in about Two Minutes Dr. Kim Brown Here a Host of Check Project with Lycos Eric Rieger Eric Regency and Mojo Guys over There and Overhears Really Talk about Our 20 over Bloating I've Seen in My Practice That I'm Trying to Is a Whole Lot More Than Just a Floating Product Yes It Does a Whole Lot More Than Just Exploding Because of the Polyphenols That You Find Keen on Trying to Get Your Exactly Right the Polyphenols Are Those Molecules That We Find in the Mediterranean Diet It Makes Vegetables and Fruit Very Colorful What Are Some of the Things These Polyphenols Do Eric These Polyphenols Can Actually Stop and Nation Help You Have More Energy Thinking Have You Antiaging and Polyphenols Are Great Athletes It Sounds like It's Your Health: More People Than Just Loading Tell Me How It Is Taking out Front If You Want to Go so 2002 Capsules Three Times A Day Facing Me with You Aren't Bloated and Just Want to Polyphenol Intake Everyday Three Chances of a War for You to Love My Tummy.com/Are You Tired of High Cable TV Rates Sign up for Dish Today and Get a $500 Bonus Offer While Supplies Last Loss Locking Your Price for Two Years Guaranteed Call American – Your Dish Authorized Retailer Now 800-570-6630 800-570-6630 – 800-570-6630 Authors Required Critical Negation 24 Month Commitment Early Termination Fee Any Automakers Friction Supply Call for It Looks like You're Losing I Am I Losing Weight I Am Losing My Lost about 10 Pounds How Are You Doing It Funny Name but I Done It with Review Zone RAD Use Zone.com and the Stuff Works It's Unique It and All That the Molecule Bissonnette Found in That I Can Tell You Is It It so It Makes You Feel Full and He Keeps Your Mind Off of Wanting to Overeat and Also Boost Your Metabolism If You're Done and More Guy Try It Today It's Gonna Work for You like His Work for Brad and Countless Other People Read You Zone.com Are IDUs Zone.com Okay Welcome Back to the Second Half Hour Episode Eight of the Gut Check Project I Married Grigor Joined by Your Host Dr. Kent Brown and Now We Have the Vice President of Marketing Communications at Alexa and All Mr. Chrissy Song Chris Welcome to the Show Thanks for Having Me Absolutely Absolutely Better Radio Voice Than You and I Both Well Yeah Well You Guys Have a Better Face for One of the First Things He Chris Asked Where He Sat down and Said Do You Guys Do One Headphone or Two and Then Can Analogize That We Do We Do to Because We Didn't Know How to Do That so Anyhow I Just a Quick Reset Thank You for Joining the Show Thank You Again for Having Me Actually Catch a Project Is Brought to You by Arch on Teal As Well As KB MD CBD You Can findkbmdcbd@kbmdhealth.com and it just so happens that Chris may happen to know a little bit about KB MD CBD As Well Please Think Our Dialects and the Power Power by Licks and All so Chris You We Are Now in Dallas That's Where Our Studio Is Siam in Dallas Here with You Guys Thanks for Having Me I Grew up in Plano Just down the Road Just I Know That That's Also That's Where I Live Right Now Sam Right on Teakwood Okay All Right in the Middle Was Back When There Was Still Some Farmland in That Region Roads That Were Definitely Not Paved Back That Well While You Have Made Your Journey All the Way to Being a Market Expert but It Was You Got Zero Stress Remember I Was Told about Russ and His Dad yet Will He's Just Call Me Right Here Is Try to Call Him to Let Me Describe a Little Bit about about His Experience Home on Such a Crazy Timing to Rent a Van Fantastic What Will Look at That Set up Well in the Meantime While Were Getting the Call Set up Which This Be Our First Time We've Ever Had Live Taller All for You Chris That's Awesome Though Our Weight Much to Say Go Wildcats for Plano West Guy While Nice Nice Sticky Big Absolutely so from Plano You Are You Hello When You Plan to Graduate High School There No so I Was Born in the Fort Stockton Texas Home Right Now Where Judge Judge Roy Bean the Hanging Judge a Hanging Judge Meant to Write Also the Largest Groundhog Population in Texas That at the Time Did I Know That I Seconds Probably Pretty Pretty Have Been Doing down There but No I Moved to All over Texas with My Dad Is an Engineer for General Electric Okay so We Were All over the Place and Then Moved to California Right and I Graduated College out There and Jumped around All Sorts of Places since Then Is Your Degree in Theology Theology Yeah That's Right This Is Great for What I'm Doing Preaching about Hemp and CBD What May Think That I in All Honesty When You Find That There Is Actually Quite a Bit of Similarity and There's Going to Be A Lot of Congruent Messaging Well There There Is A Lot Of Congruent Messaging and and We Can Get Super Deep on It If You'd like but Overall Community, Theology or CVD Will Get the Loan Both of Them Get Real Deep on Both but That Because I Think Are Highly Connected I Think One of Them I Don't Know How Far You Want to Get into This Right Now but CBD Itself I Think It's Is One of the Main Things in the Unit Can Have Annoyed Systems and Allows All That Better Empathy Sure Which Is What Is Causing so Much Disregard and Disconnection in Our Society Right Now Right and If We Can All Take a Significant Amount of Quality CB and Improve Our Ability For Our Brain to Connect with People and and Not Have Social Anxiety And Connect to People Then Were Going to Actually Build Improve Our Culture and and Not Not Have All These Great Divides so I Would Assume That Probably Whenever You Are Studying Theology That That May Not Have Been Your Attitude Towards CBD or Hemp Products or That Was Even on Your Radar Though My Gosh Cannabis in CBD and Hemp Was Bad Sure You Know the Devils We Write Back Then and That It's Definitely Not Something That I Supported I Told My Kids Said No Don't Do Dumb Stuff Listen to Dad and Don't Do Drugs and Cannabis Was Definitely One of Those Things and I Had to Change My Tune Much Later in Life and My Mom Actually Group Cannabis and Marijuana While She Was Raising Us in Texas and Oklahoma and Back What Was Illegal She Was like One of the Original Member That Was – She Is Original OGE That so and You Know I I Being the Rebellious Teenager Decide I'm to Put Our Three-Piece Suit and Go Learn Religion and You Look down from My Port Perch on People and Obviously I Had to Humble Myself and Admit Mom Was Right the Whole Time That Is so Fascinating I Don't Want to Break the Story Whatsoever but I Think We Have Our First Because This Is Going All Dr. Russell Running San Antonio He Is Patched in And Russ Can Hear Us Morning Man This Is Also My Was That Obvious He Heard the Show This Morning Was Talk about You and Your Dad I Appreciate That That Means A Lot It Does so Russ Whenever You Found out That Your Dad Had ALS When When You Look at the Options That Were on the Table What and in You Being Physician What Did You Think of the Landscape and What Did You Think the Options Would Be For Him and Then Now Looking Back to What What Cans Talking about in Terms of CBD and ALS What I Mean I Lost My Dad You've Lost Your Dad Can Lost His Dad and You Know It's It's No Fun for Anyone Any Always Wish That You Had the Experiences of Technology Later What What Do You Wish You Could Take Back to in Time from What We Learn Now She Mentioned That My Dad Started Get Sick with ALS Back When Can Our Medical School Diseases Just Initiated This Really Is and They're Just Just Seated Man Who Was Pillar of Strength and It Just Wait, Wait Enough and Where They Couldn't Hold a Hammer He Could Climb a Ladder and the Most Devastating Part of That for Us Was When He Studied the Single Ball Ballparks in Ankeny and Carry on a Conversation and Eat Well Anymore Back Then There Was Nothing for Writers One of Those Diseases like Pancreatic Cancer You Got It Sorry I Just Not Then We Can Do and Then I Moved down Here to San Antonio Started Launching Residency and Fellowship and Hooked up with Carding Jackson Was a Neurologist down Here Amazing Woman Who Runs a Big ALS Clinic Here in South Texas and I Started Flying My Dad down Twice a Year and She'd See Him in an Even In Her Clinic It Was the Experimental Things of This Kind of False Hope Was Some Anti-Inflammatories There Wasn't Anything That Worked and There Are Days When It Looked like It May Be a Little Stronger and Days When He Wouldn't Now 15 Years Looking Back You Know That He's Been Gone There's Been so Much Advancement in so Many of These Neurologic Diseases and It's These Natural Types of Things That Seem to Keep Coming up As Potential Cures for This and Have Even Had an Opportunity to Have Him Try Something like This Back Then I Did My Right Arm for Combat and I Would Believe That You Don't Get Back That's I Think When You Talk about Suitable Were What Is Referring to Is the Ability to Swallow the Ability to Form Wet so I Remember When Your Dad Would Come Visit and We Would All Go to Your We Would Gather His Residence Would Go to the Pool And She Would Mumble Words That Only a Wife of 30 Years Could Understand and She Would Translate so He Was Still Completely with It Couldn't Communicate but That Kinda Shows Also the Bond That Husband and Wife Can Have Watching Your Mom Be Able to Understand What Your Dad Was Trying to Say Was Very Touching to All of Us In Talking with Him and That's the Part He Hated the Most You Got Your French Don't You Go out Yes and Cocktails Have a Dinner You Care Phone Conversation When You're like That Friends Don't Want to Hang out with You Anymore Because It's Hard and Embarrassing to to Say I Don't Know What You're Saying so There Were Times When My Dad Loved to Drink Beer I like to Drink Beer I Were Small-Town Nebraska I Would Grow up up There so When He Got to That Point in His Disease And He We Had the Decision to Finally A Peg Tube Feeding Put Two But into His Stomach to Swallow Much Anymore When You Come down Here and I Cannot Would Sit around and We Drink Beer and Dad Would Set Some up in Achieving Stringent Squared Together and It Was Awesome and and One of the Greatest Things I Remember Doing with My Dad Back and When He Got to Where He Couldn't Talk Was I Flew up and Picked Him up and Took Him up to Minnesota Went Fishing and Camping for Weekend We Sat around the Campfire We Just Drank until I Can Really Talk Either Loved It but That's What That Disease Did Nothing We Tried Were I Think That What Were Seeing Now with This Is That We Can Talk on the Mode of How Potentially the End of Cannabinoid System Works in These Neurotransmitters No Rust We Have Christmas Song on the Show Today Is the Marketing Director of Licks and All and He Was Just Tell yet He Was Talking about How His Mom Actually Was The Original OG Is Raising Her She Was Growing Marijuana and He Went to Theology School, Rebelled The Opposite Way like If You Are a Pastor You Really Grow Weed If You're Growing We Bellied Theology School You Find out You Know What You Go Back to the Things Parents. It Worked and It Made Sense Mom Was Right I Long Yeah Yeah I Mean I Joke That All the Time. I Grew up My Dad Was Yellow Country Music and Bud Light Not Solid to Rock 'n' Roll and Drink Out Of Date Now 50 and I Listen to Country Music Drink Bud Light Back Here at That Time That Often Did That Because You Find Those Things Were We Did Know Hey Rossiter – Neurology Practice Are You Incorporating Type of Natural Alternative Anything like That Big and Real High Population of People That Are Educated on the Younger Patient Population That I Have an Initial Internet Savvy and A Lot Of Them Come to Me Already Knowing A Lot about These Things and Having Read A Lot about These Things It's All out There When You Look Which Having Awesome so I Do I Have Acrobatic Doctors That I Work with I Have A Lot Of Patients on CD Oils Not Just for Things like This That Were Talking about but My Miles to Christ in Crohn's Patients with Chronic Nausea Patients My Chronic Pain Patients like Everything It Works for Some and It Does Percent Doesn't. Well I Want to See How It Was with What You Can Find Is That and What I Found Is That Not All CBD Is Created Equal And so with Some Things and so We Have Chris on Right Here and That I I'm Very I Think I Have a Similar Mantra Have A Lot Of Patience to Come into Being There Already Though I'd Artie Tried to Be like My Mom Tried Hemp Oil Which Probably Was Hemp Seed Oil Now That I Think about It in the Will and so It's like All Things You Know Not All Seabees Created Equal That's Working to Get into Today for the Rest of the Show Talk about This How Do You Market That How You Get the Word out That Just Because You Tried This Blanket Term CBD You Know You Gotta Really Make Sure That They Got a Certificate of Analysis and All That so I Want to Do If You Had Patients and It Didn't Work on Listing the Rest of the Show Because It May Be That the Power Dialects All Brand Is What You Really Need That's Exactly What We Need to Hear Some I'm Glad You Get Thanks for Involving Me and Bring Back Member My Dad and Mandalay Castle Being Vulnerable and Talking about That I Think It's Important for You Know I'm the Same Way Love Talk about My Dad It's Been You Many Years Now 30 Years since He Died so I'm Lucky Enough Still Have My Dad but My Fondest Memories Are Him Drinking Coors Light on the Boat Name for Court like Nebraska State Aire's Stepdaughter Russ I Was Met Together and That Means That We We with Some Real Lean Years Were We Were Broke Ass Med Student and Your Dad Will Visit And We Would Purposely Go to Bars with a Wood Offers like Specials like in This Bar It Will and You Don't Medical Whatever I'm Agreed As I Am Still a Bud Light like You Have but You Know Such Such Beers like 50% Was like I Was like Yeah Yeah Johnny Jerilyn $4.55 Dollars to Run I Got My Recall and in This Is Awesome That Your First Call Every Now and Certainly I Deftly Appreciated I Appreciate You Guys and Will Keep with the Man Thanks for All You Do Appreciate It I See Russ Well Chris to Talk about Beer Similar Talk about Boys You Know What I'll Say This I Remember Listening to a Podcast Were One of the Reasons Why Beer May Be so Popular Is Because the Hops and Actually Have a End of – You Have a Cannabinoid -like Molecule so My Understanding Is That That Was All Made up All Really Got Some Some Marketing Guy Used His Powers for Evil Instead of Good and That the Two Companies That Are And It Kinda Leaves What You're Talking about Not All Seabees Made Same Two Companies That Were behind Those Actually Had to Admit That There Was Those Studies Were Completely Phone No Kidding Yeah That Is Fascinating I Was Feeling and Have Chris Consider Just Burst Bubble to Be Dropping Some Truth Bombs Now That's Awesome What We Were Just Wrapping up so You To Get into the Hemp Industry Because Krista Talked about His Trek from from Fort Stockton to Plano out to out to California and Then You Spend a Little Time in Germany Germany Where I Did Learn A Lot about Beer Dealer Lot Is Three and Half Years on the High School There and Going to Prom and Castles and All Sorts of Fun Stuff That's a Little Different Doing for like We Did Were in Plano Where I Would've Would've Done It Sure Sure so Then after School You Then Get into Some Regulatory I Figured out This Beeper and Pager and Wireless Things Can Be a Big Deal so I Started Selling Cell Phones and Pagers and You Know Five Dollar Minute Type Technology in and Got into the Technology World and Got into When Sprint Was in One Market You Can Only Use Her Cell Phone in Fresno Okay and Then the Only Been Growing since Then Moved from There into the Finance World and Helped with A Lot Of Regulatory World and There and Open Market under A Lot Of Rules and Regulations and While I Was There I Met a Guy Who Is Doing Documentary on Campus and He Was Put Together All These Different Case Studies and All These Different Videos and Clips of These People That Have Been Healed by Campus and at That Time I Was like No Bunch of Stoners and You Just Want You with the with the Theology Background You Carry a Bias with These Going into These Other Careers Are More Open-Minded at This Point What Based on My Initial Upbringing by My Mom Who Is Very Open Minded I Was I Was Always Questioning Authority and Questioning Things and through That Entire Process Even Going through Theology School I Was Questioning Everything around Me You Know the Minute That and Again I Don't Know How Deep You Want to Get into Religion Here but the Minute That I Heard about Their Profit Care and Oh How They the Canonization of All of the Books and How They Got into the Bible I Started to Start Questioning A Lot More and You Know They Trying Teach You That the Bible Is 100% the Word of God and Then You Decide to Figure out That Is about 15 White Guys in a Room to Decide Which Books Are in the Bible and You Only but Little Doubt in Your Head Sure I Don't I Don't Know That 15 Guys Can Agree about Anything and Deftly When Trust Something like That That's Guiding so Many People's Lives Divided 15 Guys in Room so It's It's Definitely No Been Something I'm Always Open-Minded and Looking at Things and Questioning Things I'm Click to Decide and Slow to Change My Mind so I See Something That's Right and Usually Jump Right in and Stick with It May Be Too Long and Then Dismantled That up but I Learned My Lesson Sooner or Later Click to Decide Slow to Change My Mind That Is a That Is a Great Line This It's like You Make a Decision but You Don't Have To Make the Right Decision to Make Your Decision Right That A Lot Of Times I Mean We've Already It's That Little Cliché but Sure Enough Perfect Is Sometimes the Enemy of Good Brian and I like to Move Fast and Make the Decisions What I What I Believe in My Gut I Think That If More People Moved That Way Things to Get Done A Lot Faster in Love Things I Think Doubt Self-Doubt Challenges A Lot Of Us and from a Marketer And I like to Empower People to Make the Right Decisions and Given the Right Information That I Learned Early on in My Sales Careers That When People Tell You Know It's It's Primarily Because They Don't Have Enough Information to Say Yes the More Information We Can Give Them the More Education We Can Give Them Then They Can Move Forward So It's Just That Self-Doubt That Little Gut Thing That We Need to Move Them on Let Me Answer Question Measured Market Are One of the Things That I Have Run into with My Colleagues to Coworkers and Things Is That When Somebody Is so Entrenched in Their Belief They Get This Cognitive Dissonance Where It's Almost like There Is a Logical From Then on Transits and Religion Parallels That Tremendously If There's Anything That Has Cognitive Dissonance Is When Somebody Has the Religion and You like Look Just Saying That This Is like You Said It's 15 White Dudes in a Room You Know Maybe It's Not Everything I You Know There's A Lot Of Things I Grew up Catholic so I'm I'm I'm a Recovering Catholic and We Do Know There's There's A Lot Of Things I Look Back on Them like Ha Knows A Lot Of Things Were Really Good about It Right Discipline You Know Learning Empathy Learning These Different Things Learning to Be Held Accountable for What You Do There's Higher Good Buyer Doing All This of the Stall That There's Times That I Took Away from Theology and Take Away from Christianity and Many of the Religions That I've Studied but Absolutely One of the Things That Jesus Did Many Other of the of the Profits They Questioned Authority May Question Things and so It's Really Important That We Teach Our Kids Only Teach People to Question You Know Why Is CBD Bad by Wise Cannabis Bad You Know That Doesn't Make Any Sense and You Know If You Really Want to Get Deep on Some of the the Conspiracy Theories of How This All Got Legally Illegal We Could Get down That Road to Because It Is Crazy Will It Tell You What First of All Is Not All Right Thought Would Be Going off Right into A Lot Of Parallels That with This so What I Want to Ask You Is a Marketer How Do You Was a Marketer Overcome This Cognitive Dissonance so Primarily It's Education Right What What Sit in Front of Me and What Changed My Mind Is Facts I When You Look at Some Kid Or Some Mom or Some Dad That His Life Has Been Changed Because They're Taking CBD on a Regular Basis They Went from Not Being Able to Talk To Being Able to Talk No They Went from 300 Seizures a Day Two No Seizures but Those Type of Things You Can't Deny Right Something Is Working so If You're Able Then to Dig into Why Is That Not like Rafael Mitchell and Started Right He Went to Discover the Why We Get High Right Many Found in a Can-Am Annoyed System and Then He's Figured out There's More Than One Cabinet to New There's A Lot Of People Don't Know Who That Is Identical I've Read A Lot about Him Please Explain Who He Is Sort of the Godfather Godfather in the Can-Am Annoyed System and He's the One That in an Israel Went to Go Does Study Why THC Affects People And He Threw His Studies Found the Indo Cannabinoid System and the CD1 and CB to Receptors and Why We Get High and Started Been Digging into the Plant In Finding That There's Many More Cannabinoids and Found CB Juan and CBN and CBG and All These Things and He's Really the One That It Brought This to the Forefront for Everyone and Only Because Return for Why People Get Hot and Move Forward from There A True Scientist and Also Somebody Who Discovered Something That I Did Learn about Med School No Is 9% of Medical Schools Now Teach about That Night I'm Surprised It's Not Really I Think That's Higher Than What I Would've Said I Would've Said 0% It Said to Me It Still Shocking That Is That Low That It's Ever I Mean I Understand Coming from Medical Field Where You Were Taught about It so That Makes Sense Right but Even 9% of Sure All the Doctors out There How Much Impact Just This One Camp Mind Is Made Can You Imagine If 20% of Our Doctors Knew about How This Mean the Doctors That That I Talk to Every Day You Know They Run the Gamut Summerlike Yes All Day In Summer like Crazy I Lose My License Right and That's the Education Back to What Your Talk about How You Change the Minds What a Link Small Has Done and Work with People like You Is to Make Sure That Those Influencers of the Health and Wellness World Those Health Professionals out There Those Doctors Are Equipped with Education Because There to Make the Biggest Impact You Know I Can Go Sell a Bunch of This Online and All Search Ads up There and Click Send It There but What We've Decided to Is Focused Primarily on Helping Health Professionals to Learn about Our Product Because There Can Make Big Impact in the Community so That I Think That That Is All I'm Sorry about That I Think That's Paul Paul W Are Found When Joy Was Here She Was Describing Your You Paul Gabe Your Etiology Is Not so Much Just to Move Product It's to Educate the World so That This All Become Something Bigger Hundred Percent Hundred Percent Our Founder Paulino Is Pre-Much a Citizen of the World Now He Considers Himself One of Those Guys That That Doesn't Belong Any One Country That Belongs to the All of the World and He's Trying to Make Big Changes CDs Just One of Them You Know He's Been a Hen Pioneer since the 90s Right and Made the Very First Hemp Bar Because It Had so Many Omega-3's and Omega Sixes and Nobody Was Getting Those Essential Fats Right Now You Have To Get Them from Meat Is What They Were Trying so Need to Know You Can Get It from the Plants and You Can Start Getting Those Things Because You Could Lit so Many People Implant Diets Were Deficient And There Is No Reason Because We Had Hemp Constantly When I Met You and Chrissy Feel They Will Affect Two Years Ago I Knew Nothing Was in Two or Three Working up on the Third One Now Is at Three Bad Is Probably through Your Probably Right Because I Give a Lecture Last Year Yes Is Your Go to the Third Value about so What Happened to Me Was I Just Walked by the Booth and I Was Just That Christie Just Said You Discredited Love You Bunches That Happens When Everyone Christie Just Brought Everybody and She Such a Great Evangelist Shoot She Has but It Was Literally It's like I Don't Know What You're Talking about What I Did Your Enthusiasm Send a Case to My Office Area and I Gave Away the Whole Case You Can Take Any Blog I Talk about I Did Well but One Bottle and What I Found Is That I Guess Maybe Got to Get to 24 I Think I Had 22 People Come Back after the Bottle Run out the Big Bottle of 3600 It's I Want More Know It Okay Run Something And I Gave It to I Didn't of Insiders Ate the Cost and Elect Someone to See Unbiased Just Predicate Event Just Tell Me What You Think and a True Scientist but True yet so I Had like 22 of 24 People Come Back to What Okay Were on to Something Now I Need to Start Teaching Myself Now I Need to Really Start Educating Myself And It All Starts with That Starts with Just the Domino Effect And That's What's That's What I'm Doing Right Now Working to Be Talking A Lot about the Actual Science of Stuff and Disease States That I'm Helping Not Claiming But Supporting Supporting Exactly Just so You We Kind of Hit A Lot Of Different Topics Here but Said Some Things That We Can Carry over into the Next Hour That I Think the Listeners Are Really Liking at Your Approach Chris Which Is Basically You Said You'd You Should Become Double Challenging Dogma You and You Really Should If You're Going to Find Something That Doesn't Just Mean Looking at Hemp and Saying I Think It's Taboo but I Need to Find out More about It to See If I Can Change My Mind There's Also Incidents We May Say Hemp Is Everything but I Need to Make Sure That It's Everything That Everybody Says That It Is Absolutely and Then Then We Also Need to Talk about the Environment That Allows Us to Foster This Kind Growth Because There's a Reason If I Remember the Story Correctly That the Discoveries Made in Israel It Wasn't I Wasn't Able Only One Able to Have Those Kinds of Experiments Here to Find Indo Cannabinoid System in a Stateside Because Our Government Prevented That from Happening so the Fact There Were 9% of Med Schools It's Surprising That It's Grown That Much of the Same Time It Should Be Hundred Percent so We Can Get into Some Really Deep Topics in Terms of How Do We Carry This Message Forward How Do We Make It Available to More People How We Present the Facts of the People Know That You're Not Selling Them Snake Oil That You're Not Telling That You Know It It Fixes Broken Bones and Lowers Your Gas Bill Because It Doesn't Do Those Things Really Get Bored but Actually I Think Fixing Broken Bones Lowering Gas-Filled FDA and FTC Has No Problem with Those Claims but It Is That You and I Could Probably Make a Correlation to the Lower Gospel If I Wanted Regulator System Brings a Homeostasis You Don't Need to Turn up the Heater Comes to the Practical Application of a CBD Is Really Where Your Expertise Is Because You've Made This Journey Right You Made This Journey of I Don't Believe in It to This Is Incredible I Gotta Spread This News in the Right Way to Do so Would You Are Much More Well-Rounded Than I Was Anticipating This Is Really Cool You Got One of the Things You Get a Very Calm Nature but I Would Have This Nervous Energy about My Gosh I'm Sitting on This Just Amazing Thing Wire but As Everybody Get It But You Seem Very Meth Methodical about It I Should Say Well I Have I Do Have What Is Known As Very Laid-Back Nature People Been Thinking I Was High My Whole Life When I Want to Buy Weed from Me When I Didn't Have It so It's Just in My Nature but Absolutely I'm Very Thoughtful about How We Communicate This Because It's Important You Know There Is A Lot Of Weight To What Were Doing This Is a You Know Even Bigger Than the Internet Boom in the 90s and Skin to Change A Lot Of Things Now If You Think about It CBD And Him Could Replace the Entire Johnson & Johnson Catalog So That Hits on Something That We Can Deftly Take the Next Hour to Think That That the Listeners Have Got to Email about It Already That Specifically Want to Know How Can We Put Facts and Research behind Were Going to Do in the Next Hour We Can Deftly Talk about What It Is That a Medical Practitioner Can Do What It Is That a Consumer Can Do What Is in Allied Health Professional Can Do so They Can Better Spread The Message to Allow People That Are Suffering or Just Sibley Want to Improve Their Quality of Life and Him and Him Products to To Their Rather Daily Routine to See If They Can Basically Get a Better Balance so Homeostasis Homeostasis Act about Getting Back in Balance Well That Is Going to Wrap up This First Half-Hour with Chris He Saw Will Be Back Here about Four and Half Minutes Thank You Seems to This Is the Only 24 Hour Take Anywhere Platforms Dedicated to Food and Fun Clear Spoony If Our Townhall.com, or VP Biden 20th Democrat to Announce His Candidacy for the Parties Residential Nominating Widens One of the Most Recognizable Names in Politics the Most Experienced Candidate in This Field and at 76 Seats Second Oldest Face Questions about Whether His Age and More Moderate Record Are Out Of Touch with the Democratic Party Featuring the Younger and More Liberal Contenders Correspondence Agar Magali American University Political Science Professor James Thurber Says If He Hopes to Win Biden Will Have To Find a Way to Connect with Younger Voters He's Really Running against His Own Record to a Certain Age and He Has To Persuade a New Generation That He's Got the Right Ideas Help America and Them President from Writing on Twitter This Morning Welcome to the Race Sleepy Joe Russian Pres. Putin Says She'll Be Briefing Both Beijing and Washington on His Summit with North Korean Leader Kim Jong June Says Cam Expresses a Willingness to Give up His Nuclear Weapons If He Can Secure an Ironclad Security Guarantee First A Woman and Her Two Young Children Died on the Family Car Was Caught up in Floodwaters Rolling Plains of West Texas about 75 Miles Southwest of Fort Worth Storm Prediction Center Meteorologist Matt Mosher Says One of 21 to 2 Inches of Rain Is Falling in West Texas Although Some Areas Did See a Bit More Not That Normal Rainfall Amount over It Adds up over over Dating Week so It's Been a Pretty Wet Winter In That Area and so That's What Caused The Flooding Issues to Homes in the City Hall Office of Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh Been Rated by FBI and IRS Agents No Word on Exactly What They're Looking for Stocks Are Mixed on Wall Street This Morning Right Now the Dow down Sharply It's off 203 Points on the NASDAQ Is up 38 Points One of the stories@townhall.com Fast-Track Student Loans Can Get Your Student Loans Out Of the Vault Stop Any Wage Garnishments Stop Collection Calls and Stop Seizure of Your Tax Refund Give Yourself a Break to Stop the Stress and Get Your Student Loan Payments down to As Little As $25 a Month Based on What You Can Afford to Pay 800-709-4395 800-709-4395 800-709-4395 800-709-4395 Use the Expenses Blue or Yellow Pills to Charge Your Sex Life Are You Thinking about What We Can Promise You the Same Results from 3 PM If You Paying $20 a Pair for the Other Parents You're Getting Taken to the Cleaners Same Results for Less Than Three Dollars More Than $16 Account for the Same Restaurants Right Now We Will Get 44 Blue or Yellow Pills 23 Discrete Shipping You Can Save More Than Hundred Dollars Our Pharmacy Prices Right Now Your 44 Pounds over 700 and Qualify for Free Shipping over Pain, Right Now 218-647-3800 21864738 Henry 186473 That's 800-218-6473 Now You Can Fly Anywhere in the World and Paid Discount Prices on Your Airline Tickets Flight to Date Alignment Harassment to Read or Anywhere Else You Want to Go and Pay A Lot Less Guarantee Quality International Travel Department Right Now Low-Cost Airlines 800 452 1075 800-452-1075 That's 800-452-1075 Okay Welcome Back Project Is Going to Be in Second Hour of Episode Number Eight I Married Grigor Join with Your Host Ken Brown Ducked Him around after All Just Here in Dallas or Plano Texas As Well As Song the Vice President of Marketing and Communication for Election All Will That Last Half-Hour Was Very Light Very in Writing Those Funds All Inroads Lead to the Truth but Everything Good Starts with a Peer Conversation of Beer in God Patient While I Have for All of Our Listeners If You Ever Listen to the Spinning Network Which Is the Host Network of Gut Check Project Be Sure and Check out Mojo 50.com and You Can Also Find the Morse Code Brenda Morse Hosts a Great Show on Their It Starts Every Day 1 PM Eastern That Is Brandon Morse of the Morse Code You Just Talk to Brandon Not Even 20 Seconds Ago in the Hallways You Return Back to the Shed I Did and I Was on Their Show This Morning at Say What Whatever He Is on I Want That Energy Just Truckloads of Energy He Does Tons of Writing Is a Copywriters Got Several Shows That Guy's Got a Good Beard Punishing My M&Ms Right Yeah Yeah I've Been You Know What I Got Beard and Good for Everybody I Think I'm on to 1/2 Years Growing This One Right Now in the Is All I Can Do I Went down to Skin Yesterday Does Not Back up What I'm Really 40 Years and One More Mention Here in Our Live at Reduced Going to Be KB MD CBD Minima Right Works for the Company Licks and All the Powers This and There's a Reason behind That the KB MD CBD You Can Find a KPMG Health.com Is Physician Recommended by the Physician and Sit across the Table for Me Right Now So We Can Get into Some Really Neat Topics in Terms of the CBD with This Man to My Right Mr. Chris Her Song and We Just Finished the Last Half Hour Talking about Essentially Finding the Truth and It Doesn't Have To Be All One Direction or All Another Direction It's Okay to Question Even Your Own Your Own New Revelations in Terms of What You Think of Him or What You Think Driving a Car Everything Should Always Be Open for Question Would You Say Chris Yeah I Think I Think Absolutely That to You to Find Your Truth and and Search for and Find out What Works for You I Mean We Were Just Talking Earlier How You When You First Met Us Got 24 Bottles of Our Product 22 People Came Back to Get It A Couple People Cited Didn't Report Being CBD Itself High-Quality CBD Is an Amazing Product I Think Everybody Should Be Taken Every Day but Some People Decide That You Don't Not Work for Them and That's That's Okay Well It's Really Interesting Because One of Things We Talked about Though Let's Get into from a Marketing Standpoint We Purposely Our Brochure What I Wanted to Address Was a Couple Things That My Patients Always Talk about Number One Why Did I Get Involved with That Number Two What Is Your and a Cannabinoid System Get Back in Balance One of the Things He Can Help and More Importantly Which Is My Favorite Panel Here Is Why Is the Powered by Alexa and All Brand Different from Other Brands That's in There Is so Many Good Reasons to to Work with Alex on Work Find a Quality CBD and There's Other Quality CD Companies out There but I Say I'm Partial to Alexa Now but It Is Important That You Know You're Mine and That's the Truth for Just about Everybody Mean I Became Vegan about Two Years Ago and Note the Reason I Did That Was A Lot Of the Same Reasons That You Guys of Been Talk about Your Fathers in Your Your Your Parents Is I Looked at My Dad and I Looked at My Mom and I Said I Don't Have Healthy Genes I Make a Change and in a Questioning What's Going on but I Needed to Make a Change in That's White and That's I Got into the Hemp Industry and I Need to Make a Change so I Had to Do Some Health Conversations and What That Did for Me It Got Me More Connected to What I Eat But I Get More Connected to What I Put My Body so I Look at the Labels Right I Look at What's Going on That's Why to Begin I Absolutely Think That That's What You Need to Do You Doing When You're Looking at CBD Where Did It Come from Who Made It Now Is It Organic What Country Did It Come from Doesn't Have a Certificate of Analysis Can You See That It's Clean Mean We Get to the Point Where Were Controlling the Grow Where We Control the Water Rights We Know Where the Water Came around Really so We Go Way All the Way down to Temps an Amazing Plant Right Yeah It It Basically Filters the Soil It Actually Is Good for the Environment but Let's Start from the Very Beginning Here so This This KB MD Health CBD Tell Me Where This Came from So Beginning to End so It Came Out Of Your Hair It Came Out Of Your Head Right. That's Right Then and What We Found Is You Coming to Us and Just Going Hey This Is Amazing This Is Working for RFR My Patients Is Working for My Client And I Need To Be Able to Provided in a Form Factor That Fits Your Protocols and We Were Just Excited about Beating to Partner with You on That Because We Want to Be Able to like We Talked about Earlier Is Educate People Right and You're Doing Such a Phenomenal Job of Educating People How to Better Run Their Lives and Heal Their Lives and Give Their Body Information to Heal Itself And What We Really Love Is That That CBD That You Work on Is Our 3600 Format It and We Been Using That Formulation for a Long Time and You You Put Some Formulation Changes to It That the Size Form Factor and Allowed It to Even Be Better and We Love That That Model We Go to Trade Shows All the Time Going to One This Week Pay the Effects Will Go to Autism One We Go You Guys Are Doing Autism 10 Yeah We Go Every Year Fantastic We Love Is Only I've Got Just for You so in the Future with Probably One Is Autism Autism Is Mid-May Mid-May Fortune Will Be Able to Do the Surgery A Lot Of Travel Coming up but Let Me Tell You What Working to Be Publishing Probably the Most Comprehensive and Scientific Review It Geeks Out I Mean to a Level That I Have To I Mean I'm Trying to Figure out How to Make It a Little Bit Easier but You Almost Can't Dance to the Point Where It's like You Need This Science That's the to Show the Most Educated Group of People That I Go and See Most of the Time Is Autism Group Right It's It Scientist Date Those Moms and Those Parents That Are Dealing with That Are More Educator and Cannabis and Diet and and Looking at the Details of What I'm Putting in My Body Than Anybody That I've Met and As Such and More Interesting No Group of People and What's My Favorite Part Is They Won't Let Us Leave Right We Get There Early We Leave Late Every Day Because They're Just Coming up and Saying I Need This Is Working for Me I Need This Is Working for Me What I Guess Was Two Weeks Ago When I Brought up the so like I Said Every Single Show We Do Some Sort of Science And One of the Articles That I Brought up Was Out Of Israel Where They Actually Looked at the Ananda Biden to AG Level Specifically Nana Might Be the One That's Always There Which Is an Endo Cannabinoid and They Showed In Autism Spectrum Disorder Almost Unequivocally Their Lower So the Deck Stacked against Him Right There You Need to Raise It up to Get Them to This Point so It's Almost like It Is a Essential Nutrient If You Are on the Autism Spectrum Disorder so I'm Very Passionate about That Myself Yeah and and I Am to Have in It It's Very Similar to Some of the

Discord https://discord.gg/yEQtqay 03:51 Chapter 929 37:35 How strong is Shanks 38:46 Eric IS mad at Wano 50:15 Power Scale 1:07:49 Question LAZ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa99... Twitter https://twitter.com/EricTerlato soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/theredforcepod...

Join QuantumDigital’s CMO Eric Cosway as he interviews Alex Bruno, owner of RE/MAX 5-Star Realty in Florida. Alex is a top producer who also works with banks, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Alex is HUD-certified, and has a strong network of home buyers and investors.   Eric: Alex, welcome to the podcast.   Alex: Hello. How are you doing?   Eric: So, it sounds like RE/MAX 5-Star has been around since 2016. What led you to want to start the business, or create a franchise for yourself?   Alex: Actually, over the years, I thought it was important based on the experience that I got in real estate. I wanted to have an office with a little bit of a different perspective, and being a buyer’s and listing agent for many years, I understand how difficult it is to be an agent. I wanted to facilitate the tools and the support for the agents the way that I would like to have it myself. I wanted to be able to answer their questions, and at the same time provide the tools that they need. I didn’t want to be the office that was open for 30-40 years. Things change over the years. The real estate market changed. The real estate agent’s needs changed. The buyers changed. Everything is completely different. And more and more the market keeps changing every year. We need to make adjustments constantly.   Eric: Is your primary focus on buyers in Hollywood, Florida? Or do you do both buyers and sellers?   Alex: I work with buyers and sellers, and I work on South Florida, not just only on Hollywood. From Miami Beach to Pompano Beach, we are open to working with different cities.   Eric: Was that area impacted by the hurricane this past summer? Last couple of months?   Alex: Absolutely. Yes. And we’re still seeing the damages around.   Eric: How did that impact you? You’re right there in the center of it. You have a staff. Not only were you affected, but I’m sure the business was impacted as well.   Alex: First of all, it’s something that is out of our control. We need to take it the way it is, and try to make the best of it. So, we need to just continue life because it was definitely a huge impact for real estate, and also properties they were supposed to close. They have to be re-inspected again, and appraised again. Some of the sales fall apart, but we need to continue. When the market crashed in 2007, life continued. And you have to keep going. And there were always buyers. We were a little spoiled, some of the agent. Deals were so easy, then they were no longer that easy. We need to work harder. But everything is possible, and we need to adapt to the times.   Eric: You came into the real estate business in 2007. How was that first year for you as a Realtor?   Alex: It was a little sad. A lot of people were very depressed. It was like the end of the world. It was a commotion—many people taking time off, going away. Other ones struggling to figure out how to react to these major changes. And I personally think it was easier for me because I was not that spoiled. I was new. So, I figured out there are always buyers. People are going to keep buying homes and selling homes. This is not the end of the world. Maybe the end of a good market, but there were always FHA buyers. Much better buyers than before. Real buyers that can afford these houses. Because, after the market crashed, lenders were more conscious about the capability of a buyer to purchase a home. You keep going, and you have to adapt to the situation.   Eric: Is there something specific about a buyer that you’ve learned—the one or two things a buyer always needs that you just know what to do, and just handle a buyer so they’re fully happy and satisfied with all the work you do?   Alex: One of the most important is to listen to them, and try to build in your mind and try to understand what the needs are for they buyer. Try to put time into that buyer to show them that you want to work with them. Because it’s a very competitive market. Here in Florida, a lot of people have real estate licenses. So, everybody knows a friend, or a neighbor, or a coworker that has a real estate license. But, not everyone is dedicated to this career. A lot of people think it’s easy, but it’s not that easy. What you need to do is just listen to the buyer, and try to work on what they are asking. And be available. That is one of the most important things; build a criteria for the buyer, and try to work on finding what they are looking for.   Eric: I read your customer reviews, and I have to tell you, they’re excellent. Here are the common terms when people talked about you. They said you were responsive. Always calls back. Knowledgeable. Trustworthy. Honest. Knows the area extremely well. Is available 24/7. So, does that surprise you, or is that just who you are—your DNA?   Alex: It’s who I try to be all the time for my clients. I think it’s important for all these points to be met—to have a happy client, and to eventually get more referrals and more business. To be dedicated for this job.   Eric: Tell me about the dedication in this job. You have a team of 8 people, is that correct?   Alex: Approximately, yes. With the photographers, yeah.   Eric: Are you active 7 days a week being a team lead, or can you now delegate some of those responsibilities off?   Alex: I delegate, but as a team leader you have to keep pushing to make sure that you keep the standards.   Eric: WHen it’s really tough, what do you tell your team? How do you motivate your team to keep moving?   Alex: There are many sources, and some of the sources we learn from the old school. You have to go back to what used to work before, in order to add what works now. In order to get buyer’s and seller’s business—even in the tough times—you have to do a hundred things. It’s not like one thing is going to give you the business. If you have multiple options, most likely you’re going to have better results. Prospectings, For Sale By Owners, campaigns, expired campaigns… those are the old school. Open Houses—a lot of people don’t believe in open houses. Some people don’t believe in broker’s Open Houses. You have to try everything. And believe me you have more chances, you’re going to succeed with better results.   Eric: Sounds like technology has impacted your business. Has it made things easier for you? Has it given better exposure to your buyers and sellers? How do you leverage technology as a broker?   Alex: Technology makes smarter buyers. The buyers know how to look. And it makes it more risky for the agents, because you get a chance of losing a buyer going directly with a listing agent, or going a different route with another agent. The information is more available. You just Google the address, and you can get all the information regarding that property. It definitely helps us also to be able to locate a property the buyer is asking for immediately through our phones. But at the same time, we need to keep the quality of the work going, to keep that buyer, being more proactive about finding what they’re looking for. Because they buyer will be looking for those properties, too. So, you’re working with a buyer… a smarter buyer.   Eric: Now that there’s so much content available to buyers to be smart buyers, has that forced your game and your agents games up to be even more on top of the market than you might normally be?   Alex: I don’t think so. It’s just that we need to adapt to the changes and grow with the changes.   Eric: Are you a team that adopts new technology? Or are you a tad more service, belly-to-belly, a little more old fashioned in the way you approach your buyers and sellers?   Alex: It’s a bunch of things together, and we have to keep moving forward with technology, and adopting new trends, new programs, new marketing—different types of marketing that probably didn’t exist 10 years ago—and try to be creative for your business. That way, you can stand in the market as an agent.   Eric: You mentioned your referrals. Is that mainly how you drive business today?   Alex: Referrals are very important. And also, if you work for an international company, your exposure is even more. But referrals is one of the things that really helps your business. It’s on the top of the list, definitely.   Eric: There are obviously some benefits being a franchise, but in your market what are the big 2 or 3 benefits of having that RE/MAX brand behind you?   Alex: When I was exploring the possibility of buying a franchise, I met with multiple companies. And the RE/MAX platform was clean and easy for the agent. And at the same time—one of the most important things for me, especially referrals—is seeing how big it is. In 100 countries, plus. And have 110,000 agents around the world. That makes you feel safe. It’s a company that keeps growing, that gives you the tools to be successful. And that is exactly what I was looking for. I was not looking about quantity of agents per square feet. Everybody has different perspectives of somebody who opens a franchise. I think that those were very important points to make a decision to continue being part of RE/MAX.   Eric: Let’s change course a little bit. You have a background in interior design. You’re from Uruguay. Tell us about how interior design informs you, or helps you in your career in real estate.   Alex: I didn’t finish the career on interior design, so I didn’t get a license for it. But, it definitely helped me to help sellers, or give them advice on how to present the home to be sold faster, for more money. Seeing, from a different perspective, the home from the buyer’s side, and being able to tell just the sellers what they should do to accomplish that.   Eric: It sounds like a really complementary skill to what you’re doing day to day.   Alex: Honestly, I love my job. And I definitely put my heart on every transaction. It doesn’t matter how much the sales price is. Every transaction means a lot for me. The important thing is to make it happen, and have a good presentation, a good description of the property. You need to put a little bit of your heart on every property that you list. Going the extra mile for the client.   Eric: Well, you’re definitely passionate about your career. What would be the other things you’re passionate about?   Alex: My family, honestly. It’s the most important thing in my life. And also my country—even though I was born in Uruguay—I have the American dream, and I love this country. I’m proud of being an American citizen. And my career.   Eric: Alex, what a pleasure speaking with you today. I know being a team lead, and being a broker with all the responsibilities, your time is very limited so it’s precious. I want to to thank you for your time. I hope you found it informative. We certainly did.   Alex: Absolutely. And I want to help other agents who don’t see the light sometimes of this business. And a lot of people who feel limited, because maybe they are foreign people, or they feel different… this is a job where you can can shine. And not because you’re pretty, or you drive a nice car. You can shine for talent.   Eric: Congratulations! You’ve done a very nice job. Alex: Thank you!

Join Christian "Spootyone" Kingsbury and Eric "Is the host this time" Knappe as they discuss Conspiracy 2, Kaladesh info, Penny Dreadful and more!

吉他大师们更多的是在和听众进行心灵深处的交流，往往能在某种时刻让你触动，低吟浅唱之间几乎是在朗诵一篇篇诗篇，当手指滑过吉他的瞬间，就如同拂过心弦般让人心动。 而对于我，这首歌的回忆，确是一种一见钟情，多年以后，却仿佛变成了从来没有认识过一个人后来一天在遥远的夜深小酒馆里，忽然就听到了《Wonderful Tonight》, 然后整张桌子里的朋友就忽然都不说话，静得只听见门口烤羊肉串的噼啪声。我听见ERIC唱着“Is that you just don&`&t realize, how much i love you" 于是我想起了某人，想起挂掉的那些电话，还有那些再没回过的短信也许我们今生不会再见如果我们在天堂相遇，你是否还会记得我，还会不会大声地喊出我的名字是否还会记得相爱的那个夜晚，那个浪漫一生难忘的车里的夜晚，当酒醉的朋友们散去，只有两个人在一起，你看着我，眼睛像是夜晚的星星一般的闪亮

June 26, 2013 Podcast: What Are The Best Fat Loss Supplements, What To Do About Worn Cartilage, Controlling Blood Sugar During Ketosis, Natural Remedies for Exercise Induced Asthma, Does ADHD Medication Affect Performance, and How To Heal Injured Ribs. Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the contact button at the bottom of the app. Please don't forget to give the - it only takes a minute and you could win a BGFitness care package! ----------------------------------------------------- News Flashes: You can get these News Flashes hot off the presses if you follow Ben on , and . What do you think are ? According to this: caffeine, sodium bicarbonate…and carbs. One of my favorite "underground training techniques" - I also reference this ? Crunches? Russian twists? Situps? Nope. Squat and deadlift. ----------------------------------------------------- Special Announcements: Next Month’s InnerCircle webinar - is officially scheduled for Friday, July 12, 6:30pm. Pacific time and is entitled: "". You’ll get the in’s and out’s of analyzing and interpreting your own nutrition and food intake – and the best resources and tools to track your diet. The brand new - is your portal to all of Ben's best fitness shows, special episodes, and videos in one convenient spot - including exclusive bonus content you won't get anywhere else except inside this app! 2013 Thailand Triathlon Adventure with Ben Greenfield - details at . Now including the pre-camp: It's a "high end" triathlon training resort. Brand new facilities - We're going to do coached sessions every day. It won't be hardcore training as much as a focus on learning about nutrition, training, fitness, and how to "get the edge" in endurance, life and health! Brand new BenGreenfieldFitness triathlon kits and clothing is available! Need a ? bgpromo13 is good for 20% off of anything. If you're looking for a topic we covered in the past - we have released the Including: 1. The Benefits of Fish vs. Fish Oil 2. The Best Ways to Stop Hair Loss 3. Increase Your Hematocrit & Oxygen Levels 4. Strengthen Your Immune System & Shorten the Duration of a Cold 5. Top 10 Ways to Boost Libido 6. Get Rid of Migraines Naturally 7. Become a Curvaceous, Lean, Ripped Female Athlete Without Destroying Your Health 8. Stop Side Stitches as Fast as Possible 9. Is It Possible for a Vegan to Be a Healthy Endurance Athlete 10. How Much Water Do You Really Need to Drink Each Day ----------------------------------------------------- Listener Q&A: As compiled, edited and sometimes read by , the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast "sidekick". Fiona (FitBritMom) asks @ 00:21:39 - What Are The Best Fat Loss Supplements? Could you give your expert opinion on cissus extract for joint health and weight management. She is currently training for a marathon, is turning 40 next year and has a family history of arthritis. Is cissus worth it or is there something else she should be taking instead? ~ In my response to Fiona, I reference joint support supplement and also the I also discuss inflammation and the Steve asks @ 00:31:57 - What To Do About Worn Cartilage He is a former overweight substance abuser turned ultra runner that has had meniscus surgery twice, wears a knee brace, foam rolls, has done all the strengthening exercises for his legs and glutes, has done acupuncture and still has knee pain. Feels like it is bone on bone. He really wants to be able to run again, is there anything else he can do? He really wants to set a good example for his kids and seems to think he will slip back into his previous life if he can't run. ~ In my response to Steve, I mention "". Eric says @ 00:39:38 - Controlling Blood Sugar During Ketosis Is it necessary to do the blood sugar hacks (like using a lot of cinnamon and bitters) if you are in ketosis? And clearly another Eric Is also wondering if you have noticed the "ketogenic breath"? ~ In my response to Eric, I mention . I also mention and these . Bob asks @ 00:48:39 - Natural Remedies for Exercise Induced Asthma Do you have any suggestions for some diagnosed with EIB (exercise induced bronchial spasms)? Benadryl seems to help but he doesn't want to take that all the time. ~ In my response, I mention this I also recommend the and this . And the . Anonymous asks @ 00:56:33 - Does ADHD Medication Affect Performance? He is a 50-year-old athlete who takes 20mg of Adderall for ADHD and also .5mg Clonazepam for sleep and anxiety. He is wondering how these might be effecting his performance (for good or bad). Also, are there ways to use more natural substances to ween off of these medications? ~ In my response, I mention the . I also mention my recommended and , including: -500-1000mg combined with 1-2g , used sparingly before high mental demanding activities -2-6g/day triglyceride based fish oil – recommend -Acetyl-L-carnitine – 500mg, 1x/day – recommend 1-2 servings “” per day -Alpha-lipoic-acid, 100mg, 1x/day - recommend 1-2 servings “” per day -For depression/lack of motivation – 3000mg + 300mg -It is HIGHLY recommended that you do neurotransmitter testing before experimenting with these particular supplements, but for neurotransmitter balance (behavioral issues, depression, etc.), you can start with 4 (to balance catecholamines and increase serotonin), twice daily (in the AM and at 4 PM) with 2 (for L-Cysteine to increase catecholamine synthesis or when using ), three times daily (the first dose at noon). Read the or before experimenting too much with this stuff. Gina says @ 01:11:45 - How To Heal Injured Ribs Fell off a chair and bruised (maybe fractured) her ribs (says she was not drunk). Went to a chiropractor, told him about her ribs and he still did a spinal adjustment and re-injured her ribs. What do you recommend to heal them as fast as possible - wants to get back to spinning, running, getting her HR up but can't really breathe right now or move her right side. ~ In my response I recommend a . -- And don't forget to go to -- Prior to asking your question, do a search in upper right hand corner of this website for the keywords associated with your question. Many of the questions we receive have already been answered here at Ben Greenfield Fitness! Podcast music from 80s Fitness (Reso Remix) by KOAN Sound. !