Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #49: Antisemitism & AI: Protecting Truth in an Era of Increasing Misinformation — Jonathan Greenblatt

Transcript

#49: Antisemitism & AI: Protecting Truth in an Era of Increasing Misinformation — Jonathan Greenblatt · Love Conquers Fear

• 0:00
  Sometimes I think we take for granted what we have and we just
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  think there's some like natural law that Danes, that this will
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  all continue. I don't think that's necessarily
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  the case. That doesn't mean that we're
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  hurtling towards some dystopian future, but it does mean that
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  it's up to US. Team humanity means we have to
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  play our part. I do not believe that we're
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  necessarily hurtling toward, you know, the Matrix.
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  But I do think that it's incumbent upon us to step up
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  where our forefathers stepped up, where they stepped up and
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  created what we know is the American Revolution.
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  And after the Civil War, we built this country.
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  So if they stepped up and think about the New Deal, created all
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  these institutions that we take for granted today.
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  And I think Americans are born with this sort of pioneering
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  spirit to make this moment work. We don't just need to like, wrap
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  our brains around how AI works. We need to open our hearts to
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  understand what it means to actually be at a point where you
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  talked about AI as flattening things, like, it's the humanity
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  flattener too. And what does it look like?
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  We can get past like these silly, like tribal ideas and see
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  ourselves really as all created in the image of God.
• 1:02
  Welcome back everybody to the Love Conquers Fear podcast.
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  I am in New York City now. You saw in the last episode I
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  was in DC with Brian Rescue, the author of The Immortality Key,
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  and I was just about to go into the APAC Congressional Summit,
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  which was a fantastic event. Lot of unity, you know, no
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  matter what you have read or heard, it is very bipartisan.
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  They actually had a track this year where you could go either
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  the Republican track or the Democrat track, and it was
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  around a 5050 split. I think that's important to
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  emphasize because there's a lot of disinformation and
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  misinformation out there and we're going to dig into that
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  with today's guest. And the reason I mention it is
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  that show me something else that's that bipartisan where you
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  have nearly a 5050 split of who's attending.
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  As I mentioned many times, I am an independent.
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  There was a lot of celebration at APAC on the hostages being
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  back and all of the wins for really trying to help stabilize
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  that region. It looks like it's possible for
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  Iran to tip, which would be incredible.
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  One of the things you don't hear really hardly anybody talking
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  about today is there's been over 10,000 people executed in Iran
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  to try to, you know, fight the, the uprising of the populace who
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  just wants freedom. You know, love conquers fear.
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  It's what this podcast is all about in the book that I'm
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  writing. And it really matters what
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  happens in that region. That region is a defining region
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  for freedom, for love, really conquering fear.
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  And it's one of the oldest spiritual regions in the entire
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  world. You know, a lot of the biggest
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  religions came out of the Middle East.
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  So I'm very proud to be involved in APAC and go to that event
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  every year. I've been donating for for I
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  think around 14 years now. Also, I've been digging into
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  Michael Pollan's new book A World Appears just came out on
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  February 24th. I'm actually recording this the
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  day after and I'm already a 4th through the book.
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  It is a good book for sure. Michael Pollan, you know,
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  famously wrote How to Change Your Mind.
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  His documentary of that name is a fantastic one.
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  This is a really deep dive scientifically into the nature
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  of consciousness and I'm found it pretty fascinating so far.
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  This is a really anticipated book.
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  When he starts talking about plant based consciousness and
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  the evidence for that, it's a pretty big mind Bender how you
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  can use, you know, time lapse to really speed up the way plants
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  move. And they're exhibiting a form of
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  intelligence. And you know, there's always
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  been a discussion and debate since the beginning of humanity
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  on what is the nature of our reality and how far does
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  sentience actually extend in the animal Kingdom, the plant
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  Kingdom, etcetera. So it's, it's pretty, it's
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  pretty fun. I would encourage you to pick it
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  up. And yeah, I've been anticipating
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  this one. So I'm going to RIP through it
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  probably in the next couple of days.
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  Maybe by the time I record my next guest, I'll have, I'll have
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  finished the book. So I'm really, really excited
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  today to have a guest on that is also a Henry Crown Fellow.
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  He's the CEO of the ADL organization we've been
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  supporting for well over a decade, very proudly.
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  And I welcome Jonathan Greenblatt.
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  Thank. You for having me, Brett?
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  Yeah, so good to have you here, brother.
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  It is really a treat to be here and I'm super excited to be on
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  the podcast. And I'm excited about Michael
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  Poland's new book. Yeah, his book The Omnivore's
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  Dilemma. I must have read it like a
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  decade ago or. More Yeah, it's at least that
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  all. And it was a just a wonderful,
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  wonderful, thoughtful, like, exposition.
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  Yeah. On food and our relationship to
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  food and our relationship. Yeah.
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  To like, like, like flora and fauna.
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  And so it sounds like this new book kind of builds on some of
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  those ideas. It builds on it big time.
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  Like to read it. And this is kind of the big
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  subject right now. Like in 2025 you had Dan Brown
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  come out with The Secret of Secrets that was all about the
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  nature of consciousness. Great, great novel.
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  I finished that at the end of the year.
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  Annika Harris, who's married to Sam Harris, as you know, came
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  out with Lights On, which was a real exploration in
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  consciousness. And then The Telepathy Tapes
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  came out with Season 2. That podcast at one point was
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  more popular than Joe Rogan's podcast.
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  I don't even. I've never listened to it
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  before. Well, season 2 is amazing
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  because season 2 goes step by step through consciousness in
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  everything from the plant Kingdom to the animal Kingdom.
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  It's fascinating. It's a good one, very highly
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  produced. And they've announced that it's
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  now being turned into a Netflix documentary.
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  And I imagine that's going to happen with A World of Peers by
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  Michael Pollan, just like it happened without a Change Your
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  Mind, which is fantastic. Super neat.
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  Yeah. So I am very proud to call you a
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  friend and really appreciate all of your leading in the arena.
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  I mean, it's been, it's been a big arena since October 7th,
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  2023. And I think that you were in
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  Austin a week or two after you got the job.
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  Yeah, shortly after. And so maybe we just start there
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  with why? Why this job as the CEO of the
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  ADL? Why is this your soul song?
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  I'll say. Well, it's a good question.
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  You know, it's an interesting role.
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  So for your listeners who might not be familiar with the ADL,
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  the Anti Defamation League, it's the oldest anti hate
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  organization in the country. It was founded in 1913 around
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  the lynching of a Jewish man. But if you go back 113 some odd
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  years, essentially Jews in America in that time lived with
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  what we would probably call today's systemic discrimination.
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  Couldn't work many professions. You could legally not like sell
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  your house to a Jew. You could legally not employ,
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  choose not to employ someone who's Jewish, again, on the
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  basis of their identity. They were kept out of many
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  universities or their numbers were kept low through quotas.
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  They couldn't get health care and medical treatment at most
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  facilities. That's why in many cities, like
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  here in New York City, where we're taping this Mount Sinai
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  Hospital was founded in the mid 1800s.
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  They called it the Jews Hospital because Jews couldn't get
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  medical treatment at the other hospitals.
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  They were all religiously affiliated anyways in that
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  environment, and there was lots of slander and scapegoating in
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  that environment. This guy, Leo Frank, he goes
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  from New York down to Atlanta to manage a family business.
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  Make a Long story short, he is falsely accused of a crime.
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  He is then wrongfully convicted and he's sentenced to death.
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  The governor intervenes because he didn't have due process and
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  there was exculpatory evidence and reduces the sentence to life
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  imprisonment. The mob is so enraged by that
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  act of leniency, they break into the jail and they tear him from
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  a cell and they hang Leo Frank from a tree.
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  And while the body's still hanging from the rope, the whole
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  town gathers around like all the town leaders, and they take
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  photographs to celebrate the lynching of Leo Frank.
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  They set up like a BBQ underneath and they keep the
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  body there all day and they, like, make it a special
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  occasion. At the end of the day.
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  They take down the body and they take the rope and they chop it
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  up into pieces and they give it away as mementos to honor the
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  lynching of Leo Frank. So it's in that environment when
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  ADL is created. And essentially, the people who
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  created the organization saw a need to fill a gap because there
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  was no one to protect the Jewish people.
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  And, you know, the NAACP had been created a few years
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  earlier, but there was no group in America to protect this
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  beleaguered, targeted, victimized minority.
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  And so when they founded the ADL with this core purpose, protect
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  the Jewish people, they wrote a mission statement that we still
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  use today word for word. They wrote that it will, quote,
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  stop the defamation of the Jewish people and secure justice
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  and fair treatment to all. So essentially about that is it
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  made sense stop the defamation of the Jewish people.
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  Again, that was their purpose, protect the Jews, they said.
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  And justice and fair treatment to all, which at the time when
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  Jews like didn't have many basic rights, were really endangered
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  or really kind of a marginal community.
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  The idea that they would fight for other people was an
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  audacious kind of outlandish idea, and they didn't have a leg
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  to stand on themselves. But in the ensuing years, ADL
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  was the organization that indeed helped to change the laws, break
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  the quotas, expose discrimination.
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  In the 10's and 20s and 30s and 40s fifties, ADL made America
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  safer for its Jews. And then starting in the 40s, at
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  the end of the Second World War, ADL committed itself to fighting
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  for equality for black Americans.
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  And in the 1950s, ADL fought Joe McCarthy and the red baiting.
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  ADL then fought for immigration reform in the 1950s, like long
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  before it was fashionable. ADL, my predecessor, literally
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  stood at the Lincoln Memorial in 9th August 1963 when Doctor King
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  gave his very famous I have a dream speech because Ben
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  Epstein, who head of the organization became very close
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  to Doctor King because they were fighting for civil rights
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  together. ADL was at the forefront of so
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  many of these key movements, and we now consider, like, our civil
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  rights history. And today, like at this time for
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  someone like me who came to this job without any nonprofit
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  experience, without any ostensible civil rights
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  experience, and I'm a Jewish person, but I'd never worked in
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  the Jewish community before. Most of my life was in business
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  building brands. You were a great entrepreneur.
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  That's as you to say, I had some experiences there, so this was a
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  really big leap. But you know, it feels like a
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  privilege. It feels like a privilege to be
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  part of an organization with such a like August history, and
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  that's played such an important role in so many moments in the
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  20th century. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing.
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  I don't know if you know this, but you've inspired me.
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  After October 7th, one of my friends who actually grew up
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  with with my dad, he was young and my dad kind of took him
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  under his wing as a son, Black American.
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  He he's leads one of the most important nonprofits in Austin
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  for Black Americans. And he invited me to keynote
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  their gala. There are over 1000 people
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  there, 90% Black American audience.
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  And it was following October 7th and I was really, I was really
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  channeling you and you know, you being in the arena.
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  And it was, it was, it was, it was a really important speech.
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  And I made that point that from the very beginning, ADL
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  encompassed all people that were discriminated.
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  Oh wow, that's so good. And I.
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  Don't think I know this story. Yeah, yeah, I've got a, I've got
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  a, got a video of it. I want to see.
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  You need to send me the link. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you do think
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  about it like I think today, you know, notions of
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  intersectionality and social justice, etcetera.
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  Like we almost take it for granted.
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  But the idea over 100 years ago of standing up like for other
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  people, this was not typical. You know, I'll tell you
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  something. I have at the offices of ADL, at
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  our headquarters up the road here in Manhattan, an ad
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  campaign that ADL did in the late 1940s pushing for racial
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  equality. And they have these, they're
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  like these ads. They were like in magazines like
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  Life magazine and such. And they were also billboards.
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  And it's got like white kids and black kids playing sports
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  together. Like in the 1940s.
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  This is unheard of. I have a super cool ad in our
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  office that ADL did in 1950. This is long before, you know,
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  Marvel movies, long before all the kind of endorsement culture
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  we live with now. It was Superman they worked with
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  the antecedent to DC Comics. It is out of Superman talking
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  about the need for racial and like ethnic equality.
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  And it's a picture of Superman with a white kid, a black kid, a
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  white girl and Asian American young person.
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  Like this was unheard of in 1950.
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  ADL was like, look, I was born decades later.
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  We both were. This is way before our time, so
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  to speak. But you just realize, like, we
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  stand on the shoulders of these people who took risks, and we're
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  bold thinkers long before it was easy to do or it was sort of in
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  vogue. You know, do you, do you think
• 14:12
  about that Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford
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  like the dots connect in reverse and think about how the dots
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  connected with you in terms of your upbringing, your
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  entrepreneurial career, you know, the success you had there
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  and how it's factored into this moment.
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  Think about it a lot. Yeah.
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  I mean, you know, my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor from
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  Germany, and he wouldn't talk about it in any meaningful way.
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  But one time I was doing a project for school, like I was a
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  junior, I think, in high school, and I had a little tape
• 14:45
  recorder. And I said, I want to tape you.
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  And he was willing to do it. And I recorded him.
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  And he basically opened up and without going into all the
• 14:54
  details, he basically said, you know, when I was a young man, I
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  thought Germany was the greatest country in the world because it
• 15:01
  was. And then of course, everything
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  fell apart. And he was grateful to be in the
• 15:08
  United States for sure, but he lost everything, lost all his
• 15:12
  family, came to his country, he didn't speak English, he didn't
• 15:15
  have any money, he didn't have any connections.
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  And he was able to carve out like a reasonable middle class
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  life in Bridgeport, CT. This is where basically I'm
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  from. And you know, I tell you
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  something, when I was very young, probably like 7 or 8 or
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  so, he took me more than once to these marches that we had it.
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  They had, they had in Bridgeport for to free the Soviet Jews.
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  This was a thing at the time. Like these Jewish people were
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  stuck behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union wasn't letting
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  them emigrate, but they weren't letting them worship or work.
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  It was like a very bad situation.
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  Anyways, I went to a few of these like marches of sorts.
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  What's interesting is a couple years later they were freed.
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  Like there was this Jackson Vanic amendment and these things
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  happened. Bottom line is that they came
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  out, and I do remember being struck by this idea that I could
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  be part of something bigger than me.
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  Like it was a moment where I sort of connected some dots to
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  kind of paraphrase jobs and thought.
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  And then later on in my life, when I graduated from college or
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  when I was getting ready to graduate, this is the spring of
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  92. It was during a presidential
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  cycle and my parents were totally apolitical, blue collar
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  and go to college. Their, their focus was on
• 16:35
  working. You know, my dad was a salesman,
• 16:39
  my mom was a secretary. So I had nothing, not political
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  at all, nor was I ostensibly, but I was talking to people in
• 16:48
  Boston. My, my, my classmates, my
• 16:50
  fraternity brothers, they were all going to consulting or
• 16:53
  investment banking or some going to law school.
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  I don't do any of those things. I wanted to change the world.
• 16:58
  I wanted to be part of something bigger than me.
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  And someone suggested I get involved in the Clinton for
• 17:03
  President campaign. So I was like, well, how do I,
• 17:05
  how do you do that? I said, well, there's an office
• 17:07
  in downtown Boston. So I showed up and I started
• 17:12
  volunteering and like once a week.
• 17:14
  And I don't want to exaggerate what I was doing, but I ended up
• 17:17
  after I graduated college, moving down to Little Rock, AR
• 17:20
  to go work for Governor Clinton. And to be honest with you, I, I
• 17:23
  did not certainly didn't know he was going to win.
• 17:27
  I would like to say now in a sort of revisionist way that was
• 17:31
  very confident, but I don't think I was.
• 17:33
  But I thought I wanted to be. I wanted to fight the good
• 17:36
  fight. I wanted to change the world.
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  And so I moved to Little Rock and I worked for the governor
• 17:42
  and it was an amazing experience.
• 17:45
  And I put the summer there in the fall and guess what?
• 17:47
  He won. And so that moment like
• 17:51
  something clicked for me, as had happened when I was a little kid
• 17:55
  and I was, it sort of affirmed this idea that I had that I
• 18:00
  could, I could change the world. I can be part of something
• 18:03
  bigger than myself. And so I would say that if you
• 18:06
  were to ask me again in a Steve Jobs, kind of like, what were
• 18:10
  those dots and how do I make my dent in the universe?
• 18:13
  Like those were the moments that connected it for me.
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  And I think that moment of moving to Little Rock literally
• 18:20
  put me on the trajectory that I'm still on now.
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  I mean, I've always made my career decisions not on the
• 18:26
  basis of how do I make the most money, but like, how could I
• 18:30
  make a dent in the universe? How could I change the world?
• 18:33
  And moving from this area, you know, the Northeast, which is
• 18:39
  very heavily populated, to Little Rock, too, must have felt
• 18:42
  as humble at the time, too. Yeah, it was very interesting.
• 18:47
  I mean, my parents were very against me moving.
• 18:50
  It's kind of a funny story, sort of funny.
• 18:52
  So I get my parents, God bless them, they're the best.
• 18:54
  But they never really been anywhere or really lived
• 18:56
  anywhere other than Bridgeport and Trumbull, Connecticut.
• 18:59
  So when I told them I'm going to go to Little Rock and I was the
• 19:04
  first, my family to graduate college and I said I'm going to
• 19:08
  go move to Arkansas. To go work for this governor
• 19:12
  from a state you've never been to is probably not going to win.
• 19:14
  My parents like, oh, this is the worst I'd and you've ever,
• 19:17
  we've, you've ever heard, we've ever heard.
• 19:19
  How's that gonna work? What are they gonna pay you?
• 19:20
  How are you gonna have healthcare?
• 19:21
  All these questions and I was like, well, I'll wait tables
• 19:26
  'cause I was, I waited tables all throughout college.
• 19:29
  It's like I'll be a waiter and I'll figure it out.
• 19:33
  They ended up paying me on the campaign.
• 19:34
  I'll be at whatever, like $200 a week or something, right, $300 a
• 19:38
  week. I mean, really it was whatever.
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  But anyways, so I did that and I, my, my folks were very
• 19:45
  discouraging. And every day they called me to
• 19:47
  tell me what it when I told them this was my plan, what a bad
• 19:49
  idea it was. They had my uncle who lived in
• 19:52
  Atlanta reach out. So I've never even been to
• 19:54
  Arkansas. Jonathan, there are no Jewish
• 19:56
  people in Arkansas. You can't go to Arkansas.
• 19:58
  It's a bad idea. So they were telling me every
• 20:00
  day it was a bad idea, bad idea. I still went again.
• 20:04
  They were just baffled and. Didn't understand it then I tell
• 20:09
  you. Then he won all.
• 20:11
  Right, all right. Well, I tell you the story.
• 20:13
  I stayed in Little Rock through like up till Thanksgiving.
• 20:17
  We had a lot of clean up essentially.
• 20:19
  And then I came up. I guess I did.
• 20:20
  I drove up, I don't even remember, but I came home for
• 20:23
  Thanksgiving and my parents brought me into the living room
• 20:27
  in our house and in our house in Trumbull, we had like a living
• 20:31
  room that we didn't use. You know what I mean?
• 20:33
  It was like the fancy room for guests, right?
• 20:36
  Like when we would have Rush Hashan at our house or something
• 20:38
  like people would use that room. Just don't tell me it had the
• 20:40
  plastic on the on the couch it. Might I didn't have?
• 20:43
  Plastics parents had. That it didn't have plastic on
• 20:45
  the. Couch understood.
• 20:46
  It but it's kind of like that room that you don't the sofa you
• 20:49
  don't use, right. We didn't use it.
• 20:51
  They brought me into that room. They sat me down on the sofa and
• 20:54
  they said they said on one and I said on the other end and they
• 20:57
  said we will never give you career advice again.
• 21:01
  Really. They literally kind of said
• 21:03
  those words and God bless them to that day.
• 21:06
  Like when I told them I was moving to DCI, guess that made
• 21:09
  sense at the time because I was going to go work for the new
• 21:11
  administration. I told them I was leaving a job
• 21:13
  at the White House to go to Business School.
• 21:15
  I'm sure in Chicago. I'm sure they didn't understand
• 21:18
  it, but they said OK. And then when I told them I was,
• 21:20
  I was graduating from Business School and going to work for
• 21:22
  some startup they'd never heard of before in California, rather
• 21:27
  than going to McKinsey or going to Goldman Sachs.
• 21:29
  I'm sure they didn't understand that, but they just accepted it.
• 21:32
  Then until I was leaving that job, we'd gone public.
• 21:34
  I was AVP did well to go start a bottled water company.
• 21:39
  I know they didn't understand it.
• 21:40
  They didn't say a word when I told them after we we sold the
• 21:44
  company. Sold the company to Starbucks.
• 21:46
  Yeah, sold the company to Starbucks.
• 21:47
  That's. Ethos Water.
• 21:48
  Ethos Water and then I told them I was going to leave.
• 21:51
  I'm sure they were very confused.
• 21:52
  Why leave a big corporate job at Starbucks?
• 21:55
  They didn't say anything. God bless him to this day.
• 21:58
  Like my parents are great and have always supported me even if
• 22:01
  they didn't always understand what I was doing.
• 22:04
  What did they think about you taking this job?
• 22:06
  I think they were very proud. Yeah, yeah.
• 22:08
  With I would imagine so. Yeah, like, look, my parents
• 22:11
  were never involved in the ADL growing up, but we knew the
• 22:15
  organization. Like all Jewish families know
• 22:18
  the organization, like the Jewish, I mean, the ADL is, I
• 22:22
  think, one of the most venerated organizations in the whole
• 22:26
  community. So I think look, in many ways,
• 22:30
  when I left the White House, 'cause after I worked in the
• 22:32
  Clinton White House and the Obama White House, I think most
• 22:36
  people leave the White House and they go make money.
• 22:39
  Like, if you're an academic, you might resume your career
• 22:42
  teaching, but a lot of people, especially in jobs like mine
• 22:45
  that are front facing, that are working with corporations and
• 22:47
  working capital markets, they go make money.
• 22:51
  I didn't do that. Like I went and took a nonprofit
• 22:53
  job. So that may have surprised them
• 22:55
  a little bit. That surprised a lot of my peers
• 22:58
  a lot. But I think they were proud.
• 23:00
  I think they were proud. I'd say so, yeah.
• 23:05
  Gosh, I mean, you think about all that's happened since you
• 23:08
  joined, I mean. Yeah, it's been like a roller.
• 23:11
  Coaster well, but but in in so many ways, like your background
• 23:15
  was kind of perfect for all that would come, you know, think
• 23:19
  about all the all the variety of kind of firefighting experiences
• 23:25
  you had. You know, just starting a
• 23:27
  company is not an easy. Definitely not.
• 23:30
  Easy chore running political campaigns.
• 23:33
  Not an easy chore in the White House.
• 23:35
  Not an easy chore. Definitely.
• 23:37
  Not. Yeah.
• 23:38
  Like I, I've definitely had a lot of jobs that are not for the
• 23:41
  faint of heart and like doing a start up and I've done a few
• 23:46
  where you're worried about making payroll or like getting
• 23:49
  this customer and that deal will make or break your business or
• 23:52
  closing around and that will make or break your company.
• 23:58
  I've had those like and so have you like you've had these
• 24:01
  experiences too. These are white knuckle
• 24:04
  experiences and it definitely toughens you up.
• 24:07
  And so I guess in some ways with respect to this job, like I've
• 24:10
  definitely been on the edge myself or skated close to the
• 24:14
  edge. And so the things that are
• 24:16
  happening here are not anything like I might have expected or
• 24:20
  seen before. On the other hand, like I'm very
• 24:23
  used to high stress environments.
• 24:25
  I think the thing that's different is like, again, you're
• 24:29
  trying to make payroll and your, so your employees start
• 24:33
  depending on you and you have customers or depending on you.
• 24:36
  That's a kind of pressure and then you have investors that you
• 24:39
  feel really responsible to because you are this job is
• 24:45
  different because this the issues that we're working with
• 24:48
  are kind of like life and death. And so I think about the work we
• 24:52
  do monitoring extremists. I think about the work that we
• 24:55
  do where we identify threats and prevent people from like getting
• 24:58
  killed. And so while that's very
• 25:02
  exhilarating, when you get it right, you worry about when you
• 25:05
  get it wrong. So it's definitely it and it and
• 25:08
  I talked to so many families, Brett, like dealing with
• 25:11
  horrible issues. So that's a different kind of
• 25:13
  stress, different kind of stress.
• 25:16
  So since October 7th, I know that you guys have been really
• 25:20
  front and center with lots of new initiatives and you started
• 25:25
  the center right and and it's in California, right, That's.
• 25:29
  All kinds of stuff, I mean. But that happened actually
• 25:32
  before October 7th, way before. So that's that's good that
• 25:34
  you're kind of prepared for what's going to come with all
• 25:38
  the disinformation and everything else.
• 25:41
  Yeah. So we have two things that are
• 25:42
  probably relevant on this. So number one, we had a team of
• 25:45
  researchers. We've had an analysts for a long
• 25:48
  time who are like buried inside the organization and a team, but
• 25:55
  not with a very tight like coherent identity.
• 25:59
  And these people were researching extremism,
• 26:03
  monitoring it. And when I came on board in
• 26:06
  2015, I thought, you know, that team was a gem, a diamond in the
• 26:10
  rough, and we should really elevate them and give them their
• 26:12
  own identity and give them more resources because I felt like,
• 26:16
  and that turned out to be the right bet that extremism would
• 26:20
  be increasing. And so that we've kind of
• 26:24
  rebooted what we call the Center on Extremism.
• 26:27
  We talked about that, how we've resourced it.
• 26:28
  And with the work they're doing, that was unbelievable.
• 26:31
  And they work very tightly with this group we created in 2017,
• 26:34
  the Center on Technology and Society.
• 26:36
  That was our office as you're saying, in Silicon Valley.
• 26:39
  And I mean again, I had worked, you know, I've, I've, I ran a
• 26:43
  venture inside Google for 3 1/2 years and I worked between
• 26:46
  Mountain View and LA or Santa Monica.
• 26:48
  And prior to that, you know, when I was a realtor, I ran a
• 26:51
  business in San Francisco. So I have a background in
• 26:53
  software development and I've run edge teams and understand
• 26:58
  that kind of life cycle of tech products, you know.
• 27:02
  So for me, I mean, I felt like Facebook was the frontline in
• 27:08
  fighting hate and we needed to mobilize.
• 27:11
  And we'd seen things, we launched it in 17.
• 27:13
  We saw things in 2016 on the campaign.
• 27:17
  We saw how Twitter, as it was called at the time, was being
• 27:20
  exploited to like like sort of weaponize anti-Semitism, to
• 27:26
  intimidate journalists and to intimidate Jewish people more
• 27:28
  broadly. And we saw how Facebook was
• 27:31
  becoming an organizing platform for extremists.
• 27:33
  They were using the Facebook group's product.
• 27:36
  So we created that center. And by the way, I should say we
• 27:38
  created that center with C Capital from Craig and Newmark.
• 27:42
  Most people, many people that he started Craigslist and Pierre
• 27:46
  Omidyar, many people know he started eBay.
• 27:51
  Craig's Craig and Newmark is Jewish.
• 27:53
  Pierre Omidyar is not Jewish and it's and Pierre is very liberal.
• 27:59
  Craig is kind of liberal minded, but not I think I wouldn't call
• 28:02
  him ideal ideological at all, but the two, but he's very
• 28:06
  committed to choose a free speech.
• 28:07
  They both are and free expression.
• 28:09
  So maybe they're both peers, very progressive.
• 28:12
  Maybe Craig's more libertarian. They both came together on this
• 28:15
  project, which I think says a lot about ADL in our positioning
• 28:19
  because ultimately, like I try very hard and we're very focused
• 28:23
  on not being partisan, but being principled and focusing on the
• 28:27
  issues as they are and dealing with the challenges.
• 28:30
  It says they as they come, not because of someone's political
• 28:34
  affiliation, but because of what they might represent to Jewish
• 28:38
  people, other marginalized groups.
• 28:40
  And I think that resonated with both Pierre and Craig.
• 28:43
  And so there they gave us some risk capital and that helped us
• 28:48
  to create this center, which is now, I think literally one of
• 28:51
  the centers of excellence in the country, focusing on these
• 28:55
  issues of online extremism and hate.
• 28:56
  Yeah, and and this AI moment, I mean, this is really the the
• 29:02
  gist of what love conquers fear is about is that the way, the
• 29:08
  way I look at it is God is working through us to accelerate
• 29:14
  our choice for are we going to create abundance for all on the
• 29:17
  planet or not? And I'm 95% certain that we are
• 29:22
  when push comes to shove. But I'm curious how you view
• 29:26
  this, this AI moment, the exponential of the
• 29:29
  exponential's, you know, we've, we've never prioritized anything
• 29:33
  like this in human history. I woke up this morning, one of
• 29:37
  the first things I read was Gartner is projecting that this
• 29:41
  year 2.4 trillion will be spent on AI investment.
• 29:45
  Oh my gosh, really? When Trump announced last year
• 29:50
  on January 21st, the Stargate project, that was 500 billion of
• 29:54
  funding alongside Mayo, Susan, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, that
• 29:59
  was already inflation adjusted more than we spent on the space
• 30:02
  race versus the Russians, inflation adjusted, more
• 30:06
  inflation adjusted than we spent on the Manhattan Project to win
• 30:09
  World War 2 and liberate, you know, Jewish people and in the
• 30:13
  Holocaust. And so for you guys, I'm curious
• 30:18
  how you view this moment. I know you've really been active
• 30:21
  with it and kind of what you're seeing in terms of a rise and
• 30:26
  things that you need to counter, but also all the beautiful ways
• 30:30
  that you can use this to to really further the cause of
• 30:33
  Indian hate. Like I think this is the
• 30:37
  question of our time. So again, as I said a minute
• 30:41
  ago, when 2016, I had this hypothesis that Facebook's a
• 30:45
  frontline and fighting hate. And I think it was flash forward
• 30:50
  now, like ChatGPT is Ground Zero, not for the fight against
• 30:55
  hate, but for the truth as we know it.
• 30:56
  I mean, ChatGPT or clawed or whatnot, Gemini llama, these
• 31:03
  things are literally ground truth for millions of people.
• 31:09
  I mean, the adoption numbers are bananas.
• 31:14
  And so what's happening, what's so interesting is with social
• 31:16
  media, like we talk about Web 1.0, Web 2.0, right?
• 31:23
  Like Web 1.0 was like, you know, again, HTML and websites and
• 31:27
  whatever you would go to the website to get what you wanted,
• 31:30
  you'd go to Google to search. And then Web 2.0 was like the
• 31:33
  advent of Facebook and social. And there you like have the
• 31:37
  social graph and you're interacting with it.
• 31:39
  Now, I don't think we call this web 3.0.
• 31:41
  We don't have a word for this age of AI.
• 31:44
  But the thing that makes it so different is Web 1.1.
• 31:47
  We don't rely on you going and interacting.
• 31:51
  AI is going to invisibly shape. It is already happening.
• 31:55
  It's invisibly shaping the world around us.
• 31:58
  And you kind of see it in the way the contents algorithmically
• 32:01
  generated right for you. But think about that on, I don't
• 32:05
  even know what the word is not on steroids on something else.
• 32:09
  I mean, it's rocket fuel, where the choices are going to be made
• 32:14
  for us invisibly, like embedded in the systems around us.
• 32:19
  I tried to explain this, why we're so focused on on AI right
• 32:22
  now. I was explaining it to someone
• 32:24
  the other day, I think it was at the Munich Security Conference
• 32:27
  talking about this. It's kind of like electricity.
• 32:30
  Yeah, it is like electricity. It affects every single
• 32:33
  industry. So as we sit here today, you and
• 32:36
  me, we've got these microphones, we've got these lights, we're in
• 32:40
  a building with heat. I took the elevator to get here.
• 32:43
  Like electricity is coursing all throughout.
• 32:47
  Like our existence, it enables what we're doing right now.
• 32:51
  In theory we could talk about electricity, but then we'd be
• 32:54
  outside in the dark because it's it's in the evening at this
• 32:58
  point while we're recording without heat and it's freezing
• 33:00
  outside like. And it won't be recorded either
• 33:02
  it. Couldn't be recorded.
• 33:03
  That's right. I mean, maybe someone would be
• 33:04
  scribing it. Perhaps so we could have a
• 33:06
  conversation, but it would be very different than what
• 33:09
  electricity. So AI is the next level.
• 33:11
  And like electricity, it's not so easy to change.
• 33:16
  What I mean by that is there's a breaker somewhere in this
• 33:19
  building, but like, I can't just change like the voltage
• 33:22
  electricity coursing through this room.
• 33:25
  And if I wanted, I have to tear open all the walls and change
• 33:27
  the wires. And so we at ADL are focused
• 33:31
  right now on how these LLMS are performing and how their content
• 33:36
  is being optimized and delivered through these AI applications
• 33:40
  because that wiring is being laying today.
• 33:43
  It's like the world is down to the studs.
• 33:46
  And this is our chance to fix that wiring before the sheetrock
• 33:50
  goes up and the wallpaper goes on.
• 33:53
  And then it's just impossible. Like, again, it can be done, but
• 33:57
  it will be infinitely more complex and like the electricity
• 34:01
  around us. Like again, you and I, are you
• 34:04
  an electrical engineer or a software engineer?
• 34:06
  I you know, I actually, I've been programming since I was 7.
• 34:08
  Always software so you but I but I I got my undergrad at UT
• 34:13
  Austin and then my MBA at warden and it it in undergrad, I was
• 34:18
  actually an MIS major. The reason why is that when I
• 34:22
  went to school, the IT the CS major.
• 34:26
  Your big project was coding printer drivers and a printer
• 34:30
  driver either works or doesn't work.
• 34:32
  It's going to thank you, Jonathan Greenblatt, for your
• 34:35
  printer driver. And I'd already built a bulletin
• 34:38
  board system when I was 10 and Internet game when I was 18.
• 34:41
  So I was used to like people using the software and giving me
• 34:46
  feedback on it. And that changed the course of
• 34:49
  my career because it really fused business with technology
• 34:53
  for me, which created a great platform to be an entrepreneur.
• 34:58
  But I, yeah, a lot of people think I was.
• 35:00
  I mean, they would just assume I was ACS or engineering major.
• 35:03
  I wasn't. Sometimes I thought you were an
• 35:04
  electrical engineer. I don't know why, but I, I tell
• 35:07
  you what, like, again, you're a technical guy.
• 35:11
  I'm not, but I have to understand a little bit about
• 35:12
  technology, but like you and I couldn't like fix electricity in
• 35:16
  this place, right? You know what I mean?
• 35:18
  That I wouldn't know the first thing about.
• 35:19
  Nor I, I can, I can like install a light bulb or I can install a
• 35:23
  light fixture. I've done that, yeah.
• 35:25
  But the point is, is that AI is going to be just like that.
• 35:28
  It's going to be all around us. It's going to shape the world as
• 35:30
  we exist in it and we are going to be at a point pretty quickly
• 35:34
  where we're not going to understand really how it works.
• 35:37
  So I deeply believe in and why ADL is focused, focused, focused
• 35:41
  on trying to understand the models right now, trying to
• 35:45
  encourage the development of Better Business rules right now.
• 35:48
  So we have kind of guard rails that route the stuff
• 35:50
  effectively. And like, look, the reason why
• 35:53
  the electricity works in this place and there are outlets
• 35:55
  somewhere over here and they're, they're standardized.
• 35:58
  Like there's a standards process so that you can plug in and
• 36:01
  access the electricity with your phone charger or with your
• 36:04
  microphone or whatever. So we need similarly a kind of
• 36:07
  standards, maybe that's a crude analogy, but standards to be
• 36:11
  installed in the AI systems that are being built right now as we.
• 36:15
  Speak yeah, I'm glad you're focused on that because it's
• 36:18
  really I mean, it's an interesting time where basically
• 36:21
  all of humanity's content is getting flattened and, you know,
• 36:26
  vectorized in these systems. And the amazing thing about that
• 36:30
  is that, you know, if you're a Douglas Adams fan, you know it's
• 36:33
  the Babel fish moment. Like we can we can chat with all
• 36:38
  of humanity's content, including the ancient spiritual text, no
• 36:41
  matter what language it was written in in English.
• 36:44
  You know, you can be in Japan and and take a photo of some Zen
• 36:49
  Buddhist art piece and get a distillation on it that
• 36:52
  undoubtedly came from either Hindu or came from, you know,
• 36:57
  Japanese and get the whole history on it in English.
• 37:01
  My wife uses it this way. My wife is Iranian and so she's
• 37:06
  in deeply interested in antiques like the Middle East and Central
• 37:09
  Asia and whatnot. So she in West Asia and so she
• 37:14
  finds things at auctions, she uploads photographs to different
• 37:19
  AI engines to try to assess what the artifact is like.
• 37:24
  If there's a writing on it, what it says.
• 37:26
  Cause oftentimes it's in like a calligraphy, like a, like a
• 37:30
  Arabic language calligraphy. It's not that easy to read how
• 37:34
  authentic it is. All these crazy things that
• 37:37
  previously, it's kind of like antique roadshow in your hand.
• 37:40
  It's amazing. I mean, in episode 10 with
• 37:43
  Morgan Linton, you know, we were we were jamming on how people
• 37:48
  that have never used it before because there are a lot of
• 37:50
  people that have never actually used it a lot.
• 37:52
  It's the majority should even approach it.
• 37:56
  And he was telling the story of his dad who is really into
• 38:01
  Japanese scrolls. And so just like taking it on on
• 38:04
  for something like that's a hobby is great and then that's
• 38:08
  the gateway to really use it for a lot more.
• 38:11
  And I tell you, we are at Adli have roughly 500 full time
• 38:14
  employees. I think all of my people need to
• 38:16
  learn AI. So we're thinking about like
• 38:19
  performance measures so that every individual has goals
• 38:23
  related to AI in the same way. Like you can't.
• 38:27
  I remember, I guess I was in, I was in high school and I took a
• 38:30
  typing class, right? And it changed my life cuz it
• 38:35
  allowed me to interact with a keyboard, which may seem very
• 38:37
  mundane today, but the keyboard wasn't.
• 38:40
  Again, it was a typewriter, but it was novel.
• 38:42
  And learning how to express your thoughts that way fundamentally
• 38:46
  enabled me to navigate an environment, a keyboard
• 38:49
  environment, if you will. Again, I understand that it
• 38:51
  doesn't seem like such a great leap, but that class helped me
• 38:56
  to do so much. So I think young people today,
• 39:00
  employees of all ages, like the dad of your friend, like, need
• 39:03
  to understand how to learn these tools, like not learning how to
• 39:05
  use them as almost as a manager, not helping your people learn
• 39:09
  and integrate and empower themselves.
• 39:11
  It's almost not. It's almost irresponsible.
• 39:14
  How? How do you how, how do you think
• 39:18
  you guys will pioneer in this moment?
• 39:20
  I mean, you're you. I look at you as a very
• 39:22
  pioneering. Type of person.
• 39:24
  No, it's true. And you know how, how are you?
• 39:28
  What are you guys going to do differently, you think, than
• 39:30
  other nonprofits? I mean, I can tell you, so we
• 39:34
  think about AI in different ways.
• 39:36
  So #1 there's what I'll call analytic AI.
• 39:39
  So we already, I mean, we've been tracking extremists at ADL
• 39:44
  since the 1930s when we worked with the FBI to identify Nazi
• 39:50
  sympathizers in the US and help the ones, help them address that
• 39:55
  challenge. Because you had people,
• 39:57
  Americans, Germans who are living here in America who are
• 40:01
  railing against FDR, very pro Nazi, pushing America to align
• 40:07
  with Germany. Very anti-Semitic, not so great.
• 40:12
  Anyways, the idea helped the FBI deal with that threat in the
• 40:14
  1930s. So that's almost almost 100
• 40:17
  years ago. It's 97 years ago.
• 40:19
  So flash forward, we've been tracking right wing extremist
• 40:22
  groups, white supremacists, sovereign citizens, those kinds
• 40:26
  of folks like left wing radicals, like hardened anti
• 40:29
  Zionists and other kind of revolutionaries, ideology
• 40:33
  people, political Islamists, other kind of religious
• 40:37
  extremists for a long time. So today we continue to do that.
• 40:41
  It's all like OSINT, right? It's all open source
• 40:44
  intelligence. We're not doing anything illegal
• 40:46
  at all, but we have so much data.
• 40:49
  So we use AI to help us navigate and make sense of information
• 40:52
  and kind of identify patterns. We've been doing that for a long
• 40:55
  time, although it's been anped up dramatically because those
• 40:57
  are so much better today. So on one level we use a lot of
• 41:00
  analytic AI. Secondly, we're using generative
• 41:03
  AI. So it used to be when you had an
• 41:07
  anti-Semitic incident, you would write a letter to ADL or pick up
• 41:11
  the phone call and then you would do an e-mail and then
• 41:14
  you'd fill an online form. Today 75% of the inputs to us,
• 41:19
  the reports are coming through a like a generative AI chat bot.
• 41:24
  And that chat bot is powered by our large language model.
• 41:27
  We basically took all of the incident data we've collected
• 41:33
  since the 1970s. Now let's acknowledge that the
• 41:37
  data is not all like normalized. So we've got different kinds of
• 41:40
  data and then then we have now nonetheless like like put it all
• 41:44
  together basically to create a model that's very smart and
• 41:48
  intelligent so that when someone goes in and says this happened
• 41:51
  to me, it can evaluate in real time.
• 41:54
  OK, Is this something that needs to be routed to law enforcement
• 41:57
  like to 911 or can we process is it real or not first?
• 42:02
  OK, it's real. Therefore it gets rudeth 911 or
• 42:06
  not OK, This actually is a case of harassment or discrimination,
• 42:09
  like workplace discrimination. This could be a litigation
• 42:12
  opportunity. So OK, so we route that to
• 42:15
  lawyers to evaluate its potential as in case they might
• 42:18
  want to take on or your child was bullied at school.
• 42:23
  OK And so you say my name is Brett Hurt and my kid goes to
• 42:26
  school at XYZ and and you know, whatever.
• 42:29
  Houston, TX. I don't know if your listeners
• 42:32
  know where you live or anything. Austin.
• 42:34
  OK now they know it's OK Brett hurt my kid is Joe Smith.
• 42:37
  You know, my kid is Bob Hurt, right at ex school in Austin,
• 42:41
  TX. And then the chat bot's smart
• 42:43
  and I could say, OK, well your kid was bullied and he is a 9th
• 42:46
  grader at this school. Here's a letter you should send.
• 42:49
  Here's the name of the principal.
• 42:50
  Here's the name of the Superintendent of schools.
• 42:52
  Here's the name of the chair of the Board of Education, their
• 42:54
  e-mail addresses. Click here to send it.
• 42:56
  Here's a kind of content you could deliver to the school like
• 42:59
  a education program and education intervention
• 43:01
  opportunity. So I think something like 3/4 of
• 43:04
  our reports are coming in that way now.
• 43:07
  And so look, when I started on the job 2015, we had something
• 43:11
  like 2800 reports come in. In the year 22.
• 43:14
  I don't have the 2025 number, felt my head, but near 2024 we
• 43:17
  had 31,000 reports. So how do you scale from
• 43:22
  investigating 2800 reports to 31,000?
• 43:26
  AI all right. So that's a powerful way that
• 43:30
  we're now being much more effective providing real time
• 43:34
  support for victims. And then secondly, other
• 43:38
  generative apps. So a lot of we do is not just
• 43:40
  trying to stop crimes before they happen, although we do
• 43:43
  that, and not just helping someone who experienced
• 43:47
  harassment or hate, although we do that.
• 43:50
  But I think at the end of the day, you only love only conquers
• 43:52
  fear if you change hearts and minds, right?
• 43:56
  So we're very focused on education.
• 43:59
  We're very focused in classrooms.
• 44:01
  So we reach something like 4-4 and a half million kids a year
• 44:04
  today with content in classrooms all over America.
• 44:08
  But we've just rolled out a new AI product.
• 44:11
  It's called Aura Ora, or as the Hebrew word for light, as you
• 44:15
  might know and what Aura allows you to do.
• 44:19
  It's like a generative, it's a Gen.
• 44:20
  AI app. So for a teacher could use it
• 44:23
  and say I'm a teacher at you know, Oak Middle School in
• 44:28
  Austin, TX, I have a classroom of 8th graders, 30 students, no
• 44:34
  Jewish kids. Holocaust, Holocaust day.
• 44:37
  My members day is coming up or I want to do a Lesson plan on the
• 44:39
  Holocaust or we're learning about the genocide in Rwanda or
• 44:43
  something, right? Give me a Lesson plan that I can
• 44:48
  use with my students over the next month, over the next week,
• 44:51
  give me a lecture for, you know, a 60 minute class, give me a
• 44:54
  discussion, etcetera. Give me slides, give me content,
• 44:58
  give me readings and Aura can generate all that in real time
• 45:02
  for the teacher. It's unbelievable.
• 45:03
  And again, that's strung on another proprietary LLM we've
• 45:06
  built using the thousands and thousands and thousands of
• 45:11
  pieces of content we've developed and written over
• 45:15
  decades on issues of teaching tolerance and kind of teaching
• 45:19
  respect in the classroom. So that's a super cool product.
• 45:24
  So now it's like a question of how do you distribute it
• 45:26
  effectively and how you roll it out effectively.
• 45:28
  Luckily, we have networks, I don't know, hundreds of
• 45:29
  thousands of teachers use our stuff.
• 45:31
  So I'm pretty optimistic about it.
• 45:33
  But that'll be a really cool tool that can create a
• 45:36
  customized Lesson plan for you in the moment, teaching these
• 45:41
  issues of anti-Semitism or extremism, other forms of hate.
• 45:44
  Yeah, that builds on the No Place for Hate too.
• 45:47
  Right. 100% yeah. So no place for hate.
• 45:49
  Super deployed isn't it? I mean.
• 45:51
  No place for hate is one of our like we have this.
• 45:53
  I mean, again, I, I got to say like I am running ADL, like the
• 45:56
  companies I'm familiar with, you know, and again, I'll just
• 46:00
  acknowledge that I've done a fair amount in the software
• 46:04
  space, but I also worked in CPG and in retail.
• 46:07
  Yeah. And so I really have these
• 46:09
  models in my mind, particularly developed when I was at
• 46:13
  Starbucks about how we are, we have like a distribution system
• 46:18
  and our headquarters, we call it the CSC, which is the Community
• 46:22
  support center because we're in the business of supporting
• 46:24
  communities at ADL. So we don't call our office HQ
• 46:27
  or national or something. We call it the Community Support
• 46:30
  center because we support the Jewish community, other
• 46:32
  marginalized communities, you know, CSC.
• 46:34
  So CSC develops the products, and then we distribute it
• 46:37
  through a network of 30 field offices.
• 46:40
  And then it goes farther out to schools and to community centers
• 46:44
  and to youth organizations and other, you know, kind of what's
• 46:47
  on the edge of the network. So yeah, I mean, we're rolling
• 46:52
  this out now through our offices out into the school system and
• 46:56
  we already have these products that are in the in distribution
• 46:59
  like No Place for Hate. That's our flagship anti bias
• 47:02
  education program. It's deployed in, I don't know
• 47:06
  the number like, well, I mean, probably millions of kids get it
• 47:10
  a year. It's all over the United States.
• 47:13
  I don't know if it's in every state, but it's in most States
• 47:18
  and it's super popular and it teaches kids not just by
• 47:21
  anti-Semitism about racism, misogyny, all forms of bias and
• 47:26
  so and bullying. And so the goal is to build on
• 47:29
  that to make it easier for teachers or instructors of any
• 47:32
  kind to help their kids in any situation.
• 47:35
  A classroom, a youth group, I don't know, a a, a church
• 47:39
  community, whatever. Help their kids deal with issues
• 47:41
  when they come up. Yeah, Yeah.
• 47:43
  That's so cool. Yeah, that's going to create a a
• 47:46
  ton of leverage and get because because I'm sure they really
• 47:51
  struggle with how they teach something like.
• 47:54
  And look, we live in a multicultural country, whether
• 47:57
  some people like it or not. Like this is a pluralistic, a
• 48:02
  heterogeneous country. And that's strength.
• 48:05
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 48:06
  And helping our kids, our young people understand how not just
• 48:09
  to navigate that, but to master that, yeah, is fundamental to
• 48:13
  our long term success as a country.
• 48:14
  Yeah. So whether the kids in the class
• 48:16
  are Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist or or
• 48:21
  atheist or Zoroastrian or by however they identify
• 48:24
  religiously, let alone ethnically or whatever other
• 48:28
  kind of walk of life they hail from.
• 48:30
  I think helping our kids, helping our teachers help our
• 48:33
  kids is fundamental. Because otherwise, you know,
• 48:37
  this gets back to your earlier question about AI.
• 48:40
  Like, look, the classroom matters, but culture almost
• 48:44
  matters more. I think our kids have these
• 48:46
  supercomputers in their hands called iPhones, right?
• 48:49
  So they are consuming information.
• 48:52
  They have access to information in a way that we never had
• 48:54
  before. And in that environment where
• 48:57
  they're getting their news from influencers and they're getting
• 49:00
  their data from, you know, Tiktok videos, it puts a premium
• 49:06
  on the the the experts in their life who can help intermediate
• 49:10
  more effectively, right? Who can help explain things more
• 49:13
  effectively than the influencer they see in an Instagram real.
• 49:17
  And so I think it makes teachers even more important and we have
• 49:22
  to give them the 21st century tools so they can succeed in
• 49:24
  this or 26 years in the 21st century.
• 49:28
  So we have to give these people the tools they need, make it
• 49:30
  easy to access, make it it low barriers to entry to use.
• 49:35
  Otherwise, like again, the kids are just going to go veer off in
• 49:38
  a different direction. So just zooming out, even
• 49:40
  beyond, you know, ADL and I have complete confidence as a donor,
• 49:45
  as a friend, that you guys are going to nail that.
• 49:49
  I hope so. I, I, I know you will.
• 49:51
  I mean, the mission's so important.
• 49:53
  You, you guys lead with love and you have really good people.
• 49:59
  Whenever I've interacted with their people are really, really
• 50:01
  good. This is our secret sauce.
• 50:03
  It's like I focus every day. I start every meeting.
• 50:07
  I start every check in. You know.
• 50:09
  With with one-on-one, let alone every meeting, every meeting
• 50:13
  like staff meeting, board meeting, everything starts with
• 50:17
  people and culture. Yeah, yeah.
• 50:18
  People and culture. That's where it all is.
• 50:20
  I mean, 100%, you know, if I, if I think about my entrepreneurial
• 50:23
  career, it was all about manifesting love inside the
• 50:26
  organization, you know, love for the mission, love for each
• 50:28
  other. It's really hard to go wrong if
• 50:31
  you're, if you're doing that well.
• 50:32
  Yep. You know, the companies I've
• 50:34
  started, I've been really fortunate to have great people.
• 50:37
  They've been rated the best places to work, and it's
• 50:40
  awesome. That's been the secret sauce.
• 50:41
  But that secret sauce was put in me by my mom, you know?
• 50:45
  Oh, yeah, Yeah. She.
• 50:47
  She learned how to program with me.
• 50:49
  She then let me do that completely obsessively through
• 50:55
  my whole childhood while everybody was telling her that
• 50:57
  she was ruining me like they really did.
• 51:00
  I mean, you know, we're talking about, you know, Arkansas being
• 51:05
  a small place when you move there.
• 51:07
  You know, Austin, when I was growing up, it was 170,000
• 51:10
  people the size of Anchorage, AK today.
• 51:13
  Now it's the 13th largest city in the US.
• 51:15
  And so people just thought like, he's not playing football, he's
• 51:21
  not doing anything else. All he's doing is working on the
• 51:23
  computer. And the whole time I was
• 51:26
  creating, I was creating software, you know, that people
• 51:29
  used. And and so she she saw that and
• 51:33
  just told them he's found his passion like leaving the loon.
• 51:36
  Awesome mom. Awesome mom, but just.
• 51:39
  Think about. Brenda Laurel Hurt.
• 51:41
  Yeah, she passed away 13 years ago now.
• 51:45
  Yeah. Yeah, my dad 18 years ago.
• 51:48
  It's weird to be, you know, 54 old guy and having lost your
• 51:52
  parents for that long. Not easy.
• 51:55
  But you know, just zooming out, I'm, I'm curious like how you
• 51:58
  see this moment. Like I'm asking you to put on
• 52:00
  the the humanitarian futurist hat of, you know, AI overall.
• 52:07
  I mean, you know, just to just to set this up, there's there's
• 52:12
  a lot of dystopian fear out there.
• 52:14
  There's a dystopian fear about job loss.
• 52:17
  There's the human collective psyche that kind of has grafted
• 52:22
  in it. These ancient stories of
• 52:26
  machines are going to kill us all.
• 52:27
  Like, you know, in Judaism, there's a story of Gollum and
• 52:30
  Prague actually has a appearance in in the secret of Secrets by
• 52:35
  Dan Ground Ground. It's it's interesting.
• 52:38
  Very, very good novel which dives deep, as I said in the
• 52:42
  opener on unconsciousness. But you know, the the modern day
• 52:46
  equivalent is like, you know, the Matrix and the Terminator
• 52:50
  and this, you know, machines are going to destroy us all.
• 52:52
  There was the malt book thing that happened recently where
• 52:55
  people are like, Oh my gosh, it's sentient.
• 52:57
  It's like creating its own religion.
• 52:58
  It's. Creating the bots talking to
• 53:00
  each other. That we can't understand and,
• 53:03
  and and so I'm just I'm just curious like how you view this
• 53:07
  moment because I view this moment as the most important
• 53:11
  moment in humanity's history for us to make it to the age of
• 53:16
  abundance for all the this acceleration of AI, quantum
• 53:21
  computing, robotics, brain computer interfaces, I think
• 53:25
  will take us into unprecedented abundance.
• 53:28
  You know, you, you, you talked about how we've had electricity
• 53:32
  for actually not that long, evolutionarily.
• 53:35
  Relatively speaking, not long at all.
• 53:37
  Homo sapien's been around 300,000 years.
• 53:38
  It's been .1% of our time. And you know, you've, you've
• 53:44
  heard the sayings and I'm sure you, you feel this.
• 53:47
  You know, we're around the same age where people like you and I
• 53:50
  are in the last generation that will remember life before the
• 53:54
  Internet, right? Well, now there's this
• 53:57
  generation which is being born, which will never know a world
• 54:00
  before AI and you just kind of go back in time to our kids, you
• 54:04
  know, the world before social media, you know, the world
• 54:07
  before this or that. And, and I think that the most
• 54:13
  important thing that has to happen for humanity.
• 54:16
  And the reason I'm doing this project and self funding it is
• 54:22
  that I am trying to help humanity have a heart shift
• 54:26
  because my, my biggest concern is not the machines, it's us.
• 54:33
  It's us and how we use them. And if you think about since the
• 54:38
  discovery of fire, we could use it for great good or great harm,
• 54:43
  starting with our original technology.
• 54:45
  And so this technology is, is really, really incredible in
• 54:49
  terms of the abundance it can create.
• 54:51
  But it's one of those with great power comes great responsibility
• 54:55
  moments. Yeah.
• 54:56
  I mean, I think, you know, I often think about that quote
• 55:00
  that Ben Franklin has reported, have said when asked, you know,
• 55:03
  what happened in there. You know, he said, we signed it.
• 55:06
  They say you've got a Republic if you can keep it.
• 55:08
  So I think a lot about the fact that sometimes I think we take
• 55:15
  for granted what we have and we just think there's some like
• 55:18
  natural law that Danes, that this will all continue.
• 55:22
  I don't think that's necessarily the case.
• 55:25
  That doesn't mean that we're hurtling towards some dystopian
• 55:27
  future, but it does mean that it's up to us.
• 55:31
  It's up to US. Team Humanity.
• 55:33
  Yeah, like team humanity means you kind of, you know, we have
• 55:37
  to play our part. We have to step up present.
• 55:40
  Mom was quoting him. OK.
• 55:41
  And look, I was quoting somebody else.
• 55:44
  The arc of humanity is long, but it bends toward justice.
• 55:47
  Something like that. Now, I tell you, like, I always
• 55:50
  believe that. But what I've come to appreciate
• 55:53
  in this job, it's not right. The arc of humanity doesn't bend
• 55:57
  toward justice. You have to go up and bend.
• 55:59
  That arc is to go up and grab it and twist it toward the
• 56:03
  direction you want. So I do not believe that we're
• 56:06
  necessarily hurtling toward, you know, the Matrix, but I do think
• 56:11
  that it's incumbent upon us to step up where our forefathers
• 56:14
  stepped up, where they stepped up and created what we know is
• 56:17
  the American Revolution, that they stepped up and created, we
• 56:20
  know as a Continental Congress where they stepped up.
• 56:22
  And after the Civil War, we built this country the way they
• 56:25
  stepped up. And think about the New Deal,
• 56:28
  created all these institutions that we take for granted today.
• 56:32
  So there are still, there are so many extraordinary people in our
• 56:37
  midst. And I think Americans are born
• 56:40
  with this sort of pioneering spirit.
• 56:42
  So I think we can do this. But it's interesting you used a
• 56:45
  phrase before that I hadn't heard previously, Like we ought
• 56:48
  to talk about mind shift, but you said that you used the
• 56:51
  phrase heart. Shift.
• 56:52
  Heart shift. Like, that's a powerful idea
• 56:54
  because I do think to make this moment work, we don't just need
• 57:02
  to like, wrap our brains around how AI works.
• 57:04
  We need to open our hearts to understand what it means to
• 57:07
  actually be at a point where you talked about AI as flattening
• 57:10
  things like it's the humanity flattener too.
• 57:13
  And what does it look like? We can get past like these
• 57:16
  silly, like tribal ideas and see ourselves really as children, as
• 57:20
  all created in the image of God. That's right.
• 57:23
  So 99.9% the same DNA wise across this globe.
• 57:27
  Right. Think about that.
• 57:30
  Think about how much squabbling is on .1% you know and.
• 57:34
  Waste of time. It's a total waste of time and
• 57:37
  we can be that beloved community all over the world.
• 57:42
  And, and, and you know, the reason I think that the heart
• 57:46
  shift can happen and that God's working through us with this
• 57:50
  technology because we're, we're essentially the hands of, you
• 57:53
  know, God, the divine, whatever, whatever someone wants to call
• 57:56
  it. Is that a lot of what we
• 58:00
  squabbled about has been about scarcity.
• 58:04
  And if you took 18 seconds of the sun's energy that falls on
• 58:10
  earth and you're able to capture that, it would power energy
• 58:12
  needs for over a year, just 18 seconds.
• 58:15
  And and we have we, you know, if it's the big fusion reactor in
• 58:21
  the sky, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's going to last another
• 58:23
  billion years. A.
• 58:24
  Sustainable like internal? Yeah.
• 58:27
  Plug in and, and it actually is happening.
• 58:29
  If you look at solar starts, if you look at the cost, and it's
• 58:34
  going to, it's going to accelerate those material
• 58:38
  science breakthroughs like alpha fold, accelerated protein
• 58:41
  folding and therefore unlocks, you know, all types of medicines
• 58:45
  or companies have been founded, you know, including out of
• 58:48
  Google to commercialize on that. We're going to have an alpha for
• 58:51
  everything we're going to have. We're have an alpha for every
• 58:54
  single problem we can imagine solving cancer, you know,
• 58:58
  solving energy, solving food, solving, you know, you solve
• 59:02
  energy. You can desalinate as much as
• 59:04
  you want anywhere in the world. You, you, you solve energy.
• 59:09
  You can have robots that go into places like Chad, which has a
• 59:12
  GDP of $660 a person. And you can build all the clean
• 59:17
  water supply they need, the healthcare they need, the power
• 59:21
  they need. You know, we have abundance here
• 59:24
  that we can't even imagine. 100 years ago, 200 years ago, you
• 59:29
  know, I had Peter Wang on recently on episode 43 and he's,
• 59:34
  he's laying a Unicorn in Austin. And what's his company?
• 59:37
  It's called Anaconda. It's a really popularized Python
• 59:40
  And you know, really big player in the AI space.
• 59:45
  And I was making this point about 100 years ago.
• 59:47
  He's like Brett, he's like, I moved here from Wuhan in 1984.
• 59:52
  He's like they're rationing our coal.
• 59:55
  They were rationing our food. He's like when I came here, he's
• 59:58
  like, you don't have to go back 100 years.
• 1:00:00
  He's like, he's going to have to go back to Wuhan in 1984, you
• 1:00:03
  know, and, and so. My wife tells me these stories
• 1:00:05
  growing up in Iran and they were living through war and they,
• 1:00:07
  like, they had food rations, you know, and so you couldn't buy
• 1:00:11
  what you wanted. And I don't know if they had
• 1:00:13
  electricity all the time. So like, yeah, it's not that far
• 1:00:16
  away that we lived with. We have an abundance today to
• 1:00:19
  use that term. That's just a degree of
• 1:00:22
  privilege. It's incredible.
• 1:00:24
  I mean, Jamie Metzel actually, you know, he was on episode 18,
• 1:00:27
  you know, he's also in the Henry Crown Fellowship with us.
• 1:00:30
  And and he made the point that actually today we already have
• 1:00:35
  all the abundance we need. It's just not distributed.
• 1:00:37
  Oh yeah, that's right. But cost of distribution is
• 1:00:40
  high. And you know, you we solve
• 1:00:43
  energy, then cost of distribution is low as well as
• 1:00:47
  this the inventive capability locally around the world.
• 1:00:51
  So we we do, we do need to have this hard shift.
• 1:00:55
  And that's why this is called Love conquers Fear.
• 1:00:57
  Is that all of the ancient spiritual text?
• 1:01:01
  It all synchronizes with a common root, which is that the
• 1:01:06
  actual reality we're in is rooted deeply in love.
• 1:01:10
  And that, you know, our souls are in this place of light and
• 1:01:14
  love and that we need to realize in this world of form that we
• 1:01:20
  can invent heaven on earth. You know, whether you look at
• 1:01:23
  that as mystically or metaphorically doesn't actually
• 1:01:27
  matter. Like if we could create
• 1:01:29
  abundance and Chad, imagine what imbalance would be like here in
• 1:01:33
  any place else, right? And, and I think that we can do
• 1:01:38
  that in the next 10 to 15 years if we have the hardship.
• 1:01:41
  The question is like, what does that look like?
• 1:01:42
  I mean, what are the ethical systems, the ethical frameworks
• 1:01:45
  we need? What are kind of like the value,
• 1:01:48
  the value models we need? I mean, I think I don't know
• 1:01:53
  that our society is yet kind of tooled up to deal with all that
• 1:01:58
  will be required in that environment.
• 1:02:00
  We're not, we're not, I'm not, I'm not saying that we are
• 1:02:02
  today. I'm just saying that it, we're
• 1:02:06
  in a time where it's going to force us to make that choice.
• 1:02:09
  Because, you know, my thesis is that if, if Ray Kurzweil is
• 1:02:15
  right, we're going to have AGI by 2029.
• 1:02:18
  A lot of people now are projecting it earlier than that.
• 1:02:21
  Once we get to AGI, we're going to get to artificial super
• 1:02:23
  intelligence. And it's pretty clear to me.
• 1:02:27
  I mean, you've been a technologist for a long time,
• 1:02:29
  that open source is going to win.
• 1:02:32
  You know when the DeepSeek moment happened with the R1
• 1:02:36
  model? That was the day before Trump
• 1:02:38
  announced Stargate. Is that right?
• 1:02:41
  Yes, the date the the week after that's when NASDAQ lost a
• 1:02:45
  trillion dollars a market cap 600 billion of that was NVIDIA
• 1:02:49
  and you just couldn't have scripted it better, you know,
• 1:02:53
  and, and and that was a very, very powerful moment because the
• 1:02:58
  R1 model was vastly more powerful than GPT 4, which led
• 1:03:03
  to the the moratorium, you know, the pause, all AI development.
• 1:03:07
  That was four months after the launch of Chachi PT that was
• 1:03:10
  March of 2023. And so you've got this, you've
• 1:03:15
  got this, this moment in time marked right before Stargate was
• 1:03:19
  announced or it's like pretty obvious that hey, these models,
• 1:03:24
  they're going to get commoditized pretty quickly by
• 1:03:27
  open source and they'll be the frontier and they'll be reasons
• 1:03:30
  people use the frontier. But the amount of money that
• 1:03:35
  collectively humanity is prioritizing into this build,
• 1:03:41
  it's unprecedented. I mean, we're, we're, so we're
• 1:03:44
  multiples, multiples beyond inflation adjusted, the
• 1:03:48
  Manhattan Project and the space race multiples like mini, like
• 1:03:52
  I, I added it up I think in 2025, it's over $7 trillion
• 1:03:57
  allocated around the world. That's amazing.
• 1:03:59
  I mean, just think about. Like the Stargate moment and
• 1:04:01
  it's accelerating pretty massively.
• 1:04:04
  And I think that I think it's accelerating in a large reason
• 1:04:11
  for hope. Like let's create the end of
• 1:04:13
  disease, etcetera. Let's create abundance.
• 1:04:17
  It's also accelerating out of fear.
• 1:04:19
  It's it's a sphere of like if the Chinese get AGI before us,
• 1:04:22
  it's all over for us if we get it before them.
• 1:04:25
  You know, I just. I don't think it.
• 1:04:27
  Works that way. I think it's, I think that is
• 1:04:30
  really what's propelling it. But you need the love to conquer
• 1:04:35
  the fear. You need the love to.
• 1:04:38
  You need love to, at best countervail, if not, conquer
• 1:04:40
  the. Fear, right?
• 1:04:41
  And that's that's in again, every spiritual text, you know,
• 1:04:45
  is it essentially if I, you know, read over over 60 books
• 1:04:49
  now in the past fourteen months and a lot of them are the
• 1:04:52
  ancient texts of the Dao de Ching, the Bhagavad Gita,
• 1:04:55
  etcetera. And where they where they have a
• 1:04:59
  similarity again, we're 99.9% the same DNA wise is that we
• 1:05:05
  have to do the hard work individually tell all love to
• 1:05:08
  conquer our fear and operate from that place.
• 1:05:12
  And then we can help others do that work.
• 1:05:14
  And then collectively, humanity, a sense like that's that creates
• 1:05:18
  heaven on earth. Wow, so how do you do that in
• 1:05:22
  your individual life? Well, for me, it's a lot of
• 1:05:25
  walking the spiritual path. It's a lot of practice.
• 1:05:29
  And just like anything you, you practice more and more and, and
• 1:05:33
  you walk that path to like one of the books that really shifted
• 1:05:37
  me was recommended by John Mackey, you know, founder of
• 1:05:40
  Whole Foods. He was on episode 30 and he it's
• 1:05:44
  called Love is Letting Go of Fear.
• 1:05:46
  It's by Jerry Jimposki. It's actually a derivative work
• 1:05:49
  from a book I haven't read, which is called A Course in
• 1:05:53
  Miracles, which is the modern day channeling of Jesus for
• 1:05:59
  today's society, which, you know, Jesus was preaching,
• 1:06:03
  obviously selfless, you know, service, love for all.
• 1:06:08
  And and the neat thing about A Course in Miracles, like a
• 1:06:11
  really big commitment, like John is in a steady group for that.
• 1:06:15
  And I know a lot of people that do that, but I think they would
• 1:06:20
  all say it's been transformational for them.
• 1:06:23
  But the nice thing about love is letting go of fear.
• 1:06:25
  It's 2 1/2 hour read and it like immediately provides you with
• 1:06:29
  actionable steps. And and it's, it's, it's simple
• 1:06:33
  things like like, let's say that you are encountering someone
• 1:06:38
  who's just really, really a jerk.
• 1:06:40
  You know, you could treat them like a jerk back.
• 1:06:44
  That might be the natural reaction of what to do.
• 1:06:48
  Or you can pause, have with a moment of curiosity and say
• 1:06:52
  maybe their mom just died, maybe like sometimes really bad is
• 1:06:55
  going on and treat them with love.
• 1:06:57
  And he gives an example of that in the book with this lawyer who
• 1:07:01
  was just like typical, you know, like super hardcore, you know,
• 1:07:05
  kind of trial type lawyer person.
• 1:07:08
  And he treated him like that. And then the next day he was at
• 1:07:11
  his course in the third row. He didn't even know know this
• 1:07:15
  guy, and he didn't know that he made any difference at all.
• 1:07:20
  And he sees them, you know, they lock eyes and he comes up to him
• 1:07:23
  afterwards and he's like, wow, you know, you're here.
• 1:07:26
  And he's like, yeah, I want to see what you're all about.
• 1:07:28
  Nobody's ever reacted to me that way.
• 1:07:31
  He was used to being stuck in this narrative.
• 1:07:35
  And we have, you know, the process of waking up, you know,
• 1:07:38
  Awareness by Anthony D'mello was a really formative book for me
• 1:07:41
  on this path. Tarot was the run, the
• 1:07:43
  recommended. He founded this company called 4
• 1:07:45
  Sigmatic. I highly recommend their
• 1:07:47
  products. There's no ads on this.
• 1:07:48
  It's just me, you know, espousing it because I use it in
• 1:07:51
  my smoothie every morning. And out of 130 books, he
• 1:07:55
  recommended that as his favorite in in his soul quest.
• 1:08:00
  And it's all about that process of waking up.
• 1:08:03
  And as you wake up, you learn how to deprogram and the things
• 1:08:09
  that don't serve you anymore and reprogram.
• 1:08:12
  And as you reprogram, you can, you can really very consciously
• 1:08:16
  bring into your life like what what you want to walk a path of
• 1:08:22
  love and service. I love it.
• 1:08:23
  I mean you're you're walking a path of love and service like
• 1:08:26
  what you do everyday. You know, it's funny, I guess I
• 1:08:29
  don't sort of think of it like that.
• 1:08:32
  I mean, I do because ADL is like manifesting that.
• 1:08:37
  I mean, we just talked about all the schools and everything else,
• 1:08:39
  I guess so, you know, I mean, it's you and your team, of
• 1:08:41
  course, but and, and all the people that that follow it, like
• 1:08:45
  the donors, the teachers, all I mean, it's, it's all of us.
• 1:08:49
  Yeah, you know, it's funny, I guess.
• 1:08:50
  Millions and millions of people. You're in the middle of it and
• 1:08:53
  you don't see it. Yeah, right.
• 1:08:57
  You know, I mean, you live. So we're all at these levels,
• 1:09:01
  right. So like on a day-to-day basis,
• 1:09:03
  I'm worried about, you know, like dealing with an incident
• 1:09:06
  that's problematic, hiring a new person for a certain role, I
• 1:09:10
  don't know, ringing in a key donor issuing and you report
• 1:09:14
  like the tax stuff. They think strategically.
• 1:09:17
  I think about AI, think about how they make sure that the
• 1:09:20
  organization is again, tooling up using these technologies and
• 1:09:25
  transforming what we do sort of getting to the next curve.
• 1:09:27
  All right. But then you're like, you're
• 1:09:29
  raising it even higher up, which is like think about the meta of
• 1:09:33
  what you're doing. And you know, I guess sometimes
• 1:09:37
  you don't really have the, I don't know.
• 1:09:40
  I mean, I don't know that I always have the privilege of
• 1:09:42
  thinking at that level because I'm much more focused on I got
• 1:09:46
  to solve this problem and I got to make sure we're aiming in the
• 1:09:48
  right direction. Well, you're in it.
• 1:09:51
  I mean, you know, you're the CEO and you're in it driving that.
• 1:09:54
  So that's the normal way to think.
• 1:09:57
  And that's actually a good thing because you're obsessing about
• 1:10:00
  the things that need to be done. But I'm, I'm in an objective
• 1:10:04
  position here to see what you guys are doing.
• 1:10:07
  And I'm just telling you, it's like, it's, it's such, I mean,
• 1:10:10
  just the cumulative impact of No Place for Hate alone.
• 1:10:14
  Is a very proud of it yeah I. Feel.
• 1:10:17
  So lucky. Feel tremendous, tremendous,
• 1:10:20
  tremendous pride. Like the work that my people do,
• 1:10:24
  the work that the staff that's connecting with teachers or work
• 1:10:26
  that the teachers are connecting with children and helping them
• 1:10:29
  to see the world, I think, in a healthier way and to see
• 1:10:32
  themselves in a healthier way. Yeah, it's a gift.
• 1:10:35
  It's beautiful, man. It's really a gift.
• 1:10:37
  I really appreciate you a lot. How do you think about this
• 1:10:40
  reality? And I've talked about that
• 1:10:43
  spiritual root, like I know you're a very spiritual person.
• 1:10:45
  Like, how do you, how do you view, how do you view this
• 1:10:49
  reality we're in? And the reason I'm asking that
• 1:10:51
  question is I really think this is the time of the great
• 1:10:54
  philosophers. Like one of the things that
• 1:10:57
  people are so knee jerk to like immediately assume these things
• 1:11:02
  are conscious. We don't even know what
• 1:11:04
  consciousness is. There's there's You put 20 of
• 1:11:09
  the world's top consciousness researchers in a room like
• 1:11:12
  Michael Pollan's doing or Anika Harris, they will disagree with
• 1:11:16
  each other on what it. Is because it's pretty amazing.
• 1:11:18
  It's, it's, you know, we've and it actually was taboo to even to
• 1:11:22
  even ask that question like you were, you would have been
• 1:11:24
  cancelled. And, and, and as a professor,
• 1:11:27
  you know, 1020 years ago, that was not, that was like nothing
• 1:11:30
  to see here. The hard problem of
• 1:11:32
  consciousness, just it popped out of the brain.
• 1:11:34
  You know, it's just part of us, you know, don't, don't ask that
• 1:11:37
  question. And it is the most fundamental
• 1:11:40
  question because it is everything about our experience,
• 1:11:44
  like totally like our self-awareness, you know, the
• 1:11:47
  smell of a rose, you know, closing our eyes and envisioning
• 1:11:50
  that beautiful moment where child first started walking.
• 1:11:54
  You know, this is this is everything to the human
• 1:11:57
  experience. Yeah, it's what makes us unique,
• 1:11:59
  right? Like it's the way we not just
• 1:12:02
  see the will perceive the world, all the senses, right?
• 1:12:05
  It's what enables us to and the reason that ties all together,
• 1:12:09
  like the ability to reason. That's what makes this different
• 1:12:13
  than the other animals or or flora, as it were, or whatnot.
• 1:12:16
  I don't know. Like I am spiritual inasmuch as
• 1:12:22
  I go to synagogue and we read the Torah every week and it's
• 1:12:27
  this ancient text that's thousands of years old.
• 1:12:31
  And I can't say with with certainty that it was handed to
• 1:12:33
  Moses by God, if you will. It was written right.
• 1:12:36
  It's it's the oral history the 10 comments are handed to.
• 1:12:39
  But like the Torah is, is the word of God and we think about
• 1:12:42
  it that way. And so, you know, I don't think
• 1:12:45
  about God as, you know, a guy in a toga with a long white beard
• 1:12:49
  sitting on a throne. I think I'll be there, by the
• 1:12:52
  way. And I, I think that idea is
• 1:12:54
  outdated, or maybe it's a little childish, but I do think a great
• 1:12:58
  deal about the divine. And I do think that God exists
• 1:13:03
  in US. I mean, we're created in the
• 1:13:06
  image of God. And I do think it is this force.
• 1:13:10
  I don't think things, how things came together, the way they came
• 1:13:13
  together. I don't believe it just happens.
• 1:13:16
  It's happenstance. Like I think it's, you know, I
• 1:13:19
  think with something I call intelligent design, I mean, I
• 1:13:21
  think it's, it's of an order. And so being of an order, I
• 1:13:25
  mean, I think the Torah is of God is the word of God.
• 1:13:28
  And so I take it really seriously.
• 1:13:32
  And you know, like not every day, but multiple days a week.
• 1:13:34
  I'll rap to fill in what Jewish people do, or more Jews, urban
• 1:13:39
  Jewish people. And I do that because it grounds
• 1:13:42
  me and it's forces me to pause. It's meditative.
• 1:13:46
  And I'll say the prayers, you know, the prayers you put on the
• 1:13:51
  tefillin. And then I say the Shema prayer
• 1:13:54
  which like this very basic Jewish.
• 1:13:56
  Prayer. And then I like, have a silent
• 1:14:00
  reflection and think about the people around me hoping that
• 1:14:04
  they'll be able to achieve their potential.
• 1:14:07
  I think about the world around me and hoping that it will, you
• 1:14:10
  know, again, move in a path of love.
• 1:14:14
  So I do that. And I think it's very
• 1:14:16
  clarifying. And it's like a spiritual
• 1:14:19
  workout. You know, it's funny.
• 1:14:23
  A good friend of mine said to me in the job I have, I should say
• 1:14:27
  I get a lot of Flack. Like I think I'm great and I
• 1:14:30
  don't suffer from like a shortage, lack of
• 1:14:32
  self-confidence. But I recognize that I do get a
• 1:14:36
  lot of incoming and a lot of people are unhappy with what I'm
• 1:14:39
  doing. Sometimes that is of a good
• 1:14:42
  faith criticism. Sometimes it's sort of bad faith
• 1:14:46
  kind of slander. Sometimes it's just like trolls,
• 1:14:50
  which is beyond bad faith, you know what I mean?
• 1:14:52
  There's no faith. It's like mealist.
• 1:14:56
  But all that being said, you know, I take I take constructive
• 1:14:58
  criticism. I take criticism constructively,
• 1:15:02
  you know, and I listen and I process.
• 1:15:04
  I try to do better. But I was talking with somebody
• 1:15:07
  at a time whenever it was in this job, when I was getting a
• 1:15:09
  lot of incoming and the person said to me, you should put on to
• 1:15:12
  fill in. It'll be like your armor, and
• 1:15:16
  that was really right, like like rapping to fill in again girds
• 1:15:20
  me. That's cool because it pauses me
• 1:15:23
  to stop and to process, to reflect and to like, take things
• 1:15:28
  in and consider how I'm going to handle it.
• 1:15:30
  And it's very, very, very, very. Yeah.
• 1:15:34
  It's I don't know if the word is exhilarating, but it's very
• 1:15:36
  empowering. Yeah.
• 1:15:38
  Is that the first meditative practice that you've adopted or?
• 1:15:42
  No, I've done I've done TM before, you know, and
• 1:15:45
  experimented with it. I also find it very useful.
• 1:15:50
  You should define TM. Like Transcendental Meditation,
• 1:15:53
  which is like a practice where you, again, you develop a, you
• 1:15:58
  develop a practice for like a better word, where you center
• 1:16:02
  yourself and force yourself to kind of empty your mind and
• 1:16:09
  empty your mind. And in doing so, take stock of
• 1:16:12
  where you are. It's very powerful, but like
• 1:16:16
  anything, requires practice and it requires practice and it
• 1:16:20
  requires more practice, and it's not easy.
• 1:16:23
  And so even though you're not physically exerting yourself per
• 1:16:25
  SE to do it right, you are mentally and spiritually
• 1:16:28
  exerting yourself. Yeah, I meditate almost daily.
• 1:16:32
  You do? It is really.
• 1:16:33
  At what length of profound? What kind of length, you know, I
• 1:16:36
  never time it. I, the last thing I want is like
• 1:16:39
  a timer going off. But it tends to be, and I, it
• 1:16:43
  always has an arc where I know that I've gone through what I
• 1:16:49
  was meant to go through. It's very transformational for
• 1:16:52
  me. It usually lasts somewhere
• 1:16:54
  between 30 to 50 minutes. Yeah.
• 1:16:57
  And most of the time it's silent.
• 1:17:00
  Sometimes I use, I had Evan Alexander on recently.
• 1:17:03
  He's the author of Proof of Heaven.
• 1:17:06
  Amazing, amazing episode. He was at our house.
• 1:17:09
  Talk about a guy that's just absolutely rooted.
• 1:17:11
  And I know this person. He had the most transcendent
• 1:17:16
  near death experience I've now had.
• 1:17:18
  I've now had 12 friends open up to me about that.
• 1:17:24
  Manoj Sexsina was on on episode 42 and at the end shared I've
• 1:17:29
  known him for 20 years. At the end shared his near death
• 1:17:32
  experience. And that's where someone
• 1:17:34
  literally glimpses beyond the veil.
• 1:17:38
  And they, they, they synchronized quite a bit.
• 1:17:42
  But Evan Alexander wrote the most popular book on that and we
• 1:17:46
  had amazing meditations together.
• 1:17:49
  But he created an app called Sacred Acoustics, which is
• 1:17:53
  binaural sounds. And I sometimes will use that
• 1:17:56
  too. And those have been really
• 1:17:58
  helpful too. There's a book I I profiled on
• 1:18:02
  on the podcast a while back called Why Buddhism is True.
• 1:18:06
  It's a guy who really is just completely talking about natural
• 1:18:11
  selection and the way our brains evolved and trying to explain
• 1:18:15
  everything that way. But it ends with a spiritual
• 1:18:19
  tone because he says, look, I don't know what consciousness
• 1:18:23
  is. Nobody does, he said.
• 1:18:25
  But let's be thankful that whatever the Buddhist were
• 1:18:28
  encouraging us to do that when you glimpse, you know, the
• 1:18:32
  unification of all and then it's deeply rooted in love through
• 1:18:35
  meditation, that that is the actual reality versus what if it
• 1:18:41
  was like dark and scary in there.
• 1:18:42
  You know, you did it And it's like, Oh my gosh, like I should
• 1:18:46
  never do that again. So he's so he he was making the
• 1:18:49
  case of if more people practiced with the Buddhist were were
• 1:18:54
  preaching in terms of really meditating, then you would have
• 1:18:59
  a much happier, you know, society that's much more loving.
• 1:19:02
  And we ended last year as a family going to Bhutan.
• 1:19:07
  Well, really. And Bhutan measures themselves
• 1:19:10
  on gross national happiness. It's deeply meditative country,
• 1:19:16
  their entire GDP. You worked at Starbucks.
• 1:19:18
  You'll get a kick out of this is 3 weeks of our coffee budget in
• 1:19:22
  America. And it it really does feel like
• 1:19:26
  one of the happiest places I've ever been.
• 1:19:28
  That's amazing. It's.
• 1:19:29
  Deep, deep inner contentment. And you know, this part of part
• 1:19:37
  of my thesis of what happens when we hit abundance is that
• 1:19:41
  we're going to go back to a more communal way of living where
• 1:19:46
  we're not just dealing with such scarcity and such, the grind of
• 1:19:50
  just constantly, you know, people trying to make ends meet.
• 1:19:54
  Once we truly have abundance on Earth, then it's going to be a
• 1:19:58
  lot more about love and deep connection with each.
• 1:20:01
  Other that's awesome. I mean, I think one of the
• 1:20:03
  success of Israel as a country is it's founded on the kibbutz
• 1:20:06
  system. This model, it's a great
• 1:20:08
  example, communal living and Israel, despite all the threats
• 1:20:11
  that it faces, deep threats, exogenous threats, endogenous
• 1:20:17
  threats like real challenges, like it's one of the happiest
• 1:20:20
  places in the world. It is.
• 1:20:22
  And I think it's because people. Don't know that because they
• 1:20:25
  haven't been there but. If people have been crazy.
• 1:20:27
  Times, and I very much believe that.
• 1:20:30
  Talk to the Israelis, and they feel lucky.
• 1:20:32
  Yeah. Like, I don't think Americans
• 1:20:35
  necessarily feel lucky. You know, I love this country.
• 1:20:39
  Yeah. And I'm deeply patriotic.
• 1:20:41
  And I feel proud to have been, you know, I did public service
• 1:20:44
  because I believe in this country so deeply.
• 1:20:46
  Yeah. Of course I do too.
• 1:20:48
  But I think people don't feel, I don't know that people feel
• 1:20:53
  fortunate. I mean, I think we won the
• 1:20:55
  lottery by being born here in this time, in this place, in
• 1:20:58
  this age. I don't know if everybody shares
• 1:21:01
  that feeling. And look, I think there's lots
• 1:21:04
  of challenges. We have lots of challenges that
• 1:21:06
  get me wrong. And again, you're born in the
• 1:21:07
  wrong zip code. It can dictate your life in many
• 1:21:10
  ways. And yet like we live with such
• 1:21:14
  already a degree of abundance. Again, we started this
• 1:21:17
  conversation where we got online talk about electricity, right?
• 1:21:19
  Like, we live with so much grace and I don't know that everybody
• 1:21:24
  always has a deep appreciation for it.
• 1:21:26
  Well, we're, we're programmed differently.
• 1:21:28
  I mean, you know, this is the walk in the spiritual path.
• 1:21:32
  Like if you grew up in Bhutan, you're programmed a certain way.
• 1:21:36
  You're programmed more for learning how to meditate young,
• 1:21:40
  having a deep communal connection here, you know, and
• 1:21:44
  I'm a capitalist. I've been a successful
• 1:21:45
  entrepreneur like you. You're, you're programmed that
• 1:21:50
  this is the country where we lifted ourselves up by our
• 1:21:52
  bootstraps, where we defeated the biggest empire.
• 1:21:56
  You know, it's, it is #1 GDP, it's the inventive capability
• 1:22:01
  coming out of this country is off the charts incredible.
• 1:22:05
  But you're also programmed to constantly be in the cycle of
• 1:22:09
  like more and more and more. And that comes through the ads
• 1:22:14
  being pushed to us. You're also being programmed to
• 1:22:17
  think that it's kind of dystopian because, you know, the
• 1:22:20
  social media is using it's, it's hijacking our bassist instincts.
• 1:22:26
  I agree with our our fear based instincts and, and frankly, the
• 1:22:29
  media too. I mean, I'm a big fan of the
• 1:22:30
  Free Press. It's a foundational principle
• 1:22:35
  for democracy. But the way that algorithms are
• 1:22:38
  programmed, it's constantly pushing us into this fear state
• 1:22:41
  constant, you know, just and, and you know, in Bhutan, you
• 1:22:46
  know, it's a comparison. They have a natural immunity to
• 1:22:51
  that. They can be more like Neo in the
• 1:22:53
  Matrix because they have that deep inner contentment and they
• 1:22:57
  know that like, hey, the path to happiness and this, this comes
• 1:23:00
  from all spiritual traditions too, whether it's Judaism,
• 1:23:03
  whether it's Christianity, etcetera, that the path to
• 1:23:06
  happiness only comes from the inside.
• 1:23:08
  There's no amount of material items you can accumulate that's
• 1:23:11
  going to make you happy. I think that was my kids all the
• 1:23:13
  time. You know, I think that the kids
• 1:23:15
  all the time, like don't look for external validation.
• 1:23:18
  You have to find your internal validation, how you dress are
• 1:23:22
  the likes the video gets on Instagram.
• 1:23:25
  These are very, very, very weak ways to kind of, you know,
• 1:23:32
  measure your own self worth. And although again, there may be
• 1:23:35
  like a sugar high you get from a like or something on Instagram.
• 1:23:39
  Just as you get a sugar crash though.
• 1:23:41
  That's exactly right. And it doesn't last very.
• 1:23:44
  Long it's the crash is worse than the high.
• 1:23:46
  Right, right. Because ultimately it's empty
• 1:23:48
  and that illusion of the high, right it, it, it, you fail to
• 1:23:54
  realize like the, the gap, like the, the, the vacuum that's
• 1:23:59
  there. Yeah, well, I know you're waking
• 1:24:02
  up early in the morning having a flight, so I don't want to keep
• 1:24:05
  you too long. But any closing words?
• 1:24:08
  What's your greatest hope for humanity here?
• 1:24:11
  My greatest hope for humanity is that like, and love conquers
• 1:24:15
  fear and I hope love conquers hate.
• 1:24:18
  And my greatest wish is that we find ways to really love each
• 1:24:23
  other irrespective of how we pray or where we're from.
• 1:24:27
  You know, how we vote. Like, I think ultimately I yearn
• 1:24:31
  for a time, in a moment when we as Americans and we as humans
• 1:24:35
  come together and just appreciate each other for who we
• 1:24:38
  are. You know, not what we are,
• 1:24:40
  right. And it's kind of where you
• 1:24:42
  mentioned King before. It's like really judging people
• 1:24:44
  for the content of their character, not the color of
• 1:24:47
  their skin or again, the place where they pray or, you know,
• 1:24:51
  whatever these these markers are.
• 1:24:54
  I mean, we're in this 21st century.
• 1:24:56
  We need to like just shed these 20th and 19th and 18th century
• 1:25:00
  markers that we used to like, you know, demarcate who we are.
• 1:25:06
  I think they're, they are, you know, ultimately not very
• 1:25:11
  lasting or meaningful. Yeah, that's so well said.
• 1:25:13
  And you know, one of the things I'll say that I absolutely love
• 1:25:17
  about America, to contrast it to a place like Bhutan.
• 1:25:20
  And there's many things that just one in particular that I'll
• 1:25:23
  mention is the diversity of our food here, the diversity of our
• 1:25:27
  literature, the diversity of our music.
• 1:25:30
  All of that is because of all these people from all these
• 1:25:34
  cultures coming together to live a collective dream.
• 1:25:38
  Yeah, and that is very American, and that's the best of America,
• 1:25:43
  really. I totally agree.
• 1:25:44
  Like I think there's a blend we can have of there's an
• 1:25:50
  interesting blend to achieve where number one, we embrace
• 1:25:54
  diversity and value it for what it is and what it represents,
• 1:25:57
  right? Like, again, my kids are richer
• 1:25:59
  because they have my kind of Ashkenazi American identity and
• 1:26:03
  my wife's kind of, you know, Persian Middle Eastern identity.
• 1:26:08
  So I think the diversity is so enriching and beneficial.
• 1:26:13
  Secondly, that we can live in a more communal way.
• 1:26:17
  And whether your community is a Jewish community or some other
• 1:26:20
  kind of structure, like I think community gives us meaning in so
• 1:26:24
  many ways. So I'm not suggesting we'd like
• 1:26:27
  denude ourselves of that or, or, or extract some of that.
• 1:26:30
  Like I think community is so valuable, but so we appreciate
• 1:26:34
  diversity. We live in community, right?
• 1:26:36
  And then we find ways to come together.
• 1:26:39
  Like I don't think that's so hard.
• 1:26:41
  So I'm very family oriented and I think it's a blessing, you
• 1:26:45
  know? And I hope that as we move
• 1:26:47
  forward, we can find this blend of appreciating diversity, not
• 1:26:51
  being afraid of it, not running away from it, but embracing
• 1:26:55
  diversity of living communally again, whatever your kind of
• 1:26:59
  organizing structure is. And then coming together on the
• 1:27:02
  other stuff, all of us in a way that doesn't require you to
• 1:27:06
  like, assimilate and flatten who you are or lose your core
• 1:27:10
  values. No, like the, the, the, the kind
• 1:27:13
  of, again, the unit of organizing, whether it's your
• 1:27:16
  family or your kind of community, your congregation,
• 1:27:19
  whatever can be a powerful way to come together with others.
• 1:27:23
  So that's what I would hope. For in the long run, I love it.
• 1:27:26
  I love it. Well, you're a good role model
• 1:27:29
  for me, for others and look beautiful human being you're.
• 1:27:34
  Very kind of say that I think you're a very role model.
• 1:27:36
  I mean, having had the success, you've had to chose to go this
• 1:27:40
  route and the other people who have these successes then choose
• 1:27:43
  to like build a yacht or then who choose to like get a plane
• 1:27:47
  and then who choose just to like sort of self edify through
• 1:27:50
  acquisition of material things. I just so, so appreciate your
• 1:27:55
  exploration of like the spiritual.
• 1:27:57
  I think it's going to be incredibly not just like, you
• 1:28:02
  know, healthy for you and your family, although it I'm sure it
• 1:28:05
  is that. But as you write your book and
• 1:28:08
  as your podcast gets more and more traction, it's like it
• 1:28:11
  awakens things. And so many people are like,
• 1:28:12
  what a gift that is. Well, thank you.
• 1:28:14
  I'll, I'll tell you. I'll tell you just one quick
• 1:28:16
  story. You know, I went to India to
• 1:28:18
  study Vedanta over a decade ago. And Swamiji Parthasarathi is
• 1:28:24
  telling the story. He's the he's the leader that I
• 1:28:28
  studied under, although he would not call himself a leader, he
• 1:28:30
  would actually not want to be called a leader.
• 1:28:32
  The place I study is called the Venanta Academy.
• 1:28:35
  His name is not on it. Deeply rooted in humility.
• 1:28:38
  He's in his 90s now. But one of the things that he he
• 1:28:42
  told is a story is he said he's, you know, in India, there's,
• 1:28:46
  there's like massive wealth and then massive poverty.
• 1:28:50
  And he's standing on this yacht and it's one of the wealthiest
• 1:28:54
  guys in India. And he's like, you know,
• 1:28:57
  congratulations, You know, I hope you're really enjoying
• 1:29:00
  this. And the guy looks across the Bay
• 1:29:02
  and he's like, you see that one? That's next.
• 1:29:06
  That was all he could do. He couldn't even be happy on his
• 1:29:08
  own yacht. You know, it's just.
• 1:29:10
  There is no end. There is no end.
• 1:29:13
  And and that was. That's again the amount of
• 1:29:16
  programming and deprogramming this required.
• 1:29:20
  Because there's no end. There's no end.
• 1:29:22
  There's always someone wealthier, smarter, better
• 1:29:25
  looking. What pick pick whatever metric.
• 1:29:26
  That comparison is the thief of joy.
• 1:29:29
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's why I think, like,
• 1:29:31
  help people to find their own path and find a different way
• 1:29:34
  to, again, like, value what you have.
• 1:29:38
  And to see the value is very, very powerful.
• 1:29:41
  Brett, it's a gift. Thank you for doing that.
• 1:29:42
  Thank you. I appreciate it.
• 1:29:44
  Well, thanks, brother. Yeah, awesome.
• 1:29:46
  Thank you so much. Thank you.
• 1:29:47
  So thanks again, everybody for tuning in to Love Conquers Fear.
• 1:29:51
  Stay tuned. One more amazing person that I'm
• 1:29:55
  meeting with in New York City that is also in the Henry Crown
• 1:29:59
  Fellowship. He's created one of the most
• 1:30:01
  successful businesses in the world.
• 1:30:04
  Thank you again for all the love you're giving.
• 1:30:06
  I get many messages now per day of people that are having the
• 1:30:10
  heart shift and are tuning in to read books and really share this
• 1:30:17
  with others. And as I said, I'm self funding
• 1:30:20
  this. There's no ads.
• 1:30:21
  I love 4 Sigmatic but they're not paying me anything.
• 1:30:25
  So stay tuned. Thank you so much for all the
• 1:30:27
  love you're giving.