AI: The Next Economic Revolution - A Conversation with Tech CEO Ahmed Reza

Greg Spillane: 0:11

What is up everyone and welcome to the show. I am your host, greg Spillane, and today we are diving into the fascinating world of AI with a guest who is making a significant impact on a global scale. The guest today is Ahmed Reza. Ahmed's diverse background and experience paint a picture of ambition, resilience and unyielding curiosity. Born in Bangladesh and starting his career as a child actor, ahmed is a well-known figure now in the tech industry. He is currently the CEO of Yobi, which we'll talk about in a second. He is also the founder of Dental Web Now, which is a company that he started and sold, making himself a multi-millionaire. He is also the co-founder and chairman of Trep Hub, which is a Y Combinator type accelerator based out of Florida, still very actively involved in the startup community.

Greg Spillane: 1:07

His background is really interesting. He contributed early in his career on NASA's Mars rover project. He studied at Cornell University and he has some really interesting stories, all the way back to being homeless in New York as an immigrant coming here from Bangladesh. His current company, yobi, is pioneering a new approach to AI communications, leveraging synth agents to augment the daily lives of workers Really interesting stuff, as it's shaping the future of AI. It wasn't enough for Ahmed.

Greg Spillane: 1:40

He's also a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion, actively investing in countries like Algeria, mentoring leaders to bridge the gap between the global workplace and the Western world. In a world where AI is becoming increasingly prevalent and there's a lot of ethical considerations that are coming to the forefront, i think Ahmed's insights are both timely and crucial. I think anybody out there whether a tech enthusiast or an inspiring entrepreneur or just someone curious about AI and where AI is going and how the ethics of it are going to affect our life this is going to be an interesting conversation. Without further ado, let's welcome Ahmed Reza to Outperformers. All right, ahmed, welcome to the show.

Ahmed Reza: 2:26

Hey, thanks so much for having me on, Greg.

Greg Spillane: 2:29

Yeah, i'm really excited to have this conversation. I am definitely in the camp of and I think most people are starting to fall into this camp that this AI revolution is truly the biggest thing to happen to society Really since the internet. I've heard some people say the iPhone. I think it's bigger than the iPhone. I think this is going to change everything. I think this potentially could be even bigger than the internet.

Greg Spillane: 2:56

We were talking offline a little bit about the impact of AI. I think it's wide reaching in regards to some of the concerns as well as a lot of the optimism that exists. There was actually an article today that I wanted to bring up with you. New York Times published it. I don't know if you saw it or not, but it said something to the extent of like generative AI is going to add or they estimate will add $4.4 trillion to the global economy. This is a McKinsey study. It talks about how productivity gains are going to be between 60 to 70% across the board and then 50 to 60% of jobs today will be automated within the next 10 years. It's interesting to see how that's going to add to the global economy. I guess it's a shift of different jobs, but we were talking about probably more the impact to our children offline. I think we're at a point in our careers where maybe we'll be able to capitalize a little bit on this, but what does that mean for the future? I'd just love to hear your thoughts.

Ahmed Reza: 4:03

Yeah, i actually think the impact of AI will be bigger than possibly the Industrial Revolution. The reason that I think that, and also when I it's funny because I would bring these things up to friends in Silicon Valley folks are very forward thinking. One of my friends pulled me to the side last year and said are you doing okay, buddy? I'm like why They're talking about this stuff. I just want to make sure you're connected to reality. There's that saying that being early is worse than being wrong. I was talking about how this would add to the global GDP. That's what could happen.

Ahmed Reza: 4:44

This is just an insanely powerful technology. I've been in the field for over two decades, so I guess that dates me a bit. I've seen the hype cycles, so the hype cycles do worry me. People get really really excited and then they go Watson can fly airplanes No, i can't, but it is really cool. There's really cool things that it can do.

Ahmed Reza: 5:08

But the impact of artificial intelligence on work is similar to how the steam engine revolutionized everything. Before that, the world was a certain way and human capital like if you needed to dig a ditch, you needed human digging capital. Then you have a backhoe instead. Now what do you do with the construction equipment that you got, you could look, set back your first. If you had a fleet of thousands of people who dig ditches, you'd be like, oh my God, what's going to happen to all their jobs? Let's look back at reality. What happened is we started building bigger buildings and skyscrapers and these cities that we've never imagined. I think that's part of the human condition. I'm a big believer in humanity and in people and what they aspire to. The reason I was talking about. What am I talking to with most of the really hardcore AI geeks and the leaders? We're talking about our kids, man. If there's one thing that I really have a lot of hope for in saving us from AI doom is that most of the AI folks they have children. We're human at the end of the day. It's really cool. As much as I geek out, what do I tell my children about how to prepare for a world that is post-industrial, one that also unlocks values After the industrial age? if you were really good at digging ditches, i'm sure there's competition still. It's just like that. It's a spectacle. It's no longer your highest value that you're physically strong. Then we changed our entire world and society around that. If you think about it When we talk about education education for the scholars, for the really, really classical scholars, for Aristotle and Socrates and the Sophists. They would teach you how to speak and they would teach you how to understand the world and do philosophy.

Ahmed Reza: 7:15

Growing up, i'm an immigrant. I was homeless in the streets in New York and then got into an Ivy League school. I was always a pragmatist. I was like ah, freaking philosophy, who cares about that? But as I get older, i realize the value of having deeper understanding of humanity, of where the world is going, so that as a leader, you can be a better leader, as a parent, just as a good human being, a good member of society, you can plan In this case, yes, there's going to be a lot of jobs in the future that are going to look very different from the jobs today. The institutions of today are very much shaped by the Industrial Revolution. One of my great disappointments in the whole school system is everybody learned this exact same thing. I've always been a bit of a geek, so I finished calculus before ninth grade. I literally went through high school just like coasting and pissed everybody else off in class because I barely showed up to class. I would just make jokes, and I aced it.

Greg Spillane: 8:23

You get A's on everything. Everybody hates that person. It's like, come on, man, i had to work hard for this.

Ahmed Reza: 8:29

If you look at it, that's wrong. That's just a very industrialized way of educating a bunch of people on how to repair that machine. You don't really care about their individuality, You don't care about what their strengths and weaknesses are. You're telling everybody they need to be standardized. You're literally robotifying humans.

Ahmed Reza: 8:50

Somebody might be extraordinary at art, Somebody might be really good at math. In my case, I wish somebody took me to the side. You're not pulling my ears and I need to study the meditations of markers or really a something You're like what I'm like. No, this is something. You're really weakened. This is something that will really help round you out better. Or woodshop, for example. I flunked woodshop. I remember our principal going it's like wait, I was going to be either valid or an illuditorious and I got a D in woodshop. I could not make a straight.

Ahmed Reza: 9:28

Now that we're at this stage here here, suddenly knowledge work, which is highly prized, and we've kind of conditioned our children to go get a degree, go become a doctor, go become an engineer. There's all these conversations around STEM. Coming from a STEM background, I wonder, like if we're not doing a disservice to our future leaders. I tell entrepreneurs that if you want to be a really good entrepreneur now, I would recommend a degree in philosophy, And I mean that, I wholeheartedly mean that Philosophy, sociology, because it's all about where the heck is the world going, you know? And am I just accepting the definitions of success, definitions of capitalism, definitions of that right? Because as an entrepreneur, you're trying to build game-changing things, things, and you have to understand the impact of that And you have to go as humanity. Have you lived through this already?

Greg Spillane: 10:31

It's interesting though, because, being an entrepreneur myself in the tech industry for the last 20 years so probably similar in age and probably lived through some of the similar hype cycles. But as little as two years ago three years ago, i mean, in the middle of COVID the thing with entrepreneurs was, like tech founders, right, you need to be able to go ahead and, like you know self-code. You need to have been a computer engineer, you need to know how to do things yourself. And now we're really at a point where you know the engineer in many ways could be replaced completely in the next five years. Now I don't mean there will be no computer engineers, but you know, a team of five can maybe do what a team of 25 was doing in the past, right? So you know that low level or even mid-level engineer that role just may not be needed anymore because you're going to automate the tech or the actual coding of tech, and it's crazy how quickly we switched from this STEM. Learn to be a coder, learn tech, learn to be an engineer Like it's a knowledge-based world, like all these types of things to like. Actually, the future is. You need to learn how to work with people, you need to learn. You know philosophy. You know learn to trade right. Not everyone's going to be an entrepreneur. Like you, know what's going to be hard to automate The plumber right. Like you have a pipe burst in your house, you're going to need a person to physically come to your house.

Greg Spillane: 11:57

And it's just so fascinating to me that, in the matter of, i mean, i know AI has been around for a long time And you know I was familiar with a lot of the type of stuff that you know you put in your own product. You know sentiment analysis and translation tools. But this shift that's happened in the last, you know, six to nine months, and a lot of it led by open AI And now you have the open source projects like Lama, and it's like a fundamental shift in the way we think about work and careers And I mean it's fascinating. And probably similar to you, i would assume I'm an optimist, not doom and gloom on any of this. But I don't know. I mean you've been in the space for a long time. I know you built a company that I'd love to get into that was using AI, well before this sort of hype cycle that we're in right now came up. I mean, what are you? are you optimistic about our future?

Ahmed Reza: 12:54

I'm generally optimistic but at the same time, I'm measured, right. I'm measured in that I think it's really important for us to learn from history. It's important for us to look back, and it might just be my age because, like like now, I'm old enough I can look back and go what do I regret And what do I not regret at this age, and project forwards and go OK, if I do these things, I won't regret it, right? So, similarly, if we look back at Web 1.0, right, Remember the old days, I really feel like I'm back in the late 90s. Late 90s when, like you know, the BBSs were still around, all these community folks were coming together, the open source. You could feel that energy And it was just felt so good to be a geek, right. So I'm just personally as a geek, I'm just really happy to be back at that point. And if you remember, back then it wasn't credentials, It was just like if you were a hacker, which was an honorific term, not the hoodie, you know hacker Yeah, of course.

Ahmed Reza: 13:54

If you were a hacker back then it was just like, wow, this like 15 year old figure out this stuff, because it was just so deep into it, right, that had such a great understanding of things. And I think the hacker spirit is something that's really important to focus on. Unfortunately, we try to industrialize everything. We try to. You can't really industrialize the hacker spirit. If you look at another entrepreneur, the thing that you look at is like, can this person figure out plumbing? if that wasn't needed?

Ahmed Reza: 14:23

I saw an article with Dara Khosha-Sawid. The CEO of Uber was driving an Uber, right, and I was like, oh, that's really interesting, like that's something that I respect a lot, because the people who figure things out, problem solve, who just have that tenacity, that great about them, right. And that's why if somebody's starting a tech startup and they're like, oh, i'm going to leave that to the tech guys, right, i don't understand that stuff, it might just be me, but I've never respected that because you got to go figure it out, like the best programmers I know don't have a computer science degree. They just went and figured it out. And that hacker spirit, the hacker ethos, i think transcends just tech, right, you go into something, you understand it and you problem solve And that, i think, is going to be unchanging has been unchanging for, i think, almost all of human history right, you look at the problems you have and you look at the tools you have and you figure out how do I put something together?

Greg Spillane: 15:21

Yeah, And it's like today, you know, i've seen it as almost like two different types of it's, like the same, it's like two sides of the same coin. And I've seen the hacker mentality, that problem solver that is really into it. for, like, almost the personal feeling of like creation, right, i would almost compare it to an artist, right, like why does an artist paint? In many cases, artists paint because they love the action of painting and creating something and taking a blank canvas and starting from nothing and then having this thing that they can stand back and look at.

Greg Spillane: 15:55

You know, why does the woodworker, you know, build things in his garage? right, is it really for commercial purposes? No, it's the act of actually creating and going through the process and learning and completing something. And it's like the tech, like the great entrepreneurs have that, but then they have this, like many times, have this capitalist side where they, like, they have that problem solving capability and they have that ability to hack and they're creative, but they also kind of see the commercial side of it. you know, like, i'd say, like Elon Musk is maybe a good example of that, where clearly Elon Musk is eternally creative and curious and driven by more than just money, but he's also a marketer and a businessman and he understands that side of it and he put those two together and it's like a really dangerous combination.

Ahmed Reza: 16:45

It's a very powerful combination and I think the canvas is just bigger. I don't think I think the wrong not to disagree, but I think framing it in a capitalistic framework is limiting it, because what he? really is speaking of artists here. I'll just lift my camera up. I was trying to hide my painting right there.

Greg Spillane: 17:04

Yeah, I love it.

Ahmed Reza: 17:05

I didn't know what I was felt like. it was the middle of a desert. I feel that need right And I think a lot of people feel that need right To express themselves. People, just people just are born with this thing right. It's like I just have to build, i have to create.

Ahmed Reza: 17:19

It's the same thing that where people want freedom, right, we're trying to live meaningful lives And I think all of this is framed by the fact that we are ephemeral, we will die, and, of course, we don't want to think about it, but it's actually a good idea to think about it and go, hey, why am I alive? What are the things that make my life meaningful, impactful, which is why we think about our children and the next generation. What do we leave behind? right, and if you frame it that way, what you can see is like in a capitalist system, in a free market system, which works great. It's a bigger canvas And you look at that as the problem space, right? So I was fortunate to meet Elon Musk before his second, before his second act. So he's, he's solved. I met him in Kimball. Wonderful people, absolutely wonderful people. Kimball is a lot more low key, but after their first really big exit right, you hear like they were sleeping in the office right, barely had a working car- We're talking PayPal.

Ahmed Reza: 18:22

Yeah, yeah, even before then, right, like they were just talking about the immigrant story, right, it was like one of their, one of their investors, was like Oh my God, you don't have a car. I was like, no, i don't have a car. So he brought in my check, said go buy a car. And Elon bought a 1950s Jaguar, that like classic, really amazing car, but doesn't drive, which which I guess makes for a fun story. It was kind of probably something I would do. It's like oh, i can go get this old Corvette.

Ahmed Reza: 18:52

But then they come, get to this point where they have hundreds of millions of dollars And, theoretically, like the drive for capitalism like that should kind of end there, or it should be like oh, let's go get more money. What? what I found really interesting is that once you get to that point, if you've done so unthinkingly, it forces you to think It's like wait, this is way more money than I could ever Spend productively. Right, you can do a lot of bad things, you can do a lot of dumb things. You could buy an island and retire there, but you're not gonna want to stop painting. It doesn't matter if people like my painting or not. Right, you're not going to stop creating like, because that gives your life meaning, it moves the ball forward.

Greg Spillane: 19:38

So yeah, which is actually was my was, was. The point I was trying to make is You have certain people out there that Will continue to paint but may spend their lives being starving artists because they just don't have the business acumen Or they don't even have the desire To turn it into a business. But then when you get that person like Elon Musk, who, as you said, could have stopped painting years ago you know, using that analogy Didn't and continues to come out with new and unbelievable, world-changing things, but he still has that piece of him that's clear, that he knows how to turn it into a business and you know?

Ahmed Reza: 20:13

I mean it's so he understands how this canvas works. Right, the canvas of this works differently, right? so instead of hacking a computer, you're hacking a different kind of system and Then it. You know what's your motivation for doing that, and that's where I think the philosophy and the thinking, and, you know, being being a little bit deeper than, like, i just want to win is it really important, right? Yeah, your legacy, right? so it was really interesting because he was talking about his legacy. Then he said what are, what are problems that are worth solving? So instead of going, hey, what's the next safest bet? He decided to go build a rocket ship company.

Ahmed Reza: 20:52

Pretty crazy right and they all ready, crazy Yeah, it's when bankrupt trying to build some sex. And The second act has been incredible now, like after the fact. You know, hindsight is 2020, right, but what you start noticing is That spirit is really important and I think a lot more people have that spirit than we realize. It's just that they don't get the opportunity, and I'm hopeful that with with the advent of AI, where Hopefully the output of that is a lot more Elon Musk's can take those bigger creative leaps in In something that resembles capitalism, but it's a little bit different. It's a little bit different in that I think What we have isn't pure cutthroat capitalism. We have regulations, we have social welfare. These are things that are really important, because if you just have cutthroat capitalism and just don't care about anybody, that doesn't win, that has, that can have issues and repercussions as well. So if we have, if you have systems where we allow people like Elon to thrive, i think we're gonna have amazing solutions for the world in medicine, in In education.

Ahmed Reza: 22:10

I can't wait to see education get disrupted, because we really don't need to put people through a factory worker training and call that education anymore. We get education can actually be much deeper, like, if you're entrepreneurial, you start out with that early, right, if you're, if you're an artist and you know you're, you're a certain way, we nurture that. We nurture that some more and then also teach you a lot stem Right so that you're, you're more well-rounded as a human being. Yet you end up living a good life. And Even for our kids, instead of telling them, hey, you need to be, you need to be really good at fitting into this, you know post-industrial, you know knowledge economy, we teach them to just be good humans.

Ahmed Reza: 22:57

Like, what makes good humans be good humans? right, that problem solving, like, yeah, i told my kids I don't expect them to just go into the workforce, but I totally expect them to be like Elon Musk because they have all every one of those opportunities. Right is like, if you can go explore what you like to do, what you enjoy doing, and how can you be of service, how can your life be about us and not just about me? because one of the things I see about great entrepreneurs is they create jobs. Right, ultimately, some act of creating. Right, they create jobs, they create, they build economies, they create new paradigms and that is just. That is just so Insanely rewarding having been blessed with being part of that myself. You know I look back and I look at the things that I've built, that the way it helps people, and of course it doesn't hurt that. You know I got rich along the way too.

Greg Spillane: 23:50

Yeah but I gotta go. I mean, you know look, you talked about your own background. You know one of the one of those guys that that got straight A's about it or in school didn't necessarily how to try hard. Clearly you have a very high level of intellect. I'm sure if we were to put you on a scale compared to you know the general public you would be on the. You know the High end of that. I Agree with you on entrepreneurship. I have the highest regard for entrepreneurs. How difficult and challenging it is. I I've chosen to go down that path myself and I Would probably leave my, my own children down that path. But but we also know that you can't have all chiefs and you know you're in a. In a normal society You're gonna have a lot of Indians. So what? what are those Indians doing in this future society?

Ahmed Reza: 24:41

so I think, i Think the current paradigm is about to shift, right, the current paradigm is about to shift. And what do people? what do people do? I've been really fortunate to have had a worldview that's different from many people, in the sense that I I was born in Bangladesh, i grew up there, and I remember a world where people would introduce one each other and They would never ask what do you do? It was unimportant, because it was. It was just a fundamentally different kind of world, and I think other people of Indian descent might actually tell you the same if you go to Bangladesh now. Today, though, it's very, very different, right?

Ahmed Reza: 25:27

The culture has changed a lot, and I think there's a monoculture culture all around the world in that sense, but it's important for us to be able to imagine that there are other realities besides the current one right now, and there are other things that actually give us, give us, meaning, right? the fact that you're an entrepreneur is just one part of your personality, so I don't know if you, if I, really went into what we did. If you looked at our website, it's a little bit. We try to fly under the radar, so I have a digital clone of myself that sounds exactly like me. It's currently handling media conversations on my behalf. If you go like, if you go and talk to my LinkedIn self, you'll be like wait, i'm, it's over here. So Here's the synthetic version of me that out does me, is trained on my voice, on my data, and is able to out out you know, creator me And yeah it's superhuman for all all intensive purposes.

Ahmed Reza: 26:23

Right, like at 3 am, you go and talk to digital Ahmed. It will respond back to you immediately and it is a manifestation of how I want to interact with people. I want to be a good person. I want to talk to lots of people. If they want to talk about professional things, you talk to my synthetic agent about my kids or family. It will not answer. It'll say sorry, that's out of the scope of what I do. So if I look at myself, holistic is like who am I like? so I eat my own dog food.

Ahmed Reza: 26:53

And last year when imad released Stable diffusion and or when you know stability, i comes about right, i see where things are going right. We were using GPT-3 before that And we were trying to build these conversational user interfaces that would be simple for business, business owners and entrepreneurs, you know, to build technically complex things with, and Once I saw what was happening, i was like, oh my god, this is going to be an insane arms race. I started playing with open source language models, right? I was like, yep, i'm gonna build synthetic agents. So we started building synthetic agents and had a six-month head start, which is why we're what most people are like you know. They hear these big companies raising large rounds talking about synthetic agents. Like, yeah, we've been building synthetic agents. We have them out in the field doing work. So it's not a theoretical. Is Ahmed's clone better than Ahmed? I look at it, man, it is absolutely better than me.

Ahmed Reza: 27:57

Yeah, those very specific things. But then I have to question Okay then who am I If I'm not that marketer and if I'm not that Programmer? right, this thing can potentially write better code than me. Doesn't get upset, you know We'll listen to employees And remember their birthdays. You know It's superhuman. But then Just ask my family and my friends which one would they rather talk to? Would they rather talk to this very defective Ahmed?

Ahmed Reza: 28:28

You know It's funny to sometimes like I have just really weird New York sense of humor because my formative years were in New York City, so I'm very dark sense of humor, even at a funeral, like in crack jokes, right, yeah, it's like, oh, it looks like we're all dying to get here, right, so they would still take that you know Imperfect human being, because there's something about us that makes us human and If you ascribe value to just that one part of me, yes, that's gonna go away, dude. As a fellow entrepreneur, you know my condolences. Like, that is definitely going away because these well, no Ways, right, but there are a lot of things that are different.

Greg Spillane: 29:13

Yeah, i don't question that at all. I mean, i get that. I I think, like I said, i think it's gonna make human relationships More important. You can't, you know, and I, i mean, i've been following the AI too And I've seen what the synth agents can do and it's pretty fascinating, pretty unbelievable. I'm a little worried about some of the deep fake type of stuff and where that's going and what's real and what's not, and who's a human and who's not. And I'm actually One of my entrepreneur adventures is working on some some, some, some tech to hopefully make that you know that problem a little bit less.

Greg Spillane: 29:46

But I Look at it more of okay, i'm an entrepreneur, i'm an entrepreneur, i'm starting a company. I used to hire, you know, a team of engineers. I had a marketing team, i had people managing social media for me, I had people doing outreach and sales for me, i had people doing copywriting for me, and now I Don't need those people, maybe right like, or I don't need as many of those people. So you're getting into a situation where, great, as an entrepreneur, it's an unbelievable tool. It could make me so productive. I could be me a co-founder and maybe one or two other people and I could replace what used to be a team of 25, right, i don't need customer support anymore. I just, i just use Yobi and I use, you know, my version of of the Greg synth, who's probably, you know, more informed than a, than a junior customer support agent would have been, you know, five years ago, you know. I think the question is what happens to those people that used to have those jobs?

Ahmed Reza: 30:45

Do they need to become entrepreneurs too, or no, i think that the fundamental nature of work changes. So my work has changed. I'll just speak from experience, right, rather than just prognostic Hating. So my work change I'm actually very tired and the reason I'm tired is because I'm at SDR is way better than I expected. Yeah, you know yeah, it's great.

Ahmed Reza: 31:05

I will still refer to it as a hit then. Way better than expected it to be. And You know, eventually, like I had to debug and figure out that if I cleared my calendar for something, i better immediately go block it out because it would fill it like almost superhuman levels, right, so The nature of my work has changed. I end up spending time tuning the synthetic agent, and that's how I kind of see the future. As You're still human, you're still needed.

Ahmed Reza: 31:34

There's something about being human that is very special, right, we as a society have to recognize that. You know The inherent worth of people and the fact that people feel deflated, that, oh, i can no longer be a programmer. Well, greg, i would still love talking to you, even if you weren't exactly these things, because you would still be Greg, right, i would still be a man, right. And if you think about your best relations of in life, i met up with a friend of mine who, who is a friend from high school, one of my first investors, right, and I've known him for for his entire life. And, yeah, he still likes me and liked me before and hopefully will continue to like me in the future and As an incredible amounts of meaning to my life, and we're both entrepreneurs, so we're both the.

Ahmed Reza: 32:21

We're both looking at the world in this way of what does the future hold? and the future is He has to learn how to take care of his synthetic agent. What does he want his synthetic agent to do, right? So, yes, if Everybody else in the world did not have synthetic agents and I did, which I kind of do so I have this crazy unfair advantage, right? So my team of 30 acts like a team of 300, but that's not going to be permanent.

Ahmed Reza: 32:46

Before you know it, you'll have that and everybody else will have that. It's like the construction equipment, like people will have it. Now, if you don't, if you don't get on that bandwagon, unfortunately you, your organization, might not survive Because, yeah, you're, you're competing, you might become an art artisanal organization, right, but no, you're not going to be able to compete. And in that case, the paradigm changes. Even for entrepreneurs, the paradigm changes, right, like, so you have a graphic designer and this and that right, i'm back in the day. I'm sure you had like a typist on staff and you had people that did graphics, but it just worked differently.

Greg Spillane: 33:23

Did you say a type, a typist on staff? How old do I look?

Ahmed Reza: 33:30

Yeah, sure you remember time for typewriters, unless I'm like a lot.

Greg Spillane: 33:33

I remember typewriters.

Ahmed Reza: 33:36

I remember taking typing classes. I did too. It was one of the best classes ever took. is it like Increased my output? I still type like a hundred words per minute plus. Yeah, sure That was my advantage in coding. by the way, i could out code most other people. I was thinking I was just, i could just get out really fast.

Greg Spillane: 33:53

Sure, that's no longer an advantage, because you just talked about that's right, yeah, so let me, let's, let's, let's dive in your company. You'll be I. I know you've done a lot of things, the past and really interesting background. I mean, you know, child actor in Bangladesh and I know you had a stint with NASA and you've done some really, really cool stuff. The one thing I just doing a little bit of research on you and I could be wrong, the dates could be wrong, but I it looks like you started the OB right around the end of 2019, which yeah, actually.

Ahmed Reza: 34:26

So I started playing around with the idea at the end of 2018. So I sold my previous company. So AI actually made me a multi-millionaire, sure. So I started my previous company, which was called dental web now, and you wonder, what does dental web now have anything to do with AI? but I had been at a bunch of startups before that and I was trying to figure out what startup do I start on my own? I was living in Florida There isn't really a VC ecosystem there and I was hanging out with a friend of mine who's a dentist and He had a check on his desk for like three thousand bucks and it said yellow pages.

Ahmed Reza: 35:03

So, as a as a geek, i was so, so, very deeply offended that he was giving yellow pages three thousand dollars a year. So I was like dude, are you serious? and he's like no, i'm paying him $3,000 a month. I I was like what, yeah? And then he goes actually I'm spending 6,000 a month on my marketing. I just like write these checks and then I go pray. He was like then I go pray that the patients come in. And here I was in his practice doing the engineering thing where I was trying to build the best practice management solution ever, to show him what a badass programmer I was right, and in reality, this was very much me trying to channel my inner Steve Jobs when I was like, wait, i'm solving the wrong problem, right? But anyways, at this time I just want to prove to him that he was just being. You know that he was just wrong about spending money on yellow pages.

Ahmed Reza: 35:58

So I rolled the call tracking system using asterisk I don't know if you remember asterisk, the PPSS, right So I gave all these guys different phone numbers. They called in and it went to his receptionist and we captured the recording in the middle. So we listened to about a thousand phone calls over three months. 56 of them were from yellow pages, i still remember, right. And he had 10% conversion rate on average, right. So he got like five, six customers for $10,000 almost like $9,000 plus, and I just did customer acquisition costs, like really basic stuff. I was learning online and I sat down with them, showed them the data. You know you don't become a dentist by not being very smart. He looked at it and he was like yep, the data is irrefutable. This is really bad And you will be my marketer going forward. I was so deeply offended. So here I am like AI, you know, i just like space flight systems.

Ahmed Reza: 36:53

At that time, I think the other gig I was doing I was helping build solar sales. I was literally programming space flight systems with C++ And I was like, how dare you? And he was like I'll give you the sixth grant a month. So I went to Upwork, hired somebody to basically look at the customer acquisition costs, you know, cut the marketing that's not working and put money towards what does. It was very, very dumb, simple algorithm, But that's like really basic machine learning, right, Right, Classifying data. And then you're just doing regression, right.

Ahmed Reza: 37:28

And that was the beginning of the last company before you know it. And less than like two years from then it was making, it was doing millions in revenue. So it must be like a luckiest guy on earth to be stumbling onto these amazing like. In retrospect I'm like man, I've been like insanely lucky, right, Because I didn't even name the company It was. It was, I think, Judy there was. I hired Judy and Chris and they both work with me still, right, I was trying to figure out what kind of company could I start that would be worthy of my technical prowess. This is really cheeky. Chris goes, but sir, it looks like you already have the company. You have customers and we have revenues.

Ahmed Reza: 38:13

It was like crap. there was no arguing with that. So my business sense comes from like really good friends who will tell me to pull my head out of my rear, and Judy was like we should. how should we name this thing? It's like we should name it dental, something right, a dental, and you should include the important keywords. So it was dental up now and dental up now, as big feet was actually using machine learning to figure out from phone calls customer acquisition cost And by doing that we helped make your average dentist an extra $400,000 a year, which is massive.

Greg Spillane: 38:48

That is massive.

Ahmed Reza: 38:50

And that I sold that company because, you know, marketing wasn't my thing. It sold it to a dental marketing company that was much older. They wanted it, they wanted tech work again ended up becoming very lucky there with that exit as well. So I was at SRI for a little while trying to figure out what do I really want to build, but it just like was nagging at me that there's this much information locked up in your communications. We were able to predict so many things like if you answered the phone call of a customer, that's a new customer. That's much more valuable. So what we did was we created a pop up dialogue box that would pop up on the receptionist computer and would give them a little bit of information. We did some user research where I would say this is a dental implant patient, a new dental patient, is calling you. So by the time they answered the phone, they would smile and they would like not put them on hold right, and their conversion rates went up. So having the right information at the right time, you know interfacing with the humans, like it doesn't matter how fancy the AI is, how do you deliver that value and deliver that value to business? So I felt like there was a lot more to the uncovered there And my biggest challenge was so now I have all these dentists who are friends, who are some of whom have helped become millionaires.

Ahmed Reza: 40:06

You know very, very good relationships, so I went and talked to them and so then I want to build an AI company and that resounding feedback I got is like dude, we love you, but when you say the AI stuff, you freak us out, right, it's like it's way too sci-fi. So say anything but AI. I was like all right, by the way, the company's name is YIB Inc. Yobibike, just two to the power 80, the largest number of bytes you can have. So it was inspired by buying this domain name, which was YIBio, five letter domain name, which basically, like you know the dot IO, which is a geek reference, yeah, yib. I was like, oh, every geek is going to get this. Nobody got it.

Greg Spillane: 40:48

So nobody got it.

Ahmed Reza: 40:49

Nobody got it. And then Lisa came in and said I'm at, no, you got to call it Like, let's call it just Yobi, it's a lot more brandable, cuter, which you can get. So that's kind of the backstory. So what I wanted to build here is okay, how do I, how do I build something that's truly useful, that brings AI, brings the benefit of AI, without having to sell AI? So what's something that people really don't care about. They don't care about leaving their phone system. Like, nobody will give you a lot of grief about going away from Verizon to AT&T or anything like that. They'll just, they'll just be like oh, whatever, they look at it as a utility.

Ahmed Reza: 41:28

So we built this phone app, desktop app, just like iMessage. It actually took quite a bit of capital and work to put it out there And we integrated into Salesforce, hubspot, twitter. Basically, imagine what does the future of communication look like? How do you and I communicate? You and I have never had a phone call Because we'll text each other, and I realized dentists also are really good at text. Like if I text them in the previous company, what I realized is if you told them to go to a dashboard and look at numbers, they wouldn't, but if I texted them a summary that they missed this much, this many calls and this is how much it cost them, oh my God, they instantly became amazing business people. Why I made that data available. Right, we blew $2,000 of your money for these five phone calls that you missed today.

Ahmed Reza: 42:16

Oh my God, Well you're gonna blow the lid off the top And I thought to myself this is, this is totally buildable. Right, being in the cloud that helps you manage your business better than even you could. Right, sure, and really give a leg up to having, you know, being a busy entrepreneur yourself. Right, you wish you had this, like you know, you wish you could clone yourself, you wish you had this robot that just wouldn't sleep and would do all of this, right, and yeah, so I decided to go crazy and build that.

Ahmed Reza: 42:45

And after I built that, remember talking to a very famous football player who was, like you put your own money into this. He's like, yeah, it's like, well, good luck, buddy. It's like such a different. He said that to you. He said that because it was very ambitious. Right, nobody wants to go into communications. Right, everybody goes. Ah, chat app, no, no, no, we're not into that, right, but I wasn't building a chat app, i was building an AI app. So after a little while, we saw uptake. At first six months, we had like 300 signups And suddenly, one month, we started ranking higher than Google Voice. We got a thousand signups And it started. It started compounding after that. I think we have more than 20,000 businesses signed up. At this point It's.

Greg Spillane: 43:32

Wow, that's a thousand, That's amazing.

Ahmed Reza: 43:34

Organically, we still. Our marketing still sucks because all of the focus has been on product and on how do we get people to adopt the future? right, so you start texting with it, you start connecting all your data sources to it. right? Or AI learns And it does things with it. One of the easiest things it can do is respond on your behalf. So we have a human and loop mechanism where, let's say, you're talking to my synthetic agent, right. What I can then do is take over, or I can train the synths to say no, my EOB, don't do this right In the future. put Greg on the VIP list, tag him with VIP, you know, and put him through immediately to me, or send me a text message or something right, or create a task for me, and as you do that, this is like how we see conversations of the future going, ultimately, longer term future. I think even the phone disappears, right, you just have your synthetic agent, your assistant, in the background that does a lot of these things for you And this agent is It's text-based?

Greg Spillane: 44:40

You're not. These aren't people talking to you, or are they? Is this a conversation where they're actually talking to a voice?

Ahmed Reza: 44:46

conversation Text-based and we have voice as well. Voice we have DSP challenges of all things that we're working through right now. So in this conversation, like it would go off just fine, But if you had a lot of background noise, you know. that's where we want to make sure that the conversation is able to be meaningful, where the synth doesn't get confused.

Greg Spillane: 45:12

There's also one of those things where I would assume that, as cool as it is and I know the text is going to get there I mean you can already start to see it. I could see customers you know dental patients feeling like betrayed. You know, if they found out later that they were talking to a synth, It was an AI, It wasn't a real person. Not via text, Not via text. I feel like that's. We've all kind of gotten very comfortable with that idea. But if I having a conversation and I feel like I'm having a conversation with a real person and I find out later it wasn't a real person, You have to understand that this is like having a conversation with my synthetic agent, and my synthetic agent is a representative of me.

Ahmed Reza: 45:56

I get to see the conversation that you had It's not separate, right And I get to train it and tell it no, this is not what I would say, right? So in the early days when I was training my synthetic agent on how to respond to people one person said so, speaking of philosophy I had to teach it a lot about what I believe in, right? So I made a post about you know, take advantage of being underestimated. That's been a very big factor for me personally. Right, if you come up to me and you're like, ah, random brown guy, i'm going to treat you like crap. It's like great dude, i have no idea who I am, but okay, right, i've used that to my advantage because that's one of the ways I've met some of the best people in my life.

Ahmed Reza: 46:35

It feels like if they had no idea who I was and you know, they underestimated. They assumed I was the wait staff because I happened to have you know, and they still treated me well, i would, i would like be like okay, i want to have a relationship with this person Like this is a good, would make a good business partner in the future to treat people nicely, right? So I made a post around that and then somebody posted was like yes, you know, just like you know, you got to hide until you can give them the fatal blow, which is totally not something like that, which is a very different type of philosophy where than what I believe in, right? And of course, my certificate was like absolutely Right. I was like no, no, no, no, no, that's not what you say.

Ahmed Reza: 47:15

Right, this is the deeper, more nuanced response. And if you don't understand what this means, right, if anybody's talking about vengefulness, right, or that kind of a zero sum mindset, make sure you do not agree with it. Right, i do not believe in a zero sum mindset, right, sera. So If you talk to my synthetic agent and you're abusive to it, you're literally being abusive to me, like it would be like if someone were right. So if you're a dental receptionist and in many dental practices, right, they're overworked. So your synthetic agent is a representation of you as trained on you, like you've trained this, right? If somebody's calling in and is being abusive, yes, it can be very patient, but both parties have to understand like that's still a conversation. It's not one that we're used to yet, but that is a conversation And if you're gonna be abusive to the synthetic version of Greg, maybe Greg doesn't ever wanna talk to you.

Greg Spillane: 48:12

Yeah well, so let's talk a little bit about your personal philosophies And I'm curious on the way you've approached life. Right, you've said it yourself you were an immigrant, came to this country young, you said you were homeless in New York. You end up at an Ivy League school, stents at NASA, successful founder exit. On your second big venture, i know you run an incubator. How have you been able to be so successful?

Ahmed Reza: 48:43

Well, i think the most important thing to start with is defining success. It's something that not a lot of people not a lot of people really think about it, and it's really crazy, right, people just assume success. I'm gonna start with myself rather than talking about other people. Right, for me, success was defined as spinning rims on our Rolls Royce, and that very unfortunate day came in my own life and I was like, oh my God, i feel like an idiot. Right, it's like being on the street. Right, like success is defined. You watched the rap videos and they have all these fancy cars.

Ahmed Reza: 49:19

So I remember at one point in my life having 11 cars and I got this Rolls Royce and I was like why do I feel so miserable? I'm supposed to feel really happy, right. And I then went and talked to Mike Milkin, who's a I'm a Milkin scholar, so I've been extremely fortunate to have, you know, someone like Mike Milkin be a mentor since I was like 18 years old, and I went to him and I said I'm gonna ask you a really weird question. You're the richest guy I know. He's one of the richest men in the world, right? How are you not miserable? Like, i just have like some stuff and I'm already miserable.

Ahmed Reza: 49:55

I miss being on the streets of New York because when I was really poor I had the best of friends. We would share our sandwiches, man, right, we would share our sandwiches. We were very kind. And I remember that love, that camaraderie, right. And once I had all of these material things, it just like looked weird and felt weird And that was missing, that camaraderie, that feeling of just feeling happy, right. The thing that you get at a barbecue I love barbecues right, like when you're hanging out with your buddies at a barbecue, just hanging out like really good feeling that you get. That's really important to happiness and success Finding success, understanding what does success really mean to you. And if you blanket accept that success equals money, you might be in for a rude awakening once you get the money. Once you get there, you might be like, oh shoot, maybe, why does this feel so empty?

Greg Spillane: 50:47

Well, let me and I get your. I agree with you. Let me rephrase it because I don't wanna make it about money. It isn't about money to me. I, the way I look at it, and you know like, really, the theme of this podcast is you set out to do something. You had a goal, whether your goal was starting a successful AI company to go after this certain industry, whether it was to potentially end up at an Ivy League school, whatever it was learn to paint, right Like. Certain people are able to set a goal and they're able to achieve their goals, and there are certain people that just dream. They're just dreamers And I'm not trying to equate it purely to money. I'm more looking to equate it to.

Greg Spillane: 51:34

You've clearly been a guy that has set goals for themselves in life. I know you. I think I read somewhere that you you consider yourself the intelligent forest scum which sort of alludes to this like I'm a feather blowing in the wind and I've just ended up in all these remarkable places. I doubt that's the case with you. I think that it's probably a little bit more purposeful along the way and you've had some, some aspirations of things you've wanted to accomplish in your life. So I'm really just trying to get to the core of what. What, what is you know, if you were gonna talk to another founder or maybe just a young kid and they say, hey, listen, there's things I want to accomplish in my life. You know like you've accomplished a lot in your life, you've seen like you've done things. You seem like you have a well-rounded family, you're happy, you've learned along the way. How do I approach life in a way that allows me to be able to fulfill the goals and dreams I have?

Ahmed Reza: 52:28

That's a really big question, right. So I'm gonna I'm gonna give you my answer for right now What I think, right now, my working theory, is the important component is failure The very, very important, just like I said, the important component of life that puts everything into perspective as death, and the important component of success that puts everything into perspective as failure. So one of the reasons that I was so incredibly motivated was because I lost the opportunity to go to school after I immigrated here and because of financial hardships, i was on the street selling books and then I got an upgrade. That job sucked because it was in the winter. Fingers would freeze up. I was 14 years old, you know, and then I worked at a Dunkin' Donuts on Rizzo Island, in this hospital for people who were all gonna die Very depressing place, generally speaking And I was cleaning up poop and other stuff off the floors and I still distinctly remember I was like man, if I could get out, it's like you know, you go.

Ahmed Reza: 53:32

If I could get out of this, if I could just have another crack at life, i would do it so differently, right, i would do it so differently. So I feel like I got really fortunate I got another crack. I went, got back to, was fortunately able to go back to high school. I finished in three years, got way more credits than was needed because, man, i was not gonna go back to cleaning poop. Right, no matter what, i wasn't gonna go back to cleaning poop. And I think being able to handle those failures is more important, because up until then, you know, i was on TV in Bangladesh, right, i hadn't had a ton of failures.

Ahmed Reza: 54:07

I was like a lot of my mom. You know my mom's very. She's a really great mom, very tough, and she would like have a very, very regimented day for me, from the beginning of the day to the end of the day. You know art, math, this, that right, But I hadn't really experienced a lot of failures.

Ahmed Reza: 54:25

And after I faced the first failure and you know, i went through that whole cycle of oh my God, i don't deserve this, and then going well, you deserve nothing, right, that's the reality. The reality is like no one deserves anything. You have to earn it, and this is reality, is harsh, and you have to then be okay with being able to risk it, right, and the only reason that you would start risking things, at least for me as an entrepreneur, is like then again going back and redefining success, because suddenly I have a lot of material success. But why do I not feel successful? It's because then I had to zoom back and go, okay, on my deathbed.

Ahmed Reza: 55:07

What am I gonna wish? I didn't, you know, didn't do or did do. And I looked back and said I wanna live meaningfully every single day, like success isn't a long-term thing. I don't know about tomorrow, right, but today I want to do everything that I can possibly do to be that person that I want to be. And if the opportunities that come to me are better than what I planned, i'm gonna thank God for it. And you know, try to live up to that occasion or rise to the occasion, and I've been fortunate to have actually had that happen to me several times. You know, my original goal was to be a scientist and to build spaceships and, you know, build Star Trek. Maybe I'll still get to build some of that.

Greg Spillane: 55:48

No, i think you hit upon something that that I think is really important for a lot of people to realize and you know, i talked to a lot of successful people and there's a couple things that you said that are very common or not common, but I think are consistent. It's a through line. One is this idea and especially I talk to a lot of athletes it's this like chip on the shoulder idea that people have, and I've found that a lot of really successful people come from backgrounds that aren't ideal. Right, they've either been told that they weren't able to do something you know.

Greg Spillane: 56:27

In your case, you talk about, you know your race and I'm sure you've faced prejudice throughout your life. You know it sounds like you don't necessarily come from a fluence. You talk about the job at the donut shop. There sounded like there was like a burning fire of like I'm not gonna live my life like this And that was a driving force.

Greg Spillane: 56:48

But then the second thing that you know I think you brought up and has really been a through line through this entire conversation is it's not all about financial success And you can make all the money in the world and you can reach these things that you think you know, make you successful. But if you don't have something deeper or a bigger purpose, or a real understanding of who you wanna be or what you want in your life, it can actually make you feel hollow right, because now you don't even have that goal. When you're poor and empty, you at least feel like money is gonna close that hole. But then when you, you know, have money and you still have that hole, you're like, oh my God, where do I go from here?

Ahmed Reza: 57:28

That's so aptly described as a hole. Right, and you're absolutely right. You're like that's the hole you immediately fill. Right, but ultimately, success is once you fill that hole. Fortunately, in our capitalist society, it's actually easier to fill than most people realize. Right, and once you fill that hole, you can then go.

Ahmed Reza: 57:52

How do I wanna live my life? In my case, i wanna live my life in a way that I'm good with myself, where I don't compromise on certain values, which I know I will regret. You know, i don't wanna build AI. That's going to severely like disrupt humanity in a way that's negative. Like I don't want that to be my contribution to humanity. I wanna build things that are good And I think that's true for most other entrepreneurs Like it's a creative act.

Ahmed Reza: 58:22

Right, you are creating organizations, you're creating value, which is why I think a lot of entrepreneurs are the ones asking what happens to the jobs? right, cause if we were just like ha ha ha, we get all the money, if we did the Mr Burns thing, it would be like high-fiving each other, like yes, we're finally rid of the employee class. That's not true at all. Right, we live for taking care of others. Like that adds an immense amount of value to you, that you're able to create jobs and that people are putting their kids through college because of organizations that you help establish.

Ahmed Reza: 58:56

Well, now that here's this new tech that's going to challenge and disrupt that. That's why it's important for us, as leaders, to look forward and go. What does the next world look like? Well, the next world looks like instead of working on the computer, you work on the synthetic agent, and your reward is just different. You still work Like we didn't stop building cities, dude, right, we build bigger cities. Things change. You know, i could have been an awesome typist, but I write code instead, right, and maybe I won't have to type, maybe I'll just type for fun, but the world changes. It's changed already in our lifetimes, like several times, right, yeah?

Greg Spillane: 59:37

No, i think your example of the Yellow Pages is a good is a simple analogy to where, yes, the internet in many ways has replaced the Yellow Pages, we don't get the Yellow Pages. I mean, yes, there's a yellowpagescom and that type of thing, but who has a book to leverage their house? right? When we were kids, you used to get these big books dropped on your doorstep.

Greg Spillane: 59:59

That business is completely gone, but it doesn't mean that the you know whatever 10,000 employees that used to work at the Yellow Pages are just homeless now. And you know, you just move on, you evolve, you find the next thing And in most cases they're probably doing something that's more fulfilling and you know whatever it might be in their life. So, yeah, i agree with you. It doesn't mean that just because certain roles maybe replaced or automated or, you know, supplemented or whatever it is that you know okay, well, i used to be a copywriter and now AI is going to replace copywriting, so I guess I'm going to be homeless for the rest of my life. It's just, you now take your skill set and you move it somewhere else.

Ahmed Reza: 1:00:38

Right, and humans are incredibly, incredibly flexible And we're really good at being humans, like for me, you know. If you ask me, am I an entrepreneur? I don't know. At the very core, i guess I'm a rebel, if anything right, and I think most entrepreneurs I meet are also just rebels, and it just happens to be that our society values a rebellion and has a way to channel it in a productive way. Right. If we weren't doing this, i don't know, like a thousand years ago, maybe we might be leading rebellions and getting it.

Greg Spillane: 1:01:09

Yeah, it's your work Exactly Well, we'd have to get some of this creative energy out somehow, right?

Ahmed Reza: 1:01:16

Absolutely Like Leonardo da Vinci. Like who wouldn't want to be Leonardo da Vinci? right? He's just lived in a different time And he expressed himself in a different way. So I look forward, honestly. I look forward to a renaissance, right. I look forward to generalists kind of coming back, or because we've over-specialized in ways. Like sometimes it blows my mind how you know somebody who's a neuroscientist doesn't talk to an AI scientist working on neural networks, and when the AI scientist goes, oh, this is based on neurons, and the neuroscientist like rolls their eyes. It's like, hey, why can't you be both? You could be both, right, if you had sufficient time, you could learn a lot more and build cooler things.

Greg Spillane: 1:01:58

Absolutely. So what's next for you, man? Well, i mean, i know you got your company. You couldn't be in a better place at a better time as far as starting a company around AI two years, three years ago. It seems like you're well-positioned, and I think the thing with AI versus the crypto world is I think people looked at crypto and was like I don't get it, like why do I need this? Like this feels like a technology trying to find a problem. And AI I think you give someone five minutes with any AI tool And they're like, oh my god, like I can see how this could be used, right? I mean, i'm sure it's probably pretty easy for you to make some sales when people understand what your tool can do, but where do you go with this? What's the next five years look like for you?

Ahmed Reza: 1:02:47

Oh boy, five years is a really long time, yeah, i know, and this would be like week at a time. At this point, right, i thought this technology wouldn't really be here or wouldn't accelerate this fast. I haven't met a single person, even folks who are leading this stuff, right, that does not say to me yeah, this is going really fast, dude, right, this is going way faster than I thought.

Ahmed Reza: 1:03:09

I thought this is where, in my head, would have predicted we'd be in 2030. So we're like a few years ahead And that's what happens when you have automations right. The first time you experience automation, you're like the internet, like sales making themselves right, that thing going on exponential growth. It's this crazy feeling And that's what I feel is happening in the AI field. So in the next five years, i would definitely expect the world to look very different, so maybe even the world order to look very different. Ideally, i'm betting on humanity. I'm betting on people's humanity, on entrepreneurs' humanity, on leaders' humanity.

Ahmed Reza: 1:03:52

I'm betting on them being deeper thinkers than just let me maximize, for I want to win The zero sum mentality I'm very afraid of, because if you are somebody with a lot of power and you don't have the depth to see, that zero sum might leave you with everything and everybody else with nothing, and at which point you're probably not going to be very happy with yourself also.

Ahmed Reza: 1:04:15

right, those are some negative outcomes that can happen with technology that's this powerful, but ideally, if the leadership of folks who are human understand that their humanity is important here, their kids are important here, right? How better to appeal to a fellow AI researcher than? what world do you want to leave for your son, like for a child that you're holding right there, right? So, yeah, speaking of humanity, right, in the next five years, i think, if the stars align and folks understand how powerful the technology is, move fast with it, we can see really amazing gains, really amazing changes. Yes, there will be disruption, but this is going to require governments and other leaders within our communities to step up to the plate to serve. right, ask not what your country can do for you, right, ask not what your world can do for you, but what can you do for the world at this point right?

Greg Spillane: 1:05:19

Can I interrupt you just for a second on that And I know we're running out of time, but I have had this conversation with my business partner, cto. We do a lot of stuff in AI too, and you get like Sam Altman was in front of Congress, testified what two weeks ago and essentially said regulate us, regulate us, we need to be regulated. So there's this thought that regulations coming down, the Future of Life Institute did the open letter and everyone's going to pause AI development for six months or whatever it might be, which I think is absolutely silly. I was looking at some of your social and I saw you talking about some open source models, like the Obama being one of them. And if you go on Hugging Face or any of these different sites, i mean it's just the amount of development.

Greg Spillane: 1:06:09

It seems like every smart person in the world has turned their attention to figuring out how to build the next AI startup. The question I have is is the cat out of the bag? Is there anything that we can do other than sort of agree to be responsible if there becomes players or bad actors that decide to use this for wrong? How do we prevent this? This isn't just a matter of Microsoft or open AI or Google or anybody else. This technology is now available to the world.

Ahmed Reza: 1:06:45

Yeah, i mean, the cat is out of the bag. It's at this point, it's already out there, and that's why I'm leaning into talking about the things that we haven't traditionally talked about.

Ahmed Reza: 1:06:58

And as leaders talking about it. I shouldn't just be talking about, oh, how do you make more money. I really do need to emphasize to that next entrepreneur that that technology that you have at your fingertips, yes, not only will it make you a billionaire very fast, but if that's all you focus on, you should also hear about my regret from yes, you need enough money to pay your bills, but really success looks different. Sure, get to that point. Get to that point where you make money. Should you make that money scamming grandmothers? If you do that, i haven't seen a single one of those folks be super content with themselves. If you just think to yourselves how the ends justify the means.

Ahmed Reza: 1:07:42

Oftentimes, this is where the victim mentality or the zero sum mentality, where you're angry at the world, that can really hurt us. So ideally, that person who would put a little bit of extra thought and go no, maybe Ahmed's right, maybe these folks that are talking about it is right. I thought about it. That's not how I want to make my money. I'm not going to run a, the largest scam engine in the world. Instead, maybe they change how they do. That. That's one way. Another way is for the rest of the community to agree that I'm not going to invite the person who just became wealthy using these. He's not going to have a seat at the table.

Ahmed Reza: 1:08:24

At the very least, societally, that should not be accepted, and when we detect it, we uniformly put the hammer down against things like that, understanding why that's super dangerous. This isn't a joke. This isn't a game that you just clone other people's voices. Yes, you can do all of these things just because you can go in and seal money from a bank, like morality and all of that stuff. It shouldn't be that you're not robbing a bank because the cops are waiting there. You should know robbing a bank is wrong Even if the cops aren't waiting there. That's really important And I think that's what's really saved us.

Ahmed Reza: 1:09:04

We don't have enough cops in the world to really prevent humanity from descending into anarchy. You need some cops, you need some structure. At the same time, it's also relying on just people's moral compass and that sense of responsibility. And I'm talking about that even more so because in the age of social media, some of that seems to have gotten dulled. Because, with COVID, everybody being indoors, only interacting with other people over a screen, maybe some of that empathy, some of the chemicals that happen in your brain when you're around the table with other people. Maybe some of those have been going missing. So if there's anything that scares me, it's that thing. It's that thing where somebody might optimize for Instagram. God forbid.

Greg Spillane: 1:09:58

Well, i think that's one of the things that's, if we've learned anything about society and I mean I'm going back thousands of years is, i think for the most part, people are moral And people do understand right from wrong, but we know that there's people who don't, and unfortunately, it just takes a small group of people who don't to cause a lot of issues in this world. No, listen, i've enjoyed our conversation a lot. I feel like we could talk for hours and hours, and I mean we've just scratched the surface in probably so many different areas that I would find of an interest to talk about. I mean, not just AI and the future of AI and the ramifications in society and where the opportunities are for entrepreneurs, but in your own background, i know you run an incubator as well and work with a lot of startups, and I'd love to dive into that. So, yeah, maybe we'll set up another time. We'll have you on the show again.

Ahmed Reza: 1:10:53

Absolutely. It was a pleasure meeting you, greg, and thanks so much for having me on the show.

Greg Spillane: 1:10:59

All right, I appreciate it, man.

Ahmed Reza: 1:11:00

All right, take care.