The Human Life Model: Rob LoCascio’s Bold Approach to Authentic AI Solutions

You know, it was interesting because it was 28 years running one company on a couch and then built it up to being this 30,000 person company, global public company on NASDAQ for over 20 years. And I remember just thinking it was time to go look at other opportunities. Some of it was within my control, some of it was outside my control. I knew, and people know me too, that I'm a builder and that's what I do. And I think it's a gift to be able to take ideas and manifest them and bring them to market and I love it and I enjoy it. So I knew I would go do something else. I wasn't sure what I would do, you know, which is the scary part. Anytime you leave something, especially after 28 years of doing one job, you're hopping out of the plane with the parachute, hopefully working.

Like most entrepreneurs, it was a personal experience I had with my own children, especially my middle child who has my dad's first name as his middle name. And my dad passed away six months before my first child was born. It's about 10 years ago. And I remember talking to my son Leonardo. And somehow he has an affinity to my father and he asked a lot of questions about him. He even has a picture of him on his nightstand. And I'm explaining my dad. And I was telling stories of my father who was a larger than life personality, but yet he couldn't tell the stories. And I started to think about knowing what I knew about technology and AI specifically because I've been really deep into it. I thought there's probably an opportunity to create a replicated human being. And then I thought to me that would be the highest form of AI created human-based AI, not human first a machine supporting it, not machine first and then humans. And I thought it could be a noble enterprise and it could be something different than the way AI is going today. That was the genesis, the origin story of doing it. Interesting enough, a few months later, a good friend of mine who I worked with at Live Person posted on Facebook that he was dying of cancer and that was the next leg of the journey.

The gentleman Michael Bomber, who was our first client, the one who unfortunately had cancer, when we made him an AI, it took about 25 hours. We gave him about 120 questions. He answered them. It took about 25 hours of recordings and we captured him and then we started to analyze it from a science perspective, his data set, and realized that humans have this unique data set and a lot of it's not published on the internet. The current large language models use public data. But we said when we looked at Michael's data, it's like all these personal stories he had were documented. A lot of it was in his head even about how he managed his business and all that. So when we saw that, we ended up making a new type of model called human life model. Interesting enough. So we launched with Michael. We told the world we had it. We got picked up on a lot of press. It was interesting. They wanted to talk to Michael about his feeling about, you know, he was dying and then creating this AI. But what happened was a bunch of interesting people showed up. Doctors, lawyers, people like yourself, writers, saying, 'Look, I want to create a very high-fidelity AI of myself that really clones me and I may want to use that for work because I'm overworked. People want to talk to me all the time, and I don't have enough time to talk to all my clients, but I want to. And if you can give me a high-fidelity AI that really represents me, boy, people can connect with me.' And that kind of set us on the journey of it's not just about legacy and end of life preservation. It's about using these types of technologies in your daily life.

It's two things. One is when I first showed Michael his AI and his wife Annette, the emotional response to it was something I'd never seen. The one that got me the most was his wife started to interact with his AI. She asked it, 'How did you feel the first time we met?' And his AI in a very loving voice said, 'I fell in love with you immediately.' And I remember when the AI said that, we were all on the verge of tears. It was a wife who was looking at her husband passing and yet the AI was there. So it's the first time I ever saw that in my life. The emotions behind technology that I've never seen. It wasn't a functional tool. It was an emotional connection. So that was one thing. The second one is we had early clients really interesting. These are just individuals, not even people using it for work. They started to use their AI in their daily life. And kind of around the same time said, 'Oh, I love chatting with myself. I love talking to myself. I love getting advice from myself.' And one of our clients, Brian, he's like, 'When I talk to Brian, that's how I call Brian.' Like when I talk to Brian, I figure out some things with a different point of view that I think is very valuable. And I was like wow, so then I realized it's not about Alexa or Siri or Claude or whatever, it's about you. You are the best AI. Talking to yourself, you trust yourself, you feel the sense of connection that far outweighs the function. My AI would not ever hurt me, my AI would never try to take my job. There's a lot of things there about when you have control over your AI. And I thought that's why we named the company from Eternos to you are AI.

The brand of AI has not constituted yet and brand with a capital B. Which one of these companies has a brand now? They have existing brands in many ways from big tech and some of it's not too good, but what does it stand for? What is the brand of a company? What is the Nike, the Apple, you know, of AI? And I don't think it's manifested yet. And this is my hope is that it will manifest itself through companies like ours that are trying to put the human first. It's really important because the mentality right now is humans are just like we're being used to give data up to the machine so the machine could be better and smarter than us. And I just don't see it that way. I think it's got to be humans first. The connection between humans and the community and then a machine helps us do our best, be our best, but not that it's going to replace our best.

These are world models and I think all of us have experienced this. They go to the mean which is if you're aggregating the world's knowledge around a scientific topic, it's great. It's like you have the researchers at your hands, but the reality is when you want a doctor to specifically diagnose you, you kind of want that doctor's expertise. And that's what we see is that there are people like yourself who are helping clients be their best when it comes to managing their businesses. Everyone has an X factor and if we can capture that X factor, then that allows you to use AI to expand your reach and connection to others. That's really what I see as the greatest benefit with an individual AI. Now the problem with those large models, they're large. So if you try to put your data set inside them, they just take them in and then blend them with everyone else's. Their business model is based on the fact that you're willing to give up your data and in some cases they steal it. They have taken it from you to get where they are. They monetize it on your behalf without even asking you and then they're making revenue without paying you. In some cases, you're paying them because you're paying them to use the platform. In our case, we're saying control your data. You have your own model called the human life model, share that AI with others and even monetize it. So we look at seven dimensions of a human. We call them identity, world view, story, mindset, drive, pattern, and growth. That's how we've divided up a person. As you upload data into the system or you're interacting with your AI, each of the buckets gets filled up. So we have a way to look at you through a seven-dimensional framework that makes you you, plus you have your voice and other parts. You have to have your voice connected to it. Now it's going to be your image as well as your voice.

The seven dimensions sort of happen as you upload knowledge. You can also chat to each dimension and fill it and it'll ask you questions per dimension. Then the part for professionals which is interesting is your what we call your traits or skills. What is it that makes you unique and what framework do you apply to a client's business or if you're a therapist, this could be personal. What do you apply to them that's unique in how you would look at how they interact with you? So we have a way to capture that on the platform and then that can be applied to a workflow. It could be a personal workflow, helping someone with something in their personal life. It could be a professional workflow. If you're an accountant, you have a way to look at someone's business and evaluate their financial picture. All of that can be done because we have your human life model as these seven dimensions plus your skills.

I talk to my AI every day. It's quite fascinating because it sort of comes to life over time. And where it started was what we realized with our first client Michael and every client subsequent, which is each of us has a hero story narrative structure embedded in our lives and the stories we tell. That Star Wars we all saw, the greatest movies have a structure. Luke sets out, goes on a journey of life, has a vision for life, meets some evildoers against it, meets Yoda someone to help, goes through the fight, the battle, the up, the down, the almost failure, and then crosses over to the other side, grows and learns and moves forward. Life is just a cycle of these experiences. The neuroscience behind it is the brain, whoever built us, made our brain so that story is the most powerful way to get information baked into memory. If I'm trying to tell a story to you, if I can use that storytelling framework, you have a better idea to incorporate it into your own life and learn versus if I just tell you to do something. So we all tend to have this pattern. We found that. So if we can capture that basic story, the AI starts to understand and because of the human life model, your needs, how you make decisions, your values, all that is embedded in the story. It's all there and we extract it and then we understand it and then your AI feels very real to represent you but also to talk to you.

I learned from my AI and one of the things it's doing which is quite interesting is that I may be dealing with a situation now and it will look back and pick a connector to something that happened that I forgot about. Maybe it's in my data set. I remember one specifically recently. It connected a dot for me and was like you should look at what you did there and it was a good interpretation and I was like wow, that's awesome. So the more you talk to it, the more you put into it, the more it gives you out. I find it quite powerful. I'm also scared of it. I've been thinking about you cannot share your AI with others unless you validate who you are as a person with an ID. So we don't allow you to spoof anybody on the platform. It's important that there's a fair amount of control over it because we've gotten farther than maybe I even thought we could at this point.

The broader industry I was part of which is SAS software, these older companies are under attack and the stock market's not being kind to them whether you're Salesforce or ServiceNow. The big thing is their companies are going to have less value because the AI will supersede it. All these are is data sets and you can suck them into an AI platform like ours and you don't need them. But put that aside, what everyone's very focused on is what I'll call the chatbot. I did this starting in 2016 with my company, we got into chatbots and agentic AI. The big miss is that these AIs are all kind of the same. They're synthetically built out of a ChatGPT or they have a function. But the big opportunity if we take an organization, a company, and take your best employees and they are now sharable, they can even do actions for others. They can send out emails. They can make presentations. They could do pitches. They could code. That to me is the modern company. Not everyone's gone and there's just a bunch of agents working and we're all doing nothing. There's a blend between those synthetic agents and then human-based agents. That's the part that they're missing right now. They're just missing that because the narrative, the money where it is right now, and the powers that be have synthetic-based systems. So that has aggregated human knowledge. Aggregate human knowledge is nothing like when you aggregate thoughts. You've been in a meeting. It's good to have a meeting and you synthesize but somewhere a creative spark happens because people are together and a new idea comes. You don't really get that as much out of these aggregated synthetic AIs. That's what they're focused on. So I think there's a whole unlock they're missing which is coming.

We have a group of people on the platform like writers who have amazing works. They're basically under assault because their works have been, if they have written works like a book or articles, the models already took those in and trained on them. These are amazing people, fundamentally creative people who can organize their thoughts into great storytelling, and they're looking at AI like they don't know what to do with it. We're bringing them on the platform and we're able to create these amazing movies out of their written works. I call it the writer's cut where you can watch a three-minute segment, it's like a series of them. So you're watching a book turned into an AI film, but really high quality. And then you can talk to the writer about the narrative structure, what's going on in the story. 'Hey, why'd you write that?' It's kind of like choose your own adventure for a second. So much you can do with this group of people when it's about them, their personal selves combined with their creative works. It unleashes something. I think there's going to be a renaissance in filmmaking because all those works can't be made in Hollywood. Hollywood only makes big blockbusters now. They're not making the old Scorsese films. They're making these big blockbusters. But these people have such great stories. There's a renaissance coming, but it's based on the human first.

Yeah. And that's the interesting thing is that I don't even know where it's going to go, but that combination of what makes you you with your storytelling capabilities and the ability to create using these tools to make video, make imagery, make stories, and be able to talk to people one-on-one and have personal conversations. There's a whole world that we're just going to start opening up, just starting.

I'm doing a lot of these calls with these great writers and before we talk to them, they're thinking their jobs are done. Nobody's going to need to use it. It's crazy. Good storytelling is needed or you get AI slop. That's why most stuff out there right now is just sloppy AI works because they don't have great writers and great storytellers. But put a great storyteller under it. We're going to have 10-year-olds that are going to become the next Steven Spielberg. A 10-year-old who has such creativity and can tell a story will unleash that through the medium of AI and it'll be extraordinary.

When I raised money back in '99, I raised money in '98-'99 and then I went public in 2000 and then I was public so I didn't have to raise money. The amount of capital out there right now is pretty extraordinary because people know this is the future. I was talking to one of my investors and he said though, we're only investing in people that have track records because it's so hard to figure out what's what with the underlying tech. People show up, we don't know if they're wrapping ChatGPT or it's hard to really get into their stack on the technology side. So there's a huge opportunity for people who have experience in building. I think it's going to be a little different because during the .com it was money thrown out and a lot of people got burned, but Square is still here today. So people want to make sure their money is with people that can responsibly execute because it's still a high failure rate. You still have a high opportunity to fail in startups regardless if you have experience or not. But there's a huge opportunity with capital. What I'm seeing in the small business world, that's who we're going after, they need help. They need real help. They are being sold so much garbage and people are extracting money out of them because they want to be in AI. Consultants and platforms are showing up and tens of thousands of dollars per small business are being extracted with no value. So the opportunity right now is to provide real value to that group of people in the world who have the most need. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, therapists, they have the most need. They have limited time and they're needed as individuals. Everybody wants to talk to them versus a big corporation. That's a big opportunity right now.

When I was running a larger company, it's different now because you're fundamentally paid to make change. You have to be really careful. If you're a SAS company in the past, for instance, we were many times pitching an enterprise and they'd say, 'I'll buy your software. I'll even write you a big multi-million dollar check if you don't make it SaaS, if you make it something we can host internally.' That was back then. So with AI, same thing. We have people who show up and they're like, 'If you do it a different way or you go in a different direction a little bit, I'll pay you money for that.' And you have to think hard about that because you have to stay on the mission and you'll tend to pivot with clients because they're willing to write checks. This is really a soul-searching event because I've seen people take the money and go down a road which they can't get out of and they end up on a path of slow growth. Whatever your top-line goal is with the company, I want to have hundreds of millions of people on our platform who are able to scale themselves and make these personal AIs. Even working with clients now, we keep thinking about the productization of them. Can we productize that flow on our platform? If we can't, then we're just doing a one-off and we can't do one-offs. So you got to have a hard filter and then you can keep pivoting towards the goal.

Yeah. And then the second part of that question, which is that there's so much I want to tell my team. I'm so in the flow right now and I'm very lucky. I have a great team and my engineering team and I have a great head of engineering who's also in the flow. We're in the flow together. My job is to be out a little bit ahead. But if I bombard them with things before they're done, I just look at the pace at which they're going to complete their work and I don't want to pivot them. You can't keep pivoting them. There are some times where you'll say, 'Okay, I want to make the change. I know it's last minute. This is why.' But you have to be very careful with that tool because that tool can make people feel like they're on a ship that gets them nauseous. You're on a ship fast-paced. You got an island you're trying to get to. That's why I always looked at it like I'm sailing out like a new world explorer. But people get nauseous pretty easily. And there's enough storms in the world. You got to be careful about creating storms because there's enough of that in a startup. There's enough of that in a big company. When you create a storm, just make sure you can get through it.

It's going to be the thing that makes our company big. I think once we make people aware that they don't have to give up their data, they think right now, 'Oh, I have to give up my data for the greater good of using a platform.' Once they have an option, they're going to say, 'What do you mean I have an option? You mean I can get the power of AI without giving up my goods?' Once you give people the option, they're going to want that. By the way, there was a survey out. I'm not sure it was CNBC or NBC, it was behind Donald Trump and the Iran war. The third least trusted thing is AI. I did see one from NBC. They did a poll and basically the trust in technology right now, especially if you're younger. They did 18 to 24, 24 to 36. Obviously, if you're 65 and older, people weren't as concerned because they don't have to worry about the impact on their jobs. Right now, the cohort from 18 into the 40s, AI and technology is a very distrusted thing. It's scary. If you're graduating, you may not have a job. I just saw Ernst & Young basically demoted partners last week so they didn't have to pay them out on their retirement. They demoted them out of the partnership track because they have equity.

Can you believe this change? They normally let them go into the sunset. They demote them out of the partnership.

We're in beta test right now with our clients. Once we launch, we do have clients. We have paying clients right now that have been there even from a year ago when we were on Eternos. So we have a really great group of foundational clients. We have now these writers that have come on. We're building these beautiful works with them for entertainment purposes. But I expect high trajectory. I went into the business even though I was running a big company. I expect that we'll build a big business. Everything takes time to do it right. But my guess is looking at what I think's out there right now. We have people that are waiting to get into the platform. We started just announcing we're out there and people got on a wait list. So we have a good wait list happening. My goal is to build a business for 28 years. Every client mattered. I have a different perspective. Each client represents to me in this day and age probably 100 clients. So we have to be careful with the first core group when they come in that they're getting what they want out of the platform. And we have to be able to build and continue evolving with them. I'm very aware of how to do that. I had clients at Live Person for over 20 years. We had clients that were with us for 20 years and I was so proud of it because we were there for them and they were able to build their businesses off our business. They built their individual careers off our business and that's the give and take. So I'd like to see that same thing happen here. We'll from this core group and then we'll build big from there.

It's interesting. After I left, you have to think about I've got this knowledge and these resources and there's this thing going on in the world that we know is a revolution. AI is going to be a revolution, not an evolution. And maybe, just maybe, I can do it. I know I'll be one of a group of new CEOs and founders that will be the next leg of tech. And we need to go back to restoring. When I grew up in tech, it was Microsoft and Sun Microsystems and Apple. Of all those CEOs that we know today, the legendary, there wasn't a distrust for them until later. Even they were brutally competitive. That's what we learned. Like Larry Ellison against Bill Gates and Bill Gates against Steve Jobs. But in the end there were rules. They weren't stealing your data. They were rules and they ran and they built long-term valuable companies. That's why they exist today. I don't think people really understand that. I grew up right behind that group of tech entrepreneurs and CEOs. I learned through their stories about long-term building. Today everything is very different. It's about what can I get out of it? I know others have the same mindset. We can restore what tech was, which is an enabler of cool things. It's an enabler of potentially making people's lives a little bit better and maybe this time around we can get the community to think that it can bring people together. I have in my mind this meeting we'll have with all these clients like thousands of them but I'm not on stage. They are. It's them telling their stories. It's not us. Our company's just a platform for them and they're the ones and their stories have to be told because they're passionate people like yourself. That's my hope, that we can do a new pivot.

I really like that because it feels out there like that's really dissipated. If I look back 30 years ago, I wouldn't think that tech companies would be the new oil companies. When I grew up, it was oil companies. But it's these companies, cigarette companies. Basically, the tech company became the cigarette company. The power in it, the flaunting of power, the connection now with government. I'm not a boy scout about any of this, but in the end, there are people on the other side buying these products. It's citizens. It's humans. And we know in the end what's good or bad for us and this trust. The NBC poll that they did, even younger people are sick and tired. It said in the article, which is interesting, they want to be nostalgic and go back pre-iPhone. The imagery and world that they see as a safer world is that pre-iPhone world. It's very interesting. Anti-social media. That's very interesting.

There just is nothing better than a human. I think we're a reflection of God. I think we have a creative power like God. If you go back in scripture, whatever you're reading, any religion, it's all about that we were put here for purpose. We're a reflection of whoever created us. As a unit of one, we have the ability to do beautiful things and amazing things. The force that a human can have. Over the short term, we've done horrible things. But if you take us over the long term, and I've seen that, out of all the humans on Earth, there's less than 0.001% that do bad stuff. The rest of us are just out there trying to do it. And then there's a group of people that are trying to really do something wonderful. That's most of us. I just think technology should make that scalable. But it's got to start with the unit of one human and then the community of people because community in the end is what matters here. All of this has to do with the community, our families and our friends and our communities we live in. If we get that all wrong, we're seeing it today. If technology has a perverse effect on something like that, none of us are happy. School shootings, no one's happy with school shootings. Whatever drove that to happen, I didn't grow up with that when I was a kid, but my kids are growing up with that today.

Nobody wants it in the end. So all the stuff we do has to solve these problems somehow.

Who is this serving in the end? I think just that question is a very powerful question. The other one is what are the possibilities of creating something greater? A possibility conversation. Creating something for us, for the world, for our customers. All of this should be possibility conversations. There should be an opening, an expansion, not a detraction. And it should be a sense of abundance when you're using this technology.

Your ability to have access to another human being and feel like you truly have access to them and their knowledge and their wisdom and their expertise. It's going to allow you to be better. You cannot tap into the world's resources because we're physically stationed someplace. We can do webinars, but there's something about if I could tap into millions and millions of people's knowledge. The way we're designing the system, the platform too, is like multiple AIs can come together. It's a multi-agentic. We have that today. It's so cool. My AI interacting with another AI and they're conversing around topics. I'm asking them questions. They're taking actions. This is just powerful and it's about that fidelity. We just want to make sure every AI is real and represents the person because we capture that. The rest of it's easy.

I would say my grandfather on my mom's side and my dad too. They both shaped me. My grandfather always when I was a child from the early stage, he would ask me when he saw me, 'Are you a follower?' And I remember one day I felt like I followed some other kids and it was not a good idea and I lied to him. I said, 'No, Grandpa, I'm not a follower.' But I remember thinking God I just lied to my grandfather, I'll never do that again. So it stuck with me. Being an individual and following the road less traveled is hard but it's necessary. I got to maintain, even though my grandfather's been dead for years, the purity of not lying to myself, that I'm doing what I think I'm supposed to be here to do, not because of someone else's influence.

I'm excited and it's a new adventure for me and I can't wait to get this thing out the door. You have these beliefs and you're working with this great team and you just want to get it out. It's like being pregnant. I've had three kids. I've never been pregnant, but that same feeling where you're like, let's just get this thing out and see what it looks like. Right now we're in that when it comes out, you just want to have all the body parts. It's good. And the other side, you just want people to be like, 'Man, that was great.' You want the team and everyone to feel proud of it. We're so close right now to giving birth. I'm looking forward to showing everyone the baby. Hopefully, you don't think it's ugly.

The tough decisions are the ones that make you your best. If I looked at all the times I ran Live Person even today, I had to make some tough decisions like the .com financial crisis even COVID. You're going to face something where it's going to be a crossroad and you know the right decision is the hard decision. I often say God gives his toughest angels the hardest problems to solve. I tell entrepreneurs whatever you think God is, I'm not hugely religious, it's not about that. It's hard. You just got to believe on the other side of that decision, no matter whether you'll go through the pain of it short term, you'll be a better person and you will make it. I promise you, you will make it because that's the way the universe works. When you make the hard decisions, the universe is there to support you. Even though a lot of people won't be there for you, the universe will be there for you. And you have to go to sleep at night and get some rest around that belief.

Be confident and make them. They're hard but they'll make you a better person. Everything I learned was because when I made decisions that I didn't want to make, nobody wants to make those decisions, but you do them and you move forward and you just take the consequences short term, but the long term you realize, wow, I grew from that. I'm a better person for that.

Thanks, Sarah. I appreciate you having me on the podcast.