Hi everyone. I have a quick update. If you've ever wondered how to actually build consistency without burning out, I made something specifically for you. It's my brand new show titled The Work Ethic Podcast with Pide Logund. This is not hustle culture. There is no grinding for the sake of grinding. I don't do that. I wouldn't advise anyone to just hustle and grind and lose themselves. No. So, I'm going to be centering sustainable excellence, the kind that works whether you're a founder, a creative, a student, a professional, a parent, whoever you are. So, every week around Thursday or Friday, you'll get specific systems that you can apply immediately, real stories from people doing the work in real life, and a weekly challenge we can all take together. Guess what the best part is? We're going to be doing this as a community. I've actually created a private WhatsApp community where you can share how the challenge went for you, where we can all swap ideas and send feedback to me directly so that the show gets better with you. So, search the work ethic podcast wherever you listen. Subscribe, follow, and join us. I'm going to put some links in the show notes. Thank you.
Thank you for joining me once again on another episode of the big picture podcast. I have a special guest from out in California. So, by way of introduction, I'm talking to a serial entrepreneur. You're involved in a few interesting creations. Let's start with that. Where did your obsession with conversation in tech start? What were you noticing on or around 1995? Am I correct?
Yeah, 1997 actually. Yeah. But yes, I started a company that became one of the largest conversational ad companies in the world. But I started in 1995. Yeah. It was called LivePerson and so yeah so I was building websites and then in 1997 I just I thought up why can't you chat on a website. I was watching people try to sell things and a lot of people traffic coming and going and shopping cart abandonment and I thought you know if you put a human on the website and let them chat probably a lot of good things would happen. So pioneered the web chat and you know built that company and it was interesting because it's such a simple concept but it had such a need and then obviously it's turned into conversational AI and ChatGPT. I mean things have evolved on where chat ended up going and it's like a main interface for AI right now which is quite interesting why that is.
Nice. Nice. So going back to 1995, which was, I believe, 30 years ago. It's funny how time flies. What specific problem did you identify that you were trying to solve or at least bridge a gap for?
Yeah, it's continued the same thread to today, which is that I don't know why, but I always had a vision around humanity and technology coming together. And the idea of a human being being powered through technology, not I was never on the side of human beings being replaced. Like that company's name is LivePerson, you know, and my new company's URI and the other company is called KID, Keep It Dreaming. And I don't know. I somehow I've been put here to try to bridge this gap between the elements of humanity, which is connection, community, creativity, and putting those into technology platforms that enable those get delivered at some massive scale. I mean, at LivePerson, we had like billions of people a year who would chat, message, and use the platform, whether with AIs or other humans. But you know that's the kind of scale I see of human connection.
Right. Right. So over the years there have been so many iterations of human and digital interaction. From the early days of let's even boil it down to the calculator. People going 2 * 2 is 4 using a calculator and thinking huh maybe this is a way for me to offload my cognitive thinking to this little rectangular thing that would enable me to make calculations faster so I can solve equations faster and so on all the way up to AI now that even the early days of AI I want to go from Stanford to Orange County and then I plug it into my Google Maps and it gives me the most efficient route. Those are the early days of the internet that AI is basically saying, well, I'm going to help humans solve a problem. What are some of the biggest misconceptions that people still have from the days of the calculator to the days of self-driving Waymos?
Look, all of tech well, a couple things. One is all of technology usually arrives at the right time at the right place for whatever reason. So just think about like when we went through everything from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution to the information revolution to now AI revolution then you have everything in between from you know car combustible engines to calculators to computers to right they all kind of arrive at the time in which humanity needs to progress itself forward. I think the thing that is always the same thing every time is there's it's a cycle, right? So, think of it as a circle. I'm going to make with my hands here. There's the top of the cycle and there's a bottom. But it's like this. When a new technology arrives, it always is the especially the media looks at the obvious things which are the top of the cycle, which is how can this hurt humanity? How does this replace jobs? How does this supersede humanity's ability to do things? And what usually happens is there's the real meat and is under and it's coming around and eventually this stuff shows up in a way that serves us to move forward, you know, and I think right now there's just this super hyperfocus on how AI can take our jobs, take our lives, take everything from us. And it's taken our identity. It's definitely taking our identity right now because it took our knowledge. Took our knowledge which was publicly available on the internet and it created these models and they're now replicating us kind of. So I just think we have a misunderstanding about the cycle. I saw the internet go from 1995 all the way through and 1995 to 2001 was this oh my god there'll be no more stores and there'll only going to be websites and every store is going to shut down and in the end it became a small portion of commerce. Like today it's like 25% of commerce is online and half of that is Amazon, you know, like most companies and we had them as customers where they're the Home Depot or Citibank, they a small portion of people are doing things digitally and they're still doing things analog because we're human beings.
I'm saying it's shifting. More and more people are doing things digitally and AI is going to accelerate that. But there's still a lot of balance between, you know, everything being taken over and the reality of a balance,
right? And recently I was doing some research on how Ford, the car company, is basically scaling back their electric vehicle production. And the reason they stated for that was, well, EV demand is not exactly what they predicted it to be. And government policy does not actually favor electric vehicle production. So now they're taking an almost $20 billion loss and then moving back to regular gas trucks and hybrid trucks. And I'm thinking, huh, when EV came on board and Elon Musk said, "Well, the future is electric vehicles." Well, two things are defining the future of electric vehicles. Demand. People are actually not buying electric vehicles. And then government policy is saying, well, we're not going to give you tax rebates, just build gas powered cars because people want to drive gas powered cars. So that tells me something about AI as well, saying, huh, this hype may not actually be what people claim it to be. And many people are saying, well, AI might be a bubble that is about to burst sooner than later. So that leads me into a tangential question around conversational AI which you're very familiar with. How did you decide what to shape and what to ignore regarding conversational AI?
Yeah, I mean the two new companies that I started one is U AI the letter U and then R.AI the other one is called KID Keep It Dreaming. They're interconnected philosophically strategically which is I see realistically I see a world in which there's small models and we call it the human life model that is a replica of you and it's something that you can manage your knowledge your data you can share it and then monetize yourself as an AI. The other thing is I see these types of models working on small devices and that's why I made like the KID device. Well, it's for kids now because kids families devices is terrible in its current format, but I want to build something that has demand. The bottom line is there's an alternative reality to what we're seeing playing out right now, which is big tech with big budgets and big models and big infrastructure and big energy needs. And that's a big bubble, you know, because I think in the end there's an alternative which is small models, small devices, you know, no need for all your knowledge going into a big thing. You can retain your knowledge and retain it and monetize it, not give it up to the big models. I think they'll have their place, but I think ultimately there'll be hundreds and hundreds of millions of individual AI models of people. They'll be on a platform. Sometimes they'll work together. Sometimes they'll be separate. And but there's a bunch of alternatives that I think make getting AI to not be an existential threat to humanity real and that's the path I decide to take knowing what I know about the technology that I've built over the last 30 years.
Nice. Nice. Sounds good. So if conversation is the interface what are some responsibilities that you think should come with that in terms of privacy concerns the possibility of manipulation on both the tech end and the people using the technology.
It goes back to what we're doing like I just think that people should own their own knowledge and models. I really feel that look the one thing we found when I started URI it was originally called Eternos and we were replicating people so that before they died they could pass themselves along like truly pass themselves with very high fidelity and high accuracy and that's where the company started it expanded because we have like professionals who came in doctors and lawyers and accountants and writers and they want to build a so they can scale their time with others. But I think this idea and what we found is this concept that we call it zero party data. There's a whole set of data that's never been put on the internet. It's in your brain. You may have written it down privately and you may even have it privately but a lot of times it's just things that are in our head. That is the new world of data to me. And whoever captures that data will get the best AIs. A lot of what on the internet is edited for audiences. It's like a lot of it's garbage. It's on social networks. Some of it's good, some of it's not. But the best AIs have very high fidelity of data sets that are very personal that are deep. So for instance, a famous author may write a book and that book's 200 pages to 300 pages long, but they may have thousands upon thousands of pages of notes about a subject about an idea to create an edited down book, an edited down news article and what's really interesting is all the data that existed that was never edited. And that's what makes AI deep and rich and I think more exciting than what we're seeing today which is a lot of aggregated knowledge around textbooks and things like this. So that's why hallucinations to me are not hallucinations it's just aggregated knowledge that's a little confused if you aggregate people's knowledge like if we had thousands of people call and we all say what do you think about this topic we'd all jump in with different perspectives and in the end you we'd come away say I don't even know what this means.
Wow. So, hearing you describe it this way made me think about how if you host a party at your house and people come around and maybe it's a game night and everybody's talking about different topics and a 12-year-old listening to all the grown-ups talking about, for example, local politics. That 12 year old is going to get a solid enough idea of local politics from that group at your house, but it may not be 100% view of local politics. Unless they go into a public library and decide to read about local politics, maybe it takes them 3 months. But that snapshot at that game night at your house gives them some knowledge, not the whole knowledge of local politics. Huh.
And that's why if you've ever used ChatGPT for like innovation thinking like I want to innovate on an idea or I want you to write a business plan for me that's unique or write my mission statement like I've done like write the mission statement for the company. It waters it down. It's never like the mission of the company. If you give it a mission you say can you just make it a little bit better? It does good at word changing and word massaging but if you just said give me a big vision that I want to go after and that's why what you haven't seen and this is what you haven't seen yet no one said I went to ChatGPT and said I want to build this giant company I don't even know what it is going to be like the entire unique formula to do it that doesn't exist yet I'm building a new company I'm an entrepreneur I'm building a new company around whatever topic you think I should build in to make millions of dollars. We haven't seen it. What you see is that people say, "Oh, I had an idea and then I used it to help me." But humans still are the there's being an entrepreneur is like being a musician. They're the same. Any creative talent or painter. There's something we don't understand. Like God or whoever put out in the world thoughts and ideas and energies and we tap into them and then we synthesize them with our brains and then we're able to then articulate them and get people around them to build them. But the human brain and the connection out here, this is not for a machine to do that we are constructed in a certain way to pick up ideas and feelings and then synthesize them into product, right? And that's just something unique, you know.
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree. So, let's talk about KID company. You're a parent and how does being a parent influence your view of the role of technology at home.
Yeah, I mean it's very interesting. I have three children, a daughter who's nine, a son who's seven, and another son who's four. And pre having children, you know, I had this perspective on technology in the home, which wasn't very deep. When you start to have kids and they start to get their hands on your device, you start to see things that are like beyond the word troubling. I talk about I started KID because I had this thing happen where my middle child, he's like four years old. One night I heard some sound and I go down and there he is scrolling on an iPad at 3:00 in the morning as a four-year-old, you know, he found the iPad somewhere and then just aimlessly scrolling, not knowing even what time it is. And when I looked at that behavior, that is an addict. That is addiction. It's right. He doesn't know why he's doing it. He just his brain tells him he got to do it. He doesn't know. He lost track of time and space. And for a child, it's very dangerous. And as I started to see and as I by the way as I got into as a parent you very few of us like as I started to look at YouTube Kids and YouTube and these things I'm like I went into them and I'm like these are very bad content providers and they're purposely creating content to make our kids junkies and it's funny because they create things that are violent but they do it with a cartoon and they have kids say bad words but they're laughing. So it's like a scene out of A Clockwork Orange if you ever seen this movie where they're like these guys are murderous villains in the future and but they do it in such a funny comical way that it's bizarre and as adult you understand that but as a child you have no idea. You don't know that hitting someone and laughing it's bad you know. So what I found is that these people are influencing our children and giving them value sets that are not our values and we see it every day with our kids in our lives. So I just thought I would like to try to make a change here.
Wow. Wow. So in terms of what's broken I mean we all agree technology aimed for kids as of today December 2025 is broken. What does healthy actually mean in practice?
Yeah. So, if you look at the KID device, like the big part like the center of the device is it's creativity. It's about kids can create images like let's create an image of a unicorn flying over a lake with a moon, you know, so like I can, you know, and so kids can start creating images. And so what we want what we ultimately want is there's the image. I can make stories and so I look at it as two big parts that I found. One is children are so creative and so innovative and yet with AI they can take whatever's in their mind and make it real which is very hard to do. So that's one power. The other power is how do we create a device a piece of technology that brings parent and child together like we have a whole place to do stories. So, bedtime stories, I sit with my kids and we say dad and Lorenzo flying to the moon and then we make up a whole story line and then it comes to life and I'm able to do that with my kids. And so this is kind of the stuff it's I call bring back the bond. Like can technology bring back the bond today? It's basically a disconnected experience. But what I'm trying to get to is can we bring back the bond and tap into a child's creativity? And to me, that's like the yin-yang of an awesome technology experience in the home with the family.
So, why did you decide to go with a dedicated device versus an app on a device?
Yeah, because I go back to my drug example. It's like if you put something in a crack house, the kids are going to go back to the addiction and they do. Everyone who tried to build an app has failed because it's next to a bunch of addictive things and kids automatically will go and do that. The other thing is parents are renting out their phones. Like you hand your kid your phone, then you want it back and it's a fight. And that's even the part that makes you really upset. They steal it, they run away. So here you can safely your child can have this device. It's safe. The AI is safe and they can be in their room, but they own it and but you as a parent can see what's going on. And you have an app on your mobile device, you can see what's going on. So you're ultimately in control of it anyway in the end.
