The Future of AI, Digital Twins & AGI ft. Bill Inman | Coffeez for Closers with Joe Shalaby

0:28So what are you telling your kids to do? Yeah, what a great intro. Thanks for having me here, Joseph. Nice to be here with you. You know, it's still not sufficient, Bill. You're changing the game in the AI space. I'm excited to have this discussion with you. And if you want, just to give people a quick 2 ,000-foot overview of what is it that you do and what does your organization do and how can people benefit from today's show? Well, Joseph, as you know, because you're a media innovator and you've really used the tools that everything that the Internet provides and social media to affect a lot of people's lives.

1:05In a similar way, technology is continuing to move real fast, specifically around AI, and the world is changing more rapidly than ever. So we created Twin Protocol, not only for the legacy use case that you talked about, being able to talk to your even deceased loved ones in some cases. We could talk about that. But also for people to be able to take part in the AI economy, which is going to be trillions of new money and people don't know how to access. So we're really passionate about bringing our technology, AI, avatars, blockchain to the world to give people the opportunity to adapt to this massive change that's coming.

1:41So that's why we created a twin protocol, Joseph. it. And, you know, recently, I've seen several other applications that have come out with being able to talk to your deceased loved ones. I feel like setting up a deceased loved one twin would take a lot of work, especially with like the lack of data that you could provide or feed the avatar. Yeah, that one thing that people don't have a lot of these days is they don't know what data to feed into their AI. It's a new problem. So it's not something that people have dealt with for a long time. But I'll give you an example of one, we call them legacy twins.

2:18These are twins that basically, maybe the person's not around or it's your grandmother. And a gentleman that works with us, his name's Curtis, his dad, Gene, was the first presidential helicopter pilot. Now, Gene passed about seven years ago, and he had a book. He had a book about stories about flying Nixon and flying Carter and flying Ford and flying Kennedy. So we ingested his book and we had some old video footage of him from like seven years ago. And you're now able to tell him, say, tell me a story about Nixon flying in a helicopter. What happened in the White House the day you flew Nixon off the lawn and he was doing the peace signs, which he was that pilot in that picture.

2:57So it's pretty amazing because his son can talk to him again and relive all those stories. So I think it's really important as time goes on that we start to capture all these stories from our grandmother, our grandfather, our families, and put those into an AI so that legacy can live on. And for generations and generations, they can experience all that wisdom. That's so cool. And I'm excited to start to play with that concept as well for those deceased loved ones that have passed on me. I don't know how emotional I'll get listening to their voices again, but it'll be quite an experience. I knew Gene, the gentleman we talked about.

3:33I was pretty emotional just talking to him because he was my best friend's dad. And I hadn't talked with him for a long time and being able to interact with him, you know, kind of got emotional for me. And he's not even a media fan. How similar was the experience? Well, you know, it's obviously AI is limited and emotionally how it can look on camera. It's getting better and better every day. It's a bit scary. But just being able to have a one-to-one interaction with him with questions that I was asking, it's a trip. It's very similar to talking to somebody in real life. It's just going to keep getting better and better.

4:09And in 10 years, you're really going to feel like you're sitting with that person. Whether it be a hologram, a humanoid robot, talking to your car, a lot of things are happening that are going to be different than they've experienced before in the coming years. In some ways, that's exciting because I'll always be able to nag my kids. Like they want that. Yeah. Yeah, you'll be around to, you know, I, you know, for these, I was talking to a lot of family offices recently, and they want to pass wisdom and finances. And you have this great transfer from baby boomers over to younger generations, because a lot of baby boomers are retiring or passing away.

4:46So these family offices are really excited because they want to share the wealth that they feel, but they also want to share their foundation, their mission, their goals, their values. and generations that follow will be able to talk to the great-grandfather who created all the wealth and said, look, I want you to really understand how we did this and how it benefits the family. There's so many use cases. And to impart that wisdom is really priceless, especially for generations to come, because the wisdom is timeless. Now, let me ask you a couple of questions before Twin, you launched and exited multiple ventures.

5:20Was there a turning point where you really felt pulled to build this new vertical of AI Twin? What is it that really drew you to this? Yeah, I've always been drawn. So quick, quick background on me. I've raised about$200 million for startup companies that I've started. And I'm talking idea stage. I'm not talking about series A, series B, later stage companies. And for the most part, they've been in human capital management and human performance. I've done some sports stuff and things like that. But I've always been enthralled with how can we leverage technology to make our lives better, to have a better career, to have more opportunity.

5:58And when I found blockchain in 2015, the first thing I did is I started to put resumes on chain. 70 % of resumes have fake information, but we put them in blockchain so it can't be modified because it lives on different servers and you can't just go in and change it. There's what's called an immutable record. We put resumes on chain and then people could go check to see if a resume had something different than it had yesterday. So you couldn't add five years experience or this vertical. So using blockchain and then naturally coming to AI, which I've been involved with since 2015 and has exploded since ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI in the past couple of years.

6:38it just naturally leads you in this direction because we're creating an intelligence greater than us and people need to understand what it is. A lot of people don't understand what's coming with AI. People need to understand what it is and they need to be able to use it in their own lives. So I'm really passionate about that. People owning their own data and then using it in their lives on a daily basis. You said something that really is thought-provoking. You say a lot of people don't understand what's happening with AI and what's coming with AI. What do you think is coming? If you go to the mission of OpenAI, which is ChatGPT, I think that's a household word now, right?

7:17Everybody knows ChatGPT, OpenAI. It's the fastest app to get 800 million users ever. And their mission is they want to achieve artificial general intelligence. So we're not there yet. Let me explain what it is. We're in an era right now of artificial narrow intelligence. Hey, AI, count this for me, something narrow. Draw this for me. Write this for me. Edit this for me. Make this contract. That's called narrow AI. The next phase of AI, and there's been many scientists and futurists that have talked about this. One, his name is Ray Kurzweil. He wrote the book, The Singularity is Near. And most recently, The Singularity is he talks about artificial general intelligence.

8:01This is when AI is as knowledgeable or smart as one person. So you have an AI equal to one person. It could then be the best engineer. It could be the best marketer. It could even be the best surgeon, obviously using different IoT devices and things. So the mission of OpenAI is artificial general intelligence, creating an intelligence that's as smart as a human. There's one more phase beyond this called ASI, artificial superintelligence. And this is when AI is as smart as the entire world all at once. And just ripping out Nobel Prize winning ideas every second. That could change pure cancer, new forms of fusion, what have you, flying cars, whatever the case may be.

8:42So people don't understand all of this is happening in the next five to 10 years. So with electricity, it gradually grew from the late 1800s till about 1930. 30, only 30 % of U.S. homes had electricity. That was a slow build. This is something we're talking about as fundamental as electricity in the next five years. People don't know how to work it into their life, their business. They don't understand how it's going to impact their jobs. So I'm dedicated to helping them. Kind of sounds scary with artificial super intelligence. I never really heard that word. Artificial general intelligence. I mean, what will AGI and ASI do to employment?

9:26in general, if you have artificial superintelligence and it's solving global problems, what does that do to every different economy? What does that do to - It's the same thing that electricity did. Electricity obviously changed from an agrarian society into the industrial revolution and then beyond. Obviously, electricity is the foundation for this conversation we're having right now. Without it, we couldn't have it. So it gets embedded into the fabric of society. And listen, there's still farmers. Of course, there's vertical farming and there's massive agrarian operations and there's Monsanto.

10:01And then there's people that just grow food in their backyard. So society changed with electricity, but it had time. You know, it had a hundred years to change. We're talking about 10 years now. So everything's compressed. So what it's going to do to jobs is it's going to make a lot of jobs obsolete. It's already doing that to some degree. But it's going to create more millionaires and wealth than the history of humanity has ever seen. So anybody that's watching this, it's not a time to be scared. I get it. I get freaked out by a lot of this stuff too. It's a time to grab it and then get ahead of it and make it like the best time you've ever had, the best economic time for your own personal wealth ever.

10:39It's possible. I mean, yeah, we're going to see publicly traded companies with one or two people. soon, you know, and like running the whole company. They have said that for, you know, definitely we're going to have one person companies that are unicorns or billion dollar companies. But, you know, we're also going to see, Joseph, companies run by AIs. So you could educate an AI on being the best podcaster, best media, most creative, fun, funny, and it could be running a company for you, talking to people about why they need to do it, taking them through the process, creating podcast ideas for you.

11:16And as we talked about actually before the call a little bit, making the content as an AI twin of you. So not only will humans, one-person companies be unicorns, AI-run companies will be around as well. And they will employ humans. So when we have ASI, that will certainly happen because now you have, you know, the smartest being ever times every human being in the world.

11:48I didn't even know those terms. You educated me today. I thought we were just talking about the world of chat GPT. I didn't know they were trying to achieve AGI and ASI. I thought we were next step was augmented reality, but it seems like there's a lot more coming. There's a lot more coming. And I urge you, if you're watching this, just go look at the mission of OpenAI and you'll see it right there front center, artificial general intelligence. So They're taking data from the internet. They basically borrowed the internet. They got really upset at OpenAI when DeepSeek, which was the Chinese company that basically took all their data and started a new model.

12:22It didn't have to train. It was a lot more easier to do less power because OpenAI had done the heavy lifting. So these companies are sucking in all the data of whether it be patents or trademarks, or they've already ingested most of YouTube. And there's a lot of legal battles now saying, wait, that was my data. Who owns that data? And some OpenAI and companies like that are winning saying, well, this is derivative works. This is just like when you were in third grade, you learned something from your third grade teacher. You don't pay Pascal or Newton every time you use physics. And that's what they're saying the fight is for them, that they can leverage data.

12:56So our goal is to give people back their data so they own it. Like Joseph, you've created 50, 100 shows now. That's your data. It's the data of your podcast guests. That's really valuable. There's a knowledge base there that would help people be successful in life if they could just access your twin. And you want to own that. You don't want to give it to OpenAI or Google or Anthropic or any of these companies. You want to own it so that you can share that with people. Although they have it. the profits every time you talk to chat gpt about me it can reference every single word it's ref it can references this specific podcast and everything we said in this podcast so they have my data and that's part of social uh ai indexing now every word you say on social media on a podcast is now indexed on these different uh ai platforms it's on grok on gemini it's on you know they're aggregating all this data and now they're able to create and formulate opinions based on these social media platforms or podcast platforms or blog platforms that are referencing my content.

14:03It's, you know. Did you like that? Do I want that? Do I have a quote? No, I mean, well, listen, it helps. So we are now in a place where AI is the decision maker for humans. And And if we are going to leverage ChatGPT for helping us make decisions, the way we feed the, I don't know if it's an algorithm or AI, I don't know what the proper reference tool is for the data we're feeding the web, which then is aggregated on the AI platforms. But we now have to play by the rules of AI, which is feed the web your data so that humans can make a proper or educated decision off of the indexing that the ai is pulling so here we are i have no choice i gotta play by their rules there's not like there's consent forms here to sign or you know omit you just gotta just you know accept that ai now decides for humans and objectively uh add all of your content on the web knowing that you're gonna it's gonna be indexed and it's going to be used to eventually help your business.

15:16Or that's my theory. Well, that's one way. That's one way. I mean, I firmly believe that there's going to be a cancel culture against all this. Just, hey, take my data, take my brain. Tell me what, tell me when I need to eat pizza at seven at night, AI. You tell me how to live life. I don't think that's the way it should be. Well, I mean, it's there now. it's because if especially if you're looking at ai to help you with like your bmi or your you know to attain fitness goals it's like what should i eat when should there's so many different devices already now telling you eat this don't eat this breathe this time let me know what what you know send me your blood work i'll tell you what to do yeah and a lot of stuff is useful i mean you're a fit guy so i imagine you use some of that stuff and it's useful to know hey i got to 11 000 or 15 ,000 steps today and my heart rate's at 140 and storing that and then getting personal advice, that's helpful and people need that, but that will not last.

16:12Okay. So once we reach, we talked about already, once we reach AGI and all of your data and everybody else's data is in an AGI system, that's going to create a new trillion dollar company that basically tells you what to work and what, what, who's employing you and what to eat. So there's a new way. This is where blockchain comes in. So let's just talk really quickly about blockchain. I'll keep it real simple. Okay. When you, when you put your, this video on StreamYard or YouTube, we've signed a user agreement and Google says, we're storing it on our servers. We're going to give you a, we're going to give you a service where we distribute this to billions of people, hundreds of billions of people, I'm sorry, hundreds of millions of people.

16:51And, and we own it. So So it's on their server and Google can look into every single aspect of your drive, of your docs, of your sheets, of your photos, and they have access to it. They just do. So on blockchain, however, when you store something on blockchain, this is true about Bitcoin, but it's also true about AI training data is what it's called. When you store something on blockchain, it's fragmented and stored across multiple servers and you have to hack or unencrypt that file from all the computer, the consensus of the computers at once. So blockchain is going to allow us to own our own data, put it out on the web, monetize it in ways we want without having to just give it to Google so they can have access to it.

17:34So that's a key technology here is blockchain, not just for crypto, but for storing our thoughts. And we're going to get away, Joseph, from basically posting on all these sites and we're going to have we're going to own it. We're going to have open sites where this is done. I don't know how that's going to happen or when that's going to happen. And I would like to create my own AI twin, take all of my content that I've published, all my blogs, all my podcasts, and have that AI twin then duplicate, you know, these shows or just create content without me even thinking about it based on all of my data that it has.

18:10Done. And that's live now. We already have that technology. We have that at Twin Protocol now. For example, what we'll do, and I think we were happy to do this for you. And by the way, any of your users here who want to go to twinprotocol.com and sign up, we could let you know to give them a free code or something, Joseph, after this, so they know to get started. So the simple thing we could do is we could take just your video from this particular call, and we could put that and ingest that, quote unquote, into your twin. That's the video data. It's yours. You own it. And so it would look just like this call.

18:43It'd have your mannerisms. It'd have your hand up. It'd have you talking, however you talk. Then we'd ingest one or all of your podcasts. And that knowledge base is stored on chain, on blockchain. And people could start asking your twin, photorealistic twin, real-time questions, voice-to-voice about any of that knowledge. So, Joseph, tell me about you. What do you do? I'm having this trouble in life. I'm having this trouble in business. From your knowledge base, you would be able to guide them. And we have that now. That's really cool. Right now, from the knowledge base we're aggregating from general AI, chat GPT is the latest one, my team is able to deduct and reason and create all my content, etc.

19:25But we haven't got to where it's video. We haven't been leveraging my knowledge base for video content specifically or a 24-7 Joseph Shalabi AI avatar that's on standby for a Q &A or anything like that, which is exciting to know that we can do. I'd love to work on that probably immediately after this podcast. And how fast is a launch? Real quick, I mean, it's real simple. So when you go to Twin Protocol, user goes to Twin Protocol, they sign up, they acquire an account, they upload just a simple picture of themselves, record three minutes of audio, put a few documents about themselves, maybe even just their LinkedIn profile, done.

20:09You got a twin that somebody can talk to right away on the, live on the internet. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to get that going and, you know, we'll let people talk to the Joseph Shelby twin on copies for closers.com. They'd love that. Yeah. And it's, I'm always, I love to be the kind of the pilot use case for a lot of our stuff. Now. Right. Do you think some of your, so have all of your past ventures been in the tech space or in, you know, Is this the first AI business that you've launched? I mean, most of my businesses have been in the tech space. For example, I've done some sports things.

20:47I work with the Association of Volleyball Professionals. We started a national youth program to help people get into the sport. My daughter played the sport, so I had an affinity for it. And I was a two-sport college athlete, so I love sports. So that's a bit of a derivative from that. I've been in the fashion industry. My cousin created a company called Foot Pedals, which was like little designer, high-heeled shoe things. A lot of your listeners probably know it. And so I've been in that industry. But much of what I've done has been in tech because it's so empowering and it helps so many people at scale.

21:19And of course, the values of the companies, the multiples you get on companies that you build there can be extreme. There's some crazy valuations now in AI, for example, companies going from 1 trillion to 5 trillion, NVIDIA. So there's a lot of power in that from a business perspective. And I just love it as well. Yeah, I mean, the EBITDA tech company is the most, it's like 10x or 20x any other company. Well, here's one for you. When Microsoft invested in OpenAI, this is at the launch of ChatGPT 3.5, the multiple was 676 revenue, which is off the chart ridiculous, right? So they barely had any revenue and they got a decabillion dollar valuations.

22:02And so there's a lot, and some people say we're in a bubble, a financial bubble, and AI is driving that. It's quite possible, actually, because a lot of these companies have valuations that don't have fundamentals based on how many customers you have and what's your gross revenue, and are you profitable? Amazon did that long 20-year cycle where they weren't profitable at all, but obviously we know they changed the entire e-commerce game and how people buy stuff. But there is a lot of fluff in today's multiples and growing a company, but they're getting ridiculous valuations. Yeah, Amazon just pivoted.

22:35I talked to another tech entrepreneur, and their revenue, believe it or not, you know where it's coming from? Is with ads now. It's more profitable than their products. Yeah, that's probably 100 % margin there. Yeah, it's mostly all margin other than payrolls and such. And they basically, he was explaining to me that, the and this is a big tech entrepreneur um and he's just went he just sold his publicly his ad company um but uh he said that you know the the products are basically just content that's all it is to get people to you know to get companies to advertise on amazon i'm like wow amazon and i'm sure it's not nearly as hyper regulated as like meta and all these other platform.

23:31Well, you know, on Amazon, and we'll probably do a lot of shopping there this, the holiday season this year, you go on Amazon and the sponsored products are right up top. And of course they know what you've viewed before and they have all the metadata on you. So they're able to serve up exactly what you want. And then people buy. And many products, especially on Amazon, they're so commoditized now. Like there's so many similar products and they're so inexpensive that it's hard to differentiate. So you really need to have a brand and this gets more and more important as AI comes around. You know this because you teach personal branding and it is so important for people really in any career to have a personal brand, to stand for something.

24:08Because what employers always want and what companies like Amazon want is they want you to bring a following. They want you to bring users to them too. And then people that can either buy or be a part of what they're doing. So having a brand for advertising is so important because it gets people to spend their disposable income and beyond. As you know, in the US, we spend way beyond and go into debt for consumerism, but that's just how it is here. Now, my argument, and correct me if I'm wrong, is like in the age of AI indexing, personal branding is imperative for any company just to survive, just because of the decision making that AI is making for the consumers.

24:49and those that don't have any personal branding, which is pretty much 97%, 98 % of entrepreneurs, they're going to be left in the dust. And those that focus on branding are going to be the ones that grab all the market share and eat everybody's lunch. So I would venture to say that as we get to this artificial general AGI or ASI, your brand is the only thing that you've got. you know be and and as you continue to build your brand you're going to be able to leverage AGI much more so than those that never started the process so I you're 100 % right Joseph I mean you are dead on with that so I I got the pleasure to go to a dinner with a gentleman named James Tagg he a lot of the patents around touchscreen technology which we have on our phones and on our watches is him.

25:45So you, he, some people call him the inventor of the touchscreen. Uh, he's got a crazy new business, but I just mentioned it to let you know how far out he is. He actually takes stem cells and sends them to the space station, grows them for 10 days at the space station, sends them back to, sends them back to earth. And then they use those as organic computer processors, brain cells as computer processors. This guy's name is James Tagg. So I thought That's crazy. What are you doing now? That's science fiction. But the point was, that's science fiction that's here, by the way. The point was, I'm like, so what are you telling your kids to do?

26:18Because here you are, you're like, you have like a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old. And here you are, foremost front end of the previous tech revolution. And you're literally growing brains as computer processors, which is weird. But that's where he is. He's like, look, and this is your story. I'm telling my kids that they need to be an influencer and they need to be good at sports because those are innately human things. Humans are going to look at other humans and basically go, who are you? And what's your brand? And what do you stand for? So even somebody of that nature who is building tech companies is telling his own kids, you got to be an influencer.

26:54You got to do peak for peak human performance stuff because that's what he believes in. And that blew me away because it shows you how important at least that gentleman says being an influencer is going to be exactly what you're talking about with personal brand wow that just confirms so much of my theory about you know personal branding and i've been telling some of my kids to do that some of my kids are already doing that some of my kids are kind of worried about the unnecessary notoriety that you get in public i was just telling i get it my director here that you know like i just went to coffee today and some guy just stopped me home with my kids you know like getting them breakfast and like hey i follow you like just threw me off you know like like well that's like yeah that's what you wish for huh that's the only part that's what you want that you wish for so yeah you don't you don't like the you know just when you're out with your family just getting stopped it's kind of annoying um but you just have to do it it's part of the game you know it's part of the pro and now you know with with where we're entering with agi and now what you just confirmed in this conversation it's like you must people must be able to acknowledge you and know who you are and know what the services you provide and the products you provide because that's the world that we're in and you know without that knowledge base you know you're you're kind of like you're competing in a very old fashioned way.