Quantum, AI & Hypersonics

What's mind-blowing about quantum, the race is about the one which says that everybody who steals encrypted piles of data with quantum, they can do a brute force decrypting that, and then all stolen information now becomes visible. When I joined the board of Lockheed Martin, the stakes that you play in that kind of organization are as high as you can get. It's required me to learn things like hypersonics. Best way to describe it is it's trying to shoot shoot a bullet with a bullet, that changes the game. This time I put AI, synthetic biology, quantum, space. Like, has there ever been a better time to be involved in it?

Welcome to The Deal Table. Today's guest is John Donovan, former CEO of AT&T Communications, where he led the company's innovation strategy for over 10 years. Drove the global rollout of 5G, and championed the shift to software-defined networking and open collaboration.

Now, as founder of QDIT, John is turning his focus to long-term investments in technology-enabled businesses with interests ranging from AI and quantum computing to hypersonics and high-performance systems.

Enjoy this episode. So you can see I have a lot more notes than usual because John is involved in so many things. That are topical that I was like, oh my God, and things I didn't even know what they were. So, you know, it's like, okay, what is, what are high, and I understand what the term hypersonic means, but let me go look at what this, what's going on there. So lots of stuff I'm going to have to figure out. I won't possibly be able to get into each of these things, but.

You.

Lead an interesting life. So you're touching a lot of things of interest.

Yeah, interest drives most of what I do. Unlike many people, I insert myself into things I think are interesting. You have that choice. Some people are on the receiving end. I'm always on the proactive side of things. If I read something, then I call the author up and go visit them. Nice.

Yeah, just so— Give me an example of that recently.

I'll give you two examples. One is I went over and visited Ben Lamb at Colossal that's doing the de-extinction and got a complete multi-hour lab tour to understand everything that they're doing. Wow. And I got 6 t-shirts for it as well.

So we had Victor Vescovo on last month and he's an investor there and he talked about the commercialization, you know, 'cause he said, I'm an investor, I wanna make money, but I also like to invest in things that sort of expand the human experience. And so we talked about Colossal a little bit.

Yeah. But I also, I do the same thing in areas like quantum. You know, a few years back I told a friend to find it. Who's the most capable? This is a dangerous thing to say because scientists have this weird thing of they condemn one another until somebody dies, and then when they die, they pretend that they're revered. But while you're alive, it's knives out. And yeah, so I've been getting my quantum expertise from what I consider the greatest quantum expert who ever walked the planet. And it's just fascinating. So I always, you know, I do a lot of investing and a lot of work on what I call the leading edge, but I'm always like spending my cycles to learn the bleeding edge. And as an investor, the bleeding edge is mostly about blood. But so that's not like where the investment is. It's just, you know, I think technology is a window problem. It says, okay, it's not that tough to pick your technology, but it's really tough to pick your timing. Because if you're too early, you're dead by no revenue and poor return on capital. If you're late, then you're dead, but the market got you, right? And so you really have to pick the window. Picking the next technology is not as difficult as people make it out to be. Picking the right time is.

Yeah, we had our first guest this morning was Eric Bennett. I don't know if you know Eric or not. Brain— Brain— Brain Supertrust. Brain Superfund, Brain Capital Partners. He founded Tolleson Wealth Management, but he's been doing— he's led organizations that are focused on research around mental health and neurological issues. And he's an early-stage investor there. So we had a very interesting conversation about timing.

We can talk about all that stuff. Yeah, I'm not an expert in everything, but I have an opinion on everything.

One thing that I'd like to touch on before we move on too far is is like the— just the— if you like or if you're interested in something, you just cold call the person. And I think that's— as the chairman.

And CEO of AT&T, if we don't.

Call that person— that's true.

I wasn't the chairman, by the way. I was CEO of the communications group. Got it.

Okay.

But here the thing is that I think that's a limiting mental belief, though, because there's plenty of people that I've cold outreach on LinkedIn and I'm at like a, I don't know, 1 in 3 hit rate.

Yeah.

And I think too many people either won't do it because there's no way that guy's going to respond.

Because they have my mindset.

That's exactly my point. But I think that's a unique— or just something that should be highlighted, that it doesn't matter where you are, just outreach. If you're interested, send an email, send a message. I just think that is a powerful thing that people overlook.

Yeah, I think most people are kind people. I don't know anybody who dislikes their college friends, even though a lot of their college friends, high school friends leave something to be desired. You just say, well, oh, well, that's just them. That's just Peter. And you tolerate it and you meet them now and you say, how can anybody hang out with them? And I've got news for you. Their high school buddies think they're just fine. They just say, well, that's just her. That's just him. So I think most people are approachable. But I've done that with authors on politics and that I completely disagree with. I like to wallow in things that I don't agree with because once you get over the hurdle of what you don't know, then you have to get over the hurdle of what you don't like, and then you kind of get over that and then you start to see that. So I'm now reading a lot of the great Cambridge philosophers because sort of like the hardcore Atheism was there. Best thing to solidify faith is to go live with the atheists and see if it makes any sense. And it doesn't to me. So it's like, that's part of faith journey for me. So I do the same thing in sciences. And the way I usually direct, offer it as advice, which is always the best way to see what someone's really opinion is. You know, what do you do with your kids? You know, read something that's gonna make you a better person. Read something with which you know nothing about, and read something within your field that is sort of at the edge of your field and try to keep juggling 3 books. One of 'em's gonna be easy reading because, you know, self-help books are generally not designed for you to, you know, carry a pencil, paper, and a calculator. But, you know, biology, for instance, may have insights into networking. And you'd say, holy smokes, never really thought of it that way before. So, you know, I think that And part of it, the journey is to get that third category of things you really know nothing about and then extend that into— there's a whole bunch of people who know things you don't, like go hang with them. And that's sort of, I think, the framework I use all the time for just staying out.

So basically you took that liberal arts education and then just extended it your whole life.

I'm an electrical engineer. I'm just a recovering engineer. I went through the 12-step program.

Right. I'm just— I'm not saying specifically you went to liberal arts. I'm just saying the liberal arts mindset of of being touching a lot of.

Different— I think of it this way, like, that for me, I grew up in an era where you had this fine layer cake. And the first layer when you graduate college is you learn the formulas and principles and you learn a trade. Like, it would apply to everything from carpentry to engineering. And then you go out and you get on-the-job experience. And then for a certain group of people, that then becomes the third layer of the cake, which is you have leadership skills, manager, leader. And that now is not the way the world works. The world needs every leader to be extending their competencies. So you have to operate across all three layers. You used to be able to retire from a layer. And move to the next layer. And that idea that you manage things by having things brought to you to discern and pick and choose, the old adage was, you know, don't bring me a problem, bring me the answer to the problem and make sure I'm okay with it. That gave way a few years back to the pace of change. So the pace of change says you have to constantly revisit your competencies. And so much so, like, It shades a lot of things I do. I look at someone's resume and I tell them, look, no one cares about experience or education until they know what competencies you have. Put that at the top. The machine's going to probably read this thing. And if the machine doesn't view you're competent, then you don't get to go to the next saying, what's my experience? So you really have to display competency. And so we, in some respects, it's just how the world has evolved in every dimension. Building materials have gotten better over time. Building methods have gotten better over time. Car reliability has gotten better, you know, all that stuff. And so I don't think a lot of people people spend a lot of time into thinking about what does that evolution mean for leadership and decision-making, for spirituality, faith. And so some of those fields that were traditionally liberal arts need that challenge, I think, of progress. Because at the end of the day, it's creativity, effort, and just correcting your errors, which makes us a great society. We're driven by people who do trial and error and self-correct as we are people who think their way into the next thing, and then we have to correct ourselves. So I kid scientist friends to say, none of you ever want to criticize Isaac Newton, but Einstein determined that Isaac Newton was wrong. And then modern scientists are proving that a lot of what Einstein did was wrong. They don't want to say it's wrong because it's just a building block, right? But we run around in business and use that term all the time about wrong. We don't think in terms of building blocks. But I think leadership to any dimension of business deal making, we move ahead, we have ideas, we progress the ideas, we kill the bad ones. That's how most things work. And And I just think that that's a great metaphor for how to live your own life and how you educate yourself. 'Cause when you graduate college, we think, oh, we got into this, I got into this great school, I picked the right area. And then you pick your vocation. I always thought of it like a race. Everybody who's behind me is gonna stay behind me if I keep working harder. So I just thought that education was, lifetime thing without someone telling me education is a lifetime thing. I looked at it as this sprint that went on for decades. And so I was constantly trying to learn. And I think it's, you know, it's sort of served me well. People would view me as broad right now, and I tell them I'm not broad. I'm just, you know, working my tail off.

What's interesting is I just started an executive education course last week with SMU and their leadership program. And day one was all these lessons on leadership and different things. And the epiphany I had was, I know all this stuff, but I don't practice it. And it's just the epiphany I had was like, hey, in order to be a better leader, you have to practice the stuff that you already know. So I think there's some synergies there in terms of continually consuming and growing and reading. And I'm sure there is a lot of opportunities where you're learning new material, but there's probably just Like you said, it's just building, maybe a little micro-building here and there.

But what if I said to you, you can pick whatever book you like with under two conditions. One is you have to be able for the rest of your life, remember the title and the author. And the second thing is you had to synthesize what you learned in that book into your life for a period of, let's say, 6 weeks until you had a habit. And you're not allowed to read a book unless you accomplish those things. Figure out who the author is, are they an expert in the subject, and am I willing to go make change in my life? If you did that, you'd probably discern and read a better set of books and stop taking everybody's recommendation. But more importantly, you wouldn't read, you would study. And that's how I think about how I approach it. I don't want to read a subject, I want to study it. And I want to get 2 or 3 books, I want to get a couple of opinions. And so then I say to myself, that's a lot of effort. Should I start that or should I not start it? And I've sort of held myself to that standard of I wanna synthesize it, I wanna repeat it, I wanna talk about it, I wanna integrate it into my life. And then the sandcastle, which was me 20 years ago, got washed over so many times that, you know, I love this phrase that you have no, obligation to be who you were yesterday. Like, you can wake up fresh every day. And that drive is, I think, is what keeps me going.

I think that that right there is a huge lesson for me because, like, I'm such a passive— like, you know, I do audiobooks in the car on my commutes and whatnot, and I retain maybe like 1/20th of what's being said on that audiobook. And to your point, it's like, what's, what's the point? Why are you even doing that if if you're not getting anything out of it?

So I'm going to tell you, I'm going to, I'm going to reinforce your, your reading habit by saying that it's sort of like saying, you know, I can listen to things and not hear them. I would challenge you by saying if you keep listening to books, eventually you're going to pick up things you didn't realize and you're going to become very good because the, the 1% becomes 5%, the 5% becomes 10%. But I think the foundation is the same across both those points, and that is select your books and select your authors with great care. And if the first thing you start with is, I wanna learn that, it's probably not gonna pass through. It does pass through in one ear and out the other, as they say, if you're taking someone else's recommendation, you have to read this book. It moved them, it might not move you. So I think that this framework that I use about, like, take an area of exploration, take an area that's going to matter in your life business-wise, and take an area that you want to improve yourself as a person unrelated to business or knowledge. Think of it like spirit and knowledge and then something that's out there a little bit. I think that simple thing, like, I would challenge you to say, take that framework and go see if it doesn't make a difference, because there's no such thing ever as a bad book. You know, like, as long as words are going in, you're processing.

Yeah, because even as you're speaking, I'm like, well, maybe I'm being too hard on myself on my audiobook journey, because like, even though I— even if I am only retaining 1/20th, that's still more than most people that never even picked up that book. And even on this podcast, I'm able to reference books all the time And at least perception-wise, people that watch or some of our friends like, man, you always come off as— because it's a way to like ingratiate yourself with somebody else. Like, like with Lade, we just talked about a book that I highly enjoyed and he lit up because he also enjoyed that book.

Yeah. So books are joy. Like if you pick them well, it's a source of joy. So yeah. And I look at books kind of the way, same way I look at stress. Someone says, oh, well, you know, how do you handle stress so well? You tell them you get used to it, but it's sort of going out in the rain. You go out in the rain and you say, well, just because you're used to being in the rain doesn't mean you're not getting wet. Just because you're moving along the book journey, it doesn't mean you're not picking it up. It just gets to be like a subtle thing. And I'm just such a I'm so fascinated by books and other people's learning that I don't even think of them as books. I think about when you listen to a book, I think of it, I love books where the author reads it himself. If you get someone, you can get 8 hours of their time or 10 hours of their time. And I think what a gift that is that they went to all that trouble to give me a 10-hour lesson on something. It's extraordinary. You pick the right people, the right books.

I share your passion for reading, although I suspect you're probably a bit more voracious than I am based on your description. But what you're describing is the importance of discernment in what you choose to read. And I would guess that would extend to what you watch on television and what you listen to. And we kind of live in an age where it's very difficult, particularly I have two daughters who are in their 30s. Their information comes from the internet for the most part, and not from traditional like news media and other things, although even those have been challenged, right? So do you worry about the state of information and how we're absorbing it? I never— and not discerning?

Yeah, I don't worry about— I worry most about things being untrue. And I think the world is a lot grayer than we let on. I'm probably one of the folks who laughs the most at the idea that there's quote unquote science and science is winning, you know, The Age of Enlightenment was the beginning of everything. I'm not that person because I think scientists can be pretty full of crap too. And so I think there's a lot of subtleties to learning that requires human interaction. And so I'm an eternal optimist. I think that the internet and encapsulating things into shorter and shorter versions have caused people to become better and better. There's no such thing as an uninformed consumer nowadays. You can just go online, look at the stars, and, you know, go to a shopping app and all those things. And so the playing field is getting leveler and leveler. And if one of the costs of that is we have to put more energy into finding sourcing, I'm probably gonna surprise you by saying I often don't read an article until I look the author of the article up. And how many times I'm surprised by someone being 24 years old, 2 years out of undergrad, and using words like unprecedented, unparalleled, extraordinary, which are tools of the trade, but they carry with it the idea that there's experience there that's just unfounded. So oftentimes I'll just not read the article because the person's under or unqualified to comment on the subject. And I think doing a day's worth of research doesn't make you an expert or put you in a position that your opinion should be something that should be shaping other people's thinking. So my dad always had this lesson when I was young. He said, you shouldn't read the op-eds, you should write the op-eds. You should have opinions on things that you formed yourself. And the hardest thing to do is to get an opinion and a valid opinion and hold it and hold it over time. And the opinion has become sort of tradecraft of every person running around. And I think that's a downside, but I don't think knowledge should ever be curtailed. So if that's the way we're going to get it, that's the way we're going to get it. I spent a lot of time this summer trying to reconstruct my own life, saying I am looking at the world too much the way I want to see it instead of the way it is. And so I came back and said, stop looking for people that are what you would aspire to see in people. See the people that are there. Look at the systems that are in place and don't compare them to systems you want to see or the ones you grew up with. Just look at the ones that are there. And I think that's really opened my eyes into being much more of a first principle thinker, to do research on subjects, to look at maybe short forms But it also leads me to use a lot more AI than I do search, because when I search something, the top of the page is driven economically by who put ad placements in and all that sort of stuff. And that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to go in and say, no, actually, these are the facts on that situation. We can debate what facts mean, but I don't think we should be debating what raw facts are.

Well, to me, that's one of the biggest ironies of 2025 or in the 2020s post-internet is it's never been easier to fact-check to see if something is real or not, but it's also never been easier just to be completely full of crap because most people are not going to validate it. They're not going to research. They're just going to take it at face value.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that, you know, I love that old Toyota commercial that the young woman says, I read an article, I read part of it, I read the title of an article, something to that effect. It is really clever. And I think it kind of captures things. We're just looking for things in shorter forms. You know, we're all trying to write fortune cookies instead of, you know, have conversations. But that's just the way the world is right now. We're just, you know, does that bother you?

I mean, it was so polarized, and we're all looking for— we all have confirmation bias. We're all looking for things that reinforce what we believe. And, and now the world's kind of constructed to only show us the things that match up. You are making a considered effort to find other things. You said you actually like to interact with people who have a difference of opinion. I would consider you to be unusual in that regard.

Well, I'm unusual in most regards. That's not a compliment. No, I think what's a little bit tricky is when things are fed to you. I don't think that you get the same satisfaction as when you go discover something for yourself. And I think that we've moved from our toes as thinkers to our heels as thinkers. And I think we actually move from standing to sitting. And then I think we lean back and then we just expect things to be presented to us. And so, yeah, there's a certain amount of time where you should really spend time around like-minded people because it's no work, but I don't think it's going to make you better. So I mentioned earlier on, like, I read books that are written about subjects from people I don't agree with prima facie, and, um, and I discover a lot of times that I still think that, like, I'm right about a subject, but I at least gain a little bit of an understanding about how people think that draw different conclusions. I think the polarization is, I think, convenient scorekeeping that we've established. I don't think we are more polarized than we were in my neighborhood growing up. We just had different names for it, right? We were, you know, I grew up in a pretty ethnically uniform group where I went away to college and then I graduated college and I moved to Minneapolis and I was wondering where all the Irish Catholic people were and why there weren't churches on every corner. But that's just part of growing up. So I think the world has great mechanisms to correct itself. As long as there are clear-eyed people that are, you know, helping society move forward. And I think that maybe it's a combination of the time and the leadership, but we're gonna emerge with having a leader that's gonna go make the changes that we need. Whether you're looking for someone who looks like Barack Obama, whether you look for somebody who looks like Ronald Reagan Or if you look at President Trump, I just think that we elect people because we want the change that's next. And if it weren't that person, it would be someone who looked exactly like that person, or as much like that person as you can imagine. Because I think these become situational leaders who, if the time was different, would not be heard from. But the time calls them. They've been spending a lifetime preparing for a calling that might or might not ever come. And then you just sort of slot that person in. But I think that we as a society, we own what we elect, we own what we, we have. And when I fill out the form, you probably noticed I don't have a hashtag and like handles and all that stuff. I don't spend time there, right? To me, that's not a real place.

I don't either. I'm not on any of the social media platforms. It was noisy and I found it that my time spent on it was not rewarding. And so I cut that out.

Yeah.

You talked about societal changes and you talked about the bleeding edge and that's where you are. I want to learn more about your firm. Is it, is it Cudith?

Yeah. Yeah.

The focus areas based on my research, number one is artificial intelligence.

Yeah.

We touched on a little bit. And that's also an area that can be an enormous positive tool, but also comes with challenges, including misinformation and deepfakes and other things. How are you investing in AI and what would you like to see come from it?

Yeah, I'll start with the name that everybody knows what a qubit is, or I shouldn't say everybody does, but a lot of people know what a qubit is in quantum physics, that when you flip the B to a D, it actually means a family of qubits. And so my kids are engineers and doing startups, and so it's kind of a clever play on words.

Um, uh, I had to look it.

Up, but I like it. Yeah, yeah. So we're a family of qubits, right? Two of my three kids are engineers and they're all working in the startup world. Um, the AI is just, you know, the, the new thing. So I spent a lot of time in the early days of cloud and mobile, and I have always had the great pleasure of being involved in whatever the latest technology is. And I've just sort of always surrounded myself with people in that space. And so each one feels more profound than the early one. You know, when you get the internet, then you get markup language and everything looks easy to click and you thought you'd reached nirvana until networks were dial-up and slow. And then you got fast networks and then all of a sudden all of a sudden that seemed like the end. And so we're just in a series of ends where, you know, AI was a breakthrough that took 50 years, you know. And so going back to this earlier thing, just when you have collectives of people working on problems and then they break through, then you go to sort of the next level. And so I look at this time, I put AI synthetic biology, quantum, space. Like, has there ever been a better time to be involved in it? And then the only hope is, can you move enough people so that society can benefit in both the short and the long run? The optionality to invent is not there because the worst thing that could happen is the bad guys get to things first. And so you have to win these races. Good people have to win the races in these technologies because more important than legislation, more important than regulation is the normative behaviors. And the normative behaviors for any industry get set by the first participants. Like the internet is open because the original folks who did it thought it should be open. And it was toothpaste out of the tube. It was very hard once it was open to lock it down. And some regimes have succeeded in doing that, but they don't look progressive because they're the ones that broke the norm. So normative behaviors in all these areas, quantum, exascale computing, all of those things, good people have to get there first and they have to collaborate to get there first. Then they have to set rules that good people would set.. And then governments can come along and they can put regulators in and they can sort of tweak and make sure there's no bad behaviors. And then legislatures come along and pass laws. But boy, getting there first is like super critical. And these things are not one person, they're community-led. And so you can't slam the brakes and say, oh, we're going to stop and think here. The trick to this is to involve the theologians and the philosophers and the social scientists and the regulators well before the cat gets out of the bag. Is that possible? It's always possible. And I think that on AI, this is probably our earliest foray into it. You know, I'll just use a simple example. You know, the Catholic Church issued a white paper on guidance for how to think about the humanity of AI. But when the internet came out, they waited half a decade and they were training exorcists because the occult had grown so big. So I think we are moving to, as they say in industry, shift left. We're getting closer to getting the right people in. Early enough. But I think technology is— it's necessary because that progress needs to occur. I think generally speaking, most of these things have created challenges, but they've also created blessings. Like, you know, there's no such thing as being deficient in language. You know, the calculator made people good at math, but, you know, who knows where We're almost error-correcting for some of the things. No one needs to be born right brain or left brain. They just have their phone and this technology is to plug the gaps of things where my strengths aren't. And I think that's great. Like if we made hard work the great tiebreaker and that we didn't say that sort of the world is going to go in favor of those who had some sort of genetic or systemic advantage and we just say, okay, we're going to kind of level the playing field here, that can't help but be a good thing.

Investing in AI. Yeah. One of the things that, that fascinates me or interests me is the fact that you've got OpenAI, you've got Google, and you've got Deepseek. You've got a couple of these big, big, big institutions and a lot of money in it. But you also see that there's thousands of other startups pursuing AI. Yeah. Like the competitive landscape when you— OpenAI has all the money. Google has unlimited budget, like, how do you compete with that? Or is it, hey, they're going this direction, we're going to take our own route? What does that— basically what I'm saying, what does it mean to invest in AI when you've got these big boys that are just playing with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars?

Yes, now we're getting down to brass tacks.

It's good.

I'm going to start numbering all my platitudes for you guys. Here's, here's how I think about it. Um, there are 4 things that that AI today is not, and you're not gonna like what those are. It's not accurate, it's not energy efficient to do, not cost effective as a result, it's not private, and it's not explainable. How do you take something like that and deploy it broadly? You know, you can hire a, a person into your customer care organization and they can make a mistake by not being trained enough, but you can't knowingly put a machine out that's giving wrong answers. Like we as society have decided we'd rather have lesser outcomes from humans with some discretion than we would a machine who has an error rate that's sort of hard-coded into repeat trials. Even if those— if the results are clearly better with the machine, we're not ready to have machines take over things. But if you look at those four things— accuracy, cost efficiency, privacy, and explainability, it's pretty hard for horsemen to overcome. So the world is going to go after, and there's gonna be big markets for anybody who can progress any of those things. I like to use Nick Bostrom's framework to think about AI. There's AI, which is whole brain emulation. Imagine how good you are if I give you AI that behaves just like you do, stays in the boundaries of what you do, You read a lot of books, it reads all books. And occasionally it says something crazy, but so do you. And you look, I say, okay, well, that's pretty good for a whole range of things. That's pretty good. Whole brain emulation is sort of like not that harmful. It's going to help kids write a paper. It's going to help me, you know, put a thesis together for an investment. It's going to help all kinds of things, but in the end, it's not making the final decision. Then there's whole brain extension, which is now we're moving where the machine has learned a lot, and now it's inferring, and it's starting to give you inference where it's saying, if this and this and this and this, then here's something you haven't thought about. And you're like, whoa, that's a little more dangerous because it's outside the brain of a human. And probably need some guardrails around it. And then there's artificial general intelligence. Artificial general intelligence is really the holy grail that some of the big investors are looking to. So if I said to you, in order for you to use AI for what you do for a living, you're going to have to pay for it to know who the social media influencers in Japan are. 'Cause that's what got baked into this model that ran. And so this see-all, know-all, be-all artificial general intelligence is probably gonna end up being less accurate and overpriced for some of the things I need. So what you're seeing now is this behemoth running and racing, and all along the way, they're giving you extremely valuable tools that you can go use. But when you sit down and get ready to use them for everyday use to run companies, you're bumping into inaccuracies. You know, it's really expensive. You know, you— I worry a little bit about training the machine on what I know with my data, and then the machine's going to have that. And then just explainability. And yeah, there's methods around all of these, but that's where the companies are also. So the whole idea of, is this played out by the Mag 7 plus the, you know, the chip companies? No, because someone who can go find something a little more efficient or a little bit cheaper, you end up with a Deepseek, which blew everybody's mind. Well, you know, it's like it shouldn't blow your mind. Everybody is working on these problems, and every few points of efficiency, every few points of accuracy is a whole nother market. And so that's where everybody is. And so we are a little bit caught up in reading what people are fascinated by instead of thinking about like what's going to be necessary for these things to become part of our everyday life.

And speaking of Deepseek, like when I still haven't played with it at all, uh, just because like when it came out, you know, a couple of my Marine buddies were like, yeah, I'm gonna give all my information to China. Is that, is that just, uh, some idiots on, on the group text?

It depends what you're doing. Like, if you, if you work for an organization that sort of, uh, is on the cutting edge of defending the country, you'd have a different viewpoint than if you were doing cyber for it. Um, and so the old saying that if you're gonna be the sheriff of the Wild West, you have to live in the Wild West. You have to kind of know, you know, what all these things are and you have to be thoughtful about it. But look, you know, you mentioned 4 or so of the behemoths, you know, what do you have, 6, 8, 10 models now that you can go to and you start to figure out if you use them all that Grok's really good because it gets a lot of the training data from X. You can ask it things that are opinions where one of them might say, I can't answer that. The other one would say, yeah, I have an opinion on that because I study opinions. So these are becoming like people. They're going from a sort of big brain down to replicate like human beings. And that's the models will get smaller, more tailored, and they're going to become a lot more companions than they are me buying a big brain. That's how I think of it unfolding. So wave 1 was infrastructure, wave 2 was applications. And I think wave 3 is going to probably be a lot more discerning around cost and what am I getting for the money, a lot more return on investment focused.

So in 2024, Neuralink implanted a BMI brain machine implant into a human brain. And 20 years ago, Ray Kurzweil wrote about the singularity, about the merging of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Elon Musk of Neuralink said that he expected the evolution of this implant to be that the neocortex would be connected to the cloud and that our intellect would be uploaded and artificial intelligence would be downloaded and we become this combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence. We had a guest that's a relative expert on this earlier today, and I asked him, if he thought this was a truism, that this was something that was going to occur. And he said, absolutely, it's just a matter of time. It may, it may take another 10 to 15 years. In, in your evaluation of artificial intelligence and investment there, how do you perceive the— you know, the other thing Kurzweil said was artificial intelligence would ultimately become smarter than human intelligence. And so if you have a combination, a merger of the two in some biological, you know, technological format. How does that play out?

Well, I think it won't play out as a one-field evolution. I don't think AI is going to be— it's going to be its own thing without evolution happening also in, say, biological neuroscience, for instance. So if you take synthetic biology and you come and you say, I can edit the gene, and so therefore I can solve a lot of disease that way because I can profile the genes and say, okay, well, you picked up this toxicity somewhere in the family history, and so we triggered these genes, we're going to kind of tune them down. Then all the work that people are doing to build drugs with AI might not be necessary. So these fields, at some point, there's a coherence where they help one another, and then there's a vision part of it where it collides. I don't think that projecting out like a pretty picture— if I told you in 1980 we were going to carry around in a phone in our pocket the power of an IBM mainframe computer and it'll cost under $1,000, everybody would have said, you're nuts. Go back even further. If I would have told you that I could take a machine and get an analog projection of you, turn it into a digital signal, send it over a tower into the ground, over fibers, over 3,000 miles, and delivered on the other end, they would say that's time shifting. Like, who do you think you are, God? Like, you're going to place shift, you're going to time shift, you're going to— like, that's just not in the realm of possibility. So I stay out of long-term prognostications because I think they move from predictions to prophecies., and I'm not, I don't prophesy. So if I stay in the horizon of prediction, I think it's pretty clear that machines are going to have to be corrected and corrected and corrected and corrected against all these dimensions. But I think they're gonna come together into things where we're gonna be very energetic about certain of them and we're gonna be very thoughtful about others. So you can project and say, are we gonna be driving cars ourselves 10 years from now? I don't say no or yes. I say, well, only if we want to. And we may in fact want to. And the whole trend of doing it may slow way down because something else comes along because we're flying instead of driving. We're not on a road, we're in the sky. So these things, everybody's working on everything. That's the beautiful thing. I have this debate all the time with my wife. All the important stuff people are working on, it's just a question of where's the money flowing? 'Cause the best minds should be working on the biggest problems with the most money. And if that's what we're doing, where we're problem solving instead of all just trying to get rich, then I think that the confluence of those two things will make things come together nicely. So getting back to your question at hand, will AI be smarter than humans? No, I don't believe that. I don't believe that will happen in my lifetime. I do think though, in a near horizon, we're going to give AI arms and legs. We're going to be confident enough that it can be a driver, which is the equivalent for us of arms and legs. We're going to have, you know, a lot of mundane tasks. We're going to— why would we take on anything dull, dirty, or dangerous if we can turn that over to a machine? So we're probably going to take certain of those things. But I think along the way we're going to create a lot of problems too. And so we're going to have to like ebb and flow this thing where we have the best system in America though. We're predominantly moral people. We're built on a great set of values and an amazing constitution. We have an economic system that rewards brilliance and that we pull all those things together. And then where we get off the guardrails, we vote legislatures in to put laws in place to sort of autocorrect them. So I'm just an eternal optimist about that stuff. And I'm not worried where we are in 10 years. I'm worried about where we are, you know, 10 days from now with the things in front of us that shape these things? And do we have the right people at the table making the decisions? And I, I feel pretty good about it overall.

You talked about time shifting and things that sort of defy understanding, and, and one of the other things you're, you're investing in focus areas for your business is quantum computing. Um, and I'm not a— I didn't know much about quantum computing, so I looked it up. I won't find it in my notes now, but It said that, you know, for normal computing, it's either a 0 or a 1. In quantum computing, it can be a 0 or a 1 or both at the same time.

Yeah.

Help, help a guy like me understand how on earth that can occur.

Yeah. The simplest way is if I told you to think of a number between 1 and 1,000 in a conventional way, I could get— ask you a series of questions and get the answer. Is it above or below 500? Is it above or below 750? Is it above or below 925? You kind of work your way to the answer. And then there's other ways I can get there faster by saying, is it above or below 500? Is it a prime number? And so the problem approach is very different. And the way to think about it is if things that we view as hard science are really just ways to explain the world. So two rocks don't know that that they equal 2. We create this thing that we think is a hard science called mathematics, but we've all agreed that the word is going to be 2 and that it's going to represent these 2 things. So we build this abstraction to sort of explain the world. What's mind-blowing about quantum is we, we take that abstraction and we go back to the physical world to compute answers. And that's the part that's really like mind-blowing because we use quantum entanglement and superposition, which you describe as it's not a 0 or 1 until you measure it. It's just a probability. The probability only goes to 1 or 0 on observation. It's, it's, it's just super fascinating because it just opens up a whole new way to think about the world and computation. But we're not going to be there overnight. The same way I told you the 4 things AI is not, quantum, we don't know how to frame the problems properly for it.

What are the applications of that?

What should we achieve with quantum computing? On the near horizon, the race is about the one which says that everybody who steals stuff that has taken encrypted piles of data, with quantum, they can do a brute force method of decrypting that, and then all stolen information now becomes visible. So we don't have any way to measure or identify where that encrypted data sits, who has stolen it and taken it. And so the world— it's like a Harry Potter cloak of invisibility that just gets lifted and everybody says, oh my goodness, all those designs for all those things are in people's hands we didn't realize. And so there's a steal in store that's been underway, and that's the thing that causes the industry to be in a race. And that's the only really near-term thing that I think people would say we have to keep progressing for that reason. But then there's a whole other category of problems like biology problem, healthcare that can just get fundamentally reshaped by the technology. So it's going to grow up just like the internet. You're going to have devices, quantum devices, quantum computers, quantum devices, then you're going to put them together into a quantum internet., and then you're going to have to go out and say, okay, now what do I do with this capability? Just like we did in the early days of the internet. Um, you know, I remember when I actually went to the University of Minnesota when it was still a DARPA project and it was called GopherNet, um, because some of its original founders were there. So, um, I probably just really massively.

Dated myself, but, um, no more so than I have.

Real quick, can you define, uh, steal and store?

Steal and store would be I'm going to take the data and I know it's encrypted, encrypted and I'm going to store it. And so I've taken your data, I have no idea what's in there, but I know what you do for a living, so I'm pretty sure that I'm gonna get some really valuable stuff eventually. Eventually, when I, when I'm able to decrypt it with brute force.

Got it. Um, is that an evolution of being in telecom for so long with like AT&T going— because I was trying to figure out this path of, of telecom to the AI, the quantum computing But when you were talking about how quantum computing in cybersecurity, because I have heard in the past that there is an arms race when it comes to cybersecurity in basically pre or just getting prepared for this moment when you do have quantum computing coming online and basically wiping.

Out current security protocols. Yeah, I think I don't think that anything comes from any one thing in my life. I'm just a random walk connecting dots. And I, I don't mean that flippantly. I let my interest guide me, and I don't worry about thinking in a linear fashion. And so I mentioned earlier, a lot of my choices of what I read are things that don't fit. And one of the reasons I do that is because I gain perspective on things that are, you know, I think sometimes somewhat unusual. So I think the breakthroughs in biology affect quantum and vice versa, although physicists will tell you biology's, you know, warm, wet, and unpredictable. So it's nothing like physics. But it's as clear as in my head that we're going to start giving PhDs in quantum biology because we're going to figure out there's a wave theory inside the body. And so, like, I'm not afraid to have a hypothesis that's uniquely mine that people that are way smarter than me would reject out of hand. But I think that— I think it's just like the exploration. And so I think that telecom is great because its structure of layers in how the protocols work and the fact that everything had to work meaning it started out saying we're going to have reliability standards at 5 nines, which is— I forget the number— like 12 minutes a year of outage. And I might have to hit 23 operators to pick up my phone on my desk and call Japan. Those have to be handed and connected. And so that interconnection is basically the foundation of the internet, which is internetworking, and then the World Wide Web, which is not the internet, It's not synonymous. It's actually, you know, it was an abstraction. That ability to abstract in how you view the world technologically was priceless. And I think it still is sort of a great foundation. It's the mathematics, I guess, that technology runs on.

One thing I wanted to go back to when you're talking about, you know, the big companies and then the AI and the smaller companies, How do we— how do you compete with that? And I understand that there's, there's different— there's so many different landscapes to go.

Off of, but, but just how do you compete? If the question is how do you compete as a big company against a little company, that's a good question because, you know, your problem is speed. If you're a little company competing against a big company, then your problem is scale. So you want the appearance of scale. You want the, the speed of a gazelle, but the heart of a lion. And then if you're big, you gotta, you gotta figure out how to get this thing to move quickly. And so I've been involved in both. Most people don't look at my resume and realize I was a CEO of a Sequoia-backed startup way back in the day. And then I stayed involved with a lot of these little companies, kind of coaching them along the way and investing. So these careers were actually seamless. And But they're two parts of one ecosystem, which I think is the magic of the United States. If I told you that one country would have a system that would siphon the world's most intelligent people to come work on the world's biggest problems and stay here and stay committed to those problems, and there would be one geography that was a net beneficiary, you'd say, I'll go— like, how do I go build that? Well, we have it, let's not destroy it. And it's the combination of those two things where there's room for both of those. Certain businesses belong scaled. There's monopolies that are natural. There are monopolies that are philosophical, economic. So we need large-scale players because who else other than like NVIDIA, Google, Facebook, like these are public statements. Mark Zuckerberg said, that he is going to get artificial general intelligence even if he has to bankrupt the firm. Like these guys, that's the sort of thing that a little company can't go do that. But a little company can fill in all the gaps that go around it. They can solve problems to make those juggernauts do what they do, but they can also become potentially that juggernaut. And I think this is the one area in the world where people can come and dream and then they can go manifest and then they can go make this stuff happen. And the best way to, you know, when you— the best way to get to a rooftop is not to put a ladder up, it's to miss on a moonshot. And I believe that. And I believe that this is like, we're in a unique time with all of these technologies moving, and we're in a unique place in particularly, like, I sit in Texas. I am so thrilled to be here during this sort of evolution in, in, in tech, in, in political, political governance, um, in regulation. Like, this is the— for me, the place to be. And the people here are just magnificent. So I look at that. If, if you can't be happy there, then you really ought to question your.

Ability to be happy. One thing, just because you kind of alluded to it, is, is right now I'm at the SMU Executive MBA program. And it's fascinating because you're surrounded by so many smart people. But being an American and, you know, I personally don't necessarily work with that many immigrants or whatnot. One of our team members is, is from a different country. But like, you meet these people that are going about to graduate and then they're like, they're on a 3 or 4 month rush to get a job or they go back home. And it blows my mind that I'm like, wait a minute, you just got an MBA from SMU. We should find a way to keep you in country. So I think, you know, finding— and again, not to go into the political whatever that is, but I just think that should be immediate access to the.

Country, at least my opinion. Yeah, I think that most everybody knows the facts that over 50% of the startups in the US are foreign-born folks that are here one way or another. And I think everybody would love for us to get an immigration policy that takes advantage of, of this, all of these foundations, without those foundations being taken advantage of. And I think it's, it's sort of a nuanced, tricky area. But, you know, I'm very bullish Texas, bullish America, bullish tech, and No matter what I read, whether it's philosophy, science, or geopolitics, history, nothing gets me off of that. I just feel like we got— we're in a magic time, in a magic place. And so don't mess with magic.

Well, it goes back to our very first podcast with the interview with Michael Levy. It's like paraphrasing, but if you just look at America, we're up into the right.

Yeah. How many areas? Yeah, I watched that and I'm really super impressed with Michael. He's a very humble guy and he's extremely accomplished. But my optimism— I'm one of 11 kids in an inner city household that by most standards was very poor. We had no air conditioning. We had 1,400 square feet for 11 kids, parents, and grandparents. And How can you not look at sitting here today with you guys as being like the greatest blessing? So I think judging the system right now, it's not my duty. My duty is to just keep pushing and then try to get everybody I can to, to take advantage of it. So I'm very focused on the next generation. It goes back to the name of Quidid and the family. My son is doing an AI company. My daughter's involved in a drone company, and my youngest is graduating Caltech, which is a meritocracy, and I'm so proud of her. And you look at that and like, where else could someone grow up in the inner city of Pittsburgh, sort of lost in the wilderness of children— there was an old lady who lived in a shoe— and end up like doing that? Like, it's just, yeah, it's Yeah, I.

Have a lot to be grateful for. We had Jim Keyes as a guest on a podcast, former CEO of Blockbuster. Carl Icahn installed him there and 7-Eleven. And he grew up in a small home, no plumbing, and was told that he couldn't— it wasn't good enough to go to college and went to college, educated himself, ended up becoming a Fortune 500 CEO. And also has this wonderful appreciation for the opportunities he's had. And that's great to see. Among the other things that you touch with your— with QDIT is hypersonics. And I certainly understand what hypersonic means, but I didn't understand what was represented by that.

So, you know, for the rest of.

Us, why don't you define that? No, I joined the board of Lockheed Martin, which is, you know, something that I take gravely seriously. Like, the stakes that you play in that kind of organization are as high as you can get. There you have to understand a little bit about space. You got to understand a little bit about where things are moving. And so AI affects it for sure. Synthetic biology at a far stretch, you can imagine. But then you have the— you add physics to it. And you add history to it. So it's been a great journey for me because I've had to say, okay, which things that I know are going to affect that business and industry, and which things in that industry do I need to go learn? And then, and then I also had to understand the geopolitics and the history of geopolitics in order to really understand what causes war to start, what causes— what allows wars to end, and, and that sort of thing. And so it's been, it's been a great journey for me. I've really— I love that part of what I do. And but it's required me to learn things like hypersonics. Best way to describe it is it's trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet. And, um, it's really important to the.

Defense, um, of— the technical definition is it travels at a speed greater than Mach 5, 5 times the speed of sound. Um, and, and that's fast.

It's very, very fast.

Is it like railgun? The way that it works is as follows: if you take a radar and it has a certain aperture to see things, and you can send something up way above that and it comes down greater than Mach 5, your reaction time once it hits your radar, as the saying goes, might, might move from hours to minutes. And that changes the game. And so the idea is, you know, how do you solve that problem? You can solve the problem by noticing on the ground when something was launched and get the launch angle and figure out what the likely target is and be ready. When it does hit your radar, you can, you know, adjust your radar. But the U.S. needs to be— is this in a— in military terms, this is very much what I said earlier. You have to win this race. The good guys have to win the race to have the best deterrence. And all the technology that the U.S. can put together and muster needs to not only defend freedom and discourage other more aggressive systems, but also you want it to be a game of chess that's over before it starts. And so deterrence is the strategy, and it's the strategy of Lockheed Martin supporting the government. It's the government's— their view of best way to fight a war is it doesn't occur. Because the technology is such that you can disable and render things not relevant. And I just look at what happened in Iran with the Israelis. You take an F-35, you fly in, you blind them so they can't see, and then you go in and you create a mission that's so targeted that most of the Iranian people had no knowledge that it occurred. And so you look at that, very little collateral damage. It was an asset play really at its core. And I know a lot of people might not like that characterization, but that's really how you think about it. Deterrence is the objective. 21st century security is about bringing these technologies we talked about in a way that there's a deterrent from doing something that runs counter to freedom, democracy, and.

The system that we fight to protect. So that's your interest in hypersonic. And if something is at 3,800 miles per hour at Mach 5, by— as you said, by the time your radar detects it, it may be too late to respond effectively. So building a defense system to respond to that certainly limits your options.

It does.

And I read that the Russians have hypersonic glide vehicles, the Avangard, and the Chinese have the DF-ZF. And so they have developed these hypersonic, uh, instruments of war, I guess. And so we are already having to play defense against that and figure out our path. I was also intrigued with the other— as the other aspect of it, hypersonic cruise missiles. You'll have to explain this to me, which are powered through flight by air-breathing engines.

Can you explain an air-breathing engine to me? I don't think on a podcast anybody needs to know what an air-breathing engine is. Okay, this— the systems steer them, there are several options. And I think that air breathing right now is how do you take the, the, the air of travel and use that to maneuver? Right.

So you've had a very diverse career where— and you have a lot of interest. Where have you had the most fun? Who— and you can't do the cop-out.

Answer of right what I'm doing right now. No, um, you know, I, I don't— it is true that I've never had more fun than this day, but that, that's been true most days of my life. Um, I have a different version of the imposter syndrome, um, in that I don't ever think I don't belong where I am, but I wake up every day thinking, how did I get to a point where I get to do this? Is this magical? Because Everything possesses a responsibility if it's called a job. And I wish that they would take people who play sports and practice medicine and actually make them sound more like jobs than play and practice. But when you look at something that's work and a job, and then you can have this opportunity to learn and excel and get good at it, and then just when you feel like you're about to you kind of master it, you get to get the next field and the next field, and then these things get presented to you in a way that it's just— it's, um, you know, I don't want to sound like it's a fairy tale, but it kind of is for most people if they have the right attitude. And I try to project this onto the kids or people who work for me, or, you know, in any sort of public speaking, is to say you have control over all this stuff. And most of you You know, it's not a question of, you know, work-life balance. It's make sure that you don't cheat God with your skills. Like, get the most out of yourself. And I think most people settle in into a set of habits that don't really push them. And if you look and say, which is the greater problem, people not having enough balance or people doing less than they're capable of, I think that We as a country, more people do less than they're capable of because they limit themselves. Because all of this stuff is out there to learn, to excel, to push yourself to— when I meet immigrants now, how often they talk about this. So I met a woman who was working 3 jobs and I said, why are you working 3 jobs? What are you aspiring to get? She said, I come from a country where you can't It's rare to have one job. And she said, I just like to call my mother and say, I have 3 jobs. And her mother's like, how can you do 3 jobs? She said, because they give you work and it fits around the other. It's crazy in this country. You can get all the work that you want. And that's just so magical to me to see someone who's so energized starting this journey that I started, you know, 50 years ago or what. I had a paper route. I was making money when I was 8 years old and putting it in the bank. And so I am really— I want the system to endure and I want the system to progress, but I want the system to be available. And I think as you age and get more experience, when you're in the beginning, you think about winning. At the game. As you get older, you think a lot more about the game, and then you start to think about how do I make sure that the game stays intact enough that people can still have these experiences where they can move their family into a whole new situation. And so for that, I'm just like— I hope it comes across— I'm like super grateful for opportunities and to get back to finish this section with how I started it. I feel like I can't believe some days that I get to do this. And I look at my day and I think, who would have thought, like my high school friends, to say I'm going to have someone come teach us quantum to a group of 6 people at old Parkland in Dallas, or that I would have an interest in that? I was like every other kid thinking, if I'm still working when I'm 60, I failed. As soon as I get enough money to quit, I'm going to quit working. And you're like, this is— no, this is Disney World because this is a rainbow ride.

What's funny about that is, is I would say for the last 6, 8 months myself, I've been on this intellectual journey of, of just like almost like the Hungry Hungry Hippo game because you're doing the SMU Executive MBA. I'm doing the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business. I'm doing audiobook after audiobook. I'm doing the Cox Leadership Program. So if you have an extra seat in one of these events, give me a call.

Yeah. Here's the thing. I'm not going to invite you until you ensure assure me that each thing causes a change in your behavior. Because to the earlier point that you made, which I think is very relevant to this discussion, it's not about whether it goes in your head, it's about whether it changes a behavior. And I think if you— like, if you— I often ask, tell people to do this exercise: ask 10 friends to give you 10 words to describe you. And I'm pretty sure if have that list, 100 words, and you synthesize it into the 10 common traits, you already are everything you wanted to be, including a good spouse and a good parent and all those things, because those are what you've been focused on. And so that's developmentally not going to be your tombstone. Your tombstone is about like, what do I evolve? So if everybody says you're smart and no one says you're generous, then you might be really smart selfish. Pretty good chance you might be. So you look, you say, okay, well, what do I want to be? Do I want to be generous? Well, do I want smart? Like, for me, I want to be wise. Wise has this dimension of you're giving back. Like, wise feels like to me like someone who you can come have a conversation with and get their wisdom, because wisdom is something you give away. When you're smart, it feels like something I got and I locked it in my head and I carry it with me., but it doesn't feel like something I give away. So I, I think that for me, the learning and the, the people I try to associate with is people for whom it's impactful because the magic is not what you learn. The magic's what you walk out with. And it's like, 'cause when we had that little session, a couple of those people who were, were in the room came back and said, that was mind-blowing. We need to go do something about that. We need to go find an investment, find a use case for quantum. We gotta get, Hey, as soon as that infrastructure is ready, we got to figure out how to deploy. Like, that's what you want. You want people who see— to see the magic in it, because that's how this stuff goes from a lab into the world, is with an entrepreneur says, hey, like, this time has come. Circling all the way back to the early comment, it's hard to pick the window and it's easy to pick the technology. And that's why this intersection of entrepreneurs and some of these advanced fields, that's where I live. And it's just so fun because you have the stakes of the difficulty of picking timing and you have all these brilliant people to be around. But then you also have these entrepreneurs with business instincts. Then you get this scorecard at the end. Did you do it? Did you not do it? Did you make money? Did you lose money? Like all that kind of stuff.

So just really a fun thing. Well, to that point, Paul, you've been with me, what, 4 years now? How much growth have you seen last year? A lot.

See, Paul.

Says a lot. Keep reading. I like the positive attitude. I like the, the mindset. I, I reread As a Man Thinketh, um, you know, a couple of times, uh, maybe once a year, and I just recently reread it. And, and your thoughts drive your actions and define who you are and you have a choice. Am I going to focus on the positives, which you do? Am I going to dwell in the negatives? And how we think, how we orient ourselves towards the world is such a.

Powerful driver of who we are. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like in my own case, I bring a lot of energy to it and I can bring energy to negative stuff, but it's not pretty. I know it's not constructive. It doesn't help the marriage, for instance. But it— yeah, I just, I just feel like positive energy is contagious. Negative energy probably is too. And so I just feel a responsibility.

To bring positive energy. And you said you're not on social media and I'm not on social media and I don't watch the news anymore because it's so overwhelming. To see all the conflict and how sort of polarized we've become. So is that an acceptable path to sort of tune out? You like to sort of hit it.

Head on, it sounds like. Well, I don't watch the news and I'm not on social media. I have no animosity to either one. I don't view them as bad.

I just don't view them as working for Is that a recent development or.

Is this something that's been with you a while? I love live sports. I listen to books. I consider music a treat. It's like ice cream for me. Like sometimes I drive to work with the radio on and I appreciate it so much.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's just like we're all wired differently and I just like my objective in life right now is to get some of the young folks and help them find their power alley. Is like I tell my kids, when you figure out what you're supposed to do, genetics is going to kick in and you're going to see a thing in you that you didn't get from your mother or I, because it goes back many generations. And you're going to see this force, it's going to be mind-blowing. And it's really great to watch when that arrives with the kids. And they don't really quite know how to harness it. But when they get that sort of, I got to go, I got to go get this. And I've been telling my kids, I've been writing notes to them, sliding them under the door since they were teenagers about, you know, how— what is their choice and what's not their choice, including what's not their choice is how they feel like treating their mother or me. Right. But, but also they don't have a choice about fire. Fire. Like, you're born with a fire, and don't extinguish the fire. Don't be afraid of the fire. And when you see how to harness that fire, that's when your magic happens. And, and it's just been great to watch the, the two oldest ones in their career wake up one day and say, I think I got it.

I think I know what the fire is. You said you grew up in a 1,500-square-foot space with your parents grandparents and 10 siblings, right? I'm curious, you talked about genetics and the fire within you. How did your 10 siblings— how have they evolved?

Are they all achievers like you, or— I don't think that's— I don't think anything is universally true across 11, other than you have to compete to be right for, you know, any sort of— like, I think what— by the time— what's your birth order? I was 8th. Okay. I think by the time I arrived, you know, they had like 2 or 3 perfect SAT scores, a couple valedictorians, and so there's not a lot of room left, right? Um, I don't think generalizing is as relevant as introspection and abstraction. Like, introspect, it's about you. Abstraction is about, like, let me look at myself. And I think that what the goal is, is to get the most out of what you have been given as raw material, because that's where happiness is. Happiness is saying, okay, I found it. It, you know, like, it's not a search for happiness, it's a search for doing the best with what you have, because when you see that manifest, that's going to be happiness. And so I'm parsing words a little bit because they're going to end up being roughly the same thing. But I think they're different journeys where if you set out, let me just go try things till I find what's happy, you want to sit down and say, when am I happiest? What do I think is going to make the biggest difference? And what are my skills? Like, because I can evolve myself and be a little bit transformative and cause things to happen that I might not have thought possible. And I don't think it's all experiential. I think some of it can be arrived at. And I think that's part of leadership is to help people figure out, put the right people in the right place to succeed. Yeah, it affects recruiting. Let me get some great people in here. I'm going to get the best person for this job. But also, once they're in, your job is to kind of understand them well enough to make sure they're evolving and they're progressing, because you get the most out of them, you get the most.

Out of your organization. Yeah, I think it's a great place.

To, to wrap up and, you know.

Call it a day. Yeah. Well, this has been a treat. Thank you, John, for sharing your time with us. And what an interesting life you've lived and continue to live.

I look forward to watching you continue that. Well, I'm an outdoor cat, so yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to keep doing what I do till I can't do it.

Yeah. Excellent.

Well, thank you for sharing your time.

Thank you for having me.

Enjoyed it.

Always with you today.