Google's AI Answers Killed 80% of Our Clicks

If you're not replaced by AI, you're certainly going to get replaced by someone that uses AI if you don't. Literally the last 18 months is the most stress I've ever endured as a man.

Rex Kurzius is the founder and CEO of Asset Panda, a Dallas-based asset intelligence platform he built into a global SaaS company serving customers that include Amazon, Toyota, Dyson, and Carnival across more than 67 countries. It gives operations, risk, and compliance teams one system of record for every asset they own.

We track endangered chickens. We track human body parts.

Before founding Asset Panda in 2012, Kurzius built and sold Timberhorn IT Solutions to the Ettain Group in 2015. Asset Panda reached number 104 on the 2018 Inc. 5000 with 3,552% 3-year growth and now operates in most of the world's languages. He has been named to the DCEO Dallas 500 and recognized as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist. Musk says that you're going to be able to upload your brain into the cloud. And presumably, if you die physically, then you can download your— yeah. So, you know, this sounds like science fiction.

It's like a movie. It's like The Avengers. It's like having a conversation with Jarvis and going back and forth with that thing all day long. What's coming is just extraordinary. What's already here is extraordinary.

In this episode, Rex explains why rebuilding a 15-year-old platform around AI is essential, how his team is building Ursa AI into a true workplace coworker, and what losing his father at age 10 taught him about relentless drive.

Your parents looking at two kids, they got to be incredibly proud, especially coming from, you know, a small bakery.

When you wake up in the morning and you don't know where you're going to get your next meal and you're 11, 12 years old and you have to be resourceful and figure out how to make those things happen, I think it just changes your DNA. Work became a thing that I thought could become my purpose, so I just looked at it differently. Work wasn't work, it was living.

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Rex Kurzius, welcome to The Deal Table.

Thank you for having me at Old Parkland, a very dynamic visual space. Beautiful.

Incredible. Very unique spot that we selected for The Deal Table podcast. And we love to have serial entrepreneurs to talk about all things starting, building, scaling businesses. And you're on your second go with that. You built, scaled, sold Timberhorn IT Solutions, and now You are the founder and CEO of Asset Panda. And when I read the description, I find myself saying, what do all those words mean? Cloud-based enterprise asset management platform.

Yes.

Walk us through that.

Yeah, so it's evolved quite a bit since we started it almost 15 years ago. We started it because we didn't have a great way of tracking high-value assets at Timberworn. And I was looking for a better way to do it. Essentially, we started out building an asset tracking management system that basically lived outside the accounting systems so people in the field could actually use it and update the corporate records. That worked out very well for a while, and then this thing called artificial intelligence came about. I don't know if you guys are aware of that. I've heard of it. I think everybody's heard of it a little bit. We really had to look at our model and try to figure out what the new world was going to look like. Ultimately, what we've done is we've re-architected, rebuilt the entire Asset Panda platform, and we've interwoven AI in every aspect of it. So it's much more, in the past I used to describe it as a noun. It did this, it was a thing. Now it's a verb. So the system, it tracks, it audits, it inspects, and it makes, helps companies be compliant. And it really is like having a coworker that you work with every day that gives you insights into your operations, gives you, enriches information about the assets themselves, and allows people to basically adjudicate their entire workday within Asset Panda without ever leaving it.

You bring up AI very early in the conversation. What is the hype versus reality? Because obviously, you know, I consume a lot of media about AI. I think everybody does. We see what's on the news, we see what's on YouTube, we see what's on TikTok. But in an enterprise system like yourself, what's the reality of it? Is it completely revolutionizing it? Is it destroying your business? Is it amplifying? What's the real?

Yeah, so for us, about 18 months ago, it became a real thing that we had to adapt to. And, you know, people think about AI in terms of what does it do for me and the applications I'm using, but it has radically affected the entire business world in a very quick, quick way. The first one on the marketing side, you had Google. I'm assuming you guys use Google. You do a search and you see that AI snippet that is basically the first response now. Well, depending on who you talk to and what you read, it replaced 60 to 80% of clicks that were going to websites.

Wow.

So that was a major fundamental shift. Like, how do you adapt your business to a world that was, you know, before you were getting inbound leads or inbound inquiries directly from keyword searches and SEO. And now all of a sudden the world has changed and most of the world really didn't understand what had changed and how to adapt to it. So in addition to SEO, there's now answer engine optimization, basically training the models on how to provide you as a response. And then there's a thing called generative engine optimization where you're taking real content that happens in your business every day that you may take for granted in a traditional sense and repurposing it instantly. So for us, we had to completely reinvent our entire business. And I think like most SaaS software companies, a couple of years ago, you didn't know if AI was going to put you out of business or help you. So ultimately, AI is helping Asset Panda in a very significant way. It's allowing us to do things with our business model that we never even comprehended that we'd be able to do. But there are a lot of things that we had to do to change how we operated. And adapt to AI in a real-time basis. So to answer your question, it's underhyped. What's coming is just extraordinary. What's already here is extraordinary. And as it continues to evolve, there's this big debate of whether it replaces employees, if it helps employees. I think it depends on what your job is and what you do specifically. But ultimately, I think that If you're not replaced by AI, you're certainly going to get replaced by someone that uses AI if you don't. So we all have to become experts in it.

One thing that you brought up about the last 18 months, just really digging in and pivoting, to be able to have a 12, 14, 15-year-old company and be able to make that shift, like, I guess it truly is one of those situations where you adapt or die.

Yes. Yeah, I think fundamentally that's exactly what's happening. And you still have people trying to figure out exactly what it means. Like, what does it mean to their business? What are the capabilities? And there are things like automatic in the backend of our system, automatic bug detection, for example. So we have agents that run 24 hours that look for issues in the code. They'll identify them, they'll write the Jira tickets, they'll create the stories around them, they'll actually write the code to fix it. And then a human reviews the information and then updates it. So the whole software development lifecycle is increasing exponentially. Now the big question is like, should you do that with AI or should you not? Is it more expensive to use AI? Are we doing something that a human could do? So I think over the next couple of years you'll see companies and people just trying to figure out what's a practical use for it, what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. And then there's constant experimentation. I'll give you an example. We have a large client in Hollywood that's a movie production studio, and they have thousands and thousands of props and costumes and all those sorts of things. And when they first envisioned buying Asset Panda, they just wanted to keep track of it. They used to be on spreadsheets. Now they were trying to move into a system that was a little more functionality, had integrations with other systems, that sort of thing. Asset Panda has evolved and AI has evolved. It's gone from, well, how can it, how can it answer questions about my assets to how can it be a true partner? So for example, this studio might say, okay, we've got a production that's going to be happening in this timeframe. The period is 1901 to 1925. Ursa is our AI tool. So Ursa, can you tell me what I should review in props and inventory that fit 1901 to 1925? So it's not only an asset register, it's actually telling you these are the things that you should consider. And then the conversation can continue. And I think that's the main thing With AI and using AI, it's not— in the past, we've always been taught that you ask a question, you get an answer. With AI, the beauty of it is the conversation that you can continue and the context that AI remembers over time to get to know you and get to know your business issues and get to know things that you've dealt with in the past to help remind you. Or let's say you get promoted and that's no longer part of your job. Well, the next person walks in and they have the entire, I call it tribal history of everything that you did in your job previously. So I think the benefits that you get from AI really kind of force you to think about the way you work in a very different way.

From a framing perspective, pre-18 months ago, how would you describe Asset Panda? And now with all this AI integration, how would you describe it?

Prior to 18 months ago, we were more of a noun. We were a container to store all of your information. We made it more efficient. We were highly flexible, so we adapted to the way that you worked. The new way, it's really turned into a verb. It does things for you. Eliminated hundreds and hundreds of clicks. You know, when you get into SaaS software and you build features, you think about how many clicks does it take for someone to adjudicate something? Well, in Asset Panda now, you can just have a conversation with it and it completely can build out an account, saving hundreds or thousands of potential clicks that a human used to do. The verification process of AI versus human is a very interesting thing now that I think a lot of us are going to grapple with. We'll see information. I don't know if you guys feel this, but sometimes you'll read things and wonder, was that AI or not? Or you see it in entertainment a lot where you listen to a song and wonder if that was AI generated or maybe movies, that sort of thing. Well, I think it's the same thing in the business world. AI is a fantastic tool, but it's only a fantastic tool if humans use it right and there's good data that goes into it. So there's a lot of opportunity.

Do you see this as going, oh cool, we've been doing this trajectory for the last 15 years, now we can go here? Or is it you just, hey, we're going to keep going?

No, absolutely. It, you know, for us, we really had to go back and understand the sort of the nuts and bolts of our system and how it would interact at scale with a technology like AI. We had partnered with Amazon and AWS a few years prior to redo the architecture of our system because the fundamental model that we built our entire application on was built on a government survey that basically said every company has roughly 7 trackable assets per employee. So as an entrepreneur coming up with the idea, looking at that study, I thought, okay, I'll go from 7, I'll increase it 30%, I'll do 10. And then we had companies put $9 million in an account. They really kind of changed our business model and the world taught us what our business model could look like. So we had to go back to the drawing board anyway and we had to re-architect our entire solution so it'd be quite a bit more scalable. As we were doing it, call it serendipity, luck, timing, whatever, our system fit like a glove with the new AI capabilities. So as we go forward in this new world, you'll see new features and capabilities rolled out by Asset Panda literally by the week that are just jaw-dropping. Some examples would be inspections. We've always had inspection modules in our systems, and historically it was Rex goes out, takes a picture of the generator, looks at the generator, fills out as much information as possible, or maybe fire suppression, suppression equipment in a commercial building that has to be checked all the time. So a human would check it and say, yeah, it looks good. And whatever notes they have on it, the calibration was this. Well, now Asset Panda does all of that for you. You literally just take a picture and it builds the inspection, in many cases better than a human could. So those types of capabilities, not to mention that it also allows us to operate in 19 different languages. We're in 67 languages right now. We expect what you'll see with Asset Panda over the next like 3 to 5 years as it becomes a major global brand. A true unicorn. And that's what we see AI is going to allow us to do because the value that we can create for companies is staggering. And a lot of times we have to say, no, it can actually do this for you. I know that you've tracked these things historically this way, or like the NFPA is the National Association for Fire Protection. They'll talk about how they do manual inspections on the firefighters' equipment, how they do it on building systems and fire suppression systems. And we're like, yeah, you can still do it that way if you want. But how about try this? And then that trained professional that's been doing it for 25 years, let them work with that information because AI is not perfect. You know, AI with a human that has expertise is a, is a pretty beautiful combination. AI on itself, it needs to be regulated, needs to be checked. And in systems like ours, knowing did AI inspect this or did a human inspect it, or did an AI— did a human improve the AI inspection? So those are the types of things that we're just trying to educate the user community about and how you can work with and use an application like this. Radically different than anything that has existed before.

So I want to dig down a little bit on what this service is for the typical client. You referenced the Hollywood studio, I think. Sure. How many items did you say were related to that?

In that one, maybe 10,000 or more.

So you offer software as a service. I sign up, I've subscribed. I'm paying you a monthly fee, and I've got these thousands of objects, and you're going to physically tag them with something, so there's a communication between that object and a software, so I know where that object is. Going to gather, going to input information about the object into the system, and now you've wrapped, so I know if the object's there or if it's disappeared, so it should help manage inventory. and control losses.

Absolutely.

So that, that's a benefit. Now you've married it to an AI tool where, to your example, tell me everything that's in the inventory that fits this criteria. So what is your ideal client? What do they look like? And, and is that a typical one, the, the studio ideal client profile?

Tends to be universities. It tends to be municipalities, utilities, amusement parks. We have quite a few different types of clients. You have to understand the flexibility of the system allows people to track things across the spectrum. We track endangered chickens. We track human body parts. We track all the components you use to run a facility. We track—

People say endangered chickens.

Yeah, like literally.

And body parts.

Literally.

That's a very wide spectrum.

Oh, it's a wide spectrum. He was speaking specifically to you, I think, on that one, right? And tools like this haven't existed in the past. You know, people would say, okay, I've gotta track these chickens. I'm gonna use this application, a write-access database. I'm gonna use Excel. And then my computer equipment's over here. And if I'm at UT Southwestern, maybe we've got an area for organ donors, or maybe there's, some testing going on with different organs. I mean, there's lots of different reasons people have to track and manage things. So the capability for this system to adapt on the fly with detailed expertise about whatever it is that you're doing is an extraordinary game-changing environment for asset tracking in general. It's— the person used to have to have the experience to understand all the nuance of what to track, what to track, maybe, maybe the specifics about the equipment itself, the depreciation schedules. Now the systems can kind of do it for them. All of your examples are exactly spot on, but let your imagination run to any reason why you'd have to track anything for any purpose, even down to the point where identifying what the thing actually is. So what is this? Take a picture of the pig statue and have it tell you the history of the pig statue and what it is and what it's probably made of. So the technology has moved to the point where it's truly functional in a physical world and helps manifest itself in the software world. So that same inspection tool can also build your inventories for you. You know, if you want to know all the books in this room, just Snap photographs and ask URSA to upload it into AssetPAN, and it'll build the inventory of all the books in the room.

Sorting and documenting seems like museums would be a good—

Oh, absolutely. We have a lot of museums.

Because I'm just thinking about even Old Parkland campus. Every artifact has a tag. Absolutely. Every rug has a barcode. So it seems like Old Parkland should be your client if they're not already.

Oh, 100%. And the way that people track the assets really is dependent upon the end client. If they want to use a barcode, fine. If they just want to use photograph. On the photograph, we take the GPS coordinates of it. They can have the information there. If they want to connect with RFID, we have webhooks. If they want real-time device tracking, we have a large client in the UK that tracks— the way to look at it is like very specific drugs for patients with things like cancer and things that when they create a drug just for that person to ship it, So Asset Panda manages all the logistics behind the shipping to get it to that specific person. So it's really, it's that configurable and that flexible and it adapts to the exact environment that you need it to adapt to for the use case that you're working on.

I read an article several years ago about asset tracking and it was documenting that some utility company that each truck had $100,000 of stuff on it. Oh, sure. And that they were losing some extraordinary amount of that each year, just disappearing from the truck. $20,000.

Absolutely.

Like that. And so in that case, am I wrong? There has to be a physical tag that— would you say RFI? You know, where it's sending a signal. So you know that it's on that truck at the end of the day. And if it's not, somebody is accountable for that. So I know that's a more limited application, But certainly a good example.

And to move further on that example, the world before was same utility company, I'm assigned to a project and it's a certain transformer that needs to be replaced or fixed. In the old world, the person sees all the tools on their truck, maybe gives it a once-over and makes sure that they have the things they think they need. They go out to the job site, oh, I didn't know I need one of these. Well, in the new world, you can just tell Asset Panda, I'm going to service this piece of equipment. What tools do I need to make sure I have? What training do I need? You can have all of that information surface via Ursa directly into the asset. So it truly becomes a work companion. There's also applications for this for your house. You know, if you have an oven and you have issues with the oven, take a bunch of pictures of it and have it inspected. It tells you what might be wrong with the oven. It tells you where you might find parts for it or a service provider to come fix it. So we see this as a global, as basically a global application that anybody in the world that has anything of value that they need to track or manage, they can use Asset Panda for it.

How do you put a value on the market for that?

The TAMs that we are focused on are all massive.

Yeah.

There's nothing that's small about the opportunity with us. And you have to understand, for years as we operated in the older environment, we had a much more manual process. You know, you would have a specific project, you would engage with us on our website, you would talk to a sales development representative, they'd further qualify you, then you'd talk to an account manager, and then you'd go through a custom implementation. Well, with the new world and the tools that we're launching, you can do all those things on your own. You can research as much information as you want about Asset Panda, We're building headless connections. Are you guys familiar with the term headless in software? The, so the concept is really you go to ChatGPT, let's say you have a corporate account at ChatGPT. Headless essentially means that Asset Panda is integrated to ChatGPT through an MCP connection. And if both those credentials are validated, you can use ChatGPT and interact directly with Asset Panda. So if you don't want to go into Asset Panda, but you want to know about depreciated assets in this category, all you have to do is go to your favorite LLM.

Yeah, I'm familiar with the MCPs. I just didn't know what it's called. Yeah, because I, because I, I do a lot of cloud code in terminal, so I'm going NotebookLM or go to my Gmail or my Slack or— so like, it, it's, it's actually kind of funny because when I first started playing with computers, and I will age myself, it was with, with DOS. Yeah, Microsoft. So it was— and now with all this technology, I'm reintegrating or I'm using computers again, almost like it was DOS again because I'm only in terminal, which is kind of funny. It's that full circle moment. Full circle. But going back to the TAMs, like in, to piggyback on what Lane was bringing up, do you, are you targeting 10 enterprise clients or are you targeting millions of retail clients or are you targeting both?

Both is the short answer. We have a robust inbound funnel, and I touched on it earlier, the change that particularly Google and the other search engines made where they were giving AI summaries and how radically that changed most businesses. By the way, that's a problem that every business is trying to figure out right now. How do they get past that chasm of pure SEO to AEO and GEO? And as you know, you build a company like Asset Panda, You do your best to find tools that can help you solve a problem, but if you can't find a tool that helps you solve the problem, well, you still have the problem, you still have to solve it. So what we did is we built an Asset Panda studio that's a GEO studio. And what we do is we transcribe every conversation that happens within the company with prospects, with sales, with implementations, with consulting assignments, emails, any support question. And we put it in a data lake in an S3 bucket, and we have Ursa sit on top of it. And essentially what it does is it surfaces, it looks for signals and conversations that could be turned into training materials, white papers, case studies, testimonials, blogs. We have it tied into a tool called Figma, which is our design studio, that will instantly take it and put it onto our website. And the more we use it and the more successful we get with it, we've realized that needs to be a product the world needs to experience as well. So you'll see Asset Panda expand into, generative engine optimization tools in the next few weeks. You'll see that like commercially viable and people can buy it.

I love the name, by the way. Thank you, Panda.

Yeah.

Anything you want to tell us about, about that?

So I have an older brother who started a company called Mailchimp.

Oh my goodness.

And that's one of his—

Mailchimp.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of those— this is a moment. Yeah. Lane is familiar with it.

I know. Exactly.

I know. That's how big your brother's gotten. I know, I know.

Yeah, good for him.

Yeah, so he started Mailchimp and at the time, I'm a serial entrepreneur, so I've started and sold multiple companies. And I remember having a conversation with him and he's growing exponentially all over the world and he's never met a customer kind of thing. And I thought, you know, I really need to find a business like that. So I was actively looking for something, very specific criteria. You had to be able to use the system on a mobile app. It had to solve a common problem around the world, et cetera, et cetera. Et cetera, and ultimately came up with the concept for Asset Panda. And my kids were young at the time. My kids are a little older now too, 27, 25, 21. I know, they grow up fast. But I also wanted to teach my kids entrepreneurship, and they had just gotten their first iPhones. So I thought, okay, this might be a really interesting way to introduce the concept of let's have an idea, let's create something, and let's take it to the marketplace. And as I was brainstorming all these different ideas, my oldest daughter, Sophie, who is an account executive at Asset Panda, saw the name Asset Panda on my list and she loved it. So ultimately my daughter ended up picking the name of the company.

So she did a good job.

Yeah, she did great.

Real quick, I just want to give you kudos and credit because how we know each other is through his son Carl, who I've met at multiple events, had coffee. And in being at SMU World and especially, you know, the social media world, first thing that people say is, oh, my daddy this, my family this. And that never came up with Carl. So I think that's— it's a, you know, good parenting on you and good for you. And, and just because, like, the only reason I know of the family success is like I had to do some research because there was a couple of things that was saying I was like, That doesn't— let me look into that. So, I just want to give you the kudos because I think that's awesome to hear. And also credit to Carl for being a stand-up good guy. Because again, so many people are like, look at me, look at me, I've done this. You're like, have you? Or is that your generational wealth?

No, absolutely. I'm really proud of my kids. All 3 of them turned out to be exceptional humans. I credit my wife with most of that. But yeah, I'm really proud of them. My kids, they do have the pressure of living up to me and then their uncle. And I've always tried to coach them. It's not really about that. Life is about— life is an adventure. And we get to create our own stories in that adventure. And I encourage them to find their own why, find their own purpose. And it'd been my dream to work with my children and to actually be able to do it. Sophie doing an amazing job on the sales and the account executive side. And then Carl's coming into his own as an AI expert, and he's helped take our company to another level. And it's just every day I wake up with just a heart full of gratitude and just very thankful for being able to work with my kids. And I've gotten to the point with them where, you know, as a dad, you're always trying to coach and teach and maybe inspire, and you just want to pass on that knowledge. And now the tables are flipping. Like, when I go sit down with my son, he's coaching me up and he's teaching me about how the world works and my daughter doing the same on the account executive side. So I feel like every day I'm just so thankful and have a lot of gratitude for being able to work with them.

And that's an interesting topic that I don't think we've ever covered is the pressures of having a successful parent. But you bring up another dynamic, which is not only do you have a successful parent, but you also have an uncle. So it's like, do you think that's double pressure, or do you think it's just— it's not really pressure at all, it's just how you, how you raise your kids?

That's a great question. I think every kid is different. I think inherently though, they feel the pressure. And then there's the flip side to it. As a parent, I feel the pressure too. Like, I need to make sure these kids grow up to be, you know, good people that contribute to the community and realize that success in life comes from lots of different places. And I remember when my kids were small, telling them what I thought the definition of success was. And it's got nothing to do with money. It has everything to do with time. Who you're spending your time with, where are you doing it, and what are you doing? Like, if you can do the things that you enjoy doing every day, you can be successful. That's why, you know, farmers living in Patagonia have wonderful, happy lives. And, you know, we are tied into a material world. United States is material. Dallas is material in a big, big way. And trying to see past that and seeing the humanity of people and what's important. Um, you know, like I said, I think my wife has done a wonderful job, like, instilling those values in the kids. They all want to be successful. They all want to travel the world. They all want to do amazing things and be adventurous. But I know that my kids will stop and help someone, you know, the moment they see someone needs help. Their humanity is there. And I think that's what I'm most proud of about my kids, whether they you know, make a ton of money in business or not really is irrelevant to me. Are they good people? Do they have a good heart?

So what do you think that you did different that so many people have failed? And again, and this is anecdotal at best, because the, the only reason you would know that somebody would fail is if you look on social media and you see some of these trashy reality TV shows. Sure. You know, but like, again, what is it that you're doing right, and what is that they're doing wrong?

From my perspective, I think every child, and it doesn't matter the socioeconomic background they come from, what they need is your time. And they don't need time doing extravagant, amazing things. They just need your time. They want to be with you, at least until like the age of 13 through 17, then they disappear for a while and then they come back. But I think it's just spending time with them. So from an early age, I took my kids all over the world. If I had business meetings, I'd take him to business meetings. I'll never forget one time Carl was like 13 or 14, and I had a large development shop in Transylvania, Romania. And we flew into Paris, and then we were going into Romania. And I remember getting to the hotel in France, and Carl opens the room and runs and jumps on the bed and just like floats into it. And he's like, oh my God, France and Paris is amazing! And then we got to Romania a couple days later and opened the hotel room door, ran and jumped off on the bed, bounced and hit the wall. That's the difference between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. So just having them in the room and the conversations and taking them throughout the world. And I remember interviewing people over the phone, and when we— I'd interview people and I'd say, hey, it's going to be on speakerphone, I want all the kids in the room. And then at the end of the call, you'd have a 7-year-old Sophie or 10-year-old Carl be like, thumbs up, neutral, or down. At the end of the call. And I'd ask them, so why is it a thumbs down? Well, the person never followed up on the two questions and didn't really answer them. So from a very early age, they were picking up on how people responded in ways that had nothing to do with the actual expertise of the business. And I think we can all agree as entrepreneurs, when you hire people, yeah, expertise is great, but attitude is everything.

I would love to see that email, like the follow-up. Mr. Rags, 7-year-old, I just want to follow up. Thank you for the opportunity to interview, but just so I can learn, why was I not accepted? My 13-year-old said, my 13-year-old said, you didn't answer the question fully.

Well, I love those stories. My oldest daughter, an SMU grad, excuse me, a Tulane grad. We have an SMU grad here in town. It's coming to work for me next month. She got her master's degree in education, taught in the school system, had her first child last year and said, "Dad, I don't want to go back into the classroom. I want to be able to spend more time at home with my son." So she's absolutely a hybrid worker for me, and it's incredibly rewarding for me. She understands it's a real job, right? And she's qualified for it. But at the same time, it's really rewarding as a parent. My father was an early franchisee of Holiday Inns, which was founded by a high school classmate of his in Memphis in the 1950s. 1950s. And so he pledged my mother's wedding ring and a $10,000 cash value life insurance policy to buy the franchise rights to Tupelo, Mississippi.

I love this story.

And to get a $300,000 construction loan on a wedding ring and a $10,000 cash value life insurance policy. And he spent, you know, years growing that business. He took me to all of his job sites all over the country. When the hotels were finished, I would wash dishes and lay sod in big swimming pools. And he had a rule, my mother and father, that we had all of our meals, we had breakfast at the breakfast table, we had dinner at the dinner table, and it was not optional. You sat, and of course there were no cell phones, you sat at the table and my father would ask questions and he would pontificate on things that were happening. And we traveled a lot. My father was indifferent, but my mother was fully infected with wanderlust. So we got to travel the world and I got to do that for my children. And I think it's made them more intellectually curious.

Absolutely.

And it has made them, I think, have greater empathy and understanding of other people, other cultures, and made them better human beings. So I really appreciate hearing that. I wonder, you know, having sat at that table with my father, listening to him and participating in his business, really shaped how I view work and those things. Your brother started Mailchimp, the one business I actually know about. Thank you, Ryan. And you—

It's not one tech business.

Yeah, true. And you've built an incredible business as well. Were you sitting at the table with your parents getting— where did this come from?

My father was a first-generation immigrant from Germany. He enlisted in the US Army right after the war, came to the United States, met my mother in Wisconsin, and they drove around the country and fell in love with Albuquerque, New Mexico. And my dad founded a bakery and he named it after my brother and I, Dan Rex Bakery. So from the time I was a kid, I thought that I made your bread, you had the oil company, you had the car company, and all the families basically had businesses. So I thought that way from the time I was a little kid. He'd bring us to work all the time. When you're a first-generation immigrant and English is your fifth best language, you're not joining the country clubs and things. You're like working. You're trying to figure out how to solve the American dream. And my dad was certainly like that. He was at work constantly. So we'd go to work and I remember having so much pride, like seeing our names on the side of the building. You know, and as a kid you think the building's massive. You go back as an adult and it's kind of tiny. But seeing our names on the side of it gave us a lot of pride. And he would give us menial tasks at work. So work didn't become a thing that I dreaded. Work became a thing that I thought could become my purpose. So I just looked at it differently. Work wasn't work, it was living. And that's why I look at it now as an entrepreneur. I was talking to somebody the other day and they were talking about, you know, describe entrepreneurship to you. And I said, well, I think it's a lifestyle. It's a— it's not a job. It is a lifestyle. It's how you think and work. And you know as well as I do, and so do you, it's 24/7. Are you ever just able to shut off what you're doing at work? Maybe in some jobs, but certainly not as an entrepreneur. Certainly not as grinding it out. There's no way. There's no— what's that old saying? I think they said that there's, there's no elevator to success. You got to take the stairs.

So Elon Musk has a good quote too, where it's like entrepreneurship is just eating like glass or something.

Oh, eating glass. Or Reid Hoffman talks about, you know, putting together an airplane after you've jumped off the cliff and you have all the materials for it. And I describe that way, you know, as a pen over 15 years, it's gone through so many different technology changes.

It's got the amount of stress you've had the last 18 months. I can't imagine.

Oh my God. You know, literally the last 18 months is the most stress I've ever endured as a man. It was the most stressful things. I got a sneak peek into the first 9 models that Google is going to be offering through Gemini.

And we're—

I think we're only in like 3 or 4 right now. And where this is going is just— it's like a movie. It's like The Avengers. It's like having a conversation, conversation with Jarvis and going back and forth with that thing all day long. And we're going to see a whole slew of new devices that come out. We're all used to using our iPhones and things like that. And I think most of these devices in the future won't even have a screen. It'll be like this little mic that you hardly even know is on, and you're talking back and forth with it. And maybe it's got a little microphone in your ear that it's going back and forth as well. And maybe it integrates directly with the windshield of your car, and boom, all of a sudden everything that you want to see is there, or your TV. Like, the world is about to change in a very, very, very rapid and fundamental way. And AI itself is, you know, it's life or death when you look at it from a government perspective. We see it playing out in Ukraine right now. And those people are using drones now and countering the Russians. And you see what's happening in Iran with the different Shia drones that are coming out. The future of modern warfare is going to be who has the best AI and the best equipment with it. So it's just fascinating how all of our lives are changing pretty radically.

We had the head of the Brain Institute on a podcast. Eric Bennett. Eric Bennett, yeah. Along with an individual, former CEO of AT&T, who's on some boards where they're doing a lot of work in brain implants. And oh yeah, you know, I'm listening to you talk about, you know, the receptor and the communication and how things are going to change. And, you know, Musk says that you're going to be able to upload your, your, your brain, your thinking, whom you are into the cloud and the cloud. You can communicate in a way where you will be able to instead of having to go ask ChatGPT, it'll just be this instantaneous thing.

Yeah.

And presumably if you die physically, then you can download your— yeah, your intel. So I asked those two guests, I said, Ray Kurzweil wrote a book, Live Long Enough to Live Forever. He talked about the— what did he call it— the synchronicity or the unification, anyway, the merger of artificial intelligence and human biological And I asked them, you know, this sounds like science fiction. This sounds like something that may never happen or it's so far down the road. And they went, no, no, no, it's—

it's here.

It's coming. Yeah, it's coming fast.

Well, to stay on the theme of like national defense, one of our previous guests, Douglas Smith, he's no longer with the company when he was with us, but now he's on the board, main director for like the nuclear company. And he's— he's been in Old Parkland giving presentations and on energy. And one thing that I did not fully appreciate was when you couple energy with AI, how much energy is a national security asset because of how much energy AI takes. Absolutely. And then if you're a proponent of this, who wins AI race wins everything, wins all. There's a huge fear about China in AI.

Absolutely. And it's highly warranted. They're moving fast. And if you look at— now, this is just my opinion, so maybe I'm wrong on this, but in decades past, you would see China getting very aggressive with the US economically, and the steel industry is a good example, like dumping steel in our market, so we had to create artificial barriers and tariffs and that sort of thing. It seems like AI is perfect for the same sort of renaissance with China and the United States. Billions and billions, like people throw around the word billion now, like it's a dollar or something. So billions and billions of dollars to create these AI models, these advanced AI models. And if you track the models, you can see almost on a week-to-week basis, which model is a little bit better than the other one. And if you look at it outside of just the US manufacturers of these models, you have a number of different Chinese companies that have created very compelling models. Maybe they're not as good as Anthropic today, but they're as good as Anthropic was 6 months ago.

Yeah, a fraction of the cost.

At a fraction of the cost. And China seems to have taken the mindset that they're going to offer these tools as open-source alternatives. So to me, that's just replaying dumping steel into the US market. They're going to do the same thing with the AI models. And if you look at how most— let's say most— the way our system's built, we use AWS and tools like Bedrock. So what we've learned about AI is if you build a company that uses AI, there's some AIs that are better than others for different tasks. So what you'll want to do inside your application is you might have one AI for image processing, and maybe that's ChatGPT, and maybe you have another one for engineering, and maybe that's Claude. Or maybe I have another one that is really more into social engineering and the conversation that's happening. Maybe that's Grok. Well, you're going to want to be able to interchange your AI models throughout your application depending upon what the end user is trying to do. So you see that already where it's very easy to swap different models and then you have the intelligence factor that you tie into it and then the rising costs. The cost to just for inference, these massive companies like ChatGPT and Anthropic are just— it's unsustainable. They're burning money so fast and what we're all consuming and getting hooked on, it's not economically viable at the numbers that we currently have. So something's got to change at some point. And when I look at the whole industry, I get fascinated by companies like Google. Google is one of the first companies I know of. Maybe there's others, but one of the first companies I know of, they vertically integrated the supply chain for AI. They have their own chips, they have their own intelligence. They probably have the greatest data repository in the world. At one point, does Google just come out and say, hey, we're going to be 80% less than everyone else? Does that just destroy the business model for a ChatGPT or Anthropic? I don't know.

That's a great observation.

It's going to be interesting to see how it all flushes out.

Well, and if Elon gets his data centers in space— oh yeah, you know, A, he no longer needs water, no longer needs energy because he's solar, and then it cuts the cost dramatically. And then he can, like, again, cut the cost probably 1,000%.

It's, it's just fascinating how many things will change.

Well, and that's, that's both exciting and really scary.

Um, yeah, probably adding to that 18-month stress.

Yeah, I—

oh yeah, you know, I, I I try to read a lot and keep up. And I went to school with a guy in Memphis named Paul Tudor Jones, who's a well-known hedge fund guy. And he opined that, you know, AI was either going to basically destroy the world or, you know, or be this wonderful tool. And I read something from a former chief technology officer at Microsoft who said, oh, it's going to cure cancer and it's going to do all these other things.

When, when I lecture at SMU, I have to pause real quick because I've seen so many memes where it's like, AI Cure Cancer, and it just uses AI to like enhance like Star Wars, Naomi, what's her name, whatever, whatever the main character and her physical attributes. And it's just like, AI, we're supposed to try to solve cancer, but all we're doing is acting like we're 12-year-old teenage boys.

Oh, right.

Yeah. Sorry, I don't mean to. No.

And you know, when I finish my lectures at SMU and there are 4 or 5 students that want to talk afterwards, It's the same question. Am I going to have a job? Absolutely. Should I go here or should I go there? And is AI going to eliminate that? And it reminds me a little bit of '08, '09. I was running a wealth management firm for ultra-high net worth investors and the world was ending with the subprime mortgage meltdown. And I thought, I'm in Memphis, Tennessee. I need to go upstream and try to figure out. And so I went to New York to the financial center and I went to Washington and I came back more confused than I was because the answer they had was, we don't know. We don't know how this is going to play out.

I saw a headline like maybe a week or two ago where firms that thought they were going to save money on labor by implementing AI are actually spending more money now on the AI than they were on the labor itself.

Yeah, it's people figuring it out. It's—

are you more excited or fearful?

Oh, no, I'm more excited. But it also is scary because everything that we've ever known to be true about the way we've lived and worked and operated is basically going to be completely reinvented or is being completely reinvented as we speak.

Which means dislocation.

Dislocation.

Opportunity and dislocation.

Yeah. I sit on the board at the, at SMU and the Dedmon School. And in our board meetings, we have discussions about what AI means. And so I spend a lot of time kind of thinking about it. And historically, it kind of upends the whole concept of how everybody learned. 'Cause in the past, when I went to SMU, I went to a lecture, I wrote my notes, I memorized things, I took a test, and it was all about the answer. Did you have the right answer or not? And the future is not about the answers, it's about the questions. How do you ask questions in a compelling way, in a way where it's not just a question that's asked and it's answered, it's an ongoing conversation that gets applied to every aspect of your life. And it's fascinating to change the way that we all think about that. What are the questions? If knowledge is free and knowledge is fully available, then what are we asking for? What do we want? And I think by operating like that, it'll take the human consciousness to a level that none of us can comprehend. The kids that are being born now, by the time that they're in kindergarten, you know, 7th grade, 8th grade, their ability to get information instantly. I mean, when I was a kid, I was going to the library all the time, right? And I have my encyclopedias. I'm going through it. My kids, they could Google things. I used to think, oh my God, what a big difference that is. You can get instant information anytime you want. All you have to do is go to Google. Now you can have the world's greatest professor with you So the things that we need to teach our kids are about questioning things and curiosity. And then for guys like us that have kind of been around for a little bit, even the younger folks that are in college now, rethinking how they think about everything. We have to reprogram ourselves to adapt to this new world in a sense. And I find myself doing it all the time at work.

Well, it's interesting because you bring up the It's the 10,000 hours thing with like Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, because in that book he's talking about how you have people like Bill Gates where he, when he was a teenager or even youthful, he was able to go to the local university and play on the computer when there was only one computer in town.

Exactly.

So he was able to get those 10,000 hours much quicker. So to your point where you have young babies now they're going to hit their 10,000 hours using AI way before, you know, especially how much they're on, on digital devices anyway.

Absolutely.

But, you know, even the last 12 months, 2 years of AI adoption, where it was, what is this? And then it was all about the prompting. Now it's— prompting is not even— it's not discussed as much anymore. It's more like, what are the right questions? What are the right systems? And it's like, what's next?

Yeah, integration. You mentioned the word, or the, the book Blink. So in the old way, we read the book Blink, maybe there are certain things that we remember from it and we retain from it. Maybe there are certain things that we start applying in our lives. In the future, I think you read the, the book Blink, you let your AI know that you really like the word Blink or Atomic Habits or Good to Great or whatever the book is and say, help me apply this to my daily life. So now Blink isn't something that sits in a remote corner of your brain where you remember a few things. No, it remembers the entire context of Blink and it knows how you act and what you're saying and what you're working on. So you can apply these great thinkers to your everyday life.

So, so bringing it back to Asset Panda, and we talked about earlier about how you see explosive growth and scalability and opportunity in the post-AI integration of the company. What does that mean? Because like, is that $10 business a $10 billion market? Is it $10 trillion? Like, I have no clue what the numbers are. Sure.

No, it's a massive opportunity. It's a massive opportunity because it covers so many different sectors of the economy that are covered by purpose-built SaaS applications right now. Or not even ideated in a certain market. So tools like Asset Panda become, can become ubiquitous because essentially what they are are highly configurable databases that adapt to the way the clients work. In the past, it was a human that had to configure it for the client based on the specifications of the client. The new way is I own a company and I am an electrical distributor. Set up my account for me, and boom, it sets up the account for you. It gives you ideas that you didn't have before. It gives you best practices that didn't exist before. You add AI into a structured database like that, and then it goes from asking the question to beginning the conversation and then continuing the conversation going over time. You will no longer have— this is my opinion too, so bear with me for a minute— but we were all brought up in silos. I took the history class and English class and I graduated. They told me I was good at math, so I ended up in finance. And within finance, I was a marketing director, I was a salesperson, I was a banker, I was a petroleum engineer. There's all these different things that were very focused on a career path, if you will. And what I see happening is I think all of those silos and career paths just they just dissolve. What's the point? If knowledge is ubiquitous, then the person that spent 30 years learning HR, where all that knowledge is right there minus, you know, the human touch of it in that example, finance may be the same way. So I don't look at any of my employees as anything in particular. I call them athletes. You're a smart person. I think of one gentleman, that we hired out of Texas A&M as a financial analyst, basically like a business analyst. And I mean, just an absolute whiz with spreadsheets, just incredible what the guy could do with data cubes and things. And to see the work that he does now every day, he does the work of a CMO in some cases. He does the work of an analyst in some cases. He's learned how to use Claude, where Claude basically does the database work right now. So when he's looking at what his day-to-day efforts are going to be, it's all tied around with what is a problem that we're trying to solve. And I don't care if you don't have any experience in marketing. If I need comparisons against these 5 companies, I need you to generate those for me. The other thing that's changed in the business world I think you're going to see happen pretty consistently is that the concept of delivery When should delivery happen? Oftentimes we'll have projects that in a previous world might have taken 6 months, 9 months, a year, a month to complete. And maybe we'll come up with the idea on Tuesday and say, we want it done by Wednesday afternoon. The only way you can do it is if you master using the AI tools.

A former guest of ours, Lane Kasselman, CEO of Blockchain.com, and multi-billion whatever, they're in the process of doing an IPO this year. But he was saying across the board, they're an AI-first company. So mandated. And I try to do it in my company too, whether it be an email, anything you're doing, use AI first. But at the end of the day, you are 100% responsible for that activity. Yeah. And I think going back to your point earlier, you know, you're not going to be replaced by AI, but you're going to be replaced by somebody who knows AI.

Yeah.

And I think that's a massive thing to implement. And we just had a recent guest who he laid off half his engineer team because his marketing team was going to market with tools that they created when the engineers were still, you know, crossing T's, dotting I's.

Oh, absolutely.

Using cloud code.

Yeah. Yeah, we see it in our development environment where, like I said, the silos are disappearing. So the dev engineers, they're doing product ideation, they're doing product research, they're doing development, they're writing agents that do development, that do product research. They're tying it into UI/UX, so user experience. So you have these people that are almost becoming like superhuman. That can do multiple jobs that used to be siloed but now are just part of solving a problem. And I think that's the way corporate America is going to start looking at this. At least the ones that adapt and succeed will see that they have opportunities and problems and they're going to put smart people, regardless of what their background was, into solving these problems by using AI tools.

And that goes back to the potential dislocation. And it's interesting to me to hear people on the political spectrum on both the left and the right talking about a basic income because of the fear that there's going to be such a dislocation of people that how people earn a living and how they function is under direct threat.

Direct threat. It's going to be so different. But I'll give you my rose-colored view of the whole thing. Yes, a lot of people are going to lose their traditional jobs. The silos are going to be eliminated. The concept of solving problems is going to be more important than having someone in a specific role that's waiting to solve that problem. But what I see happening is this beautiful future where you might have people that historically might have taken a career path of a job, but maybe they become entrepreneurs. There's something unique about everybody in this room that makes you, you, and your life experience, you. And there are certain things about you that are unique to you, like you might like to hunt or fish or travel a certain way, or you have expertise about a certain type of good or product or service. Well, now, if you allow your creativity to present itself in a business opportunity, like we're in a pig room, maybe you love pigs, right?

So somebody does.

You become the expert in pigs, you source pigs, you sell pigs. I don't know how many people are on this planet that are connected to the internet. I think they're like 7, 8 billion people total. And if you think about what it takes to create an interesting business, you don't need millions and millions of people. You might need another like 5,000 people that also like pigs. So I think the technology adaptation will actually be a beautiful thing for society. And you'll see a lot more entrepreneurial endeavors created because even things like, I don't know, you use Cloud Code and you can build a website in Cloud Code. You used to have to hire a company to do that. Marketing information. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So if one person can use AI to help them bring their passion to reality and they can find a market because we're all interconnected, I actually think it might end up being a huge positive for society. And I'm not— so I'm conservative and I'm not the kind of person that thinks a fundamental basic income is a good thing in society ultimately. So I hope society transforms and it really looks for ways to pull the exceptional side of all of us out of us, allow us to express that and maybe sell it online or find a way to monetize it.

I like your view. I hope you're right. I think about like truck drivers. What I read says 9 out of 10 truck drivers, there won't be jobs. The autonomous vehicles that basically trucking from East Coast to West Coast or wherever, a long haul, is going to be autonomous vehicles, and it'll be the last mile is where the truck driver has to come in for some period of time. So the question is, can you retrain this massive amount of people to become entrepreneurial to do things? I'm not an advocate for a basic income either. And I don't want to be the guy that rains on the parade. I guess I would say if my needle on my gauge between excitement and fear, I'm probably a little tilted on the fear side, whereas you're— a little tilted on the excitement side. There are clearly some wonderful things that are happening and are going to continue to happen that will be positive, life-changing events for us. But there's going to be some disruptions, significant.

One thing that you were talking about with the employees and having to master a lot of things, it reminds me of one of my favorite quotes that everybody gets wrong, which is that a jack of all trades is a master of none. But no one remembers the back half, which is is oftentimes better than a master of one.

Is that the finish?

That's the— I see.

No, I've only done the first part.

I learned something. Yeah.

Most people don't know the full quote because everybody say a jack of all trades, master of none. But it's oftentimes better than a master of one.

Yeah.

So I love things like that where idioms where everybody knows about it, but they're like, do you know the full aspect of it? My favorite, and this has nothing to do with this conversation, but it's our podcast. We do whatever the hell we want. Trust but verify. So, absolutely. You know where that comes from?

Ronald Reagan.

I do.

Oh, I know it from a Ronald Reagan speech, but that's it.

I thought it did.

So this is the—

that's whom I heard repeat it.

If it originated by someone else. I'm so glad you said that. I could give you a buck. Yeah, I give you a dollar because most people attribute it to Ronald Reagan. And Ronald Reagan, yes, did make it famous when he was talking about the Star Wars. —what was it in Star Wars? Russia. Russia, nuclear, Soviet Union. But the irony, though, is the trust but verify comes from a Russian proverb. So, it's like the trust but verify, nobody even verifies where the trust but verify came from. So, I just love that little random factoid. But what's next? Is it a recapitalization event? Is it an exit? Is it a legacy play for the kids? Do you do a new startup? Do you travel the world? Are you a lifelong entrepreneur worker? Like, what's next? I love to work. I hope I work.

I hope I do some work the day I die. So it's just ingrained in my DNA. I've had the good fortune as an entrepreneur owning companies to be able to travel the world, see the world, do, do things. I've never had any limitations that way. I remember in my 20s I created a bucket list of everything I wanted to do, and when I turned 30, I completed them all. Wow. So then I did another one with my 30s, completed them all. 40s, completed them all. And then I started at 50, and you know, 50 seems old, but it's young.

And it's only young if you're 50. Yeah, if you're 50.

Yeah, there you go. It's all relative. The youngest of the older people.

I'm 45 and I'm like, 40, 50 seems kind of young, but I guarantee you, we asked Tanner, she's like, God, yeah, how old is that? A bunch of old men. That old Because I guarantee you, obviously, it's at this table, young, middle, oldest. But in something like dinner's wine, we're all in the same category.

Yeah, true. Very true. Yeah. So for me, this is about legacy. And I've had the good fortune of starting, building, and selling multiple companies. I'm not the kind of person that needs a different house or different kind of cars. The things I enjoy doing, I like spending time with my family. I like to travel. I like adventure travel. I'm kind of a thrill seeker a little bit. I've done a lot of those things. So for me, it's about building a company that's a legacy, not only for me, but for the world. And I think Asset Panda can be that thing. It solves a problem that anybody that, you know, any language, any currency, no matter where you are, it solves a problem for them. So I want to, you know, create something that can help the world in its own small way and We talked about loss prevention earlier. That's a big thing. Time savings is another. And if you look at the foundation of any good company, there's two assets that matter, in my opinion. The first are the people and the second are the equipment that people use to do their jobs. And Asset Panda solves that second problem. But as we solve the second problem, AI has ballooned what we can do within that problem set. And as we begin to expand, tools like Asset Panda, I think, will become ubiquitous. They'll become like your coworker in your daily life. And that's what gets me up every day. Our TAMs are massive. We have a small percentage of each of them, but growing. And the way that we begin to offer our service model, that's a lot less high-touch, and allows people just to seamlessly integrate and experience it. Even, you know, prior to— in the past, you had to buy the whole application. Well, as you go forward, if you want to use the inspection tool, you can use that. So there's different parts of the GeoTool that we're announcing is extraordinary and solves a problem that every business has. So I see an opportunity here to build a massive global brand. And I, uh, I'm committed to it. I'm obsessed with it, uh, and I won't stop until we do it. That's my mindset.

We already talked about how the potential pressure on, on your kids having a very successful father and uncle. On the flip side, for your parents looking at, you know, two kids, they got to be incredibly proud, especially coming from you know, a small bakery?

No, absolutely. Unfortunately, I lost my dad when I was 10. And so he passed away suddenly of a heart attack. And that's, you know, part of the story of my family is, is the hardship, you know, and the things that we endured. We were almost homeless. You know, my grandparents moved to New Mexico, from New Mexico to Dallas, let us live with them. So I understood both sides of the track. I understand having my name on the side of a bakery and living in a nice middle-class neighborhood to like having nothing and being evicted from your house. And when that happens to you at the age that I was at, it becomes sort of a core foundational thing. That's why I think part of the reason I told you I think I want to work until the day I die, I think it comes from that. You know, when you wake up in the morning and you don't know where you're going to get your next meal and your stomach hurts because you're hungry and you, you need clothes and, you know, you're 11, 12 years old and you have to be resourceful and figure out how to, you know, make those things happen. I think it just changes your DNA. So for us, it was the family story. It was rooted in an immigrant who, you know, spoke English as his fifth language and just work, work, work. And then my mother, she was never diagnosed, but she was somewhere on the autism spectrum, I think. And she passed away from pancreatic cancer right at the beginning of the pandemic. But she did get to see my brother on the COVID of Inc. magazine, you know, and that sort of thing. I know that created a lot of pride with her. And you know, you were talking about things that happen in your lives, maybe the things you do with your kids to help them become whoever they're gonna become. And one of the things I remember that my mother did is, you know, I'd go into her room and ask her questions, and she'd have me wait while she was working on something. But on her mirror, she would have quotes, and they'd be quotes about being successful. They'd be quotes about, success and failure, just real interesting philosophical quotes that we all might, you know, have a couple of them that we really like that sort of inspire us. And I'll never forget walking in that room. I was so annoyed. I was like, oh my God, I have to wait here. I'm gonna get these quotes everywhere. Well, I read those quotes every single day, and I realized as an adult that those quotes ended up becoming part of my ethos. They ended up becoming part of how I thought about life. So my mother, in her own way, sort of implanted these seeds, at least ways of thinking that ultimately ended up changing my DNA.

So yeah, the last 15 years I've been in the entrepreneur space, the event space, the guru space, and the amount of speakers on stage— mindset, mindset, mindset. Every time I hear that, I'm like, shut up, just tell me how to make money. Yeah. Then now as an entrepreneur, you're like, oh, I get it. Because like entrepreneurship is, is not when do you run out of money, it's when you run out of money, how do you keep going? Or, or, and then when does your company fail? It's not when you run out of money, it's when you run out of gas. And when do you stop fighting? When do you stop doing the thing? 100%. So it— for as, as annoyed as I was all those years about mindset, it's I get it. I still don't want to hear it on stage, but, but I get it.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Those experiences are so powerful. My dad grew up in the Great Depression and, you know, they— I don't know that they had severe circumstances, what you grew up with, but they were impoverished. Sure. And he had a, he had a mindset around that and he created wealth for himself. But I remember I came home one night from school with a bag of Wendy's hamburgers And he grounded me. He said, "We have perfectly good food in the refrigerator here, and you're going to go waste money anyway." And so we're all products of the environment that we grow up in. My father was never able to— and not that he should have— able to sort of shake those foundational things that he had. Absolutely. I grew up in a different environment, the benefit of my father's success. That allowed me not to have some of those experiences. But he made me work from the time I can remember. I had to work and I hated it at the time. And now I can't imagine— like you, I can't imagine not working.

It's who I am. Absolutely.

And I take great pleasure.

And the world needs your experience. It needs the— what the world has given you. We owe it to give it back in some form or fashion. Yeah. Books, book recommendations. So I'm a big fan of Jim Collins. So Good to Great was one of the most impactful books I'd ever read. You know, the concept of two companies with basically the same opportunity and one really excels and the other one doesn't, I've always thought was fascinating. How to Win Friends and Influence People, uh, the classics, even, you know, Purple Cow. Atomic Habits is something that I've read recently. So I enjoy consuming content now on a Peloton. So I'll do that. I'll do the speakers and I'll listen to it. And a lot of times I'll do like 1.5 speed to, you know, get through the books a little bit quicker. But just have an insatiable curiosity. You know, that's part of being successful in anything in life. And even more important in an AI world where you have all this access to all this information and how do you aggregate it into your life and then how do you build your own AI model. So every time you interact with someone, it has the content of How to Win Friends and Influence People, and it shows you, hey, you could have done this better, you could have been like this, you could have said this. I think it's just a different mindset now that's going to be incorporated in the ethos of all of us as we use the technology. Have you read, uh, The Fish That Ate the Whale?

I have not. I've probably talked about on this podcast at least every other episode. But I think you would enjoy it because it's an immigrant story. It's a Russian Jew immigrant, and he saw the opportunity of bananas on the docks of New Orleans that were rotting. And he goes, what's going on? And the logistics was like, well, by the time we get on the train, get it placed, they rot. So that's what he's like, can I have those? They're like, yeah, you can have those. So he figured out how to get bananas distributed for free, and then he made a lot of money, and then he ended up buying United Fruit Company, or whatever it was called. But the reason you have Banana Republics is because this guy— yeah, but he was the main— I forget his name, but he's the main donor for Tulane in New Orleans. But it's an amazing story. It's an immigrant story, but it's an entrepreneurism capitalism with a little bit of CIA covert takeover countries. Love it. Yeah, so Well, Rex, thank you so much for being here.

This is a great conversation. Yeah, this has been great. It's been a lot of fun.

I will say that I think this is one of the first ones we've actually dug into, like, the family legacy. And, and I really like that, that we were able to have that opportunity. Yeah, no, it's cool.

And I really appreciate everything you said about Carl. I think he's a wonderful young man, but hearing it from you just makes me feel good. So thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you again.