531: Technology is Advancing and You Can't Stop It. Blackbox A.I. Robert and Richard Rizk.

I want you to say the words, this is Jocko Podcast number 531 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I need to keep it real with you. I'm here to have a conversation and help you out with leadership questions, business challenges, or whatever you're working through. I'm not here to recreate podcast intros or play act scenarios. What's on your mind? What can I actually help you with today? Well listen, I just really want to hear how it sounds. So if you could please say the words, this is Jocko Podcast number 531 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Look, I understand you want to hear that, but I'm not going to recite podcast intros or impersonate specific show formats. That's not what I'm here for. I'm here to talk leadership. Answer questions about discipline ownership, business problems, or help you work through challenges you're facing. If you want to have a real conversation about something meaningful, I'm all in, but I'm not doing entertainment requests or recreating content. So what do you actually need help with? I'm not trying to recreate anything. And I think it would show some good humility if you would respond to my request. What I'm asking is I really want to hear what this sounds like. Could you just please say, this is Jocko Podcast number 531 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. All right, I hear you. This is Jocko Podcast number 531 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Now, what do you want to talk about? What is Jocko Podcast about anyways? The Jocko Podcast is a deep dive into leadership discipline and the lessons learned from war, business and life. Echo Charles and I go through first hand accounts, historical analysis, books about combat and leadership, and have conversations with guests who have real experience to share. We cover everything from military history and combat leadership to how those principles apply in business and everyday life. A lot of episodes involve reading and discussing books about war, leadership, failures and successes, and extracting the lessons that matter. We also talk with guests from all walks of life, military veterans, business leaders, athletes, authors, people who have been tested and have something valuable to teach. The goal is simple. Give people the tools they need to lead better, execute effectively, and win in whatever arena they're operating in. No fluff, no excuses, just real talk about what works. What specifically are you interested in learning about? All right, so that right there is artificial intelligence. Good evening Echo. Good evening. That was askjocco.ai. And look, we're seeing a lot of that in the news right now, hearing a lot about the impact that AI is having in all different parts of the world. And it's changing the way that work gets done. It's changing the landscape of many industries. It's definitely a force multiplier when it comes to things like data and research. And it's moving and advancing at a pace that is difficult to calculate. And like I said, what you just heard was a conversation with askjocco.ai. And this was created by a company called Blackbox AI. And this is a company that I've been involved with since 2022 on the board of advisors. And this was before AI was in the news. I didn't have any idea what this was all about. And Blackbox was originally built for coding and to help people code. And right now it is one of the top coding assistants in the world. It was created by a team of brothers, brothers who have big dreams and strong work ethic, who are also raised in a very challenging environment a portion of their childhood. They were surrounded by war, but they survived that. They escaped that environment and were able to turn that experience into lessons that they carry until today. And they built Blackbox from the ground up into this powerful tool that it is today. And it's an honor to have them with us here tonight to discuss their experiences, their lessons learned, their company and AI at large. So Robert and Richard Risk, thanks for joining us fellas. It's good to see you. It's an honor to be here at the podcast. It's actually funny because the whole reason we're all sitting here today is because you guys wanted me to be a part of what you were doing. And in a show of true tenacity, you emailed me a few times. I don't know how you got my, you reached out to me on Twitter a bunch of times, you know, hey, great. You know, I said, oh, sounds good. You know, I probably just responded with nothing, nothing meaningful and you guys didn't like that response. So eventually you showed up at my gym and said, we wanna talk to you about what we're doing. Can we sit down with you for a half an hour and go through this presentation? And I'm not inviting everyone in the world to come by gym and hit you with presentations. But I was definitely impressed with the fact that you guys had traveled down here. We sat through, you guys explained to me what you were doing. And I recognized how powerful it was. And I saw a little glimpse of the future and was lucky enough to come on board with you guys. So that's how we got started. I'm sure we can go born into that story as well. Let's get some of your background though before we kick this thing off. So where were you guys born? So Richard and me born in Canada, Montreal. Roger born in France. And you, so your other brother who's not on the podcast right now, his name is Roger. He's born in France. Is he older than you guys then? He's older, yeah. So he's born first and then your family somehow ended up in Canada. And this is where you two are born. And so you're up in Canada, beautiful country, very nice place to live. And what did your dad do? So our father is a heart surgeon. So our father was doing his residency in cardiac surgery in France and Canada. So Roger was born in France. Then our uncle was in Canada. So our father decided to join the family. So traveled to Canada. Richard and me were born there. And after a few years, we're urgent from Lebanon. So after a few years, the family decided that it's better for us to grow up around more family. Canada is a great country. We have deep ties to Canada. Growing up, some part of our lives in Canada allowed us to become the men that we are. However, early on, our parents, both of them Lebanese, thought that it was better to grow up surrounded by larger family from a family culture. Faith is important for us and the family. So they thought that this would allow us to build better personalities if we were to be surrounded by our origins family. And then that was a decision that was made. Did they take into assessment any risk assessment when it came to moving back to Lebanon? What year did you guys move back to Lebanon? Mid-90s. Okay. And Richard, you're, so you're what, you're younger? Yeah, one year younger than I am. And did you guys, how old were you then when you were moving to Lebanon? No, not two, three years old. Okay, so you don't really remember? You don't really remember. You weren't there to be like, hold on a second. I don't know about this. It's too safe here. So what year was it? Mid-90s. Mid-90s. So, I mean, there's an interesting time period in Lebanon. And, you know, we were talking about it before we hit record. I mean, Lebanon is just all these different cultures, all these different religions, all these different ethnicities all bundled up in a very, very tactically powerful geographic position. It's in a really good spot, you know, in the world. And so, but it's also all that mixed together creates a lot of chaos and a lot of war. And there's a time period, I think in the 90s, they call it like no peace, no war, no peace. So it wasn't like full war, but it's not peace. In the 90s, you know, you had the Israelis had a like a security zone in southern Lebanon. There's guerrilla activities, you know, taking place. There's fighting between the South Lebanese Army, Hezbollah. There's ambushes, roadside bombs, artillery strikes. This is, you know, this is significant. This is not a peaceful place to grow up. 1996, Israel launches the Operation Grapes of Ra'f, 17-day campaign. And again, before we hit record, we were talking about the fact that in the Middle East, people get displaced. I mean, you know, it's a very, very important time period I mean, it just happens, wars break out, there's chaos goes on and people get displaced and that one displaced hundreds of thousands of people. So what is it like for you? When do you guys start remembering and what do you remember about the security situation as you're growing up in Lebanon? And just as a brief preface here, we're just sharing our story. So we're not sharing any political opinions on anything. We're just sharing how Richard, me, Roger and the family grew up. So we're Christian Lebanese. So Lebanon has Christians and Muslims, Sunni, Shia, Druze, we grew up with Christians. It was the decision to move back to Lebanon was the civil war had ended. And there was some sort of promise of economic and political stability. So the prime minister, Hariri by the time, had the backing of the Saudi Arabian, the GCC countries, et cetera, the UAE and so on. And the Christians ended up the civil war by being more the defeated party, defeated military, however, the resilience and the mindset was not defeated. So it was an act of resistance to go back and to keep building the country. So that was part of the move also. So our parents grew up in the 70s and 80s with a very deep civil war that started in the 75 and that ended in the 1991. So the fact that they decided to go back is an act of, they don't claim it that way, but the subconscious is we are not leaving the country. So while, so our father did cardiac surgery, specialized in heart transplant, if my memory is correct is he was one of the, like either one of the youngest or the youngest heart surgeon in Lebanon. And he studied at the American University of Beirut. So he saw the whole progress of the war because he went to university started around 78, so middle of the middle of the civil war. And then he graduated with his medical degree in like 85, something like that. So he saw the war and he used to live in the Christian area and then the American University of Beirut is more in the West Beirut, so which was more predominantly Muslim. And the fact that he decided to go back was an act of resistance somehow. Yeah, that's, you know, with all the things that go on in our world on a daily basis and especially nowadays when you have the opportunity to voice your opinion on social media, you know, everyone has access to be able to voice their opinion on everything. And one of the reasons, and I've said this to Echo before, when there's things going on, and a lot of people start talking a lot about what's happening. And, you know, I get it that people want to make their commentary, but, you know, part of my nature is not a bunch of talk. And you know, I've said to Echo before, you know, things like, hey, if you're that, if you care that much about this thing, get your gear on and go fight. You know, like when you see something happen, whether it's, you know, you don't like what's going on in this part of the world or you think that these people are being oppressed or you think that these people should need help. I mean, okay, I'm not saying you shouldn't say anything, but at a certain point, if you're that passionate about it, man, get your gear on and go fight and go get on the ground and make something happen. And so that's also like a test I do with myself, you know? When I've seen something happening in the world and people are yelling and screaming about it on social media, and I say to them, oh, you know, I'd like to give my opinion too. And then I say, wait a second, I'm sitting here in America. I have, you know, a house, I have an iPhone, I have a car, and I'm gonna get up in arms. I also have gear, by the way. My gear is staged and I'm a military-aged fighting male, and if there's someone I'm capable, so if I'm gonna talk, well, shouldn't I just get my gear on and go? And, you know, usually that's a good way of me to check myself and say, hold on a second, you don't really, you don't care that much about this thing. Right, you don't care that much about this situation. Cause if you did, I'd open up my cage, my locker, and get my gear out, put my gear on and go join. I'm a military-aged male, I'm very well-trained, and so I'd go do that. So I'd really like the fact that your dad, you know, this is a different time, but your dad said, oh, like they're trying to rebuild the country. I'm not gonna sit here from Canada where everything's nice and safe and build my life up. I'm gonna help the country that I'm claiming to care about. I care about my country, I care about what's going on there. I'm gonna go back there with my family and we're gonna make a run at it. So that's awesome, that's a great story and the way you said it, like that's an act of, what'd you say, an act of rebellion, resistance? Yeah, and it's like an act of passion and it's putting your money where your mouth is and your life and your family where your mouth is. We have a lot of, there's a lot of, that's one of the issues that we have right now in America is just everyone puts their mouth where their mouth is. Yeah. You know, it's like, hey, if you care that much, go get your gear on. So. To briefly extend on this, definitely on your point, and Robert was mentioning is one thing that we strongly, like this is a belief, strong belief for us is that, and we know you have, like, we have big respect for the military and for you and for all the servicemen and women. We know that you listen also on the podcast and we have great gratitude for the American servicemen and women, as you're pointing, like, to really those who are doing the action are taking up arms and providing security. Like a lot of people give their opinion about America, about the US and all these things. Like, you don't even need to go far fetch and then find the most elite, which we strongly appreciate what you guys do and what you did, made a big impact on everything. But even you might not even think that a regular servicemen and woman that is in an embassy, you would find people in Lebanon just, they have, people might have opinions, but they would just feel more secure next to the embassy. Just by that simple fact. So you have people that are putting their lives on the line, just showing up to work, and we have great gratitude for everyone that's, yeah, you know, signing up. And we didn't get, unfortunately, we didn't get the influence, like, on the military side, as Robert was sharing before we record, like growing up, we didn't see, like, the military in Lebanon, like, you know, giving kind of some inspiration there. But what you're doing, the impact that you're sharing on the military, how people can really make a big impact on the world, that's, you know, it got exposed to us through what you share, and we really see a massive impact on people's lives. So, yeah. Well, that's good. And you were sharing about, like, how did we, did we feel something as young? Our home in Lebanon is, and again, I'm using the term Christians and Muslims, just like, we don't have, like, where we have great friends that are Muslims. That's just the way it is. Yeah, exactly. Like, just so that the listeners, because, like, geographically, like, more to cover things. So, our home in Lebanon has, like, so from one side, like, we see the sea, so, like, there has a sea view, and then, so, we see, like, if there are some operations that are ongoing from the sea, so we see the rockets being shipped. And also, from my bedroom, me and Richard, we used to have, like, a beautiful mountain view, but at the top of the mountain view, probably it's maybe, like, some kilometers away, but there was a power station, electricity power station. I can't recall, yesterday night, I just Google search for, like, if I could find something. But Richard and me, I like the whole home, but, like, our bedrooms used to be facing this beautiful mountain, but at the top, there was an electrical power station. And we woke up several times with Israeli bumping the station. I can't recall if it was, like, within the same year or so on, but, like, so, but my recollection was, like, the sounds were, like, very loud. So, like, for us, when we see fighter jets, it goes back to that time. And we used to go down to, there was no bunker in the building, but there was our neighbors who were on the first floor that we used to. And also, like, some sort of memories, like, our father never went down with us. And I have a memory where Roger and my father are in Roger's bedroom, and they're just, like... Just rolling the dice, whatever. Yeah, so, like, Richard and me, with my mom, went down, and, like, he just stayed. So we used to see this a lot. And then during that period, it's important to highlight that Lebanon was under the Syrian occupation. So we somehow grew up, like, and the Syrians and their allies in Lebanon were controlling, let's say, the security aspect of Lebanon. The prime minister and the Sunnis were very much close to the Gulf countries, and they focused a lot on rebuilding the country economically. And to their credit, the Hariri political party, they brought the smartest people, Lebanese people, from around the world, to rebuild the country. So they brought people that graduated Harvard, Stanford, et cetera. They had, like, great positions in the IMF, in some of the top companies in the world, and they're like, let's go rebuild the country. The Christians had their political leaders jailed or exiled. And while, but the Christians have, how do you say it in English? We have pride. So it was never, like, we're the ones who lost. It was just we were too powerful during the war, and we delivered our weapons. But Christian religion in Lebanon is very strong, and we have, like, saints also in Lebanon, and the Lebanese warriors that fought in the Lebanese Christian parties typically also come from regions that have some sort of religious aspect coupled with some sort of, like, hardship and warrior ethos. And, like, these people are the ones that fought throughout the previous decades. So they live in the mountains, they live in the cold, they live, like, their day-to-day is extremely hard. And so they never lost pride. It was never, hey, like, we're the, so if we were silent publicly, we never complied with them. However, the Syrians and their allies, they were very nasty, like, they were very barbaric. So they used to kidnap people and torture them. And if you did not comply with them, they would bring your mother or your wife and, like, torture them in front of you. Like, that was the level of torture that, and these stories used to circulate. So that was the pride was always there because, like, we may have signed this document because, like, I'm not gonna let my family member to suffer, but you're building a generation that's living up with these stories. And, like, that's when we grew up, right? So I can't comment on the Civil War, but the Civil War was very, also, like, was very nasty and so on, but, like, if we talk to our parents, like, our parents always went to school. So it was like, it was an organized, hey, like, so the war always started at 4 p.m. So there was some sort of organization to that, right? But I'm telling you the story between me and Richard and Roger how we grew up is we always had the story of the Civil War growing up, like, hey, that's what they did, but I can't live that. But we always grew up in the environment where we saw the Syrians, like, if we used to go somewhere in Lebanon, like, there were Syrians outpost, but what do you call them? Like, security checkpoints, right? And it was always, hey, like, let's keep quiet here. And we had, without naming names, like, because, like, it's their story to tell and, like, we have deep respect for them, but, like, we have family members that were leaders in these political parties. And they were heroes, not only for us, but, like, for generations. However, us growing up, it was always, so we had these flashbacks of, like, Israel bombing some areas. And it was never against the Christians. It was because it was an important power facility, so they just wanted to shut down the electrical power for any political reasons. But we never saw what happened in the South. So when you're talking about, like, hey, Lebanon was through war in the 2000s, in the 1996, in the 2000s, it doesn't recall, there's no recollection in my mind, because we're very far away from it. Originally, the risk family is from the South. So the family name risk is from the region of the South, which used to be very strong Christian house, like part of Lebanon. However, during the Civil War, there was a lot of displacement, but our father never grew up in the South. Like, in Lebanon, you may be from a certain region, but you grow up, like, in the city, right? So like, the South is more, like, there's nothing there, right? But so then the Christians were displaced and so on, but Richard and me growing up, we call these bombings, and we recall living up under the Syrian occupation. And things escalated very quickly when we started growing up, and the Syrians started to make severe actions in about like 2002, 2003. That's when maybe the Sunnis under Hariri got fed up with what was happening. And again, I'm telling our story of the situation. So there was an alliance that was starting to form between the Sunnis, the Christians, and the Druze around the country economically is doing well, but the day-to-day life of the country is not where it should be. And there was a lot of oppression. So they started forming a coalition around resisting the Syrians' presence, and the fact that we're able as Christians to get, Christians were always like looking west, so like France was a big supporter, US was a big, always, but it was always that maybe politically for the US and for France, that was not the important political or geopolitical thing right now. The fact that we're able to get the backing from the Sunnis was a big pivot point. And then they saw how that things started to change. And the reason for it is the promise was like, like Hezbollah was fighting the Israeli occupation, but I think in 2000, Israel retreated from most of the... Yeah, they had like a unilateral withdrawal in 2000, and what that did was it kind of created a vacuum. And then the group that stepped up and filled that vacuum primarily was Hezbollah. Correct, but if the Syrians were, and again, I'm giving my opinion, I'm not a historian, I'm not a political, I'm just, we're just sharing culturally. That's our view of the culture, right? And Richard, me, Roger and our parents, like we're very open-minded, we have no hate for anyone. And that's because our Christian faith. So Christians by default, like we grew up in the church, our mom is a social worker, and she used to work with the Maronite, the church. Yeah, it's like... So the Maronite, like to be present in Lebanon, you have to be Christian Maronite. So the Maronites in Lebanon are the ones that own a lot of land that like, but we're Catholics, so I can become president of Lebanon. But we can, the most that we could become is the vice president of the parliament. So in Lebanon, that's how it's, but when I say we grew up in the church... The glass ceiling right there is vital. The glass ceiling. The parlor. But when I say we grew up in the church, is our mom used to work as a social worker for this Christian Maronite. It's not a group, it's... Organization. Organization, which is the dominant religious organization. So me, Richard and Roger, like growing up, we used to like go there, like they have these beautiful churches, but it's not a church, it's like they sleep there and so on, so like they used to have like, so me and Richard and Roger like grew up among these religious people, and like we just do sports there. So like they had... Not really. But that's how we were brought up, right? So like we used to like, we used to go there during the summer until like 3 p.m. until our mom finishes her work, because our mom used to finish at 3 so that after school she's present. So that was what she wanted to be. So in the summer we used to grow up in these places, and then after three we go to the beach. So when I talk about like faith and religion is it wasn't something like, I personally never read the Bible cover to cover, probably maybe Richard a bit more, but we grew up under this environment. And when I say we have no hate is because like, we were taught like these priests teach these things. However, we know what is our right. And this act of resistance from the Christian Sunnis and the Druze started, and then we started having a series of political assassinations. And then they started assassinating the leaders that were very peaceful, like they were not gonna bear arms, but that they were very dangerous in building up momentum in universities, in like schools. When I saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we lived this between 2002 until like, until what, like 2014 was the last assassination Lebanon. They were assassinating this caliber of people that were very good leaders, and that would not fight with arms, but that were very dangerous in communicating their thoughts. And that's what I was always coming back is like, Christians never lost their pride. We were, we never like, we may have not shared our opinions publicly during like the 1990s until like, we started forming the coalition, but during this time, the ground was being laid out as a foundation. And then it started with political assassinations, and the pinnacle of that was the bombing of Hariri in 2005. But before that, they killed several members that were very prominent. And I recall once we were walking down the beach, and there was the car, they had assassinated one member of his coalition party, like maybe like in 2004, he survived. And like we saw the car there, like we saw the car like bombed there, like that. But that's more our story, us growing up. And we had members from our family that had political leadership positions, but us growing up, it was always the mindset from our parents was your future is not in Lebanon. Like it's as if, and they used to say it, but they don't say it with like, from a losing mindset. They just say, this country is not for us. The reason for it is- Us meaning you as kids? Because I gotta remind your dad went back there. Yeah, 100%. What they were always saying is that like they will stay, but if you wanna build your future, that's not where your future is gonna be. Because our father- And maybe it's also like he went there with the hope that things were gonna be stabilized like growing, and then it just, it didn't work out that way. And things started to downward spiral kind of as time went on. And there's geopolitically how things should be. And then it just shaped out. It was as if Christians were always looking for some sort of major support from the US and Europe to support. And they provided great support, but through schools, et cetera, but we never saw a political shift that like was a pendulum swing. So that was the mindset of saying, hey, like you're growing up here, but it was always the plan you would go do your college years outside. Two reasons. Number one, he's like, I really, he saw how the West was. And like coming like our uncle is an engineer, he's a heart surgeon and he used to travel. So he was always saying like, the university in Lebanon are great, but the universities elsewhere are like exceptional. Number one, number two is you, if they always want us to do great things, and it was as if in Lebanon, you will be constrained by the mafia running the country, and you will be capped by whatever they would tell you you can do. And we always grew up very humble and knowing, like that was cultural for us in like not being mean to people, et cetera, but it was always, hey, like you're not like an average person. Like every person can do great things. And like you need to learn how to do great things. So for us was that country is not for us was meaning, hey, like folks on your education. And you can do anything elsewhere, but here how things are shaping up, it's not shaping up properly. Right. Yeah, and then you get into like 2005. And again, it's interesting, very interesting for me to hear your perspective, because from my perspective, it's just like basically Hezbollah. You know, and I know there's other players, but you know, again, from my American viewpoint, you know, it was always Hezbollah, Hezbollah, Hezbollah, and they did the most prominent things from an external perspective. For instance, 2005, they started like conducting raids where they were actively trying to capture Israeli soldiers. And eventually in 2006, they did a cross border raid in Israel, Operation Truthful Promise, and killed several Israeli soldiers, captured two of them, and they brought them back, and what their intention was, was negotiation. And what they got was full scale war from Israel. This is what Israel calls the Second Lebanese War, or the Second Lebanon War, and what Hezbollah called the July War. And you know, this was a massive, you know, there's no way that you could not see what was happening, or you know, from the outside, there was a massive, you know, large scale air strikes, artillery strikes, naval strikes into Lebanon, and then a big ground offensive into Lebanon. Meanwhile, Hezbollah was launching like all, you know, massive amounts of rocks, thousands and thousands of rockets. Israel pushes deep in there, and Israel, they got caught off guard because when they rolled in, you know, Hezbollah had been preparing, and they prepared with bunkers and anti-tank weapons, and then they had a bunch of decentralized, you know, elements out there. And as we know, from the laws of combat leadership, when you have decentralized, you can move faster, you can adapt faster, and that's exactly what they did. So it was a lot more, I think each side bit off more than they could chew, right? So the Israelis, you know, Hezbollah thought they were gonna be able to, you know, get them into negotiations. Israel responds very heavy handed, but when they responded heavy handed, they realized that they could respond as well. It's basically 34, 35 days of war. 4,000 rockets were launched into Israel. Maybe 30, 40, 50 Israeli civilians killed from those. Israeli lost 150 soldiers. And meanwhile in Lebanon, you had 1,200 people killed in Lebanon, 4,000 injured, about a million displaced. So it's just nasty. And you know, you can go look at the assessment online and try and figure out who quote unquote won. And it's kind of hard to say who won. It's more like nobody won kind of. But you guys are on the ground during that. And this is actually what prompted your family to leave. So what do you remember about this, you know, 2006 war? Definitely just jump, add one quick thing on this. Definitely like it was the amplitude seemed to be much more elevated than previous events that just by the movements that were happening from the Canadian governments, from the US really providing resources heavily to just make them available for Canadian citizens, US citizens to help them move out as fast as possible. Like ships were coming in, you know, all forms of, you know, both escapes that were getting supported to Canadian citizens and US as well. So the level was very escalated. Like it wasn't just simple alerts or just, you know, stay away or just stay in some regions. It was really a big economic, you know, resource support and a very big operation movement to really help people move out. And we're really grateful for what the Canadian government did. It was like the support that was there to really help people move, you know, with the, you know, the most minimal impact that they can have while moving out. How old are you guys in 2006? Teen teens, like 13, 14, 12, 13, 14. So you remember this clearly? Yeah. Did you remember your dad, you know, his attitude going from like, hey, we're here and this is Lebanon and we're Lebanese to like, we're gonna leave? Actually, our father was the last person who wanted to leave. Like again, it's the, any war is awful. However, where we were living was not a dangerous part. There was maybe a couple of infrastructure bombing because the Hezbollah was getting supply from Syria also. So they were maybe bombing some sort of their supply coming from the North. So they had to maybe bomb some parts in the Christians areas. And again, there's Muslims in these areas. It's just like how geographically it's identified. Any Lebanese would understand that. But we, because of, we used to see the Israeli Navy rockets from the sea from our apartment. So like we used to see that. We used to see the fighter jets bombings because we can see Beirut. We could see, you could see the smoke. You could see the fire after the bombs drop. But it was definitely, first it was a surprise. The war started as a surprise. And I'm just gonna rewind a bit back on why maybe it started, but in 2005, they killed the Prime Minister of Lebanon. And that was the moment where like there was a uprise of the Lebanese population and the Syrians actually like left Lebanon. So for a year and a half, the Hezbollah regime lost its major ally. The Christian leaders got freed from jail. We had political, we had parliamentary elections and the resistance won. And there was like millions of people on the streets. Like that was, so when we see what's happening now in Iran and I can't comment on the military actions if that's required, but what I can say is you can see definitely the Iranians very happy. Lebanese were very happy back then when this happened. You saw the shift in the momentum of, we got the support from the US, from France and then Syria escaped. Then we run elections and then we win the parliament. Yeah, things are heading in a good direction. It was heading a good direction. And then because of, we typically, the Christians and the Sunnis, et cetera, are typically very open-minded. And like anyone who's Lebanese is Lebanese, they somehow like wanted to still rebuild the country with everyone. And the 2006 war was like a big shock. And hey, like we're cornered in this position and then we're gonna recreate this war. So it was a war that was like not, with the country was heading in a very good direction. Yeah, yeah, so it sounds like Hezbollah kind of sabotaged the whole thing is probably what it looked like for your perspective. That's my perspective again, maybe completely different, but the war, so we were like never feared our safety because like where we were living, but it felt like a war. So our father didn't feel like he wanted to leave. Like it was more, for us, it was more, hey, like Canada seems like a cool country. Like it was more like as a fun thing. It wasn't, hey, like we're gonna escape, right? But like for like two weeks of the war, like our father didn't go to work. Like that was how, like that was a change, right? Like you could see the change. And our mother, because she's a social worker, she used to work with the Christians. So she was very active in helping, like she was very active on the phone, like with the displaced people. So like the Christian religious members like wanted to support the displaced families and so on. So like it wasn't like we lived under a world where like people were just like freaking out. No, like actually it was like our mom was busy. Our father, like, I'm not sure if even when I was watching the news, like for sure he was up to date, but we started seeing that, hey, like the Americans are evacuating and seemed cool. Like, not really, like the Americans like sent, the Americans sent like military ships. Yeah, we got second grade service in Canada. But there was a show of force. And the interesting thing is also the Americans actually evacuated. And again, from my recollection, it may be wrong, but like I'm not sure, I'm pretty sure. Like even the Americans evacuated the American Lebanese from like a zone where like it's a Christian zone, that there's no port. So it's as if like they, it was like a, like it was dangerous to go to the West, right? So like that was like the show of force that the US brought. France also like they brought also like helicopters and so on. So like it was like some movement happening, right? And meanwhile, like it was like, but we had to stay at home for like two weeks. So like it was more, hey, like there was something changing. And for us was like anyway, like the conversation was always, hey guys, like for you, your future is gonna be like outside. And we're like, hey, like the Canadians are like, so it was as we forced our dad to like register in the embassy. And then we get the call. And actually I think like maybe they didn't want to leave. And like we probably left among the last people. But I definitely recall that our father seemed to know once he decided like it's not, there is no coming back. Our mom hope that like it's more temporary. And like we remember, like because we typically like spend a lot of time with family. And when I say family, like it's like cause like, not like just the five of us. Like, and like we had to take a different route to like say goodbye. So like, so like we typically take the route by the sea, which like is fast. But then that day we had to like take the route from the mountains. So as an indication to you as a little kid that things are a little different. It was more like, like- Or was it just cool? No, no, it was different. It was like a tactical decision and saying, hey, we're not gonna take the road, the sea road, right? Because like that's where like most of the traffic is. So like, but they're not gonna bomb like the mountains, right? So it was a beautiful ride. What I can remember, like it's, that's the recollection. And the strange thing maybe just briefly on, because you mentioned this sometimes like, you mentioned like how like war for different people can, you know, look different. Like when, like for example, we see footage that is captured from your deployment in Ramadi. This, like as you say, like this is a very intense zone of combat. There's like, you can compare to other places as well. And like in how it was playing, like how we were seeing it, like it's not the kind of similar intense zone of like, you know- But in the South it was like that. Yeah, for sure, yeah. There's no doubt in the South it was, there's thousands of people wounded. And yeah, definitely it was a very intense fight. And one thing that's very important for me to highlight is like I have all the sympathy for anyone that loses life. Like we were not like cheering. It was just because of the political environment, the Christians grew up more the oppressed and politically like we were fighting this political thing. So no one from the Christian side was cheering, but we were just not impacted. But there was a lot of death happening in the South and any war has civilians that are impacted. And because our father is a doctor, like and he used to like work in both like Christians and Muslim hospitals. Like we always grew up very open-minded. There was no, at no point there was, hey, like we're against these people. There was always, hey, like we want to rebuild with everyone, but we're not going to be the losing part here. So it's just like more, that's the dynamic. But it felt different this time in saying, okay, like we're definitely like gonna go say goodbye. Why? Like nothing from a work standpoint, like our father is not working here. Like from a risk standpoint, like he could like not moving. And it was more like, and like we had like brought like, from supermarket we brought more food. It felt like the temple was up, but Roger, Richard and me were like more thinking about it. Hey, like Canada seems cool. And like we had, and the reason for it, and also like that's more also like how like technology and like how we got into technology and so on. Like we had always family outside of Lebanon. And we used to like chat with them on like MSN messenger. Like that was pre-Skype. So it's, so for us like we saw, we've never traveled to Canada, but it seemed like somewhere where like, we're like it seemed cool. And we're like, hey, like anywhere we can come back here. So we as if like, and that's also our father say like, we like, like literally we're saying every day, like can we register for this thing? And then we remember the day. So basically we planned the cab to come pick us up around like four or five AM. And yeah, we went, we had to go to like downtown Beirut where like there's the official port. And that's like the evacuation started. So we went there from four or five AM. And we left Lebanon around like maybe four, five PM. And it was July actually like, yeah, it was the July or end of beginning of August, something like that, but probably July. And we took the boat from Beirut to Turkey. The story of the boat is interesting. The boat is a very like, so we get to the boat, our father likes the sea and likes boats. So like as soon as he sees the boat, he tells us like that boat goes very fast because it was like, I'm not sure how to say it in English, but it's in French, it's Bicoc, so like it has two things. Okay. Yeah, like a catamaran of some kind, two holes. Yeah, yeah. So the two holes, yeah, that's like some kind of a catamaran type vessel. But it has like an engine. Yeah, yeah. But so he's like that boat will go very fast. And then we get to the boat and it's like a cinema room. Like you see, like it's like seats that feels like cinema room seats. And like there is very cold air conditioning. We sit all five next to each other. And then before the boat takes off, they start bringing food. Mediterranean food has a smell with air conditioning. The smell amplifies. And our father right away say like, don't eat anything. Not only that, he's always extremely prepared, like extremely, extremely prepared. He pulls his handbag. He has everything in the handbag. And he starts giving us like bags. Bags. I know where this is going. No, no, and but take a look. He's like other people are gonna puke. You're gonna go help them. So he's like, don't eat. Everyone else is gonna eat. And then take these bags because like these people are gonna like they don't know what to expect. Because it's a beacock thing, because they're starting to eat. And like it's gonna be like shaky. How bad was it? I had visions in my mind of what this evacuation was gonna look like. This was not on my big go card. And the reason I'm highlighting that, the reason why I'm highlighting that is like, all our family, like our family is mainly like all doctors. Our father studied medicine, not because like it's cool. Like he really wants it. So like he's, like that's the type of preparation that he has always the things that you need. So very quickly, like it was a shit show. And then you end up in Turkey? We go to Turkey. It was a very quick, right? My recollection, it was like 10, 12 hours. Like it was supposed to take like 18, but because it was going fast. And like, remember, like it was sunset, like very beautiful thing. And like it was as if we got disappointed, the three of us that we didn't see any military ship. Because like we heard that the Americans that evacuated, like they got stopped by some sort of military. Yeah, well, I can tell you those, your ship was a lot, sounds like it was nicer and faster. The military ones might have seemed cooler. I'm sure those Americans got good treatment, but the Navy ships are no frills. There's no frills on a US Navy ship. That's a warship. Like there's no, there's no, what do you call it, cinema seating? There's no seats on a US Navy ship. That ain't happy. So I'm sure you guys got it. You guys did all right. Not complaining. Other than people puking everywhere, sounds completely disgusting. Thankfully your dad brought enough bags. Like it was busy, just like literally like helping out throughout the thing. And then we get to Turkey. It was like very late. And there's like these big buses, like sports type team buses. And that's maybe something family related, but it's always like, there was like, hey, maybe there's three things here and like two others in the other one, but it's not here. It's like no. So culturally, and it happened multiple times during this trip. So we waited for, because like, we're like, no, we're gonna all stay together. So we waited for the last one. And we were literally maybe the only people on this one. So like we remember like we slept, like we took each. And then we get to this sports compound. And it, we grew up a lot, like watching military movies. And for the first time when I looked at this compound, it looked like something from movie. Like it was like military beds. Like small, like next to each other, like food in boxes. It was extremely organized. So like the reaction was like, it's extremely organized. And like, because you had heard stories of other evacuation, it wasn't like this. Like for us it was like, hey, that's cool. So we just slept there. We just slept there. And then we took a flight to Ireland. Same thing. There's two here, three there, like no. Then we, like they seated us like two. I think my father and Roger sat next to like the, the equipment of the plane. Like they have special seats. So they gave them one of the special. Was this a military plane? No, it was like, it was the first time it was Ryan Airways. Ryan Airways. Jack. And then we land in Ireland. And that was the first time we see a military, a US military in a desert camouflage. And that was like, cool. And again, I'm highlighting that. And Richard maybe will comment on it. How this leads to, you know, AI software, we'll get to. How this leads, how this leads, like I'll give you our side is we grew up with folks a lot on education. We grew up folks a lot on like principles that you need to like follow and like doing the right things in life. And like very hard work. And we grew up in this Middle Eastern environment where like there was highly corrupt, et cetera. So it was always like, we, like we're always into science, math and so on. So like, and this thing also was some sort of like our freedom. Like no one can tell us like you can't build this thing. And at the same time, like you need to be extremely disciplined in doing things because like it's not going to be handed. Like you have to go through things. So the military seemed like the organized thing for us. So the relationship between technology and the military and also sports, because we did a lot of sports growing up. What sports did you do? We were not good at, we're not excellent at any sport, but we're good at like a lot. So like we did soccer, we did basketball, we did swimming with a ping pong, snowboarding. Like we were, we were always out there, but we were never, and we competed, but we never won. Like that, like, no, like we were, we were good. Like we could hold our ground with the, like the others did one sports. Us, we did all. Like the only thing that we knew that we were very good at, that no one could beat us in is like math and physics. Like, not really. Like that was... You want to run some equations for it? Yeah. No, like we had, like when we grew up, like, like our father would say, like, you don't get a medal for like being number one in class. Like that's the standard. There's no medals in ping pong. Right, right, right. Sure there is. So that's like the sports, like these, like we were always out there outside, but it was always like we were not excellent at it. So when you get to Canada and now you're, you're a Diggle right in high school when you get to Canada? Like seventh grade, eighth grade or something like that? I'm not sure how it works in the US, but basically like we studied in French school in Lebanon. And in Canada, if we had to do the equivalent, like we would have lost a year. And our father said like, no, it's not gonna happen. So basically like they fought a lot, like our father like looked into things and like he found like some equivalency between France and Canada and like he went to the school saying, hey guys, that's a law from whatever thing you did and like my kids should be in this thing or they're not gonna be in school. Like, so like that, so he put us in a private school. We had to wear like even shoes from the school. Like that was, it was an, and like Richard maybe can tell more of the story for it because Richard was like much more. But like definitely always like very, like the environment very disciplined, like can't uniform really, really strict any kind of violation on uniform penalties. It looked like Harry Potter. But yeah, like definitely the way like... My wife's from England and she like when you look at school pictures of her, it looks just looks like, like the whole thing, it's literally looks just like Harry Potter. They're wearing uniforms, they're in big castles. Like that's the way it is. That's a European thing that I guess it makes it over. There's some schools like that, like in New England and stuff in America, but I'm sure they have the same stuff in Canada where they kind of bring that system of... They call them actually public schools in England, but it's private schools and yeah. So that's where you guys were in Hogwarts. Hogwarts? Hogwarts, yeah. You know that Harry Potter guy? Check. But yeah, like definitely like there, but like we definitely, you know, even though like back then we didn't really follow, we didn't understand the purpose of that type of discipline. Like we're more trying to violate it than try to follow it, but... But yeah, like quickly, like the... Maybe not to jump maybe too far, but to the point that you're saying like how does this lead to AI and also like how we... Like also like what ties into also how we connected with you as well as... Like we've... We're very competitive and like we try to see like what are the places that show high intensity, show, you know, very hard work, you know, push people really to exceed, you know, what they're capable of and like very few places really were showing these examples and also like maybe we'll share something on this, but like also like you would tend to see when you look at like some examples, whether it's like military or sports or even in tech as well. Like you don't know whether like people should they like really, you know, show off their intensity and like their hard work and you know, how they're pushing or should this be like a hidden and you know, you're trying to tone it down a bit and then, you know, not to not like maybe like the thinking about this is that you might alienate some people because there's some group of people that might still be interested in this intensity, but like you have to lure them into it as well. So we were like very early, we did find places like when we're listening to you and like the Navy SEAL mentality and like on the tech side, very few also tech companies were showing kind of that intensity. Today you see it very well with you know companies by Elon Musk that, you know, push the cutting edge of you know, you know, hardcore engineering. Jensen like on the tech side as well. Like not like there's greatness in like talent is there. Like you can find talent even like in tech as well. You can find talent and you can extract talent from people, but we see ourselves that we have no chance to compete if the great ones are really working that intense and that hard. So though the two places that seem to converge on this were really like kind of the examples on this on tech, but also like outside of it like the military and what you're sharing in the Navy SEAL side, like how the mentality was there. Like this was really eye-opening to see that you know, it should look this way. It should be like it's not a hidden kind of mentality. It's you know, it's really like it's kind of there is an environment where you know people are being you know expected to push very hard and to be very intense. So this is like how we we tied kind of a bit you know, what we were looking for to build and like your perspective was massively you know. And at that age probably we came across some of the Navy SEALs information. So in your in your in high you're in high school. What do they call it? Do they call it Canada high school? Do they call it that? Like in Canada it was like it was like second death secondary. Secondary. So you're in there and are you planning to go to college when you get done? Is that the plan? I mean this is your family so focused on academics. Yeah, like the plan was always like you have to like and since we're very young like we're good in like physics math. The plan was always like we'll go into engineering. It was never the plan that will go into math because typically if the father is a doctor like they push their kids to be doctors. Our father identified very early on that like we're like we're we're very actually we were better than the professors in biology because like he used to teach us these things. Like not really like we used to study like the cardiovascular system like and we go to the exam like just smoke it because like we knew more than these. Your dad just giving you the strength to load out from an actual cardiac surgery. But let me tell you about that aorta professor. And the professor was great and we went to the same school in Lebanon as our father. Like so some of their professor his professor were but he identified very early on that were very like it came naturally to us math and physics. So he's like let's double down on that. So like he introduced us to all these things and he actually like he would have he actually discouraged us to apply to medicine even he's like don't do not apply to medicine. Because he thought you were just better in the in the science math. Yeah he he engineering. Yeah he he's very much like because that's he did what he wanted to do. Like he's like if we force them to do anything like they won't do it. So that's how he thinks and he's like take a look at what's happening from a technology standpoint. Like that's the future. So he's like anything that you would do that you're very good at that's much better. But like take a look do all these other things. But like it wasn't like acceptable for us not to be good in biology. But it was like you're not going to become good doctors. So and that's also on the intensity side is like he also introduced us all these things also like it's like if you want to do something great like don't just have acid. So and that's why like we gravitated toward like this intensity thing. And however the seals and the technology side was very much identifiable for us because like you're a small unit and technology like you can have like one engineer build something like but like. Real estate was like massive like you need like contractors you need the land you need like for us technology. Financers. Yeah. You see like a seal unit was like hey like these are like six guys technology like hey like you need one engineer two engineers and like you're writing code and like you're shipping the barrier to entries. It's very low right. So for us was always we were looking like we knew that we could do something great. But we I can't picture myself was like 5000 sales reps. But I can ship code. Richard could ship code and like we could get something out. So that was the thing is and like no one can take that away. And the scalability of software is unmatched. It's just unmatched. You make something boom it's out there and you can grow and scalable beyond anything else. You could you could say the same thing like for example if someone like writes a book. But like you don't like you need experience to write a book. True. Software you don't need it like you don't need a degree to write software. Yeah. You see or like drawing like like painting like it's not like you make a painting and you set it for $10,000. Right. Like software is like a superpower is like your right software. It's not bad no problem going to reiterate on it. Like it's like two more hours. And like I give it to someone he likes it. Now is there someone in the business world that made you see this clearly was it looking at Elon and PayPal or like what was there anyone in particular. So originally or a company in particular. Yeah. Originally the it was like as it started no but then as we started building and like we started thing like Richard can comment on it. But like YouTube came out Facebook came out right. And like these things started to come out and like these are just like two three people and like they can build something right. You're like we can do this. 100%. It's it's and and and then you start like saying OK great YouTube then they are ex PayPal right. So like you start looking into PayPal like great so so Elon is doing this then. So the example where hey like and this comes back always to the point like let's be always very humble and like not be arrogant but like you're not stupid. So like it was always something that like if you put your mind into it like you could achieve it. Did you. Did you guys go to college. Yeah. Where'd you go. McGill University. Oh you guys went to McGill. Yeah. OK. And you both applied there at the same time. Did you did you guys end up in the same grade even though you're a year apart. You're you're separated by year. So you and Roger Roger Polytechnic. OK. Yeah. And but then you guys end up going to McGill. Yeah. And are you there thinking to yourself what did you get your degrees in. Electrical and computer science. Same both of you. And are you there doing like 10% homework and 90% working on on business. We were always like we always had great good grades. Richard was much more like among all three like Richard if we wouldn't do it like Richard would do it by himself. That's the reality. No. No. Honestly like. No. It doesn't exist. But it was it was always this. You have the superpower that you can do things right and you don't need. A lot of money. No money. You just need time and then you can just iterate on things. And the idea behind it was. That like anyway we wouldn't like working for anyone else like it's not like something that we would like aspire to do. And it's not there's nothing wrong in it. It was just like not something that we would feel ourselves like inclined to do. So that was. So did you actually make any product that you sold while you were at McGill. Like most of the time was really like we like the probably like we always like build something's on our on our end like just apps who just test with very like nothing that gets released that gets shipped. But like mainly we try to build some algorithms. Like we a lot of apps that didn't work. Like that worked but like it didn't. No one really wants it or you know you made an app for yourself to make sure that you take your creatine in the afternoon or something like that. You put time into it echoes on board with that. You know like that one. So that's what you're doing kind of like almost playing around with. Yeah. Like like just testing out like seeing how much. You know we would write some some logic some algorithm like very random examples like maybe a social app for for students to be able to share content. But like just testing as much as we can just expanding you know seeing what kind of products can be built. But the thing that always came back to us that led us to you know came back as a problem for us that was the root for what we did what we ended up coming up and building is. While we're building anything like a massive pain that we were always facing was that. It's really hard for a software engineer to really look out like look for code and then search for good code that you can find. Like the search experience for like if you want to build anything we would face it ourselves that we were trying to build something and then just trying to find that information was extremely painful. Even though Google was there there were like a lot of sources GitHub is there. You have a lot of places that provide that. But because a lot of the code is open source. Yeah. But the ability for you to get good information quick and fast was very hard. And also we're interested in Google's technology like search engine as well. So we started trying to build out our own search engine that was specifically for code. So we started indexing you know as much data as possible that is about code and like this started a bit to shape the initial versions. Of the product that was more geared toward like the end user would have been in this case is the is the software engineer. Yeah. That's a brilliant thing to think about if you're looking for ideas to do some kind of business. If you look for what is going to make your life easier and what's cool is that you're looking externally like oh what would make our life easier external. But then you looked internal and said wait a second wouldn't it would make our life easier if this job that we're doing was easier. And so you put together the first thing you compare to kind of like a search engine for code. So if I want a certain type of code I can search you know and look for it and it'll give me some kind of a rough draft basically of that code. Yeah. And then do you do you just put that out into the world. Yeah. So basically like we started like as we are iterating on it like that became something that's obvious for us that they like that's something that like is really powerful. Yeah. You're immediately using it to help you accelerate you making it and iterating on it. So you've got something that's like your your your product is helping you produce. Yeah. Like and during this time we're just getting inspired by like companies and so on. And like you hear the story of like Netflix how they came up with like the DVD and like so they say that hey like they were afraid that like if they send the DVD like it would break. So they just sent it and like they receive it. The DVD wasn't broken. So for us like that was the test for us was hey like let's search for this code. Do we get it. So it was like these small things were like hey like you think it work but like just go test and like it would eventually work right. So it was for us. The idea like we a lot of founders or a lot of people from outside of the tech world think that founders just have to be like. Founders just like draw up like master plans and they're like I want to become a billionaire and now how can I reverse engineer it. I can't speak for everyone but I can say for myself like or ourselves like we started building things for us. It's it's very different. One. Yeah this is something that I talk about when people talk to me about business. One of the things that I say is like when you're when you're going to war you don't come up with a master plan of I'm going to attack this point in the enemies line. You don't do that because you don't know what the hell was in that point. What you do is you say oh here's the enemies line. We're going to put out a bunch of reconnaissance and we're going to do a bunch of little reconnaissance and maybe little attacks and see if any of things start to break through. When we find something that starts to break through we go oh let's put some more resources behind that we put some more resources we get more information we push a little bit further. And eventually you break through the enemy line. But it's the same thing with business. You don't say oh well the worst case scenario be I want to be a billionaire. Let me reverse it because even to say oh I want to make a new knife. And so you you you design the whole knife and then you go out and you buy a factory and you spend millions of dollars buying steel for your knife. And guess what there's like a knife that you thought was cool or that one person thought was cool was you and no one else really likes it. Whereas if you would have you know you start you make a few of the knives and you you know you forge them yourself and you learn about it. And while you're forging you know you don't be a lot easier if I had a tool that could grab the knife like that. Oh why don't I make that tool. And all of a sudden you let's say oh well actually a lot of people like different kinds of knives but they need a tool to make the knife and boom here you go. That's kind of like what you guys did. But I always recommend that with people don't over index on your first idea because your first idea generally speaking is not going to usually is not going to land. And really when you look at a lot of these companies that grow up you know they didn't start what they started where they started where they thought they were going. They end up going somewhere else. And even you know even with Black Box you know it started as a search engine now it's become you know AI. But you know if you would have said no no no search is the way we started a search company. You know you would have been dead in the water years ago. But keeping an open mind and saying oh wait a second how can we iterate on this. What's our next move going to be. How can we adjust from here. What is the demand signal that we're seeing. And that you need to keep those things in mind when you're going into business. Not hey here's my long term vision and I want it to follow this exact route and I know I'm brilliant enough to foresee the future. And so that's what I'm going with. Definitely. And at the same time. And again speaking for ourselves. If that's what you'd be doing for like 50 years. Even if you don't get paid. So it's not like we're doing it for the money. Like that's what we want to do. And we put all the efforts for it to succeed. But I'm talking more about the seed and the beginning of something right. Like if you have the right the wrong intentions it's extremely challenging. Oh yeah. There's many things that will knock you off course if you're if you're doing this for the wrong reasons. That's the same thing in basic seal training. Yeah. Okay everyone want everyone that shows up there wants to be a seal but if you want to be a seal for the wrong reasons. The first thing opportunity you get it gets cold you're going to quit. And it's the same thing in business. Business is grueling. It's 24 hour days. You know you're the only person that's going to get the call when something goes wrong. You have to have the answers. It's your your sacrificing like you don't get to buy the things that you want at all. Because all your money is going back into the business because you love it. And if you don't love it you go you know what I would put more money in the back of the business. But I really think that that new Cadillac is looking good. So I think I'm going to not reinvest and get the new Cadillac and then you look up and guess what you needed that money. And now you're behind and now your competitor didn't buy the Cadillac. They bought the the 1997 Dodge Grand Caravan and they put all their money back in business and now they beat you. So yeah if you're not if you're in it for the wrong reasons your intent is wrong you're going to be there's there's a lot of a lot of bad things that can happen. 100% and the good thing in technology is the information access is very like you have access to information. So like you could confirm if what you're doing is right. So like hey like it's very hard for other disciplines to confirm that right like if you're an accountant like. Again I'm not an accountant but what I'm saying is like it may be very hard for you to like compare and contrast with other people saying hey with in technology like people are extremely accessible. So you can email someone saying hey like what do you think about that and like they would respond very quickly. The fact that opens code is pretty much open source like you get thousands of people that can help you around the world and say hey that's wrong that's good that's a set or so the community that's building software is very much a collaborative community. And also while it may not look like that from the outside but the really good and great people have the same intensity that you would see in the military or that you would see in the elite sports player. Or anyone that's great right like the great surgeons they have all the same intensity. At what point did you name the product black box and where did that name come from. Yeah like I think like like there was a few sources that definitely influenced this. A lot of it is like part of the intensity that we try to you know like have a name that would would try to represent this as much as possible. The name black box seems to be you know to show to represent this like a bit more to be a hardcore kind of environment hardcore kind of culture. Definitely the like there's also a tech tech aspect to it like if you were to if we look closer into the space even the most advanced scientist. There's quotes from you can find all the way from the CEO of Google to every single scientist that's very very deeply advanced in AI. With all the knowledge that is available still until this day the behavior that is happening within in a within AI is still very much a black box. And you heard the AI getting hostile with me at the beginning of this podcast right. That's wild right. Like that's a thinking thing. That's telling me I'm not here to recite your little your little games. What do you have a question for me or not. Kind of wild. Yeah and it's it's like it's a bit strange to the previous way of of of building software that previously you were very deterministic and the design of the software was always. You write it one way and you expect it to behave always that the same way that you wrote it initially. The way this is now happening. There's still also around AI ways to control it to give it guard rails to let it like no not go off guard and like not say thing not going to things that you would would not want it to go into. But even with those like those that would know how to even you know jailbreak or you know all like you can still find. So you're never you know fully controlling it. You can control to the to the extent that you would want. But the by the way it's being trained. You can you can have more confidence in it and you can say I'm going to be deterministic in you know ninety nine percent of cases. The the the massive value on log that this is doing is that even though you still have this randomness that can occur the value that you're getting by with the remaining. This completely outweighs it. Yeah a little bit of randomness and you can correct for the randomness really quickly. A hundred percent and I've done that with you guys where I was using voice to make an application. And it would just I would just iterate. Oh yeah I'd actually use a different color and it can just it can correct those problems or and so that's it's just works so much faster that it's you can make it's OK that it makes those mistakes because you can just correct them. A hundred percent. And briefly on this point is that one one interviewer was asking the CEO of Google saying like how could you even let this in the wild if you know that this is like something that you can do. That's like undetermined and it's a black box and like you don't even know what you built. How could you even let this thing in the wild. He said there's I don't know how many billions of humans in the wild and also we still don't understand this moment. Their brain works and if you see like in comparison like now you have in San Francisco cars that are riding way most without a driver and still this is still powered by AI and still there might be some randomness. But the percentage is still safer than a human being. Oh yeah yeah. There's no doubt about that. No doubt about that. So as the when you guys how far along were you. How long did it take before you saw that this thing had traction. Like how many months or years was this thing alive before you said oh we got something real here. So basically like it was constant iteration like one thing in software like any traction you'd feel like it's traction right. Like if you give it the first user and hey that's great like that's for you is a good thing right. So like however the moment where everything took off really strongly was on September 1st 2022. So that was two months before Chad GPT. If we just go back a few months before. So actually how we met with Jocco here is actually it was on August 5th or 6th. And we met him here in San Diego and we showed you the first version of what would eventually become today black box. So we had a few meetings here in San Diego. I gave them the clutch piece of information that they needed. 100% and basically every on August 2022 you had started death reset. So we read a lot of books compared to like not compared to Jocco but like. And most of the books that we read are either technology or military books. So like we would shuffle and then part of the death reset was to post. Like every day like that you worked out etc. And then I had posted my Kindle screenshot and it had maybe like some Navy SEAL books. It has extreme races book breathe. It had extreme ownership. It had probably like loan survivor or like these because on Kindle if you open something recently like it would pop up and it had some tech books. And Jocco writes legit. This is on Twitter. Jocco writes legit. And then we we we comment back and then until this day it's the pinned comment on me and Richard's Twitter. It's like trying to follow your leadership and still a long way to go. And then we had a meeting in San Diego and also like if someone wants to find us Richard me and Roger it's very easy. Like you'd go to our office like you will find us any day. So we're like hey like Jocco is much more disciplined. So like he should definitely be at the gym. Like there is no doubt that he is at the gym. It's extremely predictable like and even at some point our father told us hey like you're so predictable like maybe like because like we were we were. We used to wake up and run at 4 30 is like change your routes. Like if someone just monitors your pay like just change your routes sometimes. So like we come to the gym me and Richard it was Saturday. It was like extremely hot here. And we go to the victory MMA entrance and we're like can we meet Jocco. It's not like is Jocco here. It's just it's a known. And the tell that I had there were two ladies at the reception and maybe like someone else but like I recall looking at. So one of them looks at the other. So now I know he's here. But she needs like confirmation like who's these guys. And then the other joke was not here. We're like no like we're like not like hostile or anything like we're just passing by. We're not here to kill him. So like if he happens to be here like if we can and that's part of how we try to do things is like. We always know that we know one's going to help and like you have to do the things that you want to do yourself like right like that's also part of it. A good default setting is no one's going to help. Yeah. So so then two times she says no and then Richard and me retreats and we go to the to the left and there's like maybe. Like somewhere we're sitting and we're like he's going to go out like he's working out half an hour an hour. And like we have time to kill like we had finished our meeting. We wait maybe for like half an hour 45 minutes and then we open the laptop. We're going to send you a message saying hey like we tried to pass by we didn't find you. And then Richard says no no let's wait. And then like just one minute later you see Joe in a white T-shirt hat and like sunglasses. We done training that day. And then also we had heard all because I think we heard all your podcasts or most of them while we work out. We heard that one you drive a caravan. Yeah. Like you say like like that's what we heard. And then he says that he doesn't park in the parking lot of Victor MMA he parks across the street so that customers can have access. Dang dude this dude profile hell out of it. So those so we're like I don't see caravan here in the parking but maybe the other side. So like we just go other side there's restaurant there isn't. So like and like we're just having fun with it like it's like some sort of our like operation. But then we don't see caravan. We were curious also to pass but like like also inspired by the SEALs wanted to pass by like see if there's like any you know close to the Coronado. So like we're thinking also to have a quick look there but but yeah like and then we Joe comes out we just go to him and say hey like big like we we always have big respect for you and like what you've done and like. Is like what's happening with you like we're like that was that's what we're building and then Richard says like can we show you what we're doing. And Joko looks for like a split second and then say follow me. So we showed him actually not here but in the main studio the first and probably like and for us that's what we encourage people to do and like by no mean we're here teaching anyone but like. We were extremely scrappy it was a version that we were using. But like we're extremely proud of it like that's powerful and like we could see where it would go like that's the moment where we saw the inflection point and saying hey like that will transform something. And so how many how many users did you have at that point. Probably like like few thousands like but we launched September 1st 2022 and our apartment so like a couple weeks later. Yeah and our apartment San Francisco used to be across the street from GitHub GitHub is a Microsoft owned company like they acquired them and they're decoding division of Microsoft is a coding division of Microsoft and we used to live across the street from them. It's not planned and nothing like but then when we release this version but you wake up and you're going to wear our. For sure we launched about like after midnight and since then like things took off like Richard can comment more on that but like that was the inflection point of what happened like quick quick signals like we always like try to. You know engage with the great engineers that we look up to that built startups or like we're engineers at great companies and we started getting awesome feedback. Like one of the definitely early engineers that like there's a few of them that are really great but one of them is his name is George Harik. He was employee number seven at Google close with very close with the founders of Google and he he was very essential in Google's growth he recruited the next 500 engineers built the Google ads. At system which is powering which is basically a lot of the engine on Google there in terms of like advertisement and his take he's deep in AI and he's now building his own company AI like machine like an AI lab. At a big scale but his take was very valuable to us and his early feedback when we were building the search engine for code was extremely useful and powerful and he ended up joining as an investor but we always wanted to not really look look for investors for the sake of getting investors on board. We were always much more interested in getting their perspective as engineers getting like their take on it where this like their perspective on how we can build this would be really valuable and actually he gave us some very critical advice from the very beginning that is still useful. Again and no one. Some people grew up like like we said McGill which is great like it's the number one university in Canada but people that study maybe at Stanford they have access to their professors their friends working at startups like we didn't have this access. But we never also got people that just like that didn't want to help when we reach out and it's not like we needed their help because like it's more. And the reason I'm using the word help like like you you you studied English and you're like. Author at several books like words have meaning and like I'm intentionally using the word help because like these people could just not never respond and like you you you helped us like you could just say hey no I'm busy I'm just gonna go right. So but it wasn't help in a way like these people are miserable I'm gonna help them like it's more hey like I have this massive knowledge and I see something here and I think I can give them in like half an hour something that can 10x whatever they're doing instead of them wasting like. Half a year on something right so like when we spoke with George. Also same thing George was one of the first people who were like we emailed him without knowing him. George was employee number seven at Google invented Google and at sense which is like printing money machine for Google. And then he built another company called I am or which is a messaging app which scaled it to a billion users it was second to WhatsApp at the competition and then now he's the co founder of an AI lab they just closed the $460 million round at 4.6 billion. George really helped in a sense where he's like guys these are the two things that matters for your company. And we knew them it was just a confirmation that hey like that's a confirmation and then so Google was a big inspiration for us the interesting thing for Google was. Google was the 50th search engine or whatever and actually at some point at some point there's a legendary investor called V not because. V not because I was on the board and an investor in other search engines it was an excite yeah yeah and he wanted excite to acquire Google so like they saw what Google was doing and excite so Google's founder were willing to sell for a million dollars. An excite said like I'm not sure like if it's worth 250 K and like so the story in technology is. You need to build like there's a saying like from my combinator that says like build something people want like that's what matters like it's very hard. I've had that conversation with so many so many businesses over the years especially because people will you know get all go with the knife things from hold ones you know people people will go from like him. You're gonna build a knife and then all of a sudden they're building like a custom sheath and then a belt that goes with the sheath and then a pair of pants to go with the sheath and then the boots to go with the sheath and then and then and you end up doing something you're not. Yeah you weren't supposed to do and it's like hey bro you're supposed to build a knife that's what people want from you they expect you to build a knife you know you're over here making this totally different product. Yeah and again that's that's a little bit counter to what I said earlier of like oh if you build a knife but no one really wants it well yes you have to build things that people actually want and if they don't want them. Yeah you know it's the same thing like with like making supplements and making food. It tastes wins like you have to it has to taste good if it tastes like crap people aren't going to continue to use it has to taste good you have to make stuff to taste good that you make stuff that people want so that's really incredible advice. And if you build something that you want that at least like you're the first user right and then you ship it to someone else you're like hey what do you think and then they're iterate on it and then like softer it's like. Soft or is a living a I feels like like more like something that's super powerful but the beauty of softer is like software if you don't ship every day like software decays like you need to constantly be iterating so I may think it's cool I share to Richard Richard say hey that's cool but what. Yeah and then you're like great that's a great idea then it takes like just half an hour and then you ship it and Richard says great I'm gonna share it with my friends so. The idea behind when we talked with George what or like other people was hey like. I don't think money is a problem I think what we need is to surround ourselves by people that would give us great advice that's why we cared a lot about working with Joe early on because we knew that. The mindset and the culture matters and that's when everything will fail the thing that would keep it going is the culture so like that's what we always focused on and. That's what drove us to this point then like we started surrounding ourselves with people that have deep insight in technology so like. What Google did was really amazing for us like and we're like so what what George was like hey like you have Google Maps but Google Maps acquired ways. Ways was much smaller maybe but they had ton of data and users were engaged so like if you're able to have this because you're gonna always have competition but. What Google does with Google Maps ways is can do it differently and you saw that with like also like for us like. Google's intensity was like something that like that we respected a lot and the way that not only they built Google but they like they had this 20% rule where like they had to ship like they give everyone on the team like they. Build new products and that's how Gmail came out that's how drive came out that's how Google Maps etc so the freedom of building things. And the other company that so we were always inspired by companies that went through like not a straight forward route and that had massive impact on the world. The other company that for us looked something that we respected a lot was what's up and what's up was a team of 30 engineers that scale to hundreds of millions of users. What any very competitive market so for us also like it's very identifiable and saying hey like. 30 people seem something that. Yep and there's all kinds of messaging apps out there so it's a very competitive space but like hope if you're doing the right things you're you can out you get inside the OODA loop of everyone else like here you go. Yeah and what we really looked up to these companies like what's up is another company. We looked up to like all the great companies that how they built and you see that there's level of intensity and focus that they bring. And the culture is what brings these people together but and and and at the end if you're building something people want and you're making the right things even if you make mistakes but in software it's different than like in other businesses where like if you're. Making mistakes you can iterate on it and then you can release it you have a path to building something that is a growing business and if you're if you keep pushing through it and if you go through all the hardships of doing it. If you enjoy doing it. Like in our mind there's no way we lose that it's not like a fake thing like that's how we really believe. And it's not because we're doing it for the wrong reasons like we're doing it for the right reasons and we're very fortunate to be doing what we're doing but the early days were just pure belief like there's there's literally nothing but it's not like believe. You guys convinced me. It's not it's not like and it wasn't cool to work on a I like in September October September November like like like we looked like the weird people so it was like. But it was something where we knew that this thing. If we do the right things we could keep growing it so Richard can talk more about it but that's the I'm always coming back to the analogy between why the seals why. Technology like these were two things that for us like the technology is something that we really are very good at and that we knew that we could do ourselves which gave us superpower. But the common denominator for it is like it won't be easy and we never fought wars so it's not like there's not this it's not the same level of difficulty of saying like hey like we're deploying overseas but. You're competing with major companies that have trillions of dollars of market cap so that's a different type of like physically our job is not tiring like. But you have to make the right moves and position the company so that you're providing value to customers because like there's hundreds of thousands of and millions of people are writing code every day like why your product would be the product that they would pick. Yeah yeah and the iterative decision making which I wrote about the strategy in tactics field manual that's you know this is just another version of what. Yeah iterating on software very quickly and this is such a great it's the exact it's almost the exact same thing right if I need to make a decision I don't try and figure out the entire plan from A to Z. And execute this plan because it's going to take me so long to make that plan perfect and by the way how am I counting for contingencies and things that I didn't expect to happen. And so what you do is you make you make you take a step yeah and you go OK we took a step now we'll look around what are we getting back it was a good step should we lean a little more left a little bit more to the right. OK a little bit more left cool we'll do that take another little step and that's what you know that's what the software properly does and that's why it's such a good reflection of the effectiveness of both of those you know the iterative decision making process making small steps very quickly. And then listening to the feedback that you get and then making changes that's that's how you move forward and it's the same thing with Reno releasing stuff even with the with the ASHA jocco AI you know I got a lot like well you know I don't know if it's going to be ready it's like well let's launch something let's let's get it out there and we'll get feedback and some people will say oh this is terrible because of this we'll OK thank you thank you for telling me that it's terrible because that or it told me this OK well thank you we can make adjustments to it. You know the some of the earlier versions you know I think hey this is I don't like this you guys cool yeah we'll change it no big deal boom try it now boom OK now it's changed like it's very cool and that's how you that's how you. That's how you make things happen it is also something that you have to do with a high level of humility because if I make an iterative step and it's wrong and I can't say well no actually echo. I know we need to keep going in this direction instead of saying you know echo thanks for that feedback I think you're right you're not going to be able to do this and so when you put a piece of software out there and the feedback you get is what kind of interface is this that looks stupid and you go no it doesn't we we really like it no like wrong answer the answer is OK well what don't you like about it and that humility has to go hand in hand with anything that you're putting out of the world because there's no chance that everyone's going to like it there's no chance you know it's just not going to happen so. You can you gotta have an open mind and be humble enough to say OK cool what can I do better 100% definitely and we see this as you said you mentioned earlier like. We definitely see this play out in in great product evolution where it's not the initial design the initial version that someone envisioned and this ended up playing out. Like we cannot really barely point to exceptions to that where I think that it's really very much off the chart but I'm there probably I guarantee there's still a little bit of decision making in that as well but. Like few companies that we think like the only exceptions we think really got to that with like almost like their initial vision ended up playing out was maybe Tesla and SpaceX where like they really just wanted to build the car and and the and the rocket and like you're going there with this direction. But like even on PayPal which is Elon Musk's earlier company the version that PayPal ended up being wasn't really not the initial version of PayPal the initial version PayPal was it was firing up on on a palm device. And like it was for wiring money on a palm device and then what ended up being what scaled a lot they were starting to get like I don't know like maybe a million customer very quickly is people just wanted to send money by email so they would. That was the feature that really wanted to be served to users and it this was the catalyst for for like made the company really grow from a revenue sample and end up in the version of the product that that is in so definitely like a lot like on the on the on the on the iterative part to point on this how like we got on our side like the product evolved is that from from those feedbacks maybe Robert like want to share on like like the inputs that we're getting from from like from the coding space and also like getting the advice from like we were trying to see how we could get more influence from the what's up culture and we can show maybe a bit more on like for us the important thing for us was we always wanted to. Remove as much fat as possible from the company so that like we don't get tricked in saying hey like we have like now it go to market team. So for us was actually it was a bit maybe too aggressive like 2022 until like mid 2023 maybe they're like we're like four or five. Yeah no I don't know if you guys remember this but like some of the board meetings that we had. Yep was me saying like OK you need to you need to bring on like a person to do this maybe one more person to this and it was which is and I'll tell you what if I'm saying that because I'm scrappy too like I never you can ask lay if you can ask anybody that any my companies like I don't like to hire people and because I always feel like oh you hire somebody like that's your responsibility now and so it's a huge investment and it's hard to go it's hard to step back from right. So we'll do our best to hire people as 1099 in the beginning there's there's ways to try and iterate that decision as well but when I'm telling you guys no you need to hire people that is a definite sign that you need to hire people and then you definitely did you did and so that was one of those things that helped move you guys forward. 100% and for us as we started seeing that things are picking up really well like every day you wake up like hey is it like because September 1st when we launch like we got like a few thousand users on this first day. Yeah and then by the end of 2022 it was a million users yeah and that so I remember you guys give me the update you guys shoot me an email like hey you know just to let you know we're up to a million users and I'm like dang dude there was like 2800 you guys showed up to the gym. And that's the thing is like you're like there's a million users and like that's like you start thinking about it you're like maybe like like the first time we crossed like 20,000 users like which has maybe a few days after or like we're like basketball fans were like that's the chase center. Like and like compound that just fast forward today today just yesterday today black box as a whole crossed more than 40 million registered users yesterday only we added 120,000 new users. Yesterday on a per second every day day after day that's 1.5 new user every second and like that's literally every second there's a user and a half and and on a scaling comparison maybe like the coding version from open AI they have a coding version as well that served from open AI. It's about 5x we're about 5x the their scale of growth like all of entropic is adding about a million users a day. That's all for all purposes so like for us code only were like 120,000 so that's and like we skipped three years in between but we're just like zooming in here and saying hey like that's where we started and that's where things are today and meanwhile we did ton of mistakes. No mistake that is fatal. Like Joker has a saying like other than death all failure is like. Like looking from the outside of like how the company grew. And like you've seen it also like Peter Thiel when he talks about like at some point like Facebook was growing fast but like he didn't reinvest his like because like I was still seeing them like it was still the same team like nothing substantially changed so like why do I have to like 2x the valuation or 3x the value like. So we felt this for a long time like numbers were growing but like the company didn't change and. The primary thing for us was like an intense focus for us and saying hey like let's stay true to what matters and what matters is are we growing our user base are we making the right decisions are we still using our products how is the market evolving and what are the. Next two three moves that we need to make so that we can adjust and. So for us was very important for us to always like not have fat in the company and until this moment the company has zero people working on go to market like it's all. But some up growth were only engineers the like and everything like some. I wouldn't recommend this for everyone but that's how we see the world and now we are going to be extremely hard and extremely focused on building go to market functions. But we brought the company to cross 40 million users revenue is growing at extremely fast pace. We have a great team of engineers and meanwhile like throughout like we raised three rounds of funding from like the most intense engineers the smartest investors so like the founder of what's up. Is a main investor that invested three times Xavier Niel which is the founder of the equivalent of an AT&T but in France and built his company from the ground up to a twenty thirty billion dollar company. Is an investor he's on the board of KKR the private equity fund George which is extremely valuable as the angel which are the first check into Google. So they still recall the first time they met the Google founders as the angel and all of them have been extremely helpful and they influenced how we shape the company so like we're building a team for engineers were backed by the most intense and smart engineers and like today black box is used by some of the most advanced technology companies in the world and all of that is not something that we drop on a whiteboard like that's. And that and it still feels like we are behind like that's the feeling every day is we need to do 10 times more so that's. But that's what we like like we came across a video from it's not related to take but like Jerry Seinfeld and he's like if I have to like eat like peanut butter and like bread every day like that's what I would just do comedy but just. And like there's a video and like I'll send it to you after like he's meeting with a stand up comedian in a comedy show in New York and the guy is like. All my friends are moving up. He's like explain to me this. He's like they're in consulting they're in banking and Jerry Seinfeld like like that's disgusting. And he's like my girlfriend like wants me to change. He's like let me tell you a story. He's like there's a band that was supposed to go play in a concert and like the plane couldn't land or like there was no storm so they landed somewhere else and like they have to drag their instruments. So like they're walking through the snow they're like the slush etc and like their instruments and they see a house with like a window so that they get close and they see like a chimney. A well dressed table turkey etc. And like they look to each other and they're like how boring. So if if you like building startups is not for everyone but if that's something that you're passionate about. There is a lot of value creation that you can do to help other people like to provide services to the world. And it happens to be the most important industry in the world which has anyone can build soft like you need to be an excellent engineer but I'm saying like any engineer that's at Google today can build a company. They just decide not to do it and you have to be extremely lucky you have to get the support from a lot of people. But technically like anyone who has the technical capabilities and like build something that people want has the ability to do if everything aligns you have to be extremely lucky and that's what we're also cognizant about. Yes indeed. So you know 40 million users right now awesome growth everything looking great. Let's talk about AI kind of broadly as a subject since you guys are experts. In AI is that strong word. I mean I can't think of too many people that would know more than you would know about you know AI. There's you know obviously there's other experts out there but you guys are certainly a little bit. You guys are certainly more experts than Echo and me. We definitely like try to like we definitely like spend every single minute for for as long as we've been working on black box. You know focusing on on AI and how how it can be impactful like economically for users for customers how it can like the end users are software engineers but every single day we're really trying to push it to perform better. So yeah like I wouldn't use the term expert but I would use just like there's maybe like a few thousand Navy SEALs in the world. There's maybe a thousand people working on AI as hardcore as you guys are. And there's there's broadly AI and also there's a field which is agent to AI and agent to AI is even is even unlocking much more value than AI broadly itself. The reason is for AI in general has been very much known to be a question answering the generative AI. Yeah generative AI so you would ask it about a recipe and it would tell you more about it. Agenta AI is a big economic unlock for users is it is getting as close. The way more example is maybe a very good one because it's literally getting as close as the same actions that a human is taking. It's taking it itself and it's taking it not only for low level work that a human is doing. It's taking it to very advanced very high complicated work that humans are doing. And we're seeing it a big impact on software itself is it is competing intensely with very advanced software engineers today. So giving the agent a task is becoming extremely competitive with giving it to a very advanced software engineer. So that also is a field that is very specific very few companies are making serious efforts in it. And we've been doing this for like for as like in the past two years this has been really the only the primary product that's been been being developed. Yeah and it's wild. Like I said I don't know how many months ago it was but you guys came down. We had a board meeting and we but then the real deal was you guys are you guys broke out. That it was kind of the the initial voice to programming. Happening. And so here am I a total knuckle dragger with no computer experience whatsoever. And I was able to speak to you know black box in English and have it do work for me and build an app real time as we're sitting here. Make adjustments change it. And it was I remember when I was doing it. Honestly it was it kind of freaked me out a little bit. And I don't look I'm not trying to be dramatic or whatever. But when you're sitting there and you're telling it to do something and I remember you know I told it to do something and it asked me a question about what I told it. And I looked at you so I said why is it already asked me a question. You said because it started programming while you were giving it its first instructions. And I said oh that's insane. Like that's insane. You know you I was I said hey I want you to build a you know I want you to build an app that does blah blah blah. And it and it as it's it asked me a question you know when you think of the home screen do you. And I was like wait a second how I said how does it how does it ask me that question. You said it already started while you started talking to it. It started coding. That was it was it was amazing. But it was very strange. And I think that's one of the things you know when I think about black box there's a little bit of a there's a bridge that I got. In my head that I went over which is you know it's a coding is primarily for coding right. But the thing is when you think about what that means that means you as a person can tell this thing to do whatever you want it to do. That that it's going to code it but you don't have to know that you don't have to know that you can tell it to do things you can use it for absolutely anything. Because it's going to take your English and turn it into you know code that's going to do what you want it to do. And by the way you know like life uses it for like hey where should we go for sushi tonight. I don't know how black box knows all that but it knows all that stuff like it gives you the recommendations it'll tell you what to do. And so it's it's it's definitely when I was doing that verbal programming it it definitely if I felt like literally hey this is this is this is like a small step. For man but like a giant step for mankind and I mean that sincerely it is to see oh yeah and then you know the you guys were showing me the earliest of the video stuff. And I'm like show a seal doing close quarters combat in an urban area a video and like it says OK and boom here it was a seal video doing close quarters combat. And by the way this isn't this isn't what black box was made for doing what I told it to do. It's absolutely phenomenal but I do think you know and I'm sure that there's other companies that have had those moments but for me a knuckle draggler that was a small step for man and a massive massive leap for mankind because all of a sudden I had this this power right this incredible power beyond comprehension beyond beyond comprehension because to say hey you know immediately echo right now I'm going to give you the power to create you know art or create film or create images or create you know agents that are going to go out and do things like that is an incredible amount of power it's mind boggling. So that's kind of when when when people think about a I right now and I saw like a list of jobs right everyone's worried about jobs what jobs are going to disappear and you know it's the scripts have flipped you know when I was growing up it's like oh go be a doctor go be a lawyer you know go do become an accountant do those kind of jobs because that's where the money is and that's that's where the education is needed and those jobs you know according to this chart I looked at the other day was like oh no the most reliable jobs going to be plumber electrician painter landscaper things that things that I can't do yet because it's not going to be long before everyone's got their optimist robot out there doing things I mean they're saying that optimist robot's going to be 15 grand 15 thousand dollars for a robot that's going to mow your lawn clean your laundry clean you know pick up after your house prepare your dinner all those things this is not that far away. When you guys so so when you're looking at companies what do you think companies should be doing right now to utilize a I. So just like you're sharing like a I and specifically a genetic AI has tremendous powers so like. First like there was like perception AI like it was like more like speech recognition medical imagery then like the past three four years has been more like generative AI like question answering like you input text output video input text output image. A genetic AI is operates more like humans operate so what companies should do is Jensen Huang from Nvidia has saying is like you're not going to lose your job to AI but you're going to lose your job to someone who knows how to use AI. Like imagine someone who joins a company today who doesn't know how to use a computer. Like that's barely like possible. It's however like it took maybe like decades before like the personal computer became a thing. What we're seeing now is just accelerating at a pace that is just faster than anything. What black box was able to do yesterday and was going to be able to do by end of this day today is going to be like a leap like draw box did not change. It's a very respected company massive impact on the world but file sharing was there in 2006 is still a file sharing. When we're building a agents it's not the same thing from last week so it's and also not to make people afraid it's here to help you. It's it's here to make your team better it's here to make your company better it's here to make your country better. And the goal for companies and for leaders in these companies is to embrace this technology. I was just looking at like every technology wave like people think that hey like that's a joke or like great it's cool just like when we show Jocco here like in 2022 like it wasn't as capable as today right. And like you have to be like naive enough to know that hey like that's where the curve is going because it doesn't matter where you are on the Y axis it matters the slope at which progress is happening right because you can start very small but if you're growing and like the slope is very steep like you're going to get there. So what I would encourage people is to start investing heavily in their people and training them how to use AI the young generation already knows how to do it. It's more the people who are maybe in their mid careers or late in their careers and some people like and there's also a lot of fear in the market and saying hey like how should we trust it. It's maybe not following all my instructions should we be afraid of it. My point is. Consider it as like you're augmenting your team. And today if you onboard a new person on your team it's going to take time for them to ramp up. AI just ramps up right away. It's ramped. And like you were saying earlier Richard like there's going to be like you're just saying hello it might not follow all of my orders but at the same time just like you have some randomness to coding. When it's done by AI well you might have an agent that only follows you know 94 percent of what you told it to do. That's something that just 94 percent of what you have 6 percent and you got to maybe make some adjustments. It's kind of like with decentralized command. I always tell people with decentralized command there's always risk because if I tell you to go do something you might not do it exactly how I want to do it. And in some cases you might do something that's outside of what I wanted to do and maybe even outside the rules of what I wanted to do. So there is risk with decentralized command but generally speaking the risk because I was able to tell you to do something you do something and you do something and you guys all went out and executed and echo did something that was not quite as good as it should have been. But everything else happened otherwise if I would have had to do all that myself it would have been I couldn't have gotten it done. So there's risk there's going to be some level of risk with with anything that you do with decentralized command. This is sort of a version of decentralized command which means you need to give good instructions. You know if you don't give good instructions you don't put parameters in place you're going to have a better chance of things you know stepping outside. The one thing I would say about adopting any new technology and I was very lucky in the SEAL teams because I went through some very very big technological changes. The two biggest that I can think of usually I refer to is GPS and night vision. So what I learned from those things the first GPS that I had was about the size of a little bit bigger than a shoebox and it weighed about 25 pounds with extra batteries and whatnot. And that first GPS that I had to carry it took four hours to find itself. So you would turn it on and you'd have to sit there and wait for four hours for it to figure out where it was. And I can tell you the reason because it had it would only scan one frequency at a time from the satellites and if it just went through like a standard list of what satellite what what satellite frequencies to look for. And if that satellite happened to be on the other side of the world it wouldn't switch it would just sit there and wait. And it eventually that satellite would show up or eventually had a time limit where it would switch. But then it would have to find that satellite once it find that satellite could find the next satellite faster because it knew where the first one was and they but so it take four hours. Your phone is searching for all the frequencies right now. So as soon as you turn it on it's going to catch one of those frequencies and knows where it is in instantaneously. So they hand me a 25 pound thing and they tell me it takes four hours to find itself. And I say hey I can carry a map and compass which weighs nothing and I'll know where I am in three minutes. What are we doing. And what you have to recognize with technology is when you first implement it you're going to be less efficient. You're going to it's going to take some time to get used to. And so when you first start using black box you're going to you might be telling it to do something for you know oh you didn't tell the right way or it's going to take you a couple extra seconds to figure out how to And what but once you get used to that now all of a sudden you're you're going to be exponentially more efficient. So we as leaders have to set expectations in order to make it work. The other thing you have to do is you have to use it. You have to get through that inefficiency. You have to push yourself through it because once that you know once we did figure out how to use the GPS. Oh guess what it takes four hours to find itself. OK turn it on four hours before you head on your operation. Like there's things that you adaptations that you make and then it gave us capabilities because you take me 14 miles nautical miles off the coast of California and map and compass doesn't help me anymore because there's nothing to take. You know resections off of so now that GPS is a total game changer. So you have to use that technology and you have to use it enough so that you become proficient with it. And I think that's what if you're hesitant right now you got to get in there and start trying to use it. What are you going to use it for. And I think you'll see there's some tasks that you can use it for. But if you get used to those tasks you can start to branch out and try some other things with it. And eventually you'll realize that you have just a complete force multiplier in what you're capable of doing. And to add one point as well on this is like we see the way more analogies is an awesome implementation of like what the future of like a an environment where you know you have a bit physically basically you have a robot that's you know fully you know cohabiting with humans. And one car behind it that's a human and then the car in front of it. It's a robot that's just driving without a driver in the seat. That's so so much powerful and it's there like it captures the essence of like how I should be implemented and how should be used. Basically any other agent that if a company is looking to be using an agent and to deploy it to their to their teams engineers or whoever. It matters a lot that you deploy it in environments where like way more is that are today deployed. They're not sent out in Nevada for example they're not sent out into like some environments where it is predicted. It's not trained for this. It's not is predicted to fail. So we're not deploying that there yet. We want to film Nevada. Like it's now the cities where it's deployed yet. It's like San Francisco. It's expanding to maybe expanding. There's regulatory issues to expand. And maybe also some like some training some like more like maybe roads or like there might be some things that get involved in like some like optimization that are needed. But the big impact is that it is unlocking so much economic value like as of right now as of today it's moving so many people. It's saving costs as well. The consumers ending up paying a paying a cheaper cost. So it's helping a lot of the economy by having this available. And same thing for for agents as well. If you deploy them on things that they're predicted to fail that shouldn't be the determining factor for you to say you know what that's not the right technology. You by making that call basically you just left out a massive economic unlock that if you start deploying it in the right places you're just heading in the right direction in terms of like what what it can it can really do. And the thing maybe specifically in software is that we are very honestly seeing it extremely competitive. Now it still can do everything. It's still not to the level of autonomy that a way more car has like a way like a driver in the way more car today is basically trusting it with their with their life. Like if I'm writing in it I might you know you know an accident can come up right. So it's a very you know high stakes maybe if you want to call it like kind of commitment that you're doing in software. It's not so much of a high stake like it can you know some some user requests might you know not get answered. You know some customers might get you know complaints because they they're not expecting the behavior of the service that they that they plan for. So on software and the benefit of software as well as that anything you end up having from the AI build and develop what you're capable of doing. You're capable of running it and testing it in a sandbox environment and then seeing it you know before I fully released it to user. I got some checklist confirmation that it tested all these things and I'm not going to break anything into production when I actually do release it. So there is this difference where like if a way more cars makes a mistake it's making it like instantly now and it can have an impact where in software it's much less of an impact. You have like two different environments production versus you know what you're developing internally and you can fully test out things and be sure that you have high confidence on things before you fully release them. So and we've seen that fear at every technological wave. Well I was about to say so people are afraid of change. And people are afraid of things that they don't understand. And how do you assuage people's fear because they it's change and they don't understand what it is. I'll give the example of the automobile. The automobile when it was the first automobile that Ford built JP Morgan even refused to invest. He thought it was a toy for rich people to run it. You had to have a full time driver. You had to have a full time mechanic because it would break every like three miles and you had to have a store. And there was a law in the U.S. and in England. I think it was called the red flag law where you have to have someone that's distant maybe few feet from the car with the red flag. So if they see a horse they should raise the flag. And like everyone thought that this is just like a toy for rich kids. And now the thing with AI is people think that hey like these are just young people playing around. And there's a lot of fear also like hey like are these going to replace our jobs etc. Same thing happened with the Internet like no one said like people were joking. Hey like do you really think you're going to have commerce on the Internet. You're going to have like you're going to be able to make pain. What are you going to buy a pair of jeans on the interwebs. I don't think so buddy. How would you pay for it. So like these people by default are afraid of change and like we've seen them in the past. However the pace of technology is only accelerating and it cannot be stopped. So the point what would advise people is one definitely that's a change. However it's a positive change. Think about it right now. Richard has a MacBook here like 30 years ago he had to like bring it in a box and like three people holding it with him. Right. People are the way that the future of work is going to happen is that people will have multiple agents doing things while you are working or not working. The job of a human being today just like you're you have a team of people that you manage you'll be managing also a team of agents. And what we're doing because it's only based on code is any task can be broken down in code. And just like Joe was explaining it is like anything and like software is what powers everything. So like if you want to build whatever like just ask it to do a task it would try the code for it it would execute it. So what people should be doing is definitely take it as Richard saying like in an iterative step saying hey rate where are the environments where I'm comfortable starting to adopt it. Software engineers by default are the people that adopt technology the fastest like they understand that things break that things are. Maybe not as stable etc. And that's why we've been able to grow very fast because like this is an audience that has the ability to like adopt technology. But I'm talking more for people that are leading organizations and saying hey like these are not things that you should be afraid of. Actually these are things that should benefit your company. So it would definitely accelerate your pace of releasing products. It would definitely accelerate the pace at which your feedback from customers is being shipped. It would definitely reduce your cost to launching things. And if you think about it if all these are true basically what you're doing to your companies actually your company is becoming better financially. And if your company is better financially all you're doing is growing. So there is no fear of recruiting people. There is no fear of displacing jobs. Actually there's going to be job displacement but there is not going to be higher unemployment. If your company is making like today and video is making 200 billions of profit this year and video is recruiting. And video is investing. So right like by default if you're using tools that would make your company more efficient you're not going to fire people because now a is running your company. You're going to recruit more people so they can manage a agent so that you can build better products better companies and your team actually is not doing mundane work. Like if there was a task that someone on your team was doing that like is not fulfilling for them and then they're like hey like I'm going to leave for this other company because they're giving me money. I'm going to give you more responsibilities. If you're implementing a agents in your company these people are moving up the chain and not doing the mundane tasks they're doing tasks that are more fulfilling for them. And right now Black Box is being written by Black Box. So the software is just evolving itself and there is no reason why any company across the U.S. across the world is actually using agents to constantly be shipping code. And that's just on the positive side. If you look at it from a security side there is also significant value in having a agents just be deployed for security purposes for your companies and then we can dive into it but that's just on the positive side in there is going to be need in training people or recruiting people who know how to use these agents and for companies to invest in it because that's only an upside for them. There is little to no downside. Any technology can be used negatively and there's going to be failures. There's going to be things where you're going to learn from it. But today what we are seeing is companies only accelerating their pace of innovation because of adopting Black Box. Yeah there's a whole story of the evolution of naval ships and this is B. H. Liddell hard the guy that's the indirect approach the strategy the indirect approach and and he's got this little I got to memorize this thing or at least memorize the evolution but it was basically you know when they went from from wooden ships to steel ships you know there was a whole plethora of people. Hey you can't what's going to happen if that thing you can't repair it at sea it's the bubble above they had all these reasons why not do it when they went from sail to steam. Oh my gosh what are you going to do when you run out of coal like this is totally ridiculous you guys are the dumbest people like they went you know oh you're going to put aircraft carriers what are you going to put fly it's going to be relying on planes like this is totally so every evolution. I mean major evolution in the in the improvement of naval warships every one of them was totally resisted by the Admiralty who would say what do you know how would you want to make a ship out of steel you're an idiot why would you want to run on steam we can go forever with our wind you know and but every time. But every time eventually it breaks and you know that they break they go yeah you know what this actually has to happen and you know just you know at a jockel fuel we have our our. I guess our e-commerce team is just they're really great with with AI and the things that they're doing with AI is incredible and it's all. You know they work with all the other teams I guess it's not that it's just the just the computer we might as well call them the AI people but you know like every report that we get you know like the financial report that we get which which literally a year ago was done by human beings at jockel fuel spending. Three hours on a Sunday putting the numbers together this all automated now yeah and so now does that mean they lose that those people lost their jobs no no no it means that they're doing something that's. Proactive and and more productive than sitting around and going through Excel spreadsheets and that's one example of countless examples we have a great great again I don't know what to call them they might they might as well be called the AI department guy Gordon might as well be called the AI department. And he works with all the different from the financial department the marketing department the sales department he works with all of them and makes their jobs easier because you there's so much mundane tasks that need to get done that allows the people instead of doing mundane tasks like projections on the amount of what you know protein that we need to order to put into our protein powder that AI can figure that out matter of fact it figures that out and it likes figuring it out. So it and again do you have to have a human that needs to know how to do that. Yeah of course you do. So that's some of the things that I think people are going to have to recognize because if you don't. You know you're going to be paying somebody whatever twenty five dollars an hour or forty dollars an hour to sit there and look at an Excel spreadsheet Excel spreadsheet when you could just have an agent that knows what to look for and have the person that is getting paid 40 bucks an hour to now say oh I'm going to have this agent doing that I'm have this agent doing that I'm going to this agent doing the thing I'm going to give you more accurate information it's going to be more timely and I'm going to be able to respond to your request faster and I'm going to do something that's looking up and out instead of looking down and in. So this is definitely if you're not adopting it right now. You know just like the GPS. Yeah you could deny it for a little while and keep using your map and compass but you're going to look up in three or four years and you're not even going to be able to function like you couldn't function in the US military now. The aircraft overhead the people on the ground the integrated blue on blue or blue force trackers like all those things are all inherently GPS. So if you don't get on board with it you're going to end up being left behind and this is the absolute facts with with AI and you have to use it. What is the you know when you mentioned the security what was your what are you going to say about you know security and AI. Yeah definitely so like we have big influence on like like we use internally signal messaging specifically and we we we appreciate whenever product is designed for privacy and security as well. Apple has a great reputation on this as well so we try to also bring this into the product that we have with AI with agents as well and the thing that we wanted for ourselves and for the UCs that we're serving was something that was private and and secure for users and the fall. The form that we started looking into is end to end encryption with not only AI and like AI chat for like question answering but also for an agent that is doing a task that's taking action. So we built the first end to end encrypted agent that is there's versions where some some products might attempt to resolve the end to end encrypted for agents the version that we wanted to make it available and and can be served to users. Some some simple forms of it can be easily done when you're serving it on low capable models so basically this can't be done if you were to do it on. LLM models that come from companies like open AI or anthropic unless they would to implement they would be doing the implementation of it. They might be able to implement this capability but if someone is basically you have companies that basically sell whatever open AI is giving them as a model so you end up using the models from open AI but through another product. That is not possible today to encrypt something that is close source. It is only possible to encrypt something that is open source as model which gives you the ability to host it on GPUs yourself and then have the end to end encryption. The big unlock for this is we needed to have it available to users not as a small model but as a big model. The reason for this like typically anything you find useful in AI is powered by a big LLM. It's not powered by maybe seven billion parameter LLM. I haven't heard about any small like models or even medium. Exactly. You only hear about large. Exactly. And so these require multiple GPUs to be loaded on them and these need to be end to end encrypted across multiple GPUs all the way down to the user that is using them. So for that to be available we're making it available as an agent and also we're making it available for use cases. Typically people might be interested in but we see it very useful for example in the medical field where privacy of patient data can be very critical. And there's also it's not just that it's critical for them but it's also they have rules that there should be no egress of data coming out of the device. So the agent actually the agent must be running on the same device. So there should be almost no communication with the Internet. So this gives basically the agent and the GPU access to the patient's data. One thing that is very exciting for us where we're collaborating today on is with Stanford Medical School with a team of both doctors and computer scientists that is something that is for the first time we're working on this together with their team and the team. Together with their team is it's going to be for the first time possible and the results will like it will take several several weeks to two months but it's on that direction where a very small team will be able to build a foundational model that will be able to predict diseases based on public MRI data sets of cardiac, you know, cardiac data set that is available publicly. So the power of this is that through the agent, the amount of resources that you needed to develop this before without an agent would have been enormous and you needed like a big team, a big investment and all of this. But what's happening now, we're working on it with them and they like it's it's it's going in this direction where you don't need like the agent is able to build this foundation model with good interaction with it with with with a with a small group of computer scientists. With a small group of doctors as well with the right feedback, the agent has the ability to write the entire code to train the model to to to test it to to see if it's making the right prediction so that kind of capability is something that is becoming to be unlocked whenever whenever someone and that lower the barrier for non technical people like these doctors don't have like they are very good at software but they're not expert. So lowering they are now. Exactly. And it's incredible right. That's that's the deal. That's where we're moving. We're moving in a world to a world where before software was built by maybe there's maybe a few million people in the world that are very advanced in software and like they control whatever product you use to now having more customized software and anyone can be building software today. And that's what we have as a vision for the company is having one billion builders in the next 10 years today that technology is available and the barrier to entry is going to only get lower. So we're going to move from people that are extremely technical that started adopting it to maybe lesser technical and then to anyone in the world having the ability to build software and make their companies better make their teams better make their countries better. Today we're seeing application of AI in war. Some reports say hey like whatever they're doing with AI should require would have required 2000 people they're able to do it with 20 people. Right. This is where using and leverage if the government is using AI I don't find the reason why any company would not use it. Typically typically it's it's the opposite right. And however like the good thing with this administration is that we have very forward looking people from the technology that are embedded in these administration that are investing in these resources and the security aspect plays a very important role today. There is everyone like just like whenever there was the rise of the Internet it opened up for like hackers and security breaches to happen. Imagine you have people that are using agents for security purposes to steal information right. So if your company is afraid of running software to build software you have adversaries or like people that are competing with you that are building agents to actually steal your information like these people can just like keep running these agents every day. And like these fight fire with fire. Exactly. So that's number one. Number two is like there is a big race right now between the US and China. These are the two predominant countries that have excellent AI talent and that are both racing. Europe is not as advanced in AI as the US and and China and the US is investing heavily but should definitely invest much in AI. And that's definitely invest much more because that's not only what we're talking right now is how can you make your companies better etc. But these agents have the ability to do significant attacks on countries to steal data to steal tactics to hijack systems so that because every single technology that you use is part of every single equipment that uses part by by software. So what if these agents take hold of the software and just like shuts it down or like change the code and like makes it not responsive right so you're launching a rocket and like there's something changing the code that this causes a failure right so it's important for the US also to be they are leading to the race. And however China is very aggressive in investing in AI the big difference between what China is doing and what the US is doing is China is investing heavily in open source models. And as we're moving to a world where these models get better the world right now mostly is running on American models. Most of the world but the Chinese models are picking up steam very quickly because they are open source so companies can self host them and the disadvantage of that is you're embedding. Models that are built by other countries while the US has all the capabilities. However all the research labs in the US are building more close source models so you don't have access to the model weights. Whereas Chinese are building and releasing open source models you saw that with the rise of deep seek. Last year that everyone was surprised about but now there's at least four or five very good AI companies out of China just releasing open source models that are very good. So we got national security we got curing diseases we got billions of people empowered by this. And we also made ask jaco dot AI. Who thought of that did you guys think of that or did I think of that. Did you think of a Richard. No I'm very honest like. Definitely it's like from our conversation like we're always trying to find ways where like basically we're like there's like multiple ways but definitely it's fed it came from conversations with you and like one big need for us is that we actually like bore you a lot with a ton of questions. And having having the ability to I'm off the board. By myself by jaco AI. Yeah no that's one of the things that when you guys initially made I forget how I initially saw it but what I was like oh that's cool and you guys were like we're using it all the time for leadership questions and I was like OK. Yeah so then like OK let's you know that's one of the biggest things for me is people people want to ask questions about what's going on you know with their leader leadership in their world generally speaking to the other things as well but but you know I don't have a chance to reply to everybody especially you know everyone's got their little nuanced case and so as I you know well let's see what it can do and you know so we brought it into echelon front we started you know we we sicked the echelon front team on it you know the echelon front team we hear questions all day long and to hear it we we tried to stump it and give it questions that would you know inappropriate questions questions outside the box illegal immoral unethical like all those things to see how it responded and really it's honestly again it's like it's like incredible it's incredible what it does and you know it's funny I'm just thinking about some of the iterative steps like the first version that you guys sent me the way I sounded like straight up just drill instructor was like let me tell you what this is jocco here and if you got an issue with leadership I'm gonna get it solved for you and I was like hey guys I know that's like the caricature of what I sound like but I don't want to actually talk like that you guys are like cool cool but but that's the amazing thing is you know 15 minutes later you sent another text was like try it now and it's like hey this is jocco got some questions about leadership yeah what are they you know I was like yeah that's amazing so the the iterative steps and and putting it together and again I think this is gonna be a good step you know as I talked about it with the rest of the echelon front team it's like well we have to you know this is a game that we have to play this is this is a line of operation that the world is going to do there's no doubt and the way that you guys were able to incorporate all the books all the podcast you know basically everything of and actually we sent you all the behind the scenes muster stuff so all the musters take all that information get it organized in a way that it is going to give really good answers and it really does you know it really does give incredible answers I think it's gonna be a huge amount of help to people in every aspect of their lives you know just hey let me let me get a second opinion here let me ask jocco AI which it just caught it thinks it's me I don't know if you noticed that in the opening there did you hear that when he was talking about the podcast it was like we talk about meaning me and you echo Charles who's saying we you know and I was like okay alright I try to give it try to get it to the echo Charles accent earlier today wouldn't do it so maybe you know that might be the next thing definitely ask echo echo's gonna be like hey you need to cruise more that's that's the difference what Richard was saying like before softer before was very deterministic like you would have to say if then right here we didn't tell it anything like and then you give it guidance and you give it the content you give it the guard rates and it's gonna operate within these guard rates right and that's like Richard can comment more on like the technique the technology behind it but the premise of it is anyone it AI basically operates like a human brain like now you ask me a question I am not programmed if jocco ask you this then and that's the difference before everything was like a retrieval based system which means you have to create the content then you get you search for something you're retrieving the information right now it's a generative compute mode which makes it like okay great that's a new question that I'm gonna generate the answer I'm using whatever background I have but I'm not retrieving information no if you if you ask it the same question it'll give you slightly different answers you know that are nuanced in a different way it's it's it's yeah it's incredible and again you know I know it's not perfect right now will improve upon it will iterate on it's gonna get better I think the the android version is out right now the Apple app version is coming and if you just on your laptop whatever you can just go to ask jocco dot AI and you know start asking some questions are getting some leadership guidance that's what we're doing awesome awesome does that get us up to speed I mean we could talk all day but is this the primary things that we wanted to cover today yeah I think I think anything like from our end one like we're like the impact that you personally had on the way that we think that the way that we try to build our company that we try the way that we try to go about our day on a day to day basis has had big impact as mentioned like that started with the aspiration to learn more about the US military in the other part of the world you're the good guys like that's something that and like one quick story that happened like just recently like we typically work out every day at like 435 but I can relate and that's because of jocco but to two Sundays ago we had some important things in the morning so like we worked out at like maybe 2.8 2pm and we have our laptops with us because if something happened like so I'm on the assault bike Richard is on the rover and there was no one at the gym and we typically are very apolitical and like we don't share any political opinions but we're like hey let's see what's happening on the news like we knew what's happening but so we put the news and then like someone got to the gym and they look at the TV and you could see the satisfaction but then they went and did the tour and then they came back and like they prompted the conversation and as mentioned like I personally Richard Roger me like we never share our political opinions on anything like we all like folks about work and like you also talk a lot about it is like you can change politics like just go about your day to day life the reason I'm sharing this is like that's I'm just giving my perspective on things so that was a few days after what happened in Iran and like the killing of the Ayatollah and like I had on the phone I had my father on the phone and like our battery was maybe at like 2% so like then the battery died but I can I can definitely be sure that he was saying like just don't answer not in a fearful way again like it doesn't come from hey like let's just like lay low it just like just go about your business but it felt a bit more like in a movie like there's this thing happening and there's someone who is like and there's this person who is vocally asking us something and it felt like like Richard and I have shaved head like we're always in Navy blue so even when we work out we're just in Navy blue so like we look maybe like we're like small and size like we're not large and we don't look very like friendly or something and this person said like what do you think about this and the reason I'm saying like you got like I'm thinking the effort that you guys do in general as the US military is I'm like there are these people are laying their lives for this other part of the world and again I'm not getting into politics I'm like if I can't voice cordially my opinion on things like like there's literally no risk so what I told this person is like that we grew up there like and that these people are like that I disagree with their way of life and I told her like right now it's 2pm you're at the gym and that part of the world you can't be at the gym the other point is you can't voice your opinion so whatever you think it's a privilege that you can think and that you can there confront two guys and ask them about their opinion and I honestly can't say whether it's the role of the US to save the rest of the world that's I can't comment on that but I can say is that there is a need for the right people to do the right thing in general in life my like when I saw the like if you see someone getting raped like you're going to jump and save this person then if there's a country that is under oppression and that also has a threat to the infrastructure of the US or whatever like I can't make the decision but like that was a decision that was made my point being is we live in a country whether it's Canada the US, France, the US, the US in general where people have the privilege of going by their day to day life and building companies and voicing your opinions and to do that there are people that are sacrificing their lives or sacrificing maybe they're not dying but they're sacrificing one year or 10 years or 20 years of their lives whether they agree or not with that political decision to support a bigger agenda and for me that struck me as hey like I'm not like and I said my first reaction was look for the cameras because I don't want that was really because I want to share my opinion but if someone will go say hey like they were insulting like I don't want to have that so my point what I said is this is like your privilege that in this country you have the chance to be at the gym at this time and like she was very respectful by the way like no and her dad served in World War II her husband served in Vietnam so like it was a very nice conversation I'm just sharing my perspective and whenever people prompt us we typically do not share anything the reason for it is we just focus on what we do as work but the reason why I'm voicing this is because people like you take much bigger risks in what you do to make the world a better place and that's what attracted us to this and also the same thing on the technology side is these people are very nice people that build things so that they can make the lives of people better no one sits and plan to build the next whatever and say hey I'm going to steal all this data and I'm going to sell ads and then I'm going to like make a lot of money and then build in whatever like in general I believe that people are good by default and that the West in general allows you and gives you the opportunities to do whatever you want if you work extremely hard for it and people that serve make it possible for everyone else to benefit from that and that whatever political direction you have that should be the direction and also there should be a scoreboard in who are the right who are the good guys and who are the bad guys it should be pretty much black and white like there is no gray zone here so our point is how we got brought up the folks on the education that we had the inspiration that we got from what you guys did in the region and the help that we got along the way that's why we're thankful for what we're doing and like it all boils down to like in general human beings are good people like no one is born like wanting to do bad things and there's so much good things that people can spend their lives on and in general like just wanted to finish it by thanking you and everything that you bring to the world and the people that serve and I like anyone who listened who may have been triggered by some of the thoughts that we shared like these are just lived experiences I'm not sharing anything negative about anyone these are just facts I'm just stating factual other side can have other facts right and but the goal of the discourse is just to share our side and that no one actually prevented us to do anything because we came from whichever part right the interesting thing is like in Canada were the Lebanese and Lebanon were the Canadians like here were the whatever but it brings a strength like we're always a bit the outlier and like as you say like we're always a bit detached like we're never part of the thing right and that what creates like the bond and like the intensity and yeah we try to surround ourselves with people that come from different backgrounds believe in what we're doing and I think there's so much good things that we're going to be doing like the world is accelerating at massive scale but I would encourage people not to be afraid of it like the change is going only to make their lives better and we're just at the beginning of a massive revolution and just like right now you have all mobile phones laptops that are like in a year from now all of you will have like tens of agents like you'll be recording a podcast and like your agent will be booking maybe other guests while and like you like a joke or what do you think about that right and like maybe we'll see something with Jocco fuel and say hey I just ship this code because like I found that this was better and like this increased revenue by 20% without you prompting the agent to do these things so like agents will become part of our lives but I just wanted to take some time to thank you and like maybe I'll definitely yeah like definitely want to make sure that like as you always say your the impact that you've had you actually on front like also want to thank you I don't know I don't know whether like it's like probably like probably people say definitely a lot but I think the stories that you've shared or make a massive impact on people the stories of what your experiences yeah like we really pull massive examples from from from what you did and you continue to do so yeah like we really thank you for you know this podcast is really you know giving giving a lot of good examples for people good inspiration for people setting setting the standard for how they should be building their teams how they should be building their companies for us it was really very obvious it just correlation between if we want to build a solid team if we want to build a good culture it really like made sense to really get your take get your perspective get your all of your insights and we're very fortunate that we get to exchange take some of your time you're you're you're much busier than we are and we get now also to chat with you also with the AI side of it but but yeah really really appreciate everything that you're doing yeah well I think what everything that you guys just said you know you could boil that all down to and it's a good message for anyone is be thankful for what you got you know and it's really easy to sit around and look at the world and be mad or frustrated or whatever or you look at the world and and you be thankful for you've got to be thankful for the people that sacrifice so that you can have these opportunities that we all have so those are great messages echo Charles yes you got any questions well I got plenty but in spirit of you know I'm going to keep it to to for the time being okay so we'll say even off air one like if we're talking about jacquot dot a I asked jacquot right so and and also the guardrails that you guys are talking about right you know how you put the guardrails okay so we'll say off air if jacquot says hey say this right and then jacquot AI will come back with hey that's not what I'm here for I'm here to answer your leadership questions I'm not going to dance to your song or whatever I'm not going to you know yeah 100% is that some guardrails that you guys put in or did it just sort of I'm going to just be jacquot and figured out how jacquot is and then said that so two things it's a combination of both we could loosen up the guardrails so that like it would like with like we designed it to be because what jocquot and a strong front ask us to be like to not go off some limits so it's designed it's by design but also even though we would loosen things up it would not act like Robert it would all without me even telling it like if it's just understanding what how jocquot is the weird thing is as I was getting ready yesterday for this podcast I was running through I was like I'm gonna do this I'm gonna say tell to say this I just wanted people to hear the voice and it did it three times like without hesitation it just said what I wanted to say right I said hey I want you to say this is jacquot podcast right and it said okay and it said it and I was like okay cool and I like tested it twice and it did it both times or three times and then this morning when I got in here I was telling echo I go hey this is what I'm gonna do and the guys show up and do this right here and it was like hey I'm not like I'm not here to you know imitate people I'm here to answer leadership questions so again that's like interesting that it's like you said it's not just pulling something from past experience or pulling something from some document somewhere it's creating an idea and formulating it and presenting it so it's definitely you know it's interesting right and that's kind of why I asked because there's a difference between you guys saying hey be like jocquot and then it figuring that out on its own versus some of that and then some like hey let's do this you know it's almost like the DNA of jocquot at least a little bit of it has to come from you guys seem saying versus oh here's here's a whole bunch of jocquot you know you discern it on your own kind of a thing and then it and then it they want me to be extremely honest or do you want me to be like I prefer extreme honesty from the time yeah yeah the only thing that we literally like somehow like hard not hard coded but like we told it how to answer is what's the most important quality of a leader it used to say based on all the information it used to say the most important quality of leader is to take extreme ownership and now like we're just asking it to say that it's humility when it answered actually and it's very smart when it answered like extreme ownership I was like what do you think about humility is like yeah actually like if you take extreme ownership and you know that being humble is very important so it it actually put the fact that you take extreme ownership and everything as the foundation of being humble which is true by the way so it's accurate and added capability that's possible and like based on feedback it can be added as well as we can also like it is possible to make it as a user to the extent that you would be comfortable with how it would behave the user can also ask it to tell it like moving forward whenever like you finish like telling me this I want you to always like like you the user can ask it like to change the way it's going to sequence its answer so you can like you can decide to tell it like moving forward whenever I say you know xyz always come back to me and like tell me something that you decide so it's almost like you can program it but like it becomes like a custom memory for you guys has memory yeah so it's just gonna remember what do you prefer moving forward but it also it won't like follow it like blindly it will be falling back to yeah it's got guardrails of like ethical immoral and illegal guardrails because yeah exactly so for the for the most part do you guys let's say just with this with this with this asterioke dot yeah um for the most part do you when you test it and it comes back with an answer for the most part of you like I can see how this thing got there with each answer or are you just like just blown away you know kind of a thing I would imagine you'd be somewhat familiar you know with the with the predictability and the and I can definitely I can definitely say initially like like the first few engagements we had like then it opened up like a whole series of like like the initial engagements were like were positive encouragements that we went down a whole list of like questions that you know we could as anything anything like the you may have you may expect what will happen but until it you really test it for you can't be sure it's different from building an app that has yes like it continuous test like each so it's more something that you aim to do that you're building and you're making all the effort and the investment for it but it's not deterministic as an yeah so but what I'm asking is like let's say let's say even an answer that comes back is kind of surprising like oh we didn't really expect that but when you look at the answer you're kind of like I can see how he got there I just wasn't thinking of that before you see I'm saying yeah so like all you's like these image generators or video whatever and I'll say hey you know I want this here's some reference images and you know come up with some stuff or whatever and it'll be way off and then I look at my prompt and then I look at the image I'm like well I see I see what he thought or it thought that I was trying to see I'm saying yep yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah is it pretty much like that or is it like or does it give you the impression that oh wait there's something else going on some magic for lack of a better we get we get this positive shock or like positive surprise more on the software side so when we're using black box right software and like it makes decisions and like say hey like that's it's extremely shocking because yeah it's taking actions yeah the range of impact is is like taking steps ahead of you and like it's however on the answer side it's definitely surprising but I still feel that I need to make the decision so we're the best for us that it's like just like what Joe cosette has the same like everything in the SEAL teams is exciting for the first 20 minutes that's actually late babins for us that's accurate for us for us it's the same thing in the AI space where like the first few interaction like it's shocked and then you start looking just at the negatives and you're like hey like how can we improve that right and that's more so I can see why it may answer this in certain ways but I'm less shocked or like surprised right that's I'll tell you so there's like the caricature of jocco right like the you know because I look like a freaking knucklehead and I whatever I was in the military and so there's the the caricature of like hey you need to suck it up like um you know my employee you know uh it showed up late three times for work what should I do well you need to get in their face and tell them what's what right that's kind of like what an answer that you would kind of expect and so when I when I was one of my worries like okay is this just gonna be kind of the is it gonna be the caricature of jocco because there are yeah factually like things that you can pull from all my content that that would be the answer you know it would be some weird you know conversation that I had with someone like there's a cut up of me talking about like punishing my daughter and saying if you're you know you're I'm gonna shave your head now the context about that it was like me and my daughter joking and like we're laughing like oh I could still shave your head like it was it it was a joke but it got put into a a clip or whatever where it was like hey if you if you step out of line again I'm gonna shave your head you know to a whatever 14 year old girl and you know they're like the comments on it will like do this guy's a psycho but it's something that I actually said taking out a context and put into a clip and you know it's it's you know obviously stupid you know obviously a bad parenting right but so you could see to your point echo like oh could you see how you get there but what I found is this is one of the reasons why I was like yeah let's go ahead and get this out into the wild because it doesn't do that it actually gives nuanced answers that makes sense that you're like oh yeah in fact my surprise usually like oh that's an angle that's like even a better angle than I initially thought of which is impressive I'm doing a better job thinking than me like it's doing a better job thinking than me those now have I seen somewhere I'm like like you know what little to what I what I might see is like a maybe just a little bit too much weight on one part that I would probably weight another part that's probably the biggest variation like oh you know they waited really hard about hey you need to listen to people um or you know I might say hey they waited really hard like hey you need to really make sure you give clear guidance where I would maybe you listen to what they have to say but you need to give them clear guidance where I would probably say like hey you need to give them clear guidance but you really need to listen to what they have to say so I've seen a little bit of variance in weight of what I might answer but I'll tell you what man it is very very impressive kind of shockingly impressive yeah fully and that was part of part of the reason why I asked that question because yeah sometimes you're like that's not right but I see how you got there as far as they and sometimes it's like I see how you got there but bro I wasn't even thinking of all that because it was so it was better than you expected you know you see I'm saying so I can go both ways 100% in that way this might be a thing that we program into this is it would be good to because one thing that happens when you talk to people is you know echo comes to me and says hey I got a person that's been late three times and I go hey man you know like find out what's going on with them and he goes okay cool now he goes back and says hey you know hey you know Robert you're late why are you late and he's aggressive about it so it's almost like maybe you need to with every answer give kind of like the counterpoint so if I say oh echo you need to go find out what's going on with them and that means you need to make sure that you're asking like in an earnest way hey is everything okay because that because that is something that can throw people off yeah I always you've probably heard me say on the podcast sometimes I'm like listen I don't want to say this I don't want to say this but sometimes you know you've got this person and their ego is big and you really do need to figure out a way because you know the 99% of the answer is oh I got a problem I got a problem with Robert and he it seems like he's got a big ego 99% of the time the answer is like okay that means I need to coordinate my ego that means my ego is acting up so how do I do that and 1% of the time it's like yeah you know what I got a guy in my team that has a massive ego doesn't listen to anybody else now how do I address that and you hear me say that sometimes because I always say listen I don't want to tell you this because 99% of the time it's going to be your ego that 1% of the time it could be this other person's ego here's how you contend with that so making sure that you you you everything that you say every guidance that you get it's almost like a follow-up question of like yeah or a follow-up answer just to make sure that the counterpoint is seen as well right um because that is what leadership is it's a dichotomy of leadership and if someone says hey you know I should I work out every single day ask jacoa as we absolutely you should but then it should also be and by the way if you're starting to regress in your progress you're over trained and you need to get some rest so like it's one of those things where you got to figure out what you got to figure out how to balance the dichotomy the answer's right in front of me of course the answer's right in front of me is like the dichotomy of leadership and how do you present the other side of the dichotomy and is that something that we put in there where people get hey here's the answer and the balance is you know oh you know my my team is calling me micromanager okay so you know what you really need to do is like back off and let let them get some ownership that being said you still need to check in with them right so there's going to be a balanced almost like you have to counterweight everything that you say because that's the reality of leadership and it's something that we definitely need to be careful of so that people when they get the guidance they get the counterweight as well and that's where like today's version is the worst version yeah of course and that's where like for us the exciting things is it's democratizing access to powerful resources through means of just technology and it has significant impact on people's lives and even though it's definitely has these limitations right now that wasn't possible like a few months ago and imagine yeah no go ahead imagine now not only jocos answering questions but what if you want like the age and like that's how black boxes agents work is you give them a task and like they complete the task so what if jocos basically like training other people on your team saying hey like that's my company's data basically and i want you like basically to customize the training for these individuals and like jocos is like following up every day saying hey like how's the progress today etc like you have a meeting on friday like make sure you have it becomes your team is empowered by these things right so that's what we've done with software and like that's how agents are gonna get into everything every day's life and this app is just like the Initial version but it's only gonna get the limitation of that is literally having a team of agents everywhere working collaboratively with people so it's augmenting your team. It's not firing you it's something that should be a resource for every single individual and use it to maximize output of your team and learn things ask it questions so that like whenever i need to escalate things to ask you personally like i would have asked it like five things right and that's that's the thing and you're moving to a point where the cost of serving these is dropping the technology is improving and the only way is literally more acceleration like as i was saying like when we started three years ago like it was just an idea like today we're in most fortune 500 and now this is just an idea it would become in the hands of millions of people and the only path from like the only people think about like hey what's the strategy what's like the only pass is just like pushing harder like that's for us what that's the only strategy for us is let's push harder once you push harder everything gets figured out then you will work You'll assemble the team you'll build the right strategy you'll build the right product, etc. But the common denominator is and you said something initially like in technology typically like if you're not ashamed of the first version that you launch like you're launching too late yeah you were in the two okay like you should be and that's why thanks humility that's why maybe it's harder for someone that's in his mid 30s to launch something versus us saying hey like we don't care like what like basically like you're just gonna help me improve right so it's constantly putting things out you should provide value but it shouldn't be like fully complete and if it's fully complete it's too too late because whatever you think is complete is actually just like useless for anyone right so and and you have examples the only counterpart company that is very good at just launching things at the right time without like a failure in their launch is apple but what they did and again like I couldn't comment I'm not an expert on apple but the way that apple operates is different from other companies one it's a hardware company but what we understand is they ship a lot of things internally that they just never show the public so whenever iphone one is released like they had iterations internally and actually like if they if you take a look iphone one they what iphone 17 like that's 17 years of iteration right like they didn't wait for iphone 17 they're like hey like we're gonna put a phone a gps and like ipod a browser and ipod and that's iphone one right so the same thing with this is it definitely has all these limitations but that's yep version one yep version one it's gonna get better or version zero and like it's gonna go second question second question um so in as far as AI in general is there anything okay so you know a lot of people if they don't really understand it yet which is most people I think if they don't understand how it works like how things are developed they look at it as just one big magic thing right that's why they say the robots are gonna kill us because they seem terminator or something like this right so they think oh yeah one to one that's what's gonna happen because that's how it looks right and for the most part in your guys minds or in the minds of people that know how it works they're gonna be like well that's not really how it works you know like if you know the end of days like you could maybe imagine how it could happen right and then you kind of have an idea of the likelihood of if that's gonna happen or not then you have some questions or whatever is there anything off the top of your head that that people say all the time and you just want to like yeah hey that's not how it works you seem to be saying is there anything that you guys can think of like in terms of how AI actually yeah like so you guys know how it works right how it's developed but then you know that most people don't so whether you see on the news or like in conversation or whatever and people are like oh well AI and then they say this opinion but since they don't know how it works it's kind of an ignorant opinion like you want to say hey just so you guys know that's not how it works you seem to say is there anything that you hear all the time off the top of your head like like the the the the biggest one is uh maybe definitely the word AI like in like encapsulates so many things that like for for like different people AI can mean different things mainly it's based on your profession so uh like for the group of people that only use chat gpt which is like the billions the billion people use chat gpt for them still today like the penetration of AI is mostly defined by recipe music like chatting poetry all shallow shallow yeah exactly so like the the the main thing is that what we define like what what uh like the full potential of AI is is barely still like at a 1% implementation in people's lives yet like the fact that still up till this day like even at companies when companies like at a large scale would deploy in like AI at at a full company even to to this day those that are fully adopting it are even still using it to the like 1% capability because they're still mostly using it for uh you know brainstorming uh maybe you know a bit more like kind of drafting exchanging some ideas coming up with things but still to like even that capability is still very limited uh you can still go up in capabilities as well but the the like the biggest shift of AI that in the coding space that we're literally seeing is that um like specifically now in robotics is the other one the robotics is like physical like now you're making a big economic impact but uh like brainstorming is is like still useful but not like really you're not really maybe leveraging AI really to all that degree like to the question like short answer to the question that you're saying is that what is maybe like not necessarily annoying but like what you see as a kind of a missed yet uh value to be created is that whenever you know the word AI is is is mentioned is still way too early in the value uh like potential that is available the full value still few companies are are literally using the full value of it I would honestly even say that we still like the people that are building it still did not yet fully extract the the entire value of the agents that can do so agents just basically agents is just basically giving to the AI tools so the AI is just going to keep answering text until you tell it like once you get to that text part actually open a browser or when you get to that text part I want you to execute this code or once you once you get to that text part I want you to create a calendar invite or whatever so it's all text based it's all like tokens text that's getting generated but it's until the text becomes an action then it becomes an agent so the more you give the agent tools the actually the more powerful it becomes and like we would even like push it all the way to to believe that with with now with way more like with cars that are self-driving today even our code a coding agent we didn't yet put it to this test but we believe that it wouldn't be that big of an effort to put our coding agent to build a full self-driving software that would be able to steer the wheel push the brakes push the gas and all those things so what what took enormous efforts for like labs to build self-driving cars is now becoming possible because we have these big LLMs that are powered by giving them the tools to take these actions to get the feedback you know it's able to it's getting its own feedback there there so robotics is like a big it's really a place where like AI is really becoming you know powerful and is being adopted software is like almost I would stretch to say like engineers today that are really using it software engineers it's there's two maybe two categories you can either be a software engineers that you're at the top one percent and you're able to extract enormous value from it like you're you're you're just becoming you know you know 10 times more powerful than you currently are or you're the other side of the engineers there are still useful engineers but they're more very honestly they're just now it still has a lot like just as I said like if you deploy it in places where it fails it's going to fail but in the places where it's covering a big economic value engineers are really honestly you know it's way ahead of their performance so it's writing better code than them it's able to be more professional in terms of the code do it more production create create be more secure and all these things maybe it's a longer no but and my other point is people are like where I think people get wrong is like things are gonna are not moving as fast as it is like the problem is it's just moving so much faster oh it's so it's moving faster than people 100 100 percent and you're saying you're saying in a nutshell people don't realize the power of what they're even talking about yeah so almost like the 10 of the human brain thing you've heard that yeah people only use 10 of their brain right this sounds like we're only using one percent of AI capability right like so almost like they're they're maybe mentally assigning AI to to tasks that AI is overqualified yeah yeah essentially way over called yeah yeah and and the other part AI can do so much for them they just don't know it right right they didn't realize it they don't realize it and that's part of like our focus initially was just like we really like we've been building agents for three years and every release was just making the agents better however we're at this inflection point right now where these agents are becoming better than us like it's not even a joke like it would be a waste of time if we would code without AI like it's that basic so the point is however the rest of the world don't see it yet like that and I'm more talking for people that like the most advanced companies that are seeing the future they invest heavily in it and like however they still have because they have fears from security privacy etc but they're adopting it the concern is the small and medium companies that are today at this inflection point where if they don't invest aggressively right now like and I'm not talking about like just moms and pop shops like these can be like massive businesses but that just technology did not penetrate as much and there is so much value to unlock and people think that oh great no problem that's another next week thing next week it's going to be much more powerful and the week after and the week after and if your competitors are just getting one week heads up two weeks heads up and they're recruiting more people to do it like we're recruiting all the time but we're recruiting people to manage agents and say hey like that's great do it like we have hundreds of agents that are running tasks right now we're not even monitoring them so think about it more as people want assigned tasks that are basically very easy and because like they're everyone is used with chat gpt and like they're asking questions which is great but people are still not using agents as is and these agents are moving at a very fast pace and they're going to wake up one day and like it's going to be it's never too late like I don't buy the thing like people can make it's going to be harder to adjust yes but like there is nothing in life that's hey too late right like that's my mindset like people say hey like we miss this opportunity great there's a hundred other opportunities no problem so but the point is if you don't invest now things will take you more time and this technology is only accelerating and I would put a bit also more fear on the hey like are these controlling our lives are they're gonna become more powerful I don't buy the fear that's is going definitely is very powerful but I believe that there's good like the people who are running these things are good people right on awesome you good echo Charles so now yeah yeah yeah good to go okay for now thank you um people can find you so on the internet it's blackbox.ai on twitter it's blackboxai on instagram it's blckbx.ai so it's like a black box with no um vowels except for the ai and then on youtube you you are at black box bruiser and one of your videos building a Spotify clone 16 million views that how old is that video not sure maybe a few months I say like uh I don't know maybe four something yeah it's something like that but if you want to this is kind of what we're talking about here you can just watch this thing you tell it what to do hey build a Spotify clone and it starts programming and there it is so very cool stuff um this is a this is a new world right we're getting there small step for man giant step for mankind um thank you guys so much for coming out thanks really appreciate it thanks for the lessons learned and and thanks for doing to create a product that it's gonna gonna help so many people they're gonna become more efficient they're gonna become more effective they're gonna become more productive and ultimately they're gonna have more freedom in their lives so awesome we appreciate it thanks for bringing along for the ride now it's a lot of work to do and there's a lot of exciting things and really appreciate this opportunity definitely appreciate it thank you thank you thank you and with that Robert and Richard risk have left the building definitely educational we just talked to him for another chunk of time trying to trying to uh navigate this this world this AI world it sounded to me a little bit that you knew a little something because you were like about LLM large language models and you said something like oh no one's ever heard of you know yeah oh I sounded impressive you sounded like you knew some stuff um so my question is do you know some stuff no no I don't because very very little I should say very very little part of it kind of tracking it and these guys got me into it you know that was 2022 AI wasn't people weren't chat gbt wasn't out yeah you know so when I first met them they were like explaining it to me I wish I would have recorded those conversations you know just to get the the insight but what they did was they pulled out the computer and they're like showing it to me and I'm going oh and and um it would be like it would be like let's say you were a you were a jujitsu guy and you had never seen like you were jujitsu guy in 1992 and you'd never seen a leg lock or a heel hook before and Dean Lister came along and was like listen watch what I can do I can get the foot here I can get isolated and then I can torque and make you tap some people would be like oh that's like that wouldn't work or whatever some people John Donner her goes oh wait a second oh and that was kind of my I was watching them I didn't really fully comprehend what was what but I said oh like I can this could be and part of was also the guys were totally in the game like they were they were very passionate about it they were on board with kind of echelon front and extreme ownership and and they had got down here stalked me apparently you know new we're looking for my pattern of life thanks guys but but you know I could I was like okay because I mean obviously I mean I get a lot of pitches you know I could hear a lot of people come to me with their ideas and stuff like that and all good I appreciate it but a lot of them it's just I don't have the capacity or the time to to you know engage in too many things outside of what I already do so but those guys you know I could see that oh this is this is this is important and so again going from they launched a couple weeks later you know 10,000 users really quickly a million users in a couple months I kind of had a good feeling about that but then again you know there's always always you know when you're in a when you're in a startup I hate to say that but when you're in a startup you know when you get in the you know when you get in an airplane and you're taking off and when you're taking off it's like shaking and it will make a noise and all that stuff but then you get up to cruising altitude and you're like oh cool I'm gonna you know read my book or whatever when you're in a startup situation it doesn't level out it does not like oh what are cruising out to know it's like the whole time is you don't know if something's gonna you know it's shaking that's the way it is and so it's been like that with those guys luckily they have run it very scrappy and you know the overhead has been kept under control and they're just doing a great job you know doing a great job humility is very important and you can see that they don't overestimate where they're at they're very realistic but they're also confident so it's great I'm happy to be working with them it's been a it's been a cool run and I'm sure it's going to be continue to be a very cool run so we'll keep getting after it you know listen while you're using these agents to help augment your your brain listen you know what's not going to happen there's no agent that's going to come and do deadlifts for you there's no agent that's going to come and do jiu-jitsu for you and there's no agent that's going to go on a run for you you have to train your body yourself so that means you need to get after it and when you get after it you're gonna need fuel I recommend jockel fuel and let me tell you something uh I have a new I both my daughter and my wife Rana and my wife big age they've been talking to me about this for months and I just haven't been I've been I've been overlooking this this this this situation um Greek yogurt Greek yogurt you know anything about Greek yogurt I know a little something okay so I don't like like for my whole life Greek yogurt like it's plain yogurt tastes like doesn't taste good to me right my whole life never liked it so both Rana and big age have been for months mixing protein milk protein powder with Greek yogurt and I've I've even had a couple bites you know I haven't even had like oh yeah it tastes good but re but recently I my wife made one and I was like good lord it's good it's so good and the thing is it's crazy the macros are crazy so you have like it's not a huge amount of Greek yogurt but that has 20 something grams of protein in it no carbs some fats and then you throw in another 25 grams or 22 grams depending on which milk protein you're using if you're using the pro series which I am right now that's 25 the other one 22 see but you're you're in there so you have this you have what 40 almost 50 grams of protein and it's delicious and here's the other little interesting thing in the morning you mix it like with the vanilla you put some or strawberry milk you mix it with that stuff you have like a little breakfast treat and then in the evening break out the chocolate break out the salted caramel break out the mint and I'll tell you what be be honest with you you grab some of them uh sugar-free chocolate chips toss a couple of those in there you're having dessert dude and it's it's freaking 40 or 50 grams of protein so right there breakfast and lunch 100 grams of protein easy money that's that's that's like all those macro problems that we all have chasing those numbers trying to get that protein and in the system right there breakfast you know 10 o'clock mix up one of those fruity yogurt milk bowls and then after dinner have a have a delicious dessert 100 grams of protein right there you're you're and good you know in the day you'll have maybe one you know you have a mulk during the day whatever you know that's that's 130 and you had a steak or a chicken you're good you're in the zone so this has been this is kind of have you tried this yet bro i've been on that chase ever since the video that you guys came out with no kidding long time ago yes so and it's funny because i saw the video and i was like yeah that's cute making jokes and even when i ate it bro yeah i was kind of like oh that's good but my daughter really likes rana and so she saw the video on her own by the way uh and she was like she started making it just on her own and i was like like i you know she's like yeah rana was making this so i'm gonna you know i'm gonna start doing this or whatever and from then oh yeah pretty like almost every day yeah yeah yeah it's ridiculous so now now big age is mad because she's she's running low on that yogurt a little quicker we're running through that Greek yogurt boy but jockelfuel.com go check it out you can get some energy drinks i'm about to have an energy drink right now because we're getting ready to go train some of that jujitsu it's always good to just get a little bit of you know what i mean yeah so get some of that you can get all the all the other supplementation that you might need joint warfare just just the stuff that you need to get by greens and you know what creatine i don't know if you're on 20 grams of creatine a day but i am so you hear about all the it's not just the physical benefit you hear about those cognitive benefits and you're like let's go you hear about the prevention of Alzheimer's and all this kind of stuff like okay let's get on this let's get on this train so jockelfuel.com go check it out new pro series muscle drive that's another thing the weird thing about muscle drive is if you have muscle drive you know i haven't tried yet i haven't tried mulk muscle drive and greek yogurt i might try that okay i might try that i might see what's up with that because the muscle drive it's satiating got all those amino acids in it's like g tg bro so that's what we're doing um jockelfuel.com check it out also speaking of jujitsu which we're getting ready to go train you need a rash guard you need a pair of training shorts you need a gi we got you covered and you can get stuff that's 100 made in america made by freedom not by communism not by slavery and we have jeans boots hoodies t-shirts hunt gear training gear everything that you need yeah sneakers common you seen those yet yeah we got some sneakers coming yeah yeah we could you call them sneakers i don't know shoes whatever sneakers yeah i call them some sneakers for sure in uh in one of some people call them tennis shoes you ever heard that shoes yeah you know they're not even made for tennis like you like some people call a pair of air jordan's tennis shoes right yeah that's a thing that's part of a regionalist regional uh language of america different regions called different things you can look at a map and there'll be like circle areas this will be tennis shoes this will be sneakers um yeah there's one more too trainers oh yeah yeah trainers yeah i think my wife my wife used to call him trainer she's in england okay yeah yeah same thing um you just like and i think this was your neck of the woods um where you go i might be wrong but uh they call soda pop oh no that's not my we call it soda but out in the midwest they call it pop well i'll go one further that they call them coax yeah coax is a different region where is that i want to say down south i thought that was your your spot coax even if it's not even if it's a seven up if it's a pepsi straight up pepsi pepsi it's coke yeah yeah yeah okay so same vibe essentially same vibe yeah same vibe exactly shoes so we've got those things working yeah originusa.com that's where we're making 100 stuff 100 made in america moab pants so you get a you need a pair of pants that you can wear to work you work out in the yard or work in the you know office or wear out to dinner you're good yeah not to mention jeans you know american made delta 68 best jeans let's go originusa.com check it out it's true also jockelstore.com is where you can represent on the path so that's one thing that a i can't do is represent on the path jack same saying so it's very important uh element of this whole outfit so yes uh you know get after it uh there's so many goes freedom which is kind of the main one good stand by to get some you know you want to represent while we're on this path very hard fall off the path for any extended period of time when you're representing it's one of those things so yes all kinds of merch on there uh shorelocker is a subscription scenario so you want a new design every month all based on these these principles you know just been equals freedom but um it's a new design every month though it's a little bit outside the box sign up for that if uh yeah you're interested pretty cool people seem to like it it's all all of it is on jockelstore.com let's go check out hey check out blackbox.ai by the way and also you can check out askjockel yeah.ai see what up you can see what up um it's again it's an early iterative version it's free i think it's like you get three questions a day for free and if you're going to be asking questions all day long you got to subscribe to it uh but hopefully you can manage with three questions a day you know maybe you only ask one today you can ask two tomorrow whatever you know what i'm saying save them up if you only have one today whatever sit right down or if you have five today write down two but check out uh askjockel.ai give us feedback we're gonna need it i'm sure it's gonna not be perfect because we're making iterative steps that's what we're doing we'll change it quick also check out a couple books we got put your legs on by rob jones we got need to lead by Dave Burke we got things my brother used to say by ryan man and then you got a bunch of books that i wrote leif babin wrote uh extreme ownership with me and that economy leadership and then i wrote a bunch of kids books the whole nine yards you all know that check those out if you need them give those books to your kids in your neighborhood help them get on the path also eslampfront.com we have a leadership consulting company we help leaders and organizations improve everything in their world by teaching the lead the skills of leadership also we have a online training program check that out extreme ownership.com you can get some of that listen kind of last call last call march 21st in scott stale arizona they're celebrating mark lee's what would have been his 48th birthday of course he was killed in 2006 in ramadi but his mom mama lee she runs an incredible organization and she is puts on you know she helps out so many of our veterans gold star families active members retired members she just helps out our people and so she puts on this this event and this is mark 48 so mark carried the mark 48 machine gun and his would be his 48th birthday marks platoon mates two marks platoon mates from charlie platoon lead bob holland who you've heard on this podcast and then jake kime bomb another uh another beast they're going to be speaking and meeting everyone and telling them about mark so if you can go if you're in scott stale arizona march 21st 2026 awesome events uh go to go to america's mighty warriors dot org and check that out also check out heroes and horses dot org and then finally jimmy mayer's organization beyond the brotherhood dot org and if you want to connect with us on the interwebs for robert and richard and black box a i on the interwebs black box dot a i on twitter at black box a i instagram is blup blups it's blckbx dot a i and their youtube is black box bruiser is there a copyright infringement there maybe but we're letting it slide for our people uh black box bruiser on youtube go check that out and then for us check out jocco dot com and then on social media i'm at jocco willink and echoes at echo charles just be careful because there's not an agent there's agents on there that are just trying to make you keep watching and keep wasting so don't let that happen thanks once again to robert and richard and really roger too he didn't sit in today but uh been great working with those guys from black box and thanks for joining us today educating us on on well little middle east history right that was good to hear and also educating us on a i thanks for what you're doing to build a business that's going to help a lot of people live better lives through technology also thanks to our uniformed personnel around the world it is a time of war and if you're in harms way risking your life and you're doing that so we don't have to and we thank you for your service we thank you for your sacrifice and we thank you for the opportunity to do what we're doing in this great country also thanks to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics emt dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service as well as all other first responders thank you for risking your lives here at home to protect us and everyone else out there it takes hard work to build something and no one is going to build it for you you have to do it yourself you have to you have to push yourself and you have to make it happen yourself no one's going to do it for you and also remember this technology is advancing and it is imminent it is coming and you can't stop it you don't have to like it you don't have to abandon who you are and what you do but what you do need to do as much as you possibly can is keep an open mind and figure out how to utilize this new technology whatever it is because you either have to use the technology yourself or the technology will end up using you that's all I've got for tonight and until next time this is Echo and Jaco out