원문 보기
Hello, my name is Andrew Keane. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello everybody. It is Monday, October the 19th, 2026. Not just any Monday, but a special Monday, at least according to my guest, an old friend of the show, Bill Gross, the founder of Idea Lab, who at least in his words, um, has the biggest idea of his life, which he's launching today.
So, Bill, what's happening today? [snorts] Well, today we're launching idealab.ai, and we've come up with a way to develop 1.2 2 million and growing really powerful business ideas and we're giving them away to the world because we think this can have the biggest positive impact. And it's using AI to create jobs, not destroy jobs.
And it's also giving a lot of people hope because I'm really hopeful myself that this can lower the bar for entrepreneurship and give a lot of people a chance to take their passion, find their purpose, and really build something fantastic. So tell me the story of this. I know it's been germinating in your mind for several months.
How [clears throat] did you come up with the idea? Well, my whole life I've been looking at how can we use technology to solve important problems and I've started many companies over the years, 175 and counting. And all of them have a core aspect of looking for 31 different methods that I've had to develop an idea based on solving a problem.
And recently, because Claude has gotten so good, I've been using that to help me use my methodology to tackle new idea generation. But one thing struck me. I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about the copper shortage and I realized that most articles I read actually have a problem statement at their core.
In this particular case, copper shortage was because data centers need transformers faster than they can be made and electric cars need motors. But I realized what if I could take the articles that I've read and give them to Claude and say, "Can you find the core problem statement in this and then use my methodology to come up with a technology solution?" So I took 7,000 articles from the last two weeks of reading that I had done and I handed it and an hour later and $1,000 in tokens later, I had 32,000 incredible company ideas.
And at first I was kind of shocked. I thought kind of like, "Holy my life is over." Because my whole life has been coming up with ideas myself and here now AI can do that better than me. AI has gotten so good in the last year at being able to put these kinds of things together. I was shocked. But then I realized this is maybe a superpower.
Taking this and bringing this to the world could be a way to solve problems at a scale that I never could have imagined before. So I got very, very excited about that. What is an idea, Bill? Well, an idea is taking something from column A and something from column B, maybe two disparate things, and coming up with unique solution.
I'll give you one example. In that first 32,000 set of ideas, we made a search feature. So, we could drag some sliders and choose some different things. So, you could choose, well, I'd like an idea that's digital only, or I'd like an idea that can start for under $50,000, or I'd like an idea that has positive impact on more than 100 million people right now and is an urgent problem.
So, I dragged the sliders to say that and the idea that came to the top with a score of 8.9 out of 10 of the 32,000 ideas was I've been reading a lot about the war in Iran and the straight of horses is closed and gas prices are going up and more than 100 million people are complaining about the price of gasoline.
So, what about if you make a mobile app where people pay $5 a month, they lock in today's gas price so they don't have to worry about the price going up anymore. And then you take the accumulated $5 and hedge gasoline on the New York Merkantile Exchange and lock in gas prices for people. And basically what you're doing is bringing airline level hedging to consumers and that blew my mind.
Basically what that had done was take the idea of hedging. It didn't invent hedging. Hedging has been around but it's never been available for consumers. And it took a problem of today that is a new urgent problem and merge those two things together. So that's one example of where a powerful new idea can come from.
Now you still have to build a company around that. There's a lot to do beyond that, but that's an example of where a great business idea can come from merging different things from different categories because AI can have all of that in its brain at once. It's really, really powerful. So Bill, people are listening to this and thinking that's an intriguing idea, but why couldn't I just go to Claude?
go to the go go go to the brain, go directly there and say and ask Claude as as we all do every day a fundamental question you would you would ask Claude uh I I want to hedge uh gas prices because of the instability in its price. Can you help me? What are you doing that Claude directly can't do? Well, if you go to Claude and say the war in Iran is going on and gas is too expensive.
Give me some ideas. I don't think it will come up with this hedging idea. It might, but I don't think it would. If you if you say hedging, that would it might be able to do it. But I didn't even think of the hedging aspect. That that's the whole cleverness of this. So, how did Claude come up with the idea in our system?
Because I gave it my framework of 30 31 different methods of coming up with ideas. And because I fed it 17 million articles with problems and technologies and solutions, it was able to cross-pollinate those together to come up with that particular solution. So I hope that more people will do things like that.
Like I want this to be copied. I'm giving this away to the world because I really want this to help solve problems. And I think that now AI is so powerful that if you give it enough information at once and and what we've done is taken that methodology and turned it into something like a 30,000 token prompt that takes all this stuff and looks for the solutions.
That's really why this is so powerful and I really think it can be a gamecher and I never thought that AI could be that good at this and literally a year ago it wasn't. Like this has all happened in the last year. So if you were to ask why now? Well, it just got good enough to be able to come up with these incredible ideas.
And basically, after the 7,000 articles I fed it, which led to that one idea I told you about, but 32,000 others, I've since fed it 17 million articles, including expired patents and SEC filings and complaints on Reddit and Twitter and other social media and all these different technologies that I found from science journals.
So, that now has this mix of richness to be able to come up with ideas. And I have 1.2 million ventures. So, the 1.2 2 million ventures are what we're giving away to the world. So in a way you creating a a verticalized search engine for entrepreneurs. Yes. It it really is a search engine that generates ideas based on problems in the world and technologies that can solve it.
But then it allows you to type in your own skills or passion or LinkedIn profile and find the hundred that are closest to you. So, what I'm really hoping is that people will go to this and it's it's free, so people can go search and go type in, hey, I'm I'm passionate about climate tech and I'm a mechanical engineer.
Show me some ideas for that. Or, I'm a poet and I really want to do something that enhance and they'll show you ideas about that. There's so many in there. There's probably several hundred thousand climate ideas. There's several hundred thousand adtech ideas. There's just so much in there because there are many problems in the world.
There's problems in there about inequality, about healthcare. Any one of those can be turned into something that could be an enterprise that could possibly help address that problem. So is your secret source, Bill, in what you're doing here your taxonomy? I think it's a taxonomy and I think it's the structure that we put together to look for technology enablers and problems and have them meet in the middle somewhere where there's a solution that can bring real real power to that and and to build a viable business out of it.
Obviously there are many ways to change the world. Entrepreneurship is just one of them. Entrepreneurship is so great because it unlocks human potential and it also doesn't force anything on anybody. People pull the solution for you. If you make something that people really want, that that solution gets pulled.
So, it allows you to scale something in a way that you can't do otherwise and and make a business out of it, too. A couple of weeks ago, we had Matt Botven uh from Anthropicon. He's in charge of researching democracy at Anthropic. He just has a new book out about how to fix democracy. Will this play in politics, too?
I really think so. I think this will really, really help change the narrative from AI is job destruction to AI can be job creation. AI can give people purpose and passion. And I also think this can help in a lot of regions in the world, global south, Africa, Middle East, where there's a lot of youth, a lot of energy, but not quite the organizational structure to help them figure out exactly what problem should I be working on and how can I solve something maybe for my region or for the cohort of people that I really care about.
So, I'm really I really think this can play in in democracy and in really helping the economy everywhere. You founded Idea Lab in the '9s during the dotcom boom. We're in a some people think at least an equivalent AI boom. You've lived through a number of different cycles, Bill, in in this. You and I both have.
Is what we're going through now in some ways similar to the dotcom boom of the '90s? Well, it is definitely similar because the investment in this is incredible and the excitement about is incredible. I think there's something different about this because the value that it provides is so clear and so powerful.
I'll give you an example. So, we started ideal lab in 1996. We built a lot of e-commerce companies and e-commerce companies began taking off and a lot of our companies went public and they were very successful. And then there was a big overbuild overbuild of fiber connectivity uh switches whole bunch of things because people expected it to have unlimited wealth creation.
Eventually, it did build out to that, like eventually the internet completely changed society for sure. But there were a lot of companies that raced in into the late '90s building companies that really only brought in eyeballs or visitors, but not revenue. So, there wasn't as much revenue for some of those companies, and that caused a bit of a crash.
Today, we're seeing revenues that are insane. The revenue growth of the AI companies is unheard of. We've never seen anything like this. billions and billions of dollars. Not just these are not just eyeballs. These are actual users paying real money because they're getting real value. And as as an example, we're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions of dollars in token fees because we're building something of real value that will deliver value to consumers and to people around the world.
So we will keep paying that because the value we get back is much more than that. So I think we're seeing a huge investment race, but we're seeing something that touches every bit of the knowledge economy. So it really is huge. So I I really am a big believer in really making a big positive change for society with AI.
In your own way, you've massively invested in anthropic in Claude. Yes. I'm curious. Uh Bill, you're a tinkerer. You're one of the most enthusiastic tech guys I know. Did you compare uh Claude directly with Chat GPT? I assume you found that. Yes. Well, we we do use both of them. They're both great. They're neck and neck.
They're they're each are diff are better at different aspects of the process. So we use both of them. And how would you imagine uh these front as they're called these frontier companies uh how are they going to react to this? Will they see it as an opportunity as a threat? I think they'll love this.
I think that what we're doing is one, we're spending a lot of money, but I think we're hopefully going to cause hundreds of thousands, if not millions of businesses to start that all will be heavy token users. So, I think this is exactly the perfect use case of AI, which is find problems in society, build companies to address them, use tokens where possible to address them, use people for the human judgment.
Humans are still essential at every phase of this company. The companies are not autonomous. They just are assisted by the token count. And I think it's going to be fantastic. I think this is actually the use case that maybe they all dreamed of. Is this a dream to become the front door, so to speak, of the innovation economy?
I really hope that this could be a front door, but I really want this to be an assist to other people as well. So, we're working with a whole bunch of colleges. We're working with other incubators. I'd love to work with every VC firm. This isn't only for startups. This is for existing companies, too.
If you have an existing company, you should type in your goals into our system. See other companies that we've generated that have similar aspects and take the best ideas from them because we're not charging anything for this. We really feel that these ideas should be out there in the public. So, we really want people to improve their ideas, improve their businesses with this system.
Some people, Bill, are going to be listening to this and checking their pockets and thinking this sounds too good to be true. What's your business model? Well, uh, the aspect of it that is true is that my whole life, I've wanted to have as much positive impact on the world as I can. And after graduating from college, I started a series of businesses one at a time, grew them, built them, and sold them.
And then when the internet took off, I had 12 business ideas I wanted to start. And I couldn't figure out which one to start. And I decided to start all 12 because I thought I could have more impact by doing that. And that's what led to starting Idea Lab in 1996. And then over the years we built 175 companies and I'm really proud of the impact that those have had.
This now gives me a chance to have way more impact than that. This allows me to have a chance to share entrepreneurship with more people. I go around talking about entrepreneurship all the time. I share my lessons learned. I I try to help other people benefit from my experience. my hard one losses as well because we we started 175 companies and not all of them succeeded.
We probably have 50 failures. So I learned a lot of lessons from that and I try and share those. So I'm just passionate about sharing these stories about entrepreneurship. But the business model for the company is to give away the ideas for free but to large corporations like large R&D companies. Any company with maybe more than hund00 million in R&D revenue, R&D expenses and with a big patent portfolio.
I would like to license my platform to them so they can take their own IP, Trade Secrets, and use our system to develop business ideas for themselves. And those companies, because they're very profitable, they can afford to pay. And I hopefully can use that to fund this effort so I can give away the ideas for free to entrepreneurs.
Bill, there's going to be some people who are going to be sweating when they hear about this. I'm guessing that the guys at Accentra or McKenzie are going to be thinking to themselves, how can we continue to charge tens of thousands of dollars a day for consulting fees when Bill Gross at Idea Lab is giving this stuff away for free?
I think they'll use my platform to enhance it and make it more powerful for them. I'm not doing the whole consulting project of building a company. I'm giving the germ of the idea. So I would like to think that those consulting firms will use this system and take IP or or knowledge from a particular one of their clients, put that in and generate something even more useful.
So think of it in the same way that they might use Claude or OpenAI to make their support better for a company, they should use my system to do that as well. So I think that they should love this. I hope they do. I want them to. And in fact, if they're listening, reach out to me and tell me how I can make this better for you cuz I want to be a partner with partner of yours.
We talked about the Frontier Labs who are been in the news endlessly. They're under pressure and of course a couple of them are going to do their IPOs in the next few months. What about the hyperscalers? How will they respond to this? Well, again, I think they'll love this. Um, I think that what this is doing is making more valuable token demand.
not token demand to make a new image or social media uh influencer video, but token demand to add real value to the world. I think that these companies are going to be adding real value and they'll have high demand for compute. So, I think this is actually a good use of that data center buildout. Many of the companies, I think I said several hundred thousand of the companies out of the 1.2 million are climate related companies.
Some of them will be climate related companies that make data centers more efficient. Some of them will be climate related companies that make renewable energy more efficient. So all of those will help and all of those will use that compute to make society better. What about on the IP front? Uh the the frontier companies now are under assault uh on the legal front.
uh they're in all sorts of courts uh and they're they're they're armying up with uh arming up with lawyers. A lot of crit criticism of the original Frontier models is that a lot of the the data Yeah. uh that they use was stolen. Is this a a so to speak, Bill, an IP play? Are people going to be suing you claiming that you stole their ideas?
I feel that the frontier models should share revenue with the content providers that they learn from. So I really feel that they should do that. I have a whole company focused on that. My company, Pratta, is focused on trying to help publishers get a fair share from content of theirs that was read either with or without their permission from the AI companies.
I definitely think that that is part of the business model that I want to put forward and I'm doing that at le.ai as well. So, I really believe that the frontier models should pay revenue share just the way other businesses do. In the music industry, revenue is shared. At YouTube, revenue is shared.
At Apple News, revenue is shared. And now, I think maybe with the IPOs, they'll have enough capital to be able to do that. And plus, their revenues are going up. Their revenues are growing like crazy. So, maybe if they were crying poor at the beginning that they couldn't afford to pay it. I think now they will be able to.
But you're surfing off Claude. What happens if Claude doesn't agree to pay those revenues? Then won't you find yourself in court, too? I don't think so. I think what we're doing is uh only using content in our system that is publicly available and freely usable and I think that what we're using with Claude takes advantage of that.
But um it will it remain to be seen but I definitely feel that what we're doing is fully consistent with the views that I have at Cora. It seems one thing that's changed in the last 30 years since the dotcom boom of the '9s, Bill, uh is that the the business model and the idea of universities and the whole point of going to universities has come to come under assault.
I know you see this as something that can help you and I I know you've been talking to a number of senior people at universities around the US who are excited by what you're doing. I really feel that this can help universities give students something they can do both during their time at school but also after they graduate.
And I'm working with universities to try and put this right into the program. So right into the entrepreneurship program. We want to sponsor hackathons. We're working on something with Imperial College. We're working with ASU. That's Imperial in London. Yes. And I I really feel that I want to take this to every school in the world that can benefit from this.
So, if this is a chance for me to invite any school to reach out, I would love that because it's free and we really want to try and find ways that we can inspire more entrepreneurship and more students to t tackle problems that really match their passion. You got a great anecdote. You don't need to reveal the name of the university, but in the old days, people were expected to pay $50,000 to go to college.
And I know some universities or at least senior people in universities are rethinking their purpose and suggesting that kids can be paid 50,000 to go to college using platforms like yours. Yeah, we're we're talking to one college where they would like to do exactly that. Instead of asking students to come and pay to go, they would like to have students come and build a business while they're there and they'll give them money to do that.
And there's funding available to do that. And the university could have upside in that small upside kind of like a Y combinator. But think about if a class curriculum could integrate choosing your idea and building it over the few years that you're taking that course. That would be incredible. Even if you don't sustain that business after you graduate, although that would be fantastic if you do.
Think of the learning experience of building a team, learning how to choose an idea, learning how to test it, all the aspects of building that business, those will stick with you for the rest of your life. So that would be an education that is so much more valuable than a theoretical business class.
Like I once taught a business class at Caltech and in that class we uh over the course of the term we had people think up an idea uh put together a business plan for it and pitch it to the class. But it was very theoretical because there was no actual business being built. Think about if you could actually take that experience and make it an actual business being built.
That would be incredible. Bill, you're based in Pasadena, uh Southern California. Uh some people might be listening to this maybe people who sympathize with JD Vance piece Hex Seth Steve Bannon and think why we want to give away our best ideas to the Chinese. Is this going to be a global platform? Are you going to are you going to shield America off from the rest of the world?
The the current American administration I think is perhaps a little less generous than you when it comes to the giving away of ideas. We are definitely making this a global platform. This is available to everybody anywhere on the earth. And I'm especially excited about it in other places that maybe are more disadvantaged.
Of course, many many US people will take advantage of this, but the chance for someone in Egypt or someone in South America, somewhere in the Middle East to be able to take this. I showed this to someone from Flat Six Labs in Cairo and his name is Ahmed Alfie. He visited us in Pasadena and he looked at this and said, "Bill, this is a hope machine.
This is something that can just give so many people hope around the world." So, I'm excited about that. And basically, if someone somewhere is addressing a world problem that still benefits the United States wherever it happens, it still benefits the United States. So, I'm excited about that. Entrepreneurship though is still a very tough business with or without this new idea lab platform.
I mean it's still I don't know what the numbers are one in a 100 one in a thousand entrepreneurs are going to be successful and most of the rest fails. Are you going to address this on your platform? Are you going to add the caveat that uh everyone's responsible for their own ideas and most actually fail in the real business world?
Absolutely. And we want to try and help people improve the odds. So I I'll tell you the story of Ideal Lab. When we started Idea Lab in 1996, our success rate was maybe 1 in 10. And then after about three or four years, our success rate was 1 in4. And now after 30 years, our success rate is more like 2 and three.
And we still have failures. There's no question. But getting the success rate up comes from a few things. One, filtering the idea a lot further before you start. Making sure the idea is actually meeting a real demand, a real need. And then second, uh, learning how to test the idea quickly and iterate quickly.
I often joke that I shouldn't have called it idea lab because that worships the idea so much. I should have called it iterate lab because iterating is probably more important than the idea itself. So why can someone iterate better? Now AI allows you to do much faster, smaller tests so that you can iterate and be more responsive.
So we're going to help these entrepreneurs learn how to do that. Our platform will help people with that and show people the way with that. And of course, I'm evangelizing that and that I think can get the success rate up from the really low numbers you just described to a much much better level. It still will never be 100%.
There's no way you can bat a,000 in starting companies. But because you can iterate so much more inexpensively and so much more quickly, you can do what I used to do in 5 months in 5 hours. You literally can take five months of a test experimentation with consumers and all that and you can learn something about cost of customer acquisition for example in an automated automated fashion in one day and that really allows you to hone your idea and have a much much better chance of success.
You had many noted successes at idea labs and also some failures which were equally wellknown especially in the dot um boom and then bust. Had this platform been around in the '9s, Bill, how might your own history be different? Oh, this would have helped me so much. It's incredible. One of our biggest successes was a company called GoTo.com.
We invented paperclick advertising. That took off. We we licensed some of the patents to Google. We sold the company to Yahoo. That was a wild success. Another one that was a big failure was a company called Atera. started an electric car company, super streamlined electric car company and it failed right during the recession in 2008 2009 and I learned a lot about timing, testing, understanding the market.
If we had these tools that are available now with AI, we would learn so much more about is the market really ready for this idea at this moment. I gave a whole TED talk about timing around 10 years ago about how important that is. Our system now does a whole bunch of analysis on timing. The gasoline idea I told you earlier, that idea rose to the top of our system because the timing is so perfect because the trade of horses is closed right now.
Of course, that's obvious to most people, but the ability for our system to use AI to look at all the news articles and figure out is the timing right for this right now or the technologies in place for that right now. It can do that so much more effectively than than a human can. So, it really is powerful for making the success rate of ideas go up and that's what I'm hoping for.
What can't the platform do? Many VCs in particular, um, we've had many of them on this show, invest instinctively. They invest because they like the person, because the person did this rather than that. Will your platform be able to address those intangibles? It will not. The the the most powerful thing of the business after the idea is definitely the founder.
And to understand the commitment of a founder, the dedication and most of all the judgment. An idea for a business is just a starting point. There are thousands if not millions of decisions that have to be made with human judgment. What market should I go after? What region should I target? What should my logo look like?
Where do I want to start? Should I invest in this versus this? All those judgment features still come down to the individual. Now, we can help give them a head start with a good idea. We can help them iterate faster but their judgment decisions are still going to make the difference in the company. So we the AI cannot help with that.
That really comes down to the individual. So in that sense mentors, advisors, investors are just as important as ever. Maybe more so because now errors in execution won't matter as much. Understanding how to optimize a Facebook campaign versus a LinkedIn campaign versus a Twitter campaign that won't matter as much.
But the judgment you call calls you make to figure out which ones of those you should do that matters more. So good mentorship, good VCs, good investors, working with entrepreneurs, helping them make those good decisions, that's going to matter even more. So in a way, and this is an age old debate on on our new brave new AI world, in a way the human factor is even more valuable.
I think so. And I would assume that the smart consultancies, the McKenzies and the Accenturas, if they get it, would want to work with you. Yes. Yes. The human factor is huge and exactly as you said, it matters more now because it the AI can take away some of the logistics mechanics risk and brings it down to the human judgment and that's the most valuable part.
Will there be a judgmental quality? Some people believe that these frontier labs uh shouldn't be private, that they're public utilities. Will you push some entrepreneurs towards the nonprofit route? I definitely out of the 1.2 million ideas, there are probably 100,000 which are nonprofit ideas, meaning there's a really important problem in the world.
It needs this solution. here's some technology or systems that can address it, but I don't see how to make a very profitable business. So, it should be a nonprofit. So, I would love to steer people to take those. Again, that's a perfect place where with a really good plan, you could then raise the money for the nonprofit, still make a positive impact on the world.
My whole goal is just to solve as many world problems with as much impact as possible. So, I think it's going to be both profitable businesses and nonprofit businesses. How are you going to solve the problem, Bill, or at least your platform? Address the problem of government, of the fact that no one trusts government anymore.
We're not quite sure what it represents or what it should represent. We know it should be doing something, but we're not quite sure what. Well, I'm really hopeful that government will embrace this, too. I'll give you one example. Right now, if you get laid off from a job, you get unemployment insurance in almost every state, I believe, and that unemployment insurance continues while you're looking for a job.
But if you start a company, it gets cut off. Well, I think that's stupid. I think if you start a company, maybe you should get more. You should you should have some investment from the from the government. So, I don't know if that will happen, but I know people are working to try and address some of those issues.
And I love the idea that if someone gets let go from a job, but they have a passion, something they really care about, and they can find an idea in our system or elsewhere. It doesn't have to be from our system, but if our system inspires them, there should be funding available. So, I think governments can see that this is really powerful for job creation.
This is the ultimate way to take people and really help the economy even locally. So, hopefully governments will step in. We'll see what happens, but I'm going to try and raise venture money to step in and that for sure will step in. But I think government should be participating in this as well. There's been a lot of talk, Bill, of sovereign wealth funds, which are are literal uh financial machines, but in a way, in a less tangible way.
What you're trying to do is is also a kind of sovereign wealth fund. I I I would love it if basically regions, cities, countries, colleges all put together funds to help people in their cohorts be successful at business. That would be incredible. And I think that can really really help the economy. And I think again going back to what you said earlier, that's the ultimate use of foundational model tokens.
Just think about how valuable that can be if those tokens are being used to solve real pro real world problems. You haven't said it, but I'm guessing from the way you're presenting this is you don't see AI economics or our our brave new AI world as a zero sum game. You believe that this new technology can actually expand the pie.
Is that fair? I I really think it does. There's some people who say that to make AI pay back, we have to have 8% to 9% GDP growth. I don't think that something like that is impossible. Think about how powerful this is. This this has changed my life dramatically. This is a superpower tool like nothing I've ever seen.
I'm a woodworker. I like building things. And I compare, say, a handsaw to a table saw. Think about what you can do. AI is that for my brain power way, way bigger than the difference between a handsaw and a table saw. And I just think that this is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my lifetime.
I I really have seen so many revolutions. across the years from the PC revolution, internet revolution, mobile revolution. This just dwarfs that because it just touches every aspect of our thinking and it really really is exciting. But does it have a business model? A few days ago, we had my old friend Keith Tier, the that was the week publisher on the show.
He confessed that he spent $1,000 a month on all his AI platforms. I probably do that as well. Uh but and I said, "What you do with that?" I said, "Well, I can buy a I with with the with the bots now, I can I I can figure out how to get a sub $40 lens on cap on Amazon, which I'm sure is true. Firstly, I'm not entirely convinced that it's much of a time saving, but secondly, I'm not sure the economics are there.
$1,000 to spend a to to save a few dollars on a lens cap. $1,000 to save a little bit of lens cap is not worth it. But $1,000 to change the entire world of how you build businesses, that is worth it. So I I feel like I found a way to turn those tokens into value. I'm really excited about it. So the this new Idea Lab bill is is is launching today.
Uh what are the next steps? Well, we're calling it Ideal Lab AI because basically for the last 30 years it was ideal.com running companies sort of one at a time and this is ideal AI really using AI to expand the reach of that. And the next step is I want to partner with everybody I can to make this successful.
I want to partner with any anyone all the things we talked about cities, colleges, uh other incubators, VCs, anyone who can help me spread this for positive good. Is there a danger? It's too big an idea even for a guy like you. This is a big idea. This is the biggest idea I've ever had. I feel like this is this is the culmination of my whole career.
my my whole life I'm since I was 6 years old I've been playing around with ideas and and this is a chance for me to just take it to a level that I never could have dreamed was possible and I'm really excited about it and I'm going to go around the world sharing this with everybody I can. So, thank you for giving me a chance to share it here today.
But isn't the challenge for you figuring out not what to do but what not to do given the opportunity given the numbers of partners in enterprise in government in education. Yes, there will defin definitely be a challenge of what not to do. What what not to do is we can't build these businesses ourselves.
So that's why I decided to give these away. We can't just go ahead and try and pick seven businesses and try and out of 1.2 million and make an impact there. So definitely we're not in the business of trying to compete with any of these people. We really want people to just find the best thing they can do and scale it wherever they are.
Some people are going to be watching this and thinking, well, I could have done this or I could do it now. What's your what's your moat to to use another Silicon Valley term? I would like to say if you feel that you should do it. So for example, when we started ideal lab, we wanted people to copy the incubator model that we did.
There are now I think a thousand startup studios around the world that have learned from us, hopefully benefited from what we did. And I love people to copy what I'm doing. So if other people have ideas on how to do this themselves, please do it. If other ideas have ideas on how to improve it, please do that or reach out to us.
So, I feel like if you're trying to address world problems, they're big. So, we need everybody all hands on deck. I'm not trying to say there's a mode here and uh we're blocking anybody else from doing this. We want as much support as possible, but I I would love as many people to learn from this and do it themselves, too.
What would you say, Bill, to the populist right or left, to the the Bannonites, the [clears throat] the the Bernie Sanders crowd who argue that all this AI is only compounding inequality? And even platforms like yourself, like like I lab AI, I mean, it may work out, may make a few people rich, but it isn't going to distribute wealth.
Well, there's two aspects of what they're talking about. One aspect of what Bannon and Bernie Sanders are talking about is AI safety. So I definitely agree that we have to have all the safeguards to make sure that AI doesn't have a runaway danger to to humanity. But on the aspect of equality, I feel that that's exactly what I'm working toward.
I'm trying to make something that allows an individual to be able to do something on their own that they couldn't have done otherwise. So, I'm definitely mainly doing this to try and enhance equality and give more people a chance. So, it's the opposite. I I don't think that what I'm doing helps the hyperscalers or helps the big companies.
I think it helps the little guy much more. So, I definitely am doing this for for reducing inequality. And what would you say to the little guy, Bill, who who says, "I don't want a data center in my backyard. I don't want to have anything to do with this. I'm happy with my life and uh uh I don't want to participate in any new platforms.
Uh I'm happy with my old work, my old job. I don't even want to deal with AI. Well, I think that not having a data center in your backyard is a very valid feeling. But not taking advantage of AI to make your life better or to make the world better, that I don't think is a good idea. I think that everybody should try and figure out how can they embrace this to make their own life better and to make the world better.
And I think there's ways to do that without having a data center in your backyard. Where are we, Bill, in the narrative of this revolution? You've lived through. You lived through the dotcom boom. You were right at the beginning. You could have been Google before Google. Uh are we in the the we we there's always this joke where I always give the joke that it's always too early in Silicon Valley until it's too late.
Are we too early or too late? I think that there definitely is a backlash on AI right now because of two things. the data center in my backyard problem and the worry about safety and I think those are both valid but I think we are still early in the game of how much AI is going to impact humanity and I think if we work hard at it it will impact humanity for the positive so I'm working on the positive side I think with every new technology people say this over and over again there's positives and negatives I feel that the only way to make a technology come out positive is to work harder on the positives so I'm working as hard as I and to take the AI tools that are available and make it be a positive for humanity.
No, I I'm not sure I expressed my question clearly. How where are we in terms of the narrative of AI as a mature or immature technology? My sense, for example, is that we're still used to uh using AI on a keyboard in text terms, but we'll move quite quickly towards uh video and audio forms. Uh are we still in the early stage of this technology?
I think we are cuz as you said, we're still mostly typing, doing a little bit of talking like the voice AI is quite good, but most people are not using that. We will have brain interfaces. We'll have AI in our AirPods. We will have AI much more natively accessible to us. And I definitely think it will enhance our thinking in very powerful ways.
So, we're still early in the game that we're still using keyboards to use this primarily. Whenever I see you, Bill, you're full of energy. You seem particularly full now. As you say, it's the most exciting idea you've had. How do you maintain your energy? This exuberance. Is it just natural? [snorts] Do you take pills?
Do you drink something special in the morning? No. No. I'm I'm just very excited when I see something that could be this impactful. It just gets me really excited. The the the old famous line from Archimedes about give me a lever big enough and I can move the earth. I feel like this is now a lever that you can do something you never could have done before.
I think back to I think of Leonardo. Leonardo had his notebook with all his incredible sketches, but his ideas would only reach as far as his horse would take him. like he was in Florence and he can barely make it to Rome or barely make it to Turin. That's how far his ideas could spread. And now with these tools, your idea can touch the whole planet.
So that's just very exciting to me. The idea that you can use your brain power and influence things across the whole globe. It's very exciting. So I think that's what gives me the motivation. It's interesting you brought you bring up our comedes. Uh we did a a show with Richard Sosha, another very prominent Silicon Valley technologist, investor, entrepreneur who has a new book out called a Eureka.
He shares your optimism, but his optimism is based on uh AI being able to essentially think for itself. In that context, what will um ideal.ai AI. Uh, how will that shape? Yeah. Idea Lab AI. Will you just feed something in and then all these bots will go off and do it? Yeah. Well, I'm not quite at that stage yet of AI will think for itself, but I think he's ahead of me.
I'd like to meet him and learn more about what he's thinking. Uh, I'm still at the stage where AI is the power tool that assists your thinking and you apply the judgment and AI does some of the the the process part for you faster and easier. But I do think that what you just described is coming and I don't have a clear view of exactly how that will play out.
So it launches today, Bill. There are going to be a number of people watching and listening to this show who will be intrigued one way or the other. How can they find out more? Yeah. So go to idealab.ai and uh play around with the database. Uh I'd love we'd love to hear from you ideas to make it better.
This is a work in progress. This is just our announcement date. We want to make this as powerful and as useful to people as possible. So, please write us with any ideas or challenges that you find in using it. Please help us spread it. If you know people that or organizations that could help us spread this and make it more useful to people, please tell us.
And um uh my email is Bill.ai. Reach out to me directly. I'll do my best to get back to you as well. Well, it's always so refreshing to talk to you. I'm not sure I'm quite as optimistic as you. I think nobody is quite as optimistic, but uh best of luck with this venture and we'll talk we'll probably see you at DLD maybe in January.
So, we'll talk again then. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. Uh, if you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. Uh, and I'd be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.
Comments 0