Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Emil, what a pleasure to finally talk to you. I've really been looking forward to this. You are working on something incredibly interesting, and I would say that would probably alter the way the future is going to look like. But before we get to that, I want to start with your daughter.
She started the whole story.
Tell me about that.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Yeah, like, in most cases, we're inspired. Inspiration comes from the most unexpected places. Uh, so, yeah, you know about in 2020, early 2020, I was with my daughter. She was playing with her iPad. She was only four years old at this time. And for the first time, Siri pops up, and she asked me, daddy, what is this? And I said, honey, this is Siri. She's like a friend. Say, hi, Siri, and ask her a question. So, as you can imagine, a four year old mine thinking, you know what to ask Siri? And she says, hi, siri, do you have a mommy? And then she said, siri, do you like ice cream? Show me your toys. And she started having a conversation with Siri, and at some point, she says, Siri, I love you. You're my best friend. And she's laughing. And I started thinking about the future and what her world is gonna look like. And then I started thinking about technology, the digital footprint that we all have. And I was like, in the very near future, we're gonna be able to create Siri like entities that are. That is you. So your grandkids, your daughter, your son, anyone can have an interaction with you without you being in the room. So you know what I always say, what started out as daddy's quest for immortality, right? To always give my daughter a piece of me. It actually ended up being something far greater for mankind, where we built a platform where anyone, anywhere in any language, can basically upload their information, upload their minds, and create a AI agent that is them. And now this becomes your partner for the rest of your life. You continue to train it, you continue to grow with it, and more importantly, it, you know, augments you. That's where we think AI is about augmented intelligence, not artificial. So we've developed this platform and Mindbank AI. Its purpose is to enhance humanity with AI. And we're doing this currently for individuals, for people who are authors and writers who have a lot of content organizations that have knowledge that they want to retain within the company and want to obviously, be able to scale that. And there's many use cases, just like your mind has many use cases.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: What did you mean by augments you?
[00:02:39] Speaker B: So when you think about what is our mind? What? Like, when you think of our mind, right? I always say there's two.
We're kind of composed of two Personas, right? There's Ari, the dad, the husband, the person, and then there is Ari, the worker, the person who produces things, the creator, right? And all of these different Personas are intertwined in our mind, and all of our experiences feed off to, you know, support each other, right? So we're able to do. Is basically duplicate that, right? And now, once you put that into a digital entity, you're infinitely scalable.
Right. Now, Ari could be sleeping. And if I have a question that I want to ask him, I could ask his digital twin, right? Ari may have passed away, grandpa Ari, you know, and, you know, if you want to find out how he met grandma and. And have that part of the legacy within the family told from the person's mouth, right. It's a much more powerful story when it's from the person retelling it. But what I mean by augmentation is, I don't see AI as, you know, it's going to eat your babies and take your job, right? It's AI is going to augment you. And we've had tools in our evolution from the beginning of mankind to augment our abilities to produce, augment our ability to survive, augment our productivity. AI is just another tool to augment our intelligence, right? Everything's been physical from now on, if you think about it, elevators help us go up. Horsepower. It's horses that were pushing a car.
AI is now the brain power that's being put into. Into turbocharged. And that's what we're facing now. How do you bring that down to the consumer? How do you bring that down to the individual? It's a challenge, right? There's infrastructure and this and that and the other where we've built that infrastructure so anyone could upload documents, upload their voice. We've got a digital twin for you in minutes.
How you then continue to train that digital twin in your life time, that's a whole different story. How a corporation might say, let, you know, Ari's leaving the company. Let me make a clone of Ari like entity so that that job role, you know, continues to be fulfilled by someone who's had a lot of experience in the company, right? So you see, for example, baby boomers leaving. People have been in the company for 30 years, 40 years.
That's something that a lot of corporations are trying to retain somehow. And I think we've built a solution that can definitely help in that space. It takes a maturity of understanding that moment and reflecting on it just how anyone does about the day. What. What did I. You know, what happened today that has legacy value because most of our life doesn't, right. It's just, pick up the kids, take them here, take them there, you know? And if you think about the social footprint most people have, it's pretty garbage, right? It's like, oh, I took a picture of my taco and got 15 likes on Instagram. Who cares? You know? Right, when you have an interaction with your son or daughter about a bully, or you have an interaction with your kids about, you know, why you're divorced, your partner, that these deep conversations, you know, have different meanings at different stages in their lives, the story doesn't change. Right, right. Your perspective pretty much stays the same.
But the. And that's the power of this right now. What I mean by that is that you need to have a certain level of maturity on the customer side to understand that a legacy is important. What I have to say to my.
You know, with. For my legacy is a value. And unfortunately, many people don't realize that until you're faced with death very, very bluntly, in your face, right. When someone tells you, hey, you've got a week to live or something, then you're just like, oh, my God, you know, or you're around it often, you know, you come from a war. You've been in situations where, you know, you see. You see death quite often, I think. I think those people tend to have a. What I like to call the personal expiration clock on themselves. Right, right. I've got it. I've got an expiration date. You know, I did this for myself, like, in my twenties, right. Doesn't necessarily mean I'm gonna die, but it means that I'm gonna be productive probably within this window of time. And then you start thinking about that. It's like, wow, you know, it's. The older you get, the closer that expiration date comes, you know, and you get this little fire inside you.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: Do you notice when you're using mind bank that it's changing the way that they reflect about their own lives?
[00:07:18] Speaker B: For myself, definitely, you know, we don't dive into our customer data and kind of understand. Right. But I definitely know from two sides, one, personal. Right. Self reflection is definitely an interesting tool that we, as a society have lost. Right. If you think of prayer, that's a self reflection ritual that we've lost as a society. Not lost, but at least it's definitely not as prevalent as it was before. And then when you look at, you know, mental health and various studies around the benefits of journaling and things like that for PTSD, anxiety, depression, everything you can imagine, it's shown massive beneficial benefits, you know, to the point that our technologies, at this very moment, we have a grant for it to be used by the Air Force as a grant study for mental health.
They're looking at this as a new tool for what's called remote patient monitoring. Because one thing is, as you build your digital twin, you upload data, but on the backside of that is that we analyze that data for emotions and personality to build out your digital twins personality, basically. And what you get presented is a dashboard of your mind, right? And obviously, as time goes by, you have ups and downs and sideways and you can see your emotions and you can see the wave of change. And that's really interesting because, you know, when you look at the quantitative self, we have data about a lot of ourselves, right, financial data to some extent, health record data, right, education data, right, LinkedIn and all that stuff. But do we know how Ari has changed mentally in his life? You know, how are you as a teenager, 20 year old, 30 year old dad, you know, and then attribute moments in your life that would have changed your personality? That's where it's really, really powerful from a self reflection perspective, right? Because you can see your change.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Now, have you seen changes in yourself based on the self reflection process?
[00:09:23] Speaker B: So I can tell you a very specific story. So I got this idea from Mindbank in January 2020, and in January 2022, we had launched the product, maybe, I don't know, six months, a little bit more than six months before my ex wife passed away suddenly. So the mother of that four year old daughter that, you know, now she's six, and I have to tell her, mommy died sudden.
I continued to basically use a platform. I was divorced at the time, so now my daughter's full time with me. So as you can imagine, it was definitely a tough time for everyone, but it still is, you know?
But what happened was that we weren't. We were. I was able to take all my data and look at the year, and I can tell you when I started getting better mentally, I see it in the data, right. I can tell you it was like six months from. From January to about October, it was like. Right? And around October is when it started kind of going back to baseline, right. Going back to normality in some ways, emotionally speaking at least, right.
I can also see my personality, how during that period, I was more closed, you know, just not really, let's say nothing, just much more closed, let's put it this way. Right? So what, openness is one of the things we measure neuroticism, a few other ones, but you can see how my personality went like this and period in the first side of the period and then opened up in the second part of the period. But you see openness, you see kind of getting back to it. So what I mean by that is that that's a really clear, concrete use case for me, how I went through that trauma, that loss, and was able to track it, at least visualize the problem, right?
And this happened after the fact. I didn't notice, to be honest with you. It's after the fact. I noticed like, wow, I can see my change. That's one example, which is why I think it's very powerful now to start, you know, using it for what I call mental strength, right. And resiliency. And. And like anything in life, you know, your brain is a muscle, you know, it is an electrical muscle, and you need to train it, you need to kind of take care of it. And just like, you know, you think of how much time people spend on treadmills and tracking their fitness and all that. We do nothing for our minds in that.
So this kind of helps you with that tool, right, from an introspective perspective. But the output is a digital twin of you that anyone can have a conversation with, right? And if you're open to having those tough conversations with yourself and allowing others to kind of access to that, then you've got a digital twin that's very close to who you are, which is why I say that's the Persona. But Ari, you might want to build one for work. Completely different data set, different use case, different. You know, you're not going to talk about your personal loss in your business use case, right? You don't have to. You could, but you don't have to. And I think that's where the AI agents start falling into place, where you have one, let's say mind bank, but two agents, the personal, the dad and the worker.
And that's kind of the infrastructure that we've built out for the.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: So let's dive into the business side of this. How are companies using mine back today? For what purposes?
[00:12:51] Speaker B: So the first and foremost, it's augmenting intelligence, what's called workforce. Workforce intelligent automation. What that means in layman's term is you've got all this documentation about the business, about a job role, and usually, if to service a client or ask enter an faq. You have to query that document or somehow someone has to talk about that. So we're able to do. So. Let's say. I'll give you an excellent use case. A professor. Here's a professor. A lot of knowledge in their brains. They've published papers, they've been on TED talks, they've been on tv or whatever. You know, we can take all of those interviews and all of that content, all of the things that they've created in their lives, ingested into our platform. We clone their voice, measure their emotions and personality to kind of give them a bit of some feel. But ultimately, what you have is an intelligent digital twin of that person. So now a student can ask a question to the digital twin instead of asking the professor directly, right? So these are some use cases that we're doing right now, right? So a professor at Northwestern, we've got two more universities that are piloting this product because it gives that enhancement to the professor, right. And it gives access to the student, because ultimately what you want is a quick answer. Sometimes you don't need to have a deep conversation, right.
And it fills those knowledge gaps very quickly. So that's one use case. And then if you look at from an enterprise perspective, you've got a whole generation of baby boomers that are retiring. So how do we capture that knowledge? So one customer, what they're doing is interviewing these people that are about to retire and basically just answer, asking a bunch of questions as if they're a new employee in the company taking over that role.
That Q and a happens. You ingest it also with some company information, product information. And now you've got Ari, who's extremely knowledgeable about that product and that market and that segment, that clientele. So we can ask Ari, hey, what's the name of the wife of our key account? Or, you know, she likes prosecco from whatever. You know, these little intricate in these. That's. That's what gets deals done sometimes, right? These that the humanity involved into it, right? So that's another use case, right? And then the last one, I would say if you think about it from a customer care or after sales care role, where it's a lot of like customer success, customer servicing. We've done digital twins of a product specialist. So the an H vac system, five or six different machines, put all of the documentation into it and had a layer of thermodynamics. So the thing knew a lot about thermodynamics and a lot about the product.
So you would ask it a question like, the system has got a red light and I hear a clicking noise. Can you tell me what this might be? And it'll give you. It'll troubleshoot it for you. At least it'll give you an idea of how to fix it, right? So you can imagine if you're servicing a ticket, the technician can walk up to the machine already with a solution, and that will obviously speed up processes. So that's what I mean by augmenting intelligence, right? It's not replacing it, it's just making things much faster and much more accessible.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: You know, we kind of think naturally to the negative aspects of AI about, oh, you know, when Uber came along, I think there's this leaning that's very natural to human beings to think about the negative, right? The social science that have researched this call it negativity bias, right? It's why news media, you know what news media say, if it bleeds, it leads, right? So those. The stories that catch attention are, you know, the terrible things that have happened. And, you know, that is human and that is natural. But I think what's beautiful about what you're kind of sharing with us is that there's all this value that can generate. So, you know, all these new employees who don't necessarily have the knowledge, who can ramp up and get basically mentored by the most experienced employee who is now retired and help them deliver value and help them learn. I mean, that's incredible, being able to go to ask a professor a question, or it's one person asking one question, but now all of his students can ask any question 24/7 that's incredible. That's true human empowerment at the most basic, basic level of curiosity. So I'm sure there's going to be good and bad, but I think we're hugely underestimating the value that tools like mind bank and AI can drive to us. And at the end of the day, I would argue that AI is just like a hammer, right? You can be a criminal, you can pick it up and you can hit somebody on the head, or you can build a house.
But at the end of the day, it's just a tool. It's not good or evil.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly. I attribute it to much more like fire. It could burn you or it could give you light. It could cook your food. You know, it's very much. It's got a lot. A lot of. A lot of legs, let's say. But, uh. Yeah, definitely, definitely. But what's interesting is that I see, you know, like I said, I started this in 2020 and 2020. People thought I was great. They were like, you know, there was like, you know, this is good. Technology is going to come in ten years, 20 years, like, and we're. It's here. It's here today. Like, you can make a digital twin of yourself today sound like you.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: I'll confess. Before chat GPT hit, I was like, this is all bullshit. We're nowhere close to being able to do this stuff. But when chat GPT hit, I was like, the world has just changed. Or at least now the rest of the world knows what is possible. Such a huge difference.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: And I was lucky to see chat GBT and open DeepMind. They were like, I started in 2020, and literally, like, two months later, I saw that DeepMind and chat GPT both got, which was OpenAI back then, both got $2 billion investments. And I was like, okay, I'm not going to tackle the LLM problem.
These guys are going to crack that nut. I'm going to tackle the personalized AI problem. Because you take, I always say, LLM is not the cure all, be all, because an LLM is a large language model. English is a large language model. You know, Spanish is a large language model. However, our experiences of that language change our output, right? Your education changes the way you speak, what country you are educated changes your accent, right? All of these things change your language model in a personalized manner. So what we focus on is how do we make and take advantage of LLMs, which is just another tool, but really personalize it so that Ari's digital twin is as close as possible to him, right? And then add that layer of knowledge to not only an organization, but more importantly, to his family, right? Because that's a wealth that is always lost, right?
[00:20:11] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: Now you can start keeping that. And that's why we call it the mind bank, right?
It's about storing wealth, and it's the wealth that's in your mind.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: I love that.
So we talked a little bit about the risk associated security of your mind bank is incredibly important. Tell us a little bit more about the risks that you've identified and what Mindbank is doing to prevent them.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: So from a data privacy perspective and data residency perspective, we've always had the say, the, I would call it the ethics and the rules, if you want to call it that, of not selling your data, not using your data for anything other than your mind bank, right? It's a tool for you and your residency, your ownership is your data.
From that perspective, we've always had security at the top of our list, because it is about building trust with our user base to trust with our clients. And we've got, as a Microsoft for startup, startup, we get a lot of support from them, not only from credits, but also from technical support and auditing. The head of our security CTO, he actually comes from the NSA. So he was a security is his backbone, is what he specializes in.
And lastly, when you think of where we are going as a company, we've always wanted to go into a web three interface infrastructure. So that then even more so, it's, the data is in your possession, literally, right?
We're not there yet, but we will get there very soon. And from also, lastly, from a technology perspective, only one person has access to the database right now. That's our cto. So there's no one else that needs access. No one else will get access.
And we want to keep it at that level so that very few people have access to it and. And will ever have access to.
[00:22:09] Speaker A: And in addition to it, security. You've invested quite a bit in compliance.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: Because we're making efforts into the health care sector. We have obviously gone into the HIPAA compliance.
The other reason, half our team is based in Europe, and I'm actually calling you from Europe right now. So GDPR has always been a necessity as well. And lastly, because we want to be, and we always are, actually a multilingual, global company, we're looking at other compliances because it's not just about HIPAA and GDPR, but CPA. You know, in every, in every country, almost, you have their own thing. But ultimately, I think when it comes to a company, the first and foremost, it should be down to the ethics of a company. What is the purpose of this company? Like, our purpose is not to sell you soap, you know, our purpose is to enhance your ability as a human being. To produce, to live longer, albeit digitally and obviously in a secure manner, is most importantly something that you can also ethically and legally leave behind to someone as well. I can imagine a world where Ari donates his mind bank to the world.
That would be such an interesting thing. We're not there yet, but I think we're looking at ways of how do we make this a collective intelligence?
[00:23:35] Speaker A: There's a lot of famous historical figures with massive amounts of intelligence written Einstein or Socrates or whatever. Have you done any kind of work to take that massive amount of knowledge? And here's your digital Einstein. Ask him a question.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: So we took Ben Franklin's memoirs. So he has a number of volumes of memoirs. And we took it and, and ingested into our platform, cloned, grabbed a voice from. From. From a. That sounds like Ben Franklin, let's say we think sounds like Ben Franklin, and we made a digital version of Ben Franklin. And the, the purpose of that was as a use case of, like, this. You can do this as well, relatively. Also, from a historical figure perspective, I think a lot of what Ben Franklin has said in the past is very relevant today. You know, if you look at even immigration, they had immigration issues back then. You know, it's really good. Like, because I was reading the data as I, as we were uploading it and kind of cleaning some stuff up, and I was like, wow, he's like, basically dealing with the same issues. Inflation, you know, immigration, like security. It was like exact same issues just from a different context, you know? So I would. I would welcome everyone to have a conversation with Ben Franklin and ask him questions like, you know, he's even got dating advice.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Just, just. That is incredible, right? To think that I could consult or have mentors from the world's greatest minds. I mean, that's, you know, we think about the Internet being such a great revolution that you can google search stuff and get websites, but next to Mindbank and next to this next generation of AI driven applications, it looks like garbage. Google. Right? I mean, you know, I can ask Benjamin Franklin a question, or I can see some website that somebody generated, like, no, I want to consult with Benjamin Franklin. Right. That's where I want to go. That is so excited. Exciting.
This is Emil. I am so excited to see where your company is going in the future. I think there's just so many opportunities. Your biggest problem is just probably to decide what you're going to do next.
I need to ask you something. You're an entrepreneur. You've been on this journey for quite a bit of time now.
We have a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs who are listening to our program. If you have to look back on your journey and give one piece of advice, what would that be?
[00:26:09] Speaker B: I would say it's more of a framework, at least what's worked for me.
And it's something I tell my kids, and I have it on. Like, if I. If I were to make a family crest, you know, like, this would. This would be it. And it's passion, power, persistence, and peace.
And what that means is, you know, when you decide on something, go with it with a lot of passion, go with it with a lot of persistence, because it's gonna. It's not gonna be easy. You're gonna want to give up. You're gonna want to, like, you're gonna fail a number of times. You know, stuff is definitely not going to go your way, right. But you need the power to use the power through those moments, however, you know, and, and then the peace side is be at peace with whatever decision you make.
No regrets. You know, life is, life is full of regret sometimes, but you have to be, you have to come to peace with those things, right where. And that's it. That's just nothing you can do about it. Just move on. So those are the four. And I tell my kids, you know, and the other thing I tell my kids is at least my daughter, she's the oldest one now. She's nine, and she's a diver. She likes, she does springboard diving, high diving and stuff like that. So she's a little seven, eight year old kid, nine now.
And she's diving from like 10 meters, 7 meters. And it's like, it's scary for me, you know, as a dad, to see this little thing jump from that high. But one of the things I teach her is take a deep breath and verbalize. I can do this right. That's just that simple of like, you know, activate the nervous system, calm yourself down, and just go, right. Because you're going to need to regroup sometimes and you're going to need to kind of come to grips with things. So that's, you know, I think it's a long answer. It's not one thing, but I like to kind of give it that framework so that people can, can just think of the four p's, take a deep breath and just do it. You know, that's basically the recommendation. And.
Yeah, and last, like, yes, we all live. I was talking to an entrepreneur recently. He says, we all live.
We're all delusional, and you have to come to grips with the fact that you're a bit delusional. So it's okay.
It's all right to be a bit delusional.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: Emil, I am so grateful for talking to you today. I really appreciate it. We have to get you back and hear how the company is doing because I truly believe that your company and others like it are just going to change the world.
Appreciate having gone today. Thank you so much. Thank.
