[00:00:00] Speaker A: This is the movement of anything.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: What does that do for an employee?
[00:00:04] Speaker C: I'm just going to freeze my title.
[00:00:06] Speaker D: I'm Richard Gerhardt.
[00:00:07] Speaker E: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. Are you thinking of starting a business or have one you're trying to grow? Stay tuned.
[00:00:14] Speaker F: Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given it hard. Now get it in gear.
It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:25] Speaker D: I'm Richard Gerhardt, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patent strict trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:33] Speaker E: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I am the founder of Gear Media Studios, a full service podcast studio.
[00:00:41] Speaker D: Welcome to Passage to Profit the Road to Entrepreneurship where we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities who tell their stories about their business journey and also share helpful insights about the successes that they've had. Very special treat, we have Shekhar Natarajan, who is a business leader and strategist for AI guided supply chain management. And he's also the visionary founder of Orchestro AI and he also has 150 patents. So we're going to have to ask him about that.
[00:01:11] Speaker E: Oh my gosh, yes. And then we have two amazing guests. Now I have to ask you this question. Do you have a company where your HR systems, your software systems are all introverts and they just will not talk to each other?
If so, you want to hear what Noelle London has to say because she is helping clean up the HR software message so you can get everything you need when you need it. And then we have Kurt Moore. I have to ask you this. Have you ever been worried that a squatter would take your house? I mean, there's been stories on the news about people squatting people's houses and getting the title somehow and selling it out from under them. Well, worry no more because if you listen to Kurt Moore, you could figure out how to keep this from happening to you. And coming up later on, it's Noah's retrospective along with Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind.
[00:01:59] Speaker D: Well, that's awesome. I can't wait to get to our distinguished guests. But before we do that, it's time for your new business journey. Two in five Americans are business owners or thinking about becoming business owners. And so we'd like to ask our panel a question. And today's question is, what's the smartest thing you did in the first 90 days of starting your business? And what do you wish you'd done differently? So, Shekhar, what Are your thoughts on this?
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Well, thank you for having me on the show. I know that, you know, it's, it's a real honor to be here.
So like, I would guess, like, I wouldn't say this is the smartest thing, but I felt that this was the right thing to do, which was to really build with moral clarity, build a company with moral clarity versus technical clarity.
Right. I did not go after the product market fit and all those things I just said, does the values and the market fit together?
And I had to ask myself, is the problem really worth solving even if it fails?
And that became the compass of what I was trying to basically go after.
[00:03:16] Speaker D: So, so when you focused on the, the moral aspects of the business, I mean, there's a pretty wide variety of morals out there. How did you tune yourself to that? How did you make that work?
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Well, you know, for, for one, basically you, you know, you're a product of, you know, how you grow up. Okay.
And, and for me, I had this incredible journey in my life. I come from slums in India where everything about access to education, you know, paying for funerals or even like, you know, just attending school was a difficult thing, you know. And I grew up in a house in a single room with like, you know, eight members in my house. And when I came to the United States, I just had $34 in my pocket. But what made me who I am is my father's hand. My father used to make 150 rupees.
150 rupees, which is a dollar 75amonth.
And he never kept it for himself.
He actually would go and help everyone around in the community.
And so he left a lot of angels for me, Richard.
And those angels have guided me. I remember once I swirled on a five lane highway in Washington D.C.
at 3:45 in the afternoon.
I missed everything by whisker and I stood on the brake lane. What do you call it? Not physics, not luck. It's angels.
[00:04:58] Speaker D: And just for your information, in New Jersey we call that the Jersey slide when you cross five lanes of traffic in one swoop.
[00:05:08] Speaker E: Well, speaking, I mean speaking of angels, I got to tell you, my guardian angels have been, are pretty worn out.
[00:05:16] Speaker C: So.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: So and I, I lived in an industry where it is deeply human, right? Like supply chains.
If you think about it, 500 million people work in the world of supply chain. 500 million from all the way from extracting raw materials to making the products, distributing it out and bringing it to your door. 500 million people.
The only two countries bigger than that is India and China.
Okay. So if you are actually going to change the industry, you have to basically humanize everything that you're trying to do. You cannot, like, forget what makes the system.
And so for me, if I'm going to be changing the world of logistics and supply chain organizing and orienting myself just like my father did it for me, being an angel in many people's life was what I wanted to be in this journey and helping that human goodness to come out in the process of making this company.
[00:06:32] Speaker D: I mean, that's great. And I do want to come back to this during your interview because I think that's a really interesting topic because I think it's very aspirational.
And I'm curious about how you took that and those principles and integrated them into your business. But I want to hear from our other panelists, too.
Kurt, do you have any thoughts?
[00:06:54] Speaker C: Yeah, Well, I echo Shaker. I appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast. I look forward to this very much.
And I'm very impressed with what Shaker just said. That's very moving.
He's got a great story there. I'm certainly interested in learning more about that.
With respect to myself and my company's journey the first 90 days, I would say things that we did right, and I look back on and saying we got that right would be we definitely engaged a strong, diverse management team, professionals including legal, accounting, finance, marketing.
And as a leader, I think it's very important to keep those people communicating, keep them aligned, and make sure that we adapt to changes in what's going on in our business cycle, things that maybe you wish you did better. Looking back, I think companies sometimes, and we were a little bit guilty of it, just waiting too long start.
I think oftentimes startup companies are always saying, well, if I just do this, then maybe I'll be ready to go, or, okay, we did that, now let's do this too. I want to be sure that's perfect before we press go.
I would just encourage people get it close enough and then go and let the business start to naturally form.
You're going to make mistakes. I can't imagine anybody has ever started a company and been perfect. And I can't imagine anyone's ever come out and just said, know I wouldn't change a thing.
So I think just some of the reluctance to start to try to set that aside and get it, get yourself squared up and ready to go. Be believe in your product, believe in your service, whatever you're offering. Take a hard look at the market that you're proposing to engage, make sure you have a story of why would my product or my service be useful in the current market, the current competition environment, Whether that's a pricing strategy or just a better product or better customer service. Whatever it is that your story is, be sure to promote that and then stick with it and enter the market.
[00:09:06] Speaker D: Great. Thank you, Kurt. So, Noel, welcome to the show. Noel London. Tell us about what you did right in the first 90 days and maybe what you would do differently looking back at it.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me.
As Richard mentioned, my name is Noelle London. I'm the founder and CEO of Illuminist.
We're the first employee data platform that is powered by AI, built for the mid market and built with a community of about 300 different HR leaders.
You know, I would say, I think similar to Shaker, you know, I think that there was a whole lot of journey that happened before those first 90 days.
I would actually say that the journey before the first 90 days is probably the most important.
Um, for myself personally, you know, I was fortunate to start working with entrepreneurs right out of undergrad with the Peace Corps. I was down in Nicaragua for a couple of years, learned there that I'd actually been an entrepreneur and didn't necessarily know it and didn't have the vocabulary for it at the time. But I'd had businesses before and I knew that, you know, to me, entrepreneurship was all about creative problem solving. I fell in love with it. I knew that I was going to be a found and I was going to start a company. And so what I did is I spent about a decade getting ready to launch this company. So, you know, Kurt, I hear you on, you wait too long to start.
But what I did during that decade is I spent a lot of time around entrepreneurs. I worked for startups, I was an investor myself.
I started incubator programs and I led corporate innovation teams. And so what that taught me is, you know, how do you build great companies? It also allowed me to help a whole lot of people along the way. Because when you start a company, you need a lot of help. You ask a lot of favors, you ask too many favors, but you really need to be able to build up that social capital before you launch. So I would say that for me, you know, before those 90 days, there was a whole lot of work that went into this thing. I was definitely not the person that said, oh, I thought about starting a company. A lot of people say, say they think about starting a company. It doesn't mean that you're actually doing it. They're very different things.
So for me, you know, I would say getting ready to launch the company, if anybody that's listening is thinking about that, you're serious about it, you're ready to give everything up for it. There's so many resources that are out on the market. They're free resources.
There's a lot of good advice. There's also a lot of bad advice that's out there. But really take in the resources that are there to support you. You don't have to start your own. In my first 90 days, I think the best thing that I did is I had a paying customer and I was onboarding said paying customers. So didn't start the clock, didn't go in, was this was very much a side of the desk type of thing until we had real revenue. And I actually had to quit my job to keep running this business. So I would say, you know, focus on the part of getting ready before you make the jump.
Really know the problem, really know that there's a market for this problem before you jump in, see that somebody's going to pay you, they're going to sign a contract before you go all in on this solution. And then those first 90 days were an absolute blur.
All I will say is I'm glad that we just moved really fast. We kind of like Shekhar mentioned, and he was talking about values for us. We set our values and our behaviors on day one for the organization, and we just moved, moved, and we went and we were super nimble. Because those first 90 days, all you're doing is just learning and adapting. So, you know, that's all. All I would say of, you know, what went into those first 90 days, if I could change anything, I don't know, I. I kind of can't look back. I made a million mistakes probably in those first 90 days. But I also think that, you know, they built us and they made us stronger as well.
[00:13:17] Speaker D: Perfect, Elizabeth.
[00:13:20] Speaker E: Well, when we decided that we were going to refurbish our studio for use by other people, I think one thing that we did right in the first 90 days, first of all, we did do a lot of research to see if there would be a market, I actually started a meetup. And this was like a year before the studio opened to see if there were local people who would come and that would want to use a podcast or content creation studio.
And then one thing we did right was I started really networking and we had a grand opening. We had the mayor come with the big Pair of scissors and the ribbon. It's, you know, it's a storefront basically. It's a physical space that people rent and got a lot of business from that. So we have a corporate client now that's a repeat customer and we've had a few other people use the studio and some people say they want to do repeat business here.
Getting people over the hump is a little tough because people don't like being on video and it's kind of intimidating with all these cameras that we have in here and everything. But that was one, I think, mistake I made was that I didn't realize, I mean, I thought I would do some coaching, but when we first had this idea, we thought people would just come and know how to do it and just use the studio.
I really have to be a hands on coach, which I'm getting paid for, so that's fine. And I enjoy helping people and doing it, but that's.
I think one mistake was underestimating how much help people need to start a podcast because it's not easy for people. This is not easy, and there's a lot of steps to it.
[00:14:50] Speaker D: Yeah, well, that's great, I guess. You know, I'm listening to everybody talk and I'm just thinking about when, when we started Gearhart Law, I think I did everything backwards. So maybe I should start with all the things that I did wrong first.
Well, for example, like it's been 20 years since we've been, we started and it's only been like the last year that I've actually even been really thinking hard about company culture.
I started as an attorney, and we're not really trained in, you know, business protocol, business structures. I took one class that told me I had to learn about marketing, I had to learn about, you know, finance, I had to learn about hr.
And over the years, I've just kind of maneuvered my way through these and, you know, I've definitely had strategies, but, but when you talk about things like cultures and, and, and, and values, I'm not sure I really completely understood that concept until, you know, just recently and even now just kind of talking about it.
I think what I thought would help make us successful was my personal knowledge of intellectual property. And also I felt like I had an authenticity that clients would find appealing. And so I came from the corporate world where attorneys had the company as a client, and you were always thinking about the company's interest first before your own personal interest. And so when it came to counseling clients, I was always like, well, what's in the best interest of you, less than what's in my best interest as a. As a business owner.
And I think that that, you know, single kind of concept went a really long way in helping us, you know, grow. And so I think, you know, the best thing that I did was, I think just was maybe not spent so much time thinking in terms of business structures and just kind of being myself and learning as I went. And I guess if I had things to do over again, maybe I would be a little bit more deliberate and maybe I would get a little bit more education in the ways of managing a company. But everything's turned out great.
And I guess, you know what they say, based on what I've heard here, is, you know, the first 90 days of a company can really kind of define your trajectory.
And so I think when you're doing it, you just kind of have to trust your gut and, you know, build momentum as we go. So that's the takeaway from that. So now we need to talk to our featured guest in a little bit more detail. Shaker, once again, welcome to the show.
If your supply chain could think for itself and outsmart your current one, then Shekhar Narajan is the guy to talk to. He's a leader in supply chain management and strategy and the founder and CEO of Orchestral AI.
They orchestrate entire delivery networks without human intervention and have transformed giants like Walmart and PepsiCo.
And the first question I want to ask may be obvious, Shaker, but what is supply chain?
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Well, supply chain and logistics is basically the art and science of movement of things, okay? And this is like, this is the movement of anything. To be honest, anything can be considered a supply chain. Like, you know, bees going and pollinating is a supply chain because it actually creates the ecosystem.
Products moving from China all the way to our door is a supply chain, right? You basically like manufacturing like something in your hand, handcrafting it and trying to get it into someone else's hand is supply chain, right? So supply chain is all around us, but it is also invisible to us.
Invisible to us. The reason why I say that it's like an underbelly.
People only hear talking about supply chains when things don't work.
Imagine Covid.
Imagine vaccines not being there. Imagine like Purell hand sanitizers not available. Imagine diapers not available.
Imagine kids not getting the toys during Christmas.
That was because supply chains were very fragile. They were broken systems.
And it's a collection of many, many, many, many different parties. So let me give you a good example.
Like a can of Pear, like a Dole pear, grows. The pears grow in Chile, gets transported to Thailand, gets cut there, gets packaged in China and moves to New York store and gets sold for 50 cents.
So that pair actually moved 20,000 miles across the world before it showed up in your hands. And there are so many people who actually touched the journey.
So people think of supply chains as these, like, sophisticated systems, but these are all humans doing a lot of miracles so that you are not disappointed as a customer.
[00:20:29] Speaker D: So, Shekhar, so you're a master of artificial intelligence, and here we are talking about human beings being an essential part of the supply chain process.
How do you marry those two? Isn't that a paradox?
[00:20:49] Speaker A: That's what people would say, right?
No, no, absolutely not.
And the story actually goes back to the genesis of what I was talking about, right. So in 2005, okay, my father slipped into coma. He was an angel maker in many people's lives.
And I was rushed into to go to India.
When I reached home, my father basically is 88% of his brain was completely damaged.
He couldn't recognize me. I couldn't recognize him because he was completely fragile.
And here he was, a healthy guy who'd do yoga every day, would keep himself very fit. And he slipped into coma.
And at that time, I had to make a decision about whether my father needs to be alive or not.
[00:21:46] Speaker E: Oh, my gosh.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: And you don't, you don't hit like, let's go button.
You pause, you think, you think and you think.
And sometimes you think for 13 days and never get the answer. And I woke up on the 14th day and I said, like, my, my father probably doesn't want to live the way he's living.
And when I, when I had that, when I, when I went through that, it just changed the way I think about leadership. It just like tempered my entire philosophy about love, care, affection and, and consciousness.
[00:22:29] Speaker D: How did it change?
[00:22:30] Speaker A: Similar thing.
[00:22:32] Speaker D: What changed?
[00:22:33] Speaker A: So for me, like, you know, like at that time, I made a promise to my father.
I said, I'm going to look out for all the angels that are similar to him and make them empowered.
And my life has been a series of accidents. Elizabeth and Richard, like, I work for large companies. You know, I work for Coke, I work for PepsiCo, I work for Walmart, I work for Walt Disney Company.
I work for basically American Eagle. One thing which was common in all of these company, the law of large numbers.
Law of large numbers. Lot of people. Lot of people. A lot of people.
And so all these are incredibly beautiful supply chain Companies and I envision and I kept seeing because you set your intentions and your mind begins to see what you want to see.
And I started seeing angels everywhere. Everywhere. And then in 2017, I had a similar experience. Now my mother was sick and I became the voice for my mom, for her stillness, for a will.
And by then, by God, like I was super successful. I had all the titles, but I had nothing. I felt like hollow. I was chasing validation from others. I was not chasing the dream that I wanted. And I made a promise to my father.
So at that time, like I had the second calling.
And at that time I was fully determined by God. I'm actually gonna create something very fascinating for like, you know, for humans to become like extraordinary in what they do to capture the humanness. Like the guy who goes out of the way and doesn't care that he does did not finish the delivery on time, but goes to an elderly house, you know, like, you know, you know, a customer who's elderly and makes a delivery of grocery and pharmaceuticals to them.
He didn't care about like, basically like running overtime or not overtime. He just did what was right. The guy was running into the house of an elderly person whose house was in fire.
These are not like made up stories. These are actually the real stories that people don't hear about.
Right. And how do you capture the humanness of these people and make them extraordinary souls? And when you're able to do that, every transformation, every industry change becomes easy because you have the power of masses with you power.
[00:25:10] Speaker D: How do you capture that? How do you capture, within the system, within a business context, how do you, how do you capture the humanity there and channel it to the right business purpose?
[00:25:23] Speaker A: Yeah. So, so basically the way we have conceptualized, you know, if I, if I just sold virtues and values and everything, like, you know, we live in a very capitalistic world. No one would buy that, that, you know, let's be honest about it.
[00:25:37] Speaker E: Right?
[00:25:38] Speaker A: So, so the, the, the way our network works is you see this at your door today you have a FedEx driver showing up at the door, a UPS driver showing up at the door, you know, another carrier like an Amazon and a USPS mailman. Everyone is coming to your door and subconsciously people are replicating, building more delivery companies to the door. The problem is it's very similar to utility. You don't have like one company delivering water to your bedroom, one to your master bathroom, one to basically your living room, one for your kids. You don't have that. You have like one unified system so the most efficient last mile is one where basically you're consolidating everything to the same door.
So that gives the efficiency play.
Now I overlay that as a feature, like, what I'm talking about these digital angels, the angels of compassion, the angels of, like, you know, temperance, the angel of. So these are all virtues that make us very human.
And we give the control back to the humans to basically override the machine decisions.
I'm a delivery driver. I am making a delivery. I know that I have to go there. I can make an exception to that process. So you're bringing the human into the loop and basically amplifying their goodness while you're driving the efficiency at the same time.
[00:27:03] Speaker E: So if you're.
I'm just curious about how this fits in with your work with agentic AI. So if you're programming AI agents. Yeah, which I want to have my own, like, thousand AI agents to do everything that I don't want to do. I mean, is there room for human intervention if you're using AI agents to do all these tasks for you?
[00:27:27] Speaker A: Obviously, Right. Like, you know, like, you know, people have been very fascinated about autonomous delivery for a while. Like, you know, I, like, I remember, like, like, I have a lot of patents on that. And, you know, people have been talking about, like, autonomy is coming. Like, it's almost coming. It's almost there at your doorstep, and it never came, even after a decade. You know why? Because we. I'll give you a classic example. And, like, this will drive home the point in India when you're driving around, right?
Like, people, like, put their right hand and take a left turn.
They put the left hand out and take a right turn, and they put both hands up and then they drive straight.
So the driver would basically, like, the guy who's driving the vehicle is trained to think in 360 degrees. You know, like, you know, like, don't even, like, pay attention. I understand the context of, like, what's going on. So they're able to adapt, but what they're not able to adapt is a cow sitting in the center of the road. The cow cannot communicate its intent to you.
It doesn't understand your intent to her.
Right. And so we live in a very similar society where things are always going to be heterogeneous.
Always heterogeneous.
So we are always going to live in a hybrid world.
And hence basically, like, you know, human is always going to discern more, feel more, think think. Obviously, they can think. Thinking is actually like, now getting, like, you know, sort of outsourced to AI.
[00:29:00] Speaker D: But the feeling completely, by the way.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: Right, but, but the feeling and, and, and, and the, the humanness is still very human. You cannot replace it. You cannot replace it.
[00:29:12] Speaker D: So we have to take a commercial break now. This has been a fascinating discussion and has really started opening my eyes a bit to the interaction between human beings and potentially and artificial intelligence. And when we come back, I really want to know what the word heterogeneous means because I haven't heard that one before.
Listening to Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gerhardt. Our special guest, Shekhar Natrajan, who is the CEO of Orchestra AI will be back right after this.
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[00:31:46] Speaker F: Now back to passage to profit once again, Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart and our.
[00:31:52] Speaker E: Special guest, Shaker Natajan. And we are talking about supply chains and AI.
[00:31:57] Speaker D: He's a very high level thinker.
[00:31:59] Speaker E: He is. And Shaker used a word that I think is kind of a new one.
[00:32:04] Speaker D: I don't know, could you repeat the word and explain it to me? Because it sounds like it's a good word and I want to know what it means.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: You mean to say heterogeneous or you mean to say angelic intelligence?
[00:32:16] Speaker D: Heterogeneous.
[00:32:16] Speaker E: I like both of those.
[00:32:18] Speaker A: Well, I'll explain both of those.
So, so what is heterogeneous is like dissimilar things like, like basically autonomous vehicle can go side by side with the guy who's actually driving the car.
Right. So we live in a society where we are always going to have things which need to coexist together. And we as a humanity have always coexisted together.
Like we, we welcome people who don't look like us. Like, look at me, just look at me. I basically came from India with $34 in my pocket. This country is the most beautiful country that anyone can be in.
It created so many opportunities for me and I'm sure, like, I wouldn't have been the same if, you know, I was elsewhere because all I had to do is keep my intentions clean and keep like working hard and like things started to happen to me.
So that is the beauty of this country that makes it very unique. Like it is welcoming, it is beautiful. Like it gives you opportunities. Like, you know, if you have right intentions, good goals, it's going to make you like, you know, you know, realize your dreams. So for me, when I think about all these systems that we keep talking about, whether it's AI, whether it's artificial intelligence, autonomy, all kinds of robots running around, boy, these are all great things.
But what it does not do is feel like a human. And hence, instead of building artificial intelligence, how about we start building angelic intelligence? Angel intelligence. Angelic intelligence is bringing out the goodness in people. Unleashing that imagination, unleashing that creativity, unleashing that kindness. See what happened in Texas. Such a disaster. Such a disaster. But one of the most beautiful things that happened in that, even in that like, trying circumstances is people who did not know other people just showed up out of love, out of compassion.
How does a machine capture that?
[00:34:36] Speaker D: Well, you know, it's interesting as we go through this AI transition and, and we integrate artificial intelligence more and more into our, our lives, I think most of us meet it with some skepticism. Yeah, some mixture of fear and excitement. But I don't think anybody's talking about the potential to enhance the human aspect of people. I think we're all, or I am at least looking at it sometimes as a way of sort of almost taking things away from us, taking away the opportunity to think or to master skills, and they're not really being a replacement for those activities. Right.
[00:35:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:27] Speaker D: And if you, if you're looking at it from as an additive rather than a subtractive, then I think that that can bring new potential to us.
I'm not sure what form that would take, but I, I think there's could be potential there.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: Absolutely. See, like, I, I like, you know, let's rewind history, think about history.
Let's think about civilizations. I come from a land where there's a lot of cultural heritage dates long back. It goes like, long, long back.
And there was like, you know, like, and this, I'm not talking and glorifying India and all that stuff. I don't want you guys to think that, but like, there was a notion of zero, there was a notion of mathematics, there was a notion of physics, there was a notion of astronomy, there was a notion of astrology.
Right. All of these existed. And over many generations it got lost. And then like in 18th century, people show up and start like, you know, basically figuring out that, like, sun does not, like, you know, rotate around Earth like it's the vice versa, right? And like, you know, math gets figured out, like, and like, you know, gravity gets figured out. And when you go read some scriptures, people are levitating. How the heck was that possible? How are they building temples which basically carried many boulders up the hill and they were able to construct a beautiful temple with architectural marvel in it.
Who actually taught them that?
And what was lost and why was it lost? And in the world of AI, this is the most, like, scary thing that actually bothers me. If you keep training AI, it would think baby peacock is basically the smaller version of the peacock, but we all know baby peacocks don't look like peacocks, by the way. And people will think that baby peacocks are small peacocks.
[00:37:30] Speaker D: Right?
[00:37:31] Speaker A: So we're going to lose the context and basically the intellectual property of what it is. And we're going to assume what you read and what you see is reality.
It is not reality. It is hallucination.
[00:37:45] Speaker D: Right.
[00:37:45] Speaker E: Well, and Richard read an article just the other day.
[00:37:48] Speaker D: I was just going to bring this.
[00:37:49] Speaker E: Up so about how this person was saying, well, you know, just accept hallucinations as part of life. You know, you're just going to have to live with them. And Richard and I are like, no, we don't think so. I mean, we're not going to have.
[00:38:03] Speaker A: To settle for anything that we don't have to settle for. It's free will.
[00:38:08] Speaker E: Right. And I think I was at a seminar and a few different people spoke about AI in different industries. And one thing that came out is AI does. I like that you say II doesn't have the compassion, but it also doesn't have the curiosity.
So AI is.
Yeah, it's not going to do basic, basic empirical, scientific research because it doesn't even know what it's trying to do. Right.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: Because all it did is like, learn the data from the world.
[00:38:36] Speaker D: Right.
[00:38:37] Speaker A: World is basically curated with good data and garbage.
[00:38:40] Speaker D: Right.
[00:38:41] Speaker A: And like you basically mixing the good with the garbage and you're, you know, eventually you're going to come up with all garbage and like, you know, let me give you one simple exercise for all the readers, like, and all the viewers on this, on this podcast, please go do this once.
So come up with a biased solution of something like, say, like, you know, like, I'm the greatest guy in the world and just give your resume.
And AI would say, like, give it to ChatGPT and it would say, yes, you're the greatest guy in the world. And here's why. There's a confirmation bias to that.
Now take the same resume and give it to Grok and say, just shred this, like, resume. And you would say, yeah, this is like the lousiest resume I can find in the world.
And then take it to another one and say, give me a moderate view of everything. Then it will say, like, here are all the strengths, here are all the weaknesses. What is it doing? It's confirming your biases.
Right? So models have been trained with a lot of bias in sight and with a lot of data that is like, you know, is available generally, not all general purpose data is. Right. Why do I say that? Sometimes you go to Google and see, like, if the, if a restaurant is open, it says it's open, but it's not really open.
[00:39:58] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Well, before the show, Elizabeth brought up the SAP, which is an ERP system that was, I don't know, first popularized probably back in the 80s, right.
And 90s.
But at the time, people thought that those ERP systems and IT just, it was a software that would organize operations for a company, right? So you would organize invoicing and inventory.
And the idea was to use software to essentially kind of micromanage different aspects of, of the company and it was thought that that that SAP ERP system would make things more profitable. Well, it's been years and those ERP systems have worked somewhat, but they're not perfect and they still require a lot of human intervention.
And I think the point that Elizabeth was going to make, if I can put words in your mouth dear, was that this is not so far away now from the artificial intelligence that there was a lot of optimism to begin with and it did do a lot of useful things.
But as things played out, it turned out not to be the perfect solution to everything.
And I'm kind of interested shaker on what you think about that.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So let me give you the real perspective.
So all of these plannings. Let me go back to the evolution of supply chains. I think the readers would really love to know how did supply chain even evolve and all these things.
And so there were really four like evolutions to supply chain as we know it today.
Right. The first one was the world of GMs and Fords and the Milkman. Two extremes, the GM and Ford was a vertically integrated supply chain in the sense they made their own parts, they made their own assembly, they made their own cars and basically they had their own distributors where you would get the car. So it was they managed the end to end process.
And then there were the milkmen who actually would milk and come and give you the bottle of milk at your door.
It was like do it yourself. So there was two extremes of the supply chain that existed and it was not even called one at that time. People called it with a different name.
And then the economy opened and people started to find where can I produce cheaper than what I'm doing and who are my consumers? So everything got separated in time and space.
So the producer happened to be in China and the raw material happened to be in Tanzania and basically the metal was supposed to come from Congo basin because they were all the cheapest sources. So the hunt for the cheapest source and how do I manage the pipeline of the flow of goods became the second evolution of supply chains. That's why when you see and talk to supply chain people from the 90s and the 2000s, all of these softwares that you're talking about, Richard and Elizabeth, they were all good in managing the procurement processes like how do I pay my bills and how do I plan the inventory? Right.
Okay. Then came the third evolution, which is Amazon Ification, which is I click a button and I get it. So stop going to the stores, get it to my house, stop buying a basket Give me like one item at a time. That's the world that Amazon created. So what used to be available in a thousand stores, you would go to a Walmart store, you would go to like the closest neighborhood store, you buy stuff and you come back home. So you are buying your own basket now. It had to go access 130 million households.
And then as Amazon became more and more popular, this was the third evolution.
So it became like it went from B2B businesses like, you know, business to business movement to business to consumer movement. Very different, 130 million households very different than going to a thousand doors.
Now everyone is trying to catch up on that journey.
That's where the future is going to go with supply chains.
And in that world, the consumer, you expect something to be coming to your door at a specific time.
So it's like a factory like thinking I want it at 8 o'. Clock. So it has to leave a certain depot by 6 o', clock, hence it needs to get there by like 5 o'. Clock. Hence someone needs to get it like from the other place on an eight hour journey prior to that. And hence the entire supply chain is stitched like a time based network.
So what happens in a world where so many people are involved? Nothing works exactly to the plan.
And if nothing works to the plan, what do you need? Not another planning system.
What you need is a better execution system which would adapt to these changes and the world has not built one.
So SAP, while a great planning system could not really figure out how to manage exceptions and hence the humans are always, always involved in that. So this journey of perfection is one of like evolution. It's a utopian goal. Perfection is utopia. You're never perfect and hence there's always going to be human in the loop.
[00:45:43] Speaker D: Yeah, well that's reassuring I think.
Perspective.
[00:45:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:48] Speaker E: And I think in terms of that, instead of worrying about AI taking your job, you have to make AI work for you right now. And so yeah, so I had a meetup last night and I'll talk about that a little later. And I put it through a software program and then I took it and I put it through ChatGPT and said do a summary email. The meetup was like an hour and a half long, two hours long, and it spit it out and it's like perfect.
It wasn't 100% perfect because nothing's perfect. But in the past it would have taken me like two or three hours.
[00:46:21] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I mean how can you, how can you, how can you resist a software that does that we have time for one more question or comment from Shaker. And we did mention at the top of the show that you had 150 patents.
As an intellectual property lawyer, of course, I'm enormously curious about this, but maybe for our listeners, you can tell us which One of those 150 patents is your favorite.
[00:46:48] Speaker A: Well, the one I'm building right now. Angelic intelligence.
Angelic intelligence is basically think of that as like a consciousness operating system. Like, how do you bring super consciousness into the process of decision making?
And like, how do you, like, what is the architecture of the digital angels? Like, you know, there are obviously 27 angels and then there are like seven, like, categories. It belongs and like, you know, it's very similar to the seven, like, energy points that you have in your body, the seven, like, planes of like, consciousness and so on and so forth. But there's a lot of like, like correlation to like, the world of consciousness, which is like, really like the best in you. It's not like seeking the outside. It's like, what is best in you and basically unleashing that.
So I have filed for what, like, you know, 40 patterns. This is like beyond 150 that I have. But this, this would be the most beautiful thing for me. And the reason why this is very beautiful for me is I talk to you about my father, I talk to you about my mother.
I want to talk to you about my son.
My son looks exactly like my father.
Okay. And when I held my son, I said to myself, I'm going to leave a lot of angels in your life. A lot of angels. Not a million, a billion.
Because that is going to be generational impact.
And for me, this is deeply personal because it is what I'm trying to do through this journey, both personal and professional. And like, you know, what I'm trying to build as a company is all tied together and it is to leave a better future for kids like my son.
We don't need to figure out how to go live on Mars.
We can just make Mother Earth look better.
[00:48:52] Speaker D: There you go.
[00:48:53] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:48:53] Speaker D: Well, it sounds like a very interesting patent and I'll be very curious about how it turns out. It sounds like it would be an amazing concept to protect, so. And speaking of intellectual property. Oh, Shaker, before we go, where can people find you if they want to contact your company and maybe get some information about AI and logistics?
[00:49:17] Speaker A: Not in a police station.
That's good.
That was easy.
So, yes, you know, they can, they can find me, they can Google me, they can LinkedIn me like you know, they can, you know, I'm pretty searchable and like you know, anyone who's interested remotely, not even connected to entrepreneurship and is just looking to someone to someone to talk to. I would be happy to pick up the call and talk to you guys, even if it's not business related.
[00:49:52] Speaker E: Is it your full name? Should I spell your name or would you like to spell your name?
[00:49:56] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like Shaker S H E K A R like but it's like it's not. It's like salt and pepper shaker. But S H E K A R is how it's fanatically like written and Natarajan N A T as in Thomas R as in Robert A Jack J A N Now you could probably see because every time I had to speak my name to a guy like sitting somewhere on a customer service call, I had to just like spell every letter.
S Smith Hey J Edward K A.
[00:50:32] Speaker D: Apple R Robert well, thank you for that very generous offer to our audience to reach out to you and share, share your wisdom and engage in some interesting discussion. Speaking of intellectual property, it's time for intellectual property news and today we're going to be talking about intellectual property and artificial intelligence, two of our favorite topics.
[00:50:57] Speaker E: And, and Mark Cuban has just become our best friend.
[00:51:01] Speaker D: So tell us about it.
[00:51:03] Speaker E: So Mark Cuban has been speaking about this and what he thinks is that AIP intellectual property is going to be king in an AI world.
He thinks people are going to be hoarding their intellectual property and buying up the best talent and locking it up behind intellectual property.
[00:51:25] Speaker D: So there's two pieces there. One is the talent piece and the other piece is the intellectual property piece.
And sometimes when people talk about intellectual property, maybe from more of a business standpoint, they're not necessarily talking about the patents, trademarks and copyrights, but they're talking about the intellectual capital that the organization has. Right? So this is the, the knowledge that's within the organization. And if you've been following the news lately, I guess Meta has been trying to hire away people from other AI companies.
In the article here, it mentions Scale AI's CEO Alexander Wang offering them $100 million signing bonus to jump ship and just gives you a sense of the value that people are placing on the talent and the knowledge that these pioneers have. So I'd like to turn it over to our panel.
Noel, you've been listening patiently. I know you're very involved in the AI space. What do you, what do you think about this trend? Do you think Mark Cuban is right, or do you think he's a little off base?
[00:52:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's, it's fascinating.
You know, I'm in the software as a service space. And so a lot of what we talk about is moats.
So, you know, how are you protecting your business? What's your he differentiator? What's your value proposition? And so on one hand, I think that piece around scale AI, you know, maybe kind of a way to get around some of the M and a regulation of, you know, hey, we can't see too much consolidation. So now we're seeing it at the individual talent level instead of acquiring entire companies. So, like, that I think is probably part of that move, but, you know, set in another way.
I think there's pieces of that that are very spot on. And Mark is a very savvy investor and has done very well with a lot of the bets that he's made.
I said I think about it in terms of Moats. Bradfield, who started techstars, says another quote that I think about all the time that says in the gold rush, you don't necessarily want the gold, you want the shovel. So thinking about, like, the infrastructure of how are you owning the stickiness of the infrastructure around this movement? And so that's a lot of what I think about is not necessarily, you know, we haven't gone through processes on filing patents, but thinking about how do you create stickiness in your, in your product that's really hard to replicate.
So, yes, I think, you know, there's pieces around this on, you know, what's your moat? What's something that somebody can't come in and replicate right away.
Part of that, I think, is also just the real application.
You know, we're talking about. OpenAI is a very different company than a company like Illuminous. With Illuminas, we're leveraging AI to solve a very real business problem. And so I think those that really understand the industry challenges and know how to solve those with these tools, I think that that in a way like your real understanding of the problem is a differentiator where, you know, somebody's not going to vibe code your way out of that in the same way as you just really understanding the problem you're solving. Another thing that I. Oh, go ahead, Richard. I was just gonna build on that.
[00:54:56] Speaker D: No, go ahead.
[00:54:58] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I think that, yes, we're talking about intellectual property on the technology side. We're talking about talent that's building solutions and, you know, the mobility There, yes, you may have some challenges of, like, some of the things that you figured out leaking around. But another thing that I've been thinking a lot about and having a lot of these conversations around lately is that I think in this new age with AI and automation, that trust is also a real currency. That's not necessarily reflected in that statement, as in there's going to be a lot more information, there's going to be a lot more quantity of information. But I think folks really trusting on quality information is going to be important. So those relationships, those referrals, I think that people are going to double down on those things because you're going to realize I can't, I can't trust a product demo with a company that's saying that all of these things are ready when they're probably not ready in the market quite yet. I want to talk with somebody who is actually using the product to tell me, is this thing good? Do you like working with them? I think that that level of trust is going to be really important.
So with that.
Oh, go ahead.
[00:56:19] Speaker D: No, I was just going to amplify that a little bit because I do think that, you know, AI agents can be a real challenge and if they get it right. Wrong. I'm sorry. You know, the article we were talking about yesterday earlier in the program mentioned hallucinations as a feature as opposed to a bug.
Right. And so if you're using an AI agent to book a hotel in California and the hotel doesn't exist, that makes the AI agent pretty useless. Right. If it hallucinates a hotel or something else. And so I think the realness is super important there.
And, and it's really to your, to your point. So.
[00:57:03] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah.
[00:57:04] Speaker D: Kurt, what are your thoughts about all of this stuff?
[00:57:08] Speaker C: You know, I, I think Elizabeth Noel made some really good points there with respect to MOAT and, and our business plan and how we propose to engage our markets. I think it's important to note that, at least my observation, AI fits really well in certain places, and I think it doesn't fit so well in other places.
And I think it's still pretty new. I think there's definitely some reluctance probably from the demographic of age to engage with AI.
One of our fundamental core values at MOAT is to have people that can talk to our clients and our customers and not put them through the 1-800-number thing and not put them through a chat robot as their primary contact.
But that's, that's, I think that's unique to Moat and what, what our products and services are and who our target customers are, that they're more elderly.
And, you know, I'm not that young anymore. And when I think about not too long ago, I came to the conclusion, you know, we just don't need satellite TV anymore.
We don't watch that much tv.
But I need, I guess I need to switch to something else and I need to cancel what I've got. It probably took an hour to get through all of the rigamarole to get my satellite TV provider to just quit. Just, just let me go.
And I think that in my experience, customers don't want to do that. They don't want to fight for what they're trying to accomplish, and they don't want to start with engaging a chat robot on the Internet.
So again, my take is AI has got some unbelievable applications. When I think of an emergency room in a small rural town, suddenly someone's in there and they're injured. And is there an applicability for AI to help a diagnosis in a life or death situation?
I think there is.
And it, Richard, you're an attorney. Not too long ago, when you wanted to do research, you go to the bookcase behind you with literally hundreds of books and start combing through them, trying to find applicable case law.
Is there a better, easier way to get to the right answer quickly there? AI certainly would seem like it fits there.
[00:59:38] Speaker D: I would say only in the short term.
In the long term, I spent a lot of time looking through those books and I learned a lot of information that was not necessarily related to the topic that I was researching, but that came back to benefit me years later. So I guess the jury's still out, if you'll pardon the legal pun. But about whether or not, you know, it's, it's as beneficial as, as we think it is. And I just wanted to go back to Noel. I had one question before we had to move on, but I'm coming back to it. Would you consider hiring talent from another organization in the same way Mark Cuban is, you know, talking about how the AI companies are trying to secure top talent? Would you consider that as a strategy, or do you think you're better off just sort of, you know, building from the ground up?
[01:00:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I, it's not, I think it's what we hire for is very much mindset, very much behaviors. I would not necessarily say our strategy is to go and hire somebody from another company and to think that they're going to bring that type of information to us. You know, I don't, I don't I don't agree with that strategy, but I also don't believe that there are other companies that are building a solution and understand the problem that we're solving in the same way. And so that's not necessarily.
Yeah, that's not necessarily the strategy.
One thing I just to bring to life because I know that, you know, these listeners probably like stories quite a bit. But it was interesting with Kurt saying, you know, there's some places where AI does need to exist and there's other places where it doesn't need to exist. You know, we work with HR leaders and when you think about the core, you know, there's lots of different responsibilities, but the core things being around, you know, hiring people and the core things being around paying people. And I think that I've even just in a short amount of time seen very real stories where because of AI and automation, because of those bugs that you all brought up, people were paid the wrong amount and, you know, actually on the bonuses side and they were overpaid. And then you think about the risk that that puts on a business of now. How do I go and recoup that? How do I deal with this on a trust and communications front? I had another case where, you know, we were actually implementing a new really interesting HR solution. And we had a referrals program at a previous employer and there was this new candidate to CRM system. So essentially like, how do you manage recruits?
And it would automate a lot of the communications.
And, you know, you think, hey, that's a really easy way to incorporate AI and automation. But, you know, that onboarding experience is key to somebody having a good beginning experience at a company. And I had a woman that I had referred, she'd gone through the entire interview process, had a job interview, had accepted an offer, and then got an automated note that she didn't get the job. And so this was just like such a faux pas. But just thinking about, you know, hey, it's one thing when I go into chat and I'm, you know, I'm, I'm typing in and I get a weird answer. And I had that happen just now with like a bio that I was sending to something else. You know, we can kind of get over those kinds of things. But these very real administrative things that can be some of the easy, easiest things to automate, they're very real implications when you hear about those things also going wrong.
[01:03:34] Speaker D: Yeah. Okay. So Shaker, your thoughts on Mark Cuban's comments about talent and artificial and Mark Cuban's comments about talents and ip.
[01:03:48] Speaker A: Well, I think I, I agree half of the story and the other half, I don't.
Intellectual property cuts two ways, right? When you're. So there is something called trade secret and then there's something called intellectual property, it's different.
Okay? So trade secret is what you really want to do. And like, you don't want the rest of the world to know that because that's your trade secret.
That's the trade you're in.
[01:04:18] Speaker D: Okay.
[01:04:18] Speaker A: And intellectual property is something that gives you an exclusive right to use that for a period of time and then it becomes public.
Okay? So when people talk about intellectual property and protecting intellectual property, well, in essence there's no protection after a period of time.
Like, what we're really talking about is trade secret that is not really like, you know, is published anywhere. So patents like, are excluded from that kind of thought process.
So the. But where it comes to talent. And I agree with Noel and I agree with like Kurt on this topic, it is not really like pay $100 million. And like, you know, some of that I don't think is even accurately depicted because some of it is just like media, you know, getting created because the next guy who get poached out of ChatGPT, you know, they don't want them to have an offer they feel is not $100 million, so they shouldn't walk away.
Like, it's kind of like creating a defense mechanism. That's why it was actually planted in the media in the first place. Okay, so there's like even, like, I don't even agree with like 100 million packages being sent out and doled out. Like, you know, that needs to be verified and checked. But what I would definitely say is look on the heart and look for the intentionality on your team.
That's more important if you can simply buy people for money.
They're only designed to be attracted to money. So the next guy who's going to give them more money, they're just going to go there. So what is your mode, your moat is the problem you're trying to solve the mission you're on. And do the people like, does the team believe in what you're trying to do? And hence they're solely committed. I'll give you the example of my team.
My CTO used to make 10 times more than what she's making. And she has a four and a half year old kid and she, she lives in California in the Bay Area, paying like a mortgage, but wants to do this. And she left a faang company. Why because the love for the work outweighs the love for the money.
And when you do it right with good intentionality, obviously wealth follows. Obviously legacy creation follows. Obviously mission is accomplished.
And that is what I would look for in people.
[01:06:55] Speaker D: So just to amplify what you just said, people here. This is Benjamin Mann, who is the co founder of Anthropic. He said people here are so mission oriented.
He says his team turned down those mega offers because they believe more in the mission than the money.
So, you know, after several millions of dollars, you know, how much more do you need?
And the mission maybe becomes more important. Right? Yeah.
[01:07:28] Speaker A: So I will tell you this. And this is like the. The fact. And everyone knows I'm probably, like, relating the obvious to you guys.
When my father died, we just cremated him. He did not take anything with him, but what he left was goodwill. Right? And so, like, I'm not saying that. Don't chase money or wealth and all those things. You know, we all need money to, like, live a basic life and, and have, like, the security for our kids and family and generations beyond and all that stuff. I'm not like, I'm not asking you guys not to pursue that, but that should not be the only pursuit in life.
Right. The pursuit in life is basically like leading a life that has purpose and intentionality, and every human being in this world is capable of that because God has gifted you guys with that power.
Unleash that power.
[01:08:24] Speaker E: I agree.
I mean, one thing I wanted to say, at Anthropic, they say they're affecting the future of humanity, whereas people at Maida just want to make money.
And so that's really what those people are so driven to do, I guess. And what is your future of humanity look like? You could ask anybody, and I get a million different answers, but it's kind of scary, I'm sure.
[01:08:48] Speaker D: I want the future of humanity to look like Facebook, you know, but exactly.
[01:08:53] Speaker A: Like, you know, it should not be like, you know, one of those giants, like, you know, they're all like, they're all mechanized to where, like to place that. If they even come out and say we care, people should be really skeptical about it. Yeah, I would be.
[01:09:10] Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's. That's a, That's a wonderful discussion. And I think we really are getting to the root of, of some aspects of artificial intelligence and motivations and talking about the importance of intentions. I think those are all things that are important and we should keep in mind.
And I would also like to add, if you have an idea or invention that you want to protect, contact us at Gerhart Law. We work with entrepreneurs worldwide to help them through the entire process of obtaining patents, trademarks and copyrights.
And you can visit our websites, learn more about Patents.com or learn more about Trademarks.com for a free consultation. Or you can download your free Entrepreneur's guide to patents or trademarks. So we have to take a commercial break now. We have Secrets of the entrepreneurial mind coming up soon. So stay tuned.
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[01:12:02] Speaker F: Passage to Profit continues with Richard and El Elizabeth Gearhart.
[01:12:07] Speaker D: We're a nationally syndicated radio show heard in 38 markets across the U.S. we'd like to do a shout out to our affiliate WARK in Washington D.C. in Hagerstown, Maryland. Also, our podcast is ranked in the global top 3% of podcasts. And we've also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. So subscribe to the Passage to Profit show on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and also on the I Art app. So now it's time for Elizabeth's Spotlight.
[01:12:40] Speaker E: So this is where I talk about my activities, apart from marketing for Gearhart Law. And of course, I have the podcast studio. As I had said earlier, I have a few clients and a lot more work to do to get more clients, but we're working on it. And I also have a meetup group, it's called podcast and YouTube creators community that I started with Stacy Sherman. Now Sonia Satra, my coach, is helping me with that. And I just, I find today's conversation incredibly interesting in light of what we talked about last night at the meetup. Sonia is a motivational coach and she's just an overall wonderful person, but she has, well, she gave a handout out and she has kind of this mission to help people find their why.
And it was very much what Shocker Shaker was talking about. Sorry, as why do you want to do anything you want to do with your life? And so she just, she has a series of questions and she led people through it, like, why, why, why? Like.
And you finally get down and she gave example of how she did it for herself. And you finally get down to, well, this is what I want to do with my life. This is what I feel my life's purposes. That's why I'm doing all this other stuff. So I feel like AI is, is making us examine our humanity much more than we ever did before. It's really pretty interesting. We're having another meetup and it's about AI. So we have somebody who's really into podcasting and the AI effect, and he's going to talk about the new ChatGPT and he talks about AI and humanity in general. His name's Rob Greenlee. Then we're going to have Stacy Sherman who does customer experience. And it's different than customer service. It's the customer experience. And we're going to be talking about what people think about content. Do they like the AI generated content better for podcasts or do they like human podcasts? Be really interesting.
And then we're also going to have one of our attorneys, David Pustolski, there to talk about the intellectual property concerns, especially copyright. So copyright and AI and podcasting and creatives is just this huge, tangled up mess right now.
He's not going to be able to straighten it out in an hour, I'll tell you that. But that's our next one. And I'm, I'm really enjoying this meetup because we're getting really interesting people to come and present and we're talking about interesting topics and AI, everything Richard and I do now, it seems like any, every presentation we go to, every show we do here, every meetup, AI comes into it one way or another. It's, it's here to stay. But anyway, yeah, let's. Are you, do you have a comment or you want to go on to the medical minute?
[01:15:24] Speaker D: Well, I was just going to say Rob Greenlee is predicting that Google is going to be gone by the end of the year. It's going to be replaced by Gemini.
[01:15:35] Speaker E: Well, Google Search will be replaced by Gemini Search. Yeah. And it's already starting to do that.
It's already, when you type in something on Google is coming up with the Gemini answer.
Yeah, we'll see if he's right.
[01:15:49] Speaker D: But World keeps changing, so follows us closely. What about the medical minute?
[01:15:54] Speaker E: Oh, well, this is an AI medical minute. I think it was Kurt. He, it would have been a great lead into this. It still is. When he was talking about how AI can find medical issues, that it's really hard for doctors to find other ways. But, but this guy was in a motorcycle accident and he broke his ankle, but he didn't know it at first. He just went home, you know, one of these tough guys. I got it home for a couple days and then it was really hurting and he looked like he had a cut that was getting infected. So he went to the doctor and they're like, oh, man, you know, you broke your ankle in three places. I don't know how he lasted two days like that, but there you go. And they cleaned up his wound and everything and they gave him antibiotics.
[01:16:35] Speaker A: Legs.
[01:16:36] Speaker E: I sent him home goes, next day, his hand starts trembling. I'm doing it on the YouTube video, if you can see it. His hand starts trembling. So he goes back and they're like, well, we're not really sure what would cause your hand to tremble. But we have this AI assistant we call Kate. So we're going to take your whole health history. Like you have diabetes, you have this, you have that. We're going to put everything into Kate and we're going to ask Kate if she can Figure out what's going on.
So it turned out that he was getting sepsis.
And sepsis is hard to determine at first. So it's an infection that just goes through your whole body and eventually kills you. And it's hard to control and if you let it go, it can be really bad. So ended up that they did have to cut off his leg, part of his leg, because of the infection and the sepsis. But he didn't die. And without this AI intervention, they think he probably would have lost his life instead of just part of his leg.
[01:17:37] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, so that's really to Kurt's point. I mean, and that technology is available anywhere, right? I mean, it's just a matter of having an Internet connection and a computer that can handle it.
[01:17:47] Speaker E: Yeah, I don't think this was a big hospital anywhere. I think it was a small hospital out in the, you know, some rural area or something.
[01:17:54] Speaker D: Yeah, so I mean, it's pluses and minuses. I mean, you know, there's a lot of benefit. You know, on the other hand, you know, what if it was hallucinating, you know, and I guess, you know, I'm pretty sure that they would not have cut off his leg without doing, you know, further investigation and diagnosis. Right. So once they caught the sepsis, then they were able to, to prescribe a diagnostic. But what if it came up with the wrong diagnostic?
[01:18:22] Speaker E: I think they would catch it. That's why you always have to have a human involved. But doctors make mistakes all the time now. I mean. Yeah, that's true, but anyway, so with that I would like to go on to our next presenter. So Noelle London is our next presenter. You've heard her speak a little bit. She is the founder and CEO of Illuminas.
So she makes HR services systems talk to each other. So you can really figure out what's going on with your hr. So tell us all about it, please.
[01:18:50] Speaker B: With Illuminas, what we have built is the first employee data platform that is Both powered by AI and built by a community of over 300 HR leaders.
Essentially what we do is we help organizations transform their data that is scattered across many different systems.
We help them to transform that data into actionable insights on what's happening across their employee journey. So especially as we think about AI and automation and what that means for how we have to move skills and employees through organizations, that's a lot of what we do is through our software platform, we support mid market companies to understand, you know, organizational health and what's happening, but then also helping to plan for the future of their workforces.
[01:19:46] Speaker D: I, I think that's great because HR is critical to the functioning of any company, the effective functioning of any company.
And in my past experience when I worked for large companies, I was not always impressed with the level of organization within the HR function. And so to me, it seems like this is really great idea. How would the system benefit employees?
[01:20:11] Speaker B: Yeah, so when you think about it, most organizations are spending, and it really varies between industries, but employees typically are going to be the largest expense that an organization is going to have. So, you know, in retail, that may be around 50% of their annual operating budget is actually going to their people.
But typically because they're operating off of a lot of different systems to manage their employees, that data is going to live into different places. And so they don't necessarily have a good view on what's happening across that organization.
What we tend to see is, you know, for example, we can just go into retail, because I mentioned retail just now with, you know, retail customers that we've worked with, you know, sometimes they're seeing that employees are leaving.
70% of them may be leaving every 90 days.
What that ends up translating to is for the business, they're losing over a hundred million dollars in cost every single year to folks that are leaving. So when you ask, you know, what does that do for an employee? What we do is we allow an organization to understand why people are leaving and why they're employees are leaving. So by us highlighting those things, what that's allowing them to do is to be more proactive on how to manage their people, to listen. And that also ends up translating to helping them to bring down their expenses year over year, I would say, you know, what that could look like, for example, is, you know, within a retail environment, you know, probably 80% of your employees are going to be frontline workers.
We found that the number one reason when we were bringing the data together that folks were leaving as quickly as that they were is because they weren't getting scheduled for enough hours.
So, hey, if I'm not getting scheduled for enough hours in the store, I'm going to go and find another job because I've got to pay my bills.
What we also found is that there were systematic issues on why people weren't getting more hours.
So, for example, if you are working in a retail environment where you need to be trained to cut fabric or you need to be able to use a meat slicer, those are things that sometimes require trainings and certifications. So by us being able to say, is there a high performer that's within the stores that's not getting as many hours as we want them to get, they're at risk for leaving. We can go and proactively certify those individuals in new roles and so they're able to get more hours on, on the job. So that type of holistic thinking of data that lives in different places, how do we think proactively to approach our employees to both improve their experience so that there are good ones aren't walking out the door, but also to overall support the business and the ROI of those spends.
So that's, I think a lot of how we see that all come together today.
[01:23:22] Speaker E: So if HR data were a novel, okay, this is a little bit odd question, but let's go there anyway. What would be the plot twist most leaders never see coming?
[01:23:34] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting that you say that, because if HR were a novel, what I would say is that we become the encyclopedia as a luminous of bringing the different pieces of information together so that you can actually make use of what, what's happening.
I would say, you know, every organization is unique.
But, and, and, and I would also say, you know, Richard, I know you were saying early on, you know, you weren't necessarily impressed with the HR organization where you were previously. What I'd say is that the role of HR has completely changed. It's also completely changed in the last five or so years of.
You know, oftentimes when you look at an HR function, you know, we would have thought pay, we would have thought let's hire people. I think now because we've watched that organizations have had to adapt so much in the last five years to their workforces, Work from home, vaccine requirements, inclusion, healthcare, changing all kinds of things. Every single time, frankly, that you open a newspaper now, every headline is probably something that an HR leader is thinking about. Oh, what does that mean for my people? And what do I need to think about it? So all of these things that, you know, a marketer gets to do, marketing, a finance person looks at the books, a lot of the things that are hard to measure have been put on an HR leader's plate. So especially as you start thinking like huge societal changes, huge technology changes with AI and automation, HR is oftentimes right now being asked to play a really important role in figuring that out.
[01:25:20] Speaker E: So what kind of role is HR being asked to play when it comes to people's social media? Because you see things in the news all the time. This guy got fired because he posted on social Media or he reposted something and got fired for it and then somebody else can do it and they don't get fired. How does HR handle that?
[01:25:38] Speaker B: I would say that is probably one of very many different things that HR has on their day to day a plate.
So, you know, I would say, like, to the point of that, I think that that comes down to values and behaviors being very clear about what that looks like and understanding how you all respond as a leadership team to those types of scenarios.
What I would say is also, you know, hey, Elizabeth, today it may be social media is the thing that, that people are thinking about. Tomorrow it's going to be something else. And so I think that's kind of the key when you say what's the story, what's the novel?
It's almost like we're reading a novel where the plot is constantly changing and you're just trying to keep up. And so that's kind of the key that we're seeing is, you know, a year ago we were talking about, you know, there's always a great resignation, a great stay, a quiet quitting, you know, coffee clock in. There's always like, there's kind of a theme du jour for hr. But the key that they have to be able to navigate through is how do they have the data that's telling them the story of what's happening over time and how do they take the data that typically that novel would have been looking historically at, you know, what happened last year. From a compliance standpoint, I've got to report out on what happened with my people.
Now what we need that data to do in this novel is help them to predict the future of. We don't know what talent needs that we have in a year, but we have to understand how we look at skill sets and what we start hiring for so that I'm actually prepared for the future of my organization.
[01:27:28] Speaker D: So how much of a company's culture is or should be attributed to the work of the HR department versus the management and the leadership of the company? How do those two interact?
[01:27:43] Speaker B: Yeah, HR does not own culture. And that's kind of this. It doesn't sit in a silo. Organizations that think HR owns culture, it's got to start at the top. Who builds your culture is your CEO, your founder, your executive team.
And you've got to have alignment at that table and at that team. I think that what HR does is HR is a reminder. When you're sitting at an ELT table and you're making a big strategic decision hey, let's acquire a company. Hey, let's go off, open a new office in XYZ Country.
You're always making those kinds of decisions. What HR is doing is saying, is making sure that you're asking the question of how does this impact our people? What do we need to do to hold onto our best talent when we're making these kinds of decisions. But I absolutely believe HR doesn't own culture. They're there to create accountability for culture. They're there to facilitate conversations that are, you know, how is culture being translated through the organization? But it's got to come from the top down because everybody's watching. What is that, that CEO doing? How's that CEO responding? HR is there to make sure that that's being translated throughout the organization.
[01:29:06] Speaker E: Well, I don't know if you have the answer to this question because I know you're not like in the HR departments at these companies. But before COVID people could gather around and say really stupid things to each other and then somebody would get mad and tell hr.
[01:29:21] Speaker D: And then we still say stupid things to each other.
[01:29:24] Speaker E: When everybody went on Zoom, it was a little harder because you weren't really one on one with somebody at the water cooler saying, you know, you really look like crap today. Did you go get drunk last night or something, you know, and really insulting the heck out of them.
It was harder to do when people weren't physically together. Did you notice any differences in terms of people filing like harassment suits or any of that during COVID versus in person?
[01:29:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:29:50] Speaker B: So I'll be honest, you know, we're not in the employee relations side of the house.
I again think, you know, in the past we might have thought about HR around and HR wears so many different hats as we've talked about. We might have thought of like, who's getting their paycheck, who's hiring somebody and who's getting, who's complaining about somebody and getting somebody fired. Like, those may have been kind of the buckets we would have thought of before.
You know, our focus at Illuminas is we do a lot around organizational health and organizational design. So typically we're not necessarily touching employee relations claims. That's not really our area. Where we focus is we'll bring together system of record data. So like your work days. I know you all mentioned SAP before. So like SAP, SuccessFactors will bring together recruiting data, engagement data, performance data, and pay data. So what we're essentially trying to understand is what is somebody's experience when they're at the organization what is their employee journey? We bring that critical HR tech stack together to help somebody understand, you know, was Noelle a high performer or a low performer? And she didn't get promoted in this amount of time. How's her salary changing over time? Can I actually understand what is the archetype of a high performer look like at my organization?
What is that journey? What is that career path? The same way we would think about, like, marketing type analytics. What we're doing is saying, hey, what's the archetype of a high performer? How do we learn what that looks like through data that's living in different places? And then how do we take that and communicate that of, hey, Noelle, you want to grow within this organization? This is your path to do that.
[01:31:38] Speaker D: Shaker, do you have any, any questions or comments for Noel?
[01:31:42] Speaker A: Noel is probably one of the most articulate people that I've ever heard talk about this topic in a way that is so commonsensical because, you know, people always think HR equal to culture. But culture is a living organism that evolves as, as people get added into the organization.
That is why you're always constantly morphing the culture. Like, you know, so.
And they are actually accountable for it. And what I, what I, what I believe is going to be true in the future is one of the things to really watch out for, and this happened during the COVID times is when people get separated in time and space, which is what Covid did.
You begin to lose the human connection which makes companies.
And in the world of AI, where machines are going to begin to make decisions on your behalf and guide you in the process, you're going to have a similar thing come to life.
And how do you protect yourself?
So that, I think, is going to be the moral dilemma go forward. And I think, like, you know, one of the things I would love for Noel to also start thinking about is how do you retain that, the cultural integrity, the community aspect of the businesses, the values that actually companies aspire for? How do you set the temperature of what those values are? Because a lot of these companies have like, values on, on the board and in the boardrooms and like in the hallways, but they never live them. You know, so they never, you know, we want, we, we actually stand by employees. But like, sorry, like, you know, we're just letting go, like 10,000 people.
You know, we want to be, like, we want to be environmentally conscious. But sorry, like, you know, we're going to start like, making things which are not good for environment, like, okay, just pick your poison to stand against and I think like that the ability to not only hold people accountable in what I was what I would call the physical world now has to translate it into the digital realm.
Because AI doesn't have heart, it has mind.
And we all work with heart because the mind rationalizes our decisions rather Right. So that's that. I think that would be the kind of the, the unlock for the future. How do you retain that? And I think like, you know, what she's doing is amazing because I, like I've lived all these large companies. The problem is spot on. What she's going after is like, you know, really needed, you know, retaining the values of the company and all those things would be super critical in ingredient for her journey as well, I feel.
[01:34:53] Speaker D: Absolutely.
So Noel, have you ever like delivered like bad news to a client or given them data that made them uncomfortable or an insight that that kind of disappointed them? How did you deal with that? And maybe you could give us a little, a little teaser about a situation like that.
[01:35:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I, I think it's, it's part, yeah, that's part of what we have to do. And to Shaker's point, I mean, for example, you know, you're talking about like how do we have these values and then lay people off. We're not saying you're never going to lay anybody off. Like it's a tough, tough environment, it's a tough economy.
You know, companies are having to contract, you're going to have to do these things. But the way that you do them and the way that you execute them is super important because it's also, you know, that's your employer value proposition, that's your reputation, that's your brand and the market where if somebody had a, you know, sometimes you have to let people go, but you can do it in a way that's compassionate and supportive them as they're thinking about their next role.
So you know, we're not saying, you know, everything should be fluffy and you know, we know you've got to run a business. You're trying to create a high performing team. What's the best way to help you to do that?
Yes, we've had to deliver hard feedback to our customers. Our platform is delivering that hard feedback to our customers.
Sometimes people do want to see it, sometimes people don't want to see it. But you know, integrity and you know, what we set out to do was to show people the data that they may have had anecdotes for and they may have been operating on anecdotes. Instead of data. And so we're going to show what we're seeing within their system. So. But I also think, you know, in terms of delivering hard news, I don't know one HR leader on the market or in the market that doesn't get bad news to them most days at this point.
So I also know. So we're working with a very resilient bunch.
[01:37:10] Speaker D: Well, that's, that's good to hear. And I couldn't agree more with how a company handles a. Downsizing is very important, is not only just for the people who are leaving, but the people who remain right and understanding. That says a lot to your. To the people who stay behind.
Yeah.
[01:37:35] Speaker C: So.
[01:37:35] Speaker D: Yeah.
So how can people get in touch with you, Noel, and learn more about your company?
[01:37:43] Speaker B: Yeah. So check out. We're oftentimes posting what we're seeing in the market. Best practices on how HR leaders are adopting AI on our LinkedIn page.
Maybe you can put a link to us in the show notes.
I joke sometimes that I need to have a spelling bee for people that can actually spell the name of our company.
But it's going to be I L L O O M I N U S dot com.
So you can subscribe to our newsletter if you're interested in, you know, how we're incorporating AI into HR practices.
You know, we do have a community for HR leaders. If, you know, you've got a friend in hr, they probably need help and so check in on them, make sure they're doing okay. But also if you want to, you know, share our community of resources with them because we're oftentimes bringing folks together. Everybody's trying to figure this out right now.
No one's doing it perfectly quite yet. So the more that we can bring people together to share those best practices and support each other.
That's best. So, yeah, check out our website. Check out LinkedIn. We'd love to chat with you.
[01:38:53] Speaker E: Great. Thank you.
[01:38:54] Speaker D: Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gerhardt.
[01:38:57] Speaker E: And now we were on to Kurt, who has been waiting here patiently. Kurt Moore is building a moat around your home Title. So think of your home as a castle. Every person's home is their castle and there's a moat around it so nobody can come and steal your home.
So his company, Moat Title Security, uses legal innovations to freeze out fraud before it starts. This sounds pretty cool because I've always had title problems. Anytime we've done real estate, there seems to have been some weird title thing. So tell us. Hi, Kurt. Tell us how you operate and what you do?
[01:39:31] Speaker C: Sure. Well, thanks again for having me. I really appreciate it.
What moat title security does and how it's designed is to use legal documents that we've built and copyrighted to place those in the public records to protect people from title fraud and from squatters. So we've built a, what we call a notice of title freeze, which essentially works like a credit freeze, if you're familiar with that.
It essentially will say, hey, look, my name is Kurt Moore. I own this property. I don't have any intent of selling it or putting a mortgage on it or really doing anything to affect the title. So I'm just going to freeze my title and I'm going to place that notice of title freeze in the public records and let the public know that that's my intent for my property going forward.
If I want to transact, such as sell my property or take out a new mortgage or a second mortgage, I'm going to need to release this title freeze to allow that to happen. And if I don't do that, something gets recorded that happened against my will and that is to be presumed fraudulent.
So the intent of a notice of title freeze is. Is twofold. One, it would deter a potential attack. If you think of someone considering attacking my personal property, they're going to research the public records and learn what they need to know to prepare that attack.
And they're more than likely, if they're good at what they're doing when they're researching, they're going to bump into that notice of title freeze and they're going to say, now what's that? It kind of seems like this guy's paired and defensive of exactly what I'm trying to do.
Probably they're going to move off and go attack somebody else. So the first line of defense is deterrent.
If they do make an attack, Our document is designed to provide valuable evidence to the courts of law to say, hey, look, exactly what I just said. I had no intent to sell my property. I had no intent to place a mortgage on my property. There's very clear instructions in that notice of title freeze for how those things could happen, and they didn't happen. And I'm claiming that this recording, this conveyance is fraudulent. And it lines up with exactly what I've trying to prevent when I froze my title.
[01:41:46] Speaker D: So, Kurt, let me ask you just to. Just to interrupt here for a second.
[01:41:50] Speaker A: Sure.
[01:41:50] Speaker D: Is title fraud an issue? I mean, is this something that is prevalent? Can you give us some information about that?
[01:41:59] Speaker C: Sure, sure. That's a great question.
And it is, and it's becoming more prevalent. It's. It's an interesting question. I first had my first experience with title fraud. It tried to happen to my elderly mother all the way back in 2014. That's where I got this idea, back when I was in a different job in a different part of my career.
It is a thing, and it's unfortunate in this day and age that people would do things like this, but it is alive.
It's not particularly difficult, it's not particularly complicated, and it's not. Not particularly expensive to execute as a fraudster. So it is a thing.
And currently you could really do one of three things. You could do nothing and just say, I hope that doesn't happen to me.
And I think that's probably the vast majority property owners are probably in that place. The second is in the last five or 10 years, people have began to monitor their title. There's many services out there that will monitor your title, keep an eye on your title, largely using AI to see if something got recorded, and they'll give you an alert. You know, did you just intend to take out a mortgage on your property? And if they did, they'll say, yeah, that was me, or no, I don't know what that is. And it's a reactive notice that something may have happened that you need to be concerned about so you can take action.
Our view is proactive.
I think monitoring your title is better than doing nothing. But our view is. Is let's just freeze it up in the public records and let the public know that we have no intent to change our title without first releasing that notice of title freeze. So to answer your question, it is a thing, and it's becoming more and more prevalent.
If you have a chance to get to our website, we've got a news dropdown has many, many examples of how it's happening, where it's happening.
[01:43:51] Speaker E: Okay, Kurt, but I'm just dying to know, so what happened to your mother? Can you tell us that whole story?
[01:43:57] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. So. So my mother, she.
My father passed away probably 20 years, 25 years before my mom passed away. So she's living alone. She had some pretty difficult medical experiences, was in the hospital for quite some period of time, some. Some pretty dramatic surgeries and recoveries. And, And. And it. She's just getting older, she's getting more forgetful.
But we. We got her out of the hospital, got her into her home. Like most.
Like most people, they just want to go home, and she just really, really wanted to go home. So so we get her home, and one Saturday, I went to check on her, and I pulled up to her house, and there's some guy on the porch, and he's arguing with her on the porch. And I'm like, what is this clown doing? So I, you know, interceded, got him out of there. And mom's in tears, and, you know, she's like, well, this guy says, I'm selling my house to him. And I'm like, no, no, no, mom, you're not selling your house to this guy. And this guy was pretty offensive. Big, big guy.
And it was intimidating to me, let alone to my mom, but I got him out of there. And at the time, I was working in the energy industry with a ton of lean into public records, researching public records, filing documents in public records.
I passed the story along to our council at the company I was working with. He said, oh, yeah, that's. That happens. People try to take advantage of the elder. They try to get them to sign deeds, and sometimes they even just prepare a deed and they just file it on their own accord.
So to quickly get through that long story, I was working in the county where my mom's property was located. I just alerted the clerks at the office there. I said, if someone comes in here trying to record a deed, and I gave him my mom's name in this property address, let me know. And sure enough, the guy showed up a few days later and tried to present a false deed, a fraudulent deed, and record that. And they stopped it. So that's. Again, that's 2014.
So flash forward 11 years later. I believe the risk and the interactions of these types of things is only growing it.
Back in those days, you really had to go to a clerk and recorder's office and present things in person. Now you can do it online. It's just making it easier for everyone to try to take these actions.
[01:46:16] Speaker E: So what happened to the guy? Did they just let him go? They didn't try to.
[01:46:21] Speaker A: No.
[01:46:22] Speaker C: Again, big guy. And he stomped off. He grabbed the papers and stomped off. And so we diverted the attack, but there was really nothing we could do to try to.
[01:46:29] Speaker E: So he went and did it to somebody else.
[01:46:31] Speaker D: Yeah, but don't people have title insurance? Doesn't that cover the situation? I mean, it's like we spend a fortune.
[01:46:36] Speaker E: Yeah.
[01:46:36] Speaker D: For title insurance, you know, with the mortgage and all that.
[01:46:40] Speaker C: That's a great question. And. And you have to be careful what type of insurance you're getting. When you close on a property and you.
The. The title insurance, the Policy you get when you're closing on property is to protect the buyer from anything from the point of sale all the way back. So if, if there was something missed in the title review leading up to the closing, maybe they missed a relief lease, a mortgage, or they missed a lien or something, the buyer is insured against any claims that might come forward there. And that's going to fall into the title company's basket of cleanup.
But generally speaking, it's not common to insure against risk going forward. So from the point of taking possession of the property forward, that is not a very common place to place insurance. I believe it's available, it's just not very common.
But if you're going to rely on what I just described with my mom, her title policy when she purchased that property would have done nothing to cure this.
[01:47:40] Speaker D: Got it.
[01:47:41] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:47:42] Speaker D: So what do you do? I mean, how do people implement this process?
[01:47:46] Speaker C: So we try to make it as simple as possible.
If someone is interested in freezing their title, they can reach out to us, confirm that we're active and available in the state where they live. It's, it's a little bit of a slog to get our documents considered on a state by state basis. We're in that process of, of pushing it through to get into all 50 states. Currently we're in eight states and just kind of building and testing our systems and our, in our processes. But if someone's interested in freezing their title, they reach out on, online through the website. You can reach out, out to an agent, to the office and we'll walk you through how to, how to apply for a notice of title freeze or for our other document which speaks to preventing squatters. So it's, it's, we try to make that process pretty easy.
[01:48:36] Speaker E: So it's moat title security.
So do you have any success stories where somebody said, wow, somebody tried to steal my house and this stopped it?
[01:48:46] Speaker C: We haven't yet, but I will tell you, we've had, had cases where people have frozen their title and then they essentially just forget that they froze their title and they'll apply for a second mortgage and it'll get stopped. When the title company that is charged with closing their mortgage bumps into this notice of title freeze, they'll read it and they'll say, well, we can't close because you've frozen your title, so you're going to need to release your title freeze before we can go forward with the closing. So that's very reassuring to us that it lives where it matters in the public Records and it's serving the purpose that it's intended to do, which is stop things from moving forward.
But to answer your question, we've not had anyone have a full on title attack against a property that has a notice of title freeze yet. Hopefully we don't.
[01:49:42] Speaker E: Well, maybe they see the title freeze and walk on to the next one.
[01:49:45] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that's, that's again that I spoke to that a little earlier. Deterrence is our primary win. A secondary win is use it to fight back.
[01:49:54] Speaker D: Got it. Shaker, do you have any comments or questions for Kurt?
[01:49:58] Speaker A: I lived it. No, no, in the sense.
So I used to work for Walt Disney Co.
And so my wife actually spent all her energy trying to rebuild our house in Valencia, California.
Like, you know, it's like Santa Clarita area.
And so then we, like, then I had to move for my job like when I started with Walmart.
And so I came to the Bay Area and so we did not want to sell the house and we said like, you know, let's rent it out.
And like, so we had like one very good, like renter, never a problem, always on time, Greatest, like, very nice guy. And they did like, they kept the house like as though it was there. So very nice man. Okay. And then he ended up buying a house and like, you know, we brought in the next set of like, you know, renters. And then covet happens.
Okay. And then people like, you know, can just like make up things along the way, saying if I'm not like able to pay, you can basically just not pay before the payment. Okay. And so the tenant that I had would literally not pay the rent, but she would keep buying cars.
[01:51:23] Speaker D: That's not good.
[01:51:23] Speaker A: So this is like, this is like the ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my whole life. And then basically like, you know, we're trying to get her off, like we're trying to evict her and all that stuff. It goes on and on and on and on. And then like, luckily, like, you know, one of my friends said, like, you know, I know this amazing lawyer, Dennis Block, you know, he's based in, in la. And he said like, you know, he's, he's an eviction specialist. You should go talk to him. And so we went and talked to him and he was able to like, you know, get a notice, get her to evict. But boy, like, you know, that whole experience of like, you know, it was not so much that like someone encroached into your property when, you know that like my wife literally all the living daylights, trying to actually build the house she wanted to live in. Yeah, right. All the care she put in, all the, like, she picked out every little, like, small detail in the house and someone comes and squat.
[01:52:23] Speaker E: Jeez.
[01:52:24] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:52:25] Speaker A: The intention was to basically skirt the system.
[01:52:29] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:52:29] Speaker A: And while you want to, like, basically, like, think that the world is really, like, made of, like, good people, sometimes people's intentions are not well placed, and you always have to protect yourself against those eventualities.
[01:52:46] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So did you get them out? Did you?
[01:52:50] Speaker A: We got them out. Like, and, like, you know, like. So. So the. Obviously what they. The. The mistake. They did, like, you know, because we did not renew their lease and they did not pay us, essentially. They had, like, you know, they were served a notice of, like, you know, 30 days to, like, to leave the house. They just disregarded it, thinking that I could not. And then the cop showed up and then got them evicted it completely.
[01:53:14] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:53:15] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[01:53:15] Speaker E: Well, you were lucky, I guess, because.
[01:53:17] Speaker A: I'm, like, super lucky.
[01:53:18] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:53:18] Speaker E: I've heard lots of cases where they.
[01:53:20] Speaker D: Can'T do anything, but, you know, there's something fundamental about property houses, and people live in those. Right. So. Yeah, and it's. It's. It's a. It's a. So there's a lot of law around, though, you know, those situations and sounds to me like your title freeze is. Is a great idea.
[01:53:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a fantastic idea. And like, you know, and like, like, what are the odds that I would be on this podcast with you all?
Kurt talks about, like, title freeze, and I am the victim of title freeze.
[01:54:02] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:54:02] Speaker D: No, so the angels are working in a thing.
[01:54:05] Speaker A: The angels are also working for me.
[01:54:10] Speaker C: Yeah, it's interesting. I'll jump in here. Freezing your title is, we believe, the strongest, most proactive defense to someone attempting to harm the title to your house, steal the equity to your house, perhaps record a deed, and then try to quickly resell your house and get a bunch of earnest money deposits. There's any number of ways they can do that.
But the other product we offer is a notice of offer occupancy, and that speaks heavily to protecting what Shaker just described.
What that document does is says, hey, look, and my wife and I have some rental properties and we certainly use this. Look, I own this property. I'm worried about this type of fraud whether I occupy this property or not. There's just not going to be any tenant in this property, full stop. And if anyone is ever found to be in the property, they have no right to be there. Because I'm saying that's not my intent for this property. And I'm making that a public record.
And then we have what we call a little side ramp for that is if I do elect to have a tenant there, I will record a notice of property lease. It'll identify the one party that is allowed to be in that property as long as they live up to their property lease and the terms and conditions of that. But other than that, if anyone else ever shows up in the property, they're there illegally, They've trespassed, and they're unauthorized occupants of my property.
And speaking a little bit to what Sheikh her just went through, if someone shows up in your property and takes over, it's vacant property or a second home are good targets. If they just suddenly show up, your natural inclination is to call the authorities and say, hey, look, I own this property. Someone's in there. Get them out. You know, the.
The perpetrator is gonna. Is gonna spin that when a police officer shows up or sheriff's deputy, they're there to investigate crime.
And the perpetrator is going to spin that to, oh, no, no. Kurt said it would be fine if I live here, if I just do some handyman work. And he said we don't need a written lease. He says it's fine. Look, I got the keys, I got the garage door opener. Everything's good. They want to spin that quickly to a civil dispute between the two parties so the police can't take action.
So we. We believe our notice of occupancy will unravel that story quickly, because you can present that to the local authorities and say, look, you know, I was worried about this. It's happening. The only way that party could have been in there is if I would have recorded a notice of property lease. And guess what? There is not one of those recorded. So they're in there. I'm claiming they're in there as squatters.
Get them out.
It's a new product. We don't have any experience with someone using a notice of ownership occupancy and then having this happen. But we believe it's. It'll. It'll definitely benefit a property owner for having that in place in the event that they do encounter a squatter.
[01:57:02] Speaker E: Well, thank you.
[01:57:03] Speaker A: And it. It really depends on the.
The state as well. Like, you're actually operating this because it could be a pro renter and a pro owner, depending on the state.
[01:57:14] Speaker C: That's right.
[01:57:14] Speaker A: That case, like, you know, this is even more important a protection to have, have.
[01:57:19] Speaker C: That's right, that's right. You're exactly right, Shaker. Spot on. There are states that are very pro property owner and will lean into property owner rights and then there are states that are the opposite. They're more pro renters and they'll give renters, even renters that don't have good evidence that they're a legitimate renter, they'll give them a lot of leeway to stay there. And the problem is if someone does, and we've got any number of articles on our website, if someone does, does take over your property, number one, they're not going to be a good tenant, they're not going to take care of the place, they're not going to treat it nicely, they're going to tear it apart. So if it takes you three to six months to get them out, when they do get them out, your property is probably going to be very well damaged and you've got a lot of repairs to do to get it fixed up. So we believe this is a pretty cost effective way of A preventing it and B defending it if it does come against you, you.
[01:58:16] Speaker E: Oh, I agree because there have been lots of reports of this kind of stuff in the news. So again, this is Kurt Moore with Moat M O A T Title Security and thank you, Kurt. And people can find your website by typing in Moat Title Security. Is that right?
[01:58:32] Speaker C: That's right, that's right.
[01:58:33] Speaker E: Okay, great. You're listening to the Passage to Profit show with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. We'll be right back.
[01:58:38] Speaker F: I am a non attorney spokesperson representing a team of lawyers who help people that have been injured, injured or wronged. If you've been involved in a serious car, truck or motorcycle accident or injured at work, you have rights and you may be entitled to money for your suffering. Don't accept an offer you get from an insurance company until you talk to a lawyer. And we represent some of the best personal injury lawyers you can find. Tough lawyers that will fight to win your case and they're so good they stake their reputation, reputation on it by only getting paid if you win. So if you've been in a serious car, truck or motorcycle accident or hurt on the job, find out today for free what kind of compensation you may be entitled to. Call the legal helpline right now.
[01:59:23] Speaker G: 8004-9270-1480-0492-7014.
800, 4927014.
That's 800-492-7014.
[01:59:38] Speaker D: It's Passage to profit now it's time for Noah's retrospective.
[01:59:43] Speaker E: Noah Fleishman is our producer here at Passage to Profit, and he just has a way of putting his best memories in perspective.
[01:59:51] Speaker H: Got my keys. I've always kept them in my left pocket ever since I was a kid. That's the one thing that hasn't changed since then. We still use our keys to lock up and get into our homes. At least most of us in the cities do. Oh, I know all about those computerized home systems where it's all face and voice recognition. But if something in that computer goes the wrong way, heaven forbid you could be sleeping in the car for a couple of nights. That's if the car will let you back in. Keys are probably just as old as doors, and you don't have to reboot them. And with more traditional structures controlled on the Internet nowadays, we'd better cherish it. I visited one of those modernized offices recently, and I stepped out to use the restroom.
When I was just about done, I leaned over and looked around and realized there was no handle or button to, you know, finish the job. So I quietly stepped out and asked the concierge, and she said, oh, no, there's no handle or button or anything. I'll just log in and flush it later.
That was some restroom. Good thing I remembered to return the key.
[02:00:50] Speaker F: Now more with Richard and Elizabeth. Passage to profit.
[02:00:53] Speaker E: It is time for Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind.
So, Shaker and Aderjan, what is a secret you can share with our audience?
[02:01:04] Speaker A: In my case, it was my mother's code. Okay. And let me tell you what that means.
So in the city I actually grew up in, there was this, like, weird little rule where it. And like, you know, my, both my brothers went to Jesuit school school.
And like, there was a, there was a rule that said three kids from the same house cannot go to the same school.
Very weird, by the way. And it was all about giving opportunity to other kids so that, like, not, not the entire family goes to the same school. It's just like a, a weird thing of, like, the past, I guess.
And my mother had a simple reason.
She said my two elder kids go to reasonably, a very good school.
And, you know, and like, because of the, the community we come in, like, you know, we could not afford it. Like, and we were really blessed to go to that school. Like, they were really blessed to go there. And she would not, she didn't think that it was fair for her and for me to go to a school because I was a third kid. It did not, like, look fair to her.
And so instead of going and protesting and fighting and doing everything, she would go stand right outside the head minister's office every day or one year. One year. So I'm like, I'm one year late to the school, by the way. Okay, so.
And she, she stood there silently.
She never protested. But every day the head minister would walk out for the mass for the school, he would see her, and every time he walked back into the room, he would see her and she would just stand there.
And after a year, she outlasted the system and the rule went away.
The moral of the story is in the entrepreneurial journey, you never know whether you're going to be successful or not, but you should have the moral courage to outlast the system to get to success.
[02:03:22] Speaker E: Yeah, that's so great.
[02:03:24] Speaker A: So that's my code. That's what I live by. Like, I never give up. I'm Mr. Relentless.
[02:03:30] Speaker C: All right.
[02:03:31] Speaker E: Yay. Okay, so Kurt Moore with Moat Title Security.
What is your secret?
[02:03:38] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a tough one to follow. That's a great story. Shaker.
I think my, I would boil it down to be passionate about what you're doing in life.
You know, it's, it's, in my opinion, people oftentimes get drawn to making money or having fame or being well known.
I think it's much more sticky if you can do something that you're passionate, passionate about and you believe in and kind of augmenting on that. In my past career, 30 year career, at times having, you know, between 50 and 75 people reporting directly or indirectly to me, people would come into my office and say, well, I've got this problem. What should I do? And, you know, I would just say, well, what's the right thing to do? You know, what is the right thing to do here? I mean, it is a complex problem and we'd have a, a partner, we have a, you know, some kind of other potential adversary here. What, what would you want to have done to you if you were on the other side of this? And so I, I, I think there's something and it's, it aligns with what Shaker's representing there. Just, just do the right thing. Do it. It's never the wrong time to do the right thing and, and be passionate about your, what you believe in and fight for it.
[02:04:52] Speaker E: I love that. Yeah. I'm going to ask Richard now.
[02:04:56] Speaker D: Yeah, well, I'm going to stick with the, the kind of theme that's been weaving its way through our program, which is the the moral thing and, and doing the right thing. I think at the end of the day having more success is not worth it if you have to compromise your own principles.
And sometimes I think we can get caught up in our world and I certainly have, and we make mistakes or we cheat ourselves a little bit.
And at the end of the day it's not worth it because having a good feeling about yourself and doing with doing things that are consistent with your values will benefit you more in the long run than taking shortcuts or a short term gain. And I think that's pretty much the lesson that I've gotten out of the show. Yeah.
[02:05:47] Speaker E: If you, if you don't tell lies, you don't have to remember what you said. Right.
Well, I'm going to say for mine, I'm going to go down in the weeds a little bit.
So I'm going to say to anybody listening, learn how to do the queries for the large language models. I'm talking about ChatGPT, I'm talking about Perplexity, I'm talking about Google, Gemini, I'm talking about Grok and Claude, all of them. Because the reason I'm saying that is they're teaching it in the high schools now to the high school kids.
And if you're older and you remember when you used to be able to teach your kids how to do stuff and then it kind of flipped because they were learning stuff in school that we'd never been taught, it's going to be like that. So I think that it's going to be like, I don't know, it's going to be taking over. And I think it, the more you can teach yourself and learn how to do the queries, the way that the software will give you the right answer is going to help you out. And if you're ever looking for a side gig because AI took your job or something, then if you can teach yourself and how to do queries well enough that you can teach it to other people, you can always start a consulting gig. Right.
But I really feel like it's think it's going to be important not. You don't have to embrace AI 100% and love it, but you know how, how you have to know how to use it, how to make it work for you.
And I think that's my secret.
[02:07:17] Speaker D: Yeah. And I would just, you know, kind of follow on that. We still meet people who have never tried CHAT GPT fewer and fewer.
[02:07:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:07:26] Speaker D: But you know, it's, and it's.
So if you haven't Tried it, try it. It's free. And just type in a few things and see what it's like.
This is the way the world's going and you know, at least a little familiarity with it can't hurt. Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer Noah Fleishman and our program coordinator Alicia Morrissey, our studio assistant Rishiket Bussari and our social media powerhouse Carolina Tabares. Look for our podcast tomorrow. Anywhere you get your podcasts, our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gerhardt Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
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