Fixing the AI Epidemic: The Trust-First Business Growth Hack with Andrew Bolton

All of our calls on average builds our customer retention and also reduces our cost. So my operational cost lowers by not having to fire people, by not having to let anybody go, by just doing the better thing. Hey, by the way, you know, you can make money by helping people, right?

Right. By being ethical.

What a concept.

Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel All the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. We talk a lot about building businesses on this show, but what if I told you one of the fastest growing subscription companies right now isn't selling software or AI or fancy automation? It's selling something way more valuable— trust. My guest, Andrew Bolton, is the CEO and co-founder of Tech Rescue, a 24/7 tech support company that started with a very personal moment when he watched his own grandmother get rushed, dismissed, and talked down to when she asked for help with technology. He thought, this is broken and I'm going to fix it. This isn't geek squad, it's not cybersecurity, it's comfort, clarity, and conversation. And it's wildly profitable. Andrew is also, of course, not just cracking the code on building a recession-proof service business by solving a human problem. He's also a Harvard-trained strategist with Wall Street roots, a natural storyteller, and I'm going to warn you loud in the best possible way. If you ever helped a parent with their phone, worrying about a fake email or wondering how to build culture in a service business, you're going to wanna hear this. And Andrew, I can tell you from my own recent frustrations with my mother, with my aunt, with a business partner who is a former Zen monk, with, you know, my partner, with his parents, we're seeing a lot of these frustrations. And I know this is just the tip of the iceberg. So I'm really excited to have you join me today on Your Brand Amplified.

Glad to be here.

So talk about that moment. Talk about all of the things that led you to say, there is something that's fundamentally broken and I need to fix this.

Well, like we mentioned backstage, my, our story, my mother and I's story for Tech Rescue started about 3 years ago with Dad when he had issues forwarding an email. He comes into the kitchen and he asks, how do you forward an email? And we both look at him like, that's, that's a very— how do you not know how to do that? And, you know, it's a very, very similar story to many kitchens and many little kitchen nooks across America. How do you save a file? How do you find an email? Or how do you— just one of those questions that you wouldn't think anything of it. Believe it or not, here's a fun number. 14% of our entire population, 14% of all Americans say that they do not understand technology and they are not comfortable with it whatsoever. And you go, how, how is that even possible? Well, ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to you the very first computer. I know you're looking at me like I'm crazy. This is a punch card. Once upon a time in a land far away where cell phones were nothing more than just somebody's wild imagination, these punch card number 57,696— punch card number 57,696— were stacked from floor to ceiling with these little punches in them, and these little punches signified a number. That number eventually signified a code. That code was then calculated, and that's what computers were— calculating punch codes. Fast forward about 75 years, this little device is more powerful, and we all heard the quote, this little device is more powerful than what sent Neil Armstrong to the moon. So to say that people are a little bit confused and a little bit far behind—

understatement.

We need to cut them a little slack. The only reason why is because we've done studies from CNET, Berkeley, and well, as well as the University of Michigan that have estimated that for every year of technology since 2000, we're accelerating at 5 times at 3 to 5 years per year. And now with AI, which is a whole nother cat and a whole nother bag of worms, we're going even faster. Yeah, even faster. So our business, if you will, is pretty much the fallout and the result of a culture that is focused on what's next. What's faster, what's better. And believe it or not, it's sad to say, but we as a society have forgotten the number one rule is like the weakest link is the one that's left behind. And we've left 14% of our entire population in the dust.

Yeah, well, we saw this. I mean, during the pandemic, it was obvious who had internet, who had a computer at home that they could use. Whether it was students, whether it was people in business, we saw that businesses that had brick-and-mortar locations, many of them, the small mom-and-pops, were left behind because they didn't know how to use technology. They didn't have a really good functioning website. Then that's transitioned into, okay, maybe you have that now, but now you have to know AI. My mom is very technologically savvy, but when recently we're, you know, I booked her flights and I'd sent her all the information, she still didn't know how to look up that information, what apps she needed to download, even though I'd already outlined it for her. So going back to your story in that kitchen with your dad, trying to forward an email, was there a bug or was it simply that he just didn't remember or know how? He didn't know what to find.

My father is now 80 in August. So at the time he was tipping 78. There's a lot of things to answer in that question. One of them is not said, which is not their fault. One of the studies that we've done and one of the articles that we wrote about on our LinkedIn page is that Facebook, Meta, is notorious for moving the settings and within the settings menu, items within the settings menu completely around. And in doing so, it null and voids your setting requirements. Thus, you still getting notifications on your phone, you're getting bugged on all of that. It's not their fault as well. If we keep changing the game on these people every single time, no wonder everybody's confused and frustrated. And it's not just once. It's been documented that the settings on, on Meta settings have changed something like 4 times within 2 years. We're talking about— we're also talking about a generation, and we can be a little fuddy-duddy on this. We're talking about a generation that does not like change. They don't like their news hour change. My grandmother, got really upset when Anderson Cooper Hour was, was changed just for a little bit during, I think, during the election season. We're talking about a generation that doesn't like development. They don't like change. They're very stuck in the way. I mean, I can feel the genes in my own self. I don't like, I don't like things being changed on me either. So I can sympathize where there's a lot of aggravation and frustration, which is why something like Tech Rescue is so valuable to many families is because, like you mentioned, how if you were to break down, how long does it take you to go ahead and help somebody if you really break it down?

Right. Yeah, it takes a lot of time out of our workdays perhaps, or other things that we're supposed to be doing. And then it builds more frustration in us. But taking it from that moment, your personal experience to You know, there's some, an issue with your grandmother and technology as well, to you and your mother founding this company. Take us through that process of saying, of going from personal examples to going, this is a bigger issue and I'm going to solve it.

Well, grandma, my, my, my grandmother, my mother's mother was very big into genealogy. So when MySpace and Facebook were really taking off, She absolutely loved it. We dated our family back to Canada. We dated the original origins in Scotland and Ireland. And because of Insta, because of like social media, Grandma was now able to connect and talk to people that would have been almost virtually impossible. Little cousins in Ireland that, you know, now have iPads, their great-great cousin from America, 4 generations after them or before them, now in America, is now contacting them. And that was, you know, that was a game changer for her. But as we progressed and as she got older, there was more frustrations. Companies started moving customer service in the early 2010s, 2015s. We started using this word optimization. You know, that became a very popular word. So we start adding all these things in, technology gets faster, we remove settings and remove things on them, and then we remove and lay off. That's really what we did. We laid off our HR departments, our customer service departments, our independent sales departments. So when you have problems with products, you have nobody to call. Try to find the phone number of a product or service you got a problem with, and I dare you to get on the phone with them. By the way, that's a good shout out to anybody who wants to be on Tech Rescue. If you want to, if you would like to have, like to have some discounts for Tech Rescue, find one of your everyday products or services that you utilize and try to call their hotline and talk about their product with them.

And not only talk to, but talk to a human, not just talk to a computer.

Be human about them. So yeah, my grandmother, you know, being a stubborn whiskey-drinking Irish woman, you know, would get frustrated and, you know, not, you know, getting robots and things. And then finally it was just one of those conversations like, is there apps? Like, is that it? Like, are we like, is this, is this the world? And we looked, we've got AAA, which has got some libraries. We got AARP, which has got some libraries and some hours. Nothing against them. They're a good company. This is just not their bread and butter. They've got Monday, Thursday, Friday hours plus 8, you know, 8 and some odd change. And I've got some competitors around the world. Listen, I get it. This is not your cup of tea. This is not your bread and butter. This is not your business platform. You got all of you out there are doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. That's fine. This is not your bread and butter. Everything here on the table is. We are the company that is human-based, human-focused, and we are never ever going to have AI. We are not going to have robots. And I got that question actually when I was trying to sell somebody on the subway, you know, you know about AI? I said, no, there is no you know about AI. When you go with Tech Rescue, you're making a clear decision. You're making a very clear decision. That's the main decision-making thing against any competitor of ours. Do you want to talk to a human or do you want to talk to a robot? And that's what finally— it finally broke everything. And I just was like, this cannot be what we're doing. And I'll tell you this, in the 3 years that we've been banging this drum, we actually watched JP Morgan and Bank of America change their commercials. Progressive changed their commercials. I've spent the money that we've earned on PR and marketing. Hence, my marketing team reached out to you, my PR team reached out to you. We've noticed that JP Morgan Corporate and Bank of America Corporate have changed that commercial. You wanna know why? Because people are sick of robots. People don't want robots. When you have a problem— for the audience out there, I mean, really, really think about this. When you've got a problem, And you, I don't wanna talk to some, you know, I'm not here to, I need help. Do you want a robot or do you wanna talk to somebody?

100%. Well, even as somebody who knows how to use tech, who can create stuff in AI, who has to use some form of technology, multiple forms every day, it drives me insane when I can't find a phone number with a real human attached to it to speak to. You can go through a whole rigmarole and there, it's never going to answer the question that you need to ask. You're never going to get the solution, or very rarely, you know, you're gonna get stuck in the automated calls and being transferred on and on and on.

What's your opinion on AI?

What's my opinion on AI? Yeah, well, I love it as a tool and a resource, but it doesn't beat humanity. It doesn't beat the need. And, and this is what we're seeing in marketing and media. Right, is that brands have, are getting, getting less trust if people don't know their ads are being created by humans. Like, we don't wanna see just AI ads everywhere. We don't want to have everything being automated. We actually want the humanity behind it. And that's, that's really one of your big sales propositions.

You know what's funny is AI is a fantastic tool. It really is. ChatGPT, Canva, They're all great tools. It's funny, though. Every single one of these things all kind of looks the same, you know, when you see commercials for like the videos and, you know, creating videos and don't they all look the same? They almost kind of have that same look to them. And don't get me wrong, if you go on YouTube, there's a creator out there, Digital Cowboy is his name. I've heard, I've heard that. I've seen his stuff. Digital Cowboy. I gotta give it to the guy— guy or girl, whoever it is— I gotta give it to them. They're very creative. The music's interesting. The range, like, just the genre of what that one— one YouTube account can produce. One slight problem: the lyrics suck. And this is now where somebody can actually weigh pound for pound Human versus robots. This is where it all comes down to it. And I'll be the first one to say it, pound for pound, humans beat robots any day of the week. Pound for pound, humans beat robots any day of the week. They're not emotional, they're not conceptual, they're not expansive, they're not in depth, they're not emotionally in tune. They have no core. There's no soul. If you actually would like to know the difference between a robot and a human, listen to our music. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

You're telling me that Janis Joplin is gonna get outdone by an AI? Aretha Franklin, the godmother of soul? You're telling me, like, you are going to go, yeah, Earth, Wind Fire sucks compared to ChatGPT. September was, September was meh. That was a meh. James Brown, the Get Back.

Meh.

Eh, it was okay. But you should hear what you should hear. No, sorry.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Talk about though, I mean, you've made that the premise of your company. You walked away from other businesses to go all in. Talk about what that was like. Talk about. That moment when you decided, I really need to continue down this path, and, you know, deciding to have your mother be your partner?

Well, if we're being brutally honest, just between us, just between us and everybody who's listening or watching, just us. First off, I finally made it. And this is a good conversation in terms of turning points in our generations. I'm graduate class of high school of '07. My college was 2011. So I'm '07, '11. So I'm a 7-Eleven kid. I finally got tired of being fired. I finally got tired of being laid off. I finally got being told what— that I know what I need to do. I've been in sales. I've seen that the sales game had gotten harder over the years. I walked onto Wall Street in '07. I mean, in 2011, I walked onto Wall Street. As a broker-trader, just the writing was on the wall. And finally that last, we have to let you go moment. And I was sitting there and, you know, the idea of Tech Rescue was still kind of like on the table. We were just— we had a file on Google. We had a couple of notes. We had some ideas. We had some drawings. You know, it really wasn't there. And then finally, you know, that moment came and I just was like, I can't work for anybody else anymore. I can't do it. I cannot do this. I can't try to please other people and try to do what I need to do in order to make you happy, and it still is not going to work. Either I'm doing this myself, or— I know it's going to sound absolutely crazy, it's going to sound absolutely counterintuitive, but you have to— if you're an entrepreneur, you have to pawn still own it. And the only person that was and lack, you know, and unfortunately, in lack of a better word, the only person who was batshit crazy enough to go along with this was Ma. So Ma became the CFO and I went to banks. I got turned down. I went to some family friends. I got turned down. I went to some, you know, VCs that I've worked with in the past. I got turned down. You know, you know, they've tried to do this. I got that conversation a lot of times and I found out what the reason was. Staying power. We've had a lot of competitors try to do this before and we were the staying power. That's what we had better than anybody. We finally figured it out. We had the staying power. And then we realized something else. Your mom isn't calling me for help. Yes, she is calling me for help. But what she wants to do is she wants to know that somebody cares.

Yes.

That's the secret sauce. And I know it's going to be crazy to everybody, but guess what? Hey, companies, how you treat your customers is how they treat your wallets. And the idea that this idea that you've been doing for the past 5 years, 5, 10 years of F you and pay me— news flash, your day's coming. My business shouldn't exist. Why is my business growing? Because you want to know why? Because you don't care. Keep doing it. I want you to not care about your customer. Keep doing that corporate BS. Keep doing it because you know what? Don't worry about it. You just, you keep doing you. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about what's going on this side of the fence. You just keep— y'all just keep doing what you're doing. Don't worry about us. We good. Don't worry about it.

You are one, one of the most New York people I've ever met. I can just tell you that.

I'm a Jersey kid.

Yeah.

And I'm a Midwesterner, so it's funny, but we got plenty, we got plenty of love for Akron, Ohio. Buckeyes and Belly Busters out in, uh, Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Oh, believe me, we've got plenty of love for the Midwest. We love, we love having you guys come, come out east.

Yeah, well, I'm a Kansas girl myself, the Jayhawks, so, you know, different part of the region.

Flatlands.

Yes, exactly. But you, you're hitting on several key points. One is customers are key stakeholders in our businesses. It's not just our shareholders or the people who fund the VCs that fund us, or whoever, the banks, whatever it may be that we have to answer to. And if we're not answering, if we're not waking up to answering to our customers and taking care of them, we're not going to stay in business. We're going to lose out on so much more. That we could have, so much more that we can build.

You're talking about monopolies— are that monopolies are the prevention of competition, and competition is with customer service. You'll spend the extra money to go with somebody who remembers your name, remembers your family, knows what the problems are, and is willing to give you a kind gesture throughout the process. Believe it or not, there's no much extra work involved being nice to your customer. There's nothing— you're not putting in extra effort. You're just treating a customer like, hey, they just spent money with you. They got a problem. You think you might want to help them out? Or, you know what, create a company policy that says you pay us, we don't care. And believe me, you'll still get customers. You'll get customers. Just do that instead.

So talk about your business model because you mentioned a few key things as well, right? You keep it human-centered. You did go out to try to get funding. There were competitors in the market, but they didn't have lasting staying power. What were some of the things that you decided to do differently than those other people who didn't make it?

Oh, well, the very first thing that we, we been beating off with a baseball bat is we have every marketing company and every telephone company in the world telling us, you know, we'll build your agents, we'll build your robots, we'll be able to do this, we'll be able to do that. Cool. I don't want a chatbot. I don't want a chatbot. I don't want a robot. I don't want AI on the phone. I don't want my customer calling and getting Johnny 5000. I don't want that. My customers are calling me because they know that they're going to get a real human on the phone day or night, 24 hours a day, even on the World Cup, even on the Super Bowl, even on Christmas. They're going to get somebody on the phone. They don't want to deal with a chatbot. And the worst one, the one thing that we made very clear is we're not doing, we're not doing chats, we're not doing AI. Also, in our standard operating procedure, at our call center in Colorado, we have the book. It's the, you know, it's the, it's the manual, it's the handout. It's basically the company handbook. And in big red letters it says, every call is somebody's most important, most important somebody. This, this is exactly what this hotline is for. This is somebody's somebody. And if you don't treat every customer like that, We've got a problem. I do quality assurance checks. We have recordings. We listen to conversations. We do corrections. You know, we fired agents. We hire new agents. The type of people that we're looking for are sympathetic.

They're—

a lot of them have basically psych degrees. They're not business people. They're not tech people. They're basically psych majors. They understand the human concept. There's a lot of science and math that goes behind this. For example, I'll give you a freebie. New England Journal of Medicine in 2017 put out a study that found that when addressing somebody on the phone by calling them their name, you reduce cortisol levels and where they can measure adrenaline by 13%. Now, if you can drop cortisol levels and adrenaline by 13% in In my world, in my numbers, that ends a conversation 7 minutes quicker. That translates to a quantifiable result. So guess what? By the way, back to the previous couple of chapters in terms of businesses being, you know, what they are, me doing the right thing, helping a customer the right way, I earn 7 minutes of my company time. And that 7 minutes across all of our calls on average builds our customer retention and also reduces our cost. So my operational cost lowers by not having to fire people, by not having to let anybody go, by just doing the better thing. Hey, by the way, you know you can make money by helping people, right?

Right. By being ethical.

What a concept.

Yeah. You chose, and I was going to ask you about where your employees are and you're saying you chose to have a call center in Colorado. When you first started, were you the one who was answering those calls? Like, how did that start?

Yeah, right here. Right here.

And when did you know that it was time to scale?

Oh, when I got calls at 2 o'clock in the morning, I did that 2 times and I went, no, we're done. No, no, no, I can't. I'm not doing this. I need people. I need people to do this. So we had that conversation over a cup of coffee in the morning, me and Mom. I went, nah, we're done with that.

Mm-hmm. So then you're expanding, right?

We have currently 78 employees.

Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's very quick growth as well in 3 years.

So I'm purposely going to let out a little— I'm going to purposely let out some goodies on the trail to leave some breadcrumbs. In terms of the Palo Alto Five, I smacked the crap out of it. So if anybody out there is listening, Tech Rescue smacked the crap out of the Palo Alto Five-Year Plan. Yeah. So Number one, you can make money by doing good work in the world. We don't have to keep— on a side note with this, all I have to say on that subject about what we've been doing, take a look at the results of what we're getting. Take a good look. Optimization and all of this. Jaguar is the perfect example. Jaguar used to be the car of bad guys, the XKR-S. Now I don't even know what you want to call that. We've been moving in a direction that is only based off of capital and alpha. That's all we care about. And look at what we're getting. The products suck, the quality sucks, the companies are not imaginative. It's the same stuff over and over and over and over and over again. There's nothing new. There's nothing different. There's nothing better. We're not making improvements. A 100+ inch TV. Meanwhile, if you look on TikTok and you look on Instagram, China has got these panels that you buy separately and in boxes, and then they create a TV.

Yeah. Innovation. And it's interesting that when we're, we're sitting here talking about innovation and the innovation really is humanity. At the crux of it. And you've also chosen to do other things. You, you have real humans who are answering, who are treating people with respect and care, who are answering questions, who are helping. You know, I know how frustrating it is to walk through these challenges with elder family members.

I'll give the credit to my Pee Wee football coach and my, uh, Pee Wee wrestling coach. We're getting back to basics. When you're ever in trouble and you find yourself in a position that you can't get out of, just go back to basics. Get out, circle back to the middle, stand up, and let's get back to basics. Go back to 101. We're too far gone. Mm-hmm. Like, we need to come back to the basics. What are the basics? Business. Business 101. Do you offer a product and/or service that is needed? Look around your area. What can be done? What do you see that nobody else is seeing? You do that. Or build that or make that. Do people want it? Now you can charge money. That's business 101. You are fulfilling a need or a service that you see that no one else is doing. Yeah.

Well, let's talk about a couple of other things. One is your service model. You are subscription-based rather than, you know, having people pay each time they have an issue. Why did you choose that strategy?

Are you going to keep paying me $15 to call me, or are you going to put that away to make sure that you don't have to pay $15 to call me? And the reason why we went with subscription base is the whole world is subscription base. And the aspect of you coming in every time— you could come once, you could come 50. The point being is, is that if you're paying for a membership or service, you should be able to use it however you want. You should do what's best for you. I was best. A company can be built in many different ways, but we built our company around the customer and how they do things. So the customer feels better being able to get to have the choice of whether to call us or not, whether to use us or not. But they like having that option.

And how are they using you? What is like Is there one or two specific areas of tech that they're having more issues with than others?

No, it's a wide variety. It's printers, it's apps, it's internet connections, it's multiple devices being routed onto one device. It's— there's a lot of things because of our population is advanced as it is. 60-year-olds and 70-year-olds are not the 60 and 70-year-olds of our day. We get asked about Tinder, we get asked about Bumble, we get asked about many other websites that, that we would not have necessarily thought about going to a tech support company to ask about. Yeah.

So you're also providing a safety, psychological safety, because these can be sensitive, those can be sensitive issues for people or an aging population who still want to connect with other humans, perhaps.

Let's just put it this way. People are still very apprehensive about bank information and passwords. They're not apprehensive of bodily parts at any age.

Okay.

I'll leave the audience with a quick joke. It's interesting when you have a 70-plus-year-old man who wants to send a certain picture to a friend. We settled on how to take a picture for a dog, and then we sent the picture of the dog to the said recipient, and I said, that's how you take a picture and send it on WhatsApp. What you do from there is your business. And we left it at that.

Yeah, that's very clever and keeping it PG. Love that. But it also—

I'm trying to help my customer. I will try to help our customers in any which way we can, but Aren't we in interesting times?

Yes. So the stories you could share, but you're choosing, you know, you're sharing little tidbits to us.

But you know what it is? It makes me laugh and smile because at the end of the day, no matter who, what, where, when, we're just trying to communicate. Whether it's see you later or 'How was your day?' And it's a grandmother texting grandkids. Listen, WhatsApp and technology is a fantastic tool. I remember growing up in middle school where kids in my grade had parents in India and Africa, and many of them had parents in China and family in China. So you always see like these stacks of cards, you know, the, the telephone cards, you know, for international calling at people's houses.

Yeah.

We don't have to do that no more. You can get on WhatsApp right now, Facebook, Instagram, and you can have a face-to-face conversation like this, like we are right now, on the other side of the planet. You're in Kansas, I'm in New Jersey. I can be on the phone with people on the other side of the planet right now. Well, I mean, depending if they're up still, but—

Well, I'm in California now, but my mom does live in Thailand most of the time.

Okay.

So, so yeah, 100%. I, I love the technology. But let's also talk about the psychological safety. You hired people, as you mentioned earlier, who had sociology and psychology backgrounds and not IT certifications. How did you make sure that they had— knew enough about technology as well to answer all of the questions from your customers? Because I do think Hiring people, you know, this might not seem like the right bet for a company that's just trying to grow fast or trying to just think of themselves in that IT space. But you chose to think in the people space.

Do you have any children?

I do.

How old are they?

18.

Okay. So they're, so they're basically adults. How good are they? Or like, how natural are they with technology?

Oh yeah, extremely.

So if this generation now, the ones that we're dealing with now, so a 6-year-old right now has a tablet, a phone, a computer, and already knows about AI. In 12 years, 12 years of experience, 12 years of training, 12 years of video games, programming, building their own things, doing their own things, roadblocks, Everything. That 18-year-old from America is much more tech savvy right now than somebody in their 40s or 50s. Now, technology is ever-changing. That we know. Skills, when it comes to people, that's hard to come by. So that's what I look for. I look to see how is your deposition or your demeanor on a telephone. Because every call that we have, we call them hot calls. This is not a fun place to work if you're looking just to chitchat. You can make it that if you're good. Salespeople make really good people on my team. I have a lot of salespeople that work for Tech Rescue because what you can do is you can take that hot call and pivot it. Sales is nothing more than verbal jiu-jitsu. That's all it is.

You take—

somebody's calling you, they've got a problem, right? They're hot, they're angry, they're frustrated, they're confused, they're upset, whatever it might be. That's a hot call. It takes a certain type of person to take that right off the bat with a smile and then just pivot it and go, we're going to take care of you. Don't worry, I'm here. Well, now you're putting that position of control and you're putting the person at ease. That takes a certain type of skill because I'll tell you this, and we can get into that all together. This new generation, they can't handle the phones. They can't handle— you can't handle that type of customer, which is why it's very hard to find people. I would love to double my team. I'd love to be doubled at this point. But to find the right people to get on the phone is not an easy task.

Hmm. So that's one area of growth that could help expand your company. And are you married to hiring in the US?

This is where we're gonna have an interesting topic, and it depends on where, how much time you got for it. I'm actually very nervous, and this is a warning call. This is a warning call to anybody out there that has the ability to make any kind of change in the world whatsoever. From the pandemic, In 2020, we let these kids out of school. They failed the SATs, they failed the ACTs. They do not have the reading, writing, and math capabilities of a high school student. They have the reading, writing, math levels of a 5th grader. The high school graduates that graduated in 2020, 2021, 2022 have the reading and comprehension skills of middle schoolers, and we let them loose into the world. They're going to be managers one day. They're going to be people one day, these kids. And then the ones who were in middle school in '21, '22, '23, did they learn anything? And as parents, really, and I really want you all to take accountability, you work from home, your husband worked from home, your wife worked at home. Were you checking in on your kid? Did you go to their room and check their homework? Did you go to their room to check to see if they actually did their school assignments, or did they do the mouse, which all these kids on TikTok did, found all these little cool tools to move their mouses so they were staying online. Yeah, our kids got really creative on how to get out of school and not pay attention. So my problem is this: it's 2026. I've seen 6 years of the education in this country produce what I'm seeing, if we as a society and as an economy, we are going to have somewhere in the neighborhood of about 30 million kids who have no tangible skills whatsoever. I want to stay in the United States. I want to be an American-based company. But if I start seeing the quality of product, pip, and the quality of service that we can offer based off the workers that I can get, I do think, and I— and it's my theory and my opinion that you're going to see a lot of American companies do exactly that, because you have to look at the quality of worker that you can get that's willing to come and work for you. If I can't get the— if I can't, in all honesty, if I cannot meet the quality that my customers deserve, then I'll have no choice. I've listened to the interviews where they're chewing gum on the phone. They're going, yeah, hi. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You should be happy. So as we've talked about before, the right type of person is very crucial. And I'm very, very, very nervous over the quality that we have in this country. My biggest issue is that We are not listening to the warning signs around us. There are warning signs all over. We're not listening.

Right. I think that's fair. I do think there are, I mean, looking at the students who my daughter just graduated with, right, there were 5 or 8 National Merit finalists. There were a number of summa cum laude students. My daughter being one of both of those categories. You know, there were kids who were self-starters who said, hey, I need extra tutoring because I'm not learning enough virtually. But you're right, there are a lot of students who were left behind and that we have to figure out how to skill in people skills.

Well, I mean, really and truly, let's really look at this. The Department of Education just came out with the latest study of last week in terms of our education program. 1 out of 5 kids can't read or write. This is America. Like, are you— like, this is the United States of America. 1 in 5 kids under the age of 18 cannot read or write. What? And we're okay with this? That's the point. Like, really and truly, I mean, I've had the pleasure— I've had the great pleasure of my life being able to travel the world and seeing other countries and being exposed to other places. I'm gonna give the world a little— I'm gonna give your audience a little news fact. America ain't all that in a bag of chips. I'm gonna tell you this right now, we ain't all that in a bag of chips. We're getting our asses kicked by countries that I can't even pronounce, and with a gun to my head, I could not point them out on a map. And we're getting blown away by these people. Why? Why? We have F-35 superplanes, we got YF-22 Raptors that we're building, we've got all these things that we can build. We've got all this technology that we have, and we've got 1 in 5 kids that can't read or write, let alone math. Let alone math.

You're talking about priorities in the United States.

Oh, that's right.

No, that are the same priorities in businesses in terms of what are we spending money on? And they're not necessarily spending money on the right things, which brings us back to the main question is what are we, what are we trying to achieve?

Are we trying to achieve the next leap leaders and developers of the world, or are we just developing cows and sheep, right? Yeah, because I'm gonna tell you this right now, in South America they're arming themselves, they're figuring out how to do things. China and the businesses in China, regardless of what politics that you have, if you ever want to see what the future looks like, go to Tokyo, go to Japan, and you are going to get scared. You're going to get scared. And don't even get me started on the Indian population. The Indian population, if ever there was the next great engine for our country, would be a partnership with India. They're ingenuitive. They have the population base. They're always creative. I mean, you put in the infrastructure in these places, step back and watch them go. But the problem is, is we're not interested in that. I don't know what really we are interested in, but I can tell you this. What you see in product and what you see in customers is where we're going. And I personally am not moving in that direction. I don't want to be part of that direction. I don't like the direction that we're going in, and I'm purposely moving in another direction. I'm saying that that is leading to mediocrity, and mediocrity will always die off in the end.

So Andrew, what we're really talking about is you're building a movement. Tech Rescue is the company that you started in this movement, but you are really creating a movement. And I feel like you have— your call to action isn't just your tech and having people subscribe and have people, you know, who are listening like myself who's actually interviewing you saying, I need to purchase this for my elders and my family in my life so that they always have somebody they can rely on no matter where they are. But you're really calling us to a movement to think about how do we build for trust? You know, how do we solve a human problem and how do we hire and scale with empathy and trust built into our businesses from the beginning? So like you said, a few times, getting back to the basics.

I mean, we can look at it two ways. All right, let's say nothing changes and I become a multi-billionaire. It's not hard. I know that's a very weird thing to say, but if you think about statistics, the American population unregistered is over 400 million people. Over 400 million people make up the United States, registered and unregistered. About 100 to 95 million of them are senior citizens ages 65 and older. That's 100 million people at my disposal. There's 163 million registered small businesses. That's not including the hairdressers and the hairstylists out of Paterson, East Newark, Orange, Brooklyn, Manhattan that have a credit— that have a Square on their phone to take credit cards and doing small cash business. Buy an apartment. That's not to say the deli guy that does the stuff on the side, that's not even to say that. At least there's 163 registered businesses that pay taxes. 163 in America. 163 million. Just 0.0001% of that number on a monthly basis over the next 3 to 5 years compounding and then proper investment and yada yada. Yeah, it's not that hard to be a billionaire.

Millionaire.

But let's fast forward that. I become a billionaire, I'm sitting on billions, and the rest of the population in the world is still spinning the way it is. Cool. Now what? Now I'm just sitting on a big bucket of money that means absolutely nothing that I can do with, and nothing. And how many times around the world you're gonna go? How many places are you going to keep seeing? How many of this? So what? I know the B, the big B word, everybody loves it. So what if the world sucks around? Think of it this way: if you're a billionaire and you can fly anywhere around the world and all the food around the world sucks because nobody knows how to cook anymore, cool, you have all the money in the world to buy all the most mediocre food for the rest of your life. Oh, and the same goes for music. You can get on your private jet, fly to Copenhagen, hear a half meh symphony and then fly back to the United States to hear some techno crap that has no, no flavor, no, not nothing to it, and then have a maybe meh Philly cheesesteak somewhere. A meh Philly cheesesteak.

Cool.

You've got all the billions in the world to do absolutely what in a mediocre world? Or we can get back to the basics and businesses can start not being monopolized, and we can start being competitive, and we could actually start having interesting things. You know, there was a thing called Battle of the Bands. Remember those days?

Yep.

The best bands won, and the best bands got a record, got onto the local radio station, a radio station picked, so on and so forth. You know, there was a weird way of things happening, but there was a reason for it. So my feeling is this: we can make all the money in the world we can make all the money in the world. It doesn't make a difference. But if we're not, if we're not moving in the right direction, it doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean anything. So, yeah, being successful is one thing. But the thing that I need people to understand is we're kind of like a canary in the coal mines. And it's weird that you say we started a movement. It's weird to think of it like that. I don't— I wouldn't consider it that, but I don't know. I don't— I don't want to live in a boring world, and everything is starting to taste and look the same, and it's getting boring. And I remember when— I know it's gonna be so cliché, but I remember when my high school cafeteria looked like a cornucopia. There were the jocks, there were the goths, there were the skaters, there were the preppies, there were the cheerleaders, there was the football team, there was the baseball team, there were the, like, the random, you know, background characters in, you know, in the foreground. There was just all this cornucopia variety. And now it's not. And now it's like a harmonious, homogeneous paste. They all look the same. They all talk the same. They all sound the same. And they're all zombies. Like, my point being is this: we've been doing this for almost 10 years now, 10, 15 years. Like, there's this kind of movement that we've been all on. Look around you. I mean, everybody's talking about it. Nobody's— everybody's talking about it, but nobody's doing anything about it. So yeah, maybe we are starting a movement. Maybe we are something.

I don't know.

But all I know is this: between the choice of living in boring and the same thing, all right, I'll stick my neck out. I don't want to do it. I don't want to live boring. I don't want— I don't want that world for us. I don't— if I, if I have children, you know, if I go off and have children, I don't want them to have a boring world. I want them to have a little taste, you know, of what, what creativity looked like, what, you know, what people were. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make sure that people can connect with one another. That's because at the end of the day, I know it's a long-winded saying, but at the end of the day, what we're really doing is we're just connecting people. We're just trying to help people connect to one another. That's Tech Rescue in its nutshell. And the very core of it, the very core of this company is we're just trying to get people, helping people connect to each other.

Yeah, I think you're teaching us all a lot of lessons for everybody who's listening to this conversation. This is honestly, whether I'm talking to people who are heavy in tech or people who are academics or people who are small business owners or medium or scaling, everybody's having the same kind of messaging, at least the people who come on my show. And that is, there is a place for tech, but we really have to get back to humanity. And Andrew, I think Tech Rescue does it better. Than anybody else, and you are a true master lesson, right? A masterclass in how to think a different way, how to do it right, how to get back to the basics, and how to bring that humanity, that care, that love, that trust that we should have with one another back into our businesses. So thank you for that. And I challenge everybody who's listening to think about, are you moving too much towards tech? There is a place, of course, as a small business operator or any size of business to implement better processes and procedures. But do they have to be done with AI, right? What part can be better with those tools? And where do you really need to keep the humanity in your business? So I'll be back again. Yeah.

As you think about that, how you treat your customer is how they're gonna treat your wallet. It's, it's, it's simple as that.

Yeah. So think about that, everybody. That's my challenge to you today. I'll be back again with another amazing guest. And, uh, of course, Andrew, I'll have all of your information in the show notes so people can get to you, get to Tech Rescue. Maybe they will take you up on that challenge of finding that company whose phone number they can't find, that, or that's another place that needs your help. And thank you for the service that you're doing.

We're just happy that our customers like what we're doing. We're just grateful for the opportunity to help. That's, that's basically it. We're just grateful for the opportunity.

Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.