Innovating Lives, The Better Way With Paul Allen

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. So if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why has played out in their life. And so today we're going to be talking about the why of better way. So if this is your why, you are the ultimate innovator. You are constantly seeking better ways to do everything from the most mundane task of brushing your teeth to improving the rocket fuel that powers the space shuttle. You can't stop yourself. You take virtually anything and want to improve it, make it better and share your improvement with the world. You invent things and take what has already been invented and improve that too. You constantly ask yourself the question, what if we tried this differently? What if we did this another way? You contribute to the world with better processes, better systems, and operate under the motto often pleased, Never Satisfied. You are excellent at associating and taking from one industry or discipline and applying it to another, always with the aim of improving something. You generally operate with a high level of energy because after all, that too is a better way. So today I've got a great guest for you. His name is Paul Allen. Now Paul is a mission driven tech entrepreneur known for founding Ancestry.com and and soar.com. he founded eight companies since 1990 and led the global strengths movement for Gallup from 2012 to 2017. He is a popular keynote speaker and workshop facilitator and an advocate for lifelong learning. He teaches how our identity comes from knowing our family stories as well as from our personal strengths. He has spoken in many countries around the world including us, Canada, the uk, Ireland, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, China and New Zealand. Paul taught entrepreneurship for two years at Utah Valley University and Internet marketing for two years at byu. He was an Ernst and Young Utah Entrepreneur of the year in 2000 and the marketing Sherpa National Entrepreneur of the year in 2008. He's a fellow of the Utah Genealogical association and was named a Cyber Pioneer in 2010 by the Cyber Law Section of the Utah State Bar. He was the Honored Alumnus of BYU Humanities College in 2016, having graduated in 1990 with a BA in Russian. Paul and his wife Christy, live in Kansas City, Missouri. They have eight children and five grandchildren. Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Gary. Oh my goodness, I'm so excited to talk to you today. I loved your description of the better way. It was just every single thing resonated with me. So you've really nailed it with this assessment.

That's awesome. Well, take us back through your journey. Kind of give us the quick tour of your journey from being, it sounds like at BYU to all the way through to how the heck did you get to soar.com?

I never once in my young life wanted to be a business person or an entrepreneur. It just never was in my radar. I loved learning. I loved every school subject. When I went to university, I. I changed majors multiple times because every class I took, I'm like, I want to major in this. I ended up majoring in Russian, but I started a master's degree in library science. And really my entrepreneur journey was started accidentally when I went to a university conference where the president of the university was awarding honors to great faculty, researchers and the best teachers in the university. My father was receiving what was called the Karl G. Maeser Research Award because my father invented software in the 70s and 80s that was used by hundreds of manufacturing companies throughout the United States. Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Westinghouse, Boeing. They used his technology for classifying parts and processes to take raw material through manufacturing processes and create higher value. And so my dad was a world famous classificationist and decision tree software developer. He had a team that built the software, but he was the visionary. And so at the conference that I was at with my honoring my dad, the president of the university talked about gathering up all the truth in the world and bringing it to students and to communities of learners. And I was working part time at my brother's search engine company. He had a software company called folio in the 80s, and I was running a scanner, a Kurzweil $40,000 OCR scanner, and trying to build searchable infobases. And we were just scanning little bits here and there. This president of the university had a vision for putting all the world's knowledge kind of at people's fingertips. And so I thought, well, why don't I go do that? And so two years later, I started a nonprofit with my dad. It didn't go anywhere. But two years later, my best friend and I decided our mission for our first company will be to digitize all the world's most important books in every field of human knowledge. Put it on CD ROM using the Folio search engine, and see how many people we can help with their learning journey. And a few years later, we made the Inc. 500. We were making $4 million a year in top line revenue and at that point I realized I'm not going to ever go back into academia. I love being an entrepreneur. Some of the coolest people I'd ever met were entreprene. And so I just embraced it finally in 95, 96.

Wow. And so from there that led to what, Ancestry.com, was that your next big venture?

Yeah. One of the interesting things we realized in the first five years of CD ROM publishing is that almost everything good is under copyright by author or publisher. And licensing all the best books ever written in every field was going to be impossible. So I started spending hundreds of hours in libraries in the old public domain section, the history section, the literature section, some of the old science work. And we came across genealogical collections of thousands or tens of thousands of books containing birth, marriage and death records data. And in 95, in September, I went to an Internet conference in San Francisco where it hit me for the first time that CD ROM is going to go away. It's like this temporary storage and distribution mechanism. But when the World Wide Web is available everywhere, all the world's knowledge will be stored there. And so cloud computing, the term cloud computing hadn't been invented yet, but it struck me powerfully in September of 95 that we could digitize all the world's genealogy records, put it on the Internet, not pay royalties for any of it, and build the world's biggest genealogy company, which we started doing in 1996.

So how long did it take you take us through this? Because when I hear you say that, that sounds overwhelming. That sounds like, who would possibly think, you know, I think I'll take all this data and, and digitize it. How do you go about doing something like that?

I mean, as a 20 something year old, I was running a $40,000 scanner and I could scan a couple hundred pages an hour and edit it. And you end up with this pristine searchable database or text base. Now that was on a small scale, but digitization of content was happening all over the place. And more of the electronic. I remember we had to get magnetic tapes from the government, nine track magnetic tapes, and we would take data off of that. I mean, I don't go back to the ticker punch card days like my dad did, but more and more books were being published electronically. And so it wasn't necessarily all about digitizing what was done in the past. It was partly about all the birth, marriage and death records are now digital to begin with. And then in the late 90s, cameras became digital. And so you didn't have to go Scan all the old photographs. So I saw the writing on the wall that where the world is heading is content will start out digitally. That will make it almost free to index it and license it or make it available online. But it's the old content that we knew we were going to have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars or someday billions of dollars would be going into scanning all the world's microfilm collections, all the records in courthouses and in church archives. So that's why we decided to go raise tens of millions of dollars of venture capital, was the digitization costs would be enormous. But we figured that eventually we could get it done.

So how far back did you go before you launched it?

In June of 1996, we found that we put 55 million records on the Internet. It was the federal nine track tape. They had a $2,800 reel that we could buy, and it was 55 million Social Security records of people who had been deceased. And the Social Security administration had reported their birth date and location, their parents, names, and then how long they obtained Social Security benefits. It's a great starting point for genealogy in the 20th century. And that database was sold by dozens of vendors as a CD ROM collection for 29 or $59. We put it up for free on the Internet. And so within a year, we had a million visitors a month coming to our website. And really, we started small. We made a promise to our customers that every single day we would publish one small, medium, or large database of new genealogical records. And we started working with content providers, genealogy societies. And so every day for over 20 years, Ancestry would add 10,000 records, or 50 or a million. And over time, we grew to billions and billions of records. And every day, our subscription became more valuable to more people. And especially in 98, when we came up with a concept called the Ancestry World Tree, where we invited every genealogist in the world to upload their family tree, and we would index it all and make it available outside of our paid wall. So we were basically building the Wikipedia of family trees, and it was all free. And at that point, our growth exploded because we had millions of people uploading their trees, and all of a sudden, thousands or tens of thousands of connected names in trees that had sometimes taken 10 or 20 years to build. All of a sudden, new users would come in and say, oh, here's my great grandparents. Oh my goodness, I can go back 10 generations automatically. That was really the tipping point for Ancestry as a successful company was user generated content at scale.

So when you look back on your original vision. Okay, what was your original vision for Ancestry.com?

Basically to digitize all the world's genealogy records and put them on the Internet. That's where it started. Where it morphed to was community generated content. And then what that morphed to is even more interesting and I think unexpected. And people in, in the world of business, even though ancestry is worth 5 billion, don't know this next chapter. It was that we morphed our vision from genealogy on the Internet to let's connect and strengthen families worldwide. Okay. Connecting families is not just connecting you to your past, but connecting families. Started to take on a live, current social context. I actually had a dream one night that we built a an intranet for every family in the world so that cousins, aunts and uncles, second cousins, everyone could gather in private groups, share photos with each other, have a shared calendar of birthdays and anniversaries, upload content like recipes, and Even do live IP voiceover, IP chats with any relative in the world. Six years before Skype was invented, we launched MyFamily.com, and whereas Ancestry was growing slowly but surely, MyFamily.com is the idea that attracted the first $75 million of venture capital. None of the VCs were interested in the Ancestry thing until they found out that MyFamily.com was going to be photo sharing for all the families in the world. And we had this private, secure way for families to share content. It grew to a million users in 145 days. And then it started growing by 20 or 30,000 users a day. And every VC we talked to, I think felt guilty that they weren't sharing their family, their kids photos with their mom or their dad. They weren't as connected to their living family as they knew they should be. And in the long run, that everyone values family, but in the day to day grind, sometimes we lose touch with people. And so I think the money just flowed. And it was because of that idea that Ancestry raised all the money after the dot com bubble burst, unfortunately and tragically, MyFamily.com was turned from a free site that was growing like crazy into a paid site that over the next 15 years served fewer and fewer families every year. I think it could have been Facebook scale in a way if the investors hadn't turned it into a $30 a year paid subscription. But that's not what happened. And what ended up happening was Ancestry, you know, turned into a billion dollar a year revenue company and my family was shut down in 2015.

Wow. So it sounds like your vision started out as information based and ended up basically like a family reunion kind of thing.

Yeah, it became about not data, but about relationships and connection among living family members. It turns out that family is the most important thing in the world for most of humans. There's about 7% of adults in America that will spend time and money doing genealogy research. But the polls we've seen show that 95% of people say that it's very important or important for them to stay in touch with living relatives. And so even though family sizes continue to decline, when you find a cousin or an aunt or an uncle or niece or nephew, staying in touch with them and even connecting to extended family is really a big part of the human experience. And so, yeah, people value that. So myfamily.com was way more popular and had way more potential than Ancestry.com did.

Have you ever thought about bringing it back?

I started to in 2007. I was post Ancestry a few years, and a great social entrepreneur friend of mine sat down and he had a social website for college students. And I thought, why don't we morph that into a website for families? So we started a company called Family Link. And we were a few months into building the replacement for myfamily.com when I went to San Francisco and met Mark Zuckerberg. The day that he announced the Facebook platform, he held an event called F8, I think it's F8 for short. And there were about 65 software developers that they highlighted as partners of Facebook. And at the time, they only had 24 million Facebook users. But they were growing really fast. I was teaching Internet marketing at a university, and I knew all my students were using Facebook. I was using Facebook to test it out. And so when Zuckerberg announced platform my team, I got on the phone with my lead engineer, my lead product guy, and I said, we're shifting our company. Instead of building a destination website for families, we. We'll build apps for families on top of Facebook. And so By October of 2007, we launched our first app. It was called we're related, and it allowed you to privately share photos with just your relatives on Facebook. It also allowed you to collaborate on a family tree with your other relatives. We started having 15,000 people a day start a family tree. It was quite remarkable, but we started adding a million users a week with no dollars spent on advertising. We just tapped into the Facebook viral loops, and within two and a half years, we had 120 million users of we're related, and 10 million users of a little app called My Family, which was a little stick figure app that we acquired. So we had 130 million Facebook users. And then in 2010, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook kicked all the apps off of their platform, made them undiscoverable, and, and made it impossible for us to communicate with our 120 million users. Disney had come to us to sell all of our ad space for us because we were the most family friendly app in the Facebook world. And we lost $700,000 in monthly ad revenue and had to lay off 40 people. So we tried to resurrect the My Family idea when it was shut down by Facebook. They ended up building some of our key functionality into the Facebook platform. And whereas it used to be you could only be friends with someone, you were friends with your sister, friends with your grandma. We had hundreds of different relationship types. Family, this, my cousin, my aunt, my uncle. And shortly after Facebook kicked us off the platform, they now had all of those different relationship types so that you could actually define how you were connected to all your relatives on Facebook. It was very disappointing to be kicked off and then to be replaced.

So you probably are not a huge Zuckerberg fan.

The swear word in my family, when anything ever goes wrong, all of my kids will say under their breath, zuckerberg.

Oh, no. So how did it come about that? Okay, so you started ancestry.com started just growing like crazy. And then how big did it get? And then you sold it.

Did.

Were you just approached by another organization that says, hey, we want this? Or how did that happen?

We almost went public in early 2000. I moved to the Bay Area. I lived in Los Altos Hills. We moved our headquarters of Ancestry.com and MyFamily.com to San Francisco. We chose our bank to take us public. Merrill lynch was going to take us public. We wrote our S1 and they were saying we were going to be a billion dollar IPO. And on the first day after the IPO, we would trade at $1.5 billion because we missed the window. We had hired a new CEO and CFO who wanted to delay the IPO a little bit. We missed the window. And in six years later, a lot of our investors were tired. The board of directors chose to sell the company to a private equity fund. And then in 2009, the company went public. Finally. It was a nine year delay from what we thought would be the IPO to when the company actually did an IPO. And. And at that Point. I didn't own any shares because unfortunately the private equity fund bought out all the existing shareholders in 2006. So I haven't owned any shares in Ancestry since 2006.

Oh, well, I'm sure it still worked out great for you though.

Pretty well.

It could always have been better.

Okay, so you're now out of Ancestry.com you've done some of these other family apps. Tell us about the idea for soar.com?

Well, my friend worked at Gallup and Gallup of course, is one of the world's best companies around assessments of talent and potential, leadership training. They've published dozens of best selling books, but they also do a poll in the United States and a world poll. And so Gallup has maybe more data about humans in every country and what really matters to people than almost any other organization in the world. My friend worked there and the Strength Finder assessment was one of their biggest selling products, but it would been bundled in books for 15 years or 12 years and they decided to maybe do an e commerce play and make it available without books. Just buy the code, take the assessment. And my friend who I had mentored in the in the early 2000s as a young entrepreneur, he said, well, if you want to make something go viral like StrengthsFinder, you should bring in my friend Paul, who's done it multiple times. And so I started consulting for Gallup in 2012, fell in love with their assessment. Absolutely. Thought it explained me better than anything I'd ever seen before. I took Gallup's leadership team to Silicon Valley saying how do we build this into social networks like LinkedIn and Yammer, Facebook and Google? And then Gallup made me a full time job offer. So we moved to the D.C. area and I spent five years, which I totally cherish every minute and every memory, and I really gained a great knowledge and understanding of people, of culture, of leadership and of surveys and how to find out what people think and then how to do something about it. So I consider Jim Clifton one of the great CEOs in the world. He's the one that acquired the the Gallup Polling company from George Gallup's sons and then his father. Don Clifton is the inventor of strength psychology and the inventor of the Strength Finder assessment, which rolled out a few years before he died in 2003. So I really got a completely new view of life and what matters through the Gallup lens and then decided to launch a coaching platform to help everyone in the world who's taking an assessment to get great coaching after they take the assessment. And then we invented something shortly after that that allows us to store billions of hours of teaching, coaching and training content in the cloud and then to use AI to play for each listener or learner the very audio clips or video clips from the very people that they ought to be exposed to in order to develop their talents, pursue their why, and reach their full potential on Earth. And so soar's vision is now to basically take all the things I learned in 30 years, weave them together into what you could call a human potential platform. Basically, how do you unlock the greatest potential of every human being? Through discovering their why, their strengths, connecting them to people like coaches and teachers, and then connecting them to the collective humanity's wisdom and intelligence, hopefully soon stored in the SOAR audio and video cloud, and then available through smartphones or smart speakers. We kind of think about a Jarvis like AI assistant for everyone, because really everyone's an ironman. Potentially, if you just kind of fulfill your purpose, you'll be the very best version of yourself. But AI could really assist you in getting there. So that's kind of the long term vision for soar.

You don't do anything small scale, do you?

Well, I'm definitely not Elon Musk because I don't really invent kind of core technologies. Like, I'm not a brilliant rocket scientist or solar genius or spaceship person, so I'm not into the core fundamentals of physics and things. But I do see kind of how to weave together some ingredients, particularly viral marketing, so that something really good and helpful to people could scale to tens of millions, or potentially hundreds of millions, maybe someday billions of people. I do kind of see how that plays out. I am a systems thinker and I'm very disparate in my reading and my learning and my listening. I'm kind of not trained in business or technology, never had a single class in college or school around technology or business. So it's kind of like this weird, eclectic education that kind of leads me to think differently. And from what I understand, there's a $2 trillion company that says you should think differently. And so I kind of unwittingly do that.

Well, for the listeners that are familiar with the why os, the why, how and what Paul and I have spent some time together. We know that Paul's why is to find a better way. As we talked about how he does that is by seeking mastery and understanding, meaning, diving in deep. And then ultimately what he brings is a way to contribute, add value, and have an impact in the lives of other people. And as you hear his story, you can hear that coming to life in the way that he does this. But, Paul, you said something that I don't want to let you not expand on for our audience, which was you said that your friend said, hey, you got to talk to my friend Paul, who, who knows a lot about making things go viral. How do you make something go viral? That's the billion dollar question, right? How do you take something and make it go viral?

Well, there's lots of people that talk about viral marketing, and sometimes, you know, people talk about a YouTube video or a TikTok video that gets shared by, you know, millions of people, and so it gets tens of millions of views. I actually don't understand video that well. I don't understand creativity and, like, shooting something that's funny or that's touching. So I really don't have a lot of creative genes. I can't draw. I'm not artistic. I'm the opposite of that. I'm an analytics led person. So I love math and numbers and doing math and forecasting things in my head. So the way I view viral marketing is that you actually engineer viral marketing into the product experience. So here's a simple example. If I take an assessment and let's say I take five or ten minutes to answer a bunch of questions, and then I get a really valuable report back, that could be a good experience for an individual. But if the process of taking the assessment includes, you know, me telling you who my spouse is, or my partner or my parents or my children or my closest friends and say, hey, after you take the assessment, we want to share the results with 10 people who know you well so that they can add a few positive comments to each item in your report. If you design it to be not a solo experience, but a group experience, then maybe out of the 10 people, five of them will actually make a comment and two of them will say, I want to take this assessment too. This is pretty cool. So when MyFamily.com was started, the average new user would invite four and a half family members to come to join them in their group. If you start a group site and nobody's in it, then it doesn't grow. It's like you drop it, you leave. But if you get four and a half people in it and one of them happens to be the genealogist of the family, the other one happens to be the photographer of the family, they start posting content, they start inviting people, too. Pretty soon you have 30 people in your group. And that was viral marketing, but it was engineered into the product. It wasn't an afterthought. It was designed to work that way. And I think Mark Zuckerberg probably more than anyone in the world, realized that every industry, every product, everything could become social. And so Facebook's team basically tried to reinvent the news and make it social, reinvent games and make them social, reinvent cryptocurrency, banking. Every single thing they do is engineered to be social from day one. And of course, that's why they're affecting billions of people. And so, yeah, all kinds of products can be designed to be viral as a core part of the experience.

See, I don't think I would have thought of that that way. I'm so glad you mentioned that because again, when I would have thought, okay, how do I create something funny like you said, or something different and send it out to everybody that I know to see if they'll send it out so that I can become viral. Right, but you start at the beginning and create it that way so that it becomes a group experience. I love that. I hadn't even thought of that.

Well, if you watch all the fastest growing apps of all time, starting with the Facebook world and then the smartphone apps, they all not only do what I'm describing, but they also import data. So for example, Clubhouse, which grew to 10 million users in just a few months, when you start using it, it asks you for permission to get your contacts, incorporate your contacts into the Clubhouse experience. And now it knows who everyone you know on your phone. And most of the fast growing apps either leveraged your Facebook social graph of who are all your friends on Facebook, or your Twitter social graph, or now your iPhone or Android contact list. And since most people are not privacy oriented, they just say, yes, yes, yes. And now the company has access to Gary Sanchez knows 1,000 people on his smartphone. And then it makes it really easy for them to prompt you later to say, would you like to invite these other 10 people to come and check this out. So, so rather than a one time viral video share, which doesn't really give you much substance about each user, and sometimes you don't even know who the users or viewers are. With a integration of contact importing or address books or email lists into the user experience upfront, then it makes it that much faster for those apps to go viral.

So what other ways then could we make it go viral? Because now you got me thinking about obviously the why discovery and how to make that go viral. What other ways have you seen and Used that.

Make it so you can tell I'm.

Picking your brain for all listeners.

I love it, Gary, because you and I were going to have this conversation down the road because I love the why assessment and I love the yos and I want your stuff to scale to a billion people. I think it will really help a lot of people around the world to know their why, their how and their what. So, yes, we'll just kind of take it in front of this audience and I'll tell you. So one other way is when assessment results comes back, if you could create a badge or an image that would be shareable on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter. And so it's different than the mechanism I described earlier where you're asking for feedback and input from people that know and love you. But in this case it's just social media post and it could say, hey everybody, here's what I discovered about my why, my how and my what. Click here to get your own why assessment. And maybe there's a lite version that's free and people can register and take that. And then maybe there's the official rich version and then maybe there's an official rich version that's combined with a coaching session. But each person, let's say I posted and 5000 people see it and 50 click on it and 5 sign up. Okay, that's viral. And that was again engineered into the product experience. At the end of the product experience, you created a shareable, or it could be them holding a photo of a report or a smiley face or whatever and then posting the photo of themselves. I mean, it could be all kinds of things, but you would just test all kinds of different outputs from the assessment that might be fun for people to share. I actually know of an assessment. I won't tell you which one it is, but I'm confident that if I ever could license this assessment, we would literally get a billion people to take it within a year or two. And it's different than what you've done or what other psychological assessments are. It's a relationship assessment. I won't go into more detail, but it would be absolutely crazy viral.

So your mind is always thinking that way. You're always looking for, okay, I get what you're doing.

But.

But how can we really bring this to the world?

Yeah, and there's little things. My first marketing book that I bought in 95, 96 was called guerrilla marketing 100 low cost and no Cost Tactics for Getting Customers. Okay, so those hundred rules, I studied them over and over. Again, how can we use these to get customers to do word of mouth? When Amazon started putting the swoosh on their boxes so that every time an Amazon box ships, everybody sees the Amazon swoosh. I mean, that's a guerrilla marketing tactic. It's not viral marketing as much as it's a guerrilla marketing tactic. And, you know, you just look anywhere, you'll find people still today using those hundred rules and lots of new ones to kind of just as a byproduct of doing business, more people find out about you than otherwise would. I love that.

Okay, so let's talk now a little bit more about Soar, because there's so much more to that than what I think our audience yet has heard talk to us about artificial intelligence. What are you thinking in terms of that? Tell them a little bit about what you're doing with Zoom, because I know you've collaborated with Zoom. It's fascinating. I'm scared to say the word Alexa around here because I got one right behind me, but I know that's a big part of it. So let everybody know what you're doing.

Well, imagine a world where billions of hours of the great lectures, podcasts, radio shows, webinars, all the great teachers, all the great thinkers are sharing. I mean, that world already exists, but it's all distributed. I mean, you got Spotify, you've got Audible, you've got the great courses, you've got TED Talks, you've got great content everywhere. But it's hard to know what's good for you right now. Okay, if you could listen to an entrepreneur lecture right now, which one of the millions of hours of entrepreneur stories or lectures should you listen to right now? Well, you need to know kind of where you are today on your entrepreneur journey. You need to know your why, your how, and your what, and then you need to be paired with with the right person telling the right story that will help you today to take the next step in your journey. And so the more that SOAR can ask people where they are and where they want to go, and using assessments and coaching, we'll actually get a better picture of each person. When you tell us where you want to go, we will have soon indexed hundreds of thousands, then millions, then billions of hours of teaching, training, coaching, and other great content, and we will be able to say, people like you, Gary, have benefited most from listening to this speaker, this podcaster, this author, and here's what it will do to help you in your next step in your career or in your business. And so, at scale we want to organize the world's useful information and provide an AI recommendation to help you, not just in your entrepreneurship and your career. That's a big part of Life. We spend 90,000 hours doing our job. So it's best if you love it and you're good at it, but in your physical health, in your financial well being, in your relationships, in your faith experience. Wouldn't it be cool, you mentioned our zoom integration. Wouldn't it be cool if your favorite pastor, minister, rabbi or imam, or any of your religious leaders that you personally chose to be a part of their community, if all of their sermons and messages were not only recorded, but transcribed and indexed and now available to you for the rest of your life on your smartphone or smart speaker so that a message they shared two years ago that really touched you at the time is available at the tip of your tongue. You could say, alexa, what did my pastor say about the Good Samaritan? Alexa, what did my pastor say about anger or forgiveness? And it transports you back to that three minute clip where they told a story and, and they exhorted you to be forgiving or to overcome anger or to love your neighbor. And so we really think humans deserve the power of near perfect recall of all the content that matters most in every area of life. And ultimately that's where Soar hopes to be, is the content, the AI, the recommendations. But really, again, user generated content will be the key. Just like it was at Ancestry. When you upload all your family audio, all your family video, and you can instantly retrieve any bit of it from any device five years in the future and share it with your children or grandchildren. When you do that with your faith sermon library, your collection of inspiring messages from your hand chosen religious figure, not from a televangelist who's been kind of maybe over published or has been on the air for 20, 30 years, your personal pastor or minister or rabbi or priest who actually knows your family and they've been a part of your religious journey and you now have their messages in your pocket or on your voice device. And then social entrepreneurship, even political. I've been asking a lot of people, Gary, this is actually a sad realization to me. I ask a lot of people, do you think you're a great citizen of this country? Do you know who your school board members are? Your city council member, your mayor, your state legislators? Do you know their names? The vast majority of people don't. We don't even know what they're saying or thinking on any subject. Well, if we know your zip code we could take all the recordings of all the political meetings that are being held at every level of government. You know, the federal government's pretty antagonistic and toxic. All the different organizations or bodies are pretty gridlocked. But at the local level, if I had a playlist of what my local leaders have said about charter schools or about literacy or about clean water or safety or policing or anything, and I could just say, Alexa, what do my representatives say about this subject? And all of a sudden I get a five minute playlist and I know exactly what all of my representatives are saying. And then I can reach out to them and say, hey, I have an idea, or I really support you on this. But I think we're all detached from what is going on at every level of government. The SOAR platform can address that along with the other areas of human, of human existence.

And you know what I think was really fascinating about it as well is you don't have to hear a whole sermon if you don't want to. You just talk about a particular subject or something that you remembered and it gives you what, like a minute before or after or something.

Exactly. Yeah. We're actually working with AI to determine what's the right clips within a 45 minute sermon. When did they change subjects, when did they pause, when did they shift? And so you might have a one minute clip followed by a three, followed by a five. You don't want to capture an incomplete thought, you don't want to miss the punchline of any story or message. But yeah, so the clips will be of varying length in the future. Right now they're every, every 60 seconds. And so you could just search, find and play a 60 second clip. But again, using AI, we can start to determine the best clipping point in any long format, audio or video. And then in our patent, we filed a patent called precision recall in Cloud computing. And it's quite mind boggling to think that if you take any file of audio or video or any content at all and store it in the cloud, you can retrieve any file out of one quadrillion files by using a two or three word catchphrase. In other words, we're giving a two or three word zip code to every single piece of content up to one quadrillion files. And so if I say to Alexa right now, Alexa, get King Dream. King Dream has been assigned to Dr. King's speech on the Mall in 1963. If I say get Nobel Malala, the Nobel Malala phrase has been assigned to her Nobel speech. And so any clip or long format piece of content can have a 1, 2, or 3 word catchphrase or voice tag. And we hope that over time, users will start uploading really meaningful nuggets and gems, key takeaways from conferences, and assigning it a 1, 2, or 3 word phrase, and then sharing it publicly. And all of those pieces of content will be discoverable through a Google search, playable on your browser or on your smartphone or on your smart speaker. So we cover all the technology platforms, and that precision recall allows humans to do more with nuggets of wisdom than has never been possible before.

Wow, that is an amazing undertaking that you've decided to go down this path. So I remember you told me this one day. You said, I've helped people figure out where they came from, and now I want to help them figure out where they want to go or help them get where they want to go. Is that how you said it?

I think so. I mean, that's generally the gist of what Soar's about. Now, we're not about dictating anybody's values, beliefs, or journey. What we are about is collectively harnessing intelligence and wisdom from lots of people who've succeeded in various aspects of life and try to surface the nuggets and then expose those learnings and that knowledge, that content, to future sojourners on this earth who are now making their way through life. And so as soon as you kind of tell the platform who you are and where you want to go, then we have this big menu of opportunities and connecting you to knowledge and people that you never heard of before, but they actually are suited to, to you and to that next step in your journey. So it's about a platform that enables and empowers people with knowledge and wisdom from other people. So we're simply trying to connect the other great humans who have wise things to say and they've made wise choices with the future humans and the current humans who are trying to figure out our path through life. And so, yeah, it's not about, you know, guiding or dictating values. It's about unlocking the best path for each person, using their identity, their why, their how, and then the knowledge that exists out there in the universe. I had a coach once who told me that when you start moving forward, the universe tends to provision you on your journey. When you have clarity about where you're trying to go. I mean, think about all the gifts we have in this world. We have nature, we have abundance, we have technology, we have knowledgeable people, we have books, we have music, we have art, we have culture, we have all these beautiful things out there to guide us along the way. And the question is, do you find the provisions you need as you move through life? And if we're all distracted with our screens, 3.5 trillion hours this year, looking at our screens, playing games, we might not see what resources exist, some of which are free, that could actually provision us to take the next step to lead to success and thriving and flourishing. So, yes, we're talking really big, general, broad terms, and who knows whether we can pull it off at scale, but we're going for it because we have great investors, we have great employees, we have great customers, and we're looking forward to the coming years where all of those people together can provide a really wonderful human potential platform for as many people as want to sign up for it. I love that.

That's quite a vision, and I'm excited to be part of it in some way. And so my last question for you. I know I'm probably keeping you longer than we had anticipated, but it's so fascinating. What is the best advice that you've ever either gotten given to somebody?

So I've gotten a lot of advice. Once I was so unhappy that my family was going to be shut down and sidelined, that a venture capitalist who had invested in the company and actually helped save the company, he basically said, paul, you're so immature because I was going to quit the company. And he said, you're like a little boy on a field saying, I don't like how this soccer game's going. I'm taking my ball and going home. I mean, that's not advice you want to hear. But it really shocked me, and I ended up not exiting the company at that stage on bad terms. It really helped me to stay through, to get Ancestry profitable and to leave on really good terms with everybody. So that was my friend Paul who gave me that advice. Now, the best advice I give people is that 90% of the advice you get is wrong for you. My best advice is don't take advice from everybody just because they're successful, because they're wired a certain way. They have a certain how, why, and what. They have certain strengths. And so if you just take advice from people that are successful, it probably won't work for you because you have a different neurological pathway, patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving. My best advice is to find the people out there who that are wired like you, that have the same patterns, that you have the same values, and then try to use them as your role models and mentors because the advice they give, if it actually aligns with you, it will work for you and it won't feel hard, it won't be a struggle, it'll be natural because you have God given talents. You were designed to do certain things really well. If you can find advice from other people who were designed similarly. No one's designed identically with anybody else. But I had an entrepreneur friend who used to give me advice. It made me feel sick about myself. I felt like I sucked, I was a failure because I can't do Josh's version of entrepreneurship. And so my advice is be careful who you take advice from.

Wow, you just got me thinking. And I'm going to start testing this. Giving advice, getting advice from people with my same why. Well, you're a perfect example. You're a better way. And so getting advice from you. Every time I hear you speak, it's just exactly what I would like to hear. The way I would like to hear it about what I would like to hear. And it's fascinating to me.

I feel exactly the same way about you. I think your why assessment could provide a lens through which all the world's knowledge and information could be filtered so that people with each why, how and what could start to get. That's why I'm so excited about your podcast. The fact that you're already interviewing people who do live one of those nine whys. If you can use machine learning to identify people's whys all over the world, teachers, entrepreneurs, leaders, and then use that as a machine learning. So we have a lot to do together. Gary, you have an assessment that's beautiful and scalable. We have a platform that could give people a lifelong journey and after they take your assessment, which could connect them to resources and provisions and people that would unlock their best future. Good. And so, yeah, I think we're going to be partnering in a lot of ways, I hope, because whenever you talk I'm like, oh, I love how this guy thinks.

That's exactly what I'm saying. So, hey, so last thing, the last, last thing, the last, last thing, which is how can people get ahold of you? And who would you like to get ahold of you? And who are you looking to connect with?

I wish we were ready for every person to sign into Soar and download our products. Our applications have matured a lot in the past few months, but the content that I've been talking about, the hundreds of thousands or millions of hours that's still around the corner so the people that are most important to Soar right now are publishers, authors, aggregators. If you have content that you would like to transcribe and index and make available on the SOAR platform in these clips, as well as in the long format, contact me paulor.com we're also talking to investors. So anyone who's got great content or is a creator, especially if you know of thousands of hours of audio or video that ought to be added to the SOAR platform, then in the coming months we'll be partnering with large companies and organizations who have hundreds of thousands or millions of customers, employees who then will want access to the content. So we're starting with the content first, then we'll work with distribution partners soon.

And are you still focused a little bit right now on coaching and coaches?

Yeah, coaching is definitely part of the SOAR platform. So the video integration we have with Zoom coaches who use SOAR with their clients can then provide a recording, a transcript, and so the clients can have lifelong recall of what did my coach say about mindfulness? What did my coach say about toxic workplaces? You know, we all forget we have a great coaching session. Just like we go to church and hear a great sermon the next day, we can't recall anything. And so we're trying to say, let's give you recall and then allow you to highlight the things that you want to repeat over and over again until it goes into your long term memory or into your way of being. And over time, we'll all become better humans faster. I love it.

Paul, thank you so much for taking an hour out of your day to be here with us. I was looking so forward to this. I knew we were going to get some great content out of this and some great ideas and thoughts. And I look forward to us collaborating in the many, many years. So I'm excited to be new buddies.

Awesome. Me too. Thanks, Gary.

So it's time for our new segment which is on Guess their why. And so I think this is going to be an easy one for everybody. I'm going to pick the why of Steve Jobs and so many of you. Well, everybody's familiar with Steve Jobs. Everybody knows about his life, how he lived his life, how he built Apple. And so I'm curious to think or to hear what you think is Steve Jobs why? I'm pretty darn sure on this one. So I believe that Steve Jobs why is to challenge the status quo and think differently. And I'm also pretty sure that his how, how he did that was by finding a better way. And then I'm pretty darn sure that his what, what he ultimately delivered was simplify a simple solution. So his why is to challenge the status quo. How he did that was a simple solution to help others move forward. So you saw this in his life, and you see this in Apple, as he is the visionary of Apple. Was the visionary of Apple. When you think about what is Apple's tagline, Right, Think different. Where do you think that came from? Right. Directly from Steve Jobs. So if you've enjoyed beyond, you'd why podcast? Please rate us. Please share us with your friends so that we can reach our vision of helping 1 billion people discover, make decisions and live based on their why, how, and what. Have a great week. We'll see you next week.