Exploring AI in Philanthropy and Tech with Mike Spear and Jim Carter

On today's episode of the Prompt, I have a special recording that I want to share with you. And the reason I say it's a recording is because I spent some really wonderful time with a dear friend of mine named Mike Speer. And we talked not just about AI and not just about tech in general, but really about the roots of where this passion came from. Not just for me as well, but actually for him to see. Mike is one of those really special people in my life. I've known him for almost a decade now, actually possibly even a little bit more than that. And we met through philanthropy. At the time, he was working with classy.org, helping countless nonprofits just raise an incredible amount of money. He was one of the earliest employees there and helped them lead to where they eventually got acquired by GoFundMe. And he has just never left that space. And he has never left the passion for that space. He recently launched a new startup called Altruis, and we talked about that, but really it came with the origin story. I tell a lot of stories about some of the things that I've done that you actually may have not known that I have done in my life. We spoke about tech in general and really how it's evolving, not just for me as a tech generalist and a specialist for what I do for my clients, but also just how it evolves from my family life, how it's the same for him. So I want to just share that entire episode with you today, following this brief intro in completely unedited and just something really special. Such a wonderful conversation I had with him. I couldn't not share it here. So without further ado, enjoy this recording with my dear friend Mike Spier, and I will see you next time. I think people get excited about the possibility of AI and then they get deterred by the fear that it's going to be iRobot and it's going to come into their house and kill them, and then they get stuck in inaction. People don't know what to make of an evolutionary technology that they can't yet visualize for themselves. And one thing I am seeing is that the more we do lean into it, the more we try things, we're finding what we like about it.

Welcome to Cause and Purpose, the show about the leaders, innovators and change agents working on the front lines to solve some of the world's greatest social challenges. I'm Mike Spier, and our guest today is philanthropist, technologist and AI guru Jim Carter iii. When it comes to Understanding AI, especially AI in the social impact sector. I trust Jim's word above all others. There are so many people running around proclaiming to be experts in AI these days. But unlike most of them, Jim is a true practitioner in every sense of the word. He's an engineer, entrepreneur, and actually builds the things he goes on to teach about. He's worked with and for impact organizations like Pencils of Promise and Media Cause. He's been part of the teaching staff at MTEN and has directly raised more than $1 million for the organization he supports. We've been friends and collaborators for more than a decade, and he remains one of the kindest, most generous and humble people in my life. We've got a ton of great stuff to cover for you. Recorded live in person in his home here in Southern California. Jim, welcome to the program.

Appreciate it, man. Grateful to be here. Glad to be. Be enjoying the afternoon with you. Thanks for making the trip up from San Diego to LA and excited to get into it.

Yeah, man, happy to be here. Cheesy enough intro for you?

Absolutely. I'm just. I'm just sitting here receiving all of it.

Love it. There's a ton that I want to talk about with you, but let's go back to, you know, the early days of our collaboration and kind of how we met. That was when you were a technical advisor to Pencils of Promise. And one of the first things that I recall, at least, was that you, in the early days of Bitcoin, helped Pencils of promise receive a $1 million gift from an anonymous donor and a foundation called the Pineapple Fund. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to be, what the technical challenges were, what the environment was around cryptocurrency, and what that gift actually did for the organization in the end? Yeah.

You know how sometimes they say you get what you ask for? That's exactly how that happened. It all started because I found out about it actually through Pencils of Promise. A friend of ours, Susie Harrison, that worked there at the time, you know, at Pencils of Promise, I was. I was advising. I was sort of like the fractional CTO for many years. And they turned to me for all the biggest technical questions, trying to understand what could we do, how can we optimize? And I'll never forget the day because this was such a. Such a paramount event that is just unforgettable. At the time, living up in the Bay Area, I remember I was in the city, I was at my office and I got a call from. From Susie. And she said, hey, I just texted you a link to something that I found on Reddit. There's this anonymous, seemingly very wealthy person that has just come into an enormous amount of money, because at the time, bitcoin was just skyrocketing. And they created what they called the Pineapple Fund, and it was their way of staying anonymous and trying to spread the wealth. They just decided that they wanted to be as philanthropic as possible. They weren't asking for anything in return. They were staying 100% anonymous in this case, and they wanted to just distribute it to nonprofit organizations that would apply. So she applied, and they started having a communication loop with her, and she wanted to let me know about this. And shortly later, they were accepted from what they applied for. And Pine, as he or she or they or any pronoun you can imagine, wanted to actually give a million dollars worth of bitcoin to them. And they freaked out. They had no idea what that meant, how to do it, how do we receive it? I had set up Stripe Checkout to work for the organization, and at the time, Stripe had a really early beta of how you could actually receive crypto. So I said, oh, well, fascinatingly enough, we're all set up for that. All I need is the wallet address, you know, to share with the person, and it'll transfer over and it'll immediately convert to dollars. So I was like, you can tell the board and everything. You know, it's not like we're receiving all this crypto, and we have to figure out taxes or anything for it. We will receive the dollar value of whatever is sent at the time. And she said, I have no idea what you just said, but I will figure it out and get back to you. We went on to have multiple calls and do all these things, and at the time, they had no idea what any of this meant. Right. But this is my world. I understand how it works. I've been working in bitcoin and crypto for a while. I said, it's actually fairly easy. We just have to share our address. They send the you, we receive it, we do anything we want with it, and I guarantee them it'll be easy. Just trust me. So we set up that wallet address, gave it to them. About an hour later, it went through, and they all just couldn't believe that that much wealth could be transferred just at the snap of a finger that. That easily. I went on to then have conversations with the board and the CEO at the time and everything, explaining what the hell just happened, because they were still Kind of in shock, and. And I realized something really, really impactful at that moment, which is a lot of times we take for granted our natural gift. Right. I've been in technology my entire professional career. I've always had that passion for it. The simple act that I was prepared and I was willing to actually just offer the support to do this, allowed this to happen. They could have gotten so stuck in the minutia of asking questions. You didn't have chatgpt to figure this out at the time, Right? So we say that as like a privilege statement now, you know, only a couple of years, but they really had no idea what to do, and it's not their fault. So the simple fact that I was a resource and I was willing to help meant that they were able. At the time, it was. They were about a $10 million a year organization. I was able to help close 10% of the entire year's fundraising in a day just because we were able to lean in and we were there. We was right place, right time and right effort. So what I did from there is actually now I had a communication loop with Pine. They set up a Gmail address. And I remember just one day, I. I just sent an email. I was like, hey, first of all, thank you for being you. Like, you didn't have to do this. You could have sat on all this wealth and did anything you want with it. And I know I'm not the only one thanking you for it, but I said, I know what to do to help here. And I really love supporting nonprofit organizations and learning about others, if you'd like. I'm not asking for any. Any payment. I'm not trying to take a piece off the top. I just love to support your generosity. So the people that you connect with that you decide to give money to or bitcoin to, if they need help, please connect them to me. I'll make sure that they're set up, everything's secure, it's all on their side, full transparency, all of that. I just want to support the progress. And in the end, I helped almost $10 million worth of Bitcoin be transferred from about the 80 that was in this fund that Pine had set up. And all of that happened within about three weeks. So it was really just a. It was a beautiful way of realizing that when we pay attention to what we love and we're willing to do it out of just a place of kindness, really, really incredible things can happen.

Oh, yeah. Part of what I love about that story, I mean, so much of Philanthropy is, like, about name recognition and legacy and all these things and pine still nobody knows who they are.

Nobody.

And in total, it was like $86 million.

I think at the time, the wallet was worth about 86. And again, the beautiful thing about crypto is everything is ledgered, right? So the first thing they did is said, here's our wallet address. And you could see the value at the time of however many bitcoin it was worth. And for the entirety of that whole campaign, you could just watch the value of that wallet go down. Everything was fully transparent. So they were leading with transparency in a case of saying, this is what we've committed to. We funded this wallet. We want it to be empty.

Yeah.

And it was just amazing to see that there was. There was no agenda. It was just finding a way for this very now wealthy person or persons, whoever they were, to be able to do it. They never took any interviewing. I tried right at the time, I remember for the classy collaborative, we were like, is there any way we can get, like, a voice, you know, like, like, like, like a, like thrash their voice, you know, like when they do, like, the True Crime series or whatever. I was like, is there any way we could get. And there were just. There was no agenda whatsoever. And it was a really beautiful. It was a really beautiful event.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. And the slogan on their website was like, when you have enough money, money doesn't matter.

It was something like that. I can't remember what it was at the time. I just.

I had this image in my head of them, like on a jet ski in the Mediterranean, just living their best life, knowing that they were giving this massive chunk away.

It could have been anyone in any terms, you know, seemingly. What happened when I was. I did a little research on it is they just made the right choice and got in very early, sat on it, didn't touch it. And I had email communication with them from time to time. And they did open up a little bit more to me. And the, the, the two insights that I have is, one, they have more wealth than they can do anything with just because of what happened with Bitcoin. And two, at the very end of it, the last conversation I had with this person or these people was they. They came back and said, well, if Ethereum ever pops off, we'll do this again. We'll be back again. And I don't know, I mean, I just checked my wallet and just hit about 4K, which is great. It's pumping. So we'll see but it was. It was fantastic. And it was just the right place, right time.

Yeah. No, I love that. And you did go on to help other organizations do the same thing, which, you know, today crypto is sort of, like, well known, and there's different processors that do it, but at the time, nobody had the ability to.

10 years ago.

Yeah, literally. So, you know, you worked with a ton of different organizations, but I know you have a special connection with Pop, and you did some direct fundraising with them, and they actually named a school after you.

Yep.

And you got to take the family in Ghana.

We haven't been to visit that exact one in Ghana yet. But Valerie, my wife, and I've been into the field twice. Valerie's gone once with me. We've been to the field in Guatemala. So Pencils of Promise operates out of Guatemala, Laos, and Ghana. We are blessed that they honored us with the school. It wasn't on my agenda to. To do the fundraising for that. I understand the value of restricted versus unrestricted funding, because I know how the game is played. And everything that I've done has always been for the agenda of unrestricted. I wanted it to be for the organization.

Well, I remember when you heard that they were going to do that, how unexpected it was.

They completely took us by surprise. They. It was one of the years. I think it was 2018 or 2019. They had a little get together with close supporters of the organization the day before the annual gala. In fact, the gala was last week. We just went again. It was wonderful. And one of the things that they did in front of the founder, the board, everybody who was there is they specifically went above and beyond and honored Valerie and I at the time. And we had no idea it was coming. It was. It was a really cool memory.

Yeah. So the question I have about that part of it, getting to go into the field and taking Val with you.

Yeah.

How did that shift your connection with the cause? How did it shift your feeling about philanthropy, change your worldview about in the field impact work? Having spent some time actually out there meeting the teams, building the schools, meeting the people that were impacted by it.

I mean, it changes your body chemistry. You go as one type of human, and you come back completely different. And it's different for everybody. I mean, I guess there are people who come back, and maybe it doesn't affect them because they're not open to receiving what might be there for them. But the very first time I went, I was very. I was very unable to accept the fact that somebody was being so generous for me, I had a lot of personal growth I had to go through. I didn't even really get into personal development myself until about 2019, maybe even 2018. So backtrack even further than that. First time I went was 2017, and I was very, very uncomfortable. In fact, I felt like I didn't belong. The very first time I went, that was the time I met Lewis Howes. I met some really incredible people, very generous people. Very just. It was a good group, a really, really good group. I still have really wonderful bonds with all of them. And I remember sitting in the back of the bus at the time. We were just, we were playing music, everybody was having a good time. And it was really hitting me. I'm just like, why am I here? You know, these people can write all these big checks and everything. I'm like, at the time, I probably have like 10 grand in my savings account. Like, what do I, what do I have to give other than tech? And I'll, I'll never forget actually Susie, to call her out again. She said something really impactful for me. She said, yeah, most of the people in this group are here because they can write checks. Other people I mentioned, Louis, are here because he's built an audience and he's willing to do more than that. He's willing to actually share the purpose and the cause and everything else. She's like, we don't want your money. We want your efforts. We want your care. We want, we want you to do the things that you do best. Because without that, all the money in the world we can collect, we can't do anything with.

Yeah.

And that was a really big unlock for me. And that really kind of started me on just personally being more open to everything. So that really kind of changed me and I, I just set a goal that the next time I go back, I really want my wife to go because neither of us had ever done anything like it. I couldn't imagine living the rest of my life knowing that I had done something like that and her not being able to witness that herself. A couple years later, they invited us back. She got to go, she got to see it. She had the exact same experience. You know, we, we grew up very modest middle class families and we weren't open to anything like this growing up. We just didn't have that advantage. So for her to be able to witness that, it really changed her as well. I know I can speak for her on that case because she's told me and we set an agenda for ourself at that point that we wanted to find the right time to introduce it to our daughters. So very grateful to say that. We just got back from New York last week. We're recording this today, October 1st, and we just got back from New York last week. When I first started supporting Pencils of Promise, my youngest daughter, Hazel was three years old and she just turned 13. It's officially been a decade. So from being a baby, literal baby, you know, in my home to now her being a young woman and me being able to bring both of my girls then be able to witness the philanthropy of this a decade later, you know, we gave them the paddles and they raised their hand during the, the fund of need and they got to contribute. And like, I'll never forget a moment, you know, during the gala where Olive, my elder, goes, daughter was just like, dad, did that person really just give a hundred thousand dollars? Like, yeah, you should go talk to them and ask them what they do and how they do it and why they love what they do, you know, so it's, you know, being a, being a father is the, the best job in the world and I'm proud of it. So to just keep kind of pushing it forward and taking my learnings and rolling it forward, it's. It's the ride of a lifetime.

Yeah, we've both had some growth, I think, between then and now. And you gravitated towards the self improvement space and working with some of these influencers who, because of you, I've gotten a chance to meet a couple and it's been cool to kind of watch your journey and be a small part of it. I'm curious, you know, as you went through this transition because you're working with a couple companies prior and it's sort of a different space and different time. When AI started coming into the mainstream, I know it was like in use in various ways before it sort of got commercialized. But in the early days, what was it about what you were seeing with AI that inspired you to investigate it more, start tinkering with it and ultimately start building on it?

Well, as a, as a lifetime engineer. Right. I started coding when I was 16. I'm 44 now. So someone who's been an engineer for the largest majority of my life, someone who's dedicated beyond the 10,000 hours, I couldn't even, I tried to count them. I go back and think about, I'm like, I don't know how many, what's 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week? You know, from being 16 to 40 what I discovered was if I'm using myself as my best personal example, there's a point in life where you have to decide, am I willing to take everything that I've put into this point and keep pushing forward, or do I need to make changes to my life? Do I need to adjust? I mean, I think it's, we're always in that, you know, are we pivoting, are we staying, are we leaving that where it is? Are we moving on? Like we're always in motion.

Right.

If the only constant in life is change, then we're constantly evolving. So I've always been interested in AI. You know, it's been around since the 60s, Alan Turing and all of the, all of the OGs, you know, when they're sitting around like, can a computer think for itself? Was that concept. Short answer is yes, now we know. And it has been able to for a long time. It just never became popular. It always, it felt like iRobot and it felt like very doomsday. So nobody wanted to talk about it. But when the breakthrough of the concept of the transformer model, which has unlocked everything that we do now, happened in about 2017, still nobody was talking about this. Just tech nerds like me were the ones that were seeing this on Reddit and Hacker News and a lot of these forums. But even if I zoom back, we became really good friends probably during my giving Assistant days when we were building that company and at the time I was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year between engineers that were writing Python to be able to come up with, you know, machine learning models with. There was a full time data scientist that we hired and this guy was phenomenal, but my God, was he expensive. And then there was investing in Looker and Data Studio and BigQuery and all these things. And we're paying all of this money now just fast forwarding to think about that. It's all replaced by whatever we can do on our phone with ChatGPT and Claude, let alone just maybe a nominal investment in something else. So I always had in my mind there was going to be this close future where all of these things that felt really complicated would find their way to be better. And I just knew that if I didn't pay attention to it now, I would fall behind in the future. Yeah, it just, I couldn't, I couldn't actually build a plan for it. I'm really good at looking around the corner and thinking all the way through something. It's one of my, my superpowers. And this was just One that I couldn't crack. And I think it was emblematic of AI. It's, it's because it advances so quick, because it evolves. You just kind of don't know what's going to come out of it. And that's okay because this is like this first time where it's like, wow, there's life before the Internet and then there's life with the Internet. Right now we're living in a life where we knew what it was like without AI, which was only AI being popular, if you will. That was only three years ago. ChatGPT is only three years old, you know, and think of all the things that we've done with it since. And now there's this Runway ahead of us of where is it going to go? So at the time I just, I knew there was something there and I had to focus on it and I've just never let it go. It's always been something that's really been ingrained in me that I knew there was something there. I didn't want to give everything up. I'm not the best mathematician. I'm not the guy out there training and building my own models. But I do know how to make them work and I do know how to make them really shine for people. And then I started to really focus on, well, what are the biggest industries that I could apply this to? And one of the biggest is nonprofits.

Yeah, for sure. You know, the feedback that I get from the impact sector in general is there's quite a bit of confusion, there's quite a bit of fear around AI, which I think is understandable.

Absolutely.

You know, impact organizations have always been a little bit risk averse anyway. What are some ways that you see organizations using AI well, or that you, you know, from your own work, just what it could potentially unlock for them.

The way that I like to help people really visualize where they can see leaning into AI and IT doing something for them. I, I sort of teach it in like a, like a, a three example or a three step type of a model. The first one is just what are things that you're doing that just take absolutely too long? It really can be that simple. It's, you know, it has to be done. It's valuable. But why does it take so long? Is it something that you have to do personally? Is it something that your team is doing? Is it just is. It just takes too much overhead.

You're talking about largely busy work. Stuff like, stuff that's important to do, but nobody does front work.

Busy work, time to work with data, time to research said data. It really could be anything. But what are the things that just take too long to accomplish? And this is an opportunity to really, I don't say be selfish. Someone reframed it for me a while back and said make it self full. Like finding ways to say, like what if I actually could just reclaim this time, for example. So the first one is time, what takes too long that you wish could go faster. The second is just what costs too much. What, where are you spending too much? You know, for, specifically for impact organizations, every dollar is precious, right? And probably accounted for. You have to represent, you have to justify that to your board, to your cfo, to anybody who you're working with. So where you have, let's say a thousand dollar a month subscription to something and it maybe it's very valuable, does it need to be that expensive? You can start asking yourself those questions, really looking at that profit and loss statement and saying, do I have to spend that much? Maybe you do, but also maybe you don't. That's the second one. So first one's time, what takes too long. The second one is just what costs too much. And the third is actually a fun one. This is where I like everybody to get really creative, which is whatever it is that you do that you're amazing at. Doesn't matter what it is. What if you could just have more of that for the same or even a little bit less effort, right? So if the thing that you do of most value is great, that's probably why it's great. Can we just have more of it? Like what would that be like? You know, if, if you were a factory worker, could we just turn the dial up? And it doesn't take any more effort, but you're just, you're moving more parts through. It's that kind of a concept. If we can nail one of those, awesome. If we can nail two of those, even better. And a lot of the times if we really think about it strategically, you get a trifecta and it's like, okay, so now I'm able to work faster on the things that I love. It costs me less and I get more output. So why wouldn't I want to use AI for something in my business? These portions, these pieces, you're not delegating everything to a robot, but what you're doing is you're just allowing it to be part of your day to day life to help you to make decisions quicker, more effectively costly, and hopefully have better output.

Yeah, I Mean, what are the things, you know, just to connect it to the stuff at Altruist, I'm not a data scientist either. And I think when I first started asking you about I'm a data nerd.

But no, I just, I can't write those equations and things like that's, that's a whole other level of living well.

You know, and for myself, like, I felt like I studied impact evaluation, understood how I felt it should be done, but I'm not the statistician that's going to do it. And now AI is baked into altruists in many different ways. But when we first started talking about it, I was like, well, here's what I want to know and here's sort of my sources, like how do I build a prompt or how do I, how do I access that through AI? I think what you told me was just talk to it.

Yeah.

Which totally blew my mind.

Right. So it's so counterintuitive to what you think you need to do, and that's why it's so impactful, is because right now it's just a stream of thought consciousness.

Yeah.

The more you can get out of your head, the better it understands because it's all about the context.

Yeah. But I think, you know, part of the reason I bring it up now is I think a lot of the fear that we get in the, in the social sector is people just don't know how to get started. They feel like I can't engineer a prompt or use the right system or whatever. But it really.

No, I call BS on that because my kids use chat more than they use Google now. My wife, who has expressedly said she's non technical, is over there using Copilot every single day for her work because she uses more Microsoft products. My mom has started using chat to just ask it questions. It's a totally different endeavor to get her to make an account and actually be able to log in and see past chats. But everybody, no matter where you are in the technical spectrum, has the ability to ask something like ChatGPT a question the same way they're capable of searching for something on Google. And the funny thing man, is if we think about this, we've been trained on how to Google forever, probably most of all of our adult lives. If you're listening to this, I guarantee you've used Google at one point in your life. If you are a functioning human on the Internet.

Yeah.

I would be willing to bet everything that you have. There's no other way to think about it. So if 100% of humanity has had the cognition ability to be able to go to their computer, change their habit of rather than trying to find that website themselves by poking and hunting or whatever and just asking something for a little help, you also have the ability to go to chat GPT.com and ask it a question. Now, the results are going to be different. But here's the interesting thing that we don't think about. We've been trained on using Google for our entire life. Right. I was in college when it came out. I remember wherever you were. Yeah, you probably everybody, maybe not everybody. I remember the first time I used Google. But a lot of people just, we grew up with it. But the interesting thing about Google is we're still faced with the paradox of choice every time we use it. If I go and I search for podcast about impact organizations, I'd like to find you, right? I don't know what I'm going to get, but the fact is Google's going to present me with options and they're going to give me the highest rated ones, hoping that it's going to be the answer to my question. Yeah, but the fundamental difference here with AI is I just want the answer. I just, I just, I just need the output. Give me the list, give me the thing that I want to go look for. And like anything, you give it a little bit of input, it'll. It'll give you a nominal maybe, okay, possibly disappointing output. That's the same if you just say mobile phone as a Google search.

Right.

You don't know what you're going to get. Are you going to get a Samsung, an Apple, or whatever. But the minute you say, I'm looking for a podcast that explicitly interviews people who talk about their work with the nonprofit, you know, it just, the more you get it out of your head, the more you express, the more context you give. Does take more work. But how great would that be if Google was able to just understand that and give that to you too? It's the same thing. It's just a different way of doing it. And this is the way that everybody is moving. The more that we get better at asking questions. And just in general, you have a podcast, you ask questions, right? The better we are like the best conversationalists in my life are the people who ask the best questions. So if it's that same exact principle of humanity, why wouldn't we get better at asking questions with chat to advance all of the things and just all of these things really start to tie into to the same objective.

Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up. Thanks to you, I'm a big user.

Of, like, you're welcome. For better or for worse.

Yeah, right. Perplexity. I've kind of gone down my own rabbit hole. I got very into Gemini for a long time. These days, my favorite is Claude. But I've started thinking about Claude almost like as a coworker to where I have an idea. And especially. This is especially true when I do blog articles because I've started writing a lot more. I'll have an idea for something, or I'll be curious about something and I'll just go in a cloud. I'll be like, hey, here's kind of what I'm thinking about. What do you think about this? And I'll go back and forth and then some of the answers that I'll get make me think deeper about whatever it was, or it'll trigger some new thread that I wasn't thinking of before. And so we end up through this conversation. And it is a conversation because we're literally responding to each other as literal as it gets.

It's a conversation. Yes.

And we just sort of. I say we now. We sort of land on this thing that I think, okay, here's. This is the gist. This is what I'm getting at. Help me with the first draft and then I'll go into that and I'll start, you know, doing more research on my own and editing and stuff like that. It really is accessible if you just sort of dive in and start asking questions.

I think, yeah, what you have is a thinking partner.

Yeah.

Right. And the cool thing about this is you could get the same with me if we both had all the time of the day to always be talking. Yeah, we do. Like, we, we check in on each other. We have accountability calls. Yeah. By the way, massive unlock in life for anybody listening.

Big time.

Accountability. If you don't have one, two or three people in your life that you frequently check in on and it's on your calendar and you apologize to each other if you can't make it, which we do. And I think I do that more to you than you do to me. Sorry, but we. It's on our calendar and we, we do that. You can, you can have that level with AI because it's always there, it's always available, and you don't have to know the outcome to go into a conversation. The same way you can sit at dinner and just shoot the shit and ask, hey, what's, what's Going, can I help you with anything right now? What's going on? Like just being a good person, you a lot of the same principles that you want to have more time for, maybe you don't. AI opens that up for us, it gives us that opportunity. I have all kinds of projects set up in both my chat, my Claude, things like that, where I know where I want to go for what I want to do, everything from where I want to invest my money and having a thinking partner there that's a massively smart mathematician that understands how to read financial models way better than I ever will to just also projects that I've collected information about where my future customers might be. So how can I have it give me output in ways that they would speak? These are all things that, yes, you could do yourself. Absolutely. AI right now is not inherently creative. It's a reflection on what we train it on.

Yeah.

So as long as you're using well trained models, these big flagship ones, and you're willing to give it context, the output can be phenomenal. But we just have to habit shift to actually tell ourself, oh, I do have this other option. I'm not stuck. I don't have to do all those myself.

Yeah. And they are differentiated and it's important. It's only going to give you as good a response as the prompt, the prompt that you get, the questions that you ask. I'm glad you brought up Google searching, actually. I think one of the challenges with Google now, other than the fact that by comparison to AI models, it feels a little bit clunky, is a question of bias, particularly around sponsored content. You know, nowadays you got to scroll two pages down to get past all the ads to get to the first result.

Yeah, it's fantastic.

Yeah, it's really gotten great. But I think one of the things that I hear most from the impact sector around AI is questions of bias and equity. Because you have those challenges with Google, GROK will just start telling you racist things.

Oh yeah. It's so unhinged. It's incredible.

How can social good organizations who are concerned with equity and fairness and bias issues, how can they leverage AI in a way that they can feel comfortable.

With by knowing its role? In some ways it's the same as hiring an advisor, and in some ways it's very different than hiring an advisor. So if we use that as an example. So let's say that you run an organization and you hire me as a technical advisor for your organization, what are you looking for? You're looking for my Advice. You're going to give me the context, you're going to ask me the questions, and guess what? I'm a human being. I'm biased. Whether I like it or not, words are going to come out of my mouth in some way because of everything that I experienced as a child. The way that I grew up with my parents, the way that I'm married, that I have kids, that I'm a dog person, not a cat person. All of these things go into the human experience. That's why we have friendships, and that's why we don't have certain friendships anymore as well. Like everything, everything changes. So a minute ago when I said AI is a reflection of how we train it, this is why we need to trust the providers that they're training it with our best interests at heart. And these providers give us different options. And if we don't like an output, we have free will. We have the ability to go to a different provider, to try a different model, to do things a little different. So in a world where Google, let's just say, oh, let's go back to the golden years where you actually type something in and you got the first result and you didn't get hit with Reddit, and that was a while ago now, such a distant past, I don't even know. But let's imagine that you went to Google and all the sponsorship, all of that is gone. This is a, it's, it's biased, but it's a different kind of bias. They, they have sales agenda with AI right now on these, these models, all of them are charging, you know, most of them are free, which is incredible. They're free, right? Did I mention that they're free? This is a free tool. Sets of tools for now, at least in 2025. But even the paid versions, they are promising us that at this stage, these results are not biased. They are coming out of the benefit and the beauty of the way this technology is working to just give us what the AI model believes is the right answer. So the same way that you hire me as a consultant, I need to think through the problem. I need to think about, wow, I use that tool. But man, the people at that company, they weren't great. I'm not going to recommend it to you because I had that. Now, if I have a heightened level of awareness, I would disclose that to you and say, you can still choose to do that if you want. But this is my experience and we're still getting bias no matter what we do, whether it's human or AI, I will die on that hill. But at the same time, we also have to be aware that as long as we know the role of AI, yeah, we're never condoning copy paste publish from something an AI model comes out with. And this is where if we use it as a thinking partner, if we steer it, there's. There's a term in AI, a terminology called steerability. It's, hey, have more brevity in your answers for me. Hey, answer everything in bullet point form. Hey, really be verbose. You know, like, however you steer the AI, it's going to get better. The same way as if you were paying me by the hour, you'd be like, jim, cut the monologues. Let's just get to the root of this. Right? But at the end of the day, it's still advice. Yeah. So I think that's really what it comes down to is we have to know the role of the tool we're using. It's the same reason that you would either choose a hammer to put a new roof on your home or you use a nail gun. You both get the same output, but you get to choose. Where's your risk tolerance for what you want to do and how fast it would go?

Well, right. And I think what you're saying, you know, comes down to some discipline and some agency and critical thinking.

Agreed.

Like, you can't just offer it the prompt or tell it what to do and then just not put eyes on it again. Right there. Well, but still, it's abdication of responsibility, right? It's, it's, it's taking your own agency away from it.

So.

So if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, it's hugely valuable, can save you a ton of time, unlock things that you just don't have the capabilities for yourself necessarily, but that it still requires you to steer the ship and to think critically about what you're getting back.

I'll give you a great example of exactly that. One of my clients, they. I show up as a little bit like a fractional CTO for them, and one of the projects is they're about to do a really big website overhaul. I've been supporting them, giving them advice again, agency, they went out, they found bids, they got those things. CEO came to me yesterday and she was just like, I want your advice. So I gave it to her, we talked through it, I gave her my perspectives, everything else. And then just at the end of the call, she's like, will you do me a favor and just take one final pass at this proposal, the one we're going to move forward with and just make sure we're not missing anything. I was like, absolutely. This is stuff I love is like really kind of looking through it. All right. I could have sat there and spent 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, two hours obsessing over all the ways things were written or I could delegate it a little bit to AI to help me, not to replace me, not to say, hey, you can go do this on your own. She's not paying me to do it on her own. She's paying for the advice, the expertise, the years of doing this. I've built more websites than I can count. So I've done this enough that I understand the process and what to look for for. And I had already pre built a chat session for all of the objectives, everything, because I wanted that to be a thinking partner for both of us, which she loved. So what did I do? I uploaded the proposal to that same chat that I already had and I said meticulously go through this proposal and call out everything that they're going to be doing, anything that they might have been a little bit gray area about or anything else. And for fun, I actually I was thinking about this as an example. I'm writing about this in one of my newsletters. I did both. I personally went through and I was like, okay, let's see what I can find. I did spend the time I spent 30 minutes going through the proposal, re looking at everything and I had my list and I felt really good about it. Guess what? AI still found four other things that I didn't know and it did it in three minutes.

Right?

Right. I even had to run a deep research project to go find extra information. And the benefit of that was it found things that were outside of my expertise in this particular case. This is a Canadian based company and there are rules that need to be in place about this type of business and industry that I just have no idea about. So it easily could have been a red flag, but it didn't have to be. I did what I needed to do. AI did what it needed to do. We came back with a really we. Me and Chat came back to her and said these are all the things that we should consider before using Sign on the Dotted Line. And she was over the moon that this was even something that was within her grasp. At the end of the day, she was not going to do that herself. We get to choose whether or not we want to do these things ourself. We can still hire consultants. We can still have that support, but I was able to be that much more productive and that much more thorough on behalf of my working relationship with that company simply because I chose to lean in to use a tool.

Yeah.

So in a world where we have this option, why wouldn't we want to at least explore it is my challenge that I give everybody.

Yeah, we touched on this aspect too. And it's sort of my last question about the benefits of what AI can do. But I think of tech as a force multiplier. Right. It can't only be tech, but at the same time, you're just not going to be able to scale quickly if it's only your human capacity, you know, somewhat limited. So it really has to be a symbiotic partnership and collaboration. We've talked for years, going back to, like, my classy days, about relationships at scale and how social good organizations can engage donors in a smart way at your sort of prompting. We built something like this into altruist. Talk to me a little bit about your work in that field and how you're helping brands and influencers engage wider audiences and what social impact organizations might be able to learn from that.

Yeah. One of the things that I love doing right now is I'm currently building the biggest digital clone experiences on the Internet. And the data that I see, the feedback that I see, the perspectives that I see from all these different industries, all these different executions, is just wild. So let me actually explain that because I realized there's a little bit of mystique in that.

Yeah.

Which is there's a really phenomenal company based out of San Francisco that I found a couple years ago. And when I had started working with one of my now clients, they had done a deal with this company and they introduced me to them and said, hey, we're going to build a digital clone of us.

You're talking about like an influencer with millions of people that come to their stuff, absorb their content, big audience.

There's no way that this individual could ever talk to this many people. So this person wanted to be brave, they wanted to try something, they wanted to give it a shot. So we did it. And I really love this platform and everything that I could do. So I got to know them, we experimented with it, and it has been one of the craziest technology projects that I've been part of because of just how well it works, the value that it gives to these customers, and the ability that it now truly is the force multiplier. Like you said, it's one of the most celebrated products for this person that they have ever had. So much, in fact that I was talking to this person, had dinner with him a couple weeks ago and said that they had an event and at the event somebody screamed out how much they loved it while he was on stage and there was a roar from the audience of applause. And it's just like, like have no idea how to respond to that. Remember talking to him. He's just like, all of my years, everything that I've done, nobody's ever been like, I love that PDF, you know, thing that you released two years ago or whatever. Right. That one thing, that one blog article changed my life and everybody applauded. So it's just, it's wild to think about what that would do for any business and even myself. You know, I have one of my own and just knowing that people can ask my digital mind anything.

Yep.

Is a really interesting and cool. Not even a novelty anymore. It really turns into utility and we'll talk about that.

Can you explain what, what a digital clone is like, what goes into creating it and kind of what, what it's what its brain is built on.

Yeah, of course. So think about where you have all your notes, right? Everybody does notes differently. Some throw it on their phone, some use notions, some have post its riddled throughout their house, old journals, whatever. And I think we all share the same sentiment, which is like if, if your brain is scattered, then wouldn't it be amazing if you could just kind of pull all that together and be able to ask it anything, be able to access it anytime? You know, I, I use Apple notes on my phone. I just, I've used it for long enough that I have everything that I need in there and that's enough. And there's search, which is nice, but it's also not comprehensive enough. It doesn't, it doesn't have recordings like this where I've got some really, I've got some things I'm really proud of that I share with you, but that's never going to end up in my notes. So if I'm like, ah, what's that? I had a banger of a quote that I said with Mike on that one podcast. You know, what was it? Right. There's no way up until recently where you could kind of pull all that together. Now that's for an individual, but also think of it for a brand. Think of it for an organization. You have SOPs, you have brand styles, you have information about your locations, you have information about your work in the field. Do you have information about how you fundraise, what you do, where does the money go, all these things.

And I think in the impact world for organizations that part of what they do is provide information and support resources, advice for how to navigate government systems, complex things that you'd want a very specific set of information that is the.

Delivery of it, in a sense.

But also there's so much misinformation that might be out there that you need to exclude. Right, right.

And imagine if you can take all of that, put it into one big, beautiful AI brain and allow for the same way that you go and you ask ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity for anything. The difference here is, well, what if it's just yours? What if it's your brain, it's your word, your spoken way of showing up. It sounds like you, it feels like you, there's almost a connection. Or it's your brand, it can speak like you, sound like you, and feel like you. So that is very doable today with AI and technology that we have. And those are the experiences that I build to allow for the unlock. Right. So go back to my framework of threes. What takes too long? Well, if it, if it takes too long for you as the personal brand to answer, if it takes too long for your organization to have a support ticket, you know, we're recording right now. Neither of us are looking at our phones or email, but there could be somebody who's asking you a question about the work that you're doing. Well, you can't, you can't help them. Something that's always online could. Right. Number two, what would the cost of building a massive database and everything like that be? Well, this platform I work with and others like it, they make it very affordable. And then three, what if you could do more of the same? Right. In the same exact thing, what if a thousand people, because you got some kind of promotion, you had a reel that went viral, you know, a piece of social popped off. What if all of a sudden you could just give that, whether it's free, paid anything, just for the fact that you had that ability and you didn't have to hire, you didn't have to scale. That's the trifecta.

And there's protection there too, I think, because you can tell it what not to say.

Exactly.

Tell it when to escalate to a human if needed.

Right.

Things like that.

You have the ability to, without getting to the details of all the setup and configuring it just the way to really think about it. Is the same way that you would have non negotiables if you were having a conversation with somebody, you wouldn't want to talk about this or you would want to talk about that or you're uncomfortable. You know, some people want to have political, political discussions, other people want to change the subject. You have those controls with AI as well these days, where it can just stay with the information that you've given it, or it can get really creative or it can adapt. And those safeguards help with making sure the information is correct, making sure it's on brand. And then also again going right back to that bias question. You can say where unless we have told you to say it like this, don't say it and you feel better with those protections. All these are within our reach now with this concept of like an AI first world.

Yeah, it feels to me this is part of the sort of the fear in the space, I think is it feels to me for impact organizations like this is really sort of an adapt or die moment. I feel like the organizations who lean into this, learn about it, embrace it, experiment a little bit, they'll end up in a much better place than they were even before AI showed up versus burying your head in the sand. It's sort of. And we used to say this about peer to peer fundraising and all that stuff. So like, you know, you just, you're just on the path to a slow death. How can organizations sort of equip themselves to really take advantage of it as a first step?

Yeah. Adapting is the word to use because adaptation can come over time. It can be fast, it can be slow, it can be easy, it can be painful, but it changes at some kind of a nominal rate. I feel that if you do not adapt AI in any way 1%, you're simply going to get outpaced by the people that do. And this is an interesting world in the nonprofit space and the for purpose space is. This is an infinite game in most cases. You know, we're all working towards something that is bigger than us. So I'm just going to be brash for a minute. How dare you not do more of what you're doing for a reason? If you have that ability.

Yeah.

You know, don't you owe a responsibility to the output of what it is that is your life's work? If you just don't want to take it that much seriously about the things that are in front of you?

Yeah. And this, maybe this is a good transition. I don't know. I. I'm not sure I intended to go here today in this session. But that's. That's one of my frustrations about what I see in philanthropy in general is that there are great people out there who are very genuine about doing the work and are there without ego to generate social impact, make people's lives better, solve a certain problem. But there are also a lot of people out there who are there really, at the end of the day, push comes to shove and they may enjoy that they're helping people or creating some sort of impact, but they're there for the accolades and sort of, you know, the benefits societally, financially, whatever, reputationally, that they get out of it. But if we're serious about solving these problems, gotta. Gotta be open to innovation, gotta take some chances, gotta be willing to fail in order to achieve something great and really move the needle on your cause.

I agree. I agree completely.

I don't know if there's a question in there. I just sort of gotta my soapbox for a second.

Hey, soap it up. I mean, this is where we're at, right? We have this ability, so we have to choose. What are we gonna do with it? I don't want to be the guy that 10 more years from now, I look back and realize that was such a wasted opportunity of my life because I just didn't take it seriously. I'm not a guy that lives in regret, and I don't have regrets. But what I don't want is a future regret that is unavoidable, whether that's personal life, the world I'm trying to build for my kids, or just in general the work that I do in life now. I just so happen to be all in on the AI side because one, business is great. Two, there's an abundance of opportunity and everything else. I mean, just yesterday, OpenAI dropped their new social media app for Sora, and I spent hours last night creating and trying and getting creative, and I'm still making sense of it, but I don't want to have done that a year from now if I have the ability to do it now and actually allow it to influence conversations and forward progress. Because I do have a platform, no matter how big or small. I've been running an AI newsletter for two and a half years now, and I'm really proud of it. It's one of the longest running AI newsletters and it's just my efforts trying to amplify it. So whether my Infinite game or your Infinite Game, you gotta pick what game you're in. And if you have these opportunities just to Do a little bit better. Why wouldn't you?

You're using infinite game as a general term, which I have embraced myself wholeheartedly. It comes from Simon.

Simon Simeks. Yeah.

Great book. It's a fantastic book. And they talk about. You run into some of the biggest problems when you're playing one game and somebody else is playing.

It's exactly what you're thinking about.

If you're playing the infinite game and somebody else is playing the finite game, you have just a tremendous strategic advantage.

Yes.

You know, I'm a big believer in having a bias for action. And I think part of what you're saying is indecision eventually is a decision. It is a choice.

It's a deferred no.

It's a deferred no. It ends up. If you don't make a strong choice, you end up stuck with whatever it was. And I think it's important to know that going into it, it makes that bias for action a bit easier, I think.

Yeah. You know, like, as a dad, like, I'll be talking to the girls. I'm like, do you want to go get dinner tonight, maybe? I'm like, how about we actually just say yes or no? Like, could we just commit to it, not trying to be an ass, Just be like, well, we could just sit here and talk about maybe forever. And what good does that do? It's almost the same in. In what you're doing. Try to be the person that never again hits the maybe button on your calendar and see what that does to the psychology of it.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah. Also just feels good to be decisive.

It does. You know, it really, really adds clarity. You know, one of the reasons I was excited to come up here and record this episode with you, other than just getting an excuse to hang out, of course, and answer some questions I've been getting about AI from the field. I almost never get a chance to talk about myself or what I'm working on. I know I sort of drop altruist here and again, and there's a little, I don't know, AD that'll probably play at some point. I rarely get to talk about what we're building or kind of the why of it all. So having known each other for a decade, I just wanted to open it up to you and sort of do a little AMA and, you know, ask away.

That's what I was looking forward to. The coolest part about, I think, our relationship is I've known you for over a decade now, and we've both been through all Kinds of ups and downs. And no matter what we're working on, we both share really good value oriented work. And one of my favorite things is I know that you've had this mission in your heart that you've never fully been able to express and get out into the world until more recently. And I know that it took a while you really strategic in your thinking the way that you wanted to put together a plan. Not that you were indecisive, but that you were asking a lot of questions. You were finding what needed to be fixed. Right. One of the things that drives me crazy when I see SaaS companies come out and everything is they're just building what they want. But there's a difference between building what you want and building what your customers want. And no matter what your customer is, it's are you actually solving a problem? And with altruists and what you're building, I love that you're working towards solving problems that sometimes people actually don't even realize is a problem until they get into it. So I'd love to hear from you with everything that you've been putting into it. Like just actually walk me through the latest of why does this exist and why is it so needed in the world?

God, that's a huge question.

Yeah, you can break it down into the very last piece. I just wanted to contextualize the reason that I wanted to ask it. Because you've been working in this industry for longer than almost anybody else I know and you've seen such a big influx of different types of organizations and everything else. You have the most perspective out of anybody that's in my network and that's why I value your perspective in this industry. Why is this the product that you want to bring to the world?

I want to go back a ways with this answer. I did not expect to be talking about this today, but I'll try to do it quickly because I'm going to do 40 years of history in two minutes here. But.

Okay, I'm going to set a timer.

Yeah, please. You know, I was always very close to my dad and he was an attorney and he was known as having just unimpeachable ethics. And seeing his career and how he struggled at times financially, maintained a moral compass above and beyond what his clients and peers had. The fact that he wasn't as available for his family as he might like to have been. It's always been incredibly important to me to have fulfillment in my job, have a purpose in my job, and work with people that I like. Because if you're spending that much time and energy on a career, it should be important to have intrinsic value out of it to me. And he would tell stories, they'll keep this super short. But he was a corporate attorney, business lawyer, but he always talked about the most rewarding case that he ever had. He got a phone call, apparently when he was on an early date with my mom. They were at a restaurant. He got Paige at the restaurant and it ended up being a pro bono thing where somebody was getting evicted that night and his slum lord was like literally kicking him out and he interrupted his dinner and he ended up intervening legally in this situation. And then the guy ended up getting to stay in his place. And, you know, across a 30 year career, that was his most rewarding case. Things like that have always stuck with me. I'm not very religious, but I grew up Jewish and have always had this sort of outsider ethos of like sensitivity for underrepresented people or minorities or folks that were being discriminated against. And so that sort of informed my career throughout. As I grew up, I got into the film industry, I got into journalism. I've always loved storytelling. I've always loved to use storytelling as a way to expand people's horizons, drive people to action, you know, things like that. I, quite on accident, had the opportunity to join the early days of classy. I was sort of looking to get out of journalism and into something different and fell ass backwards into social impact technology and entrepreneurship. Had that experience over 10 years where I was working with nonprofits and fundraising strategy and building technology and learning how to do product. And after leaving, consulted and advised with a lot of different social good organizations. And when I started to think about what I want you to do next. This is like during and post pandemic. I just was asking myself, how do I want to show up in this next chapter? What have I been frustrated with in the social sector and how do I leverage this sort of Venn diagram of different careers and experiences from storytelling to tech to advising to impact? You know, what's the overlap there? And my sweet spot in the middle of the Venn diagram was altruist. It's a way to do impact evaluation in a way that makes sense. I don't think the other frameworks that are out there go far enough to use storytelling to make that accessible and to build a really nice product. The impact sector has just accepted crappy software, crappy technology for so long and there's no reason for it. And so to combine those things to make an elegant experience which really delivers on impact, which makes it easy for people to use, makes complex impact issues accessible to somebody who's not a deep expert and at the end of the day to drive resources to high impact organizations that are solving the most important challenges of our time. And so I think for me it's very purposeful in terms of what we're out to accomplish, but also the things that we're doing with the platform connect really well with my experience and the things that I'm interested in.

Yeah, man, that's great. I just want to underscore it's a mix of experience with seeing what's needed and where else the industry is going.

Yeah, and that's another one. So I've been frustrated for years about the persistence of the overhead myth, the scarcity mindset, the way good organizations have trouble getting seen and getting resources in major grants platforms. More than 90% of grants are renewed year over year, which is good for stability for those organizations. But it tells me there's no money for innovation and a smaller, lesser known organization is not getting funded. Continue. At the csr, the brands are very risk averse. Individuals are concerned about their legacy and so they don't want to take chances on some of these orgs. So finding a way to do that vetting for them and to make it okay to invest in something more innovative with higher potential for those groups, hopefully we start driving some resources there. But for me, it came out of a very direct personal frustration and something I saw that wasn't being addressed and really drive integrity into the space. I'm saying the space is devoid of integrity, but there's a real integrity gap around people receiving accolades and rewards for giving their money away versus really moving the needle for folks. It is a different mindset. You should do both. You should feel good about your philanthropy. But as long as we're feeling good about it, shouldn't we be driving significant positive activity and mitigating harm? You know, some of the organizations that have done very well in the past have actually left their client group worse off than when they found them. Just making a very easy way for people to have a real significant positive impact. And as long as they're feeling good about what they're doing, they should really move the needle in meaningful ways and understand how they're doing that. And that's, you know, that's what keeps me going on a day to day.

And on more of a functional side of the way that it operates.

Yeah.

What's, what's the biggest differentiator of how this changes it from like you talked about, like the antiquated way that's complicated and everything else. What does this unlock for somebody that the others just don't have?

Yeah, I mean, the easiest way to articulate that, I think, is it helps people find signal in the noise. I think the world is complicated. I think there's just so many competing messages to the point where it can feel daunting, where individuals or organizations, they have starting friction, they don't feel like they could get in the game or make a real difference in a way that makes sense to them. And so what we do is we allow our customers to input the things they care about, the regions, the cause areas, the textures of different organizations, some real subjective stuff. And then we use that to give them proactive recommendations. They're delivered not as a spreadsheet or a crazy report, but as a story that they can actually understand and understand the context and really make some fun discoveries or. One of my favorite programs that we looked at early is essentially, you know, it's an economic development app. It's helping farmers in Africa do better with their livestock. So somebody's interested in poverty and regional economic issues, they might be drawn to that. But there's this ancillary benefit to this program. It's optimized for health of the grasslands in Africa. So that has a climate benefit. And so over 20 years, they're projected to offset the equivalent of 20 billion pounds of coal from being burned every year.

Crazy.

So someone who's interested in climate, you know, you're looking at this set of organizations, you'll never find these guys. Right. But we can make this sort of fun and interesting moment of serendipity for you to where you can discover this cool program and make a real difference in the stuff that you've showed up to do, but also have these additional benefits. Benefits.

Let's go deeper on that. Why would the general person. Why would I, if I was looking for this, likely not find that specific piece?

Well, there's the bias issue that we talked about earlier, where the search engines and GPTs, they sort of know the top level stuff.

They lob the normal stuff.

Yeah. And so you got to really dive deep and get through a lot of things that are either irrelevant or maybe don't need your money. There's just so much complexity to the space now and the information can be so hard to find, both because we're inundated by information, but also because a lot of organizations don't have the capacity or wherewithal to report on this stuff effectively on their own or get the message out.

Right.

So we really help to cut through that noise. And if you come to us with an opinion on what you're interested in funding, we can quickly and easily give you a short list of recommendations. You can understand it very easily, execute your investment decision within the product, actually transact the funds. And then because we know what the unit economics are around the impact and how much you gave through the system, we can immediately just tell you how much impact you created with your dollars. And it's meant to drive efficiency across the ecosystem because then nonprofits don't have to give every donor their own report about what they did or apply to all these different grants that they may never get. It's just a much more seamless, efficient way of doing it because the funder says, here's what I care about. They get the recommendations, they make the decision right there, or they can reach out for some more information or whatever, and then the reporting is right there on the product.

Absolutely. One of the things that I'm grateful that Pencils Promise taught me was that measure of the impact unit, you know, have having a simple dollar figure that makes it insanely easy. Unquestionably, this is what we can do. Now, of course, it's a, it's an average of everything and all that, but at least at the time, Pencils of promises was $75 will holistically educate a student for a year.

Right.

And that's because that, that covers everything over all of the expenses and everything else, from the literal cost of a pencil to making sure you're supporting a teacher, all those things. Right now it's up to the organization how they want to do that. But that's a, it's a hard enough thing for a small team organization to come up with or maybe settle on. And then, then it's communicating it and then it's having the information around it. One of the things that I like about this platform that you're building is you're doing the work to find all that information. You're pre vetting, you're running through it. I want to talk about the AI component of what we put in DAO because obviously that's my jam. Yeah. But it's more than surface value, basic stuff that can be scraped from the Internet and plugged into a couple little fields. Talk to me about the depth of the reasoning behind what you're putting in and why you're just making it easy for people so they don't have to worry about that piece.

It's sort of a two part answer, I think. I think number one, what we care about that's different from a lot of the other folks in the industry. You know, quantifying impact is important if you're a follower of the effective altruism movement or some of the other platforms that are out there. It's really a race to the bottom. They're sort of telling you to spend as little as possible for each unit of impact, which is really just the overhead question. Repackaged, we're focused on depth and quality and durability of impact, not the low dollar value quality impact costs. And if you're in the nonprofit sector, you want to hire good people and keep them and not get them all burned out, you got to pay them something. You got to let them like go on vacation with their families, work towards buying a house.

You know, things that make an infinite game worth it.

Right? Literally. So the race to the bottom in terms of cost per outcome really serves nobody. And it can be misleading if what you care about is truly moving the needle. So we look at depth and quality of impact. We have a variety of different ways of getting at that. It's contextualized within the region, the specific needs of the population. So it's a different sort of criteria for folks in Guatemala versus Nepal. It's just a different cost structure and different way of going about it. We look at the culture of organizations. We don't want any sort of toxicity or unresolved harassment issues. I learned that one the hard way a couple times where it's just not easy to uncover. An organization can look amazing on the surface, but they've got this underlying rot that makes for a lack of durability, resilience, internal problems. So we want a healthy culture, we want a culture of learning. We want to see that people are actually paid pretty well. They're fiscally responsible, but they're paid well. And if we can sort of check that box, really what we're trying to answer there is can this organization do what they say they're going to do? Right? Do they have the right people in the right roles? Enough coverage?

Does the data back it up? Yeah, it's kind of like the certified B corp of, you know, systems for nonprofits here.

Yeah. Are these guys for real? And if the answer is yes, then we go right to the program level and we say, all right, what's, what's the impact here? So I guess the other part of the question was like how, how the AI is baked in it's in a few different ways and we'll talk to the engagement part in a second. But one of the things that you've helped us with a ton is, is if I want to look up a program and find out information, we have a very sophisticated prompting system. We've got to the point now where I can just put in a program Name into our AI tools and within, depending on the day, between 5 and 30 seconds, I get a 25 page report where we've steered, we put the guardrails on of like what do we consider reputable authoritative sources? What do we not? What are the questions that we think are important? How do we look at that? How do we crunch those numbers? And it spits it out in seconds. Then we take a look at that and we analyze it, we ask additional questions if we need to. We put that into a simple report, we'll publish that as sort of a version one. But the next thing we do is go to the organization itself and we say, hey, we're interested in you guys, we've got this research on you. Let's talk. Tell us what we don't know, tell us where we got stuff wrong, give us information that's non public that our model couldn't discover. We work collaboratively to figure out really what's going on there and then that's really what we publish. So we do a lot of the legwork early. We combine the AI automation with the human touch to make sure that. We're accurate, that we're really giving a full picture of what's going on, not just a snapshot and that we understand the complexities of what they're dealing with so that we can factor that into our evaluation.

And just because this conversation is so rooted in AI and tech, how did implementing that prompting system and everything else change things for you with this? What did that allow you to do?

You know, when I first started this effort, we didn't have this capability.

I remember I started the first couple of Google Docs. Yeah, this is a lot.

I started four years ago. This wouldn't even have been possible. Right. So you talk about right time, right place, but we're able to hit a level of scale and efficiency and completeness that wasn't possible even a year ago or six months ago. Right. And it's good to have done that prep work like kind of the way you were talking about getting started with AI in the early days. We did it the hard way first. So we learned a lot of lessons. We knew what to ask, what not to ask where the pitfalls were, how to really craft our approach to it so that when these tools came online, we're just seamlessly able to adapt to it. And why wouldn't you apply those learning? Right. And it's also not the kind of thing where what we do today is set in stone. My ambition with this is to evolve it continuously over time and just always make it better.

And what do you need the most right now with this project? What are you looking for?

Early clients.

What's a client look like?

Any funder who cares about their impact, really our sweet spot really is high net worth individuals, family offices, foundations. There's also good use cases for csr, even wealth managers who want to advise their clients. Anyone with access to significant philanthropic capital who wants to do it better, wants to have impact and cares about that in addition to the accolades. That's really it. You know, I've bootstrapped this whole thing. I fundraised a little bit from friends and family, but really I've been doing it myself. So now the MVP is built, it's out there, it's ready to use. So like we're taking it to market, we're getting customer feedback on it, and those first few customers who see the vision and want to take advantage of it, that'll help us really accelerate.

Yeah, it's exciting, man. How can people sign up for it right now?

You just go to altruist.org, set up a meeting with me and I'll walk you through the whole thing and we'll talk about your needs. Part of what we're doing with this as a value add to the community is it really scales nicely. Right. So we have these program evaluations. Once they're in the system, they're available to all of our clients. So as a service to funders coming on, we'll take a look at your existing portfolio. First. We'll do a refresh on the evaluation of the folks that you're already working with so that you get the update. Hopefully you get better information, uncover new information, more current information. We'll put that in the system for you. But from that point on, those organizations are now eligible for funding from everybody else that we have on there. So you talk about efficiency, force multiplier. It's a real gift to your grantees to be on the system. So we'll do that first so that when you come into the system initially, you have the information in your current portfolio ready to go.

That's awesome.

It helps our system understand what your future Needs are helps us find synergistic organizations. So, like, if you're, for instance, if you're interested in after school programs, early childhood education, stuff like that, you might not have thought to invest in a nearby nutrition program or some sort of home care program, you know, daycare, support stuff. But all those things help increase the impact of the core organizations that you've been supporting. So we'll help you uncover some of that stuff. And like I said, it really just adds value to those organizations as well as we bring on more funders.

Yeah, it's exciting. That's great, man. I mean, the projects we have the most fun on are the ones that we are just willing to commit the most effort to stay with it the longest. And I know that through all of our conversations that we've had, like any business doesn't matter what you do, you have ups and downs. One of the things I just want to honor you on is that you, you've stayed true to this, dare I say, like, at almost any cost, right from the fact that you're. You're doing a lot of the fundraising yourself, but also just you're willing. Like you just said, like when I just asked you how can you sign up, it's like, oh, book some time with me. Like, you're willing to show people the reason, because the why is the product there just there. There's no other way around it. And I just, I just want to honor that and thanks for your effort to it. But also, I just, I just know how much of an impact it is making.

Yeah. Thank you. I knew it was going to be a heavy lift when I started. I knew it was going to be hard. I did not think it was going to be this hard.

Do we ever.

But, you know, it is core to my purpose in life. You know, if you ask me, like, personally, what drives me, it's solving some of these challenges. I'm very concerned about climate change, social justice issues these days, politics, you know, but people who are spending their lives trying to solve these problems and change the world in positive ways, they give up a lot to do that. We've had some of those people on the podcast. I love nothing more than supporting those people. And when you meet someone who's engaged and smart and good at what they do and passionate and cares about this, and they're working hard to solve a problem, to make other people's lives better, I think my mission is to help that person do it better and help drive them resources. And so every so often, every couple months, I'LL just do a little reality check of, hey, do I want to keep at this thing like we talked about?

We're always changing, we're always evolving.

Always.

You know, there's always self reflection in there.

Should I just go get a sales job somewhere? Be so much easier in a lot of ways.

I know, like, I love dogs. Should I just go apply a petsmart? Does that make life easier?

And I just.

Only you can answer that, right?

I just can't do it. I just. It's like. And now we're so close to really starting to scale. So it's, you know, this is what is most meaningful to me and it's how I can make the biggest difference in the world.

Yeah. Well, I'm cheering you on, man.

Thanks, brother. Thank you very much. I do have a couple, you know, little sort of fun questions just to ask you.

Let's do it.

What do you think is the one thing that everybody feels they know or takes for granted is true about AI that is false?

The one thing that everybody thinks that they know that actually is false? Yeah, that's a good one. You came out hot on it.

You want to go to a different one first?

No, I mean, the. I think the best questions are unscripted. I think people get excited about the possibility of AI and then they get deterred by the fear that it's going to be iRobot and it's going to come into their house and kill them. And then they get stuck in inaction to really, like summarize some of the key things that we talked about in this conversation. And it's, it's different for everybody. Everybody really does have different perspectives on it. Because for the first time in a long time, we're talking about a technology that is ultimately the most personal, fastest growing, hyper evolving, and by design, unique and different. It's not the Internet where it's based off of binary bits that is either this or that. Nothing about this is boolean where it's true or false. It's not even politics where there's gray area. It's just, it's, it's, it's different for everybody. People don't know what to make of an evolutionary technology that they can't yet visualize for themselves. And one thing that I am seeing is that the more we do lean into it, the more we try things, we're finding what we like about it.

I think a lot of people think that AI is like a fire and forget thing. It's going to take your job, it's going to do everything for us. If I've learned anything from this or other conversations, it. It's not necessarily the case. It'll take some things, but that's probably for the best.

Yeah. Did you really want to keep doing that thing for the rest of your life that AI just took over?

Yeah.

Probably not now. And I say that both with empathy and sympathy. In cases that, yes, AI has taken jobs, AI has caused layoffs. AI has now started to remove entire industries. I used to hire research assistants to help me prep for when I taught within 10. Like specifically when I would give talks or everything else, because I wanted that support. I will never hire a human to do my research for me again because I have deep research processes that will run 247 and they are objectively better. I'm not trying to be an asshole about that. I'm calling it the way it is.

Yeah.

So because of that, yes, those will be replaced. But the fact is I will still die on this hill as well, is that I truly believe AI will create more jobs than it will take. Because we didn't have the car mechanic until we had the car. We didn't have the car until we had the factory line. There's this progression and all of that is technology. So if you are fundamentally resistant to AI, you kind of are resistant to technology. And you have to ask yourself why? Why wouldn't I want to think about it that way?

Well, if we want to build the kind of world we want to see that has AI in it, it requires our own agency.

It kind of requires it.

Keep your hand on this thing.

Yeah. On the law of innovation curve. Right. Where you've got the very early adopters and then you've got the early majority. And then you've got the majority, the late majority. You guys have seen that, that curve. This has been around since the 60s. It's just now gaining traction. So I am very willing to say we're still in the very early adopter stage. ChatGPT the latest stance that they gave is there at 700 million weekly active users. It's wild when you think about the amount of saturation of people who are using a product in three single years weekly, not even monthly, but they went as broad as to say weekly. So for that much habit changing, what's coming in another three. And if somebody can't find themselves in one product, the beautiful thing about the innovation of all of this is somebody's going to find it in something else.

Yeah. You're a family man. You mentioned your kids.

I am.

And among other things, I think you got to run off to some volleyball games here pretty soon.

Yeah, it's coming, but very quick.

How are you preparing the girls now for an AI future? What are you teaching them?

It starts with being honest with them kids. And in this case I have teenagers, so they're more adults than kids now, which I'm also coming to terms with just as a human being. Yeah, but whether you have a five year old or you have a 15 year old, I think the beautiful thing about adolescence in general is that you're shaped by outside perspectives in such a defining way that it leads you up until your early adulthood, like around 17, 18, 19, where then you need to start making decisions for yourself and you start locking into values and then carrying those with you. So one of the things I'm doing with my kids is I remind them that tools are available out there. I don't force them. I don't say you have to use ChatGPT to answer that. But for example, Olive is 14. She's a freshman in high school this year. I popped into her room the other night and I was checking on her and she was doing her homework and I had no idea what kind of math she was doing that's far passed out of my mind like fractions and exponents and all that stuff. And I just asked her if she needed any help on what she was doing. She's no, I got it. And I'm like, well, remember, Remember I showed you that toggle switch that you could turn on study mode with with chat GPT? If you need a little advice and help thinking about it, don't forget it's there. And she said, that's right. Thanks, dad. And that was enough. I'm not overbearing, I'm not pushing it on him. But at the same time, we'll be in the car and something that easily was Googleable, that would be riddled with ads and everything else that gets us caught up and then targeted. All that mess. They're turning to chat more for just quick answers that are good enough. They don't have to be perfect, but what is perfect? So I find the opportunities to remind them to have honest conversations about it. But at the same time, I show them the work I'm doing, I show them the projects. I, I want them to see the world that I have my hands in building. So that way something will resonate with them a little bit sooner than the kid next to them. But then I want them to talk about it as well. Like this is the Stuff my dad's building, you know, I like that. That's a little happy pride, you know, like my dad knows how to clone people. That definitely opens conversations. They've said that with other kids at the house and these kids just look at me like, do I need to call my parent? So it's a combination of showing as well as making sure they understand that status quo can be what you want it to be.

Yeah, love that. We've talked about some of your big projects now with the clones and whatnot, but you do a lot of smaller scale experimenting. What are some of the cool projects that, that you have built or now building on using AI that you're just excited about if you learn from or doing things in the market?

A million years ago I used to build mobile apps. I built some of the very, very early app store kind of things. And the interesting thing at the time is you had to learn the language in which they were built on if you wanted to release an app. And I always found ways to try to fit square peg in a round hole because I didn't want to full out learn that language. I thought it took time, things like that. One of the things about using AI now is AI is a phenomenal junior coder with the understanding of a mid level engineer. So when you mix someone like me, who is a senior level engineer who's been doing this forever, been CTO level at RAN engineering teams, I know how to prompt AI to do some really amazing things. So mixing my experience with really fantastic coding, I can come up with ideas really quick. And the interesting thing about that is that also is not going to even be necessary in probably three, six, nine months. So I started releasing iOS apps again and I've tried delegating all decisions to AI to say like, what should I build? What's out there? What could be interesting? I built my own mini meditation app just because I didn't find anything that was out there, that I just needed it to do that one thing, but at the same time, and this is going to sound a little wild, but it was quicker for me to build it than for me to go research and find it. And there was more joy in the process. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, posted this earlier in the year that the fast fashion era of personal software is among us. So it's this concept of it's almost quicker to build the thing that you want to have into existence now with AI, as crazy as this sounds, than to go research it and find it. So with that in mind, I have Started shifting my habits towards why don't I just build it? And the other example I'll give you is going back to my three level kind of hierarchy of things. What's something that I'm either not enjoying, it costs too much. All those things. I recently rebuilt DocuSign.

Oh, nice. Okay.

That's one of my other new projects.

Salesforce will be mad.

I. They've got other things on their mind. Not in a way that I'm going for them at their brand, but that I was using Panda Doc. That was just the one that I picked. You know, it's another billion dollar incumbent. $250 a year to renew. And I got like, oh, we're going to charge you. This is the fee. And I'm like, do I need to really pay for that?

Yeah.

So I did a little thinking partner exploration with my buddy Claude, and I asked what really goes into the compliance of a docuSign. I come to find out that it's all just a bunch of basic stuff. Yeah. The person has to opt in that they want to digitally sign. There has to be data retention. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, all that cryptographic stuff, it's all just smoke and mirrors, this whole marketing. So rather than spending $250 to renew with Panda Doc, I had fun with one of my AI coding tools and I just built my own version of a DocuSign platform. I call it QuickSign. It's QuickSign Pro. It's free right now for the first hundred customers. Fun little plug. I haven't even talked about the first time I've said it publicly because I built it on the same couch that we're sitting on right now while we're like watching movies with the kids. So those are a couple examples of just having fun, trying things, getting creative. But also, like, I'm gonna bring back to that fun part. AI can actually bring so much more fun back into the things that you're doing. Yeah. That you just, you never would have thought about that a year ago, even six months ago. But now these are options that you kind of can't ignore.

Yeah. If you want to know the weather in your city too, these are pretty cool.

That's right. I forgot about that. Would you like to sell that one for me?

Oh, God, no. I just, you know.

No, no.

I was fascinated by that.

For everybody who's listening here, one of my very first experiments was I had the idea of could I build a weather podcast? And I am proud to say now that it's been running completely autonomous for over a year and officially the entire network. This is a weather podcast of 16 cities across the world. San Diego, Los Angeles. Over a hundred thousand downloads on the entire network and it still cost me less than a dollar a day to run the whole thing.

Amazing.

And I haven't touched the prompts or anything like that in nine months.

I found it shockingly fun to listen to.

It brings joy to the worst of scenarios when Chicago is under snow or whatever else. The reviews are fantastic.

It's gonna rain. Bring an umbrella with you.

You should bring an umbrella.

It's a good day to snuggle up.

With some tea, enjoy the smell of the fresh rain. It's fantastic.

All right, coming up on the end here. Just real quick. I don't think I've ever asked you this, but if you didn't end up going down the tech route or getting involved in the impact sector, what do you think you would have done? What's a path you just haven't followed that might have been fun?

It's a great question. I was a DJ in high school. I've always loved music. Like high school, early college. I was already in tech when I really found the joy in that. So it's hard. It's hard to know. But I grew up in service. You know, I'm an eagle scout. So from the very, very earliest years I was learning, it feels good to be in service. So something service based. Absolutely. I don't, I really don't know what it is, but what I learned, at least because I took the tech route, is tech, AI, automations, all these things. That's the digital representation of the same thing. Just the. The act of service means a lot to me. So I really don't know other than it would be something that would have relationship as part of it. It would be something that I could find myself trying to be the generous human that I really am proud of. Yeah. But we will never know because this is my insane life that I latched onto and there's no turning back now.

You're in it now, brother. With dependence.

With dependence.

All right, last question for you. So anybody listening to this, you know, who wants to continue their education and I get more comfortable, get some advice. What resources would you direct them towards? What have you found influential? And you run an AI support circle and training circle and office hours. How can people get in touch with you to connect directly or just benefit from, you know, all this experience and brainstorming?

You can definitely find me, Jim Carter.

Me.

I've got all my links, everything there. I've got a bunch of free AI resources, anything just to really kind of get you started. But the most fun, going back to fun, the most fun way that I love sharing right now is remember how I mentioned I build digital clones? I built one of me. So I've trained a digital clone on myself. Everything I've spoken, written, when I ran my mastermind, every newsletter, every AI tool I've reviewed, recordings like this full circle. This recording will go right back into it and serve all the conversations moving forward. Trained it on almost a million words that I've written or spoken. And you can pick my digital brain 24. 7@askjc3.com Ask JC in the number 3. And not only is it again a fun experiment, but it's actually one of my favorite ways to give. I have lots of people who come in there and ask it a random question that they probably wouldn't be able to get my attention on. And I love seeing how that's actually serving in a new way.

Yeah. As you've opened my eyes to some of those tools and we've tinkered with some that you've built or something you've discovered or, you know, I've just, I've been shocked at how engaging it is, how accurate the information is that you get and how much it it captures the personality and voice spirit of the person behind it. It's really incredible.

It really is. Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Well, we can keep talking for hours, but I think that's a good place to leave it. Jim, thanks so much. I love collaborating with you. I love the accountability partner stuff. Thanks for sharing your time and your insights with us. Always great to see you. It doesn't happen often enough. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Right back at you, man.

Well, that's our show for today. We've been away for a while, but we're excited to get rolling again with some amazing guests. Big thanks to Jim for joining us today and for giving us so much to think about. Please join us next time when our guest will be social entrepreneur and impact strategist Andrew Means. Andrew joined Altruist recently as an advisor and our conversation goes deep in ways that nonprofits in philanthropy can do a better job with how they use their data and some of the opportunities and challenges our community faces in this strange technological and political era we find ourselves in. I hope you'll join us. Cause and Purpose is a production of altruist.org if you haven't yet checked out the platform we're building, please drop us a line. We'd be more than happy to give you a demo. Thank you all for listening, and we look forward to speaking with you again soon.