How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Every Business – Including Yours with David Selinger

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

We're talking with David Sellinger. We're talking about doing big things in business, being a, you know, learning, moving up, becoming a CEO, staying in charge in the right kind of way and which means accepting the blame when things go wrong and create, you know, the other thing David, we talk about is creating the environment where other people can excel, you know, and if they're not excelling, we have to take that and first look at ourselves and say, do I have the wrong person in the wrong spot or whatever. In fact, one of the first things I learned about as I got close to a lot of Big Time Fortune 500 CEOs in New York is how well they were at analyzing people. The right people, getting the right people in the right spots. And has that been a. It's kind of a fun thing in many ways because you can get, you know, it's like getting, changing a tight end to a quarterback, you know, if he needs to be a quarterback, you know, if you're a football coach, you know, it's just like, just, you know, he's just average in that position. But over here he can.

One of my mentors said horses for courses, he used to say whenever we talked about people, horses for courses. And, and that you may have a great horse, it's just the wrong course and you may have a bad horse. You just, you have to make the decision very, very quickly. How you analyze this. And this is why I go to working the problem, right? What is the problem is the problem. The process is the problem. The communication is the problem. The ownership here. And the other thing that I like to understand when I work these problems, understand the root cause is what is the middle manager saying? Because the middle manager is always going to have more access to the CEO than the person that's one layer lower. And if they're blaming their employees, I apply the same level of logic to them that I apply to myself, right? When I look at this problem, this is my problem. If you're blaming your employees and then you do the same thing tomorrow, I know exactly where the problem is. Don't think that you tricked me. I'll nod my head and I'll say yes, and I'll listen to everything you have to say. And that may annoy other people who think like, oh, look, Sally's getting The wool pulled over his eyes and then all of a sudden that person isn't at the company anymore two days later. And I think that's part of it too. Like, I don't fire people angry very often. I don't think I have actually in probably 10 years, I used to get upset at people and fire them. If I'm angry at anyone at the time that I'm firing somebody, it's always me.

Yeah.

And that's because I probably have waited too long. If you're just not this fit, that doesn't mean you're a bad person. Go.

I think you're a smarter guy if you have that feeling that you waited too long. Because the good thing about that is you gave them every chance. You know what I'm saying is you gave them the chance to turn around and that way you're not going to have any self doubt later, you know.

You know, I'm okay with one or two chances. The times when I'm. And I'm always good to reward loyalty with another chance.

Right.

I don't reward loyalty with a position. Right. That just again sets everyone up for failure. If you've been with us for four years and you've tried something and it's just not working, cool. Do you want another chance? Do you want to try something else? And what your loyalty's earned you is that ability to have that conversation. And I'm all in there. If we reach the point where there isn't a good fit anywhere, then, you know, when I'm letting somebody go, a lot of times it's like, look, this isn't working. And I think you know that and I know that we've given this another shot. Right. Let's, let's go. And, and so I don't, I don't find that when I'm letting people go, I'm, I'm upset. I find a lot of the times, hopefully I've done a good enough job that they're not that upset. But I also, again, I have to remember that it's my job not to give them so much of a chance that it hurts other people. That is fundamentally my job.

Let's switch gears and for a minute. I appreciate all the time you've given here, but we don't need. I'd be doing a bad job if I let you get away without explaining why. We should all pay more attention to artificial intelligence and what's happening in the world today with artificial intelligence. I don't think there's any, anybody better out there to Enlighten us on that subject and maybe bring it into our businesses, you know, things.

Yeah, sure, happy to talk about that. I do have to scoot in a little bit, but you know, I mean I've been in the AI world for going on about 20 world now, 20 years now, and in the professional side and about 25 years, including my academic work. And you know, the history of artificial intelligence has been one of people in the academic shoes making big promises and people in the lay part of the world saying oh my God, it's going to take over the world and launch nuclear missiles and become sentient and then that not happening and then us losing belief in it. And so when I talk about artificial intelligence, I'm talking about a specific type of technology right now that that is not yet designed to reach census, is not designed to launch nuclear missiles. But what it is doing is analyzing our speech, understanding us, talking, speaking back to us. This is the Alexis of the world, the series of the world, to a lesser degree, and I do mean lesser degree by the way. And it's a type of technology called deep learning. It was invented in around 2012 and it's what recognizes your friends faces when you post on Instagram and Facebook and things like that. It's what creates the filters on Snapchat and on Instagram. And what deep learning can do is it can understand text images and actually interact with people in like a game theory sense, playing games like chess and go and things like that. Better than any human being could have ever guessed. Right? Like so in fact go is it's an ancient Chinese game. And in 2014 the biggest experts in the field thought that AI could not beat a human being master for another 20 to 25 years. And then deep learning entered the scene and it's now so good that it had beat the masters like immediately after that. And then it was able to recognize images so that I can run an AI on my computer to analyze videos on my desktop or my laptop. That's better than what the NSA had 10 years ago by a country mile by. The best thing the NSA could run on their supercomputers, I can run on my laptop now at home. And that's a huge step in technology. It's not maybe the like sentience. My Alexa can now have a conversation with me about Star Trek and we can have a debate about whether it's better than Star Wars. That's not happening yet, but it can do these very specific things better. The way that I kind of describe it, I do a lecture series for business schools is if you kind of think about AI starting at like chimpanzee level and then reaching kind of dumb Homer Simpson and then reaching human sentience, we're just kind of reaching the Homer Simpson level of intelligence with AI now, what can we do in our businesses? I think it's going to transform almost all of our businesses. Now if that's just in a little transactional way, hey, I'm a doctor and now instead of having to dictate to a person, I can dictate to Google Translate and do text, speech to text. And it's going to be better than paying a human. It's going to be faster and it's going to be easier. And by the way, doctors have horrible handwriting to this day. And so that's an important thing to be done. There used to be these huge swaths of translators and dictators that did this for doctors. Or I'm a lawyer and I need to do discovery and I need to find out if this person talked about this subject. Even using code words, AI can now discover code words and text messages better than and search billions and billions of documents better than an army of people could. And so it's going to touch all of these various industries. Now what it's going to also do is it's going to actually transform some industries. It's going to fully transform security, it's going to fully transform our home and our home technologies. It's going to fully transform the way that we interact with each other on video. And we're already starting to see those things. And so AI as a technology has matured to the point where instead of it over promising and under delivering, in fact, if anything, it's under promise now and started really over delivering on some of these incredibly hard computational projects that we've been working on.

Two things. First of all, when you say I can analyze video better than anything NASA.

NSA.

10 years ago, what do you mean by that?

So one of the most important problems in video analysis is facial recognition, right? And facial recognition was a problem that in 2010, the state of the art was like a 60, 50, 60, 70% accuracy level. And as you can see on Facebook, like when you upload a picture like hey, is this your best friend or your wife? Like instantly, that would have taken NSA computers like super computer level and still would have performed worse 10 years ago. If you then say, hey, is this person playing soccer or is this person setting a bomb? Computers now, my laptop can identify that with like a 70% level of accuracy. Whereas the NSA couldn't even do that with like 40, 50% accuracy 10 years ago. It is amazing what these systems can do.

Now tell me, so tell me now you have a home security business and using AI, what can it do now? And then what is going to come from that? Like, if what I would say if I was you, okay, and trying to sell me on a home security system is like, get on board now and get used to this. Because this is programmed with artificial intelligence rather than beams and lasers and light switches that go on when you walk in front of it, you know?

Yeah, I mean, I would, I would make it a little bit simpler, which is I am seeing a trend in crime that is ridiculous. And all of us are seeing it right now. Right? I mean, violent crime has a 20 year trend downward. And in the last three years, starting in 2019, it started going up. Violent crime for the first time in 20 years increased in 2019, and that's continuing then. If you look at property crimes, outdoor crimes, they are at such a level that most people now live in a metropolitan where you cannot call the police and expect the police to respond at all to a lot of these crimes that are occurring. I'm talking about, you know, the obvious one as a residential person is package theft. But it's catalytic converter theft. It's smashing grabs in your cars, it's theft from your porch, it's theft from your backyard, it's breaking into your apartment complex and stealing everything out of the lobby. It's vandalism from homelessness, it is vandalism from meth heads. These are crimes that are at such a level that we all need some level of protection. So my sales pitch to you is if you own a business or you own a home or have a family, protect them, it's simple. Use a solution that works. And I just so happen to be the only salesperson in the world that sells a solution that works. So, you know, that's my sales pitch because it's true.

The uniqueness with the artificial intelligence gives and edge. How, how would you know the normal.

Stop those crimes while they're in progress. So what I do is I use AI. So when you enter my home, for example, the moment you cross the property line, you're being watched by our cameras and the AI is identifying if you're doing something suspicious. The moment you do something that looks suspicious, even if it's just loitering at my front door for 10 seconds, there's a live guard watching you. And that live guard's job is to intervene using Two way audio. And they will call the police, they will call you, they will intervene in seconds. And what that does is two things. One, most people that are committing crimes don't want to get caught.

Right.

They just realize that they're not going to get caught most of the time. So by hearing a live person say, this is deep sentinel security, I see you starting to vandalize that property. Stop. They just stop. The second thing though is when we call the police, I'm not calling and saying, hey, my house got vandalized yesterday. Can you come take pictures?

Oh my God.

You're like one of 500 people. I'm calling and saying, hey, there is a white male that's 6 foot 2 with a crowbar about to break into this house. Can you send some folks to go stop that? That's what cops are doing their job for. That's why people signed up to be a cop. I just gave cops a crime in progress, a verification of that crime, a description of the suspect, a description of the weapon, and the exact location of that suspect. That means cops can put down whatever they're doing, stop writing that ticket, get in their car, drive 30 seconds, drive, show up and be a hero. And today when we have this kind of conflict existing between cops and citizens and they all want to do that, they're doing their job so that they can be a hero. We're giving them that opportunity. So we've opened up two different things that I think everyone wants to be a part of getting in front of.

Absolutely.

I want to be a part of. Like, sweet. When we call the police department, they're not sending police officers into dangerous situations where they don't know what they're getting into. They know exactly what they're getting into. We have, we have examples where we have officers in crime ridden cities that are going to arrest somebody for a package theft. Why? Because they're trying to protect a specific neighborhood. This neighborhood's been under siege. And so they have officers there and when we call them, hey, there was a package stuff to this address. They're like, oh my God, that's awesome. There's a cop a block away. They go and arrest the guy. They get to, from a police officer's community relations perspective, they get to walk back to that house.

Yeah.

Knock on the door, say, hey, ma', am, I'm so glad you're home. I just wanted to give you your Amazon package that just got stolen.

Yeah.

That's so great for police departments. It's great for residents, it's great for Businesses. It's bad for criminals, but it's great for everybody else. And that's our sales pitch, right? We solve the problem for everybody. And by using AI, we make it accessible to everyone and at a price point people can afford.

And so to follow up on that, if someone hears this and they say, right up my alley, want to get it right away, where do they go?

Deep sentinel.com or something, you can learn about it. You can order a system right there. You can reserve one of our future systems. We have wireless systems, we have wired systems. And all of them come these. Our big pitch line is we're the only cameras that come with guards included. There's an AI guard and there's a live human guard where the only system in the world where the cameras come with guards included.

Sounds like you've got a winning edge.

You know, I mean, it's the fact I get to say we're the only company that does this. I love doing that. I'll take any opportunity to do that because it's true and it's awesome and it's what, you know, I mean, it's what I want for my family. My wife hates cameras. Big secret. She hates cameras. But you know what? We have a ton of them. Not because of me, but because she loves the this knowing that they're safe. She loves knowing that they're there.

Yeah, you have to. Hey, thanks so much. This has just been so much fun, David, and wish you the best with the company. Let's check back in with each other down the road and we'll get a chance to find out what new adventures you march into with the growth of Deep Sentinel.

Thank you so much, Larry. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you. And until next time, thanks for.

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