Leadership in the Age of AI with Pete Sacco

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to the speak like a leader podcast with john bates. Welcome to the show. With me today is Pete Sacco and I think that you will enjoy hearing what he has to say. He is an entrepreneur, he's a technologist and a modern day mystic and he is a 30 year veteran of designing and building and maintaining data centers like for real, big deal data centers. We'll talk about that. And now he's creating a new company called Gray Wolf Data Centers. And we're going to talk about this because it's just all wrapped up in everything that's happening right now in the world of technology. And uh, and we're going to talk about a lot of other things too. So thank you for joining me Pete.

Speaker A: Thanks, I appreciate it John. It's been uh, it's a real honor to uh, you know, uh, to be on the show. So thank you.

Speaker B: You're welcome. Glad to have you here. So listen, you know, it's called Live Like a Leader and one of the things that I focus on is communication. And you have had a 30 year career.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Designing and building and maintaining these data centers which are really at the hub of everything that's been going on with the Internet. Now it's AI, now it's. Tell me a little, tell me a little bit about um, you know, what, what do you think about when I say leadership and communication and the importance of these things? What, what just what comes up for you?

Speaker A: That's a great start. I mean, you know, it's funny being a CEO for 30 years, you've seen all the ups and all the downs and the data center industry has gone through not one, not two, but three complete metamorphoses with we're in the throes of the next one in AI and dare I say AI caught the data center industry napping. But throughout all of that, you need to be the leader that's going to inspire moving, you know, moving the company forward. I would say in my years as a CEO I really had a few things that had to be part and parcel to, to you if you're going to be uh, a good leader. Uh, the first one, you know, like any CEO, you have to be the master of cash flow. Right. Because no business is going to operate without, you know, without cash flow. So whether the company was on its ups or downs or we were migrating, you have to pay attention to cash flow. I would say second, you either going to be the visionary of the company or you're going to be the integrator of the company. But it's really difficult to be both. Right. One of my strengths, um, is as a visionary. Um, I'm not putting your hammer to the nail. Go just ask my wife. I'm not the guy getting the planks, uh, hammered together. Um, but I've got a pretty good sense, especially in the last 30 years, of where the data center industry is going. I, I like to say when I started the company back in my 30s. Right. I thought I knew what I was doing at 58 years old, we all did. Yeah. At 58 years old, dare I say, I absolutely. Sure. I know where the data center industry is going. And today I have a bit more confidence, black swans aside, as to where I have to lead my people. In order to do that, I would say the third thing you need to be is you need to be today the job of the CEO as master motivator. Right. You are the coach, you are the motivator. You are the mentor. That hasn't always been the case in the workforce. Right. If you go back to the Jack Welch days and the Le Coke days, you know, with that fire, the bottom 20% to scare the crap out of the top 20%. Right. Uh, you know, that, that, that those days are gone. And today I'm just the master motivator. And again, I'm drawing on another one of my strengths. Strengths are. Right. I call them superpowers in the book. Sorry, over that shoulder, you know. So that book was recently published, Living in Bliss. Achieve a balanced existence of body, mind and spirit. It's important to me because, um, it's really the cathartic tale of the last 30 years of my life as a leader, as a business leader, um, you know, and doing that. And one of the key things elements in that book was identifying what were my superpowers. Well, another one was master motivator, storyteller. And so that is something you use when you are a visionary and when you are creating culture within a company, which is the next piece, you must own the culture of your companies.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So those four things in being a true leader are being master of cash flow. You know, be the master motivator, be the owner of your culture. Um, you know, and, and, um, yeah. Uh, those are, those are the things that are endemic to being a great, you know, CEO and leader of your organization today.

Speaker B: Well, I mean, and I love that storytelling and culture came, you know, in on that list because I, I definitely think that the way I look at it, your stories as a leader, whether you, the CEO or another influential leader anywhere in the Organization. I think that the easiest day to influence culture was yesterday or the day before or the day before. Like, it doesn't get easier. You know, it gets harder. And the most direct way to influence culture, I think, is probably first through your actual actions, but then, um, you know, next it would be through stories. Right? Because I think stories are the myths that create the mythology that is your culture. And if you tell stories that are meaningful and that communicate your values and that communicate, like, how we do things as a company, there's no more direct route to interfere to, you know, influencing company culture. I don't. I think, you know, there's no doubt.

Speaker A: I mean, John, anthropologically speaking, right. That was the only way that we actually used to communicate, right. Was through the stories that we told. Right. And so, yeah, um, it's been a part of human history as long as there's human history, and it will continue to be that, you, uh, know, to be the case. And so, yeah, um, it was always just something, you know, when I went back and I started looking at what are the things in a very much Dan Sullivan kind of way, you know, the. The business consultant, he wrote all those good books, the Gap and the Gain and. And who not how in the who not how book. You know, understanding what you're good at is critical. And, you, uh, know, you know, God bless the CEOs that are good at storytelling out there, because telling stories are what engage people. Whether I'm engaging a client, whether I'm engaging a vendor, whether I'm engaging an employee, you know, nobody wants to preach to. They want to hear the stories. The good and the bad.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: I'm a pretty devout meditator. And I can tell you one secret to being a successful meditator is we need to forget both the good and the bad and live in the moment. Right. The moment is everything. And so, uh, you know, and so that being a good leader has to be, um. Usually a lot of them are pretty good meditators as well. And being able to understand and appreciate the present moment.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's good. Um, and I, you know, and I think that it's good to have strengths, and I think it's good to lean into your strengths. I think as a leader, if storytelling is not a strength of yours already, I think it's worth developing. Because one of the things that I would. That I always remind people of is that even if you don't think you have storytelling skills, you do. Because if you didn't have storytelling skills built into you genetically, you would have been plucked out of the gene pool generations ago because that's how important it is.

Speaker A: Yeah. I love when people come to me and they're like, uh, don't ask me to sell. I'm m not a seller. I'm like, you're full of it. You sell every day of your life whether you want to call it selling or not. Right. And storytelling is just another one of those, uh, those muscles that, you know, we, we probably hide under the guise of another name.

Speaker B: So now let me ask you, uh, because I'm going to paint this picture. Um.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: For 30 years you have been. And like, I mean this is a compliment in some ways. You've basically been an ultra geek. Right. Like you have been in this deep dark space of technology that most people don't even really sort of know it exists. And they sort of don't, but they don't really know about it. And maintaining data centers where everything actually is happening.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then all of a sudden you go from, I get the entrepreneur and the technologist. Tell us a little bit about where did the modern mystic come into this front? Like, how did that happen?

Speaker A: Let me back into it. Right. There's a story there. Right.

Speaker B: And so the story there was yes.

Speaker A: My background was as an electrical engineer. And so I designed, I'm 58, so I designed power supplies for the defense industry during the first two Gulf wars, which led a lot to my government contracting and power electronics. I'm an electrical engineer by trade. Right. And so from there we went, I went into the data center industry. Um, and like I said, it's gone through multiple iterations. And how were data centers used? Right. First every company had a data center. Then everybody went colocation. Now everybody's went cloud. Now we're migrating out of cloud into hybrid environments where I have a little bit in the cloud and a little bit in my premise and a little bit in colocation location. And now AI came on and AI is changing everything. Right. My new little talk and getting into the idea of the modern day mystic is that if AI was a clock, if AI was a 24 hour clock, we're only at 2am Even though it feels like it's been around a really long time. We're at 2am, we have 22 hours left to go and at 12, halfway done, we will not recognize the world. It is going to be a completely different place and most of it is going to be predicated around what do humans do when we are no longer identifying ourselves with what our intellect is and how much can we sell our skills for in the labor pool? Because it's about to be valueless. Because the machines and the robots and the AI and uh, the AI that spawns the robotics is not going to do what we do a little bit better. It's going to do it thousands of times better. And if you don't think the American business owner is going to gravitate towards that, you're crazy. And so we are going to live in a world in a pretty dystopic time in uh, that how do we identify self worth? What is the world going to look like with massive unemployment? What are people going to do? But look, I'm an optimist. If there's anything, and we will, like humankind has done time and time again, we will persevere and we need to maintain focus. At the end of this, like the TEDx talk that I'm working on, we've spoke when we, when we met, the TEDx talk I'm working on is let's stop looking at AI as the rival and let's recognize that AI is the mirror that's going to allow us to become more human because the world is about to change. And thank God because at the end of the AI, at the end of the dystopia, we land in post scarcity M and I believe that means there is no crime because there is no want, because there is no need. And yes, 90% of people aren't working, but you know what? That's 90% of people who are the governments will figure out, if the AI doesn't figure it out for the governments, how to fund the world when all value is created autonomously and people will get back to doing what people always did well, spend time with one another, be selfless, be altruistic. Like I said, there won't be want because there won't be need. We'll live in a post scarcity world where all value is created mechanically. And I say let the machines do the mechanical, let human beings be humans. And I think that the machines are going to explain to us long before we fully understand the science. Um, you know, I believe consciousness is fundamental to the universe, not the other way around. And that we are ultimately going to discover that all the, the point of all of this was that we are all interconnected in a way. And so therefore that's what we have to look forward to, is to spend time with one another because our children's children's children will look at us like we were cavemen. Cavemen like you went to Work, you did things you had to labor, you had to worry, you had to. That doesn't exist today. Today we are just there to support one another. And I think the machines ultimately. And how's this for optimism? I think the machines in the end will treat mankind far better than man has ever treated himself or each other. Yeah, machines will treat us better than we've ever treated ourselves or each other.

Speaker B: Wow. So I would love to believe this. I don't know if I'm thoroughly convinced, but I also would admit that I, uh, that I probably haven't thought about it as deeply or been as close to it as you are. So, so was it this like epiphany around AI that had you go modern day mystic or, or did you have a, um.

Speaker A: No. I'll tell you what, the whole journey, it's where, how the book was, right? One day I woke up 40 years old, £360, unhappily.

Speaker B: And just, just for people that are not seeing this, that are just listening, you definitely, you know, uh, you are in good shape, right? You are not overweight.

Speaker A: You're seeing the 30 year old older, but, but improved. Let's call it like a wine. Ah, yeah, absolutely. But I was £360. I was unhappy. I was successful financially, but unfulfilled and unhappy in an unhappy marriage. I was estranged from my son. My son's 37 today because I didn't raise him right. But more importantly, I wasn't happy. And so I'll never forget the day I went to the doctor and the doctor, I hadn't been feeling well, and she just reached across the table and she was clapping and I'm like, what's going on? She's like, peter, congratulations, you've joined the ranks of the unhealthy. Here's your blood sugar medication, here's your blood pressure medication. You know, all your stuff. She goes, you join the ranks of the unhealthy. She goes, keep it up, you won't live to your grandparents age. And that scared the crap out of me. Now I'd like to say that that would turn to everything around, right? But humans, you know, we're a tough animal, right? And we need a low point, right? We need a low point in order to kick ourselves off. You know, uh, in the book, I equate it to. It's like throwing a rubber ball in the air, right? We throw that rubber ball in the air and we accomplish something, but that rubber ball comes crashing right back to earth, right? And life is like a progressive set of bounces and ups and downs. But it was somewhere along that journey that I realized it's not about the ups and the downs. It's more like being a cork on the ocean. You have no control over the ups and the downs, right? You just have to stay above the water and realize there's an infinite sky above you and basically an infinite depth below you and just exist in the moment and be satisfied with reality, be satisfied with where you are, get rid of expectations. And by getting rid of expectations which starts to improve, you could see where the mysticism started to come in. Because I started to another strength learning. And as I read about what are all these great people, what did the ancient mystics talk about, what are the ancient texts talking about? And you always get to the same conclusion. At our heart we are all connected. And so I started to realize that one I committed, I created a framework upon that first day that the doctor said life's got to change for you. And I went down by my parents house and I said look, I got to make some changes in my life. One, I'm going to get healthy. Two, I'm going to get divorced. Three, I'm going to get remarried. Four, I'm going to have children with this woman who I do not know yet. Five, I'm going to build a relationship with my son in six, I'm going to discover what it means to be happy in life. I'm going to become happy and I'm going to teach the rest of the world how to be happy along with me. Now it took 30 years but this guy is way different, I'm happy to say. Look those girls over my shoulder there, you can't see the third one that's family 2.0. I got seven, five and three year old girls at the ripe age of 58. And if you told me Pete, do the math of all the decisions that you would need to make to have a 37 year old son, 12, nine and two year old grandchildren, seven, five and three year old completely happy. A published author, a speaker, successful businesses and a bit of a unicorn. And then I'm 58 and I'm knee deep in AI and where the world is going and how humankind is going to react to it. I'd have told you you were nuts, right? But here's where I am and I can't imagine living any other time than right now because it's like what of all Harari wrote in his book Homo deus Man spent the last millennia trying not to die by disease, famine, and war and man's going to spend the next millennia living as gods and living forever. And I think it's going to be a post scarcity world. We're going to live, we will figure it out. No technology has ever destroyed mankind before. This is not the technology that going to do it. It's the most prophetic technology the mankind has ever wrought. The calculator didn't kill us. The Internet didn't kill us. The PC didn't kill us. The servers didn't kill us. Technology TV didn't kill us. AI is not going to kill us either.

Speaker B: Yeah, so, so that's, I mean that is a like, that's. I know that it's 30 years is a long time, but it's a pretty profound change for you. What was like looking back over the whole thing, I imagine that that moment in the doctor's office was probably this one of the scariest moments. But then I got to imagine you came out, you said, I'm going to do these things, I'm going to get healthy, I'm going to do all this stuff. What was one of the really low points along the journey?

Speaker A: The low point along that journey. Remember I said it's like that bouncing ball, you keep thinking it's go higher highs, right? But it comes crashing down and uh, I'll forget, you know, there was a point in time when, you know, uh, the company started to financially struggle. Remember the data center industry? Hot now, but for me, a guy who was building data centers for every enterprise and all of a sudden the whole world went colocation and cloud. My world came crashing down, right? And you know, you learn to adjust, but you learn to adjust because you didn't adjust back here. So you learned to adjust now. And so, uh, you know, luckily, right, I'm a, you know, we were lucky enough to get through it, but let me tell you, it hit me harder than it should have. And I started to have severe anxiety. Not only that, but remember the journey I got the divorce. That was hard, right? Um, you know, it was hard, right? We need a lot of alcohol to tell that story, right? But you know, it was hard. You know, I had found the next person who I wanted to spend the rest of my life. And yep, I was committed to having kids with her. But the anxiety of am I ready 50 years old or 40 or 9 years old and I'm going to have kids, young kids again. And I was building the relationship with my son. So things piled up on me more than they should have. And that was really the first time. I had never seen a therapist before, but I um, I reach. I smart guy, right? So I reached out to. Okay, what, what do I need? And I found cognitive behavioral therapy. Um, and I found a doctor locally, CBT. Um, and uh, Dr. David Glaser out there. And uh, and he helped me. And so he taught me one of the most prophetic things that I had learned early on. He goes, pete, do not make the events of your life which you have little control over your problems. And boy, let me tell you, he also gave me a book. It was a book by Dr. David Burns. The Feel Good Handbook. And I gotta tell you, that was the next. Remember I talked about the rubber ball thrown in there. That was my next rubber ball. Because that's when I realized I had already started fixing the body. The body turned out to be easy. Fixing the mind, little bit more difficult. But as I learned about fixing the mind, I learned that one. It is possible. I learned that one. We're not our genes, right? We have an epigenetics that by moving the right levers, living right, we can actually heal our body. I learned that we have neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. And though I believe that we don't actually make conscious decisions, our subconscious makes decisions and our consciousness blurts it out justifies them. Yeah, that's exactly right. However, by giving ourselves new experiences, new learning and new understanding, we can reform our subconscious to make improved decisions. By the way, the modern mystic will be. Well take that at a step further. I believe that we are quantum beings. And that all an infinite number of us's exist all at one time. And we are the observer of all of those probabilities. And our observation collapses one of those probabilities into the objective reality that we live out. And so therein lies more we need to. There's the meaning of life. If you will improve this mind body shell so that it can have whatever outward success it wants. As long as it recognize it's part of a greater whole. And it is not an inward task or journey, but an inward remembering that we are from a source. And from that source will we return. And that's what the ancient mystics meant when they said life eternal. It just didn't mean life ever after. It meant life ever before and life ever after.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah.

Speaker A: And so we will return back to the source. So I believe it's all. There's a connectedness to all things there. And um. And it's our job to make this mind body, self as resilient as possible. Not just for the outward journey, but for the inward remembering.

Speaker B: That's. I think that's fabulous. I. I love that. And now I'm in, uh, a. I'm. I'm going to push you back into that moment one more time because it's my job. And then. And then I want to talk a little bit more about what's going on with data centers, which sounds like. Like, you know, if you're listening to this, you're like, what do you mean you want to talk about data centers? Hold on. It's really interesting, and there's a lot going on, and you'll find this very interesting, but. So I'm going to push you back for a minute, Pete.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because there was that moment when you. I guess it was about whatever, eight years ago when you went to see the therapist.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Okay. Now I'm, um. Let me roll you back to just a little bit before you made that decision.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Take us into your mindset and where you were and what was going on before you decided to see the therapist and before all this stu. Like, you know.

Speaker A: No, I got it. It's dark, right? It's a dark place because you don't think, you don't really know the depths of your own darkness until you're there. And I tell you, it's a terrible combination when you have anxiety. For me, it manifested as I had no problem falling asleep, but I couldn't sleep more than 2, 3 hours at a time. And then I was up and I was pacing because my mind was just going and going and going and thinking and permutation after permutation. And, you know, you just was it. And then when you don't sleep, you're worried about not sleeping, which makes you not sleep anymore. And, boy.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: You know, I've learned now from. Again, the body. Sorry. To me, sleep is one of the most important things to prioritize in our life, along with a few other things. Right. But sleep is way up. Right.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Um. And so it manifested with me of just hitting that bottom when I just couldn't take another day of sleeplessness, of worry of, am I really going to bring a child into this world and try to satisfy a spouse again?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: When you didn't even like who you were.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, you. And we all have a bottom. And I thank God today, John, that my bottom was shallow compared to the bottom of many people. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, but it was my bottom. And so, you know, so.

Speaker B: And it is all relative. Like, that's important.

Speaker A: It is all relative. And you know, when you're there and you're in pain and you're suffering, and your loved ones, you could see it in their eyes that they're worried about you because you've been the strong one for them all their life. And then they're seeing you struggle. You know, it's at those moments where I remember I. My now wife, man, I owe her everything because she. She was the strong one. She was the one who picked me up. And, uh, you know, she didn't bail on this. And it was funny. It was something Dr. David Glazer said. He goes, you know, he was like, well, Pete, what happens if the business fails? And I'm like, oh, man, I'll disappoint so many people, all the people who I employ and everything. And, you know. And he goes, oh, yeah. He goes, what do you think you'll do then? And I'm like, well, you know, I guess they'll have to go find other jobs. Do you think they'll resent you for that? I mean, some will, some won't. And I said, but, you know, I'll feel bad. And he's like, well, did you do your best? I'm like, yeah, I will have, you know, done my best. And, you know, what. What about your wife? Do you think she cares that, you know, you have. You're a business owner and you're successful in your. I'm like, no, man, she grew up in South America, and, you know, and, you know, so she. To me, this is. She's loving life right now. She just wants kids. She just wants to be happy and raise a family. And so she wouldn't care that you lost your job? And I'm like, no, she wouldn't care in the least. He goes, well, yeah, you know, you're creating all of these environments that haven't happened, and you're eating the world because of things that you're prophesizing, and none of them. And so, uh, that was really the moment that I realized I'm the victim of my own, you know, my own fabrications. And that was the turning point. That was the moment. And that's when I really started to discover, okay, how do I, um, unscramble this? Because this is what the problem was. And that's when I discovered I had been a meditator, but I hadn't really, really understood what meditation was until that moment and really started to dig into. And then I became voracious. And I'm reading, I think the first one I started with Joe Dispenza becoming supernatural. But that was the first, uh, but then that led to the real, the real movers in this Michael Singer. Right. Uh, you know, in his, uh, Untethered Soul.

Speaker B: You know, it's a great book. Oh my God.

Speaker A: Right. You know, unbelievable. And, and just so many people, you know, Sam Harris and, um, you know, love Sam Harris and other things. Right. And there's so many people. I would actually argue there are more people today seeking enlightenment like me than ever before in human history. Because think about it, if you were Jesus, you were Buddha, you were a person that was standing on the pulpit and you were preaching these things, you got killed for it. Yeah, we do a lot of things wrong in this world, but killing people for ideas isn't always one of them anymore.

Speaker B: And so, uh, not as much people

Speaker A: today preaching, you know, this idea of, uh, let's, let's seek enlightenment for all. And, and it's what really, this is what made me pull my bootstraps up and say, okay, we need to make some real changes. And that second set of thing was the one that was most lasting. Right. It was in that time when I really fixed the body and got down to this 195 pound person here, reframed my mind by teaching myself new mindsets of way to learn. I took stock of what I was strong at. Uh, I built a set of core values. Who, who was I and who did I want to become? So my core values haven't changed in many years. Today, today I live with, uh, I live with presence, purpose, and prosperity. And I don't mean prosperity of wealth, I mean prosperity for all. I want to die a selfless person, having lived for others more than for myself.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, and all to what you said earlier, to be a representation of the way that I lived, the best I possibly could. Not to change you, but for you want to change yourself. Yeah, that's it. We can't change anybody. We can just be the best person that we can be.

Speaker B: You know, I, it reminds me of an experience I had when I was, uh, right around 40. I, I had a dot com company, we raised over $80 million in Silicon Valley and beyond. And um, and then in the, you know, On October, like 20th, 2000, our investors came after putting over $80 million into the company. And they said, okay, guys, look, you've been really successful. You did just what we asked you very, very well. You grew, you grew market share like we, you have done a good job and the market has changed. We don't think we can get you any Further investment, and we don't think you can possibly be profitable faster, so we're pulling the plug. And I almost died of an autoimmune disease that came on, I think, because I had not been sleeping enough, and I was. And then that additional stressor. Right. And so I ended up in the hospital in San Francisco, really thinking I was very likely to die because the. My attending physicians looked at me like they were scared. And, uh, it was a really rare thing. And I've never had that experience, you know. And so I said to the universe, I was like, look, my life. I mean, I look back over my life, it had been small and selfish. As I looked back over it, and I said to the universe, look, if you let me walk out of here, big is. I call it the. Big is the beingness of the universe. I said, if you let me walk out of here, I promise my number one goal will be to make a difference. Like that will be above everything else if you just let me walk out of here. And I got to walk out. I was not okay for a long time. I'm okay now. And I've kept that promise as best I can. Like, it's. Live. It's. It lives for me, and it completely transformed my life. Like you, right? Like, yeah, I'm here to make a difference. Like, that's my number one thing. And it's, uh. It's a really great place to live.

Speaker A: Yeah, I heard two things there. One, you're right. We plan and the universe just smiles. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah. And giggles a little bit. Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. Life is going to deal you what. What it deals you. Right. And. And so. But, you know, the. The, uh. The other thing that really resonated with me was that, um. Oh, I lost my train of thought. But. But yeah, I mean, the resiliency that you showed through this is, uh. Um, is. Is what it takes is you take stock and you either quit. You either quit or. Or you got to do something. Oh, I know what I was going to say. The man. The connection between environment and your health is undeniable. And environment just doesn't mean what are we eating, what are we breathing? It's also what are we thinking and what are we feeling. Our environment, of our mental state directly is directly proportional to our fitness to survive.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so unless you are going to become resilient of mind, so goes the mind, so goes the body, and vice versa. And so, uh, yeah, they. The two are intrinsically tied as I've improved my life, mind and body. Right. Uh, you know, they are interchangeable. Um, I have a whole. And all. A lot of the podcasts I do on my side, the Pete Sacco podcast, are all about that connection between mind and body. And the things that I. We talked about. Sleep, right. Sleep is a huge one, right?

Speaker B: Huge.

Speaker A: I can tell you. Building brown fat in your body is how you make yourself weight resilient. Right. Increasing autophagy, your body's ability to get rid of dead and dying cells is what keeps you from getting disease and illness and builds longevity. And so I've got a whole talk track I do on the. On the whole fitness side of the world. Because, look, I just don't want to see those little girls grow. I want to see those little girls be old.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's it.

Speaker A: I want to see them be old. Look, I'm convinced right now that if AI is going to transform health care, I'm convinced right now I will live to 100, at least 120. I know that sounds fanciful, but I'm fairly certain that I will live to be 120 years old. And those kids, the. The sky's the limit. Look, Peter Diamandis out there in his book Longevity talks about the bowhead whale living 200 years, and it's a mammal, and it's like 91, equivalent to a human being. And the green, the Greenland shark is an invertebrate, and it lives 500 years. So, yeah, there's no reason why we can't live that long. And if I told you, like, look, most people I talk to, they're like, man, I don't want to live that long. I'm like, yeah, but if you could live to 200 years old and you could play tennis until 190 of those years, would you still want to live? And the answer is yeah. Yeah, I had enough money and I was healthy and I can be viable. Yeah, I would absolutely want to live. I think that's the world that we're about to move into.

Speaker B: Well, so. And I love that. And like, I can already tell we're going to have to do a part two here at some point. But, uh, but. So we have about 10 minutes left, I think, or so. But. And. And I. I do like. And it. You know, speaking of AI, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about data centers. And, and, uh, like, just for people who, who don't traffic in this stuff. Like, data centers are these big hubs where the Internet comes in and there's all kinds of racks of servers and all kinds of stuff like that. And it used to be that everybody had to have their own data center. And I remember running my, you know, at uh, my first.com company we had like, we had to explain to AT&T what a T1 data line was in Los Angeles because when we said we wanted a T1 they thought we were going to be making a bunch of long distance calls, you know.

Speaker A: Right. Yeah. But anyway, you're right. So the world she changed pretty quick, you know, and technology, you know, and, and technology, it's an exponential movement. Right. Um, um. And you know, before we, before, quickly, before we talk about AI, Every generation is defined by the technology that, that it, that bore it out. Right. So if you go back to our grandparents, right, that pre1945. Right. It was electricity, it was water in the home. It was the initial space race. It was initial. Right. And then my parents, the baby boomers, it was television, you know, and that really kind of revolutionized. And then me, Generation X. Right. Uh, we're arrogant as hell because I like to say we invented everything. Right. We invented the Internet and we invented the cell phone and we invented this. Right. And we were a short generation, but we were that pivotal moment of really the birth of technology. Then generation Y evolved, you know, social media and, and they were the first ones born of technology. Right. I would argue right now the unsung generation is actually the 20 year olds, the generation Z's today that Z is not getting enough credit. Those kids, those 20 year olds today are going to innovate more than every subsequent generation has innovated. Glued together times four. Right. It took 100 years for Kodak to become, to realize that they were not in the photography business, they were in the storing memories business. And they gave away the digital camera to somebody and, and it imploded the company 100. It took TikTok two years to get a billion dollar valuation.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, invent companies that are going to go from zero to $1 billion and back down to zero intergenerationally. And it's never happened like that before.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So AI is going to be what enables that. And AI is enabled by data centers. And so.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, so tell us a little bit because you know, like what we've been doing with, with data centers, if I understand it correctly, up until now is we've been doing a whole bunch of training of LLMs.

Speaker A: So that's what is so the, the big movement, right. Now what we, when people say an AI data center today, what they're referring to is typically a large language Model. Right. In a large language, model is basically the easiest way to explain it is a giant pattern matching machine. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So they take a bunch of, they take a huge vast knowledge of human knowledge, publicly available information, and let's, let's gloss over the whole argument Copyright. Yeah, yeah, let's gloss that one over.

Speaker B: Knowledge.

Speaker A: That's right, that's right. There's going to be copyright law post AI and copyright law pre AI. Right. And so we took all of this body of knowledge and we trained a model to pattern recognize on human language. What was the probability of this word coming before and what's the probability of this word coming after? And by training it on every word ever written that was publicly diagnosed and in training the model and then every subsequent model, we do something called distill. We don't start from ground zero. We actually train it on a model that's already existent and then we improve something about it. And so all of these models are trained on language and on things that are, were written. And so the biggest ones, the ChatGPT, the deep seats, the Claude, uh, they all do something really, really well, whether it's language, whether it's programming, whether it's pictures, whether it's whatever, they all do something better than the other guy. Right. Uh, but they're all trained on public information. But here's the thing, they're going to give way to the next paradigm shift in the data center world. And that is going to be inferencing.

Speaker B: Inferencing?

Speaker A: Yeah, Inferencing inference.

Speaker B: Tell us about that.

Speaker A: Also known as prompting. So when you write a prompt into a GPT, what you are doing is asking the model a question. But the world that we're going to go into isn't going to be in world of human inferencing. It's going to become a world of machine inferencing. Okay, stay with me a moment. Greg adcock owns Figure AI, the other robotics company. There's 18 major robotics companies in the world. Right. I don't think Brett will be too angry that I'm, um, pitching his SPV right now. But spv Special purpose vehicle, nobody goes public anymore. Right. Everybody get private money. His, he's got a pitch deck. He's raising $1.8 billion against a $38 billion valuation. Right. And his pitch deck basically says that in the next 35 years the robotics industry will build, I don't know, something like a billion robots by the end of 2026, a billion robots by 2030, and 10 billion robots by 2035. Well, let me tell you, you know who's going to be doing the inferencing? Robots. Robots are going to be asking the models what do I do next in real time in order to do that. And with 10 billion, by the way, that's more people on the planet. That's a whole lot of inferencing. That's a whole lot of questions. And by the way, it's not just robotics. It's going to be cars, trains, planes, your automobiles, your wristwatch, your stuff, sneakers, your belt, your cell phone, you name the thing. It's going to have some question as to what do I do next based on these sets of sensor data that's coming in. And that's going to change everything because the next paradigm shift is going to be a data center, not that's highly centralized. These giant megalithic data centers that consume fast country's worth of power in one campus. They're going to give way to data centers that sit in every town in America. By the way, it's going to look just like the telecommunications industry looked in the 1990s where every town had something called a pop, a point of presence, and that was to distribute telecommunications to the local home. What we're going to have is going to be an array of data centers that are basically going to be the high performance data centers in every town in the country to which inferencing can push its question up to the model and give a real time response. My company, Greywolf Data Centers is going to be amongst the early entrants into building geographically diverse, highly available, high performing data centers near the edge. And I got it, I, a lot of people we just glazed over like what the hell is that guy talking about? But, but that's the world. It's a complex world. And the amazing innovation that is going on in the AI industry across every vertical is vast. And I guess maybe if I'm going to leave another piece of, another piece of positive right because I'm, I'm really tired of the Terminator generation, right? We were all born of uh, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the machines were going to take over BODMA stock. Was the guy who um, he had ah, stability AI, one of the first companies that did that text to image, right? That, that became the thing of the big on Mid Journey and Dolly and all, all of those text to image things. He said something I think is very profound and prophetic. They asked him well what about all the bad AI? And he said the only way to beat all the bad AI that is about to come out is going to be with good AI and people like him are going to build large giant data models that are based on human flourishing and then give them away to the world as a public service so that there is no this is my data. And uh, I think that there's a lot of people lining up just like Ahmad that are going to, that understand the rigors of and the dangers of rogue AI and they will build better AI just like we've always come out on top. I think this is no other time in history. The difference now is every generation has waited for that one moment where the utopian society was born. This is the one, this is the time in human history when we are hockey sticking up. Uh, and though while we are in it it's gonna suck in our lifetime we will live in a post scarcity world and our children's children, children will look at us like we were cavemen for not loving and supporting one another all along.

Speaker B: Yeah, well I'm, I'm glad that there are people like you in the world doing what you do and pushing us in that direction. Um, and so tell us again the name of your book and we can find it where.

Speaker A: Yep. So it's uh, Living in Bliss. Living in Bliss. Achieve a balanced existence of body, mind and spirit. Uh, it's available wherever books are sold, but available online. And uh, we're on the Pete Sacco.com website. Um, you can get an author signed copy and I've got all kinds of things. I teach meditation, so I've got books on meditation, the whole pro. I got an eight step, uh, evolution of how, you know of meditative practice. Um, and then a whole bunch of other things. And so I, I taped it myself which was one of the most fun experiences I, I, I did actually. A guy named um, um, Dave Goldberg was the recording engineer and he was Carlos Santana's record recording engineer. And so going to New York City was, it was very cool and I recorded and I, I learned uh, all the rigors of, of doing your own thing and so that was fantastic. So that's available on Audible and, but thank you. Look, I'm not even, I'm not close to done yet. Right. I mean uh, the, the data center industry, you know, we're doing that, we're going to build our data centers. I've got a whole bunch of other tech that I am deeply involved in on the, what, you know, this, uh, the world of AI is nothing but um, opportunity. And uh, I'm glad to be alive during it. But I'm also glad to realize, realizing that the outward journey isn't really the point of it all. It's remembering that we're all connected and that we're all going to eventually be here for one another. And I just want to be one of the early entrants to let people know that it's great. Aspire away, achieve away, but remember that we're all connected and that we're. We. We all have to be there in, in the end. Um, it's been an. It's an inward remembering.

Speaker B: Well, I'm really, really happy to do my part in getting that kind of a message out.

Speaker A: Thanks.

Speaker B: So thank you for joining us and thank you for sharing that. And we'll, uh, make sure that all these links are in the show notes.

Speaker A: I appreciate it.

Speaker B: And, uh, and I really appreciate it, Pete. Thank you.

Speaker A: I would love to come back, John. I, you know, it would be great. I enjoyed to car. You know, when we talked a few weeks ago, um, this has been great. And you know, you could get me talking all night long and so I'd be happy to come back. I hope you have me.

Speaker B: All right, great. Well, I think we should talk some more about, uh, about AI and, you know, building better AI and it's a very interesting quote that, that I hadn't really thought about before, but you're probably right. Um, you know, I did grow up. Uh, I was right there in the sweet spot for Terminators. So I have my anxiety.

Speaker A: Yep. As a lot of you. Yeah, A lot of people. Very, very trepidatious about it.

Speaker B: But I will, like, I'd rather take us back to your final message, which is that ultimately we are all one and we're here for each other. And that's really what makes life worthwhile.

Speaker A: Agreed.

Speaker B: So, uh, thank you.

Speaker A: Thanks, brother.

Speaker B: All right. And thank you for listening. I know, you know, I say this all the time, but it's true. This doesn't make any difference without the generosity of your listening. So thank you for being here. Thank you for letting your friends know about us. Thank you for giving us a five star review and helping us get this out further and further. And Pete, thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time on,

Speaker A: um, Speaking Like a Leader.

Speaker B: Live like a leader. Like a leader. Live like a leader. Be a leader. And I do, really, I love the message that we're all one. That is a leadership message in my book.

Speaker A: Great job. Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you for joining the Speak Like a Leader podcast. Go be awesome.