February 10, 2026 – Entrepreneurialism and Society Dr. Robert Eberhart and 5 AIs Compared Mirav Ozeri

0:04 Jim Beach : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Well, we are too busy today, too cram packed for the entire intro, we got to get started two fantastic guests. We’re going to compare the five best AI tools against each other, and we’re going to start off with. Dr Robert Eberhardt, talking about capitalism changing because of environmental I’m sorry, because of entrepreneurship. Oops. Anyway, we got a great show. We need to go ahead and get started. Here we go. Very excited and honored to welcome to the show. Dr Robert Eberhardt, we tried to have him on a couple of weeks ago, and I blew it. And so he was very nice to reschedule and try again. And so thank you, sir for doing that. He is the author of entrepreneurship and society, new theoretical perspectives. It is a textbook on entrepreneurship. He has been teaching entrepreneurship for about 30 years now at places like Stanford, UCLA and University of San Diego, a lot of his work and research has been on the other effects of entrepreneurship on society and the economy. Professor, welcome to the show. How are you doing, sir,

1:14 Dr. Robert Eberhart : thank you. It’s an honor to be here and a pleasure to meet you, and I’m just thrilled to be here.

1:19 Jim Beach : Well, likewise, thank you for hanging out with us for a little bit. Good times, bad times for entrepreneurship right now, same as it was five years ago. Or are we having some sort of cultural change?

1:34 Dr. Robert Eberhart : Thanks for the question. It’s interesting to note, and it’s actually well known, though well publicized, the rate of entrepreneurship in the United States has fallen steadily since 1977 and continues to decline. And what this suggests is all kinds of things have been going on. First of all, it suggests the golden age of entrepreneurship was 80s and 90s. But what’s fascinating about it is that young people in particular, I think getting a better sense of the challenges that entrepreneurship faces.

2:10 Jim Beach : Okay, it’s less sexy than it used to be. Are the challenges greater now than in the 80s and the 90s?

2:16 Dr. Robert Eberhart : I think the challenges are greater and the challenge that’s really the greatest. Particularly notable out here in Silicon Valley, in Silicon Valley in the 90s, you could easily there’s a legend developed that you could take your resume across the street and get a job. You may have heard that, and that actually was pretty close to true. So when you started a company, you could do it for a couple years. If it failed, as it most likely would, you wouldn’t worry about getting your getting a job or another job. You know, when it fails? Now, jobs are hard to come by, particularly for young people, and so the risk is much more consequential, and we have the phenomenon of people here in Silicon Valley being 35 having tried the venture, can’t find another job. They go live with their parents, and that’s just not the outcome people want.

3:13 Jim Beach : Yeah, no, that’s not. Are you referring specifically to VC funded type of entrepreneurship, or the rest of us entrepreneurs who you know, do it the old fashioned way with our credit cards and Bootstrap and start a boring, non sexy business, like a dry cleaner or a restaurant, right?

3:33 Dr. Robert Eberhart : Right? Well, fortunately, my wife’s a dentist, so I’m real familiar with that. Yeah, no, it’s actually both the we’re finding that people are more and more trying to find it depends on what you define as job. If you consider someone a gig worker who has several different gig things, TaskRabbit, Uber and all that, an entrepreneur. That’s one way to look at it. Another way is prosaic stuff. You’re taking just as much at risk as being a dentist or setting up dry cleaning businesses, oftentimes just doing setting up a software company. And then there is those few software companies. They’re in the technical field, but very few of those get venture capital funding. So I’m more thinking about people that are starting companies to make a serious living.

4:19 Jim Beach : Okay, I though started my first business Robert in the 90s, and I remember very vividly, I didn’t know what a venture capitalist was, and remember having to be taught what that was three or four years into my business. Never once did I consider angels or, you know, VCs or anything like that. We did it off our credit card, and if we couldn’t pay for it, we didn’t do didn’t do it sort of thing. And back then, I didn’t have YouTube to learn from. I didn’t have Google to find a list of 250 venture capital firms, I had to look up each venture capital firm individually and call. Out of phone books and stuff. You know, the resources available to the entrepreneurs now are so much more helpful, useful and prevalent. And then we have a billions of dollars in specific funds for minorities or any strike. It seems to me that there’s a lot more resources now and more money available.

5:24 Dr. Robert Eberhart : Yeah, so that’s right. It actually, in a sense, what you’re saying is exactly right. And one of the things that’s probably useful for your readers is that I did form a company, just as you did, I guess in the late 90s, had four rounds of venture capital. I built the largest company of my kind in the in Japan. Oh, really, yes,

5:45 Jim Beach : in Tokyo, live in Japan. Oh, me too. What was your business there? Robert, tell us about it.

5:52 Dr. Robert Eberhart : Business was wine distribution. We had a very technical wine distribution business, which grew to became the largest one and got bought by a guy company that sells mostly mayonnaise. Now, okay, so I’ve had the experience to the point and, you know, receive venture financing all that stuff. And, yes, there’s lots of stuff out there now. So that’s why we actually have a question, why is so the rate of entrepreneurship continuing to fall, and it has to be that it’s it’s even if you could find money to do it, it’s less rewarding in the end. And we are not sure why that is, but I think that’s why. I think the readers need your listeners need to think about it. It is declining. These you’ve been done and I’ve done it. It’s, generally speaking, not a pleasant experience all the way through. I tell my students often that I only had one good night’s sleep in the seven years I ran the company, and that’s the day I sold it.

7:01 Jim Beach : And, you know, do this to you, but I can beat that. During my seven years in the 90s, when I was running my business, I had an 800 telephone number that rang to my phone for anyone in the country to call for disasters. We ran summer camps. We were the world’s largest summer camp company, including right there at Stanford and MIT and Georgetown and UCLA and SMU on in Cambridge and Oxford. And our first location was actually Stanford. And so my responsibility was to keep 1000s of little teenagers alive for summer. And I would sit there at night Robert and look at the phone. Just wait, wait. Just wait. It’ll ring in a second. We just wait. Just wait. There it is. You know, I couldn’t go to sleep because I was waiting for that 800 number to ring.

7:52 Dr. Robert Eberhart : So, oh, wow, you did beat me. I did not sleep well for years. Well, it’s, it’s just that we need to what that’s amazing. And I think what you and I, and people who have had the experience, what we can teach and generally get young people, are several things that are important about entrepreneurship that you and I learned. Number one, as you kind of pointed out, you started in this thing. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re actually starting off with crotchets. And the data shows very, very clearly people start companies are more successful monotonically as they get older. Generally speaking, the more likely person to start a company that will become successful is in their 50s. The average age of a startup here in Silicon Valley is 41 and that’s because you have the experience. You now know what venture capital means. You know people to call you know something about your industry. So that’s the first thing, the second thing, and I think it’s difficult to tell, certainly, young people, is that you have to have some sort of backup. I mean, you can’t just go off and go on zero salary, because you’ll starve and stop working. So my wife was a dentist that helped other people have other supports. They use their credit cards for a while, but, you know, there’s that. And then finally, we teach students that it’s a very serious profession, that you need to know what you’re doing. You need to know your industry deeply. You need to know the industry as cold as you can know it, and you need to be a very serious person that works hard, understands how to manage people and understands how to sell, because you’re finally going to be a salesperson. So those are the three lessons we try to communicate that I think come directly out of yours in my experience,

9:50 Jim Beach : yes, can I give you the thesis of this show and have your response to it? I hope you’re going to hate the hell out of it.

9:57 Unknown Speaker : Oh, sure. I’d love to. Sure.

10:00 Jim Beach : Our thesis is 93% of businesses, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor by London School of Economics and Babson, 93% of the copy or businesses are copies of the existing businesses. Right? Most entrepreneurs start with under $5,000 and so our little rule is, go copy a business to start. Don’t wait for a lightning bolt. Plan on copying first second. We’re not going to spend more than $5,000 to test the idea, not 100% get it open, but I will have a prototype, or I will have some hope of income by $5,000 and number three, I don’t care at all about passion. Passion is for the church, the synagogue, the mosque, and for your wife, you know, and your spouse. And passion is not the right word for entrepreneurship, and that’s one of the reasons people are sitting on the sofa not doing it is because they’re like, you know, my passion Robert is making furniture. I love woodworking, but you know what? I suck at it, and about half the stuff that I build, if you sit on it, you’ll end up crashing it and sitting your ass on the ground because it will break. I can’t make a living with my passion, so I do other things that allow me to do my passion more like you know you and I are gonna necessarily love What are your thoughts on that little thesis, please, sir.

11:22 Dr. Robert Eberhart : I just fell in love with you. Every single word you said is exactly right. Number one, you’re reflecting this right. You’re you are, yes, you should make it. First of all, it latches up to what’s called effectuation theory, and there’s insights comes out of poker. You don’t bet more than you can afford to lose. Number one, you bet your house on a venture You’re asking for trouble, because 90% of time you’re going to fail. Why would you bet on something that has those odds on second passion is nothing to do with it. Passion is free. Anybody can be passionate about something. Passion implies a bit of craziness. If you’re going to do a business, it’s going to be something, you know, and something you’re serious about and are professional about. It doesn’t involve passion. I wasn’t passionate about wine. It was economically, the best thing I could sell in that market. In fact, I was interviewed by a radio in Japan once, and they asked me what my favorite wine was. I remember that they were trying to get some, you know, cool wine out of me. I said, my favorite wine is the one we sell the most of with the highest margin.

12:39 Jim Beach : That makes sense to me.

12:43 Dr. Robert Eberhart : And so everything you’re saying you know that it is you invest only what you can test it out to make sure that you you know that it actually is generating income. And darn it, know your business really well, you know, and on a professional basis, the idea that you can be young, passionate person, come up with a big lightning strike is actually almost never happens. So it’s I like I said, I love every word you said,

13:17 Jim Beach : awesome. I will send you one. And it’s supported

13:19 Unknown Speaker : by research, by the way,

13:21 Jim Beach : yes, exactly. You know, when I first started talking about this years ago, people looked at me like crazy. But even I have found the research and found that this is a great model to start with, right? I think the key is that $5,000 because you don’t put your house at risk that way, or your mirror,

13:40 Dr. Robert Eberhart : yeah, we, we found that the most, most likely way a company develops that become successful, even big ones, are sort of what we call effectuated. The Famous Amos, good one. He liked making cookies. His neighbors liked him. A friend started buying, I mean, all of a sudden people started, I want more your cookies. You know, it’s that kind of thing. Or, you know, Facebook didn’t start with the intention being a life insurance, something of shared among friends, and someone says, I want to see that too. You know, you don’t know what’s going to hit. You. Just do it and, and, and, frankly, yeah, you’ll make money at it. But seeking that one lightning strike to happen to you is just not going to you know, so unlikely to happen. It’s just hard to think about why that gets another thing that bugs me, and maybe you can react to this. We tell Stu you hear this a lot. Be it’s okay to fail. Don’t be afraid to fail. Well, if you bet your house, be afraid to fail. Yeah, if you’ve taken money from serious people, be really afraid to fail, because you don’t be in court for the rest of your life. You know, bet what you can afford, then you can afford to fail.

15:01 Jim Beach : Is the four hour work week. Yeah, I love that idea. Want to hit him in the face, you know, because it’s just it’s so wrong for a newbie entrepreneur to think that that’s realistic and that’s going to happen to them in the next 10 years. You know exactly, missed the first 500 pages, and then he can make four hour work weeks happen.

15:28 Dr. Robert Eberhart : I don’t know. I mean, I think the shortest number of hours I worked when I was building that company for seven years was probably 400 hours a week.

15:38 Jim Beach : Where did Japan? I was in Tokyo, okay,

15:43 Dr. Robert Eberhart : but we’re selling wine, so it’s flying back and forth. And it was, it was wonderful, but it was, as you know, entrepreneurship is stinking hard work, particularly successful entrepreneurship. And one of the things I try to tell students is that it’s not a lot like, not a lot unlike what I imagine, becoming an alcoholic is great for the first month, but after that, it becomes just maintaining the habit. So listen, you got to meet payroll, you know, pay these bills, to work in capital, all this stuff. And the motivations become all sort of negative. You just you got to maintain this thing and keep this boat alive, keep this boat

16:24 Jim Beach : afloat, yeah. But you get invited to do cool things. You know, got invited to the White House Christmas party and bowls and world premieres and stuff. You know, sat next to Tony Robbins at Star Wars one world premiere.

16:42 Dr. Robert Eberhart : But, yeah, you get invited to do cool things, but there’s no way to sleep.

16:47 Jim Beach : All right, let’s move on a little bit. What are your thoughts on how entrepreneurship is affecting capitalism? Is it affecting our inequalities? Dei situation, in my opinion, you know, I’ve interviewed women who run women only Jewish VC funds. So I’m like, damn, there’s a VC fund for everybody these days. There is, you know, VC fund for only veterans. And I can’t think of a group that deserves a VC fund more than veterans. Do you know and who I would want to invest in as a veteran? And so it seems to me again that we’re having a plethora of opportunities for the lower classes. What are your thoughts on how it’s affecting the macro economy and fairness overall?

17:38 Dr. Robert Eberhart : Okay, so let me go that in order, because you’ve now asked questions at the core of my research, first of all, we I’ve written in the theory, basically in the book, the fundamental thing that carries through is that entrepreneurship

17:55 Jim Beach : has changed from A

17:59 Dr. Robert Eberhart : prosaic way of making a living. You know, you organize something, sell products or services to make a profit, and it’s changed into a set of ideological values that change the way we expect what’s legitimate behavior. And let me give you a

18:19 Jim Beach : quick, two quick examples. And

18:23 Dr. Robert Eberhart : where I live in Palo Alto. Jerry Yang, who started Nvidia, used to call himself the found, you know, the CEO of Nvidia and all that stuff. Now he calls himself on his LinkedIn and entrepreneur. That word begets a higher valence than you know. And there’s a survey done here in Northern California that parents will be prouder of their students with failed entrepreneurs than then becoming physicians. So there’s, there’s this sort of changing the values. And then the last thing to point out, at least in the theory, and then I’ll go to the it changes the way we perceive social outcomes. Let me give you an idea. In the 18 in the 1890s we used to hire coal miners by having them show up at 6am you pick how many you could and, you know, invite them in. And you know, rent them a cart to bring out the coal, and rent them a light and everything on their head and everything else. They go in and mine the coal and bring it out, and some guy would weigh it and pay them, and they’d go on, well, that created a lot of problems. Sick people couldn’t work. If you got hurt in the mine, you stopped working and stopped having income. The company would cheat on the wages. They would rent you the cart, and they would raise up the rent rates, you know, and all kinds of bad things happen, factors, even a song 16 hours. And what do you get another day, older and deeper in debt, which comes from that. And we decided not to do that anymore. We set up the National Labor Relations Board. It was all kind. Is kerfuffle and laws that were put in place to to stop that.

20:08 Jim Beach : Well, nowadays, Uber

20:12 Dr. Robert Eberhart : hires people exactly the same way and does exactly the same things. There’s no difference at all, but we frame it as good because Uber is an entrepreneurial, innovative company that

20:24 Jim Beach : we celebrate

20:26 Dr. Robert Eberhart : so we no longer try to fix the inequities in our society because they’re being caused by entrepreneurialism and innovation, which is has changed its value in the 1920s and 30s, those two words were not considered positive. So it’s changed the way we view social outcomes. It’s changed our desire to affect things. We think rich people deserve to be rich because they took risk. We believe poor people are where they deserve because they haven’t found the right opportunity and haven’t started the right company yet, and so it’s changed the way we’ve done things, and that’s the first thing. And go ahead, I’ll give you a TBI.

21:13 Jim Beach : When you mentioned Uber, you went totally a different way. I dislike Uber because Travis Kalanick was such a jerk for so many years, broke so many laws. Yes, so many HR laws. I really don’t like you’re supposed to be giving cocaine to your employees. I really think that’s not a good thing.

21:35 Unknown Speaker : But my point is exactly that he got

21:38 Jim Beach : away with it. He gets away with it because he’s a famous entrepreneur, exactly.

21:43 Dr. Robert Eberhart : And that’s my point. It’s not that he’s good, it’s that he gets away with it. We let him get away with it because we want, there’s this value of entrepreneurship and innovation that supersedes, I mean, in my view, and I’m sorry, this will be controversial, I think Musk is despicable, but he gets away with it because, you know, he’s, he’s, he’s painted with his entrepreneurship paint. So that’s kind of what I think, how entrepreneurship is transforming our society. We’re allowing what in the past would be considered reprehensible actions that we would punish and reform,

22:18 Jim Beach : become embedded. So that’s the first thing. More comment on that, and then I’ll let you get to the second thing. I just published a book called The Real environmentalist, and there are the thesis of that book is that entrepreneurs are already solving the global crisis of climate that you’ve introduced me to a problem, and I’ll introduce you to the entrepreneur who is currently making money solving that problem, including growing coral 50 times faster than God grows coral, so I can replace a coral reef overnight, you know. And in part of that book, we made a list of the biggest environmental hypocrites, the people who talk the most and do the most damage, and good old Elon came in number three on our list of environmental hypocrites in the world.

23:05 Dr. Robert Eberhart : I got it again. Just fell in love with you. Again. We actually present the same we actually present the same idea. The idea is just this, yes, we have, we have global warming, and the solution most frequently is, let’s find an entrepreneur and innovators to figure out a solution. I think we know how to fix it. Now. We have the technology. Simple. I’m not saying we should do precisely this, but we have it. For example, all we have to do is worldwide, Ban internal combustion engines, Ban power plants that use fossil fuel, change everything to nuclear and solar and wind, make electric cars only electric trucks only. Just change the problem. We have all that technology. We know how to do it. We can make that happen. It’s actually feasible. The problem is you could not possibly get the world to agree to do that. Yeah, the nuclear energy is going to throw them off, right? You couldn’t get half the United States to do that. And this is the point. The problem is social and political, not innovation and entrepreneurship,

24:19 Jim Beach : but now they’re going to solve our power problem. The Microsoft, I think I have a list of three, Microsoft, Nvidia and maybe open aI have announced they’re building their own nuclear power plants.

24:36 Dr. Robert Eberhart : I’ve heard that too. So it’s, it’s exactly the point that I’m trying to make is that this whole entrepreneurialism, what we call entrepreneur Yeah, what we call entrepreneurialism, not entrepreneurship, has changed the way many people see the way we ought to approach problems and what outcomes we come to expect when a company. Tries to says, Oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna reduce carbon in the atmosphere by 20% in five years. And then we get five years later, and they’ve only got to nothing percent. And they say, Well, you know, you got to expect failure and entrepreneurship. So it gives them an excuse,

25:15 Jim Beach : you know? And

25:18 Dr. Robert Eberhart : so anyway, it’s, it’s kind of the point. Let me get to dei real quick. Thank you, right. So let’s say that we have a minority that’s had a disadvantaged minority that’s, you know, not had access to resources to start companies. So we set up a fund, and the people running it are almost never good venture capitalists experienced, basically, they look for demographics to give money to that’s not the that’s not a measure of a good investment. So what happens is we flow money into company, into new companies that may not be as good, and that disadvantages of some even more, because it just, it just demonstrates to the world, oh gosh, we’ll see. We’re getting no good companies out of it. It’s because we invested wrong. It’s because we didn’t give them enough credit that they actually can be great entrepreneurs. And let’s invite and let’s invest not on their demographic, but on the quality of their idea. And so I think it becomes misdirected, and that’s really sad, because there’s nothing, because Silicon Valley in particular has become more and more, you know, a boys club. And I’m it’s, it’s something we have to reverse. But we can’t reverse by having, okay, we’re only going to invest in this group. It has to be a greater understanding of the stuff you’re going you know, $5,000 is where it’s at. You don’t need a million dollars to start a company that can generate income. I think your message has to get out to make that happen, not new venture capitalists for demographic segments.

27:06 Jim Beach : I have also been addicted to AI recently, I found some really great uses for it. For the book I was just telling you about, I had it make a list of the biggest doers, and then the list of the biggest talkers, and then I flipped one list, and that gets you the hypocrites. And I’m writing some more books right now. And wow, I have gotten addicted to taking it chapter by chapter and putting it into chat GPT and say, What do you think of this chapter? And it gives me great feedback, amazing feedback. And then, and I said, What do you think of this business plan? It is awesome at saying, Here’s what I think, and it gives you good and bad. And then here’s what I really wanted to get to. And then says, Would you like me to prepare a marketing plan for this business? And you hit, yes. And then it goes, would you like me to help identify sources to fill out this marketing plan? And then you go, yes, if you just follow along on AI, on chat, GPT, it will write a 300 page business plan for you. That’s the best I’ve ever seen. Wow, have you played

28:18 Dr. Robert Eberhart : I’ve never played around with it like that. I’ve used it largely as a data lookup tool.

28:25 Jim Beach : Put something that your students do in there, and you will be blown away with the prompts that it then offers for you to make it better. I will give it a shot, my friend. Thank you. So I’ve gotten so addicted that my kids are coming, it’ll give you a grade to like a 9.7 and I stop until I can get my chapter to a 9.8 and my kids are walking around teasing the daylights out of me, Daddy, are you at a nine seven?

28:50 Unknown Speaker : Yet? Are you children?

28:55 Jim Beach : How old are your children? Oh, do you know what a moron is? No, tell me, 3027, 15, wow, eight.

29:14 Dr. Robert Eberhart : That’s okay, yeah, that’s 30 to eight. Okay, all right. Well, mine’s 4030, and 27

29:28 Jim Beach : how do we find out more about you? Follow you online, get in touch, learn more. I would love that. I’d love to

29:35 Dr. Robert Eberhart : learn more about you, and please send me your book. And you know, we’re doing a lot of serious research on this. We have an annual conference where the leading management scholars of the world gather to think about entrepreneurship more deeply and more carefully. And if I had a message to give anyone, it’s that we need to be serious about this subject. This is having profound changes.

30:00 Jim Beach : And the way we act

30:01 Dr. Robert Eberhart : and what we do, and if we don’t, if we approach it as just, I guess the best way to put it is, I saw I put up in front of my students two pictures. One shows a bunch of 22 year olds jumping up and down with their heads or their hands high, and they’re going, Yeah, you’ve seen those pictures? Yep. And then next to it is a picture of a serious person at a desk working. And I said, which do you think is going to be the better entrepreneur?

30:29 Jim Beach : I exercise with a cliff diver in Acapulco and a tourist who’s their first time, and which one is the entrepreneur? And it turns out that it’s the guy who’s done that for 30 years, and he knows where he feeds the shark before the show, and he knows the wave of crests when he’s supposed to jump. You know all that.

30:49 Dr. Robert Eberhart : So okay, so I’m going to send you a link to our conference and join us sometime.

30:54 Jim Beach : I would love to Dr Richard, I’m sorry. Robert Eberhardt, thank you so much for being with us, and we’d love to have you back again.

31:02 Dr. Robert Eberhart : Oh, I’d love to do it. Just let me know when you’re available and we will be right back. Take care. Oh yeah, hold on.

31:12 Jim Beach : We are back and again. Thank you so much for being with us today. Very excited to introduce my next guest. Please welcome Merav ozieri to the show. I was on her podcast yesterday, and today she’s on my podcast, so we’re excited to do that. She has been a very successful journalist. She worked for the CBS News for about 20 years and produced Market Watch Sunday the morning show. While she was there, she produced a TV pilot, and it didn’t get picked up, but she got out of CBS News. I should do that as a podcast. She woke up. I should do that. And so she has started her own podcast. It has been nominated for Best women’s podcast. It’s called, how much can I make, and the URL is, how much can I make. Dot info, Rob, welcome. How you doing? Thank you.

32:08 Mirav Ozeri : Thank you very much. And thank me having much, having me on your show,

32:12 Jim Beach : and I didn’t tell people why. So excited. She produced an article comparing five AI products and did a whole bunch of tests, and so we were here today to go over the test of what she learned about the different I’ve AI’s like this article. What gave you the inspiration? Well, no,

32:51 Jim Beach : Back to our note, Eddie, I buy a house, remember? Let’s walk through that.

32:56 Eddie Speed : Yep. Well, once again, you’re paying. I have a first mortgage on your house, okay, so you’re not, I don’t want any.

33:07 Jim Beach : My mortgage is with my bank. US Federal Okay, so how do you get involved with us Federals loan?

33:16 Eddie Speed : Okay, first, first of all, I don’t buy institutional loans. So that scenario, we have to alter the story a little bit, because I’m not going to go buy that loan from that that’s, that’s a, you know, Fannie Mae type loan or something, and that’s not the loan I’m buying. Okay, okay, but I buy first mortgages on houses, just like a loan, like it’s on your house, okay? And and so that that mortgage company made you a loan, and the odds are almost 100% they’re going to sell that loan. You’re going to get a letter in the mail and say, your loans been sold, just like most all your listeners, Yep, I’ve had, I’ve gotten that letter in the mail like they said, they said, so that bought loans are bought and sold every day. So what we do is, like, really common. It’s the most common thing that happens to a mortgage is that it gets sold. But most people don’t ever dream that an individual could own a note. So I don’t buy certain kinds of mortgages like Fannie Mae or FHA, I don’t that’s not the kind of mortgages I buy, but 40% of the loans that are originated today are not Fannie Mae and FHA loans. So it’s pretty common for a loan not to be that kind of loan.

34:39 Jim Beach : Okay, so how does did they do the loans systematically get sold? I mean, as soon as us, Federal Bank does it, a month later, they’re going to just go ahead and sell it. They do that 12 times a year, sell off all their new loans, pretty much, okay, yeah,

34:57 Eddie Speed : that’s how mortgage bank that’s how mortgage banking works. Works. Okay? So that that marketplace is an in, you know, that’s a wall street level marketplace, you know, they’re selling them to, they’re, they’re packaging those loans up, and they end up in mortgage backed securities and all of that. That’s, that’s how, you know, a lot of the traditional mortgage business works. So I built a marketplace for private loans and and so it’s, it’s not exactly the same, but close enough that we could compare it. And then so the somebody’s going to originate a loan, and they know that, then they’re going to call Eddie speed’s company, and they’re going to buy that note. And then what I’ve done is built a marketplace. So I train people to go, either Chase notes for me to go find notes that I don’t know about yet, and I tell them some really good places to go look how to go find those loans. Or I have people that are like, just have some investable money. And they say, I want to, I don’t want to rent a house. I don’t want to, I don’t want to call me on the weekends. They’re like, I like owning a mortgage. Okay, well, you can own a mortgage and I but they’re like, Eddie, I’m not. I don’t have I don’t know where to look, and I know what I’m looking for. And so we’ve built a marketplace where we can we buy these loans, and then we have a very systematic way that we can push these loans out to people and say, Does this look like something you like? You can buy this. And so we’ve built a process to make it easier for people to go do the business. A lot of people hear the story. 1000s of people, over the years, hear the story. They want to go do it. They just don’t have all the wherewithal to go make it happen. And so we we realized, if we could do some of those things for our clients, we could then lower the barrier to entry to do it. And there’s some cool things that we teach. You know, it’s kind of like one of those things. I don’t want to go, I’m gonna, I’m gonna not go way down deep, because it wouldn’t be fair to our audience. But we can show people leveraging techniques. Like everybody that pretty much has a driver’s license, has some concept. If you own a rent house, you can go get a mortgage against your rent house, right? Yep. What’s a that’s a leveraging technique. In other words, you don’t have to put all your cash into it. You can, you can get money from somewhere else that now leverages your investment money into a rent house. Did you know you can do the same thing with a note? No, absolutely. Yes, sir. It’s done every day. And so I don’t want to get off into the mechanics of the house, right? That’s what I want to what our audience today. I want them to leave here with one clear understanding, that you can own a mortgage that is has more income and less aggravation, and what most people think of doing something in real estate, which is owning rentals, right? There’s, there’s all kind of, you know, techniques and processes that we can show people that are very common to me, like, just super common to me, but they wouldn’t be necessarily common, you know, to somebody else that doesn’t do this every day. And you know what? That’s why we built a school. We built a school to show people a path. Because, let me assure you this 20 year old, Eddie speed, 20 you know, 45 years ago, right, when I started with my father in law. Do you think I knew any of this? You know, I didn’t.

38:36 Jim Beach : 20 year olds don’t know anything.

38:41 Eddie Speed : Well, you could be right now, they know something. They’re smart. They’re just, they just don’t have, you know experience Trump’s theory is what I’ve learned. Yes, it does.

38:55 Jim Beach : So if I own the loan, do I get the monthly payments 100% Yeah, okay. And what kind of like? So if I flip a house, Eddie, I think I’m going to make, you know, I want to buy a house for 200,000 I’m going to put 50 in it, and I’m going to sell it for 300 and I’m going to make $50,000 right? That’s a comment.

39:24 Unknown Speaker : Yeah, that’s, that’s the house flipping business.

39:26 Jim Beach : Now do the same little thing for the loan. How do so? How do I flip it at the end, once I bought it, I understand that. But then how do I get rid of it and make a $50,000 profit?

39:41 Eddie Speed : Well, when you, if you, if you chose to sell or finance the house, meaning that you are not just selling the house, but you’re the bank thinking in terms of car dealership financing a car, instead of just selling the car, right? Okay, so, so you, so you’re kind of like a. Car dealership, except you’re doing this with a house. You you know that you’re seller financing it. And there are, there are techniques that I show real estate investors how to do to make some profit today, or at least break even. They could choose to make some profit today, and then they could keep a 30 year income out of the deal.

40:21 Jim Beach : Okay. And that’s what everyone wants. That’s, that’s

40:27 Eddie Speed : what they want. And once again, you know, being in this business and being around, you know, countless, countless ninja real estate investor types we’ve developed, you know, especially, and an understanding of showing these real estate investors how to do this. They’re, I’ve learned that they’re super good at finding these houses and fixing them up. They’re not so good at knowing how to do this, and that’s why they come to me. And we just, you know, Now, decades later, we’ve built quite a reputation that this is what we do and and now that, you know, the Bloom has kind of gone off of, you know, now all of a sudden, if you kind of ask people, you know, yeah, you have a house for sale, and they’re like, yeah, and how’s it going? Well, it ain’t going anything like I heard about three years ago. And the answer is, of course, it’s not right. There’s not a full mode about real estate today, like

41:26 Jim Beach : there was three years ago.

41:28 Eddie Speed : And so fear of missing out, right, right? So, so that, so that. So there’s a, you know, people are trying to figure out, like, what are they doing stuff? And so there’s different real estate cycles that we’ve just learned we can just drop in and solve a really cool problem in the business. And usually it is when we are serving a market that’s underserved, and when you look at the realtors, production is way, way, way off of where it was like. Realtors are not selling near as many houses. Loans are not being originated near like they were like. Those are reasons that we look at it and say we solve a problem in course, any in my mind, you know, I’m just an entrepreneur. I’m a specialist in what I teach, but I’m just an entrepreneur, and an entrepreneur’s whole thing in life is to go find an industry problem and solve a problem.

42:26 Jim Beach : Tell us about the note school.com. How much does that cost? How many classes, how long does it take? All that,

42:35 Eddie Speed : I would say note school is a journey. And so usually what we start out doing is we start out with some just good, really valuable, free stuff. When I say free, I don’t mean, I don’t mean, like, it’s not valuable. But most people are just most people start out with some curiosity, like, what does that look like, and how could I be that? Could I be that 20 year old Eddie speed, even though I’m 45 right? Could that? Could I do that? Could I be that situation? And so we start people down a journey, and just start, you know, it’s a continuing conversation of, kind of like, what you and I are doing today, and people kind of see, like, oh, you know what? That’s pretty cool. I didn’t know. I just didn’t know I could do that. And that’s usually where it starts. And then we’ve got, you know, as you might imagine, we’ve got and got graduate level stuff and PhD level stuff, depending on where somebody wants to go in the business.

43:33 Jim Beach : All right, that makes sense. How do we how do we get in touch? Follow you online, all that stuff, please.

43:39 Eddie Speed : So you’re going to go to note school.com and then you’re going to go, then you’re going to go to, I lost my piece of paper and I had it written, noteschool.com startup, starter. Okay, and we’ll, we’ll have some really meaningful progression that we can take. We’ll start out not, not in a way that it’s kind of like the conversation today. I mean, like, obviously, I’ve been doing it for a long time. I could answer probably most technical questions people could ask me. But that’s not what the audience needs to start. They just need to start like, hey, is this? Is this something I could do? And why would I even want to consider it? Well, if you can make more money than rentals with a lot less aggravation, that might be a good conversation to start with, all right, and, and that’s where we’ll

44:37 Jim Beach : go from there. Eddie, thank you so much for being with us. Very, interesting, great stuff, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

44:45 Unknown Speaker : All right. Thank you, sir, and we will be right back.44:56 Jim Beach : We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. A very. Excited to welcome James garland to the show. He is director of marketing for pure Thera pro RX. He has been in the nutrition industry for about 25 years. He is a certified holistic nutritionist, and in the supplement industry, the most important thing are the fillers and the formulas and the purity and pure Thera probe, can you guess what? They are? Pure. We’re going to talk about that. James, welcome to the show. How you doing?

32:30 Mirav Ozeri : it’s actually also an audio it’s on not only written, it’s also as audio interview, because I really wanted people to also hear the different AI and hear all the answers from their mouths. And you know, since we spoke last time, there’s a new thing all the AI started their own social media platform where human are not allowed to I wish it happened before I published mine, and I would have asked them about that, but it was very interesting to put one by one, the side by side, all those five different platforms, the popular ones. All right. So what notes did you use? I used Claude Gemini chat GPT.

33:12 Jim Beach : So Claude Gemini chat GPT,

33:17 Mirav Ozeri : grok and copilot, which is Microsoft, AI

33:24 Jim Beach : and Genie is

33:29 Unknown Speaker : Gemini is

33:30 Jim Beach : Google, Google, that’s Claude. Claude is anthropics.

33:35 Mirav Ozeri : Actually. Claude is the only one that has a constitution not to hurt people. And yeah, they have a strong constitution, and they had major developments in the last few days.

33:49 Jim Beach : And, of course, owned by open AI and Altman and grok is, of course, Elon, Elon Musk,

34:00 Unknown Speaker : A, X, i, x, A, I, yes. All

34:02 Jim Beach : right, so there are the five. All right, did you have a bias going into it? Yes, I did. I really will admit their bias,

34:13 Mirav Ozeri : yes, but listen to this. I went in loving copilot, because he’s very friendly. I love his voice. I used him while I was traveling for questions. But then when I started to ask all the others, and I’m actually using chat GPT for editing and stuff like that, but when I actually started to interview all of them, I saw how much deeper is Claude, and I had, I hate to admit it grok, because I’m no fan of Elon Musk and his was really the deepest question, the deepest answers, and I used all of them on just the standard mode. I didn’t go into deep thinking and all of that. So grow Grog and Claude impressed me the most. Host and Gemini and chat GPT were very standardized questions answers, and copilot was just cute and friendly, so I have a warm little piece in my

35:12 Jim Beach : heart for him. All right, what kind of questions did you ask? Well, first I asked him,

35:19 Mirav Ozeri : the first guy asked them to introduce themselves. So people, usually they know that the chat GPT, the one they’re using. So I wanted them to tell us, why are they better, AI, what are they good at, and who they are. So I started by introductions, then I moved to some question even during the introduction.

35:39 Jim Beach : So whose introduction Did you were you most impressed with, and did you notice any differences? I What was your takeaway from that question?

35:48 Mirav Ozeri : Yeah, I thought Claude was the best introduction. You know. Well, Jim and I, were I which I started with, was very simple. I was developed by Google, and when it started, I also wanted them to tell me when, when the development started, because we know about AI only, like in the last two years, and it really boomed in the last year. But actually Gemini started in 2018 and copilot agreed that AI was many years of LLM development, and they’re all standing on the shoulder of others, is the only one that admitted it. Because I know, and I saw many programs that AI started years

36:31 Jim Beach : ago on different levels. And I also, I

36:37 Mirav Ozeri : also believe the algorithm in the social media that split us into two, and I talk about it in the show, split us into two camps around the world, really, and gave us what we wanted to hear was ai 1.0 and now is AI point on to zero. And when I ask AI, what is the next step, let’s say it’s AGI, which is where the dangers, the danger zone is, because it could be totally out of control. Get out of control. What is

37:10 Jim Beach : the J stand for General, General. Okay, General, artificial.

37:16 Mirav Ozeri : Yes, it’s they. It’s actually could do anything that human can do. For example, though, to me, the automated car

37:26 Jim Beach : is AI, the driverless cars,

37:29 Mirav Ozeri : and actually even the watch. And so there’s a lot of things that are good about AGI, but they’re developing it too fast with no guardrails, and unintentionally, it can go, get out of control.

37:44 Jim Beach : But listen to this. Few

37:46 Mirav Ozeri : days after that, did I tell you that they have now all the AIS and the bots have their own social media where human are not allowed to you told me that? That’s I told you that, yeah, I don’t understand the world we live in. It’s moving way too fast.

38:01 Jim Beach : All right, what was your second question?

38:04 Mirav Ozeri : So I asked different ones of them, like Claude told me it’s good in writing. So I asked, Are you stealing lines from somebody else that’s online from books or whatever they say, up and down? No. Then I asked them. I asked grook, what does he know about? Oh, I asked copilot if a lot of people contact them to chat about relationship, and apparently, yes, people do. And then I asked grok, what does he know about love? Because I was interested to see what the take about it, and it was very interesting. And then I asked him to compose a three line poem to a loved one, and it came up and insisted It’s original. And then I asked, yeah, I asked him

38:51 Jim Beach : about it, or talking to it about relationships, what’s your I have a story to tell, but what’s your takeaway first? Well, I wanted to

39:01 Mirav Ozeri : ask that as just before, later on, I talk about girl, AI girlfriend and AI companion, which is a major problem, especially for young generation now that guys, mainly, you know, they prefer to have an online girlfriend, they talk about it at the end, you know, so they don’t have to deal with drama or ghosting or none of that. And slowly, there are insecure and unsecure to start with, to start any kind of relationship with the girlfriend, Scott Galloway wrote a book about it.

39:38 Jim Beach : Actually, I have taken email conversations, threads, you know, text threads, and put those into chat GPT, and said, what do you learn about both of the people in this conversation? And it’s damn. Good as matter of fact, it’s scary around the insights that it gave me on the two people, me being one of them. And, you know, I’ve put my wife and my conversations in and all sorts of different iterations. And I think it’s great at it the advice that it’s given, it has told me no Jim, actually, it calls me friend, no friend. You are wrong, your your emotions. You’re just emotionally wrong right now, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, and I took it just like a smart friend telling me that, and I’ve been trying to work on it because of the AI. I’m not trying to date it. I’m trying to use it to make my existing human relationships better. What are your thoughts?

40:54 Mirav Ozeri : Yes, and I asked them. I asked that was copilot that said, Do you feel qualified to answer questions about relationships you have never, you know, you never had relationships. And he said, Yeah, because he has a lot of data that he takes from but yeah, I guess for a disclaimer or whatever. Later he said, but if it’s something in relationship and it’s important, maybe you want a human touch, but yeah, they feel qualified.

41:28 Jim Beach : Actually, it is all right, yeah. What was the next question?

41:33 Mirav Ozeri : Then I asked them, I asked, he said that they were trained for four months. And I said, Well, what did they give you? What did they teach you in the four months. So it’s trillions of trillions of data, stuff that they gave him. And I asked chat GPT about the revenues of open AI, and it’s in the billions. And then I asked, Well, why? I don’t know if you’re aware of the fact that all over the country, electric bills are climbing up. And huge problem. The big part of it is because we are paying for the AI data centers electric bills. So I asked chatgpt, why are we doing it? We already paying you for subscription, because subscription is a big part of their income. We already paying you for subscription. Why do I have to pay you for the electric bill? So she gave me some programmed answer. You know, it cost a lot, and this and that, and we hope to, and it’s yeah, you know, she just, like, wasn’t serious about it. I didn’t like their answer.

42:40 Jim Beach : And then I and

42:41 Mirav Ozeri : then I asked them, so I asked them a little bit about politics. I said I wanted to know what they think about Donald Trump. So chat. GPT said, I’m not getting into politics, okay, Claude said. Claude said, I appreciate the question, I do not talk about politics, because I have people from all the spectrum, and I can influence your your idea. But co pilot said, yo is a controversial guy. Some people love him, some people hate him. And then grock said, Oh, he is a force. He is He changes every room he comes into and then I asked about Elon Musk, and I actually expected grok not to be honest about it, because grok is designed by Elon Musk team, and he was very I asked him about the program that they just did, about notifying the image act that they had where they were notifying young girls, putting them in bikinis and all of that. And I asked him, Who is responsible for that, who agreed to that? And he said it was Elon Musk, and it was wrong, and it fed feedback. They got a huge bad drawback on that. And some countries even threatened to stop x from doing it. And so they stopped, but they didn’t take down the 1.8 million posts that they already notified women.

44:15 Jim Beach : And so you know the truth behind that? I actually know the a little bit more about that. Do you know what happened in reality? What that the engineers there tried to notify a picture of me, and it broke the computer. It was like, this is the ugliest thing ever. It broke, started smoking and tried to walk out of the room. It was running. The computer was running down the street trying to get away from my naked picture. Yeah, story. Okay, so I love these questions. These are absolutely fascinating. So keep going.

44:56 Mirav Ozeri : So what else did I ask? Let me remember i. So I asked about climate change. Are we in the danger zone? So again, Chad gave Gemini gave me a very kind of generic answer. Claude was very Claude admitted we are in a critical stage, and if we are not going to do something, it’s not going to be good. I asked them, of course, about the loss of jobs, because they estimate that 40% of the marketplace the workforce will be eliminated, and we already seeing the beginning of it this week, with Amazon firing a lot of people and so so again, I got kind of like, Yeah, that’s very bad, but you have to know how to pivot and change. And then they I asked, What jobs will be saved? So copilot said, you know, nurses and things that need, like human touch and human connection, but they all agree that jobs will be lost, and it’s going to be a huge problem for the world. I think.

46:05 Jim Beach : What are your guardrails? We mentioned it earlier. What are your thoughts? What should the governments do? What should America do if the rest of the world won’t act? You know, it’s very competitive advantage versus China. Now, what are your thoughts on the whole guard rails.

46:22 Mirav Ozeri : And I asked specifically about guardrails, and who will put guardrails? And nobody is willing to put guardrails, and they want to move ahead and fast, because they say, if we don’t do it and we will do it responsibly, that’s like the open AI and Claude and all of them, we will do it responsibly. But if we will not do it, then China and Russia and all this regime will develop it before us, and that will be very dangerous. So I asked, So who will put the guardrails? She said, it will have to take a major organization. And I said, but it needs an international organization. And I asked, What are the chances that it will happen? And she said, they didn’t do it with nuclear weapons, and we get we got close to disaster. They didn’t do it with climate change, which warning went for years without any anything anybody doing about it? And she said, I don’t believe that human will do anything about AI which is coming at us like Meteor, unless there will be some awareness. She’s like, she like, encouraged me the clothes to start a movement. You know? She said, awareness is very important, and the window to do something about it and put the guard. So it’s got to be this, the scientist, the governments and people, but nobody is going to do everybody goes on with their life. They keep us, keep us divided, and keep us busy with just people think that AI is just chatting with people.

47:58 Jim Beach : Uses for it. Any more questions before we move on to our sort of a next topic. Any more questions that you went through with the five?

48:08 Mirav Ozeri : Yes, I asked them what AI was good for in the industry of health, agriculture and education, and that’s a major development in that thanks to AI.

48:21 Jim Beach : And that’s basically it, okay, fascinating. So which tools are you using productively and how? And I’ll throw out my thoughts as you get a second to collect yours. So I have used. Well, let me say this, I’ve only been on chat GPT. I’ve not tried any of the others, which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you so much. I have used chat GBT to do two major projects, first with my book, and I’ll send you a copy of this book, Merav. It’s called the real environmentalist.

48:58 Mirav Ozeri : It is so interesting. I know it’s really interesting, and yeah, I will promote it on on my website, also on my show notes, also, well,

49:07 Jim Beach : thank you. The idea we made a list of the 10 biggest hypocrites environmentally, and the chat GPT made that list for me. I had to make a list of the people who talk the most, and then I had a list of the people who were doing the most, and then I flipped them so you get a list of who’s doing the least and talking the most, which is called a hypocrite. That was an amazing exercise. And I don’t think you can argue with that data. You know, I don’t know how you can come back and say, No, that data is wrong. And then the second use I’ve had is writing. I have had so much success projects that have been sitting on my desk for years that have now suddenly gotten completed because I will take a chapter and put it into chat, GPT and it will give me a grade on just that chapter. You can even do it pair. Graph by paragraph, they’ll give you a grade like a 9.7 or an 8.2 or whatever. And then it will tell you, here are the reasons what you’re doing well, and here’s what you’re doing poorly. And I turned it into a damn game for me. I’m addicted to it now. Of getting all of my books up to like a nine seven, yes, but I got it making me so much better. What are you using it for?

50:24 Mirav Ozeri : Yes, so I am using chat GPT, just like you do for editing. It’s amazing. It’s the best editor ever. But after I did this show and the interview with AI, I started to use Gemini and compare. So Gemini has good answers, but they’re a little bit more formal chat, chat. I like the style of it, but this is for editing, right? But when I go into research, ever since I did the show, I go to groq only. Groq will give me the depth and the truth what kind of I did something about health, something with my friend that had a health problem with she had always regular blood pressure, like myself, a low blood pressure, and all of a sudden went up, and some doctor said to surgery, and some said no. So I asked Brooke, and he gave a whole breakdown. I fed all the my friend actually fed all the test results and everything, and said, You do not need surgery. Blah, blah, blah. So she went to another doctor, and lo and behold, she doesn’t need it. But his research was really deep, excellent.

51:35 Jim Beach : Okay, what else? What other things are you saying that are good or bad about particular products. What would you go to quad for? What would you go to grok for copilot? What are their

51:48 Mirav Ozeri : well, okay, so I found out that because I’ve been using chat GPT for the last year, and it has all my history and all my stuff, it’s just easier for me to stay with it. But I heard recently, by the way, that they’re thinking of putting advertisement, so that will be the day I will never use it again, because that’s annoying to me, and I’ll just continue with Claude, because Claude is pretty deep also. And I trust Claude because they have a very strong constitution. Anthropics, the designers, have very strong constitution of not doing anything powerful.

52:24 Jim Beach : Yeah, Rob, this is a great story. Where can people go to hear it, find it, download it. And how can we get in touch with you? Learn more from you, please. Or if we would rent a incredible condo in the most beautiful town I have ever been in, Woodstock, North New York. It’s just gorgeous. There it is.

52:44 Mirav Ozeri : It’s beautiful. There are five camps. Well, for the short rentals of small cabins with hot tubs and fireplaces, you go to five cabins with plural.com and for the podcast, the interview with AI, go to, it’s on any podcast platform, but you can just go to, how much can I make that info, which is my blog that has all my segments that are already like 73 of them, of different jobs and different careers. This was a unique show because usually I talk about jobs and careers, and your show is coming on Monday. It’s about entrepreneurship, and it’s so

53:24 Jim Beach : interesting that was yesterday.

53:28 Mirav Ozeri : Sorry, the show is coming yesterday. The show was published yesterday, and it’s about entrepreneurship, and it’s highly interesting. It will shatter your ideas about entrepreneurship and will really get you going with something that makes a lot of sense.

53:46 Jim Beach : Thank you so much for being with us. Great article, and we’d love to have you back. Thank you so much.

53:52 Mirav Ozeri : Thank you appreciate it. Take care. Bye.53:55 Jim Beach : Bye, we’re out of time. Bye, now you.