Will AI Become Your Best Friend? Erik Simons on the Future of AI, Jobs & Human Connection

The iDesign Lab Podcast | Where Design, Business, and Culture Shape How We Live and Build - Tiffany Woolley, Scott Woolley

In this episode of iDesign Lab, host Scott Woolley welcomes Erik Simons, a pioneering AI expert and serial entrepreneur who helped shape the early internet landscape. Drawing from his

Key takeaways

• AI's rapid advancement mirrors the early days of the internet, when few recognized its transformative potential.

Main topics

• The evolution of the internet from the 1990s to today

Notable quotes

"It was just obvious... once you started looking into it, you could kind of see how this building would change everything."

Conclusion

Erik Simons' journey from early internet innovator to AI thought leader underscores the importance of

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is iDesign Lab, a podcast where creativity and curiosity meet style and design. Curator of interiors, furnishings, and lifestyles. Hosted by Tiffany Woolley, an interior designer and a style enthusiast, along with her serial entrepreneur husband, Scott. iDesign Lab is your ultimate design podcast, where we explore the rich and vibrant world of design and its constant evolution in style and trends. Speaker 2 (0:31) Welcome to the iDesignLab podcast. Our guest today has been shaping the digital world long before most of us even had an email. Eric Simons is a serial entrepreneur who helped pioneer affiliate marketing, built multiple companies that were successfully acquired, and has spent more than 25 years working with artificial intelligence, AI. Today, he is one of the world's leading AI experts, an international speaker, and co-author of a number one bestselling AI book. Eric, welcome. Thank you. Thanks Speaker 3 (1:04) for Speaker 2 (1:04) joining us today. Thank Speaker 4 (1:05) you for having me. In the Speaker 2 (1:06) studio. It's Speaker 4 (1:07) exciting. I Speaker 2 (1:08) know, it is exciting. Speaker 4 (1:09) We've known each other a long time. Absolutely. Yeah. We go way back. So Speaker 2 (1:14) you were building internet companies before Google became a household name. When did you realize this internet thing was going to be? going to change everything? Speaker 3 (1:26) Well, so it was in the 90s when I was in school. And it was just kind of obvious how it could connect the world together. And it was this new way to potentially do everything that we see it doing today. But at the time, nobody really... When I talked to people about the internet, they're like, oh, it's just a fad. And, you know, like, what would my business do on the internet? Right. There was like, they couldn't even imagine what they would do. Speaker 2 (1:55) You couldn't comprehend it. And Speaker 3 (1:56) now it's hard to imagine any business not on the internet or in some way connected. When I Speaker 4 (2:01) had my grocery stores and they were first talking about the internet, I was like, so what? What's that got to do with anything to do with grocery stores? Right. And it's funny. Speaker 3 (2:07) That was actually one of my first thoughts. It was when I was in a... in high school and I had to, it was a business class where I had to come up with some kind of an idea for a business and do a feasibility study on it, you know? Um, and my only job that I had had, which actually to this day, the only job that I've had was I delivered Domino's pizza. Speaker 1 (2:25) 16 Speaker 3 (2:26) years old. Yeah. For like a few months. And, and so I knew the delivery business and I thought, Oh, with the internet, we could have like virtual, a virtual grocery store and do like. So that was my feasibility thing was basically like internet grocery delivery. But it was, you know, people were like, oh, that's ridiculous, you know. Right. Yeah, because that was in the 90s. Speaker 4 (2:47) So one of the first things, if I'm correct, is credit card and processing in the internet or gambling? What was? Oh, the first thing that I actually got into? Yeah. Speaker 3 (2:59) Yeah, Speaker 4 (2:59) it was Speaker 3 (2:59) gambling basically. So, yeah. Speaker 4 (3:04) Beginning early stages before really anyone knew about gambling on the Internet. Speaker 3 (3:08) Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it was there wasn't much going on on the Internet at the time. Well, it's Speaker 2 (3:16) funny because I even like to tell people like I went through four years of college and never sent an email. Speaker 3 (3:22) And I Speaker 2 (3:23) still remember like the friends I was hanging out with, like we would go on the computer that we bought for like Word documents or whatever. And finally, once it had like a hookup or what have you, it'd be like, oh, you can see what movies are coming out. But you couldn't buy a movie ticket. Speaker 1 (3:41) So Speaker 2 (3:41) it's like, obviously, you were at such a forefront of realizing the next steps of what was needed. So how Speaker 4 (3:50) did you jump into? The internet before it was really the internet. Speaker 3 (3:55) Well, so it actually came out of when I was doing a – so these business ideas I had when I was in school that I started exploring. And so after that internet grocery delivery idea, then in another class or another project, I had an idea for doing basically a theme restaurant. A friend of mine in school, his dad was a wealthy guy and he – And he was he owned some some restaurants and he was like, hey, if you could come up with a theme, you know, like, let me know. And I was fascinated by I'd seen in movies at the time, like video conferencing. It was the kind of thing you'd see in Star Trek. Yeah. You know, but there was no video conferencing. And so my concept, I thought, OK, well, on the Internet, there's no. So actually, the concept was. a theme restaurant where you'd have different locations and you could meet for a virtual dinner or lunch or something. So it was like a half table and a screen and you would see the people at the other location across the table. And so I was like, okay, but how, so I actually called, I was in Canada. I called Bell Canada at the time and I was like, you know, how much would it cost to do video conferencing? And they're like, well. You know, we have these like early demos of it, but we don't really have anything commercial. But it basically takes eight phone lines to get the data across. And I was like, well, that's going to be expensive if you have these restaurants in different locations. And I went back to the Internet because I realized that the Internet was this sort of world thing where you could transfer data and you didn't have long distance costs. So I started looking at what technologies were available for doing video conferencing online at the time. And that just kind of led me down this rabbit hole where I just started to see all these opportunities on the internet. Speaker 2 (5:33) I mean, it's so mind blowing to me how fast the Internet and the timing has caught up. Like, I feel like time goes exponentially quicker now because of this of the Internet. I mean, maybe it's Speaker 1 (5:50) the Speaker 2 (5:50) Internet, but I think so. I was watching the Brady Bunch, the first episode this morning with my daughter, who for whatever reason had it on when we when I walked out to the kitchen this morning. And I Googled, like, when did it start, that show? And it started, like, in the 60s, late 60s. And it just, like, it dawned on me that, like, how. Speaker 2 (6:14) Back like to me like that doesn't seem so far back, but it's really like such a short time span of where we now today are Right Speaker 3 (6:24) in Speaker 2 (6:25) the fact that you could be a part of that. It's pretty I Speaker 3 (6:28) mean, it's it's amazing I consider myself lucky to be like just the timing of it the fact that I was yeah just sort of starting my career as this thing was starting and Yeah, so the timing was perfect. But I mean, on that note, I think now what I see happening with AI, it really reminds me of that time with the internet. Because at that time, I knew that the internet was going to change the whole world in ways that most people then just didn't realize. Speaker 4 (6:59) How did you realize that? What made you think that? Where most people back then were just thinking that this might be just something that comes and goes. Speaker 3 (7:07) To me, it seemed obvious, but it was also just because once you started looking into it and you could kind of see how this building, I mean, you could see there was people there and they were looking for something to do. And you could just, I don't know, the way my mind works, I'm always looking for how you can apply technology to solve problems. And I just like the idea of just, you know, online food delivery. It just seemed obvious to me that it would make sense to. It would be cool to be able to just go online and order this stuff, right? Because the internet just suddenly made these things possible, you know, to bring all of this stuff to you. And so for me, it just seemed like a no-brainer. It was just obvious. Speaker 4 (7:48) So going back to the beginning, you're involved in gambling online. Where do you go from there? Speaker 3 (7:55) So basically what happened is I ended up, and it was when I was researching my video conferencing technology, I ended up. talking to some guys that they had built basically some gambling software. They had started on that, and I partnered with them, and I helped them to market it. I created one of the first affiliate programs online. It was the first that I know of that actually paid a commission on a sale. So for people Speaker 4 (8:24) who are listening who don't understand. what an affiliate program is. Speaker 3 (8:28) Yeah. So an affiliate program basically is, it's just a commission-based sales sort of a thing is the easiest Speaker 1 (8:34) way to think of it. And on Speaker 3 (8:36) the internet, it's really easy Speaker 4 (8:37) to track sales because you can just track when somebody clicks through to Speaker 1 (8:41) a Speaker 3 (8:42) website. Speaker 4 (8:43) So if someone's clicking through from a website. That person could get a commission. Speaker 3 (8:48) Right. And so with the casino, you know, I saw that it was basically keeping around 85 % of the money that was deposited into an account to play. And by the way, this is a reason that nobody should gamble. I'm not a gambler. You know, because then, you know, it's something that you see not just in online gambling, but it's, you know, in Vegas casinos. Speaker 3 (9:14) So when you walk into a casino with $100, on average, $85 stays with the casino. It's not because the games are that badly – well, some of them are. I mean some things like might only be 51%, 52 % like odds in favor of the house like a blackjack or something. And then you've got like slots, which is the worst. Speaker 3 (9:33) The reason you get to the 85 % is because people tend to just keep going until the luck. So like when you compound those odds, it eventually turns around. Anyway, I'm going off on a little segue here. But so what I saw is that anytime somebody deposited $100 into the online casino, $85 stayed with the house. And so I realized that we had a tremendous margin to be able to pay out for the marketing. And so basically what I did is I decided, okay, we can give a nice healthy percentage of this to whoever, you know, sends this traffic. And so I created this affiliate program where if somebody sent a click to my casino and people deposited money, then we would pay them. Speaker 2 (10:12) And so... Speaker 3 (10:13) Very quickly, because this is early days of the internet before there was Google AdSense or any of these other sort of advertising programs. If you had a website, there was really no way to monetize unless you were CNN. There was a couple of websites that could charge high ad rates, CPM, you know, just per view. But, you know, all these different sort of mom and pop websites that were popping up, they had no way to monetize. And so because my casino was one of the first way, I just very quickly grew because, you know, they all joined my program. And what I discovered was that they were all getting their traffic from search, which this was even before Google started. Speaker 2 (10:50) A search engine type thing? Yeah, it Speaker 3 (10:51) was Yahoo, basically. Yahoo, Excite, Lyco, some of these names. I don't know if you remember. Yeah, Speaker 2 (10:57) you've been around. Alta Speaker 3 (10:57) Vista, Speaker 2 (10:57) some of these things. Alta Vista, I remember that one, actually. Yeah, Speaker 3 (11:00) a Speaker 2 (11:00) moment of Speaker 3 (11:00) silence for all of those search engines. But anyways. Speaker 3 (11:05) You know, so then I started to sort of reverse engineer what they did and I became an expert in search engine optimization. And that led me into early artificial intelligence, which really just came down to automating of stuff where I discovered, OK, if I can create a website and get it in a search engine and that'll generate me X amount of dollars per month. then how about if I create a hundred of those or a thousand of those websites? Because, you know, it was just creating. It's not like you had to go out and buy land. That was the great thing about the internet. You went and created land. So it's like whoever went and created the media faster. It's Speaker 2 (11:39) so interesting Speaker 3 (11:39) to Speaker 2 (11:40) put it that way. So Speaker 3 (11:41) basically I was just out there. I was obsessed with, okay, I'm just going to create media as fast as I can, faster than anybody else and just flood search engines. So creating websites Speaker 2 (11:49) basically. Basically, yeah. Speaker 3 (11:50) And so I created this. you know, an automated system to just create websites. It was the full process from like buying a domain, acquiring the domain, and then, you know, applying some basic design. Although it was like, you know, we didn't put any thought into it. It was just like pump this stuff out. Because basically, as long as we occupied a position in the search engine, we were creating the land and the land didn't exist. I mean, a lot of stuff you went to search for, there just wasn't results. So I was like, well, I'm just going to create a bunch of results, you know what I mean? And that's basically what we did. Speaker 2 (12:18) You fulfilled a void. Speaker 3 (12:20) Yeah. Speaker 4 (12:20) If I remember correctly from years ago, you were creating like hundreds or thousands of websites a month. Speaker 3 (12:27) Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we were doing, I mean, about 150 a day. Websites. Yeah, websites. And Speaker 2 (12:34) these websites, were they shopping? Were they information websites? They Speaker 3 (12:39) were Speaker 2 (12:39) all kinds of things. Speaker 3 (12:42) In the beginning, there wasn't like when I really first started doing this e-commerce, there really wasn't very much. No, people weren't buying stuff online. So the early things I was doing was there was some like like mortgage and financial offers, companies that were looking for that traffic, because then I had to. I mean, only so many people would want to go to my casino. I didn't want to drive everybody there. I just realized that, hey, we have to find other people to buy this because now. Again, there was no way to monetize traffic. I couldn't just go to Google. It didn't exist like a Google AdSense. So I had to figure out how, okay, great, I can get all this traffic from search engines, but how do I monetize it? And so there was a few companies out there selling insurance and mortgage that they were basically, they created an affiliate program, sort of copying what I had done. And so now I was on the other side where I was selling them traffic and I did that. Speaker 2 (13:32) Is that lead generation or no? Yeah, Speaker 3 (13:34) basically it was lead generation. So they were paying me for a lead rather than a sale because there's different ways of affiliate marketing. You can do per click or per lead or per actual sale or a percentage. But anyway, so I ended up having all of this other traffic because, again, the search engines needed results everywhere and it needed to be filled. And one of the strategies I was using to make websites is I had a piece of software that I created that was searching the domain registry to see which domains were going to expire soon because they come up for renewal every year. And so then it would cross-check those to see if any of them already had a listing in Yahoo or like the search engines of the day. And if it found one, then it would put on my target list and another piece of software that would try to start registering that domain like once a second when it was coming up. So this is Speaker 4 (14:27) all automated stuff. Yeah, automated stuff. Which is I know that you have always been very intense about automating everything. Speaker 3 (14:35) Yeah. But so basically what would happen is that software every night would end up buying a bunch of domains automatically. And in the morning I'd wake up and I'd see this list of domains and I'd have to think of, okay. What am I going to put there? Because it was a wide range of stuff. And one interesting story, I was living right here. I told you, Scott, I was living right across the street from the studio here. When I first came to Florida, and this is like late 90s. And I ended up, I woke up one morning and I had acquired these two domains. I can't remember what they were called, but they were basically in the number one and two spot of Yahoo, which was the big search in the domain. caskets and basically funeral stuff. And I was like, what am I