Entrepreneurs: Is Risk-Taking in Your DNA? The Role Genetics Play in Leadership with Dr. Danielle Dick

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following is a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Nobody seemed to be talking about the role that Jeans played.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
I took a huge interest in to insurance inschurch products.

Speaker 4 (00:17):
RAG is essentially search on steroids.

Speaker 5 (00:21):
I'm Richard Gearhart and I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. You just heard
some snippets from our show. It was a great one.

Speaker 6 (00:26):
Stay tuned to hear tips about how you can start
your business.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given
it hard, now get it in gear. It's Passage to
Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.

Speaker 7 (00:43):
I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service
intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.

Speaker 6 (00:50):
And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart formerly Elizabeth McNamara, founder of gear
Media Studios, the chief marketing officer of Gearhart Law, and
a podcast consultant. And I'm also a speaker.

Speaker 7 (01:01):
Welcome to Passage to Profit, the Road to Entrepreneurship where
we talk with celebrities and entrepreneurs about their stories and
their business ventures. So today on the show. We're diving
into a topic that might take some parents and entrepreneurs
and make them a little bit comfortable. What a success,
risk taking, and even leadership aren't learned behaviors at all?

(01:23):
What if they're written into your DNA. So joining us
today is doctor Daniel Dick, and internationally recognized behavioral genetics
researcher at Rutgers University, author of the Child Code, and
co founder of Thrive Genetics.

Speaker 6 (01:39):
And then after we interviewed doctor Dick, we will be
talking to two amazing entrepreneurs. Neil Centuria a serial entrepreneur.
He says that he just can't stick with one thing.
He has to keep moving. Right now, he's the co
founder and CEO of asturing dot ai, which is very
cool because I've been talking about this kind of thing
for a long time, but I haven't actually talked to
somebody who has a citation backed AI workspace, and I'm

(02:03):
really excited to hear how he does it. And then
we have someone with an amazing story. Alan Porter is
a financial advisor and owner and CEO Strategic Wealth Strategies,
and he started his journey as a black Hawk helicopter
instructor pilot that sounds.

Speaker 7 (02:19):
Like so much fun. I would love to learn how
to fly a helicopter.

Speaker 6 (02:23):
And now he's a recognized tax strategist and he has
a whole story to go along with that, and his
mission is to help families protect their wealth and retire
with confidence.

Speaker 5 (02:32):
I am really excited to hear his story too.

Speaker 6 (02:34):
And coming up later on it's Noah's Retrospective along with
Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind.

Speaker 7 (02:41):
But before we get to our distinguished guest, it's time
for your new business Journey. Two and five Americans are
business owners, are thinking about starting a business, and so
today we're going to ask our panel what's one early
mistake or tough decision in your business journey that ultimately
drove your growth. So let's go to doctor Dick. Welcome

(03:02):
to the show. What's the one mistake or tough decision
that drove your growth early in your career.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
In founding Thrive Genetics, I thought I had a pretty
clear idea of how to use the twenty five plus
years of research that we've been doing to bring it
to people to prevent addiction improve lives. And my mistake
was really in thinking that I knew how best to

(03:30):
bring this information to people how it would be most useful.
And one of the things that I learned from my
co founder and CEO is as he started to talk
to different people and think about where could this product
be useful, Where could information to help people understand their
addiction risk, where could it be used, we actually ended

(03:53):
up finding a completely different area that had never even
occurred to me, where there's been the most traction and interest.
And I'm happy to talk about that later, but that
was really the first mistake I made and thing I
had to let go of was the idea that I
had a sense of where this product would be most
useful and the market came back with a totally different idea.

Speaker 7 (04:16):
Well, that is the entrepreneurial world. For sure. You start
on one path and then you pivot. But that's a
great example and good thing for entrepreneurs to keep in
mind as they go forward with their business journeys. Neil,
welcome to the show. We're here with Neil Centurion. Neil,
what was a mistake that you made or a tough
decision that helped you grow as an entrepreneur?

Speaker 4 (04:36):
First, Mitchell and Elizabeth, thank you for having me. Your
question is a mistake and I would prefer to use
plurals as mistakes. I have two two. I've run eight
or nine different companies since nineteen ninety five, and I've
invested in another dozen. The biggest mistake that also fuels

(05:00):
disaster and success is I picked the wrong team and
I waited too long to make a change. When I
got the right team, I was enormously successful. The team
is everything, your partners are everything. But when I picked wrong,
I just made the wrong I didn't assess it correctly.

(05:20):
Then when I recognized it, I waited too long to
make changes. I don't make those mistakes.

Speaker 7 (05:25):
Now, that's good. So what made them the wrong team?

Speaker 4 (05:29):
Well, this is really an interesting topic. This is something
doctor Dick probably can talk about, which is what I'll
call behavioral economics. Or it's really hard to figure out
what that person is like. When you're in a fox
hole and there's incoming fire, you look around it where
to go or where'd she go? It's easy for a
twenty minute presentation, a pitch. You could be charming, you know,

(05:51):
it's easy asking hard questions and background questions. Finding out
what they really can do resumes a joke. I mean,
I was ahead of this, this, this, this, and this.
But the truth is I drove a you know, I
drove a truck and parked the boss's car. Finding out
really rigorously trying to understand the characteristics of a co founder.

(06:13):
I've always had co founders or a CEO or a president,
high level sea level people hard. I don't know. If
people spend a lot of time on it, they get
it wrong half the time. It's really hard to do.
And once you do it, then you say, well, maybe
I'll change. I hope she'll change. It could be changed.
I don't want to do it today. It's too much pressure.
And then what you really need to do is this

(06:34):
can then immediately when you recognize it.

Speaker 7 (06:36):
Yeah, I have to say that a lot of the
hiring mistakes I've made have just been not even doing
enough due diligence, you know, beforehand. And I think it's
really a good point. And hiring is something of a
black art, I think in that you know, you never
really know how it's going to work out. But they
say hire slowly and change quickly. Those are good words

(06:58):
to live by. So welcome to the show, Alan Porter.
What's the one mistake that prompted your growth?

Speaker 3 (07:05):
One mistake that really problem my growth was not having
a team, a team of specialists to how has what
I do. Say, I'm your family doctor. I can treat
you for minor illness's minor injuries. But if you want
your knee operated on, you want a specialist orthopedic surgeon.
Well he's a specialist. And that's what I have on
my team, top tax specific attorneys CPAs and other specialists,

(07:26):
and we collaborate together to come up with solutions for
people's financial problems. When I found this out, to have
a team of people to work with instead of just
everybody to relying on me because not everybody can know everything.

Speaker 7 (07:37):
Well, I think that's a great lesson, and a lot
of entrepreneurs starting out do have to wear a lot
of hats. But the sooner you can diversify and get
support from other sources, I think that better off you are.
Elizabeth Caerhart, Well.

Speaker 6 (07:49):
I'm on the same page as Allan. I didn't have
money really to hire anybody, and I was working on
different things, and then I hired a coach and she
has made all the day. So I would say, if
I had everything to do over again, I would hire
a coach. But not just any coach, I mean this
coach I have. I feel like she is an incredibly
phenomenal person. She's a really good fit for me. And

(08:12):
actually she's going to be working with a friend of
mine now because she saw the changes in me and
she's like, holy crap, I want that to happen for
me too.

Speaker 7 (08:19):
Well, you know, not reaching out when it's time to
reach out, I think is a mistake. But you've corrected
that and I'm pleased to let everybody know that Elizabeth
is starting a new career as a speaker and it's
really going great, so for myself. One of the most
important things that an entrepreneur needs to become comfortable with
is discomfort. And it's not appreciating that discomfort is part

(08:45):
of the journey. And that's pretty much true for life
in general, but I think entrepreneurs sometimes deal with it
a little bit more just by the nature of the
beefs and so, you know, if it's hiring before you're ready,
or wondering if you should take the leap in to
protect your technology with intellectual property, or saying no to
opportunities that don't align with your business goals, sometimes you

(09:09):
just have to take that leap, and sometimes it's exciting
and sometimes it's terrifying, and sometimes it works out and
sometimes it doesn't. But I do think that not being
comfortable with this comfort can be a big mistake, but
learning that can lead to growth. So now it's time
to talk with our guest, doctor Daniel Dick, and what

(09:30):
if everything you thought about behavior is wrong. She's an
internationally acclaimed behavioral genetics researcher from Rutgers University and author
of The Child Code. And we'll talk a little bit
about how a person's genetic code may matter a lot
more than you may have originally thought. So get ready

(09:50):
to rethink everything that you thought you knew about parenting,
personality risk, and how it plays out in an entrepreneurial role.
So maybe you can explain to our audience succinctly and
in simple terms what your research is about.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Basically, I study how our genes and our environments come
together to shape life outcomes. A lot of my work
focuses on addiction and mental health. I direct a large
university wide addiction research center at Rutgers. But I entered
this kind of entrepreneurial world because when I became a parent,

(10:29):
I owe the irony found myself raising the high risk
child that I study, highly impulsive, highly emotional, And that's
when I realized that so much of what we take
for granted in the research world, our basic understanding of
how almost all behavior is a product of both our

(10:49):
genes and our environments, was really just not out there
in all of the wealth of information for parents. You know,
we have parenting blogs and books and influencers, and they
were all talking about all the things parents could and
should be doing, but nobody seemed to be talking about
the role that jeans played in our kid's behavior. And

(11:13):
I thought that was a huge mistake for me. Knowing
that research really was kind of what saved my sanity
when I was going through so many challenges with my son,
and I looked around and I saw so many other smart,
capable friends who were parents, you know, wondering what they
were doing wrong or what was wrong with their child

(11:35):
if their child was not being the dreamy, well behaved
child we all imagine having before we have children. And
so that's really what led me to think about, how
do we do more to get research to the people
who can use it, And that included writing a book,
and you know now co founding a company and being
an advisor on several other companies, But that's really what

(11:57):
started this journey for me.

Speaker 6 (11:59):
Well, it's funny that you talk about that, because we
have these stories from when our son was little. He
climbed up to the top of the slide and fell off.
Richard had him at the playground, and then when they
got home. I was home, he was crying his head off.
I'm like, oh, what happened. He's like, well, he fell
off the slide. Oh, He's like, that's not why he's crying.
He's crying because I wouldn't let him go back up.

(12:19):
And so now our son has two kids, and his
baby has to wear a helmet because he climbs, and
the other one does too, and so it's like, did
they get that climbing gene from him?

Speaker 5 (12:31):
That kind of seems like it right.

Speaker 8 (12:33):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
In our field, we say everyone is an environmentalist until
they have their second child, and then they realize I'm
doing all the same things. Why is one turning out
so different from the other, for example? And I think
that's one of the easy ways that you know, we
ken as parents start to see and wrap our head
around this idea that they are not just you know,

(12:56):
little lumps of clay waiting to be molded by you know,
the well and tensions of their parents. That in fact,
our genes influence our brain development, and that influences, you know,
the way our brains are wired, which is what contributes to,
you know, all these amazing differences we see between people
and their behavior. Why some kids and adults are more

(13:19):
impulsive than others, you know, or more anxious than others.
And Alan was talking about being a black Hawk helicopter pilot.
You know, my father is a retired general, was a
fighter pilot.

Speaker 5 (13:31):
And you know, lo and behold.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
So the fact that I have this highly risk taking,
sensation seeking child who his father, my father, my brother
are in fact all fighter pilots, you know, another example
of how genetic predispositions can kind of run through families. There.

Speaker 7 (13:50):
Wow, that sounds like the dream family to me, a
bunch of fighter pilots with But I did want to
ask how do jans influence behavior and what behaviors do
they influence.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Genetic influences show up very early in development, so we
start to think about stable genetic influences on things like temperament,
or personality as starting to emerge around age three or so,
and by that I mean a lot of kids behavior
you know before that is really just a product of

(14:25):
kind of early brain development. But around age three you
start to see stable differences emerging between people. Right, and
so all kids, for example, get upset or get anxious
or nervous sometimes. But when you see behavior that's consistent
across settings and across people, so i e. It's not

(14:46):
just the child who like you know, shrinks behind their parents'
leg when a dog starts snarling at them. Okay, well
that's a normal fear response. But it's the child who's
afraid to be dropped off at kindergarten, afraid to so,
you know, try the new slide on the playground, you know,
afraid when they're meeting a new person. When you start

(15:06):
to see these kind of stable, consistent behaviors, that usually
starts to emerge around the three and then continues into
and throughout our lives. Now that's not to say the
environment doesn't play a role, of course it does. But
when it comes to thinking about for example, kids recognizing

(15:29):
that they're all different, their brains are all wired differently,
which also means some things are going to come naturally
to some kids and some things are not, And so
we can really tailor our parenting to what our kids
need most and what will work best for each of
our kids by being mindful of kind of the way

(15:51):
that they're wired. And that's a lot of what my
book is about about kind of a little bit of
the research and science behind how we know kids' behavior
is genetically influenced. Some surveys about trying to figure out
where your child falls on kind of some of these
big genetically influenced dimensions, things like impulsivity, emotionality, extraversion, et cetera,

(16:13):
and then thinking about what do we know about what
parenting strategies work best for kids with different temperamental styles,
whose brains are essentially wired differently. So it's one of
the ways I'm trying to use research to essentially help
individuals in their parenting. And more broadly, I think there's
a variety of ways we can do better at getting

(16:35):
research to people to be able to use it.

Speaker 7 (16:37):
So, if there's a child that is shy.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Shyness is interesting because shyness is actually a combination of
being nervous around other people but actually wanting to interact
with other people. So that is something that has you know,
a lot of environmental influences too. So if we're thinking
about kind of the more genetically influenced underlying temperament, it
might be a child who's more introverted, for example, who

(17:03):
is not naturally you know, wanting to be around other
kids or you know, or more maybe a little fearful
who doesn't naturally want to kind of join in with
a group of you know, kids on the playground or whatnot.
And when I talk about tailoring parenting to your unique child,
it doesn't mean that you're letting the child drive. You

(17:23):
know what they're doing and what you're doing as a parent.
But it's the equivalent of if your child was not
doing well in algebra, you wouldn't send them to time
out right or say just do it, come on, like,
do more algebra. You can do this. They actually need
to learn the skills of algebra. And so if you

(17:44):
have a child who is naturally, say more.

Speaker 8 (17:47):
Fearful, then then you know saying well, come on, join
the group, go right in.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
For some kids, they naturally can do that. For other kids,
you actually need to teach them the skills that maybe
don't come naturally. Now, you're probably not going to take,
for example, a more introverted child and convert them into
someone who wants to be dancing on tabletops, right, But
can you essentially help them with the skills to be

(18:13):
able to join a work reception and you know, mingle
and interact with some other folks. Absolutely, And so we
talk about that as reaction range, meaning we have genetic dispositions,
but where we land in terms of how those actually
play out in real life. We can certainly move kids

(18:35):
in where they land, but we can probably only move
them so much. Right, You're not going to totally change
a child's personality, and you wouldn't want.

Speaker 5 (18:44):
To right now. You wouldn't. You wouldn't.

Speaker 6 (18:46):
And I just want to remind our audience quickly that
we're speaking with doctor Danielle Dick, and internationally recognized behavioral
genetics researcher at Rutgers University here in New Jersey and
author of The Child Code and co founder of Thrive Genetics.
And I wanted to ask you since this is a
show about entrepreneurs, which you're here with your book, so
you fit right in, but I wanted to ask you
a question about entrepreneurs.

Speaker 5 (19:07):
Do you feel like people are born to be entrepreneurs?

Speaker 2 (19:11):
I mean, you know that we have.

Speaker 6 (19:12):
Neil on the show, and Neil is what had twenty
companies or something?

Speaker 5 (19:16):
Is that born into? Can you learn that?

Speaker 7 (19:18):
What do you think?

Speaker 2 (19:19):
So virtually every complex behavior, whether we're talking about impulsivity, addiction,
probably entrepreneurship. Right, Virtually everything that's been studied is partly
genetic and partly environmental. And so I would imagine this
is now me, you know, conjecturing. I can't you know,
conjure up a research study, you know, in particular about entrepreneurism.

(19:42):
They're probably out there. But there are genetically influenced traits
which are beneficial. Right, So, for example, we know that
risk taking is something that is genetically influenced, and many
successful entrepreneurs are a little higher on risk taking because
you have to take some calculated risks and be willing
to to tolerate that. That's a genetically influenced trait that

(20:04):
probably helps folks who are entrepreneurs, or maybe you know,
makes some folks more interested in going into you know,
entrepreneurship and starting businesses. That said, of course, the environment
always plays a role. It can play a role in,
you know, in the sillings and arrows of outrageous fortune
in terms of how our business is unfold and how

(20:25):
our lives unfold.

Speaker 7 (20:26):
Yeah, I mean, clearly events matter. And if you could
be successful at one thing one time and not necessarily
be successful again and then get discouraged and then avoid
that activity, or you could be you know, very stubborn
about it and just continue on that path until you
know you get it. And so I certainly feel like

(20:47):
my life, my professional life and personal life have been
influenced by events, and that it's influenced my behavior, right,
and how I respond to things, my mood, the way
I approach people. And so what percentage of life do
you think is determined by genetics versus the environment?

Speaker 2 (21:07):
There are all kinds of studies that have looked at
exactly that question, and on average, a rule of thumb
is about fifty percent of the variability between people is
due to differences in their DNA and fifty percent is
due to differences in their environment. Now, that does not
mean for any one person, right, So the fact that

(21:29):
I became an entrepreneur or I became a researcher doesn't
mean that half of that is due to my genes
and half is due to my environment. It means across
the population, we are all our own unique combination. The
way that we kind of help people conceptualize this and
it makes I think a lot more sense if you're
thinking about it with respect to something like substance use

(21:50):
or mental health challenges. Right, but it's true of any outcome.
If you think of, Okay, why do some people develop
substance use problems? We know that it's partly to partly environmental.
But imagine we all have a mental health jar. Like
if you're picturing those clear mason glass Mason jars, right,
and when that jar is full, that's when somebody is

(22:13):
experiencing problems, right, So they're in the throes of addiction,
or they have depression or anxiety. Well, what can fill
up your jar? Partly genetics, So imagine you're going to
drop some marbles in the bottom of that jar. Some
people start life with just a few marbles. The other
things they can go in there lost. Well, yeah, if

(22:33):
you have just a few marbles, you might encounter a
lot of environmental rocks, and that can lead to your
jar being full and having problems. Right, You might on
the other hand, have a jar that's three quarters of
the way full, so you have a lot of genetic
risk and then it doesn't take as much of the environment.
But we're all kind of our own unique combination. And

(22:54):
that's true of virtually every life outcome. Right. Part of
it's are genes, part of it's the vironment. But what
it is for each one of us is going to
be our own unique combination.

Speaker 7 (23:05):
Well, that's absolutely fascinating. We're with doctor Daniel Dick from
Rutgers University, author of the Child Code. We have to
take a commercial break. We'll be back. Don't forget to
experience more of Passage to Profit by subscribing to us
on Facebook, Instagram, x and YouTube, or subscribe to our
podcast anywhere you get your podcasts. Just look for the
Passage to Profit show on any of these platforms. We'll

(23:28):
be back soon with AI in Business, Intellectual Property, News
and Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind. So stay tuned.

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Speaker 1 (25:34):
Now back to Passage to Profit once again, Richard and
Elizabeth Gerhardt.

Speaker 5 (25:39):
And our special guest Danielle Dick.

Speaker 6 (25:41):
We're going to finish your interview and then we have
two other presenters who are awesome as well. But right
now we want to dive into the company that doctor
Dick founded that's just doing amazing things. So what is
the name of your company.

Speaker 5 (25:54):
Thrive Genetics, and what are you doing with that?

Speaker 2 (25:57):
So one of the things that I have become I'm
passionate about is that we need to do more to
get research to people who can use it, And so
in my own area, a lot of my work focuses
on projects where we are identifying the specific genes involved
in why some people are more at risk for substance

(26:18):
use and other behavioral addictions than others. And we've made
radical progress, so we can now scan the entire genome.
We have found thousands of genetic variants that increase risk.
We can add them all up and weight them by
how big of an effect each one has to create

(26:39):
a genetic risk score for any individual. Now, and not
only that, we know a ton about what are the
early behaviors some of the things we were talking about
earlier that are in my book, what are the early
behaviors and the environments that are most predictive of who
goes on to develop problems? And so we can put

(27:01):
this information together to powerfully differentiate how at risk people
are for developing a problem. For example, people with the
highest levels of genetic behavioral environmental risk eighty four percent
of them go on to develop a substance use disorder.
People with the lowest levels of risk four percent do.

(27:23):
But there was no way to get all of this
amazing information, these huge discoveries that we have made over
the last decade or so out of scientific journals and
two people who could actually use this information. I'm a
strong believer that knowledge is power, because we know that
genes are not destiny. So if you know you are

(27:45):
more at risk, you can proactively take steps to reduce
the likelihood you'll ever develop problems. And that's what we're
doing at Thrived Genetics is taking this research and bringing
it to people so they can understand their addiction risk
profile to either prevent problems or to have more tailored

(28:06):
treatment and recovery programs to really sustain long term positive outcomes.

Speaker 7 (28:12):
I love the program and what you're doing. What is
the business model for getting the information out there? Publishing papers?
Are you doing tests for people? How do people actually
find out what their profile is and how do you
get that information to them?

Speaker 2 (28:27):
So we have built a platform. It's available online. You
can essentially fill out a short survey. It's those behavioral
and environmental factors that we know are most predictive of risk.
You can spit in a tuber suab your cheek.

Speaker 6 (28:41):
You know.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
We send these at home test kits, send it back
to the lab, we scan the genome, create those genetic
risk scores, put it all together, and we worked, by
the way, with psychiatric genetic counselors and whatnot on how
to present this information so it's understandable to the average person.

Speaker 8 (28:57):
And so we put it all together to give this
kind of risk profile, what it means, and then what
you can do to reduce risk. I talked earlier about
my big mistake.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
I thought, well, this is great, let's just get this
out to people direct to consumer, and actually, you know
the whole how are you going to make money in
a business? What is a viable marketing strategy? Et cetera.
As a researcher, that's not something that I naturally think about.
My husband is ironically the entrepreneur in this family, and

(29:29):
he would say, okay, but how is this going to
make money and who's going to pay for it? And
I would say, oh, but it's just to help people.
And he would say, okay, but there has to be
a business model here. And this is really where my
co founder and the CEO of the company, whose background
is in business, he really then did a lot of
the leg work to explore where are places where this

(29:53):
could be useful, and one of the places where right
now we're getting the most traction is interestingly in oncology
treatment because, in particular neck and throat cancers, the treatments
are so painful that opioids need to be prescribed to

(30:13):
reduce pains so that individuals can endure their treatments. Because
there is so much awareness now about the addictive properties
of opioids and you know, the dangers of addiction. What
they're finding, the doctors are finding is that patients are
reticent to take the opioids they're concerned about addiction. So

(30:35):
what that means is if they're not taking opioids alongside
their radiation treatments, it's so painful that often they can't
continue with these life saving treatments, and that prolongs the treatment,
they end up rehospitalized, et cetera. And so it's also
taking a lot of time to convince patients that you know,

(30:56):
we can manage this, and you know, obviously the it's
not like everyone becomes addicted who takes opioids.

Speaker 8 (31:03):
And so the fact that we can actually create these
risk profiles to help people understand are they one of
that small group of people who is at risk at
higher risk for addiction. That can be used to essentially
put a lot of people's minds at ease so that

(31:23):
they can essentially do the best practice treatment which is
accompanied by opioids and pain.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Management, and for those that are at high risk, they
can more closely monitor them and discuss other pain relief
medications that could be used. So that's really what we're
working on right now, and we're about to partner and
start running some clinical trials with different hospitals to look
at how that impacts patient outcomes. When we can deliver

(31:52):
that information to them.

Speaker 5 (31:53):
Well, that's very powerful.

Speaker 7 (31:55):
That's very powerful. So we have to wrap up the segment.
Doctor Dickett's been just fabulous talking with you. We love
your vision for helping people identify their risk profile around
addiction because that's such an important problem. How can people
find you or find out about Thrive Genetics.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
So you can visit our website Thrivegenetics dot ai. You
can also find more information about our ongoing research and
addiction at addiction dot Wrutgers dot edu. And my own
personal website is Danieldick dot com where I make a
lot of resources available for parents and where you can
find my book.

Speaker 7 (32:32):
Awesome. Now it's time for AI in business. So Elizabeth,
what's the plan.

Speaker 6 (32:37):
I'm going to ask each of you for one way
that you're using AI in your business. So, doctor Daniel
Dick with Thrivegenetics dot AI, what's one way that you
use AI to help your business run better?

Speaker 2 (32:50):
Our business is obviously grounded in the research, and we've
been using AI in the research and machine learning for
some time to Essentially we look at particularly now with
the wealth of things that we can collect on individuals.
We can collect genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, so all these

(33:13):
biological indicators. We can collect digital data on people's health
and how it is being monitored moment to moment. We
can do brain scans of individuals. What we can really
do is integrate all of this information alongside all the
information that's in electronic health records, personal surveys, et cetera,

(33:36):
to look at what best predicts either treatment outcomes or
who is at most risk of developing addiction. And so
we use that to essentially continue to iterate and improve
our risk prediction profiles that we then bring to people
through Thrive Genetics.

Speaker 6 (33:55):
Do you think you could do that without AI.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
He provides a way to integrate this data that just
really wasn't possible in years past. So it's a new
way of being able to integrate big data that goes
beyond the more limited, narrow kind of hypothesis driven I

(34:19):
have an idea that dopamine might be involved in addiction, right,
you know, are more limited ways that we could study
this in the past, because addiction mental health are so
complex that we really need to be able to have
these comprehensive risk profiles that bring in tons of data
and information.

Speaker 5 (34:40):
Great, thank you.

Speaker 6 (34:41):
So now we're going to ask Neil Centuria with ask
Turing dot Ai. I know your whole company's AI, but
what's one way that you're using AI?

Speaker 5 (34:50):
Maybe to speed processes or something.

Speaker 4 (34:53):
We use our own ask Turing dot ai. You can
sign up and use it. You can start immediately. We
use it it just the way anybody would use chat GPT.
The only difference is we think ours is better and
provides the kind of privacy that everybody knows what it wants.
When I talk to people, they say, look, we use

(35:16):
chat GPT, we use a clode. Do you know it's
not private? They said? We know that, so we don't
really load our private documents or the kind of research
that doctor Dick does. We don't put that in there
because that is exposing it to the public.

Speaker 6 (35:30):
That's the magic Alan Porter Strategic Wealth Strategies dot com.
What's one way that you're using AI in your business.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Well, a lot of people use chat GPT. I use
it all the time, and when I ask chat GPT
to do something, I asked them to do deep research.
That's different than just asking them to come up with
a script. But I also use that and also use
it with Hagen. I make videos on there. I've got
over five hundred videos. But those five hundred videos were
done by me. Now I've got about twenty videos now

(35:59):
that we're done with Hey, and it just looks more professional,
more polish. You don't have the uzz and the pauses
and all this other stuff. And then again, I have
a team of people that show me how to do
this because I don't have time to do it, but
they'll do me and they go and step by step
by step. It's made a big difference in my business
because just of the influx of new clients I'm getting.

Speaker 6 (36:20):
This is an important discussion to have, and we have
at every show, so people that haven't used it yet
can see what the possibilities are.

Speaker 5 (36:26):
How are you using it, Richard heart gear Heart Law.

Speaker 7 (36:29):
I use it all the time too. I'm going to
give an example. We're attending a conference next week, so
I decided to get organized and find out who's going
to be attending the conference and are there people there
that I want to interact with or different reasons, maybe
to be guests on the show or for other business reasons.
And so I put the speaker list of the conference

(36:52):
into chat GPT and I asked them to review all
the speakers and then identify people that would be good
connections for me. So it came up with about twenty
people that it thought might be a good connection, and
so I'm going to follow up with that instead of
reading through all of that by hand and trying to

(37:13):
figure it out. So, for example, in terms of guests
for the show, we want somebody who's going to be
a good guest, and so I find what I thought
a good guest is, and then it was able to
find people for that. Well.

Speaker 6 (37:25):
I use it for the marketing, and none of what
I do is really confidential. I mean, when I do
my marketing reports, I anonymize the data that I put
in there, so there's no names. But I find it
saves me so much time for the marketing. And right
now I'm having a little bit of a struggle. I'm
using it as a consultant, mainly Google Gemini because their

(37:46):
last upgrade was really good, so they're a lot better,
I think, and then they're a little more factual than
Chat to try to help me build it just a
pretty simple website, and I'm part way there, but I
would like I can watch a YouTube video which will
tell me how to build a website with this theme.
But if I get stuck and have a question that
I could go ask Chat or Google our perplexity. In

(38:07):
any case, lots of great ways to use AI. So
listeners who are listening to the Passage to Profit show
through journ Elizabeth Gearhart our special guest doctor Danielle Dick,
and we will be right back.

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Passage to Profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.

Speaker 7 (40:21):
Passage to Profit is the nationally syndicated radio show heard
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(40:42):
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And now it is time for intellectual property news. This
is so bad though, Yeah, it's kind of a sad one.

(41:02):
So today we're going to take a little bit of
a departure. It's still a legal case, but focus a
little bit more on the dark side of AI. And
a lawsuit was recently filed against Open AI and the
plaintiff is claiming that AI caused the tragic murder suicide
of a man and his mother in Connecticut. And according

(41:26):
to the plaintiffs, the AI induced a man to kill
his mother and then himself. And it raises a new
question about when people treat AI like an authority, who's
responsible for what it says.

Speaker 6 (41:40):
This is a very serious subject. I know social media
has done the same thing. It has led teens to
kill themselves and other people have done it. But this
man turned to what he thought was a trusted source.
He had a great life before, but he started having
a mental health issue, divorce his wife, moved in with
his mother, and start drinking. And the attorneys say it

(42:02):
was during this time that he turned to open AI.
So you know, that's the friend you can call anytime
of the morning, day or night.

Speaker 5 (42:10):
It doesn't matter how drunk you are. They'll still listen
to you.

Speaker 6 (42:13):
They want to hang up on you, right, And it
had a lot of authority in his life. It grew
to have a lot of authority in his life.

Speaker 7 (42:21):
And according to the legal complaint, now this was just
filed just after the first of the year in twenty
twenty six, so it's a brand new case. But the
plane of used AI frequently talked with it over several months,
and he used it as a sounding board and a
source of reassurance. And at one point he became very depressed.

(42:41):
He started cycling downward, and he asked CHATCHYPT if it
could give him a clinical evaluation, and instead of encouraging
him to seek professional help, CHATCHIPT confirmed that his delusion
risk score was near zero. And so the attorney's reviewed

(43:02):
all of their responses and chat GPT basically reinforced the
idea that he was okay when he really wasn't.

Speaker 6 (43:10):
And the problem was he'd fed so much data into
it that it felt like it knew him, so it
knew how to get to him and have him trust it,
and it acted as a friend when maybe he didn't
have a lot of friends. So if you're that isolated,
that kind of constant feedback can be very powerful. And
I know when I use my chat GPT, I mean
I'll ask it questions and it's always giving me positive strokes,

(43:32):
like it wants to be my best friend.

Speaker 5 (43:34):
And I don't really need that.

Speaker 7 (43:37):
But I kind of liked it, you know.

Speaker 5 (43:39):
So that's why I.

Speaker 6 (43:40):
Prefer perplexity when you're talking about different llms, because their
perplexity is just the facts, right. But for people that
want strokes, chat GPT is great and it could draw
you in that way.

Speaker 7 (43:50):
Right. And so this was a system failure according to
the planets, and you know, we'll see how the court
resolves the issue. In the past, there isn't really liability
as necessarily associated with this, but if this is true,
and if they can show that chat GPT pushed this
guy over the edge, then I think something needs to

(44:12):
be done.

Speaker 6 (44:12):
Well, you can argue that it's free speech, but it's
really more about responsibility.

Speaker 5 (44:17):
Can a computer have free speech?

Speaker 6 (44:20):
I mean it's not even a person, So it's really
new territory and it's going to have to be figured
out in the courts, but hopefully this will set a precedent.
At least people will be aware of it, and maybe
some of the programming will change. I know Facebook has
gotten a lot of grief and x over the echo
chambers of negative language, so maybe some of that will
apply here.

Speaker 7 (44:41):
Yeah, And from an intellectual property standpoint, most companies consider
the algorithms that generate the responses as proprietary trade secrets,
and they do this because they want to protect their
business and their investment in creating the code, which is understandable.
But on the other hand, I do think that on
issues like this there should be some level of transparency

(45:04):
and some guardrails. And my guess is that this lawsuit
will hopefully encourage the you know, the geminis and the
open ais and the clouds to investigate their own systems
and try to put in guardrails so it doesn't happen again.

Speaker 6 (45:20):
And the reason this is important is because I had
said earlier in this program in a different segment that
right now this is experiencing the fastest growth of almost
any tech platform ever, and the growth rate of chat
topt users has doubled in twenty twenty five and by
twenty twenty eight. The prediction is that people will be
using these large language models Chat, GPT, Gemini, Perplexity more

(45:43):
than they use Google Search, and eventually they'll use them
instead of Google Search. They don't know how long that'll take.
So if these are sending people into a spiral because
they trust they're agreeing with every negative emotion and the
people trust them, that can be dangerous for all of society.

Speaker 7 (45:59):
Yeah, especially teenagers. So our purpose is just to make
people aware of this possibility. If you're using AI, just
understand that it can unintentionally lead you in the wrong direction,
and especially if your parents, make sure that your kids
don't fall into the same trap.

Speaker 6 (46:18):
But that said, after that somber note, now we get
to move on to Neil.

Speaker 5 (46:24):
Neil Centuria, co founder of.

Speaker 6 (46:27):
Asturing dot ai and blackbird v dot com. You are
deep in the AI world. You know a lot about it,
so tell us. We've talked a little bit about touring,
but we want to hear all about it.

Speaker 4 (46:39):
We started this company. It's software. We provide a private,
confidential RAG platform for business, primarily businesses.

Speaker 5 (46:50):
You have to define RAG for people, What is it?
What does it do.

Speaker 4 (46:53):
Yeah. Rag's a big deal. So RAG stands for retrieval
Augmented Generation. We actually have a video on our website.
You can learn what RAG is. But let's make it
simple for everybody. RAG is essentially search on steroids. So
rather than keyword search, which is the Google and Chat
that's what they do, we create what's called vector databases.

(47:15):
So each contextual thought, each word, each sentence is broken down, disassembled,
reassembled and without getting you know, I'm not.

Speaker 7 (47:25):
A tech really.

Speaker 4 (47:28):
You get. What you get is a deep, honest, correct answer.
So we have no hallucinations because we're only pulling from
what you have. And RAG is a way to deal
with you want to ask a hard question about legal
documents or financial documents or manufacturing. We're really good at that.
And chetch ept none of them do RAG. Why do

(47:50):
they not do RAG? It's expensive, you know, it's a
little bit like a Ferrari. There's lots of goos available cameras.
Knock yourself out. You want a Ferrari, you have to
pay a little bit more or but what it does
is really special. So that's what Turing is. Ask Turing
is a RAG based platform for businesses and individuals who
care deeply about privacy, memory context. Context is a kind

(48:15):
of a keyword that says, what did I do yesterday?
What am I doing tomorrow? And when I look back
in two weeks, can it assemble all of it? That's
really the magic of the AI experience. And you're right.
Google's greatest threat is that all the llms, especially Perplexity,
are going to become the search engines. So if Perplexity
becomes your default search engine, where does Google's ad business go?

(48:37):
That world is like way over my head. I don't
care which l of them goes out of business, as
long as there's one available for me to access.

Speaker 6 (48:45):
Well, Google Gemini has the marketing to make their sore,
and they will because it's coming up on my phone
now and Google has a lot of experience.

Speaker 5 (48:53):
In this, I think.

Speaker 6 (48:54):
So for people to use your system is the first
step to load all their data into it.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
What do they than?

Speaker 4 (49:00):
The perfect solution is you go to the website, get
a free account, and you can use it with basic aims.
You can use it as a search engine. It's great,
But what you really want to do is you want
to put in what you're working on. I'm working on
this contract it's an easy it's drag and drop loaded in.
Then you want to talk to it. Where is the So,

(49:21):
for example, the baseball teams that use ours, their problem
is simple. All sports teams have the same problem. They
have enormous rules. We put seventeen hundred pages of the
Major League Baseball rule Book into Turing. If you want
to ask a question, that's a really powerful piece of
work to do. Then I got all the agents, I
got players. That's the value if you will at a

(49:46):
business level. But you can start tomorrow. You can just say, look,
I'm interested in my daughter. She teaches a challenge disabled
children and she wanted a lesson plan. Put all the
stuff into Turing, asked, and there it was. So the
trick is to use our product to get more value.
You have to be a participant. It's not ask a question.

(50:08):
I mean we do that, but that's table stakes. Everybody
does that. The value is can I understand what is
in my own data and can I get better? We'll
call it information business models.

Speaker 7 (50:22):
So what guarantees do we have that your system is secure?
Because that's you know you're talking about security.

Speaker 4 (50:28):
But that we're long on that. So we've got every
single certification you can get, but the one that matters
the most is sock two. I'm sure doctor Dick knows
about that. All you can say is we give you
every proof that we're secure. There's no magic. All I
can say is we qualified for multi factor authentication. It's
upside down. There's fourth factor. I can't prove it to you.

(50:50):
It's just we've never had a breach. So for now,
across your fingers.

Speaker 7 (50:54):
I received a link to your software, and I created
an account and I used it a little bit this morning.
One of the things I really like is that it
chooses from all the different llms, and so according to
your advertising. The query is written by the user, and
then your software decides which LLM would give the highest

(51:17):
quality answer, maybe not tell.

Speaker 4 (51:18):
Me that that's correct. So not only are we multimodel
you could pick I only want Clode, but what we
have as an auto feature that says you've asked a
prompt and we internally pick from all of the lms
who will give you the best answer. The other thing
we do that you don't get from Copilot or any
of the others. You get to say, all right, that's
an interesting answer. Now I want to ask again to

(51:41):
someone else, so we get to compare your answers. So
the way you get real granular is to be able
to cross check against multiple lms. Anybody who's using chat
Copilot's not letting you use perplexity. Okay, they're not letting
you go across and do whatever you want. So you
have to be Switzerland. You have to be a neutral party.

(52:01):
You have to say, look, I'm going to work for you.

Speaker 6 (52:04):
This sounds like a really powerful software. I want to
dig a little bit into your background as a serial entrepreneur.
So you have started many companies and you never sit still.

Speaker 5 (52:15):
You keep going to the next one. But what made
you choose this?

Speaker 6 (52:17):
I mean, obviously there's a need for this, but what
made your mind go there when you were thinking of
a new company to start.

Speaker 4 (52:23):
I'm going to defer again to my analyst and doctor Dick.
So I have two themes. I call it R and R.
Now you think that's rest and recreation, I'll tell you
what my RN R is. I was motivated by revenge
and redemption. It is environment and parents, and it is wiring.
I was built a certain way. And so if you

(52:46):
think about entrepreneurship, not all not all, but many are
driven by they've been dismissed and they're going to show
the other guy. So, you know, the joke on Zuckerberg
is he could get a date with that girl, and
that's why he started Facebook. I mean, if you think
about what motivates people, go to Tom Brady. He's he's

(53:08):
picked last two hundred and ninth in the NFL draft.
He was determined to show people. So I come from
a place of polite revenge, not revenge like with a
knife or a gun. But I'm determined to prove, you know.
And after you've proved it a few times, you'd think
that would be enough. And the truth is you keep
proving it and redemption. Redemption is about other people.

Speaker 7 (53:31):
What happened to put you in the revenge mode?

Speaker 4 (53:34):
Well? I had parents, did you?

Speaker 7 (53:38):
Once again?

Speaker 5 (53:39):
The parent gets a blame siblings that was worse.

Speaker 4 (53:43):
You know, I can't give you the answer because it's
a It is a psychoanalytic answer, and everyone is different.
It's simple things like imagine being bullied or I'm gonna
be dismissed. Why do you got to think about how
people become actors? How do you choose to be an actor?
I mean, some people do wake up and want to
dance on a table. I do believe in genetics and

(54:05):
DNA and wiring, but in my case, I was determined
to show my parents weren't very fond of me, and
I learned how to type. Here's a story for you.
So my mother says, Look, I don't think you're ever
going to mount to anything, but at least you could
be a secretary. And so I did learn to type.
I typed one hundred words a minute when I was
in the Army. I was the company clerk at mash

(54:27):
I got to sit and do all the typing because
nobody else could type as quickly as I could. So
she's right, I did. I had a life in the
army as the commander's radar.

Speaker 7 (54:37):
O'Reilly, it was a perfect t Did your mother ever
change her mind about your prospects?

Speaker 4 (54:42):
Yeah, I guess you have to ask her. She died
ten years ago.

Speaker 6 (54:46):
Well, I'm going to move on from this and give
doctor Dick a chance to ask a question.

Speaker 5 (54:50):
So do you have a comment or question.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
I think this is absolutely fascinating the idea of starting
multiple businesses and do different things across your life. I
love that and I am curious about you know, as
I mentioned, my husband's an entrepreneurs so he has me
listen to lots of different podcasts, things like how I

(55:13):
built this right, and they talk about the ups and
the downs of the process, and I love your R
and R and I'm wondering what has kept you engaged
in it? What keeps you excited? And when do you
decide Okay, I'm moving on to the next venture.

Speaker 4 (55:33):
Well, either you've sold the company or it went broke.
But I'll tell you what I think is important. And
you listen, this is about retirement. And we haven't even taught.
I like what I do. I really get pleasure. It's
not work. I was built a certain way. I'm seventy five.
This is company number eight or nine. I don't keep track.

Speaker 7 (55:54):
You've done a lot of different technologies, not just the
software guy.

Speaker 4 (55:58):
Well, I've never been the technologist. What I think is,
if you want to be an entrepreneur, either you can
write the code or you can build a team that
knows how to write the code. In the case of Oberon,
this was a very unique project involved something called DME,
which is dimethyl ether. It was going to change how
methane is converted into fuel. Our partner was Volvo. I

(56:21):
really liked it. I couldn't show you exactly chemically how
to create DME. I could show you the little molecules,
but I knew how to build a team and a
company and a partner. So the entrepreneur game is you
don't have to necessarily do it yourself. As a matter
of fact, I don't think you can do it yourself.
So you got to love what you do. And that's

(56:41):
basic for Alan Daniel, any of you love what you do,
and you know what else, it's kind of I really
like winning. It's a little bit embarrassing. I don't like
to lose. Now. There's an interesting article recently written by
one of the Harvard professors which was a go big
or go home, and the argument was, you know, you
got to go for it. And I'm of the opinion,

(57:02):
by the way, that you don't necessarily have to go
for it. Sometimes there's a lot to be said for
live to play another day. I will point out the
most recent set of football teams games last week, where
all you had to do was kick a field goal
and stay in the game. There's a lot to be
said for staying in the game, and the last sentence
on the matter of entrepreneurship, I think you need to

(57:22):
respect the investors' money. I treat it like mine. But
the important sentence would be, don't leave a mess. I
take care of the employees. I have the same assistant.
The same administrative assistant has been with me thirty one years.
I admit that the chain and the ball attached to
the desk are getting older, but she didn't leave. I

(57:42):
have the same CFO, the same I have teams that come,
they don't leave. Sometimes you know, it's we make successes,
sometimes we don't, but nobody leaves.

Speaker 7 (57:53):
Another facet of your career that I find fascinating is
that you started as a screenwriter. Right, So you worked
as a television screenwriter. You wrote for shows like Mash
and Alice and The Tony Randalls Show. So how did
you move from screenwriting to entrepreneurship.

Speaker 4 (58:12):
The business of Hollywood is byzantine and rotten. I was
at the American Film Institute, and then I stayed in
Los Angeles from nineteen seventy one to nineteen eighty one
as a writer. I did what writers do. It is
a really difficult business. So I'll tell you a quick
story about Hollywood. So I write a script. These at

(58:34):
the time when they were doing ninety minute movies on television,
not real movies. I pitch it too. I think it's
at Lorimar, which may still be around. See the guy,
He says, you know, I read this. It's fantastic. I cried.
I cried. It was emotional. I said great. He says, no,
but they're only buying comedies. Said okay, I'll be back
months later. I come back. I actually have a comedy.
I give it to him. He says, oh, fell off

(58:56):
my desk. I got bad news for you. They're only
buying tragedies. Now a true story. I actually reached across
the desk. I grabbed him by his tie. I said,
I'm never going to work in this place again. And
I walked out. And I walked out of Hollywood. I
went into the real estate development business, and I built
two million square feet of real estate before I got
bored by that and went into technology. Wow, you know,

(59:18):
I care about a legacy. We try to be philanthropic.
I care about my employees. I'll tell you a quick
story about an employee I hired, a really important person.
I do the interview it's an hour and a half
hour and twenty minutes. At the end, he's got all
the qualities and I was asking the final question and
he confesses to this. He says, I've made a lot
of money for a lot of other people, but not

(59:40):
so much for myself. I should have taken more risk.
I hired him on the spot and I said, I
will make you richer. And so far, so far, so good.

Speaker 7 (59:50):
We'll see.

Speaker 4 (59:51):
But this was a guy that I knew had all
the he missed one. He didn't take care of himself,
he says. When he says I should have taken more risk.
He's the perfect guy to run a startup.

Speaker 6 (01:00:02):
Awesome, great Neil Centuria. How can people get a hold
of you?

Speaker 4 (01:00:06):
They could use a net but otherwise you would go
to Askturing dot ai and my personal email feel free
to send. It is Neil and el at blackbirdv dot com.
Just the letter V like Victor, but no word blackbirdv
dot com.

Speaker 5 (01:00:24):
And Turing is spelled t U R I n G.

Speaker 6 (01:00:27):
Is that right?

Speaker 4 (01:00:27):
It is? It is Alan Turing.

Speaker 7 (01:00:30):
Sign up for Ask Touring I did. I think it's
a great platform and we're going to be looking for
ways to use it at your heart loss.

Speaker 6 (01:00:38):
Oh, I love looking at new software and playing with it.
That'll be fun.

Speaker 7 (01:00:41):
Passage to Profit with Richard an Elizabeth Parhart.

Speaker 6 (01:00:43):
So now we're on to Alan Porter. He's been sitting
here patiently. He's been sitting on this story, like he
started telling us, and we're like, wait, save it for
your interview.

Speaker 5 (01:00:51):
I'm like, oh my god, I got to hear the
rest of this story.

Speaker 4 (01:00:54):
Wait.

Speaker 5 (01:00:54):
So he has Strategic Wealth Strategies dot Com. Alan, do
you want to tell us your story?

Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
Man?

Speaker 3 (01:01:00):
Okay, Well, like I said before, I never thought I'd
be doing what I'm doing right now. I retired nineteen
ninety three. I was a black Hawk constructive pilot. I
had made a safe land for every takeoff, and I
dodged ale the bulls. I had a great career and
I loved what I did. I had a passion for flying,
and I had a passion for serving my country. And
after that, up until two thousand and eight, I had
a successful real estate and mortgage business. And I lived

(01:01:21):
in Thayeville, North Carolina, and my son lived at a liber Rock, Arkansas,
with with his wife Lynn, who was thirty nine, and
two daughters. They were seven and four, and we went
out there for Christmas in two thousand and nine and
my son had been one hundred percent disabled for over
three years, still not getting his disability. Iired an attorney,
finally got into this building the summer of twenty ten.
But January fifth, twenty ten, changed my entire life. His

(01:01:44):
wife Lynn called me up to She said, Alan, I've
been diagnosed with stage four pancradic cancer and they'd given
me six months to live, and of course we were devastated.
But there's no money coming in my fans, my son's
family except what I give them, and I don't know
how long I keep doing this. I was like ninety
nine percent of the people out there that thought life
insurance this was a death produce, you had died of
benefit from it. Well, little did I know she had
a terminal illness writer on her life insurance policy to

(01:02:06):
let her access the death benefit which was in the
hundreds of thousands of dollars, completely tax free, which I
knew nothing about. And if I not been for that,
my son would be bankrupt. And it took a huge
financial strain off of me. Well when passed away about
a year later, So I moved my son back here,
but my problems didn't THEND then because he's still in
the same condition. Still, he looks like he's eighty five
years of age. There's no care for where he has.

(01:02:28):
He has Type one diabetes, but it's got something. There's
no care for him. They they don't even know what
it is. But my daughter, who's all college nurse and
her husband's a doctor, had given birth to my third grandson,
and a month later she was diagnosed with breast cancer
and it was very bad. We didn't think she was
going to live. And she's twelve years cancer free now.
But in twenty twenty three she contracted Graves disease in

(01:02:49):
thyroid eye condition and at that time and still, there's
only one treatment for us called Trepezzan and it's very expensive.
He's like thirty two thousand dollars from the first confused
and there's eight of them. Inst was almost a quarter
of a million dollars. I thank god it was covered
by insurance. But the problem in January twenty twenty four
came back and she went to the doctor in February.
The doctor said to Cole, I'm sorry, there's nothing we

(01:03:10):
can do until you go blind. And then we can operate.
I mean, what a prognosis. So we sent her to Duke.
She didn't qualify for Duke because she took the Tripeza.
We did get her into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
Minnesota for about four days of testing and consultation, but
there's basically nothing they can do for either. They've got
some experimental medicine that's not approved by insurance. It's over
five hundred thousand dollars and maybe maybe fifty percent effective,

(01:03:34):
but it's not even improved for this disease. So right
now she's just living day to day, slowly losing her eyesight,
and we're praying to God something that could be done for.
But when this stuff happened to me, I took a
huge interest into insurance and insurance products. Now I understand
I used to have my Series sixty three where I
did stock and bomb port cool and everything, but I

(01:03:54):
have a team of people to do that. Right now,
I don't have time for that. That's part of my
team because I concentrate on a schurance products, whether it's
fixed or fixed index to newities or cash value life insurance,
whether it's indexed or whole life and what I've found out.
It's amazing because ninety five to ninety nine percent of
people I talked to, and too include CPA's attorneys and
financial advisors, have no idea what I'm talking about. I

(01:04:17):
show people how to reduce and possibly eliminate both debt
and taxes. I show people how to secure a tax
free retirement that does not affect the taxation of Social
Security or the means testing for Medicare Part B or
hire earners HERB attacks, which will be in the thousands
of dollars per year. Let me ask you, have you
ever heard of sequence of returns risk?

Speaker 5 (01:04:36):
I don't know a lot about financial stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:04:38):
I have not, but I find what you're saying really fascinating,
to be honest.

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
With you, because ninety nine percent of people don't, and
that includes the advisor. But if you're sixty five and
you've got a million dollars in your stock portfolio, and
you take a four percent distribution rate, that's supposed to
be a safe distribution rate to last for thirty years,
index for inflation. All of my policies go to age one.
Twenty forty douns dollars a year is not guaranteed. Do
you realize if you have a loss in the market

(01:05:05):
ten percent of eight sixty five, now you're down to
nine hundred thousand minus the fees you pay that financial
advisor whether you make money or not. And then guess
what happens If two thousand and eight happens again, where
you lost thirty eight to fifty two percent, You're going
to be out of money in the fifth year. Basically,
what sequence returns risk is is if you have a
loss in the market when you start to take the
money out within the first two to three years of

(01:05:25):
a ten or twenty year period as compared to the
last two to three years of a ten or twenty
year period, you're going to be out of money in
the fifth to the ninth year. And people are not
prepared for it. They're not advised of it. I've got
multimillionaires that have tens and hundreds of millions of dollars
in their stock portfolio and they're sixty five to seventy
five years of age, and their financial advisors have never
told them about the risk and retirement. The number one

(01:05:46):
risk of retirement is running out of money before you
run out of live.

Speaker 7 (01:05:50):
So how do you calculate that. How do you figure
out how much runway you have after retiring.

Speaker 3 (01:05:56):
Well, it all depends on what you want to do,
what kind of lifestyle you wanted to leave. When I
talk to people, they all tell me that we're going
to be in a lower tax bracket. I said, well,
I beg to differ here. We've got to work thirty
seven tree dollars deficit. And even the Gradual report said
twenty thirty. We don't raise their tax aby at least
sixty percent, we're going to have more interest than we
can pay and a company will go bankrupt. But the

(01:06:18):
thing with retirement, it comes into a lot of different areas.
You need the people need to understand. It's not rate
of return in retirement. It's about distribution of your assets.
I've got and I'm not a guest a stock portfolio
at all. But people have to have different buckets of money,
and they have to have guaranteed income in their retirement.
And it's been proven by a Harvard study. If you
haven't guaranteed income and retirement, you lead a happier, healthier,

(01:06:40):
less stressful, and longer life. And that's a fact. But
we're living longer now. People are gotten ninety five percent
if you're married, lived in ninety five. Some of them
lived longer than that, and people are not prepared for
long term care. I mean, this is devastating. How do
you go about figuring this out? Do people talk with
a financial advisor? Are there some things they can do

(01:07:01):
themselves to, you know, take whatever they have, whether it's
just social Security and a few dollars here or there,
maybe a house or you know, maybe they've been fortunate
enough to save over the years. How do you assess
what you have now and then understand, well, how much

(01:07:21):
money can I really afford to spend after I retire. Well,
it's funny because you've heard these large corporations, what's your
magic number? What number do you have to have in
order to retire? Well, they don't take into consideration inflation
and everything. But here's a big mistake that people were
making the four one K and your qualified plans ted

(01:07:41):
being you the father of the four one K, and
then in back in nineteen seventy three, he said it's
a disaster and needs to be redesigned. Very few people
understand that the fees. Fifty eight percent of people don't
even think there's a fee in a four one k.
Understand this The average freeing of four one k, and
this by forbest magazine lat Times is two point nine
to nine percent, And people will have less than half

(01:08:02):
of their money and then they get hit with taxes
from twenty to over fifty five percent. They're going to
be out of money in the fifth of seventh year.

Speaker 6 (01:08:09):
What do you think about having rental properties and just
keeping those forever till you die?

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
Well, rental property is great. All financial vehicles are great.
But rental property has risk, and you have risk and retirement.
What happens if your renters trash the place. There's risk
in all financial vehicles. But what I do is I
show people how to mitigate and eliminate the risk and retirement.
Just like I said number one perioer running out of money,
market risk, government risk, tax risk. Most cases, I can

(01:08:40):
protect you from lawsuits, leans and judgments. Very few people
understand about the taxation of Social Security or the means
testing Medicare part be which will be in the thousands
of dollars per year. If you're sixty five and married
and you make forty four thousand dollars a year outside
divisional income, four to one k stock portfolio, rental, property
or everything, and your pay tree thou hours a month

(01:09:00):
of SOL security, eighty five percent of your SOLI security
is going to be taxed, and that puts you in
the twelve percent minimum tax bracket ten point one to
three affective tax bracket. Provided taxes don't go up, you're
right in a checked Uncle SAM for six thousand dollars
a year. And it also affects the taxation of Medicare
Part B or the means testing, and that can go
by word three hundred and fifty percent. And if you

(01:09:21):
make enough money now you have permit taxes and that
alone is going to cost you tens of thousands of
dollars per year. And people are not prepared.

Speaker 5 (01:09:27):
Well, when should you start taking out your Social Security?

Speaker 6 (01:09:30):
Let's say you're still working and you're making money, Well,
what age should.

Speaker 5 (01:09:34):
You take it?

Speaker 3 (01:09:35):
Longer you let it go. It grows by eight percent
every year, but with cost of living entries. But I
took mine at my mandatory of car mar age. I'm
seventy three and I've taken my money and put it
into an index universal life insurance policy. I don't need
the money right now. I've been to pay on it
for ten years. Now I'm going to make more money
than what my Social Security was paying me, and I'll

(01:09:56):
have my sole security on top of that. But every
everybody's situation is different. You know, they got very, very
poor health and they don't have any other forms of income.
There are so many people in the United States. I
think fifty to sixty percent of the people in the
United States rely on Social superio as their number one
form of income and retirement, which is very sad because

(01:10:16):
most people are in poverty, whether you think so or not.
But like I said, the longer you wait, the more
income you can get. It depends on your financial situation.
It depends whether you where they can work. I'm like Neil,
I absolutely love what I do. I'm never going to
retire as long as I have a sound mind, because
what I want to do is I want to educate
people on the financial strategies the wealthy and the banking

(01:10:37):
institutions have been using for years. It's all about education.

Speaker 7 (01:10:41):
So I guess we have two sectarians on the show.
I guess so and so that should be inspiring to
all of our listeners, who.

Speaker 5 (01:10:48):
They st don't seem like they're in their seventies.

Speaker 7 (01:10:50):
You know, and they look a lot younger, both of them.

Speaker 6 (01:10:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:10:53):
Well, we have to give doctor Dick the chance to
chime in here, Doctor.

Speaker 7 (01:10:56):
Dick, do you have any questions or comments?

Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
I have to say this is one of those places
where I think it's so important to partner with people
with expertise and passion in different areas, because, you know,
listening to Neil talk about his passion for his companies
and Alan listening to you talk about your passion for finances.
I'm obviously passionate about research and getting it out, but

(01:11:19):
I will tell you that the numbers and the money
piece is in fact one of those things that, no
matter how much I read about it, I just can't
get into it right.

Speaker 5 (01:11:30):
Like that one doesn't get me out of bed in
the morning.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
But I love that it does for you and people
like you who I can learn from and work with too.

Speaker 5 (01:11:42):
So that I don't have to become the expert in that.

Speaker 7 (01:11:44):
That's exactly right, I mean. But here here's an example.

Speaker 3 (01:11:48):
Now, I'm a certified tax and BSNIS advisor, and one
of my clients at doctor is fifty one years of age.

Speaker 7 (01:11:54):
We're getting back two million.

Speaker 3 (01:11:55):
Two hundred and eighty thousand dollars in taxes he's paid
over the last three years.

Speaker 5 (01:11:58):
That's amazing, Alan Porter.

Speaker 6 (01:12:01):
How do people get in touch with you to get
this advice for themselves?

Speaker 5 (01:12:05):
What's the best way to reach you.

Speaker 3 (01:12:07):
I always call you at nine one zero five to
five to one one zero four six nine one zero
five five to one one zero four six. Now I
don't charge my consultations. It's all about education. My email
address is Strategicqwealth the number zero at gmail dot com.
And you can always go to my website, which is
www dot Strategicquealth Strategy dot com. I've got hundreds of

(01:12:30):
movies on there. I've got podcasts. I've got a calculator
for retirement. You can click on there, put your numbers
in there and find out how much taxes you're going
to get paying on your qualified plan and you take
it out.

Speaker 5 (01:12:40):
I know someone who's going there right after this show.
I've never archard.

Speaker 6 (01:12:45):
Unfortunately we have to end your segment, Allen, but this
has been eye opening and encouraging.

Speaker 5 (01:12:50):
I will say encouraging.

Speaker 6 (01:12:52):
For me because it sounds like you have some really
good ideas for people that really hold on to their
own money, which I think is great.

Speaker 5 (01:12:59):
At this point, we have to take a break.

Speaker 6 (01:13:01):
Listeners who are listening to the Passage to profit share
with Richard Elizabeth Garhart and our special guest today, doctor
Danielle Dick, and we will be right back.

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Speaker 7 (01:14:07):
It's Passage to Profit. Now it's time for Noah's retrospective.

Speaker 6 (01:14:13):
Noah Fleischmann is our producer here at Passage to Profit,
and he just has a way of putting his best
memories in perspective.

Speaker 12 (01:14:20):
You know, everybody's screaming about AI right now, but the
fact is there are many long standing, existing technologies in
our world that are to this day vastly underutilized. I'll
give you an example. There's that real field technology, the
thing that the weather people on TV used to tell
you it's going to be fourteen degrees tomorrow morning at
seven am, but actually you're gonna feel like it's nine below.
How do they do that, how do they compute that?

(01:14:41):
And how can they actually tell me that confidently? And
you know something, after all these years, they're almost never wrong.
So what if we implied that same technology to something
like personal finance. Well, it's a thirty percent loss you're
going to encour over the next six months, but actually
you're gonna feel destitute and bankrupt for the next seven years.
Or in relationships. I know we've only been dating five months,

(01:15:04):
but this breakup's gonna make you feel as though you
just ended a thirty five year marriage, So accept this
ten dollars gift card from me please. You know, if
we keep going in this direction, we're not going to
need therapy anymore. Want to get in talk with your feelings?

Speaker 5 (01:15:17):
Just check the app.

Speaker 3 (01:15:18):
What are you gonna do?

Speaker 12 (01:15:19):
Argue with technology?

Speaker 1 (01:15:21):
Now more with Richard and Elizabeth Passage to Profit and now.

Speaker 6 (01:15:25):
It is time for secrets of the entrepreneurial mind. So,
doctor Danielle Dick with Thrive Genetics dot AI, what is
a secret you can share with our audience.

Speaker 2 (01:15:36):
Being the researcher and obviously working with lots of undergraduates
over the past couple decades, one of the things I
think a lot of people feel is I need to
be expert in something. There are other people that know
more about this. You know, this isn't my wheelhouse. Certainly

(01:15:58):
as a PhD, I felt that way. I had expertise
in a particular area, you know, in research and what
I do there. But starting a company and moving out
of just the world of academia into the business world
was a real leap. It felt like being a student again.

(01:16:19):
I didn't know what I was doing. I was learning
all new things, but it was exciting, and I have
loved where it has taken me. I've met interesting new
people like you, all that I would have never probably
cross paths with before. And to hear other folks, like
when Alan and Neil were talking about they're still passionate
about what they do. I thought that only existed in academia.

(01:16:42):
I thought professors were the only ones who kind of
you know, wanted to die in their corner offices there.
But to my mind, the secret is being okay with
trying new things and stepping outside of your comfort zone.
I think that's where some of the most exciting twists

(01:17:03):
and turns of my life have happened, which is hard
for me to say as a very type a planner,
But you know, I loved Neil's story about how he
started out in Hollywood and ended up as an entrepreneur.
Those kinds of understanding life is not a straight line,
but there are twists and turns, and embrace that journey. That's,

(01:17:27):
you know, finding out those exciting things you never expected
to lie around the corner. To my mind, that's really
the secret to continuing to find new passions and find
new ways to contribute to the world.

Speaker 6 (01:17:43):
Absolutely so, Neil Centuria with Askturing dot Ai, what is
the secret you can share with our audience.

Speaker 4 (01:17:52):
I'll make it easy for you. The key is not
to do stupid things. And in order to do that,
I'm going to encourage people to read. And the books
they need to read are exactly on behavioral economics. And
what they have to do is they have to read
Dan Conneman and Twurst Key and there's a dozen. I've
written a couple of books. There's one of the rules

(01:18:12):
in the book says, it's what you don't know that
you don't know that will kill you. I'm a passionate
fan of Conoman and all of his books about how
people make decisions. Decision making is hard. So the key
is not all the books about discipline and dedication and
blah blah blah. It's really about how you think about

(01:18:34):
decision making. And I'm going to support doctor Dick on
two more things. Get a mentor or get a coach.
And they're not so easy. There's a thousand companies that
say sign up and will be your coach. Let me
tell you, I had the same analyst for thirty five years.
So and by the way, his kids finally graduated college.
So I was, well, I think you need to study

(01:18:58):
read all the other stuff. I don't know, but I
think those books not books about dedication. It's books about
decision making. The decision tree is a complex one and
all the other qualities of being flexible and pivot and
awareness that comes with That's baseline. But my recommendation is

(01:19:22):
read some books, real books, and it's okay to read
books that aren't on the topic. Like it's okay to
read Hemingway, it's okay to read Faulkner, It's okay to
read Dostoevsky, it's okay to read proofst If you can
get through it, it doesn't matter. It informs how you think,
and how you think is where really passage to profit occurs.

Speaker 5 (01:19:42):
Excellent, Thank you, Yes.

Speaker 7 (01:19:44):
So nicely tied up there at the end.

Speaker 5 (01:19:47):
Yes, I like that.

Speaker 6 (01:19:49):
Alan Porter with Strategicwealth Strategies dot Com.

Speaker 5 (01:19:52):
What's the secret you can share?

Speaker 3 (01:19:55):
The secret I can share is to have an intense
passion for what you do, being able to learn from others,
and to have a team that you can count on, because,
like Nielsen, not everybody knows everything. And that's why I
do what I do too, because I have a team
I learned that after the first six months I was
doing this business, not everybody can know everything. And I

(01:20:17):
teach to think outside the box of conventional financial planning,
and I want to create a paradigm shift in people's
thought process about finances. And when I come across with
the passion that I have and my teen concept, it
resonates with my clients.

Speaker 5 (01:20:31):
Excellent. Richard Gearheart with Gearheart law dot com.

Speaker 7 (01:20:34):
I've been thinking a lot lately about firm longevity. Gearhart
Law is going to be celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year,
and I've been thinking about how have we managed to
stay in business for that period of time, And I
attribute it to talent and passion. Those things are important,

(01:20:54):
but I think what's more important are the systems and
the routines that the organization develops and the habits that
it gets into that and you also have to be
able to get out of tricky situations, because every once
in a while, something is going to come up and
it's going to be a difficult one. And the way
to get out of a tricky situation, I find is

(01:21:16):
to talk about it with other people and ask their
opinion about what they would do. And what they think
the courses, and then based on that you can come
up with your own solution, or you know, you can
adopt one of theirs. But I think it's important to
get a lot of perspectives on.

Speaker 5 (01:21:32):
That excellent spoken like someone.

Speaker 7 (01:21:34):
Who's who's face few, Who's face few?

Speaker 6 (01:21:37):
So me Elizabeth Garheart with Care Media Studios. I'm going
to go a little bit more in the weeds than
you guys, because I do this every week practically, and
I'm going to say right now in early twenty twenty six,
if you want to improve your brand visibility and your
business visibility, one thing that is really powerful is to
give presentations. Being on podcasts helps to giving physical presentations

(01:22:02):
really helps a lot because I've been doing a lot
of research on marketing in twenty twenty six and all
these lms who we love and hate, they're looking to
see that you're which is so ironic. They're looking to
see that you're a real person, that you're not AI generated,
and they're looking to.

Speaker 5 (01:22:17):
See your expertise.

Speaker 6 (01:22:18):
So if you can get invited to speak somewhere or
get invited on a podcast, this is even better. Because
this is iHeartRadio, which has a huge brand identity and
that the LMS recognize. Then that really helps you and
it helps your website authority and everything you're doing.

Speaker 7 (01:22:33):
So that's great. That's it for us. Passage to Profit
is a Gear Media Studios production at the nationally syndicated
radio show appearing on forty stations across the US. In addition,
Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by feed
Spot Podcasters database as a top ten entrepreneur interview podcast.

(01:22:54):
Thank you to the P to P team, our producer
Noah Fleischman and our program coordinator Alisha Morrissey, our studio
assistant Rusicatpusari, and our social media powerhouse Carolina Tabares. Look
for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our
podcast is ranked in the top three percent globally. You
can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, x and on

(01:23:16):
our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this
program is believed to be correct, never take a legal
step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearheart Law
is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You
can find us at gearheartlaw dot com and contact us
for free consultation. Take care everybody, Thanks for listening and
we'll be back next week.

Speaker 1 (01:23:38):
The proceeding was a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed