Episode 78 - How AI Can Be A Driver of Truth and Flourishing with Tom Kehler
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In 1969, Tom Kehler was hunched over a Model 33 Teletype connected to an IBM mainframe developing a program to learn a function from data. Today, he’s here to talk about the future of artificial intelligence.
A lot has happened in the in between decades, both in society and in Tom’s life in Silicon Valley. As the CEO of CrowdSmart, a business using AI & Collective Intelligence software platform to improve the accuracy of predicting investment success while reducing ingrained bias, he’s seen it all.
Tune in and hear where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going...
Episode Transcript
Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
Tom Kehler: We wanted to create a platform whereby you could just use collective intelligence to create kind of a way to score innovations in such a way that it doesn't matter what your background was, where you came from, it was a great idea. It should get funded. So that's the core idea of that leveling, making sure capital flows based on the value that they're creating, not who they are, where they went to school.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, I'm joined by William and Rusty, as always and guys, today, this is a special occasion. It's rare that we stay within Silicon Valley for a podcast. All three of us, of course, live in different towns here. But we've got a guest from Half Moon Bay. We're talking before we went live, Half Moon Bay, of course, being the home to lots of really cool things, including the greatest pumpkin festival of all time, but also mavericks.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm a little peaked out today because our guest, you know, when you want to talk about somebody who's been there from the beginning. Right. This whole Silicon Valley thing, you know, and a lot of people just think Silicon Valley from the show, you know, which is pretty funny. Unfortunately, sometimes it was too real. But, you know, there was a beginning. And our guest today was pretty much at the beginning. So I yeah, I got a little. Yeah. Geek things going on. Your intro, you talked about
Tom Kehler: a little bit about my age, but I was only 14 when I can't I'm just.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, well you talked in the intro Rusty about nineteen sixty nine and I'll tell you what, I was done in nineteen sixty nine. I was only around for about two and a half months of it. Oh yeah. Yeah. So that's super cool. That's a faithful obedience in the same direction, working in an incredible industry. So maybe just typically we start off by asking our guests who they are, where they came from, their faith journey and how it's all worked up. We do want to get that from you. But as we get started, just maybe some thoughts and observations of the last 50 years in Silicon Valley. I mean, it's got to be much, much, much different than it was 50 years ago.
Tom Kehler: So actually, I came here in nineteen eighty two, so it's just about 40 years ago. But actually it was a wonderful experience because I literally ran the age group at Texas Instruments in Texas and I'm originally from the East Coast. We'll get there in a minute. But I invited Ed Feigenbaum, who was one of the fathers of expert systems, and I invited him to speak to the tea group. And after it was over, I was telling him I had grown up on the East Coast where I like mountains and good scenery and no offense to anyone from Texas here, but the scenery wasn't quite as good as I wanted in North Texas. And so two weeks later, he basically said, why don't you come out to California and do a startup? And I thought about it and did it. So I arrived here. An unfortunate thing of that part of the story is that I got to meet John McCarthy, who was one of the other fathers of A.I. So two things happened. I got early stage of Silicon Valley, but right in the heart of the development of artificial intelligence.
Henry Kaestner: So some number of our listeners will think of artificial intelligence as being something that's been going on for two or three years. They've just heard about it starting to come into the mainstream. You're talking about a very different start. I mean, it's been going on for a long time. You're talking about the very beginning.
Tom Kehler: Well, in fact, it was very big. There was a first wave that was quite big and it was around something called expert system. So the first wave is how do we take what humans are good at and put it in a program? And DARPA will call this hardcoded AI, where you would literally try to model how people use logic and knowledge to solve a problem. And so you actually built something called symbolic processing systems that think of the math here being logic, reasoning and knowledge representation as the basis of it. Current AI is all about mathematically learning patterns from data, but the two play together. In fact, we'll get into this. But what's happening now is there is a return to bringing together the first wave of AI with the second wave AI to create a new wave around human centric or human in power day.
Henry Kaestner: I mean, OK, I want to get more into that here in a little bit because there's a lot there. We need to start talking about artificial intelligence. There's a theological underpinning to all of this and I want to unpack that a bit. OK, let's go back to who you are. You come from the East Coast. Who are you? Where do you come from? Have you always been a Christian bringing us up to speed?
Tom Kehler: So I was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,
Henry Kaestner: and home of Jim Thorpe.
Tom Kehler: Yeah, that's exactly right. It was an interesting little town. It was a pre Revolutionary War town. So we had our bicentennial in the mid 50s. And, you know, we have the George Washington slept here, I think kind of going and Joe is one of the colonies. But my father was a minister in that town. And that's also interesting as a teenage kid growing up, I will leave that alone for a minute. But I basically committed my life to Christ when I was 16 and literally thought I was going to go into missions work. And it's a funny life story. Every time I try to go into missions, guys pushed me into. And seriously, I tried over and over again, you'll hear that later as we get into this, but I really had a heart for Bible translation and the heart for Bible translation literally led me into artificial intelligence because I got very fascinated with the idea of how can you learn a language and then translate the Bible into that language. So that was my beginning journey and faith was setting off to do that. I got to me, actually, Cameron Townsend, who is the founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators, as well as Kenneth Pike, who is a professor at the University of Michigan who developed a linguistics theory that actually has a lot of the components of what we now use in A.I. But what was going on at that time and this is actually I graduated from high school in sixty five and there were people who were beginning to think about using computers more for the text processing side, but to help in translation and in fact went very from the beginning of when computers were born, they began to try to do machine translation machine translation actually goes back to the early 50s. And so I got caught up in that vision that maybe there was a there there on how you could take computing technology and marry it with this notion of machine translation. And could you somehow and that was the initial vision. I mean, I thought, wow, you can translate the Bible into all the languages quickly. And there was another component to it, which is the method by which Summer Institute of Linguistics is for learning languages was kind of a learning technology where you try to learn patterns and sell. My initial foray was into mathematical linguistics. There's a professor at Cornell University by the name of Joe Grymes, who was doing some early work on that. But there was a number of academics who could see this vision of the possibility of computing technology completely changing the way that we got the word of God out to the world. And also as part of that, I mean, I'll get into that a little bit later. But there was actually an ongoing thread there said literally the way I got in, I was inspired by this mission of, you know, can you apply computing technology to enabling people to learn languages and then translate the Bible into those languages?
William Norvell: Again, I'm fascinated by one question. We can go deeper at some point. But when I hear you talk about that, my mind goes to, well, it should have worked. Did it did I feel like there's still a ton of people working on Bible translation? Why wouldn't that have worked at this point?
Tom Kehler: Massive underestimation of how hard it is to understand language. And that became my life journey in my part of a I was natural language understanding and still is. If you dig in to what's at the core of crowd smart, it is really working with how do we understand when people are saying something, what it communicates to someone else and all of those kinds of things. But it is a harder problem. And this is more about what I expect about the future of A.I. We've made more progress in natural language understanding in the last five, ten years that went on for 50 years prior to the massive improvements has been in that area. But today it would be more possible. But it's still not quite there because deep understanding, you have to understand the culture, the meaning, the amount of knowledge that gets applied in Bible translation is way deeper than you can still encode into a machine
Rusty Rueff: is one of the issues. Also, like who has authority? Like I mean, people are translating the Bible all the time. Humans, right. They're spending hours and hours poring over their interpretation of the Greek and how it was applied. And then they say, this is my translation is one of the issues with machine learning that you can't have authority. It should be the crowd.
Tom Kehler: Well, that's a good point. And now you're playing into my beliefs about that. It should be collective intelligence and no one even has gotten close to doing that. So in my own you know, I continue to stay fascinated with linguistics. But one of the things that, as we all know, if we were all students of the Bible, we have to get into what was the context and what was going on. So cultural context and all of that determine semantics and meaning. And so that is I mean, to your point is that is the hard part. Now, I would dream of a day when people could use a collective intelligence to perhaps generate some more integrated translation, but anyway, yeah, it's in general, I would say, very hard problem.
William Norvell: That's interesting. That's interesting. And so that's how you got into I could you walk us through, maybe do a quick flyover of your career to date? Obviously, you mentioned Crowd Smart a couple of times, and I want to make sure we tell our audience what that is. But what else have you worked on during the season? And sort of tell us a little bit about where you are today and what crowds are trying to do.
Tom Kehler: So it's a crazy path. I started out, I thought, well, I'm going to go at the time. Keep in mind, artificial intelligence. Well, it had been named in the summer of nineteen fifty five at Dartmouth. It was still very nascent by the mid 60s at that point. So the areas you could study and actually computer science was barely coming into being as a degree. Most schools, even like MIT or others, had Dubberly and within Devilly you have some work around computer science. That's what I did. I was a doubly at Drexel, but while they're in retro, I can see it. I couldn't see it for decades, but God intervened in my career in a very strange way. I was planning on being a Dubberly with the idea of working on this linguistics stuff while helping out in missions with things like radio communications and all that practical. I lost my scholarship. I walked up and down the halls of Drexel looking for work study as pastors get ahead. No money. And I was going to a private school, which was at the time Tim Keller, which was a lot of money. And so this Jewish professor by the name of Richard Corren befriended me, but he said, you know what? You're going to have to study solid-state physics. And he got me into a fully supported research fellowship where I went from being an undergrad to being in the graduate program, working on my Ph.D. in applied physics. And I couldn't figure out what God was doing with that at all, except that another little thing, his next door neighbor was a very, very on fire believer. We'd have daily prayer meetings together. So God put these two people together in the same hallway. And so I studied this and this was the summer of sixty nine. When I'm on the teletype, I'm literally I happened to have a professor also at the University of Pennsylvania, Herb Callon, famous in thermodynamics, who had this vision of how you could take things from statistical physics into computer science. And if you look in the literature today, a lot of that work is what is in machine learning. So literally, I was getting exposure to early forms of mathematical A.I. through that process, and I didn't figure it out until the current wave of A.I. showed up, but I literally went down that path. So that was one path. So I had no choice but to go into the academic. I went off to try to be a Bible translator. I thought maybe I'll do that. I studied with Summer Institute of Linguistics after I finished my PhD and then I got offered a position in physics, teaching physics and computer science at a local university, Texas Woman's University. And I did that for seven years until I got recruited into TII to run a part of their age group because it was during that period at the university. Then I started to publish papers that touched into the area and befriended a bunch of people who were at the AI Group from MIT, and they brought me into that group. Then from that group, I got recruited out to Silicon Valley. So that's a high level view that in Silicon Valley I became CEO of Intel Corp., which was the first and I think only a company to go public. In the 80s. It was called in I for the stock symbol, very successful in the area of expert systems, essentially helping corporations take the expertize of their experts, putting it into computational systems. And then from there, I was then in the track of being CEO of tech companies and through current. So after Intel, a corporate was Kinect, which spun out of Apple, one of the first e-commerce companies to go public, and then after that, another company that won't go into those details. But basically, that's been my I've been part of kind of three ways. The AI wave, the first one, the e-commerce wave in the nineties, and then what became kind of the social media technology wave, which I consider what we're doing, a crowd smart. So part of that,
William Norvell: those are good ways to be a part of fun,
Tom Kehler: just fun.
William Norvell: And one of the things I want to duck into this for a little bit, you know, we talk a lot about jobs here. On the podcast, we talk a lot about how employment is such an amazing thing that Faith driven entrepreneurs can bring to the world, how God desires work, how he had worked before the fall, just the dignity of work, the dignity of giving a good job to someone and what that does for them. And I know recently you wrote a paper talking about job creation through sustainable investing with artificial intelligence, which is a bit of a mouthful, but I think you're going to deconstruct that a little bit. Could you walk us through a little bit of some of your thoughts?
Tom Kehler: Yeah. So the whole basis for founding crowd Smart initially was we wanted to find a way to level the playing field for entrepreneurs the way Silicon Valley works. And I happened to enter it that way. Right. You have a Stanford professor bringing you in. How hard is it to attract funding? Right. I mean, the point was, is we were connected immediately. I met with Gordon Moore, the famous Moore's Law, Gordon Moore. I met him when I came here. So connection is all about connection, not about. Do you really have a good idea, even if you went to school somewhere other than, you know, if you were in the main view, somebody knows, you know, somebody else can and myself. And we really believed that we wanted to create a platform whereby you could just use collective intelligence to create kind of a way to score innovations in such a way that it doesn't matter what your background was or where you came from. It was a great idea. It should get funded. So that's the core idea of that leveling, you know, making sure capital flows based on the value that they're creating, not who they know or where they went to school. Now, we ran a small fund for three or four years applying this technology to that. And one of the things we found out is we were funding 40 percent of the founders and CEOs were female, radically different from what was going on in the venture world. And we're a minority driven and they didn't necessarily go to the same schools. So what that led to is that article is we believe that if you sort of do this in general, get out where you can. And we're working with groups like Angel, M.D. or others that are, you know, angel investors or early stage investors. How can you use technology to make it such that if you have a great idea and a great team and you built something, that you're going to be able to get funding for it and thereby create jobs? It was we all know job creation comes through new companies. And so the driver is finding capital flow to the ideas that are most likely to do the job creation.
Rusty Rueff: Thompson, you heard at the beginning of this thing that I was kicked out. Great to have you on here because I actually built my first expert system Shell in nineteen eighty seven. Wow. Good. IBM had delivered it to it at Pratt and Whitney where I worked at the time and I was working.
Tom Kehler: You were a customer of Intel?
Rusty Rueff: We were. And yes. And so we had this tool and I was working in a group called the Hourly Compensation Group and it was where we scored and rated jobs, the work that people did against a pay grade. And we had all these different pay grades and we had the National Metal Trades Association scoring system. And there were five guys in this group that had been doing it for like 50 years. And they were all getting ready to retire. And they were like, who's going to do this in the future? So we took the IBM expert system, Shell, and I took all everything I could from these guys heads and I put them in. And so if a job used a drill, it went this way. Did you have to pick the drill bit yourself? Then it went that way until you finally could score the job against the eleven different levels of the match.
Tom Kehler: Exactly. And by the way, IBM, our product that Intel Corp., the key product, knowledge engineering environment, was an IBM program product. So they were very close partner. I don't know if you used our product or not, but we were very close partners with IBM in those days. Like I said, you know what IBM program product means as part of their core product offerings. And I remember Pratt and Whitney we worked with probably I don't know, I remember at one point sixty seventy percent of the Fortune 100. We did all kinds of cool stuff, by the way, just so you guys don't feel bad, you know, the fact that this variable pricing on airplane seats that unfortunately came from us so that it used to be there were just airplane ticket prices that were singular, you know, you paid. Get from here to there, then someone figured out, hey, there are all these people who do these cool decisions about inventory management, could we put that in an expert system? We did. Republic Airways did it. Republic got bought by North-Western that then propagated through the industry as using this rule based inventory assignment. So you may pay twelve hundred dollars and the person next to you spent four hundred dollars and dies.
Rusty Rueff: We just heard the beginning of DEVAM pricing there. It was right there.
Tom Kehler: That's why they came out of the fact that you guessed it. What's important about that is computational models can then scale right. And therefore it suddenly it goes through the industry.
Rusty Rueff: All right. So let's fast forward this all turns into what we now know is a I or think of a I. Can you dispel some of the myths of A.I.? Right. Because we're all kind of scared of it. I actually I'm really excited about it because I think when it democratizes and we all are running a smart machine learning programs on our phones, the world will get amazing. But right now, I think there's a bit of a fear some small groups are going to control them, then that's going to control us, you know, take us down the path of dispelling the myths. And then I also want you to weave in how your faith is a lens on what should or shouldn't happen with A.I.
Tom Kehler: It's very, very good question. And I mean, you're tapping into something that, you know, you're sort of making my mind explode at the moment. But let's start off with, first of all, one of the things we did at Intel Corp. is we had the ability one of the things I was most fascinated about my specialty has been in knowledge, representation and reasoning in that first wave. And there is a paper that was published in the late 80s in the ACM around the rolls of frame based reasoning and knowledge, representation and A.I. systems. But underneath that, we had an ability to do something called truth maintenance. You love that idea. The idea is in a logical system. You say if these are your assumptions, then all of these things have to be consistent with that. So it's about logical consistency of truths management. You can only begin to toy with that idea about what that means in terms of faith. But there literally is an ability to do what are called multiple worlds where in this world this assumption set. These are the logical consequences of that in this world and this subset. These are the logical consequences of that now, I believe, for the future of A.I. and one of the reasons I believe we need to marry this knowledge representation side because we can use that to build ethical systems, are ethically driven operating systems into A.I. And how is that going on yet? No, it is right now, the National Science Foundation is looking to fund with twenty million dollars a new center for human and powered A.I.. I have been part of sort of a mission driven thing early on to move from the current generation of A.I. to human empowered A.I. just to have this ability to integrate how we think we should have machines as an extension of human capability, as the way we make sure that A.I. systems are working at the request of what humans want to see happen now cannot get perverted possibly. By the way, I'll tell you this. I do not believe generalized AI is around the corner. My statement on that, I think I have it. One of my papers is generalized. I will be a decade away for many decades to come, meaning that.
Rusty Rueff: So I'm not going to get my program on my smartphone.
Tom Kehler: Well, you will get some snippets. I mean, some of this stuff you can do right now, for example, the bad stuff, ability to completely create false identities or take someone's identity and falsify it. That's all real and that's really dangerous. The ability to make you believe that every bit of news you're reading is agreeing with you is real right now. And that's caused by a and that's disastrous as we see it. What it's doing in the world right now, people kind of they're in a chamber reflecting their own biases. And it's a very dangerous thing. And we see some of the I mean, people can go into imaginary worlds where they're no longer grounded in truth. That's a very dangerous thing in A.I. Is that the root of that? Needs to be dealt with and there are groups that are forming this ethically oriented. But the notion of just a generalized thinking machine is a ways off, I believe. But the components we have now need to be brought under some kind of ethical guidance. I really believe that. So where my faith comes in, it is first of all, I have a couple of things that have integrated in this. If you think about the investment world and you think about the definition of faith, faith is about evidence of things hoped for. Right. Investing is kind of bad. That, too, is you see some evidence and then you hope there are some outcomes out of that. The high technology for that is Bayesian. Reverend Bayes was a Presbyterian minister in the seventeen hundreds who is trying to connect the notion of evidence with what we believe about the future. So he is literally taking this notion of evidence based reasoning with we see through a glass darkly, and he was trying to put math around that and that is now the foundation for a lot of A.I. systems was which is this. And literally what we do in our system is we create Bayesian belief networks. Certain beliefs will imply certain outcomes. So for me, this integration of faith and A.I. is pretty real because you can actually, you know, kind of create this sense of, well, based on this set of reasons or facts, these are the outcomes we might expect applying that to investing. It's fairly straightforward. It's things like, well, if the facts are that the company's had some traction and people agree that on the traction and if the team is hot and people agree on the team being hot, that would predict that they're likely to do. I'm oversimplifying that. But you can see where what we're trying to do in our system here is we're literally saying, what are your reasons for believing? And then we try to project from that, what do we think the outcome is going to be? So, I mean, I know I wrapped a lot into that, but I really believe the way we think about evidence and then what we want to do is how do we think about evidence and what does that imply about what we expect? There's a lot of overlap.
Rusty Rueff: That's really good. Flip it around for us. What does I do to expand the kingdom in the future?
Tom Kehler: Well, let's go back to my dream in the U.N. as a kid was can this help with communication? And what I mean by that is, you know, essentially Bible translation is one, but I would think more is how do we use I for example, what we're just talking about here, use I to level the playing field for capital flow. To the right, I mean, this is just about integrity of where that money goes and will that create jobs and will it do things for the least of these? My brother and I mean, one of the things probably the most haunting scripture verse is that one for me. Right. What did you do for these? Least of these? My brother, particularly in Silicon Valley. Right. You live in Silicon Valley. That's not your first thought. And for me, it's always been a dream to take a technology. And how can we use this to perhaps help with entrepreneurs that may be in developing world? How could we create an ability? I did a little thing where there was a group called Guys of Geeks and I thought, well, could we use the technology to help people who are behind in the Gaza Strip? I get advice from people like Google and other places to be able to build their startups. I mean, you start to think of knowledge sharing on a global basis where we might be able take our experience here in Silicon Valley and enable someone in Kenya to build a business. It creates jobs that fascinating.
Henry Kaestner: I think that I think that you've talked yourself into two other podcast episodes, at least the future of A.I. emissions, and then also just how A.I. and the work that you're doing across smart impacts investors and investing models and democratizing access to capital. I want to ask you about your reflections and not so much just on A.I., but on what being an entrepreneur in general has taught you about God and your faith. How have you seen God show up? What is it about God that you now know from your entrepreneurial career that maybe you didn't know as a pastor's kid growing up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania? Wow.
Tom Kehler: They really good question. One of the benefits I think I alluded to earlier, I've had, you know, the guy I created the key product with, which was intellect. Our product was a humanity, but a solid believer. So I've had this benefit of in each company to have some co creators of that company be people of faith. That's been great. But it's also I've seen myself sometimes get when Intel Corp. went public and all that open confession, I got completely caught up in that. And literally I went from when I first came out here as a pastoral intern while trying to do a startup at Peninsula Bible Church because I was still wanting to do something with ministry. And yet when that thing took off and in the 80s, Intel, it was kind of like the Google. We had the free meals and everybody we were IBM was a shareholder, so was Harvard Endowment Fund. So we were like and I was traveling all over the world. I was busy, busy, busy and kind of got pulled away, just got swept up. And so one of the things that taught me to say grounded. Right. It's real. It's important how you finish, not how you start. And so it was about getting back to grounding. And frankly, I went through a divorce and had to do a restart in my faith walk and I left my faith walk. It set the centrality of it to how I made decisions. It faded off to the side. And so one of the things I learned is you keep the centrality of your faith while at the very core of how you relate to people and how you make decisions. And so now today, if you were to say, how do I spend my day, I start today of forty five minutes to an hour, a word praying because I realize it almost every day. It's easy for me to get caught up in those pressures and go off track. And then I finish the day with a review, you know, because it's the last thing I do at night is go through the word and prayer. First thing I do in the morning is that and a key element of that is be anxious for nothing. Think about that. And being a CEO of a company where you may know all the different things that go on, that has been the biggest spiritual discipline for me is live and the peace of God and live in a sense of joy. No matter what's going on, if you're down to a thousand and you can't you can't make the next payroll, but then, you know, whatever is going on is that centrally you focus on. Just spend your mental energy in today and focus on what God wants you to do today. And it may even take care of some employee situation more than some business deal, but just stay focused on that. So that's what I've learned, is that I call it micro obedience, obedience into very little things. We're supposed to be people of joy. So if I'm in a meeting stressing out. That's so good. Yeah, and it's inexcusable, you see, what I'm saying is or if I'm being anxious or playing out scenarios, that's not good. And by the way, I failed this week on what I did, too. Yeah. So but the point of that is that passion about micro obedience, I think is very important.
Henry Kaestner: Micro obedience. That's really good.
Tom Kehler: Well, I mean that because we so often read the scripture verses like be anxious for nothing and say, yeah, it's a good idea. No, it's a commandment. If you're a Christian and you're running around showing all kinds of anxiety about whether it's running out of money or making a lot of money, which either side of it, it's that peace, contentment. And that has to be right now,
Henry Kaestner: some number of people listening to this are going to identify with the Tom that is going through the Intel Corp. IPO or just crazy. Yes, they still believe they believe enough to listen to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur. There are lots of other more entertaining podcasts by Joe Rogan you could listen to with your time. So they believe enough to listen to his podcast, and yet they just aren't they're not there yet or not that yet. It's that they've lost it along the way, as maybe you had during the time of just a lot a lot of work going around that IPO. How'd you get it back and what would you tell them when they've kind of drifted away?
Tom Kehler: Well, first of all, you know, God's intention for you are far better than anything you can imagine for yourself. And I know that's hard to get in your head because a lot of times you'll have you walk into something that doesn't look like it's good for you at all. And so, you know, God blessed me with a marriage where it was literally I got married a second time and and we're now married going on 30 years. But there was a kind of a rebirth there. A believing woman who I partnered with. And I literally just in that transition lifestyle was I'm never going to do that again. I'm always going to put a boundary around the work thing. Work is not, my God. Right. And so that's part of the part. I would say that you really have to be careful about idolatry. You know, idolatry is the real deal. And if you say that, you know, once I get all this money, I'm going to do great things with it. Forget that idea, because, you know, the real thing is God can provide you anything you need. And so your focus should be totally in trust on him. I mean, so I had that attitude for a long time. Hey, I'm just going to work like a maniac now, and this thing is going to do really great. And then. And then. And then, you know, I'll do all these things. Well, that is not the right way to go. Only thing I could say is the enjoyment of everyday life comes when you trust God. And we're supposed to live in the light and content and enjoy. And it's just better to live that way then and worry and strife and trying to make something happen. I don't know if that helped Amen.
William Norvell: I can't imagine not helping. And that was an amazing thing. And I'm about to come to our clothes and ask you about a scripture that God is using in your life right now. But one just came to mind to me as you were giving that talk. And I want to share with our audience. My wife and I were recently reading through Proverbs, doing the monthly proverbs, and we were in Proverbs 30 and just read this different proverbs. Thirty seven through nine, I think speaks to what you were talking about. It says two things I ask of you deny them not to me before I die. Remove me far from falsehood in lying. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me lest I be full and deny you and say Who is the Lord? Or lest I'd be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. And I just love that picture of daily bread from Proverbs. And of course Jesus repeats that in the Lord's Prayer. And I hear you speaking to that of you know, that can't be your focus either achieving so much or having so little. Your focus has to be on that micro obedience to what God called us to do. So I just want to share that. And now I'll invite you to share. We love this portion of our episodes at the end where we get our guests to share how God's working on their heart through his word and through the scripture and how that can transcend our listener. So love to invite you to share a little bit about maybe what is coming to your mind through the word of God. Could be something today, could be something in a season of your life that you've been meditating on. But if you wouldn't mind share and we really appreciate it.
Tom Kehler: We are this morning it was in James and how the tongue is a rudder. Right. And, you know, I mean, that was the focus of your words really matter. And so when you're leading a company, you have a lot of interactions with people where it's very easy for your words to either be discouraging or hurtful or whatever. So I look at the role of CEO of a company. It's primarily is how am I relating to the people in the company, to customers, you know, all the stakeholders within that. You know what words are my using. And there's a lot in that right. Don't create words of overpromise to investors. Right. Be transparent. Don't create words of discouragement. But on the same time, you have to manage to heart problems. So how do you deal with difficult situations? So to me, today was like my prayer. Was, you know, the words that flow out of my mouth would bring grace and kindness or support or growth to people. And so hopefully that happens. I mean, it was interesting, I beg you, version fan. So this just happened to be in a scheduled study are going through. And it happened that came up today is that verse. And I just thought how, you know, the tongue can just you can turn the course of a relationship with a few words and it's very powerful.
Henry Kaestner: That's a great word. God is use your time to help steer us, the three of us in our audience. And we're really grateful. Thank you very much for your time. And thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for agreeing to be back on our podcast, on the Faith Driven Investor podcast and the business that's called the presumptive close, by the way.
William Norvell: Well, the good thing is he's in Tampa Bay, so we can go find him if we need to.
Tom Kehler: That's right. I know. Look, this is first of all, I want to encourage entrepreneurs because it's hard. I mean, I jokingly say to my friends, I don't bungee jump know, I don't do anything like that. But when you're doing an early stage company, some days you think you're going to die. Some days you think you're going to rule the world. And it is actually it's exhilarating and fun, but it's important that you maintain a youthful mind at all times. And that's another thing I think we learned so much from scripture is as literally having this useful line in how we approach situations, which I think is God's will for us, meaning all things are possible, all of that, that my joy in working in early stage companies is around this, that sense of the adventure. It's more fun than you can imagine.