Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:03:22 · Daniel First, Alexa von Tobel
[00:03:22] S0: So, when I was, in my teens, I was really interested in these thinkers who were... Would connect, religion and philosophy and, you know, what at that time was science. And they would try to form ideas about the human mind. You know, for example, Maimonides, who was this twelfth century thinker. And so I thought that if I studied neuroscience, maybe I could come to some sort of deep scientific understanding of human nature about why, you know, what human flourishing looks like, why we desire what we desire. And in philosophy, there's... You know, a lot of philosophy ultimately is derivative from people's ideas about human nature. That really is what drew me to neuroscience in the first place. [00:04:02] S2: By the way, Daniel, you and I had never put that together. We had that in common. I also started studying mind brain behavior out of such interest. So, you did something that I kind of want to call out because it's pretty fascinating. When you were at Yale, you founded the Society for the inter... Interdisciplinary human flourishing, which is a mouthful. What does human flourishing mean in your mind? Maybe just start there.
00:04:02 · Alexa von Tobel, Daniel First
[00:04:02] S2: By the way, Daniel, you and I had never put that together. We had that in common. I also started studying mind brain behavior out of such interest. So, you did something that I kind of want to call out because it's pretty fascinating. When you were at Yale, you founded the Society for the inter... Interdisciplinary human flourishing, which is a mouthful. What does human flourishing mean in your mind? Maybe just start there. [00:04:30] S0: I became a little bit less religious in my late teens. And, you know, after I I got deeper in neuroscience, I wanted to to really think about... I I just felt like there were a lot of different ways that I could live life if I wasn't just gonna, you know, blindly follow, religion. And so I started looking, and a lot of my friends were studying these questions about, you know, what it meant to live a good life, what human happiness is, really an entirely different discipline. So I had one friend who was a philosophy, major, and he was studying virtue ethics. And then I had another friend who was an economist. She was studying, Bhutan and how they use gross national happiness instead of, GDP to measure success of their economy. [00:05:09] S2: That's what I wrote my senior thesis on. Never... Yeah. We never connected to that. Sorry. Keep going.
00:05:09 · Alexa von Tobel, Daniel First
[00:05:09] S2: That's what I wrote my senior thesis on. Never... Yeah. We never connected to that. Sorry. Keep going. [00:05:15] S0: Oh, interesting. I wanna hear more about that. But... Yeah. And so I had a... You know, and I had other friends obviously who were studying psychology. And so, it seemed, you know, odd to me that these... All these disciplines were being, thought about completely independently. And so I made, like, a salon series, dinner series where we would bring different people together and say, hey, if you're studying the economics about human flourishing, obviously, you'd be interested in talking to people in philosophy or psychology thinking about the same thing. [00:05:42] S2: I I just... It really stands out as such a young person for you to be thinking so profoundly about human flourishing and, you know, sort of society as a whole really struck me. And so thanks for sharing that with us. I want to fast forward to kind of your early career. Walk us through what happened after college.
00:06:02 · Daniel First
[00:06:02] S0: After college, I got pretty disillusioned with neuroscience. And I first studied philosophy for a couple of years because I saw that, you know, neuroscience would try to come to these big conclusions, but, you know, for... About the human mind, you know, by doing... For example, I was working in a cocaine addiction lab where they were studying cocaine addicts and what was going in their mind when they had an fMRI. But I saw that when they... When these professors who were doing these things would try to make conclusions about the human mind from that, there often were a lot of philosophical assumptions embedded in it about things like what is our true self, what do we truly want. So I studied philosophy for a couple years. And when I was there, I just saw this pattern keep on happening that whenever there would be a scientific breakthrough, whether it's in neuroscience, whether it's Darwinism, whether it's the furnace, people then just try to explain everything through the lens of that scientific breakthrough. People thought the mind was a furnace. People thought that love could be explained by Darwin. And so I was always kind of interested in what would be the next what would be the next mania. And then I I attended really on a whim this talk that McKinsey gave in 2016 when I was a grad student at Columbia, and I was studying philosophy of science at the time. And, it was all about big data and how big data is gonna solve all problems, and McKinsey was gonna be at the forefront. And I thought, oh gosh. This is really gonna be this is gonna be the next mania.
00:07:17 · Cameron, Daniel First, Alexa von Tobel
[00:07:17] S3: So speaking of the next mania, AI has been around for a while, but in 2022, with the rise of generative AI, that's when it truly went mainstream. And so in 2016, you were already deep in the space doing graduate work and machine learning. How did you end up focusing on AI? [00:07:35] S0: Really, after I attended, that talk, I thought that what was obviously gonna happen over the next couple of years was that everybody would start making every decision, you know, using big data and eventually AI. So I would start... I started writing philosophy papers about, you know, whether AI was gonna be the next religion. But soon I realized that, you know, if if you actually don't have any experience building these models in the wild, you you know, your opinions are, you know, detached from, you know, the actual reality of what's happening. I So actually went and I joined McKinsey to try to see how these Fortune 500 enterprises were actually actually building AI. And so that's what what made me interested in in it in the first place. [00:08:12] S2: I wanna transition to you starting Axion. Obviously, we met you years ago. Where was the idea? What was the moment? And in plain English for everybody, let people know what is Axion?
00:08:12 · Alexa von Tobel, Daniel First
[00:08:12] S2: I wanna transition to you starting Axion. Obviously, we met you years ago. Where was the idea? What was the moment? And in plain English for everybody, let people know what is Axion? [00:08:22] S0: In in, you know, in plain English, Axion, really, it's a it's a command center that American manufacturers use across aerospace, medical devices, consumer electronics, really all to try to understand what are the top issues that are impacting their customers. So you can imagine a company like Boeing's trying to understand, you know, why are planes, having issues in the, you know, in the hands of airlines. Medical device, manufacturers like Medtronic are trying to get ahead of recalls. And, companies like SharkNinja will release slushy machines and try to understand what issues our customers facing so they can also, you know, makes... Make the next, version even more compelling. It turns out that there's just tons and tons of data, that that, you know, comes from IoT and telematics, from other types of customer feedback, from technician investigations. And so Axion is an observability platform that links together all these datasets and helps the helps the different groups at the manufacturer understand what the issues are. Think Issue three sixty, what are the top issues impacting customers? Why are they happening? And how do we solve them?