Dan Thomson Podcast Transcript
Dan Thomson joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Dan Thomson. Dan Thomson is founder of Sensay, a leading platform for the creation of AI based digital clones and a pioneer in digital immortality. He founded Sensay in 2023 to create solutions across a range of sectors from healthcare to education, building a knowledge capture and share platform for the betterment of humanity.
He has a track record of launching and scaling new ideas, whether in the food and beverage industry or technology startups. Prior to founding Sensay, Dan worked in a number of corporate and CC roles in the technology and web three industry. He served as chief marketing officer, then strategic advisor at MetaRisk, a blockchain enhanced risk financing firm, and director of business development at InsurAce, a decentralized insurance protocol.
Well, good afternoon, Dan. Welcome to the show!
Dan Thomson: Thanks so much for having me!
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate you making the time and I generally stick to the North America side of things when I’m doing a podcast during the week. But today I get the lovely experience of going virtually to Thailand. So, I appreciate you making the time.
I know that the time zone difference is sometimes a little crazy to manage. So, thank you, Dan. Let’s jump into your first question here. Your journey from founding food and beverage businesses to pioneering AI based digital clones with Sensei is remarkable. How did your background in hospitality industry influence your approach to launching and scaling tech startups?
Dan Thomson: So, I mean, it is an interesting, I think everyone thinks that their, their own story is long, but when it comes to how I moved from hospitality, which I guess I fell into from an early age through more necessity than anything else, then evolve within, within the industry. As I had to put myself through university and then just ended up, I guess the entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and ended up opening my own bars, restaurants, cafes, juice bar chain.
And then that kind of just kept evolving and expanding. But at the same time, you know, I had this idea in the back of my head ever since I studied philosophy at university at the time. To create something that would be able to capture my stories, my personality to extend myself beyond my, my physical body and time on this planet.
And I think there’s, it’s not the obvious natural progression from hospitality to an AI tech startup, but there is a lot that we can take from work in hospitality that goes, I guess, quite undervalued in a lot of the world, which the customer service aspect of a focus on ensuring that you create quality products and actually the work ethic of a lot of hospitality focus.
It’s really incredible compared to a lot of other industries where they are maybe overvalued slightly. So, I guess the always the continued work ethic from that, the innovation and the ideas and the marketing push and the just focus around customers and customer satisfaction really kind of drives a lot of who I am and what I do in general.
And then, so when it came around to actually starting to work on, on Sensei and moving over to this incredible project, it was a natural flow for me to continue to be customer focused and really get into the minds of the people that we, we hope to improve the lives of. So, by applying some of the principles from hospitality, it really does help us to create a better business all around.
I think there are a lot of businesses out there that could really learn a thing or two from the hospitality businesses in general. And I think there’s a lot of transferable skills. I think when you. Start any kind of hospitality business. I think you have to wear many hats and you really have to be careful with budgets.
And, you know, there’s a reason that there’s a such a high sort of failure rate with them. So, it’s, you know, you, it’s very different to a lot of other businesses where you maybe have, you know capital, a lot more available capital upfront to be able to be a bit more. Really inflexible with it, but when you’re growing small hospitality businesses and trying to grow them into chains and multiple venues, and you know, you really do have to stretch every penny and every cent and really make that go as far as it can while dealing with the sort of endless onslaught of problems from anything from new regulations to customer issues, to supplier issues, to staff issues.
So, you know, it’s a really tough business out there. And I think there’s a lot of lessons that have. Stuck with me from doing that, but it’s what I’ve moved into now has always felt like the thing that I, you know, was meant to be doing this whole time ever since I studied this concept in university. And then actually, you know, about 7 or 8 years ago, I actually wrote a book around creating digital immortality.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. And, you know, a lot of times entrepreneurs, especially entrepreneurs in the tech startup ecosystem, a lot of times they don’t come from the tech because they don’t, they don’t have a tech background. So, I appreciate you providing some insights around that. And I think that’s very helpful, your creative energy and those other industries that you brought here to tech.
So, thank you. And Dan, Sensei is at the forefront of digital immortality and AI based digital clones. What inspired you to create Sensei? And how do you envision it impacting industries like healthcare and education?
Dan Thomson: So, this goes back to, as I say, my, my, my university days, but also at a time when I had actually injured myself when I was quite you know, quite younger, I had a bit of an accident where I think there’s a, you know, a general rule that you shouldn’t go down water slides head first.
And I found out why I actually hit my head on the bottom of a pool quite hard because I did that. And it left me sort of concussed pretty badly. And I actually ended up like unable to access my memories for almost 48 hours, which is a terrifying experience because you can kind of, you know, you should know something, but then you can’t quite grasp it.
And that’s influenced a lot of the way I live my life is that it’s influenced a lot of who I am in terms of wanting to do as much as I can be as much as I can realizing that in some aspects, my life is a collection of stories as all of us. And so, I try and make my stories as varied and interesting as possible, both in life and business.
When it came to, you know, that combined with a philosophy degree and understanding identity and consciousness and existentialism, it really started to hone in on, you know, this, this concept of being more, creating more stories, making myself. As you know, trying to live as much as I can, but it always kind of stuck with me in terms of how I process the sort of meaning behind everything I did.
And that actually led to a time when I had left the UK about 2016 and I had moved down to Spain at the time. And I actually, you know, I found myself a little bit lost after having been working for a while. 12 to 15-hour days on average in the UK and London to have much more relaxed life in Spain. And it kind of really took the, the ambitious drive out to me and kind of make me think, you know, what, what’s, what’s everything for when you can live somewhere that is arguably cheaper with the quality of life that everyone aspires to have and have that with, you know, less work and, you know, more, more time for themselves.
And so, it really kind of made me start sort of thinking about how, you know, I should be motivated myself, what, where I should find the meaning in and purpose and what everything I did an incredible time. And I was really sort of searching for, you know, purpose again, and what I ended up doing was actually writing out philosophy and, and looking into a search for how I could extend myself beyond my time as planet, whether that was.
Through, you know, success and riches and fame, or whether that’s through bloodline or anything else, actually, the, what the philosophy came to and it turned into my first book, which was immortality and digital age. And that’s about understanding that we have this collection of data about us that if combined with a sufficiently advanced AI, we could create lifelike indistinguishable replicas of ourselves.
And these replicas could, you know, interact with future generations as if it were us. They could even, you know, manage our assets after we’re gone. And that was really the foundation of where Sensei started you know, a few years back. And that was the inspiration. And then it was just a case of waiting for the technology to become advanced enough that we could actually start working on it.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that, Dan. I liked the backstory. Some of the challenges you went through, your ups and downs, trying to figure your life out, but you definitely landed in a great space and the timing was great. And we’ll jump more into that here in a second. Thank you. So, Dan, as the author of Immortality in a Digital Age, can you elaborate on what digital immortality means and how Sensei’s platform is helping to make this concept a reality?
Dan Thomson: Absolutely. So digital immortality for me is this idea of having something of us that lives on, something more of us that, you know, we have that other generations in the past haven’t, didn’t have available to them. If you think about, you know, where we’re at as a civilization now, it’s very rare for us to be able to remember anyone past maybe three generations back.
We might know some names, maybe we’ve done some family history searches, and maybe we know a little bit of information, or if someone was particularly successful or famous, we might know a bit more about them, but it doesn’t really get to know who they were as individuals, doesn’t really get to know them as they, as they interacted.
But us in our generation, we actually have this opportunity, this data, this, this ability to create almost a intergenerational connection through our photos. Our videos are just our messages in a way that’s never been possible before. So, by creating replicas of ourselves, we can actually touch generations for decades, centuries, millennia to come.
We’ll be able to talk to our great, great, great, great grandchildren. We’ll be able to actually help them share our wisdom, share our stories, tell them about ourselves. Now, arguably it won’t be us and the, the idea of actually transferring our own consciousness into the machine is a whole huge leap beyond what, what we’re talking about here.
But at least we can do more with who we are in terms of being able to share that, that knowledge, that wisdom beyond our physical form and our time on this planet. And that’s really incredible. It doesn’t just translate into kids, grandkids, you know, something that survives us, but also it can be applied in a huge number of different ways in contemporary means by looking at, instead of generations, we can look at cycles of education, of business, of plea time.
So, by applying the same principles, you can actually create a exceptionally useful tool for transferring, well, for storing, transferring, sharing, and even generating knowledge and wisdom. Between these cycles, so that could be an employee transitioning out of a job and their replica being able to help their existing team to continue to function.
It could be the case of a, you know, a government transitioning into another one, enabling replicas to be able to pass on. Otherwise, inaccessible information to the incoming government so there’s plenty of this huge amount of opportunities for replicas within organizations for individuals in both contemporary and future sensors.
And you know we’re super excited to actually be building this this form of digital immortality that becomes a super powerful tool for us to use now and also enables us to. Have a version of us that can connect and share ourselves for, you know, generations to come.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. It’s kind of like from the sci fi movies, right?
You know, you can actually convert that consciousness into a documentary, a living documentary that you use using artificial intelligence to pass on to generations. But just really simply amazing. I love that coin the term that book immortality in the digital age is, is pretty cool. So, thank you. And Dan, last question of the day, if you could briefly share in your other book, the digital afterlife, you explore the concept of life beyond physical death through technology.
How do you see this concept evolving in the next decade? And what role will sensei play in this transformation?
Dan Thomson: Yeah. So, my second book, the digital afterlife was, you know, it was an imagination of, okay. And if replicas are possible, if this concept of digital immortality, or at least a digital extension.
It is a viable option for us as a, as a species to, to pursue, you know, how would we go about doing it? So, what I ended up creating was this kind of like, you know, roadmap and this concept around who we are because identity is extremely subjective. We think of ourselves one way, but the persona that we put out to.
On our social media might be very different to the way we interact with our neighbors, with our closest friends, with our friends, with our family, with our, you know, someone on the street that you meet. Maybe you have a particularly bad day and you bump into someone and their impression of you might not be favorable.
So, this kind of subjectivity of. You know, how we are perceived has to play into identity as well. And then beyond that, you’ve got obviously social media, you’ve got your emotions, you’ve got your stories, your sort of contextual information of how you would react given certain situations and certain triggers and a lot of other personality traits, mannerisms and things that go into who we are.
So, the second book is really about firstly, you know, how we would even capture all of that information and how much of it we would really need to create a quality replica of someone that would be good enough to actually almost act on their behalf and then also started exploring some of the use cases.
And so it was, it was a really nice piece to follow up to the first one. So, it was a real sort of exploration and arguably a roadmap for what we’re building at Sensei. So, it takes a lot of understanding of, you know, how we could build these incredibly intricate replicas that’s, you know, almost indistinguishable from the real person.
And we’re still so early in this, but even now, you know, I’ve got my replica that’s answering messages for me on a couple of platforms. And it even captures even our team who know. That I, uh, that I do this from time to time, even they get caught out sometimes, but not caught out in like, it’s a ha, you know, I’ve, I’ve used my replica instead of me.
The idea of having it answer my messages is that it has my data and information, so it knows certain answers that it can respond to, which we see as an un-blocker for our team. It enables them to access information instead of having to wait for me to come online or finish my meetings or, you know, just respond to them.
So, it’s a real valuable tool for increasing the productivity of myself and the team so there’s a lot of you know really cool use cases that we’ve identified in general that span education health care professional use cases. Even gaming imagining my NPCs for gaming so the you know the second the second book was really a road map as to how we can capture that individuality of the person and put that back into a quality replica and then with a quality replica how that could be used.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And that’s just great. It’s kind of having a knowledge base, a bot that’s there 24 seven that could answer all the questions for your staff, your family or whatever that is. I think that’s awesome. So, Dan, I really appreciate you diving into this today. And it was certainly a pleasure having you on and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Dan Thomson: Thanks so much for having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Dan Thomson Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
