Think Like a Billion-Dollar Mogul: Ari Rastegar on Language as Power and How He Teaches His Kids About Failure

Annie Wenmiao Yu (00:00)
Ari Rastegar is one of the most influential voices in Texas real estate.

Ari Rastegar (00:03)
the dividends that are paid are so exponential, are so mind blowing that it will enhance every single part of this experience of being a human being.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (00:13)
his work has been featured everywhere from Forbes to the Wall Street Journal.

Ari Rastegar (00:17)
through of dumb stuff, I lost the money. I had it in cash and I lost it. Well, that was a hundred percent of my net worth. So I went to zero.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (00:24)
Mm.

Ari Rastegar (00:24)
measuring low someone's trauma against someone else's, I think is cruelty.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (01:23)
Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with someone that many call the Oracle of Austin. Ari Rastegar is one of the most influential voices in Texas real estate. He is a visionary known for turning resilience into a true competitive edge. Ari is a Texas native with a law degree from St. Mary's, and he founded Rastegar Property Company in 2015 and has since built a remarkably diverse multifamily and self-storage. to a 600,000 square foot industrial space near Tesla's Gigafactory. Ari is the author of The Gift of Failure and his work has been featured everywhere from Forbes to the Wall Street Journal.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (02:02)
Ari, welcome to Low to Grow. who do you want to be listening to our conversation today?

Ari Rastegar (02:09)
I would like anybody that has a dream, that has a goal, that is looking to grow, that is looking to evolve, that's looking to stay curious, and looking to do something that is gonna make some kind of impact in the world in a positive way.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (02:25)
Wonderful. Ari, where does your story start?

Ari Rastegar (02:28)
Well, my story, I guess, started on April 6, 1982 at 9.27 a.m. when I was born in Austin, Texas. And my journey has taken me through various places across the United for education, for a couple different community colleges, undergraduate university, a study abroad in Mexico, law school in San Antonio. Many, many years in New York City after law school and made this kind of, you know, this journey of this little squiggly path all the way back here to Austin, Texas, where I own and operate our real estate private equity firm.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (03:10)
you described just there the squiggly path. What actually took you from someone who was at law school to someone who runs a state empire?

Ari Rastegar (03:19)
Well, I wish I could tell you it was completely planned and it was my objective all along. I don't think it really was, but I can tell you while I was in law school, I borrowed about 3,500 bucks to buy a single family lot to build a house while I was in law school. And that really gave me something tangible to understand what it could be like to be a real estate investor. I had a $80,000 interim construction loan to build the house, and we ended up selling it for $115,000 around 2007, right before the great financial crisis shook the fibers of the financial world. world and all of the types of loans and the types of pricing and the demand that existed during that area came to a screeching halt. And so I practiced law for a couple of years and that took me on a journey into the entertainment business and very quickly running a very large entertainment business, doing very large events for the David Guetta, the Black Eyed Peas, Snoop Dogg. very, very large companies, working with corporate sponsors like Sports Illustrated, all of a sudden, Ice Storm and Legionnaires' Disease threw the unthinkable into that business, which immediately kind of brought me back into the real estate side of the business, but this time at the commercial real estate level, this time with operators that were investing all across the United States. And I went to my network that I through blocking and tackling by sitting up at the bar at an Italian restaurant in New York City, getting to know the bartender, getting to know wealthy people sitting at the bar, and offering them access to the types of projects that I knew through various operators that were experts in multifamily, experts in self-storage, various repositionings. And through those relationships, I was able to provide my growing investor base to access to deals that they didn't have an opportunity to be a part of, which gave me the ability to not take as much risk, which, I didn't really know how to run a real estate company or investment company at the time, but I knew the people that were running these deals and I trusted them. I was able to do my homework and kind of take the money from this hand into an LLC and then put it in these deals. And once those deals started to monetize, I started to think that, maybe I could I could be a developer also. I could start to find these deals on my own and one thing led to another. And now we've invested in 38 cities, 13 states, seven different asset classes. Our investors are public pension plans, insurance companies, firefighters. We have a very large book of accredited investors. And it's very exciting to see something go from just a piece of land to now an elementary school and know, kids coming back and forth out of it and seeing lots developed and seeing industrial facilities be built. It's really an invigorating feeling to know that you can, you know, take a part in having something that starts in your mind that ends up on a blueprint and then ends up being something that you can actually walk into and touch and feel.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (06:29)
an incredible story. And you're evidently someone who is amazingly successful. when I was doing some research and listening to some of your previous podcasts, I noticed that you mentioned two words, success versus fulfillment. How are they different for you? And also do you feel fulfilled at the moment?

Ari Rastegar (06:47)
Thank you for asking. Success and fulfillment in my experience and I think the only thing I've gotten really good at at this point in my life is failing and failing properly I think is also very much a art and a science not unlike success and fulfillment So success I've come to realize is really a scientific method and I'll give you an example So when you when you went to Oxford, I know one of the you know, most prestigious universities in the world You know, you started out it was your first year you got a syllabus. And you looked at that, you saw this major, it was, you know, four years, five years in the future, and they gave you a syllabus, they gave you an outline and said, okay, here's the prerequisites that you need to take, here's the courses you'll take in your first year. And you pass those courses, here's the courses you would take in your second year, here's the courses you would take in your third, fourth, and then by the end of that, you would then have your first degree, so to speak, and you would have been very successful. Quite frankly, having this first degree and having a finishing your college education, think just about anybody in the world would agree that that would be a very successful attribute to add to your CV or add to your resume. I give that example because that's a scientific approach. You selected something, you had a desire, they laid out a curriculum, it was one plus two plus three, and then you received this degree at the end of it. That to me, is a sign of success. Fulfillment is very much an art. Fulfillment is how you feel about that success, your level of maybe your worthiness, your level of empathy, your level of love, your level of gratitude. And a lot of times these emotional sensations that you feel can be the journey to get there. You don't have a syllabus. There is certain core tools maybe you can use. I've used meditation in my life and I've very often said that my work is my worship and is my way of contributing back to something. But ultimately, I think a lot of people that go after wealth or go after massive success are actually in search of They run two parallel paths and can definitely be intertwined. But one of my mentors for many years, Mr. Tony Robbins, you know, said something that resonated with me so deeply. I've done so many of his seminars, whether Unleash the Power Within or Date with Destiny. I did one, a virtual seminar, you know, about a month ago. So the path to learning never stops. But he said something that really shook me to my core, and that is success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. And it kind of hit me to think, wow, it's almost a cliche.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (09:21)
Hmm.

Ari Rastegar (09:26)
to see very wealthy people that have broken families or they're just miserable, they have health problems and you think, my gosh, you have all this money, you have all this notoriety, you have all this respect from your peers, but you're miserable. And that didn't seem very fun to me. That didn't seem like the life that I wanted to live. So I started on a quest about 10 years ago, not only to build something successful, something that I could be very proud of to do something for our investors that could build their retirements and create the means or the resources that would allow them to hopefully follow their dreams in retirement and be able to have these meaningful, fulfilling moments with their families or whatever the things that they really love to do. them side by side and figuring out, what could be successful? What can that look like? What can I measure? And then what are the acts and behaviors I can do that would create a beautiful life, create a meaningful life. And I find that they go one and the same because in my experience, one of the words that encapsulates fulfillment is progress. And if you're making progress and you can look back at your journey, whether it's an inch or whether it's a mile, and you are doing somewhere that's forward looking, progress tends to insinuate purpose. And when you have purpose, something that is beyond you, something beyond just something that is about you personally, I think that creates a field or that creates an outlook, that creates a perspective that can house more of those positive elevated emotions. And by pairing work with progress and something that you're doing for your customers, having an insatiable, insatiable, relentless drive, to serve your customer, to serve your community, to create something very meaningful and useful, and you pair that with empathy, with gratitude and these elevated emotions, it creates almost like a tapestry, so to speak, of both blending success and fulfillment. And I think those together start to create a meaningful life. And I'm very much early in my journey on that process. definitely fall out of that into some of those lower base emotions and go back into some of the higher elevated ones. And I find for me, it's like a seesaw, you know, back and forth, but it's definitely a practice and it's definitely something that needs to be worked on every day. And when you pair it, as I said, with something that's really going to serve millions and millions of people, I think that starts to at least get us closer to what the formula could be.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (11:56)
Hmm. And can I ask when was the last time that you felt really fulfilled?

Ari Rastegar (12:03)
yesterday.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (12:05)
and what were you doing then?

Ari Rastegar (12:07)
I was a meditation that I learned from Dr. Joe Dispenza and anybody that's watching this, certainly entrepreneurs that are so riddled with stress and I've been there. Anybody that knows me knows, I have a relentless work ethic. It's in my DNA. I mean, there's been weeks that I didn't leave my office. I slept under my desk. There was times that, you know, I was making $2.86 an hour delivering pizzas try to get through school. Even after law school, trying to pay student loans, I had an apartment and I was literally sleeping on the floor because I had no furniture. I've been through those places of very high stress moments and can be very physiological as well as it can be emotional. And I found that meditation work has been one of the greatest, greatest tools for lack of a better term. to make more coherent and be able to make you more productive, more efficient, creating more equanimity so that you can be more clear-headed, that you can make better decisions, not only more strategic and intelligent, but also more ethical in the way that you go about no way for me to recommend meditation more to any of your listeners, anything that you're doing in this life with all these different stimuluses that are flying at your head. Meditation will find a way for you to calm your mind in such a way because meditation is preparation for activity. It's not about just zoning, out and bumming out on the couch. I think of it as like an arrow that you're pulling back before you fire off. So it's preparing your nervous system, preparing your mind to go in there with that incredible laser-focused work ethic that all entrepreneurs need to have to become successful. And yesterday, I spent many, many hours doing very particular meditations around the energy centers of my body. body. The Indian tradition has called it chakras. Dr. Joe has called them energy centers. We've known about this for 10,000 years. Every major culture in the world has talked about them. them in some capacity. three lower energy centers have to do with survival. Then you move into your heart, you move into your throat, you move into your mind. And now what Dr. Joe has done that's so beautiful is he started to measure them with modern tools. So it's not just some woo-woo concept where, my energy centers, I'm going to go out to the Himalayas. And this is something that we can truly see the field. Every living organism has a field. And now we know with our thoughts and our mind, we can start to impact those things. There's been thousands and thousands and thousands of testimonials of people that have used this type of meditation work to create the life of their dreams, to heal illnesses. And now science has become the language of mysticism. And yesterday I found myself falling into some stress, worrying about certain things, looking too much in the future, trying to control the uncontrollable. And I spent some time working on those lower energy centers, keeping my eyes closed, bringing awareness to them, drawing up elevated emotions of gratitude and love and optimism. And I physically felt it change. I felt my state changed. I came out of it. I felt great. I went back to the work that I had to do. I spent several hours working as well and it became much, much more enjoyable and more productive. And I started to see the pieces fall into place.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (15:24)
I really like how you brought that up actually and to me as someone who is just building in the current climate I do see an increasing convergence of mind and body and spirit in popular culture. And also what you were describing there about using meditation as a tool to calm you, to prepare you, to give you the energy to then tackle other challenges. Completely appreciate that, I think when I was at university, I could not do yoga or meditate and I found it super boring. Then after a few years of creating a startup, I relished it and I realized that it strengthened me as well. So now it's something that I do as part of my daily practice. I think from the way that you are talking, Ari, you're obviously someone who is a successful entrepreneur and entrepreneurship is similar to doing an extreme sport. There's a lot of bodily needs that's needed and also mental energy and strength and barriers that's needed. in the work that you do and how you talk about failure, you also talk about resilience. Would you be able to share what the lowest point in your life has been? and how you were able to get yourself out of that dark mental situation.

Ari Rastegar (16:30)
Yeah, I find that the more that you grow, the more your challenges grow. And so in various low points in my life, I'll give you an example. You know, one time when I was delivering pizzas in college, I had $300 and through a bunch of dumb stuff, I lost the money. I had it in cash and I lost it. Well, that was a hundred percent of my net worth. So I went to zero.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (16:35)
Hmm. Mm.

Ari Rastegar (16:53)
that was a pretty low moment, but in hindsight, as I've gotten bigger and there's more zeros and more losing $300 today might not impact my net worth as dramatically as it did that time. But the point is measuring low states or measuring someone's sadness or someone's trauma against someone else's, I think is cruelty. I think, and also measuring your own low point, your own you know, your own dark times against the dark times of that other person that you were that's evolved, the college student, then the law student, then the entrepreneur on the first startup versus this person today. I think measuring them or comparing them is not as productive as talking about just the nature of what it means to be at a dark point and have that dark night of the soul. And what I've come to believe at this point in my life, is that problems are the gifts that we grow from. And I'm not saying that's necessarily an enjoyable process per se, but my perspective about the dark times has changed dramatically where I have an ability now to be more introspective, which only took me 40 to figure out what that means. So it's certainly not an overnight path. But I can tell you from an investment standpoint, from a real estate standpoint, the past several years have been very difficult. I mean, you had a global pandemic, which shuttered so much of the real estate business, shuttered a lot of the global markets. Then you have interest rates spike 500 basis points, which is, you know, 5 % overnight on a floating rate loan. And you know, cities like Austin that are obviously incredible, incredible cities for growth have this massive influx of people during COVID and then people started to leave. And so these types of stresses that come in the cycles of real estate, which we've experienced the last few years, posed a lot of challenges. We had to work out different loans, we had to talk with investors, we had to postpone developments, and all of these things together start to impact your own identity, your own self-image, as well as having very uncomfortable conversations where you talk to people and say, hey, we're gonna have this thing built, this thing is gonna happen here. but it's gonna take a little longer than we thought. And those types of things, when you're an entrepreneur, your identity, your own self-worth is so tied to business because your business is an extension of you. And I think the greatest businesses in the world started with so much heart center and so much of a desire to grow and give something to the world piece of Walt Disney lives in every movie still to this day. think he's frozen in a cryo chamber somewhere, he's but, arguably he's dead, but his heart still lives in all the joy and happiness we see on young kids that have no idea who Walt Disney is, or you wear a pair of Jordan tennis shoes the way that you feel like you can still fly through the air. I talk to young kids that are friends with my oldest daughter and my son who's 10 years old and they don't even know who Michael Jordan is. They just think Jordans are cool shoes, which is a funny change where that heart ends up staying in those products. So I think that coming to terms with these stressors and coming to terms with the world feeling like it's falling on you, and you see this with every great entrepreneur. Tesla was almost bankrupt if they hadn't got a government contract, literally at 4 p.m. on a Friday, it was going to zero. then all of a sudden it turns the other way. And as entrepreneurs, the more zeros, the more commas, it's like the old biggie, biggie smalls, more money, more problems. And I've come to realize one thing about doing billions of dollars worth of deals or being involved in billions of dollars worth of deals is billions starts with bills. until you start and synthesize those things, you start to let stress govern your decisions. And when stress is governing your decisions, that means fear is most of your decisions. And I've come to find that fear in some instances is actually good. When I'm scared, my senses are heightened. I can make snap decisions. I can react very, very quickly. But no organism can operate and live long when they're at a high stress state. None. No organism on this earth they're in a stress state for too long, they die. And humans are no different. We're just, you we are an organism at our very core. So learning how to use stress and using survival to react very quickly and using those cortisol spikes to do something if there's an imminent danger. But we need to come to learn that a text message doesn't mean a lion is attacking us or, you know, a bad comment about you on a social media post doesn't mean that somebody's trying to stab you in the throat, literally. and coming to weigh those things and learn how to develop the tools to deal with those stressors so we can make even better decisions.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (21:38)
I'm curious, how are you teaching your kids about failure?

Ari Rastegar (21:42)
I'm glad you asked that question. My father, when I was about 13 or 14 years old, gave me the book Think and Grow Rich, and it was one of the most impactful moments of my entire life. And last night, actually, I started reading Think and Grow Rich, the kids version with my 10 year old son. And I will remember that moment for the rest of my life. We were, got on FaceTime and he read about 10 or 15 pages on his own. He's an excellent reader. He's absolutely brilliant, way smarter than I was at that age, which was not saying much. But he read it and then we went through and read the preface together, read the biography, the short biography about Napoleon Hill. We started to read the table of contents and it was a very impactful moment where I can start to teach them some of these things because with children, although I'm not an expert in kids by any stretch of the imagination, being a parent is probably the most difficult thing I've ever endeavored to do in my life. starting to read the introduction with my son in Think and Grow Rich and starting to talk with him and being able to pass down what my father, that great gift my father gave to me, a little bit older than he was, but I think Kingston is much more mature than I was at that age and was able digest it better. But they, seen me have vision boards on my walls since their youngest ages. They've seen me do emotional priming exercises with Tony Robbins. They've heard me, seen my goals being written out. they've seen this type of behavior, this emotional fitness behavior. for most of their lives. and when the book came out, you my kids read it, they saw it. And in fact, I wrote it at a seventh or eighth grade reading level with the hope that they could read it at the ages when it came out and be able to, I can share some of that experience with them. And my oldest daughter, Victoria, she's 13 years old now. And, you know, being a 13 year old is, you know, is... is not easy stuff, coming to terms of all the different things, all the implications that means. And I think a lot of times in this social media era, being a young lady is especially difficult, not undermining the journey of the gentleman out there, but there's a lot out there that requires navigating, requires sensitivity, and I think requires this practice of figuring out how to deal with these tools to deal with the stressors that come along in our lives. So, I think the basics are always applicable, no matter what's happening or what's changing in this world. Fundamentals win championships. When we're looking at deals, there's certain metrics that we look at in terms of the location of it, the population growth, the financial metrics, the leverage, the debt you use, the interest rates that you use, the way that you calculate the exit opportunities. So many of these fundamental things are applicable in any type of thing. But at the end of the day, I'm sure there's a lot of people that went to certain business schools or have expertise in finance and things that can explain to you the particulars of maybe the formal business side of what it means to be an entrepreneur. But for me, my focus, my life work has been around the other intangibles that go into building resilience, that go into building grit, that go to build the emotional fortitude that it takes. to actually show up every day in your best self to create a product that's so meaningful that you can touch millions or hopefully billions of lives.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (24:58)
How did you come to value the importance of that, of all the untangibles, the emotional health and the emotional resilience and how important that is to business success?

Ari Rastegar (25:09)
desperation, being miserable, feeling awful, feeling angry, feeling, sad, feeling entitled, feeling inadequate. and at one point those feelings, you have to either take accountability, take total responsibility for your life. Cause you realize that one day no one's coming to save you. as Michael Jackson would say, it's starting with the man in the mirror or it's starting with the with the lady in the mirror. It's you versus you. This is a 1v1 game. This is an inward game. So much of life is about psychology more than anything. Marketing is about psychology. Sales is about psychology. Understanding your customers is about psychology. most importantly is getting to know the demons that are in your head by their first name so you know your own triggers, you know your own insecurities. And once you start to learn how to manage those things, you can become so wildly efficient in all of your endeavors. And for me, it was going through that stuff. And I could give you a sob story about my childhood, my upbringing, which we all have. And there's always somebody that has a harder story. And I was very blessed because I was born in America. you know, I was very blessed to have all four of my limbs, to have my faculties, to have my health. And in seeing that I had those things and recognizing that I was given these incredible blessings from nothing that I did myself. They were a gift. Starting to take those blessings and grow on them and then go out and find different tools to better myself. And the more that I built myself, the more that I worked on myself, the more that opportunities presented themselves, the more the business grew. And at this point in my life as a 43-year-old CEO, I'm just getting warmed up. Like, this is the best I've ever felt in my entire life. And I feel like I have so much more to give, and that's an exciting feeling.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (26:55)
place to be in. Ari, at what stage were you in life when you realized that no one was coming to save you?

Ari Rastegar (27:01)
college. I went to two community colleges. I was a terrible student in high school. there's a bunch of labels that people gave me that I don't think they meant any harm by it. I think that's the education that they had around ADD and anxiety and whatever stuff they came up with. I tell my daughter now, I don't call it ADD or ADHD. I call it ADA, which is Attention Deficit Advantage, And I could then, alchemize those labels or those negatives into something positive. I had a very bad speech impediment growing up, a stutter and a lisp. And I went to seven years of speech therapy to effectively learn how to talk. And I think the moment that I realized that I could make progress, the moment that I realized that I can improve on some of these things if I worked on them consistently, because in the short term, when you work on something, any type of skill, progress seems like it's daunting. It doesn't seem like you're ever going to get there. But then over time, over weeks, months, forget about years or decades, the progress becomes absolutely exponential. in college is when I started to really start to work on myself, started to really write some goals out, revisiting that book, Think and Grow Rich, and realizing that thoughts could be things. And then getting through law school and then learning how to meditate and then just adding on and compounding these life skills that somehow work to invigorate and power and fuel the drive that I had to go be successful. And ultimately I started to see those drive to be successful had underlying emotions. The desire to be very wealthy came from a desire to feel free, to feel safe, to feel secure, to feel seen. ⁓ And once started to become evident, I started to be able to take myself out of the equation and started to think instead of me, started to think of we. And when I started to have that mentality, the business just started to go to a place that interesting to say the least.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (29:00)
Hmm. Ari, I think you hinted at it a bit earlier, but I know that you have Iranian and also German heritage. I'm curious, what language do you think in?

Ari Rastegar (29:08)
I did. you ask such wonderful questions, by the way. I can tell why you're successful Annie. One of my old mentors used to say, questions are the answer. If you want a better answer, ask a better question. Amateurs want answers, professionals ask great questions. So compliments to you. I do think in English now, but I think culturally, I think in Farsi. Farsi was actually my first language. My first few words were in Farsi. I didn't speak English until I was a couple years old. I started to speak very, very early, very influenced by Iranian culture. But now I'm trilingual. I speak Spanish, Farsi, and English fluently and understand a little bit the Latin-rooted languages. You can kind of, you know, it can pick up a couple of things here or there. I haven't learned German yet, but it's certainly on my list. Mandarin Chinese is above that at the moment in terms of my priority. But I think culturally in Farsi and that from a linguistic standpoint now in English, but I dream in Spanish, I dream in Farsi and I dream in other languages that I don't even know what the hell they are. So maybe I can demystify those one day too.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (30:06)
Okay. Okay, interesting. do you think that you thinking in Farsi has given you an advantage or disadvantage in how you're able to operate in corporate America?

Ari Rastegar (30:29)
giving me an enormous advantage, enormous advantage because know Farsi is an ancient language. You there's words in Farsi that just don't exist in English and if you look at Sanskrit as an example there's more letters in Sanskrit, there's more letters in Aramaic that there is in English. English is in fact a more base language than some of the others. A lot of the Asian languages, they have more characters, they have more ways of expression. I wrote my thesis about William Shakespeare. I've studied Shakespeare and read Shakespeare my entire life. And when you look at what he's been able to do with iambic pentameter and what he's been able to express, if you look at some of the other poetic works of Rumi or of Hafez in Farsi, expansion of what they've been able to express with having so much more phonetic latitude is really incredible to see, I think the greatest writing ever in English language. Certainly the greatest playwright is with Shakespeare and I guess in an American English, probably Mark Twain. But there's a limit to this language. So I think that it's given me a much more expansive look at the world. It's given me a more worldly, global ancient take on how things are done from an etiquette standpoint, from a forward-looking standpoint, from a time horizon standpoint. And I feel extremely fortunate to have that as my heritage.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (31:48)
That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing your experience, Ari. Let me close by asking you our podcast staple, which is what do you think is one thing that will allow more people to have better mental health?

Ari Rastegar (32:02)
Meditation, hands down. said this many, many times and I try not to lose the opportunity to say it. Meditation now, there's such a baggage around that it's some activity that's esoteric and it's some woo-woo stuff that you have to go to the Himalayas and you chant or need to take Ayahuasca or whatever people do and that's just so far from the truth. You know, this is something that you do with you It's about your own journey, but there is a technique there is a practice to do it and I would recommend anybody listening to this, do yourself the favor, give yourself the gift of going to see Dr. Joe Dispenza at a seven day retreat or doing the online course, which I've done many times, or going to learn transcendental meditation. Go learn a practice of how to keep your eyes closed, find some equanimity and the dividends that are paid are so exponential, are so mind blowing that it will enhance every single part of this experience of being a human being.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (33:03)
That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that, Ari. Let me just ask you one more question because I think it would be a missed opportunity if I don't. Where do you see AI having the most impact in your life in the next three years?

Ari Rastegar (33:17)
we're in the fourth industrial revolution. And I think of AI the same way that we would have thought of electricity, The underpinning, the enablement tool of everything else that's coming. I mean, there was a time that I would Google everything, now I use ChatGPT 100 times a day as this assistant to get better information. But I think that it's one of the greatest blessings in the history of mankind. just like anything, you could use electricity for an electrical chair. But it's a tool just like anything else. And I'm very confident that the custodians of AI will treat it in the best use possible. Will there be some downside to it, absolutely. There are car accidents as well, but you can also take your car to drive your children to school. encapsulating it as one thing that's necessarily good or bad, it's back to a tool. A gun can be used to protect someone, a gun can be used to hunt. food or can be used for some nefarious behavior to cause harm. I think AI is no different and I think it is the single greatest tool for enhancement to enhance humanity's ability to be more human that's ever existed and I can't wait for it to continue to evolve.

Annie Wenmiao Yu (34:23)
Fantastic. I definitely also agree about AI enhancing humanity and I'm super excited about what it can bring. Ari, it's been a pleasure to have you on the Low to Grow podcast. Thank you so much.

Ari Rastegar (34:34)
Thank you, Annie.