The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast 262 Allan Sutherland, In-Telligent Personal Safety Notifications App

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

Allan Sutherland, In-Telligent Personal Safety Notifications App

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So anyway, be sure to watch for that. And of course, we always have the best guest as always. Today we have a very interesting guest, Alan C. Sutherland. He's the founder and CEO of In-Intelligent. It's an app that you can download on the Android and iOS store. And he's got a career of over 30 years as the co-founder of Cam Rich Consultants, a consulting partnership that was formed with a close friend while at the College of the University of Illinois. So basically, over the last while, they've been working on this idea and crafting into an app, this way that we can communicate with each other using different technologies that he'll talk about, and being able to make it so that you can hopefully have a safer life.

Welcome to the show, Alan. How are you today? I'm fantastic, Chris. Thank you. Very much looking forward to meeting you. Now, there's some interesting things you guys have going on, and people can go to the website. I think it's in-telligent.com, correct? That's right. And you guys have done some interesting things, but let's talk about you first. Give us a bit of background. What's your journey through life to get to designing this app for the people?

Thanks, Chris. So first off, very excited about being here and appreciate you and your listeners for paying attention to what we're all about. So I started Intelligent about five years ago. But a few years before that, as Chris mentioned, I started a company called Cambridge Consulting with a couple buddies in college. We really were focused at that time in helping small businesses do a better job of really understanding how to make their business operate better and how to deal with their challenges. I went from there into public accounting, left public accounting, went to work for a big multinational company and ran its private capital group for the better part of almost 20 years. So I was able to not just be able to see lots and lots of different financing and interesting

transactions that would come along at the very, very early stages of telecom and other type of interesting infrastructure investments, but also was able to travel the world. And one of the things that I met or one of the things that I enjoyed about traveling the world was getting to know people world. And one of the things that I met, or one of the things that I enjoyed about traveling the world was getting to know people and understanding different cultures. I've been in about 90 countries on almost every continent. And so I've really gotten a chance to kind of sort of understand who people are and what they're about

and understand that what they care most about is keeping themselves and their family and their loved ones safe and secure and really can sort of having the best life possible. Everybody views that differently, but they're all about that. And so when I was getting to a crossroads in my career, as you can see, I'm not the youngest tech person you're going to have on your show. It was, do I stay in a big company? Do I stay in, you know, do I stay in a big company?

Do I stay in, you know, do I work there until I retire and get a pension and do all that other good stuff, travel the world, you know, enjoy the perks of working for one of the largest companies in the world? Or do I leave, go out, try to form a tech company that's designed to keep people safe and can sort of wash bottles, answer the phones, do everything that's needed to keep people safer and can sort of wash bottles, answer the phones, do everything that's needed to keep ourselves afloat while we're trying to create a structure that can keep people safer and better informed wherever they happen to be around the world. That's awesome. So what motivated you to do that?

So, you know, like most of us, 9-11 was a big inspirational moment. Interestingly enough, I was actually in Windows of the World, which is the restaurant that used to be at the top of the World Trade Center. I was in Windows of the World the week before that having breakfast. I was then a week later on 9-11 in the air flying from Chicago to Philadelphia. I got on the plane. Everything was fine. When I landed, the second plane had just hit the second tower. And sort of all hell was breaking loose.

I felt for a very, very few minutes I was like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, walking through and things were shutting down behind me. I had no idea what was going on, right? I flipped open my phone, listening to messages, and realized that the whole world was about to change. Now, I was safe. My family was safe. Most of the people that we know were fine, but we were all affected by that moment. And the thing that was the scariest about it, Chris, was that you had people in an office building, and this was, you know, two massive buildings, that never expected an airplane to fly into the building. I don't care how prepared you were, you never expected an airplane to fly into the building. And you never expected the building to collapse. And so, you

know, since we, after the age, and I know that's the right age, but after seven, eight years old, we kind of sort of understand that fire drills are no longer real fires. And when we get a drill goes off, when the fire alarm goes off, we expect that it's probably more a false alarm or some sort of drill and we're more annoyed. And that's what happened in 9-11. People heard the alarm. They knew that they were supposed to leave, but they weren't sure if it was a false alarm, if it was real. Some people went back to work and it just, we needed a better communication system. Unfortunately, I was working at the time. And so, you know, like me and like everybody else, I go, we have to have a better system.

Somebody needs to figure this out. Well, since that point in time, right, life had advanced. We now have a thing called an iPhone, right? We have our fancy Android devices. It's hard to imagine a world without them, but they didn't exist 15 years ago. And so the federal system that was put in place in response to 9-11 was a system that was designed off of fancy new text-based technology back then. Today, as we know, you know, their technology, the federal system is pretty much crap. So I said said you know i i really wanted as

i was saying i was looking for a cause right i feel almost like a millennial here but i was looking for a cause a cause um i was turning 50 and i said you know let's let's figure out i left and i said i want to figure out use my knowledge of tech from an investing side use my understanding of the cellular system to come up with a better view under the theory that if the federal government can do something like in an amber alert we can do it better and if we can privatize it and we can bring it to the masses we can make a better system than what they can do as a government entity. So that was our primary inspiration. Now, some of the other things that I'll never forget 9-11. I remember I had lost about $75,000 the night before locking all of our mortgage loans

because we'd gone through a huge dip of the market, and it had been going on for a week, and I finally had to lock the loans because I was already eating it enough as it was. And I was drinking very heavily because I was pissed off losing 75 grand. And so I woke the next morning and I called Countrywide, the lender at the time that we sold some of our loans to and i said uh i said hey i just want to make sure you guys need to make sure and get all those loans

locked for me i want to make sure those all went through call me if there's a problem and they go the stock market's been blown up uh we've been attacked by terrorists and you need to turn on the TV. And I'm like, is this some kind of joke? And I'm hung over just horribly. And, and I go, uh, he goes,

you need to go turn on your TV. So I go turn the TV on and the first building is on fire. It's live on CNN. And, uh, I'm watching it and I'm just like, what the hell is going on? And I'm trying to figure out the stock market has been blown up.

They said it was shut down. And as we're watching, the gal goes, there's another plane over on the horizon. And I don't think at that time they really knew that a plane hit the building. They just knew it was on fire. Right. And there was like, you know, swirling reports. And the guy goes, yeah, there's a plane.

Is there a plane coming in? There's a big plane coming in. And we're all just watching it live as the plane comes in. Wow. And just smashes into the building. And at that point, it becomes very clear that we're you know this isn't some accident right and uh i remember the horror of it it was just it was horrifying it was so bad that i actually i after the buildings fell i i i went back to bed just

hoping that i was in some sort of hangover nightmare dream, and I tried to go to bed for an hour and see if I'd wake up from this horrible thing. But you guys have built this app to also deal with emergency situations like the Parkland shooting where local police are scrambling. I know that one of the things of the Parkland shooting is the police were pretty much kind of – no one could figure out what to do for quite a bit of time, actually. And, of course, the security guards there had scrambled and left the kids to fend for themselves. And so you guys have built this app to work with law enforcement agencies, government entities,

school districts, and other groups around the country. In fact, Miami-Dade Police Department, I guess, is working with you. Is that correct? That's exactly right, Chris. So first off, thanks for sharing that story about, you know, we all have a 9-11 event in our minds. And it was the biggest thing from our generation. Before that, it was the Kennedy assassination.

Now it's 9-11. I'd love to be in a situation in this world that we don't have to worry about another one. But unfortunately, that's kind of sort of the reality. We can't stop the bad people doing bad things, whether it be at 9-11 or it be down in Parkland. What we can do is we can help kind of sort of get the word out in the right way, in the most authoritative way. So if you think about communication, you go away from the horrific events and you go to communication itself. In order for communication to be effective, you have to be able to create a good message that gets

to the recipient in a way that they can actually receive it, see it, and act on it. And those were our core principles when we were designing intelligence. So we took the first concept, which is I need to get somebody's attention. So we all have our mobile devices with us almost 24-7. In fact, there's certain studies that talk about that, you know, we panic most when we can't find our phone because our phone is the way we connect with the world. It has become an amazing third appendage or fourth appendage

or fifth appendage, of course. And it is how we talk to our friends, how we talk to our coworkers, how we get our news. Everything comes through these little computer devices. But what happens because of that and the prevalence of push notifications is we put our phones to silent or do not disturb all the time. Because otherwise we'd be bothered with bings and clangs and all kinds of stuff. So that created a sort of a blackout situation. So I said, all right, if we, again, go back to the federal system and an Amber Alert, one of the things that works really, really well about an Amber Alert is it makes your phone make noise

when there's an alert coming out around a missing child because missing children are important. And so, you know, we want to be a good community and we want to be able to react and check it out. So I said, all right, how do we get a phone to make noise when Chris has put his phone to do not disturb or silent? Or he's listening to music or he's talking on it. How do I break in? And so we worked really, really hard.

Android is this amazing open platform, and we were able to kind of sort of get past that. Apple, you know, in Steve Jobs' defense, he built a great, great technology and a great platform, but he put a switch on the side of it that said, if I flip this phone to silent, I am telling the world I don't want to be bothered.

And so we said, all right, let's figure out a way around that. And I mean, no disrespect to Mr. Jobs, but I go, if there is a technology out there, if there's a computer, we've got smart people and we can figure out a way around it. So we worked really, really hard, came up with the silent switch so that when your message goes out and you're either talking on the phone or you're just letting it sitting around like we are right now having a great conversation, that phone that we're going to override that silent setting and we're going to make that phone make noise when you have intelligent on your device. So that solved number one, which is it forces you to look. And we've all been in that situation, you know, invariably when you're sitting in church and you forget to put your phone on silent and someone calls you and you immediately go to it and everybody pays attention. That's what we were going for is to get people to look.

Second thing that was important, and this is is so you think about Parkland you think about the the World Trade and anything in between important conversations around getting people to look makes you make sure that message gets them. We then said the second one which is really really critical is we have to be able to auto group people based on where they are. So we're a mobile group. You know, our world, people don't work in one location anymore. They have their computers, they have their phones. They get up, they wander around. But they do business wherever they happen to be,

and they talk wherever they happen to be. So they need to be safe where they are. So in a world trade situation, the authorities needed to send a message to people that were in the building. Well, they didn't know who was in the building. But if all those devices were there, we could auto group those devices and send a message to them just simply because those devices are in the building. Because the devices are at Parkland or the people are at Parkland during the shooting, we could send a

message to the people that are there that might be different than the message that goes somewhere else. So those were the two keys. Law enforcement loves it. As you pointed out, we work with government agencies. South Florida, unfortunately, has been kind of sort of one of these hotbeds over the last couple of years. You go up to Orlando and you had the Pulse nightclub shooting. Then you go down to South Florida and you had the shooter at the Fort Lauderdale airport. You've got a whole bunch of stuff that unfortunately, they just get it. They understand what's going on. So we've been very, very fortunate to work with their police departments and their officers, but we also work with school districts for purposes of getting messaging to teachers or to parents. We work with organizations, businesses that have real-time communication where they need to get information to their officers,

to the board of directors, to their employees, letting them know what's going on. And we work just individually with a mom and a dad and a family unit that needs to get a hold of each other because they're stressed because I'm trying to get a hold of my wife. She doesn't answer her phone. It's really, really important. And I need to be able to somehow get past that silence switch, make her realize that I need to talk to her because otherwise she's never going to know and then she's going to be really pissed when I didn't get to her. So can this empower my mom to make sure that she gets me awake when I'm napping or sleeping?

There is no doubt. We desire to involve people in our lives. When you're not answering your wife's text message. She can be there. That's exactly it. Right. So, again, it has to be used judiciously. I think you get the idea.

But it's like you better answer this text and I better find out where you're at. Dinner is ready. That's exactly right so so we go from you know a small group of you and your mom up to everybody that happens to be on a college campus just happens to be there when there's an active shooter letting them know that they're you know what they need to do and how they need to be safe so this would be a great thing maybe if i go on a family trip with my family and you know maybe i'll separate at disneyland or something like that um uh so this will this will you know if my mom so basically my mom if she had this app and i did

we were grouped she could override and and like bring my phone if it normally my phone a lot of times i think it automatically with samsung it goes to sleep once it's right once the the the i forget what it's called, the gyroscope sits for enough time and doesn't move. Then, then it, then it goes into standby mode. And a lot of times she likes to call early in the morning and sometimes I'm sleeping in, she's, she's also ahead of me in the time zone. So sometimes she forgets that I'm behind her. Sure. But yeah, that's pretty interesting that's exactly it chris so so we we override silent we wake phones up so it doesn't matter a lot of a lot of apps you know

you close them out you force close them so that's not using your battery it's not using your memory we actually work whether or not the app is on the screen whether it's minimized whether it's closed or the device is awake or sleep it just has to be powered up you have to have intelligent on your phone you have to have an account but you just as you said i'm actually in park city right now um the family and i are you know using this long martin luther king weekend to ski and so and so exactly what you just said skiing as a family we we break up, right? We've got my wife and I, we may go down one run, the girls may go down another, and we think we're going to end up in the same spot, but then we don't. So your mind immediately goes, well, where are they?

Is everything okay? So we use intelligence to communicate with each other in that stressful time where you can't otherwise get them. But what's even better than that is we've connected with all of the resorts in North America with something we call Ski Connect, which just simply by being here in Park City, I'm immediately connected to the Park City Mountain or the Deer Valley Mountain or the canyons and their ski patrol so if I happen to be out skiing and I've and I've fallen and I've gotten hurt I don't have to be searching for the right number it's already pre-programmed into my device I just through intelligent I just hit simply hit a button and I'm immediately connected with the ski patrol. I can then let them know I'm on this run. I'm hurt.

And they can send somebody out. Plus, they can send out a message through intelligent to everybody that's on the mountain saying, hey, there's bad weather coming in. You need to get off the mountain to keep yourself safer, which, of course, they could never have done in a normal situation because they'd never know who was on the mountain and what was going on. So exactly as you described, the whole thing about intelligent is auto-grouping people so that you can get a message to them, but also giving them a message, the ability to get a message back into the right people's hands and the right floors. Cool.

So this might be good as an iPhone I can't get up at, but if you have ugly parents and you're concerned about them being able to send an emergency signal? That's exactly right. And so, like, for example, our aging kind of sort of population, there are all kinds of new challenges that we haven't had before. So one of the things that we're working with Phillips Lifeline on is creating a – think about putting – and I don't like to equate seniors to dogs. Sometimes we like our dogs more than our seniors.

But be that as it may, we all have this concept of a dog fence around our property. The idea is, so if you think about where we do auto-grouping, if you have a senior who's living alone, who's maybe starting to suffer from dementia, and you then give them a wearable created by Philips, we then can link that wearable and that technology into an intelligent group where if the person, let's say this is your mom, let's say she wanders outside of that circle, you would get an automatic alert through intelligent saying hey, your mom's out wandering. Now that first circle, you may just get a normal notification. It may not make your phone make noise.

You know, it may just be mom's, you know, left the house. The next one, or maybe it's a ping, right? Just pings out there. But now she's gone a little bit further, right? And now you're sitting there going, hey, I really want to know. Mom's now three blocks away from home, and I want to know. And so it sends a message to you, specifically causes your phone to override, saying your mom's out wandering.

And then using the Philips and intelligent technology, be able to figure out where she is, maybe give her a call, maybe call a friend or somebody in the area and keep you less anxious about something that's going on, you know, states thousands of miles away. Maybe you could use this for your teenagers. So if they're sneaking out in the middle of the night to go, to go, you know, do teenager stuff. You could, but teenagers are usually a little more tech savvy.

I'll just turn off the phone. Exactly. You know, this, this actually would be really good because my father's passed since, but we went through a good because my father's passed since, but we went through a lot of years where when he called, the only time he called me was when he was going into the hospital for a heart attack or some sort of mild heart attacks that he would have. And it got to the point where every time he called, I'd be panicking because if I missed the call, I'm like, oh, God, he's in trouble.

And every now and then he'd just call me and be like, oh, I just was calling to see how you're doing. He was, he was, he was, he, his dementia had started to kick in. So usually 99, 95% of the time when he called, there was an issue. My mom, uh, uh, will call me at all hours of the day and and yeah sometimes i'm asleep like i said i'm behind her um and the other day she she texted me at three in the morning which she never does right and i didn't see it and i woke up sometime in the middle of the night saw it and was panicking and calling her because i'm like she could could, she could be at the hospital. And it turns out she was just awake and bored. Mom, don't call me when you're awake and bored.

I can really use this app right now because I could give it to my mom and say, mom, here you use this app. If you are in an emergency situation, otherwise I'm sleeping through your texts and phone calls. Yeah, exactly. And so, Chris, what you're saying is exactly. So that's the B to C side. We have a B to B side where we work with, for example, the hospital. So one of the biggest challenge hospitals have and families where people go into the hospital is getting a hold of the loved ones

quickly and explaining to them this is what's happening with your loved ones. So it's, you know, somebody goes into the ICU and the last thing you want to do is leave the hospital while something's happening because you're nervous that you're going to miss one of those last events. The hospitals were working with them to create a variety of different communication tools where they could just create a small group and send a message out to the family, keeping you aware of what's going on with mom or dad. Similarly, doing something where if you've got the code team and the code team is going along, the thing that they hate about having whether it be

an assisted living center or a hospital is coming over the PA system saying code team to room so and so code team to this what they prefer is they prefer to they actually just send a message very quickly to the person's device and so so that it doesn't go over the PA and so it doesn't bother people so we're so we're working in a variety of those situations, even as all the way down to the thought of, let's say you've got a power outage in your area. And now you're, so it's 2 o'clock in the morning. You've gone to sleep. You're sleeping alone. You need to get up the next morning at the right time.

And you rely on your alarm. But now power's gone out at 3 a.m., and your alarm needs to be reset. If you're lucky enough to wake up and realize that your power was out, then that's great. But if you don't, then you might miss that meeting. You might miss what's going on, and you might want to know. So the whole idea of working with the power companies to give an opt-in where if you wanted to, you could get an audible alert in the middle of the night as opposed to an inaudible alert for things like power outages, flight cancellations, water in the basement, all these things that you wouldn't otherwise know, but if you could get it, you might sit there and say, that could add real value to my life.

So that's the type of thing we do on the business-to-consumer and business-to-business side that's really hoping to use our override and grouping technology to keep people safer in Los Angeles. I can see a lot of applications for this, whether it's just family- or B2B, you know, certainly, I mean, Google, Google had a recent thing where they had the shooter on campus. Right. So shooter on campus, business lockdowns, school lockdowns. Of course, you're working with Miami-Dade Police Department right now. And they're basically using the platform to keep school officials informed of emergency events in the area.

And then, and of course probably maybe helps them do some coordinating or, or stuff like that. That's exactly right. So one of the things that's happening in our schools and they do this down in Miami gate is they have an open door policy, which means that during the school day, the doors are not locked and that the doors to the school are open so that people can get in and can get out.

Now, they obviously have controlled vestibules so that not everybody can just wander through the school. But there is a there's an open door policy when the police when there's a police action in the area. And we're not talking about like a fender bender or something like that. Some sort of maybe an armed robbery. I just say exaggerate. What the police want to do is they want to get information to the principals in the area around that event, telling them that they need to put their school into lockdown because they want to keep these bad people from getting there. So before this, before Intelligent, they were forced to send out text messages.

They were forced to send out emails and make phone calls. Miami-Dade County has hundreds of schools, and these schools are broken up into eight different districts. So you can imagine, say, 50 schools in one area that need to be notified, and you need to make sure the principals know what's going on so that they can do this. You need a team of people just to call everybody and hope that they're actually paying attention to their phones and picking up and doing what needs to be done. So it was creating a nightmare. When we walked in with the intelligent solution that would give them the ability to send out a message to all 50 principals and assistant principals in seconds, causing their phones to blow up, telling them you need to put your school into lockdown. That gave them, that saved them, you know, minutes and hours of time. It also allowed the principals to immediately put

their school in lockdown, tell the teachers and everybody else what was going on. And then similarly, when there was an all clear that was issued, they were able to very easily and efficiently send out that all clear message that allows the principals to know that, okay, my school's now safe again. I can now go off and do what I need to do. So it's, sorry. And so what it combines is the students, the staff, the parents, the police, everybody is in on it if they use the app and, you know, I guess ordained through either the police department or the school says, hey, all you parents download this app, all you students download this app.

That's right, Chris. So it's not necessarily the exact same message that goes to everybody right so you want to be able to control the conversation so they have one say the very private group which is just the principles assistant principals in a specific area they get one message then miami-dade can then also send out a message to all parents and let them know what's going on. The parents can opt in to receive this.

It could be one where the principal has a group with the teachers and sending out a message to the teachers letting them know what's going on, right? Because the teacher will have their cell phone with them, they won't necessarily have anything else. So it's a really nice kind of sort of multi-purpose platform based on how they want to be communicated with and trying to get the right information in the right hands at the right time. Well, it seems like a really brilliant and timely thing because we know that if these students can find a place to barricade themselves into classrooms, they probably have a better chance of surviving an active shooter situation and i know a lot of schools go on lockdown just just

from crime that happens in the area or someone with a gun in the area like you say a robbery um and uh it probably is a good thing too because uh parents i know are a lot usually lost in this situations a lot of them will see just on the news there's something happening at their school, and they're down there just worried sick trying to figure out what's happening, and this could at least get some information in their hands so that they're aware of how dire or, you know, unimportant maybe the – well, I guess it wouldn't be important if they get a notice, but you know what I mean.

They can evaluate. No, you're right. They can kind of know what's going on. No, you're absolutely right, Chris. So, you know, I mean. They can evaluate. They can kind of know what's going on. No, you're absolutely right, Chris. So, you know, we almost not, there's almost never a situation where we're in a stressful time like you described where people say, oh, we were over communicated with, right? They always look around and go, why won't somebody tell us something?

Yeah. And I normally see those parents, they're standing outside the school at a perimeter point that's been made, and they don't know if there's an active shooter in the school or if it's just a local, you know, somebody saw a guy with a gun wandering around the streets, and they don't know. And certainly, I imagine as a parent, you know, getting a message that says, this is exactly what's happening. Right. You know, here's the level of threat, maybe, maybe and uh you know here's what you should do and you know information is yeah key

and the speediness of it with what you guys are delivering in being able to hit everyone real time geolocate geofence all that sort of good stuff uh i think i think that's really something this time has come thank you thank you yeah no you, you've summarized it really, really well. I mean, so, you know, you go back, and I hate to pick on South Florida, but you go to the Fort Lauderdale shooting in the Fort Lauderdale Airport, and Sheriff Israel, so we all know it was a lone gunman. It was bad. He shot some people, and that wasn't nice in any way, shape, or form.

But he was subdued relatively quickly in an isolated area of baggage claim um not throughout the entire airport right the word of mouth spread through the entire airport that there was a shooter running around in fact they at the height of this they had this view that there were gangs of people running through the airport, shooting at people. And so passengers and just fellow travelers were going through the emergency doors out to active runways, trying to get away from these crazed gunmen, right? Which is horrible, right? Which is horrible. If we could have just sent a synthesis through Fort Lauderdale Airport saying, hey, you know, it's okay.

It's scary, but it's all good. You know, people would have been in a much better position. And that's exactly what we work for, right? And we, in fact, we have every airport, every major airport around the world is already on our, preloaded onto our platform so that any security officer in those locations could quickly and easily send a message out to people that are there just simply because they happen to be there. So when I got to O'Hare, I was connected to the O'Hare group yesterday. When I landed in Salt Lake City, I was disconnected from O'Hare. I was automatically connected with Salt Lake. When I left the airport,

I was automatically disconnected. So just because I'm there, if they needed to get me, they could have, which is, you know, the name of the game. And I imagine also being notified that a situation is contained and controlled and subdued you know whoever the attacker is and you know kind of like an all-clear or at least like a hey we think the situation is contained definitely the faster that can get to people

and like you say word of mouth can spread and be crazy um i know there was some riots there weren't some riots but some stamped stampedes over some different events, I think in other countries recently, where people thought there was going to be a shooter again running around, and it was just a false claim, but it spread like wildfire, and I think some people got trampled in it. But definitely being able to let people know immediately, give them an all-clear, let them know that the situation is contained, the faster that can go out, you know, being able to let people know immediately, give them an all clear, let them know that the situation is contained.

The faster that can go out, the better. Because, yeah, it just embellishes, you know, like you say, it turns from one shooter into a gang. And, you know, I'm sure that the horror goes on for much longer than it should when someone can call it an all clear. Right. And you had that, Chris. So you you had a situation like if you look at this and you go you know you saw those those parents in Parkland on the perimeter

like saying just tell me and your heart goes out to them you had a similar personal situation where your mom just sends you a text at like 2 in the morning and now you're looking at it hours later, and your mind immediately goes to, you know, gosh, is everything okay? And we play these scenarios of horrific events in our mind until you actually hear that all clear. And there is, you know, you hit it on the head. If you get from an authority, in this case mom, or the officials, the police, or the school officials, telling you, authority, in this case, mom, or the officials, the police or the school

officials telling you, hey, everything is fine, then your anxiety level goes way down. But until that happens, your anxiety is through the roof. Because unfortunately, with events that happen around the world, we all get a little bit more nervous. Like we were saying, before 9-11, you wouldn't have expected airplanes to fly into the World Trade Center and the World Trade Center to collapse, right? Now, it's been done. We've watched it, and it could happen again. So our mind goes to that as a horrible. It's not just a monster in the closet.

It's a reality. So consumers can use your product. They can go to your website and download it. And then you also have a B2B side for business solutions where people, organizations can partner with you to make things work. You've got the silent override is one of the features of the app. It does have auto translation. The messages can be translated in 100 plus different languages and delivered in the recipient's

preferred language. So you, I mean, you have a worldwide potential of marketing to this app. It's got auto grouping. Users are automatically grouped based on location, allowing hyper-targeted messaging. You've got message media. It takes pictures, PDFs, GIFs, and hyperlinks that can be included in messages. I would imagine pictures are really important or hyperlinks of news so that people can maybe see what's going on at a location.

You can share information, maybe what a shooter or attacker would look like. There's emergency situation for assistance for 24, I believe, 24 hours a day. Is that what that is? Yes, 24 hours a day. And they have helplines, hotlines, and emergency services. I think this is, yeah, a brilliant thing as time has come. I really feel, I don't know what I'd do if I had to go to school again as a child. I can't imagine the horror of every day you go to school going,

it's the day I get shot. I'm just trying to learn two plus two. And that's just a horror show. I don't know. I'd demand to be homeschooled if I was a kid. So you guys have an open API architecture that makes it easy for Enterprise IT teams to integrate into a branded app. So people can just make their own app using you guys as a back end then.

That's right. That's awesome. That's awesome. Because I know a lot of people would have their own things. So if I'm a police department and a lot of police departments either have their own apps or where they, yeah, they usually have their own apps like on a, on the app store. So can they integrate your, your API and your data into their app? That's exactly right. Cause so, you know, the concept was we want to keep people safer, but not everybody wants to use, they don't want to necessarily download intelligent.

They may have their own app that they're already using. So if I'm with, if I'm in the city of San Jose and San Jose already has an app and I'm a resident and I'm getting the information from them, San Jose doesn't want to say, hey, go ahead and download Intelligent, too. Of course, you always can. There's nothing against that. But we want to give the flexibility to integrate into San Jose's app.

If United Airlines is going to cancel a flight and they want to send out an audible alert to the passengers that are part of that canceled flight, they don't want to have to have the passengers download another application. So being able to integrate into other people's apps is almost just as important as getting them to download our app. We create that solution that goes both ways. The number one group that we're working with right now in the school space is this company called Catapult, which is based up in the Northern California area.

And Catapult specifically works with first responders and principals getting emergency information out to the right people. They have an app already, and they've used us for purposes of that emergency communication. So, you know, anybody, anytime there is a first and fast need, we can help out. Go back to that picture issue that you were talking about. The reason why we did, we created the ability to attach pictures is goes back to that Amber alert that we talked about at the very beginning, right?

An Amber alert goes out and it doesn't include a picture of the child. You sit there and you think about it, you're going, you can put a picture on a milk carton, but you can't put a picture in a message. It seems ridiculous. So we created the ability to have a picture so that if you have a missing child, you can actually send out all kinds of information about who the person is that you're looking for, what the car looks like, maybe a picture of the car, because not everybody knows what a, you know, blue and pallet looks like.

And, you know, also a picture of the child. So you're able to really kind of sort of help there. The last thing, and I, you know, there's a lot of questions that I'm happy to answer, but that language is also critical, right? We, when you send a message, you're, let's say, a police department or a weather agency, and you want to get an emergency alert out to the people in a specific area, you want to send it out in one language to make it easy, but you need the people to get it in their language. So whether, let's say I'm down in Cabo and there's a message that goes out, that message is probably going to come in Spanish. But if I don't speak Spanish, it doesn't do me any good. I need to be able to have that automatically translate into English

without me having to do anything. It just needs to come through. In Sochi at the Olympics this last year, they were using a similar system for purposes of weather alerts The problem is all the alerts would go out in Korean. So unless you can read Korean You didn't do good And so what our alert would do if they had been using the intelligence system inside is it would still make noise It would still show be craving cream But it would show up on my phone in English, or in the Russian person's phone in Russian, or in the Israeli's phone in Hebrew, whatever

the case may be. That's awesome. You even have stadium and venue communication. I know for a lot of these stadiums and venues, they're a soft spot if terrorists want to attack them or something. And of course, sometimes if you lose whoever you're with at the stadium, you're trying to find them sometimes if they're wandering around the halls. And I'm sure there's a security thing, too, as well.

I was just reading about a guy who developed something where he sent his daughter back to go get the wallet out of his car after they'd left it, and she was attacked, and they couldn't find her. And I think if they could have had some sort of geocaching on her phone, they could have probably found where she was at and where she'd been taken to. No doubt. Scary stuff. And it's stuff that we don't like to think about, you know, Chris, but it's real and it happens. And so, you know, what we found with our customers is they love the fact that they don't. It's kind of a download, create an account and forget about.

So that if you never use intelligent, right, if you never get an overrided alert, if you never get anything to cause you any problems, we're perfectly happy. We don't need you to have a bad event in order for us to be happy. We want you never to have to worry about technology, but we want it to be there in case you need it. Yeah, definitely

pretty awesome. Geo-specific events can be delivered to recipients, requiring convenient time, specific information, critical situations. I'm actually going to ask my mom to download the app so she can be on it. And I'm going to say, Mom, if you ever get in the hospital, I mean, this is the ultra ping me because you really got to talk to me. It's super important.

I want to send this to her because, you know, she's older and she's fairly healthy, but, you know, you just never know. I hate getting those calls and you hear I'm in the hospital and you're like, no. And definitely being able to know what's going on and stuff. She also, I mean, there's so much application for this. It's pretty amazing,

especially from a B2B aspect and people being able to utilize the technology. Safety is just of the utmost importance and being able to keep people alert. And hopefully this will be a way where we can save lives, especially in schools or natural disasters, even natural disasters are something that you want communication on. And it's cool that you guys are, you guys are integrating with the airports,

resorts, what are the sort of communities? So whether, what, so, uh, college campuses around the country. So every major campus we're also connected to.

Um, so if you just happen to be on campus, so it's kind of like having those red light phones in your pocket. So you can immediately connect with campus police if you need to um weather the usgs on earthquake alerts as well as um getting information from noah on lightning strikes as well as severe weather going to what you're talking about we had a but well now it was back in the summer so it it's about, what, six months ago. A couple was in North Carolina. It was Sunday afternoon.

It was a quiet day. They knew storms were coming in, but the wife wasn't feeling real well, so she went up for a nap. The husband was just kind of sort of chilling out in the family room. All of a sudden, his phone goes crazy with an intelligent alert. It causes, again, it causes the phone to make noise until you actually look at the message so he walked over to silence his phone so she wouldn't be bothered it says you're in the path of a tornado jeez we were geo right and he goes you need to take cover now and so and i'm paraphrasing but that's effectively he went got her up they went into the bathroom

and according to him not more than five seconds later the part of the house that they were both in was gone wow tornado had come through and ripped it apart his roof was across the street the whole thing he said if if he hadn't gotten that alert they would have been gone wow yeah in fact the the thing that i was talking about earlier where there was a huge um everyone was running was i think it was about a month ago there's an island over in the philippines yes they had a tusami and they had their the first tusami came out of nowhere from an i believe an underwater earthquake off the volcano. But the next day they had another panic attack because of just a bunch of silly rumors running around. Someone said, oh, there's another one coming. And suddenly, like, everyone started running and it was escaping and it was just a false alarm.

And certainly in cases, I mean, they couldn't help this to Sami. But certainly in other cases like that where we've had those sort of weather events um that are disasters waiting to happen uh just critical that to let people know that's a that's a great use case there that uh sadly you you have going but the the you know keeping the loss of life and saving lives is super important in these events right definitely definitely thank you yeah we we we are you know you know, we've got a small but very dedicated team. They, you know, I am, as you have heard, passionate about what we're doing, which I think is fantastic. But I am not a coder.

I don't, you know, I don't know how. I can remember Fortran from college, but that's about all I remember about it. So, you know, the thing that these guys can do, I found some developers about four years ago. They have been with me ever since then. We have a patent now on our technology, which is exciting. All the people that work with us, I can honestly say I am the oldest, which makes me the wisest, I think, by definition. But they are just great.

We've got graphic designers, marketing people, customer support, tech folks that are all focused on one thing, and that is make this world a safer place. Millennials get bad raps for a lot of reasons. One of the things that they do, rightfully so, sorry, but what they do is when they're around a cause, when they believe that they're making a difference and they feel like they're doing something that is helping others,

they rally and they get excited, and we've just got a fantastic group of people that work with me. Well, this is an awesome product. that is helping others, they rally and they get excited. And we've just got a fantastic group of people that work with me. Well, this is an awesome product. I mean, I think this is brilliant, especially when it comes to school shootings and events and horrible things that happen with disasters in the world. And, of course, sometimes man-made disasters. Anything more we need to know, Alan, as we wrap the show?

No, Chris, thank you very much. You know, we are available on the App Store and Play Store, our website's in-telligent.com, and we want to work with everybody and help everybody on the planet be safer. Sounds good. I'm going to be down in the afternoon with my mom on it so she can do it. Give us the plugs to the website one more time so people can look those up. It's N-I-N-telligent, T-E-L-L-I-G-E-N-T.com.

And it's available on the App Store and Play Store. Just type in intelligent and it will get you right where you need to be. Sounds good. Well, I certainly appreciate you coming by the show and telling us about it. I appreciate my audience for tuning in and be sure to check out the app on the app store.

Also, be sure to go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button so you get all the notifications of all the cool podcasts and shows we're doing and of course some of the cool CS technology. We're going to be going to South by Southwest coming up here in the next short term.

So be sure to watch for stuff like that. And if you're interested in sponsoring the new, the Chris Foss show coverage, contact us at the show. Anyway, appreciate you guys for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time.