I first met Brett Hurt years ago through many speaking events for the National Retail Federation.

At the time, Brett had built and sold Coremetrics, an analytics company, and was getting ready to launch Bazaarvoice, which would become one of the defining companies in the consumer reviews/UGC space. We became fast friends and have stayed connected through decades and waves of technological disruption and entrepreneurial success… Coremetrics, Bazaarvoice, data.world (which he recently sold to ServiceNow and I acted as an Advisor), and now his true life’s work with Love Conquers Fear.

What has always stood out to me is not just what Brett has built… but how he thinks.

Always curious… generous…deeply human. Willing to ask bigger questions without losing sight of the practical ones. A few weeks back, I was in Austin speaking for Host Hotels & Resorts, and Brett invited me into his home to record an episode of his Love Conquers Fear Podcast. What followed was not really an interview. It was a conversation between two friends who have both spent a lot of time watching technology move from fringe to inevitable. Over two hours, we talked about AI, entrepreneurship, fear, abundance, leadership, disruption, media, the future of work and what it means to stay human as technology accelerates. And that last part may be the whole point. Most conversations about AI still get pulled toward the tools, opportunities or possible futures. Which model is better? Which company is winning? Which job disappears first? Which agent gets you the best output? All useful questions, but not always the most important ones.

In the conversation, I talked about the difference between using AI as an answer engine and using it as a superpower.

One path makes everything a little more efficient while possibly making us all stupider and redundant. The other path forces us to think better, argue better, question better and create with more agency. If everyone suddenly has access to “pretty good,” then pretty good stops being the differentiator. Brett’s new book, Love Conquers Fear – Humanity, AI, And The Age Of Abundance For All, sits right in the middle of this (and he will be a guest on an upcoming episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel). It is not a small argument.

What I appreciate about Brett is that he does not approach this as a detached observer.

He has built companies… sold companies… scaled teams… and generated generational wealth that he is actively putting back into many communities. He’s lived through the internet’s early promises, the rise of data, the social web, the platform era and now AI. He understands the machinery of capitalism and technology, but he is also asking something much more human…

What happens if we build the future from a place of love?

This conversation gave us the space to unpack that. Not neatly… not with easy answers… but honestly. There is something different that happens when a conversation is not trying to perform certainty. It can make room for optimism and anxiety to sit at the same table. It can hold two truths at once: that AI may unlock extraordinary new possibilities, and that power, infrastructure, incentives and control still matter deeply.

That is why this conversation felt so meaningful to me… it was two friends trying to make sense of what comes next….