Ben  00:01

Everything is, like, totally mutually reinforcing and supportive. I don't have a ton of downtime, but I don't need downtime or retreat from my life. It's all of a whole, I would say, at this point. And one of the things that's been very helpful on this is my daily meditation practice. I meditate, without fail, at least once per day, but sometimes up to four or five times a day, durations ranging from ten minutes to half an hour per session, and that's been hugely helpful for me.

Leah  00:36

Hello and welcome to Season Three of The Founder Mindset, brought to you by ATB. I'm your host, Leah Sarich, and I'm delighted to be back for another season of talking to Founders about what it's really like to build a company from that first big idea. If you've listened to previous episodes, you know, I was a journalist for over 20 years, so I'm more curious about why anyone would ever want to become an entrepreneur, not so much about the business model, product, market fit and so on. I want to understand why entrepreneurs keep going, why they think they're the ones to solve a massive problem, why they want to make a real impact in the world. And if you're here, I bet you want to know why too. Let's find out. 

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Joining me today is Benjamin Alarie, Co-Founder and CEO of Blue J, an AI solution for tax research used by accounting firms of all sizes that helps professionals provide exceptional service for their clients. Ben, thank you so much for being here today. I know you're a very busy guy. Let's be clear. You're a scholar, you're an academic, you're a law professor at the University of Toronto. You're an author. I could keep going. You went to Yale. You clerked for the Supreme Court of Canada. But as I ask everybody on this podcast, how did you get into entrepreneurship?

Ben  01:51

 I took a very unusual route to becoming an entrepreneur. And you know, as you mentioned, through the path of starting out as someone with a lot of education and, you know, working as a law professor for more than a decade before getting into entrepreneurship is really through a process of elimination, I would say actually, because the setting is, you know… I'm sitting in my office at the law school at the University of Toronto, and I found myself as Associate Dean, and I found myself leading an effort to reform the law school curriculum—how we actually deliver a legal education. And that led me to thinking about, what should we have in mind as we do this? I had some senior colleagues who warned me, “Ben, nobody's really done this for the last 40 years, and there's a reason it's really difficult to change the curriculum and how you know our colleagues are going to want to teach their law courses.” But then that got me thinking, well, if it's been 40 years since somebody like me showed up with an appetite to do this, it'll probably be another 40 years before someone like me shows up in the future, which then, Leah, triggered this thought—Well, okay, if that's true, then, I mean, we need to be thinking about what's going to happen the next 40 years. Whatever we do to the curriculum is going to have to accommodate societal changes, technological changes. But then that got me thinking—well, what's going to change? And my conclusion was basically everything. So I was sitting at my desk at the law school, in my office, thinking that everything is going to change. That has implications for the curriculum, but it also has major implications for my career. And I had this thought, well, you know, AI is coming straight for the law and you know, I am a very active legal scholar. I write a lot, and I'm really familiar with the pain of doing a lot of traditional tax research work, and it got me thinking—there's got to be a way to massively accelerate tax research, leveraging AI. And the more I thought about it, the more convinced that I was that that had to be a future true state of affairs. And the more that I thought about that, the more I worried about the irrelevance of not doing something about that, and the risk of being in the year 2040 at the front of a law school classroom, teaching 80 students tax law with chalk in my hand, realizing that back in 2014 or 2015, I had this opportunity because I foresaw what was coming, and I didn't want to be in a position of being too nervous to do something about it at the time and then have that regret. And so, then I started to have this heretical thought, well, maybe I should start a company… maybe I should do a startup, and maybe I should become an entrepreneur and make this happen. And the more I thought about it, the more appealing the idea was. And it again, it was a process of elimination. I'm like, well, it's not going to be some recent computer science or math grad who is going to want to do this because they don't have the legal expertise. They probably don't have the interest in tax law. It's probably not going to be someone in Tax Practice at an accounting firm, or maybe at a law firm, who already have really busy demanding technical careers and clients that they're servicing, they're not going to want to take a flyer on doing a tech startup to do this, and if it's not me, then who is it? And if it's not now, then when is it? And so I kind of like got into it that way, and I also will admit to being quite naive about what it might take to make this thing successful. And so I also had this thought, which I think is characteristic, maybe of an entrepreneurial mindset, which is, well, how hard can it be? People start tech companies all the time, I'm capable of doing difficult things, and I don't know, like, I maybe I should give it a shot. And you know, how hard could it possibly be? People do it all the time, which it turns out 10 years later. So now we're like 10 years later, and it's both, it's like, grossly naive, but also a very powerful way of approaching things, because it's actually, it has a lot of hidden wisdom in it and a lot of hidden foolishness in it, that kind of perspective. And so I appreciate the naivete of the thought, because it's what actually has powered a most amazing adventure for the past decade, and so I appreciate my younger self's boldness and, you know, not fully appreciating the challenges that would be involved in the path.

Leah  06:29

I love that, because that's actually… I hear that quite a bit on the podcast. How hard could it be? Or I was really naive when I got into this. I didn't realize what I was taking on. So I love that, that you shared a very similar sentiment. I understand you had a year of academic leave, and you know, when most academics kind of chill out in that year? That was not the case for you. That was the year that you decided to build Blue J Am I right?

Ben  06:51

That's right. So, I finished my four year term as Associate Dean, and I was entitled to a year's relief from teaching in the classroom as a in lieu of a sabbatical year. And the beautiful thing about that is, is that you have no responsibilities around the law school when you're on administrative leave. And so it's like, “Hey, here's a golden opportunity to start this and see what might be made of this.” And so I said to my two Co-Founders, Albert and Anthony, who are both also faculty members at the University of Toronto, “Let's do this. I'll take the lead. I want you guys to be involved.” And we set off and got it done. I said, you know, I don't have other things to occupy me for the next year. I'm gonna and I continued writing and doing other things that I'm interested in, but I was able to throw myself at Blue J for that first year, which was a really hugely valuable opportunity, and one that is a huge privilege, and I'm so grateful to the university for making that possible. It's a huge luxury that others are not typically afforded in lots of different occupations, so it was a huge benefit.

Leah  08:05

No kidding. And that brings us to Blue J. So why don't you tell us all exactly what Blue J is?

Ben  08:12

I mean, Blue J is really a system that leverages AI to massively accelerate tax research. So tax research is something that most people don't spend any time thinking about, except for tax lawyers and tax accountants and the very few people who may have encountered a copy of the Income Tax Act, maybe in the wild, or the Internal Revenue Code, there are these massive volumes with thousands of pages of tissue paper, thickness pages, and set out in excruciating detail the requirements of tax law. And so it's one thing to file your tax return every year to work through the forms and report the numbers from the different boxes on the different reporting slips that you get and keeping track of your revenues and expenses and all the bookkeeping stuff. There's a massive amount of complexity in the legislation itself that undergirds all of that work, that administrative work, that compliance work, and that's really where tax lawyers and tax accountants really spend a huge amount of their time, and it's interpretation work. So you're reading very difficult to read legislation, which is very complex, lots of cross references throughout the documents. And then there's case law that you need to make reference to, where the judges are interpreting what the different provisions in the legislation mean. And then you have, you know, the Canada Revenue Agency or the IRS making interpretations of different provisions. And you need to be aware of all of these things if you're advising clients on what they should do for tax purposes, and all sorts of different situations. You're basically, you know, meant to be the master of those materials and be able to give them confident, clear advice about how they should proceed for tax purposes.

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Blue J cuts through all of that. We can take what might be 15 hours of research and turn it into a 15 second exercise of asking a technical tax question, having Blue J go through millions of pages of authoritative tax information, find the most relevant stuff, and then synthesize an answer based on all of those most authoritative resources and write a plain language, clear, succinct answer to your tax research question. And then, if you're so inclined, you can carry on a conversation with Blue J about the tax research thread that you've started. You can challenge it, you can probe it, you can ask for more details about certain aspects of it. And so we are in this position where, like, increasingly, thousands of tax lawyers and tax accountants throughout North America, throughout Canada, throughout the US and now into the UK, are using Blue J on a daily basis to accelerate their tax research and it's like, it's so fun Leah, because they love it. And yeah, the sheer joy that people have who are using Blue J and feeling this pain relief from not having to do this really laborious tax research the traditional ways is just so rewarding for everyone at Blue J. So it is for me, of course, but it's also for for the other roughly 100 folks who are working away with me shoulder to shoulder and building this solution for our customers. It's hugely motivating to get the messages and the notes of thanks and the very positive feedback that we get from our users. And it is overwhelmingly positive feedback, even when it's amazing, even when Blue J occasionally makes a mistake, which it does do, the response from users is usually quite encouraging. It's like, oh, Blue J, I can't believe you got, you made this mistake. But they provide feedback, and then, you know, we use that to further improve the product for everybody. And so it's anyway, it's a heck of a lot of fun now, because we can take this area that was oftentimes super frustrating for tax people and make it, make it a much more interactive and, you know, dare I say, fun exercise.

Leah  12:33

Okay, so what I'm hearing, though, is like 15 hours to 15 seconds. So that is essentially transforming the work that these professionals do. What does that feel like to have that kind of impact on these people and let alone their clients?

Ben  12:52

I mean, it's, it's amazing, and it's so interesting, because it doesn't mean that they will only spend 15 seconds on that work. What it means is, it's really the first 15 hours of that work that gets compressed into 15 seconds, and then it becomes questions about other questions, about strategizing about, well, what do we do with this answer, and what are the other business implications? What are the personal implications? How do we… and so I'm speaking here as a tax professional. How do we as tax professionals now deliver, you know, really personalized value to our clients, and how do we really deeply understand what the business people we serve, and you know, a lot of times it's personal, the the families that we're serving, what are their goals and aspirations? If we're servicing, you know, an owner managed business, there are probably family implications and really drilling down into solving the problems of you know, their clients, which is ultimately a very humanizing thing about all of this, which is we're actually empowering those tax lawyers and tax accountants to be more human in their work. And they, I think they've, Leah, I think they've always cared about their clients. I think now the clients feel it more because the tax professionals that they're engaging with are able to spend more time with them, and have you know, this is a bit of a metaphor, but like an improved bedside manner, right with… and just like, “Hey, so I've been looking into your situation. We could do this, we could do this. We could do this.” And instead of saying “Oh, I'll take that question away and get back to you in a couple days,” it's “Oh, I can look it up right now, and oh yeah, or I'll call you right back.” And the level of services is much higher. And so everybody's happier. The end clients are happier. The tax professionals are happier. I'm also happy. I've got some satisfied users, which makes me feel great.

Leah  15:02

That's amazing. The one thing I am a little bit curious about, though, is that you are, you know, transforming a very traditional space. And I wonder how some of those, you know, people that have been around for a while working in that space, was there any sort of hesitancy about this at the beginning, I would imagine you may have gotten some kind of blowback.

Ben  15:22

Oh, sure. You know, tax lawyers are typically ridiculously smart, and they know they're ridiculously smart, and they also have a very rich playground in which to express their intelligence. It's not surprising if you are an exceptionally talented human in an exceptionally demanding domain, and you've curated this expert insight into this area over, often, literally, decades of work, and you've seen tax law change and evolve, and you've stayed up on all of the different changes over many years, and some guy like me comes along and says, “Oh, guess what? Great news. Let me announce this great news to you. We can leverage technology to replicate these carefully curated understandings that you've developed at great personal effort and expense over decades. We can replace that with a software program that we will license to anybody who would like to use it, who's a potentially competitive tax professional.” You can imagine a number of different reactions. One is, first of all, it's like denial—”I don't think you could build this, because what I have developed over this period of time is pretty amazing. And this is why my clients use me, and this is why they retain me, and they pay me, you know, significant amounts for my expertise. So first of all, I don't think you can do it. Second of all, even if you can do it, I don't think I want to use it, because I'm already there. I'm all like, I've already got all this tooling, I'm not looking for, you know what you've got?” You're like, “Ben, you're trying to sell a microwave to me, and I'm a master chef, right? Go find somebody else to sell your microwave technology to,”—is another reaction. I guess the third reaction, and this is, this is one that is often whispered, if it's even uttered at all, is like, “What does this mean for me? So if this is true, so if I actually believe Ben, or, if they tried the system, there's like, oh, like this is really is a game changer. I'm not sure that I like this very much, because, you know what makes me special now, if the system is widely available and people can get up to speed very quickly and discover in 15 seconds what it might only take me an hour or two to discover, because I am a super expert at this,” like, a lot of uncertainty about, you know, what does this mean for me, the future of my work? I remember hearing a number of times people saying, “Oh, it's a good thing. I'm three years from retirement, or one year from retirement, or five years from retirement, because, you know, I'll be able to exit this game before this new technology really takes hold.”

Leah  18:28

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Ben  18:54

I'm pretty good-natured, so it doesn't bother me that much. The denial thing… I'm like, okay, that's okay. You don't have to believe it. You can just watch what's going to happen in the next few years, like this. So this will be a disagreement that resolves itself naturally over the course of the next several years. So those ones I was actually very tolerant of. I'm like, this is it's actually an empirical question. It depends. Let's see what happens. My chips are on—this is going to happen, your chips seem to be on—this isn't going to happen. I already know how well it works today. I can only imagine it's going to continue to improve, and at some point I will be proven right. So I will let time take care of those kinds of reactions. I think the reactions of, well… I'm not sure I want to use it… I think there, the reaction is, typically, that's okay. There might be junior people in your firm who might really want to use it to get up to speed more quickly on their work. Also, incidentally, I do believe that the best crafts people are also open to using the best tools available to do their work. And so it may be too soon for you to get comfortable with, you know, exploring with these new tools, but I think eventually you'll get there. And so overall, I'm patient, right? I'll be patient. I'll wait until you're like, ready to… until you start hearing everybody saying that this is an amazing thing, and you really have to use it. And then, by the time you circle back to it, you will be amazed, too, and you will… if you really are as talented as you believe you are, you will find that you are able to do things with this technology that other people aren't able to do because they're not as expert, they're not as prepared. They don't know about the best ways to kind of approach this tech. It'll unlock new things for everybody who uses it. And then the people who are keen to just say, “Well, good thing, I'm going to retire in the next couple of years,” I think Leah, at this point, they've already retired, so, like, they've kind of done all right for themselves, right? And they've exited. I think this really is about the future. So as with everything, I think, I'm patient, and I think it's really a bit of a paradox, because the faster things move, I feel a greater amount of personal patience about it, because all of this stuff is changing very quickly. It's getting better so quickly that I know I won't have to wait very long for any of those concerns to be allayed. And in terms of, you know, it's capable, it's clearly changing things like it's, it's been 10 years in coming so, you know, but you know, especially the last few years, I think everyone would agree that AI is really capable of some pretty astonishing stuff, for sure,

Leah  21:41

No question. And you sort of glossed over this bit. But I am thinking about the young professionals that are coming up, you know, the next generation. I mean, this is just regular for them. This is, you know, how they were learning, you know. I mean, I've got teenagers. They're using it all the time already. So I can't even imagine the next generation of folks working in this space.

Ben  22:01

So, for example, at some of the biggest firms that are using Blue J, new folks are coming into the practice, and they're starting off, and they're starting off very nervous as generations of new tax professionals have started off, you know, kind of for time immemorial, feeling like—Okay, I have, I have some preparation from from university, from the courses that I've taken, but I'm also super eager to get into things and understand how tax is actually practiced in a real environment. And they get often thrown into the deep end, and they're, they're asked to go chat with a partner about some tax matter that the partner is working on, and the tax partner will inevitably say, “Okay, can you please go away and do some research on this point, write me a memo. Don't make it too long, you know, two to three pages. And on this point of tax law, it's for this thing that I'm working on.” And the Junior will go away. And every single time I think Leah and the history of tax professionals, that person, that junior person, has walked down the hall back to their workstation and thought to themselves—I am in over my head. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do a good job in this. This partner seems to think that I know everything, even though I've just started, I'm familiar with some of the terminology that was used in that exchange, but I'm really not sure if I'm up to this. And now they'll get back to their desk, and they will open Blue J, and they will ask Blue J, you know, a beginning question, like, “Can you please at a high level, explain X, Y, Z,” whatever it is that they were just instructed to do research on. And Blue J will very patiently explain everything at an introductory level. Then they can, they'll have that context, and then they can go a little bit deeper, get some more detail, and then they can start really digging into the particulars of this, you know, two to three page memo that they're expected to research and turn around in the partner. 

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Now the amazing thing that's happened is when that work product gets turned around to the partner, that partner is invariably now extremely excited about this new person at the firm who they are expecting to mentor, because this work product is now often, you know, in the top decile of work product that they've seen in the past. So it's better than 90% of the like first, you know, cut at a memo that this partner would have had. Like many, many, many juniors over the years, like, cut this work product, and they'll immediately think—Oh, here's a new so and so and the so and so's being like the top two or three tax people that they've mentored over their careers. And the reason is they're using better tools. So they're using better tools to accelerate the research, so the turnaround time is probably faster, on average the quality of the work product is in the top decile. The senior partner doesn't have to spend a whole lot of time punching drafts back and forth and saying, “No, no, you're you're off track. Go research this. Go research this. Go research this.” So the senior partner is very happy because their time is being better used. The junior person loves, of course, the positive feedback that they're getting on their work product. They have been well served by their tax education to date, because they are familiar with the technology. They are able to be a relatively sophisticated consumer of this kind of technology. They're not typing it into chat GPT. They're using a sophisticated like verticalized AI system that's got all the relevant information in it and is tuned to provide answers directly for the kinds of work that they want to do. So the junior folks are, by and large, like super happy about this. They're using this to teach themselves to impress the senior folks in the firm. And now it's gotten to the point where, people in early in their careers are mentoring folks who are in accounting programs or in law programs, and they are telling people who are in programs, “Hey, when it's time for on campus interviews, you should ask the firms that you are interviewing with, what kind of technology they use to support people in the practice, because you want to be going to a firm that's going to be using, you know, the current tools in order to support your work. It'll accelerate your development as a junior tax person,” and and it's actually a pretty tough battle now for junior talent. There are fewer people graduating from accounting programs. There are fewer tax people coming out of law schools, and I don't know why that is, but there's a huge demand for tax people. And so the smart firms are realizing—Oh, this is not just a learning and development tool when people arrive. It's not just a way to make the entire practice more client friendly and client centric. This is also a recruitment device. So if we use this kind of technology, that it improves our ability to recruit the most promising, most thoughtful, most selective new grads. It's a tough word for talent out there.

Leah  27:17

That's incredible. When I start thinking about the implications in the field. That's remarkable. But, you know, I ask every person who sits in this studio or in this chair, you know, the building of the company is one thing, but there's always a moment when things can kind of go sideways, or you're just not sure you're going in the right direction, the do or die moment or the big pivot. Did you have any of those moments in the building of Blue J?

Ben  27:42

Oh, I think everybody has those kinds of moments along the way. I think Leah, like it was interesting after about seven years… so this is, this is going back to, like, mid to late 2022, we were growing, but we weren't growing as quickly as we wanted to grow. And you know, for a venture-backed startup, you want to be growing at, you know, ideally you should be, if you can doubling every year in terms of your revenues. We weren't there. We're growing, I want to say 30%, 40% per year, which is still a relatively fast growth rate, but not what a venture-backed, you know, investor is looking for from their portfolio companies. And we faced a bit of a challenge, which is, how do we accelerate growth rate to really, you know, to be the kind of growth story that we want to achieve here. And the timing was super interesting, because chat GPT was released at the end of November 2022 and so when that was released, it became a light bulb moment for us that the technology had matured enough and there might be a way to leverage large language models to power a lot of what we had been doing using more traditional, supervised machine learning technology for tax research, and harness this new large language model technology, this Chat GPT technology, in order to power a new version of Blue J, and it came at the perfect time, because we were trying to figure out—how are we going to grow faster? And one of the biggest problems in our existing product line, people who used it loved it. The challenge was, it wasn't answering all of the tax research questions that people had, and so we were using case law to generate these predictive models in order to answer questions, but we had to have a predictive model on a particular topic for that to be useful to you as a tax practitioner. There's a lot of white space that we just couldn't touch because there just are not court cases on every different aspect of tax legislation. We had this thought then, at the start of 2023, what if we used the large language model technology to produce a system, a version two of Blue J that could answer every single tax research question someone might have? And we made the decision at that point, okay, let's put the existing products into maintenance mode. Let's keep them going. And we had, like, a good set of customers at that point, and it was risky, but I said, “Okay, for the next six months, we're going to only maintain the existing products, and we're going to try to build the system that can answer any tax research question, and we threw ourselves at that effort, and the rest is kind of history from there, because now we've exploded to, you know, by the time people hear this, we'll be certainly well over 3000 firms signed up to be using Blue J. We're signing firms up at the rate of several hundred a month. It's really exciting.  

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Leah  31:03

It's so exciting. But I'm so curious about what it felt like for you as the Founder to go—let's park what we've built, not park it, but let's just put it over here and just try this new thing. How did that feel for you as the Founder?

Ben  31:19

It felt very ambiguous. I think it's the same feeling as when you start something new from the beginning, in a way, because, in a way, it was a new beginning. And so it felt a lot like, like it did seven years before that, when we were starting the company. I'm like, “Okay, I guess we should do this.” It was like, the same kind of thing. It's like, “Well, you know, what we've been doing isn't scaling the way that we want it to scale. This other direction seems like it could have that potential. And so it seems like it's a bet worth making. And I think the time is now, so let's go for it.” But there are no guarantees that any of these things will work out when you make the decision. One of the… I remember at the time, one of the big questions was—Well, should we do this just for tax law, or should we try to do this for all of law? And that one was a… in retrospect, we made exactly the right decision, which was, let's focus on tax law, which is where we have the most academic depth, and that's our natural strong point. Trying to build it for all of law, I think, would have been really challenging, and would have pitted us directly against a bunch of really well financed competitors who are coming out of the woodwork. So this focus on tax was precisely the right decision to make at that time, and it's paid off. But it wasn't whether to do it, really wasn't really the question. The question was, should we do it and focus on tax, or should we do it and focus on, or, and not focus on tax, and kind of try to do it for all areas of law. That would have been, I think, a pretty significant mistake.

Leah  33:09

That's exciting. But as we know this business, and creating a startup, and doing all the other millions of things that I know you're doing, then, this has an impact on your personal life. I'd love to know, what's it like to be you, you know, to be the entrepreneur, to be the founder of Blue J, but to also be the professor and the author. How does that affect your personal life?

Ben  33:29

I have a great personal life. I think, I think Leah, the thing that's happened for me over the past decade is all of these things align, and they all mutually interact and mutually support each other. Now I'm married to my high school sweetheart, Krista. She's amazing, wonderfully supportive. We have two daughters, Charlie, who's 20, Frankie, who's turning 14 shortly, and we spend lots of family time together. Charlie's away at school now, but we've spent much of the past five years… this was a pandemic project, hiking the Bruce Trail from end to end on the weekends, because, of course, during the lockdowns, there's nothing else to do, and so we started in innocently on, you know—Oh, we'll go for a hike this weekend on the Bruce Trail.” And we knocked off a few different parts, and then we started to think—Oh, well, you know, maybe we should make a project out of this as a family, and do the entire Bruce Trail. And we ended up becoming a little bit more, you know, organized about this and we ended up completing that in October 2024, after, I guess, just around between four, just over four years of effort, I think. It's like nine hundred and something kilometers long, but, like, a ton of, like, really great family time, and both kids were really happy to do it, which I'm grateful for. And Krista's father, Tom, came on the hikes with us too. And so we had a big family celebration when we got to the end up in Tobermory last October over Thanksgiving weekend. And there, I mean, there's room in my life for Blue J and there's room in my life for family, but I think everything is, like, totally mutually reinforcing and supportive. I don't have a ton of downtime, but I don't need, I don't need downtime or retreat from my life. It's all of a whole, I would say, at this point. And one of the things that's been very helpful on this is my daily meditation practice. I meditate without fail, at least once per day, but sometimes up to four or five times a day, durations ranging from 10 minutes to half an hour per session, and that's been hugely helpful for me. It makes me much calmer and I think, much more aligned. I think my own casual experience of it is that it brings the different parts of my neurology into alignment. So, you know, my right, like my right brain talks to my left brain, and, you know it's, it's kind of, it allows any static that's building up there to kind of get resolved. And I think it's, it's supportive of this overall kind of alignment of my nervous system, I guess, with my ecosystem, I guess as a way to think about it.

Leah  36:38

Sure, it sounds like you're very intentional about protecting or maintaining your ability to function at a very high level. Would that be accurate?

Ben  36:49

I think that's right, yeah. I think that's right, yeah. And so I started meditating shortly after starting Blue J in 2016 and it's really stayed with me. And I don't think I've missed a day of practice in many years now, and it's been hugely helpful and and, you know, when I started meditating, one thing that happened was I lost any interest in alcohol. And it's not because I, like, decided—oh, I'd like, I'd better, like, drinking is bad, and so I shouldn't drink. It's like, exactly, I think it's just like—Oh, this feels good to have this level of clarity, and I'm not interested in losing that clarity by having alcohol… it's just not… has zero appeal to me.

Leah  37:36

Yeah, it didn't align to your point, right? Yeah. Oh, fascinating.

Ben  37:42

Intentionality makes it sound very well thought out. I think it's a byproduct, really, of the meditation, and I think the worthiness. I think maybe this is it—maybe I think about the worthiness of what we're doing at Blue J, and I think about the the larger purpose to which it serves. And I think that's really motivating, and that causes me to want to put everything that I can into maximizing Blue Js contribution towards bringing us to a better use of technology in law and in tax law specifically. So I think it's just like, I care a lot about that outcome for for society, but also for Blue Js employees and for Blue Js investors and for Blue Js customers, and for my family and for everyone involved. And so I think it's the the interpersonal stakes and the social meaning of what we're doing that that causes me to to want to be sharp and make good decisions. So I don't know. I guess even explaining that, I think you would say—okay, Ben, so that sounds pretty intentional. 

Leah  38:56

I mean, it does, but I keep thinking of alignment too. You sort of mentioned that it all aligns for you, and actually it leads beautifully into some of our last questions here, which is thinking about the impact that you're creating in the world. You know, when you start to think about creating impact, either with yourself or through Blue J, how do you think about creating impact?

Ben  39:20

I think about leveraging technology to improve the legal system. I you know, as a law professor, spent many thousands of hours reading case law, talking about case law, thinking about policy, thinking about social, political, economic implications, particularly with respect to taxation, with respect to law and economics, I think there's so much room for thoughtful tax policy, improvements in tax policy, improvements in tax law, leading to greater economic efficiency, greater fairness, the avoidance of pitfalls, the avoidance of tax loopholes that you know will lead to a fair allocation of the tax burden in society. It will lead to, you know, faster growth of businesses, more employment, more rewarding jobs, like improvements to human life. So I think it's… it all boils down to, ultimately, if you scratch at it enough to wanting to promote human flourishing, I think. And so I think that's the impact that I would like to have, and that I believe everyone at Blue J wants to contribute to.

Leah  40:35

I love that. I love it. I do want to give you an opportunity to talk about a book that you have, I know you've got a new book coming out, and this is a big part of who you are. You've written books before. What was… The Legal Singularity got a lot of people talking to say the least. What…tell me a little bit about the new book that you have coming out, if you're able to. 

Ben  40:55

Sure. So my co-author and I are preparing the manuscript for final submission to Oxford University Press. It's tentatively titled Super Justice and it will be, it really is a worthy successor to The Legal Singularity in that we talk about, where does law go from here? So AI is clearly here. We think it's going to lead to significantly improved legal processes. We think it's going to lead to greater decentralization, greater tailoring of legal systems to local community kind of needs, but also be informed by global experience with different policy choices that can be embedded in law. And so think about it as really a dynamic vision of a future legal system that is, you know, more well developed, but also more well tailored to local preferences, tastes, needs, without sacrificing fairness or efficiency, but understanding that local values may differ around the world, and it's not going to be a one size fits all kind of prescription, and I think it addresses, to some extent, one of the misconceptions from The Legal Singularity, because the title seems to suggest that it's going to be like some domineering single version of law that is going to be everywhere, and that isn't really what Abdi and I had in mind with The Legal Singularity. What we had in mind is really well explained by the subtitle, which is How AI Can Make Law Radically Better. And we didn't fill in exactly what the contents of the law would be just, we merely posited that there are a whole bunch of reasons to think that AI will be an enabler of much better law. And so, Super Justice is my attempt to flesh that out a little bit, talk about how we're going to get from where we find ourselves here in 2025 to a future state of the law that is dynamic, respects local preferences, values, and, above all, promotes human flourishing.

Leah  43:10

That's wonderful. Okay, so final two questions. We ask the same two questions of everybody. You are building Blue J, you're writing the story for the company. How do you hope it goes?

Ben  43:23

Well, I'd love to say that, you know, Blue J grew into a mature global company and was, you know, essential to the development of Super Justice / The Legal Singularity, really laid the bedrock for future generations to benefit from highly dynamic, highly efficient, highly fair legal system. And now whether that happens directly or indirectly, I'm quite open to whatever the future brings here. I don't perseverate over the precise path. Is it an IPO? Is it, you know, Blue J staying independent for a long time as a private company? Is it a strategic acquisition where, you know, Blue J is able to, you know, realize its mission under the auspices of some other company? I thought all of those things are fine. I just want it to be, you know, when the story is told, I would like it to be, you know, Blue Js work was instrumental in bringing about this future state that everyone benefits from.

Leah  44:33

Amazing, amazing, and as the Founder of this company, and you are, you know, you're a Founder of a tech company now Ben, how do you hope your personal story goes?

Ben  44:43

Oh, well, I tell everybody that I plan to live to 300 so I would like to live to 300. So full disclosure right now, I'm 47 so that means I have 253 more years to go on this planet. I think it'd be pretty audacious for you know, a 47 year old to be, you know, directly trying to predict how the next 253 years are going to go, Leah. It'd be like my four year,you're asking, kind of like my four year old self to ask how life is going to go to age 40. So, like, I don't know, well that, you know… whatever I would have said at age four would have been wildly off the mark, so I think I'll just leave it at that. I'll say, I don't know, but I'm sure future Ben will invent a very good set of experiences and adventures and harness them to contribute something back to the world.

Leah  45:35

I have no doubt. Ben, thank you very much for this conversation.

Ben 45:39

Thanks, Leah, it's been fun.

Leah  45:53

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Leah  46:32

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