What you’ll hear in this episode:

- Growing up rural, discovering tech through literature, and the first wave of the web

- Early blogging, Wired’s origin energy, and finding community online

- The Burpee Seeds → Bazaarvoice case: bad reviews, better product, unstoppable social proof

- “Before AI / After AI”: agents, multimodality, and embodied robots explained simply

- Open source vs. closed models, geopolitics, and the efficiency race behind the scenes

- From Gaussian diffusion to simulation: training a robot dog to walk on a yoga ball

- Fear vs. love, prisoner's dilemma thinking, and building toward the Age of Abundance for All

About Love Conquers Fear:

In an era of exponentially evolving AI and robotics, one question looms: Will humanity make it? Love Conquers Fear is where leadership meets love, technology serves humanity, and vision becomes action. Host, Brett Alexander Hurt, tech entrepreneur and investor, sits down with some of the world’s most influential people to ask: Will we unite to create the Age of Abundance for All? These conversations are calls to action, awakening leaders everywhere to rise and help humanity choose the Light.

Follow Brett Alexander Hurt on Linkedin: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/bretthurt/⁠

Follow Brett Alexander Hurt on Medium: ⁠https://databrett.medium.com⁠

Follow Brett Alexander Hurt on Substack: ⁠https://brettahurt.substack.com/⁠

Love Conquers Fear on Youtube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@LoveConquersFear2025⁠

Love Conquers Fear on Spotify: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/6wngdSw7FmdibLC9mu300q⁠

Love Conquers Fear on Apple: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/love-conquers-fear/id1841734456⁠

About Ethan Holland:

Ethan Holland is Vice President of Draper Digital Media, a writer, digital strategist, and chronicler of the AI revolution. An early internet pioneer, he began publishing online in the 1990s and helped companies from Burpee Seeds to national retailers transition into the digital age. Over three decades, his work has bridged literature, technology, and commerce, appearing in The New York Times and on stages like Adobe’s Worldwide Sales Conference. Since the launch of ChatGPT, Ethan has produced a weekly newsletter curating 36,000+ links on AI, connecting technical trends with cultural and humanitarian context. He has also collaborated with Google, YouTube, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, and Twitter on major product launches. A Swarthmore graduate, he serves on multiple boards, including the AI Virtual Inn of Court executive committee. Outside of work, he is a devoted father, science fiction reader, and believer in technology’s potential to help humanity.

Ethan’s Website: https://ethanbholland.com

Ethan on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanholland/

Timestamps:

00:00 - Episode preview

01:09 - Intro to Ethan Holland

05:02 - Family background: Delaware Supreme Court Judge father / Harvard mom

05:30 - First exposure to Unix & computers

08:42 - Early blogging introduced by Justin Hall

13:51 - First job: bringing Burpee Seeds catalog online

18:15 - Early e-commerce days, Shop.org, and the beginning of Bazaarvoice

23:47 - Why word of mouth = power of the people

26:16 – Why a few bad reviews build authenticity

28:00 - Book & podcast thesis: The Age of Abundance for All

30:39 - Gazelle & cheetah metaphor: awe and fear of AI

32:27 - Open source vs. closed frontier models

36:00 - Stargate project and DeepSeek

39:43 - Open source = blessing and curse (balkanization)

40:31 - Will AI make us happier? Agency in your pocket

45:11 - Lessons from Cuban Missile Crisis: fear vs. trust

46:30 - How we’ll get to energy abundance

49:40 - Ethan’s AI newsletter

59:14 - Key breakthroughs from 36,000+ links: agents, robots, multimodality

1:06:08 - The AI news that blew him away - AI Agents, Embodied Robots, Gaussian Diffusion, Jim Fan at NVIDIA

1:10:00 - Theory of mind in AI: context + emotion

1:21:35 - Bill Joy: Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us

1:23:40 - Stay informed so love wins

1:26:05 - Outro