The Norris Group Real Estate Podcast

Real Estate Through Data with Sean O'Toole | Part 2 #946

• The Norris Group, Craig Evans

Share episode

In Part 2 of Bruce Norris’ conversation with Sean O’Toole, the discussion expands beyond real estate into the future of energy, leadership, and artificial intelligence. Sean shares why power production, global cooperation, and responsible AI development will play a critical role in shaping the economy — and what investors should pay attention to as technology accelerates. 


Sean OToole is CEO & Founder of PropertyRadar, the property data and owner information platform real estate pros have trusted since 2007 to do billions of dollars in deals.

Sean got his start with data in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. After the dot-com bubble, Sean flipped properties for five years, and with data-informed insights, got out right before the housing bubble burst.

Sean launched ForeclosureRadar in early 2007 before anyone had heard of the foreclosure crisis.

In 2013, he relaunched ForeclosureRadar as PropertyRadar, a greatly expanded property data and owner information platform serving a broad audience of real estate professionals and property-centric businesses.

Today, PropertyRadar remains the go-to platform for data-driven real professionals intent on leveraging comprehensive property data and owner information to grow their business directly.



In this episode:

  • Leadership challenges in scaling reliable and sustainable energy systems.
  • The rapid development of AI and the rise of superintelligence.
  • Why global cooperation is essential to keep advanced AI safe.
  • The growing tension between regulation, innovation, and data privacy.


The Norris Group originates and services loans in California and Florida under California DRE License 01219911, Florida Mortgage Lender License 1577, and NMLS License 1623669.  For more information on hard money lending, go www.thenorrisgroup.com and click the Hard Money tab.


Video Link

Radio Show

Narrator:

Welcome to The Norris Group real estate podcast, a show committed to bringing you insights from thought leaders shaping the real estate industry. In each episode, we'll dive into conversations with industry experts and local insiders, all aimed at helping you thrive in an ever-changing real estate market. continuing the legacy that Bruce Norris created, sharing valuable knowledge, and empowering you on your real estate journey. Whether you're a seasoned pro or a newcomer, this is your go-to source for insider tips, market trends and success strategies. Here's your host, Craig Evans.

Sean O'Toole:

grid.

Bruce Norris:

Right.

Sean O'Toole:

That may not be the kind of power you're talking about. There's the, you know, there's the intellectual power, there's political power, and then there's, like, turn on the lights power.

Bruce Norris:

Yeah, make it work power. Because, I mean, all over country, they're building these power sources, right?

Sean O'Toole:

Yeah. I mean, and you'll also see, like, if you're really following this closely, we've got our first AI chip running in space. They can put those in orbit that are in the sun, 100% of the time. There's less atmospheric interference with the sun, so they get more power. There's natural cooling, because space is cold.

Bruce Norris:

Right.

Sean O'Toole:

You know, so, like there's, there's infinite opportunities for, you know, more power. It's just cost and time and and, of course, we've got, we're trying to reactivate Three Mile Island.

Bruce Norris:

Right.

Sean O'Toole:

Just about to reactivate Diablo Canyon, which is right where I grew up, you know? So, yes. Nuclear is, and I think nuclear makes a lot of sense. You know, they've got these small nuclear plants that

Bruce Norris:

Nuclear, right? are self contained. You just drill a mile deep hole, drop this thing in the bottom of the hill and out comes electricity, enough electricity to power a small town, you know. Think of my little town here. We need, we need one or two of them, and it power everybody for, I don't know, 50 years, and then when the thing runs out, it's just buried a mile down. Leave it there. Like there's lots of solutions for power, but, but yeah, there's going to be a huge race for power because... Well, that's so China right now has 20 nuclear power plants under construction.

Sean O'Toole:

Oh, yeah. Way ahead of us.

Bruce Norris:

We've closed most of ours, right?

Sean O'Toole:

Yep, yep.

Bruce Norris:

Okay.

Sean O'Toole:

So, these are the areas where I think, you know, come back it winning versus losing, but leading, right? We're not going to lose our power plants. We're not going to get bombed, you know, I don't think bombed out, but to be leading, right, we need to be figuring out how we generate, you know, more power, because at the end of the day, if they have more compute than we have compute, and they have the people that can put that compute to work, they're going to lead, we're not. And it is going to come down to kilowatts produced, right like that going to be a big decider in who leads and who follows and who has power.

Bruce Norris:

How do you catch up? If somebody's dozens of power plants ahead of you? I don't know how long it takes to do a nuclear plant, let's say. How long does it take to do that?

Sean O'Toole:

A long time, especially in our current regulatory environment.

Bruce Norris:

Exactly.

Sean O'Toole:

Yeah. So yeah, but that's where you just need a whole, you need leadership, right? You need the leadership to say, 'Hey, this is a imperative. How are we going to do this?' I mean, if you go back and look at at, you know, the bomb, for example, when we put our minds to things and really get to work, we can, we can lead, we can be ahead, but it takes a lot of focus and determination. And, you know, so, yeah, I think it's super important. It's the right question to be asking.

Bruce Norris:

Are most of the companies aligned with a country or just their business?

Sean O'Toole:

If they're running their company, well, what's the right so I'd love to say that they were aligned with a country, and I think there's a lot of leaders and individuals are aligned with the country, but I think, you know, one of the things that we lose sight of it with nationalism and tariffs and, you know, and that kind of thing, is that our markets and our companies here in the US are global, right? So, you know, it to root for the stock market and root for nationalism are kind of like diametrically opposed, right? Like, I don't see how you can do both. If you do, you're a hypocrite. I'm sorry for all those out there who have those two views, but you know, it just doesn't work. We're not, we are still the most important market in the world, but as we're throwing out tariffs and stuff, that's fine. They just sell other places. It's not we're not doing the damage we think we are. So, you know, I think, I think there again. You got to, you got to lead by example and by showing what's possible.

Bruce Norris:

Joey, you want to...

Joey Romero:

Yeah, I wanted to jump in just, I've been reading a lot about this stuff. So, one of the things that Sean talked about where it's going to lead to the extinction of us, all of us, it's not, can we clarify? It's not AGI, it's Superintelligence . But they're saying that the AGI will lead to the Superintelligence, right? And the thought was that AGI, was 15 years away. But there's a recent, you know, paper that came out that says it's 2027 so it's around the corner. And then the Superintelligence once thought it was going to be, you know, 2050 maybe that's going to be a lot sooner, you know, following AGI. Now, a lot of the the leaders in this have signed a statement of risk in 2023 and they've updated it right 2024. Are you aware of that statement, Sean?

Sean O'Toole:

Yeah.

Joey Romero:

Okay. Would you have signed it?

Sean O'Toole:

So, I don't think it's as imminent a problem. And I think if you look at it the wrong way, as in, like we need to stop or slow these things down. Like North Korea is not going to stop. Russia is, you know, like, like others aren't going to stop. So I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. The right way of looking at it is, how do we develop this in such a way, right, that we can show how that it can be done safely, and stay enough ahead of the bad actors so that whatever they develop, like our stuff out does their stuff, and we can keep the bad actors at bay. Like, that's the war we're in. You know these folks that are like, oh, we need to stop this for humanity arrest. Like, I'm sorry, you're just dreaming. That's not the way the world works. That's not the way humanity has ever worked. We've been killing each other for so long, for so many reasons, mostly religious, like, just forget that. Like, so I don't understand what they're trying to achieve. So it's pointless to me.

Joey Romero:

So when you when you were talking earlier, you actually were echoing a lot of what Stuart Russell was was talking about. And Stuart Russell is the professor from Berkeley who wrote Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, and he's been teaching for 40, 50, years, and he's coming out and saying he doesn't want to stop, because he was the question was asked him, would you stop, AI right now? And he was like him and how he couldn't. And he and he landed on, I would put a pause on it until we could ensure all those things that you're talking about, the barriers, or, you know, a way to make sure that humanity's best interests were always going to be at the forefront.

Sean O'Toole:

I think, I think that you know, if you pose that question to me, is 'if Sean, if today you were God, you know, what would you do?' I might say,'Let's pause and I'll get in a room and talk about this a little bit, right?' But not being God and not being able to force, I don't even know if God can force everybody on the planet to His will. You know, whatever your beliefs are there, I'll leave to you. But like, even if you had that ability, like, outside of that ability, it's just not going to happen. So what's the point in the question? Like, we show we saw what happened. We said, Okay, we're not going to sell Nvidia chips to China. Well, China just developed DeepSeek with old chips. That's, you know, that's as powerful as our stuff with the new chips, like cheaper, and now they're out building, they've put their whole frickin country around building their own chips that are better than Nvidia's. We'll see whether they can do that or not. But you know, like one of the things I learned super early on in software was, and this comes back to foreclosures, just bear with me for one second. I had an investor in one county in 2008 offer me a million dollars to shut off ForeclosureRadar in that county for one year, right? Because he could make so much money at the auction if he didn't have the competition. And I told him no. And I told him no for one simple reason, because if I had done that, even in just that one county, I would have had another competitor in that county in months, right?

Bruce Norris:

Right?

Sean O'Toole:

This idea that we are so, so powerful, you know, whether that's us as the US, us as individuals, or whatever, that we can determine everything for humanity is a farce.

Bruce Norris:

Do you think then there's, there'll be kind of a collaborative meeting with the powers to be countries and say, Okay, how about we cooperate instead of try to beat each other? What about we get to a safe ending for everybody to benefit?

Sean O'Toole:

Well, I mean, that was the idea of the United Nations after World War Two, right? So, it's a good idea, it's little harder in practice, yeah, lot, a lot of people don't love the United Nations and where it's ending up on things and the outcomes it's having on things, but that was the, you know, that was why the United Nations exist. Is because we came collectively to that conclusion after World War Two, that we come to a new conclusion, or even a conclusion to, like, not keep trying to mess with the night or fix the United Nations or whatever. The only way I think, as humanity, we get to that point is after we have a sufficient worldwide disaster to bring everybody the same page. Covid wasn't that, right? It didn't get everybody on the same page, if anything, it caused more division than we've ever had. So it's going to have to be something a lot worse than covid That gets us all on the same page and gets us to have progress.

Joey Romero:

Bruce had just one more question. Yeah, go ahead. No. Sorry. So you know, there's, I listen to the Diary of a CEO, and what he's talked about, is the conversation that the CEOs of these AI companies that are having in public are very different than the ones that they're having in private. And it's all based on data. It's all based on safety. Do you think that these companies are abandoning safety in AI because of that race to be first? And would you, would you say that they need to bring some of that back. Because, you know, some of those in an open AI, they're just leaving, you know, they're like, Hey, open AI is just like saying, you know what, abandoning AI safety 100% so how would you approach that?

Sean O'Toole:

I think they dispute that last claim a little. But I would say I've been in software long enough to know, you know, I've got a release going out today. Last night, we found multiple issues in the release, right? Do I still release it? You know, these aren't safety issues. They aren't, you know, is it the AI isn't going to tell somebody who's having a hard day to kill themselves. But you know, this stuff's really hard, and on this scale, and with the questions that people ask, how do I test for what Bruce is going to ask AI today, right? And, and how do I think through every possible consequence, we're going to get a lot wrong, right? The question is, how do we learn from it? And I think the also, the question is, you know, these things are trade offs that people have to that are constantly weighing right? There's real risk for this com, these companies, right? If they, if they suddenly have 1000s of people committing suicide because of terrible advice, or start losing people billions of dollars in the markets because of terrible advice or things like that, those companies lose, right? So there's a safety in the like, what's good for humanity concept, but there's also safety in like these companies want self preservation, and so do you trust their self preservation, or do you come in and put a bunch of rules on them? If you put rules on them? How do you do that? Because we don't really know. Like, finally, what's going to happen in every case. So how do you even test for that? Like, these are really big questions. Is that can't be answered. And I don't think you know whether you're the CEO or the top scientist on this stuff in the world, like truly making something safe. It's like, how do I make a box knife truly safe, right? You know, my sister's dad wouldn't let her daughter use, my niece use a butter knife. So she was, like, 13, because he's afraid she hurt herself. You know, it's like, where do you draw those lines, right? I gave my son a pocket knife really early. He could have killed himself, you know, like, it really is those kinds of questions, and it's not, you know, the one thing I don't buy is anybody who goes, oh, what we need to do is we'll just add this regulation and it'll fix it. I think, I'm not saying there should be no regulations, but I think you have to be really careful with those, because there's as good a chance adding that regulation puts us behind.

Bruce Norris:

Oh, sure.

Sean O'Toole:

And keeps us from having the breakthroughs that we need to have to lead. And I'd rather have us based companies, right and the US government, you know, having more breakthroughs than other countries, than not. You know, we're constantly dealing with the privacy thing, because we make public records data available to investors and others to go, reach out to homeowners, and these privacy laws keep cracking down on what a California company or a US company can do with data, but they're not cracking down, and they can't crack down, and they will never crack down on the real source of the problem, which is, you know, actors in North Korea using phone numbers to call your mom and steal$10,000 from her. And that's why they're putting in place these rules. But these rules don't apply to the bad actors. They only apply to the good actors, and they're adding, you know, billions of dollars of cost to the good actors who aren't the ones spamming you right, and have zero effect on the bad actors. It's, you know, some of this stuff just becomes really super misplaced and doesn't understand the world that we live in today.

Joey Romero:

Well, that's going to do it for part two. Please stay tuned next week as we finish up our interview with Sean O'Toole, CEO and Founder of PropertyRadar.

Narrator:

For more information on hard money loans, trust deed investing, and upcoming events with The Norris group. Check out thenorrisgroup.com. For more information on passive investing through the DBL Capital Real Estate Investment Fund, please visit dblapital.com.

Joey Romero:

The Norris Group originates and services loans in California and Florida under California DRE license 01219911. Florida mortgage lender license 1577 and NMLS license 1623669. For more information on hard money lending go to thenorrisgroup.com and click the hard money tab.