The Hope Machine (Holy Shit, My Life is Over): Bill Gross Gives Away 1.2 Million AI-Generated Ideas

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello, everybody. It is Monday, October the 19th, 2026 Not just any Monday, but a special Monday, at least according to my guest, an old friend of the show, Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab, who, at least in his words, has the biggest idea of his life, which he's launching today. So Bill, what's happening today?

Bill Gross (0:52)

Well, today we're launching Idealab.AI, and we've come up with a way to develop 1.2 million and growing, really powerful business ideas, and we're giving them away to the world because we think this can have the biggest positive impact. It's using AI to create jobs, not destroy jobs, and it's also giving a lot of people hope, because I'm really hopeful myself that this can lower the bar for entrepreneurship and give a lot of people a chance to take their passion, find their purpose, and really build something fantastic.

Andrew Keen (1:21)

So tell me the story of this. I know it's been germinating in your mind for several months. How did you come up with the idea?

Bill Gross (1:28)

Well, my whole life, I've been looking at how can we use technology to solve important problems. I've started many companies over the years, 175 and counting, and all of them have a core aspect of looking for 31 different methods that I've had to develop an idea based on solving a problem.

Recently, because Claude has gotten so good, I've been using that to help me use my methodology to tackle new idea generation. But one thing struck me, I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about the copper shortage, and I realized that most articles I read actually have a problem statement at their core. In this particular case, copper shortage was because data centers need transformers faster than they can be made, and electric cars need motors. But I realized, what if I could take the articles that I've read and give them to Claude and say, can you find the core problem statement in this, and then use my methodology to come up with a technology solution?

So I took 7,000 articles from the last two weeks of reading that I had done, and I handed it, and an hour later, and $1,000 in tokens later, I had 32,000 incredible company ideas. And at first, I was kind of shocked. I thought kind of like, holy shit, my life is over because my whole life has been coming up with ideas myself, and here now, AI can do that better than me. AI has gotten so good in the last year at being able to put these kinds of things together. I was shocked. But then I realized, this is maybe a superpower. Taking this and bringing this to the world could be a way to solve problems at a scale that I never could have imagined before. I got very, very excited about that.

Andrew Keen (3:04)

What is an idea, Bill?

Bill Gross (3:07)

Well, an idea is taking something from column A and something from column B, maybe two disparate things, and coming up with a unique solution. I'll give you one example.

In that first 32,000 set of ideas, we made a search feature so we could drag some sliders and choose some different things. So you could choose, well, I'd like an idea that's digital only, or I'd like an idea that I can start for under $50,000, or I'd like an idea that has positive impact on more than 100 million people right now and is an urgent problem. So I dragged the sliders to say that.

The idea that came to the top with a score of 8.9 out of 10 of the 32,000 ideas was, I've been reading a lot about the war in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and gas prices are going up, and more than 100 million people are complaining about the price of gasoline. So what about if you make a mobile app where people pay $5 a month, they lock in today's gas price, they don't have to worry about the price going up anymore, and then you take the accumulated $5 and hedge gasoline on the New York Mercantile Exchange and lock in gas prices for people, and basically what you're doing is bringing airline level hedging to consumers, and that blew my mind.

Basically, what that had done was take the idea of hedging, it didn't invent hedging, hedging has been around, but it's never been available for consumers, and it took a problem of today that is a new urgent problem, and merge those two things together. So that's one example of where a powerful new idea can come from. Now you still have to build a company around that, there's a lot to do beyond that. But that's an example of where a great business idea can come for merging different things from different categories, because AI can have all of that in its brain at once. It's really, really powerful.