143 - Brett Hurt - Love, Fear, Abundance, & AI

What happens when someone who has spent nearly his entire life understanding code, data, and technological systems begins questioning the nature of reality itself? In this episode Dr. John Price is joined by Brett Hurt who began programming at seven years old and went on to become one of Austin’s most successful technology entrepreneurs. He founded Coremetrics, acquired by IBM for $300 million, and Bazaarvoice, which became a billion-dollar public company. Most recently, he co-founded and led data.world before its acquisition by ServiceNow in 2025. But after decades of building companies and achieving extraordinary financial success, Brett found himself moving toward a very different set of questions. A series of psychedelic experiences, including one he describes as an encounter with God, initiated what Brett calls his Soul Quest. He read more than 85 books in 18 months, exploring consciousness, post-materialist science, spirituality, ancient wisdom, and the nature of reality. That exploration eventually became his USA TODAY bestselling book, Love Conquers Fear: Humanity, AI, and the Age of Abundance for All. In this conversation, we begin with the seven-year-old who discovered coding and explore how computer science shaped Brett’s way of seeing the world. We talk about entrepreneurship, failure, self-doubt, wealth, and the “scarcity operating system” that helped drive his success. We then move into the psychedelic experiences that disrupted his understanding of reality and his subsequent investigation into consciousness, science, and spirituality. We also explore the hard problem of consciousness, whether intelligence and consciousness are actually the same thing, what AI may reveal about being human, and how education must change when information becomes nearly instantaneous. And we examine Brett’s central argument that love can conquer fear, including a deeper question: What if fear is not simply something to overcome, but something that can tell us what matters? This is a conversation about technology, but underneath it is a conversation about the human being creating the technology: what forms us, what drives us, what our systems cannot measure, and what happens when the worldview that helped us succeed can no longer contain our experience. Brett Hurt is a serial technology entrepreneur, investor, USA TODAY bestselling author, and CEO of Love Conquers Fear. Alongside his wife, Debra, he co-leads Hurt Family Investments, which has backed more than 150 startups and 50 venture funds. Topics include: computer science and coding, AI and consciousness, psychedelics and mystical experience, the nature of reality, entrepreneurship and self-doubt, wealth and success, fear and love, education in the age of AI, post-materialist science, and the limits of what data can tell us about being human. https://www.loveconquersfear.org