 It's like when you learn a second language and you start to understand syntax and grammar and symbols and meaning and you see a second form of intelligence and we start to understand the taxonomy of intelligence, but start to maybe understand our self. I think a lot of us think humans like intelligence is one of the gifts that tends to set us apart in certain realms. But so maybe getting a lens to understand that better is a really empowering area. And then further, I feel like many of us are living in almost like a little bit of a dystopia with illusions of free will and are stuck doing things or driven by different external forces and what if you could unlock from some of that to really pursue your own fulfilling and creative pursuits. Boom! What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sokian. We are on site at The Sandbox in the beautiful San Diego, California. We are now going to be talking about human-AI collaboration. We have Alex Bates joining us on the show. Hi, Alex. Great to be with you today. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So pumped for this conversation. For those who don't know, Alex's background. He is the managing director at Neo Cortex Ventures, technology chair at The Sandbox, a member of the Forbes Technology Council, an author of Augmented Mind. Previously, he was CTO of MTEL, which was acquired by Aspen Tech, and you can find all the links in the bio below to newcortexventures.com, TheSandbox.ai, as well as the augmented mind book link. All right, Alex, let's start things off by asking one of our favorite questions. What are your thoughts on the direction of our world? I am actually a huge optimist, which I know seems like a contrarian perspective lately, but I see lots of challenges, and I actually see amazing technologies and solutions coming out and see humans rising to the challenge, so actually super optimistic about the potential. So there's this like pressing pressure cooker consciousness evolution that's happening, where we have to win this wisdom race. There's like exponential technologies being democratized, and the potential for malevolence occurring is like even more so than what we experienced with the Cold War and nuclear bombs. And so like you're very optimistic about us being able to win that wisdom race. Evolve consciously fast enough. I am. I mean I know as a species we've gone through some pretty major cataclysmic, near cataclysmic events, I think we always rise to the occasion. I think there's large challenges, but sometimes necessity is the mother invention, and I feel like the rising pressure will actually help us evolve and rise to the occasion. I love it. I love it. And then what would you say is a principle that you think could be widely embodied to help us rise to the occasion? That's a great question. I feel like actually excess sort of negativity or fear and doubt can actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I feel like mindset of not just shutting down in fear is an important part of it. When I was a young engineer, I thought none of that stuff mattered, soft factors, but actually as I've grown and aged, you mentioned the wisdom part, I think that I've discovered how important that really is when you approach these kinds of problems. That's a really good one, that fear and doubt can be self-fulfilling prophecies. So to really just clean our channels and clear them of those and really bring in that love and that harmony and that peace and butterfly effect that out to other people and watch our world. Consciously evolve. I love that. Alex, let's talk about your journey. So you were born in Portland in Oregon, and you grew up there for a good chunk of your life. Did a little bit of six states in six years, you said? Six cities, four states. Four states, six cities. And who were you as a kid growing up that got you interested in what you care about today? I think there were a few of these just imprint moments. I remember going through visiting my grandfather in New York and reading his bookshelf and these books about philosophy of mind, and then my uncle, this mathematician, and we would just debate these topics about the mind and even things like the soul. But he wasn't afraid of science at all. So I just remember all these, and I remember also hearing stories about the people behind math and science, and that was really fascinating to me is how they came to these kind of Eureka moments and at some point became sort of obsessed with the mind and brain and neural networks and kind of went from there. And when you were seeing these moments of like epiphany or of just deep Eureka, what were the things that you noticed about them that caused those, and what did you get interested about them? Yeah, there were some interesting patterns there. So for example, almost none of them happened in an office at a whiteboard. So Archimedes in the bathtub, people getting on to bus walking in nature, unplugging, disconnecting, switching out of your kind of task positive orientation, which actually most of our work environments are not at all set up to facilitate. But yeah, so I thought it was so interesting, it was usually when you're unplugging that you're really primed for those kinds of discovery moments. But when we take a moment of silence, and you call them use of task positive, like that we're doing task oriented things, so when we kind of unplug from those into more moments of silence or solitude or just being basically, we're just being. When we just be, it gives us the time and space we need to do those profound free associations and then be like, aha, stuff like that. Totally, yeah. Like the kind of mind wandering, there seems to be this process, sometimes people think it's linked to the default mode network, but almost a little bit subconscious in nature, but undirected mind wandering, which we think of as wasting time, but actually it turns out maybe is one of the most important things we need to give ourselves freedom to do. Undirected mind wandering. I love that. That's a great way to put it. It's also like that the balance to strike is hard here between undirected mind wandering and not. So it's like, how do you pick whether to work for four hours on your Cortex Ventures or go on a hike for four hours? And which one will accelerate your North Star journey the most? These are very tough questions. So how do you know when to mind wander for an hour versus do task positive for an hour? That is a very tough question. I don't know if there's a simple answer. I did see a lot of these aha moments from at least like some of the Nobel Prize winners and so on that have written about it. It was after a rigorous period of study, sometimes 10,000 hours, almost like a decade, but now you've absorbed and embodied all of the detailed first principle understanding of a subject area. Now I'm not saying work 10,000 hours before you go for a hike by any means, but there could be many eurekas on the way to maybe your huge life altering one. But yeah, so it's an interesting thing. So you probably need to do some focused task positive concentration to think about maybe an area you really want to solve a problem in. And probably the frequency maybe is a little personal to each person. I mean, sometimes when you hit a wall is when all whether it's fatigue, exhaustion, burnout, or just anything, you know, sometimes I'm just going to push through it, but actually maybe actually go take a walk at that point and you'll be surprised. Like let your subconscious mind kick in and it's this engine there working for you. Most of us aren't even aware of it. And then what about, you know, leading up into these last, like even just pre-MTEL days? How did you get so fascinated with this human AI collaboration? I mean, I think back a lot of the discoveries in science, I was always fascinated by the people and the stories behind how they came to these. And when I went into AI and neural networks and so on, there were some amazing breakthroughs, but it became clear human mathematicians and physicists were still at the pinnacle of the profession. And so it just became clear why is it that after 60 years of AI, humans are still so good at these things and we're just starting to understand those human gifts. And I think it was a series of discoveries of how actually amazing our human gifts are, which isn't really well publicized or told in the mainstream. And there's certainly some amazing gifts for AI and machine learning as well, a lot of which are complementary. So it was like a series of observations and at MTEL, I was both building the machine learning and the neural networks, but then going out later in our company and into the field and working with the human users in these factories and drilling rigs and develop just this huge appreciation for their intuition and what they brought to the table and it thought it was important to recognize that. That was 11 years of MTEL, right? That's right. And so you were the CTO and you also, so let's talk about this. This is, I love the way that you describe this. So it's almost as though we can use this sensor suite to predict the malfunctioning or failure of mechanical equipment. We can then interject and prescribe some sort of a solution that can prevent the failure from happening. And this is, I was also telling you about this before we went on that, I care so much about the same process for the biometric state of the body, so predicting pathologies and intervening to not get to that point of failure within the body. So tell us about how that came to be. You guys going forth and making that happen. Where you said like inside of factories and oil rigs and whatnot, where it got used and then just how cool it was to see how humans were the ones that still had to go and see what the sensor had detected and go and do the replacement and whatnot. So tell us about that. Yeah. I actually early in my career actually as an undergraduate I dabbled in some research and published a little bit in the area of biomedical diagnostics, in this case for early detection of glaucoma, which can cause blindness. But it turned out that you had these noisy data sets, but you could apply different types of mathematical computational techniques to detect it. But I remember it was interesting seeing the trade-offs there as far as sensitivity versus specificity and false alarms, but we were able to get a signal in the noise and that kind of thing. But going in with M-Tel, there's this concept of descriptive analytics, which is mostly characterizing what's happened in the past, predictive where you're maybe trying to predict something's going to happen, but you don't know exactly. You can't very well characterize the mechanisms. You maybe know something's going to happen in a year, but you can't get down to the detailed mechanisms. Prescriptive analytics, which you just mentioned, so coming up with a prescription or an intervention is the highest value, most important, and yet the least often achieved, and that's where these people were so key. And it's one thing that's kind of a funny paradox is if you think back to the movie Minority Report, you have the pre-COGs that make a prediction and the pre-crime unit Tom Cruise goes out to stop it. Similarly in our realm, so we were like the pre-COG, we'd predict this compressor is going to fail in 45 days. If our software worked right, we would falsify our prediction, which means we'd get in prescribed. Here's how you avoid this. And then it almost leads to a funny thing like, well, was it going to fail? But over time, you prove that with statistics and meantime between failure and so on. But it's interesting. So with pre-scriptive, you're literally trying to change the future. And yet whether it's human health or machine health, that's really the Holy Grail. That's what you want to do. That's actionable. Yes, yes. And this is also so evidently seen with how we can at all these little bifurcating moments of our life trajectory that we can pick to do certain things that alter our life outcomes. And this can be as simple as just on a day-to-day basis. Did I pick to actually sleep the eight hours or did I only sleep four? Or how do I feel the next day? And that same thing with what I chose to eat that day. Did I eat junk and fast food or did I eat healthy nutrition raw foods? These different sorts of, and that's a daily feedback loop that you feel, but it's also you can, on a longevity clock, you can also see yourself either shaving off days if you're choosing bad habits. So this is all critical at those bifurcating moments. Did you listen to a mentor or did you take a risk, a couple risks to open a couple doors for yourself? So this is super applicable to even our trajectories towards our divine purposes on the planet. What were some of the examples you gave a compressor as an example? Give us some more of these examples. Because this is now becoming more and more like sensors in factories and they're now becoming all over the place, especially with IoT era. Yeah, we've really evolved towards closer to ubiquitous sensing and of course, storage of sensor data and all the kind of prerequisites to be able to go in with large scale machine learning and look at these problems. Ironically, these machines are way farther along in maturity than humans when it comes to sensing infrastructure, right? My ring is measuring my heart right now and it's tracking sleep. And I occasionally wear a few other sensors, but these compressors might have 400. And so it would be nice when the sensing for us humans catches up, right? I feel like we're pretty valuable too. But anyway, yeah, so the tons of sensing infrastructure, which of course was invaluable, where there were some complications were the labeling, almost like actually in digital health now, one challenge is electrical health records because there's a lot of unstructured text and doctors write things differently. Similar challenge and maintenance where the way they wrote what happened, what repair, they didn't weren't quite as rigorous or consistent. So similar actual challenges in the two. We did used to joke that, thank God we're not looking at humans because humans have a stress and mind state loop into our health. You mentioned feedback and your mind state and your sort of mental health can actually have huge impact on your physical health. And as far as we know, these machines didn't have that extra complication. But certainly there were other complications that we had to solve in that space. But yeah, now looking ahead to humans, I think huge opportunities and some unique things with our mental state too. And then you guys were taking the data from the sensor suite and processing it in real time to get feedback out to the operators. That was kind of the loop. That's correct. I mean we might take ten years of history of sensor data to train up our models. But the nice thing is we can learn, for example, a pattern of a bearing failure or an impeller failure on one pump and transfer it across the entire fleet. So we wouldn't have to wait till every pump had historical failure. It was almost like it had distributed immune system. You pick up an immunity for one antigen on one, transferred across. Actually each of us has a learning immune system but unfortunately we can't transfer that across each other. But we were able to do this digitally with that. Kind of a little bit of transfer learning like in terms of me not touching something hot and then you going like damn that should hurt him. Not touching that. That's right. A little bit but yeah, that's a good one. Like you being able to fight off some sort of a bug. I would love to be able to take your immune response and also embedded in and distribute that knowledge to other people. Yeah. That's a good way to put it too. I like that way. Okay but then how did, okay, MTEL got acquired by Aspen Tech. And then you ended up working within Aspen Tech for a while on that transitionary process. Yeah, did a two-year period back with the parent company before I moved on. And then what was the, like moving on, like what happened within you where you were like, it's time? I think, I mean there were some just low level things involving a retention package and a vesting schedule but above and beyond that huge respect for Aspen Tech actually learned a lot. They spun out of MIT in the 80s and they at the time had sort of the largest amount of chemical engineers in the world that were, they did software to simulate and then run and optimize all the worldwide chemical and refining plants and just massive, massive industries. And so I learned a lot. They also had one of the highest profit margins of any publicly traded company and the fiscal discipline was amazing to see but at the same time as an entrepreneurial technologist, you know, doing budgeting and forecast and all that wasn't really, that was too much of the public company perspective. So I learned a huge amount but I think got to the point where I really am a huge believer in small teams and the ability to make big impact and effects. So I knew that that was more of my pull and then also really on the investing side, the ability to also leverage that into other investing in small teams and letting them grow as well. Okay and then what about the first then moments of, you know, okay, well it's time, I'm departing, I'm ready to do small teams and make big change with that. What were those ideas that were kicking in for you and how did, you know, Neal Cortex Ventures, how did Sandbox, how did Augmented Mind, how did these things come up? Yeah, it's actually, it's an interesting evolution there because after the exit, I did have some more time on my hands, it wasn't the 100 hour work weeks anymore and so on. And so I formed this sort of AGI mastermind group and it was a collection about 10 people and a lot of them had both some research background but also some frontline experience launching startups and seeing real world adoption effects and so on. And they each came from different backgrounds, some were robotics, some were human computer, some were neuro tech, all these different kind of arena areas and we'd meet once a month and talk about paths to super intelligence or artificial general intelligence. And so some of the impetus for the book was actually kind of crowdsourcing, getting a finger on the pulse within the AI community and then of course I had one from with the mainstream from the media and so on. And I just saw this big disconnect between what was kind of being portrayed and what I saw, you know, in the front lines or the ground with respect to what today's AI was doing and how it was complementary. And so really a lot of the perspectives for the book came from, you know, diving in with that group discussing these things. And I guess you could think of it as partly, it was partly a call to action within the AI community and then partly getting a message out outside the AI community as well. Wow. Okay. The mastermind for paths to AGI. That's a really interesting transition. Yeah. Whoa. Okay. And then, okay, as that's these gatherings are happening and you're masterminding these paths, then did it also, like, I'm so curious about both what were the different conversations about the paths to AGI and then also how did like New York Cortex Ventures and Sandbox and Augmented Minds, how did those come up? Yeah. Well, the, yeah, so a lot of the conversations were about where we've had wins and where we have not had wins. And there was a lot of non wins. So people in the AI community know that we've had some great wins and we kind of have halfway self-driving cars and voice recognition, voice assistance, but we know there's a huge list of accomplishments that we have not yet hit. And so we've all heard about hype, life cycles and so on, but a lot of our conversations are, why haven't we gone faster in these areas and why have we gone fast in certain other areas? So it was kind of dissecting that and some of it had to do with where we had ample data and where there were more concrete things and circumscribed domains like gaming where it's less of an open system with uncertainties and feedback loops and things that complicate the ability for AI to thrive. But so that was a lot of the perspectives there. And there were a number of people that had perspectives on human AI collaboration. Some people were part of that DARPA funded PAL project, which became KLO with SRI that spun out Siri and some other technologies. So we had some of the kind of DARPA military perspective on it and then some other perspectives. But yeah, I think then it really helped me motivate to decide both to write a book and to launch. So neocortex ventures and the sandbox were born as just a mechanism to fund technologies in the space, both to accelerate progress, but also to fund the human AI kind of augmentation aspect. And the sandbox was born as a physical accelerator with office space where we could plug people in and give them the space and network and mentors and typically invest as well. Yeah, the spin outs now make sense. Now, what was their specific order like in terms of augmented mind then neocortex ventures then sandbox or did they all kind of happen around the same time? How did that work? Neocortex ventures was launched first. That was sort of launched as a really underground kind of thing pretty early on. But then I started working on the book to crystallize the ideas from these mastermind group meetings and also to really dive into the research on what are the human gifts and what are the AI gifts and how at a detailed level could they be complementary. And so yeah, and then the sandbox also launched around the same time. One of my colleagues Shane Scaff here was one of the key people to push that and I came on as a partner to help with that as well. And then what are some of those human gifts and what are some of the AI gifts? That's an interesting one. It turns out and this is something I don't think is very well discussed in the mainstream. So the human gifts, I mean a lot of us think, okay well humans are creative and that is a gift and that's true but actually even in a domain like math we had the first automated theorem prover in 1956 called the logic theorist. It's kind of the dawn of artificial intelligence and we thought we had our deep blue moment. Humans were surpassed at math. Turns out 60 years later humans are at the pinnacle. So one of the human gifts is creativity even in very logical mathematical domains like math itself at making these nonlinear creative leaps where we're coming up with theorems that we intuitively know are correct and then we eventually fill in the steps and prove them. And so both generating theorems that are true and that we eventually prove, people like Richard Feynman in physics where he would come up with theories or explanations and it would frustrate other physicists to the point where one of them disparagingly called him one of the great intuitionists of our era and that was a subtle dig at the fact that it took other people to fill in the steps sometimes. And Einstein himself people actually, he didn't fill in all the steps and the proofs because he was just so brilliant intuitively. So I mean some of the gifts are creativity but even in very engineering or mathematical domains and then a host of other things that come from our embodied cognition. So we grow up and run thousands or millions of experiments trial and error interacting with our environment. We have this intense curiosity and drive to understand the world as well as intense drive for a physical agency to be able to manipulate and modulate it. And with those two whatever environment I mean I think we have so much plasticity that it's interesting to think if we were born on Mars or somewhere else like we probably could to a certain degree adapt. And so AI doesn't do that today. I mean you can think way in the future where baby robots that adapt and learn through trial and error and develop a embodied cognition of the world but today they certainly don't do anything near that. They mostly passively learn from massive, massive data sets and we live in a real-time world with physical interactions, social interactions. And so there's just this massive gulf between the two and they give rise to different gifts and different strengths that are really complementary when you get down to it. So and that's what I think is very untapped both from a technology investment perspective but also from just an awareness perspective when some of the fear is about AI. That one makes me really want to cry. It's so beautiful, really. It's gorgeous. There's an edge of knowledge that we've been pushing for so long as humans and that there are a lot of times this really deep sometimes it feels like it's just God channeling through us and for us to push that edge we're like intuiting what is beyond the edge of knowledge that we know. And then everyone says that's fucking ridiculous. Your net it's impossible. It's not going to happen. And then the burden of genius is on us in a sense to just stick with it and to push and to push and to push and to propose these super contrarian outside of the box ways of thinking. And then again it's like sometimes people are so damn creative that they spend all of their time out at that edge trying to conceptualize and come up with new ways to push it and then they're like can we have some assistance from people to actually make those incremental steps that are needed to hypothesize and to prove repeatedly that that is actually true. I love that. It just really just takes me into all of the ways that we've just made ideas and have made a life better by pushing that edge over time. So then maybe some of the ways that AI's gift right now at least is to do things that are maybe a little bit more on like narrow intelligence. Totally. And I mean the ability to do repetitive obviously pattern recognition on datasets well beyond human reach and also to be more consistent. So like perfectly repetitive pattern recognition that doesn't part of our gift as humans in fact is that our memories are actually always changing. Every time we retrieve like content and Dressel memory we contextualize it to who we're now telling it to or the room we're in and sometimes that's good. Sometimes it's not good. Sometimes you do want perfect consistency and yeah so the strengths of AI to take massive volumes of data but then the another the more empowering strength I think is the ability to offload some of the menial intellectual housekeeping that a lot of us are stuck doing and actually help us have a lens unto ourselves where we start to it's like when you learn a second language and you start to understand syntax and grammar and symbols and meaning and you see a second form of intelligence and we start to understand the taxonomy of intelligence but start to maybe understand our self. I think a lot of us think humans like intelligence is one of the gifts that tends to set us apart in certain realms and but so maybe getting a lens to understand that better is a really empowering area and then further I feel like many of us are living in almost like a little bit of a dystopia with illusions of free will and are stuck doing things or driven by different external forces and what if you could unlock from some of that to really pursue your your own fulfilling and creative pursuits. What a profound way to look at what is this intelligence explosion that's happened with AI because it gives us a new way of looking at our own intelligence for really like you said the first we need that second language you understand your the first language better and how it works same thing with our own intelligence now that we have an AI we understand our own intelligence a little bit more because I like that a lot I also liked what you said about children too I liked how you it's just so true that children are these little scientists and that they're always like hypothesizing and you know and imagining and tinkering and and and understanding and they're mirroring a lot of the things that the parents and community are doing around them and it's almost as though like they themselves have this infinite creative potential and then we file them into the economic machinery that usually squashes the creative potential and so like what is the new paradigm for taking the youthful creative spirit and just like having it flourish from age five to 10 to 15 to 20 instead of you know file it into little you know fill in these bubbles on these tests and then and then go do work that doesn't give you fulfillment or meaning in life so it's a whole new change and it's gorgeous because it feels like millennials and Gen Z are basically sniffing out the bullshit and they're sniffing out the archaic lines of code and they're saying enough with that this is the new paradigm this is where we're going this is what we're doing it's really exciting okay now what then are you looking at with neocortex ventures and sandbox like who are some of the organizations that you're like aha yes we will either give you our mentor network in our acceleration space here or we want to invest in what you're doing how do you how are you picking those and like give us some examples yeah well it's usually it's a two way thing we want to make sure that we obviously vet any in the sandbox to start with you know will companies will come in and maybe pitch where they're at what they've built whether they have a pilot customer or what status they're at and that kind of thing and we'll assess do we think you know do we think this is the right potential we can't accept everyone so some there's going to be some filtering of that maybe it's we think it's a great idea but it's too early or too late or whatever it is but then the second part is can we help them and actually that's almost more important we'll look at is this a consumer play here we only do business to business enterprise we just don't have the experience in in be the business to consumer we'll look at what vertical is it in do we have an expertise in that is a hardware software we tend to lead more towards software although we've now had some hybrid startups one examples in life science where there's a hardware and software component there's another one dealing with that so so some of them aren't hard and fast filters but so it's like can we can we help them and do we think they fit our profile of the startup we're looking to plug in some examples we have we have a synthetic biology startup that's doing optimizing DNA printing with some machine learning processes it's kind of a trial and error thing that goes through temperature gradients when you print DNA essentially by assembling these oligos together into strands of DNA and so a lot of things where machine learning is going in and maybe changing or disrupting a market and it tends to be very vertical applications as well so like machine learning and industry x you mentioned narrow earlier so they do tend to be very narrow in nature with neocortex ventures my investment thesis is sort of twofold one is definitely that for the foreseeable future sort of you know two to three years i still think narrow ai plays are are going to be the most successful meaning ai in this industry or ai in that industry horizontal platform plays across industries i think eventually we'll get there but i don't think we're quite there now and at least that's not what i would i personally target the augmented intelligence is is another key focus and that one is an interesting one because it is so new that it takes no one is really describing themselves as that i think they're actually just starting to one encouraging thing is that i mean the book came out october 2018 so last year and garner just put out a report in the last week saying that they actually forecast augmented intelligence will be a 2.9 trillion dollar industry and to me that's encouraging because i feel like we've been needing a wake-up call and it's it was very encouraging usually numbers like that will be a wake-up call so i think this will help with some of these companies right now if i find one they're probably not calling themselves that so it takes more digging and curation to find them and you're calling it augmented intelligence augmented intelligence yeah okay and then that and the augmented intelligence is human ai collaboration that's correct yeah okay and then okay you see you gave us some of the examples on on sandbox and new cortex ventures now maybe give us some of the um these optimal ways that you already see it happening as well as where you see it going where human gifts and ai gifts are synergizing into a centaur yes definitely well i i and i like the centaur because this hybrid being had powers greater than the sum of the parts right like it was like this sort of super human being and i do think that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts they kind of the humans augment the ai that ai augments the humans and you get this one plus one is is greater than two and so um so yeah in terms of um i guess the the examples of that um are you asking in particular like specific examples of that right now yeah let's do it yeah so i think um it is definitely a newer domain um i'm seeing some of the former people that were in the sri project behind like uh DARPA the DARPA funded um a project originally called PAL and they called it um Kaila which is cognitive assistant that learns and and organizes and so that like the voice assistant was sort of a sliver of of what the potential was so now it's like how do we you know get the rest of the 99 percent of the vision of that and some of that would be for example um if you think about all the text we deal with so some nlp uh incorporation into that where we can offload if you had like a hundred assistants that you could say go research these things and bring me back the results you could go so much faster in coming up with hypotheses running and producing outputs and that kind of thing so nlp is definitely one of the the key areas i've been focusing on that um but i think i think there's a whole a whole bunch of them so they're going to be coming out here shortly and then where would it where does it feel like intuitively that like out of the dislike this um perspective like three trillion dollar future of of augmented intelligence like where is it going to be most most common most evident but also just most uh useful like where's the greatest utility with it like right now we already have these incredible cameras and this incredible um audio capturing system the distribution system on the with the information technology infrastructure we have these computers already and phones that are augmenting us so tremendously um what else like are like on on the voice side of things the units are now in so many homes and offices all over the place lights this color i feel this way change the mood like this maybe spray some scent in the you know room to change mood you know music all these like yeah with the augmented reality and virtual reality um transition that we're going through as well and how that's augmenting our intelligence so we are where where will it be that that you know that ai is maybe picking up some of the the patterns and that they're giving you know these useful insights into humans like we also talked about our biometric states like yeah where where yeah where's he going yeah no it's it's really interesting i mean i feel i actually have a slightly contrarian perspective on that because i feel like a lot of the technology described email smartphones notifications social networks text messages is actually knocking us out of our core gift so i feel like we've actually created an environment today where we're undermining our number one gift and strength which is is the creativity the eureka moments the epiphanies that we have and so if we're moving to a chapter which i think we definitely are where menial low level repetitive stuff is no longer going to be value adding we're going to be moving up a value chain where these epiphanies and eureka moments are really going to be our key gift it's not going to be just assembling things and assembly line for 12 hours a day which i don't think is really empowering for anyone to do so if if our if these creative sparks are our gift i think my hope for the next generation of technology is going to be we figure away reduce the distractions like almost all this tech driven by advertising is designed to capture your attention i think we all understand the attention economy and we're surrounded by tech that's that's zapping us out of that so the next wave what i think would be much more empowering is finding the better balance where if you want to opt in for this period of time to this notification driven world where people expect instant responses on text and email and status reports but what if you had tech that you could actually delegate some of that so in another example is in a lot of work environments you have to produce status reports on a regular basis and for me that knocks me out of creative flow state right i'm sitting near jam and oh i got a report to the boss it's friday i got to tell him what i've done what i haven't done easy task for ai something that's working with us monitoring us auto produce those status reports communicate it get rid of low level distractive communication and emails yeah when you want the social part we're all social beings that's when you opt in and you go and you socialize and you have conversations but when you're in your flow state it's not when you should be interrupted with that so that's that's one key area i'm so happy that you ventured us into that point it's like we're in this beautiful pinnacle creative flow state that we do not want interrupted and then we're like being demanded our our attention is being demanded in other domains and it's just what is the right way you said there was this like idea of maybe like an opt in so maybe like i don't even know how i could handle this opt in thing i don't know because like flicking on the switch onto receiving notifications in itself is already tremendously overwhelming for me period already off the bat phones always on silent every single notification on every single app is off social apps deleted from the device unneeded unnecessary total period and no when you message me it does not mean that you will get a reply even the same day or the same week for that in that case i'm in a creative flow state i'm doing things that are aligned with my north star if that comes in in a certain way that it needs to be addressed immediately because it's it's also very funny it's like totally you know as above so below this very spiritual principle very nature-oriented principle it's also very true about our communication like as above so below in the sense that not only does someone message me and i'm like i can't reply to that it's uh no way i can reply to that well the same thing happens to me all the time i'm reaching out to people way smarter than me and i'm not getting replied it's so so so true as above so below and and that's that but that's the way that it that's the way it rolls and we we have to we have to admire that also as we reach out to people that are smarter than us that are more influential than us that they're in their creative flow states and they can't also reply to everybody that's reaching out to them i'm really happy that you mentioned the ways to automate these things too like the reports those reports are like right now we have a we have an intern that's working with us and like dude that weekly report that i have to fill out it's like it doesn't even matter if it takes three or five minutes because it doesn't actually only take three or five minutes it also is the switching cost totally you have to switch yourself from the flow state to the do thing three to five minutes there but all your firing and wiring and activity that was happening in the flow state it's not just going to immediately pop back to its state that it was in it's going to take you along it's like trying to get the car from zero to sixty again and now during the week you're thinking ahead because you know you have to produce that report so there's a riffle of it yes and the other one is there's a bunch of a bunch of these like like x.ai's another one that's really interesting it's doing the email automation like as long as i just say yes to my email assistant for scheduling a meeting between alex and i then from there i don't do anything literally the assistant will work with you or even better your assistant virtual assistant total assistant and they'll just find wednesday at nine a.m. and that's it and it's just like that like it just appears on our calendars and we're like thank goodness we didn't have to do that i think that itself will be freeing for me i mean i have a stress response to calendar scheduling because especially for that two-year period i was almost always triple booked so i'm always writing these oh i'm so sorry apologetic emails and it's a little stressful but and so freeing yourself from if i'm myself at least from calendaring i would so be so happy to delegate that and then you know go and hire up the value chain if you had an a partner that can do scheduling that's great some low-level stuff what if you had a private and this is something they call teaming or human a i not just personal assistant but like scientific co-collaborator co-founder at that level something that knew your entire life's history of writing and intellectual thought i mean transformative right and i'm looming on the horizon but part of my push to accelerate is to really get there and get that out so it's not only a digital twin of alex bates to be able to do things like see okay like let's run a simulation of what happens if alex works out every day for one hour for the next week and see what happens to his productivity sociology his life outcome all this stuff longevity but if then it's also like can we literally have alex have a one-hour meeting with his digital twin whereas digital twin like purposely like pokes you in the spots that maybe you need to really work on your own self-growth and your self-development like your triggers and stuff but then also like plays like intellectual creative tennis with you on the ideas that you have and all of a sudden you're like whoa that was epic i just learned so much is like a compression algorithm for creativity for love it i love it so it's like a virtual assistant a virtual medical coach a virtual intellectual scientific collaborator creative collaborating coach spiritual collaborating coach and what you even mentioned alludes to maybe almost like a life coach like it's a combination of things where and some people think of significant others and partners and so on for fulfilling some of this and certainly they do but it actually puts too much pressure on another person to be your therapist life coach co-collaborator i think actually it could freeze some of our relationships yes so much pressure of that but the possibility here you even alluded to like some of the nudging that could happen we there's this book the paradox of choice we like freedom we don't like choice if i have to make 50 choices in a day i'm just exhausted even what to dress in a court seat like Steve Jobs just wear the same thing every day what to eat i mean all these micro decisions are actually taxing on us so what if what if we had an ai that could learn personalize delegate what would that free us up to have the will power and an energy left to decide to do now that we don't have to make 50 micro decisions that are that are meaningless and so that's an example to me of where we don't yet have true free will in some of these areas and the exciting ability to unlock us and what would we do with that extra bandwidth i mean it's it skies the limit that's such a good one that with our partners and our relationships we see this happening all the time divorce rates are really high people are pursuing careers and like memetics over genetics like their spread of their ideas rather than the spread of their genes to a single child all there's all these types of like examples of this where it's like the it's both a gorgeous idea of like oh i found this like you know twin flame or this soulmate where we can just you know help each other grow so so beautifully in every single domain in respect like yeah that's like that's possible exists and like you can totally get that and whatnot but like you also realize that you have a north star and they have a north star and you have to also you know create both as you create together you also create independently and away from one another and that there are ways that that they can just not optimally optimize you like you can optimize yourself more effectively through a really powerfully trained um AI coach and i think that that's like hands down something that a lot of people are really excited about um and and also just like it's going to be really important that it's trained well like there was the the other recent uh delivery of something that was really profoundly awakening which was that if yeah just training um like a you you you training uh facebook on who you are based on your likes um over 300 of them and they know you better than you know yourself or your partner knows you there's like how many yeah how much how much internet activity does it take for the AI to know me better than I know myself like AI knows the last time that you know I visited the specific site or that I bought this certain thing better than I remember it and then it's like you know if I'm trying to say that oh I haven't done that in a while they're like no you did it last week like you can't just say that you know that you went on a run last week because you haven't been on a run in a month and like yeah yeah that was such a fascinating the Cambridge analytic of the five factor ocean model of profiling that was used with your likes to yeah no no more about your parents or your significant other and it worked shockingly well and of course was used for some elections but I think the knee jerk reaction to that was we need to shut everything down and go back to the middle ages of privacy um I think you can guess where I'm going to come out on this this position I understand where they're coming from but I also feel like regressing in the face of fear that we could be manipulated you can either do one of two things you can say I'm going to cut off from the world and live in a castle with a moat or you can say I'm going to try to uplift myself to understand myself better so I'm less susceptible to manipulation because I still we're still social creatures we want to get out there's always a chance we can be manipulated or taken advantage of and what if we could evolve and transcend our own capabilities so that we're just more resistant and and I think obviously that's the side I would be on and so likewise and you know looking at the next evolution from that another uplifting thing for me is AI combined with this area called neuro tech and I know you've talked to a number of people in this space and of course we met physically at the at the brain mind yes meeting for the first time in person and that consortium so neuro tech is a step change that's looming even the there's some people in the AI community they're very skeptical actually about about humans they're like we're here now um the obsolete in a decade and I don't fall into that camp I know some of these people they're good people I think maybe in a couple centuries and of course we'll be human I the transcendent thing comes out in symbiosis but but you know what so so there's the skeptics think we'll have no role but neuro tech so neuro tech and AI neuro tech will be a step change where our human computer human AI interface evolves from a keyboard a mouse and a little square screen to direct communication and incredibly empowering so and actually one other thing that excites me is there's this area of teaming research and DARPA has a new project teaming could actually be human to human like the Apollo program actually like the Manhattan project and the Manhattan project cracked nuclear energy in three years it's kind of mind boggling when you look back yeah it was like 30 core scientists and then a bigger team of 300 but what if we could all have our own Manhattan projects and figure out what's the best collaboration brainstorming even some like cognitive dissonance like there's the person on the team that you know you really have to prove it and they have a competing theory and then eventually lock in on the actual solution and so human to human human to AI I'm super excited about the intersection of neuro tech and AI and we talked about the empowerment the self insight so most of this data now is because it's used for advertising is used for manipulation to either get attention or to buy products what if it was used to give us neuro feedback bio feedback insight into yourself and at that point we'd all be more resistant to manipulation because we'd actually understand ourselves better so beautifully synthesized again so there's the there's this like it's it's now becoming more and more prevalent it's so interesting it went from the the GDPR it went from that to like there's also like the these like hyper authoritarian let all the data flow to the to the to the to the authoritarian regime of the country or whatever and then there's the like absolutely I'm moving to the middle of the forest no way ever will I ever let them ever data data my data my data does protect and hide and the most thing that you were giving an example about there's like there's like it's like every scenario that's being basically illustrated is one of it's it has some sort of a fear response to it all of them almost do and like we need to paint the the one that's filled with love the one that's filled with peace the one that's filled with self and collective actualization we need to paint that one and make that the most vivid and then drive our resources to that one and then make that one the one that happens and that's that's the best way to view data to just to build a social fabric where I trust my biometrics my psychometrics my everything to flow there for it to be a really good coach for me on medical on north star coach all this type of stuff and you did also point out how on the neurotech side that one's extremely beautiful I mean these these devices have already been neurotech in a sense the phones and the computers are already a massive addition to our our cognitive capabilities and capacities you would be you'd be surprised at at how just like 20 years ago without like the democratization of these devices so so ubiquitously that when you know when we wanted to to look something up when we weren't near like a computer you know what would we do just go to the library go to get an encyclopedia or whatever it was and and uh like now it's as easy as just saying it to the voice device and asking them the question about about what we want to learn about I mean like the the speed at which we are augmenting ourselves already with the with the technology with technology and now the next iterations moving away from meat sticks on keyboards towards yeah towards it's like it's it's really beautiful I always think about this because I myself have to edit edit a tremendous amount of video for for the show but you know just like using um any of the video editing softwares um with a keyboard and a mouse is just just think about the next steps the next steps are like you know throwing in the time like these clips from the from the video with you know without space and me just literally just throwing them into this you know to this beautiful three-dimensional visual digital space and then for me to be able to take them and just so easily just adjust them with my fingers in the space and and and furthermore is the thought is just with thought I can then go and edit these videos and make creative beautiful pieces of content with just my thoughts and you also gave the example of the team as well like can you literally get you know how can you in just it was so there's three years at the manhattan project and 30 people with a how many total 300 hundred and then there was bigger support teams but core teams of scientists partly do the confidentiality and compartmentation but they're almost shocking they pulled this off in such a short period of time like what is possible if the pressure is cooking so much and especially like they didn't have what we have now with the corpus of all knowledge being available on the internet so it's like yeah what is what is possible now like you have this beautiful idea right there's a gorgeous idea that you want to execute in the world but it's like kind of overwhelming because you know you have to take all of these crazy long steps to get there but also you also know that you may have a second one and a third one that come up later along the way what if we could compress that time by having the AI coaches and assistants along the way to help us get to that first north star that beautiful release of something creative and then just go to the next one instead of only do one in a lifetime maybe you can do three or five totally yeah I mean it's amazing to think because you think about types of augmentation first of all I think we'll start to get a better understanding of our own of creativity and our own what makes us most creative and something that can actually personalize our environment for our own peak creative moments and so that would be hugely uplifting and then also the the interface aspect so it could be the speed of thought so they say that when you dream it's in hyperspeed like in the movie inception and part of the reason they think is there's no sensory input and part of our perception of time is all the sensory input so it does kind of slow down when you can process without that it's like you're operating at a faster speed and so if you think this is kind of getting a lot there but what if you could be brainstorming and you weren't having to move mice and keyboards but your brain was directly getting feedback it'd be like you're dreaming but in an awake state maybe you could think ten times faster we don't really know yet I know Elon Musk the recent announcement with Neuralink of course addresses the bandwidth bottleneck so that is when the boss we got the spinal cord sensory motor control and that's our interface to the real world but what if you could so first of all he's looking at tapping into the brain but even for the input output aspect where we do our brainstorming and that kind of thing that can all be greatly enhanced and so the Neurotech things that are happening I love how Elon is very impatient I mean in the good sense where I'm not going to wait a decade you're actually piloting next year and I know people that we met at BrainMind that are going to be implanting semi-invasive chips next year in their own brain because that's the only way to do it right now so they're going to read it on themselves but that path to me is going to be just an absolute game changer for our interface to AI and each other damn what a profound way to think about it is just that like if you think about yourself in the dream state it's like what's going on in that state with a lack of like you know at least like the physical input stream that's happening like why does it like what's going on with time and with my input stream in the dream space and like how much quicker could I and you know not have the bottleneck of needing to go down my spinal cord to move the mouse in the specific direction that I want to move in and get the feedback back of what I did and back up back up and through what I through what happened or through tactical you know just get it back up just what if it just how much faster could it be and what would what would I be able to achieve and okay let's talk about this what about you know handling this in a way that is like spiritually evolved because this is what's tough is that we have monkey politics still happening around the planet and we know that we're kind of sick of it like we're we are we're just we're sick of monkey politics we're sick of um of people not treating our planet like it's the thing that gives us life and that sustains us we're sick of um we're sick of like depending on something that is uh exogenous to us for our own uh divine potential like that I need some sort of a of a religion or a government or something that that versus me being able to discover myself that I am God within God and that um I don't and that if we all discovered that we wouldn't need a government to take care of things among us so that our lack of then that spiritual evolution is so evidently visible in all of the issues we have in our world our disconnect from nature and sources the reason why we have so many of the issues so how can we be trusted to to behave benevolently towards each other when we put ships in our brains what are your thoughts about that well another fascinating question and and I actually do occasionally discuss spiritual matters even relative to ai it's it's uh but and I think um it's really interesting so I was actually talking to daniel kredick who founded the empathy lab at google and we're talking about so you have ecu and and empathy and how can computers play in this space and some people are thinking the state of the art is reading every micro expression and inferring what your affective emotional state is and she said no actually a better goal is like ram das changing the channel where we treat each other almost as like spiritual beings we have our own life journey that gave us probably some imprints that made us who we are now but instead of trying to understand every micro response to things we said or misinterpretations what if we just change the channel to a higher level of awareness and interaction something that the tech committee would normally not think about at all but actually and it blew me away when she said that but it actually it is it is fascinating like the goal isn't really to deal with micro expressions and micro emotions it's it's to have all this evolve to a higher level I do think that the neuro feedback and the ai sort of partner is part of that journey because to get to a spiritual level part of it is understanding our self and maybe unlocking from some things in our past maybe it's some traumatic things we go through childhood it's such a random process certain things have an imprints are made and it has massive impact later in life and in general I think we all have certain types of free will and certain types of spirituality but a lot of us are drawn back by some of these things and so ability to get more of that self insight and to really evolve and transcend and there's a lot of ways to talk about transcendence but I think technology definitely can be part of that that journey you're spot on that changing the channel to see each other as spiritual divine beings that all have our own beautiful note that we're playing in the symphony or a beautiful paint stroke that we're doing on the canvas of creation viewing it that way it transforms you forever if you're a guy you no longer just look at a woman's physical features you you start thinking about their spirit and what their purpose is if you are a if you are if you are a person of of any like skin color from around the world you don't fear other people for their skin color but rather you wonder what happened to them growing up that that that is different philosophically morally than when where I grew up because it was from a different part of the world that had a different philosophy and a different upbringing so it's like do you just you start seeing things differently and then that you can never go back to the to the old ways once that once that happens so like turning up the channel on spirituality around the planet will eradicate the the the potentiality of malevolence as we go into the exponential technology age I mean 100 because if you think about augmenting 7.7 billion people to superhuman levels just like the centaur maybe some people if you have some mental health issues and some people actually have actually genetic things which maybe lead to psychopathic or sociopathic whatever and so some it's a combination of nature and nurture some maybe it actually is pure nature and they just are wired some people don't have amygdala responses for certain things and maybe in a sense it's not their fault but if we could understand that and solve the mental health aspect before we give them the superhuman augmentation tools then we are moving to a spiritual level but we're addressing the mental health issues where they where they care we're addressing traumas where they occur so that we all are sort of in an actualized state now we're ready to take that leap and maybe be augmented to that level so I think obviously that's part of the the journey and the solution there but but yeah it's really interesting to think about how it's almost most people think of spirituality as the opposite of technology but I see it as is a tool to unlock us from some things that are actually limiting us from being more spiritual there's no other way than to beautifully mesh together spirituality and science there's just no other way those two things are hand-in-hand the most important things for us to just fully embody and intertwine and actualize that's like that's what God that's what creation wants us to remember that we come from source and that as we intellectualize and break apart the atom into its smallest components and as we understand the brain of its smallest components and we keep doing that process that remember that you also come from source and remember that you have a spiritual purpose here that you've come to that we've all come to do on this beautiful symphony slash painting of of art of creation there's no other way they have to come together we literally are in you know Silicon Valley Silicon Beach what San Diego's name I mean beach ish but then of course that overlaps LA so to be determined I think we're trying to actually call so Cal Silicon Beach thing because Silicon Valley if it includes San Francisco we where perspective is LA and San Diego are part of the same collective and Silicon Valley gets lumped together like like SF and Oakland and San Jose and the North Bay and sometimes Monterey and Santa Cruz and stuff so like fine and so Cal can have Silicon Beach be San Diego and LA thank you yeah thank you we just solved it like every single team in Silicon Valley in Silicon Beach especially because in Silicon Beach you have Hollywood along with all the tech which has a lot of entertainment power to spread memes around the world but Silicon Valley obviously has these massive tech giants and whatnot that every single one of those teams needs to have a philosopher an ethicist moral scientist spiritual leaders meditation leaders psychedelic trainers psychedelic psychotherapists I'm saying like literally there should be a suite of spiritual actualization philosophy and ethicists that are at every single one of these massive companies in Hollywood's period period otherwise we are opening up the fragmentation of our spirit to accidentally allow the malevolence is to come through we're we're accidentally by not thinking well enough in advance opening up the potentials for it I mean it's so true there's such a power for storytelling and movies is such a visceral way to tell stories I also think that when you talk about like impact and bringing all those people and perspectives to make sure this is has a positive kind of endpoint even for investing I heard one investor made a comment I like to invest in one of the seven deadly sins and you think about social networks so I think there's there's an awakening happening in the investment community about the importance of impact investing and just impact not just pure economic bottom line right people and planet and it's interesting to think about the power of Hollywood and storytelling that also they're actually obviously recently they've been struggling cranking out blockbusters some of them come out but they've had a lot of a lot of duds and maybe people are tired of the old stories and the deadly sins maybe let's try to evolve that thinking too that's that's a really great idea what about your relationship with source what is that like my relationship is it's been a journey actually when I was a young engineer everything was ones and zeros and engineering and that's all that mattered there was no such thing as really psychology beyond like low level behaviors and bf skinner studies and so on and as I grew up and evolved and matured a little bit the concept of the w something actually wisdom right you brought up wisdom earlier and spirituality and source early on my perspective was I guess for like an agnostic it's unknowable so I don't even spend too much time thinking about it but as I've as I've gotten older I've become a lot more curious about it I definitely believe in some greater order I mean there you can interpret that number of ways I feel like the reason I'm so passionate about trying to understand the universe and ai's one tool to do that is I do think there's some beautiful meaning to it that we're just like an ant on the shore right now looking out and it's a long journey to even come close to starting to think that but one is appreciating that beauty and that the unknowns but the other part of me wants to quickly transcend the human limitations to where we can just get a little bit closer I mean the low level things are we in a simulation are there other forms of intelligent life out there but the meaning of life in the universe and getting closer to the source I think the source would embrace that and and to me science and engineering are one of many tools but are not like antithetical or heretical to that that journey and then what about your relationship with the the way that free will and determinism interplay another great one okay I want a big believer in that free will can exist I don't think everything is determined I do think that a lot of us have illusions of the amount of free will we have and and everything from getting better self insight but also better insight into the universe and and things that happen like I say to each one of us in our life journey and understanding the universe as a whole will give us so much more freedom and I think a lot of us spend so much our life buffeted by things happening and some of them are beautiful and spontaneous but others are are things that are just disempowering or stressful so how do we what is the optimal like once we start to have more freedom and and to pursue more creative and fulfilling things what will that look like and how will we use that freedom I think it's going to be really interesting and you know I think we're just at the cusp of starting to understand and explore that but I look forward to having more of it does it feel as though there are forces that are at play on the planet that are channeling through us onto this board game that is planet earth like sort of good and bad yeah like that yeah the star wars the dark side well I actually feel like I don't know if I'd caught forces I think that each of us has a potential for good or bad I think that some people have had traumatic experiences or or just mental illness that do things that we think of as bad or evil or not empathetic and some of them weren't parented well and were raised in toxic households and they lash out when they're older and were like that person is a horrible human being shouldn't even be around but if if we can all I guess what I call evil I mean when you look at someone's entirety of their nature their nurture where they grew up and doesn't necessarily excuse the bad behavior but you start to understand okay here's all the things that led up to that I like to zoom out and say for all these people that do these bad things that we don't want to have how can we solve the things that happened their childhood their parenting maybe genetics in some cases and how can we solve those problems and then maybe there wouldn't be so many of these dark things happening in terms of whether there's I don't believe in like sort of like a you know a satan type thing in fact I mean in the enlightenment a lot of the scientists were burned at the stake for tapping into the dark force and committing witchcraft and of course everything seems like witchcraft or you understand how it works so I don't believe in that kind of dark force but yeah I think I guess like as we move up to almost really almost godlike capabilities as we look at this augmentation path it brings up a whole new set of questions and ethics almost if you could bring back an extinct species should you should you bring back all extinct species do we need to create a millionaire it's like a bunch of brand new questions come out that are kind of crazy to think about and even good and bad like here's a crazy thing someone recently told me they were glad they went to a really bad school with gangs and so on because it gave them character and that flips the whole thinking like do we need to go through some tough episodes to then get to the other side and appreciate and have gratitude those are complicated questions I can't say how the answer I love those questions that the do the roots need to reach down to hell for the leaves and fruits to reach the heavens is such a good question that's a really really tough one and on the other side of the greatest traumas are the greatest treasures would we get those treasures if there weren't traumas who know I mean that's that's a really if you're born into a utopia like a perfect world and it's just like you're just trying to incrementally make the utopia better it's like is it like how what is that like is that perfect is that a perfect creation where is this actually a perfect creation deep question deep question that's all I have to say that's a good one that's a great that that'd be so funny to for me to like finish the question about free will or determinism and you're like deep question that you just like look at me it's a good one I'll often do that sometime when someone asks me a question yeah because that also shows you know humility because it's a really hard these are really tough tough questions okay let's ask one of the toughest questions which is what is the teleology of our species like what is the purpose or the meaning of life yeah another great one I mean to me I think humans have this quest for expiration on the one hand we don't like change and we're fearful of change and things that shake things up but yet we have this deep thirst for expiration and also understanding and understanding the world and universe around us in terms of purpose I think definitely striving up almost up to God like just understanding the universe understanding the purpose the source as you call it and I mean I remember being tear to shardan talking about the the noosphere and right now I mean when we start to understand we're a bunch of atoms and they're actually comprised into a bunch of cells we're actually a trillion cells that don't know who we are and they're all buzzing around and getting our energy and splitting and all this crazy stuff and then we're this emergent phenomenon and now there's 7.7 billion of us on the planet and so this one path of each of us maybe transcending our limits I actually feel like self-awareness isn't really the end game it's actually maybe a higher level of group consciousness or beyond just our boundaries right I mean when you get into the physics you talked that earlier the boundaries actually not so concrete and when you think about memetics and thought and so on I think there's transcend like becoming more human by transcending human limits I feel like is one of our purposes oh I love that one we as 8 billion cells it can realize the full collective consciousness that we all make up and then for that to fully realize itself as source being that that rather than just the individual cells realizing but the whole collective oh that's a good one it's good and then and then making more cells like could a hundred billion cells be in the cosmos be being creative having meaning having consciousness and all realizing that they're coming from source what a freaking cool creation this is I remember I was hanging out with a friend recently and I and I said I said something this is with great confidence but also great humility I said source and creation is gorgeous and beautiful but we can make something better and they got a little upset but I see we were coming from it's still sourced it's still another creation it couldn't that's an oral boros even that's what we just make the next one and it just yeah yeah yeah how many layers are we in a simulation Alex almost back to sort of the agnostic thing a fascinating question I think it is answerable with with AI so it's pure speculation without too much data it doesn't feel like one to me but is I could be in a simulation I wouldn't necessarily feel like like it was so I mean all the studies I've seen you can find these glitches or defects I think really the only path to answering it is is augmentation and just accelerating our intelligence to levels like trillions beyond what we are today to answer that that one and the intelligent extraterrestrial life are ones that burn at me yes so I'd be I'd love to speed up the answers to those yeah yeah evolve from cricket intelligence to be able to answer those questions better thank you yeah yeah good way to put it and then what is the most beautiful thing in the world I mean to me seeing a fully seeing when people become so actualized and and fulfilled that the love for everyone around them and the respect and gratitude appreciation for the present moment whether it's seeing your child playing in a playground or someone else's child or just humanity as a whole like appreciating nature to me like that level of both gratitude lack of judgment just acceptance we always talked about sort of accepting where spiritual beings life is spiritual the universe may be spiritual and is realizing how beautiful that all is to me is that it would be a beautiful thing so beautifully said and this has just been one of my favorite interviews thank you Alex it's been such a pleasure thank you so much for coming on the show really amazing as always I love your work and really enjoyed this so much thank you thank you thank you thank you everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode also let us know what you're thinking about the conversations that we had today about human AI collaboration about the future of the augmented mind and augmented humans merging together with AI and collaborating have more conversations with your friends your families co-workers people online on social media about that be at the cutting edge of that conversation and let us know your thoughts in the comments about those topics as well also check out the links in the bio below go check out neocortexventures.com check out the sandbox.ai come and visit if you're local in the San Diego area come and visit and also check out the augmented mind book link as well highly recommend checking that out and also support the artists the entrepreneurs the spiritual leaders the leaders in your community support them and help them grow support simulation our links are in the bio below to our PayPal cryptocurrency patreon linking and design cool merchant get paid all those links are below help us to continue doing cool things like coming on site to San Diego to do interviews and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we love you very much thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon peace that was so good thank you so much i absolutely loved there are several things that you said too where i'm like i'm so glad you're recording it like you captured some moments so beautifully we captured this whole game of tennis that's yeah that's what we did that's what this is that's all this is just capturing games of tennis between two worldviews and sharing it with other people and then having other people go whoa look at all those like that that inspired me i know what i'm going to do with that yeah it's transferring the minds of your nose here yeah yeah totally that's it