 I believe that the part that governments have to play, right? The governments have to make sure that the pandemic doesn't spread exponentially in the country, which you can achieve by enforcing social distancing and mask wearing and doing enough testing. But of course that's not very nice for economy, right? The real question on the side of economy and probably on the side of all of our social lives because people have our social animals and we wanna go out and meet. And I enjoy seeing you on Zoom a lot, right? But I enjoyed speaking to you directly at DLD much more. So we wanna get back to that. And I think that's a question that at least we're still working on. How can we use technology to maybe need less measures and still prevent exponential spread? Music Hans Christian Boos is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Chris is the founder of ARAGO, a member of the Digital Council of the Federal Government of Germany, author of many academic and business publications focusing in on artificial intelligence, computer networks, IT security and information management. Chris is also active in several boards and supports the European startup scene. Chris studied computer sciences at ETH Zurich and the Technical University, Darmstadt. R&D efforts are focused on distributed computing, graph theory and rule engines plus deductive logic in combination with reinforcement learning. Both approaches are consistent with the notion of the network being a global area for computation and storage. Similarly, they deal with the problem of ever growing information flows and with the desire to find intuitive ways of allowing businesses and their users to be in control of information and knowledge. Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thank you very much. I mean, what you just read was techies trying to be marketing, right? Doesn't work much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it does. And actually your biography is a lot longer. I could probably say a lot. You've been doing this for quite some time, not only in your studies, but you've been moving in this direction for a long time and I believe the way I've heard you put it in other talks is you've been able to hide out in your man cave or in your nice area to work for many years. And then in the last five years, really active in two years, you've had to come out and get on stage and educate people about the buzz around AI and that. But you've been working on this for a long time and so I could probably speak about your bio quite a bit. Am I getting it right? Yeah, I mean, I started ORAGO in 1995. And so really a long time ago, no one was really talking about AI at the time. And ORAGO was created to research AI in a more general way than that it's possible in a university setting because of the way we finance science today, you have to, as a professor, you have to specialize very, very quickly. And I believe that building AI that is useful to businesses and people needs components from many areas of this artificial intelligence research. And the only way to do that was to build a company that could incorporate these many flows. And how has the company been going? I mean, how are things progressing? I saw some changes a while back with a hero engine and maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. Well, there is a lot of movement on the company side, right? What it was, what phase it is in, how internationalism and all these questions. And I was very happy actually in the throes of the pandemic that I was able to buy back the company and take it more out of the investment space to allow us to do focused work. But if you look at it from a technology point of view, there's basically two components that are in there. On the one hand, it's a data operating system that allows us to have data that represents the world, that tries to really model the world. And then the second one is a problem solving engine, an engine that takes knowledge and tries to combine knowledge pieces in order to solve a problem that you give to the machine. Those problems could be totally different things. And I'd say one of the more interesting parts of how we approach the topic is not just learning from data, but actually learning from people as well. That's fabulous. Well, thank you for giving us a little update. The other update I'd like to hear from you is, so you have been doing this a long time. You've been kind of on not only innovation, cutting edge, emerging technologies in this space, but you've also been working with governments and large corporations who are trying to prepare themselves for the future, but also stay ahead of the curve. I wanna stick away during our conversations from too much marketing. I guess you can touch on that, how you'd like. My question really is, is how has maybe that prepared you to weather this pandemic and how have you been? I mean, we last saw each other in Munich at DLD. That was this year, before everything really hit hard and heavy. And we had some great conversations, but how have you weathered this pandemic and did any of that help prepare you? Yeah, I mean, I was pretty close to what was going on and how the initial shock of that there even is a pandemic and that it could spread exponential, the realization that there is such a thing as exponential spread of disease that, I mean, the scientists, the epidemiologists all knew, but we all learned that the hard way. And I think I was very fortunate or privileged that I was very close to this whole development. And I had the pleasure of speaking to several CDCs globally and seeing how they were handling it and how all of a sudden for years and years they have been these warnings, but the CDCs have been all but ignored and all of a sudden they're all super center stage. And now the question that is coming up is can technology in any way help us in mastering the virus and mastering the type of life that we have? But I was totally fortunate because I was so incredibly busy, right? I didn't have much time to be depressed even though at some point we had very depressing news coming in every day when you're very close to the numbers. That is of course shocking, but if you're trying to get work done then this is also motivating for actually getting things done. So I had the absolute fortune of being extremely busy and having this feeling that you could maybe potentially contribute something to getting us out of that really incredibly bad situation. I think that that is a lot of motivation to get you up in the morning and start getting stuff done. And I think that for if I had worked in a business that just had to slow itself down or shut down and basically sent me on vacation, maybe I would have been fortunate because I love music and I love reading and all this because I could have kept myself busy. But I think there would have been way more depressing because this feeling that something is just being done to you and you can't do anything about it. I mean, that's horrible. I can relate to a lot of people feeling very bad about not having the freedom to do something about the pandemic. I mean, that's the hard part, right? So I was fortunate because I was in the middle of it and still am because I believe that technology could be one of the keys and actually reconquering normal. There was an app that you played a part in as well and the Corona app, is that correct? Yeah, we were part of or initiated this project that created first a platform for different approaches on how to do digital contact tracing and then the platform completely fell apart because we couldn't agree on, should there be multiple approaches or only one? Should it be with data collection or without data collection? Who should have the data and all of that? It's a very unfortunate thing that this fell apart because I think that we could have gotten to a better place much faster. This was also the time when the Apple Google initiative was created and they used some of the ideas from that initiative that is in there. And now it's still a commercial effort actually because I believe that the part that governments have to play, right? The governments have to make sure that the pandemic doesn't spread exponentially in the country, which you can achieve by enforcing social distancing and mask wearing and doing enough testing. But of course that's not very nice for economy, right? The real question on the side of economy and probably on the side of all of our social lives because people have our social animals and we wanna go out and meet and I enjoyed seeing you on Zoom a lot, right? But I enjoyed speaking to you directly in a DLD much more. So we wanna get back to that. And I think that's a question that at least we're still working on. How can we use technology to maybe need less measures and still prevent exponential spread? I think the government job of doing preventing exponential spread that has been pretty much done. Now it's the job of economy and society to, well, either accept a new normal where everything runs at half capacity and that will of course have huge economic effects that we probably won't like and then have social effects because it's harder to meet people and so on or find a solution how this is no longer necessary while still making sure that the virus doesn't spread. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot that even though with the lockdown that you have been involved in but it's also really just a continuation of things that you've been doing before and that we touched on this a little bit at DLD but it's being prepared instead of being reactionary to pandemics or problems that come in the future that we have the not only the digital transition but the tools of emerging tech and AI and whatever else we're working on up to speed to be able to react in a different way to almost prepare us for what is to come so that we have a little more resilience that we get through things a lot easier. That kind of leads me, you know, so you work with a German federal government and you're for the Bundestag and you kind of counsel them in AI, how does that look like help us lay person every day who might not be involved in that? What does that kind of counsel or advice look like and how can you help them with the transition? So first of all, I mean, this is a personal journey I can tell you about my personal experience here. First, when you get called by Ms. Merkel and she asked you, would you join this group of smart people to give advice to a government and there's no way you can say no, right? There's just no way you can say no. But I'm sure that everybody in this group had the same idea. It's like, oh my God, how do I get out of this very quickly? Because everybody's got enough work, right? So and why did I have this initial feeling that it would not be worthwhile is because if you're very distant to politics and the executive branch of a government then you always have this feeling nothing is moving, right? There's just nothing, a lot of talk, the very little action and that people have completely fixed mindsets that would never change. And I think this is what changed my mind is when we met the cabinet and it's really completely partly independent. When we met the cabinet for the first time they took a lot of time out of their busy days and they were completely open and they were listening and they were not just having their typical no, this is how we do data, this is how we do digital transformation, this is how we blah, blah, blah. Like everything was not set in stone and that's what gave the impression, at least for me to spend way more time on this than was ever allocated because there are lots of strategic decisions that needed to be made. And the interesting part about the way that Germany has set up its digital council is that it is not in existence to write a paper or have committee meetings where you have a defined deliverable, right? It is there to advise and have an opinion on the things that are happening and that are being done. And that is done in a way which is, it doesn't work through the press, right? It works through direct conversations and this means we actually have the liberty to say what is great and what is crap in very direct terms. And if you have to feeling that other, the people you're talking to are actually listening and thinking about it, right? That's when you feel that even if they then make different decisions, right? As with the corona, right? I always, I obviously was more for an approach that would have generated more data so we could manage them better. But I always said the government has to make a decision because it's not just that question that they have to deal with. So if you actually have this feeling that people listening to what you have to say and they take it into their decision-making process, that feels pretty good. And I have learned a lot about things that are possible. Many more things are possible and there's much more open-mindedness than you'd expect, especially at the top. And I've learned a lot about the small things that keep everything back, right? And that's kind of, there's a lot of very frustrating small things that is holding up how countries, not just Germany, but countries in general, move ahead because the structures are organically grown for such a long time. And there is, besides the rule book, there is an etiquette and everybody sticks to the etiquette. And a lot of time governments forget that they are actually the ones that make the rules and the ones that can change the rules, too. All the eyes are on the right, yeah. Don't get me wrong, we're in a democracy so we have the parliament that makes the laws, right? But there's a lot of execution following inside these laws and there's a lot of red tape that just wouldn't need to exist. Yeah, I'm hoping that in the future that the emerging technologies, technology period will help us to kind of break down and decentralize this bureaucracy and kind of make governance a little bit more efficient and more secure and more unified so that the decision making and the processes are a little bit easier and faster, better, different than they have been in the last few centuries. But you know, that's an interesting one, right? Because in Germany, we're masters of bureaucracy, right? The form was invented here. You probably have to fill one out when you die. Yeah. But actually, you do, right? That's a different thing. But when push comes to shove, as we have just seen in the pandemic, this bureaucracy can actually do something. I would say that in many countries, the parties pulled together and put away their petty differences and said, now we've got to get through the pandemic, so in Germany. But what I found really very motivating was that in all parts of the administration that would we normally laugh at, right? The civil servants, that they're slow and they polish their trees and all of it. Those people did an amazing job. Because they took decisions. Even if there was no framework yet, they just made it happen and they're not everybody, of course not everybody, right? There's many bad examples of what was not done well and blah, but a lot of people like totally outgrew expectations and made the country run even in lockdown and made strategies work. And I think that a lot of times we totally over, we overlook this, right? Is because the country with 80 million people, that to keep running smoothly and not go into complete chaos, that's a pretty good job when their normal has just been abandoned, right? But everything's normal. Just things run on autopilot. But when there's no normal, right? How can it still keep running? And that makes me very positive that we don't like change here, but we can deal with it. So maybe we just need to have more change forced down our throats. I agree. We do need more change. And there was just a show on, say, the F last night about the Germany situation. A lot of Germans really don't know that the climate effects that Germany feels is in the top three of all countries in the world of what we actually feel of what's going on in our world. And so we're feeling it. We're seeing it. We just need to have this paradigm shift to understand and get some actions involved. So my hope is that we can figure out, we use the tools and technology to, I don't know, simplify bureaucracy is a better way to say it, but kind of to make it more effective to get some more guidelines and rules so that when the hard time comes, we have some operating system to fall back onto. Something I would say, hey, this'll get us through here securely. All the eyes of our world are really on Germany right now. We hear the talks about Trump and the Bolsonaro's and that, but really as far as the pandemic and the transitions, a lot of positive things going right coming here. The reason I mentioned that is there's also a technology committee or board as well for the White House for the United States. And that board used to be made up of tech and science and space was Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and some other fabulous people who kind of also said, hell, I don't want to do this when Trump got on. But for my listeners, I'm mentioning that because you're at that same level for Germany, for also for Europe in their respect because it's Germany, but Germany has such a high place in the EU that that's a pretty big honor that you have. And I'm glad to know you, but also to know that somebody who sees all sides of the bigger picture is on that board kind of looking out for the best interests of the individual because that, I mean, when I've had conversations with you, I really get that feeling that you're not only honored to be there, but you also want to make sure that it turns into action and that there's some kind of that bureaucracy is done in a different way. Yeah, I mean, that's what we need, right? We need a system that relies less on the bravery of single individuals but has more changeability built into it. And maybe a lot of people see this as well. I also say is what we need more is long-termism, right? That affects things like a pandemic. The problem is that whatever you have in the news today actually happened three weeks ago, right? So that's a problem for a lot of the news cycle and a lot of people who forgot what happened three weeks ago. And it's with climate change, right? Whatever we're dealing with actually happened five years ago and this is why long-termism is something that we really need back. And I think it's also something that we should have back in our economies. I believe that in the next 12-month employment is going to be our chief topic and it's going to be the main responsibility of companies and countries to make sure that there is still livelihood to be had. And yes, we're very fortunate here in Germany because there was a good social system and a network for people to be caught by but it'd be much better if we agreed on the long-term view that if we keep businesses running tomorrow, then we still have a much better starting point in order to build a future than if we have to rebuild from scratch. I'm right with you and that leads nicely into my next question. I don't know if you knew that Elon Musk is here in Germany, he's been here for a couple of days now. He's here to look at this new virus. It's like a virus lab that he's doing and also take a check on the new Gigafactory in Berlin that they're building, ties into the tech and to somebody who's that very controversial, other different things about that. But the reason I mentioned that is my question is, do you feel like a global citizen and how would you feel about a world in the future without nations, walls, borders and divisions of humanity from one from each other? I was on the call this morning that said, you know, we're not sure we're gonna make it to this event or we're not sure we're gonna get the visa or we're just going through a second wave of the pandemic and they're not letting anybody travel. But yet those futurists who've been working a long time, well over 10 years on the future on technologies and neural net link or whatever the space, all their deadlines and all their things for the most part have continued to progress forward and meet those deadlines during this point in time. And so, you know, with that outlook of how we caveat it, our beginning is, do you feel like a global citizen and how would you feel if the future of our world kind of moved more into that direction borders, no borders, nations, divisions of humanity? So, absolutely, I feel like a global citizen, right? I'm, when we're not having a pandemic, I love traveling and mainly because I love meeting people. And I think that's the best way to learn, right? The most horrible thing that can happen is people having an opinion about the world without having seen the world, right? And then you run into all these stereotypes and if you wanna talk about geopolitics, go and visit places, right? You, yeah, there's a much better understanding. And I think this is super important, for example, about the question between China or the US and so on. If you have not been, how can you have any opinion about how a society works and these questions? So, yeah, I totally feel like a global citizen. I also think that, look, we're in the boat together, like all the big problems, the pandemic, climate change, energy, food, all these are global problems because if we run, if the pandemic, obviously, is a global problem, everybody knows this now, if we have climate change or food shortage or water shortage, because of that, then we'll have huge migration efforts and people moving around a lot and that'll screw everything up that get people out of normal. So, we are sitting in this boat together anyway, like anyone who doesn't acknowledge that, who thinks that I am by myself, I'm gonna make decisions that optimize myself and who does not see that this is a very short-term way of thinking, I'm sorry, like go back to school. Seriously, is then on the other hand, when times get rough, people tend to make the world smaller, right? Go back to the family, go back to the village, go back to town, go back to a nation and feel nationalistic about it when times get tougher. And I think this is about identity, right? Because unless the aliens come and attack us, we will not have, we don't have an identity as earthmen, right, or earth people, because we have identity with our locals and I'm in Munich right now, right? And Bavarians don't even feel German. It is, identity is important, but there is no conflict between identity and global citizenship. Like nobody wants to take away your Americaness or your Germaness or whatever your Bavarianess from you, just because we are sitting in the same boat and have to solve the same big problems together. Actually, these different types of identity and these different types of origin and these different types of having been brought up with different belief systems and so on. That's what we call diversity, right? But if you wanna solve a difficult problem, what you really need is diversity. You don't need uniformity to solve complicated problems or unexpected problems. So normally people see such a big conflict between the question, are we a globalized global society or are we little nations that should hate each other to the bone is we're both, we are nations and people that come from nations and people that come from towns and villages and places and we have our local quirks and they are quirks in there. They can be cute or horrible or whatever, but they make us diverse. And if we wanna as a global humanity, there only is one humanity, right? If you wanna solve a difficult problem, we have to bring this together because diversity is the only way how to actually peek outside the box, not just think outside it, but have a look outside it because it paves the way to the more crazy ideas that might be necessary. Now, I like how you say that it's very systemic and it's got the global problems cannot be really solved with a siloed or linear view of trying to tackle that problem. It's gotta be much more of a global response and a system that tackles it, but that doesn't mean your culture, your religion, where you're from, your good beer or pretzels in Bavaria have to go away that you can still have that identity but maybe function on a different global operating system. And that brings us into a little bit of the emerging technologies. I'm really hoping that we can have a unified operating system or plan in the future that raises the bar for humanity for some form of a global operating system where we're all countries and nations come together and say, hey, we're never gonna let humanity ever go below this basic level again on how we treat each other and how food and poverty and hunger and wellbeing and equality and many, many other infrastructure-owned digital problems are that that's the bar that we set and we can still have our cultures and divisions and nations but the standard is globally, no matter where we're at and where we travel because we're all on that same spaceship earth, we're all earthlings. The other thing that you mentioned that was I found interesting, I had a friend and I think you know him as well his name's Mika Lainona and he's from Helsinki, Finland, ghost company, yeah. And he basically said, you know, Mark, we need aliens, we need an alien invasion or we need, so that humanity unites itself. And funny enough, just last, I think it was two weeks ago, the economist came out with the cover and a huge issue says that the alien is here and it is the virus, it's the pandemic and it's the one thing that has transcended borders and nations and also in some respects tried to, has unified us and how we approach it and solve it in some respects but that virus is here, it's among us for a while and there'll be more to come. I would like to know your hope and I mean, well, before I go on to that, there's one last thing before I get away from the personal questions for you and you have a real unique style at all your events, you always, you're like the aficionado of t-shirts, you have the best saying on your t-shirts always and wear the coolest shirts ever at all your events. Is there something to that? What pushed you in that direction? Do you make a statement with that? I wanted to ask about that. I do, I do and actually before we started, I was wearing a black t-shirt and my head looked like floating in the air so I had to change it and the black t-shirt was talking about science does not care what you believe and now I have, I gotta get up a bit, right? So now no place like home in a nerdy way on the t-shirt. I think that when I give presentations I typically feel like people are giving me the most precious thing they have which is their time, right? Which is the only limited resource that they have and so I'm trying not to waste people's time and this is why I typically when I do something and presentation wise, it's totally content packed and this goes against the number zero rule of presenting which is redundant, redundant, redundant. So my t-shirts are key messages that are there throughout the talk and that are totally redundant because you can read them a hundred times if you wish. That's basically my contribution or my bow to I know the rules of rhetoric and so on but I don't feel that I feel that I owe people more content than just repeating the same thing over and over again. So anybody who's ever listened to any of your talks and I think I've listened to quite a few well over 20 at least and I know you have a lot more you've been doing it for a while. You're very good about giving us, letting us drink from the fire hose, giving us so much information and hopefully that will glean enough out of that of a very complex thing out of us to get some come away with some understanding and that's a nice lead into where I'm going with this questioning is really before when you've been doing this for a long time there was not a lot of time where you're out on stage talking about AI and all these things. There was a lot of time where you're actionable working on it in the lab, in the computer room and behind the computer doing the work and research and dedication that it took to go there. But then there was at least I saw it and I don't know if this is true, this kind of a change and when I've watched you on stage your message is different almost every time from TechCrunch or Darwin or Noah or whatever fabulous event it is but it's almost one of educational. Would you say so your biggest since beginning was really first to educate the people and educate those executives and those companies what the realities of AI is and how to understand it so that they could then go forward and actually apply it or use it correctly or how did that journey begin and why is it been so much in this? This is really a evangelical educational type of what we get out of it. Like I'm out there trying to educate but it's really what I'm trying to do and it came about because I saw this AI hype builds and I think it's horrible, right? This whole hype about artificial intelligence that is just dreadful because it limits the thinking of people today when they think about AI they think about deep learning networks they think about predictors and classifiers. That is such a small part of and it's strategically irrelevant. If you just have these things you got to really got to ask yourself what's all the bohi about? But there is something very relevant about AI which is that the amount of work that we as people need to be doing goes down dramatically so either we can do so much more or we have to work so much less to have the same like either we now accelerate our development because we can do so much more or we can progress in it very comfortably. And I bet there is feelings for both strategies, right? I'm off the let's move it ahead type but and that's my intention of actually starting to talk about AI is like get a bit of understanding so you could allow yourself to have a long-term opinion view on this and not just what can we do right now? This will give us 2% added whatever and impact on the future who cares, right? I actually believe that AI has a huge impact on the future because after the economies of scale it's the first thing that allows us to make a major step in productivity and if that happens our economic systems will change and the freedom that we have as individuals will change completely and our experience, right? Which we now sell as time has a much higher value and we can give it without giving all our time and you know that you see that I'm very into this time topic time is the only limited resource, right? That we all died. So we've got to do better things with our time. That's beautiful. Thank you. Is there some specific whether it was during this pandemic or in this all these times where you're educating people like one big takeaway that you kind of like if you could speak to everybody on the planet and say, hey, you're getting this wrong about AI or I'd like to give you this word of wisdom that you really need to understand that disparity. I mean, sometimes you talk about the dystopian or robots telling you, I love you, what you'd see maybe whether it's on Star Trek or Orville or La Machina or whatever that movie was. Well, so I am not a dystopian, right? I believe that there is good and bad in every technology, right? You can use gunpowder to shoot people or you could use it to mine ore and have much better tools out there and anything can be turned into a weapon and anything can be turned into something good. So AI can be turned into a weapon or can do unexpectedly bad things and it can do fantastically good. And I think that we need to give the only way you can turn it into something good consciously if you understand what to do with it. And it's not like a snap decision, it's a strategy of doing things and this is why understanding is important. So the one thing that I would like people to understand about AI, that AI is the ability to multiply our experiences as people. I mean, that's if your experience can be used while you're not there and still perform, right? That's really what it does. It's like interest, but for your brain. Yeah, yeah. My first hardest question for you, we're just getting to it now is the burning question, WTF. And it's not the swear word. It's what's the future? And I wanna know what Chris's what's the future is. Do you have a vision? Is there something? What's the future, Chris? I think that our future is going to be a much more internationalized or internationally organized planet. I think that we will have fewer national interests influencing global politics, but much more bigger blocks, different society shapes. And I believe that our future is that we are much more paid as individuals for doing what we can best, do best. And what we can do best is A, make new experiences and B, deal with other people. And I think those things in an industry driven economy have a shortfall, right? So we are paid today for repetition because we go into the office, we do the same thing over and over again. This is how our education system worked. And we're trying because people are expensive. We're trying to automate interaction between people. But then we feel we meet people and we say, like, whoa, this is actually nice, right? So I think these two big things that are very human are going to come back. A, the joy of making new experiences may be completely new or just new for yourself. And the joy of dealing, having something to do with other people. So you did the Lufthansa Flying Lab in 2017, I believe it was. It was the one of the first to South by Southwest. Was that correct? And we were at DLD in Munich this year. I was on the way to a tour to Davos to the World Economic Forum. And we were in the Lufthansa booth at DLD and got the chance to have a nice discussion, which I enjoyed very much because I must say most of all the events that I do, it's very rare that there's enough time, that precious thing of time that we have time to sit down and have a little discussion. We found a moment, I think it was around lunchtime where drinking and eating, to have a little discussion. And you educated me so much, not only on AI, but let me thrust some of my crazy ideas upon you to do some questioning. And I really thank you for that, but I wanna tell our listeners, tickle a little bit of what maybe even my stupidity, what I asked, because I've been struggling or wrestling with this for some years. I believe that what distinguishes us from other species is collective intelligence and that it worked for us very well for numerous years, through books and speeches and research papers and videos and passing on this collective intelligence to our offspring and to others to have them and help them to build a better world. In today's day and age of fake news and information overload, and really information we don't need to have and just too much information that it's more than we need to know on the area that we're focusing in on, I said to you, it would be nice if we could have a real time update of collective intelligence, something that maybe we could get artificial intelligence involved, machine learning, you're the pro in that and kind of gave you my craziness. And besides slapping me and not running off and saying, I can't talk to you, you educated me, but you also gave me some ideas. Can you give us a future blick or a view of maybe what to expect? Or will there be companies in the near future that are working on things, neural net link or other things down the road that will help us to not make the same mistakes in the past, to help us quickly make bureaucratic or other decisions on a global basis to keep up to speed with our exponentially growing world? See, the short answer is no, let me have this a bit longer. The longer answer is we don't want that, right? Because one of the great things about having intelligence is that we also have freedom of choice. We can have a long debate whether that's actually true in brain science and so on, but every one of us feels that we have freedom of choice. The problem that we have today and why this intelligence is actually not progressing very well these days. And I've just yesterday seen a documentary that the Flint Effect, right? Where intelligence grew with wealth is now reversed and intelligence actually is falling with wealth. That is that we have so many tools today that appeal to our, I mean, evolutionary beings, right? So we still hold the animal. We still hold the instinct driven part of us in us. And then this goes into Kahneman's thinking fast and thinking slow, right? And if you press the right levers then we have these very basic feelings like fear and so on. And this is how marketing works. This is how fake news works. This is how populism works. This is how extremism works and so on. It's always our fascism works. It always appeals to this interferes and so on. And it takes an effort to actually step back and say like, no, let me think about this independently, right? It's very easy to regurgitate. I met a taxi driver who was telling me that Bill Gates is trying to rule the world. I'm like, what the fuck, right? And so I asked him and then he repeats this stuff and then you question this and he goes like, right? If people are not too far down the line that they're not listening and not having a conversation, right? Actually just by asking a few questions you get to do rethink. But that ability to actually make up our own minds, right? We don't wanna get rid of that. Even if we could build a machine that would warn us, hey, you are about to do something stupid. Should we build that machine, right? Because we should be able to make our own mistakes. And the problem is that some mistakes we make like long-term ones that create climate change might actually dangerous for us as a species. But we do have free will and we should exercise it. And that's what I meant with we should think more long-term than short-term. And unfortunately some of the technology trends that we have, right? That for example, the ones that try to get you more likes or followers or retweets or whatever, right? Those are the ones that go for your dopamine hits and that are actually taking your long-term view away. We really have to have more of a long-term view. And then we would really be able to make up our own minds. And I think we would have many more people dreaming like Elon Musk about going to space because that's a long-time goal and it makes total sense if we don't want to limit how many humans there are. That's beautiful. A lot of that long-term thinking that way is really a very old indigenous type of thought process. So a lot of indigenous tribes and cultures, ancient cultures, they said, the decision we'll make as the tribal leaders or the elders or the patriarchs of this society is one that has to stand the test of six generations. So what we decide and we'll make is gotta at least be one we're making it for the six generations in front of us. And that today's civilization frameworks are one on much shorter time frames for whether it's a prime minister or minister or president or others are usually four, eight years, time frames may be a little bit longer, but they're not always that generational way. And so I've still got this hope or optimism not to take away our free will, but is there gonna be an emerging technology or some extra help like an operating system that is decentralized or secure or one that that gives us the option to say, okay, we're never gonna go below that mistake for humanity or something. Is we have any hopes of things like that? I mean, we could have something like that within the eye if it's the type of conversation we had, right? If we had an AI that would take on the experience of a lot of people, that would create a minimum level, but it would also allow us to solve problems much more effectively because we could have the diversity approach and not just that we've always done it like this, right? We'd be much faster in achieving something, but we'd have to be very careful not to get too comfortable, right? Because with such a help, it's easy to get lazy. And if you look like, if you look at Europe, for example, it's a fantastic continent and there's a great attitude towards social security and all these things, I believe it's a great attitude, right? Some people might disagree in, but the problem is that Europe is so well off that all people were sitting in their deck chairs and said like, yeah, digital transformation might be important in some time. Let me get back to having a cocktail, and now the pandemic comes and it teaches the last one of us that unexpected stuff happens and that we have to be able to deal with it and that getting out of the deck chair is not so bad, it actually fun to do something. Yeah, the Wally with Disney movie, exactly. Yeah, that's what I was thinking about. Exactly, yeah, that's a beautiful movie. I have three last questions for you and then if you wanna ask anything or say anything as well as we wrap up, but there are more takeaway questions for my listeners. I have a lot of entrepreneurs and innovators, futurists and authors who think a lot about the future, think a lot about environmentalism and some global systems that are maybe are in place that they could implement into their lives or their businesses that would give them that extra edge to create a better future, to create a different future than some of the models we're operating on today. If you were to speak to one of these young innovators in your field, thinking about or looking for ways to make a real impact, which way would you guide them? What kind of advice could you give them? Do you want the deep and meaningful one or the business one? Both, I want them both. The business one, it's very easy, right? So the business one is go to an enterprise conference, meeting, webinar or whatever, listen to what the enterprise guys say that they need to do a lot of change management on and focus on that topic because when enterprise like established businesses talk about change management, then what they're basically saying is we need at least five years to get our hours going. That's your time to eat their lunch. So that's a good way to have a fast impact and you know the business need is there because people are actively looking for it and you know that they're procrastinating and don't get off the chair if you have a solution. It's easier to buy your stuff or yourself before actually making a change. So that's the short-term impact one, right? And the more long-term impact one is do the difficult stuff. Like there are hard problems out there like just pretending no, there's no more hard problems. That's just not true, right? And there should be way less copycats and way less people who say like, yeah, this business model is great and we should optimize it a bit and then bring in the next one. There should be way more people actually tackling difficult things. And I'm not just talking about social responsibility or social entrepreneurship and stuff like that. I'm talking about difficult problems in terms of because they need change, right? So for example, if you look at something great like five AI people who set out to build their own self-driving system, autonomous cars is definitely one that is a major change and it's very, very, very hard to do for established automotive companies and there's actually a group of people who try to do it and then they were scaled down by their investors to solve a specific problem because you could make money faster with that. So my message here is to the entrepreneurs, A, do the difficult problems and be to the investors is like finance the long-term stuff too. Yeah, and that goes right along with what you've been saying all along this long-term vision, which I totally agree that the first comment you made about eating their lunch, that's truly when the disruption occurs. You know, they're dragging their feet and they're not doing a lot, they're talking about it. That's when these small, medium enterprises or startups can come in and truly eat someone's lunch. I'm working with a company called Soul Machines. I don't know if you've heard of them out of Australia do kind of a digital twin AI where you can get a physical image of like myself and then you train a computer to kind of answer questions or deliver talks or speeches. What are your thoughts? I'm looking, I don't know them. I'll Google it right after we're done. Yeah, you'll have to Google it and look at it. So as we move to this online, I was busy at the beginning of this year, I've been extremely busy this year as well and, you know, back to back events more advising because of the pandemic, more people are saying, man, we wish we let it listen to you. We didn't implement those things. Before someone else eats our lunch or we have to close our doors, can you help us get our companies turned back on? Can you get help us with the transition we need to make that we should have made, you know, five, 10 years ago? And so I've been real busy, but this move to online events, you know, we both did a lot of in-person events and we will again. But I was like, man, it would be nice if I could have a digital twin, some kind of a AI that I could train, feed all my talks into it. I mean, because it's universal knowledge about science and math and about our climate and things that the data is going up exponentially, but and the weather's getting more extreme, but it's not like it's, you know, the message is changing too drastically. And so I was thinking, hey, I need to train this. And then, you know, a couple of events and I'll maybe see how they do and if that's something that's possible. Is that just a fantasy? Do you think I could ever get a machine up to speed like that that would be able to represent me? They have some of them online that are like customer service agents, virtual agents on websites and stuff. You're a member of Max Headroom? Yeah, it's like a Max Headroom that's like a chatbot. I think that just to give a speech and be more interactive, I think that's well possible to actually have a conversation afterwards about the content of the speech. I think that's far away. Right? To convey the content in a better form than just watching a movie. I think that is well possible and much more individualized and so on. That's well possible. The ability to afterwards talk about it and like cater to an individual, that's much harder. And the last one is in your experience, in your learning, in your companies, in your talks, what is one thing or maybe multiple things that you wish you would have known from the start? You could have avoided so many mistakes or been so much further ahead. If you haven't told us already, is there anything that advice you could give people say, hey, avoid these or I wish I would have learned this earlier on in my journey? Yeah, I would give one thing and that's about team building. It's a lot of time we take people on into our teams because they have great experience, right? And we say like, look at the history and the jobs and we get the silverback people and that's not what we're looking for. Like that's totally not what we're looking for. The actual question is, if you find someone with a lot of experience, that's great but it's only valuable if that person is also adaptable and a lot of people with a lot of experience are totally not adaptable. So you bring them into a company and they try to replicate whatever they have been successful with before and it fails miserably or you try to replicate something that you've seen elsewhere but it's totally out of context and it fails miserably and it both has happened to me. I've done it myself and I've hired people who've done it and the question is like experience is great but it's almost worthless if you are not willing to change your mind and adapt. That's beautiful. You know I'm an advocate for the sustainable development goals and speak about them all over sustainability and climate that's a big topic of mine during this pandemic, the environmental social governance index funds have all weathered the first and second quarter investments and divestments even that of 2000, the end of 2019 very well and more so than all their conventional counterparts and in the Morningstar indexes 25 out of 28 weathered better than their conventional counterparts. So I'm an advocate, I'm a model for kind of an evangelist for that as a system but how do you feel about the sustainable development goals being a global plan for us to December 2030 and about the goals in general? Do you have any thoughts or things you're working on? Look, I mean, you're just saying what I'm saying in a much better way, right? Because sustainability goals, that's all the speaker of the day. What I said is long-termism, right? Is like think long-term which is in today's speak global sustainability. So I could not agree more and it proves that of course in a world that changes a lot like it's doing right now the short-term stuff doesn't work in the long-term stuff works because the long-term stuff had to think about change anyway and then the second part is the sustainability goals, right? I think that is really important because if you don't set yourself an ambitious goal like we're competitive animals. If we don't have goals, we go to sleep. So yeah, we need long-term goals. So sustainability goals makes a lot of sense. With emerging tech and digital transition a lot of have advice from companies as well they're like, yeah, but we only can fit one or two goals into our business model or into our annual reports. I'd like to clear you up. I'd like to educate you on that because actually you touch on all 17 goals and the whole world needs to make this transition into a different future of how we keep up to speed with our exponentially growing world. We need some of these tools and these helps in the right way. To get us there and you said it eloquently but a ship without a plan, a spaceship earth without a direction, a goal, a future, no plan we're not gonna get there. We're gonna have what we see on TV, sci-fi dystopian. I mean, I had the pleasure of early on in my career a fantastic guy, George Beiger. He was a banker at the time he was now a value entrepreneur. Told me, you know, Chris, speed is important. Don't forget the direction. And that is so true, right? Sometimes in technology, we just dash somewhere if no clue where we're going. It's so good to know where you're going first. Thank you so much, Chris. It's been a sheer pleasure. Do you have anything you'd like to last words of wisdoms for my listeners or anything you'd like to ask me before I tell you goodbye? No, I think we've covered like almost everything that was in there. The last thing I wanna say is let's try and not use technology to cement social distancing, which is bad for us as people and is bad for us as economy. Let's try and use technology to get back to capacity and meaning and so on. That's the long-term goal and focus on that. Perfect, we will. I know we can do it. So I'm going to an event here real soon that's using that to still have events and still have us together. So that's really great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Chris, it's good to see you as a pleasure always. Take care. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.