 If I can touch on that, essentially the sum of what a work is doing my team and I are essentially trying to build personalized AI teaching systems that are able to map the sum of human knowledge as it's being released online and to essentially optimize personalized lesson plans for each given individual's mood as it changes in real time, the unique learning styles. We envision the future of education look something like kids playing a video game, the video games will react to their moves, to optimize their engagement, they're not going to want to eat in the bathroom, do anything else but play these games, but they're going to be learning mathematics, physics, calculus. We see the number of hours kids are already spending on video games and say that the past couple hundred years of pedagogical sciences is not really a science more of an art. Teachers come out with hypotheses and then putting it into the classroom with really small data feedback with non-replicable experiments. So what we're trying to do is essentially build data that correlates human behavior using biometrics with how do we interact with media, how do we interact with each other, how do we build a large enough critical mass of data that lets us begin to use unsupervised analysis to model what are the meta variables that govern human engagement, human learning, how do emotions, stress, anxiety, your personality types, your political bias, all the different things that quantifies a human, what is your heart rate, all the different biometric and personality, inner, external nature and how do these correlates with actions behavior in response to an extremely diverse set of attention economy assets like film, media, online courses. So the idea is by understanding how do people react in general, then we can begin to optimize performance. Someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sokian. We are still on site in the beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada. We are now going to be talking about AI to optimize human performance and much more. We have Ben Tam joining us on the show. Thank you for having me. It's really wonderful to talk about the work my team is doing. Thanks so much for coming on the program, Ben, and I'm really grateful to Andreas Forsland for introducing us. Oh yeah, Andreas and his company, Cognition, is doing some really cutting-edge works. Yes, I'm so pumped. Nice to have mutual acquaintances. Exactly, lots of them. Lots of them. We have so many mutual friends. Yeah, it seems like. I'm pumped to die. I'm so pumped to dive in with you. Ben's background for those who don't know is founder of Atlas Holdings, which is an AI company working on emotion technologies using human data to optimize human performance. You can find all the links in the bio below, atlasholdings.fund, neurotechex.com, as well as the LinkedIn profile. Ben, let's start things off with a big picture understanding of who we are, what's really going on in this reality, where we're heading. It seems like humans are immersed in this exponential technology age. It seems like AI is eating our world. It seems like the most upstream issue that we can try and get to is the education of children. It's trying to make it so that children when they're born into the world have deep feelings of interconnectedness with other humans and with nature, that they understand the nature of this reality, that they can figure out what their North Star is and pursue that, bringing their gifts into the world. Tell us about how you see that equation and how what you're building is helping catalyze that process. No, that's a really excellent way to begin the conversation because we do live in a time as many of us in the tech and general entrepreneurial industry know is it's really catalytic time where we have really two paths that humanity can go down. One is a bright beautiful future where everyone is empowered, or another is a really nuclear fireball. And depending on what the actions of our leaders do today, it's really going to catalyze one of these visions or another. So we think about things on a first principle basis. What do humans need to thrive and be happy? First and foremost, we need to survive. We need to be able to overcome the hardships that nature throws at us, the wind, the rain, the shelter, the food. And we do live in a society today where much of these resources are provided through a particular system and structure. But what we're heading into in the world is we're going to see increasing levels of inequality. We're going to see higher levels of job optimization through AI. There's just going to be a bigger social tension, a social unease. And what is the best way to ensure a more stable, prosperous human race and interplanetary species? I believe rather than using AI to centralize and automate more work, that's naturally the way things progress. But what if we use AI and all these revolutionary technologies to empower not just the weakest links in society to strengthen the whole chain, so to speak, but how do we use technology to essentially structurally change the system? The idea is that in a world where with sufficient education, we're able to master the forces of nature, find a way to get shelter, food. If everyone has the means to innovate, to think about what they need to survive, through whether it's through external help. But ultimately, education is what allows us to independently not just think about our passions, but get the skills, the tools, and resources to execute on them. So hopefully a future humanity, if a lot of our leaders today do our best to catalyze change in the right direction, is one where people feel empowered enough to first and foremost survive. And then more importantly after that, to think about what you really care about in this world and then build it. But you can't do any of that without a sufficient knowledge base internally, whether it's engineering, mathematics. So if you want to be the best chef or a great chef, you have to know the fundamentals, first principles behind culinary, or even being a gardener. I want to be the best, most beautiful gardener artist in the world. It requires a base level of education, so to speak. So that's why a lot of the work that my team is doing is geared towards trying to solve that education problem structurally, once and for all, so to speak, by automating pedagogy. Wow. Okay. So it says though, then let's go with the directional arrow of civilizational trajectory towards prosperity for all. Let's follow that one because that's my favorite way of putting it is a way don't sell, I'm not selling any stories around fear, only towards prosperity, only towards the inline civilization for all. So okay, so now in order to get there, we need a very aware way of meeting the basic needs of all people on the planet. And these basic nutrients that are needed, you are listing some love from the people that birth us into the world. We need love. We need air, water, food, shelter, electricity, education, these basic needs. So to build the social fabric that's most conducive to those basic needs being met for everyone around the world, so the democratization of those things, leveraging AI automation, those technologies to make those things as readily available as possible. Then there needs to be some sort of a process for the discovery of that unique spirit that's in that seed to fully be able to identify what is the unique gift that it wants to express. Why did it adventure into consciousness here in this body, this beautiful piece of art called body for it to bring these gifts forth. So we have these components that need to happen to enable the prosperity for all. So it seems as though then there's a moral burden, an ethical burden, a philosophical burden on not only like you gave this example of trying to get these these links, if you think of each one of these pieces of the chain, each one of these links to be able to actualize the ones that have the most resources right now, the ones that have the most power right now, have to have the feelings of being burdened in a sense of trying to build that social fabric that is most conducive towards the prosperity for all. So what do we do in order to get these incremental steps in the next decade or so that ensure that prosperity for all? Well I might be a romantic idealist but the way I see it when the universe came about and when a big ball of energy naturally the progression is to find orders, to find the most optimal way to structure the universe in itself. How do we go from a big crazy ball of energy into through the big bang to create structures, to create time, to create life. And what I like, what qualms the mind as you mentioned all this is a quote by Marcus Aurelius in meditations where he says horse runs, bird flies and a human just does good things. I think it's in all of our nature naturally to think about what we feel is morally beautiful and this just means what is valuable, what is more valuable than our own life in fact. How do we rank our own life in value in comparison to the other beautiful things in the world? And naturally what humans do is after we've thought about these values then we act to optimize strategies to maximize these but the problem arises when there is a lack of opportunity to even think about one's self in such a metaphysical way when we're say living on the streets or if we don't have food or if our families are in danger we don't even think about ourselves or where we don't have the luxury of thinking about values greater than our own immediate survival. So I feel like the question is not how do we spark this because I believe all humans have that innate beautiful nature to find morality and to live for it and then die happy. But the real question is how do we eliminate that which prevents people from reaching the levels of self-actualization. So it's a really hard problem but you know it's a really valuable one. No pun intended. Would you say then those obstacles are the lack of those basic needs being met when you don't have love, you don't have air, water, food, shelter, electricity, education? 100% and this is why even though I have a very strong love for capitalism I also like I had Andrew Yang on your podcast earlier before talking about universal basic income where at the very least those who are most disadvantaged in society who don't have the very fundamentals at the very least a system would be there to address that. I mean I'm Canadian so I can't speak much for our neighbors down south but I thought that was very well thought out those policy changes and it's a really big issue because there's no one clear-cut answer and you're always going to piss off someone no matter what approach you take in that direction. There's I think always a nuanced way to put this just like you began your statement by saying that you appreciate aspects of capitalism that have helped us get to where we are yet we also realize that the way that in nature we see things like the redistribution of carbon that is sequestered by the largest trees through the roots and fungal systems to the little seedlings in the smaller trees that don't get to sequester as much carbon that same process of resource distribution is clearly not evident in human hierarchies of wealth. It's just not there and we have to be completely honest that it's not there and then we have to build the social fabric that makes it so that the obstacles that you're listing earlier where these fundamental needs are not being met in those root systems where they can be overcome so that people can upon birth have the basic needs to identify with their North Star what their purpose is and go on a trajectory to get there. That's that's a really remarkable way to put it. I do agree and that's I guess that's what makes the problem so fun if it was really easy then it wouldn't be worth one's whole life effort. I think the best way to find a good happy value to work towards is one that's just great enough where it seems like it's almost impossible but I mean if you achieve all of your life values like trying to optimize all the things what are you going to be left to optimize so it's good to have a really really hard problem to solve. I think that's what makes it fun you can wake up and say oh this is really fun and having that humility to say oh even though one may never win the war so to speak one must always do our best with whatever we got. Yeah I mean what's the alternative. Every moment going towards that big vision in a very selfless way that in a perspective that always keeps in mind the hundred billion humans before us that built civilization that we get and that by the time that we pass ourselves that we will be leaving it incrementally towards justice incrementally towards prosperity that we lived every single day building towards that is paramount. Okay so the design of that fabric is really about the removal of the obstacles of removing poverty of meeting the basic needs in education and all the other nutrients that are needed for the seed in order for that seed to flower and that requires a big moral burden of those at the top that are leading the big companies that are leading the big governments that are the wealthiest people on the planet to and we're going to get to this in a little bit in our conversation on the way that you're collecting people's biometric states that maybe it's important we've talked about this on show quite a bit to see those those the people of the greatest power to be able to map how much empathy do they have how much spiritual awakening do they have how much deep ability to interconnect with other humans of nature and really smart yeah right yeah because if we can measure those states and then prove when someone does not have those states maybe we can incrementally nudge their them in those directions of gaining more of those states and then being able to see that in their biometrics and then their decisions towards redistributing those resources for empowerment rather than for self-dealing and conspicuous consumption will actually see that happen you know that's a really good way to put it because when we choose who we want to elect in who do we want to follow it's important not just to know their their thoughts and what they speak it's important to know their subconscious so being able to leverage biometric technologies um always with ethical consent is important because it lets you get an insight into a person's feelings and we make most of our decisions most of our actual purchasing power um purchasing decisions and general decisions in life based on what we intrinsically feel every time we are dealt with a a topic that might be sensitive or just any topic in general all the logic has been processed in our prefrontal cortex then processed into language and then we have the edges to speak it but a lot of that of that pure emotion that pure visceral gut feeling is lost during the translation of language i mean i can smile and i talk with like an excited tone but what's really happening underneath um if we want to have a true access of transparency uh to i guess the elites like the the leaders is it's gonna it's gonna be important to highlight this level of information uh for all the stakeholders you know democracy and around the world you know that's that's a really cool um cool topic yeah i love this topic and it requires people that are building the biometric technologies with given ethical consent like you're indicating yeah i think that's really important to not just do things legally but above and beyond that what is moral what is the uh principal way of doing things uh in collecting such sensitive data yes i'd love to touch on that we will yeah we're gonna get through we're gonna get to that that's important to talk about yeah yeah and the actual tech stacks that you're building to do so um okay so this is kind of the big picture vision is getting a empowerment for every single child to be able to unleash their fullest gifts to remove those obstacles make those basic needs met um around the world and then maximize that prosperity through that through that lens and i also really like the perspective of having a we for some reason we decided that my uh my partner or my uh your partner all of our partners our spouses whatever you want to say they basically become everything they have to be your emotional support they have to be your you know your workout partner they have to be your spiritual partner they have to be your business partner they have to be your everything for you which puts a huge burden on on on each other when actually a good amount of that can be offloaded to um ai an ai coach that knows you actually better than your partner does in some ways and that actually can nudge you in the direction of of working out or of or i'm reading those a couple of dozen of pages that you have to get to um you know etc and that helps with those trajectories towards um unleashing the north stars and i like your focus on ai coaches for every single seed that's bringing its fruit into the world yeah ultimately the limitations of a teacher uh no matter their natural brilliance in being a good teacher is limited by the amount of knowledge that they know like i cannot teach what i don't know i cannot learn from someone who doesn't know what they're talking about but with an ai approach we're able to essentially map human knowledge uh crowdsource it or really specialize knowledge sets and give this access to to ai algorithms to be able to learn more effectively than a million teachers could i think google just released their quantum-braced chip that apparently has quantum supremacy which which means that it can start processing and acquiring and analyzing data much greater greater speeds and imagine ever not to digress but the brain is has quantum phenomenon happening in it which is cool a cool digression yeah so i love that big picture focus it's such a vital part of where we're heading in our future and then ultimately this becomes a data science problem is the automation of of optimal pedagogy on the child's direction towards their north star yeah if i can touch on that essentially the sum of what our work is doing my team and i are essentially trying to build personalized ai teaching systems that are able to map the sum of human knowledge as it's being released online and to essentially optimize personalized lesson plans for each given individual's mood as it changes in real time the unique learning styles we envision the future of education looks something like kids playing a video game the video games will react to their moods to optimize their engagement they're not going to want to eat in the bathroom do anything else but play these games but they're going to be learning mathematics physics calculus we spend we see the number of hours kids are already spending on video games so we're thinking why don't we automate the process of teaching into a video game format and use the most cutting edge emotion sciences to to try to present this content in not just a way that's engaging but optimized for a person's unique learning styles so each one of us should have a one on one mentor like we as humans we evolve to speak face to face like you can see my emotions change in real time and then you can tailor our conversation to optimize my our engagement but we've really lost this in the industrialized revolution where like we got one teacher to 30 students and there's no way one teacher can can track and personalize a lesson to every student and it gets even worse in the digital age of one teacher to like a million students so using using technology we can actually bridge back that gap but this is an extremely extremely hard problem to solve because it requires a bunch of unsupervised approaches unsupervised machine learning approaches to map human knowledge and it's optimized personal lesson plans so what our team recognizes is that before we try to build a an AI based solution we have to recognize that it's a data science problem which means that you have to have a sufficient amount of data to optimize any algorithm with oh yeah our business model which is important to keep in mind not just a theory but how do you build sustainable dominant businesses that let you reach your goals so our business model today involves helping other enterprises work with human data making human data easily accessible for humans and all must be done with ethical transparency above and beyond what is hidden in the terms of service so it's very important to think about these ethical concerns as we source data because we're ultimately we're working with technologies like eye tracking facial tracking brainwave data heart rate data these are super personal data sets and we have two rules in our company for any product that we build the first is extreme transparency rather than high acquisition of data legally in the terms of service like some other big companies might do we have philosophy to make sure that any user who's going to be giving us their data knows downright in the marketing so there's no step of the interaction with any companies that the end it's sort of hidden you never want something to be taken by surprise and the second is to ask ourselves if we build this technology do I want my little brother or my little sister using it and then once it matches those two criteria I find that there's just generally a semi semi foolproof way to approach this yeah always looking for better ways to to do things more ethically and in a more philosophically sound way but yeah acquiring data and working with with new alternative data it's it's important to think about the future ethical concerns and execute them today rather than just sort of run fast and break things so to speak and in disrespect yeah they had digressed a bit there I love that synthesis so I love your vision with it too so all right so we have a bloom two sigma which is such an important phenomenon so we need the one-on-one mentorship with every single one of the young people that's trying to actualize their gifts clear not one to 30 but we need a one-on-one mentorship with every single one okay and then we need also to leverage the new technologies like augmented reality all these new fields that are emerging having neuro feedback towards you reaching your goals as well this this learning in these in these three-dimensional spaces of play and that's a big one as well and then we have just this overall ability to map civilizations knowledge try and be able to identify at a young age when this child's born what do they want to be exposed to which areas of play do they want to learn and see what they like and then if they like those more you enter them deeper and deeper into those areas and see if that's it and then they they buy more and more identified with their field that they want to pursue and then that's when you know you you're doing things very ethically along this way that the child knows the parents and know that that the data that you guys are working with is very it's very it's important to be ethical and so you you make it clear that all these biometrics that are coming in that it's all very transparent this is crucial along the process absolutely I really hit the hammer on the the nails head I think that's the same yeah and just what's kind of disgusting to see today is many companies they recognize the value of data but they don't treat the data as as the user's ownership I think now it's good we're starting to see a lot of awareness that your data is your data is you should have a sense of ownership and control over it so we just want to take that to the extreme and treat it not just as a property right but as a human right all data is like it's kind of like a universal basic asset that we can actually get ownership of and then potentially compensated for yeah it could be part of that universal basic income is our asset of data absolutely to give you a really negative scary example there's a company called Brinco why do we have to why do we have to do the negative scary example as a warning there's a okay I mean I like to see how it is towards the positive directional prosperity oh I understand like the importance of giving the examples of fear but I think it's so much more important to guide us towards yeah I think on the first principles basis of the things we talked about that's that's pretty important just rather than sort of framing things in one thing or another hopefully you guys in the audience can they know people already know about what is the all of these malevolent malevolences and all of the fears and all of the panics and catastrophes and negative potentials people have already heard so many of those examples like let's just focus that's true that's the daily news right there it's the daily I can I can respect that we want to focus on a positive positive trajectory what's the potential moving forward so I my question on this front is how do you guys figure out how to map civilizations knowledge using unsupervised machine learning how do you then understand what my you know how do you how do I play with all of the different possible edges of knowledge and then figure out what my unique gift is I want to bring how do I use your AI coach etc yeah well I think the best way to approach this is with humility and say that the past couple hundred years of pedagogical sciences it's not really a science more of an art teachers come out with hypotheses and then putting it into the classroom with really small data feedback with non-replicable experiments so what we're trying to do is essentially build data that correlates human behavior using biometrics with how do we interact with media how do we interact with each other how do we build a large enough critical mass of data that lets us begin to use unsupervised analysis to model what are the meta variables that govern human engagement human learning how do emotions stress anxiety your personality types your political bias all the different things that quantific quantifies a human what is your heart rate all the different biometric and personality inner external nature and how do these correlates with actions behavior in response to an extremely diverse set of attention economy assets like film media online courses advertisements not very cool industry but it's pretty big so the idea is by understanding how do people react in general then we can begin to optimize performance so our business model today involves collecting helping other companies in the attention economy that already have networks to add in a layer of emotional data because taking a step back to build a personalized AI teacher is a multi-decade vision yes and if we try to launch that today this is a cold start problem yes we need a sufficient amount of data to launch it but we're also building a business a startup and an entrepreneurial journey to create zero from one or one from zero yeah hopefully not the other way so the idea is our business today involves helping enterprises that already have networks but could use emotional data into their networks to optimize it the problem is that these technologies are rather new facial tracking brainwave tracking heart rate tracking so most companies they don't have to in-house specializations to build these solutions and to deploy them and to ethically source them so that's where we come in we go there and almost do a lightning consultancy analysis for any given company whether it's one of our fortune 500 clients government agencies or nonprofits and we customize an end-to-end solution where our engineers and scientists just think what's the best way to incorporate an emotional data layer and then we build our technology out there so the idea is by being able to deploy these emotion solutions across industries and to build a team of talented scientists and engineers send me a message on LinkedIn if you guys want anyone wants to join but yeah sorry that's great plug no please do yeah the idea is to centralize a team of super brilliant people and that become eventually over the contracts over the clients over the years we become experts in working with emotional data collecting and centralizing emotions and human reactions to it in an ethical and politically sound way then we would be able to solve the co-start problem of identifying how do we what type of algorithms are best give the best performance on this type of real-time human data set it's like everyone's trying to create an artificial intelligence that's like general AGI but no one really understands what it means to be a human yet and the best way to understand what it means to have human consciousness across demographics across age across nationality across gender is to collect the data first and to build a business that is sustainable so that we can eventually scale up to do much greater things so it's like it's almost being humble and saying oh this is what we know this is what we don't know this is what we can do and what we can do let's be the best in the world at it which is what we call emotions as a service I love that yeah emotion as a service yeah AAS yeah it's like software as a service all right so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah instead of SAS yeah I I love how you put it as a emotional layer that has to be applied to governments nonprofits 4500 companies just around the world an emotional layer so basically all of the data that's coming in from the internet of things smartphones ar blah blah blah almost cars it's coming from everywhere now there's got to be some sort of a way to measure my mood my emotional state from all this data and then be able to like a like a very like a very easy way of like if there's a way to get my my heart rate variability or my my eg just if there's ways to simply get these pieces of data or just having the sensors in the room etc all these different places iot that can then do things like alan we're sensing a slightly higher stress levels so there's now going to be a spray of lavender into the room or now there's going to be some jazz music that's played or now we're going to open up to one of your favorite readings or videos etc take a little bit of time to stretch and relax you know just this is really not it is rocket science because you need the big corpus of the layer of emotion the massive catalog to make it so that you actually know when someone's feeling stressed or you know when someone's feeling tired or you know when they're feeling happy or you know when they're on a really good path of focus towards their goal and to have that AI coach actually tailor these experiences like you're saying you've got to build in this multi decade long process this big catalog of the emotions 100 ethically like you said but it's not fucking rocket science at the same time because you don't need to have all these scientific reports about nature therapy being good for people to know to just get out of the tiny little rat cage cubicle you're in and go to the trees go to the beaches go to the places where you will feel like you are interconnected with everything i think the reason why we are locked in these sub optimal frameworks is we grew up in a society where we really emphasized IQ productivity rationality but we're not taught almost never in the public education system to use our EQ to develop our heart to develop our internal sense of how do i feel about this maybe that was not not what i mean the industrialized era you know people are trying to turn out cogs in a machine so the whole education system has been really geared to get people to think externally about and try to be a productive member in society and grow your IQ but without a lack of any emotional training lack of any self mastery and yeah you know this i'd love to talk a little bit about one of the social impact projects we're working with let's do it in regards to emotional self mastery i love it because the Dalai Lama has made this one of his crucial points as well as the emotional self mastery why is it not being taught at the first moments of birth on on that would be a great person to partner with i'm sure we can learn a lot from some of the meditations and philosophies that they've developed one of the social impact projects they were working on is how do we help recently release incarcerated individuals or people who are currently in the prison system get a better sense of self mastery and our solution is personalized guided meditation to help recently released inmates that are in halfway houses or even in within the prison system itself it's a very vulnerable population and how do we give them the tools they need to to stop and think and go explore themselves internally and to ultimately get a better sense of self mastery i mean we could all really use that to be able to develop our own internal fortitude so to speak and so even though the technology can be applied in almost every single industry that emotional data layer we have to ask ourselves what is what does society really need the most right now and above and beyond profits and revenues how can we uh work on really game-changing products that can potentially alleviate the suffering of countless people i mean the big reason why most people incarcerated begin with is not through their own fault it is through trauma and abuse and neglect as children that's what the statistics and experiments and studies show and being incorporated within the prison or within the prison system there's really very little avenue to break out of that circle i call it a revolving door because people leave the prison system and then they don't have the resources the skills the support they need to to break out of that trap you know that that self-defeating anger and trap you're providing the intervention at the most critical time where it can alter their trajectory out of the revolving door and towards their north star yeah absolutely so yeah what what a great thing about working on self mastery tools is we are all humans whether we're incarcerated wherever student whether we're in old age by building the same core principles of optimizing a person's self-awareness given their feedback on their own neural and physiological behavior we can translate a lot of these learnings and product features from say from the prison industry into the education industry into the mental health industry so it's like many ways to understand and optimize a human from them like i'm a human i don't even know what it means to be a human that's how tricky the problem is it's like meta on meta on meta yes yes okay so it seems as though when we take in the mass amount of data in terms of emotions and what it means to be human in this grand scale what it how we can basically log biometrics and emotional states and show which biometrics of heart gut brain etc have to do with which states of emotion so it's a big catalog then the when you have the ai coach making the recommendations for people it's making it based on a very strong catalog of states where it knows that if these are the biometrics that are being shown then it means this state and if this person feels like they want to get closer to their north starting the state then i will provide this as an intervention right now that's the feedback loop yeah and the ai the ai's brain will be thinking what is the probability given the current state of the inputs what is the probability of the decision making that's going optimize and performance whether it's learning a particular subject or learning a particular skill this is just a human brain can't process all that data and and and not and do it scalably that's why we have the algorithms that already know us better than we know ourselves i don't know where i was a month ago i don't know where i was a year ago i don't know what i ate a month ago what i google knows facebook knows blah blah blah etc they just know and i don't i don't know who i was messaging that day i don't know what i was messaging them don't want to want to buy i want to buy the emotional sentiment as well regarding all those messages right when i was messaging you what was my emotional sentiment etc being able to parse that through nop i mean there's so much data there that i'm not aware of and that are like you said our processing systems aren't as capable but let's let's get to this um uh the emotional layer itself is you're already starting to work with companies that that want you to embed so you're doing like a custom a custom build build out for the companies to build in the emotional layer ethically with them and then taking the data from there to build out the big catalog absolutely and we select our clients extremely exclusively we have to make sure that they're the right philosophical fit because we don't want everyone to empower any firms who don't have that core dedication to protecting their human users privacy so what we specialize for our clients is white label turnkey full end to end solutions using whatever technologies they feel is best uh what that we uh after our analysis we prescribe a certain amounts of strategies that they can embark on whether it's use eye tracking facial tracking brainwave data heart rate data so every client's a unique beast and i think the best is to is to think hey if the client's business was my business how do how how do we optimize from here giving the technology and the skills and it's hard because anytime a client anytime a business in general wants to work with any one of these technologies they have to hire phd you're going to spend months and potentially years developing and testing a product or or working with an external consultancy that ultimately ends up uh holding all of the code and not giving them the empowerment so what we what we do is we go in there and we we do our own consultancies and we develop white label turnkey solutions to empower their brand empower their users so we're called atlas holdings because it's a pretty boring name and uh like there's a saying that you can go really far if you give other people the credit and um oh yeah everything's your fault when it goes wrong and nothing is your credit when it goes right that's how to be a good person well i think we all have to ask ourselves are we are we building something for the credit or are we building something for impact for what transcends us for the rest of humanity that's and if that's the answer then you will have great support from other people absolutely and i'm not so sure if your audience members have read uh ann ran's book atlas shrugged whereas she talked about she's a philosopher in the 19th century where she talked about what happens if the most productive people in society shrugged the weight of the world um because atlas was a great god that carried the world on the shoulder that's right but i don't think that's always the best way to approach things so with atlas holdings it's almost like a symbological tribute to ran but also to say hey what happens if the most dedicated people in the world um saw that it is worth it to to do what they feel is best for the rest of humanity that's right it's like a good north star exactly yeah yeah and it's atlas holdings that talks about the burden atlas is also a big catalog of all of the emotional states and uh and the the biometrics that are associated with that but it's also that the it is upon the ones that have the most um especially around the world to be the most benevolent in the uh maximizing prosperity moving forward and i want you to give a couple of these analysis you listed these things called you know facial tracking facial recognition or eye tracking facial recognition um emotional sentiment how do you um as much as you can can you give us an example of where you're making the emotional layer at a company oh absolutely why don't i talk about resound all is the world's first automated platform for focus groups so right now focus groups are a really big industry but to run a focus group you have to send out a bunch of ads hire people locally bring them to laboratory physically and to and then you pay them about 16 bucks an hour to scan their emotions and you normally do this through another company so it's a very long process to get a focus group running so what we've done is we built an app where we hire about 600 to 700 biometric freelancers that get paid to download our app and then get paid to watch videos as we track their emotions in real time so it's a way for people to sell us through mutual consent their facial expressions their eye tracking they know exactly how much money they get how much money they're getting you know and it's their choice to say oh i think it's worth my time like a dollar an hour or seven dollars an hour depending on the content on how engaging the content is so essentially what we do is we have decentralized and fully automated the process of the focus group industry and this lets us deliver a human attention minute per dollar and about a hundred times to a thousand times less than our competitors it also allows us to do really interesting things like analyze the emotions of crowd behavior around the world versus traditional focus groups and research groups and traditional neuroscience where it's focused to one demographic so one thing that's interesting is we can see how different cultures react to say racism yes we can see in north america there's a big civil rights movement which is beautiful because when we show racist imagery to people in north america almost across the board it's just big frowns, scrawls like that's not cool that's not right but we also see in countries whether it's not a very developed sense of civil rights when racist imagery is shown this might be a smile or or or just no no response as well yeah we can also do things where we analyze gender how different genders react to really controversial and like painful subjects like we ran an experiment what you just said it was so interesting because it we swing uh albeit quite deeply into traumas of the initial millions of indigenous people that were here over 500 years ago and the way that they've been killed and displaced and then we do the transatlantic slave trade trauma and then because of those things and then what happened with the southwestern part of the united states and Mexico and Latin America etc we swing all the way into the depths of that trauma and because we do we're swinging in so far in the civil rights direction for the indigenous for Latin America for for Africa for women's rights for gay rights etc so it's so interesting that so then we in a sense become at the forefront absolutely it's like it's like so interesting yeah being a say if one has say been in a fight and really beat up someone to a pulp then you can stop and grow and reflect and say hey look that was really not the behavior that I want to embody as I grow and evolve and find my level of moral growth versus a man or woman who's never been in a conflict or done things that they might be ashamed of then they have no context of how do we grow as an individual there's no differentiation of right or wrong yeah so I think very much having made a lot of painful painful mistakes in the past as a culture the culture grows and evolves and defines its greater form as it's like in an earlier part of our conversation and the universe tends towards greater moral others like the same as the human mind and the human society and the human as a as a whole so I'm really optimistic because anytime we make really bad mistakes as a species we say good yeah we say like oh gotta like move on let's just move on and like how do we like what's best for our children what's best for the future I love that phrase by uh uh jockel jockel yeah he's well I listened to that podcast all the time he he did so great that he right after someone says something that went horrible or miserable or bad he goes good let's move on good because it's all learning experience it's all yeah I have I have another point just around what you were just talking about it's so important to bring this up you have a way of seeing the internal state the consciousness of the person through biometrics you can you can objectively begin cataloging conscious states and so then when you see that the person is not uh experiencing states of like uh feelings of of sadness or or or uh or just a disgust when they see that racism happening then you know that there is something that's different like what is their state of consciousness when they're not feeling that versus when they are feeling that so these are different states of biometrics and consciousness and then you want to you know if we're trying to move people towards a more just society towards one where there isn't that racism where there isn't those obstacles then there is some sort of a way to create through an AI coach learning around that evolutionary process for people so it's just it's just so interesting basically there's there's a a once you get the states of emotion and the states of biometric and consciousness so you have this we're completely honest with ourselves yeah yeah once we have that and then we have how we want to uh have an AI coach nudge us towards our north stars along their journey we have these things harmonize and what no it it's it's important because today we see the left and the right i see values in both approaches but there's no conversation there's no sense of commonality and i think the problem is everyone has their own biases but not everyone's aware of their own biases so by the idea is to essentially use a lot of our technology to create to create a sense of self-awareness like oh you know without judgment because it's an AI like if we just show you how you're feeling like we're not saying anything bad or good we're just saying hey here's the data you make the human decision on there in many cases so there's a lot of directions that this can be taken in the whole industry of emotional technology and emotional human performance optimization is it's in this infancy is really really young human optimization through human data yeah and even at the level of these focus groups like you're saying i like that example a lot it seems way more efficient getting people paid super transparent then they can quit the job that they don't care about and sell their data like as we mentioned earlier data is a human right um and it's like the right to your own body it doesn't matter if you own your own body if you if no one if you don't have to write to a marketplace to sell and buy food and trade so what we're trying to do is create the platform where people can own their own data and monetize on it so the future of work might be you sitting and and watching videos or playing games and selling your data through consent to people can use that for predictive analytics to drive their content creation drive their marketing as long as it's all done with extreme transparency and to empower the end user all the ownership of their own data i think then it is it can be deployed in a very useful way for humanity i would talk about the negatives i believe you guys imagine that yeah you know the the negative ways that these technologies can be used if they're not done with an ethical principle and in a community i'll talk about very shortly Neurotek X we spent the last four or five years really digging into all the different ethical considerations the ways that these technologies like brainwave data all the different biometrics can be ethically and reasonably deployed on a business in a human sense but i won't die if i do that just yet i'll get lost in a digression after digression we talked about this a little bit earlier too and i really want to know how to be able to get these things implemented as soon as possible you have like we were talking about emotional states states of consciousness along with their biometric states that represent them excellent then you have the certain ways of of when you watch something like someone getting physically violated that someone feels like they're in pain themselves they have empathy or they feel like smiling and so what what do you you know what do you do in that scenario how do you how do you catalyze that awakening for someone to feel more empathy same thing with these global ruling elite that we were talking about earlier how do we map the emotional and biometric states of consciousness to see how much they care about other people they care about unconditional they care about maximizing prosperity moving forward versus their own self-dealing tendencies and so to be able to make the ai coach says recommendations towards a prosperous future you know those are some of the examples you know give the example about about data as well being a human right well how do we make it so that every single person is able to take what is their own emotion and consciousness and biometric data and be able to decide when they want to open those valves and let that data go to researchers into to doing that process of maximizing prosperity getting properly compensated for having that be transparent I mean these are the most pressing questions of some of the most pressing questions of the exponential technology agent some of the most pressing questions of the movement towards AI coaches in general it seems like you're taking a really good first principled angle not only with data ethics and transparency but also about getting people paid for their data rights but also about starting with the big emotional layer um to get the best data for the AI coaching I know I think uh philosophy is the first step but it's useless without proper business model generation not to sound too cliche but if we want to execute our moralities we have to as a business my team and I have the challenge of figuring out ways to get this to market to scale it and to start making something valuable today with with the ethics but not always relying fully on the goodwill or or philosophies or what is nice so yeah to to I guess to answer your question of what how do we say make some of the global elite some of the presidents some of the industry leaders more aware of their own empathy or lack thereof and how do we improve that I think the first step is I like to always say the first step to change requires self-awareness if you don't know you're making a mistake if you don't know that something yet you're doing something because of your subconscious bias that's always there's no real way to actively grow yourself as an individual and real change never comes from someone coming from the outside like real true change comes from when you think about something and you compare the possibilities of what you could be if you eliminate the behavior or adopted another behavior but I would be lying if I say we knew the right answer so our first step is to sort of build self-mastery tools that help students to help incarcerated people gain a better sense of self-mastery and I love that it's a really hard problem but it's kind of fun yeah because you're a human trying to understand humans well you're a human trying to teach an AI to understand humans yes yes yes you know the meta layers that you were talking about earlier yeah again it seems as though um having humans be able to more oh no very kind of you thank you I love your questions by the way they're really really on point and and uh exponential questions thanks very well thank you thank you thank you why do you go like this instead of like like this oh I guess I've got Chinese ancestry so is that what this is a sign of my respect saying hey I see you recognize you as a person the one's the fist and one's the palm yeah I believe the the Thai people do that versus the this one interesting wow wow I just I really love just doing that like respect I respect the divine in you however I can do that you know yeah yeah like I always try to call everyone sir man or brother sister yeah yeah me too because I find that it never hurts one to give a bit of kindness into the world yes I mean if anyone ever abuses you got to have the strength to stand your own and destroy you need to take any weight against but but um always has a natural default it's important to spread that sense of respect it's like a pool that we all drink from if we go around like making enemies or like spreading a negativity around we're sucking from it yeah rather than contributing water which is kindness to exactly yeah a giant communal pool that we're all gonna sit on while our children were sick we talked about several times the challenge that we are currently at as a society in this reality we are at this beautiful moment of challenge is it the exact purpose of creation or source or god or the universe or the multiverse or whatever you want to call it is for us to be at this exact beautiful point of challenge I like to think that this beautiful moment is constantly moving constantly evolving and the concept of god is really the sum of all of these movements as we progress back and forth through time so I think that things are always the way they should be I think trying to always imprint our subjective perspectives on things and say oh this is this shouldn't happen to say something shouldn't happen is almost self-defeating because this is just what the reality is and as a part of that reality we have a decision as to whether we want to try to solve that for the future or let these inefficiencies happen as we see fit so it's I think it's probably impossible for the part like the cell in the body to understand what the whole human body is doing but each cell in our human body has a choice so whether it wants to keep being a cell I like to this might be a bit extreme but I sometimes say that even a rock has consciousness because if the rock didn't know that it was supposed to stay in a certain geometric atomic formation how would it remain a rock why doesn't its proton just blast off in somewhere else but no I go ahead do you do you think that we are all one I believe that we are all one and disconnected in the sense that that disconnection is part of our oneness and then that we are parts of a giant network and as a part we have our individual autonomy our character our subjective life perspective but that we are all also alive in the greatest sense of the universe such that even after we die we are still a part of that same giant network as it transforms like life is like energy when we die like even if we become a rock that rock is still part of a greater interconnectedness and that's enough for me because yeah that that's enough for me to to be able to live and die happily I think so we're all one and there's unique essences or spirits to each of us as well no a hundred percent like even a cat or a dog or any rock in itself is a separate entity but at the same time in equal measure connected with everything else so it's a it's a okay a contradiction of of dichotomy yeah but that's the way I see it within the deep oneness and interconnectedness our separations that can be combinatoricized in a infinite amount of ways yeah and our perceptions our individual perceptions of the world really determine what the next step of the network is going to take whether it's a superposition a superpositioned beam of energy when it is I guess I won't go too much in stuff I don't really know I don't want to misrepresent any quantum physicists you know just writing in the comments describe what my feeling is that each of us the way we perceive the world as a part of it determines how we move forward and how the network evolves and grows so yeah like perception understanding ourselves first gives us a much more solid way to perceive the rest of the world absolutely I'd love understanding our own consciousness first I loved your focus on self mastery throughout this conversation I love your company's focus on self mastery being the first one of these first big principles about evolution is self mastery know thyself know thy north star and know thy steps along the way to get there all that type of stuff 100% and to be a bit poetic it's like when the beam of energy has become self aware that's when it breaks down it's a superposition it becomes something real okay I'm gonna get flack for that one I know one more time say it again when when it's like as a poem you know it's a poetic way to think about it when an object is in superposition when it finally figures out what it wants to be yes when it solidifies its perspective so to speak whether it's like you collapse you collapse into one direction into one that's probably not an accurate but it's a nice philosophical I agree it's poetic and scientifically accurate so we are in a state of superposition with our north star trajectory until we make the decision to message Ben and invite him on the show then the show happens oh yeah yeah yeah ought to create a show like this like when the etc yeah like when the human will is focused that's when a lot of action and the results we're constantly collapsing the probabilities yeah yeah the problem is when we don't think about ourselves we remain superposition reacting to the world rather than sort of formulating and forming something into it yeah yes yes um it's like philosophical science poetry yeah exactly do you think that the most upstream issue that we face as a society in this reality is our lack of understanding of the oneness our feelings of separation our lack of feelings of interconnectedness I think the biggest issue facing our generation is a lack of opportunities in an increasingly unequal world where we're going to see automation we're going to see a digital AI revolution and we're going to see massive populations of people displaced and left without a means to survive and that's only the result of this from a game theory perspective is warfare rioting white spec poverty so I think the biggest problem that we're facing is to fix the like how do we take care of those who really need to help because those who don't need to help we're going to find our own sense of moral ability whether it's becoming an actor whether it's becoming a gardener but the biggest impediment to increasing human morality and human consciousness I believe is a lack of opportunities that our current generation is moving in the direction we're hitting towards and so this is why I'm very burdened by say people who really try to focus on empowering those who could really use the help yeah so then the most pressing thing is to be able to deliver a powerful social fabric that is most conducive for the actualization of all the spirits that are birthed into it and leveraging that in our that's what we want that's it yeah that's that's it it's hard problem to solve but it's doable you know people are aware of it no pun intended yeah I'm aware of the problem yeah I like that that focus um we can pass a little bit of time now on uh Neurotech X your initiative to make BCIs more accessible to people in community as well as FEV your founders and entrepreneurs of Vancouver community absolutely what I would recommend is anyone in the audience who is sort of interested in biometric technology or working with biometric devices to check out the Neurotech X community we've got thousands of scientists around the world that are super supportive we just believe in trying to provide networking resources opportunities for anyone interested in this really young field of brain computer interfaces I'm currently trying to help us launch a marketplace to centralize brain computer interface devices such that our Neurotech X community has a much cheaper and faster and easier way to find the right devices for them I also helped found the Neurotech X Vancouver chapter so it's a local community if you're in Vancouver feel free to join our cleanup group we're happened to be the largest in western Canada but what is nice is we're all over the world and basically almost every major city like 30 chapters around the world so yeah I think the beautiful thing about having a community to support you is if you ever need help if you have ideas you need to find partnerships you need to find people to hire people to work for projects you want to build having a community around you is the surest way to succeed in your career and supporting and growing a community you believe in it's rewarding yeah and another community that that I've founded in Vancouver is called the FAF group founders and entrepreneurs of Vancouver kind of cheesy name but essentially being a CEO being an executive being a founder is extremely it can be really lonely and difficult and hard at times so what I decided was why don't we bring a group of us together we're about a hundred large now we have businesses all across the range of industries and then we just get together to do like silly things like detonate a bunch of high explosives like to target shooting or eat dinner or like do archery tag or go for wine and dine so building that sense of network growing the community around you and really caring about how do you grow a community that adds value to all the members that's uh it's been instrumental in growing say my own career so I recommend that anyone who's out there find your community a community of people who share your values hopefully transhumanism and um try to grow it and try to like give back do it do what you do what you can yeah I love your focus on community and the importance of that along our north star trajectories is crucial so when you have an AI coach that's assisting you along the way it's also gonna be it seems very important to also have humans along the way and so it's a big question of our time as well what will be the future with humans and given the area of expertise that humans can do better than general intelligence slowly shrinking over time yeah and the good thing is and everyone who's listening to this is a human and that means that they can make a big change in the world if they they value and think about what they want to do and do their best to do it I mean even if no one succeeds it's still worth the effort because that's the human spirit to just keep doing what we think is the best uh the most moral thing to do reach that north star so to speak despite the adversities I that's so crucial and then also the way that you've been explaining what you're doing with atlas holdings is I think a really good way of people watching or listening to think about tackling some of the biggest issues that are facing our world because you're coming from such a deep first principled way of viewing it which is that if I want to help with this AI coach to bring people to the north stars I have to start with building the most robust data set of emotions and conscious experiences with biometrics possible then then uh be extremely ethical about and transparent about data getting people paid for data rights all this type of stuff at the most foundational layer then actually doing the process of the AI coaching and helping people get there and all that type of stuff um and helping all these companies build emotional layers in the process I mean it's just a very strong way of of um of approaching one of these big issues you know our team has really done our best to optimize this and um yeah so our team has we've got some really brilliant people helping us on our team um so I can't take any of all the credit for that yeah shout out to the atlas holdings team and and I also just shout out in general um we uh need to build that social fabric that is most conducive for everyone actualizing their gifts and to make it at a time of automation and AI coming in we got to make it happen as soon as possible um and uh and keep it on the positive prosperity directional arrow um as much as we can so yeah this was really solid yeah it was very enlightening really really happy to be here and to to share uh share our work with you and your audience thanks man it's really really wonderful to see your podcast spreading the message of transhumanism getting it north star getting people thinking about what is possible with exponential technologies just so much that can be done today ethical moral philosophical transhumanism yes with business model evolution yeah yes yes yeah thanks man thank you so much for coming on the program likewise thank you for hosting it's been wonderful yeah some some of the best questions I've ever been asked here thank you brother thank you and some of the best strategies on tackling the most pressing challenges yeah our team is doing the best we can thank you that's all we can do the best we can yeah that's right that's right thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below let us know what you're thinking we would love to hear from you about all the things that ben was teaching us about AI emotion technologies using human data to optimize human performance let us know what you're thinking check out atlasholdings.fund check out neurotechx.com also check out ben's profile linked in reach out to him if you want to partake in any of the things that he's been talking about reach out also support the artisty entrepreneurs and spiritual leaders organizations in your communities that you believe in and around the world you can support simulation our links are below to our show paypal patreon cryptocurrency design cool merchandise to pay keep supporting us so you can do things like coming on site to be in kubernetes interview people like ben and go build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we love you very much thank you for tuning in we will see you soon that's so cool dude this podcast is so fun that's really cool work you're doing