 So General Magic, for your listeners who haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend the documentary because it's a great story about how both the future is unevenly distributed and also about how the future comes very, very slowly and then all of a sudden. And people, you know, the example, General Magic is a good example of how, for instance, Apple was working on a vision that was very close to the iPhone as early as 1995 and that every few years it looked like it was just a couple years away. Many people created products. The company that I was a founder of OmniSky also created a product with this vision. And then 2007 all of a sudden the future arrives, but it was incubating, it was bubbling, I've got some bread rising in the kitchen, it was doing that incubation that all technologies do and then suddenly burst out. Welcome to Inside Ideas with 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Today I have the wonderful opportunity to introduce a friend of mine, Barack Berkowitz, who is the Director of Operations and Strategy at MIT Media Labs, has a unique position there as well. He is the founder of MarketCentrics, a consumer strategy consultancy for tech companies. He consults to startups, venture capitals and large companies. Some of those past clients have included Digital Garage, Apple, Sony, Fiji Film, Polycom and many others. He also serves as an investor and advisor to many startups including Little Bits, New Context, Improbable and Quixi. Over the past 25 plus years, Barack has served in a number of consumer technology leadership roles. Most recently, Barack was CEO of EVI, a virtual personal assistant that was acquired by Amazon, a big deal. And then Intelligence and Alexa. So prior to EVI, Barack was managing director of Wolfram Alpha, the revolutionary answer engine. He also was chairman and CEO of Six Apart, the global leader in blogging and co-founder and president of AmiSky. I could go on and on. The camera I'm using right now is a Logitech camera and he used to be part of the portal and EVP as general manager of Logitech. With nine over nine years, with Apple USA and Apple Japan and a number of different leading consumer and marketing programs and roles. Barack started his tech career at Macy's, running the world's first large scale consumer computer store chain. So MIT, when you think of MIT, normally you say, okay, Boston, East Coast, Barack is joining us from Palo Alto. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Good to see you again, Mark. It's been too long. It really has. So that leads right in. The last time we saw each other was at DLD and then right after that in Munich and then right after that at the World Economic Forum in Davos. And we got a little bit of a chance to talk, but there's always such a vying for time and conversations there. It's not always the best place to sit down and have deep dives. And then the craziness hit us and happened at all sorts of wild things have happened since the great beginning of the year. And I lost touch with you until, well, probably got what was almost almost a month now or a couple of weeks ago. I sent you a movie, General Magic. And that brings us to how you're here today. You have an interesting story. I don't know if I've left everything out in your biography. I'm sure I have, but you know some of the guys from General Magic or had some dealings with them. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that or anything I left out? Well, yeah, I'm happy. Let's talk about General Magic for a second. You sent that video and I responded because I was very involved with the beginnings of that company. There was a project inside of Apple. My last year at Apple was spent in the Advanced Technologies Group, which is basically an incubator inside of Apple. And there was a project inside that incubator led by a guy named Mark Parat, who is the founder of General Magic. And that project was called Paradigm. And in that project, we envisioned a handheld computer connected to a global network with connection to every person in the world and every business in the world and something you would carry around with you that would allow you to do commerce, would allow you to communicate, allow you to be productive, and keep you on time for your meetings. So that doesn't always work. So General Magic, for your listeners who haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend the documentary because it's a great story about how both the future is unevenly distributed and also about how the future comes very, very slowly and then all of a sudden. And the example of General Magic is a good example of how, for instance, Apple was working on a vision that was very close to the iPhone as early as 1995 and that every few years it looked like it was just a couple years away, many people created products. The company that I was a founder of OmniSky also created a product with this vision. And then, 2007, all of a sudden, the future arrives, but it was incubating. It was bubbling. I've got some bread rising in the kitchen. It was doing that incubation that all technologies do and then suddenly burst out. That's kind of like this diffusion of innovation curve, the Gaussian curve, the bell curve. But in that curve, on the S portion of that curve, there's this gap or this chasm. It's almost I'd like to get your views or feelings on that where I kind of liken it to shooting a bow and arrow. You have that great momentum to pull back. You're preparing and getting the force and energy before you let go and then you get your launch and your shoot. And sometimes you make it over that chasm or that gap and sometimes you don't. I don't know if I would say Google Glass has never made it over the chasm. Is that the similar type of this incubation, this breeding period, the chasm? Or is it something different? No, I think it's the same thing. And it's pretty much where I've spent my whole career is in the middle of that chasm. I sometimes say, if you ever see me get involved in a business, invest in that business idea 15 years later. Because I'm often pretty much always in things very early. Personal computers in 1985, coming back internet in basically 1994, blogging and social networks in 2002, personal assistants in two days. So you can see I've pretty good at being too early. And General Magics is a good example there. That's basically the paradigm part of it was 1989. And I think the company was founded in 1992 or something like that, or 1990. So you spend a lot of time in this period where a technology is maturing. Well, part of what it's doing is maturing. But often a large part of what's happening is the piece parts are coming together. All the things you need for that technology or that thing to become successful and to be able to be a mass product are coming together. For something like the iPhone, you need networks that are fast enough. You need screens that are sharp enough. You need processors that are fast enough. You need a whole series of infrastructures that aren't being built by the company that brings that product out. And only when they come together do you have success. And so for instance, social media requires both the idea, the services, and enough people being online and enough people connected. And in fact, for social media to really take off, it really did require very good internet connected mobile devices with cameras. Because images have always been a critical driver in social media, particularly person to person social media. That brings us to a great position where you're at. I mean, I know you don't speak a lot about the research or the actual goings on too much about MIT Media Labs. But I was wondering if you could give us any insights of this journey. What is the anniversary or over 25 years now, right? Oh, it's almost 35 now. 35 years now. And you've been there for a pretty good chunk. So it would be nice to know what we can see from the future of MIT or what's going on to be hopeful, what's working on, what any kind of information you can maybe give us of insights there. And the reason I ask is I've always been a fan of MIT. But I've cleared back in 1972 with the World Model 3 and Dennis Meadows, Donel Meadows, and the Limits to Growth book, and many other things that have over the times come out of not only MIT, but then great things that have gone on there. So I would love to hear an update on what your life is. And also, the forward-thinking futuristic type of work processes that you find there. Obviously, MIT is not in Palo Alto, but that would be nice if you kind of let us know how that structure works. Yeah, so I mean, first I'd say, as you said, I'm not a researcher at MIT. I run operations. But I think at the Media Lab, and I think the Media Lab has also always been about the ideas of the future, about how new interfaces will evolve, how new science will evolve, how new technologies will evolve, and how they'll impact people, and also how to have them impact people in a humane way. And to not forget the societal impact of technology, all technologies have always had societal impact. And all technologies generally can be used for good and evil. The wheel can be used for good and evil. Fire can be used for good and evil. It's a balance. So it's a balance. And it's an interesting thing to study, that balance, and can you skew that balance at all? A lot of it has to do with just staying conscious of that balance and knowing that that balance exists. I'd say that it's interesting. This is an example of how the future arrives suddenly. When I started over seven years ago at the Media Lab, there were a huge number of people who were very skeptical of the idea that I could be basically in Boston every other week and run operations from Palo Alto and not even full time. I do some other work, too, as you said. So the head of operations, yet not on site all the time and doing other things. And it's funny because my life before this was half time I'd be in my office on video talking to staff and in meetings. And that was very unusual, even in a place like MIT Media Lab, six months ago. And now everybody's living my life on some level. And my life is even more virtualized than it was before. I do believe that the balance that I had where you have a certain frequency of face-to-face personal interaction makes the video interaction much more successful and possible. I do not believe we can go into a full virtualized video world because we are dealing with people and there's lots of things in terms of trusting people that come from being with them face-to-face and knowing them. But it is very interesting how that has evolved and how my work style has become quite common. And I guess one thing I can say is I know that many people are having trouble today controlling their constant availability because suddenly they're at home and they're on the computer and it seems like workdays can go on forever because why not? You're just sitting in front of a computer. Why couldn't you know you don't quote unquote go home? And a long time ago I think I learned that you can't work like that. That you do need a calendar. You do need to, if not go home, go to the gym, go bicycling, do other things, and have breaks. And I can't tell you how many people I've talked to recently who have said to me they're working the hardest they've ever worked in their life. I think I was one of them. Yeah, I haven't heard it from you but I'm not surprised. And for many people in the same job they're working the hardest they ever have in their life. And a lot of that has to do with learning how to balance the technology, both not for them only but for the people they're working with and how to create limits and how to figure out that, no, your break in the morning to come to work was not about your need to be transported. It's even more important your need to set up for the day to have some time when you're awake but not dealing with anybody. And just because you're home now doesn't mean you should be turning on your Zoom immediately when you get up, you know, having breakfast and coffee in front of Zoom is probably not the best idea. Now, the infrastructure, and I don't know if you can go into this but the infrastructure of the MIT Media Labs not only how the organization is but as far as, you know, we think MIT Media Labs the technology, the who's who of everything and infrastructure has this pandemic time for all the educators but all for all those researchers and all the people in the lab. Has that been up to speed? Has it been ready? Has it been able to take this, you know, remote working and things smoothly? Was there any learning curves or were you, because you've been working this way and with advanced innovations and technology for a long time, were you guys well prepared? So I think it's a complex answer to that. We definitely were, I mean, we have people from so many different disciplines including biology and including epidemiology that we definitely were more aware sooner than most of MIT about the likely impacts of the pandemic. We were the first place at MIT to close down and actually got some pushback about that close down because we did it before the Institute did but, you know, the executive leadership at the lab after talking among the scientists became quite convinced that the safest thing we could do for students and faculty was to close the lab. And we did that at least a week and a half before the Institute came to the same conclusion. The figuring out how to do meetings remotely, which technologies to use, et cetera, I think we had been using Zoom, we had been using Zoom within the lab for about a year and Skype and started to use it more as the pandemic came on and we had our own license and MIT negotiated a license during the pandemic. It was hard definitely to run classes. It was something that we had not done before. It was definitely hard to do research and there's a good deal of research that you cannot do if you're not in the laboratory and people don't have those laboratories at home. So it's a, because we have so many disciplines, it's a very uneven balance between, you know, those who found it very straightforward to do their work and those who found it quite a big challenge to do their work. And as you can imagine, the bio people found it much harder. People who were doing a lot of physical building, of physical fabricating, et cetera, found it much harder because the fabrication tools weren't available. And at MIT, already a month and a half ago, we started letting people in on a limited basis who did need access to their labs and did need to be in and working within those places. But it was, you know, as you can imagine, it required adaptation for everybody. I would say that this is a technically very articulate group and, you know, the technical literacy of the group is high. So it was probably easier for most people than easier for people at the lab, than most people in- The learning curve was reduced, I'm sure. The learning curve was reduced, but still, it's really, it's not about technology. It's about how do you communicate what tools work? How do you manage your time? And that's very few of us have spent a lot of time looking at that. With MIT Media Lab and then we'll finish it on discussing them. Are there, is there such thing as hubs around the world? Like, I know one time I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, Harold, he said that the Hoffman City University in Hamburg had something to do with MIT. I don't know if it was a media lab or something else. But, and then I know Korea and other places have things with MIT label on them. Are those media labs or are those other MIT places? Can you explain that, do you know much about that? Yeah, so for the most part, there's only one MIT Media Lab. And we purposely don't even call it plural because it is a single laboratory of interdisciplinary work. Or as we often say, anti-disciplinary work. And, but there are relationships with some universities that are loose around the world, but there is no other MIT Media Lab. And even MIT does not have as many foreign partnerships as a number of other universities do. It does have a partnership and a deep partnership in Singapore and one in China. But for the most part, what MIT for the most part is not as decentralized as many universities have become and or doesn't spread its brand that way or licenses brand. And the Media Lab itself definitely does not. So I'm not considered, the Palo Alto is not considered a hub of the lab. That's half here, I just happen to live here. Great, well, thank you. So that brings me nicely to where the real question of importance that I wanna know is, how have you weathered this pandemic time, the Black Lives Matter, the unrest, this different lockdown place, your human zoo that I see behind you looks very comforting. I know you have a dog and you're baking bread and you're not too much in confinement, you're used to working this way for a long time. But how have you weathered this time and what books, what reads, what discussions have helped you the most and what does it look like for you at this time? Yeah, I sometimes feel a little guilty saying that it has been very easy. Palo Alto is easy. I'm used to this form of working. I live in a beautiful place with somewhat ideal weather. Our worst winter, January means it might rain some. I was lucky enough to get a Peloton. So I was able to transition from, I think our gym shut down in late March and I was able to kind of very easily transition from that Santa Clara County where I live was the first place in California, one of the first places in California, the lockdown. So altogether, I've been very fortunate. I greatly miss traveling. I greatly miss my friends around the world. I miss community, which you can only get so much of on video, but I feel very lucky. My family's healthy. My mother who lives in Cambridge is doing extraordinarily well and it has been pretty easy, you know, Costco deliveries, whole food, you know. The reason I ask that is, because I know in some respects, you're a global citizen. You travel a lot. We saw each other as I mentioned in Munich and then in Switzerland at Davos. So we've seen each other in Italy. I think we've seen each other in Spain and a couple of other places. So you definitely get around, we both travel a lot. Do you consider yourself a global citizen? And if not, or if you do, how do you feel about a possible future with global citizens without nations, borders, walls, boundaries to restrict us, not just from a pandemic, but in general to a new global model or operating system? Have you thought about that or what would your feelings be about something like that? Yeah, so first of all, I don't particularly love the phrase global citizen for a couple of reasons. One is it's a very citizen is a very legalistic phrase and it implies a government and I'm not necessarily a believer in global government. And second of all, I think it's off-putting to a lot of people who hear it for the first time. It's kind of sounds like a global conspiracy. And it's not really how I think about the world at all. In fact, I think one of the things that we all should have learned through this pandemic is competent governance matters. Confident governors make a difference. You live in a country where your Prime Minister or President, sorry. I just... Prime Minister. Counselor, yeah. Counselor is a scientist and therefore Germany faced this epidemic as what it is, a scientific problem, a technological problem. We are, President is a little bit less than a scientist, even though his uncle went to MIT as he was proud to tell everybody. I don't think any of that rubbed off on him. I don't think it wore off, but rubbed off, but he does. And so what I do think is the ability of people around the world to work together independently to have impact has changed. And I do believe that that's an incredibly important fact and a really meaningful difference and a friend of mine, I think you've met him, do Jamie Matzel, has started this website called Our Shared World. And it's around this idea of a pledge of interdependency instead of independence. I don't know if you've talked to him yet about this, but I do believe that there is another layer beyond local governments, beyond organizations, beyond international bodies, beyond NGOs, which weirdly has come back to the atomization of people working together, connecting to each other on WhatsApp, deciding they wanna support somebody down the street who's doing really poorly. You know, this is kind of the dream of this interconnectedness is, was, and now is that we can take action, even global action, without being part of an organization, without being part of a group, without being part of a government, without being a citizen of that thing. I think you brought up Black Lives Matter and I had some very dark feelings about where America was going for quite a while in the last year or so. I am an American boy, but I am the descendant of German Jews and I never believed America could go down this very dark path. And I think when we met at Davos, I was really disturbed that what I see America as was becoming untrue and there was a great risk. And I turned markedly optimistic during Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter really showed this ability. There's no central organizing group. There is a group that calls themselves Black Lives Matter, but they did not organize any of these demonstrations. And these demonstrations took place because people messaged each other and people got on social media and foreign interference was pretty well filtered out or at least did not have much impact. And even when the president of the United States tried to stir the pot and get people to come out in opposition to Black Lives Matter and even implying that they should come out that way violently, it didn't happen. And in fact, little towns in Idaho with populations of 300 and not a Black person within 400 miles came out with 10, 20% of the population for Black Lives Matter. And I think the optimistic thing there is what we said a long time ago, power to the people. The dream of these technologists, surely the dream of Steve Jobs was to put power in people's hands. And I know a lot of people think the valley is somewhat of an evil place, and that that's just some form of whitewashing. But I'll tell you, at least for myself and the people I worked with at Apple in their early days and the people I met in the technology industry around the valley when I first moved here and I moved from New York City, that was not lip service. People really deeply believed it. And really, I think, many still do, and suddenly we see this ability. And we see even the ability to root out disruptive forces in these demonstrations through, not through cops, not through anything else, simply through these conversations. We can have a conversation about defund police, which is really about trying to make the jobs that police do in the United States more rational for the police themselves so they don't get put in such awkward situations and for the people dealing with them so that police come to situations where they're really needed and where social workers or mental health experts or other people go to those things and a poor cop doesn't get forced to be a social worker and a mental health expert and a family relations expert. So all of this really makes me encouraged that through personal action, through global networks, real difference can happen. And these boundaries just do not matter on the internet. They don't exist on the internet. And in that way, I'm surely a citizen of the internet and I surely am comfortable most places in the world. I saw, I also speak about it in a different term, kind of like this homo symbiosis that we need to become a part of this symbiotic earth that, whether earthlings or that is the correct term that we're all really distant cousins related to each other that they're, we should be free to move around anywhere on this earth as distant cousins and not bordered off or walled off from each other. And so I see that in you, I see that in our movements and our friendships and the things. So I appreciate you telling me that and is there any profound readings or things besides those movements that then gave you this new optimism and hope for the future? Or was it just in general, the actions that you saw? Well, I think for quite a while, I've been reading a bunch of things on technology and the world. And one of the things that I feel very strongly is that our media distorts the world around us in extremely negative ways. And I'm not talking about the political dialogue, which is a problem all to itself. I'm talking about the fact that the world is a much better place than most people think it is. The things that we have accomplished since World War II are mind boggling and rarely celebrated. The fact that if you had read a book in the 70s about population growth, you would not believe the number of people we have on Earth today. And more importantly, you would not believe how few of them are starving. You would be shocked because you would say that math is impossible. We have achieved bringing huge numbers of people out of poverty. Now, that creates new problems and it does create other issues, but we shouldn't forget that we've proven ourselves able to deal with things that seemed impossible to deal with. And that gives a lot of hope to our ability to deal with the problems that come from having more people not starving. They're not starving, they're not dying. There are more people wealthy, the number of people who've become middle class in China in the last decade is my bottle. The idea that the middle class has almost doubled, more than doubled in size in the last 20 years. Is mind boggling, actually probably tripled in size. The idea that companies sell two billion phones in a year is crazy. That's insanity. Craziness that there are more phones on Earth than there are people is insane. I think I mentioned this to you just like the phone statistic, how many phones per person. We're actually in the Anthropocene, you see me standing here, but we're in the Anthropocene of chairs. We have what is it? Six to eight chairs per person. How many billions of chairs more than we have humanity? Well, okay, you go places, you sit down, but there are numbers and things like that are really, and we've been talking for the last three, four years, the rising billions that will have the smartphones in the palm of their hand, the intelligence, the data, whether it's misinformation or accurate information, the data, the ability to look and research things in the palm of their hand, which nicely leads to the question, the big burning question that I want to ask you, the big burning question is WTF. Most people think, oh, that's the swear word. No, it's what's the future for you, Barak? What is the future? I mean, I'm figuring out the future for me, so it's a little bit complex and I've gone through many periods in my life where I'm feeling around for what the future is and that's kind of been my career and my life. But I would say, and the pandemic has not changed my first feeling about that, which is that there are two big remaining waves of digitalization, one around biology and health and another around artificial intelligence and what that means for human existence, how people live. So personally, I'm very interested in artificial intelligence and health and how it will impact our ability to discover treatments for all sorts of things. And so that's probably part of the future for me. I am not one of those people who believe I'm never gonna travel again, I'm always gonna stay on screens. No, I'm probably gonna get on a plane as soon as I believe it's a reasonably safe thing to do. We all take risks all the time. Management of risk is a large part of life. Unfortunately, the risks today are not such that I would get on a plane. And anyway, there's no place to go because nobody's gonna let Americans in at the moment because we're handling the pandemic so badly. So the airlines are opening up, but there are also some places still closed not letting anybody in, but yes. Yeah, well, close to Americans. You can go lots of places. And particularly nice places in Europe, but I cannot. That will change, my friend, don't worry. Yes, well, yes. Our curve will change at some point, it will, but. That was the question is, do you have this hope and optimism for the future? The models or the ways that we've been operating or we've been living in the past and then we hit a pandemic or we hit some snafus, so to say, right now, if you push the current model out, most places of the world, people are wearing masks, there's social distancing, there's a lot of hygiene, personal protection measures. But if you push those models out into the future, well, they're not ones of disappearance of those personal protection methods or hygiene methods. They're basically pushing masks into, now we're wearing a gas mask, now we're wearing an oxygen mask, now we're wearing a space suit to enjoy the future. If you really push those models out, we know that there's gonna be other pandemics, other things that arise and happen. Is that the future? No, I think that in this time of pause, of this time that the world economic form is calling the great reset, I really believe and would love to hear your input or views that we're going to be able to pivot to change, to make that great reset to say, no, the future that we're on, the trajectory, whether our leader is the Trumpocalypse or the Bolsonaro or the Shea, it doesn't matter that we want a different, much brighter, resilient, desirable future to be in that we don't wanna be running around on space suits. And now we're gonna do the necessary actions and things to make sure business and science and politics and our governance in the future is such that provides us with that infrastructure, that desirable future to live in. And so that's the one I'm hopeful of. I have family, as you know, all over the world and I have business and projects all over the world. I plan on seeing all the needs to change and I can give you the hope and optimism that January 2019, there's a UN organization that does air travel and carbon emissions from air travel and emissions period from air travel. And they have been working since 1945 on carbon reductions, carbon schemes and innovations to make that transition so that we can continue to travel without harming our planet. And in January 2019, the implementations already began for one of them is called Corsia that's already began. But I know, as you probably will do since you deal a lot with research and innovators and different things you've probably heard in the grapevine, by 2024, by 2025, 2026, the latest, there are over 125 different vertical takeoff drone taxis, five passenger taxis, Ilium, Hyundai, Uber's got into the business, Airbus and Boeing are doing commercial versions of modifications on electrical things, new fuels are coming about. I really believe that we're going to see not a Star Trek type of a travel, but we're gonna see some real innovations and things come very quick, just like we've seen in an electrical vehicle, arena, things change fairly rapid. So we'll be back seeing and traveling without harming our planet and harming each other in the process because people have already been thinking about that. And that's why I wanted to interview and speak with you is because I think you're not only an innovator and a thought leader, the early adopter, the innovator, but you're also surrounded by those type of people that kind of think about the boundaries and pushing the future that we could have. And so I don't know if you have anything that wasn't really a question, but that was more like the hope and optimism that we will be there and if you have any thoughts about that at all. Yeah, I mean, I am also extremely optimistic and even I see that this concept of the great reset, I'm not sure, I completely believe in the great reset, but I do believe that the world is changed by massive events. And this is a massive event. The dinosaurs were killed by asteroid hitting the earth. COVID is an asteroid. COVID has an impact that affects a huge number of ecosystems around the world. And the good news is that some of the changes that are taking place were pretty self-evident that they would have to take place and that we would go through pain for them to take place. And for the most part, while the pain of the pandemic is horrible and the people lost to the pandemic is disastrous, hopefully it is not the 60 plus million people that were lost in World War II. It is comparatively, it is tragic, but it's comparatively less tragic than big forces that have forced people to rethink things have been in the past. And I do have a strong belief that it is a catalyst for changes that will ripple through society over the next decades. Some of those are just people are suddenly used to, well, I don't have to travel for everything. I can, you know, that's a huge impact on the environment. It's a huge impact in changing the economy and making it more resilient. People suddenly have become familiar with ways that they can connect with people. Ways that you and I have probably been doing for a long time. Long time. It's suddenly very common to everybody. So, and that leads me to this optimism that, yes, a lot of problems will be solved not through governments, not through organizations, but through people. You know, people who meet each other and decide they agree. And as we all know, networks interconnect into very large groups very quickly. It is, I mean, it is, it's probably terrifying if I were to look at my social network, how many people are three degrees away? Yeah, three, yeah. I'm not sure I believe in six degrees of separation anymore. I believe we've actually, you know, we're a lot closer on a lot of things. And we're really, in many respects, we've hit this exponential curve or the growth or the function, not only in the ugly and the bad, but also in the good and the positive and then the innovations and the things to do that balance that you spoke about in the beginning to really use that not only for destructive and the bad things that can happen, but really to get us to keep up to speed with our ever-changing environment and climate and innovation so that we can really do it in the right way and efficient way for humanity, for the good of health and well-being of us all. You asked about books and I'm in the midst of reading Andy McAfee's More From Less. And it's somewhat of a controversial book, I know, because it basically says technology works and capitalism works. And I basically believe that. It does not say pure capitalism with no controls work. It does not say pure technology with no thought works, but it does say that, and I strongly believe this and have for quite a long time, that on balance these two things have brought more good than they've brought bad. And on balance, accepting that fact is incredibly helpful to then controlling and managing how those forces can be steered towards less harm and even more good. If these forces are so powerful, if they allow us to do so much, then all what we need to do is tune them. And this is one of the reasons I'm a little bit concerned about this concept of the Great Reset. I don't think in any way, shape or form, the pandemic is the end of capitalism. In fact, I think it's mind-boggling the way scientists all around the world are working to find solutions for the pandemic. And a good portion of that is driven by capitalist instincts and a good portion of it is driven by technologies. And they are not, neither of them are necessarily bad. And neither of them will necessarily make profits off of the pandemic, but it will lead to changes in the pharmaceutical industry that'll last for decades, last forever. And I think that a number of people, Pinker, McAfee, et cetera, have made a very convincing case that we should not throw at the baby with the bathwater, that we can build a more human, a more caring society without throwing away the things we know work that we've seen work very effectively. And I'm optimistic we'll do that because I am optimistic that people will work together to overcome these problems. And that's, you know, when we talk about the Facebook problem, this is not a Facebook problem. I mean, Facebook or Twitter or whoever can fix things at the edges in governance. But only the users can fix things in the court. Only the users can stop talking to friends who spread crazy rumors. Only the users can start coming down on making sure that you don't live in a bubble. Only these are things that definitely, there are very good points about the gamification of these social networks and how that needs to be dialed down. And the social network that I was CEO of did not succeed because it actually dialed down. For instance, it limited how many friends you could have. And it required you to put people into networks. And that was not successful. Was that because of the critical mass or was that because of this, what is that, the 1,100? It's because we, yeah, I mean, I think that a number of people have tried this. The issue is social networks by their nature tend to always be the social network with the most people becomes, quite obviously, the social network with the most people is by definition the most popular. And by definition, once it has the most people, it's likely to continue to grow because the odds become higher and higher that that's where your friends are. And you can have different social networks for different purposes as we see with Instagram or we see with Twitter or we see with LinkedIn. But in the end, if you put artificial walls around the way you grow, then somebody else will come out removing those walls and they'll grow faster. And I would say, you know, at six apart, our founder really was worried about these social interactions and to make sure they were friendly and make sure that they were caring and positive. And she was, of course, totally right. But you can't do that by fiat. You need to do it by building a culture and building cultural norms. And we should understand this society of the web is a very, very young society. It is maybe 20 years old at the most. So think about how long it takes to build a culture, how long it takes to build social mores, how long it takes to build quote unquote religions. It takes time for societies to build the way they interact so that they remain healthy. And that's what's going on in the internet today. And these conversations are incredibly important because they're the building of our social norms. They're the building of the rules of how quote, civilized people use these tools. And that will not be solved by regulation. That's going to be solved by the users, communicating with each other and setting boundaries. So there are things you will not allow people to do if they're sitting next to you in a restaurant. Well, there are things you shouldn't allow people to do if they're sitting next to you online. And that will happen. And the final thing I'll say about that is in the great reset, there seems to be some discussion about the end of governments, the end of big businesses, et cetera. And again, I'll say governance does really matter. It really does make a difference. And I think Europeans right now, many of them don't even appreciate how lucky they are to be in a place that is generally even at the edges, even in the countries that you often think of not being well-governed or being ungovernable are basically made mistakes, which is normal when a new situation comes up but corrected those mistakes and are well-governed. And all you have to do is look at Brazil or the United States to see what happens when you don't have that. It's a famous Joni Mitchell. You don't know what you have till it's gone. Exactly. Yeah, you don't know how good you've got it till it's gone. And people like to complain. Yeah, they do, they absolutely do. I think there's a couple of really strong words of wisdom in what you say, not only within the balance and the governance. To me, it kind of ties a lot to innovation and technology as well. So I don't think we're ever gonna get rid of the Trumpocalypse, the capitalists or the extremely horrible evils of our world, I think then in some respects, some way there, they will always be there, always come quelling to the bubble up to the surface. And so we need to have that balance there, that true, not ying and yang, but that true balance. And the way that I kind of see that tying in to technology and I don't know how apt or how much you know, but the quantum state is a damn difficult thing to explain or to talk about. But it's both on and off at the same time it's both ones and zeros. It's both states at the same time if I'm very in a very dangerous way, surmising it easily, but in the same way when I've asked people, you know, what is the future? What is the solution? What are, it's both things at the same time. It's are all the things at the same time because you need that symbiotic, the virus and the microbes and the good gut health and all those things at the same time. And so technology stance, I guess it would be quantum state or quantum computing or that quantum leap that we want to take. How can we live in harmony or imbalance with both states at the same time? Because in that respect, there's also tons of efficiency, tons of speed, tons of future ways of living that keep us in this nice, safe operating space of our planetary boundaries. I don't know how you feel about that, but that, you know, emerging technologies and quantum states and all these very complex things that are hard to describe, I try to relate them through this and different lens. And to me, that seems warm, that's very fitting. I think it's an interesting analogy and somewhat useful analogy because people do wish there was an absolutist solution. Just kill capitalism and we'll live like we're in the Garden of Eden, you know, just stop using carbon at all and the world will be a wonderful place. You know, forgetting that our food is grown. Forgetting that our food and our bodies. Bodies, et cetera, that we breathe carbon dioxide out. We are carbon dioxide creators. And it's far more about getting back to the balance, about moderation, about finding how we live together. And, you know, and the only way you can do that is by looking at what we have done right. Looking at what we've done wrong is not particularly helpful. It's problem solving is helpful, but when you look at what we've done right, you can start seeing courses towards other things we can do right. And, you know, after World War II, the international bodies that we built to stabilize peace really made a difference and we should not be throwing away those ideas. The idea that a country like America after World War II decided they had to invest in Europe, had to give money to Europe to rebuild, was revolutionary. And we need to think about what does that mean for the world and the future? What does it mean on how we interact with developing countries? What does it mean? Because this should not, cannot be only right after a war, you know. It needs to be constant. Yeah, and then the other part of living in balance means never living in silence. And I think that's also the great encouraging thing about the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. First of all, it became a global movement. And it became a global movement because it has meaning around the world. It does really have meaning around the world. And it became a global movement because people started to realize the greatest sin for all people is when they see injustice, when they see wrong to stay silent about it. And since that's the easiest thing to do, and the safest thing to do, it is the most likely thing for people to do. And I'm greatly encouraged that it seems like, at least in this issue, but I think on many other issues, people are starting to say, I don't need to be safe, I can't stay silent. And I'll say my grandfather was a rabbi in Berlin, in the 30s, and was a speaker at the March on Washington, and his speech was focused on the idea that the greatest sin is silence. And I think the world is starting to realize that. It truly is. That might answer part of my next question. You know I'm a United Nations sustainable development goal advocate and do a lot of things with the UN and the WEF. Do you believe that there's a plan, an earth shot, a climate shot, a moonshot for, to get us to 2030 to change the kind of trajectory we've been on? I think it's a hard question to answer, partly because moonshots have become so common that they've almost faded into the background and some of them are being driven by capitalism. When you see what's happening with battery technology on earth, it is a moonshot. It is mind-boggling, the gigafactories and the deep integration all focused on the transition to a far more sustainable electric-driven society. So, and I do believe that that's one of the most important moonshots taking place right now. I think during the pandemic, there's a new moonshot around global cooperation on managing viruses and threats to global health. Is a moonshot taking place right now and it's not going away and it is using hundreds of thousands of scientists, maybe millions of scientists around the world working together to solve a single problem. But that single problem can very easily serve as an analogy and be used against a large range of human diseases, a large range of problems we have. And it won't stop just because we overcome this one, this one pathogen. We will be using these systems. These people are building human relationships. They're scientists. So they're building human relationships when they start solving problems together. And those relationships will not go away and the next problem or the problem that they go back to, suddenly they'll have new communities that they hadn't been communicating before with. And interestingly enough, go outside of their companies and go outside of even their scientific disciplines. They become anti-disciplinary because the problem of getting a cure or a vaccine for this virus is a multidisciplinary problem. It includes epidemiologists with manufacturing experts with computing, with a whole host of issues that need to get integrated. And that breaking down of walls, every problem that we've solved has been solved by breaking down walls between people so that you get ideas from all over the place. And that's happening today in bio and I think that's a moonshot. Whether there is a silver bullet moonshot for the problems of the Earth, I don't think so. I think that there are a lot of these huge projects that in any other time we would call mind-boggling moonshots, we would call them the equivalent of building the nuclear bomb. The number of scientists who worked on the nuclear bomb in the United States is incredible fraction of the number of scientists working today on COVID-19. You earlier said that you don't have a lot of faith in global governance or also in some of these international organizations as well to come up with a solution that the historical precedence that you could tell me if I'm wrong, the historical precedence that we experienced at 2015 that had never happened on a global scale before that I've ever seen where 193 plus countries came together for the first time ever and agreed on the 17 sustainable development goals, the targets and the indicators for them. So that was September 24th, 2015. And then again in December agreed upon the Paris Agreement to keep us below 1.5 degrees of warming by 2030. I believe that is our plan. And I know it is our plan globally from our world leaders or governance that the UN really led it in the right direction. It's a place of having an event for everybody can have a voice at the table and those countries came together, made that agreement and set out this roadmap, this plan we're five years into the plan now into this historical global moonshot or historical precedence. But I believe strongly because all 17 are a system they're tied to health and digitization, they're tied to so many things in our world that I truly believe that it is a roadmap to get us a solid different type of infrastructure by December, 2030 if we reach it and also draw down and keep our global warming and some of the environmental issues we're having which are, I don't even know if it's right to say secondary causes of what's going on with our biome which are creating some of these pandemics, the viruses and even though we find the cure for this one virus or the vaccine for there will be some more there will be other climate catastrophes and environmental events that occur that'll affect us and business and insurance and things in many other ways. So I believe that is the plan as a UN sustainable development go out that's strongly my feeling and that it is a good roadmap if we follow it. The great thing is is that a lot of people they want to know the profit, the bottom line what's the proof, how do we know that's being sustainable is expensive there are things like that. And the wonderful thing is is that the beginning of this year as you saw me very hopeful and optimistic upbeat and kind of excited because Microsoft came out with also another historical ambition with what they said and it wasn't really what they said was very noble but they said a historical precedence by saying since we've been in business we'll remove all our historical carbon emissions by 2050. Well, that was a historical precedence was then set the ball in motion. So then Jeff Bezos comes out and does the earth fund then Amazon comes out Delta comes out and many others have come in now we've got well thousands of companies with market caps over $47 trillion that have come on board with ESG things to push us in the right direction and work towards the sustainable development goals. But then through this great pause that we've had this pandemic the earth overshoot day which was last year was July 29th as now August 22nd gained something like 32 days and all ESG stocks investments and divestments have outperformed their conventional counterparts and Nikki index, NASDAQ, SMB 500 SMB global all of those have been proof that it's actually a much better model to work towards that. It's more efficient and more innovative and I know you know about that and I know a lot of the projects that MIT Media Lab and other things you do are in that direction as well because you've referred friends and others who are working on those type of things. Do you have any other thoughts on that direction or feelings that if we move more towards that and globally that that's a better plan or a unified plan? Yeah, I think I totally agree and I think notably it's not a single moonshot. It's 17 priorities to stimulate tens of thousands of solutions against each priority which is what it'll take step by step a more equal and just world doesn't come about by one moonshot. We need to deal with the challenges of gender inequality and the challenges of racial inequality and the challenges of religious biases and ancient wars and there's just such a wide range of problems to deal with but humans are very good when a society has said let's focus on these things and I think that's the contribution that the priorities have created and now what you need is enough freedom for people to go around them and organize around them and some of these solutions will come from one person or two people doing something very meaningful and some of these solutions will come from governments doing huge projects and some of them will come from companies seeing a profit opportunity and moving towards them and for many companies companies have lifespans that are greater than people and for many companies they can view long-term priorities even easier than people can and particularly ones that have the capital to do it. So yeah, I do believe that that pledge has made a real difference and kind of called out the issues we need to focus on and I do believe that we are in a position to do it because suddenly we have all the tools we need to do this from when I talked about products and the chasm I would say in many ways the world was in a chasm where all the things necessary to deal with climate change to deal with poverty, to deal with inequality we're not fight in place and those pieces have come together or coming together and we're suddenly seeing capabilities to address problems we never had before and those capabilities don't just empower governments and don't just empower organizations but they empower individuals to have impacts far greater than they could have had before. Thank you so much for that. I only have two more questions for you but they are extremely difficult, they're big ones, they're not small but if you could give me your synopsis feeling on them and your view, I would much appreciate it. What does a world that works for everyone look like for you? It's a very hard question, isn't it? Yeah, this is very hard and it might change, you might give me your answer now and it'll change tomorrow. Yeah, I mean I think that a world that works for everyone has, you know, is less privileged for me and I think that's a good thing and I think I have more than my fair share of privilege that I can easily give up some of it. I think a world that works for everyone has everyone have access to the things that I have access to and you know, and has everyone not worrying about the things I don't worry about. I don't obviously, I don't worry about being fed, I worry about being fed too much. Yeah, I have that same problem. I don't worry about, you know, how I will pay the electric bill. I worry about using too much electricity and so, you know, I think that that world, for me though, also means broader relations with the world because in the equal world, I can have conversations with people in places that I could not today. In the equal world, people can, I could work together with people who I cannot necessarily work with today and people's core ability to achieve will in the end, you know, and this goes back to more from less, will in the end make the whole world richer and the whole world a better place for people to live. So I think what it also means for me is a happier world and a world where I worry less about us devolving into chaos and worry less about the evil forces in the world and believe that, because I do strongly believe that the vast majority of people are not evil, that the vast majority of people just want to live a happy life and that if given the tools and if given the power, that's where the world will go. And so I think it's a very nice world with me giving up a little bit and some people, some of my friends who are much, much more privileged than me giving up more. And I think most of us would say, that's fine. That's a wonderful world to live in. It is a wonderful world. Thanks for sharing that. The last question as we depart is kind of a two-part. One is there anything that you haven't let us know or said that you would like our listeners to know but even more so if you were able to go up to every human being on our planet individually and depart a message from Barak to tell them your words of wisdom, your empowerment or your sustainable takeaway, what would that be? Would, do you have a message or something that would empower them or make them better for having heard that, get them on the right foot or even help them in any way? So it's, you ask for a somewhat God-like proclamation and I don't know if I could possibly do that, but I would say that if I could talk to every person in the world, I would one, and I think this is true more for poor people than for rich today, look at the gifts that you have, look at the positive things in the world, spend more and more of your time focused on empathy, on understanding other people's lives and understanding how interconnected you are with these other people's lives, even if you never meet them or see them or live their life and spend more time on creation and less time on criticism and worry. We don't spend more time on thinking about solve a lot of problems by talking about what's wrong with the world. We solve a lot of problems by deciding we're gonna fix what we think is most important and we can only do that together. Nope, none of these problems that we're talking about today are human scale problems, one person problems. And so if we're gonna do it together, we need to converse with each other and we need to care about each other and we need to empathize with why making a change might be much harder for one person than another and why we are all imperfect. So there's a lot of criticism sometimes about, well, there's been all this mismanagement of the pandemic, maybe just everybody wants the pandemic to exist. No, maybe people are just human and maybe people make mistakes even when they're trying to do the right thing. And for most people that's the reality, despite the fact that I live in a place where I fear that my government is actually doing things wrong because they want to. But again, the bet doesn't solve any problems, me getting together with people who want to overcome that does. Making sure that those people don't continue and replace with the voice and the action that the world needs to see or that the US needs to see. And I think America, not all the time, but at times has been a very empathetic place and epithetic to the world's problems, despite all the behavior we've had that has been harmful. But we are the first non-colonial superpower and returning to a place where we're even more helpful, more empathetic and more aware of the things we've done wrong. And Black Lives Matter, again, another reason why it gives me so much optimism is it's the first time in my lifetime I've seen the world dealing with this original sin of America around slavery and understanding it and understanding what it did to Africa and African-American people. And that's a huge opening of our heart to something that's hard to look at. Thank you, my friend, and I really have enjoyed this time. I could talk to you for hours and I hope everything opens up very soon and that our past will cross again and I will catch you in a moment for some deep-dive discussions because I have thousands of other questions I could ask you and I've enjoyed every moment and I'm sure my listeners will as well. Wish you all the best and much health. Thank you so much for- You too. Thank you. It will be good when we can all hug. Yeah, it will be great.