What AI, AGI, and the Metaverse Mean for the Future of Humanity w/ Alvin W. Graylin | EP #104

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Is it get optioning those options.

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Someone who has been thinking about this longer.

I think there definitely is a lot of confusion about what the metaverse is. These kind of capabilities are going to move into 100 grams and less devices. That's something that will transform our relationship with computing and with devices in general.

The idea of living in the multiverse, living in the metaverse, is a compelling notion. So will we get there?

I think that actually can happen a lot faster than most people expect. When you're on this digital parallel universe, as long as you are smart, as long as you're hardworking, as long as you're creative, you will be able to provide value to somebody else somewhere else in the world.

Everybody. Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshot. Today I've got an extraordinary guest, a gentleman who is brilliant in the areas of the metaverse and AI. Alvin Grayland is the Global VP of Corporate Development for htc, one of the leading companies in the VR XR world. He's really been leading this revolution for the last 30 years. Under his leadership at HTC, they've introduced 50 different hardware products, formed 100 different partnerships globally. He holds advanced degrees from MIT, including an Ms. In computer science and an MBA, a BS in electrical engineering from University of Washington where he was with the famed HIT Lab, the Human Interface Technology Lab. Love the work they've done there. Alvin, a pleasure to have you here, buddy.

Well, great to be here, and thanks for inviting me. Peter. It's been. I've known you a while, and it's just amazing to follow what you've been doing. So it's great that we can chat about this because I think we're at a very pivotal time in the history of humanity.

We are. And just for everybody, I just consumed this book. It's called Our Next Reality. Here it is by Alvin Grayland and his partner, Louis Rosenberg. I got a chance to read an advance copy and actually contribute a little bit to the book. But if you've been hearing about the metaverse and about AI and wondering where this is all going, this is a compelling visionary look at what's happening over the next decade, and I really commend it to everybody. Our Next Reality. Alvin, let me tell you what I want to talk about here. It's hell of a lineup here. Are you ready? Today on this podcast, everybody listening here, we're talking about what is the metaverse, the convergence of XR and AI, the future of education, health, and the nation state. I want to talk about US and China. Is it collaboration or competition? You bridge both worlds. And Taiwan as well. I want to talk about the timelines of mass adoption for XR technology. Is there a killer app? I mean, Apple's Vision Pro has sort of flopped. It's not popping. Is it a decentralized or a centralized AI future? Can we create a world of abundance with this? And let's talk about ethics and human rights in the metaverse as well. How is that for a lineup?

Well, that should give us plenty to talk about, but I'm sure more things will pop up as we discuss things.

Yeah. So I can't think of someone who has been thinking about this longer. Let's start with the beginning. Metaverse had a real buzz when Facebook changed their world, their world, their name to meta. A lot of conversation, and now the last three years, it's been AI. So let's begin by defining what is the metaverse, what is xr, and how does AI play in all of that?

Yeah, so I think there definitely is a lot of confusion about what the metaverse is, and particularly there's a lot of conflation between the metaverse and web3 and, you know, crypto and so forth. I think those are, you know, different areas. They both have their place in the world, as you know, but the simple way to think about the Metaverse is really the 3D version of the Internet that the world has been building for the last 30, 40 years. But instead of having websites, we're going to have 3D virtual worlds. And, you know, humans, we've evolved over, you know, millions of years to be optimized for a 3D space, you know, to be surviving in a 3D world. And so we actually had to adjust ourselves to 2D screens for the last few dozens of years as our way to communicate. But, you know, it makes a lot of sense for us to move into where most natural, and not just using things like keyboards and mice to interface, but using our hands or our eyes, our mouth, our bodies, as the natural way of connecting with the computers, with other people around the world, and with future AI entities that will be inhabiting these 3D spaces. So, and I actually checked this definition with Neal Stephenson, who coined the word Metaverse, and he's like, well, you know, I kind of made this shit up when I, when I wrote the book, but what you're describing makes sense to me. So, you know, that's good enough for, for Neil.

Yeah. And Neal Stephenson wrote the forward to the book. And those who know, he's an extraordinary science fiction writer, most famed, he wrote about what's called the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer. Right? Yes. In Diamond Age. So when I think about the Metaverse, I think about headsets, I think about an XR we refer to as both VR and ar. Correct. Sort of the going back and forth between the two. I think about AI inhabiting and creating that virtual world for you, and then crypto being sort of an economic layer for transactions on top of that. Is that fair?

Yeah. So I think right now there's a lot of distinction between people say, oh, this is a VR device or NR device. The reality is that very soon we're going to get to devices. We're already at these devices here, which are 200 grams, and they wanted to do VRAR. That is the Vive XR Elite. So as you see, it's actually one third the size of the Apple Vision Pro, but it does a lot of the same functionalities and it can see through, it has color, high definition, see through, it has immersive capabilities, and it has ability to transform into a glasses form factor or more of a headset form factor. So that's already available today. But within the next one to two years, what we're going to find is that these kind of capabilities are going to move into 100 grams and less Devices that will look a lot more like glasses than the headsets that we've seen today. So the distinction between AR and VR are going to really melt away. And I think that's really going to be important because that's when people start to say, okay, I can actually wear this outside. It's both socially acceptable and it's comfortable. And it gives me an added superpower of essentially being able to see anything, have access to all of my information instead of pulling a screen out of my pocket, have a screen that's in front of my face when I need it, but at the same time it can go away and I can see through it and be able to have connection with the physical space that I'm at. And when that happens, people will not be debating whether this is going to happen. Right. I mean, when you have, right now, people wearing the Vision Pro out there, it just, it just looks dorky. I mean, I know people do it for cloud, for cloud points, but I think that that's like a temporary thing. But, you know, having a 50 gram, 60 gram device on your face, that allows you to have all those capabilities. It's comfortable, you can wear it all day and it allows you to have access to any information you want. I think that that's something that will transform our relations with computing and with devices in general.

So let's put some more of a visceral feel on this. What does a 50 or 60 gram device feel like? A little heavier sunglasses.

Yeah, so I mean, if you look at the current Ray Ban sunglasses, they're about 50 grams. So if you wear a, you know, a red, you know, a little bit thicker, it's not kind of the super thin versions, but let's say the Wayfarer type glasses, that's a 50 gram device or you know, a product on your face. So, and you know, people will wear that all day, they're out in the sun, they're exercising with it. It's, it's not, it's not a weight that becomes cumbersome. And I can actually, I'm testing it today. I'm testing smart glasses that, that way, in that, that type of, of ranges. And they're comfortable and I don't have an issue with them wearing it all day.

And multimodal AI, which is coming on strong, gives AI vision through your glasses. And then the question becomes, can you get high resolution back into the retina? I remember Furness, your thesis advisor, what's his first name again? Tom. Furness. Yeah, Tom Furness who was leading the hit Lab, the Human Interface Lab. He talked about a future of a sort of a laser raster scan in the back of the eye that could paint super high resolution with something really small. And I'm still hoping and waiting for that to materialize.

Yeah, I mean, in fact, his patents were what was some of the basis for Magic Leap. I don't know if you remember them.

But I saw Rony last week.

Billion dollars. Yes. But that was what they were trying to do, but they never actually executed on it. I'm not sure if we need to get that type of technology because we really haven't refined it enough to know when that's going to be available. But what we can say is that waveguide type devices are getting to a acceptable level where you can get to that weight and size levels that we just talked about and at the price levels that become affordable. Because even this year, I think at the end there's two or three manufacturers that are already talking about devices similar to what I'm talking about. I mean, it won't have a full immersive capability. It's probably 30 or 40 degrees field of view, but for a lot of use cases, that's enough. And that's a good stage. Right. And if you wait another one or two more generations after that, I think we're going to get to that immersive 100 degree field of view capabilities.

So the question is, when do we get to Ready Player One? Right. I mean, there's probably no other film or book that captured the public's imagination, with all due respect to Neal Stephenson, but just the idea of living in the multiverse, living in the metaverse, is a compelling notion. So will we get there and when?

Well, I think some of the things in Ready Player One are going to take a lot longer. Things like the feel and the temperature and all the full body suit. A lot of those technologies exist today, but they are not mature and they're probably a little too expensive and too high friction for it to be mass market. So. But I think in terms of getting to the visual quality, we're definitely not that far away in terms of getting to all of the different senses. That's going to take some time. And in fact, Reggie, Player One, I don't know if you know, but HTC was the official VR partner for Warner Brothers and Ready Player One, So I actually negotiated that deal and we got all of the access to their 3D content and made seven different game titles from it. So I really enjoyed that book. And I also enjoyed Snow Crash and Stevenson's book as well. But I think that the thing that they really did well was that they kind of meld modern kind of popular culture together with technology. And I think we're getting there, we're getting close.

Let me paint the picture of a near term scenario where I'm wearing my XR glasses, I'm walking around, I can turn on history mode, and as I'm walking down the streets of Manhattan, it can show me what the buildings were 100 years ago or tell me what famous thing occurred here. Or if I turn on shopping mode, it can tell me. And if I'm looking for a particular wristwatch or jacket, it can show me what's inside the stores as I'm going forward. Or if I turn on physics mode, as cars are accelerating, I can see equations I can be learning 24 7. So it can be an AI overlay on. My favorite mode, by the way, would be health mode. Don't eat that. Take the stairs instead of the escalator. So when is that going to be here? That's more of an AI function than even a VR function.

I think that actually can happen a lot faster than most people expect because it doesn't require that much processing power to do what you're describing. In fact, essentially all you need is an agent that is able to see what you're doing. If you give it access to your environment, your camera, and it's able to analyze kind of both your conversations where you're looking at, it can give you all of that kind of advice in real time. So essentially you have a full time assistant on a device. Now if the processing is happening in the cloud, then device can be even smaller. If it's happening on board, on the device, it may require a little bit more powerful capabilities or maybe it's linked to a phone that does the processing and it's just transferring it to your glasses. But the AI for it is actually available probably today. You could do pretty much everything you just described with the AI capabilities today. It's just a matter of do we want to give that AI access to all of that information. And I think there's a lot of fear today about privacy and how much information we're sharing. If that processing is happening in the cloud, people are more worried. I think very soon. We actually are now getting models that are 2 or 3 kind of gigabyte type models, essentially 2 billion, 3 billion parameters that are able to do most of the things that you're describing. And if that's the case, that will run on A cell phone. So if it runs on the cell phone, you don't need to go in the cloud. You don't have to worry about your data going into some server somewhere and having your privacy invaded. So if that's the case, I actually think that what you described earlier about the young ladies primer can happen very soon.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I believe more of a, you know, my favorite character is Jarvis from Iron man. And I believe that we're going to have that version. I think you're going to give your XR AI partner access to everything. I mean, you're going to allow it to listen to your phone calls, read your emails, see what you're eating. Because by doing that it gives you such value. And people say, oh my God, my privacy. Well, I mean, listen, you're on your email with Microsoft or with Google, you know, Alexa, I want to say her too loud, she'll hear me. You know, is listening to what's going on in your bedroom. I mean, if you think that you have real digital privacy already, I mean, let's be honest, it's not really there.

I can't agree with you more. In fact, so this is kind of a counterintuitive thing. Everybody's so worried about privacy that when they actually take action, very few people actually protect the privacy that they, they value so much. And here's, you know, before we're trading our privacy for the ability to, to access, you know, cat pictures and videos on YouTube. Now if we say okay now, instead of that, I'm actually giving access to this agent that is working on my behalf. I think that changes the entire equation. And then at that point you, you actually want to do exactly what you said is make as much possible available to this agent, have it understand my needs, my wants, my preferences, my friends, and then be able to help me be a better version of myself. And that is actually possible today. That's the amazing thing. People think that is so far away, but that technology is available.

Your subtitle here is how the AI Powered Metaverse Will Reshape the World. And I was going to ask you, we've heard these hype cycles on the metaverse on VR for 20, 30 years. You've been in this field for 30 years? 33 years, I think. So why is it different now? Is it AI? Why did you write this book?

This is actually a really important question. Because we are at such a pivotal time in and the development of our species. And this is why I wrote it. Because if we let things go by default, it probably will not end well because of what possibilities are being graded by the combination of AI and XR Technologies. And I'll actually talk about why those two come together because a lot of people, you see people talk about the Metaverse and you see people talk about AI, but you don't see a lot of people putting them together and explaining the relationship between the two. What we're now creating with AI essentially is a superpower brain that allows us to supercharge everything that we're thinking and it's going to help us solve problems that we haven't been able to solve for hundreds of years. Now, if you have the wrong people using that power, it can be used for bad. So we know the whole double edged sword thing. So how do we make sure that bad people don't get their hands on or aren't able to do as much with it? That's really one of the biggest concerns with AI. The other issue with AI is when it actually does even the good things that it wants, it will disrupt our society. It will put people out of their job, it will change the way we work and live and play and the way we interact with each other and the governmental systems. And can our society adapt to that at the speed of change that's coming? As you know, the prior industrial revolutions took eight decades, seven decades and six decades or something to unfold. And it gave society a lot of time to adapt. This one's going to happen in the next five to 10 years. It's going to be like that in societal years.

You've been on my stage at the Abundance Summit a number of times and I hope you'll come back. You know, Elon was there this year and talking about timelines, as was Ray Kurzweil. And you know, their prediction for AGI is like next year and then digital superintelligence by 2030. And there's no way in the world that society and humanity can possibly adapt at that rate.

That's exactly the issue is that it's going to come fast. I'm not sure if it's next year or if it's three or four years years from now, but it is. I think it's within the next five to ten years for sure. I think if you talk to most experts, if you talk to them three, four years ago, the consensus was 30, 40 years from now. If you talk to them now, the consensus is somewhere between one to about 10 years. And that shrunk a lot. So even the pessimist folks are probably saying like 10 to 20 years. But they used to say 100 years or never. So I think that the pace of change and our ability to adapt need to prepare today. That's why I wrote this book. And the other thing is, how can XR play a role to help solve some of these problems? Because for the issue of job displacement, if we actually create a proper global metaverse ecosystem infrastructure on a global basis, then when those people are displaced from their physical jobs, it gives them another parallel economy to go do something right? Whether to make an additional supplemental income or whether to actually have a place just to go express themselves and go travel and go learn and have an outlet for their energies. I think that's something that having the metaverse will help with. And the other thing is that having a global metaverse system allows you to create more natural rebalancing of wealth and equality between the haves and the have nots in terms of nations. Because when you have a digital economy, it doesn't really matter where you are. But today with the physical economy, it matters a lot where you were born. But when you're on this digital parallel universe, as long as you are smart, as long as you're hard working, as long as you're creative, you will be able to provide value to somebody else somewhere else in the world. And that allows essentially a redistribution of wealth in a natural way. Not forcing something to happen, but allowing the people with capabilities to find a new way to increase their capabilities or personal capabilities by going to an online school. You've been working on the Singularity University dozens of years and trying to educate, reeducate the world. And I think there's, and you know, from the book, I mean, there's just so many studies that Show In a 3D space, you learn a lot, lot faster and you retain a lot more. Right? And so allowing that to be the education platform is going to be tremendous in terms of reshaping education. And the other thing is that it allows for, it allows for us to then allow these people, once they have been re educated or educated, than to find employment on a virtual economy. And that solves some of these issues.

So let me ask you about an issue that is of concern. You bring it up in the book, and I really want to discuss it with you, which is in a future where we've got digital superintelligence and humanoid robots, both of which are coming extraordinarily fast, and it enables this amazing world of abundance where you can have anything you want. But the question becomes, will you know, we humans like struggle. And we like purpose, right? We like to have challenges in our video games, right? If a video game, if you jumped into a video game and every time you shot, you hit and you would always win, you'd stop playing after a few minutes. It'd be boring. And I think life is that way too. We need this sense of like, purpose and going big. And so the question is, when we have this superpower capability, can humanity up level its sense of purpose and what it wants to go after. So we remain engaged in the game.

I actually think that it is the thing that will help us up level because if you look at the Renaissance, why did all of these, why did Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, why were they able to spend so much time creating beautiful sculptures and art and inventions? Because they had a patron that helped to support them, that took care of their basic food, shelter, clothing, other things. And they said, go and focus, go and focus and spend your time doing what you want. And when they did that, these people were able to create amazing new inventions and we had a renaissance. What we will see with AI and robotics is that essentially we will allow these machines to be our patrons because they will go and do the labor that we used to do, which then liberates us to go and have the ability to find our calling. Most people talk about occupation. My job is my occupation. Occupation. If you look at the land route, that is occupational, which is to be occupied, to spend, to waste time, or how to spend your time, what we should be thinking about is, is our vocation. So vocation, the root is vocational, which is about. It's the call to be called the calling, right? Which is your purpose. Now if we focus, rather than saying, I'm going to trade my time for money, which is my to become, I want to spend my time on my calling, on my purpose, how I can contribute the most to the world. Then question of money goes away and it's really more about, okay, I don't need to think about what I need to buy next week and can I pay for rent? How can I contribute the most, what I want to learn the most, whether it's being a musician or being artist or being an inventor or being a coder or being AI researcher, all of that's fine. In fact, there's a quote I recently read that really spoke to me, which was Picasso. He said, the meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away. He didn't say, the purpose of life is to accumulate wealth or to accumulate status and I think that really summarizes a really important question that we struggle with in just two phrases. And that actually helps to think about. When we have these AI and robotics and new dimensions to work in, not only are we now given the resources to go and do these things, we now have a new canvas to unleash our creativity, to now just not make statues, but to create 3D worlds that we can share with other people, to create 3D experiments to go in and allow us to go and do research. Because we don't have to think about whether or not I need to sell this thing, but whether or not this thing is good and brings something that the world didn't know before. And I think that's going to create a real abundance of new breakthroughs that we have.

Yeah, no, that is so. It's interesting, right? Some people say they're worried about digital superintelligence. They're worried about can humanity survive in a world of digital superintelligence? And I almost flip the question and say, can we survive without digital superintelligence?

Yeah. In fact, I mean, as you know, in the book, one of the parts I talk about is later on, when this super intelligence is available, you know, it actually can help us solve some of the real societal issues in terms of the conflict between people. Right. Between governments. You know, today, all of these constructs of, you know, different countries or different parties or different religions that are creating, you know, consistent thousands of years of conflict between people. If we up level ourselves and say, hey, you know what? This super AI is able to take everybody's perspectives and give us some guidance in terms of how we should solve some of these long term conflicts. And when we also start to move from a physical world to spending more time in a virtual world, we don't necessarily have the limited resources of I only have one Jerusalem or one Washington D.C. or one whatever. Now everybody can have whatever versions that they want. And you're not fighting over limited resources. I think those kind of things are going to happen.

One of my favorite examples in a simple form is if I have a watch and you have a piece of gold and we trade in the old economy, now you have a watch and I have a piece of gold. In the digital economy, if you have a digital data set and I have a digital data set and we trade, now we both have the digital data set. It's an abundant mindset.

Absolutely. I think knowledge is just like that, right? Knowledge and intelligence. The more you have, everybody wins. Right. And it is so different than the prior society we were working in where it's all about scarce space while affording. It's about who has access to what resources. And that's what everybody strive for. Once we get to this place of abundance because of digital intelligence, because of robotics, because of genetic engineering, that will give us maybe a little bit longer health, right? All these things that we felt were constrained and scarce becomes abundant, I think changes everybody's mindset of conflict that has persisted since we can record a history.

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I was actually born in China.

You were born in China?

Yes, but I moved here when I was 9, so I spent a lot of time in both countries.

Yeah. Do you have a dual citizenship or.

U.S. no, actually, I think China does not allow dual citizenships. I am a US Citizen.

Okay. And you worked.

I spent exactly half my life in the US and half my life in China.

You bridge both worlds. And what I've seen over the last three years is an increasing, you know, tension growing, and especially in the realm of AI, and that can't be good for humanity. Can you speak a little bit about that? Because, you know, one of the things I'm going to bring to the abundance stage this coming year is, you know, I want to bring a balance to that conversation.

Yeah. And unfortunately, I think that the rhetoric on both sides have just gotten very overheated over the last six months. I've actually seen a little bit of reconciliation. So it is a little bit better than it was a year ago, but I think it'll probably get worse before it gets better. Because of the elections. Whenever there's an election, you have to create an external enemy. And the reality is that these two countries need each other. And these two countries right now are the leading drivers of growth and innovation in the world. If they work together, we can solve so many problems. If you look at the AI side, there was a report that was recently published that showed 50% of the world's AI researchers were born in China. Of the world's AI research, 37% of the AI researchers in a top AI researchers, top 20% AI researchers in the U.S. are actually from China, and only 37% are from the U.S. so actually, there are more Chinese born researchers in AI in the U.S. than there are U.S. born. So it's clear that these two countries are already working together, but because of, you know, I guess policies and governmental positioning, we're creating this artificial conflict. And where you know, you know, I guess some is economically driven, some is politically driven, but you know, it's actually made worse recently because of all of the hardware restrictions. Right? So not, not only is, you know, is the US talking about, hey, you know, we can't work together, but they're also saying you can't buy this equipment, you can't buy equipment not from US companies, but not also other companies in the world that are supplying the semiconductor space or that are creating chips that are creating whatever. And essentially what that does is saying, okay, you need to create your parallel technology stack and we will become more and more bifurcated and the interdependence that we created that actually unites people becomes weaker and weaker. And I think that's completely the opposite thing that we need to do. Because when these two countries are both so smart, so powerful, so capable, and in economic perspectives they're becoming more and more equal. If you create enemies out of each other, it won't end well. Right? We've seen in history what happens when two very strong countries are put into that type of adversarial relationship. So I really hope this is just, just a short term issue because of the elections that will go back to where we have been for the last 20, 30 years where there was a lot of cooperation and the growth, you know, there was more growth out of China over the last 30 years than you know, such almost the rest of the world combined in terms of economic GDP growth.

You know, there's a good analogy in the space industry. Back 20 years ago, this thing called ITAR which was preventing US launch companies from sharing information or satellite companies from sharing information with Russian launchers or European launchers and so forth. And it created this divide and all it did was force non US entities to build their own technology since the US couldn't share it openly. I mean, it's not going to go away.

Look at the space station, it's the same thing, right? You look at the International Space Station. Now China's actually have a more modern space station than the international one that's going to becoming decommissioned soon. So in a few years actually Chinese will be the only space station out in orbit. So these kind of fire policies that are very short sighted, we really need to get out of that cycle. We've had a lot of Other technologies where we've done global cooperation like the CERN super collider. Every year people are putting one or two billion dollars to put that together, keep it running so that the world can come out with, you know, kind of the particle physics and better understand the universe. You know, same, same with all of these communication across these radio telescopes that are trying to understand what's going on to find the gravity waves. Right. I mean, so there's just so much that we could do. We cooperated to solve the ozone problem, you know, the ozone hole issues. So, and, you know, just there is possible to do that. It's possible, but we're definitely not doing what we should be doing. And this is why I said it's so important for people to read this book, because it's not just telling you what's happened, but it also has a lot of specific recommendations in terms of what policymakers need to do, what AI and Metaverse companies need to do, and actually also what students and young people need to do so that we are prepared for what's coming. And we try to bend that future towards the positive version of what could happen. Because, as you know, the book is a debate. It's a debate between Louis and I, and he's, he plays the more, you know, kind of pessimist of kind of the world's, you know, the bad things that can happen to the world. And I play the optimist. And the reason we did the two positions is that most books today are either one or the other, and most people will read one side and they're done with that topic and, and they won't think more. And by putting both perspectives into one book, we want to force you to think, we want to force you to see the arguments on both sides in a fair and just way and then come to your own conclusions. But, so I think Plato was one that said, I can't teach anybody anything, but I can only make you think. And that's what we want to do. I think once people think, whatever conclusion that they come up with will be something that they hopefully will now take action on instead of just listening to and then put away.

Listen, you know, I love how you think because it's how I think too. So we're on the same side. Let's talk about a little bit more about AI in particular. Decentralized, democratized AI versus, you know, you know, sovereign or closed AI. Where do you think we're going? And you know, given the near term dangers. Right. So I put AI into three categories today. It's amazingly useful. There's very little downside. It's incredible. I use it all the time, as do you. It says my family. Long term digital superintelligence, I think is going to be one of the greatest gifts to humanity. It's the interim 1 to 5, 1 to 8 year time frame where it's the dystopian use of AI by, by malevolent individuals that are most concerning. So how do you think about that? If you had the ability to set policy to guide us through this period of time, what would you advise? What would you recommend?

So I think there's actually a lot of confusion in terms of, because of the terms that you were talking about, open source AI and decentralized AI and sovereign AI and so forth. And each one of these, there's multiple meanings. So let me kind of give you a quick summary so that we are kind of aligned on what we think we mean by them. When people talk about sovereign AI, what they're saying is every country has their own AI. Every country, whether it be a US AI, a China AI, a Saudi Arabia AI, whatever. And each AI is based on your culture, your information and your ethics and your culture. And what that creates is actually the exact opposite of what the world needs. Because what that creates essentially is 200 countries that see each other as enemies, because you're different than me. And the world has always been about an in group and an out group SMB. And if the AI is only trained on your perspective and it doesn't see other people's perspective, it will work for you. It will try to make the world better for you, but by doing so, probably make the world worse for everybody else. So if we succeeded in creating 200 super AIs, that the world is in trouble. The other thing is, by dividing our resources across 200 countries, we will probably never get to Super AI because we're going to run out of compute when we're going to run out of energy and we're going to run out of data. Everybody today, when I talk to a lot of researchers, they say, hey, it's hard to get data today. And if I just had more compute, I could do so much more. When, you know, I understand why. If you look at Jensen Huang is the one that is like super pro sovereign AI because of course he's going to sell 200 versions of his chips to every single country in the world and every single lab in the world. So it's good for his chips and good for his profit margins, but it's probably not the best thing we can do for society. So I think that's one thing we can think about. The other thing is by combining our resources, we actually now I'm sure you know about the scaling law, right? Essentially the more compute you give some AI system, the more data you give some AI system and the more parameters you give that AI system, it will become smarter. It's loss function. Essentially the error from what you would expect would go down. And it's been consistent across several dozen orders of magnitude across all of these areas. So. And we don't see, we actually don't see a change in that trend, at least for the foreseeable future. Otherwise you wouldn't have companies out there trying to raise, create 10 billion or $100 billion infrastructure because they know that having 100 billion infrastructure is better than the 10 billion is better than the 1. And so what that means is that Instead of having 200 versions of something, let's create one version, one giant resource where all of the compute for these type of capabilities are put in one place. All of the data of the world. Let's put everybody's data together. Because the more data we have, the more complete view it will, the more likelihood it will take into the perspectives of other cultures. And I was speaking in Qatar about a month ago and the people in the Middle east said all these AI systems, none of them take into our culture or our language. It's all trained on English, it's all trained on Western ideals. When I ask it things, it doesn't tell it from my perspective. And I don't like that. We need to have them. Instead of them hoarding their data and saying, I only wanted to be trained on my data, they should put their data into a general pool. In fact, I don't know if you heard the saying from Friedrich Nietzsche. He said, you have to be a C to take an input from an impure stream and still stay pure. Right? So, so it means that you have to be big. You have to be, you know, you have to have all the information. And when you have all the information, then when some wrong thing comes in, it's okay, it, you, you will just, it will just meld into and meld into the, the whole system. Just like, you know, if I told you today that drinking bleach will help solve your, you know, your, your disinfect or you will help solve your, your cover problem, you'll probably say, oh, that's not, you know, he's, he's just joking with me. But if you told that To a child, he may actually think that that's the real thing because he doesn't have that base of knowledge. And by hoarding, no one would ever.

No one would ever say that. No one would ever say that.

Hypothetically. Right, so, but yeah, so that, that's the issue with Sovereign. Right? We are reducing our compute and we are reducing our data and we are reducing our accuracy. The other thing is now there's open source AI and then there's kind of closed source AI. Now that's really the idea is that, okay, open source AI saying, hey, if everybody has an AI system, then the good guys using the AI system will be able to beat the bad guys using the AI system. That may be true if it was a known attack vector. And back in the day when we had castles and we had people that. Siege castles, castles, you probably need like two to three times the people inside the castle to attack them. So there was kind of asymmetric, whatever asymmetric force to be able to overcome. But as you know, there's very few castles that are working in the world today because different tactics came and they said, okay, actually the castle idea doesn't really work anymore. And particularly in cyberpunk, it doesn't work. And, and we see today, you know, you can have one cyber attack, one attacker, some, some teenager somewhere in, let's say, Russia can take down a whole network. And there was, you know, maybe hundreds of people that were trying to protect that network. And it doesn't, it's, it's not, you know, you cannot say, I, I have a, you know, a good guy with a gun and a bad guy again, and they'll be even. I think that that logic doesn't make sense because it's now flipped completely the other way. The asymmetric ratio is so much more in favor of the. Just like a terrorist, I just need one gun and one bomb and I can shut down the whole city. So we really need to change that mindset. We just need to make sure that the systems are smart enough so that that doesn't happen. Now the other thing is open source versus now they're centralized versus decentralized. Right. In terms of the problem with, if you look at what the Internet is built on today, there's decentralized aspects, but a lot of the capabilities are actually built on centralized servers and it's on server farms that are in data hubs and giant networks all over the world in specific places. To say that I'm going to run the entire Internet off of everybody's laptop and everybody's phone and completely distribute it. It's actually not really viable. If you're doing the extraterrestrial search and you're not really worried about timing and you're just saying, okay, I just need some cycles, that is probably okay. But if you are saying, hey, I need to run a mission critical system and I don't know if that particular phone is going to work. And the problem is when you're training these AI systems, they all have to kind of come back around the same time. It's not really that great in terms of a. This is why those people are building, you know, $100 billion data centers, because they want everything to be in one place so that all the training happens. And every second, every microsecond or nanosecond matters because you have to do so many trillions and trillions of calculations. And when you try to distribute it across different devices, across different places, network, it's just, it's intractable to make that work. Right. So I think, you know, it sounds good in principle. Why don't we just everybody distribute all the compute and that there's no reliance on the cloud Systems, on the AWS's or Google Cloud. It's actually hard to do. And this is why, if you look at the Internet today, it's not.

Let me just hit on two things. First of all, I think one of the things that's important just to double click on is the importance of being able to preserve the cultures of every nation and make sure that the large language models are inclusive of all stories, history, untold, recipes and so forth from every nation. Right? So you're not. So that's one element. Now where that becomes resident. Is it one super AI? I think we talked about decentralized, but for me the real term is democratized. So every nation has access for its citizens. It becomes a infrastructure, like, you know, a ubiquitous infrastructure, just like, you know, communications and just like Internet and just like oxygen, right? Where it's available to everybody.

So, so I, that I completely agree. I think democratization in terms of making it accessible to, to everybody. Right. In fact, I think the only way it will be democratized is if you have a global effort to, to do it instead of national effort efforts. Because a national effort to do it means that I built it, this is mine, it's available to my people, but it's not available to your people. And likely the only two countries that will win the lease is either China or the US because they are right now the most powerful and richest Place maybe the European Union together as a group.

And don't forget the Middle east is going to invest heavily. You're going to see Saudi and the Emirates investing.

Oh yeah. I mean, they're definitely investing a lot. But right now it's very difficult for them to get the talent and to get access to the data as much as is available in these other three major regions. I think if you really want us democratized, we need to take the same effort that we did with these global programs. We've had examples like the nuclear nonproliferation. Everybody in the world agreed, let's not do these bad things. We had the, the human genome trials that we said, okay, let's not change the human genome and spread it out to the world. We talked about the ozone treaties and so forth. So there are lots of examples where we've done and it's actually turned onward.

Yeah. Let me continue on AI for a little bit. Then we go back to the Metaverse. I want to talk about Apple's Vision Pro. I want to talk about addiction in the Metaverse because my kids are. If I left them alone, they'd be on Roblox 24 7. I think instead of food or sleep, it's video game playing. But before that, you know, this year at ted, Mustafa Soliman, who will be on my stage next year at the Abundance Summit, and he's now, I guess, head of AI at Microsoft, you know, suggest that we don't allow recursive improvement. We don't allow AI to program AI. What are your thoughts about that?

Honestly, I think the only way for us to get to ASI is to allow AI to program AI.

Is why?

Why?

Artificial superintelligence. Yeah, yeah.

And you know what we really need to get to is to get to asi. Because if we are at an immature baby AGI level, that's when bad things happen. That's when you have a superpower, but you have an immature understanding and ethics and consciousness. If you have a toddler. Yes. If you have a toddler with a gun, it's a thing. Right. And that's what kind of very powerful but not complete trained systems are. And when it gets into the hands of these bad actors that you were talking about, things will happen. So we need to get as quickly as possible to ASI versus as quickly as possible to that toddler with a gun. And the only way to do that is to have it be self recursive in terms of training. Why are humans able to have done what we have even though our brains have not changed in 100,000 years. Actually, it's gotten a little bit smaller. It's because we are recursively teaching each other. Every generation teaches the prior next generation. And we learn and accumulate. We're able to adjust how we work and how we do things. And if we allow these AI systems to do the same thing, which is already happening actually, and honestly, it's not something you can stop, because even recently there was the Devon. I don't know if you saw the Devon announcement, which is an AI engineer that's made of AI, and he can go in and change his own systems. There was some controversy in terms of how real those demos were, but I think a lot of people do agree that it didn't perform exactly what they had promised. But it is actually significantly better than what was possible with just GPT4. So, like 10x now. So, you know, just imagine in a few years or with, or within a few months, probably when GPT5 comes out, it will probably have the capability to do a lot of those things. And when you do that, you are able to then progress at a very different rate. And we need to get to that rate to be able to get the breakthroughs that we're looking for. Humans work on probably about two to three hours a day of quality work. And our brains, our signals to our brain is about 100 meters per second. These machines are going to work 24 7. And they are traveling at the speed of light. Their signals are traveling at a speed of light, and you've got 200,000 of them in one data center. We cannot limit this. With our capabilities, we should allow this to happen. Now, we do need to be careful because if we allow it to happen, we need to allow it to happen. This is why it's actually important to have a metaverse ecosystem. Because if we trained it and then let's test it out on a mini Matrix universe for AI. In the movie Matrix, they're putting humans into a matrix and a simulation to allow them, you know, to. To kind of live this world and see what happens. What we should be doing is to create a metaverse system and allow these AI to go in there and then they can run at, you know, at, you know, 10x or a millionx speed, and we'll see. Okay, well, is this a dangerous AI or not? Is this an AI that's going to kill us? Is this an AI that's going to misunderstand us and we put it in there so that it can play out its timing right? Because one of the Things that people are afraid of is that there's now this fear that people will say in 2024, nothing bad happens, but this super AI in 2025 starts to destroy the world. But let's just put it into this world, run it through the next million years and see what does it do, and see if it becomes an evil or a benign or a compassionate AI. And I think we should let that happen, but we should have it in a controlled manner and we shouldn't let it happen in a globally collaborative manner because we need to do what you said. We need to make sure that everybody's culture and language and history are all represented. And by knowing everything, it will then take into everybody's perspectives into account to give you the guidance that we need as a species. Because our leaders today are probably not doing that.

Yeah, no, I do believe that humanity have a higher probability of successful survival under benign digital superintelligence than under human, human leadership. You know, there's a great analogy that Mo Gadot from his book Scary Smart uses, which is that of Superman, right? Which is that, you know, Superman landed in Kansas, was brought up by a God loving, you know, respectful family and became Superman, but if he had landed in a drug den, he'd become a super villain. And so how we train our AI, how we raise our AI and AI are our progeny, they are we, they are our derivatives of humanity really matters. And I do love the idea of building a simulation. I mean I, I believe that we're living in a simulation, so it'd be a simulation within the simulation. But that's another, another conversation where we put these AIs and see how they play out. And we've done this a little bit. There have been a few times where Facebook back then and Google have created AIs that have gone divergent in, in their behavior. One of the things I'm, I'm interested in is does, is a, does an abundance mindset? Does a loving, caring, benevolent mindset scale with intelligence? I believe the answer is yes. I hope the answer is yes.

Actually there's been research. In fact, one of the papers in there showed that the more information that it had, the more benevolent the personality of the AI was. Even if it's unaligned or unrefined, not fine tuned version that we found that that was the case. So, and I think we see that in our daily lives, right? The most compassionate people I know are the most informed, most educated and probably the elder generation because they've seen everything and they've seen the bad things that can happen when you do bad things and when other people do bad things. And so we, we can learn from that, right? In fact, I don't know if you remember one of the chapters, I, I actually read the biographies of the, the kind of most respected leaders of last hundred years and the most despised leaders of the last hundred years. And the, the key, the key difference between the two wasn't military service. They think, you know, 60, 100% of the, of the, of the kind of authoritative leaders were, had military background, but 60% of the most respected ones also had military background. The thing that was the amount of education they had and then even more so the amount of interest in lifelong learning so that they broadened out their understanding. And those are the ones that had the longest, I guess, track record of success. And people just saw them as, these are really great examples. And we can share a slide of that because I think it's very clear. The Hitlers and the Stalin and the Pol Pots, they either left school early or they kicked out of school or they didn't get their education or just all these issues that were consistent with just. They may not have been bad people if they actually had a fuller education because they're clearly smart people. Because if they weren't smart, that's one.

Of the most important points for me, because people shouldn't. The hope is that with intelligence comes tremendous wisdom. When you ask, why is someone wise? They're wise as an elder because they've seen a lot of stuff. And I imagine that a digital superintelligence is going to be able to run a billion simulations and say, these directions not so good. These directions, okay, this is where we should go. And then guide us that way.

Well, that's kind of what we were saying earlier, that once you get to the AI side level, then when a bad actor says, hey, I want you to make me a bomb, or I want you to make me a supervisor, it was like, you know what? That's probably not a good idea. I'm not going to do it. But if they were that, that teenager who just listened to everybody and just try to be helpful, then we're going to, we're in trouble. You know. So as you know, there's a saying that power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think the opposite is also true with knowledge, because knowledge enlightens and absolute knowledge enlightens absolutely. And if we think that that's really the case, we need to make it as knowledgeable as possible because I don't know Any knowledgeable people that are super corrupt. I mean, it's just people who understand, who've been through things. They have a much more complete perspective.

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Yeah. So you know, as part of my work, I've actually invested in multiple BCI companies and I have to say we are really in a very early stage with ecl. And I know also have friends who are who are in neuralink and know what they've been doing. And you know, if you look at what they've recently released and it looks really cool. You have a guy who's playing video games with a chip and it's. But essentially that capability was in the Utah array 15 years ago, right? People had that capability and it's, you know, essentially collecting, connecting to the motor cortex and it's a few dozens of links of little, I guess little wires that are taking the signal. But it is not really knowing your thinking. It is able to see what you want to move. For us to do a full grain uploading or downloading, we essentially need 80 billion of those things. And from a few hundred to tens of billions. I don't see it as being feasible anytime soon. And I don't think it's 2033. Maybe it's a 2333 and maybe with ASI it's different. Once we get to asi, everything is off.

I think that's, that's the point, right? Everything becomes possible when you've got digital superintelligence doing the design work for you, including longevity, escape velocity. But one of the things that is driving.

I guess one thing though to that point is I don't know if that should be our goal because I feel like people think that okay, now you have this AI, we need to be as smart as this AI. Just like right now, nobody's going out and saying I'm running faster than a car or I'm jumping higher than some machine. It's just you accept that, hey, you know, I have limitations to my body. And you know what, it's probably okay that it is smarter than us and it's probably okay that these machines can do things faster than us. So just like we came from a lot of other species, there are bacterias and frogs and fish and birds and they're all fine. And they're not out there trying to say I want to be a human, I want to be the super bird who's going to be faster than worse smart than a human. They're not trying to do that. And I feel like, I don't know if we need to say that we have to be smarter than a data center of the fastest latest chips. Our machines are constrained in terms of this is a 100,000 year old meat machine that won't be changing that much. Why do we need to try to compete?

Well, listen, I am all for bci. If I can think in Google, if I can and occupy a humanoid robot and Be able to physically instantiate myself someplace else. I'm also open to a digital upload. Those are all things that I think are expansive of humanity. And we are undergoing a rapid evolution of what it means to be human and, and society will change as well. So I don't think you're saying you're against it, you're just not saying it's not necessary. Is that true?

Yeah, I'm saying it's not necessary in terms of making data a real goal. Because if that's the short term goal, then people are saying we're going to put a lot of resources to make that happen. I would rather we focus on even if these machines are better than us, we are still going to have the, the human side of it. What will be more important to us later is not about how much money we have. It's going to be about our family, our friends, our community, our relationship with each other and having a fulfilling life. And having fulfilling life.

Let's talk about happiness. Let's talk about human happiness. Because that is ultimately when you ask people what do you want? And then you go further and say, what do think? You, what do you really want? What is it? I want to be healthy, I want to be happy. And so you've thought about happiness. Talk about that for a second.

Yeah. So one of the last chapters is kind of will achieving this bring us happiness? And the research is actually pretty clear, at least in terms of what brings us happiness, is the freedom to choose what we do. Having close family relationships, you know, having some kind of purpose in your life and then, you know, having at least your basic capability, your needs taken care of. Right. And so in fact, and I think even in your abundance book, you talked about at a certain income level, it doesn't bring you actually extra happiness. In fact, if anything, once you get past a certain level, it actually goes negative. You start getting more stress from having more money. So I think what we need to think about is how do we bring those kind of qualities to more of the world. If you look at the current chart in terms of income to happiness level, it's a pretty relatively linear chart in terms of the higher income groups do have a higher happiness or satisfaction level. But then the strange thing is there are also some relatively lower income groups that are as happy as the, the higher income level. So, so even though there's a trend, it is not a, it is not a on a line. So what, what it. And what we also found out is that with the, when I was doing my research in Terms of, of different, you know, levels of income. In the, in the US it used to be 75, 000. Now so I think 150, 000, something like that. But in other places in the world, in, in China it's probably like 20 or 30,000. In, in Africa is like 5 to 8,000. So it's actually not a fixed number. It's not a fixed point that everybody's going to be super happy. It is actually just about how am I compared to my neighbors. If I'm relatively good compared to my neighbors, then I'm actually happy and I don't need more income. What we do see is actually the amount of energy you use is something that actually is highly related to your happiness. So the more successful you are, the more developed you are, the more energy you're using. But that also levels out. If you look at the last 20 years, there's actually been a downtrend of how much energy every major developed country has been using per person per year. Right. So I think it popped out in probably like 1990. And since then it's been dropping every, pretty much every year consistently. So it shows that having more doesn't really satisfy you. It's really about having enough. And that actually creates a more sustainable world. We don't need to get everybody to the US level. We actually probably get it to the European levels, about half of the US level in terms of per capita energy use. If we get it to that level, that's only about, I think about 1 or 2x more than Southeast Asia and probably 2 or 3x more than Africa. So if we can increase energy abundance by 2 to 3x, we essentially get everybody to kind of the European lifestyle. And I actually think that European lifestyle is probably more from a happiness perspective. They are much happier than the Americans who are using more energy, have more per capita income, but they're less happy. So this is what I think we will be able to do. When we have AI offloading a lot of our work. We will have time to go learn music and learn languages and go travel and go kind of enhance ourselves. And when we have that freedom, we will be happier and we will also be more knowledgeable. And by being more knowledgeable, we will probably be more understanding and more compassionate, which, you know, it's like a reinforcing positive loop that just makes the world a better place.

Yeah, agreed. You know, I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about abundance since I wrote a small passage in the, in the.

Book on the subject thank you for your important contribution.

Well, and you talk about abundanceism as a term and just for people to get a sense of where the metaverse will enable abundance, which for me is accessibility to anyone, everywhere at the highest possible levels. And I, I use the example that Google and Baidu as search engines, Google in the United States and Baidu in China provided equal access to knowledge independent of economic level. Google for the poorest child and Google for the wealthiest child was the same. Can we list where we're going to see abundance coming from the Metaverse?

Yeah. So if you look at what's happening with, with Metaverse is actually, it is able to supercharge our senses. You have AI supercharged our minds, you have genetic engineering will supercharge our bodies. But Metaverse and immersive technologies supercharges our senses. And when you supercharge our senses, it allows us to experience anything we want and anywhere. So not only are we able to learn more, we're able to also travel back in time. We're also able to become different size. We can be the size of a planet or be the size of a microbe. And if you look at, in terms of abundance, what does today's billionaires, what can they do that today's average person can do? It's about experience. It's about experience. And when you have a lifelike, immersive world that you can go into, anybody can have any experience they want. So there, there's nothing lacking. And when, when, when you have that, then you essentially have kind of a de facto equalization of fulfillment of life fulfillment. Because, you know, if, if I wanted to travel to, you know, Egypt or if I want to go, go to space, to the moon, there's, there's not, not very many people go to the moon. How many people, 300 people has left the orbit, you know, since the invention of or since the start of time. Right now, anybody can put on the headset and be in space and go to moon and go to the Mars. And at some point when we have our AI agents out there traveling the rest of the galaxy, we can be in this headset traveling with them. In fact, that's one of the final epilogue is kind of that story, right? So I think that's the sense of abundance, because nothing is limited when you're talking about a virtual world. Everything that we think of today as a constrained resource becomes completely abundant. And knowledge is also the thing that I really think becomes super abundant because you are able to just learn so much more. And everybody can become the best version of themselves. And I think that's all we need to be. That's all we need to ask for. I don't think we need to be, we don't need to know as much as, you know, GPT7 but I think we, we need to be able to say that hey, I've learned as much as I can. You know, I try to read something like 80 to 100 books a year and that's my most fulfilling thing. Every time I finish a book I'm like, oh, I learned something new and that, that made me more complete person, right? And so I can see why, you know, Elon is saying the making curiosity the, the, the, the reward function. Because if that's a reward function, that's a very positive reward function. And nobody's going to say be curious. And because of that I'm going to make a bunch of paperclips. Those are not aligned. If you're curious. You actually want to have as much diversity of life as possible. You want to have as much diversity of experience as possible. So you want to preserve a very diverse ecosystem of humans, of animals, of all kinds of beings in the world. And so that actually is very kind of pro human when you have that type of a reward function versus things like maximize compute or maximize production or something. So I think we should be able to get them.

Let's talk to the teenagers listening, the young adults listening, and to the parents listening. And I want to drive into, into two questions here as we close out. What's your advice for young people in school right now? And then the second thing is, what's your advice to me? I have two 12 year olds who love their metaverse. For them it's Roblox and other equivalent gaming worlds. China limits use of computer computers and games significantly. Should the US be doing the same thing? Your kids are grown. What's your advice to me? So let's address both of those items.

We actually have one section at the end of the book which is a tips for young people. And I advise everybody to read. I'll make those pages available to everybody so you don't have to buy the book to see it. But I think the key is really most parents today are saying, hey, I want them to learn stem. I want them to be super great students and make lots of money. I think that's probably not the best advice for long term for these young people. I think we need to help them find their purpose. Like Picasso said, I think you gotta find your gift, whatever your gift is. And it may not be in programming and it may not be in science, it could be in music, it could be in poetry, it could be in history. So I think giving a broader curriculum to your young children is actually a really good thing. In fact also music and arts opens up different types of connection in their brain than just doing STEM work. So I think that's important. So having them find that, that really real purpose and passion that they have and then having them go deep in it. Because I think one of the things I see with young people today is that they tend to have very short attention spans and probably because of all the Instagram and TikTok culture, everybody's, they just want everything fast in one minute or five seconds. I want to know what's going on. And to really understand something you have to read, you have to read full books, you have to really watch these two or three hour podcast and understand the real connections and reasoning behind things. And we really need to get people to get away from just getting the quick answer and to think about what questions can I ask. And I remember hearing you say that a lot. It's like the important thing is to get your kids to ask the right questions. And I cannot agree more with that because if they're asking the right questions, it means they're thinking, it means that they questioning themselves of what do I need to learn more about this? And when, when, when you have an AI system that can answer anything, knowing what to ask is a lot more important than getting the answers. And, and I, I actually find myself right now with AI systems and I'm just listening, trying to find I understand a topic and something that I may not. I would hear a word somewhere or a topic somewhere and I want to know deeper. And I would just, you know, pretend that I'm a five year old kid and just keep asking questions and, and honestly in the half an hour I can become fairly knowledgeable on a topic that I had very little understanding for. And I think we need that kind of curiosity because most education today teaches us to go for the quick answer and to be afraid to ask questions. Because asking questions a lot of people think is showing you don't know something, but the reality is that we don't know a lot of things and we just need to accept them. Playing with these tools and I think we just got to go out and use them because when you don't understand, you're afraid of if you start using it, you're going to see the value of where it applies. And today they are tools in another five to 10 years, they're going to be our patrons. They're going to be the ones that helps to offload us and give us the freedom to do all those things that we wish we had time to do. And then in 10, 20, 30 years, it's going to be our progeny. So we need to see it grow up and be able to also guide it along the way. I think it's allowing it to just say, okay, I don't need to think about it. Somebody will take care of it. I think that's something that will not end in the way that we want. We need to be an active part of the process.

To parents of young kids, should parents be limiting the amount of time kids are playing video games? Or is that that training them for the future that's coming our way?

Honestly, I think limiting is probably the right thing because most games today are designed to be addictive. They provide. Maybe in some cases they provide some value, but in most cases they only provide the value for a very short term. If I play the game for, let's say, an hour or two to understand what it is, which I do sometimes because I need to understand what's out in the market. But I'm not going to go spend 50, 100 hours on something because the additional value that I would gain from it is very limited. So in some ways I actually agree with what China is doing in terms of saying each child three hours a week and limit that. I think we should probably do that with social networks too, because there's a lot of these social networks, especially the ones that are maybe less meaningful. I think we may want to also limit how much time our children spend on it. Just like we used to say, hey, don't watch more than an hour or two hours of tv, tv, or can't watch TV after a certain time. I think we should take that same perspective with gaming. One thing I do want to talk about is I think we really have understood the value of soft skills. Now that the hard and stem skills are essentially a given, we need to make sure that our kids spend more time learning philosophy and psychology and communication and history and how to lead. Because those are the things that will actually separate how they will be integrated into this future world. Because in the future, the most important thing is how we will interact with each other. And that's all about the soft skills.

I agree. Yeah. Debate, leadership, compassion, the ability to lead somebody to. To convince them to support a vision, to provide a compelling story for folks, for sure.

Storytelling to allow us to ask the question, why? Because before people saw about how do you do this, how do you do that? But now that we know we can do almost anything or soon we will be able to do almost anything, is why should we do it, should we do this? And having the ethical guidelines to go along with and who does it affect when I do these things, I think that's an important part that we miss a lot. Another thing I think is important is actually spending time on health and fitness. A lot of people, especially in Asia, they don't put their kids into sports classes. They're like, it's a waste of time. I just want them to focus on school. And I think that the US and probably Australia, whatever, is probably a little bit better than that. But I think that's something that we should get people into sports because sports, sports allows, especially team sports, allows you to have the trials and tribulations of success and failure and the concept of teamwork and how do you work with a large group, how do you lead groups, how do you follow? And what happens when things don't work out and it's okay when things don't work and what happens when you work really hard and the difference of training a lot versus training a bit little. The other thing we don't do enough is sleep. I think I used to pride myself, I only sleep four or five hours. You and I both, I can get so much more sleep.

I sleep when I'm dead.

Yeah. And honestly these days I think by sleeping more, your brain just works so much better. And young people will be the same when they sleep is when they remember and turn that short term memory into the long term memory. And too many parents, parents don't prioritize sleep for their children and I think that's critical. And then lastly for young people, you need to think about finding mentors and also spending more time with your parents because the time goes so quickly. And I lost my dad last year and I wish I had spent more time with him. And you don't realize it until it's too late. And, and also my children have grown up instantly and I was traveling between China and US and I felt like I didn't get to see them enough as they were growing up. That's probably one of my biggest regrets. And so I feel like young people, while they have a chance to spend time with their parents, do it because the older you get, the less time you will spend with them and you will wish you had spent more and you will learn things from them because they are One of the few people in the world that you know essentially is.

Just.

I guess it's the unconditional love, right? The true unconditional love is the parents love for their child. And to have that, they will give you advice that they think is truly helpful for you. So spend more time listening to your parents.

I'm going to go hug my kids. I'm going to go hug my kids right now as soon as they get back from school. Alvin. Great. Kaylin, the author of Our Next Reality, How AI Powered Metaverse Will Reshape the World. Get the book. It's on Kindle. It's hardcover. I consumed it on audible. Alvin, you're an amazing friend and visionary. I'm grateful to have you in my life. And thank you for joining us today on Moonshots.

Thank you, Peter. You've been a real mentor. I was talking about mentors and I see you as a mentor and I listen to all of your shows and I learned something from every show. So it is my honor and privilege to speak to you today.

Fantastic. Where do folks follow you on Twitter or other platforms?

Yeah, so Twitter is a Grayland, and then on LinkedIn is Alvin Grayland. So pretty easy. And then also you can go to our nextreality.com and find out more information about the book. Oh, actually, there's one thing I do want to mention is we created a custom GPT for the book that you can ask any questions in, and it uses all of the content from just the book to answer you. So hopefully that will give you a preview of any concerns that you have.

And that's on our nextreality.com is where you find the GPT.

Actually, there's a link to it, but it goes to the custom GPT of OpenAI's chatgpt.

Wonderful. Thank you, my friend. Talk to you soon.

Thank you, sir.