Stephen Ibaraki | Radical Curiosity: Self-Actualization and Leadership in the Age of AI

When you program a computer, you don't have to go to get a degree from Stanford or an engineering. You can just talk to your computer and it'll program it. If you were to install or have somebody install OpenCL on your computer, you could say, I want this created. It can code it for you and create it. It can create an application for you. Microsoft, they have this AI Foundry capability where you can have all of this autonomous coding capability. GitHub, which Microsoft took ownership over, but still open source. Community, they have all of this automatic copiloting capability.

What if in just a few years aging itself could become optional, or AI could think faster than we ever imagined? Today I sit down with Stephen Ibaraki, a visionary who's advised the world's top CEOs and predicted exactly where AI and technology would take us.

We get into resilience, entrepreneurship, and what it really takes to stay human in a future that that's coming faster than most of us are ready for. My name is Dr. Fleet Maull, the founder of HeartMind Institute, your co-host for this session. And I'm thrilled to be here today with Stephen Ibaraki. Welcome, Stephen.

Well, it's a real pleasure to be here with you, Fleet. I mean, you got an amazing background. You're definitely a servant leader, and you've made so many global contributions that are impacting everybody worldwide. So it's such a pleasure to be with you on your session here on your podcast.

Well, this is the second opportunity of having these conversations because you interviewed me for your podcast. You know, we like to start these conversations, Stephen, with a bit of a personal level, with a bit of a backstory, a bit of an origin story. And you've played such a critical global role in technological leadership. I'm curious how that career emerged for you, whether you had a scientific or technological background and then moved into entrepreneurship and leadership. But I wonder if you could just a little bit about how Stephen Araki ended up in the role you've been playing on a global stage for quite many years now.

Well, you know, my grandparents immigrated into Canada over 100 years ago, right? And they were very entrepreneurial, both my mother and my father's side, and they built a lot of assets and things like that. And they were definitely North Americans. They, you know, they were citizens and really devoted their lives to the betterment of North America. But something strange happened in a way, and that is when the Second World War happened, my grandparents were interned and all their assets were taken away. And it's interesting, my grandparents my parents never complained ever. They never said this was a travesty or was a, an issue or anything like that. I mean, I only found out more just on my own, you know, cuz you read about things, you read about history, you read about Japanese Americans, you know, serving with valor actually for the Allies, right? And in fact being the most decorated battalions and things like that. So, but they come back and their parents are interned, right? Or my grandparents, you know, my mother was interned. And so that shaped my life in this sense because my aunts had a legacy and my uncles and things like that of service. So when they were interned, their education stopped, but when they got out, they decided to pursue different professions, but one of service. And that's one of the things that my parents instilled with me was one of service. But what also happened then is when my parents, you know, were released or my grandparents were released, then Basically they were penniless, right? Because all the assets were taken away. And so one of the probably shaping things for me was when I was very young, what my parents did is they invested in encyclopedias. And I mean, that's everything they had. It's not like, you know, we were wealthy because the assets were taken away. So really any means they have, they invested in encyclopedias, but it wasn't just one. Encyclopedia was like one on science, there was one on general knowledge, there was one on language, there's one on culture, there was a series on fables and things like that. So all of these different volumes. So when I was really young, I just used to sit on the floor and just every day just kind of devour all of these things, you know, and it gave me a really breadth of understanding. For example, the one on culture, it told me about other people in different lands and to respect. Diversity and to look at the lens from the other side, not from our Western side, right? So it gave me the capacity to kind of like mirror neurons to sort of walk in their shoes. And my, in fact, my parents would always say that to me. If I would, when I was very young, say, oh, look what that person did. Or, you know, maybe be judgmental. And they would say, no, you know, Stephen, you have to put yourself in their shoes. You don't like walk in their sandals and think about their perspective and respect and honor their journey, right? So that was, that's all I really realized when I was really young. And then because of that curiosity and the access to all of these encyclopedias and dictionaries and things like that, I thought everybody had this. I didn't realize that. I didn't realize until actually I was in middle school that was actually quite rare because other students, if they had a project, they'd have to go to the library or things like that. I'm saying, well, I could just use the encyclopedias at home, right? And, but that instilled curiosity about people, about nature, words and geography, about fables, the roots of fables and things like that. And also about science. And one of the things that my parents did too is they brought these encyclopedias that have updates coming in every month. And I remember being so excited every month when a new book would arrive with updates and things like that. And I would just spend hours, just literally hours and hours devouring that material. What it also did though is my parents, when I grew up, as I was very young and I would say, I can go to Mars, or yeah, you could, or I could go to the moon. Yeah, absolutely. You just have to work hard and then you could pursue any idea. So they never ever challenged an idea I brought out. You know, what are clouds made of? They never, or, you know, or challenged any idea that I had, no matter how fantastical, big results. Oh yeah, absolutely. You could do that through hard work. So it trained me to also be kind of self-actuating. So let's say I was curious about chess. I just taught myself how to chess just by reading these encyclopedias 'cause they had some. If I wanted to learn about technology, I would just read about it and then figure things out. They gave us this self-actualization kind of a theme. You know, if you want to do something, just look into yourself. And so I built a computer when I was really young. At Penn, it had an expert AI in it as well. And it was a, it was a lot of satisfaction. And keep in mind in those days, in 1965, you know, computers, nobody had computers. There weren't computers in the home and there was these big mainframe computers, but they weren't everywhere like they are today. So that curiosity continued. And when digital circuits came out and I built digital circuits -based computers and things like that. And then from there, that got me more curious into, from a professional standpoint. But I would say it, it's really my parents. And my, two of my aunts became nuns. Their education was stopped when they were interned, but when they got out, they joined the Catholic Church, became nuns, and they ended up getting advanced degrees as nuns and joined a teaching order. And it's only much later in life that I realized just how special they were because every time I met a priest or a bishop or something and I would say, oh, my aunts are nuns. And they would say, yes, we, we know your aunts, Sister Catherine or Margaret. And, and that's because they were very strong. In other words, they would definitely voice their opinions and they definitely didn't subjugate themselves in a sense. They served the male components in the church and served the religion and the Catholic institution, but they definitely did stand up for themselves as well. And they innovated because many years later, even though I was quite young still, but many years later, they had this computing system that the Catholic Church had designed for them. And they had this database system and they would need improvements and they would say, Stephen, would you be willing to have a look? And so I ended up repairing or adding modifications to the system. So I would just look at it and think, oh, okay, I could see how this thing works. And then I would serve their order. Where they had this computer that could manage different things for them. And so that's interesting. And it was interesting to see that they were really quite tech savvy and were using these small computers, microcomputers with databases and things decades ago. And so we're really quite tech savvy. And my sisters and my brother, you know, again, always encouraging when I was young. So, but I could do a whole podcast or a whole half day just describing how nurturing the family was and how it provided a really sort of heartfelt positive arrow forward.

Amazing.

Yeah.

What a good fortune of an incredible family background, despite the challenges that your family went through with internment and so forth. Yeah, I can resonate with your story about, it was your sisters that became nuns?

Aunts, yeah.

Your aunts became nuns, yeah. I was raised Catholic in the Midwest and had nuns for the first 9 years of my education. So I'm very familiar with that world. And, you know, I grew up in a basically good middle-class Roman Catholic family. We had our challenges, but there was a certain kind of dismissing. I think they were concerned I'd be a dreamer or something like that. And they were always, you know, forget about that stuff, focus, you know. And so it was a little dismissive there, but I didn't let it deter me. But also when you were speaking about your family being in the encyclopedia business, I guess my parents, you know, probably an encyclopedia salesman came to the door and I guess they bought this encyclopedia when I was quite young. It was called the World Book Encyclopedia and it was on a big stand up upstairs in this hall between all our bedrooms. So I had 3 sisters and an older brother and we would get new editions. Like you said, you'd get updates from it. And, and I was fascinated with that. That became a whole world for me. So I really resonate with that. So, you know, Stephen, you have, as I read your bio, you know, you've been in rooms with the leading CEOs of the top Fortune 500 companies in the world, the movers and shakers, the people whose decisions are really impacting our lives in the future, often decades in advance. And I'm curious how you see that world of leaders and to what extent leaders are really embracing responsibility for how technology is going to shape our future, and to the extent that perhaps they're abdicating some of that responsibility, just kind of a window into how that works. I know from what we hear, especially with AI, you hear a lot about both companies and countries keep competing because if the other, if we slow it down, the other will get ahead of us and all that kind of thing. But I know there's got to be thoughtful, intelligent people who are having deep conversations about these things and really trying to think this through. So where do you kind of see that at, and does it have a light side where there's some hope for wisdom driving this into humanity's future, and does it have a bit of a shadow side where the competition kind of takes over?

I've been really, really fortunate that all the CEOs and top leaders that I've encountered and have time to spend time with or engage with, and even on a continuing basis, in fact, even last week, I have a regular meeting Southern California Master Fund, there's a private executive working group. So you won't see a public footprint, but we meet privately and it's a CEO-led fund of funds and they do direct investments in companies and things like that. And I was invited in to support them back in June of 2020. And I meet every week with the founding chair or every 2 weeks. You know, we used to meet weekly, but now it's every 2 weeks. But it ends up we talk for hours. So in fact, just last week we had our last biweekly meeting. His name is Dick Gautner. He's a serial Fortune CEO. He sits on and has sat on boards of some of the top companies in the world, and he belongs to the CEO leader groups, Leaders with Purpose and things like that, and fellowships within Harvard. And he's the co-founder and he's currently chairing the CEO Leadership Alliance, and he's the founder of the National Talent Collaborative, which is 33 other leadership groups around the US working together. My experience has always been that they're very thoughtful. And the reason that these meetings that are typically supposed to be half an hour to an hour end up being 2 hours is because the conversations are very far-reaching and thoughtful. And the implications in being stewards of the planet, positive stewards of the planet and of humanity as well. So there's definitely a heartfelt concern. I don't wanna say concern because I don't want to, there's always a heartfelt thinking about how can things be moved in a positive way and address things in a positive way with positive outcomes. And my experiences with the people I interact with, I would say they're very much servant leaders like yourself. They're there to serve others and they spend time serving and listening others. And so with this explosion of technology, they're very, very aware of it. And in fact, the reason the CEO Leadership Alliance reached out back in 2020 was this is a group of multinational private CEOs, and they said, you know, we have a talent initiative. We're looking at addressing diversity and ensuring that the underserved, we can serve the underserved in ways. And even back when I first came onto their executive working group, I said, well, how about AI? And that's because I always believed that AI was good, but I've also bought quantum and other areas, but in some respects, maybe quantum was just too far advanced, even though now it's actively being in pilots and proof of concepts and things like that. But AI, even back then, AI was considered, wow, that's a, maybe that's too far advanced. But of course AI has exploded. And so they actually embarked on an AI talent initiative, or talent initiative generally in STEM, but one with AI. And now it's, you know, they're working with high schools and colleges and employment, and they're working with, city and state and governments and things like that. And then that expanded into a more general talent initiative serving with 33 different leadership groups around the US. And so their perspective of AI is, what can we do so it could enhance people's lives? How could it create jobs? How could it enable economic growth? How could it serve those who are underserved in a community? How can it help in healthcare to expand the capability and the reach of healthcare? How could it do biomedical innovation in a way that can't be done today? So it's always being, what are the positive impacts that could enhance humanity or enhance the planet in some way? So, and in fact, I just came back from a conference called YPO EDGE, and the only reason I can talk about it, 'cause a lot of it's under NDA, right, is because there's some public things about it now so that I could talk about. Generally, but you know, YPO is an organization founded over 70 years ago in 1950. It's about 38,000 chief executives, and then they have broader communities of partners and young Y&Gs and that, probably about 90,000, I would say. But it's, the core is 38,000 chief executives. And I estimate, this is my estimation, this is not one that they would put out, so this is my estimation. They do about $12 trillion in revenue across 150 countries, employing 22 million, and they have, Thousands of events they hold at the chapter level and the region and even at global levels. But there's only really one global conference. It's called EDGE. And I participated in 2019 and I participated in Barcelona last year. And then I participated this year. And in fact, I did 12 commitments. And a commitment could be a rehearsal or commitment could be a planning meeting. But I did 12 commitments from the opening plenary where I was on main stage to about an hour interview. It was supposed to be a 15-minute interview and ended up being an hour. The very, very end on the very last day, which ended at 4 o'clock, and I showed up early for the interview and ended up being about an hour. And they posted on it that I did this interview and they posted that you could see I'm on the opening session as well. So in general, again, I would say the perspective was very positive. you know, in the betterment of the planet, the betterment of humanity, things like that. And how to embrace technology in a way that could be beneficial for economic development, job growth, you know, company growth, but also obviously society, looking at the betterment of society and things like that.

So major corporations often get a bad rap in society and leaders as well. And there have been some industries that have certainly perpetuated environmental harms and other harms beyond when their knowledge was, you know, that they could have woken up maybe a little earlier. But I've always been impressed. I read a book by Peter Drucker many years ago, who's a well-known executive coach and leadership trainer, and he had interviewed many top CEOs and really top worldwide companies, and he compared many of their qualities. He actually compared their qualities with spiritual teachers. Now I don't want to over-romanticize this or idealize it, but it takes a lot of training and accomplishment to get to that level. So these are thoughtful people, these are intelligent people. They've done their work, right? They're, you know, you don't just stumble into those levels of responsibility. That kind of opened my mind about that. And I tend to be a realistic optimist by nature. So I tend to, I'm not one of these, the sky is falling kind of folks. So I tend to, you know, trust that humanity has good instincts. And fortunately you, you came with a really strong ethical background and I think I think sometimes though, I'd like to ask two things about technology. One is that I think a concern a lot of people have is that our technological development is getting ahead of our emotional, moral, spiritual development as human beings, right? In order to be able to have the context as a human society to handle these powerful technologies. That's one thing. But you also brought up the work on talent search and probably bringing opportunity for education to more people and diverse groups of people. Technology is such a— can be such a democratizing force and such a leveler. Like, anybody today— I mean, you know, when I grew up in the 1950s, you had to pay your dues. You know, if you're going to go— well, you weren't going to take a rocket ship to the top. You had to work your way through, pay your dues. Now, anybody who develops the competencies and the skills and the technological knowledge, they can really do and create whatever they want if they're willing to work hard and learn, right? So there's a great leveler there. And at the same time, as technology is advancing, there may be some risk that we're going to have the technological savvy and then we're going to have the non-technological savvy. And that's going to create a bifurcation in our world and our global society that may exacerbate already the divides that are there economically and socially and so forth. I wonder if you could address those two questions. One about how we can keep our human development and moral and spiritual psychological development, especially as leaders, apace with technological development, and the other about any concerns you see about, you know, these technologies kind of bifurcating the world into those who are savvy enough to benefit from these and those who are not.

Yeah, let's do the last, the second question first, and then you can remind me about the first question because I'm going to get into a lengthy sort of top context-driven answer. So initially when you saw different kinds of technology came coming out, it was definitely a have or have not. And that's because the cost was so high. So, you know, the cost to electrify your home was cost initially, and then it democratized where everybody has it. The same was true of phones. I remember when I was young, we didn't have a phone in the home. And then I remember when we got a phone. I remember when we didn't have electric lights, we didn't have electricity. And then we got electricity and things like that. And that's because cost, right? So there's always been this limiting factor. If you had an automobile, it's because you could afford an automobile and then it became more mass produced. So that was always this dividing line for, you know, I would say over 10,000 years. It's kind of like you had the means, then you would have access to more advanced capabilities or better food or things like that. But that started to change with when you went from vacuum tubes to transistors, because transistors are much easier to handle, miniaturized, and then they created large-scale integrated circuits, right? And then in the '70s, and again, it brought the cost down, it brought the cost of compute down. So we went from mainframes, which only a few corporations could afford. We went to mini computers, which medium-sized businesses—

Supercomputer on your wrist these days.

That's right. And they're everywhere. And in fact, every phone has some kind of computing chip in it, right? And I'm talking phones that are used in every part of the world amongst, you know, farmers who are even at a subsistence level. They now have a phone and that phone has a computer chip in it, right? And because the cost has come down. So, so I think this divide still continuing, but it'll disappear because the cost of energy will come down, the cost. So think of it of this kind of different layers, right? So at the very bottom is energy. And already, for example, in clean energy that China produces through the, just their clean energy, more than the total output of the US, all of energy, I think it's maybe 2x, right? And I'm not making a judgment about one country to another, but I'm just saying, so what that means is energy is becoming much cheaper. Right now. And there's this company on fusion, I think it's called Helion, and they just did an announcement where they just did a major plasma breakthrough and they're targeting to have their fusion reactors used by Microsoft in their data centers 2028, right? So what does that do? It brings the cost of energy down. There's plans to put solar arrays into space. There's already floating solar arrays on water reservoirs. In fact, Thailand had that. The largest one, the Shurizam Dam for in that area. It used to be something like 45, 48 gigawatts. It used to be the largest, but now there are other parts of the world have larger. But you know, you have all of this water and then they put floating arrays, solar arrays, right? It brings the cost of energy down. You put it into space, the conversion rate is so much higher that it brings the cost of energy down. You can even put this kind of nano particle layer on top of existing solar cells and increase the conversion rate by a significant number, like in the orders of tens of percentage points higher. You can use perovskites, which have a higher conversion rate. So whether it's fusion and things like that, so this underlying driver of everything of energy is coming down, which means the cost of production is gonna come down, which means that there's more of a proliferation. And I'm not talking 20, 30 years from now, I'm talking this is happening real time today. Now shipments of what they call small modular nuclear reactors, right? Where it used to have these huge ones required that were like billions and billions of dollars and take a decade to build and things. Now you can build these small ones and you can, you know, put them on the back of a truck, for example, or you can have one in your community, things like that. They're putting them into near data centers, right, as an energy source. So the energy factor, as it becomes more, you know, proliferates, then it'll drive the cost down because above, above the energy is hardware. And the hardware could be quantum computing hardware, it could be chips hardware, it could be chips amalgamated into computers, but there's this kind of next layer of hardware. So energy coming down, the cost of fabricating these things. I mentioned that we went from vacuum tubes or mechanical computers, which are really expensive and they only had maybe 3 in the world, vacuum tubes to transistors to ones that have integrated circuits to these GPUs that have, you know, Cerebras has this chip that has like, you know, over a million transistors on it, right? So it's bringing the cost down, or in the case of NVIDIA, it's in the hundreds of billions, right, of transistors into these systems on the chip. So the more you integrate, the smaller the components you get into photonic chips, and again, drives the cost down. The energy to drive them is coming down. The miniaturization is bringing the cost down. The computational capability of these things is coming down. So, so if you look over the past 10 years, an AI supercomputer would be something like $130,000 to $150,000. You saw NVIDIA come out with this Spark Cube that you can hold it in your hand. It has the same power as that $150,000, $130,000 AI supercomputer, but it's $4,000, right? Same power. So again, this miniaturization, the cost coming down, the proliferation, and that scaling is continuous. So you've got this energy driver, you get the hardware driver. On top of that, I call it fabric. The fabric is the ecosystem. It's the cloud computing. It's all of the things that make use of that hardware. So I call that the fabric. And on top of that fabric of ecosystem, and the proliferation of that is becoming more accessible. You can access that fabric now in the global majority, anywhere in the global majority, in the underserved communities. You can access it anywhere. And the proliferation is increasing, right? So I call that the fabric, the internet, the fabric, right? And then on top of that, you have intelligence. And that intelligence could be robotics, it could be an AI machine learning, it could be biological intelligence and the realization there's computational capabilities in biology, even at the cellular level. And so that cost, that realization, the proliferation is coming down. And then on top of that, you have autonomy. So it's energy, hardware, fabric, intelligence, and autonomy. Autonomy is where, you know, there's this controversy and excitement and inspiration as well. When Open Claw came out, this Peter, this gentleman, this engineer who had a great exit and decided, you know, what if I can create these autonomous agents? He created something called Open Claw, it's open source. They just got merged into OpenAI, but OpenAI is committed to keeping it open source and put a foundation around it. And Peter, the gentleman who created this thing, is now working for OpenAI. But autonomy is this ability for you download it on your system and just does things for you on its own. In fact, there was even a social community created called Maltbook where these autonomous agents can actually just work and communicate amongst themselves like a Reddit.

I read something about that, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there's still a lot of human puppeteering occurring, but there's some that are independent that's on that thing, right? So that autonomy is going through the roof. So those layers are compressing. And so that have or have not will disappear. And that is, the cost will come down where everybody will have access. Also, when you program a computer, you don't have to go to get a degree from Stanford or an engineering. You can just talk to your computer and it'll program it, right? If you used OpenClaw, I'm not advocating for the use of OpenClaw, but I'm saying this is possible. If you were to install or have somebody install OpenClaw on your computer, you can say, I want this created. It can code it for you and create it. It can create an application for you. Microsoft, they have this AI Foundry capability where you can have all of this autonomous coding capability. GitHub, which Microsoft took ownership over but still open source community, they have all of this automatic copiloting capability. You have OpenAI with CodeX 5.2, 5.3, this has coding capability and Google Gemini. Google Gemini 3.2, and it has coding capability. So when I say coding capability, you just prompt it, you just tell it what you want, and then it just creates it all for you. So those barriers to creativity, you know, I could only go public on this because if you look at the YPO website and you look at the YPO at Sydney, which was just a week ago, and there's a little bit about the opening session that Lucy Guo is there. and Lucy Guo has created the best business platform creators. But those creators can do a lot of things because the hit to technology is seamless. It's hidden. You don't even know it's there today. So, you know, you can command things. So again, that means it's gonna be ubiquitous. You don't have to have technical ability. You know, you realize now, you know, there's this poll, maybe it's about a month old, for the first time in American history. 60% of Americans don't believe you need a college education.

Mm-hmm.

To be successful. And then there's a realization that you can just get skills. Where can you get these skills? You can get it through the internet, through YouTube videos, through Coursera, these online platforms for education. You can self-teach. You can use your AI to act as the tutorial to gain expertise and skills. So. That's the first time in history where it's flipped, right? Or if you look at some of these major founders who have these deep science backgrounds and they're saying they're hiring on skill, they're not hiring based on your degree. If you look at the hires within IBM or let's say Google, I would say especially, or maybe Microsoft and others now who are the top leaders, they're not hiring based on your degree stack. They're hiring based on can you do it? right? And whether you have a degree or not, they're hiring based on skill. And those skills are accessible. Anybody can access them. And that proliferation of skill will continue. So what happens in the whole educational paradigm has to switch so that it becomes more self-actualization, right? Where you internal locus of control, you train people to be the driver of their future and of their enablement empowerment rather than dependency on the world and others and things like that, right? But because this 5 layers, the energy, the hardware, the fabric, the intelligence, the autonomy is proliferating, everybody will have access. And we just need to train people to become self-actualizers, internal locus of control where they control and they determine their ability to gain skills and things like that. So this switch has to happen. And that's where talent development and empowerment, that conversation has to change. So I said it wouldn't be a short answer.

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It's really amazing what you shared there. And you know, you were just pointing to this need to shift our education paradigm around training people to internalize that locus of control and to be self-actualizers. You know, I've been involved in prison reform work and developing programs to help people who are incarcerated for a long time. And you know, that's kind of on the extreme end where often people have almost no internal locus of control. Everything's outside, often an impoverished internal environment, sometimes very negative internal environment. But even in the general population, I think we've been enculturated for many years to depend on institutions, to depend on this, to depend on that, to not be— I mean, some people by nature are self-actualizers and some people pass this through their family lineages and so forth, like your family. But I think that is a critical shift. And, you know, probably our overall philosophy of education really needs to be looked at. Is there dramatic thing. And maybe that's part of the answer to my other question that I'd ask you. With what you're describing, especially the autonomy part of AI and where that's going, which some people find kind of scary, how do we keep our, as humanity, as our leadership, but really all of us, and how do we keep our moral, psychological, emotional, spiritual development apace with this technological development? So we can handle it with wisdom and partner with it, even if we are evolving some kind of autonomous intelligences. How do we partner with that with wisdom?

Yeah, and I would say this ties into a question I get asked all the time about how do we prepare our youth, our children for in the future, right? And really that advice I give on that aligns with is how do we as humans keep up and ensure that we can progress and keep a pace of the technology and integrate it in a positive, ethical way, right? So, and it comes down to some basic principles, and that some basic principles are practice reading and spending time every day on the edge. And so that you get curated information about the positive impacts and integration and how you can do this. And I can give you two resources that I'm heavily embedded in. ACM. Association for Computing Machinery. We are the largest computing science organization, but we're also a nonprofit. And a lot of our material is open, freely available. In fact, we just this year made our digital library, the digital library is the world's largest repository of computer science knowledge. We made it freely available. We open, made it open access. Anybody could come in and access all of that. Curated information, and by and large, it's all positive-focused. I shouldn't say by and large. It's positive-focused, and it has ethical considerations built into that as well throughout, right, that largest repository. So the other one was IEEE. IEEE also has a very large repository, and both the ACM, Association of Computing Machinery, and IEEE were the largest science and technology engineering organization in the world. We also have all of this content that's curated, both the ACM and the IEEE, that we give out daily news feeds. And those daily news feeds are things like the ethical positive application of technology in this country or a major breakthrough that will enhance humanity, but there's always the ethical positive considerations for it. So I encourage that as part of our new wave of thinking is to embrace looking on the edge and spending time with positive news feeds on the edge. And that will then underpin and help to increase your substrate, your foundation of ethical, positive development of the technology and not being afraid of it, but being to embrace and integrate it in a thoughtful way. And I've just given two great resources. Now, one of the greatest founders in the world, created the commercial computing marketplace. His name is, uh, Vedant Khosla, and he's a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He had a billion-plus exit. He's become one of the most famous investors of all time. I actually did a fireside with the ACM, was actually Computing Machinery, for an hour. And he talks about that. He talks about spending time on the edge, but he talks about noise in that edge. And I'm saying, if you just consume things from the ACM and IEEE and another organization, IFIP, and similar national organizations, it'll eliminate a lot of that noise 'cause it's curated, right? It's, they, you know, they look at it very carefully to make sure that it's for the positive and the benefit of the world and humanity. In fact, that's kind of like a model within IEEE, by the way. And in fact, if the audience wants to, I just did two interviews, one with Yanis Ioannidis, who's the president of ACM, He's the top leader in ACM who's elected by our membership. He's also a good friend. And look at the interview and look at his shaping, his messaging. It's all about how can we do things for the benefit of the world, the benefit of humanity? What are the resources to do that? What are the projects we're working on? What are the 14 working group task forces he's created? It's ACM-directed, but it's really about for the benefit of the world and things like that. I just did one with Marianne Randall. And she's the current president of the IEEE. Very thoughtful. Her history is about thoughtfulness. And so I encourage the audience to take a look. The two top leaders of the two top organizations who then are stewards of the two top repositories of leading-edge information. So that's kind of one rule. And that's a rule that I give to young people as well. Spend time. It's like these are the encyclopedias you should be looking at, right? Number 2 is think cognitorial thinking. In other words, I just met a musician, but engage in that musician and be curious. Ask that musician all sorts of questions. I'm not saying I personally, but I'm thinking I'm a young person and I'm not into music. And let's say I'm taking the subway or something and I just happen to strike up a conversation with a person because they have a guitar on their back or something as a musician. Then ask questions, be curious, ask questions. And this is part of combinatorial thinking. Think of, ask questions to be curious about this person who you have no common sort of training with and things like that. And you'll learn, you'll expand your thinking. And then let's say the next time you see somebody and they have a uniform on and they're in the military, but you don't know of anybody in the military and to strike a conversation, be curious and to understand what that lifestyle is and that decision. What if the next time you see a nurse or somebody just coming off duty, they're quite animated, so they're maybe willing to even get a call, ask questions, be curious about their background, right? Maybe the next time you happen to meet somebody who happens to be a scientist, ask questions, be curious. Because now you have these different experiences and questions people with different backgrounds, then practice combinatorial thinking. Think about how does my conversation with the musician relate to my conversation with the artist or the nurse or the scientist or the military professional? What are things in common? How are they different? How can I combine these different ways of thinking into some sort of novel way of thinking about the world? When can you do that? You could do that in the morning when you're just waking up, spend some mindfulness time thinking about cognitorial thinking when you, and then walk. You have to walk between yourself and a bus stop, or you have to walk between yourself and a park or something like that. Spend some time, of course, being aware of your environment and being situationally aware, but also think in a cognitorial way. So practice cognitorial thinking. Also run experiments. So when you're curious about something and you don't know what it's about, why not run an experiment? Because so much of the creativity after— I told you that Lucy Guo, this lady, maybe by the way, I should give you a little bit of background. Lucy Guo, who was on the main stage in the plenary, she was coding when she was preteen, self-taught. She then was building commercial applications as a teenager that actually would generate more income than the combined salaries of her parents who were Silicon Valley engineers. And then she entered Carnegie Mellon and then accepted and took up a Thiel Fellowship. And the Thiel Fellowship is, you know, rather than spending 4 years in college, I'm going to fund you to educate yourself and create a startup and things like that. And of her cohort, of her class, she was, she, and of all the Theo Fellows ever since then. She's the most successful because she co-founded a company called Scale AI, which got acquired by Meta for about $30 billion. And then she created an investment vehicle called Backend Capital, which has invested in over 100 companies. And she's created a new platform called Passus, which is for creators. It's a business platform for creators, right? So she definitely practices this kind of combinatorial thinking, being curious, asking questions. Things like that. And this aspect of staying on the edge, right? In fact, I have a meeting today with her just after this. So just a remarkable individual. Oh, and by the way, she made Forbes list as the world's youngest female billionaire.

And how old was she when she became a billionaire?

30.

Oh my goodness. Wow.

And she's 31 now.

Ah, wow.

That's amazing. Okay, so the equation hasn't finished though. Right? So thinking on the outlier, combinatorial thinking, being curious, running experiments. So she continually ran experiments. When she was coding before she was 10, she was running little coding experiments. And then when she was a teenager building commercial applications, she was just running experiments. And running experiment could be tech-based, but it could be attending an event that's different. Than what you normally attend, a summit or a forum or a working group, or it could be a church group if you have a spiritual and a kind of a Christian faith, but it could be attending things that are different. So running experiments, environments that are different, talking to people that are different, right? Then the other thing is networking as well, networking with people who are different than you, but in a safe way. I'm not talking about networking people who are not good for you, but, you know, safe people. So if you practice those things, questioning, observing, experimenting, associating, networking, cognitorial thinking, accessing safe information, curated information, and you instill that with self-actualization and, you know, internal locus of control where you're in control, but accessing all the things that are readily available, then humanity and all the things that consist of the global ecosystem can progress in a safe way. That doesn't stop bad actors though. The bad actors will always be there.

Yeah. So, well, you, you're pointing to, I think what really is the most important thing for any of us today is learning how to learn. If we really learn how to learn, then we can, you know, we can be continually pivoting and innovating and, you know, and figuring out how to thrive and progress and self-actualize really whatever's happening in the world, whatever's happening technologically, culturally. And there's, I have a friend who has a book, it's not super well known. Eben Pagan has a book called Opportunity, and he talks similarly about, you know, look at lots of different systems and models and thought models and different things going on in the world. Talk to different people because the real innovations come because somebody recognizes, oh, I could take that and integrate these two and complete something completely new.

Right?

And so it's that diversity in our thinking and And looking at different opportunity really arises for somebody who's got this very open mind and looking at, oh, I wonder if you combine that, I wonder if you put those together, how does that inform that, right? And so I love everything you're saying about how do we get that kind of thinking and that kind of, how do we get that into our early education system? I'm sure there are projects going on, but in general, our institutionalized education systems are pretty far behind the curve in that. Regard. So how do we begin to train children to be self-actualizers and make use of those learning tools that you're talking about versus just sort of trying to enculturate them in the conformity of some kind?

You know, it really starts with the parents, right? It has to start in the home. So it's a culture shift as well. So how do you create systemic culture shifts? And that's by having, you know, like local forums on this and there's a group called the Computer Science Teachers Association. It's something that was founded within ACM, but we're an independent, it's an independent organization. So ACM Association of Computing Machinery, the ACM initially funded this program called Computer Science Teachers Association, but it's an independent organization. And they practice, you know, this area of curiosity and combinatorial thinking and, you know, taking control each student in essence taking control of their education, but teachers being a guide in that process. But parents also, or family, so whatever family structure there is or friend structure has to endorse and be part of that. And that creates a, requires a cultural shift. Now there's different parts of the world that are already have gone through that cultural shift. So the American experience, there are regions, I mentioned the CEO Leadership Alliance is doing this cultural shift. But it's CEO-driven, but they're working with teachers and parents and they're working K-12 and superintendents and colleges and businesses. And there's 37 leadership groups that are working through this in the US. And the reason that the CEOs decided to take a lead in this is so that because they have the ability to execute and drive at all levels, right? They could get the attention of governments and counties and cities and parents and their employers. So if they work across all stacks, so they have the ability to create this. How can we continue to get this to spread, let's say, in the US? Then investigate the National Talent Collaborative. See how you can support the local regions, right? Because the CEOs have to work with the communities. They have to work with the parents in those communities, the students in those communities, the employers and the government officials, the education systems, the superintendents. Of the high school systems and things that they have to work with all of those. So go to the National Talent Collaborative. It's a, there's a website, NTC, search for the CEO Leadership Alliance and say, gee, I'm a parent, I'm a family member, I'm a friend. How can I support this program? And then, you know, and do the local outreach at the 33 leadership groups around the US. And because they're community programs, right? CEOs are helping to drive it, but they are working peer-to-peer with community, right?

So. Well, what you're pointing to and the theme of my podcast, which is called Radical Responsibility, is that it's up to us. We really have to take ownership for this. We can't, you know, we can watch the news, say, oh, this is happening or that's happening, it's gonna go here, it's gonna go there. We're getting a very filtered version. I love what you spoke about, about, you know, even if we are fearful about technology, then expose ourselves out there to the edge you're talking about. And to that thoughtfully curated edge you were speaking about to these organizations and begin to learn, right? Because wherever all this is going, it's up to us. It's up to each of us, right? And sometimes I think we think that because the world is vast and systems are vast and now the technology is changing so fast, we may feel very disempowered and feel like, well, what can I do? I can't do much. And somehow we have to make that shift inside of ourselves, each one of us, and realize that we can start engaging in some way, just start anywhere. The minute we start engaging, we start learning and then we start feeling more empowered and less powerless, right? So I think you're pointing to really just, really the key factor for the future of humanity is making the shift towards self-actualization, towards learning how to learn, towards really embracing ownership and agency, but the world we're co-creating together.

Yeah, and maintaining that curiosity, but in a respectful way. And in fact, one of the things that, your team did earlier. You said, Steve, we could send you a list of questions. I said, no, let's just keep it unscripted and we'll just have a dialogue, right? And that's because I respect you and I wanna engage with, and I'm curious about your thinking. So if it's unscripted, then that curiosity will manifest in real time. And that's how you engage with others, right? Don't script it, do unscripted. Talk to your neighbor, talk to the other parents, talk to your teachers, engage. And by engagement with curiosity, not scripted, then you can co-create in positive ways. Right. And with respect.

Well, so we're kind of nearing the end of our time here. I wanna circle back to just sort of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial spirit for a moment. Well, you talked about what's happening with this latest gentrification of AI and, you know, vibe coding and the ability to just speak into AI and have it do coding for you. Anybody can create anything today, just about. I mean, you talked about the woman who as a teenager was already creating things that created economic engines that outstripped even her engineering parents' current salary in Silicon Valley. And now she's a billionaire at 31. It's pretty limitless what we can do. I mean, it's just opened up creativity to such a level and how to really empower people to say, you know, I can just start learning about these tools. 'Cause we all have creativity, right? We all have a creative spirit in us, a creative instinct. And there's probably no greater way to get in the driver's seat of our own life than through some kind of entrepreneurship.

Yeah, and in fact, one of the recommendations, because I do a lot of private events where I get invited in, and it's typically to CEOs or investors, but they also often bring up questions about their children and about the future. So I talked about cognitorial thinking, being curious, experimenting, associating, networking, things like that, right? But one of the other aspects too is I also say encourage entrepreneurial thinking. And the reason is that entrepreneurial thinking encompasses all of that. You have to be curious, you have to do combinatorial thinking, you have to think on the edge, and you have to be agile and you have to embrace differences and things like that, right? And you're always constantly solving problems in real time. Entrepreneurial thinking actually encompasses all of that. Entrepreneurial thinking also has this kind of Angela Duckworth view of grit. Now I'm gonna give you my take on her, so I recommend you go and research her directly, but this is my take, right? So, you know, there's this aspect there. Everybody has some kind of, let's call it talent, some abilities. And those abilities could be kinesthetic, it could be visual, it could be auditory, it could be some combination of those. It could be emotional. Talent, you have emotional intelligence talent, or it could be the ability to kind of concentrate on one particular task in a very focused way, et cetera. It could be any myriad of areas. And I think talent exists across a million dimensions in very nuanced ways in different spectrums, right? So, so everybody has some kind of abilities, right? If you work really hard, right? Some abilities you work really hard to get skills. And then if you apply those skills and work really, really hard, you'll get some achievements. And that achievement could be you got a raise, you know, or you got some recognition from, from a colleague, or you got, you made a fellow citizen, you made them feel rewarded in some way. So you get those skills, you work really hard, you get some achievements, and the achievements doesn't have to be monetary. It could be across the spectrum of many areas, right? Now with achievement, you then have to have resilience and agility and optimism and perseverance, and then you'll get whatever the definition of success is because it varies depending on the field, right? And there has to be this kind of self-success of where you feel motivated and happy with where you are in life, right? Or at peace with what you've done. So, but a big part of that is this resilience of perseverance and agility. And embracing volatility as don't think of what volatility is a problem. Think of it as an opportunity, right? And to be resilient and during these periods of uncertainty and volatility and persevere, but with optimism as well. Those things encompass entrepreneurship. And by embracing those areas, then if you wanted to do a startup and be an entrepreneur in the classical sense of an entrepreneur, then you could be successful as an entrepreneur. And Lucy Guo would be example of a, she embodies all of those, perseverance, you know, and optimism, but resilience and things like that. That mindset of entrepreneurship and startups also applies to the times we're in now where, you know, for the first time I did an interview with a, a longtime educational colleague of mine. We used to be professors in a college early, many, many years ago. And I just interviewed him 'cause he's continued, his name is Richard Longworth and he continues to write books and things like this. And he gave me a statistic. And so, so I recommend you go to the Richard Stephen interview, but just thinking and reflecting on what he's saying for the first time of Gen Zs are like 1997 and ahead, right? And boomer generation, what, 2012? But this is Gen Zs for the first time, girls, I think he said, I said 60% are having anxiety. And he says nearly 50% of boys are having anxiety. And it's because of this uncertainty, right? So my sort of feeling where maybe I've extended Angela Duckworth, I don't know if I have or not, but you should go to her original work. But my feeling is that resilience and that ability to be agile and doing and persistence, you have to embrace that. As well. And that will then help combat this increased anxiety. The increased anxiety is because of this uncertainty that's out there. So the entrepreneurial spirit and the startup spirit covers all of that.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting you brought up resilience with HeartMind Institute, which I started in right as the lockdowns began with the pandemic in 2020. And we did our first online summit on resilience called the Global Resilience Summit, 'cause I had a sense that we really need to focus on resilience. And as HeartMind has grown, the challenges have increased and I've had to continually raise my game in terms of my own resilience. And now with AI, I mean, we had quite a run for a couple years during the pandemic, a little bit post, but now AI is really just dramatically changing everything in the online education space. And so we're really having to be innovative and pivoting and just be in a state of not knowing and trying to, see where to go next, not only how to sort of stay a pace with where it's going, but perhaps lead where it's going, right? And it's really quite thrilling. There's been a few moments when I thought, whoa, I had something that's really working, suddenly it's not working anymore and feeling, oh, you know, but okay, that's ridiculous. This is exciting, right? This is exciting. So how lucky am I to be living at this time in life and to have the ability to jump in and play in this landscape and try to innovate and be creative. I mean, it's really a thrilling time to be alive. And it really is the resilience that allows us to keep getting back in the game, so to speak, and to learning and to be curious and to— because we can either let all this kind of push us back into that anxiety and despair, even overwhelm, or we kind of learn that maybe what you were talking about, expose ourselves to the edge, just spend some time there, you get fascinated with it, you get in it, you get inspired, right? There's energy there. There's so much energy right now in the world in terms of how things are changing, the levels of creativity and energy. And if you can just tune yourself into that, it's incredibly enlivening.

Yeah. And by embracing it, then you're embracing your internal locus of control. You're in command, right? Rather than I'm being the subject of all of the external forces. And people have much more control than they think, but they have to embrace it, right?

Absolutely. Well, this is— I could keep asking you questions all day long, but I know you have other commitments, Stephen. So thank you so much for this fascinating conversation. Are there some primary sources where people can go to find out more about your work and your podcast and all the interviews you do with fascinating people?

I would say maybe, you know, just type in IEEE Systems Council and then my name, and then you'll see a list of of interviews that I've done. The longest list of interviews is with the CIPS, the Canadian Information Processing Society. So CIPS, and on the community page, there's interviews dating back from the year 2000. The ones that I did prior to the year 2000 are gone, and that's when servers changed and things like that. So what I've done now is I've taken over that from the year 2000. So that, you know, the interviews don't get lost and so on. So, but the oldest repository is dating back from the year 2000. There's over 1,500. It's probably, probably about 2,000 now. I try to do about 100 a year now. More than 2,000. Initially, right? So, but CIPS goes back to 2000. I would say IEEE Systems Council, and you type in my name, they go back maybe 4 or 5 years, something like that.

Well, it's just amazing what you pointed to with these major repositories of computational science being now available and open source to anybody who wants to begin exploring this. And your catalog of amazing interviews you've done with amazing people around the world, it's all available and it's just up to each one of us to exercise our curiosity and access these incredible sources for information. And I love what you said as well, like like explore a bunch of different areas of it, because it's the connections that are going to inspire our own curiosity. It's having that conversation with the musician on the subway or the person currently serving in the military or someone at Pomona-Brea. It's just exposing ourselves to these different types of information and then letting our brain do the work. Our brain's amazing at connecting the dots, right?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And as you mentioned, IEEE and ACM, and there's IFIP as well. And then There's local societies like KIPS out of Canada. You know, there's a lot of open material available. KNVI out of the Netherlands, et cetera. Every country has some kind of an association or a series of associations where you can get all sorts of curated information. Your work, your podcasts, of course, you've done outstanding work and you continue to be an amazing servant leader for the world. So people should be supporting everything you do.

Well, thank you so much to you, and thank you for your time today, and thank you very much for the work you do in the world, and I look forward to learning more.

Well, thank you again.

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