Generating 23rd Century Solutions in the 21st Century with Gordon Chiu #19

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith. And welcome to another edition of Redefining Tomorrow. It's here where we discuss topics that may redefine your future, that may redefine how we live on this planet or any other type of redefining you might consider. A quote I've lived through or with my entire life is, you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. And in essence, today we're going to be redefining tomorrows. A topic that we're going to explore today is just generating 23rd century solutions in the 21st century. So big promise. Here we have with us good friend Gordon Chu. How are you, Gordon?

Hi, David. I'm well, thank you.

So let me tell you. Share with you a little bit about Gordon. Gordon is the CEO and CTO of Fingra. He has 41 patents domestically and internationally, ranging from medicine through to material sciences. He's been involved in industries from biotech to data science to consumer products and medicine. He and I started talking several months ago about leveraging his skills within Project Moon Hut and the Mirth entities. And we've been working towards creating a new entity focused on new materials. So we've had. Which is not common. We've had a decent amount of dialogue getting to this point. And I know that where he's going to take us today is. Well, I don't know the topic, but I know where he's going in terms of title wise. I know that he's going to give us tremendous value. So that said, Gordon, do you have an outline?

David? I do.

Okay. How many points do you have?

I have somewhere between 4 and 5.

Okay, so we're going to do a 4.5. Why don't you give them to me and then we can start. So what is the first one?

Sure. The first one is on awareness.

Awareness. Perfect.

Number two. Second one is on fear.

Fear.

Three. Place. What was that place? Place. Yeah, Position. Yep, place. Okay.

4.

Timeline.

And do we have a 4.5 and a 5 or a 4.5 or a 5 total? Which one do you want to call?

So that one involves you because of our conversation involves Hong Kong. Perfect.

So we'll do 4.5. And I'm going to call it Me, you, Hong Kong. Perfect.

Is we intersect on that place.

Yeah, we definitely do.

Yeah.

So let's start with number one. Where are we going with this in terms of generating 23rd century solutions in the 21st century?

Okay, so if we begin with awareness. Yeah. You know, a lot of people, they go through life and they're not quite aware of where they're going or even where they're coming from. But they believe that they need to do whatever it is that someone else is telling them to do, so they go and do it. Some people spend their. End up spending their entire lifetime chasing that task in, you know, because we're going to end with Hong Kong. We're going to talk about some. A lot of people where I come from learn to be very, very focused. Extremely focused.

So when you say where I come.

From, I come from. My parents came from China. Yeah. So they came from a place going through Hong Kong, where you need to really, really focus so that you could be useful. So focused that you may not look at the bigger picture because you're so focused, in other words, maybe getting a degree, getting the best grades, and then so focused that you might have something next to you that you never realized. And I grew up watching that. I grew up seeing that. I had a lot of questions about that. So were you.

What was the focus that you were told you had to focus on?

Oh, my father wanted me to be number one because he was number one.

What was he number one and what did he. When he said number one, what did that mean to you?

Well, it was very foreign. It was. Sounded very hard because, you know, we all know numbers when we're very young, especially if you're Chinese origin, you know what number one is. So that's the number that is in front of all the other numbers, except 0 is in front of 1 as well. So. So, you know, just to make it lively. Right. You know, to. My father would tell me how he was number one of. And then he. He would mention that we. We were very poor and his handwriting and calligraphy was so number one that when he got to. Got to. When my grandparents had to pay for tuition, they didn't have to pay any tuition. Oh, that's impressive. Yeah, yeah. And then the second.

Was he a calligrapher, you said?

No, no, he was not a calligrapher. Then the other thing he was number one of. And I'm not going to do them in order, but I'm going to give you three major highlights. Another thing he was number one was he did not attend a major private school because we didn't have any money at the time. So he scored himself from the government schools into a place called Dia Seasons Boys School. DBS in Hong Kong.

Yeah.

And he ended up in the A band classes. There's apparently A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H or something like there's a lot of bands and he, he, he was in the A band, which is the hardest one. And he was number one in table tennis as well.

Wow.

So number one that when he came to the United States he took down the United States champion in one of the games. Right. So remember, he has an American born son now who gets older and he keeps hearing the same story. So I have all kinds of ideas about this. Right. So I would ask him how come he didn't start a table tennis school. This is as I once I was older, when I was younger I would just listen to the story, but I would ask that question and then he would answer, there's too much risk. But my father, when he came here, he didn't end up at, he finished at Columbia University, but he didn't start off at Columbia University. He started off in Kansas where he met my mother. And my mother also was from Hong Kong and she ended up in Kansas as well. And I said, you know what the chances are of finding someone? And, and then, you know, Kansas isn't one of those states out of the 50 states that you'd say, oh, I have to go there.

Right. I'm sorry, but that Hong Kong going to Kansas is, it's a very different lifestyle.

It's flat in Kansas. I actually went to Kansas. I just had to go to Kansas in, in the, you know, as a scientist you get invited to many places and then most people, you know, right off Kansas, why would I want to go there? But I wanted to get some answers. So I went to Kansas just as one of the places I did in the world of graphene to understand what they had experienced. And my answer after going there and my questions that came from there mushroomed. I had even, I had more questions now of why would you ever pick to go there? Right? And they, they, they got, gave me my answer is that it was really inexpensive to go to Kansas. Yeah, yeah, like it's really inexpensive. I said, but then how do you get out of Kansas? Everywhere you go it's more expensive. So, so that was my, you know, I had so many questions about this, so awareness. My father was number one in so many things and he wanted to be the number one. But my awareness was a bit different is that I felt that number one required a lot more work than number 15 or number 30. And it's 1 out of the denominator matters. So 1 out of 10 versus 1 out of 300. So in my high school there were about 300 or so individuals in high school. And if you Wanted to be in top 10%. You could slip all the way to 30 and you'd be fine. 35, 32. And so I, I felt that I had a lot of room to go, and I, I graduated in the 20s, so I was. If I, if it took longer to graduate than four years, I'd probably slip all the way to 30. Right. Because there was room.

I like how. I just. I love how you're calling it slipping.

Yeah. Right.

You know, there's 300. We had 425, 23 students in our class.

Yeah.

And I think I was. So I. I'm kind of feeling bad now. I was number 32, I believe, out of 425.

Yeah. So.

So I slipped all the way down. Sorry.

Right, Right. But you. Percentage wise. Right. The denominator matters because, you know, that's, it's how much slippage you have. And I want. I thought that that kind of slacking allows you to explore.

Oh, because you saw it as 10. The top 30 is 10%. So now you've dropped down.

Right. Right. Oh, okay.

See, I never, never had taken the number 32 and used the denominator to say I was in the top 10. I never even thought about it because I looked at. I was 32 and number one scored a perfect score on his SATs. Number two was in the same category. So I was, I was actually looking up. I never looked down. I don't know if that makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. So the awareness of the upper is important, but also awareness of the down. Yeah. So to practice that awareness requires you to consider, like our topic 23rd century is 200 years forward. A lot of things we solve for or we aim for is short term. Sometimes we solve things for ourselves short term that do damage. Long term.

Yes.

Such as positioning yourself in a place where you can't get out of marriage is one of examples. But they say that the getting out is a divorce. But there's a cost of divorce.

Yeah.

Some people like to focus on the financial costs. I think that focusing on the memory, like, you don't get to delete all those memories. So what happens is while you may be separated now, you know, let's say you get a disease. Statistically, the thing that kills people the most is after the divorce, they have a disease that would have been. Would have had a better outcome if the individual that you didn't like stopped liking made a phone call for you, like 911 and saved your life. So now that person's gone. So. And you also lose the Desire to get better because it's harder, you have less willpower. That's right. It's the willpower, the loss of that willpower. So, so there is a lot of. When you raise your awareness, which requires a lot of practicing, constantly practicing, then you, you find out, wow, you know, there's value on the other side. For example, number one, I was going.

To say if you can give, because I'm trying to get my mind around it and I'm trying to look at the awareness, which I didn't look down, I looked at 32 and I said where did I miss? And so give me some examples that someone like yourself or people, achievers, people who have challenges looking at their awareness might want to explore. Because I'm trying to figure out where I might be having my blind sides.

So, so for example, you introduced me as a, as a founder of a company and, and you know, CEO and that. But in the patents. So in order to get the patents, you have to be an inventor of novel things. Meaning that all the books that you read, there's a lot of people buy a lot of books all the time, you know, and some people buy so many self help book, but once you read all those, now nothing that you've read is novel because they're all published. So as an inventor though, you can't take what you read to come up with things and say that you're yours because they're someone else's. So to live in that other side, to be productive. You mentioned 41. So it seems like I'm fairly productive in the sense that some people in their whole life, life have no patents and other ones have one patent. And patents are not. You go get them. They have to be granted in your name or they're granted in your team. So being part of that requires a level of ego reduction significance. Because if you mention I have 41, if I mention how many rejections I have, does that mean I tried 4,000 times? Right? No. Yeah.

So that would be what the Einstein or one of the innovators have said that there are thousands of errors or experiments they worked on to get to the positive one. Are you saying that you to some degree have to look at that other side?

Yeah. So if you were to look at that other side and practice looking at that over and over again, you'd find out that there are two possibilities. Someone could get a result. Either that they had lots of shots on goal, their end number is like. And say for 41 patents, I had 40,000 attempts, 400,000 attempts. 4 million attempts. So that's an N number on the denominator side. Or if my awareness was really tweaked, maybe I could have 41 out of 41. Or maybe I could have 41 patents out of 30 tries. What? It mushroomed on its own. That's exactly what happened to me.

Explain.

So graphene, which is a 23rd century material, led to a lot of the mushrooming because the material did not exist. That's helpful, right? As an inventor, if you are dealing with a material that exists like wood or, or, you know, plastic, that's existed for a while, then somebody may have done what you've done already. There's, there's billions of people. Right. Right now, you know, we're at the 8 billion level. So, you know, and then if you look at all the dead people, all the people have passed, and you add those to the live ones, there's more than 8 billion, right? Oh, yeah, well, yeah, quickly.

Right. Let me. You're, you know math fairly well. I'm gonna guarantee you there's more than 8 billion.

Okay, good. So. So that, so that people. I don't want to make the math too complicated. Yeah. Except the living ones. And you add the dead ones. That's a lot.

It's. It's a huge number.

Yeah.

And even if you, even if you just go back to the, the end of the beginning of the 19th century and use that Right. There's a tremendous amount of people who lived on the planet. So I'm, I understand the concept. What I'm challenged with.

Right.

Is the value in it. And let me explain. I have this. The saying in the beginning, you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. Personally, for me to think about the fact that other people have done it or not done it is. It's a lot of work. Let me give you an example. To create a. I have patents to one of them. Decision making based upon programmatic and algorithmic analysis that had never been done, never been seen. Like you're saying it's novel. The challenge with that is I'm not looking at all the people who didn't succeed or why I didn't succeed or how many people have filed. What I'm looking at is what is the possibility with that technology? So I don't, I, I'm still, I'm having a little challenge with how much do I have to spend? My eyes are closed right now, and I know you can't see me. My eyes are closed and I'm trying to think, what would that Value do for me that make.

Would it.

Is it an ego thing? Is it a. What does it help me to do?

Hmm. So, so first of all, in awareness training, if you think of Mr. Miyagi and the Karate Kid, he was using his chopsticks to catch flies. In the movie. In the movie. Maybe in real life people don't do this.

No.

Right. But the movie, the movie raised your awareness. You know the scene, a lot of people know the scene. And so it changed your awareness. Oh, apparently awareness can do this for us. The key about awareness training is to not end game. Because if I knew what it was for, that may prevent what it's really meant to be.

Okay, philosophical. Yes.

Yeah, it's deep. Because if I knew, once I know what it's for, then, then I might have prevented the, all the real possibilities that it could truly be.

Okay. So that I understand, because you're opening your mind to possibilities in that sense. Yet I'm trying to draw the correlation between your father, your, your 20s, my 32, and how being aware of that much moves me, moves me forward as compared to not moving me forward. I guess that would be the opposite. Moving forward or standing still. So there's be three states you could be in.

Yeah. So my father said to me, like, I, I would ask him, I'm glad you went back to that because you would. I would ask him, why should I be number one?

That's a tough question. I mean, I mean, it's a tough. That was my gut reaction. That's a tough question because I don't know if individuals often explore their own internal reasoning for the things that they make their decisions to become.

Right. And remember that would be end gaining now. Because if I, I want to be number one. Because, and so he, he mentioned that you'd, you, you'd make me very proud if you're number one. And I said, would you not be proud of me? Would you not love me if I was, if I was number 27? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. The love shouldn't change because love should be unconditional. It shouldn't be conditional upon number one. So now he knows a problem. So is he going to respond to, no, I'm going to love you less. Right.

Of course I grew up and I was, I was born and I was told I was going to be a doctor or a lawyer. That was, I mean, I came out and I, it was a choice. It was either you, we don't take you home or you're a doctor or lawyer. So my entire upbringing was hard Sciences. My entire upbringing was in that, in that side. So. Yeah.

Right.

So what did he answer?

Well, it was, he answered about the, the fact that I would be able to get a job, I would get into a top school, a better school. And I said, how do you know that I wouldn't get into a top school if I was number 27? Or, you know, how do you know that? Right. And so I'm an annoyance when I was younger to just do what you're told. Right? Yeah. Yeah. But I question, what am I losing when I focus all of my time on. On what I think is more important versus I left an open canvas of raising my awareness. Right. So that's why today, the first item is, if we're going to solve things in the 23rd century, one might say, why don't you just solve today, don't worry about tomorrow. There's quotes like that out there.

Yep.

And if everybody saw, like, live every.

Day to this fullest.

Yeah. Those type of things. Or enjoy every day, don't think about tomorrow. If I, if, if everybody did that, if I started doing that. Right. Then you look at some of the patents and things like that, or why we end up having our conversations. If I did that, you and I would not have this podcast. The people listening to my talks on ted. Right. You know, that, that stuff, they wouldn't have heard invent because only by exploring my awareness and then training to improve that. So I, I would mention to, you know, in another conversation, not in the same conversation, but over time with my dad, I would say, you know, if you're an Olympic athlete, you know, you're going to be going to the Olympics with your special, or you're a singer, you know, singer, and they, they pick you in Hollywood. You don't stay in your high school. Your high school is a distraction. That's not the right place for you. Why. Why is that? Yeah.

Someone came up to my mom and said they wanted to train me to be in the Olympics as a skier. And my mom didn't know any better. She was not aware. And she said, no, my son's going to go to college and be a doctor. She didn't know that you could do both.

Yeah, do both. Right, exactly. So you could do three things, four things. Now, there comes the point when you do certain number of things that some of them become distractions. And in life, we get distracted. Some people say, distract me, distract me for the rest of my life. I care not to figure out anything. And there's, there's that too Right. But awareness is that your awareness of who you are and what you want requires practice. It requires compare and contrast. It requires experiencing, oh, I don't want to be number one. And then you write down your answers of why.

So a quick, quick piece on when did you, when were you aware that you needed to be aware? If that's the way you say it. And the second is what did you do to be aware? And I'm kind of even including in there, if you may, because of my living in Asia for a decade, you, you being of Asian descent, it could be there's a large cultural component I would believe is also part of that answer.

Well, the culture that I, that I became aware of became very early on. I was aware of certain things. Like, for example, the, the term Chinese church, you know, it doesn't seem like it's, it's, you know, anything. It's a church that has a lot of Chinese people in there. But, but if the children don't speak Chinese and you call yourself a Chinese church, then I guess you're only good for, until the, the children grow up and the church collapses or it doesn't, doesn't is not sustainable. So you got that. And then my father loved to mention a title called the Way of the Dragon. And in Cantonese I'm going to say it says, so you, you, if you, if you are a strong dragon, strong ones, the weak ones forget about them. The strong dragons cross the river right across the river. That's what it would, what it translates to. So then that means that people in Hong Kong and that the Way of the Dragon was the Bruce Lee title so that the strong dragons would come over. And he was describing how he's a dragon because of his scores and being number one. And so I, being his oldest son, I should do the same thing. But my question was, and this is awareness training again, is that, but when.

Did you start, when did you start your, when did you realize that you needed to be aware?

Reflecting back as an older individual, I was aware maybe at, at 2 years old. I had awareness. Okay, all right. I became more aware at 5. It was an annoyance. And if you, if people, you know, who, who study change, right, if you really studied. I'm not a studied thing. I'm not a, I'm not under a microscope. But I study myself to improve my awareness. So if you were to study things and look at the things that drive you and question you, learn a lot about yourself. So one of the things that happened to me, David, was I, I, I was born in this country, United States and New York. But then within a very short amount of time, I was sent back to Hong Kong because my grandparents could take care of me while my parents getting out of Kansas, you know, they figured out a way to. Out of Kansas. I was born in 74. So now, you know, 1974 was, was a, was a troublesome time. People are always trying to figure out whether or not we're going to have 1974 again, where gas prices are high. And you know, and then, well, we haven't had that yet, so, or, or we haven't seen that same thing. A prolonged duration of stagflation. We, we fear it, but it hasn't shown up. Well, in Hong Kong, I was, I came back to the United States before I was a year and a half old because the plane ticket was cheaper. So a lot of it was. The common denominator was how much is it going to cost? How, what, what, what, what are, you know, you got to look at your dollars and cents. But there's also a quote that says, penny wise and pound foolish. So something happened to me. My first experience in Hong Kong changed me to become aware that there, that when I was in a tub in the United States, in New York, that the water was much colder, the environment was much colder than it was in Hong Kong. What turns out, I still remember this, that that's because they, they turned on the cold water more than the hot water in the tub. Right. And it was in an apartment at, at a relative's place. And it didn't look nice, it didn't feel good. Right. The walls, the brick walls in Queens, New York was not the same as the brick walls and the concrete in Hong Kong. Of course.

And in Hong Kong, they, they drink hot water, right? You don't serve cold water on a table. You get hot water.

Yeah, yeah. But those are where my grandparents, my parents, parents were. And also on my mother's side, my, my, my grandfather on my mother's side had never held any other child but me because I happened to be there and everyone was bringing me around. I was the oldest of their grandchildren on both sides. So it became, I mean, male wise and, and, and, and, and so, and you know, there were other ones older than me on the female side, but it, it on my mother's female side, they had other children. But the thing is that I happened to be there. I was in very close proximity. So I, I became aware that when I was eating grapes, when they had grapes, that my mother's father would peel the grapes from me. She said he'd never done that for me. And then when I got sick in Hong Kong, my grandfather would take me to top pediatricians, the best. Right. And he couldn't stop talking about. So I was reminded about that as I got older. Well, when I came to the United States, all those treatments were gone. It's pretty shocking. So you can become aware of your surroundings if there's a lot of contrast. And then you could be aware of things if you were more aware without the contrast. So practicing that can come at different points in time. Cherish. Right. Embrace the awareness. All right. So now the awareness can change your outcome because awareness thinking like you wrote the book Paid to Think. There is also a quote that says ideas are a dime a dozen. So how do you get paid for an idea? Right. If ideas are a dime doesn't then that means you get a couple, a bunch of dimes. Right. Your book Paid to Think isn't about. And also your consultancy list isn't getting paid a bunch of dimes. Right. So how do you, how do you balance these, these, these forces that are out there? And so I want to introduce something with a composition. Awareness of me versus awareness of we. We. Yeah, the plural, the, the plurality in we shows that your goals can change as you age depending on their social events. You may now be thinking of you and your spouse and you and your children. This is what happened to me.

That's exactly where I went.

Ah, yeah. Why not learn to proactively change them before the situations and circumstances change for you.

Say. Help me with that one.

All right, so we're talking about 23rd century, right. Just to make sure people see that is that if we just focus on our day to day jobs, we may end up creating circumstances and problematic situations that will not be easily solvable because we got to multiply ourselves times 8 billion. Yeah. And some of those problems, erosion, you know, profitability, when we think of me, profitability versus we profitability. We may create things that are not so good for these social long term outcomes, but they're profitable. Right. So the quality of what we do. And so what do we do in society? Oftentimes we will, we'll say now we have a problem and then we retroactively, we, we reactively try to fix it. We create, and we create nonprofits, we create other things. So we build a lot of goodwill. So say, you know, and I don't want to pick on casinos or, or cigarettes or things like that, but, but we're going to use some of Those examples is that. Is that, well, how do we know that cigarettes give you cancer? Is it 100%? If it's not 100%, then. Then. Then it's just correlated. It's not the cause of cancer. You might have cancer from something else. And you could spend 50 years arguing.

That there are people who smoke their whole life and not gotten second. But then there's people, and there are people who have not smoked their whole life and still gotten cancer. And it could have been from food products.

Right. So the, The. The. The problem you have there is the focus on whether or not you get cancer. That shouldn't be the focus. Is that. Is it. Is it. Is putting anything in your lungs other than air, Right? Is that. Is that. Is that naturally done by any other organism? Do other organisms put artificial things other than what they need to survive? We are the only organism that does that to ourselves, and that creates friction and tension in the process. If we looked at it that way, we want to remove the tensions, then the body may be allowed to progress.

Okay, so my mind immediately went to, animals get cancer.

Yes.

And animals in the wild get cancer. Now, you could possibly correlate it to the fact that sometimes they eat foods that have been created by humans. It could be the water flow that happens off the drainage systems that they're consuming. Yet I would probably bet that no matter where you are in the world, animals get cancer. The question then, I guess is did the. Did they have as much cancer 500 or 500 years ago or a thousand years ago than they do today? I don't know if there's a correlation there. Yeah, but when you say that. So then you're almost saying that cancer exists because it exists.

Of course it exists. Because it exists. Yes. It might not. You know, it's hard to say. So you don't, like, if you make your end game to be, all right, I don't want to smoke because it gives me cancer, then you run into the problem of not everybody smokes will get cancer. But if you start looking at health and wellness or, you know, you want to be aware of things so that you want your body to have the least amount of tension. The chance of you inventing something, the chance of you finding a solution that fits that. That. That philosophy will be very different. You know, you and I met at the Stanford meeting, and you were talking about Maslow and how he. He ran into this marketer who. Who then created this pyramid, but that you don't have to take care of all your basic needs. And then Create community and help people.

Maslow just took it on, but he didn't agree with the science of it because you don't need to be self actualized to be wealthy or have your needs taken care of. So everybody who quotes Maslow tends to be quoting something that doesn't work.

Right. So awareness training allows you to ask these broader questions, to notice these possibilities. So your awareness is definitely. You're an elevated person of awareness because you're aware of the, you know, when you and I met, we talked about the implications of some of my patents beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Right. And I don't have any applications of my, my many of my work beyond the Earth's atmosphere because even I am limited by what I run into.

Yeah, it was a great conversation because you just started going crazy. Yeah, your mind just opened up to new opportunities.

Right. So, so awareness and we're going to loop back into this because they all combine together. But then I'm going to talk about the next topic is fear. Right? The fear.

Yeah. Do you know I actually had to look this up in Paid to Think there's a whole chapter on global awareness. Did you see that?

I didn't read your book.

No, no, I'm just saying, did you notice there's a whole chapter on awareness? So I'm asking myself, okay, the intersectionality of what you're saying because you've taken it down to an individual level, which is just, it's an interesting. Okay, I'm aware and I'm double aware and I'm trying to look at the interconnectedness of the awareness.

Ah, yes. Yeah. So, so in, in teaching, right. You know, you mentioned to, to teach you these things like you, you know, you're a new student. So awareness is, is one level and then we need to combine that with the next topic which is fear. Okay. Fear oftentimes drives us to be a yes person. The fear of not getting chosen so that something comes to your plate and it's really not, you know, your awareness may or may not be at that level. But so some people who are very aware know that they need to say no, but their fear overpowers them. So they say yes when they mean no. They say yes when they mean no. So it can happen in dating, it can happen in the or like you know, you were going to order this item because you always wanted to and then the waiter waitress comes by and says tonight these are the specials. And then the person across from you orders something and then you get swayed, but you really wanted to have that you've always been waiting to come there. This is now your third time. And every time you get distracted by what's going on, you never order the item. Now, are you aware that you did that? Some people are not aware of that. But the fear of missing out is another thing that can throw off someone. And the awareness is actually something that, if your awareness is high enough, you may be able to counter the fear of missing out. Because the FOMO fear of missing out is oftentimes what gets us in trouble. Right? We're looking at the end game. Oh, I can make it. I can make a return. I can make a quick buck. Yeah, but then you could also lose everything because now it's. It's elevated. Right? So the fear, right, if we add an education as an example, subset example under the awareness and fear is that if we, if we don't keep up with all of what we're doing, right, from first grade to second grade to third grade, we're not staying in the education system. We. We might, we might miss out on something really important. Right? But then let me show you. And this is specific to Hong Kong. So we're jumping an example of Hong Kong's very. Okay, but it's also useful in New York because New York's very extreme. So a lot of cities, these, these places are pretty extreme as far as when it comes to scoring on tests. Right. And. And the DSC is a test in Hong Kong where, where you got A level students. It's British influence. So you need to score really, really high. And one time there was a video of a person who, who teaches others to score really, really high because they scored really, really high. And they could do all these calculations and they got to chemistry. They're showing these calculations. And then that person also has a vlog, very popular. They have a vlog, a video log where they, they show what they do for their day job and they're in the job and they also happen to shoot where they're living, right? And they're living in their day job and they're having what Cantonese say fan hub. And what fanhap is is. It's a box. It's a box. A rice box, right? So fond is rice and hop is box. So rice box has something to take out and made of Styrofoam. But I thought you knew your chemistry or I thought you were the top scorer. Why would you be feeding yourself something like that? And if you're, if you're so good on the dse, getting like multiple a's why would you.

Not know that? The chemical reaction with the food and.

What you're eating and the heat. But why would you take the position to set yourself up like this, where you have all these. You have, like, hundreds of thousands of students learning from you, but you look like your finances aren't together, right? You look like. Because they were videoing that, you could see their bed. You can see the. The red light, which is the air conditioner in Hong Kong. So you could see that. And you know, that's just suddenly because you do a lot of work with major corporations. The contrast of that is like, if you're not aware of this, then, you know, you, you would, you wouldn't pick this up. But if you're aware and you're looking at the background, something's not right. And by the way, this is a girl, female, doing this. And what happens is, have you ever considered what other guys might think of you doing the, the coaching, the. The. All the jobs that you're trying to do? And then, you know, will you have time for me? Will this be a good relationship? Where are you coming from? So there's.

But wouldn't. Wouldn't you argue that that teacher, student, educator, they did not have a fear. They believe that by showing what they show, it will not harm them and that that won't make a difference. Such as, I know you've run into people who say, I really don't care about this. This is who I am. And for some people, that works temporarily.

And sometimes it doesn't work temporarily. Many things can work. It's longer term, whether or not that's a good positioning. For example, if she's so capable, which I saw that she is quite capable, if instead of doing that positioning, she actually. And then the example would be. A different example would be you go take a summer job as a cashier. Nothing wrong with that. It works. It temporarily makes the summer job because it makes some money. And, you know, you go, but what I did and I had happened to me when I was at Rensselaer was I took a summer job that was for NASA and in NASA, the program under Professor James P. Ferriss, he was the late James P. Ferriss, was to look at the origins of life. In layman's term, it's like seeing if aliens exist. Well, that's a big topic. All right, so origins of life. And I'm looking at whether or not the fragments. What I was doing was I was learning something. I was escalating myself. I was looking at new patterns that Most undergraduates that get summer jobs would not learn those patterns because it was novel. And I was infused with a lot of graduate school work because of the level of the project. And I was learning something that would follow me for the rest of my life. I was growing.

Yeah, but the average person has a fear of asking for that job, has a fear of going towards that job. So how. How does the. The challenge with someone like you, you're extremely bright. I mean, I. You and I have had enough conversations.

You're.

You're unbelievably intelligent. You see interconnectedness of what the average individuals does not see. And some of that, I do believe, is an innate capability. I mean, if you've ever. I don't know if you and I spoke about artwork, but I draw, I paint, I sculpt. And I don't know if I could ever teach somebody to do those things. My father was pretty handy.

My mom was not.

I tended to be very handy. It doesn't matter. Carbony, plumbing, electrical, or it's draw, paint, and sculpt. But yet, if you asked me to do other skills that other people do, I will never. I mean, biologically, my size, my shape, my hands, my. It would be extremely difficult for me to meet that demand. You can do these things. You could get that job. You could be aware. You could say to the professor or the job person that you're talking to, can you put me in that environment?

How do you.

How is it. Are we talking about being aware of the fear or getting over the fear or controlling the fear or leveraging the fear? Where are you taking fear?

So.

Or all of those.

If you. If you become truly aware of what your gifts are and you find the relevancy of where your gifts are, and then you enhance those gifts by practicing on those. Now those are no longer gifts. Those become. They turn from gifts and talent into honed into skills that are supported by talent. And then you become a specialist. You become very, very good because you started off with. So becoming aware of those gifts actually reduce the fears. Because now people, all people, want someone who has a cap like you're sculpting. If you took the sculpting and continued on there, you don't. You know, logically, you'd become a very good sculptor. At least you started ahead of certain things versus you didn't have any. So the awareness helps complement the fears that we run into. And every time, you then get a little bit better. And I'm going to use an example that everybody knows the name Bob Dylan. But there's a Bob Dylan you never would have heard of if he, all he did was sing cover songs. The voice isn't that great, but the Bob Dylan we do know is he was very poetic and he was able to write songs and then along camera someone with an incredible voice, they sing his song or the producer matches the song and then suddenly, wow, who wrote that? Bob Dylan. He also sings, by the way. And so, so, and he loves to sing. So he.

Is that how it happened? Is that actually how it happened? He, he wrote for somebody else and that's how he became his fame.

You, you read the history and you see that, that, that, that is quite, quite apparent. And I'm going to give another name to help us along. And this is in Hong Kong and China. His name is Jack and his last name is Ma.

I've heard that name.

Yeah.

Well, just maybe once or twice, Jack's.

Mother would say, you know, if you, if you want to make me proud, like I, I love mahjong and the things make me proud, just go work at Apple in the factories and then have like 500 people under you and we'll be good. We're good. From her awareness standpoint, that is good. Of course it's good. You know, 500 people under you, that means you're at a certain management level.

And that's a very, very classic Chinese.

Approach, of course because it is under. In their awareness that is the right thing to do. But if you add in talent and add in desire and add in those things that counter the fear and you have a couple of situations that occur and you compare and contrast that to Alibaba. Well, the numerator and denominator must be compared to, you must compare the two, compare and contrast in order to hone that skill.

So it sounds like you're putting precedence or primary focus on awareness is really the essence of eliminating fear and that, the fear you want to be aware. Because I'm, I kind of want to change this to. It's number one is awareness. Number two is awareness of fear.

You're very good with words. So, so it's, it's awareness of the. So when I did the outline, it is. Sometimes people are not aware yet, so they all they experience are fear. But fear can also help you with the, the formation of the fears that, that you can't conquer and the fears that you, that are, that were just, oh, that was silly. Right? Then there's nothing to be afraid of like afraid of the dark. And then you find out, oh, there's nothing there. So you can find out that there are some fears that will look but the fear of, of, of, you know, there's a yield sign and I, I'm afraid that if I don't follow the yield sign, I just step on it. I, I might hit, you know, someone might hit me. Now if you had no fear like that and all you did was, oh, you know, this yield sign is just silly. Let me just go right through. So fear is useful.

Oh fear. Fear is a necessity for humankind to be able to survive what, what I'm trying to do in my head as is. Okay, let's take a person who has fear. Let's say they are responsible for. I get raising capital. They have tons of knowledge, they have tons of connections, they have tons of every attribute. You would have visibility, capital in their wallet, historical reference, the job that they have. But that individual, even with the awareness of where they stand and they know they're afraid of making the call or the outreach, doesn't make that call because they eve that fear supersedes everything. And they won't call that person and say, could you donate or could you be a part of, or could you participate? Even though they know the names, they have the contacts, they have everything. How do you take the awareness side or the fear side and make it so that person? And I get this, a very simplistic equation, but it's a simple, it's one that I can get my mind around. How do you get that person to make that call? How do you get that person to do that? What, what more would you have to give them so that they would overcome that fear? Am I making sense? So I'm using an example of something that worked very hard for a very long time. Working with an individual in all sorts of situations. All of those things are there. Knowledge, capability, history, wealth, you name it, Even would sit down with somebody but could never, never say, hey, you give, how much do you give to the X Society a year? Oh, I give, you know, 1.2 million. Could you, could you give, I don't know, 20,000 to our cause? Could not do that because his fear, to me, his fear was that they would look at him poorly. Yet if you know many people who are wealthy, they constantly ask people for money, you know, support the philanthropic, support the orchestra group, support my foundation, support my this, support this. And they're on boards and they do that all the time. But this person couldn't. So I'm actually asking a very serious question and I wasn't able. This is One I could not solve. How do we get, using your formulaics, awareness and fear, how do we get that person over that edge?

So, so if you become truly aware of thyself, then you start finding out, and I'm going to give you, before I answer that question, some examples. Right, so let's say we're working a lot of hours on the zoom and we're, we're in the facing a camera, and the camera actually isn't positioned in the right place. So your neck is extended, your head is tilted back, so now you have neck pain. So, so, so you, you go and buy this, you know, this chair, because you're sitting in this chair and say it's a wooden chair and you go switch to an ergonomic chair, which is a chair that sits for you. Yeah, it sits for you so you don't have to sit as much. So, so now you, you go and do that and you feel much better because it's ergonomic. Yeah. So what you do then is you take on more things because now you feel better and then you find out your neck pains back and the chair has been upgraded to an ergonomic chair, chair that sits for you, but you now have neck pain. So. Yeah. So what have we just done? Right. Without the awareness that maybe you're working too many hours, maybe the camera should, could have been lowered. But wait a minute. If I lower the camera in front of me so I can look right at the camera, now I can't see my screen. So, so most cameras that you look at are actually above the screen and many hours of that will give you neck pain. So we're back to that. Answering that question is that, is that they need to understand the root cause, the awareness. Right. And then the root cause of their fear so they can make some sense of what's going on. But unless they spend, unless you spend time on that and practicing around with, with number of people, you may not be the key.

I know there's not. You know, when you have individuals that work with you in all different walks of life, it's. You're not always going to solve everything. I do know that. I, I would love to have made that situation work. And it didn't. And that's okay. You move on, life continues. I just thought maybe there was another, another way to address the challenge.

Well, sometimes, yeah, right. You know, some people, it's like some people, you see them and you know that they could have be doing something very, very much, very much better for themselves, but you can't Interfere. Because now we're into. Now you brought me into the third and fourth topic, which is place and timeline. So, okay, some people are in a place in their life that they cannot hear you. You might be in a place where, like, I was in a place in my life where I could have needed you. City Super. Yeah. Except the sequence was wrong. I was in City super before you arrived as a City super consultant, you know, and lead in Hong Kong. We were, we were years apart. The time wasn't folding on itself the right way.

What year were you there again?

I was there in 2001 through 2007. Okay. Yeah.

I was to. I think I started with them on the executive committee at2011.

Yeah. So.

And went to 2016. 16. So we a. I was with them for five years on their executive committee. So, yeah, very different City. City Super. And I mean, unbelievable growth that we went through while we were there. Yeah. City. City Supers. So you were there and question, how would I have helped you?

I don't know. I don't know. But I just know that my, the people funding me and, and looking at what I was doing would say, like, if we could get you in City Super. Right. Then. Yeah, then that would.

I would get that often with being that we were by far the number one luxury food store and we had amazing, I mean, 600 versions of sake.

There were 600, like a bunch of kale half the size of Whole foods in the US where they charge 299. You charged $8 for a bunch half the time.

Well, there's. There's a reason for that.

Yeah.

The reason was, and individuals didn't know this, that we had a large jet come in from, for example, Japan every single day. We had jets flying in. We wanted fresh produce. We. We knew of the challenges with unhealthy foods. So it would be from Indonesia or from Singapore. Not so much Singapore, but different parts of the Asia Pacific region. And also because the customer base were individuals who were very. It was very eclectic, a lot of different groups. So if we were going to be having something that was Thai, we brought in the Thai food that they would love, that they would have had when they grew up in Thailand. And so we had jets coming in with food. And so when you do that, when you're willing to pay for fresh kale that was not grown in. And I'm not trying to pick on the country, China, we had. There's challenges with chemicals. You would. There was a cost to that. And as you know, Hong Kong, there was a Lot of wealth. So at $8, it sold well.

The problem of, of, of to many locals, right? They would say, who can afford that? And in their awareness, in their fears, now, just tie this in. They, they would say, why would you do something like this? And I got asked a lot of questions about, you know, I'm MD, PhD. I'm studying at Mount Sinai, which is very difficult to get in. And then also MD, PhD. So you have a huge KPI key performance index to, to achieve. You have a lot of volume to study. And then you go entertain and become Spa man. Right? Spa man is where, you know, you, you service as a consultancy for a new startup. So spa that uses a different concept. I mean, the amount of risk. Someone would see my father. I'm going to give you an example of my father and my uncles and people around me, you know, MD, PhD, requires focus. And I would say, yeah, but a light bulb, you know, can shine, it can light up a room. A laser can focus, but it doesn't do very well at lighting a room. So I need to have also the light bulb. Yeah. So Hong Kong was a phenomenon. I said, you know, city super, get in there. Right?

Yeah. Everybody would say, get in there. But look at the, look at how many pieces are in the, in the shopping cart. We were not the number one. People would go to other places for.

The other products and there weren't other city supers. You didn't have like 15 competitors.

No.

Right. You were. Yeah, that's right. You dominated. And people said, why? Why don't I want to dominate that? But you got your spot. And so the place and the timeline, those two other items are really, really important, is that if I were to choose Mount Sinai over Hong Kong, if it was like, I choose only my left hand, I chop off my right hand, I wouldn't have a wife right now who is my wife currently. I wouldn't have that.

I might have currently, like, just so you know, you're. You're in a current state.

Yeah, well, I wouldn't. I mean, I might have another state, an alternative parallel universe. Right, Where.

I didn't tell you the reason I was in Hong Kong was in 2009, 2010, the United States and everything fell apart. The whole world just.

I came back to the United States in order to. I was asked to solve some problems of a very high level. And I'm actually getting a letter. I've received a letter. I will send it to you, David. And it talks about. In fact, I could read it to you, but it's in my inbox. This letter talks about what I did during that time.

Well, you're looking for it. I ended up.

I'll read you the letter the first. Okay, got it. So it says Dear Ms. Bertarelli and Mr. Bertarelli and of the Bertarelli Foundation. I am writing on behalf of Meredith Financial Group in regard to Dr. Gordon Chu. Meredith is a US registered finance and capital markets advisory company located in New York City, founded in 1991. We provide investment banking, structuring and strategic advice to a range of early and second stage companies typically post launch in the US and abroad including emerging markets. We are writing this letter to support Dr. Chu and Fingra applications and submissions in support of the Harvard Innovation Laboratory submissions venture supported by the Foundation. Personally, I am a Harvard Business School alumni MBA class of 1974 and I am an active member in the HBS activities of New York and Boston. Now the second paragraph. Dr. Chu has been affiliated with Meredith since 2010. The year we're in is 2023, so that's 13 years. He is a friend and esteemed colleague. He interfaces with entrepreneurs from various cultures and his interpersonal skills are invaluable. Additionally, I am sure you are already aware there's an aware topic. Dr. Xu has a deep understanding of graphene technology and his advise on engagements related to its commercialization. Dr. Chu holds over 41 domestic and international patents, many related to graphene technology and materials engineering. These patents are key components for product development at his company. From a personal perspective, I regard Gordon as my friend. A man raised in two cultures with a burning intellectual curiosity. He has the rare talent to interact and listen to others while still being thoughtful and reflective. These leadership qualities served him well in the business realm. I have no doubt they are equally essential in the academia. There's no question about his considerable scientific knowledge and research capabilities. But he's also a born teacher, capable of thriving in a collegial setting with other professors and researchers. And as important, Gordon has the inherent capability to mentor learners. The next generation of students will be most fortunate to learn under his watchful and caring eye. To give you my Highest recommendation of Dr. Hsu and welcome further inquiries about his background and character. Sincerely, William J. Potter. So you see, I came here and in Wall street there was a major fire. Most things had lost their valuation and I cut my teeth in the 0908 period and back to back, back to back. 10 deals in sequence, made at least 10x with me looking at the science and saying what can be done and the attitude and the awareness that you know, and the fear and looking at the. Why is the valuation down? Because there's fear. There's rampant fear. What is the awareness here? These are Y equals X to the fifth power. They're all exponential growth things. This could create jobs. It could transform the future of humanity. We need to like. I made my bets and people saw like every single bet he talked about was at least 10x10 times on y equals X when it's linear is a massive number. But when X to the fifth, you put a 2 for X, 2 to the fifth power is 32. So it's not hard at all to get 10 times of return when you're focused on exponential growth. Not linear growth, exponential. So that's a, that's an awareness. Fear. The place I happen to be in Wall street when, you know, I went there and the timeline was the opportunity where the, the sun was not going to rise.

And did you, did you choose Wall Street?

Yes, I did. Okay.

Because at the same time you were choosing Wall Street, I was choosing Hong Kong and Asia. I thought that's exactly what happened. I, what was happening in the States. I chose. I, I sent out an email to a bunch of people. Person responded and I said to. We were, we had a call at one in the morning. She asked me why I chose one in the morning. And I said, well, it's your time, not my time we're dealing with. And she was surprised. And I said, look, if you, if you'll give me 90 minutes of time, I'll come out and visit you. She said, who's paying for this? I said, I am. She said, who's paying for the plane ticket? I said, hotel. I am, I am. So you're going to fly all the way out to Hong Kong just to have 90 minutes with me? And I said yes. And so I hopped on a plane to a place I'd never been. Fear, purpose, whatever. Awareness. I landed, and before I got there, she had 100 people in a room to hear me present. She wanted me to present to people and, and the rest is history. There is City super, there is Tektronics, there is Dole, all of those Ferrari, Ferragamo, major brands around the world, because I chose the place. So you were choosing, which is just funny in the correlation. Here's an awareness. We both chose a place, but it was the opposite.

Right, right. I had gone to Hong Kong first, though, so I chose well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

So you chose to be the States. You chose to be Wall Street. I Chose to go the other way, which is just interesting.

It's just.

Okay, so how, how do you, when you look at place, because you're bringing it up as a topic. How do I, how do I use place to get a 10x?

Oh, your place will be much.

How do I choose how you're helping, you know, the dynamics of what we're talking about here. So you and I are talking about creating materials company. We're talking about all sorts of conditions. If you were to advise me on creating and leveraging Place, how would you help a 10x?

So because I've had some years of doing 10xs, that's. I'm not as interested in 10x.

Okay, so what do you want? 100x 1000x?

Well, I'm interested in 10 to the sixth power. Right. So a million.

Okay, so let's, let's use 10 to the 6. I'm good with, I'm get good with any 10 to the something.

So you start thinking so which is only, you know, in, in the, in the log world. Right. It's only 6. Right. So. So the digit is only 6. So it's not so high when you look at exponents. Yeah. And when you start thinking about what it is that, that what attracted me to so we were introduced out of Stanford. And, and what attracted me to what you're working on is, is, is that the, the realm of the Earth's atmosphere and beyond. I have never worked on that. I mean, I looked at whether or not life exists, but I didn't work on it using graphene materials. And if you look at what, where I was at Harvard University, it was to look at artificial intelligence and whether or not there are applications related to that to enhance graphene even further. Yeah. Right. So with, with AI, a lot of people use AI to like, for example, they use it to write answers for a test or an essay. That's about as, as, as, as, as 19th century an approach to use AI. Right. If we're looking at 23rd century solutions versus using AI to create something that can solve for a problem using graphene, which we already know is an incredible 23rd century material. What, what kind of problems will we experience in 200 years? Well, if we practice doing that. You know how I can practice doing that is to talk to you. Because it's your problem as well as mine. You've made it your problem because you call your thing Moon Hut and all your podcasts are around. That problem is what's going to happen in the future. Right. And what is going to happen in the future? Well, you know how infections become normalized. Like you get better without actually doing anything. It's because it's not because you're so great yourself. It's because the organism ran out of energy, like it burned itself out. Napoleon lost because he ran out of energy. The amount of energy required to continue to advance. Hitler, same thing. Continue to advance. It's diluted as you keep advancing the amount of energy to get to number one. There's a cost to being number one. There's less cost to being number 27. And if the denominator is there, you now have a reason to slip. Because it's not that I did nothing, I just let myself slip. It's like I apply the energy to other things. And one of the things I applied to was in the world of performing arts, I wanted to be able to carry my ability to share an idea. I didn't know this would impact a TED talk. I wasn't end gaining, but I thought this was a valuable skill. And every night I would be very focused on doing something my dad did not think there was a future for, which was in public speaking and performing arts. But later on, if you look at my history, I end up combining that. Because many scientists do not publicly speak, they're not able to put together their communicative ideas and less so even in business. So a scientist might say, oh, this is what I see. But then how do you communicate that to turn it into a valuable business? Well, to practice. If you can't just. You're not born that way because that's not your skill set. You might be skilled and talented. You may are talented in science, become skilled in the science. You learn the language. You do well, you build, you keep building. But you don't gain the skill set of public oration because there's no time. By the time you're a PhD scientist, well, you got all this stuff in your head and now you can't explain them. Even the words that you speak, the prepositional phrases you use, people don't, can't understand that. So when I was in Hong Kong for the radio television program, they would say, oh, by the way, what do you study? And I said, well, I'm an MD, PhD candidate at Mount Sinai. And they would say, what's that? That's powerful. That's probably like a billion dollars in my pocket. Because what is that? Is not. The response I thought I would get is like, maybe you're so smart. Or you know, that's a really hard thing to do. They didn't say anything like that. They said, what is that? And I took that to heart and I said, I'm in trouble. Because if it's. What is that? And there's so many people in Hong Kong, there's a problem. So I, I gained a new name, which was Spa Man. Since I was consulting, they. They come up with little jingles in Hong Kong. They're, they're very good at that. They're like inventing a new language within the Cantonese language. And people said, that's like an embarrassment. You have all this going for you. I said, it's irrelevant because in. In the place that we're in, in the timeline we're in in Hong Kong, Spa man is 10 times, 100 times, a million times more valuable than an MD, PhD candidate, which means you sound like a student, right? So, so, so in the culture of. Where you're going, you gotta evaluate. So what is your culture? When you think about Moonha, Moonha is talking about something that most people are not thinking about. They're not thinking about flooding, but yet we had floods in New York City, we had floods in Hong Kong. They're getting more and more.

We had them in Libya, we had it in Greece, we had it in Pakistan, we had it in Shanghai or. Yeah, Beijing.

We.

Yeah, we had. In 10 days, we had 12 major floods around the world that have never had such a precedent precedence in terms of flooding.

So, yeah, we've got massive challenges this year, 2023. We happen to have. We happen to have two wars ongoing internationally. We've got the virus from 2019, Covid, that now has taken a new form, right? It's taking a new form. It's the granddaughter of the Omicron virus. It's the granddaughter. So this version of the virus is known as the JN1 new variant. Um, and unlike the grandfather we were fearing, somehow the granddaughter is, is. Is sexier, it's sleeker, it's faster at infecting people.

And yeah, the 30 spike proteins, it.

It has now gained. Also the World Health and, and CDC have indicated that this is a variant of. Of. Of of interest. Right? They don't want to use the word concern, but it's of interest because, of course, it's interesting, right, to look at that. Do you know that the deer have all these Covid viruses? And, you know, we don't. They don't worry about that because it's not in humans, right? So a lot of times human beings, because of where our awareness is, our awareness is focused on, let's just keep doing it. Let's just do it. In fact, there's a. That's a slogan that, that a company that begins with an end uses. Right. Just do it. So we just do it and we keep going. But your positioning in something that could potentially the potential energy of moonhunt or anything related to space is so high. Who goes and invests in space? Billionaires.

Well, see, the challenge is people. Yeah. The inventing, investing in space is not as an easy formulaic. Often it is because they have a dream to go into space and they, yada, yada, yada, will save Earth. I think the one differential here is that ours is mirth, Moon and Earth. Ours has a framework for coming back to Earth. And I think yours and our conversations have been focused around the redeployment and reutilization in a completely. Let's use place than has been done before to extrapolate, to create, to develop new types of materials that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

You know, David, when I bring in place and timeline at this point in my life where I have two daughters and they're seven and eight years old, and when I, when I show them the model, the figurines, you know, that, that you've created, and then the conversation around space, they took the, the astronomy book that I had taught in sixth grade, when I took a little stint in 2017 to be a high school teacher in Westchester and also in Riverdale. That, that time period, they got so excited. They looked at everything. Yeah.

Isn't that amazing? Isn't it amazing that it's. It's not because. I don't think it's because it's space. Because space is a. There's a certain type of person who just loves space. It's because they can see a future for the people on Earth.

Yeah. And see, the problem that you have on Earth right now is if you said, I climb Mount Everest, then, you know, you have other people who've also done that. So unless you say I've climbed Mount Everest three times in three different ways and survived. Right.

Yes.

Right. Well, okay, so. So the, you know, this becomes we're maxed out, right.

No, we've done everything on Earth so that there's not a lot for young children, young kids under the age of 30 to accomplish something. You want to show up at Mount Everest. There's going to be tons of garbage from people who've been there many times. You want to go see the Eiffel Tower. Oh, everybody's seen it. You want to you're taking pictures that everybody else has taken pictures of. And it's becoming more and more difficult to find that uniqueness. I mean going over Victoria Falls in South Africa and I think Botswana, Zambia, you, hey, people have done that before. So there's. The uniqueness has disappeared. And something that's aspirational, inspirational, motivational, educational, directional like Project Moonhot gives a different flavor as for example to your children.

My professor at Wharton, I had many and one of them is a, is a, is an expert at mountaineering, climbing mountains. And, and he mentioned that he also climbed other ones, but everyone's, he actually did survive and climb Mount Everest three different ways three times. So, so the, the question becomes if you climbed Aconcagua, I think that's the name of the mountain. That's the, it's 6,961 meters. Compared to Everest, it was just 8,848 meters. It would count as number two. But you don't hear people say I climb the world's second tallest mountain. And you might not even know the name because it's just right.

There's your father.

There it is. Right. And I, I study the. Because I want my girls to experience what table tennis is in ping pong. I studied this and I said the game, the game that my father so excelled at, which I haven't had this conversation with him yet, but I will. It doesn't create great posture for girls. Like I don't see, you know, very good looking girls playing table tennis. You know, isn't that interesting? I mean it's just another observation. Now these observations come because I'm a father of two girls and I'm looking at their posture and I'm looking at how you sit and, and, and that in, in, you know, and development, their development. And I look at that and then, so then I looked at other sports with a paddle like splash and tennis and you know, yeah, you, you start looking at this and you look at the frame and how you have to hunch over to serve the ball and things like that. And I wonder if practicing in that environment, right. If you want to become number one, may then take something from you versus oh, we should experience that. But our goal is not to be number one. It's to, you know, do it as a family and to experience some exercise. Right. Very different angle. The reason I like Moonhot though is because in the discussions it's already, and you know, this, it's already changed some of the solutions that I've come up with in general One of the things we're going to run into in 200 years earlier than that is, is our food issues. All right, so, so as we have the flooding, suddenly all the food we're growing is a problem. We, you know, humans have changed the face of the earth through their agriculture as our populations have skyrocketed. And it's still exponential, by the way. We're still growing. So as we're growing and we use the technology that, that, that we have so developed in the past to grow food, meaning we need large plots of land and we, you know, grow on there. And then if anybody eats our food, we kill them. That's what we do. We kill whoever touches our food. So who's that? Right. Well, there's fungi, we're talking small bacteria, disease. Right, we got that. And then on the larger level we've got like rabbits and other things that come in and affect our food. So what do we do? We have come up with a way to poison them. Right. Those are called insecticides, pesticides. Right. And we poison them and we'll have some of that ourselves. But that's okay. There's a cost benefit analysis that they came up with. A cost benefit. Does it have to be like that? So then you look at, well, there's, there's City super, which you were at, and other places, Whole Foods, where there's an organic section. It's a section because it cannot support 8 billion people that way. So then there's the third opportunity where we came up with ways to modify the genetics so that even the rabbits and the insects won't eat the plants. But we'll eat them. Yeah. And so, so it's like very strange, right, where we look at, because we're talking about awareness, fear, place, timeline, and then, and then we've interspaced that 0.5 Hong Kong in between. If we do that right, and we're eating those things, is there a problem? Now some people feel that's a problem. But the other side of it is that, do you know what the bigger problem is? We'll starve if we don't do this. Right, right.

That is right.

So you have driving forces around. Of course, it's fear based. The organic movement is a fear based save thyself. Right. You know, get wealthy enough so you can eat that. And the other side is, you know, you're busy saving yourself. But the long term solution has to be we modify all the foods so that the insects don't want to eat them.

Yeah, I'm going to push a Little bit in a different direction with this because we use it in Project Moon Hut. One of the things that I've shared often, and I want to know how the. I've drawn a diagram in front of me. So let me give you two things. One of them is the situation, and the second one is a diagram and you can address each other when you like, is that United States only has about 25, maybe 30 years of topsoil left. It's because of the tilling. It's the constant reuse of the same soil. And if you look at a farm and you see a house sitting up higher than the rest of the fields, it's because the food, the nutrients have been taken out of the soil and the soil's gone down a meter or three feet, and that's why it's down. It's because it's been used. And China, they say, only has about 10 to 15 years of topsoil left due to degradation, overusage, poisons that have been placed inside of them. So the challenge about food is a big one. So I'm just adding to that conversation. But I also took your four categories. I drew a circle because I was looking for something that this came from my wife that I look for is one of these things is not like the other. Do the words that are selected, do they meet a certain criteria so that they're all even? And so I drew awareness and I put in fear in one of the blocks and I put in place and timeline. And the first thing I realized is that two of them are behavioral, the other two are scientific. And if you look at the scientific side, it could be physics too. But there I'm assuming, you know, 4D length, width, height, time and location. It's actually five parameters, but it's in four. It's called 4D because location is considered zero. So that's number one. But you have two that are behavioral and two that are sciences. Timelines in place or timelines in location. I'm trying to take that model. I'm looking at the food and I'm trying to ask the question, how do we generate 23rd century solutions in the 21st century by looking at this? It's not a complete model. It's like a half and a half. How do we use that? How do we leverage that as a tool so that not only you and I, as we're having our conversations about developing products within the mirth ecosystem, Moon, Earth ecosystem, but how do we get the world to take and generate 23rd century solutions? My question Clear.

So here is a great example of how we can take just two words and to apply something around thoughts, right? So one is science. Science. Most people know what science can do now. And then there's also conscience, right? Conscience is the, is the thing that science also needs. You need to combine both. Conscience is not pronounced conscience isn't pronounced conscience. So science plus conscience plus conscience creates good, positive, long term outcomes for all. Right? You know, when you, when you combine those two. So if I didn't go to Hong Kong first, because I am. I look Chinese, I'm I, my. I don't have a Chinese accent. I don't have a Hong Kong accent. But that Hong Kong was the first to say I was very valuable. How was that value? Why was it picked up? Is because I said something on the radio show. My first inning was that the detergent that is found in the things women use for their face is also found in the dish soap and the dishwashing detergent that you use in the kitchen. And that is the reason why you have a huge problem with aging and wrinkles. And by the way, the ingredient is called sodium Lauryl sulfate. And that one minute thing got me a lot of shares. And this wasn't even, this was before YouTube and anything like that. In the year 2001, it went pretty viral for that and I became known.

Is it still. Is a sodium Lauryl sulfate still used?

It is.

Okay, and is it for women's soaps and cleansers or is it for everywhere? General?

It's everywhere.

Okay, so any soap we're using is the dub soap bar.

Many, you know, rather than naming names, many of them use it. Because first of all, not everyone believes, all right, that, no, like we had the organic situation. Not every believes that, that escape is a solution. Right? And if you think about it, escape is not a solution. But then, you know, what do you do now? Well, save thyself, right? So, so you got organic and then you got, you got. Well, what do we use? Well, until AI arrives, you wouldn't be thinking of soapberries with sodium or sarcocyanates. You wouldn't, you wouldn't think of other possibilities. You'd just say, you know, we'll just, we'll just, we'll just, we'll just keep doing what we're doing. Those people are crazy. And you look at just the total sales and things like that, and you're not considering that. Now, in the skincare world, anytime I talk about beauty and then I talk about health, it changes the entire conversation, especially if there's women there, they suddenly grab their husbands and they said, did you know about this? And they tell their friends, did you know? I heard this. And that's what happened. Within a matter of weeks, their investors started showing up and people started wanting to throw money at the possibility of creating this in Hong Kong. Now, unlike City super, where it was established and it was years and you're tweaking inside, I became the direct recipient of this Count of Monte Cristo effect suddenly. And now I'm, now, now I'm, I'm enrolled to switch some of this up into a university called Bridgeport to study naturopathic medicine. After four years of doing the MD, PhD and now I learned a new language base around botanical medicines and what plants can do for our health. And then now suddenly I'm in Alaska with Dr. Andy Weil, who's talking about salmon and the benefits of the fish. But I had a contract for thousands of bottles of salmon oil. He didn't have a contract like that. So suddenly the Commerce Department in Alaska, you know, start talking with me and saying, you're very interesting. This is really peculiar. And to this day, I have lots of friends in Alaska. Now, graphene, of course, brought me into Alaska in a different way. But why I want to bring this up, into this, this awareness of me versus awareness of we, the fears, the place and the timelines is that when we run out of food, there's going to be, as we run out of food, as we run into tension, moments with growing food, it's going to get dicey.

It's already getting dicey.

Right, but it's going to get very dicey. And unless we have a solution beyond organic. Right, and it's not to use, to make a better organic without the pesticides is how do you take care of 8 + billion people? If you start thinking about it like that, you're now no longer going to use education to eliminate because eliminating the solution provider. It could be anybody who's alive and growing and the people to be born even, you know, that could come up with solutions with us. Right, for the species.

Yeah, the it interesting. I'm sure, I know you're aware of this. We've touched on it. Possibly Spain is running out of water. And the challenge with running out of water is you running out of water. I mean, there's cities, communities there that have to truck in water. We have challenges with Italy and Greece. You look at just the olive oils. Again, we've spoken about that. And Spain is the vegetable garden of Europe. So if you at times they've seen where there's just no vegetables on the shelves or they're bought extremely fast. And that causes challenges in communities. My wife and I were talking this morning and she said I really don't like going on the community app anymore. And I'm thinking why? I mean she's always been on the community app and we're not. We're in a, I'm going to say more upscale region. Not this is not a boaster brag. It's just because it helps the storyline or the understanding is. She said there are people saying I can't afford the food anymore. I mean, we lived a certain way. We can't live anymore. We have our car broke down and because of how expensive it is to live today, we are. We can't repair the carburetor.

Let's.

I'm using something that we common term we we can't repair parts of our car and we need the car to be able to get to work. And she said it's everywhere. She said all of the people are complaining on this app and I'd never heard her talk about that. So we. My point to add, I'm not trying to pile on is that it is piling on and it's happening in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Cambodia, Malaysia, it.

And on its own it is. Right now I'm going to give you a report so you can pile on onto that too. Right. It's yesterday, you know, yesterday and the day before. So Monday, December 18th was when it was released at 5:45am by by a writer. His name is Jeremiah Budden. B U D I N and the title is New Report Reveals Major Problem. At more than 200 US military bases, hundreds more communities are likely at risk. And I'll read you the first paragraph. Right. A new report from the Department of Defense has revealed that at least 245 military bases in the United States have been leaching toxic chemicals into the drinking water of nearby communities, putting an unknown number of people at risk. The DoD report confirms at least 455 military bases are contaminated by per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAs, and that 275 out of 295 bases checked had released those chemicals in the proximity of the drinking water supplies. PFAS is a forever chemical and because of their inability to naturally degrade, they've been linked to cancer. Now, linking is different than, you know, somewhat distantly correlated. Linking to cancer, linking to birth defects, decreased immunity. Oh well, we just came out of COVID and we're still not yet high cholesterol, which a lot of people are getting, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems per a number of other reports. So you start thinking about where the military is. It is classified as one of the largest polluters of PFAS in the world. So, you know, you know, you're, you're nodding. I don't see you, but I can imagine you're nodding. You're seeing this. You could look at this and say, this is not my problem. I have nowhere, I never read anything like this. You could ignore. But that doesn't mean the tree didn't fall. Right? The tree has fallen. There is, this is a problem. And so along with the water disappearing is the water's being poisoned. What, what, what, what type of organic solution, an organic living community solves that problem for 8 billion people.

Yeah, I'm, I understand. And I'm. What I'm again, you're brilliant. I, I, I love the way your mind thinks. We've, we've spoken many times. We go in many different directions to be able to solve solutions. And what I'm trying to find out, uncover, discover, is the.

How.

Not that we could duplicate you. That's not a possibility. We, we're all individual on our own storylines. What are the. If we made someone aware, I don't know how to make them aware in the context in which you're describing. And I know that there's fear. We all have them. I have them, you have them. We, they're embedded into us. They're the reason we put our feet on the ground in the morning. We know that we have, we eat because there's a fear of not eating and what would happen to us. I do know that place is important. You came to the US or you were in the US and went to New York City. I chose a place, Hong Kong, which I absolutely loved. It was the most amazing city while I was there for 10 years. Just absolutely. There was no other city in the world that was close to the dynamism that was there. And having worked around the world, you had an opportunity in Alaska. Great. Got it. And not everybody's got that opportunity. I could tell you the stories of Alaska, also very, very unique. But we had those opportunities and these timelines that we're talking about, at least in Project Moon Hut is the next 40 years. So we're talking about 23rd century solutions today to solve, for example, food. If you were to take me having gotten to understand Me, know me. And you're going to say, David, I want you to use these in a different framework than you've used them in the past. Because I don't look at them the same way you do. How would you advise me to do that? Is that a pretty clear question? Because I want to, I want to get down to a nuts and bolts. Okay, David, you need to do more of this. You've got to look at it. I'm trying to. Hopefully I'm clear.

Well, this is why after looking at the various interviews you've done. Right. And I typically do that, you know, you know, I have a podcast out of Harvard University, and in that, in that podcast titled Calling All Explorers, I talk about the value at Harvard to be 99 as opposed to number one. Why is that? Well, everybody who got in there were somewhat nearer, if not number one. The biggest problem they have is figuring out how to work together, you know, so when was the last time you trained to work together and raising your awareness? That was in kindergarten when you weren't quite aware, but you knew that you needed to share your toys. Otherwise. Otherwise. But you could also get beat up because, because there, there, you know, you didn't have much of a forebrain at the time to control the emotions or someone else didn't have it and then you get beat up. So there's a lot of stuff going on. Well, the last time, we need more practice in kindergarten and Wharton, Harvard's executive education showed me that because unlike, and this is quoting directly from the faculty, unlike the undergraduates and the MBAs, which don't know anything, the MBAs know something from undergrad, but now they're here to learn more about business because they don't have something and they want to work for someone. All your classmates and your peers have been the same situation. In the executive side, you all have money. That's why you, you, you, you paid. You, you or you got your company to pay, which means that you made them money. All right? And so they're paying for this. You have connections, but you're, you're burning desire of something greater than yourself. You're burning to see why. How can I? I'm going to be the next CEO of and by the way, Walgreens, the CEO, former CEO of Walgreens, she was up here. Rosalind Brewers. And so, so you think about people at that level. What's your biggest problem? It's not how much money you're making, but how do you get everybody to go back to work? Major issues and so they bring in the professor who's a mountaineer, right? Talks about those kinds of things. If you're in a mountain and you're, you know, you have a team member and one of them says, you know, I'm not cooking tonight. You need thousands of calories more than you normally eat. You will die if you don't cook tonight. Well, you know, so we go into an argument and one person each offer themselves. Well, that's what happened in the mountain. So, Rodrigo, who shares with me about this. Yeah, it was. This was like a big awakening, right? So what do you have to do, David? You have to awaken these individuals of all walks of life. You have to partly crowdsource them, right, so that they realize that we don't have a lot of time, right? We don't have a lot of time. We're on borrowed time. So.

Yeah, no, I. And so the. Yes, yes, we have to awaken them. And part of that is storytelling and the interconnectedness of all the activities that we're doing.

And you're doing it right. As an example of why I have plenty to do. It's not like I don't have anything to do. But why am I interested in this topic of beyond the earth, that we've solved these problems? Because if we don't look beyond, not to go find another place, but in looking for solutions of things on that surface, we will. I will create an environment, an ecosystem of not just you, but others, where I will be thinking like that. And the more I think like that, the more I will be able to see a solution. If I never think like that, right, then I will never see a solution. So I'm going to give you a math problem. It's very simple. This math problem we've all run into, and it uses substitution or elimination, which are techniques we learned in high school. And this. The problem goes like this. You and I are going to go into a store. We're going to see three bottles of water and two apples that cost us $8. And the question is, how much does two bottles of water and two apples cost us? And so we're now going to go give the other scenario we had three and two cost us eight. If it's two and three, two bottles of water and three apples, it'll cost us seven. So now we have two equations and we have a question. So we know what the question is. How much does two does? Does two. Does the two cost? Right, two and two cost. Well, in substitution, you'd have to write everything down in Elimination, you'd have to write everything down, eliminate one of the variables, and then figure that out and do it. But neither of them get you to the answer of what does 2 and 2 cost? Immediately you have to do a lot of motions behind it. And there's nothing wrong with those methods. It's just that after you do that, you think you know how to do it. But it's the long, drawn out way and you might not remember it. It also might introduce certain fears in you. How good am I with substitution? How good I am with elimination? But let's go and introduce a third way. And this happened when I was in helping high school and I wanted to explore, become an undercover parent to know what's going on. And I got my first chance of experiencing high school again by living with the students. And my goal, which I didn't want to endgame, was to like, imagine if we could raise the rank of everybody. There's 900 plus kids. How do you do that? Inspiration, awareness that we can do that. So I had them apply and do a different exam. Not the SAT or act, but this was for the Columbia University High schoolers program where you had to take an exam, you had to know certain facts. And we, we together were on a mission. But I don't like the word to just use mission. We were on an experience together where if I accompanied you for two hours, every teacher had to do an activity. But if my activity wasn't to do like track or something like that, I'm not very good with track. I'm old now. So I said, what if I could inspire you to do something where your school titled EF Academy in Westchester, New York could never, never rank, Never. No one ever got there. What if we got some people there and that result at Columbia inspired all the others to, to say the impossible can be achieved. Just that one wrinkle in time. And I was only there for one semester. And after that I was at the Horace Mann. But you know, and I didn't want to teach 9 through 12 anymore because, you know, Horace, man, I had to drive from New Jersey over there. So I taught sixth grade and then after that experience, I share it on the TED talk, right? So, so remember the, that the awareness is to introduce a different level awareness. Now back to the problem. What if we bought everything at the store? Remember the first case was $8. The second case was $7. If we bought everything, we would have spent $15. If we took the three bottles of water and two apples and combined it with the two bottles of water and three apples. We would have five bottles of water plus five apples equals $15. We spent everything, we bought everything. So we factor out the five and we have water plus apple equals three because five into 15 is three. So we now know that one water plus one apple is $3. The question was, how much does two waters and two apples cost? Well, you know, that's six. So I didn't have to write anything out. I do that again on the for people who want to see the TED talk, I do it with a bunch of other equations. I show how you can, you can do, you can do things from a different perspective. The point isn't told to go and memorize back a bunch of facts and figures, although we do need to know, well, there's 26 letters of the Alphabet, there's five vowels, there's 26 minus five, that's 21 consonants. You do need to know some of those things to get yourself going. But eventually you need to know that some things are better as you, as you open them up. Open innovation is the open innovation around a problem. How do we know or how do we don't know that some of these solutions might happen where the person didn't have the earlier awareness, wants to have practice, would love to join this club, this, this group, this, this movement and where they raise their awareness and suddenly, although they're a high school teacher, they find a way to solve for the billion dollar food problem because they work on it and they're talented and they love doing this and they want to belong. That's my story with Hong Kong. Hong Kong made it possible for New York to take notice. And when I was in New York and made a couple of things work 10x 10x 10x that's when I landed my own deal. When I landed my own deal that happened to be graphene. And I tried to use what I believed in chemistry to be valuable is to take away the mining of graphite. That's what, that's a major granted patent out of Singapore to take the mined graphite and to stop mining for it. Because mining is destructive not only to the environment, whether we mine into the earth or we mine on the surface of the earth. Surface mining of the earth is, is farming, right? So that's another way of looking at it. But what if we destroy what we're looking for by mining? So graphene, which is the thinnest layer component of two dimensional component of the three dimensional graphite, when we mine the graphite. Graphite's weak. Think of pencils they break. So if you were to make graphene directly, you'd create something stronger than diamond, you know, and more conductive than copper. You'd be able to make that directly make graphite. And now it breaks. So then you'll never get the good graphene, the really capable things. Now the graphene I created wasn't pristine though, because the pristine graphene, you'd make it from carbon dioxide where you don't need the earth at all. The problem with that is it's not mimicking nature. So there's another level of imperfection. Although it's perfectly under the microscope, it's not naturally made. So having the naturopathic medicine as my scope and lens, but prior to that to have the allopathic side to look at the science and the, and the function. And if you combine all those and you look for the sweet spots, that's how the graphene patent to make graphene, you know, graphene is very famous. I mean it received a trillion dollars. And you know, it's, it's going to be one of the components that allow us to be in great levels exploration in, you know, whether it's beyond earth or way, way beyond. However, the wrong kind. How did you know that? I just, it was a feeling. It's a, you know, so on top of the awareness that one has to train this platform mirth, you, you said to me, it, we are not doing space research. We are creating a right, an ecosystem for people who are doing it to have conversations, to have connection.

It's a mirth ecosystem and a mirth economic system. Yes.

Many teachers didn't talk about to me while I was in the academy because they were busy teaching the students until we had lunch. And then some of the teachers said to me, you actually know your stuff. I said, now remember, I'm an undercover parent. So I'm thinking like, wait a minute, you don't know your stuff? I said no. And so, you know, casually asking them, and they said no, we're just here because they pay us to teach. What it's like $70,000 a year in tuition and you, you don't know your stuff? That could be me writing the check. So remember, the awareness training is awareness of me as I'm just an employment or awareness of we where Those could be my daughters. I was looking to see where, what type of school should I send them so that they could be compatible with Hong Kong, Southern China as well as the United States. See, this country made me who I am. Why? Because the United States of America if you're Chinese. And I sent, I saw plenty of discrimination because one of the key discriminations is you can't be ordinary when you're Chinese. I asked, I, I often ask my father, why can't I be ordinary? I want to be ordinary.

In Hong Kong, if you are not in the top 16% of the class graduation 16%, you are told you're not going to college, not going to university, you are going to have to find a career path. So if you're not in the top 16%, that's it, you now have to pick a job path. Otherwise you're not going to go to university. So yeah, it still is embedded in the, in the culture. Now that's changing because of the takeover.

That let me introduce a new concept of awareness shift, right? To introduce some fear into there, which is, imagine if we took the Hong Kong system as well as in the US where if you're Chinese, you have to be exceptional. And we applied it to your body. Your body, David, so that, so that if, if there's certain cells in your body that are not exceptional, we should cut them out, Right? Cut them out. Now, how unexceptional. Well, you know, we use the education system, so 90% or better is an A, right? So now if you're a high school teacher and you bring someone on a trip and you bring back 90% and you lost 10%, that's not an A, right? You know, if you gave someone a million dollars and they brought back 90%, that means they lost a hundred thousand dollars for you. So with that in mind, though, we're going to cut out any cell that in your body or any organ in your body that's not functioning at the level of an A or better, right? So 90%. So if you have something that's functioning 85%, this is aging is what it is, right? So then you, you need to cut all those things out. That doesn't make any sense in the world of medicine, whether you're looking at allopathic or a naturopathic, any medicine, it doesn't make any sense. This is craziness. And don't we need every human being because humanity is at check. Humanity, the species is at risk when we run out of energy. Now one of our solutions, just like agriculture were doing, was to poison the food, right? So you see, you see? Okay, so we can still eat it. Well, are there any functional problems with that? Well, what about, what about electric vehicle solutions so that we preserve our energy sources? Is that going to allow us to function in in the Earth's atmosphere and outer space. Can it do that? Well, we have some missing links, maybe it can, but right now it can't. So you start looking at this. And we can't use petroleum either. We can't pump our way into space. So we have some issues with what fuel source do we use. Uranium happens to be on Earth. We've had a lot of problems. But how many people worked on uranium? Not as many as they as worked on Covid. So the thing is that when Covid came about, every scientist with any capability dropped everything they're doing. We found more solutions than we need. The issue with the mirth is very simple, is if you get enough people, if I told you in the future, in 200 years, you'll be long forgotten unless you worked on something that solved something critical for humanity. And if that critical item is related to beyond the earth, which I see it's very clear to me, very, very apparent if it's beyond the earth, then, then, then shouldn't you spend at least 10% of your time doing something related to that versus 100% of time? We'll just, we'll just ignore it. We'll go watch a movie or something. Well, you know, you betting on space is going to produce some items of use on earth. All right. Now a lot of people ask me how come you went to, how come you didn't stay in, in China only, right? Because you're Chinese, you know, And I said, I was born in the U.S. not my decision. Yes, but then I got created in this environment and the US is number one in many things and China is number one in other things. So why can't you have both? Why can't you have both worlds and work with them in tandem? So why must one choose one or the other? As an American born Chinese, you can either say, I am a banana, which I'm yellow on the outside and white on the inside, which is kind of derogatory, negative. So I experienced seeing discrimination done internally as well as externally. I didn't get discriminated against because I, I was creative in my, my communication. I said, why can't I be the fortune cookie? Your fortune cookie. The fortune cookie was invented in the United States. It does not exist in China. It is your happy ending at the end of the meal. I am your fortune cookie. Now never did a TED talk on this, but I, nor will I, you know, after you do two, you say, you know, that's enough, I can talk elsewhere, we can do things like this. But the point about about choice and awareness and fear and place and time is you have to know where you are. If you're not aware of your place and you try to do something that's out of the sequence or unlikely to happen, while unlikely can happen. Those are called Hail Marys. Right? Those are possible. But you not you have to look at the. What is going to be trending and really, really important. AI. Yeah, that's important. But not as important as the species having, you know, we're being checkmate with the species.

Well, those are the. Those are our six mega challenges.

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm. My mind is racing about the. How to take a person. If you have a person who's interested in learning and being aware of. That's a whole different ballgame. If you have a person who's experienced global experiences, you know, I mean, we've both worked around the world. Is that the minute you land in a new country, you ask yourself new questions. How do we pay for things? How do I get around? How do I. How. What type of food should I eat? Where should I eat? What's dangerous, what's not? We ask new questions and with new questions we get new answers. The challenges and maybe that's not our solution today is to how do you get the majority of the people who don't continue to ask those new questions all the time? And I guess it would be, is it okay that they don't ask those questions and they're okay with the status quo and that there's a group of individuals who do move things forward? And is that. I don't know. I'm asking myself the question is, is that enough to help us over the next 40 years address the directive that we've got and I do have. There actually is a diagram of this where we actually say we don't need everybody, we just need people to make changes. We need the right group of people at the right time who ask the right questions to make decisions that help us to make those decisions. And I'm sitting here saying awareness is the big premise here. That's your umbrella. And then the question beckons. How do you take a person to have them desire to be aware?

I want to introduce two other things to wrap up our.

Yeah, and then you had a Hong Kongy. Hong Kong.

Hong Kong example of the A level student that has five or six A's. And now they're working in the finance firm in the starting position and they're eating from a fan hub. Right. Rice box. But then the other side they're teaching all these kids to score higher. They're the leader. So hundreds of thousands of people work on this, but they're not aware of seeing this person also eating from a rice box. Right. And not making it. We see that if we focus on that, we see a lot of times so so many people have paid in education. And then one of the big talked about points is it's not monetizing. I can't even pay for what I spent in education, which is one side of it. The other side is I would love to reach out to that person. I don't know them. This is just an observation, an awareness. I don't know them, but I know that the matching and the relevancy of scoring high on the DSE is not necessarily a high correlation to in a finance firm. What are you going to do? You're going to top stock picker, Right? Okay. So. So I'm introducing that example and I'm going to introduce one more example of a powerful scientific discovery that has negative outcomes. And it's in the world of organ transplants. The year when I was in Mount Sinai those years they had a lot of problems with liver transplants. The rank of the school fell because they, you know, the state was taking their license away and all the kind of issues. Right. Okay. So now organ transplant, powerful scientific discovery, but a negative social outcome can result. The science is an advancement, but the usage needs to be considered within the possibilities of human trafficking. So say you have some money and some wealth and you end up having a problem. Can you buy someone else's organ if they're willing to sell. Right. That should be the transaction. Right, but on a different level. Right. I'm not a judge, but I'm saying that there are certain consequences for being paid to think. Your book, right. So sometimes you could be thinking that you are paid and that payment is good enough. But blast the rocket up to the moon, right? Mirth and none of the stuffs we accumulated will matter. Take racism and all the tensions we have. That doesn't matter to me when I'm thinking of a large thing is what's wrong with you. We need every human being because we don't know. Actually 8 billion might not be a good number. Good enough number, number for the survival of the species. Maybe we actually need billions more. What the problem is, if we're looking at our energies, it's dispersed. We're not thinking of humanity when we have racial tension. We're not thinking of when we're doing a job. We're just thinking of self preservation. Let me get ahead of others. Right. Climb ahead. And others when the species were on borrowed time. Because look what happened in 2019. Look what is happening to the egg supply as the bird flu infects.

Yeah.

You know, foul and other things. And so they're all in the air. If, if you, if you try to raise your chickens out there in 2023, you had an infection problem. Most people don't know that. And then you got people using bird feeders. Right. Wow, that's like a zombie movie. Well, it can start with movies. It can start with engaging people. We need to keep engaging because who are we to say, you know, who we're going to eliminate and who we are? So Wharton brought that concept to the forefront. They said, I'm very good at finding people who like what I do, otherwise I wouldn't be where I am. But I need to work on getting others who don't know what I'm doing, who may not be supportive, and then bring a topic that engages them. So if they want to work on Guitar Hero and I'm working on space, well, they're not the right employee. They're not the right person. But if the topic wasn't space versus Versus Guitar Hero, but instead it was the survival of your next generation. Species is. We are one system. Right. You know, humanity, humans versus any other species. We. We have just to make food. We have taken the earth and remapped it, driven out all these things. Do you think that can. How can you keep. How can the thing keep going up again exponentially? It's going to hit certain forces. Can we each spend 10% of our time? 10% is all I'm asking on one day of each week, which is better than nothing to support things like this? Because without the support, we will end up creating monsters. And we end up looking at ourselves and saying, I thought someone was working on this.

But we do know human behavior. And I heard the other day, United States. And I'm not picking on the US I'm just using it as a data point. US has more gyms than any place in the world in terms of country per capita. And yet we have in America. And I'm saying we because I'm an American living in America at this point. We have an obese society. We have more of things to address. So many different categories of mental health, food consumption, diet plans, and yet we still haven't solved any of those things. You live in Asia and food consumption is completely different narrative. It's not about consumptionism it's about, oh, isn't it amazing? I remember sitting down with Eliza from City Soup and I love sitting down. We'd have a meal every month together and she'd say, okay, let's start with the vegetables. Now when was the last time you heard an American sit down a restaurant and say, let's figure out the vegetables first? Because in, in Hong Kong or in Asia you would select vegetables are amazing. And she would pick amazing vegetable dishes and she never let me do it. No, I'll take care of this. And amazing individual to work with. So, yes, the. You're describing a narrative which I'd like to believe more people believe that the society, if they knew there was a demise or they knew there was a challenge or they knew there was something that was going to impact them, they're going to make a difference is my point. They're going to make the right choices.

Well, I would argue that piece in there is that Harvard did a study that they shared this with me. I mean between the two universities, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton and Harvard. They convinced me because I used to have. Your part of your thinking is that some people just is not, not the right fit. And they showed me in the 60s there was an experiment in 70s where they would put people in an elevator that go up and down that elevator and there were two openings on either side. But they introduced some plants in there by individuals that were, that were part of the study. And it showed how social influence can even affect the, the, the regular, you know, person going up and down that elevator. And they had all these plants and there were more of them than the individual. And they, they, they calculated how many would do in order to make the person second guess themselves and turn the other way. And so, so there's a power in, in numbers and also in the time and example. So for example, you know, in speaking of these examples, hydroponics has not received a lot of effort. Like the funding of COVID.

Hydroponics is also so far the SPACs, I think every one of them has.

Right. So they have their issues. But, and, but graphene. Right. And, and, and, and, and food not really thought about. Right. Graphene and soil not thought about as growing mediums not really thought about. I touched upon some of those things earlier, but it was because I had all this funding, so I, it was like, well, let me try this and this one. And I had other investigators who believed in this. So we, we found data points and the, the goal was to find data points. It wasn't to grab everything it was just to learn and to experience the data points. We are such a far cry when it comes to humanity and the data points because we, we, we just allow those solutions. So the getting more individuals, whatever the walks in life, like some of the people that you've interviewed to the people that I run into, we start there and we grow the body and. Yeah, and that's absolutely.

I know I. One of the thing. Yes we are in terms of Project Moon, I think you know that we're very open to everybody. I just had a call with someone we're going to ask to be on the podcast. We were talking about it and she, she invited me to speak at her event that she's having in March. And I said, let's do it together. And she looked at me, I said, you've been part. Learning about Project Moon not for a few months now, and, and you're the one who promotes it. And I said, what would you. If we were going to speak together together? She said, I would say, and this is not a space person at all. Like I'm not. She said, we have to talk about how the going to the Moon will save. Is the only way to change tomorrow or improve the Earth or whatever. She said, it was perfect. When I spoke in, I was in Technion University, one of the top universities in Israel. And I didn't. I don't have a PhD and almost. I think you have to have a PhD to speak at this, to this group. And when I was done, an individual walked up to me and said, David. And my entire. I realized during the presentation about Project Muna that everything I work on may never be used ever or in my lifetime because he works on different distant galaxies and black holes and really complex things. And he said, what do I do? And he was 62 years old at the time. And he said, what do I do? I said, exactly what you said. Take 5 or 10% of your time every week and say, how can I apply what I know to today? How can I apply it to Project Moon? How can I make that change? I guess the space turns off a lot of people, but you'd be surprised. To you, it was a torch. I mean, it lit you up. And I watched it happen. But to a lot of people, it's like, why am I going to bother? I got my own challenges here. Not being able to see far enough into the future to understand that we are not space, we're about Earth, and that we're accelerating innovation. We're doing all of these different capabilities. We don't want to talk about it on the program itself yet. I would say you're on the right path with everything you've said. What I'm trying to get around is that how do we, how do we get individuals to come on board more quickly, which you talked about using networks. We're doing that. I'm still, I'm trying to use your model. I have it in front of me. I've had it in front of me since you had come up with it. But I converted it to a circle, not a square. Sorry, it might have been a square. And I put the four in there. And I'm still asking myself, how do we leverage this four sets. Awareness, fear, place and timelines, either in story development or in, in human behavioral components of what we do to help move the needle. Even if it's 1%, because 1% of 8 billion is quite a lot. And I'm, I'm still, I'm still trying. I haven't figured it out. If you've got a solution or an answer to that. I'm chewing my pen, sorry. If you have a solution in that, in that context. Yeah. Just a challenge. Just a challenge. Was there anything else with Hong Kong? Because you had that at 4.5. Was there any other point about Hong Kong that you wanted to bring up?

Well, the thing you kind of did with Hong Kong is you shared how you were looking at exploring that location. And one of the points when, when, when the, the country, I mean, nobody knew what to do because there was so much, so many problems. And to this day, I mean, why have we, why have we had to raise rates and pull things back? We're still, we're still reeling from the damage that was done. Valuations that got shot weren't coming back. This shock and awe experience is just one of many that are going to happen. Yeah, right. Save yourself doesn't really work very well if the whole thing is boiling. Right. So when you think about the example I used in education and why I formed a, A coaching platform, tutoring platform, was to do two things. One, which is to create an environment for my daughters to learn about Hong Kong and, and, and their culture, which I skipped one step. Kind of like, you know, dad could have been like, oh, dad does everything granddad does. No, dad didn't do what granddad does. Dad is 90%. And that's being extremely generous. 90% illiterate in Chinese. I could be probably 95% illiterate in Chinese, but the illiteracy is so high. Do you want to See that risk and be like me. My daughters have a contrast with my wife, who she doesn't have, you know, these valuation capable, moving things that I, that I have demonstrated in the past. But at the same time, she has all the stability and all the literacy check marks. She sounds good at the karaoke. I can't sing because I can't read. You know, the Chinese, so I can't. I'm not someone you want to bring there. I left it like that. I didn't change it. I could have spent time and hours. I chose not to because this eyesore is actually a powerful example. You look at organ transplants and why there's a social issue with human trafficking. And so you say, well, you know, everybody wants to come into the United States. What happens if everybody came in the United States? What happens. The United States will be. Will we still be united if everybody came in? We. The. This country functions on a, on a. On a balance that. If my father came here and he wasn't productive and I can't. I was born and I'm not productive then. Although I didn't want to be productive in my early stage, I always questioned, why can't I be ordinary and, and be fine? It's the, it's. The other question that one should ask.

Is what does that mean? How do you be ordinary? I don't even know what that means.

I do nothing. I basically take up a piece of space and I receive maybe certain government subsidies and, And I just like, you know, I just wait till I die. I expire.

So. So look at the contrast there.

You.

I'm smiling like ear to ear. You have taken achievement success number one. And you've said ordinary. I said ordinary. You use the word ordinary and to you, ordinary is taking up space and not doing anything. That's like you went all the way to the other end. Because I know, and that's okay. That's interesting. I love it because it says not a bad thing about you. Please don't take it that way. It's the type of thing where an individual like yourself who is an achiever doesn't look at yourself. I know you're saying these things, you're approaching things in certain ways, but I don't think you sit down and say, wow, wow, wow, because I wouldn't be talking to you. I don't have those, I don't like those conversations. You don't pat yourself on the back in the same way. You're saying, what do I do next? That's all behind me. What's the next opportunity. That's behind me. That's why we're working on this new materials company, because that's behind me. There's just, there's something else to do. But you equate it ordinary to taking up food, oxygen and space. I love it.

You know, Right, you.

But even to, but to you. And there was nothing wrong with it. Please, please, please, please. It's that people like you, which I love. Look at what you've done is not extraordinary, even though you might phrase it that way. That's the way we sell. But you, you wake up and say, how do I get excited? What excites me? What drives me? What new idea can I work on? Because I don't want to sit around at a beach for two weeks and read a book. Now, if you're reading a book that has to do with molecular biology, there might be another story.

Not really. But I mean, nobody described, you know, as an inventor, you, you don't get credited by saying, oh, how many books I read. You get credited based on what you.

Invent, what you build, what you do, what you create.

Yes. If we start looking at the limits of humanity, which, you know, the, the item I put in there, one of the. It was place. But also time is that as we age, we will start having double. You know, we'll have, we'll need, we'll need eyeglasses. We might need reading glasses. Certain things start to break down. We're, we're all on this borrowed time. If we don't use our time to extend for the next generation because they're not ready yet. Like, for example, my daughters, they're seven and eight years old. If I don't help them. Oh, yeah. If I look at their KPI, their return on investment. Right, right. You know, and I say go and figure something out. Right. What I've done is I've shortened their possibilities. What I need to do is I need to buy them time with my life force. Right. Inspire them. So they continue to, for example, want to embrace both Chinese and English. Well, you know how hard that is. It was really difficult because if I model church, going to Chinese learning classes one day a week while people go to church one day a week, a lot of people then stop going to church because it didn't work. Well, how do you know if you weren't twice a week? Oh, they don't offer twice a week. Maybe some people need four times a week. They don't offer four times a week. They only offer once a week. Well, then you do A statistical curve in today's time period, once a week, seven days a week, doesn't, may not work. And then the other thing, because I became a Christian, I was Catholic, born Catholic, became a Christian at the Billy Graham crusade. And I distinctly remember this. You will go to hell if you don't believe in Jesus Christ. So all the people don't want to go to hell, Raise your hand. Well, of course I'm going to raise my hand. But then what have you just suddenly done? Your question was, how do I get a lot of people there? Well, I would try to say don't come to Christ because Christ is not like, you know, any other gods out there where you, you know, you believe in one God. God doesn't go and give you gifts like Santa Claus. Right. You know, if you're naughty or nice, you know, you got, you got this list. No, what happens is you have. You'll get whipped into shape. Now if you want to get whipped into shape now, raise your hand. And most people said, I'm not doing that. Why, why do I need to be whipped in shape? But the ones who do, you suddenly have created a filter of strong individuals, right? So you tell them, you know, look, don't join mirth. Humanity's gonna, you know, suffer whatever it suffers. And the many things that we owe, they're all going to start coming out. The floods, other things, potholes with EV vehicles weighing more. All these things are going to break. Shrinking cities are going to happen because if you raise more taxes, people leave. If you lower taxes, you can't fix anything because the problems with the materials are so flawed. So imagine if I go and work with you and we find something up there, right? And up there doesn't mean we have to be up there. It means that in the concept of thinking of that, we find a solution that applies on Earth.

Well, that's. Yeah, that is. There you go. That's part of the chat. That's the part of Project Moon. Most of the innovators who created for.

Going beyond Earth never went myself into creating. You did. Opportunity that I simply from wanting to do it. I got into heaven. Right. You know, simply by wanting to be whipped into shape. I tricked myself and I'm in heaven, but actually I'm no longer in heaven in some like, you know, lowly position. Oh, you know, maybe, maybe they credit things. I don't know if they credit things. I haven't been to heaven and back. You know what we need to do, right?

There's a fast, there's, there's A clear lane and a. And a. And another lane. Yes, you got into another lane to get it.

When you think about what is the. What is the driving force it's too is to do things that are better. You leave them better than you found them. You find reasons to drive you. I don't have a reason to go teach high school. I mean you think in my entire DNA of all the things I explained and the letter I shared that William Potter wrote, I mean at this investment bank doing backflips and then, you know you're going to be a high school teacher. Well, I have found a reason. My reason was my children. So that is you find the greater reason and you join a group that is a guild a A powerful platform that is driven by a greater reason.

Well, that's. There you go. So you join Project Moon Hut and you. And you help with Project Moon. So yeah, that's the, that's the higher. Not to get religious because we are ant. I don't know if it's not anti denominational, we are non denominational or is that what it is how it said we are we. Whatever you believe it. We would like you to participate. So Gordon, thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. I know takes time to put together what you're going to talk to us about and I hope you had some of that experience and enjoyed that too. So once again, thank you. I appreciate the time and the time you've been policing with Project Moonhot and the Mirth Entities. Tremendous.

Thank you. I believe that this is the right thing to do for humanity. And if other people see my thought process and simply just want to trust in, you know, not doing the homework, but trust my homework of something related to the longevity of humanity. If that feels good to you and you want to spend 10% of your time then, then, then you do it right. You write songs about it, you do a movie about it, you know, anything, everything helps.

Well, we have the immersive side, we have the mirth magic, which is AR VR digital twin haptics, 3D40 gaming toys. Yes. There are so many different ways to get involved and to profile.

So yes. DavidGoldsmith.com has. Has things in Chinese there. And you didn't have these connections. You went there and the connections blossomed. You didn't have all of them. Right. You know, you, you.

No before I did.

Right. So you went there and it just happened. So you know, if that can happen for David and certainly has, you know, I shared examples of how it happened for me compared to the person who does really good on their school and all they do is they, they then take some very distantly relevant thing other than having good grades. Right. You're now in finance. Well, of course they're going to give you the desk job. It's like giving Superman the Clark Kent desk job. And we know what that did. It did nothing. So you know, all the other people he couldn't save because he was, he was busy being Clark Kent. Don't Clark Kent yourself.

Yeah, no, there's, there's plenty of opportunities and one of the. So I again, I appreciate it and thank you for the shout out which we're just trying to do our best to here and move things forward. So again, Gordon, thank you. Now, what is the one best way.

That people could connect with they like, you know, what I do in education and the TED talk stuff and how I invite people to kids especially to do research to influence how products are made. They can visit www.dwaprep.com and see that bifurcation model. I make sure kids do well. And I say it's my fault if you don't. Right. It's not your fault. But the bonus is that how would you like this world to be shaped? And I have various clients that come to me and these kids get to also contribute to the, to the outcomes of these projects.

Well, perfect. So that was D W A prep P R E p dot com. Well, again, thank you. If as always, if you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. And I personally would love to connect with anybody who's listening on the project Moonhot side. On the redefining side, you can reach out to me@davidavidgoldsmith.com There's Instagram mrdavidgoldsmith. You can connect on Twitter @goldsmith. There's LinkedIn, there's Facebook. There's many different ways that you could reach out to us. We appreciate you listening in. And that said, I'm David Goldsmith and thank you for listening.