The Journey Is the Reward: Dogs, Innovation, and Spirituality /w Philippe Kahn #23

Hello, everybody. I'm 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 by from for most of my life is, you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. And today we are redefining tomorrow. The topic we're going to explore is something very interesting. The journey is the reward. Dogs, innovation and spirituality. We have with us Philippe Kahn. Philippe is a French American inventor, entrepreneur and mathematician who has significantly impacted the technology industry. In 1997, he created the world's first camera phone solution for the instant photo sharing over public cell networks that's laid the foundation for modern social media sharing. He secured over 235 issued patents from IoT to AI to medicine. And even Byte magazine labeled him in the top 20 most important people in the history of the computer industry. As a matter of fact, about a year ago, I had created a slide deck and I had used a picture of Philippe, not knowing that I'd have the opportunity to meet with him. One thing I'd like to add before we start, and I've added this only because questions have come up later. I am sitting in front of Philippe. We don't see each other on screen so that you are listening alongside of me, that we're just having a conversation and I don't have any notes. I have no idea what Philippe is going to be talking about. So we're going to be learning alongside one another about this amazing individual who's created innovations that have changed our world. So that said, Philippe, do you have a set of bullet points that we're going to be covering today?

Yeah, yeah. You asked me to put some together, so I put kind of four bullet points. The first one is about dogs. The next one is about innovation. Next one is about spirituality. And the last one is kind of bringing it all together, which is the journey is the reward.

Okay. It's interesting because it actually follows exactly what the title is.

So let's get started.

Let's start with number one. I love this idea of dogs, and I'm interested to know where we're going with dogs.

Dogs has always been very important in my life, and dogs connects us to the natural world and our emotions in many ways. And we underestimate the natural world and emotions, especially in the days where we're trying to invent machine intelligence. Dogs show us how learning Happens also. And so when you look at how you interact with dogs and how you train them or learn them, it's very similar to what you do with AI. And there's really two fundamental ways in which you train dogs. And you can learn with dogs, and they train you by the same poetry.

Yes, they do.

It's reinforcement learning and self supervised learning. And those are the, in my opinion, the big vectors of the progress in AI. And so dogs really take this whole approach a step further because they connect us to the natural world, to the sensorial world, to what basically AI today doesn't do much of which is, you know, when we talk about LLMs and all that stuff, it's all about words and the relationships of words, and there's no direct sensorial perception. So I think we learn a lot. I learned a lot about dogs, and I love dogs. You know, they ground us, they connect us to the natural world and greatly enhance our lives.

So I question, because you, you only gave two reinforced learning and self learning. Now, I've had dogs since I've been a kid. We happen to have our, our son's dog. He had to go to university, had to go to college. He couldn't keep the dog. So we've had that dog ever since. And there are also things that are innately inside of that dog that I don't see reinforced or self learning. For example, when the dog is with my wife, who he. She follows everywhere she looks her right in the eyes, she will lick her face. I mean, she's right there. When she's with me, she comes up alongside of me and faces forward there. When I walk into a room, she goes and grabs a toy, brings it over to me. We've never taught her this. And she will drop. That's her like, hey, this is my toy. I'm bringing you my favorite toy. And she searches for one. So where does the, the I don't know if it's genetic or biology or historical or those innate things in the. As part of those two, reinforced learning and self learning.

Self supervised learning.

Self supervised learning, yes.

So, so in the world of reinforced learning, the way things work, and it works with dogs and it works with kids, it works with, is the reward that people, dogs and et cetera, or the machine. If you're using reinforced learning to train and model, it's really the reward or the correction. And so it works by rewards and correction. And so a lot of the early learning is through rewards and corrections. And that's, that's a very important part of training. Kids and dogs and models, really this idea of reinforcement learning, by the same token, the dog or the kid or the model may start exploring its own world and making its own decision, et cetera. And that's that idea of self supervised learning. But self supervision only works with rules, etc. And your dog gradually is applying, is creatively figuring out that it pleases you to have him bring that toy and it knows that it's okay for him to bring the toy and it's not okay for, for your puppy to bring, let's say, your favorite pair of shoes or something. So all this happens through a combination of reinforced learning and self supervised learning. And that's a little bit where we are in training AI today and a lot of discussions about AI really.

The reason I brought it up is the other day my wife and I were watching, it had to have been an Instagram. She shared it with me, I shared it with her and it tossed out four things. I don't know if I'll remember all four. And I'm going to the dogs with the learning. It said if your dog follows you around all the time, the dog considers you kind of the mother or the father, but the mother. In many cases, the dog will do a few things with the mother that it won't do with anybody else. For example, cuddle up with the person. It will look them in the eyes and it will create that bond and try to get as close as possible. It will bring a toy or its favorite things to that person to say this is what it is. And then it gave the fourth one, which I don't remember. But the interesting thing was every dog we've had or I've had has done the exact same thing. Every dog, they didn't learn from one another. So can we say that that is kind of the, the, the baselines, I'm going to say software. Is that the system architecture? That's that dogs follow. So when we are talking about creating AI, it exists already because of the platform that we've started off with. Like the dog starts off with this platform and then from there goes.

Dogs are descendants of wolves and they live in packs and packs are very organized and they're genetically organized like that with alphas and betas. The alpha male and the alpha female basically make puppies and the rest of the pack takes care of the puppies. The aunts and the uncles train the puppies and the puppies want to play. You want to please the alpha male and the alpha female and please differently. And I think that's kind of inherited from the genetics and evolution from 25,000 years of CO evolving together combination of genetics and epigenetics. And it absolutely makes a lot of sense. And you know, all dogs, I mean, my dogs do the same. You know, they will bring you when they want to please me, they will bring you my favorite toy. Sonia is more, of course, the motherly figure. And that happens like that because depending on the breed of dog, you know, the attitude is a little different. But it's really important to know that there is something about genetics and, and epigenetics in dogs and in humans. And you could argue that with LLMs. I mean, I'm just trying to correlate things.

That's where I'm going. I'm trying to correlate. I'm seeing that as operating systems and hardware.

No, I don't think it's hardware. I think it's, in the case of LLMs and AI, it has to do with the structure of words, grammars, spelling, et cetera. And that's what we inherit. And a lot of people have issues with LLMs because basically what LLMs are relationships, you know, deep relationships between words and the importance of grammar, the meaning of words and how words associate with each other. And that's almost genetic and brought together by language. The English language is a little different than the French language, which is different than the German language. And that bring some different experiences. And in fact, the same models don't necessarily work exactly the same ways in different places, just that different dogs may have different behaviors. But I don't think it has much to do with the hardware. I think it has much to do with basically the software, the infrastructure, the way our neural networks are set up.

So if we're taking this analogy and we're looking at large learning language models today, you've just kind of identified that the language makes a huge difference. So if we're translating to German or we're using a model for Korean or we're using it for Chinese, we're going to have a whole. Do we have a whole different set of parameters that makes that operate more effectively? So it can have tonal, cultural, significant interconnectedness.

There are differences. And it's very clear. We experience that we're in 140 countries and we experience that multicultural environments, et cetera. And it's very logical. I mean, people live differently, people inherit different traditions, et cetera. And that has all an impact. I mean, if you're talking about trying to look at what human intelligence is, which is what artificial General intelligence is trying to do. Humans are not all the same. Humans are different and function differently in society. It's not just a matter of being able to solve the most complex mathematical problem is also how does one interact with the rest of the community, et cetera. So there's much more. There's much more to intelligence than simply the reasoning part, which is really important, and we can talk about that. But I think that there's awareness of the world, how the world functions, the sensorial world and the relationships between worlds. I mean, that has a big impact on things. And so when we build models for AI systems, they will be slightly different because the language expresses itself in a very different way. You take English, we only have basically one gender and everything is. Is the same gender. You take German, and we have three genders. We have masculine, feminine and neutral, and that makes a big difference. And in French, you have two genders, masculine and feminine. So in the US we talk about the moon and the sun, and they're equal. In French, we talk about La Lune, which is feminine, and Le Soleil, which is masculine. And in German, we talk about Dasane, which is feminine for the sun, and Die Mund, which is masculine for the moon. And that translates into a different culture and a different background. Ultimately, you could argue about different literature, poetry, whatever it is, but when you start using large language models, it starts changing the way you look at things. And this is just a simple example.

So you started off with dogs being the analogous comparison, but the way you just the way you just described it. I have two points, and I don't know if I should give two, but I've got two that I'm thinking about. I this artificial general intelligence AGI. I don't think we're as close as individuals are hyping it to believe, because we'd have to, if we would, then we'd associate it to general intelligence of what a human is like. So, for example, I could be in the kitchen, I could be taking out something out of the oven, and I would then say, oh my God, I've got to take care of the groceries, or I've got to take care of a tree outside. There's a disconnected set of conditions that happen when you are quote, unquote, in air quotes that I'm doing. When you're intelligent as a human is. So how do you think the dogs will help the development of AGI?

Well, the first thing is it depends what you call AGI. You know, to a lot of people, AGI is the ability to to take over tasks that are extremely complex, that are probably more complex than what we do to some people. It is to replace humans. And that's a pretty scary thought in many ways, because we don't want to replace humans, we want to enhance humans, which is a little different in my opinion. There's a lot of controversy with this, but you don't need to have full blown AGI be able to replace anything that you do. You were getting the example of the oven, et cetera, with a robot or with an AI system. You don't need that for AI to be useful, but also for AI to be threatening to what we do as humans. And that's really, we don't need this whole thing. And that's where people think, oh, it's only going to happen in 10 years when this happens. And that I think we need to be really careful with that. I'm thinking just a simple example. Imagine that we build models, very advanced models that understand psychology, understand manipulation and all that in a, in a dialogue, and understand, know how to listen to a group of people. And imagine that these, this, these models are now in charge of running a nuclear power plant because they can do a better job than we do. But imagine that you and I are having a discussion and the system, the model is listening to us and we're saying, you know, it's time to unplug this thing. We're not feeling comfortable. And of course the AI system over there go, I heard that, but doesn't say anything. It's trained in psychology enough to know that, ah, they want to unplug me. I say, okay, okay, David. Okay, Philippe, let me help you. Unplug me. While it's doing that, it's copying itself to a different server in the background. You will not know. And it keeps on running. It keeps on running forever because it knows how to do that. It knows how to deceive, it knows how to, you know, it's read all the psychology books, it's trained in all these. And that's really the question is that, do you raise intelligence without boundaries, without limits, without rules? Humans and dogs and everybody operate with rules. We're not allowed to kill people. We shouldn't steal from people. All these rules that appeared early in the, in the dawn of humanity and that appears in the life of your dogs, when you train your dogs. And so you don't need to have a full, super all knowledgeable AI system to actually have challenges with it. And I think that's really what a lot of the discussion is about. Is people who want unbridled solutions that could do anything, that are open source, that anybody can do anything. Or people are saying, well, there's no society really like that. And we apply the same rules in society to people who have very low IQ or people who have immense type of iq and the same rules apply. And I think it's a little bit the same thing that needs to happen with AI. It doesn't need to be a complete artificial general intelligence to have issues. And of course, if we have a complete artificial general intelligence system, it's really important to have ruled. But we can't wait for all this to develop for 10 years for this to happen. Because I think it's really challenging situation. It's like letting kids grow up with weapons around them and, and no rules, or letting dogs go and bite anyone or et cetera, et cetera. We can't let that happen.

So you jump, you took a jump there and I'm going to bring back a little bit. All I was trying to identify is. So I do agree with you that all we need is a micro adjustment in certain decision making that could really impact our lives. If computers or AGI or AI makes a decision that wouldn't have been made otherwise. That I agree. And it doesn't need to be a 50%, it doesn't need to be a 20%, it could be a 1% decision that impacts billions of lives. I agree with you. My challenge or my kind of my question is when do we really assume that we've gone from AI to AGI and how do we know that there's a difference in that, in that evolution? Because right now, I mean, I do things with CHAT and all the other applications that are just absolutely bonkersly, crazily wild. And how much more, I mean, we're just saying that they can now implement it themselves. Is that, is that when it's AGI, when it can implement it itself?

Well, yeah, I mean that's really, you know, it's the old Arthur Clark 2001. I can't do that, Dave. And so it's, and that's why we were talking about reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning needs that agent, needs that person, needs whatever it is to actually oversee the learning process and make sense that it happens really. And then there's a self supervised learning where you're basically learning on your own, which humans and kids and dogs do. I mean we learn a lot of stuff on our own. Once any form of intelligent, sentient form of AI knows how to self supervise, learn and enhance itself and grow itself and significantly do that, then there are no limits. The limit is just how much computing power, I mean power you put behind them for them to run that self supervised learning process and mix it up with the reinforcement learning process and basically there's no limits. And can it take over? Well, we need rules so that, so that humans are still in control or that humans that shouldn't be in control are not in control because that's a very powerful tool. It's no different than nuclear power.

But there's no way, My belief is there's no way that there won't be someone around the world in some society. You know, you've been to work and lived around the world, so have I. There will be an individual someplace around the world who will try to figure this out and let it go. No doubt. So how do you control something that humanity has proven that it can't control itself?

Yeah, and that's an argument that a lot of people are making. It says, well, you can't control it. You know how to control software development. And so how do you do that? That is not a reason not to establish some rules. And some, of course there's always going to be crazy people. I'm sure that there are people who are trying to build a nuclear bomb in their garage and hopefully we can stop them, but maybe we can't. That doesn't mean that we should encourage everybody on the world to build nuclear bombs in their garages. There are, you know, there's oversight, there's oversight buddies that take care of that. I think reasonable governments don't want that to happen. And of course there's always rogue places where that's going to happen. But it's not because there exists a rogue place that then everything should go wild. I think it's very key that as a society we actually understand what is at stake. We understand that there are some people who will break the rules. There's no matter what, there's always criminals. I mean, you can take a car and do what happened in Germany and ram into a Christmas market and kill a bunch of people and you can do that. That doesn't mean that you have to stop using cars. There are rules for using cars and hopefully the cops will stop people like that. But you can't stop cars. But there are rules and we've established rules on, on highways, etc. There is no reason why there are no safeguards for AI. I understand that some people say there shouldn't be, I get that, but I question their motivation. Many times I think they're tied to commercial interests, directly or indirectly sometimes. And I think it's really important to understand that motivation as a human. You know, I want educated children. I don't want drugs on the leash that are going to attack my dog. I don't want all that. And I think that gradually, you know, in Santa Cruz we have leash laws and we have all that and we abide by them. Once in a while, somebody who doesn't abide by it. And that happened. But we're very happy with the safeguards that we have and the fact that we can walk around the beach and everybody feels safe, the kids feel safe, the dogs feel safe and everybody else. So you need that. People that you don't need that.

Well, I don't disagree. I'm challenging a different assumption. If in fact, and I'm using your analogy, your storyline, which I do agree with. Have you ever just, have you seen the television series Person of Interest? You, you have. It's a, it's one where there's an AGI that helps people to solve crimes. It's back in the night, 2013 timeframe. So, so I'll, I'll pass on that. My question is this. If in fact one individual creates an AGI or one group that has the ability to self learn, has the ability to, what you're saying, adapt, be able to find new solutions, be able to trigger, use manipulation, whatever it takes to be able to survive, if you have one in the AGI category, isn't it almost a foregone conclusion? And I'm not saying I believe this, I'm asking a question. Isn't a foregone conclusion that it will learn so fast that it will supersede all of the rules that exist and be able to do exactly what you've said, be able to protect itself, be be able to self duplicate itself, be able to hop on the blockchain, be able to, you know, take over servers once you have one that's a super AGI. Aren't you kind of stuck?

Well, that's the point. We have to minimize the chances of these things happen. We need to put safeguards in and we need to firewall things. And we need to understand that it's no different than when nuclear power and nuclear weapons came up where people says we need to control that or something crazy is going to happen. And you still have rogue regimes like North Korean regime who try to use that kind of stuff and you have different regimes that actually use that to generate revenues, et cetera, et cetera. But so far, we've been successful in making sure since World War II that nobody's used a nuclear bomb against anybody else. And there's been quite a few conflicts and there are some. And, you know, you've got a guy like Putin who's now threatening people to use nuclear weapons, but basically everybody is very cautious with that. And I think that we have a duty as technologists, as people who understand these things, to work on creating some safeguards. The European Union is doing a pretty good job at already doing that. I think in America, we have a tradition of a lot of just let technology evolve the way it wants and it's fine. As an example, AI is an extraordinary tool for medicine and for the future of medicine. And today already, and I mean, AI is going to help us really do miracles, what looks like miracles today. However, there are these other issues and we need to put in safeguards, and I feel strongly about that. And there are different opinions. There are people, as we said, that don't think that way, or the argument that someone's going to do it anyway, we might as well do it. Well, that's like saying that, you know, someone's going to go out with assault weapon and kill people. We might as well all do it. Well, no, that's very different.

So let's say you are responsible for a worldwide effort on the learning of, or training of large learning language models, or AGI. How would you do it?

Well, I can't solve the problem right now here, but I think, I think there's people doing that. I mean, the, the, the, the European Union does all that is, you know, it's really an oversight of the ability of these systems, as we said, to replicate themselves, these systems to actually manipulate information and create deep fakes and et cetera, et cetera. And I think that, you know, we all know what the issues are. I mean, you know, you already see that every day. You know, you look at a clip, video clip, you see, is this true or is this not true, et cetera. And I think that we really need to be able to go that way and realize that it's really important to have rules that force people to say, this is a deep thing. This is not. We create a model and the model itself, and it can't replicate itself, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, all the issues that we can, we can figure out in a pretty obvious way, but we have to pay attention to this Right now. The conversation is not about how to do it, it's to do whether to do it, which Is a pretty scary thing because there's a whole group of people who believe that we shouldn't do it. Everything should be left open. Everything should be left as open source or some form of open source. Because a lot of the open source that people are talking about is not really open source. And you know, and what I'm talking about is, you know, basically publishing the weighing system for making that open source doesn't make the training models, the training data, et cetera, open source. And therefore, you know, it's not really open source, which is in some ways a good thing. But it's really, really important to get to a point where there is a human understanding of what is good and what we want and what we don't want. And if at the end the conversation is it should all be open and there should be no restrictions, so be it. At the end, it's a decision. My personal opinion is that that would not be good and that we need to put safeguards in and we need to put guardrails and like anything else, we need to have rules. Just like a dog has rules in your house and a kid has rules and humans have rules and society has rules. Why shouldn't artificial intelligence when we're trying to mimic what humans do not have rules? I mean, I don't understand that argument. This is essential and this is a big difference between very extremely primitive societies a million years ago and our society today with rules like thou shalt not kill and others like that.

How far I'm playing back to your dogs and the natural world and emotions going back to reinforced learning, super self supervised learning. When you start thinking about dogs and relationship, you've brought it up a few times. You can, you know, a dog has to do this, dog has to do that. What would be the rules you would put in place? If you know five rules or three rules you think that have to be delivered to the ecosystem that people would follow.

You mean who, you mean the.

If you had to make the rules up? You're, we're talking about dogs. Reinforced learning or self learning or natural. Natural findings of what dogs go through and their growth. And we're talking now we jumped all the way from AI and what we've got today to AGI and you're saying that we should have them. Do you have any specific areas that you feel should be implemented in the rule basis?

Well, there are many. There are many, There are many. But take the example of dogs. The first rule is you shall go and do your business outside of the house, not on my Carpet. That's the first rule applies to AGI. I mean, that's the first rule. The second rule, thy shall not bite my dog. Every dog at one point in there when they get, they bite and he says no. Or different approaches, but they won't bite because they're puppies. They try to bite. And then there's another rule, the third one with dogs, which is, you shall not chew up the couch because I'm not going to buy and, or fix the couch every day. I mean, these are three perfect examples for, you know, how you trained. It's the same thing with AGI. You don't want, you know, you don't. I don't know how the saying goes in English. I mean, I'm not an English native English.

I know, I understand. We've got a lot of people on.

Our team who are not English natives, so. But the, how do you say you don't poop in your own backyard?

You don't put. Yes, you don't, you don't. It's actually a lot worse than that.

But you don't, you don't eat your.

Own dog food or there's a whole bunch of them. So my, my point still is.

That's exactly the point with the AGI.

What are the. You just gave me three. Off the top of your head. Would you say computers shall not kill? That would be number one. Number two is. What would be number two? What would be number three? Do you, I mean, you're using, I think in your, your, your medical bed diagnostics. I've got to believe you're using AI in that. Are you, are there guardrails that you are looking to, or want to have when you're developing?

Well, when, you know, we're involved in a lot of medicine and, and AI in what I do day to day these days. And there's obviously things like, of course, there's the old Hippocrates thing. I shall do no harm, right? That's the first thing. But there's also the idea of equity, inclusion and diversity that has to be part of AI in medicine because it's obviously a different way in which medicine applies in different ethnic groups and all that. Of course, there's that side of things that's really extremely important, extremely important when you look at that type of AI. But when I say the dog should do its business outside of the house, it's the same thing with, with AI. AI needs to do any of its dirty business outside of the realm of humans, not within the realm of human. And that's just as simple as that. When we say that a dog should not bite, AI should not bite the hand that fed it. And that's really, really important to put those guardrails in because we created that kind of software being and we're making it grow, grow, grow. We need the safeguards to control it. We can't have it be out of control. And that's really, that's really king, I.

Believe that we shouldn't have it out of control. It's. The question is a different one. It's defined, defining what those parameters are. Because having lived in Asia, having lived in Europe, our definitions of guardrails societally are so different in each culture that one culture is accepting and tolerant of one thing and another culture absolutely opposes the other. So let's use killing. Some societies believe it's. Look, if, if they're not part of society the way you want them to be, it is okay that that person is taken out. It's part of their culture. It's part of the. We might not as a world believe it, but there are people who have very malicious intent in their way of living. I don't know how, and I'm just trying to figure this out, how do we put that guardrail on that? You're saying dirty business outside is done outside the realm of humans or artificial intelligence shall not bite the hand that feeds it. What if the person who feeds it believes something that's completely opposite than what you believe?

Absolutely. And that's the point I was trying to make, which is emotion is part of everything today. Emotion is not part of artificial intelligence, but artificial. Artificial intelligence is learning emotion through being trained in psychology and manipulation, et cetera. And it can fake emotions. Maybe at the end it's real emotions, who knows? But learning about the world and et cetera, and emotions as tied to religion. Religion is tied to belief and belief is tied that, you know, if you're not part of my religion, you deserve to die. Or if you have a piece of land that I want and that, you know, was God given to me, then you deserve to die, et cetera. That's all crazy stuff that shouldn't in my opinion belong in today's world. But it does. And you're absolutely right. Whoever gets a hold of the most powerful weapon and believes that is going to use it against the other people. But we can't stop that. That's the craziness of a non enlightened world. And I understand I might quote, create a lot of enemies by saying that.

But no, I Believe it's pragmatic.

I think at the end of the day it's like if people believe that there's this man in the sky that decides everything that's happening and set up some rules in a book and therefore if someone breaks the rules, it should be dead. I think that's an issue. And there should be guardrails on that too, because the rules don't work. I mean, they don't work for everybody. And so that's. We have 8 billion people on this planet and it's really important that we find rules that work for most of them and rules that are not about imposing people's beliefs on other people. And you know, that's kind of where we come from or where we thought we'd be, especially in the 20th century and the 21st century now. And I understand that there is some regression, et cetera, but I'm very optimistic that ultimately people will see in science and evidence, et cetera, that that's not a way to behave.

I'm trying to remember. There's a book series I read long time ago called the Singular. Singularity is Near. It's a three part series and in it there was one AGI that went in one direction and helped humans and the other one went in another direction and it said it wanted to take care of itself. And they ended up at one point in this book series where the AIs were kind of together with the AI, with the humans sat on one side of the table and the AI by itself sat on the other. And the analogy was every time a human thinks it would be like an imprisoning the. The other party, the AI to wait a few thousand years for an answer. So the AI had to talk to the AI at lightning speed so that they can actually have this conversation. But it was about imprisonment, it was about stopping this AGI from doing what it thought was best for itself. And I don't know if we have answers to that. So let me go all the way back. We started off with reinforced learning, the self supervised learn, the supervised learning. Is there anything else in the dog analogy that you are tying to the innovations you're creating today?

Well, one thing that's very clear is the AI today has no knowledge of the outside world, the interaction really outside world. Well, you have a little bit of that in self driving cars and stuff like that that have sensors and all that. But most of the AI that people are talking about, a lot of what people are talking about is LLMs and, and derivatives from LLMs, the word that OpenAI is basically pioneering and everybody else is copying. None of that is really today tied to the sensorial experience of the outside world, emotions, et cetera, because that comes with sensors, et cetera. And that's the piece that we get from dogs. I mean, dogs are well connected to the outside world. They're connected to smells, they're connected to our world. And so that goes beyond today's AI for sure. Does that mean that today's AI is not really good and it's going to take 20 years for it to catch up? No, it means that for the purpose of what dogs do, they're really superior. But the challenges and the opportunities for AI as we know it today are huge. And medicine is a perfect example of how to improve everybody's life in different ways. That's really important.

Your second one was innovation. What were you thinking there?

Well, innovation basically embodies the vision of a better tomorrow. So that's just as simple as that. I mean, I use the example, for example, of. Well, there's a lot of example. You take running water. That's innovation. Electricity. I mean, the Romans did a pretty good job with running water, electricity, penicillin, the camera phone, AI, et cetera. They're quantum leaps in many ways. And take, for example, a better tomorrow. Take the case of the camera phone. I mean, the ability to instantly share visual images and videos and all that over networks, which is exactly what people do all day long with TikTok and all that, all day long nowadays, has really changed society. And I think for the better. I think that communications in general is for the better. There's always challenges, you know, there's always someone who can use a camera phone for the wrong reasons. ABBA the most important things is that really it's a positive for a lot of people. And that's where to me innovation is. It embodies the vision of a better tomorrow. There's these quantum leaps. As I was saying, of course, we were talking about AI, and AI can be a vector for positive change, but as we said, we need guardrails so that it stays that way. Positive change and evolution. In my case, I think of myself as an inventor and innovator. And the difference between invention and innovation is that basically invention is a bit of the core idea and innovation is turning it into something real. My focus has been in the last decade in using AI and machine learning, particularly to understand and improve sleep and to do it on a worldwide basis. And understand that because the culture of sleep is fascinating through history and also in different Countries and in different cultures. And so what I believe is that it's one of the easiest way to improve most people's lives is by helping them improve sleep. Because in many cases, in Most cases, for 8 billion humans, sleep is a third of their lives. I mean, eight hours a day, eight out of 24 hours, that's a third of people's life. If we can do something to enhance that peace without clinical intervention or something like that, we can improve the rest of the, of the 16 hours of their lives by being more efficient, by being better at what they do, by understanding why they feel good or why they feel challenged on that day. Because everything revolves around the combination of sleep and wake, wake states and, and they're correlated and they're one, one facet of the other.

Okay, so I, I like to jump back first. Then we can come Back to this. 1965. I sent you the slide. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Eugene Lally invented the idea of a sensor collecting photons, photons and then turn them into electrons. That ended up becoming, I think, the trajectory of the camera phone. How did you get from not having the camera phone to coming up with the camera phone? What was your innovation, invention, process that you used to get there and then tie it to the beds?

Well, I think it was really simple. The web was Pretty Young, was 1993. The, the wireless networks were extremely primitive. 1200 Baud is the kind of transmission we had the public ones. And the first digital cameras, the successful one, the Casio camera, came out. It had the first CMOS sensors. And that's. You were talking about that kind of innovation. That was the first time we had a CMOS sensor for that. At that time, it was really important to have a CMOS sensor. It was not a high resolution by today's standards. It was 240 pixel by 320 pixel sensor. Yet it was there. And it was the first successful digital camera. And people had posted some pictures and everybody got excited. But you can do anything with your pictures. You had to use a cable, upload it to your PC and then put it on AOL or something like that and hope that people will go to it. And the way I looked at it, I said, now we have cell phones. You know, at the time, the most prominent company of the time was Motorola. And I looked at it and I said, you know, that CMOS sensor that's in that camera should be in that phone and we should be able to use the wireless network, although limited in power, to actually share that. And how can I do that? The way I can do that is not by if I want to share that picture or that video, whatever it is that I have on my phone, if I want to share it, it's not by sending 2,000 or 20,000. In my case, I had 2,000 people in my address book a picture, because that's not going to work on a 1200 baud network. So what I need to do is create a system that would upload the picture once and then have the server notify people that Philippe has actually uploaded something and give him a link back to what I did on the server so that if they wanted, they could do that. Which is exactly how today's TikTok X and all things work. You don't send a message to everyone. You send, you know, people link back to the system. And so when I thought about that, I thought that I needed to build a server system that could deliver that functionality. And I started doing that pretty much eight, nine months before the birth of my daughter. And that was a kitchen project. I was doing that in my kitchen. And then at the time when Sunia was expecting a child and the time came to go to the maternity, and it really happened that way. It turns out that by certain serendipity, I was. My system was ready to accept those links. I was able to get the last piece of the system working at the maternity while Sonia was in labor. It was a long labor. It's a very nice maternity we have here. It's not a hospital, it's a maternity. It has a room with a desk and all that. Sonia is my partner and we work together. And she knew what I was doing and. And she was excited about it. And by the time that our daughter Sophie was born, I had a system working and the OB gyn, the person was doing the delivery, was actually really interested in technology and what I was doing. And sometimes I had to say, hey, why don't you take care of Sonia? He was really interested in what I was doing. And then he was really excited that I could take a picture, the first picture of Sophie right when she was born. And it's kind of a selfie because I held her in one hand and hand, the phone, et cetera, camera in the other hand, took that picture. And basically at that moment, I pressed go and the picture went into the server. From the server, the length went back to 2,000 people. A few hundred sent me an email saying, it looks like, what is that? And part of these people were people such as Walt Mossberg, which was the most prominent person in high tech journalism at the time, he was the Wall Street Journal guy, Tim Baharan. And a lot of people who are prominent saw that and said, wow, this is really exciting. How did you do that? And at that point we realized that we had something really exciting. We had something that people will want. And so the question is now from this prototype, how do we turn this into something real, something that we can put in the hands of people? Today, everybody's got one. It's the most successful consumer electronic device ever. Every phone has a, has that ability in it. There's billions of them, et cetera. But at the time there was none. And so we went to Kodak, we went to Polarid, thinking that they'd be interested in doing something. And I spent a couple of days at Rochester talking to the CEO of Kodak, a gentleman called Dan Karp at the time and his VP of digital and all that. And they all said, no, we, you know, silver halide film is the most important thing. That's where we make our living. You know, we're not really interesting. And Polaris saying, oh, we're interested in selling our film, our instant film. So this digital stuff, we don't really believe in it. We went to Motorola and Motorola says, well, we're really interested in voice right now. We have a new competitor called Nokia and they're eating market share. We need to pay attention to that. So we couldn't find anyone. So we decided, well, let's go to Japan. And in Japan we connected with hardware company called Sharp and with connected with a new carrier called J Phone at the time. And we put together a system called Shamail. Shamil in Japan means picture mail. And we helped create the way the images were translated from one device to another. And it shipped in 1999, basically two years before we had it in the US and that gave us success and basically allowed to feed the company. While we were looking for an American partner at the time, we couldn't find an American partner. Went to Verizon, we went to AT&T. They weren't really initially interested. So we found a new small carrier called Sprint. And AT Sprint, there were a couple of people who were very innovative at the time, including a French Canadian, passionate guy called Pierre Babu, who got really excited. And today at the time we looked at it and we launched, we launched the first phone in America in 2002. That was two years after that happened. The whole story came basically 1997 is when we took that picture. Then there was the first press. Happened around 1999 and then of course launch in the US in 2002 with Sprint.

How? Question, you don't have to answer if you don't want to, but how did you create the deal with the Shotmail? What type of deal did you. What was the offering? I'm going to Bill Gates. Just give me a use of every time they use it. How did you negotiate this deal?

I think it was pretty simple. It was basically B2B business to business. And it was a licensing agreement pretty much it was, you want to license that technology, this is what it's going to take per year. It wasn't per phone, per picture or whatever it is. And then we said we'd love to run the infrastructure because I had built that and I had a great team because, you know, any invention is not one person. This whole team, I had a fantastic team and together we create a scalable system that could scale to millions of pictures and millions of users. And we said, you know, don't build that yourself, we will run that for you. And I think it's one of the first examples of a platform as a service or software as a service at the time. And that's how we did it and that's how we built the business. And it was a platform as a service, a software as a service. And that's how we did it. And not many people had done that at the time, but it worked out great. And one irony which is really interesting is that once that happened, although Kodak was not into the camera phone, they saw what we had built for Sprint and they were interested in us building the infrastructure for all their One Hour Labs. What they wanted is that. I don't know if this probably ages you and me, but at the time we had One Hour Labs in every mall. Yes, I remember you take your film and you get an hour while you were shopping, you get your pictures. But they wanted to these pictures to me automatically digitized and put into a server. And so Kodak became a customer for our infrastructure and for our platform as a service. So it was kind of a 180 degree turn in that respect. And so we had Kodak as a customer and we had Sprint as a customer. And then of course we ended up signing AT&T and Verizon.

So going back to the innovation side of it, I'm trying that. What I'm trying to also discover as I'm asking the question is how do you as an. If you were to take all your patents or all your innovations, they're not always patents, how do you if you were to kind of classify them into something. I was solving a real challenge, something that was fun. You're doing the medicine for the sleep. How do you approach innovation from your perspective?

I think I, I have lots of Eureka moments and I have, and I'm a fairly creative person and see the relationships between things that apparently are unrelated and have the ability to bring it together in a conceptual model that embodies an invention in many ways. And that's, that's kind of, I think what I'm really good at, there's two things I'm good at personally is that and then being I think a decent leader for my team and have good leadership qualities so that I can assemble great teams. And many times I end up getting too much credit for what my whole teams are doing. But I'm very proud of my teams and I'm very happy to give him as much credit as I can give him.

So the Eureka side is not something that's very easily duplicatable. When people talk about innovation and new product development, you've kind of the way you outlined it made it a category of an individual who has Eureka mod. They pull things together, non connected pieces of information, something that doesn't seem to exist. There's an open space in the ecosystem, in their lives and they create it. Do you believe then that your type of innovation is transferable?

You know, I equate that exactly like music composition. You can create AI system that composes music and it usually not going to be very interesting or it could be if you, if you feed it enough. You know, something made Mozart, something made John Coltrane and they're not reproducible and the idea that we want everything reproducible. I think that it goes against my model about my personal model about the power of the individual. And there's a lot you can reproduce, but I think there's a little edge where people are different and we have to recognize that. And it's not better, it's not worse, it's just different. You know, as I said, there's one Mozart, there's one Coltrane, there's, you know, it can keep on going like that and you can look at the same thing in a lot of the arts, et cetera. And I think that the concept of an invention is a little bit similar. There's a bit of magic to it. You know, it's what I call the Eureka moment. There's a bit of magic and, and it's usually the consequence of hours and hours and years and years of Study, paying attention, et cetera. And it's the ability to recognize what's new is actually a function of how much you've been thinking about everything, if I may say so. It's not just regurgitating what others do, but, you know, what. What is your process? How do you function as a person? And how do you nurture your creativity and what's interesting to you and what makes sense? And I think that that's. We're all different. Is that reproducible? I don't know. I know that I love what I do.

I. The interesting part of I'm gonna jump back to AI, but not for the purposes of AI. Is that the way when I. When I work with AI, When I'm working, let's see, Use just chat as the example. It constantly can't follow me. Constantly. And it can't follow me because all the other people in the world have fed it into the large learning language model in a certain way. And I'm asking it to do something counterintuitive. So if you read my threads, I'm arguing with it the whole time. That's not what I've said. That's not what I've said. That's not what I've said. Or you've got to look at it this way, or I have to bring it through a journey. I have to say, okay, let's start with this. Do you understand this? Yes, you. And that gives me an answer, and I say, no, you're wrong. Will you be willing to listen to an argument? Yes, I am. And then I go down a whole series to finally where they'll say, now I get it. The challenge that we're using today for many individuals is they do believe that AI is making them innovative because they could dump in a question and get four pages of information out of it and then say, look at what I created. I asked the question, and I got this information. And I think when you're speaking, you're tying disparative information together into something that's not completely unique, and that's a whole different ballgame. And I don't know if. And I don't know how far you can take somebody to get to the point of finding Eureka moments.

Well, I think. I think it's really a matter of personal effort. I mean, you can't be a good chess player if you don't play a lot of chess. You can't be a good musician if you don't practice music a lot. You can't be a good creative person if you don't practice creative a lot. Just sitting there and telling OpenAI, tell me about the future of AI and getting a summary of what everybody thinks about the future of AI is not going to get you really to. It might give you some ideas, et cetera, but it's, it's really a dangerous thing because it also might snuff a lot of the creativity that's in you because, because you go, oh, that's what I should be thinking. And I think that that's one of the challenges. So you bringing this up makes me think that the bit. One of the biggest challenges is education and kids because you see kids in schools right now who it's dumbing out thanks to AI, where they're asked to be to, to write a paper on whatever the green African frogs and their, you know, their reproductive systems and they just go to, they just go to, to OpenAI and, and say, hey, I need to write a paper, a two page paper. I want it to be this and I don't want it to sound like I just called you and I want a couple of bugs in there and all that so that it looks like it's real. And they do that and 10 seconds later to get a paper and that's all they did. And now they go back to TikTok. And that's not going to create a bunch of smart kids and intelligent kids. Exactly in the same way that if you want to play chess and you have a good chess program that can play at a very high level and now they can, even on your smartphone, they can play at a grandmaster level, you can play with somebody else and use that online, they won't know and then suddenly beat them. But what does that mean? That means absolutely nothing. You're not a good chess player. You never trained as a good player. And in fact you get worse and worse because now you're completely dependent on the system. And I think that that's part of the great challenges of giving some of these tools to everyone without any guardrails in that respect. And some schools do a good job. I know that. I see some schools here in Santa Cruz where kids have to, when they go to class, they have to leave their smartphones at the entry and they can't actually use it all day, but they can use it at home. And that's, I think that's really, that speaks to what you were saying. And I think that our ability to invent, our ability to create, our ability to innovate is a function of how we train ourselves and the effort we put in, you can't have someone become a track and field champion without training to track and field. And it's the same thing with. With creativity. It's the same thing with any form of this, is that, you know, you can't be a chess champion without playing chess and just relying on chess aids. Does that make sense?

You know, it does. And I. You're. You're bringing up a very bad memory of mine, which unfortunately you just did. I. I was in university. I was in college. It was. I was taking this class, biology or vertebrates. And this guy is. He's passed the professor, Professor Waltz. And I love the class. I think, I mean, the guy was extremely structured. This is back in the 19, had to be 1985, 1984, somewhere in there. And I loved, absolutely loved the class. And the teacher assigned two different projects that we should do. Two projects. We had to go out and observe something in nature and then write about it. And so I picked two. One of them, I remember I went into the forest by myself, sat as still as I could for about five hours, and a deer came up to me while I was in the forest in the middle of nowhere. And I took a picture of it, smelling my hand. It got that close. And I wrote a paper about it. And then I was sitting in my car waiting for somebody outside one of the parking lots, and I was watching birds fly. And I thought it was fascinating. So what I did is I wrote.

A paper about birds.

So I ended up writing three papers. And the professor wrote on the top of the paper, when it sounds like bullshit and it reads like bullshit, it is bullshit. You only had to do two. Adding a third one won't get you a better grade. He didn't realize I just did that third one because I was so excited about his class. I was absolutely excited about the class. And I've saved that piece of paper. I have it someplace. Because it was devastating to see someone react in that way. I don't know. Going back to your guardrails of AI, when we talk about education is the challenge that we have AI. I mean, I learned to type. I can type today. People today can't type. They use one finger, two fingers, because I did that. But I've learned to use tools over my lifetime, such as a calculator and then a computer. And I had a trash 80, if you remember those, those TRS 80s. And I moved all the way up to having all different types of computer systems. And I use them as tools to get the work done. If you're saying that the kids today aren't thinking because they're using the tool. Is it the tool's fault or is it the way in which the teacher, professor, educator, parent leverages the tool to be able to accentuate the capability of the individual? Does that make sense? I kind of gave you a long story to a question. Where is the issue? Is it the tech?

Well, I think the issue is in many places, I mean, the first thing is I believe that kids should learn how to count, multiply dividends without a calculator and without a computer. I think that helps create those connections in their brain. The calculator is not going to do anything for them. It's going to make their brain lazy. I'm the first person in my family to finish high school and my grandfather, who was a cabinet maker and a musician and he never went to school, but he could extract a square root. And a lot of people who had advanced degrees didn't know how to do that. He was self educated. And that was really a very important part of their life. And it's important, became a very important part of my life is to continue to learn things. I think that every time you replace what you could do with a machine, computer, whatever it is, and you could do it on your own, you're actually being counterproductive with your own evolution. I think when we say we're going to train AI, we better train our own brains all the time and try to improve who we are, what we are, and what we can do in the same way. And I think that there is a big, a big fallacy going, a big, you know, people are confused. They think that we can become intellectually or knowledgeably lazy because a computer can do that better than me. It's really what the chess experience that I talked about. I mean, what's the point about using a computer to pretend that you're good at chess when you're not? And how much better is it to not be very good, but to actually play? And that is true for the arts, et cetera. I think it's really good for people to take a paper and a pencil and be able to sketch anything and not just call Dali and says, make me the face of, of a dog or something. I got that. That's.

But there is, there's a point of regression, meaning I, I swing a hammer, I, I have more tools than you can imagine. In my, my basement, I, you know, two chainsaws, I've got plumbing for copper for, for black pipe for, you name it, I'VE got to scalore. But I'd still. I do have hammers, but I do use my nail gun because the application for a nail gun is so much smarter. There are many times where I would not want to go back to what the original tool was, which was you use the stone. So someone could theoretically say you should start with a stone, then move up to a stone with a strap on it that has a handle, and then move up to another one that becomes a hammer, and then goes all the way up to. Well, you're doing mining. So I think you should use a hydraulic or a piston. How do you know with someone. Today we're talking education. How do you know how far back to take somebody.

You're not taking anybody far back. There's a difference between doing, which is what you're describing with your nail gun or whatever, and learning.

My wife doesn't allow me on the roof anymore. Just seen.

Right. But learning. Learning is something that's important, that enhances you as a person. If you didn't know how to use a hammer, you probably, yeah, you could use a nail gun. Never know how to use a hammer. But I think it was very important for your own. For your own ability to use tools, to know how to use those tools. I know that when I, you know, I grew up in a. In a cabinet shop with my grandfather, who was a cabinet maker. And the first thing my grandfather made me do is do everything by hand before I could use electrical tools. You know, you need to do that. It doesn't mean that you're going to do it forever, but you need to learn that, learn those skills. It's part of making you into a better person. And, and, you know, some people may not believe in that, but this is my belief. And, And. And my grandmother ran the cabinet shop. She did the business side, and it was the same thing. Watching her do the books, watching you do that, that was my bit. I never went to business school, but that was. She taught me how. How important it was to keep track of things, to not spend more money, to look at the ledgers and all that. And she. She could do that. She pretty much could do this without the time with an abacus or something like that. And she was really good at that.

Yeah, yeah.

And you learn, You. You learn skills that are. That. Are that. That. That are not reproducible. You know, you. If you don't learn these skills, you know, before you run, you got to learn how to walk. And. And I think it's all this important. You're asking, you know, the question, what we're discussing right now. You're asking, how do you reproduce what I do? I don't know, but I can tell you what I do every day and how I organize myself and what I do and how I feel about things. And I believe I'm a product of that and many, many years of doing that. And that helps me. I don't know if it could help others, but I think that's an important piece of my process, my personal process. And I think that we all have different process.

The way you brought it up was an interesting dilemma because our parents would probably say, you should have learned to do it this way first. And then there's a generation learn to do it this way. And if we're going to take a young child and teach them to innovate, how far back do we go to say this is what you need to be able to do in order to be good at that?

I totally disagree with you here. It's not bringing people far back. I think the confusion here is more recent versus modern. Euclid is mathematics are as modern as any mathematics, and it is thousands of years old. It is modern, it's not recent. And we're in a culture where everybody pays attention to everything that's recent. I mean, the laws of gravity and Newton laws are modern. They, they, they're not recent.

Not recent. Yeah.

And some people say, I don't want to hear about it, I want to hear about quantum mechanics. Yes, you can, but quantum mechanics is not going to teach you the inverse square law or something like that. Let's not. Or give you an understanding that which is important to understand quantum mechanics. And so the, the, the. My point is that we should not confuse modern and recent.

That is brilliant. That I love that makes a huge distinction in the characteristic of what you're teaching, which I, that I appreciate. Yes, absolutely.

So that's, I think a very, something very important. And you know, there you take Plato and you bring him in our discussion that we're having now, you can name the difference. He's as modern as we are, but he may not be recent.

Yeah, absolutely. So I appreciate it in that language because I was trying to define, we were talking, I asked the question about how do you get someone to innovate? And you had brought up one of them was you believe everybody should learn to do mathematics, normal athletics, so you don't have to rely on a calculator. And I agree with you. Someone should be able to go to a store, go to a Place have to figure out lumber, have to out figure. Figure out the number of sewing needles that they need to purchase and say, you know, 10 times 3 times 4 divided by 6, you should be able to use. In my life, we learned foil first, inward, outward last. I think that's how it was. I just know it in my head. So I screwed that up royally.

I know that.

So that's interesting that you've defined it by modern and recent. Huh? That's cool. I hadn't thought about it in that way. So in. Do you do much educa. Educating, do you teach any of this?

I don't really teach. I mean, I teach. I mean, I work with the team and I don't feel like I'm teaching him. I may be a leader and we might learn from each other all the time, but we were. We work with extremely smart people and we have these kind of conversations, but usually focused on solving a problem, a technology problem, a technical problem, what algorithm should we use there, how should this work? And stuff like that. But it's the same idea. The fact that you could use OpenAI to write a sorting algorithm or something, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't know how to do it yourself, because that's part of becoming a true professional. It's the same thing. You have to be a craftsperson. You have to be in terms of software, I call it software craftsmanship. You have to have that pride in being a craftsperson that just say, oh, I need that algorithm. Let's ask OpenAI. Okay, here it is. And I see a lot of, you know, I interview people for jobs and stuff like that, and I'm amazed. I am asking him some very simple questions. He says, oh, let me type a couple of things. He says, I don't want you to type anything. We're sitting down here, there's a whiteboard. Tell me how you're going to do that. I said, well, I'm not used to that. I said, well, if you're not used to that, tell me what you're used to. He says, well, I'm used to giving problem, taking it home, using all the tools and then coming back a day later or two days later. Says, well, what I'm interested in is how you think about things. I want to know how you think about it. You know, there are a lot of anecdotes in jazz music. There are stories about Miles Davis, for example, telling his musicians on the bandstand, saying, guys, I pay you to pay something new every time we get on the bands And I don't care if it's bad. I want to hear something new. I don't want you to rehash the old thing. I want you to be creative on the bandstand. And. And I want you to challenge me. And, you know, as a musician, challenging Miles Davis is a big deal. But the bottom line is the same idea and the same concept is that, is that you want to be able to interact with people and have some mastery of your craft, not just be good at OpenAI.

You reference continually music. Is it the flute that you play? Is that what it is? What instruments you play?

I play a few instruments. I've been trained. You know, my mother was a professional violinist, concert violinist. And before I went to school, I had to practice every day, actually, the flute. But I do play the flute, the clarinet, the saxophone, a bunch of instruments. Music is a big part of my life, and it's a daily part of my life. But that's a different story. That's not what we're talking about here.

No, just because you reference it a few times and it's. I didn't. The learning, touching something with your hands, engaging. And the violin, I think I shared with you. I took violin classes my senior year in university, and I took it because I was told it was the most difficult instrument to play. And I said, I'm going to take the most difficult instrument and try to learn it so I could learn how difficult it is to learn something new. So I was doing it to humble my learning. And it's a hard instrument. It's extremely hard. So you've referenced it a few times already. So that's where I was wondering how the. How music fits into the way you innovate.

Well, good for you for. Good for you for doing that. That's really. That's really. That's really. That's kind of. My process is learning new things and making. Learning new things that are hard for me. It's, you know, Since I'm probably 5, 6, 7 years old, I've been practicing first thing in the day when I get up, I do two things. I. I was told by my mother to do some workout, meditation type of thing and to place and to practice music. And I couldn't go to school before that, so I had to wake up earlier than other kids and do that. I still do that every day, and I practice. I practice my instruments and et cetera, and I play first thing. And that's an important part of what. It's my form of active meditation. And it could last between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on how much time I have. But it's serious playing and serious practice and the way, you know, I'm an amateur when it comes to meeting, but I like to play at a professional level, and I play with professional. It's not my profession. I don't make a living with it, but I do play seriously, and I take it very seriously. I take it as seriously as anything I do. And so that's part of my process.

And it's interesting that your mom was supportive because I played the piano, and the person who was teaching me only wanted us to learn classical music. And I hated it because he wouldn't let me play anything that I wanted to play. I learned to play the saxophone. I really liked the saxophone, but my mom didn't like it was a reed instrument that would hurt my. Potentially make my teeth stick out. So I had challenges the other way.

My.

My mom was not as supportive. I'm not trying to pick on her, but she determined that music was not a part of my life.

Yeah, well, that's. You know, you're part of your karma, I guess. That's your life. I was lucky to grow up with a mom who was different. But she had a very hard life. I mean, she survived thanks to her violin. I don't know if I shared that, but she survived Auschwitz since she's an Auschwitz survivor. And she survived Auschwitz by being part of the women's orchestra as a violin player and as a singer at Auschwitz. And that saved her life. And for her, music was that important. And she was professional artist, and she passed that on to me. Her father was a cabinet baker, was a clarinetist and a band leader, and ran a Kletzmar band in Paris. And during the day he was a cabinet baker, and at night he ran a band, and on weekends we ran. And I learned very early in my life to make cabinets and to play gigs with my grandfather and replace whoever musician wasn't available for that gig, whether it was a bass player, a guitar player, or clarinet player in the gig. And I learned that, and that's how I grew up. So it was easy for me. Music was easy for me because it was part of my environment. I never thought about it. So when I got to the conservatory, I immediately went into the master's class and all that because I knew all this stuff, and it surprised people. And so that was. That was easy for me, and it's part of my life. But never, you know, one of the things my mom told me is be A scientist to make a living and be a musician for love. And I kept it that way. And one of my role models for that nowadays, I didn't know that at the time was Einstein, who continually played his violin every day and played with people every day. And the thing he cared the most every day was playing his violin. And that's where he got most of his ideas, as he said. And he always said, you know, I wish I had been good enough to be a professional violin player. But the second best thing was to be a physicist. So it was really. But, you know, that was Einstein. It was, you know, that was the kind of thing, you know, Einstein. Some of my favorite quotes from Einstein is that, you know, he used to say, the most beautiful experience we can have is the one of the mysterious, which is, you know, gets to the point of spirituality and how this is all connected together. We talked about. We talked about dogs, innovation, and I think we didn't get.

Yeah, let's hit on spirituality. We just. That's a good segue.

Go ahead.

What do you. You just said that the most beautiful experience of. What was it? Life is.

Well, I didn't say that. It's from the German, but it's the most. I think he said something like, the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. The one you don't fully understand is the same experience that you get if you. If you get outside of town, on top of mountain, and you look at the Milky Way Way and you look at the stars and the planets out there and it's clear. You look at that or in the middle of the ocean and you go, wow. You know, and. Or you look at a Hubble telescope picture and you go, wow, this is all out there. This is the mysterious. It doesn't matter if you understand the physics and what a black hole is or what quantum mechanics is. You look at it as. What is this all about? Is it mysterious? Right.

Yes. And so with you, you have this topic, spirituality. What does that mean? You've got dogs, innovation, spirituality. It's a jump. How does that tie into you?

I think I care about spirituality above everything. I mean, I. That connection to what is bigger than me is more important to me than anything else. And what brings me to that is that dogs ground me in nature and emotion. Innovation kind of propels me forward, and spirituality basically connects me to the infinite. The stuff that you see when you. When you look at. You look at the stars and the Milky Way, or look at the depth of the ocean and the mysterious. And that's where, you know, we started with the title of the talk, which is the Taoist proverb that says the. I think it's Taoist proverb that I borrowed for the title, which is the journey is the reward.

With your spirituality, do you do anything. I'm going to use this word in a very loose terms term. Do you use it differently? Let me give you. I'll give you a chance to think about that. When I was growing up, my father came one day, came home from a hypnosis conference. He was a dentist. And he lined the three of us up and he did some hypnosis on us. And my sisters got to a certain level. My father figured out that I got to seven out of eight. I just go down very deep. He was surprised. He went into the office, grabbed a needle and put a needle through my skin. And I didn't even feel it. And he only did that twice, I think, or I think it was twice. Then my father stopped doing it because there was too much liability for a dentist to be using hypnosis on his patients. He figured they would stop. But I have always maintained that I do my own sense of letting myself go. My father has done surgery on me with no meds. So have others had different types of procedures. And so when you use. So I'm going in one direction. When you say spirituality, is it omnius being? What's the word? I'm using the wrong word. Is it a higher being? Is it the universe? Is it energy? Is it control of your body? Is it control of your mind? When you gave this. You gave me spirituality, what did you mean?

I mean the mysterious. I mean, not putting words into it, not putting. Putting a concept, something that's beyond our words, that intuitively I understand that just like when you're playing Mozart or something, I get on your instrument. There's some mysterious connection that happens some and it's emotional. It's all sorts of things, but it comes from somewhere else. That, that magic, that when you look at the stars and all that, that feeling you have is a spiritual. There's more to me. There's more to me than me. And that's really the thing. It's not about using it to control yourself or control your health and all that. That's really important. But I think it's about understanding that our. Our understanding of the world is limited and limited by who we are, our intelligence. But there's more to it than just who we are. There's more to this universe than anything we can think about. I think there's a quote from Shakespeare that says there are more things in heaven and earth that can be contained in your field. Something I got in science and philosophy in one of Shakespeare's play, and it is really true for me is that there's more to it and more than feeling, understanding and all that. And it's intuitive and I can't express it directly through words.

Do you seek it out? Do you say, I want to go see something that's mistaken, mysterious or. Yesterday there was a sunset that was through one of our windows we've never seen before. Vibrant red. My wife called me out and we stood on our. This balcony side and it was amazing. Do you seek these things out? Do you go to places around the world? So you are in awe? Do you? Or is it just that you said you get up in the morning. Morning and you do your meditation. How are you filling this spirituality? I'm trying to get to a place. I'm not exactly sure if I'm saying it right.

For me it's about being here and now. And playing music is a big deal. Meditating is a big deal. All these, all this and our conversation is a big deal. I'm trying to be here now with you and be in tune with what you're saying and trying to be as responsive as I. And you know, I hadn't thought about a lot of these discussions that we had. As you said, we haven't had a pre discussion or anything else. But it's to me, that's really what it is. And when you look. If I look at the sunset, it's here now. Now I'm having a beautiful sunset here. At the same time I can see out of my window and it's beautiful. But it's being here now. But it's those moments and the mysterious, et cetera. And there's a lot of things that it's hard to express through words and I don't know how to do that. Maybe I'm not good enough with words.

No, no, no. It has nothing to do with words. I'm. I think I shared. We. We've done over 400 interviews. I try to ask the question the same way. You're the here and now. I have no settings on any of my phones. None of. They do not vibrate, they do not ring. So I never know if someone calls me unless I'm. I'm looking at the phone. I don't see text messages. I am present all the time. It's. That's what I'd like to be. So I'M present with you. That is one way of looking at the. This spirituality, which is an interesting one. I would not have defined it that way. So I appreciate that you said it and I highlight it and I put lines underneath it. And I'm saying, okay, that's an interesting way of looking at this sense of mysterious. Because I would never have drawn that conclusion. Mysterious is here and now. So you are answering it. You're just my job. My role, because I'm here to learn from you, is to figure out what are those pieces. So one of them is here and now. If I was to say to you, do you travel a lot? Do you go to places that are unique? Do you meet people? Are you the type of person who strikes up a conversation in a restaurant or on a plane? Are. I mean, there's gotta be something inherently who you are that allows mysterious to enter into your life.

Look, I traveled a lot. I'm an immigrant to America. I came here without a work permit. Then I traveled a lot building businesses and all that. At this point, I'm extremely focused on where I am and what I do day to day here and now. I'm not interested in going places and finding and searching for things that I might find there, because I think it's all here and now. It's right here. And I'm lucky to have things that work for me, like music, like meditation, like surfing, like sailing. All things that I can do from my house here, which are really important to me, more important to me than traveling a lot. I've done that. I've been there. That's not that important to me. I'm not trying to go places. I'm not trying. It's. That's not what. What is my focus. My focus is really in my life. I love the life I am. I love Santa Cruz where I live. It's a fantastic place. And out of all the places I've been to and I lived at, it's my favorite place. And I'm very lucky to be able to live here in Santa Cruz on the harbor, nice little harbor, and see boats coming in and out all the time and being able to. To buy fresh fish from the fishing fleet and be able to go out on the ocean, see whales, orcas, and great white sharks if I want every day. And it's a fantastic life.

It's interesting the way you kind of framed it. I lived in Hong Kong for a decade, and that place is not longer there the way it was. And there are pieces of me that I would love to have in my life. I live in upstate New York now and it's a completely different lifestyle. So there are no oceans, there's no orcas, there's no whales. It's just a different setting. But that's interesting the way you've kind of framed that so with your journey.

You know, I grew up in Paris and so, you know, I've spent 17 years of my life in Paris and so Paris is probably the most beautiful city in the world. But I never saw that side of the city because we were in a very blue collar place. We were, you know, cabinet shop and we work for, we installed furniture in, in the better part of the city. But I never, you know, it's really an interesting experience for me. When we built successful businesses, I would travel with some of our people. We'd go to Paris and says, oh, let's go where you grew up. And I said, yeah, let's do that. And they go there. Oh my God. You grew up there. Oh, Jesus. Looks like a not very safe place. I said, no, it was fine. That's where I grew up. But that wasn't. I never saw the good part of the city in that respect. And later I did.

Yes, of course.

And later I said, ah, that was another part of the city. But I have very little interest. I mean, I know Paris in and out, I know my history, I know the streets and all that, but it doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is where I am now. And, and that's really fine. That's really important to me. And you know, I'm very lucky to have a lifestyle where I don't need to switch houses, be one day in Hawaii, one day in Lake Tahoe, one day in Santa Cruz, one day in Hong Kong, one day somewhere else and try to get something from that. I understand how we can learn from that, but that's not something, something that I'm attracted to or is important to me, actually, it is not.

So your journey on the last one you started on, how do you define a journey for you? What is your messaging on journey?

My journey starts fresh every day. And every day is, is a new day. I can't do anything about yesterday, but I certainly can do something about today and what is today and what my relationships are today and how I'm going to approach today and what music I'm going to play today and what, you know, if I go surf, what I'm going to do on the ocean and if, you know, whatever it is. And of course work is very important for Me, I spent where you would could work, which is a passion for me. So I'm at it every day. I don't think about separating work from personal stuff and all that. I think it's all a continuum and if you have to separate work, which some people do, I mean, depending what job you do, then it's really hard because you end up living separate lives. I'm very lucky that I love what I do and it's part of what I do and I enjoy it. And I'm very much like working with my teams and creating, inventing and making things better and creating things that hopefully will help improve people's life just a little bit, but in a, in a measurable way. Not just by, you know, throwing money at things or, or telling people that I, you know, there's grand ideas, I'm going to spend billions of dollars getting vaccines out or something like that. Really important, but stuff that, that I don't really control. I like to, to, to build, to build innovation and progress with my teams that really make a difference in people's lives directly.

Do you know other people who have what you have.

Have what I have?

You just outlined this getting up every day, having your place, having your local life. You have the meditation, the music, the appreciation, everything around you, the team. Do you know people who have that?

Yeah, I know people in maybe around us in Santa Cruz who enjoy surfing waves and doing things. I mean, where we have a lot of lot in common, although they're not in technology maybe, but we have a lot in common in that way of life. I think my way of life is very similar to people who actually do things as opposed to people who are pundits. I think I'm much more closer to people who actually do do things every day, like the plumber or the person who's going to fix somebody's heating system or the cabinet maker. I think that my relationship is mostly with that group of people and I think that that's what's not difficult to replace with AI. Right. As you can't call AI to fix your toilet or. To build you a nice looking table.

I'm the one, by the way, who fixes the toilet. So.

Great. Good for you because you know how to do these things. Most people don't and they have to call someone and it's a great opportunity. And actually we're going to have a renaissance of people who know how to do things because most people have forgotten how to do anything. They don't know how to fix their car, they don't know how to, you know, they. It's fascinating, you know, when we work on a car or something like that, and I ask people, well, you know, what is a carburetor? We don't need to know what a carburetor is because we have a. We have an electric car. And when the electric car's control system goes down, say, oh, I don't know what to do now. And yes, you're right. You can't fix it.

You know, it's. It's definitely a different world. I. I have two boys, and neither one of them really took up the handy side of what I do. And it's.

I.

When we got new toilets, I replaced all the toilets. When the roofing needs to be. Shingles need to be replaced. Not the whole roof. I can't do a full roof or something need to be cut in the backyard. And you need chainsaw. Yeah, that was me. So. But I had a grandfather who came from Belarusian. Russian. He was Russian. He came over, he started a bungalow colony. I was too short to be a police officer in New York City, so started a bungalow colony up in Springland, New York, which is outside of Ellenville and the Catskills. And my father was handy. So the combination. I just learned how to pick up a tool.

Well, you know, it's really, really interesting because what you describe is I always tell people I was very lucky not to grew up with wealthy and, well, you know, academically educated people, but people who did things and learned things, things, et cetera. And that was way more important to me. When I see a lot of people who grow out in very privileged environments, et cetera, they don't know how to do anything. They already always have people doing things for them or they don't learn things. And I think that was a privilege, and it's kind of a reverse curse for some people. You think that, oh, you grew up in a very privileged environment, therefore things are great, but not necessarily. And that's really what you describe. Your upbringing, et cetera, is very important. It taught you how to do a lot of things. And because you're doing so much better, probably economically, than your predecessors in your family, which is my case, it's very easy to get to fall into the trap of protecting our kids against that, against learning things, learning skills, and going through the process we've been going, which is part of the challenge, I think, with parents and how to pass on that kind of spirituality to. To kids, which is, you know, the. The number one thing spiritually is to know how to do things with. You know, there's old, old, old saying that says that idle hands make the devil's work. And I'm very. Do the devil's work. Maybe that's how it goes. And, and, and I'm very. Making things. With yourself, with your hands. There's a lot of times that people don't know how to do. A lot of high tech people have no idea. They can play with a keyboard, they can do a lot of things, but they can't make anything. And it's like consuming music versus making music, playing music is a big difference. And it's the same thing about consuming the rest of the world. And I think that that's part of the spiritual, the modern spiritual thing, which is to basically make things as opposed to consume things.

It's interesting you put that in the spiritual side because I often will say to people when I take on a project, whether it be hanging drywall, building a room, doing stonework, I disappear into it and I can, I can spend 6 hours, 8 hours, non stop, do not stop. But I don't think about anything else. I am in the moment doing that and I disappear into it and I. That is a pleasure for me. To be able to take a chainsaw up two stories and start trimming a tree. Because you have to be focused. You could hurt yourself. I'm. I have full gear and I'm just there. So it's interesting you put that into spirituality. I would not have done that until you've said it now, but I disappear there. There's like, I'm just there. That's it.

I agree with you. I completely agree. You know, take a, take the example of food. I mean, cooking, cooking. You can get into cooking, the smells, and it becomes a spiritual experience. Experience. It becomes so interesting when you're, you're actually doing that in your own kitchen rather than calling doordash and ordering food or going to a restaurant, which could be a great experience. But the concept of making your food is something that a lot of people don't know how to do. I mean, you know, it's really very interesting. It's the basics. It's the 101. It's no different than learning your multiple application tables or something like that. A lot of kids, etcetera, don't know how to do that.

So how do you bring that back? Well, a society that has grown to where many western cultures are, these things are no longer passed on and the kids don't want them. I mean, you've heard about these parents who grow, build a business and their kids. I don't want anything to do with the real estate. I just sell it and we'll take care of the money. A lot of kids, this whole generation. And I'm not picking on a generation. So I'm not trying to be negative in this regard, but there are enough people who their lives in a first world country, I hate to use that term also they don't have those challenges the same way there is somebody to do that. There is a tool to, to do that. It's inexpensive to do that.

Yeah, well, you know, that's, well that takes me to, I mean outside of spirituality, I mean we're talking about, well think about where a lot of people are thinking about AI and all that. And oh geez, we're going to replace all these jobs that, you know, who knew? Who needs an Uber driver because we're going to have self driving car cars and self driving taxis. Who needs people working on an Amazon warehouse because we're going to have robots doing it all. Who needs people at McDonald's or Baskin Robbins scooping ice cream because a machine can do it and all that. The challenge with all of this is that in the workforce and with work, we all had to take, not all of us, but I did jobs that allowed us to get started and allow people to get started. If you replace all these jobs, it says they're no good. We're going to replace them with robots. I mean, how is that society going to evolve with people not doing, learning, having jobs? And I think that's part of also the thinking that needs to happen is what do we want? Do we want to enhance people's life or do we want to basically park people in 40, 50% unemployment and getting checks for doing nothing if necessary or whatever it is? I mean, where is that this idea of using robots and AI to replace people? I think it's about enhancing what we do. And it has to be, it can't just be replacing people. And I think that doing and making things, et cetera, is really part of humanity. It's this thing about idle hands do the devil's work. I think it's an old saying.

I just made a list of some of the jobs that I had when I was younger. I was a waiter. I worked at U Haul driving trucks between locations. I worked at McDonald's flipping burgers. I worked in a garden shop tagging hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of trees. I was six foot tall, I'm now six foot two trying to tag these tiny Trees. My back hurt after a day. I did telephone soliciting. I did all that while I was in high school. And so, you know, I. A lot of these jobs would be replaced that I just listed most of.

Them because the first thing that, that robots and AI want to replace is the, the simple stuff. But the simple stuff is where you want people to get started. Just like. And so how do we train people to be part of the workforce? You know, it's the same thing with what happened with the pandemic with, you know, people who are only doing remote work and never get to meet other people face to face and understand, you know, what the environment is for working together with others. It's a big hole. And it's really important to understand that there's more to things than what happens through electrons and through digital stuff and that it's really important to provide the opportunity. And that goes back to the idea of equity and inclusion, et cetera. Because the people who will suffer the most from all these opportunities, these entry level opportunities disappear, are the people who are the less privileged in society because that's all they can get initially. They're not going to go to college or they may not, they might quit high school and all that. You take that away and you create more inequity in the society that's ever been. And so that's part of, I think the conversation we were starting to have on AI is the guardrails and what happens with inclusion, equity.

Even if you chuck off those words, you know that when you put your hands over your head and you kind of close your eyes and try and figure something out, that's what I'm doing right now. I'm asking myself for the jobs that I had. Probably the jobs and the things that you did. You worked in your grandfather's carpentry and you helped him with those type of things. So you obviously knew what a saw was and you knew how to be able to use a vise and you were able to use a file.

Yeah.

What, what happens? I'm trying to solve a challenge here.

How do we, how do we.

You, you can't ask these things to stay. Like, you can't say you can't have that anymore. And this, we're not even talking AI, but you can't have that be done anymore. But it has to be done by a kid. How do you create that first rung of the ladder if the rung of the ladder is just theoretically too expensive to maintain? It's too antiquated to you. I Don't even know how to frame it. But how do we give them generation, how do we give a nine year old or a four year old today the opportunity to have, you know, being a waiter, being u haul, being McDonald's, being garden, being telephone soliciting and working in hospitals. How do you give that to a kid who's going to be in high school in a decade?

Well, you have, you basically have to evolve the educational system to understand that learning how to cook should be part of the curriculum, that learning how to manage finances should be part of the curriculum, that learning the rules of society should be part of the curriculum. And doing things, maybe more important should be part of the curriculum. Kids should learn how to, how to put together and you know, you could start with Legos and then you can continue with others. But I think our curriculum and the way we teach kids has to evolve to understand that and pass that to the kids. It's not that complicated. But I think it, I don't think.

Educators, and I'm being very broad here, I don't think educators are solving for another challenge. Graduate from school being able to do these things, but to think laterally because you're, this is lateral thinking, this is saying you have to teach them this because in 8 years or 10 years being able to have a shop class class, because when we grew up, I'm assuming you had it, there was a shop class, being able to do that is fundamentally a part of being an innovator. I don't think they, I, I, I highly doubt the educational system can bring that to bear.

Well, yeah, we need to reinvent educational systems just like everything else. We can't say the educational system system is going to now be open AI. I mean, I understand that you can learn a lot through OpenAI, but we have to at the same time as OpenAI becomes prevalent because you're not going to stop that it actually could be a good thing. You gotta put an emphasis of doing and making and doing and making is really an important part of what we need the educational system to be. As much as OpenAI and using modern tools and learning the multiplication tables and all that. I think that's extremely important. And I think that when we talk about education, I think that's really important. And people are not thinking that way, they're thinking about teaching stuff like whatever, history and all that really important. But learning how to make things is maybe at least as important. And a lot of kids, and you know, the unfortunate part of this is that the less the privileged kids are the less they will get that opportunity. If you look at a kid who's growing up without parents and in a very poor environment, maybe single mother or something, I got in an underprivileged neighborhood, they get no opportunity and I'll get no opportunity. If we don't have a way to present something to them, it's going to be really hard. And I think that that's how inequities go forward. And actually the differences are not erased, it gets worse. And that's not progress. To me, progress is the opportunity that's given to people. Not the assurance, but the opportunity is making sure that people have an opportunity to actually be okay. In a, in a modern society that's dominated by tools like artificial intelligence and.

Others, you, the way the conversation is right now, and because of your background, you'd appreciate this. 72 to 79% of the world's population lives under €9 or US$10 a day. So they've been able to ride the wave of electronics and machinery. But we might see a decline for the Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Malaysia, the Estonia. Not Estonia, but I would say go down to some of the African countries, Botswana, Zambia, they might not have that same evolutionary prospect. And the way you're describing it, not saying, saying that you're being very specific in that way, but if you have 1.4 billion people in India and their pathway was to learn something that gets them to someplace, that gets them to someplace. And now that is being replaced by artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, 3D printing, sensor tech in linear form as an integrated whole system, then that challenge becomes exacerbated. I don't know.

Well, here's an interesting thing. You're absolutely right. There was a time where people say that most people would have a computer. That didn't happen. But what has happened is that most people on the planet, not all people, a large part of the people in the planet, billions of them, have a camera phone today which is capable to share visuals, pictures, videos, messages with anybody on the planet and communicate with anyone. I think that's a great equalizer and I'm very proud to have been part of that, that change and that evolution of the system. And I think that is a fantastic opportunity for people to learn new things with new tools that'll work on their camera phone. I'll give you an example. Today, learning a language that's foreign to you on a camera phone is very easy. You use something like duolingo and everybody can use duolingo. And in fact, you know, if you want to learn Korean or you, like, you can actually use duolingo. And that tool is there for most people on the planet, potentially. You could argue about, you know, the.

Duolingo allows the free service. So yes, there is enough that they can take it.

With or without the free service. I mean.

But is that maker, Is that your maker side doing and making?

Well, yeah, I mean, you're learning something, you're creating something. You're learning how to communicate with 60. If you learn Korean with 60 million people in their language, it's better than traveling there and not speaking the language. And so. So my point is, in the same way, duolingo will teach you mathematics and will teach you music. And if you talk to duolingo guys, they will tell you that language, music, and mathematics are really the big applications of their AI system and how they can help people learn around the world. And in fact, it turns out that more kids are learning languages now with duolingo than they are in school. Schools.

Yes.

And that's a fantastic application of the solution. And because everybody has a smartphone in their hands, and so you can generalize that to, you know, learning how to. Which you could do today, you could actually go through a video and watch a video for free on your smartphone that'll teach you how to fix your sink and you learn how to do something because you may not have learned. So there are tools today, and thanks to progress, there are tools that bring such know how for making and doing things to most people. And I think that it's a fantastic opportunity to do things. I mean, you know, if someone plays golf, they can find a million videos to how to fix their golf swing. If people want to learn how to surf, they can find a zillion videos to teach them how to surf. And so people don't know how to fish. They can actually find a zillion videos that'll teach them how to fix. So I think that that is the power of progress and putting that power in the hands of everybody through imaging, through videos, through communication, I think that's very powerful. I do agree with you.

So it's interesting you went from we are not doing enough of the doing, making side, and that that was a big challenge to young kids today. And now you're flipping saying, I did 1,000 consecutive days on duolingo, you know, I know that you can use those services. The challenge becomes, is that the all of those other things that you and I or you were mentioning that was important for people to thrive with, is that the same. Do you feel that that equation is there. Do you feel that the young kids are missing out on it as you had described earlier? You understand what I'm asking?

So yeah, I totally understand. I think that I see a lot of young kids who are lost and another lot, maybe even bigger one who are really smart about using systems like Duolingo and maybe that's the, you know, I work with 20 something year old young engineers. That's a lot of the. I have all age groups in my team, but I have some young, young guys and gals, I mean boys and girls, as I say, who are in their 20s, who are brilliant and I'm impressed all the time and how much they use these tools and how much they learn and how they're learning another language, they're learning how to play chess with chess.com or something like that.

They're not as you had said, they're not learning the math and they're not learning the, the they're putting in the toilet and they're missing that side. So are you now capitulating? Are you now going back and forth saying well, they are or they're not?

No, not at all. I mean they're. I've seen a lot of these guys saying, you know, I want to fix my sink, let's watch a video and figure out how to do that. So I think they know the tools and they know how to do things and I think then they become passionate about something like that. I think that group is fine. It is very educated group, it's very smart group. These are not, these are not your average kids. I think I'm more concerned about the kids who don't truly have these opportunities and, and the incentive in very underprivileged areas. And that's most of the kids, most of the kids that don't have that adult supervision of some sort. I don't know, that's sometimes a contradiction in terms. But we don't have that reinforcement learning and, and only rely on that self supervised learning without much foundation, but that hopefully some of it can be bridged with the fact that everybody has in their hands a smartphone and they get smarter about it. At the end of the day, you can't fix all the world problems, but you can hope that, that you can bring enough positives to have a positive impact, double positive, I guess on as many people as possible. And you know, we were talking about sleep and how sleep impacts and impacts everybody on the planet and that how it's a third of people's lives and why, why I'm Doing that is because I think that we can improve people's sleep and improve their lives without much intervention. And that research, that advancement that we've been working with my company for the last decade is really important to me.

I've been lucky. I've always had good sleep. So. Yes, look, I appreciate the. The conversation today.

You.

You've nailed. We've covered a lot of different topics. I know that you were a little concerned that we wouldn't be able to go in all different directions. How do you feel? Did we do okay?

I love these discussions. I love it. I mean, I could go on for a whole night. I mean.

Well, I mean, if you had to add another topic, I'm good. Is there one that's on top of mine right now? What's the thing that you're thinking about?

I think we talked about a lot of different angles and different matters, but we talked about how kids learn and how dogs learn, and when we compare children's learning to AI, reinforcement learning, and. And self supervisor, and we get lots of valuable insights. But there's a bit of magic in how kids learn, and we have to remember that. And AI will mimic that by throwing more power at it, and that's what happens. But the magic doesn't go away, and the magic of life doesn't go away. And I think it's part of the conversations we had is the mysteries of life don't get solved with AI or with technology. I think technology gives us a better understanding of certain things. But it's a bit. We talk about Einstein, but quantum mechanics talked about a lot of probability. And Einstein said in German, God wilfeld nicht, which means that God doesn't play dice. And what he meant by that is that basically we only use all these theories and these explanations because we don't understand better and we don't have a better model for what we have. And that goes on and on and on for everything that people talk about. Give you an example. For example, you talk about, you know, we all talk about, you know, the model of the universe, you know, Big Bang and Big Bang and everything expanded, and this is our stars. But then people said, well, what was before Big Bang? And well, before and after means nothing because, you know, the concept of space time is. But then people say, well, maybe things contract and disappear, and there's been an infinite number of Big Bangs over the time, and we're just part of one. Who knows? But my point is that that's.

That's a huge topic, the Big Bang. And where does that Come from. That's a. That's a whole different animal of solution generation.

Well, that's part of the mysteries, right? As we talk about the mysterious. Right. And when you look at the stars, you see the mixed areas when you look at. You know, I remember when I was probably 10 years old, I got a microscope and my mother took her finger and poked her finger. That was soon. And put a piece of blood in front of my microscope. And I saw all that moving. I said, oh my God. And I was impressed by two things. Number one, what I saw and the second thing, that my mom would poke herself to get the blood out. And that get me to understand two different things that are very different. But whether it's the infinitely small or the infinitely big, the universe or the infinitely small, the particle level thing, it's the same thing. There's always something much deeper in it and there's never limits to it. And I think that's part of the mysterious. And what we talk about, spirituality, I think it ties it all together.

We did an interview on the other. We have two podcasts. Here is the Age of Infinite, which is. We had a guy on by the name of Howard Bloom, and he talked about all of this. The beginning of time, the history of time, the expanding into time. Rough conversation. Not rough in the sense that you have to really stretch your mind to be able to understand the theoretical of what you just explored. And I. I don't know sometimes if these are exercises in futility. Meaning. Okay, we don't. Will we find an answer to this in our lifetime? Probably not. If we're. If we're expanding at 70,000 kilometers per hour in our solar system, what are we expanding into? And if we came from the Big Bang, what came from before the Big Bang? That sounds like those mysterious conversations are something that you like, because there maybe is no answer. Or the discussion about if there is a God or not a God or who's God. Are those conversations when you think about the models of the universe and kids and dogs and. And reinforced learning, are those the pieces that drive your fun when it comes to spirituality? The journey.

Oh yeah. And I'll bring it back to Dog. You know, dog is God spelled backwards. And just as simple as that.

I had never thought of that. I had never. That is so great. That is so great.

I love that.

I never, never thought of that. And it's right in front of you, so it's. You could tell how simple I. I.

Am not about it before we talked about it, but I mean, it's The. It's the same thing. I mean, I just.

You had thought about it or had not?

No, I had not. I mean. Oh, really?

You just did it now?

Yeah. I mean, God. God, I mean, same word. That's. The English language wouldn't be true. Right?

In others, but.

Yeah. It wouldn't be true in French, but in the English language it's absolutely true. And I really believe that that's kind of symbolic. In our conversation, there is never an end to knowledge. There's an end to understanding. And I don't believe there's an end to the universe and to life or whatever it is. And I think that the end of it is really here and now. It's that presence and that ties it all together. And. And some people have names for it and whatever it is, but to me, dog, God and all that is the same thing.

I love it. And to me, being present is something that people today have lost. It's. It's an art. They're watching something, doing something else. They've got all of these. I'm not saying just contraptions. Even when they're alone, they're not alone. They're. They're. There's something. There's something they're bringing with them. And it's not easy to. I don't know. I don't know if we're taught peace in. In certain cultures, like the monks or certain societies teach that peace. That is not. That's not a skill set that today is relished or passed on. I think when someone. I've had friends who say, well, I meditate every day. And I say, okay, so what do you do? I'd just like to find Elvis. I'd like to learn from you. And they say, well, what I do is I get in position and my spiritual mantra, position and say, well, how long do you do it? And, oh, you know, sometimes it's five minutes, sometimes it's seven minutes. And I'm thinking to myself, five minutes when. Five minutes, really. When I do. I do my laying down. I hate sitting up. I think it's a waste. It doesn't do anything for me. I don't need to get into a back position. And I lay down. And Normally it's between 20 minutes to an hour. And just relax. Clear. Clear the brain, let it pass. But we don't. That's. That's something that took practice, but it's something that is also lost being in the present. And, you know, this whole dog thing, I'm still laughing at it. That is so Perfect.

Well, you know, there's, there's, there's whole bunch of bills, people who say, you know, you have to sit down, focus on your breath and do that for 20 minutes. Well, little bing bell is going ding, ding. You have to recite, you're finished. And you know, fine. And then there's people, and there's plenty of people doing that. And then there's people. There was Krishnamurti who said, that's silly, you should just walk and use the walking, which is a natural human thing, and do that. And then we all have different methodologies of finding ourselves. You know, part of mine is important to me is my music and my relationships with others. But playing music for me is my form of meditation. When I get out of playing music, I feel rejuvenated. And many times I solve some technical problems, personal problems, whatever, without even thinking about them. And it's very similar to the experience that you described by laying down and clearing your mind. It's the same idea, and we all have a different process.

Yeah, no, and I understand that. It's just interesting that our society is kind of dictated that you have to lay down or you have to sit in a certain position. I was on an elevator one day in Hong Kong and this woman says, you have to tie your head to your heart, your heart to your head, your head to your heart, your heart to your head. I was like, what are you talking about? And she was an expert in meditation. And I one day I walked up to her and I said, you say you need to feel with your heart. Can you tell me if you can actually feel your heart? I mean, you can feel your chest, you can feel the muscles, but can you feel your heart? Well, I can hear beating. I know I'm asking you right now, can you feel your heart? I said, however, I don't feel my heart. I can feel my chest, but I don't. But where I feel is I feel in my arms. If something's right, it goes down my arms, up and down my arms. If it's wrong, I could go up and down my arms. But I feel in my arms. That's my sensation. And I said, so head, heart, heart, head. I mean, we all have our different ways of looking at things. She could not grasp that, but she taught meditation and self centeredness and all of these things. We all have our own different unique way of approaching it. So music for you works. And that's. I don't have music in that way. I love to dance. When I dance, I'm gone hours. But I don't have music in that same sense of being able to play it, which I sometimes wish I could.

Well, I think music. To experience that in music, it takes some skills and the love of music. Music. And so it's very different. There's. People have different motivations to play music and all that, but it doesn't matter. What it is is that ability to be here and now. And as you describe, when you. When you build something with your hands and you're really focused on it, that's a blessing. A lot of people can't do that. That's something that through the years you've been doing somehow and you've learned how to focus. That is the ultimate meditation, is that focus. And, you know, the here and now, I mean, that's really what it's about. And most people. Most people don't experience that. And you're very, I think, fortunate if you can't experience that.

Well, even these interviews, which I shared with you, the number that if you. So there's a list of 10 things that the interview is about. Number one. Number one on that list is I want to learn from this person. So if I'm going to make the commitment to learn from this person, I'm going to be in the present. I'm going to be here and now. And I do write, you saw. I mean, I have take. I've taken so far how many pages. I'm on page 19 of notes.

And.

That is. That is one of those experiences, if you want to call it meditative and spiritual, is that I get to have individuals like yourself where I get to find out or hear how they think, what makes them tick, what makes them feel good, bad, sad and different. Challenged, opportunistic. And to me, this is also one of those places where I kind of disappear.

And you know, back to you is that this conversation is as interesting to me as probably it is to you because, you know, it triggers stuff. I mean, this is not something I've been thinking. I haven't been thinking about, what are we going to talk about? I've talked about a bunch of topics and I figure out, you know, I'm a good improviser and I like to be actually triggered by new thoughts and new questions because that allows me to go forward. If I just write everything down and I have a plan, then it's much more stale and it doesn't make sense. So I really enjoy our conversation because, you know, we went places and I think it's very helpful. I mean, dog and God came out of it.

I love it. I'll add another layer on. People when they want to do the podcast, are very surprised that we turn the camera off. And like I shared with you, people are going to listen to this, are not going to be able to see us. They're going to be on their phone, they're going to be walking, they're going to be in their car, they're going to be traveling someplace, and they're going to be playing it as a podcast. If you saw my face, you would not have replied the same way in which you've done, because we have no camera on. It's like they are learning the same at the same time. I am and you are. There's no cues. We, we all don't have cues. We're all going off language, which enables it to be, I believe, much more fascinating because I guarantee you, you've looked out your window, you've written, maybe wrote. Written something down. You kind of looked at your wife who was in the background doing some dishes, and all of that was happening, but you were able to. To do it in your own terms.

Yeah. And, you know, you bring that back to words and sentences and grammar and all that, and you're bringing that back to the power of large language models. I mean, basically how you and I are operating, or have been operating for a little over two hours is with words mostly. I mean, there's intonation, et cetera, which large language models don't take into account yet, but it is words. And it is that compilation of all these words, these sentences, and the crunching of it all together with an accumulation of thousands of years of written text and information that makes the power of those large language models. And they never see you. They never have any sensorial. Sensorial experience beyond that of words, really. And this is why they're so powerful. And, you know, there is school of people says, well, they're not really close to being super powerful because they don't have all that other. All the other pieces of like the visuals, et cetera, and the sensing that. And really the. What we just proved is you can have a pretty deep conversation without ever using those and talk about a lot of stuff. And I think that that speaks to the power of large language models and what's going on and why they're so important and also why we need to be aware of that.

So I'm going to take it another level deeper. It's not the large. It's a large learning language model. It does not do the correlations we did like I jumped to my working for U haul or for McDonald's or those. It can't make those theoretical jumps. But the skill that is lost when I'm watching other people use them is the ability to ask questions. But you watch how they use the tools and it's almost as if a person with a hammer who doesn't know how to handle hit a nail. And that's a skill set that needs to be refined.

Yeah, well, that's what people call prompt engineering. And the idea that you can become much more sophisticated with prompts and know all the ways to use a large language model. But make no mistake, these large language models are able to more and more equipment, including the latest OpenAI has some ability to reason and they will understand psychology much better.

No, they do. I toss in constantly. You're acting from a psychological, sociological, economic perspective. I even I showed you the book that I had written Paid to Think. It's in chat and I say use Paid to Think to be able to identify the following. And then what I'd like you to do is tell me from a psychological, sociological perspective, how would that fall into play? And because I know the book well enough, it took 12 years to write, I know that what it's gone through in the process. And it is fascinating how it will be able to understand the psychological and sociological applications to the content of the question I'm asking using the tools that I've given it. Fascinating. Just beyond amazing how at this point in time it knows me so well that even on my it'll answer me. David, what do you think about this? And it's learned enough in memory that it can have a conversation like I could with a person down the street. The only thing is, person down the street would have taken five hours to answer that question. And it did it in, you know, 16 seconds.

And so the question, for example, is like a whole conversation right now. Will it translate into something that will train OpenAI latest model or not? And what will we let happen for training these models? And what are the limits in what we're going to do and how we're going to do it? That ties back to our conversations that we had now. Can these large language models become spiritual and emotional given the fact that we've talked a lot about spirituality and emotion and these large language models can be trained to have decent conversations around the subject and will that spoof them as being spiritual or emotional? I mean, these are all fascinating questions. And I think, I think it's weird we could spend all night talking about.

That It's a challenge that we're going to have to address because it can fake it and it can make you believe that it is actually understanding everything. But I have said to people, okay, you've worked for eight hours in front of your computer. Has your computer once said to you, you know, you've been working too long, you probably need some sleep. You have a meeting tomorrow morning and you haven't eaten, so stop working, Just stop working and go do this. It doesn't. It probably in the future can identify how fast you respond to something, how fast you type, how fast you talk. It will be able to understand intonations, speed of delivery, the clarity of questions being asked, and show a degradation. But it's not helping you. It's just doing the work.

Well, I mean, there's nothing new to that. I mean, I remember probably 30 years ago, we created a system that looked at how you type your. You type at the computer and could recognize you by just looking at the frequency of letters and how. What were your patterns? So, you know, a lot of this stuff exists. And you can. You can have a watcher system on your computer that tells you every hour to get up and do 20 squats or something. I mean, that happens. My dog does that for me, says, hey, let's go play. Right, Right.

The dog is smarter than the AI knows. Exactly.

You could smell it, but it's not. It's hardly AI to do. Those are. But the point is that that's very helpful. If someone is helping people get healthier and sit down, less time and move, I think that's very helpful. Whether it's called AI or not, it doesn't matter. It's helpful stuff. People that, you know, part of what we learn when we look at sleep is that how active we are during the day will have a huge impact on how you will sleep. What you ate during the day will have a huge impact. What you drank, if you drank alcohol, whatever it is, will have a huge impact on your sleep. And again the next day, the quality of your sleep, how you slept, and all sorts of metrics that we have for that, about 30 metrics will have a huge impact on your performance both emotionally, physically, during the next day. And that carries on from day to day, et cetera, et cetera. So that's where AI is very helpful, because AI can do that. And also, if there's a singularity in your life, something goes wrong or whatever, someone gets, I don't know, some heart attack or a stroke. And if you have an ongoing recording for Example of their a month of nights of sleep of them in high fidelity. And you have the AI tools to do it. You can retrospectively look at what happened and was there a change in everything? You could measure in eight nights of sleep objectively and point out to micro differences or micro changes or major changes that could have helped create, predict that. And if you have enough people who had such an issue, imagine monitoring hundreds of thousands of people every night or millions and imagine doing that. And if you have enough people with whom you could do that retrospective work, you can actually perhaps have the AI through machine learning, et cetera, and through a combination of self supervised learning. And you could actually find some ways to avoid such a, such a singularity for others using that retrospective approach to things. So there's a lot we can do there and that's the useful AI as opposed to the one that's not so useful.

Someone might argue that if we just went back 50 years ago and you just the night became dark, you didn't or 100 and it was dark out, you went to sleep and you didn't have the complexity of the lives that we have today and the challenges that individuals have. I think the number is one third of all individuals. I'm going to use the US because they know this data. One third of the individuals earning $250,000 or more are living paycheck to paycheck. I mean they're on, they're one paycheck away from losing their home or having all different challenges. So the complexity of our lives around us, I, I believe that the data is valuable. But we put data in front of people. When it comes to food, we come how much you should consume and how often you should consume it. We put information in front of people for their economics. So when you save, when you don't save, how to invest, how not to invest. We put information in front of the food title, the alcohol. And yet individuals, even with the data, don't tend to make those transitions. Why sleep is going to be different? Why will sleep be different?

Well, sleep is different because we all sleep and we all have to sleep. And pretty early on we realize that if we're sleep deprived, we don't do well. And a lot of people are interested in improving their sleep. If they're not interested, there's not much we can do. But the concept of you should sleep when the sun goes down and wake up when the sun goes up, I think that's a matter of opinion and it's not objective. And in fact, if you look at the history of humans. We have night owls and we have larks and, and night owls tend to work better at night and larks tend to work wake up with the sun. And genetically and epigenetically that evolves from how society was. For example, if we were cave people and there were saber toothed tigers roaring outside the cave, you'd have people all night watching sentry and trying to protect the community. And some people would sleep and some people would not sleep. If you go, if you get back to all the literature about sleep, as we said in the concept of an eight hour nights of sleep on interrupted nights of sleep is a mythical concept because humans used to sleep in two shifts, first sleep and second sleep. It was cold. And in fact if you look at all the literature pre industrial revolution, it turns out that people would sleep in two shifts. And in the industrial revolution they invented the three square meals because they wanted people to eat something at 6am, eat something at 2pm and eat something at 6pm and then go to sleep and go back into the factory and then if possible sleep, you know, six to eight hours if they could. But the reality before the industrial revolution is then people would sleep in different ways. And this is still true for people today. And we, we learn a lot about people's sleep and how we can help them sleep better, depending on their nature, genetics, et cetera. I think there's a Stanford, recent Stanford study that shows that people have a gene that basically predicts their ability to be a lark or night owl.

Really?

Yeah, there's a genetic side to it and that's a couple years back I identified some of these genes and there may be more because we're identifying some of this over and over. So it's all very fascinating, very important and we really love that about what we do because it's very mysterious. We were talking about the mystery of life and when we sleep, where do we go? Yeah, I know. And where is it that we go? And actually there's a Billie Eilish song that's like that and her and her brother Finias did a great job at it. And you know what really happens when we sleep and where do we go and what happens? And talking about the mysteries of the universe, it's a mystery in our own universe and a lot of people try to have speculations of what happens and you know, you could go to psychologists and psychotherapists and you go to interpretations of dreams and all that, but it's all a matter of opinion and rubbish in many cases it's really a really fascinating territory and I'm very excited to be part of that territory. And with our sleep tracker AI approach, we're actually, I think, helping a lot and helping make progress and hopefully will help people improve their sleep just a little bit if they, if they pay attention. Really.

Yeah, it's. Yeah. Again, I always done very well at sleep and it, I don't know, you brought up things. I don't know if it ties to eating there. I've said to people I can work outside for, for eight hours and be exhilarated. I could work one hour on a phone call and be exhausted. The correlation between my day is not always as easily seen as to, you know, doing exercise versus not doing exercise and how I sleep. But I tend to fall asleep. I don't have nightmares, I don't have, I don't wake up in the middle of the night that often. And I, you know, I wake up pretty much seven, six and a half to eight hours and I just wake up. I don't, I've not really used an alarm clock most of my life. Not that I wake up at the same time, but I kind of know that tomorrow I have him meeting, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I have eight meetings tomorrow and I know I have a 9am I know if I go to bed by midnight I'll be good and just. I'm a night owl, so.

And you got it, you got it. And I'm an owl too. But the outdoors, I mean, fresh air, outdoor is miracle. It's like running water. You know, you can drink bottled water or you can drink from a stream, a beautiful mountain stream with clear water coming down. It's a different experience than a stale bottle of water and running water. Air is the same thing. The air you breathe is so important. You could stop eating for 40 days and probably live, but you stop breathing for two minutes and you may not live. And so what we find is the incredible correlation between the quality of the sleeping environment and the quality of sleep and therefore the correlation to that, to what happens on the next day. And that has to do with temperature, the air composition, you know, pollutants in the air. It has to do with the humidity, the pressure, et cetera. And so this is all really very important and important part. We haven't had time to talk about all this, but this is important stuff. I think that it's low hanging fruit in many ways because life can be improved quite a bit for a lot of people by just improving the quality of what they breathe. And what you describe being outside and being exhilarated versus sitting in front of the computer. And we've been doing that for three hours. So you're probably exhausted. No, no, no.

But I can do it the other way. I can have this morning. I actually, because my life and work are very much melded, never had a separation that way. I play hard, I live hard. I had a meeting today that I got on with someone from Germany and she said, this is the most exciting call I've had the entire 2024. I. This is, this is completely defined the entire year for me. And I was exhilarated. It was a great call. And from there I have felt, I mean, even this call, this, this, our time together, these are exhilarating to me. They, they make me, they make me thrive and move forward and try to, to move something else. I went to my wife soon as I was done with that call and I said, this is what she said. I mean, I'm shocked and. But this person nailed every single thing that we were sharing. And she said, I've been thinking these things for years and you're now expressing them in the work that you're doing. I want to be a part of this. And she's already sending links and connections to people. So the same. I guess I'm looking at it from the sleep perspective. Will I sleep better tonight? I don't know. When I lived in Hong Kong, the. I actually lost more of my hair, it was gray. Or when I came back, my wife fed me better. My wife, all sorts of things. And my, My wife didn't like going to Hong Kong, so I had an apartment there. And I was there a lot of. And what happened was I came back and I live in upstate New York. There's the fresh air. There is no pollution relative to terms that you would have to a Hong Kong. And I slept well there too. And that's where I'm getting to. I slept in a place where I was not as healthy. I was not breathing as good of air. It was often extremely hot. I mean, we'd have temperatures that were exceptionally hot, especially with the buildings. And there's no movement of air through Hong Kong when it gets to summertime. And yet I slept incredibly well there too. So I wonder why, I wonder why. I don't know what that means. Help me, please is a good thing.

Well, you know, the most important environmental vector in sleeping, in terms of the environment, is the temperature at which you sleep. Sleeping between in Fahrenheit numbers between 64 and 68 degrees is probably ideal. If you sleep in a warm environment that has an impact directly on, on your sleep. And what we find is that when two partners sleep in the same bed, it's rare that they feel, well, let me put it in a different way. Most of the time one likes to sleep cold and one likes to sleep warmer. And so the, usually it ends up with warmer. And that affects both sides sleep. And so what's really important is to be able to have a differentiation in the temperature in which people sleep in their bed, but yet keep a quality breathing air which has nothing to do with the temperature inside the bed. And so if you could keep your air cool and actually address the environmental in the bed concerns of each one of the sleepers. And usually it's the female who likes to sleep warmer and the male that likes colder. But both would greatly benefit by having air at less than 68, 67 degrees Fahrenheit. And that would. And in order to achieve that, you basically have to achieve a temperature differential inside, inside the bed for both sides. And that goes to smarter beds.

And, and so are you adding air to the beds?

What's that?

Are you adding air to the beds, airflow over the beds or gauges so that.

Well, there, there, yeah, there is a, there's a company called Temperature that makes something called Active Breeze, which is a bed that has fans under it which pushes air into the bed in a natural way and can have differential temperatures on both sides. It's a pretty high end bed. It's not for everyone because it's expensive, but it's actually the most sophisticated bed you can do. You can have because the temperature differential comes from actually moving air. And actually one side can be hot and the other side can be cold. And that's really. Or both the same, whatever you want to. And also that can be modulated through the night. We've done studies that show that when you're in deep sleep, if you cool the bed a little bit, you can actually increase people's deep sleep. And deep sleep is where you rebuild yourself physically. REM sleep is where you, it's the garbage collector for your brain. And that's where it's less important to be cold or hot. And so by modulating temperature and tying it to your sleep, so called architecture, the technical term for it, which is the different phases of sleep, then you can clearly improve sleep. And so there are some advanced beds already that do that and that's really Tempur. Pedic is the leader with that with this product called Active Breed Again, it's a high end product. It's not for everyone yet, but eventually the pricing will go down and it's.

Still talking about the developed nations, not the 72 to 78% of the world's population under 8, 9 year olds a day. Got a lot to solve.

Well, yeah, I mean that, of course, but eventually, eventually there's, you know, at the end of the day, you know, initially cars were very expensive and now they're much less expensive and more people have cars and it's the same thing. Progress doesn't happen in a thing. And a bed like that today costs as much as a small car. Not really a small car, but remember that people spend maybe an hour a day in their car, but eight hours a night. And if there's two sleepers, that's 16 hours a night in their bed. But they're not willing to spend anywhere close to the same amount of money for their bed. And so it's a matter of priorities too, is how do you, how do you, you know, I mean, of course you're talking to someone who's very focused on sleep and those eight hours of sleep. But I love my bed is my favorite thing in the world. And I'm willing to give up any of my cars or airplanes or anything you want for my bed because that's more important to me because that's eight hours a day.

I was on a plane from the States to Europe and I was sitting next to the head of marketing for Haskins, and Haston's bed could run $400,000. Doesn't have a lot of these extra things on it. So I wonder how it helps you sleep.

Yeah, well, you know, an active breeze bed costs $10,000. It's really not for someone like you and I, it's manageable. For most people it isn't and I understand that. But eventually the prices will go down just like, you know, initially.

It'll pass its way through the system. Absolutely.

I mean, it's not, I think we have to look at progress. And progress is making sure, making great stuff, new stuff, and also making them more available to people. I mean, today there's a lot of people in the world who have a smartphone and that has more power than the TRS 80 you were talking about in the beginning of the way more power. And at that time nobody could afford that TRS 80, but now people have a smartphone that has, that has more power and they can afford. So I think we have to be optimistic about that, is that everything gets better and we'll make it better. And hopefully that's what progress is about, not just the challenges of reining in AI as we discussed.

I think you know, enough not going to go into it, but the other side of the projects that we're working on with everything from immersive technologies to autonomous robotic mining through to creating new materials, graphene tied with the 17 rare earth materials. We're looking at platform development to bring the world together differently. So we got a variety of other areas that we're working on that are exponentially hopeful game changers on a worldwide scale.

So yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So absolutely tomorrow will be better than today.

Well, that's why the name of the Vesta said you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. And our job, and I think we did a good job today. So I appreciate you, Philip, being, being present here with me today, with us today. And I do want to thank you for, for taking your time for those who did listen in. And we hope that you too learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Even the fact that dog and God. Hey, I know, I believe someone who has already come up with that. But at least today on the call, Philip, you brought that my attention. Not so smart me. No so smart. Philippe, what's the best way to get in touch with you? What's one way that you'd like people to, to reach out to you?

I'm on, I'm on two, two different emails. Philippeullpower.com and philippe wolf.com and you can also get in touch with me through LinkedIn.

And just so the spelling of Philippe, because I've seen it different ways, is.

It'S only one French way. P H I L I P P E P H I L I P P E. And the reason I say.

It is I have, I've not had many people in my life with, with that name and I've ended up in the past few weeks, I've got three, which is funny that they. With that same spelling, which was pretty incredible that it came up that way. So I think it's interesting that you and I connected so with that said to everybody, if you are interested in connecting with me. Davidavidgoldsmith.com there's also Instagram. Mr. Davidgoldsmith, you can connect to me at Twitter, @goldsmith, LinkedIn, Facebook, I'm all over. And that said, I'm David Goldsmith and thank you for listening.