Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - When Humans Will Truly Enter the Metaverse w/ Alvin W. Graylin | EP #104

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

In this episode, Peter and Alvin discuss how AI and AR will affect all aspects of society in the coming future.  03:38 | Understanding the Metaverse 46:33 | Democratizing AI Through Global Collaboration 1:15:42 | Balancing Technology and Education Alvin Graylin is the Global VP of Corporate Development at HTC, leading the company's expansive portfolio in virtual reality (VR) and technology across the region. His experience includes over 20 years in the tech industry, with pivotal roles in startups and multinational corporations specializing in VR, AI, and mobile technology (Industry of Virtual Reality Alliance, Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance, Immersive Tech). Under his leadership, HTC Vive has had significant advancements in VR, introducing over 50 hardware products and forming over 100 partnerships globally to enrich the VR ecosystem. He is a recognized thought leader in VR, contributing to over 200 keynote speeches at major tech conferences worldwide. Read his new book, Our Next Reality: https://OurNextReality.com  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6  I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The idea of living in the multiverse, living in the metaverse, is a compelling notion. So will we get there? I think that actually can happen a lot faster than most people expect. When you're on this digital parallel universe, as long as you are smart, as long as you're hardworking, as long as you're creative, you will be able to provide value to somebody else somewhere else in the world.

Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshot. Today, I've got an extraordinary guest, a gentleman who is brilliant in the areas of the metaverse in AI. Alvin Graylin is the Global VP of Corporate Development for HTC, one of the leading companies in the VR XR world. He's really been leading this revolution for the last 30 years. Under his leadership at HTC, they've introduced 50 different hardware products, formed a hundred different partnerships globally.

He holds advanced degrees from MIT, including an MS in computer science and an MBA, a BS in electrical engineering from University of Washington, where he was with the famed HIT Lab, the Human Interface Technology Lab. Love the work they've done there. Alvin, a pleasure to have you here, buddy.

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

It's called Our Next Reality. Here it is by Alvin Graylin and his partner, Louis Rosenberg. I got a chance to read an advanced copy and actually contribute a little bit to the book But if if you've been hearing about the metaverse and about AI and wondering where this is all going. This is a compelling You know Visionary look at what's happening over the next decade and I really commend it to everybody our next reality So Alvin, let me tell you what I want to talk about here.

It's a hell of a lineup here. Are you ready? Okay, so today, on this podcast, everybody listening here, we're talking about what is the metaverse, the convergence of XR and AI, the future of education, health, and the nation-state. I want to talk about US and China as a collaboration or competition. You bridge both worlds and Taiwan as well. I want to talk about the timelines of mass adoption for XR technology. Is there a killer app? I mean, you know Apple's vision Pro has sort of flopped. It's not popping. Is it a decentralized or a centralized AI future? Can we create a world of abundance with this? And let's talk about ethics and human rights in the Metaverse as well. How's that for a lineup? Well, that should give us plenty to talk about, but I'm sure more things will pop up as we discuss things.

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

there's a lot of conflation between the metaverse and Web3 and crypto and so forth. I think those are different areas. They both have their place in the world, as you know. But the simple way to think about the metaverse is really the 3D version of the internet that the world has been building for the last 30, 40 years. But instead of having websites, we're gonna have 3D virtual worlds.

And humans, we've evolved over millions of years to be optimized for a 3D space, to be surviving in a 3D space, to be surviving in a 3D world. And so we actually had to adjust ourselves to 2D screens for the last few dozens of years as our way to communicate. It makes a lot of sense for us to move into where we're most natural and not just using things like keyboards and mics to interface, but using our hands or our eyes or mouth, our bodies as the natural way of connecting with the computers with other people around the world and with future AI entities that will be inhabiting these 3D spaces.

I actually checked this definition with Neal Stephenson who coined the word metaverse and he's like well You know, I kind of made this shit up when I when I wrote the book But what you described they make sense to me. So, you know, that's good enough for for Neil Yeah, and Neal Stephenson wrote the forward to the book and those who know he's an extraordinary science fiction writer most Famed he he wrote About what's called the young Ladies Illustrated Primmer, right? Yes, in Diamond Age. So when I think about the metaverse, I think about headsets. I think about an XR we refer to as both VR

and AR, correct? Sort of the going back and forth between the two I think about AI Inhabiting and creating that virtual world for you and then crypto being sort of an economic layer for Transactions on top of that. Is that fair? Um, yeah So I think right now there's a lot of distinction between people say, oh, this is a VR device or an R device. The reality is that very soon we're going to get to devices. We're already at these devices here, which are 200 grams. Which one is that?

And they already do VR, AR. That is the Vibex R Elite. So as you see, it's actually one third the size of the Apple Vision Pro, but it does a lot of the same functionalities and it can see through it has color, you know, high definition see through it has immersive capabilities, and it has ability to transform into a glasses form factor or more of a headset form factor. So you know, that's already available today. But within the next one or two years, what we're going to find is that these kind of capabilities are going to move into 100 grams and less devices that will

look a lot more like glasses than the headsets that we've seen today. So, you know, the distinction between AR and VR are going to really melt away. And I think that's really going to be important because that's when people start to say, okay, I can actually wear this outside. It's both socially acceptable and it's comfortable and it gives me an added superpower of essentially being able to see anything, have access to all of my information, instead of pulling a screen out of my pocket, have a screen that's in front of my face when I need it. But at the same time, it can go away and I can see through it and be able to have a connection with the physical space around that. And when that happens, people will not be debating whether this is going to happen. I mean, when

you have right now people wearing the Vision Pro out there, it just looks dorky. I mean, I know people do it for cloud points, but I think that's a temporary thing. But having a 50-gram, 60-gram device on your face that allows you to have all those capabilities, it's comfortable, you can wear it all day, and it allows you to have access to any information you want. I think that's something that will transform our relationship with computing and with devices in general. So let's put some more of a visceral feel on this. What is a 50 or 60 gram device feel like? A little heavier sunglasses? Yeah, so I mean if you look at the current Ray-Ban sunglasses, they're about 50 grams. So, if you wear a, you know, a red, you know, a little bit thicker, it's not kind of the super

thin versions, but let's say the Wayfarer type glasses, that's a 50 gram device or, you know, a product on your face. So, and, you know, people will wear that all day, they're out in the sun, they're exercising with it. It's not a weight that becomes cumbersome. And actually, I'm testing it today. I'm testing smart glasses that weigh in that type of ranges, and they're comfortable. And I don't have an issue with them wearing it all day. And multimodal AI, which is coming on strong, gives AI vision through your glasses. And then, you know, the question becomes, can you get high resolution back into the retina?

I remember, Furness, your thesis advisor, what's his first name again? Tom Furness. Tom Furness. Yeah, Tom Furness, who was leading the HIT lab, the Human Interface lab, he talked about a future of a laser raster scan in the back of the eye that could paint super high resolution with something really small. And I'm still hoping and waiting for that to materialize. Yeah, I mean, in fact, his hands were what was some of the basis for Magic Leap.

I don't know if you remember them, but they raised $1.5 billion. Yes. But that was what they were trying to do, but they never actually executed on it. I'm not sure if we need to get to that type of technology, because we really haven't refined it enough to know when that's going to be available. But what we can say is that waveguide type devices are getting to an acceptable level

where you can get to that weight and size levels that we just talked about, and at the price levels that become affordable. Because even this year, I think there's two or three manufacturers that are already talking about devices this year, I think in the end, there's two or three manufacturers that are already talking about devices similar to what I'm talking about. I mean, it won't have a full immersive capability. It's probably 30 or 40 degrees field of view. But for a lot of use cases, that's enough. And that's a good stitch, right?

And if you wait another one or two more generations after that, I think we're going to get to that immersive, you know, 100 degree field of view capabilities. So the question is, when do we get to Ready Player One, right? I mean, there's probably no other film or book that captured the public's imagination, with all due respect to Neil Stevenson, but just the idea of living in the multiverse, living in the metaverse, is a compelling notion. So will we get there? And when? Well, I think some of the things in Ready Player One are going to take a lot longer.

Things like the optics and the field and the temperature and all that, you know, the full body switch. A lot of those technologies exist today, but they are not mature and they're probably a little too expensive and too high friction for it to be a mass market. So, but I think in terms of getting to the visual quality, we're definitely not that far away. In terms of getting to all of the different senses,

that's going to take some time. And in fact, the Ready Player One, I don't know if you know, but HTC was the official VR partner for Warner Brothers and Ready Player One. So I actually negotiated that deal. And we got all of the access to their 3D content and made seven different game titles from it.

So, I really enjoyed that book and I also enjoyed Snow Crash and Stevenson's book as well. But I think that the thing that they really did well was that they kind of meld modern kind of popular culture together with technology. And I think we're getting there, we're getting close. Let me paint the picture of a near term scenario

where I'm wearing my XR glasses, I'm walking around, I can turn on history mode. And as I'm walking down the streets of Manhattan, it can show me what the buildings were 100 years ago, or tell me what famous thing occurred here. Or if I turn on shopping mode it can tell me and if I'm looking for a particular you know wristwatch or jacket it can show me what's inside the stores as I'm going forward or if I turn on you know physics mode as as cars are

accelerating I can see equations I can be learning 24. So it can be an AI overlay on, my favorite mode by the way would be health mode. Like, you know, don't eat that. Take the stairs instead of the escalator. So when is that gonna be here? Is that, that's more of an AI function than even a VR function. I think that actually can happen a lot faster

than most people expect, because it doesn't require that much processing power to do what you're describing. And essentially, all you need is an agent that is able to see what you're doing. If you give it access to your environment, your camera, and it's able to analyze both your conversations, where you're looking at, it can give you all of that kind of advice in real time. So essentially you have a full-time assistant

on a device. Now, if the processing is happening in the cloud, then device can be even smaller. If it's happening on board on the device, it may require a little bit more powerful capabilities, or maybe it's linked to a phone that does the processing and it's just transferring it to your glasses. But the AI for it is actually available probably today.

You could do pretty much everything you just described with the AI capabilities today. It's just a matter of, do we want to give that AI access to all of that information? And I think there's a lot of fear today about privacy and how much information we're sharing. If that processing is happening in the cloud, people are more worried.

I think very soon we actually are now getting models that are two or three gigabyte type models, essentially two billion, three billion parameters that are able to do most of the things that you're describing. And if that's the case, that will run on a cell phone. So if it runs on the cell phone, you don't need to go into cloud. You don't have to worry about your data going into some server somewhere and having your

privacy invaded. So if that's the case, I actually think that what you described earlier about the young ladies primer can happen very soon. Yeah, you know it's interesting. I believe more of a, you know, my favorite character is Jarvis from Iron Man and I believe that we're going to have that version. I think you're going to give your XR AI partner access to everything. I mean you're going to allow it to listen to your phone calls, read your emails, see what you're eating, because by doing that, it gives you such value. And people say, oh my god, my privacy. Well, I mean, listen, you're on your email with Microsoft

or with Google, you know, Alexa, I want to say or too loud, she'll hear me, you know, is listening to what's going on in your bedroom. I mean, if you think that you have real digital privacy already, I mean, let's be honest, it's not really there. I can't agree with you more. In fact, so this is kind of a counterintuitive thing. Everybody is so worried about privacy that when they actually take action, very few people actually protect the privacy that they value so much. And here's, before we're trading our privacy for the ability to access cat pictures and videos on YouTube. Now, if we say, okay, now instead of that, I'm actually giving access to this agent that is working on my behalf. I think that changes the entire equation.

And then at that point, you actually want to do exactly what you said, is make as much possible available to this agent. Have it understand my needs, my wants, my preferences, my friends, and then be able to help me be a better version of myself. And that is actually possible today. That's the amazing thing. People think that that is so far away, but that technology is available today. That's the amazing thing. People think that that is so far away, but that technology is available today.

Your subtitle here is, How the AI-powered Metaverse will Reshape the World. And I was going to ask you, you know, we've heard these hype cycles on the Metaverse, on VR for, you know, 20, 30 years. I mean, you've been in this field for 30 years, 33 years, I think. So why is it different now? Is it AI? Why did you write this book? This is actually a really important question because we are at such a pivotal time in the development of our species. And this is why I wrote it, because if we let things go by default, it probably will not end well because of what possibilities are being graded by the combination of AI and XR technologies. And I'll actually talk about why those two come together, because a lot of people, you see people talk about the metaverse and you see people talk about AI, but you don't

see a lot of people putting them together and explaining the relationship between the two. What we're now creating with AI essentially is a superpower brain that allows us to supercharge everything that we're thinking, and it's going to help us solve problems that we haven't been able to solve for hundreds of years. Now, if you have the wrong people using that power, it can be used for bad, right? So we know the whole double-edged sword thing. So that, you know, how do we make sure that bad people don't get their hands on or aren't able to do as much with it?

That's really one of the biggest concerns with AI. The other issue with AI is when it actually does even the good things that it wants, it will disrupt our society. It will put people out of their job. It will change the way that the way we work and live and play and the way we interact with each other and the governmental systems. And our society adapt to that at the speed of change that's coming, right? As you know, the prior industrial revolutions

took eight decades, seven decades, and six decades or something to unfold. And it gave society a lot of time to adapt. This one's going to happen in the next five to 10 years. It's going to be like that in societal years. You've been on my stage at the Abundance Summit a number of times, and I hope you'll come back. Elon was there this year talking about timelines, as was Ray Kurzweil and you know their prediction for AGI is like

next year and then digital super intelligence by 2030 and there's no way in the world that society and humanity can possibly adapt at that rate. That's exactly the issue is that it's going to come fast. I'm not sure if it's next year or if it's three or four years from now, but I think it's within the next five to ten years for sure. I think if you talk to most experts, if you talk to them three, four years ago, the consensus was 30, 40 years from now. If you talk to them now, the consensus is somewhere between one to about 10 years. And that shrunk a lot. So even the pessimists folks are probably saying like 10 to 20 years, but they used

to say 100 years or never. So I think that the pace of change and our ability to adapt and need to prepare today, that's why I wrote this book. Right. And the other thing is, how can XR play a role to help solve some of these problems? Right. Because for the issue of job displacement, if we actually create a proper global metaverse ecosystem infrastructure on a global basis, then when those people are displaced from their physical jobs, it gives them another parallel economy to go do something, right? Whether to make an additional supplemental income or whether to actually

have a place just to go express themselves and go travel and go learn and have an outlet for their energies. I think that's something that having the metaverse will help with. And the other thing is that having a global metaverse system allows you to create more natural rebalancing of wealth and equality between the haves and the have-nots in terms of nations. Because when you have a digital economy, it doesn't really matter where you are. But today with the physical economy, it matters that a lot where you were born. But when you're on this digital parallel universe,

as long as you are smart, as long as you're hardworking, as long as you're creative, you will be able to provide value to somebody else somewhere else in the world. And that allows essentially a redistribution of wealth in a natural way, right? Not forcing something to happen, but allowing the people with capabilities to find a new way to increase their capabilities, their personal capabilities by going to an online school. I mean, you've been working on the Singularity University for dozens of years and trying to educate, re-educate the world.

And I think there's, and you know from the book, I mean, there's just so many studies that show in a 3D space, you learn a lot, lot faster and you retain a lot more, right? And so allowing that to be the education platform is going to be tremendous in terms of reshaping education. And the other thing is that it allows for us to then allow these people, once they have been re-educated or educated, then to find employment on a virtual economy.

And that solves some of these issues. So let me ask you about an issue that is of concern. You bring it up in the book, and I really want to discuss it with you, which is in a future where we've got digital superintelligence and humanoid robots, both of which are coming extraordinarily fast And we are it enables this amazing world of abundance where you can have anything you want But the question becomes will you know we humans like struggle and we like purpose Right. We like to have challenges

We in our video games, right? If a video game if you jump to do a video game and every time you shot, you hit and you would always win, you'd stop playing after a few minutes, it'd be boring. And I think life is that way too. We need this sense of like purpose and going big. And so the question is when we have this superpower capability, can humanity up level its sense of purpose and, and what it wants to go after so we remain engaged in the game?

I actually think that it is the thing that will help us up-level because if you look at the Renaissance, why did all of these, why did Michelangelo, Leonardo, Da Vinci, why were they able to spend so much time creating beautiful sculptures and art and inventions? Because they had a patron that helped to support them, that took care of their basic food, shelter, clothing, other things. And they said, go and focus, go and focus and spend your time doing what you want. And when they did that, these people were able to create amazing new inventions, and we had a renaissance. What we will see with AI and robotics is that essentially we will allow these machines to be our patrons, because they will go and do the labor that we used to do, which then liberates us to go and have the ability to find our calling. Most people talk about occupation. My job is my occupation.

Occupation, if you look at the root, the Latin root of that is occupatio, which is to be occupied, to spend, to waste time, or how to spend your time. What we should be thinking about is our vocation. So vocation, the root is vocatio, which is about it's the call to be called, the calling, right? Which is your purpose.

Now, if we focus rather than saying I'm going to trade my time for money, which is my application, to become I want to spend my time on my calling, what my purpose, how I can contribute the most to the world, then the question of money goes away. And it's really more about, okay, I don't need to think about what I need to buy next week and can I pay for rent? How can I contribute the most? What I wanna learn the most?

Whether it's being a musician or being artist or being an inventor or being a coder or being an AI researcher, all of that. In fact, there's a quote I recently read that really spoke to me, which was Picasso. He said, the meaning of life is to find your gift, and the purpose of life is to give it away. He didn't say the purpose of life is to accumulate wealth or to accumulate status.

I think that really summarizes a really important question that we struggle with in just two phrases. And that actually helps to think about when we have these AI and robotics and new dimensions to work in, not only are we now given the resources to go and do these things, we now have a new canvas to unleash our creativity, to now just not make statues, but to create 3D worlds that we can share with other people, to create 3D experiments, to go and allow us to go and do research because we don't have to think about whether or not I need to sell this thing, but whether or not this thing is good and brings something that the world didn't know before.

And I think that's going to create a real abundance of new breakthroughs that we have. Yeah, no, that is, so it's interesting, right? Some people say they're worried about digital super intelligence. They're worried about can humanity survive in a world of digital super intelligence. And I almost flip the question and say,

can we survive without digital super intelligence? Yeah, in fact, as you know in the book one of the parts I have to talk about this is later on once this super intelligence is available, you know, it actually can help us solve some of the real societal issues in terms of the conflict between people, right, between governments. You know, today all of these constructs of, constructs of different countries or different parties or different religions that are creating consistent thousands of years of conflict between people.

If we up-level ourselves and say, hey, you know what? This super AI is able to take everybody's perspectives and give us some guidance in terms of how we should solve some of these long-term conflicts. When we also start to move from a physical world to spending more time in a virtual world, we don't necessarily have the limited resources of, I only have one Jerusalem or one Washington, D.C., or one whatever. now everybody can have whatever versions that they want And you're not fighting over limited resources. I think I think those kind of things are going to happen

And one of my favorite examples in a simple form is if if I have a watch and you have a piece of gold And we trade In the old economy now you have a watch and I have a piece of gold and we trade in the old economy, now you have a watch and I have a piece of gold. In the digital economy, if you have a digital data set and I have a digital data set and we trade, now we both have the digital data set, right? It's an abundant mindset. Absolutely. I think knowledge is just like that, right? Knowledge and intelligence, the more you have, everybody wins, right? And it is so different than the prior society we were working in, where it's all about scarce space while affording us about who has access to what resources, and that's what everybody's

tried for. Once we get to this place of abundance because of digital intelligence, because of robotics, because of genetic engineering that will give us maybe a little bit longer health. All of these things that we felt were constrained and scarce becomes abundant. I think it changes everybody's mindset of conflict that has persisted since we recorded history. Everybody, I wanna take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me

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Go to fountain life comm backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners All right, let's go back to our episode. So one of the things, you know, I used to come to China every year I would take a group from my abundance community and we'd visit Beijing and Shenzhen and Shanghai and Hong Kong and it was an incredible trip and I'd meet with the CEOs of all the top tech companies and a huge respect for the entrepreneurs in China, right? And you've bridged both worlds, right?

You born in the US, you're US citizen, you've worked in China I was born in China, but I Yes, but I knew her when I was nine, so I you know, I spent a lot of time in both countries Yeah, I do have a dual citizenship or US. No, no actually I think China does not allow dual citizenship So I am a US citizen. Okay, and you work, but I've spent exactly half my life in the US and half my life in China. You bridge both worlds and what I've seen over the last three years is an increasing, you know, tension growing and especially in the realm of AI and that can't be good for humanity.

Can you speak a little bit about that? Because you know one of the things I'm going to bring to the abundant stage this coming year is you know the I want to bring a balance to that conversation. Yeah and unfortunately I think that the rhetoric on both sides have just gotten very overheated. I think that the rhetoric on both sides have just gotten very overheated. Over the last six months, I've actually seen a little bit of reconciliation. So it is a little bit better than it was a year ago. But I think it'll probably get worse before it gets better because of the elections. Whenever there's an election, you have to create an external enemy. And the reality is that these two countries need each other. And these two countries right now are the leading drivers of growth and innovation in the world. And if they work together, we can solve so many problems, right? If you look at the AI side, there was a report that was recently

published that showed 50% of the world's AI researchers were actually were born in China, of the world's AI researchers. 37% of the AI researchers in a top AI researchers, top 20% AI researchers in the US are actually from China and only 37% are from the US. So actually more Chinese born researchers in AI in the US. So actually, there are more Chinese-born researchers in AI in the US than there are US-born. So it's clear that these two countries are already working together. But because of, I guess, policies

and governmental positioning, we're creating this artificial conflict. And I guess some is economically driven, some is politically driven, but it's actually made worse recently because of all of the hardware restrictions, right? So not only is the US talking about AI, we can't work together,

but they're also saying you can't buy this equipment, you can't work together. But they're also saying, you can't buy this equipment, you can't buy equipment not from US companies, but not also from other companies in the world that are supplying the semiconductor space or that are creating chips that are creating whatever. Essentially, what that does is saying, okay, you need to create your parallel technology stack, and we will become more and more bifurcated. And the interdependence that we've created that actually unites people becomes weaker and weaker. And I think that's completely the opposite thing that we need to do. Because when these two countries are both so smart, so powerful, so capable, and in economic perspectives, they're becoming more and more equal.

If you create enemies out of each other, it won't end well. We've seen in history what happens when two very strong countries are put into that type of adversarial relationship. So I really hope this is just a short-term issue because of the elections that will go back to where we have been for the last 20, 30 years, where there was a lot of cooperation and the growth. There was more growth out of China over the last 30 years than essentially almost the rest of the world combined in terms of economic GDP growth. There's a good analogy in the space industry back 20 years ago, this thing called ITAR, which was preventing US launch companies from sharing information or satellite companies

from sharing information with Russian launchers or European launchers and so forth. And it created this divide and all it did was force non-US entities to build their own technology, since the US couldn't share it openly. I mean, it's not going to go away. You look at the space station, it's the same thing, right? You look at the International Space Station. Now, China's actually have a more modern space station than the international one that's going to be coming decommissioned soon.

So in a few years, actually Chinese will be the only space station out in orbit. So these kind of prior policies that are very short-sighted, we really need to get out of that cycle. We've had a lot of other technologies where we've done global cooperation, like the CERN super collider. I mean, every year, people are putting $1 to $2 billion to put that together, keep it running,

so that the world can come out with the particle physics and better understand the universe. Same with all of these communication across these radio telescopes that are trying to understand what's going on to find the gravity waves. So there's just so much that we could do. We cooperated to solve the ozone problem, the ozone hole issues. And it's possible to do that. It's possible. But we're definitely not doing what we should be doing. And this is why I said it's so important for people to read this book because it's not just telling you what's happened, but it also has a lot of specific

recommendations in terms of what policymakers need to do, what AI and metaverse companies need to do, and actually also what students and young people need to do so that we are prepared for what's coming and we try to bend that future towards the positive version of what could happen. Because as you know, the book is a debate. It's a debate between Lewis and I, and he plays the more, you know, kind of pessimist of kind of the world's, you know, the bad things that can happen to the world, and I play the optimist. And the reason we did the two positions is that most books today are either one or the other. And most people will read one side and they're done with that topic, and they won't think more. And by putting both perspectives into one book, we want to force you

to think. We want to force you to see the arguments on both sides in a fair and just way and then come to your own conclusions. But, you know, so that's, you know, I think Plato is when he said, I can't teach anybody anything, but I can only make you think. And, you know, that's what we want to do. I think once people think whatever conclusions that they come up with will be something that they hopefully will now take action on instead of just listen to and then put away. Listen, I you know I love how you think because it's how I think too so we're on the same side. Let's talk about a little bit more about AI in particular decentralized democratized AI versus you know you know sovereign or closed AI. Where do you think we're

going and you know given the near-term dangers, right? So I put AI into three categories. Today, it's amazingly useful. There's a very little downside. It's incredible. I use it all the time as do you. It's as my family. Long-term digital super intelligence I think is going to be one of the greatest gifts to humanity. It's the interim, you know, one to five, one to eight year time frame where it's the dystopian use of AI by malevolent individuals that are most concerning. So how do you think about that? What would, if you had the ability to set policy to guide us through this period of time? What would you advise? What would you recommend? So so I I think there's actually a lot of confusion in terms of because of the terms that you were talking about, you know

Open source ai and decentralized ai and sovereign ai and so forth and in each one of these There's just multiple meanings. So So let me kind of give you a quick summary so that we are kind of aligned on what we think we mean by them. When people talk about sovereign AI, what they're saying is every country has their own AI. Every country has to be a USAI, a China AI, a Saudi Arabia AI, whatever. And each AI is based on your culture, your information, and your ethics and your culture. And what that creates is actually the exact opposite of what the world needs.

Because what that creates is essentially is 200 countries that see each other as enemies because you're different than me. And the world has always been about an in-group and an out-group, us and me. And if the AI is only trained on your perspective and it doesn't see other people's perspective, it will work for you. It will try to make the world better for you, but by doing so, probably make the world worse for everybody else. So if we succeeded in creating 200 super AIs, the world is in trouble. The other thing is by dividing our resources across 200 countries, we will probably never

get to super AIs because we're going to run out of compute, we're going to run out of energy, we're going to run out of data. Everybody today, when I talk to a lot of researchers, they say, hey, it's hard to get data today. And if I just had more compute, I could do so much more. And I understand why, if you look at Jensen Huang is the one that is like super pro sovereign AI, because of course he's gonna sell 200 versions of his chips to every single country in the world, and every single lab in the world.

So it's good for his chips and the good for his profit margins. But it's probably not the best thing we can do for society. So I think that's one thing we can think about. The other thing is by combining our resources, we actually now, I'm sure you know about the scaling low, right? So essentially, the more compute you give some AI systems, the more data you give some

AI system, and the more parameters you give that AI system, it will become smarter. It's loss function. Essentially, the error from what you would expect would go down. And it's been consistent across several dozen orders of magnitude across all of these areas. And we actually don't see a change in that trend, at least for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, you wouldn't have companies out there trying to raise or create $10 billion, $100 billion infrastructure, because they know that having $100 billion infrastructure is better than a $10 billion,

is better than a $1 billion. And so what that means is that instead of having 200 versions of something, let's create one version, one giant resource where all of the compute for these type of capabilities are put in one place, all of the data of the world. Let's put everybody's data together because the more data we have, the more complete view it with, the more likelihood it will take into the perspectives of other cultures. I was speaking in Qatar about a month ago and the people

in the Middle East said, you know, with all these AI systems, none of them take into our culture or our language. It's all trained on English. It's all trained on Western ideals. When I ask it things, it doesn't tell it from my perspective. And I don't like that. Right? And so we need to have them, instead of them hoarding their data and saying, I only wanted to be trained on my data, they should put their data into a general pool. In fact, I don't know if you heard the saying from Friedrich Nietzsche, he said, you have to be a C to take an input from an impure stream and still stay pure. So it means that you have to be big, you have to be, you know, you have to have all the information. And when you have all that information, then when some wrong thing comes in,

it's okay. It will just melt into the whole system. Just like, you know, if I told you today that drinking bleach will help solve your, you know, your disinfectant, or it will help solve your COVID problem, you'll probably say, oh, he's just joking with me. But if you told that to a child, he may actually think that that's the real thing because he doesn't have that base of knowledge. And by hoarding information, we actually... No one would ever say that. No one would ever say that. Well, hypothetically, right? So that's yeah, so that's the issue with sovereign, right?

We are reducing our compute and we are reducing our data and we are reducing our accuracy. The other thing is now there's open source AI and then there's kind of closed source AI. Now that's really the idea is that, okay, you know, open source AI is saying, hey, if everybody has an AI system, then the good guys using the AI system will be able to beat the bad guys using the AI system.

That may be true if there was a known attack vector. Back in the day, when we had castles and we had people that siege castles, you probably need like two to three times the people inside a castle to attack them. So there was a asymmetric force to be able to overcome. But as you know, there's there's very few castles that are working in the world today, because different tactics came and they said, okay, actually the castle idea doesn't really work anymore. And particularly in cyber, it doesn't work. And we see today, you can have one cyber attack, one attacker, some teenager somewhere in, let's say Russia, can take down a whole network. And there was maybe hundreds of people that were trying to protect that network.

And it doesn't, it's not, you know, you cannot say, I have a, you know, a good guy with a gun and a bad guy with a gun and they'll be even. I think that logic doesn't make sense because it's now flipped completely the other way. The asymmetric ratio is so much more in favor of the end. Just like a terrorist, I just need one gun or one bomb and I can shut down the whole city. So we really need to change that. We just need to make sure that the systems are smart enough so that that doesn't happen. Now, the other thing is open source versus open source. Now, they're centralized versus decentralized, right? In terms of the problem with... If you look at what the internet is built on today, there's decentralized aspects, but a lot of the capabilities are actually built on centralized servers.

And it's on server farms that are in data hubs and giant networks all over the world in specific places. To say that I'm going to run the entire internet off of everybody's laptop and everybody's phone and completely distribute it, it's actually not really viable. If you're doing the extraterrestrial search and you're not really worried about timing and you're just saying, okay, I just need some cycles, that is probably okay. But if you are saying, hey, I need to run a mission critical system and I don't know if that particular phone is going to work.

The problem is when you're training these AI systems, they all have to come back around the same time. It's not really that great in terms of a... This is why those people are building $100 billion data centers because they want everything to be in one place so that all the training happens and every second, every microsecond or nanosecond matters because you have to do so many trillions and trillions of calculations. And when you try to distribute it across different devices, across different places of network, it's intractable to make that work.

So I think it sounds good in principle. Why don't we just, everybody distribute all the compute and that way there's no reliance on the cloud systems, on the AWSs or Google Cloud. It's actually, it's hard to do. And this is why, if you look at the internet today, it's not working. Let me just hit on two things.

First of all, I think one of the things that's important just to double click on is the importance of being able to Preserve the cultures of every nation and make sure that the large language models are inclusive of all stories history Untold recipes and so forth from every nation, right? So that's one element. Now where that becomes resident is at one super AI. I think we talked about decentralized, but for me the real term is democratized. So every nation has access for its citizens.

It becomes a infrastructure, like, you know, a ubiquitous infrastructure, just like, you know, communications and just like internet and just like oxygen, right? Where it's available to everybody. So, that I completely agree on. I think democratization in terms of making it accessible to everybody, right? In fact, I think the only way it will be democratized

is if you have a global effort to do it instead of national efforts. Because a national effort to do it means that I built it, this is mine, it's available to my people, but it's not available to your people. And likely the only two countries will win, Greece is either China or the US because they are right now the most powerful and the richest place. Maybe the European Union together as a group. And don't forget the Middle East is going to invest heavily.

You're going to see Saudi and the Emirates investing. Oh yeah, I mean, they're definitely investing a lot, but right now it's very difficult for them to get the talent and to get access to the data as much as is available in these other three major regions. So I think if you really want this democratized, we need to take the same effort that we did with these global programs. We've had examples like the nuclear non-proliferation. Everybody in the world agreed, let's not do these bad things. We had the human genome trials that we said, okay, let's not change the human genome

and spread it out to the world, right? We've had, we talked about the ozone treaties and so forth. So there are lots of examples where we've done, and it's actually turned our way. Yeah, let me continue on AI for a little bit Then we go back to the metaverse. I want to talk about Apple's vision pro and talk about

Addiction in the metaverse because my kids are if I left them alone, they'd be on roblox 24-7 I think instead of food or sleep It's video game playing but before that, you know this year at Ted Mustafa Salman who will be on my stage next year at abundance at the abundance summit and he's now I guess head of AI at At in Microsoft You know suggest that we don't allow recursive improvement. We don't allow AI to program AI What are your thoughts about that? Honestly, I think the only way for us to get to ASI is to allow AI to program AI. ASI is artificial superintelligence.

And what we really need to get to is to get to ASI because if we are at an immature baby AGI level, that's when bad things happen. That's when you have a superpower, but you have an immature understanding and ethics and consciousness. A toddler. If you have the ability to have, yes, if you have a toddler with a gun, it's a thing, right? That's what kind of very powerful, but not complete, trained systems are. When it gets into the hands of these bad actors that you were talking about, things will happen. So we need to get as quickly as possible to ASI, versus as quickly as possible to that toddler with a dog.

And the only way to do that is to have it be self-recursive in terms of training. Why are humans able to have done what we have, even though our brains have not changed in 100,000 years? Actually, it's gotten a little bit smaller. It's because we are recursively teaching each other. Every generation teaches the prior next generation, and we learn and accumulate. We're able to adjust how we work and how we do things. And if we allow these AI systems to do the same thing, which has already happened, actually, and honestly, it's not something you can see because even recently there was the Devon announcement, which is an AI engineer that's made of AI and he can go in and change his

own systems. There was some controversy in terms of how real those demos were. But I think a lot of people do agree that it didn't perform exactly what they had promised, but it is actually significantly better than what was possible with just GPD 4. So like 10x back. Now, so you just imagine in a few years or within a few months, probably when GPD 5 comes out, it will probably have the capability imagine in a few years or within a few months, probably, when GPD-5 comes out, it will probably have the capability to do a lot of those things. And when you do that, you are able to then progress at a very different rate.

And we need to get to that rate to be able to get the breakthroughs that we're looking for. You know, humans work on probably about two to three hours a day of quality work. Our signals to our brain is about 100 meters per second. These machines are going to work 24-7 and they are traveling at the speed of light. Their signals are traveling at the speed of light and you've got 100,000 of them in one data center just we cannot limit this with our capabilities. We should allow this to happen. Now, we do need to be careful, because if we allow it to happen,

we need to allow it to happen. This is why it's actually important to have a metaverse ecosystem, because if we trained it, and then we kind of let's test it out on a mini-matrix universe for AI. In the movie, Matrix, they're putting humans into a matrix and a simulation to allow them to live this world and see what happens. What we should be doing is to create a metaverse system and allow these AI to go in there, and then they can run at 10x or

a million x speed, and we'll see, okay, well, is this a dangerous AI or not? Is this an AI that's going to kill us? Is this an AI that's going to misunderstand us? And we put it in there so that it can play out its timing. Because one of the things that people are afraid of is that there's now this fear that people will say, in 2024, nothing bad happens, but this super AI in 2025 starts to destroy the world. But let's just put it into this world and run it through the next million years and see what does it do. And see if it becomes an evil or a benign or a compassionate AI.

So we should let that happen, but we should have it in a controlled manner. And we should let it happen in a globally collaborative manner, because we need to do what you said. We need to make sure that everybody's culture and language and history are all represented. And by knowing everything, it will then take into everybody's perspective into account to give you the guidance that we need as a species. Because our leaders today are probably not doing that.

Yeah, no, I would, I do believe I would, that humanity have a higher probability of successful survival under a benign digital super intelligence than under human leadership. You know, there's a great analogy that Mo Gadat from his book Scary Smart uses, which is that Superman, right, which is that, you know, Superman landed in Kansas, was brought up by a God-loving, you know, respectful family and became Superman, but if he had landed in a drug den, he'd become a super villain. And so how we train our AI, how we raise our AI, and AI are our progeny, they are our derivatives of humanity, really matters. And I do love the idea of building a simulation. I mean, I believe that we're living in a simulation,

so it'd be a simulation within the simulation, but that's another conversation, where we put these AIs and see how they play out and we've done this a little bit. There have been a few times where Facebook Back then and and Google have created AIs that have gone divergent in in their behavior one of the things I'm interested in is the is a does in their behavior one of the things I'm interested in is does a

does an abundance mindset does a loving caring you know benevolent mindset scale with intelligence. I believe the answer is yes. I hope the answer is yes Actually, there's been research in fact one of the papers in there showed that the more information that it had, the more benevolent the personality of the AI was. Even if it's underlined or unrefined, not fine-tuned version, that we found that that was the case. So, and I think we see that in our daily lives, right? That the most compassionate people I know are the most informed, most educated, and the, you know, probably the elder generation, because they've seen everything. And they've seen the bad things

that can happen when you do bad things and when other people do things. And so we can learn from that. In fact, I don't, if you remember one of the chapters, I actually read the biographies of the kind of most respected leaders of the last 100 years and the most despised leaders of the last 100 years. And the key difference between the two wasn't military service. They, you know, 60, 100% of the kind of authoritative leaders were military background, but 60 percent of the most respected ones also had military background. The thing that separated them was the amount of education they had, and then even more so, the amount of interest and lifelong learning, so that they broadened out their understanding. And those are the ones that had the longest,

I guess, track record of success. And people just saw them as, you know, these are really great examples. And, you know, we can share a slide of that because I think it's very clear, you know, that the Hitlers and the Stalin and the Pol Potts, they either left school early, or they kicked out of school, or they didn't get their education or just all these issues that were consistent with just, they may not have been bad people if they actually had a fuller education because they're clearly smart people because they weren't smart. That's one of the most important points for me because people shouldn't, the hope is that with intelligence comes tremendous wisdom.

Right? When you ask why is someone wise, they're wise as an elder because they've seen a lot of stuff. And I imagine that a digital super intelligence is going to be able to run a billion simulations and say, these, these directions, not so good. These directions, okay, this is where we should go. And, and then guide us that way. Well, okay, this is where we should go and then guide us that way. Well, that's kind of what we were saying earlier, that once you get to the AICI level, then

when somebody, when a bad actor says, hey, I want you to make me a bomb or I want you to make me a super virus, it was a, you know what, that's probably not a good idea. I'm not going to do it. But if they were that teenager who just listened to everybody and just try to be helpful, then we're in trouble. So as you know, there's the saying that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely. I think the opposite is also true with knowledge, because knowledge enlightens and absolute knowledge enlightens absolutely. And if we think that that's really the case, we need to make it as knowledgeable as possible. Because I don't know any knowledgeable people that are, you know, corrupt, super corrupt. I mean, it's just, you know, people who understand, who've been through

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a special discount. You'll find it at Viom.com slash Peter. You know, I was talking to Elon recently about XAI and his mission is to create an AI that is maximally curious and truth seeking. And I like that a lot. Elon also has said if we can't beat them, join them. And how about if we merge with AI, right? So Neuralink is going to connect my neural cortex to the cloud. Ray Kurzweil, we also know, has predicted high bandwidth BCI by 2033 or thereabouts.

What do you think about this idea of connecting with this ASI? Yeah, so as part of my work, I've actually invested in multiple BCI companies. And I have to say, we are really in a very early stage with BCI. And I also have friends who are in their link and know what they've been doing. And if you look at what they recently released, and it looks really cool. You have a guy who's playing video games with a chip. But essentially, that capability was in the Utah array 15 years ago.

People had that capability. And it's essentially connecting to the motor cortex, and a few dozens of links of little wires that are taking the signal. But it is not really knowing your thinking, it is able to see what you want to move. For us to do a full brain uploading or downloading, we essentially need 80 billion of those things. And from a few hundred to tens of billions.

I don't see it as being feasible anytime soon. I don't think it's a 2033. Maybe it's a 2333. Maybe with ASI it's different. Once we get to ASI, everything is off, right? I think that's the point, right? Everything becomes possible when you've got, you know, digital super intelligence doing the design work for you, including, you know, longevity escape velocity. But one of the things that is driving... I guess one thing though, to that point is, I don't know if that should be our goal.

Because I feel like people think that, okay, now you have this AI, we need to be as smart as this AI. Just like right now, nobody's going out and saying, I'm running faster than a car or I'm jumping higher than some machine. You accept that, hey, I have limitations to my body. And you know what, it's probably okay that it is smarter than us. And it's probably okay that these machines can do things faster than us. So just like, you know, we came from a lot of other species,

there are, you know, bacteria, frogs and fish and birds, and they're all fine. And they're not out there trying to say, I want to be a human. I want to be SuperBird who's going to be faster than, more smart than a human. They're not trying to do that. And I feel like, you know, we don't know if we need to say that we have to be smart or smarter than a data center of the fastest latest chips. I just, you know, our machines are constrained in terms of this is a 100,000 euro meat machine that won't be changing that much. Why do we need to try to compete? Well, you know, listen, I am all for BCI

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

Is that true? Yeah, I'm saying it's not necessary in terms of making that a real goal. Because if that's the short-term goal, then people are saying, we're going to put a lot of resources to make that happen. I would rather we focus on, you know, even if these machines are better than us, we are still going to have the human side of it.

What will be more important to us later is not about how much money we have. It's going to be about our family, our friends, our community, our relationship with each other and, you know,, and having a fulfilling life. And having fulfilling life doesn't necessarily- So let's talk about happiness. Let's talk about human happiness, because that is ultimately when you ask people, like, what do you want?

And then you go further and say, what do you really want? What is it? I wanna be healthy, I wanna be happy. And so you've thought about happiness. Talk about that for a second. Yeah, so one of the last chapters is kind of, will achieving this bring us happiness?

And the research is actually pretty clear. At least in terms of what brings us happiness is the freedom to choose what we do, having close family relationships, having some kind of purpose in your life, and then having at least your basic capabilities and your needs taken care of. And so in fact, and I think even in your abundance book you talked about, at a certain income level, it doesn't bring you actually extra happiness.

In fact, if anything, once you get past a certain level, it doesn't bring you actually extra happiness. In fact, if anything, once you get past a certain level, it actually goes negative. You start getting more stressed from having more money. So, I think what we need to think about is how do we bring those kind of qualities to more of the world? If you look at the current chart in terms of income to happiness level, it's a pretty relatively linear chart in terms of the higher income groups do have a higher happiness or satisfaction level. But then the strange thing is there are also some relatively lower income groups that are as happy as the higher income level.

So even though there's a trend, it is not on a lot. So what we also found out is that when I was doing my research in terms of different levels of income, in the US it used to be 75,000, now it's like 150,000, something like that. But in other places in the world, in China it's probably like 20 or 30,000 and in Africa it's like five to 8,000. So it's actually not a fixed number. It's not a fixed point that everybody's going to be super happy. It is actually just about how am I compared to my neighbors.

If I'm relatively good compared to my neighbors, then I'm actually happy and I don't need more income. What we do see is actually the amount of energy you use is something that actually is highly related to your happiness. So the more successful you are, the more developed you are, the more energy you're using. But that also levels out. If you look at the last 20 years, there's actually been a downtrend of how much energy every major developed country has been using per person, per year. So I think it

topped out in probably like 1990. And since then, it's been dropping pretty much every year consistently. So it shows that having more doesn't really satisfy you. It's really about having enough. And that actually creates a more sustainable world. We don't need to get everybody to the US level. We actually probably get it to the European levels, about half of the US level in terms of per capita energy use.

If we get it to their level, that's only about, I think, about 1 or 2x more than Southeast Asia Asia and probably 2 or 3x more than Africa. So if we can increase energy abundance by 2 to 3x, we essentially get everybody to kind of the European lifestyle. And I actually think that European lifestyle is probably more from a happiness perspective. They are much happier than the Americans who are using more energy, have more per capita income, but they're less happy. So this is what I think we will be able to do when we have AI offloading a lot of our work. We will have time to go learn music and learn languages and go travel and go enhance ourselves. And when we have that freedom, we will be happier

and we will also be more knowledgeable. And by being more knowledgeable, we will probably be more understanding and more compassionate, which, you know, it's like a reinforcing positive loop that just makes the world a better place. Yeah, agreed. Yeah, I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about abundance

since I wrote a small passage in the book on the subject. Yes, thank you for your contribution and the important important contribution well, uh and and you talk about uh abundant abundancism as a uh, a term and and Just for people to get a sense of where the metaverse will enable abundance where which for me is Accessibility to anyone Everywhere at the highest possible levels and I I use the example that Google and Baidu

Right as search engines Google in the United States and by doing China provided equal access to knowledge Independent of economic level right the Google for the poorest child and Google for the wealthiest child was the same. Can we list where we're going to see abundance coming from the metaverse? Yeah. So if you look at what's happening with metaverse, it's actually able to supercharge our senses. You have AI supercharge our minds. You have genetic engineering will supercharge our bodies. But metaverse and immersive technologies

supercharges our senses. And when you supercharge our senses, it allows us to experience anything we want and anywhere. So not only are we able to learn more, we're able to also travel back in time. We're also able to become different sizes. We can be the size of a planet or be the size of a microbe. And if you look at in terms of abundance, what can today's billionaires do that today's

average person can't do? It's about experience. It's about experience, right? It's about experience. And when you have a lifelike immersive world that you can go into, anybody can have any experience they want. So there's nothing lacking. And when you have that, then you essentially have kind of a

de facto equalization of fulfillment, of life fulfillment. Because if I wanted to travel to Egypt, or if I want to go to space, to the moon. There's not very many people, or to go to the moon. How many people are there?

300 people has left the orbit since the invention of, or since the start of time. Now anybody can put on the headset and be in space and go to the moon and go to the Mars. And at some point when we have our AI agents out there traveling the rest of the galaxy, we can be in this headset traveling with them.

In fact, that's one of the final epilogue is kind of that story, right? So I think that's the sense of abundance because nothing is limited when you're talking about a virtual world. Everything that we think of today as a constrained resource becomes completely abundant. And knowledge is also the thing that I really think becomes super abundant, because you are able to just learn so much more, and everybody can become the best version of themselves. I think that's all we need to be. That's all we need to ask for. I don't think we need to be,

we don't need to know as much as GPT said, but I think we need to be able to say that, hey, I've learned as much as I can. I try to read something like 80 to 100 books a year, and that's my most fulfilling thing. Every time I finish a book, I'm like, I learned something new. And that made me a more complete person. And so I can see by, you know, Elan is saying, the making curiosity, the reward function, because if that's a reward function, that's a very positive reward function. And, you know, nobody's going to say, I'll be curious. And because of that, I'm going to make a bunch of paper clips. Those are not alive. If you're curious, you actually want to have as much diversity of life as possible.

You want to have as much diversity of experience as possible. So you want to preserve a very diverse ecosystem of humans, of animals, of all kinds of animal beings in the world. And so that actually is very kind of pro-human when you have that type of a reward function versus things like maximize compute or maximize production or something.

So I think we should be able to get there. Let's talk to the teenagers listening, the young adults listening, and to the parents listening. And I want to drive into two questions here as we close out. What's your advice for young people in school right now? And then the second thing is, you know, what's your advice to me? I have two 12-year- are Love love their metaverse and for them it's roblox and other equivalent gaming worlds You know how much China limits use of computers and games

Significantly should the US be doing the same thing, you know your kids are grown What what's your advice to me? So let's address both of those items. So, we actually have a one section at the end of the book, which is a tips for young people. And you know, I advise everybody to read the auction, I'll make those pages available to everybody so you don't have to buy the book to see it. But I think the key is really, you know, most parents today are saying, hey, I want them to learn STEM, I want them to be super great students and make lots of money. I think that's, that's probably not the best advice for long term for these, for these young people. I think we need to, we need to help them find their purpose. Like Picasso said, I think you're going to find your gift, whatever your gift is, and it may not be in programming, and it may not be in science. It could be in music, it could be in poetry,

it could be in history. So I think giving a broader curriculum to your young children is actually a really good thing. In fact, also music and art opens up different types of connection in their brain than just doing STEM work. So I think that's important. So having them find that really real purpose and passion that they have,

and then having them go deep in it. Because I think one of the things I see with young people today is that they tend to have very short attention spans. And probably because of all of the Instagram and TikTok culture, they just want everything fast in one minute or five seconds. I want to know what's going on.

And to really understand something, you have to read. You have to read full books. You have to really watch these two or three hour podcasts and understand the real connections and reasoning behind it. And we really need to get people to get away from just getting the quick answer and to think about what questions can I ask. And I remember hearing you say that a lot. It's like the important thing is to get your kids to ask the right questions. And I cannot agree more with that because if they're asking the right questions, it means they're thinking. It means that they are questioning themselves of what do I need to learn

more about this? And when you have an AI system that can answer anything, knowing what to ask is a lot more important than getting the answers. And I actually find myself right now with AI systems, I'm just trying to find, understand the topic and something that I may not, I would hear a word somewhere or a topic somewhere and I want to know deeper. I would just pretend that I'm a five-year-old kid and just keep asking questions. And honestly, in the half an hour, it can become fairly knowledgeable on a topic that I had very little understanding for. And I think we need that kind of curiosity because most education today teaches us to go for the quick answer and to be afraid to ask questions because asking questions, a

lot of people think is showing you don't know something. But the reality is that we don't know a lot of things, so we just need to accept them. Playing with these tools, and I think we just got to go out and use them, because when you don't understand your freedom, if you start using it, you're going to see the value of where it applies. And today, they are tools.

In another five to 10 years, they're going to be our patrons. They're going to be the ones that helps to offload us and give us the freedom to do all those things that we wish we had time to do. And then in 10, 20, 30 years, it's going to be our progeny. So we need to see it grow up and be able to also guide it along the way. I think it's allowing it to just say, okay, I don't need to think about it. Somebody will take care of it.

I think that's something that will not end in the way that we want. We need to be an active part of the process. To parents of young kids, should parents be limiting the amount of time kids are playing video games or is that training them for the future that's coming our way? Honestly, I think limiting is probably the right thing because most games today are designed to be addictive. They provide, maybe in some cases, they provide some value but in most cases, they only provide the value for a very short term. If I play the game for, let's say, an hour or two to understand what it is, which I do sometimes because I need to understand what's out in the market,

but I'm not going to go spend 50, 100 hours on something because the additional value that I would gain from it is very limited. So in some ways, I actually agree with what China's doing in terms of saying, each child three hours a week and limit that. And I think that we should probably do that with social networks too, because there's a lot of these social networks, especially the ones that are maybe less meaningful.

I think we may want to also limit how much time we, our children spend on it, just like we used to say, hey, you know, don't watch more than an hour of TV, or, or can't watch TV after a certain time. I think we should take that same perspective with gaming. One thing I do want to talk about is I think we really have understood the value of soft skills. Now that the hard and STEM skills are essentially a given. We need to make sure that our kids spend more time learning philosophy and psychology and communication and history and how to lead. Because those are the things that will actually separate how they will be integrated into this future world.

Because in the future, the most important thing is how we will interact with each other. And that's all about the self-skills. So I agree. Yeah, debate, leadership, compassion, the ability to lead somebody to convince them to support a vision, right? To provide a compelling story for folks. Yeah, for sure.

And also to allow us to ask the question why, right? Because before people thought about how do you do this? How do you do that? But now that we know we can do almost anything, or soon we will be able to do almost anything, it is why should we do it? Should we do this? And having the ethical guidelines to go along with it.

And who does it affect when I do these things? I think that's an important part that we miss a lot. Another thing I think is important is actually spending time on health and fitness. A lot of people, especially in Asia, they don't put their kids into sports classes. It's a waste of time. I just want them to focus on school. And I think, you know, that the US and probably Australia or whatever is probably a little bit better in that. But I think that's something that we should, we should get people into sports

because sports allows, especially team sports, allows you to have the trials and tribulations of success and failure. And the concept of teamwork and how do you work with a large group? How do you lead groups? How do you follow? And what happens when things don't work out? And it's okay when things don't work. And what happens when you work really hard? And you really, the difference of training a lot versus training a little.

The other thing we don't do enough is sleep. I used to pride myself, I only sleep four or five hours a day. You and I both. I can get so much more sleep. I'll sleep when I'm dead. Yeah. And honestly, these days, I think by sleeping more, your brain just works so much better. And young people will be the same. When they sleep is when they remember and turn that short-term memory into the long-term

memory. And too many parents don't prioritize sleep for their children. I think that's critical. And then lastly, for young people, you need to think about finding mentors and also spending more time with your parents because time goes so quickly. I lost my dad last year and I wish I had spent more time with him. And you don't realize it until it's too late. And also my children have grown up like instantly and I was traveling between China and US and I felt like I didn't get to see them enough

as they were growing up. That's probably one of my biggest regrets. And so I feel like young people, while they have a chance to spend time with their parents, do it because as the older you get, the less time you will spend with them. And you will wish you had spent more and you will learn things from them

because they are one of the few people in the world that essentially is just, it's, I guess it's the unconditional love, right? The true unconditional love is a parent's love for their child. And to have that, they will give you advice that they think is really helpful for you. So spend more time listening to your parents. I'm going to go hug my kids right now as soon as they get back from school Alvin Graylin the author of our next reality

How AI powered Metaverse will reshape the world? Get the book. It's on Kindle. It's hardcover. I consumed it on audible Alvin You're an amazing friend and visionary. I'm grateful to have you in my life and thank you for joining us today on Moonshots. Oh, thank you, Peter. You've been a real mentor.

I was talking about mentors and I see you as a mentor and I listen to all of your shows and I learn something from every show. So it is my honor and privilege to speak to you today. Fantastic. Where do folks follow you on Twitter or other platforms? Yeah, so Twitter is A. Graylin and then on LinkedIn is Alvin Graylin. So pretty easy. And then also you can go to ournextreality.com and find out more information about the book.

Oh, actually, there's one thing I do want to mention is we created a custom GBT for the book that you can ask any questions in, and it uses all of the content from just the book to answer you. So hopefully that will give you a preview of any concerns that you have. That's on our nextreality.com is where you find the GBT. Or actually there's a link to it,

but it goes to the custom GBT of OpenAI's Chalk GBT. Wonderful. Thank you, my friend. Talk to you soon. Thank you, sir.