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

29:52Once 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 these things that we felt were constrained and scarce becomes abundant. I think changes everybody's mindset of conflict that has persisted since we recorded history. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians.

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32:34Alright, 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 of my audience community and we visit Beijing and Chen Zeng 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 bridge both worlds, right? You've borne the US, your US citizen, you've worked in China, I worked for China. I was in China, but I had a point in China. I was, yes, but I came to him when I was nine. So I spent a lot of time in both countries.

33:11Yeah, do you have a dual citizenship or US? No, actually, I think China does not allow dual citizenship. So I am a US citizen. OK. And you were a time on. I spent exactly half my life in the US and half my life in China. You bridge both worlds. And what I've seen over the last three years is an increasing 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 one of the things I'm going to bring to the abundant stage this coming year is I want to bring a balance to that conversation. Yeah, and then, unfortunately, I think that the rhetoric on both sides have just gotten very overheated.

34:01Over 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 the public at worst, before it gets better, because of elections, whenever there's an election, you have to create an external enemy. And the reality is that these two countries need each 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 has shown 50 % of the world's AI researchers were actually were born in China of the world's AI research.

34:4637 % of the AI researchers in a top AI research, up 20 % AI researchers in the US are actually from China. And only 37 % are from the US. So actually more, there are more Chinese, more foreign researchers in the US than there are US born. So it's clear that these two countries are already working together, But because of, you know, I guess, policies and governmental positioning, we're creating this artificial conflict. And where, you know, I guess some is economically driven, some is politically driven. But, you know, it's actually made worse recently because of the hardware restrictions. 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 buy equipment not from US companies, but not also from other companies in the world that are supplying the semiconductors things or that are creating chips that are creating whatever and you know, essentially what that does is saying, okay, you need to create your parallel technology stack and we will become more and more bifurcated and the interdependence that we created that actually unites people becomes weaker and weaker and I think that's the 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.

36:21If you create enemies out of each other, it won't end well, right? We've seen in history what happens when that, 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 elections that will go back to where we have been for the last 20 -30 years, when there was a lot of cooperation and the growth, there was more growth out of China over the last 30 years, then, you know, such almost the rest of the world combined in terms of economic GDP growth. You know, there's a good analogy in the space industry back 20 years ago, this thing called ITER, which was preventing US launch companies from sharing information or satellite companies from sharing information with Russian launchers or European launchers and so forth.

37:14And it created this divide and all it did was force non -US entities to build their own technology since the US couldn't share it openly. I mean, it's not going to go away. Look at the space station. It's the same thing, right? you look at the International Space Station. Now China actually has a more modern space station than the international one that's going to be coming to the commission soon. So in a few years, actually, Chinese will be the only space station out in orbit. So these kind of higher 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, right?

37:59I mean, every year people are putting one or two billion dollars to put that together, keep it running so that the world can come out with the particle physics and understand the universe. Same with all of these communication across these radio telescopes that are trying to understand what's going on in the two to find the gravity waves. I mean, so there's just so much that we could do. We cooperated to solve the ozone problem, you know, the ozone hole issues. So, and you know, just, there is possible to do that. It's possible. But we're definitely not doing what we should be doing. And this is why I said it's so important for people to read this book because it's not just a such and telling you kind of what's happened.

38:47but it also has a lot of specific recommendations in terms of what policymakers need to do, what AI and Metaverse company 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 kind of pessimist of the bad things that can happen to Ron. I played the opinus. And the reason we did the two positions 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.

39:32And by putting both perspectives into one book, we want to foreshade a thing. We want to force you to to 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 that's you know, I think Plato is when they said I can't teach anybody anything But I can only make you think and 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 And you know I love how you think because that's how I think too.

40:08So we're on the same side. Let's talk about a little bit more about AI. In particular, decentralized, democratized AI versus, you know, sovereign or closed AI. Where do you think we're going? And 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. I says my family. Long -term digital superintelligence, I think, is going to be one of the greatest gifts to humanity. It's the interim one to five, one to eight -year time frame where it's the dystopian use of AI by malevolent individuals that are most concerning.

40:58So 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 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 decentralize AI and sovereign AI and so forth. And each one of these, there's multiple meanings. So let me kind of give you a quick summary so that we are kind of aligned on what we think we mean by them. When people talk about sovereignty, I want their saying is every country has their own AI.

41:33Every country ought 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 rates is actually the exact opposite of what the world needs. Because what that creates is interesting is 200 countries have seen each other as enemies because you're different than me. And the world has always been about an in -group and an out -group. 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.

42:14So if we succeeded in creating 200 super -AI's, the world is in trouble. The other thing is, by dividing our resources across 200 countries, we will probably never forget to supray because we're going to run out of compute and we're going to run out of energy and we're going to run out of data. Everybody today, when I talk to a lot of researchers, they say, hey, it's hard to get data today. And I just had more compute. I could do so much more. And when, I understand why, if you look at Jensen Huang as the one that is super pro sovereign AI, because of course, he's going to sell 200 versions of his chips to every single country in the world, than every single lab in the world.

42:53So it's great 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 law, right? Essentially, the more compute you give some AI system, the more data you give some AI system, and the more parameters you give that AI system, it will become smarter. It's a 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.

43:32And we actually don't see a change in that trend, at least for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, you wouldn't have copies out there trying to raise your rate $10 billion, $100 billion infrastructure, because they know that having 100 billion infrastructures better than a template is better than a one. And so what that means is that if we, 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 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.

44:16I was speaking in Qatar about a month ago. And the people in the Middle East said, you know, all these AI systems, none of them take into art culture or language. It's all train of English. It's all train of Western ideals. You know, 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 want to be train of 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.

44:58So it means that you have to be big, you have to have all the information. And when you have all the information, then when some wrong thing comes in, it's okay. It would just be held into the whole system. I mean, just like, you know, if I told you today that drinking bleach will help solve your, you know, your disinfection, you will help solve your COVID -19. COVID -19. You probably say, oh, yeah, that's not, you know, 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 it, no one would ever say that.

45:33No one would ever say that. Oh, well, well, you, the hypothetical click, right? So that's the issue with software and AI. We are reducing our computer and reducing our data and reducing our accuracy. The other thing is now there's open source AI and then there's kind of close source AI. Now that's really the idea is that, okay, open source AI is saying, hey, 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 and back in the day when we had castles and we had people that see castles, castles, you probably need like two to three times of people inside a castle to attack them.

46:23So there was an asymmetric force to be able to overgune. But as you know, there's very few castles that are working in the world today, because different tactics him and they said, okay, actually the castle idea doesn't really work in more and particularly in cyber. It doesn't work and we see today, you know, you can have one cyber attack, one attack or 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 either.

47:06I think that that logic doesn't make sense because it's now flipped completely the other way. The asymmetric ratio is so much more in favor of being just like a terrorist. I just need one kind of one bomb and I can sit down at home sitting. So we really need to change that time. 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 also. Now they're centralized versus decentralized, right? In terms of the problem with, if you look at what the internet is built on to me, there's decentralized aspects, but a lot of the capabilities are actually built on centralized servers, and it's on server forums that are in data hubs and giant networks all over the world in specific places.

47:57To say that I'm going to run the entire internet off of everybody's laptop and everybody's phone and completely distributed. 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's probably okay. But if you are saying, hey, I need to run a vision critical system. And I don't know if that particular phone is going to work. And the problem is when you're training these AI systems, they all have to 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.

48:38Because they want everything to be in one place. So that all the training happens. and every second, every macro second or nanosecond, not theirs, because you have to do so many trains and trains of calculations. And when you try to distribute it across different devices, across different places of network, it's just, it's intractable to make it work, right? So I think, you know, it sounds good in principle. Why don't we just everybody distribute all the compute? And that way there's no reliance on, on the cloud systems, on AWS's 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 going to be.

49:16Let me just hit on two things. First of all, I think one of the things that's important just to double click on is the importance of being able to preserve the cultures of every nation and make sure that the large language models are inclusive of all stories, history, untold recipes and so forth from every nation, right? So you're not. So that's one element. Now, where that becomes resident, is it one super AI? I think we talked about decentralized, but for me, the real term is democratized. So every nation has access for its citizens. It becomes a infrastructure, like, you know, ubiquitous infrastructure, just like, you know, communications and just like internet and just like oxygen right where it's available to everybody.

50:08So so I that I completely agree 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 And likely the only two countries will win races, either China or the US, because they are right now the most powerful in the richest places. Maybe you're paying union together as a group. And don't forget the Middle East is going to invest heavily.

50:43You're going to see Saudi and the Emirates investing. Oh yeah. 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 available in these other three major regions. So I think if you really wanted to democratize, we need to take the same effort that we did with these global programs. We've had examples like the nuclear non -proreferration. Everybody in the world agreed. Let's not build these bad things. We had the human genome trials and we said, okay, let's not change the human genome and spread it out to the world.

51:25We've talked about the ozone treaties and so forth. There are lots of examples where we've done. It's actually turned over. Let me continue on AI for a little bit. I want to go back to the metaverse. I want to talk about Apple's vision pro. I want to talk about addiction in the metaverse because my kids are, if I left them alone, they'd be on Roblox 24 -7. I think instead of food or sleep, it's video game playing. But before that, this year at TED, Mustafa Salimun, who will be on my stage next year at abundance, at the abundance summit, and he's now, I guess, head of AI at Microsoft, he suggests that we don't allow recursive improvement.

52:14We don't allow AI to program AI. What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, honestly, I think the only way for us to get to ASI is to allow AI to program the AI. If you look at why artificial super until yeah, yeah, and you know what we really need to get to is to get to ASI because if we are at an immature baby AGI level, that's when bad things happen. That's when you have a superpower, but you have an immature understanding and ethics and consciousness. If you have a toddler with a gun, it's a thing, right? And that's what kind of very powerful and not complete trained systems are. And when it gets into the hands of these bad actors that you were talking about, things will happen.

53:05So we need to get as quickly as possible to ASI versus as quickly as possible to that toddler with a gun. And the only way to do that is to have it be self -recursive in terms of training. Why are humans able to have done what we have, even though our brains have not changed in 100 ,000 years, actually has gone a little bit smaller, right? It's because we are recursively teaching each other. We are, every generation teaches the next generation and we learn and accumulate. We're able to adjust how we work and how we do things. And if we allow these AI systems to do the same thing, which is already happening, actually, and honestly, it's not something you can see, because even recently, there was the Devon, I don't know if you saw that, that kind of Devon announcement, which is an AI engineer that's made of AI, and he can go in and change his own systems.

54:00There 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 GVZ4. So, like 10XPAP. Now, so, you know, you just imagine in a few years or with, or with in a few months, probably when GKD5 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, to be able to, to get the breakthroughs that we're looking for.

54:36Humans work on probably about two to three hours a day of quality work. And our brains, our signals to our brain is about 100 meters per second. These machines are going to work 24 a seven, and they are traveling at the speed of light. They're signals traveling at the speed of light, and you've got 300 ,000 of them on one data set. So 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 on a metaverse ecosystem because if we trained it, and then we kind of, let's test it out on a many matrix universe for AI, right?

55:21In the movie matrix, they're putting humans into a matrix and assimilation to allow them to kind of live this world and see what happens. What we should be doing is to create a metaverse system and allow these AI to go in there and then they can run that 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 say out, it's timing, right? Because one of the things that people were afraid of is that there's now this fear that people say, in 2024, nothing bad happens, but this super AI and 2025 starts to destroy the world.

56:02But let's just put it into this world and run it through the next nine years and see what it's going to do. And see if it becomes an evil or a denying or a compassionate AI. And I think, I think, we should have that happen, but we should have it in a controlled manner. And we shouldn't let it happen in a globally collaborative manner because we need to do what you said. We need to make sure that everybody's culture and language and history are all represented. And by knowing everything, it would then take into everybody's perspective until, to give you the guidance that we need as a species. Because our leaders today are probably not doing that.

56:43Yeah, no, I do believe that humanity have a higher probability of successful survival under a benign digital superintelligence than under human leadership. There's a great analogy that Mo Gadot from his book, Scary Smart Uses, which is that Superman, man, which is that Superman landed in Kansas, was brought up by a god -loving, respectful family and became Superman. But if he had landed in a drug den, he'd become a supervillain. 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.

57:32I mean, I believe that we're living in a simulation. So it would 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 Google have created AIs that have gone divergent in their behavior. One of the things I'm interested in is does an abundance mindset, does a loving, caring, benevolent mindset scale with intelligence? I believe the answer is yes. I hope the answer is yes. Actually, there's been research in fact, one of the papers in there showed that the more information that it had, the more benevolent the personality of the AI, even if it's underlying or unrefined, and then find two aversion that we found that that was the case.

58:37So, 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 probably the elder generation, because they've seen everything, and then they've seen the bad things that can happen when you do bad things and when other people do things. So we can learn from that. If you remember one of the chapters, I actually read the biographies of the most respected leaders of the last 100 years and the most despised leaders of the last 100 years. The key difference between the two was in military service. They think, you know, 60, 100 % of the kind of authoritative leaders were military background, but 60 % of the most respected ones also had military background.

59:26The thing that separated them was the amount of education they had, and then even more so, the amount of interest in life longer so that they brought 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 we can share a slide of that because I think it's very clear. You know, the headlers and the Stalin and the Pope, 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, you know, 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.

1:00:12That's one of the most important points for me because people shouldn't. The hope is that with intelligence comes tremendous wisdom. When you ask why is someone wise, they're wise as an elder because they've seen a lot of stuff. I imagine that a digital superintelligence is going to be able to run a billion simulations and say, these directions, not so good. these directions, okay, this is where we should go and then guide us that way. Well, that's kind of what we were saying earlier, that once you get to the ASS and AI side level, then when somebody, when a bad actor says, hey, I want you to make me a bomb or I make one should make me a supervisor, it was like, you know what, that's probably not a good idea, I'm not going to do it.

1:00:57But if they were that teenager who just listened to everybody and just try to be helpful, then we're going to we're in trouble, you know. So, as you know, there's the saying that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think the opposite is also true with knowledge, because knowledge enlightens, and absolute knowledge and lightens absolutely. And if we think that that's really the case, we need to make it as knowledgeable as possible, because I don't know any knowledgeable people that are super corrupt. I mean, it's just people who understand, who've been through things, they have a much more complete perspective.

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1:03:45So, Neuralink is going to connect my Neural cortex to the cloud. You know, Ray Kurzweil, we also know has predicted high bandwidth, you know, BCI by 2033 or thereabouts. What do you think about this idea of connecting with this, you know, ASI? Yeah, so, so, you know, as part of my work, I've actually invested in multiple BCI companies and I have to say we are really in a very early stage with ECM. And I know 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 in his.

1:04:27But essentially that capability was in the Utah array, 15 years ago. People had that capability. And it's essentially collecting, connecting to the the motor cortex is 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 grain uploading or downloading, we essentially need 80 billion of those things and you know, from a few hundred to tens of billions. Um, where, where, you know, it just, it's, I don't see it as being feasible any time soon. And I don't think it's a 2033. And maybe it's a 2333.

1:05:17Ah, but, you know, and maybe with AII, super. Once we get to AII, everything is up, right? You can help. I think that's the point, right? Everything becomes possible when you've got, you know, digital superintelligence doing the design work for you, including one Jehovah's escape velocity. But one of the things that is dry. 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 to say, we need to be as smart as this AI. Just like, right now nobody's going on saying, I'm running faster than a car, or I'm jumping higher than some machine.

1:05:56You 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 you know 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 and frogs and fish and birds. And they're all fine and they're not out there trying to say, I want to be a human. And you know, I want to be the super bird who's going to be faster than a more smart than a human. They're not trying to do that. And I feel like, you know, don't know if we need to say that we have to be smart or smarter than a data center of the fastest -later ships.

1:06:36And just, you know, our machines are constrained in terms of this is a 100 ,000 -year -old meat machine that won't be changing that much. Why do we need to try to compete? Well, you know, listen, I am I am all for BCI if I can think in Google and if I can occupy the In a humanoid robot and be able to physically Instantiate myself someplace else. I'm also open to you know a digital upload. I mean all those are all things that I think are expansive of of humanity and we are undergoing a a rapid evolution of what it means to be human and society will change as well. So I don't think you're seeing it where you're against it.

1:07:29You're just not saying it's not necessary. Is that true? Yeah, I'm saying it's not necessary in terms of making data real gold, because if that's the short -term gold, then people are saying, We're going to put a lot of resources to make that happen. I would rather we focus on, even if these machines are better than us, we are still going to have the 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 being, I think, a fulfilling life. And having fulfilled life.

1:08:05Let'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 Say what do you really want? What is it? I want to be healthy. I want to be happy and so you thought about happiness talk about that for a second Yeah, so one of the last chapters is kind of you know we'll be achieving this bring us happiness and the research is actually pretty clear you know, at least in terms of what brings us happiness is, you know, the freedom to choose what we do, having close family relationships, you know, having some kind of purpose in your life, and then, you know, having at least your basic capability and your needs, taking care of, right?

1:08:51And so, you know, in fact, and I think even in your abundance, what you talked about, at a certain income level, it doesn't bring you actually extra in fact, if anything, once you get past a certain level, it actually goes negative. You start getting more stressed of having more money. So what 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 of in terms of income to happiness level, it's a pretty relatively linear chart in terms of, you know, the higher income groups do have a higher happiness or satisfaction level, right?

1:09:34But then there are also, the strength thing is there are also some relatively lower income groups that are just happy as the higher income level. So, so even there's a trend, it is not, it is not an on a lie. So what, what it, and what we also What's 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, I think 150 ,000 something like that. But in other places in the world, in China it's probably like 20 ,000 to 30 ,000 in Africa, like 5 ,000 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.

1:10:11It is actually just about how all in my 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 success 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's a top -down in probably like 1990.

1:10:50And 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 a lot. 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, like half of the US level in terms of per capita energy use. If we get it to the level, that's only about one or two X more than Southeast Asia, and probably two or three X more than Africa. So if we can increase energy abundance by two to three X, we essentially get everybody to the European lifestyle.

1:11:32And 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. Okay, 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 and kind of enhance ourselves. And when we have that freedom, we will be here. And we will also be more knowledgeable, and by being more knowledgeable, we will probably be more understanding and more compassionate, it, which is like a reinforcing positive loop that just makes the world a better place.

1:12:13Yeah, agreed. I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about abundance since I wrote a small passage in the book of the subject. Thank you for your contribution. An important contribution. Well, and you talk about abundanceism as a term. and just for people to get a sense of where the metaverse will enable abundance, which for me is accessibility to anyone everywhere at the highest possible levels. And I use the example that Google and Baidu, as search engines, Google in the United States and Baidu in China, provided equal access to knowledge, independent of economic level, the Google for the poorest child in Google for the wealthiest child was the same.

1:13:06Can we list where we're going to see abundance coming from the Metaverse? Yeah, so if you look at what's happening with Metaverse is actually, it's able to supercharge our senses. You have AI supercharged our minds. You have a genetic engineering with supercharged our bodies, but metaverse and immersive technologies superchargers are senses. And when you supercharge your senses, it allows us to experience anything we want in 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 sides. We can be the size of a planet or be the size of a micro.

1:13:46And if you look at in terms of abundance, what does today's billionaires, what can they do that today's average person can do? It's about experience. It's about experience. And when you have a life -like 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 effectual equalization of fulfillment of life fulfillment because you know if I wanted to travel to Egypt or if I want to go go to space to the moon There's not very many people or towards the moon. How many people? If 300 people has left the orbit you know since the mention of our sense of start of time, right now How anybody can put on the headset and be in space and go to the moon and go to the Mars.

1:14:41And 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. And that's one of the final epilogue is kind of that story. So I think that's the sense of abundance at that because nothing is limited when you're talking about a virtual world. everything that we think of today as a constrained resource becomes completely about and knowledge is also the thing that I really think becomes super abundant because you are able to to just learn so much more and everybody can become the best version of themselves and I think that's all we need to be that's all we need to ask for I don't think we need to be we don't need to know as much as your GPT sub but I think we need to be able to say that hey I've learned as much as I can.

1:15:33I try to read something like 80 to 100 books a year. And that's my most fulfilling thing. Every time I finish a book, I'm like, oh, I learned something new. And that made me more complete person. And so I can see by, you know, Eli is saying the making curiosity, the reward function. Because if that's a reward function, that's a very positive reward function. Nobody's going to say, I'll be curious. And because of that, I want to make a bunch of paper clips. But that's not those are not alive, right? 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.

1:16:11So you want to preserve a very diverse ecosystem of humans, of animals, of all kinds of animals, of beings in the world, right? And so that actually is very kind of pro -human when you have that type of a reward function, versus things like maximize, you know, compute or maximize production or something. So I think we should be able to get to. 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?

1:16:58I have two 12 year old who are love love their metaverse and for them it's row blocks and other equivalent gaming worlds You know how much China limits use of 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 let's address both of those items. So we actually have a one section at the end of book which is a tips for young people and I advise everybody to read. I'll make those pages available to everybody so you don't have to buy the book to see it. But the key is really, most parents today are saying, hey, I want them to learn stem, I want them to be super great students and make lots of money.

1:17:50And I think that's probably not the best advice for long -term for these young people. I think we need to help them find their purpose, like Picasso's. I think you've got 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, you know, also music and and parts opens up different types of connections in their brain than just, you know, doing STEM work. So, so I think that that's that's important.

1:18:32So having them find that that really real purpose and passion that they have and then having them go deep in it. Because I think one of the things I see with young people today is that they they tend to have very short attention span and you know, and probably because of all the Instagram and TikTok culture. Everybody's not, you know, 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 them.

1:19:07And we really need to get people to get away from just getting the quick answer and to think about, what questions can I have? 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.

1:19:41and I'm just trying to find, I understand the topic and something that I may not, and I will hear it word somewhere or I'm topics somewhere and I want to know deeper. And 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 novel on the topic that I had very little understanding for. And I think we need that kind of curiosity. Because most education today teaches is to go for the quick answer and to be afraid to ask questions. Because asking questions a lot of you think is showing you don't know something. But the reality is that we don't know a lot of things.

1:20:17And we just need to accept playing with these tools. And I think we just got to go on 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 ten 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, 30, 30 years, it's going to be our project. So we need to see it grow up and be able to also light it along the way. I think it's allowing it to just say, okay, I don't need to think about it.

1:21:04Somebody 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 system. 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 less than 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 1 ,500 hours on something, because the additional value that I would gain from it is very limiting.

1:21:53So in some ways I actually agree with what China is doing in terms of saying, you know, each child three hours a week and you know, limit that. And you know, I think they should probably do that with social networks too, because there's a lot of these social networks, especially the ones that are maybe less meaningful. I think we may want to also limit how much time our children spend on it, just like we used to say, hey, you know, don't watch more than an hour or a large TV, or don't can't watch TV after certain time, right? 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.

1:22:35Now 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. And because in the future the most the most important thing is how we will interact with each other and that's all about the self -stills. 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, for sure.

1:23:19And also to allow us to ask the question, why? Because before people saw about how do you do this? How do you do that? But now that we know we can do almost anything, or soon we will be able to do almost anything, 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 Alfin Finns. A lot of people, especially in Asia, they don't put their kids into sports classes. There's like, it's a waste of time.

1:23:59I just want them to focus on school. And I think the US and probably Australia, whatever is probably a little better in that. But I think that's something that 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 a lot versus training a little.

1:24:36The other thing we don't do enough is sleep. I think, you know, I used to pride myself, well, I only sleep four or five hours a day. You and I both. I can get so much more sleep when I'm dead. Yeah. And I honestly, these days I think by sleeping more your brain just works so much better. And young people would 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. And I think that's critical. So, 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.

1:25:19And 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 instantly and I was traveling between China and US and I felt like I didn't get to see them in it 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 the parents do it because as the older you get the less time you will spend with, then you will wish you had spent more and you will learn things from them because they are one of the few people in the world that you know, essentially is just, it's un, I guess it's the unconditional love, right?

1:26:04That the true unconditional love is a parents love for their child. And to have that, they will give you advice that they think it's really helpful for you. So, so spend more time listening to your care. I'm gonna go hug my kid, I'm gonna 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.

1:26:45No, thank you Peter. You've been a real mentor. You have talking about mentors and I see you as a mentor and I listen to all your shows and I learned something from every show So it is my honor and position to to see T is there fantastic where do folks follow you on on Twitter or other platforms? Yeah, so Twitter is a grilling and then on LinkedIn is how the grilling so pretty easy And then also you can go to our next reality calm 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 a book to answer you.

1:27:26So hopefully that will give you a preview of any concerns that you have. And that's on our next reality .com is where you find the GBT. 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.