Super Soul Special: will.i.am: The Future of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence

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1:09I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time. taking time to be more fully present. Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now. Hey, babe. It's finally happened. Hey. Yes, thank you for having me. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Okay, so everybody knows you started out this founder of this super group, the Black Eyed Peas, and since then you keep rising and you keep growing, and it literally feels like you are expanding.

1:54So you're a consultant, you're an investor, you're an entrepreneur, you're an advocate, you're an activist, you're a philanthropist. You're like a modern-day Renaissance man. I read where you used to spend how many hours a week devoted to music for a period of time and then fewer hours a week devoted to music for a period of time. I just have to ask you this. Are you retired from music? I'm retired. No, I'm not retired from music. I just don't want to be in the music business. I love making music. I'm talking about me personally, like Black Eyed Peas. Yep. We make music. We haven't done it in eight years, but we have a new project that's virtual reality and augmented reality.

2:38But I just think there's so much technology and there's so many young kids that are doing awesome stuff to try to compete the way that we used to. I don't know. I can't. I think we're supposed to do something different. Yeah. Or birth new cats. Like, I saw him with Jimmy Iving when I was, he was my age right now. Yeah. I was 20-something. He was 40-something. And now that I'm 40-something, am I supposed to, like, no? I think I'm supposed to be, like, developing cats and believing in kids the way Jimmy believed in us. It's about this narrative where I saw this movie called Waiting for Superman, and that movie just was the beginning of this inner transformation where, you know, it talked about the decline of education in America and our position as a leader in the world and how we're dead last, we're almost last in education.

3:35and one of the schools that they highlighted in the film was Roosevelt and that's a school my mom went to. And that was a school that I would have went to if my mom didn't send me an hour and a half away from school ever since I was seven. And the thing that hurt my heart was it was waiting for Superman, like waiting for a fictitious character to solve real problems. To show up and solve this problem. I remember we did that on the show. And yeah, I remember that film, Transforming. Yeah, for a lot of people. Yeah, so I just went out looking for supermen and women. Yeah. And met Lorraine Powell-Jobs and asked her if she could bring her program, College Track, to Boyle Heights, the ghetto that I'm from.

4:18And since then, the program has been successful in Southern California. I now sit on her board. Dean came in with First Robotics, and I asked Lorraine if I could couple robotics with her college track program because the last thing I want to do is send kids to college and then they graduate with a diploma and debt. So now our kids are going to school with robotics degrees, with robotics as their major in engineering and mathematics and technology, computer science, and it's been great. We have a 100 % graduation rate. We've been doing it for eight years now. I think it was 2008 or 9 or something you came on the Oprah show and we had taken these young boys who Didn't have an opportunity to go to college and from Delaware.

5:09Yeah, and you gave them an opportunity to go to college And I think you were motivated by that moment I could feel in that moment that something happened when you met them on stage and yeah, they were connected it was that moment where I was like, okay, I need to do more of this and And we started in high school, and I came in their lives because of the Oprah Winfrey show transitioning from high school to college. I need to go sooner. So I went out and went to my ghetto and adopted a junior high school, kids at 13 years old. And it was 60 kids, and now those 60 kids are about to graduate college next year.

5:52And they're all going to school. 80 % of them, sorry. 80 % of those kids are going to school for robotics, engineering, computer science, mathematics. And it's great. And now we have 670 kids. But it all started off 10 years ago at the Opal Emper Show. Oh. Isn't it amazing how you start out wanting to, I found this so much often for myself, you start out wanting to offer your services, lift somebody up, and you end up getting lifted yourself. that the reward is far more than you ever imagined. No, it puts you on a straight arrow to where it's like people will be like, yo, Will, you want to go to this one party?

6:36What party is that? No, I can't go to there. No. Why not? No, no, no. I just can't go to that party. Because I'm now responsible for 600-some-odd kids, and if it doesn't reflect what I'm really, truly passionate about, then I can't really be rocking like that. So you actively seek out some of the coolest people in the world. I love what Jim Gianopolis, chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures, said about you. He says, Will has the most advanced right brain and left brain of anyone I know. Usually people are logical and analytical or intuitive and creative, but Will is each to such a high degree.

7:14He's a creative genius who thinks pragmatically about the way the world really works. I agree you don't think like anybody else. How would you describe the way your mind works? Well, music taught me how to pattern match. What does that mean? So matching patterns, it's like, hey, I noticed that people say, obrigado, in Brazil. Yeah. And they say, arigado, in Japan. I wonder why that? Does anybody realize that, you know, obrigado and arigado is similar and, you know, phonetically? and my mind then wants to research on the connection between Brazil and Japan. Right. And turns out Japanese love samba and bossa nova.

8:03And does the Portuguese play any part in what's happening in Brazil and the adoption of what came first, obrigado or arigado? Yeah. And a form of that is no different than making songs and finding rhymes and metaphors and similes. and then seeing the patterns in inner cities on connecting poverty with zoning. And whenever you have a liquor store and a check cashing and a motel, fast food restaurants and a strip mall, it's connected to these kids that don't have a way out and in and out of juvenile hall and eventually jail or prison in their lifetime. because you don't have the same zoning configuration and in and out of juvenile and prison where you don't have these strip balls and you know it's connected to you know investment in a child from 7 to 18.

8:57So pattern matching in music and then you see it you see it and that's the way your brain works. My brain just sees these patterns. And patterns. So you're at the forefront of what is being called the next industrial revolution that's AI, artificial intelligence and robotics. I think people get, they get really fearful of that term, don't you? Because it sets off all sorts of alarm bells in people's psyche. What does it mean to you? Can you explain for everybody watching and listening to us who doesn't already know what that means for us, AI, what it actually is? So movies, Hollywood did an amazing job with creating this dystopian future where robots and AI take over.

9:41And that's when you have one company. So the pattern matching comes in when I look at these films. I'm like, hey, wow, people are afraid of the Terminator because there's one company that dominates. People are afraid of the Matrix because there's one company that dominates. But they're not afraid of Star Wars. You have 3CPO, RTD2, all these other types of AI and robots, but the thing that they're afraid of in that film is the empire. Because when you think of these robots and this AI and these films that have created this fear, you don't know the intentions of the company, and it's one thing dominating over all society.

10:21Yeah. And Star Wars, to me, is the optimism around robots and machines and AI that assist humanity. But it can be equally dangerous. So can water. True. True that. So can anything. Yeah. It's a tool. We have to look at it as a tool, and how are we going to make sure that tool serves humanity? Yeah. Well, I'm just saying, equally dangerous. Stephen Hawking, the genius physicist who died this year, says success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, says our greatest existential threat, I think there's potentially a dangerous outcome there.

11:09Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says I'm in the camp that is concerned about superintelligence. Are you in that camp? Nope. Yes? Superintelligence, yeah. I think it's our test as creatives, humanity creating something that potentially will be more powerful than humanity. That super intelligence, this artificial intelligence stuff that we are dealing with now is a nice tool. Yeah. But it's not totally conscious. But a nice tool now, many people fear, can lead to a super tool later. Well, then we should have never had the Internet. We should all get off social media right now. Right this minute, right, right.

11:56If that's it, right, so... It's coming, right? So we just need to prepare ourselves. I think for a long time we've ignored our God-given technology, spirituality. Right. Is that how you refer to spirituality, our God-given technology? So we're hardware. Yeah. And there's something that fuels our hardware. Yeah. And that's our spirituality. So a phone has some type of operating system that allows it to function. and we as human beings are you know in this this idle i'm talking about mass society yeah we're in this idle cruise control or spirituality is not it's like if there was a bar yeah we had a wi-fi bar and how connected you are spiritually most folks are probably have one bar if that yeah um if you were measuring it by your yeah by the bar that's interesting yeah my 10 is up that was one of the things, one of the first things, Bill Clinton, when I first met Bill Clinton, he was like, your antenna's up.

13:02I'm like, antenna's up? Out of all the things, why would he say that? Because I always, my close circle of friends, we always would use that. Is your antenna up? What are you tuned into? And how well connected are you? And are you growing spiritually? I think this is a shove and a push to wake us up spiritually. This time. This fourth industrial revolution that we're in. All right. So I read somewhere where you see a time when everybody will have their own personal AI. What does that future look like? What does that look like? Okay, so if I were to say, hey, Oprah. Hey. Who's more powerful? Yeah.

13:41BBVA, Barclays, Bank of America, all combined. Yeah. Or Google. You would say Google, right? Yeah, yeah, right. Okay, if I were to say Swiss Bank, HBC, Wells Fargo, all combined, or Facebook. Yeah, let's say Facebook. So here are three companies, six of which, well, three different banks, that their business is to hold people's money. Yeah. So something that holds people's money, grows people's money, saves people's money, isn't as powerful as someone who doesn't take any money from you. So Facebook takes no money from you, by the way. It's a product that's for free. That's because data is more powerful than money.

14:26So you can't really know anything about me if I just put all my money on a table. That my money is not going to tell you who I am. It's not going to tell you where I go unless you have receipts on what I've spent. But your data does. It tells me everything. So most people on the planet, they have no clue what they're doing when they're on social media. They don't know whose company they're growing. They don't know how intelligent they're making the company. They just have this thing for free. Meanwhile, data is power. And if you're going to have access to your data and your data is to enrich your life, not only you as an individual, but all your data doppelgangers and your community, then you need to have some type of data scientist that's yours.

15:06And that would be a personal AI. So if my data is mine, I need my own AI. Mine. That knows me, gives me this feeling that it cares about me. and my home, and all these companies are now rushing into your home. They're rushing into your house to know everything about how you live, which would be... So you weren't surprised when you heard about the data being stolen from Facebook at all? Data being bought. Bought. I mean, bought. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. So these companies know more about you than the government in the country you live in, by the way. So, and I think the same way Uber has disrupted transportation, whether it's MTA or metros or taxis, a new wave is going to disrupt the data giants.

15:55And we need disruption. Right. It's what you think, right? We need disruption. We have, like, these data monarchies. Yeah. So, if you lived back in a day and there was a king and a queen, the king and the queen owned everything. the land you lived on. They provided you with mortar. They gave you the, you know, the building knowledge of how to build buildings. And when you built buildings, most likely the king and queen owned them. And that's what we are in right now. Well, what's fascinating to me is that you're so open and receptive to it. And there are a lot of people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, who are like people were probably when automobiles first started.

16:37And they're like, oh, I'm going to just keep my horse. I'm just going to keep driving my horse. Or when people said, you know, now we're going to have telephone service. Or, you know, people are usually afraid of change. It's the nature of being humans is that you like to keep things the way they are. Yeah. Yeah. So every 100 years, it turns out every 100 years there's this leap. Yeah. So 100 years ago today, Edison and Tesla were battling on who's going to connect New York and Chicago and try to, you know, turn the Niagara Falls into an energy source. And J.P. Morgan and Westinghouse were investing in them around 100 years ago.

17:26Now, every single city in the world, more or less, is powered with electricity. We have the ability, you know, that same company that Edison started, General Electric, launched RCA, which is Radio Corporation of America, and NTSC. Now we have radio and TV and new ways of connecting with the Internet. Yeah. And 2000 and right now, a different type of electricity exists. Now you can talk to it. Now you can talk to electricity. You get your phone, you say, hey Siri, you go in the house. Those little devices have some type of power in it and the electricity understands human uttering speech. And that's going to change how we interact with machines and things.

18:13And, you know, my whole mission is how do you get more inner city kids, ethnic folks, building and designing tomorrow? Because it's going to be built and designed anyway. Just like 100 years ago, my great, great uncle was not a part of the conversation how the world was going to go. They didn't, you know, participate in the making and shaping. Getting at the table where any decisions were being made. Yes. So that's the reason why I try to encourage my kids, hey, you guys better be a part of this conversation. It's going to be designed anyway. So you were an initial investor in Beats with Jimmy Iovine and Dr.

18:50Dre. And when that company was sold, you used the money and created your own tech company called I Am Plus. And it's described, I've heard, as this kind of futuristic think tank. It's a sort of modern incubator. you gathered together developers and content makers and students and scientists and designers. So what are you creating at IM Plus? So we've created an artificial intelligence voice operating system. And right now we are helping augment Deutsche Telekom's customer service in Austria. So our system speaks German, English, Spanish, French. It's learning to speak Mandarin and Cantonese as we speak.

19:31Our developers are getting it prepared for that. So, yeah, so we augment call centers. We are working on our consumer product that we're going to launch shortly. And it's in and around the things I was talking about before is how do we empower people to retain their data and giving people personal AI. You said that right now we're living in an inhumane age and the human age is about to come. But we're going to need assistance to get there. And that's why I'm optimistic about artificial intelligence. Maybe we need a different type of intelligence so we can see the human in us. Do you believe that artificial intelligence can help us become more human?

20:12I want to believe that, but the more stuff I see on TV with people just doing the worst things to each other, it's disheartening, and it tries to diminish and break my optimism, but I remain optimistic. It's coming. You're talking about the divisiveness. that we're all feeling in the world. Just this, like, this angst. There's this fuzz, this frequency of, like... Something's off, people. Yeah. Yeah. If you put your antenna up, you feel it. It's like this unsettled... Yeah, what does it feel like to you? It feels like to me that we've lost a spiritual core, that we've forgotten who we are, that we are so disconnected from source energy, whatever name you want to give to that.

21:00What does it feel like to you? That's what it feels like to me. And that everybody's just sort of playing into each other's hysteria. For me, it feels like the parents are not here and the kids are acting up. All over the world. All over the world. It's like, where are the parents at? It just feels adolescent. It feels like, you know, carelessness, selfishness at the extreme. Like if Oprah was walking down the street and wants to trip, people would whip their phones out before they say, are you okay? If I was to walk down the stairs and fall, people would pull out their phone before they say, hey, are you alright?

21:46And that's this, for what though? So they could post it for likes? And the likes don't benefit you at the end of the day, it benefits the four data monarchy. There's these four kingdoms called Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. And in the order that I said, Apple is a little bit more open and controlled with their data. They're not as data hungry because they sell a product. So there's a part of me that is optimistic, but then I'm concerned on just pay attention. go to the restaurant and just see people together, and they're not together. You see people when they're walking down the street, which is great because I'm on the phone too, but there is no type of manners anymore.

22:41There's this digital route, and you see it when you travel and people come up to you and just throw a phone in your face. And expect a selfie. And expect what, and there's no word for it. There's no rude, there's no word for it. Like if I burp, it's like, wow, that was rude, Will. Yeah. Like if I had gas, I would hold my gas because I don't want to bust out in front of everybody in the room. Yeah. But when it comes to like other needs, we have no more manners. It's like this disregard to anybody's personal space. And it has nothing to do with, there's like invasion of privacy and then there's invasion of privacy.

23:21If I select to go on social media, it does not mean that I should get rushed and bombarded by everyone else's, you know, desires to capture moments, right? And that's why I think we need some type of, you know, on-off switch in the form of a technology that is looking out for me. I should be able to tell my thing. Now we need a technology to look out for us. Why can't we do it ourselves? Because we don't have the time of the day. Well, why? You don't think that there is a need to return to some kind of value system that says, this is rude, invading a person's personal space. I remember walking across the bridge during the movie Selma, and this woman was screaming at me about, give me a selfie, give me a selfie.

24:11And I physically could not do it. And I was just like, take the picture. Just go ahead, take the picture. And she said, I don't want to picture you. I want to picture me in the picture with you. And then I couldn't get to her. And then she had much, much, much, much attitude, which that has happened to me several times. I'm sure it's happened to you too. People have much attitude because it's like you are, it's now flipped that if you don't allow me to invade your personal space, then you're being rude for not letting me take a selfie. What's wrong with you? You won't let me have a selfie. Are you pulling yourself over it?

24:48That's why I didn't like you. It's like, what? Are you serious here? It's got to the point where, you know, in the name of freedom, I no longer have freedom of what I want to do now. Because I'm supposed to, like, I asked my mom, I'm like, Ma, if you had to raise us in this era, could you have? No, boy. She said, no, boy. Because society is now dictating how parents are raising their kids. Like, my mom raised me the way my grandma raised her. And those are three different times. Two of them were synonymous with each other. Like, my grandma, that's like fresh out of slavery. She was born in 1920.

25:31Her grandma was a slave. My mom was born in 1950. And there were similarities. Because there was, you know, Jim Crow. Yeah. And they migrated from the South to Southern California. So here I am. I'm a video game kid. My mom was TV kid. My grandma was radio kid. My grandma's mom was picking you in Mississippi. Yeah. Picking things. Ready for the best summer ever? ID Tech is the original and most trusted tech camp for kids, ages 7 to 17. offering over 50 epic courses like Camp Crunch Labs IRL, BattleBots with TakeHomeBots, AI and Machine Learning, and more. Camps are all about high-energy fun, new friends, trusted instructors, and exclusive tech partnerships.

26:24Experience ID Tech at 75 college campuses nationwide. Visit IDTech.com and use code IDTech to save$150 on a week that's guaranteed to be the highlight of your kid's summer. Save on tropical flavors at Whole Foods Market during the Savor the Tropics event with yellow sales signs highlighting seasonal finds throughout the store. The produce section is bursting with pineapples, mangoes, and kiwis at their juiciest. Grill up fresh seafood paired with tropical fruit marinades or grab and enjoy the spicy Hawaiian pizza, huli huli chicken, and more. Finish with a sweet slice of mango yuzu chantilly cake.

27:04Savor the Tropics and save at Whole Foods Market.

27:10Back to what we were saying earlier, do you think there will be a time where we actually, because, you know, it's debated over and over again whether technology connects us or disconnects us, and I love your analogy. We're just now talking to electricity. I think it's both. It connects us and it disconnects us. But how can we use it? Will we be able to move to a time when we'll be able to use it to maximize connection and minimize disconnection? Do you see that happening? Yeah, so for example, here's what the phone does really good right now. Yeah. If I'm lost somewhere and I say, hey, I need to get to X and X coordinates, it could get me there.

27:46Yeah. It mapped the whole planet. Yeah. Really well. But it hasn't mapped me and people yet. So if I said, hey, I want to weigh 170 by April 19th, 2018, it should be able to give me directions on how to do that. She helped me. Right, so I'm taking all these steps, but really I don't really know what to do with those steps. Are the steps really for me, or is it for the company to know my steps? Now you've got to start asking questions like, yo, what's really going on here with all these step stuff? Are you all watching me step? Are you all calculating my steps? Is it for me, though? Because how is it really for me?

28:26Yeah. Y 'all don't even know what I ate. Yeah. To even burn off that stuff. So that's for weight, but what about... Or maybe they do. Maybe they do. Maybe they do know when you age. Right? So what if I wanted to have life aspirations, things that I want to accomplish, things that I want to do in life, with all the knowledge that's out there in the world, can a system help me achieve my goals? So you don't have that much time to search the Internet for all the things to really help you. There's not enough time. It's so noisy. It's the reason why I believe fake news is fake news. There's just so much stuff out there on purpose to flood you from what's right and what's wrong.

29:08You don't have enough time to thumb through it all. I don't know anybody that got time to live life, spend time with their family and friends, work, and thumb through life. It just so happens that people thumb through life more than they are interacting with people. Now, what if you had something to help you save time where you don't have to thumb through life? to where you don't search the internet. The internet comes to you. And not notifications where it's like, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling. Because if I had to talk to something, it has to be smart enough to give me what I need.

29:45And that is the optimism I have with this, not super intelligence, just personal intelligence for me. You can't do advertising and like pop up windows in the form of a conversation. That system has to be precise to give me what I need when I need it in the form of a conversation. And as soon as somebody starts, if I'm talking to you and then I start talking about for 99 cents, Nike shoes on Figueroa Boulevard, you'll be like, what the F are you talking about? You can't just blurt off into freaking advertising mode out of nowhere. You wouldn't want me as a friend. And the same thing, I believe, is for this personal thing.

30:24It's going to help us save time. It's going to help us connect with the people that we care about because we don't have to thumb through life. We're thumbies. We're thumbing through life. Yeah, like not dummies, thumbies. Going through life for... Yeah, I think we need to have a verb for that. Like, you're thumbing too much. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to thumb you. Yeah. Like, thubbing, thumbing, tilting. Yeah. Like, two people, boyfriend... Well, we need language for that. We also need language for what has happened to us, as we were saying earlier, what has happened to this sense of rudeness, this sense of we don't have a language for how people should be behaving.

31:07Yeah, yeah. Now, I've heard you say you want kids just to dream to be like Steve Jobs and not only like Stevie Wonder. That's your main mission in life now, correct? Yeah. How do you do that when this generation more than ever just wants to be famous? Oh, it's terribly hard. but I think there's this get it about to get it, about to live that life gotta make it rain whatever the hustle mentality is I always say but Steve Jobs did it so big he don't hustle Bill Gates did it so big he isn't grinding why do you want to hustle and grind there's a way to get it to where you're not grinding, you wouldn't buy a car that grinds you wouldn't want to ride a horse called Hustle because eventually it would get tired.

31:57Yeah. Like, you want a horse named Lightning, you want a car named Smooth. Yeah. Right? So how do you apply the same things to life? Like, for a long time, they thought African Americans couldn't excel in tennis. Arthur Ashe and the Serena sisters dominated. They said the same thing with golf. Tiger Woods dominated. The same things can be applied in the world of tech, science, solving problems. So let's start dreaming that dream. Let's start saying, there's five foot two people that want to do it like Michael Jordan. There's no way. You five two, bro. And even if you, and you can get it that way.

32:37But not, there's more people that could get it like Steve Jobs than they are like Michael Jordan, turns out. Because everyone would turn pro by applying themselves. Department of Defense needs it. Department of Energy needs it. They need it. And there's a shortage of engineers. And I know that you believe that poor, underprivileged, disenfranchised children are actually a business. What is the business of poverty, do you believe? Okay, so let's say, take me back. I'm 11 years old. I'm into projects. Just like you have scouts that go out and look for football players and basketball players to go to college, They're scouts that go into inner cities that check GPA, seeing how many people are in and out of juvenile hall, and they decide where they're going to build the next prison.

33:30And it just so happened in America for a long time, prisons were privatized. Yep. Everybody should watch 13th, by the way. Yeah, your delinquent behavior was a business for folks. Say, for example, and it all starts with how much money they invest in a kid at an early age to go to school. If you go to Brentwood or the equivalent of Brentwood across America, a kid's getting$8 ,000 to$10 ,000 a year for their education. If you go to Boyle Heights or Watts, a kid's getting$3 ,000 to$5 ,000 a year for their education. Wherever there's$3 ,000 to$5 ,000 a year for their education, those kids are subject to bad food, no financial literacy.

34:09They're in and out of juvenile hall in prison. And that's a business. They're obese and diabetic, and they're going to end up on some medicine. and the food that they're eating is going to scale their bad health to levels at which they probably won't live a long life. But throughout their life, they were generating so much money for pharmaceutical companies, correctional facilities, and it's a business. So you want to combat business with business. So let's educate our kids, either change how school districts invest in a child or do what I do in my neighborhood. There's so many celebrities that come from inner cities.

34:46they can adopt their school. So I adopted my school and then adjacent to the neighborhood I grew up in and it cost about a million and a half bucks and for a college training program my college track it works. So all the folks that are watching this hearing it it works. All the folks that are NBA they have disposable income or rappers or singers actors actresses go to the hood that you come from and adopt it. It costs 1.2 a year. If you can do it that way. I mean, there's people rapping about spending money, wasting it. Like, imagine if our community was rapping about, like, changing their neighborhood.

35:30Right? That would be awesome. Not getting, like, y 'all can't wait to get up out the hood. How about, like, I can't wait to change the hood. Imagine that. Imagine that was the path forward. Like, yo, I can't, yo, how much you changed your name? Man, I changed my neighborhood, like, X amount. boom boom boom I mean it will be amazing right like we always complain about the things like underserved communities or underdeveloped communities but we never ask who are the servers and the developers like I wonder who these developers and servers are that are making it possible for these living conditions turns out we can be the servers and developers ourselves so this makes you an optimist right you're an optimist about the future yeah I'm the kind of optimist that if someone says, you know what they say, when the door closes, another one opens.

36:19I don't say that. You don't say that. I say when a door closes, I'm going to go build another door because then that way it will always be open because I own that door and I can close it when I want. You could be an optimist that's still waiting for other opportunities or you could be an optimist that makes opportunities. And that's how optimistic I am, is how do I go out and make opportunities and not wait for them? Love it. All right, tell me what this is. Oh, Master of the Sun? Yeah. Master of the Sun. Blackout Peas present Master of the Sun. I hear this is a book that is like augmented reality.

36:56I'm really excited about this. You know what I'm excited about this? Because it means future books is going to change. Right? Yep. All right. So Master of the Sun is a graphic novel that I wrote five years ago with Nir and Damien Scott and then Jack. And what it is, you classic traditional graphic novel. Marvel was our partner. Yeah. But we created this technology that allows you to put the phone over the book and the book comes to life. Like so. Oh.

37:35Ah, motherfucker!

37:41We need to make Malik tell us who his supplier is. We find him, then we can find out. Wow. Because I can think of any other way to do that. So you have the app that you put over the book, and then the book comes alive. Yeah. So I scored it with Hans Zimmer. So I went to Hans Zimmer's studio in Santa Monica. I'm like, look, I got this team that I've had for the past eight years. My financial folks were like, Will, you need to get rid of this team. I was like, no, no, we'll figure something out. You don't understand. They're talented. And so everyone was talking about this new technology that augments physical spaces, books, and just like the space between me and you.

38:17You could layer it and put new information. I could see with augmented reality, I could see like Oprah's digital halo, the things that are on your mind, things that you traveled. And right now it's on a phone, but tomorrow will be glasses or contacts. Yeah. So we're just, we're really like, what, five, six years from being able to see what other people are thinking, right? Not see what they're thinking, but seeing what people's, their collection of thoughts. So right now we have that, if I wanted to follow your feed, really that's a collection of thoughts. What you thought about that picture, your comment about that, your conversations.

38:56If you really look at social platform, you really get to see what a person is about. Yeah. What's important to them or what they think is important or what they want you to think is important. But I need this device, this phone right now. So this book shows you that what you thought a book was in the past will change tomorrow. Where I can go deeper into what that sentence was about or hidden gems behind that phrase or picture. Depending on the author, you can tell deeper stories with augmented reality in books. Right when you thought books were obsolete, here comes something to bring them back up again.

39:31And the same way this book has been transformed, me sitting and talking to Oprah would be transformed when I have augmented lenses, whether they're glasses or contacts, which I think could be distracting. It could be distracting, because every once in a while you... But people do that anyway when they talk. Well, so it all excites you, right? It just excites you. Do you sleep well? I've learned now that I've changed my regimen and plant-based, I sleep really well. Okay, I was going to say. Are you constantly thinking about things, what the future is, what's it going to look like? Yeah, so I go to sleep around 12 now, wake up at 7, 8, work out, eat right, and have deeper sleeps.

40:22But I still, I'm always thinking about what tomorrow might be. and what's your spiritual base what keeps you personally grounded your spirituality the essence of you um the conversation the prayers that i have with my my future self and my past self really so when i pray and meditate i meditate and pray to my 18 year old self right now who's lost because he doesn't know how to get here. So I send him, you know, GPS coordinates. Here's how you get here. Stay away from that, stay away from that. And I meditate and pray to that person. And just like the six-year-old. Why? Because you're already here in your 40s.

41:08So why do you need to do that? Because that's what got me here. Okay. So I don't see time like, you know, it's one o 'clock. I'm late to a meeting. I think I think of time as this constant loop if you choose to connect to your your past self and future self okay right so yeah I'm here at 42 yeah but like I have a memory of your 18 of my 18 year old self I know he's lost and and he got me here because I send him here just like my 60 year old self is sending me to that. Yeah. Like why am I doing AI? My 60 year old self is telling me to do this. Yeah. Because it's going to be built anyway. Let's make sure it's built by folks that come from areas that either are going to have tougher lives because of which, right?

42:01How do we make it easier for those folks, right? By making sure the algorithm is looking after them. If you're in a car, self-driving car, AI. And in the car is like a 20 billionaire. And right next to him is, you know, a 100 millionaire. And walking across the street is Jamal. And they're all going to LAX. And to pass LAX, get to LAX, you have to pass Inglewood, the hood. And there's a car accident happening. And AI knows that Jamal, in an instant, is only worth a negative$2 ,000. whose life is being saved and protected. That algorithm is being programmed now. That algorithm is being programmed now.

42:50That algorithm has to be being programmed now because everyone's talking about self-driving cars. So from that perspective, there's sensors on the car that can see the face and know where that face is connected to financially and if they've been in any crime or not to be able to protect not only the lives of the car and the value and the... Who's more important, the vehicle and the system or the person? Oh, this is scary. Yes. This is scary. You've got to think about that stuff right now. This is very scary. This is very scary. That's the reason why I'm like... If the car knows who I am as I'm crossing the street, I think that's pretty darn scary.

43:25What's scary is all the Uber drivers would be out of jobs in five years. You think? You know. You cannot say autonomous vehicles and then at the same time say Uber drivers. Yeah, does not compute. So there's a lot of things. But with AI, new jobs will come. It always is as so where kids that have nothing end up creating things that never existed. Jazz, hip-hop. Hip-hop, yeah. It all came from folks that were forgotten. Yeah. So what are those folks going to dream up and imagine in new careers and new industries that are going to come for their dabbling in AI? And the sooner you put them in the conversation, the better it is for folks that are synonymous to their life conditions.

44:17So I just talked about, like, inner cities. What about slums? One of those slums is Bangalore, India. Bangalore, India, 2005, wasn't the Bangalore, India you know today. The Bangalore India you know today is like the tech hub of India. Yeah. Right, so you see how tech can transform the living conditions, and it will continue to change. Yeah. So AI is, people are grazing over it. Spellcheck is AI. The dog ears, when you're on Instagram or Snapchat, is some version of AI or AR. It's here. Yes. Stephen Hawkins is a genius, and rest in peace, great addition to society as a whole. Elon Musk, amazing.

45:04So some people could be like, really, Willian, we're supposed to take your optimism over the geniuses? You should always take optimism over worry and fear. Their concern is not that AI is bad. It could be bad. But then you have to ask, why will it go wrong? It will go wrong if education is not matched with investment for AI. So if we have a dumb society, that's when it goes wrong. What are we doing to counter that and make sure that we play a role in making sure to our best abilities that people are educated? How do you change frequency in popular culture to where education is sought after and not just meaningless materialism?

45:51Thank you. Cool conversation. Thank you. Thanks, Oprah. I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Join me next week for another Super Soul Conversation. Thank you for listening.