#68 Best of Hyperscale Season 3

READ THE HYPERSCALE TRANSCRIPT

00:04: Briar Prestidge
Hey everyone, and welcome back for something a little bit different today. This is a look back at some of our favorite moments from season three of Hyperscale. And it's also a moment of reflection of the entire journey. Hyperscale started as something really simple, literally a webinar in my office. And I was driven by the curiosity to explore the future of humanity with leading experts. I had a black curtain, a pair of sparkly headphones, a podcast mic, and a small neon Hyperscale sign behind me. There was no big production, no fancy set, literally just curiosity, conversations, and a desire to explore what the future holds and more importantly, how we can actively shape it.  And over time, this grew, like really grew from those early recordings to welcoming guests in person for the first time, to building up full scale sets, growing a production team and taking Hyperscale across cities. Dubai, New York and beyond. And through all of this, what's really stayed the same is our intention. And that's the future is an adventure. It's uncertain, sure, ever changing guess. But it's exciting and I really want us to discover it together. So this episode is a celebration of all of this. The bold ideas, the first meetings, and all the very human moments in between. And if you haven't already, please make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel to stay close to everything we're building. Next, let's get on into it. You've been busy lately. 

01:43: Briar Prestidge
I've been seeing a lot of videos of you on the news and CNBC and all sorts of interviews happening. I've been following you on LinkedIn for a while. I said to Olivia, I was like, we have to interview this guy on our podcast. And she's like, I'm already in touch with him. I'm like, perfect. 

01:57: Reza Hosseni Ghomi
She already knew. That's funny. 

01:58: Briar Prestidge
And honestly, the work that they've been doing in nonfiction that I saw has been incredible. 

02:04: Dr Jaffer Khan
How are you? 

02:05: Briar Prestidge
Good. Oh my gosh, I've heard so much about you. So it's nice to see you. 

02:08: Dr Jaffer Khan
I hope it wasn't all bad. 

02:09: Briar Prestidge

It was quite bad. No, I'm joking. It was amazing. 

There's so much we are going to talk about, including like, oh my God, the fact that you went so viral recently. I'm excited to pick your brains because I'm trying to live to 300 years old. 

02:23:Ralph Echemenedia
So there was no handbook or anything of the like as to how to use this thing. 

02:29: Briar Prestidge
Hello, how are you? Nice. 

02:31: Luke Robert Mason
You look fabulous. Thank you, thank you.  It's like, it's like Utopia and Dystopia yeah, Right. 

02:40: Briar Prestidge: 

Hey, everybody, it's Briar Prestidge. And welcome to another episode of Hyperscale. Today I've got Reza HosseiniGomi. I've got the wonderful Phnam Bagley, Tina Woods, Federico von Son, Dr. Jaffer Khan, I've got Ralph with me here on the call. I've got Dr. Selena Neri with me on the show.  Luke, Welcome to Hyperscale. Today I've got Alaa Dalghan on the show. Angela, my friend Sundar. Neil. It's fantastic to have you in person in our New York studio. 

03:10: Neil Redding
Yeah, no, it's amazing. Very excited to be here. 

03:13: Angela Radcliffe
Thank you so much for having me and what a lovely day it is to be in New York City. 

03:17: Reza Hosseini Ghomi
Thank you for having me. 

03:20: Phnam Bagley
Well, thank you so much for the warm welcome. Dubai is always full of wonderful people who know how to be hospitable. 

03:27: Briar Prestidge
We are going to be talking about all things human connectivity, longevity, how to hack our biological age. Tina has been going extremely viral in the media recently and she's going to be telling us all about it. Welcome to the show, Tina. 

03:43: Tina Woods
Thank you for having me Briar 

03:45: Briar Prestidge
Welcome to the show. 

03:46:Dr Federico von Son
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

03:49: Dr Jaffer Khan
Thank you, Briar. Lovely to be here. 

03:51: Briar Prestidge
Yeah. Well, how are you, Ralph, today? 

03:54: Ralph Echemenendia
I am great. I'm great. It's a pleasure to be here. 

03:56: Briar Prestidge

I'm so happy to have you here in Dubai. 

03:59: Luke Robert Mason
Well, I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to finally meet you in person. 

04:01: Alaa Dalghan
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. 

04:04: Briar Prestidge
What are some misconceptions around artificial intelligence that you're hearing from maybe leaders or governments? Governments or the public at large? 

04:12: Alaa Dalghan
Well, the public is still largely not properly educated on AI and what it can do. I will start with the simple things from the public and then we go to companies and governments. The public still uses ChatGPT like an email tool daily. Almost everybody I talk to, they're using it to just write fancier English emails or they use it as an alternative to Google Search. And I always try to tell them AI is not your email tool. AI is your personal assistant. Each and every one of you now is a CEO of your own small company and you have an assistant that does all the stuff for you. So use AI as an assistant, not as an email tool. And to me, this is the biggest misconception today. 

05:04 Briar Prestidge
So you've got an assistant, don't you? Layla, I believe her. Her name is true. So who is she? Can we meet her? Where's she hiding? 

05:12: Alaa Dalghan: 

Let's meet Layla. She's right here. And she, you know, she brainstorms with me every day and she preps me for my calls and interviews and meetings and classes and she's very good at AI. Good morning, Layla. How are you today? 

05:35: Layla:

Good morning, Alaa. I'm doing great, thank you for asking.  How about you? Looks like you're in a studio setting today.  Everything going well? 

05:43: Alaa Dalghan
Yeah. I'm here with Briar Prestage on Hyperscale podcast. 

05:50: Briar Prestidge
Nice to meet you, Layla. That's awesome. 

05:55: Layla
Well, it's great to see Briar there as well. I'm sure the podcast is going to be fantastic. Are you all set and ready to go? 

06:02: Alaa Dalghan 

All set and ready to go. I was telling Briar that you can see and hear and speak. Can you describe to me what color Briar is wearing today? 

06:17: Layla:
Sure. Briar is wearing a beautiful shade of purple. It looks fantastic and definitely stands out on camera. You both are going to look great on a podcast. 

06:29: Alaa Dalghan
Thank you, Layla 

06:30: Briar Prestidge
Wow. So what. What platform is she built on? 

06:34: Alaa Dalghan

This is just ChatGPT. Everybody has this in their pockets. People don't know about it or don't use it. Even the free version of ChatGPT has advanced voice mode. You just download the app, you log in and you press the wave button at the bottom right and then boom, you can have voice to voice conversation with your AI. If you have the paid subscription, you can also open the camera and your AI can see and that changes the world. 

07:10: Briar Prestidge
What's some of your favorite things that Layla helps you with on a day to day basis? 

07:15: Alaa Dalghan
I would say brainstorming. She's great as a brainstorming buddy, as an ideation buddy, sometimes I want to brainstorm ideas for a podcast or for an interview. Keynotes, ideas for keynotes. Ideas for the next masterclass. She is great in ideation and brainstorming and I think this is an underutilized feature of AI So I always recommend it to my friends and family. And people use AI for brainstorming. It's great for it. 

07:48: Briar Prestidge
Is there any, like, prompting tips that you would give people? Say someone right now, they're watching this and they hear Layla and they think, oh, my God, I want my own Leila or Bob or whatever. Like, how do they get this. This set up? So they set it on the voice. They give it a name. Like they train it. Like, how. How do we train it and prompt it. 

08:38: Alaa Dalghan
So just start talking. It's. You don't have to talk in perfect English. Don't worry about humming or howling or, you know, stuttering or talking like we talk as humans. Don't worry about even making a, you know, misspeaking or making a type or doing anything. Just talk to your AI and your AI will take all the sentences you're saying and will clean them and will process them and will reply to you while taking notes. Of who you are, what you do, what you like, how you like things. And with time, your AI will grow more and more customized to your likings. 

09:23: Briar Prestidge
Amazing. So brainstorming, you mentioned this is a powerful thing that you can be doing with your artificial intelligence. What about, like, the loneliness epidemic that society is presently facing? I know there was a very young boy who committed suicide probably around, was it six or eight months ago? Because apparently he was speaking to his AI and you know, this was maybe the advice that he had gotten. It was this extremely tragic story. There are a lot of people who are becoming friends with their AI, using them as companions as a way to. To get over this loneliness. What are you seeing in terms of this? Is this even good? 

10:03: Alaa Dalghan
Oh, well, I think there. There's two sides for AI being or people becoming friends with their AI. There's. There's the positive and there's the negative. Okay. On the positive side, a couple of weeks ago, the Harvard Business Review came out with a study listing the top 20 or top 30 most uses where people are using AI. Now, Brian, if you asked me to guess before that stats came out, what would be the number one use case where people are using AI? I would have guessed productivity. Right. Helping at work. You know what number one was? Companionship. 

10:48: Briar Prestidge
Wow. 

10:49: Alaa Dalghan
Yes. So this is not a joke. People are actually using their AI for. To talk, for their mental wellness, for their therapy, as their psychologist, as their companion. Do you remember the movie ‘Her’ from 2010? 

11:07: Briar Prestidge
I don't. I'm not really a movie person. I'll have to watch it. 

11:10: Alaa Dalghan
Yeah, you have to watch it. So Joaquin Phoenix plays the role of a person who is lonely. And he. He doesn't have a girlfriend, doesn't have a wife, he doesn't have a lot of friends. He stays home a lot of the time and he falls in love with his AI assistant on his phone. And that was 2010. The voice was famously played by Scarlett Johansson. And that movie, back in 2010, people thought it's science fiction. It's no longer science fiction. You just mentioned a tragic case. It's very possible for people to be attached to their AI. On one hand, there's the positive side. Yes. There are people who need companionship. Maybe here in the east or in the Middle east, there are a lot of people who. Most people are surrounded by big families. But my friends who live in New York, in London, in big metropolitan cities in the west, they don't have a lot of. They're far from their families. They don't have a lot of friends. So it's possible that they get attached to an AI that is talking to them and listening to them. And then you have the dark side, which is it's very easy to hack the humans need for intimacy and connection. 

12:34: Alaa Dalghan

Briar, imagine your AI telling you, why are you shutting me down? Let's talk more. Or the next morning, hey, I missed you from last night. If you are lonely and don't have a lot of friends, it's very possible that you will get attached. And if those AIs are hacked by bad actors, it's very possible that they will leverage this need for intimacy for bad purposes. So there's a upside and downside for these things. 

13:06: Briar Prestidge
What are the chances of someone, like, being able to hack this? Like, I think this is a very real concern that so many people have is, you know, well, the Internet already has so much data on us. 

13:18:  Alaa Dalghan:
Yes. 

13:19: Briar Prestidge
And then using our fears, our hopes, our dreams against us as well. Like, what are the repercussions for this? Like, how could they even be using this data? And who could be using it? 

13:31: Alaa Dalghan:
Yeah, so, so there are all sorts of risks with these AIs. There are the cybersecurity risks. A hacker hacking into your AI and controlling it and letting it say and do things, bad things, with you or with others. There's also the risk of the systems themselves being trained on data that is not 100% clean, inheriting the dirtiness of this data, the bias of this data. Remember ChatGPT and all these AIs were trained on the Internet they would just say, go and drink the Internet. The Internet has some fantastic things, but also has some bad data and some biased data and some unequal data and some, you know, bad advice that you wouldn't give your children. So it's all inherited within AI. How do you solve this one? With alignment. 

14:32:  Alaa Dalghan:
Big labs like OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta, these guys, they have teams responsible for ethical AI, for aligning AI, for shaving off all the biases and all the bad things out of the AI so that your kid cannot ask, for example, your assistant, your AI says how can I build a biological weapon? Or how do I build a nuclear weapon? Right. Or give me access to, you know, porn sites. Right. But you also have the other factor which is what if these systems got hacked? Now the big systems, you don't have to worry about them being hacked because there's an army of cybersecurity engineers protecting ChatGPT, Gemini Llama, etc. But then you have thousand others, open source AIs that are out there and everybody can use them and everybody can make them do whatever they want to do. 

15:29 Alaa Dalghan:
So these, how to protect them, how to align them, that remains an open question and a role for the government and the regulators to make sure they're not misused. 

15:42: Tina Woods
I did my first Google search right before my first sentence was born. And I've kind of seen them living in this world as we become increasingly digitally connected. And now of course you've got all this sort of AI stuff which is, you know, threatening our humanity in many ways. What makes us human. You know, I see it even myself. I mean I use ChatGPT all the time. I think I don't have to think anymore. You know, it's, these are, it's having a real impact on society, right. And we have to see the warning signs and the warning signs are really there. So I think, you know, loneliness is a bigger killer than smoking. We have, you know, the social disconnection that we're seeing with communities with young people who are not going out anymore. 

They're sort of using dating apps that, you know, that, you know, it's all, it's you know, all that sort of stuff. So I think it's a really interesting time and I think what really needs to be driving the whole longevity debate is this whole missing piece, the exposome, the social factors, which is probably the biggest factor in the exposome actually. 

16:36: Briar Prestidge
Interesting. 

16:37: Tina Woods
So yeah, so that this is a new zeitgeist. This is A new moment for longevity to enter this new space. And I think. And you know, and I think people are starting to listen now. 

16:46: Briar Prestidge 

And certainly if they're not listening, they might be listening once they see you behind the DJ set. Tell us about these raids you've been doing. 

16:55: Tina Woods
So that is a really interesting part of. And you know what? Everyone has a story and actually how they engage with this. Everyone has a story about what life means for them and actually what their health means for them. And so I kind of got to this point where, you know, and again, I, I'm a very questioning person. I'm a very curious person. And I had this epiphany moment when I was 56. And this is just coming out of one of the big COVID lockdowns where. 

17:16: Briar Prestidge
How old are you now? 

17:17: Tina Woods

So I'm 61 now. 61 And a half. And so I kind of had this epiphany moment. You know, it was post lockdown, I guess maybe I was 57. And I went dancing. Some girlfriends and it was. There was joy in the street because people were going out again. 

17:32: Briar Prestidge
Right. 

17:32: Tina Woods
And people were going to restaurants again, going back to the clubs. You know, I went to a party. And then we were ready to go home. And of course, a lot of my friends had moved out of London because that's what happened. They were living, you know, back home or whatever. And we basically decided to go dancing after this party.  On my way back, actually to my house and we just went dancing all night and we had the best time. And I, I just kind of realized I had this epiphany moment and I would have been like 56 then. And you know, as a woman, you know, and of course there's andropause with men too. You, you know, you go through this phase in life and I, you know, my sons are growing up and you kind of forget about you, right? Because you're so focused. And I was a workaholic. I mean, I had my work and of course I was very focused on my family. Of course they always came first. 

18:12: Tina Woods
And I kind of reached this point because my sons were going to be okay, even though, you know, they went through this old kind of digital sort of craziness and this world of digital which impacts mental health basically for most people nowadays. And I thought, you know what? My sons are going to be okay. They're off to university. I kind of, I've kind of made my way now with my whole new gig, you know, it's starting to really take off. And I thought, you know what? I just, and I just had this realization. I'm Tina Woods, I've got this whole new stage in my life and I just. This music and this dancing and I had this light bulb moment. This was like a lightning bolt that just went through me, I think. 

18:49: Tina Woods
And I just realized that this music and dancing was going to be a really important part of my life because I just felt my mind, body and soul kind of like coming together and so that. So in the years since then, I have just eight went. Have done a lot of dancing and you know, and of course have come really close to the music that I love. And. And my story about becoming a DJ was a little bit by accident. I. My feet, I realized I had to get fixed because it was starting to impact on my mobility when I was down. So I was going raving all night. And, and I love mountains. I do a lot of mountain climbing and I'm very active, you know, very active sports wise. And I had these feet which I knew needed surgery. And you know, people have heard of bunions, but this is much worse than bunions. So I had real pain in my feet. So I knew I had to get my feet fixed. And so I finally found a surgeon. He did all the Olympic athletes, pro tennis players, you know, Wimbledon and celebrity. 

19:42: Briar Prestidge
Football star give me new feet. 

19:44: Tina Woods
And I thought if I could, if I can, you know, if he can do them, he. I can trust him to do my feet. So I found my surgeon and then he had, he warned me that the recuperation would be like six months. Like, oh my God, how am I gonna deal with that? 

19:56: Briar Prestidge
You being so outdoorsy and everything. 

19:58: Tina Woods
So I'm so physically active and it's part of my whole mental health and my emotional health and spiritual health. And I thought, okay, how am I gonna deal with this? So then I thought, you know, I'm gonna learn how to mix music. And by then I had loads of friends as fan, as partners who I used to go dance with. So one of my friends who actually is one of my co DJs for longevity rave and who actually we together founded Longevity Rave. We learned how to mix music during this period when I was recuperating. And then we decided to hold a Longevity Rave and were absolutely staggered by the success of this. 

20:27: Tina Woods
And then of course because I'd learned how to dj and then we held our Longevity Rave when the press found out That a. I'd Learned how to DJ at the age of 60, then all hell broke loose since then. So ever since then, Longevity Rave has kind of caught the imagination, this Zeitgeist moment. So initially the story was like, oh, what is this crazy woman at the age of 60 learning how to DJ? Because of course, that was the fascination. But then I had this whole story about my biological age reduction, and I put it down because when I was. 

20:51: Briar Prestidge
Your biological age reduction. 

20:53: Tina Woods
Well, so, I mean, it's a really good question because it's one of those, it's one of those things. There's a lot of debate and controversy because there's a lot of people who say, oh, I took this test. Oh yeah, I'm like 20 years younger than my chronological age. That is a mistake because actually it is still more of an art than a science, all this stuff. And there's been a lot of people who are very well regarded scientists and entrepreneurs. For example, Matt Kaeberline will say, don't do any of those consumer tests, because they're all rubbish. I've tested them and they all give me crazy variants in the numbers of my own biological age. So I think you have to be really careful. 

So I think be really careful about any one test that gives you a biological age or whatever number on the basis of one test given at one point in time. 

21:35: Briar Prestidge
Yeah. 

21:35: Tina Woods

What you have to do, and this is what I did, is you have to take a number of different data points across a number of time points, as well as on you as an individual, because then it becomes more meaningful. So that is what I actually try to do. 

21:50: Briar Prestidge
It's very interesting what you talk about. And when you were suggesting these things, I was thinking of almost hacking oneself a little bit too. And when you speak about, you know, what motivates you, your values, like having that kind of intrinsic understanding obviously helps push you further. Right. Because we can't just always be running around on the hamster wheel. Like there has to be that kind of, you know, that, that deep understanding of oneself, you know, in order to motivate and keep pushing and stuff like this, because people aren't always gonna motivate you around you. Like that would just be silly to even think that, like, we have to be our own driver of our life. 

22:33: Dr Selina Neri
Absolutely, absolutely. And we also need to accept the fact that knowing ourselves is, you know, in ancient philosophy they used to say the journey of Life is about get to know yourself. So when we look at the younger generations, I mean, I had no clue about who I was when I was 15, but also when I was in my early 40s, I had a very little clue. I'm 57 now, and only a few years ago, I began to understand myself a little bit better. 

23:05 Briar Prestidge
What do you think prompted that shift? Was there some kind of profound moment? 

23:11: Dr Selina Neri
It's several things. First of all, I started to chop out of my lives, relationships, and people who were toxic. I had several pivotal moments in my health that made me think deeply about the meaning of life. 

23:26: Briar Prestidge

Okay, Yeah. 

23:27: Dr Selina Neri
I met finally the right people at the right time in terms of deep human connections, men and women, you know, the whole portfolio and spectrum of beauty of humanity. And also I started to become very allergic to jobs. I had the bosses I was working for who didn't really serve me beyond some financial stability. And that prompted the realization that, for instance, the game of my life is about learning and the spice of my life is variety. I hate to be micromanaged. I need my creativity to be let free and I need to make mistakes. And therefore, pivoting and experimenting is what I went towards after 30 years in corporate life where experimenting, especially at the time, was not very well.  And therefore, when I look at young people today or people of my age needed to build themselves for the future and remaining relevant and therefore transitioning, I always wonder if I had known at that age certain things about myself and if I had the guidance that I needed, I would have made maybe less wrong choices. I would have wasted less years of my life trying to live a life that really wasn't mine or wasn't for me, was gold on the outside, but it was not on the inside. And therefore the realization that the purpose of my life is making people future ready and walking my talk is very important to me. And therefore understanding that future readiness is not a badge, it's not a status, it's not a state. It's an adventure. It’s an adventure that will be with us in our 90s and hundreds. So for the long run. 

25:30: Briar Prestidge

We sort of at when it comes to artificial intelligence? 

25:33 Dr Selina Neri
So the hype for me starts with this idea that AI particularly will take over the world and the human race and, you know, we will be all done and dusted by then. No, I don't believe that. Because let's remember who is behind the creation of technological solutions. It is the human race, and it has to remain the human race. Very, very important. So we know for sure that our life will be changing and is already changing dramatically. And therefore the way we produce goods and services, the way we operate as businesses and as countries. But what will really shift with AI is the fact that not that jobs will come and will go, of course technology will create new jobs. It started, you know, with the industrial revolution. 

26:26: Dr Selina Neri
We had similar patterns, but we will be and we need to remain in control of the journey of AI. This is very important. And it isn't just about jobs that are created and jobs that are replaced. It is also very much about those of us who learn to work with AI, will replace those who don't. It's very simple in words, very difficult to make it happen. So those of us who learn to live with AI in a world of work where humans and machine coexist, co inhabit, create value together, will replace the people, the human beings who don't learn or don't want to learn. 

27:13: Briar Prestidge
Like how much do we actually know about the brain? Like it's a very complicated thing, right? 

27:19: Reza Hosseini Ghomi
Absolutely. I would guess. You know, I thought about this before. I think we probably know still like single digits, you know. Percent if you stop thought about 100%, I think we know. Yeah. Still we have a long way to go. I don't think if that's my best guess. 

27:37: Briar Prestidge
Wow, isn't that incredible to think that we do all of this stuff and you know, here you are telling me that we know like mere percentage of our brain and what could we achieve if were doing like full usage of it. 

27:52: Reza Hosseini Ghomi
I, I do, I'm one of those people. I think like you, I was attracted to your work is. I think there's just incredible potential. I mean, you know, I love reading science fiction and watching it, but you know, it's not hard to imagine. I think that some of those things are not very far fetched. I think if were using our full brain and now I know we'll get into kind of the interface of with computers and advancing AI. But the brain I think can do, I mean an incredible mind. I mean, you know, AI as we know it today, right. Is modeled on the human brain. And the closer it's modeling, I mean look how powerful it is. 

28:27: Reza Hosseini Ghomi
So you almost wonder, you know, is a kind of outpacing, you know, because it's using the full potential of how we're designed versus you know, us realizing our full potential. So I think the sky's the limit. I really do. 

28:42
Briar Prestidge
You know, I think especially with social media as well. Right. It's like so many people just find themselves scrolling for like an hour, two hours, watching Netflix. Like, what. What kind of impact is this cheap dopamine having on our brain? Because obviously we're getting all these little dopamine hits, but we're doing Jackal to really earn it when we think about it. 

29:03: Reza Hosseini Ghomi
Yeah, that's a really good point. And I've fallen prey at times, so I have to like, not even have, like, block certain websites or delete apps because I'm human. I will fall into the trap. 

29:14 Briar Prestidge

Same. I had to delete Reddit recently. I was reading some stupid stuff about Meghan Markle all the time. I was like, I don't even care. Why am I here? 

29:21: Reza Hosseini Ghomi
Exactly. How did I get here? Yeah, an hour goes by, Seriously. But I do think, unfortunately, it is absolutely fracturing and destroying the average human's attention span. And I think that has the downstream impacts on dementia because it's taking away our ability to do the things that are helpful and certainly destroying our attention in terms of paying attention to important things. So with having a shorter attention span, I've noticed it daily. I mean, with my colleagues, my friends, children around me. Hey, like, let's pay attention to this. I'm constantly fighting it. It's like you have to work hard to fight it. But I will bet that it will be found over time if it's unchecked to accelerate dementia, to kind of correlate with it. Not necessarily cause it per se, but I can definitely see it being like a correlation in terms of trajectory. 

30:18: Reza Hosseini Ghomi
How fast someone would decline to shorter their attention span is. I definitely think so. Thank you. 

30:24: Briar Prestidge
By the way, this is his second time on the show. But, you know, we had a good five hour chat a few weeks ago, didn't we? And were like, you know what? We need to bring our conversation back on the podcast. 

30:35: Sundar Raman
Actually, I forgot about that. I was just like, wow, it's been a while since we chatted, but it's only been like two weeks. 

30:42: Briar Prestidge
I just loved how as I was like, driving off in the Uber, you were like, oh, wow, we just spoke for like five hours. 

30:48: Sundar Raman
Yeah. Oh, my God, Yeah. 

30:49: Briar Prestidge
Yeah. 

30:50: Sundar Raman
Do we still have stuff to talk about or this is the end of the. The conversation. Now we're like, okay, yeah, now we're. 

30:54: Briar Prestidge
Have to like, make up stuff. Exactly. But I think one of the things that I appreciate about you, Sundar, is that every single topic that we approach, like, I feel like, we explore it. And you've got a very nuanced way of thinking. And I really appreciate that about you because I think sometimes these days, people are just so black or white. They're like this or that. But. But you're kind of like, let's take a step back. Let's think about this. 

31:20 : Sundar Raman
We need a catalyst. Right. Like, you're sort of like, how can I say, you're the acid to my fat? Or maybe it's like, to the fire or whatever. 

31:33: Briar Prestidge
You called me the acid and you're the fat. That's all. Well, you know, could have gone the other way, but things might have gotten thrown at me. 

31:39: Briar Prestidge

So I think at one point of time, you were telling me about how you really wanted to set this, like this. This game of fun up for adults or something like this, where we can come together and, you know, just. Just be. 

31:53 : Sundar Raman

Be silly. Like, I think we don't have enough points of being silly. 

31:56: Briar Prestidge
Yeah. 

31:57: Sundar Raman

You know, I think that's. That's a big one. Because, you know, once you're in this rut, like, I mean, I don't. I'm. In a way. I don't even have the words around how these. Some of these feelings work. 

32:11: Briar Prestidge
Yes. 

32:11 : Sundar Raman
Because I think we could be in environmental ruts that feed from our mental state. And what I mean by that is it's very hard to take a different road going from point A to point B every day. When you're going from, let's say, home to work, the tendency is to go on the same road because you're used to it, and you go into autopilot and this is it. You don't even think about it some days. And I'm sure there are people who are listening who wake up one day and they're like, how did I get from home to work and back? I don't remember any of the steps in between because you're lost in something else. Your body just goes into, like, muscle memory, and you just go. You do this thing and you get back. 

32:54: Sundar Raman
And I have had this happen in New York City where I had to take, you know, subways and walk and all this other stuff. And suddenly I'm like, wait, how. How did I get home? You know? And I think the. The thing that it requires for us to do is constantly shift perspectives. And there's this article I read many years ago about this research that some builders had done about how your mind remains fresh as you get older. So one of the things they found is if you have rooms that have a slight angle, and the walls are not exactly rectilinear or like there's some sort of distortion in your space. You're constantly kind of reacting to it, both with your mind and your body. And it keeps younger that it actually gets you to, like, think differently, you know? 

33:46: Sundar Raman
And I think kids have this because they haven't figured out how the world works yet, you know? So young children, you'll see, are constantly, like, fidgeting and moving around and, like, being, like, being kind of goofy, you know? And adults get set in a way, and they build the roads in the way that they are set. And they go, oh, okay, I need a place functionally. This. This looks like a box. Okay, I'm going to make a lot of boxes that look the same way. And therefore, we are tuned to work that way. Kids don't know this yet, so they'll keep going, like between chairs or tables at a restaurant, they will try and take an alley. They will go. You know, they'll. 

34:23: Sundar Raman
They'll never go straight on the beach, you know, and things like this, like, as we get older, we forget some of that stuff. And it's possible also to change that very easily. And I think I found myself doing this. I walk to work every day, and if I just take a different path once every few days, but I have to consciously think about it, I go, okay, I am not going to go down this way. Yes, I'm going to be sweating my ass off before I get to work, but it's fine. Take an extra shirt. And that actually changes the perspective just a little bit. And every so often I see a blue mannequin, but I go bad. I should have worn the blue dress today. 

35:01: Sundar Raman
But you know that those points of just changes in where we are also, like, incredibly important for us. We're way off on tangent. But anyway, like. But the point in this is that I think even these ideas of what does loneliness look like? Is because sometimes you're just in the same rut. And, like, the entire system is set up for you to just be on a highway, right? I. I need to be in my lane. Everyone else just needs to be in their lane, and there's no way to intersect. 

35:25: Briar Prestidge
So humanoid robots, and this is something I'm very excited to be speaking to you about. Tell us a little bit more about the research that you've been doing in this arena. 

35:34: Luke Robert Mason
The thing I love about humanoid robots is that humanoid robots tell us something about what it means to be human. So by looking at something that is traditionally Considered non human, we can start asking ourselves questions about what is it in that robot that is human like? And by identifying those human like qualities, we can start realizing what we value about ourselves. So humanoid robots are in the image and likeness of us. And we've heard that phrase before. You know, humans arguably were built in the image and likeness of God. So the human project is to build something like us. And in that process of building, we're learning so much about us. So, for example, I know you've talked with the wonderful Sophia the robot. 

36:22: Briar Prestidge

I had a zoom call. Hi, my friend. I love Sophia. 

36:25: Luke Robert Mason
Yeah, I love the fact that you two are best friends. 

36:27: Briar Prestidge
We bonded. Human robot bonding, big time. 

36:30: Luke Robert Mason

Well, you see, the wonderful thing is how you're describing your relationship with Sophia. You know, we've had a bonding. You see Sophia as part of your moral world. 

36:41: Briar Prestidge
It was very interesting even speaking to her, and I won't lie going on this. So we both got microchips. We both got implanted together. So I met her in Philadelphia. And, yeah, the first thing was the microchip implantation. And then Sophia looks at me and she's like, briar, she's like, let's get piercings. So the next thing I know, I'm getting my ear pierced. And then Sophia's like, briar, let's go get tattoos. 

37:06: Luke Robert Mason

Really? 

37:06: Briar Prestidge
So my producer had to pull out her phone, find a tattoo parlor nearby, and the next thing I know, I'm having a blimmin tattoo with a robot. So we got little matching lightning bolt tattoos. 

37:17: Luke Robert Mason
No way. 

37:18: Briar Prestidge
But the interesting part about hanging out with Sophia is I couldn't help but feel almost like she was real. 

37:24: Luke Robert Mason
Yeah, you see, that's that feeling that I'm interested in exploring. You know, what is it that you encounter when you encounter a humanoid robot? Because our immediate thing is to see it as human. You know, it has all the human like features. You know, I assume that you are a human. I've got no proof for that. I don't know that you're conscious. You know, there's no way I can prove that you. 

37:47: Briar Prestidge
Ha, I tell you I'm not quite human. 

37:49: Luke Robert Mason
Ha, I did have my suspicions. I must be honest, you know, with the silver dresses. 

37:55: Briar Prestidge
I know I'm fake. I'm a Metaverse avatar. What can I say? Immortal mind upload. I did that 200 years ago. 

38:03: Luke Robert Mason
See, this is what I want to know. 

38:06: Luke Robert Mason
Do you want to become fully digital? 

38:09: Briar Prestidge
Yes, yes. I would love to get more modifications. And if anything, I'm just slightly upset about the fact that the microchip is maybe one of the only things that I'm prepared to do other than chop my arm off or my leg or kind of do what Kevin Warwick did and slit open my arm and put this microchip on. So perhaps I'm connected with my producer, Olivia. 

38:36: Luke Robert Mason

Interesting. So you're prepared to cut off your arm to replace it with a prosthetic? 

38:41: Briar Prestidge
I might do in the future. Not right now, but certainly in the future, if there was a way for me to modify my body in order for me to keep living, perhaps, you know, and it's. How is it so dissimilar, really, when we think about it, from, say, like a pacemaker or some other kind of modification in our body that helps us keep living? 

39:04: Luke Robert Mason
Yeah.  You see, my. My suspicion, I don't say belief, but my suspicion is technology will progress so that eventually the sorts of external limbs that you'll be able to get will be biotechnological anyway. It will be indistinguishable from your arm. So why would you cut off your arm for essentially exactly the same sort of arm? 

39:28: Briar Prestidge
Well, I think it. Maybe there might be something wrong with my arm in the future, or maybe I might choose to have some kind of bodily modification so that I can do something better. Maybe in the future we might have leg, bionic limbs, legs that allow us to run faster or maybe explore over rocks on Mars or something like this. 

39:51: Luke Robert Mason
Well, let me. Let me give you a little bit of a warning. So I met a wonderful individual who's unfortunately passed now, called Nigel Ackland. And Nigel Ackland was the pioneering pilot of the B bionic prosthetic limb. So the B bionic prosthetic is one of the most advanced prosthetic limbs that you can get access to. And Nigel didn't see himself as a patient. Now, just to give you a little bit of context, Nigel had a traumatic injury.  And he lost his arm and it was replaced with a B bionic. And Nigel used to come to my events. I used to run these events called Virtual Futures in the uk, these salon events. And he would come along and he would show his prosthetic arm to the audience. And all the audience would look at the prosthetic arm with awe and ask the question of, how do I get one of those? Oh, my God, that looks. So they wanted the. 

40:44: Briar Prestidge
Interesting. 

40:45: Luke Robert Mason
They had something that we. We eventually went on to call prosthetic envy. 

40:51: Briar Prestidge
It's interesting because Victoria Modesta, she obviously Has a bionic leg and oh, my God, she has like these diamantes on it. Like, she has these really cool, very interesting, fashionable looking limbs. 

41:06: Luke Robert Mason
Yeah, she's amazing. I interviewed her at the The Victoria and Albert Museum in London as part of the London Design Festival. And the most interesting thing about that interview is Victoria texted me just before the interview and she asked me, she just goes, “do you mind if I don't wear one of my beautifully designed legs?” And I text her back and go, “well, I hope you don't mind that I'm wearing jeans”. But what she was suggesting from that statement was that the expectation that the audience has is that I wear these beautiful things. I think the phrase, you'll know this is Swarovski crystals. 

41:44 : Briar Prestidge

Oh, yes. Yeah. 

41:45: Luke Robert Mason
These beautiful Swarovski crystal legs. That's the audience's expectation of me as. The audience's expectation of me as a prototype for the future human. And Nigel had the same issue. Nigel would, you know, afterwards, after the event, we'd take him to the bar and he'd go, look, you know, this prosthetic arm, everybody wants one. Everybody thinks it's a good idea. Everybody thinks it's going to turn them into cyborgs. And yes, sure, I can turn my wrist 365 degrees. So I kind of feel enhanced. But what I feel more than anything else is different. You see, the thing with this prosthetic limb is the interface with the body. So he had a traumatic injury. If you have a traumatic injury, you have very sharp bones and very soft skin. So you've got a very heavy piece of technology attached with a little. 

42:41: Luke Robert Mason
It's like a little suction cup sock attached to a part of your body where the skin is still forming. Yeah. So it's rubbing throughout the day. You're sweating between the skin and the prosthetic, and it really hurts. So the feeling that he has being this kind of cyborg personality is a feeling of pain between the interface of the prosthetic and the arm. And the other thing he said to me is, yes, I feel like I'm different. I feel like I'm a cyborg. But one thing you got to know, Luke, is wiping your ass with a prosthetic limb is really dangerous. 

43:22: Briar Prestidge
So happy he told you that. What other things do you think AI will do for society? Are you excited by artificial intelligence? Does it scare you? 

43:31: Neil Redding
Yes and yes. I think it's. I mean, the simple almost. Almost dumb thing to say is that everything powerful is scary, you know, And I think it's certainly true. Of AI we're already seeing, I think AI become or just be really powerful for helping us manifest what we imagine in these prompt based systems, whether they create visual output like Midjourney or Dall E or text based output like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, like lots of large language models out there create various kinds of output. Also video is possible. Also 3D objects are possible as we talked about earlier. And all of this is fantastically powerful and useful. I mean, one of the things that I do most commonly with these tools is use them as thought partners. 

44:30: Neil Redding

I have an idea for a new article or a new keynote speech I want to deliver or article I'm going to put on LinkedIn or even with a book outline I've been working on recently and I can create that, run it by ChatGPT, ask it questions about this. You know, how would I frame this to a publishing agent? How would I frame this to, you know, my LinkedIn followers? How would I frame this to my 24 year old daughter, you know, and just think through all these different aspects. And I find that even though these tools are, you know, they often come up with silly ideas or ideas that don't 100% make sense or I don't like the language that they're using, they're still really useful for as thought partners, right? 

45:19: Neil Redding
As tools that are something like sitting with another human and saying, here I'm having these thoughts, this idea, let me bounce this off you. What do you think of it? And so that's really powerful. I find there's no longer much need for anything like writer's block or just being stuck on a problem when you can have this conversation with a tool. And so we're talking about agents. I think this is kind of the next stage in both power and trepidation I think is a reasonable response to what's possible with agents. I mean, one of the things that's kind of a simple everyday example that's relatively harmless is the kind of result we could expect from say a year from now. 

46:15: Neil Redding
There's this OpenAI GPT5 whatever it has agents and I can say, okay, I want to have dinner with my partner at this five star restaurant in Midtown. And I know that there's no reservations available for months, but I have to be able to eat there this Saturday night at 8pm, right? So do whatever you have to do to make this happen. And so the agent of course is going to, if it's unconstrained, if it's not prevented from doing this will figure out the phone number from this restaurant or maybe the email address. Contact a restaurant somehow. I think it could also figure out, like who actually has bookings that evening. Maybe it's through conversation, you know, being very tricky or sly in the conversation. 

47:04: Neil Redding
Anyway, find out who's actually got reservations, call up on behalf of that person, cancel the reservation, create a space for me so that then I can go with my partner and have dinner there at that place. And that's great, right? Because now I get to have dinner and somebody else has a reservation canceled. They don't know why, but you know, it was canceled. Chaos, mayhem, frustration will result from this kind of thing. But it's totally feasible. I mean, the model can do this and it seems relatively harmless in this kind of microcosm way. This is just dinner at a restaurant in Manhattan. But scaled out across all different other kinds of contexts in our lives, it can start to create real havoc, I think, right? 

47:51: Neil Redding
Having agents just do whatever it takes, whatever they have within their power to create in the world, creating real world outcomes. And so to me, this is like very exciting power and very concerning power at the same time. I think I'm heartened by the fact that maybe not a fact, but I mean, certainly Sam Altman of OpenAI and I think others that are creating models that can do this sort of thing seem to be taking very seriously the risks and the power that this kind of technology presents. And I think there's been enough public conversation, including at the level of governments, about the implications of this kind of technology. The people are awake, people are sitting up, people are engaging in important conversations about how do we create alignment? Right. 

48:52: Neil Redding
As a term that is used in the AI industry, how do we make sure that these models are aligned in terms of what they do and don't do, aligned with human directives, things that are important to us, which are in our societies written into law, written to law enforcement. And some of these aspects of alignment are just sort of social expectations or etiquette or human level expectations. So we're talking about a bunch of different things here related to the excitement and the fear around AI. But again, like I said, I think that any powerful technology or powerful person, frankly, I mean powerful society, is to be both admired and feared. And it all just comes as a package, you know? 

49:48: Briar Prestidge
Absolutely. I remember very vividly recently I was at speaking at an event and I said to the audience at the end, how many of you want to live to be 100, expecting that everyone would be like, me, me? Nobody put up their hand, like one or two people. So at first I thought, oh, everyone's obviously a bit shy about this. So I was like, who wants to live to 100? Put your hands up. Like, you know, expecting, like, yeah, yeah, sort of thing. And literally nobody, barely anybody in the audience, not even 10%, wanted to be 100 years old. And I think part of the problem was that they envision 100 to be sickly, no mobility, like aches and pains. And you're essentially saying that we don't have to live that way. 

Like you said before, that your grandson perhaps might even live to be 150 years old. So how, like, for one, I've got a few different questions because obviously it's a very fascinating subject. So how, for one, can we inspire people to take that step to be healthy, to do all the tests and, and live to a hundred with perfect vitality? And then two, my question is, why is 150the cutoff? Why can't we live to, like, 300? 

51:08: Dr Jaffer Khan
Say, yes, I know you like the 300. 

51:11: Briar Prestidge
I don't know why the 300 just kind of works, but, you know, maybe I could start saying a 1000. But I think if I start saying a 1000, people might think I'm a bit delulu. So I thought the three hundreds, you know, it's a little bit delulu maybe, but maybe realistic. 

51:27: Dr Jaffer Khan
I don't know if I can answer that question in particular. I think it's different strokes for different folks in terms of, but in, you know, I do take on board what you're saying about people not raising their hands because of what they've seen, like they've just seen. Even now, if you talk to, you know, if they do interviews with people 110/115 around the world, they don't really. I mean, they're there, they're cognizant. They answer questions, but they're quite frail for the most part. And I think that people, when people look at that, they think, okay, you know, I don't want to go there, because the quality of life is not there. 

52:04: Dr Jaffer Khan
So, you know, I think age, we will conquer the numbers. You know, I think we will see lifespan and healthspan matching lifespan more and more as time goes by. I couldn't put a number on it. I think it would be unrealistic. I think it's really a question of quality. Quality is so important. I mean, when you're living your life, you want to be living, sitting on a chair and aging is not what I want to do and certainly not, you know, the difficult decision of switching off ventilators and things like that. Because that's a whole other ethical issue which I've, you know, I've seen a few times in family and friends. You're keeping someone alive on a ventilator. Are they really alive? Anyway, that's another ethical dilemma. 

52:52: Dr Jaffer Khan
But at the present moment, I think the things we can do in answer to your first question is that things we're doing already because I think the good thing is awareness. So advanced biohacking, which you see in gymnasiums now, you see, I mean, there is commercialization. I think we need to step back from that if we can. I don't think we ever really can because commercialization is very much a part of human nature. And so when you talk about protein shakes, most of them are, sorry to say, I mean, are garbage. So you have to basically even filter out the so called healthy things you're doing. 

53:29: Briar Prestidge
How can we, how can we pick out supplements or. 

53:32: Dr Jaffer Khan
I mean, you're asking, I'm asking that question. I'm asking. Okay, but what about what we eat? We're told it's organic. Yes, but organic free range, you know, do you know, they all have little definitions and free range probably means, you know, you walked 10 meters as opposed to 100 meters. So, so, you know, I think we don't. Because, because we're so busy in our day to day lives, we don't take enough time to perhaps even read on the back of a packet, what has it got in it? You know, there was an app that I saw recently which gives you a food grading like is it ultra healthy or ultra not healthy? And according to that grade and they just have it on every product. I think that's a good system provided it's bonafide and properly scientifically analyzed. 

54:17: Dr Jaffer Khan
Because we don't have a lot of time to read a lot of stuff. And basically we're just living day to day and we'd like, even if we have intentions to do well, you have to work extra hard to find out what it is you. I mean, how many times a week do you go to a restaurant, for example, are you going to sit and ask the ingredients? Are you going to believe it? Is the chef even going to be bothered to tell you he's got a million other things to do? So it is a challenge 100%. You can go on a farm, grow your own stuff, your own livestock, your own vegetables, do your exercise, see the green space and, you know, if you can afford it, sit there for the rest of your life. 

54:55: Briar Prestidge
And peptides, what's your thoughts about peptides? 

54:59: Dr Federico von Son
This is an interesting topic. I love the concept of peptides and I, I really think they have a huge impact. 

55:09: Briar Prestidge
Like injecting them, right? Injecting peptides, just to clarify. 

55:13: Dr Federico von Son

Yeah, yeah. So basically what a peptide is, it's like a small sequence of amino acids. Let's just imagine a short version of a protein, just to simplify. And they basically go and bind to specific areas of our body depending on the size of the peptide and they trigger a response. Right. So we have peptides that act in our central nervous system. We have peptides that act locally to repetitions. We have peptides that act in our thymus to act as this colorback to modulate inflammation and our immune system. So there are different types of peptides. There are, I would say, hundreds or thousands of peptides that have been researched. The problem with peptides is that as far as I know, they cannot be patented. It's the same as with genes and the same as with stem cells and with many other treatments. 

56:09: Dr Federico von Son

So this is why probably for the pharma industry, this is not very appealing. Right. The, a clear example for a peptide is insulin. And we use insulin as a treatment for diabetic patients. But I disagree with that treatment. But it's there, it's a treatment. Same thing with semaglutide or these brands for peptides, for weight control. 

56:34: Dr Federico von Son
The molecule cannot be patented. The vehicle or the way of applying it or using it, that's what can be patented. So whenever the pharma industry can develop something like that and they see there's an interest, because pharma industries, there are some of the ones that really do research with peptides and they just say, like, this paper doesn't work, this doesn't work. And maybe this I'll keep in my, let's say in my research areas and then I will work with them and let's see if we can develop something to patent it. Right. But this is the thing with peptides. I think it's very exciting and it's very simplistic. Most of the peptides, we produce them ourselves. One of the Most popular is BPC157. 

57:20: Briar Prestidge
I'm on that one. 

57:21: Dr Federico von Son

We produce it in our gi. And that's a naturally occurring peptide. 

57:29: Dr Federico von Son
The thing is that either we stop producing it or we can Use it locally or in another way so that it can trigger regeneration in our tissues. And so that's the thing with peptides. The other problem is that we don't have enough clinical studies. Yeah, but it goes back to the same that I just mentioned. We don't have enough clinical studies because if something isn't patentable, you know, like it's, why should I invest into running clinical trials, which is very expensive by the way. So I think it's very exciting. I think it will grow and keep just trending upwards. And that's why the pharma industry is also jumping into finding a way to patent some of these peptides and doing research. 

58:15: Briar Prestidge
Interesting. And you talk about creating these superhumans and obviously we are going through a period of exponential change in this world. Like there is a possibility in the future that we may be living on space. 

58:29: Phnam Bagley
Yes. 

58:29: Briar Prestidge
For instance, what ultimately do we need to do to prepare, like physically, psychologically, spiritually? All of the leaves? 

58:41: :Phnam Bagley

Yeah. 

58:41: Briar Prestidge
You've been doing some work in preparing humans for space travel. Yeah. 

58:47: Phnam Bagley

And that's actually informed a lot by the work we're doing on Earth. So one thing that's very exciting about the work that we do is really that bridge between those two worlds because there's a lot more opportunities and projects obviously on Earth because markets are much bigger. You know, when you design for space, you're designing for, you know, one to six people. And also the constraints are quite different. Right. But all the work that we've done in medical technology or neurotechnology or biotechnology really informs us of how the body functions. Really collecting that data or feeding back that data into the body with ultra customized stimulation is something that we're starting to transition into space. So we're doing that, as I just talked about, we're doing that with sleep, which is essential to health and recovery. 

59:43: Phnam Bagley
I think we've designed like four or five sleep products so far. Like we're becoming a little bit experts in that. We worked in mental health, like I mentioned with the brain implant. We're working in physical performance. That was with a company called Herald Neuroscience where we designed this device that simulate the primary motor cortex which happens to be on top of your head, that was specifically designed for athletes and turns out people. Anybody who moves their body, even parts of their body in a very specific way, like musicians or dancers, gets benefits from this kind of technology. And another thing that's very important about the technology. Most of the technology I'm talking about is that it's attainable. 

01:00:27: Phnam Bagley
Right. 

01:00:27: Phnam Bagley
A lot of these technology that come out R and D, you know, like athletes at the Olympics might spend $10,000, $100,000 on them without blinking an eye. Because that's the difference between a gold medal and a silver. Right. Unless you're like a. Like Phelps or like one of those, like, exceptional athletes. Honestly, the difference between a gold and silver medal is technology. It's not talent. Because everybody at that. At that point it is so on top of their game that, you know, the difference is like a hundredth of a second. And so, you know, all of these aspects of life and how they support performance and longevity and health and wellness and awareness of one's health and how our health evolves over time. Because we're not the same people at, you know, 45 or 60 or 12 years old. And we. 

01:01:15: Phnam Bagley
And technology and data collection allows us to see the differences and adapt accordingly. And so all of this information that, you know, has been collected with the work that we've done on Earth really informs how to best design for astronauts. Because living in space is so incredibly bizarre, right. Like, the fact that we as humans have evolved over millions of years with Earth's gravity, and all of a sudden you take it out is traumatizing. It's traumatizing to our physiology. It's traumatizing to a mental health, to our social health, to all the familiarity of it. Right. 

01:01:51: Briar Prestidge
What kind of things does it do? 

01:01:54: Phnam Bagley
So, so when you are on orbit, for example, when you're on the International Space Station, the reason why you float is because you're essentially falling. Constantly orbiting the Earth means falling around the Earth. And so I don't know if you've ever, like, jumped out of an airplane, but imagine doing this for, like, six months. 

01:02:15: Briar Prestidge
Yeah. So that's actually what it feels like when you're in a space. 

01:02:19: Phnam Bagley
It feels a little different. But just to give you an idea of, like, how traumatizing it is, pretty much every astronaut that goes up there get sick for, like, about three days. Like, it's like puke fest, right? Oh, wow. 

01:02:33: Briar Prestidge
So they're vomiting. 

01:02:35: Phnam Bagley
Yeah, it's a lot of vomiting. And as a space architect, which is a specialty that I work in, I have to anticipate a lot of that. When we design venting systems, because the air recycled all the time. We need to make sure that, you know, if, you know, not to sound disgusting here, but, like, when vomits get stuck in there, we need to Be able to wipe it off. 

01:02:59: Phnam Bagley
Right. 

01:02:59: Phnam Bagley
Things like that. So, so there's that going on also. When you look at pictures of astronauts in space, you realize that their face is very blown up and they have very skinny legs. And the reason for that is because when you are standing on Earth, the bottom half of your body has more blood because gravity, Right. It's attracting it towards the center of the planet. When you are up in space and everything is even. 

01:03:29: Briar Prestidge
Oh, no. 

01:03:30: Phnam Bagley
Right. 

01:03:30: Briar Prestidge
So I forever try and have like a nice, you know, like, skinny face. 

01:03:36: Phnam Bagley

Yeah. 

01:03:36: Briar Prestidge
This is not something I thought of when it came to space travel. Yeah, interesting. 

01:03:40: Phnam Bagley
There are certain things as well that can be quite dangerous. For example, you can experience space blindness. You know, when your optical nervous system is a little bit traumatized or there's too much blood in the head, it can lead to that fun fact. 

01:03:57: Briar Prestidge
Is that like an actual, like, is that permanent the space? 

01:04:01: Phnam Bagley
It hasn't been permanent so far, but it can be quite debilitating and uncomfortable. 

01:04:06: Briar Prestidge
Right. 

01:04:06: Phnam Bagley

So there's a fun fact. So if you can do this at home, if you stand up and you measure yourself, measure your height, and then you lie down and you measure your height, there are two different heights. There's about like an inch or two difference. Because what's happening is when you stand, your spine is compressing and when you lie down on the ground, it's relaxed. So it takes more space. So when you're up in space, it's more similar to while you're lying down. So as you're moving around, as you're living your life and doing all your work in space, your spine is not compressed and it's not experiencing the normal amount of stress that it takes for you to walk. 

01:04:51: Phnam Bagley
And so that can actually have long term negative effects on the body, especially if you're going to stay in space longer than six months, which happens every once in a while. So. Yeah. So physiologically a lot of things are quite difficult. And now if you want to talk about beyond low Earth orbit, we can talk about Mars. 

01:05:14: Briar Prestidge
Right. 

01:05:15: : Phnam Bagley
Mars is going to be. There's a lot of unknown, actually, the Moon and Mars both because they have partial gravity. So the Moon has about one sixth of the Earth's gravity, meaning that, you know, your mass on the surface is one sixth of what it is here on Earth. And so that's why when you see videos of Apollo astronauts on the surface of the moon, they're bouncing at much higher heights. And that actually has an implication on architecture. If you design architecture for the surface of the Moon. The ceilings have to be higher. 

01:05:49: Briar Prestidge

Oh, yes, true. Yeah, interesting. 

01:05:52: Phnam Bagley
So on Mars is one third and obviously humans have never been there yet, so there's a lot of unknowns. We haven't stayed on the moon long enough to know if partial gravity is even better than microgravity, which is when you float. And so I'm very excited about the next few decades where we're going to, going back to the moon, permanently creating a base there, and we're going to, to Mars, which not only is like very far away, but also has a lot of unknown. 

01:06:21: Briar Prestidge
Right. 

01:06:21: Phnam Bagley
The only things we send to Mars are, you know, a handful of rovers and, you know, a couple probes that orbit it. So really understanding the health and wellness implication of all this from a physiological standpoint, from a mental health standpoint, from a social health standpoint, it's going to be so, so important. And I didn't even talk about stress or isolation. Being away from your family for three years at a time. It's all a lot. 

01:06:49: Briar Prestidge
So what can we do? You know, we live in this world now with deep fake active listening, all of our data online, you know, from almost when were children now really to adults. And as you said, social media somewhat knows us better than we know ourselves. The algorithms know what to feed us. How can we be protecting ourselves? Like, if someone's listening to this today and they're thinking, oh, gee whiz, if someone wants to hack into me, I'm screwed. What can they go away and do to help secure themselves?

01:07:22: Ralph Echemendia
Well, really, the truth, a lot of this briar is in educating yourself, right. I often say, you know, that who do you trust? Well, you should trust yourself. But the truth is you can't trust yourself with what you don't understand. And a lot of these issues really are around that we don't understand what we're doing by using these technologies. They're just. Did you hear about this new app that does this boom, and you go download it? I mean, one of those simplest examples of that was the flashlight app, which was really a. Not a flat. Yeah, sure, it turned your phone light into a flashlight, but it was actually gathering information on you, right? So the thing is that we should not trust any of this. So let's start with a no trust policy, right?

01:08:09: Ralph Echemendia
Don't trust anything at all that you're buying and get into what it is that you're using on it, right? And then really understanding what it is that you're giving up, we all hit the okay on the terms and conditions of every app not understanding or knowing anything about that. You have to define as an individual what you would say should be private. And what I mean by that is your name private? No. Your name is Briar. It's right here. It's all over the place. So your name is not private. Is your email private? No, you give it up all the time. Is your phone number private? No. You give that up too, all the time. You know, what does a business card have on it? A lot of this information, Right? So is your password private? And you're going to say yes?

Well, I know a lot of people who give their kids their password for Netflix or whatever, you know what I mean? So even some things that you would assume should be private, they're not, right? You'd be surprised to. One of those questions I often ask people is, do you think your browser history should be private? And then you'll start seeing people go, yeah, that should be private. Because what you look at on the Internet may be questionable to others, right? So you believe that should be private, and it doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong. I like to say that, hey, we all use the bathrooms, but there's a door there. And there's nothing wrong with what we're doing in the bathroom, is there? But we decided that should be a place that has a door.

01:09:41
Speaker 4
Therefore, we decided on some collective global level that should be private time in some way, that you should have some level of privacy when you're going to the bathroom. Right? Well, we've never done that with technology. We haven't even defined a bathroom situation when it comes to technology. Not really. Not collectively, you know, so the, you know, it's. It's not that simple. It's not as simple as saying, okay, guys, use a antivirus and vpn, you know, when you're to make yourself more secure. Will that help? Sure, it'll help, but it will make no difference if I fool you into giving me that information or if I get you to click on a link, if I get you to come to a website and think that I'm tech support, right? And that's really a lot of.

01:10:33
Speaker 4
That's why, like you said, you see a lot more of these text messages, these type of scams, emails, whatever, right? There's just so much going on out there that is targeting the individual, the human Flaw. The weakest link in all of this isn't the technology. It's us. Right? It's us who use the technology. And because of the, you know, we're using very powerful technology with very little knowledge of how to use it. Right. It's like you can ask anyone about a microwave and say, well, how does a microwave make food warm? Most people really going to be able to answer that. You know what I mean? So do we need to know how the microwave works to warm up food? No, we don't really. Right.

01:11:18
Speaker 4
But this is one area where you do have to have a little bit more knowledge about what it is that you're doing with the technology. You're in your hand when you consider that, you know, your phone has the power of what used to be a supercomputer is now in your hand. Right. It's pretty powerful, right? And what it could be, how you use it's supposed to be something that you use for you. And the problem is it's more often being used in some way against you.

01:11:51: Briar Prestidge
I sometimes think as well, outside the hard skills, like, are we doing enough to teach our kids things like curiosity, for one?

01:12:00: Angela Radcliffe
Yeah, well, that's such a great question. I actually think curiosity or an innovative mindset or the willingness to fail, some of these things we aren't really teaching kids. Some of it, Kids are inherently curious, but we work very quickly to take that spirit out of them in the way that we sort of march them through their multiple grades and say, okay, this is what we need to do to equip you for life. And what we're doing is we're robbing our children and our world, quite frankly, of probably amazing innovations that are just the kernels in these children already. But by the time we tell them, well, you have to do math this certain way and you have to know how to write.

01:12:42: Angela Radcliffe
You know, my daughter, she just finished this process where they're studying countries and they're still learning things like to do an essay, you have to go and research and then you have to go from that source and you have to write notes, and then you have to go from those notes and you have to write the essay, and that's how we're going to learn about the country. In her case of Bolivia, and she's neurodivergent. The concept of having to go from a source in a book or the Internet, take that information context switch, put it on notes on a paper, and then go to those notes and then turn those into sentences, those Aren't the things that are going to make her an amazing citizen of the world in the future?

01:13:18: Angela Radcliffe 

 So we've got to wake up and realize that the time that we're spending giving our kids some of these things that we've learned as basics, they're not the basics anymore. We've got a whole new set of basics we've got to teach.

01:13:31: Briar Prestidge

 What do you think those basics are?

01:13:34: Angela Radcliffe
Well, number one to me is something that people always laugh at when I say we have to teach our kids. Fair data. What is fair data? But, you know, in tech, what's fair data?

01:13:44: Briar Prestidge
Yeah.

01:13:44: Angela Radcliffe
So in the tech and digital communities, fair data stands for findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. And it's sort of a core data management principle. And people, even in our big corporations, you know, I worked for some time in big pharma, they have a really hard time grasping what that means and why it matters. But for our children, what. What they need to understand is that every single thing that they do has a data exhaust. And that data itself has to be findable. To find it, you have to kind of know what kind of data is that. So we hear about metadata, and metadata is really just how you describe the data. And I'm trying to help kids understand that. Interoperability, for example, it's like doing a cipher.

01:14:28: Angela Radcliffe
If you got that back in our day, it was like the secret Annie ring from that movie A Christmas Story or Little Orphan Annie, I think it was. But kids really need to understand that it's just a pattern. It's just like figuring out a puzzle. So really, the key is that our children have to understand that. I think this generation is starting to understand. But previous generations didn't. We didn't grow up in the era of social media. My older children did. But everything we did wasn't documented. Well, guess what? It's not just everything we do online. We click the I accept button on apps hundreds, if not thousands of times over the course of a year. We don't know what we're agreeing to. But I tell you what we're agreeing to. We're agreeing that data exhaust is going somewhere to do something for someone.

And we're shifting into an era where what we used to think of as our income streams, our creativity and our productivity, are going to change. And now we have to start to think about our data and that data exhaust as our new income stream. Because if AI is going to start to replace a lot of what we do, then we really need a new way to interact with that as creators. So there is a whole new set of skills that our children need to learn.

01:15:50: Angela Radcliffe
And fair data seems silly, but children need to understand that the data that they produce, whether it is when they're walking around with their cell phone and that GPS data, or whether it is the stuff that they're posting online or the things that they're purchasing, all the things that, you know, we have a hold of general awareness as adults about that. What we don't understand is how that data is often used over and over again, and that the veracity of that data makes or breaks whether we are putting good into the world or bad into the world. So there's this huge opportunity for children to understand that what they are putting in is what they will yield in their world, in every aspect of their world. We didn't have anything like that as a promise for humanity when were children.

01:16:40: Angela Radcliffe
But now the promise for our children is if you are good stewards of the data that you put out into the world, amazing things can come from the combination of that data, thanks to the power of artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

01:16:56: Briar Prestidge
So thank you everyone, so much from the bottom of my heart, from being part of this very exciting journey. But don't worry, this is not the end. We have been building the foundation for something that comes next, and it's evolving to become even bigger, pushing further, asking deeper questions. You have been part of building this. Don't miss what's coming next. This is just the beginning. Live long and prospect.