[Music] everybody wants things to improve but nobody likes change I think the time is actually quite ripe for augmenting creativity but also shortening this bridge between humans and machines we don't really have ready access to our information it's scattered it's kept in different places you can remember
something it's really difficult then to go and utilize that information even though we have this wonderful access we couldn't have had with AI you can iterate something that might take an entire human lifetime do your reading do what's natural to you as a human and then what we're doing is storing all of
that for you for when it's relevant and it's connected for you right with AI we can think of it as I call it an evolutionary boost well now we've got the one of the biggest levers in at least my lifetime loosen your focus let your mind wander as a scientist by training like we are trained really to
think nothing is true it's always going to be disproven well hello everyone it's jimos sha with yet another infinite Loops I have been looking forward to today's guest for quite some time because she's designed something that I think is going to become a really dominant idea uh in
the future and that is how AI can help expand and enhance and amplify human creativity my guest is Alice albre who wow PhD in cognitive Neuroscience from Yale my daughter went there and so I know the campus well a postto work at Berkeley where I started out wow we're
just uh very sympatico here uh and the founder and CEO of recollect uh you got inspired by a quote from the neurosurgeon Vivian Ming who said you have seven lives and they're all about seven years long so you you better figure out what you're going to be doing for your next seven and you came up with
recol welcome thank you yeah thanks for having me so so uh RC essentially is what you're trying to do is harness AI to build new things not just automate workflows but amplify human creativity I think that's one of the greatest use cases for AI talk to me about about recollect and and how you got the idea
uh and uh walk us through uh your your origin story of both the company and yourself yeah um so uh as you mentioned my background originally was in cognitive neuroscience and then I left Academia in 2014 and got into Tech and did lots of machine learning work and through that time I'm sort of obsessed
with this idea that we can use these Technologies to augment humans we can learn a bunch about the way that their minds work and then um figure out ways either to assist them or augment them with those Technologies and so um I love that you found that quote about Vivian
Ming uh she really was impactful and I feel like when I went to start recollect um you know I had done the academic route and I'd learned a ton and love that and then i' done the sort of like working in Tech and growing up with data as a thing in Tech uh for those about seven years or so um and so for
recollect we're really focused on like you said augmenting human creativity um and even sort of deeper than that as the field has been advancing so quickly um I think the time is actually quite ripe for augmenting creativity but also like shortening this bridge between humans and machines with the goal of
saying how do we create these sort of cyborgs that are human first use this technology to be more creative and do more creative thinking um and so what we're building right now are the very initial stages of that with recollect how do we take all the stuff that you know the things you read how do we help
you connect those the way your mind would so using these biological models to inform that um and then how do we bring that to in times and in ways where we can boost that creative thinking we can boost your Divergent thinking um or at least we can help you cope with the
like delus of information that you have access to or that you're confronted with so you can make some space to do that thinking yeah you make a point in uh talking about the fact that uh information everyone kind of thinks information we're in the information age we're moving into a different age but
you make a very good point which is you know we don't really have ready access to our information it's scattered it's kept in different places and and I'd like you to elaborate on that point because when I when I saw that when I was researching for for our conversation I was like that is a really
good point that I would not naturally come up with so so elaborate and amplify that a little bit Yeah so I think right now we're faced uh and and the lens I usually use for this is kind of an evolutionary one right so I know how our minds work in the space that we adapted this space is very different and so
right now we have access to information we could not have had had access to before so we have access uh let's even now you I are in different places where having a conversation I'm getting information from you I couldn't have gotten that without all this technology so we have access to that kind of
information and a ton of it and it's very scattered so I think as soon as we put things behind these rectangles in our computers so they're very handy I have lots of physical books and things but I don't have to carry those with me everywhere um I and I can't really search over those unless I remember oh
yes it was this book around this part of the book and I can go find a highlight or a quote or something um so we have all of this access all of a sudden when we put things inside of the machines and when we have the internet but it is quite scattered once you start stuffing
at places and I think people tend to collect information they put it maybe in uh some sort of aspirational storage system for themselves kind of like a file cabinet but a really hidden one um and I honestly don't think our minds can reason about this information when it's in that format so it's it's it's
effectively invisible it's not physical anymore um there's way too much of it and it does get really lost and Scattered for people so even if you can remember something um and I have a pretty poor memory it turns out for sort of proper names and you know what exactly was that thing um it's really
difficult then to go and utilize that information even though we have this wonderful access we couldn't have had before you bring up memory and you also talk about that quite a bit and that's something that I've always been fascinated with um I'm I'm lucky and that I have a a very good memory for
anything I read I can kind of look up and I can see the page uh but but I have a horrible memory for things I hear or uh you know conversations like this I'll remember some keywords and my notes help me because if I write it out uh that helps me remember it but uh I also have this uh Theory and uh I'd love your
opinion on it and and that is that uh and you've got the PHD so I'm going to defer to you I I have this idea that we we tend to unconsciously and unknowingly upgrade our memories to things that we believe now and and the reason I came to this theory was I've been keeping journals for 40 plus years
and I was having a conversation about I think it was the first Gulf War back in 91 under the original George Bush B George Bush Senior and and at this conversation which was a few years ago I was saying everyone was saying well yeah I supported that war because it was ridiculous that they invaded Kuwait and
everything else and and I said yeah so did I and I was going through a journal uh around that time period and and I found I was called a liar in my own handwriting because I did not support that war in fact I was vehemently against it and this was this is what I wrote at the
time am I right about that do does that happen to our memory yeah so there's something called a recency bias in memory um and so the things that happened more recently are more memorable um we also actively rewrite our memories all the time so they're really not very reliable we
could remember facts which I think are different than episodes um and when we try to remember episodes what happens is when new information comes in it kind of over writes that and so there's lots of other like psychological mechanisms that come into play there we like to you know if we keep a view now that we didn't
keep 20 years ago we're more likely to rewrite that memory with our current view because we sort of can't put ourselves easily back into that 20 year ago version um so memories are very slippery when we think about oh this thing happened to me or that movie I saw even um and some people like you said
you have this sort of visual memory for things that you've read that makes a lot of sense some people have a really strong memory uh very few actually though this like very photographic memory it sounds like you have um but there there sort of when we say memory it's a much broader category and it
interacts with attention it interacts with our mood uh and it interacts with time in these super interesting ways yeah and I'd like to go deeper on that because I it seems to me that there is a link between creativity and memory um in that so for example somebody on Twitter last night
was talking about memory memorizing a poem and when I was a kid uh sorry nerd alert I memorized like a 100 BS now the reason that I did that was my father had done it and I thought it was really cool that he could like recite all these poems but one of the things that I found that I wasn't anticipating is like
because of those poems right in my memory I'd see a line like the world is too much with us late and soon getting and spending we they waste our pow as little we see in nature that is ours and that makes me think oh and then it connects to another idea and another idea and another idea and is the idea
recollect that you're going to try to kind of amplify that using the AI yeah in a sense that's what we're doing right now really is that we're trying to take all of these memories and the example use is great because the also the things you could would connect that same line to now are different than
when you first encountered it so you've got a much richer memory bank now and so um we actually some of the ways we model this are through graphs which is incidental but if we think about walking from one node to another in a graph right uh and we spread that out the idea here is that these these connections
that I would make to the same column and the connections you would make all the stuff connected to that is different and so when we think about boosting memory um or boosting creativity rather we can think about going a few steps out on that graph so the connection you making
now to that poem or to the phrases in that poem are going to be different and they may not make sense to me like if I saw it you know I could visualize those connections I might be like I don't understand these things don't fit together but you have a framework for that and so that's a superpower that we
as humans have which is when we're trying to solve a problem when we're trying to write a poem or create something especially what we're doing is this very natural process of oh yeah this and this should fit together and then we manipulate that in some way and we share it with somebody else and
that's our idea um and it could be something that only I could think of because of the exposure I had or my how my memories were connected um but with recollect what we're doing right now is trying to connect all that information for you and then when you recall it we bring you back really what's very
related so you don't like I can never get this thing back so that specific poem might come back if you were thinking you wrote something about that um but we bring you things that are sort of related too so we we kind of push the boundaries on this graph for the serendipity and see if we can spark
something that would have been hard to replicate otherwise um and so as we refine those models we get better and better at making those connections um and I think for me that's a good starting point for people but memory in and of itself it really is a foundation for a lot of other things we need to do
too yeah and you also make the point that um the idea that the to enhance your creativity what you ought to do is when you're exploring new ideas make sure that there's some overlap with ideas that you already know about I like that I in fact I think reading your stuff it was the first time I'd ever
seen that explicitly stated which uh you know I guess and I kind of thought about how I do things I'm like you know that I didn't even realize that's what I was doing uh but but you know one Idea LED to an bent idea but then I'm I'm love to dive down ra rabbit holes and so like I
jump in um and talk a bit about that so somebody listening watching us they want they want to become more creative I've had a lot of conversations with people who really kind of believe that uh creativity is something that's innate so I would love your opinion on that because I don't agree with that um but I
want I want to hear what you have to think about that yeah and sort of like stepping backwards from that I think it is innate and that we're all innately capable of creativity right so I don't believe that anybody is not creative I think that we lines are set up to learn
language innately and we're set up to to creatively solve problems innately so that we can survive in the world and if we couldn't do that we wouldn't really survive um and so I think creativity is a loaded term for lots of people where they think like oh I'm too analytical there's all of this like Nuance around
this idea but I think you can increase your creativity you can do things to give yourself more opportunity for Creative for creative thinking rather um one of them is consumption or interacting with ideas like you said oh I have this piece and if I have something that's slightly adjacent to it
I can more easily attach it right to my memory and then I have a bigger tree to to navigate to found creative ideas um and so I think you you know consuming ideas consuming broad ideas but also sort of making those connections as you go is one thing you can do to reinforce that so I do this a lot I'll be reading
something it could be completely I read like four or five books around the same time right and it could be completely unrelated it could be a book I'm reading to my kids even and I'm like oh this is it and I'll write it in the margin and I'm sort of like yes this is the same idea in a different format right or like
something is is the same here um and so for me that helps me to just broaden all the time um so I feel like that's one of the biggest things and then the other is which is unfortunate right now you can't be hyperfocused so this rabbit huling is great which is actually not really
hyperfocus uh sometimes it can get to that but if you get so narrow that you're really only really thinking about one thing really hard like in a difficult way it can be harder to come up with creative solution you have to step away from that loosen your focus let your mind want wander and in the
internal mind wandering what it's doing is kind of picking about this tree and looking for those connections and then they come together and you're walking down the street and you're like oh I figured it out um so I think managing your time managing your space in that way is also really important to to
increase that cretive work yeah something I I started doing a long time ago after reading about it was well first off I I tried to like meditate endlessly and I fail I was um abject failure at it so then I came across this this other book where he was saying you know you don't even you just sit just
sit quietly for 15 or 20 minutes in a room make sure there's no stimulant so there's no music there's no phones there's no electronics or books or any or no open books and just sit you can have your eyes open you have your eyes closed doesn't matter that's all you've got to do and so I tried that and first
couple of weeks I felt like an idiot because I'm like well I'm just sitting here but then it really did unlock what you just talked about which is not a lot happened during the time but I did find that like when I was out for a walk or I was in the shower or whatever bam like
there came the solution is is there some kind of underlying process in our brains that explains why that is so you know it's it's interesting I think there's these different phases right so there's uh if you think about it as a system where you're bringing information in that one you want to be
kind of focused for so you're not just like completely all over the place but the one where you're actually coming up with the ideas um there and and I think in the article you found like I talk about these different networks that come on and off for us and they're coming on
and up all of the time um but when you want to put these ideas together I think you you don't want to be in this very like high executive functioning very focused kind of state um um and the other way we can think about this is sleep right so in sleep we're taking all these memories from the day we
consolidate them they come together in these bizarre ways and dreams um and so that really is the most uh obvious manifestation of this creativity where you're like what the heck why did those two things go together and you don't have this other network on top of that this sort of control Network going like
this isn't relevant this is bizarre um but I think as we get older we get better at kind of managing those different states I think children are really awful at it which is very amusing where you you hear them and you're like fascinating I don't know what's happening anymore um but they're sort of
like freely floating between these different states all the time I I I I just was lucky enough to be on a vacation with all of my grandchildren I have five and they range in age from nearly 10 to uh just like nine months and my three-year-old granddaughter is in that phase right now that you just
mentioned and I just love it I just can love watching her and the way she comes up with things and it's I'm I'm trying to figure it out like Lon what why did why why do you think that and then she'll take this very circuitous path when she's trying to explain to me why she said what she said and I do find
that fascinating I did talk to One neuroscientist who basically said you know for the first maybe five years of life it's basically like you're the child is on psychedelics all the time so let's let's bring AI into it uh because you know one of the things that excites me about AI is it's kind of the
ultimate uh replicator iterator right in a with AI you can iterate something that might take an entire human lifetime to to do talk to me about how that is going to fit in to recollect and and and how that's going to help it's interesting yeah so so the thing I think about AI is
that or Mach machines and AI right like they have this idac memory they have perfect memory for things unless something fails in the machine and they have unlimited time and can just crank away at these computations that we would get too tired or bored and walk off from right so that's a huge strength the
human piece of that though is that we have this creativity and we have this uh sort of these goals and these things in mind and so when I think about bringing those two things together what I want to do is find the strength in each and find that Connecting Point and so we could
feed a bunch of information to an AI and say combinator just put the stuff together at you know a bajillion times and then we get all of these ideas right but the but the machine in the sense has no idea why and it couldn't it doesn't have a goal um it's missing this Rich context of my entire life right of all
this information I know that oh yeah this should or shouldn't go together for these reasons um and so I think this question comes up a lot with AI which is oh is it creative can it be creative um and you know I think the word again is too overloaded to answer that question but I think that um when we talk about
using AI or humans using AI for these things I think if we can get to a place where the human is really the one setting the goal has the motivation is really thinking about something and then can leverage the system that can quickly spin through lots of different simulations of things and say oh and it
has a probability distribution that makes sense right so given this you know millions of ideas it turns out it should be able also to tell me how probable are each of these right um and then you can have this I think this nice symbiosis where the human is able to push the
direction push the goal and then correct these things and then we can use the machine to spin these up um which should help like decrease the fatigue for the human I think it's the way I think about it yeah and and we are very much aligned on our way of thinking about AI because
that's kind of how I think about it I think that it's just an i i one of the CEOs for one of our portfolio companies that are trying to see Ventures basically says AI is an infinitely scaling grad student and um and and but with his implication that uh you know that what you you as the professor are directing that gr
student and you are saying hey I really want you to go find all of this for me and and my idea is that AI is going to at least for the foreseeable future is going to be an incredible tool for human beings to to use to amplify their own creativity but I stress tool right so so
for example can I point an AI at a bunch of really interesting uh scientific work and say you know find the her patterns right and uh I think yeah that's going to be really interesting but it's going to be up to me to once I'm presented with that data think now this made sense this oh okay this is what I was looking
for right and and on the idea of can AI be creative I'm I'm a big fan of David Deutsch the uh author of the beginning of infinity and fabric of reality was a Quantum physicist uh at Oxbridge and anyway he he agrees with you he thinks that AI itself is not creative right
it's it's we who are the creative aspect or spark here and why I'm so excited and it seems like why you're why we're mutually excited is that with machine learning wow we now have this incredible like aredes give me a lever and I can move the world well now we've got the one of the biggest levers in in at least
my lifetime I think do you agree do you think that AI is probably revolutionary in that aspect at least I think so I so I've been doing rine learning stuff since about 2010 um and so we call it a AI off and on um I think that the models that we have now are really new and very
exciting um I think that they open up a lot of possibilities for things that we didn't we couldn't do before with these machine learning NOS um I think it is going to be a huge shift in the technology space but I think there's going to be other components to it that like we've we've stepped away from a
little bit in the excitement over at least generative AI right now um one of those components is sort of the hardware aspect of this in terms of there's lots of data that you can point machine learning to and it can do lots of interesting things with that data and so um you know in what we're building at
recollect we're focused right now on connecting all of these uh pieces of information for an individual and it's very personalized way and that uses a lot of machine learning models um but I think what we'll see as maybe even a bigger Tipping Point is when we start to see a couple of areas that are still a
little too far off from each other sort to converge um so one thing I'm really excited about is taking you know biometric data from an individual and understanding what I attend to so a lot of my time in Academia out is focused on this idea of attention in different ways um but if we take that as an example
right so if we take the hardware getting better right we're getting better sensors it's easier to do these things on device we were already on that path we take machine learning models that are also getting better at uh analyzing this information and finding patterns in it and being able to classify oh are you
attending to this are you not um is your mind wandering right now and then we we take that and attach it to these other models it's not necessarily just AI anymore what we're doing is taking these models lots of different kinds of models and figuring how do we attach the human
to what the model knows so how would we use that human attention to guide the model then and my presumption is that will dramatically decrease the size of the models very quickly so when we talk about oh it could generate a million ideas but it doesn't know which one to if it knew what I attended to generally
and then it used that as a way to to focus that in instead of coming up with 10,000 or a million options and I look at them right we could get really focused really fast so I think we'll start I I think we are at this Tipping Point I think AI is a huge piece of it um but I think we'll have advances in
different fields that are spurred by the use of AI and then we'll have this combination I think of uh greater insight into the human sort of physiological State as a way to connect to these things um and at that point we have like a probably a more efficient controllable system which could be huge
I think yeah my my friend Brian romelli calls it intelligence amplification and I get frustrated sometimes when I see people reacting very negatively to Ai and I think it's uh and obviously I I I should check my priors here because my priors are like it's a tool and you know are you afraid
of a hammer are you afraid of a screwdriver and I understand that that's an unfair uh way to way to put it but what what do you think about that why do you think that we have this significant minority of people a very by the way many of them very very intelligent people so let's not try to uh straw man
them here uh who who are so kind of terrified of of AI just in general what why do you think that is um I think the one of the scary parts of this narrative is the super runaway super intelligent which AGI yeah well it's actually Beyond AGI so AGI is really just meeting human
intelligence is really the goal beyond that is the super intelligence which we haven't hit and I I think we're I just actually there was a piece I wrote coming out on Monday about this uh but I've been thinking a lot about why are people freaked out the same question right and do they need to
be so scared of a runaway super intelligence that is purely AI um I don't think we need to be scared of it right now and I think that the reason they're scared at the heart of it is they can't imagine what it does so if I told you it wasn't AI but I said you know uh I don't know a box monster was
coming right and like the Box monster does things you can't understand right or it sees things you can't see or it can produce things that you can't you as a human if it if it's actually super intelligent may not be able to understand what's happening and so I I think this unknown is what's really
scary to people um and a lack of morality right so if it's not a human first super intelligence and it can be either it could be machine super intelligence that happens or it could be a human or a bunch of humans together collectively as an intelligence that gets augmented to Super intelligence
right um and so if we have only this machine super intelligence I think the fear is doesn't care it's not bound by social norms it's not bound by evolutionary constraints so it doesn't have to eat or worry about getting food or resources that way um and and also I think people tend to anthropomorphize
this technology to a huge extent because going back to the evolutionary piece we can't conceive of something that talks and is not human it just doesn't exist so we we immediately ascribe humanness to a thing that can use language this way yes and uh that's why I'm excited I I don't know whether uh I I don't know
the state of it I've actually haven't looked into it but this idea that potentially we could use machine learning to see if other uh animals actually have languages whales and and dolphins were the ones that were mentioned in the piece I was reading and and do do you think let let let's
hypothetically say let's say that we had an AI that translated whale or translated dolphin do you think that that would actually soften this link that humans have between anything that talks as a human if if all of a sudden we learned oh goodness whales have been talking to each other for a long time it
seems maybe it's not just human or or do you think that we would stick with our human Centric view of like the ability to use language so I that's a very interesting question um I think that we would broaden the bubble to be oh it's a human to be that it's an animate things and we ascribe a lot of feelings to
animate things animals that you know and we ascribe lots of feelings and emotions and we think they're conscious right we think they have conscious experience that if we could just translate maybe they could describe to us or maybe their conscious experience is so different because of the way they see the world it
it doesn't overlap enough but um yeah I think we would still be in this this Loop of animate versus inanimate which is a machine um and I think that it would be the interesting crossover is if we have humanoid robots that have ai function you know in terms of functionality and
they look more human right um and we treat them as such then then it gets even trickier um yeah I don't know how our mindes would cope with that yeah um getting back to the machine superintelligence it seems like people I I like and and read Nick AUM for example and he he seems to
be kind of augmenting softening his view uh like he he was very worried uh about uh machine super intelligence and in recent interviews I've seen with him he seems to be walking it back a little do you do you agree I haven't seen recent interview I know his work yeah I don't know if everybody's going to walk it
back I don't know if Kurt is going to walk this back like I don't know who that has been been beating this drum of oh we're going to get this runaway super intelligence it's going to be maybe terrible uh or maybe like there's other people that are like maybe it's going to
be amazing um like I think the walking back yeah I I think it makes sense to walk back a little bit now that it's less unknown if we take the fear being that it's unknown and we get to know a little bit of it right we feel like we're on a path towards it with the AI we have right now and that feels not so
bad and so maybe you could reframe the next step right into the unknown as being maybe not so bad we're getting evidence we're building up right we're we're information processing machines here and we're like well that didn't go terribly wrong yet so maybe the next little step
isn't going to be terribly terrible but yeah there's still that fear there I think and you mentioned uh just a moment ago the idea that potentially the super intelligence could be humans plus machines um and and I remember a quotee that I read that I thought was really interesting about us about we humans and
and it went something like uh if you drop a single human naked and alone in a forest what you've done is provide a very tasty meal for all of the animals in that Forest if you drop 10 humans naked into that Forest you've introduced a new super Predator apex predator to the to the uh forest in other words we
humans the reason we became the apex predators of this planet is because we can coordinate we can chunk thinking we can uh assign tasks we can do all of those things is is there do you see that happening throwing uh like uh a machine learning AI into the mix with humans I do so I think there's
two pieces there one is individual human gets thr into nature or into a terrible situation and we can use different Technologies probably powered by AI right to give them superpowers right if we gave them something that could let them hear frequencies they can't hear
normally that's augmenting them and maybe that gives them an edge on the Predators that are kind of creeping out of the bushes at them um but and we could call that a super intelligence right any anything above the smartest human right now is a super intelligence and then we've got that right um but I
think once we get people collectively together that's absolutely right we are apex predators right now because we are able to communicate and share this information um we're also able to coordinate and work together in these ways and so I think if we think about uh a bunch of machines and we say machines
coordinate with each other it's going to be very different in its nature than a bunch of humans that are augmented in these different ways trying to coordinate together um and I also think that we can use machine learning to figure out better ways to connect the humans even right so not even these
individual I keep making hand Gest no one can see but like I'm thinking of like extra parts of your body like appendages right like those are the augmentation but really we have this system that like even when with what we're building right now I think about this a lot like we're connecting all of
the stuff I know and my notes and things what if we took my graph and your graph and we see oh there's all this overlap here but here's where it's different right and we wanted to coordinate for this podcast and think about some things that would be a way we could use the
machine learning to increase our individual intelligence levels even if we're going to communicate it gives us another layer and it sort of highlights for us oh these are the areas where you're you're related here's where you're not here's where the sort of outside of that is um and it could help
us find other individuals that have useful information for us right if we're trying to coordinate in a group of a hundred um I may not know that somebody over there has something really important that I need to know and so I think that collective intelligence is probably a form of super intelligence I
would go on a limb and say like yes that means the definition on paper um and then augmenting individuals alone or in a group plus a layer on top of that would be kind of an amazing super intelligence I think yeah and what got me really interested in machine learning uh probably 2014 there about I've been
thinking a lot about this idea of you know our new networked world and then the idea of like how are we going to build the human Colossus and I immediately said well Machine learning would be really really helpful in doing that and and you made the point though about uh dropping the
single person with some AI enhancements I love that because it's reminiscent a Bucky or said that you shouldn't call somebody like dumb or or smart you should say they're either tuned in or not tuned in and and so he used he used the example of the microscopic world and and he said you know before the
microscope we had no idea that there was this entire world there and then we invented the microscope and voila we got tuned into the microscopic world and I use that same analogy with AI you say we could have it so that we can hear all of the frequencies or we can see all of the light spectrum that alone to me is like
that is going talk about superpower yeah can you imagine being able to hear what a bat can hear or to navigate by so I mean there are so many use cases here that I just find so exciting and and like I it it's sort of what what we can do and let's let's bring it back to creativity though
because um you know in the piece that you wrote for every you were basically saying uh that what what we really need here is the ability to contextualize uh and you know I always think of David bals the the implicate order and the explicate order I don't know if you're familiar with bom but uh
he he was a out there uh Quantum physicist he got black but there's a great story because uh he was Oppenheimer was his mentor and then uh it came about that um that Bal had joined the Communist party and and the the the whole thing about Oppenheimer blackballing him because he wrote This
brilliant he was a Quantum physicist and he wrote This brilliant uh uh thesis called the implicate order and essentially uh Oppenheimer was like if we can't prove his thesis wrong we just have to say we have to make sure that everyone thinks poorly of him the man OD homing odd homing him and and so I did a
little thread on Twitter saying yeah basically the smartest people in the world in uh the 1940s was kind watch the movie Mean Girls and and you'll you'll get an idea of how they did that but I want to ask about that because we do humans we do have all of these other I I think that we're fundamentally
emotionally governed and I think that the the the king or queen emotion is fear uh especially fear of the unknown um and evolutionarily speaking that makes a lot of sense right yeah we we are all the descendants of the people who ran away yeah right and so how how do you think will we evolve more rapidly
I have you read the weirdest people in the world no I'm going to now though Ah that's a that's a great book because he he he he makes the case that um and he uses as his example um reading uh it turns out when you take uh fmis of a human brain of a highly literate person the part of the brain that used to be
given over to visual Acuity right is colonized to learn how to read when you look at the actual shape of the human brain of a highly literate person versus an illiterate person the shape of the brain is actually different and and and that's this kind of external cultural Evolution that
happened and and I wonder given that as kind of the underlying idea could could this enhance human evolution I think so and that's I mean in some ways like saying yes well enhance human evolution is a bul statement the the tricky thing about human evolution is that it's generally
slow I have not read this but my knee-jerk reaction is that those people maybe had a predisposition that their Acuity was a bit better or different and it made them better readers it made reading less uh tiring for them and so they liked it more and they did it more and maybe their brain changed over their
lifespan or maybe their brain was just a little bit different anyway and then we have you know and that could be an evolutionary piece right where uh because it takes so long to evolve I think that you know being again having access to that many books is new we didn't have millions of years where
everybody could read all these things but we did have different visual tasks and different kinds of ways of maybe manipulating small objects or building small things with beads and things that really required this a great visual Acuity to be there um so I think that with AI we can think of it as I call it
an evolutionary boost right so evolution is going to take a very long time we're not going to be able to sort of wait that out or I'm not going to be able to in my lifetime um but what if we take the places where I know we have evolutionary shortcomings and we say aha we can take technology and kind of I call I think
about it as like patching a whole of that um one of these is our attention right like we have very limited attention systems on purpose and so attention's main role is really to or there's a few but one of them is to alert you to Danger so you have this sort of like bottom up attention like
there's a snake coming at you you're alone in this scary place look at the snake quickly um and then we have more like a top- down attention this go directed attention where uh there's all these famous experiments that where you miss the gorilla running by um right where we get focused on a thing and we
don't really perceive the rest of the stuff going on in a scene um and so that's great because it computationally allows us to deal with the world like if we took every image that are that comes across our retina every CAD we make every little eye movement and we try to
compute all of that a new we would be lost we couldn't do anything else we' be totally dysfunctional our brains would have to be so much larger and we couldn't come out of the birth canal it would be terrible and so we came up with these mechan we meaning Evolution but we
can actually try and fill some of these holes now because we don't like if we can take the technology and say okay you can't possibly attend all the stuff you're reading right like you got bits and pieces of it here and there um and you did a good job because what you remember now like if if I read this book
now um I'll remember the things that are relevant today right my attentional system will make sure that I you know unless I'm you I guess where I can remember most of the things that I see right like uh my attention system will narrow that but there's a bunch of stuff in the book that might be relevant in
five years say I'm working on another problem and unless I can make that bridge in my mind and say all right bolom was talking about this five years ago the specific piece of this and I wonder if he thought about some other things and go back and look them up um it's hard for me to do that so I think
we can say great and and part of what I'm thinking about a lot right is like don't don't worry about your attention so much right like do your reading do what's natural to you as a human then what we're doing is storing all of that for you for when it's relevant and it's
connected for you right um but there's so many other ways we can get past this evolutionary ceiling that we've hit and it's really memory constraints attentional constraints um we have capacity constraints in terms of how many things we can really keep in mind at once and so it's about four uh and so
when we earlier when we talked about oh we could have the machine go and do all these computations that come up with millions of ideas is and just like you know grind away and iterate we can't really do that as machines because we can't keep all the stuff in mind um and so we already made our own evolutionary
B like boost by creating pens and papers and computers to Rite things out on and kind of externalize the things in our mind we can't cold um and so we've already done some of these things but I think there's a lot of room there to say look at where the gaps are evolutionarily see if we have a
technology or a thing that we can use to fill that and then we have this amazing like we lose all of the constraints really that we've grown with yeah and uh in the same book the weirdest people in the world he he spends a lot of time on cumulative cultural Evolution and and basically this idea
that uh Robert Anon Wilson called U books and and the printing press the first instance where we humans were able to time bind our ideas and send them in the future and I always like that very much because the idea that really prior to that we had monks I guess writing out
the the Scrolls and we had the library at Alexander with all with all of the various Scrolls but we didn't have a convenient uh relatively inexpensive way to time bind ideas and and push them into the future and now like we're we're in the cat bird seat in my opinion because we not only have that but we
have all of these additional ways I love your idea of patching at The evolutionary mistakes because that that you know it's like what was the joke the Douglas Adams joke uh that um uh reading Darwin proved to him that God had an inordinate fondness for [Laughter] Beatles always thought was really funny
um but it you know there there are these these things and I think that this too is one of the things that ignites the fear in people like they everybody wants things to improve but nobody likes change right and I I I I think that um another David Deutsch quote is that I think is really illustrates the problem
that a lot of people have is he asks you know what were physicists uh think thinking and saying about the internet and quantum physics in 1900 they weren't saying anything about it because they we had invented it we had come up with the exclamations yet and I think that we have this default uh bug in human OS
that that we know everything there is to know and like that's going to be bad because we already know and of course we don't know uh and you know I think uh what did um Edison say we don't know half a %c of 1% about anything and and so when you speculate what ideally when you have
recollect built and and everybody's using it hopefully I'm using it as well what do you see as like what'll be the the the the first order effects in in thinking in creativity Etc what's it going to really supercharge yeah so it is available there it I let people on sort of one by one right now but people
can try it uh the the first I'm putting my hand up here for anyone who's just listen to us I I would love to try on uh yeah I feel like the I have I have like each piece of what you just said I'm holding it my mind and I'm only have three lots here I'm like oh no I'm gonna lose one
of the working memor ter uh the the first order effects of this right so you talked about oh now we have this like readily available uh knowledge really right which we didn't have before and it's all over the place and that was a big revolution you know with the internet and things so what we're doing
is kind of capitalizing on that piece of it to an extent and saying great you have access to all this information but but access and and meaningful usage of it are very different right I can access the library right now at Miu and I get everything that they have but that doesn't mean I know anything from that
um and so I think the first order effects really are sort of like delivering on this just in time information promise that was supposed to be the internet in a sense um and then really pushing people to uh I guess I think of it sort of like a staircase and when I talk to like early customers
they're like oh my gosh if you could just give me access like it would be amazing everything's lost it's silent I can't find it and we did that and we're like here's your access right and they're like oh my gosh but the ne it's really it really is a staircase because then they're like what do I want to
think about what what do I need to do with this right so there's this sort of like now what and I think that's the next phase is really taking all of this data that we have now uh I mean some people get on with like 40,000 articles like it's a ton of data um but taking all of that and being able to reflect
back to you kind of where we talked about these evolutionary gaps right like we have all of these things that we do unconsciously that we really can never access meaningfully um how do we use that information to help you do your creative work in a better way right so if we can tell that like some of the
stuff you're reading is putting you in a bad emotional state can we reflect that back to you in a way and give you materials to help shift your state um and we can right so I think the the biggest change right now is understanding that like we waved our magic wand we give people the superpower
and then they're like now I have to figure out how to do this work with access to all of this stuff whenever I need it um and like what am I actually trying to think about and what do I need to do to get there um and you said something about scientists that I thought was very interesting before I I
think that was the third slot in my head uh but you know as a scientist by training like we are trained really to think nothing is true it's always going to be disproven and the best thing you can do in science is disprove something because we learn something from that it's really when I first got into this
gig I was like oh I'm going to know everything I'm going to know all the true things I'm going to discover and I think the farther you get down that path you realize it's really the inverse you know less and less and less and nothing is true anymore you could tell me tomorrow we could breathe water and I'd
be like well that was weird why' we think not that didn't um I I I I could not agree with you more and the the the scientific method is essentially uh I think uh an author that I was reading he said it was the original punk rock ethos like no that's not true that's wrong and and and the
whole point of it is to learn by disproving right and and it you can't even call it a real thesis if it can't be disproven right that's uh pretty self-evident and and you just have this what seems to be from a Layman myself s's perspective people wanted to do the opposite right they they they they want
it to so no this is true science proves this to be true no no no no no no no that's not the way the scientific method works right but we want this certainty right going back to this like scary super intell we want to know what's happening we want to feel like we have
this and when we don't it is unnerving um but it's also kind of a superpower if you take that mindset and then you become something else right like I transition to being an entrepreneur and I'm like really anything's possible if I can think about like how maybe this could I'm like prob we could try it
right you get this experimental kind of push to it um and it drives some people nuts because they're like well make the decision this should be happening and I'm like it could or we you know it could be different we're going to have to look and so it's it's a very interesting shift I think in terms of
knowledge like all of these I love that you call these sort of like time box or time bound ideas from people because if you already read a lot of these things I think if we could take a level up abstract a level up right a lot of the details are wrong we prove them wrong later science are otherwise Phil
philosophy uh you know government all these but there's there are threads in there that are right right like some piece of that idea still resonates with Plato and all of these really really ancient thinkers now because they they had no idea like you said about the internet that they didn't know what this
was going to look like um but they did pull a piece out and we can build on that piece I think over time too and and we don't prove maybe that specific thing wrong but like all the like the details around that can change I think a lot yeah I I I think there's the idea that
like over time you know maxims for example maxims are essentially the compression of ideas over time right and and they compress and compress and compress and compress getting rid of all of the stuff that was wrong right uh usually many times not because a lot of maximums aren't true but I I also like
your idea that you you talked about uh at length in your every article the idea of the generating of new ideas the Divergent thinking and then bringing it back to let's focus on the useful which is convergent and the author Howard Bloom calls that fion Fusion thinking yeah which I really really like because
uh you know you you've got to explore widely but then you also have to bring it back in because if you're just always out here you're never going to get right to the nub of that great new idea yeah I think no please oh just just on that note about the weirdos right I think uh
we have each individual can think divergently right and then we have some people that seem to think more divergently than others and we label them as weirdos and maybe they don't need some social i i self-identify as a weirdo so when you said the title I was like oh no um but I think with that
though um when we converge and converge and converge as a society right and we we try to try to pull out the thread of this thing um and some of the like weirdo branches break off along the way or or threads sub threads of this um but I think also there are fundamentally different directions we can take with
that and so so like I think my hope is like as people do get exposure to more and more ideas as people do this sort of Divergent thinking the convergence could be oh I need to not just go totally off the rails and just like putter around forever like I want to do something with
this right and that's that's sort of like the sort of philosopher scientist and an engineer right like when you when you feel like you've got something moving you could test it and then can you make it real um but I I guess I'm sort of a cheating that like individually I think we need to do this
to keep ourselves on track and don't wander completely off um and when we don't do that successfully we we often get labeled as weirdo too so if you don't Converge on some of the social norms well enough right like uh then you really don't get to sort of do all the other kinds of converging with these
ideas or or sort of you know work with the pack and these are really sort of very people that are very very Divergent maybe um but I think all of these ideas come to play when we think about individual intelligence and the way that we think creatively collective intelligence and the way that we think
and then time all of these people that were sort of reading their ideas I think of those as conversations with those people so if I'm conversing with somebody who bound their idea in 1930 uh like I get to interact they don't get to hear me talking but I get to hear them um and I feel like all three of those
things have to come together in the right way for us to move somewhere forward without anyone knowing right again to this uncertainty where we're going like we're going to create where we're going there is no predetermined place um and so we're sort of marching forward with these loose set of criteria
right now yeah and of course that is the the Hallmark of complex adaptive systems right is that emergence comes from below it doesn't come from this sort of top down uh order right and I believe that one of the things that's happening is and and maybe a little quicker than I would have guessed is we are moving from
what I would call a normally distributed Society to one of a chaotic uh normal distribution normal distribution brownie motion I'm sure everyone listening knows about that the the 60 whatever 8% in the middle that's what everything's designed for that's like where all the thinking
is and all of that sort of thing and and in the mental broad sense a chaotic distribution pattern it's very peaky middle so it's not a 68% distribution it's quite a bit less than that and it has very long tails that's the Divergent aspect and so I think that there's where we're moving I think it's great because
that's where all of or not all but many of the good ideas come from but I think you also have to consistently remind yourself of Wicken Stein's idea don't look for meaning look for use right and I want to I want to find both but um if if you can remind yourself okay is there
a use because as you say like you can get into a re you get really far out on the tail and like you'd be a lot of fun to talk to at a cocktail party but you know maybe your life is is a complete Rin wreck right um I I think that it one of the things that is very um interesting and contrary
in many respects is we we do have this inborn desire for the illusion of certainty and yet we are also incredibly adaptable species yes and and and so it's like the Louis C joke about uh Wi-Fi in airplanes you know he says the first time you're on a plane and it has Wi-Fi and you're like this is the most
miraculous thing in the world I can't believe it I'm 30,000 ft above the Earth in a tint can and yet I can log on and argue with people on Twitter and he goes and then the minute it fails you go what the yeah so I do think that our adaptability will see us through and and
our ability as a species to you know really incorporate all of that into uh our our daily uh you know routine Etc but I I find it really fascinating this in initial reluctance and fear and then the The Tipping Point gets reached and oh yeah of course of course I I love that um so so what what do you think
like seven years 10 years from now and you're on version whatever 7.0 uh what's that version just speculate for me what's that version of recollect look like yeah I think it it looked much closer to the cyborg idea uh yeah I actually when I started recollect was very interested in this idea of
bringing in some sort of brain computer interface and taking that information using that like really threading that into the models um and this was back in 2019 and no one cared about AI they cared even less about neuroscience and brain computer um and so I feel like as a first time founder I
was like well I'm never going to get funding so I should probably cre the beginning of this and then hopefully the world catches up with this idea um and so I think in you know seven is years here um my vision for this really is that we do bring that in right I think
we'll bring in it before the seven years but we bring in this biometric data we bring in all the stuff that we know about what you know we bring about we bring in what we learn about what's going on on with you what are your goals what are what are you trying to accomplish in the world on a day-to-day
basis minute what are your intentions um and I think if we can bring those three things together we can act oh and I think what we all need to do is sort of throw away this idea that machines are deterministic at all anymore I think that's the big shift with AI honestly um and so we use all of those things to
adaptively create your experience with these machines and so whatever you're doing is generated based on this information based on what's going on with you in the moment are you feeling stressed right are you feeling are you are you really focused right like there's all of these Dimensions we can
pull in um we can thread those through the models and then we can really say okay we can infer that your goal is to uh record this podcast we bring up something that allows you to see each other in this space um and we change the lighting to be in the right way for you uh whatever works best for your mood in
this conversational tone here right we bring information into the side if we need it or little cues if I'm forgetting the name of an author of a book that sort of slides in for me um but I think what we've got is the the base work for all of this uh sort of contextual and
really not just language contextual but human contextual data um and then if we decide that our operating systems are no longer deterministic and I don't think they should be and don't think we'll have rectangles very much longer um that we can just generate it it doesn't have to
be the same for you it doesn't have to be the same for me doesn't have to be the same when I wake up in the morning it could be totally different um and we can hook into a lot of the ways that we actually do think and our minds actually do work that are not like fighting with this so putting information in the same
place all the time right like if you need to remember something virtually that should just go in the same place that it Mak sense for you and that could be different again for you than it could be for me um but that's sort of the future that I see for recar is pushing this boundary of can we really we
already have a sort of cyborg idea but can we push it farther and can we take the technology that already exists right now um and change people's minds a little bit right so there is this uncertainty there's is this sort of we saw this when we first launched recollect the you know the very first
version of what we launched people could not get past the fact that they weren't doing like this word plus this word and I'm not sure they still right now they can type what whatever they're thinking and I'm like type a sentence type a paragraph I don't care just tell me what
you're thinking give me your thoughts and they really struggle with that as an interaction and I think that you know some of the stuff if we can make it more invisible more adaptive and more personalized like it will be so much easier to adopt the stuff that's coming I think is is pretty maybe not obvious
but like I think some of these things will definitely happen totally agree um and you know one of my hypotheses has been that we are moving uh not just the broad economy from mass production to mass customization we we are moving everything to mass customization which is what you're really doing which is why
I was fascinated by your article and what you're doing uh because uh I mean how cool I'm when I see it I just like how cool is that because it we we are out of this idea that one size fits all um it certainly it certainly does not we are very cognitively diverse and I I look at cognitive diversity as a massive
benefit as opposed to some sort of liability right the the the more cognitively diverse uh people that you can bring or machines that you can bring into uh a problem or or a creation I think the better and so I also love the idea that and I agree with you it's got to be almost invisible yeah right
because if it's not it it it gets very difficult for the human to uh you know incorporate it into the just their daily routine uh do do you have any like tricks that you're trying to I don't mean tricks any any procedures or uh use cases or or uh project flow that work towards that idea
of of making it as invisible as possible yeah I think the the way it's it's more of a framework for developing these types of things right now it's that you the invisible piece of that will be when it's more intuitive so when you're not calling on this thing right when when in recollect you're not
writing down what you're thinking when we're taking this information in the background and we're putting it together and we're intu in oh this is this is the thing right now for you right that's the invisible piece the first part of that though to build those kinds of models is
getting the explicit piece without it being clunky and that's the design like needly really is hard to thread um in making these kinds of products because you need this underlying data to build a model for how that works and you don't want to have somebody sitting there like God forbid clicking through like a
million check boxes and and trying to guess at you know right so so I think the haven't I don't think I fully solved this but this is sort of where I'm heading right now which is if it's going to be invisible right it has to feel like you but better and it can't feel like I'm tight I'm like yeah I got to
type all this stuff and I don't even know what I'm doing right now um and so I think that I I I hope that's where lots of people start heading um and I also and I you know I am a person that's fairly narrow Divergence like I'm verion all these different measures and you know and I would love and and and part
of this creating this is selfish as well I think for lots of Founders um but if we could create these very personalized experiences for people that match the way they work right and they allow them to thrive and create this abundance in the world rather than it's like when we
wouldn't let people right left-handed like that that's you know I'm still I'm old enough that was true right um but if we if we sort of move away from that but then we also have almost going back to this idea of like can we communicate with the dog or the or the whale right like if we can find a a middle ground of
this information where like a lens where like if I'm having trouble communicating an idea because I'm kind of all over the place and other person is more steady can we create a a middle layer of that too with this where it's like I've done these things I'm putting it together I
have my whole world personally that makes sense to me you don't have to come sit in it with me and like really understand it but can we also then help you take all that stuff right now we have what we call playgrounds which are infinite canvases you can put your ideas on there and you can move them around
and kind of think spatially which I think is important for people but if someone else looks at my playground they're like I this is wacky bananas like I don't know how you navigate this it's like a it's like a desk full of papers right and I'm like where you got to go over here and they Dem it
sometimes people are like I don't know what this is and I'm like oh you're right it is really hard to for someone else not in my brain to use um so I like my hope too is that we can say okay we let you be neurod Divergent you're perfect the way you are and we're going
to help you to get to that communication with another human so we can all coordinate better right like I can actually get my idea over to you on this podcast or to people out listening and they could follow it and they're not like I don't know where we left off yeah and that is what I find most attractive
about what you're doing uh I think that um if you know the B the the biggest challenge with communication is the assumption that it took place right uh and and if if we can use our our various Innovations and Tech to to make that coordination of communication more understandable to people of very
different uh neural uh you know uh types boy that's going to be very helpful and you know I I and and maybe this is just aspirational but I definitely think that projects like yours and and others that that I've seen some I've invested in that a lot of them are moving towards this ability to better coordinate the
way we humans get communicate with each other I mean just that alone would be such an odd loock in my opinion yeah it would be for me too I feel like uh it's especially as a founder and working on sort of an esoteric area right even if we could build something that allows other people
to you know read this article or I wrote or the podcast or something and they understand it enough to find me right like that's that's even just the basic we don't have to coordinate on anything but like having a beacon out there where they're like oh hey I had a thing that would be beautiful right like I feel
like I would get so much out of that even um exact exactly I I totally agreed got completely on a on a different subject what was it like going from Academia to being a Founder well I had a big s in the midle there where I worked at different tech companies so when I left Academia um it was a fascinating
time so it was 2013 is and data data science had just become a role and I had spent like 10 years at that point um collecting data from humans very arduously right having them sit in lab sitting the fmri scner oh my gosh setting up the EG caps like just hours of my life to collect very little data
respectively and so when somebody told me hey and I and I focus on attention right like my my study was around how do we perceive scenes how do we take all this information and make it computationally possible and so when I made the shift I was very nervous to go to Industry because I didn't know what
it meant as an academic um but I was also fascinated because we were hitting a time where I could get data from millions of people and I didn't have to put them in a chair I didn't have to do really anything and like explaining that I I went to yahooo First back then and
explaining that to the people with such excitement and saying oh my god do you realize you have all of this you know what they're doing you know what they saw you have so much information for free and like kind of pushing that across um and and like the the the negative side of that for me was I
didn't fully understand coming from Academia to Industry you know I think a lot of people when I walked onto the scene as this weirdo from Academia were like oh you can help us and train people's attention forever and it took me a minute to to really realize that like because I could right like I understood the degree of
visual angle between items that was best right like how do you activate these different kind where your eyes need to be all of that information I understood um and when I realized that I thought like oh no it's like I don't want this for people like I don't want you to endlessly scroll your recipe app
that sounds really sad and and dystopian to me um and it was a wrong objective function really right we were pushing towards advertising like how do we monetize this as much as possible and when I figured that out I left that forever and did other work in data science right like I took a bunch of
different roles um um and then the last R I had was there was a really beautiful group here in Brooklyn in a converting garage down the street called Fast Forward labs and it was a bunch of academic expats and we were your nerd best friends and we would help people back then with deep learning right so
they were collecting all this data linked on the big data thing and it was their oil and they were very excited and in my job was to come and imagine what they could do with it and how they would technically accomplish that and that was really fun um but at some point I I I
decided and it was around seven years-ish maybe a little more so I thought of Ming again uh you know this is all great but I would love to work on the thing that I want to see that's true in the world not necessarily whoever is paying for having a nerd best friend around um and so and so I really and and
I I had great support from people which was which was awesome um the founder of fast for Hillary Mason and she was really supportive too of like just do yeah a great idea go ahead um and so again again with that sort of person saying like you could do this thing I was able to shift my mindset again and
say oh okay so I was an academic then I was a data scientist machine learning engineer person um and now I can be a Founder which is a totally different skill set kind of because having done all these things in Industry I gotten to understand okay how do you build products effectively how do you lead an
engineering p like I treated that period sort of as like a second uh maybe very long postto but like how do you learn to Industry well um and then you could take those two things and put them together and say great now I've got the skill sets uh and I learned a ton working for
other people and figuring out what they needed uh and then I could apply it to what I wanted to be true so you know I'm not quite seven years or not even maybe not in the midpoint anyway I'm not seven years into this journey as a Founder yet uh but I think the the transitions have
been some of the more interesting parts of my life where I decided okay I I think I understand what this is and I'm ready and all of it gets to come back together in these threads over time uh and so yeah who knows what the one after this looks like I don't know very very cool and you mentioned something that uh
I ran into a lot when when talking in very excited uh terms about the potential of AI and and that would be people thought well so you can sell more ads and and I and I would look at them and I would say you know just because the first gen uh maximize the objective function for Revenue doesn't mean we
can't maximize the objective function for creativity for Innovation for a whole variety of other things and it was really interesting because I mentioned Bucky Fuller you could see instantly the people who tuned in when when they heard that they're like oh of course right of
course and and so I think what you're doing is absolutely fascinating I want to pay really close attention uh to you I would love uh to to get a chance to to be one of the uh chosen to give it a try um and if you if you've listened to other episodes of the podcast you know that we we end it with uh a a uh
question where we're going to make you the Empress of the world um you can't kill anybody you can't put anyone in a reeducation camp but we do have a magical microphone that we're going to hand to you and you can speak two things into it and you will incept all 8 billion people on the planet for
whatever their morning is whenever they wake up they're going to think that the two things that you spoke into that microphone were their own ideas and they're going to say I've just had the greatest idea and I'm actually going to act on it what two things are you going to
incept yeah and so not fully formed ideas I'd like to accept I did think about this for a minute before I got on uh one of them would be if you're looking around the world and you're like I don't have enough in any capacity like really thinking flipping that around for a second and thinking what do I have and
taking an account of that will let you open up to feeling sort of comfortable I feel like as humans we always want more of things right we want to be like on a treadmill on a thing and so I think we could accomplish a lot if we kind of let that go and then we say wow look at all
the stuff I have I have friends and family and everybody's relatively healthy right now right so I think that was one big thing and then the other I wanted to incept people with is just it's sort of a weird idea I get sometime in my head where I'm like every human is on Earth for about the same amount of
time give or take right there's things that happen um and we all end up in very different places right we end up doing very different things we end up in different socioeconomic classes and and all of these things happen but we're really all here like like Joe Biden and I are on
the same planet right maybe I'm not as old as D Biden yet but right like but I'm not the president I don't want to be the president but when I think about that is is sort of like if I could incept this in someone's head and be like who are you looking at and saying oh gosh they're doing this amazing thing right
we talked about all these wonderful authors right we T we you know and if you think about that and you go well what would I have to change to get there right like if I assume Blank Slate we could all just level this thing um what would I actually have to do and this has been incredibly helpful for me I think
throughout and so I would love for other people to just you know wherever you're at in life whatever you know whatever you look like whatever you act like whatever is going on for you wherever you started um you do have some control of popping over to another past if you just think about us all as humans and
we're all here for about the same amount of time I love that because you are not on path dependency is an important thing to take into consideration but that doesn't mean you can't step off that back uh which which I I love that idea because if more people thought that way
there'd be a lot more people actually stepping off that well-worn path and and blazing and blazing one of their own well Alice this has been absolutely fascinating uh you are a joyed to talk to where can people find out more about your company about you uh yeah so we're on Twitter uh I think it's at recollect
uh and then our website is re-c collect. AI um I hope I got that right uh but maybe we can put it in the show notes if I didn't w we we we will check for and make sure it's right in the show notes perfect yes so yeah we're on Twitter uh we have our website if you want to get on the wait list I think there's still a
place where you can mention that you listen to the podcast so I can I can look for you and try to get you off the weit list as well awesome thank you so much Alice and and best of luck with this I think it's a really great project and I wish you great success with it thank you