Greg Voisen
Welcome back Inside Personal Growth, this is Greg Voisen, the host of Inside Personal Growth. And joining me Well, exactly from the Silicon Valley, Steven or where?

Steven Hoffman
I am a couple hours from San Francisco. I am Davis, California.

Greg Voisen
Davis?. Okay, so you're in Davis, while you've got it all set up to do this, we're going to be talking to Steven Hoffman, about one of his three books, you guys can see from the screen, that he's got all his books listed down there, but this one intrigued me the most. And it's The Five Forces That Change Everything: How Technology is Shaping Our Future. And, you know, boy, is it ever it's, it's constantly doing that. And I think the speed at which it will be doing that continues to escalate. And I'm going to let our listeners know something about you, Steven, he likes to be known as Captain Hoff. He's the CEO and the chairman of Founders Space. And for all of you looking for that just go to foundersspace.com. It's a global innovation hub for entrepreneurs, corporations, and investors with over 50 partners in 22 countries. As I said, he has written other books. These include, make elephants fly surviving a startup, the five forces. In addition, Captain Hoff has served on the Board of Governors and multimedia counsel, he was the founder and chairman of Producers Guild Silicon Valley Chapter was the founding member of the Academy of Television Interactive Media Group. So he has a lot of background in Hollywood as well. He went on to launch founder space with the mission to educate and accelerate entrepreneurs founder space has become one of the top startup hubs in the world. He's also trained hundreds of startup founders and corporate executives in the art of innovation and providing consulting to many of the world's largest corporations, including Qualcomm, Bosch, Intel, Disney, Warner Brothers, NBC, Gulf Oil, Siemens, Viacom, and goes on his degrees at the University of USC, currently resides in California spends most of his time as he says in the air, visiting startup investors around the world, but you are a busy guy. And we are pleased to have you on because, you know, some of these ventures work out and some of them don't, as we all know, and it's your job kind of from your position and your expertise, kind of evaluate who might and who might not. And you start your book off with introduction of yourself. And you state that you spent the past several years traveling the globe, as we said, collaborating with top entrepreneurs and visionary thinkers, to set the stage for the interview, could you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself? And what is the greatest lesson that you learn from it, kind of a very extraordinary journey into the minds and the ideas of these kinds of entrepreneurs that are willing to risk it all, I was looking at a new way, call it invention. And it's, and we use it every day. Because we recycle our garbage, right? We recycle the waste the food products, and it's called Lomi. And the guy raised $7 million on a startup deal. And I can see that it's going to go crazy, because there's right now four months backlogged on orders for the lomi. So LRMI, it's not a plug, but I think I'm going to get one because I hate the little bags, want to use the get the dirt. So tell us a little bit about the journey, what you've learned from these extraordinary people. Yes,

Steven Hoffman
it's fascinating, because my job is basically working with entrepreneurs all over the world, investing in companies and collaborating with the people who fund these companies and the people doing the research behind them. And what I've discovered in my journeys, is that all these ideas that we don't think are possible, actually are becoming possible. And we are at a critical juncture right now, where things like brain computer interfaces that can read your mind are coming into being where we have technology, where we can look at the human genome, and literally create new species of plants and animals that never existed basically take evolution into our own hands, nano technologies, which are absolutely fascinating. You know, that where we can inject these little Nano robots into your body and can actually attack and kill cancer cells. So these things were out of science fiction novels, they were there. He aren't even printing food, even printing food, right? And yeah, my labs growing crazy beef lab grown fish lab grown chicken, it's insane. It goes on and on and on. So and we're going to Mars. So we are at this point right now, I became so fascinated with all these different things that I thought, what I want to do is talk to the people who are actually on the frontlines of pushing this technology, find out what they're doing today, how far along they actually are in laboratories before these, they're actually productized that reaches the general public. And then from that, look into the future, and see the changes that will happen. And also in the book, I really take time to point out the positive changes, and then the negative changes, because these technologies are exponentially more powerful than anything we've seen before. So they are like, you know, we invented the atomic energy, which unleashed the atomic bomb. And that totally transformed the landscape of, of our planet, and politics and everything for from then on. Well, we have new technologies that have the same potential, not just in blowing up things, but in actually transforming how we interact with each other, how we view ourselves as human beings, how we shape our society. And those are the things I go into in the five forces.

Greg Voisen
Well, let's talk about those five forces, because you say they're the five forces that change anything. Tell us a little bit about each one of those forces, if you would, and how you think those forces are going to change everything.

Steven Hoffman
So they're the fundamental forces that I see driving change is number one, conductivity, mass conductivity, all of us, when we jumped online, on the internet, boom, it changed every business on the planet, it changed all of our lives. You know, when I was young, when I was a kid, I couldn't even imagine everybody sitting on their phone tapping away, you just couldn't imagine those things now, like you literally cannot walk out of your house, you feel naked, without a very high powered computer connected to this internet thing. And that is just the beginning. Because we are about to take another step further. And the next step further, will be when we literally, instead of tapping away, which is very crude, if you think about it, it's slow. It's to type away and tap away. It's stuff that takes a lot of time. And you can only do limited things. Imagine when your brain is directly connected to the internet,

Greg Voisen
I think I think Captain Hoffman or Captain Hoff, and it dials your number, or it doesn't even dial a number. It just connects with you.

Steven Hoffman
So first of all, yet, they are in the laboratories right now, like at Brown University and Duke University, they are doing experiments where people who have locked in syndrome, they're completely paralyzed. They've put a chip in their brain, and they can literally send text messages to people, they can literally control their iPad, they can drive themselves around in a wheelchair, they can control robotic arms, if you could do those if people could, people can do that now. So it's only it's not science fiction, it's just a matter of time before this technology is commercialized. And we get to the point, no, nobody knows how long it will be before we have consumer devices that can do that. But brain computer interfaces are already on the market, like you can go to Amazon, buy one for a couple 100 bucks. They're crude, they are limited in their capabilities, but they can read your brainwaves. They can tell you if you're stressed out and relax, they can help you meditate help you sleep, things like that. The next generation is coming. And I go really deep on the implications of that. Like, it's not just I can send a message to you. It What if everything, you the beauty about our brains, is everything in our heads, our heads are literally black boxes, all we have are inputs, these little electronic inputs coming from our ears coming from our eyes, you know, coming from our skin, that that our brain interprets as the world around us will now if we have direct access to our brain, the internet can literally be another input. That means your brain is connected to the cloud. But it's not just connect to the cloud. It's connected to every device connected to the cloud. Think about that mind blowing, because it's absolutely mind blowing every sensor, like out there, ultraviolet sensors, infrared sensors, robots walking about, you could literally connect directly to them. You could be looking through the eyes of a robot potentially, you could potentially be looking I could look through your eyes, your eyes are just signals. What if I could? What if we have advanced AI that can actually isolate the signal coming in from your eye, transmit it to my brain? I could do that. And they've done that These experiments in laboratories with rats actually,

Greg Voisen
where the computing speed is, I think, one of the keys and I know you can submit programs to a place in Berkeley, right? That has astronomical computing speeds, whereas before, we'd have to test these software's now it's very, very fast. Yeah,

Steven Hoffman
it's, well, the computing speed is still going up and up and up exponentially. And we've all you we also have coming online quantum computers. So quantum computers, they might not be used for this. But we don't know the full potential of how quantum computers will change the landscape. And there's new nanotechnologies, new materials. on a molecular level this, I go into this in the book being developed every day, in laboratories around the world, these new materials, like we think we've reached a limit of our chips, what we don't know, because these new materials are coming out that can do things that were never done before.

Greg Voisen
So the first one is really connectivity, what's the second one, you've got five of them. So

Steven Hoffman
So there, there are five, bio convergence is the idea that we are converging with our technology with our machines. And I go into detail on biohacking these people who are literally putting chips inside their body, to do all sorts of things that create nuisance, they see the world in different ways. There's people put magnets in their fingers, and all of a sudden, they can feel magnetic fields, you know, I go into life extension, like what will we live for longer? What does it mean, for human beings to break that theoretical 150 year limit? That is supposed to be the maximum for human? Look, if we can re-engineer our bodies, there, there is no reason we cannot design ourselves to live forever, evolution has us die off because breeding has been a good thing. You know, the combination of new genes, that's how we evolved. But now that we control evolution, we don't necessarily need to die. And then there's all these other

Greg Voisen
amazing now, but from the flip side of the coin, because you know, Ray Kurzweil and you know, you cite him in the book, and in Steven Kotler who I've had on the show many times, you know, there's some implications to what you say, I love what you're saying. But the implications, from the societal level, if you flip the coin, if you said, Hey, we could get technology that could keep people alive forever, don't you think we will have some problems from a growth in the space? And where are people going to go?

Steven Hoffman
Not necessarily. Okay, if you look at the world today, and I analyze this in the book, actually, if you look at the world today, are popping up of industrialized countries that were suffering a crisis, because literally, our populations are aging, which means there are more many more old people than there are young people being born. People aren't wanting to have as many babies, right. And so there's, in the US, there's a labor shortage in countries like Japan, they don't know how they're going to take care of all their elderly. There's so few people that just aren't enough young people to do it. Yeah. And that's a problem. Yeah. Now, it's not just aging. It's not just living forever. It's living forever healthy. Like if we're going to live forever as geriatrics. Well, that's a nightmare. So the idea would be that we can cure cancer, which we're on the way to doing, we can cure all these diseases, we can reverse aging, so that we become an optimal healthy age, and people will still die. I mean, people will die in accidents. People design die of all sorts of things murder, you know, unfortunately, maybe war hopefully will solve that problem. But unlikely in the near future. These things, people will still die. So it's not like people are going to go forever. And then you have guys like Elon Musk out there, and Jeff Bezos who say we need more people because we got to take them to Mars, we've got to eat them to the moon, right? So all these problems aren't necessarily problems. We think of them as problems, but they aren't.

Greg Voisen
What about the third one? So we've covered to Rhonda three, what is the third force that you believe is there?

Steven Hoffman
The other one is I look at I call it human expansionism. And that means the human race is expanding our knowledge both outwards into space, like I was talking about with Elon Musk and all the billionaire boys launching their rockets, and also inward into the world of nanoparticles into the unseen world of quantum computers and quanta. So these two this force of expanding our knowledge that way, is opening a whole new universes for us to grow and change the human race. I can you know a couple seem very obvious if we're going to live on Mars, as organic beings, we're going to have to re-engineer our genetics to survivors of weirs. It's a harsh, insane environment, we, if we're going to survive there and have any semblance of a real life, you know, terraforming a planet is really hard, it's probably easier to genetically alter US and other animals and plants so that they can survive better in this environment. Also, in deep space, if we're going to be traveling beyond our solar system, that whole thing, in the in the world of molecules, we are doing, we are just we are on the cusp of actually figuring out how to build very complex machines at a molecular level. And this, this combined with quantum computing, with the real strength of quantum computing is not to run a computer like on your desktop, like that's not what it's for. It's to run very advanced computers, because it's a quantum computer, it can understand the complex dynamics and changes on a molecular level. So we can develop new chemicals, new materials, so like CRISPR, you mentioned that the book, I mean, that's been talked about now for quite some time, that was back on bio convergence. So CRISPR, you know, we're changing all our plants and animals, they're all these technologies, what you have to understand are interrelated, they aren't moving, they aren't silos. So when I say the five forces, I divide them into five main forces. But I also show how they're interconnected. So one doesn't move without another, we are getting the advances we are in CRISPR, gene editing alone, it's CRISPR, gene editing with AI, with big data, you know, the whole genome project, a big data project, right? With the internet, all these things, which is mass conductivity, all these things working together to actually advance each other.

Greg Voisen
But fundamentally, though, isn't that the technology, it's all bound together, as you're talking, the one that will help us eliminate disease help us live longer, how this has helped us have a healthier outcome in life, as you were saying, Hey, we could live forever, hypothetically. It's a hard one to grasp for me. But the reality is, is yes. And let's say it is that technology, which is the fundamental basis point, to actually be able to do that. And you talk about neural pioneers, you speak about the brain computing interfaces, which were talking about a minute ago at Brown University, and what people are being able to do is that fits into which force is that one in particular.

Steven Hoffman
So that fits into mass connectivity, because that putting a chip into our brain literally allows us to connect with each other. And the whole infrastructure of the internet, the cloud, at a whole different level than we're doing now with our fingers in our eyes. So

Greg Voisen
it seems antiquated, to be honest with you to sit and type on a keyboard. And, you know, I know we have AI and we can do voice recognition. And we've got these things. But even now, for the numbers of years, we've been doing it, it seems relatively antiquated, like

Steven Hoffman
yeah, now it's clunky. It's all Yeah, we will have high speed connections to our brains. But the real questions that go into in the book is not just we'll have them, but how will they transform us? So number one, I can intuit how you feel right now. Like I can look at your face, I can, you know, and I can feel my own emotion, empathy towards you, anger at you happiness, whatever I feel, you know, based on what you feel, right, but I cannot feel your emotions. What if our brains were connected? What if I could take stimuli from you? And actually put it into me? Could I feel you what would I be able to feel? Would you like with a loved one? Could you actually feel their love? Mm hmm. Also, what does this technology mean for the government? Like we're in for corporations? Right now? We know companies like Facebook minor data, what if they have access to our brain? What does? Why do we trust Facebook, the government, other entities out there with direct access to our brain in what insurance can we have? It's one thing you know, and hackers out there, right? So right now somebody can hack your, you know, you online, they can steal your identity, which literally means they can run up some bills in your name. That's pretty, that's bad. But imagine if they actually could hack your brain. They can actually really steal your identity. Literally. Yeah, your identity. That is scary.

Greg Voisen
Yeah. So what is the fourth? What's the fourth force?

Steven Hoffman
So fourth force is the force of deep automation. That is the process we've been undergoing since the industrial revolution. where we've been automating effort process. And this is accelerated with the introduction of artificial intelligence. Because now there is no reason we can see into the future. We know, there's no reason a machine cannot, at some future point in time, do every single job a human does. So I go into all the amazing things robots are doing now. And then I talk about where robots will be headed. Like I haven't

Greg Voisen
we see more robots that have gone at the more of the personal level to do more menial tasks. And in the homes, I mean, I look at it and they say, Well, we have robots that are helping assembly cars, we have robots that doctors are using for surgery. We have robots in many different places. But I haven't seen this out surge of, you know, hey, I want a robot. I know it's there. And you can buy him for like $2,500. But you don't see a big adoption of them. Why are we not seeing the larger adoption of things like?

Steven Hoffman
that? Yeah, ever since we watched the cartoon, the Jetsons? Yeah, kids, yeah. Oh, we're going to have a robot made? Exactly. Yeah, the problem is, what humans do, like in the home is very complex. So it's a very sophisticated problem to solve. So right now, artificial intelligence has been really good at solving narrow problems. And we call this actually narrow AI. That's what we have today. It's the more specific the problem and clearly defined the parameters, the easier it is for that artificial intelligence to do an excellent job, in fact, a far better job than human beings. However, you once you have a whole bunch of situations, like we're seeing this now with self-driving vehicles. You know, it's very hard because there's so many variables in so many things that could happen out there, when you're driving around, that is very hard to make a vehicle that can actually drive in still, that's a narrow problem. It's not super broad. But it's, it's an order of magnitude broader than other problems. Well, I

Greg Voisen
mean, they're like you have Tesla's using it, the trucks are starting to use it. They say, next year, trucks will be on the road without drivers. So you're going to have autonomous vehicles. I remember watching a video not that long ago, but Tony Robbins having a discussion with a robot. And it was a complete discussion. I mean, it was like, literally, she was answering. And you probably saw this, but it seemed so real way it was built and everything. At what point are we kind of crossing over to be able to build something, which literally starts to think on its own?

Steven Hoffman
So that is the big that is the zillion dollar question. You talk to people at the company, open AI, which is one of the leading companies in artificial intelligence. And they are very optimistic, but they're kind of, they love getting headlines. So they will go out a lot. And they've developed these API's right now that can write articles, literally in you would read them, you know, in your news feed and not know that article was written by an AI, you think it's written by him. But these articles tend to be articles on again, narrowly focused on the weather, on sports, on stocks, you know, they're there, they can make it sound just like a human, but it's very narrowly focused. So the AI can do a really good job, right? When we crossed the line, which we will at some point, we will go from what we call narrow AI, to Artificial General Intelligence. Yeah, general intelligence is what a human does, right? That is when you I will tell you before we get to AGI Artificial General Intelligence, we will have robots in the house helping us in more and more ways. We see it with the Roomba, you know, all these different devices, eldercare devices, they are coming, they are here, and they're getting smarter and smarter every single year. But there will be a quantum leap forward, when we hit that point where robots can start to piece together the world in much the same way that the human brain does. Yeah, maybe the dots. Yeah, and nobody knows. So one of the leading computer scientists at Berkeley professor, he was like, you know, the week before they discovered the atomic bomb. Somebody was doubting it would ever happen in the next 50 years, you know, many scientists, so we honestly, these things don't happen linear. Like they happen. They happen to happen. And then all of a sudden, boom, you make this breakthrough, just like with the transistor, any of these things. And what we're going to see, probably my guess, is, it's going to take probably 30 years, that's my guess, but I don't know, right? It could be 10 years; it could be 60 years. But at some point, although we're going to discover how to create a system that is complex enough, so that it can start to process the way our brains process and I will tell you, our brains are very sophisticated, but also very simple. What we are is incredibly good at pattern matching. Like if you think about your life and all the decisions, you make your pattern matching, like, oh, this works, I'll do more of this, oh, I try this and it doesn't work or other people show me it doesn't work. I won't do it that way. And then we save this information. So what they are developing at MIT right now, to answer your question. They're actually developing robots that Learn to Learn. Say, they actually are trying to figure out how do you get a robot that learns to learn like a child goes into the world and starts to experiment like so they have, they have robots now that they're developing, that literally can go into the world, and try all these different things, and start to deduce which ones produce the best results in the beauty of robots is once a robot learns something the right way, it can instantly share that with every other robot in the world, through the internet, like humans, we take years to learn, we have to grow up, we have to have our parents, we have to go to college, you know, all these things to learn, a robot can gain all that knowledge in a few nanoseconds, like, you could transmit all this knowledge that all the other robots before them have learned. So once, so these robots are going to be so powerful, once they start to communicate with each other and share learning, it's going to be explosive. And that's the final section of my book. And that is where we go into what is going to happen when we hit this critical when we hit the point where these robots will be able to function like human beings,

Greg Voisen
like icon, its own consciousness, you know, in Star Trek with Leonard Nimoy, right? We are Yes. You know, it was human and but yet not human to right. So the reality is, is that I think we are on the cusp of that we really are. What about implantations? You said people putting implants in their fingers, putting implants there? How far we offer? Where are we with implanting chips into our brain.

Steven Hoffman
So we're doing that right now with deep brain stimulation. So we actually put a they can, they can help people with things like Parkinson's disease, by actually putting a wire deep into somebody's brain and stimulating it. That's common, you know, we have pacemakers in our hearts. Right? You know, for people with heart problems. We're putting chips in the body right now. And we're doing that more and more. Oh, Elon Musk, others, you know, he has neuro link, there's a bunch of other companies out there, some of which are even further along. But they're, they're not as vocal about it, that are working on how we interface with the brain. And my, my thing is, most people out there will be very reluctant to get a chip in their brain, even if it's a tiny hole that's drilled into your brain, you know, you just the idea, most people won't do it. So really, the big breakthroughs are going to come in the US military, DARPA is actually putting a lot of money into this right now. They are working on how do you develop a non-invasive means you don't have to drill a hole or stick, you know, a stent into you or anything, you can literally aware headband and communicate at a high bandwidth with low noise with your brain.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, well, it would, it would only go that the military might be doing something like that.

Steven Hoffman
Now, you know why they want it. They they're developing smart helmets they want on the battlefield, every soldier to be connected to a cloud. Yeah, it will literally tell you, it will give an AI will be gathering all this data in real time, and can literally tell you, Oh, behind that wall, there's three enemy soldiers. Oh, there's, you know, you need to move down here. You know, that's a friendly, don't shoot that way. All that information that a soldier wouldn't have can literally be transmitted to them. And hopefully,

Greg Voisen
hopefully, Steven, we can get to a point where we live in peace, this whole thing in Ukraine right now is I It's a trap. I mean, I'm it whatever our government's going to do to spend that money to have sophisticated helmets, then the question is going to who's going to be racing to have that first. And who wants to use that technology to, you know, do that hopefully we can use that for good some way and I could see how it could be used for good in many circumstances, one as a protection device. In other words, if you could sense people who might be an attacker, meaning on the street, right, okay, great, you know. Now in the section on building an interplanetary ecosystem, you speak about space exploration. You've talked a little bit about Mars is a growing industry that includes hundreds of companies Elon Musk, obviously, Jeff Bezos, the world's most powerful government space agencies speak with our listeners about space exploration and kind of its complications.

Steven Hoffman
So there are a lot of complications. So first of all, getting human beings to Mars is a huge, huge undertaking agreed not impossible. But it's very optimistic to think we're going to have people a sizable colony of people living on Mars in the in the next 40 years. Right? It's very optimistic to think that and Elon Musk's plans are even more aggressive. So the problem is, is Mars is it's going to be miserable living on Mars, you're going to be trapped inside this little unit living unit won't be able to go outside because Mars is highly toxic, also getting to Mars, huge, huge barriers, they're trapped, you know, human beings we're not, we did not evolve to live in space in zero gravity. And what even once we're on Mars, it's a totally different environment, not suited, in fact, the complete opposite of what humans need to survive. So if you think we have problems on our planet, due to climate change, wait till you go to Mars, Mars, this is hell, right? It's literally hell, it's, you must come volunteer and go there. But I'm not like, I will tell you, the ones who are really going to make good progress on Mars are not these biological beings who are not suited to the planet, it's robots. Robots are going to be the colonists of Mars, like, realistically, robots are going to be doing most of the work most of the productive stuff on Mars. So I that then you then you get into the politics of it. You have different countries like the US, China, Russia, all these countries competing, who owns Mars, like, what does it mean, when one country gets there first and starts to build stuff? We're going to have to work out all those treaties. Same on the moon, there's also lots of natural resources, especially on the moon and asteroids. How are those divvied up? What do we do?

Greg Voisen
Like with our current technology? Isn't it about a six month ride to Mars? Yeah, yeah. And you know, and then return on a good cycle? Have you figured out how you might return? Now if it's a robot, that's okay. But if it was an actual human being the return trip, we don't know how you're going to get that?

Steven Hoffman
Right. We don't know yet. There's still so many unanswered questions, you know, six months. And it's can be a brutal six months of going there, because there can be solar flares that can literally kill you along the way. Yeah, there could, there could be lots of complications with your body. In that timeframe. Also landing on Mars, it's one thing to get a robot down safely? How do you get human beings down safely? And how do you get human beings in mass down safely? And then how can you build an infrastructure on Mars to actually allow them to return to Earth at some point? Yeah, pretty cool. Is it a one way ticket for the near future?

Greg Voisen
Yeah. So you know, these five forces, which you've outlined are really, really interesting. And the technology that's, that's driving them, I think the connectivity thing right now, is probably the biggest thing and during the pandemic, to have even what you and I are using right now, which is something pretty antiquated at zoom. But the reality is, it works. You speak about deep automation as one of the five forces, you give us an overview of the core developments in the deep automation.

Steven Hoffman
So, in deep automation is basically everything that can be automated will be automated. And so we are seeing huge advances like right now in, you know, surgical robots that can do work that high paid professional surgeons used to do it. So what will be the surgeon of the future? Will they be more like an IT worker? Yeah, will the surgeon actually, you know, because you don't need nimble hands, you don't need all that training, a robot is going to do that better than you can, you know, and right now, robots can do certain procedures much better than people not all there. But it's just a matter of time they're going, they're picking the ones that are the most profitable, really, and doing those first. At a certain point, the people won't be doing that. So what will a surgeon be doing? Will they be more like a computer scientist IT guy like it's just controlling this robot? Perhaps that will be what medicine is. Also you go to your doctor for a diagnostic, you know, there's an the doctor can only know so much. How many medical journals can a doctor read a year? You know, doctors forget things. Doctors are extremely rushed. How much time can a doctor spend with you, when you go in there, they're looking at their watch, they have to get to the next person. They can spend a lot of time thinking about your problem and AI could literally spend an unlimited amount of time. Plus have an unlimited amount of data from all these medical journals throughout history, all these case studies that he can actually pull in to diagnose you far better than a doctor. So what do we need a human doctor for? If they're not going to diagnose you? They don't need to write a prescription that's an easy part for an AI and assist them to fulfill Right, you know, what do they do? Every job on the planet will be changing like that? Does this mean we will have mass unemployment? What does it mean that people will do in the future, you know, and this isn't going to happen tomorrow, we're not going to see these, these advances are happening gradually. But one by one, they're going to change. So in the near future, people's jobs are changing, we already see that the type of work we need to do needs to be more information oriented, more innovation oriented, and more people to people oriented things that robots and machines don't do very well. However, in the in, in the distant future, our jobs may be totally different. Like, we'll, we'll have to restructure society. And I imagine this could be very positive, because I don't know about you. But most people, when they do a job, they do it for the money. And they do it for the companionship for being with other people and for feeling fulfilled in society, like they are a bread earner, they can take care of themselves, those things, make them feel good. But if you're working at you know, stocking shelves at a Walmart or flipping burgers, not the most exciting job, you could there are a lot of things you could think of that would be more exciting. So would we be able to unleash people's creativity and time to put towards other things, like for example, could we build a whole system in the future, I like to imagine like what's possible, where people are rewarded for contributing back to society, it could be people who make society green, or go out and plant plants and make beautiful gardens, it could be people that create art and share it with other people. It could be people that are comedians that make other people laugh, it could be people, that just inner, you could actually be paid, because we'll need some form of universal basic income, right? But you could actually be paid for giving other people good feelings, like we will have chips in US monitoring our emotions. And when you interact with other people and create happiness, you actually receive rewards like, you know, monetary rewards, you know, it could be a whole new economy of happiness, and a whole new way of viewing our time in the world and what our worth is, then what we do now, which is just to earn money for ourselves and our family.

Greg Voisen
Well, I think you've given our listeners a really big overview, a broad brush of, you know, expansive consciousness, let's put it that way. To expand one's consciousness to actually think into this creative space that you're speaking of, is one thing for it to actually evolve there. And that's the evolution of the human species. Along with it, all of these things require certain forces, you talk about five forces, which I'd say a lot of them are external forces. But then there's these whole internal forces, which are the ones that we are living as human beings, that actually have to transform for us to be able to adopt, adapt, and evolve into this new species. Because in essence, you do talk about almost a new species of human being when you start talking about this. And if you were going to leave our listeners with three great takeaways from the book, what would they be? And how would you suggest that, you know, maybe they learned to expand their consciousness to think about this a little bit further or play with it even? Because I think one of the things that we have lost a lot as, as individuals, his play is creative. So you know, how might they play in a space to have fun to see how this might expand their consciousness so that they could evolve that consciousness to have a greater acceptance of what you're talking about.

Steven Hoffman
So number one, technology is just a tool. It's a more advanced tool, we've been using tools forever, you know, to make fire, to make implements for farming, to make our homes. Weak. This is a new tool. And it can it's like any tool can be used for war, it can be used for peaceful things, all sorts of diff everything in between. What you need to think about is how can I take the technologies today and actually use them to change and enrich my life, not necessarily to make me just more money, which a lot of people think is enriching their life, but it actually isn't. You know, that's at the end of the day, it's just, it's just a paycheck. If you have enough to live off of and you're secure, then everything else doesn't make that big a difference. What makes a big difference? We found with human beings who really want to expand their consciousness, to connect with the world to understand who they are, is our relationships with other people. So you have Ask yourself even today, and more so in the future, because these technologies are going to be so much more seductive, talk, I talk all about virtual worlds that will suck you in. But these great things that are amazing, can also isolate you from other people. Right? So can you use the technologies you have at your disposal right now and in the future, to better connect with the people around you to better understand who they are? And to better understand yourself and who you are. So they're going to be technologies for monitoring the brain? And to what cause? Into what cause? Right?

Greg Voisen
You know, I say, and to what cause, I mean, if I was going to do that, you know, get greater connectivity, all my relations, everybody I connect with, it's like a big web. For to me, it to what cause would be for more empathy, compassion, understanding, and peace. You know, the reality is, that's what we need in this world right now, hopefully, and can sustain. But what is in personal commentary here, a waste of our resources, all of our resources, meaning human life potential, is to do things like war, which seems so antiquated by nature. It's just it's, it's ridiculous what we're doing?

Steven Hoffman
Absolutely. I mean, we're just creating destruction. Unfortunately, the human beings tend to be very short sighted. Yeah, we often tend to be very selfish. And we inflict great harm upon ourselves and others. Yeah, the process. So part of this technologies, and you know, gene editing and all these things is can we advance beyond that? Can we advance beyond our primitive ape likes, you know, brains, and actually reach a higher level of consciousness. And there's a number of technologies, which will potential influences, number one, with gene editing. And it's kind of scary, but we can actually change human nature, like core nature. So we could potentially reprogram ourselves to be much more cooperative and much less confrontational, much less violent. That's one way. Another way, though, is to take who we are right now. And some people don't want to re you know, reprogram the human race, the human species, we can work on ourselves, to actually use technology to better understand and problem solve. So a lot of the world, a lot of our problems are caused by miscommunications and misalignments in our goals, like thinking that a lot of people think it's a zero sum game. You know, and people in the US think this too, they think, you know, if I give to somebody else, if another group out there get something, I'm losing something, right, if somebody else gets something, I'm losing something, the world actually doesn't work that way. That's a myth. Actually, the more people cooperate, the more people work together and share amongst each other, the richer everybody in the community gets. Now this has been proven throughout history, you can look at all the centers of, of prosperity, and they have a much greater degree of collaboration, of sharing of working together of sharing resources. But we still have that primitive side to us, which says, I want it if you know, I want this and if I can't get, you know, I don't want you to have it if I can't get it. Right. And, and that reads, like just like in Russia,

Greg Voisen
that's an ego thing. I remember, Bucky Fuller used to say, seek to understand not misunderstand, he never wanted to be misunderstood. I wrote a chapter in a book called the fuller way. But you know, we're kind of running out of time. But what I would like to do is let my listeners know, Steven, you have really been amazing at educating the five forces that change everything. For my listeners, we're going to put a link to founder space, we'll also put a link to Amazon to this book, we're going to do another interview with Steven, for his other book that just came out in the startups. You can see down the side, make elephants fly, surviving a startup and the five forces are in. Thank you so much for being on the show, and spending some time with me and the listeners and exposing and really more than importantly, acknowledge you for expanding people's consciousness, expanding people's thought process. Critical thinking is so important today. And we for some reason, it's kind of been lost a bit. And I think I don't blame technology. I don't blame AI for that. But I think as human beings, being able to actually think through critical steps ourselves, and to come up with new ideas and creative solutions, and then feed them into a computer. That's great. The reality is, is you've opened my mind expansively. And I appreciate that. And I hope for our listeners. And I really appreciate you taking the time to expose us to the five forces that change everything. Any last comment,

Steven Hoffman
I just want to say, there's so much good we can all do in the world, if we just try. And some of it comes from ignoring all the social pressures, the pressures to make money, the pressures to advance your career, and just think about, you can realign your values, you can set your own values, you don't have to subscribe to what everybody else around you is doing what the media is telling you to do, you can set your own course. And you could derive far more satisfaction, knowing that you are doing something that really benefits society in the world than just something focused on benefiting yourself.

Greg Voisen
I really like that. I think that if we had more souls out there doing that, then working from the destructive side, we could create an I'm not going to say utopia. But in a in a turn. People seek to just wake up every morning, be happy, contribute and help people help other people. And if those were your three reasons for waking up every morning, it would be a good reason to wake up. And Yes, money as an outcome so that you can survive and live is great. But it's so in one sense. It's a made up tool that we've used to exchange monetarily to create this system that backs all this, but you've been a fascinating guest. I love it. Thanks so much, Steven. It's Captain Hoff. And it's founder space calm and the five forces that change everything. Thanks for being on. Thanks, Greg.