Inventing The Future

We live in a world where the only constant is change. And the rate of change itself is accelerating. Things are moving really fast in this increasingly exponential world.

With the exponential boom in AI, machines are becoming faster and more intelligent than ever. These advances in AI will bring an unprecedented world of abundance but AI is also likely to cause massive disruption. As AI continues to get smarter and more capable, it will continue to replace many of today’s jobs.

This brings a lot of interesting questions that we explore in this conversation

1. How fast are things moving and what is causing them to move so fast?
2. How serious is the risk of job displacement? What jobs are likely to be displaced?
3. How concerned should we be? What can we do about it?
4. What will happen when AI is 100x, 1,000x, or a million times smarter than us? Will we be able to control AI?

We all start off with these wild dreams as kids — dreams of who we want to become, what we want to create, and what we want to achieve….. and some of us keep having those dreams.

But for most of us, something happens and we end up not taking the path of fulfilling our dreams. Something gets in the way and instead we end up taking a very traditional path: get a degree, get a job, then keep climbing the career ladder.

The traditional path makes sense because of

• Culture — e.g. “my mom will kill me if I don’t go to college”
• Society — e.g. “You’re working on something and it’s not doing anything?”
• Security — You need money to pay the bills

For some people, the traditional path works and they love it. But for others, they go down the traditional path and they’re left wishing they went down another path.

Enter Farza Majeed, my guest today, and his company, Buildspace. Farza created Buildspace to give an alternate path to the dreamers. They are building the Hogwarts for builders and dreamers. In other words, Buildspace is a school for people that don’t want to just “get a job”.

Buildspace is a place where you can figure out what you’re passionate about, create something you love working on, and then learn how to turn that creation into a financially sustainable path you can pursue full-time. The end goal? people working full-time on their creations sustainably — that means teaching you to figure out how to make money, raise money, get government grants, whatever needed.

The basic way Buildspace works is that they have a collection of “Builds”, which is a sort of guided course / project within a specific domain, such as Web 3 or AI. For example, they have a build on how to use GPT-3 and build a simple website that uses GPT-3.

Buildspace was started in 2019 and they have pivoted 10 times. Now they’ve become extremely prolific —  over 125,000 people have built something using Buildpsace, 1000s have attended IRL events, and some have started multi-million $ agencies, found co-founders, and even gotten funded for their own startups.

What if we created a world where we use our own data to augment our thinking, extend our memory, to automate our chores, and to track and improve important things in our lives?

This is the vision of what a utopian future of responsible data usage looks like from the perspective of Michael Jelly, today’s guest.

This vision is in stark contrast to the way the world works today, where data about us is predominantly used to manipulate our behavior for the benefit of third-parties.

This utopia is the premise on which Michael’s company, Magicflow, is centered on. Magicflow is a productivity tracker that helps you focus, get into deep flow work sessions, and identify the things that are obstructing your flow. Today, Magicflow is a productivity app but Michael has a much broader vision of how data can be used to enable us to live healthier, more productive, and fulfilling lives.

Apart from being a brilliant founder, Michael is an incredibly curious and deep thinker, which is why this conversation naturally ran on to be close to 2 hours long. It’s a big time commitment but once you experience a bit of Michael’s mind, you’ll find yourself hooked in the flow of the conversation.

“If you design your life to where you love it, you never need to escape it” — This is the core life philosophy of Alex Schachne, today’s guest.

Alex is a former college basketball players and a 2nd time founder.
But Alex didn’t always have a clear idea of what path he wanted to take in his life. So Alex went on a quest to interview incredibly successful people and hearing each person's life & career story gave him a chance to see which paths truly resonated with him.
These conversations changed what Alex thought was possible for his future.

Alex now claims that his life’s “path is” to help people find theirs — to inspire people to do the things that inspire them.
This led Alex to build Paths — a social network for students to explore life & career paths, and get advice or mentorship through short audio clips.
Alex is a solo founder and is currently a one man army, where he has built and done everything on his own.
He’s still early in his journey as a founder, hasn’t raised a huge sum of money, and is still figuring out a lot of things, just like many of us.

• Alex’s journey from being a college basketball player to becoming a founder
• Some of the biggest mistakes Alex has made
• An exploration of life design and what it means to be successful

“I’m more worried about other startups than AWS or Google” — Eric Jung

After testing over 12 ideas and founding 3 companies, Eric Jung is currently focused on building Unreal Speech, a Text-to-Speech software service that he claims is better and 8x cheaper than AWS. The text-to speech uses an ultra realistic AI narrator that is trained to sound audiobook-esque. The software can for example read any piece of text in the voice of Jordan Peterson or Gary Vee.

Eric is a South Korean founder living in San Francisco, and he became inspired to work on tools to help people consume information after learning to speak English by watching YouTube videos in English with closed captions in Korean.

Eric recently launched on Product Hunt, earning the #3 spot for the day and also raised $300K from the founders of Readwise, Shaan Puri, and Furqan Rydham.

💬 Discussed in this episode...

• Where does your purpose come from?
• The future of AI & the value of automation
• Will everything be automated? Should everything be automated?
• What is Unreal Speech and what problem are you solving?
• How the hell are you competing with AWS and other giants?
• How would you respond to AWS and other competitors lowering their price?
• “I’m more worried about other startups than AWS or Google”
• How do you handle criticism?
• What stage are you at right now and what challenges are you facing?
• The concept of WHO not HOW
• Have you found PMF? How do you find PMF?
• How Eric raised $300K
• Work-life balance: Eric surfs almost every day as a founder
• What do you want to become, create, achieve, and give in your life?

What would you do if you dropped out of college, pursued 12 different ideas but none of them worked, and only had $0.50 cents in your bank account at one point?

Would you give up or persevere?

Today’s guest, Arnav Bathla, decided to keep charging forward because he believes he was born to be an entrepreneur and he couldn’t possibly see any other option.

Arnav is originally from India and after dropping out of college and booking a one-way ticket to San Francisco over 2 years ago, he played around with different ideas and almost none of them solved a ‘pressing’ problem.

He went from one idea to the next until, at some point in his journey, he had less than a dollar in his bank account. But still, he never gave up.

After a 7 month hiatus, the ITF podcast is back!! 🚀

In this special comeback episode, Julian interviews his co-founder at Mindflow, David Glass.

Julian and David quit their jobs (Meta & Cisco respectively) in April (4 months ago) to take the full plunge into the entrepreneurial journey and so far, it has been an incredibly rewarding journey filled with tons of challenges, lessons, and joy.

In this episode, we cover things such as…

1. What Mindflow is
2. The problem that the company aims to solve
3. Why Julian and David both quit their jobs
4. The two pivots that Mindflow has undergone and thinking behind them
5. Lots of wisdom on how David thinks and looks at life

“Comfort isn’t exactly what I’m optimizing for” — David Glass, when asked why he quit his job to take the full leap into entrepreneurship.

The pandemic completely shifted the nature of how we work. The abrupt changes brought by the pandemic either destroyed companies or forced them to radically adapt. In this episode, Julian speaks with Kian Gohar about the leadership principles, culture changes, and new rules of work that are required to thrive in this new age.

❓ Who is Kian?
Kian Gohar inspires the world’s leading organizations to harness innovation and moonshots to solve complex problems.

💥 Kian is the co-author of “Competing in the New World of Work” with Keith Ferrazzi, which was published just two days ago on February 15th by HBR. The book highlights the future of work by providing research-based insights and best practices for leading change in the ever-evolving post-pandemic world of work. Kian, Keith, and their team interviewed over 2000 executives, entrepreneurs, change-makers, and leaders around the world to understand what they do and how they responded to the pandemic. We’ll talk about many of the lessons shared from the book in this episode.

💥 Kian is the founder of Geolab, an innovation research and training firm empowering leaders through coaching, strategy, and design.

💥 Previously, he was an Executive Director of the XPRIZE Foundation, designing moonshot challenges to solve pressing global problems through partnerships with corporations, foundations and governments.

💥 He was also on the faculty of Singularity University, teaching exponential thinking to thousands of entrepreneurs and executives. Kian has coached the leadership teams of dozens of Fortune 500 companies and is a sought-after public speaker on innovation.

💥 He is a graduate of Northwestern, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Business School.

💣 4 Value Bombs
💥 1. There are four leadership competencies that consistently showed up in leaders and companies that thrived during the pandemic. Doing all 4 leadership competencies really well puts you in a flow state of being radically adaptable. The four competencies are collaboration, agility, resilience, and foresight.

💥 2. One of the main advantages of working in person is having spontaneous conversations that can lead to an idea or a better relationship. In the new remote world, you should create a culture where you can feel comfortable calling somebody and asking them a question.

💥 3. To improve the foresight of your team/company, task everyone to identify one particular external threat that could impact your business, whether that’s tech, economics, policy, or a competitor. Ask them to track that domain for the course of a month and report back with their findings.

💥 4. Entrepreneurship is a journey, not a career path. It isn’t a path because there is no clear direction of where you are headed. As long as you’re open to learning, pivoting, and working with people who you really admire and who are going to change the world, you’ll open yourself up to a lot of opportunities.

In this special episode, we celebrate ITF’s one-year birthday, which happens to be Julian’s birthday as well! To celebrate, Julian gets personal, vulnerable, and deep.

We usually interview next-level entrepreneurs on this podcast but with this episode, you’ll get the opportunity to know Julian better as he tells the story of three of the most transformative experiences in his life.

The three stories consist of...

1. The recognition of Julian’s privilege
2. The discovery of Julian’s purpose
3. The biggest mistake Julian has ever made, which got him suspended from school 😮

Julian also touches on having left his previous startup, Vize, to pursue an idea he has become obsessed about and felt that he could not ignore. The new startup is named Mindflow and we are building a learn-to-earn platform that leverages crypto and NFTs to financially incentivize people to learn.

“When you do things with the focus on what benefit you will get out of it, your potential and motivation will be limited. But when you focus your energy on how you can contribute to all of humanity, you tap into an unbounded source of energy.” — Julian Alvarez

We thank you all for supporting this podcast and for boarding this rocket ship with us. In many ways, this exponential journey is just beginning so buckle up and let’s continue to ascend onward and upward 🚀

How can you capture the knowledge buried inside conversations and convert them into actions? 

After graduating early from UPenn in 2015, Krish Ramineni dove headfirst into Microsoft as a Product Manager. Krish enjoyed his job and he was learning a lot but he realized that he was making incremental improvements to existing products instead of being truly innovative and building new products. When graduate school at Cambridge was right around the corner a year later, a fateful meeting with Sam Udotong (current Co-founder and CTO) led him to tinker around. Together they build the foundation for Fireflies AI: an AI note-taking assistant for your meetings. 

Fireflies raised $14M in their series A round and $5m in their seed round. Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong recently made in on Forbes 30 Under 30.

Fireflies went through at least 5 pivots before finding product-market fit and Krish and Sam both lives on pizza and soylent for over a year before building something that could attract the attention of investors.

❗ What PROBLEM is Fireflies AI solving?

Approximately 40% of our time is spent in meetings daily, but that knowledge is rarely captured in an efficient and reusable manner. We also speak an average of 150 words/minute, but write approximately 50 words/minute. Meetings are often not easily transferrable to output. 

Moreover, how do you extract value from an audio recording or transcript? What if you want to pluck only the action items, important dates, or metrics discussed? Whether you’re preparing to sit down with competitors, investors, or your internal team, extensive manual effort is required to condense a meeting into digestible, high-value morsels.

🛠️ What is Fireflies AI’s SOLUTION?

Imagine summarizing an hour-long meeting in five minutes by using an AI that can guess which parts of the conversation are the most important.

Fireflies AI is an AI meeting assistant that joins your meetings across Zoom, WebEx, Skype, Google Meet and all other video conferencing platforms. Not only does it take notes, summarizes the meeting and transcribes it at extremely high accuracy levels, it creates a knowledge base of meeting content. Their AI tool intelligently extracts value out of the recordings, allowing you to easily navigate the most crucial parts of the phone call. 

Moreover, with their integrations and workflows, the assistant automatically inputs information into other applications and systems and even can send recaps to Slack. This automates tedious post-meeting work so employees can focus their energy on curating rich and meaningful conversations.

This was a monumental year for NFTs. The most expensive NFT was sold for $69.3 million. The market cap (total money in NFTs) of NFTs went from $17 million in January to $3.25 billion in August (19,000% increase in 8 months). The trading volume went from $4.75 million to $6.5 billion in the last year (141,000% increase). And finally, this year, the number of people that own an NFT went from 1 million to 25 million. This is truly insane exponential hockey stick type growth, and things are just getting started.

You may be thinking, “Alright yeah, that sounds pretty wild but WTF is an NFT and why should I care?”

WTF is an NFT? No, NFTs are not Northern Fried Tacos and they are not Ninja Fighting Tattoos. NFT stands for non-fungible token. To understand what non-fungible means, let’s first understand what fungible means. When something is fungible, that means it can be exchanged for something else of equal value. For example currencies like the USD or Bitcoin are fungible. You can exchange any $5 bill for any other $5 bill and you'll have the exact same thing.

How Do NFTs Work? NFTs are possible thanks to the technology of the blockchain, which is the same technology that powers Bitcoin. The blockchain can be thought of as a public decentralized database, where anyone can see what is currently stored on the blockchain and see the full history of all transactions. Therefore, with NFTs, you can see a record of when the NFT was created, who currently owns it, and the history of all the transactions for that NFT. These NFTs uniquely represent pieces of media that can be anything digital, including art, videos, music, gifs, games, text, memes, and code.

Use Cases For NFTs There are many different use cases for NFTs today but given that it is such a novel technology, new use cases are continuing to be created every day. Here are a few of the use cases that are covered in this episode.

1. Digital Art / Collectibles
2. Music
3. Access Based NFTs
4. Gaming
5. Redeemables
6. Identity
7. Certifications / Credentials
8. Land in the Metaverse
9. Fractionalized Ownership of Assets

In this episode, we also discuss how NFTs are giving unprecedented financial power to creatives, how NFTs will change internet culture, how to buy NFTs, and what to look for when investing in NFTs.

NFTs are still early, and will evolve. Their utility will increase as digital experiences are built around them, including marketplaces, social networks, showcases (virtual museums, your own space in the Metaverse), games, virtual worlds, and more. Someday every internet community might have its own micro-economy, including NFTs and fungible tokens that users can use, own, and collect.

The companies that end up going bankrupt do so because they fail to disrupt themselves. In other words, they generate such an insane amount of revenue that they develop a corporate immune system that will attack any idea that poses a threat to the company's core business.

It was during his time at Singularity University that Salim did his seminal research on the attributes that the fastest growing companies in the world had in common. Salim compiled this research to write his popular book, Exponential Organizations.

🧑🏼‍🦲 More About Salim

Salim is a sought-after business strategist who presents globally to the leaders of many of the world’s largest companies and Heads of State.

He is the Chairman at OpenExO, the Author of Exponential Organizations, a Board Member at X Prize Foundation, and the Founding Executive Director at Singularity University.

Salim is a serial entrepreneur. Most recently, he founded OpenExO and ExO Works. He previously founded several technology companies, including New York Grant Company, Confabb, PubSub Concepts, Fastrack Institute, and Ångströ, which Google acquired in 2010. In addition, he led Brickhouse, Yahoo!’s internal incubator.

🚀 How To Start a Startup (According to Salim)

1. Finding your MTP (Massively Transformative Purpose) is the first and most important step.
2. After you find your MTP, either create or find communities that are trying to solve that problem. In those communities, you will be able to learn more about the problem and find the people you need to form a team.
3. Put together a founding team with a few key roles such as engineering, business, product, etc.
4. Come up with your breakthrough Idea (aka your Moonshot) that is at least 10x better than the status quo.
   If your product is not 10x better than the status quo, the market will ignore you. If your product is 10x better, the market can't ignore you.
5. Follow lean startup thinking, such as iterating on your MVP until you find product-market fit. You must go from 0 to 1 before you can begin to scale (going from 1 to n).
6. Set up the rest of the ExO attributes

📱 Socials

Due to the countless barriers to innovation, many people never choose to innovate or bring their ideas to life. And the grand majority of those who do try to innovate end up failing. How do you lower the cost of innovation and maximize the probability of success?

Henrik Stamm Kristensen is a serial entrepreneur who has founded five companies, four of which are food technology companies and one of which is a communications platform. After 35 years in the food industry, he is now the Founder and CEO (Chief Moonshot Officer) at BlendHub and the Founder of ChemoMetric Brain.

❗ What PROBLEM is BlendHub solving?
It's a human right to know what we are putting into our mouths. Unfortunately, food industries are mostly B2B. It will require time and patience to educate them, in order to eventually reach the end consumer.

🛠️ What is BlendHub's SOLUTION?
Creating a platform for food production as a service. Under the BlendHub umbrella in the four food technology companies, they ensure food safety, food security, and food quality. Initially, it began with a static factory, but this wasn't enough. They needed a global replication model.

So, they invented the world's first portable powder blending, packaging, and quality control factory in a forty foot container. After the first one was patented in 2010, it was deployed in India in 2011. Through localization, they were able to save 30% on costs. They ideated a multi-localized network of food production hubs that are closer to the ingredients and the final consumers.

📱 Socials

Cryptocurrency is the fastest growing technology in history. Its current growth rate is 113% annually and it's the first asset to have gone up 2 million percent since its inception. It's accelerating twice as fast as the Internet did during the dot-com boom. Visualize this: 140M crypto users exist today, but this number will scale to 1B by 2024. 

Matthew Chivers and Micah Baylor are propelling this movement forward through Mage, a blockchain consulting company that provides a range of services to accelerate the adoption of blockchain technologies. They consult across crypto, blockchain, digital real estate, sales strategy and sales development.

Matthew is the Co-Founder and CEO at Mage. Micah is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Mage.

❗ What PROBLEM is the problem with the existing financial infrastructure?
61% of people globally do not have a bank account. There are barriers that cause friction to acquiring this essential service: a legal identity, credit history, age, and proof of residency. Even for those with access, the banks in their country may not be trustworthy. 

Banks often abuse their power to freeze or close bank accounts. While this can decrease the number of clients engaging in illegal activities, governments (like in Nigeria) can close down bank accounts of organizations that are protesting against them. In this scenario, Bitcoin served as a platform through which they could receive donations and payments, financing their protests without government intervention.

Moreover, the US government owes a towering debt of $16T. They remedy this by printing money or raising taxes, which hurts the global economy. Money printing raises inflation rates, decreasing the value of the existing US dollar. You're incentivized to spend your money now instead of saving it, which is not in the best interest of your financial future. Tesla, for example, bought bitcoin to hedge against government money printing. 

🛠️ What is Mage's SOLUTION?
The trend is clear. We've transitioned as a developed society from commerce to e-commerce, mail to e-mail, and now we are making the transition from money to e-money.

Most people simply view money as a means of satisfying their material desires. For Mar, having power over one's finances tasted like freedom. She believed it would make her happy, but it didn't.

Now what? At 21, Mar became a financial trader in a Wolf of Wall Street-esque environment in London. After reaching the peak of her career half a decade later, Mar acquired her Master's degree in Economics at Schumacher college and embarked on a personal and spiritual growth journey by traveling the world—for 10 years. 

Mar Michelle Häusler is the Founder of Give & Take Lab, a collaborative laboratory focused on advancing the exploration of new ways of interacting with money, and Time4Changers, a learning journey for Generation Z individuals to birth their purpose projects, and Creator of the Inkiri social currency.

❗ What PROBLEM is Give & Take Lab solving?

If money didn't exist, what would you be doing with your time right now? People's relationship with money is often fueled by a rat race pattern or the fear mentality that drives us to chase financial stability. We don't give ourselves the space to grow. 

Money is a neutral energy, amplifying the entities you project. Many people project scarcity and attract that as well, despite their attachment to a stable "9-5" that supplies them with secure wealth.

Moreover, our society is not built to let kids dream. The world closes you down from a young age. The impossibility of a fulfilling life without financial strain is pushed onto us.

🛠️ What is Give & Take Lab's SOLUTION?

An empowering community centered around three fundamental pillars: awareness, connection, and empowerment.

The Lab has facilitated the reformation of thousands of people's personal relationship to money across the globe. Their strategy is anchored in perspective-shifting, connecting to oneself, and feeling the energies of those important to you and your community.

Strategically collaborating with the education system, Time4Changers aims to embed crucial concepts like financial literacy, regeneration and sustainability, mental health, life purpose, and more into Generation Z individuals between 11 and 18 years of age. 

📱 Socials

Since childhood, Norris was passionate about making the world feel smaller through faster transportation. After studying aerospace engineering at UCLA, he worked in the aerospace industry as a propulsion engineer for three years on vehicles that break the sound barrier. At Stanford's Graduate School of Business, he realized low-boom supersonic travel was the future.

As in, what if you could travel at supersonic speeds that are 2 or 3 times faster than the average plane? When a 12-hour flight prevented Norris from flying to Asia to visit his grandparents, he knew in high school that he wanted to be a change-maker for improving cross-pacific relationships. Leading this bold mission, Norris Tie is the Co-Founder and CEO of Exosonic, Inc., a startup that is building commercial supersonic planes.

In the past 50 years, the speed of commercial airplanes has not gotten faster. Have you ever not traveled somewhere due to how long the flight is? Moreover, the cost of a flight increases the longer the flight is due to heightened labor costs to staff the aircrafts, employ the aviators, and feed the passengers.

Despite our planet being massive, flying has shrunk it by allowing us to travel at speeds of 460-575 miles per hour. Within 24 hours, you can reach the other side of the globe. Imagine the further worldview expansion and economic prosperity we could achieve from shorter flights. Businesses could collaborate more easily and traveling could be more accessible to the masses. When distance is not a barrier, valuable relationships are formed and intangible connections are deepened.

A quiet supersonic airliner that is 2.5-3x faster than traditional places. Their plane is set to enter service in the mid 2030s time frame.

Their aircraft is currently projected to carry up to 70 passengers and fly from Los Angeles or San Francisco to London in 6 hours or so. Although these seats will cost business class prices upfront, they will increasingly become more affordable over time.

To fund their R&D costs, they have acquired partnerships with the US government and its Air Force. For the future, they will evolve these into multi million dollar military defense contracts for a more stable resource flow.

"Are we going to be satisfied with the status quo forever and suffer through twelve plus hour flights forever? No, someone has to do something that will make transportation even more convenient and open up the world even more." - Norris Tie

By 2050, our globe will face the colossal challenge of accommodating 10 billion people. The million-dollar question is: how are we going to feed them? And how are we going to do it in a sustainable manner without killing the planet and without harming the animals that we share this planet with?

Paul Shapiro is the CEO of The Better Meat Co., the author of the national bestselling book, Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, a 4x TEDx speaker, and the Host of the Business for Good Podcast. His business-to-business startup has pioneered a fungi-based alternative to animal meat that is much more sustainably produced, healthier, more affordable, and arguably even better tasting.

❗ What PROBLEMS are The Better Meat Co. solving?

Our modern-day methods for feeding our growing population are unsustainable.

The main culprit? Raising livestock to satisfy the increasing demand for meat as nations become more developed (and hungrier for meat).

Despite the boom of interest in plant-based meat consumption, traditional meat consumption is on an upward trajectory. Unfortunately, this involves major environmental, animal cruelty, and health implications.

Additionally, the UN recently projected that increasing demand for animal protein will likely trigger the next pandemic. Factory farms with windowless warehouses and crammed chickens are the perfect conditions to cultivate a virus.

14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions are traced back to animal farming practices. It's no secret that raising animals necessitates more land, more water, more plants, and more resources from our solitary planet. To make matters worse, raising animals is one of the leading causes of deforestation and it drives climate change, biodiversity loss, and more.

Animal cruelty and disregard for their health are more widely prevalent than most meat consumers are cognizant of. Ignorance is not bliss when your hard-earned dollars are supporting the barbaric treatment of animals (and contradicting your personal values).

🛠️ What is The Better Meat Co.’s SOLUTION?

Pioneering a food technology to grow meat through fungi and not animals.

Their startup leverages fermentation to subject common ingredients like potatoes to convert them into meat-like products in less than a day. Compared to cows that require 14 months to two years to be ready for slaughter, their microbial protein can be harvested within 24 hours. Rather than using plants, their secret ingredient is fungi, which has a much meatier texture and has been used as a meat replacement for centuries.

If you could live forever, would you? Combining the forces of science and technology, a leader for the movement towards immortality has emerged. Zoltan was reporting frontline for National Geographic in war zones, even enduring a near-death experience with a landmine in Vietnam. This enlightened him to the value behind surpassing the limitations of terminal flesh and improving the human being and therefore the human experience.

Zoltan Istvan is the American-Hungarian Owner and President of ZI Ventures, a former 2020 US Presidential Candidate for the Republican party, founder of the Transhumanist Party, and a Bestselling Author and Futurist. He currently serves as a media figure working towards publicizing transhumanism and accumulating funding for further research.

Transhumanism is a social and psychological movement in which the proponents advocate and predict the enhancement of the human condition. Transhumanists are developing technologies that can greatly enhance longevity, mood, and cognitive abilities.

❗ What is the PROBLEM that transhumanism is solving??

About 150,000 people are dying per day. Transhumanists are in a race to overcome death.

Moreover, inequality is worsening in the social sphere. With proper structure and basic income, our health care systems could support this movement of strengthening our mortal bodies.

With a trillion dollars, death could be conquered in 10 to 20 years. Unfortunately, the National Institute of Health (NIH) is not funding research because aging is not viewed as a terminal disease.

We currently only access less than one percent of the light and sounds that can be heard in the universe. Our perceptions of the vastness around us are extremely limited.

🛠️ What is transhumanism’s SOLUTION??

Augmenting our current human capabilities through technology.

Transhumanism is both the application of radical technology to human beings and a social movement of surmounting beyond our physical restraints (think travelling space and merging with machines).

Aging is a disease with a feasible cure. For example, transhumanism has developed prosthetics that tie to your neural system for soldiers’ crippling wounds. These robotic limbs are currently allowing wounded veterans, the handicapped, and disabled people to regain their strength. From brain implants to driverless cars and jet packs, technology bolsters us to be more than human.

We have not yet tapped into 99 percent of the universe. Imagine having a hundred senses; it would revolutionize our human experience. The pursuit of indefinite lifespans is spurred on by the complexity of life and the desire to discover the vastness of our universe and exponentially improve our intellect.

Machines will retain a sense of their humanity, mitigating the risk of conflict between humans and cyborgs.

While establishing a universal basic income, accessibility to augmented healthcare will not be an issue. A positive cycle of investing into society will be reinforced.

At 13, she taught herself programming. And ever since the robotics club in middle school captured her interest, her vigor for driving pivotal change and solving hard technical problems, has been unstoppable.

By 15, her technological bandwidth expanded to machine learning and blockchain. From developing platforms to track counterfeit medication in developing countries to reducing the cost of prosthetics, she was deservingly awarded the “Young Innovator to Watch” by the Consumer Technology Association.

Today, Alisha Imran continues to invent the future at age 18. Her passion? Exploring the intersection between significant problems and the cutting edge technology that can solve them. She manifests this through three key roles: She is the Co-founder at Voltx, a developer at Hanson Robotics, and a Machine Learning Intern at Kindred.ai.

Voltx is a machine learning company that is developing software to accelerate research and development testing of energy storage devices, including batteries and supercapacitors (SC). Hanson Robotics is an AI and robotics company dedicated to creating socially intelligent machines that enrich the quality of our lives. They are the creators of Sophia, the human-like robot. At Kindred.ai, she will be developing more intelligent machines using cutting-edge techniques in reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning.

What is the PROBLEM that Voltx is solving?

Innovations from electric and flying cars to solar panels are enabled by lithium ion batteries. In the development of these batteries and supercapacitors, testing is the primary bottleneck. For example, long duration manual testing for a lithium ion battery can take 3 months to a year to complete. Industry competitors are working towards the next best battery with the highest energy density output, but no one is optimizing the development process. Therefore, batteries are currently unscalable. Companies can’t increase their production and renewable energy can’t be sustained without these massive energy storage systems.

What is Voltx’s SOLUTION and VISION?

A software platform to reduce battery testing time.

This will exponentially expedite the development process of batteries. Voltx aspires to collaborate with battery manufacturing companies to increase the number of devices they’re producing annually. Eventually, these applications will allow renewable energies to be more stable and reliable for widespread use and application. Electric vehicles will become more accessible to the masses, improving the environment through less carbon emissions.

Sit back for an overdue reflection on Julian’s recent transition from college to Silicon Valley, where he recently moved to start his career at Facebook as a Software Engineer.

Julian graduated from college in December 2020 and took 7 months off before he started working at Facebook. During this 7 month journey, he started this podcast, worked relentlessly on his startup, Vize, traveled to South America for a month (and did Ayahuasca), and invested a significant amount of time into building systems, networking, and learning.

This episode is a reflection on his journey and his most valuable lessons from all of these experiences.

Julian co-founded his startup Vize almost four years ago and even though there have been minor wins, the team has struggled tremendously to get paying customers and find product-market fit. The entrepreneurial journey has been nothing short of incredibly challenging but he’s not willing to give up until his mission-driven team has tried everything they possibly can.

Six months into his podcast, Julian has been careful with measuring the right success metrics. Analogous to entrepreneurship, the initial results will be disproportionate to the amount of effort expended. Fortunately, he set a 100-episode goal before he would allow himself to consider giving up. Find out how he defines his core success metrics and hear about other valuable lessons Julian has learned from running the podcast for half a year.

In South America, Julian discovered his immense privilege. South America is filled with poverty and in some countries like Venezuela, the minimum wage is $5 / month. Julian’s most profound experience was his 3-day ayahuasca retreat. He shares the most important lesson he took from this mystical experience in this episode.

“The key to success is to demand more from yourself than anybody could possibly expect of you.” - Julian Alvarez

Top Value Bomb

With each ascending level of success, your ability to produce results will be increasingly contingent on “Whos” and now “Hows.” When doing anything, your first thought should be “Who can I ask to help me?” rather than “How can I do this?” Learning through traditional methods, such as books, is linear, while learning from others is nonlinear because you can get immediate answers to your specific problems and questions. Moreover, your network is your scope of opportunities.

Machines can replicate processes, but they can’t detect quality. Human beings are the mindful drivers that define meaning, and that is what sets us apart.

Caitlin is an explorer in the worlds of technology, innovation, and well being. She is an author of two books named Designing Wonder and Mindful by Design, a professor at Stanford teaching classes such as “Digital Wellbeing: Healthy Relationships with Technology”. 

After teaching for two decades, Caitlin founded MindWise, a storytelling and experience design studio and consultancy, in 2015. Their impressive client portfolio includes Google, Facebook, Oracle, Ted, Evernote, and the US State Department. 

What is the PROBLEM that MindWise is solving?

How do you incorporate technology into learning experiences? Educators and managers are eager to utilize technology to teach their students or train their teams, but they fear losing touch with their humanity or compromising their quality of life. An even more challenging task is taking the salient and meaningful takeaways from a VR experience and bringing it back to one’s reality. Moments of enlightenment are often too fleeting for long-term impact. Users are not expertly guided on how to apply their newfound concepts moving forward.

What is MindWise’s SOLUTION?

Utilizing a triangle of mindfulness, storytelling and design.

By incorporating a design thinking mindset, Mindwise encourages deep inquiry and empathy through the expressive art of VR technology.

Storytelling as a form of teaching is ten times more memorable than delivering random, abstract concepts. A story can be defined as a package of what we find meaningful. Once it’s transferred, the recipient will attach their own meaning to it and its lessons are now more deeply ingrained. 

From coaching TED talks to advising at high schools and universities, MindWise delivers all forms of program support with their innovative methodology. 

As a result, MindWise pioneers connection and freedom through artificial intelligence.

If not me, then who? At an Uber Elevate Summit in 2018, JR realized that no one was taking initiative to bring flying cars to Canada. In a room filled with aviation experts, JR felt an overwhelming amount of imposter syndrome. Why would a 27 year old with almost no experience in aviation think he has what it takes to bring electric flying vehicles to Canada?

While he grew up in Calgary’s energy hydrocarbon center, his wanderlust led him to live in Toronto, Barcelona, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. As the travel bug was solidified within him, his divergent side on sustainability was unveiled. He’ll never forget the morning he woke up to smog so thick, he felt the sting in his lungs. His visceral reaction to the pollution awakened him to the consequences of conventional aircraft.

JR Hammond is the 29-year-old CEO and Founder of Canadian Air Mobility (CAM) and the Executive Director of the Canadian Advanced Air Mobility Consortium (CAAM). The consortium serves as the non-profit idea generator and CAM is the for-profit investment house that ensures these business opportunities evolve into revenue generating operations.

❗ What is the PROBLEM that CAAM is solving?

The Problem regarding sustainability: Conventional systems are not sufficient anymore. The aviation sector is accelerating our global footprint at the fastest rate and aircraft emissions are exponentially more harmful than ground emissions.

The Problem regarding city infrastructure: We can’t stack or expand highways anymore to facilitate the natural movement of people, goods and services. With the rapid urbanization of cities worldwide, we lack the ground space needed. Cities are growing at accelerated rates and space is running out. Our additional transportation needs are growing faster than bridges and tunnels can be built. HOW MUCH SPACE PARKING LOTS TAKE

The Problem regarding traffic and human connectivity: The pandemic has proven that face-to-face interactions are irreplaceable in their value both for social and professional interactions. However, in the US, people that commute to work waste 54 extra hours a year in traffic delays. That's almost a week and a half of work. In LA, which is the most congested area, commuters waste an average of 119 hours per year.

🛠️ What are CAM and CAAM’s SOLUTION?

The CAAM aims to mobilize an industry towards a shared vision: developing aviation as the next shared transportation service.

For the first time in Canadian aviation history, the three levels of government, airports, operators, and new electric aircraft developers gathered to discuss expanding conventional routes through hydrocarbon powered aircraft.

The goal of CAAM is to build the necessary infrastructure needed for electric flying vehicles to be possible. They prioritize public perception, dealing with regulations, and ensuring public safety. 

Most employees don’t value themselves enough to put in the work they need to achieve their goals. In fact, 80% of employees experience work-related stress and anxiety and depression costs companies over $1T globally every year. But what if you could solve these problems by going to the gym for your mindset?

After a degree in commerce with a focus on Human Resources & Organizational Behaviour, Lucy Born hopped on the self-development train. She has also studied Organizational Leadership and Economics.

One master’s degree in counseling psychology later, she became a registered psychotherapist and began coaching founders and CEOs. After coaching founders and CEOs for several years, Lucy noticed that many of the people that needed coaching the most were not getting it because it was not accessible or familiar to them. Learning about the problems confronted in corporate environments among employees and understanding the value of coaching, Lucy took the entrepreneurial leap and decided to start Inward to provide accessible coaching services to companies.

Lucy is the Founder and CEO of Inward, a one-on-one virtual coaching service that hires the top three percent of coaches with organizational experience. She took something that already exists—coaching—and created a system around it to fit the personalized needs of each company.

What is the PROBLEM that Inward is solving?

80% of employees experience work-related stress or burnout. Anxiety and stress cost the global economy one trillion dollars annually. 1 in 6 people cried to a colleague this year. COVID-19 has aggravated this issue, but benefit programs still remain underutilized in the background.

The Problem for Employees: The fear of failure and lack of worthiness are two main areas where employees struggle mentally. When a company’s employees fail to value themselves, own who they are, and believe they are worthy of being helped, it generates a vicious cycle of beating oneself down to force unsustainable growth.

The Problem for Companies: Employee engagement is declining and turnover rates are increasing, which means skyrocketing costs for companies. When unassisted, many employees quit and leave, requiring companies to invest excessive capital on hiring and training programs. Moreover, when one employee is

What is Inward’s SOLUTION?

Accessible, affordable, and high utility of coaching services provided to companies that they can offer to their employees as a benefit.

Inward works with all employees by having them identify their goals & needs (e.g. burnout, healthy habits, role transition, leadership skills, etc.) and then scheduling coaching calls with highly vetted and qualified coaches to help accomplish those goals.

When his Professor presented a $10,000 dollar award for the best entrepreneurial robotic solution, Francois was all ears. Inspired by a frustrating Airbnb experience where the key for the home was frozen under the mat, the host was unresponsive, and he was fined five thousand dollars for leaving a window open, Francois used his frustration to fuel his inspiration for what is now Enso Connect. In studying computer and cognitive science, he drove his idea to completion in his University of Toronto classroom.

Francois Gouelo is the 25-year-old CEO and Co-founder of Enso Connect, a revolutionary guest management platform for the short term rental industry.

His futuristic vision is accredited to his passion for smart homes. The power of sensors and devices existent today are underserved or underleveraged in many ways. Consider your Alexa, for example. Its potential hasn’t nearly been unlocked yet.

What is the PROBLEM that Enso Connect is solving?

Time equals money. Too much time is spent managing short term rentals. On average, an account manager can only manage up to 7-10 listings, with each listing exhausting ten hours per week. Amid the thousands of problems in the short term rental ecosystem, the impact of ineffective communication on the guest experience is massive. This is a particular vertical many have not touched.

The Problem for Hosts: Hosts need to reap the benefits of placing their rentals on marketplaces like Airbnb. Unfortunately, manpower is costly and requires high maintenance when delivering a quality guest experience. During the pandemic, cancellations wreaked havoc as operational costs rose and profits plummeted. Hosts further struggled to ensure their properties were leveraged in a safe and profitable manner.

The Problem for Guests: Everyone has had one negative Airbnb check-in experience. Whether it’s being locked out of the Airbnb, not being able to find the wifi password, or having an unresponsive host, there is no systematic solution that currently exists. In many countries, short term rentals are banned due to complaints around bad property management.

What is Enso Connect’s SOLUTION?

A guest experience management platform that unifies communication across multiple channels.

Enso Connect uses a chat AI named Jarvis that is connected to all the smart home devices. Jarvis uses these smart home devices and other data to automate the entire process from pre-boarding to arranging the cleaning.

The goal is to automate up to 80% of the communication through scheduled messages, welcoming instructions, restaurant recommendations, sending the wifi password, etc. Since guests repeatedly ask the same questions, these answers are automated for maximum efficiency.

As a result, Enso Connect lowers operational costs so managers of short-term rentals can scale quicker.

Enso Connect’s mission is to “revolutionize the travel industry by providing guests with the comfort and convenience of a hotel, while receiving the community experience of a home.”

A few months after he joined a startup out of college, the dotcom bubble burst in April of 2000. Thereafter, Tanvir set aside his stockbroker dreams to found two companies as his entrepreneurial career took flight. In a world of uncertainty, Tanvir thrived as an entrepreneur.

Tanvir Aman is a lifelong serial entrepreneur and is currently the Founder and CEO of Dunyha.

He came up with the idea for Dunyha while he was managing his own Airbnb and realized that customer satisfaction from guests and his level of involvement were positively correlated.

After this epiphany, Tanvir started Dunyha, a startup that is revolutionizing the housing crisis by empowering real estate ownership through an operate to own model. This means that you have a host that lives at a property and in exchange for providing hospitality to the guests, they get to stay at the home for free.

What is the PROBLEM that Dunyha is solving?

Where people want to stay looks starkly different from ten years ago. Moreover, real estate ownership is becoming increasingly inaccessible for young people, particularly in urban districts and cities. Generation by generation, real estate prices are accelerating while wages are stagnating.

The Problem for Homeowners: Most college graduates are burdened by college debt. Additionally, despite the extra costs, the majority of Generation Z individuals want to live in urban districts or the center of “buzz.” However, 44% of Millenials lack a down payment for a traditional mortgage. Lastly, there is an increasing need for buildings to be built sustainably as a long-term asset that is both efficient and technologically modern.

The Problem for Travelers: Today, more people are attracted to booking Airbnbs or alternative lodging than hotels. Hotels are simply stale, with no element of excitement that can satisfy the adventurous zeal of Generation Z. Even though Airbnbs are great, they tend to have limited property management, security, and service layers in the average lodging experience. Hosts are often faceless and do not provide guidance to travelers.

What is Dunyha’s SOLUTION?

A purpose built and curated Airbnb experience. First, they design sustainable homes that resemble micro hotels. These combine the appeal of Airbnbs with the consistency and hospitality of hotels. Second, they bring in young people (Generation Z and Millenials) who are passionate about the hospitality industry. These individuals are the ideal operators of the micro-hotels due to their focus on enhancing the service aspect of a guest stay. They’re incentivized by free rent and profit sharing income. After three years, they’re able to purchase the property and business by securing financing. Typically, you would either pay for rent or if you had enough money, you would make a downpayment to purchase a home. Dunyha gives you a third option with their operate-to-own model. Straying from the traditional rent-to-own or own model, their operating model has the power to transform and improve the entire travel lodging industry. Travelers can now control their experience and the design of it.

As a result, Dunyha harnesses the entrepreneurial spirits of young people and provides them with the income producing assets of real estate.

Dunyha’s mission is to “empower real estate ownership serving travelers.”

At 18, Jay Olenicz decided to break a world record. Four years later, Jay and his brother embarked on the 48-day journey across the Atlantic that would earn them three Guinness World Records. After several near-death experiences and countless hours of reflection, Jay conducted a reassessment of his life. This profound experience inspired him to quit his management consulting job in Bristol, UK, and start a travel tech startup in early 2020. 

Jay is the CEO and Co-founder of Staze, a travel app that allows you to book last-minute “holiday” rentals for discounted prices and provides travel recommendations so that you don’t have to worry about deciding where to go.

What is the PROBLEM that Staze is solving?

When Jay was a management consultant, he traveled and stayed at Airbnb’s so often that he realized that he could get significant discounts on luxurious Airbnb accommodations if he contacted the owners last-minute and asked for a discount. He and his Co-founder, Henry, realized there was no marketplace for discounted rentals.

The Problem for Travelers: The process of traveling and booking last-minute vacations is fundamentally broken. On average, it takes fours hours of research for someone to find a place to travel. Travel, in its current archaic state, is like Blockbuster 20 years ago, where you would have to choose what movie to rent out of a selection of 100s of options. Additionally, without a market for discounted rentals, most travelers will spend a lot of money unnecessarily.

The Problem for Hosts: In the UK, holiday rentals are unoccupied 45% percent of the time throughout the year, which amounts to about about 50 million nights per year. But this isn’t just a problem in the UK, it is a global problem. Across the world, there are 1.2 billion nights per year of holiday rentals that are unoccupied. This is a massive amount of money that is being lost.

What is Staze’s SOLUTION?

Staze saves travelers money by giving them access to last minute holiday rental deals and they save hosts money by maximizing the utility of their properties.

Like Netflix recommends shows, Staze personalizes your travel search based on your preferences. By using travel preferences (such as cost and distance) and leveraging an AI engine, they save “thinking” time for their consumers by reducing the four hours it usually takes to book a trip down to four minutes.

As a result, Staze helps people travel more for less and also helps property managers to maximise their revenue.

Staze’s mission is to “enable people to live fun, free, and fulfilled lives through experiential exploration.”

1. When you’re able to disconnect from the world, you’re able to reconnect with yourself on a deep level. Devoid your environment of external stimuli, and you will have no choice but to go deeply within yourself.
2. When you have a two-sided marketplace, target the acute pain points for those on both sides of the equation. In Staze’s case, they increased travel demand by minimizing the cost and time it takes to travel, which incentivizes hosts to offer up more rental properties.
   

Daniel Dubois is the Co-Founder and President of Key, a serial entrepreneur, and an adventure seeker overflowing with nuggets of wisdom. He’s a Vancouver native and he’s founded and sold two venture-backed companies. He worked at his dream company Airbnb for 2 years, where he strategized growth in top-tier markets. Then, In 2019, he came up with an idea he became obsessed with and took a leap of faith that propelled him into his current venture, Key.

Key has created a new economic model for residential real estate that replaces a conventional mortgage in a Homeownership-as-a-Service (HaaS) model. With Key, you can buy a home with only $15K while maintaining the freedoms of renting.

What is the PROBLEM that Key is solving?

In Toronto, it takes an average of 21 years to save up for a down payment. Say “goodbye” to owning even an entry-level condo until your late 40s. Without having the ability to own a home, people have to spend an excessive amount of money on rent. At Airbnb, Daniel witnessed the crisis we have in homeownership. The thousand-year-old system is highly inefficient—it’s broken. How can you solve the housing crisis and make homeownership affordable?

What is Key’s SOLUTION?

Key’s solution is an innovative economic model that does not require a mortgage. Traditional homeownership is binary-- either you own a home or you don’t (and therefore have to pay rent). Key’s solution enables people to buy equity in a home with as little as $15K instead of having to buy the entire home. For example, this means that you can buy 12% of a home instead of having to buy the entire home (it’s non-binary). As a result, the amount of rent that you pay is proportional to the amount of equity you own in the home. So if you own 12% of a home, you would only pay 88% of the original price of rent. Therefore, instead of having to pay the full amount of rent for a countless number of years, you can buy your home slowly over time.

But Key is more than just an innovative economic model. They also built technology that digitized the home buying process. 

Key’s economic model has a ripple effect that enables them to have a greater impact. By purchasing entire buildings, they are functioning as an economic engine for developers to do more and they’re mobilizing passive investor capital like never before.

Key’s mission is to “create a world where real estate is a source of freedom and prosperity for everyone.”

1. Key’s innovative homeownership model is a key demonstration that your innovation does not have to be limited to the product or service you are offering. Sometimes it can be the economic or business model that creates the most value and sets you apart. But Key’s economic model is not the only thing that makes them valuable. They are pairing their economic model with technology that augments the quality of the experience. When you pair a unique economic/business model with an incredible user experience, you will make your solution both valuable and rare.
   
2. If your idea isn’t worth it, you’re prone to giving up prematurely. If you are not willing to dedicate 10+ years of your life to solving a problem, then don’t even try.
   
3. When you’re validating an idea, prototype. Clarify what you know, what you don’t know, and how you can validate these assumptions as fast and as cheaply as possible. You don’t need to code and you don’t need thousands of dollars to build a prototype.
   

Get up, show up, and lift up. Chance Becnel is the 8-year CEO and Owner of Axiom Healthcare Services, a company that is revolutionizing senior care. They employ over a thousand people and gross $50-60 million annually. By exuding servant leadership, Axiom has thrived since 2008 on a vision of exponential growth. Chance has accumulated 30+ years in management experience and 25+ years in senior care.

“How do we provide high-quality, world-class service for seniors in the disease management and sick care space?” Normally, this problem has been institutionalized. “Healthcare” promotes vitality, whereas “sick care” is treating someone that is ill. Despite the reinvestment incentives in disease management, Chance believes personalized prevention is key. Adventuring into other “sand boxes,” Chance has guided his company into the vitality and life span business. By transitioning from sick-care to future-forward healthcare, he’s skating to where the “puck” is going.

3 Value Bombs

1. Most companies offer solutions for people at the higher parts of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but there are billions of people at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy with underserved needs. Chance thinks there’s a lot of opportunities in coming up with cost-effective solutions that can help these people move up a level in Maslow’s hierarchy.
2. When you serve others, you are also serving yourself. “It's very powerful what we're capable of getting ourselves to do when our purpose is on a higher level”
3. If you don’t disrupt yourself someone else will disrupt you. Axiom started off in the sick care area of the healthcare space and even though they have had tremendous success, they are now starting several projects to get into the health vitality space.

In this episode we discuss…

• [3:45] Why did Chance decide he wanted to become a CEO?
• [7:35] What is Axiom?
• [8:54] What is the mission of Axiom?
• [15:50] What is the problem that you are aiming to solve?
• [25:08] How are you solving these different problems?
• [26:19] The importance of culture in Axiom’s success
• [32:46] If Axiom was to achieve its ultimate destiny, what do you think the world would look like?
• [39:22] Why is culture important and what are the pitfalls of getting it wrong?
• [42:42] What is an exponential organization and how do you build one?

People & Resources Mentioned

• Peter Diamandis
• Steven Kotler
• Peter Crone
• Scott Barry Kaufman: his newest book, Transcendence, touches on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
• Salim Ismail & his book, Exponential Organizations
• Lean Startup

In this solo episode, Julian explains why your mindset is the most valuable tool that you have as an entrepreneur and why It is one of the greatest determinants of your success in both your professional and personal life.

We all want to be successful in both our personal and professional life, regardless of what success means to us. But if you don't have the right mindset, you're not going to get to where you want to go because most barriers in life are psychological, not technical.

You might not believe me but let's take a closer look at why your mindset is the defining factor in your success.

When you fail at something, you might think that the reason you failed is because you didn't have the time, money, experience, technology, or people that you needed to succeed. But the truth is that all of these things are resources and although not having the resources you need may be the reason you failed, it is not the defining factor. Failure is never about the lack of resources, it is about a lack of resourcefulness. Resourcefulness is the defining factor in our success and our emotions are the greatest resources that we have at our disposal.

Your mindset is important because how your look at the world determines how you feel at any moment—it directly influences your emotions. And how you feel at any moment determines how you respond—it determines what decisions you end up making. And your life is ultimately the result of all of the decisions that you make in your life.

Therefore, our mindset is the source of where we currently are in life and it is the key predictor of our future success.

1. Problems Are Opportunities Mindset
2. Purpose-Driven Mindset
3. Moonshot Mindset

Why your mindset is the greatest determinant of your success [1:49]

The Problems Are Opportunities Mindset [6:40]

How Jeff Bezos came up with the idea for Amazon [12:44]

The Purpose-Driven Mindset [15:29]

How to discover what your Massively Transformative Purpose [26:42]

The Moonshot Mindset [28:26]

Practical tips on how to apply 10x thinking and think creatively [35:04]

Sources/Resources

In this special episode, Bryce Watson joins Julian Alvarez, your host, to talk about their entrepreneurial journey and their startup Vize (short for Incentivizing Good). 

Vize's mission is to help billions of low skilled workers find a job that they love and empower them with the skills they need to advance in their professional lives. Vize launched its pilot in Tijuana, Mexico, where the current goal is to improve working conditions for factory workers in Tijuana. These factory workers are often overworked, made to work in unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, don't feel respected by their employers, and are sometimes made false promises prior to their employment that are never fulfilled once they start working. Vize aims to improve working conditions by allowing workers to anonymously write reviews about their work experiences so that the transparency of working conditions can help workers make better-informed decisions bout where to work and hold factories accountable for treating their workers better.

Bryce Watson is a Co-Founder and the CEO at Vize. He has a Masters in Economics and International Development from Texas A&M University and has over 5 years of experience working in international development.

Julian Alvarez is a Co-Founder and the CTO at Vize. He is the host of this podcast and will start working as a Software Engineer at Facebook in June 2021. Previously, Julian has interned as a Software Engineer at Facebook, LinkedIn, and Goldman Sachs.

Welcome to this introduction episode for the Inventing The Future podcast!

Never in history has the potential for entrepreneurs to disrupt industries and solve problems on a massive scale been greater. The decreased cost and increased power of technology has democratized our ability to solve large-scale problems. The convergence of exponential technologies (AI, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Blockchain, to name a few) is enabling us to solve problems that could not be solved before. Today, a single individual or team—driven by a purpose—can transform our world. 

Our mission is to inspire and empower entrepreneurs to solve the world's biggest problems. We'll specifically focus on the world's biggest problems because, as Peter Diamandis brilliantly says, "the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest opportunities." 

Join me, growing entrepreneur and computer scientist Julian Alvarez, as I interview those that are inventing our future. We'll explore the problem they are eradicating, learn about their unique solution, and uncover the mindsets, insights, tools, strategies, and wisdom that have proved invaluable in their arduous journeys. If you are an entrepreneur, an aspiring entrepreneur, an innovator, a disruptor, or a highly ambitious person that dreams of making a massive dent in the universe, this podcast is for you. 

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. 

So, how will you invent the future?