Thinking Bigger and Bigger and Bigger When it Comes to Anything w/ Henk Rogers #39

Hello. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite. Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes which have turned led to the renaming of periods into ages. You've personally just experienced the information age and what arrived at this been.

Now just consider for a moment that you might right now be living through a new transitional age, the age of infinite, An age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefined lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources. The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that has come to life as together we create a new definition of the future.

Our podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut. We were named by NASA Project Moon Hut through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem. Then to use those endeavors, the paradigm shift thinking and the innovations, and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

Today, we're going to be exploring thinking bigger and bigger and bigger when it comes to anything. And we have Hank Rogers with us today. How are you, Hank? I'm doing great. Thanks. Hank has a, but not only a history, but an interesting job. He is the owner of the Tetris company, you know, the game Tetris that you play. That is his. He was in Japan. He first he's a an entrepreneur in the video game designer video game designer and entrepreneur.

He then ended up creating a video game, found secured the right to Tetris. And from there, if he wants to give any more, it's just amazing that, he's here. And so the little back story, I don't always give a lot of about an individual, but the first ever event that I ever went to in the space industry was 2014, 2015. I think it was early 2015 because we started project Moon Hut into 2014 is the I was asked to go to an event in Hawaii called the great giant leap.

And at this event, I was told would be some of the top people in the space industry. So we had, sorry to say, the first event I ever went to or 50 about 50 people, there was Buzz Aldrin. There was the individual who put the rover on the comet from France, who worked with the European Space Agency. There were some people there who'd been so engaged in the space industry that it was like being at a PhD level event. I was typing so fast to figure out what a dragon was, what kilograms was.

I didn't think it was Game of Thrones just to be able to understand the language in the beginning I was not a space individual. And that's where I met Hank. So, Hank, there's our background. Do you have an outline for us? Kinda. Yes. So I I thought I thought you might be interested in, hearing a little bit about my business career since everybody asks me about that. So we'll start with number 1, would be your business career. Yeah. Computer games. Okay. Well, hold on.

Just we'll call it business career. Yep. Yeah. Number 2. Number 2 is, my mission number 1, which is to fix this planet. To fix this planet. Mine 2. And then number 3. Number 3 is to make a backup of life by going and colonizing other planets. Other planets? Number 4? And we don't actually have to spend a lot of time on this one, because it's just there to, keep the other ones, seeming like they're eminently doable.

And then Okay. Of course, to figure out how the universe ends and do something about it. How the universe ends, and to do something about it. Now, is there a number 5? No. No. 4 is enough. Okay. I think oh, I I skipped 1. I I skipped mission number 2, which is to end war. And I think I haven't gotten around to doing doing anything about it. It's left over from from my days as as a high school student protesting against the war in Vietnam in New York.

Okay. So we'll we'll kind of put that into, 2.1. Yeah. So tell me, the the topic, Thinking Bigger, Bigger is Big. So share with me teach me teach me what I need to know to think bigger. Wow. Teach you what's this I'm I'm Yeah.

I can teach you anything, but, you know, so, you know, it's it's, it's when whenever you're in something, and you think that whatever it is that you're working on, and you're gonna accomplish that, and so on and so forth, Like, while you're at it, think about what would be the bigger thing that you could do that would be much bigger than what you were just working on, for example. You know, how does how do you go from, the biggest thing that you can think of to something bigger.

And it it it turns out that going bigger often is is about the same, how I could say, level of difficulty as going big in the first place. Whatever it is that you're on, you might think this is big, but doing something that's 10 times as big is about the same amount of work. So you might as well do the 10 times bigger thing. So I I mean, I can go through each of those, my business career, my missions, and kind of, like, run through how I went from big to bigger to bigger.

But I'm gonna wanna know, it looks like we talked about, I'm going to wanna know how I can take what I what we're doing, what I'm doing, and what end so that I could understand how to make that transitional leap. So I'm gonna be pushing you through this, obviously. Push me. Push me. Yes. I mean, you gotta just, like, like, think outside of your box that you're in because, you know, no matter what you're doing, you've you've you've got sort of you've you've built a box around yourself.

You're you're inside of your a room of your own creation, and, like, everything that happens to you happens in that room. But guess what? That room is pretty tiny, compared to the room that, first of all, it could be. And if you look at beyond the room, like, beyond the building, or beyond the city, or beyond the country or beyond the planet. You know, there's always a bigger way of think of of looking at something, and why not? Well, I'm but if we took I mean, we've got project Moon Hut.

We're designing plans for man to live on the moon. We're looking to accelerate the earth and space based ecosystem. We're taking all of that information, all those endeavors, and turning it back on earth so that earth we improve life on earth for 50,000,000 species. How do we get bigger? How do how do we get bigger? Well, I mean, if we're gonna go through my mission, mission number 3 Well, let's say you wanna start with 3, or do you wanna start with some of the things in your career?

Or do you wanna jump to 3? I could do that too. You're asking me right now how do you think of it in fixing the planet, and I'm just about that kind of leads me to 3 and 4 Okay. Up in my business career. Where would you like to go? Let's start with how do we think bigger? Let's just go right there, and then we can come back to the others and you can interject them throughout. Alright. So so I'll talk a little bit about my business career, and and I sort of backed into it.

I I when I was, gosh, in my twenties, I worked for my father in the in the gem business. And, I hated working for my father because he never gave me any, like, real responsibility. And whenever I had an idea, he's, you know, he always said his idea was better. What do I know? And so on and so forth. And he did things terribly wrong. Like, he never paid taxes. He never did any accounting. Really? Oh, man. Are you kidding me? He was he was smuggling stuff from, you know, from country to country.

He was just living in his own world. And, you know, he would do things like make an appointment with a really important gem dealer and then be 2 hours late. I just just really I I just could not believe that this was my role model for how to do business. So, I I so my first thing is to to get away from his business. It just so happened that I was in Japan, and, personal computers had come out. And so, hey. You know what? Personal I I can program.

I majored in computer science, and I minored in Dungeons and Dragons back at the University of Hawaii. And, so I I can put those 2 together, because I I went to Akihabara, which is the the electronic center at that time, the electronic center of Japan, to find out what was going on. And I looked at the computer games, and there weren't any role playing games. And I said, oh, man.

This is a chance I can make a role playing game, and I'll be ahead of everybody because nobody knows about role playing games. And, you know, in the US, there were there was, Ultima and Wizardry. There were already role playing games on on the Apple, and, and the Commodore, and the TRSA the TRSA the TRSAID was Temple of Apshai. And, so I thought, well, I'll just make one of those. And so I got started. Well Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. So here's an idea for thinking big.

My question to you would be, how did you just come up with how do you come up with role playing game like that? At that point, I believe in history, they they weren't doing it. So did something trigger you? Were you challenged by something? Did you learn something? Did you see something? What was the mental jump that caused you to say, let's do this? I gotta say that it was just at that point, that was the beginning of my career we're talking about here. Yeah. I understand that.

I mean, I I know I know that there were were was a car invented yet? We're talking about a boatload of naivety. That's what was going on at that moment in time. What I didn't know is that the reason there were no role playing games in Japan because Dungeons and Dragons didn't exist in Japan. And so I was making a game that nobody would know how to play, because nobody knew what a role playing game was.

So instead of, like, the the US based role playing games, which basically got the people who played the paper game, the the the board game of Dungeons and Dragons, and pulled them into a computer version of the of the board game, I didn't have a board game to pull people out of, and so when when SoftBank well, I went so I I started writing this game. I got halfway, and, I I took it to SoftBank, and I said, can you introduce me to a publisher? And they said, you know what?

All you gotta do is get your wife to answer the phone. You know, you can do just do this yourself. You don't need, a publisher. I thought, shoot. Okay. So I said, of course, that was that was biggest b s ever. And they said, well, guarantee, we'll we'll buy you 3,000 copies of your game at Christmas. And I thought, okay. So I worked my ass off to finish the game until Christmas.

And meanwhile, I I had a friend of mine from from Thailand, from the gem business came by, and he said, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm making his game. And, he said, what what how much money do you have to do this? I said, well, I don't have any money. He says, well, how do you expect to do this as well? And I was just didn't know anything about business at the time. So, anyway, I talked him into putting $50,000 into my business. And I, and for that, I gave him half the company.

That was in that was in 1980, 1976, 19 what was it? 83. It was 1983. 3. Yep. I figured it was about there. Yeah. 1983. So, I said I said $50,000, and and he says, boy, you really don't know anything about business, do you? And he said he would come he would do the accounting and and do the business end of it, and I just had to make the game. I said, fine deal. Sucker never showed up once. I so I end up I end up building that business. I didn't speak read or write Japanese, by the way, just FYI.

Yeah. Okay. And you still don't? I had to no. I I can speak, and understand Japanese, but I refuse to study, you know, the Japanese characters. I think those those are hieroglyphs, and they they belong in the history books. They don't belong in in a keyboard. How do they type in the kanji? They they have a QWERTY keyboard, and they translate whatever you type on the alphabet into kanji. Why the hell do you bother translating it?

Just keep it, you know, and then they say, well, there is the there is the you don't know the true meaning of a word if you don't see the the, you know, the character. I said, how do you guys talk? I mean, you talk to each other. There is no no kanji or Chinese characters floating around while you're talking. You know, it's only sounds. So turn those sounds into phonetic alphabet and be done with it. Anyway, it just pissed me off because, you know, I I English is my second language.

I I I came from the Netherlands to, to the States when I was 11 years old, and I didn't have to learn how to read because I already knew how to read. I just needed to know how to speak English. And so you could just go to another language and use the same alphabet. It's just like going to another country and having to use an, a different numbering system. It doesn't make any sense. Anyway, sorry. Yeah. I No no worries. I digress.

So, come Christmas, the you know, we had I had spent my advertising budget, and I've done some couple of full page ads in in in computer magazines, and we got absolutely no reaction. We got one phone call during the 1st month and 3 phone calls during the 2nd month of advertising full pages. So I've blown my advertising budget. SoftBank says, I'm sorry. We're only gonna order 600 copies for the for Christmas, and I and I'm thinking, oh, wow. This is the end of the business.

We're gonna run out of money real soon. I wrote the game myself, but by that time, I had a couple of other people working for me. So it's January, and we're, like, dead in the water. Product is not moving. Nobody knows what black onyx is. And so I asked my guys, so how do people in Japan find out about computer games? This is well. They read about them in the magazines as well. How do you get into the magazine?

So, well, you you you have a hit game, and then the magazine guys come and interview you and your company. As well, that's obviously not happening. So what are we gonna do? So I said, okay. This is what we're gonna do. We're gonna do it backwards. You're gonna call every magazine, make an appointment. I'm gonna go and visit them and show them how to play my game, which I did. I traveled to Japan.

I went to every magazine, and in February to from January from when I went to visit them to February, they all played my game and fell in love with my game. So it takes them so the cycle is on by by March, with the the the magazine articles all come out. And then so in March, SoftBank call calls me up and orders 10,000 units. In April, SoftBank calls me up and orders 10,000 units.

I was the number one game in Japan in 1984 after that, like, kilo So so you you did you did something that there's an assumption made here. You did something for some reason that made you bigger, and it is that you turned something upside down. Now I'm gonna go backwards. You there was no Dungeon and Dragons, which meant that you came from the US.

You understood this Dungeons and Dragons, and you carry that mental construct, that cultural, entity over the ocean to Japan, and that became your impetus to think differently and to start a game. What made you say, well, let's do this backwards? Because that if that was so easy, everybody would do it. When you're when you're an entrepreneur, when you're in a business, things are never going to go the way you expect them to go.

And if you have the flexibility to think outside the box, to think differently, to do something different, and think of a new way of doing something, pivot, whatever it is, if you have the, how can I say, the balls to do that, then you have a chance? If you have I I know that. The challenge is I personally am well, the challenge is it's not so easy. So for example, for me, Project Moon Hut started because someone from NASA said something, and I just said, you're doing it all wrong in in summary.

And I said, you're trying to solve a 1,000 Rubik's cubes at once. And it came from a question. I'd spent 9 hours with NASA. I didn't know anything about space, and they said they wanted to solve for a woman being pregnant on the moon. And my answer was no. No. No. No. No. You you don't solve for that right now. We're explorers. We have technology to stop that. You're solving these 1,000 Rubik's cubes. Let me show you a different path. But it was that question.

I can go back to that comment that he made. What was the was it does was it desperateness? Does everybody have to be desperate to be flexible so that you could decide to turn it around? There was something in you that made you do this differently. Occasions during my my business career where or or or even my post business career where I just say, hey, let let's look at this from a completely different direction and and take a different path.

I mean, you again, you don't wanna be stuck on the you wanna be able to take a right turn or a left turn instead of just going straight, because going straight is the obvious thing, and everybody does it. And and and any everybody, how can I say, is not all the people who are really successful took a turn somewhere that other people didn't take?

And I'm going to bet you that everybody took that turn because something knocked them, something hit them, something spontaneously combusted in front of them. I I started my second company because I kicked my first partner out of my first company. He didn't do any work. And I was like you carrying everything. And a company called we were desperate for money. The and said, could you get us a product? I looked up back then the Thomas register, like an Internet book.

I found a company I called them, and they said, well, if you order from us, we'll give you net 30 terms. So I turned to my girlfriend, Now Life, and I said because they asked me what's the name of the company. I said, what's the name of our company? And she said, I don't know. Just call it at your service. At your service started, it was changed, but at your service started because we got net 30 terms. We needed the money, and someone wanted a product. Yeah. Yeah. That's how the company started.

It was not it it was not an intelligent decision. It was desperation. Well, okay. So so if you wanna talk desperation, desperation Yeah. So a lot of thing and you'll find out later how do I how I found my missions in life, is sort of a, an earlier desperation story. And it's, you know, I was 18, moved to Hawaii. Of course, I'm gonna learn how to surf, and here I am surfing on the North Shore.

I'm, you know, I've I've only been surfing for, you know, a couple of months, and I'm on the I'm out there on a day, and this is this is in the days before they could predict how big the waves were going to be on any given day. Okay. So you could go out in the morning, and then it would get bigger and bigger and bigger, because the the weather report didn't tell you that there the waves are gonna become 12 feet by the afternoon. Okay. Yeah. That just didn't exist. So here I am.

I'm out there, and all of a sudden, the waves are starting to get bigger and bigger. I'm going, oh, shit. How how you know, I I'm not able to serve these big waves. And I had to make I had to make my choice. So here here I am, I wipe out on a on a, I don't know, 10, 12 foot wave, whatever it is. They measure waves in from the back in Hawaii, so it's probably a that wave was way over my head. And, so so I lost my board. This isn't the day before bungees.

Bungees didn't exist yet, so that means that your board is not attached to your legs somehow by a little, you know, piece of rubber. So there there, I can see my board wash up on shore in the distance. Oh, really? It that went that far. It just kept on going. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're talking about I'm I'm in the white water now. Okay. I'm in the white water, and and, so I've I've gone over the what what it means to go over the falls. You're in a wave, and you go up, and then it drops you down.

You're going in you're tumbling. You're like in a giant, washing machine, and it drops you down. And when you're in the in the white water, white water is lighter than regular water because it has bubbles in it. Yeah. So if you weigh it, it weighs less. So that means you don't float in it. So here I am. I'm in there. I'm trying to figure out which way is up. I'm using my my energy to try to try to get to the surface, gasp for air, and I did this, like, I went over the falls 3 times in a row.

And, finally, I'm floating, and now I'm being I'm on the reef, and I'm I'm in this riptide, and it's pulling me away to the channel, which is gonna pull me back outside. If I'm back outside, you know, I'm already tired, and here I am, and I'm trying to figure out what to do, and then I get a cramp. Can you imagine? Like, I've I've used up my energy. I've I'm and and I'm I have a moment of clarity. I said, you know what? I am not going to die today. I still have stuff to do.

I actually thought this. And then my and then I have a moment of clarity, and it's okay. So, what's going on here? Which muscles are not working? Where do I where do I have still have strength? And I changed my stroke. I I switched to a backstroke, and so I found new muscles that still have had, like, oxygen or energy left in them, and I back stroke my way through the, the riptide onto the beach. I crawled on the beach like freaking rock Robinson Crusoe, and I, like, how can I say, collapsed?

I I crawled onto the beach and collapsed, and I I lay there for, like, 15 minutes. I couldn't move a muscle, And, but I survived. Hello? So sometimes you gotta make that decision that you're gonna survive, and you just gotta make up your mind. Because it I mean, I could've easily panicked at that point instead of, like, figuring it out, and I could've drowned. There would've been no one there to save me for sure.

6 minutes under under the water, and you got brain damage, so I would've been history. I didn't have I was out there by myself. My there was no friend watching. I was So so something pushed you. So when it came to this position because you had to think bigger, you had a failing business. There had to have been something that made you say, excuse me, to anybody out there who's listening, I'm just gonna fuck it. Well, I have to do something to make this business survive.

And I'm I'm picking on this specifically because it was a bigger decision. It was, do you fail, which most companies do fail, and you decided to make a drastic change even counter to the industry's norms. Was there a historical precedence to that? Did you read about someone who did it? Were you scared at the moment so much that you are willing to try it? Were there was something we there had to been a trigger. Well, okay. So so two things. 1 one is I hate losing. Okay. Okay? I hate losing.

I hate losing pretty much more than anything. I'm very competitive. And the person that I didn't want to lose to at that moment in time was my father. Yep. My father, with his crappy business ethics, whatever you wanna call them, was still a serial entrepreneur. He would start new business, start new business, and they would, like, fall by the wayside as he went for new businesses.

And I said, I'm not gonna do this, and I'm gonna prove myself because he was kinda laughing at me that I was doing this computer game. I mean, here, I'm what what am I doing? I mean, he didn't understand what I was doing at all. He'd never played computer games. He didn't understand what computers were, and so on and so forth. So I just didn't wanna lose to my father. That was the and by the way, that was probably the reason that my first business, I had trouble in my first business.

Because once I got to the point where I beaten my father, I made more money than him. You know, if you are so smart, why don't you make more money than me? That kind of thing, you know. So I wanted to make more money than him in the worst way, and I did. And once I accomplished that, I kinda lost interest in the business. Gotta already done what I what I set out to do. You weren't you you weren't your target wasn't the business. Your target was your head.

It's a bit by the way, here's here's a phrase that I've had since I'm 12. I'm not competitive as long as I win. And and people you could take it multiple ways. Winning means you and I winning. When we were younger, my son would play basketball with me, and he at 12 years old, I was £200 or a 100 and some odd kilo. I'm a big boy, and my 12 year old would have challenges. But if he won, if he felt like he won, I won too. So winning is not always that has to be my win. It could be my team.

It could be my family, it could be people around me, community, animals, whatever you would like. So that's one of mine. Not competitive as long as I win. But I have mother issues and father issues too, so I'll I'll give you that. Okay. So so, you know, I wrote the first couple of games for the company, and we were I was, like, all of a sudden famous. I could actually buy a car. In fact, I got a very nice car. And and so I I was, I had a lifestyle all of a sudden, when, you know, independent.

My dad never paid me. I worked for him for 6 years. He never paid me. So ridiculous. Like, anyway. No. No. It's not. I I I won't even I won't even go there. I should be laying down on a couch. Yeah. So, anyway. So, I wrote the first couple of games, and and then I I I hired a team of people to make the 3rd game, which, by the way, never happened, because I wasn't the one doing it. For whatever reason, I didn't know how to run a team.

But fortunately for me, at the same time that I was doing that, I started traveling around the world looking for games to bring to Japan, and I licensed a whole bunch of game. I lice I licensed Electronic Arts original games. I published Star Wars games in in Japan. I had European games, and one of those games, which I found at the Consumer Electronics Show, was a little game called Tetris. Wait. So before you get there, gonna interrupt again.

What made you decide to shift from being a game producer to a game, acquirer or a salesperson or whatever you wanna call it? Because that's another big jump. Oh, so I went from being a developer to a publisher. Publisher. Okay. And and and the reason was is because my, you know, I I was capable of turning out a game per year.

And I had a marketing team, and I had a sales team, by this time, and and basically, they were busy once once a year when I finished my game, and the rest of the time they were not. So I thought, they need something to do with the rest of the year. So we should we should license a bunch of games, have them translated to to the Japanese computers, and then and then they'll be busy all the time. That's the way I thought about it. Otherwise, they would be wasting time.

Was that something that some that some you saw somebody else do, and that was the inspiration for it? Did you wake up one moment, one day, and say, I need to go license and be a publisher? Was it what what was that spark again? Because there's always a spark. I don't know. I, You know, it's it's when I decided that after 2 years of making games that I that I couldn't make games and run a company at the same time.

That I and I chose running the company because I thought I was too old to be making games for the rest of my life. It's it's a sort of a stamina issue. You know, programmers that that that program games, they work day and night. I work day and night. So you were the the the impetus for you was frustration. You were working day and night. You had a team. You were paying the bills, and you saw that this was a dead end, and you needed to make a change. I know. Is that fair is that fair?

I could have hired a CEO, but I made the conscious choice that I wanted to be the CEO. So it was just a different Kenny, I'm the oldest of of 8 boys and 1 girl. So Wow. I've always been the big brother. I've always been the team leader. I've always been the one that everybody looks up to. And so I was always in charge, and so I you know, if I if if I'm in a situation with a bunch of people trying to figure out to do something, I'll take charge. I have no no problem taking charge.

And and we okay. So that's very clear. You had you wanted to make sure for your that your family saw you. You were the leader. You'd always been educated or in positions of leadership, so you were able to take those skills and the frustration. And you said, I'll take over the CEO role, and I'll license. And I'll travel in license. So, anyway yeah. So I did. Okay. So the Tetris story. Yeah. So Tetris was, at a booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

And, so 6 months later, I had licensed Tetris for all the computer platforms. In Japan, there were 8 different computers. They were not compatible, and, the family computer, the Nintendo, which had just had come out the year before. So, yeah. I You're gonna love me. You're gonna love me at the end of this. Yeah. You'll probably never speak to me again. How did you negotiate that deal? Why did it take 6 months? How did you introduce it? How did you know this was the game? Okay. Oh, I know.

I know. I know. Okay. So I'm at the Cool Loop Control Consumer Electronics. So there's hundreds of monitors with people lined up waiting their turn to play some game. Yep. And so, basically, as a license, c, meaning somebody who licenses games, I stand in line, play a game for a couple of minutes, try to make up my mind whether I like this game or not, and then have a conversation with the publisher of that game, see if I if the the Japanese rights are available. That's generally how it works.

And and if you've got hundreds of games and you've got, like, a couple of minutes per game, you basically spend a couple of minutes on one game and then you go to the next game and to the next game and to the next game. Well, I found myself in line at the Tetris machine for the 4th time. This is obviously a huge waste of time because here I am. I'm getting hooked on a game on the floor of the conserv show when I'm supposed to be doing business and finding games.

So but by the time I played it for the 4th time, I realized I was getting hooked on this game. I don't get hooked on games very easily, so I got hooked. And, you know, if you're gonna license a game, you gotta have, you gotta know that somebody's gonna wanna play that game. And if you wanna play that game, that's at least one person that really wants to play that game.

And I looked at that game, and it's so simple and so clear and so different from the other games that I thought this I, you know, I understand this. I can I can do this? I play a Japanese board game called Go. In fact, I play it with my father. He was a 6th degree black belt, and I'm a 3rd degree black belt. It's the only I never did get to his level in Go, but I competed with him.

And Go is black and white stones, and unlike chess where the the, you know, the king, the queen, the bishop, the rook, they all have different shapes and different powers. The ghost stones are black and white, and they all have the same power. Yet, go is a much deeper game than chess. I mean, it's like an order of magnitude more complicated and more interesting. The the number is there is just there's more moves than there are atoms in the universe.

Yeah. It's it's it's 19 times 19, that's 181 times 118 times so on and so forth. Yeah. You can look at it that way. That's one way of looking at it. And so chess chess can be done brute force, you know. A computer can look ahead in chess and find a checkmate in the future, whereas Go doesn't work that way. It becomes astronomical very quickly. Mhmm. Anyway, Tetris is that kind of game. It's very simple, little squares, nothing not nothing weird going on.

It's just obvious what's going on on the screen. So anyway, I fell in love with the game, brought it back to, Japan. Everybody in the company started playing it. I mean, like, when I say everybody, I'm talking about the secretaries. This is not this is not a game that is limited to the gamers in the company. This is a all of a sudden, everybody in the company is interested in playing this game.

And what the reason it took me 6 months was, there was a long list of copyright notices on, you know, like, who had the copyrights, and, basically, I went as high upstream as I could, because each time somebody else gets in between, they're taking a piece of the action, and so by the time, you know, by the time you rent, if you license it from somebody who got the license from somebody who got the license, you know, but you're all this food chain that you have to support, means that the royalties are expensive.

So I my, the farthest I could find up the food chain was Mirrorsoft, and Mirrorsoft is the, company owned by Robert Maxwell. Robert Maxwell rings a bell. He's the guy who jumped off a boat after losing his, his entire work workforce's pension fund, multibillion dollars of pension fund. The mirror this guy was like Murdoch, a publishing magnet. And, anyway, that was his company. And, well, these are these are the days of faxes for Christ's sakes.

I sent these guys faxes, and I never for months, I sent them fax and never got back, and finally, I get a fax back. This fax no longer belongs to Mirrorsoft. It's like, what the hell? And so that's what took the time. So then I started phoning, and finally I got to talk to a human, and they said, you know, so and so is coming to Japan in June, and they're they're gonna make the the Tetris deal. And I said, well, I know that guy.

That guy was the guy who owns the company who ran the company that I played the game at at the Consumer Electronics Show. I knew him. Anyway, his So you were all the way back to the guy that you were talking to originally? Yeah. Really. So so he went to the biggest software company in Japan who had basically paid him to make a flight simulator, and so he had to go to them first. Name of the company was ASCII. Now ASCII stands for American Standard Code for into information interchange.

What a dumbass name for a Japanese company. It it it absolutely means nothing. So, anyway, this is ASCII, and ASCII had made a deal with Microsoft. They represent the Microsoft in Japan, so it's ASCII Microsoft. That was a big company. So he went to them and said, you you know, how about Tetris? And they looked at it, and they said, they said, no. They we're we're gonna pass on this one. It it's too retro. Yeah. So you are lucky.

It's 1988, and and the biggest company in Japan says Tetris is too retro. Well, it's like Pong on steroids, which is still old. Yeah. But, I mean, it's it's, like, retro. You could say baseball is retro. Yeah. Sure. Game that was paid in the 1800. So what? You know, it it doesn't mean anything. Aren't you glad they didn't understand that? Oh my god. You have no idea. Of course. So, anyway, that you know, what happened with the licensing rights of Tetris is a long story.

Well well, tell me tell me the pieces for that because the first thing that comes to mind, and I'm thinking going still, we're on the age of infinite, is bigger and bigger and bigger is there's steps that you have taken, you are willing to pursue 6 months to go after something which many individuals would quit at.

You were able to identify that the purse finally get someone on the phone that you identified who this was, you had a lucky break that ASCII had not taken this on, but you still hadn't negotiated deal. And that deal had to be the right deal. So you weren't losing royalty. So that you could be extremely profitable. How did you Let me let me get to the big bigger picture here. Okay. K. So in 1988, Nintendo came out with Game Boy.

And I and I thought to myself, wow Tetris is the perfect game for Game Boy because the screen is small, the number of dots you have on the screen is limited, and so most of the games that are on the like the on the video game, the bullets are so small that you can barely see them on this tiny screen, so they don't translate very well. But Tetris, the pieces are squares. They're easy to see, so it's like the perfect game, and it's portable. You can play it anywhere.

So, I started looking at at the contracts that I had entered into, found that that handhelds were specifically excluded for whatever reason. I don't know what the what the Russians were thinking when they were making these license agreements. So, I mean, I I could spend the rest of the day talking about this story, but on in February of 1989, I got on a plane to Moscow, not knowing anybody in Moscow, and just landed there and said, I'm going to find out who has the rights to Tetris.

I'm gonna license the rights, to Tetris for Game Boy, and then I'm gonna go back to, the States and license it to Nintendo, and they're gonna publish Tetris all over the world. So so the guy that you met at the CES Consumer Electronics Show was the guy who you created the contract with, but now you're circumventing this individual and you're going to Moscow to find a higher upstream individual. Well, nobody had the rights to Game Boy. I knew that. Oh, okay.

It wasn't like like somebody had the rights to to Game Boy, and I took it away from them. These are rights that had not been spoken for by anybody. And so, actually actually, before I went, I I talked to the president of Nintendo USA, and this is this is probably the biggest deal I ever made in my life at that moment.

And I go, you know, mister Arakawa, you should include Tetris with every Game Boy that you sell, because I know when you release a new hardware platform, you always include a game with the first, I don't know how many units. And he said, why should I include Tetris? I have Mario. And I said, look, if you want little boys to buy your Game Boy, include Mario. If you want everyone to buy your Game Boy, include Tetris. And you can include Tetris, and then you can sell Mario afterwards.

And he he, called in his, his game people and so on, and they they kinda agreed. So I, on a handshake, you know, I said he asked me, so what's the deal? I said, well, I'm the deal is I if you tell me that that you want this game, I will get on a plane and go to Moscow and get these rights. So I need you to, and I thought of the biggest number I could think of, guarantee me $1,000,000 and pay me a a dollar per unit. Yeah. And and that's a lot of money. He shook my head.

But you so you it's like the Microsoft, deal for was it how many dollars a game? $16 a game? I don't remember the, per unit for the application. I forgot what it was. Don't quote me on it. So you didn't have Moscow yet, so you went to them first, and you said, will you do this if I can get this? Yes. And they agreed and shook your hand, and that's okay. And that was enough. That was it.

It took me it took me like 3 days to find Elektronor Technica, the, the software and hardware ministry, because, you know, you were dealing with the government. It's like going to North Korea and and trying to license something. They they didn't have license they didn't have intellectual property. They didn't believe in an intellectual property. They and yet they had the rights to this game, and I tracked them down and negotiated with them. I was there on a tourist visa.

But you didn't even know how much it was gonna cost you. So you're asking for a dollar a game and a $1,000,000 guarantee, but you're not even sure if Electronica Technica is going to give you a name. Of course, of course, of course. But I mean, look, the if a dollar in in the US, you know, I'm gonna say, a $1,000 in the US is like $100 in in in the Soviet Union. It's completely different. Oh, I know. I've I've worked in I've worked in Moscow.

I've worked in Saint Petersburg, but you were taking a gamble that that math would work out, and you just figured based upon Oh, yeah. The ruble, and I don't know if the ruble was back there. You just said it would work. Yeah. So I offered them 25¢ and a $150,000. And, I mean, that's what we negotiated at the end. And, so got the deal. And that's when I became good friends with Nintendo. I mean, real good friends. Obviously. Every month or however with it that was cut.

They sold they sold, 30,000,000 units of Tetris on, packed in with Game Boy, and then another 30,000,000 standalone box product. So it was it was catching time. So you, the challenge for and let's take it to peep individuals who are going to start a company in the space industry. The challenge for people who are going to start any type of enterprise is that these stories are aspirational. They are fantastic. They get people excited that they can do it.

Yet so many things had to line up so that you ended up getting this big win. There are a lot of individuals who try to do the exact same thing, and they fall flat on their face. Well, so here so the so let's go back to surfing.

Yeah. If you if, you have to learn how to paddle before you can actually stand up and catch even the tiniest of waves, and then you have to fall off your board a whole bunch of times, and then finally, you get the balance right, and then you start surfing bigger and bigger and bigger waves. If you were to go out there and try to surf a big wave without knowing how to surf, you would, like, die. And so that's kinda how business is.

You shouldn't be afraid of falling off your board, making mistakes, or, you know, or swallowing some water. You you just have to get back up your on on your board and try it again try it again until you know how to do it. Then when the big wave appears, you actually know what to do, and that is kind of where I was when I went to Moscow. I kind of by that time, I've done enough deals that I that I knew how to do a licensing deal. I knew how to convince them.

I know how to explain how the business works, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So, yeah, this is a big advantage I had, because, my I lived in Japan, and at that time, my Japanese really was still really shitty. So I, I learned how to speak English as a second language, meaning use fewer words. Don't use big words. Mhmm. Use a smaller vocabulary, and lo and behold, these people who've been studying English but can't speak it can all of a sudden understand you.

This is the thing that that most Americans can't can't do. I remember Nintendo went to to to Moscow later, and they tried to speak to the Russians. They weren't communicating. They were using big words, and and when the Russians didn't understand, they would speak louder. It's not about speaking louder. It's about using fewer words and and being clear and speaking slowly. Anyway, well, there's I think there's 2 other pieces to the language side.

One of them is the Chinese language does not have this a subject, so there's a lot of collaborative conversation with it, And this, so the dialogue is different. When they learn English, they learn that there's a subject I. And the second part is that in Asia, having lived there for 10 years, everything's negotiable, which is not very indicative, for example, of the American system or many European countries, and, many other countries around the world, but you can negotiate almost anything.

And so negotiation is a lifestyle when it comes to, the Asia Pacific or Asia region. Mhmm. So maybe there was something there that also helped you. Could be. Could be. I I mean, I can't I I I don't know everything that made me who I am or gave me the abilities that I have, whatever they are.

So anyway, let's get past this, the business story, because, you know, fast forward, my friend, the the guy who made, Tetris, I helped him come to the US, get him his rescue him and his family, and, basically, we formed the Tetris company, and we've been controlling the Tetris company ever since. We still control it today. And he basically, we he he lives not far, for 20 minutes from here. We get together every other day, and and drink, and talk story about whatever.

So we're not only business friends, we are friend friends. And, so here so here's what happened. It's 2,002, and, games start to come out on mobile phones, and these in those days, they were basically text based games because phones didn't have graphics. And the 1st phone that could play a game was about to come out, because it's a phone that you could take a picture. Can you imagine that?

You could take a picture, and if you take a picture with the phone, there's a little screen where you can see the picture. Well, if you have a screen and a CPU that can handle all that data, you actually have a little game machine. And so those those early phones that could could take pictures could also play games.

And the first one was coming out from Sprint, and I I went around to, try to find a licensee for Tetris for mobile phones for the US, and this is after I'd gotten a $1,000,000 advance out of Japan. The biggest advance I could find in the US was $25,000, and I'm going, like, you guys have absolutely no idea what's gonna happen. So I felt like role playing games in Japan in 1983 was games for mobile phones in the US in 2002. And I said, okay. Well, I can do this.

So I rolled up my sleeve, and I I made a company, Blue Lava Wireless, and we made games for mobile phones. The company that offered me $25,000 advance for Tetris in 2,002 bought my company in 2,005, 3 years later, they went public, and they they they raised $68,000,000. I got the entire $68,000,000, plus I got 4,000,000 shares of Jamdat stock, which 1 year later turned into cash.

So this was this was my big exit, and this happened in 1980, sorry, in 2,005, which basically leads me to the second half of our program. Because what happened is a month after I sold my company, I found myself in an ambulance on the way to, hospital with a 100% blockage of the widow maker, which is the biggest artery in your heart. Yep. I was on my way out. And the first thing I thought, I was looking at the ceiling, I say, you gotta be freaking kidding me. I haven't spent any of the money yet.

I know a guy who sold his company for a tremendous amount of money, and a week later, he, got hit on a motorcycle and died. It's so ridiculous. You know? Yeah. It's like he was 41 or 48 or something. So, yes, a week later. Yep. And I said, no. I'm not going. I still have stuff to do. This is the second time I said that. And so I I have 2 stents. It it completely solved my problem, and I'm I'm in the in a hospital in the recovery room, and I'm like, what did I mean by stuff?

And this time I got to seriously thinking about it. And so I said, well, look, you know, my kids are all finished with school. They all started their own families, so they don't need me anymore. I've made enough money, put enough money away, so my wife doesn't need me anymore. So, actually, all the things that I've been working for all this time, they're already done. So what did I mean by stuff? I still have stuff to do.

And so I actually seriously thought about what is it that's gonna piss me off if I didn't do, something about it by the end of my life, you know, at the end of my the next time. And I came up with my bucket list and my missions in life. The first one, came to me in the back of the newspaper. It was a little article. It is in Hawaii for Christ's sakes. Tiny ass article that says, oh, by the way, we're gonna kill all the coral in the world by the end of the century. You idiots.

Do you have any idea what that means? What what what's causing that? It's carb it's carbon dioxide going into the ocean causing ocean acidification. Basically, the ocean will dissolve coral faster than coral can make coral. I said, you know what? It's not only coral that depends on that, you know, on that material. It's also all the shellfish, and it's also plankton. You're talking about collapsing the whole entire ecosystem in the ocean.

That's what you're talking about, and you're just like, it it's it's back. It's not even front page news in Hawaii. So my first mission is to end the use of carbon based fuel, which has expanded, you know, because you start you start off, you know, thinking big.

I'm gonna end the use of carbon based fuel, that was my mission, and, to that to that end, I created the Blue Planet Foundation in Hawaii, and and, not knowing how I was gonna do this, but I said, we're gonna end the use of carbon based fuel in Hawaii, and we put a line in the ground. We we actually managed to to do to be the 1st state in the country to have a mandate of a 100% renewable energy by 2045.

You could say 2045, that's a long last way in in the future, but you have to decide when you wanna get to 0 and work towards that, and then then you can take that date and move that date forward. But if you start with a date that everybody can agree on, yes, sure, we can do it by 2045. And, well, you know, 2040 5 was a negotiation. We won a 2040, the politicians won a 2050, and we settled 2045. Turns out, 2045 is a perfect date because it's the 100th anniversary of the United Nations.

So now we are looking at not just looking at doing it for Hawaii, which by the way, we're on track, because we also followed up by having a, changing the business model of the of the utility, so that they make more money the quicker they switch to renewables. So guess what? Now their shareholders are on our side, because we're gonna make them more money. And so, basically, they went from saying it's impossible to, coming out, like, 6 months later saying, hey.

We can do this by 2040, and they're actually on track to do it some by something like 2035. So Hawaii is on track, and we're now the the Blue Planet Foundation's helping the other states. We've we've we've helped 13 other states with their legislation, the same legislation that we passed in Hawaii, which is a 100% by some date. And so what's the what's the next step? The next step is to go bigger. Because the United States, big as it is, we're only 6% of the people in the world.

And if we solve the problem here, it's just not gonna fix the problem in the world. Mhmm. We have to fix the rest of the world. So that's where I am now. I've I've just, started the the Blue Planet Alliance, and we're going to do the same thing that we did in Hawaii, but do it with countries. So our office is across the street from the United Nations.

We're going to work with the United Nations, to figure out how to fix well, it turns out that it's not only climate change that needs to be fixed by 2045, but it's plastic in the ocean. It's god knows. Deforest The the yeah. We call them in Project Moon Hut, the 6 mega challenges. Climate change, mass extinction, resource depletion, displacement, social and physical displacement, exponential impact from things like overfishing, and then political unrest.

And those are the 6 that we concentrate on in project. Perfect. So we need to fix all of those things, and I think that we pick a date in the future by when we need to fix all those things, and I think the date is 2045. The strategic the sustainable development goals, they all they all target 2030, and they started in 2015, so it's a 15 year cycle. So what's the next 15 years?

The next 15 years in my mind have to be the regenerative development goals because we have to put back everything that we've taken. We have to fix everything that we've destroyed, and then it makes sense for us to be sustainable. I ask individuals, I can ask you. You've got a date. Normally, I ask individuals in the categories over 6 mega challenges. I will say to them, okay. So you're working on claiming the ocean. Yes. How long you been working on it? 10 years. Yes. How you do?

What are you doing? Where's okay. Okay. Okay. And I listened to the whole story. And then I said, say to them, when will it be fixed? And they said, what do you mean? I said, you're working on something. You say you're working on it's gonna be done. So my question is, on a global scale, when will it be done? Oh, come on, David. That's a big question. There's so many moving pieces. No. Then you're not solving anything. You're doing something for economic reasons.

You wanna be a part of the community. You wanna put your name impact on the end. I'm really asking a very serious question. If you're going to clean the oceans, tell me the day that the oceans will be cleaned. And Yep. And I've I've picked the date, 2045 as the date everything needs to be fixed. And what's the date in your mind? Because I have a date. What's the date in your mind that it's beyond that it's the it's a it's almost as if it's a lost cause. I don't even think about that.

I I mean, what's the point of thinking about that? Because a lot of individuals that I've spoken to have not asked themselves what happens if it's not solved because they're not coming at it from they can solve it. They're coming at it from doing an activity. So I one of the questions I ask individuals is I say to them, take take your life and add 40 years onto it. Okay. How old will you be? Okay. Now you know how old you'll be. How old will your children be? So I'm 57. I'll have 9 I'll be 97.

My kids are 28 and 26, so they'll be in their sixties. They'll they could have grandchildren and maybe even great grandchildren. Okay. What will the world be like by then with climate change? And if we don't do, if we don't do enough and people start to sometimes realize how soon that is. And I say, okay. So connect the dots for me. Tell me how you're solving it. So we can have climate change. We can have, deforestation stop.

But if we still dump United States, United States, for a variety of reasons, dumps 12,000,000,000 gallons of municipal waste into the ocean every day. 600,000,000 bathtubs, 3300000000 bathtubs, 600,000 swimming pools. And it's municipal waste. It's not pesticide waste, agricultural waste, industrial waste, radioactive waste, mining waste, yada yada yada. It's just municipal waste, which is like getting a cup full of poison.

You United Europe is bigger in terms of population, but let's use it's the same. And let's take China and India not picking, but they're big countries and they're easy to know. Well, that's 50,000,000,000 gallons of poison going into our ocean every day. If we don't solve 50,000,000,000, not including all the other countries, that's that's poison in the ocean. It's not just CO 2. It's something bigger.

And there's there's blank stares when you ask how is it gonna be solved, so that's why I asked the question. Yeah. No. I mean yeah. So I I went to I went to Denmark to, basically, to look at a bunch of different things, and, and they gave me a list of things, that I could visit, and one of them was waste treatment, water treatment plant, and basically so I I I looked at this plant and they said, you know what? The water that we produce that goes into the ocean from here is drinkable.

And so, I mean, it's it's technologically Yeah. It is. We already know how to do this. We all we already know. When we build a moon base or The moon hot. Just call it a call it a moon hot. You gotta say moon hot. Yeah. I can yeah. I can whatever you wanna call it. Oh, well, that's a project moon hot. You're on our podcast. You just got I'm sorry. Maybe the benefit of the doubt even with moon hot. Yeah. So, basically, we're not we're not gonna be peeing out the door.

Yeah. That stuff is, like, water is gonna be unbelievably valuable, and any kind of organic material that exists on the moon is gonna be unbelievably valuable. So we're not throwing anything out. Yeah. It's gonna be circular. We're we're going to learn how to live with our own and reuse all of our own waste. Nature does this. Nature does this all the time. So we just have to copy nature and do it ourselves.

It's just that we've been historically, you know, the world has been so big compared to us when we were just, like, a couple of 1000000 people in the world and spread out that no matter what kind of waste we produced, first of all, it was all organic, and it's all just completely absorbed by nature, like, immediately. Just like it absorbs, you know, all of the animals waste. It can it can process it. It's got the filtration through the soil. It goes to the aquifer.

It's clean through the process, and you end up with a beautiful stream that you can reuse. Yeah. So we have this technology. It's it's it's just kind of stupid economics that we that we live in right now. The economics of it's okay for us to dig something out of the ground, use it for a while, and then throw it out Yeah. And then create piles of garbage. I mean, that that just has to stop. We we're running out of room. And I live on an island in Hawaii, and the the landfills are filling up.

The the recycling is when when, as far as I can tell, when China stopped taking plastics and glass and all that That's just like a disaster. The recycling material is just piling up somewhere in Hawaii, or it's ending up in landfill. It's just ridiculous. We have to we have to do again, I was in Denmark, and every township has a recycling center. And there are, like, 40 dumpsters, glass window glass, other glass, concrete, concrete with rebar.

I mean, all these dumps are there are there, and then you just you sort your garbage out, and when they when one of them fills up, some industry comes and picks it up and has raw material. And yes. And so I was in Hong Kong when China said they were no longer gonna take cardboard. They were gonna change that policy. And not soon after, I don't know, a year or 2 later, I'm reading an article that China had built a 50 year dump, and they had just closed it because it was full in 25 years.

So they'd filled a 50 year dump that they estimated would take 50 years. They did in 25. And the challenge is our world is based upon growing individuals into consumers. It's moving them from tier 1 to tier 2, tier 2 to tier 3, and tier tier to 4. 4, which we're in, you and I, are the most wasteful of all of them, but yet the growth factor or the the the belief is tomorrow is better if you move up the ecological lad this ladder of 4.

The challenge is in Asia Pacific, you were in, in Japan, I'm in, Hong Kong, Wherever I went, the desire is to have more. And it's, I I've shared this on the Redefining Tomorrow podcast. I have a friend in Shaumen, which you might know Shaumen. It's, near Shanghai, south of Shanghai. This one woman and I are talking one day. We're having this great conversation, and I say she says, I gotta take a shower. And I said, no no worries. I'll talk to you in, what, 20 minutes?

And she said, no. I said, what do you mean no? She said, I take a 20 to 15 minute shower every day. And I and I said to her using my righteousness from being a, tier 4, country, and I started to talk, and she slapped me so hard my head is still spinning. She said, don't you come telling me how to live my life. You had this your entire life. You lived in this society. You've had all these opportunities. Now, it's our turn. And the surprise was not that she said it.

I connected a dot and the dot was this. Our media in tier 4 countries, meaning Hollywood, lifestyles rich and famous from Europe or wherever they may be. They've shown a lifestyle that has been led by tier 4 countries for the past few decades. And the Asia Pacific region has seen them. And this was propaganda to a way of life that people could have and should have.

And so the challenge is without being reductive or negative saying you can't have, you can't do, you can't be, you can't this, How do you make them change? I the name of the podcast, The Age of Infinite, infinite possibilities, infinite resources that come from space based thinking, that come from space, that come from thinking like you just did. You can't just throw things out.

So if you wanna take a hot shower for 50 minutes, you might not have the water you take a bath for 50 minutes, you could take a shower. Why can't the device be right next to the tub? It cleans it immediately, sends off a small discharge, But the rest of the shower for the next 40 minutes is like tub water. It's cleaned enough. It's being filtered. Mhmm. But it's a shower that you can have every day.

And that's what you would do if you're gonna take a long shower in another planet is you'd have to figure out a way to be able to have that lifestyle. Yeah. So, we're about to pivot to, you know, to space commission number 3. Yep. So just to wrap on on, you know, mission number 1, you know, I travel around around conferences and ask people, so if it was up to you, what would you fix about this world? What's the what's the most pressing problem? What should we fix?

And as many people that I talk as I talk to, that's how many things I came up with. Yes. I know. So so so rather than say, I'm gonna fix this or whatever or that or whatever I think the biggest problem is, I'm I'm coming at it from a systemic way of thinking about it. Is there's the top down way of thinking about it and the bottom up way of thinking.

And the top down is that we have to make the list of things that need to get done, and we need to get governments to pay attention and say we're gonna solve that problem by 2045, that kind of thing. Where am I getting these this list? I there's a book called Drawdown, and, there's a, group of people that, are called Project Drawdown, and they are they made a list of the 100 things that that we need to do to solve climate change. The 100 things, the most pressing things.

And it it it's like girls' education or that kind of stuff. I mean, it's right in right up there. That would change things tremendously. The number one thing that needs to be fixed, by the way, is not carbon dioxide. It's refrigerants. Yeah. They're right. And so and it's, like, not it's something that we are not even thinking about, because it's not something that we can notice. With climate change, we can watch the climate kick our butts. But with the refrigerants, it's, like, invisible.

Nobody even knows they exist, or that they're a problem. So anyway The US did that thing about 10 years ago or 8 years ago where they shifted for air con air conditioning units. They shifted to a different refrigerant that wasn't as dangerous. Well, it was because of Freon. It was because of the ozone hole. Correct. It turns out that the the new refrigerant that replaced the the the Freon or whatever it was, the hydrochloro Yeah. I don't remember the number.

Carbon whatever they are, Turns out to be a 1000 times worse than than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Really? Yeah. It's it's insane. And So much for so much for politics and science providing It's, like, oh, we did a great thing, and they always look they always point to that, you know, how the world got together, and and stop the o the ozone hole from, from growing as as a as a huge success.

But, you know, like, as long as the cure is not worse than the than the, than the disease, I think we we we can move moving forward. But in that case, the the cure is like, oh my god. When you think about it, internal combustion was the cure for horses, you know, and and so going from methane, which is horses, you know, horses belching and and and and horse manure, basically, how can I say it, turning into methane? Internal combustion is, like, 20 times better than that.

Yeah. And and you can go a lot further. We've made a big improvement, but guess what? Now that we have, like, what, how many 1,000,000,000 cars in the world? Now that's become the problem. We need to have a solution that's 20 times better than that, and we will. And electric electric and hydrogen cars will be that solution. So we're on the way. In a lot of cases, we're already on the way. It's it's happening. The consciousness of people towards climate change is increasing rapidly.

It turns out that we can even get Republicans and Democrats to agree that climate change is the biggest problem that we're facing right now. So, I mean, that's a that's a new thing. So And yet at the same time, I'm part of a few groups. Almost everybody says they're an impact company today. I mean, it's ridiculous. And if you ask the question of how were you measuring solving challenge for impact, they're not the individuals or organizations are not looking upstream.

They're only looking at a few variables downstream, and they're not looking at sideways what impacts they've had to other, value chains at the exact same time. And what if you did look at those, they're no longer doing actually impact. They could be harming something else in the process of doing impact like the Freon example that you just Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, at the end of the day, basically, there's somebody in the world who understands that problem, all of them.

And how do we get those problems to be solved by people? How do we get people to take action? So this is the bottom up approach. I'm, you know, I ever since the the Paris agreement and the fact that the the countries that signed on to the Paris agreement are actually not on track to solving climate or staying within 2 degrees by a long shot.

Correct. So I I don't have the highest hopes for the United Nations to be able to solve this problem, because it's just not how the United Nations work or how countries work. You know, your problem that you mentioned earlier saying, you guys have had it so good all this time, and now it's our turn to have it good. So why are you taking our ability to have the good life by saying that we can't produce carbon dioxide or whatever it is, you know?

I I I've gotta tell you, living in Hong Kong was an absolutely amazing place. It's changed a lot. But one of the things the 1st week I was there or 1st month, don't remember the exact timing, was on the front page of the SCMP, South China Morning Post. There was a picture of the globe, and it said, if the rest of the world lived utilizing the same resources that Hong Kong uses, we'd need 13 additional earths to be able to support it. Yeah. Well, you could say that about any city, I'm sure.

No. What? No. The reason I if you had been to Hong Kong, you would notice that there is a term the every single building was so freezing that you would wear a jacket in the middle of the winter or summer because it was so cold. We actually had jackets for our meetings that we would put on in the middle of the summer and every taxi cab, even during March when it's not that cold, it could be, you know, 20 Celsius or 50, 60. They had the air con on. Mhmm. So, yeah, it's a it's a lifestyle.

And so, yeah, let's get to I believe the United Nations is not the solution. I don't believe governments are the solution. I believe that it's the it's the world. My gamer background and my role playing game back background comes back to, solve this problem. I'm in the process of creating an app, and it's a Yelp for environmental action. So people after I give a speech somewhere, they always ask me, well, so what can I do? And I said, well, I don't know what you can do. I know what I can do.

I can get up here and and try to convince a bunch of people in an audience to do something, but I don't know what your talent is. I don't know what your ability is. I don't know what your desire is. You have to find out what you wanna do.

But giving get you know, after giving that thought, I realized, you know, a lot of people, they might want to do something, and they might be motivated, hey, I'm really gonna do something, but then they just don't get around to it, and they don't know where to start. And so, this is where role playing comes in. So, in a role playing game, you do small things, and you gain points, and you go up a level.

Then, you start doing bigger things, and you gain points, and you go up another level, and then you do bigger things. You become stronger each time. You become smarter. You become faster. Yeah. And so, this is what I wanna do with people. So, the app is like well, I've I've I've asked people to send me. I got I got hundreds of things to do, and I sorted them into categories, and I found a way to to sort them into just 3 categories plus other.

And the 3 categories are energy, which has everything to do with climate change, fossil fuel, transportation, and waste, which is to do with the circular economy, plastic in the ocean, litter, all that, and then nature, and nature is basically, active regeneration of nature. Rebuilding the coral reefs, replanting the forest, the mangroves, whatever it is, putting back putting back what we've taken from nature. Those three categories.

And so the way the way the the app would work is you would start, say, say it's energy. Well, the the the smallest thing you can do, and this a 4 year old can do it, just turn off a light in a room where where there's nobody. So so can I can I add one while we're on the list? Sure. You're gonna have a lot of them. Well, this is one that this one will probably shock you. The guy who invented Siri, I've spoken to him. I don't remember his name off top of my head. I apologize to him.

He now handles, I think, Samsung's, innovation. He did the math of the cables length and energy it takes to post one photograph on a Facebook or an Instagram or something. So it's millions of miles or or kilometers of cable. It's server farms. It's information, not including storing it. To post one image on an app is the equivalent of 3 20 watt light bulbs running for an hour. That's the energy to post one post on your Instagram account.

So if you post 10 today, you could run 3 20 watt light bulbs for 10 hours. That's, that's pretty amazing. Yeah. That's like a that's like, holy cow. I'm the I'm the, honorary consul to the kingdom of the kingdom of the Netherlands to Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Marianas. And so I I keep in touch with what's going on in in the Netherlands, especially when it comes to things like renewable energy.

And, you know, the North Sea is being covered by offshore wind, and so all these fishing villages are no longer able to fish because they're now, their fishing grounds are wind farms. Well, so, you know, how much of an impact in Holland had this wind farm made? And he said, you know what happened. Well, what happened is that because we had the wind farms, the, the electricity became so cheap that companies started locating their server farms. Yeah. In Netherland.

And basically, all of the energy that we produce and all of the offshore wind now goes to power server farms. Blockchain, utilization like Bitcoin. Yeah. Bitcoin. That's the same. Exactly. Oh my god. My Yeah. It's it's running it's running something. It's just insane. So so how do you going to your app, you said turn off light. Mine was gonna be don't make the post. Yeah. Okay. So so it I mean, like, so doing something which is negative Mhmm.

Is generally not something which is, how can I say, sustainable? It's not. So that's why I'm you said turn off light, and I'm I said to myself, oh my god. I mean, I've got a 45 But here's the deal. So so you start off by by picking up a piece of garbage, putting in a garbage can, and you go up a level, and now you're talking about recycling, I don't know, bags of plastic bottles, and and you go to the next level.

And now you're, basically going upstream and and doing beach cleanups with, like, a 100 people. You you go up again, and and and now you're cleaning. I mean, when you think about the things that that need to be done that require larger numbers of people, those are all things that that happen as you go up levels and you become, you know, you gain the status of being somebody who's actually fixing the environment, you're actually doing something about it. You're not just talking about it.

And so the things get bigger, and by the way, it isn't just you doing something, but if you, if your father just so happens to be working for a company that does blah, and you can convince your father to change his company's way, and that would be, like, a huge impact. Not only do you get points for what your father just did, but you can trade your father's account and make him into a freaking hero.

See, I mean, the the challenge that I have, and I'm not picking on your app because I actually have a gaming system that I think that we should talk about, that we're working on for project Moon Hut. When I today, if I measure the amount of food that I ate and the packaging that went with it, It is mind boggling. I mean, it's absolutely mind boggling how much extra material printing, paper, plastic that goes into it. I don't know how easily I can offset that.

Okay. But here let me give you an example. There there is a similar product it's about garbage, and picking up garbage. There's a an app that that deals with that, and you take pictures of the garbage as you pick it up. And it turns out that the number one litter item in the Netherlands is a candy wrapper.

And so a group of people went to the CEO of this company and said to him, do you realize that your plastic candy wrapper for that for for your candy is the number one litter item on the streets of this country? Mhmm. And he he never even imagined that. He never even thought about that. And so he pledged that he was going to make his candy wrappers biodegradable. And within a year, those candy wrappers became biodegradable.

So what I'm saying is that people, once they once they understand that there's an action that they can take, they can organize and take those actions and cause that kind of change. Well, what you what you did though is to me a little bit different is you were able to do data analytics overlaying on top of human behavior, being able to analyze that and be able to come back with an assess a conclusion that could be offered to the company.

So you there was a variety of things that went into it, but it's be it's basically it's like a Waze technology for cars is now you know where all the potholes are. Now you know where all the challenges are, but it's a data game. Yes. And that data is being collected as we go, you know, Pokemon Go showed us that that humans can collect data if you don't rely rely on experts. See, that's why I say Yelp and not Michelin.

Michelin, there's, like, a handful of people that go to a handful of restaurants and tell you that they're the most amazing restaurants in the world. Whereas Yelp, the way it works is everybody goes to a restaurant. They can say something on Yelp and give feedback at to the next people that are making decisions about what restaurants they should go to. Yeah. Now we can do the same thing with companies. You can say, okay, this product is eco friendly or this product is not eco friendly.

I I I have a little system there. Instead of giving a product 5 stars, give it 5 planets if it's eco friendly. And so, the more planets a product has, and this is user generated content, the more people buy that product. So I'm not gonna stay in a hotel that is not eco friendly. So better have 5 planets or I'm not staying in your hotel.

Then it becomes a competition to see see who can book the most eco friendly hotel and all the products become nice and and, you know, there's a feedback loop from the people that are concerned about it to the companies that produce those products. But let me finish about the the app. So the the app, the way the app works is, we collect things to do from, first of all, from NGOs that want things done, like the Sierra Club asked me to write my congressperson to make them do something.

It's just not the kind of thing that I'm I'm going to do, but there might be somebody else who's not a Sierra Club member who's just fine with writing those kinds of letters. The problem is Sierra Club can only talk to the people in their silo. Yeah. Because they they don't share information about about their members with other NGOs, that kind of thing. So here it is. It's a outside of Sierra Club.

If Sierra Club wants something done, they put it inside of the app, and then somebody will pick it up and get points for doing that particular thing. So now they are reaching huge numbers of people. It can be used for by students to, have Friday strikes. It can be used for, you know, anything. Anything that anybody needs to be needs to get done. Well, one source is, of course, the NGOs because they know what they're doing, but another source is just straight up crowdsource.

And then in addition to the crowdsource, we connect things to do or we get celebrities to say, I want you to do this. And if a celebrity, I don't know, Ronaldo says, we need I want you to go and pick up candy wrappers. And then all of his fan pick fans pick up candy wrappers. They're all getting little points for candy wrappers, and Ronaldo's also collecting points for the same thing because he he got them to do it.

So so what I'm saying here is that then it becomes, you know, celebrities, sports figures, musicians, whatever, boys bands, they can get their fans to do things. And and it there's no longer a politics or why am I doing this? It's just, can you please do this for me? And if they do it, then they get points. So now you're now it's a competition between, I don't know, the top movie stars or the top musicians to see who can get the most points.

So I I I I I'd even even imagine that you could have the fans of, like, the New York Yankees versus the box Boston red sox. Who can collect the most points before the next game? You know, that kind of thing. We can compete city versus city or country versus country. I don't care as long as it's good stuff. We just have to vet to make sure that it's not, like, destructive stuff.

That's and again, we go back to we don't know what the challenge is, good versus bad because of, like, the free on example. So let me go back to the title because I think I shared with you one of the things that I focus on is the promise of the title. Thinking bigger and bigger and bigger. What made you decide that this was where or how you are going to put your stake in the ground?

Yeah. It's because I because I looked at what I was doing, and I realized that it isn't going to solve the problem at the end of the day, and I need the problem to be solved at the end of the day. My mission is not to end the use of carbon based fuel in Hawaii. My mission is to end the the use of carbon based fuel in the world. Why? And and the why? Why? Because that's that that is the job. Oh, why? That's what needs to be done. But why? I mean, why why why is it?

Because because otherwise, we're we're giving our our children a crap future. So the reason you're doing it is for your children? I'm doing it for everybody's children. The It's not my children. It's not I I understand that. If you heard our thing, our directive, it is to, to improve life on earth for all species, and we have 6 mega challenges. So I'm asking you, what made you decide that you were going to take on changing it for the rest of the world? Not like a bad thing.

I'm asking you a positive. No. I understand. I understand. So when I started in Hawaii, you know, I remember being on a panel, and a panel of experts, and, this was at IUCN, the International Union For the Conservation of Nature. I was on a panel about renewable energy, and and I said, I'm going to, have Hawaii become 100% renewable by 2,045. And the guy next to me says, oh, I'm an expert in this area. There's no way you can do that.

And and I said I said, well, I'm not as smart as that guy, so I'm gonna do it anyway. So you're not competitive as long as you win. You you are that's the phrase. That's my I've had it since I'm 12. You could borrow it. It is The thing is, you know, like, I I didn't know how I was gonna do it or that I could do it, and now we're on track. But you did it. You got bigger because someone kicked you in the face, slapped you in the face.

Someone said you can't, and you then turned around and said I can. Your first reaction wasn't, I'm gonna do this because my my children, and that's why I'm going to make sure that I could prove this. The first thing was, wait. Wait. Wait. Don't ever say that to me again, because I'm gonna do it, and this is a value to my children. Yeah. I mean, you you can you can you David, you can say that, but that's not how my mind works. Okay. That's why I'm asking. Yeah. So that's what I'm telling you.

My mind just works. Look. If I can do it in Hawaii, which I thought was impossible, why not do it for the rest of the world? Which I think is impossible now, but when I'm done with it, it's it's gonna be you know, somebody's gonna be sitting next to me, so, well, that's impossible. And I said, well, I'm gonna do it anyway. I I I I'm very much like you. I'm not picking on you. I'm trying to figure out how you think. I I think I showed you my book. It's it's it's massive.

It's 297,000 words, took 12 years to write. I mean, I'm I'm driven like you are in different ways, and so I'm asking what's the impetus for you? What's that push? What was that thing that made you say, I need to make sure this is done, and you're telling me you sat next to a guy on a panel. No. And he basically And that's not the reason. That's just an that's just like a symptom. Or It was a cause. It was a connection. It helped you to say, let me look at it. About it.

Well, first of all, I don't yeah. I'm I'm not very good at at at, having tell telling me people having people telling me what I can't do. Yeah. Let me decide what I can't do. You know, you can decide what you can't do. Maybe you can't do that, but I'm gonna do it anyway. That's just the way I feel about it. I know what that that's great.

And I and I think that when we talk about bigger, bigger, and bigger, because we're talking about on Age of Infinite is a pa is achieving a 250 to $400,000,000,000 project. And we're telling individuals who are listening an offering or listening, you know, me too, is that there are possibilities. And the challenge is when someone hears an individual, and I'm not trying to talk to the audience, I'm talking to us.

Is someone hears what you and I say, they often will say to me, yeah, but you're you, you can do it. Oh, no. No. But but David, you you always take on big projects. No. No. But David, David, you don't understand. You know so many people. I landed in Hong Kong. I didn't know anybody. I landed in Hong Kong because my wife and I needed money because the world the 2,009, 10, the crisis was happening and I had to find a place to make money. So I landed in Hong Kong.

I mean, it wasn't anything rocket science. It was like strategically, this is the one. I needed to make money in an opportunity and I flew all the way 25 hours, landed on a shore, and built a business out of it through the Asia Pacific region. Yeah. So so the bottom line is, what I wanna say is, I as a game designer turned publisher or, you know, entrepreneur, if I can pivot and and get Hawaii to end the use of carbon based fuel, which I know nothing about.

This guy knows everything, and I know nothing, and yet I'm doing it. The answer is is that if you wanna do it, just do it. This is not this is not like You have you you have children. Right? Yeah. Okay. Because I know congratulations for your bay your grandchild. You can't just turn to your child and say, do it. It doesn't work. But no. But you can say that to yourself. Okay. That's that the only person the only person that you really 100% have control of is yourself.

You are the one you have to change. You have to you have to ow. You have to be the change you wanna see in the world. I know. I I I personally don't say those types of things to myself. I for thinking bigger. What happens with me is there's a spark. There's something that said there's something that's seen. And I say, Let me I'm going to solve that. I'm going to do that. But I don't say just do it. Somehow I click and it I'm going to say more times than not.

There's a challenge put in front of me where I I'm frustrated with somebody. I'm frustrated with something. I see something and I say this is moronic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're saying you get pissed off and you're gonna do something about it. But, you know, like, what happens to the people who don't get pissed off? I know. That's that's what I'm trying to find. Is there maybe you do something different?

What I'm trying to say is is, you know, when when you play a role playing game, what do you get out of it except that you have a good time while you're playing the game, and you feel good about having a level 52 character? I mean, what do you actually get out of it? You don't get any money out of it? You've wasted a lot of time. It's caused probably a big problem with you and the people that live live in the same household. I mean, what do you get out of it? You get out of it.

You get what you get is you get, like, yes. I did something even though it's it's fake. That's interesting because I just realized when you said that, I have never been a gamer. You just don't realize it. I I don't watch. I don't watch sports. I it doesn't excite me. I wanna play it. Yeah. Ditto. So so I am I wanna be on the field I wanna play, and I don't play video games. Never really have. I would I'd sit around and watch some when they played the games in university, college.

They would have a game in the hallway, and everybody would play with the shooting of the tanks. Excuse me? Did you play sports? Yeah. I was a competitive skier, tennis player, soccer, and I'm a black belt at Taekwondo. Hello? You're just doing something in the real world rather than a virtual world. There's no difference. Yeah. Well, so I think there's a difference. But I don't relate that to and I don't. I'm just trying to think. I don't believe I relate it in terms of the same scoring type?

Like, I don't try to street for I think it's because we don't play video games. People who play video games and and snowboard get the same rush out of doing something amazing in the virtual world or in the real world. And what what's the difference between sports and virtual sports? Sports was invented they they were invented by people a long time ago to make sure that we were physically fit for a lifetime of physical labor. That's what you're preparing for in the old days. And guess what?

These are not the old days anymore. We are preparing ourselves, meaning young people are preparing themselves for a lifetime of mental labor in virtual worlds. And so it's the same thing. They're training for something that they're gonna do in the future. It's just not physical labor anymore. It was were sports actually invented for keeping people in in healthy condition? Really? I I'm I'm I'm just asking a serious question. I mean, why would you do it? I mean, that yes. I just I think so.

I think I think all those activities are useful. They they keep you in in condition. Well, you could say that sports, you know, had to do more with keeping people physically fit so they could fight battles like the old Olympics. Mhmm. You know, the wrestling and boxing and those kind of things.

But, I mean but sports in general, I I I believe that sports in general are physical fitness things when, you know, again, we in in in normal life today, there's not a whole lot of physical labor left for us to do. I I yeah. I know. I understand that today. I'm going back. I I I would probably say that part of it is, competition to win a mate, competition for community, competition for something inside. So, yes, there's a gamification to that. And Yeah. You're you're trying to find a difference.

What what I know what I I'm not trying to find a difference. The way when when I work, I always ask myself the question first. What do I do? Like, what how do I get excited? How do I think something through? And I'm not the guy on the side of a football game or basketball and I've been to them when I was in college. I was second row seats, but I was not the guy jumping and screaming on the side or yelling at the stands. That's not me, But I'm competitive with myself to an unbelievable degree.

Yeah. It's but I mean, computer games are like that. You know, it it today, you could there are video channels where people watch people play computer games. Yeah. I know that. I've seen these things where YouTube, they go and watch a replay. It looks ridiculous. But, I mean, it's it's about as ridiculous as watching someone do you know, watching somebody play golf. Why don't you go out there and play golf yourself? Yeah. I agree. I mean, so we're we're off on a tangent.

Well, that that's okay because I'm trying to get back to the bigger, bigger, and bigger. And so we we got through a new panel of experts, renewable energy, 2045. You were a little frustrated with the guy, and so I'll just to pick it up from there. Yeah. So the so the the bigger, bigger, bigger is is basically I'm starting myself on those 2 areas, the top down, bottom up, and all that, and I'm working on climate change specifically.

But then there are all the other people who are going to contribute things that they want done to the alliance, and those things need to get done too. So it's a mechanism for everything to get done, not specifically this thing or that thing. I'm not creating another silo. I'm leaving it open. This is like an Airbnb instead of a hotel. It's it's where everybody can put whatever they want to get done into a database, and other people can pick those things and do them, and get credit for them.

Hopefully, you know, the the status will get you something. Like, if you're if you're applying to a university, your status in environmental status will have something to do with your placement. You know what I'm saying? There'll be real benefit. Or if a company's gonna hire you, you know, what level are you? And, you know, do you actually give a shit? Have you actually done anything? And and so these kind of things I'm a I'm a, a one k on United.

So when they when we're getting on a plane, I get to get get on first. Whoops. Yeah. I know. Like, such b s because This. I'm I'm, you know, I'm in business class, so there's never a problem putting my roll away, you know, roll on, you know, into the into the bin up above. Yeah. And so what what's the benefit? I get to be on the plane a little bit longer than everybody else? Is that a benefit? So people Well, you also don't get you get priority status so you don't get bumped off a plane.

There's about 6 other things that you get to go to lounge, which makes it easier. So there's a few other perks that go along with it, but that's that's the gamification. Yeah. We need society to have those kind of perks for people who who actually working their asses off fixing this place. Yes. Absolutely. And to that point, it's hard to believe that all these essential workers who we've called essential workers that we've needed when it came to shot distribution.

Why wasn't why weren't all these people at the very front? The people who made sure the food was there or in the grocery stores and everything else. So they were gamified. You're essential. You're important. But they weren't gamified. I don't believe in all places as the priority people when it came to be given shots if they wanted one. Yeah. That's just because there's no central system.

Mhmm. Yeah. So I think that the alliance and getting everybody in the world to do something, to gain status, and have everybody compete to see how much of the environment that they can actually fix, how many trees can they plant, You know, I think that is a interesting metric for people to talk about each other, you know, if you get a job, buy a product, whatever it is, it you should have that that status should be worth something.

And maybe we can even have those points be be Bitcoin points that you collect in 20 your offspring collect in 2045, if we fix everything or when we fix everything. And and I'd I I completely agree with what you're saying. I'm trying to I'm trying to make it bigger in my head, so it's might sound one way. I I think this is I think if we do it right, we this is a way to fix the entire planet.

The that's why I do wanna talk to you about the gamification of what we're talking about because it integrates the sum of what you're doing on a scale in Mearth within the moon earth ecosystem, and how we can gamify Mearth, which would then impact and you said it earlier. You talked about how space is for the circular economy, the gig economy, the shared economy, the resource utilization.

And so when you learn about our more in-depth, you'll be able to see that there's a huge gamification component to it. Yep. By the way Go ahead. Why why MERS and not Mars? It's, because if you that's a very good question. When you look at creating ecosystems or economic systems, we you let's start with the economic system.

You would in the old days, years years ago, someone hop on a boat, let's call it the Nina, the Pitta, the Santa Maria, and it would go to another share shore, would find a place, drop someone off, and come back, leave some people there and say, we'll be back. Maybe they won't. And when they got back, they would say, hey. Hey. Here's a, there's some opportunity there.

So more individuals would open up their wallets, be willing to make this route, and eventually, you create an economic cycle search system that happens. When you think of the moon, the moon is only 3 days away in terms of travel. But if you think of Mars, Mars is an elliptical hitting where you can only reach it within a 2, right now within a period of about 6 to 8 months, and then you're on a a cycle where you're 3 years away to be able to get there and then come back.

So if you were gonna do a round trip, it's at least 3 years with today's technology. You can't make, Mars go faster. No. I understand. I understand. So if you so ours is that with in the space industry, what I found, and again, I'm not a space person, is that people would say, moon, Mars, Pluto, Juke, we're gonna go out. We're gonna go to the galaxies. And I would say, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Let's slow down a little bit.

We have an economic system or an economy that can be created between the moon and earth within Mearth. And that we can trade and bring things back, whether it be platinum or microgravity work that could be creating new products or, low atmosphere conditions. And the Star Trek Enterprise will be built if you were to think in that way, between the moon and earth within Mearth. So we can actually create this land environment, this space, and we can fill that with a full economic system.

And in there, there's, space solar power. There is the ability to be able to expand where we live and even more so, the moon is very much a part of the Earth. We, are the the fact that we rotate the speed that we do, the tidal waves, the tides are dependent on them, animals are dependent on them. So you the next phase is this moon and earth ecosystem. David, you have to tell me this. I'm this is this is the next part of my talk. Okay. Well, I've you asked me.

So so in in that you speak Mars and and and Mars because because, you know, eventually, Mars is probably more capable of of of supporting a, you know, 1,000,000,000 people compared to the moon. Basically, where we have to do I don't know. We there's there's no, no chance that we can turn that we can terraform the moon, but we can terraform the Mars. But that and that's another day and time.

So I ask this question of individuals, and I asked it actually, the first time I ever asked it was at the great giant leap. I said, when will we be on the moon? And at that event, with all these individuals from Buzz Aldrin to you name it, guess when was the date that everybody gave? I know. You were you were standing there. I remember. It was I say I say 2030. Okay. That is the date that everybody believes, and you're right.

So if we're gonna be 2030, that's the date that almost everybody or beyond. They would go further 2035, 2037. Yeah. If you look at timelines for the fact that on earth today, today, the day this is being done, February 27, 2011, there is not a human rated rocket on the planet that can get to the moon. It's not saying it won't happen in a month or 2 or 3, but there's not one that get us to the moon.

So if we use timeline thinking and we just measure out experience, opportunities, shipping of, tons of materials that have to go, the moon is right around the corner for creating a new ecosystem. And that's where 2030, if you're saying we're going to terraform the moon or we're on Mars and we're gonna have a 1000000 people on Mars, we're talking so far in the distance, the moon is right here to give us what we need for Earth. The moon is right here.

You no. Look. Look. Let's let's let's go step by step on mission number 3. Okay. I'm here. I'm here for you. Mission number 3 is to make a make a backup of life. Okay. As far as we know as far as we know, we have no evidence of life having existing or having existed anywhere else. I mean, this is what we're trying to figure out with, you know, on on, Mars right now. Has there ever been life on Mars? Yeah. But as far as we know, there's no life anywhere else.

And we have evidence that that, things come from space and do major damage. You know, like like the rock that killed the dinosaurs, which wasn't a very big rock. Came from space, hit this planet, and wiped out the dinosaurs. If that rock hit this planet today, we would be gone. Yep. I mean, all of our food sources would be destroyed, you know, blah blah blah, we would be gone. And so, I can I can foresee a, a major whatever? It's called existential. Existential.

Yeah. So, you know, event of biblical proportions where life gets snuffed out. Yeah. If we have life living on another planet, the odds of that happening goes down to 0. We've already figured that out. And so, I, coming from the computer game industry, you know, like, if if my programmer came to me and said, you know, I've been working on this game for a year, and now my I fragged my hard disk, and I I I Where's your backup? Backup. You are so fired.

And and and I might even turn to the CEO and said, are you serious? You didn't back up all these c these other drives? Yeah. So so so and and and now basically I I kind of feel that this is the reason we exist. Now people ask me why do I want to go to other planets, and and I say okay, this planet, look at life on this planet. It's a very thin skin around this entire planet. Let's give it a name, mother nature. I think what's going on right now is mother nature is pregnant, and we are it.

We are the way mother nature makes a backup, makes a child, makes another mother nature on another planet. We are the way. And, yes, she's having morning sickness, and she's getting a fever, and she's gonna make it really uncomfortable until we finally decide, yeah, we gotta go. And when we go, then all the pressure of When we go, mother nature's gonna say, finally got rid of that coronavirus human.

I think I think that that when we go, because we can't survive without the rest of Mother Nature, that we will bring life as we know it with us. And then it gives it a start in another place. This is really the reason we exist. You should there there are a bunch of podcasts where this thing goes without saying on the Age of Infinite. One from the I just shared with you before we got on.

Alex Leyendecker did a phenomenal, phenomenal, phenomenal job in a category I was always interested in, which was since the space thing he is. He said that if we don't solve sexuality and reproduction and we have not solved that, there's no way we can go to any planet and survive. And he goes over radiation radiation challenges, the, challenges with where the sperm, if the egg will, adhere to the wall, the challenges with all of these things are so far from being solved that's unbelievable.

Yeah. That's one way of looking at it, and the other way of looking at it is there are people that are thinking about this right now. I mean, stem cells, you know, cure for cancer. If we if we can cure cancer, basically what we're doing is we're taking cells that are malfunctioning, which is radiation radiated cells, and we're getting rid of them and and replacing them with with cells that are working.

All I'm saying is it's a great podcast to listen to for this one challenge, because it was a question I had is, how do we ensure that the human species, if it leaves, if it goes off planet, the interview answers, it's a 4 and a half hour interview. And he did a brilliant job of really explaining tech on the biology side and the cultural, sociological, scientific side. So just one you should listen. When was this conference, the Great Giant Leap?

2015. I'm almost well, I can actually look up when did I meet you. I no. I didn't create you at the sign. It was, I think, 2015 is when it was. I'm almost positive. 15. Okay. So, HiSeas actually predates that then. HiSeas, I have a, I I got involved because I was involved in in space exploration, moon, Mars, whatever. There was a project that was coming together, which was a cooperation by the University of Hawaii and NASA to test long term missions on Mars.

And HI SEAS stands for Hawaii Space Exploration, Analog, and Simulation. And, so the idea was to, sequester 6 people in a dome that was like a Mars habitat, for long periods of time, if they and and see how they work if they go crazy. So, kind of thing. So, I got involved because, 4 months before the first crew showed up, NASA and the University of Dubai figured out that neither of them could own a habitat.

So the head researcher on bended knee came to my door and said, can you please own a habitat? We will rent it from you. And I said, if I'm gonna own a habitat, it isn't going to be a piece of shit. And the reason is because, you know, all of the other habitats in the world are these these low budget, slapped together, terrible condition, like, I don't understand.

If you're gonna send somebody to Mars, they better have some seriously comfortable digs, you know, because I think that that the psychology of being cooped up with with 5 other people kind of requires you to think a little bit about creature comforts. Yeah. And so we we basically trashed their threw out their design, we we spent a month working on a new design. In 3 months, we had the thing built. The, paint was still drying when the first crew arrived.

Now, we did 5 missions, 4 months, 4 months, 8 months, 12 months, and 8 months. During a mission, 6 people stay in the habitat, they go outside, they wear a space suit. If they communicate with the outside world, we delay that signal 20 minutes each way as if Mars is on the other side of the sun. Okay. Yep. Mars is from 4 minutes to 24 minutes. So it spends a lot of time out there in the 20, 24 minutes. And so we did that for 5 years.

And, so we learned a lot, NASA learned a lot, crew selection, don't don't get, you know, weed out these narcissistic people, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Well, actually, that's what yeah. That's very important. Yes. That's very important. And so at the end of the 5 years, basically, I took over, and my theory is that we gotta go to the moon first before we start thinking about going to Mars. Yeah. So that's, I mean, obvious. So I just I just looked it up, by the way.

November 7th to 11, 2014. 2014. Yeah. That's You were so much younger then. No. Thank you. No. So was it was then and yes, I believe the Mars Moon is the next step. It's not the it doesn't have to be the end game. No, of course not. We can create an economic, we call it the Mearth ecosystem and the Mearth economic system. And that can be a full functioning ecosystem. No. Absolutely. Well and it can be it can be okay. So here's something about, earth based colonies.

No colony on earth has ever survived that depended on resupply from the home country. Mhmm. And so when we build a moon base, if we're gonna survive if that colony is gonna survive, it has to be able to survive on its own without resupply. And that's the objective. Okay. Okay. We have to grow our own food. We have to recycle all of our material. Anything new that we want, we have to be able to get it from from the moon. We we can't wait for resupply.

Mhmm. Eventually, we're gonna have to be able to make our own chips. Correct. For now. So, to figure this out, I I did another great giant leap, another conference in Hawaii. It was the, International Moon Base Summit, and I I brought luminaries from all over the world, including Buzz Aldrin, by the way, to my I had 75 people from all over, and we basically, I broke them up into little groups and had them, figure out when, where, how, what, you know, about a moon base.

And that's sort of the basis from which I am my plan internal my my mental plan comes from that gathering. And so we And you didn't invite me, so I'm insulted 6 years later. I'm sorry. I didn't even know who you were. I know. You're you're standing next to me. You don't even remember me. We we only invited smart people. Ah, yes. Of course. Oh, touche. Yeah. I did I obviously didn't show my the best side of me. Whatever. So I So I I do agree with all you're saying.

The one thing that I would I not it's not a disagreement. It's that whether it's Mars or moon, but let's talk about the moon. One of the advantages of the ability of being on the moon is that we can create the be 3 days away. Someone gets sick. If you need to get something, we could send it based upon timing and and capabilities of rockets. But the other part of this is that today, all most expeditions are about science, research, exploration going on.

Project Moon Hut, its focus is to create an earth and space based ecosystem. It is to drive that ability to sell to create. So the first thing we have is a box with a roof and a door a moon hut. And the second is an industrial park, where products and services will start to be manufactured that could be used on the moon, and on earth. So we actually don't go to exploration as our our science as our secondary approach for being on the moon.

It's the the construct is all about how do we create an efficiency, not a completely self sufficient, but an efficient ecosystem immediately. Yeah. I mean, you you can you can try to get it right, and they try to get it right in the in Biosphere 2. Mhmm. A good friend of mine, in fact, he's working I'm the chairman of another organization called Pisces, the Pacific International Space Center For Exploration Systems. I'm not writing that, by the way. Rodrigo Romo, Pisces.

Yeah. Rodrigo Romo runs it, and he spent 6 months in in Biosphere 2. And, you know, there was a lot of lessons learned. They tried to grow food in soil, and they tried to maintain all these ecosystems, and basically, 8 people spend all of their time growing food, and they were always hungry. Yes. That's not a formula for success if you're gonna build a a, you know, a moon base.

You you need to you need to, like, spend, I don't know, 10% of your labor on on growing things, and the rest has gotta be doing other things. Now, what are the other things? Yeah. We we can try to guess what what the other things are. You mentioned, you know, that building things, and so on and so forth. That's manufacturing, which is very interesting, you know.

Sure. Space anything you wanna man manufacture for space, for going anywhere, should be manufactured on the moon, and then and sent and lifted off the moon, because it's much cheaper to lift stuff off the moon. Correct. But here's what here's the thing, you know, I'm I'm again, I used to be in the gem business. I think, and I don't know this of course for a fact, but we've only only scratched the very surface of the moon. We haven't really found out what's inside the moon. No, we haven't.

We actually, that's a question I asked a long time ago when it was Daniel Faber who said to me, David, we've never dug on the moon. We we we've never dug on the moon. We don't even know if we can dig on these planets because first of all, with so it's low gravity that if you pushed, you're gonna be pushed backwards. So you'd have to create new technology for it. And there's a woman from Rebecca from a company by the name of Search Plus.

She's an architect and, and a material science or, fabrics type person, and her name is Rebecca Pales Friedman. And she was the one who said we might not be able to actually dig the way we anticipate on any planet outside without the type of gravity that we have here. So now we don't know. Oh, no. No. I I that's nonsense. I mean Well, the challenge it was Daniel Faber. You you probably know the name. He was the guy who said, David, we and Daniel Faber is I he's very well known. He sent me down.

He said, we don't know if we can dig on the moon. We've never done it. We don't know how We've never done it. Okay. But I mean, that's just an engineering channel. Yeah. No. But that my point is the timeline. It's about timeline. Can we solve it? Yes. But we have never done it. So it's an assumption that we can do these things. That's all my point is. Not that we can't solve it. I know what you're saying. I know what you're saying, but I I know people who are working on exactly that. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And I had a guy on the phone from Japan who's been working on this for about 10 years, and he was introduced to me as one of the foremost people in the industry. And I let him speak for probably an hour going over everything. And I said, okay, so when you break it, are you putting into a crusher and then do you break it down from a primary to secondary? And how do you do this and how do you do this and how do you this? What are you talking about? I said, I ran a rock quarry.

I got 22,000 tons of stone. You can't answer any question that I have. Okay. So off world is figuring this stuff out? Yeah. They're trying. Absolutely. Yeah. Off world. They're already mining on earth. Yes. Yes. So does that mean that they'll be the people to do it often? That they'll be, but but, you know, they them or they or someone like them will do this.

What I'm trying to say what I'm trying to say in general is the first the first wave of what we do on the moon is is exploration and science. That's the first wave. The second wave is is mining. We're gonna find things on the moon that don't exist on earth. Number 1, there's nothing on earth that was created in a vacuum. Mhmm. And we have a planet with a surface area the size of Africa that has that has that has everything that we have on earth, but it was formed in a vacuum.

You can't tell me that the stuff is the same. No. It's actually not because we already know that it was an an asteroid that hit the Earth at a very high speed No. What I'm saying what I'm saying is, like, the lava flows that that all Right. You know, the surface of the moon was liquid, rock at some point. Yes. Now when you get take liquid rock rock and and and crystallize it on Earth, you get something. When you crystallize it in a vacuum, you get something else.

Yeah. Yes. We we don't know what's completely there. We do know certain things are there. And not only that, but there was a period of time, 3 and a half 1000000000 years ago, when the earth and moon were bombarded by asteroids. That's what all those giant craters are all about. And the stuff that landed on earth has been subducted and eroded. We can't find it anymore, but on the moon, it's still all there. Yeah. Anything that we would wanna go to an asteroid for is on the moon already. Correct.

So we can just drive to it. Yep. I agree. We we're in agreement. The moon the the moon gives us. Yeah. Exactly. So, and then and then the third one, of course, is is, is tourism. It's people wanting to have 1 6, people who can't walk anymore can walk again. Or people can have, a one sixth gravity sex, or god knows what what they're going to invent. We're gonna invent, you know, flying.

I mean, if you read the Heinlein stories, you you can fly on the moon because your your weight to whatever muscle ratio means that you can actually fly if you if you give them artificial wings. So, I mean, there's a lot of things we could do on the moon that you just can't do on on Earth. And your your question about, you know, having babies and all that Yeah. That's something else that's gonna be solved because you'll be able to create using you could build a city that's partially centrifuge.

In other words, you can create a city that's 1 g by It's it's it's not that and I've asked Lynn Harper was the first person I met at NASA Ames, and She's one of the people. Lynn Harper. Yes. And she was one of the first people I met at Ames. And a good someone who's done a podcast is Rauta Abramovich. But when I spoke with Lynn, and she's also in the in this category, I spoke with Lynn, and I'm asked this question the very like, the second day I was there.

And she said, David, cells probably won't reproduce properly. They won't they won't divide properly. And there were a series of of activities that she went over. So it's not something that we're close at all, my point. We will solve it one day, but today in 2021, we are very far away from solving that dilemma, which was just what Alex Leyendecker went over. And we had, what's her name? Sonia Schleppler. She went over and these categories.

And then we had someone talk about, the name escaping me at the moment, that in space, how we're dying, how rapidly we die. So we've had a few of these conversations and it's just for me an eye opener because I had never thought about the challenges and how dire they are. So yes, we can solve them one day and and that's one reason we're doing chips in space, so that we can solve the challenges on Earth in microgravity. So let's hope.

Yep. So, my plan, and I formed as a result of the the moon based summit that I had, the International Moon Base Alliance, main an International Moon Base Alliance is basically a bunch of people, companies, whatever that are gonna bring build a moon base on the moon by 2030. Here's what's going on in the world. You've got all these billionaires building airplanes, and no one's building airports. What is wrong with this picture? No no airport, no airplane.

Mhmm. And so if you if you're gonna have a rocket that lands on the moon more than once, it's going to have to have a place to land. Otherwise, it's gonna destroy everything around it when it lands. Yes. When on the on the moon, when when you when you land or take off, the the dust and rocks under your rocket go ballistic, and there's nothing to slow them down. It just keeps going until it hits something.

So if you've got any kind of infrastructure anywhere near that rocket, it's gonna be blasted out of existence. So so basically, we need to build landing pads, first of all, and then we need to build facilities for people to stay and and and work once so the Starship, you know, I talked to SpaceX guys. They said they can land me a 150 tons on the moon by 2024. Give them an extra year, say it's only a 100 tons. That is still a crapload of of payload. Yes. And so what are we gonna send up there?

Is it gonna be ISS style, you know, little capsules? And the answer is maybe in the beginning that's what it'll be, but pretty soon we're gonna have to be building larger struct robotically building larger structures, and that's the part of the thing that I'm working on right now. The long term goal is to use in situ resources, to be able to create a kind of lunar concrete. I think, if we don't find a clever way of blocking radiation, we're all gonna be living underground.

And so the mining, will not only produce mining materials, but it would also produce space for us to live underground. You know, if you go, I don't know, I don't know, 10, 20 meters underground, you now no longer have a fluctuation temperature problem. Yep. And you And we're talking just so someone's listening. They're called lava tubes. It's what No. No. No. No. No. I You're not talking a lava tube? I have lava tubes, near high seas. I've gone in through into lava tubes through, skylights.

This is a hard thing to do. It is not easy to get in and out of a lava tube. So you're saying that we would dig 20 to 30 meters underground? I would say that we'll be mining for something. This is how they mine for opals in in Lightning Ridge and and the Mooka in in Australia. If you remember that scene where in in Star Wars with a floating car, Luke Skywalker floats up to the outside of this hole in the ground, and the people are walking downstairs.

Yeah. That hole in the ground is and is is in Australia. When they dig for the OPAL, the spaces that they dig, they live in those because it's a 140 degrees, on the surface. And by living down there in the places where they they net it down to reasonable temperatures. So living underground is the way to go. I mean, we we we say, oh, people don't wanna live underground and this and that and the other thing.

But, like, if you look at where people have actually lived on this planet, people live in in in ice huts, in snow huts, in in the Arctic Circle for Christ sakes. They have babies in them. What what different you know, you live underground. You go out when you're done when you need to, and you stay inside when you're not. But it's not like you're gonna go to the beach, on Tuesday.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm so the first thing that the that the Moonbase Alliance is doing is we're actually building a dome, and an airlock, and it's the dome is sort of like what what we think is a building block for a Moonbase. Once you have a structure that you can build robotically and build a bunch of them and tie them together, now you have working spaces. And hopefully, we'll get to the point where we can build larger ones where we can actually start growing food.

But the food has to be managed robotically as well. We can't have people growing food. It has to be robots growing food. We we learned that in The Martian. Right? Didn't we learn that in The Martian? Learned from a science fiction movie. You know, the the the Martian, they're on their way back from Earth back to Earth, and they change their mind and go back to Mars. That's not how it works.

No. What I mean is the the whole thing collapsed on them, and they they didn't have robots taking care of their, plants. Didn't they? Did they? On the Marsha? We don't remember. I don't think they I don't think they had plans. I didn't think they had robots. You. Yeah. But science fiction is entertainment at the end of the day. It's also inspiration.

So, so anyway, the the bigger side of that of of the moon base, alliance is that we're actually gonna build a moon base on the moon, by the end of the decade. That's the idea. I think if I have a 100 tons going to the moon, I can build an amazing moon base. So what's what's the cost of your moon base? It's okay. So so what is the cost of, I don't know, the World Trade Center? I mean That that you can figure out the cost. Yeah. I mean So what's the cost?

See, have you done the math, feasibility study and said, okay. I estimate. No. No. It it it's the other way around. This is not how Elon is thinking either. If you ask NASA, they'll tell you, well, it costs us about $40,000,000,000 to build the ISS, so we're talking about probably $80,000,000,000. Fast forward, in today's dollar, that's probably, I don't know, $200,000,000,000. Mhmm. Something like that. Mhmm. It's like, yeah.

Sure. If you do it that way, if you get NASA to do it I'm not saying NASA, you've gotta be saying to yourself, we have to have rockets go up. There's gonna be a cost to getting the rockets up. There's going to be some things you hadn't thought about. There's a cost structure to this. Of course, there is. But you start with a vision. And then you I understand we we I know the vision. I just heard it. So when you laid out your vision, is this a 200, a $350,000,000 project?

Is it a $500,000,000 project? I I think it's I think it's probably a $100,000,000,000 project. Okay. I asked that only because I watched something recently and people are planning on doing, and I won't name it because people would know, they're planning on doing something very large in space. And when you do everything and you look at the bottom number, they're raising $1,000,000. And there is no way with a $1,000,000 that you're gonna be able to do Of course not.

But Yeah. But but that's these are there there are people associated with this project who gave a number, and I would say I just looked at it and I'm not a space person. I said, come on. So that's why I asked. That's the what what are you thinking? Yeah. But it depends on on on, you know, where do you say you're done? You say, for a $100,000,000,000, we can probably build something that that can hold, I don't know, a 100 people. Yeah. And then we have a moon base. I mean, we have a presence.

A $100,000,000,000 if, for example, the Space Force Force gets involved, they could pay for the whole thing. Yeah. Absolutely. You know? And and if you look at at at the way it works in in Hawaii, we have an international airport that shares runway with the, Hickam Air Force Base. So the air force, they they share fuel, they share infrastructure, the the military guys have their their own space, and then the civilian have their own space, and they live together, and it works just fine.

If the if that if there is a need for military in space, that would be a way to use them. And most colonies in the past, I wanna say, military was involved on some level. In the in the pretimes, yes. Absolutely. There was there was some form of military or protection with them. Mhmm. So it's for Yeah. We have this we have this discussion. I'm I'm open lunar, and we have this discussion about what are the rules for doing things on the moon.

And I said, like, dudes, the the the Chinese just poured a bunch of concrete on a rock in the ocean and say that's our land. Yeah. And this is this is a well established, set of rules about what is a rock and what is an island, and whether, you know, whether there's territory involved or not. It it has to exist, when it's high tide.

It has to still exist, or or it's not a it's not a thing, and so you can add concrete to a to a rock that that that is submerged at at high tide, and and so it's above high tide all the time. But they they break those rules, and who's, you know, try and stop me. And I think the same thing's gonna happen on the moon. Are we gonna fight a war on earth because somebody broke some rule on the moon? I don't think so. I I like the model of international airports.

When you go to an international airport, no matter where you are in the world, once you're in the airport, you're sort of in international territory. Yep. You know, you you everybody just looks at each other, and they don't think about, oh, that's such and such a nationality. Everybody uses the same toilets and uses the eats in the same restaurants and buys the same, the luxury goods. And so That's only when when they look at us. When they look at you, then, you know, they're kinda questioning.

Who's a I'm joking. I'm joking. I know you're trying to do your best here. I get it. No, I agree with you. The international airports are, in essence, it's a limbo. You are not in one country or another. That's the way it should be on the moon. That's exactly what a moon base should be like. That's a that's exactly what the moon base you should drop your nationality when you get to the moon. Why have a nationality? What do you need it for?

It's surprising because when you wherever you go, you bring your culture, your nationality, your your all of those things with you. You can't help it. So you bring your you believe your non or religious beliefs, you bring your norms, you bring your sexuality, and those all come with you no matter where you go. Have you ever been to Burning Man? I have not been to Burning Man. Okay. Well, then you then you don't know what you're talking about. But you still bring who you are with you.

Oh, you become somebody else. Okay. You yes. You can. And that's what the hope is. That's one of the dreams of many people in the space industry. That is in fact what happens. Everybody gets indoctrinated when you get to Burning Man. No garbage allowed. You you have to, do gifting. There's no money exchange. You can't advertise anything.

There's a whole bunch of rules, and they're just different from normal society, and people from all over the world get together in this place, and you lose your nationality. You just become creative, whatever it is. So what I'm saying is it's possible to create a culture, in another place and have everybody adopt that culture. Hawaii is like that, by the way. People come from all over the place. You know? I I lived in Japan. My children, grew up in Japan.

They're all they're culturally Japanese, but they're always gonna be foreigners in Japan. Mhmm. Yes. Because that's Japan. Yes. Okay. In Hawaii, there are no foreigners. Mhmm. That's just the way it is. Everybody just assimilates and and and chills and becomes locals. You don't even have to speak the language, and you still assimilate to the culture of Hawaii. Hawaii is a great place. Yes. And so I think Hawaii That's where we met. Yeah. Well, there you go.

I'm just saying I'm saying Hawaii is the culture that needs to be exported to the moon and exported to the rest of the world, if you ask me. So mission number 4. Yes. Mission number 4. Find out how the universe ends and do something about it. So why the hell do I have this, mission? I asked myself this question. Why? It's like, you gotta be kidding me. What the hell are you thinking? And, you know, I don't know where this mission comes from.

Maybe some future space alien realized that the that the inflection point for saving the universe is happening now, and they need to communicate with somebody in the past, and I'm and they chose me. And you're the one. Yes. I'm the one. It's like, gee, thanks, you know. You're like Matthew McConaughey as a conduit behind the walls.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I have had this conversation with, like Buddhist reincarnations, you know, to see what what, you know, how does the universe end, and they generally say it gets real hot. I think that that tradition is about our solar system. If you think about, you know, what is the universe? Their definition of the universe could barely be the sun or or or or earth. So they didn't understand galaxies and all that.

That's interesting that you say real hot because what I have heard is the galaxy will eventually go dark and cold. No. Of course. I'm what I'm saying is that the Buddhist think that. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So they so they're obviously their their definition of the universe is different from ours. I I crowdsource this on Facebook, by the way. I said, anybody out there know anything about, the universe? You know? I'm I'm trying to figure out how the universe ends here.

And Facebook has all the answers. Of course. I'm gonna Yelp this, this, conversation as what was I give the Yelping for this when we go down this path? Anyway anyway, so one of my Facebook friend raises his hand, and says, yeah. I know something about this. Do you remember who I am? I said, and I said, yeah. You're the younger brother of my high school girlfriend. And well, he said, good on you for remembering who I am.

He says, do you remember that little fortune teller lady that stayed at your house? And I go, yeah. She said I was she saw me in Antarctica, which I thought was ridiculous. By the way, I've been to Antarctica with my entire family, so that actually came true. What she said about him was that he was gonna study abroad and become a great scientist. And we, you know, we laughed about both of those things.

And he ended up, studying astrophysics at Oxford, and now he's a tenured professor of cosmology at Columbia University. So he does know something about something. And he said, oh, by the way, we're coming to Hawaii next February. This is already many years ago. And they had a conference just like our conference where I met you. This is a cosmologist conference, and I'm like, oh my god. My dream come true. I said, okay.

On Monday, you're coming to my house, we're gonna we're gonna have dinner, and we're gonna talk old times to get our personal shit out of the way. On Tuesday, you're bringing me 25 of the most interesting cosmologists, and their spouses, whatever. I'm gonna feed them, I'm gonna get them drunk, and we're gonna talk about the end of the universe, which is what we did. And so I've I learned all about dark matter and dark energy, and so on and so forth. So I actually have time.

They said their biggest conclusion of that gathering was, like, you should call us back together in about a decade and maybe Wait. Wait. Did you just say you have time? Yes. Okay. I just I was gonna hit the mic like that. Did I actually hear that he feels like he has time? Okay. So we do have time. In other words, the universe isn't ending next week because Okay. You know, the reason I was thinking if the universe ends next week, then why am I working on all these other missions? Right.

We we pack it up and, do something, and it's okay. Have fun.

But but actually actually, the, you know, what's going on in the universe compared to what's going on this tiny ass planet, or even our planet, and the moon, and Mars is I mean, the scale is so ridiculous that all these things that we're talking about that are hard things to do, like fixing this environment, ending climate change, taking all the plastic out of the, all those things are just gonna be like small mentions in the history books in the future. Oh, they're gonna be mentioned.

Yeah. Like in like the industrial revolution. And then we invented, steam engine. Oh, and then we invented the cotton gin, and then we did this, and then we invented the container, so we no longer lead it in longshoremen. Then we had automatic driving cars. All these things just happened. They're like small things in history, but they were not small things at the time. They were huge things.

Yep. And so what I'm trying to say is that all the things that I'm doing, even though they sound like they're big or bigger or huge, whatever, they're still tiny compared to the scope of time and the scope of space and the scope of human imagination. So I'm not doing a big thing. I'm actually doing a tiny thing. It just may seem big to people who don't think that way. So but I I I've gotta bring you back. You wrote, figure out how the universe ends and to do something about it.

So did you figure out how the universe ends? And you're doing a small thing, but what are you doing about the universe ending? So, so first of all It's your bullet point. No. I know. It's my bullet point, and I and I gotta own it. And, you know, I, myself, haven't figured it out. I Okay. You know, we we, we have, possibility of figuring out what dark matter is in maybe the next decade or 2. But nobody at my in the group thought that we would ever figure out what dark energy is.

Yeah. But I mean, these these these are things that we now think we don't know anything about. Then there's a breakthrough. Absolutely. When somebody discovers relativity, or quantum theory, or, you know, something like that, which shakes everything else up. You know, we we could be wrong about our calculations. We could we could find out that, in fact, we are that the universe's, expansion is not accelerating, or that there's matter being generated somewhere.

Maybe dark matter is matter in a parallel universe that has gravity in ours, but not not matter in our universe. And and maybe maybe we can get some matter from the other. Who knows? I have the we had on Howard bloom, you might know the name. And he started his podcast from the beginning of time. And we went through all of this and it always is a challenge, first of all, to go back 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of years and then to go forward 1,000,000,000 of years.

So yeah, these are questions that we are not we believe we're sure of, but we might find out in 10 years or 20 years that we were completely off. Yeah. So so, you know, the one of the things that they they said, the cosmologists said, if you asked us 30 years ago, we would have told you that we know something about something. But today, we can we can be very, how can I say, sure that we know nothing about anything? You know, and it's yes.

So to get to to do so let's take this other half of it then so that we have figured out that you, we don't know how the universe ends. And I'm almost well, I can't say positive that I won't be around because we don't know what will happen to the transfer of cognition to neural nets and capability of keeping a human consciousness alive in a an alternative form. So we cannot say that you I you're a little bit older than I am.

So the timeline all comes down to how lucky we are to make it to that point with the health and technology merge to a place to keep someone alive longer. The second part, to do something about it. Is there something besides what you're doing that is related to the universe ending that you're doing? No. I'm just in the research stage. Love that. Sorry, I haven't really gotten far into that one, but I it's a good ending. Yeah, so, so, just a brief story of of how the the story of Black Onyx Okay.

Which is the my first game. I there's actually a story that surrounds it. So you, are a young man on a on a planet, an earth like planet, and, on this planet, there is a tower that contains, I don't know, all these guardians, and inside the inside the tower is this object called the black onyx. What is the black onyx? And you've you in your travels, you find an old blind man who turns out to be the last of the, like, the Norse gods.

That they were supposed to be immortal, but they, little by little, got bored and killed themselves, and there's only one left. And he gave his, he gave up his eyesight so he could see the future. And what the what the Onyx is is is, a previous race of super beings figured out that the universe was going to there's too much matter in the universe, and it was gonna collapse.

And so what they did is they they brought together a whole bunch of super massive black holes, and they created a shield around them, neutralizing them. Now, in neutralizing these, of course, if you if you were to, like, immediately take away, a third of the mass of of the universe, that probably causes a gravity wave of whatever biblical proportions. I would say even bigger than that because biblical just means our planet. Yeah. There you go. How do you know?

Well, I I I'm I'm gonna take a guess that everything that's in the bible is on planet Earth. Okay. Alright. Alright. So so, basically, what he what he does, he the the black onyx is this thing that couldn't con that contains, like, a third of the mass of the universe. And there's all kinds of theories about what the black onyx is among the people. They think it's a object with magical powers, or who knows? And so there's this this whole competition about who gets the black onyx.

But he looks into the future, and he and he sees there is a future in which humans try to figure out what it is, and they put it in something like the Hadron Super Collider, and they knock out one of the vertices of the Onyx, and it collapses. And therefore it creates the end of the it's Ragnarok. Yeah. That's that's what Ragnarok is.

So your job as the young man is to take it to the other side of the planet, and there's a stargate on the other side of planet, and you dial in a random number, and chuck it into the stargate, and what happens is it gets sent into the Oort Cloud, and it takes humanity another, I don't know, most x millennia to find it. When they finally find it, they're smart enough not to punch a hole in it. So they they don't have 5 of these that they distribute around the world.

It's out of the universe, it's 1. Yeah. It's it's 1. And and I'm just going to what is it? The Avengers where the Yeah. But then my my my game my story was blown up because the the universe is expanding, not contracting anymore. So it's like, damn. I have to make a new story. Oh, I I I don't, think in these ways. So it's always amazing when someone has the ability to be creative in this vein and to take things in in these, in these directions.

So, yeah, it's, so we are going to, we're going to last for a few. We're not gonna be blown out of the universe, hopefully, and we won't have the the massive biblical proportions happening. Yeah. Hopefully. I mean, we're in a we're in a biblical proportion event right now, and we're the cause of it. So but it's happening so slowly that we don't notice it, by and large. But it's gonna speed up, and we're gonna do something about it. That's why we're here. So, this has been fun.

It definitely went in a different direction than I would have thought, and I the the guests don't know this. I don't say this that often the people listening in don't know this. The guests do, is that I don't know. I gave you, we came up with a title, and you decide what this is about. And you determine your own bullet points. You determine your own direction. So I people are are how does this work? I said, I don't know. I don't know what, Hank is gonna talk about.

And they're fun because they're engaging, and you took us on a journey that I had not thought you would take us on. So this is all great. Yes. And I enjoyed every minute of it. This is kind of yeah. It's a conversation worth having. You know, everybody should have their have a story and, have a chance to tell their story. The challenge is that podcasts or interviews are often not, they're not conversations. In the same vein, they're the guest come the host comes with their initiative.

The guest comes with theirs, and you're there's a battle often. I'm not saying all of them, but there's a battle of the story and who's the lead. I I come here to learn from you. I do challenge, but I come here to learn from you. And that's it. That's number 1 is I wanna hear a different perspective. I wanna be challenged, challenging my own thoughts. And you did that today and that and I appreciate that. Well, thank you.

So, a for all of you who are listening in today, I wanna thank you for taking the time to listen in. And I do hope that you learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Once again, the Project Moon Hut Foundation is where we're looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon. A moon hop. Name came again from NASCA NASA through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem.

Then to take those endeavors, the paradigm shift thinking, the innovations, and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Now, Hank, what's the single best way for people to connect with you? Oh, the single best way for people to connect with me? It's Yeah. [email protected]. Okay. [email protected]. Yeah. And I too would like to connect with anybody who's interested. You could reach me at david@project [email protected].

We're changing that because we've got both URLs. There's you can connect at Project Moon Hut, or at Goldsmith for me. There's LinkedIn and Facebook. We've got our Project Moon Hut on there. And we're in the next few weeks, we'll hopefully have a brand new website up. The team in Germany is doing an awesome job, so you'll be seeing that. So I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite.

Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes which have turned led to the renaming of periods into ages. You've personally just experienced the information age and what arrived at this been. Now just consider for a moment that you might right now be living through a new transitional age, the age of infinite, An age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefined lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources.

The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that has come to life as together we create a new definition of the future. Our podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut. We were named by NASA Project Moon Hut through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem.

Then to use those endeavors, the paradigm shift thinking and the innovations, and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring thinking bigger and bigger and bigger when it comes to anything. And we have Hank Rogers with us today. How are you, Hank? I'm doing great. Thanks. Hank has a, but not only a history, but an interesting job. He is the owner of the Tetris company, you know, the game Tetris that you play. That is his.

He was in Japan. He first he's a an entrepreneur in the video game designer video game designer and entrepreneur. He then ended up creating a video game, found secured the right to Tetris. And from there, if he wants to give any more, it's just amazing that, he's here. And so the little back story, I don't always give a lot of about an individual, but the first ever event that I ever went to in the space industry was 2014, 2015.

I think it was early 2015 because we started project Moon Hut into 2014 is the I was asked to go to an event in Hawaii called the great giant leap. And at this event, I was told would be some of the top people in the space industry. So we had, sorry to say, the first event I ever went to or 50 about 50 people, there was Buzz Aldrin. There was the individual who put the rover on the comet from France, who worked with the European Space Agency.

There were some people there who'd been so engaged in the space industry that it was like being at a PhD level event. I was typing so fast to figure out what a dragon was, what kilograms was. I didn't think it was Game of Thrones just to be able to understand the language in the beginning I was not a space individual. And that's where I met Hank. So, Hank, there's our background. Do you have an outline for us? Kinda.

Yes. So I I thought I thought you might be interested in, hearing a little bit about my business career since everybody asks me about that. So we'll start with number 1, would be your business career. Yeah. Computer games. Okay. Well, hold on. Just we'll call it business career. Yep. Yeah. Number 2. Number 2 is, my mission number 1, which is to fix this planet. To fix this planet. Mine 2. And then number 3. Number 3 is to make a backup of life by going and colonizing other planets.

Other planets? Number 4? And we don't actually have to spend a lot of time on this one, because it's just there to, keep the other ones, seeming like they're eminently doable. And then Okay. Of course, to figure out how the universe ends and do something about it. How the universe ends, and to do something about it. Now, is there a number 5? No. No. 4 is enough. Okay. I think oh, I I skipped 1. I I skipped mission number 2, which is to end war.

And I think I haven't gotten around to doing doing anything about it. It's left over from from my days as as a high school student protesting against the war in Vietnam in New York. Okay. So we'll we'll kind of put that into, 2.1. Yeah. So tell me, the the topic, Thinking Bigger, Bigger is Big. So share with me teach me teach me what I need to know to think bigger. Wow. Teach you what's this I'm I'm Yeah.

I can teach you anything, but, you know, so, you know, it's it's, it's when whenever you're in something, and you think that whatever it is that you're working on, and you're gonna accomplish that, and so on and so forth, Like, while you're at it, think about what would be the bigger thing that you could do that would be much bigger than what you were just working on, for example. You know, how does how do you go from, the biggest thing that you can think of to something bigger.

And it it it turns out that going bigger often is is about the same, how I could say, level of difficulty as going big in the first place. Whatever it is that you're on, you might think this is big, but doing something that's 10 times as big is about the same amount of work. So you might as well do the 10 times bigger thing. So I I mean, I can go through each of those, my business career, my missions, and kind of, like, run through how I went from big to bigger to bigger.

But I'm gonna wanna know, it looks like we talked about, I'm going to wanna know how I can take what I what we're doing, what I'm doing, and what end so that I could understand how to make that transitional leap. So I'm gonna be pushing you through this, obviously. Push me. Push me. Yes. I mean, you gotta just, like, like, think outside of your box that you're in because, you know, no matter what you're doing, you've you've you've got sort of you've you've built a box around yourself.

You're you're inside of your a room of your own creation, and, like, everything that happens to you happens in that room. But guess what? That room is pretty tiny, compared to the room that, first of all, it could be. And if you look at beyond the room, like, beyond the building, or beyond the city, or beyond the country or beyond the planet. You know, there's always a bigger way of think of of looking at something, and why not? Well, I'm but if we took I mean, we've got project Moon Hut.

We're designing plans for man to live on the moon. We're looking to accelerate the earth and space based ecosystem. We're taking all of that information, all those endeavors, and turning it back on earth so that earth we improve life on earth for 50,000,000 species. How do we get bigger? How do how do we get bigger? Well, I mean, if we're gonna go through my mission, mission number 3 Well, let's say you wanna start with 3, or do you wanna start with some of the things in your career?

Or do you wanna jump to 3? I could do that too. You're asking me right now how do you think of it in fixing the planet, and I'm just about that kind of leads me to 3 and 4 Okay. Up in my business career. Where would you like to go? Let's start with how do we think bigger? Let's just go right there, and then we can come back to the others and you can interject them throughout. Alright. So so I'll talk a little bit about my business career, and and I sort of backed into it.

I I when I was, gosh, in my twenties, I worked for my father in the in the gem business. And, I hated working for my father because he never gave me any, like, real responsibility. And whenever I had an idea, he's, you know, he always said his idea was better. What do I know? And so on and so forth. And he did things terribly wrong. Like, he never paid taxes. He never did any accounting. Really? Oh, man. Are you kidding me? He was he was smuggling stuff from, you know, from country to country.

He was just living in his own world. And, you know, he would do things like make an appointment with a really important gem dealer and then be 2 hours late. I just just really I I just could not believe that this was my role model for how to do business. So, I I so my first thing is to to get away from his business. It just so happened that I was in Japan, and, personal computers had come out. And so, hey. You know what? Personal I I can program.

I majored in computer science, and I minored in Dungeons and Dragons back at the University of Hawaii. And, so I I can put those 2 together, because I I went to Akihabara, which is the the electronic center at that time, the electronic center of Japan, to find out what was going on. And I looked at the computer games, and there weren't any role playing games. And I said, oh, man.

This is a chance I can make a role playing game, and I'll be ahead of everybody because nobody knows about role playing games. And, you know, in the US, there were there was, Ultima and Wizardry. There were already role playing games on on the Apple, and, and the Commodore, and the TRSA the TRSA the TRSAID was Temple of Apshai. And, so I thought, well, I'll just make one of those. And so I got started. Well Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. So here's an idea for thinking big.

My question to you would be, how did you just come up with how do you come up with role playing game like that? At that point, I believe in history, they they weren't doing it. So did something trigger you? Were you challenged by something? Did you learn something? Did you see something? What was the mental jump that caused you to say, let's do this? I gotta say that it was just at that point, that was the beginning of my career we're talking about here. Yeah. I understand that.

I mean, I I know I know that there were were was a car invented yet? We're talking about a boatload of naivety. That's what was going on at that moment in time. What I didn't know is that the reason there were no role playing games in Japan because Dungeons and Dragons didn't exist in Japan. And so I was making a game that nobody would know how to play, because nobody knew what a role playing game was.

So instead of, like, the the US based role playing games, which basically got the people who played the paper game, the the the board game of Dungeons and Dragons, and pulled them into a computer version of the of the board game, I didn't have a board game to pull people out of, and so when when SoftBank well, I went so I I started writing this game. I got halfway, and, I I took it to SoftBank, and I said, can you introduce me to a publisher? And they said, you know what?

All you gotta do is get your wife to answer the phone. You know, you can do just do this yourself. You don't need, a publisher. I thought, shoot. Okay. So I said, of course, that was that was biggest b s ever. And they said, well, guarantee, we'll we'll buy you 3,000 copies of your game at Christmas. And I thought, okay. So I worked my ass off to finish the game until Christmas.

And meanwhile, I I had a friend of mine from from Thailand, from the gem business came by, and he said, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm making his game. And, he said, what what how much money do you have to do this? I said, well, I don't have any money. He says, well, how do you expect to do this as well? And I was just didn't know anything about business at the time. So, anyway, I talked him into putting $50,000 into my business. And I, and for that, I gave him half the company.

That was in that was in 1980, 1976, 19 what was it? 83. It was 1983. 3. Yep. I figured it was about there. Yeah. 1983. So, I said I said $50,000, and and he says, boy, you really don't know anything about business, do you? And he said he would come he would do the accounting and and do the business end of it, and I just had to make the game. I said, fine deal. Sucker never showed up once. I so I end up I end up building that business. I didn't speak read or write Japanese, by the way, just FYI.

Yeah. Okay. And you still don't? I had to no. I I can speak, and understand Japanese, but I refuse to study, you know, the Japanese characters. I think those those are hieroglyphs, and they they belong in the history books. They don't belong in in a keyboard. How do they type in the kanji? They they have a QWERTY keyboard, and they translate whatever you type on the alphabet into kanji. Why the hell do you bother translating it?

Just keep it, you know, and then they say, well, there is the there is the you don't know the true meaning of a word if you don't see the the, you know, the character. I said, how do you guys talk? I mean, you talk to each other. There is no no kanji or Chinese characters floating around while you're talking. You know, it's only sounds. So turn those sounds into phonetic alphabet and be done with it. Anyway, it just pissed me off because, you know, I I English is my second language.

I I I came from the Netherlands to, to the States when I was 11 years old, and I didn't have to learn how to read because I already knew how to read. I just needed to know how to speak English. And so you could just go to another language and use the same alphabet. It's just like going to another country and having to use an, a different numbering system. It doesn't make any sense. Anyway, sorry. Yeah. I No no worries. I digress.

So, come Christmas, the you know, we had I had spent my advertising budget, and I've done some couple of full page ads in in in computer magazines, and we got absolutely no reaction. We got one phone call during the 1st month and 3 phone calls during the 2nd month of advertising full pages. So I've blown my advertising budget. SoftBank says, I'm sorry. We're only gonna order 600 copies for the for Christmas, and I and I'm thinking, oh, wow. This is the end of the business.

We're gonna run out of money real soon. I wrote the game myself, but by that time, I had a couple of other people working for me. So it's January, and we're, like, dead in the water. Product is not moving. Nobody knows what black onyx is. And so I asked my guys, so how do people in Japan find out about computer games? This is well. They read about them in the magazines as well. How do you get into the magazine?

So, well, you you you have a hit game, and then the magazine guys come and interview you and your company. As well, that's obviously not happening. So what are we gonna do? So I said, okay. This is what we're gonna do. We're gonna do it backwards. You're gonna call every magazine, make an appointment. I'm gonna go and visit them and show them how to play my game, which I did. I traveled to Japan.

I went to every magazine, and in February to from January from when I went to visit them to February, they all played my game and fell in love with my game. So it takes them so the cycle is on by by March, with the the the magazine articles all come out. And then so in March, SoftBank call calls me up and orders 10,000 units. In April, SoftBank calls me up and orders 10,000 units.

I was the number one game in Japan in 1984 after that, like, kilo So so you you did you did something that there's an assumption made here. You did something for some reason that made you bigger, and it is that you turned something upside down. Now I'm gonna go backwards. You there was no Dungeon and Dragons, which meant that you came from the US.

You understood this Dungeons and Dragons, and you carry that mental construct, that cultural, entity over the ocean to Japan, and that became your impetus to think differently and to start a game. What made you say, well, let's do this backwards? Because that if that was so easy, everybody would do it. When you're when you're an entrepreneur, when you're in a business, things are never going to go the way you expect them to go.

And if you have the flexibility to think outside the box, to think differently, to do something different, and think of a new way of doing something, pivot, whatever it is, if you have the, how can I say, the balls to do that, then you have a chance? If you have I I know that. The challenge is I personally am well, the challenge is it's not so easy. So for example, for me, Project Moon Hut started because someone from NASA said something, and I just said, you're doing it all wrong in in summary.

And I said, you're trying to solve a 1,000 Rubik's cubes at once. And it came from a question. I'd spent 9 hours with NASA. I didn't know anything about space, and they said they wanted to solve for a woman being pregnant on the moon. And my answer was no. No. No. No. No. You you don't solve for that right now. We're explorers. We have technology to stop that. You're solving these 1,000 Rubik's cubes. Let me show you a different path. But it was that question.

I can go back to that comment that he made. What was the was it does was it desperateness? Does everybody have to be desperate to be flexible so that you could decide to turn it around? There was something in you that made you do this differently. Occasions during my my business career where or or or even my post business career where I just say, hey, let let's look at this from a completely different direction and and take a different path.

I mean, you again, you don't wanna be stuck on the you wanna be able to take a right turn or a left turn instead of just going straight, because going straight is the obvious thing, and everybody does it. And and and any everybody, how can I say, is not all the people who are really successful took a turn somewhere that other people didn't take?

And I'm going to bet you that everybody took that turn because something knocked them, something hit them, something spontaneously combusted in front of them. I I started my second company because I kicked my first partner out of my first company. He didn't do any work. And I was like you carrying everything. And a company called we were desperate for money. The and said, could you get us a product? I looked up back then the Thomas register, like an Internet book.

I found a company I called them, and they said, well, if you order from us, we'll give you net 30 terms. So I turned to my girlfriend, Now Life, and I said because they asked me what's the name of the company. I said, what's the name of our company? And she said, I don't know. Just call it at your service. At your service started, it was changed, but at your service started because we got net 30 terms. We needed the money, and someone wanted a product. Yeah. Yeah. That's how the company started.

It was not it it was not an intelligent decision. It was desperation. Well, okay. So so if you wanna talk desperation, desperation Yeah. So a lot of thing and you'll find out later how do I how I found my missions in life, is sort of a, an earlier desperation story. And it's, you know, I was 18, moved to Hawaii. Of course, I'm gonna learn how to surf, and here I am surfing on the North Shore.

I'm, you know, I've I've only been surfing for, you know, a couple of months, and I'm on the I'm out there on a day, and this is this is in the days before they could predict how big the waves were going to be on any given day. Okay. So you could go out in the morning, and then it would get bigger and bigger and bigger, because the the weather report didn't tell you that there the waves are gonna become 12 feet by the afternoon. Okay. Yeah. That just didn't exist. So here I am.

I'm out there, and all of a sudden, the waves are starting to get bigger and bigger. I'm going, oh, shit. How how you know, I I'm not able to serve these big waves. And I had to make I had to make my choice. So here here I am, I wipe out on a on a, I don't know, 10, 12 foot wave, whatever it is. They measure waves in from the back in Hawaii, so it's probably a that wave was way over my head. And, so so I lost my board. This isn't the day before bungees.

Bungees didn't exist yet, so that means that your board is not attached to your legs somehow by a little, you know, piece of rubber. So there there, I can see my board wash up on shore in the distance. Oh, really? It that went that far. It just kept on going. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're talking about I'm I'm in the white water now. Okay. I'm in the white water, and and, so I've I've gone over the what what it means to go over the falls. You're in a wave, and you go up, and then it drops you down.

You're going in you're tumbling. You're like in a giant, washing machine, and it drops you down. And when you're in the in the white water, white water is lighter than regular water because it has bubbles in it. Yeah. So if you weigh it, it weighs less. So that means you don't float in it. So here I am. I'm in there. I'm trying to figure out which way is up. I'm using my my energy to try to try to get to the surface, gasp for air, and I did this, like, I went over the falls 3 times in a row.

And, finally, I'm floating, and now I'm being I'm on the reef, and I'm I'm in this riptide, and it's pulling me away to the channel, which is gonna pull me back outside. If I'm back outside, you know, I'm already tired, and here I am, and I'm trying to figure out what to do, and then I get a cramp. Can you imagine? Like, I've I've used up my energy. I've I'm and and I'm I have a moment of clarity. I said, you know what? I am not going to die today. I still have stuff to do.

I actually thought this. And then my and then I have a moment of clarity, and it's okay. So, what's going on here? Which muscles are not working? Where do I where do I have still have strength? And I changed my stroke. I I switched to a backstroke, and so I found new muscles that still have had, like, oxygen or energy left in them, and I back stroke my way through the, the riptide onto the beach. I crawled on the beach like freaking rock Robinson Crusoe, and I, like, how can I say, collapsed?

I I crawled onto the beach and collapsed, and I I lay there for, like, 15 minutes. I couldn't move a muscle, And, but I survived. Hello? So sometimes you gotta make that decision that you're gonna survive, and you just gotta make up your mind. Because it I mean, I could've easily panicked at that point instead of, like, figuring it out, and I could've drowned. There would've been no one there to save me for sure.

6 minutes under under the water, and you got brain damage, so I would've been history. I didn't have I was out there by myself. My there was no friend watching. I was So so something pushed you. So when it came to this position because you had to think bigger, you had a failing business. There had to have been something that made you say, excuse me, to anybody out there who's listening, I'm just gonna fuck it. Well, I have to do something to make this business survive.

And I'm I'm picking on this specifically because it was a bigger decision. It was, do you fail, which most companies do fail, and you decided to make a drastic change even counter to the industry's norms. Was there a historical precedence to that? Did you read about someone who did it? Were you scared at the moment so much that you are willing to try it? Were there was something we there had to been a trigger. Well, okay. So so two things. 1 one is I hate losing. Okay. Okay? I hate losing.

I hate losing pretty much more than anything. I'm very competitive. And the person that I didn't want to lose to at that moment in time was my father. Yep. My father, with his crappy business ethics, whatever you wanna call them, was still a serial entrepreneur. He would start new business, start new business, and they would, like, fall by the wayside as he went for new businesses.

And I said, I'm not gonna do this, and I'm gonna prove myself because he was kinda laughing at me that I was doing this computer game. I mean, here, I'm what what am I doing? I mean, he didn't understand what I was doing at all. He'd never played computer games. He didn't understand what computers were, and so on and so forth. So I just didn't wanna lose to my father. That was the and by the way, that was probably the reason that my first business, I had trouble in my first business.

Because once I got to the point where I beaten my father, I made more money than him. You know, if you are so smart, why don't you make more money than me? That kind of thing, you know. So I wanted to make more money than him in the worst way, and I did. And once I accomplished that, I kinda lost interest in the business. Gotta already done what I what I set out to do. You weren't you you weren't your target wasn't the business. Your target was your head.

It's a bit by the way, here's here's a phrase that I've had since I'm 12. I'm not competitive as long as I win. And and people you could take it multiple ways. Winning means you and I winning. When we were younger, my son would play basketball with me, and he at 12 years old, I was £200 or a 100 and some odd kilo. I'm a big boy, and my 12 year old would have challenges. But if he won, if he felt like he won, I won too. So winning is not always that has to be my win. It could be my team.

It could be my family, it could be people around me, community, animals, whatever you would like. So that's one of mine. Not competitive as long as I win. But I have mother issues and father issues too, so I'll I'll give you that. Okay. So so, you know, I wrote the first couple of games for the company, and we were I was, like, all of a sudden famous. I could actually buy a car. In fact, I got a very nice car. And and so I I was, I had a lifestyle all of a sudden, when, you know, independent.

My dad never paid me. I worked for him for 6 years. He never paid me. So ridiculous. Like, anyway. No. No. It's not. I I I won't even I won't even go there. I should be laying down on a couch. Yeah. So, anyway. So, I wrote the first couple of games, and and then I I I hired a team of people to make the 3rd game, which, by the way, never happened, because I wasn't the one doing it. For whatever reason, I didn't know how to run a team.

But fortunately for me, at the same time that I was doing that, I started traveling around the world looking for games to bring to Japan, and I licensed a whole bunch of game. I lice I licensed Electronic Arts original games. I published Star Wars games in in Japan. I had European games, and one of those games, which I found at the Consumer Electronics Show, was a little game called Tetris. Wait. So before you get there, gonna interrupt again.

What made you decide to shift from being a game producer to a game, acquirer or a salesperson or whatever you wanna call it? Because that's another big jump. Oh, so I went from being a developer to a publisher. Publisher. Okay. And and and the reason was is because my, you know, I I was capable of turning out a game per year.

And I had a marketing team, and I had a sales team, by this time, and and basically, they were busy once once a year when I finished my game, and the rest of the time they were not. So I thought, they need something to do with the rest of the year. So we should we should license a bunch of games, have them translated to to the Japanese computers, and then and then they'll be busy all the time. That's the way I thought about it. Otherwise, they would be wasting time.

Was that something that some that some you saw somebody else do, and that was the inspiration for it? Did you wake up one moment, one day, and say, I need to go license and be a publisher? Was it what what was that spark again? Because there's always a spark. I don't know. I, You know, it's it's when I decided that after 2 years of making games that I that I couldn't make games and run a company at the same time.

That I and I chose running the company because I thought I was too old to be making games for the rest of my life. It's it's a sort of a stamina issue. You know, programmers that that that program games, they work day and night. I work day and night. So you were the the the impetus for you was frustration. You were working day and night. You had a team. You were paying the bills, and you saw that this was a dead end, and you needed to make a change. I know. Is that fair is that fair?

I could have hired a CEO, but I made the conscious choice that I wanted to be the CEO. So it was just a different Kenny, I'm the oldest of of 8 boys and 1 girl. So Wow. I've always been the big brother. I've always been the team leader. I've always been the one that everybody looks up to. And so I was always in charge, and so I you know, if I if if I'm in a situation with a bunch of people trying to figure out to do something, I'll take charge. I have no no problem taking charge.

And and we okay. So that's very clear. You had you wanted to make sure for your that your family saw you. You were the leader. You'd always been educated or in positions of leadership, so you were able to take those skills and the frustration. And you said, I'll take over the CEO role, and I'll license. And I'll travel in license. So, anyway yeah. So I did. Okay. So the Tetris story. Yeah. So Tetris was, at a booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

And, so 6 months later, I had licensed Tetris for all the computer platforms. In Japan, there were 8 different computers. They were not compatible, and, the family computer, the Nintendo, which had just had come out the year before. So, yeah. I You're gonna love me. You're gonna love me at the end of this. Yeah. You'll probably never speak to me again. How did you negotiate that deal? Why did it take 6 months? How did you introduce it? How did you know this was the game? Okay. Oh, I know.

I know. I know. Okay. So I'm at the Cool Loop Control Consumer Electronics. So there's hundreds of monitors with people lined up waiting their turn to play some game. Yep. And so, basically, as a license, c, meaning somebody who licenses games, I stand in line, play a game for a couple of minutes, try to make up my mind whether I like this game or not, and then have a conversation with the publisher of that game, see if I if the the Japanese rights are available. That's generally how it works.

And and if you've got hundreds of games and you've got, like, a couple of minutes per game, you basically spend a couple of minutes on one game and then you go to the next game and to the next game and to the next game. Well, I found myself in line at the Tetris machine for the 4th time. This is obviously a huge waste of time because here I am. I'm getting hooked on a game on the floor of the conserv show when I'm supposed to be doing business and finding games.

So but by the time I played it for the 4th time, I realized I was getting hooked on this game. I don't get hooked on games very easily, so I got hooked. And, you know, if you're gonna license a game, you gotta have, you gotta know that somebody's gonna wanna play that game. And if you wanna play that game, that's at least one person that really wants to play that game.

And I looked at that game, and it's so simple and so clear and so different from the other games that I thought this I, you know, I understand this. I can I can do this? I play a Japanese board game called Go. In fact, I play it with my father. He was a 6th degree black belt, and I'm a 3rd degree black belt. It's the only I never did get to his level in Go, but I competed with him.

And Go is black and white stones, and unlike chess where the the, you know, the king, the queen, the bishop, the rook, they all have different shapes and different powers. The ghost stones are black and white, and they all have the same power. Yet, go is a much deeper game than chess. I mean, it's like an order of magnitude more complicated and more interesting. The the number is there is just there's more moves than there are atoms in the universe.

Yeah. It's it's it's 19 times 19, that's 181 times 118 times so on and so forth. Yeah. You can look at it that way. That's one way of looking at it. And so chess chess can be done brute force, you know. A computer can look ahead in chess and find a checkmate in the future, whereas Go doesn't work that way. It becomes astronomical very quickly. Mhmm. Anyway, Tetris is that kind of game. It's very simple, little squares, nothing not nothing weird going on.

It's just obvious what's going on on the screen. So anyway, I fell in love with the game, brought it back to, Japan. Everybody in the company started playing it. I mean, like, when I say everybody, I'm talking about the secretaries. This is not this is not a game that is limited to the gamers in the company. This is a all of a sudden, everybody in the company is interested in playing this game.

And what the reason it took me 6 months was, there was a long list of copyright notices on, you know, like, who had the copyrights, and, basically, I went as high upstream as I could, because each time somebody else gets in between, they're taking a piece of the action, and so by the time, you know, by the time you rent, if you license it from somebody who got the license from somebody who got the license, you know, but you're all this food chain that you have to support, means that the royalties are expensive.

So I my, the farthest I could find up the food chain was Mirrorsoft, and Mirrorsoft is the, company owned by Robert Maxwell. Robert Maxwell rings a bell. He's the guy who jumped off a boat after losing his, his entire work workforce's pension fund, multibillion dollars of pension fund. The mirror this guy was like Murdoch, a publishing magnet. And, anyway, that was his company. And, well, these are these are the days of faxes for Christ's sakes.

I sent these guys faxes, and I never for months, I sent them fax and never got back, and finally, I get a fax back. This fax no longer belongs to Mirrorsoft. It's like, what the hell? And so that's what took the time. So then I started phoning, and finally I got to talk to a human, and they said, you know, so and so is coming to Japan in June, and they're they're gonna make the the Tetris deal. And I said, well, I know that guy.

That guy was the guy who owns the company who ran the company that I played the game at at the Consumer Electronics Show. I knew him. Anyway, his So you were all the way back to the guy that you were talking to originally? Yeah. Really. So so he went to the biggest software company in Japan who had basically paid him to make a flight simulator, and so he had to go to them first. Name of the company was ASCII. Now ASCII stands for American Standard Code for into information interchange.

What a dumbass name for a Japanese company. It it it absolutely means nothing. So, anyway, this is ASCII, and ASCII had made a deal with Microsoft. They represent the Microsoft in Japan, so it's ASCII Microsoft. That was a big company. So he went to them and said, you you know, how about Tetris? And they looked at it, and they said, they said, no. They we're we're gonna pass on this one. It it's too retro. Yeah. So you are lucky.

It's 1988, and and the biggest company in Japan says Tetris is too retro. Well, it's like Pong on steroids, which is still old. Yeah. But, I mean, it's it's, like, retro. You could say baseball is retro. Yeah. Sure. Game that was paid in the 1800. So what? You know, it it doesn't mean anything. Aren't you glad they didn't understand that? Oh my god. You have no idea. Of course. So, anyway, that you know, what happened with the licensing rights of Tetris is a long story.

Well well, tell me tell me the pieces for that because the first thing that comes to mind, and I'm thinking going still, we're on the age of infinite, is bigger and bigger and bigger is there's steps that you have taken, you are willing to pursue 6 months to go after something which many individuals would quit at.

You were able to identify that the purse finally get someone on the phone that you identified who this was, you had a lucky break that ASCII had not taken this on, but you still hadn't negotiated deal. And that deal had to be the right deal. So you weren't losing royalty. So that you could be extremely profitable. How did you Let me let me get to the big bigger picture here. Okay. K. So in 1988, Nintendo came out with Game Boy.

And I and I thought to myself, wow Tetris is the perfect game for Game Boy because the screen is small, the number of dots you have on the screen is limited, and so most of the games that are on the like the on the video game, the bullets are so small that you can barely see them on this tiny screen, so they don't translate very well. But Tetris, the pieces are squares. They're easy to see, so it's like the perfect game, and it's portable. You can play it anywhere.

So, I started looking at at the contracts that I had entered into, found that that handhelds were specifically excluded for whatever reason. I don't know what the what the Russians were thinking when they were making these license agreements. So, I mean, I I could spend the rest of the day talking about this story, but on in February of 1989, I got on a plane to Moscow, not knowing anybody in Moscow, and just landed there and said, I'm going to find out who has the rights to Tetris.

I'm gonna license the rights, to Tetris for Game Boy, and then I'm gonna go back to, the States and license it to Nintendo, and they're gonna publish Tetris all over the world. So so the guy that you met at the CES Consumer Electronics Show was the guy who you created the contract with, but now you're circumventing this individual and you're going to Moscow to find a higher upstream individual. Well, nobody had the rights to Game Boy. I knew that. Oh, okay.

It wasn't like like somebody had the rights to to Game Boy, and I took it away from them. These are rights that had not been spoken for by anybody. And so, actually actually, before I went, I I talked to the president of Nintendo USA, and this is this is probably the biggest deal I ever made in my life at that moment.

And I go, you know, mister Arakawa, you should include Tetris with every Game Boy that you sell, because I know when you release a new hardware platform, you always include a game with the first, I don't know how many units. And he said, why should I include Tetris? I have Mario. And I said, look, if you want little boys to buy your Game Boy, include Mario. If you want everyone to buy your Game Boy, include Tetris. And you can include Tetris, and then you can sell Mario afterwards.

And he he, called in his, his game people and so on, and they they kinda agreed. So I, on a handshake, you know, I said he asked me, so what's the deal? I said, well, I'm the deal is I if you tell me that that you want this game, I will get on a plane and go to Moscow and get these rights. So I need you to, and I thought of the biggest number I could think of, guarantee me $1,000,000 and pay me a a dollar per unit. Yeah. And and that's a lot of money. He shook my head.

But you so you it's like the Microsoft, deal for was it how many dollars a game? $16 a game? I don't remember the, per unit for the application. I forgot what it was. Don't quote me on it. So you didn't have Moscow yet, so you went to them first, and you said, will you do this if I can get this? Yes. And they agreed and shook your hand, and that's okay. And that was enough. That was it.

It took me it took me like 3 days to find Elektronor Technica, the, the software and hardware ministry, because, you know, you were dealing with the government. It's like going to North Korea and and trying to license something. They they didn't have license they didn't have intellectual property. They didn't believe in an intellectual property. They and yet they had the rights to this game, and I tracked them down and negotiated with them. I was there on a tourist visa.

But you didn't even know how much it was gonna cost you. So you're asking for a dollar a game and a $1,000,000 guarantee, but you're not even sure if Electronica Technica is going to give you a name. Of course, of course, of course. But I mean, look, the if a dollar in in the US, you know, I'm gonna say, a $1,000 in the US is like $100 in in in the Soviet Union. It's completely different. Oh, I know. I've I've worked in I've worked in Moscow.

I've worked in Saint Petersburg, but you were taking a gamble that that math would work out, and you just figured based upon Oh, yeah. The ruble, and I don't know if the ruble was back there. You just said it would work. Yeah. So I offered them 25¢ and a $150,000. And, I mean, that's what we negotiated at the end. And, so got the deal. And that's when I became good friends with Nintendo. I mean, real good friends. Obviously. Every month or however with it that was cut.

They sold they sold, 30,000,000 units of Tetris on, packed in with Game Boy, and then another 30,000,000 standalone box product. So it was it was catching time. So you, the challenge for and let's take it to peep individuals who are going to start a company in the space industry. The challenge for people who are going to start any type of enterprise is that these stories are aspirational. They are fantastic. They get people excited that they can do it.

Yet so many things had to line up so that you ended up getting this big win. There are a lot of individuals who try to do the exact same thing, and they fall flat on their face. Well, so here so the so let's go back to surfing.

Yeah. If you if, you have to learn how to paddle before you can actually stand up and catch even the tiniest of waves, and then you have to fall off your board a whole bunch of times, and then finally, you get the balance right, and then you start surfing bigger and bigger and bigger waves. If you were to go out there and try to surf a big wave without knowing how to surf, you would, like, die. And so that's kinda how business is.

You shouldn't be afraid of falling off your board, making mistakes, or, you know, or swallowing some water. You you just have to get back up your on on your board and try it again try it again until you know how to do it. Then when the big wave appears, you actually know what to do, and that is kind of where I was when I went to Moscow. I kind of by that time, I've done enough deals that I that I knew how to do a licensing deal. I knew how to convince them.

I know how to explain how the business works, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So, yeah, this is a big advantage I had, because, my I lived in Japan, and at that time, my Japanese really was still really shitty. So I, I learned how to speak English as a second language, meaning use fewer words. Don't use big words. Mhmm. Use a smaller vocabulary, and lo and behold, these people who've been studying English but can't speak it can all of a sudden understand you.

This is the thing that that most Americans can't can't do. I remember Nintendo went to to to Moscow later, and they tried to speak to the Russians. They weren't communicating. They were using big words, and and when the Russians didn't understand, they would speak louder. It's not about speaking louder. It's about using fewer words and and being clear and speaking slowly. Anyway, well, there's I think there's 2 other pieces to the language side.

One of them is the Chinese language does not have this a subject, so there's a lot of collaborative conversation with it, And this, so the dialogue is different. When they learn English, they learn that there's a subject I. And the second part is that in Asia, having lived there for 10 years, everything's negotiable, which is not very indicative, for example, of the American system or many European countries, and, many other countries around the world, but you can negotiate almost anything.

And so negotiation is a lifestyle when it comes to, the Asia Pacific or Asia region. Mhmm. So maybe there was something there that also helped you. Could be. Could be. I I mean, I can't I I I don't know everything that made me who I am or gave me the abilities that I have, whatever they are.

So anyway, let's get past this, the business story, because, you know, fast forward, my friend, the the guy who made, Tetris, I helped him come to the US, get him his rescue him and his family, and, basically, we formed the Tetris company, and we've been controlling the Tetris company ever since. We still control it today. And he basically, we he he lives not far, for 20 minutes from here. We get together every other day, and and drink, and talk story about whatever.

So we're not only business friends, we are friend friends. And, so here so here's what happened. It's 2,002, and, games start to come out on mobile phones, and these in those days, they were basically text based games because phones didn't have graphics. And the 1st phone that could play a game was about to come out, because it's a phone that you could take a picture. Can you imagine that?

You could take a picture, and if you take a picture with the phone, there's a little screen where you can see the picture. Well, if you have a screen and a CPU that can handle all that data, you actually have a little game machine. And so those those early phones that could could take pictures could also play games.

And the first one was coming out from Sprint, and I I went around to, try to find a licensee for Tetris for mobile phones for the US, and this is after I'd gotten a $1,000,000 advance out of Japan. The biggest advance I could find in the US was $25,000, and I'm going, like, you guys have absolutely no idea what's gonna happen. So I felt like role playing games in Japan in 1983 was games for mobile phones in the US in 2002. And I said, okay. Well, I can do this.

So I rolled up my sleeve, and I I made a company, Blue Lava Wireless, and we made games for mobile phones. The company that offered me $25,000 advance for Tetris in 2,002 bought my company in 2,005, 3 years later, they went public, and they they they raised $68,000,000. I got the entire $68,000,000, plus I got 4,000,000 shares of Jamdat stock, which 1 year later turned into cash.

So this was this was my big exit, and this happened in 1980, sorry, in 2,005, which basically leads me to the second half of our program. Because what happened is a month after I sold my company, I found myself in an ambulance on the way to, hospital with a 100% blockage of the widow maker, which is the biggest artery in your heart. Yep. I was on my way out. And the first thing I thought, I was looking at the ceiling, I say, you gotta be freaking kidding me. I haven't spent any of the money yet.

I know a guy who sold his company for a tremendous amount of money, and a week later, he, got hit on a motorcycle and died. It's so ridiculous. You know? Yeah. It's like he was 41 or 48 or something. So, yes, a week later. Yep. And I said, no. I'm not going. I still have stuff to do. This is the second time I said that. And so I I have 2 stents. It it completely solved my problem, and I'm I'm in the in a hospital in the recovery room, and I'm like, what did I mean by stuff?

And this time I got to seriously thinking about it. And so I said, well, look, you know, my kids are all finished with school. They all started their own families, so they don't need me anymore. I've made enough money, put enough money away, so my wife doesn't need me anymore. So, actually, all the things that I've been working for all this time, they're already done. So what did I mean by stuff? I still have stuff to do.

And so I actually seriously thought about what is it that's gonna piss me off if I didn't do, something about it by the end of my life, you know, at the end of my the next time. And I came up with my bucket list and my missions in life. The first one, came to me in the back of the newspaper. It was a little article. It is in Hawaii for Christ's sakes. Tiny ass article that says, oh, by the way, we're gonna kill all the coral in the world by the end of the century. You idiots.

Do you have any idea what that means? What what what's causing that? It's carb it's carbon dioxide going into the ocean causing ocean acidification. Basically, the ocean will dissolve coral faster than coral can make coral. I said, you know what? It's not only coral that depends on that, you know, on that material. It's also all the shellfish, and it's also plankton. You're talking about collapsing the whole entire ecosystem in the ocean.

That's what you're talking about, and you're just like, it it's it's back. It's not even front page news in Hawaii. So my first mission is to end the use of carbon based fuel, which has expanded, you know, because you start you start off, you know, thinking big.

I'm gonna end the use of carbon based fuel, that was my mission, and, to that to that end, I created the Blue Planet Foundation in Hawaii, and and, not knowing how I was gonna do this, but I said, we're gonna end the use of carbon based fuel in Hawaii, and we put a line in the ground. We we actually managed to to do to be the 1st state in the country to have a mandate of a 100% renewable energy by 2045.

You could say 2045, that's a long last way in in the future, but you have to decide when you wanna get to 0 and work towards that, and then then you can take that date and move that date forward. But if you start with a date that everybody can agree on, yes, sure, we can do it by 2045. And, well, you know, 2040 5 was a negotiation. We won a 2040, the politicians won a 2050, and we settled 2045. Turns out, 2045 is a perfect date because it's the 100th anniversary of the United Nations.

So now we are looking at not just looking at doing it for Hawaii, which by the way, we're on track, because we also followed up by having a, changing the business model of the of the utility, so that they make more money the quicker they switch to renewables. So guess what? Now their shareholders are on our side, because we're gonna make them more money. And so, basically, they went from saying it's impossible to, coming out, like, 6 months later saying, hey.

We can do this by 2040, and they're actually on track to do it some by something like 2035. So Hawaii is on track, and we're now the the Blue Planet Foundation's helping the other states. We've we've we've helped 13 other states with their legislation, the same legislation that we passed in Hawaii, which is a 100% by some date. And so what's the what's the next step? The next step is to go bigger. Because the United States, big as it is, we're only 6% of the people in the world.

And if we solve the problem here, it's just not gonna fix the problem in the world. Mhmm. We have to fix the rest of the world. So that's where I am now. I've I've just, started the the Blue Planet Alliance, and we're going to do the same thing that we did in Hawaii, but do it with countries. So our office is across the street from the United Nations.

We're going to work with the United Nations, to figure out how to fix well, it turns out that it's not only climate change that needs to be fixed by 2045, but it's plastic in the ocean. It's god knows. Deforest The the yeah. We call them in Project Moon Hut, the 6 mega challenges. Climate change, mass extinction, resource depletion, displacement, social and physical displacement, exponential impact from things like overfishing, and then political unrest.

And those are the 6 that we concentrate on in project. Perfect. So we need to fix all of those things, and I think that we pick a date in the future by when we need to fix all those things, and I think the date is 2045. The strategic the sustainable development goals, they all they all target 2030, and they started in 2015, so it's a 15 year cycle. So what's the next 15 years?

The next 15 years in my mind have to be the regenerative development goals because we have to put back everything that we've taken. We have to fix everything that we've destroyed, and then it makes sense for us to be sustainable. I ask individuals, I can ask you. You've got a date. Normally, I ask individuals in the categories over 6 mega challenges. I will say to them, okay. So you're working on claiming the ocean. Yes. How long you been working on it? 10 years. Yes. How you do?

What are you doing? Where's okay. Okay. Okay. And I listened to the whole story. And then I said, say to them, when will it be fixed? And they said, what do you mean? I said, you're working on something. You say you're working on it's gonna be done. So my question is, on a global scale, when will it be done? Oh, come on, David. That's a big question. There's so many moving pieces. No. Then you're not solving anything. You're doing something for economic reasons.

You wanna be a part of the community. You wanna put your name impact on the end. I'm really asking a very serious question. If you're going to clean the oceans, tell me the day that the oceans will be cleaned. And Yep. And I've I've picked the date, 2045 as the date everything needs to be fixed. And what's the date in your mind? Because I have a date. What's the date in your mind that it's beyond that it's the it's a it's almost as if it's a lost cause. I don't even think about that.

I I mean, what's the point of thinking about that? Because a lot of individuals that I've spoken to have not asked themselves what happens if it's not solved because they're not coming at it from they can solve it. They're coming at it from doing an activity. So I one of the questions I ask individuals is I say to them, take take your life and add 40 years onto it. Okay. How old will you be? Okay. Now you know how old you'll be. How old will your children be? So I'm 57. I'll have 9 I'll be 97.

My kids are 28 and 26, so they'll be in their sixties. They'll they could have grandchildren and maybe even great grandchildren. Okay. What will the world be like by then with climate change? And if we don't do, if we don't do enough and people start to sometimes realize how soon that is. And I say, okay. So connect the dots for me. Tell me how you're solving it. So we can have climate change. We can have, deforestation stop.

But if we still dump United States, United States, for a variety of reasons, dumps 12,000,000,000 gallons of municipal waste into the ocean every day. 600,000,000 bathtubs, 3300000000 bathtubs, 600,000 swimming pools. And it's municipal waste. It's not pesticide waste, agricultural waste, industrial waste, radioactive waste, mining waste, yada yada yada. It's just municipal waste, which is like getting a cup full of poison.

You United Europe is bigger in terms of population, but let's use it's the same. And let's take China and India not picking, but they're big countries and they're easy to know. Well, that's 50,000,000,000 gallons of poison going into our ocean every day. If we don't solve 50,000,000,000, not including all the other countries, that's that's poison in the ocean. It's not just CO 2. It's something bigger.

And there's there's blank stares when you ask how is it gonna be solved, so that's why I asked the question. Yeah. No. I mean yeah. So I I went to I went to Denmark to, basically, to look at a bunch of different things, and, and they gave me a list of things, that I could visit, and one of them was waste treatment, water treatment plant, and basically so I I I looked at this plant and they said, you know what? The water that we produce that goes into the ocean from here is drinkable.

And so, I mean, it's it's technologically Yeah. It is. We already know how to do this. We all we already know. When we build a moon base or The moon hot. Just call it a call it a moon hot. You gotta say moon hot. Yeah. I can yeah. I can whatever you wanna call it. Oh, well, that's a project moon hot. You're on our podcast. You just got I'm sorry. Maybe the benefit of the doubt even with moon hot. Yeah. So, basically, we're not we're not gonna be peeing out the door.

Yeah. That stuff is, like, water is gonna be unbelievably valuable, and any kind of organic material that exists on the moon is gonna be unbelievably valuable. So we're not throwing anything out. Yeah. It's gonna be circular. We're we're going to learn how to live with our own and reuse all of our own waste. Nature does this. Nature does this all the time. So we just have to copy nature and do it ourselves.

It's just that we've been historically, you know, the world has been so big compared to us when we were just, like, a couple of 1000000 people in the world and spread out that no matter what kind of waste we produced, first of all, it was all organic, and it's all just completely absorbed by nature, like, immediately. Just like it absorbs, you know, all of the animals waste. It can it can process it. It's got the filtration through the soil. It goes to the aquifer.

It's clean through the process, and you end up with a beautiful stream that you can reuse. Yeah. So we have this technology. It's it's it's just kind of stupid economics that we that we live in right now. The economics of it's okay for us to dig something out of the ground, use it for a while, and then throw it out Yeah. And then create piles of garbage. I mean, that that just has to stop. We we're running out of room. And I live on an island in Hawaii, and the the landfills are filling up.

The the recycling is when when, as far as I can tell, when China stopped taking plastics and glass and all that That's just like a disaster. The recycling material is just piling up somewhere in Hawaii, or it's ending up in landfill. It's just ridiculous. We have to we have to do again, I was in Denmark, and every township has a recycling center. And there are, like, 40 dumpsters, glass window glass, other glass, concrete, concrete with rebar.

I mean, all these dumps are there are there, and then you just you sort your garbage out, and when they when one of them fills up, some industry comes and picks it up and has raw material. And yes. And so I was in Hong Kong when China said they were no longer gonna take cardboard. They were gonna change that policy. And not soon after, I don't know, a year or 2 later, I'm reading an article that China had built a 50 year dump, and they had just closed it because it was full in 25 years.

So they'd filled a 50 year dump that they estimated would take 50 years. They did in 25. And the challenge is our world is based upon growing individuals into consumers. It's moving them from tier 1 to tier 2, tier 2 to tier 3, and tier tier to 4. 4, which we're in, you and I, are the most wasteful of all of them, but yet the growth factor or the the the belief is tomorrow is better if you move up the ecological lad this ladder of 4.

The challenge is in Asia Pacific, you were in, in Japan, I'm in, Hong Kong, Wherever I went, the desire is to have more. And it's, I I've shared this on the Redefining Tomorrow podcast. I have a friend in Shaumen, which you might know Shaumen. It's, near Shanghai, south of Shanghai. This one woman and I are talking one day. We're having this great conversation, and I say she says, I gotta take a shower. And I said, no no worries. I'll talk to you in, what, 20 minutes?

And she said, no. I said, what do you mean no? She said, I take a 20 to 15 minute shower every day. And I and I said to her using my righteousness from being a, tier 4, country, and I started to talk, and she slapped me so hard my head is still spinning. She said, don't you come telling me how to live my life. You had this your entire life. You lived in this society. You've had all these opportunities. Now, it's our turn. And the surprise was not that she said it.

I connected a dot and the dot was this. Our media in tier 4 countries, meaning Hollywood, lifestyles rich and famous from Europe or wherever they may be. They've shown a lifestyle that has been led by tier 4 countries for the past few decades. And the Asia Pacific region has seen them. And this was propaganda to a way of life that people could have and should have.

And so the challenge is without being reductive or negative saying you can't have, you can't do, you can't be, you can't this, How do you make them change? I the name of the podcast, The Age of Infinite, infinite possibilities, infinite resources that come from space based thinking, that come from space, that come from thinking like you just did. You can't just throw things out.

So if you wanna take a hot shower for 50 minutes, you might not have the water you take a bath for 50 minutes, you could take a shower. Why can't the device be right next to the tub? It cleans it immediately, sends off a small discharge, But the rest of the shower for the next 40 minutes is like tub water. It's cleaned enough. It's being filtered. Mhmm. But it's a shower that you can have every day.

And that's what you would do if you're gonna take a long shower in another planet is you'd have to figure out a way to be able to have that lifestyle. Yeah. So, we're about to pivot to, you know, to space commission number 3. Yep. So just to wrap on on, you know, mission number 1, you know, I travel around around conferences and ask people, so if it was up to you, what would you fix about this world? What's the what's the most pressing problem? What should we fix?

And as many people that I talk as I talk to, that's how many things I came up with. Yes. I know. So so so rather than say, I'm gonna fix this or whatever or that or whatever I think the biggest problem is, I'm I'm coming at it from a systemic way of thinking about it. Is there's the top down way of thinking about it and the bottom up way of thinking.

And the top down is that we have to make the list of things that need to get done, and we need to get governments to pay attention and say we're gonna solve that problem by 2045, that kind of thing. Where am I getting these this list? I there's a book called Drawdown, and, there's a, group of people that, are called Project Drawdown, and they are they made a list of the 100 things that that we need to do to solve climate change. The 100 things, the most pressing things.

And it it it's like girls' education or that kind of stuff. I mean, it's right in right up there. That would change things tremendously. The number one thing that needs to be fixed, by the way, is not carbon dioxide. It's refrigerants. Yeah. They're right. And so and it's, like, not it's something that we are not even thinking about, because it's not something that we can notice. With climate change, we can watch the climate kick our butts. But with the refrigerants, it's, like, invisible.

Nobody even knows they exist, or that they're a problem. So anyway The US did that thing about 10 years ago or 8 years ago where they shifted for air con air conditioning units. They shifted to a different refrigerant that wasn't as dangerous. Well, it was because of Freon. It was because of the ozone hole. Correct. It turns out that the the new refrigerant that replaced the the the Freon or whatever it was, the hydrochloro Yeah. I don't remember the number.

Carbon whatever they are, Turns out to be a 1000 times worse than than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Really? Yeah. It's it's insane. And So much for so much for politics and science providing It's, like, oh, we did a great thing, and they always look they always point to that, you know, how the world got together, and and stop the o the ozone hole from, from growing as as a as a huge success.

But, you know, like, as long as the cure is not worse than the than the, than the disease, I think we we we can move moving forward. But in that case, the the cure is like, oh my god. When you think about it, internal combustion was the cure for horses, you know, and and so going from methane, which is horses, you know, horses belching and and and and horse manure, basically, how can I say it, turning into methane? Internal combustion is, like, 20 times better than that.

Yeah. And and you can go a lot further. We've made a big improvement, but guess what? Now that we have, like, what, how many 1,000,000,000 cars in the world? Now that's become the problem. We need to have a solution that's 20 times better than that, and we will. And electric electric and hydrogen cars will be that solution. So we're on the way. In a lot of cases, we're already on the way. It's it's happening. The consciousness of people towards climate change is increasing rapidly.

It turns out that we can even get Republicans and Democrats to agree that climate change is the biggest problem that we're facing right now. So, I mean, that's a that's a new thing. So And yet at the same time, I'm part of a few groups. Almost everybody says they're an impact company today. I mean, it's ridiculous. And if you ask the question of how were you measuring solving challenge for impact, they're not the individuals or organizations are not looking upstream.

They're only looking at a few variables downstream, and they're not looking at sideways what impacts they've had to other, value chains at the exact same time. And what if you did look at those, they're no longer doing actually impact. They could be harming something else in the process of doing impact like the Freon example that you just Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, at the end of the day, basically, there's somebody in the world who understands that problem, all of them.

And how do we get those problems to be solved by people? How do we get people to take action? So this is the bottom up approach. I'm, you know, I ever since the the Paris agreement and the fact that the the countries that signed on to the Paris agreement are actually not on track to solving climate or staying within 2 degrees by a long shot.

Correct. So I I don't have the highest hopes for the United Nations to be able to solve this problem, because it's just not how the United Nations work or how countries work. You know, your problem that you mentioned earlier saying, you guys have had it so good all this time, and now it's our turn to have it good. So why are you taking our ability to have the good life by saying that we can't produce carbon dioxide or whatever it is, you know?

I I I've gotta tell you, living in Hong Kong was an absolutely amazing place. It's changed a lot. But one of the things the 1st week I was there or 1st month, don't remember the exact timing, was on the front page of the SCMP, South China Morning Post. There was a picture of the globe, and it said, if the rest of the world lived utilizing the same resources that Hong Kong uses, we'd need 13 additional earths to be able to support it. Yeah. Well, you could say that about any city, I'm sure.

No. What? No. The reason I if you had been to Hong Kong, you would notice that there is a term the every single building was so freezing that you would wear a jacket in the middle of the winter or summer because it was so cold. We actually had jackets for our meetings that we would put on in the middle of the summer and every taxi cab, even during March when it's not that cold, it could be, you know, 20 Celsius or 50, 60. They had the air con on. Mhmm. So, yeah, it's a it's a lifestyle.

And so, yeah, let's get to I believe the United Nations is not the solution. I don't believe governments are the solution. I believe that it's the it's the world. My gamer background and my role playing game back background comes back to, solve this problem. I'm in the process of creating an app, and it's a Yelp for environmental action. So people after I give a speech somewhere, they always ask me, well, so what can I do? And I said, well, I don't know what you can do. I know what I can do.

I can get up here and and try to convince a bunch of people in an audience to do something, but I don't know what your talent is. I don't know what your ability is. I don't know what your desire is. You have to find out what you wanna do.

But giving get you know, after giving that thought, I realized, you know, a lot of people, they might want to do something, and they might be motivated, hey, I'm really gonna do something, but then they just don't get around to it, and they don't know where to start. And so, this is where role playing comes in. So, in a role playing game, you do small things, and you gain points, and you go up a level.

Then, you start doing bigger things, and you gain points, and you go up another level, and then you do bigger things. You become stronger each time. You become smarter. You become faster. Yeah. And so, this is what I wanna do with people. So, the app is like well, I've I've I've asked people to send me. I got I got hundreds of things to do, and I sorted them into categories, and I found a way to to sort them into just 3 categories plus other.

And the 3 categories are energy, which has everything to do with climate change, fossil fuel, transportation, and waste, which is to do with the circular economy, plastic in the ocean, litter, all that, and then nature, and nature is basically, active regeneration of nature. Rebuilding the coral reefs, replanting the forest, the mangroves, whatever it is, putting back putting back what we've taken from nature. Those three categories.

And so the way the way the the app would work is you would start, say, say it's energy. Well, the the the smallest thing you can do, and this a 4 year old can do it, just turn off a light in a room where where there's nobody. So so can I can I add one while we're on the list? Sure. You're gonna have a lot of them. Well, this is one that this one will probably shock you. The guy who invented Siri, I've spoken to him. I don't remember his name off top of my head. I apologize to him.

He now handles, I think, Samsung's, innovation. He did the math of the cables length and energy it takes to post one photograph on a Facebook or an Instagram or something. So it's millions of miles or or kilometers of cable. It's server farms. It's information, not including storing it. To post one image on an app is the equivalent of 3 20 watt light bulbs running for an hour. That's the energy to post one post on your Instagram account.

So if you post 10 today, you could run 3 20 watt light bulbs for 10 hours. That's, that's pretty amazing. Yeah. That's like a that's like, holy cow. I'm the I'm the, honorary consul to the kingdom of the kingdom of the Netherlands to Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Marianas. And so I I keep in touch with what's going on in in the Netherlands, especially when it comes to things like renewable energy.

And, you know, the North Sea is being covered by offshore wind, and so all these fishing villages are no longer able to fish because they're now, their fishing grounds are wind farms. Well, so, you know, how much of an impact in Holland had this wind farm made? And he said, you know what happened. Well, what happened is that because we had the wind farms, the, the electricity became so cheap that companies started locating their server farms. Yeah. In Netherland.

And basically, all of the energy that we produce and all of the offshore wind now goes to power server farms. Blockchain, utilization like Bitcoin. Yeah. Bitcoin. That's the same. Exactly. Oh my god. My Yeah. It's it's running it's running something. It's just insane. So so how do you going to your app, you said turn off light. Mine was gonna be don't make the post. Yeah. Okay. So so it I mean, like, so doing something which is negative Mhmm.

Is generally not something which is, how can I say, sustainable? It's not. So that's why I'm you said turn off light, and I'm I said to myself, oh my god. I mean, I've got a 45 But here's the deal. So so you start off by by picking up a piece of garbage, putting in a garbage can, and you go up a level, and now you're talking about recycling, I don't know, bags of plastic bottles, and and you go to the next level.

And now you're, basically going upstream and and doing beach cleanups with, like, a 100 people. You you go up again, and and and now you're cleaning. I mean, when you think about the things that that need to be done that require larger numbers of people, those are all things that that happen as you go up levels and you become, you know, you gain the status of being somebody who's actually fixing the environment, you're actually doing something about it. You're not just talking about it.

And so the things get bigger, and by the way, it isn't just you doing something, but if you, if your father just so happens to be working for a company that does blah, and you can convince your father to change his company's way, and that would be, like, a huge impact. Not only do you get points for what your father just did, but you can trade your father's account and make him into a freaking hero.

See, I mean, the the challenge that I have, and I'm not picking on your app because I actually have a gaming system that I think that we should talk about, that we're working on for project Moon Hut. When I today, if I measure the amount of food that I ate and the packaging that went with it, It is mind boggling. I mean, it's absolutely mind boggling how much extra material printing, paper, plastic that goes into it. I don't know how easily I can offset that.

Okay. But here let me give you an example. There there is a similar product it's about garbage, and picking up garbage. There's a an app that that deals with that, and you take pictures of the garbage as you pick it up. And it turns out that the number one litter item in the Netherlands is a candy wrapper.

And so a group of people went to the CEO of this company and said to him, do you realize that your plastic candy wrapper for that for for your candy is the number one litter item on the streets of this country? Mhmm. And he he never even imagined that. He never even thought about that. And so he pledged that he was going to make his candy wrappers biodegradable. And within a year, those candy wrappers became biodegradable.

So what I'm saying is that people, once they once they understand that there's an action that they can take, they can organize and take those actions and cause that kind of change. Well, what you what you did though is to me a little bit different is you were able to do data analytics overlaying on top of human behavior, being able to analyze that and be able to come back with an assess a conclusion that could be offered to the company.

So you there was a variety of things that went into it, but it's be it's basically it's like a Waze technology for cars is now you know where all the potholes are. Now you know where all the challenges are, but it's a data game. Yes. And that data is being collected as we go, you know, Pokemon Go showed us that that humans can collect data if you don't rely rely on experts. See, that's why I say Yelp and not Michelin.

Michelin, there's, like, a handful of people that go to a handful of restaurants and tell you that they're the most amazing restaurants in the world. Whereas Yelp, the way it works is everybody goes to a restaurant. They can say something on Yelp and give feedback at to the next people that are making decisions about what restaurants they should go to. Yeah. Now we can do the same thing with companies. You can say, okay, this product is eco friendly or this product is not eco friendly.

I I I have a little system there. Instead of giving a product 5 stars, give it 5 planets if it's eco friendly. And so, the more planets a product has, and this is user generated content, the more people buy that product. So I'm not gonna stay in a hotel that is not eco friendly. So better have 5 planets or I'm not staying in your hotel.

Then it becomes a competition to see see who can book the most eco friendly hotel and all the products become nice and and, you know, there's a feedback loop from the people that are concerned about it to the companies that produce those products. But let me finish about the the app. So the the app, the way the app works is, we collect things to do from, first of all, from NGOs that want things done, like the Sierra Club asked me to write my congressperson to make them do something.

It's just not the kind of thing that I'm I'm going to do, but there might be somebody else who's not a Sierra Club member who's just fine with writing those kinds of letters. The problem is Sierra Club can only talk to the people in their silo. Yeah. Because they they don't share information about about their members with other NGOs, that kind of thing. So here it is. It's a outside of Sierra Club.

If Sierra Club wants something done, they put it inside of the app, and then somebody will pick it up and get points for doing that particular thing. So now they are reaching huge numbers of people. It can be used for by students to, have Friday strikes. It can be used for, you know, anything. Anything that anybody needs to be needs to get done. Well, one source is, of course, the NGOs because they know what they're doing, but another source is just straight up crowdsource.

And then in addition to the crowdsource, we connect things to do or we get celebrities to say, I want you to do this. And if a celebrity, I don't know, Ronaldo says, we need I want you to go and pick up candy wrappers. And then all of his fan pick fans pick up candy wrappers. They're all getting little points for candy wrappers, and Ronaldo's also collecting points for the same thing because he he got them to do it.

So so what I'm saying here is that then it becomes, you know, celebrities, sports figures, musicians, whatever, boys bands, they can get their fans to do things. And and it there's no longer a politics or why am I doing this? It's just, can you please do this for me? And if they do it, then they get points. So now you're now it's a competition between, I don't know, the top movie stars or the top musicians to see who can get the most points.

So I I I I I'd even even imagine that you could have the fans of, like, the New York Yankees versus the box Boston red sox. Who can collect the most points before the next game? You know, that kind of thing. We can compete city versus city or country versus country. I don't care as long as it's good stuff. We just have to vet to make sure that it's not, like, destructive stuff.

That's and again, we go back to we don't know what the challenge is, good versus bad because of, like, the free on example. So let me go back to the title because I think I shared with you one of the things that I focus on is the promise of the title. Thinking bigger and bigger and bigger. What made you decide that this was where or how you are going to put your stake in the ground?

Yeah. It's because I because I looked at what I was doing, and I realized that it isn't going to solve the problem at the end of the day, and I need the problem to be solved at the end of the day. My mission is not to end the use of carbon based fuel in Hawaii. My mission is to end the the use of carbon based fuel in the world. Why? And and the why? Why? Because that's that that is the job. Oh, why? That's what needs to be done. But why? I mean, why why why is it?

Because because otherwise, we're we're giving our our children a crap future. So the reason you're doing it is for your children? I'm doing it for everybody's children. The It's not my children. It's not I I understand that. If you heard our thing, our directive, it is to, to improve life on earth for all species, and we have 6 mega challenges. So I'm asking you, what made you decide that you were going to take on changing it for the rest of the world? Not like a bad thing.

I'm asking you a positive. No. I understand. I understand. So when I started in Hawaii, you know, I remember being on a panel, and a panel of experts, and, this was at IUCN, the International Union For the Conservation of Nature. I was on a panel about renewable energy, and and I said, I'm going to, have Hawaii become 100% renewable by 2,045. And the guy next to me says, oh, I'm an expert in this area. There's no way you can do that.

And and I said I said, well, I'm not as smart as that guy, so I'm gonna do it anyway. So you're not competitive as long as you win. You you are that's the phrase. That's my I've had it since I'm 12. You could borrow it. It is The thing is, you know, like, I I didn't know how I was gonna do it or that I could do it, and now we're on track. But you did it. You got bigger because someone kicked you in the face, slapped you in the face.

Someone said you can't, and you then turned around and said I can. Your first reaction wasn't, I'm gonna do this because my my children, and that's why I'm going to make sure that I could prove this. The first thing was, wait. Wait. Wait. Don't ever say that to me again, because I'm gonna do it, and this is a value to my children. Yeah. I mean, you you can you can you David, you can say that, but that's not how my mind works. Okay. That's why I'm asking. Yeah. So that's what I'm telling you.

My mind just works. Look. If I can do it in Hawaii, which I thought was impossible, why not do it for the rest of the world? Which I think is impossible now, but when I'm done with it, it's it's gonna be you know, somebody's gonna be sitting next to me, so, well, that's impossible. And I said, well, I'm gonna do it anyway. I I I I'm very much like you. I'm not picking on you. I'm trying to figure out how you think. I I think I showed you my book. It's it's it's massive.

It's 297,000 words, took 12 years to write. I mean, I'm I'm driven like you are in different ways, and so I'm asking what's the impetus for you? What's that push? What was that thing that made you say, I need to make sure this is done, and you're telling me you sat next to a guy on a panel. No. And he basically And that's not the reason. That's just an that's just like a symptom. Or It was a cause. It was a connection. It helped you to say, let me look at it. About it.

Well, first of all, I don't yeah. I'm I'm not very good at at at, having tell telling me people having people telling me what I can't do. Yeah. Let me decide what I can't do. You know, you can decide what you can't do. Maybe you can't do that, but I'm gonna do it anyway. That's just the way I feel about it. I know what that that's great.

And I and I think that when we talk about bigger, bigger, and bigger, because we're talking about on Age of Infinite is a pa is achieving a 250 to $400,000,000,000 project. And we're telling individuals who are listening an offering or listening, you know, me too, is that there are possibilities. And the challenge is when someone hears an individual, and I'm not trying to talk to the audience, I'm talking to us.

Is someone hears what you and I say, they often will say to me, yeah, but you're you, you can do it. Oh, no. No. But but David, you you always take on big projects. No. No. But David, David, you don't understand. You know so many people. I landed in Hong Kong. I didn't know anybody. I landed in Hong Kong because my wife and I needed money because the world the 2,009, 10, the crisis was happening and I had to find a place to make money. So I landed in Hong Kong.

I mean, it wasn't anything rocket science. It was like strategically, this is the one. I needed to make money in an opportunity and I flew all the way 25 hours, landed on a shore, and built a business out of it through the Asia Pacific region. Yeah. So so the bottom line is, what I wanna say is, I as a game designer turned publisher or, you know, entrepreneur, if I can pivot and and get Hawaii to end the use of carbon based fuel, which I know nothing about.

This guy knows everything, and I know nothing, and yet I'm doing it. The answer is is that if you wanna do it, just do it. This is not this is not like You have you you have children. Right? Yeah. Okay. Because I know congratulations for your bay your grandchild. You can't just turn to your child and say, do it. It doesn't work. But no. But you can say that to yourself. Okay. That's that the only person the only person that you really 100% have control of is yourself.

You are the one you have to change. You have to you have to ow. You have to be the change you wanna see in the world. I know. I I I personally don't say those types of things to myself. I for thinking bigger. What happens with me is there's a spark. There's something that said there's something that's seen. And I say, Let me I'm going to solve that. I'm going to do that. But I don't say just do it. Somehow I click and it I'm going to say more times than not.

There's a challenge put in front of me where I I'm frustrated with somebody. I'm frustrated with something. I see something and I say this is moronic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're saying you get pissed off and you're gonna do something about it. But, you know, like, what happens to the people who don't get pissed off? I know. That's that's what I'm trying to find. Is there maybe you do something different?

What I'm trying to say is is, you know, when when you play a role playing game, what do you get out of it except that you have a good time while you're playing the game, and you feel good about having a level 52 character? I mean, what do you actually get out of it? You don't get any money out of it? You've wasted a lot of time. It's caused probably a big problem with you and the people that live live in the same household. I mean, what do you get out of it? You get out of it.

You get what you get is you get, like, yes. I did something even though it's it's fake. That's interesting because I just realized when you said that, I have never been a gamer. You just don't realize it. I I don't watch. I don't watch sports. I it doesn't excite me. I wanna play it. Yeah. Ditto. So so I am I wanna be on the field I wanna play, and I don't play video games. Never really have. I would I'd sit around and watch some when they played the games in university, college.

They would have a game in the hallway, and everybody would play with the shooting of the tanks. Excuse me? Did you play sports? Yeah. I was a competitive skier, tennis player, soccer, and I'm a black belt at Taekwondo. Hello? You're just doing something in the real world rather than a virtual world. There's no difference. Yeah. Well, so I think there's a difference. But I don't relate that to and I don't. I'm just trying to think. I don't believe I relate it in terms of the same scoring type?

Like, I don't try to street for I think it's because we don't play video games. People who play video games and and snowboard get the same rush out of doing something amazing in the virtual world or in the real world. And what what's the difference between sports and virtual sports? Sports was invented they they were invented by people a long time ago to make sure that we were physically fit for a lifetime of physical labor. That's what you're preparing for in the old days. And guess what?

These are not the old days anymore. We are preparing ourselves, meaning young people are preparing themselves for a lifetime of mental labor in virtual worlds. And so it's the same thing. They're training for something that they're gonna do in the future. It's just not physical labor anymore. It was were sports actually invented for keeping people in in healthy condition? Really? I I'm I'm I'm just asking a serious question. I mean, why would you do it? I mean, that yes. I just I think so.

I think I think all those activities are useful. They they keep you in in condition. Well, you could say that sports, you know, had to do more with keeping people physically fit so they could fight battles like the old Olympics. Mhmm. You know, the wrestling and boxing and those kind of things.

But, I mean but sports in general, I I I believe that sports in general are physical fitness things when, you know, again, we in in in normal life today, there's not a whole lot of physical labor left for us to do. I I yeah. I know. I understand that today. I'm going back. I I I would probably say that part of it is, competition to win a mate, competition for community, competition for something inside. So, yes, there's a gamification to that. And Yeah. You're you're trying to find a difference.

What what I know what I I'm not trying to find a difference. The way when when I work, I always ask myself the question first. What do I do? Like, what how do I get excited? How do I think something through? And I'm not the guy on the side of a football game or basketball and I've been to them when I was in college. I was second row seats, but I was not the guy jumping and screaming on the side or yelling at the stands. That's not me, But I'm competitive with myself to an unbelievable degree.

Yeah. It's but I mean, computer games are like that. You know, it it today, you could there are video channels where people watch people play computer games. Yeah. I know that. I've seen these things where YouTube, they go and watch a replay. It looks ridiculous. But, I mean, it's it's about as ridiculous as watching someone do you know, watching somebody play golf. Why don't you go out there and play golf yourself? Yeah. I agree. I mean, so we're we're off on a tangent.

Well, that that's okay because I'm trying to get back to the bigger, bigger, and bigger. And so we we got through a new panel of experts, renewable energy, 2045. You were a little frustrated with the guy, and so I'll just to pick it up from there. Yeah. So the so the the bigger, bigger, bigger is is basically I'm starting myself on those 2 areas, the top down, bottom up, and all that, and I'm working on climate change specifically.

But then there are all the other people who are going to contribute things that they want done to the alliance, and those things need to get done too. So it's a mechanism for everything to get done, not specifically this thing or that thing. I'm not creating another silo. I'm leaving it open. This is like an Airbnb instead of a hotel. It's it's where everybody can put whatever they want to get done into a database, and other people can pick those things and do them, and get credit for them.

Hopefully, you know, the the status will get you something. Like, if you're if you're applying to a university, your status in environmental status will have something to do with your placement. You know what I'm saying? There'll be real benefit. Or if a company's gonna hire you, you know, what level are you? And, you know, do you actually give a shit? Have you actually done anything? And and so these kind of things I'm a I'm a, a one k on United.

So when they when we're getting on a plane, I get to get get on first. Whoops. Yeah. I know. Like, such b s because This. I'm I'm, you know, I'm in business class, so there's never a problem putting my roll away, you know, roll on, you know, into the into the bin up above. Yeah. And so what what's the benefit? I get to be on the plane a little bit longer than everybody else? Is that a benefit? So people Well, you also don't get you get priority status so you don't get bumped off a plane.

There's about 6 other things that you get to go to lounge, which makes it easier. So there's a few other perks that go along with it, but that's that's the gamification. Yeah. We need society to have those kind of perks for people who who actually working their asses off fixing this place. Yes. Absolutely. And to that point, it's hard to believe that all these essential workers who we've called essential workers that we've needed when it came to shot distribution.

Why wasn't why weren't all these people at the very front? The people who made sure the food was there or in the grocery stores and everything else. So they were gamified. You're essential. You're important. But they weren't gamified. I don't believe in all places as the priority people when it came to be given shots if they wanted one. Yeah. That's just because there's no central system.

Mhmm. Yeah. So I think that the alliance and getting everybody in the world to do something, to gain status, and have everybody compete to see how much of the environment that they can actually fix, how many trees can they plant, You know, I think that is a interesting metric for people to talk about each other, you know, if you get a job, buy a product, whatever it is, it you should have that that status should be worth something.

And maybe we can even have those points be be Bitcoin points that you collect in 20 your offspring collect in 2045, if we fix everything or when we fix everything. And and I'd I I completely agree with what you're saying. I'm trying to I'm trying to make it bigger in my head, so it's might sound one way. I I think this is I think if we do it right, we this is a way to fix the entire planet.

The that's why I do wanna talk to you about the gamification of what we're talking about because it integrates the sum of what you're doing on a scale in Mearth within the moon earth ecosystem, and how we can gamify Mearth, which would then impact and you said it earlier. You talked about how space is for the circular economy, the gig economy, the shared economy, the resource utilization.

And so when you learn about our more in-depth, you'll be able to see that there's a huge gamification component to it. Yep. By the way Go ahead. Why why MERS and not Mars? It's, because if you that's a very good question. When you look at creating ecosystems or economic systems, we you let's start with the economic system.

You would in the old days, years years ago, someone hop on a boat, let's call it the Nina, the Pitta, the Santa Maria, and it would go to another share shore, would find a place, drop someone off, and come back, leave some people there and say, we'll be back. Maybe they won't. And when they got back, they would say, hey. Hey. Here's a, there's some opportunity there.

So more individuals would open up their wallets, be willing to make this route, and eventually, you create an economic cycle search system that happens. When you think of the moon, the moon is only 3 days away in terms of travel. But if you think of Mars, Mars is an elliptical hitting where you can only reach it within a 2, right now within a period of about 6 to 8 months, and then you're on a a cycle where you're 3 years away to be able to get there and then come back.

So if you were gonna do a round trip, it's at least 3 years with today's technology. You can't make, Mars go faster. No. I understand. I understand. So if you so ours is that with in the space industry, what I found, and again, I'm not a space person, is that people would say, moon, Mars, Pluto, Juke, we're gonna go out. We're gonna go to the galaxies. And I would say, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Let's slow down a little bit.

We have an economic system or an economy that can be created between the moon and earth within Mearth. And that we can trade and bring things back, whether it be platinum or microgravity work that could be creating new products or, low atmosphere conditions. And the Star Trek Enterprise will be built if you were to think in that way, between the moon and earth within Mearth. So we can actually create this land environment, this space, and we can fill that with a full economic system.

And in there, there's, space solar power. There is the ability to be able to expand where we live and even more so, the moon is very much a part of the Earth. We, are the the fact that we rotate the speed that we do, the tidal waves, the tides are dependent on them, animals are dependent on them. So you the next phase is this moon and earth ecosystem. David, you have to tell me this. I'm this is this is the next part of my talk. Okay. Well, I've you asked me.

So so in in that you speak Mars and and and Mars because because, you know, eventually, Mars is probably more capable of of of supporting a, you know, 1,000,000,000 people compared to the moon. Basically, where we have to do I don't know. We there's there's no, no chance that we can turn that we can terraform the moon, but we can terraform the Mars. But that and that's another day and time.

So I ask this question of individuals, and I asked it actually, the first time I ever asked it was at the great giant leap. I said, when will we be on the moon? And at that event, with all these individuals from Buzz Aldrin to you name it, guess when was the date that everybody gave? I know. You were you were standing there. I remember. It was I say I say 2030. Okay. That is the date that everybody believes, and you're right.

So if we're gonna be 2030, that's the date that almost everybody or beyond. They would go further 2035, 2037. Yeah. If you look at timelines for the fact that on earth today, today, the day this is being done, February 27, 2011, there is not a human rated rocket on the planet that can get to the moon. It's not saying it won't happen in a month or 2 or 3, but there's not one that get us to the moon.

So if we use timeline thinking and we just measure out experience, opportunities, shipping of, tons of materials that have to go, the moon is right around the corner for creating a new ecosystem. And that's where 2030, if you're saying we're going to terraform the moon or we're on Mars and we're gonna have a 1000000 people on Mars, we're talking so far in the distance, the moon is right here to give us what we need for Earth. The moon is right here.

You no. Look. Look. Let's let's let's go step by step on mission number 3. Okay. I'm here. I'm here for you. Mission number 3 is to make a make a backup of life. Okay. As far as we know as far as we know, we have no evidence of life having existing or having existed anywhere else. I mean, this is what we're trying to figure out with, you know, on on, Mars right now. Has there ever been life on Mars? Yeah. But as far as we know, there's no life anywhere else.

And we have evidence that that, things come from space and do major damage. You know, like like the rock that killed the dinosaurs, which wasn't a very big rock. Came from space, hit this planet, and wiped out the dinosaurs. If that rock hit this planet today, we would be gone. Yep. I mean, all of our food sources would be destroyed, you know, blah blah blah, we would be gone. And so, I can I can foresee a, a major whatever? It's called existential. Existential.

Yeah. So, you know, event of biblical proportions where life gets snuffed out. Yeah. If we have life living on another planet, the odds of that happening goes down to 0. We've already figured that out. And so, I, coming from the computer game industry, you know, like, if if my programmer came to me and said, you know, I've been working on this game for a year, and now my I fragged my hard disk, and I I I Where's your backup? Backup. You are so fired.

And and and I might even turn to the CEO and said, are you serious? You didn't back up all these c these other drives? Yeah. So so so and and and now basically I I kind of feel that this is the reason we exist. Now people ask me why do I want to go to other planets, and and I say okay, this planet, look at life on this planet. It's a very thin skin around this entire planet. Let's give it a name, mother nature. I think what's going on right now is mother nature is pregnant, and we are it.

We are the way mother nature makes a backup, makes a child, makes another mother nature on another planet. We are the way. And, yes, she's having morning sickness, and she's getting a fever, and she's gonna make it really uncomfortable until we finally decide, yeah, we gotta go. And when we go, then all the pressure of When we go, mother nature's gonna say, finally got rid of that coronavirus human.

I think I think that that when we go, because we can't survive without the rest of Mother Nature, that we will bring life as we know it with us. And then it gives it a start in another place. This is really the reason we exist. You should there there are a bunch of podcasts where this thing goes without saying on the Age of Infinite. One from the I just shared with you before we got on.

Alex Leyendecker did a phenomenal, phenomenal, phenomenal job in a category I was always interested in, which was since the space thing he is. He said that if we don't solve sexuality and reproduction and we have not solved that, there's no way we can go to any planet and survive. And he goes over radiation radiation challenges, the, challenges with where the sperm, if the egg will, adhere to the wall, the challenges with all of these things are so far from being solved that's unbelievable.

Yeah. That's one way of looking at it, and the other way of looking at it is there are people that are thinking about this right now. I mean, stem cells, you know, cure for cancer. If we if we can cure cancer, basically what we're doing is we're taking cells that are malfunctioning, which is radiation radiated cells, and we're getting rid of them and and replacing them with with cells that are working.

All I'm saying is it's a great podcast to listen to for this one challenge, because it was a question I had is, how do we ensure that the human species, if it leaves, if it goes off planet, the interview answers, it's a 4 and a half hour interview. And he did a brilliant job of really explaining tech on the biology side and the cultural, sociological, scientific side. So just one you should listen. When was this conference, the Great Giant Leap?

2015. I'm almost well, I can actually look up when did I meet you. I no. I didn't create you at the sign. It was, I think, 2015 is when it was. I'm almost positive. 15. Okay. So, HiSeas actually predates that then. HiSeas, I have a, I I got involved because I was involved in in space exploration, moon, Mars, whatever. There was a project that was coming together, which was a cooperation by the University of Hawaii and NASA to test long term missions on Mars.

And HI SEAS stands for Hawaii Space Exploration, Analog, and Simulation. And, so the idea was to, sequester 6 people in a dome that was like a Mars habitat, for long periods of time, if they and and see how they work if they go crazy. So, kind of thing. So, I got involved because, 4 months before the first crew showed up, NASA and the University of Dubai figured out that neither of them could own a habitat.

So the head researcher on bended knee came to my door and said, can you please own a habitat? We will rent it from you. And I said, if I'm gonna own a habitat, it isn't going to be a piece of shit. And the reason is because, you know, all of the other habitats in the world are these these low budget, slapped together, terrible condition, like, I don't understand.

If you're gonna send somebody to Mars, they better have some seriously comfortable digs, you know, because I think that that the psychology of being cooped up with with 5 other people kind of requires you to think a little bit about creature comforts. Yeah. And so we we basically trashed their threw out their design, we we spent a month working on a new design. In 3 months, we had the thing built. The, paint was still drying when the first crew arrived.

Now, we did 5 missions, 4 months, 4 months, 8 months, 12 months, and 8 months. During a mission, 6 people stay in the habitat, they go outside, they wear a space suit. If they communicate with the outside world, we delay that signal 20 minutes each way as if Mars is on the other side of the sun. Okay. Yep. Mars is from 4 minutes to 24 minutes. So it spends a lot of time out there in the 20, 24 minutes. And so we did that for 5 years.

And, so we learned a lot, NASA learned a lot, crew selection, don't don't get, you know, weed out these narcissistic people, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Well, actually, that's what yeah. That's very important. Yes. That's very important. And so at the end of the 5 years, basically, I took over, and my theory is that we gotta go to the moon first before we start thinking about going to Mars. Yeah. So that's, I mean, obvious. So I just I just looked it up, by the way.

November 7th to 11, 2014. 2014. Yeah. That's You were so much younger then. No. Thank you. No. So was it was then and yes, I believe the Mars Moon is the next step. It's not the it doesn't have to be the end game. No, of course not. We can create an economic, we call it the Mearth ecosystem and the Mearth economic system. And that can be a full functioning ecosystem. No. Absolutely. Well and it can be it can be okay. So here's something about, earth based colonies.

No colony on earth has ever survived that depended on resupply from the home country. Mhmm. And so when we build a moon base, if we're gonna survive if that colony is gonna survive, it has to be able to survive on its own without resupply. And that's the objective. Okay. Okay. We have to grow our own food. We have to recycle all of our material. Anything new that we want, we have to be able to get it from from the moon. We we can't wait for resupply.

Mhmm. Eventually, we're gonna have to be able to make our own chips. Correct. For now. So, to figure this out, I I did another great giant leap, another conference in Hawaii. It was the, International Moon Base Summit, and I I brought luminaries from all over the world, including Buzz Aldrin, by the way, to my I had 75 people from all over, and we basically, I broke them up into little groups and had them, figure out when, where, how, what, you know, about a moon base.

And that's sort of the basis from which I am my plan internal my my mental plan comes from that gathering. And so we And you didn't invite me, so I'm insulted 6 years later. I'm sorry. I didn't even know who you were. I know. You're you're standing next to me. You don't even remember me. We we only invited smart people. Ah, yes. Of course. Oh, touche. Yeah. I did I obviously didn't show my the best side of me. Whatever. So I So I I do agree with all you're saying.

The one thing that I would I not it's not a disagreement. It's that whether it's Mars or moon, but let's talk about the moon. One of the advantages of the ability of being on the moon is that we can create the be 3 days away. Someone gets sick. If you need to get something, we could send it based upon timing and and capabilities of rockets. But the other part of this is that today, all most expeditions are about science, research, exploration going on.

Project Moon Hut, its focus is to create an earth and space based ecosystem. It is to drive that ability to sell to create. So the first thing we have is a box with a roof and a door a moon hut. And the second is an industrial park, where products and services will start to be manufactured that could be used on the moon, and on earth. So we actually don't go to exploration as our our science as our secondary approach for being on the moon.

It's the the construct is all about how do we create an efficiency, not a completely self sufficient, but an efficient ecosystem immediately. Yeah. I mean, you you can you can try to get it right, and they try to get it right in the in Biosphere 2. Mhmm. A good friend of mine, in fact, he's working I'm the chairman of another organization called Pisces, the Pacific International Space Center For Exploration Systems. I'm not writing that, by the way. Rodrigo Romo, Pisces.

Yeah. Rodrigo Romo runs it, and he spent 6 months in in Biosphere 2. And, you know, there was a lot of lessons learned. They tried to grow food in soil, and they tried to maintain all these ecosystems, and basically, 8 people spend all of their time growing food, and they were always hungry. Yes. That's not a formula for success if you're gonna build a a, you know, a moon base.

You you need to you need to, like, spend, I don't know, 10% of your labor on on growing things, and the rest has gotta be doing other things. Now, what are the other things? Yeah. We we can try to guess what what the other things are. You mentioned, you know, that building things, and so on and so forth. That's manufacturing, which is very interesting, you know.

Sure. Space anything you wanna man manufacture for space, for going anywhere, should be manufactured on the moon, and then and sent and lifted off the moon, because it's much cheaper to lift stuff off the moon. Correct. But here's what here's the thing, you know, I'm I'm again, I used to be in the gem business. I think, and I don't know this of course for a fact, but we've only only scratched the very surface of the moon. We haven't really found out what's inside the moon. No, we haven't.

We actually, that's a question I asked a long time ago when it was Daniel Faber who said to me, David, we've never dug on the moon. We we we've never dug on the moon. We don't even know if we can dig on these planets because first of all, with so it's low gravity that if you pushed, you're gonna be pushed backwards. So you'd have to create new technology for it. And there's a woman from Rebecca from a company by the name of Search Plus.

She's an architect and, and a material science or, fabrics type person, and her name is Rebecca Pales Friedman. And she was the one who said we might not be able to actually dig the way we anticipate on any planet outside without the type of gravity that we have here. So now we don't know. Oh, no. No. I I that's nonsense. I mean Well, the challenge it was Daniel Faber. You you probably know the name. He was the guy who said, David, we and Daniel Faber is I he's very well known. He sent me down.

He said, we don't know if we can dig on the moon. We've never done it. We don't know how We've never done it. Okay. But I mean, that's just an engineering channel. Yeah. No. But that my point is the timeline. It's about timeline. Can we solve it? Yes. But we have never done it. So it's an assumption that we can do these things. That's all my point is. Not that we can't solve it. I know what you're saying. I know what you're saying, but I I know people who are working on exactly that. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And I had a guy on the phone from Japan who's been working on this for about 10 years, and he was introduced to me as one of the foremost people in the industry. And I let him speak for probably an hour going over everything. And I said, okay, so when you break it, are you putting into a crusher and then do you break it down from a primary to secondary? And how do you do this and how do you do this and how do you this? What are you talking about? I said, I ran a rock quarry.

I got 22,000 tons of stone. You can't answer any question that I have. Okay. So off world is figuring this stuff out? Yeah. They're trying. Absolutely. Yeah. Off world. They're already mining on earth. Yes. Yes. So does that mean that they'll be the people to do it often? That they'll be, but but, you know, they them or they or someone like them will do this.

What I'm trying to say what I'm trying to say in general is the first the first wave of what we do on the moon is is exploration and science. That's the first wave. The second wave is is mining. We're gonna find things on the moon that don't exist on earth. Number 1, there's nothing on earth that was created in a vacuum. Mhmm. And we have a planet with a surface area the size of Africa that has that has that has everything that we have on earth, but it was formed in a vacuum.

You can't tell me that the stuff is the same. No. It's actually not because we already know that it was an an asteroid that hit the Earth at a very high speed No. What I'm saying what I'm saying is, like, the lava flows that that all Right. You know, the surface of the moon was liquid, rock at some point. Yes. Now when you get take liquid rock rock and and and crystallize it on Earth, you get something. When you crystallize it in a vacuum, you get something else.

Yeah. Yes. We we don't know what's completely there. We do know certain things are there. And not only that, but there was a period of time, 3 and a half 1000000000 years ago, when the earth and moon were bombarded by asteroids. That's what all those giant craters are all about. And the stuff that landed on earth has been subducted and eroded. We can't find it anymore, but on the moon, it's still all there. Yeah. Anything that we would wanna go to an asteroid for is on the moon already. Correct.

So we can just drive to it. Yep. I agree. We we're in agreement. The moon the the moon gives us. Yeah. Exactly. So, and then and then the third one, of course, is is, is tourism. It's people wanting to have 1 6, people who can't walk anymore can walk again. Or people can have, a one sixth gravity sex, or god knows what what they're going to invent. We're gonna invent, you know, flying.

I mean, if you read the Heinlein stories, you you can fly on the moon because your your weight to whatever muscle ratio means that you can actually fly if you if you give them artificial wings. So, I mean, there's a lot of things we could do on the moon that you just can't do on on Earth. And your your question about, you know, having babies and all that Yeah. That's something else that's gonna be solved because you'll be able to create using you could build a city that's partially centrifuge.

In other words, you can create a city that's 1 g by It's it's it's not that and I've asked Lynn Harper was the first person I met at NASA Ames, and She's one of the people. Lynn Harper. Yes. And she was one of the first people I met at Ames. And a good someone who's done a podcast is Rauta Abramovich. But when I spoke with Lynn, and she's also in the in this category, I spoke with Lynn, and I'm asked this question the very like, the second day I was there.

And she said, David, cells probably won't reproduce properly. They won't they won't divide properly. And there were a series of of activities that she went over. So it's not something that we're close at all, my point. We will solve it one day, but today in 2021, we are very far away from solving that dilemma, which was just what Alex Leyendecker went over. And we had, what's her name? Sonia Schleppler. She went over and these categories.

And then we had someone talk about, the name escaping me at the moment, that in space, how we're dying, how rapidly we die. So we've had a few of these conversations and it's just for me an eye opener because I had never thought about the challenges and how dire they are. So yes, we can solve them one day and and that's one reason we're doing chips in space, so that we can solve the challenges on Earth in microgravity. So let's hope.

Yep. So, my plan, and I formed as a result of the the moon based summit that I had, the International Moon Base Alliance, main an International Moon Base Alliance is basically a bunch of people, companies, whatever that are gonna bring build a moon base on the moon by 2030. Here's what's going on in the world. You've got all these billionaires building airplanes, and no one's building airports. What is wrong with this picture? No no airport, no airplane.

Mhmm. And so if you if you're gonna have a rocket that lands on the moon more than once, it's going to have to have a place to land. Otherwise, it's gonna destroy everything around it when it lands. Yes. When on the on the moon, when when you when you land or take off, the the dust and rocks under your rocket go ballistic, and there's nothing to slow them down. It just keeps going until it hits something.

So if you've got any kind of infrastructure anywhere near that rocket, it's gonna be blasted out of existence. So so basically, we need to build landing pads, first of all, and then we need to build facilities for people to stay and and and work once so the Starship, you know, I talked to SpaceX guys. They said they can land me a 150 tons on the moon by 2024. Give them an extra year, say it's only a 100 tons. That is still a crapload of of payload. Yes. And so what are we gonna send up there?

Is it gonna be ISS style, you know, little capsules? And the answer is maybe in the beginning that's what it'll be, but pretty soon we're gonna have to be building larger struct robotically building larger structures, and that's the part of the thing that I'm working on right now. The long term goal is to use in situ resources, to be able to create a kind of lunar concrete. I think, if we don't find a clever way of blocking radiation, we're all gonna be living underground.

And so the mining, will not only produce mining materials, but it would also produce space for us to live underground. You know, if you go, I don't know, I don't know, 10, 20 meters underground, you now no longer have a fluctuation temperature problem. Yep. And you And we're talking just so someone's listening. They're called lava tubes. It's what No. No. No. No. No. I You're not talking a lava tube? I have lava tubes, near high seas. I've gone in through into lava tubes through, skylights.

This is a hard thing to do. It is not easy to get in and out of a lava tube. So you're saying that we would dig 20 to 30 meters underground? I would say that we'll be mining for something. This is how they mine for opals in in Lightning Ridge and and the Mooka in in Australia. If you remember that scene where in in Star Wars with a floating car, Luke Skywalker floats up to the outside of this hole in the ground, and the people are walking downstairs.

Yeah. That hole in the ground is and is is in Australia. When they dig for the OPAL, the spaces that they dig, they live in those because it's a 140 degrees, on the surface. And by living down there in the places where they they net it down to reasonable temperatures. So living underground is the way to go. I mean, we we we say, oh, people don't wanna live underground and this and that and the other thing.

But, like, if you look at where people have actually lived on this planet, people live in in in ice huts, in snow huts, in in the Arctic Circle for Christ sakes. They have babies in them. What what different you know, you live underground. You go out when you're done when you need to, and you stay inside when you're not. But it's not like you're gonna go to the beach, on Tuesday.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm so the first thing that the that the Moonbase Alliance is doing is we're actually building a dome, and an airlock, and it's the dome is sort of like what what we think is a building block for a Moonbase. Once you have a structure that you can build robotically and build a bunch of them and tie them together, now you have working spaces. And hopefully, we'll get to the point where we can build larger ones where we can actually start growing food.

But the food has to be managed robotically as well. We can't have people growing food. It has to be robots growing food. We we learned that in The Martian. Right? Didn't we learn that in The Martian? Learned from a science fiction movie. You know, the the the Martian, they're on their way back from Earth back to Earth, and they change their mind and go back to Mars. That's not how it works.

No. What I mean is the the whole thing collapsed on them, and they they didn't have robots taking care of their, plants. Didn't they? Did they? On the Marsha? We don't remember. I don't think they I don't think they had plans. I didn't think they had robots. You. Yeah. But science fiction is entertainment at the end of the day. It's also inspiration.

So, so anyway, the the bigger side of that of of the moon base, alliance is that we're actually gonna build a moon base on the moon, by the end of the decade. That's the idea. I think if I have a 100 tons going to the moon, I can build an amazing moon base. So what's what's the cost of your moon base? It's okay. So so what is the cost of, I don't know, the World Trade Center? I mean That that you can figure out the cost. Yeah. I mean So what's the cost?

See, have you done the math, feasibility study and said, okay. I estimate. No. No. It it it's the other way around. This is not how Elon is thinking either. If you ask NASA, they'll tell you, well, it costs us about $40,000,000,000 to build the ISS, so we're talking about probably $80,000,000,000. Fast forward, in today's dollar, that's probably, I don't know, $200,000,000,000. Mhmm. Something like that. Mhmm. It's like, yeah.

Sure. If you do it that way, if you get NASA to do it I'm not saying NASA, you've gotta be saying to yourself, we have to have rockets go up. There's gonna be a cost to getting the rockets up. There's going to be some things you hadn't thought about. There's a cost structure to this. Of course, there is. But you start with a vision. And then you I understand we we I know the vision. I just heard it. So when you laid out your vision, is this a 200, a $350,000,000 project?

Is it a $500,000,000 project? I I think it's I think it's probably a $100,000,000,000 project. Okay. I asked that only because I watched something recently and people are planning on doing, and I won't name it because people would know, they're planning on doing something very large in space. And when you do everything and you look at the bottom number, they're raising $1,000,000. And there is no way with a $1,000,000 that you're gonna be able to do Of course not.

But Yeah. But but that's these are there there are people associated with this project who gave a number, and I would say I just looked at it and I'm not a space person. I said, come on. So that's why I asked. That's the what what are you thinking? Yeah. But it depends on on on, you know, where do you say you're done? You say, for a $100,000,000,000, we can probably build something that that can hold, I don't know, a 100 people. Yeah. And then we have a moon base. I mean, we have a presence.

A $100,000,000,000 if, for example, the Space Force Force gets involved, they could pay for the whole thing. Yeah. Absolutely. You know? And and if you look at at at the way it works in in Hawaii, we have an international airport that shares runway with the, Hickam Air Force Base. So the air force, they they share fuel, they share infrastructure, the the military guys have their their own space, and then the civilian have their own space, and they live together, and it works just fine.

If the if that if there is a need for military in space, that would be a way to use them. And most colonies in the past, I wanna say, military was involved on some level. In the in the pretimes, yes. Absolutely. There was there was some form of military or protection with them. Mhmm. So it's for Yeah. We have this we have this discussion. I'm I'm open lunar, and we have this discussion about what are the rules for doing things on the moon.

And I said, like, dudes, the the the Chinese just poured a bunch of concrete on a rock in the ocean and say that's our land. Yeah. And this is this is a well established, set of rules about what is a rock and what is an island, and whether, you know, whether there's territory involved or not. It it has to exist, when it's high tide.

It has to still exist, or or it's not a it's not a thing, and so you can add concrete to a to a rock that that that is submerged at at high tide, and and so it's above high tide all the time. But they they break those rules, and who's, you know, try and stop me. And I think the same thing's gonna happen on the moon. Are we gonna fight a war on earth because somebody broke some rule on the moon? I don't think so. I I like the model of international airports.

When you go to an international airport, no matter where you are in the world, once you're in the airport, you're sort of in international territory. Yep. You know, you you everybody just looks at each other, and they don't think about, oh, that's such and such a nationality. Everybody uses the same toilets and uses the eats in the same restaurants and buys the same, the luxury goods. And so That's only when when they look at us. When they look at you, then, you know, they're kinda questioning.

Who's a I'm joking. I'm joking. I know you're trying to do your best here. I get it. No, I agree with you. The international airports are, in essence, it's a limbo. You are not in one country or another. That's the way it should be on the moon. That's exactly what a moon base should be like. That's a that's exactly what the moon base you should drop your nationality when you get to the moon. Why have a nationality? What do you need it for?

It's surprising because when you wherever you go, you bring your culture, your nationality, your your all of those things with you. You can't help it. So you bring your you believe your non or religious beliefs, you bring your norms, you bring your sexuality, and those all come with you no matter where you go. Have you ever been to Burning Man? I have not been to Burning Man. Okay. Well, then you then you don't know what you're talking about. But you still bring who you are with you.

Oh, you become somebody else. Okay. You yes. You can. And that's what the hope is. That's one of the dreams of many people in the space industry. That is in fact what happens. Everybody gets indoctrinated when you get to Burning Man. No garbage allowed. You you have to, do gifting. There's no money exchange. You can't advertise anything.

There's a whole bunch of rules, and they're just different from normal society, and people from all over the world get together in this place, and you lose your nationality. You just become creative, whatever it is. So what I'm saying is it's possible to create a culture, in another place and have everybody adopt that culture. Hawaii is like that, by the way. People come from all over the place. You know? I I lived in Japan. My children, grew up in Japan.

They're all they're culturally Japanese, but they're always gonna be foreigners in Japan. Mhmm. Yes. Because that's Japan. Yes. Okay. In Hawaii, there are no foreigners. Mhmm. That's just the way it is. Everybody just assimilates and and and chills and becomes locals. You don't even have to speak the language, and you still assimilate to the culture of Hawaii. Hawaii is a great place. Yes. And so I think Hawaii That's where we met. Yeah. Well, there you go.

I'm just saying I'm saying Hawaii is the culture that needs to be exported to the moon and exported to the rest of the world, if you ask me. So mission number 4. Yes. Mission number 4. Find out how the universe ends and do something about it. So why the hell do I have this, mission? I asked myself this question. Why? It's like, you gotta be kidding me. What the hell are you thinking? And, you know, I don't know where this mission comes from.

Maybe some future space alien realized that the that the inflection point for saving the universe is happening now, and they need to communicate with somebody in the past, and I'm and they chose me. And you're the one. Yes. I'm the one. It's like, gee, thanks, you know. You're like Matthew McConaughey as a conduit behind the walls.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I have had this conversation with, like Buddhist reincarnations, you know, to see what what, you know, how does the universe end, and they generally say it gets real hot. I think that that tradition is about our solar system. If you think about, you know, what is the universe? Their definition of the universe could barely be the sun or or or or earth. So they didn't understand galaxies and all that.

That's interesting that you say real hot because what I have heard is the galaxy will eventually go dark and cold. No. Of course. I'm what I'm saying is that the Buddhist think that. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So they so they're obviously their their definition of the universe is different from ours. I I crowdsource this on Facebook, by the way. I said, anybody out there know anything about, the universe? You know? I'm I'm trying to figure out how the universe ends here.

And Facebook has all the answers. Of course. I'm gonna Yelp this, this, conversation as what was I give the Yelping for this when we go down this path? Anyway anyway, so one of my Facebook friend raises his hand, and says, yeah. I know something about this. Do you remember who I am? I said, and I said, yeah. You're the younger brother of my high school girlfriend. And well, he said, good on you for remembering who I am.

He says, do you remember that little fortune teller lady that stayed at your house? And I go, yeah. She said I was she saw me in Antarctica, which I thought was ridiculous. By the way, I've been to Antarctica with my entire family, so that actually came true. What she said about him was that he was gonna study abroad and become a great scientist. And we, you know, we laughed about both of those things.

And he ended up, studying astrophysics at Oxford, and now he's a tenured professor of cosmology at Columbia University. So he does know something about something. And he said, oh, by the way, we're coming to Hawaii next February. This is already many years ago. And they had a conference just like our conference where I met you. This is a cosmologist conference, and I'm like, oh my god. My dream come true. I said, okay.

On Monday, you're coming to my house, we're gonna we're gonna have dinner, and we're gonna talk old times to get our personal shit out of the way. On Tuesday, you're bringing me 25 of the most interesting cosmologists, and their spouses, whatever. I'm gonna feed them, I'm gonna get them drunk, and we're gonna talk about the end of the universe, which is what we did. And so I've I learned all about dark matter and dark energy, and so on and so forth. So I actually have time.

They said their biggest conclusion of that gathering was, like, you should call us back together in about a decade and maybe Wait. Wait. Did you just say you have time? Yes. Okay. I just I was gonna hit the mic like that. Did I actually hear that he feels like he has time? Okay. So we do have time. In other words, the universe isn't ending next week because Okay. You know, the reason I was thinking if the universe ends next week, then why am I working on all these other missions? Right.

We we pack it up and, do something, and it's okay. Have fun.

But but actually actually, the, you know, what's going on in the universe compared to what's going on this tiny ass planet, or even our planet, and the moon, and Mars is I mean, the scale is so ridiculous that all these things that we're talking about that are hard things to do, like fixing this environment, ending climate change, taking all the plastic out of the, all those things are just gonna be like small mentions in the history books in the future. Oh, they're gonna be mentioned.

Yeah. Like in like the industrial revolution. And then we invented, steam engine. Oh, and then we invented the cotton gin, and then we did this, and then we invented the container, so we no longer lead it in longshoremen. Then we had automatic driving cars. All these things just happened. They're like small things in history, but they were not small things at the time. They were huge things.

Yep. And so what I'm trying to say is that all the things that I'm doing, even though they sound like they're big or bigger or huge, whatever, they're still tiny compared to the scope of time and the scope of space and the scope of human imagination. So I'm not doing a big thing. I'm actually doing a tiny thing. It just may seem big to people who don't think that way. So but I I I've gotta bring you back. You wrote, figure out how the universe ends and to do something about it.

So did you figure out how the universe ends? And you're doing a small thing, but what are you doing about the universe ending? So, so first of all It's your bullet point. No. I know. It's my bullet point, and I and I gotta own it. And, you know, I, myself, haven't figured it out. I Okay. You know, we we, we have, possibility of figuring out what dark matter is in maybe the next decade or 2. But nobody at my in the group thought that we would ever figure out what dark energy is.

Yeah. But I mean, these these these are things that we now think we don't know anything about. Then there's a breakthrough. Absolutely. When somebody discovers relativity, or quantum theory, or, you know, something like that, which shakes everything else up. You know, we we could be wrong about our calculations. We could we could find out that, in fact, we are that the universe's, expansion is not accelerating, or that there's matter being generated somewhere.

Maybe dark matter is matter in a parallel universe that has gravity in ours, but not not matter in our universe. And and maybe maybe we can get some matter from the other. Who knows? I have the we had on Howard bloom, you might know the name. And he started his podcast from the beginning of time. And we went through all of this and it always is a challenge, first of all, to go back 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of years and then to go forward 1,000,000,000 of years.

So yeah, these are questions that we are not we believe we're sure of, but we might find out in 10 years or 20 years that we were completely off. Yeah. So so, you know, the one of the things that they they said, the cosmologists said, if you asked us 30 years ago, we would have told you that we know something about something. But today, we can we can be very, how can I say, sure that we know nothing about anything? You know, and it's yes.

So to get to to do so let's take this other half of it then so that we have figured out that you, we don't know how the universe ends. And I'm almost well, I can't say positive that I won't be around because we don't know what will happen to the transfer of cognition to neural nets and capability of keeping a human consciousness alive in a an alternative form. So we cannot say that you I you're a little bit older than I am.

So the timeline all comes down to how lucky we are to make it to that point with the health and technology merge to a place to keep someone alive longer. The second part, to do something about it. Is there something besides what you're doing that is related to the universe ending that you're doing? No. I'm just in the research stage. Love that. Sorry, I haven't really gotten far into that one, but I it's a good ending. Yeah, so, so, just a brief story of of how the the story of Black Onyx Okay.

Which is the my first game. I there's actually a story that surrounds it. So you, are a young man on a on a planet, an earth like planet, and, on this planet, there is a tower that contains, I don't know, all these guardians, and inside the inside the tower is this object called the black onyx. What is the black onyx? And you've you in your travels, you find an old blind man who turns out to be the last of the, like, the Norse gods.

That they were supposed to be immortal, but they, little by little, got bored and killed themselves, and there's only one left. And he gave his, he gave up his eyesight so he could see the future. And what the what the Onyx is is is, a previous race of super beings figured out that the universe was going to there's too much matter in the universe, and it was gonna collapse.

And so what they did is they they brought together a whole bunch of super massive black holes, and they created a shield around them, neutralizing them. Now, in neutralizing these, of course, if you if you were to, like, immediately take away, a third of the mass of of the universe, that probably causes a gravity wave of whatever biblical proportions. I would say even bigger than that because biblical just means our planet. Yeah. There you go. How do you know?

Well, I I I'm I'm gonna take a guess that everything that's in the bible is on planet Earth. Okay. Alright. Alright. So so, basically, what he what he does, he the the black onyx is this thing that couldn't con that contains, like, a third of the mass of the universe. And there's all kinds of theories about what the black onyx is among the people. They think it's a object with magical powers, or who knows? And so there's this this whole competition about who gets the black onyx.

But he looks into the future, and he and he sees there is a future in which humans try to figure out what it is, and they put it in something like the Hadron Super Collider, and they knock out one of the vertices of the Onyx, and it collapses. And therefore it creates the end of the it's Ragnarok. Yeah. That's that's what Ragnarok is.

So your job as the young man is to take it to the other side of the planet, and there's a stargate on the other side of planet, and you dial in a random number, and chuck it into the stargate, and what happens is it gets sent into the Oort Cloud, and it takes humanity another, I don't know, most x millennia to find it. When they finally find it, they're smart enough not to punch a hole in it. So they they don't have 5 of these that they distribute around the world.

It's out of the universe, it's 1. Yeah. It's it's 1. And and I'm just going to what is it? The Avengers where the Yeah. But then my my my game my story was blown up because the the universe is expanding, not contracting anymore. So it's like, damn. I have to make a new story. Oh, I I I don't, think in these ways. So it's always amazing when someone has the ability to be creative in this vein and to take things in in these, in these directions.

So, yeah, it's, so we are going to, we're going to last for a few. We're not gonna be blown out of the universe, hopefully, and we won't have the the massive biblical proportions happening. Yeah. Hopefully. I mean, we're in a we're in a biblical proportion event right now, and we're the cause of it. So but it's happening so slowly that we don't notice it, by and large. But it's gonna speed up, and we're gonna do something about it. That's why we're here. So, this has been fun.

It definitely went in a different direction than I would have thought, and I the the guests don't know this. I don't say this that often the people listening in don't know this. The guests do, is that I don't know. I gave you, we came up with a title, and you decide what this is about. And you determine your own bullet points. You determine your own direction. So I people are are how does this work? I said, I don't know. I don't know what, Hank is gonna talk about.

And they're fun because they're engaging, and you took us on a journey that I had not thought you would take us on. So this is all great. Yes. And I enjoyed every minute of it. This is kind of yeah. It's a conversation worth having. You know, everybody should have their have a story and, have a chance to tell their story. The challenge is that podcasts or interviews are often not, they're not conversations. In the same vein, they're the guest come the host comes with their initiative.

The guest comes with theirs, and you're there's a battle often. I'm not saying all of them, but there's a battle of the story and who's the lead. I I come here to learn from you. I do challenge, but I come here to learn from you. And that's it. That's number 1 is I wanna hear a different perspective. I wanna be challenged, challenging my own thoughts. And you did that today and that and I appreciate that. Well, thank you.

So, a for all of you who are listening in today, I wanna thank you for taking the time to listen in. And I do hope that you learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Once again, the Project Moon Hut Foundation is where we're looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon. A moon hop. Name came again from NASCA NASA through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem.

Then to take those endeavors, the paradigm shift thinking, the innovations, and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Now, Hank, what's the single best way for people to connect with you? Oh, the single best way for people to connect with me? It's Yeah. [email protected]. Okay. [email protected]. Yeah. And I too would like to connect with anybody who's interested. You could reach me at david@project [email protected].

We're changing that because we've got both URLs. There's you can connect at Project Moon Hut, or at Goldsmith for me. There's LinkedIn and Facebook. We've got our Project Moon Hut on there. And we're in the next few weeks, we'll hopefully have a brand new website up. The team in Germany is doing an awesome job, so you'll be seeing that. So I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.