Salim Ismail - Co-Founder and Chairman of OpenExO

Colbert Cannon: Welcome to Season 10 of the HPScast. I’m your host, Colbert Cannon. If you’re new to the pod, HPS is a global investment firm. We manage over $100 billion in assets for a broad range of institutional and individual investors. That capital is invested across private credit and public credit strategies. Each week, I sit down with key relationships to, partners of, and friends of the firm to learn from their experience, ask how that experience shapes their current roles, and give insights into HPS and how we operate.

So with that, let’s bring in our guest. Our guest this week is a serial entrepreneur and business builder, a futurist of the highest order, and a multiple time bestselling author. I’d call him a renaissance man, but that seems too backward looking of a term for this gent.

He attended Waterloo University and spent time as a consultant early in his career before finding his true passion as a founder and investor in digitally disruptive businesses. He’s the founding Executive Director of Singularity University and Co-Founder and Chairman of OpenExO, which, as he would describe it, is a global transformation ecosystem connecting professionals with organizations who want to build a better future through cutting edge ideas and actionable methodologies. He’s also a board member of XPRIZE, a fascinating nonprofit that offers public competitions with material cash prizes to incent technological breakthroughs for the benefit of all of us.

We were lucky enough to have this gentleman come speak at a recent investor conference where he offered fascinating insights into artificial intelligence and helped us sort out the signal from the noise around that fast-changing technology. And he was kind enough to agree to come on and chat with us on the pod so that you, our listeners, could get the benefit of it as well.

So, without any further ado, I’m honored to welcome in this week’s HPScast guest, Salim Ismail, technologist extraordinaire. Salim, welcome to the pod.

Salim Ismail: Thank you for having me. You know, there’s this comment that people make that you should under-promise and over-deliver, which I think you’ve really blown for me, but great to be here.

Colbert Cannon: I’ve set you up terribly. All right, Salim, let’s start from the start. Where’d you grow up? Where are you from originally?

Salim Ismail: I was born in India. I grew up in Mumbai until I was 10 years old. I come from a weird, diplomatic family in India. And then my parents emigrated to Canada when I was 10, and I did my schooling and university there. Then I was in Europe for 10 years, and I’ve been in the US for about 25 years, so I’m quite confused.

Colbert Cannon: I love it. Let’s go all the way back. You attended undergrad at Waterloo. Why was that the right choice for you at the time?

Salim Ismail: I actually went because my father was an engineer, and Waterloo’s like the MIT of Canada. And the paradigm was, in India, when you grow up, you do what your father did. And so, I started off in engineering, and I hated it. And I was a terrible student, and I got kicked out. And I took some time off, did some work, and came back, and re-got myself back in good graces.

And then I decided, let me finish my career in a more interesting subject. And so, my degree is actually in theoretical physics.

Colbert Cannon: And so, you’ve got this degree. What did you want to do? You’re graduating college. What did you figure out first?

Salim Ismail: So, I got into software engineering and software development early. And then the challenge in Waterloo is that they do this co op system where every four months you’re off working somewhere. And the challenge with that system is it’s great because you get different, diverse work experiences. By the time you’ve graduated, you have two-and-a-half years of work experience in different places, which is amazing. The bad part is that when you compare what’s happening in the workplace with what you’re studying, there’s such a huge gap that it demotivates the hell out of you.

So, I’m like literally helping IBM launch the IBM PC in Europe. It was one of my projects. And then I come back, and a theoretical physics professor is talking about a comet orbiting a light star neutron at a six light year radius, and what’s the gravitational pull. And you’re like, I’m never going to use this.

So, it was a really hard slog. I just needed a technical degree to be able to leave Canada elegantly, which is what happened.

Colbert Cannon: Yeah. So tell us about that. Tell us about your first steps professionally post college.

Salim Ismail: So, I went to Europe, and I started building large software systems for banks and insurance companies and ended up living in several countries in Europe – all the cold rainy countries like Belgium, Holland. France, England and Ireland and so on. I got a really good sense for the back-end systems work that was being done in the 80s and 90s to really transform businesses and set them up to use ERPs, etc.

As I got to the end of that, I decided this doesn’t really work because you build this amazing system, but the company wasn’t ready and set up to use it. So, I shifted from software to management consulting to prepare the cultural aspects of what was needed for this change to take place, because there was a wholesale cultural change that went with reintroducing a completely new software system, for example. And that was four or five years of change management, management consulting, what was called then business process re-engineering.

And I ended up in Paris as a partner in the firm, and they wanted me to set up the French office. And I was still toying with this idea of me doing entrepreneurship. And I went to incorporate the office in France, and they said – the French authorities told me – it would take me eight months to incorporate because France was bureaucracy central. And I was like, I cannot spend eight months of my life incorporating a business. I’m out of here.

And I came to New York City and ran a private equity business for a bit. And then I got into technical entrepreneurship after that.

Colbert Cannon: Well, let’s talk about that plunge because, listen, every entrepreneur I know talks about taking that leap. It’s not easy. Tell us about the decision to say, you know, it’s time to actually do this on my own.

Salim Ismail: So, it was somewhat accidental as many of these things are. I was running this private equity business, and I got a roommate who turned out to be one of the godfathers of the technology world. He’d literally written Lotus Notes in architecting Microsoft Office and like six other things like that. This fellow was like the Forrest Gump of technology, like been everywhere.

I met this fellow and was like, this is unbelievable. How could somebody have done all this? Why do they need a roommate? They should be on a yacht. And when I asked him what he would do next was so game-changing that I decided to build it.

So, I actually hired a developer on the side and said to go build this thing. And then I showed it to him, and we started building a business together. And that actually started another business that had become quite profitable. So, I used all the profits of the one to fund the other, and we ended up basically building the predecessor to Twitter.

The challenge with technology entrepreneurship, as I learned the hard way, is it’s very bad to be early in the tech space. It’s better to be late. Like, Google was not the first search engine, nor was Facebook the first social network. So, we essentially spent three or four years teaching the marketplace and laying down the underlying technology for then Twitter and Facebook to take what they’ve done and we’ve done, and to build on top of that.

So, that company failed, but it got me well known. And I decided that I needed to move because building an internet infrastructure product company in the early 2000s was like breaking bylaws. VCs had no idea what we were doing, etc.

Colbert Cannon: Before we lose that thread, you know, every entrepreneur I know – and I am married to one – will tell you they learn more when things go wrong than when things go right. So, tell me about the lessons learned from that moment. You mentioned one of them early and late, but what experiences do you draw from that?

Salim Ismail: Many, many, many, many, many lessons. First of all, that primary success factor in any early stage company is luck. There’s nothing else. Everything else is a byproduct of that. You can work hard, you can be very, very talented, but unless you have that lucky break, you won’t make it. So, there’s a weird thing around that that’s worth coming into.

Secondly, that when I kind of came to grips with this startup, I realized that people would much rather be comfortable than happy. And the people I’d surrounded myself were much more comfortable, kind of, keeping the thing as a small scale thing rather than really going big with it. And I just wasn’t able to break through that barrier.

And many other lessons on CapTable. If you’ve seen the comedy show Silicon Valley,

Colbert Cannon: Yes, amazing.

Salim Ismail: I lived the first three seasons of that episode to episode.

Colbert Cannon: Felt a little too real for you.

Salim Ismail: So, I went to Silicon Valley, and I started building a company there. And I was in the middle of starting another startup, and then Yahoo came along and said, “Hey, we need somebody to run our incubator. Would this be interesting for you?”

And I’d put all my eggs in the basket in the tech company in New York, like my last dollar. So, I was broke. And then Yahoo offered me to be a Vice President. It was a seven-figure stock option. It was very, very lucrative. Even then, I was like, you know, I really don’t want to work for a big company. That’s like selling out to the man.

And finally, one of my mentors said to me: “Are you an idiot, or are you just stupid? Like, which is it? Shut up and take the job. You can’t even last another month or two the way you’re going, and you can’t count on a start-up being successful in the next two months.”

So, I decided to take the job at Yahoo, and it lasted a couple of years. And when Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo, I was one of the raft of people that decided this is not going to work, we’re going to be stuck in this conversation for another year or two while they work this out. And I’d been casting around for what to do next.

And the other thing that I identified at Yahoo was a problem that I’m now very much focused on, which I call the immune system problem, right? When you try anything disruptive in a legacy environment, the antibodies attack you, because all of our organizations, especially large organizations globally, are designed for two things. They’re designed for, predictability, and they’re designed for efficiency. Predictability and efficiency are the two heuristics that every big company operates on. They want to deliver the same package, the same Big Mac, in a million locations, at the same quality level.

The problem is that we enter a more disruptive world where predictability and efficiency are not the right drivers. You now need agility, flexibility, adaptability, speed. And so, this is why every big company in the world struggles with disruptive innovation because the immune system attacks any new ideas. So, that was really troubling for me.

As a next step in another kind of total twist of fate, I’d set up a relationship between Yahoo and NASA to do some interesting projects together. And one day, the NASA people said: “Hey, we’re helping launch this thing called Singularity University. We’re having 70 thought leaders from Silicon Valley come to the founding community conference of this. Do you want to come along?”

And I showed up having never heard of Peter Diamandis or the XPRIZE Foundation or Ray Kurzweil or even the concept that we now call “the singularity.” And the top of my head lifted off, and I asked a lot of questions.

About two weeks later, Peter said: Do you want to run it?”

I remember hanging up the phone from that conversation and my wife said: “How was your call?”

And I said: “I think I’m a Dean. I don’t know how that happened.”

Colbert Cannon: Let’s define some terms. What does “singularity” mean? You mentioned Ray Kurzweil who helped popularize it, but tell us what that means.

Salim Ismail: So, there’s a concept pioneered by a science fiction writer called Vernor Vinge Wenge, who coined the term “technological singularity”, which is a hypothetical point in time where machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence. And then we go into a technologically driven evolutionary phase rather than a biologically driven evolutionary phase.

Ray Kurzweil is famous because he wrote a book in 2005 called “The Singularity is Near”, saying that we will cross that threshold in 2045, and that we will have human level AI in 2029. Everybody in the world said you’re nuts. You can’t possibly be right, but what happens with Ray, he makes outlandish predictions that turn out to be 85% correct.

You know, Bill Gates has called him the smartest man alive type of thing, a brain the size of many planets, and a more thoughtful leader on the future of technology as I’ve ever met.

Colbert Cannon: So then Singularity University. Tell me the mission for those less familiar. What does it do?

Salim Ismail: The mission was we are entering the biggest transformation in the history of humanity that we’ll ever see, and we are not prepared for that transformation. So, let’s bring in the leading experts in the world, the people that are running the world today – CEOs, investment leaders, government leaders – and give them a sense of what’s coming so they can be better prepared for it than our current crop of leaders.

So, we would run programs on the future of biotech, robotics, AI. We focused on technologies that are all going through a Moore’s Law type of doubling pattern. So, for example, in neuroscience, the resolution at which we can image the brain is doubling every year. If you take drones, the price performance of drones is doubling every nine months.

In possibly the most dramatic and real example, solar energy is doubling in its price performance every 22 months and has been doing that for 40 years. So, roughly every two years, for 40 years, we’ve been doubling the price performance of solar. At this pace, we will be able to deliver the entire world’s energy supply with solar in eight years. So energy, which has been scarce for the entire history of humanity, is about to become abundant. And now we’re talking about the geopolitical consequences of that.

So, what we were doing is bringing together the world’s experts in all these areas and teaching them the future. Where will biotech be in three years or five years or seven years? What were these technologies intersecting? What inflection points should you be tracking? What labs and companies are doing the most interesting work? And then, they would go off to their home countries and companies and governments better armed to deal with the future than currently.

And so, I built that for about seven years and led all the programs. So, my secret superpower is that if there’s a lecture, lab, or workshop on blockchain, I’ve heard it 60 times.

Colbert Cannon: Now Salim, in 2014 you come out with a book called “Exponential Organizations.” Tell us a little bit about that.

Salim Ismail: Yeah, we just published a second edition last year. There’s a way of organizing the world for 20th century organizations. And the ExO book, kind of, laid down the markers for how you organize the world for the 21st century.

Colbert Cannon: And I will say it’s incredibly prescient. You know, nine years ago, I think it has aged really well.

Salim Ismail: It has. I think it marked an inflection point for how we organize ourselves, right? I’m more proud of it than I thought I would be. It kind of seems to have hit a chord in how you think about the world.

Colbert Cannon: Fascinating stuff. All right. Now I mentioned in the beginning, you also serve on the board of XPRIZE. I find their mission and concept beyond fascinating. For those less familiar, tell us about XPRIZE and how it works.

Salim Ismail: So, on the back of seven years of Singularity and the Yahoo experience, I realized that the way we’re organizing has completely changed, and the way we’re building businesses. And we noticed that, from about 2010 onwards, there was a new breed of organization where they learned how to scale the organization’s structure as fast as you could scale technology.

And so, I wrote a book on that, documenting what they were doing. Look at the way TED used community to scale to a global brand in just a few years, right? Or Uber not hiring its own staff, or Airbnb tapping into other people’s assets. So, we documented a model and popularized that.

In about 2016, Peter approached me and said, “Would you join the board at XPRIZE?”

Now, XPRIZE is just an amazing story. Peter Diamandis, who’s the founder of XPRIZE and also the founder of Singularity University, was trying to get into space, and he applied to NASA to be an astronaut. And NASA said that you’re not going to be an astronaut, that you’re not disciplined enough or diligent enough, etc.

And the Cold War had ended, and there was no government investment in space anymore. Peter happens to read the biography of Charles Lindbergh, who crossed the Atlantic a hundred years ago, and it turns out he did it to win a prize called the Orteig Prize, which is about $3 million in today’s money.

And he said, wait, this guy put up a prize, got a 15X ROI in R&D, and the collective innovation across all those teams led to the commercial aviation industry as we know it today. So, he said, the space industry is stuck – let me put up a prize, a honeypot in the middle of this stuck innovation landscape and see if I can attract an ecosystem of innovation. And the resulting design is now Virgin Galactic. And the alumni from all of those teams ended up building SpaceX and Blue Origin and all the nanosatellite companies that we know today. And so now we have a trillion dollar space industry that didn’t exist.

Colbert Cannon: Salim, what open prize do you look at and say, “I’m really excited to see that one come to fruition.”

Salim Ismail: A year-and-a-half ago, Elon Musk funded a $100 million prize for carbon extraction at scale, and can you figure that out. I remember talking to Al Gore about this and I said, “How do you frame the climate change problem?”

And he said, “We have to run every power plant and mine in the world backwards for 100 years to solve the problem.”

So, you think about the scale of the amount of carbon that we have to extract to make the world, kind of, stable again. That’s the most interesting prize.

We have 1,300 teams that have qualified for the semifinals of that prize. So, think of the collective innovation across more than a thousand teams working on the problem. We’ll crack that problem.

Colbert Cannon: You spoke incredibly thoughtfully at our investor conference, laying out some of your views on artificial intelligence. You’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Let me start with the big picture.

If you are even a smart and discerning type of reader, you could read a lot of articles about AI and come up with two binary outcomes. Either A, it’s the Terminator movies –  robots are taking over, humanity’s doomed – or AI ushers in a utopian future, saves humanity and the world, and everything’s fine.

Why do you think the truth’s somewhere in the middle?

Salim Ismail: I don’t think the truth is in the middle. I think the truth is very much on the AI saves humanity side. Okay?

The reason that we go down the other side is that when you see technology portrayed by Hollywood, you always see a negative dystopian outcome. The robot overlords turn to take over the world. But the reality of how we’re exploring the world with technology is very, very different.

If you think about PageRank – Google’s AI that’s crawling web pages around the world – it’s designing and developing a completely different type of intelligence that’s complementary to human intelligence, not replicative. Human beings have evolved for four billion years to do two things: to survive and procreate. And AI is not limited with those issues. So, why would we think that’s where we’ll end up?

We anthropomorphize it a great deal. I think the way I would frame it is much more on the positive side which is that the more intelligence we can bring to the world, the more we’ll able to leverage technology better, the better the world becomes – a better place, faster, right? But because our brains are dominated by this little thing called an amygdala, we always go down the negative.

Colbert Cannon: I love hearing the optimistic side of this because you’re right. I mean, of course, the more apocalyptic, the more dangerous things are out there. Of course that sells.

Give me a tangible example of something you’re seeing right now with AI that’s indicative of that, sort of, more positive future.

Salim Ismail: Let me, let me give you a data point on the positive, and I’ll come back to AI. If you went back 200 years ago, the percentage of the human population globally that lived in extreme poverty, which was two dollars a day in 2011 equivalent dollars, was 94%. Okay? That was 200 years ago.

Roll forward 200 years and it’s now about 8-9%. Okay? You don’t see that in the news – like a 90% drop in extreme poverty. Bill Gates predicts we’ll eradicate extreme poverty by the end of this decade. Never will you see that in the news. It’s unbelievable that we’ve lifted the entire world out of poverty using technology. So, that’s the data point that you can, kind of, live off.

You look at solar energy. We now have mechanisms to be able to eradicate breast cancer globally. It’s there, FDA approved. Now we just need to get it out. So, there’s some unbelievable things happening, in progress, all sorts of times.

On the AI side, it comes through the idea that – let’s say I’m a travel agent specialist and I’m working to help somebody book a vacation in the Caribbean for their family. There’s a lot of white collar drudgery in my job. I have to make sure that the two family member rooms are next to each other, that the kids are catered for, if their flight changes I have to go shuffle all the details. There’s a lot of hassle in just dealing with that, which takes up, like, half my time probably dealing with those exceptions. And AI can now handle most of those and leave me freer to do more creative things.

Colbert Cannon: You offered a perspective on our investor event that I believe quoted Bill Gates as saying – and I’ll paraphrase – people are dramatically overstating the impact of AI in the next two years and understating it over the next five. That was seven months ago, I think, when you said that. Is that still true?

Salim Ismail: I believe that’s still true. You know, you always have this hype cycle that Gartner pioneered. Like, when 3D printing first emerged, everybody goes, oh my god, everybody will have a 3D printer in every room printing out widgets. And the only question will be, which rooms would you put your 3D printer in? And then you go through this trough of disillusionment where we’re like, no, it’s never going to work. The technology was a dud. It’s a disaster, etc. And then you come out the other side and you end up with things being 10x better than you ever dreamt. But nobody notices.

Cell phones went through that curve, TVs went through that curve. 3D printing is at the top of the trough of that curve coming out the other side, but nobody notices.

AI has yet to hit the full collapse, but it’s tipping over. The expectation is AI will solve every problem on the planet with oodles of space, a room to spare, and we never have to think about anything, and isn’t it great? So, there’s this utopian promise when new technologies are introduced. Then, we see this massive collapse and we go, oh my god, it’s never going to work.

Now, AI has already been through one of these over a 20-year period that was what was called the AI winter, and almost no new kind of applications were found over a long period of time. Now, we’re going through a second wave of that. The expectation is we might hit what’s called AGI or Artificial General Intelligence.

So, 98% of AI is what’s called “narrow AI”, focused on a very specific application like credit card fraud detection, or anti-lock braking, fuzzy logic in your camera to keep it stable when you point and click, etc. AGI is artificial, like a human intelligence, the ability to generalize concepts across frameworks and problem solve across multiple domains. And there’s a holy grail of AI reaching what’s called AGI. And people think, wow, when we hit AGI, then we’ll have human level consciousness.

And I actually fundamentally disagree with that concept because I disagree with what the hell do we mean by intelligence? The IQ test measures two aspects of intelligence: the speed of thought processing and the ability to match concepts across frameworks. That’s what the IQ test measures. But it doesn’t measure emotional intelligence, cognitive intelligence, spatial intelligence, the eastern concept of presence or awareness. All of that adds up to what we call “intelligence as a whole.” We really don’t have a clear definition of it.

And secondly, I disagree with the concept of overtaking because the minute I can prescriptively describe a task, an AI robot is going to do it much better than me anyway. So, what are we talking about here? All we’re talking about is that we have this capability that just does things cleaner and more thoroughly than anything we could do humanly.

And that’s where it uplifts humanity, because now I have all these neurons freed up to do lots of other creative, amazing things. And I think that’s where the promise of AI will really show up.

Colbert Cannon: So then, talk me through the societal impacts of this. I mean, you spent your time as a software engineer and then helped organizations manage through change. Like, don’t we need to have the same impact on society to make this all work?

Salim Ismail: We do. And this is the challenge. This is the fundamental challenge for leadership globally. You know, when you look at institutions around the world, at least in companies and investments, you have a form of a creative destructive loop. And if you’re not making enough profits, people will shift their resources to a better opportunity, right? And therefore, it forces you into a positive feedback loop. There’s no feedback loop for the UN. There’s no feedback loop for our health care systems or legal systems or intellectual property systems.

What I find totally amazing about the world today and one of the reasons I’m so enthusiastic about the future is that today you have young people that can innovate disruptively without permission. And it’s driven by two factors that are very important that I think all your listeners should anchor deeply in their brains.

Throughout history, it’s always been true that advanced technologies cost a lot, and so only a government lab or a big corporate lab could do R& D, launching products and services. And you had this trickle-down effect from big companies, government, to the little guy. And a little guy could never do disruptive innovation because they didn’t have the money, access to research, whatever. Today, for the first time in human history, advanced technologies are very cheap. Solar energy is cheap, sensors are cheap, the blockchain is open source and free, the tools that we use to build AI are mostly open source.

The second thing that’s about technology that’s completely unique to today’s world is that we have a dozen technologies now operating on a doubling pattern like Moore’s Law. In the past, throughout human history, at any time, maybe one technology is accelerating or another. Never have we had a dozen of them all move at the same time at this pace.

So, when you intersect drones that are doubling every nine months with AI that’s doubling every three months, that multiplier adds a whole other level to the equation, right? And so this is what’s so profound about the world today. I call it 20 Gutenberg moments. In the 15th century, the printing press appeared and completely changed society. I would argue we have 20 of those hitting us at the same time because solar energy changes the world completely. Blockchain changes the world completely. AI changes the world completely. The longevity breakthroughs that we have will change the world completely. And we are not prepared as a society to absorb that level of innovation. That’s why you see the world freaking out in conservative cycles.

Colbert Cannon: So, I find this obviously beyond fascinating, as I’m sure our listeners do. What would you recommend if you’re a dilettante in this space? You know, I read it, I pay attention, I try to keep up, but it’s not my day-to-day job. What resources do you use? What publications? What do you advise us to do?

Salim Ismail: Resources that I would use are – follow the MIT Tech Review, because they are constantly talking about tech breakthroughs that are happening. Peter’s World in the Abundance Summit is really powerful, because he talks about the technologies that are delivering us from scarcity to abundance. We have our OpenExO Community, which is now close to 40,000 people in 150 countries, constantly talking about the breakthroughs in these things. We have a subset of our community that’s about 600 people that’s just focused on AI, and every week they get together. They’ve built like a hive mind.

But it’s really critical to keep in mind two things. One, watch technologies that are going through a doubling pattern or a multiplier effect. Number two, project out where those are going to be and how they’re going to be disruptive and track those. If you’re investing, for example, in fossil fuels and you can see a doubling pattern in solar, you might want to divest out of fossil fuels, right? Because that’s going to collapse. You just don’t know when – at some point, that will collapse.

Colbert Cannon: I couldn’t agree more. Salim, one other advice question for you. I’m the parent of three teenage children. Many of our listeners have kids. What should I be coaching my kids on in terms of educational pursuits, focuses outside of school, to be ready for all this disruptive change?

Salim Ismail: Yeah, this is a super important topic. I have a 12-year-old, so I’m desperately hoping the schooling system transforms in the next few years before he gets there. So, given I basically have 10 years of deep education in the space with Singularity University, plus what I’m seeing out in the world, I frame it in the following way.

For the last several hundred years, we’ve been doing education from, what I would call, the supply side. You were taught to go become really good at some skill – an accountant, an engineer, a welder, a car driver, or whatever deep profession somewhere that would have monetary interest. You then acquired those skills, got a credential – I’m a doctor, I’m an accountant, I’m an engineer. And then you sell those skills in the job marketplace, right? So, you acquired supply side capability, and then you went to the demand side, hoping there was demand for your capabilities.

When I talk to kids today, and when I talk to parents today, I tell them, please consider flipping that around. Because, what we’re seeing today is, kids are saying, what problem do I want to solve? So when I talk to young kids, I say pick the problem that’s most exciting for you to solve and then go work on the problem space. Don’t work on the supply side, because the shelf life, the half-life of a skill, used to be about 30 years. So, I tell people to shift from a push-based education system where we’re getting kids into a classroom and trying to cram algebra into them – mostly they’re thinking about lunch – to a pull-based system where you pick a problem that you’re excited about and pull down the skills and capabilities and technologies you need to solve that problem.

Colbert Cannon: That’s great advice. I want to move to the last segment of the pod, something we like to call “Best Ideas”, where we offer up something that’s added value in our lives. “Best Ideas” because it’s our goal as investors to maximize exposure to those. As our guest, Salim, I’m going to ask you to go first. What is your best idea this week?

Salim Ismail: Bitcoin.

Colbert Cannon: All right, go on. Why?

Salim Ismail: So, when you think about digital currencies, there’s three triangular points on a digital currency to make it effective: decentralization, security, and scalability. And the reason cryptocurrency is interesting is not because they’re digital because the dollar has been digital for a long time already. It’s the fact that you can program the money, which allows you to decentralize and be secure at the same time. What Bitcoin did not solve for, at the time, was scalability. So, I’m fascinated by what’s happening with Bitcoin. I think it’s going to become the reserve currency of the world, and I’m super excited about how that pans out.

Colbert Cannon: Well, let me say, fascinating. All right, then, so for my best idea, as people know, I like to be inspired by the guests of the week. As you’ve heard in this fascinating conversation, Salim’s obviously an expert in AI and technology in general. And I started thinking about works of media that touch on artificial intelligence. There is a lot, and there has been for a long time, and I would say even more so now, of course, as AI becomes more and more in the popular vernacular.

My favorite film where artificial intelligence is a core theme, though, came out about a decade ago and flew a little below the radar. My “Best Idea” this week is the film “Ex Machina”, directed by Alex Garland. “Ex Machina” stars Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander – all three pretty early in their careers – and they just explode off the screen.

So, for those intrigued by AI, generally, and inspired by a world class expert in it, as our guest is today, my “Best Idea” this week is “Ex Machina”, streaming now and available to rent on most online services.

All right, with that, it’s time to wrap up for the week. Salim, thank you for coming on. Thank you for your recommendations and your insights. I’m grateful for this conversation. It was a real pleasure having you on today.

Salim Ismail: Hope it’s been helpful and great to have been with you.