As I get older, I become more conscious of my mental and physical health. It's easy as an entrepreneur or business person to lose track of your health – but investing in your personal health can be the best thing you do for your business.
Many of my friends now believe that with technology and a sustained focus on health & longevity, they can live past 100. They're paying attention to genetic, physiologic & biochemical makeup, cognitive function, body composition, cardiovascular performance, hormonal status, and much more. Whether they're going to live past 100 or not, I can see the daily results in the quality of their life and the way they look.
It's the reason I started working with APEX, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden's concierge medical wellness practice.
They've got me eating salads, taking supplements, and thinking about what it takes to be healthy, fit, and vital.
The goal is to enjoy life though … Not to deprive yourself as this image portrays …
Exercise is also an important part of the "healthy, fit, and vital" equation.
With gyms being closed during the recent Quarantine, I found another tool that I fell in love with.
Her name is Carol; an AI fitness bike that personalizes a HIIT workout for you, based on your fitness and your preferred workout length. It makes it way easier for me to fit workouts into my schedule (and way harder to justify skipping a session).
The promise is an "hour's worth" of exercise compressed into an 8-minute workout that really only has two 20-second periods of intense effort.
The science is sound. My experience is that it works for me. I've done it for about two months now. The results are undeniable (in terms of muscle tone, endurance, 20% improvement on many of the metrics tracked by the bike, etc.).
The more you use it the smarter it gets. It automatically adjusts to give you exactly the resistance you need to keep you motivated and to continue making progress.
I've been impressed. Working-out at home has always been a struggle for me. I've bought other tools for lifting or cardio, but they tend to end up as coat racks or space fillers.
Exercise has a "social" component for some people ( comes to mind). Some people need the "social" component of exercise to get through hard workouts (think Peloton or OrangeTheory.) The Carol bike doesn't fully satisfy that part of exercise … but they do a great job of keeping the session short, fun, and gamified (so that you know where you are, how you are progressing, and where you stand in the rankings). The combination of the efficiency of the workouts – and being able to see that you are getting fitter, objectively, has been just what I needed.
Sticking with the philosophy theme, I encourage you to watch this video below on selective attention.
Daniel Simons' experiments on visual awareness have become famous. The primary conclusion drawn from his research is that we can miss incredibly obvious things, right in front of us, if our attention is focused elsewhere.
While watching the video, count how many passes the team in white makes.
This is worth doing so you experience it yourself.
First, did you get the number of passes correct? Second, did you see the gorilla?
If you have already seen this video or heard of the study, it's much easier, but most people absolutely miss the Gorilla, despite it not being hidden.
Think about how often your focus blinds you to the obvious.
This next video demonstrates "change blindness". In an experiment, 75% of the participants didn't notice that the experimenter was replaced by a different person.
Warning: Objects In Your Attention Span Are Fewer Than You Perceive.
It's well known that we often miss objects in our field of view due to limited attention and change blindness, but, it's true with more than just sight. Moment by moment, the brain selectively processes information it deems most relevant. Experiments, like these, show the limits of our capacity to encode, retain, and compare visual information from one glance to the next.
More importantly, this suggests that our awareness of our visual surroundings is far more sparse than most people intuitively believe. Consequently, our intuition can deceive us far more often than we perceive.
As an entrepreneur, when I focus fully on something, it's as if everything else goes away. That level of focus can be a gift – but it can also be a curse. In Genius Network, we have a form we fill out at the beginning of each meeting. In it is a diagram where you rate your score on 8 factors: physical environment, career, money, health, friends & family, significant other, personal & intellectual growth, and fun & recreation
It's rare that I'm fully succeeding in all 8 … we only have so much focus and bandwidth, it's inevitable I'll miss things. Clearly, in an information-rich environment, attention is a scarce and essential resource. So, pay attention (or automate the things you know need to be done right, every time).
What are you currently prioritizing, and what's falling to the side due to that focus? What are you missing?
Hope this was a helpful reminder. Let me know what you think about posts like this. Thanks.
It can be difficult to have a nuanced discussion around AI online. There's a lot of PopSci around it, people conflate a very diverse range of algorithms and intentions into the general "AI", and realistically when you get too in-depth into what algorithms are best for what problems, most people lose interest.
That's why I'm personally a proponent of any discussions around AI. Awareness is important, and if more people can understand the basics, then some subset of them will become better educated… rinse and repeat.
Robert Downey Jr. and YouTube partnered for an 8-part docuseries on the Age of AI. I've only watched one episode, but that episode did a decent job of addressing the highest-level issues with AI.
I won't go through the whole video with you – because you're quarantined and I think it's worth watching, but there are a couple of points I wanted to re-emphasize.
Your Data Is Becoming More Important, Not Less Important
"Everyone's concerned about identity theft. Meanwhile, they're giving all their data for free on the internet. I'm what I like. I'm what I don't like. I'm where I go, I'm who I know. I'm what I search. I'm my thumbprint. I am my data" – will.i.am
My son, Zach, has ultimately given up on privacy – his argument is that everyone's information is out there anyway. Even my eldest son, Ben, who is a cybersecurity expert, has semi-resigned himself to his data being out there. He takes many precautionary measures but recognizes that he's not truly anonymous.
In the video, Will.I.Am is getting an authentic reproduction of his face, mannerisms, and voice – they even got the pimple he had during the day of filming. In doing so, he specifically asks for the voice to be a bit robotic. He does this "for his mom" but in reality, it's to make clear – this is a robot, not me. It's avoiding the Uncanny Valley.
We're at an intersection where it's going to become harder to decide what's real and what's fake. With deepfake video and audio, protecting your personal brand and identity becomes difficult, and simultaneously more important.
The Path Forward
The road to AI supremacy is long and fraught with booby traps, potential missteps, and ethical issues. Questions like "how far is too far?" will have to be answered, and countries will likely strive to unite around shared rules of ethical AI.
If there's anything that makes me confident about our ability to successfully travel that road, it's looking at humanity's ability to adapt. The reality is, we've been working symbiotically with "machines" since the very beginning, but our definition of the machine simply continues to improve. It's fractal, and each time the technology we're adopting gets bigger, so does the eventual positive effect on day to day life.
AI adoption is a big step, but the positive effect it can have on our lives is astronomical.
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