High Agency

‍Mo Dhaliwal

[00:00:03] Welcome to High Agency, igniting conversations with inspiring people, leading transformative change. The future of health isn't just about living longer. It's about living sharper, stronger, and with more resilience. We're on the edge of an era where your body's cells might be stashed away like precious assets, ready to regenerate a healthier version of you. Welcome to the thrilling world of regenerative medicine, a space that's catapulting from sci-fi fantasy to a billion-dollar reality. By 2026, this field is projected to hit $26 billion, driven by innovations that don't just patch you up, but aim to freeze the clock on your cells, preserving your vitality for the long game. It's no longer just about lifespan. It's about life power. Scientists and entrepreneurs are hacking biology, leveraging AI, and building data. They're creating the digital avatars and twins of our bodies. Think of an ecosystem where your preserved cells could one day repair, restore, and even enhance you, where personalized cell therapies address the root of the problem before it becomes a crisis. From non-invasive cell collection to synthetic biology breakthroughs, the field is evolving at light speed. And in the midst of this bioengineering revolution is Stephen Ten holder. Stephen isn't your typical biotech founder. He's a boundary-pushing innovator who leapt from lab experiments to co-founding Acorn Bio labs, a game-changer in cell preservation. While still a student, he was already pioneering CRISPR technology for plant immunity and snagging awards at iGEM. Acorn Bio labs started in the University of Waterloo's Velocity Garage, where Stephen mixed science with grit to grow a company that's now backed by Y Combinator. A dual-minded thinker, he holds patents. He mentors future disruptors and works to help science and technology startups thrive in the Canadian ecosystem through the Creative Destruction Lab. Stephen's work is redefining how we think about health, longevity, and the very structure of our lives. So today, we dive into his vision, his journey, and what he's cooking up in the next wave of bioengineering and making longevity tech accessible to everyone. Welcome, Stephen. Thank you, Matt. So longevity tech, I mean, isn't this what Brian Johnson's doing? Yes, I love Brian Johnson.

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Steve ten Holder

[00:02:30] He isn't just bringing insights into health into the mainstream; he's also pushing a bit of like an ideology. I don't know if you've seen his talks, but he loves saying 'the don't die movement', right? Almost as if it's a new way of just like looking at the world. So I appreciate that he's doing the hard work that it takes to change people's culture around how they think about living longer. So beyond just the fact that I think he's doing it, he's a great guinea pig doing these experiments on himself that we all get to learn from. When you dig deep beyond the sort of superficial weirdness of it, he's actually also a very interesting and philosophically sound thinker.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:03:12] So what was the genesis of Acorn Biolabs? Like at what point did you decide that bioengineering for longevity is going to be your purpose? And this is an area of your life where you're going to focus so much.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:03:24] I mean, I have to admit it's a bit of it. It stems from naivety. Honestly, when I was in grade 10, I had a realization that we are going to die. I think we had all kind of understood that before. But your brain has to get to a certain sort of like maturity level to really grasp and fully understand what that means. That's a pretty early realization, though.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:03:44] Yeah. Yeah. I think I think it was. I think for me, it was like late 20s after like a really bad hangover. Yeah. Like pondering it all. Yeah.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:03:52] But oh, my God. Great. That is quite, quite early. Yeah, I agree. It was definitely early. And strong as well. And it made me look into the philosophy of it and the fear, like the core emotions of fear drove my brain into thinking about what to do about it. And for whatever reason, it decided that science and doing something in an engineering biology way was at least like if I only have one lifespan and I have to do something with the project of my life's career anyway. I might as well give this whole 'like we could live longer and not have to die, at least in the short 80 years in front of us', kind of a shot, give it a good shot anyway. So I had decided that from grade 10 in my undergrad, I went to Waterloo, very innovative university, awesome place. I honestly expected I would just be like thorough academic. Right. This is a basic science problem. But I had the concept that, hey, there's all these Silicon Valley people. They're very interested in longevity as well. Yeah. Yeah. Screen Me was a thing at the time, much more popular than it is now. And you could send cells through the mail to get sequenced for DNA. And so I thought, hey, real quick, let's just get the enthusiasts, send their cells through the mail, I'll freeze them in one freezer. And then a group of us get to bring our young cells into the future, and maybe we'll get to use them to live longer. I thought that would be a cute Kickstarter side project, and I'd go off and do my PhD. But it ended up becoming a whole company.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:05:25] Yeah.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:05:26] So, that's incredible.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:05:28] And I think there's always been a fascination with living longer, having more opportunity to exist in this state, and whatever that means. I'm not sure if you're a fan of Dune. Dune, yeah. Yeah, I am. And there was one of the later books where there was this amazing quote, and it was like one of the Bene Gesserit was kind of reflecting on ancient humanity. And she was saying that. Like, you know, I think they were talking about spice production. And how critical it is. How critical it was. And they were talking about longevity and the fact that, you know, they had about 300 years, you know, 250, 300 years to kind of get their life's work done. And she was talking about ancient humans that, you know, could barely make it to 100 years. And, oh, God, they were just in such a hurry all the time. Right. So, it is kind of interesting because, you know, as you get older, I feel like you, you know, suddenly life becomes more precious and you start thinking about how much time you have left, the road ahead. I'm definitely pondering my own mortality far more now than at any point in my life. But there is this, you know, interest and appreciation for saying, okay, now that we've kind of arrived into this consciousness and in this state, how can we get more out of it? But let's just assume it's going to happen for a second. I just want to go through like a thought experiment with you. I think it might be an interesting journey. Let's do it. If we were to project it into the future and say that the work that you're doing, the investments into this area, that they all pay off. Right. And a natural coming of age thing for us now is that as you're growing up, everybody gets their sales. And then, you know, later on, 80, 90, you're just, you know, getting the right thing to just extend your lifespan. So, now that every human is living to 800, right, what does that look like?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:07:08] A lot of changes. So, I bring this up with people all the time, as you might imagine. And I've heard every critique that you could possibly have. So, one of them is, you know, dictators will live forever and we won't have change. Another one is like the world's going to overpopulate and, you know, we just don't have the resources to keep everyone alive. We're going to die for that long. Another one is sort of like bad ideas that stay in the minds of old calcified people. They need to die so that the young new ideas can recycle through. It's like that quote, right? That science progresses with every funeral. That's right. Yes. I'm not going to claim to know the answers to any of these things necessarily. Basically, any prediction that you make more than 20 years out into the future and now more than 10 years out in the future is like almost certainly wrong for reasons that you can't anticipate. Right. Right. Right. But I think we're underestimating how much smarter people will also get. So, look at Neuralink. Look at obviously what AI is already enabling us. You know, 10 years ago, we had a cell phone in our pocket that allowed us to communicate with anybody and look anything up. And now we have a cell phone in our pocket with an oracle we can speak to. And in 10 years, it's going to be even better, even more positive. So, I don't think long-lived humans. I think they're going to prefer having young, nimble minds that make it to 200 are going to be okay with calcified minds. I think they're going to prefer having young, nimble minds that move with good ideas and reject bad new ideas as well. So, I actually think it's just going to be the best of both worlds from that perspective. What part do you question the most, do you think, personally?

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:08:49] So, on the surface, it just sounds awesome, right? Yeah. Because I feel like if I could be 40 years old for the rest of my life, forever. Yeah. Like, who wouldn't want that? Sounds incredible. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, for me, I think 40 is the right age. Cool. But, you know, when it comes to the technological integration, I sometimes think back to this quote. It was like a tech panel somewhere. And like Elon Musk was like speaking at it. And, love him or hate him, he's got some great one-liners. I agree. And he said this thing where. He basically said that, you know, biological life might be the bootloader for technological life. Yeah. Right. And for anybody that's curious, a bootloader was, you know, on more legacy operating systems. It's like you would start up your computer, it would check the memory, check the RAM, run all these checks before the real thing showed up, right? And the real thing would be Windows. The real thing would be your old Mac OS operating system. These days, the bootloaders get hidden from us. We don't necessarily get to see them processing. But the idea is that there's this little thing that shows up that just kind of readies the environment for the real thing to show up. So for him to say that, you know, biological intelligence might be the bootloader for artificial intelligence, you know, like it was profound. It kind of blew me away a little bit because, yes, we can extend our lifespans. But at the end of the day, you know, like it might be centuries. Could it be longer? I don't know. Without massive technological intervention. And at that point, you know, why not be just entirely technological? And fully solid-state, where it doesn't, you know, now suddenly time doesn't mean anything because you could be 100,000 years old. You could be a million. Who cares? OK, a few thoughts on this.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:10:31] One is I don't think the human experience as it was created by evolution through natural selection over the last 100 million years is the peak of experience. You could think of the space of just like possible experiences that conscious things in the universe can have. And human experience, like the human condition, is a narrow sliver. Of all those possibilities. It's a great one. Don't get me wrong. I freaking love humans. Humans are great. And we happen to have been born humans. But we have the unique opportunity to peer beyond that. So this is why I think the work Neuralink is doing is actually maybe the most important work that Elon is doing. The humanoid robots are probably going to be next, you know, 20, 30, 40 years. But then I think beyond that, we will want to merge with the AI hyperintelligences and take on new forms. I question this idea that we could like upload our consciousness. I think there's way too much hand waving going on there. And we don't actually understand consciousness deeply enough to understand whether we would actually just be killing ourselves and giving birth to a clone digital version of ourselves. That's actually a deeper and more fundamental problem than a lot of people give it credit. But, yeah, I think, I don't know, people give it this label, transhumanism. Even that, I think, is sort of like a limited version of thinking about this. So, yeah, in the Dune series, the Bene Gels. You know, thinking on this sort of 300-year scale. I love that Frank Herbert's vision showed what what thresholds get unlocked as fundamentals of the human condition change. Obviously, the Bene Gels weren't exactly the greatest force in the universe necessarily. But you could think of old people who think about climate change now as personally knowing that they will exist on Earth 200 years from now. And therefore making different policy decisions. As a result of that. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:12:24] No, that's an incredible perspective. Yeah. And, you know, by no means is this form, this experience, the peak of what's what's possible. I think a lot is going to be unlocked. But what else do you do you kind of see as being there's there's the engineering, I think, aspect where socially, perhaps there's a bit of an aversion to the idea of engineering. Yeah. You know, and I think maybe it comes from, you know, GMO crops and, you know, a lot of negative perception around that. And so we're kind of talking about GMO humans and the immediate, I think, reaction for a lot of people is a bit of aversion to that. Right. Of we're taking something that is natural, therefore wholesome, and now adulterating it actually in wild new ways without actually understanding what that might mean on a thousand or ten thousand year time scale. Right. Where do you think the predictability kind of comes in? Right. Of all of these changes we're making willy-nilly, if we make them, how do we-how do we predict the outcomes? What if it's a dead end?

Steve ten Holder 

[00:13:31] You know, when you walk outside of your apartment and you go on the streets of a city, you're taking a risk of being hit by a car. I think a core difference in temperament between people here is risk tolerance and how good they think good risks can be. I think that is the fundamental distinction. And so then moving up a layer from that, I do think in the future we're going to bifurcate society. There will be the people who are afraid of taking risks because they feel like their classic human existence is awesome already. And why take these risks that might hamper it even a little bit? And there are other people who are not as happy being sedentary and who have visions of a future that is fundamentally different and interesting and worth pursuing. And they will be taking risks with, you know, AI as a risk already. We're literally already going full force into that risk. And biology is no different. You're totally right. So there's that perspective. There's also. Yeah, I mean, like if you look at GMO, it does seem like that was basically just a giant miscommunication. Like what actually has gone wrong with any human from GMO foods? I think they kind of like conflate it with Monsanto and like pesticides and stuff. You know, it is a bit funny when you go to the grocery store in a highly educated market like Whole Foods. I'm sure everybody there is college educated, etc., and yet they are buying organic apples as opposed to what, non-organic apples. That doesn't even make sense. But how chemically, there's no such thing as an inorganic apple, so you can say it's an organic apple. Anyway, so you can see that my position here is basically that. It got a bad rap and I hope it will get a better rap over time. And then, yeah, I mean, on the human modification side, like I don't think you're going to be able to hold people back. Like the innovators are going to innovate; they're going to go do it where they have to do it.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:15:34] Yeah.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:15:35] And they'll bifurcate away from the people who want to be like Amsterdam, like Europe, where they've got it made in the shade and they'd rather regulate than innovate.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:15:44] Yeah. And actually, I think it's probably even more than a bifurcation. Like I was reminded of this years ago. I was talking to this guy who was a far futurist at a department in Oxford, and they're running models and simulations on like 100,000-year time scale for humanity. Right. And doing risk assessments and all this sort of stuff. And I was talking to him about about this technological advancement and what it means because I asked him about his pendant. And he had this this pendant he wore that basically had some instructions about how to cryogenically freeze him when he when he dies. Whoa. And I was blown away because I was like, 'That is so interesting because it's like this program and he's a part of it.' Yeah. And we're on this like bus ride in Amsterdam. And he said or I asked him, 'I'm like, oh, that's amazing. You know, like when you die, this thing has instructions on where to take you and your whole body is going to be frozen.' And he turned to me like totally nonchalant. He's like, 'Oh, no, no, I'd be inefficient. Just the head.' He's right. Yeah. And and so, you know, I found that fascinating. I'm like, you know, this is normal for some people. But the other part was as I was talking to him about like change and technological innovation, you know, he kind of reminded me that, you know, we are on a planet that still has like fourth-world tribes. Right. We were on a planet where, you know, the futures arrived differently in different areas. Right. It's all over the place. And so there's going to be an increasing fragmentation. It seems now with neural network technology where, you know, even the idea of human, like right now, we can still generally identify a human. Right. Because whether it's a fourth-world tribe or us. You can say, OK, all these people have about the same characteristics that have been around for the last hundred thousand years. Right. But what you're describing in this future, it kind of changes what a human is then, doesn't it?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:17:26] Yeah, totally. And sorry, I thought where you were going with that as well as the sort of like wealth inequality of it all. That's definitely a part of it. Right.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:17:33] Who can afford these futures?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:17:34] Right. Yeah. Fortunately, it seems like economies of scale make this democratized as in, you know, the wealthiest people don't have access to a better iPhone than you do. Or, I could get the wealthiest people don't have access to a better version of ChatGPT than you or I could get. And, you know, GPT-3. 5, I think for like some versions of four or four mini are available for free to everybody in the globe right now. That's amazing. And I think and I hope longevity technology and like intelligence technology. I'm just kind of loosely framing it that way will also become democratized, you know. Yeah. So I'm hopeful about that. However, I also see this sort of, you know. Should we have should the United States in 1969 have landed on the moon, spent however many billions of dollars they did doing that, you know, while they still had homeless people on the streets in the United States, while there was still third world countries that were literally malnourished, you know, just with basic needs. And I think the answer is actually still yes. I don't know that we're going to solve those problems anytime soon, even with much better technology. And on top of that, I do think if we allow. Some of those innovators, quote unquote, at the top or who are getting millions of dollars in VC funding to pursue these crazy ideas. That technology may allow solutions to these policy and corruption issues that actually have continued to keep people impoverished in ways that would not have been possible in the past without allowing the innovators to do that. Maybe that was a little bit convoluted. Basically leapfrogging. India leapfrogged wires. Wired telephone poles went to wireless. Exactly. And that has created more lift in terms of poverty than anything else. So it turns out the innovators somewhere else led to poverty reduction through this leapfrogging effect. So I do think it's worth allowing the innovators to keep pushing forward, even if there is this inequality in wealth, because it will actually benefit the lower the lower half as well.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:19:40] I was definitely on the side of years ago of. You know, space exploration, technological investments. You know, why are we doing that while there's homeless people on the streets? And then eventually you come to learn that actually it isn't a capacity or resourcing issue for, you know, homelessness or for those levels of inequality. It's actually political will for the most part. Right.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:20:02] That's a whole other conversation for a whole other group of people. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it's basically impossible to make the policy and political change that people would like to see because it's humans continuing to just have human fundamental rights. Human fundamental traits that will not go away, whereas technology is actually changing the fundamentals of the game and allowing gains beyond policy and politics.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:20:24] So we're not going to have a technology conversation without talking about AI and everything that it's doing. And, you know, your role is quite fascinating to me for that reason as well, because I mean, talk about changing multiple variables simultaneously. Right. Like bioengineering, you know, was and continues to be a massive category unto itself. And then AI research, as we know, has been happening since the 50s. Right. Until now. And it's, you know, compounded. But the acceleration that we've seen over the past number of years is pretty insane. Right. And what you're doing now is at some sort of nexus between bioengineering and artificial intelligence. What is it? What has it done for you? And what's what's coming?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:21:08] I mean, it hasn't done anything yet. It's been a lot of research and a lot of development with some of my old co-founder friends. Mm-hmm. And we've been meeting weekly for months because we're this excited about it. Okay. So AI is already helping people administratively. Right. This is the sort of highest-level task. Mm-hmm. You don't want to send as many emails. You want it to look through your entire email chain and just make it so that you don't have to spend as much time doing these dumb administrative things that take up a lot of time. And that's going to improve efficiency for scientists and everybody. Layer two for scientists is this idea that it's going to be able to help do things like literature search. Right. So, a whole body of written text knowledge for scientists will allow them to make connections in the literature to better direct their research. And I think that's going to be amazing. And then the third level, though, the deepest, is AI fundamentally understanding the patterns of biology itself. The chemists are working on this as well. The fundamental patterns of chemistry or even physics; this will be a sort of far cry one, but, you know, AI giving us unintuitive solutions to physics problems. Right. So this is at the sort of highest level how I think a lot of AI researchers are excited that it could help with science itself and create and fuel new discoveries. I'm obviously most excited about the biology one, and there's already a bunch of traction that's been happening here. Mm-hmm. You know, obviously not my work, the work of a lot of other very brilliant people to take the language of life, DNA, A, Cs, Ts, and Gs, and apply a very similar transformer model, transformer architecture to that to get these interesting results. Right. To be able to prompt, I want this DNA sequence and have it actually spit it out. Or to prompt and say, hey, I just sequenced the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Here's a whole bunch of random DNA for you. What does it look like to you? Right. And then the AI can categorize it for you and say, this is this, this is that, this will probably behave this way, this will behave that way. And then you could even add that to a library of sorts, biological capabilities you are now aware are possible. Right. As a sort of, like, catalog of parts or a catalog of capabilities, and then remix them and generate new things. Mm-hmm. So this sort of Jurassic Park future I think is possibly closer now because AI, this ability to like read and write the language of life was the sort of missing piece. Mm-hmm. This is the optimistic view, and I could get into more of it, yeah.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:23:37] Well, I mean, it's the optimistic view, but you referenced Jurassic Park. Right. Like, it's not like nothing went wrong there, right?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:23:43] Yeah. A lot went wrong there. Yeah. And this was at the macro scale, right? Mm-hmm. Like bringing back dinosaurs, like all right, we could shoot them with guns, like I think you'd be fine. Bringing back ancient viruses, can't shoot a virus. Yeah. Right? So that's actually the more scary one to me, and there's plenty of very smart people that are preempting this and saying, you know, we don't want people to be able to use AI to design bioweapons. Mm-hmm. That'd be obviously horrible.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:24:08] So I kind of glossed over it earlier, but I just want to back up for a second. Yeah. And talk specifically about what Acorn Labs. Sure. Where you said it was a bit of a, you know, it was a bit of a lark, like a hobby project. Sure. You thought this would be fun on Kickstarter. Yeah. But then it got into Y Combinator, and it's an independently running company now. Mm-hmm. What's that looking like, and what's the future of Acorn?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:24:32] So it continues to expand. Yeah. Just, yeah, I guess to be clear. I stepped back personally from sort of day-to-day operations and working at the company itself about four years ago. I still have some ownership, and I personally made a secondary exit out of it. So happy story. But so originally I had wanted the Brian Johnson-type market for Acorn. This sort of thing I rationally explained to you that you should preserve your young cells because you want to live longer, and this is smart, and then people buy it.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:25:05] Mm-hmm.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:25:06] It turned out there was a market there for that. Yeah, but it wasn't as big, especially I guess seven years ago when we first sort of launched, six years ago. But where there was a bigger market was cosmetic biotech, right, like these sort of Botox clinics, PRP, you know, this sort of like beauty aesthetics biotech market. It turns out there's a really good fit there. So Acorn at this point, if you go on the website, Acorn. Me, and you look at the map of where they have partner clinics, it's a lot. I think it's like over 50 or something across North America at this point. These are locations that people can go physically, book an appointment, and then a nurse or one of the people that are trained at the facility will pluck 50 of your hairs and freeze them for you. And then, boom, you've got your cells stored. So that's where Acorn's at now, continuing to grow. They finished a Series A, and I'm very proud of the team and what they're doing, and it's fantastic, yeah.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:26:01] So what have you moved on to since Acorn?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:26:03] Right. So now I'm in Vancouver. Acorn was back in Toronto. And I've moved on. I've moved on to, yeah. So, you know, Acorn is fantastic in the sense that it is a curator of human cells in freezers. And it is a marketing machine to get people to do that. And that is exactly what it should be doing, totally. I also want to participate in what we will do with those cells. The core science behind, you know, eventually the scientists are going to unfreeze them and do something with them, right? Acorn already has done a lot of work to their credit. On validating exactly, you know, a bunch of things that could be done with those cells. And the entire scientific community of regenerative medicine is working on like a thousand different applications as well. So that work is ongoing. But now, for me, it's sort of like, actually, yeah, AI for biology could work for this as well. So what you store, when you store cells with Acorn, is stem cells. Stem cells are these sort of like, you know, baby-like cells that can divide into a whole bunch of different cell types: heart, liver, neuron, etc. So in the future, the example I'm going to give you is, you know, I'm going to do a lot of research. One of the cells I like to use is the liver. You know, we've all been drinking our whole lives. Our livers start to go bad when we're 80. That has all these systemic effects on the rest of your body. You start feeling bad. Your brain starts feeling bad. Everything feels bad. So, you need a new liver. And you were smart enough to store some of your young cells. But it turns out, even let's say 40 years from now, the scientists are still struggling with exactly how to take one of your young embryo baby-like cells and turn it into the entire complex variety of 50 sub-cell types that make up your liver. And to make a full replacement unit for you. That's the dream. Because then you can just transplant a literal young version of your own liver into your own body. And now, a young liver is helping improve your entire feel. Right? That's great. So AI, it may turn out, will be the perfect tool for helping us understand how to nudge that cell into the perfect two. And then from each of those into those perfect two. With the right set of signals and the right set of factors. And the right set of everything. To get it to grow perfectly into a liver. So I'm working on, yeah. Specifically, what I'm working on now is not what I just described to you. Because I think that's a little too far out. And it's not exactly a venture-backable idea today that's going to generate any sort of revenue. It's that far out, you think? Yeah. Yeah. I think that one is there. There are other startups that are working on that. I guess it does take doing a sort of like business analysis though. And saying like. Are they going to be raising money on milestones for the next five years? Versus are there other ideas for how to use AI today that will generate revenue in the next year to get things going in a more meaningful way? And then if you do have a successful company, then you can expand it to other things. So that's what I'm doing now.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:28:56] Got it. And so it's more about the tangential technologies that you're exploring where these things intersect. And that might turn into other opportunities. Is there anything that keeps you up at night? Like what are you most worried about in your field? Like are there specific regulatory technological challenges that are on the horizon that you think might fully thwart this? And then the reason I bring that up is because, you know, recently read this book, Why Machines Learn. And it was actually on the Creative Destruction Lab Reading Club. Cool. And it was fascinating to me that, you know, research into machine learning and AI. Was way older than I had realized. But then these periods of AI winters as they describe them, right? And at the time, it wasn't regulatory or technological. It was more so just in the field of research. Of going down a path and then realizing that's a dead end. And then taking a long time for somebody to pick up on something and, you know, tangent off in a different way. But those winters existed, right? And they came up like three times. And so, right now we're at this, you know. Maybe it's the apex. Maybe it's still kind of the beginning of the curve. But there seems to be this moment we're in with artificial intelligence and the explosion of its applications to fundamentally every aspect of society. And I wonder if this explosion is just going to continue blossoming forever. And just, you know, radically accelerate research and progress in a variety of fields. Or if there's anything that could create a sort of winter, right? For this nexus of bioengineering. And artificial intelligence.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:30:34] Regulatory is definitely one of them. Like you mentioned. Regulatory ultimately is like what is the will of the population of a people? You know? If they don't want GMOs, whether they don't want it for the right or the wrong reasons, regulatory is going to push back on GMO. So public communication is actually a huge important part of this. On the flip side, I do also think like a lot of people who suffer from diseases want innovations to happen. Your grandfather, who's suffering from Alzheimer's, and then you're looking at yourself. And you're like, oh, man. I kind of want innovation so that we don't, you know, all suffer from this. So I think there will be that tension between the regulation, the desire to not screw with things. But also the like, hey, we could actually cure some of these things that cause us a lot of suffering. That's one big one. Yeah. So the regulation is one. But I don't know. I'm getting more optimistic about that one. Like I think regulation will be fine. I think the bigger one and the reason that AI had AI winters is Mother Nature. Mother Nature will respond how she will. It turns out that the original neural net researchers from whatever the 60s, 70s, 80s were actually on to something. They were right. They were doing it right. It's not like they were wrong. They just didn't have NVIDIA GPUs yet. If they had done essentially the same experiments they had done but with whatever processing power, 100 billion parameter models, they would have discovered some crazy shit by then, right? So it could be that biology is like this as well. It could turn out. It could turn out that while ChatGPT is able to successfully run, you know, they haven't actually published how many but I'm guessing it's something like 400 billion parameters for GPT-4. 0. It could turn out that biology is just a fundamentally much more complex language. Human language, it may be, you know, one one-hundredth the complexity of biological language. And it could turn out that we need a 100 trillion parameter model. In order to be as effective in biology as they were in human language. And so that's why I say Mother Nature is the ultimate decider of whether there's going to be a winter for this part of the field. Now, I'm still optimistic that there will be subsectors of biology that will be improved no matter what. Like we're already seeing, like we're already getting very positive, you know, futures here. And I already know a bunch of companies that are training large models to do specific, unique, interesting things with biology. So I'm optimistic anyway. But I think the Jurassic Park future, and I don't want just the Jurassic Park future because I think it's funny. And it's also going to be cool. And it's also going to just be one of those like, you know, SpaceX is exciting and interesting because a whatever 20-story rocket is literally coming back down on Earth. I also want biology not to just be abstract. It would be super cool if we had a 20-foot story T-Rex that people could then relate and say, oh, it's exciting. Live application and actually connect with it in some meaningful way. Exactly. So I'd like that anyway also. But actually what it hints at is. Is that we will have a deeper control of human biology and the biology of things we care about around us like agriculture, etc. So I kind of went on a little bit there. But the point is that I'm optimistic that we won't have a complete winter. And then the ultimate answer is going to come from what Mother Nature says in terms of what we understand about the complexity of biological language.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:33:54] So what else are you excited by? Like, I mean, there's a work that, you know. I can feel it. It's like reverberating from you, the passion. But when you look out into the world for fields that, you know, you're very familiar with, who else is doing interesting things? What else is exciting to you out there?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:34:10] Okay. I personally love when technologies invade your living room. As in, like, your grandmother or grandfather, you know, you could sit them down and just be like, hey, check out this new object that's been invented. And they get to have a cool experience directly with that object. Virtual reality is that for me. Like I'm just saying, it sounds like you are in this camp as well. You know, somebody who's into Dune is likely the kind of person. So, you know, I haven't actually tried the Apple Vision Pro, right? Yeah. And I totally should have. I bought the first Oculus, the second Oculus. I played through Half-Life: Alyx. I freaking loved that thing. During COVID, I was basically spending my entire time in VR just checking it out and doing stuff. And that's exactly the kind of technology you can slap on somebody and it changes their experience. I do think we're going to have some amazing things. We're going to have some amazing movies and video game experiences in our lifetimes that are just going to blow us away. They're just going to be so engaging and so awesome that it's going to make you really enjoy, you know, interacting with other people too. People often imagine it's going to be this sort of like isolating, like, you know, get out in nature and touch grass. Don't stick in your virtual world and become a robot or something, or a zombie. No, I think it's actually going to be like it's going to feed to humans what humans want, which is ultimately contact with other humans. And yes, there's going to be AIs that are going to be playing in that world as well. But ultimately, people want to connect with others. And the better you can do that, the better you're serving these core fundamental parts of what it is to be human. And I'm very excited what VR is going to enable in that respect.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:35:39] No, it's an interesting one for me as well, because there's also some interesting research into the fact that that degree of immersion does interesting things to like kind of hack the empathy centers of your psychology. Yeah. So, the connection and experience you have, the messages that you're susceptible, yeah. Perhaps vulnerable to, yeah. You know, it's pretty extreme in VR, yeah. Yeah, I agree. How about you? What are you excited about? You know, I'm actually, how should I put this? I'm kind of excited about all of it, but also I think kind of scared, right. But in a in an excited sort of way, yeah. Right, it's the anticipation of the unknown, right. So when something's unknown, there's always a little bit of trepidation, sure. But mostly it's excitement. And so for me, when you know, much like yourself, the living room technologies, that's really fascinating to me. Like just a couple of years ago, I had this experience with my mom. We were in the car. We're like driving to like a wedding or something. And she's sitting there, I think, setting a reminder or an appointment or something with like Siri on her phone. Right. And I just looked across at her and I said, like, Mom, like growing up, you know, when you were a little girl. Right. Did you ever imagine that you'd be sitting in a car driving to a wedding in Canada, you know, talking to like a fucking robot with like a piece of glass in your hand and giving it instructions? Yeah. She looked at me. She's like, no, of course not. Right. Because, you know, she grew up in a village that didn't have, you know, running water or electricity at the time. So in many ways, the degree to which technology has changed the last 60, 70 years has been incredible. And I think by and large, there's been a lot of incredible social benefit. You know, but humans have been humaning pretty hard. So, you know, environmental impact, like there's the damage part of it that I think weighs on me sometimes. I think about, you know, what are the costs of it? What are we doing? So I think it's the unintended consequences that sometimes give me pause. Right. For example, I think it was, you know, maybe weeks or months ago, there was some sort of headline I read that there was like a Mars rover that discovered the first piece of litter on Mars. Right. Like, from a previous mission. Exactly. Right. Right. So I was like, you know, and when I was thinking about it, it was quite profound to me because I think the story was just meant to be kind of cute. But it was profound to me because it was like, you know, we go to a new space that is kind of pristine from human contact. And, you know. First thing we do is like. We're not picking up after ourselves. That's our wrapper out there. A hundred percent. Right. So, you know, same thing with space exploration. Right. It's, you know, there's this model and I suck at remembering names or terms, but there was something that might be a limit. There's a limit to our ability to travel space. And it's essentially if a planet becomes enveloped by so much garbage, like space junk. Right. That you can't actually escape, you know, your gravitational pull anymore. So it's those unintended consequences from such a rapid wholesale change that give me reason to pause. But beyond that, it's all exciting. Right. Like the fact that I can, you know, pull up the latest version of ChatGPT on voice and get it to explain some really old Punjabi. Idioms and folk songs that I kind of got, but not quite. And have a conversation with it. Like, I mean, my head and my heart explode when that happens. Right. Because there was so much like knowledge that's trapped there that I think, you know, largely was probably lost with my grandparents. Right. And and previous generations. But there's, you know, some amount of context that it's able to give me that nobody around me can. So the opportunity is incredible. Right. But as always, I just kind of, you know, I worry about humans just doing human stuff and you know, fucking up a lot on the internet.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:39:22] Which by the way, is part of the reason that I think human nature isn't the be all end all. Mm hmm. That we have a human chauvinism. Chauvinism. But we also have. Yeah, we have we like humans because we are humans and it's the best example we have for it. And we revere and we hold sacred our ancient cultures and the the yeah, the unique things our grandparents brought to the world, et cetera. But clearly they were also flawed because, you know, within them was also the sort of throw the trash. You know, like who cares about the environment around you kind of thing like that was in there also. Right. Yeah. So I don't know. This is why it's super dicey. But I think it could also be super meaningful to notice the things that were accidentally evolved into our brains to suit what our ancestors needed 400,000 years ago and to do some snipping. Tribalism is one that I would get rid of pretty quickly. Another one is, you know, a desire for sugar, simple sugars, right? Like this one is definitely just like, oh, my God, super dumb. We don't need that. And there's going to be 20 other ones. You know, the the desire for what lies behind corruption. Often it's like somebody who, you know, wanted to prove to their high school colleagues that, you know, they were actually like quite, quite interesting and cool and they actually did get power. And now they lure their power over everyone else and make them feel special. Yeah. There's so many psychological principles behind that and a lot of it evolutionary.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:40:54] Right. Because, you know, like social prowess was tied to survival. Right. As you know, carbohydrate intake was, you know, physical survival. Right. Yeah. A lot of, you know, evolutionary sort of vestigial components lying around for sure.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:41:08] Anyway, so we should revere those vestigial things and consider them sacred as the ancestry that we came from. But we should also not hesitate from shedding parts of it that we can tell. Just logic or rationally don't make sense.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:41:23] So I mean, I've challenged, you know, some of the ideas and thinking in this conversation. But have you encountered, you know, people, you know, in your in your realm, in your work that you can't get on side, that you're talking to excitedly about this future, about the possibilities and whether it's in academia or outside of that, that just aren't able to come along? And what are the obstacles?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:41:50] Yeah. I mean, yeah, totally. And there's a spectrum of that. There’s so radical, longevity is definitely a harder pitch for a lot of people. Right. It’s like I want people to live like two, three, four hundred years. People will play with that idea. But then to like take it seriously and to devote effort and time and to support it is a totally different thing. Fortunately, just shy of that is health span, which is just let's make people live healthier until they die. You know, the ideal human life in that view of the world is, you know, you live well, well, well, well, well. And then when you’re ninety-five, period. That’s right. And then when you’re ninety-five, you just die in your sleep one day. Right. As opposed to sort of like a slow decline and having to live years of suffering, which I'm also on side of. And what's great is that the fundamental research for both of those is the same. It's not like it's different. It's just ideologically or sort of like a vision of what humans ought to be doing ends up being different there. And eventually we'll have to litigate that difference. But for now, the research is basically the same. So great. I'll work with those people and they'll work with me. I think it's fine. And then, yeah, I mean, obviously I care about my artist friends. I care about my environmentally driven friends. You know, these are our colleagues, our neighbors, the people who, you know, we, we, we see at the movie theater and shop with at the grocery store. And even if you and I. Right. Read something like Dune and are awestruck and want it to happen, there actually are plenty of people who see it very differently. Like they'd rather live in a, you know, a happy commune of colleagues who do simple things like farming, creating gardens, and, you know, exploring art with each other. And that's kind of what they want, and that's it. And, I really don't know what the solution is here, but that is ultimately like the strongest pushback I've gotten. So I want to think that we could go out and work on the bridges and I'm not thinking we could go out and actually make an impact on that community and together we can't be even more productive and a better group of people working together where I love working with people, and that sort of impression is like it doesn't take me back to the field when I was there. I loved it; I really do. So it's something everyone loves that. It's a really good one. That sounds like talk about gardening, considered not necessarily practicing, aging in place. Like just go into a store and just get them. Is that something you talked about? You will that group or multiple groups, subgroups, whatever will live their lives the way that they want to, and we support that. Still, hopefully they support what we want to do as well, but just in sort of different spheres because the human, um, what the human mind ends up wanting just ends up being different for different humans. And there isn't like a core philosophical reason to say one is better or right compared to the other. So I think they just have to exist in slightly different parts of the universe and they both review each other and consider each other sacred and harmonize without having to fight.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:44:50] Man, I hope yeah so I've got a two-part response yeah. First is on the Dune piece yeah, again because of the imagination, the possibility looking 20, 000 years into the future and what does that look like? Whether it's Dune or um this uh series I just watched um this year I think um called Foundation, yeah, um Isaac Asimov, like incredible. But yeah, I think any far-future science you there's a rumor that this thing called Earth might have existed where humans came from and nobody's really sure. I love that yes right because the exponential degree to which humanity must have gone in order to expand out into the universe and how the human experience kind of also exponentially splintered into so many different things that's a great opportunity for you know this form and this consciousness and you know I feel like there's no better way to honor um you know our existence than to wish for a future like that um but here we go um but you know that that bifurcation that you're describing here right um public will is pretty critical right and a lot of decisions are going to be made around that and this is kind of related to that you know regulatory winter question I was asking earlier is I just wonder how we're going to negotiate some of these Spaces because there's a lot of room for things to fundamentally drastically change with the type of you know engineering and possibilities on the technology side, I wonder if public will can keep up right because you know in any political environment you've got you know five percent of the people that feel really strongly one way and five percent that feel really strongly the other way and the ninety percent that you know aren't quite sure don't give a or you know we'll vote the way their neighbor voted, yeah so navigating that public will is probably the thing that you know might need to be reconciled to some. Extent, I think that's a really good question, and I think that's a really good question, um, and I think that's a really good question. And I think that's a really good question to say that this is happening, but here's how we're kind of taking care of, you know, the present state or the status quo, or society as it exists, this is where I help.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:46:54] Sorry, this is where I hope groups like Skyrocket will help, oh wow, right! Like, this is the communicators of the world, the people who understand these visions and understand the art and understand the human mind. How do you put this, right? Like the sociology of, like, the majority that ninety percent. You identified in the middle and how to speak to them, Apple does this amazingly, obviously they know, look at how they're doing AI to you and me. I open up ChatGPT on my phone; I have a dedicated button for it now, uh, and I think it's fantastic. I freaking love it, and I'm sure you do too. I open up Apple Intelligence Siri, the new Siri, and it sucks-a lot! Like, I really don't like it, and yet, you just described your grandmother or, sorry, your mother who used Siri, that's interesting. So Apple is clearly not saying, 'We are you,' we're building AI for the tech enthusiasts; we're slowly building it for the everybody people, and humanizing.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:47:57] it so whatever lessons we can learn from apple's clear success in humanizing and artistifying artistifying artisticifying uh the technology to make it palatable uh is actually maybe half the battle uh like half that's a lot uh I think you're totally right yeah it comes down to the experience right the experience creates the appreciation the adoption uh and then and then the willingness right because if um my mom can't use an android for that reason right if android is great for power users because you can do lots of shit and get in there and really customize stuff that's right uh but from you know that that five-year Old to 90-year-old, yes, they don't do too well, right? Yes, yes, um, um. So, let's talk more immediate. We've talked you know everywhere from like centuries out to a hundred thousand years and then back to twenty thousand years. Is there something coming up in the next you know months or a year for, for your particular initiatives that you're working on that you're really excited about?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:48:54] Yeah, um, shout out to AWS; it could have been Google; it could have been Azure, Google Cloud, whatever – you know they are helping startups that are excited by AI kick start their efforts. So, I don't know, a lot of you know, I don't know I don't know, I don't know, like if weird before people would be familiar with this, but like the sort of AWS startup credits so they've gifted us 100k in these credits, I've abused those, oh you've abused them too, yeah, repeatedly for years; it was just like every four years they're like 'yeah', I have another hundred thousand. Which is so funny that it feels like funny money, you know, when they do that. Um, but it also genuinely in this case for me specifically like, I would have wanted to train a transformer model anyway, it buys a lot of compute, it's yeah, and it is weirdly like the platform that people are saying is a capital expenditure. At this point, um, so I've set up laboratories in the past for the biotech science work that I've done. You spend, you know, you raise money from investors and you spend some of it on these pieces of equipment that then, if it turns out whatever the startup doesn't work or whatever, you can sell the equipment; it's just like selling something and you can like get their money back or some of it at least it's like capital stuff that you keep making money off of. And in the AI world, foundation models like training your own transformer, whether it's just fine-tuning or transfer learning, or you know actually doing a full foundation model, 100. million parameters or something uh that has become the new capital expenditure which is amazing that amazon is just giving us the sort of like capital expenditure on and we could probably go to gcp and be like you we didn't have a great experience with amazon we'll come with you and get another hundred thousand maybe we'll see how that works but anyway I’m excited by that because we're actually taking some of the uh most bleeding edge models that exist now we're tweaking adding data building out a lot of the data and then we're going to be able to build out a lot of the data and then we're going to be able to build out a lot of The data, and then we're going to be able to build out a lot laboratory, a physical zebrafish laboratory. We're going to have thousands of fish; I know it's a whole conversation we could have about it. There's a model organism that we're going to use to text test toxicity on upcoming drugs-cosmetic drugs or it could be you know pharmaceutical new drugs-and they need that result. AI will help get better insights as to why they reacted the way they did, and therefore to learn from that to get better products in the future. So, that's basically the business model I'm going after. So, we're going to have this farm of zebrafish that represents Nature, as in, we do experiments and nature gives us back the raw output, the raw correct answers. Then, we're going to have our AI, or capital invested AWS transfer learned AI, that we will keep feeding new data from the real lab based on tweaks that we've done and based on experiments and perturbations, etc. so our AI will get more and more powerful. And as we return results to customers, we'll say, 'Yeah, here's your standard results that you expected.' By the way, this time, we'll just give you some AI results as well; they say that, 'You know, this is how deep it went; this is the mechanisms; these are the connections that you didn't Expect and then they're gonna be like, 'wait, wait, what was that?' And then we're like, 'oh, yeah, yeah, just our AI is getting better.' And we if you want it next time, it'll be $20,000. You know, like um, so that's the current strategy and the current uh kind of thing that I'm excited about.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:51:58] Beyond the technology and bioengineering background, I feel like you've got like a marketer buried in there as well because what comes along, uh, so much of the technological stuff you're working on is also an idea around how to actually um attract somebody to it right, uh, which is you know, uh, often missing, right from a lot of people that work on engineering problems. They don't necessarily understand what motivates people, how to make it relevant, how to make a connection... uh, but yeah, I feel like for you if it wasn't bioengineering it probably would have been marketing.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:52:27] Yeah, I appreciate that it's so funny. I've gone back and forth on this. I think I told you my journey was like originally I thought I would just be like an academic, a scientist. I kind of still think a pig savvy, but then I came back and thought something turned out and I went to the law school and did a syllabus that I took to some of my friends from the class one-on-one-what do you know? What to look for, what to think of? Quem pas That kind of thing, and I without doubt, I'm shooting the whole thing. I have just as in everyone else ever; it's really, it really feels weird because it's not very creative and really challenging, but as soon as I said I would listen, but that felt a little if you will. I really felt there was some kind ofいneed with what that subject matter was that that continues to linger. How do you pitch a project to get brilliant product? I wrote what I'm trying to do; I wanted to pitch a project to kind of play the game. By the way, and I don't use the lady, but I want to. And I hope that I can actually still hold some of those core science things maybe. Be seen as somebody who's selling or marketing or communicating science and technology well. But yeah, you're totally right. You have to convince people to do their life's work with you. You have to convince customers that it's exciting. You have to convince AWS that it's worth investing in. So I appreciate what you said.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:53:33] No, I mean, application of hardcore science to society, economy, community, I think we need to see a lot more of that. There has to be more relevance towards these spaces because things are moving way too fast for anything to be happening in some deep, dark room somewhere. And then later on, some papers emerge that the average person's going to be largely disconnected from. So, yeah, those two things must intersect in powerful ways because we don't have time to catch up. Things are moving way too fast. I totally agree with you.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:54:03] So, what's exciting for you then? What's in the most immediate future, like a year, two years? How are you guys thinking about AI, if I may ask, in AI and integration and all that?

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:54:12] Yeah, I mean, this isn't, I was about to be like really protective about the answer, but then I realized that'd be stupid because I was going to talk about AI. Well, so even AI is going to fundamentally change our business. And, you know, that's not a secret. No, it's, I think the degree to which, it's changing things is, I went from feeling like, oh, this is cool. We're adopting cool tech to almost overnight feeling like we're on the back foot completely, right? And so what I'm really interested in is as a thought experiment first, and then as a business principle later, thinking entirely from transformers and language models first and being like, okay, that's the center of the business, right? And now how do we work through that in order to shape the outcomes that we're after, right? And that's creating some, again, you know, unintended consequences, right? Because on the one hand, it's an exciting proposition to take, you know, our model and go from having AI tools at the edges, which we do today. And we're using them quite well from creative to code, to copywriting, like AI is touching everything that we do, right? But to take that and move it to the center, you know, it sounds good and well. Interesting. Unintended consequences. So at Skyrocket, we've been around for 13 years now. And for a period of, you know, seven or eight years, we had almost like an unbroken chain of designers, meaning that we had a creative director who trained up designers under him. After a couple of years, they became senior. We hired juniors under them. And there was almost like this lineage. And I, you know, took some pride in that, right? There's like this ongoing lineage of talent and our way of doing things and our perspective on the world. And that's been fundamentally broken because we've been doing this for a long time. Between economic pressures and between, you know, everybody trying to do more with less, I feel like there's a level of, frankly, junior work that AI does a good job at, right? So anybody that was going to be in some sort of service industry today, You would, of course, hire. You need people, absolutely. People are critical. But you're going to be looking for senior talent that can actually orchestrate and shepherd perhaps some junior talent, but a lot of AI agents and tools to make things happen, right?

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:56:34] It's the way to think of it. You could even have junior people if they are visionary enough to lead AI to a result.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:56:42] But that's super tough, right? And I feel like that's going to be the, you know, the needle in the haystack that's going to set those junior people apart. Because part of the reason why in creative spaces they have to apprentice, you know, under senior people is they need the experience and they need that feedback loop, which on AI is kind of instantaneous, right? Yes. But they need you; they need years of it in order to like reinforce learning and gain that experience, right? So, at times, you'll definitely find, you know, a diamond in the rough and they're amazing. And a lot of times, you know, people just need the time to gain the experience, right? So my heart kind of goes out to, I think, junior creative talent right now more than anything because senior creative talent still needs to be able to shape and curate the offerings to understand, right? So whether it's another person or whether it's AI, you still, you know, today we still need them to actually curate the offering, right? But I feel like that's caused a, you know, a pretty massive disruption there. But having said that, you know, the future is already here. So, what I'm looking forward to at Skyrocket is to actually, you know, just flip our ways of working and these tools and these ways that are on the periphery right now. It's taking some time and kind of scratching everything off the map and saying, 'you know, we're not going to think of this as an iteration, but as a fundamental, like if we were going to start Skyrocket tomorrow, right? Actually act like a startup and say nothing else is going on. Yeah.' Start this today. And how do we start? We would place AI at the center and then say, 'how do we work through this?' That's, yeah.

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:58:05] Yeah. Funny enough. Yeah. We're thinking basically the same way. For me, it is the thought that if you were to recreate all of this bio data, thinking about it is going to be used for AI first. It would not be as scattered and all over the place as it currently is. And it would probably help you stand out because you would have a version of an AI that's just going to be more powerful. That's going to be a moat. That's going to be what's going to be able to distinguish you in a genuinely hard to replicate way. So yeah, I'm glad you're thinking about that. That's very forward-thinking of you. And I also, yeah, as you're thinking about the sort of like junior creatives, the diamond in the rough, the one in a hundred that is able to sort of like marshal these AI tools toward outcomes, I hope that they will create startups around their co-creative juniors. You know what I mean? Like, because they also have access to these AI tools and they also get to start from scratch, you know, you obviously have the benefit of probably resources and actual experience and like, you know, subject matter expertise developed over decades, but there will be flip side, you know, sort of like nimbleness and youthfulness-y sort of that comes from the young creatives that I hope they embody or embrace. That's absolutely my hope as well.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:59:21] Yeah. Yeah. Hope to see that. Cool. Steven, you're doing a whole bunch of really wild and crazy shit, man. If people want to learn more about what you're doing, where should they go? 

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Steve ten Holder 

[00:59:32] X. com. And you can follow me on X. You're not going to do the jump? The jump? X. It's Twitter, right? At Steven 10. It might be Steven dot 10. No, I think it's just Steven 10. S-T-E-V-E-N-T-E-N. And on Instagram, I guess, if you want Steven 10 as well. Steven 10 holder. You just look me up. Yeah, I think it's so easy. In the future, I'm pretty sure people will be able to like, you just hear the name of a person and you'll just go to your personal AI and you'll just be like, hey, I heard this interview. I really, for me, would you follow Steven 10 holder on whatever, all the platforms that I use, right? It'll be as easy as that. So yeah, thank you for the time. I really appreciate the questions and having met you. And everything that you're doing for the local community as well is huge. So I just want you to know that I really appreciate that. Oh, I appreciate that, man. Thank you.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[01:00:18] Yeah, and thanks for asking me questions. Nobody were asking me questions. Really? So it's so nice of you to do that, yeah.

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Steve ten Holder 

[01:00:22] I don't think of it as nice. I think of it as like, you're somebody that is clearly thinking intelligently on these things. And I want to learn about it as well. All right. Thanks. Thanks, Steven. Thanks for coming to High Agency.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[01:00:32] Everybody. Thank you, Mo. OK. Well, hopefully we've given you a lot to think about. That was High Agency. Like and subscribe, and we will see you next time.