Q & A with Charles Cormier
CEO Wisdom Podcast
Over the last decade, Charles Cormier has interviewed and worked with more than 3,000 CEOs, raised over $100M, and built teams of more than 2,000 people.
Today, he hosts CEO Wisdom - a podcast featuring founders, CEOs, investors and operators sharing the lessons behind building exceptional companies.
Recent guests have included leaders from Meta, Mozilla, Apollo, Y Combinator-backed companies, and other high-growth organizations.
1. What truth about business or human nature do you believe that would get you canceled on LinkedIn?
I think the bar for success in business is too high for most people. Most tech businesses fail because the founder cannot build the minimum viable product or generate enough revenue before investors take notice. Venture capital expects a 10X return on investment.
2. What decision looked stupid when you made it — but turned out to be one of your smartest bets?
After defining the planetary address framework, I experienced a long delay before seeing a viable business model for the planetary maps. My end product is a completed digital map with sufficient coverage of planetary roads to become the de facto standard once those maps proliferate. The planetary address framework looked simplistic when I first discovered it, but the more I explored its implications, the better it got.
3. When did you realize you were playing a completely different game than everyone else?
I was amazed to discover that there were no historical precedents for the planetary road maps. At no time in history has another human made maps of the Moon and Mars that include a system of roads. Why not? Even the early astronomers could have made rudimentary maps by drawing routes between the landforms that they viewed through their lenses. Certainly during the Apollo era, while men on rovers were roaming the surface of the Moon, I would have expected to see a proposed system of roads at the various lunar landing sites. Space mining is still a ways off, but that is another target market for planetary roads, yet no one else is playing in my sandbox.
4. If you lost everything tomorrow, what exact steps would you take to rebuild in 90 days?
It took much longer than 90 days to get here, but since I have my copyrights and own 95% of my company, I am taking steps to ensure I won't lose everything.
5. What do most high-performers secretly suffer from — but no one talks about?
High performers are never satisfied with their own performance. I have had experiences where others took aspects of my work forward without including me, but that was largely irrelevant because they were working with an unformed idea that I would have ultimately rejected in favor of a more refined model. I am sure that I will look back on this phase of my company building as being surprisingly naive.
6. What’s the most dangerous advice in your industry that people blindly follow?
Don't do anything that jumps out of the box. Stick to incremental improvements of current technology if you want to be successful in your field. The obvious outcome is that entire fields of study, such as space roadbotics, are overlooked.
7. What’s one obsession or daily ritual you have that no one would expect?
I am a big fan of e-bikes and scooters. I live in an area with lots of beautiful rides. I am about 2 miles from the beach, and a mile from the boat docks. I try to get out every day, even in the coldest weather.
8. How has success messed with your mind — in ways you didn’t anticipate?
I don't consider myself to be very successful, only fortunate to be able to pursue my own interests in retirement. Success in America is something very different, but the pursuit of happiness is more important to me at this stage in my life.
1. What scares you more: AI being controllable... or it not being controllable? Why?
For context throughout this discussion, I categorize AI with technologies that shield humans from natural selection, along with culture. So from the standpoint of the threat of AI, I see it as being problematic over long time scales because it may change the way humans evolve.
Here is a good article discussing this in the context of human evolution.
“Ask yourself this: What matters more for your personal life outcomes, the genes you are born with, or the country where you live?" Cultural evolutionary researcher Tim Waring, of the University of Maine, said.
"Today, your wellbeing is determined less and less by your personal biology and more and more by the cultural systems that surround you – your community, your nation, your technologies. And the importance of culture tends to grow over the long term because culture accumulates adaptive solutions more rapidly."
2. If AI reaches escape velocity by 2026, what do humans become in that equation?
AI and consciousness are really two different trajectories. Intelligence can co-exist with consciousness in humans, but it is separate from consciousness in machines. Machines are not sentient beings. Mammals and other living creatures are still the only conscious entities.
3. What’s one belief you have about superintelligence that 99% of experts would disagree with?
I don't believe that superintelligence will ever replace humans. Humans will evolve with or without superintelligence, even if that evolution is deliberate, planned and conscious. I am a big believer in conscious evolution, as per my blog.
https://www.reloquence.com/blog/evolution
4. If you could install a single principle into the core operating system of AGI, what would it be?
I suppose the obvious principle would be to help humans to evolve.
5. If AI replaces 90% of knowledge work in 5 years, what happens to status, meaning, and economic structure?
As a retired NASA engineer, I can vouch for the superiority of working independently, making my own decisions, investing my own money, and being free and clear of any hierarchies that could suppress or even kill my startup company, Reloquence. I am hopeful that as time passes, AI will enable more creative thinkers and take on the repetitive, routine work across all demographics. I am especially proud that Reloquence, in collaboration with FiOR Innovations, an Oregon-based mapping company, charted the first map of the first roads in space. This was done on a shoestring budget while I was in retirement.
6. Will AI amplify our best qualities — or just reflect our deepest dysfunctions at scale?
Both. AI reflects the intelligence of Homo sapiens, so if you are waiting for AI to solve our problems, you are in for a long wait. I think the only way out of some of our bigger problems—inequality, climate change, etc.—is to accelerate the evolution of the species via conscious evolution. The planetary maps are my attempt to do just that.
I suppose being the first man on the Moon indicates a possible type specimen of a new species. Maybe someday we'll look back on the Apollo Moon landings in the 1970s as the dawning of Homo planetarius. Maybe someday we'll look back on my maps as the migration of Homo planetarius.
7. What will be the last job a human ever holds… and will that job even matter?
I don't think jobs will ever go away for humans because we have so many unsolved problems and unresolved issues. There is plenty of room for conscious beings on this planet, along with artificial intelligence. I don't think we are asking the right questions about AI's impact on humans. We need to ask the question: How will humans evolve if technology and culture shield Homo sapiens from natural selection?
