This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Stop Thinking Small: Moonshots, AI & Human Potential with Dr. Salima Bhimani | 432

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us got way too practical. We learned what’s realistic, reasonable, and likely to work. We became responsible adults who pay the mortgage and don’t launch every half-baked idea that hits us in the shower. Great. But what if being “realistic” is sometimes just fear with better branding? In this episode of This Is Woman’s Work, Nicole Kalil talks with Dr. Salima Bhimani, moonshot architect, entrepreneur, former Alphabet Chief Strategist for Responsible Technology, CEO of 10x Responsible Tech, and author of Invent Now: The Next Leap in Moonshots. Salima challenges the idea that innovation, AI, emerging technology, and moonshot thinking belong exclusively to Silicon Valley geniuses with billion-dollar budgets. Instead, she argues that human ingenuity exists everywhere—and that the future gets a hell of a lot more interesting when everyday people stop being passive recipients of technology and start participating in what gets built. They explore: What a moonshot idea actually is—and why it’s not just for tech billionaires Why Salima believes we’re wasting enormous amounts of human genius and potential How AI and emerging technology are lowering the barriers to innovation Why humanity—not technology—is the real moonshot How to stop underestimating your own ability to create change and make an impact The importance of community and collaboration when solving complex problems Why we tend to underestimate our own impact while wildly overestimating everyone else’s How purpose and creativity can emerge during messy, uncertain seasons of life Why friction, frustration, and problems may be exactly where the best ideas are hiding What Salima calls the “third space,” where human ingenuity and technology come together This isn’t about convincing everyone to cure cancer, build the next Google, or become an inventor. It’s about getting a little less impressed by what’s “realistic” and a lot more curious about what could be possible. Thank you to our sponsors! Protect your loved ones without spying on them. Go to HeyPolo.com/work or use code WORK and get 40% off your first year Connect with Salima: Website: https://salimabhimani.com/  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Invent-Now-Next-Leap-Moonshots/dp/1394394020  IG: https://www.instagram.com/moonshotmaven_salimabhimani/  Related Podcast Episodes Pioneers: 8 Principles for Building a Business That Lasts with Neri Karra Sillaman | 383 AI, Hiring, and the Future of Work (Without Selling Your Soul) with Katie Fortunato | 395 AQ: The Intelligence You Actually Need (And Why IQ & EQ Aren’t Enough) with Liz Tran | 386 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At participating A&W locations in Ontario. If you love the show, the best way to keep it going is simple. Share it, rate it, and support the sponsors who support us. I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Women's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. And today, we're questioning what's realistic, reasonable,

or rational. And all the ways that our need to be those things might be getting in the way of what's possible for you, for us, and for the world. Because somewhere along the way, many of us have become, oh, so very practical. We've learned what's likely to work and what probably won't. We've become really good at working within the confines of what already exists, and we call it being responsible. And listen, I'm all for paying the mortgage and not launching every half-baked idea that enters our brains in the shower, which is where all of my ideas seem to happen. But I really do wonder how often being realistic is fear rebranded to sound better. Because what if the big biggest risk isn't thinking too big. What if it's thinking too small? That's what drew me to what our guest calls moonshots. And before you decide this conversation is only for tech billionaires

trying to colonize Mars, stay with me. Because what we're really talking about is possibility, human ingenuity, all the things we've stopped questioning because that's just how it is. And the ideas that we dismiss because we don't think we're the kind of person who gets to have them, much less build them, especially now when AI and emerging technology are changing what's possible and also making a whole lot of us really nervous. I mean, maybe the question we should be asking isn't what will technology do to us? Maybe it's what could we do with it? What if the next big breakthrough doesn't come from the usual people in the usual places solving the usual problems? What if we're surrounded by untapped genius, ideas that never get explored because we've gotten so good at talking ourselves out of them?

And what becomes possible when more of us stop asking, can I, or should I? And start asking, why the fuck not? So, friend, buckle up because today we're talking about what our guest calls moonshot. Dr. Salima Bimani is a moonshot architect, an entrepreneur who knows a thing or two of, about building what has never been built before. She was Alphabet's first chief strategist for Responsible Technology, Business, and Leaders, where she helped shape billion-dollar moonshots

like Waymo, Wing, DeepMind, and Google X. She's now the CEO of 10X Responsible Tech, a senior fellow at AI 2030, and the author of Invent Now, The Next Sleep in Moonshots, which is a challenge to stop wasting human genius and start building what we have. haven't yet imagined. Selima, welcome to the show. I have lots of questions for you, but I want to start

by asking about the argument you make in your book, which is that we're wasting human genius. What do you mean? And how are we doing that? Yeah. Thank you so much, Nicole, for having me. I'm so excited to be here. In your introduction, which, by the way, I felt like was such a good summary of the book, it really is an invitation to people to start thinking about what their potential is and what their potential impact could be in the world. And, you know, so much of what we've built in the world really, like big technological solutions that have impacted our lives, like think about the internet, think about search, think about now self-driving technology. You know, these are all technologies that we are on the receiving end of us. Most of us are. 99.9% of the world is on the receiving end.

And I'm just asking people to think about what happens if you put yourself in the driver's seat. right? You're not, you're not no longer on the receiving end of technology, but you yourself are a vessel of ingenuity, your community as your society, as your family, is vessels of ingenuity. And what would happen if we brought that forward, harnessed it, and then thought about, well, what do we do with technology as our co-partner in order to unlock solutions and possibilities that we just don't imagine is for us or for other people? So it's really about shifting sort of the dynamic and asking people who have never really thought about and maybe didn't think it was for them to actually get into the driver's seat of being moonshot makers,

which ultimately means solving really interesting, gritty, unimagined problems and opportunities in the world that could take us to a different place as a human race. I love that, interesting, unimagined. my brain keeps going to technology. Yes. Is that what you're talking about mostly? Or are there moonshot opportunities that have nothing to do with Silicon Valley? Yeah, I'm talking about, well, first of all, we're not talking about Silicon Valley in the traditional

sense. I mean, Silicon Valley has been associated with technological breakthrough. That's just the reality of it, you know, and some other parts, maybe some other labs or incubators around the world. But what I'm really saying is that we're in a moment where technology is all around us. You know, now the barrier to entry to build something with technology is also lowered quite significantly. You know, you don't have to be a software engineer to build software. You don't have to be, you know, technical in order to, you know, build an application for something.

But that's not the moonshot. In the traditional world of moonshots, that was the moonshot. The breakthrough, the technological breakthrough was the moonshot. It was the thing that everybody was aiming for. I actually say that the moonshot is humanity. It's really about, you know, have we unlocked our potential to live our fullest, best, healthiest, most well life? And we're in a moment now where technology can help us unlock some of that in the way that we haven't before. And it's really the convergence of this human ingenuity that, again, we haven't really, really partnered along with technology in order to see what happens. We've built. in small incubated spaces out of Silicon Valley with a small group of people who said, hey, there's a problem, let's build a solution, let's apply it. And I'm saying that no, actually all of us have the capacity to imagine what we haven't imagined yet is possible for

the world. And if we were to just collectively use our genius in order to discover those opportunities and then say, by the way, now I can use technology in order to do X amount of that problem, I can actually now build a solution that wasn't buildable 10, 20, 30 years ago, even two years ago. That is quite exciting. Yes. Okay. My brain keeps going to force somebody who's listening in who's like me and almost has prided themselves on being practical and, you know, rational and all of that. Yes. I know for sure for myself there's some protection mechanism there. But I want to get into like what this even looks like. So could you give us some examples of moonshot ideas or what it could look like for someone like me or the listener who

considers themselves like a normal, regular, everyday person to have this type of an idea? Yeah, for sure. Well, first, I want to take it back one step, which is that the spirit of invention is within all of us. You know, I had that spirit invention instilled in me by my family because my family had to, they had to move from India to East Africa to the UK to Canada, you know, because they became refugees and, you know, they were poor farmers and they had to figure out how to invent themselves over and over and over again. So that sense of ingenuity, that sense of, you know, evolving and sort of being in the friction with the world and figuring out, like now what do I do with myself or now what do I do with my family? How do we, you know,

how do we make the most out of our life? That has always been, you know, that I think we all have that to some degree. So first of all, even in the book, I asked this question of like, how many people do you think you can impact? Like, do you think that that spark of invention lives inside of you? How does it live inside of you? And I don't share stories like from my days at Alphabet. I share stories like I'm standing on a stage doing a play, an Oliver Twist. And all of a sudden, you know, I stay a line and it impacts 200 people in the room, you know, that's where it lives. It's in the capacity to tap into that part of yourself that says, oh yeah, I actually can impact the world. And maybe my world is small. Maybe my world is big. It doesn't matter. Tapping into that sense is

really, really, really important. Once we do that, then really the next step is to ask this question, and this is where the moonshot piece comes in, is, you know, what problems are closest to me? What problems are closest to my community or my family or the industry that I work in? You know, and what have we been circling around or imagining? Now, I've had family members that have had cancer. I know a lot of people that have. And, you know, I was just listening to one of the CEOs of Anthropic talking about how, and Anthropic is one of the big technology companies that are the forefront of AI evolution right now,

or revolution, depending on how you want to look at that. And he was talking about how, you know, we could solve cancer in the next 10 years, you know. And one of the ways that we could do that is by just kind of, you know, going into the lab and figuring out, like, what is really required biologically and otherwise. And I agree with that. However, what I think is that cancer is not just a biological problem. It's actually a human problem, right? It's living environments where people are exposed to things that can cause cancer. is communities that don't have health care and therefore are more vulnerable. It is, you know,

people who have doctors who either get it or don't get it and they don't get the care that they need or they do get the care that they need. It is the psychological weight of having something like cancer. There's studies that actually show that people who have cancer have rates of depression that are higher than most people who have, you know, maybe depressive symptoms as a result of, you know, the day-to-day life that can, you know, oppress itself on you. So it's not just a biological problem. It's actually what I call an ecosystem problem. These are all the pieces of the puzzle that connect back to solving cancer. And then you add on insurers and you add pharmaceuticals and you add all the people that are invested in how we move with cancer or don't move with cancer. So sometimes a moonshot

just begins with you and me thinking about what is the closest problem to me. the need to me, the opportunity to me, that really nobody seems to fully understand or get because it's not just this one thing, it's multiple things. Now, that can get very overwhelming. All of a sudden, you're like, oh my God, how would I even solve that? What would I do with that? But the point of Invent now and what I'm saying is you don't solve it alone. You actually go and you gather the people. You talk to the people in your community. You bring the doctors that you're connected to. You bring the scientists in and you start to think about how do we really solve this?

Like, what would it look like? How do we discover together? Not in a lab, not by somebody sitting in Silicon Valley at a desk figuring out how to solve cancer. But we, together, with our collective genius, discover where the opportunity really lies. And maybe it, yes, maybe is part of it is, yeah, let's solve the biology of cancer. But then maybe the bigger part of it is let's solve the ecosystem that makes cancer possible to begin with. As you were talking, I was thinking one of my best friends just has the biggest heart and she's a foster parent. Yes.

And we were talking about how messed up the systems are. And the general feeling I got, she's in it. She's doing everything a human could possibly do. But the feeling I got is it's too big. I can't solve anything. right? And so there's this feeling of like, I can't impact that. So what do you say to the person who has that feeling when something feels too big, insurmountable, or we feel too small or too isolated to impact things like that? Yeah, and that's real. You know, I say this in the book quite a bit. It's like

building a moonshot is not for everybody, you know. That's just the reality. Not all of us need to be innovators or inventors. You know, some of us might play another role. But for people who are, are curious enough and feel like maybe they have the capacity or want to have the capacity to do something like this, I just say, don't go, don't go, it's not, it's not a one, it's not a solo act, you know, it's not something that you do on your own. It never, it never is and it never should be. And I think that's where partially the overwhelm comes from. And I've had that myself and my whole life, you know, where I'm like, oh my God, if I'm going to go solve, you know, educational disparity in some remote village in, you know, in South Asia, like,

how am I going to do that on my own? I'm like, oh, I don't do it on my own. That's the ego thinking that somehow I am the answer to the problem. I'm not the answer to the problem. We are the answer to the opportunity, you know, and where that opportunity leads us to solutions or ideas to pursue, we do that collectively. And so the tribe is very, very important. You know, the active development of a tribe that allows us to get to things that we wouldn't get to alone. That is fundamental. You know, we talk about how on a day to day, you know, with our own psychology and sort of dealing with all of what's happening in the world and a lot of people struggling with loneliness. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, psychologists and other talk about is building a tribe, you know,

having a community that's fundamental to your own well-being and your mental health. And I'm saying that that tribe and that community is actively developed is fundamental to us finding opportunities and solutions to problems in the world and to needs in the world that we haven't imagined. yet. Having a teenager who's becoming more independent is both a blessing and a curse. I want her to have freedom and privacy, but I also want to know she's okay without turning into a full-time stalker. And that's what I like about Hey Polo. It's a family safety app built around consent. Everyone controls what they share with whom and for how long, whether that's an exact location, general area, or even private mode, because trust still matters, even when we worry. Hey, Polo can let you know when

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functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Nespresso.com. You gotta try breakfast. And what better way than with a delicious Pratt organic coffee? Starting with just $1 all day, every day now until December 31st. I'm participating in A&W locations in Ontario. Yeah. I'm so glad you really.

reiterated that, that none of this happens alone. Nobody's solo solving these big problems or opportunities in the world. Now, you said earlier about our impact, and it could be in small ways and in big ways. I'm curious, do you see, I'm guessing, but I could be way off base, do you see that most people underestimate their impact? It's so interesting because I think there's a story in the book where I say that I don't, you know, I didn't spend a lot of my time, like, reading about tech leaders or, like, people who were having big impact, because I always felt like if I kept looking at them and listening to their story, I would feel farther away from my own potential. Because they always look like they have something I don't. You know, like they're genius, their resources, there's something.

There's always something there that is going to separate you from that reality. And so I would always focus on what's the problem, what's the impact? Like, where are they actually trying to make the change, you know? And that inspired me. My, my inspiration came from where are we actually touching the ground, you know? It's nice to look up here and be like, whoa, that is a really inspiring person. And that's okay. And that people will do that. But if we start to measure our own potential against those people, we will actually oftentimes shrink. And I've seen it happen over and over and over. It could happen in relationship to your boss. It can happen in relationship to your partner. It can happen in relationship to all kinds of people and things around you, right?

So part of this is, you know, not looking at those people as the measuring, you know, stick against what you're capable of and what your capacity is. And really turning in and saying, what is my capability and my capacity? And maybe my capability and capacity is actually to not build a moonshot because you know what, moonshots are hard to build. Solving, you know, hard, complex problems is not something that is easy. And I'm very clear about that in the book. But do you have the potential to impact maybe even just a circle of people around you? Yes, you do it every day anyway, you know, whether you're conscious of it or not. So for me, that, that sort of, again, turning in is really the beginning point. And, you know, and it's not just measuring yourself up against other people.

but it's really about starting to say, hey, have I shrunk my possibility? Have I shrunk my potential in relationship to what the world is telling me or not telling me? And we have to meditate on that one. Yeah. Okay. So as you were talking, I've just reminded, I think generally speaking, we have a tendency to underestimate our own impact and overestimate someone else's. So like, I'm sure there are geniuses and you've probably worked with them. But I think sometimes we have a tendency to look at other people and make them bigger in our mind, even if they're just figuring it out as they go to. And I also had the thought of, you know, somebody might be listening and maybe they don't have a moonshot idea or they decide it's not within their capability or capacity to do something that

big, like cure cancer or solve the foster care system or something along those lines. But I would imagine that more of us have the opportunity to participate in an idea like that. we may not be the leader or the owner, but you think about those things. And I think so many of us have a way to impact. Yeah. I just think we're in a moment, particularly now, because a lot of people are struggling. You know, a lot of people are struggling. Like, what is my potential? Like, what is my opportunity? How will I, you know, how will I survive in this world? You know, like, what will my life look like 10 years from now? And I think all of those questions are existential questions, right? They get to the heart of what makes you you and what makes you human and how you

relate to the world and how the world relates to you. So I just think, you know, that, I mean, yes, I wrote a book about moonshots, but I think fundamentally what I wrote about is really about awakening people to their own purpose, to their own ability to see more of themselves. And I think we do that by one recognizing that, yes, we're always in relationship to what's around us. We're always in relationship to who's around us. But also, if we step away from that for a minute, if we give ourselves time and space to really step away from that and start to connect back to our own self. You know, I did this exercise with a friend of mine where, you know, she had been in an industry for like, I don't know, 20 or 30 years.

And all of a sudden she was like disillusioned by the whole thing. And she was like, I don't even know where to start with. exploring myself. And I said, okay, let's just start with a very simple question. What is it that you see about yourself? What do you see? Like when you look in the mirror, what do you see? You see a person, you see a woman, you see somebody who's worked in XYZ place. You see, you know, you see a mother, you see a daughter, you see. What else do you see? Have you changed a life by having a conversation that wouldn't have happened before? Maybe. Have you been an ear for somebody who didn't have an ear?

Were you somebody that picked up a piece of garbage off the street and, you know, helped with litter? These things seem so small, right? But when looked at our whole life, they compound to make us who we are, what makes us who we are and what makes us tick. So, you know, part of this is going back to that, giving ourselves, allowing ourselves, the space and time to really look at ourselves. And listen, I looked at myself many times and there are things in that mirror and I was like, nah. What I have accumulated about me that I don't want anymore because they don't serve me. At 51, those things no longer serve me. In fact, they hold me back.

I literally, I'm telling you, Nicole, I wrote this book through chaos because I, it's actually quite interesting. I wrote it, and I was just talking to somebody about this a couple of days ago, I wrote it in a way where I am saying that I'm actually hopeful about the future. I feel inspired about the future. I think we're at the moment. We're at the cusp of something that we haven't even yet tapped into yet as a human collective. Again, using technology as our co-partner, ethically with responsibility, with our eyes wide open, about all the things that we don't want it to do, and we should not continue to perpetuate

that. But also, I wrote it through a really hard personal time. You know, I was going through menopause, crazy. Let me tell you. Crazy menopause. Okay. Still going through it. Yeah, me too. I was feeling very, like, disconnected from myself in a way I've never felt in my whole entire life. I was feeling like, yeah, I'm doing this and I'm doing that and I'm doing that. None of it makes any sense. Why am I at 51? I've always been actively committed to myself, to my own growth, to my own wellness, to my own spirituality, to my own, you name it, you know. And all of a sudden, all my tools didn't make sense. Like, I wasn't care. So I, here I am sitting in my own skin feeling like I have no idea what the hell I'm doing on this world. I don't know who I am anymore. I feel like my body and my mind are just off on different directions. And yet I am writing a book about possibility. Like what the fuck?

Yeah. It's interesting. Okay. So many things have popped in my head as you were talking. But what you just said, I think hopefully speaks to so many of us. I think a lot of us think that we need to be in this perfect place in our life or like super calm and collected and everything's got to be going well in order for us to create or in order for us to put something good out into the world. And what I'm hearing from you is completely aligned with my experience is you create to create. you put something good out in the world to put something good out into the world. Yes. And sometimes you're in a good place

and sometimes you're not and you just keep kind of one foot in front of the other toward what matters most. But then also re-examining, taking the time to think about what matters most because that may evolve and change. You also said something, I have a belief that if we look

over the course of our life, there's breadcrumbs. They give us insight into who we are and who we want to be and purpose and passion and all of those things. I have a version of a question that I, the similar question that I ask myself, which is what do I know to be true about me at this point in my life? Yeah. Just really connecting to who I am, my unique abilities and talents, superpowers, what matters to me, that type of thing. Yeah. That's consistent.

And I can take that to any industry or any opportunity. or any idea with confidence because I have so much evidence that I can rely on that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I've asked myself that as a similar question of what is true about me today. And, you know, what do I want to have be true about me, you know, two minutes from now, five years from now, 10 years from now? And that's not to sort of set you up in false expectations, but more to say that to your point, like if you have evidence of all of the things, all the things that you have accumulated and done and felt and experienced in life, that comes with you. You know, it's not like it gets you race because you have a moment. You know, in the book, I talk a lot about friction that, you know, like that invention actually

happens from the points of friction. People avoid friction, right? People are like, ah, it's too messy. I don't want to do that, you know. And in the world of technology, you know, oftentimes we're talking about what we call optimization, right? We want to like find a solution neatly. You know, maybe there's some mess around it, but sure, we'll deal with the mess. We'll just kind of optimize it out. You know, we'll, we'll, we'll clean it up. And then we'll build a product, and then we'll put the product out there and all be neatly packaged and everything else. And I actually think that where the greatest invention comes from is the mess. I actually did a keynote last year on this, and I had like 100 people sitting there. And I was talking about the mess of invention.

where invention comes from is in the messiness of our lives, because if we think it comes from the neatness of our lives, then we will miss all kinds of opportunity, and we may just never do it. We'll just wait for the moment and the moment and the moment until I feel perfect or I feel like alive or I feel this or I feel that. And listen, there are times where you do need to feel a little bit more alive so you can do the thing.

That's also real. I don't deny that at all. But I also think that we're in a moment where our lives are just so messy. You know, there's mess all around us. You know, the world is messy, our environments are messy, our systems are messy, our society, our communities, our homes, like, whatever it is, you know. And I, you know, I had this thing for the longest time, Nicole, where I literally can't work in a mess. Like, my brain stops functioning. Like, when it's messy, I'm like, oh, I can't do it. You know, and then I had a kid at 46. And let me tell you that there is no escape in the mess, okay?

Right. And I had to literally train myself now. I just don't ignore the mess because I feel like then it's denying that the mess is there. So what I do is I look at the mess and I say, okay, is there something I can pick up right now? Sure, because I need to get to this. And I can pick up the next few things in the next little while. And I'm going to ask somebody else to go pick up the other stuff because why am I the only one picking it up? You know, so it's like it's like it's like finding your way and finding you in that context that is continuously evolving. But invention, and innovation, again, for me, happen through that friction of you with life, with systems, with people. And it's there when we actually allow ourselves to sit in that and be with that with other people and really tap into that and say, what could we discover through that something happens,

whether it's for yourself or whether it's for something larger like a moonshot. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function, and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving.

Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. You've got to try breakfast. You got to try bread. And what better way than with a delicious pre-organic coffee?

Starting with just $1 all day, every day now until December 31st. You gotta try breakfast at A&W. At participating A&W locations in Ontario. I'm gonna just hone it. For you, the listener, I really want you to hear what Salima is saying right now because I think it's so important. So much of what we are seeking comes from the things we're trying to avoid, right? So we try to avoid friction, and yet you're saying innovation and creativity and all these things

come from friction. In my work on confidence, I think people are always trying to think about confidence in the context of their best days and accomplishing. When I found that confidence gets built the strongest on our toughest days and when things aren't going according to plan, think about purpose. So many people's purpose has stemmed from some of the most painful or challenging experiences of their lives. I understand nobody wants to feel like crap. And yet we avoid all these things that often give us our greatest opportunities. So thank you for saying that and for reminding us of that. I can't let you go without asking you about the idea you introduced in your book about the third space. What is it? And why do you believe the most important breakthroughs

will come from there? Yeah. So, you know, the way that, like I said, we've built technological solutions that have impacted all of our lives. Like pretty much everyone's attached to their phone at this point, right? So I mean, there's no running away from technological breakthroughs as they'll continue to be part of our lives. But, you know, we've built, we've built those breakthroughs and those solutions and the, you know, the way that it's going to impact our lives in, again, incubated spaces, right? Like labs in Silicon Valley, like in a room in Google, you know, in a room at Facebook,

and a room at, you know, Microsoft. And what the third space is saying is actually we're at an op, we're at the moment now. where the streets of our everyday lives can meet the lab. Because when the barrier to entry to build things with technology goes down, then you could build a solution with software, Nicole, that maybe you couldn't have done 20 years ago, that I couldn't have done 20 years ago, right? Now we can do that.

But that's not enough. That's still focused on the old version of how innovation and invention happens, right? You build something technologically and now you've done the thing. But in my book, I talk about how humanity is really the moonshot. That's the moonshot, humanity. And technology is the thing that helps us unlock something that we wouldn't have been to be able to unlock before. So what the third place really is is that let's bring together human ingenuity.

Let's go and enter these systems that are really complicated, these ecosystems that they talk about them, whether that's our food system or whether that's, you know, something in the medical field or that's education. And let's take the technology. and let's bring those things together and see what opportunities we could discover that we wouldn't have been able to discover before and pursue together collectively. So now educators are not just solving for the fact that AI is changing the education system, but it's also happening with parents and it's happening with policymakers and it's happening with technologists that are trying to build

solutions in this. We've come together to say, what is the real opportunity here that could impact millions upon millions of people. It's not happening because somebody came and said, hey, here is the iPhone. It's happening because you and I together designed what the iPhone might do for us as a human race on a day to day and in the long term. That is a very different frame than how we've been approaching invention and invasion. Yeah, it is a very different frame and full transparency. I feel like my brain is having a hard time keeping up because it is so different and because I have a lot of old beliefs that are, you know, I'm not tech savvy and I'm not an inventor and I'm not very creative. Like so I'm having some stuff here. So could you give us

maybe some more day-to-day potential starting points for some where humanity meets technology? Like what does this even look like? Again, I want you to start with a problem or an issue or a challenge or an opportunity that's closest to you. You know, something that matters to you on a day to day. So one thing that matters to me is that, you know, I have to take my son to, you know, preschool every morning at a certain time, you know, and I have to make sure that lunches are done and this is done and that is done. Now my hormonal 51-year-old brain, and it is true. Like brain fog is like a huge part of my life, unfortunately. One thousand percent you couldn't convince me otherwise. Yeah. Yeah. And it sucks. I used to be able to like remember like not just facts, but context,

situations, people, like, no problem. I never used, I hardly ever used my calendar. I would remember all of my meetings. I don't know. I can't do any of that anymore, right? So what would be a solution that we could build around that, right? Where women are facing brain fog as a result of potentially, you know, menopause. What is something that we could actually address around that that would make it easier for women to actually remember and to attend to the things that, without trying to feel like they have to hold it all in their brain and get frustrated and tired. And now you're, now you're mad, right, because you've forgotten 50 things that should have come with you in the car that didn't come in the car. So there is like the implications are not just, I'm forgetting things

because of brain fog or brain fog's not allowing me to hold all these multiple things in my brain. It's that now my family gets impacted. Now it's like now how I feel about myself gets impacted. Now it's that, you know, I have to take an hour or more to do something that would have taken me 20 minutes in the past. So can we build a solution around that? Can we look at that and say, okay, what if we brought together, what if I brought together my mom, my mom friends, right? And then maybe in our group we have a friend that's a psychologist and maybe we ask them to come in. And then maybe my neighbor actually is works in technology. And maybe I ask them to come into the dinner table. And maybe I ask, you know, somebody else that I know that could connect to this problem in a different

perspective. And now we're sitting at the dinner table and we're talking about this problem. And we start talking about like, what the hell? How do we address this real thing that happens in my life every single day? And I know I can't solve it by myself. And I know it's not just an app that's going to make me remember that's going to really get to the meat of what's going on here. So if we were to all sit around the table and talk about it, what could we come up with? What would we discover? That is such an incredible example.

And I'm getting excited. I'm like visualizing being at that table because I don't have any. ideas other than what you said is we don't need another reminder app. We don't need another to-do list thing because there's plenty of that and it still keeps all the responsibility on us. My point is this is a great example because it reiterates this idea of bringing people together who have thoughts, opinions, experience, ideas, skills, and like not beginning with the end in mind, like I want to create whatever, but starting from the humanity and the community and, the problem or opportunity that exists.

Yeah, and that discovery, that place of discovery, Nicole, that's where the goal is. That's where the gold is. You know, that's the gold. You know, this place of discovery, we don't spend enough time there. We spend a lot of time with like, hey, here's a problem I could solve. Let me go build something like an application or like get on Instagram and start talking about X, Y, and Z. And that's fine.

And people will do that and people will continue to do that. And I don't have any, I'm not going to critique that. What I will say, though, is that if we really spend time in that space of discovery with people that we wouldn't normally explore these things with, what could we discover? What could we unlock? What could we tap into? We just haven't done invention or innovation from that perspective. And I'm saying that you don't have to be a Google to do that, right?

That might happen in something that is closest to you or that's something closest to somebody else. And we can start in a place like our dinner table. But if we bring people together who would never have talked about this together, what might open up? What could be possible? And this isn't just collaboration for collaboration's sake. No, I'm saying that this is the thing that is missing in how we invent. That's a starting point. And there's a lot more to this, of course, than just that.

But it's a starting point that could really get us finding things and exploring things and discovering things that we could never have imagined. And that, I think, that is the seed that then leads us to, you know, how many more people could this impact. Yeah. I got to tell you, I'm feeling incredibly inspired. And I started a conversation feeling overwhelmed, not because of you, but because of the idea of big ideas, you know, kind of. Yeah. But my last question is for the person listening in who maybe has a moonshot idea or wants to participate in one or just as looking for

next step. What do you hope this conversation or reading your book would compel people to build or rethink or pursue? You know, I think I think if I was to tell people what that is, then that would sort of be the answer. This is what the book is trying to do. But I feel your question as an invitation that I pass back to other people to say that, you know, especially in this moment where people are trying to figure out what's next for them. And a lot of people are having that conversation with themselves or their friends or their colleagues, this is the moment where I think you have to invite creativity into your life. You know, this is the moment where, you know, go talk to like three or four colleagues about, you know, this is something, hey, is this something

that we should be thinking about? Or I have no idea what I should be thinking about. Let me bring together a group of people where maybe through our conversation, we'll look, we'll discover something together. That's what happened for me, actually, when I left alphabet. I ended up meeting some people who ended up becoming friends and co-founders. And we ended up co-founding a company together in an area that I would have not have built a company in, right, which is really around detecting things in airspace and low airspace. And how do we really detect things that are above us? And what kinds of technologies are already out there, but what kind of technologies could we build?

And I would have never thought to do that had I not put myself out there to actually meet people, not to find an idea, but just because these were people that maybe were exploring similar venues as me, maybe they were having similar conversations or different conversations. We just ended up meeting and there was something about that spark of convergence that allowed us to walk down that path. So part of this is like serendipity, if you will, right? Part of it is that something you cannot control. But the parts that you do have agency over is the curiosity, the willingness to go and explore, floor with other people and to tap into that ingenuity in yourself and to say, yeah, I actually do

have the spark in me to do something in this world that hopefully will have implications. Maybe it's just for one person. Maybe it's for 10. Maybe it's for a million. But I want people to think that they actually could impact a million and then decide not to. Oh, I love that reframe. Thank you. And I'll just say for the listener, if you are looking for the simplest next step, go get the book. invent now. It's available on Amazon or wherever you buy books. Let's keep our local bookstores in business. You can also visit her website at salimabamani.com. We're going to put those links in every other way to find and follow Salima in show notes. Selima, thank you for being here for literally blasting my mind and for inviting us to make a much bigger impact and stop talking

ourselves out of that, then I think we would, if left to our own devices. So thank you for everything. Thank you, Nicole. This was been a pleasure. Okay, friend, the biggest thing standing between you and what's possible isn't a lack of intelligence, technology, resources, or ideas. It's most likely all the ways we've learned to dismiss an idea before we even give it a chance. We say it's too big, too hard, too unrealistic. Who am I to do that? We've gotten really good at letting those thoughts end the conversation. But what if they were where the conversation started? And look, not every idea that enters your brain needs to become a moonshot. Some ideas are in fact terrible. Being discerning is not the same thing as being afraid. But I hope this conversation makes you a little less impressed by

what's realistic and a little more curious about what could be. Because I don't want a future that happens to us. I want one we've actively participated in building. So, question the obvious, challenge the reasonable. And when that voice in your head asks, who do you think you are to do something like that? Maybe your answer is simply, I'm someone who's willing to find out because that is woman's work. Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyum, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know. And the story's moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industry shaping tomorrow.

and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing, and of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.