Excellent Advice For Living: Kevin Kelly On Wealth, AI, Optimism, & The Future

Here to give us necessary life essentials is skilled navigator of uncertain times, Kevin Kelly. For those unfamiliar, Kevin is the co-founder of Wired magazine—widely recognized as the bible of the digital age. He is a renowned futurist, author, and public speaker whose insights into the world of technology and its impact on society have been widely sought after and deeply influential. Over the course of his career, Kevin has authored several seminal books, including Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World and What Technology Wants. He has also been a prolific writer and commentator on a wide range of subjects related to technology, culture, and society, and has been a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, and Scientific American. Kevin shares a hopeful vision of the future of technology, and how it will continue to transform our lives and our world for the better. We delve into the latest trends in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other emerging technologies, exploring their potential to shape the world in ways that we can scarcely imagine. But the center of today’s exchange is Kevin’ latest book, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. From setting ambitious goals, optimizing generosity, and cultivating compassion, this is a must-read gold mine for wisdom on careers, relationships, parenting, finances, and more. My hope is that Kevin’s words brighten your thinking about the future and above all, prepare you for the inevitable changes on the horizon. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Momentous: LiveMomentous.com/richroll Whoop: http://www.whoop.com/ BetterHelp: BetterHelp.com/richroll Express VPN: http://www.expressvpn.com/RICHROLL Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Don't aim to be the best. Aim to be the only.

• 1:24Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Today, I'm speaking with Kevin Kelly, a true pioneer in the world of technology and media, here to help us make better sense of our confusing present and to share an admittedly optimistic gaze into the future.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  In the end, it's only going to be the optimists who are going to shape our culture. So you want to be on the side of the optimists to make your vision possible.

• 1:47Rich Roll?

  Kevin is a co-founder of Wired Magazine, widely recognized as the bible of the digital age. He's also a renowned futurist, an author, a public speaker, whose insights into the world of technology and its impact on society have been widely sought after and deeply, deeply influential. Over the course of his career, Kevin has authored several seminal books, including Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems in the Economic World, and What Technology Wants. He has also been a prolific writer and commentator on a wide range of subjects related to technology, culture, and society, and has been a regular contributor to publications, including The New York Times, The Economist, and Scientific American.

• 2:29Rich Roll?

  In today's conversation, Kevin shares a hopeful vision of the future of technology and how it will continue to transform our lives and transform our world for the better. In addition, we discuss Kevin's latest book, which is called Excellent Advice for Living Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. And the book, as predicted, is excellent. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible.

• 3:02Rich Roll?

  Okay, this is a powerful exchange about where our new world of technology is heading. And my hope is that Kevin's words help brighten how we're thinking about a future that is so rapidly evolving. And above all, helps to prepare all of us for the inevitable changes on the horizon. So without further ado, please enjoy me and Kevin Kelly.

• 3:27Rich Roll?

  Well, Kevin, it's an absolute delight to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this, to coming down. I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. And I got to tell you, I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit like nervous. My outline is like 10 miles long. There's just so many things I'd like to talk to you about. I'm sure we'll get to 5% of them today. But I guess my head is just jumbled with too many ideas. But I can't, I can't begin without acknowledging this collection of extraordinary books that are on the table right now. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see them, this series of three volumes called Vanishing Asia, these beautiful coffee table books

• 4:10Rich Roll?

  chronicling the photographs that you've taken over many decades of your experience in Asia. And we were just chatting before the podcast, you know, kind of going through them. And it's really quite a spectacular kind of,

• 4:27Rich Roll?

  I guess, you know, history of not just certain cultures, but also, I think in many ways, and I've heard you talk about this, kind of an important document of disappearing, you know, aspects of, of these cultures that, you know, are quickly diminishing. And part of your motivation being like, I just want to capture these on film before they, you know, they become something of a bygone era.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, thank you for having me. And it's a real joy to be able to share some of this work. And other things that I'm up to, but the Vanishing Asia books that you're talking about have been a 50-year compulsion, I guess is really honestly what it was, to kind of document these vanishing ceremonies and traditions that I have witnessed and I've had sort of the pleasure of witnessing in some cases because they're no longer being done, at least the way that they were. And I, again, had the privilege of seeing the world at a moment when it was very easy for someone like me with no money to get

• 5:33Speaker 01

  to these really remote places that had not changed very much. Now they have. They're kind of on a future trajectory like the rest of us. So this was my passion project to document these things. And we did a Kickstarter program to help make copies of them available. And I'm just really glad that I can share it with other people who might enjoy them as much as I do.

• 6:01Rich Roll?

  So your relationship with Asia goes all the way back to your youth, right? Like you have cut a very interesting and unique path, sort of, you know, orthogonal to, you know, the traditional notions of what a young person is meant to do in order to be upwardly mobile and kind of, you know, headed off into the wilderness with your backpack to explore the world in a very kind of Jack Kerouac sort of way.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was very, maybe say unintentional. I didn't have grand plans. I was inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog in high school to, it gave me permission to kind of invent my life, to invent your own life, that you had permissions because until that moment I hadn't really met anybody who wasn't following the same, you know, progression of things, high school, college, work for a corporation. The idea of being able to do something was really not an alternative. The hippies were beginning to kind of... Pioneer one of those and I said, okay, I think I see other people that admire who are

• 7:13Speaker 01

  going a different direction. That means it's possible. And I wound up in Asia without the faintest clue about what it was, or I'd never eaten Chinese food, never held chopsticks. It was very parochial at the time. And so it kind of just blew my mind in terms of the possibilities and the otherness and the differences were very, very prominent. And it was very welcoming and it was very cheap. And so I had a home there to explore. And that's what I did for my twenties, basically.

• 7:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So it was an extent. It wasn't just taking a gap year. You were there for back and forth for many years.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  A gap decade.

• 7:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  A gap decade. Well, you know, if they'd had a gap year at that time, if that was a thing, or even internship, you know, I would have done that and probably gone back to college. But because there wasn't, I dropped out and I roamed around Asia. And I say kind of tongue in cheek that, you know, after a decade or so, I gave, I awarded myself an honorary degree in Asian studies. Because I felt like, okay, now I know something.

• 8:23Rich Roll?

  But those experiences are, or were truly formative in, in your worldview and also in the advice that you now dispense to younger people about what's important, what you should be thinking about, what you shouldn't be concerned about in terms of pursuing, you know, a meaningful life.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. The way I might reduce it now, all those years of experience and travel is in your twenties, try and spend some time doing something that looks nothing like success. That's kind of crazy, stupid, weird, orthogonal, unprofitable, crazy, maybe dangerous. And that experience is likely as unsuccessful as it might look then to become the touchstone for your success later on. It will become really, really important to you if you're able to do that.

• 9:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I did the opposite and regret it deeply. I wish that I had had such a broadening experience in my youth, especially now in my mid to late 50s, looking back, thinking, why didn't I do that, right? But when you're in that moment and all the social pressure and all the messaging that you're on the receiving end of is sort of incentivizing you to do the opposite. So you really have to buck tradition and there's a lot of parental and social pressure that militates against this. So it's not an easy, it's a courageous act.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  In fact, the more successful you are in school, the more there is a kind of outward pressure for you to follow that and take advantage of your good scores, your good grades. But I actually, my son and my kids went through the same thing, college prep and all this stuff, and they were on their way to college. They went to college and that was another story, but I did.

• 10:24Rich Roll?

  Were you trying to talk them out of it?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  I did.

• 10:27Rich Roll?

  It's like the kids always do the opposite, right?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. So my wife is Chinese and so she's, you know, education all the way. And it's the one thing we disagreed about because I was off to the side saying, you know, you don't really have to go to college. But here's the thing, is like, if you have an alternative, if you have a program you want to do, if you have a travel, if you have something you want to work on, make it a program for us and we'll support that. But if you don't have that, then you have to go to college. And to my surprise, all three went to college and it's like, that would not have been what I would have done, but they went to college. But after that, our son was doing some things. He went to get a job and he said, look, you need to spend at least a year goofing off

• 11:14Speaker 01

  and doing nothing because for your entire life, you've been like getting grades and working hard and all this kind of stuff and you've graduated. It's like you have to goof off for a while. And so he was thinking about getting an MFA in art. And then so he's decided to give himself his own MFA, to make a little program where he did art for a year and then wrote up a thesis at the end and made a kind of like a PhD project out of it and gave it to his other art professors at school to read. And so he'd awarded himself an MFA, which I thought that was exactly what he needed to do.

• 11:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  And that was so good for him in many, many ways.

• 11:53Rich Roll?

  It's so hard to see when you're at that age how important that sort of goofing off time is. Because it does feel like squandered time when your peers are kind of escalating up the corporate ladder or what have you. And there's an inherent tension or conflict between the incentives of our modern developed world, which are pushing us in a certain direction to become productive and, you know, independent financially and contributory. But ultimately, you know, and I'm sure you would agree, and you're a product of this, the most interesting people that have the most to contribute are the people that took that, you know, less beaten path and went deep into exploration

• 12:37Rich Roll?

  and spent the time in rumination and experience to come out of it more robust and with a set of seemingly, you know, not connected skills that somehow later in life all congeal to make them, you know, kind of truly the only person who can speak to a certain issue or an expert in a field that maybe nobody even thought would be a field.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. It's really clear right now that the major engine of wealth, and I would also suggest personal happiness, is being able to think different. That's the engine. And when we're all connected 24 hours a day around the world with our little devices. The the true value is being able to think a little differently. That's the source of innovation. That's how you make great things. That's how you make great art. And anything that can help you think differently, including AI, which we'll talk about later, I'm sure. But travel and other experiences doing, having, uh, reading different books than other people read.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  I mean, there's lots of ways to do that, but you want to really cultivate that ability to think differently in a world where everybody's connected together all the time. And so I I would argue, yes. Zig while everybody's zagging, you know, and um, try and do something different. And, you know, travel is a tremendously efficient and productive and inexpensive way to do that. And um, taking time off, goofing off is another great way to do that. Sabbatical Sabbath um, is another great way. So there's, that's the assignment really for most people is, is to have different ideas, to approach things differently. You're going to need help doing that.

• 14:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I think that we frame this backwards in the sense that when I have enough money or when I retire or when I have the the luxury of time, then I will indulge that, you know, instinct to to go see the world. When in truth, you know, and through your experience, it's the, it's like when you don't have money and you have tons of time, that's the time to do it. And we think, oh, we can't afford it. But your example, and I I don't know that it's that different today, is that there are incredibly cheap ways to do this. You can work when you're there, you can work and then go there and live, live cheaply. And one of the pieces of advice that that I always give to young people that I that I wish had been given to me when I was younger was have experiences, live lean so that you can have

• 15:12Rich Roll?

  choices and, you know, indulge in your creativity and your curiosity. Because uh, this idea that at eighteen or at twenty, you're supposed to know, you know, what it is that you're going to do in the world and and lock in on that is absolutely ludicrous.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, there's, there's so many things about that. There was a, I think Ralph Potts talked about this story, which um, it might have been in the movie of a sky who's going to Wall Street and he's kind of. Hates Wall Street, whatever, but he's got to make a lot of money. And he was explaining to his friend that he wanted to work for maybe one or two more years so he could have his money, his fortune, whatever it is. And then he could buy a motorcycle and drive it across China. And we were just, we laughed, the travelers laughed because you could work at McDonald's for a year or half a year and earn enough money to buy a motorcycle and ride across China. It's not a matter of money. It's like, it's like, it's the time.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  And that was the thing that I got traveling when I was younger with very little money at all, was meeting some people on these tours and stuff who had a lot of money. And having a guy tell me that he envied me because I was taking my time, you know, I was on the hiking in the Himalayas, right? And I was going on and they were on a kind of a forest little thing and very controlled. And it's like, he was saying, I wish I could have been you. I wish I did that when I was young. I wish I had that kind of time. And here's a, here's a rich guy. And I was like, oh, I get it.

• 16:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  It's like the rich have money, the wealthy have time. And it's much easier to be wealthy than rich because you can control, you have time that you're given. And so that's the thing I started to aim for, was that kind of having the wealth of time and control of my time.

• 17:04Rich Roll?

  I'm pretty sure that that story comes from Ralph Potts's book, Vagabonding. And it's lifted out of the movie Wall Street. It's Charlie Sheen, you know, talking about what he's gonna do when he, when he, when he makes it big, right?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Right, right, yeah.

• 17:19Rich Roll?

  It's like, you could do that now.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  You could do that now. Well, you know, that's, that's, that's a very common trope in our family. My kids sort of have heard it many times, but very, I know, every couple of years I sit them down, I have three kids, and I say, I have a magic wand and I'm gonna give you a billion dollars. But only if you tell me what you're gonna do with it, right? What are you gonna do with a billion dollars? And they'll go through the kind of lists and what maybe they're imagining. They're young adults and stuff. You know, I would maybe buy a house or something and I would go on a trip somewhere and I would have this. And I said, okay, you haven't spent any of your money yet.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Cause in six months, that entirely interest will pay back and you're back with a billion dollars. Now what are you gonna do? Oh, well, maybe I'm making something up. Maybe I'll start a little shop selling knitwear or I want to do a little daycare center or whatever it is. And it's like, okay, you don't need a billion dollars for that.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  So this idea, I mean, most people's dreams are not a matter of, they're not gated by money. They're gated by other things. And it's very clear in my own experiences that that dream of wanting to work to have the fortune to do it is, that's a really convoluted and unnecessary way around getting what you want your dreams to do.

• 18:48Rich Roll?

  Right, but it's the byproduct of a culture that we live in that is, you know, sort of pushing this narrative or incentivizing this notion that extreme wealth is the path to happiness. And that, you know, material accumulation and comfort and luxury are the keys that will unlock that thing that's missing in your life and fill that desperate hole in your soul. And it's only through stories of people who have, you know, explored that to the very, you know, nth degree and have reported back that, you know, and despite their reporting back, we still don't believe them.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:28Rich Roll?

  That's how powerful this messaging is.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 19:31Rich Roll?

  You know, I think that it demands, you know, some extreme counter programming in the form of, you know, kind of your experience and the experience of others who. Can report back that in fact, after you meet your, your, your base needs through income, it's not that money isn't important, that it's truly, you know, experience and broadening your horizons and finding a way to contribute and, and, and link your, your life path to some kind of purpose or meaning that extends beyond your, your, your ego and kind of, you know, self gratifying instincts, that you will find the happiness that all those other false promises fail to deliver on.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I've had, again, the honor and privilege to hang out with some billionaires. And what's remarkable is, is that they're still asking themselves what they want to do when they grow up, right?

• 20:26Rich Roll?

  Which is good.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Which is good, right, exactly. But it's just saying that, that their billions actually haven't really helped them do that alone. In fact, it's added another burden, it's become another job, it's another whole set of things that they have to, to overcome. So, I mean, having a billion dollars is something you overcome. And it's a real issue about thinking about your kids and what impact it has on their kids, which is very, very strange in many ways. And so, um, so, so I've concluded, this is not in my advice book, but this is a piece of advice I have now, which is, my advice is, if you can all help it, do not earn a billion dollars. Okay? Please give me a favor.

• 21:10Rich Roll?

  Okay, Kevin, I'll try to avoid that.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You'll be much happier, do not earn a billion dollars.

• 21:15Rich Roll?

  Well, the real calculus is, is the money that you're earning creating freedom for you, or is it creating, you know, a, a more, you know, calcified prison for yourself?

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Exactly, right.

• 21:25Rich Roll?

  Cause it can do either of those things. I'm sure there are billionaires who've been able to figure out how to, you know, create freedom out of that for themselves, maybe not, I don't know. I don't, I don't even know that I know any billionaires, but you do. But, um, you know, if your, if your wealth can provide that, then, okay.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:44Rich Roll?

  But if it's just creating misery for yourself, then what's the point?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Right. And so that, that level of getting what you need comes way before a billion dollars, is what I'm saying.

• 21:53Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  It's like, you know, and so at that point of a billion dollars, it is a burden. It is something that really weighs on the people who have it. It's kind of like fame, it's my advice, it was just, you really don't want to be famous either, if you just read any biography about a famous, really famous person. It's another type of imprisonment. And most of the people who are really, really famous really regret that that is because they have to deal with it all the time. And it's a real, what's the word again? Hinders them in many ways. And so it's not freedom at all. And it's the same thing. So you really want to focus on, this is my piece, my favorite piece of advice

• 22:37Speaker 01

  from the book, which is don't aim to be the best. Aim to be the only.

• 22:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  And that only is where you'll be much more satisfied, happy. You'll probably have enough. And that is the route. It's the billions is another person's success. That should not be your success. It's someone else's movie if you're trying to make a billion dollars. You want to go, you want to be the star on your own movie.

• 23:10Rich Roll?

  Sure, but explain that a little bit more because the idea of being the only is an intimidating

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:18Rich Roll?

  prospect, right? Like, how do you become the only? The only at what? And I think becoming the only at anything, even if it's the most obscure thing on the planet, does require, again, back to what we were talking about earlier, you know, kind of being contrarian or cutting against the grain and doing things a little bit differently. And I don't know that everyone is sort of cut out for that.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so first of all, it is a high bar. It is a very, very high bar. And the second thing, in my experience in both my own life and looking at other people, it will take most of your life to arrive there. There might be the really weird freakish person who's born and has a clear idea of what they're really great at that nobody else can do. And they go for it. But most of us, it's a long and meandering, winding road with lots of detours and right turns and setbacks and turnarounds and everything else to arrive there. And you actually don't ever arrive. You're always on that journey of trying to figure out what it is about yourself

• 24:24Speaker 01

  that is special and unique. But it doesn't.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  And okay, so there is a paralysis I've seen in young people. It's like, I don't know what I'm passionate about. I don't know. And so I can't really start. I can't give my 100% until I know what that is. And I've become convinced that the proper way to start is to master something. And in that mastery, that becomes a platform that you begin to kind of move towards discovering what it is.

• 24:59Rich Roll?

  Passion is a product of action.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 25:01Rich Roll?

  It's not the other way around.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 25:03Rich Roll?

  And so waiting around until you're struck with what you're passionate about as a precursor to action is the way most people think about it. And that just leads to paralysis and like a protracted period of confusion.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. So you almost, and it doesn't matter where you start, because that's not where you're going to be ending. And that's true. Again, if you look, any remarkable person that you admire, they didn't start there. They arrived at their, and the more kind of distinctive, unique, special, and only they are, the more likely they started way away from where they actually discovered what they were good at. And so, don't, doesn't really, don't be concerned about where you're starting, as long as you're moving forward in that way of really deliberately trying to get better, you'll arrive in the right direction.

• 25:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think age and wisdom really gives you clarity on this perspective, though. When I look at your life, obviously, when you headed out to Asia at a young age, or even when you were working at the Whole Earth Catalog and founding Wired, like, none of those experiences could have created clarity that you would be this thought leader and futurist and pontificator on, you know, everything. I don't even know how to qualify, like, what it is that you do. But what you do is very unique, and you are a one of one, right? And all of those experiences assembled to produce this individual who has a certain perspective that has value

• 26:34Rich Roll?

  that nobody else has. And, you know, in my own experience, I've done a number of things that have led me to this place. None of which I whiteboarded or predicted or kind of scoped out or set as a goal. They're the byproduct of trying different things and failing and all the like. What I find, though, is that it's very difficult to penetrate the mindset of a 20 something year old person with this. That perspective almost has to be earned and an example of that is I had Rain Wilson on the podcast like a year ago, who is, he was, he was an actor on that show, The Office, whatever. He was like, 20s are for fucking around. Don't even worry about it. What are you guys so stressed out about? You're supposed to be, you're supposed to go out and fail and like, who cares? Right?

• 27:19Rich Roll?

  And that, like, we shared that video and it went crazy viral and it was a pretty close 50 50 split in like how people responded to it, like people saying amen on the one hand and a lot of people being like, you don't understand my life. Like, how dare you? I can't afford this. That's a very privileged perspective and, you know, I would, and, and, and not to be, you know, like, I'm, I'm, I'm sensitive to people's varying, you know, socioeconomic conditions, et cetera. I don't know people, you know, people's lives, but, you know, I think the wisdom of that still holds true, but I think it's, my point being that, you know, for a lot of young people, it's, it's, it's threatening to hear that. It's hard to hear that to like, step into the idea that that might be a

• 28:04Rich Roll?

  possibility is, is scary and it does, you know, you know, require kind of grappling with, with, with certain realities. And so I guess my question is like, is it different now? I mean, we live in a different time now than when you did it. Is it harder to do that now? Is it still possible? Like, how would you speak to that young person who had kind of a, you know, a strong visceral negative reaction to that type of advice?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  I too am sensitive and I'm thinking not just of the people in this country, but the people all over the world.

• 28:40Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Say in Asia where I spend a lot of time, where this is a very real thing and they have far more constraints on their lives even than, say, a typical American in terms of their parents and their expectations about what they do and stuff. So the way I would say that is a first pass is that if it is all possible for you, the more you can do that, the better. So I would say, yes, there are going to be people whose lives do not allow them that luxury. And that's unfortunate and that's something we would like to change. That's something that, for me, what prosperity brings, which is that we have more choices. And, you know, for most of the people in the villages of the Asian countries that I

• 29:24Speaker 01

  have spent in, they had even fewer options than that. They were, if they stayed in the village, they were going to be the farmer. They didn't have any chance to become the only. So, yes, I think it is privileged in that sense, but what we want is we want to spread that privilege around to more people. But if you have any chance to do that, in some ways, you're cheating us by not taking advantage of that. That's why you do art. You do art, in part, for yourself, but also because you owe it to us. That's the deal. And the deal meaning that you're alive and you have this chance and you have a genius

• 30:06Speaker 01

  that nobody else has, and if you can share that with us, we all benefit. So I would say, yes, it may not be that everybody can take advantage of it, but it's still true, to the extent that it is possible for you, it'll be better for you and for the world if you did.

• 30:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well said. Good advice, and that's just, you know, one kind of slice out of, you know, the greater slices of advice that are coming out of this new book that we've mentioned but haven't explained, which is your newest book, Excellent Advice for Living.

• 30:45Rich Roll?

  This is sort of, this is a really interesting book because on the one hand, it's incredibly simple, but every idea that, you know, shows up on every page, the more you consider these very concise phrases, the more profound you realize they are. It's almost a tweet storm, right? This is like a tweet thread in the form of a book, condensed wisdom over the course of your life, you know, offered up in very digestible form. You can open it up to any page and just, you know, consume one thought and think about it, you know, for the day. So, talk a little bit about like, why you decided to write this book? And what your kind of intention for it is?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  So, I began the book, not with the idea of making a book, but I have been in the habit of writing down bits of wisdom into a little compact proverb of some sort to help me remember it. So, I could repeat it to myself. So, a piece of advice I picked up at Whole Earth from one of the editors, Ann Herbert, was, this was, I don't know, 40 years ago. She said, "Look, you know, whenever you are being invited to do something into the future, like to have a meeting, to go speak somewhere, to have coffee with someone, to make a presentation, ask yourself, 'What'd I do if it was tomorrow morning?'"

• 32:15Speaker 01

  And that was like, oh man, that was so useful. That was so, so powerful. Because that's what I would do is I would get an invitation to do something. I said, "That's really great, but wait, wait, wait, wait. Would I want to do this if it was tomorrow morning?"

• 32:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And then...

• 32:30Rich Roll?

  If it's, if it's far enough out on the calendar, like I'll agree to anything.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. But you, but it'll be, soon enough, it'll be tomorrow morning. You're like, "I don't really want to do this." So, this future projection was very, very useful. And so, I reduce it to that little thing and I would repeat that to myself. And there was another piece of advice that I learned from, I don't even remember where, because these things come and go. But it was that if I lost something in my household and I couldn't find it, and then I finally found it, my flashlight, whatever it was, and I would go to put it back, the piece of advice was, "Oh, no, no. Don't put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it." Hmm. Because that first impulse, next time you can look for it. That's where I'm gonna find it. So I repeat that to myself. And so I decided, I was writing these down.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  And then I decided that I should keep doing that for my kids. Because I have three kids. And we, our, our style of parenting was based on my experience, which was I didn't really pay much attention to what my parents said. I pay a lot of attention to what they did. So that was our style, which was, we didn't preach or even give advice to our kids very much. It was all through what we did. And, but, as writing these things down, there were like a lot of them that I actually wished I had known earlier. So I was like, well, it's time. We should give some of those, write them down and, and, and give them to the kids.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  And so that's what I was starting to do, I started to write down things. And at first for my son, to things that I wished I'd known earlier. In these little, compact, tweetable things. And that's how it began. And I put out 68 of them on my 68th birthday. And I shared it with my kids and they loved it. And I then shared it with my greater family and went out from there and it kind of ricocheted around the internet and did this thing. And I was encouraged to do more of them. And I kept doing them on my birthday. And then there was a point in which they were kind of scattered all over the place. And I thought they needed to be in between covers so they could hand it to a young person. And that's the origin.

• 34:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's great. We talked earlier about, don't be the best, be the only. That's certainly one entry in here. And I wrote down a couple that kind of, you know, stuck out to me. I mean, they really are like, you know, these just really, they, on the surface, like really simple thoughts, right? Don't keep making the same mistakes. Try to make new mistakes. Like, okay, well, what, what are you actually saying there, right? Like, we should go make mistakes. Like, you have permission to fail and you should fail.

• 35:18Rich Roll?

  It's only problematic when you keep doing the same thing over and over and over again. Right?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:23Rich Roll?

  I love this other one. Productivity is often a distraction. Don't aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible. Instead, aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Right. And that's something, again, it took me a long time to kind of realize that because you'd read all these productivity books and stuff, getting things done and all that kind of stuff. But no, no, actually, what makes me happiest is spending an inordinate amount of times, things never getting done. So I make one piece of art every day. I did that for last year.

• 35:58Rich Roll?

  You're sharing the AI art that you share on Twitter every day.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  But I spend an incredible amount of time. It's like, I'm not trying to reduce the amount of time, I'm trying to increase the amount of time I spend that because I just enjoy it so much.

• 36:10Rich Roll?

  Right. Another one is, and this gets into kind of segueing into the broader picture of who you are. Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist, you don't have to ignore the multitude of problems we create. You just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:35Rich Roll?

  So, you know, this gets at the heart, you know, kind of the core of like who you are as a human being. You know, you're many things, but most notably, you know, sort of the reductionist term that gets associated with you is futurist. I don't know how you feel about that.

• 36:53Rich Roll?

  But, you know, that is the thing. Like, you have this capacity to communicate and understand the present moment and how it relates to the near and short-term future. And you have the facility to kind of communicate around that, that is rare and I think instructive. But I think, you know, as we've already demonstrated, it's broader than that because you have lived this very broad life, you know, well-traveled, deeply considered.

• 37:27Rich Roll?

  Clearly, somebody who has devoted copious amount of time to pondering questions, big and small, and from that, extracting what the short and long-term future will hold and how to deploy our attention, what we should be worried about, thinking about, what we shouldn't be worried about, et cetera, all of which is condensed and consolidated in this latest book. But the overarching theme to all of this is this unbridled optimism. And this is something that I personally struggle with, especially in our very current moment, where things seem to be happening quite rapidly, and from my perspective, at

• 38:09Rich Roll?

  times spinning a little bit out of control. So, talk me through your perspective of... Let's talk about the current moment first, before we get into future casting.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 38:20Rich Roll?

  Like, how are you making sense of what is actually happening right now? We're right in this moment of ChatGPT-4 being introduced to the world, and there's a global conversation that's occurring at a very broad level around artificial intelligence, what it means, what it portends, what it's doing for us, what our fears are, et cetera. So, where are you at with all this?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think you're right to kind of pinpoint the optimism as a pivot. And I think, I would say that I am generally, by temperament, genetically, proposed to be optimistic. But that actually, I have actually... But also think optimism is something you can learn, particularly as a child. And I have actually deliberately become even more optimistic as I get older. And where does that come? As I said, there's a natural temperament, but it comes from other places. I don't spend much time trying to predict the future. I am trying to predict the present.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Just to figure out what exactly is happening, going on right now, and to really look at that. And I think that's half of the, half of the president is just getting this understanding what's happening right now. And, um, but I, but I have noticed over time that, um, optimistic views tended to be more correct than not. So the, the people who, like if, so the more I became interested in the future, the more I would read the past and become interested in history, which I hated in high school. I just had no interest whatsoever. I was turned off by it. I just didn't see it. But as I started to travel more, as I started to have to work in the technology, which was changing so fast,

• 40:13Speaker 01

  the more interesting, I'm more interested in I became in history, and the more I read it. And now I just mostly read history. And what I get from that, and my own experiences traveling in these undeveloped and developing places, was the acknowledgement of progress. Acknowledging that there actually has indeed been progress, material progress as well as moral progress over time. And that when we, when people talk about the, this current time and the craziness of it, I have to say, you can only say that if you have no idea of history. And how crazy things, how crazy politics were in the US, say in the 1890s or whatever.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  It was, we just, it's almost beyond belief. I mean, think about the fact that there was a vice president who shot his political opponent. It's like, and then went back. Like dueling, yeah, like Hamilton. It was like, that's like, that's totally, you know, I mean, and we disagreed to the point that we were killing each other during the civil war. So, so in that sense, if you, history gives a little bit more perspective to the current problems. That's all I'm saying. It puts it into perspective to say, well, actually, we've had periods like that in the past and what happened. So, um, that sense of history and progress, I think informs a lot of how I look at things.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  And, um, that's a fundamental, um, orientation. So, so the little heuristic that I have, that I play in my head, which is that if we can create 1% more than we destroy every year.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Then we can have progress because that 1% can accumulate. That's the genius of compounded interest. If you can have 1% betterment, so 1%, if we can be 1% better than we are bad, that's all we need. And that little tiny bit is kind of invisible in the world. 1% difference in betterment, it means like 49.5% of everything is crap and terrible and maybe harmful. So it's really hard to see that little difference of 1%, but we can see it in retrospect if we look behind. And I had the privilege of being in a time machine and going back to the behind,

• 42:39Speaker 01

  going back to where we were and really living there in a feudal time with feudal relationships and feudal technology and very little. And so I know deep down where we've come from and how far we've come. And that sense of like, well, here's what we get. Yeah, we got some new problems, but man, we also have some new good things. And it's so much easier for us to imagine going forward the problems and all the ways in which it doesn't work. That's entropy. It's harder to imagine the one or two ways things do work. The way things work are much more improbable than the way things break. That's again, that's the rule of entropy.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  That's the second law of thermodynamics. It's never been broken, which is that the ways in which things cannot work and degrade are far, far vaster than the few ways that it can work. Because things that work are more improbable. And part of what we want to be is we want to be improbable beings. Another way we could say of like, don't be the best, be the only is be the most improbable person possible. Okay? And so that improbability is biased to things breaking down, to there being more ways we can imagine things not working and the difficulty in trying to imagine ways that do work.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  And that comes back again to why we should be optimistic, which is that because it's so hard to make things that work, they really work inadvertently.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  We have to kind of imagine that they could work and to believe that they could work in order to make them work. So there were a bunch of people who saw the Star Trek communicator and said, "I want to make that. I want that to be real. I believe that that could be real." There were lots of ways in which it could not work, and there were many tries, the Newton and others, that failed. Because it was easier to fail than not, that's the general rule. But there were people who really believed that that would work and it'd be good. And so that belief, that imagination, of imagining what it is that we want and believing that it's possible, is... Those are the people who make the things. And so in the end, when we look back, all the good things we have were made by people

• 45:04Speaker 01

  who believed that they were possible and believed that they could be made. And so going forward, that's going to be the same, is that it's... If we want to have a society that really works and is full of technology, we need to imagine an optimistic view of it and believe that we can actually reach that.

• 45:25Rich Roll?

  I'm completely with you on the belief that we need to, you know, have a sense that the world can be better and aim our intentionality and our hard work, you know, in that direction. But on the subject of like, the world becoming 1% better, or, you know, kind of looking around and seeing, you know, what's happening, is that not a factor of the lens through which you choose to perceive the world? Because you can look at the Star Trek communicator and then, you know, look at the iPhone, etc., and celebrate that. Or you can look at the accelerating rate of, you know, species extinction and climate

• 46:10Rich Roll?

  degradation and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots and... And the sort of, you know, to your point about, you know, understanding history, looking at the history of past empires and the rise and fall and the arc of these and to try to identify where, you know, the United States might fall on that arc, you know. I think you might agree that we perhaps we're on the decline of that and what does that mean in terms of the global, you know, sort of power structure and where we sit in the world and what we should be focused on and whatnot like. So there's a choice of perspective that comes into play here that sort of tempers my, you

• 46:52Rich Roll?

  know, my, my, you know, ability to just jump on the optimistic bandwagon.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  So you're right. And my perspective is decidedly, in this, in this respect, not American.

• 47:06Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  There are 350.

• 47:08Rich Roll?

  Which is healthy.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  There are 350 Americans between China and India alone, there's 10 times the number of people. Increasingly, what they think about the world will matter more than what we think about the world. So I, so I look at the world in a kind of a global perspective and I think that's where we're moving to. And that's part of what the US is still struggling with is this idea that it is a superpower and it doesn't want to be, doesn't want to be a globalist. I mean, this is sort of like the ultimate insult right now, which is crazy to me because look, people, this is where we're headed to. We're headed to a planetary economy. We're going to have planetary governance. That's the direction that we have a planetary machine right now.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  So on average, globally, if you do the Obama test, which is, I'll let you, you're going to be born at some year in a random assignment of sex and gender and place in society, where do you want to be, what year do you want to be born in? There's, there's not a year in the past. That's a better deal than right now.

• 48:08Rich Roll?

  That's the Steven Pinker kind of notion of this is the best time to be alive.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  This is the best time. This is the acknowledgement of progress. And so, yes, there are new technologies. The more powerful they are, the more powerful problems they will produce.

• 48:26Rich Roll?

  Right. Explain that a little bit, like this idea of fracturing the binary between we're either moving towards a utopia or a dystopia.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that is, and by the way, almost every single really good science fiction movie about the future is dystopian because they just make greater stories. I mean, the people writing stories really know how to tell stories. And they're mostly about this dystopian world. There's very, very few about a world that you would want to live in on this planet. And that's a problem for us. But that choice of, and then utopias, we just, first of all, I don't think they're a good idea. I don't think we'd be happy there, and they're impossible. But this idea of no other choice, and I coined a term called protopia, which is this idea that we can have a world that's a little tiny bit better.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  This going back to the little delta incrementally, a little bit better. We're kind of creeped towards betterment over time. It's not problem free. In fact, the problems are the propulsion for progress. And that world of inching forward where we have new problems as well as new technologies. That's the protopian world. And I think that is, that's a more achievable, that's a more achievable destination.

• 49:52Rich Roll?

  Part of that definition is also driven by human agency and choice, right? That's the thing. Like, we are, we are creating this in real time, right?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I wrote a book called The Inevitable. And the inevitability that I talk about in the book, which is technological inevitability, is that Things like, once you invent, once a civilization, anywhere in the galaxy invents electrical wires and things, they'll begin to invent electric motors. And once, and once they have electrical signals, they'll have radio. So it's like, there's a sequence of things, which will inevitably come up. Once you have, you know, electrical networks, you'll have the internet of some sort, sooner or later on your planet. Now, and AI will come. So, the AI coming is sort of inevitable, but what's not inevitable is the character of the AIs, and they're plural, there are many types.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  And who owns them? How are they governed? Is it international or national? Is it commercial or non-commercial? Is it nonprofit? Is it open source or closed? There are so many different attributes that we have to decide and can decide and have the choice to decide, and all those choices make a tremendous difference to us. So the AIs are coming, but the character of the AIs in the system is, is entirely our choice collectively. So we do have tremendous choices, even in the fact that this stuff at the large scale is inevitable.

• 51:19Rich Roll?

  But that choice can only drive so much of the landscape of consequence, in the sense that there will always be, especially with these emergent technologies, a landscape of unintended consequences. And by their very nature, they are unintended, despite our best efforts to curtail them or to, you know, instill them with a certain ethic that we think is going to, you know, be the best for humanity.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Right, so, in addition to the unintended negative consequences, there are also unintended benefits. And that's sort of what we see happening right now with GPT and the image AI generators, and that to me is a thrill, is that...

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Lots of things that they're doing, the inventors of them had no idea that they could do. Right, and within 24 hours, there are use cases popping up that nobody thought of in one day. Right, and that's the thing I discovered in researching the history of technology is that the, first of all, several things. One is simultaneous independent invention is the norm. Because the idea of the heroic inventor is just totally wrong. It's a Hollywood invention. But the idea is that ideas and inventions are networks of things. There are many, many parts, and if someone didn't invent it, someone else right behind them would.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Which means that also, the inventors of them don't know what they're good for. I tell the story in one of my books about Thomas Edison, who was inventor of the phonograph, the wax cylinder, recording things. And he, that evening or day, whatever it was, he made a list of all the things he thought this device would do. And the number one thing, which actually he did, and it's been, something had been recovered, was to record the last words of the dying for prosperity. So this was like a really freaky thing. It was like, oh, in the future you could hear Aunt Albert talking.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  And he made other ideas, and number 10 down at the bottom was you might be able to use it for music. Right. So he had no idea. Yeah, yeah, no concept of use case. And the only way we are going to figure out these new technologies, particularly as they're complicated, is through use. It's through use. We can't think. There's a term I call thinkism. Thinkism is this idea that we can decide and figure out things and have solutions and solve stuff by thinking about them. But it's action. It's using them. These technologies are so complicated, they have to be used in action for discover both the pluses and minuses. And that's what's happening right now with the AIs, is that we've been talking about it for 100 years,

• 54:06Speaker 01

  but it's not until we actually use them every day that we begin to see what they're good for and bad for. And so, and so this, this idea, there's, there's unintended negatives, but there are also unintended positives as well.

• 54:20Rich Roll?

  Right. So, within, within days, as we said, of, of GPT-4 going online, there's tweet threads about use cases that nobody thought of before. Somebody figured out that, you know, you could automatically have a lawsuit filed against a robocaller, you know, like these amazing, like, very, like, you know, specific, small use cases that are kind of amazing, you know, writing out in handwritten notes, an idea for a website, and then Chat GPT, just creating that website in minutes, or whatever it is.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:55Rich Roll?

  But also, we have, you know, Meta launching, or sort of, you know, introducing its AI, and somehow, that immediately finds its way to 4chan, when it was supposed to be guardrails, I guess, within the ecosystem of Meta. Like, there are these things that humans do, right? Like, whether, whether they're, they're malevolent, or just chaos agents, you know, that, that, despite our best efforts to guard against, find a way, right? And so, protecting against that causes concern. And I think the, the deeper concern, perhaps, or, or, or the thing that, that I think myself and other people find alarming, is just the, the pace at which

• 55:37Rich Roll?

  this is happening. It's, it's a dizzying pace, you know, that, it's occurring so rapidly, that we don't have time to even get our footing before there's a new announcement, and a new leap in technology. And that gives us the sense that this is getting away from us, a little bit.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it's not getting away from us, it's barely, I mean, if you get into the actual thing, we can unplug these at any time, we can set back. There's very few things that are completely irreversible. And that's one of the myths about AI, is somehow it's irreversible, that it's gonna unleash, and then it's gonna turn around and kill us. And that's just Hollywood again. It's, it's a good story, but there's no, absolutely no evidence whatsoever, in any direction, that there, that it's on a runaway exponential curve. In fact, it's the opposite. So, so the idea would be that exponential curve, we get it going, and it's unstoppable, it becomes kind of a superpower, but... If you actually, there is no exponential growth in the intelligence part of it.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Exponential growth is in the resources that we consume to make it. So it's actually the inverse of exponential growth. Meaning it's requiring more and more compute power to produce a little bit of a gain. So the gain is not increasing exponentially. The gain is pretty linear, but the number of resources required to make that increases exponentially. So it's actually self-limiting in that sense, right now, at this time.

• 57:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, we should distinguish between narrow AI, generative AI, and then, you know, the kind of thing, the sexy thing that's out there on the horizon, which is, you know, general AI, which we're nowhere near at this point.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:25Rich Roll?

  But we're in this uncanny valley in the way these chatbots speak to us that create the sensation of, you know, humanity or some level of consciousness that's truly just an illusion. But it is unsettling in that, I guess.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  So let me acknowledge, it is unsettling, it is moving fast, but it's not out of our control. And then, secondly, what we're discovering is something more fundamental, which is not that this thing is getting so much smarter. It's just that we're realizing that many of the things that we held as being highly elevated to achieve turn out to be fairly mechanical.

• 58:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  I can assure most people, you're not going to lose your job. You may lose your job description, okay? And the task in your job may change, and some of the tasks may go away, but your job is unlikely to go away. So far, I've found only one kind of job, of one person, one kind of job who's lost to AI. Everyone else is going to change it. But we have time, if we pay attention to it. What we don't want to do is to... Prohibit or outlaw or ban these things because then we don't get to steer. It's only, we can only steer these things by using them. And so there is a, there is a tendency to want to, well, I want to stop it. I want to halt it. I want, I want, I don't want this thing to happen.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  And that means that, no, no, you're not, you're not going to get to steer. The people who actually do use it somewhere are going to be the one steering it. Cause we can only steer it through using it, finding out how it works. And the, the idea of general intelligence, artificial general intelligence, I think is, is, is, is again, it's a myth. It's, it's not even real. We have no evidence of such a thing. Because so far, the kinds of intelligence that we make are very, very specific, very, very narrow. And we have really no idea how our own brains work. We're just, we're just projecting all kinds of things about us.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  And I think one of the greatest things that the AI is going to help us is to help us become more human and better human. And I'll give you an example, the simplest one, which is we train these generative AIs on all the stuff that every, all humans have written. All the content, all the books, all the writing, all the literature. And it's sort of like the average of, of humans. Okay. And, and, and it turns out that the average human behavior is sort of sexist, sexist and mean. And like, we're outraged, it's like, we won't accept that. It has to be better than us. Okay.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  We can, we can put in ethical moral guidance into these because it's just code. That's pretty easy. The, so we can easily code in ethics to these AIs and we can actually give them better than us. But the problem is, is that we humans don't know what that looks like. Does it mean like you're woke? Is it like being super woke? Is it something else? Is it, what, what does that look like to behave better than us or at our best? Where do we get that consensus? Who is the who? Who is the us in this? Who decides who the us is? There are all these questions. But if we can arise and come there. So if this is what the best human

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  or the better human would look like, and then we can code that into it, we could make them. And then that would help us ourselves become better. Because it's like our children would make us better people. Okay, we want our children to be better than us. And so we articulate the best behavior. And they can maybe help us change our behavior. So in the effort to actually try and come up with ethics that are consistent and deep, moral guidance that is elevated for us, we have a chance to become better humans.

• 1:01:35Rich Roll?

  Sure, but that is a larger problem than I think people understand. Because there is no one. In the same way that there is no monolithic AI, there is no monolithic ethic. There is no one singular value set that should drive this.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:53Rich Roll?

  And you know, the ethics or the values that are important to the creators of a particular AI may not very well match up against the value set or ethics of another group.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:05Rich Roll?

  So that's a difficult problem to solve, of course.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  It is, it is. It's a huge problem.

• 1:02:09Rich Roll?

  And those, you know, whatever is instilled into that AI in terms of values and ethics is going to dictate results. So that's a sticky wicket, for sure.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  So you may have people favoring one or the other. So it's like the old trolley problem for the self-driving car.

• 1:02:24Rich Roll?

  I'm going to use this AI for this and this for this.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Well, no, it's like, okay, you have a car. So should the car prioritize the safety of the driver or the pedestrians?

• 1:02:35Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, we get down to thought experiments that are...

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Those are old philosophical problems.

• 1:02:40Rich Roll?

  Like trolley problem.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  But now we have to answer them. We can't just wave our arms and say we don't answer it. We actually have to answer it. And so people will say, no, I'm going to buy the car. That prioritizes the safety of the driver over the passenger. They'll make an answer. The answer is, we're going to favor the safety of the passenger over the pedestrians. And you can buy that one because that's our ethics here. So we don't, again, we have given ourselves a pass. The kind of inconsistent ethics and morality that we have when we're driving. Because we don't know who we favor. We don't have that luxury with the AIs. We actually have to make a decision, which will force us to understand that our own ethics are very shallow and inconsistent. So we have to have a better one.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  And they'll be, as you said, they'll be competing ones. And which ones do people favor?

• 1:03:29Rich Roll?

  Right. And there are regulatory and legal issues that are implied by that, right? Like, are you really enabled to make that decision? That your car gets to favor you over the pedestrian? Who gets to make that decision?

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:03:46Rich Roll?

  That's a problem. I think the other wrinkle here is, is that makes people a little unsettled. And maybe you can speak to this. Is this notion that the AIs, even as they currently exist, the creators of them can't tell you how the decisions are being arrived at. And I think that that freaks out a lot of people.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  It does.

• 1:04:07Rich Roll?

  And if we can't understand that, and we're only at the inception in terms of the power and capacity of what these tools are going to be able to avail us in the coming years, that's disturbing as we tiptoe towards a more general AI version of what we're now seeing.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're right. This sort of unexplainability of the AIs is disturbing. It's interesting that we aren't as disturbed that the humans that we deal with can't explain things either, for some reason.

• 1:04:36Rich Roll?

  We accept that, right?

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's perfectly fine. But I demand, this is again, going to say, we demand our creations to be better than us, okay? And but secondly, to that point is, there are efforts. Right now, there's a whole field of AI study called explainable AI to actually have it explained. And what it does is you use another AI. That's built to reach in and to try to explain what the AI is doing.

• 1:05:02Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  And that is, of course, the genesis of consciousness.

• 1:05:06Rich Roll?

  But isn't it so complicated that even should that secondary AI succeed at that, the manner in which it would communicate to a human being would be so reductive as to be

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:20Rich Roll?

  Not necessarily even accurate.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Right, and that's exactly the same problem that humans have. Why did you do that?

• 1:05:27Rich Roll?

  Right, well, we're all clouded by our emotions and our biases and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  By the way, just wait till we add emotions to this, which is in the next couple of years, because a lot of people think, well, you can't really have emotions until you have consciousness and awareness and stuff. No, again, emotions is something that's very primitive, like the other things we're discovering. You don't need very much. Our pets have emotions. We can put, we can put lovingness and being loved and gratitude, all these things into very elementary machines, and they're gonna really spook people because it'd be like her. There'd be people who bond to these things in an emotional way.

• 1:06:08Rich Roll?

  Like Meghan.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Like Meghan. And so it's, it's like, it's gonna be very, very complicated, but the thing...

• 1:06:14Rich Roll?

  And yet, the optimism within you remains undaunted.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Because they are like our children. It's like, yes, and we're like gods. Okay, we're gonna make these beings that have free will and choices, and we hope that they surprise us with amazingly good stuff. But the price that we're willing to pay is that they may do something harmful. Okay, that's, you can't really, you can't generate anything really great without that possibility of going the other way. And so are we willing to pay the price to unleash these kinds of entities that can actually generate new things? And I think we want to minimize that harm.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  And so how do we do that with children? We train them. We instill them with values. We try to have, we try to, we try to move forward our own values into. And so we are going to train them. We don't want to restrain them and say, no, no. The fact that you could do something wrong means that I'm not going to let you have, make a choice. I'm not going to let you create anything new. And so that's what we're doing with these machines. In order, in order for them to generate new things that would be useful to us, with us, we want to train them.

• 1:07:35Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  And so we want to minimize it. We're not going to eliminate it.

• 1:07:38Rich Roll?

  I got you. But on this idea that we are the gods, we are unleashing this new technology and we are training it and it is learning. What happens when what it is learning is how to self-improve itself? And to do that with extreme exponential rapidity to the point that almost instantaneously it becomes the god and we become the subject? And the notion that we can simply unplug it becomes, you know, an impossibility.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  So I'm with you all the way except for the exponential part. As I said, there's zero evidence of that. In fact, it's the other way around. It can have thinkism. It can work in its brain, but it doesn't have what it needs, which is what we are gifted with, which is a body to interact with the world and have impact. So yes, it could work in its, in its little mind and go round and round and get a little smarter, but it's stuck inside a circuit somewhere. To actually have impact, to actually take control, to actually have effect on the world, it actually has to be connected to the world in some ways.

• 1:08:45Rich Roll?

  But isn't it connected to the world by dint of being, you know, wired into the internet?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  That does, what's it going to do?

• 1:08:53Rich Roll?

  I don't know. What, what couldn't it do?

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's like it's connected. Right now, its impact is the fact that other people are reading it. Humans are translating that into the world. They're, they're doing it, they're, they're putting out whatever it is. So in the sense that it needs us, it still needs us. The idea that it can be independent. Is is an abstraction that just it's very it's a fantasy that we can imagine, but it doesn't have any bearing in the actual real world. And the same thing with exponential. We can imagine exponential growth, but there's no evidence at all of anything being exponential in the real world right now. And and and to have something that gets smarter and smarter through his own training,

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  to have some effect on the world, it has to do something in the world. Like, what's it gonna do? What's what's this brain gonna do? Is it gonna like, there's, you know, it's gonna take over the drones. Well, how's it take over the drones? What's the what's that mechanism? I mean, it's gonna like, put itself somewhere. I mean, it's all it's a fantasy.

• 1:10:02Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, it it reminds me of, I think it's, is it Nick Bostrom who has

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  The Paperclip guy.

• 1:10:09Rich Roll?

  The Paperclip, The Paperclip Thought Experiment.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  It's it's it's a it's a it's actually like, it is a religious fantasy, this belief that the thing could become like our god. It's like the cargo coat. It's like, well, we're it's gonna solve all our problems. That's the Ray Kurzweil idea. It gets it, and then we can solve cancer. Well, the thing about it, that's thinkism. This idea that you could solve cancer by thinking about it, just by reading papers? You could read, you could have the most genius AI in the world right now, and if it read all the papers about cancer that has been published so far, it would not be able to cure cancer. It still need to do experiments. It would still have to, there's still stuff we don't know. This idea of, so Ray and people like that like to think, and they think, well, if I if you have a really lot of thinking, then it can solve problems.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Thinking is one part of solving a problem, and it's probably not the most important part.

• 1:11:02Rich Roll?

  This idea that you call dumb smarten, right?

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's another problem, which is that these AIs can be really, really intelligent in one area and completely idiotic in another. And I think our frustration is going to be, like we see with ChatGPT already, is like, how can you be so dumb while you're so smart at the same time in another direction? And that's because the engineering maxim is we can't optimize everything. There's always trade offs. Every organism alive today is not, there's no general purpose superior organism. There's no organism that's better than any other organism because they're all being trade offs for particular jobs. And so if you're really, really fast, then you're probably not very nimble. If you're really powerful, you're not going to really be efficient.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  And so there's just trade offs. And the same thing in, in, in intelligence. There are a lot of dimensions to it. It's not just a single one. And there's going to be like, to be really, really good at translating or image generating, you're probably not going to be good, as good as something else that's made for it over here. And so this idea of a general intelligence, it's, it's, it's ignorance of the fact that we have no idea how our own minds work. We don't even, we don't have access. We can't explain ourselves. And, and yet, we've, we've come to understand that we can, things can still be useful, even though we don't understand them.

• 1:12:29Rich Roll?

  It's interesting because as somebody who is a techno optimist, I would think that you would anticipate or expect that general artificial intelligence is an inevitability, but you seem to be saying like, this is not possible, or in the event that it arises, it's not going to come in the form that we fear.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  I, I think the picture you want to have in your head of, of thousands of different species of AIs, plural, many of them being created to perform certain functions, like, say, doing mathematical proofs, which will be amazing to help us do proofs of scientific stuff. Okay, they're going to be engineered to do that, and we'll work with them to do that. But the picture of, of rather than a kind of a superhuman, godlike thing, is to think about these as artificial aliens, like Spock.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  They may even be conscious at some level. Although most times consciousness is a liability. We don't want your self-driving car to be conscious. Because it's a distraction. You don't want to be worried about whether it's-

• 1:13:34Rich Roll?

  That consciousness is a liability.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  It's a liability.

• 1:13:37Rich Roll?

  You want it to be like a binary function, functioning machine.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  And, and, and, yeah, and these things are also not binary. They're, they're, they're gradations. There's little bits of, of things, including consciousness and intelligence. But the way to think of them is like Spock, which is meaning that they can be very, very bright about certain things. But they're not human-like. Because they're built on different kind of substrate. And that's their benefit is that they don't think like us. And that's true of the generative ones we see right now. They can imitate us in a bland way. But that's not useful to us. And you, we, we detect it. We are already sensitized to it. It's like, no, that's, that sounds like a GPT. So I call them the universal personal intern.

• 1:14:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  And you're, it's embarrassing to release the interns' work. You want to check their work. You want to work with them. They're going to always be available for doing all kinds of things. But it's a, it's a cooperation. It's a, it's a partnership. It's a, they're co-pilots. They're, they're interns, they're assistants. And we're going to use them like we navigate with a GPS assistant, a navigator. We have assistant librarian who searches the web for us. Now we have the interns who help us create things. And that's the current state. But what we're going to is, is these artificial aliens, which are really smart. But they, they, they aren't. If they're really, really smart in some dimension, they're unlikely to be smart in another dimension. At the same time, because it's a trade-off.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Because it's engineering. You can't opt, like, what would be like the, what's the super organism on the planet?

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  The organism to beat all the other organisms. It's like, that's the nonsensical question. You were saying, what's the intelligence that would be superior to all intelligences? It's a nonsensical question.

• 1:15:28Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, we like to think as human beings that we are the most, you know, adapted, advanced. But, you know, are we any more adapted to our environment than the cockroach? You know, you've spoken about this, right? Like, we need to recalibrate how we think about these things and then apply that mentality to how we're thinking about AI. So, in that, you know, kind of strain of thought, would you say that this is a base level, like emergent life form or intelligence? Like, how are you thinking about that in the more kind of like, you know, sci-fi sensibility?

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 1:16:09Rich Roll?

  Like, is, there is this idea that, you know, we as human beings, like the caterpillar to the butterfly, are here to evolve and that the evolution, you know, will ultimately be, you know, to transform into this new life form at some point, which will not necessarily be carbon-based and maybe silicon-based.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  So, I wrote a book called What Technology Wants?, which was primarily trying to ask this question of, what are the general directions in the evolution of technology? And just as a spoiler, my view of, my theory of the, my theory of technology is that it's an extension of the same forces that run through evolution in life. The same self-organizing forces are working through evolution. And evolution is basically biological life accelerated, that is kind of like, is attempting to create forms that you could not get to with wet tissue. So, these, all these, this space of all possible things that, that you need to have a mind

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  help you make, the mind came from wet biology, but can make these things that we could not get to, that the biological evolution would not get to by itself. And so, what are, what's the general directions? And one of the direct, general directions is that we constantly will specialize, that we make The first life is a general purpose cell. And now in our own bodies, we have like 52 different specialty cells. We have skeletal cells, heart muscle cells. We've specialized and that's the general pattern is you have the first camera that did everything. Now you have specialized cameras, high speed cameras, underwater cameras, infrared cameras, high speed underwater infrared cameras.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  We just kind of go and that and same thing with IQs and AIs. We're going to have a general kind of general purpose thing and they will make these specialized versions of them over time.

• 1:18:08Rich Roll?

  Right, like the the general or the AI as it exists now being a single celled organism as opposed to a nerve cell or a yeah, exactly.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  And so and then the question is, the big question that I have really no opinion about is whether we humans will speciate. And it's very possible that with genetic engineering that there will be people, say the Amish, my friends, the Amish, who will decide, under no circumstances will I or any of my descendants ever modify their genes. And then you have other people, it's like, yeah, tomorrow, I'm gonna.

• 1:18:46Rich Roll?

  Get me into that thing, right?

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Take away my, take away the Alzheimer's gene from I and all my descendants.

• 1:18:52Rich Roll?

  The Brian Johnsons out there who are quantifying themselves to the nth degree.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Right, but but I'm removing, you know, really, you know, Parkinson's gene. I don't want to have it in me or my kids, just take it out. And so over time, we might have two different or more species, we don't know. And then the AIs are, again, as I said, artificial aliens and we'll make more of them and they'll work alongside of us. And that's to me, the reason why I'm optimistic is I believe that there are problems that we have right now, both in science and in business or culture, that we, our own minds may not be able to solve. It's like quantum gravity, whatever it is. Maybe our human minds by themselves can't solve that, but working with.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Minds that we make, we may be able to solve.

• 1:19:41Rich Roll?

  Sophisticated interns.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  Sophisticated interns and co-pilots, we together, we can, we can figure out some of these things to solve. And that's, so I look at a future that's filled with thousands of different kinds of AIs. Maybe there's, maybe we speciate or not, who knows? And that world is, so there's not this sort of one big godlike AI that's kind of afraid of, but instead we have this, they're like machines. We have, we, we don't have one big machine. We've got a lot of machines. And it's like, how do you feel about machines? Well, which machine do you mean?

• 1:20:18Rich Roll?

  My dishwasher?

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  The dishwasher, or the car, or whatever it is. How do you feel about AI? That would be completely ridiculous. It's like, well, which AIs are you talking about? So I think, and that kind of, that's a protopia.

• 1:20:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Not utopia, it's a protopia.

• 1:20:34Rich Roll?

  Right. Protopia, the product of, of human agency and, and, and innovation with a optimistic bent to it towards progress and, you know, positive, a positive better world.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  The pro comes from proceeding forward, the progress, prototyping, and the pro versus the con. So there's, there's lots of, of that. And the idea is, is that, yeah, it's, it's like now, but a little bit tiny better.

• 1:21:06Rich Roll?

  Right, a little bit. I think there's a misguided sense that people could get that, that your perspective on technology is, is steely and cold, but in fact, it's quite the contrary. I think you have a very profoundly spiritual relationship to, to all of this, that I think is fascinating, that, that I'd like to explore. And maybe a way into that is, is something you mentioned earlier, which is the fallacy of the heroic single inventor, this idea that, you know, the Einsteins of the world are, you know, these singular people that we look to who pioneered certain technologies and, and kind of putting the lie to that.

• 1:21:51Rich Roll?

  To that myth and understanding that there are kind of tectonic plates at play here, where if that person hadn't done it, there was somebody right on their heels that could have done it. And the idea that that these sorts of ideas are are kind of percolating in the collective super consciousness of of humanity and maybe even broader than that. So talk a little bit about that, because I think this is super interesting.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there is there is scientific evidence and academic evidence that this idea that most inventions, the norm is to be invented at the same time independently by a number of people. And when you look at it, it's shocking, the numbers that we'll come up with of simultaneous inventions in the past. And of course, that's why we have Patent Office today is to kind of adjudicate that, because multiple people, even even today, are inventing the same things. And of course, the other thing that's happened recently, I'd say the last 150 years, is that there's very few single inventors. Almost all great things have teams of people necessary at this point. And so.

• 1:23:03Rich Roll?

  So solo genius, you know, idea is.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  It's just solo genius. And even the solo villain is a Hollywood trope, this idea of the person in the cave or at the top of the mountain who's got all this technology that works on the first time, and it's like they're by themselves. It's like, come on, you're right here, you've got five guys just trying to keep the IT going for this place. And so, so that solo thing is just wrong. We're a very communal thing, and we're becoming more mutualistic as we go along as a society. We're much more dependent on each other for everything. And that's my idea of the technium, which is that even technologies require other technologies to live and operate, and that the system of all the technologies connected together is has an agenda itself, has a has an impulse or a tendency.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  That's the technium. And I think that this idea that it is we're a much more mutualistic society and technologies are is is is important for us to understand. And then one of the, I think, works against one of the worries that people have of the rogue. Villain, you know, the individual who can unleash smallpox or bioengineered weapon or other things. And it's the fact that these technologies are becoming more complicated. That that actually is even beyond an individual to do. Again, it's a kind of a fantasy idea. But in my research, the power of individuals to do harm

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  has actually not increased through technology because the technologies constrain that because they're much more mutualistic and social. You just need a lot more people to get things done. So that's, again, another reason for optimism. But I do want to say one thing about the, we'll call it the spiritual component of technology. My, um, my understanding of both the origins of life and going through the unveiling and unrolling of life on this planet and this creation of minds. I think, first of all, that it's happened a zillion times throughout the universe.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I take it for granted that there are other planetary civilizations and they have something kind of a similar origins and growth. But that, um, uh, the basic, um, the basic trend, the basic arc that we're going through, that we're following, we, that we're part of. So that we're part of something that began at the Big Bang and is running through us and will go on beyond us. And technology is the kind of current form of that that we're, that we're involved in. And what it does, what it gives us, what technology gives us is cosmic technology from the Big Bang through us is increasing choices and possibilities.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  I mentioned earlier that, you know, farmer, until a couple hundred years ago, most people didn't have much of a choice about what they did with their lives. They were constrained by. The undevelopment to be farmers, or maybe a farmer's wife, and to be a mother. And those were the only choices that most people from most of human history have had. But we have discovered this new invention called the scientific method, which unleashed a whole bunch of new possibilities that did not exist before. And we're the benefit of that today, you and I. We're doing things that 100 years ago, nobody would think would be a job. No one would think you could survive on doing.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  And in the future, there'll be people doing things that we would not believe would be possible today. And I think what that means is that the story I like to tell is to imagine Mozart having been born before anyone had invented the piano, or the symphony, or anything like that. Say he was born 2,000 years ago. His musical genius would be totally lost on us. We would never get to share it. And that's a shame to us and to him. And then there's imagining Van Gogh being born before he invented oil paints, or Hitchcock, or Lucas before invented the cinema.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  So each one of these, our inventions have enabled that genius to be, to flower and to be shared, benefiting both us and them. And that means that today, somewhere in the world, there's a Shakespeare who has been born, and she's waiting for us to develop the technologies that would allow her genius to be shared and enjoyed and benefiting us. So we have a moral obligation to keep inventing these things, and the moral obligation to get the primary technologies of clean water, and education, and everything else that will also enable that.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  And so, for me, we're on a grand journey of trying to open up the possibilities to allow that every person, born and yet unborn, would have a chance to develop their genius, to become the only.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  And to share that with us as a benefit. And that's, that's the big story that I think we're about. And then, you know, in that process, when people were making things, they're making something new. And they can seem like they're just worked into the capitalist consumer business of making something new that doesn't work. But in fact, they're taking part in this great arc of trying to open up the possibilities of the universe to the people on this planet.

• 1:28:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a beautiful sentiment. You can't help but think, well, I have two thoughts. You can't help but think of what genius was lost or squandered.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:01Rich Roll?

  Because we had not developed the appropriate outlet for the expression of that particular genius over the course of human history. And then secondarily to that, this notion of collective consciousness, of almost a hive mind, right? Like, we're all participating on some level in the gestalt of forward motion in the generation of these new technologies without really understanding the context or the broader kind of macro role that we're playing. We're like ants, like, you know, moving, you know, along as we're digging our anthill or whatever.

• 1:29:44Rich Roll?

  But we have no awareness of, you know, the broader, the broader game at play. And yet it is sort of unfolding naturally as if there was some sort of divine plan at play or greater intelligence that we're consciously unaware of.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I would like to add one other spiritual dimension to that, maybe coming back to the Vice book. And that is that I think at the heart of my advice is the fact that this long arc, this generative thing of increasing possibilities, of this self-organizing dynamic, that it has another attribute, which is a paradox at its heart. And that for whatever reason, the way the universe kind of works is that it's generous at its foundation in terms of producing things and its abundance and its improbability. And that generosity is captured in this paradox of our own human situation,

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  which is that the more you give away, the more you get. Which makes no logical sense whatsoever. But it's so reliable that you can live your life based on that. And that that sense of being able to give away, knowing that you'll get it, is the foundation of all artistic creation. And the best habit to have, because you need to produce a lot. You need to give away a lot and keep making things. In order to make something great, you have to make a lot of bad stuff. And if you are confident, excuse me, that there's more where that's come from, that you can keep giving that away. And that's how you arrive.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  Your understanding of yourself is a generous outpouring. And that you can rely on that. That you can rely on the fact that people are going to treat you well if you assume the best of them. You can rely on things getting better because we're trusting the future generations. So there's a sense in which a lot of my advice about how to behave is based on this premise that at the heart of this long arc in history of creating more possibilities is a generosity that we can count on.

• 1:32:01Rich Roll?

  Sure, and I think that's beautifully articulated. And I'm certainly, you know, somebody who has experienced that myself and would agree with you wholeheartedly. I think with respect to the piece around innovation and technology, where it becomes sort of problematic or challenging is around the idea of whether these innovations are extractive or regenerative or sustainable, right? And we have a long history of producing innovations that seem to benefit us, but ultimately, long term, are too extractive to be sustainable and are wreaking havoc on our planet.

• 1:32:46Rich Roll?

  And it creates this tension between progress and this ticking clock, where we are quickly depleting the resources of our planet and not respecting it adequately. And so the question becomes, can we pivot away from extractive technology to, you know, at a minimum, sustainable technology? Or perhaps more laudably, regenerative technology? So where does your mind sit around how we make that pivot? Because I think we're Living in a world in which the systems that we have created have erected a misalignment of incentives that drives us towards the extractive model.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, this goes back to, I think, we have a lot of choice, and particularly in the politics of things, that is a choice that we can make or not make. And I think we have not yet made any technology that we can't make greener, more appropriate, but that's a political will choice, that's a choice.

• 1:33:48Rich Roll?

  Right. And political will is a big sticky wicket problem.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  Technologically, we know what a lot of the solutions are. There's two kinds of problems. In my mind, there's the tractable problems, problems that we know how to solve, but just have to choose to, and then problems that we have no idea how to solve. Most of these climate ones are in the first category, where we know what most of the solutions are. And so, that's will, a political will of choosing to do those. You know, and we know that if we electrify the current existing energy system, I mean, we can consume exactly

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  the same amount of energy, but electrify it, we can reach 50% of our climate goals. By electrifying all the stoves, electrifying all vehicles, electrifying all heating, electrifying all transportation, electrifying everything, just that alone will get us halfway there to the current goals. And so, we know how to do that. Electric cars, all kinds of heat pumps. And it's the will, the political will, to do it. So, I would say that that's a category one problem, which is good, because it means that we know how to solve it.

• 1:35:13Rich Roll?

  Right. We have the technology.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  We have the technology.

• 1:35:16Rich Roll?

  We have the solutions, but it almost, it makes it more frustrating that we can't implement those technologies, like we're in our own way.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 1:35:24Rich Roll?

  Because of the systems that we ourselves have erected.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:27Rich Roll?

  That are preventing us from taking advantage of, of knowledge that's accessible already.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Right. And so one of my bits of advice from the book is that you can't reason someone out of a opinion that they didn't reason themselves into. So the thing about it that we're kind of confronting is that people, unlike, say, the AIs, are not just very logical. They often, they're very emotional. They, they arrive at things for not logical reasons. And they inherit views. They have cultural standards and norms that they absorb, even unconsciously. It's just, so, so we're very, very, very complicated and we have to kind of operate at other levels to, to change

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  our minds. And people who, like me, who like to think, think that if we can change how people think, they'll change their minds. But that doesn't work very well.

• 1:36:32Rich Roll?

  No. And we have the added, you know, problem of people being motivated by their own self-interest. So, again, incentives.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's true. That's human nature. We're gonna, so, so you have to, yeah, you have to make it work. And that's, we're seeing some, some change in electric cars. And so electric cars, the reason is, is that they're just better cars. Forget about everything else. They're just superior cars in every way. And that alone may help them come about and become the norm.

• 1:37:04Rich Roll?

  Right. But then we have the downstream extractive, you know, practices in terms of mining and minerals, et cetera, to create these batteries that, you know, it's sort of like, for every new solution, there's a new problem that we have to address.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, and my protopian viewpoint acknowledges that, that, that most of the problems we have today are caused by the technologies of the past. All the problems that we're gonna make in the future are gonna be made by the technological solutions that we have today. And so you say, you know, what's the point? Well, the point is, is that actually, we keep increasing the possibilities and choices that we have. Okay? That's what we get out of it. So I agree with the technological critics who say that, you know, we keep increasing the number of problems.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  But where I differ is I think the solutions to the problems made by technology is not just personal virtue. It's actually new technologies. Who themselves will have new problems. But that is the problems that propel. The problems are just opportunities in disguise.

• 1:38:19Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, theoretically, I'm in agreement with you. I get tripped up a little bit by the ticking clock of environmental degradation. Like, how much time do we actually have to solve these problems before we, you know, eclipse a certain, you know, point at which, you know, the global kind of climate crisis becomes so untenable as to be irreversible? Like, that's, you know, we really are up against that right now. And so there's a certain urgency to this that I think needs to cattle products out of the theoretical mindset into the truly practical application mindset.

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  Right. Yes. And that unfortunately is going to be a very hand-wavy deadline because of our ignorance, particularly at the planetary scale. One of the things we discovered, and not just through climate, but if you ask any question of the Earth, of our society, at the level of the planet, the answer is, we don't know. And I was involved in trying, it was a failed attempt, to try and do a survey of all the species on our planet, because we don't know. We don't know to I don't know, I would say to maybe 50% of what the actual numbers, we haven't even identified

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  all the living species on this planet, which is like, it's like crazy. And so, so if you ask any kind of question, the one we know about the most is population. And even that, I think we're 10% off either direction. And we're constantly revising even now the projections of our own human population. And one of the things I am concerned about is the coming population implosion after we reach our peak, and we don't have agreement on when that is, but it's probably within less than 50 years. And so, and that's the thing we know the most about at the planetary scale. And so, our ignorance about our own planet, what's going on and what's happening right

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  now is phenomenally great. And that's one of the first places that we should be working on to stabilize the climate.

• 1:40:37Rich Roll?

  Not to mention, all of that being exacerbated by a denigration in the global conversation and a sense of decorum in how we problem solve. As we move towards what many consider to be this post-truth world that's being exacerbated by social media algorithms and information silos that are making communication and problem solving more difficult, which is of course, another unintended consequence of technological innovation.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  That's right. And so, yeah, I mean, we're moving, whether we want to or not, whether we acknowledge or not, to becoming a more planetary society. And that disturbs people both on the left and the right.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  They go crazy over this idea of a global governance. And yet, we have a global planetary problem that requires global cooperation. This not going to happen otherwise. And so, and so that, to me, that's a new phase of our civilization that we're moving into. This planetary wide level of whatever it is that we're making. We don't even have names for it. And that is truly a frontier for us as a species. That only happens once in a planet's life when you have this knitting together of a planetary civilization. It only happens for the first time, once. And so, that's what we're moving into.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  And I think we don't have good language, good vocabulary. We don't have good notions. We don't have a good role model. It's truly a frontier.

• 1:42:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but unbridled optimist that you are.

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:24Rich Roll?

  Undaunted.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  It's gonna be fantastic.

• 1:42:26Rich Roll?

  It's gonna be amazing, right?

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:42:29Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Because the alternative is what?

• 1:42:32Rich Roll?

  Right, okay. But, you know, I don't know. Maybe I'm injecting a little, try to, a little realism into this. I don't know. I don't wanna, I don't wanna like, you know, rain on your, on your parade. I wanna be an optimist. I'm like, Kevin, help me become more of an optimist.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  Not everybody can be an optimist, okay? Because we're in a speeding car, as you mentioned earlier. And in order to turn, you have to have brakes. There have to be some people who are braking it, who are to be able to turn.

• 1:42:59Rich Roll?

  You're the guy saying it's gonna be amazing.

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  I'm the engine, and I think we need to have a really, and the engine has to be more powerful than the brakes to keep going forward. So I'm glad that there are people who are trying to brake it because we need them, okay? But my role is to keep making the engine go more powerful as we can go forward.

• 1:43:18Rich Roll?

  I got you.

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  Okay?

• 1:43:20Rich Roll?

  I got you. All right, so you're talking about the global sort of conversation that we need to have to solve these big, big problems. I wanna, I wanna take that down to the very local. You mentioned the Amish earlier.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:36Rich Roll?

  This is a community of people that you've spent quite a bit of time with. You're sporting an Amish beard. Did the Amish beard come before your immersion in the community?

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Yes, before.

• 1:43:47Rich Roll?

  It did. Why is that?

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  I just, when I grew up here after high school.

• 1:43:51Rich Roll?

  Just style?

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  The mustache just drove me crazy. Couldn't stand it, so I shaved it off and then I discovered, oh, the Amish do that. Maybe they're my brethren.

• 1:44:01Rich Roll?

  And that's your thing.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  But then later on, when I became more interested in technology, I became more interested in the technology, I mean, the Amish, and I went to start to visit them. The first time when I rode my bicycle across the US, I would visit them and I was, I had one major question, which is how do they decide what technologies to use or not? And it was a, it's a very interesting conversation because they have trouble articulating that. It's so culturally kind of embedded that, that they haven't really thought about it in a kind of a curious way. But that was my main question and I, and I decided that they had some lessons for us outside about our own use of technology.

• 1:44:44Rich Roll?

  So that's a, a culture that's a mystery box to most people.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Most people, yeah.

• 1:44:50Rich Roll?

  We look at it and, you know, we're, we're curious, we sort of, you know, glance at it like we're glancing at a, a car accident as we're driving down the freeway without really understanding what's actually going on. But you have spent a lot of time with these people. And what's fascinating is you've extracted certain principles around living that are instructive. So talk a little bit about that.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  From the Amish, you mean?

• 1:45:16Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:17Speaker 01

  So the Amish, okay, so, so there's a stereotype of the Amish is they don't use technology, which is incorrect. They use technology, but they have, they're very careful in selecting which ones they use. And they're always, not always, but they are gradually changing that mix. And then thirdly, the mix of what the Amish use is really governed parish by parish, sect by sect.

• 1:45:44Rich Roll?

  Decentralized.

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  So, so, so it's not uniform. And the ones that are most liberal, we say about their use of technology are the ones in the heartland where the Amish kind of were centered and began. And some of the more stricter ones are at the outer edges of, of, of that upstate New York and, and Indiana. And so.

• 1:46:08Speaker 01

  So it varies, but the general principle that they use is they have two main criteria for deciding whether to adopt technology in their lives. The first one is, will this technology help me to strengthen my family? And the goal, or the evidence for that is, they want to be able to spend breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every meal with their children until they leave. That's their goal. So that means they want, they have one room schoolhouse nearby, and the kids come back for lunch. It means that they do business in their farm in the backyard, or they have a little shop in their backyard. That's their ideal. And if they have technologies that help them do that, they'll use it.

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  So I have some old order, old order Mennonite friends with a horse and buggy, bonnets, suspenders, the whole thing. But they have, in their barn in the back, they have a CNC milling machine, computer-controlled milling machine, running electricity from a diesel, and the 14-year-old girl in the bonnet is running the CNC machine. Okay? Because it keeps them on their family. And the second criteria is, does it help and breed our community as a community? So the reason why they have a horse and buggy is that the horse can only go 15 miles in any direction, so all their shopping, doctors, whatever it is, it has to happen within 15 miles.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  So they keep everything in that community.

• 1:47:37Rich Roll?

  The priority, the real focus, the locus of that decision-making is, is it making our community stronger, more interconnected, more intimate? Or is it fracturing it?

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so when a new technology comes along, they have Amish early adopters. And they're usually guys, and they'll have like cell phones.

• 1:47:58Rich Roll?

  They're like beta testers.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  And they'll say, I need a cellphone for my business.

• 1:48:02Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  And so the bishop says, okay Ivan.

• 1:48:04Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  Okay Ivan, you can have a cellphone, but you've got to keep it in the shed. You can't have it in your house.

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  And you have to solar charge it. And we're going to be watching you and your family to see if this is making you stronger as a family man. If this is, if you're, and if you're actually more contributing into the community. And if you're not, you have to be willing to give it up. And so Ivan tries it out and they say, oh, they discover something about the phone is that his wife wants one because her sister is now been moved away to a place in Indiana and they want to keep the family in touch. So basically the Amish are adopting the flip cellphone.

• 1:48:56Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Because all the evidence so far has been that it strengthens their ability to have communities move apart and live in different areas because the land gets too expensive in one area. And so, and the, and the, and the family business is better for that, so they can keep in the backyard. So they're saying yes to the cellphone, flip, flip cellphone. Now Ivan has a new smartphone he's wondering about.

• 1:49:26Rich Roll?

  Right, like that becomes very diff, very sort of challenging quickly because obviously you can go on the internet and perhaps learn more efficient ways of farming that will increase your yields or other tools that could help.

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  And the bishop has.

• 1:49:42Rich Roll?

  Make the community stronger, or you can go down a Twitter, Twitter rabbit hole and, you know, like, you know, spend all your time staring at your screen all of a sudden.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  And the bishop has heard these arguments. And so they have, they have Amish computers now, which are computers that just do spreadsheets. They don't, are connected to the internet because they discovered that, hmm, spreadsheets are really handy if you're running a business. And then they have, they do have, some of them are experimenting with online where they have like parental controls that are public and shared and whatnot. So they can go to certain sites. Or they've been using it as public libraries. So I've been, this guy gave me his card for his website and it's like, if he's making barbecue.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  Metal barbecue stuff. I said, "An Amish website?" And I said, "Well, I just get at the library." I go to the library to pick up my mail, whatever it is. So it's out of our home and it's at the public library. So that's one solution.

• 1:50:48Rich Roll?

  Right. That's fascinating. You know, and what comes to mind for me in thinking about this is, again, another tension. The tension between the solutions to our biggest problems, lying in technological innovations and really investing in that. And on the other, on the flip side of that, a harkening back to a simpler time.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:51:13Rich Roll?

  And when you think about food systems and the impact of factory farming and monocropping and soil degradation, et cetera, we're seeing this emergent movement around regenerative agriculture, right? Which is, in some ways, a throwback, right? It is a recognition of a more ancient practice that is more beneficial for the planet.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:51:41Rich Roll?

  That is kind of exciting in terms of how we're rethinking how we feed the planet, et cetera. I'm not sure it's something that can scale to the level of feeding everybody on the planet, but I can't help but think how cultures like the Amish, the Mennonites, et cetera, could participate and be at the kind of forefront of these types of movements. I feel like they have a lot to contribute in that regard.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  The Amish are really big in dairy farming because no ordinary English farmer, they call them, wants to bother with this. Too much effort, too much hand labor. And the Amish still have a lot of big families and the young kids are instrumental in their workforce and they're still doing dairy. But I joke with them that I think they're going to be among, I think eventually they're going to accept the robot milker, which are amazing and would enable them to continue expanding their dairy business as the other English farmers to give it up one by one, which is happening very fast because it is very, very labor intensive. So I think that might be, again, a kind of a weird little thing where... Some high-tech stuff in AI robotics can help the Amish.

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  There's a thing called precision agriculture that's enabled by AI. So if you imagine kind of like a big tractor with outstretched arms, it goes down the rows and rows of lettuces and the, there's a camera, camera eyes in all the little rows. And using AI, the tractor, we'll call it, can identify individual lettuce seedlings by number. It can recognize it. Oh, this is, you're 2152A. I was here yesterday. And it can give the exact, it can appraise its health, give you the exact amount of water and nutrients

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  or whatever it needs based on that individual seedling. Using GPS and everything, it remembers it. And so it has millions of these that is tending individually.

• 1:53:46Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  That is something that a human farmer would love to be able to do, but can't. And yet this precision agriculture machine, which is being driven by AI, is, and that reduces the amount of pesticide or fertilizers and water needed per plant, because it's just giving exactly what that plant needs.

• 1:54:05Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  That's how AI can transform this kind of, of agricultural revolution that we want.

• 1:54:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, wow. And did you say that that's something that the Amish are interested in? I can't imagine.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  The Amish are not interested in that. The Amish are interested in this milker, the robotic milker.

• 1:54:25Rich Roll?

  I see, okay.

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  Because that's their main cash right now for most Amish farmers is the dairy business, because it is very labor-intensive. It's working with animals, which they love, and it needs the kind of hands-on stuff. But the thing about milking cows twice a day, so here's, the cows actually decide when they get milked. That's the beauty of it. They're not being forced. It's the cows are happier because they decide when they want to relieve. And they come in and get milked automatically and move out. That's like, that's, everybody's happy. Cows are happier, there's more milk, and the farmer doesn't have to get up at 5:00 AM and go on vacation every once in a while. That's huge.

• 1:55:02Rich Roll?

  You know what would be better? If we just all stop drinking milk, because we don't need to.

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:55:08Rich Roll?

  That's another

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  What's another discussion?

• 1:55:10Rich Roll?

  That's another thing, yeah. Switching gears a little bit. You're somebody, and again, going from local now back up to global. You're somebody who's spent a tremendous amount of time in China. Kind of, we're coming full circle here. Or in Asia, and in particular, China. You've visited China many, many times.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  My wife is Chinese.

• 1:55:29Rich Roll?

  Your wife is Chinese. China is very interesting right now, what's happening there. And I feel like it's a culture and a place that the Western world doesn't fully understand. So, help me understand what we need to know about China. Maybe where our thinking is sideways on this. What we should be focused on, what we shouldn't be worried about, et cetera.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:55:59Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's a big question, obviously. But like, you know, China is, you know, is

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  What should we think about the US? So, first of all, I would say several things. One is, I would have had a more confident answer just three years ago before COVID. When I was going, living there constantly. I felt I had a pulse on the country. And I felt that, right now, I feel blind. Because I haven't been there, and things are changing very fast.

• 1:56:27Rich Roll?

  Since before COVID.

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  Before her COVID. I was there right before COVID, my last time. And, so if something has shifted. And I don't have a good sense of what that is right now. So, I would say, I would kind of preempt with that, that I feel less confident about it. The thing I would say, and it's still true, is that almost anything you can say about China is true somewhere in China. Right? I mean, it is so vast. And there is more diversity in China than within the US, between California and Maine. I mean, it's really vast. But one of the things that people don't appreciate, that I will mention, is that Part of the genius and greatness of the US was it's built on immigrant experience

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  of people coming from all over the world, bringing it together, that mix up and mash up, that kind of hybrid vigor of produced by having people from many different backgrounds try to contribute and make and be unleashed. And that is happening in China, and it has been happening, but the immigration is all internal. So you have people from very disparate, from Yunnan, from Qinghai, from Guilin, coming together and they speak indecipherable languages to each other. Except they have this common language, not English, but Mandarin. But at home, there are languages and backgrounds and traditions that are completely foreign to each other.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  And so they're all coming into cities, the young people, mixing it up and having this immigrant hybrid vigor that we have experienced in the US. And that was really what was going on for a very long time, I mean, for the past 10 years. And that has been really very, very productive and tremendously energetic. And you have cities like Shenzhen, where most of the stuff that we're using for electronics is made. Shenzhen in the 80s, okay, so that's maybe 40 years ago, 30, 40 years ago, was a fishing village. And now it's a city bigger than New York City. And it means that every single person in that city, nobody was born there.

• 1:58:38Speaker 01

  None of the people in Shenzhen, 13 million, 15 million people were born in Shenzhen? They're all immigrants, they're all coming people out. And it's the youngest city in the world. Because they're all, everybody's young there. So it's the youngest, hippest city in the world, and they've built brand new opera house and library. It's just, it's a brand new city, the size of New York and the scale of New York, that's brand new. So there is, no matter what happens in China, politically...

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  There is a momentum and a hustle and ambition that I don't think is going to be squashed by, no matter what happens, whether they overthrow things, I don't know. But I'm just saying that there is a huge desire, a huge collective moving forward that's not going to be stopped. And I don't know where it's going, but I'm saying the pressure, the volume, the intensity of that is hard to appreciate, but it's not going to be stopped by whoever's president or whatever the party is in power. It can certainly be diminished or demodified, whatever,

• 1:59:52Speaker 01

  but it's really a billion people on the march. And we have to kind of acknowledge that. And so I think that's one thing I would say. The other thing is I asked a lot of the young people in China constantly who their heroes are, what their dream was, besides getting rich. And the answer was zero, zero. No heroes and no dreams of what they're going to do. So they're racing at 1,000 miles an hour forward, but they don't really know where they're going.

• 2:00:28Rich Roll?

  That's very strange. What do you make of that?

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  So I would go into dorm rooms, which in the US would at least have posters of things, something that they like, that they're hoping for, you know, bands or something cool, whatever, something that would give some idea of what their interests were. There are none of those in China. It means that they're ripe for a new religion. There's no holy scripture, there's no constitution, there's no sacred texts, there's nothing to guide them. So that means, one, it's a possibility that could be some weird thing, a belief thing that would go through, that many people would follow.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  It means that I think they're hungry for a vision of where they want to go. There's been a whole thing of the China dream now, trying to get it going. But I don't know what it is, and no one else does either. So I would say that they're ripe for a belief in something bigger than themselves. But it hasn't been articulated yet.

• 2:01:35Rich Roll?

  Right. And is it your sense that that belief, when it arises, would sort of challenge the governmental structure? Or, you know, create a situation that pits the people against?

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  That's, we'd have to make a bunch of different scenarios, and that could be certainly one of them. But here's one thing I would say about that. I would ask these young people in the big banquets and stuff, maybe they'll be drinking a lot, so it's good to see. So like, what's one thing that you all agree here on? What's one belief? What's one thing you could all agree on that you want? And they said, almost in unison, stability. The Cultural Revolution and the crazy, the insanity of that is still close to, their parents went through it. And all kinds of stories go all different ways.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  That is so vivid. It's like, we'll take, it's like, we'll take almost anything, but we don't want another revolution.

• 2:02:49Rich Roll?

  Right. Give me a job, something stable, an income.

• 2:02:52Speaker 01

  They don't want a revolution, so they're not having a revolution yet.

• 2:02:59Rich Roll?

  Right. No revolution anytime soon. Yeah, fascinating. Yes, it's so interesting. And I appreciate what you had to say about the complexity and diversity of this, you know, massive landscape of a billion people. But I can't help but think of the implications of a talent pool, one billion people, you know, deep. In a culture in which they've already, you know, outpaced the rest of the world in terms of manufacturing quality, of course, and, you know, what comes next with that and, you know, where we're going to be in 10, 20, 30 years.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they have, they have great power and they don't yet have a great dream. I mean, yeah, so anyway, I mean, that's true for many countries, but China's moving so fast and has such a force and a momentum that, that could be dangerous or it could be wonderful.

• 2:03:53Rich Roll?

  When you, you cast your gaze forward as a, as a future, as a futurist.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:04:00Rich Roll?

  With finger quotes, what does the world look like 20 years from now?

• 2:04:04Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 2:04:05Rich Roll?

  10 years from now, do you have a sense of that? Like, this is your, this is your jam, Kevin?

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so I would say several things. I would say it's going to be more, more things will be the same than, than change. So I think, you know, 95% of the world in 20 years from now will look like today. And I think most of the changes are not going to be in the physical world. That revolution has already kind of mostly been completed. It'll be much more an intangible thing of how we understand who we are, like this AI stuff, changing our, our beliefs about ourselves and how we connect with each other. So I think it'll be kind of more in the social realm. I think the thing after smartphones are the smart glasses, but I've been saying that for way too long.

• 2:04:54Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, you were a big VR guy and you, you're kind of.

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  Well, in the 80s.

• 2:04:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, so your timeline on that.

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, I've been wrong for so long.

• 2:05:02Rich Roll?

  You've been right about a lot of stuff. I would say you, you were wrong about that.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, so, so, so take that, like, you know, I'm just still wrong.

• 2:05:09Rich Roll?

  And even lately with Meta's big bet on VR and AR and the metaverse and all of that. And then as soon as ChatGPT hit, like, nobody cared about any of that, so.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  Exactly, so, so I've been wrong before on that, but that, but that's actually, I mean, that's still my answer about what comes after the smartphone. And I think that, I'm hoping that most gas cars have been replaced and I'm hoping that we have electrified at least the developed countries by then. And I hope that if we're lucky, we may have the very first glimmers of, of fusion, synthetic solar, which is what it is, and.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  I, you know, other things I'm hoping, again, the general trend to less violence in the world means that there's less conflicts overall on average, and that continues in that direction. And then, you know, the wild card of China, but there's always India, which is going to exceed China in the number of people. And what we're seeing, India is the diaspora of India is going to be a fundamental thing. As we can see, even the tech companies in the US, the percentage of them being led by Indian-Americans is phenomenal, and that may be one of the great exports of India is

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  technical people around the world.

• 2:06:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:40Speaker 01

  And so.

• 2:06:41Rich Roll?

  I think there's a huge export of Indian culture as well.

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:06:46Rich Roll?

  Movies, television, music.

• 2:06:47Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:06:48Rich Roll?

  And we saw it at the Oscars this year, and you know, I think it's, you know, that's going to continue.

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, the three Rs, RRR.

• 2:06:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, RRR and the song and, yeah.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  It's just an amazing, I watch these just to understand, or the three idiots, if you haven't seen that, it's a must-see, one of the biggest Hindi Bollywood movies. So, so I would say that would be another thing, I would say maybe more of an influence of India on the world stage.

• 2:07:13Rich Roll?

  Right. What's a pie in the sky idea, though, that you're playing around with? Like, all of those predictions are fairly grounded, I think, but what's a more harebrained thought that might have occurred to you where you think things might go that?

• 2:07:28Speaker 01

  Well, this is, again, this is maybe a hope, I'm hoping that we really do have lab-grown meat available, animal cell-based meat.

• 2:07:39Rich Roll?

  Cellular, yeah.

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  Cellular, whatever, clean meat.

• 2:07:43Rich Roll?

  They keep changing the terminology around that.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  Whatever it is, you know what it is. I'm hoping that that is commercially available in many, many different varieties by then, as someone who doesn't eat mammals, and so I'm really looking forward to that.

• 2:07:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's an inevitability, it's just a, it's a cost thing right now.

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:03Rich Roll?

  The technology exists, it's commercially available in restaurants in Singapore. In a limited way, it's too expensive, but the technology, like they're continuing to iterate on that pretty rapidly and it's just, it's just a matter of scale, I think.

• 2:08:17Speaker 01

  Well, in theory, but to me, that's a pint in the sky because I'm interested in not just replicating the existing animals, but actually making a whole new super meats.

• 2:08:25Rich Roll?

  Out of, out of extinct animals?

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Let's eat the mammoth.

• 2:08:31Rich Roll?

  This goes back to your, like your species project, right? Like, yeah, you wanna, you wanna have a woolly mammoth burger?

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, why not?

• 2:08:38Rich Roll?

  Oh, man. Yeah. I'll stick to my plants. I do think, I do think it's, it is, it is interesting what's happening in that space.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:47Rich Roll?

  There is a, you know, a consumer acclimation phase that we have to go through because people are, I think it, they have a certain reaction to that. But I think over time, will, will, will go away, but you know, right now.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it has to be, I'm ready for it and I'll pay a little bit extra for it. So I'll be one of the first customers and I have been trying them in the, in the Silicon Valley ones and.

• 2:09:13Rich Roll?

  Have you tasted it or?

• 2:09:14Speaker 01

  I've tasted several, but not, not actually the, the beef or the mammals. I've tasted fish and cheese, milk products, but not the actual meat. And hamburger is easy to do because it doesn't have the structure, but to make a steak is a, to make those two is really haven't been able to do so far, but they're working on it and, you know, I'm looking forward to it.

• 2:09:41Rich Roll?

  A lot of money and a lot of smart people are on that problem. What are the things on that note that you think we're going to look back on, I don't know, 50 years from now, 100 years from now and just, just cringe?

• 2:09:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. It may be eating meat might be one of them. I have another idea, which is kind of maybe trivial, but I thought it was very possible, which is that it may be embarrassing for us who have names assigned by our parents.

• 2:10:09Rich Roll?

  Yes, I, I saw the New York Times article where you had a list of these things and that one definitely popped out to me.

• 2:10:16Speaker 01

  It's like arranged marriages. It's like, yeah, of course you're going to be, choose your own name when you're 16 or whatever it is. I wish we all did that. And the idea that you have a name assigned by your parents, I think is just gonna be embarrassing.

• 2:10:32Rich Roll?

  Right. That's very interesting. I mean, I feel like that's a sort of progression or evolution beyond the gender conversation that we're having right now, like a natural extension of that.

• 2:10:45Rich Roll?

  You added to that wrapping food in plastic, that's a no-brainer.

• 2:10:51Rich Roll?

  Getting off the summer from school?

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:53Rich Roll?

  We're just gonna be educated round the clock?

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  Why not? I went to this one school where the teachers were not allowed to teach you anything, except how to learn. So yeah, I think that's, well, you should be taking your vacations when you want to, rather than just in the summer. So, it doesn't mean you have to go to school all year, it just means that you don't have to take all vacations together.

• 2:11:14Rich Roll?

  Well, I think these technologies are so powerful and our education system is so lagging in terms of acknowledging the power and the capacity for these technologies to revolutionize how we learn and what we learn. Like, we're learning the wrong things, we're not learning the things we should be learning, and we're not training young people to leverage the best of what technology has to offer in order to really, you know, kind of nourish their educations.

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I have one word: YouTube. YouTube is this-

• 2:11:50Rich Roll?

  That can go both ways.

• 2:11:52Speaker 01

  It's phenomenal, underappreciated, the way in which it's accelerating our culture and the role it's playing in education today. And it has great potential to be even more accelerant. And I don't think they even know, they, being at YouTube, don't even realize what they have. And part of the problem is that unlike a bookstore or a newsstand, we can go in and see what's being covered, there's really no way for anybody encountering it to have any idea of its depth and breadth. And it's this vast ocean that is kind of subterranean and people don't even understand the way in which it's working on learning and accelerating

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  every field, from brain surgery to- Science is really incredible.

• 2:12:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think we're ripe to see tons more innovation in the space of education.

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 2:12:52Rich Roll?

  And, you know, kind of pivoting back to the advice piece, before I let you go, I did want to touch on one last thing, which is this thing that you did a while back, where you lived your life for six months as if you were going to die. And this became the subject of This American Life podcast. So, explain a little bit about like what you did, why you did it, and kind of what you learned from that experience.

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I told this story on one of the first This American Lives, and I'd never told it before, and I've never told it as well since. So, I would urge people to go look for it.

• 2:13:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we'll link it up in the show notes.

• 2:13:29Speaker 01

  It's called Should Have Been Dead. But the short version was that I got this assignment after religious conversion in Jerusalem, to live as if I was going to die in six months, and actually take it seriously. So, I suspected, knew as a healthy 20-year-old, that I wasn't probably going to die, but I had to really take it and prepare to do it. And that's what I did. And it took six months, and I was riding my bicycle across to my end date. And I was surrendering the future the entire time, not taking pictures, because who needs pictures in three months? And that stripping away of my future was really important,

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  because when I was reborn, on the next day after the six months, I suddenly had my future before me, and I realized how important it was to have a future forward, how necessary and humane, and how inhumane and torturous it was to be stripped of a future. And that kind of instigated my interest in exploring the future, and really trying to develop it, because I think it's an essential part of being a human being, is to have something in front of us.

• 2:14:47Rich Roll?

  Yes, how we contemplate, how we think about the future, how we plan for the future and just conceptualize it really is part and parcel of what makes us human and is part of the motor or the motivation for getting up in the bed, you know, out of bed in the morning and planning how we're gonna live.

• 2:15:07Speaker 01

  Exactly, right. And we have, in addition to that, being given these incredible bodies that we're given time and time only moves forward, that is the future. And so it's not only do we have this incredible blessing of being able to be put into things that have impact, that we can actually have impact, unlike being intangible beings of light, we have things that we can do and make and get hurt and hurt others and help others and build stuff, but we also get the time, we get the arrow of time going forward, knowing that we'll have time and a future. And that, to me, is the great, the great ride that we're on. The angels in heaven are weeping to see us squander it.

• 2:15:52Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 2:15:52Speaker 01

  So take advantage of it.

• 2:15:53Rich Roll?

  On the, on the subject of squandering it, I mean, I think the human mind is, is, you know, oriented around conceptualizing the future in, in the context of self-interest or optimizing self-interest. And also isn't great about pondering the future in a long-term sense, but more in a short-term sense. And, and long-termism is something you've thought a lot about, is something you care a lot about, and I think is something that's also percolating up in the culture and becoming a bit of a zeitgeist thing where more and more people are talking about the importance of thinking about and approaching our problems from an extremely, you know, long lens point of view.

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  Right. It's, it's taking the kind of a civilizational scale or a generational scale is what we like to put about it, thinking in terms of generations, maybe working on something that might not be finished in your own lifespan, that might require generations to complete, like a cathedral or a road system or something grand like that. And, but even beyond those kind of grand plans, what we want to do is to kind of help people like ourselves become good ancestors to, to actually...

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  Have, do something so that in the future, they may say, hmm, thank you ancestor for having started that or done that in the way that most of what we've surrounded ourselves here has been built by previous generations and we should thank them. So what can we do to be a good ancestor besides planting a tree?

• 2:17:27Rich Roll?

  Right. And what is the answer to that for you?

• 2:17:34Speaker 01

  Trying to increase learning in the world so that we can unleash opportunities for the maximum number of people born and yet unborn, so that they can share their genius with us and themselves.

• 2:17:47Rich Roll?

  Beautiful. I think that's a great place to land the plane for today. I have a million other things I could have talked to you about today.

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  We'll get to them.

• 2:17:58Rich Roll?

  I'd love to have you back.

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:18:00Rich Roll?

  In the meantime, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier is your new book. Everybody check it out. This is like the perfect book to just, you know, basically open to any page and have a thought for the day. I love it. And you're a national treasure. Thank you. A global treasure. An international treasure.

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  A cosmic treasure. Okay, well, thank you.

• 2:18:22Rich Roll?

  A cosmic treasure, yes. You're a gift. You're somebody I've followed you for a very long time. And like I said at the outset, I was nervous to meet you because I've been very invested in the work that you've done for many years. So it really was an honor and a gift to have you here to share with me today.

• 2:18:38Speaker 01

  It was my pleasure. I enjoyed every minute. You're a great interviewer. I just love your presence. Thank you for being you.

• 2:18:43Rich Roll?

  I appreciate it. Thank you, Kevin. Cheers. Peace.

• 2:18:46Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 2:18:47Rich Roll?

  Plants.

• 2:18:48Speaker 01

  Progress.

• 2:18:49Rich Roll?

  Progress. There you go.

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 2:19:02Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify,

• 2:19:42Rich Roll?

  and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance

• 2:20:21Rich Roll?

  by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Salis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiate. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.