Jim Pethokoukis — Building an Up-Wing Culture

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Welcome to the Build the Future podcast.
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My name is Cameron Weecy and I'm your host.
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I've always been fascinated by the ideas and the sentiment that drove American culture in the 1960s with the space race, a culture galvanized to dream about the possibilities of tomorrow, whether it's food, transportation, cities, biology or anything else.
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It was this cultural mindset, rooted in optimism, that the world tomorrow would be better than the world today, a mindset where people were compelled to build things and I quote JFK not because they were easy, but because they were hard.
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It's this desire to build and to dream that seems to have been lost and something we're here to bring back With Build the Future.
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We're here to promote the ideas and stories of those who see how the future can be better and promote their plans to get us there.
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It's our mission to get you to dream about the possibilities of tomorrow, to dream about the future that you want to live in, and inspire you to go build.
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Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Build the Future podcast.
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I'm your host Cameron Weecy, and today we're talking with Jim Pethacuchus, the author of the Brilliant Substack Faster Place, which I love and read every week and the author of the new book, the Conservative Futurist.
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How we Get the Science Fiction Future we were promised.
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Jim's a writer, great public thinker, and in this episode we have a ton of fun talking about the role of media in shaping culture.
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Optimistic stories and the importance of good science fiction are about now his new book, of course, and how we ultimately get the future that we're going to be excited about living in.
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So I had a ton of fun, so, without further ado, let's jump right in.
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Jim.
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How we doing today.
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Great, I am ready to go.
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I'm ready to accelerate my way through this fine podcast.
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Indeed.
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Well, thank you for coming on on Build the Future.
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We've crossed paths several times in the last couple of years since I wrote that World's Fair essay and I've been a long-time subscriber to Faster Place.
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All subscribers are greatly appreciated.
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And then you just had a book come out, the Conservative.
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Futurist how to Create the Sci-Fi World we were promised.
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Let's start with what is the future that we were promised?
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It was a nuclear-powered space-faring future.
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I mean, those were two of the foundational pieces that with unlimited inexpensive energy and advances in rocket propulsion, we would have atomic everything, everything from atomic flying cars to atomic blenders.
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We would be using those blenders in space, on the moon and beyond.
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We would have great leaps forward in computers and I think you know maybe a little more down to earth, that this kind of economic growth that we saw in the 50s and then in the 60s would continue unabated and America today would just be a far richer place, a healthier place, and we would be taking very fast rocket trips to wherever we want, everywhere, from London to a Mars city.
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So it's been called I didn't make this phrase up, it's been called Cool Shit, futurism.
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And it was, it was a futurism of hardware, even though computers were part of it.
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But it was big, it was bold, it was optimistic, Indeed.
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Cool Shit.
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Futurism yeah, it's like all these things that make life exciting, make things worth living.
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I do really want an atomic blender.
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I do a little bit more than my NutriBullet, which would be a very powerful blender, Cameron.
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It'd be a blender of great robustness.
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As a design.
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I wonder what it would, how it would do on a.
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Will it Blend Everything?
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will be blended, everything will be blended.
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But I should note, though, that that we kind of had this period again and maybe a little more irrelevant for you maybe not, but then in the 90s, in the late 90s, boy, it wasn't just like the boom and the internet.
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People were so optimistic that not only, would, with the economic boom, sort of continue unabated again to the future, but you started reading a lot more about again, about space, about the singularity.
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Wired magazine every three months, was running these wildly optimistic pieces.
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So, even though the longer period and what a lot of people will focus on is kind of that immediate postwar period, we had again kind of a hint of that in the 90s for a while.
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Not much since then it has happened, and a big part of the book is that I think we're at sort of this moment again where you have these technologies converging.
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But I just want to make sure we get the most out of them and if this is that kind of opportunity for a real sustained leap forward in growth and progress, that we don't blow it.
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Totally.
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We could have unpacked this.
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But what was it that drove that sort of sentiment in the 90s?
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I think you and I would probably point to a lot of the science fiction, the stories that were being told culturally in the 50s and the 60s that were sort of fueling that era of optimism where we're building colonies on the moon, having our atomic blenders, atomic everything.
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I personally haven't looked too much into that sort of moment in the 90s.
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It's interesting because in the early 90s there wasn't a ton of it's kind of a forgotten recession.
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We had savings and loan crisis and there was a very slow kind of jobless recovery and sort of.
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The economic consensus by like 94, 95 was that the era of fast growth was over.
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We were now going to be a 2% economy.
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These presidential candidates who were running for president in 96, they should just like tamp down their speeches.
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You're raising people's expectations.
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And that really, the exact second that that sort of consensus really became concrete and widespread, already the economy was beginning to take off, so that it was really if so, if you were, it was a great time to be a contrarian because the consensus had it Absolutely wrong.
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And then literally, like, literally, like.
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When that hit its sort of peak gloominess, again it already started to take off.
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And like a year later, people are like off to the races.
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Singularity is an eye, we're gonna grow 4% forever.
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A little bit of very rapid growth can really that's widely spread, can really change people's Opinions.
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And then you know you had a new technology that looked like it had a lot of promise and it was just a great confluence of like the.
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And then you know, and then there were these you know global that you were, you know the, the Soviet Union, you know, fell and China looked like it was becoming more capitalist.
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So it seemed like everything was sort of moving in the right direction and it really was kind of a holistic, all of society, techno, econ, optimistic period that I have not seen anything like that since.
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Interesting.
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Yeah, it was a little bit before, before my time, and you know the popular dialogue around sort of the great signature, to call the great Downshift, is like, really focused on the earlier era.
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But Everyone seems to overlook that that blip in the 90s, one of my favorite examples is I had you know, cuz I was a, I was a journalist and LA in the late 90s and I had this fan in ideally the financial journalism.
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I had this fantastic look ahead into the two, into the 2000s, from from Lehman Brothers, and they were super, super bullish and like we're just gonna keep on going.
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This is the new digital internet economy.
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Now, of course, lehman Brothers did not even make it like another 10 years after that, they clapped with a financial crisis, and nor did we get the uninterrupted period of rapid growth that like didn't happen either.
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So it was a tremendous.
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It was a tremendous bummer.
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I'll be honest with you to like, expect that and instead getting, like you know, the global financial crisis and slow growth after that and pandemic.
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So I I don't need to go through that again.
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I want the good growth and I wanted, I want to keep growing.
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I'm ready for that.
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So what do you feel like we're out right now.
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What's the sort of your view?
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Because it seems there's there's hints of things that are really starting to bubble up.
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I Think the technology we're seeing and a lot of I mean people probably sick of out hearing about AI ready, but I think I think, across energy and Computer science, meaning AI, biology and space and what people really are not focusing on the massive decline in space launch costs and how that will help enable potentially a lot of those kind of like space streams.
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You know, you know of the Immediate post war decades, like I think those are for real technologies.
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It's always a matter of timing.
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Usually, you know it takes a while to, you know the fully and you know like perfect these technologies and and businesses have to learn how To use them and things need to be approved and of course, that's some of my concern.
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I think these are all potentially together an important cluster of technologies, every bit as important as those of the second industrial revolution, of, you know, factory electrification, the internal combustion engine and industrial chemicals.
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I think these are really important and we just have to make sure that they are supported to the extent possible by public policy and by our culture.
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I mean, when I started writing this book, you know, you know to me, you know the example of nuclear energy and how we basically Pause that and kept it pause for my entire life.
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I'm like that's a really powerful example, but like that's what we're trying.
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That's what some people want to do with AI.
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They want to effectively pause it or regulate it or nationalize it, with very little consideration about how that, could you know, slow that technology down.
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So it's like I feel like I'm reliving.
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So I was a kid then.
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Not much like I do about it, but I feel like I've been training my whole life for this moment again, where we're gonna have this potential, this real leap forward.
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But the same kinds of people that didn't want to do it back then either they're still around or they've taught their children or they've taught their apprentices.
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You know, much like the emperor and Darth Vader, they have taught their apprentices and they are on the dark side, and that's so.
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That's what I'm worried about.
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I think it's a real thing.
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We see how negative people already are about AI.
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I think it's a real concern.
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It's a fascinating comparison.
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I hadn't sort of linked the sort of nuclear nuclear fear in the 70s and 80s to now, the AI fear, and like there seems to be a cultural shift right now when people are realizing that we don't have we generally we don't really have a client problem, we have an energy problem and that is our constraint like, oh, we probably should reconsider this thing that we have hamstrung ourselves on, and the worst case is that we don't fix that, and then we don't, and then we hamstrung ourselves on AI and then we don't fix that until you know, 20, 30 years from now, where We've continued to like just Puddle muddle along no more muddling and again it's the va, the same.
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I Well, I think, ideally we would think hard right now about the, the nuclear mistake, and realize that it's a lot of the same kinds of people, a lot of the same kinds of organizations, certainly the same kind of worldview that we're seeing again with AI and and and and really the space, and also with some of the, some of the new energy technologies, where it is this ultra better safe than sorry, you know approach From people who really don't want to see the progress, whether that, you know, either they think it's dangerous on its own, or they're very, or they think economic growth is inherently bad.
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It's just gonna use up all the earth.
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So anything that facilitates that, whether it's cheap energy or what have you, or the ability of AI To enable the help, enable all these other technologies, they don't want that.
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So I Hope that we can point to the example like, hey, we've done that, we tried that and we don't.
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What we have is a, a scarcity of clean energy Problem.
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Why would we want to do this again at some point?
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We have to learn that lesson and I I kind of think we will.
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I think that you it's clear that, like, if you're concerned about climate change, that telling people to use less energy, you know, forget just in a rich country, but in other countries that really need to use more energy to raise your living standards, that is a that is a loser proposition and ultimately what you have to settle on is we're just gonna have to, you know, make more clean energy and any kind of problems created by that we'll have to deal with them on the fly.
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Do you have a sense of like why that view is so pervasive?
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Because to me it just seems like it's like morally wrong to be over here in the West and say, oh, we've industrialized and oh, but now we have climate issues and so, hey, developing nations, you can't do what we did, you need to stay where you're at.
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Like that just seems morally wrong to me and like, do you have any senses like why people like how people jujitsu their way of thinking about that is like a good thing.
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Some will say well, you know, we'll help them by redistributing, and then the West will sort of lower its living standard so they so up poor countries can raise theirs again.
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Good luck selling that to people.
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So that's obviously not gonna happen.
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What would happen, more likely if you're gonna go down that road, is that we'll keep what we have.
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Maybe our growth will be slower or stagnant, but they'll never get rich.
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And and how they justify it well, bad luck.
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I guess that's just really too bad.
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I don't think they'll say that in public.
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But if what you're saying is oh, we know the West will redistribute its vast resources and create this kind of global equity, what you're really saying is the latter meaning, because that's obviously not going to happen.
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I see no scenario where that one.
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We just came out of a pandemic where people were freaking out because there weren't enough like Clorox wipes on the shelves.
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We are not a society that does suffering.
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This is not a theocracy.
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We do not deal with shortage as well, as I think that that we're gonna be in a permanent recession and permanent shortage is an utter misreading, of sort of like our national room or the room that all rich countries are in.
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There really is no path.
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But forward, and I think that part of this is articulating a compelling vision of what that future looks like.
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That addresses a lot of these, a lot of these challenges around climate, around energy, around, you know, our relationship with AI and our relationship with technology, and how we ensure that the planet and humanity flourish together, not like at the expense of one another.
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I want to get out of the zero-sum game and the zero-sum thinking like that, that is, that is the dream killer.
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Like that is the society killer.
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A society or global society mired in zero-sum thinking, where you think any gain that guy gets makes me poor.
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I mean that to me that's a recipe for conflicts, it's a recipe for misery, and and the only way you get out you sort of crack that puzzle is through technological progress, driving growth.
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That that, like, that's the only way that we really figured to to get, to get out of that trap, and that that is an absolute trap that some people would actually have us voluntarily stay inside you know I'm hopeful because I don't find that vision compelling at all.
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I don't think most people do.
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They're like I don't want that but I think there's a lot of people who think maybe they don't want that, but I think that's that's the way it has to be.
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I, you know, I did a podcast and we were and I was talking about these kinds of themes and when it was over, the producer who was probably it was a young woman, probably about your age is like she said, like everything you just said, all my friends think the opposite.
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Like that you can't solve these problems.
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That we are destined for a world that of an of a chaotic climate and where all the rich people live on space stations and we're all on the earth like in the rubble fighting it out.
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Like that I'm like no, that that would be a choice.
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Only way is that we chose that.
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I don't know why you would choose that.
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I'm not choosing that a Cameron, you're not gonna choose that.
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So, like, why would we do that?
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no, it's like inhuman is just like.
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Yeah, I think the I want to kind of point to the framework, the articulate in the book around sort of the, the two different mindsets, the upwing and downwing, because it's sort of you that we've been talking about this like we're kind of limited, things are scarce, we don't want any, you know, we want to hold off the future for as long as possible because it's scary and uncertainly to catastrophe more or less represents the downwing and then the opposite upwing is the opposite.
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Can you articulate the two, like how you sort of define both of those?
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you know the books called the consider of futures.
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I work at a kind of a center right think tank but, like you don't have to be like conservative or on the right center to believe in any of this.
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There, you know, I know there are plenty of people who are like left of center or call themselves Democrats, people in the middle.
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I think the common bond there is that you think that if you think we can solve problems, that we have enough, enough smarts not perfect intelligence, but enough smarts and will and tools, and the tools we don't have, we can build those tools to make things better, not a utopia, but like incrementally, year after year, make things better, solve problems and create a better world.
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Like, if you think like that broadly is true and not and as we just said, not everybody does, then that is an upwing belief, whether you're also on the left or right.
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If you don't think that's true and you're more concerned about the downsides to all that, you're more concerned about the disruption for progress, you're think that like, oh, space, that kind of sounds neat, but you know we have all these problems here on earth and the robots will take the jobs and then they'll murder us and we'll probably screw it up anyways and you know I, I'm very fearful that.
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You know that someone from another country they'll, they'll take my job and I'm very fearful that trade will make me all that stuff that's down weak thinking.
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You can find that on the left and right too.
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That's why, despite the name of the book, like I, I really kind of want to move out of that framing because I think it, I think it leads to nowhere.
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You end up alienated people who you agree quite a bit like I.
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Just you know I just I just wrote in my faster please.
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Newsletter.
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You know Noah Smith.
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You know well-known newsletter writer, twitter person like he.
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You know he's he's still left to me, but I tell you, we agree on a whole lot when it comes to the fundamental sort of goal of a society, which is to make life better.
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You know, through innovation, you, like him and me in a room, I, we probably come up with a pretty good Ted Point agenda totally yeah, and I think I like how there's.
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There seems to be this thing that's transcending the traditional sort of like political divide, where it's no longer sort of left versus right.
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It's like are you pro future or anti future?
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And I think the up wing, down wing.
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It's a like really good sort of encapsulation of that yeah, like anti future.
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But listen, you know, when you look at politics how much of it is sort of stuck, wanting to return to the past, wanting to return to 1964.
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That world, you know that world, the societal arrangements, the family arrangements, people very worried about change.
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What I like about that era was not living in that era, but what I like about the era was the optimism and the effort to create a better tomorrow, not to stay there.
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That that's not what we're trying to do.
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But clearly there are people who view it like that and, you know, run political campaigns.
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Here's my dream that, like whenever a president, someone runs for president, they'll have like the big flashy campaign ad which they'll go with the uplifting ad and they'll show great things from America's past.
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But what I noticed with those ads they all ended in about 1969 with Apollo, like you know.
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They'll like World War two, jesse Owens winning a gold medal, apollo, and and then not much.
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You know that's that is the kind, that's the kind of backward-looking I don't want.
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I want to hear a lot more about how we're gonna create great kind of America altering fate, altering stuff that will make us healthier, wealthier and hopefully a more resilient society.
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How would you get people who don't, who are like, and I don't really feel like this certain political system is serving me, like how do you advocate the upweighing sort of mentality to both people who are sort of neutral right now and the people who are downwing?
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I mean it really can't be apathetic.
00:21:28.201 --> 00:21:34.124
I mean, I think at some degree people get what they want and I think what we've kind of wanted is caution.
00:21:34.124 --> 00:21:39.162
We've wanted caution at a very deep level and that's what we've got.
00:21:39.162 --> 00:21:51.144
I mean, I mentioned this in the book in 2000, and that was the 2000, and I think, 12 Republican debate.
00:21:51.144 --> 00:22:06.083
They had Mitt Romney who eventually got the nomination, and they had a debate and Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, said we should build a colony on the moon, we should build a and it could be our 51st state.
00:22:07.798 --> 00:22:11.241
And like Mitt Romney, who I kind of generally like, was like that's a ridiculous idea.
00:22:11.241 --> 00:22:13.482
Any business that tried to do it would go bust.
00:22:13.482 --> 00:22:18.400
And everyone was laughing and they're like what a gaffe, what a political gaffe.
00:22:18.400 --> 00:22:27.599
I'm like no, that says something very wrong about our society and our sort of our reflexive caution that that would be mocked.
00:22:27.599 --> 00:22:31.845
Of course, at the very moment SpaceX is working on Falcon Rocket.
00:22:31.845 --> 00:22:42.108
So it actually kind of made a lot of sense and I think we help read that kind of timidity in our politicians.
00:22:42.108 --> 00:22:46.862
Listen, politicians don't like to be bold, but they think there's like an audience for anything.
00:22:46.862 --> 00:22:50.583
That's what they'll give them If they think that's what we want.
00:22:50.583 --> 00:22:52.501
What we want is acceleration.
00:22:52.501 --> 00:22:59.665
We want universal vaccines and we want to be able to knock away a comet if it's coming here.
00:22:59.665 --> 00:23:03.664
And instead of having 2% growth, we want multiples of that.
00:23:03.664 --> 00:23:07.263
Well, you'll find politicians pushing that.
00:23:08.355 --> 00:23:27.420
What do you think the core underlying the intellectual scaffolding is for the upwing narrative, the upwing point of view, just to contrast it with the downwing I've talked about this before the limits of growth, population bomb, this sort of that cultural zeitgeist in the 70s seemed to be very pervasive.
00:23:27.420 --> 00:23:30.784
What are the sort of upwing counters?
00:23:31.756 --> 00:23:41.205
Well, one of my favorite quotes is why is it, when we see nothing but progress behind us, who we think will have nothing but disaster ahead of us?
00:23:41.205 --> 00:23:43.442
Listen, I'm a simple person.
00:23:43.442 --> 00:23:45.622
I look at what we have done.
00:23:45.622 --> 00:23:54.824
We have created a much better world over the past 250 years, even in this period of relative stagnation.
00:23:54.824 --> 00:24:00.859
I would rather live today than in 2000 or 1990 or 1980 or 1970.
00:24:00.859 --> 00:24:01.763
I've lived through those years.
00:24:01.763 --> 00:24:03.382
I would much rather be here today.
00:24:03.382 --> 00:24:14.163
So, but relative to what we expected and relative to what we could have achieved, it is to me stagnation, even if it's not literally stagnation.
00:24:16.277 --> 00:24:21.387
And did we do everything we could reasonably have done to change that?
00:24:21.387 --> 00:24:22.798
No, we did just the opposite.
00:24:22.798 --> 00:24:33.184
I mean, if you wanted to create the kind of world we're talking about, you wouldn't dramatically reduce what the government was spending on basic science research.
00:24:33.184 --> 00:24:36.960
You wouldn't have followed up the Apollo program with nothing all right.
00:24:36.960 --> 00:24:55.080
If you really were serious about creating the kind of world we're talking about, you wouldn't have passed regulations that make it almost impossible to build anything of consequence in this country, either at all, or inexpensively or quickly, which means you get a lot less of that.
00:24:55.080 --> 00:24:58.463
I mean two very basic things.
00:24:58.463 --> 00:25:01.362
Listen, I would like us to.
00:25:02.315 --> 00:25:03.902
It doesn't have to be the only lens.
00:25:03.902 --> 00:25:13.303
If we look at public policy and I work at a think tank Well, every time we pass a law we should think how does this affect, sort, of, the innovative capacity of our country?
00:25:13.303 --> 00:25:15.461
Does it make it a little bit less?
00:25:15.461 --> 00:25:16.523
Does it make it a little bit more?
00:25:16.523 --> 00:25:24.622
Now you can look at other things too, but if you don't look at that as one of the factors, then you end up in a world where we send smart people home.
00:25:24.642 --> 00:25:26.259
We want to come here or we don't let them hear.
00:25:26.259 --> 00:25:27.678
We don't let them hear.
00:25:27.678 --> 00:25:44.220
I mean that again, you know not to do on Elon Musk in a podcast or anything, but I remember him saying in person I was attending a thing with him and he said if you want to do something great with your life, there's no better place to do it than the United States of America.
00:25:44.220 --> 00:25:58.682
So like that's a real secret sauce, deep magic of what we do, and like to not give that any thought and to disregard it, as many politicians are, that's not trying very hard to create a you know, I think, a richer, more capable society.
00:25:58.682 --> 00:26:00.622
So I mean that's my scaffolding.
00:26:01.236 --> 00:26:07.362
One thing that's like fast for me is sort of visions of the future that emerged post limits to growth, like in the 70s.
00:26:07.362 --> 00:26:19.578
There's sort of this counterculture movement that Stuart Brand and Gerardo Neal and Eric Drexler were all involved in articulating like sort of as these responses to the limits of growth are you familiar with.
00:26:19.578 --> 00:26:49.419
Well, stuart Brand and Eric Drexler, yeah, the sort of organizing sort of thing that brought those guys together was Gerardo Neal, the Princeton physicist, the high frontier, and I thought that was the most like compelling sort of narrative, like in concrete, definite thing that transcends the sort of, oh, we're gonna run out of resource on earth Cause, even given human ingenuity, like, how quickly can we build new things to replace some of the?
00:26:49.419 --> 00:26:51.539
You know the challenges that we're facing?
00:26:51.539 --> 00:26:54.759
Like, oh well, let's just build up and go a little bit beyond.
00:26:54.759 --> 00:26:58.281
You know the atmosphere, and then our problems seemingly are solved.
00:26:58.674 --> 00:27:00.501
It's not like those ideas didn't exist.
00:27:00.501 --> 00:27:01.838
They were there.
00:27:01.838 --> 00:27:05.285
Why did we choose not to follow them?
00:27:05.285 --> 00:27:07.142
I mean, there were certainly post-apowl.
00:27:07.142 --> 00:27:09.883
There were lots of ideas about what comes next.
00:27:09.883 --> 00:27:12.895
There were ideas about okay.
00:27:12.895 --> 00:27:16.061
So there were ideas about, you know, furthering the space program.
00:27:16.061 --> 00:27:22.721
There are ideas about supersonic flight coast, you know, city to city rockets there, you know, hypersonic.
00:27:22.721 --> 00:27:27.096
So there were these ideas out there, but why didn't we?
00:27:27.096 --> 00:27:29.025
So, why don't we pursue them?
00:27:29.025 --> 00:27:41.246
And I think, I think, fundamentally, we became a less future-oriented society in the early 70s and that ended up permeating policy, our culture.
00:27:41.410 --> 00:27:45.369
I think you have to have those things supporting each other.
00:27:45.369 --> 00:27:52.943
You can chicken or egg them, what comes first, but you need to have them supporting each other or you won't have the mechanism for change.
00:27:52.943 --> 00:28:12.854
And if you don't have the culture, because with any change, again it's going to come disruption, jobs will come and go, businesses will rise and fall, and if people don't have some confidence that it's all going to be worth it, they're going to say it's not worth it and it's not worth it and we just better stay with what we're doing.
00:28:12.854 --> 00:28:24.226
And you can forget about the generationships, or you can forget about the giant space stations and coast-to-coast nuclear reactors.
00:28:24.226 --> 00:28:26.298
It's just not worth it.
00:28:26.298 --> 00:28:28.308
And we fail to provide.
00:28:28.308 --> 00:28:39.369
There's a saying from a Dutch futurist in my book, frederick Pollock, which is people who fail to imagine a better future, they're not going to have a future.
00:28:39.369 --> 00:28:52.226
And that seems to me to be coming true when and I'm sure you see it probably among your own friends just a lot of deep pessimism about the future, which creates, I think, a real paralysis and lethargy.
00:28:53.211 --> 00:29:09.349
Let's talk about the role that media plays in all this, because even the change and addressing it, you introduced me through Faster Plays 2 for All Mankind, which is one of my favorite shows, and then I don't think it's been out for a while, so it's spoiler.
00:29:09.971 --> 00:29:11.939
Well, the fourth season comes out November 10.
00:29:11.939 --> 00:29:15.299
I know it's on my calendar on, so I can't wait.
00:29:16.172 --> 00:29:17.032
But it was fast to me.
00:29:17.032 --> 00:29:22.284
In like season three, they articulated the job loss from Helium 3.
00:29:22.284 --> 00:29:28.369
And I thought that was just a beautiful sort of there's always going to be change and there's always going to be this sort of tension.
00:29:29.016 --> 00:29:32.357
There's protesters at some point, right, right, exactly.
00:29:32.357 --> 00:29:36.369
That's the sort of world building of the show that it sort of acknowledged that.
00:29:36.369 --> 00:29:45.125
But even with all kind of the cool stuff that's happening, you know, because we're going to Mars and we have nuclear fusion reactors, someone's not going to be happy.
00:29:45.125 --> 00:29:50.301
So is society built around that unhappiness?
00:29:50.301 --> 00:29:53.740
Or do we say one?
00:29:53.740 --> 00:29:56.369
Do we say, like okay, we'll try to help those people, we're going to keep moving forward?
00:29:56.369 --> 00:30:06.369
And do those people believe that, like okay, like my life plan is going to be different than what I imagined, but I'll press forward and try to make the best of it?
00:30:06.369 --> 00:30:23.163
But I also know that these changes will create a ton more opportunity and you can define that word in lots of ways for my children and grandchildren, like, if you believe that you can take a lot of disruption in your personal life, if you think it's for the better.
00:30:25.979 --> 00:30:34.142
And you know, I think it's important that people again, I'm not an artist, I'm not a novelist, I'm not a filmmaker.
00:30:34.142 --> 00:30:40.369
I'm sure there are people who can create better, interesting images of the future, but like that needs to be done.
00:30:40.369 --> 00:30:56.196
It's whether it's Hollywood, whether it's Mark Andreessen and Silicon Valley, whether it's whether it's people who are just really good at mid journey, and new AI tools who can create images or short films which, so we don't have to rely on Hollywood, we can do it ourselves.
00:30:56.196 --> 00:30:59.339
Those images need to be created, and a lot of images.
00:30:59.339 --> 00:30:59.931
No, there's.
00:30:59.931 --> 00:31:10.141
No, I mean it doesn't have to be sort of this one version that maybe I might prefer or come up with, but lots of visions and lots of ideas and let them compete and we'll see what we choose.
00:31:10.611 --> 00:31:12.396
Are there any concrete sort of things?
00:31:12.396 --> 00:31:14.071
You would like to see the things?
00:31:14.271 --> 00:31:23.000
to me that are most concrete and I think these I think are fairly basic One, to make sure that we can produce a lot of clean energy, right.
00:31:23.000 --> 00:31:32.483
So, again, if that's fission fusion, deep geothermal, you know, regular solar and wind could be a part of its space.
00:31:32.483 --> 00:31:37.917
Solar, like, I'm agnostic about that stuff, but so that needs to be part of it, all, right.
00:31:37.917 --> 00:32:10.349
So I think energy is like a general purpose technology, maybe the ultimate general purpose technology, and like I was just having this conversation with someone there, so like, like, if you ran for president, what would be on your platform I'm not sure this is a winner, but absolutely on my platform would be planetary defense, whether it's from, whether it's from, you know, asteroids or comets, or gamma bursts, you know, solar storms, stuff that can really disrupt an advanced technological society.
00:32:10.349 --> 00:32:22.359
I think that needs to be, that absolutely needs to be on the agenda, whether hardening the earth or making sure that we're in places other than the earth, to me, that that makes you have enough energy and making sure.
00:32:22.359 --> 00:32:32.022
I'll tell you, I was just rewatching the film the Road I don't know if you've seen that, cameron where something, something has happened and basically earth is just pretty much devastated.
00:32:32.550 --> 00:32:37.997
And if you, you know, if you read the book, in the film it's it was probably a comment strike and there was like no coming.
00:32:37.997 --> 00:32:40.136
The whole point of the movie is there's no coming back.
00:32:40.136 --> 00:32:42.962
There's absolutely no coming back from that.
00:32:42.962 --> 00:32:44.369
So I would like to avoid that.
00:32:44.369 --> 00:32:54.369
So, so, so it's a abundant energy, planetary defense, and I wouldn't mind being able to get from, like, washington DC to Tokyo in about 45 minutes.
00:32:54.369 --> 00:32:56.705
If we can make that happen, that would be awesome too.
00:32:56.705 --> 00:32:57.369
Absolutely.
00:32:58.250 --> 00:33:07.523
So I think, like the planetary defense contrasts well with like imagine a film like that's kind of like the Martian contrasted with that.
00:33:07.523 --> 00:33:12.060
The Netflix movie came out to you so like don't look up.
00:33:12.060 --> 00:33:13.369
You know, it's just like that.
00:33:13.369 --> 00:33:16.369
The don't look up is like oh wow, look at humanity.
00:33:16.369 --> 00:33:24.369
Like we can't solve our problems, like our kind of helpless and we can't coordinate, because this bad thing is going to happen and we're all like kind of shit out of luck.
00:33:24.369 --> 00:33:27.362
It's like why are we telling that story?
00:33:27.362 --> 00:33:29.369
Versus oh, we have this huge problem.
00:33:29.369 --> 00:33:39.369
Humanity has come together, we've you, we've brought our best scientists or best engineers are best thinkers and we've coordinated ways to alleviate this problem and ensure that doesn't happen again.
00:33:39.369 --> 00:33:44.321
It's like very, you know, upwing, it's upwing, downweighing, sort of media.
00:33:44.653 --> 00:33:46.369
I'm not sure what you think you accomplished with that.
00:33:46.369 --> 00:33:49.269
That was a demoralizing movie.
00:33:49.269 --> 00:34:05.432
It was also demoralizing the Apple Plus series, extrapolations from Stephen Soderbergh who did Contagion, which was supposed to be a serious fact based thing, about a series about climate change and there was nothing about nuclear in it.
00:34:05.432 --> 00:34:13.264
And by the end of because every show is like another 10 years in the future and by the end we had survived, the world was way worse.
00:34:13.264 --> 00:34:17.349
There was nothing about nuclear and they are putting CEOs on trial for war crimes.
00:34:17.349 --> 00:34:18.659
Who wants?
00:34:18.659 --> 00:34:20.369
And sorry, what are we supposed to do?
00:34:20.369 --> 00:34:22.349
Like, what is the call to action there?
00:34:22.349 --> 00:34:27.329
That sounds terrible, rather, how about like a Martian version of that?
00:34:27.329 --> 00:34:35.510
Like you know, you can make interesting, compelling media like everything Listen, everything doesn't have to be up way, we can have plenty, I like.
00:34:35.510 --> 00:34:43.132
I love a good zombie as much as you know movies, just the next person, but they have that be like 95%, that.
00:34:43.132 --> 00:34:46.121
That is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia.
00:34:47.614 --> 00:34:49.300
The Contagion is a good example.
00:34:49.300 --> 00:34:50.992
I think this.
00:34:50.992 --> 00:35:07.369
This points out something that I'm curious to get your perspective, that I've been thinking about, which is, I think our pro future, like the opposite stories are mispriced Because no one watches Contagion or Terminator and says, oh, we should do something about this.
00:35:07.369 --> 00:35:09.369
It's just like passive fear.
00:35:09.369 --> 00:35:11.253
It's like, oh, we don't want that.
00:35:12.195 --> 00:35:24.978
Versus you have, like Ready Player One and the social network, which are different, differently, sort of top, but those inspired people that gave them examples, like most the people I know in Silicon Valley.
00:35:24.978 --> 00:35:31.538
Like they watch the social network and like, oh, I can go be an entrepreneur, and that wasn't the point of the movie, but it gave them that permission.
00:35:31.538 --> 00:35:43.369
And Ready Player One, palmer, lucky Zuck like they've watched the movie, they read the book, they read Snow Crash, which was sort of the previous serve or the first instantiation, and like it compelled them to build something.
00:35:43.369 --> 00:35:45.376
So like it matters.
00:35:45.376 --> 00:35:50.135
It matters Like if you, if you define, hey, here's what could be like.
00:35:50.135 --> 00:35:59.856
Even like you have entrepreneurs building like the primer from Diamond Age or which is the Neil Stevenson's book, because they're like, oh, that is cool, that doesn't exist, we should build it.
00:35:59.856 --> 00:36:03.369
Versus oh, we're going to have a global pandemic.
00:36:03.369 --> 00:36:04.393
We should do something like.
00:36:04.393 --> 00:36:05.918
I don't think it compels people to action.
00:36:05.918 --> 00:36:08.016
The same way, no one seems to be thinking about this.
00:36:08.773 --> 00:36:09.643
I mean a lot of my, a lot of my book.
00:36:09.643 --> 00:36:16.349
You know there's a lot I have studies as economics of the history and, and I'm like, well, the culture stuff.
00:36:16.349 --> 00:36:18.369
Is it really, you know, does it really go with that?
00:36:18.369 --> 00:36:24.882
Is it like then, the more I wrote the book, I'm like like this may be the most important part of the book, right?
00:36:24.882 --> 00:36:34.985
I mean, it obviously inspires entrepreneurs and technologists, you know, as well as giving society an image like it really does matter.
00:36:34.985 --> 00:36:46.190
And the example I've been, you know I've been using a lot as I've been talking about it is the book by William Gibson called the peripheral, and there's a TV show called the peripheral.
00:36:46.190 --> 00:36:48.717
I think of another fine Apple Plus production.
00:36:49.498 --> 00:36:50.320
It's set in the future.
00:36:50.320 --> 00:36:59.369
It's set both like in the 2030s and in the year like 2100, and it's clear that in that between that time period, like nothing major went wrong but lots of little things went wrong.
00:36:59.369 --> 00:37:06.974
So you know, you had some pandemic and a bit of a nuclear war and climate and all of it added up and like 80% of us died.
00:37:06.974 --> 00:37:21.981
But then, like in the middle of that is at least in the book, the way Gibson wrote it was science started popping, it started, everything started to work the AI, the, you know, the nanotechnology, and that's the only reason, like anybody survived.
00:37:22.061 --> 00:37:25.068
But I'm like, but it was still kind of too late.
00:37:25.068 --> 00:37:26.536
So that's my.
00:37:26.536 --> 00:37:29.304
So I don't want it to be too late, right, you know.
00:37:29.304 --> 00:37:35.947
So I don't want to, I don't want to figure out all this stuff, you know, as the comet is heading toward us, right.
00:37:35.947 --> 00:37:38.099
So so to me, that that is.
00:37:38.099 --> 00:38:06.786
You know, that is kind of a gloomy movie, but there's actually is like a message in there that you know that I think under that maybe a different writer might have pulled out more, and that, so you can do this kind of media, these kind of stories, and have them be interesting and all that, but have like a fundamental lesson that people can draw away, which is, like we don't want to wait till it's too late, so like, maybe we don't want to like screw up AI, so everything that we could get in two years, we don't get in 20 years.
00:38:07.594 --> 00:38:13.878
Yeah, it's, it's it's like trying to think about like, what a, what a framework might look like for that type of type of story.
00:38:13.878 --> 00:38:26.909
We're I think we're we're both friends with Jason Crawford from Ritwoythia he and I have spoken about this, and then we have another friend who's a director and film producer and we're trying to figure out, like what is it?
00:38:26.909 --> 00:38:30.559
What does like, the genre look like for this type of film?
00:38:30.559 --> 00:38:54.289
And so what are the like, the underpinnings or values or ideas that are represented in the stories, whether they're like pro-topian or I mean even to some extent like the peripheral, where it's like maybe it's not like, oh, we solve all the problems, but like it, it's pointing in a different direction, like, what do you think about the like, what that set of films, like, would look like, or what the sort of?
00:38:54.289 --> 00:38:56.277
How would we define that category?
00:38:56.476 --> 00:39:05.992
So I think it can be like a cautionary tale, as with like the Martian or or the revival of Lost in Space, which I think is on Netflix, which I wrote about in the book.
00:39:05.992 --> 00:39:17.327
Almost every episode was about fixing a problem with something that at least approached like real science, where the jeopardy comes from, like not being able to fix something and figuring out how to solve the problem.
00:39:17.327 --> 00:39:26.166
So I like, so I think like that's like like kind of like the Martian, kind of Lost in Space genre, the you know the kind of the cautionary tale.
00:39:26.166 --> 00:39:30.222
Oh, if we had, if we only had this technology, like we wouldn't be having this massive problem.
00:39:30.222 --> 00:39:39.688
It's me it's so easy to create something which you could, which people could leave with something beyond despair, that I don't think it's that hard.
00:39:39.688 --> 00:39:50.463
Instead, we just had media which has leaned into this, completely into the despair, where it's obviously like there is there is not going to be a happy ending.
00:39:50.463 --> 00:39:55.664
Listen, a zombie movie where the whole world is basically destroyed but the people at the end live.
00:39:55.664 --> 00:40:00.447
That's not like a happy ending, so they can live like we did 500 years ago.
00:40:00.447 --> 00:40:01.833
That's not a happy ending.
00:40:01.833 --> 00:40:06.369
I'm not an artist, but I I think there are enough examples out there where it does.
00:40:06.369 --> 00:40:09.621
It's not just Star Trek, I mean, that's one example, but there are.
00:40:09.621 --> 00:40:15.802
There is enough out there that if someone wanted to do it, I listen like for all mankind.
00:40:15.802 --> 00:40:16.021
You know.
00:40:16.041 --> 00:40:19.695
Kind of this alt history, which is another interesting genre.
00:40:19.695 --> 00:40:34.865
I mean Ronald D Moore, you know, who did Balsar Galactica and did Star Trek, like he just created that right so like other people could have done that, but he did it and had a really good sort of leaping off point which is Russians win the space race.
00:40:34.865 --> 00:40:36.289
Then what happens?
00:40:36.289 --> 00:40:38.418
Well, america's like guess what?
00:40:38.418 --> 00:40:39.423
We're going to keep on racing.
00:40:39.423 --> 00:40:44.461
So you, you know, now we're going to win the next round and then everything flows from there.
00:40:44.461 --> 00:40:50.103
So I would like to see like really intelligent alt history world building, like in a smart way.
00:40:50.103 --> 00:40:54.478
I think that I think there's tons of alt history books out there.
00:40:54.719 --> 00:41:16.492
I think that's a very ripe genre for this kind of stuff in which you can have things go right, things go wrong, heroes, villains, all it doesn't have to be a bland and just because it popped my head, you know, like I said, we can create our own media and I think if you've ever watched like the five and a half minute SpaceX video about Mars colonization.
00:41:16.492 --> 00:41:22.525
That's pretty spectacular, it's, it's to me I, anyone I've showed that is like that's great.
00:41:22.525 --> 00:41:23.869
We should do that.
00:41:23.869 --> 00:41:37.806
I recommend, if you go to the SpaceX side, I think you can find that it's you can, you can, you can make it, but it has to, I think, appeal to kind of a certain like we're pioneers, we're explorers, but that's as humanity, that's who we are.
00:41:37.806 --> 00:41:39.514
So, I think, trying to appeal to that spirit.
00:41:39.514 --> 00:41:46.360
Like, as you know, interstellar another great, I think, fundamentally pro progress movie, though it is very dystopian in a way too.
00:41:46.902 --> 00:42:05.273
Yeah, but the trailer, though that teaser, that that they want, that they like released to promote the film, where it's Matthew McConaughey sort of narrating, you know, this key scene was like, you know we've forgotten that maybe we're still, like we're pioneers, that maybe the best is not behind us but ahead of us, and just like camera.
00:42:05.293 --> 00:42:06.155
I'm getting the chills now.
00:42:06.155 --> 00:42:06.496
Camera.
00:42:06.496 --> 00:42:07.780
I love that movie so much.
00:42:07.780 --> 00:42:17.672
I in my in my, I'm in my AI office, but if we're doing this from my home office, I have a giant interstellar poster sitting on my wall.
00:42:17.672 --> 00:42:18.655
Absolutely Love it.
00:42:19.478 --> 00:42:20.822
It's in in that that one scene.
00:42:20.822 --> 00:42:32.083
I can never get this out of my head, the scene where Matthew McConaughey is in the classroom talking with the principal and MERS teacher and they're like like Murphy can't be bringing this book to school.
00:42:32.083 --> 00:42:33.288
What do you mean?
00:42:33.288 --> 00:42:37.679
Like we can't talk about the Apollo missions because it's distracting kids.
00:42:37.679 --> 00:42:56.257
It's like, oh, it just like it gets me so, so tense thinking about that and that seems to be like I mean, that's the the downwing sort of mentality, that's great because all the problems in that society stem from a pervasive downwing attitude.
00:42:56.536 --> 00:42:57.539
That's what it got people.
00:42:57.539 --> 00:43:03.240
It got when they finally had a really big problem that they needed the tools to solve.
00:43:03.240 --> 00:43:07.007
They did not have them and they didn't have them out of choice.
00:43:07.007 --> 00:43:12.186
And that is where the disaster didn't come from progress, but the lack of progress.
00:43:12.855 --> 00:43:18.518
Last thing I want to talk about is, you know, a shared interest of both you and I, which is the World's Fair.
00:43:18.518 --> 00:43:20.043
What excites you about?
00:43:20.043 --> 00:43:38.061
About the World's Fair, historically and in the role it can play in enabling you know the sort of cultural perspective of the future, one of the most important roles of the World's Fair was to introduce people to technology so they could, you know, see it up close, they could touch it.
00:43:38.362 --> 00:43:54.072
They could, you know, it wasn't a strange thing Everything from robots or highways of the future, all kind of and people got, you know, real electricity like very novel, but people got to experience it.
00:43:54.072 --> 00:44:01.755
So, a way, it kind of accultured people to the stuff that maybe they were only reading about or it just did not seem so foreign.
00:44:01.755 --> 00:44:08.577
I think that's an important role and certainly one can see with all these new technologies how that could be important.
00:44:08.577 --> 00:44:23.692
Again, I mean, you created a very, I think, attractive, super creative vision of like one version of what a World Fair could look like and I think, along with that, like the idea of spectacle, like getting people kind of fired up.
00:44:23.751 --> 00:44:49.623
And one of the examples I use in the book was from the London Olympics of 2012, where they did this whole great thing at Wembley Stadium about the Industrial Revolution which you know went from the green sort of the green fields of England to, you know, all the you know the worst parts Industrial Revolution, the smoked stacks, but then out of a come, you know, it ends up producing modern society is represented by the you know Golden Olympic rings.
00:44:49.623 --> 00:45:09.423
And Danny Boyle, the great director who organized that, said that that's the message he wanted to get, that you know that we as society things, you know we move forward, went through difficult periods but here we are making like, making a better civilization, like, so that can be done.
00:45:09.423 --> 00:45:12.902
It was, it can be done in the Olympics, it can be done at World Fairs.
00:45:12.902 --> 00:45:27.460
I was talking to someone who thought who about this idea and she like you know, it's very you know again, it's you know the reason World Fairs are still popular in poorer parts of the world because it gives poorer people an opportunity to see these things that they don't see in their lives.
00:45:27.481 --> 00:45:29.387
And I'm like that's wrong.
00:45:29.387 --> 00:45:43.907
I mean, like, how many people still like have never put on like a pair of like you know goggles, you know virtual reality goggles, or bent into a driverless car or even tried chap, gpt or any of this stuff?
00:45:43.907 --> 00:45:55.949
I mean that was a great time, I think an unbelievable moment for a World Fair to like introduce people to technologies and sort of the spectacle of human achievement.
00:45:55.949 --> 00:45:59.500
I don't see how that ever goes out of style.
00:45:59.500 --> 00:46:03.170
You've done great work turning me out to this and you that's.
00:46:03.170 --> 00:46:04.735
You've been a real hero on this.
00:46:05.577 --> 00:46:06.521
Do it, do what we can.
00:46:06.521 --> 00:46:14.626
So this is this is one of my favorite books Fair Management by Lennox Lore, who is the GM of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.
00:46:14.626 --> 00:46:19.161
Down through the ages, fairs have marked significant milestones in man's development.
00:46:19.161 --> 00:46:30.451
For each generation assault the urge to vent its pride and demonstrate its progress and the quality of its products, fairs have greatly accelerated the acceptance of new methods and of scientific, technical and agricultural discoveries.
00:46:30.451 --> 00:46:41.097
Masses of people assembled from distant parts saw for the first time recent developments that could be useful to them and thus speeded the otherwise lengthy interval between inception and general public acceptance.
00:46:41.920 --> 00:46:50.092
And so, through the halls of the future times there were ring the gay voices of crowds seeking that which is new, and since human nature changes, but little that which is old.
00:46:50.092 --> 00:46:59.530
There were skeptics in 1930 who felt the day of the fairs was over, the reason that the world had become sophisticated and blossoming through the printed word and the radio.
00:46:59.530 --> 00:47:05.847
People had heard all worth hearing and with the ease of travel made possible with the automobile, they had seen all worth seeing.
00:47:05.847 --> 00:47:11.016
The doubters proclaimed that the day of the Hick was gone forever and with him the reason for a fair.
00:47:11.016 --> 00:47:17.541
That they were wrong was amply tested by the record breaking crowds which have attended fairs since 30 years after.
00:47:17.581 --> 00:47:34.911
That was a 1964 World's Fair in New York City with the new version of the Futurama exhibit, which was also the 39 World's Fair, and I think the only thing that matched it was the artwork of Michelangelo who was at the fair lines around the block.
00:47:34.911 --> 00:47:41.110
People wanted to see in the Futurama exhibit vision of tomorrow and that thing had it had.
00:47:41.110 --> 00:47:42.132
It was all classic.
00:47:42.132 --> 00:47:45.597
Like you know, it was the, you know, space colonies, undersea cities.
00:47:45.597 --> 00:47:47.507
People love this.
00:47:47.507 --> 00:47:59.559
We are never too sophisticated to see what sort of crystals of imagination Can be exhibited with great spectacle at fairs.
00:47:59.559 --> 00:48:14.291
I think I would love I mean I would love to see those return to the United States and United States put in other rich countries, put great effort into them in a pro-progress, technologically optimistic way.
00:48:14.291 --> 00:48:17.690
Yeah, that's a great passage.
00:48:18.391 --> 00:48:23.128
It just gives me chills every time I read this is it's timeless.
00:48:23.128 --> 00:48:26.838
Humans gathering, wanting to tell stories, wanting to, wanting hope.
00:48:27.199 --> 00:48:34.657
People want to hear a story about how tomorrow Can be better than today, I don't again that that story will always sell.
00:48:35.266 --> 00:48:43.195
Well, we've got a lot, of, a lot of work to do with you and I and everyone who sort of believes in the future, to To kind of tell these stories where people find you.
00:48:43.646 --> 00:49:02.659
They should definitely sign up for for faster please, and by copy of your book faster, please on sub-stack, the book the conservative futures how to create the sci-fi world where your promise available everywhere Amazon Books, a million Barnes and Noble and audio Kindle hardcover.
00:49:02.659 --> 00:49:05.590
I get I mentioned faster, please on sub-stack.
00:49:05.590 --> 00:49:13.731
I also I can see mccasey on CNBC AI website and occasionally on fine on fine Podcasts like like yours.
00:49:14.304 --> 00:49:14.706
Incredible.
00:49:14.706 --> 00:49:18.806
So any any sort of last, last words you want to depart to people?
00:49:18.922 --> 00:49:21.614
Don't be discouraged, right, you know, don't be discouraged.
00:49:21.614 --> 00:49:24.744
We absolutely have it without our means to do better.
00:49:24.744 --> 00:49:30.097
I'll leave with this the conservative futures I talk about probably most in the book.
00:49:30.097 --> 00:49:35.141
This guy, herman Khan, who was a nuclear war theorist in the 60s, began this totally.
00:49:35.141 --> 00:49:49.525
You know, I love techno capitalism as he called it, and he said listen, at the end of the day, if we can just not make a lot of Dumb decisions and if you can have a bit of good luck will be okay, I think we've made too many dumb decisions.
00:49:49.525 --> 00:50:02.067
So we just have start making fewer dumb decisions, a few more smart decisions like a few we talked about, and as long as we can get that planetary defense up and running before a comment, I think we'll be okay.
00:50:02.067 --> 00:50:04.170
But we can make those decisions.
00:50:04.170 --> 00:50:07.318
It's, we have the agency, we have the power, so let's go do it.
00:50:08.226 --> 00:50:10.891
Let's go do it onwards, onwards and upwards to a better.
00:50:10.891 --> 00:50:12.414
Faster, please, faster, please.
00:50:12.414 --> 00:50:13.737
All right, jim, thanks so much.
00:50:14.427 --> 00:50:15.048
Thank you, cameron.
00:50:16.047 --> 00:50:18.525
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the build the future podcast.
00:50:18.525 --> 00:50:24.291
If you loved, it would be really grateful if you share it with a friend or post a review on Whatever.
00:50:24.291 --> 00:50:27.469
Wherever you watch and are listening to this, that's it from us.
00:50:27.469 --> 00:50:28.811
We'll see you next time.
00:50:28.811 --> 00:50:30.293
Until then, go build.