Episode #399 from 3:45:34
Hope for the future
When you zoom out and look at the 21st century from a human history perspective, across the timescale of many decades, maybe centuries, what gives you hope about human civilization? Everything you've seen: you've traveled the world, you've talked to some of the most powerful and influential people, and you look at the future, what gives you hope about this little planet of ours? What gives me the most hope is that anything's possible. If there's one lesson that I took from my time in government, it's that people coming together to try to make tomorrow different than yesterday can succeed. And if the right people in the right places focus on the right ideas, I think the advancement that we can have for human history and for society can be tremendous. And I think that right now, I see we're at a place in society where there's a lot of what I call squabbles between countries, which are really man versus man issues. And those are as old as time, right? We've been fighting about borders or religion or who wronged somebody 100 or 1,000 years ago. And these are what I call more tribal battles. But I do think that as we advance with artificial intelligence, as energy becomes cheaper and it's more readily available, I think we're going to have massive industrialization, I think we're going to have massive advancement.
Why this moment matters
When you zoom out and look at the 21st century from a human history perspective, across the timescale of many decades, maybe centuries, what gives you hope about human civilization? Everything you've seen: you've traveled the world, you've talked to some of the most powerful and influential people, and you look at the future, what gives you hope about this little planet of ours? What gives me the most hope is that anything's possible. If there's one lesson that I took from my time in government, it's that people coming together to try to make tomorrow different than yesterday can succeed. And if the right people in the right places focus on the right ideas, I think the advancement that we can have for human history and for society can be tremendous. And I think that right now, I see we're at a place in society where there's a lot of what I call squabbles between countries, which are really man versus man issues. And those are as old as time, right? We've been fighting about borders or religion or who wronged somebody 100 or 1,000 years ago. And these are what I call more tribal battles. But I do think that as we advance with artificial intelligence, as energy becomes cheaper and it's more readily available, I think we're going to have massive industrialization, I think we're going to have massive advancement.