Robert Scoble #12 on Work, Energy, the American Dream and Work - Gutenberg Academy

Okay, but so what is about work, what I experience is I think we will run out of work or we start to create.

I just totally disagree.

Or not out of work, but I think the idea of eight hours, days.

I totally disagree with that too.

Let's go work.

Yeah. And part of this is I grew up in Silicon Valley. And when I grew up, Silicon Valley was still largely agriculture. Still, you know, I lived on an apricot orchard which now Apple Computer paved over, right? And so the jobs went from agriculture. Those jobs disappeared. And the farmers used to talk like this. Oh my God, our kids are never going to have jobs. How are, you know, where's my kids going to work? You know, all the jobs went away. Something replaced it though, which was manufacturing. I worked on a soldering line in high school at hp, right? And built things. Those jobs went away and you know, people have been, you know, how are we gonna replace these manufacturing jobs? My kids aren't gonna be able to do soldering or putting machine screws into metal in a car plant or building things. Those jobs went away. They largely went to China, right? And other places. And now we're arguing about a new kind of work. Oh my God. We have to compete with the Chinese, with our minds. How are we going to do that? We're not as smart, we don't have as many people. Everybody's like, but the human mind is a crazy thing. We find ways to do new things and when we do new things, we want new things. And when we want new things, we create jobs for people. And I don't see that ever stopping. Optimist is always right in this equation. The pessimist is always wrong. And yeah, there are dislocations. There are 20% unemployment, but there have been 20% unemployment. The depression happened, there was 40% unemployment. And we survived and we moved on and we found a way to create need and create new things. It's called marketing. You know, I just drove some race cars from Germany on Tuesday. I want one now. It's $100,000 car. Did that create jobs? Yes. I can't afford it. But I have a need now, right? And humans are good at coming up with new things. I just drove yesterday. There was this new company from Y Combinator called Boosted Boards, makes an electronic skateboard. Twelve hundred dollars, right? Not possible to build five years ago. Today they can. I want one. So do a lot of other people. They're selling dozens a day of these $1,200 skateboards. We didn't even know we wanted one. Five years ago, it wasn't even possible even if we wanted one. Right. And the human mind is brilliant at coming up with new things to do and build and dream about. And, you know, there's a lot of people who I meet who want to go to space. You know, that's not possible today. But your branch is building something that'll take, you know, rich people up and another 20 years it'll take normal people up. And so God bless this world. I love it.

I just ask myself, because I don't think that there will be oil left when I'm 90 or I don't know.

There's more energy spraying down from this thing called the sun. I know, you know, that we are wasting. We are not collecting any of that energy here in Half Moon Bay, even with the fog.

Yeah, it's true. But you have to start with it. And the other.

We can build things. My dad was a nuclear engineer. We can build nuclear plants. They, you know, they might cause new weird cancers, you know, when they blow up like they did in the Japanese earthquake. But we know how to build these things. We know how to take care of energy. It's just, are we willing to. And we will be willing to. When oil runs out, we will be willing to pave every surface of this world with solar cells to collect energy for batteries because we don't want to stop driving and going places. We don't want to stop flying places and going on vacations. We don't want to stop dreaming about going to space. We don't want to stop building more and more things to let us entertain ourselves. So, no, that problem will be solved. The worst problem is going to be the global climate change, the global warming, the seas going up, the dislocation of billions of people, including a lot around here. I mean, if you go down the street, Half Moon Bay is largely near the surface of oceans. San Francisco is built on landfill, right? So if the Ocean goes up 6ft, San Francisco's in trouble, New York's in trouble. That's going to be a deeper problem for my kids, I think, and a much harder one to solve long term than figuring out how to replace oil. Replacing oil, I can see that. So if I can see that, no problem, it'll get solved as long as there's a financial incentive to solve it. And there will be, because people don't want to stop driving, right? When their gas runs out. They're going to put lots of pressure on everybody to figure out how to do a solar car or solar panels along the roads. To charge the cars. That will get solved. The global climate change is going to be a tougher one because maybe we solve it in the first world. But I've been in China and the pollution there is just horrid.

Right.

They're going through their industrial revolution and then India is going to go through an industrial revolution and then other places, Africa is going to go through an industrial revolution and it's going to be very difficult to convince those nations not to pollute while you are realizing that the pollution is causing massive dislocations to societies. So that's not a problem for my generation, but certainly for the next one.

Yeah. Okay, thank you very much.

That makes sense.

Yeah, it makes sense. So it's really a great way to show the American dream. Yeah, or it's some. Yeah, in some way it's the American dream.

The problem is everybody else wants the American dream too. China wants the American dream. They're building cars, right.

They weren't.

They were. You know, people are not satisfied with their own. With their own. Like I was in China in 95 and they all had bicycles.

Right. In Germany, there's a different trend. It's really going. People are driving more bicycles.

Happening here and there. In America it's hard because in Germany, in Europe, you guys have had high gas taxes for a long time. So you're paying what, $9 a gallon for gas and you've used that money to subsidize really great public transportation. I mean, you know, when you get to Germany, you can take a high speed train anywhere and it's beautiful and it's nice and clean and efficient and it's always on time. I mean, the Swiss trains, in Switzerland, they leave when the second hand gets to the top of the hour. They're running like a Swiss watch. And we don't have that here. Here our trains are bumpy, they're slow, they're. They don't go very many places. Right. I don't have train, I can't go on a train here. I'd have to drive over the hill to just get on a train. So it's. American culture is one about cars. And so it's gonna be very hard to, it's gonna be hard to unlock that from American psyche, I guess, you.

Know, But German culture was a lot about cars as well. But I don't know, maybe we don't have so big roads in the big cities and more people are moving to cities.

And also the public transportation is better in Germany, so you can take a bike on the train. Get into the downtown and then take the bike around the town. I don't have that capability here. I would if I lived along the train track, but it, it's tough, it's tough to do that here. And it's also so spread out. I mean, I'm 45 minutes from Twitter that way. I'm 45 minutes from Apple that way. I'm 45 minutes From Oracle that way. And so it's very, very spread out in Germany and Europe countries. The cities are more compact up there. It's not always true. There's still suburbs, but I don't know, it needs to be a lot of rethinking of cities and where we live and to get to the point where we can go back to riding a bicycle. But the problem is, even if every American and every Chinese or every German rides bicycle and stops driving a car, there's a billion Chinese who want to drive cars now and they're buying them, they're building them, and there's a billion Indian people. So if those two nations want to drive cars and the rest of us are going to bicycles, it doesn't matter. There's, we've not changed the world. The world has, you know, we've changed ourselves, but we haven't, we haven't changed the pollution that's going on. Right. So we need, we need to really rethink a lot of things. And it's going to be tough.

But if we look at these self driving cars and they are like taxis, so you just open your app and say, I want from here to there and then three minutes later there's the car in front of your house.

Well, that means you can make fewer cars and you can spread the cost.

Over more people and you don't have so many people there.

You have to change the culture. So you have to change what's in my head. That I want to own a car that's possible, that I can see happening. I can see getting to a place where, okay, I can just order this car and it'll show up when I need it and there'll be enough of them and it'll happen consistent. You know, it's, it has to run like a Swiss watch. It has to, you know, when I want a car, it has to be there, otherwise I want to own it. The reason I want to own the car is it's there, it's in my garage. I can, yeah, it's freedom, right? I can always go somewhere and I never have to wait for a bus or a train or a Taxi to pick me up. Uber has happened because the taxi system is really crappy, right?

And yeah, but, yeah, but you know, to come back to work if you, I don't know, normal car is standing around for 23 hours if you a day. So if you just extend the usage time to 8 hours so you 8 fold it, you only need 18 of the cars or maybe for the rush hours, double the usage. But you don't need every false car.

There's 3 billion people in the world who don't have cars who want them, okay? And so, so while we're buying less cars here, we're gonna spread that, that cost out over the world and enable more people to have more access to transportation. Right?

But I want to, where I want to get to is the idea of working eight hours is very young compared to human history. I find people worked only as much as they needed. And I think, yeah, but when you're.

In an idea age like I do what I love, right? I do what I love and it's my identity, my life. If you told me I could only do that for eight hours a day, I wouldn't know what to do. I really wouldn't know what to do. So I don't. The idea that you have to clock in and work, you know, work is something you do from 9 to 5 is totally foreign to me. I don't understand that world. I did that when I was in high school. I can't imagine doing that today.

Right?

And as, as the economy of the mind increases and more startups happen and more of the entrepreneurial behavior happens, people do more what they love, therefore they're going to work more even if they don't have to. And there's not going to be an hour that you work. That idea is just foreign to me. I do want to get more productive at what I do. And so I've written 1500 Gmail filters to filter out my email so I don't have to pay attention to email and I can do more enjoyable things. But the goal is to have enjoyment, which you know, to me that still is some form of work or some form of hardcore play. You know, racing cars was fun, right? Which leads into new work, right? Because even if I was rich and I had the time, I wouldn't want to sit on a beach, I'd want to maybe learn how to race cars for a while. Now I have to buy a million dollar race car and I have to go and take lots of lessons and do lots of practice and all that. Now I'M all of a sudden efficient at racing cars. Well, that's new. That's work now. Once you get to that level, it's work. Snowboarders, you know, I was just hanging out with snowboarders and skiers in Aspen. That's work to them is skiing down this mountain that's like this and that's work. To me, it looks like play, but when it turns over to that point where you're proficient now it's a job because you can make money with this. And to keep doing it almost needs that, right? Unless you're just a trust fund baby and independently wealthy. But I interviewed the guy who invented Hotmail, and he has hundreds of millions of dollars and he's starting a new thing. He's working on rebuilding on building a new city of the future in India. And I said, why are you working? And he goes, well, I tried to sit on a beach for two years and it was really boring. Work is part of what we're driven to do. If we're not doing something productive, something that's evolutionary in our mind, isn't satisfied. We don't like just sitting on the beach doing nothing. It doesn't feel right into our brains. Doing something to improve the world feels good. And look at Bill Gates. He has so much money. He could. He'll never be able to spend the money that he has. Never. He could try. He could try to spend all that money. He can't spend $60 billion. I mean, he's giving away billions of dollars and he's still the number one richest person in the world, right? He's actively trying to give away his money, and he still is number one.

Hard. I can't help it.

But he feels good by doing something with that wealth, trying to improve the world and going to India and sitting with school teachers and. And it makes you feel good, it makes you feel alive. And so I don't believe for a second that work hour is going to get shorter. I think it's going to get longer because people are going to find things to do that are more satisfying.

Okay, that's a much better answer.