Peter Leyden: A Vision of the Future from 2020 to 2050

This episode is brought to you by the New Retirement Planner. More on this later. Welcome to the New Retirement Podcast. Today we're going to be talking with Peter Layden, an author, entrepreneur and public speaker. Peter has spent his career figuring out the future, explaining what's probably coming next and and helping envision how we could create a better world. He came to San Francisco 25 years ago to work at Wired magazine, founded two of his own media startups, and hosted several interview series with a network of innovators. Peter's written two books on the future that went into multiple languages, including the Long A Future History of the world from 1980 to 2020. And he recently published the sequel, an online series of stories in Medium called the Transformation A Positive and Plausible Narrative of America and the world from 2020 to 2050. We're going to talk about what the next 30 years might bring us and how that could impact our lives and the lives of future generations. With that long preamble. Peter, welcome to our show. It's great to have you join us.

It's great to be here, Steve. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I appreciate your time. One thing that struck me in the way we got here was I saw that the talk you did on the Long now, which we'll link to. But given all the angst that we have right now with we're living through Covid this pandemic, there's concerns about AI and will that get out of control and climate change. But with all that backdrop, you strike me as fundamentally an optimist and I was just kind of curious to get your perspective on that.

Yeah, well, I'm kind of genetically predisposed to being an optimist. I've been an optimist since I was a little kid. So there's just a kind of personality type thing about me. But more seriously, I've spent a lot of my life looking at the big picture, long term trends. And I've also been a student of history even before I got into the futures business, which has been the last 25 years or so come off of my experience at Wired magazine where he said there, which was really a magazine about the future as well as a magazine about technology. One thing you realize when you look back in history is to me is an inexorable kind of progress, at least not only just through the Western countries and through American history, but also ultimately now, globally. And there's so many ways you can track long term trends on data in whether, like I say, through the west, through the developed world, through the Developing world. Even now, things are getting better. And there's many ways to measure this. And in that big picture lens you can make that argument. And so what's interesting to me is when you turn your gaze to the future, we kind of leave all that perspective looking back at the door. And we don't really kind of keep thinking more big picture long term going forward. And we lose track of the, these larger trends that are moving in these directions. And we tend to just be very focused on immediate things that pop up and freak people out. And that's particularly true for people who are investing. I mean, you know, you're looking like, is it up, is it down today? Is, you know, this and that, earnings call, boom, boom, boom. It's all short term, super kind of focused in the moment things and very little or I don't know exactly your crew and how you do it. But many people kind of lose track of looking at the long term. And so there is a body of work, there's a bunch of tools of what they call strategic foresight, there's some scenario planning, A bunch of things have been developed in the last bunch of decades of which I'm quite familiar with and have been schooled in that help you think more systematically, more rigorously, more comprehensively and more accurately I would say about the future. And so when I about this project of the transformation started about 18 months ago where we were just surrounded by gloom and doom. I mean it was like, you know, climate change of course is just everyone's paralyzed by it. But then, you know, income inequality and what's happening society, society and racial inequities and all that kind of stuff is going on and you know, political polarization in this country and all through Europe and you know, freaking out about AIs coming and we're gonna have overlords and you know, genetic engineering, we're all going to be mutants. And anyhow you just roll the thing out and every, you're surrounded by science fiction movies, you're surrounded by magazine cover stories, you're surrounded by tweets from, you know, all directions and stuff. And so at some point I said wait a minute, I'm just gonna stop, step back here folks. There's so much else going on here and much of it very positive that we really just need to step back, see the forest of the trees. And with that I started this project where I kind of went out and interviewed about 25 world class experts all over the world on this kind of bigger picture framework of the next 30 years and I started looking at the data and the way I kind of do it with a big picture lens, long term lens. And I came up with a very different framework of what I think we're heading into, which is in fact, almost the opposite of this dystopian craziness. But I think we're moving into a lot of things which we're going to talk about today. But it's largely much more positive, in my opinion.

Yeah, no, and that was what was so. I think I found so invigorating about it, was that you had this really positive perspective about what's coming. And I definitely want to dive into that. That's going to be the meat of what we're trying to talk about. But first I wanted to kind of have you take us through your thinking for the long boom that you wrote. I think you wrote this article in 1997 and then you published a book in 2000 of the same title. And in that you really looked at, I think, from the 1980s and then through 2020 and kind of what was happening and like you're describing what really is driving change. So I would love to kind of get your. How you framed up your thinking there and kind of what you saw as the big drivers for the long boom that were, I guess, ending now or bookmarking before we go through the transformation, which we'll talk about next.

Totally. Right. Okay, so here's the deal. I was recruited to the very early Wired magazine. I'm not a founder of Wired, but in the early days of Wired, which was kind of the early to mid-90s, and people kind of lose track and kind of forget about that period. But literally people were just trying to, what is email and what is the World Wide Web? And, you know, there's literally about 20 in 1995, when I really started the project, the Longboom project, kind of similar, because, you know, even though it's published in 97, the Way magazine pieces, big cover stories work, you know, they usually take, you know, a good year, if not more. And so this was really a 1995 story that, you know, it started in through 96 and ultimately came to fruition in 1997. But the reason I'm kind of saying this is it's a good proxy to say 25 years ago we were looking around and you're looking, and people were frankly coming off a recession in the early 90s. People forget this. There's a lot of gloom and doom. And everyone was also looking at this goofball, you know, Internet thing. Where, you know, this company with the nutty name of Amazon was trying to sell books online. And you know, anyhow, there's just this whole crazy thing app. Anyhow, there's this situation where everyone was like, what? Even though there was, people were starting to talk about the potential of digital technologies and they were starting to talk about, hey, what's going to happen as we connect the world up in this, what I would call the first phase of globalization. People couldn't see it, they couldn't see it coming together, they couldn't see how it cross connected, how it reinforced itself. And at Wired though, we were immersed in that scene and we were also kind of plugged into all these entrepreneurs who were kind of giving shape to that future. And so we said, so I basically took the lead with another guy called Peter Schwartz, who was trained in kind of scenario planning and thinking long term. He was working at the time at a place called Global Business Network, world renowned scenario planner. And he and I, we essentially created this creation called the long boom. And what we really did is, you're right, we started with telling the story that everyone's familiar with starting in the 80s with the beginnings of the personal computer stuff. But we basically kept going through the 90s and then we just kept telling the story all the way to 2020. And what we did is we tried to explain how as more and more people were going to get online and these computers through Moore's Law was going to get more and more powerful and when they were going to start shrinking in size and pretty soon they're going to be mobile and pretty soon ways to connect with gonna be wireless and we just kind of walk through the probable trajectory of what was seemed to us as an inexorable development. This was gonna happen, maybe not totally inevitable, but it was inexorable. And so we saw that. And then the same thing with globalization. It was at the mid-90s, it was just kind of starting. But we said, you know what's gonna happen when you start cross connecting all these economies and when you start moving supply chains and when you start China starts developing and we start outsourcing jobs and things. Positives and negatives of that. But the positive of that is you're going to essentially reinforce these kind of, you're going to stimulate the economy, you're going to stimulate growth, you're going to start moving, essentially the economy is going to starting to move towards a boom. So we were predicting what would happen if you had a digital economy boom. What would that look in its Adulthood coming out of the infancy there. And then how would it get reinforced in a global context through globalization. And. And we basically told the story of the world from a future historian looking back on this period, was telling the story of the world to 2020. And here we are in 2020. And basically what we laid out largely was true. And we can get into that if you want to talk about that. Some things we got wrong, but largely we got it true. And by the way, since this is an investment crew, the Dow is at about 5,000 in 1995. And when our book came out, which was late 90s 99, actually, you're referencing the paperback, there was a crop of books we were kind of grouped with, and one was Dow. 36,000 was one of them, if you ever remember this, or even kind of reference this thing. And we were kind of grouped in that, and people just thought we were insane. I mean, we weren't particularly talking about the stock market. We were just talking about we're going to enter a global boom driven by these fundamentally new technologies. These goofball startups are going to be the most powerful companies in the planet by 2020. And this is just. You got to wrap your head around this, people. That's kind of what we were saying. And what do you know? Here we are 2020, and the Dow just cracked 30,000. And it's like, now everyone just shrugs it off, like, of course it's going to happen, but at the time, they thought we were literally insane. So, anyway, I'm just kind of putting this as, like, we pretty much nailed it on the fundamental trends like that. And then we had goofy things like, we thought literally we'd maybe get back to Mars for storytelling reasons and stuff. We threw stuff into the story, this scenario, this story from the future that went wrong, but that wasn't the fundamental story. The story we were trying to say is what I just laid out to you.

All right, well, that's incredible. And good job calling that out. I do remember Tao 36,000.

Oh, you do remember that?

Yes. The problem was. Yeah, well, I had a company that we started in 1995. We filed to go public in 1999. We waited, and then the window to go public closed. And so we saw the whole. I mean, I lived through the carnage of, like, oh, hey, we could be worth tens of millions of dollars or we could be worth nothing.

Exactly. I feel your pain. I was involved in a lot of that stuff, too. But here's the thing. Inexorably coming off the crash, there's the Web 2.0, the next crop of shops. I mean, anyhow, this big story didn't really get fundamentally disrupted by that crash, even though everyone was wringing their hands saying, oh my God, it's over anyhow. And this is the same is why. So just to kind of preface where we're going with this is same situation around 2020, I'm sitting there going, everyone's gloom and doom and doesn't. And but they're missing the forest of the trees because, my God, not only are we going to, I would argue, go into another tech boom, I think we're going to go into tech boom. That's tech boom squared. And it's going to be even more a bigger deal. And anyhow, there's a bunch of reasons for this and we can talk about that later, but the point is we're doing it again.

Yeah, no, it's so interesting. I mean, there's definitely like a parallel because so Dow 36,000 came, the market tanked. And so everyone was like, that's total bogacity. But then if you pull back a couple decades, you're like, oh, they're actually right. And so now what's funny is there's a group called Ark Investments, and they're like, hey, the future is going to be huge. It's going to be massive. All Tesla, they're total bulls. But everyone else, a lot of people are also like, this is a complete bubble. It wouldn't surprise me from an investor psychology perspective that we do see a correction. People dismiss that. But maybe they're right. And like you're saying, by the way, maybe you should go work for some hedge funds and just dump a lot of money in these theories because that's probably why you get very rich. Because that's what they like to do. It's like, let's go.

Well, we'll see. That's the secondary conversation we're going to have.

All right, well, this is great. So before we move on to kind of like the transformation, two questions about this. So one, did anything surprise you from after you wrote the long boom till now that things that have happened that you didn't anticipate one way or another?

Well, yes, and they come into a couple categories here. And again, I'm kind of thinking of your audience a little bit. People are thinking about the investment side is one of the things we thought at the time. In the mid-90s, we could see the climate pressure is already going to build and we could imagine that we were going to have to the Technologies around alternative energies was going to have to evolve quickly alongside that. And so we just went with that saying, in fact, at the time it was interesting. You're always trapped in the time when you're talking about we were totally bullish on hydrogen fuel cells at the time, which I don't know if given that you sound like you're a mid-90s guy, you're in that scene. The idea was that's possibly the way we'll go rather than the way we ended up going with batteries and electrical grid power, stuff like that. Anyhow, the point is we made some early thoughts of how that would go. But the thing about that, and then also another category of biotech, we also saw the beginnings of biotech, genetic understanding, although at that time mid-90s was very crude compared to today. We thought, oh gosh, biotech was going to move faster than it did. So there was a kind of a basic thing is not all technology is created equal and certain things you think could move faster than they did. And I think we were kind of essentially in our scenario, we were trying to think that we thought both those would move faster than they did. And they both didn't. And one of the reasons they didn't was essentially because of politics. And so there's a second way. So there's one thing of like sometimes things take longer than you think. So there's a whole way to talk about that if you want to go there. But the other way I think is important to this is politics matters. Politics can screw stuff up. So for example, in biotech, because of all the federal approvals and drug testing, and there's a bunch of things that put overlays in that that we hadn't fully thought through just how long that stuff takes in a more neutral. You just think of it, that's just what it takes to deal with human oriented stuff like that. The other one though, in terms of politics gets very. It's really interesting. So for example, think about the election in 2000, which was neck and neck between George Bush, the Texan oil guy, and Al Gore, the guy who later writes is kind of the champion of climate change, and that it came down to a few chads and Florida, whatever. And so you could imagine an alternative history, a credible alternative history of America. That would have been a very different period of time if you would have built off of that momentum of the 90s into a different way around clean energies that mattered. So politics kind of mattered there in a way. Other things, in a broader sense of politics, is who could have predicted that Middle east terrorists were going to kind of blow apart the World Trade center and the United States was going to go into two trillion dollar wars in different parts of the Middle East. I mean anyhow stuff like this happens now, this is inevitable. There's always going to be crazy wildcards that happen. But anyhow there is stuff that can knock these things off. And so anyhow there's some ways to think about more systematically about thinking about politics. I will say this is I took all these insights from what I learned in the past 25 year kind of run on this last thing of what worked, what didn't work and why it didn't work. Spent a lot of time on that. In fact the long now talk you're referring to, I literally dwelled on that a little bit more since that whole crowd is interested in future thinking maybe this crowd probably less interesting on that stuff. But anyhow I thought that through in order to readjust my lens going forward for the next 30 years and I think I course corrected for some of that stuff and that's maybe some of the stuff we can talk about.

Yeah, for sure we'll dive into that. And on the climate note, I think that maybe we're at a moment and inflection point in history since I think the climate there's obviously underlying drumbeat about hey, carbon levels are going through the roof and sea level rise. But you know, I mean, well we're here in California, right. So wildfire is like becoming a more frequent, much more intense problem. Like where I live in the wui, the wildland urban interface here, you know, I feel like, you know, our house could burn down in any fire season. Like basically I'm mentally prepared that this thing could be gone. Everything we own was gone. Which is very strange. Like that's not how I grew up. I'm not like for my kids, like I don't know, when I was a kid I wasn't thinking and we don't obviously communicate this to our kids. But it's like I wasn't thinking our house could be toast and like I might have to move somewhere else. Right, right. And go to a new community. But that, that's the reality. And I think also with what's we saw in Texas and tornadoes and hurricanes and flooding, you know, I think it's becoming a more real thing for more people in this country that hey, climate change could disrupt their lives materially. So and then now Biden's elected, so and he's making noise about, you know, hey, maybe we Go all in on green energy. And I think you're going to talk about that a little bit. But I could see us saying, hey, let's make those infrastructure investments, create jobs. You know, by the way, I threw solar on my roof, shout out to Tesla and that has been. And I have a couple batteries in it. So it's like a giant iPhone now. But it's pretty cool, right? All power could go out and we can keep doing it.

I have a similar system, but I said the storage batteries are awesome off the solar and I have actually Tesla car that actually. So I am now running all my electricity in my home off the sun and all the energy, all of my fuels, so called fuel for my cars off the sun. I'm literally spending nothing on electricity or fuel for now for wherever. It's such a no brainer that anyhow. So now the market takes over. This is exactly right. So we're at a point now that again, looking forward, this is going to start taking off in a big way, I think.

And one other comment I think that Elon Musk, you know, does a good job of. He wrote up this thing called the Master Plan 10, 15 years ago saying, hey, guess what? I want to build an electric car when they're going to start expensive and then get cheaper. And then I want to do solar and then I want to do batteries and then I want to build these little micro grids in people's houses. And the reality. And you have that I'm one, one electric car from getting that. And then it's like, yeah, drive around for free, free electricity, you know, and extrapolate that to the world. You're like, oh, we have free energy like that. Free energy feels a lot more real when it's running. There's actually free energy at your house. Like I sell my, I sell electricity back at the grid now because we overproduce it. But yeah, no, I mean he did a good job of doing what you described, which is thinking in 10, 20 year chunks. Right. What's possible. And it shows you how far it gets you because look what the guy's getting done now. Launching spaceships and stuff like that.

Totally. Well, that's okay. So maybe should we get to that? I mean, where we're at now, where do you want to go?

I want to dive into the transformation. So what do you think? You talked about some of these long term trends. So looking forward, is it the same trends or are there new things like what drives the transformation?

Okay, so here's the way to think about this one of the things we got right, or I got right in that long boom, the thing I just described to you, you can actually get pretty damn close to the core technological developments. The trajectory of those and the kind of general trajectory of those. You can kind of come pretty close to that. And you can also. And there are certain things around demographics particularly too, there are some inexorable things, like if someone's born 20 years ago, they're going to be 20 years old today. All of idiot. There's a bunch of things that you can actually map out long term, some of these things. And there's other things that are more fickle or more kind of, you know, who knows what will happen? And those, if you filter those off and you just get to those core things, what are they? And so if I look ahead at the next 30 years, there's essentially about a dozen what I would call inexorables. And the reason I call them inexorable, they're not totally inevitable. And they could be shaped and pushed back and slowed down a little bit, maybe nudge this way or that way. But in general, these are inexorably going to happen under almost any scenario. And if you start thinking those through, many of them are largely positive developments that we're underappreciated from the point of view of the first way to say, yes, there's technology developments, but it's not just the old technology developments, but it's not only. But there is an extension. So if you take just information technology, if you took the last boom, we just went through the long boom from 1980 to 2020, that 40 year run was really driven by digital technologies. And it's true, we got to this point now that it's pretty Damn Amazing that 60% of the world is online and we have these powerful computers and all that. The thing I think. But there is an extension of that boom. We're now heading into the next phase of this thing. And one way to think about it, there's three big developments you got to think about, or at least two. One is in the end of this decade, in the next decade we are going to connect up every single person on the planet with a few rounding errors. A few people will be missed. But in General we'll have 8 billion people on the planet who will be reached by high bandwidth. By today's standards, It'll be like 5G kind of around the world. This is a decade from now. And with all you talk about musk, another project is these low level satellites bringing Broadband to, to every place in the world. Right. So anyhow, and he's not the only one doing that at all. So it's just, it's inexorably going to happen that everybody in the planet's going to be connected in 10 years. Well, that's like, whoa, we've got 60% now, by the way, just to put it in perspective. In 2000 we had about a handful of, about, you know, a handful of Americans were basically online. Really, you know. Yeah. So the point is this thing is it's a world historical moment. We're going to connect up people like this never happened before. It's going to happen in the space of basically 30 years. That's amazing at some level, but it also opens up all these cross connection stuff. So that's one. The second thing that's happening is essentially we're entering the era of AI and essentially what you've now got is intelligent machines getting more and more intelligent. They're not, by the way, ever, I would say the computer scientists I talk to, they're not going to become smarter than us and our overlords and all that kind of stuff is just this kind of goofiness that happens to, you know, whatever the media does this or sci fi does this, at least in the this century, we're not going to be in that situation. So anyhow, the point being is. But we're going to have these incredibly powerful, you know, extension of our capabilities and this is going to go into advanced robotics and get more and more subtle. So we're entering this crazy moment here that essentially human capability is going to have this exponential increase in our ability to do shit. And it's going to happen to everybody all over the planet at the same time. So you start thinking, wow, that's a big deal. That isn't just like, oh, we got a new feature on our phone or something. So anyhow, that's a huge thing. I would argue the third inexorable about that is essentially these two things, among others, is going to lead to accelerated innovation. That's one of the others. I squeezed all these inexorables down to two words. So, you know, it's either universal connectivity, we're going to have ubiquitous AI, you're going to have accelerated innovation. Because basically innovation is cross connecting people from different backgrounds, different fields in terms of seeing how to solve problems differently. And that's what innovation is. And if you take everybody in the world who by the way, AI is going to enable simultaneous language translation seamlessly, so you essentially Will be able to with subtlety and nuance be able to communicate with anyone around the world them to understand what you're saying, immediately read all the stuff that's in Chinese or Farsi or Swahili, you know. Anyhow, this kind of cross fertilization of ideas and people is just world historical again. It's going to turn our Tower of Babel into this crazy, seamless, connected humanity. And anyhow, who knows what that's going to do. But I will say one thing is do not bet against the ingenuity of human beings and don't bet against the power of these tools because it's going to give us crazy capabilities. Now can it go wrong and can there be issues in privacy? And everyone's raises the issues. I get that. We had enough people focusing on that. I'm just trying to open yourselves up to like think what's going to happen when that happens. Because it's going to happen this decade now. What's crazy about this thing is it's not just infotech. We kind of know that story because we've been playing in it right alongside it. We've got a world historical boom happening in biotech. We have now for the first time really mastered genetic understanding. 20 years ago. 20, just 20 years ago in 2000, we had not yet cracked the first human genome and it cost $2 billion to figure that out. And now you can get anyone can get their genome, their entire genome crack for about a thousand bucks. It's going to get to nothing or about 100 bucks or something in this decade. And everybody. And it's not just humans. We're taking a virus that comes the pandemic is all like the virus comes in, we've got a genetically coded in a second and we're just like the mutations, we got it in the next day. We can figure that out. Anyhow, the point is the amount of our genetic understanding is just insane. And then now we're on the verge. We also with crispr that can genetically engineer things so we can now engineer life, living things, which by the way is everything. You know, most people's homes are built with wood. That's genetic engineering. Their food is living, you know, their clothes is cotton. That's living. That affects all these materials and all these kind of industries essentially that are previously like hey, let's just grow them. It's like, well now we can actually engineer them anyhow. So there's a whole thing there. So I mean again we just go all program on that one. And on top of it and this is the crowning achievement we're going to essentially we got the energy, clean energy technology revolution that is essentially in the space of about 30 years is going to completely replace the entire carbon energy infrastructure of the planet is going to be transitioned to a clean energy transit infrastructure. The planet I mean it's not won't be totally complete in 30 years, but it's largely going to happen in the next 30 years and they'll be petered out till whenever something decades later a little bit as it peters out. But the point is the amount of change and it's going to happen and retrofitting everything and all our energy systems. You talk about your house that's going to happen times 8 billion or I mean 8 billion. But yeah, some 3 billion homes are going to become like that. The point is, I'm just kind of talking excitedly like you got a triple whammied technology boom. Not just the 80s, 90s or the 90s digital technology boom. You got a triple whammy thing on a world scale because it's all going to happen at a global scale. It's crazy. If you can't make money in that environment, you got to better go back to start over or something because it's like the opportunities are going to be nuts and could shit happen and could be things slow down. Absolutely. But the general context of this is kind of mind blowing at some level when you really grok what's starting to roll out here.

Yeah, no, I hear you. I actually heard Greg Ventner, the guy who sequenced the genome talk and he was saying, hey, describing exactly what you said, which is like when we first did this, it was a few hundred million dollars to sequence a genome and then it got down. Now you're saying it's 1,000. He said it's going to go to 2 cents, the same cost as flushing your toilet. And as soon as it's that this is what he said up on stage and he says when it's that cheap, guess what you're going to do. You're going to, we're all going to be sequencing our genome a couple times a day or every day like with our Apple watches or whatever. And it's going to be like, hey, you know, okay, looks like you don't have cancer today or whatever. You know, it's like we're scanning you. So I think that, you know, definitely this idea of an abundant future where unlimited energy, that's free, everybody's connected AI solving all kinds of problems. I mean it sounds like utopia. And some. But I also wonder about other things like, okay, the idea that we might live a lot if we don't, you know, get in car accidents, like, we might live a lot longer. And what does that look like? I mean, hopefully healthier lives. I mean, maybe we can extend our health span, you know, but there's going to be these second order effects or there's not enough work to do. I mean, I think we're already seeing that. There's, there's like, look what happened with COVID It's like, okay, slam the brakes on, you know, the economy, a huge chunk of the service economy is like, isn't working. But a huge chunk of the economy is plowing ahead at 90 miles an hour, you know, working all the time. But we're able to kind of markets up, everything's up. We're able to kind of support a big group of people that aren't working for now at least. I mean, I know we have to get everyone back to work, but I hear you. It's like when I listen to you, it's like, okay, there's going to be an economic boom. The technology is going to drive. I mean, if history, the last 40 years are any indication, we just went through a huge acceleration and improvement in quality of life for most people and also lowering of poverty worldwide. Those trends are accelerating. Right. So wealth creation should increase. And at the same time, we are probably going to see more taxes because we've got a more progressive, you know, cohort of folks generation, the Gen Z millennials. They're going to be like, okay, listen, we want better quality of life, we want more equity, we want wealth spread around more and stuff spent on infrastructure. So we'll see both of those things. But hopefully we can afford it because the economy is cranking.

Yeah. And again, I don't know, the net worth of the people might listen to this, but there's plenty to go around, folks. I mean, like, give me a break. It's like there's, if you, you know, spread it around, it's for the good of everybody and there's plenty. You're going to live fine at higher tax rates individually or corporate tax rates or any of these things that get rebalanced even just back to their historical norms. It's like, you know, there's always going to be a way to do this. And like I said, there's going to be so many ways to make money. And coming up here, it's like, don't focus on, oh my God, my tax rate's going to go up 3% or something. It's like just, you know, think about, oh, my tax or my stock portfolio is going to go up 20% or something. There's a bunch of ways to think about it. So that is again, that's old thinking to be freaking out about that. That was the last era's freak out and fight. Just get over it because we're in a different thing. And honestly, the golden age of American capitalism was the post war boom. It even dwarfed what we've been through the last 40 years. It was actually better. We had the level of growth rates and that was essentially, I mean, honestly at the very top. The tax rates in the 50s and stuff on multimillionaires were like 90% or something. I mean, people get around it in various ways. But the point is the nominal tax rates were phenomenally higher than what they are now. And you know what? People were fine. They were still rich people, they still had great, they still had multiple homes and I mean, how many damn things can you get? And so anyhow, the point is just reframe the thinking around this and I think it'll be a lot better also. The other thing is if you don't do this, and this is where we got to essentially in the last decade is the pitchforks are coming. I mean, it's getting to be crazier and crazier. The solutions people are talking about and historically we watch what happens if you don't bend with that because literally the pitchforks do come and they eventually does get to be really a big problem. So, you know, roll with the punches here and kind of go with the flow. And I think it's a much better practical plan politically, in my opinion.

Well, yeah, it's important to study history. Right. If you, when you get too much wealth inequality, you get revolutions, French Revolution, all these different revolutions, you know, it will happen.

Yeah, yeah, it's all over the place. Yeah. Anyhow, totally on point with that one thing you mentioned that I would just. Maybe you're going to go there. But I would say the other thing that's just amazing about what this is is you made vague reference to it, but globally, we've been focusing a little bit on the US here, but just putting it in context because I didn't really draw on this up till now. But for example, in that 40 year period from 80 to 2020, China went from a middling country, which I think they had about $1 trillion economy in 95, 25 years ago, to essentially about a $15 trillion company $15 trillion GDP now which is the second biggest superpower in the world next to the US about 20 trillion. And so that happened in the space of 25 years. But here's what they did also Is they pulled 800 million people, 800 million people out of essentially dire poverty, which is about a buck 50 to 2 bucks a day. They were living on into the city, into these cities, into working class or what is in a global sense, global middle class kind of lifestyles, which is not American middle class per se, but it's, you know, they had a refrigerator and they had a scooter, electric scooter and they had, you know, that kind of level stuff and a little security so they could weather, you know, whatever that happened to 800 million people. And globally it's happened to about 2 billion people. So there is a kind of larger human story that's this thing which is a good story that is like now we need about 2 to 3 more million people to be sorry, 2 to 3 more billion people to do that. But we're interestingly on track to do that. And anyhow, this whole thing can happen. And the other thing that's about it is we're all on the same planet. So if we don't do that, we're going to essentially blow the lid off the climate because those people have to come off the land. They're burning the trees, they're burning the forest just to survive and all this kind of stuff. They need them to get in much more efficiently into cities. You need them to get into a more productive kind of economy. You need them to. Anyhow, all the stuff we know there's this very tried and true kind of method that the America and the west has been through developed world and it's now, China's been through it as the first or one of the biggies to go through that in terms of the developing world. And now we've got others like that, but we're on it and we know how to do that and we can do that in the next 30 years too. So anyhow, this is an exciting thing, not just domestically, but globally. And again, if you're talking to a divestment crew, this boom is not going all over the place just like the last one was. I mean people forget. But remember in the 2000s when we were kind of had the dot com crash and everyone was kind of ringing their hands in America. China was on fire, Turkey was on fire, Brazil was on fire, the price of oil was going to about $150 a barrel. Because everyone wanted oil because the global economy was on. It was blooming up until the 2008 crash. Right. And so the point is these things don't. They're global because we're so connected. And so a lot of this is going to go global and that's a good thing because we need it to be there. Anyhow. It's a lot of trends to go.

It's great context. I mean I'm looking at a chart of the S&P 500. We'll post this up here. But in 1980 it was roughly 130 and now it's about 3800. So a little bit more. So that's 30 times in 40 years. And you can see it's like generally up. And then there's the bump around 2000 came down. Then there's another bump around 2008 where it comes down drawdown, I should say. And then from 2008 it's like freaking straight, like a freight train going straight up. I mean there was the COVID downturn which then came back just as fast. Yeah, but yeah, I mean if you look forward in time, if these trends continue, we're going to see some massive wealth creation. And back to these ARC guys, we'll see how present they are. But one thing they're talking about is like, hey, AI and deep learning is going to create $30 trillion of value on top of the Internet. And they made an interesting analogy. They were like, hey, pre Internet, the Internet, it was tiny on top of it. And then Internet became much bigger than it and just dwarfed it, kind of like. And then they think AI and deep learning is going to dwarf what we've done with the Internet so far. Essentially saying what you're saying, but $30 trillion is one and a half times the U.S. economy today. And that's just one thing.

Exactly. And there's about, at least my understanding is about 100 trillion in sloshing around in market and capital investment capital around the world. You might know that better than me, but that's the other thing people say is well, can we pull this climate transition off and scale up the clean energy infrastructure fast enough? And it's like if you turn the supertanker of global finance and liquid capital towards these increasingly obvious growth areas, it doesn't need to be government. In fact, it shouldn't be government doing all this. It should be government setting some high standards, some good directions, some consistent policies, and, and then private capital moving in these directions to fuel the build out. And the build out should Just take off. And so, anyhow, there's a way to see my project. The Transformation was essentially a quest, you could say, 18 months ago, where I said, I'm just going to go out and interview some of the most amazing people in the world. Look at these numbers, the way I've been able to do my whole life and put this together in, yes, a talk and different now podcasts like this. The other thing, though, I will say about this series, which we haven't really talked about, is before the talk, I actually wrote a series of articles in Medium. There's half a dozen of them. And one of the ways I did this was to tell the comprehensiveness of this story the way you and I are kind of scooting from, oh, it's tech, oh, it's demographics, oh, it's politics, oh, it's global, oh, it's China. There's a million ways to tell a story. So what I decided to do, and it's kind of essentially a small book. You could almost say these six stories add up to about 25,000 words in medium, which open to anyone, by the way. Just search for the Transformation series in Medium. My name is the guy there. Anyhow, the point is, what I did is I told the story of our era from 2020 to 2050, the next 30 years. I told that story from the lens of a person in 2100, which is 80 years from now. And the reason I told the story like that is that is the distance that if we told the story of what came out of the Great Depression of World War II, we're also 80 years away from that. And you can tell that story with very clarity. You know, oh, Hitler was a bad guy. This happened. You know, we had to go to war. It took four years. Oh, you know, we came out of that and we kind of did all these programs to kind of build the infrastructure. Anyhow, you know the story now so we can tell it with clarity. And so I was just having this guy in 2100 telling the story. How did we solve climate change? How did we evolve this, Deal with this income inequality and evolve capitalism? How did we actually deal with political polarization in the West? Anyhow, I kind of lay that thing out, and so it's a comprehensive story. And here's the thing, though, which I think makes it more real for people, is that person telling the story is actually a member of Gen Z. This is a kid who might be your kids. Whoever's listening to this thing was born in 2000, came of age, like out of college in 2020 in this pandemic, and then spent the next 80 years, in his case, living to age 100, which, by the way, in 2100, age 100 is going to be like 65 or 70 now, because we'll still be a lot of people. Vital. You won't be losing anyhow. We'll have so much medical advancements, so many genetic understandings, so much biotechnology treatment, so much understanding of cell deterioration, so much neuroscience understanding, dementia, all this stuff. We're going to be in a lot better shape as we get old. There's some limits to how much we can live. But let's just say those kids, these kids are going to live to the end of the century. They're going to be through this whole thing. And so this kid is at age 100, looking back with clarity and crisp, remembering everything and saying, here's how we did it from 2020 to 2050. And it tells that story, laying out all these pieces that we've been talking about more directly and today. And so it's a kind of cool way to do this, but it makes you think that this is not some crazy abstraction, is like the kids today, your kids, if you're listening to this and you got kids, or maybe they're already investing as a Gen Z, but this is not an abstract thing. It's like we're either going to solve climate change and solve these problems, or we're totally screwed. You aren't going to make it to 2100. So I'm assuming we're going to make it to 2100, and that means you're going to be able to tell us a positive story of how we did it. And that's what I did with this series. And so, so it's quite, you know, anyhow, it's been very popular and people are really getting into it, and this is kind of the basis of what we're doing here.

Well, I love that perspective because you're right. I mean, sitting here today in 2021 and thinking back to if I was alive in World War II or something, or the Great Depression, I don't think people then couldn't imagine what it's like today. Right. They just would have a very hard time. And I think if we put that lens on and say that's accelerating, I don't think we can really imagine. We can start to imagine, but the innovations are coming faster and more furiously. It's like the iPhone was invented in 2007. It's like, okay, 14 years. I mean, how Much has the world changed, right? It's just ridiculous, right?

Well, here's a good. You totally are right about this. But here's a little thought experiment and I say this. We're damn lucky that this global pandemic hit in 2020, because if it would have just happened literally just 20 years ago, 20 years ago in 2000, it wouldn't have been that much different than the pandemic global pandemic that hit in 1918. And I'll tell you why. Because in 2000, first of all, you would have had, like I say, maybe, I don't know, about 50 million Americans online. You would had zero Chinese online. You wouldn't have anyh the whole world, nobody in the Middle east anyhow. Nobody would have been online, right? Except for these kind of affluent Americans kind of thing. And so here we are 20 years later and the pandemic hits and boom. Everybody jumps onto Zoom meetings. It kind of keeps working. Everybody, kids go to school over the zoom things, right? It's like everybody had these powerful computers and we all have these connections. They're all high bandwidth. We could actually do. It's like we couldn't have done any of that in 2000. Like none of it is zero there was any of it. You know, it would have been some kind of creaky motive that might have gotten a few of us connected to the server, maybe. Anyhow, the point is just think of that, that's 20 years. That's one category. Second category is that we already talked about it, but just refresh our memory is we wouldn't have been even cracked the first human genome for a billion bucks. We would let alone been able to kind of watch the daily mutation of the genome of the virus. So we would have been totally screwed there. We wouldn't have known what they do and we would have been so far away from these pandemic. These vaccines are all essentially a breakthrough that's been working on for the last 20 years. We didn't even know how this would could have happened even in 20, 30 point is just 20 years that would have done. And the third thing is in 1980, it would sorry in 2000 with the crash of oil and carbon energies that happened around this pandemic, we'd be in a position that there'd be no alternative coming off this crash to really build on this clean energy infrastructure because solar was way too expensive just 20 years ago. It hadn't gone down that price curve that it was grinding down for the last 20 years, actually, it's been grinding down for 40 years anyhow. It wouldn't have done that. We wouldn't have been at the place. And so we wouldn't be in a position where we can actually rebuild a whole different infrastructure and really have a shot at doing climate change. So we're lucky. But that's only 20 years have passed that have given us those advantages. So you think ahead and you go, well, let's see, in 20 more years, what are we going to be able to do in 20, 40, 20 more years? In 20 60, in 20 more years. I mean, it's a really makes you think at some level because people don't really groke how fast technology changes and how big a difference it can make in all of our lives. And that's the way to think.

Right. In your talk, you referenced Amara's Law from Stanford Professor Roy Amara. If I'm quoting correctly, we overestimate the impact of technology in the short term and underestimate it sounds like wildly in the long term.

Yeah, totally. Right. In Silicon Valley kind of tech circles, that's a known. And it's not that well known quote, but for people outside that scene, yeah, that's a good thing to contemplate. And it's very true. Very true.

Okay, well, I'd love to dive into a couple user questions. One is from Theresa Young. So she wanted to know, I'd love to hear more about why he's optimistic about the environment. That's her biggest area of concern for the future. You know, what trends are you seeing that to make you feel optimistic? And also, you know, also, you know, elaborate maybe on electric cars and you know, what you're seeing with solar and fossil fuels and so forth. Maybe carbon recapture too. I don't know. There's some stuff happening there.

Yeah, well, yeah, good question. That is essentially the main motivator. I mean, that is the problem that has flummoxed and is depressed more people than any of them is that question of climate, mounting climate change. How can we ever turn what I call turn the corner of it? We're probably never going to get back to where we were 30 years ago kind of feeling. And so we're going to have to mitigate the worst excesses of what we've been worried. We're worrying about a lot of different bad scenarios. So the question of solving climate change is never going to be completely solved. And hey, we're back to where it was in 1900 or something. Probably it's not out of the question long term, but yeah, now in this century, we're going to have to deal with containing it as much as possible. I think we can do that. And then evolving our essentially our society to be more adaptable, resilient and kind of deal with it, but still be able to live thriving lives that it's all good. That's my shorthand. When I say solving climate change. It's kind of the way to think of it. There are many things that give me hope on this level and not just goofy hope. We mentioned some of them. The technology is here. We talked about solar. So I mean if you look at the numbers and again this talk I did, I did a ton of graphics infographics that show this very inexorably we have hit the price points now in the next few years. Well right now solar is cheaper than in many energy other alternate carbon energies across many places. Certainly in the sunny places like California and Texas stuff. Anyhow, there's all these things are now at the point where it is now we've turned the corner on. They're cheaper, they're better, they're more scalable and they're continuing to go down in price. And this is, is something that is the tech world has learned a long time ago is once you crack a scalable technology like that that keeps coming down in price, it's boom. They just go nuts and there's nothing to stop it ahead of it. And that's not just solar. There's a bunch of things same thing if you take electric cars. It's a similar thing which again if you take the price of batteries they've been driving down just like the price of solar panels have been driving down. They have now hit the point where they are as cheap and in the next few years will be cheaper than internal combustion engines. And it's just going to continue in a way that and for people who haven't had don't have electric cars are just better all the way around. There's no maintenance. There's literally no moving parts. There's no maintenance. They're safer because the batteries keep you from crunching the thing down. I mean it's like it's just a complete and utter no brainer to go electric. And so and of course that's what's happening. You know, Elon Musk saw it earlier, you know, people saw it earlier but now every single car company in the world is now in this transformation that's we're doing it so that's positive anyhow, you can just go down the whole list. So there's the technologies are there I told you about. The politics is changing in a fundamental way. We're seeing how, you know, this is global capital starting to get it and move the money differently anyhow. There's a lot of things coming together. It takes, it's a longer answer for you. But I'm saying we really have to reframe. It's not this completely dystopian, no win solution that's just innervating and everybody debilitating. And if we go there, then we might not pull this off. But it's much more hopeful than you think. And if you really look at the numbers, it's actually really heartening. And anyhow, you need a more comprehensive. It's going to have to get out there more. But we're turning the corner on this thing.

Yeah, I mean, I see it happening. I mean, you know, solar on my roof, batteries and then when I drive around California, big giant windmills and solar farms and you know, solar panels on schools, on parking lots and stuff like that. It, you know, it's, it's definitely proliferating. So that's, I'm a believer in that.

Yeah, yeah.

So we have another question, Sean Bailey, you know, what are your thoughts on technologies that might dramatically enhance longevity and quality of life? And do you see the percentage of people who live to be over 100 increasing dramatically or just staying on the current trend?

Well, I made some reference to that earlier in the podcast about Gen zers living to 100 and going beyond that, frankly. And I gave you the reasons. I mean, we're just entering the kind of the biotech era, you could say, or something. And so one way to think of it again from an investment point of view is biotech is kind of where infotech was in the 90s. It's kind of, it's not well understood outside of the circles of who knows. But it is totally ready for prime time and it's ready to scale and it's got, you know, for just, I mean you can take any category, you know, cell based meat or something, you know, is like, which is essentially creating meat without, by taking kind of the stem cells of animals, not killing them by the way, and just growing that same thing in bat feeding it with it. It's so much more efficient, it's so much more environmentally friendly. It's actually getting to the point where there's real products, the price points coming down, I mean the whole kind of stuff anyhow, you just go to any of these things. There's a million, they're all over the place now. And so Materials you're going to see basically materials are going to replace plastic. So you know, the scourge of plastic that everyone's wringing their hands, it's like polluting everything and screwing the planet up and all the damn oceans with them. You could actually re engineer biological materials that essentially would essentially biodegrade after being exposed for two weeks to salt water in oceans and they'd be gone. Or you could basically see, you know, if it's exposed to UV light for, you know, more than three weeks or something, it'll go. Anyhow, there's a bunch of ways you could play this thing that we could just completely solve that anyhow. Point is they're all over the place. And yeah, those are more material things, but from human health it's just going to go the same way too. All this stuff's going on with human health. We're going to really redesign how health care goes. So yes, these things are going to go. There is one thing that people in the long term future think about is there is a kind of a limit. It's a kind of a technical limit that we think it's not clear how humans can get beyond about 120 years. And it has. Which is a whole technical way to describe that. So yeah, the term. Exactly. Okay. If we want to go into it. Yeah, there's a kind of a. There is some fundamental limits and so it's not like, or I'm, I'm in a group that's. I don't think it's going to relive to a thousand years or something that's not going to happen. But, or at least in again in the next century. But anyhow it's going to be. But the thing to think about it is not super long, maybe up to 220, but also pretty vigorous and active lives till about 100. And then, and then, you know, and then, then you'll slow down in different ways. But you know, think about that. It's like, you know, that's extending life. We extended life. Essentially life expectancy of Americans is this, in the 20th century went about 40 years, expanded by 40 years to about now it's about 80 year olds kind of is the average age and it's not crazy to think we could expand them maybe another 20. You know, the average lifespan will be 100. Yeah, there'll be. People go over that to. It'll be, you know, the person interviewed on the show will be, you know, 120 or something, but it won't be 100. 100 will be like, okay, yeah, you managed 100 awesome. Everyone did. Or most many people did well.

And then so, you know, for our users it's like, hey, the traditional trajectory of life is okay, you're kind of educated and kind of growing up from 0 to 25. You work from 25 till 65 and then you live another 10, 20 years and then you're done. But you know, there are also people trying to retire earlier, you know, so there's people that are trying to retire 45, 50, but if you're living another 30 or 50 years, you know, but only working 20 something years, the calculus changes. But I mean, if the economy's cranking and the market pays for it, maybe it does work out well.

Here's what I would say beware of is first of all people who are already old now. And I would just kind of say boomers and older, the damage has been done or something is like a lot of this stuff is essentially going to be essentially. That's why I use the Gen Z. A Gen Z who's coming at the age of 20 now and will spend their life, you know, which is they're super healthy and nothing's really happened to them yet. And you know, whatever, those people will be in this new medical, genetic, you know, biotech era. And so they'll hit that hundred. But I don't think it's going to do a lot of good or much good for the 70 year old boomer right now. So anyhow, a lot of the demographics are going to play out kind of on and the other thing I would say about this to you since you're, you know, I don't think it's going to be that everyone's going to sit around for 50 years doing retirement. I think it's going to be we're going to restructure what, what the work life is. It's going to go longer, it's going to be more knowledge work, advanced robotics, A bunch of stuff is we're not going to be flipping burgers and shit, but we will, you know, people will do stuff, but it'll be meaningful, it'll be filling, it'll be paid, but it might only be 20 yards a week or something and whatever, and you'll do it till you're 80 or something or, you know, who knows, I don't know, there'll be some changes.

I totally agree with that. I mean that's kind of our vision right now is like, hey, we see a lot of people in our community. They're, they're super intelligent, they've got great experience and they're like, well now I'm financially independent so I don't need to work. But they're also like, well, I don't want to just sit around, you know, whatever playing golf or something all day long. They're trying to find meaningful things to do, but they want to control their schedules, you know, so do work that they like when they want it, where they want and when they want. So I think that's definitely kind of, kind of how we see the future. And so let's, but let's, let's give a shout out to Gen Z. So even though Gen Z, you think you're getting screwed because all the wealth is with the 50 year olds, those guys are actually still going to not benefit from all these technologies and boom, that you're going to benefit from. So you will get paid back.

Well, if you really want a boost, if you're Gen Z, read my story because you'll have saved the world. I mean, honestly, the way I frame it from this guy in 2100 is it's really going to be the millennials and Generation Z that are going to, to pull this off for us. It's not going to be led by boomers, it's not going to be led by Gen Xers even, but it's going to be essentially the story of the century is going to be driven by those two big generations. And so you'll have a lot to be, you'll be responsible for this if we, if in a good way that you'll have pull it off and if, if we don't pull it off, lay the blame on the boomers and the Gen Xers who have got us in his mess. But anyhow, I'm being a little facetious, but I'm just saying there's some truth to that actually.

All right, this is awesome. Okay, well, so just before I wrap up, you know, for you personally, like, are you going to take this, these Medium articles and turn them into a book or what? You know, what do you, what are you spending your time on the next few years?

It's possible, in fact I'd be approached, but I've written a couple books as you mentioned, when I've written a couple and I'm due for another one and this would be a good one. I'm doing two things right now if you want to kind of follow what I'm doing. I'm basically, I'm now going to start a new conversation series. Think of it as a podcast or Something with the Long Now Foundation. It's the group that I actually did this talk with on the transformation, but it's essentially on a monthly series. I'm going to be interviewing some of to my mind the most remarkable people on the planet about the long term future of this century. We're just developing it now but committed thing we're going to do. It'll probably launch within a couple of months and you can get that through the Long now, which is a nonprofit looking ahead, trying to foster long term thinking. And I'll be doing that as that. And then I'm also, right now I do a lot of public speaking and so if you're interested in that you can go to my website peterliden.com and through that to my agents and stuff. And I'm doing a lot of speaking around this issue and I'm doing a lot of advising of kind of senior execs. I do a lot of spend time with them. I'm doing a big project now with, with I'm a senior fellow for strategic foresight at Autodesk, the kind of technology company that is essentially creates the software for all architects or many most architects for construction firms, for manufacturing folks and even for Hollywood movies and stuff trying to how to make three dimensional buildings and understand how that all works as well as Star Trek worlds that don't exist but they're three dimensional. Anyhow, I'm doing some help with them thinking about the next five to 15 years. So I spend a lot of time with kind of companies like them trying to get them to think more strategically about the future. In their case, I mean I think they could play a piece in this reinvention of the planet around retrofitting and redesigning everything for sustainable everything. And so I'm kind of doing, going for me I'm a more of a mission guy at some level. So I've got to try to see what could I do to help people think and act, think long term and act strategically for the good of all for the long term. And that's kind of where I'm at in my, my life. And so that's my plan.

Well, I, I appreciate hearing that. I mean one of the things we want to do is do well. We're doing online events that are live but if in person comes back, you know, maybe do in person event, it'd be great to come have you come over and, and speak.

Well, happy to, I'm happy to do it. Happy to do it. So let's, let's stay connected on that.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we think is going to happen is like I see the human capital of people over 50 or who are retiring as the next dark fiber. It's all this human capital that's kind of can be unlocked and leveraged and used to educate people. Or you've got these 4 billion people coming online. Hey, put these folks to work teaching them new things or kind of bringing other ideas to them. All right, so with that, I'm going to wrap it up. So thanks Peter for being on our show. Thanks Donald Robeson for being our sound engineer. Thanks for listening the folks out there. Hopefully you found this useful. If you've made it this far, I encourage you to check out Peter's work at PeterLaden.com, we'll link to that, the long now, his talks and the Medium articles when we post this up. You can also come to our Facebook group or follow us on Twitter. And finally check out our tools@newretirement.com so you can build a financially confident future. And also any reviews are welcome. So with that, thanks and have a great day. Hi DAV with New Retirement here and I just wanted to thank you for watching a little bit about us. We at New Retirement are disrupting the financial services industry by offering independent, affordable planning for all. One of the ways that we're able to do this that I'll share with you today is the fact that we are paid by our users. By offering our Software Planner plus at a low transparent flat fee, we are able to keep the lights on and continue to improve in a way that is aligned with you. Unfortunately, we live in a world where there is no free lunch and free products turn you into the product by selling your data to marketers, pitching fee laden products you don't need, or trying to manage your money for a percentage of assets under management. And so I urge you try Planner plus today under a two week free trial and see why Millions use New Retirement to make the most of both their money and time.