The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Our Fourth Age: A village elder’s story for young Homines sapientes about surviving their future history by Mr Terry Vernon Thiele

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Our Fourth Age: A village elder's story for young Homines sapientes about surviving their future history by Mr Terry Vernon Thiele WHY THIS BOOK? Welcome to our Fourth Age. Our species already has ...survived three. For millennia we hunted. After the ice, we farmed. For the last eight generations, we manufactured. Our Fourth Age is upon us. We are at teetering on the brink of a technological meta-revolution the likes of which we can scarcely imagine, driven by nanotechnology, synthetic biology, 3D printing, automation, instantaneous-always-on-global communication, artificial intelligence, and cheap ubiquitous off-grid energy, to name just a few of the disruptors. It will redefine everything that we know and do … and may take our jobs. At the same time, we are undergoing societal upheavals on a scale never before seen. For the first time, most of us now live in cities. For the first time, the old outnumber the young. Within our children’s lifetimes, global population will peak and then start to decline. Half of all country populations are already declining. And the decline won’t stop.... Instinctively we fear the unknown . . . fear chaos. We formed groups that created cultural and societal norms to protect us from that primeval chaos. But all of those norms wither in the blast of the technological and societal changes that are accelerating us into a future our imaginations cannot grasp. For 7,000 generations, since anatomically “modern” humans emerged 200,000 years ago, children could look to their parents and grandparents for life lessons in how to confront the chaos. No more. The yesterday experiences of parents and grandparents will be of little help to today’s children in surviving tomorrow’s world. Our children have no cultural maps, no societal talismans, to guide them. Which leaves them with only their instincts to confront the chaos. Those instincts were crafted to enable us to survive in a world that we left millennia ago. That long-forgotten world hardwired us to overreact violently when we are frightened. Chaos is frightening. And chaos is about to engulf us. Welcome to our Fourth Age. Do we have the innate capacity to survive what is about to happen to us? This book explores that question for the sake of my grandchildren.

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Starting point is 00:01:32 We have another amazing gentleman on the show. He's a brilliant mind who's going to expand your mind so much you may need to order an expanded cranium on Amazon. You can actually get that. There's an aisle for it. He's the author of the news book to come out October 2nd, 2021. Our Fourth Age, a village elder's story for young homines sabientes after surviving their future history. We'll get talking about what that title means and everything else. Mr. Terry Vernon Thiel is on the show with us today.
Starting point is 00:02:05 He's going to be talking to us about his book. He has been for over 40 years experienced helping government officials, corporate officers, and graduate students think about the future. He served in the U.S. Treasury, CIA, DIA, and the Executive Office of the President, and has worked for GE, AB Electrolux, and Berkshire Hathaway's Lubrizol Corporation. Terry has taught strategy innovation at several universities and business schools. He's received his BA Magnum Cum Laude in the history for Princeton and Jurisprud Doctorate from NYU School of Law. If I can learn to pronounce things this morning, that would be great. He is a graduate of the National War College and has authored a book
Starting point is 00:02:52 examining how we got to where we are and what it might mean for the future survivability of our species. His current book is out now. Welcome to the show, Terry. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on the show and having us with you on your brilliant books interview. Give us your.com so people can find you on those interwebages in the sky. Well, frankly, the easiest way to find me is on LinkedIn. There you go. Do you want to give that.com? Do you know the.com off the top of your head? T-V-T-H-I-E-L-E at LinkedIn.com.
Starting point is 00:03:30 There you go. So what motivated you to want to write this book? Is this your first book, Terry? It is, and it was about 40 years in the oven. There you go. I spent the better part of 40 years trying to get people to think about the oven. There you go. Uh, I, I spent the better part of 40 years, uh, trying to get people to think about the future.
Starting point is 00:03:49 And, uh, throughout that time, there were some themes and trends that seemed to appear. And, uh, I finally got around, uh,
Starting point is 00:04:00 to putting finger to keyboard and, uh, uh, wrote it all down. Writing it was an educational process in and of itself. And I'll get back to that later about how the publishing process today is an example of some of the changes we're witnessing. There you go. There you go. There you go.
Starting point is 00:04:25 So why did you title the book Our Fourth Age? And then we'll need to get into what is a homines sapientes? Most people would say homo sapiens and think that that's plural as the Latin name for the species. When I sent the book out for comment to a number of academics, one of them, a classics professor, a brilliant gentleman, immediately came back to me and said, your Latin's wrong. And it turns out that the plural for Homo sapiens is homines sapientes. The reason I stuck it in the title, I got the footnote to it in the prologue,
Starting point is 00:05:14 is a classic demonstration of how we think we know something when we actually doubt. In some respects, I think that's the story of our current state of affairs as a species. We think we know lots of things that we actually doubt. Yeah, the bit of the Dunning-Kruger sort of effect. Yes, yes, very much so, very much so. Yeah, it's amazing to me how many people live in these bubbles of social media and news. They just end up being, oh, what's the term that they use? Confirmation bias. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:05:57 It just supports whatever sort of thing you believe, whether it's sane or completely insane or completely off. Well, and again, there's interesting context for what you're saying. I'm going to back out and give you sort of the broad spread of how the book approaches our history
Starting point is 00:06:20 as a species. As the title suggests, I would suggest that we are entering our fourth age. Now, the first age, I'd argue, is go back 200,000 years, thereabouts.
Starting point is 00:06:36 And when we first became anatomically modern, and we were hunter-gatherers on the savannah. Roll the clock forward to, let's say, 12,000 B.C. And at that juncture, we evolved into farmers and herders. That's our second age.
Starting point is 00:07:02 Isn't that called the pre-McDonald's age? The pre-McDonald's age? The pre-McDonald's age? I think that's the scientific term for it. Go forward again to, I'll pick a date, 1785. Why that date? Well, that's about the time that steam engines became commercially available and were reliable. And that jump in energy production
Starting point is 00:07:26 powered us into the third age of mass production where we made things. We were manufacturers. That's the Big Mac age then, yeah. The Big Mac. Quarter pounder age, I think, fries. And I picked 2020 with COVID as sort of the jump off for what I'll call the fourth age.
Starting point is 00:07:47 That's interesting. And I'm characterizing the fourth age, the justification for it is based upon what I would argue are dramatic, societal, and technological changes, the like of which our species has never before experienced. Well, that was definitely something that was a huge change. And how many, just for conversation's sake, do we have more ages after the fourth age? Yes, actually, I'm working on the fifth age, assuming we survived the fourth.
Starting point is 00:08:25 Yeah, that's what I'm wondering about. But we'll get to that in a little bit. All right. We'll stick with one age at a time. Let's talk a bit about the fourth age. We have enough trouble. What societal changes are we talking about? I would argue that for what the data tells us is that for the first time ever, more people live in cities than in the country. For the first time ever.
Starting point is 00:08:55 When you look at the demographics of the world, everybody's concerned about overpopulation. Well, if you look at the data, half of the countries of the world are not reproducing themselves. Japan, Korea, Eastern Europe are forecast to be losing 40%,
Starting point is 00:09:17 40% of their population. China just crossed that threshold too. China has reached its peak population and it is getting older and smaller. Yeah. Interestingly enough, when you speak about India and China, India is still growing, but they both have a major issue that other countries don't have. For cultural and legal reasons in the two countries, for decades, they have been self-selecting male babies over female babies.
Starting point is 00:09:57 So in China, you've got 25 million Chinese men for which there are no Chinese women. And in India, I want to say it's above 60 million Indian men for which there are no Indian women. So if you're looking at social disruption, not only are shrinking populations disruptive, but there's a heck of a lot of unrequited testosterone involved in those two countries. Oh, yeah. 95% of the population increase that the UN is forecasting between now and the end of the century is all Africa. Wow. Some of those countries, I want to say Nigeria, I'd have to go look at the data, are forecast to grow up to 450%. In Africa?
Starting point is 00:10:53 So when you look at huge population increases, huge population decreases, and urbanization, we are going through dramatic changes that we have never seen before. And I would argue that my grandchildren, any child born now, is in a unique position compared to any child born previously. Because any child for the past 200,000 years could look at their parents and their grandparents and say, my life is going to look something like that.
Starting point is 00:11:34 I don't think that's true anymore. And partly because of societal change, but also partly because of technological change. When you look at what is going on but also partly because of technological change. Yeah. When you look at what is going on in terms of 3D printing, artificial intelligence, the Internet, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, cheap ubiquitous off-grid energy,
Starting point is 00:12:03 and there are several other disruptive technologies, they are all coming to commercialization at the same time. What that means is we are going from a third-age global economic model of a few making many to a fourth-age economic model of many making a few. Wow. And what that means is most of the economic criteria that businesses have used to measure success, economies of scale, inventory, barriers to entry. Well, with 3D printing and new materials and instantaneous communication,
Starting point is 00:12:58 those barriers to entry go away. Anyone can compete with anyone. So the traditional model of where you made 80% of your revenue off of 20% of your SKUs, that's flattened out. You make 100% off of 100% because the model of economic performance is going to be very different.
Starting point is 00:13:21 Now, it's not everywhere all at once, but it's the old quote, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. Oh, wow. and publishing. This is Christensen's Long Tail, where the internet and computers have enabled a revolution in how music is made, sold,
Starting point is 00:13:56 distributed. Netflix versus Errol's. If you remember VHS tapes. Yeah, I definitely do. Yeah, and so getting back to my book, when I was first writing the book, I thought, I'll go find an agent, and the agent will help me go find a publishing company, and the publishing house will make my book my book a new york times bestseller
Starting point is 00:14:25 and i rapidly discovered that agents are only interested in you if you have already published or you already have a large social media following either of which i had i luckily had a colleague of mine who was in the process of writing his first book and he was about six months ahead of me so he mentored me through the process both of us self-published on amazon i want to say 85 of the books that are published today are self-published yeah i would believe it and it is a fundamental revolution in the publishing world. It's an entirely different approach. So in any event, getting back to that fourth age and that disruption between society and technology,
Starting point is 00:15:15 and then the question is, well, how well are we managing it? Well, from a business standpoint, I'd point out that the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company in 1935 was 90 years. And in 2016, it's 18. Wow. That is amazing, man. In 1970 to 2015, the average lifespan of all publicly traded companies nearly halved. So what that data tells me is that modern business is confronting problems it can't solve. Now, on the political side... Before we switch to political what's the
Starting point is 00:16:07 behind that is it because change is moving faster or innovation is going faster the rate of change the rate and degree of change are accelerating to the point where if you aren't thinking about the problem with strategic planning. Geez. I did strategic planning for decades for companies. And I think the patron saint of planners, you see a copy of my book in the background and the screaming lady on the color on the cover. That is Cassandra, who was the daughter of Priam, the king of Troy. Cassandra was the priestess of Apollo.
Starting point is 00:16:54 Apollo approached her seeking sexual favors, which she refused him. And he cursed Cassandra with the ability to foretell the future that no one would believe and she could not change. That's the patron saint for strategic planners. You work with a company and you say, yeah, and they don't believe you and none of that happens. Gotta love it. But that rate of change is demonstrated
Starting point is 00:17:27 by a book that came out 2019 by a Swedish physician Hans Rosling. The book is called Factless. In fact, it's right there. And Rosling had gone
Starting point is 00:17:44 and he was troubled by what he was seeing in terms of people he was talking to who didn't seem to really understand the state of the world. And so he went to Davos in 2015 and he had a series of generic questions about the state of the world. Basic information that you would think
Starting point is 00:18:14 that the people who are setting policy and direction would know. Okay? He then went in 2017 and polled 12,000 people in 14 different countries. So he has a very large basis for this analysis. And I'll give you an example of one of the questions.
Starting point is 00:18:38 And all of the questions had three answers, A, B, or C. They could pick. In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has A, almost doubled, B, remain more or less the same, or C, almost halved. 93% of the 12,000 got that wrong.
Starting point is 00:19:07 Wow. 39% of the attendees at Davos got it wrong. The answer was C, almost halved. Wow. Now, the point being, at the end of the day, out of the 13,000 people, no one got all 13 questions right. 15% got them all wrong. And the average score was 15% right.
Starting point is 00:19:37 Only one person got 11 out of 13 right. Wow. The observation that Ronsling made was, well well i'll read you a quote if i could i have tested audiences from all around the world and from all walks of life medical students teachers university lecturers and then scientists investment bankers executives and multinational companies, journalists, activists, senior politicians. Most of them also get most of the answers wrong. Some even score worse than the general public. A few of the most appalling results came from Nobel laureates and medical researchers.
Starting point is 00:20:20 By law of averages, even a troop of chimps would score 33% on each three answered question. Wow. That's a fast one. And we got beaten out by chimpanzees. I've seen those people that can get beaten out by chimpanzees. I think I've seen them on social media. So the point being. I'm on social media,
Starting point is 00:20:41 so that's a kick at me too. I'm a boomer. It's new to me. But the point is, if the people who are in charge don't know the facts, how could you ever expect them
Starting point is 00:20:58 to set the right policies? That's true. Now, I'm going to go back to 200,000 years in the first age. Because that's not irrelevant. We learned some fundamental things 200,000 years ago. Instincts. Which are still with us. And I would argue those instincts basically
Starting point is 00:21:26 summarize, I'll give four common, the first of which is, we are afraid of everything. And when we're afraid of something, we tend to overreact violently. Secondly,
Starting point is 00:21:41 we discovered that living in groups improved our chances of surviving and finding a mate and passing on our genes. So we are intensely social animals. Thirdly, we discovered that improving our status within the group further improved our chances of surviving and getting a better mate to pass on our genes. So we are status climbers. We will lie, cheat as a species. We will lie, cheat, steal, and kill other hominins
Starting point is 00:22:17 to improve our status within our group. And fourth and finally, we're curious. Not in any altruistic sense that we want to understand the divine, but rather we want to know what's over the hill because it might eat us. Those four instincts still drive us today. And the challenge we're facing in the fourth age is the rate and degree of change are coming at us so fast that it's frightening. And so we tend to overreact violently. And what we do is we find groups that we think explain the situation for us, that give us
Starting point is 00:23:12 some sense of comfort. And whatever the top person in that group is telling us to do or telling us what the state of the world is, we believe it and we go with it because to do anything else is scary. And as we've just seen, the people at the top of these pyramids don't know what the hell is going on. They don't know the facts.
Starting point is 00:23:35 And the rate of change is such that they're incapable of keeping up. Houston, we got a problem. Yeah. I mean, it's moving so fast, we're losing track. We're losing ground, maybe. Well, the way we think, there's what they call the DIKW model, Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom.
Starting point is 00:24:03 Data is all of the stuff out there. Everything you see here and all the information flowing around. And when you're challenged with a particular issue or question, you go through all of that data and you pull out the useful bits. And that's information. And then you analyze the information in order to figure out how to do something. And virtually every business manager is a knowledge manager. They know how to do something.
Starting point is 00:24:37 Now, the difference between knowing how to do something and knowledge and wisdom is knowing what to do, not necessarily how to do it. And so we find so many of our leaders are knowledge managers who have learned how to do something and they keep doing it because they know how to do it and they're comfortable with it and changing it is frightening. Yeah. Very few people, there are very few people that take the, you know,
Starting point is 00:25:16 the step from knowledge to wisdom, uh, and deciding, do we really want to, do we really want to be doing that? I don't know if that's a good idea. Maybe we, maybe we ought to try something else here. It seems we always go round and round.
Starting point is 00:25:31 The one thing I always say that people have heard a million times on the show is the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. So thereby we just go round and round, and we end up kind of seemingly repeating the same history and problems and mistakes that we make as a group of humans. Well, you know, just a classicacities that need to be cured. Well, it makes you wonder, where did they come from well adhd or i should say dyslexia i misspoke dyslexia was never an issue until we started writing
Starting point is 00:26:34 the ability to to switch the letters that didn't impact anybody before there were letters to switch. Or something to write with. And in fact, all three of those attributes, dyslexia, autism, and ADHD, psychiatrists argue they were critical survival mechanisms 200,000 years ago that better enabled a tribe to survive because the guy that can't sit still and is always fidgeting and going off and doing something is the guy that finds out what's over the hill and the autistic guy that is really good at napping flints makes the best spare points. So what we've now classified as human frailties were in fact part of our survival toolkit. And so where do we go in our fourth age? What can we learn? Because clearly your book is trying to teach people
Starting point is 00:27:43 what our fallacies are and where we lack. Right. I mean, how do we, how do we, do we need to change course? How do we change course? And what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, that's, that's the hard part of the book. And again, what I did is I applied some business planning tools. I did some scenario planning on what the world might look like.
Starting point is 00:28:08 I think scenario planning is more valuable than forecasting because it forces you to think about scenarios that may be low probability but high impact and whereas forecasting is just looking at high probability and when you when you take a look at those from a societal standpoint did nothing to change course, things don't look very good for a large portion of the world because of those societal and technological changes. Yeah. I was just noticing, you know, you talked earlier in the show about how China and Japan and other things are in declining birth rate. We're also in America in a declining birth rate, and just globally. Well, but interestingly, one of the demographics experts that I've worked with,
Starting point is 00:29:15 a gentleman by the name of Dick Hokanson, argues that this is the Anglo-Saxon century. Because looking at the data, he says that the United States, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, of all of the developed world, we are the closest to maintaining a birth rate that will maintain the population. But more importantly, those are the countries where the talented, ambitious, educated people in other countries want to move. Yeah. have our populations augmented by self-starting
Starting point is 00:30:08 people who are willing to take the risk to get up and change their circumstances. What about our marriage rates and our birth rates? Because those are in decline. In fact, massively, there's been this huge thing that's going on where we have fewer men
Starting point is 00:30:24 going to college than ever before. In fact, we have women outpacing them. And one of our societal issues that we have is women usually date up hypergamy. They usually date someone who earns more than them and has more resources and security. It's actually a biological thing for eons of time. And now we have the problem we have is, you know, these young men aren't going to college, so their financial futures are likely going to be impacted. I know some companies are starting to change where they're, I think even an airline said they're
Starting point is 00:30:56 going to not require a college degree for men to do stuff, but men have been kind of tuning out. And some of the social media things that have been going on and impacting some of the expectations of both parties have been delusional. And so they're not mating. They're not marrying up. You know, I lived in Vegas for 30 years. And I remember the moment Vegas announced that, hey, people aren't getting married anymore. So we're not running 24 hours a day on our licensing. And I was like, that's an interesting sign,
Starting point is 00:31:28 especially when you consider how drunk people get into Vegas and end up married. And, you know, a lot of things have changed. But the marriage rate's falling. And the marriage rate is, you know, families and marriages and all that stuff is a key tax building block for the U.S. government and governments around the world, you know, making money and then, of course, a growing tax base, you know, like we talked about earlier. So are those things the stuff you discuss in your book or have you thought through those sort of elements? Well, again, I've been looking at the demographics with a longer time frame.
Starting point is 00:32:10 Okay. So if you look out 10 years, you look out 20 years, there's always some variation from, you know, five-year period to five-year period as to what's working and what's not working. The demographics experts that I, and I'm not an expert in the area, but the ones that I was reading seemed to suggest that between immigration and the general stability of Anglo-Saxon societies that we're in a better place. Maybe we're not in the best place societies that we're in a better place maybe we're not in the best place but we're in a better place versus the rest of the world again i look at a country that's getting uh russia's losing 14 of its population yeah meanwhile africa the average, is growing by 200%. Both of those are extremely destabilizing,
Starting point is 00:33:09 whereas the shifts in our demographic profile, pro or con, are, let's say, closer to the error bar, such that socially we can manage them, whereas others in other countries are virtually unmanageable. And, of course, it all depends upon how it plays out. If I had to forecast what I think the future holds in terms of what will save us, because, again, we get violent when we're afraid and there's a lot of scary things going on the one thing that stands out for me and it
Starting point is 00:33:56 and it really came back to a year ago my daughter-in-law was sitting there with my four grandchildren in July, and they were watching Christmas and July movies. So they were watching Home Alone. And Macaulay Culkin was watching a taped movie on a VHS player about some gangsters. Oh, yeah. And my grandson looks to my daughter-in-law
Starting point is 00:34:32 and says, what's that machine? What is that? What is that thing? And she explained, well, back in the day you could get a VHS player or a beta player and what you'd do is you would go to a store, and when movies came out,
Starting point is 00:34:47 they would ship to these stores these little boxes with tapes in them. And there'd be rows and rows and rows of these boxes on these shelves, and if you were lucky enough to get there fast enough for a popular movie, you'd grab one of those, and you'd rent it and took it home, and you stuck it in that machine,
Starting point is 00:35:04 and then you played the tape. And then at the the end we have another machine that you would take that out put it in the other machine to rewind the tape before you took it back and my son-in-law who's or my uh grandchild i should say who's a bit of a smart ass you know looked at her and said, how did you live like that? And there's a wonderful YouTube video of two teenagers being given a rotary phone. Oh, yeah. I love that video. I'm trying to figure out how to use it. examples is our children, my grandchildren, grew up in a time where the rate and degree of change was accelerating. So for them, they have never lived without having 24-7 instantaneous contact with the entire world. And they have observed rapid evolution in technology,
Starting point is 00:36:15 as well as intimate awareness of social trends and social activity. They are plugged in, clued in. They may not be any smarter, but they're more aware and they are more comfortable with change than I would ever be. Again, I'm a boomer. And a lot of stuff scares me. And so my hope for the future is that my grandchildren have the adaptability to cope with the change without becoming so frightened that they do the unthinkable thing.
Starting point is 00:37:08 And what is the unthinkable thing? Well, I think we're getting close to it in Ukraine. Oh, like war and maybe nukes? Yep. There you go. There you go. It's interesting. You know, I think a lot of uh assume that war was something of the past and uh
Starting point is 00:37:27 that you know we kind of lived in an age where there was enough balance and economic pressures to keep people from going to war and we found out that we're completely wrong on that there's still mad men in the world who who they really just really don't give a fuck. Yeah, well, I was a minor cold warrior when I worked in the government in the 70s and the 80s. And I'm going through deja vu at the moment. Yeah. It's like I've seen this movie before. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:38:05 It doesn't take much to spin out of control. No, it sure doesn't. It sure doesn't. And when you look, and again, it's really in a way fascinating, when you look at how technology is changing warfare and just the whole process of intel collection and analysis uh the amount of what they call open source intelligence oscent um the ability to to get uh satellite imagery of what's going on in real time on open source uh is just completely and utterly amazing in terms of how that impacts
Starting point is 00:38:50 what we're doing. The problem is that the decision making that goes along with it isn't up to the task. It's true. We're still making sometimes overall decisions. So let's wrap up. What do you hope people come away with with your book? What do you hope they learn? I hope people come away with some humility and recognition
Starting point is 00:39:17 that what they are absolutely certain that their group believes and their view of the world is the right view, might not be all it's cracked up to be. I would hope that people would step back and you know, if all those
Starting point is 00:39:37 people at Davos got all those questions wrong and we got beaten up by a troop of monkeys on basic facts of the condition of the world maybe we ought to pay a little more attention to getting the
Starting point is 00:39:55 information right going into our knowledge analysis if people become a little more sensitized to the rate and degree of change and appreciate that, and again, I'm counting on the youngsters. I'm counting on young people who go, oh, yeah, I got this. This changed. Yeah, this is cool. I'm okay with this because I'm not. It scares the shit out of me.
Starting point is 00:40:29 Yeah, it's crazy some of the things that are going on you see in the world. We seem to be becoming more hedonistic when it really comes down to it, in my opinion. And I think partly that's because we're afraid, and so we say, oh, what the hell? Yeah, we just, yeah, throw it out the window. So it's going to be an interesting journey, but hopefully people can read books like yours and learn from them and uh hopefully make some better choices educate themselves you know the the it's so important to discover the things you don't know that you don't know because you know as i told my niece and nephew that's the one thing that will always get you usually the one thing i always get you is that one thing you're not watching for,
Starting point is 00:41:06 the things you don't know that you don't know. And it's changing so fast. Can I give you one last example? Sure. Sustainability. Climate change. Now, I'm not arguing whether or not climate change exists. That's not the point I'm trying to make.
Starting point is 00:41:24 The point I'm trying to make is that to the extent that policymakers are concerned about climate change and they are implementing policies in order to offset it, next generation with the unspoken assumption that a third age Henry Ford mass production economic model where few make a many is going to continue. But those climate change policies are not going to work in a world where many make a few. The policy implications, how one addresses millions of manufacturers making on their kitchen tables with 3D printers customized products for their local markets. That's a whole different footprint and requires a whole different set of policy thinking than what they're doing. And this is where the monkeys are beating us out. Yeah, the monkeys are beating us out. It's going to be an interesting ride, man, in the fourth age. And how long do you think this age will last, the fourth age?
Starting point is 00:42:43 Or does it just determine it upon our survival and well to that whatever it's interesting i i don't know but i do know you would ask me is there a fifth age the fifth age of the book i'm working on is when we expand as a species beyond earth and we start populating the solar system ah there you go so once we start having reproducible populations someplace else be it mars be it asteroids be at the moon be it space stations, whatever the venues are, what does that do to us as a species as we leave the place that established our instincts that we've already seen we still carry with us? And how does that change us that fifth age? That'll be interesting to see how that turns out.
Starting point is 00:43:49 Well, it's been very insightful to have you on the show, Terry. I've enjoyed it. And hopefully you've given us advice so that we can survive until the fifth age. So there you go. We can only hope. That or at least, you know, you can do whatever you want with everything after I'm gone. That's my policy. I don't have any kids, so I'm not vesting it.
Starting point is 00:44:08 But you have grandkids. But, you know, as far as I'm concerned, you know, if you want the place to go to hell, just do it after I'm gone. I'm getting close to that myself. My dogs probably won't appreciate. They're like, hey, man, we're probably going to be around after you, you idiot. Like, why throw us under the bus? I don't know. Maybe I'll take them with me. There you go. Terry,
Starting point is 00:44:30 thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you. I appreciate you having me. Thank you. Give us your .com so we can find you on the interwebs once more. T-V-T-H-I-E-L-E TV Thiel at LinkedIn.com.
Starting point is 00:44:45 There you go. Order the books, folks, wherever fine books are sold. Our Fourth Age, a village elder story for young... From Amazon. From Amazon. Wherever fine books are sold. Don't go in the alleyway bookstores, we always say, because you might get mugged or need a tetanus shot.
Starting point is 00:45:01 Our Fourth Age, a village elder story for young homines sapientes about surviving their future history. Thanks for tuning in, folks. Be sure to see us on goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, linkedin.com, Fortress Chris Voss, and of course, youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Thanks for tuning in.
Starting point is 00:45:20 Be good to each other. Stay safe and get to the Fifth Age. We'll see you next time.

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