MICHIO KAKU: Leadership is understanding the
challenges of the future, to working on scenarios
of the future.
Now, President Eisenhower, when he was a general,
he was asked about his attitude toward victory,
toward fights and toward war and he basically
said that pessimists never win wars, only
optimists win wars.
And optimists what separates them from the
pessimists?
You see, the optimists see the future, the
bright side of the future, the future that
has opportunities, not the pessimists who
simply says ah, I can't do it, not possible,
end of story.
That's it folks.
So, you have to have not just optimism but
you have to have one eye on the future.
LAWRENCE KRAUSS: I'm a pessimist, but that's
no reason to be gloomy.
And that's become our mantra in some sense,
and it seems perfectly appropriate when you
think about the universe because the universe
first of all isn't here to make us happy,
it isn't here to please us and it doesn't
give a damn what happens to us.
In the far future of the universe is likely
to be miserable as I talked about in my last
book and I point out in my new book could
be even more miserable.
So, in a purposeless universe that may have
a miserable future you may wonder well how
can I go about each day?
And the answer is we make our own purpose.
We make our own joy.
JASON SILVA: And I've fallen in love with
this idea of feedback loops.
One of the things that Rich Doyle, who wrote
""Darwin's Pharmacy,"" talks about is finding
ways to become aware, to learn to perceive
the feedback loops between our creative and
linguistic choices and our consciousness and
our experience.
In other words, the extraordinary capacity
that we have to sculpt and mold our lives.
The spaces we inhabit, the people we surround
ourselves with, by curating spaces, by curating
circumstance we essentially co-author our
experience.
A lot of people go through life thinking that
they don't have any control, that life is
just happening to them but that's not true.
We have a lot more control than we realize
and this extraordinary control comes from
the power of feedback loops.
You literally can decide, can almost author
an afternoon into being by planning to meet
in a certain place with a certain person,
listening to certain music, drinking a certain
kind of wine.
I've decided that I'm going to see the world
through rose colored lenses, I'm going to
be optimistic, I'm going to look for the beautiful
in every possible experience.
That intention, that agency coupled with action,
with editorial discernment and saying okay
I'm going to do this, I'm going to hang out
with this person, it creates a self-amplifying
feedback loop, in other words the intention
to be optimistic makes me stumble upon all
these things that make me feel more optimistic
and so on and so forth.
KEVIN KELLY: Over almost 200 years every year
has gotten a little bit better when we look
at the scientific evidence.
And while it's possible that next year everything
could change, everything could collapse and
fall to the ground, statistically, probabilistically
it won't it will continue because 200 years
has gone and next year it probably will continue.
But if you look at the kind of current political
regime around the world and the factors of
pressures, environmental pressures, the pressures
of distraction that we have from the new media
then I think you have to resort to hope.
In the long term optimists decide the future.
It's the optimists who create all of the things
that are going to be most important in our
life because it was the optimists who built
and invented all the things that are now important
in our current lives.
And I think people behave better when they're
optimistic.
There's absolutely a need to be critical and
doubtful and skeptical and even pessimistic
just like if you have a car you have to have
brakes, you can't have a car no matter where
it is without brakes.
But it's the engine, the optimistic engine
that keeps going and going and refuses to
stop and it's only concerned about going forward
that really drives a car, but you certainly
need breaks to steer it.
WILLIAM MAGEE: Is it itself a form of stratification?
Is there something about optimism that's a
resource that we can understand as a psychological
good like happiness?
So if it's stratified in a population how
is it associated with other kinds of stratification,
income and so forth, education?
And so, you're saying well class, the real
interesting one is class.
Everyone wants to know pull yourself up by
your bootstraps, think positively you'll be
successful, if you're optimistic you'll be
successful.
But of course, if you're successful you're
going to be optimistic so there's the reverse
causality thing and so taking class and looking
at class is a really interesting part that
I'll want to get to.
And I think that's an interesting question
because there's a lot of theory around sociology
and emotions, around the idea that expectations
are created, the ability to meet expectations
generates energy, that energy is what allows
people to do things, that emotional energy,
and then it replicates itself.
So, people are convinced to be optimistic,
especially the middle classes, and if they're
not able to achieve those expectations then
their energy goes down and they become dissatisfied.
SILVA: There's always going to be the wildcard,
there's always going to be the circumstances
you can't plan for, there's always the unexpected
the relevance and the serendipity, but just
like that book ""The Power of Pull"" talks
about we can funnel the serendipity or we
can channel the serendipity funnel, we can
help engender and engineer serendipity by
the choices that we make every moment.
And so, by cultivating rich social networks,
by cultivating weak ties, not just close ties
but the weak ties, by becoming connectors
and by connecting others so that they connect
us we create a world in which these self-amplifying
feedback loops feed on top of each other.
So, good circumstances lead to other good
circumstances which lead to other good circumstances
and each one of them encourages us to then
live more openly and participate in that creative
flow space and you can go on and on.
But that requires a boldness of character
as well because the realization of the dizzying
freedom we have to compose our lives, if I
can do anything it can be paralyzing, but
I think that if we are able to courageously
embrace the uncertainty of that freedom and
then exercise discerning and smart and refined
creative and linguist choices every step of
the way we do have the capacity to turn our
lives into a work of art.
KAKU: When I was a kid, when I was a child
I had two role models.
The first was Einstein.
I read that he couldn't finish his greatest
work and as a child I said to myself I want
to help you finish it.
I want to help finish it because it's the
fundamentals of physics.
But the other role model I had was, well,
I used to watch ""Flash Gordon"" on TV every
Saturday morning and he kind of like blew
my mind away.
Ray guns, cities in the sky, invisibility
shields, monsters from outer space.
And then I begin to realize that the two loves
of my life were actually the same thing, that
if you want to understand the future you have
to understand science.
You've got to pay your dues.
That's where leadership will take you because
you can see the future.
That's what Eisenhower could do he could see
the future of a war because he understood
the mechanics of the war and how the war would
progress.
Seeing the future is the key to success in
life, I think it's the key to intelligence
and it's also the key to leadership as well.
Now, you might say to yourself now wait a
minute, I thought IQs were a good predictor
of the future?
Wrong.
If you take a look at people with high IQs,
yeah some of them do win the Nobel Prize,
but a lot of them wind up as marginal people,
petty criminals, people that are failures.
And then you wonder why?
Why is it that some people with high IQs never
get anywhere?
Well, the Air Force had this problem, you
see the Air Force devised a test: what happens
if your airplane is shot down over enemy territory
in Vietnam and you were captured by the Vietnamese?
Do something.
What are you going to do?
It turns out that the people with high IQs
got paralyzed, flummoxed, they didn't know
what to do they were paralyzed.
What?
You're captured behind enemy lines?
What are you going to do?
Give up?
The people who came up with the most imaginative,
the most creative ideas they were the ones
who did not score so high on the IQ exam but
they were creative, they saw the future.
They came up with all sorts of schemes in
which to escape.
Now, I like to think of it this way: let's
say you get a bunch of people, kids, and you
ask them to rob a bank.
That's your job: rob a bank.
How would you do it?
I think the people with high IQs would get
all embarrassed, flummoxed, they wouldn't
know what to do.
Even people who want to become policemen of
the future they would get all flummoxed.
But, criminals they're constantly thinking
about the future, master criminals now not
the ones who are petty and just steal things
off the grocery shelf, but the master criminals
are the ones who constantly simulate the future.
How do you rob this bank?
How do you nail down the police?
How do you get away?
Where is your getaway car?
These are the ones who have high intelligence.
These are ""the future leaders.""
KELLY: If you have only brakes you don't go
anywhere.
And I think what we have right now is we have
an imbalance between pessimism and optimism
and we really need a lot more optimism about
the future in order to have an engine keep
going.
And I think that one of the reasons why we
maybe have an imbalance right now is because
we have been burned so often by the promises
of the optimists about how technology is going
to bring us a kind of utopia.
And I think nobody believes in utopia anymore,
I certainly don't.
But dystopia is actually not any better, and
that's actually the only vision that we have
of the future, which is really sort of made
by Hollywood in some science fiction, which
is of a dystopia that collapses.
And I think that while we can't believe in
a utopia I think a better vision of the future
is protopia, this idea that we have incremental
progress, that we're working and creeping
very, very steadily but slowly towards betterment.
So, every year is a little tiny better than
the year before, not much but a little tiny
better and that kind of incremental progress
is really only visible when you turn around
and look back behind you.
Because half or even a one percent difference
is really something we can't see every year
and it's not going to be seen in the news.
If you look at the news the news is about
outliers, it's about unusual things, it's
not about the slow evidence of progress, which
is not seen in the news.
So, if you want to see what's really happening
in the world you can't look at the news you
have to look at the scientific evidence, which
is going to register a very small delta that
is really not visible unless you turn around
and look behind you and then you can see oh,
20 years this is real.
KRAUSS: We make our own purpose and it seems
to me life is more precious because it's temporary
and accidental and we should take advantage
of that.
And we have evolved brains and that allows
us to ask questions not just about how the
universe works but how we should behave.
Now, it's a long philosophical debate about
whether you can get ought from is and maybe
you could never get ought from is and maybe
the reason is the slave of passion, but one
thing seems clear to me that without knowing
what it is you can never get to ought or if
you do the ought that you get to is silly.
If you don't know the consequences of your
actions, which is really what science tells
us, then you can't assess how to behave.
And so, understanding empirical phenomena
plays a central role in leading a better life
it seems to me and it should play a central
role in public policy so that we as a society
can make sound decisions about how to act
in the common good.
KELLY: Civilization is not monumental heroic
enterprise, it's the small creep of one percent
betterment through centuries.
And I think if we believe that progress is
real then we can actually behave better.
If we believe that progress is real we can
still dream about making these new things
because we know that even through the new
technologies are going to introduce as many
new problems as they solve and that most of
the problems that we'll have in the future
will come from new technology, you'll still
go forward and make and invent those new things
even though they will create new problems
because those new problems themselves will
birth new solutions, which will have new problems,
but that circle and cycle keeps going round
and round and there's a one percent net gain
for each revolution and that's what we get
out of this.
