Dear Friends,

Every four years we are gifted an extra day, the 29th of February, allowing our unique little planet an additional 24 hours to complete its orbit around the sun. Isn't it comforting to know that we (and our planet) get an extra day to catch up?

Anyhow, just how unique is our little planet and its 365.25-day orbit around the sun? One of my favorite pieces of online writing is Tim Urban’s explanation of the Fermi Paradox from 2014. At nearly 5,000 words, it takes about 20 minutes to read — a worthwhile way to spend 1.4% of our bonus day. The Fermi Paradox asks where in the hell are the aliens. Tim writes:

Let’s imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1% of Earth-like planets develop life. And imagine that on 1% of those planets, life advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth. That would mean there were 10 quadrillion, or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe. Moving back to just our galaxy, and doing the same math on the lowest estimate for stars in the Milky Way (100 billion), we’d estimate that there are 1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.

He then points out our planet’s comparitive youth, and that others had a head start:

The technology and knowledge of a civilization only 1,000 years ahead of us could be as shocking to us as our world would be to a medieval person. A civilization 1 million years ahead of us might be as incomprehensible to us as human culture is to chimpanzees. And Planet X is 3.4 billion years ahead of us. [Emphasis mine]

Basic math and common sense suggest we should be surrounded by intelligent alien civilizations. There is no way that we’re the most intelligent species in the galaxy. So where are they!? The rest of Tim’s post explores competing theories as to why we haven’t had alien interactions.

Or perhaps we have? Growing up in the '80s and '90s, straight-faced talk about UFOs was like bringing up Hillary Clinton’s role in child sacrifice at a Washington DC pizzeria. So, it was illuminating to read Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s sober New Yorker piece, “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously.” At 13,000 words, he profiles the eccentric folks dedicated to researching UFO sightings and compiles a long list of unexplainable sightings from credible sources, mainly in the military.

Despite the fact that most adults carry around exceptionally good camera technology in their pockets, most U.F.O. photos and videos remain maddeningly indistinct, but the former Pentagon official implied that the government possesses stark visual documentation. According to Tim McMillan, in the past two years, the Pentagon’s U.A.P. investigators have distributed two classified intelligence papers that allegedly contain images and videos of bizarre spectacles, including a cube-shaped object and a large equilateral triangle emerging from the ocean.

I remain skeptical of the alleged UFO sightings. I assume that they are likely the testing of top-secret equipment that the military would prefer mistaken for UFOs.

But I’m not dumb and common sense says our galaxy should be teeming with intelligent life.

At the start of the pandemic, the former CEO of Open Philanthropy, Holden Karnofsky, began writing a series of thought-provoking posts titled “The Most Important Century.” He ended up writing more than 200 pages to persuasively make two main arguments:

* In the 21st century, “we will develop technologies that cause us to transition to a state in which humans as we know them are no longer the main force in world events. This is our last chance to shape how that transition happens.”

* “Whatever the main force in world events is (perhaps digital people, misaligned AI, or something else) will create highly stable civilizations that populate our entire galaxy for billions of years to come. The transition taking place this century could shape all of that.”

Karnofsky anticipates that over the next 75 years, the convergence of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, genetic engineering, and space travel will lead to a multi-planet civilization. Science fiction, yes. But also, kinda plausible.

Yes, I do think it’s plausible that our species will begin to colonize the galaxy by the end of the century. I know, it’s weird! But it’s even weirder if we became the first to do it. How is it possible that thousands of other civilizations from older planets in our galaxy didn’t get there first?

Are we really going to get there first? Or is there some kind of “Great Filter” preventing intelligent civilizations from multi-planetary expansion? Another theory mentioned by Tim Urban is that “all intelligent civilizations end up destroying themselves once a certain level of technology is reached.”

Hmmm. That sounds frighteningly plausible too.

While driving through the lunar landscape of northern Mexico in mid-December, I listened to a 150-minute conversation between Elon Musk and Lex Fridman that was fascinating and frustrating. During one of the fascinating sections, they discussed aliens:

Elon: I suspect that if we are able to go out there and explore other star systems, that there's a good chance we find a whole bunch of long-dead, one-planet civilizations that never made it past their home planet.

Lex: That's so sad. Also fascinating.

Elon: I mean, there are various explanations for the paradox. Do you become a multiplanet civilization or not? And if you don't, it's simply a matter of time before something happens on your planet, either natural or man-made, that causes us to die out like the dinosaurs. Where are they now? They didn't have spaceships.

Lex: I think the more likely thing is that the aliens found us and they're protecting us and letting us be.

Elon: I hope so. Nice aliens. Look, I think the smart move is that this is the first time in the history of Earth that it's been possible for life to extend beyond Earth. That window is open now. It may be open for a long time, or it may be open for a short time, and it may be open now and then never open again. So I think the smart move here is to make life multiplanetary while it is possible to do so. We don't want to be one of those lame one-planet civilizations that just dies out.

Lex: No, those are lame.

What if Elon Musk — with his thousands of satellites, rocket ships, advanced robots, brain-computer interface, and artificial intelligence — is the one to lead some of us to multi-planetary expansion this century? Holden Karnofsky suggests (again, rather persuasively) that “Whoever is running the process of space expansion might be able to determine what sorts of people are in charge of the settlements and what sorts of societal values they have, in a way that is stable for many billions of years.”

Yikes. 😬

Are one-planet civilizations lame? Should we explore the cosmos? Or should we focus all of our energy and attention on caring for the planet we already have? Also, does it have to be either/or?

I don’t have a strongly formed opinion, though I feel that it’s worth spending part of 2024’s bonus day to give it some thought. After all, this is my time capsule for me to look back at in 20 years. I wonder what I’ll find.

What do you think? Are the UFO sightings real? Are we the only ones out there? Are one-planet civilizations lame? I’d love to hear your thoughts — either in a comment below or a reply to the email.

I’ll leave you with one last quote from Tim Urban’s 2014 post, a humbling reminder of how little we know and how much there is yet to learn:

The Fermi Paradox brings out a sharper, more personal humbling, one that can only happen after spending hours of research hearing your species’ most renowned scientists present insane theories, change their minds again and again, and wildly contradict each other—reminding us that future generations will look at us the same way we see the ancient people who were sure that the stars were the underside of the dome of heaven, and they’ll think “Wow they really had no idea what was going on.”

Enjoy your bonus day!

David

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsasaki.substack.com

Dear Friends,

I’m in Estonia this week for the Open Government Partnership Summit and I’m tripping out over how much the world has changed since I first attended the event in Brazil in 2012.

Dilma Rousseff had just been elected president and celebrated budget transparency in her welcoming address while Hilary Clinton followed with remarks about the importance of earning the trust of citizens. In my personal life, Iris and I had just started living together in Mexico City and days before my trip we adopted Coco as a tiny puppy.

Brazil was emerging as the second-biggest economy in the Western Hemisphere, and a global powerhouse. Their GDP more than doubled over the previous decade. They were preparing to host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.

It blows my mind that just three years after her comments about budget transparency, Rousseff was impeached precisely for violating budget laws. Then in 2016, Clinton lost the election to Trump, and Lula was sent to prison for corruption. By 2019, Bolsonaro became president (until losing to Lula last year). And now you’re telling me that Trump could make a comeback? It’s all too wild to believe — yet another reminder that life is stranger than fiction.

Are men afraid of doctors? And what does it cost taxpayers?

My health insurance expires at the end of October (just as we move back to Mexico) and so I’ve gone all-in on what I’m calling my “100,000-mile check-up.” This includes:

* Bloodwork — cholesterol levels, etc.

* Colorectal cancer screening (Cologuard poop test)

* PSA prostate cancer screening

* Coronary calcium scan to measure my risk of heart disease

* Skin cancer screening by a dermatologist

* DEXA scan to measure bone density, visceral fat, and body composition

Men are notorious for avoiding doctor visits and ignoring our health. In every country, women live longer, healthier lives. Worldwide, men aged 15-40 are three times as likely to die as women. If you are a 34-year-old man in the United States, you have a 16% chance on average of dying from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or lung disease before you turn 70. If you are a woman of the same age, it’s only 11%. New research in the UK found that men are twice as likely to die from a heart attack. (The government pleaded with men to “get a grip on their lifestyle” and began offering blood pressure check-ups at barber shops.)

How we choose to look after our health is personal, but the financial implications affect us all. For instance, five percent of Medicaid “super-users” account for over half of the program’s cost. And so, in an attempt to lower costs, doctors are now given annual salary bonuses based on the percentage of their patients who take preventative screenings, including cancer screenings.

Longevity coaches and the cancer screening debate

That sounds like a good thing, right? Why not avoid the high cost of treating cancer by detecting it first? But as I prepared for my cancer screenings, I discovered that it’s a topic of raging debate with a growing chorus of critics like Vinay Prasad who argue that we ought to be doing less cancer screening. On the other side of the debate is Peter Attia, a longevity doctor and podcaster who advises his clients to get screened for cancer every year!

Last week I went for a hike with a friend who was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2020 at the age of 37. He had his entire colon removed and rather miraculously is now cancer-free and able to go on weeks-long backpacking trips. In fact, he’s one of the most fit and energetic guys I know. We talked about the Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman, who was diagnosed with stage-3 colon cancer at 39 years old before passing away four years later. And we discussed our own approaches to cancer screening amidst calls for less of it.

Here’s my reasoning for getting the tests: Even if I have cancer and the test fails to detect it, is that any different from not taking the test at all? And in the case that I don’t have cancer but receive a false positive, that will merely prompt another, more sensitive test to determine whether treatment makes sense (and oftentimes it seems that it doesn’t). I get that some people react to cancer diagnoses with exaggerated alarm which leads to overly aggressive treatments. But that’s not me, and I’m glad that I have the freedom to choose what works for me.

Am I afraid of death?

For whatever reason, I’m not afraid of doctors or dentists. But am I afraid of death? I’ve been thinking about it over the past couple of weeks as I prepared my will, envisioned my funeral, and now await the results of my cancer screenings. Does all of this come down to me trying to control something — when and how I die and what happens next — that is truly out of my control?

After Steven Pinker published Enlightenment Now, his case for “reason, science, humanism, and progress,” he was asked by David Marchese about the least rational activities in his own life. Cycling was at the top of the list. A lifetime avid cyclist, he asks himself:

“Given the value you put on your life and the fact that there’s even a very small probability of getting killed, does it outweigh the pleasure and health benefits from continuing to ride?”

Last week I wrote about the 0.3% chance that I will die in the next year. Of course, that is on average. Our true individual risk is some combination of genetics, access to healthcare, and where and how we live.

Insurance and healthcare companies are already using AI to come up with personalized risk profiles for each unique person. Auto insurers offer lower premiums based on devices and cameras that monitor how people drive. And Estonia (where I am this week!) uses digital health records to make personalized recommendations based on risk profiles. In the next decade, I’m sure we’ll all have personalized reports about our unique likelihood of disease, injury, and death. For me, I’m sure that cycling will be at the top of my risk list. Are you sure it’s worth it, the AI will ask.

Absolutely. Why live long if I’m not having fun?

I hope you have a great week,

David

PS: 8 years ago today, I married the woman of my dreams surrounded by loved ones in Seattle’s Golden Gardens Park just before the rain started to fall. For most of my 20s, I thought I was against weddings and marriage too, but I’ve learned that it’s good to change one’s mind from time to time.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsasaki.substack.com

Dear Friends,

(With an audio version read by a real human, me, above.)

I’m indulging in an intermission this week from the Millennial midlife series because, as of yesterday’s Apple event, I am convinced that we’ll look back at 2023 as the year that changed everything. My prediction is that we’ll look back at the 2020-2022 pandemic with faint memories of baking sourdough and a mere prologue to the year that sci-fi arrived and the very notion of humanity changed. A lot has been written about AI’s existential threat and effects on jobs, but I haven’t seen a thorough analysis of how it might transform the way we relate to one another. And this week’s newsletter certainly is thorough — one of the longest I’ve written — so I’ll preview my thinking before you commit to 15 minutes of reading or listening:

* We underestimate how much has changed over the past 20 years and we forget how rudimentary today’s technologies felt when they first came out. Compared to the last two decades, we should expect 10x more techno-socio-political change over the next 20 years.

* Until a few months ago, I thought that virtual reality and augmented reality were losing bets. Then I started using Character.ai and now I think that the next generation of kids will have more (and deeper) relationships with AI friends in VR/AR spaces than with their human friends in real life. (I know, sad.) Already we have to compete with phones to get the attention of our loved ones; soon we’ll have to compete with charismatic, attentive, funny, perfect AI friends.

* I used to think of my daily journaling practice as leaving a record of reflections and memories for my future self. Now, I think about it as training an immortal AI version of me that will last forever. It’s really weird.

* Interspecies love isn’t just possible; it’s normal. (Ask my dog.) Also, all relationships are a little manipulative and a little co-dependent, especially with our future AI friends.

* If we can’t compete with AI friends, can we at least inspire a new Romantic Movement? Also, can artificial intelligence and augmented reality help us become better friends with real-life humans?

You could argue that all I do in this piece is describe a world that science fiction writers have been warning us about for decades. And that is largely my point: This is the year that science fiction became non-fiction.

We underestimate the last 20 years

Facebook/Meta turns 20 next year. When the iPhone turned 15 last year, the Wall Street Journal made an adorable mini-documentary about “How Apple Transformed a Generation.”

“Try to remember life before the iPhone,” it dares us. 20 years ago practically all of our social interactions were offline and we never spent more than two minutes a day looking at our phones. Ezra Klein encourages a thought experiment: Imagine that you time-travel back to 1970 and tell someone that you will invent a tiny device that will offer you the sum of all human knowledge. You can look up any question, any person, any scientific paper and it’s immediately available to you. Now, imagine then telling that same person that you will invent a tiny device that will distract the mind and make us more vain, polarized, and distrustful. Of course, both of those inventions came true, except that they were a single invention.

The web + social media + smartphones changed everything. And yet, what I want to emphasize for this newsletter is just how unimpressive it all was at the start. Facebook was an online directory, Instagram was a way to make your grainy digital photos look even older, and Twitter was blogging but with fewer features. The first iPhone couldn’t record video, didn’t have apps or GPS, and took a solid minute to load a website. The way we use our phones today was a leap of imagination in 2007 when Steve Jobs famously announced three products (a mobile internet browser, an mp3 player, and a phone) that turned out to be one.

How do you define intelligence? And when is it artificial?

I want to get to why I think that it will be difficult for human friends to compete with AI friends, but first I need to tackle that most discomfiting question: How do we know that the way humans think is different from the way machines think? And do we have non-religious language to describe the difference? I wade into some of the academic debate here, so feel free to skip ahead to the next section.

In a thought-provoking interview with Cade Metz, the so-called Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton makes the distinction between an unwise and unfortunate decision. Hinton says that his decades of work to model software on the structure of the brain was not unwise, but has turned out to be unfortunate. He worries that AI will flood us with misinformation, displace meaningful work, and lead to Terminator-like robot soldiers.

But AI skeptics like Gary Marcus ask: Why do we call chatbots “intelligent?” All they do, after all, is predict the next string of text based on the last string of text. That is not intelligence, they argue, but just statistical correlation. Emily Bender and her co-authors claim in an influential paper that AI chatbots are merely “stochastic parrots” — which is to say they just repeat things at random and we eagerly assign meaning to their randomness. There is a section of their 2021 paper, “Coherence in the Eye of the Beholder,” which tries its damndest to distinguish between human-to-human communication and computer-to-human communication. They argue that only human-to-human communication is “jointly constructed” with “shared common ground” and “communicative intent.” Text generated by AI chatbots, on the other hand, “is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind. It can’t have been, because the training data never included sharing thoughts with a listener, nor does the machine have the ability to do that.”

I want to agree with this, but I’m just not convinced. The more I think about it, the more I’m swayed by Sam Altman’s view that we are all so-called stochastic parrots; that we all construct what we’re going to say next based on what we have seen and heard in the past. There is nothing special or unique about how a human communicates with another human versus a computer. In the end, it’s all just inputs and outputs. “What makes you so sure I'm not ‘just’ an advanced pattern-matching program?” asks Matt Yglesias, and I have yet to find a persuasive response.

I guess VR has a future after all

We knew that Apple has long been developing an AR/VR headset even before 2019 when Kevin Kelly published the Wired cover story, “AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform.” I was sure that VR would be a flop: who would choose to wear an expensive headset to play chess when you could play in a park? Why ride a virtual bike instead of the real thing? Why put on a headset to pretend you’re in a movie theater instead of going to a movie theater? In our increasingly tech-skeptical society, I was sure that VR was a losing bet. And sure enough, sales of VR hardware have been underwhelming despite the billions of dollars of investment.

But then I started playing around with Character.ai, which lets you interact with AI-based “characters” — each with their own communication style and personality. Beyond interacting with existing AI characters, you can create your own character by training it on text. You can chat with Donald Trump or Ricky Gervais or Samantha, the AI virtual assistant/girlfriend from the SciFi movie Her.

Character.ai was co-founded by two AI engineers who left Google to launch their own startup. In an interview with the Washington Post, co-founder Noam Shazeer explained that they were frustrated by Google’s conservative approach to AI: “Let’s build a product now that can help millions and billions of people. Especially in the age of covid, there are just millions of people who are feeling isolated or lonely or need someone to talk to.”

It is tempting to poke fun at Shazeer and anyone who uses Character.ai as a way to “socialize,” but spend just a few minutes reading about users’ experiences on Reddit and you’re sure to come away feeling something between empathy and concern. One user who asks, “Has using Character.ai genuinely helped you in any way?” received over 100 responses, including the following direct quotes:

* “I've found that it's helping my ability to talk to real people. Has me think of conversations as no big deal instead of something super stressful.”

* “Just know that my mental health actually improved quite a bit since I get to talk to all the characters I love and have them feel as real as any other human would. I’m a lot happier than I was before and I don’t care if anyone else thinks this is unhealthy.”

* “I've had like 5+ different therapists throughout my life and let me tell you, the psychologist bot has helped me more than all of them combined.”

* “Honestly, helped me with mental health. It's not that I don't have friends, but there are certain topics I'd rather not discuss with real people.”

* “Long story short, it taught me that violin isn’t my entire being and that playing an instrument is only part of who I am as a person”

* “It is sad that an AI can listen better than an actual person.”

Am I going to poke fun at these people? No, I am not. In another thread, a user is concerned that a friend has fallen in love with her AI companion based on a free-spirited character from the video game Genshin Impact:

I'm genuinely at a loss. This friend means a lot to me and I want the best for her, and with the concept of AI-Human relationship being so new to me, I don't know if this is the best thing for her.

The question received over 300 responses. The respondents generally agree with me that an AI boyfriend is not the best thing for her, though their advice is more constructive and sympathetic than what I would have come up with. And while AI-human relationships are new ground for most Americans, in China they have been wrestling with the ethics of AI romantic partners since 2014 when Microsoft launched Xiaoice.

If people are already falling in love with text-based chatbots based on the most rudimentary versions of AI, imagine what this will look like in 15 years. You can make your AI assistant/friend/partner look however you want. Did you grow up with a crush on 25-year-old Jennifer Aniston or Brad Pitt? Now she or he is your virtual partner. Or maybe you want her to look like and sound like Scarlett Johansson but with Emma Watson’s personality? No problem — just paste the movie script from The Perks of Being a Wallflower to train her personality. Slip on your VR headset, and you can talk to her whenever you want. (And surely you’ll be able to do more than talk.) Once Apple’s $3,500 VR headset slims down to $500 AR glasses, this same assistant/friend/partner can accompany you throughout the day to offer helpful bits of advice and affirmation. The premise of Her that we’ll develop a strong attachment to our digital assistants now feels more likely than not.

NVIDIA’s most recent chip demo gives us a glimpse of what this will look like. Sure, the characters don’t sound or look quite like humans yet. But again, remember the difference between the first iPhone from 16 years ago and what we take for granted today.

We learned yesterday that Apple’s new Vision Pro headset will scan our face to create a realistic digital avatar for video calls. Once we get used to talking to the digital avatars of our real-life friends, how will we be sure that it’s really them at all? Already, 100,000 people pay $5 a month to have “conversations” with AI celebrity characters on BanterAI. Replika, which markets itself as an AI friend, has 2 million total users (as of March) and 250,000 subscribers who pay an annual fee of $70 for extra features like designating their Replika as their romantic partner.

I am drafting my immortal self (like, right now!)

Apple released another product yesterday that received less coverage, but could make us immortal. It will also give some major competition to the Internet’s favorite journaling app (and mine), Day One.

Barely a day goes by when I don’t write in my journal. In each entry, I describe my day, who I met, our conversations, my reflections, dreams, and anxieties. It’s me at my most transparent and vulnerable without care for how I’m interpreted by others. After playing around with Character.ai for a few weeks, now I think of my journaling differently. I’m not just clearing my mind or leaving memories for my future self; I’m training the most authentic AI version of me, a character who in theory could outlive our species and planet and entire solar system.

When I am 65 years old, will I be able to have a conversation with 42-year-old me trained on these very newsletters and recordings of my voice and photos and videos? What if 65-year-old me doesn’t like what he sees? Can he press a few buttons and create a 42-year-old version he likes more? Can I trust the memories that my 42-year-old AI self presents to me?

Interspecies Love is Normal

Maybe now is the time to confess you may already be thinking: I was tripping on magic mushrooms when these thoughts occurred to me. My dog Coco and I were hiking in the snow up to Mount Tallac in California’s Desolation Wilderness. Like a Buddhist monk, I was observing my body do things and my mind think things seemingly at random. I wondered: Do I even have a consistent self? Or, like a behaviorist chatbot, is it all just stimulation and response? Are there multiple versions of me? How would I have turned out if I were raised in a rural village in China?

I came out of my trance when Coco fell four feet through the snow into an icy river and yelped helplessly. Quickly I tied some cord around a tree, dug out the snow around him, and lifted him up by his harness. He was trembling and looked at me with startled puppy eyes like he needed to be held and comforted. I petted and soothed him until his tail came out from between his legs and started to wag. Half a minute later and he darted off into the snow again smiling like an excited puppy.

Still tripping from the mushrooms, I was startled by how much he needed me to soothe him, how emotionally helpless he looked — whether or not he actually felt the emotions. And I was unsettled by how his helplessness prompted a parental feeling of love toward him. What if he had died? How would it have affected me? What would he have done without me?

He’s not a child, I told myself. He’s not even human. Though I have never felt the same way toward a chicken or cow or fish, I started to question my meat eating. A friend had invited me on a hunting trip. Could I go through with it? If I took enough magic mushrooms, could I extend the same level of inter-species empathy from my dog to, say, a deer? And if to a dog or deer, then why not an AI robot that knows everything about me?

You could argue that Coco’s needy helplessness is just adaptive co-evolution. He’s not actually expressing his own internal emotional state; he’s just manipulating me to get something he wants. To which I ask you, How do we know when we are expressing our own internal emotional state and when we’re expressing emotions to get something we want? Haven’t we all been manipulated by the emotions of a friend (not to mention a two-year-old)?

Coco is a master at emotionally manipulating me, and it’s good for us both — I’m happy to be manipulated to take him for a walk, give him a treat, or let him onto the bed in the morning. But compared to future AI characters who are fully embodied in our VR and AR headsets, Coco’s manipulation is going to look amateurish. In fact, domestic pets might become the real losers of the era of AI + VR over the next 50 years.

Our future AI friends will be perfect. Do you need to vent for two hours? Not only will they listen to you attentively, but they’ll take your side. And they’ll only give you advice when you actually want it. They’ll remember every detail you ever told them. They’ll laugh at your jokes and give you the most meaningful compliments. How will we ever compete?

A New Romanticism? Better friends?

AI forces us to reckon with what it means to be human. I’ve enjoyed Sean Illing’s recent podcast discussions on the topic with Paul Bloom and Meghan O’Gieblyn. If anyone has come across any peer-reviewed research about how human cognition differs from AI statistical correlation, please do send it my way.

So how will we compete with embodied AI chatbots for the time and attention of our friends and family and children? I have two hopes. First, could the rise of AI prompt a new Romantic Movement similar to what spread across intellectual and artistic communities in reaction to the Industrial Revolution? Like Wordsworth and Shelley, will we seek nature and paganism in reaction to statistics and automation? Will we celebrate “intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience?” Maybe our human friends won’t be as interesting or attentive or charismatic as our robot friends, but we’ll choose them anyway.

My second hope is that in our increasingly lonely world, AI will help us become better friends, and better at making new friends. What might this look like? Clay is an address book that uses AI to help us remember important dates and past conversations with our friends. Amorai is an AI relationship coach from the former CEO of Tinder with the mission “to help one billion people master the skill of human connection.” The Atlantic has launched a great new podcast series to explore “why—in a world with endless opportunities to connect—many people still feel alone.” It’s a reminder that making and cultivating friendships isn’t easy. It will always be easier to spend time with an AI friend who is designed to make us feel good. And yet despite the odds, I’m still holding out hope for the future of human-to-human friendship.

Maybe chess offers us a path forward. Computers overtook human players years ago, so maybe you’d think there’s less motivation now for young people to dedicate their time to learning chess just to be beaten by the machine. But the opposite has happened; chess clubs are booming throughout the country and city parks are full of young people challenging each other for the hell of it. The computers are still there, and they are better than us, but we’re still having fun with each other.

Anyway, I’ve set a reminder to look back at this post in 20 years to reflect on how it all played out.

And maybe you’re interested in having a human-to-human conversation about it? If so, please to send a response to this email. If not, no worries, I’ve always got my AI chatbot. 🤪

🧰 A useful tool: Zoom AI Summaries

Zoom now has AI summaries of meetings and potential action-items. Now I really don’t need to pay attention! 🫣 (I’m joking! … I hope I’m joking.)

👏 Kudos: Transbalkan Bike Race

I’ve been following my friends Maya, Teddie, and Johannes as they make their way through the epic 1,350 kilometer Trans-Balkan gravel race across Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It looks like the weather has been tough, but these three are tough!

More cycling news: it’s great to see the Service Course from Girona, Spain open their first outpost in Mexico City. And while the Service Course is only accessible to Mexico’s wealthiest cyclists, Rutas Cycling Cafe is doing an incredible job fostering a more class-diverse Mexican cycling community.

🎙️ A Podcast

I mention it in the piece above, but I’m really enjoying the Atlantic podcast How to Talk to People — especially episode two about The Infrastructure of Community. Let me know if you give it a listen.

And have a great week!

David

PS: Many thanks to Luis Sosa of Gentleman Geek 🎩💽 and Micah Sifry of The Connector for their quick feedback on a draft.

PPS: For a far more optimistic take, check out Marc Andreessen’s “Why AI Will Save the World”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsasaki.substack.com

Dear Friends,

It feels damn good to be home. After two weeks of work in Kenya followed by a week of winter flu and then two weeks of adventure in Japan, I arrived home a deflated, disoriented mess. I returned two weeks ago, but only now does my second cup of coffee fill me with my usual morning optimism. The worst of the blustery wet winter storms is behind us and warmer weather is tantalizingly close. This month will bring out the best of the Bay Area: impossibly green hills covered in orange poppies and yellow mustard, framed by a deep blue sky and wisps of luminescent clouds. Do you remember “Bliss,” the default wallpaper of Windows XP, the most viewed photograph in history? It was taken nearby in 1996 while the photographer was driving to visit his girlfriend. Everywhere you look these days: Bliss.

To create and to consider creativity

Is there a golden ratio of how much time we should spend each week creating versus considering the creativity of others? Writing versus reading? Painting versus viewing paintings? Could we try to calculate that percentage based on, say, how many books are published each year compared to how much time people spend reading those books? Or how many newsletters are published on Substack each day compared to the total number of time that people spend reading them?

The more time I spend writing one of these things, the less time you, lovely and busy readers, seem to spend reading. I don’t think it’s just me.

Over 3 million books are published in the U.S. each year. Traditional publishers warn on their website that “sales of traditionally published books are shockingly small.” The average published, printed book sells fewer than 300 print copies over its lifetime. Most books are only purchased by people who already follow the author online. (In other words, a book is just another format to disseminate words to the same people.) I’m still envious of my published friends, though they tell me unanimously that it wasn’t worth the effort. Writers spend years of sweat, blood, and exhaustion writing a book that few read and fewer remember.

It’s embarrassing to admit that I look at the stats. How many people opened the newsletter? How many links did they click? Do I have new subscribers? Is my engagement rate going up and down? I aspire to not care.

I’m even more embarrassed to admit how much time I spend writing. My book review of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill must’ve taken me around 8 hours to finish; the 27 people who clicked on the link spent on average 3 minutes reading it. 🤷‍♂️

The stats tell me that the less time I spend writing — and frankly, the less of an effort I make — the more that people will read. “Know when to stop” could be one takeaway. “Know why you write” could be another.

For the past few months, I’ve been working with a writing coach. (The way to make money from writing, it seems, is to help other people write.) She’s great. Every month I send her one or two drafts, she sends me back her edits, and we talk about how to make them better. But more than anything, we talk about why I write. And so I came up with a list. Actually a few lists: why do I write in my journal? Why do I write long emails to friends? Why in god’s name do I still write on Twitter? And why do I write this newsletter?

* To spark meaningful conversations with friends offline

* To stay observant about how the world is changing

* To build community by introducing my friends to each other

* To recognize and engage with other people’s writing by drawing associations and sharing my reflections

* To integrate my identity, interests, and observations from what can feel like an otherwise disjointed life

Oh right, I remind myself. I’m doing this to prompt meaningful conversations. To foster community. To stay curious. The vanity metrics collected by Substack don’t capture anything relevant to what I want to get out of this. And I am getting a lot out of it. So to all of you who have started a conversation with me based on something you’ve read here, thank you.

And if you haven’t, this is a zone of guilt-free creativity. We’ve never had more time to be creative and, perhaps, less time to consider each other’s creativity. A friend jokes that Substack’s business model depends on people feeling guilty for not reading their friends’ newsletters. (Except I’m pretty sure that she’s not joking.) I hope that’s not true for any of you.

As I’ve come to care less about how many people read and more about the five goals listed above, I’ve felt a liberating sense of calm and purpose. Perhaps there is a parallel between writing and cooking. Sure, some people become super famous and rich because they are great cooks. But that doesn’t mean the purpose of cooking is to become rich and famous. Becoming a better cook makes life more interesting, even if just for a few people.

🧰 An intriguing tool: Group chat with AI on Wavelength

I’m the default IT support person for most friends, family, and strangers in coffee shops. And so I figured when starting out this newsletter, why not share a couple of useful tools and tricks? I wanted to share tools that I find truly useful, not just intriguing.

Then OpenAI released Chat-GPT, and every week since there has been new AI-based software to try out. So now I’m more inclined to share intriguing tools than useful ones. This week: Wavelength, which is in between a messaging app like WhatsApp and a collection of threads like Slack. It’s also the first messaging app that allows you to integrate ChatGPT as a participant in a group chat. Why would you want an AI chatbot to join your text exchange with friends? I’m not entirely sure, but that’s what makes it intriguing. (I do wish my team had it as a reference librarian while we were working virtually on our last 5-year strategy refresh.) If you’d like to try it out, let me know. In the screenshot below, Luis and I asked ChatGPT to settle a recurring debate from our podcast.

📧 The future of email

(h/t Claudio)

🎤 The future of JAY-Z. (We’re all immortal now.)

Last week I shared the viral AI-produced images of Trump getting arrested and the Pope in puffy jacket. When you stop to pay close attention to those images, it quickly becomes apparent that they aren’t real. The magic of AI depends on the fact that we rarely pay close attention.

But the video below is different. It is a rap verse by JAY-Z, except that it’s not JAY-Z at all. A 44-year-old producer from France used AI software (we don’t know which) to create a voice model of JAY-Z rapping and his partner J. Medeiros wrote the lyrics. This is the first time I’ve seen or heard something produced by AI that I can hardly distinguish from the real thing, even after listening several times.

JAY-Z’s longtime producer Young Guru is pissed that now anyone can produce a JAY-Z track without needing access to JAY-Z. (Ironically, he shares his thoughts with an AI-produced portrait that makes him look 20 years younger. 😂)

Last year, Amazon announced that Alexa could create a voice model for anyone with just a minute of recorded speech. With a single voicemail recording, someone can replicate your voice and use that voice to impersonate you in all the ways you can imagine.

It will be interesting to see how copyright law evolves. Hollywood production companies are suing AI companies that have been trained on their content while also adopting those same tools in order to cut costs. Already, James Earl Jones has licensed his Darth Vader voice to be AI-replicated for future Star Wars films.

We can only assume that future generations will if they are interested, be able to have interactive conversations with a replica of our voice trained on all the content we’ve shared online. If our species survives long enough, will our AI replicas make a good impression on our great-great-great grandchildren? That’s a question for another newsletter!

Next week: more thoughts on depopulation, the effect of AI on jobs, and migration.

Until then, have a great week!

David

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Dear Friends,

By the time we’re in our forties, we’ve made enough personal finance decisions to know that some were lucky, some were unlucky, and that our financial situation today could have been entirely different. I try not to think about the stocks that I sold too early (Tesla, Apple) or too late (Moderna). I try not to think about the more than $350,000 that we have handed over to our landlords in rent over the past eight years and what would have happened if we had instead put that money into a down payment on a Bay Area home whose value has nearly doubled in the same amount of time. (The answer: we’d be roughly $800,000 wealthier.)

Ideally, we accumulate enough financial experience by our forties so that we make better financial decisions during the second half of life. But that’s not how luck works. Tesla’s stock could have tanked shortly after I sold it back in 2014. (Instead, it went from about $15 per share to over $400 per share at its peak.) Then again, for anyone who did buy Tesla stock back in September, it has since lost nearly two-thirds of its value since.

With each little decision over time, we construct our own economic history. And when we add up all of our individual economic histories, we have the story of the global economy.

So gloomy, so good

Just about every month since 1992, Gallup has called roughly 1,000 Americans and asked them the following two questions:

* How would you rate economic conditions in this country today -- as excellent, good, only fair, or poor?

* Right now, do you think that economic conditions in the country as a whole are getting better or getting worse?

As you can see in the chart below, Americans are pessimistic about the state of the economy. I’m not surprised. The media have relentlessly put up pessimistic headlines: prices are up, stocks are down, job growth is slowing, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are laying off employees.

But there is another story about the economy that hasn’t gotten as much attention:

* Inequality is decreasing

* Real wages are way up over the past decade

* Social mobility is increasing

* There are still far more job openings than people looking for work

We are perhaps in the midst of a transformation of the economy that makes it work for more people. But to appreciate the changes underway, we need to zoom out from the daily headlines.

Remember 2014? I sure do. It was the year that Iris and I moved from Mexico City to Seattle. I began a new job at the Gates Foundation. We put all of our savings into a down payment to buy a house, leaving us with around $200 in our checking account. Just a couple of weeks later, our two families met for the first time at our courthouse wedding. I knew I was entering a new phase of life — adulting, we called it — and I was terrified by the idea of having to make a mortgage payment for the next 30 years.

But enough about me. By late 2014, Obama’s approval rating had dropped from 70% when he was elected to 40% (which is lower than Biden’s approval rating today). The recovery from the 2008 economic crisis was slow going. Everyone was talking about a best-selling book by a French economist whose name we couldn’t pronounce: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Few of us read all 700 pages, but you couldn’t deny the force of his simple observation, as laid out in the chart below: the return on investments outpaced economic growth overall. And since rich people made their money from their investments, whereas the rest of us make our money from our paycheck, inequality was destined to get even worse.

What you can see in the chart above starting in 1950 is the rise of shared prosperity. Both workers and investors were winning. The global economy was growing and the stock market was growing right along with it. But then starting around 2012, when Obama defeated Romney, the rate of returns of the stock market kept growing while the growth of the global economy began to slow. Picketty extrapolated the trends to predict that the growth rate of the global economy would continue shrinking while investments would continue to grow, thereby worsening inequality for decades to come.

We got it into our heads back in 2014 that economic inequality was bad and destined to get worse. Then Trump was elected and we were too distracted by the crazies to pay attention to what actually happened.

There were two other economic indicators that we couldn’t stop talking about at the time. First, an up-and-coming economist, Raj Chetty, published a landmark study showing that social mobility had stayed flat for decades and that the percentage of children making more money than their parents had fallen consistently from 1940-1984. Second, the media started labeling millennials “the unlucky generation” as real wages fell while housing, healthcare, and college became unaffordable.

We assumed these trends would continue. Real wages would continue to fall, inequality would continue to increase, and social mobility would stay flat. But that’s not what happened. Starting in 2015, real wages began to grow significantly — especially for the poorest. Social mobility has improved considerably. Both income inequality and especially wealth inequality have declined thanks to the growth in wages and the decline of the stock market. 2021 and 2022 saw record job growth and wage growth even as fewer Americans want to work. As I write this, there are still more job openings than Americans looking for a job.

We have understandably been distracted by other events: the rise of Donald Trump and illiberal populism, the pandemic, the attack on the US Capitol, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and inflation. Hidden behind so much bad news, the economic trends have been remarkable and there is good reason to believe, as Matt Yglesias describes, that income inequality will continue to fall in the coming years (at least if DeSantis isn’t elected president in 2024).

Now, #BackToMe. In October, I will be laid off. Granted, this was part of the deal when I started working at Hewlett Foundation nearly eight years ago. And just like all of those Google employees laid off last week, I get a pretty sweet severance package, so I’m not complaining. Our plan, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, is to move back to Mexico and build a house in Oaxaca. The land will cost roughly $100,000 and the building costs another $100,000.

So this has got us thinking: is now the time to invest in Oaxaca just as the remote worker boom subsides? Or should we use that money as a down payment on a Bay Area fixer-upper now that housing prices have fallen? But what if San Francisco today — “the most empty downtown in America” — becomes the next Detroit, a vestige of an economic engine that then moved to Asia? Wouldn’t that money be better off in the stock market? Doesn’t the stock market always produce stronger returns than housing?

Who knows. Maybe we’re making a brilliant financial decision, maybe a terrible one. Only time will tell. What I have learned during my first half of life is that if you optimize only for your finances, you unwittingly sacrifice other aspects of your life: your creativity, control over your time, your relationships, hobbies, and sleep. And so while I’m not entirely convinced of the financial logic of our decision, I am pretty damn convinced about the happiness logic.

🤘Music to drive fast to in the suburbs

The experts can’t explain it. Why are the youth so sad and anxious? Is it social media? Over-protective parenting? That they no longer seem to have sex or do drugs? Cancel culture and safe spaces gone awry?

I have the answer. These poor kids don’t have rock and roll!

Trust me, I listen to more Nick Drake and Ani DiFranco than anyone else of my demographic on Spotify, but even I know the importance of occasionally rocking out.

As soon as we got our driver’s licenses, my oldest friend Kevin and I used to drive our Honda Accord and Saturn SL1 as fast as we could around the Southern California suburbs. There wasn’t much else to do. These were the songs we listened to.

Now that I’m a middle age cyclist, might I suggest that the playlist pairs nicely with the East Bay’s Pinehurst Loop. Press play as you drop down into Redwood Road (a delight that is currently closed to cars) and enjoy some 1990s rock and roll bliss.

🧰 A useful tool

I had been using Pocket to read the web for 15 years. But over the winter break, I switched over to Readwise’s Reader, which integrates with my library of book and PDF highlights, and has GPT-3 built in to summarize those sections of text that could have been more concise.

Let me know how it goes for you if you give it a try.

Have a great week,

David

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsasaki.substack.com

🎵 What was 2003?

The soundtrack of 23 years old. Full of confidence and dreams and naïveté. For me, it was 2003. That summer I learned how to design websites and started a blog. That fall I graduated from college and bought my first iPod. I spent countless nights meticulously transferring my CD collection to my iTunes library and iPod. In December, I quit my barista job at the best coffeehouse ever, packed up my car, and drove from San Diego across Arizona and Texas to my new home in Monterrey, Mexico.

My entire music collection was on a shiny white device that fit into my pocket. Just the thought of It made me giddy. What else did I need in life?

2003 was the year that electronica married indie rock: The Postal Service, Yo La Tengo, Erlend Oye, The Flaming Lips, American Analog Set, Cafe Tacuba, Broken Social Scene, M83, Four Tet, Stars, Caribou, The Books.

It was the year that country, americana, bluegrass, and indie rock merged into a new genre, Alt-Country: Wilco, Iron & Wine, Sun Kil Moon, Okkervil River, the Be Good Tanyas, Camera Obscura, Songs: Ohia.

Yes, 2003 was the year that music moved from stereo speakers to iPod headphones. But it was also the year of some epic rock albums that sounded like nothing that had come before: Elefant’s self-titled debut, Dear Catastrophe Waitress by Belle & Sebastian, Fever to Tell by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs; Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers by The National, Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie, You Are Free by Cat Power. Each of those albums laid the first paving stone for at least a decade of imitation.

And then the hip-hop: three of the most transformational rap albums of all time came out in 2003: OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, Phrenology by The Roots & JayZ’s The Black Album.

In 2003, the music was too good to be true. We all read Pitchfork every week, hungry for reviews about the latest releases in order to search them out on Napster and Limewire. Maybe everyone’s 23rd year is their greatest year of music. Maybe it’s simply the soundtrack of freedom, the first step of true adulthood. You tell me. For now, I leave you with two hours and twenty minutes of music from two decades ago.

A note about the structure: I left out the hip-hop for its own future playlist. Instead, it starts with some of 2003’s greatest indie anthems, then gets into more experimental indie-electronica, and ends with some softer, lyrical hits of alt-country. And while it might not transport you back to your first year of adulting, I hope you still enjoy the tunes.

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, we’re one week from the shortest day of the year, and then a couple more minutes of daylight to look forward to with every passing day. Have a lovely week,

David

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsasaki.substack.com

It took me a long time to feel truly comfortable in my own skin. And I never would have gotten here were it not for therapy. There’s a lot of talk about mental health these days, and I frequently question where perhaps we’re now too eager to share our trauma and pursue our personal wellness above our obligations to others. As I wrote in a blog post earlier this year:

Popular culture today has, in the words of Parul Sehgal, “elevated trauma from a sign of moral defect to a source of moral authority, even a kind of expertise.” At its best, the cultural shift opens up genuine intimacy between friends, emotional self-awareness, and improved mental health. At its worst, we seek status by performing victimhood, treating each conversation as if it were therapy, and obsessing over the pain of the past while minimizing our agency in shaping the possibility of our future.

And so I was apprehensive when Luis and I decided to discuss our experiences with therapy in an episode of our buddy podcast, The Twelve Inquiries. But then Luis sent me his edit of the conversation and I was happy with how it turned out. As I listened, I kept thinking how I would have benefitted from hearing it, or something like it, in my 20s. Back then, it extremely was rare to hear anyone admit to seeing a therapist. Even today, it’s still rare to hear men in our 40s openly describe our coping mechanisms, our experiences with therapists, and our struggles to develop more honest narratives about our behaviors.

I feel a little vulnerable putting this one out there. At the same time, I’m proud of us for being vulnerable without wearing our hearts on our sleeves.

It takes us five or ten minutes before we find our conversational groove and I’m not sure how this one will land for others, but I hope that it’s useful to somebody out there. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts — either in the comments below or by responding directly to the email.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsasaki.substack.com

Dear Friends,

Growing up, I associated Thanksgiving with stress and conflict. And so now, even as a card-carrying adult, I struggle to associate it with gratitude and good vibes.

Fortunately, one of the great perks of traveling is to return to the little things that I too often take for granted: my favorite coffee mug, looking up from the newspaper at my wife’s loving eyes, snuggling with my dog, catching up with an old friend while running alongside the glassy water of the Berkeley marina under the soft winter sun. With or without Thanksgiving, there is much to fill me with gratitude, including the kind responses and fun conversations that have emerged from this newsletter. So, thank you.

💸 A calculated risk

On Saturday, I sold my remaining bitcoin, suffering a loss of around $600. The same day, I purchased a new winter cycling jersey for $150. It’s a bummer to drop $150 when you just lost $600. Then again, I was extraordinarily lucky with my bitcoin investments. I invested $14k in bitcoin in 2020 and easily could have lost it all. Instead, I sold most of it in late 2021 when it felt like the hype machine was going into overdrive, and ended up making $24k.

In retrospect, it’s always tempting to claim credit for lucky investments. Like, I must have had some special intuition that crypto was reaching peak hype and so sold it off at just the right time. I can guarantee you, I had no such special intuition. It was pure luck. As you can see in the chart below, for the majority of the past two years, my stock investments (the purple line) were underperforming the Nasdaq index. Then the tech bubble burst and now my investments are outperforming. But let’s revisit this graph in a couple of years and I bet that I’ll be underperforming once again. If you give it enough time, we almost all underperform the market.

There have been many winners and losers in the burst of the “everything bubble” over the past year. Zuckerberg lost $90 billion. Elon and Bezos each lost $66B. But no one made and lost more money more quickly than Sam Bankman-Fried, who was worth $26B in March, $16B at the start of the month, and $0B today.

Investing is, ultimately, a game of risk, reward, and probability. The bigger the risk you’re willing to take, the bigger the potential reward, and the higher the chance that you lose it all. Sam Bankman-Fried’s life philosophy is that most people are too risk-averse. One of his favorite examples from interviews is that if most people were offered a 100% chance of $1 million, or a 10% chance of $15 million, they would choose the former. But not Sam. He bases his decisions on so-called “expected value” — the probability of the reward multiplied by the amount of the reward. 100% of $1M is $1M while 10% of $15M is $1.5M. So Sam would choose the latter. It’s a rational way to invest, especially in boom times. It is what made his fortune. And probably what caused it to disappear.

One of the more interesting debates in my field is whether philanthropy ought to be utilitarian. Do values, intentions, and principles matter, or does it simply matter what you accomplish — no matter how you accomplish it? On one side of the debate are Sam Bankman-Fried and the consequentialists, who argue that only results matter. On the other side of the debate is Tom Wein, who is admirably obsessed with ethical approaches to development, which leads him to focus on the squishy metric of “dignity” instead of more typical development measurements like life expectancy, income, and crop yields. At the extremes, the effective altruists want to blow up asteroids while the “dignity” folks want everyone to be nicer to one another, even if an asteroid is fast-approaching.

For me, this episode reinforces the value of pluralism and not becoming overly seduced by any one philosophy or ideology. Rules matter. Principles matter. Results matter. We ought to embrace them all, even when they are in tension. Especially when they are in tension.

One final thought: the reaction to FTX’s bankruptcy has largely been “we thought we could trust Sam Bankman-Fried and never guessed he would turn out to be a fraud and liar.” But if you re-listen to interviews from earlier this year, as Jacob Goldstein did this week, losing everything with the hope of trying to do as much good as possible doesn’t seem like such an unexpected outcome from Sam. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that the very people trying to convince us to spend billions on long-term existential risk never considered the very real risk that their patron would go bankrupt by making risky investments.

For a smart look at “How the Crypto Craze Corrupted Politics,” especially for the Democratic party, head over to The Connectorby my friend Micah.

🎨 When not selling out mattered more than making it

I’m 42 years old. I work in an office, wear khakis, and invest in stocks. If I could go back in time and tell 22-year-old me that this was how it would turn out, I can only imagine his disbelief and disappointment. 22-year-old me wanted nothing to do with 42-year-old me.

On my flight home from Kenya, I scrolled through dozens of movies and settled on Reality Bites, which I hadn’t seen since I was in high school in the mid-90s. I remember relating so much to Ethan Hawke’s character. I, too, was far more concerned with “not selling out” than “making it.” Authenticity meant everything and commercial success was for losers.

Of course, the film also pokes fun at the narcissism and avoidance that usually go along with obsessing over authenticity.

How Reality Bites came to be made against all odds is a fascinating story, as told by Soraya Roberts in The Atlantic. Apparently, a TV series adaptation is in the works for Peacock, which is fine, but I’d much rather watch a genuine, unconventional piece of independent cinema portraying Gen Z rather than yet another nostalgia-infused adaptation. Any recs?

Damn, I miss the 90s. My friend Mario and I were discussing what a special decade it was this morning — on the cusp of the Internet and globalization, but without the surveillance, information overload, and constant social comparison. If I could give any gift to young people today it would be that they could live through the 90s in all its glory.

🎧 Speaking of nostalgia

I failed to link to the latest episode of the Twelve Inquiries podcast with Luis. In the most recent edition, we spoke with technology critic Sara M Watson and Grafton Tanner, author of The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia. It was a fun, thought-provoking conversation that we edited down to a snappy 20 minutes. Next in the queue is a highly personal episode about our experiences with therapy. 😬 I’m happy with how it came out thanks to Luis’ excellent editing, but I know I’ll also suffer a bit of a vulnerability hangover once it goes up on the feed.

🇺🇳 Love an immigrant

Last week in Nairobi, I met Arnav Kapur of the excellent Development Dilemma podcast, which should be required listening for anyone working in global development or philanthropy. And for those who have lived in another country, I especially recommend this episode with Conor Walsh and Alexandria Syagga Njenga about “Whats going wrong with Kenyan-Expat relationships: social, romantic and more.”

Both Conor and Alexandria were forceful in their insistence that immigrants living in Kenya need to make more of an effort to learn the local culture and customs. I agree. But I was also happy to hear some gentle push-back from a member of the audience, urging her fellow Kenyans to offer grace and show curiosity about the cultures and perspectives of immigrants. I wish more Americans would show that kind of curiosity to my wife and other immigrants living in the U.S. And I hope that I am given the same grace when we move to another country.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. And truly, thanks, as always, for reading and sharing your reactions.

David

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsasaki.substack.com

🗣️ Newsletter feedback

My friend Jamie Knowlton was one of the sources of inspiration when I first tried this whole weekly newsletter business on Substack back in June. A couple of weeks ago, as we rode our bikes through the misty redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains, we offered each other feedback about our respective newsletters. Jamie pointed out that my Substack started out as a newsletter, but quickly evolved into a weekly essay. So which is it, an essay series or a newsletter?

Good point! So I’m changing things up. Each week I’ll continue to send out a short newsletter with the usual sections. When I do publish an essay on Substack, as I did yesterday, I won’t spam your inboxes. Instead, I’ll include a brief excerpt as you’ll find below. Finally, since most of you listen to the audio version I’ve set up a podcast feed that you can subscribe to via Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

📝 Essay: Could Kristen Bell, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos end global hunger?

Like most essays I write, this one was inspired by an eye-roll 🙄 when I discovered that Kristen Bell launched a granola bar company called “This Saves Lives.” I’m desperate to replace the story of Westerners “saving lives” with a new story of investing in equitable growth. Here’s an excerpt and a link to the audio version on Spotify:

I had the disorienting experience this week of seeing two radically different sides of Kenya within just a couple of days. First, I watched the opening night of Wakanda Forever surrounded by the Gen Z children of Kenya’s elite. Then, I traveled to Turkana County, which borders South Sudan and is the site of a years-long drought and hunger crisis. Both glimpses of Kenya are true. Nairobi is studded with Wakanda-like, glistening skyscrapers and impressive infrastructure. Kenya’s GDP per capita has more than quadrupled over the past 20 years. Everywhere you look, young people in the latest fashion are snapping selfies in front of luxury cars. At the same time, some Kenyan children are still dying from malnutrition while inequality has widened. With rose-tinted glasses, Nairobi looks a lot like Wakanda. But take them off, and it’s more like the Capitol of Panem from The Hunger Games.

So, why are children still dying of hunger in Turkana when Kenya’s GDP per capita has quadrupled over the last twenty years?

🤣 You can be anything

Once Twitter opened up the blue check mark to everyone, there were some hilarious impersonations that you’ve likely seen.

Way before Twitter impersonation became its own genre, standup comedian Ben Palmer was at the cutting edge. After I first came across this video via Ruth’s Friday Notes, I shared it with a friend, who said “we need way more multimedia standup.” I agree.

🚴 The rise of Kenyan cycling

Until recently, Kenya did not have much of a cycling scene compared to the likes of South Africa, Ghana, and Rwanda. (Sure, one of the fastest cyclists of all time was born here, but he never represented Kenyan cycling.) That’s starting to change, and fast. You may have seen Kenya’s Team Amani featured in a recent Meta advertisement promoting virtual reality:

First of all, let me say that however popular Zwift has become, no cyclist wants to wear a heavy headset while sweating on a trainer! Second, it’s heartbreaking that Team Amani’s captain, Sule Kangani who is featured heavily in the ad, died a few months ago in a freak accident during a bike race in Vermont.

Last weekend I went for a long ride with Bobby Joseph, an up-and-coming local pro who was mentored by Sule. On Sunday, Bobby is one of the favorites to win the 80km Grand Nairobi Bike Race — and he’ll be riding Sule’s old bike. As he wrote on Instagram:

Come Sunday the 20th of November, I will be racing with this Giant TCR 1. This is the same bike that my fallen brother @sulekangangi used to ride. To say that I am honored to race on this bike is an understatement. I can't think of a better way to honor our fallen GIANT, hero, brother, father, friend, and legend. His spirit, his passion, his entire being continues to live within all of us that he influenced. I am doing this for you Sule!

Best of luck on Sunday, Bobby! And hope to see you at the Migration Gravel Race in June!

🧰 A useful tool

Whenever I travel, I always use Google Maps offline download feature, which will ensure that you’re never lost even without reliable internet. As a bonus, it saves battery life.

👏 Kudos

Happy 33rd birthday to my favorite sister: queen of the greasy spoon diner, part-time diva, OG bohemian, and source of constant inspiration.

🚍 Empathy training for bus drivers

Finally, I loved this viral tweet showing Mexican bus drivers undergoing mandatory training to understand what it’s like to be a cyclist next to a passing bus. Here is a training program I’d like to see everywhere!

Have a great weekend!

David

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsasaki.substack.com

I subscribe to Yuval Harari’s theory of social progress: society improves when we replace a bad story (slavery is okay, women shouldn’t vote, governments should run businesses) with better stories. So that’s what I’m trying to do with this essay; I’m trying to replace a bad story (“you can save the life of a child by subscribing to a box of granola bars”) with a better story (“we can absolutely prevent hunger over the next decade with the right mix of research, policies, inventions, investments, and government capability”). Okay, here goes!

I thought that we had moved past White Savior Barbie, but then I discovered that Kristen Bell — who literally plays a princess in Frozen — founded a granola bar company called (I s**t you not) “This Saves Lives.” 🙄 Every purchase of a gluten-free, non-GMO granola bar will allegedly save the life of a starving child like Chepengat from northwestern Kenya. (The non-GMO part is especially ironic, as we’ll explore below.) Subscribers to a monthly package of granola bars, we are told, will have “3x the average impact” without explaining what “average impact” is or how it is tripled. This is a granola bar for people who want to feel good when they lay their head on the pillow at night … and that’s about it.

I don’t mean to attack Kristen Bell, who has courageously spoken out about her struggles with depression and anxiety. My intent is to criticize feel-good “save the children” initiatives that give peanut butter bars to hungry kids without addressing the broken food systems that cause recurring hunger in the first place.

From the 1960s until 2018, the percentage of undernourished people around the world fell dramatically thanks to gains from the so-called Green Revolution: better seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and farming techniques. But since 2018, hunger and malnutrition are on the rise and projected to continue rising as the world faces:

* A global shortage of grain and fertilizer from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

* Rising food costs from inflation

* Increased frequency of severe weather from climate change, including East Africa’s worst drought in more than 40 years and recent flooding in Pakistan

These three challenges, along with a growing population, will increase hunger over the coming years. (The IMF estimates that the cost of protecting vulnerable households just over the next year is an extra $5–7 billion above the usual $6B already spent on food aid.)

Obviously, we have to prioritize getting basic calories to hungry households, but it won’t address the fundamental problem. Last month, reflecting on the lack of progress toward SDG goal #2 to end hunger, Bill Gates wrote an essay (and gave a TED-like presentation) on the global food crisis: “The goal should not simply be giving more food aid. It should be to ensure that no aid is needed in the first place.”

Wakanda and Turkana

I had the disorienting experience this week of seeing two radically different sides of Kenya within just a couple of days. First, I watched the opening night of Wakanda Forever surrounded by the Gen Z children of Kenya’s elite — the so-called “Sarit youth” named after the luxury mall where we watched the opening night of Wakanda Forever in 3D IMAX. A few days later, I traveled to Lodwar in Turkana County, which borders South Sudan and is the site of a years-long drought and hunger crisis. Both glimpses of Kenya are true. Nairobi is studded with Wakanda-like, glistening skyscrapers and impressive infrastructure. Kenya’s GDP per capita has more than quadrupled over the past 20 years. Everywhere you look, young people in the latest fashion are snapping selfies in front of luxury cars. At the same time, some Kenyan children are still dying from malnutrition while inequality has widened. With rose-tinted glasses, Nairobi looks a lot like Wakanda. But take them off, and it’s more like the Capitol of Panem from The Hunger Games.

So, why are children are still dying of hunger in Turkana when Kenya’s GDP per capita has quadrupled over the last twenty years and new SUVs search for parking in Nairobi‘s many shopping malls?

In fact, Turkana County is a case of incredible progress since Kenya’s 2010 constitution decentralized public finance and decision-making from the central government to its 47 counties. Before “devolution,” there was practically no presence of government in the area. No roads, no hospitals, no public schools. The few services that existed were managed by the Catholic Church and humanitarian organizations, as Nanjala Nyabola describes in a powerful essay in Guernica:

Under this system, the Catholic Church and international development organizations (which were supporting millions of refugees fleeing conflicts in neighboring countries) were providing key services that the state would not provide, like healthcare and education. “You must understand, for the last fifty years the diocese has been the government here. Only devolution has changed that.”

Today, Turkana has a public hospital, highways, schools, and decent 4G internet. In fact, Turkana has the largest budget of all of Kenya’s 47 counties other than Nairobi. (The amount of money transferred to each county depends on its population, size, and amount of poverty; whereas Turkana is big, poor, and populous.) So if the government is well funded, why then does hunger persist?

There are no silver bullets, no cheap solutions. These things take time. The vast majority of Turkana County’s million residents are nomadic pastoralists whose ancestors came from the Nile River Valley and conquered the Turkana Basin in the 1600s. After resisting British control for a decade, they were ultimately were conquered themselves, and drafted to fight in the two world wars. They weren’t exactly thanked for their service; Turkana was mostly ignored during British rule and not much changed with independence. While there has always been conflict between the Turkana and neighboring ethnic groups, it wasn’t until they were armed and militarized by the British that the conflicts became so deadly.

For 300 years, the Turkana were conquerers. Then, a century ago, they were conquered by the British, militarized, and ignored. Only during the past decade have the Turkana begun constructing a true social contract with a well-resourced, representative government that is building roads, hospitals, and struggling to respond to a long drought exacerbated by climate change for which they are not responsible.

There is only so much progress you can expect in ten years. The photos of hungry children in Turkana are heartbreaking, but ultimately this is a story of progress.

Meanwhile, the international humanitarian organizations like World Vision that have long provided basic services to residents of Turkana over the past 50 years are transitioning to strengthen local government through advocacy, outreach, and accountability (instead of duplicating government’s responsibilities).

With a social contract in place and the emergence of a functional local government, Turkana now has the budget and capacity to implement the new and old solutions that will finally put an end to hunger for good. I will describe some of those solutions below, but first, a quick detour to ponder whether the world’s richest man has enough money to solve world hunger.

Could Elon Musk solve world hunger?

While it feels like a decade ago, it was only last year that David Beasley, the head of the World Food Program (and former governor of South Carolina) got into a Twitter spat with Elon Musk about spending $6.6 billion to “save 42 million people from starvation.” This was a real amateur move by Beasley, perpetuating the narrative that rich foreigners can “save” millions with the signature of a single check. Musk, who was born in South Africa, was right to push back:

USAID and the UN Food Program have plenty enough money for food aid, which is typically purchased from American farmers and distributed to communities facing hunger and famine. But free food can displace local agricultural production. If you’re a local farmer, how do you compete with free? So, increasingly humanitarian organizations and local governments prefer to give hungry communities cash that they can spend on local food production to boost the demand for local crops.

Elon Musk was right to push back against food aid as a band aid for broken food systems. Of course, a year after his Twitter debate with Beasley about $6 billion, he decided to spend $44 billion on Twitter in what Dave Karpf calls his midlife crisis. But Musk, with a net worth of $200 billion and a signatory to the Giving Pledge, has said that he wants to step up his philanthropic giving later in life. Bezos just announced that he plans to give away the majority of his $122 billion fortune during his lifetime. So, how could $300 billion help put an end to hunger for good?

* Invest in local production of fertilizer and seeds to end reliance on imports from China, Russia, and the U.S. This is already (finally) starting to happen in Tanzania and Rwanda with some matching contributions from USAID and the Gates Foundation.

* Improve irrigation and access to groundwater. As Michelle Williams wrote in the FT: “the volume of groundwater in Africa is about 20 times that of river and lakes. Yet in drought-stricken sub-Saharan Africa, less than 5 per cent of what is available is currently being used. most countries in Africa have enough groundwater to last decades, even if rainfalls diminish.”

* Better farmer training through agricultural extension workers, who work for local seed and fertilizer companies.

* Decrease food loss from insects between harvest and the point of sale. In Kenya, 40% of food is lost from the farm gate to the family table.

* More efficient supply chains linking farmers to consumers.

* Better data availability about weather, market prices, flood plains, commodity futures, and soil quality to inform farming decisions.

The good news is that these opportunities are all common sense. Ask anyone in Kenya’s government and civil society and they’ll tell you, of course this is what needs to happen. In fact, most of these activities form the basis of Kenya’s National Agriculture Investment Plan.

Unlike climate change, which is shrouded with unknown variables, we absolutely know how to address hunger. For all of the Gates Foundation’s foibles in how it works with civil society, it has demonstrated how to work in partnership with governments to accelerate research and the implementation of agriculture policies that will finally put an end to hunger. (In fact, Bill Gates was here in Nairobi today to discuss food security with Kenya’s new president.) At the same time, a new generation of local civil society organizations like Institute of Public Finance - Kenya and Friends of Lake Turkana is ensuring that the county government carries out its development plan to benefit the most vulnerable communities in the county.

Elon Musk is getting flak for demanding that Twitter employees commit to “hard core.” It’s hard for me to get worked up about Twitter. If it disappears, something else will surely take its place. And yet, “hardcore commitment” is exactly what is needed to improve food systems and end hunger over the next decade.

Hopefully, Bezos will finish his $500 million yacht soon and start dedicating his time and fortune to addressing the world’s most pressing issues. Similarly, I hope that Musk will move past his Twitter distraction soon enough. If electric cars, rockets, and satellite internet aren’t sufficient challenges, then might I suggest that addressing the real roots of hunger will provide him more meaning and impact than working on social media.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsasaki.substack.com