What I learned from the people who shaped the century - Vikas Shah [Camp Digital 2018]

“WHAT I’VE LEARNED
FROM THE PEOPLE THAT
SHAPED THE CENTURY.” *
Vikas Shah, MBE
Twitter @MrVikas

Wait…. So you’re a journalist?

THIS TALK ISN’T ABOUT MY DAY JOB
I’M GOING TO TELL YOU ABOUT
A HOBBY THAT WENT ROGUE….
*

But first, get comfy… there’s a
[necessary] economics lesson

95%
5%
Things that can't necessarily buy happiness but help
immensely.
Money Literally everything else

But what is the secret of making
this ‘money’ of which you speak?

Intelligence & Wealth are
Not correlated.

“Are you rich?”
I don’t know, but….
On average, everyone in this photo is a billionaire….
Bill Gates Some dude…. My Cat (Samosa)

T E C H N O L O G _
CLUE: I am the source of all major economic & social change.

I don’t mean tech in the startup sense…

Information
Industrial
Agricultural

Dude, there’s no oil
Holy crap! We have oil
We literally make ALL
The oil….
Hmmm…… I don’t
Think we have as much
Oil as we thought…
Dude, what is this
’renewables’ nonsense
Dude, nobody wants
Our oil anymore
The Kingdom
of Oiltopia

The old newspaper model:
We control access to eyeballs, we are the
arbiters and controllers of quality content,
and it’s really hard to enter our world.
Vs.
The new media model:
Anyone can access any eyeball, anytime,
for practically zero cost. Quality isn’t that
important anymore, emotion is.

The old newspaper model:
We control access to eyeballs, we are the arbiters and
controllers of quality content, and it’s really hard to
enter our world.

DU
http://www.thoughteconomics.blogspot.com **
** catchy right?

“..but wait, I almost choked on my
non-dairy avocado cappuccino on
my way back to my coworking space
where I run a global branding
consultancy, where I am CEO even
though we have no employees, so
technically I am CEO of myself, but
that aside…….. And before I go to
my meditation with pigeons class….
Thought Economics is a crap
name….”
- A. N. Other Brand Consultant

Vikas: I’d like to interview you.
Jimmy: Sure, send me the questions!
Vikas: *sends*
Jimmy: Those are sh** questions, try again.
Vikas: *works really hard & sends*
Jimmy: Great, let’s get a call arranged!

The rest of this talk contains a surprisingly high amount of name-dropping….
However, it’s relevant to the talk, so don’t hate me too much…..

Deep breaths………
... Count to 10
….. Get your therapists
number ready….

“OK, I get it, you’ve met some
famous people. BIG DEAL, I paid a
lot of money for this conference,
so tell me something useful.”

https://thoughteconomics.com/
Bookmark this immediately.

https://thoughteconomics.com/
1.Interviews with the individuals who have
shaped the century.
2.All interviews to be published as transcripts.
3.No editorialization of interviews & content.
4.No advertising on the site, ever.
5.Interviews are text only.
6.The site should always be free.

“…when things become ubiquitous, they also become invisible. It used to be
that the process of getting online for me was a separate step, with a noisy and
slow process of a modem on a phone line. Now, with WiFi, my laptop often seems
to just simply be on the Internet. The process of connection has become much
less visible, so that the feeling of my computer connecting to the Internet has
changed to a feeling that my computer is the Internet, or is on the Internet.
Similarly, as the Internet becomes ubiquitous on various kinds of devices, it just
starts to be part of the assumed fabric of technology. This changes how we relate
to it, and how we use it.”
- Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia & Wikia Inc
Interviewed by Vikas Shah, Thought Economics

“In the past, with consumer culture, economics dictates that most resources go
into empowering the hit makers. So we got a lot of investment in building great
popular culture, and some of it really has been great. But some of it has also been
really quite awful and bland. With participatory culture, economics dictates that
we pour more resources into building an infrastructure platform that anyone
can use, so most resources go into empowering the long tail. Small groups of
people can come together and make use of a powerful infrastructure to enable
them to pursue their own passions and interests, without regard for popularity.”
- Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia & Wikia Inc

“The internet is a nervous system for humanity, one we have built
ourselves. It’s an extension of our minds using technology, allowing us
to share the sum of human knowledge and endeavour online. At the
time the technologies creating what we now call the ‘internet’ were
conceived, nobody had any idea it would grow as fast as it would, and
that pace of growth is continuing unabated.”
- Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of the Ethernet *
* For any millennials in the room, Ethernet is basically wifi, but with wires.

“The internet is simply the latest in a series of information sharing
capabilities which started with writing and came through major milestones
like the Gutenberg press and other mass-media like newspapers, television,
radio and so on. It has the interesting property that it permits interactive use,
whereas most mass-media mechanisms are one-way through publishing,
broadcast television, radio and so on. Internet, on the other hand, allows for
two-way and group interaction.”
- Vint Cerf, one of the ‘Co-Founders of the Internet’
“We can’t imagine humanity without the level of interconnectedness
we experience now, the internet has changed everything.”
- Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of the Ethernet

“The centre of our culture has shifted from the finite,
monumental pages of our books to screens; which
are unfixed, eternally changing and becoming
something else. The centre of our culture is becoming
ephemeral, fast moving and incomplete – and it’s
changing our constructions of truth. We are weaving
and connecting together a very large thing which
could be thought of as a large machine or organism.
This organism is composed of 7-8 billion people, and
the many, many billions of computers, servers, IoT
devices and chips which are wired together into one
meta-organism.”
- Kevin Kelly, Founder of WIRED

“I think in the future humans will use technology to upgrade themselves into gods.
I mean this literally, not metaphorically. Humans are going to acquire abilities that
were traditionally thought to be divine abilities. Humans may soon be able to
design and create living beings at will *, to surf artificial realities directly with
their minds **, to radically extend their lifespans ***, and to change their own
bodies and minds according to their wishes ****.”
- Yuval Noah Harari, Author & Thinker
* - Done (J. Craig Venter)
** - Verrrrrry close…..
*** - In progress
**** - A startup called Nectome is trying to do this (no, really)

“Take death itself as a leading example. Throughout history,
death was seen as a metaphysical phenomenon. We die
because God decreed it, or the Cosmos, or Mother Nature.
People accordingly believed that death could be defeated only
by some grand metaphysical gesture such as Christ’s Second
Coming. Yet lately we have come to redefine death as a
technical problem. A very complicated problem, no doubt,
but still only a technical problem. And science believes that
every technical problem has some technical solution. We
don’t need to wait for God….”
- Yuval Noah Harari, Thinker & Author

“I think it would be foolish to say it’s not possible to overcome
our limitations. When a scientist says something is not
solvable, they’re usually proved wrong, sometimes rather
quickly. Ageing looks like a hard problem now, but we know a
number of the things that contribute to it…. overcoming these
problems is harder than understanding them, it would be
foolish though, to think they will never be overcome. Even if
we’re aiming for immortality, just having a healthy lifespan
of 120 or 150 would be pretty amazing right? The
consequences of that alone would be enormous to humanity.”
- Professor Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize Winner

From the time humans emerged, to basic art and proto-writing, 69900 years
From the emergence of this basic art (cave painting) to agriculture 16600 years
From agriculture to fire 8200 years
From the wheel to democracy 2470 years
From the industrial revolution to the advent of modern physics, 125 years
From the first commercial broadband (c.2004)
to Kim Kardashian breaking the internet with
her bum (2014)…. Ten years.

…be careful of people peddling statistics……

“…it’s OK to be weird, it’s
OK to be strange. Normal
is boring, you don’t want
to be normal...”
- AJ Mendez
Correlation between awesomeness & strangeness

Meet Dmitry Itskov, the 37 year old billionaire who is trying to make us the next platform.

“Until now, mankind has created technologies that were meant to be extensions
of the human body such as a car, a train, a plane for fast movement, a mobile
phone for communication at a distance, a video camera for recording an image, a
warm house to have shelter from bad weather and so on. We suggest focusing on
the development of the human body. Can we make the body faster and stronger,
invulnerable to disease and high and low temperature, pressure and radiation?
Can we make the human body immortal? I believe that further human evolution
will be associated primarily with the transition from a mortal, biological body to
an immortal, artificial body. We may evolve from having one body to having
multiple; from having a vulnerable biological body to having a cybernetic body;
to having a nano-robotic body that can be controlled by thought to change its
shape, and then, perhaps, to a hologram-like body consisting of light. Perhaps,
these evolutionary changes seem fantastic and shocking, but I think that it is an
inevitable reality. .”
- Dmitry Itskov, 2045 Initative

“Technology, as long as we are not talking of something
super-human, is just an amplifier of intentions. The more
powerful technology is, the bigger the impact you can
make on the world. Compare for example, bows and arrows
to nuclear weapons. They’re both technologies with the
same intent, but the impact of a nuclear bomb is greater
than a bow & arrow. One of the concerns existentialists see
is that we may have people who- for some reason- want to
extinguish everything. The more powerful our technology,
the easier it becomes for them to do that…”
- Jaan Tallinn,
Co-Founder of SKYPE /
Future of Life Institute

“Where we consider existential-risk, there are now
many more people on the planet considering these
risks than ever before, and as a result, we are
relatively much safer than ever before. That doesn’t
mean we are safe, but we have gone from the path of
certain doom to the path of almost-certain doom –
and that’s phenomenal progress in relative terms!”
- Jaan Tallinn, Co-Founder of SKYPE / Future of Life Institute
>> P H E W ! <<

“With one exception, every event in your life may or may-not
happen, death will definitely happen. We know we’re mortal, but
we don’t seem to be able to come to terms with it and so we live
our lives in a foolish manner. If you are conscious of your
mortality, and you don’t know whether your life will end today
or tomorrow, you will live very sensibly. You won’t have time to
quarrel or fight, you won’t have time to wage wars, you will only
do what truly matters and nothing wasteful. Right now,
humanity- somewhere in it’s mind- thinks it will be around for an
eternity, and you see the consequences of this everywhere.”
- Sadhguru (Actual Guru)

“You have to be patient, and you know
what? You gotta’ like bullsh** A lot of
the time, the reason your stuff ain’t
working is because bullsh** happened. A
lot of people give-up because of the
politics and turn into frickin’ wusses. If
you want to be successful? You have to
take bullsh** and turn it into fertiliser..”
- Will.I.Am (literally the coolest person on the planet)

“Everyone has their own path and their own truth to
follow, and we become the product of many things- our
parents, our environment, and so on. It’s very important
to make sure that you understand, as early as you can,
who you really are- and what you want to do in life. You
have to be a very strong character to survive life. How can
a child, with such little strength, fight a world that is so
f***ed up? …we have to change the world and realise that
we’re born alone, and we die alone.”
- Marina Abramovic, Artist

“We all grow up with dreams but life kicks us around a
bit and we then leave school, get busy, and sometimes
life or people rob us of these dreams. The game
changers of society are the ones that hold onto these
dreams and they fight their way through the mess of
life and stick to their visions.”
- Bear Grylls

“War is hell, I was there I’ve seen it, experienced it, and lived
it. In my 98th year, it’s not my problem. But for the younger
people, wake up, speak up, stop it! For the young people of
today, I give them three pieces of advice:
Never give up.
Never give up.
Never give up.
And that’s the best advice I can give,”
- Ben Ferencz (Prosecutor, Nuremberg Trials)

“You have to live for today and make the best of today.
Maybe at the end of the day you will feel like you have not
hurt or damaged anyone or even that you have done some
good. It’s been the lesson by which I have lived the rest of
my life. You can plan for the future, but not anticipate it.
In reality there is only today, nothing else.”
- Iby Knill (Survivor, Auschwitz)

Is this guy almost done….?...

That time I met a national treasure…

So how did you speak to him!?
1. I wrote letters
2. I emailed
3. I spoke to agents
4. I spoke to managers
5. I spoke to the BBC
6. And then…

In true nature-expert fashion…

20 Requests Sent 10 Replies/Discussion 3 ‘Lets Schedule’
INTERVIEW

"For leaders, fear of failure is hugely important; if
you look at the negative behaviours of many
organisations and people, they are as a result of
dodging responsibilities and decisions through a
fear of failure. Fear of failing limits organisations.
A little bit of fear is good, it generates a creative
tension and gets people to respect the task at
hand, but as soon as you’re more scared of
failure than you are excited about succeeding,
that’s when fear becomes a problem.”
- General Stan McChrystal

"Sometimes I don’t think people know what
they’re signing up for when they become
entrepreneurs… nobody talks about the failures
and very rarely do they talk about the very hard
times. Nobody wants to admit that their
company almost went out of business 10 times.
All the talks I give are about failure, how hard it
is, how much this job kinda’ sucks and genuinely
how tough it is. People often go into this world
thinking it’s all roses, and it’s not.”
- Dennis Crowley

“… People must go toward a fearlessness
where they are trying new things, and must
accept that by doing that- a certain
percentage of things will fail. Failure is not a
necessary evil, but rather- it is a positive part
of on-going progress… the fact that you fail
means that you are trying. As soon as you
try to avoid failure, your life is actually
facing the wrong direction.”
- Ed Catmull

“We create our lives, and
we can recreate them too.
Your biography is not your
destiny…”
- Sir Ken Robinson

THANK YOU!
Vikas Shah, MBE
https://thoughteconomics.com
Twitter @MrVikas

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