# Dave Thackeray on Critical Thinking and Staying Human with AI

by [kirupa](https://www.kirupa.com/me/index.htm) | filed under [Interviews with Creative People](https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm)

If AI can do the hard things we once had to learn the hard way, what is left for school to teach? My hunch is critical thinking and knowing how to learn, the skills that still feel durable when every answer is a fingertip away.

I chat with [Dave Thackeray](https://www.linkedin.com/in/davethackeray/), a career journalist who runs the strategic storytelling studio Word And Mouth, about AI's impact on people and how best to use it. We set out to talk about making sure AI behaves in ways we understand, but the conversation quickly went in many directions, from authenticity and failure to purpose, loneliness, longevity, and new societies among the stars.

To learn more about Dave:<br>
💼 [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/davethackeray/)<br>
🚀 [Word And Mouth](https://wordandmouth.com/)<br>
📰 [All Mouth newsletter](https://thacknology.substack.com/)

Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI

## About this conversation

The conversation begins in 1982 with a ZX Spectrum 48K and the code listings Dave typed in from the back page of Crash magazine. Sometimes they even worked. That curiosity ran through a career in journalism, a lifelong obsession with information, and a habit of asking the daft questions that make the penny drop for everyone else in the room. It also explains why authenticity matters so much to him. In a world of polished personas and AI avatars, his request is simple: give us the respect of being yourself.

That leads to a question neither of them can fully answer: could we ever build a reliable barometer of truth? Kirupa points out that most of what we find interesting lives in a gray area, and that more accuracy would likely cost us privacy, while Dave would rather know what he’s dealing with, even if that means a pixel-based polygraph. They find firmer ground in learning. AI doesn’t judge a stupid question, it can pitch an answer at whatever elevation you need, and for the curious, every answer unlocks more questions.

Critical thinking becomes the thread the two keep pulling on. With AI moving too fast for anyone to settle into a new normal, Kirupa sees critical thinking and knowing how to learn as the skills that stay durable. Dave brings the idea to building with agents: Matt Pocock’s skills can help, but they can’t replace a clear understanding of what you’re making before you start dancing on the keyboard. From there, they turn to purpose, struggle, and failure, including the chance conversation that helped Dave’s wife rediscover her gift for teaching movement.

The last stretch gets wonderfully speculative. Dave describes The Return, the book he wrote with AI’s help about Adam Smith, and wonders whether AI could lead us back to a simpler life built around craft. Kirupa isn’t sure the hedonistic treadmill would let anyone stay content there. They move through longevity, a loneliness pandemic, multi-planetary societies, new states with their own laws, and why experiments in communal living rarely catch on when there’s always an undo. Dave closes with the book he feels sums up the conversation: Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed.

## What you'll hear about

- Dave traces his curiosity from a ZX Spectrum 48K and Crash magazine to a journalism career built on simplifying complexity.
- Authenticity sits at the center of Dave’s worldview, while Kirupa weighs what a perfect barometer of truth would cost in privacy.
- AI can make some people lazier and others more curious, depending on whether they stop at the first answer or keep asking.
- Critical thinking looks like the most durable skill, whether you’re learning something new or scoping a project before AI agents start building it.
- Purpose often grows out of struggle, failure, and chance conversations, which makes it a harder question as AI takes on more of the work.
- Kirupa argues that new societies, whether on other planets or in self-governed states, only become real experiments when there’s no easy way back.

## Jump to a topic

- [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=0s) **A Spectrum 48K and a Lifelong Curiosity**: Dave traces his path from typing in code from Crash magazine in 1982 to a journalism career spent asking the questions other people skip.
- [5:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=337s) **Authenticity, Incentives, and a Barometer of Truth**: Dave makes the case for simply being yourself online, while Kirupa weighs algorithms, gray areas, and what a perfect truth meter would cost in privacy.
- [15:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=941s) **Lazier or More Curious with AI**: A remark from Dave’s wife opens a discussion of answer-seekers and question-askers, AI as a judgment-free tutor, and what AI could do for education.
- [24:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=1463s) **Stability, Uncertainty, and Critical Thinking**: As AI moves too fast for a new normal to settle in, they make the case for critical thinking and ask what happens when every layer of Maslow’s pyramid shakes at once.
- [38:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=2324s) **Think It Through Before You Build**: Dave explains why scoping matters more than ever with agents, why Matt Pocock’s skills help but aren’t enough, and how a tiny error can land you in Brazil instead of Birmingham.
- [44:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=2697s) **Purpose, Struggle, and Hidden Superpowers**: Kirupa asks where purpose comes from when AI does the work, and Dave shares how a chance conversation helped his wife rediscover her gift for teaching movement.
- [52:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=3155s) **A Simpler Life Before the Factory**: Dave describes The Return and imagines AI helping us get back to craft, while Kirupa wonders whether the hedonistic treadmill would ever let us feel content.
- [1:00:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=3620s) **Longevity, Loneliness, and Autonomy**: From Ernest Shackleton to a website where the food never comes, Dave reflects on entitlement, the race to extend our lifespans, loneliness, and the autonomy technology gives back.
- [1:05:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=3901s) **Wealth of Nations Among the Stars**: Kirupa imagines a multi-planetary future without zero-sum fights over resources, and Dave wonders whether today’s comfortable humans, and the leaders they’d need, are ready for it.
- [1:12:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4365s) **Pioneers, New States, and No Way Back**: They consider new societies as experiments, why communal living rarely catches on when there’s always an undo, and Dave’s parting pick, Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed.

## Transcript

The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors.

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=0s) - Kirupa

Hi, everybody. Today, I talk with Dave Thackeray. We originally set out to talk about AI and how to make sure it behaves in a way where we fully understand why it's doing the things it's doing. But as it turned out, our conversation went in a lot of different directions, which is actually great, because Dave has spent a lot of time thinking about AI, its impact on people, and how to best make use of it. So it's going to be a great conversation and a lot of fun. Let's get started.

All right, Dave, it is great to meet you. You're one of the long list of people that I've known online for what seems like forever. I actually don't even know when we crossed paths back in the day, but I've always enjoyed the things you've been sharing, and now it's just great to meet you in real time. I guess I'll start by asking the question that I ask all my guests: How did you get started in tech? What was the first thing you remember doing where you were like, “I'm going to do more things in this chaotic tech environment”?

### [0:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=55s) - Dave Thackeray

What a question. What a great question. Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me onto the show. I am one of these belligerent hobgoblins that most people don't want to talk to, so the honor is all mine. The only older person on X is Kevin Kelly, one of my great heroes. And actually, that's probably a good introduction, because one of Kevin's most recent articles was called Flounder Mode. I cherish this phrase, and I love the article, and I think it probably speaks to my long-held obsession with technology.

I had a Spectrum 48K, and this was 1982. I'm staggered. I talked to my much younger wife about this, and she can't count back that far. I'm very proud to say that my journey through technology started there. I remember Crash magazine coming out every month, and I used to type in the code on the back page of the magazine. Sometimes it worked. Those were the glory days.

I've always wanted to find out more about things. I've always been curious, I've always been to some degree creative, and I've always been interested in information and simplification. I was always the guy in class who was asking all the questions, and I was never really sure what I was looking for, scrambling around for answers that I didn't know I wanted, I guess. That's why I'm such a bane at meetings, because people mostly stop asking questions.

And then I typically ask the daft questions that people either didn't want to ask or forgot to ask, and then the penny drops for everybody. So I'm a bit of a cause célèbre in that respect. But I've been a journalist, so I think that whole information obsession has run through my whole life, to be honest with you. And computers obviously make it easier to find patterns in information, to find the information.

Taking me up to the modern day, these past few years have just been incredible, because I guess I'm a bit of a maverick. One of my old bosses at a higher education, further education college up north in England, before I moved here to Germany, said, “You know what, Dave? You're a bit of a maverick, aren't you?” And I remember thanking her for that. And she said, “No, Dave, it wasn't a compliment.” But I love that.

I love challenging. I think it's the whole journalist thing of campaigning for the maligned community, the people who needed you to stand up and be counted on their behalf. And navigating through complexity has always been something that I've really, really loved to do. I've always loved to find examples of how people had finally got the message and how they were able to explain things in really simple ways, because that, to me, was a sign that they fully understood their domain space. They understood what they were talking about.

That very misattributed quote—I think Pascal got it last—about “I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so here's a long one.” People who don't get it typically make things complex. They conflate complication with superiority. And I'm like, oh, so wrong!

So, a very long-winded answer: I think I've just been here trying to figure things out the whole time. It's nearly 45 years now since I got that first computer, and I'm still baffled most of the time. But yeah, it's a crazy world out there. So the more people like you and I can do to make it easier for others to understand, the better, I think.

### [5:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=316s) - Kirupa

Curiosity is something that I've seen in a lot of what you do, in that you never quite get stuck on any one thing. You're always trying the newest, coolest things out there, seeing how they apply to everyday things, and then contextualizing them in terms of: Is this really something valuable, or is it just a flash in the pan that is going to disappear in a short period of time?

### [5:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=337s) - Dave Thackeray

Yeah. One of my great friends, who works for a big fashion company in the US, calls me a scrappy futurist, which I think is probably about right. There's a phrase: strong opinions, lightly held. So I go into something, and I'm furiously excited about it. I'll spend a lot of time poking around the edges and seeing what works, what sticks, and what fails.

Because I've seen so much stuff that you do in and around, you know how many people are pretending. In this day and age, it's so easy to polish your presence and develop this gilded reputation on a house of cards. There's no foundation there. Imagine trying to build a house on sand. It just doesn't work. And yet, because we're able to hide behind so many levels of veneer now, anybody can... This whole idea of videos, user-generated content that's generated by an AI avatar—this is where I start losing hair, because I'm like, I just need people to be authentic.

If we could just establish a baseline and say, “Please come to the party. Share your ideas, share your dreams, share things that others can rally for. Please just do one thing for me: give us the respect of being yourself.” Because that is such a difficult thing to ask for in this day and age. And that's the one thing that drives me mad above all else: How do we get people to just be themselves?

I don't know whether that's insecurity, I don't know whether that's frustration, I don't know what it is. But that's why X is one of my favorite places to hang out and, at the same time, one of the most exasperating, because you never really know—unless you @Grok, voice of reason—who's telling the truth. And that might be something that Trump got right. Maybe post-news really is a thing.

### [7:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=471s) - Kirupa

Yeah, it all goes back to incentives in many ways, right? What is the incentive for someone to be authentic, which takes more time and more thinking power to get something right, versus putting something into an AI that just says exactly what their audience wants to hear? Whether it is accurate or not doesn't really matter. And you rinse and repeat that over a period of time. The way the algorithms are designed, they're going to naturally promote the content that people like, which may or may not be authentic, and those who are more authentic end up having to struggle for the last 20% of eyeballs, which often never get used.

### [8:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=510s) - Dave Thackeray

Do you think we'll ever be in a position where—and this may or may not be propelled by AI—people will have enough trust in themselves? They will have endured enough failures, and they will have a mindset of positivity fueled by their own capabilities, where we're able to create a barometer of truth or a barometer of authenticity. In real time, whether it's the person themselves confessing that they are speaking nothing but the truth, or some kind of technology that's able to give us an approximate heuristic of how likely it is that the person we're talking to, who is in our eyeballs, is who they purport to be.

Because that's something that... I spend so much time building stuff these days, and that's the best thing about the current day: the fact that we can create personal software on the hoof. One thing that I would really like to see is some way that we can guarantee that the person we're talking to is being themselves. Can we get there?

### [9:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=597s) - Kirupa

I think this is the journalist in you speaking in full volume. I think about this question a lot, and I don't think there's a good answer for it. The reason is, there are things you can verify as true or not. Am I living in the place that I say I'm living in? Have I worked in the places that I said I have on my LinkedIn?

But most of everything else that we find interesting is in a gray area, where it's hard to verify unless you devote a massive amount of resources. Or you live in a situation where every moment of your life is tracked online, or in some kind of system that knows everything about you: all your private messages, maybe even your thoughts.

I do think that things like Neuralink will become an everyday part of our lives, where we're going to be augmenting human capabilities with those of computers. And they're going to have telemetry. They're going to have data that they send back to a centralized system. So there will be a world where even the gray area will be something that can be analyzed and basically balanced against truth and not.

The question then is, do we want that as well? Are we okay with essentially a true yes-or-no, 100% accurate kind of meter that tells you if someone is being authentic or not? And what do we lose as a part of getting that accuracy? You get more accuracy, you lose privacy. Or you can be inaccurate, which is the world we're living in right now, but that maintains a certain level of freedom.

### [11:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=687s) - Dave Thackeray

Yeah. Was it A Few Good Men? “You can't handle the truth”? I think I could work with a pixel-based polygraph. I think I would be more happy knowing what I'm dealing with rather than guessing at what I'm not. And this is why I'm so interested in your work with algorithms. It almost feels like we're entering into an age where there finally is an answer for everything, and it takes people who are a thousand times smarter than I am to get to that point.

But if some people are telling the truth, seeing how quickly we are reaching these higher highs than anyone could have imagined just 12 months ago, in terms of all of these major questions that are already being solved by swarms of agents and billions of tokens, I think there's a certain comfort. You asked me at the start of the conversation as well. It's what drives me: I want AI to help us all embrace our own humanity, and I think humans have failed to help us do that.

If everything goes to plan, technology will remove a lot of the drudgery and the burdens from our lives so that we can focus more on being meat-based, biological. And I think if we can unlock that, there is a door opening for us all. Because we are, by definition, becoming more as we ought to have been before everything—before environment changed us and rooted us somewhere we didn't necessarily need to be.

I wonder if, because we are then becoming more humane, we are able to be more accepting of the unvarnished self. Then Instagram might just fade away, because we all know what that is really there for. I think there are so many human-created problems that we could fix or overcome quite cleanly if we were able to find a way to accept each other. I don't know whether that starts with basic respect, but I'm obsessed with the idea that it starts with authenticity.

I don't want it to go off into some philosophical treatise at all, but that, for me, condenses my worldview and everything that I'm working for at the moment into that one thing. If I could just make a tiny, tiny dent in helping people to be less insecure, less judgy, less obsessed with this perfect self—man, can you imagine how many problems in our world would just dissipate? Because we'd finally be able to talk toe-to-toe, face-to-face, mind-to-mind in a way that's unfiltered and unguarded. Oh gosh, that sounds like Christmas Day and my birthday rolled into one. Bring it on.

But that's what I say. This is the great thing about the world that we live in right now, and especially AI: it can take anybody in so many different directions. I'll just finish off this latest monologue with something that I was chatting about with my wife the other day. She was saying, “I think AI has made me lazier,” which is a common refrain. I hear that from lots and lots of people: “I'm just getting the answers. I'm not having to think about it.”

My point of view on that is that I think it polarizes two very distinct camps even more. One is the people who don't respect the currency that is information—this goes back to the information thing. They're like, “I just want the answers. I don't want to think about it. Just give me the answers.”

And then on the other end of the spectrum—not right at the other end, but close to it—I'm there, where I'm thinking that asking the questions of AI unlocks lots more questions for me. The first question is just the starter of the banquet. And I start going, “Well, okay, that helps me to understand the subject a bit more, so I can pry a bit more, so I can tease out a bit more information.”

And then I'll ask it to take different stances. It's the common prompt engineering thing, the context. I'm saying, “Okay, this time steelman it, but this time also strawman it.” And then I'll say, “Okay, you've got all these different arguments. Right, I want you to take a position on every side of the argument, or every side of the subject. You're an expert here, you're a teacher here, you're a student here. Help me.”

You would never have had access to this information before. This complexity, this texture of data and information, is something that we just didn't have access to before. And sure, some of it would be hallucinated. I think that is decreasing as frontier labs do better and better work, I think—not yet proven. But that information quality and density that we just didn't have access to—at the moment, I think that, again, is something that is helping us to become more truthful.

Because instead of hiding behind opinions that we never had validated either way, right or wrong, if we're the kind of person who wants to be seen to be an expert, then we've never had better tools and better information at our disposal. So we're creeping there. And I think the more people get to not fear AI and think that it's going to kill us all—there's a 10% chance of this—the more confident, as empowered and informed humans, we will feel in ourselves. So bring back Alan Watts is what I say, Kirupa, in short.

### [18:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=1103s) - Kirupa

I think it's very true, because one of the things that's nice about AI is that it doesn't judge when you ask a stupid question. It has no concept of what a stupid question is. So for any topic—getting back to your question of authenticity—as the consumer of content, I have all the tools at my fingertips to go really deep in an area with pretty much the world's best expert, which an AI in many ways is.

If I'm reading something about, let's say, nuclear energy, and I don't know all the ins and outs of it, and Grok's summary gives me a reasonable answer—like we talked about earlier with what Twitter provides—I can go deeper. I can ask the AI for more details, ask more questions, ask more follow-ups, and have the answer be at the right elevation to help me understand it. It doesn't have to go very deep. It can be very high level, or it can go all the way to the deepest of weeds, pointing to scientific research that might have happened in recent history.

Those are things that we never had before, and that's one of the best things about AI in some ways: if you're willing to put in the time, you can be an expert on anything very quickly, because it is tuned to your style of learning. Do you like reading dense text? Option available. Do you like reading things more in a visual form? Available. Do you want it in a video form, dynamically generated just for you? With the latest models, if you're willing to pay for the extra tokens you need to generate that, you have it all available.

That makes it one of the most groundbreaking things I've ever seen, especially given that I spend a lot of time trying to teach people various things. It's completely changed my worldview of what it means to learn and teach at the same time.

### [20:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=1201s) - Dave Thackeray

We could spend about 361 hours talking about the positive benefits of AI in education. It's one of my latest soapboxes. And I'm not just talking about Alpha School. I won't go off on a tangent too much here, but there's a guy, Anand Sanwal, who used to run a financial analysis company called CB Insights. Brilliant, brilliant mind, and he's now into education.

And I wouldn't say aping Alpha Schools... Alpha Schools, in a nutshell, is where they give you three hours of civics or three hours of specific focused education, and then the kids go off in the afternoon and do whatever they want to do: forestry or making hats or rockets. The real vocational stuff.

But I would love—by the way, in Germany it is illegal to homeschool your child, which I can see getting old pretty quick, but for now that's stood for about 50 years or more. I really want to see some progress, some solidifying of pedagogical principles, educational principles, with AI enhancing that mandate. And I don't think that's too long from now. I don't think that is fortune-telling or crystal ball-gazing. I think within the next 12 to 18 months, we'll see something quite established come to fruition.

You've got a young daughter. I've got an even younger daughter. All the time that I'm spending on AI these days, looking at ideas and proposed solutions, I'm like, how could this be adapted in its sort of protein form and its sort of atomic unit state to help young people? To almost be like a version of technology that isn't ruining their brains as social media did.

I think social media has been a terrible blight on the potential of technology. I actually think social media for most people has gone... People now think, “Oh, technology is just decaying everything. It's accelerating entropy,” whatever it is. People have a very cynical view of technology. I hope that AI, through things like healthcare that we've already seen, but specifically education, because that's my soapbox, can actually start turning around technology's reputation.

I would love to head PR for technology right now, because I think we're standing on the shoulder of something really quite exciting. But we've got a ton of things to do first before we can restore public faith in technology. And I think that's the problem: people think AI is the problem. I think it's what begot AI—technology's earlier mistakes and missteps—that is putting AI in the predicament that it's in now.

And that's what we've got to work through before we can get to the point where everybody's like, “You know what? AI isn't here just to ruin art. AI is here to help us, in some way, save ourselves.” And so we're at the stage now where it's a blank canvas, aren't we?

I think you're vastly more experienced in this world than I am, but I feel like the more I look at people who are supposedly experienced in this space, they're talking so naively, because they just don't have the tools. None of us have the experience yet to talk about it expertly. But I'm absolutely adamant we're in a blank space state right now. That canvas is ready to be painted on, but we're nowhere near ready yet to pick up the brushes and start making a proper mark on it. You must be feeling a lot of that. Where do you think we are on that spectrum of AI maturity?

### [24:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=1463s) - Kirupa

I think the... no one knows. And here's the reason why I think that. With every technology that we've had, there's always a moment where something brand new comes in and completely changes how things are done, and then there's a steady state that goes on for three, four, five years, where it's like, “Okay, now I know what's going to happen. I'm going to build all my knowledge and figure out how to reorient my entire view of the world, or my business, or my personal life, around what technology did.” The internet is an example. Networking, data—all of this over the last 30, 40 years were good examples of it.

But with AI, we're not able to get that moment where things are standing still long enough to just pause, analyze the current state, and then figure out how to reorient and rebuild everything around it. Because by the time you make even the first crack at figuring the solution out, AI takes another leap forward in terms of what it's able to do. And that causes fear. At the end of the day, many societies like the stability of being able to know, day in and day out, what will work and what won't. At least that describes the majority of people.

There are always the outliers who like to go and shake things up a bit. They're often the entrepreneurs, the ones who create the company. They're the ones who stick their neck out where failure is very much an option, and they're okay with it. They're like, “Yeah, either I want to win big or lose big, but I don't want to be in the middle where everything is just comfortable.”

If you think about it in terms of a seesaw that you might have had growing up, or that you've seen in playgrounds today, either one direction is up and the other direction is down, or you're meeting in the middle. With AI, it actually amplifies both extremes in this bizarre world. It's kind of like quantum entanglement or something, where both sides can be up at the same time. So it amplifies the best of society, but it also amplifies the worst of it.

And depending on where you stand and what direction you want to focus on, you're not wrong being terrified of AI and thinking it's going to be the end of humanity as it is. And you're also not going to be wrong thinking that AI is going to be the cure and solution to everything that is going on. Until AI slows down to the point where we're like, “Okay, let me pause, let me take stock of what's available and what's going to be relevant,” it's not going to give comfort to anybody.

Because our society for hundreds of years has really been designed around this classic model: you learn a trade, you get really good at it. You spend multiple years going to school, learning the basics of critical thinking and memorization, and then you go even deeper into an area you think is going to be valuable. If you go to vocational school, you're applying that more quickly to the problems of today. Or if you go into a four-year program and then graduate school and so on, you're spending six, seven, eight, ten years to do a PhD.

You're in a system that has been decoupled from reality in so many ways. And now you find yourself entering a job market, or entering a set of problems, where you're completely unprepared because you spent all this time in a traditional world. Every day you're spending not working hands-on in the real world, education is just taking you further away from being relevant.

So how do we tell people... Like we talked about earlier, we both have young children. What does it mean? We may all have taken traditional paths of going to school and getting a degree. What does it mean for them in their world in the next 10 years, or 14, 15 years? What is the value of an education? When AI can do all the hard things that I had to learn the hard way, that you had to learn the hard way, what is the one kernel that education is going to teach you?

My hunch is that it's critical thinking. If you tease apart everything else, knowing how to learn and being able to think critically about something are the two things that I feel are still durable, even in the world of AI. For everything else, you're just a fingertip away—or in the future, just a thought away—from having the answer from AI. Do I need to know how a Fourier transform works? Probably not. I wrote about algorithms a lot. Does someone really need to know how an algorithm works? No, they really don't. They might need to have a basic understanding of it.

But AI is going to get to a point where there are enough competing AIs that you aren't going to have an AI saying, “I'm going to deliberately mislead people. I'm going to deliberately say that you should do this thing because I just choose to do so.” If you're in a competitive environment, you're going to try to be the most accurate AI, the fastest AI. You're going to do all these things.

And so I worry less about relying on AI to power 90% of the things that our brain typically does. But when we also offer the 10% of critical thinking to the AI as well, that's when I get a little bit concerned. Maybe even that concern is actually not a concern at all, and it's just me projecting my past historical biases onto how fast things are moving right now.

### [29:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=1753s) - Dave Thackeray

The critical thinking thing—you are hitting the nail on the head. We see a real shortfall in people's critical thinking ability across the board: all levels of power, authority, anyone, the everyman. And you made a really good point about where we are with AI, and the seesaw is a perfect analogy.

There are two trains of thought on stabilization, aren't there? One is where AI slows down. Not sure that's going to happen. Geoffrey Hinton might say that, and Yann LeCun might say that we've got the wrong architecture to build us towards ASI or AGI. We're projecting, we're philosophizing, or, to use a common parlance, we're hallucinating what the future looks like with our current generative AI architecture. That might be true. So I'm skeptical. I don't know enough.

But the more worrying example of stabilization is where AI gets to the point where it has achieved ASI, and therefore it doesn't need... I can't remember whether it was Elon or somebody—and it was only this week—who said there's no point striving for more once you achieve a certain level of intelligence. There's just no point. It's like you've ticked all the boxes, all the symbols are green. It's irrelevant.

And if we get to that point, that's when people start taking notice and start thinking, “Oh, maybe I need to jump on this train.” It's too late. It's too late. We're at a point where people's minds will be blown in every conceivable way, and I think that jump will just be too far. So the critical thinking piece is something that we can really work on now. And unfortunately, AI at the moment is just magnifying greed rather than magnifying our lust to be better humans.

Back to that model again: I think there are seeds and shoots, camps where people are starting to use them. There's a friend of mine who runs a brand called Slow AI—Sam Illingworth, who's an academic, and a very smart academic—and he's preaching AI from the perspective that we should make it applicable, we should make it practical, and we should be pragmatic about it, rather than just going all in on something that none of us know enough about.

But this whole curriculum design thing: how do we give our young people the skills that they need? How do we give them agency? How do we foster creativity and innovation and entrepreneurship? It's an inevitability that needs to be adopted in their lives as the number of real jobs declines exponentially. At some point, the reverse hockey stick—I'm sure that's coming one day.

And I think the bedrock of all that, you're absolutely right, is that everybody in every conceivable part of the education system, or even civilization at large, needs to grasp the critical thinking nettle. And I'm not sure that we are in a position where the shape of education is right, nor is the curriculum preached by education right.

So if we're not able to... And thank heavens AI is here, because maybe it will be able to create a semblance of personalized learning, as it is with personalized medicine, or at least take that to next levels of success. But unless we're able to practice what we preach—and we preach that everybody has different learning styles, going back to basics here—unless we're able to adopt a different way to teach, and not just a different subject to teach...

Talking about what we said earlier, which is that people will just keep on dumbly using AI to get the quick answers: the people who are minded and wired that way won't be able to be taught unless we have a radically different way to readjust their view of the world and show them the incentives that can be achieved, if only they can rewire their brains and get into a different modus operandi.

But there seems to be nothing but problems at the moment, in a world where there should be abundant opportunities. And maybe this is it. Maybe AI has just helped us to identify those unknown problems and surface those—the Eisenhower matrix, isn't it? Surface those problems that we just weren't aware of, or that we just pushed under the carpet and conveniently hid because we didn't have any answers for them. Well, maybe the carpet's disappeared now. Maybe it was a magic carpet.

And we now have an opportunity to solve the problems. It's like when you've got a broken dishwasher on the worst possible day: all of a sudden those dirty dishes are coming out, and we've now got to figure out a different way to clean them. And I'm hoping that the capitalist in all of us recedes gracefully, just for a few years, as we start to reset what civilization could be and start to envisage a better tomorrow.

Maybe it takes a scrappy futurist, I don't know, but I'm very keen to see those conversations happening, ones that give us hope for the future rather than fear that we can't cope with the modern day. So how the heck are we going to deal with the most uncertain tomorrow? And I think...

### [35:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=2143s) - Kirupa

I know you mentioned you don't want to get too philosophical here, but I think we're already there. So let's go deeper into the philosophical world of it. What makes AI very different is this: if I look at multiple views of what makes for a fulfilling life—Maslow's pyramid of needs is a classic one—I always feel like, for the longest time, all the problems that we faced never hit the core of that pyramid itself. You always worked on tangential problems around you. It's like, will I be able to do A? Will I have time to watch things? Will I be able to go somewhere? And all of that.

What AI is really doing is going right at the middle of every one of these layers. If you don't have a way of getting basic physiological safety—will I even have a job? How will I pay for my everyday basic living?—if you don't have that foundational thing answered very well, everything above it, like am I being authentic, am I learning critical thinking, is all secondary. Just like it would have been for anybody in any situation where, even without AI, this was going to be a challenge.

When we talk about social media and all these things, I'd say that various parts of technology, as part of amplifying both the good and the bad of human flaws in general, and the good things as well, all go at various sides of it, but never in a very even path.

Social media might have cracked this nut of self-esteem and love and belonging and so on, where you were like, “Okay, I don't have that. I'm going to make up for it with social media. I'm going to do all these other things.” In some ways that's good. In some ways it can be very bad. But AI just takes this big brush and goes across all of it at the very same time.

Going back to earlier, a pyramid can always be rebuilt as it's getting damaged. You can always fix it. But when the damage is happening in all directions at the very same time, where do you even start trying to fix it? One of the classic things you learn just working in business—and I'm a product manager, so one of the classic things I always like to explain—is that sometimes you just let the whole thing fall apart. Let the pieces fully break and fall, and then it's time to put it back together.

### [37:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=2266s) - Dave Thackeray

Brave.

### [37:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=2269s) - Kirupa

There's no point trying to stop the plates from spinning or falling out, because you're not going to succeed. You're going to waste unnecessary effort. Just step back, let it fall, then we'll rebuild it afterwards. I think that is, again, a scary concept for many people, because everyone wants to grow up in a world where they think they have all these basic things, or where they follow a certain predetermined path to have that stability. I think the lack of that makes it very worrying for a lot of people. And governments and societies are a reflection, in many ways, of what people are thinking.

And so a lot of what we're seeing are the leaf examples of the core problem, which is: how do we ensure stability when everything is going to be changed? And there's no sight of that stability coming, because the cause of the change is rapidly increasing. The models are getting more powerful, which is good and bad, depending on your point of view again.

### [38:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=2324s) - Dave Thackeray

Yeah. And to bring the critical thinking thing back into AI, I had this thought a while ago. I thought if we were able to educate a new generation of solution engineers and database architects, then at least they'd be ready for the next two to three years. That changed completely when I realized that Opus 6 has probably got you covered. Thanks for the offer. However, I now think that if our future world is going to be truly agentic, then critical thinking is at the heart of that part of life too.

Because that's the one—like I said to you before—I've failed in. And I think failure is fantastic, by the way. I'm probably the best advocate for failure, because I've done it so often. And I've survived, and I've bounced back, and I'm quite happy about that. But I think the biggest problem for me with doing anything with AI has been properly scoping what I need before I've even touched the keyboard.

And I don't use Whisper. I don't go into the whole voice stuff. I'm not a massive fan of that. I've still not been won over. I think that's for the kids, which is basically anybody under the age of 40. But I realize now... There's a great developer and hero of AI called Matt Pocock, if you're familiar with him.

### [40:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=2427s) - Kirupa

Yeah, I follow him.

### [40:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=2428s) - Dave Thackeray

But of course you do. Everybody does. And he built loads of AI skills. Skills are basically just folders that tell AI what to do in more detail, so you don't have to keep regurgitating the same old instructions and JSON and whatever you want to throw in there: markdown files, blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, unless you've got one of Matt's skills... He does something called Grill Me, or the Wayfinder skill. Wayfinder is more for features, and Grill Me is to conceive the project with the best possible underpinnings before you get into the PRD stage, which is essentially—I'm not telling you; obviously this is your job—instructions for how a project will unfold and ensue, and then there are tasks and stuff that fall out of that. So Matt gives you a hand with that by asking you these probing questions.

But I don't think that's anywhere near enough if we are going to suddenly have one billion serious builders of applications and solutions. Because it assumes, or it reads between the lines—it interpolates—it fills in gaps for you. It's there as a partner. And so it's not actually getting your mind clear, so when the agentic coding partner returns later and asks you questions, you're not fully clear. You're not the teacher. You're being taught.

Critical thinking for me is taking those 360-degree cameras—and this is probably a good metaphor—looking at every conceivable angle of whatever it is that you're trying to create, and having this fabulous understanding of it. Microsoft Word is a good example. I often look at Microsoft Word and I'm like, how the heck did all of that functionality come into such a sprawling application? It blows my mind.

And yet I feel like we all need to have a systems understanding, or a solutions knowledge, for a project, or for whatever manifestation we want to create in our name. We always need to have that level of detail, that diligence in understanding the product, before we start to build it. Otherwise, everything that happens after we start dancing on the keyboard is going to be fundamentally flawed. And as you start to build out, all those errors start to amplify.

What you end up with is a bit like that famous example where the pilot of a plane had the compass set 0.1 degrees off its destination, and instead of landing in Birmingham, he landed in Brazil. The difference is voluminous. And critical thinking is at the heart of that. If we aren't able to properly look around an entity, the construct is going to be something vastly different from what we thought we'd conceived in the first place.

We're expecting AI to act not only as a tutor, but also as a mind reader. And it isn't that. That's why we keep being told that judgment and taste are all that's left for the human once AI takes hold of our world, our universe. Critical thinking is... My goodness me, how do we get there? This is great, having this conversation, but I genuinely don't know what we need to do.

I don't know whether we establish it. We talk to Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist, and we say we create this great worldwide critical thinking institute, and everybody becomes a card-carrying member, and you have certain obligations, otherwise you're not going to get your benefits. I don't know. But the more we think about critical thinking, the more it becomes clear that it's way bigger than any one of us individually would even fearfully acknowledge.

I think it's mad. And thank you for bringing this up, because it's huge. I feel like even just having this conversation, Emmy, my daughter—I feel like her education is in slightly safer hands now, because at least we've talked about it, and it's out there somewhere. So thank you for that.

### [44:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=2697s) - Kirupa

Yeah. As with all things, it goes back to incentives. I think we're going to get to a point where our definition of success is going to evolve over time. If success means that critical thinking is the one thing you need, and everything else becomes secondary, naturally you're going to start getting people to do what needs to be done to have critical thinking at the forefront of what they work on.

Again, going back to the pyramid of needs: if that's what's going to help you get that stable pyramid, you're going to do whatever it takes. Because no matter what, those mini metaphors of how you create a fully fulfilling life—for thousands of years, it's all danced around various forms of that pyramid in some ways.

And so critical thinking might be the one that you need. Because if you take a traditional engineering job over the past 20, 30 years, not everybody was a critical thinker. There were people whose job it was to listen to someone who had the vision for what the future needs to be, what the final product needs to be, and then they had to make it a reality.

In this world, that role is being more and more given to AI, because how something gets built, and all the things that need to be done as part of it, AI is going to do for you. But it still does not have the ability to actually look at the various things that are going on, connect the dots, and come up with a cohesive narrative, a nice story, and the solution at a level of detail—to your point, keeping the AI from going to Brazil when it actually needed to go to the actual destination. That's where domain expertise, taste, critical thinking, all of it comes back into the picture.

Now the question is, will there be enough of that for 7 billion people to do? Or how do we break it down into a world where there's still value?

Because I will say a lot of my identity and purpose is around technology. I love that I know these things. I love spending time in conversations like this and so on. If I had to start over today, with AI doing all these things for me in such a trivial fashion, very, very quickly, I would need to find a new thing that gets me motivated, that gets me excited about what I do. Without that, I don't know what I would be doing, or if I would be as optimistic as I am about the future.

I think the sense of purpose is something that we need to figure out. How do we give people that, where there's something to strive towards? Because for a lot of people, the hard work they put into accomplishing something—that's huge. Every book I've read about people who are in the Marines or in the military, or who did hard things... By working on hard problems, it doesn't matter what domain you're in. Just by virtue of having gone through the struggle of doing something difficult, it makes you a better person at the end, because you're now able to contextualize your view of what you need to worry about and what you don't.

You mentioned earlier that you love failure, and that you've failed and succeeded so many times. But with each time you've done that, your bar for what is a moment of panic, or something you need to stress and lose sleep over, changes greatly. And the more you go through the extremes—the highs of success and the lows of failure—the better tuned you are at it.

And I think that with AI, most people never get beyond a certain zone, which means they're almost always in a certain state of panic. It comes down to the experiences you need to level set: what am I actually needing to panic and worry about? What is a true fight-or-flight situation, versus, “You know what? Just let it go. Not a big deal”? Of course, that's something you'll be learning through society and your family and so on, but the main way you're going to learn it is by walking through the fire yourself.

### [48:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=2927s) - Dave Thackeray

Yeah. And this whole idea of scar tissue—which incidentally is a great name for a podcast, so if you're looking for your next adventure, fly by. We don't celebrate these failures, which I think causes us to reflect inwardly rather than respect outwardly. It's a dangerous game to play, especially when we need community more than ever. We need people in our lives more than ever. And I think that's maybe what technology was designed to do in the first place: to actually help people be more human, which we've covered briefly.

So I love this whole idea that you were talking about, of purpose. And this is the one nut that I don't think the vast majority of us have ever managed to crack. We're all in... I say “we,” I don't mean it literally. Most of us are in jobs that we hate. Most of us spend most of our waking lives doing things just to pay the bills. And it seems like an awful waste. And I think if there was a way that we were able to help people reflect on influences that were of a positive nature, that were giving them hints as to what their superpowers really were...

I talk about my wife a lot. I'll talk about her again. I met her over three years ago at a co-working space in Tenerife. And I fell for her because, as well as being incredible in the corporate world, she has been a dance teacher. I remember vividly, we were sat on the roof terrace at this co-working place, and I said, “You have to give a class of this particular flavor of dance.” It's a very accessible form of movement coaching for anyone, even me. I've got two left feet. And I said, “You've got to do this,” because she has so much passion about it.

And so one night we went to the shala, which is just like a yoga studio by a different name. There were 13 or 14 people there. There were lots of guys there, which is quite uncommon when it comes to anything to do with movement. And every single person by the end... She got us all to start on the floor and then gradually rise up. It was kind of a spiritual thing.

And from that day, she's done a lot more in this space, because I saw in her this incredible potential. And I say it was always there. It was always there. She's had training, but it had gone dormant because other things had taken precedence. Since then, she's on Insight Timer now, which is a free platform where she does this twice a week, and she gets the most incredible reviews. Clearly there's something there. This is her superpower.

Which just gives you evidence—and it's N equals 1, it's not exactly empirical—but it gives you a suggestion that sometimes it's chance conversations with people that will help you identify what your real purpose, or your raison d'être, is. I don't think we need Simon Sinek to tell us that.

But this has moved me into an interesting space that I just wanted to cover, and I think it kind of wraps up the critical thinking thing quite nicely. I said before that my main obsession is to simplify complexity, and I think that's what made me a reasonably good journalist. A few months ago, with the help of AI, I wrote a book called The Return, which posited the idea that... A guy called Adam Smith, exactly 250 years ago, wrote a book called Wealth of Nations.

And this was to essentially remove the specialist roles and replace them with some degree of automation. So instead of having one guy making the whole pin, you'd all of a sudden have 40 people on this makeshift conveyor belt, a factory model. All the different parts of that pin would be made individually by 40 different people. And therefore, if you ever had a problem to do with the whole pin, then obviously this theory would fall down. But it worked beautifully well.

And this whole factory model that Adam Smith conceived has taken us to where we are today. If you look at cubicles in an office, it's essentially a factory. Every office is essentially a factory. And I'd always thought, until recently, that we needed to move forward to 2027 and beyond, where we talked about a fully agentic industry, or an agentic civilization. And then we'd need to figure out ways of doing futuristic things as humans. What are we left with?

But I'm actually starting to think that it's gone the other way. As AI removes more and more things that we considered human, but were never human in the first place—they were just things that we had to assume because no other entity would be able to take them on for us, all that grinding—I actually think that we are going backwards.

So in a way—Yuval Noah Harari, I think that's his name, the guy who wrote Sapiens and Homo Deus and all the rest of it—he always talks about the arc and the evolution. I'm actually thinking that with AI, we can yearn for and receive a simpler life that predates Adam Smith and Wealth of Nations, where we go back before the factory. Maybe we go back to the days when there were true craftspeople: ironsmiths, blacksmiths, all of these different people. I love this idea of making horseshoes.

We go back to this world where—talking education—the curriculum goes back to maths and science, and everything is almost analog again, because computers are taking care of the digital side of our world. And we can actually do what humans were designed to do in the first place. Because we always say, don't we, that we were never designed for the modern world. Well, who's to say that we can't have what we were designed for back?

But with all of the pleasures and all of the luxuries and all of the miracles that the modern world has given to us. If 16th-century Britain had had all of the cholera vaccinations and all these magical things that would have stopped people getting poisoned by the water supply...

I watch Sherlock Holmes, and I'm like, I would kind of like a bit of that, please. Arthur Conan Doyle knew what he was talking about when he wrote that. I don't want all the murders and all the grisly crimes and stuff, but I quite like the whole idea of the dressing up and all the fancy stuff, without any of the curses of the ancient world. Who knows?

### [56:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=3410s) - Kirupa

I mean, maybe that's what the future will end up becoming, in its own way. Is there a world where you don't have to do a 9-to-5 that you don't like, and you have a thing that you're uniquely qualified to do, and you just do that day in and day out, and you're happy doing that? And AI does all the busy work, or the things that you don't want to do, at a scale that's personalized to every person in society. So you do spend a way to maximize what's going to happen.

But I always find that... You've probably heard about the hedonistic treadmill, where you have to constantly be on the treadmill in order to make sure your bar for what makes happiness keeps increasing. Because for humans, for various reasons... We have two cats, and a lot of our friends have dogs. And there's a very simplistic view of their world, where they don't look for the next big thing. They don't compare their current state with their previous state and then go, “Okay, why am I not moving fast enough?” They're just content, because they have an absolute point of view of what it means to be happy and satisfied.

Whereas for humans, that bar is always moving, and it's always based on: am I happier today than I was yesterday? Even though my absolute level of happiness is probably astronomical compared to what it was for anybody at any point in history—for all of us collectively, with all the modern amenities and technologies that we have. But it's like the derivative. It's the slope, the delta between yesterday and today. If it's going up, I actually am happy. But if it's even slightly going down, I'm not focused on my absolute level of happiness being very high. I'm so focused on that small glitch where it went down a little bit.

I think we're wired like that. So my worry is that even if we get into a situation where we're doing that, contentment is just not basic human nature. Maybe it was back then, or maybe it wasn't. I think we just have this romanticized view of what it was like before. But it's just that the base level was so much lower than it is right now that small things could rapidly increase your ability to be like, “Wow, this is amazing. I'm truly happy,” for a brief moment until the mundaneness of it catches up.

I think that might be one of the things where we might need to be rewired a bit. And who knows? With these neural implants that might be coming out, maybe we're not that far away from being rewired to be as content as our pets are. But to go even further, in a darker direction: maybe social media and endless entertainment at our fingertips is a version of that, where we are basically force-fed contentment. Our need to be constantly evaluating—are we doing better today than we were yesterday?—and striving to become greater than what we were before is no longer needed. That's been greatly dulled.

And so, as long as... Was it the movie WALL-E, where there's the robot, and everyone's just floating around in space, happily watching things, completely physically unable to do any major work and so on? Maybe that could be a version of society we end up in, if we're not careful, because any alternative would require more challenges. Given an easy path and a hard path, most people and societies will choose the easy path.

### [1:00:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=3620s) - Dave Thackeray

I mean, I think we're a long way from Ernest Shackleton, aren't we? He put out that audacious newspaper article saying, “This is the most cataclysmic adventure that you will ever endure. I would probably rather you didn't apply for this, but if you are a madman, come join us.” That kind of route. And I can't imagine anybody... Probably because expectations and entitlement are so rife among us these days. It's like, why is this not being handed to me on a plate?

I remember, in South Korea at the moment, there is a trend for these websites where you go through the process of ordering, but nothing ever comes. One of the websites is called Food Never Comes. So it's like an Uber Eats, but you just get that dopamine hit of placing the order. And then you're like, “Well, it's never going to come, but I enjoyed the moment while it lasted.” And that whole idea of satisficing—I never quite got that.

But there's this whole thing about life not really mattering quite like it used to. And this whole thing about longevity now, this addiction to ever-extending our lifespans—it's a real thing. I mean, Bryan Johnson is kind of the poster child for that, I guess. But there are big names, David Sinclair. There are lots of people out there who are desperately trying to find a way out of death. And I just think we have lost sight of what it means to truly be human.

And we all get caught in the technology bubble. I'm one of the worst for it. I spend way too much time still on X, and I am in a filter bubble. And I know most people are not like this—the 0.01% of the population that hangs out on this sometimes quite fetid social network. But I do think, having spoken to real people as well, that there is a disengaging from what we used to be.

We know there is a loneliness pandemic at large. Old people are seeing their friends die off. They're getting older, and for some reason, disease still claims most of us. There are many, many more people who are missing partners now, who are lonely. And at the same time, I see opportunities for telehealth and virtual companions. So there are solutions there.

But fundamentally, I think this is all about giving us our humanity back through, as you mentioned before, this whole thing about purposefulness. I think we are getting to a point where we are being given that as a gift. If we're able to start to trust ourselves rather than trust organizations, I think this is where technology really does play a trump card, because it does empower us.

It does give us a degree of autonomy to choose our own futures, like those adventure books used to do. I just remember turning to page 56 and battling an orc in one of these Choose Your Own Adventure books. And it feels a little bit like that, but with a rosier ending.

So this is really why I get so amped about AI, and why, like yourself, I'm really keen to cheerlead for and advocate for technology in our lives, with an asterisk, or a caveat, which is: please use with care, and consult a medical professional if you have any problems with that diabetes. There is always a better future. I think we just need to own our own futures better.

And I think that's in part what technology is starting to force upon us, really: this autonomy, which used to... Because we were under the auspices of a nanny state, or because our employers were taking care of us a little bit too well. We're now entering the stage where autonomy is ours, and there is no alternative to taking responsibility for ourselves. And I think that in turn, slowly but surely, will turn us more human.

### [1:05:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=3901s) - Kirupa

You brought up Wealth of Nations, and one of the things that Adam Smith also talked about is that it's not a zero-sum game. It's not a world where someone has to win and someone has to lose in order to be successful. It is a world where, by trading and by being more interdependent upon everybody, you end up growing the pie larger than what the individual parts might have been before. That was another completely fascinating way of thinking about the world, and about how various countries viewed what their success would be over the next several centuries.

Now, let's imagine... You mentioned longevity and all these things. When everyone is going to be alive forever, the fight for resources will be even more drastic than it might be today. But we're looking at it from a point of view where all the resources we care about are within the Earth that we live on. Imagine we become a truly multi-planetary species, where there are probably more planets out there than there are people even today, when we basically look at the numbers.

What if it becomes a situation where there is no longer this limit of resources and space and all the things that we have right now? You can actually have the same thing on a different planet, in a different area, where you're no longer constrained by the resources you have. Living forever is not going to mean competing with someone who is also living forever, where you have to compete for that same small piece. What if the version 2.0 of Wealth of Nations is really about the wealth of, essentially, intergalactic regions?

And at this point, we no longer need to worry about whether AI is going to do all the work for us, because there are going to be so many things that need to be done. There's so much from robotics and from software, everything that needs to be done, that your 9-to-5 job will now be different, because there's plenty for you to do. You now have purpose, because you can go back to being a craftsperson at one particular trade that you might need to do, because there's so much opportunity outside of just the planet that we live on.

### [1:07:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4024s) - Dave Thackeray

I'm skeptical, and I'm slightly cynical about this view, and I love to embrace it and poke at it feverishly. Dan Suarez wrote a great book about asteroid mining, which really got me on this path to start thinking about the scenario that you pictured. I can see that we might eventually end up in that situation, and not because the world's end is near. I don't think it's that we can't do it. I don't think that it is a non-starter as far as an idea goes.

My problem is, I'm not sure that humans would be... In a bit the same way that we talked about the stabilization of AI. We talk about neuroplasticity, and the fact that we can rewire ourselves and adapt to changed situations. But if you look at some anthropological studies where people have been placed in challenging situations... There was a research paper from, I think, the '80s, where they tried to emulate earlier civilizations and their lifestyles and their structures and impose them onto a then-'80s group of people. And they wanted to see if these individuals were able to cope with and tolerate the conditions that their ancestors had.

And they performed so terribly badly that the research study had to be cut short prematurely, because it was so interminable to these people. It wasn't like The Revenant. They didn't have to wear bearskins. They didn't have to go around enduring all these miserable conditions in exactly the same way. But they were given a hint of what it would have been like to live 300 years ago, and they just couldn't do it.

And this, to me, feels like a land of milk and honey. I'm like, yeah, I would be one of the first people who would tick the box saying, “Yes, I will go on a one-way journey to Mars.” I'm fascinated by the idea. I think it could really work. And I love the idea of going back to these simple vocations that we talked about.

But I think something tripped before the COVID pandemic, probably around the financial crisis in 2008. I think something tripped in people that almost took us into a place, mentally, where it would have been impossible for us to even live back in the '70s, let alone in a world that was so mythical to us. I mean, 30, 40 years was implausible for most people, I think, in the noughties, in the 2000s. Just intolerable in every conceivable way. I'm just not sure that we could deal with it en masse. I don't know.

Because I think we don't have the... We think about people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, these real great totems of civilization. People... I mean, even Elvis, in a different way entirely. But all these real big people who inspired conviction and reliance and commitment and reassurance and self-respect and ambition—none of these people exist anymore.

So, against a backdrop where the only person who almost occupies a deity-like role among a certain community is Elon Musk—apart from that individual, where are the leaders who can take us from a very comfortable position to a very uncertain state? And even if the rewards and the incentives you mentioned are so great, to teleport yourself into that new environment takes some degree of aspiration beyond the individual self, beyond Maslow and his pyramid. I think it takes something like a higher power, almost, to guide us there.

And I don't think there is such a thing these days. I don't know about you, but I certainly haven't seen any evidence of this individual or this manifestation for decades now. So I fear that while it could transpire, we as people couldn't transpire to become healthy and self-sustained in that state. I just don't think we can right now exist in anything but a status quo in the here and now.

And again, that's why I worry quite a lot about how we're going to handle things in the next few years here on planet Earth, with no other civilizations to contend with, and no interplanetary species to worry about. It's like, I don't know. I just think we're a bit soft, don't you?

### [1:12:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4365s) - Kirupa

Yes, but here's where I think it might be different. What this now creates is that you can have competing ideas: people with different versions of what the world should be like. They can populate a different part of the universe, and then over a period of time, we'll just see what works and what doesn't. We often talk about experimentation and being able to try things out, and it often happens at a very small scale, in an area where it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. Your business might go under, but it's never a society-redefining kind of moment.

But in this new kind of world, where you do have the ability to build your own thing from scratch without your traditional government, we do get to see which of these utopian views will work and not work. It's very different from, let's say, the 1500s, 1400s, when America was first being discovered by the European settlers, and then they created the Constitution. America was an experiment. The founders had a point of view that was radically different from what was done before, where individuals have the ability to control their government and their destiny in a much more direct way.

Okay, now imagine that we multiply that across every one of the planets that you and I want to encounter. I think there's an opportunity here to figure out what will work and not work, and to truly be able to redefine it. Now, will we get there? Probably not anytime soon, but I think the pieces are slowly being laid for that to be a starting point.

I think there's a technological thing we need first. You can't spend your entire living existence stuck in a spaceship. There needs to be better technology there. In the longevity world, if it is truly your telomeres that give you an indication of your age, and you're able to reverse that, now you can be in cryosleep. And then for a thousand years, it doesn't matter, because your biological age has not changed from when you first got onto the spaceship.

I think opportunities come up. I think we have new problems and new things to solve. And I think the right people at that moment will come in, because you're going to have the pioneers. You're going to have the individuals who are willing to sacrifice everything to see how this works, just like the many people who might have gotten on the Mayflower many years ago, not even knowing if the boat would reach where it did.

And even before that—I'm always fascinated by history in general—when you read about how the Vikings discovered so many parts of some of these areas, they didn't really have advanced technology, or even a compass in some cases. They just went forward and hoped that they hit land somewhere. I'm guessing we learn about the survivors. Probably many did not survive, because they did not end up hitting land. They ended up being lost at sea forever.

But those kinds of things, I think, are very innate to us: the need to discover, the need to experiment, the need to do things. Not with everybody, but with enough people, where a few people are showing the path, just like your example of Gandhi or Martin Luther King.

Those are all examples where you don't need everybody to do this. You need one person to say, “There is a path here. It's going to be rough, but the destination is going to be worth it.” There'll definitely be a role for people in that world, and again, you don't need everyone to do that. There is hope. I do think there's hope for that.

### [1:16:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4563s) - Dave Thackeray

I think trust and authenticity come back to this as well: these individuals need the currency of trust in order to influence enough people to follow their lead. And again, that feels like it's dearly lacking these days in our communities. Maybe it occurs... Do you know a guy called Balaji on X? Very, very prolific guy.

### [1:16:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4594s) - Kirupa

Yeah, yeah. I think he talks about crypto and society and many things. Yes.

### [1:16:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4600s) - Dave Thackeray

Nation-states. There's another guy lately who has been talking about creating something similar in Honduras. And I think this is a stepping stone. This is a test bed. This is a real litmus test for how we might act, serve, and behave in a thoroughly unique environment, in readiness for something that is quite audacious.

By the way, I think you should put a bid in with Charlie Brooker to be a scriptwriter for Black Mirror, because some of this stuff is seriously next-level, and I would happily watch endless episodes about your theories. I love these ideas of creating new states, with your own territory, your own laws, your own principles, regulation. I wonder why more of this hasn't caught on. I've always been really interested in the idea of communal living, like kibbutzes.

### [1:17:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4660s) - Kirupa

Ah, I have an answer for that, because I've spent a lot of my thinking on exactly that.

### [1:17:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4662s) - Dave Thackeray

Please, God, yeah, fantastic!

### [1:17:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4664s) - Kirupa

The reason is, there was always an undo. You make a decision to go into one of these states, and you're like, “Oh my God, I made a mistake.” You can always go back to your previous life. That option existed for many of the pioneers back in the day, across all civilization.

When I was reading about when Iceland was discovered, I think by the early Vikings, the boats got destroyed. They couldn't go back. They had to figure out a way to make it work in that area, and they hoped that other people would come in the future and be able to replenish supplies and so on. But they were banking on, “Okay, whatever is provided here, we're going to have to make the best of it.”

I think that's where you need that true isolation of a thousand-year space trip or something like that, where... The escape hatch is so easy: you can always just pull the cord and be like, “You know what? I made a mistake. I'm going to go back to the earlier thing.” Because what we're talking about here is fundamentally rewiring our views of success, of right and wrong, and of what we've been conditioned to think the world needs to behave like.

And you need to go through that struggle to rewire your brain, rewire society, and all of that. That cannot be done if you're always just one quick plane ticket away from getting back to your comfort zone. It's about how far from the comfort zone you can go and tolerate the pressure of it.

### [1:19:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4747s) - Dave Thackeray

You just described Matt Damon's role in The Martian, haven't you? Where he was growing potatoes in that biosphere while he was waiting to be rescued. And I don't know whether that film has in any way influenced Elon's wild ambitions. But there are so many examples, aren't there, of no way back, and how that can positively affect people.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. When we are facing adversity that's out of our control, people are remarkably ingenious and creative in finding ways to endure it. Before we recorded this podcast, I told you about how limited my long-term memory is. Well, I remember vividly watching a movie called Alive, which was about a plane crash in the Andes, I think deep in the winter, and how people essentially ate each other to stay alive. And that, to me, is the extreme of what people are capable of enduring when they are in these particularly precarious situations.

And you're right. I think sometimes... In fact, it is on me, not giving people the credit they deserve. If you take a cross-section of the population and you expose them to certain things, if you're lucky in choosing the right ones, then they will amaze you. But equally, there are other cross-sections where you'll be like, why did I even bother running this study in the first place?

### [1:20:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4850s) - Kirupa

Yeah. It's a classic pathfinding problem in algorithms, for example. You believe it's a destination somewhere. You have a wide open space. Do you take that next step, or do you retrace back to where you are? And you have no idea whether the next step you were going to take before you gave up was the actual destination or not.

And it depends on your tolerance for risk, or your tolerance for... Is the gain worth losing everything? Do I not have anything to lose? Those are some of the equations that play a big role in this. And I think that's why you often find the most uncanny individuals are the ones who end up doing some of this risk-taking, because they're like, “I have nothing to lose, and I have everything to gain. Otherwise, I don't have this middle comfort zone. Either I'm doing this or I'm not. And so I'm just going to go forward.”

Even in careers, even in business, even in just your typical 9-to-5 jobs, you often find that those who lean in and go all in on something may be wrong, and then we never hear about them again. But those we do hear about were the ones who did exactly that. Survivor bias, and history being written by the winners, and all of that. But you do find that there's nobody who was truly impactful in their society, or in their world, or even in their local environment, who didn't go all in on something they believed in, and then reap both the benefits and the downsides as a result.

### [1:22:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=4936s) - Dave Thackeray

Wow. Do you know what? One day I would love you to just do one whole episode, with you just tipping out all of your brain cells on the prisoner's dilemma and game theory. Because those are two subjects that I would dearly love to be taught alongside critical thinking.

I think those help us to better understand human behavior, and also to understand how to socialize in the best possible ways. They really open our minds to things that I don't think we fully understand. There are some people who do fully understand them, and it's those people who need to share what they know with us. They're the ones who can simplify complexity, and they're the ones that I want to hear from.

And I also want to hear what Jeff, which is that newish decision-making AI model, would say if it was asked to solve the trolley problem. So these are just very random stream-of-consciousness thoughts aligned to what we've been discussing, because I wanted to, A, just take you in a different direction, and B, give you an out if we've already outlived our welcome for the length of this particular episode. So it's another choose-your-own-adventure moment for you. Decide what happens next.

### [1:23:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=5024s) - Kirupa

Yeah. I think, Dave, there's a lot more that you and I can both chat about, so I think we should have a round two at some point in the future. This is definitely not the last time that whoever's watching or listening is going to be hearing us go off on a complete tangent.

One of the things I always mention is that our conversations here—we often have a set of topics we want to talk about, but it often goes in whatever direction we end up going. I think this episode is a classic example. There was an idea of what I thought this entire conversation was going to be about, but I think we took it in a much better, much more authentic direction than it would have been with us talking about the same old things: AI, technology, storytelling, entrepreneurship, and all that.

So I actually love this conversation, and I definitely want to have round two of it, and also dive deeper into why you don't like voice as a form of input when it comes to using AI. But that's a topic for a future time.

### [1:24:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=5086s) - Dave Thackeray

Well, thank you. And I want to just give one recommendation of a book that kind of sums everything up, from my perspective, for today's conversation. It's trotted out with monotonous regularity, but it's called Black Box Thinking. It's by a chap called Matthew Syed, a very popular newspaperman over in the UK. He discusses all kinds of theories and debunks most of them. Brilliant, brilliant book, all about critical thinking. Some real surprises in there.

And yeah, it's one of the greatest influences, if you like, on my later growth professionally, and one that I was able to share with lots of my colleagues, which probably picked up a couple of promotions for me in the process. So I recommend that book to anyone. Not that you asked me for a recommendation, but I was happy to share it anyway.

### [1:25:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=5134s) - Kirupa

No, fantastic. I'll make sure it's linked in the description and so on. But Dave, thanks again. I know with the time zone it's late, but I appreciate your time, and we're going to do this again.

### [1:25:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClFkj9v5TeI&t=5145s) - Dave Thackeray

Pleasure.


## Conclusion

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