Billionaire Chris Sacca answered my question in front of hundreds of thousands of people and blew my mind.
He answered my question about our social responsibilities regarding the pace of technology, and in doing so he reminded me why today’s billionaires give me hope for humanity.
Chris Sacca (AKA DJ Sacca Khan, AKA MC VC, AKA Sir Tweetsalot) is your typical kind, bearded tech dude/dad in a very unique 21st century cliche-Silicon-Valley-sort-of-situation. He was raised in a small town, but now he’s on track to be the most successful venture capitalist of all time. Casual.
Even more casual, I got to ask him a question — and he answered it in front of an audience of (as far as I know) several hundred thousand people on the Tim Ferriss Show podcast.
The mechanics of this, if you’re interested, were: Tim Ferriss, who is a good buddy to Chris and also new media mogul with the top-ranked business podcast on iTunes, decided to do interview round 2 between them a few weeks ago.
Tim tweeted that the questions should come from us, his audience. I happened to be lucky enough to catch that tweet right as it hit, so I had something of an early-poster’s advantage on Reddit - I got upvotes just because I posted as soon as I could.
Now, if you haven’t listened to the first interview Chris did with Tim Ferriss, you might enjoy that as well. It informed the question I ended up asking. You can find that first podcast by clicking here.
His answer, and the second podcast, is here.
Anyway, here’s my question (click here to see it on Reddit):
Chris, in light of your admiration of Bucky [Buckminster Fuller, for the uninitiated] and fascination with scifi and musings about the future, what are your thoughts on how human societies can adapt to the increasing speed of tech advancement?
More concretely, how do you see your family’s day to day life changing as VR comes to prominence, alternative education becomes the norm, artificial intelligence starts replacing a significant number of jobs, biotech starts changing our lifespans, and we begin to colonize other planets?
His answer knocked me off my feet.
Not only did he take nearly a full third of the podcast to answer me, he went in directions I never could have seen coming. I’m so glad I got the chance to ask.
Here is his answer, trimmed from the full podcast:
I’d like to break his response down, comment by comment. I think what he said was an amazingly informative look at the way decision makers in Silicon Valley see the world, but also a surprising look at what can be done to increase our own level of awareness and empathy toward other groups of people.
Please note that the quotes below are paraphrases for simplicity. If you want his full comments please listen to the podcast (which is not mine and I do not have rights to) by clicking here.
First, on colonizing planets
“Oh man, this just got DARK! Planet colonization is not a short term concern of mine, the physical limitations of space travel render it low on the list for me. Unless you know something about hyperspace I don’t know yet…”
This part of my question was informed by the fact that I recently had the opportunity to tour Space X twice. If any group of humans is on track to make us confront the ethical and legal realities of space colonization within our lifetimes, SpaceX is that group. If you’re curious about the details, Wait But Why had unprecedented access to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and put together an incredible piece on the entire story (and game plan) for SpaceX. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. The post goes into great detail on the entire plan, from rocket launches right now to fund research, all the way to an actual plan to start colonizing Mars by 2030ish. Truly crazy times we live in.
Next, Engineering vs. Empathy
“We have an engineering focus on what the measures of progress are, and that progress is outpacing our biological [and perhaps ethical] adaptation.”
We hear tech-enthusiasts (and Chris actually mentions this in his answer) talk all the time about the exciting advances we have coming. There’s very little talk about what the societal implications for that technology will be.
Often, this is just because it’s hard to imagine exactly how coming technology will change things. But sometimes it’s because we’re just not being fully attentive in the face of shiny, exciting inventions.
This isn’t a new problem.
In the early 20th century, societies first began learning how to adapt to television and radio’s effect on human moral development and family dynamics. We have ratings systems as a result of some of the slip-ups we had as a society along the way.
We know from how things have gone in the past that we have to keep track of the pulse of new media because of the dramatic ways mass media and new technology can influence people’s views about each other and about the world we live in.
What’s most interesting to me about his thoughts is that this isn’t what you’d expect to hear from your stereotypical billionaire. And that’s what’s so exciting about today’s billionaires: they’re not stereotypical.
We’re still living in the first few hundred years in human history when you can genuinely navigate from a place of relatively little influence or power to become one of the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet in the span of a single lifetime. As a result, those in positions of influence are now more representative of and empathetic toward the average human’s position than ever before in history.
Obviously, I’m not saying there’s not a lot of room for improvement, there is always room for all of us to improve our own empathy.
To broadly generalize, most individuals in positions of power and authority seem not to be aware enough of their own privilege in comparison to the range of suffering and economic difficulty in the world to say stuff like this:
“To bring this back to your question, one of the things I think it’s hard for me to do is put myself in the shoes of people who will end up on the wrong side of these equations. On our current path there will be way fewer people who have it good, and the rest will struggle. The old economy with careers and benefits and pensions is gone. There are scary implications to that.”
Chris realizes his privilege and he’s making some effort to consider the perspectives of people who still have no power or influence. Even more, he’s helping other people realize what a hard time they all have imaging the realities of their privileges.
He appears to be trying his damnedest to figure out how he can best contribute to the world around him in a way that improves everyone’s place in society, and help his peers have that same attitude.
“How do I begin to perceive the fear, anxiety, hopelessness, and helplessness in a certain group if I know in my heart that I’ll always find a way to come out on top? That’s the myopia that concerns me most. Silicon valley today is populated mostly by people who would consider themselves winners of the traditional race. This causes the exclusion of the voices that are vital to a round, robust society. It’s beyond gentrification.”
He says the lack of empathy seems to him like it won’t just cost us materially, but it may also cost us our nation, causing social and political unrest as a result of an out-of-touch class of elites.
He reminded us again to check out “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” and “Not Fade Away” - both to cultivate a more empathetic perspective.
“How can you build something for someone else if you don’t have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?”
Next, Education
“Pre-suppose that you weren’t just using schools to just train your kids to be ‘successful’ - my peers at one of the best schools in the nation had narrow worldviews. Most had never lived or worked among poor people, volunteered, worked tipping jobs, etc. Same thing happens at Google and similar big, popular companies. ‘Successful’ people with uni-dimensional lives. What if you started a school that pre-supposed the goal was happy kids.”
The people who care about your GPA are people who you’ve given no other basis to evaluate you.
Who knows how successful he or others like him who care about seeing the world from a broad perspective will be at actually changing the world for the better, but we’re here now.
We’re at a place in history where at least some of us who are born with no influence will end up more famous than anyone has ever been. Our chance as humans at providing representation for the powerless has never been better.
I asked this question (and included comments on some of the follow-up questions, too) because I wanted to better understand how people in Chris’s position and circles think about these problems.
And it turns out he’s thought about it more than I think anyone expected.
“I might not care about a $4.99 app install, but almost everyone else on earth does. How can you build something for an audience you don’t know? There’s an incredible amount of empathy missing in the system today.
Well, I didn’t see that coming, and he keeps going. He gets even more to the heart of the problem:
You don’t have to look far to understand political discord. There is a huge group of people in the United States who have lost control over their own destiny. The small businesses they used to run have gone away. They’ve lost their farms, their houses, and the ability to plot their own future. When they get up in the morning committed to work hard, they don’t necessarily know it’s gonna work out for them. If that were you you’d probably be looking for scapegoats, too.”
That’s just it. Chris acknowledges that much of his success has been luck, and that for most people it just feels like we’ve lost control over our own fate. Even if we work our asses off, we can’t get ahead of the curve. And how can you win if you can’t even imagine what you should try to get an advantage?
“Take the time to understand stories of failure, struggle, and difficulty. Invest in that understanding. Our lives will be richer for it, societies will be stronger, kids will be better, and our products and services we make serve better as well. Is that a long enough answer for you?”
Yes Chris, that was a long enough answer for me, and thank you so much for taking the time to answer so thoughtfully.
Steve Moraco wrote this over the course of several weeks because when he first heard the podcast (a few weeks after it came out) he was just so pleasantly shocked that he didn't immediately know how to comment on what Chris had said in his answer. But now it's written, and he hopes you liked it.Steve feels the need to write third person bios at the end of his posts because it's funny and because it gives you a reminder to hit the "recommend" button below (the little heart) so that other people can see this post!
Remember, every time you hit recommend on my medium posts, you get free kittens.
