The Time Capsule Podcast David Sasaki

Dear Friends,
Every four years we are gifted an extra day, the 29th of February, allowing our unique little planet an additional 24 hours to complete its orbit around the sun. Isn't it comforting to know that we (and our planet) get an extra day to catch up?
Anyhow, just how unique is our little planet and its 365.25-day orbit around the sun? One of my favorite pieces of online writing is Tim Urban’s explanation of the Fermi Paradox from 2014. At nearly 5,000 words, it takes about 20 minutes to read — a worthwhile way to spend 1.4% of our bonus day. The Fermi Paradox asks where in the hell are the aliens. Tim writes:
Let’s imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1% of Earth-like planets develop life. And imagine that on 1% of those planets, life advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth. That would mean there were 10 quadrillion, or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe. Moving back to just our galaxy, and doing the same math on the lowest estimate for stars in the Milky Way (100 billion), we’d estimate that there are 1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.
He then points out our planet’s comparitive youth, and that others had a head start:
The technology and knowledge of a civilization only 1,000 years ahead of us could be as shocking to us as our world would be to a medieval person. A civilization 1 million years ahead of us might be as incomprehensible to us as human culture is to chimpanzees. And Planet X is 3.4 billion years ahead of us. [Emphasis mine]
Basic math and common sense suggest we should be surrounded by intelligent alien civilizations. There is no way that we’re the most intelligent species in the galaxy. So where are they!? The rest of Tim’s post explores competing theories as to why we haven’t had alien interactions.
Or perhaps we have? Growing up in the '80s and '90s, straight-faced talk about UFOs was like bringing up Hillary Clinton’s role in child sacrifice at a Washington DC pizzeria. So, it was illuminating to read Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s sober New Yorker piece, “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously.” At 13,000 words, he profiles the eccentric folks dedicated to researching UFO sightings and compiles a long list of unexplainable sightings from credible sources, mainly in the military.
Despite the fact that most adults carry around exceptionally good camera technology in their pockets, most U.F.O. photos and videos remain maddeningly indistinct, but the former Pentagon official implied that the government possesses stark visual documentation. According to Tim McMillan, in the past two years, the Pentagon’s U.A.P. investigators have distributed two classified intelligence papers that allegedly contain images and videos of bizarre spectacles, including a cube-shaped object and a large equilateral triangle emerging from the ocean.
I remain skeptical of the alleged UFO sightings. I assume that they are likely the testing of top-secret equipment that the military would prefer mistaken for UFOs.
But I’m not dumb and common sense says our galaxy should be teeming with intelligent life.
At the start of the pandemic, the former CEO of Open Philanthropy, Holden Karnofsky, began writing a series of thought-provoking posts titled “The Most Important Century.” He ended up writing more than 200 pages to persuasively make two main arguments:
* In the 21st century, “we will develop technologies that cause us to transition to a state in which humans as we know them are no longer the main force in world events. This is our last chance to shape how that transition happens.”
* “Whatever the main force in world events is (perhaps digital people, misaligned AI, or something else) will create highly stable civilizations that populate our entire galaxy for billions of years to come. The transition taking place this century could shape all of that.”
Karnofsky anticipates

Dear Friends,
I’m in Estonia this week for the Open Government Partnership Summit and I’m tripping out over how much the world has changed since I first attended the event in Brazil in 2012.
Dilma Rousseff had just been elected president and celebrated budget transparency in her welcoming address while Hilary Clinton followed with remarks about the importance of earning the trust of citizens. In my personal life, Iris and I had just started living together in Mexico City and days before my trip we adopted Coco as a tiny puppy.
Brazil was emerging as the second-biggest economy in the Western Hemisphere, and a global powerhouse. Their GDP more than doubled over the previous decade. They were preparing to host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.
It blows my mind that just three years after her comments about budget transparency, Rousseff was impeached precisely for violating budget laws. Then in 2016, Clinton lost the election to Trump, and Lula was sent to prison for corruption. By 2019, Bolsonaro became president (until losing to Lula last year). And now you’re telling me that Trump could make a comeback? It’s all too wild to believe — yet another reminder that life is stranger than fiction.
Are men afraid of doctors? And what does it cost taxpayers?
My health insurance expires at the end of October (just as we move back to Mexico) and so I’ve gone all-in on what I’m calling my “100,000-mile check-up.” This includes:
* Bloodwork — cholesterol levels, etc.
* Colorectal cancer screening (Cologuard poop test)
* PSA prostate cancer screening
* Coronary calcium scan to measure my risk of heart disease
* Skin cancer screening by a dermatologist
* DEXA scan to measure bone density, visceral fat, and body composition
Men are notorious for avoiding doctor visits and ignoring our health. In every country, women live longer, healthier lives. Worldwide, men aged 15-40 are three times as likely to die as women. If you are a 34-year-old man in the United States, you have a 16% chance on average of dying from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or lung disease before you turn 70. If you are a woman of the same age, it’s only 11%. New research in the UK found that men are twice as likely to die from a heart attack. (The government pleaded with men to “get a grip on their lifestyle” and began offering blood pressure check-ups at barber shops.)
How we choose to look after our health is personal, but the financial implications affect us all. For instance, five percent of Medicaid “super-users” account for over half of the program’s cost. And so, in an attempt to lower costs, doctors are now given annual salary bonuses based on the percentage of their patients who take preventative screenings, including cancer screenings.
Longevity coaches and the cancer screening debate
That sounds like a good thing, right? Why not avoid the high cost of treating cancer by detecting it first? But as I prepared for my cancer screenings, I discovered that it’s a topic of raging debate with a growing chorus of critics like who argue that we ought to be doing less cancer screening. On the other side of the debate is Peter Attia, a longevity doctor and podcaster who advises his clients to get screened for cancer every year!
Last week I went for a hike with a friend who was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2020 at the age of 37. He had his entire colon removed and rather miraculously is now cancer-free and able to go on weeks-long backpacking trips. In fact, he’s one of the most fit and energetic guys I know. We talked about the Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman, who was diagnosed with stage-3 colon cancer at 39 years old before passing away four years later. And we discussed our own approaches to cancer screening amidst calls for less of it.
Here’s my reasoning for getting the tests: Even if I have cancer and the test fails to detect it, is that any different from not taking the test at all? And in the case tha

Dear Friends,
(With an audio version read by a real human, me, above.)
I’m indulging in an intermission this week from the Millennial midlife series because, as of yesterday’s Apple event, I am convinced that we’ll look back at 2023 as the year that changed everything. My prediction is that we’ll look back at the 2020-2022 pandemic with faint memories of baking sourdough and a mere prologue to the year that sci-fi arrived and the very notion of humanity changed. A lot has been written about AI’s existential threat and effects on jobs, but I haven’t seen a thorough analysis of how it might transform the way we relate to one another. And this week’s newsletter certainly is thorough — one of the longest I’ve written — so I’ll preview my thinking before you commit to 15 minutes of reading or listening:
* We underestimate how much has changed over the past 20 years and we forget how rudimentary today’s technologies felt when they first came out. Compared to the last two decades, we should expect 10x more techno-socio-political change over the next 20 years.
* Until a few months ago, I thought that virtual reality and augmented reality were losing bets. Then I started using Character.ai and now I think that the next generation of kids will have more (and deeper) relationships with AI friends in VR/AR spaces than with their human friends in real life. (I know, sad.) Already we have to compete with phones to get the attention of our loved ones; soon we’ll have to compete with charismatic, attentive, funny, perfect AI friends.
* I used to think of my daily journaling practice as leaving a record of reflections and memories for my future self. Now, I think about it as training an immortal AI version of me that will last forever. It’s really weird.
* Interspecies love isn’t just possible; it’s normal. (Ask my dog.) Also, all relationships are a little manipulative and a little co-dependent, especially with our future AI friends.
* If we can’t compete with AI friends, can we at least inspire a new Romantic Movement? Also, can artificial intelligence and augmented reality help us become better friends with real-life humans?
You could argue that all I do in this piece is describe a world that science fiction writers have been warning us about for decades. And that is largely my point: This is the year that science fiction became non-fiction.
We underestimate the last 20 years
Facebook/Meta turns 20 next year. When the iPhone turned 15 last year, the Wall Street Journal made an adorable mini-documentary about “How Apple Transformed a Generation.”
“Try to remember life before the iPhone,” it dares us. 20 years ago practically all of our social interactions were offline and we never spent more than two minutes a day looking at our phones. Ezra Klein encourages a thought experiment: Imagine that you time-travel back to 1970 and tell someone that you will invent a tiny device that will offer you the sum of all human knowledge. You can look up any question, any person, any scientific paper and it’s immediately available to you. Now, imagine then telling that same person that you will invent a tiny device that will distract the mind and make us more vain, polarized, and distrustful. Of course, both of those inventions came true, except that they were a single invention.
The web + social media + smartphones changed everything. And yet, what I want to emphasize for this newsletter is just how unimpressive it all was at the start. Facebook was an online directory, Instagram was a way to make your grainy digital photos look even older, and Twitter was blogging but with fewer features. The first iPhone couldn’t record video, didn’t have apps or GPS, and took a solid minute to load a website. The way we use our phones today was a leap of imagination in 2007 when Steve Jobs famously announced three products (a mobile internet browser, an mp3 player, and a phone) that turned out to be one.
How do you defi

Dear Friends,
It feels damn good to be home. After two weeks of work in Kenya followed by a week of winter flu and then two weeks of adventure in Japan, I arrived home a deflated, disoriented mess. I returned two weeks ago, but only now does my second cup of coffee fill me with my usual morning optimism. The worst of the blustery wet winter storms is behind us and warmer weather is tantalizingly close. This month will bring out the best of the Bay Area: impossibly green hills covered in orange poppies and yellow mustard, framed by a deep blue sky and wisps of luminescent clouds. Do you remember “Bliss,” the default wallpaper of Windows XP, the most viewed photograph in history? It was taken nearby in 1996 while the photographer was driving to visit his girlfriend. Everywhere you look these days: Bliss.
To create and to consider creativity
Is there a golden ratio of how much time we should spend each week creating versus considering the creativity of others? Writing versus reading? Painting versus viewing paintings? Could we try to calculate that percentage based on, say, how many books are published each year compared to how much time people spend reading those books? Or how many newsletters are published on Substack each day compared to the total number of time that people spend reading them?
The more time I spend writing one of these things, the less time you, lovely and busy readers, seem to spend reading. I don’t think it’s just me.
Over 3 million books are published in the U.S. each year. Traditional publishers warn on their website that “sales of traditionally published books are shockingly small.” The average published, printed book sells fewer than 300 print copies over its lifetime. Most books are only purchased by people who already follow the author online. (In other words, a book is just another format to disseminate words to the same people.) I’m still envious of my published friends, though they tell me unanimously that it wasn’t worth the effort. Writers spend years of sweat, blood, and exhaustion writing a book that few read and fewer remember.
It’s embarrassing to admit that I look at the stats. How many people opened the newsletter? How many links did they click? Do I have new subscribers? Is my engagement rate going up and down? I aspire to not care.
I’m even more embarrassed to admit how much time I spend writing. My book review of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill must’ve taken me around 8 hours to finish; the 27 people who clicked on the link spent on average 3 minutes reading it. 🤷‍♂️
The stats tell me that the less time I spend writing — and frankly, the less of an effort I make — the more that people will read. “Know when to stop” could be one takeaway. “Know why you write” could be another.
For the past few months, I’ve been working with a writing coach. (The way to make money from writing, it seems, is to help other people write.) She’s great. Every month I send her one or two drafts, she sends me back her edits, and we talk about how to make them better. But more than anything, we talk about why I write. And so I came up with a list. Actually a few lists: why do I write in my journal? Why do I write long emails to friends? Why in god’s name do I still write on Twitter? And why do I write this newsletter?
* To spark meaningful conversations with friends offline
* To stay observant about how the world is changing
* To build community by introducing my friends to each other
* To recognize and engage with other people’s writing by drawing associations and sharing my reflections
* To integrate my identity, interests, and observations from what can feel like an otherwise disjointed life
Oh right, I remind myself. I’m doing this to prompt meaningful conversations. To foster community. To stay curious. The vanity metrics collected by Substack don’t capture anything relevant to what I want to get out of this. And I am getting a lot out of it. So to all of y

Dear Friends,
By the time we’re in our forties, we’ve made enough personal finance decisions to know that some were lucky, some were unlucky, and that our financial situation today could have been entirely different. I try not to think about the stocks that I sold too early (Tesla, Apple) or too late (Moderna). I try not to think about the more than $350,000 that we have handed over to our landlords in rent over the past eight years and what would have happened if we had instead put that money into a down payment on a Bay Area home whose value has nearly doubled in the same amount of time. (The answer: we’d be roughly $800,000 wealthier.)
Ideally, we accumulate enough financial experience by our forties so that we make better financial decisions during the second half of life. But that’s not how luck works. Tesla’s stock could have tanked shortly after I sold it back in 2014. (Instead, it went from about $15 per share to over $400 per share at its peak.) Then again, for anyone who did buy Tesla stock back in September, it has since lost nearly two-thirds of its value since.
With each little decision over time, we construct our own economic history. And when we add up all of our individual economic histories, we have the story of the global economy.
So gloomy, so good
Just about every month since 1992, Gallup has called roughly 1,000 Americans and asked them the following two questions:
* How would you rate economic conditions in this country today -- as excellent, good, only fair, or poor?
* Right now, do you think that economic conditions in the country as a whole are getting better or getting worse?
As you can see in the chart below, Americans are pessimistic about the state of the economy. I’m not surprised. The media have relentlessly put up pessimistic headlines: prices are up, stocks are down, job growth is slowing, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are laying off employees.
But there is another story about the economy that hasn’t gotten as much attention:
* Inequality is decreasing
* Real wages are way up over the past decade
* Social mobility is increasing
* There are still far more job openings than people looking for work
We are perhaps in the midst of a transformation of the economy that makes it work for more people. But to appreciate the changes underway, we need to zoom out from the daily headlines.
Remember 2014? I sure do. It was the year that Iris and I moved from Mexico City to Seattle. I began a new job at the Gates Foundation. We put all of our savings into a down payment to buy a house, leaving us with around $200 in our checking account. Just a couple of weeks later, our two families met for the first time at our courthouse wedding. I knew I was entering a new phase of life — adulting, we called it — and I was terrified by the idea of having to make a mortgage payment for the next 30 years.
But enough about me. By late 2014, Obama’s approval rating had dropped from 70% when he was elected to 40% (which is lower than Biden’s approval rating today). The recovery from the 2008 economic crisis was slow going. Everyone was talking about a best-selling book by a French economist whose name we couldn’t pronounce: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Few of us read all 700 pages, but you couldn’t deny the force of his simple observation, as laid out in the chart below: the return on investments outpaced economic growth overall. And since rich people made their money from their investments, whereas the rest of us make our money from our paycheck, inequality was destined to get even worse.
What you can see in the chart above starting in 1950 is the rise of shared prosperity. Both workers and investors were winning. The global economy was growing and the stock market was growing right along with it. But then starting around 2012, when Obama defeated Romney, the rate of returns of the stock market kept growing while the growth of the global economy began to slow. Picketty e

🎵 What was 2003?
The soundtrack of 23 years old. Full of confidence and dreams and naïveté. For me, it was 2003. That summer I learned how to design websites and started a blog. That fall I graduated from college and bought my first iPod. I spent countless nights meticulously transferring my CD collection to my iTunes library and iPod. In December, I quit my barista job at the best coffeehouse ever, packed up my car, and drove from San Diego across Arizona and Texas to my new home in Monterrey, Mexico.
My entire music collection was on a shiny white device that fit into my pocket. Just the thought of It made me giddy. What else did I need in life?
2003 was the year that electronica married indie rock: The Postal Service, Yo La Tengo, Erlend Oye, The Flaming Lips, American Analog Set, Cafe Tacuba, Broken Social Scene, M83, Four Tet, Stars, Caribou, The Books.
It was the year that country, americana, bluegrass, and indie rock merged into a new genre, Alt-Country: Wilco, Iron & Wine, Sun Kil Moon, Okkervil River, the Be Good Tanyas, Camera Obscura, Songs: Ohia.
Yes, 2003 was the year that music moved from stereo speakers to iPod headphones. But it was also the year of some epic rock albums that sounded like nothing that had come before: Elefant’s self-titled debut, Dear Catastrophe Waitress by Belle & Sebastian, Fever to Tell by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs; Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers by The National, Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie, You Are Free by Cat Power. Each of those albums laid the first paving stone for at least a decade of imitation.
And then the hip-hop: three of the most transformational rap albums of all time came out in 2003: OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, Phrenology by The Roots & JayZ’s The Black Album.
In 2003, the music was too good to be true. We all read Pitchfork every week, hungry for reviews about the latest releases in order to search them out on Napster and Limewire. Maybe everyone’s 23rd year is their greatest year of music. Maybe it’s simply the soundtrack of freedom, the first step of true adulthood. You tell me. For now, I leave you with two hours and twenty minutes of music from two decades ago.
A note about the structure: I left out the hip-hop for its own future playlist. Instead, it starts with some of 2003’s greatest indie anthems, then gets into more experimental indie-electronica, and ends with some softer, lyrical hits of alt-country. And while it might not transport you back to your first year of adulting, I hope you still enjoy the tunes.
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, we’re one week from the shortest day of the year, and then a couple more minutes of daylight to look forward to with every passing day. Have a lovely week,
David


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