Three Things I Learned This Year

Looking back on a year of big ideas.

Friends,

I hope you’ve had a wonderful 2024. For me, it’s been an extraordinary year of learning, thanks to an unforgettable lineup of Next Big Idea podcast guests, including Michael Lewis, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Nate Silver, Kim Scott, Scott Galloway, Sebastian Junger and Bill Gates — a few of whom you may have heard of — and rising thinkers like neuroscientist Charan Ranganath, philosopher Lorraine Besser, and physicist Sara Imari Walker.

What have I learned this year? Three things:

1 — Wisdom requires “seeing time.”

2 — There is joy in the very best work, and work in the very best joy.

3 — Imagining the future we want is a precondition for realizing it.

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We have the great pleasure of talking with a wide variety of people on the podcast — philosophers, data scientists, computer scientists, raconteurs, historians, psychologists, business leaders. My favorite moments are when ideas from different thinkers converge into a new understanding, which updates my model of the world. Each of the learnings that follow resulted from conversations with several very different thinkers we were lucky enough to have on the show in 2024.

1. Wisdom requires “seeing time.”

We humans have a peculiar relationship with the concept of time. We talk about it as something outside of us, something that slips away or passes us by. It’s more accurate — and useful, I think — to see time as the medium in which we exist, the dimension that makes life possible. We are time, in a sense. And most of what is worth wanting — great relationships, fulfilling, purposeful work, enchanting adventure — can be realized in due time.

Of course accepting time as a dance partner requires humility. We usually can’t have what we want right now. It’s in our interest to take the long view. Why? Because everything we do that matters we do in partnerships with other people — either individuals or systems comprised of people: teams, markets, technological ecosystems, societies. These systems exist at different scales, each with its own metabolism, moving at its own speed.

I learned from Sara Walker, the silver-tongued theoretical physicist and author of the new book Life As No One Knows It, that to understand an organism (a human, for instance), it is necessary to understand the 3.8 billion years of evolutionary history that was necessary for its complexity to become possible. There is a “physicality to time,” Sara likes to say. Our bodies embody the time it took for us to be assembled. We are “vast in time,” she says, and we also have a future “possibility space” that is proportional in size to our history. I find this notion that we physically embody our history to also be useful metaphorically, because of course each of us is a direct result of the history that has brought us to this moment, only some of which was in our control. And every person with whom we interact is an unwitting product of a different history.

I learned from Oliver Burkeman, who I think of as one of our great contemporary philosophers — author of Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals — this notion that we should feel that time is inside of us, not outside of us, and we should accept our limitations, our finitude, our lack of control. “The more we try to render the world controllable,” he warns, “the more it eludes us; and the more daily life loses … its resonance, its capacity to touch, move and absorb us.” I learned from Oliver that to be truly immersed in precious moments, and have more of them, you have to treat them, ironically, as if they are not precious. Again, time is not something outside us that is passing us by; we are time. And our lack of control of our existence — we can exert a kind of limited control, in a patient relationship with time — is what makes life enchanting! Many of us spend our lives aspiring for ever-greater control, only to realize that life IS relationships, and a relationship over which you have control is no relationship at all.

Finally I learned from Seth Godin, and his latest book This Is Strategy, that most humans don’t “see time” — this phrase is from Seth. And that the world is composed of countless invisible, concatenate, inescapable systems. The art market is a system, with different stakeholders who benefit, and others who are excluded. The wedding industrial complex is a system that is highly effective at separating you from your money. The ride sharing business is a system that has largely replaced the taxi system that preceded it. It’s next to impossible to stop a system that is working for the people who participate in it. What you can do is interact with systems wisely, and build new better systems that over time replace existing ones (much as the founders of Uber replaced taxis). What is strategy? It’s what we can do today, with knowledge of the systems with which we interact, to make tomorrow better.

These three conversations helped me see more clearly that building a beautiful life is more like gardening than the other metaphors we commonly use — a battle or a journey. Because great gardeners see time. They understand when certain actions are critical, the right inputs of water, light and soil, the relationship between neighboring plants, and what outcomes are reasonable in due time. A good gardener is patient. Unperturbed by the cycles of the seasons. Appreciative of the stages through which living things express themselves.

I have not always had this patience. I have sometimes thought of life as a battle, me the hero, machete-ing my way through the day, or perhaps an explorer paddling with or against the current. And there are certainly times for valiant action! But when I look back at the mindset that has produced the best outcomes of my life to date, it’s been the persistent, loving, sometimes patient attention of a gardener.

2. There is joy in the very best work, and work in the very best joy.

One of the great privileges of my 2024 was the opportunity to have a conversation with the great American storyteller, Michael Lewis. What I learned is that he is not only a keen observer and storyteller, but also an expert liver of life. These skills intertwine.

When Michael Lewis was in 10th grade, the principal called him into his office. He shook his head and said, “Michael, I understand that you said to your English teacher, ‘Are you always this pleasant, or is this an unusually good day for you?’ You understand, Michael, that this is not helping you.”

“The class seemed to enjoy it,” Michael replied.

“You know, Michael,” the principal went on to say after some shared amusement, “you may be the happiest person I have ever met.”

Michael thought to himself, “He may be right. I may be the happiest person I have ever met.”

Joy is at the heart of Michael’s work. “If I were going to critique myself,” he said to me, “I do have the problem that I can’t write things that aren’t fun. If I am not having fun, the reader is not having fun. I have to be excited about the material. And one way I can sort of sense the excitement is if I'm laughing. If you're laughing, you're in an emotional space and that's the goal is to get into the emotional space. Once you're laughing, it's easier to cry.”

When Michael is working on a book at home, he likes to wear a big pair of headphones, so he can’t hear himself. “My wife tells me I am constantly laughing. Laughing at my own jokes.” The process of writing, for Michael Lewis, is joyful. It has to be. Otherwise, he’d rather hang out with his friends. “My resting state,” he says, “is probably inert. I can really just lay around and screw off and procrastinate with the best of them.”

Let’s pause for a moment here. Michael Lewis is a legend. He has written 18 books including Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short. In his spare time he hosts a popular podcast and recently started a new series of articles for The Washington Post to tell the stories of government workers. In what world is Michael Lewis lazy?

It gets more interesting. Michael Lewis sees his laziness as a tool, of sorts, for his work. “Sloth and indolence serve as a kind of filter,” he says. “It changes [my] relationship to potential stories and potential material. It requires the material to rise to the level of interest, where you feel obliged to engage with it.” He is reluctant to take on new projects. He abandons many. But when he takes one up, he gets pretty into it. And this, no doubt, is why his writing is so powerful.

This dovetails nicely with what we learned from our conversation with computer scientist Cal Newport about his latest book, Slow Productivity. It boils down to three principals:

• Do fewer things

• Work at a natural pace

• Obsess over quality

When we work this way, at a natural pace, putting love into the product, it is a far more joyful experience. And here’s the surprising thing: we actually get more done when we work this way. When we are freed from the panic that time is “passing us by,” we are immersed in our work and play, and we do it better, and time slows down. This is Oliver Burkeman territory. We can find our way to this place Cal’s way, by slowing down and obsessing on the quality of our work, in which case joy is a byproduct. Or we can get there Michael Lewis’s way, by looking for the joy. Good work will follow. I am with Michael.

Just as there is profound joy in doing great work, the joy of living — joi de vivre — takes work. We need resistance and challenge to experience the joy of engagement. Anna Lembke explained the neurochemistry of this in our 2021 conversation about “the hedonic setpoint” — our natural tendency to acclimate to both positive and negative experiences. Pleasure exists on the other side of discomfort. Either choose your preferred form of discomfort (the bracing chill of jumping in the ocean, the ache of a good run), it will choose you.

3. Imagining the future we want to experience is a precondition for realizing it.

Even to me, annoyingly relentless in my optimism, happy for the plants when it rains, the future has felt frightening at times in recent years. Will MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher who helped create the effective altruism movement, compared this moment in human history, in our 2022 conversation, to humanity’s drunk adolescence, swerving between lampposts, foot on the accelerator. That image has never left me. If we survive the next hundred years, Will told us, trillions of future humans could enjoy tens of thousands of years of unimaginably wonderful human experience. In the next few decades, technology has the potential to deliver a world of superabundance powered by clean energy, free of the scarcity that drives geopolitical conflict. If we aren’t careful, however, autocrats could take control of these all powerful technologies, leading to thousands of years of Orwellian dystopia. No pressure, guys, but we need to figure this out in the next 50 years.

Yuval Noah Harari, in his new book Nexus, describes what is at stake in greater detail. Every breakthrough in communication technology, from the first markings on clay tablets with sticks to television to the machine learning algorithms that power social networks, has changed culture, politics and governance. Harari sees AI as a double sword — on the one hand, it could improve education and quality of life around the world, ushering in a more enlightened politics.

On the other hand, AI powered surveillance could tip the scales in favor of totalitarian regimes. “When you have a major upheaval in information technology,” Harari told us in a live conversation in September, “You have an earthquake in democracies, and we are experiencing it right now all over the world. And if we don't pay attention and do something about it, democracy might collapse in the next few years.”

When I asked Bill Gates if we should slow down the pace of AI development, he said, “if we knew how to slow it down, a lot of people would probably say, okay, let's, consider doing that, [but] … the incentive structures don't really have some mechanism that's all that plausible of how that would happen.” Of course, Bill also believes a world free of disease and scarcity is likely coming. So much so that he worries about human purpose in a world in which we no longer have hard problems to solve.

I have spent a fair amount of time in the last couple years worrying about both the downside and upside of our current dizzying pace of technological progress. I have been persuaded by divergent thinkers like physicist Sara Walker, philosopher Will MacAskill, and computer scientist and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that it is necessary and important work to imagine, in some detail, the future we want. Imagining it, of course, is a necessary first step if we would like to bring it into existence.

It matters that we engage in this process collectively, at scale, because fear of the future is itself one of the challenges that we have to navigate. And it’s a natural instinct – It has the potential to foment social unrest, and in our panic, make us susceptible to self-serving demagogues. The prediction we can make with the greatest confidence is that our world is about to change dramatically. For the better, I believe, if we choose to make it so.

Sara Walker said that imagination “is a physical act.” Every thought is a cascade of neurons firing, an intricate symphony of electrical signals and chemical exchanges — synapses bridging, neurotransmitters flowing, circuits lighting up in rhythmic waves, sparking ideas that spill beyond the mind and into the world. This physicality of thinking can drive change: AI developers leaving profit-driven companies to create more ethical ones, politicians championing policies that redistribute wealth, employers paying fairer wages, people tipping a little more, musicians playing in the streets. Imagination moves matter—within us, between us—and catalyzes change.

So let’s engage in a small act of imagination — I like to think about the future of our cities, which soon will be filled with driverless EVs in a range of sizes, from cheap one person vehicles to party buses to sleeper cars for evening trips to the country. The revolution is underway — Waymo currently does 150,000 driverless rides a week in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix, and is launching soon in Austin, Miami and Atlanta. Cities will be cleaner, safer and quieter, autonomous electric vehicles eliminating the need for horns and sirens, making the streets safer, and removing the particulate diesel exhaust that covers our cities with soot. Within a few years, flying human-scale electric drones (eVTOLs), quieter and cheaper than helicopters and exhaust-free, will be offering quick flights to major airports.

Within a decade or two, a large portion of jobs in restaurant kitchens and warehouses and retail and manufacturing and delivery will be automated, including the likely deployment of tens of millions of humanoid robots. The most repetitive white color labor, like the work of attorneys and surgeons, will likely be automated as well. It’s easy to imagine the downside of this future — rampant unemployment, ever-increasing concentration of wealth, societal unrest, a widespread crisis of purpose. But we can conjure just as easily the version of this future that we want — superabundance could make a healthy life free of repetitive labor available to all, if we act with generosity and foresight. Communities of artists and musicians, dancers and magicians, poets and philosophers could flourish.

We talked with Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, about the imminent availability of personalized AI tutors for every child, enabling teachers to do their best work, and all of us to learn more seamlessly throughout our lives. We talked with Jamie Metzl, author of Superconvergence, about radical improvements to human health through personalized, precision healthcare, bioengineered spider silk that is three times stronger than kevlar, the development of lab grown meats that could return millions of acres of land to their natural state. Ever more efficient renewable energy could help us capture carbon, reduce emissions, and at least mitigate the worst effects of climate change. No guarantees, but there is a path, according to our wise and learned podcast guests of 2024, to a better world in the coming decades.

In 2025, I am looking forward to exploring further what’s coming, talking with the people leading these revolutions, as well as their critics. And I am looking forward to continuing to explore the big questions that have been themes of our show — how can we better understand ourselves, individually and collectively, and create the future we aspire to? And in the meantime savor the world that we have.

Thank you all for listening and contributing to our community in the last year. I look forward to another extraordinary year of learning in 2025.

— Rufus