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OutsideVoices with Mark Bidwell

OutsideVoices with Mark Bidwell

By: mark bidwell
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 In OutsideVoices Mark Bidwell talks to remarkable and compelling leaders from the worlds of business, exploration, arts, sports, and academia. In these conversations he explores topics of fundamental importance to many of us today, both in work and in life, topics ranging from leadership and performance to creativity and growth. OutsideVoices has a clear purpose: to bring fresh and diverse perspectives that help listeners navigate the world we live in.Aldabra Capital GmbH 2019 Economics Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Charles Foster: One Man’s Search for Meaning: a Journey to the Origins of Consciousness

    Charles Foster: One Man’s Search for Meaning: a Journey to the Origins of Consciousness
    May 16 2023
    Charles Foster is an English writer, a traveler, a veterinarian, a taxidermist, a barrister, and a philosopher. Like my previous guest Steven Kotler, he believes in getting deep into subjects in a very immersive and experiential way. In his earlier book called Being a Beast, Charles shares his experiences of trying to live as an otter, a badger, a stagg, a fox and other animals and birds, all in order to better understand what being a wild animal is really like. His latest book is called Being a Human, where he and his 13-year-old son live in the wilderness as Paleolithic hunter gatherers to really understand what it means to be human.   Charles rolls up his sleeves and puts himself into the shoes of our ancestors going back many thousands of years. And when asked why he bothers to drag himself and his children off into caves, he answers as follows: because I don't trust books, and you get a wholly different kind of knowledge by doing and feeling things. So this is a man trying to be a better human, a better father, a better son, a better husband, a man who dives deep into a subject in order to enhance his understanding of arguably the most important topic that faces us all. He's a traveler through time and space. Being a Human is a travel book, essentially, about traveling across generations, and Charles’s curiosity is infectious.   What We Cover: 5:09 - How Charles landed on such a diverse range of professional activities10:00 - Why writing Being a Human was much harder than writing Being a Beast19:06 - What Charles learned by experiencing the hunter-gatherers’ way of life25:00 - Desouling and the big changes humanity experienced in the Neolithic period38:23 - Shamanism and why we lost the ability to perceive the world in a “mystical” way45:13 - What it means to be a proper father and a proper son Key Takeaways and Quotes:  Trying to get into the heads of ancient humans is very difficult. Even ancient humans can lie to us, it’s part of their complexity. The cave paintings are not always telling a straightforward story.It’s a shame that an almost mystical way of looking at the world, given to us by physics, is not imported into the biological world which we inhabit.The desperate quest for a right story is behind all this political, economical, and ecological mess we live in today.  Resources and Links Mentioned: Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness by Charles FosterBeing a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide by Charles FosterConnect with Charles Foster The Snow Leopard by Peter MatthiessenThe Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams Other Popular Interviews on OutsideVoices: Steven Kotler: Getting Younger with Age - Mindsets for Boosting Learning and FlowKevin Kelly: Raising the Bar - Excellent Advice, AI’s for Better LivingWade Davis: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in Today’s WorldBenedict Allen - Exploring Cultures Connect with OutsideLens: Subscribe to our free newsletterConnect with Mark Bidwell on LinkedIn and Twitter
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Kevin Kelly: Raising the Bar - Excellent Advice, AI’s for Better Living

    Kevin Kelly: Raising the Bar - Excellent Advice, AI’s for Better Living
    May 2 2023
    Kevin Kelly first appeared on this show back in 2016 to talk about his bestselling book, “The Inevitable”, which was a review of the key tech trends that were shaping our lives. Today, almost seven years later, I’ve been struck by how prescient a number of his predictions turned out to be back then, in particular around artificial intelligence, which we talk about in this episode.   Kevin’s latest book is called Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. This is a curated selection of aphorisms, which guide how Kevin lives his life, and which he was encouraged by his family to put together several years ago. It's a mixture of very practical, as well as quite counterintuitive, but nevertheless fascinating advice for parents, for children, and for grandparents. There are echoes of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, in emphasizing the importance of thinking long term, of deferred gratification, or of compounding, but there are also different ways of looking at the world, drawing from the work from James P. Carse and his “Finite and Infinite Games,” that guide Kevin and how he approaches things.   Kevin has done a huge amount of travel and he shares with us how he thinks about traveling, and why he sees traveling as such an important activity for the youth to pursue. Towards the end, we talked about what his current projects and his future projects are, and he's embarking on a 100-year project, being enormously optimistic and positive about the future.   What We Cover: 08:26 - Three types of travel and Kevin’s approach to traveling 19:49 - The idea of finite and infinite games and the parts of our society and systems that can be perceived as infinite games 23:24 - The paradox of generosity and why it works even if it seems counterintuitive in today’s world 30:19 - The value of rites of passage for the youth and how to recreate them in the modern Western society 34:03 - Where we are going next with the advancement of artificial intelligence 45:43 - Kevin’s 100-year project and why he is optimistic about the future Key Learnings and Takeaways: Travel is essential for growth - encountering the other and learning is one of the most powerful and transformative experiences for the youth that should be facilitated and subsidized on a national level The foundational paradox of our human societal collective existence is that the more you give, the more you get, that you cannot deplete your generosity and kindness. The thrilling adventure that the society is headed into right now is trying to elevate the AI's so that they're better than humans, even though we currently don't have a consensus on what ethics and morality mean that we could program into AI. Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:  Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly The Inevitable and other books by Kevin Kelly https://kk.org/books  Connect with Kevin Kelly on social media @Kevin2Kelly  Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse  Kevin Kelly: The Formula for the Next 10,000 Startups, Failing Forward and Becoming a Teaching Organization on OutsideVoices Other Popular Interviews on OutsideVoices: Mohnish Pabrai: Cloning, Learning from Charlie Munger, 100 BaggersSteven Kotler: Getting Younger with Age - Mindsets for Boosting Learning and FlowRobert Cialdini: Pre-Suasion - How to Influence with Integrity  Connect with OutsideLens: Subscribe to our free newsletterOutsideLens Website, LinkedIn, TwitterConnect with Mark Bidwell on LinkedIn and Twitter
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    49 mins
  • Kevin Kelly on AI

    Kevin Kelly on AI
    Mar 31 2023

    In this short episode, I’m sharing an excerpt from my recent interview with Kevin Kelly. He's got a new book coming out in May 2023, called Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. We’re going to release the full interview when the book is out, but in the meantime, it’s worth sharing with you some of Kevin’s insights into the topic of AI, which is one of the areas in which he is genuinely a world leader. 
     
    Unless you've been living in a cave or under a rock, you're likely very interested in how AI technology is going to shape out - whether it is just one more iteration of the Silicon Valley hype machine, or whether this is something far more fundamental, something that threatens a number of our global institutions relating to democracy, to the economy, and to what it means to be human.
     
    Be sure to also check out my previous interview with Kevin Kelly, linked below in the show notes, as well as my recommendations of two other shows where you can learn more about AI. 
     
    What We Cover: 

    • Where we are right now on the path of AI development
    • How we can use AIs as interns and still keep our jobs or create new ones
    • The challenge of ‘ethical’ AI and how we can use AI to be better humans
    • Reasons to be optimistic about technology

    Key Learnings and Takeaways: 

    • There is no large-scale unemployment due to AI, but there is a big case for using AI chatbots as trained interns to offload your work to them
    • We can program ethics and morality into AI, but we currently don't have any consensus on what ethics and morality mean and how to be better than humans
    • Another frontier to break with AI is epistemological - how we decide what’s true and how we can automate trustworthiness

    Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

    • Kevin Kelly: The Formula for the Next 10,000 Startups, Failing Forward and Becoming a Teaching Organization on OutsideVoices
    • Connect with Kevin Kelly on social media @Kevin2Kelly 
    • Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GTP4, ChatGTP, and the Future of AI - Lex Fridman Podcast #367
    • Stratechery by Ben Thompson
    • Midjourney AI tool
    • DALL E-2 by OpenAI  
    • Stable Diffusion AI tool

    Connect with Mark Bidwell: 

    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
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    14 mins
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