You will never pay utility bills again.

0:00 Pamala Welcome to You Know Too Much, the show that teaches you everything you never knew. You need to know about the people, passions and obsessions shaping our world. I'm Pameaa Buzick Kim.

0:09 Eva And I'm even McCloskey. And today we're talking about the future from AI and data centers to innovation and infrastructure. Could we be laying the groundwork for another special century?

0:20 Pamala Joining us today is Mark Ruckman, a thinker and entrepreneur who believes today's tech revolution may have more in common with the past than we realize. Mark knows way too much about what could spark the next special century. And by the end of this episode, you will too. Hi, Mark.

0:37 Mark Hello. How are you doing?

0:39 Pamala Good. Great.

0:40 Eva Welcome.

0:41 Pamala Yeah. Thanks for being here. I'm super pumped today because I don't know what is special. What is a special century?

0:49 Mark Yeah, sure. Let's start there. I'll define that. So special century, comes from Robert J. Gordon. Robert J. Gordon is, economist, macro economist, economic historian at northwestern. And so he wrote this book in, 2017 that's called The Rise and Fall of American Growth. And what he does is he tracks, this time period from 1870 to 1970 that he calls the special century.

1:17 Mark We put a man on the moon. Electricity was the beginning of the nervous system. So it's like right now think about like AI, where we're not. It's like all of that electricity, you know, wasn't really in the productivity statistics until 1920. So it's like, if you think about it, humanity is filled with J curves. What's a G curve?

1:40 Mark It just goes. Everybody's excited. Oh I don't know what I'm doing. Oh, wow. This is going to be great. So it's like basically humanity is filled with J curves. So only the beginning of the nervous system was built. And why do I think that we're headed for another special century is that we're ultimately building the brain and the nervous system of that industrial output that we didn't do last time around.

2:06 Mark So that's the first phase. So and then the next phase, think about like robotics or androids, advanced robotics. It's like you're going to build the muscle skeleton of it. I mean, we're we're probably going to be too old for the muscle skeleton to be. Yeah, totally like input it. But we'll see the g curve impact because we haven't think about all the data centers.

2:29 Mark That's just the beginning of AI infrastructure.

2:32 Pamala Yeah. That was what I was curious is all the things you sort of described are more physical. So like even just like plumbing and all those things, all those things are actually like literally physical where I feel so much of what you talking about, what could be the next possible special century? None of that necessarily feels physical to me.

2:52 Pamala But I guess what you're saying is between the data centers and then the robotics, that would become more of the physical elements beyond the nervous system part.

3:01 Mark All of the all of the physical elements you're building, all those like dendrites, nerve cells, things, things like that. Because you're going to need these data centers for all of the compute that you're going to have to handle, because everything is going to run on the cloud. Yeah. So right now we just don't have enough space for everything that's going to run, and we're going to be building that capacity.

3:25 Pamala How how did you get into this? Yeah. You made you think of this.

3:28 Mark Yeah I was born working class. So if I was born rich, I'd be a history professor. I always looked at history first. This has to do. It's like I always joke around with my mom. It's like, so what do you do? I do book reports. I'm the person who will read the 400 page book over the weekend.

3:44 Pamala Over the.

3:45 Mark Years. No I'm, I, I'm a.

3:47 Pamala Mark.

3:48 Mark I will, I will say I will speed read it and stuff and stuff like that and then go here's, here's two slides about it. Yeah. I'm realizing okay, this is me also being a dork.

4:00 Pamala We love you. We love dorks because we're good too. Yeah. Yeah.

4:05 Mark I'm in good company. History is basically the start. The study of our folly, punctuated by greatness.

4:13 Pamala In layman's terms, I almost look at this like cooking and baking. Because baking is just so precise and cooking is more of just like, you know, can you what what are your instincts in there? Yeah. It's messier. It's not always so specific.

4:29 Mark Yep. That's exactly right. Because it's like cooking you could do by feel baking. You've got to do by science.

4:34 Pamala So when did this sense of this could be. Or this is going to be the next special century come to you?

4:40 Mark I stumbled across like, Robert Gordon's book. I'm like, something's here one morning. Like I was like playing around with the I. It's like, okay, why do I disagree with him and let her wake up my wife? I'm like, that's it, Robert J. You're going down. It's just like, what is going on? And then I'm like, I figured out where he's wrong, what his whole premise for the book was.

5:03 Mark You're not going to have that type of growth again. Right. It's like in 1940, 80% of houses were thought of as networked. What did that mean in 1940? That basically means you had running water and electricity, telephones. There was definitely phones already, but not like as mainstream as it is as it is today. Actually, the funny thing about phones, it's like that was the first social media because especially in rural areas, you'd, you'd like listen in on the, on the group line, basically the party line, that's where you basically got your gossip.

5:38 Mark That's where my people like found out was what was going on in town. It's the leap of like kind of like, is there going to be more of an intelligence. You know, are there things that are like, you know, autonomous agents and all that's like I mean we've all seen Westworld. We know you know, we know all those all those horror stories.

5:58 Mark And if you think about it like the biggest, productivity gains were between 1920 and 1970, world War one just ended. We went through the depression and we went through World War two. So William James, he's kind of the father of American psychology. He said, war is the gory nurse of social cohesion. We haven't had any, like, cohesive force, like World War Two bonding us.

6:25 Pamala Yeah. Yeah. I think certainly as Americans we've had it pretty late because we haven't even had war on our land for a very, very long time. We don't feel the pain really.

6:37 Mark We haven't had a shared trauma event since 9/11.

6:40 Pamala Yeah.

6:41 Mark I mean, the pandemic usually acts as a shared trauma event, but that actually went.

6:47 Pamala Yeah, that went that was that went opposite sides.

6:51 Eva That was.

6:51 Pamala Yeah vivid. So I guess my question about the growth element, I'll say I would interpret that sometimes as growth meaning more population, more people. But I don't think that's necessarily what the word means. Or is it?

7:05 Mark First of all, growth is omnidirectional. But electricity only took about 40 years to figure out what to really do with electricity to get productivity going as a result of that.

7:18 Pamala So do you not worry about the resources, like do you think the cause that you think it'll all balance out, the cause and effect essentially.

7:28 Mark Okay. I'm going to be a dork here, but yeah, what am I, what am I, what am I? Friends taught me this one. Have you ever heard of this, Soviet physicist? Kardashev?

7:38 Pamala No, no.

7:39 Mark So, Kardashev is essentially thinks about, like, a Kardashev one. Civilization is a civilization that is able to utilize efficiently all of the resources on the planet. So that's a Kardashev one. A Kardashev two is basically able to utilize all of the resources in the solar system efficiently. And then Kardashev three is basically you can use all of the resources in the universe efficiently.

8:10 Mark Now, where are we on this whole Kardashev? Yeah, yeah. Negative energy somewhere. We're somewhere between like point four and point six. Let's just say we're halfway to a Kardashev one level one. Okay. But I think that it's it's headed in the right direction.

8:27 Pamala I guess the question becomes, obviously the big subject around this is water and data centers. And I guess my question is, do you feel like we'll get to that tier one before we to do so much destruction? Because these are big, giant things. And I hear that you're saying, like we are headed in a good direction. We will get there.

8:47 Pamala But I guess at what means will we get there?

8:50 Mark So what is it? What does that mean? So if you're going to have a data center in your town, great. You will never pay utility bills again. If you don't want to live in this town, we will buy your house at two x of value so you can move somewhere else. If you want to stay here, here, here are the risks, but you will be compensated appropriately for for those for those risks.

9:13 Mark Because I don't because I don't think the data centers are not going to be built. But I do see if there's not any sort of share in the bounty, the data centers are going to get sabotaged.

9:24 Pamala What do you hope shows up in the special century, like in your lifetime and then beyond your lifetime? Like, do you have ideas and thoughts of like where this could go and what and what you want or what you think will happen?

9:37 Mark We're somewhere kind of in that digital reformation right now. And what I do think will happen is what we've defined as a middle class life within the G7, the G7, it's like the OECD is like, yeah, yeah, think on how many countries they count. Let's say like 39 right now. And the G7 is the seven richest countries on earth.

9:58 Mark So if you think about it, like a G7, middle class lifestyle will be a baseline because that could be provided for from, you know.

10:08 Pamala And mean technically it could be a baseline. Today we just choose for it to not be right.

10:14 Mark We we choose we choose for it not to be because we've invested in in brainwashing systems. I was a kid who stopped standing for the Pledge of Allegiance.

10:25 Pamala Totally.

10:26 Mark Because it's usually teachers would just be like, did you you read the whole thing? All right, why don't you just go to the library and leave me alone? Yeah. I'm like, okay, fine living.

10:35 Pamala Give me. So I love okay, so a higher standard of life will become the baseline love. What are some of the other things that you think are going to happen?

10:46 Mark I think I think that think about this. We're going from in like a few people have talked about this, like Richard Tucker has talked about like the age of creativity. If you think of if you think about that, it's like we are judged on what we do, what is our work. You know what we do if the age of creativity, if like your baseline is met, does that mean that we judge people on what they create.

11:15 Mark Because one of the, one of the things that I wrote a few years ago was this thought leadership piece that creativity is the new literacy, in the same way that literacy changed, you know, Europe between the 1500s and the 1700s. It's like creativity is going to do the same for us.

11:36 Pamala And what forms of like give us some examples of what forms you think creativity could take off.

11:45 Mark Like during Davinci's time there was simply not that many creatives, right. It's like we didn't really get mass creativity until advertising really like in the 1880s and the 1890s. That's like too loosely if you think about like those famous posters, like in Paris, like Metro, it's like Toulouse-Lautrec did those posters that was advertising.

12:06 Pamala Yeah, yeah.

12:08 Eva It's romantic to think about. So motivate. Yeah.

12:15 Mark It's it's a mode of.

12:16 Pamala Creativity I love it. Yeah.

12:18 Mark But but I think but I think that the more that people go through the process of creation, the more that they will be able to see other people's perspectives.

12:29 Pamala Yeah. I mean, the universe. Yeah. It's beautiful. The university ality of, I even say that word. Right. But feelings, you know, is the one thing that we can all have. And I agree with you that we're feeling so disconnected from each other because of that lack of empathy. And I do believe creativity speaks to everybody around the world.

12:48 Pamala Mark, how are you? How are you preparing or what are you doing for the special century? Like what do you what it like, what's your daily look like? You know, obviously it's in your brain. You're researching it, you're thinking about it. You're, you know, fever dreaming it. But what are you. What are you doing?

13:07 Mark I think I'm doing what? What almost everybody in the professional class is doing. Partly hoping, partly investing, partly wishing that the worst doesn't come. Yeah, but. Because. But because I've read so much history, I kind of know where things. I know the scenarios that might take place. But those are essentially scenarios that that might take place. But I also know that regardless of what's happened with you, we have always come out okay.

13:43 Mark We have not necessarily come out okay within a person's lifetime.

13:50 Pamala That's true. They're fair. So in your in your hoping what do you what do you do. You feel a need to relay that hope to other people because you have such an understanding of history and because you do have hope?

14:11 Mark I don't I mean, I feel that I have a need to share this because I have a need to share history in some capacity. It's right. It's kind of like, why did I not become a professor. Because I wanted my nice dinners earlier. Fair and I had a few professors in college go and say you know what.

14:31 Mark Recommend you can get a PhD. You can do this. But then they go, we'll let you in on a little secret. I'm like, okay, first you don't make that much money be after you get your PhD. There's about 20 people who know exactly what you're talking about. And you hate ten of them.

14:49 Pamala Yeah.

14:50 Eva Well, I appreciate.

14:51 Pamala That your.

14:52 Eva Obligation.

14:54 Pamala Has led.

14:55 Eva You to us.

14:57 Mark I don't know if it's an obligation, I would, I would, I would, I would, define it as a sickness that could be viewed as an obligation.

15:05 Eva Okay. Fair. Fair.

15:06 Mark It's it's like, look, if I was born rich, I'd be a history professor. If I was born upper middle class, I'd be a comedian. But I was born working class, and I ended up in advertising. Yeah. Which is basically a combination of all of those things.

15:20 Pamala Yeah. I'm just. We're just all the town haulers. That's all. Good. That's it.

15:25 Mark We're we're we're the town haulers. It's like it's it's like this. Somebody had to tell the story around the fireplace. Yeah I yes it's us.

15:33 Pamala Yeah. Well as we're wrapping this up my question to you is would you still call it special Century. Would you call it something else.

15:41 Mark Maybe not in our lifetime but in our grandkids lifetime. I don't think living to 120 is going to be that big of a deal.

15:48 Pamala But do you.

15:49 Mark Yeah, that's a different question. Yeah, that's a different question. Okay.

15:52 Pamala What do.

15:53 Mark What what what I will say is.

15:55 Pamala Well, that's all for today's episode of, you know, Too much a huge, huge thank you to Mark Richman for sharing his insights on history, innovation and the forces that could shape the next great era of human progress.

16:07 Eva If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe, leave us a review and share it with someone who would love it. Explore more episodes and behind the scenes content at You Know Too Much Media.

16:19 Pamala Follow us on Instagram and YouTube to keep the obsession going. Thanks so much, Mark.

16:24 Mark Thank you.

16:25 Pamala Oh my god. Yeah.

16:26 Eva Thanks so much, Mark.