#162 Nathan Myhrvold - The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish  ## Metadata - Author: **The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish** - Full Title: #162 Nathan Myhrvold - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/dd895cd8-fd16-4a1c-8d62-21cef2fa71d0 ## Highlights - The Importance of Planning Ahead Key takeaways: • Humans are not great at longterm things, such as eating right and working out. • This is because the immediate gratification of, "I'm late for an interview this morning. I got to leave. I don't have time to work out" is more appealing than the longterm gratification of "I'm eating right and working out so that I can have a healthy body and a healthy mind.". Transcript: Speaker 1 Humans are not great at long-term things, okay? We all know that we should eat right and work out. Lots of us don't. That's because the immediate gratification of, oh, I'm late for an interview this morning. I got to leave. I don't have time to work out. That was me this morning. There's a society. We try to plan ahead ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c04705ce-6d62-4cad-a6d0-a369b689ea94)) - The Future of Transportation Key takeaways: (* Modern trains are autonomous for all intents and purposes., * Subway systems are also autonomous, with computers controlling the trains.) Transcript: Speaker 2 Do you think we'll see totally like, why don't we have autonomous trains then? Because that's a closed network, closed loop, practically speaking. Speaker 1 I mean, there's well, many modern train systems are autonomous for all intents and purposes. They will have humans on board as a safety or a backup feature. But when you have modern trains, by which I don't mean any train in the United States, I'm afraid. But if you have the high speed trains that are going 300 kilometers an hour in Europe, more increasingly in Asia, you can't rely on humans to make all of the decisions. It's just we don't operate fast enough. We're not totally reliable. We can be distracted. We're great for some things. Don't get me wrong. But those systems are very much controlled with computers. The same thing is true for most modern subway systems. You've got lots of subway trains, have this complicated thing of different stations and so forth. ([Time 0:09:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0a1840fb-2620-4334-88d1-89c7771c42d4)) - The Importance of Taking Care of Earth Key takeaways: • Humans are not great at longterm things, such as taking care of the planet. • It is better to treat Earth as a second home rather than a disposable planet. Transcript: Speaker 1 You know, they went to South America. They had colonies in Africa and other places. But even earlier than that, the way humans got to Europe was they left Africa. But at this stage, you have to say, well, gee, if we really need to leave this planet, a we must have screwed something up pretty badly. Some people say, well, that's always good of Mars that we have a second home for humanity. Well, if you really had to do that, the moon is a lot closer and has a variety of advantages. Or you could build large habitats in space. There was a physics professor named Dr. O'Neill at Princeton, who was a big fan of this idea. But so far, we don't even need to do that. And it makes a lot more sense to try to take care of this planet and not screw it up than to treat Earth as being disposable. Now, it's OK. We'll have Mars. Because if you keep thinking that way, you're going to screw Mars up, too. Speaker 2 Where are we going wrong and taking care of this planet? Speaker 1 Humans are not great at long-term things. OK? So we all know that we should eat right and work out. Lots of us don't. And that's because the immediate gratification of, oh, I'm late for an interview this morning. ([Time 0:16:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e3d003f8-100d-4516-9804-73fa1137cfd7))