Sumit Paul-Choudhury has written 'The Bright Side', a book about optimism. Sumit discusses how his wife dying reshaped his views on optimism, differentiating between pragmatic optimism and blind faith. He explores how having an optimistic outlook, although seemingly against his scientific training, aligns with good mental health.
"Believing in a better tomorrow is not the same as saying that today is great."
We touch on the evolutionary logic behind optimism, the impact of agency on perception, and how alternate histories can inform future thinking. Sumit also reflects on the role of optimism during personal grief and provides insights into his writing process and the broader importance of the arts and humanities. The conversation closes with advice for optimism in younger generations and an emphasis on appreciating everyday human interactions.
"Postcards from your future self can be more helpful than New Year’s resolutions."
Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or YouTube.
Contents:
00:19 The Moment That Changed Everything
01:08 Embracing Optimism
02:58 The Psychology of Optimism
04:42 Rational Optimism vs. Pessimism
09:39 Alternate Histories and Humility
13:20 Leadership and Optimism
16:03 Techniques for Optimism
20:45 Optimism in the Face of Grief
23:40 Teaching Optimism to the Younger Generation
26:03 Understanding the Climate Problem
28:41 Victorian Sewer Systems: An Underrated Marvel
29:41 Debating De-growth Ideas
32:07 The Importance of Arts and Humanities
34:36 Moonshot Ideas
38:33 Existential Risks
40:21 Personal Creativity and Writing Process
45:58 Current Projects and Life Advice
Transcript (This is AI assisted, so mistakes are possible)
Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Sumit Paul-Choudhury he leads Alternity which is a studio that looks at alternative histories and speculative futures. He's also written a book called The Bright Side, which is about optimism. Welcome.
Sumit: Hi. Ben.
Ben: You write that you became an optimist the night my wife died.
How did that moment reshape you?
Sumit: So I think everybody has a moment in their life. Sooner or later.
Preferably if you're lucky later, but when you have to think about whether the world is benign and whether your life is gonna go smoothly or not. And we all have an expectation of that. It's not a particularly rational thing. And in the wake of that event, what I had to face was that the world was not as benign as I thought it would be, or my life was not gonna be as.
Smooth as I thought it would be. 'cause up until that point it had all gone pretty well for me. Really. I had a, pretty, I had a good upbringing, I had a pretty successful education and I was starting to have quite a successful career. And then this sort of happens and you think, actually things are evidently not gonna be that easy or that trouble free.
And so that kind of, inspired as you might expect, a period of some reflection about about this. And one of the things that occurred to me, so I started, there's two things happened. One was that I started to think almost as a joke, I started to say, I'm gonna be an optimist. 'cause I thought of optimism as being quite a silly, frivolous kind of way to, to look at the world.
Not harmful per maybe harmful, but I thought of it in terms of, if you don't really wanna think very hard about the world, you just say, oh, things will work out and that's optimism and that's all that, it really means.
and so one thing that happened was I started doing things that I thought would help. And as I later found out what I hit upon were the kinds of things you are actually supposed to do if you want to be more optimistic or act more optimistically. And I found that they were working, it was started out as a stance, but it started to become a real thing.
And then in the course of doing that, I realized that actually I'd always been like this, that I'd always been an optimist, and that I was actually quite deeply baked into my personality. Which was difficult for me to accept in many ways because I just said, I think, I thought it was a frivolous way to look at the world, particularly with someone who like me.
I was, I studied physics, I trained as a journalist in both those professions, whatever the truth might be. You are supposed to think of yourself as being, a hardened, analytical, critical thinker. Someone who judges things on the basis of evidence and solid argument and so on are not really someone who just thinks things will work out in a particular way.
So there was a real issue for me there to reconcile this kind of newfound identification of myself as an optimist. And what I've been trained to think was the best way to, to look at the world, the best way to approach it. And that's what sort started me down this road.
Ben: And you distinguish essentially between a pragmatic optimism from this.
Notion that you glossed over in terms of a blind hope, that kind of idealistic, almost foolish kind of hope. Can you unpack the difference and did the sort of face of having to look at that through grief and everything else also help differentiate this difference between a kind of blind faith, hope and where might you have a more rational optimism?
Sumit: So what I got to, and I started to look at this, I think of it in terms of layers almost. So what I found quite early on when I started thinking, looking at optimism seriously, was that it is the default state, not just of me, but
who have good mental health, who enjoy good mental health are optimistic by default about our own lives in, there's lots, loads of psychological research to the effect that we systematically overestimate our chances of leading a trouble free life. We think good things are gonna happen, so we think we're gonna have healthy relationships and successful careers and, earn more money than we'd like, than our peers and so on.
We think all those things are gonna happen. And we don't think the bad things are gonna happen. So we don't think we're gonna get cancer. We don't think we're gonna be in a car crash. We don't think we're gonna get fired. We don't, and that seems to be very deeply rooted in the way that we look at the world.
And what I found was that there's a good evolutionary logic for that. The simple version of which is if you didn't believe that you wouldn't get our bed in the morning, you have to believe the world is gonna, you're gonna succeed otherwise, why would you do anything, right?
And actually, if you don't believe that, people who don't believe that. Or don't score well for opt or highly on optimism. Tend to be people who have depression. There's quite a big correlation there between those two things. So it's a psychologically healthy state. But having said that, that's where I think we start.
That's what evolution has given us, if you like, and what our base psychology gives us. But of course, we have lots of ways of looking at the world that go beyond that. We have lots of rational tools for making sense of the world. We have lots of ways of assessing what's coming that are more analytical than just our instinct.
And I thought that gives us a, that means that we can build on that basic urge to believe that things will improve. But how do you harness that turn into something useful? And that I think is when you get into the, alright, now you can start thinking about intellectual ways of doing this.
Aren't just hoping things will turn out that are about trying to figure out how they might turn out better and then doing something about it.
Ben: I guess the rational part of me though thinks so. There's, there is this line of evidence that if you're clinically depressed, you. Judge the probabilities of the real world better than a typical person.
A non-depressed person, like you say is a little bit more optimistic than real world chances. But actually basing it on the real world probabilities is more rational and is therefore a more true way of seeing the world. I was wondering what you would've thought about that, and maybe that also interlinks into this optimism gap that you can see about, depending on which scenario, which framing you use.
I think some surveys show. People can feel good about their own future if they're not the press. So a typical person but tends to actually feel more gloomy if you ask them about society or some other things outside of themselves individually, but on this kind of more culture sector led thing.
Yeah. And I was wondering about the mechanisms behind that and whether we should narrow it and if so, what we should do about it.
Sumit: There's two slightly different things going on there, but there are, but there's a common strand, which is agency. So the thing that the person who sees the world with with depressive realism essentially.
So the person who sees the world and says the probabilities accurately or seemingly accurately, I should say what that doesn't take into account is the fact that we don't have perfect knowledge about the future. If you had, and this is why I have a problem with the work, with the use of.
People saying they're realists. Because actually if you're being a, if you say you are being realistic, you're essentially, you are implicitly saying. I know how things are gonna turn out and actually we dunno how things are gonna turn out. And I think one of the issues is that we consistently underestimate our overestimate, how well we see the future.
We think that things are gonna be more or less the same tomorrow as they are today, despite the fact that actually I. What actually tends to happen is a lot of the time they are, many days are the same as the day before. But then there comes a day when everything changes, you know? And actually as it happens this past quarter century, we seem to have gone through quite a lot of those, between, so we've got, nine 11, the financial crisis, covid the outbreak of war in Europe.
And so you know, there's quite a lot of stuff that's happened in the last, in living memory. That should suggest that actually sometimes things change very rapidly and in ways that we don't expect. So the thing that I think that you're missing, if you think about what looks like a realistic probability what looks realistic from the here and now is that the future is open and mutable.
And that in two ways, one in the sense that it holds possibilities that we don't know about which is about the predictability of the future. And that obviously varies from domain to domain. Some areas we can be very clear about, some areas much less we can forecast tomorrow's weather pretty neatly.
We can't really forecast an election in three years time with anything like that. Degree of accuracy. And some of those possibilities will be positive. And the argument that I would make is that if you are an optimist, whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, it's, it boils down to self-fulfilling prophecy.
Because, but the difference is there's an asymmetry and payoff one that, in a very neutral way you don't necessarily care about. But as a human being living in the world, you do, if you are an optimist you accept that there are positive possibilities out there. And you might try and steer towards them, not necessarily precisely, but in some sort of way.
That means you're more likely to realize those positive possibilities if you're a pessimist. On the other hand, and should we said that pessimism in this sense is very close to fatalism, it's not doing anything basically. And that means that essentially, yes, you'll be correct, that nothing will happen to previous situation, but that's because you haven't done anything about it and you will not benefit from unexpected positive surprises.
So essentially, being a pessimist, you give up the potential upside. And so that's where that falls down. That kind of idea of agency, the ability to direct, that's also the root of the optimism gap, the gap between how we view our lives and how we view the collective future. Because it's to some degree because we believe that we have control over our own lives, which you know, is true to some extent, maybe not as much as we think.
What we don't believe is that we have control over other people's lives and certainly not how strangers behave. And I think that's why, optimism is strongest for ourselves. And then it gets a bit weaker for our friends and family. Then this kind of a quite a, an odd area in which there are people who we think are agreeable and competent in the lingo.
And we are willing to believe that things will go well for them. Beyond that, it's strangers and we don't think we know how they're gonna behave. We don't believe that they, we can control what they'll do and we become quite negative about what that's gonna, and that's where the gap comes in, I think, between what we think we are gonna do and what we think society is gonna do.
Ben: That model makes a lot of sense for me. I've seen it in animal behavior studies that one of the things you can get into is this learned helplessness condition. So you learn that nothing. You can't do anything and then you stop doing something. But the point you make, which I think I haven't heard it, I.
Quite as articulate as that which you really nailed is the fact that we can impact our own futures. And therefore, even though your probability might be X, whatever you're gonna say, there's not 0.5, you can actually shift that probability by your own agency, your own choice and acting on it. And actually, I think we can probably influence others or influence strangers in societies probably more.
Than we expect. At least we could do within that, which would make sense. I've seen you write as well that you've called alternate history, a tool for humility or essentially looking at these scenarios of that. How do you think maybe businesses, governments, companies, or even ourselves can use what ifs or structured what ifs without getting lost in sort of fantasy type of land, but still being using as a case for say, constructive optimism about the world?
Sumit: I, it's not easy is the first answer to that really. But the and I think the so opt, so we are storytelling animals, it's probably, at this point, every time anyone ever says something's unique about human beings, they turn out to be wrong. But but we do seem to be, at least our capabilities in that respect, seem to be much greater than any other organism we know about, which is double-edged sword because I think it gives us that ability to think about the future in ways that that give us a lot of, a great deal of.
More capacity to plan our futures than any other animal does. We can envisage the future in many ways, which, and the fact that we could do it in many ways, not just one, is is one of our superpowers. The same thing applies in reverse. We can do the same thing with the past, but we don't do it very often.
And I think, it's we do it as a pastime, really. It's everywhere in, in fiction. Alternate histories are really, and, speculative future are everywhere at the moment. The, I think there's varying ways you can look at it. One of them for me is just to remember that the stories we tell about the past are, to some extent, just stories.
It's not to say they don't have a factual basis or that things didn't actually happen because I wanna be careful about not turning this into Revisionism, but the but it's the but what I think we. We tend to do is we tend to construct a narrative that says something happened, then something else happened, then something else happened.
And it had to happen like that. And that gives us the sense that where we are now is where we had to be. And of course when you look at the past, actually, we just talked about, how contingencies have shaped this, our living memories. But the same is also true for history.
And we know about some of these, some of these kind of accidents of history are celebrated. Some of them not so much. But when you get into it, there's always kind of points in which history could have taken a different course. I don't think you need to be precise about what that course might have been.
It's an entertaining pastime to do the, what if someone had killed Hitler when he was a baby, and how would the world have turned out? That's the canonical, alternate history experiment. So you can think that through and you can plot it out. And there are lots of hobbyists who do this with.
What would've happened if the Roman Empire hadn't fallen or whatever else. And you can construct lots of. Interesting, intriguing words out of that. But I think the top level is really just remembering that actually how we got here was not a succession of pre-ordained moves. We didn't get to this point because, things unfolded according to some sort of plan.
We got here because, people did I. People did the best they did. They could. Some things happened that nobody controlled Nature got in the way. Every now and again, you get plagues, you get natural disasters. Buildings fall down every now and again. That sort of thing shapes the course of history.
And if you remember that, it makes you think actually the future is not set in the same way either. And every decision we made remembering that every decision we made in the past and everything that happened in the past led us to where we are, but not necessarily to this specific point.
The flip side of that, and this is what I mean about being humble. This, we are not in a particularly special or preselected place. That means that the same is true going forward. We could go to any number of places from here.
Ben: So should we be worried about. Panglossian leaders, those who just end up spouting what seems to be almost fantastical nonsense on that side.
Or I guess you need some leadership, something to lead us to a better place. How do we deal with this in terms of a leadership thinking and particularly where I guess we've seen arguably in the western world over the last decade or two, some leaders which might be tilting towards that panglossian style of thinking.
Sumit: I think so there's, yeah, again, it's a double-edged sword because you need people to have clear visions of what they think is possible. And you need people who are gonna able to inspire that sense, that confidence in the people who they have to lead. Which is, again, relatively obvious because who are you gonna follow?
Are you gonna follow the person who says things are gonna be great or you're gonna follow the person who says everything's gonna be wrong, go wrong. I don't have to. So yeah. Excuse me. So optimists are, are popular people like hanging out with optimists. People will go where optimists tell them to go.
It's contagious in that sense, in the sense that people want to do what optimists tell them. I think there's the balance really is when it steer, it drops from being, I. There's a difference between being optimistic and being delusional, and I think it's the delusional piece that is the, or delusional and denialist, really, it's when you insist that your optimistic vision of the future is gonna pan out regardless of the evidence of the contrary.
I. That it starts to become dangerous. All politicians when they get elected have to do so on an optimistic promise. I talked about that kind of, that zone of people that we don't know, but we're willing to accept, the on who's will behalf willing to accept optimism.
Politicians love to be in that zone. Politicians really want to be in that zone of people who are agreeable and who we view as agreeable and competent and whose optimism we believe. That's what they're always trying to get into, and they do it explicitly in campaign speeches and so on. And they have to, because of course anyone who's not in a position, not in office doesn't actually know what they're gonna be able to achieve.
They can't let, so they have to offer up an optimistic promise. And to some extent it has to be a faith-based promise. It has to be this is what I think we're gonna do. Then you get into power and you suddenly discover that, in the words of that infamous treasury note, sorry, there is no money, or whatever else.
And and then you have to deal with reality and modifying it. Where it goes wrong, I think is the point at which people start to say actually still gonna work out. Because with, regardless of whatever else is going on. A lot of the time, this is not particularly obvious from the outside, you just know things are not going to plan.
But it's not. Sometimes it is. And it's things like Covid. COVID is the clearest example I think. We had panglossian leaders on both sides of the Atlantic and the US and the uk. Trump and Johnson re jump Johnson and Trump respectively. And we also have people like Bolsonaro in Brazil, all of whom were essentially at the beginning of the pandemic.
Wanted quite understandably to say, this is just gonna go away. It's not gonna be a problem. Like Johnson said, we'd be done with it in six weeks. Trump just said it would banish miraculously. Bolsonaro denied it existed pretty much. And then they all of them got covid quite seriously.
Of there's no point being blindly optimistic in these circumstances. Reality catches up as Philip k Dick said. Reality is that which when you ignore it doesn't go away. You can ignore Covid, but it's not gonna go away.
Ben: Yeah. That that's back to reality.
I was reading. On the internet just recently that people have been started to use some of these AI agents or GPT to do this technique of being an ideal parent or being an ideal person. And I was reflecting that this was similar to something you've written around being your best self, that you could be your idolized self.
And I guess this was also a case for optimism. So I, I was interested in. Have you used the technique of being of thinking about your idolized self or maybe even an idolized society or what a utopia might be like and how should we use this, and how useful do you think this kind of thinking might be?
Sumit: Yeah. So I dunno, the chat the chat GBT examples but I can imagine, I think I probably have a rough idea of what you're talking about, but the so yeah the best possible self exercise, I should say there's not a great deal of of evidence that you can change your default level opt of optimism very much.
And I would say that's actually probably fine because we, you grow up with a certain level of optimism for various reasons and and you know how to work with that as it were. So I'm not sure that just generally increasing your level of optimism is necessary, particularly desirable anyway, what I think is useful is to direct it, is to think about the areas, specific areas in which you might wanna be more optimistic.
And that's where I think this thing of, if you don't feel optimistic, you can then bring your intellect to play. You can try and reason through it, and that hopefully will start to make you feel better about it more generally. So the best possible self exercise, which is one of the few interventions that has any evidence supporting it.
It's modest, but it does have it. It's this idea that you should just consciously think about what you want out of your life and you should try and do that. Imaginatively really, it's set aside a certain amount of time each day and, try and come up with a, an idea of what your life might be like if you achieved everything you wanted to achieve.
And some ideas about how you might get there. And the kind of thing about that is it's not, that doesn't sound particularly revolutionary and in many ways it's not really. It's not saying much to say you should do that. The thing that I think is striking about, it's that we just don't do it very much.
We do it once a year at New Year when we make a set of completely unrealistic resolutions, which we then promptly fail to adhere to, and then we give up until the next year and we do it all over again. So actually, although it's not a hard exercise to do it's not something we do very often.
I do think it, despite what I've just said about it not being much rigorous risk evidence. In favor of it. There is evidence in favor of the best possible. It's not a massive effect for me personally. I mean from personal conviction. I think it does work for a couple of, one was because when, during the period of my bereavement is what I invent, one of the techniques I stumbled upon I'm a writer by trade, so I started blogging about what my future life might be like.
And sometime in more or less direct ways. And I found that was really quite a helpful exercise because it helped me to think about, 'cause in that situation, the future just looks like a wall at some points. There's nothing, you can't see anything past, the present day.
So just doing that exercise in alright, so what does this look like a few years down the line? That was helpful. And then I realized that actually, this again, it's one of those things I've been doing. For a long time. And I do think that probably if you carry on doing it, you don't necessarily have to sit down 15 minutes with a piece of paper or whatever and you can write about it.
You can draw, you can there's a technique which people use with communities where they ask you to write a postcard from your future community. So what do you want the place you live to be in, be like in 10 years time you write a postcard to yourself. So lots of ways, but it's about that imaginative conception of what that might be like.
And just the mental exercise of. Trying to think through those possibilities, I think does have a very solitary effect.
Ben: I love that idea that you write about like postcards from the future. This idea, you can do it from a society or your community. Like you say, you can do it to yourself and also your suggestion that you may have a baseline level of optimism.
Like you said, some level of optimism might be hardwired from some of our biology and neuroscience, but actually to some extent you can train it a little bit, but maybe not. In an overall sense, but in some of these slightly narrower domains, in terms of what you might wanna train, you don't wanna be optimistic across everything at all times, and you end up panglossian.
You can train a little bit of it. And that really struck a chord with me.
Sumit: You end up with toxic positivity essentially. Just to throw another buzzword into the mix, I think what we, you've, we've seen what happens when people try to be. Overwhelmingly positive all the time, and and it does end up, ends up again in denial. It ends up in denial of, the things that are not making you happy. It ends up in denial of the things that are not making other people happy. So just blindly try, I think. And I think that's where you tend to get to if you just try to be more optimistic.
You just try to be more positive across the board. You can only really do that by pushing away uncomfortable truths. And I don't think that's a great approach. I think being, as you say, being narrower about what it is you would like to, the specifics you'd like to fix, specifics you'd like to think about, that's probably more useful.
I.
Ben: I'm really interested how you've used some of these techniques, particularly in grief or bereavement and how that has happened because I did a show around death and some of it had quotes from people in grief and bereavement. And I think a lot of them found it very hard to come to this place on, on say, the Bright Side, and yet it seemed to really work out for you.
So I was interested if you think it was just particular to your situation or whether you think some of what you went through could be. Techniques which might be useful for others. So I guess one is imagining a possible future or at least some better possible futures within that. And is there anything else you came to this realization?
Because I think you went through a few things. You went for long walks, you did these other types of, you tried a variety of things, which people do, and yet you still manage to settle on this kind of rational, optimistic route.
Sumit: I think a lot of it for me, part of it was just that I, as I said I discu realized that I clearly was actually quite strongly optimistic to begin with.
And I think people find different ways to optimism. They find different reasons for optimism. I think if I'd had a family at that point, I might have thought about what I needed to do for their lives rather than my own. And of course, people in that position have a different set of considerations about how they move forward and what they can do.
I had the freedom to. At that point fortunately for me to essentially say I can do what I want for a bit and see how things turn out. If I'd had kids, that probably wouldn't have been true because you have to give them routine and all the rest of it. So there's part of that.
Part of it was another, part of it's about guilt which is not really, it's not directly relevant to optimism in that sense. But when I think it helped but didn't take it seriously to begin with. Because initially I could think of it as this is not something, 'cause I obviously wasn't happy, and I think that if I had thought about it and thought that I, I'm, and thought I was being, doing something that was about.
Being happy or pretending to be happy, I would've found that uncomfortable. But because I treated it as an exercise it was a bit detached from how I was feeling. There's a certain degree of dissociation between my emotional state and my kind of, and this is what I'm doing to get through this.
And from people who've written to me since the book came out and people have contacted me, there's, there are a lot of people who've said. Similar kind of feeling that that, I have to be positive. I have to find optimistic way forward. But it's difficult to it's difficult to say that or to express it because you don't want people to believe that what you're think that what you're saying is I'm over it.
It's done. I'm happy now. 'cause it's very much not that believing in a better tomorrow is not the same thing as saying that today is great. Which is again, actually true for all of the kind of dimensions we're talking about. It's also true of, the world situation, I am I'm, as an optimist, I think the world will be better, 50 years from now than it is today.
But that is not to say that I think today is grace by any means.
Ben: Yeah. I often express that today's got a huge amount of challenges, yet it is still out of the last thousand years, the best possible time to be born is now and probably the right. It'll be better to be born in 10 years time, in 20 years time than it is today, more or less.
Do you think this has lessons for what we should be teaching or discussing with a younger generation, say children or even younger people? Because I find maybe one of the loops back is I meet some people I. Who I guess I would describe or always describe as being climate anxious or having this anxiety around the world.
And this is why I really feel that some of them are close to learned helplessness and I very much say you've, got to somehow develop your own agency and things around that. And often it makes them feel better because they are suddenly imagining a better world and trying to take steps towards that.
Is there anything else you would perhaps point towards younger people or children that we should be discussing with them?
Sumit: I think with the younger people, this is it. Difficult 'cause I think that we have, I think we have inadvertently ended up in a situation where we're telling young people about all the things that are gonna be terrible about their futures.
And none of the ways in which things have improved or none of them. That's exaggerating, but I think I think it's very easy as a young person today. And I'm not a young person, so I'm always a bit cautious about saying what I think young people, hear or see or do. But, I think it's very easy to get nothing but messages of doom.
Because of the media environment we live in. It's very easy for that to happen. And it's very. It's, there are lots of ah, what am I trying to say? I think the experience of previous generations in this respect. So there's quite a lot in the book about how I lived in terror of of nuclear war when I was younger, as I think many people of my age did.
And I'm not saying that, that these are the same kind of fear or that or that that just because nuclear war hasn't happened doesn't mean that climate. Like collapse isn't gonna happen. They're both, but they're both problems that needed addressing and they're both problems that seemed intractable at the time.
And I think it would help for young people to appreciate that the situation they're in is not, is actually not unprecedented. There's a lot of messaging to the effect that we are in unprecedentedly dangerous times. And I don't really. Believe that in a way. I think the risks are very real and very large.
But our capabilities are also very real and very large. And our knowledge is very real and very large. One of the points I make a lot of the time is that actually the reason, you know it, is it not better that we know that there is a, the climate is in trouble. Rather than, the situation we would've been in.
50 years ago, the climate was already in trouble. We just didn't actually X Exxon but but most of us did not know at that point that the climate was in trouble. And yes, it, this stuff is scary. And we, and the news is because there's this constant drip feed of bad news. But in many respects, we should treat that as we know what the problem is.
Now we know what the problem is, and when it comes to climate, we actually know what we have to do about it. It's actually, it's not a complic, and at base it's not a complex problem, it's about the level, the atmospheric concentration of certain gases. That's not that hard to understand or to start dealing with the politics and all the rest of it's different.
But, anyway, I'm rambling. Yeah,
Ben: no I think that's you make some really great points that I think particularly presents in climate and environment. Essentially we fixed the ozone hole, right? We don't talk about that anymore. I remember, when I was growing up, we were taught about that and it was a really big problem and we actually fixed that problem.
And you go back a little bit further in, in the history of London, we had these really big, thick pea super. Events which I, I've only now seen pictures of it because it disappeared and we solved it. And our generation knows nothing about that. And same with some of these other existential risks.
I, I think you're right. Nuclear is a problem. Now we're talking about what? Manmade pandemics ai, existential risk. And actually were so much more aware of them than when we came out of, into the 1950s into nuclear where we had no real. Thought about it within that. So yes, the risks are great or maybe as great as they have been, but our ability to meet that is, is perhaps just as high.
Sumit: There are some interesting history. Helps. Again, I think, and I mean I, I don't think kids necessarily want someone to tell them about, ancient industrial history. But there's probably palable ways of doing it. One of my a friend of mine, Tom Han, who's pointed out he's a studies existential the history of existential risk and existential risk panics, as it were.
And there are interesting reflections. So there is when when people first started talking about splitting the atom way back when, the early 20th century, there was similar kind of rhetoric around, this might destroy the world unless I do it, in which case it will be a limitless source of, of potential for the human race.
And nobody understood its capabilities very much so it was kinda like. It will cure disease, it will provide energy, it will run your car, it will do, it will do everything, and you can't help but look at that now and think actually this is exactly the same. This is this, it's the same conversation as we're having about AI now.
It's it's both cornucopia and apocalypse. Only a few kind of why souls can manage it, otherwise and it could do everything. And none that never turns out to be true. Yeah,
Ben: and I can see particularly with the ai, if you ask. Certain Americans, they'll say, yeah, we will save the world.
As long as the Chinese don't do it. And then you speak to some Asians, the Chinese is oh, it'll all be great as long as you don't let the Americans do it. So I dunno whether they can both be right or wrong, but some of that anyway, I thought we might do a small section of what I call overrated, underrated.
So I'll give you an idea or a sentence and you can comment on it, whether you think it might be overrated or underrated and some thoughts from this. Probably it's in. In this space. So overrated or underrated? Victorian sewer systems.
Sumit: Oh. Underrated. And they're in the big section in your book, right?
Yeah. I say underrated. Yeah. They under, they're underrated I think in the sense that I don't think people appreciate the. The scale of the project or we don't think about it. It's one of those things you say we don't really think about very much anymore. One thing is who wants to think about sewers for a start?
But but the problem was, in the middle of the 19th century, the Thames was completely polluted. Like it was it was un central was becoming an uninhabitable because of the stench and the massive disease.
And so Basel Jet set out, once they decided this was a problem, to clean it up with this massive sewer system and he built it successfully. It was a Victorian mega project. It took vast amounts of, of material and ingenuity and money and all the rest of it. And now the terms is clean enough to mostly to swim in and for wildlife to to enjoy and so on.
So it's, and that's something that happens. It's there below our feet if you live in London. And we give little thought to it needs replacing now, granted but very much underrated. Yeah.
Ben: Very good. De-growth ideas, underrated or overrated?
Sumit: I think a bit of both. Sorry. That's weaseling isn't it?
Yeah, that's fine. You could do that. I think I think overrated in the sense that that it's very easy to clamor that what's wrong with the world is the fixation with growth. And I think, I. Certainly there's some truth in that. There are decisions, there are certainly some decisions that get made in the name of growth that are probab, that are short term.
We all know that there are some decisions that get made that are short termist and ultimately counterproductive and so on. And we all know that growth in the ways that it's usually measured, which is essentially to say GDP doesn't really capture the things that make life worth living. It makes capture some of them, clearly.
But there are lots of things that it doesn't capture. On the other side of it though the the reason so it's easy to say that Degrowth is the answer and we should just move away from growth altogether. The other part of it though, is I don't think anyone's come up with a very credible response to that really.
We've had attempts at defining happiness and a broadening out the scorecard and so on, so that we include more factors I think about is just introducing carbon emissions as, probably the only constraint maybe that's being taken seriously on growth.
That's the only thing. And the amount of political turmoil and social turmoil that has resulted from saying we need to consider carbon emissions, on a similar footing to the potential for growth. So just there aren't that many easy solutions here. So I think degrowth. Clearly there isn't some sort of alternative to the growth at all costs approach.
I feel like the wheels are coming off that at this point. We know that there are significant ways in which it's failing our societies. I don't think just saying just step away from it is really the answer. Either there's a middle ground somewhere that people who know more about this stuff than me.
Should be trying to work out and I'm not sure they are trying to work out, I think they're trying to shout at each other instead.
Ben: Yeah. Although there is this issue of time horizon like you said, there's some things you can do which look maybe good on a three to five year basis. In fact you could say, if you only had two years to live, these are the things you might do.
As opposed to you were thinking on a hundred year view or a 50 of your, let alone a thousand year of you. And there are these problems in terms of for instance, when you've looked at happiness or other things that people find important. So education, health. And the the correlation of with GDP is like 0.8 or something is really high.
We haven't managed to look at these some other things. And the happiness thing is again is very mixed. We can't quite get round to it, but I agree. I think we should be looking more of it. So under and overrated. Great. Okay. The role of the arts, so arts and humanities, underrated.
Or overrated?
Sumit: Oh, massively underrated, I think. And yeah, again, with, again, with the caveat, underrated in a sense that I, so one of the things that I, I believe but cannot prove as it were is that I think that we have, when I say we, I mean I'm really talking about the UK here, or it probably applies to some other societies as well.
I think we've let the organs of the organs of imagination, that's a terrible phrase, but I think our societal organs of imagination have been allowed to atrophy. Imagination and creativity in a broad sense, rather than the narrow ones of product design, if you like. Whatever. What I mean by that is that that places like Univers, so universities have been turned into job factories to make it overly state this overly crudely. But but the, the the guiding staff in universities has become, how many productive, employees are you gonna turn out.
We have systematically through succession of events, some deliberate, some otherwise stifled the creative potential of many people who might once upon a time have been. And I know this seems quite a long way removed from what we've been talking about, but people who might once sort have picked up a paintbrush or picked up a guitar or whatever else now cannot really do that in a viable way.
We don't have the educational facilities for it. We don't have the recreational facilities for it. We don't have society that rewards it. And I think all of those things regardless of the actual products, of those activities which I think are themselves valuable, but I think what it does is it gives people permission to think about the world, in ways that's not, that are not the ones that they're necessarily given, by rote, and the more we do that, the more difficult it becomes for people to see other ways that the world might turn out or to have conviction that the way that they see the world, has merit. And yeah, and it's art and humanities that do that. There's some culpability here in that some of the arts and humanities have become so preoccupied with themselves that they've forgotten about, the wider world or seem to have lost interest in engaging with the wider world.
But nonetheless, yeah, I think we've become so fixated on hard skills on stem and this is coming from someone who is, stemmed to the core. We've become so fixated on that. I think we've forgotten about the piece that the arts and humanities. Contribute.
Ben: I've always said the cutting edge of physics wherever you get, is much closer to philosophy, arts, creativity than it is to just mathematical equations.
And I think the role of fiction, creative arts, imagination does give you both of these things. This ability to imagine these other worlds and also then to imagine other people, other societies who aren't necessarily you. Okay. Last one on maybe last couple on overrated, underrated moonshot ideas.
Overrated or underrated?
Sumit: Overrated. Yeah, over, overrated. Not in the sense that I don't think they should exist. I think they should exist. I think it's great for people to have ambitions people, societies. To have big ambitions and see what happens if you pursue them. This all sort of presupposes that you have the luxury of doing that.
But nonetheless, I think it's a good thing generally to have moonshots, things that seem unachievable. 'cause sometimes they turn out not to be. That's the, the self-fulfilling processes of optimism, what I think is, underrated by comparison, and this is not to say it's not happening, it is what I call in the book multiverse shots.
And this is not a particularly rigorous concept, but it's the idea that you should be trying to nurture ideas which have the potential to flower into many domains. One of the areas, and there's a couple of areas in which I think I could, there's sort of a. You can make the contrast. One is air travel, and or yeah, mean air travel, let's call it air travel.
And I get very frustrated by there's a certain demographic, shall we say who like to complain that Concord doesn't exist anymore. And that it was a great failure of it was an engineering triumphant, and doesn't exist. And where are we going as a society? And so now we have attempts to rebuild supersonic planes and and get that up and running again and.
I can't think that's a, that's not a particularly helpful moonshot. It solves a very limited problem for a very limited group of people and one that doesn't arguably need solving. And the same could be said for all the flying car startups, that exist out there. And these are essentially trying to solve problems that don't really exist.
They're ambitious, difficult, technical engineering problems. They're not real problems. Whereas I think, the other modes of aviation what you could do with air shut technology. There are people exploring all these things, but what you could do with aviation, air shut technology, what you could do with biofuels, what you could do with other forms of propulsion.
These are all fields that are comparatively unglamorous compared to the big Bang, if you like. Yeah, I think moonshots are great. I think it'd be better to try and identify fertile areas of research a bit more than in a bit more of a constructive way than we do at the moment.
Ben: I thought that was a really interesting section in your book. It. Tell for a couple of things that I think that, for instance, I don't need an AI robot for my coffee maker, but there was so much other stuff you wanted to put robots to use that maybe you could think about. So I did think there was one on that.
Sumit: Yeah. But it was also
Ben: interesting on the aviation point that maybe it's, we want systems moonshots, which would be multiverse in, in the sense that I think the phrase comes from, oh, we wanted flying cars, but we only got. Two hundred and forty four, a hundred forty four or whatever. But actually we didn't solve it.
But had you solved a proper Twitter, social media for the world, that actually would've been, and will, would still be much more valuable than if oh, it's just, we didn't happen to solve that to solve that
Sumit: one. I think it's interesting in that context actually. 'cause I think of a GI similarly.
I think a GI is a not well, actually, I do think to put my cards to the table. I think it is a pointless moonshot, really. I think I think it's expending an awful lot of of power resource human endeavor and all the rest of it in the pursuit of making a human ish machine. Whereas actually I think, the, I think AI has probably has a myriad of really useful applications in many areas of life that we are not really focusing on because we're.
Currently hung up on this idea of we can make an all powerful, all rounder, which I don't think is gonna happen. And I don't think it's gonna be particularly useful if we do.
Ben: I think that is just starting to happen. It's interesting. It's maybe a little bit like what we saw in, in, in the internet is in just getting our heads around how to use this.
And that's, I think this is why you're saying younger people use. These AI agents, but yeah, we don't necessarily need them to be 10 x or a hundred x better or like human-like intelligence 'cause we can't even use our own human-like intelligence now as effectively as we could. So maybe we've got some
Sumit: of these things.
I think the great potential of AI is to think in ways that we don't think, yeah, I'm not sure the point, I'm not, I don't really grasp the point of creating machine that will think like we do, but not as well. I think. I think creating a machine that will think in ways that we don't think is much more useful.
Ben: Yeah. Okay. And then the last one on this I guess we touched on, but overrated, underrated, this would be existential risk. I guess we can talk about AI or climate within that, but do you think overall this some of this focus on existential risk is overrated or underrated?
Sumit: I think it's hugely overrated.
I think I don't and a bit cautious here because we do seem to be inventing things that could do. Great damage to, a large number of people. Ever large number of people, numbers of people. We are in a point in history where we could exterminate ourselves probably more than we, but nonetheless having said that I feel a bit like, I think we've started to think about the future, the way that we think about, we used to think about God, we think the future is gonna judge us, and that, there's an apocalyptic moment coming or a moment of salvation coming. And now we put it in, we couch it in terms of what our technology's gonna end up doing as though we were not in charge of it.
Or that we were not in control of it or that we don't have any ability to decide how we use it. And I find it hard to believe that our situation today is, somehow worse than, and the comparison I like making with this is a medieval peasant in, 1350, the Black Death is coming.
People are dying in their droves. You dunno why You dunno who it, you dunno who it's gonna affect. You. Dunno why it's affecting them. You dunno how to prevent it. You can't do anything about it. Your society is completely imploding. It turns out quite well for you if you're a peasant, actually.
Because feudal, the feudal system collapses and all the rest of it. But I find it hard to believe that, that was not a moment that felt more dreadful from the point of view of existential risk than the moment we have now. When we are, concerned about, we are worried about technologies that don't exist yet.
And it's not wrong to worry about technologies that don't exist yet, but the very fact that we are worrying about them in advance. It's surely an improvement over, am I gonna be dead when I wake up tomorrow?
Ben: Yeah, agreed. Existential risk then overrated. Okay. And then last few sets of questions.
I had one I guess moving to personal creativity on your writing process or your own imagination process. 'cause you, oh yeah. You've got a whole book out and also I guess you run a creative studio. I've asked this for a number of people and I think there are as many different creative.
Processes as any other things you can write in the morning, you can write in the evening, you can write any of the 25 7. You can write lots, you can write little but I am interested in what people do. So do you have a particular writing process? Do you like notebooks or your laptop person?
Morning person, evening person. Do you write with music? No music or however, is there anything about your writing process you'd like to share?
Sumit: I can take the music bit. 'cause always with music, that's the easy, that's the easy part of my answer. You know what I don't have a very good answer on this really.
I don't think so I wish I had a cut and dried writing process because then I could just do that over and over again and be much more productive than I am, or maybe not, I don't know.
But like most, like many people who write a large part of it is a mystery to myself really. I spend a lot of time reading. I think the one thing that, I have figured out about myself is that I am the kind of person who integrates a lot of information rather than the kind of person who has one idea and pursues it doggedly.
Unfortunately the process by which I do that is a bit opaque even to myself. I tend to read a lot of stuff in the area I'm interested in, and then at some point, words tend to present themselves to me, largely fully formed. Often when I wake up in the morning I have, I go to bed, with a massive stuff in my head, and I wake up in the morning with, with the lines I want to write down.
I. That's a very unsatisfactory answer to anybody who wants to actually do this is the truth.
Ben: Yeah. Speech. Make sure you sleep. Yeah. Make sure you sleep. That's a good one. Okay last couple of questions then I have one, which I guess is the sort of meta question, which is there a question about optimism that you never get asked, but you would like someone to ask you?
Was there any question that, oh, you always wanna be asked, but no one ever asks it to you?
Sumit: I don't always wanna be asked. Oh gosh, yes. Give me a second.
I guess the question which I am asked and which I've written like 89,000 words of justification, but which I still don't really know what my actual answer to it is is it right to be. Optimistic. And when I say right to be optimistic, I mean in a cosmic sense. So in the book I explain the first part, the, why I think there's an evolutionary rationale for being optimistic.
And in the second part I talk about the people's attempts to, and this is, it's the second part really that we're talking about here. I talk in the second part about the philosophical arguments for optimism, at least actually slightly antiquated, philosophical arguments. But nonetheless, and they're cosmological arguments.
They're arguments about the way that the world is arranged. Is the world arranged in such a way that it's justifiable to be an optimist? And if you are if you are if you have religious faith, if you're a believer. That's an easy answer, a question to answer in many. It's not easy in the sense that you still have lots of other questions to address then, but it's quite easy to say yes because God is benevolent.
So you should be an optimist. You should believe that things work out. If you are not a believer on the other hand then you are left with this question of, what is the universe like? Is the universe patterned? Does the universe have a direction? Does the universe, want something from us?
And. That would be an empty question. Were it not for the kind of. Problems of cosmology today. So modern cosmologists have all these questions, some of which I think are a bit overrated, go back to that. But nonetheless they are questions. There are questions about why the universe is so neatly arranged.
Why the physical constant, the universe suit us and. I, I'll specifically set up in a way that leads to the emergence of human life in the ways that we don't think would've happened otherwise. I don't actually think that's a problem in the sense that, I think there are explanations for that, but it is an interesting question about, so what do we think about our relationship with the universe in that case?
Does that mean that is there at some kind of level, an ordering to the universe? That means that actually the way we perceive the universe, the way we move through it, the way we behave in it. Justifies us being optimistic. Is there something like that? I don't know what the answer to that is.
I suspect that there probably isn't an answer to it. Because from that little ramble you've probably understood it's not an easy question to articulate. But there is a question there about is the structure of the universe such that there is a direction or a purpose or a rationale?
Ben: Yeah. I was chatting to another physicist who's. Talked about philosophy and this notion of free will, is it deterministic or not? And he came to a conclusion that essentially we have free will in practice because of complexity and these other things. And it alludes to what you said earlier is because we don't know how the scenarios are gonna play out.
We have to run the program. We have to run, we are the program in the sense that we have to run these scenarios. Although, I dunno whether it gives justification, I do think that actually you might as well be optimistic because if that is going to make your program or your scenarios tilt to the ones that you might do because we don't know and may never know to, to your point.
And because the only way of knowing is to run the program. Then you might as well run the program in this way because it's gonna be neutral. So you can choose one or the other.
Sumit: Yeah. Pragmatically, here I am in the world. I have to make my choices. I can't not make my choices.
Yeah. So in that sense, it doesn't really matter what the fundamental nature of the universe is, I still have to get on with my life and I started to do it in a way that I think is gonna turn out well. 'cause I'm not gonna. Actively decide I'm not gonna become the dice man and roll a dice to decide.
And I'm not going to leave it to the universe to decide. But the physicist in me would still like to know, yeah. Ultimately out there,
Ben: is there a universal law or framework which is guiding this. Yeah. Great. Okay. And then last question, are there any current projects you wanna highlight?
Current project. Current or future projects. And is there any life advice or advice career, advice life, or anything that you'd to leave with listeners?
Sumit: What happens next is an interesting question for me. Part of what I'm doing next is is around this question of what does, what does it mean to be a human in the universe?
I have a kind of campaign going to which I'm gonna get started shortly. And how to make the universe scary again. I think we've I think we've become a bit too comfortable with the idea that we know everything, we can do everything. And I think there's a bit of restitution of that that needs to happen.
I started thinking about my next book, which I mixed feelings about, but 'cause it's a big project, but, it started to itch, so I think that's gonna happen sooner rather than later. And in terms of life advice? Oh gosh. I don't know if I'm, I think I've exhausted my supply of life advice in the book.
Really. I think, yeah, no, there is one actually, which is I think the I think forgetting everything else, all of that kind of intellectual scaffolding and like what I tried to do in the book was provide lots of lenses to look at the world through, and hopefully one of them is one that you'll look through and think, yeah, I think the world does look brighter through that one.
But the the one thing I think is most helpful is I. Or most immediately useful is to try and pay attention to what your life is actually like in the day to day. Because when we get gloomy about the state of the world it's this kind of thing of our own lives are okay. But we think the rest of the world is terrible.
I think it's worth remembering that, the people you meet in an everyday, as you go about your life, most of us, fortunately most of us live in, peaceful societies. At least, we go about the world and we meet people and everyone does what they're supposed to do and and people are friendly and generally get on and, traffic works. So thousands of people, millions of people go about their business without erupting into conflict or violence or decay or whatever else. So every day when we go out in the world, what you actually see is people getting on with it. And people managing their lives and trying to reach the best outcomes for themselves.
And when it comes to that optimism gap, I think what helps is to remember that's what people are like all over the world. What you're seeing around you, you're not in a privileged to some extent you are but it's not that you are in a bubble separated from the rest of humanity.
That's what the world is like. That's what people are like. I think that helps to get over the optimism gap.
Ben: That sounds excellent advice. And so with that, I'd remind everyone the book is called the Bright Side. And with that, thank you very much.
Sumit: Thank you, Ben. Thanks.