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The Current Transcript for January 1, 2018

Host: Catherine Cullen

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

'We are moving into uncharted territory': Futurists shed light on the robotic revolution

Guests: David Houle, Faith Popcorn, and Robert J. Sawyer

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Slow down you're going too fast.

VOICE 2: Too fast? We're only doing 2,500 miles per hour.

CATHERINE CULLEN: The Jetsons bold vision of flying cars in the 21st century hasn't come to pass yet - but that could still be in store after all. Who would have predicted Uber or self-driving cars? Well, we're starting today by peering into the future - looking at the important trends, technological innovations, and more that could shape the world in the years to come. We're asking three esteemed futurists what we should all be doing to adapt. Then it's that time of year again.

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VOICE 1: Every day I am going to do one thing I have never done before - that my friends is my New Year's resolution.

VOICE 2: Oh, that's a good one. Mine is to pilot a commercial jet.

CC: No matter what is on your list of New Year's resolutions, it is a time when many of us focus on self-improvement. But have we as a culture become a little too obsessed with improving ourselves? In half an hour, we'll hear from the authors of a self-help book like no other. It's the story of their year being self-help guinea pigs - trying every piece of self-help advice in sight. I'm Catherine Cullen in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and this is the New Year's Day edition of The Current.

[Music: Adaptation Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

ARTHUR C. CLARKE: It will be possible in that age perhaps only 50 years from now for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London. In fact, if it proves worthwhile, almost any executive skill, and administrative skill, even any physical skill could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world will have shrunk to a point.

CC: That was the science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke in 1964. Bold predictions about a bold new world connected by technology - a revolution in how humanity communicated. And he wasn't too far off as it turns out. Today on this first day of 2018, we're turning to three modern-day futurists to look ahead to what we can expect this year and beyond. As part of our project Adaptation, we're asking what citizens, companies, and governments can do to adapt to coming new realities. David Houle is a futurist and author. He's in Sarasota, Florida. Faith Popcorn is a futurist and CEO of Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve. She's in Wainscott, New York. And Robert J. Sawyer is a science fiction author, and he’s also a futurist. He is here with me in Toronto. Hello to everybody and Happy New Year.

FAITH POPCORN: Happy New Year to you, too. I hope it's going to be happy.

CC: Let's our predictions about that right now. We just heard that Arthur C. Clarke clip talking about the Internet revolution. David Houle I'd like to ask you, what do you think is going to be the biggest agent of change in this coming year?

DAVID HOULE: Well, you can't just forecast for one year. I think this year's going to be the acceleration of what I call the age of intelligence - artificial intelligence machine learning, the ever more awareness of the catastrophic effects of climate change, and the beginning of what we humanity will be doing is moving to a post-capitalist society.

CC: You packed a lot in that one answer. Can you give me an example of what the age of intelligence you're talking about?

DAVID HOULE: To go back to the man who opened the show Arthur C. Clarke, he said "The goal of the future is 100 percent unemployment." And the 2013 Oxford study showed that 47 percent of all the existing jobs in America would be rendered obsolete or put out of the system by what I call machine learning, automation, or artificial intelligence. I think you're going to see an acceleration in this year of ever more realization that jobs as we know them are going away. I speak a lot on the education circuit - a lot of educators are very proud that they're having fifth graders and 10-year-old girls learning to code. And the reality is that that's going to be an obsolete profession by the time they get out of high school. There's going to be a lot of dynamic change this year in the perception of machines, automation, and robots.

CC: Faith Popcorn, what do you think of that prediction?

FAITH POPCORN: I agree completely. I think it's going to be even faster than we think. What we're going to be doing with those unemployed people is to hook them up to some very interesting virtual reality - something called Princeton snow drifting where you can pick a place that you want to go and you can go there. It'll be more sophisticated intelligence and you'll be able to take these virtual, but not really virtual, vacations. These vacations could last a year or more. You can meet people from your past and future there. And I think that will keep the civilization kind of happy because it's going to be a civilization not in a good way that won't have jobs; it's going to be supported by minimum income where it's a new kind of welfare where we're going to be supporting them. It's like the frog in the water - although actually that story is not true - the frog does jump out of the water, but we're not going to be able to jump out of the water.

CC: These kinds of predictions, we've been hearing about this for a long time - I was doing some Googling [laughs]. John Maynard Keynes wrote in a 1930 essay. I think that's an example a lot of people might remember. That by 20 or 30 - it was really our leisure time, not our work time that was going to define us. I think now a lot of people feel like they actually don't have a lot of leisure time; they have less leisure time than they imagined their forefathers having.

FAITH POPCORN: I think we're in the bridge right now - from the past to the future. It's like the dinosaurs - banged around a lot before they fell over.

CC: So we're the dinosaurs? [Laughs].

FAITH POPCORN: The dinosaurs - we are the dinosaurs because we're going to be blended with man or woman and machine. Next evolution - we're becoming more and more robotic ourselves with implants and further implants chips, learning chips, all kinds of things. But I think that maybe we're busy now, but we're going to not be very busy in the next 20 years. Alan Murray of Fortune magazine predicts that 50 or 60 percent of the Fortune 200 will be out of business.

DAVID HOULE: Just to add onto that, I completely agree. I was rereading Bertrand Russell because I read everything he wrote when I was a young hippie, so to speak. And here's a quote from him, "To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization." And so that's basically a summary of what Faith was just saying.

CC: I want to bring someone else into the conversation. We've got Robert J. Sawyer with me here in studio and I wonder how accurate you think these predictions are, Rob? But also the moral implications.

ROBERT J. SAWYER: Well this is very interesting as a science fiction writer what we principally deal with is the societal effects and the unpredictable second and third order effects. It's all rosy and wonderful to say that we will have a post work society where everybody lives a life of leisure. And indeed we see a lot of more young men than young women pre-adapting to that - spending all their days playing video games which is the closest thing we currently have [unintelligible]

CC: So that's adapting. That's not just slacking off.

ROBERT J. SAWYER: That's right - adapting to immersive virtual reality. But the societal reality has always been going back to the dawn of Homo sapiens, that a surplus particularly of young men. We all well know psychologically that women mature more quickly than men do and one of them great reasons we've always gone to war is to eliminate the surplus young male population, which has routinely ended up filling our prisons.

CC: That is a very interesting way of framing that.

ROBERT J. SAWYER: It's a horrible reality, right? That the civil unrest in the United States was not a response to the Vietnam conflict that existed before the Vietnam conflict - it started in the early '60s before the war had really gotten going. So we have these utopian visions that everybody will take up watercolor or everybody will live in a virtual reality and tour the pyramids of Giza. When in fact they're going to be a lot of people who say, “Yes, but you know it's really more interesting to roll cars in the street in real life, than it is to fly like a bird.” Faith mentioned dinosaurs. The very interesting thing about dinosaurs is they did not die out and it took us hundreds of years of paleontology to recognize completely morphed into birds. We, even paleontologists, even dinosaur specialists, did not recognize that the dinosaurs were still there. But it's so completely transformed that they no longer looked like dinosaurs. And in that sense, we are as Faith said, at this cusp where we're about to have a sea change and what it means to be human.

CC: Faith, I want to bring you in again because Robert was talking about gender. And you have some very interesting predictions particularly in light of what we've seen in the last year - #MeToo movement. You have very interesting predictions about the implications for gender, so talk to us about that.

FAITH POPCORN: Yes, I think that's part of the adaption that's so interesting. What's happening now is - and you watch harassment, the #MeToo thing, all these men being called out and only a small portion of them. More and more this will happen and eventually men and women - and it's going to be kind of natural. It's an adaptation. I'll tell you what's going to happen, and then what's going to happen after that. Men and women will pull away and separate at war. Already this is the largest transfer of wealth to females. So they don't need that family structure anymore. The thing that happens right after that, is what we're calling [unintelligible] sexuality can also be what you're describing as an adaption, where it just like everybody laughed when we said there's going to be a brown race - it's just going to get less and less white. We're saying it's going to get less and less female or male, and kind of come together. But there will be cuts in terms of intelligence. The wealthier as usual or the more powerful will be granted better chips - higher intelligence [unintelligible]. But gender is not going to be the big divider.

CC: I have to say, it sounds to me like science fiction.

ROBERT J. SAWYER: Well, I got to interrupt then. As the science fiction writer, science fiction is literature of plausible alternative realities. It's not fantasy. It is our job to predict plausible alternatives. Some we want to have come true - as Faith said a world in which gender does not define you in terms of your economic realities. Some we horribly don't want to have come true. Like Margaret Atwood's prediction that the religious right in the United States in The Handmaid's Tale will take more and more power from women. We put plausible realities on the table so that as an informed electorate and as an engaged citizenry we can choose which one we want to make into the reality.

CC: David, I think we better get you to jump in here.

DAVID HOULE: Yes, I want to jump in based on something that Robert just said and then go back to something that Faith just said. To me as a futurist, I always say in part that I'm a futurist because I read science fiction at an early age. So you're welcome Robert [laughs].

ROBERT J. SAWYER: Well thank you, David. And you mentioned Toffler, Toffler was the first pop futurist. He wrote Future Shock, which was a big, mega bestseller in the '70s. But he said the only preventive medicine against future shock is the reading of science fiction.

CC: Well to a certain extent it seems to be - these are cautionary tales. I do wonder though, David, you have so many elements in what you're predicting this age of intelligence, age of climate change, are you looking at the future being more utopian or dystopian?

DAVID HOULE: We just came Christmas and Christmas Carol which made me think of Dickens. And I'm leading a three evening seminar in January here in Sarasota. And on the third section I'm going to put up the quote, "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times," because I believe that the way I say it, is that I have gone from being a futurist to the canary in the mind. In other words when I see the catastrophe of climate change, when I see the rearrangement not just of the workplace but the economic structure of the world going forward relative to intelligence, I say between 2017 and 2037 is a 20 year period will there be more change more transformation than any time in human history. So what that means is that the old is crumbling and the new has yet to be fully engaged. So I believe that we have the opportunity to evolve to a higher level of consciousness in the next 20 to 25 years or it can go down to Armageddon. In other words when chaos sets in the transition, we have to be very careful. So I find myself standing on stages now saying to people we have to think about strategic retreat for climate change, we have to think about a universal basic income, we have to think about doing it because it's a transformative time. We can't just let it happen to us. And that's why I'm sure that Faith and myself are more in demand whenever things get weird or chaotic or nervous or upsetting, let's call a futurist to help us guide us through.

FAITH POPCORN: [Unintelligible] The other thing I think that you're kind of coming out of is that shift. I mean that's a very interesting thing. The Mayans you know predicting the great world ages; every 5000 125 years is going to be a shift; the solar sun flare I think happen every 11 years, so that should be 2019. I think one of you is saying you're going to maybe see a drop in the markets and that's when things go into turmoil.

CC: I think this can sound a bit I think abstract or a bit fantastical though. I know Faith you have a lot of concrete examples of how you think things are changing.

FAITH POPCORN: It always sounds that way when it hasn't happened yet.

CC: Could you give us an example of how the workplace might start to look different in the next couple of years?

FAITH POPCORN: Well working for robots, for example. So first let's say we're going to come in and we're going to feel so smart because we have these robots working for us. And then you're going to notice they don't get tired, they don't have to go home and they don't complain - best part. And they don't have to eat - go for dinner. And gradually these robots are learning. This is a fact. And the workplace becomes much more - it's happening already - robotic and we end up either working for them or blending with them, mating with them.

CC: Mating with them?

FAITH POPCORN: Well, mating not in a sexual sense. You know the singularity. Every time you have a chip in your finger or a knee transplant or an elbow piece of metal in there, you're starting to become robotic and it just becomes more and more. Teeny bots eating hopefully cancer; measuring everything on the inside, especially your thoughts. Some people think this is going to be very good because we are always communicating with each other globally even though it's hard to see and feel. But the idea that we will be read, not only our blood pressure or heart rate - Apple just came out with a watch it's a company called a live core. It's watch brand that does an EKG right on the spot. So we're going to be read mentally, which is the scariest part, and physically and emotionally, and be dealt with in those ways by people trying to get the most production out of us and being able to monitor more than our blink rate.

ROBERT J. SAWYER: Just as a Canadian patriot. Well it is started with science fiction as we predicted all of this. Just because we're speaking in Canada, Catherine and I. Muse is a Canadian company, which was the first company to make a commercially available home EKG. It only has four sensors or six sensors, but it actually can read to some degree what's going on in your brain. And you can buy it at a commercial store for under $200. So we are getting technology - they use now with locked in patients. We talk about mind-reading and that's fantasy. We use with locked in patients that we can tell with an EKG whether they're thinking of actively playing tennis or passively listening to music. And once they've learned that they can say yes by visualizing actively playing tennis versus no by passively listening to music, they can actually answer questions despite there being no other interface between them and the outside world. It's quite fascinating.

CC: So Robert, if we accept this idea of the increasing - I'll use the word encroachment, although it obviously has a bit of a negative connotation. The increasing encroachment of robots. What does it mean for our humanity?

ROBERT J. SAWYER: Well it's a very interesting question. My mother died two years ago just before we introduced assisted dying legislation in this country. And so she had to die, as she said once the life's work was moved, now we wait for me to starve to death because there was no humane way to do it. Now in theory a doctor can help her here in Ontario - can help her humane or could have helped her humanely pass or another patient in the same condition. But that's debilitating for the doctor. The doctor's taking the Hippocratic Oath, which says do no harm. And to have to make that decision - well my whole life is about saving life, my whole career I should say is about saving life. And now part of that is taking away life from people. That kind of morally fraught condition is much better resolved by a robot.

CC: I think a lot of people are going to have a hard time with that idea.

ROBERT J. SAWYER: They are now. But what they found in Japan with robot caregivers for the elderly is they are much preferred in many circumstances to human caregivers already. They don't get short tempered and an elderly person who would never dream of inconveniencing a human by saying, "Could you just get that off the top shelf or bring me another blanket," thinks nothing of asking a robot to do it.

CC: So Faith do you think people may be asking robots to help in their lives?

FAITH POPCORN: Yes, I think we're going to get very used to that robots and the most wonderful babysitters for children. They don't lose patience. They can read the child's feelings, emotions, turn the pages properly, and never fall asleep. And just to say the whole humanisation factoring in robots - her name's Sophia. She's in Saudi Arabia. The first robot to become a citizen. And Sophia's quite amazing, she can answer questions, she's learning. Her voice recognition technology has come from Google's Alphabet. And she's a lovely companion to the elderly in nursing homes, helping crowd at large events or in parks. So I think that's how we kind of get used to them and less afraid of them.

DAVID HOULE: What I want to say is I got very frustrated about two years ago with this over-simplistic. Are we going to be working for robotic overlords - you know the Terminator 3. So I looked up the definition of the word intelligence and nowhere in the definition of intelligence is the word "human," like dolphins are intelligent whales intelligent. So the point is, the phrase artificial intelligence is being used because we are the first iteration of humanity to have to psychologically adapt to an equal or superior intelligence cohabiting the planet with us. So we're calling it artificial at this moment because its de minimis, it lessens, it makes it not like us. But it is not artificial. Intelligence is intelligence. These robots that Faith had talked about are intelligent. The driverless cars are intelligent. So we are moving into the age of intelligence where our interface is the superior intelligence. And I want to add one thing because Robert touched on it. I've always said, we first interface with intelligence with keyboards, and then it was touch screen that was voice Alexa or Siri. And the next is brainwave direct communication with computers and that's been going on for seven or eight years and an increasing degree of success. So back to your earlier comment a question Catherine. I believe that brainwave computer interface is just preparing us for brainwave to brainwave interface in an evolutionary step because we can focus on that and not focus on the job we have to do.

CC: What I'm trying to understand David is should we be trying to resist any of this? Can we be trying to resist this automation presence of robots?

DAVID HOULE: I always say that technology is not good or bad it just is. It's what humans use it for. A plane can get you to a place much more quickly but it can drop bombs. So it is the application of the intelligence and how it shapes humanity. That is the issue to take. So this is the greatest technological invention in terms of changing how we live since electricity. So was electricity good or bad? Well you have the electric chair, but you can read at night. It is really about how we choose to embrace it in ways that aren't retro, if you will. We are moving into uncharted territory. It's like the world is not flat, it’s round.

CC: We are almost out of time. But I do want to talk a little bit about how people might want to prepare themselves for this future that you're all envisioning. Faith I'm going to start with you.

FAITH POPCORN: Well I just want to agree with one thing Stephen Hawking said, that the most threatening thing to happen to humanity are robots. And I think the way we can prepare for it is to relax and enjoy it while we can because we're all at this certain age where the bad part is not going to be with us. It is inevitable the train left the station, the boat has left the slip, and I don't think there's a preparation. I think that we can try to get into fields that kind of work with co-workers as robots. But just to fight it is not going to be kind of useless and energy depleting.

CC: David, what do you think?

DAVID HOULE: I agree with what Faith says. I want to add that that everybody listening to our words here have to take more of a responsibility to help shape the future in these times. That you shouldn't be scared. You should take steps. Certainly down here in the United States there is a whole a lot of us and them going on. And I've been increasingly been saying, it's not about us and them, it's about you and what you want and what we want, what we need to do. I think that the way that people can prepare for this year 2018, 2019, and 2020 - the next few years - is to be very proactive and have self-inquiry. I think that mass media, this show except it of course, has a great tendency to dumb down and create groupthink. And groupthink doesn't work going forward. It's what individuals and collectively individuals can do that want to shape the future. I think just being proactive and not scared.

CC: Well it's funny. So Faith is saying enjoy it. And you're saying be proactive. Robert, you're going to get the last word.

ROBERT J. SAWYER: Sure. It's funny we're in the CBC Broadcasting Centre and you just retired your mail delivery robots. You had robots a decade or more ago that wandered the corridors and delivered mail.

CC: Not terribly impressive looking things [laughs].

ROBERT J. SAWYER: But technology moves by leaps and bounds. And it's interesting that this corporation actually took a little bit of a step backwards in automation. They're now really good consumer home automation products. Echo from Amazon, Google Home - give one a try. You can get the mini Google Home thing for 40 bucks Canadian. The cheapest Alexa thing, for $50. The best way to learn what this is about is actually give it a try instead of fearing it. That said, the best advice of all is read science fiction.

CATHERINE CULLEN: [Laughs]. Okay, we are going to leave it there with the predictions for the future. Thank you so much everybody.

FAITH POPCORN: Thank you. It’s fascinating.

DAVID HOULE: Absolutely. Thank you.

FAITH POPCORN: Thank you

David Houle is a futurist and author. He was in Sarasota, Florida. Faith Popcorn is CEO of Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve. We reached her in Wainscott, New York. And Robert J. Sawyer is a science fiction author and futurist. He was with me in Toronto.

ENCORE | These authors dedicated a year to self-improvement. Here's what they learned

Guests: Carl Cedarstrom and Andre Spicer

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Hey when lunch is over. Want to go back to the office and run up and down the stairwell with me? My Fitbit says that I'm at 5,348 steps and I need to hit 10,000 today.

VOICE 2: I'd love to. But my Fitbit says I'm only getting three hours of quality sleep at night. So, I kind of just need to go back to the office and have a nap.

VOICE 1: Okay. Marty, you want to join?

VOICE 3: Oh I would, but my Funbit says I've got to drink this thermos of wine.

CATHERINE CULLEN: The ladies of CBC's Baroness Von Sketch with their send-up of our obsession with self-improvement. Beyond our Fitbits, calorie counters, fitness trackers on our watches and phones, our social media feeds are full of tips for becoming a new and better you. Everything from how to let go of anger to eating more antioxidants, to erasing wrinkles and you may be paying extra special attention right now as you contemplate your New Year's resolutions. But some say our obsession with self-improvement is verging on unhealthy. Of course self-betterment is hardly a new phenomenon. Think back to Norman Vincent Peale and his 1950s bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking.

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NORMAN VINCENT PEALE: One reason that the positive thinker gets positive results is he is not afraid of a problem. As a matter of fact he finds problems exciting.

CC: Or the current day self-help guru, Tony Robbins.

SOUNDCLIP

TONY ROBBINS: What makes people fail? Who here in this room has ever failed to achieve what you really want in life - a goal, a dream, a desire? Raise your hands and say 'I'. We all fail. So here is my question: When you fail to achieve the goal, why did you fail tell me? You quit too soon. Very nice, that's an honest answer. This is great. Give a hand for that please.

CC: Well Carl Cedarstrom and Andre Spicer were curious about all the self-help buzz, so they set themselves an ambitious goal. They spent a year as guinea pigs completely immersed in the self-improvement movement. That meant trying some unconventional and extreme methods for boosting their body strength and brainpower, as well as productivity and pleasure. They share their story in a new book called, Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement: A Year Inside The Optimization Movement. Carl Cederstrom is an associate professor at Stockholm University's business school in Stockholm, Sweden. And Andre Spicer is a professor at the Cass Business School at City University in London, England. They spoke with Anna Maria last month.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: So Carl why did you want to go deep into the self-improvement world? What were you hoping to discover?

CARL CEDERSTROM: We had been interested in self-improvement and optimization culture for a relatively long time and also wrote our previous book on the topic. And people pointed out when that book came out, The Wellness Syndrome, did we have any first hand experiences of this ourselves and the truth was that we didn't really have any experiences at all. So we thought if we're going to do our next book it is going to be about those experiences. But we were both really hesitant at the start. We were thinking we would write a book which would be more like a novel and we would invent two characters to put them through all of these experiences. But as we were going to start writing the book we thought maybe we should just do it ourselves and instead of having those fictive characters we should do it in a more kind of journalistic and scientific way and put ourselves through this and then record experiences as we go through trying to optimize pretty much every area of our lives that we could think of.

AMT: It's kind of fun too because then we can, as the reader we can be voyeurs into your little experiment. Andre what exactly is the optimization movement?

ANDRE SPICER: So the optimization movement is really the kind of self-help 3.0 if you like. So it's really where someone like Norman Vincent Peale and Anthony Robbins who we heard earlier meets with Silicon Valley technology. And they want to kind of improve your life but you're using all sorts of technological gadgets and gizmos and mechanisms of sort of measuring and quantifying your life in order to do it. It's kind of like a tailorizing for the self. Where you're turning yourself into this kind of balance sheet which you constantly measuring, managing and checking off. And even when you're asleep you're trying to kind of quantify your sleep in order to improve it.

AMT: And Carl are we now in an age where self-improvement is synonymous with being morally good?

CARL CEDERSTROM: I think we are and you can see how self-improvement has become so deeply integrated into our lives and everything from school and our work. So we could really see how self-improvement is something that we all take for granted. Why would you not like to become a better person? And this of course is related to how society is organized today around principles of competition and a very individualistic notion of doing your best to optimize your own abilities and potentialities.

AMT: Each month was dedicated to a specific pursuit, January is productivity, and July is pleasure. Carl how was July?

CARL CEDERSTROM: July was by far the best month of the year I should say. So it's a little bit ironic I suppose doing a book on self-improvement and when I have to single out the one thing I enjoy the most over the course of the year it has to be picking up smoking again after having quit six years ago. And I'm not recommending anyone to pick up smoking, but compared to all the other things we tried over the year that was one of the few things that was just deeply pleasant. But I was doing that for 10 days, then spending a lot of time cooking great food. And by the end of the month the last 10 days I made sure to do nothing and live by the noble principle of idleness which is an elevated way of really doing nothing at all.

ANDRE SPICER: While Carl was enjoying himself smoking. I'd been a vegetarian for 16 years and I picked up eating meat again which some of it was good and some of it was bad. And then I went on an old junk food diet for a few weeks and spent my time playing video games which again many of my friends would find that deeply pleasurable. I found it rather unpleasurable to say the least

AMT: [Laughs] And Andre your pleasure months was very different from your month dedicated to optimizing your sex life, because you had one of those months too

ANDRE SPICER: Indeed. So this was a very difficult month for me. Carl and I have talked about many things but we realized that one thing we hadn't talked about really before was our sex lives. And I felt like I had not really talked about this with many people. You know Wittgenstein the philosopher in his book talks about [unintelligible] which 'she but you cannot speak, you must remain silent' and I felt like this was a bit about sex to me. So I tried to first of all try to talk about sex. There's a program called Sexersize where you can kind of do certain exercises to improve sexual performance. Then when on and tried out some techniques used from the pickup industry and then finally on towards the end of the month found myself in a tantric sex workshop, walking around almost having kind of close sex with some sort of stranger. It was a rather strange experience.

AMT: And Carl you were trying to buy sex toys.

CARL CEDERSTROM: Well I was trying to optimize masturbation and become multi-orgasmic. So I was trying to take this very seriously. So I went to see experts. I was reading the books and using all the different techniques that are being suggested. And also buying various sex toys. But I came up against my own barriers over and over again. But I think I find out what that barrier was in that particular pursuit to becoming multi-orgasmic and that is that according to these people - sometimes referring to themself as sexual Kong Fu Masters, is what you need to come to a point where you're actually making love yourself. And I can think of many people I would not like to have sex with and unfortunately I would have to put myself into that category.

AMT: [Laughs] That was a new discovery for you, was it?

CARL CEDERSTROM: I've never tried it before but when trying it I felt I'm not going to try this again.

AMT: Let's go to November. You both focused on attention. Let's listen to a bit of that.

SOUNDCLIP

AUTOMATED MESSAGE: The next station is Kent Street.

ANDRE SPICER: Hi everybody. I have been on this journey this year. I grew up hating my own body. Society told me I just wasn't good enough. I thought there is something wrong with me because I did not have the right kind of body. And what I really hope is that by sharing this with you today, you are going to see yourself differently. We are all brothers and sisters. We are all equal. This is just a vessel. So thank you all for listening.

[Applause]

AMT: Andre, explain what we are hearing there.

ANDRE SPICER: As I was listening to this I was wincing. It was towards the end of the month. And my aim was to get as much media exposure as possible. So I'd been studying various kinds of viral media techniques and I decided that what I was going to do was to go onto the subway the Tube in London and repeat a stunt which had been pulled by a New York model called Escarra Lorance, where she'd stood and given a speech about positive body image. And I'd basically written the speech out and I repeated it word for word, standing in my underwear on a train on Saturday night to stunned onlookers and passengers.

AMT: We heard some applause there. What was the look on their face?

ANDRE SPICER: Well the people immediately in front of me were a group of 60-year-old people on their way to the theatre. And they didn't look very pleased, but further down the carriage where drunken revellers who are in their 20s and they seemed to enjoy it very much. By the end of it the whole carriage was applauding my message.

AMT: Do you take notes as you go? What do you do? You run home and write notes?

ANDRE SPICER: Yes, the idea is that each day we would go home and keep a quite close record of what happens. And then our own experiences of it try to be as objective in the description as possible and also allow emotional reactions about it.

AMT: And were there times when it was just really daunting and you thought, "Oh no, I have to do this today."

CARL CEDERSTROM: I think almost every day was like that. But there were ups and downs during the year and I think our relationship was coming to an all-time low in March and luckily April was set aside to optimize relationships. From the start a plan was to try to become better fathers, better husbands. But we saw that as an opportunity to try and do something about our relationship. So we found our cognitive behavioural therapists who were giving therapy online, over Skype. So we were doing therapy with her over the month and trying to find ways of getting ourselves through this very difficult time.

AMT: What were the problems? Why were you having a difficult time as friends?

ANDRE SPICER: If you asked each of us you would get different reactions. But I guess it's when you work so intensely with each other on such a strict schedule. We were talking to each other every day and we had to kind of live up to quite high demands and sometimes we failed. So in March for instance, I ended up failing on my objective which was to learn coding in one month. As a result Carl sent me a punishment which was to go to a Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park in London and give a speech to people of around about a hundred people on the topic of 'why I am an asshole.' As you would imagine I wasn't very happy with doing this

AMT: You both seem to think the other one thought less of you. Do you like each other now?

CARL CEDERSTROM: Well I think we are slowly getting back into the friendship we had when starting this. But as Andre says I mean one of the sort of interesting insights that we have, with some hindsight, is that pushing yourself this hard and trying to apply all of the techniques of self-improvement and doing that together with someone, you beginning to be very punishing both in relationship to yourself, but also in relationship to this other person your with. So I think we came to the conclusion both of us, by the end of the year, part of the explanation why we had become not enemies but why we had difficulties was partly because of this attitude that we had adopted and embraced very closely.

ANDRE SPICER: And it was this idea I guess that you constantly - even if you hit your limits you have to go beyond them

AMT: You know and some of your challenges - I want to talk about a few more of them. Which month was it, Carl, you decided to learn French and then you just to up the ante you committed yourself to doing an interview in French live on air.

CARL CEDERSTROM: So while Andre's punishment was to speak at Speakers' Corner, my punishment was to learn French in one month and go on radio to speak French. And I think if I had to single out one moment that was the most dreadful during the year; it's by far that radio interview. And coming into the studio and the radio interviewer understanding that my friends are - well not non-existent but very close to nonexistent. And I was sitting there with all my notes and struggling to get through a one hour long interview.

AMT: How's your French now?

ANDRE SPICER: Well it was becoming so traumatic trying to learn French in one month. So I've not been able to go back to French since then. But still thinking that I should do that.

AMT: Did all these attempts at self-improvement make you self-righteous with other people?

Well I think so strangely enough I started out as you know quite accepting person. But during the year I started to think, 'well if you only worked harder, if you only committed yourself more, if you only use the techniques of deliberative practice or develop your grit, then you could achieve things'. So I found myself even giving my mother-in-law motivational advice and crafting little slogans for her to help her on a way of writing this book which she'd been talking about writing for many, many years.

AMT: You had your mother-in-law used the pomodoro. The tomato.

ANDRE SPICER: Yes, the pomodoro. So this was one thing which both Carl and I probably go around recommending to others, which is if you have an unpleasant task ahead of you - whether that's you know writing something you don't want to do or reading something or doing the dishes - you sit 25 minutes aside and you work on it and then once it's up, it rings, you have a five minute break and then you go on and keep on working.

AMT: You're supposed to use the tomato shaped kitchen timer, right? That's where it got the name the pomodoro. Andre, August was creativity month. You admit you're naturally not a funny guy. You set out to become a stand-up comedian. How did that go?

ANDRE SPICER: Indeed. So at the beginning of the month. I was a little bit lost for what to do. So I was sort of fishing around for ideas and eventually I kind of came to the idea that I'll try and become a stand-up comic. And my parents were visiting from New Zealand at the time and they sat down. My father sort of said, "Well what are you up to these days, son?" And I said, "Well this month I'm trying to become a stand-up comedian." He looked into the distance and then turned back and said, "Well our family's not so naturally funny." But nonetheless, I went on and learned stand-up comedy and performed at the Edinburgh Festival, which is the world's biggest stand-up comedy festival. I got precisely two laughs and then I decided that I tried again, following the advice of deliberative practice and then I got about five laughs at a large comedy club in London. Nonetheless, I felt quite exhilarated from the experience and I suddenly somehow got this strange idea that I had an alternative career waiting for me as a stand-up comic. Hopefully, I've got rid of this idea now.

AMT: You got rid of it now?

ANDRE SPICER: Well, we'll see.

AMT: Yes. Carl one of the crazier experiments you tried was to transform how you looked and you got some injections. What did you do you?

CARL CEDERSTROM: This was in November. And the idea was to optimize attention. And I wanted to see if I could make myself more good-looking. And I wanted to do this in an objective way as possible. So the first thing I did was to take photographs and different selfies of myself. And I was putting it on an Internet forum called Reddit and they have a thread there called, 'rate my appearance' and then people were giving suggestions what I could do to become better looking and they gave me grades on my looks. And after that I went to cut my hair at a very expensive hairdresser and dyed my hair. Then I went to a plastic surgeon and I came in and said, "What could you do to make me look better?" And she said that I had a very boyish look and she wanted to enhance my manly features and make me look a bit more like George Clooney, is what she said. So I agreed on it. And she injected seven millilitres of something called Restylane, which at that time I didn't know what it was. But my chin got a lot bigger and after that I went to wax my chest and I had a spray tan and then had are professional fashion photographer take my photos. And meanwhile I had opened our Instagram account and started to post pictures online. And by the very end of this month I was posting my new pictures on Reddit asking the users to say what they thought about my look now. And that was really interesting because one person said before five out of ten, now six.

AMT: All that work for one point? [Laughs].

CARL CEDERSTROM: All that work for one point. I think that says something about self-improvement because when I was spending my days looking at other gym selfies on Instagram, you begin to understand what an enormous amount of effort you have to put down in order to get that kind of body. And we often think about this culture as very self-obsessed and narcissistic. But it's also, and maybe it's a lot of degree, self-annihilating and self-obliterating and almost bordering on masochism because the amount of pain and suffering you need to go through that is very difficult and hard work.

AMT: And you had those wrestling injections and you went home and your partner Sally, you asked her what she thought. What did she say?

CARL CEDERSTROM: Well she didn't notice it at first, and I also could not see any difference. She couldn't. I mean it's very subtle. But I think if you look at my Instagram account then - Can I say the name of the Instagram account?

AMT: Sure.

CARL CEDERSTROM: People want to look. It's Optimized2016. So there you would find before and after pictures. And I think the line, the chin line you could see it. It's a little more distinct after the surgery or the injection than it was before.

AMT: You're kind of telling me though that sometimes optimization leads to sort of demoralization.

CARL CEDERSTROM: Yes I mean definitely what happens when you do this kind of thing is you are - well I mean it's I think it's based on addiction in some ways. You do something and you see some small improvement then you carry on and you do this in what eventually becomes a very destructive behaviour. And I think at the bottom of this is a sense of not being good enough or inadequacy. And I think what this book is trying to show is that when you try and turn your life inside out and optimize every aspect of your life it is going to be very tough. You're going to develop our mindset is really going to be very harsh not only on yourself but also on other people. And I think sadly much of this is sort of feeding into a kind of individualistic and punishing culture that we have today.

AMT: Which of your experiments still haunts you and keeps you awake at night?

CARL CEDERSTROM: For me the one that is still haunting me a little bit is of course the sex month. And I felt very uncomfortable being so open and sort of oversharing these experiences. So that is the one that I still feel a little bit uncomfortable. My daughter coming to the age where she can read it.

ANDRE SPICER: And for me one of the things I guess I'd sort of found difficult was the actual kind of reflection on what this all meant because we spent a whole year trying to sort of to test these things out. And then we had to sort of reflect on what was the purpose of all this? What did we actually learn from all of this? In some ways we began to realize maybe this was all sort of meaningless in some ways. Like it was all just pointing at the absurdity of self-help. And as soon as you kind of stop trying to improve yourself is this kind of return to the ways you were almost beforehand. The kind of old habits kick back in. And it points out in some ways this is all about this kind of futile attempts by humans to escape from their obligations or escape from the big questions in life which is like purpose, meaning, and in some cases even your own inevitable demise.

AMT: In your day to day life as you pass a bookshelf, as you see the ads, as you see the billboards on self-improvement, what do you think about now that you've gone through this year?

ANDRE SPICER: Strangely I have this increasing desire to give these things a try sometimes. So the current thing in London which is very popular is that Wim Hof method which involves getting into cold water for three or four hours in order of invigorate your body. And when I saw this was that having it at a local kind of yoga centre I wanted to go and try it. But then I had to stop myself. So I've developed a kind of strange curiosity towards this, like the people in top gear I want to try cause I sort of want to have some strange sort of curiosity towards these things, but then think 'well that's part of my life is maybe over for now'.

AMT: Except what could possibly go wrong, just one more try. [Laughs] What about you, Carl?

CARL CEDERSTROM: Almost the opposite relationship to self-improvement now than what Andre described. So we were doing this was so intensively for one year it was everywhere around. And now I see self-improvement everywhere. So for me it's very difficult to draw the line between self-improvement and most other things that are seeing around us in life. So I almost feel as if everything has become self-improvement and not being particularly keen or interested in trying new techniques or new technologies and new strategies.

AMT: It's a fascinating way to look at the industry. Thank you both.

ANDRE SPICER: Thank you very much.

CARL CEDERSTROM: Thank you.

CC: Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer are the authors of Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement: A Year Inside The Optimization Movement. They spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti last month. That's all the time we have for the New Year's Day edition of The Current on CBC Radio One. On the next edition of The Current, a poignant story about re- learning to stand, walk, and run as an adult. I'm Catherine Cullen. Thank you for listening.

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January 1, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

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