The Change Resilient Podcast Episode 4: Byron Reese on Superorganisms
For episode four, I sit down for a mind-expanding conversation with futurist and author, Byron Reese.
Byron is a longtime serial entrepreneur who holds numerous technical patents and has started a half dozen companies over the past thirty years. He is currently CEO of a startup called PhotoOp AI. Byron is also the author of several bestselling science books, including We are Agora. His AI book, The Fourth Age, sold 500K copies in 14 languages.
He and his wife have resided in an old Victorian home in Georgetown, Texas for a quarter of a century where they homeschooled their four children.
Our conversation covers building technology companies, using AI in our personal lives, the joys of beekeeping, the possibilities that human structures like cities operate as superorganisms, and much, much more.
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Show transcript (slightly edited for clarity, machine transcribed, apologies for errors):
00:00:03] Steve Semelsberger: Welcome, everybody, to an episode of The Change Resilient. Byron Reese is a long-time serial entrepreneur who holds numerous technical patents and has started 6 companies over the past 30 years. Byron is currently CEO of Photo Op AI. He's also the author of several best-selling science books, including We Are Agora, which I've read and adore, and which we're going to talk about in a fair amount today. Byron's AI book, The Fourth Age, has sold over half a million copies in 14 languages. Byron and his wife have resided in an old Victorian home not too far from me in Austin, Texas, in Georgetown. They've been there for a quarter of a century, and that's where they've homeschooled their four children. Byron and I were colleagues from 2008 to 2013, and I'm honored to call Byron a friend. Byron, welcome to the Change Resilient Podcast.
[00:00:57] Byron Reese: Thank you so much for having me, and the feeling is, of course, mutual.
[00:01:01] Steve Semelsberger: It was fun to work together many years ago, and my gosh, 15 plus years we go back, and, you know, we've lived through quite a lot of technological change. So, I was wondering, when you think about your relationship with change. What have you learned about being resilient that maybe you didn't understand when we first met each other many, many years ago?
[00:01:29] Byron Reese: Probably that most of the time, your need to adapt to change is always, always incremental. Most people think, oh my gosh, you know, we need to teach coal miners how to code, or something like that, where you think about these, like, sharp breaks in technology, but that's not really how things... You know, I didn't learn anything to speak of in school that I use in my daily job, and yet I have a daily job, and I can, you know, I have expertise. And so you say, well, how did you learn that? I learned it a tiny bit at a time, every day. We've all done this. You hear a new concept or something? and you get on Wikipedia, and you click on links, and then the next thing you know, it's the next day, and you know a little bit more. And so, I would encourage people not to feel stressed by it, that if every day you just look for one tiny little thing to apply technology to. To maybe ease up, maybe automate the signature in your email, or something very small. And then you could take that time, that 5 minutes you just saved, and use it to learn something new. And that's all it takes to stay on top of things, a little bit at a time. And that's not... was not obvious to me, because I think C.S. always said something about... Day by day, nothing feels like it changed. But if you look back 5 years, everything changed. And so, I think we kind of, or at least I would have back then, felt like. Oh my gosh, I hope I'm not up to this. And the last thing I'll say is that the good news is all humans can do this. All human beings are able to teach themselves new things. That's our superpower. And so everybody can do it. It's not just, like, a skill for the elite.
[00:03:15] Steve Semelsberger: Yeah, it's such an important element of resilience, this ability to proactively and thoughtfully change, sometimes over massive periods of time. There are other elements of resilience, such as grit and fortitude and steadfastness and determination. You know, as a multi-time entrepreneur, Byron, from the time I've known you, you've seemed like a gritty, resilient person. Have you always been that way? As a kid? Did you consider yourself to be what we would now call resilient psychologically?
[00:03:48] Byron Reese: I don't know. I'm more... You know, it's an interesting question. One of the hardest things in entrepreneurship is... Knowing when to stay the course, and knowing when The smart thing to do is to change change lanes. And... And erring on either side of that is problematic. There are all these terms that, like... They always have a a good adjective and a bad adjective, and yet they're basically synonyms. So, you have resilience, but you could also say you have stubbornness.
[00:04:25] Steve Semelsberger: Yes.
[00:04:26] Byron Reese: And you wouldn't necessarily think that's a good thing, so...
[00:04:29] Steve Semelsberger: Shadow side of some of these concepts.
[00:04:31] Byron Reese: Yeah, I'd like to think maybe I'm... More... I go into it... Knowing that I'm wrong more often than I'm right.
[00:04:41] Byron Reese: And I fail more often than I succeed. And... And the only way for me to make that work Is to make sure my failures are small and my successes are big. And so... I, I've... and then I also try very hard To separate myself and my view of myself from my outcome. Because when things go bad, I don't think I did something bad. And the flip side of that is when they're going great, you don't get full of yourself either, because you're, you know. that you... you give it your A game, you try your hardest, you do your best. I've never once laid awake at night worrying about stuff, because I know I, like. business stuff, because I know I like... I'll do what I can, I'll do the best I can, and... And the outcome will be the outcome. Now, maybe there are... I don't know that there are a lot of, you know, the power people whose names we all know, you know, the... the billionaires and the trillionaires and all of that, I doubt they describe themselves that way, so I don't know that my experience is all that normative. I have found what works for me and helps me keep my sanity. I can say that right now, in the era of... this extraordinary change with AI, I'm... I'm adopting and discarding ideas. Much faster than ever. So, I don't know what that means. I'm less resilient? I'm more adaptive. I don't know...
[00:06:29] Steve Semelsberger: That's a great, great frame, Byron. I'm curious about... How comfortable you are in being wrong. Where do you think that came from? Is that innate? Did you learn that early in life? Did you learn that later in life? A little bit of all?
[00:06:49] Byron Reese: I... I think... No, I think it comes from a lot of failure. And learning that Not to internalize it. I'll give you an example. I'll give you a real example. I had these websites that, You know, getting a lot of traffic, but I couldn't monetize them. So I decided to start some businesses. And I would buy my own advertising. And I had two ideas. One of them was singing telegrams delivered over the telephone. I thought this was a great idea. For $10, you go to this website, you pick out... you select a person's name, you listen to some jingles, and they get a phone call, and somebody sings them a singing telegram. It's kind of silly. But it would have been $10, and a Hallmark card's $5, and I thought, oh, that's pretty good. And the other idea I had at the same time was letters from Santa, mailed to your kid from North Pole, Alaska, so they got a North Pole postpart. And I launched both of those businesses, and I thought both of them were good ideas. The Singing Telegram one got zero orders. Like, no pity order. No, my mother didn't buy one just to support Nothing. Zero orders. That other business, I've sold over $10 million worth of those letters.
[00:08:07] Steve Semelsberger: Wow.
[00:08:07] Byron Reese: Now, to me, both of those ideas looked about the same going in. In retrospect, one of them was awful. Nobody wants to see a telegram. And so, in retrospect, and I always come out of things, and I'm like, okay, I learned an important lesson here. And now, next time, I'm gonna... I'm gonna kill it. And what I do is I make a different mistake entirely. And to me, they are always obvious in retrospect. And... and you just, at some point, can't beat yourself up over it, because... It's all I would be doing. So, I probably... I think I failed about... 8 times for every one time they succeed. Something like that, 6 times to one, something like that. And, you know, I have all these little things, like, well, Babe Ruth struck out more than anybody else. I don't even know if that's true.
[00:08:56] Steve Semelsberger: But it helps you.
[00:08:58] Byron Reese: It's reassuring. So, I don't ever think about it. Like, I... I just know I'm always trying... as an entrepreneur, I'm always doing businesses I'm enjoying, and I think that takes a lot of it. Like, I had fun writing the singing telegrams and writing the letters from Santa, and so that helps a little, too.
[00:09:18] Steve Semelsberger: You know, when you first talked about the singing telegrams, I had a Seinfeld episode in mind, and I was even thinking a bit of ELF before you talked about the Santa letter, so I'm right there with you, Byron. Maybe we're of the same cloth and generation. Well, I want to make sure that we get to your latest book here pretty quickly, and we'll weave some other subjects through, and as I've shared with you for our last lunch, I loved We Are Agora. Much of our audience may not have heard of it, may not be familiar with it. So, can you describe the core premise of We Are Agora, and then... Why'd you write it?
[00:09:54] Byron Reese: So, when I... I grew up on a farm. And, I used to... I was a Boy Scout, and I would go to summer camp. And when you go to Boy Scout summer camp, you learn, woodcraft stuff to get merit badges. And I was a real nerdy kid, surprisingly. And I saw a... a new merit badge I had never seen called Bookkeeping, and I was like, I want to learn accounting at summer camp. And so I signed up for bookkeeping, along with 6 other nerdy Boy Scouts, and we showed up, and this old grizzled man came out and said that the Boy Scouts of America never had, nor ever will, have a bookkeeping merit badge that we had all signed up for beekeeping. And that is a story about how I became a beekeeper. It is a true story. And what I learned about bees is fascinating. So... You know, bees are made of cells, just like us, and the bee is a creature. But the bees come together and they form a hive. And that hive is another animal. It's not a metaphor for an animal. It satisfies the biological Conditions of an animal. For instance, it's a warm-blooded creature. The hive holds its temperature to 97 degrees. Bees are cold-blooded, individually. The hive lives 100 years. The hive reproduces. Every spring, the hive divides into half. It isn't that the bees are reproducing, but the hive reproduces. The hive has a memory longer than any bee. The... The hive has emergent capabilities. It can do things no bee can do. A hive lives 100 years, a bee lives a few weeks. And so that got me thinking. I wondered if people were the same. There's a group of people A shitty. An animal. Not a metaphor, but is there a being, an emergent creature that can think? And can remember, and can do things. And I didn't know the answer to that. I didn't. So... but what I did learn is that bees are called... something called a superorganism. And a superorganism is an organism made up of other organisms. By the way, you're a superorganism, individually, because you're made up of cells, and they're all alive. If I took you apart, a cell at a time. Those cells would go on living, but you would vanish. So, I asked the question, is there... is it possible that A city, or humanity at large, can think, and can remember, and can act, And, and, and can reproduce. And so, I... you mentioned in my introduction, I'm a science writer. And one way we do science is we put forth falsifiable hypotheses. We say, if there is such an animal, what would be true? And I came up with a bunch of those. It would be true that... None of us could live outside of it. If you dropped us on a desert island, we would not thrive, and those sorts of things. And so I wrote the book. ask... trying to ask... answer those questions. And over time, I came to firmly believe there is such an animal. And I, therefore, decided to name it Agora. And the Agora was like this noisy, ancient marketplace in ancient Greece, where everybody got together and everything kind of happened. And that's sort of us. That's our thing. And so I'll stop there. That's the thesis, that humanity is a superorganism, it's an animal as a whole. That has significant Influence on... on us, and why we're here. Well, I'll say that. It answers, I think, from a scientific question basis, why are we here? And science does not like why questions. Right? Science likes, how? When? Why? It's a completely different one. And so I wrote that book, and I... I think I can tell you why we're here.
[00:13:43] Steve Semelsberger: So, in the later chapters, you offer a perspective as to... why, perhaps, we have evolved with and from the Earth. Is it a spoiler if you tell our audience a bit of where the book goes, or would you.
[00:14:00] Byron Reese: No, absolutely. Tune in next week at the same time. Pretend I have demonstrated to your satisfaction. bet... that humanity is... functions as a superorganism. Now, that's... the whole book tries to prove that.
[00:14:24] Steve Semelsberger: Yeah, and you methodically go through it. You take the reader on a multi-chapter journey, and you build, and you reach a place where it's, at least from my brain, hard for me to argue against. So yes, pretend the reader has gone through that, and they're there with you.
[00:14:39] Byron Reese: And to be clear, this isn't a religion, it's not metaphysics, it's a biology book that says. There's this preacher, Now, if... There is a creature, Agora, What would it want? And what it would want would be... all we know is what all living things want. It wants to... survive, and it wants to reproduce. That's what living things do. So you take the first one, survive. Shouldn't worry about that. And the answer is yeah. Statistically speaking, someday a great big ol' comet is gonna, like, smash into this planet and destroy all life on it. It's just gonna happen. And... how would you keep that from happening? Well, you would, perhaps...
[00:14:44] Byron Reese: Have a species that... so, let me back up just slightly.
[00:15:35] Steve Semelsberger: Okay.
[00:15:35] Byron Reese: There was an essay written a long time ago called I, the letter I comma pencil. And it was this guy, Learn at Hand, who wrote that no human being knows how to make a pencil. Nobody could go fell the tree, and make the yellow paint, and mine the ore for the ferrule, and get the rubber for the eraser. Nobody. And yet, pencils get made. And why would that be? How could that be? In our age, we might say iPhones. An iPhone has 60 different elements in it. Your body only has 30, so that thing's got twice as much going on as you do. And nobody could make one. So the question is, how do they get made? How do iPhones get made if nobody knows how to make it? Nobody could put a man on the moon, and yet a man was put on the moon. And so what we say is that, that... is that this Agora creature has emergent properties. Emergence is when a system can do things that no individual can do. A clock is an emergent thing. It can keep time, but none of the gears can keep time. But the clock can. So, you've got this emergent creature that can make iPhones and put people on the moon. And that creature wants to live, it wants to survive. And so it's gonna do everything it can to either spread to other planets or... or deflect an asteroid, that's heading to this planet. Which, by the way, we're already working on. We're sending up probes that smash into these things and try to deflect them. And so I think we're here, and there's all of us, because our job is to protect this planet. Yeah. Are we...
[00:17:08] Steve Semelsberger: Are we the planet, Byron? Is there any difference between....
[00:17:11] Byron Reese: Boom!
[00:17:11] Steve Semelsberger: ...us and the planet, or are we one thing?
[00:17:13] Byron Reese: A great question. I personally don't think we are. A man named James Lovelock, who recently died at 103, not from old age, by the way. put forth something you may have heard of called the Gaia Hypothesis, G-A-I-A. And he said that the Earth... all life on Earth forms a living system. So he thinks the Earth is alive. The biology of the Earth is alive. And I buy that. Again, it's not a religion, it's just saying the Earth is a single living organism that holds All these things constant, the salinity of the oceans. Even though there's all this water putting salt in the oceans every day, and they don't get saltier, because tectonics plows it under. You get all these trees that put forth oxygen, and all these things that breathe the oxygen, yet the oxygen level on this planet never changes. To two decimal places, or has it for hundreds of millions of years. So, all of these... and the Earth... also holds its temperature in a range ideal for life. Even though the sun used to burn much hotter. And now it doesn't burn as hot. The Earth is no, colder than it was then. So, he thinks it's alive, and I think it created us because it needed something that Had opposable thumbs, and could come together, and have the emergent ability to protect that life. And it's more than just A theory, in the sense that One of the great mysteries of life on this planet One of the great mysteries of life on this planet, is... How it formed so quickly. And yet it only ever formed once. Now, we know it.
[00:19:01] Steve Semelsberger: One time, most scientists believe that everything here amongst us happened from a singular event, at least based on my reading of most science.
[00:19:09] Byron Reese: Absolutely, so there was a... And the reason we know that is that we share... all share the same DNA. You know you share 99.9% of your DNA with a chimp. You share 50% of it with mildew. You share 60% of it with a banana. It has long sequences of DNA, just like yours. And that's why we can take a glow... a glowing gene out of a mushroom, put it in a fish, and get a glowing fish.
[00:19:34] Steve Semelsberger: Yeah.
[00:19:34] Byron Reese: So, how in the world did that happen? I think it could only have happened because it's infinitely complex, and yet it seems to have appeared fully like that. And to my mind. that the answer to that is obvious. Life did not begin here. It began elsewhere, and it spread through space. And there's not like aliens planted it or something. Some other planet teeming with life blew up, and all that matter just drifted, and there was this warm planet with water, and it landed in the water, and boom, there's life instantly, and bloop! It does its thing, and grows. And then, someday, our day will come. And then our... our biological matter will drift and land on another planet. And that's how I think And so my falsifiable prediction is we're gonna find life. on other planets, and it's gonna have our same DNA.
[00:20:27] Steve Semelsberger: Mmm.
[00:20:27] Byron Reese: Yeah.
[00:20:28] Steve Semelsberger: That's cool.
[00:20:29] Byron Reese: PA, dioxyribonucleic acid, twin double helix, just like us. And that's... that's what I believe. I do not believe we'll find something that's not related to us.
[00:20:41] Steve Semelsberger: Are you willing to go on record, Byron Reese's, to approximately how far into the future that might occur, your future is, would you think?
[00:20:48] Byron Reese: Sooner than you think, Or a betting man. I would say it's in the solar system. One interesting thing is that you... I've mentioned you have 30 elements in your body. the elements in your body are not in there in the same proportion that they are on the Earth, interestingly. You have elements in your body that are exceedingly rare on the Earth, and so it's really strange that we're made out of those. They are not rare on Mars, by the way.
[00:20:51] Byron Reese: So we could be some life that lived a time on that planet. I think that's what's happened. See, the universe, we think, is like 12 billion years old, and yet our solar system's only 4 billion. There have been two suns where our sun was before, and we know that because our sun is full of heavy metal. And first-generation stars are only made of hydrogen and helium. Only a star that's imploded can... all the gold, if you wear a gold ring, all the gold in your ring is older than the Earth. It's older than the solar system, it's older than the sun. Because it had to come from a star that died a long time ago. I love that. So, 4 billion years. A system was here, and it lived, it died, it grew up, and time came, and it's matter, another sun, and then its matter floated around, and... Nope!
[00:20:55] Byron Reese: The fun question to come out of that is. well, what does that mean to me, as a person? Like. Why do I care? Why is this important to me, other than it's interesting? May I speak to that, or do you have a different.
[00:22:28] Steve Semelsberger: Please, please speak to that, and then, And I want to take you back to some elements of superorganisms and....
[00:22:35] Byron Reese: Well, let's go there first. We'll come back to, how then should I live? We'll save that.
[00:22:40] Steve Semelsberger: This may logically lead to it as well, too. So I was thinking a bit about this tension between the resilience of the system And the well-being of the individual, to your point, each one of us. And so, as you were talking about the survival of the hive, that the hive survives and thrives, individual bees die. companies, as organizations, innovate. People in those companies might be suffering as companies are maximizing profits. Societies advance economically, some people get left behind, and so... how should we think about this tension between the super... superorganism, take a city like Austin, where we roughly both live, for example, holding that's a superorganism. How do we think about the tension between what's good for the individual and what's good for the superorganism?
[00:23:33] Byron Reese: That is the question. So, for the superorganism to thrive, it has to find a niche. It has to find some ecological thing that it fills. But also the individuals within it have to. They have to fill a niche. It's interesting because bees evolve over time, and individual bees change over time, and hives evolve over time. And it's all itself. Kind of evolved over time. Healthy superorganisms, and you can have unhealthiness. There aren't, by the way, superorganisms where half of the bees are against the other half. Those are highly dysfunctional, and I mean, we don't have examples of that. But you can have very sickly ones. Sick superorganisms that... that can't, Or challenge superorganisms. A fire... a forest fire sweeps through the forest and, you know, damages the hive, or kills lots of bees, or some fungus comes in. The hive has... the hive, you're right, can... can suffer, can suffer harm. What you have to remember, though, is that we can't survive without the superorganism, and the superorganism is made up of us. So there is no... there is no... scenario where Austin fails, but we all do well. And there's also no scenario where we all fail, but somehow Austin thrives. So, it's... it's like this, It's coevolution It's... these things kind of... Change over time together.
[00:25:03] Steve Semelsberger: Is that how you look at it, Byron? Because there might be, you know, going back to the company, there might be a minority of the company that's really grinding and suffering. There might be, you know, a population within a city that's had systematic disadvantages. That might be suffering. There might be people taking on more. There could be some luck involved. You know, some argue that some elements of entrepreneurship have a bit of luck in them, too. So, how do you think about, the minority, the smaller, you know, 10, 15, 20% of any type of organism, organization, and or superorganism that might really feel like they're kind of getting the raw deal?
[00:25:44] Byron Reese: I think they should feel that way.
[00:25:46] Steve Semelsberger: Hmm.
[00:25:47] Byron Reese: You see, we're different than the bees, because we have ethics. And we... the bees are driven by their instincts, but we can be driven by our values. And... There was a time, a long time ago, 80,000 years ago. That humanity hit a population bottleneck, like. We got down to, we think, 800 humans? And you can tell, because all humans are very closely related, so at one time there were very few. And when you look at the archaeological record of how we survived, it wasn't because we put the old people and the... and the injured people out, and the elements far from it. We took care of people. And that's... we're a social species, and we survived because we took care of each other. Now, if they could do that with 800 people, and no cities, and no walls, and no writing, and no technology, and no medicine, and no nothing. And here we have... the wonders of our world, of unlimited wealth, unlimited power, unlimited everything, and we can't protect all the parts of the superorganism? That's a decision. That is not a biological fact. That's a choice we make.
[00:26:56] Steve Semelsberger: And...
[00:26:56] Byron Reese: And it's a choice that, if we do make it, shame on us if we don't. If we don't do it. We don't have any excuse. You see, in... all throughout history. Scarcity has been the thing that has kind of defined everything. There was never enough food for everybody, so some people get it, some people don't. There was never enough leisure time, there was never enough education, there was never enough of anything. And so some people get it, and some people don't. And then we learned a trick. not that long ago, called Technology. And with technology, we learned how to amplify what we're able to do. And that little trick is why we look around the world we live in and see nothing but You know, we've done all of this. And we have no reason, excuse, there's no excuse for leaving anyone behind. And so, yeah, if you think you're getting a raw deal, you probably are.
[00:27:52] Steve Semelsberger: I appreciate your clarity and directness on that, Byron. And there's a episode of Brett Hurt's podcast, Love Conquers Fear, where he interviews you, and I've known both of you for a long time. Brett's a guest on this podcast as well, too. And both of you, to me, seem to be very optimistic about the future, inclusive of a future with AI. What makes you optimistic? Is it this sense that Man, if we got down to 800, and we've had calamity and strife and famine, and conflict and genocide to degrees that, you know, most people alive have no sense, really, of. and yet, you know, we're still here, that... doesn't the future kind of have to get better, or what other things make you optimistic, especially given the moment when there's quite a bit of pessimism around AI and other societal factors?
[00:28:44] Byron Reese: I am optimistic, very, and I don't... it's not like my schtick, it's not like my thing, oh, he's the optimist. I have to earn my optimism, like, every day. Like, I have to convince myself of it. That said, the case for optimism is very much stronger than the one for pessimism. And the reason being is because the optimists have all of the empirical evidence on their side. You can take any... standard of progress. Like, infant mortality. As standard of living, access to education, self-government, life expectancy, status of women, individual liberty, take any measure of progress, okay? Then you pick it sometime in the past. You can pick 50 years ago, 100, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, you pick it. And then you spin the globe in your head, and you pick any country you want. You can pick anywhere, anywhere in the world. And I guarantee you, whatever time you pick, whatever place. By whatever measure, things right there are better today than they were then. Now, there are a couple of exceptions from that, but that is the rule. You... we were barbers. Barbers, beyond belief. Just not that long ago. In 12th century France, they had a popular pastime called cat burning. Where they built a big bonfire and threw cats in it, and boy, was that fun. And we tortured people for entertainment. For entertainment. You know, you gather everybody around and you torture them. We were just awful. Now, biologically, those people were no different than you and I. If you and I had lived there, we would have been going to those cat burnings. Like, it just... There's no biological theory that would argue otherwise. So what has changed? What has changed is that we have developed a notion called civilization. We have learned how to get along with each other better, and we have increased our values, and we have, and boy, the list of what we're doing wrong is far longer, don't get me wrong. I'm not holding this up. And in the book, I spend a fair amount of time going down the list of things that our ancestors are going to look back on us and say that was the equivalent of cat burning. They're gonna look at how we, raise animals at scale and factory farms. They're gonna look at how we slept on soft beds when a billion people on this planet are hungry. They're gonna... they are gonna look back on us and judge us harshly. And that'll be a great thing, because that means they will have made that much more progress.
[00:31:16] Steve Semelsberger: Yeah. Yeah, well put, Byron. So, in this moment of who knows what AI becomes. what are... what are your thoughts? Is... is AI, say. and I'm making this up, Byron, so take it in a different direction, but 20, 30 years from now, do you think AI continues to be a tool? Is it, you know, becoming, like, an extension of us? brain technology interfaces, is it going to become an organism altogether? Are we witnessing the emergence of another form of life here? Is there, you know, going to be a superorganism of AI? What do you see, Byron?
[00:31:59] Byron Reese: Well, that is the question of the hour, and I will start by saying, of course, I just have an opinion. I don't have any special knowledge, I haven't been to the future or anything. What I can say, and so all I know is history, what I can say is that All technology that increases human productivity is good for humans. Full stop. If technology makes a human more productive, that's good for humans. So, stop. Number two, our technology does change us. Do you know, before we had writing, Plato was kind of against writing. Plato said writing was not a system for remembering anything, only a system for reminding you. And he said if everybody can write stuff down, their memories are going to go to pot. They're not going to be able to remember anything. And sure enough, our memories are vastly worse than... Placos would have been, because back then, if you wanted to know something, you better remember it, and they were real, real good at that. And we have a lot of examples of that, and so we should expect it's going to change us, and we probably will know a lot less individually. The question, of course, is can Agora do more? It doesn't really matter if I can find Canada on a map or whatever, but am I part of a creature that can provide for people better or not? Do I fill a role? You see, if you were a hunter-gatherer, if I sent you back 15,000 years, they would regard you as worthless. Me too. It's like, well, what can you do? And it's like, well, I'm pretty good on a computer, but not much else. And it's like, dude, we can each do, like, 500 things, and you can do one thing. So we would be worthless. We have become so specialized that we can't even live on our own anymore. And that's wonderful, because that means Agora has all these different things it can do. So I think all of that's gonna happen. I do not believe it is a being. It cannot be a being, I don't think. Because if AI is, you know, written in, you know, it's written in computer language. It's written in Python, and... And, And that means it's just math. And because it's just math, it means I can write it all out on a whiteboard. And I don't care how big that whiteboard is, I can write a bunch of numbers on it, and they're never gonna be alive. They're never gonna, come to, or anything. It is a tool that magnifies human ability, and we should... Everybody. Everybody. It makes everybody. Electricity makes you stronger, right? Like... look... Hydraulics means you can operate a forklift and lift 10 tons. AI gives you, like, a second brain, and it's better. I can't code, but I'm a more productive coder than anybody on the face of the earth was 5 years ago.
[00:34:36] Steve Semelsberger: Hmm. Good comparison. Good comparison. Good clarity as well, too, that you really do see it as a tool that continues to help humans versus becoming an organism of its own. Thank you for that.
[00:34:50] Byron Reese: I'm... you shouldn't take too much comfort, since I said I'm wrong 6 times for every one-time memory. So smart money would be betting against everything I'm saying. Now, I just qualified to say. That's my learned opinion, but it is, not from any special... I don't have any knowledge anybody else doesn't have.
[00:35:08] Steve Semelsberger: Well, you're willing to say things. Back in 2010, you spoke to a collection of media marketers about the future that you saw back then, and you were invigorating, and, you know, a lot of what I remember turned out to be pretty accurate as well, too, so...
[00:35:26] Byron Reese: Well, I will say, I'm on record I'm on record saying that the AI we have today is impossible, and I would never want to see it.
[00:35:35] Steve Semelsberger: Well, there we go.
[00:35:37] Byron Reese: And boy, am I glad I was wrong. I love it.
[00:35:40] Steve Semelsberger: Yes, I think we're happy as a whole that you were wrong. Well, you generally have multiple projects underway. There's a game that I know you and your family have produced. I'm curious, are you thinking about another book, or perhaps even actively working on another book?
[00:35:58] Byron Reese: Have we talked about this? I'm curious.
[00:36:00] Steve Semelsberger: I think maybe we talked a little bit about....
[00:36:02] Byron Reese: I mentioned the ghost book?
[00:36:04] Steve Semelsberger: Yes, you've told me.
[00:36:06] Byron Reese: Ok, I'm writing a book, I'm writing a book. About ghosts, and fairies, and magic, and astrology, and... and all those sorts of things. And it's a science book. And... I've never had anything happen to me weird. Like, I've never had any experience, like, saw a ghost or anything.
[00:36:27] Steve Semelsberger: Have you had any, any synchronicities? Have you had things....
[00:36:29] Byron Reese: Oh, you know, sure.
[00:36:32] Steve Semelsberger: Okay, but no apparition.
[00:36:34] Byron Reese: Right, nothing that I could be like, no, a little green man landed in my backyard, and I went and talked to a fella. They haven't had anything happen to me like that. So, I'm not writing this book with a particular axe to grind. But... I think science is really close-minded about those topics, because you go to a science person and you say, hey, are ghosts real? They'll be like, no. And really, what a scientist should say is. I have no idea. Show me some evidence. Show me some evidence, and I'll give you a verdict. But I have no way of knowing one way or the other. And so, I wanted to treat these... all of these things real, as being... take people at their word, they saw what they say they saw, or they think they say what they saw, and I want to know if there's a scientific explanation For them. It's kind of like Scooby-Doo, you know? They see the ghost, and it always turns out to be some real estate developer who is, like, trying to tie the price of land down, so you can buy all the stuff. Exactly. And so, I'm trying to do that. So, I've been traveling all over the world, meeting these people who... who claim to... to know the fairies, or, To, to talk to the gin, the male genies, all of that. My favorite people are in Iceland, because in Iceland, I've always read that, like, three-quarters of the people there believe in fairies, right? And... And every time I would get to know somebody there, I would say, I hear three-quarters of people here believe in fairies. Is that true? And they're like, oh, yeah, I'm sure that's true. And then I would always say to you, and then they all said the same thing. They go, me? No, no. I know. But that being said, I did have this one thing happen to me that was very strange. I... and then they tell you this story, this fairy story that they had. So they can't even bring themselves to admit it to themselves, but then they have their story. Wow. So I think... Well, it's really interesting to me that, like, in Ireland, there's all these ferries, and you can't swing a dead cat in that country without hitting a fairy upside the head, right? And in the United States, we have more Irish people than they have in Ireland, and we don't have any of that tradition here. So it's like the fairies only live, like, in that part of the world. They don't live here. They live in Iceland and Ireland and those places, but they just don't like the climate here or something, is all I can come to. So I'm having fun with that book, as you can probably tell.
[00:38:55] Steve Semelsberger: Yeah, and I imagine that there's ways that you look for the skeptics, the people who tell you they don't generally believe in these things and are hesitant and don't want to be on record, and that those are the juicy stories that make you more curious.
[00:39:12] Byron Reese: It is true. I look for people with PhDs in hard sciences who have seen one story, one ghost. don't want to go on record. Yeah. Because those people are gonna do everything they can to explain it away, and they can't.
[00:39:24] Steve Semelsberger: Mmm... when do you think the book might come out, Byron?
[00:39:27] Byron Reese: Maybe never. It's taking a long time. I... I will not use AI to write a word of anything, not an email or anything, because I'm a writer. It's my voice. Like, my voice is me. And... You know, you could read Agora, and you could probably hear me in it, right?
[00:39:46] Steve Semelsberger: Yeah, I could.
[00:39:48] Byron Reese: And... And so, every word is a drop of my blood in those books, and they... They take a long time. I don't know when it's gonna be out.
[00:40:00] Steve Semelsberger: Well, and the journey that you're on, traveling to places and really being on the quest rather than on the validation of the hypothesis, focusing on the invalidation of the hypothesis, is a beautiful thing. I hope to hear more stories from you. You also have a company, and you've started multiple companies. Would you like to tell us about your current product or company?
[00:40:21] Byron Reese: Well, I will say this, because this is of general interest. Nobody cares about, like, my company and what I'm doing, but I will say what my experience of this company has been.
[00:40:30] Steve Semelsberger: Yes.
[00:40:30] Byron Reese: Well, we're recording this in the middle of August of 2026. And I would say, in the last... Six months. Everything I do has, in a day, has changed. And in the last 3 months, it has as well. How I work... is... 100% different. Everything has changed. So, I... I have multiple AIs, right? And they do all code, they can all... all... read my emails, and they can write files. And then what I did is I had them write, like, this Python program so they can talk to each other. And then I give them, like, hey, I want 4 ideas to do whatever, and then I want you to go do them. And then they start debating it among themselves, and then they come up with these 4 ideas. Now, I've gone to bed by this point, right? You're with me. And I go to bed, and then I wake up, and they've made four websites. And it's like, oh my gosh, these are good. And so, everything I do is now amplified through that. I have gone... I don't type anymore. I 100% voice, because it works now.
[00:41:40] Steve Semelsberger: Yeah, it works.
[00:41:42] Byron Reese: And so, my life has changed. And what that means is that we iterate ideas much faster, so I get those 6 failures in, and like. A week? And then I hope, you know, the next week I get a success. So, right now, it's... it is tumultuous. We're doing so many different things, and I don't know where it's gonna land. I'm still pushing the envelope of these tools, and I haven't given them one thing. Ask them to do one thing. They have not been able to do. Amazing. And so, I'm having the time of my life, and my company... Yeah, and if you're sitting... if you're... If you operate a jackhammer, don't worry about any of this stuff, not gonna touch you. If you sit at a desk all day and look at a computer, if the person sitting next to you is doing this stuff. You better be as well, because it's not... they're gonna be 20% better, they're gonna be 20 times better.
[00:42:39] Steve Semelsberger: Yes.
[00:42:39] Byron Reese: Is that your experience?
[00:42:44] Steve Semelsberger: Yeah, so much so. At the same time, you know, I have... two older kids, 20-22, and I think there's real concern of their generation associated with how we have real energy problems, how we have environmental challenges, and how the AI may go beyond serving us to actually harming people's ability to earn a basic income, to take care of their families, you know, and I look at the world through this lens of abundance, I think, similar to you, Byron, but I also hear younger voices expressing a clarity. They're very clear on social media, some of the real harms that have happened to young people through social media, and they're asking, I think, really good questions about AI. I'm curious, as you have dialogues with people of different generations, are you picking up on some of this, and would you offer any perspectives to people who are maybe in their early 20s now, and really thinking deeply about this?
[00:43:47] Byron Reese: So, I have children the same age as yours, and my experiences are the same. You know, they call the World War II generation the greatest generation. I think this current batch of kids, I think they're the greatest generation.
[00:44:01] Steve Semelsberger: Pretty amazing, yeah.
[00:44:02] Byron Reese: Yeah, because, you know, I went to high school in the 80s, right? So every young person I know by the way, has kind of something they do and something else they do. They have all these interests. They're very savvy about the world, and they all have a cause. They all have a social conscience. And now, you may not agree with it, like, that's your business, but I wasn't like that in the 80s. You know, I was in high school in Reagan's America, and I never thought about the kinds of things they think about, and I think it's wonderful. Now, most of the time, people Yeah, this is the one I'm gonna say... I mean, so I'll take, like, A long pause. For added emphasis. So, a lot of times, people think the world would be better if more people thought like they did, right? I don't care what political party you're in, you probably think the world would be better if more people were in your party than the other party, alright? That's not how superorganisms work. Your body has 327 different kinds of specialized cells. So you have cells that do one thing, and cells that do another thing, and another thing, and they're all very different. And they come together, and they're the magic that make you. And so the superorganism functions because we're all different. And so you need people like me, who are just gung-ho and excited and all of that, and you need all the cautionary people, too. And you need every... you need all of that together. That's the agora, that's the voice of everybody. And that's how humanity makes it through. If everybody was stepping on the brakes, or everybody was, like, me and exuberant, we go off the rails, but the superorganism functions because of that. So I say, young people, speak your mind. speak your mind, and, you know, I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing, and we're gonna feel our way forward as a species, and we're gonna be better for it.
[00:46:00] Steve Semelsberger: It's beautifully put, Brian. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with our audience today? We've covered a full gamut of topics, looking back. I understand you love living in Georgetown, Texas. You have a beautiful Victorian house. Are there things about living in a smaller community like that you get to see by walking the streets of Georgetown that you might not experience in a place like New York City?
[00:46:25] Byron Reese: Well, you know, the house is 130 years old, and we're only the third people to live in it, and that's kind of cool. Because you get a sense that you're the custodian of it, not the owner of it. Because it's gonna be here long after me. And it's a different... it's a different time horizon. But I would actually like to close on the thing I touched on, which is, how then should I live? If I'm a person, what is it that... why should I care about Agora or any of this stuff? And... I know a lot of, kind of, accomplished, smart people, and most of them beat themselves up a lot, and they think. They should be doing more with their life. And they... carry the weight of the world on them, and they read the newspaper, and they think, how can I change this? And they get overwhelmed by it. And then, they also think that, like, there are these power people in the world who... they call all the shots, and they're the famous people, and they really control history. And... And when you think of the planet as... when you think of humanity as a superorganism, and you're a bee. There is no super-achieving bee. The queen isn't in charge, she's just the reproductive unit. The... the bees... the hive thrives when all the bees just fly out and get their nectar and bring it back. When the... when they make the royal jelly, when every bee just does their little thing. That's what makes it work. I like to tell the story from right after World War II. In San Francisco, this young man in his 30s committed suicide. He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. And there happened to be, at Stanford, a psychologist who studied suicide, Dr. Jerome Motto. And he heard about this, and he thought he would go up and just look into it. And so he went up, and he got entry into the man's apartment. And he lived alone, he had no health problems or money problems or anything. Lived alone. And he... but he had left a suicide note, not knowing who was gonna find it. So he left this note, and what the note said was. I'm going to walk to the bridge right now. If one person smiles at me along the way, I will not jump. And it's a heartbreaking thing, because he walked to the bridge and nobody smiled at him. And that's what superorganisms... that's your purpose in life. It isn't to save the world. It's to every day be a tiny bit kinder than you were yesterday. just... that's... that's all it takes to build utopia. It isn't each of us doing Herculean efforts and All of that. It's everybody just being a little nicer to each other, day by day. and that makes the superorganism function, and it thrives, and you can't do anything, and I can't do anything, but Agora can do anything. And so, just be a little bit kinder, and everything in the world is gonna be alright.
[00:49:28] Steve Semelsberger: Byron, I've known you a long time. I've seen how you are in the world. You're a kind person, you're a thoughtful person, you're a generous person. You're an inspiring person, and you're fun, too, man. This has been a really great conversation. I can't thank you enough. Byron Reese, his latest book is We Are Agora. Look him up. It's an awesome read, even though he told you many of the stories, you'll enjoy it. Byron, thank you so much for joining us on the Change Resilient Podcast today.
[00:49:58] Byron Reese: Thank you, Steve, I had a great time.