Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: What a Time We Live In

As I rode in the back seat of my Uber the other day, looking up at the smart phone the driver was using to find my destination, I could not help but wonder (as in “wonderful”) of the changes that have occurred in the world during the past 45 years.

I remember hosting a group to watch the sixth game of the 1975 World Series and all the oohing and aahing over our new 25-inch Magnavox color TV set. I remember my friend Ralph walking up to it and exclaiming, “Man this is like being at the drive-in!” Today, most of us have at least a 40-, if not 50-, or even 70-inch TV in our house.

I remember as a kid watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, a few years later watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, and watching them with an overriding sense that this was the last time I would see these things. Remember that? We might have had reruns, but we did not have the internet, streaming, or YouTube, so we just assumed that most things we were watching we would never see again.

I remember first becoming aware of Google and then YouTube. In fact, one night my son-in-law Pat and I (after having a few) went on a three-hour YouTube binge. (Don’t tell me you haven’t done that.) The night was filled with:

“Hey, let’s find the Beatles on Ed Sullivan!” It was there.

“How about Dylan going electric at Newport?” It was there.

“How about Janis at Altamont?” It was there.

“How about the Ali-Liston fight in Lewiston, Maine? It was there.

It went on like that to the point where we thought they might have everything that had ever happened in the world: “Maybe they have the Last Supper!” Of course that was not there, and it was time to go to bed.

That was fun, but let’s get to the point. There is more knowledge and information at our fingertips today than at any other time in the history of the world. People talk about the golden age of television. This is the golden age of television simply because we can watch whatever the previous golden age of television was.

We can watch anything we want at any time we want. More than 30 years ago, I read Alvin Toffler’s books, Future Shock, The Third Wave, and Power Shift; John Naisbitt’s Megatrends; and Faith Popcorn’s The Popcorn Report, amazed about what 2020 would look like. If you reread them, you will be astounded at how much they got right.

Popcorn and Naisbitt both talked about a time, for example, when people would watch TV shows whenever they wanted to watch them. They talked about people shopping and buying from the comfort of their own living rooms. Imagine that.

If someone had told me 25 years ago that I would be able to find just about any book I wanted—even the 1928 version of the Hardy Boys’ The House on the Cliff—and that on a site called eBay I would be able to buy a copy of the exact same book I had bought at Berry Paper’s in Lewiston, Maine in 1964, I wouldn’t have believed it.

To make my point, I have purposely used more common cultural examples of how the world we live in today is so different than the world we grew up in because that’s what most of us can identify with.

But let’s not forget our current world of electric vehicles, or modern space travel where instead of a space race between nations we are witnessing a space race between billionaires.

A popular comedian (whose name I won’t mention because everyone hates him now and it’s not the Jell-O salesman) once talked about how quickly blasé we can get. We fly 600 miles an hour, a mile up in the sky, coast to coast in a metal tube, going from New York to L.A. in five hours and all we can talk about is how few peanuts there are in the bag they give us with the plastic cup of Coke Zero. Despite this comedian’s peculiar proclivities, he had it right.

Now, if you are flying coast to coast and all you can talk about is a bag of peanuts, maybe it’s time you look into the near future, the one that is just upon us, just around the corner. I recommend reading the new book, The Future is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. You will discover that we actually do have flying cars/cabs called eVTOLs (electric take-off and landing vehicles), that we have a high-speed travel tunnel in the works, computers that are building themselves faster than any human can, autonomous trucks hauling freight, and artificial intelligence—Google’s Talk to Books lets you ask a question on any subject and responds by reading 120,000 books in half a second to provide you the right answer. Hey human, how are you going to compete with that?

These things represent just a very small sampling of what you can find in that book. Still want to focus on that bag of peanuts?

It’s only common sense.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.