Robo-Abundance: Future of Prosperity – Episode 656

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[00:00] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, welcome to the podcast. We’re going to be talking about the future. Abundance here. We’re going to use the example of robo-taxis. Kim, have you been in one before? I have. I was so excited last August. We had to go to Phoenix, Arizona, and I have friends there, and I absolutely knew Waymo taxis were a thing and that we could get one at the airport. It was the first thing on my list. I absolutely wanted to have it happen, and it did, and it was super cool, and the novelty wears off quick, but it was still totally doable. I was so grateful that we got the chance to be in a city where they are prevalent. It’s amazing. To some people, they view it as a threat,

[00:49] but again, if I recall, when the horse and buggy people were mad at cars, the situation kind of solved itself, so maybe there will be a huge innovation change. Peter Diamandis came out with a report and said that the cost per mile on a robo-taxi is at 40 cents a mile, whereas Uber is $2 a mile. It’s shocking. Big difference, right? Yeah. Yeah. So that means that the one, and we’re still early on with all of this that’s happening. We’re seeing costs change. There are problems. You mentioned the Waymo problem in San Francisco. What was that problem? So I’m only loosely aware of it, and I hope I get the facts somewhere in the ballpark of correctness, but apparently there was a power outage, and there were four or five Waymos

[01:42] that got stuck at an intersection and couldn’t figure out who went next, and I don’t know if one of them ended up crashing or not. It made such big news because it is a rather unusual thing, and that’s the point. It’s a rather unusual thing. If you look at the statistics of the millions, in fact, I don’t know if we’re possibly into billions of miles already, that the robo-taxis and other similar driverless spaces have gone, some of them in tests, some of them in actual experiences. It’s unbelievable the very small amount of problems that have occurred, and so we need to keep this in perspective. This is not a space to be afraid of, and it is a space to learn about and a space to keep an eye on

[02:38] and a space to apply our own prosperous thinking to, because like you mentioned with the horse and buggy, the whip makers, the people that shoveled the horse poop in the streets, et cetera, yes, they had to find new occupations, and they did, and they could, just like people today will be an Uber driver, for an example, which was in and of itself a huge improvement from being a taxi driver in terms of flexibility, creativity, efficiency, et cetera, and yet we can go so much further, and so this is the nature of humanity, and then we create and we bring forth an idea, and sometimes we improve an idea, and this is what’s going on in not only the robotaxi space, but robots in the home. I’ve said before,

[03:30] I cannot wait to get a gardening robot to help me with my huge amount of flower beds that seem to constantly be needing to be weeded or garden area or what have you. I’ll happily do my own dishes, but I want that garden weeded. So this is a space that’s just gonna be so fun to pay attention to in the next two to three years, Spencer, and I know that term of time is not surprising to you, but I’m sure it is for a lot of our listeners. This is happening now. Absolutely. I can’t remember if it was Jensen from NVIDIA or if it was another thought leader. It might have been Sam Altman. The conversation was around robots and AI, and he said, we can’t imagine what it is. He goes, but you will notice soon

[04:25] when you walk down the sidewalk and robots are doing work and activities with other humans. We haven’t seen that, but it happens in parts of China now. They’re starting to do that. And so for us to be thinking ahead, like right now, 2026, how are you putting yourself further in the future? You’re reading the right things. You’re talking with people. You’re in the top innovative class. How are you doing that? And what can we do? That’s a great question. I think it’s so important, first of all, to really do a check-in with your own mental space around it. And if you’re just naturally an innovator, you are early adopter, et cetera, great. Then it comes pretty naturally. I refused for many years to get a smartphone.

[05:25] I was very happy with my Motorola, whatever I had at the time that was not a smartphone. And I don’t remember what finally tipped me over the edge. Probably Todd saying, I’m not going to keep helping you with your old dumb phone because if something would go wrong, I wouldn’t be able to fix it. So nevertheless, I get it in that sometimes there’s just spaces that we are struggling with mentally or relationship-wise as it relates to us relating to the thing, if you will, et cetera. So for those that are either having a Kim moment of not wanting a smartphone or having your own moment of either being afraid or mad at or concerned, especially at a spiritual level, I hear people have concerns about,

[06:13] oh, you know, Father, Mother, God didn’t anticipate for us to have our brains taken over or what have you. I just encourage you to look for little tiny aspects of good. Find little things that are good about this technological space and dive in. And so that means that it is so important that you pay very close attention to what you are reading, watching, listening, and paying attention to. Because if you are listening or reading or watching somebody that’s fairly negative about this space, you’re going to pick up on that and you’re going to intentionally or unintentionally go down the river of negativity and frustration and fear around this space. And I am going to draw a line and say that is not helpful.

[07:04] I understand that going the other route, which is reading and listening to somebody that is positive around this space, whether it’s somebody like Peter Diamandis or some of the gentlemen that you mentioned, it will help you dig out, and sometimes it takes a little effort, the good that can occur, that is occurring already in this space. And we are going forward into this space. We as a society, obviously worldwide, are going into this space. So as human beings, as individuals, we have got to figure out a positive relationship with it. We cannot go bury our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not going to happen because this is not 10 to 20 years in the future. This is two to five. And so find people that have a positive perspective on it.

[07:56] Pay attention to them. Read and watch and listen to them. Again, you do not have to agree with everything that they say. It’s been well stated that I love to follow Peter Diamandis. He is absolutely one of the people that I would encourage you to follow. Again, you don’t have to agree with everything that he says. But he started using the verb, or I should say the word, compute, C-O-M-P-U-T-E, as a verb. My team was like, the sentence is wrong. Did you mean computer? I said, nope, compute. It’s a verb. And what does it mean? Well, it means to get in there and make the computations necessary to figure things out. Again, mentally or from a measuring standpoint or accounting standpoint, or just the act of compute-ing,

[08:46] and then shortened to the verb compute. So it can be a fun space. Find the good. Find the fun. Do whatever it takes to create an open-minded space around it. I acknowledge you do not have to agree with all of it, yet I find you will have a much happier existence if you look for and find the good in it. If you’re looking for the bad and you’re looking for the negatives and you want to find all the articles about the five waymos in the intersection in San Francisco, they’re there as well. And so you have to ask yourself, well, how do I do better today? How do I feel better today when I follow the negative trail or the positive trail? Yes, absolutely. There’s one area of your life that maybe most people don’t know.

[09:42] I’m going to shed some light on this in a cool sense that may be helpful, which is you have a, we’re going to call it a black and white, kind of two sides, which is the living in a rural area where it’s simple, it’s calm, it’s tech-free, in many essence of walking the dog to the barn kind of world. And at the same time, you have a husband that built his own plasma cutter machine and has wired gadgets and doodahs and all of these other things. So what I have observed from you is that you’ve been able to pick and choose the things that you want to take into your life. And a lot of people believe that they have to take it all or nothing. How have you found that through the lens of chem? Well, it’s a great question.

[10:47] Let’s add in, we have an entire solar arrangement for our entire home and office, and yet we love oil. The whole aspect of oil, we live in Texas, and if I could have one of those little pump jacks in my backyard, I would have it in a heartbeat, and I would plant flowers around it. So remind me, what was your question? So you have this world where you have simple and low tech, no tech, and you’ve got the most high tech as well, but you don’t get overwhelmed and you don’t feel like you have to do it all and you don’t push it away either. Yeah, so thank you for clarifying that or reminding me of it. So it’s a choice, right? Every single thing is a choice, and I follow a Bible teacher, it’s Madeline Moppen at Bible Roads.

[11:38] She says, put your Bible next to your TV remote and choose wisely, which I just think is brilliant. And so that’s what we do every single day, both me and Todd, because Todd could get mired in technology muck for days and days and days, and if he let himself, some of it would do absolutely no good at all, and then as you’ve brought up, other things like bubble to the top and do amazing good, and we cut our entire steel gate with this plasma cutter that is a huge, I mean, I’m talking a room size piece of equipment. I thought we were getting a 3D printer that’s like two feet by two feet, right? So sometimes that deep digging that he does creates amazing things like that, and so, again, I think each person

[12:32] just has to be purposeful about it. A lot of people use the word intentional. I think purposeful is a much better word because on purpose we have chosen to live in an area that is very remote and enables us to have the most quiet that you can imagine, but everybody can have that. We have chosen to take some technological steps, and we have some arrows in our back because of this. I know some of the technology over a period of time, we lost about $100,000 of technology because we didn’t have the proper electrical system into our home. It’s really what caused us to go get the solar is because of how much brown electricity, so you have blackouts. Well, brownouts are when poor electricity comes through the line,

[13:24] and it was ruining equipment after equipment after equipment until we finally figured out what the problem was, and then it took us, I don’t know, how many years and lots of dollars to solve the problem, but now the problem is solved, and that’s the solar. So it’s just, again, a purposeful choice to be very, very careful of what works for you and what works for your family, and then, of course, if you are in a marriage, you have some things that work for one spouse and not the other, so you have the whole situation of having to navigate that space. What’s a priority for me is not always for Todd and vice versa, and there’s good in that as well in navigating that space of are we agreeing to disagree, for example.

[14:07] So all of this is doable, and it starts in our thought. Absolutely. It absolutely does. You’ve laid out some principles in there. Too often people are unwilling to listen to the other side or unwilling to accept that the other side, Todd going off and tinkering in the science lab, is not how Kim wants to spend the Saturday afternoon if she has time. That’d be curled up, reading a book next to the dog. Both are good. Now, we learn how that works, and that’s the part of abundance. So, Kim, very well said, and thanks for sharing some of the stories that help us to see. Of the books that you’ve written, which you’ve written a lot, which one would tie in best with the conversation we had on this?

[15:06] Probably the most recent, Busting the Scarcity Mindset, because that’s what’s occurring, and it’s weird because we are in an abundant world right now, an extremely abundant world, and yet, our own scarcity mindsets, and believe me, I have them too, sometimes cause us to not see that abundance, and so that is a book that not only is it helpful because it literally can help every single listener and generations on both sides, which I love being able to help multi-generational families, young families often, and then I get to help the parents and the kids, and that’s super fun, and that Busting the Scarcity Mindset book is very applicable to all three of those generations, and sometimes, of course,

[15:54] you get four with great grandchildren, et cetera. Furthermore, the book that you and I and your wife, Jen, have collaborated on that has the seven principles of prosperity all spelled out in a children’s book series called Adventures at Prosperity Patch, and profiles the dogs and the alpacas, and teaches some good lessons around those seven principles of prosperity. All seven of those books now are on Amazon, so we must include the link to those in the show notes. Kim, I appreciate your wisdom. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit ProsperityThinkers.com.