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Technological Change

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This is a new age of industrial revolution. New inventions have come out that are straight from the imaginations of science fiction writers. Phones that are small computers, computers that are flat and thin as a pancake. Television shows are stored on our phones too, and new vaccines come out for each type of flu strain that evolves. It’s a fantastic era of innovation, with new ways to communicate over vast lanes of social media. As Mark Fischbach aka YouTube personality Markiplier has stated, "The global, shining goal of the internet is to combine everybody, and let everyone talk with everyone, and unite and make cool stuff together."

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ROB BELL:

Rob Bell is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and spiritual teacher. His books include Love Wins, How to Be Here, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, Velvet Elvis, The Zimzum of Love, Sex God, Jesus Wants to Save Christians, and Drops Like Stars. He hosts the weekly podcast The Robcast, which was named by iTunes as one of the best of 2015. He was profiled in The New Yorker and in TIME Magazine as one of 2011’s hundred most influential people. He and his wife, Kristen, have three children and live in Los Angeles.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Rob Bell: We have better technology than ever, we’re more enlightened than ever, why do we see these upsurges or explosions of very primal, tribal conflict? "Let’s build a wall. Let’s keep them out. Let’s have these people separate from these people. Let’s make sure that those people never..." There’s a French paleontologist named Pierre Chardin who wrote about 100 years ago and he said that everything that rises must converge. And he essentially laid out an arc of the history of the world and the evolution of the universe and that there are moments of great conflict on the way to unity, depth and complexity. So there’s actually a whole body of thought that if everybody’s in separate tribes but the whole thing is moving us towards a global tribe, a connection - everybody’s my brother and sister. The only way for this tribe to become close connected brother and sister with that tribe is they’re going to have to interact. And when they interact those first interactions may be a little dodgy, as the Brits would say. There may be some conflict.

I also think if you go beyond simply larger large-scale movement towards complexity and unity whenever you encounter the unknown, whenever you encounter pain, loss, suffering or something different it will either break you open and you will be broken open in the best kind of ways so that you become more expansive. South American Indians have this phrase. They talk about making room within yourself for the immensities of the universe. So you were always taught that these people are like this but then one of those people moves in next door and you find out they’re actually fantastic. They’re actually wonderful. Like, the best neighbor you’ve ever had. Then whatever you were previously taught, whatever bias, racism, bigotry, you now have to redo all your labels and categories because they don’t work because this flesh and blood person has smashed them to pieces. So this disruption, it will either break you open and you will become more expansive, more inclusive, more of an embrace for the other. Or the pain of that disruption, you will dig your heels and you will regress. You will build a bigger wall between the two of you.

And I would argue that what’s happening right now is the world is shifting really, really, really fast. If you go back 500 years and let’s say the year 1543. If I were to say to you 15 years after the invention of the printing press. What, 1443 or whatever that is. If I were to say to you, hey this books thing. I think this books thing could really catch on. We all laugh now because we’re like yeah, that books thing did kind of catch on, and it upended government, authority, education, religion, science. We’re essentially 15 years into the Internet. We’re only 15 years into what could - probably is the greatest sort of technological invention or revolution in at least 500 years, maybe ever. So we’re in this time of massive transition. If you would have said to Jeb Bush at the beginning of the republican primaries, who had more money stockpiled than any candidate ever with more name recognition than any candidate, 'Oh by the way, you’re going to get destroyed by a guy on Twitter.' We wou...

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