When Einstein praised spiritual genius in his age, he saw it as a counterbalance to technological

advance to a destructive, unreflective application of the fruits of science.

This generation's wisdom is being spun in concert with technology.

The internet is our version of splitting the atom.

It holds immense powers, both perilous and

promising, as it upends the meaning of ancient elemental things like making and leading and

belonging and learning. A concern I live with, and which complicates my sense of the transformative

possibilities of the age in which we live, is how much

the digital world disperses the very energies and initiatives that makes possible. My favorite

wise man about the internet, Seth Godin, is attentive to this danger too. But looking at life

writ large through the lens of the internet, he also sees that the digital world hands us a power to be connecting to others beyond kin and tribe, to create our own tribes, bound by passion and service, quite apart from bloodline or geography.

This is Becoming Wise, an inquiry into the mystery and art of living.

I'm Krista Tippett.

Something that I'm really intrigued by that I feel you're adding to is this sense or this knowledge that we all have, that we are living in a moment of great flux.

We are living in evolutionary times.

And I read as I was digging into you that Charles Darwin was a really formative figure for you.

Yeah.

People impart a lot into the notion of evolution, some of which wasn't Darwin's work itself. But what is important here is not only

do times change, but those times change not just our stories about ourselves and our expectations,

but they actually are changing our brain. So, you know, when the Industrial Revolution came,

there were 20 years when basically everyone in Manchester, England, was an alcoholic.

Because instead of having like coffee carts, they had gin carts that went up and down

...