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• Mr. Toffler's official site
• About Revolutionary Wealth
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Tavis: As we continue our 'Road to Wealth' series, tonight I'm pleased to welcome acclaimed author, Alvin Toffler, to this program. His books, of course, include the seminal and perennial bestseller, "Future Shock,' a book that foreshadowed many of the changes in American society over the past thirty-five years. His latest is "Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives.' Mr. Toffler, an honor to meet you. Glad to have you on the program.

Alvin Toffler: Pleasure.

Tavis: I assume that you had no idea - maybe you did - I assume you had no idea that "Future Shock" would sell and sell and sell and sell.

Toffler: Well, that's true, that's true. One of the worst forecasts we ever made (laughter) was to underestimate the sale. My wife and I had lunch with our publisher after this and I said, "I'll tell you how many we thought it was going to sell if you tell us how many you thought we'd sell." I said maybe fifty thousand and he said forty thousand. As far as we know, it's this eight million just in the United States, paperback edition alone. It's sold all over the world.

Tavis: What do you think - I mean, the obvious answer, I guess, would be the predictions that you all made, the forecasts that you made in that book, but it's one thing for those forecasts to have made sense to a book-buying public then. Why does that book still resonate even now? We've moved past most of those predictions.

Toffler: Because the central point of that book was not the individual forecasts, but the larger forecasts that change was going to accelerate. That was at a time when that was not discussed at all. What's happened now is that we're living in a time-squeezed society. Everything is in a hurry, including the interview. That's just life today.

So I think that people have felt from the day that book came out, they said you're writing about my life. My life is speeding up, speeding up, and how do we cope with that? So I think that the issue in the case of "Future Shock" was the central theme of the book rather than individual forecasts, which were in fact, by and large, mostly correct.

We talked about cloning way, way back. We talked about, at that time, video recording, which didn't exist, and a whole bunch of forecasts that turned out to be correct. But the main point of the book is what turned out to be even more correct.

Tavis: Well, since I'm so time-squeezed (laughter), let me use my time wisely. Before I get to the next text, "Revolutionary Wealth,' one other question about that? How does one go about forecasting? I mean, people don't really refer to you as an economist even though by trade you are. People refer to you as a futurist. How does one go about making those kinds of forecasts? I mean, you don't just pull this stuff out of the ethers. How do you make these forecasts?

Toffler: Not at all. There's no crystal ball, there's no magic way. We work hard at it. We read everything in sight. We try to read stuff from outside the United States as well, so we're not just looking at our own culture, and we travel. We talk to people who are actually doing things that are going to have an impact on the future.

It might be biologists or it might be scientists or it might be some political figure and so forth. We go around looking for those changes that are just incipient now, just getting started now, and conclude from this mass of information what the general directions are.

I think what we tried to do in "Revolutionary Wealth" is not say, you know, buy this stock. What we're trying to say is that we're missing, in looking at the stock market or looking at the economy, at the trade deficit and the fiscal deficits and so forth, we're looking at tiny little pieces of an enormous change that's taking place in the nature of economics in general.

We've gone from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge-based economy and we do not yet understand that. Not only do we not understand that at the level of the economy, but we don't understand that at the personal level as well, how to take advantage of that and how to educate for that and so forth.

Tavis: I want to get you to address the subtitle of the book, at least the first part of it, which is how this wealth is going to be created. You hint now at the fact that you and your wife suggest in the book that that next round of wealth creation is going to be knowledge-based. How, though, do we take that knowledge and transform it into wealth? How is that going to happen?

Toffler: Well, again, if I were looking to see what's going to develop next in terms of products, for example, I think we're going to see sensors of every kind. Right now, if you want a sensor in your car that tells you if you're pulling up too close to the guy in front of you, you can get it in a few models. That's going to be standard in every car and it will be all four sides.

But sensors of all kinds. For example, biological sensors for medical purposes. But also sensors that maybe tell you that somebody is invading your privacy. Somebody is reading your email when it's being done and so forth and so on. So I think that sensors of every kind are going to become more and more important, in my judgment.

In addition to that, I think we're going to see very advanced forms of agriculture that make what we do today look truly primitive, as it is in most of the world. I think we're going to see what we call hyper-agriculture, making use of not just the satellites which we already make use of in agriculture, but all kinds of new technological advances that are being made for other purposes, but may have agricultural applications.

I think we're going to see a dramatic increase in educational opportunities. We know that the education system we now have is in crisis. It is in crisis because it was designed to create little factory workers and it runs like a factory. Our school systems simulate the world of factory work. Show up on time, do rote and repetitive work, get in the yellow bus and be trained for commuting on your way to your job in the future and so forth, but that's not the economy we're going to have.

So I think we're going to see more and more experiments. For example, why could we not experiment - this is just one thing - why not go to school three days a week instead of five days a week? What about those other two days? Maybe one day you spend online learning with a group of others and, the other day, maybe you spend doing community service from which you learn something in the process. Indeed, you could do community service that's directly connected with what you need to learn. I need to learn algebra because I can't solve the traffic problem here without knowing algebra and so forth and so on.

We've seen already more and more external tutors. We're seeing people home schooling and so forth because the system is broken. It is designed to feed an economy, which will not be there when the kids get out.

Tavis: I know the young folk watching right now are like, "Yeah, Mr. Toffler. I'm down with the three days of school (laughter).' That said, for those young persons watching who still are young enough to take advantage of what you write in this book, there are many of us who read it, but might not be young enough to take advantage of it.

If you're watching right now and you've now learned to view how this wealth is going to be created, on a fundamental level, what advice do you offer to persons to take advantage of it, to change their lives for the better?

Toffler: Well, without knowing the individual, everybody is different, so without knowing the individual, we don't give stock advice. I don't even follow the stock market very closely, so I can't answer that. But the key to everything has to do with reading, thinking and trying to stay in touch with the new developments as they come along, which is easy to say, but not so easy to do.

Tavis: What I'm getting at here, the argument in the book is that the wealth that's going to be created is going to be knowledge-based. If I'm watching this program right now and I have some knowledge or I'm interested in gaining more of it so that I don't get left out of that wealth creation, what do I do? Aside from reading everything I can get my hands on, that's important, but reading alone doesn't make you wealthy.

Toffler: One question is, what do you love?

Tavis: Right.

Toffler: What do you love to do? You love your job, I'll bet you.

Tavis: Sure.

Toffler: And I love mine. Everybody said, "Don't do it. You'll starve." So start with that. If you're a kid or you've got a kid, what is the kid good at? What does the kid like to do? Is there some way of translating that and encouraging that? I would start with that.

The second thing is to try to get some picture of where the economy is going, you, yourself. Unfortunately, I think that much of the economic news that's given out on television every day in what I call "Econoland" is inaccurate. I think it's giving pieces of the picture, but it's not telling the big story. The big story is that, in 1956, we for the first time had more white-collar and service jobs than we had blue-collar jobs. That's when this so-called new economy really started.

The other relationship of this is you can't understand economics as economists frequently try to do by just looking at economics. You've got to look at the social problems. You've got to look at the opportunities in the social system. You've got to look at religious and value changes in the society and so forth. We're creating a new way of life. Big word, creating a new civilization. I think that, when you understand that, you understand that the changes in the economy are part of something even bigger.

Tavis: One of the things that I admire about you, aside from the high quality nature of your work, is that you're quite a wordsmith. I'm always fascinated in how you and your wife come up with these terms that you really put into the American lexicon. You just dropped one of them just now, Econoland. The term we all know, prosumers. Not consumers, but prosumers. I'll let you explain that. But how do you come up with these terms, these words that you add to the lexicon?

Toffler: (Laughter) I don't know how come, but it probably has something to do with the fact that, when I was young, I wrote a lot of poetry. Words meant a lot to me.

Tavis: That's a powerful answer, though.

Toffler: I had an uncle and aunt who encouraged writing even though they were starving at the Great Depression and so forth and so on, but I was always encouraged to enjoy words.

Tavis: Is there a particular - this calls for another level of honesty and candor which I know you're up to - is there a particular forecast that you and/or your wife made about which you were wrong that stands out for you?

Toffler: Of course, of course.

Tavis: Actually, if I asked George Bush that question, he'd say, "I don't know."

Toffler: No, no, absolutely. Let me say this out loud. We don't use the word prediction because it implies certainty, which we don't have. In our judgment, nobody knows the future. What you can do is watch emerging patterns as they develop and see how they interact with one another. There's no certainty about this. Did we make mistakes? Yes. I'll give you a good example.

Long before anybody heard of cloning, in "Future Shock" which was published thirty-six years ago, we wrote that there would be cloning. We wrote that there would not only be cloning, that we would clone animals and humans. We have cloned animals and we will clone humans, I believe, whether we want it or not. Somebody will. But we also made a mistake. We said that would happen by 1985 and it didn't.

So the question is, how did we arrive at that era in the forecast? The answer is, we got it from a Nobel Prize-winning biologist. That was his estimate of when he thought that would happen. So, yes, of course, nobody can write a book or a whole series of books like ours about the future without making lots of errors.

Tavis: Well, as you said, they're not predictions. They are forecasts and they are rarely wrong about the things that they do in fact forecast. The new book by Alvin and Heidi Toffler is "Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives.' I wouldn't take any bets on how much this one is going to sell. Even Mr. Toffler was so far off on "Future Shock.' We'll leave it at that. An honor to have you here.

Toffler: Well, thank you. A pleasure.

Tavis: Nice to see you.