It's common to say that information is power and knowledge is power. And this was true for much of History. Our information was very scarce and the censorship worked by withholding information by blocking the flow of information. But we now live in a very different age. When we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, we have far too much of it. We don't know how to make sense of it and censorship now actually works.
By distracting people with too much information, with irrelevant information with this information and in this, in this age, Clarity is more important than ever before. Because we need to know what to focus on attention becomes, maybe the most scarce resource of all,
that's evil, Noah Harare, and this is the Retro podcast.
The Rich Roll podcast.
What is going on, everybody? I am rich roll. This is my podcast. Welcome aboard. Thanks for listening. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for sharing it with your friends. I do see all the social media posts, and I want you to know that I appreciate it. Doing this show
is just such an
unbelievable honor. It is
one of my greatest Joys and it simply would not be possible without all of you guys, that is the truth. So, again, thank you. And speaking of honors, I'm not even gonna
pretend to be low-key
about today's guest. This one is definitely a big deal for me. And I think it's fair to say sets a new high watermark for the show because today's guest is none other than you've all Noah, Harari for the very few.
Familiar. You've all is a renowned historian. He is a prodigious intellect and one of the truly great. Thinkers of our time, you've all received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002. He's currently a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his current research focuses on the biggest questions of our time. Things like what is the relationship between history and biology?
What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals is there? Justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded and what ethical questions do science and technology raised in the 21st century. You've all is a guy that I've wanted to meet ever since I read his first book sapiens, which is a groundbreaking and utterly fascinating Narrative of
Humanity's
creation of Humanity's Evolution, this book, had a profound impact on me and all of you should read it immediately. If you haven't already, you've all is also the author of homo Deus which is an equally mind-blowing book
that Tunes his
perspicuity on the estimation of our species future and our quest to upgrade humans into gods and you've always got a new book out this week. It's called 21 lessons for the 21st century.
Yeah.
And in the way that sapiens looks
at our past and Houma, Deus kind of peers into our future. This book Roots Us in the present. It's sort of a wrestling match with how to best. Understand today's most pressing issues. Today's conversation is about this present moment. It's about what you've all sees. As the biggest problems we face and what do you imagine as we will soon face? Should we fail to soon? Craft Solutions? Speaking of solutions are you fed up with Washington?
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Super excited about this one. It took quite a bit of
jockeying to make this
happen. The only way I could make it work in the midst of his insanely busy pressed to her for the new book. This is a guy who lives in Israel and and, and really doesn't leave, unless he has to, unless he has a book that he's promoting. So the only way I could make this happen was to fly to New York City and fit into his schedule. So that's what I did and really glad I did it the best way I think to introduce the subject matter of today's
Conversation is to just read the first sentence of the new book, which goes like this in a world. Deluge by irrevelant information Clarity is power.
Clarity is power. It's a powerful statement. I think it sets the theme for not just this new book but also all of the work that he does everything that he speaks about you Vols work is really defined by his ability to see things clearly with a distance and a rare objectivity that I think provides room for him to explore these big ideas and really compelling ways. It's a Clarity he credits to meditation something. He
His two hours, every single day, with an annual 60-day silent Retreat. And today, we explore all of this. We explore the Urgent questions. We Face through this Clarity of evolves finely ground Blends. This one is a little bit shorter than my usual conversations. I only had a tight hour with him so I couldn't probe quite as deeply as I would have preferred. But this is nonetheless packed with plenty of gems to ponder. We discuss the problem of disinformation and distraction
The implications presented by advances in biotech and infotech how big data Harkins the end of humanism and the potential of AI to do many things, not the least of which is produce a massive irrelevant class of people. We talked about the problems with education and the growing importance of developing emotional and professional flexibility and resilience, it was truly an honor to spend an hour with one of the great great.
The 21st century. I think we had some fun. I think you've all enjoyed it as well. So, here we go. Without further Ado, please. Enjoy my conversation with you've all Noah, her re-evolve pleasure to meet you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for carving out some time to talk to me. You're in the midst of what I can only, imagine is a hurricane of press at the moment. Today is the day, the book comes out in the United States. Yeah, right. So congratulations. Thank you. It's an
Amazing work and I've been following your, your trajectory for a while and impact that you're having on culture is really quite something, it's profound, and so thank you for the work that you do. Before we even get into it, I appreciate it in looking, you know, sort of to introduce you to the audience. You're now in your third book. The first book sapiens, cast a glance backwards, on the history of humanity, homo dais cast that glance forward.
We can anticipate in the future years to come and this newest book Roots Us in the presence. We're in very interesting times right now confusing times and you're trying to make sense of what is going on and trying to cut a path forward in the interest of humanity. And I think, you know, to kind of launch into this
The first sentence in the book, really sets the tone and kind of encapsulates everything at your about and the work that you do, which is Clarity is power. So can you explain that concept for me?
Yes, it's common to say that information is power and knowledge is power and this was true for much of History. Our information was very scarce, and censorship worked by withholding information, by blocking the flow of information.
But we now live in a very different age. When we are flooded by enormous amount of information, we have far too much of it. We don't know how to make sense of it and censorship now actually works by distracting people with too much information. With irrelevant information with this information and in this, in this age, Clarity is more important than ever before. Because we need to know what to focus on attention becomes Maybe.
Be the most scarce resource of all and were to, where to direct your attention, and how to keep your attention on the important things. This is extremely important and one of the things that I guess differentiate, the powerful people today from the less powerful is knowing what to do with their
attention. Yeah, there's never been greater demands for our attention, you know things like fake news. Although
Ascending and we're having this fake news moment. Are certainly nothing new misinformation and disinformation and propaganda are as old as Humanity. But this watershed moment that we're having, we're we're just inundated with attention by virtue of devices that are specifically designed to addict' us and distract us. It's becoming it's become increasingly more and more difficult. To discern truth from fiction real.
A tea from Ops equation and, and to just seek to kind of navigate our lives with that sense of clarity.
Yeah. And I, I would agree that the fake news and decent formation of definitely not something new. We had them from the very beginning of history and in many ways, it was much worse in the past. With all the talk about in our Facebook and Twitter spreading rumors and fake news, just think about yourself in some medieval village.
Thousand years ago, maybe in England somewhere and somebody comes along and tells you hey, do you know this old lady who lives at the edge of the village? I'm just so her flying on a broomstick and, you know, within an hour you would have a raging mob with, you know, hitch pitchforks and torches ready to burn. This old lady to death. So fake news is not
You problem created by Facebook or Twitter, or Putin, or Trump, or anything like that. What is new
is that now we are surrounded by devices which were designed to hack our brains in a way, which was never possible before. Because until today, nobody really understood the human brain in the Middle Ages. The understanding of how the human body and how the human brain function and how human attention functions was extremely rudimentary. So yeah.
People knew a few tricks about how to grab attention, but it was nothing like what we see today simply because science has progressed since the Middle Ages. And I think the maybe the most important thing for people to realize about living in the 21st century, as against the Middle Ages or the Stone Age, is that we are now hackable animals.
People don't want to hear that. I know, we like to think that we're sentient.
Gant and that we have agency, you know, beyond the capabilities that you're sort of writing
about yes we all sentient. We do have agency but something is changing until today. Basically nobody could really hack us. We're just too complicated and Science and Technology were too primitive. So if you went around believing that hey, I'm a free agent, nobody can really look into my brain. Nobody can really understand.
Mind. Nope, nobody can manipulate me and predict what I'm going to do next. This was true but this is no longer true. Humans are extremely complicated animals but they are not infinitely complicated. And in order for us to cross this Watershed we don't really need algorithms that no us perfectly. This is impossible. Nothing is
Perfect in the world, you can't build a system that predicts everything or that understands you perfectly. But in order to have a big revolution in politics in culture, you don't need a perfect system. The system just needs to be better than the average human, and this is not so very difficult because, you know, humans, often make terrible mistakes in the decisions and the most important decisions of their lives. Humans often know, quite surprisingly little.
About themselves about their desires about their minds. So if this is the yardstick to build an algorithm that knows you better than you know, yourself. This is not an impossible mission and we are very close to the point when somebody like Amazon or like the Chinese government are going to have these kinds of algorithms, these kinds of
systems. What's interesting about it is that it's not happening against our will work
Voluntarily signing up for this. And I think, most people are proceeding on this assumption that these tools are making our lives better. What's wrong with Amazon? Predicting the books that I want to read, what's wrong with me being delivered? That kind of advertising, you know, of the products that I already want to buy, it seems, you know, if not benevolent it on some level, not malevolent.
Yeah. First of all, this is part of the design.
I mean, this is not the secret police, from George Orwell's 1984. This is the secret police from Brave New World. I mean, it works by understanding you and by appealing to your own Cravings, your own emotions. So, so, yes, I mean, the system works by making you feel that they are on your side, right? Otherwise it wouldn't be. This kind of system will be the old-style, gestapo KGB, but
Equally and even more importantly, in many cases, it is a benevolent. I mean, depicting it as some kind of terrible conspiracy, misses the point, if everything, if all these developments were just a terrible conspiracy to abuse us, then I don't think it would have worked very well. The point is that in many cases these systems do understand us better and can improve our lives in many ways. And this
The Temptation. I mean, in some cases, it's obvious. If you think about a Health Care system, that monitors what's happening inside your body and yes, it knows what's happening inside, your body better than your of your quotient conscious mind. If you have, I don't know. Console spreading in your body very often people become aware of it. Only, when it's already a big, big problem and you start feeling pain and you don't know what it is.
Is so you go to the doctor and you have this exam and this test and then it is a fun. Do you have cancer spreading in your liver or something? And it's now going to be very difficult, very painful to very expensive to deal with it. And the alternative is to have the system that constantly monitors what's happening in your body and is able to discover the I can service starting to spread in your liver.
It's still in the initial stages, you don't feel anything but the the biometric sensors they are already picking up the first telltale signs that cancer is beginning when it's still very easy, very cheap pain, free to get rid of it. So this is wonderful. Why would we like, what, why would we want to block this kind of development? And it's also the case that in many decisions in life from which movie to watch.
To what to study in University. We could use help, we have to make very bad choices. So if I want to
help me out a lot when I was younger, yeah, it was save me a
decade. So the whole problem is that
There is a huge Temptation there. It's not just a kind of malevolent conspiracy, there are downsides, but how to, how to resist the Temptations or how to enjoy the benefits without suffering. The harmful consequences, this is the Big Challenge and just saying, oh, this is all a terrible development, we should just unplug yourself completely from all the devices.
This is not going to work and this is probably a bad idea because we would be missing so many positive developments,
right? I'm wearing a ring right now. That is actually a biometric device that measures my heart rate and my heart rate variability and my various sleep States. And I'm looking at this as a tool as a benefit sort of blissfully divorcing myself from the fact that I am a product of big data and right now, we're
In this moment of convergence of infotech and biotech. That's going to reshape how we live and what our world is going to look like. So, so play this dystopia out for
me.
Oh well if you want to go into the store Pian Direction, then you know, the question is who knows who gets the information that this biometric device is collecting on you and what are they going to do with it? And if this kind of information is being harvested by some big Corporation or by some government and you have no idea what they are doing then,
Could lead in all kinds of dystopian, directions, one dystopian scenario, just imagine North Korea, having these rings mass-produced and forcing every citizen of North Korea to go around 24 hours with this ring and to give all the information to some Central database, and you walk into a room and you look at a picture of Kim Jong on the wall and the ring, picks up the signs.
As of anger, right? The signs of
dissatisfaction next stop. The
gulag. Yeah, the next stop is the Gula. It's almost like
Minority Report like a precognition model of trying to figure out who's going to be an Enemy of the State exactly before an act is even, you know,
perpetrator told me before the actress, perpetrated before you even think about doing something. I mean you can pick you can have if you follow all the, I don't know how many citizens there are in North Korea like 20 million or 30 million, if you follow in.
Of them for enough time, you can build the profile or that you can you can pick up the dissidents when they are in kindergarten.
You don't need to wait until they are 30 years old and working in the Department of Transport in Pyongyang. And having these schemes to do know, you can pick them up in kindergarten and re-educate them or whatever. So if you want to go dystopian there many just think what Stalin would have would have done. If he had these kinds of biometric
Technologies. Here we tend to think
Of this age of Technology as being in its adolescence. But I think we're really in its infancy, we still in the birth canal here and we have no idea how to telescope forward into what what this is going to look like and and you with your superpowers of clarity,
giving us a glimpse of what
perhaps is to come. And the argument that you make is
Is that big data Harkins? The end of humanism. So can you explain what humanism is? And what you mean by
that? Well, uman ism is the belief in the supremacy of of humanity. And in particular human feelings, you can kind of encapsulate humanism in the idea that human feelings are the ultimate Authority in the universe, or at least on Earth and in politics. This means that the voter knows best the highest
Already in politics is the feelings of the of the voters and should be very clear that we are talking about feelings. Not about rationality, when you go you have a referendum or you have an election, you are appealing to the feelings of the voters, not to their rationality. If elections were about rationality, there was absolutely no reason to give equal voting rights to everybody. We know perfectly well the different people have different era
Rational capabilities and different knowledge, expertise and so forth. When you need to. Again, if you have cancer in you and you go to the hospital, you go to the expert, you don't have any referendum between all the people you meet on the street. You want the person who has the best capabilities, but in in humanist, politics know, you appeal to the feelings of individuals. This is the highest Authority in the field of Economics, it manifest itself in the
Idea that the customer is always right. The highest Authority in a humanist. Economy is the feelings of the customers. If the customers want something, and it doesn't matter why? Because it's a crazy whim, it's a, it's a fad. It's a fashion who cares? This is the highest Authority in the economy. If everybody wants it or if enough people wanted they vote with their credit cards, there is nobody who can say well, but this is bad for you. Why are you in? I my feelings.
Are the highest Authority and it's the same in out in out. Humanism the, the humanist slogan in art is beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. It's just like the customer is always right. There is no Authority higher than the beholder. And if you like a certain genre, or a certain piece of art, your feelings are, the ultimate judge is nobody out there who can tell you, yes, do you like it? But it's actually bad checks actually
Bet art and in ethics, the idea is just follow your heart. Just do. What? Feels good. If it feels good. Do it. It doesn't feel good. Don't do it. Of course. Sometimes, you know, you're good feelings. Collide with somebody else's bad feelings, I feel very good about stealing your car. You feel very bad about it. So we now have an ethical debate and when you look today in the world you see that the very complicated ethical debates around things like identity.
Politics, which actually revolve around human feelings. This is the highest Authority. You don't appeal to God, or to the Bible or to the pope, you appeal to, I feel and all this comes also down to education, the highest ideal of Education, according to humanism is to teach people to think for themselves. Again, they are the highest Authority. So this is
humanism right? That, that economic forces, political forces cultural forces, all been to the will
The whims of the collective emotional landscape of the
population. Exactly. In the only thing that can counter the feelings of human being, is the feelings of another human being. That that's the game.
And all this is now threatened by what happens when a big data algorithm can hack the human system and cannot only predict people's feelings. So you don't need to ask them, you know, better than they. What they feel. It's very difficult to know what you feel when we have entire professions like therapists. Well, just trying to get us in touch with our emotions. It's very difficult to know what I actually want and what happens if you have a
Him. That knows what I want better than me. So Authority, gradually shifts to that system. And what happens if the system can if you can it can predict and understand my feeling. So well it obviously could manipulate my feelings as well. The Oracle becomes a sovereign and then Authority, completely shifts away from from human emotions. There is a famous quip about I think communism that you
have a communist before the Revolution. You have a communist agitator inside standing in front of a crowd and and telling everybody when the revolution comes we will all eat strawberries and cream. And then somebody says but I don't like strawberries and cream and then the agitator says, when the revolution comes, you will like strawberries and cream
cause you were like what the state
tells you that? Yes. And, you know, in 1917, the way that the state
And you like something was very crude and not very pleasant. But in the future the state can make you like strawberry and cream in very sophisticated and pleasant ways.
So where does this lead us specifically, you know, in terms of how this is going to?
Change Market forces and change the political landscape and change, you know, specifically how we, how we, you know, navigate the world in terms of careers and making a living. I mean, you talk a lot about the irrelevance irrelevant class. And in terms of AI, and and reshaping the the discussion, not around, you know, the revolution of the robots that are coming to kill us.
But in the sense that it's going to render a giant swath of the human population unemployable and and
irrelevant. Yeah, there are many many themes that we can explore. There is the theme of irrelevance and uselessness that again, coming back to the Communist Revolution. If in the 20th century, the big struggle was against exploitation. They are trying to exploit you in the 21st century. The big struggle might be against irrelevance, they just don't need you.
And it's much much more difficult to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation. So this is one thing. Another thing is that we just don't have any idea what you mean, life is going to look like when more and more of the decisions are taken by these algorithms on our behalf because for thousands of years, almost all religious and political and artistic Traditions, depicted life is a drama of the
In making, whether it's a Shakespeare play or whether it's a Jane Austen novel, or whether it's a Hollywood comedy, or whether it's a theology book, they all describe Life as a kind of Journey that you are walking on the road and every few steps or every few miles you reach an intersection. And you need to choose. You have small decisions, what to choose for lunch. You have big decisions, whom to marry
whom to vote for whether to start this career of that career, whether to go to war to make peace and the whole drama revolves around the decision making the right decision. Now, how does life look like? How does Outlook looks like? How does theology looks like when whenever you reach the intersection, you just take out the smartphone and you say, OK, Google. What do they do? Just try. Another King Lear.
Macbeth always, don't let as somebody who doesn't believe in Free
Will. How is this different
qualitatively? Oh, I mean you know there is a lot of confusion about about for the free will. People definitely have a will people definitely make decisions all the time. We make choices all the time if the to say that I don't believe in Free Will and the science doesn't even understand what free will means. It doesn't mean that people don't make decisions, we make decisions all the time but these decisions don't
Not reflect Freedom, they reflect millions of different factors that we are unaware of the vast, majority of them, my main problem with Freewill aside from the sound from the scientific fact that it just doesn't make any sense. If expense is that if you believe in Free Will you are extremely uncurious about the way you make decisions about your own desires about your own mind. You just tend to identify with what
Our pops up in your mind, a desire pops up and hey, let's me, I chose this. This is my flu will. I'll do it. I'm sorry leveled out not to interrupt, but but as a
sort of countervailing perspective on this, presuming that every human being is the aggregation of their traumas and their decisions and their various experiences packed into that. Is this idea that we're not making clear decisions are decisions are clouded by, you know, our various experiences that perhaps
us for making the best decision in our best interest. So that smartphone, might be able to
help us transcend those limitations to make a better decision. He's Weitzel temp. Tia, I mean, if the smartphone always made terrible decisions, then very quickly, we would throw it away. But the thing is that in more and more fields, we discover by empirical experience that it's a good idea to listen to Google or Netflix or Amazon. And if you think about
Think like, navigating your way around New York, so like I'm not going on this book tour. So I'm going to to here and they're all over the city and most of the cab drivers, they they just rely on Google Now, right? So, and it's a good idea. I mean, you reach an intersection your gut. Feeling tells you turn right? Google says, no no turn left. It's better. You trust your gut feeling you stuck in traffic. You miss your appointment. Next time, you'll listen to Google. You arrive on time.
So you learn by experience, it's better to listen to them. They know they're talking about and now it's with traffic in 20 years it will be decisions like whom to marry and what to study in University and it will be tempting because they will give us very good recommendations.
At the same time, we're moving into this era where the Gestalt of automation is accelerating at a crazy pace and there's a lot of conversations about jobs and lost jobs, but the problem is much more dire than that. Can you elaborate a little bit more on what that landscape is going to look like the job
Mark. Yeah, in
2050. And how that impacts generations to come,
well, the, the
Scenario. Is that the robots are coming? They'll take all the jobs will have nothing to do. And for some people in some countries, this may be the case, there are many countries today, that rely primarily on cheap manual labor for their economies people working in sweatshops and and textile factories. And these economies May completely crash.
In other countries, like in the u.s. many jobs will disappear, but many new jobs will appear. If you bring back textile production from Honduras United States because you now have 3D printers and you now have robots that are far cheaper than the people in Honduras. So, Honduras is in a very big trouble, but in the u.s. you have, maybe more jobs, not in producing textiles, nobody needs that. But, for example, in writing code because the,
Ain't business of the textile industry is going to be data and code. You need a lot of data on your customers, what they want, what are what is the new fashion and about their bodies? I mean you can now design a shirt specifically for your torso. You don't need to rely on mass production like in the industrial
revolution and you'll be able to print that in your
home. And you can print it in your home or in New Jersey, you don't have to bring it from from Honduras.
But you do need coders. You don't need people who deal with data and so forth. So there are new jobs but the thing is that these jobs to will gradually be automated and and change very rapidly the landscape in the job. Market ahead of us is going to be extremely hectic and bumpy. The automation Revolution will not be a single big Watershed event that lots of job disappear. Many new jobs appear.
Yeah, the few years of turbulence, and then everything settles down to a new equilibrium and of snow. Every 10 years, I mean, AI is not is not even near its full potential, it's just in the in its infancy. We haven't seen anything yet. So, every 10 years, you are likely to lose your job or your job is going to be completely transformed by the new wave of the latest machine learning Wizardry. And if you
Want to stay in the game. You will have to basically reinvent yourself and not just once but repeatedly you you throw in extended life, spans people live longer and they retired at an older age, maybe. So maybe you need to reinvent yourself five or six times during your lifetime. So not just the idea of a job for life, but the profession for life, this is going to be completely obsolete.
Yeah, and it's it's
going to require a level of skills far, you know, far more advanced than this idea of the the the coal miner than becoming a factory worker where you can easily translate, you know, some basic skill sets to re-educate people. It's going to get a lot more complex and you know, even now would you look at Millennials and gen Z? I mean, they're very acclimated to this freelance economy.
Very few of them. Look at a job as something, they're going to do for the rest of their life. But I think that that's only going to accelerate the lifespan on those careers are going to get
shorter and shorter. And the thing is that they are young. Now when you're 25, when you're 30, Reinventing yourself is difficult. It's never easy to, to, to reinvent yourself, but I did still feasible, but when you, when you get to the age of say, 40 50 60, it becomes more and more difficult.
And this is what awaits all of us and certainly the younger generation. So the fact that they may enjoy to some extent the gig economy in though, 20s this is not necessarily what you would like your life to be in your 50s but maybe you don't have any option. Maybe if you want to stay in the game, you need to run faster and faster and the greatest.
Be in. This respect is likely to be psychological that, how do you maintain the kind of mental flexibility? That maybe at age 20 comes natural to you, but for most people is not natural at all at age, 50 or 60,
right? So resilience and emotional intelligence become Paramount in a way that that we haven't seen before which calls into question, our entire educational system.
Stone. Yes, exactly.
We're still stuck in this, you know, sort of Elizabethan Victorian or model model of how we're educating children that's very information-based and is just out of step with the times and what is going to be required? So, how do we rethink? How we're educating our
youth, you know, everybody almost everybody I guess.
Who deals with these issues know that the educational system is bankrupt. It's not adapted to the realities of the 21st century. But we don't have an alternative model. We have a lot of experiments, but so far. None of these experiments seems to be scalable. You can have a small experimental school which does amazing things. But then you think, okay, now how do I scale this to millions of teachers and hand and tens of millions of stuff of pupils, that's
That's a big big Challenge and I certainly don't have the answers. I would definitely agree that the things we need to invest in. Education are emotional intelligence and mental, flexibility and learning how to learn rather than cramming information. That's the easy part to say that, but how do you teach
emotional intelligence? I mean, if you were raising a child, what is the curriculum that you would
create?
You come on. I'm what you gotta have the answers, I don't
know. I know. It's tough, right?
That's again. And also, I am I can come up with this list of things we can do, and, but then you think, okay, but we can, we need to do it in a systematic way, with hundreds of thousands of teachers ways, supervisors, with budgets for the government, who want to know that the money is not wasted on whatever and and
Then you realize. Okay, so my idea of okay, let's take a group of kids to the woods and live for him for a week and build, build a house in the tree and things like, okay, how do I do it with government budgets and millions of kids? And, and so forth, that's much more difficult than I thought it first. And that's the big, the big problem. It's not with coming up with a solution for a small number of kids in an affluent suburb.
It's coming up with a solution, which is scalable to the whole country and basically the whole world or in the worst problems. As we mentioned earlier, may not even be in the United States. There are far more likely to be in places like Honduras. Oh, like Brazil or like
Bangladesh, are the places that are most prone to be automated
first? Yeah, it's the places that are easiest to the, it's easiest to automate what they do and profits from the automation.
Will not go to andorra's. They will go to California. So, you know, if coal miners in Pennsylvania lose their jobs, you can Envision a situation in, which the government taxes, the big high tech companies in Silicon Valley and in order to help the coal miners in Pennsylvania, right? But I don't see the government of the US stocks in Google and Amazon in the u.s. to help people in
Honduras.
Why do you think we're not talking about this enough for me? We talked a lot about jobs and and, you know, job loss. But that conversation is very rooted in the present moment. There's not a lot of deep thinking going into forecasting, what the future might hold. And perhaps, that's systemic. That's, you know, a fundamental flaw in our liberal democratic system that relies upon economic.
Market forces to solve these problems for us and doesn't provide the bandwidth or the incentive to think long-term about what the world may look like so that we can plan for it in the present.
Well, it's always difficult to deal with future problems. When you have more urgent business, may be less important business, but more urgent business right now, and this is, especially true in a system when you have over the four-year election cycle.
That okay, why should I now spend my time and my political capital on solving a problem, which will hit us in 20 years that won't get me, re-elected in four years. And that's one of what one, one very important ingredient of the problem. But on a more basic level, it's just, you know, everything is just very, very new five years ago.
All this talk about a I still sounded like science fiction, the attention, we now have on AI in you know it's it happens so fast. I remember that I when I published my first book sapiens it was 2014 just four years ago. And the book doesn't mention a Ayatollah that suppose I can remember nobody was talking about it. I mean, you know, a few people in Laboratories in in Silicon Valley on some universities, they
It's something big is in the pipe, but in 2013-2014 a, I was still not in the news, now, it's everywhere. So, four years is not such a long time to write to kind of start a completely new political debate.
I think humans are hard-wired to, to kind of fundamentally view the world as somewhat static liberal democracy is here. It's always going to be
be here. It's hard for us to imagine a future. That looks qualitatively different from the one that we live in now and
How do you square that? Like, squaring that with the rapidity. I mean we've never seen the rapidity of change that we're seeing now and it's just continuing to accelerate, and it's be what it's bewildering. We're playing catch-up in a way that if we're not careful is, is going to lead to dire circumstances for all of us. And so I feel like we almost need a different system, a system of star chambers of really smart people who are getting together to talk.
About these ideas to prophylactically. Come up with solutions that will keep us on a positive trajectory and, and not lead us astray,
you know, these, he's allegedly. What they are trying to do in China, that forget elections, forget liberal democracy, we need a very different kind of systems, A system that can look ahead decades and plan things without all this.
This Troublesome stuff of Elections and it has its advantages and it has some very big disadvantages as well. And as much as I have a lot of faith in experts and in scientists, there are dangers in giving like, you know, all the Authority or too much authority to a small group of experts and thinking that well, they'll figure out what.
Do especially, is these experts are in the end. Still humans with all the biases and all the flows of human nature again, then the next Temptation, he said, okay, so let's take it out of the hands of humans and give it to algorithms but then you have entirely new problems. Part of them are still an inheritance from the human problems because the humans design the algorithms and very often they design the algorithms with their own bias.
This has built-in and they don't even realize it, but they're also entirely new problems. When the decision making process becomes completely opaque to humans. And this whether we like it or not whether it is the solution or a solution or whatever. This is, this is going to happen more and more. That as the world becomes more complicated, as the pace of change increases, most people will just not be able to understand what the hell is happening.
And more and more power will be concentrated in non-human hands in the hands of these algorithms and we see it happening. For example, right now, with the global financial markets. That so much of the transactions there are being done by algorithms and very often even the best. Human experts can't explain what is happening, right? Like with the flash crashes, and this is just likely to increase, even if you keep a human at the top,
Pop like the CEO is a human being the president. We want to human president. But as everybody who worked at least for some time, in a big bureaucratic system knows very often that the person at the head he or she they are just figureheads the real decisions are taken down the line by the people who prepare the different options. Like you come to the president with three options, this is what we can do with Iran, or this is what we can do with the
Crisis in the market and okay so the president gets to pick between three options but who decided that these are the three options. Why only these three what about the other five options? Which never will never brought to the table in many, many cases. The real decision is which 3 options to bring to the president. Very often two options are just so Unthinkable that you know what he's going to do, any one of the
motivations behind the choices made.
To, to present those three options, everybody has their own
agenda, exactly. And now, the question is, what happens when the three choices which are presented to the president of the CEO, they were shaped by algorithms according to the way algorithms understand the world. And it's so complicated that we can't understand why the algorithm decided that these are the three options, right? But we need to choose from and this
Is going to be, we are going to encounter this problem in more and more areas in life. Now here in each start with the simple stupid things like why does Netflix give me these five options to for the next movie? Why these five movies? Why not 50 others? But here you know the stakes are very low. So okay, so I watched a bad movie, but what happens when you have an incredibly sophisticated Financial system,
That no human being can understand. And then the computer alerts, the president that look, there is now a crisis in the markets. And these are the three options you can do, and he doesn't even understand what they mean, and he certainly doesn't understand. Why do you think there is a crisis? And why do you think that these are the three options? Well, you're human, you will never understand it. But trust us we know and it doesn't matter if you call it a democracy or a dictatorship.
Whatever. It's a kind of system that we have never encountered
before.
I don't know what to do. I don't know what to make of all
this. There's that's a great year. That's a human reaction. Yeah. It's like what, the, what do you do
with that? What to even do? You know what, how do we even process that? How do we find a way forward?
You can, you can actually look at the present mean, how many people today? Let's say in the u.s. can honestly say, they understand how the financial system works.
Probably a lot of people who will claim to understand it, whether they truly do or not.
Even let's be very generous. Just two people who claimed, I really understand the financial system out of how many people are there in the u.s. like 300 million three hundred fifty million. How many would honestly like like, say yes, I understand how this system works. I would imagine a very, very few, I mean, maybe a million out of 350 million. That's still a very small percentage.
It's and we are already living in the world, which is so complicated that most people don't understand how something like that. And something important like the financial system works. And one of the things that is happening in politics, is that people talk about the things they understand. Not about the things that are important, and it happens in the political. I mean, I understand immigration. Okay? You have these foreigners. They want to come here.
I don't like it. Okay, the attract, I think one of the main attractions of talking about immigration is that you understand, or at least you think you understand what we're talking about. If we are going to debate the interest rates that the Federal Reserve sets, I don't understand how to talk about
it. Well, in the people that would purport to understand it disagree among themselves
and fundamentally. All of this
is based on, this is something you talk about all the time fundamentally it's based on a story.
A that we all agree is fact but which is really a myth.
Yes. But, you know, in the case of immigration, at least, we know that what the story is. In the case of the interest rates of the Federal Reserve. Most people just don't understand the story at all. So you can't have. I mean, there is nothing people like to disagree, they like to shout and argue and I think this and you're wrong. But you can't have this kind of argument about the interest rates because you don't
Understand anything. So you talk about immigration, you know, it's like in in, in in businesses like you have a meeting of the of the of the staff and you have two items on the agenda. One item is, which pension fund which pension program to have for, for the, for the staff and the other item is which coffee machine to buy. So we would have a five-minute debate
The pension fund because nobody understand. Okay, let's just do whatever he says. I mean, we trust the Chief Financial Officer that he knows what he's doing. And then you have a 2 hours argument, which about the coffee machine because this is, if we understand that, we know, we can
talk the beauty of humans shifting gears a little bit. I want to talk about global climate change and how you think about this problem and where you know where we're at?
In terms of our ability to reckon with, you know, one of the enumerated things that you discuss in your new book, The Greatest challenges facing human kind,
well, climate change.
The two most important things to realize about it is that it's happening. It's not some future scenario. It's not like, you know, nuclear war is an existential threat to human kind, but it's just a future possibility. It's not happening right now. Climate change is happening right now so we need to do something and the second thing we need to realize is that the only effective way to counter climate change is through Global cooperation.
It should be absolutely obvious that there. You cannot stop climate change on the national level. It's not a national problem. No country is ecologically independent. Even the most powerful countries like China or the u.s. they are not independent countries. When it comes to the climate, and this is something, which is very annoying and threatening, especially for people from the Nationalist, right? Which we were in this
breakdown,
Of global cooperation at the moment with the rise of nationalism, which is not helping this
problem. Yeah. It's just taking us in the wrong direction and I don't think it's there for a coincidence that almost all the people who deny the reality of climate change. They come from the Nationalist, right? And at first thought you it would, it seems like a very surprising coincidence. Why is it that almost all the climate change deniers are right-wing nationalists? Why don't you have like?
Twing socialists who deny climate change and historically speaking. It's even more surprising, because historically caring about the environment was something, which characterized the, right? And which characterized nationalists, they are the ones who care about forests and going out to Nature and connecting to the Earth, whereas the left-wing socialist. They love industry and big cities in the proletariat and things like that. And when you look in like in the, in the first half of the 20th century,
So environmental causes, these are the kinds of things that Nazis cared about.
And suddenly this becomes a left-wing thing. And the conservatives, they don't care about conserving the environment and my explanation for what happened is. The realization that you just can't do much on the national level. So if you if your ideal is to be this kind of isolated Fortress, we don't need Global cooperation, we don't like globalization, we don't like to cooperate with foreigners so we don't
Like to admit that there are Global problems that demand Global cooperation and which just cannot be solved on a national basis.
Yeah. It's distinct from the problem presented by nuclear proliferation because on some level nationalism, still provides nation states with the ability to prevent that Armageddon event from happening because of mutual incentivization. Yeah. Because
Has of mutual destruction, that would occur, but that sensibility does not apply to addressing the climate change problem
yet. For many countries that if you're a small country, you're completely helpless. You think about lately, the extreme case. If you are a small island nation in the Pacific Ocean like Kiribati, which is one of the in danger of being swallowed by the ocean. If climate change continues, there is nothing you can do about
To save yourself. I mean you can you can reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Kiribati to 0. You can even start absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere. It won't help you if you don't get the Chinese and the Indians and the Americans and the Europeans to adopt, better environmental policies. It won't help you. And it is even a country, like China, that now, realizes the danger. It faces from climate change. You
You cannot save Shanghai from the Pacific Ocean unless you cooperate with the Germans and the Americans and the Russians, and what makes it even more problematic is that some Nations might calculate and perhaps, even correctly to a certain degree that they actually stand to benefit from climate change. This is particularly true of Russia, which could benefit quite a lot.
From climate change from global warming and it's also true of many of the countries in the short term at least in the short term. Yes. But they could, they have very few assets on the ocean. So if the Oceans Rise, it's not a problem. Big problem for Russia. If Siberia cools warms up and becomes a breadbasket of the world. That's because if the Arctic Ocean
melts, do you think those those
Conversations are going on.
I don't know, but would be again, another big plus if the Arctic Ocean melts then all the shipping from China to Europe instead of going through Singapore and the long way through the sweat. So the Cape of Good, Hope you can just reroute them through Kamchatka and novias Amalia and suddenly Kamchatka is the new single pool. So, that's a big plus and also, Russia and also, Iran and Qatar,
In Saudi Arabia, their economy is based on fossil fuels. So, if we, suddenly have a big shift from burning fossil fuels, to renewable energy to win solo nuclear, that's going to be create an enormous economic shock for a country like Qatar or like Russia which whose economy depends on oil and gas. So it's for this reason to, it's not
Going to be very so easy. Yeah. So what is the
bridge forward towards Global cooperation around this issue, human beings as storytellers? What is this story that we can cry craft and all agree upon to begin to address this in a constructive
way? Well, the three things, first of all, to realize that for at least the vast majority of humankind, this is a terrible danger to unite people, you need an enemy but the enemy doesn't have to be another human.
The enemy can be a danger that threatens all of us and climate change. Definitely fits the bill. So you have an enemy which is always good in a
story but it doesn't have a
face. Yes, he's got its ephemeral. Yes, it's not as good an enemy as Hitler always Voldemort but it's something. I mean, you can work with it. Secondly. Besides an enemy you need to have hope
That we can do something about it and not only prevent the worst outcome but we can actually benefit from it in many ways over the last few years there is a growing realization that climate change is not just a danger that we need you know like good Puritans to consume less and and drive less and spend less in order to save the planet. We can actually benefit a lot from developing new. Eco-friendly Technologies even economically. There is a lot of room
Um for if one thing that you can't do in today's world is to stop economic growth because this is the number one value, whether we like it or not this is the number one value of almost all countries. They can say whatever they want. They can call themselves Communists or liberal democracies or Hindu or Muslim or Jewish or secular. Then their number one value is really economic growth. So if you need in order to stop climate change to stop economic growth, it won't
happen. Now it has to
The
it has to be incentivized in a cat and a capitalistic way. It's in the best interest of all of these corporations to
go green. But not only incentivized in in the sense that you will have more regulations and we take externalities into account but actually developing new. Some types of new eco-friendly Technologies is going to be really beneficial and maybe to give one example.
Which is close to my heart, is clean meat. That one of the main polluters and one of the main causes for climate change and four other ecological problems around the world is the dairy and meat industry. And it also has the added problem of causing enormous suffering to billions of sentient beings. Now we can develop and we are developing a new technologies of
Seeing milk and dairy, simply from cells. Instead, if you want a steak, you don't need to raise an entire cow and then Slaughter, the cow, you just grow a steak. Now, again ten years ago, this sounded like science fiction, but this is now being done by quite a number of startups and companies all over the world. The initial price I think for in hamburger was three hundred thousand dollars in 2013 and now I heard it's down to about
About ten dollars and it's still going down. So, in 5 or 10 years, you can have a cheaper hamburger and much more ethical hamburger. And also a much healthier I'm Burger because if you raise it, if you don't raise it a cow, if you just grow the hamburger from cells, you can determine the exact ingredients and you don't need so much antibiotics. And you don't need all the fat and and you can have a much much not just cheaper and
But much healthier hamburger. So we don't need to think about is, okay. We have to do some difficult stuff in order to prevent climate change. There are actually a lot of potential benefits there.
Yeah, the clean meat Revolution is is happening. It's unclear what the the time frame is, might take a little bit longer than we may realize, but it's certainly coming in the same way that, that automated driving is coming, there might be a weird acclimation period of people trying to get
Used to this idea, but I think that they will. And, you know, this is a explore this topic. On the podcast, I had Paul Shapiro on who wrote clean me, who I know, you know, you wrote the forward to his book and had Bruce Friedrich on. I'm trying to get from the good food Institute, you know, him amazing individual. I'm trying to get new mobile Eddie on from Memphis meets because I think it's fascinating what's happening there and we have, you know, a dire crisis in the form of factory farming right now. That's wreaking
We'll have a on the world. We need a more Innovative better way to feed our growing population, which brings me to the subject of veganism. You're here, you're vegan yourself you've got a million
interviews it doesn't get if people don't
ask you that much about this but I'm interested in you know and what motivated you to adopt this
lifestyle. Well first I would say that I'm vegan Niche beginners. Okay. Yeah I'm not very religious about I
I try to limit my involvement as far as possible because the meat and dairy industry, but I don't see it as a kind of, you know, Purity laws like I come from a Jewish background. So I know all about the OCD is that people can develop about, you know, ritualistic Purity laws with food. So I try not to go there. The reason that brought me to Vigor to veganism is purely ethical.
Just a growing awareness of the enormous suffering. We are inflicting on billions of sentient beings just to indulge our culinary fences. I mean at least in the 21st century if you were an Inuit living a thousand years ago and the only thing you have to eat around you is seals and fish then. Okay, I won't try to convince you.
Become vegan. But if you live in New York in 2018, that that defense doesn't hold, right? And so, I think that just for the ethical reasons, this is what we what we need to
do. Yeah, our hour is almost up and I want to be conscious of your time, but I want to, I want to end this conversation. Bringing it back to where we started, which is this idea of clarity as power and your
Methodology for being as clear as possible is your Devotion to your meditation, practice for pasta. No meditation you meditate two hours a day. So perhaps a good way to end. This is to talk a little bit about the impact that, that practice has had on you as a human being and how it informs the work that you do. Mmm,
I don't think I could have survived these last few years with all the meditation.
You know, we all the publication of the book and all the attention and traveling around the world without the peace of mind that the meditation brings I could not have done it. I couldn't have written the book in the first place without the meditation because as you said it brings a kind of clarity and focus. Especially if you try to condense the entire history of the world into like 450 Pages. Very ambitious. Yes you need gives you a gave you this in.
Incredible objectivity, though, to see everything from 10,000 feet.
Yeah. But you need to be able to focus because there are so many details that can take you here and there and then you end up writing 4,000 pages, and not 400 pages. But really, for me, the most important contribution of of meditation, is to really be able to see reality as it is. And to tell the difference between what is
Really happening and what is just stories generated. By the mind, the human multipolar, your
smartphone out. And the algorithm would tell
you, this is the one that so far algorithms on you're getting even close to telling you that. The human mind is a factory for generating. Fictional stories about myself about my family, about my country about the world, and it's so difficult.
Michael to tell the difference between the stories we invent and objective reality. And I, when I came to my first Meditation Retreat, we passing arbitrate it was 18 years ago. I was doing a PhD in Oxford and I thought was a very smart person and that I Know Myself very well and I'm in control of my life and the teacher gave us the first few days. The practice is very, very simple in a way.
Just observe your breath, just observe when the breath is coming in, be aware when it's coming in? You know, it's coming in when it's going out you just know it's going out. You don't need to do anything. Not a breathing exercise. Don't need to control the breath. You just no no it's coming in. It sounds like the simplest thing in the world and I was absolutely shocked that I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds. Like, I would try to just know it coming in or out and within like five seconds, the
And would run away to some memory, some fantasy, or I forgot, I needed to do this. So I need to do that and whatever. And I realize, I know almost nothing about my mind. I have absolutely no control over it. We need to start from zero and this was an MD. I think it was the most important thing anybody ever told me in my life and it was the most shocking realization or of my life and
Also the and transformative. Yeah, very very transformative and from from then on both in my Prime my private life and also in my work I try to just stick with this. Very simple exercise just try to see what is really happening right now.
Yeah. And you go on annual extended Retreats 30 to 60 days?
Yeah I've been last year. It was
Today's the year before that it was 45
and silent but sire time,
absolute silence. Definitely. No smartphones and computers. But also, you don't talk with anybody there. You're just, you're with your mind 60 days.
Unbelievable. Our time is up. Thank you so much, I really appreciate. I appreciate the work that you do. I wish you. Well, best of luck with the new book, everybody should pick up the new book, 21 lessons for the 21st century and thank you very much. You've all thank you for listening. Yeah. How do you feel? I feel great because fun. All right. Awesome. Thanks you guys.
Incredible human being that you've
all such such a pleasure, such an honor to spend an hour with him. Really hope you guys enjoyed that, please, please, pick up his new book, 21 lessons for the 21st century, and if you haven't already, make a point of checking out his other landmark work sapiens and Homo Deus, you can thank me later. You can learn more about, you've all @yn Harare.com, and you can follow me on Twitter if you like, he's at Harare underscore you've all
but like most
Great minds. He follows absolutely zero people so he isn't likely to see your Tweet if you mentioned
him. I imagine he's too busy meditating or speaking or perhaps cogitating on the next big idea but I got plenty of links in the show notes on that episode page on which role.com to extend your experience of this conversation and to learn more about you've all in his work and his world. If you would like to support our work here on
The podcast, just subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts or Google podcasts or on whatever platform. You enjoy this content. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash Rich Roll, and just share it with your friends on social media. That's the best thing. If you just share your favorite episode with somebody else, I love that and I appreciate that. If you want to contribute beyond that, we have a patreon which you can find at Rich Roll.com for /. Donate I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show.
Today, Jason camiolo for audio engineering production, show notes, and interstitial music, Blake, Curtis, and Margo Lubin for graphics DK. David Cohn for sponsor relations and theme music as always, by analemma appreciate you guys. Thanks for all the love. I'll see you back here next week, with running, coach writer, and Emissary of all things running culture, knocks Robinson, it's a really good. One until then may peace be with you, my friends.
