21 LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY with Yuval Noah Harari | The James Altucher Show

[Music] so once again we have you've all Noah Harare on the podcast you've all welcome back Thank You Toby Reagan you came on after your second book homo Deus but also to talk about your first book sapiens and now this time we have 21 lessons for the 21st century each lesson is mind-boggling how smart and how many questions you ask about where our species is heading and how we have to think about now I think you described it as you know sapiens was kind of about the past the history of the human species homo Deus is about the potential future even the far future where we are going as a species but twenty-one lessons for the 21st century is how we can think about all these issues right now and potentially solve problems right now is that a fair broad macro assessment yeah I started with the past and the future and now it's time for the present and I I want if it's okay I want to just quickly talk about review sapiens just to kind of you know demonstrate the way you think I mean there is a close connection between the books I mean the new book 21 lessons it really takes the insights from the previous two books and bring them to bear on the present moment so okay so we talked about Neanderthals and we talked about cyborgs what does this tell us about brexit and about the current crisis in the economy and climate and so forth yeah and I mean you deal with a lot of issues you deal with you know where are we heading in terms of how much control data is gonna have over our daily lives will will the middle class turn into a useless class as data and automation kind of take control of basic jobs what's the role of liberalism as a philosophy for guiding governments when there might be humans with more capabilities and others do too control over data there's many many um questions you ask and I think questions even more than answers which is which is always interesting it's a book of questions it's not a book of answers it's not like okay read this and you know what you need to do in the world it's more like let's open a discussion yeah about what we need to do and actually let's focus the discussion because we are having a lot of discussions and many of them are about the wrong subjects well well essentially I wanna I want to get to that in a second so today Bill Gates actually in the New York Times wrote a great review of your book and I'm just curious there's Bill Gates ever call you on the phone and say hey what do you think of this baby cause it's sick because I don't have a phone so but as far as I know no he hasn't called us here yeah you don't have a phone no no no the smart phone I have a landline but nobody knows the number you have a landline do you does it have is it the kind of dial where you have to dial all the way around in a circle it has a test you press numbers but I don't have this a smart phone like mobile phone are you trying to keep away from social media I'm trying to conserve my time and attention and it's it can be such a draw such a destruction I don't think I would have the time to write books if I have the smart phone I guess that's true because a lot of people use social media to promote their ideas but for you you promote you're able to promote your ideas through books that are widely read or mean they've been read by millions of people so you don't really need to put it I have social media I mean now you have a Facebook account and a Twitter account and so it is useful I mean to get to people I mean you do need to live in the 21st century less another one lesson number one but I I try to I'm very careful about preserving my time and my attention attention is maybe the most important resource all right present and many devices like smartphones are really designed to grab your attention to take to take over your attention so that can be dangerous sometimes I love this od and you don't read the daily newspaper hardly ever III read long books I mean I I distrust show texts yeah so if I really want to understand something I try to find a good book about it well clearly because part of writing these books particularly they're so dense with knowledgeable information and I don't mean dense in a bad way I mean dense and a good way you tell them so many stories but you have to do kind of it is a huge pyramid of research underneath so you must be just constantly informing yourself not from the latest news but from you know years and centuries of archaeological research historical trends and so on to do the research for these books yeah III starts I stopped reading a lot of books all the time I drop like 90 something percent of them after 10 pages if I didn't learn something really interesting on you after 10 pages they say ah there must be some better book out there I know it's not necessarily the best policy and not necessarily the best policy for everybody but that's my method actually it might not be a bad policy because if they can't say what their main core idea is that they're trying to educate you with in 10 pages what's the odds that they're gonna do it in the yeah this is exactly my way of thinking so maybe with things like I don't know Tolstoy's war and peace you can't you can't have this policy but at least with most nonfiction it doesn't have to be the main idea but you need to get some new insight some new perspective from the first few pages otherwise my impression is it's unlikely to come later on and then even if you learn something in those first 10 pages what I feel like a lot of books somebody has a good 10 pages they submit to a publisher and the publisher says listen this was great we did another 300 pages now to put it in a book store what's the isin you're gonna learn that much more in the next 300 pages oh well and in most control book after a hundred pages that also happens if they read the first ten pages it was very interesting and then I keep reading and after how many pages I realize okay so it wasn't what I expected but my main message is is that really I I I focus on a very broad spectrum of material and the way to manage it is to try to stick with something that really changes the way that you see the world I mean this is kind of the balance I mean if if you're going to if you read just one or two things every week instead of many many different articles at least these one or two things should be profound and important in some way yeah you bring up an interesting point cuz it's related to your writing I feel like you don't write something unless you've really thought about how the current ways we think about an issue you need to at least be questioned and so you raise the question so for instance in sapiens you bring up I'm gonna skip to the middle but you bring up the really interesting point that in 10,000 BC the so-called Agricultural Revolution where mankind starts harvesting and farming wheat was actually a negative to the species in many ways it was a positive in that we could feed a billion people but it was negative in that we suddenly um changed our diet to just focus on a wheat based dye instead of plants vegetables animals what we were doing before and that our brains might have even shrunk as a result of not being aware of you know the 3 or 5 mile radius around us we're just focused on the very specialized farm work we were doing and you know and that led to you know city-states and kingdoms and Wars and so on as we kind of you know fought each other for resources so all this became like a net negative basically for most people life just became harder of course if you're a king or you Fura some high priests or even a philosopher then life was relatively good and better in many ways then as a hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age but most people were with kings and were interests across they were peasants and and farmers and herders and their life in many ways was much harder than we for physically you work much harder the human body evolved for millions of years in adaptation to climbing trees and running after rabbits and things like that and suddenly you find yourself from sunrise to sunset just plucking weeds and carrying water buckets from the river and harvesting and grinding corn and you see it in archaeological remains that people begin to suffer from all kinds of problems in their backs in their necks in their knees and so the body suffers from the transition also the mind life as a hunter-gatherer for most people are far more interesting if you have to choose even today between going to the forests to look for mushrooms or are carrying water buckets from the river all day or working as a cashier in a supermarket all day I think that going to the forest to look for mushrooms is far more interesting I mean even to decorate depending on what mushrooms you looking for even if you look just for the ordinary kind the edible ones to fill your stomach rather than to change your mind still it's it's more interesting I mean even than most people what most people do today of course it comes with all kinds of difficulties and dangers in the forest you have snakes you have Tigers you have to be alert all the time but that also means that just by necessity you develop kinds of alertness and Sensibility that most of us have lost over the last 10,000 years when you go to the forest to look for mushrooms you have to be extremely present you have to be aware of every sound of every smell because this can be in a dangerous signal warning signal but the tiger is coming if on the other hand you today go to the supermarket to buy your groceries you don't need to be so alert there are no Tigers lurking between the cornflakes or whatever so you can wholly the tiger that's true that's one tiger that lurks there but he's not going to eat you you're going to hit him and so you can just go and you know stare at your mobile phone while you're doing it texting messages and not even being present in the supermarket so in terms of these basic human skills to be present to be able to listen to be able to smell to be able to taste life was much more colorful enriched 10,000 years ago and yet history will sort of pose this as a positive because we were able to to grow to a civilization or species of a billion people yeah the speciated enormous lee if you look at it from the viewpoint of the species then it's a net gain but if you look at it from the viewpoint of a three-year-old Chinese peasant girl who is dying from starvation thousand years ago then it doesn't look so so so so good when people as individuals paid an enormous price for our collective advance as a species and most history books of course celebrate the advances of the species and tend to forget about the hard life of the individuals that make make all this possible and you start I want to ask you a little bit more about the thinking process of kind of going against these thousands of history books but you start to make almost a parallel point about today's day and age and where the species is going with the rise of data you could almost compare the rise of big data and AI and the benefits the touted benefits to the species is the same as the Agricultural Revolution you know supposedly benefit of the species in 10,000 BC so so how do you you know we all grew up you know reading the same more or less text books or ideas how do you then kind of come up with this twist that instead of humans domesticating we and having this huge advance I mean it's called the Agricultural Revolution for a reason you reverse it completely that we domesticated humans yeah just maybe this particular idea that wheat domesticated humans comes it's not my idea it comes from Jared Diamond's work and many of great insights over ideas of a lot like this one they actually the trick is to change the perspective you tend to look at a story from one perspective the easiest thing you can do easiest in in the conceptual sense of of thinking okay let's try it right to find a new insight is change your perspective don't look at it from the viewpoint of the King look at it from the viewpoint of the peasant don't look at it from the viewpoint of the humans look at it from the viewpoint of the cows or wheat and every time you change the perspective you see a completely different world and this is a trick that you can use when you make films and it's a trick you use when you write history books so like I actually want to get to the 70,000 BC that you mentioned sapiens but let's skip ahead in this book what were some of the perspectives that you kind of so again the books called twenty-one lessons for the 21st century what were some of the perspectives that you switched in order to get some insight well one switch is to switch from the perspective of humans to the perspective of algorithms how would al gur ifs and erst and humans and the idea here is that you can understand under standing humans from the inside out from our own experience how we experience the world but when you look at us from the viewpoint of a Big Data algorithm we actually look like a huge organic or a huge biochemical algorithm that can be hacked and can be deciphered and this is something maybe the most important thing to know about life in the 21st century is that we are now hackable animals and this is something that most people refuse to accept because it completely contradicts their perspective of the world they view the world from inside out and from that from that perspective nobody out there can really understand me can really understand the rich in a world that I'm experiencing my desires my choices they reflect my free will there is reflect my human spirit this is something that a computer will never be able to understand and you see it for example in almost all the science fiction books and movies that you know the robots are rebelling and trying to kill all the humans oh the aliens are coming from outer space with their gigantic spaceships and laser guns and whatever and humans are that you think that that's it humankind has absolutely no chance to resist the aliens or the other rebelling robots but in the end the humans win why because the robots can't figure out something called love they just don't understand it so they lose because they don't understand how the humans sacrifice one another would sacrifice themselves for one another because of love something like that and you know this is extremely self-centered and and childish to think that oh they will never be able to understand love because from the perspective of the algorithm well this is just another biochemical process if the computer can diagnose cancer it can diagnose love it's just a different different biochemistry I love the parallel though of viewing love is a disease that could be potentially cured but you if you think about it humans have been manually hacking this for let's say a hundred years since the beginning of advertising so we walk around the street were flooded with thousands of advertising images a day but again we the kind of mutual pact is that we know this but we don't know this we know that we are flooded by all these messages but the common understanding is that the customer is always right and it's the feelings and whims and the choices of the customers that the entire economy is built to satisfy and the idea that no but the choices of the customers they have been programmed by the advertisement industry you can't say this I mean we know it part of our part of us know this because there's nothing you know this testing of ads to see which works and so there's some algorithmic aspect even over the pass you know 20 or 30 years but it it's intensified over the past five years exactly I mean the thing is that what began as a kind of carpet bombing our strategy now becomes precision guided munitions so you don't show the same ad to everybody you tailor the ad to the unique weaknesses and biases and cravings of the individual you hack the individual instead of working by statistics well in the end this is your point in the book that that free will itself is kind of a myth I mean we we already know that a lot of cognitive biases that we have no control over shape our decisions but we still think we have largely more control over them and that and they have a rest but your point is that with data we'll be able to analyze well what music triggers what parts of the brain what images trigger what you know the sales or greed parts of the brain and so on so that the first level is kind of data used for advertising but the second level might be data used for much more insidious decision-making yes if you get to know a person well enough if you get to know a person better than that person knows himself or herself and that's even on the inside how the brain works and everything and you know people know so very little about themselves both on the biological level certainly how many people really understand their brains ah but even on the psychological level on the mental level we have an entire profession of therapists who are just trying to help us get in touch with ourselves because it's so difficult and if you go and in practice something like meditation then at least when I started practicing meditation I was struck by how little I know I know almost nothing about my mind and you know we have this myth of free will which in a way serves as a curtain that hides the reality about ourselves that actually dampens our curiosity because if you really believe in the myth of three of lis will my desires reflect my freedom I chose these desires I chose everything that I own you know everything you understand yourself you understand your desires you know what they are coming from there is nothing to investigate but once you realize no um my desires don't reflect my free will they reflect all kinds of processes on the biological level on the psychological level which I don't understand then you start being very curious about yourself and I think that you know in the 20th century in in throughout history this advice to people get to know yourself better this was always very good advice but you don't really know necessarily why you want this or why you want that but for all of history though you had all these Socrates and Buddha and Freud telling people know yourself if you said now I don't I I can't be bothered about it you didn't have competition still you were a black box to the rest of humanity so it wasn't such a disadvantage not to know yourself but now in the 21st century what you need to realize you have real competition this time it's not like in the days of Socrates if you don't get to know yourself better there is somebody out there who is right now trying to hack you and not just one Amazon is trying to hack you and Google is trying to hack you and coca-cola is trying to hack you and the Russians and the American government and the Chinese they are all trying to hack you right now way into and there's different again there's different layers so for instance Amazon's trying to hack you in the sense of oK you've all bought this this this and this and our AI and our data about people similar to you ball show that he will probably buy this next yes and so that's what they'll start to show you and then maybe five years from now they'll send it to you yesterday what you were gonna buy tomorrow yes what's what's the next insidious level of that so that's kind of almost a good thing when does it start to get darker well its first they sell your product and its really started with selling products all these all these methods but now these methods are also being used to sell you politicians which is a bit more insidious than selling people products the next step is to start manipulating your desires instead of just fulfilling them yes he wants this but we can actually make him want that instead and then it really becomes kind of the twilight zone that if you realize that actually my desires they do not reflect my free will they reflect a more and more sophisticated system of manipulation then what can I trust if I cannot trust my own inner most authentic desires and wishes and again this was a problem throughout history throughout history if you really looked hard you would have realized that many of your desires they come either from biological bugs or from cultural manipulations and propaganda and so forth but still you were in a privileged position nobody out there could really understand you better than you understand yourself so you're saying like things like nationalism or to an extreme fascism or on the other side liberalism or before that religion we're different man-made stories to potentially take control of your free will in a way that's the kings or whoever could control but now it's with Digitalism for lack of a better word it could get deeper they actually get inside of you in ways that you can't say no to exactly because simply because they understand the biology better they understand the brain better they have better devices to monitor what's happening there and they are going to have better devices to change what is going on there so what you try to do a thousand years ago with the priests preaching from the pulpit you will be able to do in a far more invasive in 10 or 50 years with all kinds of brain computer interfaces and direct biological interventions so it's not moving by direct by biological intervention as you understand the biological system better you can you know luck with every system once you understand how the system works you can start changing it in in in more and more ways ranging from most sophisticated pills to change your mind all the way to genetic engineering which changes the basic blueprints of the human brain and through that the human mind and after all if you think back 70,000 years ago we go back to the cognitive revolution what made Homo sapiens different from all the other human species around like the Neanderthals and what really transformed us from a species of unimportant apes into the rulers of the planet was quite minor changes in our DNA which resulted in the restructuring also on a relatively small scale of the human brain the brain did not get bigger it just got connected wired in a slightly different way and this was enough to turn this insignificant ape into the ruler of the planet and and just to just to mention I mean I thought this was so fascinating in sapiens 70,000 years ago that the cognitive revolution you mentioned how humo sapiens as opposed to even other branches of human like Neanderthals developed the ability to to essentially use imagination for storytelling and gossip and this allowed us to work in bigger groups than just tribes even working groups of millions and that allows us to conquer the world and it would you think it was just mutations or what do you think as far as we understand I mean the basic the basic fact is that we control the planet because we are the only mammals it's an cooperate on a very large scale no other mammal can cooperate flexibly on the scale of thousands and millions and if you examine all these large-scale human corporations what you find is that they are based on storytelling and on fictional and imaginary entities we can cooperate with millions of strangers because we all believe in the same fictional stories about God's about Nations about money about corporations all kinds of things I think it's only the imagination well new you you mention a great example where you know Isis could destroy a town but don't save all the dollar bills they find even though they hate America if it has George Washington on the bill they'll keep it because we have this belief in the story of the American yeah I mean the dollar is the it's a completely worthless piece of paper when we look at it from the perspective of a chimpanzee you cannot eat a dollar bill you cannot drink it you cannot worry there is nothing that a chimpanzee can can do with the dollar bill and the same goes for Homo sapiens there is nothing really useful that you can do with the dollar bill so why is it so valuable because we have these most amazing storytellers in the world not the ones that that win the Nobel Prize for Literature but the ones in the Federal Reserve and they tell us this amazing story that you see this this green piece of paper this is worth a banana and as long as everybody believes this story it really works I can go to a complete stranger whom I never met before giving this worthless piece of paper and get a banana in exchange and this is how the world works and why do you think other hominids around 70,000 BC and there were several different kinds out there including Neanderthals why do you think they didn't develop the storytelling ability as far as we know it's it's pure chance as to the base of understanding what you have is some chance mutation in the DNA resulting in small changes in the internal structure of the brain which give rise to cognitive abilities such as the ability to create and believe fictional stories which on the face of it sounds like a very minor and insignificant ability but actually it turned out to be maybe the most important ability that we have we can trade with billions of strangers because we believe in the dollar bill and the chimpanzees can't and this is why we control them and it goes all the way back to the Stone Age in the Stone Age also we have no evidence of trade between different Neanderthal bands as far as it like we you find you have artifacts made by Neanderthals but they are always made from material like Flint stones that are found in situ in in the place where they lived but we sapiens you find artifacts made from material which was brought from hundreds of kilometers away so the was trade now how do you in order to have trade you need trust you meet in the middle of the jungle of the savanna this strange ape whom you you don't know him you don't know her and but you need to trust him or her to trade with them so what do you do you tell a story the the most basic story is as far as we can tell from anthropology is an ancestors tale yes I don't know you but actually we are both descendants of the same great ancestor who lived couple of generations ago and if we both believe this story about the ancestor we can trust each other and amazingly it's still the story on the dollar because you have an ancestor hey you you're the descendant of George Washington me too so I can trust you I can you can give a nice banana no so so before before getting into kind of some of the 21 lessons for the 21st century because this is related do you think sapiens as a species are more violent than other species have been because you mentioned for instance in sapiens we get to Australia which is in itself an amazing feat like how do we get how did we go over the water and even know that Australia he's there was going to be there but then within two or three thousand years any species that could potentially hurt us is extinct like do you think we you think it's it's humans that are naturally violent or would any species be violent and we happen to have this ability to work together some species of definitely more violent than others and humans are quite violent and chimpanzees are also violent maybe not a bonobos but certainly the common chimpanzees are quite violent the big difference is simply that we are far more powerful it's a bit like with children and adults children are not nicer than adults they are just weaker than adults so most of the murders in the world are committed by adults not because adults are more evil simply because adults are more powerful it's interesting actually the transition between childhood and adulthood 18 to 8 is 18 to 22 and it's probably the most violent age yet you know when kids have the physical power of an adult you know but if you go even even a step further and you think about the really big mass murderers like Hitler and Stalin and Mao and all these people they're in their 40s and 50s and 60s so again they are not necessarily I'm not sure that Hitler would be the kind of guy you would be afraid to meet in a dark alley there are much worse people to meet in a dark alley than Hitler but the joke no really no comedy club but I mean he's not dangerous on the level of an individual you meet in some dark corner at night he's dangerous when you put him in charge of a country or in charge of a a storytelling machine or in charge of a storytelling machine yet a propaganda machine basically that created the fascism that he that he's read yes so um so it's a different kind of evil and in in this sense it's not necessarily it's not that we are more evil than chimpanzees we are in charge of a far more powerful system so and therefore all our weaknesses our fears our hatreds can result in mass murder on a scale that is far beyond what the most vicious chimpanzee can accomplish so so then you know bringing this into the present day and your twenty-one lessons for the 21st century you start to look at how today's technologies may have exceeded our ability to essentially evolve with them yeah because we still have the same DNA we had let's say 70,000 years ago and our challenge now is what do we do we got to look at all the worst-case scenarios and these and ask the questions which is what you do in this book so you know one of them being you know what does the rise of data mean towards free will which in turns what does it mean towards our liberal philosophies of democracy and so on you also look at you know essentially the rise of AI and robotics and what does this mean for moving our middle class to a useless class like well what would you say across these lessons there's just common theme of we're losing power to the to the machines that that we created and that some part of us might merge with like what's your what's your worst case scenario oh the worst case we have three big problems humanity has three big problems in the 21st century and these are nuclear war and climate change and technological disruption and each of them is enough to destroy human civilization on by itself and when you combine them you get a really toxic mix and there's another characteristic of all three which is that globalism could maybe you know basically viewing civilization is one global society could potentially temper the risk yes but we're not we're probably not you know at the end of sapiens we get this sense that we're on on the direction of globalism but but the reality is there's volatility along the way we may not get to globalism in time is this nationalism and and so on right now we are still much more United than in any previous time in history we are far more connected and we also there are more and more ideas and institutions that are common to all people across the world whether it's in politics whether it's in economics everybody uses the dollar even Isis liked to have their dollars certainly when it comes to science to things like medicine how to build a hospital how to cure a disease how to build a bomb everybody agrees on that you it's not like a thousand years ago when you heard very different medical systems and medical theories in different parts of the world ah take something like the I don't know the FIFA Football World Cup just a few months ago try to get Argentinians and French and Japanese a thousand years ago alcohol to come to Russia and play a game together absolutely impossible not just because you don't have the transportation and the Russians don't even know that America exists there it's also because there is not a single game which everybody plays across the world I mean to think about situation today when everybody almost everybody maybe not Americans I I hear that your football is not a big thing but at least potentially you do have some football just potentially that kids all over the world play exactly the same game according to exactly the same rules an Argentinian meets an English football hooligan and they can speak about the offside rule and they know exactly what we talk about there is nothing like it a thousand years ago there is not a single game that all humans play everywhere so you can't have something like that we are far more United than ever before in this sense but we are not united enough in order to deal with any of these three BRIC big problems nuclear war climate change and technological disruption we need very significant global cooperation because it should be absolutely clear none of these problems can be solved on the national level and I think the clear is is that let's take look nuclear war the fear is that the technology will increase so fast meaning it'll be easier and cheaper to make a nuclear weapon that we don't evolve globalism enough to to basically meet that the challenge yeah or another big problem which is becoming more severe these days is that as AI develops it could completely destabilize the the balance of power the nuclear balance of power in the kind of golden age of the Cold War we when you had a good day the balance of power between the Soviets and the Americans it was based on on the robustness of the weapons systems that you knew that I knew that you knew that you can destroy me there is nothing I can do to protect myself but the promise of the new technologies and especially the rise of AI is that you don't know maybe I have already taken over your nukes and you just don't know it because you don't realize that I have planted all kinds of logic bombs and Trojan horses and malware inside the system that controls your nukes and I know it but you don't know it and this is extremely destabilizing in such a situation we are in a much worse position than in the Cuban Missile Crisis but if you don't if you cannot be sure that you have control over your nukes there is no longer an effective deterrence and there is an increasing temptation to use it before you lose it okay maybe maybe now we have control over them but at the rate that China is developing their AI in ten years we could be completely overtaken by them and we can't even trust our nukes at that time because maybe they already control them I remember um looking at a company where they're involved in cybersecurity and these guys were telling me that essentially every single company in the fortune 500 and every electric grid is attacked all day long from basically every country in the world like there's no there's no end and I said to them all can you is there a way to fix the problem and their answer and they were all PhDs their answer was theirs whoever they are is smarter than us like the bad guys always somehow smarter than the good guy in these situations because the bad guy is just willing to do anything and the good guy has limitations so so essentially we can assume that that angle you're going down is gonna have a bad end yeah in an a I'm in an AI arms race whoever wins humanity will lose we are getting into an AI arms race it's maybe the most important thing that is happening on the geopolitical level now in the world is that we are entering five years ago it wasn't like it but now we are already in the midst of an AI arms race and this is a terrible situation because it almost guarantees that all our worst nightmares about AI will be realized well every country will say we don't want to do this terrible thing we don't want to develop this dangerous technology but we cannot trust our rivals to abstain so we have to do it first but you know you can also assume still if we assume they control us they might not know that we control them yeah and there's still that kind of game makes its worse because well the less you know the more difficult it is to create effective deterrence and the greater the temptation to just go ahead and do something well what about you mentioned also the the potential for one of humans to use AI to enhance their abilities either enhance their brains or use biological innovations to enhance their physical skills in a sense you know another problem we potentially face in this century is the splitting apart of two species like the super humans and the regular Homo sapiens is that is that realistic or does the fact that technology always get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper make anything that's accessible to the super humans ultimately successful to everyone well ultimately maybe but there is a question of a time gap if it becomes cheap in 100 years it's not enough because during these hundred years there will be enormous new developments so the gap will become bigger and not smaller and you we cannot just assume it could happen nobody knows but we cannot assume in advance that every major technological advance in things like bioengineering of the erect brain computer interfaces will very quickly become very cheap and very common and everybody will enjoy it at least some technologies could remain very expensive very kind of lucrative and will create an unprecedented gap between the rich and the poor because for the first time in history you will be able to really translate economic inequality into biological inequality right so right now I might even the case that for a few years some people could afford iPads and others couldn't which wasn't really a big deal but it will become a big deal depending on the technological innovation and the time it takes in reach the poor and even today if you look at something like big data algorithms so yes everybody has smartphones almost everybody this is part of the system they need you to have a smartphone so they can gather the data about you it's it really it doesn't make you more powerful it makes the Big Data algorithm is more powerful and in contrast to the smart phones which are now almost ubiquitous the Big Data algorithms they belong to a very very small segment of society and a very small segment of the world even it's not there like every country as these beaker operations just very few countries control or owned almost all the data over the world and it's not like they're going to share it like Google's never gonna share the data except with the Gus governments Facebook's never going to share their data it's not like they're gonna say here's all the data everybody I'll buy I don't know about never I mean you can have all kinds of it can come from within it can come from pressure from without regulations political debates but this is the kind of it will definitely necessitate a political action so so this is another problem that you mentioned and then another problem you mentioned in terms of technological innovation is that the rise of AI and automation could turn the middle class into a useless class so we're no longer shelving shelves at Walmart these people are just simply but as opposed to everybody who worked on horses eventually worked on cars it's not the case that everyone who is gonna be replaced by AI will have a new industry to work at and because now the computers will be doing the jobs yeah there will be new jobs but most of the new jobs will be high-skilled jobs that demand all kinds of creative abilities and all kinds of highly professional skills and for many people it might prove impossible to retrain themselves both because they lack the necessary education they lack the necessary financial support to have a year or two to retrain themselves maybe because they lack the psychological resources to reinvent themselves but well it's it's not like you know in like in nineteen twenty if you were a farm worker and you were laid off because they now have these tractors they don't need you so you move to Detroit or some big city and you go to work in a tractor factory and this is you don't need to spend a lot of time on or effort to rescale yourself as a worker in a big factory but if you lose your job as a truck driver in 2032 a self-driving vehicle and a new opening in designing software it's going to be a lot more difficult to retrain yourself as a software designer than it was to retrain yourself as a factory work although I wonder if like the profits generated by these corporations who are using these new productive technologies all of those profits themselves will flow into society and create more opportunities or more jobs or more I don't know we can't political question yes I mean there are some very positive scenarios ahead of us we've been focusing on the negative scenarios but there are wonderful scenarios that yes lots of jobs disappear but it's the crappy jobs that disappear that people needed to do because they needed money they needed food but nobody really wanted to be a truck driver on the road twelve hours a day and if you can for example tax the big corporations that enjoy the enormous benefits of the automation revolution and use these revenues to support the unemployed truck drivers and enable them either to retrain themselves Oh to realize whatever dreams they have in life this could be a very good thing the thing is that you need a completely different political system to do it and even more importantly you need to do it on a global and not on a national level because of one of the biggest dangers is that the automation revolution will completely destroy the economies of some countries whereas the benefits will go to a very small number of highly developed countries that and if you don't have a global safety net the consequences for billions of people could be catastrophic it's exactly these problems though that could be the last the final thing preventing us from globalism just because of what you just said so climate change for instance will at least initially benefit some countries and and hurt others so there's there's a there's gonna be a last-minute tendency to stick to nationalism so that not everybody you know shares in the pain that's one of the biggest dangers that it's certainly for the last five years we are heading in the opposite direction of global cooperation and many of the pressures and also many of the opportunities of the new technologies and of climate change are going to tempt people further in the direction of nationalism and isolationism so so in terms of we as individuals okay we have these problems and there's the many other lessons you described in the 21 lessons for the 21st century but as an individual how do I start to cope with this now one of the things you mentioned is questioning like not not allowing this myth of free will to think I understand myself of questioning all the ideologies around me and then you also mentioned in the book you know your style of meditation but maybe kind of more internal reflection to to build the the muscle of self-reflection well what other or what ways do you use to kind of you know fight these potential catastrophes as an individual well in the individual it's pretty limited what you can do you can certainly try and build your skills and you can certainly increase the your own self understand understanding your own powers of introspection and self-knowledge and meditation is certainly very helpful in that and there are many different techniques to do it but it's not kind of the silver bullet that will solve all the problems and that will save humanity we need to collect the minute collective action on all levels so as an individual because it's very limited what you can accomplish as an individual one very good idea is join an organization there is there are so many organizations out there and when people organize they can usually accomplish far more then way they try to work as individual activists and you think oh whatever the cause is you think this a social media platform like Facebook is conducive towards creating global organizations that could address some of these issues we work both ways on the one hand they make it easier for people to to to communicate and to form organizations with like-minded people maybe even on the other side of the planet on the other hand they can also look people inside these digital worlds when you think that just are doing likes or having signing online petitions you've done your share and actually you need to go out into the offline world - yes yes sir that you need to go out to the offline world to make sometimes every will change and and so if you are really troubled about these things join an organization this is a very one of the best advices that I can give there is so much more that even an organization of 50 people can do compared with 50 individual activists each doing my own thing so so you know we have to wrap soon I just want to again say what a great book by Yvonne or Noah Harare 21 lessons for the 21st century but I really feel like all three of your books it's like a it's like a trilogy you have to read all three they're just so amazing I sort of feel like eight years ago you must have had a tumor or a stroke like you were writing about twelve century medieval fighting faced on these autobiographical texts of knights from the round table or whatever and then suddenly you write the three smartest books ever written in mankind like what happened in your life that you just said I'm gonna be the smartest man alive instead of just some academic well one thing that happened I got tenure at university I could do whatever I wanted and I no longer had to feel the publish or perish you know water coaster um but a lot of people get tenure yeah that's true but for many people it's too late by the time they get tenure they forgot what they really wanted to do and somehow I still remembered and you know it's partly it's it's uh it's it's luck and partly it's it's a lot of help that I got from many other people I mean you look at the book and you think okay that the author masses must have been a very smart person but there are many other people B I'm responsible for the fact that you are now reading this book I know just how to read books but like the real PR genius behind the success of all three books is my husband Itzik without whom I think nobody would have heard about sapiens or Homo do so twenty-one lessons did he put you on Coursera because that's where I for savings came in America he had a very big fight with the university the university wanted to do this online course for for Coursera and they brought this they put it in a basement of the university I had like there was no teleprompter I was reading from a text on paper as if I was in the 1970s in some in the early days of television and the photographer that they brought kept falling asleep you're in and like one time he just fell on the camera and the camera fell down yeah and he fought and it took fought with with the university to get proper budget and to do it in a proper way and and this is how the Coursera course came out and and like that you need like you need an entire village to raise a child you need an entire village to get a book out there but I think also important like what you said in the very beginning about not having a phone that probably saved you carries the phone oh this is why I I have the largest work your separate how do you get in touch with each other we have to meet I'm gonna try this no phone thing because I feel like that takes an hour to a day because you get on the phone it's not a the phone is just an app on your phone now like the rest is just like checking it's also actually it's actually the new status symbol if you're really important you don't have a phone if you work for somebody you have a phone that says it you're saying well okay you've all know Harare thanks once again for coming on the podcast 21 lessons for the 21st century but I also recommend sapiens and Homo Deus is there gonna be a fourth book are you thinking of it I don't know you know you all think give you an idea you should set up a little company advising these major companies about what to do with their big data and advising governments how to how to deal with some of these issues oh thank you a multi-million dollar company I'll think about it I have a feeling you're not gonna think too much about it thanks very much thank you hey thanks for listening to the James Alta Trish show on YouTube today I have more great episodes for you every single week so don't forget to click my face right now and subscribe to this show more episodes are here more episodes are coming thanks so much for watching

Channel: James Altucher

Views: 67,528

Keywords: James Altucher Podcast, Altucher Report, yuval noah harari, 21 lessons for the 21st century, homo sapiens, yuval noah harari meditation, yuval noah harari sapiens, yuval harari, homo deus, 21 lessons, yuval noah harari 21 lessons for the 21st century, yuval noah harari interview, yuval noah harari ted, 21 lessons for the 21st century review, 21 lessons for the 21st century yuval noah harari, noah harari, harari yuval noah

Id: 6hc6TNV6F-g

Length: 56min 17sec (3377 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 18 2018