"If You Want To SUCCEED In Life, DEVELOP THESE SKILLS!" Yuval Noah Harari & Jay Shetty

in that moment in the supermarket that i stand and i see these two brands and how to choose i choose this bread the mystery of the universe it isn't the mystery of the universe we know today a lot about what's really happening in your brain in your mind when you make this choice and it's increasingly becoming easier and easier to manipulate these choices thank you everyone for coming back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the whole world thank you for making us the number one podcast in the world it means so much to me i'm so grateful for all your love all your engagement and most importantly for choosing education for choosing enlightenment for choosing empowerment over everything else in the world you're taking out your time right now whether you're walking your dog you're at the gym you're commuting to and from work thank you for taking this time to invest in yourself now today's guest is someone that i've been looking forward to for such a long time so i'm so happy i'm so excited that he's finally here his name is yuval harari you've probably seen it in every bookstore in the world if you travel at all or if you ever walk into shop you will have seen it his amazing international best-selling books sapiens homodeus and 21 lessons for the 21st century he's also a two-time winner of the polanski prize which he won in 2009 and 2012 for his originality and creativity and today we get to dive into his incredible mind and find all of these insights that he shared yuval thank you so much for being here today it's great to be here i'm grateful that you allowed the opportunity no i'm i'm so excited i genuinely was so looking forward to this discussion because the it's not only about the success of your books what you've been speaking about in your books have dipped into so many different parts of mainstream culture and i love that how a thinker like you has been able to do that in today's incredible world so congratulations uh for everything that you've done and i'm hoping this is the start of a new relationship for us as well yeah but i'm going to get straight into it okay and i want to start off talking a bit about happiness because happiness is a big theme for my audience it's something that my audience cares a lot about and i picked out something that i wanted to read that you say in your book and you say one of the chapters in your 21 lessons for 21st century is happiness equals reality minus expectations right happiness equals reality minus expectations and i want to dive into that because i want to ask you how should we set expectations we all have expectations i have expectations doing this podcast i have expectations when i'm thinking about when you think about anyone investing in their job they have expectations when someone starts a relationship they have expectations what is your take on how we should form set and create our expectations for happiness oh that's a big one to start with yeah definitely um i think that we need to uh we need to relax control a bit i mean not to i mean not to say to ourselves these should be my expectations the first step is actually to familiarize yourself with what you already expect and with the internal processes that have generated these expectations because usually we know almost most of us know extremely little about really what's going on inside us and about what forms our opinions our desires our expectations there is a general tendency to identify with whatever pops up in your mind and we are encouraged a lot by our culture and by the key ideologies of the age whether it's liberal democracy whether it's capitalism consumerism to just identify with our inner voice with our um you know all these slogans that just just do what feels good just connect to your heart and all these things and people mistake it to mean just identify just look inside you and the first thing that comes up identify with that and my my advice would be to really take the time to explore what is happening inside you and where do all these things really come from so much of our expectations and our desires they don't reflect any inner true self they reflect um a million manipulations done on us either by external forces or even by internal forces that we know so little about so before we reach the point when like we write ourselves the list of items this is my agenda for life this is my expectation from life take a take time a long time to first of all familiarize with yourself with what is actually happening inside yeah absolutely i i think your sport on i completely agree with you i was sharing with you earlier that i was training to become an investment banker and work in business growing up and then i got to a point where i looked at that and i was like is that even me like why do i even want to do that and i realized because in the part of society that i grew up in that was the most glorified role so the people that i was surrounded by had made that seem as the peak role or job that someone in our society could attain and so actually it wasn't my goal or dream it was just the dreams and goals of people around me yeah is that what you're referring to about how we there are a million ways in which we're forming our dreams and goals yeah that's part of it yeah you know that's that's a very old story throughout human history you're always influenced by your friends your family the culture around and much of what people took to be their innermost desires and expectations it actually came from outside today it's even more extreme because we are increasingly acquiring technologies that enable external agents whether corporations or government or whatnot to really hack the the human mind and hack the human brain and manipulate us in ways which were never possible before which makes uh it's even more urgent than ever to really get to know yourself um you know the the advice know yourself it's the oldest advice in the book you go back thousands of years you meet socrates or buddha or confucius this is what we'll tell you get to know yourself it's the most important thing in life and but there is something new today what's new today is that for the first time in history you have real competition if in the time of buddha you didn't make the effort to know yourself nah i'm too busy so you missed enlightenment but you didn't you you didn't face any competition out there because the kings and the aristocracy and the merchants in the time of buddha they couldn't get in your head but today you have real competition you may not have the time to get to know yourself because you're too busy i'm too busy with the family with the work with whatever but there are people who have the time and the money to get to know you that's their business to really get to know you their entire business model is based on that or their entire political model is based on that and and so you now really have competition from these corporations and governments and it's it's a very simple equation or a very simple idea if they get to know you a little better then you know yourself game over they can manipulate and control you and you will not even realize it because the easiest people to manipulate are the people who believe in free will the people who believe that their thoughts and desires and expectations they reflect some authentic inner self and they don't question is is this really the case right right right so how much does that person have free will how much do you think a person does have free will i would say as a first approximation extremely little i mean i don't want to delve too deeply into the argument about the theoretical possibility of free will uh if you if you want we can go there i want to go wherever you are but uh but as a first approximation i would say that even if you believe that free will is possible theoretically in some situations you should at least acknowledge that 99 of decisions don't reflect your free will they reflect something else so i don't mind even consenting the philosophical point let's say that there is free will but free will is not something you have free will is something you need to struggle for and the the the wrong idea about free will is that i have free will any thought that pops in my mind any desire that i have this is my free will so it is sacred and it represents something sublime and this is nonsense the that is this is not the case maybe if you work really very hard you would reach a point when at least some of the decisions in your life will reflect freedom but it's not something you can just take for granted now there are a lot of forces in the world which encourage us to have this simplistic idea that anything that pops in the mind is the reflection of my free will it comes most notably in the economic sphere from the whole consumerist and capitalist system which it's built on the premise that the customer is always right i mean you know when you talk to the big corporations or to some business magnets and you ask them about their practices and about problematic things they do they their final line of defense is always the customer is always right yes we are doing these things but the customers are buying it and the customers are the number one authority this is their free will if the customers want it who are we or who is you to tell the customers that they are wrong are you some big brother that knows better than them so this is like the final line of defense the customer is always right and this is based in a way on the idea of free will that the will of the customer represents this sublime i don't know force that manifests itself through your desires like i want this brand of conflicts ah amazing that's human free willing action and it's the the mystery of the universe manifests itself like in that moment in the supermarket that i stand and i see these two brands and how to choose i choose this bread the mystery of the universe it isn't the mystery of the universe we know today a lot about what's really happening in your brain in your mind when you make this choice and it's increasingly becoming easier and easier to manipulate these choices and again the easiest people to manipulate are those who think that when they choose this brand in the supermarket they are exercising their free will absolutely absolutely and it's interesting you say that before i go into the question i'm taking off a tangent was how some of the biggest creators and inventors in the world have not thought customer first so when you think of people like steve jobs or even henry ford i think it was henry ford who said that if i asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses right and and so he said i didn't ask people what they wanted and steve jobs would often say that too as well that you are creating because the audience doesn't actually know what they want but so some of the most powerful inventors have actually gone the opposite way but in regards to that point that you're making there at the end then what does one do and i agree with you you're saying that the person who becomes the most fooled or deluded is the one who believes that they have the most choice and free will yes so what do we do what does an individual do in that scenario in this crazy information filled world where i was saying that the other day that you know before we were targeted by billboards which was only if you drove and then it was the television which again you had to own one and you only spent a few hours a day and then it was the internet which you still needed a computer and a dial-up connection and now it's all the time right so what does one do when they're being bombarded with all of that information oh take time off is that they like the best advice i i can give you know that the first take time off it's extremely important during the day during the month during the year um i don't believe in in i mean i i don't think we can or should completely disconnect i mean we are now having this conversation we hope that millions of people will see it i have nothing against you know social media on the internet they have done wonderful things for humankind i don't know i met my husband online in a dating uh site that's awesome so yes so i i've some of my best friends are applications so i have nothing like inherently against them but not all the time the first thing is just take time off then you ask yourself what do i do in this time off so i would say different things probably work work best for different people like i meditate i do video meditation other people they do different kinds of meditations some people find that out is much more it's a much more effective way for them to explore the in a reality for some people it could be sports or going hiking in nature many things but i would say two things in in general about all these things whatever works for you do it quickly because you don't have much time i mean there is this race going on as we now talk there are these corporations and governments that are busy trying to hack you and you need to stay a few steps ahead of them so that's one thing which was never the case before or was was less the case left before and the other thing is it won't be so much fun and some people have this idea that a journey of inner exploration is is a fun journey oh i'll discover all these amazing things about myself and what a good person i am and i will have these wonderful experiences of bliss and peacefulness and oneness with the universe and sometimes it happens i don't say it never happens but a lot of that is uh is painful experiences it's boring experiences like you have like to go through a desert of boredom and one of the i think biggest obstacles for people today in in the world of the 21st century i don't know how it was you know 2000 years ago but today i would say that both the inability to deal with boredom is one of our greatest weaknesses and in almost any meaningful journey you have to go through boredom uh whether it's you're traveling to another country and you have to spend some time in the airport or whether it's you're having a conversation with somebody i find from my experience that if you're in a conversation that doesn't allow space for boredom it will never reach anywhere interesting like if you meet i now travel around the world and i meet these very uh uh powerful and famous and influential people and the problem with powerful and famous and influential people they don't have time so if you get an hour with this person then every minute should count and boredom is is the scariest thing because if the conversation becomes boring it's over i don't have time for this nonsense i have to run this company i have to run this country i ca bondo you go bore somebody else with that search and i love that and then what you find is that you are forced all the time to all the time think what's the most interesting and important thing i can say and then you reach you usually reach out for the things you've already said a million times before and you know they're effective and both of you find yourself just exchanging these slogans and you never reach anywhere new and to reach someplace new in a conversation like you need to go somewhere and and nobody really knows what they're talking about and you're wandering around and you realize oh it's not going anywhere and you come back and you wasted 20 minutes on on something which was in the end it was nothing and you you can't do it when you meet the president or whatever but the most interesting conversations i had in life it was like this long conversation when much of it was was quite boring yeah so and it's the same when you go to explore yourself like i don't know not necessarily in meditation even like you want to you you go to use sport so okay you start i'll go on a hike and you start going and after three hours you feel thirsty and it's hot and it's inconvenient and there is nothing to see and you say oh forget that i'll go back and watch some some some movies and you'll never reach the interesting parts of the journey either the geographical journey or the kind of inner journey of exploration if you don't allow yourself if you don't have the the discipline to go through these boring and sometimes painful and sometimes scary bits i love that i'm so glad you brought that up i think it's such a brilliant point i think you're so right because as soon as you put the pressure of performance on whether that's the pressure of performance through time like when we know we have a time limit like you were saying when you're meeting influential people and you've got like 30 minutes to say something profound yes or you've got like 40 minutes to prove that you have more knowledge or wisdom or whatever it is and so sometimes times are pressure sometimes the pressure is not time but the pressure is the people at the table it's like you know that everyone's powerful at the table and so the pressure is oh my god i know he's smart and she's smart so what do i have to say and and i think you're spot on that in those times our lateral brain completely switches off the logical brain switches on and we just say stuff we already know and and you don't have moments of brilliance and you don't have a moment that that sparks unique thought you don't get into flow state for example you can't you can't generate anything new i think that's so true and i have to say in my training as a monk which i loved and was an incredible part of my life a lot of it was just discipline and doing the same thing over and over and over again in the beginning and what you said walking across that desert of boredom to then find a breakthrough yeah and it's almost just like that painful 99 to experience that one percent of bliss yeah like in the movie it always gets condensed into this fast track one minute or two minutes like i don't know you have yoda training luke skywalker so in the movie it just got condensed into these two minutes you get the point let's move on nothing and it was probably very i don't know it's fiction of course but probably a lot of it was just you know this tedious thing that you have to go through through it absolutely are you bored right now on right now no no all right we're going to get bored for a bit guys we've got to get bored for a bit so that you've will you know get some space no i i think that's a great point i think becoming okay with boredom is such a useful skill and i think you're spot on that in the journey of self-exploration or any journey i just came now from silicon valley and what we what we just said is the greatest heresy possible in california in 2019 in la in 2019 in san francisco in 2019 to say let's just give some space to boredom there is nothing more radical and and subversive than i just i just saw that uh reid hastings some time ago said that netflix's biggest enemy like he was asked who is the biggest competitor of netflix and the answer was sleep so true it's not hulu it's not any of the other it's sleep that's our biggest competitor so you know boredom if people could get along with boredom you know entire industries will crash we just collapse yeah no it's so true and and the instant gratification industry the instant excitement industry is is driving off that we know that that's obvious there's a step let's start here the boring movement yeah let's start the boring movement here i love it this is the boring podcast we're gonna call it that i love it no and it's true i read a study that eighty percent of us pull out our phone in a crowd just to not feel lonely right like not even to do anything just when we're walking through a crowd we pull out our phone just so that we feel like we're doing something and that pressure of always wanting to do something just so high no i love that i think that's such great advice find time this weekend to be bored right be okay with boredom do you have it have you and this i don't expect you to have an answer i'm just exploring it because i love the point you brought up do you have any ways of becoming more okay with boredom or letting there be moments in a conversation like i'm sure when you went out on your first date with your husband when you met through online dating i mean was there any boredom there or were you like having to say stuff was he did you allow space for boredom because there's so much pressure when you date someone right i don't remember that it was boring but yeah there is definitely a lot of pressure in in those situations to be charismatic to be you know to be attractive to yeah not not to bore the other person it's the worst thing you can do it was so boredom is unit it's an abstract idea what what does it actually mean yeah what it actually means is our particular sensations in the body it's not an abstract and when you actually observe i mean you see that they are extremely unpleasant like when you're bored we tend to think about boredom as something like nothing happens but actually a lot of things are happening there is a lot it's not you know it's not like severe pain it's actually a more subtle kind of pain in throughout your body which many people find far more intolerable than the heroic severe pain that you know again i'll take an example just for meditation because because i'm more familiar with it but i know that a lot of people when they sit for meditation and there is a strong pain they it's quite easy for them to deal with that they're actually even enjoying it in a way because they feel i'm doing something very important now i'm getting over this pain no pain no gain wonderful pain is good and then when bottom comes it immediately breaks them they can't deal with it because it's it's again it's a very unpleasant feeling in the body it's not abstract but part of it you don't feel heroic you don't feel you're doing something important you're feeling that you're wasting your time that you're so little and insignificant and and especially people who say come to whatever practice it is uh again it could even be out like you're learning to paint and ah now i'm picasso i'm doing this great work of art and i'm having this this autistic crisis that's wonderful but if if you're just bored you don't know how to deal with it it's for most people i think it's it's actually more difficult to deal with this subtle pain of boredom than with the heroic pain of some great crisis absolutely i think you spot on that's yeah for me boy for me when i'm bored i find a i use it as space to breathe properly that's that's kind of what i do and i'm just in a gap or i'm in a moment where i'm like a bit bored right now you know and it's so easy to do the habit of just picking out my phone and and i know that and i've noticed myself do that over and over again that whenever i'm bored or there's a gap i just take on my phone without any purpose without any intention without any goal and so for me i've stopped doing that and using that as a moment to breathe there is actually something when you pick up the phone what actually happens in in your body is that there is a little excitement ah maybe i get some some email maybe i got some like to my facebook whatever and so the moment you pick up the phone there is a rush a small rush of excitement in the body and actually this is what makes it so addictive people are addicted not actually to the phone people are addicted to the small rushes of excitement that they think they can get dozens of times a day every time they pick up the phone to see what's there yeah and those pleasure centers keep decreasing yeah so we have to do it again and again again and again and again we have to accelerate to keep up because that pleasure center is depleting every time and i think that's what we don't realize is that the more you do it the harder it becomes to experience that feeling again yeah because you've just dropped it lower and lower and lower amazing okay we started the border movement today on this day 26 april 2019 you valencia the boredom movement the bottom podcast okay the second thing i really wanted to dive into apart from happiness with you which which leads nicely to this because i think this boredom experience also slightly links to what i wanted to go to which is education you speak a lot about education i've made a ton of videos about education and the education system and my challenges to it just yesterday i was talking to people about how like when we were educated we were taught to believe we had to be good at everything we were taught that you had to get an average grade at this and an average grade at that and an average grade at that and you had to be equally good at history and science and math and english and a lot of the videos that i've made on these topics have have been shared a lot so one of the videos i made on this topic has 367 million views on one video it's been shared like 8 million times or something crazy like that and it's because we feel this pressure through our education now i believe that the ideal education system should have a head a heart and a hand a head for critical thinking a heart to understand to experience and then a hand to give to serve to make a difference and you talk in your chapter about the four c's of critical thinking communication collaboration and creativity yeah that's not my idea and it's like the the experts in the field are increasingly talking about these four c's absolutely so tell me about your thoughts on the education system and and why you got fascinated with that and how you think that's impacted some of our mistakes we make now my interest with the educational system comes i mean i am in the education system i i'm a professor at the university so so it's part of my life but now it's mostly from thinking about the coming revolutions especially in the job market that again we're in unique situation in human history when for the first time we have no idea how the job market would look like in 20 or 30 years that was never before the case in history i mean there are always things you couldn't predict about the world 30 years from now you know political revolutions wars plagues economic crisis nobody could ever predict that but at least about the basic skills that humans will need in 30 years in order to get a good job and in order to support themselves and get along in life we always had quite a good understanding of that so if you lived a thousand years ago in the middle ages in some small village and so people didn't know who would be the king in 30 years people didn't know there might be a plague or an earthquake who knows but they knew what they needed to teach their kids if they were to have a a a reasonable life in 30 years you need to know how to plant rice and how to take the goats herding and how to make cheese and how to make bread and how to build the house and all these and today we just have no idea what people will what skills will people will need in the job market in 2050 anybody who tells you i know how the job market would look like in 2050 and what skills will be needed is uh deluding either you or also themselves the only thing we know is that it will be a completely different job market because of the amazing advances in ai and machine learning and also in bioengineering so more and more jobs will be replaced by machines and computers and robots some jobs will be transformed and new jobs will appear now i don't think we are facing a situation no more jobs in the world there will be new jobs the big question is going i mean actually two big questions one big question is about training and retraining there will be new jobs will people have the skills necessary for these kinds of jobs previously when machines replaced humans for instance in agriculture so machines replaced humans in low-skilled jobs in farms but a lot of new low-skilled jobs were created in factories like the tractor replaced you on the farm so you moved to detroit to work in ford's corporation to build a tractor and the new job was usually a relatively low skill job so within a couple of weeks perhaps two or three months you could transform a farm worker into a worker in a tractor factory but today when you look to the future so people say yes there will not be any more jobs for truck drivers because you have self-driving trucks and there will not be a lot of jobs for people producing shirts in textile factories and things like that but there will be new jobs in the creative industries whether in art or whether in science or in in in interacting with people but the problem is these new kind of jobs will require high skills so it won't be so easy to take an unemployed textile worker at age 40 and transform her into a software engineer that creates virtual reality games and what makes it even worse is the huge gap between different countries i think that in a country like the us which is bound to reap much of the benefits of the coming ai revolution because california along with china is one of the of the centers of this revolution there will be immense new wealth created at least in some parts of the united states so i don't worry for the americans but when i look at other parts of the world countries which depend almost entirely on cheap manual labor say just south of the border you go to mexico you go to el salvador to honduras to south america what will happen there i mean we are not educating the young people today in honduras or in colombia to be software engineers so even if there are a lot of new jobs in california for software engineers this is not going to help the kids who are growing up today in honduras or or colombia so what will they do and we have no answer and that's actually my biggest worry about the education system now is from a global perspective the huge gap that is opening between different countries in the face of the coming ai revolution if you were in charge of the education system south of the border what were the things you'd be thinking about at least i need money okay but if you had the money if you had the money what would you be thinking about because money is not never an issue really oh north of the border even north of the border it's an issue but south of the border it's you know you go to brazil and uh we are just going to brazil in a few months and you have people coming to brazil with all these ideas about we should teach kids this and we should teach the kids that and the local people come and say we don't even have schools i mean where do you want us to put them in that sense money right that you know i mean in some places you have the schools run in in a shift system like because you you just don't have the facilities so some kids learn from eight o'clock in the morning to two in the afternoon they go home another shifts come right right and another shifts come at night because they just don't and you know this is some things you can't just throw money at it you need more than that but the basic infrastructure you basically the first thing you need is money okay and but there might yeah so looking at it from that perspective my hope is that there are people who believe in those communities and want to invest in them uh yeah i i hope so and again the the main thing is that we need a global thinking on this on this because in the last few decades what we've seen is a a reduction in global inequality global inequality was extremely high in the early 20th century when you had a few industrial powers colonizing the rest of the world so say uh britain dominating india and much of africa and much of the middle east and the disparity was enormous and then in the last few decades the gap wasn't completely closed but india and britain are now far far closer than they were 50 years ago or 100 years ago so we have seen a reduction in global inequality but now we are on the verge of a new burst of growing inequality just like the industrial revolution of the 19th century this is what created initially the gap between britain and india so now you have the ai revolution concentrated in just a few countries the usa and china are leading the race you have a few other countries which which joined the race most countries are far behind and the economic consequences will be enormous so the danger is that what we've seen a century ago we will come back and then it's not just a question say of people in brazil rich people in brazil caring about poor people in brazil and investing in their education and healthcare and so forth there won't be enough resources in in brazil or maybe not brazil but but some other countries so we need global thinking on that otherwise it will be a rerun of the industrial revolution with these enormous gaps between a few countries that dominate the world and most of humanity which is far far behind absolutely no i agree and i guess my thinking from where i'm always coming from is just to me the global thinking always needs to be towards how we create more meaningful careers how we create more meaningful jobs how we create opportunities for people to be better engaged yeah because that's what's going to create a happier more peaceful more cohesive world it's almost like otherwise there's a rerun in culture of you slot people in to jobs they don't want to do that aren't good for their health mentally or physically that then leads to another repercussion of that person being dissatisfied and then that reruns yeah like do you think that where you do you think having met some of the most influential people on the planet do you feel that that's the dial that's the compass that we're trying to get to or do you think that's just for the most influential people yeah most of them are too busy with the immediate crisis right i mean part of the problem and this a little goes back to what we discussed earlier about boardroom and things like that that they are over excited and i mean i can understand them i mean i i'm lucky i don't have a country to run i don't have a multi-billion corporation to run yes so i can allow myself the time to you know just read a book or just go for a walk or go from a take a meditation retreat they can't and part of the issue they can't or they won't they really can't i mean they have so much on their plate they have all these immediate crisis and like we had just the the case in in france with the protests against emmanuel macron and one of the things that the protesters told him and i'm not judging who is right who is wrong i don't understand french politics well enough i was just struck by what they said that because he uh the the initial cause was that he wanted to impose a new tax on on fuel uh in order to partly in order to combat climate change and this caused a huge backlash and some of the protesters told the president you're thinking about uh what will happen 20 years from now we're thinking about the end of the month we don't have money for the end of the month we don't care about 20 years from now and that's a real issue um it's in it it's easy and i talk a lot about the need to we need to do something about climate change but then a simplistic answer okay let's just put money on a tax on fuel and if this tax hurts disproportionately poorer people then this is not a good solution so now he has this crisis on his hands and he can't just okay okay i'll just go on this long two months retreat and i'll uh uh do meditation i do i'll hike in the alps and i i'll inform myself about climate change and he doesn't have the time he has that he has brexit he has the uae eu elections he has uh the crisis in in libya he has the the the relations with china and by the time you reach this influential place you really don't have the luxury to think slow and broad and that's a huge huge problem for the system and again i don't have like these easy solutions part of the idea of you know addressing the general public like what we were doing here and not just going and talking with a few presidents and and ceos is to realize that yes they are very influential people but they are also extremely limited by their position of power and by the enormous pressures on them from different directions so even for the influential people it would be easier to do something on climate change if you have tens of millions of people saying that this is the number one priority and that they are willing to make some painful sacrifices uh for that and it's the same with the kind of global educational crisis that um you i i hope that more and more people around the world understand that you know the consequences of these crime of this crisis we will see them only in 20 years when the people today in indonesia and nigeria and brazil who are now in kindergarten when they will be 30 and 40 this is when the full force of the crisis will hit but if we wait until they are 40 to do something about it it's too late yeah we need to think what we are teaching youngsters today in order to uh to solve the the the coming crisis of 2015. absolutely yeah and and i think those uh i think that's a very good analysis of this situation because i i appreciate that there is no quick solution there is no easy recipe and when i'm listening to you talk there's parts of me that are thinking like it's the way we've constructed these roles of influence that these people don't have the time and space and the boredom to be able to actually do their jobs properly like we've not created these roles efficiently and effectively and at the same time the responsibility on each and every one of us listening and watching right now to actually become change makers ourself to be someone who takes responsibility for action to be a part of the solution to to actually step up and say no this is a priority and we need to go in that direction i think that is even though it's not a quick recipe i think it's a good wake-up call i think it's a good wake-up call that can make us all aware that we can't just wait for this to be solved from the top yeah because that's not really going to happen especially assuming that a lot of our viewers and listeners are in the united states then america is still the most powerful country in the world economically militarily politically so americans can do more than the citizens of any other country um and there is still you know this expectation that america will be the leader of the world uh in recent years it's been going in the opposite direction that it's really i think that's very unfortunate it's abdicating and willingly abdicating its role as leader of the world for decades you know both from the right and left republicans democrats what was common to all the spectrum of of of american political system was that they intentionally saw themselves as the leaders of at least the free world and then in the last few years america confidence says no we don't want this job anymore for us america first we need to first of all think about ourselves and our own interests and nobody wants to follow a leader whose moto is me first so the rest of the world i mean is now you know some countries are trying to step up and fill the vacuum so in climate change now china is becoming kind of or tries to depict itself as the leader of the world in trying to combat climate change but then in other uh areas uh it's it's definitely not like that so we in this moment of of real crisis in in human history we find the world without a leader and this again this is something that people in the u.s can do more about than in any other place because still the us is kind of the um [Music] almost natural leader for humanity because it is still the most powerful country in the world other countries of course have to step in and it would be good to have a world which is yes less unipolar when we can't just trust a single country to do everything all the time definitely but um there is still a huge disparity in in powers between the different parts of the world that that's still the case yeah definitely but i i do like that point you made there even though there's a subtle point is that ultimately if we live in that belief that this country is the most powerful and they're going to solve everything then we also kind of just debilitate ourselves and we just go oh well if they're not going in the right direction or wait for them to go in the right direction and actually what we all need to do in my opinion is pull our socks up and get stuck in because there's no the i'm not a big fan of the victim mentality or the mentality of waiting for someone else to solve a crisis it's like if you're you know if your house is on fire you don't wait for your mom or your dad to fix it you you get involved too right and so if we believe that there's a crisis or even if we don't believe there's a crisis but we believe things are not going in the right direction i would want everyone from every country whether it's india whether it's australia whether it's across europe to step in yeah take action and in in that sense actually the the one good thing that comes out or could come out of the current retreat of the united states from the position as leader of the world is that it it kind of forces other countries and other people to step in yes and i hope that this this will happen yeah good we have the same hope yeah we have the same hope i love this okay great so we've kind of gone from happiness and inside to global macro viewpoints i want to go back inwards again and this is actually from a couple of days ago i read somewhere that when tim cook was speaking at the time 100 summit an event that happened this week he was speaking about how if you're spending more time looking at a screen than in someone else's eyes then you have a problem you have a problem and you're getting things wrong yeah and i know it's just a good line yeah it's a very good line and and you also said that you know you said that it's so much easier now to connect with your cousin in switzerland than it is with your husband because he's always looking at his phone at breakfast you did write that down it is out there you did say so to walk me through that addiction we spoke a bit about the the excitement we get from the phone the addiction we have from the phone but how have you seen people overcome that i mean part of it is also that when you connect when you connect with somebody through a phone or through a screen um again it's it's easier to deal with the problematic stuff because you can just shut the phone once it becomes problematic and with a real person you can't do that so it it like real relationships forces you again it's like the boredom thing they force you to deal with the difficult issues part of the attraction of all these online communities and online relationships and virtual relationships is that once a difficulty arises you can just immediately disappear like you can unfriend your facebook friends in a way that you can't enable your real neighbors if you live in a house and they're just that this annoying family just moved in and the kids are making a lot of noise in the middle of the night and you can't just say okay i'll press a button and they'll disappear from my life can you imagine that eject yeah unable it doesn't work like so you have so you need to develop these social skills okay what do i do okay i'll go there and i knock on their door with a cake or something and i'll try to have a nice conversation and then somehow make them understand that i need to sleep and they should keep their kids more quiet or something yeah but it's it forces you to develop these social skills and um and that's extremely important and we are losing these skills i mean the more time again you spend watching screens than watching eyes is you are in this sense kind of downgrading some of our human abilities i've just seen this wonderful uh presentation by tristan harris who is this yes tech philosopher from from from silicon valley and he just had this wonderful presentation about how technology is basically downgrading humans downgrading human skills like what to do when you have a problem with your neighbors right so so actually instead of technology upgrading us it's downgrading our human skills yeah it it we upgrade our our phones all the time but inadvertently it downgrades our a lot of our social and personal skills yeah and which ones that you think are the biggest ones that we're losing so one of them is you know deleting our neighbors and and yeah i completely agree with you what are the other ones that we're losing out on that we can be aware of so anyone who's listening and watching right now how can they become more aware of the types of skills we're losing because sometimes i don't think it's as obvious to us because everyone's on their phone our careers are now digital yeah we just talked about ai and the rise of technology in every area of our lives whether it's work health like your dentist now wants to you to use a toothbrush that can notify them when something goes wrong in your tooth right yeah so it's like all parts of our lives are becoming automated and systemic so how can we become more aware of the skills we're losing or which ones are those top skills that we're losing well many of the top skills are social of dealing with other people so another example which is now actually gets a lot of attention and there is a lot of talk about this is all the issue of filter bubbles okay that people kind of lock them or or even inadvertently the algorithms the facebook algorithms the twitter algorithms that youtube algorithm that gets to know us increasingly show us uh videos or articles or opinions which are aligned with our own opinions and we think that the entire world thinks like me like i don't know i'm a democrat and i don't know any republicans and i never see any republican videos and and then when the uh trump wins the election i can't understand how could it be there is no republicans so who voted for him it's all the people not in your filter bubble who voted for him and what we are losing is the ability to engage with uh opinions with people who think differently for from us now one crude way of trying to fix that that at least some corporations like facebook tried to do is every now and then show you a uh an article from the diff a different side of the political spectrum but this didn't work because it only made people even more angry because it wasn't in a in a situation when you can really engage with the people behind it like you have this your view in the world and you read something from another perspective and you become very angry what are these stupid people who think like that and it actually made things even worse now again a century ago if you lived in some small town then the situation was such that you all the time encountered people who think differently from you because the community uh was made of you know of those of different and of different viewpoints and you had to develop these skills of how to engage uh with and and how to cooperate and part of what technology is doing is that it downgrades these skills it makes life easier yeah and it's all these things which are difficult and uncomfortable to do like having a real conversation with somebody who thinks differently and it's you know it's just so much easier just to talk with the people who think like me totally absolutely yeah and it's that principle of like non-judgment being able to view observe and entertain a thought without judging it yeah and that becomes extremely hard right now there was a great study by mit where they showed two people's networks and he was looking at their online network and saying which one is more creative and impactful and innovative and it was employee and it was employee it be and their twitter networks and they found that when you know the same people who know the same people who know you back you end up being less creative less innovative and come up with less interesting ideas because you don't have that challenging of thoughts and so i love that one of your solutions to that or one of your recommendations at least that i gained from the book was this beautiful colored quality of humility of being the the openness that we have towards other people's views and not this kind of deep religious belief about the truth of our views and how we're always right i i love that let's let's dive into humility first of all i'm fascinated that you brought up humility because humility is probably my favorite quality in the world uh i find it the most endearing thing in the world when i meet someone who has it especially someone who's very accomplished and my favorite story about humility and i'm sure you know this but i'm sharing it for anyone who's listening and watching right now is from benjamin franklin and his 13 precepts so benjamin franklin had 12 precepts 12 things that he wanted to live during his life that he wanted to aspire for and once one of his friends said that you're getting a bit egotistic about these things you're pretty good at it so he added the 13th one and then when he was dying supposedly the story goes that he was asked which one he didn't achieve and he said it was the 13th one and they said which one was the thirteenth one he said humility he said that was the one that he didn't achieve in his lifetime so humility another thing that what i think about monks in the buddhist tradition or hindu tradition whatever the monk cuts from his other vices he adds to him to to his to his ego yeah yeah i overcome this i overcame that exactly exactly yeah as soon as we feel we've achieved something yeah it becomes a step on the other side of ego absolutely i completely agree so i love humility i'm fascinated by it uh what's your definition of humility and and how do we start increasing humility in our lives in a positive way well i mean in in the book it's it's more again in the more political and historical context and the the idea is don't think you're the center of the world and this is actually again in in the book it's more about collective humility the humility of groups of of political parties of nations of religions um one of the curious things to see as a historian is that everybody thinks they are the most important thing in the world even you wouldn't believe these tiny tribes or insignificant nations they somehow manage to kind of turn the whole history around so they turn out to be the most important thing and you know if you think that i don't know if the chinese think they're the most important in the world then okay i can understand it to some extent but then then you go say to israel and you find this tiny nation utterly convinced that we are the most important thing in the world the entire world revolves just around us and it was always like that that we invented every any everything and i i use the example of israel as in jews because it you know it's it's not so nice to criticize other nations and other people it's it's easier when you criticize your own but this is not meant as a kind of anti-jewish or anti-israeli thing whatever your nationality or religion is now after we you finish watching this do this exercise on on your group and you know in almost any invention you would mention they would say we invented it first there is even a story that jews invented yoga what do you believe that the posters of yo i i in jerusalem when i was a student i went to i was definitely this year i went to study yoga with this teacher in jerusalem and on the first class he explained to the student you know that a lot of people think that yoga comes from india but no no no actually yoga was invented by abraham and the postures of yoga actually reflect the letters of the hebrew alphabet the aleph the bad the gimmel and and people and you know i quit after this first class this is not a person i would be studying yoga from but you have people seriously believing that and when you look at the great span of human history it should be obvious that nobody is at the center yes almost every nation or religion contributed something but most things when if you had to live your life based only on the inventions and creations of people from your nation you would have a very miserable life you'll probably be dead i mean if you have to eat only the uh things that were domesticated by your direct ancestors like i don't know italians you must now stop eating tomatoes because tomatoes were domesticated in mexico and not by italians and indians forget about these chili peppers no more chili peppers for you chili peppers were also domesticated by mexicans and mexicans don't put yourself too too high because you like your steaks and hamburgers they there were no cows in america before columbus and no horses they came from the old world and so forth and so on and so on and it's just not just food it's everything so really understanding how interconnected the whole humanity is and that yes your people contributed something but it's a small thing it's not the whole thing and it's most important i think in the field of morality because again i mean in israel there is this very strong belief we invented morality before the jews there was no ethics in the world we invented it and the entire world owes us this huge debt of gratitude because all the morality in the world came from the jews and this you know this is absolute nonsense i mean even monkeys have morality even animals it goes it's millions of years ago it's in evolution some at least social rules of do and don't do and hunter-gatherers tens of thousands of years ago had ethics long before they knew anything about the bible people in india in china in australia had extremely wonderful ethical systems in many ways much better than anything that came out of the judeo-christian tradition long before uh uh they knew anything about about the bible so yes jews contributed some things but don't let it go to you to your head you are not so important what a beautiful message to to to end on on that message i love that message i think it's incredible if we all looked at our wardrobes our kitchens our refrigerators our homes our cars we noticed that it was inspired by the globe it was never one or the other it was never just one place one country or one region i think it's such a beautiful message i have so many more questions i want to ask you i hope we're going to do this again on nationalism competition and a billion other things but we end every interview with what we call the final five quickfire rapid fire questions okay so these are one to three word answers one second three words yeah or one sentence maximum once and so this is number one what is the biggest mistake we make as humans one word three words one sentence max underestimate our stupidity nice i love it okay question number two what is the best advice you've ever received observe your breath nice number three what is the worst advice you've ever received just follow your heart nice okay number four what's the one thing you want to learn this year or you're trying to learn this year [Music] how the other side is think is thinking nice i like that awesome and number five if you could get everyone in the world to practice one thing for 30 days what would it be um i won't say meditation because it's not going to work um well humility i love it yuvo you are incredible thank you so much for coming on the podcast i really enjoyed it i i didn't i'm hoping i could fail on the board i'm hoping i got bored at one point because otherwise this won't live up to your standards but we started the boredom movement today i hope we're going to keep in touch we're going to be friends and i'm just so grateful that you took the time to do this thank you so much uh all the best for all the incredible work you're doing i'm excited to see how your incredible mind and thoughts seep its way into our entertainment world as well and continue to help us make education more accessible and relevant so thank you so much yeah thank you yeah thank you so much great thank you everyone for watching make sure you subscribe to the show if you haven't already share this on instagram as well remember i'm always looking for your insights the quotes that you took away feel free to share them on instagram as well thank you so much for being here and being an incredible audience see you guys soon if you want even more videos just like this one make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here i'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book think like a monk from think like a monkbook.com check below in the description to make sure you order today

Channel: Jay Shetty Podcast

Views: 192,398

Rating: 4.903419 out of 5

Keywords: Jay Shetty, Jay Shetty Podcast, Jay Shetty Interview, On Purpose Podcast, Jay Shetty Inspiration, Jay Shetty Motivation, Jay Shetty Video, Self help, Self improvement, Self development, entrepreneur, success habits, purpose podcast, Jay Shetty relationships, yuval noah harari, yuval noah harari joe rogan, yuval noah harari interview, yuval noah harari tom bilyeu, success secrets, how to succeed in the 21st century, life advice, yuval noah harari speech, jay shetty speech

Id: 9qLHEaZNzbM

Length: 62min 6sec (3726 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021