What Should Leaders Learn from History?

hello so before I got on an airplane to come here A friend of mine asked the question and the question was if I had an alternate title for my talk tonight what would it be and uh I thought about it a little bit and I decided that maybe the title was um a plea for balance so obviously balance of what there are two forces throughout history that have shaped every single civilization without exception and those two forces don't like each other they're they're in conflict with one another they Clash the first force is the Innovative Force the Innovative force is the force that believes that the only way to greet the future is through change it likes change it seeks out change it's a very dangerous Force especially when it's Unleashed and there's no counterbalance to it because it'll tear up culture and it'll change traditions and it changes identities and it asks uncomfortable questions by contrast the other force is the preserving Force the preserving Force wants to not just lock things in place in this moment it actually almost always has some amazing event from the past that it looks to as the model not just for the present but for the future as well in other words there's some moment in the past that the preserving Force says this is what we should be doing I can't believe we're doing what we're doing what we're doing right now is wrong the Innovative forces have gotten out of control the problem is is our species at least for the last 12 000 years has steadily kept changing the amount of Technology available in other words whether we want to or not we have been in a state of constant change for 12 000 years just look at what we've done in the last 200 years the last 50 years the last 20 years the the pace of change is actually accelerated so that it's geometric it's an exponential curve which is of course scary because it means that on one hand some of the Innovative forces out of control it's out of balance and the preserving force is lost control of that and as a result we see a pendulum swing if your Society has some balance the pendulum swing should be kind of gentle it shouldn't be too horrible there's been a there is one state that has done a decent job in the last two centuries of getting a level of balance and it's Sweden it's used for 175 years it's used its Democratic institutions to slow things down if the change was too fast and the swedes would vote conservative but then when the swedes are ready for more change they would vote socialist and it went back and forth today Sweden a country of 11 million people is one of the largest economies on the planet it's stable the people have buy-in they have levels of happiness by contrast one of the most shocking events in terms of imbalance was the conflict that took place in Spain from 711 to 1492. in the South the Muslim ruled Spain was Innovative it was diverse it was accepting it had Commerce it did inventions it changed things as minor as how shoes were made the term cord waner comes from Cordova and stark contrast the fanatic fundamentalist Christian states of the north sought not just to create a unified Spain they sought to crush that diversity and create a homogeneous state where everybody believed essentially the same thing they sought to then also Purge the Jewish and Muslim populations from Spain in the process what's incredible about the Spanish moment is not only that the conflict lasted 781 years and not only that by most people's standards the bad guys Juan the homogeneous Crusher population but that it all kind of came together in one year so it obviously was a process that took eight centuries but in one year 1492 a bunch of it lined up just the way they wanted it to the kingdom of Granada Falls the last Muslim Kingdom the Jews are expelled and then 10 years later the Muslims are expelled now obviously a lot of Jews and Muslims converted and they became the conversos and the Mariscos but it's also the air that the world is forever dramatically completely changed it's flipped upside down and shaken because it's the year that Columbus starts the conquest of North and South America by Europeans it's the year that triggers a catastrophe for the Native American populations within a century somewhere around 150 million Native Americans die it's incomprehensible Mass enslavement Conquest whole civilizations are destroyed and it was possible because the Spanish had so much momentum from the war machine that they had built to crush the Muslim South that they just simply took that momentum they Unleashed it into the new world and when they did they brought that preserving force of homogenizing with them and the result was that even though the Spanish created a massive Empire that stretched across two continents and then the Philippines they didn't have the ability to adopt they didn't have the industry to develop their to keep their sustain their war machine to replace the armado and the English sanket in other words what they had done by creating this locked in homogeneous society is they had lost the ability to innovate and adapt for the future so even though the Spanish Empire last 300 years the only reason it lasts 300 years was its massive size gave it the momentum to sustain itself in other words the preserving Force got out of balance and in control and it was catastrophic the thing that made the conquest of the Americas possible was also the very thing that doomed the Spanish Empire but having said that that's actually not what I want to talk about I don't want to talk about the past well I do but more recent past I actually want to dive into something a little bit closer to us and I was thinking about it and we live in a world where everything's ideological everything is liberal conservative I'm so exhausted by it sometimes socialist and at the end of the day I have awful names for everybody nobody knows enough to be certain of anything and the fact that you're certain makes me certain that you're wrong right so to avoid that and not upset people I decided to try and do something a little apolitical but to still illustrate my point so my story I'm going to give you a little story is about NASA right space exploration usually people don't get too upset about space exploration I should be able to get away with it in 1972 NASA approached President Nixon because they had just made a discovery it was a really cool Discovery it turns out that if they launch a probe by 1977 if they launched a spaceship by 1977 they could catch the four big gas giants with the one spaceship they could send this probe to Jupiter use its gravity to slingshot it past Jupiter to Saturn past Saturn to Uranus past Uranus to Neptune and then leave the solar system and send us data back the whole way makes him Mania was going to resist the reason they knew Rick Nixon was going to resist is because Nixon was part of the preserver Force in American parlance we'd say conservative but it's not really a liberal conservative thing so I want to be careful with it which is why I'm using the preserver for us it in the in 1968 Nixon believed he had been elected to undo the 60s that was his mandate he wanted a 1973 to be 1953. honestly I think if it could have been 1853 he would have preferred that but at least 1953 the year he became vice president for Eisenhower so two years after we land on the Moon 1971 Nixon slashes NASA's budget they're punished for their success so by 1972 they know they're in trouble so they go to the president tears already in their eyes because they're worried he's going to say no and they tell them about this unbelievably strange event where the planets are not really lined up but kind of lined up right for probe purposes they're lined up they need to launch by 77 so they can't wait for the election results and besides Nixon might get a second term so they need the permission now so they got them and they go will you authorize us to send this probe to look at the four big gas giants and of course his answer is no and the reason his answer is no it's because he sees science as part of the problem what does science do it asks questions it never really answers any question by the time you're done answering a question you end up with 13 more questions and it and the result is that it leaves us going wow I just don't like electrons electrons are so bizarre we can actually have a situation where we can look at an electron and it behaves like a particle and then we can change the parameters and it acts like a wave but here's what's really weird the way we change which one it does is if we looked at the data on how it was behaving if we don't look it acts like a wave as soon as we look it acts like a particle it's almost as if the electron is aware that we're looking right you look at that you go okay I don't never am I going to think of electrons again I'm done with it it's protons for my future because protons are predictable so Nixon is looking at this and he's going we just did the 60s and it's because of people like you innovators who hold Summits to have ideas talked about right that's what this is in case you hadn't figured it out already it's a chance to share and maybe make people uncomfortable on occasion but but to get ideas out there and Nixon goes the 60s which by the way was 15 years long started in 54 ended in 69. Steve's was total upheaval it was a revolution in the true sense of the word an actual Revolution we changed everything we changed the way people dressed we changed the way men wore their hair we changed the music we listened to we changed the political structure we made space for women women to have more political rights movement to have more economic rights we made space for black people we made space for brown people we didn't make everybody equal by any means that would be naive and silly and foolish to think but at least it got better we changed our relationship to drugs to marriage to sex to everything and Nixon and his folk hated every moment of him it was torture for them they wanted the old order returned and so he says no he says no to NASA so they start begging and they're trying to get something out of this and somebody has the idea two two planets what if we compromise how about this Mr President just give us two planets Jupiter and Saturn and the president goes okay just two planets which is of course brilliant on NASA's part because all they have to do is launch the probe at the first two planets and it'll automatically get the other two in 1977 after launching Voyager 2 NASA changes its course so that it will officially pick up Uranus and Neptune and we did and Voyager one and two of course get to go down and history is the greatest probes ever sent into space they're amazing so Nixon interfering with NASA maybe not the worst thing to ever happen to the world but it has a serious consequence the Saturn V rocket that we launched to the moon was never intended for the moon Phantom Braun didn't care about the moon we cared about Mars the whole goal was that the moon was going to be the first step to Mars that's where we were going and so that same year NASA got stuck asking the president permission to also go to Mars and he said absolutely not we're not wasting American taxpayer dollars that could be used to cut taxes for the rich and fight the war in Vietnam and so he said no so they had a backup plan they said okay how about this Mr President what if we design test and use a space pickup truck and he goes a space pickup truck what's that the space shuttle obviously it's the spaceship with a payload in the back that you can put things in it and he goes oh I can relate to pickup trucks and I bet the American public can too and he approves it now in NASA's mind they thought they were manipulating the president again they thought what they were going to get was this the space shuttle to build a space station by bringing stuff up to it and then once they had the space station they would bring the stuff up to build a spaceship to go to Mars off the space station this is the first necessary step and here we are it's 2023 and we're not really close we haven't gotten to Mars what they needed the president to do was do a Kennedy Kennedy said by the end of this decade we'll be on the moon they needed the president to say by the end of this Century we'll be on Mars he didn't so there are consequences at that level but actually there are consequences that are way worse than that Nixon tried to identify what was the causes what were the causes of that Revolution that we call the 1960s and he and his friends concluded there were two two things that caused this one was the incredible U.S economy from 1948 to 1973 for 25 years the U.S economy was so amazing that you could conceivably get a job I mean a regular job I don't mean an amazing job just a job and the pay would be so high and the benefits so amazing that you could not only afford to buy a house and feed your family you might be able to send your kids to school to college and and you might be able to retire really well picketty says in his book the capital in the 21st century that that was the only time in fact in human history where a person could work and make wealth right because if you look at the middle class today in the United States they don't make wealth they barely get by the difference between the middle class and the lower class is that the middle class has stable housing and the lower class doesn't have stable housing the wealth distance between the lower class and the middle class is negligible it's meaningless they're barely getting by but for 25 years people were prospering and what they realize is Maslow's hierarchy of needs if people aren't fretting about food if they're not worried about shelter if they're not in constant fear that the economic situation they're in will collapse they have mind space to start to ask bigger and better questions like wait a minute what about civil liberties what about civil rights what about human rights and the next thing you know by 1954 six years into this explosive economy we're in the middle of a revolution the other thing that Nixon identifies as a problem is our education system now if you if I say that today the American education system usually people laugh and by the way that's appropriate so feel free to go ahead and do it right now so I'm a college professor I've been at this I've been a Prof I've been a teacher for 28 years I think something like that and I have to tell you I have a steady stream of students who've just basically never held an idea in their brains and their lives and they can barely read and they can't do math it's not a thing they whip out their phone their external brain and they use that instead and then I think wow but when you think like when you learn math it builds neural Pathways in your brain so that means that part of their brain isn't developed which means they think differently than I do which is fascinating it could be a power maybe having a mathematical brain or a mathematically trained brain limits you in some way but at the same time it makes me worried especially when I read the essays and then being getting to cry so what Nixon tries to do is begin to chip away at the American education system on purpose he doesn't really do that much damage honestly he doesn't do that much damage to the economy either but he does damage the economy 1973 is is pretty much the high point to the American Empire for those who haven't figured it out we've been in Decline for 50 years 1973 was our Apex it was our height but it was also the moment when we had the most egalitarian society we've ever had there was class Mobility the distance from the poorest person the richest person was really really low and it was a time of innovation I mean we landed on the moon that wasn't a bad thing to do think of how primitive the computers were they were so awful that they had to hire mathematicians to double check the results from the computers because they knew the computers weren't reliable they could get the answer quickly but they couldn't get it to you accurately they were black women we put them in back rooms don't worry nobody had to know about it they would call computers that was their title that was their job title so Nixon doesn't quite do all the damage but he does some and by many socioeconomic indicators the United States starts to go backwards in 1973. in other words in many ways the economy in 1973 is something that most Americans dream of and reminisce of it's our imaginary moment when we think of the economy that the preserver nature wants to get back to so when a politician stands up and says I'm going to do something like make America great again they're thinking in the 1973 economy when they hear that they're thinking in 1953 sorry they're thinking of 1853 when they think of the social order so really they're here make America 19th century again Reagan is the guy who does the destruction to the education system he slashes funding is terrible we've had 40 Years of underfunded education so why does all this matter I'm going to give you since I've been doing this NASA thing I'll give you one more NASA thing it's just to bring this home so from 1962 to 1972 so for 10 years that's when we built the Saturn V rocket in my mind it's still the best rocket ever I know the SLS has more is a little bit more powerful but the Saturn V was glorious and when I say 1962 the first two years were just designing the rocket they didn't actually start building the components until 64. in today dollars it costs 10 billion 10 billion dollars to do the Apollo program basically when you think about it that's nothing it was money well spent just just the just the pictures back from the moon were worth 10 billion we decided that we're gonna jump start the Space Program 50 years later what have we been doing for 50 years point to something we've achieved in the last 50 years besides cell phones I was going to reach for mine but I realized I didn't have it on me and we have these incredible computers these handheld computers okay that's great and the entertainment man Hollywood can really knock it out of the park TV these days incredible but name something like truly do we cure cancer name something that we've done that's Monumental in the last 50 years that stands up to going to the Moon a discovery we made Higgs boson was pretty cool I remember exactly where I was when Higgs boson was discovered I was on a dirt road in Vermont driving listening to BBC cry because I couldn't believe how cool it was but that was just for a few nerds something that the whole world could look at and go wow this is incredible this is the moment we've achieved something all the civilizations before us have those things there's something they can look to and we did too until 50 years ago it's almost like we decided we were done we achieved what we wanted to we went to the moon we were finished up we're going to redo it we're going to go back to the Moon so we have to restart the whole space program including building a rocket to replace the Saturn V that project took 11 years to build SLS space launch system I feel like that's the worst named rocket ever space launch system isn't that a rocket did we just name our rocket rocket I feel like we named our rocket rocket 10 11 years 11 billion dollars Saturn V was 10 years 10 billion dollars let's just call it even right it's close enough what's an extra billion in an extra year we built 15 Saturn V Rockets we built two SLS somehow 50 years ago we were seven and a half times more productive 50 years ago when our computers were so awful we had to have a backup team check the math 50 years ago when we didn't have all the Alloys and Plastics that we have today same money so you can't blame it on the funding same amount of time so you can't say it was rushed how is it that 50 years ago we were so much more Innovative that we could land on the moon six times that we could link up with the Soviets in space and we're just now trying to re-figure all that out all over again and the answer is that the preserver force in the United States economy was so good so thorough that the United States simply doesn't have the ability to operate the way it used to so here's my plea my plea is for world leaders not to give up on the preserver Force if if the Innovative Force gets out of balance that's not good it'll erode things for for example history it's quick to forget it's not interested in the past or culture or Family Ties it's dangerous what I'm saying maybe is hold on to it a little less tightly so that when the Innovations come about we can adapt and engage more of the community one of the things that's happened over the course of the last 50 years in the United States is it's college has become more and more exclusive not inclusive it's become so expensive that a person has to ask themselves a really strange question am I willing because right the United States is such a strange place we want to charge crazy amounts of tuition for public post-secondary education do we really have enough MDS that we can afford to to weed this out can weed them out do we really have enough engineers and the answer is obviously no the United States is six percent Asian but thirty percent of our MDS are Asian so we've compensated for the fact that our education system is terrible by just importing and brain draining on the rest of the world what we should do is fix the education system so I keep saying 1853 is the thing they're looking to because in the 1853 system white men like me are the only people who have privilege and Power are the only people who have a guaranteed path to that I can be completely mediocre and I still have a chance at it well the United States is 59 white today so 29 white men throw in class even if you let half of the white man because the other half were too poor to go anywhere even if you let half of the white man achieve you're down to 20 14 and a half percent 15 can you really afford to throw away 85 percent of your talent and my answer is not in 2023 in 2023 there are too many things that have gone wrong the environment has gone wrong our planet is destabilizing we're 90 Seconds To Midnight according to the Doomsday Clock we have some real problems and we're going to have more pandemics in the future actually frankly I think covid was an easy one and I think we got really lucky this I mean think of Bubonic plague in smallpox this could have gone really bad and it just didn't we dodged that one what we need to be doing is we need to be harnessing our intellectual capability and also we need to remember something that at some level the preserver Force has it wrong because the thing the preserver force is preserving was at the time the innovation in other words through the lens of history at the end of the day the preserver and the innovator looked the same in the past it's only now that we're upset with it and obsessed with it and freaking out and so on that note I ask for more balance when it comes to allowing change to happen in society thank you [Applause]

Channel: World Government Summit

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Keywords: #WorldGovSummit, #Dubai, #UAE, #MyDubai, #Space, #ClimateChange, #Technology, #Happiness, #Youth, #AI, #ArtificialIntelligence, #دبي, #الإمارات, #الحكومات, #الإمارات_العربية_المتحدة, #القمة_العالمية_للحكومات

Id: zjUKUCYtqxA

Length: 28min 32sec (1712 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 14 2023