00:00:25.960 --> 00:00:28.120
For 99% of human history -

00:00:28.240 --> 00:00:31.200
- people believed the Earth was
the center of the solar system.

00:00:31.320 --> 00:00:34.520
They looked up in the sky
and saw what happened -

00:00:34.640 --> 00:00:38.000
- and it made perfect sense to them.

00:00:38.120 --> 00:00:43.400
And then 500 years ago, along comes
Copernicus and his buddy Galileo.

00:00:43.520 --> 00:00:47.480
They're like, "Nah, the sun is
the center of the solar system."

00:00:47.600 --> 00:00:52.400
And super interesting and very,
very analogous to our time is -

00:00:52.520 --> 00:00:56.880
- that they went to the powers that be
at the time and said, "Hey, guess what?"

00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:00.640
"The Earth isn't the center
of the solar system."

00:01:00.760 --> 00:01:03.360
Galileo didn't invent the telescope
but he popularized it.

00:01:03.480 --> 00:01:07.000
He's like, "Look, you can
see it with your own eyes."

00:01:07.120 --> 00:01:09.720
And the Catholic Church said to him:

00:01:09.840 --> 00:01:12.960
"You can stick that telescope
where the sun doesn't shine."

00:01:13.080 --> 00:01:16.360
And they stuck him in jail
for the rest of his life. Why?

00:01:16.480 --> 00:01:20.560
Because if Earth was diminished,
so were they.

00:01:20.680 --> 00:01:23.160
And the only fact they cared about -

00:01:23.280 --> 00:01:28.160
- was their status,
their privileges and their power.

00:01:41.200 --> 00:01:45.880
The 21st century will either be
our greatest century or our worst.

00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:49.600
That's going to depend on the choices
we make in the next couple of decades.

00:01:54.080 --> 00:01:56.640
It's time to wake up.

00:01:57.760 --> 00:02:01.600
We cannot not take action anymore -

00:02:01.720 --> 00:02:05.000
- because there are issues
with our climate -

00:02:05.120 --> 00:02:09.240
- conflicts because of globalization,
growing inequality.

00:02:09.360 --> 00:02:13.720
There are issues
with loss of our freedom.

00:02:13.840 --> 00:02:17.360
This is happening because we don't
have a narrative that makes sense.

00:02:37.440 --> 00:02:39.520
- We're rolling.
- You're rolling? Okay.

00:02:39.640 --> 00:02:41.520
- Rolling.
- All right.

00:02:43.680 --> 00:02:46.160
- How are you doing?
- I'm really enjoying this.

00:02:55.720 --> 00:02:58.440
- Where am I looking, at you?
- You're looking at me.

00:03:03.720 --> 00:03:07.120
I'm trying to think of the right way
to respond to that.

00:03:14.920 --> 00:03:20.040
One of the big challenges for
constructing a winning global narrative -

00:03:20.160 --> 00:03:24.840
- is to be able to identify some foe.

00:03:24.960 --> 00:03:31.240
And whether global threats
we face today are concrete enough -

00:03:31.360 --> 00:03:36.200
- to serve as the villain
in this story is an open question.

00:03:36.320 --> 00:03:40.160
So if we want to create a global "we" -

00:03:40.280 --> 00:03:43.440
- we should invent
an extraterrestrial alien.

00:03:43.560 --> 00:03:49.000
I always thought an alien invasion would
do wonders for helping us come together.

00:03:49.120 --> 00:03:52.320
An alien invasion would solve many of my
problems and disseminate Big History.

00:03:52.440 --> 00:03:56.200
An invasion by Martians would be
really helpful right now.

00:03:56.320 --> 00:04:00.520
The alternative might be
some kind of really bad virus.

00:04:00.640 --> 00:04:04.760
- A global pandemic.
- Because global warming isn't fast enough.

00:04:35.080 --> 00:04:38.800
A key part of this is getting
the right diagnosis.

00:04:38.920 --> 00:04:43.280
Until we get the right diagnosis of the
problem, it's hard to move to solutions.

00:04:45.320 --> 00:04:49.800
I think only if you look
at the history of humanity -

00:04:49.920 --> 00:04:52.640
- in the context
of the biosphere as a whole -

00:04:52.760 --> 00:04:56.840
- can you really grasp how strange
is the moment we're living in.

00:04:56.960 --> 00:05:01.560
Never in four billion years,
since life first began on this planet -

00:05:01.680 --> 00:05:06.600
- has a single species had
so much power collectively -

00:05:06.720 --> 00:05:10.320
- that they can change
the entire biosphere.

00:05:10.440 --> 00:05:13.640
Planet Earth is under new management.

00:05:16.960 --> 00:05:20.800
Given that we are still accelerating
our CO2 emissions -

00:05:20.920 --> 00:05:24.080
- at the end of the century,
the planet will be so warm -

00:05:24.200 --> 00:05:28.560
- that the effects of warming alone
will be formidable.

00:05:29.760 --> 00:05:32.760
We need to figure out
how to get to a world -

00:05:32.880 --> 00:05:36.080
- which has energy
without greenhouse gas effects.

00:05:39.320 --> 00:05:42.640
The problem that brought
this group together -

00:05:42.760 --> 00:05:49.000
- is a deep sense that
we are in a time of dangerous turbulence -

00:05:49.120 --> 00:05:53.160
- and there is both in this country
and around the developing world -

00:05:53.280 --> 00:05:56.720
- a massive amount of
social and economic instability.

00:05:56.840 --> 00:06:00.240
We believe that foundationally
it's been caused -

00:06:00.360 --> 00:06:04.360
- by 40 years
of rising economic inequality.

00:06:05.440 --> 00:06:08.560
The American dream was,
I'm going to do better than my parents.

00:06:08.680 --> 00:06:11.280
Half now do worse than their parents.

00:06:11.400 --> 00:06:15.480
The rates of depression
and anxiety are overwhelming.

00:06:15.600 --> 00:06:18.840
The number of people
on antidepressants is scary.

00:06:18.960 --> 00:06:23.720
The number of kids with ADHD.
The rate of addiction to...

00:06:23.840 --> 00:06:28.560
I used to think addiction to Facebook was
a joke or a metaphor, but no, it's real.

00:06:30.160 --> 00:06:33.480
We have a situation
that we didn't use to have.

00:06:33.600 --> 00:06:37.720
70-80% of people get their news
through social media platforms.

00:06:37.840 --> 00:06:41.600
The vast majority of people are
still consuming the mainstream media.

00:06:41.720 --> 00:06:45.120
But they're also consuming, depending on
whether you're on the left or the right -

00:06:45.240 --> 00:06:49.240
- this massive amount of propaganda.
And, of course, propaganda works.

00:06:50.560 --> 00:06:54.600
We've seen disinformation spread
like wildfire on social media.

00:06:54.720 --> 00:06:56.800
It's a huge problem in a society -

00:06:56.920 --> 00:07:00.240
- if you have entire sectors
of the population -

00:07:00.360 --> 00:07:03.960
- who believe fundamentally different
facts about the state of the world.

00:07:04.080 --> 00:07:10.480
You cannot have a democratic government
when your citizenry is as twisted -

00:07:10.600 --> 00:07:14.160
- because that's what propaganda does,
as ours is.

00:07:15.400 --> 00:07:21.120
I actually believe... we're not going
to win the war for democracy.

00:07:22.920 --> 00:07:27.080
Maybe there's a 3% chance we win,
but if you told me -

00:07:27.200 --> 00:07:31.160
- my son had brain cancer and there was
a 3% chance that we could beat it -

00:07:31.280 --> 00:07:34.720
- fine, I'm going to give
every bit of energy I can to beat it.

00:07:34.840 --> 00:07:36.760
That's how I feel about this.

00:07:39.120 --> 00:07:41.920
Democracies are sustained
by social cohesion -

00:07:42.040 --> 00:07:46.680
- and social cohesion is sustained
by reciprocity norms.

00:07:46.800 --> 00:07:53.080
And if you build an economy that
systematically impoverishes most people -

00:07:53.200 --> 00:07:57.960
- and puts most people
in a state of precariousness -

00:07:58.080 --> 00:08:02.320
- and insecurity and worry -

00:08:02.440 --> 00:08:06.200
- you destroy their capacity
to invest in themselves -

00:08:06.320 --> 00:08:10.000
- to take risks, to think
about the future, to be happy.

00:08:10.120 --> 00:08:15.240
And when you do that,
you get massive political polarization -

00:08:15.360 --> 00:08:19.360
- cynicism, anger, racism, xenophobia -

00:08:19.480 --> 00:08:24.200
- and, you know, that's what happens
before the end.

00:08:31.360 --> 00:08:35.240
Any aspect of our society is
increasingly being penetrated -

00:08:35.360 --> 00:08:37.920
- by different kinds of technology -

00:08:38.040 --> 00:08:42.800
- and as this process is moving
faster and faster -

00:08:42.920 --> 00:08:47.880
- virtually nobody understands science
and engineering in the parliaments.

00:08:48.000 --> 00:08:55.160
And this is a toxic mixture
of incompetence and power.

00:08:57.360 --> 00:09:02.240
Today, we can see clearly the formation
of a critical infrastructure -

00:09:02.360 --> 00:09:07.200
- that encompasses all communication,
all data storage -

00:09:07.320 --> 00:09:12.160
- all financial transactions,
certainly all digital manufacturing -

00:09:12.280 --> 00:09:16.520
- increasingly everything that has
to do with controlling transportation -

00:09:16.640 --> 00:09:21.840
- energy, all our health data.
It influences every aspect of our life.

00:09:21.960 --> 00:09:25.000
We as humans have
to engage in figuring out -

00:09:25.120 --> 00:09:29.000
- how the heck do we make
a good governance structure of that -

00:09:29.120 --> 00:09:33.720
- because whoever's in control of that
will have complete control of us.

00:09:34.640 --> 00:09:39.160
I will assert that our educational system
at all levels is badly broken.

00:09:39.280 --> 00:09:44.960
We aren't doing due service to the younger
generations that we're trying to train.

00:09:45.080 --> 00:09:49.360
Because of the speed that
everything works at, we're now focused -

00:09:49.480 --> 00:09:54.760
- on the next quarter, the next minute,
the next Facebook like -

00:09:54.880 --> 00:09:57.480
- the next election.

00:09:57.600 --> 00:10:01.760
And instead of using big data
to predict the future -

00:10:01.880 --> 00:10:04.600
- we're using big data to do day trading -

00:10:04.720 --> 00:10:09.680
- and we're spending and trading
rather than investing in our future.

00:10:09.800 --> 00:10:14.400
You see that in our infrastructure, our
education system and how we do health.

00:10:14.520 --> 00:10:20.320
It's all short-term, and we've discounted
the future so dramatically.

00:10:21.480 --> 00:10:26.360
Our ability to manipulate the world
has skyrocketed decade by decade.

00:10:26.480 --> 00:10:31.280
It's creating the problems we're seeing.
Global warming being the obvious example.

00:10:31.400 --> 00:10:36.160
I worry most about climate change
because there's a clock ticking on that.

00:10:36.960 --> 00:10:42.320
Unless we think globally,
my children are going to suffer.

00:10:42.440 --> 00:10:46.080
So that's the argument that we need -

00:10:46.200 --> 00:10:49.600
- to understand how to communicate.
In a nutshell.

00:10:50.680 --> 00:10:56.760
We have to believe
that we humans are capable -

00:10:56.880 --> 00:11:00.640
- of generating the knowledge
and the skills needed -

00:11:00.760 --> 00:11:07.440
- to steer us towards
a more stable and sustainable -

00:11:07.560 --> 00:11:11.000
- and civilized future
in which people can live well.

00:11:11.120 --> 00:11:15.640
I have this nightmare sometimes.
You wake up, someone says:

00:11:15.760 --> 00:11:20.560
"Captain, are you ready to land?
We're near to LAX Airport."

00:11:20.680 --> 00:11:26.280
And I wake up and I look
at dials and screens on a jumbo jet.

00:11:26.400 --> 00:11:29.080
And I have no idea.

00:11:29.200 --> 00:11:33.600
We have to learn quickly
if we're to land this thing.

00:12:22.440 --> 00:12:24.880
We have people from
all over the world here.

00:12:25.000 --> 00:12:29.000
We all agree
that there's something big going on.

00:12:29.120 --> 00:12:33.240
I see my role as a scientist as it's not
my job to impose my values on others -

00:12:33.360 --> 00:12:38.200
- but it is my job to connect
the present to the future.

00:12:38.320 --> 00:12:44.200
I can tell somebody, "If you make these
choices, this is how the world will look."

00:12:44.320 --> 00:12:47.480
If they get an accurate picture
of how that world would look -

00:12:47.600 --> 00:12:51.400
- their values may help them
make better decisions.

00:12:55.600 --> 00:12:59.320
People make a lot of bad choices,
because they believe -

00:12:59.440 --> 00:13:03.720
- their values select something like
global warming is not a problem.

00:13:03.840 --> 00:13:07.760
Well, that's not a question of values.
That's a question of a misunderstanding -

00:13:07.880 --> 00:13:10.840
- about the relationship
between the present and the future.

00:13:10.960 --> 00:13:15.240
Because the world in which we just pump
CO2 in the atmosphere ad infinitum -

00:13:15.360 --> 00:13:19.160
- is going to be a world
that nobody's going to like.

00:13:21.160 --> 00:13:24.840
We're here mainly to understand
what can we change -

00:13:24.960 --> 00:13:27.560
- what kind of knobs can we turn -

00:13:27.680 --> 00:13:33.080
- so that we prevent disaster
based on fundamental values.

00:13:33.200 --> 00:13:37.000
Like I would love to have my grandchildren
to be able to live free and happy lives.

00:13:41.560 --> 00:13:46.000
We need a fundamentally new conception
based on science and empirical reality -

00:13:46.120 --> 00:13:50.520
- of human behavior in human institutions
and culture and in interdisciplinary -

00:13:50.640 --> 00:13:55.200
- bringing together the best ideas and
empirical facts into a coherent theory.

00:13:59.880 --> 00:14:05.280
As scientists, we must provide some
of these good sustainable trajectories -

00:14:05.400 --> 00:14:07.160
- because who else should do it?

00:14:07.280 --> 00:14:11.800
Natural scientist can't do it alone.
It has to be a diverse group of people.

00:14:11.920 --> 00:14:15.160
That's why we have
this diverse group of people around.

00:14:15.280 --> 00:14:19.720
A clearer conversation is needed
about the sort of world we'd like to see.

00:14:19.840 --> 00:14:22.720
I think that conversation
has to be global.

00:14:22.840 --> 00:14:26.160
It must include
Russians and Chinese.

00:14:26.280 --> 00:14:29.760
It must include
people in small-scale societies.

00:14:33.600 --> 00:14:37.200
I love conversations across disciplines.

00:14:37.320 --> 00:14:41.800
They're fairly rare, and this one is
across lots of disciplines.

00:14:41.920 --> 00:14:47.720
What I'd love to see come out of this is
we uncover more of these possibilities -

00:14:47.840 --> 00:14:52.240
- because by just putting out
some possibilities -

00:14:52.360 --> 00:14:55.880
- you have a different idea
of measuring it as access to solutions.

00:14:56.000 --> 00:15:02.000
What could we feasibly dream of,
that's within our reach right now?

00:15:03.000 --> 00:15:06.960
We're not done inventing.
Is this the best society we could have?

00:15:11.680 --> 00:15:17.160
This is a place where
I can both learn about and anchor ideas -

00:15:17.280 --> 00:15:20.600
- that I can then go
extend into the world -

00:15:20.720 --> 00:15:25.120
- and either knock down bad ideas
or build new ideas, right?

00:15:25.240 --> 00:15:28.760
Which is how you create
social change in the world.

00:15:31.440 --> 00:15:33.480
The system isn't working -

00:15:33.600 --> 00:15:37.320
- because it was built
for a clock speed that's 100 years old.

00:15:37.440 --> 00:15:40.000
Now the clock speed is just faster -

00:15:40.120 --> 00:15:45.240
- and that may imply political reforms
that people have not yet considered.

00:15:45.360 --> 00:15:50.440
When you talk about these things, people
get engaged, because we're all concerned.

00:15:50.560 --> 00:15:55.720
Yet people are thinking about issues that
bear on us from different perspectives.

00:15:55.840 --> 00:15:59.720
Why don't we have some time in the future
a world technology organization -

00:15:59.840 --> 00:16:06.120
- that brings all this research,
the movements ... It gives it a body.

00:16:09.960 --> 00:16:12.920
This group is not going to drive
a social change movement -

00:16:13.040 --> 00:16:16.440
- but could help inform
a social change movement.

00:16:16.560 --> 00:16:22.200
It's like a fire hose of ideas
and you just get blasted.

00:16:22.320 --> 00:16:24.640
You come out so much richer
but also exhausted.

00:16:24.760 --> 00:16:27.880
But that's fine.
What a great way to get exhausted.

00:16:29.320 --> 00:16:34.000
What is the vision and what do we want
in our society going forward?

00:16:34.120 --> 00:16:39.360
The Chinese are successful in terms of
wealth, power, status and leadership -

00:16:39.480 --> 00:16:41.840
- because they're pursuing
that clear goal -

00:16:41.960 --> 00:16:46.320
- and lining up resources and values
to go after that goal.

00:16:46.440 --> 00:16:49.640
Very different than other countries,
including the West.

00:16:53.240 --> 00:16:58.760
I feel like we have no vision and I admire
the Chinese for having such a vision -

00:16:58.880 --> 00:17:04.080
- and knowing and articulating so clearly
what their plans are to get there.

00:17:05.200 --> 00:17:10.080
The success of the West
in the last 250 years has been -

00:17:10.200 --> 00:17:15.560
- expanding the cooperation of strangers,
and identity has been a key part of that.

00:17:15.680 --> 00:17:19.680
A big part of the success of the American
model was creating an American identity.

00:17:19.800 --> 00:17:24.920
The circle of identity and cooperation
is now collapsing back to older forms.

00:17:25.040 --> 00:17:28.480
The fundamental question is how
do we get the circle expanding again?

00:17:28.600 --> 00:17:33.280
I lived in Canada 10 years and I became
Canadian, and when we took the oath -

00:17:33.400 --> 00:17:38.920
- the judge asked us to keep our
identities, in my case, my Greek identity.

00:17:39.040 --> 00:17:44.760
The identity of being Canadian is to be
proud of everybody's different identity.

00:17:44.880 --> 00:17:50.000
But I always felt this is because they're
a rich country with no obvious enemies.

00:17:54.240 --> 00:17:57.760
Having multiple identities is great,
but it's probably something you enable -

00:17:57.880 --> 00:18:01.240
- rather than something
you can start with.

00:18:01.360 --> 00:18:07.280
In schools today, we overwhelmingly teach
people about their national identity -

00:18:07.400 --> 00:18:11.920
- and I think that's dangerous
because it smuggles in the idea -

00:18:12.040 --> 00:18:15.520
- that your fundamental loyalty
is sort of tribal.

00:18:15.640 --> 00:18:19.200
In a world with nuclear weapons
and problems like climate change -

00:18:19.320 --> 00:18:22.560
- that have to be solved by
collaboration across many nations -

00:18:22.680 --> 00:18:26.800
- I don't think that's the identity
that should dominate.

00:18:26.920 --> 00:18:30.400
I know of nowhere in the world where
courses are taught in human histories.

00:18:30.520 --> 00:18:34.960
If we keep teaching about national
histories, we just guarantee more wars.

00:18:35.080 --> 00:18:37.600
The internal values of people are
radically different -

00:18:37.720 --> 00:18:41.720
- in how they want to organize the world,
so at the global governance level -

00:18:41.840 --> 00:18:45.240
- there's very little that the global
government should worry about.

00:18:45.360 --> 00:18:47.600
Maybe you should worry
about peace alone.

00:18:47.720 --> 00:18:50.800
- There shall not be war. That's enough.
- Good start.

00:18:55.120 --> 00:19:01.200
But our reigning institutions weaken our
confidence in global governance right now.

00:19:02.080 --> 00:19:05.520
There's a meta question
about who gets to decide what's good.

00:19:05.640 --> 00:19:10.520
One of my irreducible goals is
that I want to live in a society -

00:19:10.640 --> 00:19:15.400
- where the majority of citizens get
to decide what's good for them.

00:19:15.520 --> 00:19:21.520
Not a few people at the very tippy top
deciding what's good for them.

00:19:21.640 --> 00:19:24.840
The answers that the majority will come to
will be imperfect -

00:19:24.960 --> 00:19:27.960
- but they will almost certainly
beat the shit out of the, you know.

00:20:12.920 --> 00:20:16.360
There are three big dates
in the history of the biosphere.

00:20:16.480 --> 00:20:18.720
First is the origin of life.

00:20:18.840 --> 00:20:22.440
The second is multicellular life,
and the third is right now.

00:20:24.600 --> 00:20:27.680
This is a transformative moment
on a scale of four billion years.

00:20:27.800 --> 00:20:30.480
Now, if I'm right, you cannot see that -

00:20:30.600 --> 00:20:34.160
- unless you're willing to contemplate
a scale of four billion years.

00:20:44.000 --> 00:20:49.240
Origin stories help you
place yourself in the universe.

00:20:49.360 --> 00:20:53.480
They tell you how you came to be,
how your people came to be -

00:20:53.600 --> 00:20:58.320
- how the Earth came to be, how life
came to be, how the stars came to be.

00:20:58.440 --> 00:21:02.880
It's a sort of mapping.
It allows you to say:

00:21:03.000 --> 00:21:06.440
This is who I am.
This is when I live.

00:21:06.560 --> 00:21:12.280
This is where I live. This is
the sort of universe that I live in.

00:21:12.400 --> 00:21:16.880
And that's a very powerful way
of thinking about who you are.

00:21:17.000 --> 00:21:19.080
And as with any mapping -

00:21:19.200 --> 00:21:24.360
- if the mapping is good,
then it will teach you what is possible.

00:21:40.040 --> 00:21:43.680
We're looking at
an astonishing acceleration -

00:21:43.800 --> 00:21:46.480
- in a process
that's 200,000 years old.

00:21:46.600 --> 00:21:51.080
To fully understand it,
you need to understand the phases -

00:21:51.200 --> 00:21:53.400
- that this story has gone through.

00:21:53.520 --> 00:21:55.960
I go right back to the beginning -

00:21:56.080 --> 00:22:00.680
- with a species that's capable of
exchanging information so efficiently -

00:22:00.800 --> 00:22:03.040
- that that information begins
to accumulate.

00:22:03.160 --> 00:22:08.480
And then also in this long story, what
you see is what I call mega innovations.

00:22:08.600 --> 00:22:12.160
Agriculture is one.
That allows populations to grow.

00:22:12.280 --> 00:22:17.000
Population growth requires
shifts in social structures.

00:22:17.120 --> 00:22:20.000
Shifts that give us
traditional civilization.

00:22:20.120 --> 00:22:24.200
The industrial revolution
was one more mega innovation.

00:22:24.320 --> 00:22:27.680
A globalizing world
encouraged innovation -

00:22:27.800 --> 00:22:31.640
- that took us across
this fundamental technological divide -

00:22:31.760 --> 00:22:35.840
- where we got access not just to
the energy of recent photosynthesis -

00:22:35.960 --> 00:22:37.840
- which is what agriculture did -

00:22:37.960 --> 00:22:42.760
- but to the stored results of
photosynthesis over 300 million years.

00:22:48.240 --> 00:22:52.640
If you mentally extend this graph
of total human energy use -

00:22:52.760 --> 00:22:55.920
- it's about 50 times to the left.

00:22:56.040 --> 00:22:59.360
- What's the starting date on your graph?
- It's 1800.

00:22:59.480 --> 00:23:03.720
So something like 50 times will take you
back to the end of the last ice age.

00:23:03.840 --> 00:23:08.040
If you imagine that graph, then
this spike of total human energy use -

00:23:08.160 --> 00:23:10.160
- how astonishing this spike is.

00:23:10.280 --> 00:23:14.920
I don't think you can understand
modernity without seeing -

00:23:15.040 --> 00:23:20.520
- that there's been this staggering
bonanza of virtually free energy -

00:23:20.640 --> 00:23:24.200
- which has driven
so much of modern change.

00:23:35.480 --> 00:23:38.400
Modernity has created very good lives -

00:23:38.520 --> 00:23:42.560
- which we often take for granted,
but this is a very new thing.

00:23:42.680 --> 00:23:47.960
Thinking about the future, you don't
decide: Am I optimistic or pessimistic?

00:23:48.080 --> 00:23:53.520
Optimism is a kind of necessary part
of the equipment we need -

00:23:53.640 --> 00:23:56.640
- if we're to solve these problems.

00:23:56.760 --> 00:24:02.720
I think there are serious grounds
for optimism about a nonrevolutionary -

00:24:02.840 --> 00:24:06.720
- non-catastrophic resolution
of these tensions -

00:24:06.840 --> 00:24:12.120
- many of which arose simply because of
the sheer speed of technological change.

00:24:12.240 --> 00:24:17.200
We know what the challenge is.
We have to assume there's a good outcome.

00:24:17.320 --> 00:24:22.480
There are no guarantees. There may be
costs. That's the attitude we must have.

00:24:56.760 --> 00:25:02.000
We just assume that democracy is
the best thing there is, end of story.

00:25:02.120 --> 00:25:06.640
I'm questioning something
that may be politically incorrect.

00:25:06.760 --> 00:25:11.920
Can democracy work in this epoch
we are entering?

00:25:26.200 --> 00:25:29.720
If we want to have
an enlightened democracy -

00:25:29.840 --> 00:25:35.720
- how can we force people
to understand more -

00:25:35.840 --> 00:25:39.360
- if our survival depends on it?

00:25:48.640 --> 00:25:51.840
This is an open question.
What do you think about this?

00:25:51.960 --> 00:25:57.080
I think altering democracy is one of the
key things we should be thinking about -

00:25:57.200 --> 00:26:01.360
- and how can we tune democracy
to make it work better.

00:26:01.480 --> 00:26:06.360
So I agree, Steen, with your skepticism.
If our future depends -

00:26:06.480 --> 00:26:10.320
- on people getting a deeper scientific
understanding of climate change -

00:26:10.440 --> 00:26:14.400
- and acting rationally
on that information, we are screwed.

00:26:14.520 --> 00:26:18.120
But what history tells us does work is -

00:26:18.240 --> 00:26:22.200
- over time, populations can
adopt new social norms.

00:26:22.320 --> 00:26:26.800
One of the successes of democracies,
including the British one, which is old -

00:26:26.920 --> 00:26:32.080
- is it widely wired into society
those norms and rules of the road -

00:26:32.200 --> 00:26:35.800
- which people don't think much about -

00:26:35.920 --> 00:26:39.840
- but get transmitted
generation to generation and act on.

00:26:49.400 --> 00:26:53.520
Are there a new set of norms and rules
that could be transmitted -

00:26:53.640 --> 00:26:56.520
- through these cultural mechanisms
that we know work?

00:26:56.640 --> 00:27:01.320
And could that be done in a time scale
that matters in the challenges we face?

00:27:01.440 --> 00:27:05.520
But there's also a harder scientific
question of what would those be?

00:27:10.520 --> 00:27:15.800
What is this notion of whether democracy
is no longer functioning built on?

00:27:15.920 --> 00:27:22.480
In some ways Brexit and Trump are showing
that democracy is actually functioning -

00:27:22.600 --> 00:27:27.360
- because a lot of people haven't
had their voice heard for a long time -

00:27:27.480 --> 00:27:30.000
- and Trump and Brexit reflects that.

00:27:32.840 --> 00:27:36.880
If people are making choices
that are producing outcomes -

00:27:37.000 --> 00:27:40.640
- that will serve them in the future,
then democracy's functioning.

00:27:40.760 --> 00:27:44.880
But if they're making choices that,
for example, are based on lies -

00:27:45.000 --> 00:27:50.080
- they're not producing outcomes that
serve the very people that are voting.

00:27:52.600 --> 00:27:56.440
What's the empirical evidence
that democracy is broken?

00:27:56.560 --> 00:28:00.480
I offer the following:
When you do surveys of people -

00:28:00.600 --> 00:28:04.200
- and what their preferences are
on a host of issues from -

00:28:04.320 --> 00:28:07.800
- in the US, climate change, guns,
in other countries, other issues -

00:28:07.920 --> 00:28:12.120
- there is evidence that there's been
a widening gap between those things.

00:28:12.240 --> 00:28:16.800
You have very large majorities for certain
positions on political issues in the US -

00:28:16.920 --> 00:28:19.200
- that aren't being achieved
through politics.

00:28:19.320 --> 00:28:24.480
82% of the US population supports
some basic restrictions on guns.

00:28:24.600 --> 00:28:26.920
There is 0% chance of that happening.

00:28:27.040 --> 00:28:31.560
That's a huge disconnect between broad
social preferences and political outcomes.

00:28:31.680 --> 00:28:36.160
So we've seen a system that's
become more disconnected from reality.

00:28:56.560 --> 00:29:00.000
There are many ways
in which corporations trump humanity.

00:29:00.120 --> 00:29:04.800
They can be more rational than humanity
can on all sorts of dimensions.

00:29:04.920 --> 00:29:07.320
They can maximize in a more efficient way.

00:29:08.680 --> 00:29:12.080
One scary thing
about where we are right now is -

00:29:12.200 --> 00:29:18.200
- that this superior form of intelligence
has already found a way -

00:29:18.320 --> 00:29:22.600
- to capture the only mode
that we humans have -

00:29:22.720 --> 00:29:26.240
- to think reflectively
about what our future should be.

00:29:26.360 --> 00:29:31.000
Government has been captured
by corporations everywhere -

00:29:31.120 --> 00:29:34.480
- except maybe in the Nordic countries.
I don't want to get into that.

00:29:34.600 --> 00:29:39.840
The point is, I think there's an urgency
right now if humanity is to prevail.

00:29:39.960 --> 00:29:43.200
As a member of humanity,
I'm all for us winning.

00:29:43.320 --> 00:29:45.680
But if we're going to have a fair fight -

00:29:45.800 --> 00:29:51.200
- how do we reclaim the ability
to self-govern becomes really critical.

00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:14.000
People would have said in 1948,
what the world needs now is democracy.

00:30:14.120 --> 00:30:18.080
If we just spread democracy everywhere,
happiness will spread everywhere -

00:30:18.200 --> 00:30:21.280
- and flourishing and prosperity
will happen everywhere.

00:30:21.400 --> 00:30:25.840
And indeed, if you look
at the history of the world since 1948 -

00:30:25.960 --> 00:30:28.960
- there's been
an extraordinary explosion -

00:30:29.080 --> 00:30:33.040
- in the presumptiveness
of "democracy" everywhere.

00:30:33.160 --> 00:30:38.320
But if you ask, in fact,
whether the people rule -

00:30:38.440 --> 00:30:42.920
- the answer is at least from the
perception of the people, not so much.

00:30:43.040 --> 00:30:49.520
At this moment, global dissatisfaction
with democracy has never been higher.

00:30:49.640 --> 00:30:51.760
What scares me the most -

00:30:51.880 --> 00:30:57.400
- is the growing skepticism among
the elite in the idea of democracy.

00:30:58.800 --> 00:31:03.720
A common question I hear in many different
contexts: What's wrong with the people?

00:31:03.840 --> 00:31:06.520
How could the people be so stupid?

00:31:08.560 --> 00:31:12.160
My view is that this sneer
is obtuse and oblivious -

00:31:12.280 --> 00:31:16.360
- and it misses a critical truth
about why we are here -

00:31:16.480 --> 00:31:19.640
- and the urgent need to fix it.

00:31:21.560 --> 00:31:27.360
And I want to focus on a change
that has been triggered by technology.

00:31:27.480 --> 00:31:29.960
Broadcasting was the emergence
of a technology -

00:31:30.080 --> 00:31:35.080
- that enabled many to hear
at one time the same thing.

00:31:37.240 --> 00:31:42.440
We hear the people through polling just
when they have something smart to say.

00:31:42.560 --> 00:31:45.720
They had something smart to say
because we knew a common set of facts -

00:31:45.840 --> 00:31:49.360
- and we knew a common set of facts
because of a platform of communication -

00:31:49.480 --> 00:31:52.120
- which forced us to know those facts.

00:31:53.440 --> 00:31:56.240
We're now in the stage after.

00:32:02.120 --> 00:32:06.880
The idea of broadcast is gone. Radical
fragmentation of attention happens.

00:32:07.000 --> 00:32:12.960
We produce many sources of information,
leading to this inevitable fragmentation.

00:32:13.080 --> 00:32:17.240
Those who were forced before
to watch the news, for example -

00:32:17.360 --> 00:32:21.400
- because that's the only thing that was
on between 6 and 7, aren't forced anymore.

00:32:21.520 --> 00:32:25.160
They can watch
whatever they want to watch.

00:32:32.600 --> 00:32:38.560
So I think the internet has given us
incredible diversity in culture -

00:32:38.680 --> 00:32:43.120
- that is to be celebrated and trumps
everything that happened before -

00:32:43.240 --> 00:32:46.760
- but it's a terrible thing
for common knowledge -

00:32:46.880 --> 00:32:50.480
- and therefore
a terrible thing for democracy.

00:32:54.440 --> 00:32:59.960
And we're never going back. We will always
live as human culture has always lived -

00:33:00.080 --> 00:33:03.960
- except for the 20th century,
in this really deeply fragmented world -

00:33:04.080 --> 00:33:07.920
- of all of us knowing different things
at the same time.

00:33:15.240 --> 00:33:18.800
What's the response?
There's an anti-democracy response:

00:33:18.920 --> 00:33:22.760
The people are absurd,
so let's find a way to ignore the people.

00:33:22.880 --> 00:33:27.560
Then there's a pro-democracy response,
which imagines us going back -

00:33:27.680 --> 00:33:32.680
- to the kind of common sphere
where we all understand everything.

00:33:32.800 --> 00:33:37.640
These responses both presume
what democracy needs is all of us -

00:33:37.760 --> 00:33:42.600
- to be functioning
at a high level at a particular time.

00:33:42.720 --> 00:33:47.120
We need to find a way to give up on
that assumption and to recognize instead -

00:33:47.240 --> 00:33:52.160
- that "we" is always built
and we must always defend -

00:33:52.280 --> 00:33:56.360
- how the "we" that we are paying
attention to is constructed.

00:34:02.080 --> 00:34:04.280
Think about the presidency:

00:34:04.400 --> 00:34:09.280
When we imagine the president speaking,
we don't imagine him tweeting.

00:34:09.400 --> 00:34:12.680
For the president to speak is for
the president to speak at the end -

00:34:12.800 --> 00:34:16.400
- of a very elaborate process
where he's been informed.

00:34:16.520 --> 00:34:20.120
In America, it's unfortunately only ever
been "he", but he's been informed -

00:34:20.240 --> 00:34:24.200
- and he is reflected
and has a chance to present his views -

00:34:24.320 --> 00:34:29.160
- and that is the view of the president.
And in that process, he gets staff.

00:34:30.680 --> 00:34:35.360
So why not us?
Because we the people have views -

00:34:35.480 --> 00:34:38.440
- but our views aren't constructed,
our views are found.

00:34:38.560 --> 00:34:42.960
Somebody calls us up during dinner:
"What do you think about NAFTA?"

00:34:43.080 --> 00:34:47.600
Or "Should we have thorium reactors
that replace natural gas?"

00:34:47.720 --> 00:34:51.160
So we give our views,
and those views get reflected -

00:34:51.280 --> 00:34:55.640
- however, or from
whomever they are collected.

00:35:02.200 --> 00:35:05.960
We say, "71% of us believe
we should go to war in Iraq" -

00:35:06.080 --> 00:35:11.720
- but those views are not informed.
They're uninformed, differently informed.

00:35:11.840 --> 00:35:16.000
And in this process,
nobody helps us understand anything.

00:35:30.200 --> 00:35:36.240
I'm trying to encourage the idea
that we think about understanding "we" -

00:35:36.360 --> 00:35:41.840
- without "we" speaking
for all of us at the same time.

00:35:45.560 --> 00:35:49.040
Think, for example, of the idea of a jury.

00:35:49.160 --> 00:35:53.800
In the US, juries are a central part
of making important decisions.

00:35:53.920 --> 00:35:57.400
They decide whether
somebody gets executed or not.

00:35:57.520 --> 00:36:04.240
The idea of a jury, this collection of a
dozen people, is a highly regulated idea.

00:36:04.360 --> 00:36:08.600
There are rules about what
they're not allowed to hear and consider.

00:36:08.720 --> 00:36:13.120
If at any moment along that process
you did a poll of the jury and said:

00:36:13.240 --> 00:36:15.400
"Is she guilty or not?"

00:36:15.520 --> 00:36:20.800
"Yeah, nine of us think she's guilty."
That would not be the view of the jury.

00:36:20.920 --> 00:36:25.520
The view of the jury is the product
of this huge process.

00:36:25.640 --> 00:36:30.040
And once it's finished, it has
incredible normative significance -

00:36:30.160 --> 00:36:33.240
- life-and-death significance
in some contexts.

00:36:47.280 --> 00:36:50.360
The idea that has the most potential
is deliberative polls -

00:36:50.480 --> 00:36:52.480
- that Jim Fishkin has advanced.

00:36:52.600 --> 00:36:57.360
Deliberative polls are the idea
of regular polls plus something.

00:36:57.480 --> 00:37:02.840
You take a random representative selection
of a public, but then you inform them -

00:37:02.960 --> 00:37:06.240
- and give them an opportunity
to deliberate in small and large groups.

00:37:10.840 --> 00:37:17.920
This is a picture of Mongolia. This is a
random representative sample of Mongolia.

00:37:18.040 --> 00:37:20.200
Mongolia is the size of Western Europe -

00:37:20.320 --> 00:37:24.040
- so half these people
spent two nights on a bus -

00:37:24.160 --> 00:37:29.720
- to sit in the parliament and deliberate
about proposed constitutional reform.

00:37:29.840 --> 00:37:33.600
As a constitutional law professor,
I was deeply skeptical -

00:37:33.720 --> 00:37:38.200
- that these ordinary Mongolians
would be able to understand anything -

00:37:38.320 --> 00:37:43.240
- about the really complicated question
that they were being asked to address.

00:37:43.360 --> 00:37:47.200
But I was astonished
with the incredible sophistication -

00:37:47.320 --> 00:37:50.840
- and common wisdom that evolved
over these two days.

00:37:50.960 --> 00:37:52.960
The consequence of this poll -

00:37:53.080 --> 00:37:56.360
- is something any constitutional
professor would be proud of.

00:37:58.280 --> 00:38:03.440
And it had a persuasive effect
on what the parliament ultimately did.

00:38:11.200 --> 00:38:15.840
The process involves bringing both sides
in, working through for months in advance:

00:38:15.960 --> 00:38:20.560
What information does the public need
to understand both sides of the issue -

00:38:20.680 --> 00:38:23.680
- and then developing
so that the public can understand it.

00:38:23.800 --> 00:38:28.440
It's essential that both sides believe
that their side has been represented well.

00:38:28.560 --> 00:38:32.760
You have to make sure that it's the right
mix of male, female, rich, poor -

00:38:32.880 --> 00:38:36.240
- professional, nonprofessional,
all the relevant demographic categories -

00:38:36.360 --> 00:38:39.560
- have to be represented in a random way.

00:38:41.160 --> 00:38:45.840
It seems that the image of these people
deliberating is people in a room.

00:38:45.960 --> 00:38:49.600
Is that part of an essential ingredient?

00:38:49.720 --> 00:38:53.600
One problem with online deliberation
is it's too voluntary.

00:38:53.720 --> 00:38:59.000
You can easily opt out or be isolated. The
deliberation contacts are important, too.

00:38:59.120 --> 00:39:04.120
If you allow people to deliberate
in their own spheres -

00:39:04.240 --> 00:39:08.160
- polarization increases.
Understanding decreases.

00:39:08.280 --> 00:39:12.640
Psychological literature says it has to be
in person because it's facial expressions.

00:39:12.760 --> 00:39:15.480
When you disagree and reach out
and touch somebody -

00:39:15.600 --> 00:39:18.320
- it's a very high bandwidth interaction.

00:39:18.440 --> 00:39:23.240
If this is something that we all agree on.
then we are really saying that -

00:39:23.360 --> 00:39:28.520
- some new technologies don't go together
with some essential aspects of democracy.

00:39:28.640 --> 00:39:31.040
Therefore, we do need to backtrack -

00:39:31.160 --> 00:39:34.960
- and find a place for old-style
techniques like people in a room.

00:39:44.040 --> 00:39:49.000
I do think that the next level of our
technological change is going to be -

00:39:49.120 --> 00:39:52.600
- when the technology itself
reflects what it means to be human.

00:39:52.720 --> 00:39:57.240
AI is a future form of self-governance -

00:39:57.360 --> 00:40:02.160
- where you collect data on people,
analyze it, and we vote with our behavior.

00:40:02.280 --> 00:40:09.040
So why aren't we saying that 3% of
deliberative representation happens -

00:40:09.160 --> 00:40:13.880
- and 97%, some AI and some
central decision-making by somebody -

00:40:14.000 --> 00:40:16.320
- is just what's going to happen?

00:40:16.440 --> 00:40:20.360
Predicting what will happen,
I would agree with you.

00:40:20.480 --> 00:40:25.880
Describing that in a neutral way,
I think is a terrible mistake -

00:40:26.000 --> 00:40:30.120
- because that future is
a terrible future.

00:40:30.240 --> 00:40:33.880
I can say,
what I want is environmental regulation -

00:40:34.000 --> 00:40:37.760
- but what I'm going to do is
what will actually benefit me.

00:40:37.880 --> 00:40:39.280
That's why we institute government.

00:40:39.400 --> 00:40:43.960
That depends on what you put in the AI
algorithm, which we might choose or not.

00:40:44.080 --> 00:40:49.000
But the "you" is the ambiguous statement,
because you're right that -

00:40:49.120 --> 00:40:54.200
- China will put one thing in the
algorithm, Singapore will put another -

00:40:54.320 --> 00:40:58.040
- and neoliberalism will put
a third thing in the algorithm.

00:40:58.160 --> 00:41:01.680
The question is whether we as citizens
feel responsibility for the thing -

00:41:01.800 --> 00:41:04.880
- we're putting into the algorithm.

00:41:05.000 --> 00:41:10.200
Fotini, you really managed
to push my button.

00:41:10.320 --> 00:41:14.680
I was surprised,
but I saw you were smiling -

00:41:14.800 --> 00:41:18.160
- so I know you said that
to get some ideas out.

00:41:18.280 --> 00:41:24.920
If you allow this infrastructure of
everything to monitor our behavior -

00:41:25.040 --> 00:41:29.120
- that means you lose your autonomy
and you lose your authority.

00:41:29.240 --> 00:41:33.400
So I was wondering, did you have
some other idea that I just didn't get?

00:41:33.520 --> 00:41:40.480
While we argue about privacy, things are
happening to billions of people.

00:41:40.600 --> 00:41:44.680
So I'm worried that we're sitting around
talking while it's happening.

00:41:44.800 --> 00:41:48.560
I'm actually not 100% convinced
it is a dystopia.

00:41:48.680 --> 00:41:50.520
I'm not saying that I disagree with you -

00:41:50.640 --> 00:41:56.080
- but I think there may be an evolution
of these values for a new world.

00:41:56.200 --> 00:42:01.720
And one way that you can help them
evolve is by challenging them.

00:42:01.840 --> 00:42:05.280
The Lord disagrees!

00:42:06.720 --> 00:42:09.800
Keep your freedom, Fotini!

00:43:03.440 --> 00:43:09.320
There are a number of alarming trends
identified by political scientists -

00:43:09.440 --> 00:43:12.560
- that we've seen in the US
and in democracies throughout the world.

00:43:12.680 --> 00:43:16.360
The first is the spread
of disinformation -

00:43:16.480 --> 00:43:19.400
- that has been used by malicious actors -

00:43:19.520 --> 00:43:25.120
- who want to undermine trust in
democratic institutions around the world.

00:43:25.240 --> 00:43:28.880
The second is polarization,
the fact that -

00:43:29.000 --> 00:43:32.760
- the left and the right
are moving apart over time -

00:43:32.880 --> 00:43:36.720
- both in terms of what they think
about issues, but also, more worryingly -

00:43:36.840 --> 00:43:39.000
- how they feel about the other side.

00:43:39.120 --> 00:43:41.600
There's this increase
in affective polarization -

00:43:41.720 --> 00:43:45.560
- where left increasingly hates the right,
doesn't want anything to do with them -

00:43:45.680 --> 00:43:51.520
- doesn't want their kid to marry somebody
whose family is right-wing and vice versa.

00:43:51.640 --> 00:43:54.520
The third is participation
in the public square.

00:43:54.640 --> 00:43:59.040
Democracy only really functions well
if all citizens are able to have a say -

00:43:59.160 --> 00:44:03.600
- and to discuss in public forums
how they feel about the issues -

00:44:03.720 --> 00:44:07.080
- and how they think
society should be run.

00:44:07.200 --> 00:44:12.200
There's a worry that digital outrage might
facilitate the spread of disinformation.

00:44:12.320 --> 00:44:17.680
It might accelerate polarization and limit
participation in the public square.

00:44:27.040 --> 00:44:32.720
It's actually amazing that we evolved to
feel outrage on behalf of other people -

00:44:32.840 --> 00:44:36.080
- but if it's an error, and I worry that -

00:44:36.200 --> 00:44:40.240
- these new technologies are increasing
the frequency of these errors -

00:44:40.360 --> 00:44:42.000
- the results can be hideous.

00:44:51.440 --> 00:44:55.440
Imagine if we were communicating,
having dinner, by each of us standing up -

00:44:55.560 --> 00:44:59.520
- whenever we wanted to and yelling at
everybody, "My steak is great, I love it."

00:44:59.640 --> 00:45:04.280
And then we sit down again
and everybody goes:

00:45:04.400 --> 00:45:06.000
"I like that. I like that, Johan."

00:45:07.160 --> 00:45:08.840
We don't communicate that way.

00:45:08.960 --> 00:45:12.200
If you look at how communication
takes place on Twitter and Facebook -

00:45:12.320 --> 00:45:17.160
- it's strange that we all collectively
got entranced by these environments -

00:45:17.280 --> 00:45:21.520
- and that we bought into
that paradigm of communicating.

00:45:29.520 --> 00:45:33.280
If you build an eight-lane asphalt road
right through the middle of town -

00:45:33.400 --> 00:45:37.280
- people will speed, and you could put up
little signs: "Oh, you shouldn't speed."

00:45:37.400 --> 00:45:41.280
You could put the cops there
and do all kinds of things -

00:45:41.400 --> 00:45:46.240
- but they will speed, because the road is
built for speed. That's just human nature.

00:45:46.360 --> 00:45:51.440
So instead of having the police and signs
and laws, just build a different road.

00:45:51.560 --> 00:45:56.560
If you know how people are, accommodate
it and make it better for everybody.

00:45:56.680 --> 00:46:01.160
Make the road more narrow,
add a speed bump, plant some trees.

00:46:01.280 --> 00:46:04.920
That's working with human nature
rather than ignoring it -

00:46:05.040 --> 00:46:09.320
- and then just trying
to kludge your way out of the problem.

00:46:11.200 --> 00:46:14.040
With social media, that's what we have.

00:46:14.160 --> 00:46:18.840
We had this idea we're going to connect
everybody. It's going to be great.

00:46:18.960 --> 00:46:24.240
Instead of sending an email to one person,
you can send it to 100,000 people at once.

00:46:24.360 --> 00:46:29.120
So, it's going to be "social media".
That's the idea.

00:46:29.240 --> 00:46:33.080
Everybody is their own
television station or radio station.

00:46:33.200 --> 00:46:36.520
But what they didn't fully account for,
I'm not pointing fingers -

00:46:36.640 --> 00:46:40.040
- because to me, that sounded
like a great idea as well -

00:46:40.160 --> 00:46:44.160
- but it might be that now
these technologies have run amok -

00:46:44.280 --> 00:46:48.680
- and have become almost abusive
to human nature.

00:46:54.560 --> 00:47:00.040
If moral outrage is a fire,
the internet might be like gasoline.

00:47:00.160 --> 00:47:01.840
There's good evidence now -

00:47:01.960 --> 00:47:06.600
- that moral emotional content spreads
faster and farther on social media.

00:47:06.720 --> 00:47:11.840
So to the extent that bad actors,
who want to spread disinformation -

00:47:11.960 --> 00:47:16.720
- can inject that disinformation with
outrage, it'll spread further and faster.

00:47:16.840 --> 00:47:21.240
Words like attack, bad, blame,
care, destroy...

00:47:21.360 --> 00:47:24.000
Every moral emotional word in a tweet -

00:47:24.120 --> 00:47:28.360
- increases its retweet likelihood
by 20 percent.

00:47:28.480 --> 00:47:31.000
These are massive effects.

00:47:32.840 --> 00:47:35.920
Humanity is a social species. We don't
acknowledge this often enough -

00:47:36.040 --> 00:47:40.520
- but you can simply not be happy
without social relationships.

00:47:40.640 --> 00:47:45.920
Increasingly, these social relationships
are being mediated by technology.

00:47:46.040 --> 00:47:51.800
1/7 of the world's population is a member
of Twitter, Facebook or the like.

00:47:51.920 --> 00:47:57.000
We should all be so much happier now
thanks to Facebook and Twitter.

00:47:57.120 --> 00:48:01.280
And is that really the case?
Empirical data suggests no.

00:48:01.400 --> 00:48:05.600
The smartphone generations are not
hanging out with friends.

00:48:05.720 --> 00:48:09.040
See the release of the iPhone in 2007?
It just drops off.

00:48:09.160 --> 00:48:11.840
Less sex, less likely to get enough sleep.

00:48:11.960 --> 00:48:15.720
This also contributes to mental health.
More likely to feel lonely.

00:48:15.840 --> 00:48:19.760
Facebook wants you to spend as
much time on their platform as you can -

00:48:19.880 --> 00:48:24.880
- but it's associated with a sharp decline
in subjective well-being in young adults.

00:48:28.080 --> 00:48:32.120
There are experimental data, where they
told some people not to use Facebook -

00:48:32.240 --> 00:48:35.200
- and another cohort
to use it to their liking -

00:48:35.320 --> 00:48:39.320
- and they observed sharp differences
in the quality of life.

00:48:39.440 --> 00:48:44.640
Any parameter of social and psychological
well-being is affected there.

00:48:44.760 --> 00:48:50.040
So this global brain and how the internet
is connecting people, that's good.

00:48:50.160 --> 00:48:54.680
But these environments also create
social and psychological dysfunction -

00:48:54.800 --> 00:48:58.680
- that might outweigh the good
that they bring about.

00:48:58.800 --> 00:49:02.920
What looked at Twitter network, we had
five million randomly chosen individuals -

00:49:03.040 --> 00:49:06.680
- and we harvested all their timelines.
Twitter allows you to do that.

00:49:06.800 --> 00:49:12.000
3,200 most recent tweets, which
gives you a couple of years of activity.

00:49:14.520 --> 00:49:18.600
You have a computer read a text and say
that's a positive text, that's a negative.

00:49:18.720 --> 00:49:23.040
Then you combine it all together
and produce a time series graph -

00:49:23.160 --> 00:49:27.320
- and say, "Oh, now people were very down,
and now everybody was really happy."

00:49:27.440 --> 00:49:31.880
So you could keep track of
how entire populations are feeling.

00:49:32.000 --> 00:49:37.280
We found that most people in these social
networks are surrounded by friends -

00:49:37.400 --> 00:49:39.880
- that are, on average, happier than them.

00:49:44.680 --> 00:49:47.680
We see these two very strong clusters.

00:49:47.800 --> 00:49:54.000
Unhappy people tend to be connected to
friends that on average are also unhappy.

00:49:54.120 --> 00:49:56.280
Think about this.
You're miserable.

00:49:56.400 --> 00:50:00.240
You're connected to miserable people,
and they are still...

00:50:00.360 --> 00:50:04.720
- Less miserable than you.
- On average.

00:50:04.840 --> 00:50:08.720
- So this is bad.
- Life is just shit.

00:50:13.760 --> 00:50:17.480
On the basis of my findings, I deleted
my Facebook and Twitter accounts.

00:50:17.600 --> 00:50:22.720
So I'm no longer in social media
and it's bliss. You should join me.

00:50:25.920 --> 00:50:30.760
The question is, how do we change
the business model, fix the algorithms -

00:50:30.880 --> 00:50:34.000
- so that we can minimize these effects?

00:50:34.120 --> 00:50:38.880
First I thought about limiting the
number of friends that you can have.

00:50:39.000 --> 00:50:41.600
Apply Dunbar's number and just say:

00:50:41.720 --> 00:50:45.640
"Your allotment is 150 because that's
about the most you can keep track of."

00:50:54.480 --> 00:50:58.480
This technological change has not only
created the problem, but created a need -

00:50:58.600 --> 00:51:01.600
- to rethink the fundamental norms,
not abandon free speech -

00:51:01.720 --> 00:51:07.040
- but rethink the way we think
about it against the new technology.

00:51:15.000 --> 00:51:18.240
What do we know about
the regime before the new technology?

00:51:18.360 --> 00:51:23.560
We know that there was curation,
and we were actually okay with that.

00:51:23.680 --> 00:51:28.240
Now, the reduction of the cost enables
every individual to get their speech out -

00:51:28.360 --> 00:51:33.160
- and the realization that with that comes
a cost that we still need to avoid.

00:51:33.280 --> 00:51:37.280
- How would you articulate that cost?
- It's the undermining of democracy.

00:51:37.400 --> 00:51:43.360
Through the ability of anybody
with any crazy idea to push it out there.

00:51:44.880 --> 00:51:50.680
We have the option of regulation, finding
some place to restore the curation -

00:51:50.800 --> 00:51:54.800
- and/or of increasing the difficulty
of getting to certain kinds of speech.

00:51:54.920 --> 00:51:58.000
We can think of strategies
that makes all of them -

00:51:58.120 --> 00:52:01.560
- of which government regulation
remains the least desirable -

00:52:01.680 --> 00:52:04.480
- and also the hardest
to persuade people about...

00:52:04.600 --> 00:52:09.360
We can attack at the point of technology.
The heart of this is the platforms.

00:52:11.760 --> 00:52:16.320
- So we should break them up.
- But is that splitting the Hydra's heads?

00:52:16.440 --> 00:52:20.640
There's different ways to do it.
One simple way would be to say...

00:52:20.760 --> 00:52:23.240
We're really just talking
Facebook and Twitter.

00:52:23.360 --> 00:52:26.840
You say, you cannot be both
a social network and a news feed.

00:52:26.960 --> 00:52:29.920
You have to break those
into two separate, unrelated businesses.

00:52:30.040 --> 00:52:36.040
So the news feed won't through the social
network pass them any piece of crap.

00:52:36.160 --> 00:52:39.440
They're going to have to choose
the things that they look for.

00:52:39.560 --> 00:52:44.880
Second thing that I'd do would be to say,
you just can't use advertising.

00:52:45.000 --> 00:52:47.800
That doesn't violate
current free speech norms -

00:52:47.920 --> 00:52:52.000
- and it would deprive one of the
chief incentives and growth developers -

00:52:52.120 --> 00:52:55.360
- for the kind of crazy speech
that we get.

00:52:55.480 --> 00:53:01.720
We also have to change the algorithms,
we need to inject serendipity -

00:53:01.840 --> 00:53:06.240
- because how we form ourselves as human
beings and how we learn about the world -

00:53:06.360 --> 00:53:10.840
- is to a great extent by chance
interactions with places and people.

00:53:10.960 --> 00:53:14.880
So we have to put that back
into cyberspace -

00:53:15.000 --> 00:53:18.400
- because the algorithms thrive
on making echo chambers.

00:53:18.520 --> 00:53:24.560
I agree. The way I think about it is
the platforms are already curating -

00:53:24.680 --> 00:53:28.960
- based on their assumptions
about what they think you want -

00:53:29.080 --> 00:53:32.120
- and as a result
are feeding you something.

00:53:32.240 --> 00:53:36.760
My idea is, they don't make those choices
for us. You have to make your own choices.

00:53:36.880 --> 00:53:41.520
I think it's a huge mistake not to impose
the same things with Google.

00:53:41.640 --> 00:53:45.520
If they want to be so big,
they must release their algorithms.

00:53:45.640 --> 00:53:48.840
We have to be able as individuals
to go in and say -

00:53:48.960 --> 00:53:54.320
- do we want to have a neutral view
or a view that is completely cut?

00:53:54.440 --> 00:53:58.600
Agreed. So Twitter, Google and Facebook
are the three big ones.

00:54:07.920 --> 00:54:10.280
Tech companies are waking up -

00:54:10.400 --> 00:54:14.560
- to the potentially harmful consequences
of their products -

00:54:14.680 --> 00:54:18.400
- but they are corporations,
whose primary function is -

00:54:18.520 --> 00:54:21.840
- to make money for their shareholders.

00:54:21.960 --> 00:54:27.080
And that's a structural fact
that is going to make it difficult -

00:54:27.200 --> 00:54:31.280
- if we researchers find out that
the problem is their business model.

00:54:31.400 --> 00:54:37.080
So there may be some
tough impasses ahead.

00:54:55.400 --> 00:55:00.200
It's a fantastic experiment, but we should
realize that it is an experiment.

00:55:00.320 --> 00:55:03.640
We've been experimenting with society.

00:55:03.760 --> 00:55:07.720
I'm grateful to Facebook and Twitter. In
a way, they've done something fantastic.

00:55:10.160 --> 00:55:15.160
But on the other hand,
I think we need to recognize that...

00:55:16.280 --> 00:55:22.120
Well... how should I put this?
I'm trying to choose my words carefully.

00:55:22.240 --> 00:55:24.280
But my impression is -

00:55:24.400 --> 00:55:27.240
- that we've all made a really big mistake.

00:56:39.320 --> 00:56:44.160
What's new is the scale,
the speed of all these problems.

00:56:44.280 --> 00:56:48.040
So, do we have the time needed -

00:56:48.160 --> 00:56:51.280
- to vet all the possible
unintended consequences -

00:56:51.400 --> 00:56:55.560
- or do some of these problems need
to be acted on very quickly?

00:56:55.680 --> 00:56:59.000
I'm thinking of climate change and
the weather patterns we've been seeing -

00:56:59.120 --> 00:57:03.760
- and data that's beginning to suggest
that the Paris Accords were -

00:57:03.880 --> 00:57:08.920
- probably too weak, if anything.
And yet we see very little action.

00:57:13.720 --> 00:57:15.520
This time, if we get it wrong -

00:57:15.640 --> 00:57:19.640
- it won't just be a matter of adjustment
locally, it'll be a global problem.

00:57:19.760 --> 00:57:25.400
So the challenge is to make sure that
the 195 countries in the Paris Accords -

00:57:25.520 --> 00:57:29.920
- actually do do something
about carbon change fairly quickly -

00:57:30.040 --> 00:57:34.560
- so that the next two or three
generations are not living -

00:57:34.680 --> 00:57:37.160
- in a world that is so hot -

00:57:37.280 --> 00:57:41.760
- that agriculture breaks down, new
diseases appear, cities are flooded etc.

00:57:47.840 --> 00:57:53.000
The first thing the CO2 does, among other
things, it traps the heat from the sun -

00:57:53.120 --> 00:57:57.320
- and as a consequence of that,
the planet is getting warmer.

00:57:57.440 --> 00:57:59.480
Historically speaking, it's a good thing.

00:57:59.600 --> 00:58:03.640
Without CO2 in the atmosphere
we'd be living on a snowball earth.

00:58:03.760 --> 00:58:07.640
So we need a certain amount of CO2
in the atmosphere.

00:58:07.760 --> 00:58:11.760
And we have wobbled between
180 ppm during the ice ages -

00:58:11.880 --> 00:58:17.720
- to 280 ppm when out of the ice ages.
And we have now pushed that up.

00:58:17.840 --> 00:58:21.120
By now we have crossed
the 400-ppm mark -

00:58:21.240 --> 00:58:26.680
- and we're going up about 2.5 ppm a year.
There's no question that we're doing that.

00:58:33.280 --> 00:58:35.840
The pain comes after it's long too late -

00:58:35.960 --> 00:58:39.560
- because there is
a 50-60-year, if not longer, delay -

00:58:39.680 --> 00:58:42.720
- between having put
the greenhouse gases in their place -

00:58:42.840 --> 00:58:44.920
- and the oceans having warmed up.

00:58:45.040 --> 00:58:48.840
Just because we got to 400 ppm,
we haven't experienced that world yet.

00:58:57.880 --> 00:59:03.440
Energy is a large player in the system. We
do need a brand-new energy infrastructure.

00:59:03.560 --> 00:59:07.000
I don't think we can just
fix the one we have.

00:59:07.120 --> 00:59:10.840
And it better be affordable,
clean, carbon-neutral -

00:59:10.960 --> 00:59:15.240
- and not introduce its own new set
of environmental issues.

00:59:15.360 --> 00:59:19.800
Solar energy is by far our best hope.
It's getting cheaper and cheaper -

00:59:19.920 --> 00:59:25.080
- but we must overcome the inherent
intermittency issues we have.

00:59:25.880 --> 00:59:28.120
With energy, we need to do three things.

00:59:28.240 --> 00:59:31.720
We need to extract it. That could be
a solar panel, that could be a coal mine.

00:59:31.840 --> 00:59:35.760
We need to convert it into a useful form.

00:59:35.880 --> 00:59:41.040
And we have to clean up after ourselves.
I argue these are roughly three thirds.

00:59:41.160 --> 00:59:44.960
So far, we've taken the point of view that
we can just dump it in the atmosphere.

00:59:45.080 --> 00:59:47.560
The atmosphere is big and can handle it.

00:59:47.680 --> 00:59:50.680
And then we found out
the atmosphere is not big enough.

00:59:50.800 --> 00:59:55.480
This is the same story
we had with sewage in the 19th century.

00:59:55.600 --> 00:59:59.840
People said, "Well, a little bit of slop
hasn't hurt anybody yet." Well...

01:00:04.880 --> 01:00:11.080
We need to stop at 450 ppm,
which is the goal set by the IPCC.

01:00:11.200 --> 01:00:15.640
You can think of this as a translation
of the 2-degree warming.

01:00:21.560 --> 01:00:27.440
At current trends, we are about
17 years away from hitting 450 ppm.

01:00:27.560 --> 01:00:33.640
Now, we say it would be nice if we could
reduce and recycle it, but if we fail -

01:00:33.760 --> 01:00:38.480
- dumping it in the atmosphere is
acceptable, and we have to stop that.

01:00:40.240 --> 01:00:43.960
This is a key point. To stabilize at any
temperature, we have to get to net zero.

01:00:44.080 --> 01:00:46.960
And that's what got me started.
When I started...

01:00:47.080 --> 01:00:51.040
This was in the early '90s and climate
models weren't all that good yet.

01:00:51.160 --> 01:00:57.000
I said, "I don't really care whether
the number is 350, 450, 550 or even 750."

01:00:57.120 --> 01:00:59.560
We need to stop.

01:01:02.280 --> 01:01:06.120
And the change I have right now is
we're already in an overshoot -

01:01:06.240 --> 01:01:10.520
- and we will have to bend the curve
back down at the end.

01:01:10.640 --> 01:01:13.760
I think that overshoot is about 100 ppm.

01:01:13.880 --> 01:01:19.280
That is more CO2 than was
emitted in the 20th century.

01:01:21.720 --> 01:01:24.080
So even if I could stop overnight -

01:01:24.200 --> 01:01:27.560
- you have a very serious
residual carbon dioxide problem.

01:01:27.680 --> 01:01:31.640
The fact that I cannot stop overnight
will make it even harder.

01:01:31.760 --> 01:01:35.120
We have an enormous
sequestration effort in front of us -

01:01:35.240 --> 01:01:38.840
- and it's not a question of whether
we like carbon sequestration.

01:01:38.960 --> 01:01:42.960
We gave up on that option
in the 1980s and '90s -

01:01:43.080 --> 01:01:46.440
- because we decided
not to do anything.

01:01:48.800 --> 01:01:51.640
We have littered the atmosphere
with so much carbon -

01:01:51.760 --> 01:01:55.240
- that we have to clean up
after what we already did.

01:01:55.360 --> 01:02:00.440
One central technology to make this work,
not the only one, but one -

01:02:00.560 --> 01:02:04.120
- is the ability to pull CO2
back out of the air.

01:02:04.240 --> 01:02:08.320
We are grossly underestimating what
it will take to stabilize these things.

01:02:08.440 --> 01:02:13.440
If people say we need to have 3-4 gigatons
of negative emissions per year -

01:02:13.560 --> 01:02:16.680
- that's wishful thinking.

01:02:16.800 --> 01:02:18.960
Okay.

01:02:27.480 --> 01:02:32.000
You can ask: "How could I get the carbon
dioxide back out of the environment?"

01:02:32.120 --> 01:02:35.840
You have three options.
You either get it from the biomass.

01:02:35.960 --> 01:02:41.520
You're growing things and photosynthesis
picks CO2 out of the air. And it works.

01:02:41.640 --> 01:02:44.480
But you'd have to dedicate more area -

01:02:44.600 --> 01:02:48.920
- than we currently have dedicated
to agriculture. That sets the scale.

01:02:49.040 --> 01:02:54.240
I'm not telling you we shouldn't do that.
In a portfolio, it will play a part of it.

01:02:54.360 --> 01:02:59.520
Secondly, you could collect CO2 from the
ocean. There are some fundamental issues.

01:02:59.640 --> 01:03:04.840
You are hidden behind 25,000 molecules
of water for every molecule of CO2 -

01:03:04.960 --> 01:03:09.240
- whereas in the air,
the 400 ppm translates into 1 in 2,500.

01:03:09.360 --> 01:03:14.440
I think from a technological perspective,
your best bet is the atmosphere.

01:03:17.240 --> 01:03:22.040
Yes, we know we can do that because
in a submarine, people do this routinely.

01:03:22.160 --> 01:03:25.560
In a spacecraft,
people will do that routinely.

01:03:25.680 --> 01:03:31.640
The challenge is not can we do it, but can
we do it at a price the world can afford?

01:03:33.200 --> 01:03:37.680
If we keep it at $500 a ton,
that's an economic collapse.

01:03:37.800 --> 01:03:40.720
If we can get it to $50 a ton -

01:03:40.840 --> 01:03:44.080
- the world will hardly notice
that it had to fix it.

01:03:44.200 --> 01:03:47.720
If we can get down to $100 a ton,
we start looking interesting -

01:03:47.840 --> 01:03:51.320
- and I think we are
within striking distance.

01:03:51.440 --> 01:03:54.480
Any technology people have
is sorbent-based.

01:03:54.600 --> 01:03:56.800
What's sorbent?

01:03:56.920 --> 01:04:01.080
You have something which binds the CO2
as it flows over it.

01:04:01.200 --> 01:04:03.640
Our absorbent has
the remarkable features -

01:04:03.760 --> 01:04:07.280
- that when it's dry, it loves CO2.
When it's wet, it doesn't.

01:04:07.400 --> 01:04:10.240
This thing has air blowing through it.

01:04:10.360 --> 01:04:15.360
With our current design, in
about 20 minutes, it's soaked. It's full.

01:04:15.480 --> 01:04:20.760
It now collapses into this box.
We spray water in.

01:04:20.880 --> 01:04:24.680
Now it's moist and the air inside
will enrich itself with CO2.

01:04:24.800 --> 01:04:27.720
Then I have pumps
and compressors taking it out.

01:04:30.920 --> 01:04:34.840
The recapturing process figure
is roughly 1/3 extra.

01:04:34.960 --> 01:04:36.720
- A what?
- 1/3 extra.

01:04:36.840 --> 01:04:39.360
Your energy consumption is 1/3 larger -

01:04:39.480 --> 01:04:42.560
- than if you had ignored the problem
in the first place.

01:04:42.680 --> 01:04:48.680
You're saying that
it'll cost us 33% extra energy -

01:04:48.800 --> 01:04:52.280
- to have a system
where you take care of the carbon?

01:04:52.400 --> 01:04:57.320
Yes, if you want to clean up
after yourself, you will need energy.

01:04:58.760 --> 01:05:03.520
What's it look like when you get
some carbon? Is it a liquid?

01:05:03.640 --> 01:05:08.480
It's CO2 gas. You can compress it
to 100 atmospheres, then it's a liquid.

01:05:08.600 --> 01:05:12.400
So you get CO2 gas,
you compress it to a liquid.

01:05:12.520 --> 01:05:16.960
- Then you stick that liquid somewhere.
- You pipeline that to an oil well.

01:05:17.080 --> 01:05:21.600
- You can't convert it to a solid?
- Yes. That's mineral carbonate.

01:05:21.720 --> 01:05:24.240
We could be in Morocco
where you have basalt -

01:05:24.360 --> 01:05:28.280
- and we could inject the CO2
into the basalt formations -

01:05:28.400 --> 01:05:34.080
- and permanently form solid carbonates
underground, which put the CO2 away.

01:05:36.280 --> 01:05:42.240
You need 60 m2 of frontal area of these.
Think of these things, this wide -

01:05:42.360 --> 01:05:45.440
- this tall, when they are closed,
about 8 m tall.

01:05:45.560 --> 01:05:49.600
So you need about a dozen of them
to fill into a shipping container.

01:05:49.720 --> 01:05:52.920
That would give you a ton of CO2 a day.

01:05:54.720 --> 01:05:57.160
And we want 36 gigatons a year.

01:05:57.280 --> 01:06:02.200
Now, you would need 100 million shipping
containers to knock the CO2 back off.

01:06:03.760 --> 01:06:07.160
If you look at a car engine,
it costs about $10 a kilowatt.

01:06:07.280 --> 01:06:10.280
A power plant costs
$1,000 a kilowatt.

01:06:10.400 --> 01:06:14.680
So the mass production of the car engine,
we argue, is what makes it so cheap.

01:06:14.800 --> 01:06:20.000
So I see us not building
very huge collectors, but instead -

01:06:20.120 --> 01:06:23.680
- building collectors
on the ton-a-day scale.

01:06:28.320 --> 01:06:31.000
We build 80 million cars
and trucks a year -

01:06:31.120 --> 01:06:35.680
- and Shanghai Harbour sends out
30 million filled containers a year.

01:06:35.800 --> 01:06:39.800
So clearly, industrial production
can reach these scales -

01:06:39.920 --> 01:06:43.000
- without getting
completely bent out of shape.

01:06:43.120 --> 01:06:47.920
So I'm arguing this is
a very large scale, no doubt about it -

01:06:48.040 --> 01:06:53.440
- but it's also a very large problem, so
you have to operate at a very large scale.

01:06:53.560 --> 01:06:56.600
On the other hand,
the scale is not so prohibitively large -

01:06:56.720 --> 01:07:00.120
- that you would throw up your arms and
say, we've never done anything like that.

01:07:00.240 --> 01:07:03.400
Yes, we are doing things
on this scale routinely.

01:07:03.520 --> 01:07:04.880
One more point.

01:07:05.000 --> 01:07:10.440
Once you have it, it will take
40 years to pull things back down.

01:07:12.680 --> 01:07:15.840
We have to come
to a societal agreement -

01:07:15.960 --> 01:07:20.440
- that if you want to use
a ton of fossil fuel carbon -

01:07:20.560 --> 01:07:24.120
- you'd better put a ton away,
and it is certified that you did that.

01:07:24.240 --> 01:07:27.760
Governments could buy
these certificates of sequestration -

01:07:27.880 --> 01:07:30.040
- off the market and void them.

01:07:30.160 --> 01:07:34.600
The moment they did that,
you have a true negative emission.

01:07:39.400 --> 01:07:44.480
Today, the polluter is the one
who has control over fixing the problem.

01:07:44.600 --> 01:07:49.240
If you have air capture, they lost
that control. You can now say:

01:07:49.360 --> 01:07:53.800
"If you don't want to fix it, we'll fix it
for you and we'll send you the bill."

01:07:53.920 --> 01:07:56.920
You'd be surprised how fast that
power plant operator would figure out -

01:07:57.040 --> 01:08:01.840
- that they internally themselves
can fix this problem much faster.

01:08:01.960 --> 01:08:05.840
So I would argue
we're actually not slowing down action.

01:08:05.960 --> 01:08:11.840
By democratizing the process of doing it,
taking it away from the polluters -

01:08:11.960 --> 01:08:16.760
- we actually will accelerate
the process rather significantly.

01:09:09.880 --> 01:09:13.320
One useful way to deal
with a lot of these things is -

01:09:13.440 --> 01:09:18.080
- pricing externalities back
into the deal, and for example -

01:09:18.200 --> 01:09:23.000
- carbon emission rules
paying for education through taxes.

01:09:23.120 --> 01:09:26.200
It's subsidizing care work -

01:09:26.320 --> 01:09:31.520
- and it's putting extra taxes on sugar
because of the health burdens it creates.

01:09:41.840 --> 01:09:48.240
I met the manager of Rite Aid,
nice, old gent, a few years ago.

01:09:48.360 --> 01:09:50.160
So I asked this guy:

01:09:50.280 --> 01:09:55.640
"Ever considered not selling cigarettes
since you're a healthcare company?"

01:09:55.760 --> 01:09:59.640
And he said, "Young lady..."

01:09:59.760 --> 01:10:03.560
Yes. Thank you.
That was really nice, wasn't it?

01:10:03.680 --> 01:10:09.200
He said, "You and your friends need to get
the balls to make the government stop us -

01:10:09.320 --> 01:10:12.720
- because we are not going
to do it unilaterally."

01:10:12.840 --> 01:10:17.200
In many cases, corporations
would be happy to be regulated -

01:10:17.320 --> 01:10:20.760
- as long as you regulate the competition.

01:10:22.720 --> 01:10:27.520
I got to hear Paul Polman, CEO of
Unilever, and the first thing he said is:

01:10:27.640 --> 01:10:33.280
"I am deeply committed for the sake
of my grandchildren to sustainability."

01:10:33.400 --> 01:10:38.960
I promise you, there are lots and lots of
CEOs of very, very large corporations -

01:10:39.080 --> 01:10:42.840
- who can't wait to be regulated,
to be forced -

01:10:42.960 --> 01:10:47.560
- by a changing regulatory environment
into more sustainable policies.

01:10:47.680 --> 01:10:51.320
Don't expect them to go public on this -

01:10:51.440 --> 01:10:55.760
- because they have to cope with
their own boards and shareholders as well.

01:10:55.880 --> 01:10:58.440
But they are waiting for that moment.

01:11:00.960 --> 01:11:06.880
Corporations are so multinational, they're
gluing parts of the Earth together.

01:11:07.000 --> 01:11:12.160
The problem is regulating them, because
regulations now are largely a local thing.

01:11:12.280 --> 01:11:15.040
On the other hand, there is
some power of governments to say:

01:11:15.160 --> 01:11:18.840
"If you want to do business in my country,
you've got to obey this standard."

01:11:18.960 --> 01:11:24.160
Actually, it's kind of worse than that,
because the countries usually say:

01:11:24.280 --> 01:11:27.480
"Come to our country and hire some people,
and we'll lower your taxes."

01:11:27.600 --> 01:11:34.800
With the European Commission, we tried the
last few years to get tax laws unified -

01:11:34.920 --> 01:11:40.040
- and of course,
Luxembourg and Ireland opposed.

01:11:40.160 --> 01:11:44.080
So only some lame language
could actually be passed.

01:11:44.200 --> 01:11:48.880
I've come to a radical position that
the corporate tax system is unfixable.

01:11:50.160 --> 01:11:55.000
Corporations will always have more
lobbying power than government can resist.

01:11:55.120 --> 01:11:59.160
Instead we should focus on
actually taxing capital quite directly -

01:11:59.280 --> 01:12:05.520
- because all corporations are owned
generally by the 1% or even the 0.1%.

01:12:05.640 --> 01:12:08.480
We know who they are.
We know where they live.

01:12:08.600 --> 01:12:13.240
We've seen governments figuring out
where their assets are, if they want to.

01:12:13.360 --> 01:12:16.240
Almost all of our tax burden is on labor -

01:12:16.360 --> 01:12:19.360
- and in this technological world,
that does not make sense.

01:12:19.480 --> 01:12:23.120
So actually taxing the largely
dead capital of 100,000 people -

01:12:23.240 --> 01:12:27.400
- sitting in the Cayman Islands
or wherever is much simpler -

01:12:27.520 --> 01:12:31.040
- than trying to sort out
the international shell games -

01:12:31.160 --> 01:12:34.200
- that Apple
or all these other companies play.

01:12:34.320 --> 01:12:38.480
It creates incentive to use the capital.
Otherwise it costs you money to hold it.

01:12:38.600 --> 01:12:41.520
Exactly. And it never touches
the real economy.

01:12:41.640 --> 01:12:45.320
5% of GDP.
5% of GDP.

01:12:45.440 --> 01:12:50.840
When you map it out, you see
these loops of money sloshing around -

01:12:50.960 --> 01:12:55.040
- that never touch the real economy,
that are enriching people in the top 1%.

01:12:55.160 --> 01:12:58.720
The people who take the little bit off
the top of no-value creation.

01:12:58.840 --> 01:13:02.920
Take a little off the top
of a big river, it's a lot.

01:13:54.560 --> 01:13:58.400
Inequality has increased
dramatically since the '70s -

01:13:58.520 --> 01:14:03.920
- so the wealth that's been created
has not been shared significantly -

01:14:04.040 --> 01:14:08.560
- because of ideologies like the one
that's currently in power -

01:14:08.680 --> 01:14:12.800
- that if you cut taxes for the rich,
they'll make more stuff -

01:14:12.920 --> 01:14:16.960
- and then it'll all trickle down
to the poor. But that hasn't happened.

01:14:35.160 --> 01:14:41.040
The way in which modern economies
have characterized growth in the West -

01:14:41.160 --> 01:14:46.400
- or globally since the '40s was GDP,
which is a measure of output...

01:14:46.520 --> 01:14:51.840
How many cars we make and all this stuff.
It's not a horrible proxy for growth.

01:14:51.960 --> 01:14:55.160
But as the economy has evolved,
it's gotten worse and worse.

01:14:55.280 --> 01:14:58.400
There are a bunch of
fundamental problems with it.

01:14:58.520 --> 01:15:04.720
One of the fundamental problems of it is
that it does not account for inequality.

01:15:07.320 --> 01:15:09.800
It is possible to have GDP rise -

01:15:09.920 --> 01:15:13.720
- where a few people at the top are
the beneficiaries of all that growth -

01:15:13.840 --> 01:15:15.760
- and everybody else loses.

01:15:15.880 --> 01:15:19.320
So if you look at the GDP statistics,
it looks like things are going great.

01:15:19.440 --> 01:15:24.040
But if you examine the actual experience
of the typical person -

01:15:24.160 --> 01:15:28.560
- things are getting worse,
and this is happening in most of the West.

01:15:28.680 --> 01:15:30.880
The other thing about GDP is -

01:15:31.000 --> 01:15:36.240
- it doesn't capture any externalities
like pollution and stuff like that.

01:15:36.360 --> 01:15:43.000
And it characterizes outputs
but not outcomes in terms of welfare.

01:15:45.960 --> 01:15:49.120
There's been a lot of good research
about what people care about.

01:15:49.240 --> 01:15:54.240
Do they actually care about inequality?
Does it matter to anybody but economists?

01:15:54.360 --> 01:15:59.680
The answer is they do have
a set of values around meritocracy.

01:15:59.800 --> 01:16:03.600
People get what they deserve,
a fairness of process -

01:16:03.720 --> 01:16:08.720
- that the process itself leads
to fair outcomes.

01:16:08.840 --> 01:16:14.440
Inequality can be a signal of an unfair
process and also of a fair process.

01:16:14.560 --> 01:16:17.280
Bill Gates is really rich.
Are you disturbed by that?

01:16:17.400 --> 01:16:21.880
Most people would say he did something
useful in a meritocratic process.

01:16:22.000 --> 01:16:25.840
Is some shady hedge fund manager
who made a lot of money during the crisis?

01:16:25.960 --> 01:16:28.040
Well, probably not.

01:16:28.160 --> 01:16:33.360
It's important to ground these discussions
in stuff and values people care about.

01:16:33.480 --> 01:16:38.160
It then bridges into: How do you
construct a new social contract -

01:16:38.280 --> 01:16:41.880
- that people would broadly view
as fair and ethical?

01:16:43.520 --> 01:16:48.600
For the Americans in the room
it's worth just reflecting -

01:16:48.720 --> 01:16:52.160
- that if you care about reproductive
rights, there's a brand for you.

01:16:52.280 --> 01:16:55.320
If you care about animal rights,
there's a brand for you.

01:16:55.440 --> 01:16:58.040
If you care about civil rights,
there's a brand for you.

01:16:58.160 --> 01:17:01.560
If you care about the rights
of old people, there's a brand for you.

01:17:01.680 --> 01:17:06.120
If you care about the baby seals
or the whales or, you know, you pick it -

01:17:06.240 --> 01:17:09.520
- there's a go-to organization
that represents your interests.

01:17:09.640 --> 01:17:11.680
Gun rights, everything.

01:17:11.800 --> 01:17:16.880
When Trump's administration pushed through
a $1.5-trillion tax cut for the rich -

01:17:17.000 --> 01:17:20.200
- who did Americans turn to? No one.

01:17:20.920 --> 01:17:24.000
No one.
There was no organizing to counter that.

01:17:24.120 --> 01:17:26.280
And that's why it got pushed through.

01:17:27.640 --> 01:17:30.960
The median family in America earns
$59,000 a year.

01:17:31.080 --> 01:17:37.480
If they'd been held harmless by inequality
since 1980, they'd earn $86,000.

01:17:37.600 --> 01:17:40.640
If they'd fully participated
in productivity growth -

01:17:40.760 --> 01:17:43.520
- they would earn $101,000.

01:17:43.640 --> 01:17:47.920
Let me underscore this point. The nation
owes the median family a raise -

01:17:48.040 --> 01:17:52.280
- of $25,000-40,000 a year.
It's a lot of money.

01:17:53.920 --> 01:17:56.360
So in very conservative terms -

01:17:56.480 --> 01:18:02.240
- $2 trillion per year that used to flow
to wages for ordinary Americans -

01:18:02.360 --> 01:18:07.840
- now basically has been
captured by economic elites.

01:18:09.160 --> 01:18:12.520
That gap is why people are so pissed off.

01:18:20.960 --> 01:18:25.600
In the '70s, 65% of American workers
were entitled to overtime.

01:18:25.720 --> 01:18:29.000
Today, it's 7% -

01:18:29.120 --> 01:18:32.520
- because if you're paid more
than $23,600 a year -

01:18:32.640 --> 01:18:36.680
- they can throw you
a fake title like assistant manager -

01:18:36.800 --> 01:18:40.840
- and make you work 78 hours a week
and not pay you overtime.

01:18:40.960 --> 01:18:45.160
Forget your family life. Forget
raising your kids. Forget all that.

01:18:45.280 --> 01:18:49.880
That part of a dignified life goes down
the tubes. But the most insidious thing -

01:18:50.000 --> 01:18:55.640
- and the thing that some of us
in this room built a career on -

01:18:55.760 --> 01:19:01.560
- is getting two people to do the job of
three by making them work 60 hours a week.

01:19:01.680 --> 01:19:03.960
Something I did my whole career.

01:19:04.080 --> 01:19:07.720
If you do that 60 million times
across an economy -

01:19:07.840 --> 01:19:10.840
- you pull 20 million jobs
out of the economy.

01:19:13.480 --> 01:19:18.800
I spent 20 years at McKinsey
doing that stuff, and it really worked.

01:19:18.920 --> 01:19:22.000
We really changed the way companies ran.

01:19:22.120 --> 01:19:25.960
A disturbing aspect of what's
happened over the last four decades -

01:19:26.080 --> 01:19:30.400
- has been the gutting of middle-class,
again, particularly in the US -

01:19:30.520 --> 01:19:35.520
- from an economic standpoint, but also
from a political power standpoint.

01:19:35.640 --> 01:19:39.880
We've seen growing dysfunction in
our democracy and on representativeness.

01:19:40.000 --> 01:19:45.440
And so we've been excluding people
both economically and politically.

01:19:45.560 --> 01:19:48.560
That's a poisonous combination.

01:20:14.760 --> 01:20:19.640
So far, the way we learn economically
about economic organization -

01:20:19.760 --> 01:20:23.360
- is we do an experiment,
you know, we try out Marxism.

01:20:23.480 --> 01:20:26.360
That was a long, painful experiment.

01:20:34.280 --> 01:20:40.000
Here, we tried Milton Friedman-style
free-market capitalism and deregulation -

01:20:40.120 --> 01:20:45.120
- and the 2008 crisis is a clear lesson
that that doesn't work.

01:20:45.240 --> 01:20:49.320
Unfortunately,
that lesson hasn't been absorbed.

01:20:50.600 --> 01:20:54.560
These trends are true in every developing
country but to differing degrees.

01:20:54.680 --> 01:20:59.320
- Inequality is rising in every country.
-There's a bit of nuance to this.

01:20:59.440 --> 01:21:03.920
The US is the psycho case
and Britain is a close second.

01:21:04.040 --> 01:21:07.720
There's a spectrum where some countries
have experienced rising inequality -

01:21:07.840 --> 01:21:11.200
- others stagnant wages,
others declining social mobility.

01:21:11.320 --> 01:21:15.440
But only the US has experienced all three.
There's a strong correlation between -

01:21:15.560 --> 01:21:20.760
- the strength of these effects and how
much they drank the neoliberal Kool-Aid.

01:21:20.880 --> 01:21:25.840
There's no question that the embrace of
Milton, what we now call neoliberalism...

01:21:25.960 --> 01:21:31.120
- Although they hate that phrase,
- What do they call it? Just free markets?

01:21:31.240 --> 01:21:37.360
They just call it economics. The law
and economics movement in law schools.

01:21:50.680 --> 01:21:53.560
Neoliberalism is the story
we've told ourselves -

01:21:53.680 --> 01:21:58.320
- which has enabled a small group
of people to capture all the progress.

01:21:58.440 --> 01:22:01.880
And the story is relatively new -

01:22:02.000 --> 01:22:05.480
- 30 or 40 years old,
and the story contains bits -

01:22:05.600 --> 01:22:09.000
- like the only purpose of the corporation
is to enrich shareholders -

01:22:09.120 --> 01:22:15.760
- which today is accepted
by really smart people that I know.

01:22:15.880 --> 01:22:20.000
As... you know,
as true in the same way that -

01:22:20.120 --> 01:22:25.280
- force equals mass times acceleration is
considered true. And it was just made up.

01:22:25.400 --> 01:22:29.920
It's a moral law about how we arrange
the status and privileges in a society.

01:22:30.040 --> 01:22:35.000
So killing that idea and replacing it
with something better is essential -

01:22:35.120 --> 01:22:39.440
- if you're going to have
the kind of society you want to have.

01:22:46.400 --> 01:22:51.200
Capitalism enables people
to have private ownership of things.

01:22:51.320 --> 01:22:55.560
But it doesn't imply that there should be
no rules governing those arrangements -

01:22:55.680 --> 01:22:59.600
- and that the rich should
be able to exploit the poor.

01:22:59.720 --> 01:23:05.360
And that arrangement, we characterize
as neoliberalism, is essentially a way -

01:23:05.480 --> 01:23:12.120
- that consolidates power and wealth
at the top while excluding other people.

01:23:12.240 --> 01:23:18.880
And that's a political arrangement. That's
not a necessity of the economic system.

01:23:19.000 --> 01:23:22.000
Neoliberalism is a movement
about ideas -

01:23:22.120 --> 01:23:26.000
- and it's not directly focused
on immediate social action.

01:23:26.120 --> 01:23:31.800
It's a belief that if we can change ideas,
we can change the world.

01:23:33.760 --> 01:23:38.520
Ideas are kind of like the operating
system of our politics and economy.

01:23:38.640 --> 01:23:42.680
When you use your computer,
you're not aware of the operating system -

01:23:42.800 --> 01:23:46.320
- but it's back there shaping
and controlling everything.

01:23:46.440 --> 01:23:49.640
Our intellectual frameworks
play a similar role.

01:23:49.760 --> 01:23:53.040
The ideas that we had
based off of neoclassical economics -

01:23:53.160 --> 01:23:58.240
- and neoliberal political ideology
really took off in the '70s and '80s.

01:23:58.360 --> 01:24:04.520
They caused politicians and
business leaders to think differently -

01:24:04.640 --> 01:24:09.560
- about how the economy worked and that
caused them to take different actions.

01:24:09.680 --> 01:24:11.720
The neoliberal paradigm is sophisticated -

01:24:11.840 --> 01:24:15.120
- but you can boil it down
to three core propositions.

01:24:15.240 --> 01:24:19.840
One, that the best way to conceptualize
society is atomized individuals -

01:24:19.960 --> 01:24:22.920
- competing rationally
to maximize their own utility.

01:24:23.040 --> 01:24:25.320
At the other end of the spectrum,
you believe that -

01:24:25.440 --> 01:24:29.080
- the best measure of success for
your society is wealth measured by GDP.

01:24:29.200 --> 01:24:32.920
Believing those two things,
you have third, a program -

01:24:33.040 --> 01:24:37.200
- which is the proper role for government,
essentially to encase markets.

01:24:37.320 --> 01:24:40.160
Because free markets are the best way
for atomized individuals -

01:24:40.280 --> 01:24:44.160
- competing to maximize
their self-interest to generate wealth.

01:24:44.280 --> 01:24:47.360
The neoliberal paradigm had
a profound effect in shaping -

01:24:47.480 --> 01:24:52.000
- what we did all across the board,
whether it's trade policy -

01:24:52.120 --> 01:24:57.080
- industrial policy, labor policy, welfare
policy. Colonized field after field.

01:24:57.200 --> 01:25:00.040
The law schools are completely captured
by law and economics.

01:25:00.160 --> 01:25:04.960
So, the neoliberals reshaped
the entire globe.

01:25:09.240 --> 01:25:14.000
We're at a moment today much like the
post-Great Depression and the early 1970s -

01:25:14.120 --> 01:25:19.520
- in the sense that we're dealing with a
world which feels like it's coming apart -

01:25:19.640 --> 01:25:24.160
- for reasons that are related to,
though not all exclusively attributable -

01:25:24.280 --> 01:25:28.000
- to the product of this set of ideas.

01:25:28.120 --> 01:25:33.120
Is this because the paradigm is going out
of date or because the world is changing?

01:25:33.240 --> 01:25:34.560
I think it's both.

01:25:34.680 --> 01:25:39.280
So one of the tendencies of a political
economy that's focused around markets -

01:25:39.400 --> 01:25:42.480
- is to generate wealth inequality.

01:25:42.600 --> 01:25:45.680
In the '70s and '80s,
that was not that big a deal -

01:25:45.800 --> 01:25:48.000
- because we were at a historic low
for wealth inequality.

01:25:48.120 --> 01:25:52.720
It didn't happen precipitously fast and it
seemed to be solving problems for people.

01:25:52.840 --> 01:25:55.160
But by today, it's a big problem.

01:25:55.280 --> 01:25:59.200
People are really aware of it. It's a
generator of enormous social tensions -

01:25:59.320 --> 01:26:02.080
- all across the way
and through different lenses.

01:26:02.200 --> 01:26:05.440
The neoliberal paradigm doesn't have great
answers to it. Even the progressive side.

01:26:05.560 --> 01:26:12.600
The global free trade regime that was
accelerated by it has produced benefits -

01:26:12.720 --> 01:26:15.840
- but also a set of tensions they don't
have answers to within that paradigm.

01:26:15.960 --> 01:26:20.400
And then the biggest one, which is the
coming wave of AI automation technology -

01:26:20.520 --> 01:26:24.760
- is just upending the workplace, and
the neoliberal paradigm is essentially:

01:26:24.880 --> 01:26:29.560
"We're just going to allow this massive
further shift from labor to capital."

01:26:29.680 --> 01:26:34.680
There's no good answers
within this paradigm.

01:26:38.480 --> 01:26:41.520
A key part of this is changing education.

01:26:41.640 --> 01:26:44.920
The next generation of leaders need be
better taught than those we have now.

01:26:45.040 --> 01:26:48.080
They need to not be taught
this neoliberal paradigm.

01:26:48.200 --> 01:26:51.600
The neoliberals did recognize this
because you're training the people -

01:26:51.720 --> 01:26:55.520
- that are going to teach others. You
didn't need to capture every university.

01:26:55.640 --> 01:27:00.200
They captured a few that trained graduate
students who then taught everywhere else.

01:27:00.320 --> 01:27:04.120
The students were the people who then
went out and became the policymakers -

01:27:04.240 --> 01:27:06.960
- and doing all of the work.

01:27:08.480 --> 01:27:13.760
A set of ideas came in and changed
the way the world worked.

01:27:13.880 --> 01:27:16.000
We would argue not for the better.

01:27:16.120 --> 01:27:21.120
Maybe a new set of ideas can come in and
change the world in a better direction.

01:28:30.880 --> 01:28:37.280
The trick is to find the happy medium.
A place where... a typical person -

01:28:37.400 --> 01:28:41.640
- working reasonably hard can lead
a dignified life and feel fairly treated.

01:28:41.760 --> 01:28:44.760
And not to make everybody rich
or everybody the same -

01:28:44.880 --> 01:28:48.400
- or to make getting rich illegal
or anything like that.

01:28:48.520 --> 01:28:54.120
You just want to create a society where
everyone... you'll never get to everyone.

01:28:54.240 --> 01:29:00.640
Where the majority feel like it's fair
and reasonable and high-functioning.

01:29:03.200 --> 01:29:08.640
A key part is constructing
a new intellectual paradigm -

01:29:08.760 --> 01:29:13.440
- and our hypothesis is that we actually
have many of the puzzle pieces for that -

01:29:13.560 --> 01:29:17.640
- lying around in the community
that we're all a part of.

01:29:17.760 --> 01:29:23.040
We have the potential to begin assembling
them into both a positive theory -

01:29:23.160 --> 01:29:27.000
- that better describes social systems
in a more empirically validated way -

01:29:27.120 --> 01:29:32.000
- but also leads to normative theories
about how we can make the systems better -

01:29:32.120 --> 01:29:36.320
- and serve the interests of people
more broadly, and at a conceptual level -

01:29:36.440 --> 01:29:41.840
- the environment needs to be the
wrapper that all this is happening in.

01:29:41.960 --> 01:29:48.760
So, do people see those puzzle pieces
out there? Are we missing some?

01:29:48.880 --> 01:29:53.080
Does that kind of framing help,
or do you think of it differently?

01:29:57.680 --> 01:30:01.040
The big vacuum I see is
that one-paragraph description.

01:30:01.160 --> 01:30:03.560
We can write down a clear
one-paragraph description -

01:30:03.680 --> 01:30:08.800
- of what Milton Friedman-style
neoliberalism is. What is the alternative?

01:30:08.920 --> 01:30:15.440
At the core of the neoliberal movement was
a set of foundational intellectual ideas -

01:30:15.560 --> 01:30:18.880
- but a key jump the neoliberals made
was not just -

01:30:19.000 --> 01:30:22.920
- translation into understandable language
but specifically to moral language.

01:30:23.040 --> 01:30:26.720
If you read the Mont Pelerin Statement,
it is a call to arms.

01:30:26.840 --> 01:30:31.960
It is a set of moral statements
about freedom and opportunity and so on.

01:30:32.080 --> 01:30:36.400
We need to do a bit of shifting of...
We have a core of intellectual ideas -

01:30:36.520 --> 01:30:41.000
- but how do we connect it
into that larger moral narrative?

01:30:41.120 --> 01:30:43.800
It's important to identify the core idea.

01:30:43.920 --> 01:30:47.720
I think the core idea is
adaptive complex systems.

01:30:47.840 --> 01:30:53.320
I see that as the key mechanism that might
both have some grounding in reality -

01:30:53.440 --> 01:30:55.680
- and might appeal to people
and resonate.

01:30:58.880 --> 01:31:03.040
Mainstream economics hasn't bought into
the toolkit they would have to master -

01:31:03.160 --> 01:31:07.000
- in order to be able
to model what's going on.

01:31:07.120 --> 01:31:09.440
Instead of modeling the world -

01:31:09.560 --> 01:31:13.480
- with these very stylized dynamic
stochastic general equilibrium models...

01:31:13.600 --> 01:31:15.880
That's what the models
they use now are called.

01:31:16.000 --> 01:31:21.080
... let's simulate an artificial economy
and make it look like the real economy.

01:31:21.200 --> 01:31:25.400
It's a complete paradigm shift
in the way you do the science.

01:31:34.640 --> 01:31:40.240
The approach is to create artificial
economies that mimic the real economy -

01:31:40.360 --> 01:31:43.600
- closely enough that we can do
experiments in the artificial economy -

01:31:43.720 --> 01:31:48.080
- to see what would happen
if we tried out new ideas.

01:31:49.120 --> 01:31:54.480
I've looked at alternative perspectives
from a complex systems perspective -

01:31:54.600 --> 01:31:59.880
- that the economy's a dynamic system,
constantly evolving and innovating -

01:32:00.000 --> 01:32:04.360
- and that people are not rational
Spock-like robots but actually people.

01:32:11.240 --> 01:32:14.960
Inequality is where the shit hit the fan,
so we should build on that.

01:32:15.080 --> 01:32:18.960
One thing that I think is an essential
part of the complex systems narrative is -

01:32:19.080 --> 01:32:23.760
- that you build models where you actually
respect individuals in the model.

01:32:23.880 --> 01:32:27.760
So you build in the ability to think
about problems like inequality -

01:32:27.880 --> 01:32:33.080
- and those low-level interactions
and the way in which people is linked -

01:32:33.200 --> 01:32:36.360
- to the emergent phenomenon
of the macroeconomy -

01:32:36.480 --> 01:32:39.920
- and the political system
and democracy and everything else.

01:32:40.040 --> 01:32:45.360
You build that into the whole conceptual
framework from the get-go.

01:32:49.760 --> 01:32:55.160
We can create the new economy without
doing every experiment the hard way.

01:32:55.280 --> 01:32:58.200
But if we want a good simulation
of the economy, we need -

01:32:58.320 --> 01:33:03.320
- large-scale, big science teamwork,
and we could do it.

01:33:03.440 --> 01:33:07.240
We have the skills and the knowledge,
but we're not doing it.

01:33:32.480 --> 01:33:35.280
Earth is the center of the solar system.

01:33:35.400 --> 01:33:38.400
Galileo didn't invent the telescope,
he popularized it. He's like:

01:33:38.520 --> 01:33:41.560
"You can see it with your own eyes."

01:33:41.680 --> 01:33:46.440
The Catholic church said: "Stick that
telescope where the sun doesn't shine."

01:33:46.560 --> 01:33:50.680
And they stuck him in jail
for the rest of his life. Why?

01:33:50.800 --> 01:33:54.960
Because if Earth was diminished,
so were they.

01:33:55.080 --> 01:34:01.840
And the only fact they cared about was
their status, their privileges and power.

01:34:02.760 --> 01:34:06.040
Neoliberalism is exactly the same thing.

01:34:06.160 --> 01:34:09.960
It is an embedded ideology that
benefits a small group of people -

01:34:10.080 --> 01:34:13.720
- and they're going to hang on to it
with their fingernails.

01:34:19.440 --> 01:34:24.120
Part of fixing these problems is a new
set of ideas, a new thought system -

01:34:24.240 --> 01:34:28.440
- a new set of means
that are more grounded in reality.

01:34:28.560 --> 01:34:33.240
The behavioral model of the neoclassical
economics and neoliberals was made up.

01:34:33.360 --> 01:34:36.760
Nobody studied human beings.
These were philosophers -

01:34:36.880 --> 01:34:40.600
- who made up ideas of how humans behave
that turned out to not be true.

01:34:40.720 --> 01:34:43.800
We'd rather have a system of thought
based on the kind of work -

01:34:43.920 --> 01:34:47.680
- that someone like Molly is doing;
how humans really behave.

01:34:51.280 --> 01:34:54.560
One big revolution in
understanding human behavior -

01:34:54.680 --> 01:34:58.200
- has been understanding humans
as a social species.

01:34:58.320 --> 01:35:03.800
We come equipped with a set of instincts
and behaviors to facilitate cooperation.

01:35:03.920 --> 01:35:07.400
This paints a vastly different picture
from the neoliberal model -

01:35:07.520 --> 01:35:11.560
- which assumes we're all transactional,
self-interested individuals.

01:35:16.440 --> 01:35:18.240
We're incredibly social creatures -

01:35:18.360 --> 01:35:22.480
- and one of our primary points
of distinction is how much we cooperate.

01:35:22.600 --> 01:35:25.640
You can only solve trivial problems
by yourself.

01:35:25.760 --> 01:35:31.080
Any complex problem requires us
to team up and cooperate.

01:35:34.720 --> 01:35:37.720
We would like a new way
of thinking about prosperity -

01:35:37.840 --> 01:35:40.840
- that is linked to
our material standard of living -

01:35:40.960 --> 01:35:44.520
- but is not tied to notions
of market transactions -

01:35:44.640 --> 01:35:47.240
- but it gets at something fundamental.

01:35:47.360 --> 01:35:50.040
Our goal is to rip economics
down to the studs -

01:35:50.160 --> 01:35:55.120
- and rebuild it around a more accurate
characterization of what people are like -

01:35:55.240 --> 01:36:00.760
- how social systems behave, and a
new and better definition of prosperity -

01:36:00.880 --> 01:36:05.600
- that can align economic progress
and moral progress.

01:36:05.720 --> 01:36:11.160
The concept is that value comes from
what we call solutions to human problems.

01:36:14.040 --> 01:36:17.040
Our stock of solutions to human problems -

01:36:17.160 --> 01:36:21.040
- is a way of thinking
about the wealth of society.

01:36:24.320 --> 01:36:28.320
And growth is the rate at which
we're creating and making available -

01:36:28.440 --> 01:36:31.240
- new solutions to human problems.

01:36:42.600 --> 01:36:47.440
So if we came up with a new solution for
anti-gravity boots to help us get around -

01:36:47.560 --> 01:36:49.880
- but only Bill Gates could afford them -

01:36:50.000 --> 01:36:52.280
- we wouldn't say
society's prosperity has been increased.

01:36:52.400 --> 01:36:56.880
So there's a natural notion that things
have to become widely available to people.

01:36:57.000 --> 01:37:00.480
When antibiotics became very cheap
and everybody could get them -

01:37:00.600 --> 01:37:04.920
- that was a huge increase
in human material welfare.

01:37:05.880 --> 01:37:11.480
If prosperity in societies is accumulation
of solutions to human problems -

01:37:11.600 --> 01:37:16.880
- and not GDP or essentially how
much stuff we burn or move around -

01:37:17.000 --> 01:37:22.680
- and growth is the rate at which we
distribute solutions to human problems -

01:37:22.800 --> 01:37:26.760
- then the way in which we've understood
what capitalism is and how it works -

01:37:26.880 --> 01:37:29.720
- is probably deeply flawed.

01:37:36.800 --> 01:37:41.200
We think capitalism really
needs to be redefined -

01:37:41.320 --> 01:37:45.760
- as a system that is designed and
optimized to solve human problems -

01:37:45.880 --> 01:37:49.120
- and to distribute the solutions
as fast as possible.

01:37:49.240 --> 01:37:51.880
And we call that Market Humanism
to signify -

01:37:52.000 --> 01:37:57.360
- markets in the service of humanity.
Not the other way around.

01:37:58.120 --> 01:38:01.120
Eusocial animals are things
like bees and ants.

01:38:01.240 --> 01:38:04.360
Creatures where their very survival
depends on their cooperation.

01:38:04.480 --> 01:38:06.920
Humans are eusocial creatures.

01:38:07.040 --> 01:38:10.160
Most of us would not survive
without other human beings.

01:38:10.280 --> 01:38:12.400
We all are able to deeply specialize -

01:38:12.520 --> 01:38:16.360
- and then cooperate networks
to exchange our specialism -

01:38:16.480 --> 01:38:21.280
- to then tap into the larger societal
knowledge that we have to solve problems.

01:38:21.400 --> 01:38:24.600
Versus the neoliberal narrative,
which is all about atomistic competition.

01:38:24.720 --> 01:38:28.000
When you understand humans
as eusocial creatures -

01:38:28.120 --> 01:38:33.880
- we believe that you end up with what
we call the golden rule of economics -

01:38:34.000 --> 01:38:36.000
- which is the principle of inclusion.

01:38:39.000 --> 01:38:44.200
People have this sense that if
and when we have economic growth -

01:38:44.320 --> 01:38:48.840
- we should include other people
in that growth for moral reasons.

01:38:52.120 --> 01:38:55.440
What our research shows
quite conclusively is -

01:38:55.560 --> 01:39:01.520
- if you understand how economic growth
is really created in human societies -

01:39:01.640 --> 01:39:05.760
- you can see that that framework is
both wrong and backwards -

01:39:05.880 --> 01:39:10.400
- that economic inclusion
turns out to be the thing -

01:39:10.520 --> 01:39:16.240
- the technical mechanism that creates
economic growth in human societies.

01:39:17.440 --> 01:39:20.520
Inclusion creates growth.

01:39:22.720 --> 01:39:25.280
We need to help people
contribute and participate -

01:39:25.400 --> 01:39:28.720
- give them the skills, education,
infrastructure and capabilities -

01:39:28.840 --> 01:39:31.880
- and when they contribute,
they need a fair deal back.

01:39:32.000 --> 01:39:36.200
When you do that, the circle of trust
expands, participation expands -

01:39:36.320 --> 01:39:40.040
- you get more innovation,
more growth and more fairness.

01:39:42.480 --> 01:39:48.200
The economy is people, not money, and the
more people we include in that economy -

01:39:48.320 --> 01:39:53.160
- as workers, entrepreneurs,
inventors, consumers -

01:39:53.280 --> 01:39:57.400
- the bigger the economy grows
and the better it gets for everybody.

01:39:58.520 --> 01:39:59.840
What's the one meme -

01:39:59.960 --> 01:40:03.960
- if you could drive it into the system
up to the top political business levels -

01:40:04.080 --> 01:40:08.320
- it would be that inclusion
and cooperation create prosperity.

01:40:08.440 --> 01:40:11.920
If we can get the flipping thinking
to that -

01:40:12.040 --> 01:40:16.320
- that starts opening up a different
conversation and culture.

01:40:16.440 --> 01:40:19.920
Just to underscore how different
this is from a neoliberal framework -

01:40:20.040 --> 01:40:26.240
- in '72, Arthur Okun, a famous economist,
wrote The Big Tradeoff: Equality v. Growth.

01:40:26.360 --> 01:40:30.440
They put these two things
in opposition to each other.

01:40:30.560 --> 01:40:33.320
If you provide healthcare,
that might be justified -

01:40:33.440 --> 01:40:37.000
- for social justice or fairness reasons,
but there's no free lunch.

01:40:37.120 --> 01:40:40.280
"That's going to hurt
the economy and hurt growth."

01:40:40.400 --> 01:40:44.520
This big tradeoff set up our politics
for the decades after.

01:40:44.640 --> 01:40:50.080
The Democrats became the party of fairness
and the Republicans the party of growth.

01:40:50.200 --> 01:40:55.040
They fought around that big tradeoff, but
they both accepted that larger framework.

01:40:55.160 --> 01:40:59.760
And that contributed strongly
to the breakdown of the social contract -

01:40:59.880 --> 01:41:05.400
- and the dysfunction that we see. We see
that big tradeoff as just nonsense.

01:41:06.400 --> 01:41:08.880
It's hard to underscore enough -

01:41:09.000 --> 01:41:13.040
- how deeply that old idea about
the tradeoff between fairness and growth -

01:41:13.160 --> 01:41:17.000
- is embedded in our political
and economic culture.

01:41:17.120 --> 01:41:21.360
How deeply people who make laws
believe that.

01:41:21.480 --> 01:41:27.720
To break that idea and to replace it with
this other idea can be transformational.

01:41:39.480 --> 01:41:45.240
There's a ton of really powerful
and persuasive abstract theory -

01:41:45.360 --> 01:41:50.920
- that leads you to this conclusion,
and a shit ton of empirical evidence too -

01:41:51.040 --> 01:41:54.200
- that there's basically
no contradictory set of empirical data.

01:41:58.240 --> 01:42:03.240
With respect to policy, we sought
to have a list of fundamental things -

01:42:03.360 --> 01:42:07.440
- that you need to have
to drive these feedback loops.

01:42:07.560 --> 01:42:11.560
They start with things
like fairness and justice -

01:42:11.680 --> 01:42:14.800
- because you can't have
cooperation without them.

01:42:14.920 --> 01:42:18.480
The product of fairness
and justice is trust -

01:42:18.600 --> 01:42:22.600
- which is the glue that makes
cooperative networks go.

01:42:22.720 --> 01:42:26.640
Competition isn't the goal,
which is the conventional view.

01:42:26.760 --> 01:42:30.360
Once you see evolution is the point where
you want as many competitors as possible -

01:42:30.480 --> 01:42:32.880
- and then monopolies aren't right.

01:42:33.000 --> 01:42:37.560
And from that you end up
with a new narrative about inclusion -

01:42:37.680 --> 01:42:40.080
- and the central role
of the middle-class...

01:42:40.200 --> 01:42:44.880
That economies don't grow trickle down,
they grow actually from the middle out.

01:42:45.000 --> 01:42:48.560
If you look at the history of successful,
prosperous economies -

01:42:48.680 --> 01:42:51.080
- they all have large, vibrant,
diverse middle-classes -

01:42:51.200 --> 01:42:54.160
- because that's where the workers,
the entrepreneurs come from.

01:42:54.280 --> 01:42:57.600
We don't get more innovation
by giving Bill Gates a tax cut.

01:42:57.720 --> 01:43:03.800
If a bunch of kids grow up to be engineers
or entrepreneurs, then we will get some.

01:43:03.920 --> 01:43:08.040
- It's also where demand comes from.
- We've hollowed out the middle-class.

01:43:08.160 --> 01:43:12.320
It's sapped the energy out of demand,
slowed investment, hurt entrepreneurship.

01:43:12.440 --> 01:43:14.600
There's good things going on -

01:43:14.720 --> 01:43:18.160
- but we will be eating our seed corn
if we keep going this way.

01:43:19.840 --> 01:43:22.240
We see a positive role for business
in this framework -

01:43:22.360 --> 01:43:24.920
- because businesses properly run
are not in the business -

01:43:25.040 --> 01:43:28.480
- of making money for shareholders but
in the business of solving human problems.

01:43:28.600 --> 01:43:33.120
Some of the most long-lasting businesses
have thought of themselves in that way.

01:43:33.240 --> 01:43:37.920
The shareholder capitalism revolution,
which only happened starting in the '70s -

01:43:38.040 --> 01:43:43.440
- in some ways took the human purpose
and the soul out of our businesses.

01:43:48.080 --> 01:43:53.280
Defining prosperity and growth
in terms of improving welfare -

01:43:53.400 --> 01:43:56.720
- makes one thing super clear -

01:43:56.840 --> 01:44:04.200
- which is that every economic act
is an explicitly moral choice -

01:44:04.320 --> 01:44:06.600
- because you're either solving
people's problems -

01:44:06.720 --> 01:44:10.880
- or creating more problems
than you solve, and what that does is -

01:44:11.000 --> 01:44:14.000
- it merges the moral and economic world.

01:44:22.960 --> 01:44:27.320
Doing damage to the climate,
which can cause GDP to go up -

01:44:27.440 --> 01:44:32.000
- isn't seen as a positive but as creating
a problem rather than solving a problem.

01:44:32.120 --> 01:44:36.960
Some activities are good, some bad. This
framework helps distinguish between them.

01:44:37.080 --> 01:44:41.320
Solving the climate problem in this
framework is economically positive -

01:44:41.440 --> 01:44:45.120
- because it's increasing
real human welfare.

01:44:47.280 --> 01:44:52.400
One of the things that we like best
about this common sense language -

01:44:52.520 --> 01:44:56.120
- about what prosperity is,
is it democratizes the way -

01:44:56.240 --> 01:45:00.680
- in which humans can talk
about prosperity and purpose.

01:45:02.400 --> 01:45:07.160
How do you talk around the dinner table
about whether you're increasing GDP?

01:45:07.280 --> 01:45:09.520
But you can have a great argument -

01:45:09.640 --> 01:45:13.600
- about who's solving
the most important problems in societies.

01:45:13.720 --> 01:45:18.160
And centering prosperity
in a moral context -

01:45:18.280 --> 01:45:25.000
- and one that also leads to increasing
amounts of material welfare, we think -

01:45:25.120 --> 01:45:30.080
- leads to fulfillment in the deepest way
that human societies can offer it.

01:46:11.000 --> 01:46:14.080
We didn't just hear about
a whole bunch of interesting things.

01:46:14.200 --> 01:46:17.720
Each one of us individually,
our perspective has changed.

01:46:17.840 --> 01:46:21.320
We're going to go out of this
richer than before.

01:46:21.440 --> 01:46:23.920
We all believe
we want to change the world.

01:46:24.040 --> 01:46:29.520
It's not just an empty
ivory-tower academic exercise.

01:46:29.640 --> 01:46:33.080
We don't need to bullshit to say
we're already starting -

01:46:33.200 --> 01:46:38.280
- to have a laundry list of solutions that
are important for the whole picture.

01:46:38.400 --> 01:46:42.240
What we haven't gotten yet
is the coherent story.

01:46:42.360 --> 01:46:45.520
How can our scientific ideas come out?

01:46:45.640 --> 01:46:49.720
We can do that not just by saying,
"I have one solution."

01:46:49.840 --> 01:46:53.640
That's good and dandy,
but it doesn't really matter much -

01:46:53.760 --> 01:46:56.640
- because you drown
in the noise of problems.

01:46:56.760 --> 01:47:01.680
However, if our perspective,
our world view can provide -

01:47:01.800 --> 01:47:07.000
- solutions to almost all the problems
here, then suddenly you have something -

01:47:07.120 --> 01:47:12.920
- that the previous paradigm of
how to see the world had no way of doing.

01:47:13.040 --> 01:47:15.800
Then can we hope for more?

01:47:26.280 --> 01:47:28.680
Our stock of solutions to human problems -

01:47:28.800 --> 01:47:32.120
- is a way of thinking
about the wealth of society -

01:47:32.240 --> 01:47:37.040
- and about growth as the rate at which we
are creating solutions to human problems.

01:47:37.160 --> 01:47:42.320
We must stop, so by the end of the century,
we'll be in a zero-carbon environment.

01:47:42.440 --> 01:47:46.000
We need negative emissions
if we want to fix this.

01:47:46.120 --> 01:47:49.920
Deliberative polls are the idea
of regular polls plus something.

01:47:50.040 --> 01:47:54.160
I know of nowhere in the world where
courses are taught in human history.

01:47:54.280 --> 01:47:59.280
If they want to be so big,
they must release their algorithms.

01:47:59.400 --> 01:48:02.640
Limiting the number of friends
that you can have.

01:48:02.760 --> 01:48:05.960
You cannot be both
a social network and a news feed.

01:48:06.080 --> 01:48:09.200
You have to break those
into two separate businesses -

01:48:09.320 --> 01:48:11.640
- and you can't use advertising.

01:48:11.760 --> 01:48:15.720
We have to put serendipity
back into cyberspace.

01:48:15.840 --> 01:48:20.920
We create artificial economies to see what
would happen if we tried out new ideas.

01:48:21.040 --> 01:48:26.000
Corporations would happily be regulated
as long as you regulate the competition.

01:48:26.120 --> 01:48:29.080
We should tax capital quite directly.

01:48:29.200 --> 01:48:34.520
Every economic act is
an explicitly moral choice.

01:48:35.240 --> 01:48:38.600
Optimism is going to be a tool
in solving these problems.

01:48:38.720 --> 01:48:43.800
We know what the challenge is. We have
to assume there's a good outcome.

01:48:43.920 --> 01:48:48.960
There are no guarantees. There may be
costs. That's the attitude we must have.