POP: Pick of the Pods: thinking big

Welcome to POP - my weekly recommendation for the one podcast you should be listening to right now.

This week, a genre that might be called 'thought leadership' - interviews with heavyweight thinkers on big topics.

I only just discovered that the South African comedian Trevor Noah, who pulled off the impossible task of replacing Jon Stewart on US news satire show The Daily Show, has his own podcast (it's been around for about a year). So...

??If you listen to one podcast this week on big thoughts...

... make it What Now? with Trevor Noah

#WhatNowPodcast #TrevorNoah #YuvalNoahHarari

In this episode, Trevor meets Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, a potted history of humanity, and, most recently, NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.

This is perfect material for a podcast, as Trevor Noah brings a light touch to what is pretty heavy stuff.

To give a flavour of their conversation, they look at the nature of evil:

Is humanity locked in a struggle between good and evil? Not according to Harari, who says that notion - which is at the heart of many religions - is almost a caricature of what is a much more complex reality.

In a way, evil is easier to deal with, at least cognitively, than ignorance. Evil is kind of simple. It's a simple story about the world ... Ignorance on the other hand, it's not some kind of deep something in human nature. It's just the world is so complicated.

I don't think the problem is with human nature, it's with human information. If you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions.

So if we all were less ignorant, we would be less evil? Not exactly.

There is no easy solution. It's not like, OK, let's send everybody to school and they will not be ignorant. People can have PhDs in whatever and still be incredibly ignorant about so much, so many things.

The simple fact is no one person can ever know anything like everything we need to know. Harari cites a story by Jorge Luis Borges about map makers that create a map so perfect it ends up full-size, covering the entire land it is meant to represent.

The simplistic notion that we can "flood the world with information", which Harari says is popular in Silicon Valley, is wrong:

If you just flood the world with information, the truth sinks to the bottom and it's fiction that flows up because most information in the world isn't truth, but truth is a very rare and costly subset of information.

Part of the problem with all these conspiracy theories we see flooding the world - they tell people, 'do your own research'. It's impossible. Nobody can just research everything by themselves. It's a fantasy of complete independence ... science is a team sport ... if you really want to understand the world, you have no choice but to rely on these huge networks.

Always big thoughts on my podcast, Radio Davos - check it out on any podcast app: https://pod.link/1504682164

Thanks for listening. Please leave me your own recommendations for great podcasts in the comments, or DM me.