Theyve held long, strongheld views, i think their war against dissent and desire to control has never been answer intense as they are today. Theres something fundamentally different and new. Youwalk this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Next, Joshua Cooper ramos coceo of Kissinger Associates talks about this book the seven inflame the seventh sense. [inaudible conversations] hello. Thank you, everybody, for coming. This is great. As a writer for most of the last two months ive been getting up eave morning saying to my wife, what if nobody reads the book . I woke up this morning, what if nobody comes . So its very nice to come out. And some of you are hear to talk about the buick but the realityes wire fortunate to have two friends of mine who i think will be more interesting and probably more fascinating than many of you. Jacob weisberg is a longtime journalist, published a book on Ronald Reagan i cant recommend highly enough, and mall gladwell, a writer and humorist. Nonfiction best sellers. So well talk about my new book, the seventh sense, and one of the things that ill be able to good over quickly in the conversation, one of the big ideas in the book is theres just so many questions to answer that this bottle of kind of talking to you is not spirally the right model. But we want tone it up to questions and debate and i hope people will talk about the ideas that are interesting. So, with that well well just have a little conversation up here. Jacob will talk to me and well all talk and then well open up for questions. Thank you for coming. Great too see so men people. Very nice of you. [applause] i was good to go say, welcome nyu graduated. I think i know you were probably tempted to celebrate after graduation but coming here and getting a start on your career is figuring out what this thing is all about is a good way to launch your postcollegiate you outperformed pea people out drinking. Or not. I was going to say the least famous person he i decided to be the moderator. So im going to try to just sort of direct the conversation a little bit, at least to get started, and i wanted to start it off just by asking josh a little bit of what he is trying to do in the book and how he got interested and just to get started, josh, what is the seventh sense . So, the historical concept is seventh sense is really this feeling, this instinct for the way in which were enmeshed in all of these networks which change things. When you look around the world and see the most expensive war on terrorism in human history, maybe producing more terrorists. An Economic Policy designed to help the middle class and stabilize the economy that appears to be kind of accelerating instability and fragility and causing deflation. You look at the political environment, all these things happening that are unexpected. My idea was to roll up my sleeves and understand what was driving that. Ill i came at imfrom a couple of different perspectives. One was a very interesting experience back when you and i were first getting into know each other in the 90s. I had briefly run an internet Startup Company that failed so i got that experience under my belt. And in the process of shutting it down i got a phone call from this guy i never heard of from moore. Mike morris. And mike said, you dont know me. Used to be a journalist and ive now moved into the Venture Capital business. Would you mind getting on a plane and coming tout Silicon Valley . I think theres a company you ought to think about joining. I was got to join time and i said, ill go out. So i fly out and mike, my First Encounter i was not prepared for what i got but future encounters with Venture Capitalists would not be that dissimilar. Showed up in San Francisco away in his convert rebel mercedes and took me down to a warehouse where three guys were sitting around, starting a company, and i said this where is you ought to work. Do i do this or go to Time Magazine which seemed like that was the icon of every possible dream you could have in journalism. So, i said, the opportunity to be employee number four at a Company Called yahoo. Theft not going anywhere, and i got on an airplane and now back to new york city think, thank goodness i missed that one. Have the civility of Time Magazine. So once opposite you make an 800 million mistake like that, you enif you have vision to you say to yourself, what was it i missed . And it was clear to me that there was this dynamic and this possibility of creation of incredible new basins of prosperity, information, ideas that came from just connection itself. So part of it part of where the seventh sense came from whats sense of gee i wish i had it back then and part of it was, look around the world. So many businesses the world we lived in, journalism, are being disrupt bid huge horses. I saw when i left journalism ten or 12 years ago and win into the advisory business and moved to china, these forces are really working out all over sever site. The things that have happened are happening to military affairs and economics and ideas are being overturned. So my question was, was there some way could i really get to the root of understanding this . We all know basic idea which is the connection connected phone, connected to journalists. Its just different being connected to an economy. I wanted to figure out what was underneath that and was there a certain sensibility. What i saw is there were people travis looked a a car and sees Something Different that produces uber and i just see a car. The story of the instinct. Its a learnable instinct, something that is usable because people have it but it does often kind of challenge traditional ways of thinking. Just to be very literal minded we know what the five senses are, and sixth sense is a sense of history. Thats right. The description of napoleon. Nietzsche. He used to kind nietzsches view, of the industry revolution, this is so crazy that my five sense are not enough and were going to go crazy. Nietzsche did anyhow. But we need an additional sense, this idea that you sort of had a sense of where this change was on the ebb and flow of human hoyt. It would give you something to grab on to the idea of the seventh sense we still knee the five senses and sixth sense also need a sense of what is mean to how does that change things. So its understanding of networks. Silicon valley people say they divide the world into people who get and it people who dont get it. People who get it, theyre talking about people who have this understanding of how connection changes the nature of business and just the nature of politics, changes the nature of everything, and people who take advantage of that. What i tried to do in the book is say that ability to understand networks is a piece but also incorporates a different element, which is that its not enough to understand the work. You have to understand the world in which theyre moving so i think i almost have a sense of kind of the world one way to look at its on the one hand you have a group of people who have a tremendous amount of power in politics and media, who dont understand how Networks Work and the process of trying to solve problems often make them worse. Then a group of people understand Networks Real and they tend to younger and silt the heart of companies where you can make the case, the google algorithm, the most powerful handles assembled in human hoyt and that group, who i talk about in the book and spend time with, doesnt necessarily understand the larger social construct. The idea of whether its the classical is in sol caval or the idea of what makes an economy or society function. So the rest of us are stuck in the middle. The cultivation of the seventh sense, maybe we can duck later about the issue odd around Artificial Intelligence. Were not machines. We have to understand both the networks and the history and ideas that surround them and that really havary path forward. Often this manifests itself and you tell these stories in a reversal of an existing power dynamic for asymmetry. Isis, you describe as the seventh sense phenomenon. Donald trump with just his little old his twitter account versus the republican establishment and that effect doesnt happen because some person or organization shows up and uses it differently. The networks permit you they change the way in which these forces behave. So when somebody looked at isis and thought these are just a bunch of yahoos with a truck. They discover when youre part of a connected system that ability to make these videos, horrible videos of people being behead as a viral power. That traditional power structures have hard time competing with. One more question i was thinking about reading in the book, do these people who are the beneficiaries of the phenomenon people who understand it or just beneficiaries of it . Does donald trump understand networks, understand what youre talking about intuitively or just somehow he has harnessed it. I think it is maybe a little bit of both. Theres this intuitive sense some people have how the Networks Work. And i think theres just there are many things. One thing about networks theyre very contagious. We build them to be we want them to be efficient. One point in the book is the Network Evolves in ways that what the networks want. What they want is to be connected all the time. Want to be super efficient. And so were Building Systems that are hyper contagious without necessarily the kind of foundational belief, structure saying, what are you doing in a very contagious system in this is really germane for better or worse in this kind of world of Foreign Policy and security because the larger historical narrative against which all this take place is when power shifts dramatically, when the way power is structured in a society shifts, that creates incredible disruption. In the book i make this comparison between enlightment and the Industrial Revolution. Wiped out many of the sacred european institutions which were ararchitected for a different idea whoa some be in charge. As you look around the world today there are very few institutions we trust more than we trust ten years ago, almost everything has kind of declined. And thats a worrisome sign. A question about what basis you build a new order. So malcolm, i thought, my god, david and goliath. Your most recent book it bass asymmetries that work out and surprising ways ways and why the are cases i was reading joshs book, how does your theory match up with his theory . Oh. You can tell we didnt prepare for this. Youre completely flummox beside myid flummoxed beside my question. I suppose the network is a lot of what josh is talking about is the deceptive power of networks, because we have an need to focus on a come pope next of a network we miss the kind of hidden power that comes from the connectivity. So in essence it does its a version of a david and goliath argument which is that david is actually much stronger than he appears. Im actually more what im more what i was more interested in after reading the book was the downside of networks. What makes i love for you to explain a little bit more, josh, what they cant do, and so if the opposite of a network is a hierarchy. What is the situations are networks best optimized for and what situations are hierarchies most appropriate for . Other question is i think were so early in this process of figure ought what Network Power means. The other question is, why Certain Networks structure themselves in certain ways, and can we predict in advance with Network Structures are likely to emerge . One classic model is is winner take all Network Structures. In the world we have nine platforms with more than a billion users, facebook, google, microsoft office, microsoft windows, youtube. And what is interesting is these systems have a winner take all effect. The more people who use facebook, the more anymore to use facebook and the more people use facebook. First of all creates natural monopolies are were not used to dealing with. The economic structures its very cheap for facebook to ad additional users so they get more and more profitable and has the effect of concentrating a huge amount of power in few people. If you look at the deal around. If you were fighting a war, you wanted to control the coast, you wanted to control the air space, the mountain passes. Well, to pollies are things that emerge purely as a result of connectivity. The difference between st. Petersburg and moscow is always 450 mileses. But depending on how its connected, it can take you a week or a millisecond to get there. Topologies change shape depending on the nature of the connection x. There are topologies for currencies, facebook has a topology, that famous six degrees of separation idea never heard of it. Yeah, exactly. All kinds of networks have top logical features and designs, and they tend to optimize themself for the design that makes them most efficient. So the interesting question is, you know, are there areas so we know, for instance, why the facebook effect works. Whats interesting is when you look at businesses like amazon that at the beginning, it wasnt inherently clear that a merchandise business was going to have that effect. The more people used amazon, therefore, more people would want to use it. Why couldnt more people use amazon and all these other things . The great Business Insight of jeff bezos was to drive this technology was the more people that used it, the faster the prices went down. Its not easy enough to say, okay, theres hierarchies in topologies or Network Structures which is kind of where i was. What you find is actually there are Different Network designs that serve different needs. And this is particularly interesting. As the great question about this when you talk to people who are designing these systems now are how are Artificial Intelligence systems going to distribute themselves . Theres an argument to be made that if you have access to all of this data, the smarter the a. I. System gets. It gets more data on itself, or more people want to use it so they can take advantage of it. Smarter and smarter. So part of to of the seventh see is what is the right distribution of power. And the last thing ill say about it and the reason thats important is it gets you right at the heart of these questions like how does a democratic system function. Its based on this premise of relatively equal distribution of power. Capitalism functions with this idea of relatively equal participation in the marketplace. What do you do when what the system craves is actually a very different kind of structure. But, i mean, im interested to hear you sort of explain in some specific examples whats different. I mean, we had, we had networks, young call them topologies if you want, you know, in the political structure of the 19th century. A political patronage system is a network. What is the sort of difference, and why is that vulnerable and not durable in relation to the kind of network, you know, president obamas social Media Network that he leveraged in the campaign . So i think its very important to say, actually, networks unlock a huge understanding of a lot of history. In fact, if you look at most of the great empires, you can think of them, in fact, as network systems. The empires that were built on the rivers of asia or india, that were built on the ocean. The British Empire was nothing if not an empire, it just happened to be conducted by ships instead of electrons. And theres a lot of interesting work being done in economics and history with you go back and understand the efficiencies as part of them. The biggest change now is two things. One is the incredible speed at which things happen on networks. Theres a famous line of one german general about a hundred years ago toward the end of the First World War who said, you know, if this negotiations leading up to the war with had been conducted by horseback instead of this damn telegraph, we could have avoided the war. We didnt know what to do about it. So that acceleration of daily life which we all know has spilled into the networks. Thats the first thing, the speed of the networks is unbelievably fast. And that, one of the things when you ask yourself what strives this Movement Towards a winnertakeall system, partly that is efficiency. Theyre much faster. If you had to look for your friends on facebook and myspace, you would discover its an inefficient process. There was a small team at facebook that about three years in when they were sort of at this pivot point, and friendster was still around, figured out this essential agreement which is if you joined facebook and got seven friends in ten days, you were likely to stay. That was the insight that led to this huge acceleration. So one is speed is different than in the past. And the second thing thats different is this kind of winnertakeall system in which the intelligence of the network, the more it sees, the smarter it gets, and so the better et get better it gets. Lets talk about business, politics and Foreign Policy. Now, you speak a lot to business audiences. The marketing world is very engaged in what youre doing. Do you see and you see, you talk to very different kinds of businesses. Do you see businesses that have an understanding of what josh is talking about, having a differential kind of success or picking up on your last question, are there places in the Business World where a much more conventional, hierarchical structure still obtains or still does that . Well, it seems to me that there are lots of businesses that are in a process of transition towards something that is a lot more, looks a lot more like a network and are having difficulty understanding how to adapt to that. So, for example, if you think about a hospital. The traditional unders