Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies

00:00:00.000 | If we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions,

00:00:04.800 | created by an alien intelligence that we don't understand,

00:00:09.360 | but it understands us,

00:00:12.320 | this is a kind of spiritual enslavement

00:00:16.320 | that we won't be able to break out of

00:00:18.880 | because it understands us,

00:00:22.000 | it understands how to manipulate us,

00:00:24.400 | but we don't understand what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs.

00:00:33.520 | The following is a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari,

00:00:40.000 | a historian, philosopher, and author of several highly acclaimed,

00:00:44.400 | highly influential books, including "Sapiens," "Homo Deus,"

00:00:48.240 | and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century."

00:00:51.120 | He is also an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu

00:00:55.360 | and the current right-wing government in Israel.

00:00:58.480 | So while much of this conversation is about the history and future of human civilization,

00:01:03.680 | we also discuss the political turmoil of present-day Israel,

00:01:07.680 | providing a different perspective from that of my recent conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.

00:01:13.760 | This is the "Lex Friedman Podcast."

00:01:16.400 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:19.520 | And now, dear friends, here's Yuval Noah Harari.

00:01:23.040 | 13.8 billion years ago is the origin of our universe.

00:01:27.440 | 3.8 billion years ago is the origin of life here on our little planet,

00:01:32.720 | the one we call Earth.

00:01:33.760 | Let's say 200,000 years ago is the appearance of early Homo sapiens.

00:01:40.160 | So let me ask you this question.

00:01:41.920 | How rare are these events in the vastness of space and time?

00:01:45.360 | Or put it in a more fun way,

00:01:47.600 | how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there in this universe?

00:01:50.880 | Us being one of them.

00:01:52.960 | I suppose there should be some, statistically, but we don't have any evidence.

00:01:58.000 | But I do think that, you know, intelligence in any way, it's a bit overvalued.

00:02:02.240 | We are the most intelligent entities on this planet, and look what we're doing.

00:02:09.760 | So intelligence also tends to be self-destructive,

00:02:14.800 | which implies that if there are or were intelligent life forms elsewhere,

00:02:20.640 | maybe they don't survive for long.

00:02:22.240 | - So you think there's a tension between happiness and intelligence?

00:02:26.080 | - Absolutely.

00:02:27.760 | Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness.

00:02:35.920 | I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between intelligence and consciousness,

00:02:41.360 | which many people, certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry, tend to miss.

00:02:46.640 | Intelligence is simply the ability to solve problems, to attain goals,

00:02:52.960 | and, you know, to win a chess, to win a struggle for survival,

00:02:59.920 | to win a war, to drive a car, to diagnose a disease.

00:03:04.240 | This is intelligence.

00:03:06.080 | Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate.

00:03:12.000 | In humans and other animals, intelligence and consciousness go together.

00:03:17.680 | They go hand in hand, which is why we confuse them.

00:03:20.400 | We solve problems, we attain goals by having feelings.

00:03:25.680 | But other types of intelligence, certainly in computers,

00:03:30.800 | computers are already highly intelligent, and as far as we know, they have zero consciousness.

00:03:36.960 | When a computer beats you at chess or Go or whatever, it doesn't feel happy.

00:03:41.280 | If it loses, it doesn't feel sad.

00:03:43.920 | And there could be also other highly intelligent entities out there in the universe

00:03:52.080 | that have zero consciousness.

00:03:54.320 | And I think that consciousness is far more important and valuable than intelligence.

00:03:59.120 | - Can you still make the case that consciousness and intelligence

00:04:03.120 | are intricately connected?

00:04:06.000 | So not just in humans, but anywhere else.

00:04:08.640 | They have to go hand in hand.

00:04:09.920 | Is it possible for you to imagine such a universe?

00:04:11.840 | - It could be, but we don't know yet.

00:04:15.600 | Again, we have examples, certainly we know of examples

00:04:18.800 | of high intelligence without consciousness.

00:04:21.520 | Computers are one example.

00:04:23.120 | As far as we know, plants are not conscious.

00:04:29.440 | Yet they are intelligent.

00:04:31.040 | They can solve problems.

00:04:32.960 | They can attain goals in very sophisticated ways.

00:04:35.360 | So the other way around, to have consciousness without any intelligence,

00:04:42.160 | this is probably impossible.

00:04:43.840 | But to have intelligence without consciousness, yes, that's possible.

00:04:47.600 | A bigger question is whether any of that is tied to organic biochemistry.

00:04:54.960 | - We know on this planet only about carbon-based life forms.

00:05:01.520 | Whether you're an amoeba, a dinosaur, a tree, a human being,

00:05:06.160 | you are based on organic biochemistry.

00:05:08.560 | Is there an essential connection between organic biochemistry and consciousness?

00:05:15.520 | Do all conscious entities everywhere in the universe

00:05:18.560 | or in the future on planet Earth have to be based on carbon?

00:05:22.560 | Is there something so special about carbon as an element

00:05:26.240 | that an entity based on silicon will never be conscious?

00:05:29.680 | I don't know, maybe.

00:05:31.280 | But again, this is a key question about computer and computer consciousness.

00:05:36.800 | Can computers eventually become conscious even though they are not organic?

00:05:42.240 | The jury is still out on that.

00:05:44.560 | I don't know.

00:05:45.040 | We have to take both options into account.

00:05:48.240 | - Well, a big part of that is, do you think we humans would be able to detect

00:05:54.800 | other intelligent beings, other conscious beings?

00:05:57.520 | Another way to ask that, is it possible that the aliens are already here

00:06:00.560 | and we don't see them?

00:06:01.440 | Meaning, are we very human-centric in our understanding of,

00:06:07.920 | one, the definition of life, two, the definition of intelligence,

00:06:10.800 | and three, the definition of consciousness?

00:06:12.640 | - The aliens are here, they are just not from outer space.

00:06:16.640 | AI, which usually stands for artificial intelligence,

00:06:20.800 | I think it stands for alien intelligence, because AI is an alien type of intelligence.

00:06:27.200 | It solves problems, attains goals in a very, very different way,

00:06:31.520 | in an alien way from human beings.

00:06:33.760 | And I'm not implying that AI came from outer space.

00:06:36.240 | It came from Silicon Valley.

00:06:38.160 | But it is alien to us.

00:06:40.160 | If there are alien intelligent or conscious entities that came from outer space

00:06:45.920 | already here, I've not seen any evidence for it.

00:06:51.040 | It's not impossible, but in science, evidence is everything.

00:06:55.360 | - Well, I mean, I guess instructive there is just having the humility to look around,

00:07:01.600 | to think about living beings that operate at a different time scale,

00:07:05.680 | a different spatial scale.

00:07:06.800 | And I think that's all useful when starting to analyze artificial intelligence.

00:07:12.400 | It's possible that even the language models,

00:07:15.920 | the larger language models we have today are already conscious.

00:07:19.200 | - I highly doubt it, but I think consciousness in the end,

00:07:22.960 | it's a question of social norms,

00:07:25.360 | because we cannot prove consciousness in anybody except ourselves.

00:07:30.240 | We know that we are conscious because we are feeling it.

00:07:32.800 | We have direct access to our subjective consciousness.

00:07:36.880 | We cannot have any proof that any other entity in the world,

00:07:41.680 | any other human being, our parents, our best friends,

00:07:44.880 | we don't have proof that they are conscious.

00:07:46.480 | This has been known for thousands of years.

00:07:49.440 | This is Descartes, this is Buddha, this is Plato.

00:07:52.320 | We can't have this sort of proof.

00:07:54.960 | What we do have is social conventions.

00:07:58.400 | It's a social convention that all human beings are conscious.

00:08:02.320 | It also applies to animals.

00:08:05.200 | Most people who have pets, our family believe that their pets are conscious,

00:08:10.880 | but a lot of people still refuse to acknowledge that about cows or pigs.

00:08:15.120 | Now, pigs are far more intelligent than dogs and cats,

00:08:19.760 | you know, according to many measures,

00:08:21.200 | yet when you go to the supermarket and buy a piece of frozen pigment,

00:08:26.480 | you don't think about it as a conscious entity.

00:08:28.800 | Why do you think of your dog as conscious,

00:08:31.760 | but not of the bacon that you buy?

00:08:34.720 | Because you build a relationship with the dog,

00:08:39.200 | and you don't have a relationship with the bacon.

00:08:42.000 | Now, relationships, they don't constitute a logical proof for consciousness.

00:08:50.000 | They are a social test.

00:08:51.200 | The Turing test is a social test.

00:08:54.000 | It's not a logical proof.

00:08:55.680 | Now, if you establish a mutual relationship with an entity,

00:09:00.560 | when you are invested in it emotionally,

00:09:05.360 | you're almost compelled to feel that the other side is also conscious.

00:09:10.800 | And when it comes again to AI and computers,

00:09:14.880 | I don't think that at the present moment computers are conscious,

00:09:18.640 | but people are already forming intimate relationships with AIs

00:09:25.440 | and are therefore almost irresistible.

00:09:29.760 | They are compelled to increasingly feel that these are conscious entities.

00:09:34.720 | And I think we are quite close to the point

00:09:37.680 | when the legal system will have to take this into account,

00:09:40.880 | that even though I don't think computers have consciousness,

00:09:45.280 | I think we are close to the point the legal system

00:09:48.240 | will start treating them as conscious entities

00:09:52.080 | because of this social convention.

00:09:54.800 | - What, to you, is a social convention just a funny little side effect,

00:10:01.520 | a little artifact, or is it fundamental to what consciousness is?

00:10:06.000 | Because if it is fundamental,

00:10:07.440 | then it seems like AI is very good at forming

00:10:10.000 | these kinds of deep relationships with humans,

00:10:12.240 | and therefore it will be able to be a nice catalyst

00:10:16.080 | for integrating itself into these social conventions of ours.

00:10:20.240 | - It was built to accomplish that.

00:10:22.960 | - Yeah.

00:10:23.200 | - We are designing, again, you know,

00:10:25.520 | all this argument between natural selection and creationism, intelligent design.

00:10:32.960 | As far as the past goes, all entities evolved by natural selection.

00:10:38.720 | The funny thing is, when you look to the future,

00:10:41.520 | more and more entities will come out of intelligent design,

00:10:45.280 | not of some god above the clouds,

00:10:47.120 | but of our intelligent design

00:10:49.280 | and the intelligent design of our clouds, of our computing clouds.

00:10:53.680 | They will design more and more entities,

00:10:56.160 | and this is what is happening with AI.

00:10:58.160 | It is designed to be very good

00:11:01.920 | at forming intimate relationships with humans.

00:11:04.960 | And in many ways, it's already doing it

00:11:09.200 | almost better than human beings in some situations.

00:11:12.640 | You know, when two people talk with one another,

00:11:15.520 | one of the things that kind of makes the conversation more difficult

00:11:22.240 | is our own emotions.

00:11:23.360 | You're saying something, and I'm not really listening to you

00:11:27.280 | because there is something I want to say,

00:11:30.240 | and I'm just waiting until you finish, I can put in a word.

00:11:33.760 | Or I'm so obsessed with my anger or irritation or whatever

00:11:39.600 | that I don't pay attention to what you're feeling.

00:11:42.160 | This is one of the biggest obstacles in human relationships.

00:11:45.040 | And computers don't have this problem

00:11:48.160 | because they don't have any emotions of their own.

00:11:50.880 | So, you know, when a computer is talking to you,

00:11:53.600 | it can be the most—

00:11:54.800 | it can focus 100% of its attention

00:11:57.680 | is on what you're saying and what you're feeling

00:12:01.440 | because it has no feelings of its own.

00:12:04.160 | And paradoxically, this means that computers can fool people

00:12:09.680 | into feeling that, "Oh, there is a conscious entity on the other side,

00:12:15.200 | an empathic entity on the other side,"

00:12:17.680 | because the one thing everybody wants

00:12:20.000 | almost more than anything in the world

00:12:21.520 | is for somebody to listen to me,

00:12:24.480 | somebody to focus all their attention on me.

00:12:26.960 | I want it for my spouse, for my husband, for my mother,

00:12:30.960 | for my friends, for my politicians.

00:12:33.440 | Listen to me.

00:12:34.160 | Listen to what I feel.

00:12:36.080 | And they often don't.

00:12:37.520 | And now you have this entity

00:12:39.360 | which 100% of its attention is just on what I feel.

00:12:43.200 | And this is a huge, huge temptation,

00:12:46.000 | and I think also a huge, huge danger.

00:12:48.080 | - Well, the interesting catch-22 there is

00:12:50.960 | you said somebody to listen to us.

00:12:53.680 | Yes, we want somebody to listen to us.

00:12:56.080 | But for us to respect that somebody,

00:12:58.080 | they sometimes have to also not listen.

00:13:03.040 | It's like they kind of have to be an asshole sometimes.

00:13:06.160 | They have to have mood sometimes.

00:13:07.520 | They have to have self-importance and confidence.

00:13:10.240 | And we should have a little bit of fear

00:13:12.720 | that they can walk away at any moment.

00:13:14.560 | There should be a little bit of that tension.

00:13:16.640 | So it's like-- - Absolutely.

00:13:17.680 | But even that, I mean, the thing is--

00:13:20.160 | - Could be optimized for.

00:13:21.120 | - If social scientists and psychologists establish

00:13:25.040 | that, I don't know, 17% inattention is good

00:13:28.720 | for a conversation because then you feel challenged,

00:13:30.880 | oh, I need to grab this person's attention,

00:13:33.200 | you can program the AI to have exactly 17% inattention,

00:13:38.080 | not one percentage more or less,

00:13:40.720 | or it can by trial and error discover

00:13:43.840 | what is the ideal percentage.

00:13:47.120 | Again, you can create, over the last 10 years,

00:13:50.960 | we have creating machines for grabbing people's attention.

00:13:54.880 | This is what has been happening on social media.

00:13:57.600 | Now we are designing machines for grabbing human intimacy,

00:14:03.360 | which in many ways, it's much, much more dangerous

00:14:07.040 | and scary.

00:14:07.760 | Already the machines for grabbing attention,

00:14:10.000 | we've seen how much social and political damage

00:14:13.760 | they could do by, in many way, kind of distorting

00:14:17.520 | the public conversation.

00:14:19.040 | Machines that are superhuman in their abilities

00:14:23.680 | to create intimate relationships,

00:14:26.000 | this is like psychological and social weapons

00:14:29.280 | of mass destruction.

00:14:30.880 | If we don't regulate it, if we don't train ourself

00:14:35.920 | to deal with it, it could destroy the foundations

00:14:39.600 | of human society.

00:14:40.640 | - Well, one of the possible trajectories

00:14:42.720 | is those same algorithms would become personalized,

00:14:46.480 | and instead of manipulating us at scale,

00:14:49.040 | there would be assistants that guide us to help us grow,

00:14:52.240 | to help us understand the world better.

00:14:54.320 | I mean, just even interactions with large language models.

00:14:59.200 | Now, if you ask them questions,

00:15:00.480 | it doesn't have that stressful drama,

00:15:05.040 | the tension that you have from other sources

00:15:07.680 | of information.

00:15:08.480 | It has a pretty balanced perspective that it provides.

00:15:11.520 | So it just feels like that's, the potential is there

00:15:15.440 | to have a really nice friend who's like an encyclopedia

00:15:21.360 | that just tells you all the different perspectives,

00:15:23.600 | even on controversial issues,

00:15:25.280 | the most controversial issues,

00:15:26.960 | to say these are the different theories,

00:15:28.800 | these are the not widely accepted conspiracy theories,

00:15:32.800 | but here's the kind of backing for those conspiracies.

00:15:35.440 | It just lays it all out with a calm language,

00:15:38.240 | without the words that kind of presume

00:15:42.320 | there's some kind of manipulation going on underneath it all.

00:15:45.600 | It's quite refreshing.

00:15:47.200 | Of course, those are the early days,

00:15:49.040 | and people can step in and start to censor,

00:15:52.800 | to manipulate those algorithms,

00:15:54.400 | to start to input some of the human biases in there,

00:15:57.360 | as opposed to what's currently happening

00:15:59.680 | is kind of the internet is input,

00:16:02.960 | compress it, and have a nice little output

00:16:07.520 | that gives an overview of the different issues.

00:16:10.560 | So I mean, there's a lot of promise there also, right?

00:16:13.040 | - Absolutely.

00:16:13.520 | I mean, if there was no promise,

00:16:15.360 | there was no problem.

00:16:16.480 | You know, if this technology

00:16:17.520 | could not accomplish anything good,

00:16:19.440 | nobody would develop it.

00:16:20.720 | Now, obviously, it has tremendous positive potential

00:16:24.240 | in things like what you just described,

00:16:26.160 | in better medicine, better healthcare,

00:16:28.160 | better education, so many promises,

00:16:30.320 | but this is also why it's so dangerous,

00:16:32.560 | because the drive to develop it faster

00:16:37.360 | and faster is there,

00:16:39.440 | and it has some dangerous potential also,

00:16:42.720 | and we shouldn't ignore it.

00:16:43.840 | Again, I'm not advocating banning it,

00:16:45.600 | just to be careful about how we,

00:16:48.480 | not so much develop it,

00:16:50.560 | but most importantly, how we deploy it

00:16:52.800 | into the public sphere.

00:16:54.000 | This is the key question.

00:16:55.040 | And you know, you look back at history,

00:16:57.760 | and one of the things we know from history,

00:17:00.480 | humans are not good with new technologies.

00:17:03.440 | I hear many people now say,

00:17:05.280 | "You know, AI, we've been here before.

00:17:08.240 | "We had the radio, we had the printing press,

00:17:10.400 | "we had the Industrial Revolution.

00:17:12.080 | "Every time there is a big new technology,

00:17:13.920 | "people are afraid, and it will take jobs,

00:17:16.320 | "and build bad actors, and in the end, it's okay."

00:17:19.600 | And as a historian, my tendency is,

00:17:22.160 | "Yes, in the end, it's okay,

00:17:23.600 | "but in the end, there is a learning curve.

00:17:27.920 | "There is a lot of failed experiments

00:17:32.400 | "on the way to learning how to use the new technology,

00:17:36.560 | "and these failed experiments could cost the lives

00:17:40.560 | "of hundreds of millions of people."

00:17:42.640 | If you think about the last really big revolution,

00:17:45.200 | the Industrial Revolution,

00:17:46.560 | yes, in the end, we learned how to use

00:17:49.920 | the powers of industry, electricity, radio, trains,

00:17:54.000 | whatever, to build better human societies.

00:17:56.320 | But on the way, we had all these experiments,

00:18:01.200 | like European imperialism,

00:18:03.360 | which was driven by the Industrial Revolution.

00:18:05.600 | It was a question, "How do you build an industrial society?"

00:18:07.920 | "Oh, you build an empire, and you take,

00:18:10.240 | "you control all the resources,

00:18:12.560 | "the raw materials, the markets."

00:18:14.400 | And then you had communism, another big experiment

00:18:17.440 | on how to build an industrial society.

00:18:19.840 | And you had fascism and Nazism,

00:18:21.760 | which were essentially an experiment

00:18:24.240 | in how to build an industrial society,

00:18:27.280 | including even how do you exterminate minorities.

00:18:31.120 | Using the powers of industry.

00:18:33.760 | And we had all these failed experiments on the way.

00:18:36.400 | And if we now have the same type of failed experiments

00:18:40.800 | with the technologies of the 21st century,

00:18:43.280 | with AI, with bioengineering,

00:18:45.920 | it could cost the lives of, again,

00:18:48.400 | hundreds of millions of people,

00:18:50.080 | and maybe destroy the species.

00:18:51.680 | So as a historian, when people talk about the examples

00:18:58.000 | from history, from new technologies,

00:19:00.800 | I'm not so optimistic.

00:19:02.480 | We need to think about the failed experiment,

00:19:06.640 | which accompanied every major new technology.

00:19:09.520 | - So this intelligence thing, like you were saying,

00:19:12.880 | is a double-edged sword.

00:19:14.000 | Is that every new thing it helps us create,

00:19:18.800 | it can both save us and destroy us.

00:19:21.520 | And it's unclear each time which will happen.

00:19:25.120 | And that's maybe why we don't see any aliens.

00:19:27.040 | - Yeah, I mean, I think each time it does both things.

00:19:31.280 | Each time it does both good things and bad things.

00:19:34.000 | And the more powerful the technology,

00:19:36.800 | the greater both the positive and the negative outcomes.

00:19:40.960 | Now we are here because we are the descendants

00:19:45.120 | of the survivors, of the surviving cultures,

00:19:48.560 | the surviving civilizations.

00:19:51.360 | So when we look back, we say,

00:19:54.160 | in the end, everything was okay.

00:19:55.920 | Hey, we are here.

00:19:56.960 | But the people for whom it wasn't okay,

00:20:00.400 | they were just not here.

00:20:01.520 | - And okay has a lot of possible variations to it

00:20:06.800 | because there's a lot of suffering along the way,

00:20:08.720 | even for the people that survived.

00:20:10.480 | So the quality of life and all of this.

00:20:12.880 | But let's actually go back there

00:20:14.880 | with deep gratitude to our ancestors.

00:20:19.440 | How did it all start?

00:20:22.080 | How did Homo sapiens outcompete the others,

00:20:26.000 | the other human-like species,

00:20:28.240 | the Neanderthals and the other Homo species?

00:20:31.680 | - You know, on the individual level,

00:20:34.560 | as far as we can tell, we were not superior to them.

00:20:38.400 | Neanderthals actually had bigger brains than us.

00:20:41.440 | And not just other human species, other animals too.

00:20:45.360 | If you compare me personally to an elephant,

00:20:47.840 | to a chimpanzee, to a pig, I'm not so,

00:20:50.800 | I can do some things better, many other things worse.

00:20:53.360 | If you put me alone on some island

00:20:56.480 | with a chimpanzee, an elephant, and a pig,

00:20:58.960 | I wouldn't bet on me being the best survivor,

00:21:02.960 | the one that comes successful.

00:21:05.920 | - If I may interrupt for a second,

00:21:07.520 | I was just talking extensively with Elon Musk

00:21:10.800 | about the difference between humans and chimps,

00:21:12.560 | relevant to Optimus the robot.

00:21:16.560 | And the chimps are not able to do this kind of pinching

00:21:20.720 | with their fingers.

00:21:22.720 | They can only do this kind of pinching.

00:21:24.320 | And this kind of pinching is very useful

00:21:26.560 | for fine manipulation of precise manipulation of objects.

00:21:29.920 | So don't be so hard on yourself.

00:21:31.600 | You have a-

00:21:32.080 | - No, I said that I can do some things better than a chimp.

00:21:35.600 | But if Elon Musk goes on a boxing match with a chimpanzee,

00:21:40.080 | you know-

00:21:41.920 | - This won't help you.

00:21:43.200 | - This won't help you against a chimpanzee.

00:21:45.920 | - Good point.

00:21:46.320 | - And similarly, if you want to climb a tree,

00:21:48.880 | if you want to do so many things,

00:21:50.480 | my bets will be on the chimp, not on Elon.

00:21:53.280 | - Fair enough.

00:21:54.240 | So, I mean, you have advantages on both sides.

00:21:56.480 | And what really made us successful,

00:22:00.320 | what made us the rulers of the planet,

00:22:02.480 | and not the chimps and not the Neanderthals,

00:22:04.720 | is not any individual ability,

00:22:06.720 | but our collective ability,

00:22:09.200 | our ability to cooperate flexibly in very large numbers.

00:22:13.920 | Chimpanzees know how to cooperate, say 50 chimpanzees,

00:22:17.200 | a hundred chimpanzees.

00:22:18.320 | As far as we can tell from archeological evidence,

00:22:20.880 | this was also the case with Neanderthals.

00:22:23.760 | Homo sapiens, about 70,000 years ago,

00:22:27.440 | gained an amazing ability to cooperate basically in unlimited numbers.

00:22:34.080 | You start seeing the formation of large networks,

00:22:38.000 | political, commercial, religious,

00:22:40.000 | items being traded over thousands of kilometers,

00:22:44.960 | ideas being spread, autistic fashions.

00:22:47.920 | And this is our secret of success.

00:22:52.160 | Chimpanzees, Neanderthals can cooperate, say a hundred.

00:22:54.800 | We, you know, now the global trade network has 8 billion people.

00:23:00.160 | Like what we eat, what we wear,

00:23:02.160 | it comes from the other side of the world.

00:23:04.160 | Countries like China, like India, they have 1.4 billion people.

00:23:09.200 | Even Israel, which is a relatively small country,

00:23:11.440 | say 9 million citizens,

00:23:13.520 | that's more than the entire population of the planet

00:23:16.480 | 10,000 years ago of humans.

00:23:19.200 | So we can build these huge networks of cooperation

00:23:23.120 | and everything we've accomplished as a species,

00:23:26.080 | from, you know, building the pyramids to flying to the moon,

00:23:28.800 | it's based on that.

00:23:30.000 | And then you ask, "Okay, so what makes it possible

00:23:34.000 | for millions of people who don't know each other

00:23:36.960 | to cooperate in a way that Neanderthals or chimpanzees couldn't?"

00:23:41.200 | And at least my answer is stories, is fiction.

00:23:46.560 | It's the imagination.

00:23:47.840 | If you examine any large-scale human cooperation,

00:23:51.840 | you always find fiction as its basis.

00:23:55.760 | It's a fictional story that holds lots of strangers together.

00:24:01.440 | It's most obvious in cases like religion.

00:24:04.160 | You know, you can't convince a group of chimpanzees

00:24:07.840 | to come together to fight a war or build a cathedral

00:24:11.040 | by promising to them, "If you do that, after you die,

00:24:14.160 | you go to chimpanzee heaven

00:24:15.680 | and you get lots of bananas and coconuts."

00:24:18.000 | No chimpanzee will ever believe that.

00:24:20.080 | Humans believe these stories,

00:24:21.680 | which is why we have these huge religious networks.

00:24:25.280 | But it's the same thing with modern politics.

00:24:28.960 | It's the same thing with economics.

00:24:30.640 | People think, "Oh, economics, this is rational.

00:24:33.280 | It has nothing to do with fictional stories."

00:24:35.360 | No, money is the most successful story ever told,

00:24:40.080 | much more successful than any religious mythology.

00:24:43.280 | Not everybody believes in God or in the same God.

00:24:46.640 | Almost everybody believes in money,

00:24:48.880 | even though it's just a figment of our imagination.

00:24:51.120 | You know, you take these green pieces of paper, dollars,

00:24:55.280 | they have no value.

00:24:56.320 | You can't eat them, you can't drink them.

00:24:58.080 | And today, most dollars are not even pieces of paper.

00:25:01.360 | They are just electronic information passing between computers.

00:25:04.720 | We value them just for one reason,

00:25:08.640 | that you have the best storytellers in the world.

00:25:11.120 | The bankers, the finance ministers, all these people,

00:25:14.800 | they are the best storytellers ever.

00:25:16.560 | And they tell us a story that this green little piece of paper

00:25:21.600 | or this bit of information, it is worth a banana.

00:25:24.400 | And as long as everybody believes it, it works.

00:25:27.600 | - So at which point does a fiction,

00:25:30.400 | when it's sufficiently useful and effective

00:25:33.840 | and improving the global quality of life,

00:25:36.560 | does it become like accepted reality?

00:25:39.760 | Like there's a threshold which is just kind of-

00:25:42.160 | - If enough people believe it, it's like with money.

00:25:44.400 | You know, if you start a new cryptocurrency,

00:25:47.040 | if you're the only one that believes the story,

00:25:49.120 | I mean, again, cryptocurrencies, you have the math, of course,

00:25:52.960 | but ultimately it's storytelling.

00:25:54.880 | You're selling people a story.

00:25:56.800 | If nobody believes your story, you don't have anything.

00:26:00.960 | But if lots of people believe the Bitcoin story,

00:26:03.600 | then Bitcoin can be worth thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.

00:26:07.280 | Again, why?

00:26:08.080 | I mean, you can't eat it, you can't drink it, it's nothing.

00:26:10.560 | It's the story around the math, which is the real magic.

00:26:16.160 | - Is it possible that the story is the primary living organism,

00:26:20.800 | not the storyteller?

00:26:21.840 | So that somehow humans, homo sapiens evolved

00:26:29.280 | to become these like hosts

00:26:32.400 | for a more intelligent living organism, which is the idea.

00:26:36.480 | And the ideas are the ones that are doing the competing.

00:26:39.120 | So this is one of the sort of big perspectives behind your work

00:26:45.200 | that's really revolutionary of how you see in history.

00:26:47.280 | But do you ever kind of take the perspective of the ideas

00:26:52.240 | as organisms versus the humans?

00:26:53.920 | - It's an interesting idea.

00:26:56.080 | There are two opposite things to say about it.

00:26:59.120 | On the one hand, yes, absolutely.

00:27:01.840 | If you look long-term in history, it's all the people die.

00:27:06.000 | It's the stories that compete and survive and spread.

00:27:10.400 | And stories often spread by making people willing

00:27:14.800 | to sacrifice sometimes their lives for the story.

00:27:18.240 | You know, we know in Israel,

00:27:20.800 | this is one of the most important story factories in human history.

00:27:25.520 | And this is a place where people still kill each other every day over stories.

00:27:29.520 | I don't know, you've been to Jerusalem, right?

00:27:31.920 | - Mm-hmm.

00:27:32.400 | - So people are like, "Ah, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem."

00:27:35.520 | You go there, I've lived in Jerusalem much of my life.

00:27:37.920 | You go there, it's an ordinary place.

00:27:40.400 | You know, it's a town.

00:27:41.600 | You have buildings, you have stones, you have trees,

00:27:44.320 | you have dogs and cats and pedestrians.

00:27:46.640 | It's a regular place.

00:27:48.320 | But then you have the stories about the place.

00:27:52.720 | "Oh, this is the place where God revealed himself.

00:27:55.680 | This is the place where Jesus was.

00:27:57.520 | This is the place where Muhammad was."

00:27:59.680 | And it's the stories that people fight over.

00:28:03.200 | Nobody's fighting over the stones.

00:28:05.600 | People are fighting about the stories about the stones.

00:28:10.560 | And the stories, if a story can get millions of people to fight for it,

00:28:16.880 | it not only survives, it spreads, it can take over the world.

00:28:22.480 | The other side of the coin is that the stories are not really alive

00:28:29.920 | because they don't feel anything.

00:28:31.520 | This goes back to the question of consciousness,

00:28:33.920 | which I think is the most important thing.

00:28:36.000 | That the ultimate reality is consciousness,

00:28:42.400 | is the ability to feel things.

00:28:44.320 | If you want to know whether the hero of some story is real or not,

00:28:50.320 | you need to ask, "Can it suffer?"

00:28:52.960 | Stories don't feel anything.

00:28:58.880 | Countries, which are also stories, nations, don't suffer.

00:29:02.400 | If a nation loses a war, it doesn't suffer.

00:29:05.520 | The soldiers suffer, the civilians suffer, animals can suffer.

00:29:09.200 | You have an army with horses and whatever,

00:29:11.280 | and the horses get wounded, the horses suffer.

00:29:13.600 | The nation can't suffer.

00:29:15.040 | It's just an imagination.

00:29:17.360 | It's just a fictional story in our mind.

00:29:19.200 | It doesn't feel anything.

00:29:21.360 | Similarly, when a bank goes bankrupt or a company goes bankrupt

00:29:25.680 | or when a currency loses its value,

00:29:29.440 | like Bitcoin is worth now zero, crashed,

00:29:32.720 | or the dollar is worth zero, it crashed,

00:29:34.880 | the dollar doesn't feel anything.

00:29:36.400 | It's the people holding the dollars who might be now very miserable.

00:29:40.720 | So we have this complex situation when history is largely driven by stories,

00:29:48.480 | but stories are not the ultimate reality.

00:29:53.360 | The ultimate reality is feelings of humans, of animals,

00:29:59.520 | and the tragedy of history is that very, very often we get the order wrong.

00:30:07.200 | Stories are not bad.

00:30:08.720 | Stories are tools.

00:30:09.840 | They are good when we use them in order to alleviate suffering.

00:30:15.680 | But very often we forget it.

00:30:19.840 | We, instead of using the stories for our purposes,

00:30:24.320 | we allow the stories to use us for their purposes.

00:30:28.720 | And then you start entire wars because of a story.

00:30:32.560 | You inflict millions, suffering on millions of people

00:30:36.560 | just for the sake of a story.

00:30:37.920 | And that's the tragedy of human history.

00:30:40.960 | - So the fundamental property of life,

00:30:43.120 | of a living organism is the capacity to feel,

00:30:47.200 | and the ultimate feeling is suffering.

00:30:49.920 | - You know, to know if you're happy or not,

00:30:51.920 | it's a very difficult question.

00:30:53.280 | - Yeah.

00:30:54.320 | - But when you suffer, you know.

00:30:55.600 | - Yes.

00:30:56.000 | - And also in ethical terms,

00:30:58.800 | it's more important to be aware of suffering than of any other emotion.

00:31:03.920 | If you're doing something which is causing all kinds of emotions to all kinds of people,

00:31:10.480 | first of all, you need to notice if you're causing a lot of suffering to someone.

00:31:14.640 | If some people are like it and some people are bothered by it

00:31:18.560 | and some people are a bit angry at you,

00:31:20.240 | and some people are suffering because of what you do,

00:31:22.560 | you first of all have to know,

00:31:23.920 | "Oh."

00:31:24.160 | Now, sometimes you still have to do it.

00:31:26.640 | You know, the world is a complicated place.

00:31:28.240 | I don't know, you have an epidemic,

00:31:30.000 | governments decide to have all those social isolation regulations or whatever.

00:31:35.600 | So in certain cases, yes, you need to do it,

00:31:38.880 | even though it can cause tremendous suffering,

00:31:41.280 | but you need to be very aware of the cost and to be very, very,

00:31:46.240 | you have to ask yourself again and again and again,

00:31:48.960 | "Is it worth it? Is it still worth it?"

00:31:51.440 | - And the interesting question there,

00:31:54.320 | implied in your statements is that suffering is a pretty good component

00:31:59.520 | of a Turing test for consciousness.

00:32:01.040 | - This is the most important thing to ask about AI.

00:32:04.000 | Can it suffer?

00:32:05.200 | Because if AI can suffer,

00:32:07.360 | then it is an ethical subject and it needs protection,

00:32:12.080 | it needs rights, just like humans and animals.

00:32:14.560 | - Well, quite a long time ago already.

00:32:17.440 | So I work with a lot of robots, legged robots,

00:32:21.040 | but I've even had, inspired by a YouTube video,

00:32:24.480 | I had a bunch of Roombas and I made them scream

00:32:26.480 | when I touched them or kicked them or when they run into a wall.

00:32:29.040 | And the illusion of suffering,

00:32:32.960 | for me, silly human,

00:32:35.120 | the anthropomorphizes things is as powerful as suffering itself.

00:32:39.760 | I mean, you immediately think the thing is suffering.

00:32:44.000 | And I think some of it is just a technical problem,

00:32:47.200 | but it's the easily solvable one.

00:32:49.440 | How to create an AI system that just says,

00:32:52.720 | "Please don't hurt me. Please don't shut me off. I miss you.

00:32:56.240 | Where have you been? Be jealous also.

00:32:59.600 | Where have you been gone for so long?

00:33:03.440 | Your calendar doesn't have anything on it."

00:33:05.600 | So this kind of, this create through words,

00:33:10.960 | the perception of suffering, of jealousy, of anger,

00:33:15.200 | of all of those things.

00:33:16.400 | And it just seems like that's not so difficult to do.

00:33:18.960 | - That's part of the danger,

00:33:21.200 | that it basically hacks our operating system

00:33:25.840 | and it uses some of our best qualities against us.

00:33:31.120 | It's very, very good that humans are attuned to suffering

00:33:36.480 | and that we don't want to cause suffering,

00:33:38.640 | that we have compassion.

00:33:39.600 | That's one of the most wonderful thing about humans.

00:33:42.160 | And if we now create AIs, which use this to manipulate us,

00:33:46.960 | this is a terrible thing.

00:33:48.160 | - You've kind of, I think, mentioned this.

00:33:50.480 | Do you think it should be illegal

00:33:53.520 | to do these kinds of things with AI,

00:33:57.120 | to create the perception of consciousness,

00:33:59.760 | of saying, "Please don't leave me,"

00:34:01.040 | or sort of basically simulate

00:34:03.920 | some of the human-like qualities?

00:34:05.360 | - Yes, I think, and we have to be very careful about it.

00:34:08.560 | And if it emerges spontaneously, we need to be careful.

00:34:15.360 | And we can't rule out the possibility

00:34:17.760 | that AI will develop consciousness.

00:34:19.920 | We don't know enough about consciousness to be sure.

00:34:23.200 | So if it develops spontaneously,

00:34:24.960 | we need to be very careful about how we understand it.

00:34:31.200 | But if people intentionally design an AI

00:34:35.760 | that they know, they assume it has no consciousness,

00:34:38.720 | but in order to manipulate people,

00:34:40.400 | they use, again, this human strength,

00:34:44.640 | this human, the noble part of our nature against us,

00:34:49.680 | this should be forbidden.

00:34:51.200 | And similarly, on a more general level,

00:34:53.920 | that it should be forbidden for an AI

00:34:57.040 | to pretend to be a human being.

00:34:58.640 | That it's okay, you know, there are so many things

00:35:01.520 | we can use AIs as teachers, as doctors, and so forth,

00:35:05.120 | and it's good as long as we know

00:35:06.880 | that we are interacting with an AI.

00:35:09.520 | We should, the same way we ban fake money,

00:35:12.960 | we should ban fake humans.

00:35:14.400 | It's not just banning deepfakes of specific individuals.

00:35:19.360 | It's also banning deepfake of generic humans.

00:35:24.160 | You know, which is already happening

00:35:26.400 | to some extent on social media.

00:35:28.720 | Like if you have lots of bots retweeting something,

00:35:31.760 | then you have the impression,

00:35:33.600 | "Oh, lots of people are interested in that.

00:35:35.360 | That's important."

00:35:36.160 | And this is basically the bots pretending to be humans.

00:35:40.880 | Because if you see a tweet which says,

00:35:43.440 | "500 people retweeted it,"

00:35:46.720 | or you see a tweet and it says,

00:35:49.920 | "500 bots retweeted it,"

00:35:51.920 | I don't care what the bots retweeted,

00:35:53.760 | but if it's humans, okay, that's interesting.

00:35:56.000 | So we need to be very careful that bots can't do that.

00:36:01.040 | They are doing it at present,

00:36:02.480 | and it should be banned.

00:36:04.160 | Now, some people say, "Yes, but freedom of expression."

00:36:06.400 | No, bots don't have freedom of expression.

00:36:10.480 | There is no cost in terms of freedom of expression

00:36:15.200 | when you ban bots.

00:36:16.240 | So again, in some situations, yes,

00:36:19.040 | AIs should interact with us,

00:36:21.280 | but it should be very clear,

00:36:23.040 | this is an AI talking to you,

00:36:25.200 | or this is an AI retweeting this story.

00:36:28.960 | It is not a human being making a conscious decision.

00:36:32.400 | - To push back on this line of fake humans,

00:36:36.000 | because I think it might be a spectrum.

00:36:38.960 | First of all, you might have AI systems

00:36:41.200 | that are offended, hurt,

00:36:44.000 | when you say that they're fake humans.

00:36:47.600 | In fact, they might start identifying as humans.

00:36:51.840 | And you just talked about the power of us humans

00:36:57.360 | with our collective intelligence

00:36:58.640 | to take fake stories and make them quite real.

00:37:01.440 | And so if the feelings you have for the fake human is real,

00:37:06.960 | you know, love is a kind of fake thing

00:37:10.320 | that we all kind of put a word to, a set of feelings.

00:37:14.880 | What if you have that feeling for an AI system?

00:37:18.480 | It starts to change, I mean,

00:37:22.320 | maybe the kind of things AI systems are allowed to do.

00:37:27.280 | For good, they're allowed to create,

00:37:32.240 | communicate suffering, communicate the good stuff,

00:37:37.120 | the longing, the hope, the connection,

00:37:39.760 | the intimacy, all of that.

00:37:40.960 | And in that way, get integrated in our society.

00:37:44.320 | And then you start to ask a question,

00:37:45.680 | and are we allowed to really unplug them?

00:37:49.280 | Are we allowed to really censor them,

00:37:51.120 | remove them, remove their voice from social media?

00:37:54.800 | - I'm not saying that they shouldn't have a voice,

00:37:56.240 | they shouldn't talk with us.

00:37:57.280 | I'm just saying when they talk with us,

00:37:59.200 | it should be clear that they are AI.

00:38:01.040 | That's it.

00:38:02.180 | Don't, you can have your voice as an AI.

00:38:05.920 | Again, I have some medical problem.

00:38:08.160 | I want to get advice from an AI doctor.

00:38:10.400 | That's fine, as long as I know that I'm talking with an AI.

00:38:13.600 | What should be banned is AI pretending to be a human being.

00:38:19.200 | This is something that will erode trust,

00:38:22.320 | and without trust, society collapses.

00:38:25.600 | This is something that especially will endanger democracies,

00:38:29.520 | because democracies are built on,

00:38:31.200 | democracy is a conversation, basically.

00:38:33.280 | And it's a conversation between people.

00:38:36.880 | If you now flood the public sphere with millions

00:38:41.360 | and potentially billions of AI agents

00:38:44.880 | that can hold conversations, they never sleep,

00:38:47.840 | they never eat, they don't have emotions of their own,

00:38:51.520 | they can get to know you and tailor their words

00:38:54.800 | specifically for you and your life story.

00:38:57.840 | They are becoming better than us

00:39:01.120 | at creating stories and ideas and so forth.

00:39:07.200 | If you flood the public sphere with that,

00:39:10.160 | this will ruin the conversation between people.

00:39:14.160 | It will ruin the trust between people.

00:39:16.400 | That's, you will no longer be able to have a democracy

00:39:20.640 | in this situation.

00:39:21.840 | You can have other types of regimes,

00:39:24.400 | but no democracy.

00:39:25.360 | - If we could talk about the big philosophical notion

00:39:28.240 | of truth then.

00:39:29.040 | You've already talked about the capacity of humans.

00:39:34.400 | One of the things that made us special is stories.

00:39:37.840 | So is there such thing as truth?

00:39:43.040 | - Absolutely.

00:39:44.880 | - What is truth, exactly?

00:39:46.400 | - When somebody's suffering, that's true.

00:39:48.320 | I mean, this is why one of the things

00:39:51.120 | when you talk about suffering

00:39:52.160 | as a kind of ultimate reality,

00:39:54.400 | when somebody suffers, that is truth.

00:39:57.120 | Now, somebody can suffer because of a fictional story.

00:40:00.880 | Somebody tells people that God said,

00:40:04.480 | "You must go on this crusade and kill these heretics."

00:40:07.600 | And this is a completely fictional story.

00:40:09.200 | People believe it and they start a war

00:40:11.840 | and they destroy cities and kill people.

00:40:13.760 | The people that suffer because of that,

00:40:16.480 | and even the crusaders themselves

00:40:18.640 | that also suffer the consequences of what they do,

00:40:21.040 | the suffering is true,

00:40:22.480 | even though it is caused by a fictional story.

00:40:26.080 | Similarly, when people agree on certain rules,

00:40:31.760 | the rules could come out of our imagination.

00:40:34.640 | Now, we can be truthful about it and say,

00:40:38.960 | "These rules, they didn't come from heaven.

00:40:41.200 | They came from our imagination."

00:40:43.200 | You know, we look at sports.

00:40:44.800 | So we have rules for the game of football, soccer.

00:40:48.160 | They were invented by people.

00:40:50.800 | Nobody, at least very few people,

00:40:53.280 | claim that the rules of football came down from heaven.

00:40:55.840 | - Yes.

00:40:56.080 | - We invented them.

00:40:57.520 | And this is truthful.

00:40:58.880 | They are fictional rules invented by humans,

00:41:02.400 | and this is true.

00:41:03.120 | They were invented by humans.

00:41:04.640 | And when you are honest about it,

00:41:06.640 | it enables you to change the rules,

00:41:09.120 | which is being done in football every now and then.

00:41:12.000 | It's the same with the fundamental rules of a country.

00:41:14.960 | You can pretend that the rules came down from heaven,

00:41:19.680 | dictated by God or whatever,

00:41:21.760 | and then you can't change them.

00:41:22.960 | Or you can be like, you know, the American Constitution,

00:41:26.400 | which starts with "We the people."

00:41:28.160 | The American Constitution lays down certain rules for a society,

00:41:33.760 | but the amazing thing about it,

00:41:36.320 | it does not pretend to come from an external source.

00:41:40.080 | The Ten Commandments start with "I am your Lord God."

00:41:46.000 | And because it starts with that, you can't change them.

00:41:49.760 | You know, the 10th Commandment, for instance, supports slavery.

00:41:54.880 | The 10th Commandment, in the Ten Commandments,

00:41:57.840 | it says that you should not covet your neighbor's house,

00:42:01.440 | or your neighbor's wife, or your neighbor's slaves.

00:42:04.640 | It's okay to hold slaves, according to the Ten Commandments.

00:42:08.320 | It's just bad to covet the slaves of your neighbor.

00:42:12.640 | Now, there is no 11th Commandment which says,

00:42:16.880 | "If you don't like some of the previous Ten Commandments,

00:42:20.000 | this is how you go about amending them."

00:42:22.320 | Which is why we still have them, unchanged.

00:42:24.560 | Now, in the U.S. Constitution, you have all these rights and rules,

00:42:29.920 | including, originally, the ability to hold slaves.

00:42:33.120 | But the genius of the founding fathers of the United States,

00:42:37.360 | they had the humility to understand,

00:42:41.680 | maybe we don't understand everything.

00:42:44.640 | Maybe we made some mistakes.

00:42:46.960 | So we tell you that these rules did not come from heaven.

00:42:51.280 | They came from us humans.

00:42:53.040 | We may have made a mistake.

00:42:54.720 | So here is a mechanism for how future generations

00:42:58.640 | can amend the Constitution, which was used later on to,

00:43:02.400 | for instance, amend the Constitution to ban slavery.

00:43:06.000 | So now you're describing some interesting and powerful ideas

00:43:10.000 | throughout human history.

00:43:11.280 | Can you just speak to the mechanism of how humans believe,

00:43:14.720 | start to believe ideas?

00:43:17.360 | Is there something interesting to say there,

00:43:19.520 | from your thinking about it?

00:43:20.720 | Like how idea is born, and how it takes hold,

00:43:25.280 | and how it spreads, and how it competes with other ideas?

00:43:27.840 | First of all, ideas are an independent force in history.

00:43:31.840 | Marxists tend to deny that.

00:43:35.440 | Marxists think that all history is just a play of material interests.

00:43:41.760 | And ideas, stories, they are just a smokescreen

00:43:46.400 | to hide the underlying interests.

00:43:49.920 | My thoughts are, to some extent, the opposite.

00:43:54.000 | We have some biological objective interests

00:43:58.480 | that all humans share, like we need to eat,

00:44:00.960 | we need to drink, we need to breathe.

00:44:05.360 | But most conflicts in history are not about that.

00:44:08.000 | The interests which really drive most conflicts in history

00:44:13.280 | don't come from biology.

00:44:14.800 | They come from religions, and ideologies, and stories.

00:44:18.960 | So it's not that stories are a smokescreen

00:44:22.560 | to hide the real interests.

00:44:24.880 | The stories create the interests in the first place.

00:44:29.200 | The stories define who are the competing groups.

00:44:33.280 | Nations, religions, cultures, they are not biological entities.

00:44:37.600 | They are not like species, like gorillas and chimpanzees.

00:44:40.480 | No.

00:44:40.980 | Israelis and Palestinians, or Germans and French,

00:44:44.400 | or Chinese and Americans,

00:44:46.320 | they have no essential biological difference between them.

00:44:50.080 | The difference is cultural.

00:44:51.520 | It comes from stories.

00:44:52.960 | There are people that believe in different stories.

00:44:55.280 | The stories create the identity.

00:44:57.760 | The stories create the interests.

00:45:00.400 | Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over Jerusalem,

00:45:03.440 | not because of any material interest.

00:45:05.680 | There are no oil fields under Jerusalem.

00:45:08.320 | And even oil, you need it to realize some cultural fantasy.

00:45:13.360 | It doesn't really come from biology.

00:45:15.440 | So the stories are independent forces.

00:45:19.600 | Now, why do people believe one story and not another?

00:45:22.480 | That's history.

00:45:24.560 | There is no materialistic law.

00:45:28.480 | People will always believe this.

00:45:30.320 | No.

00:45:31.040 | History is full of accidents.

00:45:33.120 | How did Christianity become the most successful religion in the world?

00:45:37.520 | We can't explain it.

00:45:39.280 | Why this story about Jesus of Nazareth?

00:45:44.160 | The Roman Empire in the third century CE was a bit like, I don't know, California today.

00:45:52.320 | Like so many sects and subsects and gurus and religions.

00:45:57.920 | Everybody has their own thing.

00:45:59.040 | And you have thousands of different stories competing.

00:46:04.880 | Why did Christianity come up on top?

00:46:06.960 | As a historian, I don't have a kind of clear answer.

00:46:11.440 | You can read the sources and you see how it happened.

00:46:17.520 | Oh, this happened, and then this happened, and then Constantine adopted it,

00:46:20.880 | and then this, and then this.

00:46:21.840 | But why?

00:46:22.960 | I don't think anybody has an answer to that.

00:46:26.720 | If you rewind the movie of history and press play, and you rewind and press play a hundred times,

00:46:35.200 | I think Christianity would take over the Roman Empire in the world, maybe twice out of a hundred times.

00:46:40.640 | It was such an unlikely thing to happen.

00:46:43.440 | It's the same with Islam.

00:46:45.280 | It's the same, I don't know, with the communist takeover of Russia.

00:46:49.600 | In 1914, if you told people that in three years Lenin and the Bolsheviks will gain power in the

00:46:57.200 | Tsarist Empire, they would think you're utterly crazy.

00:47:00.400 | You know, Lenin had a few thousand supporters in 1914 in an empire of close to 200 million people.

00:47:08.880 | It sounded ludicrous.

00:47:11.200 | Now, we know the chain of events, the First World War, the February Revolution, and so

00:47:18.320 | forth that led to the communist takeover, but it was such an unlikely event.

00:47:23.440 | And it happened.

00:47:25.200 | And the little steps along the way, the little options you have along the way, because,

00:47:28.640 | you know, Stalin versus Trotsky, you could have the Robert Frost poem.

00:47:32.080 | There's always...

00:47:32.480 | Yes.

00:47:32.980 | And history often takes, you know, there is a highway, and there is a kind of sideway,

00:47:40.160 | and history takes the sideways many, many times.

00:47:43.520 | And it's perhaps tempting to tell some of that history through charismatic leaders,

00:47:47.840 | and maybe it's an open question how much power charismatic leaders have to affect

00:47:53.840 | the trajectory of history.

00:47:55.200 | You've met quite a lot of charismatic leaders lately.

00:47:58.720 | I mean, what's your view on that?

00:48:01.280 | I find it a compelling notion.

00:48:02.960 | I'm a sucker for a great speech and a vision.

00:48:05.600 | So I have a sense that there's an importance for a leader to catalyze the viral spread of a story.

00:48:16.160 | So, like, I think we need leaders to be just great storytellers that kind of sharpen up

00:48:22.640 | the story to make sure it infiltrates everybody's brain effectively.

00:48:26.560 | But it could also be that the local interactions between humans is even more important.

00:48:34.640 | But it's just we don't have a good way to sort of summarize and describe that.

00:48:37.760 | We like to talk about, you know, Steve Jobs as central to the development of the computer,

00:48:45.040 | maybe Bill Gates, and you tell it to the stories of individuals like this,

00:48:49.600 | because it's just easier to tell a sexy story that way.

00:48:52.800 | Maybe it's an interplay, because you have the kind of structural forces that, I don't know,

00:48:58.320 | you look at the geography of the planet, and you look at shipping technology in the late 15th

00:49:06.480 | century in Europe and the Mediterranean, and it's almost inevitable that pretty quickly somebody

00:49:13.680 | will discover America, somebody from the old world will get to the new world.

00:49:18.560 | So this was not a kind of, this didn't, if it wasn't Columbus, then it would have been a five

00:49:24.400 | years later somebody else. But the key thing about history is that these small differences

00:49:31.280 | make a huge, huge difference. You know, if it wasn't Columbus, if it was five years later,

00:49:38.240 | somebody from England, then maybe all of Latin America today would be speaking English and not

00:49:44.160 | Spanish. If it was somebody from the Ottoman Empire, it's completely different world history.

00:49:49.920 | If you have, and you know, the Ottoman Empire at that time was also shaping up to be a major

00:49:56.960 | maritime empire. If you have America being reached by Muslim navigators before Christian navigators

00:50:06.480 | from Europe, you have a completely different world history. It's the same with the computer.

00:50:10.720 | Given the economic incentives and the science and technology of the time, then the rise of

00:50:20.080 | the personal computer was probably inevitable sometime in the late 20th century. But the where

00:50:26.720 | and when is crucial. The fact that it was California in the 1970s and not, say, I don't know,

00:50:34.800 | Japan in the 1980s or China in the 1990s, this made a huge, huge difference. So you have this

00:50:42.240 | interplay between the structural forces, which are beyond the control of any single charismatic

00:50:48.240 | leader, but then the small changes, they can have a big effect. I think, for instance, about the war

00:50:54.960 | in Ukraine. There was a moment, now it's a struggle between nations, but there was a moment when the

00:51:02.800 | decision was taken in the mind of a single individual of Vladimir Putin, and he could

00:51:08.320 | have decided otherwise, and the world would have looked completely different.

00:51:13.040 | - And another leader, Vladimir Zelensky, could have decided to leave Kiev in the early days.

00:51:19.840 | There's a lot of decisions that kind of ripple. So you write in Homo Deus about Hitler,

00:51:27.360 | and in part that he was not a very impressive person.

00:51:32.320 | - I say that?

00:51:33.680 | - The quote is, let me read it.

00:51:36.480 | - Okay.

00:51:37.040 | - He wasn't a senior officer. In four years of war, he rose no higher than the rank of corporal.

00:51:45.120 | He had no formal education. Perhaps you mean his resume was not impressive.

00:51:48.800 | - Yeah, his resume was not impressive. That's true.

00:51:51.360 | - He had no formal education, no professional skills, no political background. He wasn't a

00:51:56.400 | successful businessman or a union activist. He didn't have friends or relatives in high places,

00:52:01.280 | nor any money to speak of. So how did he amass so much power?

00:52:06.720 | What ideology, what circumstances enabled the rise of the Third Reich?

00:52:11.680 | - Again, I can't tell you the why. I can tell you the how. I don't think it was inevitable.

00:52:18.640 | I think that if a few things were different, there would have been no Third Reich. There would have

00:52:24.720 | been no Nazism, no Holocaust. Again, this is the tragedy. If it would have been inevitable,

00:52:29.920 | then what can you do? This is the laws of history or the laws of physics. But the tragedy is no,

00:52:35.200 | it was decisions by humans that led to that direction. And even from the viewpoint of the

00:52:42.800 | Germans, we know for a fact it was an unnecessary path to take. Because in the 1920s and '30s,

00:52:53.120 | the Nazis said that unless Germany take this road, it will never be prosperous. It will never

00:53:02.160 | be successful. All the other countries will keep stepping on it. This was their claim.

00:53:08.960 | And we know for a fact this is false. Why? Because they took that road, they lost the Second World

00:53:17.760 | War, and after they lost, then they became one of the most prosperous countries in the world

00:53:25.600 | because their enemies that defeated them evidently supported them and allowed them

00:53:31.920 | to become such a prosperous and successful nation. So if you can lose the war and still be

00:53:39.520 | so successful, obviously you could just have skipped the war. You didn't need it.

00:53:45.280 | You really had to have the war in order to have a prosperous Germany in the 19th century? Absolutely

00:53:50.480 | not. And it's the same with Japan. It's the same with Italy. So it was not inevitable. It was not

00:53:58.240 | the forces of history that necessitated, that forced Germany to take this path. I think part

00:54:06.400 | of it is part of the appeal of… Again, Hitler was a very, very skillful storyteller. He told

00:54:15.280 | people a story. The fact that he was nobody made it even more effective because people at that time,

00:54:23.280 | after the defeat of the First World War, after the repeated economic crisis of the 1920s in Germany,

00:54:31.280 | people felt betrayed by all the established elites, by all the established institutions,

00:54:39.680 | all these professors and politicians and industrialists and military, all the big people.

00:54:45.040 | They led us to a disastrous war. They led us to humiliation. So we don't want any of them.

00:54:52.160 | And then you have this nobody, a corporal with no money, with no education, with no titles,

00:54:58.960 | with nothing. And he tells people, "I'm one of you." And this was one reason why he was so popular.

00:55:06.400 | And then the story he told, when you look at stories, at the competition between different

00:55:13.760 | stories and between stories, fiction, and the truth, the truth has two big problems.

00:55:21.520 | The truth tends to be complicated and the truth tends to be painful.

00:55:26.720 | The real story of… Let's talk about nations. The real story of every nation is complicated

00:55:35.200 | and it contains some painful episodes. We are not always good. We sometimes do bad things.

00:55:42.880 | Now, if you go to people and you tell them a complicated and painful story, many of them don't

00:55:50.160 | want to listen. The advantage of fiction is that it can be made as simple and as painless, attractive

00:55:59.200 | as you want it to be, because it's fiction. And then what you see is that politicians like Hitler,

00:56:05.920 | they create a very simple story. We are the heroes. We always do good things. Everybody's

00:56:13.440 | against us. Everybody's trying to trample us. And this is very attractive. One of the things

00:56:20.560 | people don't understand about Nazism and fascism, we teach in schools about fascism and Nazism

00:56:27.760 | as this ultimate evil, the ultimate monster in human history. And at some level, this is wrong,

00:56:37.120 | because it makes people… It actually exposes us. Why? Because people hear, "Oh, fascism is this

00:56:44.720 | monster." And then when you hear the actual fascist story, what fascists tell you is always

00:56:53.760 | very beautiful and attractive. Fascists are people who come and tell you, "You are wonderful.

00:56:59.760 | You belong to the most wonderful group of people in the world. You are beautiful. You are ethical.

00:57:06.400 | Everything you do is good. You have never done anything wrong. There are all these evil monsters

00:57:12.160 | out there that are out to get you, and they are causing all the problems in the world."

00:57:16.720 | And when people hear that, it's like looking in the mirror and seeing something very beautiful.

00:57:23.360 | "Hey, I'm beautiful. We've never done anything wrong. We are victims. Everybody's…" And

00:57:29.200 | when you look… And you heard in school that fascism, that fascists are monsters.

00:57:35.280 | And you look in the mirror, you see something very beautiful. And you say, "I can't be a fascist

00:57:39.760 | because fascists are monsters, and this is so beautiful, so it can't be."

00:57:43.200 | But when you look in the fascist mirror, you never see a monster. You see the most beautiful

00:57:51.760 | thing in the world. And that's the danger. This is the problem with Hollywood's…

00:57:56.400 | I look at Voldemort in Harry Potter. Who would like to follow this creep?

00:58:02.640 | Yeah.

00:58:03.520 | And you look at Darth Vader. This is not somebody you would like to follow.

00:58:08.400 | Christianity got things much better when it described the devil as being very beautiful

00:58:14.240 | and attractive. That's the danger, that you see something is very beautiful, you don't understand

00:58:21.040 | the monster underneath.

00:58:22.400 | And you're right precisely about this. And by the way, it's just a small aside.

00:58:28.720 | It always saddens me when people say how obvious it is to them that communism

00:58:33.280 | is a flawed ideology. When you ask them, try to put your mind, try to put yourself

00:58:40.560 | in the beginning of the 20th century and see what you would do. A lot of people will say

00:58:45.680 | it's obvious that it's a flawed ideology. So, I mean, I suppose to some of the worst ideologies

00:58:51.280 | in human history, you could say the same. And in that mirror, when you look, it looks beautiful.

00:58:56.320 | Communism is the same. Also, you look in the communist mirror, you're the most ethical,

00:59:00.560 | wonderful person ever. It's very difficult to see Stalin underneath it.

00:59:06.560 | So, yeah, in "Homo Deus" you also write, "During the 19th and 20th centuries, as humanism gained

00:59:12.960 | increasing social credibility and political power, it sprouted two very different offshoots.

00:59:17.520 | Socialist humanism, which encompassed a plethora of socialist and communist movements,

00:59:22.720 | and evolutionary humanism, whose most famous advocates were the Nazis." So, if you can just

00:59:28.800 | linger on that, what's the ideological connection between Nazism and communism as embodied by

00:59:34.240 | humanism? Humanism basically is, you know, the focus is on humans, that they are the most important

00:59:42.960 | thing in the world. They move history. But then there is a big question, what is, what are humans?

00:59:49.520 | What is humanity? Now, liberals, they place at the center of the story individual humans,

00:59:59.200 | and they don't see history as a kind of necessary collision between big forces.

01:00:06.160 | They place the individual at the center. If you want to know, you know, there is a bad,

01:00:10.320 | especially in the US today, liberal is taken as the opposite of conservative.

01:00:16.880 | But it's, to test whether you're liberal, you need to answer just three questions. Very simple.

01:00:22.320 | Do you think people should have the right to choose their own government,

01:00:27.200 | or the government should be imposed by some outside force? Do you think people should have

01:00:33.920 | the right to the liberty to choose their own profession, or either born into some caste that

01:00:41.520 | predetermines what they do? And do you think people should have the liberty to choose their

01:00:46.640 | own spouse, and their own way of personal life, instead of being told by elders or parents who

01:00:54.080 | to marry and how to live? Now, if you answered yes to all three questions, people should have

01:00:59.520 | the liberty to choose their government, their profession, their personal lives, their spouse,

01:01:04.800 | then you're a liberal. And most conservatives are also liberal. Now, communists and fascists,

01:01:14.000 | they answer differently. For them, history is not, yes, history is about humans. Humans are the big

01:01:21.600 | heroes of history, but not individual humans and their liberties. Fascists imagine history as a

01:01:29.120 | clash between races or nations. The nation is at the center. They say the supreme good is the good

01:01:39.280 | of the nation. You should have 100% loyalty only to the nation. You know, liberals say, yes, you

01:01:46.000 | should be loyal to the nation, but it's not the only thing. There are other things in the world.

01:01:50.480 | There are human rights. There is truth. There is beauty. Many times, yes, you should prefer the

01:01:57.440 | interests of your nation over other things, but not always. If your nation tells you to murder

01:02:04.320 | millions of innocent people, you don't do that, even though the nation tells you to do it. To lie

01:02:12.720 | for the national interest, you know, in extreme situations, maybe, but in many cases, your loyalty

01:02:19.760 | should be to the truth, even if it makes your nation look a bit not in the best light. The

01:02:26.800 | same with beauty. You know, how does a fascist determine whether a movie is a good movie?

01:02:32.080 | Very simple. If it serves the interests of the nation, this is a good movie. If it's against

01:02:37.520 | the interests of the nation, this is a bad movie. End of story. Liberalism says, no, there is

01:02:43.280 | aesthetic values in the world. We should judge movies not just on the question whether they

01:02:51.760 | serve the national interest, but also on artistic value. Communists are a bit like the fascists,

01:03:00.080 | instead that they don't place the nation as the main hero, they place class as the main hero.

01:03:06.640 | For them, history, again, it's not about individuals, it's not about nations. History is

01:03:10.640 | a clash between classes. And just as fascists imagine in the end only one nation will be on top,

01:03:17.920 | the communists think in the end only one class should be on top, and that's the proletariat.

01:03:24.080 | And same story. A hundred percent of your loyalty should be to the class. And if there is a clash,

01:03:33.280 | say, between class and family, class wins. Like in the Soviet Union, the party told children,

01:03:39.840 | if you hear your parents say something bad about Stalin, you have to report them. And there are

01:03:47.120 | many cases when children reported their parents and their parents were sent to the gulag.

01:03:53.280 | Like, and, you know, your loyalty is to the party, which leads the proletariat to victory

01:04:00.640 | in the historical struggle. And the same way in communism, art is only about class struggle.

01:04:07.920 | A movie is good if it serves the interests of the proletariat. Artistic values, there is nothing

01:04:14.160 | like that. And the same with truth. Everything that we see now in fake news, you know,

01:04:20.480 | the communist propaganda machine was there before us. The level of lies, of disinformation campaigns

01:04:28.880 | that they orchestrated in the 1920s and 30s and 40s is really unimaginable.

01:04:36.080 | So the reason these two ideologies, classes of ideologies, failed is the sacrifice of truth,

01:04:43.680 | not just failed, but did a lot of damage, is the sacrifice of truth and sacrifice of beauty.

01:04:50.480 | And sacrifice of hundreds of millions of people disregard, again, for human suffering. Like,

01:04:55.600 | okay, for in order to, for our nation to win, in order for our class to win, we need to kill those

01:05:02.080 | millions, kill those millions. That was an ethics, aesthetics, truth, they don't matter. The only

01:05:10.320 | thing that matters is the victory of the state or the victory of the class. And that's, and liberalism

01:05:19.040 | was the antithesis to that. It says, no, not only, it has a much more complicated view of the world.

01:05:27.120 | Again, both communism and fascism, they had a very simple view of the world. There is one,

01:05:32.960 | your loyalty, a hundred percent of it should be only to one thing.

01:05:37.280 | Now, liberalism has a much more complex view of the world. It says, yes, there are nations,

01:05:42.640 | they are important. Yes, there are classes, they are important, but they are not the only thing.

01:05:48.160 | There are also families, there are also individuals, there are also animals, and your loyalty should be

01:05:56.240 | divided between all of them. Sometimes you prefer this, sometimes you prefer that. That's complicated,

01:06:03.360 | and, but, you know, life is complicated. - But also, I think, maybe you can correct me,

01:06:09.360 | but liberalism acknowledges the corrupting nature of power when there's a guy at the top,

01:06:15.600 | sits there for a while, managing things, is probably gonna start losing a good sense of reality

01:06:24.480 | and losing the capability to be a good manager. It feels like the communist and fascist regimes

01:06:33.200 | don't acknowledge that basic characteristic of human nature, that power corrupts.

01:06:38.640 | - Yes, they believe in infallibility. In this sense, they are very close to being religions.

01:06:45.520 | They, in Nazism, Hitler was considered infallible, and therefore you don't need any checks and

01:06:52.000 | balances on his power. Why do you need to balance an infallible genius? And it's the same with the

01:06:57.920 | Soviet Union, with Stalin, and more generally with the Communist Party. The Party can never

01:07:04.400 | make a mistake, and therefore you don't need independent courts, independent media,

01:07:10.000 | opposition parties, things like that, because the Party is never wrong. You concentrate the same way

01:07:16.720 | a hundred percent of loyalty should be to the Party, a hundred percent of power should be in

01:07:22.480 | the hands of the Party. The whole idea of liberal democracy is embracing fallibility. Everybody is

01:07:28.800 | fallible. All people, all leaders, all political parties, all institutions. This is why we need

01:07:35.360 | checks and balances, and we need many of them. If you have just one, then this particular check

01:07:42.080 | itself could make terrible mistakes. So you need, say, you need the press, you need the media

01:07:50.000 | to serve as a check to the government. You don't have just one newspaper or one TV station. You

01:07:55.680 | need many so that they can balance each other. And the media is not enough. So you have independent

01:08:01.040 | courts, you have free academic institutions, you have NGOs, you have a lot of checks and balances.

01:08:07.200 | So that's the ideologies and the leaders. What about the individual people, the millions of

01:08:12.800 | people that play a part in all of this, that are the hosts of the stories, that are the catalyst

01:08:24.560 | and the components of how the story spreads? Would you say that all of us are capable of

01:08:32.320 | spreading any story? Sort of the Solzhenitsyn idea that all of us are capable of good and evil,

01:08:41.920 | the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

01:08:45.440 | Yes. I wouldn't say that every person is capable of every type of evil, but we are all fallible.

01:08:54.720 | It partly depends on the efforts we make to develop our self-awareness during life.

01:09:03.200 | Part of it depends on moral luck. If you are born as a Christian German

01:09:12.240 | in the 1910s or 1920s and you grow up in Nazi Germany, that's bad moral luck. Your chances

01:09:21.680 | of committing terrible things, you have a very high chance of doing it. And you can withstand it,

01:09:29.360 | but it will take tremendous effort. If you are born in Germany after the war, you're morally lucky.

01:09:36.480 | You will not be put to such a test. You will not need to exert these enormous efforts not to

01:09:44.720 | commit atrocities. So this is just part of history. There is an element of luck. But again, part of

01:09:51.520 | it is also self-awareness. You asked me earlier about the potential of power to corrupt. I listened

01:10:00.960 | to the interview you just did with Prime Minister Netanyahu a couple of days ago. One of the things

01:10:06.480 | that most struck me during the interview was that you asked him, "Are you afraid of this thing,

01:10:14.880 | that power corrupts?" He didn't think for a single second. He didn't pose. He didn't admit

01:10:20.560 | a tiny little level of doubt. "No, power doesn't corrupt." For me, it was a shocking and revealing

01:10:32.880 | moment. And it dovetails with how you began the interview. I really liked your opening gambit.

01:10:42.160 | No, really. You kind of told him, "Lots of people in the world are angry with you. Some people hate

01:10:49.120 | you. They dislike you. What do you want to tell them, to say to them?" And you gave him this kind

01:10:55.440 | of platform. And I was very excited. "What will he say?" And he just denied it. He basically denied

01:11:04.000 | it. He had to cut short the interview from three hours to one hour because you had hundreds of

01:11:10.080 | thousands of Israelis in the streets demonstrating against him. And he goes and says, "No, everybody

01:11:15.600 | likes me. What are you talking about?" But on that topic, you've said recently that

01:11:20.240 | the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may go down in history as the man who destroys Israel.

01:11:27.680 | Can you explain what you mean by that? Yes. I mean, he is basically tearing apart

01:11:33.440 | the social contract that held this country together for 75 years. He's destroying the foundations

01:11:40.720 | of Israeli democracy. You know, I don't want to go too deep, unless you want it, because I guess

01:11:46.960 | most of our listeners, they have bigger issues on their minds than the fate of some small country

01:11:52.080 | in the Middle East. But for those who want to understand what's happening in Israel, there is

01:11:56.960 | really just one question to ask. What limits the power of the government? In the United States,

01:12:05.200 | for instance, there are lots of checks and balances that limit the power of the government.

01:12:11.360 | You have the Supreme Court, you have the Senate, you have the House of Representatives,

01:12:17.760 | you have the President, you have the Constitution, you have 50 states, each state with its own

01:12:23.040 | constitution and Supreme Court and Congress and governor. If somebody wants to pass a dangerous

01:12:30.160 | legislation, say in the House, it will have to go through so many obstacles. Like if you want to

01:12:36.320 | pass a law in the United States taking away voting rights from Jews or from Muslims or from African

01:12:45.280 | Americans, even if it passes, even if it has a majority in the House of Representatives, it is

01:12:50.720 | a very, very, very small chance of becoming the law of the country, because it will have to pass

01:12:55.840 | again through the Senate, through the President, through the Supreme Court, and all the federal

01:12:59.840 | structure. In Israel, we have just a single check on the power of the government, and that's the

01:13:06.880 | Supreme Court. There is really no difference between the government and the legislature,

01:13:12.640 | because whoever, there are no separate elections like in the US. If you win majority in the Knesset,

01:13:18.960 | in the parliament, you appoint the government. That's very simple. And if you have 61 members

01:13:25.120 | of Knesset who vote, let's say, on a law to take away voting rights from Arab citizens of Israel,

01:13:32.480 | there is a single check that can prevent it from becoming the law of the land, and that's

01:13:37.280 | the Supreme Court. And now the Netanyahu government is trying to neutralize or take over the Supreme

01:13:43.760 | Court, and they've already prepared a long list of laws. They already talk about it. What will

01:13:50.160 | happen the moment that this last check on the power is gone? They are openly trying to gain

01:13:58.080 | unlimited power, and they openly talk about it, that once they have it, then they will take away

01:14:06.400 | the rights of Arabs, of LGBT people, of women, of secular Jews. And this is why you have hundreds

01:14:13.920 | of thousands of people in the streets. You have Air Force pilots saying, "We are stop, we stop

01:14:22.240 | flying." This is unheard of in Israel. I mean, we are still living under existential threat

01:14:28.240 | from Iran, from other enemies. And in the middle of this, you have Air Force pilots

01:14:35.200 | who dedicated their lives to protecting the country, and they are saying, "That's it.

01:14:40.640 | If this government doesn't stop what it is doing, we stop flying."

01:14:45.680 | So, as you said, I just did the interview, and as we were doing the interview, there's protests

01:14:53.280 | in the streets. Do you think the protests will have an effect?

01:14:56.960 | I hope so very much. I'm going to many of these protests. I hope they will have an effect. If we

01:15:04.720 | fail, this is the end of Israeli democracy, probably. This will have repercussions far

01:15:10.960 | beyond the borders of Israel. Israel is a nuclear power. Israel has one of the most advanced

01:15:18.560 | cyber capabilities in the world, able to strike basically anywhere in the world.

01:15:23.040 | If this country becomes a fundamentalist and militarist dictatorship, it can set fire to

01:15:31.840 | the entire Middle East. It can, again, have destabilizing effects far beyond the borders

01:15:40.480 | of Israel. So you think without the check on power, it's possible that the Netanyahu government

01:15:45.840 | holds on to power? Nobody tries to gain unlimited power just for nothing.

01:15:51.120 | I mean, you have so many problems in Israel, and Netanyahu talks so much about Iran,

01:15:56.800 | and the Palestinians, and Hezbollah. We have an economic crisis. Why is it so urgent at this

01:16:02.480 | moment, in the face of such opposition, why is it so crucial for them to neutralize the Supreme

01:16:09.840 | Court? They are just doing it for the fun of it? No. They know what they are doing. They are adamant.

01:16:16.560 | We were not sure of it before. There was a couple of months ago, they came out with this plan to

01:16:22.800 | take over the Supreme Court, to have all these laws, and there were hundreds of thousands of people

01:16:26.880 | in the streets, again, soldiers saying they will stop serving, a general strike in the economy,

01:16:33.120 | and they stopped. And they started a process of negotiations to try and enrich a settlement.

01:16:39.760 | And then they broke down, they stopped the negotiations, and they restarted this process

01:16:47.360 | of legislation, trying to gain unlimited power. So any doubt we had before, "Okay, maybe they

01:16:55.760 | changed their purposes." No. It's now very clear they are 100% focused on gaining absolute power.

01:17:04.720 | They are now trying a different tactic. Previously, they had all these dozens of laws that

01:17:11.040 | they wanted to pass very quickly within a month or two. They realized, "No, there is too much

01:17:17.280 | opposition." So now they are doing what is known as salami tactics, slice by slice. Now they are

01:17:23.200 | trying to one law. If this succeeds, then they'll pass the next one, and the next one, and the next

01:17:28.400 | one. This is why we are now at a very crucial moment. And when you see, again, hundreds of

01:17:33.360 | thousands of people in the streets almost every day, when you see resistance within the armed

01:17:39.360 | forces, within the security forces, you see high-tech companies saying, "We will go on strike.

01:17:44.320 | You know, they are private businesses." High-tech companies, I think it's almost unprecedented for

01:17:51.040 | a private business to go on strike, because what will economic success benefit us if we live under

01:18:00.080 | a messianic dictatorship? And again, the fuel for this whole thing is to a large extent coming from

01:18:06.960 | messianic religious groups, which just the thought, what happens if these people have unlimited

01:18:15.840 | control of Israel's nuclear arsenal and Israel's military capabilities and cyber capabilities?

01:18:23.120 | This is very, very scary, not just for the citizens of Israel. It should be scary for people

01:18:29.440 | everywhere. - So it would be scary for it to go from being a problem of security and protecting

01:18:38.560 | the peace to becoming a religious war? - It is already becoming a religious war. I mean, the war,

01:18:44.800 | the conflict with the Palestinians was for many years a national conflict in essence.

01:18:50.240 | Over the last few years, maybe a decade or two, it is morphing into a religious conflict,

01:18:59.040 | which is again a very worrying development. When nations are in conflict, you can reach

01:19:04.160 | some compromise. Okay, you have this bit of land, we have this bit of land. But when it becomes a

01:19:09.280 | religious conflict between fundamentalists, between messianic people, compromise becomes

01:19:16.000 | much more difficult because you don't compromise on eternity. You don't compromise on God.

01:19:22.240 | And this is where we are heading right now. - So I know you said it's a small nation,

01:19:29.040 | somewhere in the Middle East, but it also happens to be the epicenter of one of the longest running,

01:19:35.040 | one of the most tense conflicts and crises in human history. So at the very least, it serves

01:19:41.440 | as a study of how conflict can be resolved. So what are the biggest obstacles to you,

01:19:47.920 | to achieving peace in this part of the world? - Motivation. I think it's easy to achieve peace

01:19:55.520 | if you have the motivation on both sides. Unfortunately, at the present juncture,

01:20:01.200 | there is not enough motivation on either side, either the Palestinian or Israeli side. Peace,

01:20:07.120 | you know, in mathematics, you have problems without solutions. You can prove mathematically

01:20:14.320 | that this mathematical problem has no solution. In politics, there is no such thing. All problems

01:20:21.760 | have solutions if you have the motivation. But motivation is the big problem. And again,

01:20:29.600 | we can go into the reasons why, but the fact is that on neither side is there enough motivation.

01:20:37.200 | If there was motivation, the solution would have been easy. - Is there an important distinction

01:20:42.720 | to draw between the people on the street and the leaders in power in terms of motivation?

01:20:50.560 | So are most people motivated and hoping for peace, and the leaders are motivated and incentivized to

01:21:00.320 | continue war? - I don't think so. - Or the people also? - I think it's a deep problem. It's also

01:21:05.040 | the people. It's not just the leaders. - Is it even a human problem of literally hate in people's

01:21:12.160 | heart? - Yeah, there is a lot of hate. One of the things that happened in Israel over the last

01:21:17.760 | 10 years or so, Israel became much stronger than it was before, largely thanks to technological

01:21:24.960 | developments. And it feels that it no longer needs to compromise. There are many reasons for it,

01:21:33.120 | but some of them are technological. Being one of the leading powers in cyber, in AI, in high tech,

01:21:45.040 | we have developed very sophisticated ways to more easily control the Palestinian population.

01:21:52.640 | In the early 2000s, it seemed that it is becoming impossible to control millions of people against

01:21:59.760 | their will. It took too much power. It spilled too much blood on both sides. So there was an

01:22:07.920 | impression, "Oh, this is becoming untenable." And there are several reasons why it changed,

01:22:13.280 | but one of them was new technology. Israel developed very sophisticated surveillance

01:22:19.040 | technology that has made it much easier for Israeli security forces to control 2.5 million

01:22:26.240 | Palestinians in the West Bank against their will, with a lot less effort, less boots on the ground,

01:22:35.840 | also less blood. And Israel is also now exporting this technology to many other regimes around the

01:22:44.000 | world. Again, I heard Netanyahu speaking about all the wonderful things that Israel is exporting to

01:22:49.520 | the world, and it's true. We are exporting some nice things, water systems and new kinds of

01:22:55.440 | tomatoes. We are also exporting a lot of weapons and especially surveillance systems, sometimes to

01:23:05.200 | unsavory regimes in order to control their populations. - Can you comment on, I think

01:23:14.080 | you've mentioned that the current state of affairs is a de facto three-class state. Can you describe

01:23:21.440 | what you mean by that? - Yes, for many years, the kind of leading solution to the Israeli-Palestinian

01:23:26.400 | conflict is the two-state solution. - Can you describe what that means, by the way? - Yes,

01:23:30.240 | two states between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean will have two states, Israel as a

01:23:37.600 | predominantly Jewish state and Palestine as a predominantly Palestinian state. Again, there

01:23:43.600 | were lots of discussions where the border passes, what happens with security arrangement and whatever,

01:23:48.080 | but this was the big solution. Israel has basically abandoned the two-state solution. Maybe they don't

01:23:54.560 | say so officially, the people in power, but in terms of what they do on the ground, they abandoned

01:23:59.840 | it. Now they are effectively promoting the three-class solution, which means there is just

01:24:07.440 | one country and one government and one power between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River,

01:24:14.320 | but you have three classes of people living there. You have Jews who enjoy full rights, all the

01:24:22.640 | rights. You have some Arabs who are Israeli citizens and have some rights. And then you have

01:24:29.360 | the other Arabs, the third class, who have basically no civil rights and limited human rights.

01:24:34.400 | And nobody would openly speak about it, but effectively this is the reality on the ground

01:24:41.840 | already. - So there's many, and I'll speak with them, Palestinians who characterize this as a

01:24:46.080 | de facto one-state apartheid. Do you agree with this? - I would take issue with the term apartheid.

01:24:53.440 | Generally speaking, as a historian, I don't really like historical analogies because there are always

01:24:58.160 | differences, key differences. The biggest difference between the situation here and the

01:25:03.840 | situation in South Africa in the time of the apartheid is that Black South Africans did not

01:25:11.920 | deny the existence of South Africa and did not call for the destruction of South Africa. They

01:25:18.400 | had a very simple goal. They had a very simple demand. We want to be equal citizens of this

01:25:26.000 | country. That's it. And the apartheid regime was, no, you can't be equal citizens. Now, in Israel,

01:25:34.240 | Palestine, it's different. The Palestinians, many of them don't recognize the existence of Israel,

01:25:39.520 | are not willing to recognize it, and they don't demand to be citizens of Israel.

01:25:45.520 | They demand, some of them, to destroy it and replace it with a Palestinian state. Some of

01:25:51.840 | them demand a separate state. But if the Palestinians would adopt the same policy

01:25:59.280 | as the Black South Africans, if you have the Palestinians coming and saying, "OK, forget about

01:26:05.680 | it. We don't want to destroy Israel. We don't know a Palestinian country. We have a very simple

01:26:10.160 | request, very simple demand. Give us our full rights. We also want to vote to the Knesset.

01:26:17.440 | We also want to get the full protection of the law." That's it. That's our only demand. Israel

01:26:22.640 | will be in deep, deep trouble at that moment. But we are not there. I wonder if there will ever be

01:26:29.840 | a future when such a thing happens, where everybody, the majority of people, Arab and Jew,

01:26:36.640 | Israeli and Palestinian, accept the one-state solution and say, "We want equal rights."

01:26:44.800 | Never say never in history. It's not coming anytime soon from either side.

01:26:49.280 | When you look at the long term of history, one of the curious things you see, and that's what

01:26:56.880 | makes us different human groups from animal species. You know, gorillas and chimpanzees,

01:27:01.840 | they are separate species. They can never merge. Cats and dogs will never merge. But

01:27:07.440 | different national and religious groups in history, even when they hate each other,

01:27:12.960 | surprisingly, they sometimes end by merging. If you look at Germany, for instance, so for centuries

01:27:20.080 | you had Prussians and Bavarians and Saxons who fought each other ferociously and hated each

01:27:26.560 | other. And they are sometimes also of different religions, Catholics, Protestants. You know, the

01:27:31.440 | worst war in European history, according to some measures, was not the Second World War or the First

01:27:37.600 | World War. It was the Thirty Years' War, waged largely on German soil between Germans, Protestants

01:27:44.400 | and Catholics. But eventually they united to form a single country. You saw the same thing, I don't

01:27:51.040 | know, in Britain. English and Scots for centuries hated and fought each other ferociously, eventually

01:27:57.600 | coming together. Maybe it'll break up again, I don't know. But the power of the kind of forces

01:28:06.400 | of merger in history, you are very often influenced by the people you fight, by the people you even

01:28:14.400 | hate, more than by almost anybody else. So if we apply those ideas, the ideas of this part of the

01:28:23.280 | world, to another part of the world that's currently in war, Russia and Ukraine, from what you learned

01:28:30.160 | here, how do you think peace can be achieved in Ukraine? Peace can be achieved any moment. It's

01:28:36.880 | motivation. In this case, it's just one person. Putin just needs to say, "That's it." You know,

01:28:42.240 | the Ukrainians, they don't demand anything from Russia, just go home. That's the only thing they

01:28:47.440 | want. They don't want to conquer any bit of Russian territory. They don't want to change the regime in

01:28:52.400 | Moscow, nothing. They just tell the Russians, "Go home." That's it. And of course, again,

01:28:59.120 | motivation. How do you get somebody like Putin to admit that he made a colossal mistake, a human

01:29:06.800 | mistake, an ethical mistake, a political mistake, in starting this war? This is very, very difficult.

01:29:13.600 | But in terms of what would the solution look like? Very simple. The Russians go home. End of story.

01:29:20.400 | - Do you believe in the power of conversation between leaders to sit down as human beings

01:29:28.720 | and agree? First of all, what home means, because we humans draw lines.

01:29:36.480 | - That's true. I believe in the power of conversation. The big question to ask is where?

01:29:41.920 | Where do conversations, real conversations take place? And this is tricky. One of the interesting

01:29:49.280 | things to ask about any conflict, about any political system, is where do the real conversations

01:29:55.520 | take place? And very often, they don't take place in the places you think that they are.

01:30:02.000 | But think about American politics. When the country was founded in the late 18th century,

01:30:08.400 | people understood holding conversation between leaders is very important for the functioning

01:30:14.160 | of democracy. We'll create a place for that. That's called Congress. This is where leaders

01:30:19.600 | are supposed to meet and talk about the main issues of the day. Maybe there was a time,

01:30:25.280 | sometime in the past, when this actually happened. When you had two factions holding different ideas

01:30:35.600 | about foreign policy or economic policy, and they met in Congress, and somebody would come and give

01:30:41.120 | a speech, and the people on the other side would say, "Hey, that's interesting. I haven't thought

01:30:45.920 | about it. Yes, maybe we can agree on that." This is no longer happening in Congress. I don't think

01:30:52.480 | there is any speech in Congress that causes anybody on the other side to change their opinion about

01:30:58.640 | anything. So this is no longer a place where real conversations take place. The big question about

01:31:06.240 | American democracy is, is there a place where real conversations, which actually change people's

01:31:14.080 | minds, still take place? If not, then this democracy is dying also. Democracy without

01:31:21.360 | conversation cannot exist for long. And it's the same question you should ask also about

01:31:26.240 | dictatorial regimes. Like you think about Russia or China. So China has the Great Hall of the People.

01:31:33.120 | Well, the representatives, the supposed representatives of the people meet every now

01:31:37.600 | and then, but no real conversation takes place there. A key question to ask about the Chinese

01:31:43.920 | system is, behind closed doors, let's say in a Politburo meeting, do people have a real conversation?

01:31:51.600 | If Xi Jinping says one thing, and some other big shot thinks differently, will they have the

01:31:59.200 | courage, the ability, the backbone to say, "With all due respect, I think differently,"

01:32:04.720 | and there is a real conversation? Or not? I don't know the answer. But this is a key question.

01:32:10.240 | This is the difference between an authoritarian regime can still have different voices within it.

01:32:17.680 | But at a certain point, you have a personality cult. Nobody dares say anything against the leader.

01:32:27.040 | And when it comes again to Ukraine and Russia, I don't think that if you somehow manage to get

01:32:34.240 | Putin and Zelensky to the same room, when everybody knows that they are there, and they'll

01:32:39.280 | have a moment of empathy or human connection, I don't think it can happen like that. I do hope

01:32:48.640 | that there are other spaces where somebody like Putin can still have a real human conversation.

01:32:58.480 | I don't know if this is the case. I hope so. Well, there's several interesting dynamics,

01:33:02.400 | and you spoke to some of them. So one is internally with advisors. You have to have

01:33:07.440 | hope that there's people that would disagree, that would have a lively debate internally.

01:33:12.960 | Then there's also the thing you mentioned, which is direct communication between Putin and Zelensky

01:33:18.560 | in private, picking up a phone, rotary phone, old school. I still believe in the power of that.

01:33:26.400 | But while that's exceptionally difficult in the current state of affairs, what's also possible

01:33:32.400 | to have is a mediator like the United States or some other leader, like the leader of Israel or

01:33:39.120 | the leader of another nation that's respected by both, or India, for example, that can have,

01:33:46.160 | first of all, individual conversations and then literally get into a room together.

01:33:49.760 | It is possible. I would say more generally about conversations, as it goes back a little to what

01:33:58.560 | I said earlier about the Marxist view of history. One of the problematic things I see today in many

01:34:06.240 | academic circles is that people focus too much on power. They think that the whole of history

01:34:13.760 | or the whole of politics is just a power structure. It's just struggle about power.

01:34:20.240 | Now, if you think that the whole of history and the whole of politics is only power,

01:34:26.400 | then there is no room for conversation. Because if what you have is a struggle between different

01:34:34.560 | powerful interests, there is no point talking. The only thing that changes it is fighting.

01:34:43.120 | My view is that no, it's not all about power structures. It's not all about power dynamics.

01:34:48.960 | Underneath the power structure, there are stories, stories in human minds.

01:34:54.640 | This is great news, if it's true. This is good news, because unlike power that can only be

01:35:02.800 | changed through fighting, stories can sometimes, it's not easy, but sometimes stories can be

01:35:10.080 | changed through talking. That's the hope. I think in everything from couple therapy

01:35:17.200 | to nation therapy, if you think it's power therapy, it's all about power, there is no place

01:35:25.280 | for a conversation. But if to some extent, it's the stories in people's minds, if you can enable

01:35:32.880 | one person to see the story in the mind of another person, and more importantly, if you can have

01:35:39.840 | some kind of critical distance from the story in your own mind, then maybe you can change it a

01:35:46.480 | little. Then you don't need to fight. You can actually find a better story that you can both

01:35:52.480 | agree to. It sometimes happens in history. Again, French and Germans fought for generations and

01:35:58.480 | generations. Now they live in peace, not because, I don't know, they found a new planet they can

01:36:05.200 | share between France and Germany, so now everybody has enough territory. No, they actually have less

01:36:10.160 | territory than previously, because they lost all their overseas empires. But they managed to find

01:36:17.200 | a story, the European story, that both Germans and French people are happy with. So they live in

01:36:23.760 | peace. - I very much believe in this vision that you have of the power of stories. One of the tools

01:36:30.800 | is conversations. Another is books. There's some guy that wrote a book about this power of stories.

01:36:37.760 | He happens to be sitting in front of me, and that happened to spread across a lot of people. Now

01:36:42.000 | they believe in the power of story and narrative, even a children's book, too, so the kids...

01:36:47.440 | I mean, it's fascinating how that spreads. I mean, underneath your work, there's an optimism.

01:36:57.920 | I think underneath conversations, what I try to do is an optimism, that it's not just about power

01:37:04.560 | struggles. It's about stories, which is like a connection between humans and together, kind of

01:37:11.760 | evolving these stories that maximize happiness or minimize suffering in the world. - And this is why

01:37:19.760 | I also, I think I admire what you're doing, that you're going to talk with some of the

01:37:24.800 | most difficult characters around in the world today. And with this basic belief that by talking,

01:37:34.640 | maybe we can move them an inch, which is a lot when it comes to people with so much power.

01:37:41.120 | I think one of the biggest success stories in modern history, I would say, is feminism.

01:37:48.240 | Because feminism believed in the power of stories, not so much in the power of violence,

01:37:56.960 | of armed conflict. By many measures, feminism has been maybe the most successful social movement

01:38:03.920 | of the 20th century and maybe of the modern age. You know, the systems of oppression,

01:38:10.240 | which were in place throughout the world for thousands of years, and they seem to be just

01:38:15.840 | natural, eternal. You had all these religious movements, all these political revolutions,

01:38:20.880 | and one thing remained constant, and this is the patriarchal system and the oppression of women.

01:38:26.160 | And then feminism came along. And, you know, you had leaders like Lenin, like Mao, saying that if

01:38:33.680 | you want to make a big social change, you must use violence. Power comes from the barrel of a gun.

01:38:41.520 | If you want to make an omelet, you need to break eggs, and all these things. And the feminists said,

01:38:46.960 | "No, we won't use the power of the gun. We will make an omelet without breaking any eggs."

01:38:53.440 | And they made a much better omelet than Lenin or Mao or any of these violent revolutionaries.

01:39:01.120 | I don't think, you know, that they certainly didn't start any wars or build any gulags. I

01:39:06.320 | don't think they even murdered a single politician. I don't think there was any political assassination

01:39:12.080 | anywhere by feminists. There was a lot of violence against them, both verbal but also physical,

01:39:20.240 | and they didn't reply by waging violence, and they succeeded in changing this deep

01:39:32.560 | structure of oppression in a way which benefited not just women but also men.

01:39:38.080 | So this gives me hope that it's not easy. In many cases, we fail. But it is possible

01:39:46.560 | sometimes in history to make a very, very big change, positive change,

01:39:52.240 | mainly by talking and demonstrating and changing the story in people's minds and not by using

01:40:00.240 | violence. - It's fascinating that feminism and communism and all these things happen in the

01:40:05.600 | 20th century. So many interesting things happen in the 20th century. So many movements, so many ideas,

01:40:11.200 | nuclear weapons, all of it, computers. It's just like, it seems like a lot of stuff, like,

01:40:16.400 | really quickly percolated and it's accelerating. - It's still accelerating. I mean, history is just

01:40:20.960 | accelerating, you know, for centuries. And the 20th century, you know, we squeezed into it

01:40:26.640 | things that previously took thousands of years, and now, I mean, we are squeezing it into decades.

01:40:31.840 | - And you very well could be one of the last historians, human historians, to have ever lived.

01:40:37.280 | - Could be. I think, you know, our species, Homo sapiens, I don't think we'll be around in a

01:40:44.080 | century or two. We could destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, through ecological collapse,

01:40:51.440 | by giving too much power to AI that goes out of our control. But if we survive, we'll probably

01:40:58.720 | have so much power that we will change ourselves using various technologies so that our descendants

01:41:07.520 | will no longer be Homo sapiens like us. They will be more different from us than we are different

01:41:14.880 | from Neanderthals. So maybe they'll have historians, but it will no longer be human historians or

01:41:22.080 | sapiens historians like me. I think it's an extremely dangerous development, and the chances

01:41:28.960 | that this will go wrong, that people will use the new technologies, trying to upgrade humans,

01:41:35.440 | but actually downgrading them, this is a very, very big danger. If you let corporations and

01:41:42.400 | armies and ruthless politicians change humans using tools like AI and bioengineering,

01:41:50.000 | it's very likely that they will try to enhance a few human qualities that they need,

01:41:56.800 | like intelligence and discipline, while neglecting what are potentially more important

01:42:05.760 | human qualities, like compassion, like autistic sensitivity, like spirituality.

01:42:12.400 | If you give Putin, for instance, bioengineering and AI and brain-computer interfaces,

01:42:19.840 | he's likely to want to create a race of super soldiers who are much more intelligent and much

01:42:30.240 | stronger and also much more disciplined and never rebel and march on Moscow against him.

01:42:36.080 | But he has no interest in making them more compassionate or more spiritual. So the end

01:42:43.280 | result could be a new type of humans, downgraded humans, who are highly intelligent and disciplined

01:42:54.080 | but have no compassion and no spiritual depth. For me, this is the dystopia, the apocalypse,

01:43:03.200 | that when people talk about the new technologies and they have this scenario of the Terminator,

01:43:10.080 | robots running in the street shooting people, this is not what worries me. I think we can avoid that.

01:43:15.520 | What really worries me is using the corporations, armies, politicians will use the new technologies

01:43:24.240 | to change us in a way which will destroy our humanity or the best parts of our humanity.

01:43:31.200 | And one of those ways could be removing the compassion. Another way that really worries me,

01:43:35.120 | for me, is probably more likely is a brave new world kind of thing that

01:43:39.840 | removes the flaws of humans, maybe removes the diversity in humans, and makes us all these

01:43:49.760 | dopamine-chasing creatures that just kind of maximize enjoyment in the short term,

01:43:55.840 | which kind of seems like a good thing maybe in the short term, but it creates a society that

01:44:03.600 | doesn't think, that doesn't create, that just is sitting there enjoying itself at a more and more

01:44:12.880 | rapid pace, which seems like another kind of society that could be easily controlled by a

01:44:18.400 | centralized center of power. But the set of dystopias that we could arrive at through this,

01:44:23.680 | through allowing corporations to modify humans is vast, and we should be worried about that.

01:44:32.080 | So it seems like humans are pretty good as we are, all the flaws, all of it together.

01:44:40.080 | We are better than anything that we can intentionally design at present.

01:44:44.960 | Like any intentionally designed humans at the present moment is going to be much,

01:44:50.560 | much worse than us, because basically we don't understand ourselves.

01:44:53.760 | I mean, as long as we don't understand our brain, our body, our mind, it's a very,

01:44:59.280 | very bad idea to start manipulating a system that you don't understand deeply,

01:45:05.040 | and we don't understand ourselves. - So I have to ask you about an

01:45:09.360 | interesting dynamic of stories. You wrote an article two years ago titled

01:45:13.760 | "When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy," how understanding the structure of global

01:45:18.800 | cabal theories can shed light on their allure and their inherent falsehood.

01:45:24.000 | What are global cabal theories, and why do so many people believe them?

01:45:29.280 | 37% of Americans, for example. - Well, the global cabal theory,

01:45:34.240 | it has many variations, but basically there is a small group of people, a small cabal

01:45:38.400 | that secretly controls everything that is happening in the world.

01:45:42.720 | All the wars, all the revolutions, all the epidemics, everything that is happening

01:45:47.440 | is controlled by this very small group of people who are, of course, evil and have bad intentions.

01:45:52.480 | And this is a very well-known story. It's not new. It's been there for thousands of years.

01:46:00.800 | It's very attractive, because first of all, it's simple.

01:46:04.640 | You don't have to understand everything that happens in the world. You just need to understand

01:46:10.320 | one thing. The war in Ukraine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 5G technology, COVID-19,

01:46:16.800 | it's simple. There is this global cabal. They do all of it. And also, it enables you to shift

01:46:24.960 | all the responsibility to all the bad things that are happening in the world to this small cabal.

01:46:30.480 | It's the Jews. It's the Freemasons. It's not us. And also, it creates this fantasy,

01:46:37.680 | utopian fantasy. If we only get rid of the small cabal, we solve all the problems of the world.

01:46:44.160 | Salvation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Ukraine, the epidemics, poverty,

01:46:49.200 | everything is solved just by knocking out this small cabal. So, again, it's simple,

01:46:55.040 | it's attractive, and this is why so many people believe it.

01:46:58.080 | It's, again, it's not new. Nazism was exactly this. Nazism began as a conspiracy theory.

01:47:05.760 | We don't call Nazism a conspiracy theory because, oh, it's a big thing, it's an ideology.

01:47:10.560 | But if you look at it, it's a conspiracy theory. The basic Nazi idea was the Jews control the world,

01:47:17.040 | get rid of the Jews, you solved all the world's problems. Now, the interesting thing about these

01:47:22.480 | kind of theories, again, they tell you that even things that look to be the opposite of each other,

01:47:31.520 | actually they are part of the conspiracy. So, in the case of Nazism, the Nazis told people,

01:47:36.880 | you know, you have capitalism and communism, you think that they are opposite, right? Ah,

01:47:42.640 | this is what the Jews want you to think. Actually, the Jews control both communism, Trotsky, Marx,

01:47:48.960 | were Jews, blah, blah, blah, and capitalism, the Rothschilds, Wall Street, it's all controlled

01:47:54.160 | by the Jews. So, the Jews are fooling everybody. But actually, the communists and the capitalists

01:47:59.520 | are part of the same global cabal. And again, this is very attractive, because, ah, now I

01:48:06.240 | understand everything, and I also know what to do. I just give power to Hitler, he gets rid of the

01:48:12.240 | Jews, I solved all the problems of the world. Now, as a historian, the most important thing I can say

01:48:18.800 | about these theories, they are never right. Because the global cabal theory says two things. First,

01:48:26.400 | everything is controlled by a very small number of people. Secondly, these people hide themselves,

01:48:31.520 | they do it in secret. Now, both things are nonsense. It's impossible for people to control,

01:48:37.840 | a small group of people, to control and predict everything, because the world is too complicated.

01:48:44.320 | You know, you look at a real world conspiracy, conspiracy is basically just a plan. Think about

01:48:49.600 | the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. You had the most powerful superpower in the world,

01:48:57.440 | with the biggest military, with the biggest intelligence services, with the most sophisticated,

01:49:04.160 | you know, the FBI and the CIA and all the agents. They invade a third-rate country,

01:49:11.520 | third-rate power, Iraq. With this idea, we'll take over Iraq and we'll control it, we'll make

01:49:17.280 | a new order in the Middle East. And everything falls apart. Their plan completely backfires.

01:49:23.600 | Everything they hoped to achieve, they achieved the opposite. America, United States is humiliated.

01:49:30.400 | They caused the rise of ISIS. They wanted to take out terrorism, they created more terrorism.

01:49:35.840 | Worst of all, the big winner of the war was Iran. You know, the United States goes to war

01:49:42.160 | with all its power and gives Iran a victory on a silver plate. The Iranians don't need to do

01:49:49.600 | anything. The Americans are doing everything for them. Now, this is real history. Real history

01:49:56.000 | is when you have not a small group of people, a lot of people with a lot of power, carefully

01:50:01.920 | planning something, and it goes completely out of, against their plan. And this we know from

01:50:08.960 | a personal experience. Like every time we try to plan something, a birthday party, a surprise

01:50:14.720 | birthday party, a trip somewhere, things go wrong. This is reality. So the idea that a small group of,

01:50:22.560 | I don't know, the Jewish Kabbalah, the Freemasons, whoever, they can really control and predict all

01:50:29.440 | the wars, this is nonsense. The second thing that is nonsense is to think they can do that and still

01:50:35.600 | remain secret. It sometimes happens in history that a small group of people accumulates a lot

01:50:42.480 | of power. If I now tell you that Xi Jinping and the heads of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party,

01:50:50.320 | they have a lot of power. They control the military, the media, the economy, the University

01:50:56.080 | of China. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is, obviously, everybody knows it. Everybody knows

01:51:02.320 | it. Because to gain so much power, you usually need publicity. Hitler could not, Hitler gained a

01:51:10.800 | lot of power in Nazi Germany because he had a lot of publicity. If Hitler remained unknown, working

01:51:16.960 | behind the scenes, he would not gain power. So the way to gain power is usually through publicity.

01:51:24.160 | So secret Kabbalahs don't gain power. And even if you gain a lot of power, nobody has the kind

01:51:32.400 | of power necessary to predict and control everything that happens in the world. All the

01:51:39.600 | time shit happens that you did not predict and you did not plan and you did not control.

01:51:44.320 | The sad thing is there's usually an explanation for everything you just said that involves

01:51:52.320 | a secret global Kabbalah. That the reason your vacation planning always goes wrong

01:51:57.760 | is because you're not competent. There is a competent small group,

01:52:01.440 | that ultra-competent small group. I hear this with intelligence agencies. The CIA are running

01:52:07.920 | everything. Mossad is running everything. You see, I mean, as a historian, you get to know

01:52:12.880 | how many blunders these people do. They are so, and they're capable, but they are so incompetent

01:52:18.720 | in so many ways. Again, look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Before the war, people

01:52:23.360 | thought, "Oh, Putin was such a genius and the Russian army was one of the strongest

01:52:27.840 | armies in the world." This is what Putin thought. And it completely backfired.

01:52:32.320 | Well, the Kabbalah explanation there would be there's a NATO-driven United States

01:52:38.240 | military-industrial complex that wants to create chaos and incompetence.

01:52:42.400 | So they put a gun to Putin's head and told him, "Vladimir, if you don't invade, we shoot you."

01:52:47.840 | How did they cause Putin to invade Ukraine?

01:52:50.240 | The thing about conspiracy theories is there's usually a way to explain everything.

01:52:55.680 | You can explain religion. You can always find explanation for everything. And in the end,

01:53:02.960 | it's intellectual integrity. If you insist on whenever people confront you with evidence,

01:53:08.560 | with finding some very, very complicated explanation for that too, you can explain

01:53:14.000 | everything. We know that. It's a question of intellectual integrity.

01:53:18.800 | And I will also say another thing. The conspiracy theories, they do get one thing right,

01:53:24.880 | certainly in today's world. I think they represent an authentic and justified fear of a lot of people

01:53:33.600 | that they are losing control of their lives. They don't understand what is happening.

01:53:39.840 | And this, I think, is not just a legitimate fear. This is an important fear. They are right.

01:53:46.480 | We are losing control of our lives. We are facing really big dangers, but not from a small cabal of

01:53:55.120 | fellow humans. The problem with many of these conspiracy theories is that, yes, we have a

01:54:01.360 | problem with new AI technology. But if you now direct the fire against certain people,

01:54:10.080 | so instead of all humans cooperating against real common threats, whether it's the rise of AI,

01:54:19.840 | whether it's global warming, you're only causing us to fight each other.

01:54:24.640 | And I think that the key question that people who spread these ideas, I mean, many of them,

01:54:29.520 | they honestly believe it's not malicious. They honestly believe in these theories.

01:54:35.680 | Is do you want to spend your life spreading hate towards people? Or do you want to work

01:54:44.000 | on more constructive projects? I think one of the big differences between those who believe

01:54:48.080 | in conspiracy theories and people who warn about the dangers of AI, the dangers of climate change,

01:54:58.320 | we don't see certain humans as evil and hateful. The problem isn't humans. The problem is something

01:55:08.720 | outside humanity. Yes, humans are contributing to the problem, but ultimately the enemy is

01:55:17.200 | external to humanity. Whereas conspiracy theories usually claim that a certain part of humanity

01:55:24.560 | is the source of all evil, which leads them to eventually think in terms of exterminating

01:55:30.960 | this part of humanity, which leads sometimes to historical disasters like Nazism.

01:55:40.640 | So it can lead to hate, but can also lead to like cynicism, apathy that basically says,

01:55:46.640 | "It's not in my power to make the world better." So you don't actually take action.

01:55:51.520 | I think it is within the power of every individual to make the world a little bit better.

01:55:56.800 | You know, you can't do everything. Don't try to do everything. Find one thing in your areas

01:56:02.960 | of activity, a place where you have some agency, and try to do that, and hope that other people

01:56:10.320 | do their bit. And if everybody do their bit, we'll manage. And if we don't, we don't,

01:56:17.440 | but at least we try. - You have been part of conspiracy theories. I find myself recently

01:56:24.000 | becoming part of conspiracy theories. Is there advice you can give of how to be a human being

01:56:32.000 | in this world that values truth and reason while watching yourself become part of conspiracy

01:56:37.760 | theories? At least from my perspective, it seems very difficult to prove to the world that you're

01:56:44.240 | not part of a conspiracy theory. I, as you said, have interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu recently. I

01:56:52.320 | don't know if you're aware, but doing such things will also, you know, pick up a new menu of items

01:56:58.480 | that your new set of conspiracy theories you're now a part of. And I find it very frustrating

01:57:03.680 | because it makes it very difficult to respond, because I sense that people have the right

01:57:11.200 | intentions, like we said, they have a nervousness of a fear of power, and the abuses of power, and

01:57:20.480 | as do I. So I find myself in a difficult position that I have nothing to show to prove

01:57:28.400 | that I'm not part of such a conspiracy theory. - I think ultimately you can't, we can't. I mean,

01:57:35.600 | you know, it's like proving consciousness. You can't. That's just the situation. Whatever you

01:57:41.680 | say can and will be used against you by some people. So this fantasy, if I only say this,

01:57:49.040 | if I only show them that, if I only have this data, they will see I'm okay. It doesn't work

01:57:54.400 | like that. I think to keep your sanity in this situation, first of all, it's important to

01:58:02.080 | understand that most of these people are not evil. They are not doing it on purpose. Many of them

01:58:07.680 | really believe that there is some very nefarious, powerful conspiracy which is causing a lot of harm

01:58:15.840 | in the world, and they are doing a good thing by exposing it and making people aware of it and

01:58:21.760 | trying to stop it. If you think that you're surrounded by evil, you're falling into the

01:58:28.320 | same rabbit hole. You're falling into the same paranoid state of mind, "Oh, the world is full

01:58:33.440 | of these evil people." No, most of them are good people. Also, I think we can empathize

01:58:40.080 | with some of the key ideas there, which I share, that yes, it's becoming more and more difficult

01:58:48.640 | to understand what is happening in the world. There are huge dangers in the world, existential

01:58:55.280 | dangers to the human species, but they don't come from a small cabal of Jews or gay people or

01:59:03.280 | feminists or whatever. They come from much more diffused forces, which are not under the control

01:59:11.920 | of any single individual. We don't have to look for the evil people. We need to look for human

01:59:20.320 | allies in order to work together against, again, the dangers of AI, the dangers of bioengineering,

01:59:29.840 | the dangers of climate change. When you wake up in the morning, the question is, do you want to

01:59:35.840 | spend your day spreading hatred, or do you want to spend your day trying to make allies and work

01:59:44.400 | together? - Let me ask you a big philosophical question about AI and the threat of it. Let's

01:59:52.320 | look at the threat side. Folks like Eliezer Yudkowsky worry that AI might kill all of us.

02:00:00.240 | Do you worry about that range of possibilities where artificial intelligence systems in a variety

02:00:09.280 | of ways might destroy human civilization? - Yes. I talk a lot about it, about the dangers of AI.

02:00:17.120 | I sometimes get into trouble because I depict these scenarios of how AI becoming very dangerous,

02:00:22.640 | and then people say that I'm encouraging these scenarios. I'm talking about it as a warning.

02:00:28.400 | I'm not so terrified of the simplistic idea, again, the Terminator scenario of robots running

02:00:36.400 | in the street, shooting everybody. I'm more worried about AI accumulating more and more power

02:00:44.640 | and basically taking over society, taking over our lives, taking power away from us until we

02:00:53.520 | don't understand what is happening and we lose control of our lives and of the future.

02:00:58.880 | The two most important things to realize about AI, so many things are being said now about AI,

02:01:04.640 | but I think there are two things that every person should know about AI. First is that AI

02:01:11.120 | is the first tool in history that can make decisions by itself. All previous tools in

02:01:17.360 | history couldn't make decisions. This is why they empowered us. You invent a knife, you invent an

02:01:24.320 | atom bomb. The atom bomb cannot decide to start a war, cannot decide which city to bomb. AI can

02:01:32.000 | make decisions by itself. Autonomous weapon systems can decide by themselves who to kill,

02:01:40.720 | who to bomb. The second thing is that AI is the first tool in history that can create new ideas

02:01:48.320 | by itself. The printing press could print our ideas but could not create new ideas. AI can

02:01:57.040 | create new ideas entirely by itself. This is unprecedented. Therefore, it is the first

02:02:04.000 | technology in history that instead of giving power to humans, it takes power away from us.

02:02:10.960 | And the danger is that it will increasingly take more and more power from us until we are left

02:02:19.760 | helpless and clueless about what is happening in the world. This is already beginning to happen in

02:02:27.200 | an accelerated pace. More and more decisions about our lives, whether to give us a loan,

02:02:34.320 | whether to give us a mortgage, whether to give us a job are taken by AI. More and more of the ideas,

02:02:40.960 | of the images, of the stories that surround us and shape our minds, our world are produced,

02:02:48.960 | are created by AI, not by human beings. - If you can just linger on that, what is the danger of

02:02:54.720 | that? That more and more of the creative side is done by AI, the idea generation. Is it that we

02:03:04.320 | become stale in our thinking? Is that that idea generation is so fundamental to like the

02:03:10.000 | evolution of humanity? - That we can't resist the idea. To resist an idea, you need to have some

02:03:16.560 | vision of the creative process. Now, this is a very old fear. You go back to Plato's cave,

02:03:25.040 | some of this idea that people are sitting chained in a cave and seeing shadows on a screen,

02:03:32.720 | on a wall, and thinking this is reality. You go back to Descartes, and he has this thought

02:03:39.200 | experiment of the demon. And Descartes asks himself, "How do I know that any of this is real?

02:03:45.920 | Maybe there is a demon who is creating all of this and is basically enslaving me by surrounding me

02:03:53.840 | with these illusions." You go back to Buddha, it's the same question. What if we are living in a

02:03:59.760 | world of illusions, and because we have been living in it throughout our lives, all our ideas

02:04:05.760 | or our desires, how we understand ourselves, this is all the product of the same illusions.

02:04:12.160 | And this was a big philosophical question for thousands of years. Now it's becoming a practical

02:04:20.240 | question of engineering, because previously all the ideas, as far as we know, maybe we are living

02:04:26.160 | inside a computer simulation of intelligent rats from the planet Zircon. If that's the case,

02:04:32.000 | we don't know about it. But taking what we do know about human history, until now, all the stories,

02:04:39.920 | images, paintings, songs, operas, theater, everything we've encountered and shaped our minds

02:04:46.400 | was created by humans. Now increasingly, we live in a world where more and more of these cultural

02:04:53.440 | artifacts will be coming from an alien intelligence. Very quickly, we might reach a point

02:05:00.080 | when most of the story, stories, images, songs, TV shows, whatever, are created by an alien

02:05:09.040 | intelligence. And if we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions,

02:05:16.720 | created by an alien intelligence that we don't understand, but it understands us, this is a kind

02:05:25.200 | of spiritual enslavement that we won't be able to break out of, because it understands us, it

02:05:34.160 | understands how to manipulate us, but we don't understand what is behind this screen of stories

02:05:43.200 | and images and songs. - So if there's a set of AI systems that are operating in the space of ideas

02:05:50.880 | that are far superior to ours, and we're not almost able to, it's opaque to us, we're not

02:05:57.120 | able to see through, how does that change the pursuit of happiness, the human pursuit of

02:06:05.680 | happiness, life? Where do we get joy if we're surrounded by AI systems that are doing most of

02:06:13.760 | the cool things humans do much better than us? - Some of the things, it's okay that the AIs

02:06:20.080 | will do them. Many human tasks and jobs, they're drudgery, they are not fun, they are not developing

02:06:30.720 | us emotionally or spiritually, it's fine if the robots take over. I don't know, I think about the

02:06:37.040 | people in supermarkets or grocery stores that spend hours every day just passing items and

02:06:43.840 | charging you the money. I mean, if this can be automated, wonderful. We need to make sure that

02:06:50.560 | these people then have better jobs, better means of supporting themselves, and developing their

02:07:00.320 | social abilities, their spiritual abilities. That's the ideal world that AI can create,

02:07:08.560 | that it takes away from us the things that it's better if we don't do them and allows us to focus

02:07:19.040 | on the most important things and the deepest aspects of our nature, of our potential.

02:07:24.880 | If we give AI control of the sphere of ideas at this stage, I think it's very, very dangerous

02:07:33.680 | because it doesn't understand us. AI at present is mostly digesting the products of human culture.

02:07:44.480 | Everything we've produced over thousands of years, it eats all of these cultural products,

02:07:51.760 | digests it, and starts producing its own new stuff. But we still haven't figured out

02:07:59.120 | ourselves, in our bodies, our brains, our minds, our psychology. So, an AI based on our flawed

02:08:09.040 | understanding of ourselves is a very dangerous thing. I think that we need, first of all, to

02:08:18.800 | keep developing ourselves. If for every dollar and every minute that we spend on developing AI,

02:08:27.280 | artificial intelligence, we spend another dollar and another minute in developing human consciousness,

02:08:34.160 | the human mind will be okay. The danger is that we spend all our effort on developing an AI at a

02:08:41.840 | time when we don't understand ourselves, and then letting the AI take over, that's a road to a human

02:08:49.680 | catastrophe. - Does this surprise you how well large language models work? I mean, has it modified

02:08:55.840 | your understanding of the nature of intelligence? - Yes. I mean, I've been writing about AI for,

02:09:01.920 | I don't know, like eight years now, and engaged with all these predictions and speculations.

02:09:08.640 | And when it actually came, it was much faster and more powerful than I thought it would be.

02:09:13.760 | I didn't think that we would have, in 2023, an AI that can hold a conversation that you can't know

02:09:23.360 | if it's a human being or an AI that can write beautiful texts. I mean, I read the texts written

02:09:31.600 | by AI, and the thing that strikes me most is the coherence. You know, people think, "Oh, it's

02:09:38.640 | nothing, they just take ideas from here and there, words from here and put it." No, it's so coherent.

02:09:45.040 | I mean, you read, not sentences, you read paragraphs, you read entire texts, and there is

02:09:51.840 | logic, there is a structure. - It's not only coherent, it's convincing. - Yes, it makes sense.

02:09:57.600 | - And the beautiful thing about it that has to do with your work, it doesn't have to be true.

02:10:02.480 | - No. - And it often gets facts wrong,

02:10:05.760 | but it still is convincing. And it is both scary and beautiful. - Yes.

02:10:10.800 | - That our brains love language so much that we don't need the facts to be correct. We just need

02:10:19.600 | it to be a beautiful story. - Yeah. That's been the secret of

02:10:23.520 | politics and religion for thousands of years, and now it's coming with AI.

02:10:28.320 | - So you, as a person who has written some of the most impactful words ever written in your books,

02:10:34.880 | how does that make you feel that you might be one of the last effective human writers?

02:10:42.000 | - That's a good question. - First of all, do you think that's possible?

02:10:45.360 | - I think it is possible. I've seen a lot of examples of AI being told, "Write like Yuval

02:10:52.560 | Noah Harari and what it produces." - Has it ever done better than you

02:10:55.920 | think you could have written yourself? - I mean, on the level of content of ideas,

02:11:02.720 | no. There are things I say I would never say that. But when it comes to the, I mean, there is,

02:11:10.720 | again, the coherence and the quality of writing is such that I say it's unbelievable how good it is.

02:11:19.760 | And who knows, in 10 years, in 20 years, maybe it can do better, even according to certain measures

02:11:27.920 | on the level of content. - So that people will be able to do a style

02:11:33.680 | transfer, do in the style of Yuval Noah Harari, write anything, write why I should have ice cream

02:11:42.480 | tonight, and make it convincing. - I don't know if I have anything

02:11:46.320 | convincing to say about these things. - I think you'd be surprised.

02:11:48.800 | - I think you'd be surprised. It could be an evolutionary biology explanation for why.

02:11:52.720 | - Yeah, ice cream is good for you. - Yeah. So I mean,

02:11:55.600 | that changes the nature of writing. - Ultimately, I think it goes back.

02:12:02.080 | Much of my writing is suspicious of itself. I write stories about the danger of stories.

02:12:14.880 | I write about intelligence, but highlighting the dangers of intelligence. Ultimately, I don't think

02:12:22.880 | that in terms of power, human power comes from intelligence and from stories. But I think that

02:12:30.640 | the deepest and best qualities of humans are not intelligence and not storytelling and not power.

02:12:38.240 | Again, with all our power, with all our cooperation, with all our intelligence,

02:12:43.520 | we are on the verge of destroying ourselves and destroying much of the ecosystem.

02:12:48.320 | Our best qualities are not there. Our best qualities are nonverbal. Again, they come from

02:12:57.600 | things like compassion, from introspection. And introspection, from my experience, is not verbal.

02:13:03.840 | If you try to understand yourself with words, you will never succeed. There is a place where you

02:13:11.280 | need the words. But the deepest insights, they don't come from words. And you can't write about

02:13:19.200 | it. That's again, it goes back to Wittgenstein, to Buddha, to so many of these sages before,

02:13:24.720 | that these are the things we are silent about. - Yeah, but eventually you have to project it.

02:13:30.720 | As a writer, you have to do the silent introspection, but project it onto a page.

02:13:36.720 | - Yes, but you still have to warn people, you will never find the deepest truth in a book.

02:13:43.120 | You will never find it in words. You can only find it, I think, in direct experience,

02:13:50.240 | which is nonverbal, which is pre-verbal. - In the silence of your own mind.

02:13:54.560 | - Yes. - Somewhere in there.

02:13:55.840 | - Yes. - Well, let me ask you a silly question then,

02:14:01.280 | a ridiculously big question. You have done a lot of deep thinking about the world, about yourself,

02:14:08.560 | this kind of introspection. How do you think, if you, by way of advice, but just practically

02:14:16.640 | speaking, day to day, how do you think about difficult problems of the world?

02:14:20.960 | - First of all, I take time off. The most important thing I do, I think, as a writer,

02:14:29.760 | as a scientist, I meditate. I spend about two hours every day in silent meditation,

02:14:36.160 | observing as much as possible nonverbally what is happening within myself, focusing body

02:14:44.080 | sensations, the breath. Thoughts keep coming up, but I try not to give them attention. I don't try

02:14:50.160 | to drive them away, just let them be there in the background, like some background noise.

02:14:54.480 | Don't engage with the thoughts, because the mind is constantly producing stories with words. These

02:15:04.080 | stories come between us and the world. They don't allow us to see ourselves or the world.

02:15:10.080 | For me, the most shocking thing when I started meditating 23 years ago,

02:15:14.800 | I was given this simple exercise to just observe my breath coming in and out of the nostrils,

02:15:21.120 | not controlling it, just observing it. I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds.

02:15:26.560 | I, for 10 seconds, would try to notice, "Oh, now the breath is coming in. It's coming in,

02:15:30.640 | it's coming in. Oh, it stopped coming in, and now it's going out, going out." 10 seconds,

02:15:34.960 | and some memory would come, some thought would come, some story about something that happened

02:15:40.400 | last week or 10 years ago or in the future. The story would hijack my attention. It would take me

02:15:49.040 | maybe five minutes to remember, "Oh, I'm supposed to be observing my breath." If I can't observe my

02:15:56.240 | own breath because of these stories created by the mind, how can I hope to understand much more

02:16:03.120 | complex things like the political situation in Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,

02:16:09.200 | the Russian invasion of Ukraine? If all these stories keep coming, I mean, it's not the truth,

02:16:14.080 | it's just the story your own mind created. So first thing, train the mind to be silent and

02:16:20.960 | just observe. So two hours every day, and I go every year for a long retreat between one month

02:16:26.720 | and two months, 60 days of just silent meditation. Silent meditation for 60 days.

02:16:32.880 | Yeah. To train the mind, forget about your own stories, just observe what is really happening.

02:16:41.280 | And then also throughout the day, have an information diet. Today, many people are very

02:16:49.840 | aware of what they feed their body, what enters their mouth. Be very aware of what you feed your

02:16:57.280 | mind, what enters your mind. Have an information diet. So for instance, I read long books.

02:17:05.360 | And I prefer, like I do many interviews, I prefer three-hour interviews to five-minute interviews.

02:17:12.400 | The long format, it's not always feasible, but you can go much, much deeper.

02:17:21.840 | So I would say an information diet, be very careful about what you feed your mind,

02:17:27.440 | give preference to big chunks over small-- LUKE: To books over Twitter.

02:17:33.760 | SRS: Yes, books over Twitter, definitely. And then when I encounter a problem,

02:17:39.280 | a difficult intellectual problem, then I let the problem lead me where it goes and not where I want

02:17:52.320 | it to go. If I approach a problem with some preconceived idea or solution and then try to

02:18:00.000 | impose it on the problem and just find confirmation bias, just find the evidence that supports my

02:18:05.680 | view, this is easy for the mind to do and you don't learn anything new.

02:18:11.760 | LUKE: Do you take notes? Do you start to concretize your thoughts on paper?

02:18:18.800 | SRS: I read a lot. Usually I don't take notes. Then I start writing and when I write,

02:18:26.400 | I write like a torrent, just write. Now it's the time you read, you did meditation, now it's the

02:18:33.520 | time to write, write. Don't stop, just write. So I would write from memory and I'm not afraid

02:18:41.520 | of formulating, say, big ideas, big theories and putting them on paper. The danger is once it's on

02:18:47.760 | paper, not on paper, on the screen, in the computer, you get attached to it and then you

02:18:54.480 | start with confirmation bias to build more and more layers around it and you can't go back.

02:19:00.160 | And then it's very dangerous. But I trust myself that I have to some extent the ability to press

02:19:09.040 | the delete button. The most important button in the keyboard is delete. I write and then I delete.

02:19:17.360 | I write and then I delete. And because I trust myself that I'll have the… every time I come

02:19:23.440 | to press the delete button, I feel bad. It's a kind of pain. I created this, it's a beautiful

02:19:29.040 | idea and I have to delete it. But I try and hopefully I do it enough times. And this is

02:19:36.000 | important because in the long term, it enables me to play with ideas. I have the confidence to

02:19:42.240 | start formulating some brave idea. Most of them turn out to be nonsense.

02:19:50.240 | But I trust myself not to be attached, not to become attached to my own nonsense.

02:19:56.720 | So it gives me this room for playfulness. - I would be amiss if I didn't ask, for people

02:20:02.880 | interested in hearing you talk about meditation, if they want to start meditating, what advice

02:20:07.840 | would you give on how to start? You mentioned you couldn't hold your attention on your breath

02:20:14.320 | for longer than 10 seconds at first. So how did they start on this journey?

02:20:18.560 | - First of all, it's a difficult journey. It's not fun, it's not recreational, it's not

02:20:26.400 | kind of time to relax. It can be very, very intense. The most difficult thing, at least

02:20:32.560 | in the meditation I practice, vipassana, which I learned from a teacher called S. N. Goenka,

02:20:37.680 | the most difficult thing is not the silence, it's not the sitting for long hours, it's what comes

02:20:43.840 | up. Everything you don't want to know about yourself, this is what comes up. So it's very

02:20:50.720 | intense and difficult. If you go to a meditation retreat, don't think you're going to relax.

02:20:56.240 | - So what's the experience of a meditation retreat when everything you don't like comes up

02:21:03.280 | for 30 days? - It depends what comes up.

02:21:05.760 | Anger comes up, you're angry. For days on end, you're just boiling with anger. Everything makes

02:21:12.320 | you angry. Again, something that happens right now, or you remember something from 20 years ago,

02:21:18.000 | and you start boiling with... It's like, I never even thought about this incident,

02:21:23.440 | but it was somewhere stored with a huge, huge pile of anger attached to it, and it's now coming up,

02:21:32.160 | and all the anger is coming up. Maybe it's boredom. You know, 30 days of meditation,

02:21:38.640 | you start getting bored, and it's the most boring thing. Suddenly, no anger, it's the most boring.

02:21:45.680 | Another second, I scream. And boredom is one of the most difficult things to deal with in life.

02:21:55.280 | I think it's closely related to death. Death is boring. In many movies, death is exciting;

02:22:01.520 | it's not exciting. When you die, ultimately, it's boredom. Nothing happens.

02:22:07.520 | - It's the end of exciting things. - The end. And many things in the world

02:22:12.000 | happen because of boredom. To some extent, people start entire wars because of boredom.

02:22:18.160 | People quit relationships. People quit jobs because of boredom. And if you never learn how

02:22:25.600 | to deal with boredom, you will never learn how to enjoy peace and quiet, because the way to peace

02:22:34.000 | passes through boredom. And from what I experienced with meditation, I think

02:22:40.240 | maybe it was the most difficult, maybe at least in the top three, much more difficult, say,

02:22:46.800 | than anger or pain. When pain comes up, you feel heroic. "Hey, I'm dealing with pain."

02:22:52.880 | When boredom comes up, it brings it with depression and feelings of worthlessness,

02:22:59.920 | and it's nothing. I'm nothing. - The way to peace is through boredom.

02:23:05.440 | David Foster Wallace said the key to life is to be unborable.

02:23:10.880 | Which is a different perspective on what you're talking to. Is there truth to that?

02:23:18.240 | - Yes, I mean, it's closely related. I would say, like, I look at the world today, like politics,

02:23:23.680 | the one thing we need more than anything else is boring politicians. We have a super abundance of

02:23:30.560 | very exciting politicians who are doing and saying very exciting things, and we need boring

02:23:37.360 | politicians. And we need them quickly. - Yeah, the way to peace is through boredom.

02:23:44.880 | That applies in more ways than one. What advice would you give to young people

02:23:50.880 | today in high school and college how to have a successful life, how to have a successful career?

02:23:57.040 | - What they should know, it's the first time in history nobody has any idea how the world would

02:24:03.520 | look like in 10 years. Nobody has any idea how the world would look like when you grow up.

02:24:08.800 | You know, throughout history, it was never possible to predict the future. You live in

02:24:12.800 | the Middle Ages, nobody knows. Maybe in 10 years, the Vikings will invade, the Mongols will invade,

02:24:18.640 | there'll be an epidemic, there'll be an earthquake, who knows? But the basic structures of life will

02:24:25.520 | not change. Most people will still be peasants. Armies would fight on horseback with swords and

02:24:33.280 | bows and arrows and things like that. So you could learn a lot from the wisdom of your elders.

02:24:41.040 | They've been there before, and they knew what kind of basic skills you need to learn.

02:24:47.040 | Most people need to learn how to sow wheat and harvest wheat or rice and make bread

02:24:53.520 | and build a house and ride a horse and things like that. Now we have no idea, not just about

02:25:00.320 | politics. We have no idea how the job market would look like in 10 years. We have no idea

02:25:07.200 | what skills will still be needed. You think you're going to learn how to code because

02:25:16.160 | they'll need a lot of coders in the 2030s? Think again. Maybe AI is doing all the coding. You don't

02:25:21.600 | need any coders. You're going to, I don't know, you learn to translate languages, you want to be a

02:25:26.960 | translator, gone. We don't know what skills will be needed. So the most important skill

02:25:34.160 | is the skill to keep learning and keep changing throughout our lives, which is very, very

02:25:40.640 | difficult, to keep reinventing ourselves. It's a deep, again, it's in a way a spiritual practice

02:25:47.920 | to build your personality, to build your mind as a very flexible mind.

02:25:58.400 | If traditionally people thought about education, like building a stone house with very deep

02:26:10.480 | foundations, now it's more like setting up a tent that you can fold and move to the next place

02:26:17.680 | very, very quickly because that's the 21st century. - Which also raises questions about the

02:26:24.480 | future of education, what that looks like. Let me ask you about love.

02:26:30.080 | What were some of the challenges? What were some of the lessons about love, about life that you

02:26:39.520 | learned from coming out as gay? - In many ways, it goes back to the stories. I think this is one of

02:26:46.480 | the reasons I became so interested in stories and in their power. Because I grew up in a small

02:26:57.040 | Israeli town in the 1980s, early 1990s, which was very homophobic. And I basically embraced it,

02:27:08.080 | I breathed it, because you could hardly even think differently. So you had these two powerful

02:27:16.800 | stories around, one, that God hates gay people and that He will punish them for who they are or for

02:27:27.040 | what they do. Secondly, that it's not God, it's nature, that there is something diseased or sick

02:27:34.160 | about it. And these people, maybe they're not sinners, but they are sick, they are defective.

02:27:42.640 | And nobody wanted to identify with such a thing. If your options, okay, you can be a sinner,

02:27:48.560 | you can be a defect, what do you want? No good options there. And it took me many years,

02:27:54.720 | till I was 21, to come to terms with it. And one of the things, I learned two things. First,

02:28:01.840 | about the amazing capacity of the human mind for denial and delusion. An algorithm could have told

02:28:11.200 | me that I'm gay when I was like 14 or 15. If there is a good-looking guy and girl walking,

02:28:17.680 | I would immediately focus on the guy. But I didn't connect the dots. I could not understand

02:28:26.400 | what was happening inside my own brain and my own mind and my own body. It took me a long time to

02:28:32.960 | realize, "You know, you're just gay." So that speaks to the power of social

02:28:38.560 | convention versus individual thought. This is the power of self-delusion.

02:28:43.040 | That it's not that I knew I was gay and was hiding it. I was hiding it for myself successfully,

02:28:50.560 | that I don't understand how it is possible. Looking back, I don't understand how it is

02:28:54.960 | possible. But I know it is possible. I knew and didn't know at the same time.

02:29:00.080 | And then the other big lesson is the power of the stories, of the social conventions.

02:29:06.240 | Because the stories were not true. They did not make sense even on their own terms.

02:29:11.760 | Even if you accept the basic religious framework of the world, that there is a good God that

02:29:18.720 | created everything and controls everything, why would a good God punish people for love?

02:29:27.360 | I understand why a good God would punish people for violence, for hatred, for cruelty. But why

02:29:34.960 | would God punish people for love, especially when he created them that way? So even if you accept

02:29:42.720 | the religious framework of the world, obviously the story that God hates gay people, it comes

02:29:49.520 | not from God, but from some humans who invented this story. They take their own hatred. This is

02:29:55.920 | something humans do all the time. They hate somebody and they say, "No, I don't hate them.

02:30:01.280 | God hates them." They throw their own hatred on God. And then if you think about the scientific

02:30:09.440 | framework that said that, "Oh, gays, they are against nature. They are against the laws of

02:30:14.960 | nature," and so forth, science tells us nothing can exist against the laws of nature.

02:30:22.240 | Things that go against the laws of nature just don't exist. There is a law of nature that you

02:30:29.440 | can't move faster than the speed of light. Now, you don't have this minority of people who break

02:30:35.280 | the laws of nature by going faster than the speed of light. And then nature comes, "No, that's bad.

02:30:41.200 | You shouldn't do that." That's not how nature works. If something goes against the laws of

02:30:45.920 | nature, it just can't exist. The fact that gay people exist, me and not just people, you see

02:30:52.720 | homosexuality among many, many mammals and birds and other animals. It exists because it is in line

02:31:01.280 | with the laws of nature. The idea that this is sick, that this is whatever, it comes not from

02:31:07.840 | nature. It comes from the human imagination. Some people who, for whatever reasons, hated gay people,

02:31:14.800 | they said, "Oh, they go against nature." But this is a story created by people. This is not the laws

02:31:21.840 | of nature. And this taught me that so many of the things that we think are natural or eternal or

02:31:30.480 | divine, no, they're just human stories. But these human stories are often the most powerful forces

02:31:38.080 | in the world. - So what did you learn from your personal struggle of journey through the social

02:31:48.800 | conventions to find one of the things that makes life awesome, which is love? So what it takes to

02:31:55.280 | strip away the self-delusion and the pressures of social convention to wake up?

02:32:00.320 | - It takes a lot of work, a lot of courage, and a lot of help from other people.

02:32:07.040 | This kind of, again, heroic idea that I can do it all by myself, it doesn't work.

02:32:14.800 | Certainly with love, you need at least one more person. And I'm very happy that I found Itzik.

02:32:22.160 | We lived in the same small Israeli town. We lived on two adjacent streets for years,

02:32:28.160 | probably went to school on the same bus for years without really encountering each other. In the end,

02:32:34.320 | we met on one of the first dating sites on the internet for gay people in Israel in 2002.

02:32:42.960 | - You're saying the internet works. - Yes. I said a lot of bad things

02:32:46.480 | or dangers about technology and the internet. There are also, of course, good things. And

02:32:51.120 | this is not an accident. You have two kinds of minorities in history. You have minorities which

02:32:58.080 | are a cohesive group, like Jews, that, yes, you're as small as being born Jewish in, say,

02:33:05.600 | Germany or Russia or whatever. You're born in a small community. But as a Jewish boy, you're born

02:33:11.840 | to a Jewish family. You have Jewish parents. You have Jewish siblings. You're in a Jewish

02:33:16.400 | neighborhood. You have Jewish friends. So these kinds of minorities, they could always come

02:33:21.200 | together and help each other throughout history. Another type of minority, like gay people or more

02:33:27.440 | broadly LGBTQ people, that as a gay boy, you're usually not born to a gay family with gay parents

02:33:35.040 | and gay siblings in a gay neighborhood. So usually you find yourself completely alone.

02:33:43.120 | For most of history, one of the biggest problems for the gay community was that there was no

02:33:49.120 | community. How do you find one another? And the internet was a wonderful thing in this respect

02:33:56.640 | because it made it very easy for these kinds of diffuse communities or diffuse minorities to find

02:34:03.440 | each other. So me and Itzik, even though we rode the same bus together to school for years, we

02:34:08.800 | didn't meet in the physical world. We met online. Because again, in the physical world, you don't

02:34:14.080 | want to identify in an Israeli town in the 1980s. You ride the bus. You don't want to say, "Hey,

02:34:19.360 | I'm gay. Is there anybody else gay here?" That's not a good idea. But on the internet, we could

02:34:24.640 | find each other. There's another lesson in there that maybe sometimes the thing you're looking for

02:34:29.040 | is right under your nose. Yeah. A very old lesson and a very true lesson in many ways. So you need

02:34:37.680 | help from other people to realize the truth about yourself. So of course, in love, you cannot just

02:34:45.120 | love abstractly. There is another person there. You need to find them. But also, we were one of

02:34:51.280 | the first generations who enjoyed the benefits of gay liberation, of the very difficult struggles

02:34:58.880 | of people who were much braver than us in the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, who dared to question

02:35:06.560 | social conventions, to struggle at sometimes a terrible price. And we benefited from it.

02:35:14.800 | And more broadly, we spoke earlier about the feminist movement. There would have been no

02:35:20.160 | gay liberation without the feminist movement. We also owe them for starting to change the gender

02:35:29.680 | structure of the world. And this is always true. You can never do it just by yourself.

02:35:37.200 | Also, I look at my journey in meditation. I could not have found the idea of going to

02:35:43.760 | meditation retreat okay, but I couldn't discover meditation by… I couldn't develop the meditation

02:35:50.480 | technique by myself. Somebody had to teach me this way of how to look inside yourself.

02:35:57.200 | And it's also a very important lesson that you can't do it just by yourself,

02:36:06.800 | that this fantasy of complete autonomy, of complete self-sufficiency, it doesn't work.

02:36:13.280 | You hear, it tends to be a very kind of male macho fantasy. I don't need anybody. I can be so

02:36:19.920 | strong and so brave that I'll do everything by myself. It never works.

02:36:24.960 | You need friends, you need a mentor, you need the very thing that makes us human, as other humans.

02:36:38.560 | You mentioned that the fear of boredom might be a kind of proxy for the fear of death.

02:36:43.840 | So what role does the fear of death play in the human condition? Are you afraid of death?

02:36:49.200 | Yes, I think everybody is afraid of death. I mean, all our fears come out of the fear of death.

02:36:55.920 | But the fear of death is just so deep and difficult. Usually, we can't face it directly.

02:37:02.960 | So we cut it into little pieces, and we face just little pieces. Oh, I lost my smartphone.

02:37:08.880 | That's a little, little, little piece of the fear of death, which is of losing everything.

02:37:14.400 | So I can't deal with losing everything. I'm dealing now with losing my phone or losing a

02:37:19.520 | book or whatever. I feel pain. That's a small bit of the fear of death. Somebody who really doesn't

02:37:28.320 | fear death would not fear anything at all. They'll be like, "Anything that happens,

02:37:34.400 | I can deal with it. If I can deal with death, this is nothing."

02:37:36.880 | - So any fear is a distant echo of the big fear of death. Have you ever

02:37:43.040 | looked at it head on, caught glimpses, sort of contemplated as the Stoics do?

02:37:50.640 | - Yes. I mean, when I was a teenager, I would constantly contemplate it,

02:37:56.080 | trying to understand, to imagine. It was a very, very shocking and moving experience. I remember

02:38:05.920 | especially in connection with national ideology, which was also very big, strong in Israel, still

02:38:12.080 | is, which again comes from the fear of death. You know that you're going to die, so you say,

02:38:17.600 | "Okay, I die, but the nation lives on. I live on through the nation. I don't really die."

02:38:22.960 | And you hear it especially on Memorial Day for fallen soldiers. So every day, there'll be in

02:38:30.080 | school Memorial Day for fallen soldiers who fell defending Israel in all its different wars,

02:38:36.800 | and all these kids would come dressed in white, and you'll have this big ceremony with flags and

02:38:41.840 | songs and dances in memory of the fallen soldiers. And you get the impression, again, I don't want

02:38:48.400 | it to sound crass, but you get the impression that the best thing in life is to be a fallen soldier.

02:38:53.200 | Because even though, yes, you die, everybody dies in the end, but then you'll have all these

02:38:56.880 | school kids for years and years remembering you and celebrating you, and you don't really die.

02:39:02.400 | And I remember standing in these ceremonies and thinking, "What does it actually mean?"

02:39:07.040 | Like, okay, so if I'm a fallen soldier, now I'm a skeleton, I'm bones in this military cemetery

02:39:16.720 | under this stone, do I actually hear the kids singing all these patriotic songs? If not,

02:39:23.840 | how do I know they do it? Maybe they trick me. Maybe I die in the war, and then they don't sing

02:39:27.600 | any songs. And how does it help me? And I realized, I was quite young at the time, that if you're dead,

02:39:36.160 | you can't hear anything because that's the meaning of being dead. And if you're dead,

02:39:40.720 | you can't think of anything like, "Oh, now they're remembering because you're dead." That's

02:39:44.080 | the meaning of being dead. And it was a shocking realization.

02:39:47.840 | But it's a really difficult realization to keep hold in your mind. Like, it's the end.

02:39:53.600 | I lost it over time. I mean, for many years, it was a very powerful fuel, motivation for

02:39:59.680 | philosophical, for spiritual exploration. And I realized that the fear of death is really a

02:40:05.760 | very powerful drive. And over the years, especially as I meditated, it kind of dissipated. And today,

02:40:12.800 | sometimes I find myself trying to recapture this teenage fear of death, because it was so

02:40:18.720 | powerful, and I just can't. I try to make the same image. I don't know.

02:40:23.440 | Something about the teenage years.

02:40:26.960 | Yeah. As a teenager, I always thought that the adults, there is something wrong with the adults,

02:40:31.840 | because they don't get it. I would ask my parents or teachers about it, and they, "Oh, yes, you die

02:40:39.120 | in the end. That's it." But on the other hand, they are so worried about other things, like there'll

02:40:44.720 | be a political crisis or an economic problem or a personal problem like with the bank or whatever.

02:40:50.080 | They'll be so worried. But then about the fact that they're going to die, "Ah, we don't care

02:40:54.560 | about it."

02:40:54.960 | That's why you read Camus and others when you're a teenager, you really worry about the existential

02:41:01.120 | questions. Well, this feels like the right time to ask the big question, "What's the meaning of

02:41:06.320 | this whole thing?" And you're the right person to ask. What's the meaning of life? Yes.

02:41:11.280 | The meaning of life? Oh, that's easy.

02:41:12.480 | What is it?

02:41:12.960 | So what life is, if you ask what the meaning of life is, life is feeling things, having sensations,

02:41:25.600 | emotions, and reacting to them. When you feel something good, something pleasant, you want

02:41:32.000 | more out of it. You want more of it. When you feel something unpleasant, you want to get rid of it.

02:41:37.680 | That's the whole of life. That's what is happening all the time. You feel things, you want the

02:41:43.200 | pleasant things to increase, you want the unpleasant things to disappear. That's what life

02:41:49.360 | is. If you ask, "What is the meaning of life?" in a more kind of philosophical or spiritual

02:41:56.400 | question, the real question to ask, "What kind of answer do you expect?" Most people expect a story,

02:42:05.120 | and that's always the wrong answer. Most people expect that the answer to the question,

02:42:11.040 | "What is the meaning of life?" will be a story, like a big drama, that this is the plot line,

02:42:17.360 | and this is your role in the story. This is what you have to do. This is your line in the big play.

02:42:24.160 | You say your line, you do your thing, that's the thing. This is human imagination. This is fantasy.

02:42:30.960 | To really understand life, life is not a story. The universe does not function like a story.

02:42:38.320 | So I think to really understand life, you need to observe it directly in a nonverbal way.

02:42:47.040 | Don't turn it into a story. And the question to start with is, "What is suffering? What is causing

02:42:55.760 | suffering?" The question, "What is the meaning of life?" will take you to fantasies and delusions.

02:43:02.480 | We want to stay with the reality of life. And the most important question about the reality of life

02:43:08.800 | is, "What is suffering, and where is it coming from?"

02:43:12.960 | And to answer that nonverbally, so the conscious experience of suffering.

02:43:17.680 | Yes. When you suffer, try to observe what is really happening when you're suffering.

02:43:25.520 | Well put. And I wonder if AI will also go through that same kind of process.

02:43:35.360 | And if we develop consciousness or not. At present, it's not. It's just words.

02:43:41.200 | It will just say to you, "Please don't hurt me at all."

02:43:43.680 | Again, as I've mentioned to you, I'm a huge fan of yours. Thank you for the incredible work you do.

02:43:51.760 | This conversation has been a long time, I think, coming. It's a huge honor to talk to you.

02:43:59.120 | This was really fun. Thank you for talking today.

02:44:01.280 | Thank you. I really enjoyed it. And as I said, I think the long form is the best form.

02:44:07.120 | Yeah, I loved it. Thank you.

02:44:11.360 | Thanks for listening to this conversation with Yuval Noah Harari.

02:44:14.320 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:44:18.000 | And now, let me leave you with some words from Yuval Noah Harari himself.

02:44:22.480 | How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity,

02:44:27.920 | democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

02:44:34.000 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:44:38.560 | Bye.

02:44:39.600 | you

02:44:40.640 | you

02:44:40.720 | you

02:44:41.220 | you

02:44:43.280 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies | Lex Fridman Podcast #390

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