Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies | Lex Fridman Podcast #390
- If we now find ourselves
inside this kind of world of illusions, created
by an alien intelligence that we don't understand,
but it understands us, this is a kind of, you know, spiritual enslavement that
we won't be able to break out of, because it understands us, it understands how to manipulate us, but we don't understand
what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs. - The following is a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari,
a historian, philosopher, and author of several highly acclaimed, highly influential books,
including "Sapiens", "Homo Deus", and "21 Lessons
for the 21st Century". He is also an outspoken
critic of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the current right
wing government in Israel. So, while much of this conversation is about the history and
future of human civilization, we also discuss the
political turmoil of present day Israel, providing
a different perspective from that of my recent conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Yuval Noah Harari. 13.8 billion years ago is
the origin of our universe. 3.8 billion years ago is
the origin of life here on our little planet, the
one we call Earth, let's say, 200,000 years ago is the
appearance of early homo sapiens. So let me ask you this question. How rare are these events in the vastness of space and time? Or put it in a more fun way, how many intelligent alien
civilizations do you think are out there in this universe? - Hmm. - Us being one of them. - I suppose there should
be some, statistically, but we don't have any evidence. But I do think that, you
know, intelligence in any way, it's a bit overvalued. We are the most intelligent
entities on this planet. And look what you're doing. So intelligence also tends
to be self-destructive, which implies that if there are, or were intelligent life forms elsewhere, maybe they don't survive for long. - So you think there's a tension between happiness and intelligence? - Absolutely. Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards
amplifying happiness. I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between
intelligence and consciousness, which many people, certainly
in the tech industry and in the AI industry, tend to miss. Intelligence is simply the
ability to solve problems, to attain goals, and, you
know, to win at chess, to win a struggle for
survival, to win a war, to drive a car, to diagnose a disease. This is intelligence. Consciousness is the ability
to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate. In humans and other animals, intelligence and consciousness go together,
they go hand in hand, which is why we confuse them. We solve problems, we attain
goals by having feelings. But other types of intelligence,
certainly in computers, computers are already highly intelligent. And as far as we know, they
have zero consciousness. When a computer beats you
at chess or go or whatever, it doesn't feel happy. If it loses, it doesn't feel sad. And there could be also
other highly intelligent entities out there in the universe that have zero consciousness. And I think that consciousness
is far more important and valuable than intelligence. - Can you say to me on the
case that consciousness and intelligence are
intricately connected? So not just in humans, but anywhere else. They have to go hand in hand. Is it possible for you to
imagine such a universe? - It could be, but we don't know yet. Again, we have examples, certainly we know of examples of high intelligence without consciousness. Computers are one example. As far as we know,
plans are not conscious, yet they are intelligent. They can solve problems, they can attain goals in
very sophisticated ways. So... The other way around, to have consciousness
without any intelligence, this is probably impossible, but to have intelligence
without consciousness, yes, that's possible. A bigger question is
whether any of that is tied to organic biochemistry. We know on this planet only
about carbon-based life forms. Whether you are an amoeba,
a dinosaur, a tree, a human being, you are based
on organic biochemistry. Is there an essential connection between organic biochemistry
and consciousness? Do all conscious entities
everywhere in the universe or in the future on
planet Earth have to be based on carbon? Is there something so special about carbon as an element that an
entity based on silicon will never be conscious? I don't know, maybe, but again, this is a key question about computer and computer consciousness,
that can computers eventually become conscious even though they are not organic? The jury still out on that. I don't know. I mean, we have to take
both options into account. - Well, a big part of that
is do you think we humans would be able to detect
other intelligent beings, other conscious beings? Another way to ask that, is it possible that the
aliens are already here and we don't see them? Meaning, are we very human
centric in our understanding of, one, the definition of life, two, the definition of intelligence, and three, the definition of consciousness? - The aliens are here. They're
just not from outer space. AI, which usually stands
for artificial intelligence, I think it stands for alien intelligence because AI is an alien
type of intelligence. It solve problems,
attains goals in a very, very different way, in an
alien way from human beings. Yeah, I'm not implying that
AI came from outer space, it came from Silicon Valley,
but it is alien to us. If there are alien intelligent
or conscious entities that came from outer space already here, I've not seen any evidence for it. It's not impossible, but,
you know, in science, evidence is everything. - Well, I mean, I guess instructive, there's just having the
humility to look around, to think about living beings that operate at a different timescale, at
different spatial scale... And I think that's all
useful when starting to analyze artificial intelligence. It's possible that even
the language models, the large language models we have today are already conscious. - I highly doubt it, but I
think consciousness in the end, it's a question of social norms. Because we cannot prove consciousness in anybody except ourselves. We know that we are conscious
because we are feeling it. We have direct access to our
subjective consciousness. We cannot have any proof that any other entity in the world, any other
human being, our parents, our best friends, we don't have proof that they are conscious. You know, this has been
known for thousands of years. This is Descartes, this
is Buddha, this is Plato. We don't, we can't have
this sort of proof. What we do have is social conventions. It's a social convention that all human beings are conscious. It also applies to animals. Most people who have pets firmly believe that
their pets are conscious. But a lot of people still
refuse to acknowledge that about cows or pigs. Now, pigs are far more
intelligent than dogs and cats according to many measures. Yet, when you go to the
supermarket and buy a piece of frozen pig meat, you don't think about it
as a conscious entity. Why do you think of your dog as conscious, but not of the bacon that you buy? Because you've built a
relationship with the dog and you don't have a
relationship with the bacon. Now, relationships, they don't constitute a logical
proof for consciousness. They're a social test. The Turing test is a social
test. It's not a logical proof. Now, if you establish
a mutual relationship with an entity where when you are invested in it emotionally, you are
almost compelled to feel that the other side is also conscious. And when it comes again
to AI and computers, I don't think that at the present moment computers are conscious,
but people are already forming intimate
relationships with AIs and are therefore it's almost irresistible. They're compelled to increasingly feel that these are conscious entities. And I think we are
quite close to the point when the legal system will
have to take this into account, that even though I don't think computers have consciousness, I think
we are close to the point the legal system will start treating them as conscious entities because
of this social convention. - What, to you, is a social convention just a funny little side effect, a little artifact? Or is it like fundamental
to what consciousness is? Because if it is fundamental, then it seems like AI
is very good at forming these kinds of deep
relationships with humans. - Yeah.
- And therefore it'll be able to be a nice catalyst for integrating itself into these social conventions of ours. - It was built to accomplish that. - Yeah.
- We are design... Again, you know, all this argument
between natural selection and creationism, intelligent design. As far as the past go, all entities evolve by natural selection. The funny thing is, when
you look at the future, more and more entities will
come out of intelligent design, not of some god above the clouds, but of our intelligent
design and the intelligent design of our clouds,
of our computing clouds. They will design more and more entities. And this is what is happening with AI. It is designed to be very good at forming intimate relationships with humans. And in many ways, it's already doing it almost
better than human beings in some situations. You know, when two people
talk with one another, one of the things that kind
of makes the conversation more difficult is our own emotions. You are saying something
and I'm not really listening to you because there is
something I want to say, and I'm just waiting until you
finish, I can put in a word, or I'm so obsessed with my
anger or irritation or whatever, that I don't pay attention
to what you are feeling. This is one of the biggest obstacles in human relationships. And computers don't have this problem, because they don't have
any emotions of their own. So, you know, when a
computer is talking to you, it can be the most, it can focus 100% of its attention is on what you are saying and
what you are feeling, because it has no feelings of its own. And paradoxically, this
means that computers can fool people into feeling that, oh, there is a conscious
entity on the other side, an empathic entity on the other side. Because the one thing
everybody wants almost more than anything in the world, is for somebody to listen to me, somebody to focus all
their attention on me. Like I want it for my
spouse, for my husband, for my mother, for my
friends, for my politicians... Listen to me, listen to what
I feel. And they often don't. And now you have this entity, which 100% of its attention
is just on what I feel. And this is a huge, huge temptation. And I think also a huge, huge danger. - Well, the interesting
catch 22 there is you said, somebody to listen to us. Yes, we want somebody to listen to us, but for us to respect that somebody, they sometimes have to also not listen. It's like they kind of have
to be an asshole sometimes. They have to have moods sometimes. They have to have like
self-importance and confidence and we should have a little
bit of fear that they can walk away at any moment, there should be a little
bit of that tension. So it's like... - Absolutely. But even that,
I mean, the thing is... - Be optimized for.
- If social scientists and say psychologists
establish that, I don't know, 17% inattention is good for a conversation because then you feel challenged, oh, I need to grab this person's attention. You can program the AI
to have 17%, exactly 17% inattention, not one
percentage more or less. Or it can by trial and error discover what is the ideal percentage. Again, you can create... Over the last 10 years, we have creating machines for
grabbing people's attention. This is what has been
happening on social media. Now we are designing machines for grabbing human intimacy, which
in many ways is much, much more dangerous and scary. Already the machines
for grabbing attention. We've seen how much social
and political damage they could do by, in many way kind of distorting
the public conversation. Machines that are superhuman
in their abilities to create intimate relationships, this is like psychological
and social weapons of mass destruction. If we don't regulate it, if we don't train ourself to deal with it, it could destroy the
foundations of human society. - Well, one of the possible trajectories is those same algorithms
would become personalized. And instead of manipulating us at scale, there would be assistance
that guide us to help us grow, to help us understand the world better. I mean, just even interactions
with large language models. Now, if you ask 'em questions, it doesn't have that stressful drama, the tension that you
have from other sources of information, it has a
pretty balanced perspective that it provides. So it just feels like that's a, the potential is there to
have a really nice friend who's like an encyclopedia
that just tells you all the different perspectives,
even on controversial issues, the most controversial issues to say, these are the different theories, these are the not widely
accepted conspiracy theories, but here's the kind of backing
for those conspiracies. It just lays it all out. And then with a calm language, without the words that kinda
presume there's some kind of manipulation going on
under underneath it all. It's quite refreshing. Of course, those are the
early days and, you know, people can step in and start
to censor, to manipulate those algorithms, to start to input some of the human biases in there as opposed to what's currently happening is kind of the internet is input, compress it and have a nice
little output that gives an overview of the different issues. So, I mean, there's a lot of
promise there also. Right? - Absolutely. I mean, if there was no
promise, there was no problem. You know, if this technology
could not accomplish anything good, nobody would develop it. Now, obviously, it has
tremendous positive potential in things like what you
just described in, you know, better medicine, better
healthcare, better education, so many promises. And, but this is also
why it's so dangerous. Because the drive to develop
it faster and faster is there, and it has some dangerous potential also. And we shouldn't ignore it. Again, I'm not advocating
banning it, just to be, you know, careful about how we
not so much develop it, but most importantly how we deploy it into the public sphere. This is the key question. And you know, you look
back at history and one of the things we know from history, humans are not good with new technologies. I hear many people now say, you know, AI, we've been here before. We had the radio, we
had the printing press, we had the industrial revolution. Every time there is a big new technology, people are afraid and it'll
take jobs and the bad actors. And in the end it's okay. And as a historian, my tendency is yes, in the end it's okay, but in the end, there is a learning curve. There is a kind of a lot
of failed experiments on the way to learning how
to use the new technology. And these failed experiments
could cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people. If you think about the
last really big revolution, the industrial revolution,
yes, in the end, we learned how to use the
powers of industry, electricity, radio, trains, whatever, to
build better human societies. But on the way we had all
these experiments like European imperialism, which was driven by the industrial revolution,
it was a question, how do you build an industrial society? Oh, you build an empire, and you take, you control all the resources, the raw materials, the markets. And then you had communism, another big experiment on how to build an industrial society. And you had fascism and
Nazism, which were essentially an experiment in how to
build an industrial society, including even how do you
exterminate minorities using the powers of industry. And we had all these failed
experiments on the way. And if we now have the same type of failed experiments with the
technologies of the 21st century with AI, with bioengineering,
it could cost the lives of, again, hundreds of millions
of people and maybe destroy the species. So as a historian, when people talk about
the examples from history, from new technologies,
I'm not so optimistic. We need to think about
the failed experiment, which accompanied every
major new technology. - So this intelligence
thing, like you were saying, is a double-edged sword, is that every new thing
it helps us create, it can both save us and destroy us. And it's unclear each
time, which will happen. And that's maybe why we
don't see any aliens. - Yeah, I mean, I think each
time it does both things, each time it does both
good things and bad things. And the more powerful the technology, the greater both the positive
and the negative outcomes. Now, we are here because
we are the descendants of the survivors, of
the surviving cultures, the surviving civilizations. So when we look back, we say in the end everything
was okay, hey, we are here, But the people for whom it wasn't okay, they're just not here. - And okay has a lot
of possible variations to it because there's a lot
of suffering along the way, even for the people that survived. So the quality of life and all of this. But let's actually go back there to our, with deep gratitude to our ancestors. How did it all start? How did homo sapiens
out-compete the others? The other human-like species? The Neanderthals and
the other homo species? - You know, on the individual
level, as far as we can tell, we were not superior to them. Neanderthals actually had
bigger brains than us. And not just other human
species, other animals too. If you compare me
personally to an elephant, to a chimpanzee, to a pig, I can do some things better,
many other things worse. If you put me alone on some island with a chimpanzee
and elephant and a pig, I wouldn't bet on me
being the best survivor, the one that comes successful. - If I may interrupt for a second, I was just talking extensively with Elon Musk about the
difference between humans and chimps, relevant
to optimize the robot, and the chimps are not able
to do this kind of pinching... - Okay?
- With their fingers. They can only do this kind of pinching, and this kind of pinching is very useful for fine manipulation, precise
manipulation of objects. So don't be so hard on
yourself. You have... - No, I said that I can do some
things better than a chimp. But you know, if Elon Musk
goes on a boxing match... - Yeah.
- With a chimpanzee, you know...
- This won't help you, this pinch.
- This won't help you against the chimpanzee.
- Good point. - And similar, if you
want to climb a tree, if you want to do so many things, my bet's will be on
the chimp, not on Elon. - Fair enough.
- So I mean, you have advantages on both
sides and what really made us successful, what made
us the rulers of the planet and not the chimps and not
the Neanderthals is not any individual ability,
but our collective ability, our ability to cooperate
flexibly in very large numbers. Chimpanzees know how to cooperate, say 50 chimpanzees, 100 chimpanzees, as far as we can tell from
archeological evidence, this was also the case with Neanderthals. Homo sapiens about 70,000 years ago gain an amazing ability to cooperate basically
in unlimited numbers. You start seeing the
formation of large networks, political, commercial,
religious, items being traded over thousands of kilometers, ideas being spread, artistic fashions. And this is our secret of success. Chimpanzees, Neanderthals can
cooperate, say, a hundred, we, you know, now the global trade network
has 8 billion people. Like what we eat, what we wear, it comes from the other side of the world. Countries like China, like India, they have 1.4 billion people. Even Israel, which is a
relatively small country, say 9 million citizens. That's more than the entire population of the planet 10,000 years ago of humans. So we can build these huge
networks of cooperation and everything we've
accomplished as a species from, you know, building the
Pyramids to flying to the moon, it's based on that. And then you ask, okay, so what makes it possible
for millions of people who don't know each other
to cooperate in a way that Neanderthals or chimpanzees couldn't? And at least my answer
is stories, is fiction. It's the imagination. If you examine any large
scale human cooperation, you always find fiction as its basis. It's a fictional story that holds lots of strangers together. It's most obvious in cases like religion. You know, you can't convince
a group of chimpanzees to come together to fight
a war or build a cathedral by promising to them, if
you do that, after you die, you go to chimpanzee
heaven and you get lots of bananas and coconuts. No chimpanzee will ever believe that. Humans believe these stories, which is why we have these
huge religious networks. But it's the same thing
with modern politics. It's the same thing with economics. People think, oh,
economics, this is rational. It has nothing to do with
fictional stories. No. Money is the most
successful story ever told. Much more successful than
any religious mythology. Not everybody believes in
God or in the same God. But almost everybody believes in money, even though it's just a
figment of our imagination. You know, you take these green
pieces of paper, dollars, they have no value. You can't eat them, you can't drink them. And today most dollars are
not even pieces of paper. They are just electronic information passing between computers. We value them just for one reason, that you have the best
storytellers in the world, the bankers, the finance
ministers, all these people, they are the best storytellers ever. And they tell us a story
that this green little piece of paper or this bit of
information, it is worth a banana. And as long as everybody
believes it, it works. - So at which point does a fiction, when it's sufficiently
useful and effective in improving the global quality of life, does it become like accepted reality? Like there's a threshold
in which you just manage... - If enough people believe
it. It's like with money. You know, if you start
a new cryptocurrency, if you are the only one that
believes the story, I mean, again, cryptocurrencies, you
have the math, of course, but ultimately it's storytelling. You're selling people a story. If nobody believes your story,
you don't have anything. But if lots of people
believe the Bitcoin story, then Bitcoin can be
worth thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Again, why? I mean, you can't eat it, you
can't drink it, it's nothing. It's this story around the
math, which is the real magic. - Is it possible that
the story is the primary living organism, not the storyteller? - Hmm.
- So that somehow humans, homo sapiens evolved to
become these like hosts for a more intelligent living
organism, which is the idea. And the ideas are the ones
that are doing the competing. So this is one of the sort
of big perspectives behind your work that's really revolutionary of how you've seen history. But do you ever kinda take the perspective of the
ideas as the organisms versus the humans? - It's... It's an interesting idea. There are two opposite
things to say about it. On the one hand, yes, absolutely. If you look long term in
history, all the people die. It's the stories that compete
and survive and spread, and stories often spread
by making people willing to sacrifice sometimes
their lives for the story. You know, we know in Israel, this is one of the most important story
factories in human history. And this is a place where
people still kill each other every day over stories. I don't know, you've
been to Jerusalem, right? So people like, ah, Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You go there, I've lived in
Jerusalem much of my life. You go there, it's an ordinary
place. You know, it's a town. You have buildings, you
have stones, you have trees, you have dogs and cats and pedestrians. It's a regular place. But then you have the
stories about the place, oh, this is the place where
God revealed himself, this is the place where Jesus was, this is the place where Muhammad was. And it's the stories
that people fight over. Nobody's fighting over the stones. People are fighting about
the stories about the stones. And the stories... If a story can get millions
of people to fight for it, it not only survives, it spreads, it can take over the world. The other side of the coin
is that the stories are not really alive because
they don't feel anything. This goes back to the
question of consciousness, which I think is the most important thing. That the ultimate
reality is consciousness, is the ability to feel things. If you want to know whether
the hero of some story is real or not, you need
to ask, can it suffer? Stories don't feel anything. Countries, which are also
stories, nations don't suffer. If a nation loses a
war, it doesn't suffer. The soldiers suffer, the civilians suffer, animals can suffer, you
have an army with horses and whatever, and the horses get wounded, the horses suffer. The nation can't suffer. It's just an imagination. It's just a fictional story in our mind. It doesn't feel anything. Similarly, when a bank
goes bankrupt or company goes bankrupt, or when a
currency loses its value, like Bitcoin is worth now zero, crashed, or the dollar is worth zero, it crashed. The dollar doesn't feel anything. It's the people holding
the dollars who might be now very miserable. So we have this complex
situation when history is largely driven by stories, but stories are not the ultimate reality. The ultimate reality is feeling, feelings of humans, of animals. And the tragedy of history is that very, very often we get it,
we get the order wrong. Stories are not bad. Stories are tools. They're good when we use them in order to alleviate suffering. But very often we forget it. We, instead of using the
stories for our purposes, we allow the stories to
use us for their purposes. And then you start in entire
wars because of a story, you inflict millions,
suffering on millions of people just for the sake of a story. And that's the tragedy of human history. - So the fundamental property of life, of a living organism
is the capacity to feel and the ultimate feeling is suffering? - You know, to know if
you are happy or not, it's a very difficult question. - Yeah.
- But when you suffer, you know.
- Yes. - And also in ethical terms, it's more important to
be aware of suffering than of any other emotion. If you are doing
something which is causing all kinds of emotions
to all kinds of people, first of all, you need to
notice if you're causing a lot of suffering to someone. If some people are like it
and some people are bored by it and some people are a bit angry at you and some people are suffering because of what you do, you
first of all have to know, oh. Now, sometimes you still have to do it. You know, the world is a
complicated place. I dunno. You have an epidemic. Governments decide to
have all those social isolation regulations or whatever. So in certain cases, yes, you need to do it even though it can cause tremendous suffering. But you need to be very aware
of the cost and to be very, very, you have to ask yourself
again and again and again, is it worth it? Is it still worth it? - And the interesting question there, implied in your statements, is that suffering is a
pretty good component of a Turing test for consciousness. - This is the most important
thing to ask about AI. Can it suffer? Because if AI can suffer, then it is an ethical subject
and it needs protection. It needs rights, just
like humans and animals. - Well, quite a long time ago already, so I work with a lot of
robots, legged robots, but I've even had, inspired
by a YouTube video, had a bunch of Roombas,
and I made them scream when I touched them or kicked them, or when they run into a wall. And the illusion of suffering,
for me, silly human, that anthropomorphize
things is as powerful as suffering itself. I mean, you immediately
think the thing is suffering. And I think some of it is
just a technical problem, but it's the easily solvable one, how to create an AI system that just says, please don't hurt me. Please don't shut me off. I miss you. Where have you been? Be jealous. Also, where have you
been gone for so long? Your calendar doesn't have anything on it. So this kind of, this, create through words the
perception of suffering, of jealousy, of anger,
of all of those things. And it just seems like that's
not so difficult to do. - That's part of the danger
that it basically hacks our operating system and it uses some of our best qualities against us. It's very, very good
that humans are attuned to suffering and that we
don't want to cause suffering. That we have compassion. That's one of the most
wonderful thing about humans. And if we now create AIs which
use this to manipulate us, this is a terrible thing. - You've kind of, I think mentioned this. Do you think it should be
illegal to do these kinds of things with AI, to
create the perception of consciousness, of saying,
please don't leave me? Or sort of basically simulate some of the human-like qualities? - Yes. I think, again, we have
to be very careful about it. And if it emerges spontaneously,
we need to be careful. Again, we can't rule out
the possibility that AI will develop consciousness. We don't know enough about
consciousness to be sure. So if it develops spontaneously, we need to be very careful about how we understand it. But if people intentionally
design an AI that they know, they assume, it has no consciousness, but in order to manipulate
people, they use, again, this human strength, this human, the noble part of our nature against us. This should be forbidden. And similarly, on a general level, that it should be forbidden
for an AI to pretend to be a human being. That it's okay, you know, there are so many things we
can use AIs, as teachers, as doctors and so forth. And it's good as long
as we know that we are interacting with an AI, we should, the same way we ban fake money,
we should ban fake humans. It's not just banning deep
fakes of specific individuals. It's also banning deep
fake of generic humans. You know, which is already
happening to some extent on social media. Like if you have lots of
bots retweeting something, then you have the impression, oh, lots of people are interested in that. That's important. And this is basically the
bots pretending to be humans. Because if you see a tweet
which says 500 people retweeted it, or you see
a tweet and it says 500 bots retweeted it, I don't
care what the bots retweeted, but if it's humans,
okay, that's interesting. So we need to be very careful
that bots can't do that. They are doing it at present
and it should be banned. Now, some people say yes, but
freedom of expression, no, bots don't have freedom of expression. There is no cost in terms
of freedom of expression when you ban bots. So again, in some situations, yes, AIs should interact with us,
but it should be very clear, this is an AI talking to you, or this is an AI retweeting this story. It is not a human being
making a conscious decision. - To push back on this
line of fake humans. 'Cause I think it might be a spectrum. First of all, you might have
AI systems that are offended, hurt when you say that
they're fake humans. In fact, they might start
identifying as humans. And you just talked about
the power of us humans with our collective intelligence
to take fake stories and make them quite real. And so if the feelings you have
for the fake human is real, you know, love is a kind
of fake thing that we all kinda put a word to a set of feelings. What if you have that
feeling for an AI system? It starts to change. I mean, maybe the kind of
things AI systems are allowed to do, for good they're allowed to create, communicate suffering,
communicate it, the good stuff, the longing, the hope, the
connection, the intimacy, all of that. And in that way get
integrated in our society. And then you start to ask a
question on are we allowed to really unplug them? Are we allowed to really censor them? Remove their voice from-
- I'm not saying- - Social media. - They shouldn't have a voice. They shouldn't talk with us. I'm just saying, when they talk with us, it should be clear that they are AI. That's it. Don't... You can have your voice as an AI. Again, I have some medical problem. I want to get advice from
an AI doctor. That's fine. As long as I know that
I'm talking with an AI. That what should be banned
is AI pretending to be a human being. This is something that will erode trust. And without trust, society collapses. This is something that especially will endanger democracies, because
democracies are built on, democracy is a conversation basically. And it's a conversation between people. If you now flood the
public sphere with millions and potentially billions
of AI agents that can hold conversations, they
never sleep, they never eat, they don't have emotions of their own. They can get to know you and tailor their words specifically
for you and your life story. They are becoming better
than us at creating stories and ideas and so forth. If you flood the public sphere with that, this will ruin the
conversation between people. It will ruin the trust between people. You will no longer be
able to have a democracy in this situation. You can have other types of
regimes, but not democracy. - If we could talk about
the big philosophical notion of truth then, you've
already talked about these, the capacity of humans. One of the things that
made us special is stories. So is there such thing as truth? - Absolutely.
- What is truth? - When somebody is suffering, that's true. I mean, this is why one of the things, when you talk about suffering as a kind of alternate reality, when
somebody suffers, that is truth. Now, somebody can suffer
because of a fictional story. Like somebody tells people that God said, you must go on this crusade
and kill these heretics. And this is a completely fictional story, and people believe it and they start a war and they destroy cities and kill people. The people that suffer because of that, and even the crusaders
themselves that also suffer the consequences of what they do, the suffering is true
even though it is caused by a fictional story. Similarly, when people
agree on certain rules, the rules could come
out of our imagination. Now, we can be truthful
about it and say these rules, they didn't come from heaven, they came from our imagination. You know, we look at sports, so you have rules for the
game of football, soccer, they were invented by people. Nobody, at least very few
people claim that the rules of football came down from heaven. - Yes.
- We invented them. And this is truthful. They are fictional rules
invented by humans. And this is true. They
were invented by humans. And when you are honest about
it, it enables you to change the rules, which is being done in football every now and then. It's the same with the
fundamental rules of a country. You can pretend that the
rules came down from heaven, dictated by God or whatever, and then you can't change them. Or you can be like, you know,
the American constitution, which starts with "We, the people." The American constitution lays down certain rules for a society. But the amazing thing about it, it does not pretend to come
from an external source. The 10 Commandments start with, "I am your Lord God." And because it starts with
that, you can't change them. You know, the 10th commandment, for instance, supports slavery. The 10th commandment,
in the 10th commandment, it says that you should not
covet your neighbor's house or your neighbor's wife
or your neighbor's slaves. It's okay to hold slaves
according to the 10th commandment. It's just bad to covet the
slaves of your neighbor. Now there is no 11th
commandment which says, if you don't like some of
the previous 10 Commandments, this is how you go about amending them. Which is why we still have them unchanged. Now, in the US constitution
you have all these rights and rules, including originally
the ability to hold slaves. But the genius of the founding fathers of the United States,
they had the humility to understand maybe we
don't understand everything. Maybe we made some mistakes. So we tell you that these
rules did not come from heaven, they came from us humans,
we may have made a mistake, so here is a mechanism
for how future generations can amend the constitution,
which was used later on to, for instance, amend the
Constitution to ban slavery. - So now you're describing
some interesting and powerful ideas
throughout human history. Can you just speak to the
mechanism of how humans believe, start to believe ideas? Is there something interesting to say there from your thinking about it? Like how idea is born
and how it takes hold and how it spreads and how
it competes with other ideas? - First of all, ideas are an
independent force in history. Marxists tend to deny that. Marxists think that all
history is just a play of material interests, and ideas, stories, they are just a smokescreen to hide the underlying interests. My thoughts are to some
extent the opposite. We have some biological
objective interests that all humans share. Like we need to eat, we need
to drink, we need to breathe. But most conflicts in
history are not about that. The interests which
really drive most conflict in history don't come from biology. They come from religions
and ideologies and stories. So it's not that stories
are a smokescreen to hide the real interests. The stories create the
interests in the first place. The stories define who
are the competing groups. Nations, religions, cultures, they are not biological entities. They're not like species like
gorillas and chimpanzees. No. Israelis and Palestinians
or Germans and French or Chinese and Americans, they have no essential biological
difference between them. The difference is cultural.
It comes from stories. There are people that
believe in different stories. The stories create the identity, the stories create the interests. Israelis and Palestinians
are fighting over Jerusalem not because of any material interest. There are no oil fields under
Jerusalem, and even oil, you need it to realize
some cultural fantasy. It doesn't really come from biology. So the stories are independent forces. Now, why do people believe
one story and not another? That's history. There
is no materialistic law. People will always believe this... No, history is full of accidents. How did Christianity
become the most successful religion in the world? We can't explain it. Why this story about Jesus of
Nazareth and not, you know, the Roman Empire in the third
century CE was a bit like, I don't know, California today, like so many sects and subsects and gurus and like everybody has their own thing. - Yeah.
- And you have, you know, thousands of different stories competing. Why did Christianity come up on top? As a historian, I don't
have a kind of clear answer. You can read the sources
and you see how it happened. Oh, this happened and then this happened and then Constantine adopted it and then this and then this. But why? I don't think
anybody has an answer to that. If you rewind the movie
of history and press play and you rewind and press play 100 times, I think Christianity would
take over the Roman empire in the world maybe twice out of 100 times. It was such an unlikely thing to happen. And it's the same with Islam. It's the same, I don't know, with the communist takeover of Russia. In 1914, if you told
people that in three years Lenin and the Bolsheviks will gain power in Tsarist Empire, they would
think you're utterly crazy. You know, Lenin had a few
thousand supporters in 1914 in an Empire of close
to 200 million people. It sounded ludicrous. Now, we know the chain of events, the First World War, the
February Revolution and so forth that led to the communist takeover. But it was such an unlikely
event. And it happened. - And the little steps along the way, the little options you have
along the way 'cause, you know, Stalin versus Trotsky, you could have the Robert Frost poem. There's always...
- Yes. - (laughs) Always comes to... - And history often takes, you know, there is a highway and
there is a kind of side way. And history takes the sideway.
- Yeah. - Many, many times. - And it's perhaps tempting to tell some of that history through
charismatic leaders. And maybe it's an open question, how much power charismatic
leaders have to affect the trajectory of history. - You've met quite a lot of
charismatic leaders lately. I mean, what's your view on that? - I find it a compelling notion. I'm a sucker for a great
speech and a vision. So I have a sense that
there's an importance for a leader to catalyze the
viral spread of a story, as, so like, I think we need leaders to be just great storytellers
that kind of sharpen up the story to make sure it infiltrates everybody's brain effectively. But it could also be that
the local interactions between humans is even more important. But it's just, we don't
have a good way to sort of summarize that and describe that. We like to talk about, you know, Steve Jobs as central to the
development of the computer, maybe Bill Gates. And you tell it to the stories
of individuals like this, 'cause it's just easier to
tell a sexy story that way. - Maybe it's an interplay
because you have the kind of structural forces that, I don't know, you look at the geography
of the planet and you look at shipping technology in late, in the late 15th century in
Europe and the Mediterranean. And it's almost inevitable
that pretty quickly somebody will discover America, somebody from the Old World will
get to the New World. So this was not a kind of, if it wasn't Columbus then
it would've been a five years later somebody else. But the key thing about history is that these small differences make a huge, huge difference. You know, if it wasn't
Columbus, if it was five years later somebody from
England, then maybe all of Latin America today would be speaking English and not Spanish. If it was somebody from
the Ottoman Empire, it's completely different world history. If you have, and you know, the Ottoman Empire at that
time was also shaping up to be a major maritime empire. If you have America reached, being reached by Muslim navigators before Christian navigators
from Europe, you have a completely different world history. It's the same with the computer. Given the economic
incentives and the science and technology of the time, then the rise of the personal computer was probably inevitable sometime
in the late 20th century. But the where and when is crucial. The fact that it was California
in the 1970s and not, say, I don't know Japan in the 1980s or China in the 1990s, this
made a huge, huge difference. So you have this interplay
between the structural forces, which are beyond the control of any single charismatic leader. But then the small changes,
they can have a big effect. And I think, for instance, about the war in Ukraine,
there was a moment, now it's a struggle between nations, but there was a moment
when the decision was taken in the mind of a single
individual of Vladimir Putin. And he could have decided otherwise. And the world would've
looked completely different. - And another leader, Vladimir Zelensky, could
have decided to leave Kiev in the early days. There's a lot of decisions
that kind of ripple. - Yeah.
- So you write in "Homo Deus" about Hitler, and in part that he was not a very impressive person. - Did I say that? - The quote is, let me read it. - Okay. (laughs)
- He wasn't a senior officer, in
four years of war he rose no higher than the rank of corporal. He had no formal education...
Perhaps you mean his resume. - Yeah, yeah. His resume was
not impressive, that's true. - He had no formal education,
no professional skills, no political background. He wasn't a successful
businessman or a union activist. He didn't have friends or
relatives in high places nor any money to speak of. So how did he amass so much power? What ideology, what
circumstances enabled the rise of the 3rd Reich? - Hmm. Again, I can't tell you the why. I can tell you the how. I
don't think it was inevitable. I think that a few, if a
few things were different, there would've been no 3rd Reich, there would've
been no Nazism, no Holocaust. Again, this is the tragedy. If it would've been
inevitable, then, you know, what can you do? This is the laws of history
or the laws of physics. But the tragedy is, no, it was decisions by humans
that led to that direction. And, you know, even from the viewpoint of the Germans, we know for a fact, it was an unnecessary path to take. 'Cause you know, in the
1920s and 30s, the Nazis said that this, unless Germany take this road, it will never be prosperous,
it will never be successful. All the other countries
will keep stepping on it. This was their claim. And we
know for a fact this is false. Why? Because they took that road, they lost the Second World War. And after they lost, then they became one of the
most prosperous countries in the world because their
enemies that defeated them, evidently supported them and
allowed them to become such a prosperous and successful nation. So, you know, if you can
lose the war and still be so successful, obviously you could just have skipped the war. You didn't need it. I mean, you really had to
have the war in order to have a prosperous Germany in the... Absolutely not. And it's
the same with Japan. It's the same with Italy.
So it was not inevitable. It was not the forces of
history that necessitated, forced Germany to take this path. I think part of it is part
of the appeal of, again, Hitler was a very, very
skillful storyteller. He sold people a story. The fact that he was
nobody made it even more effective because people, at that time, after the defeat of the First World War, after the repeated economic
crisis of the 1920s in Germany, people felt betrayed by
all the established elites, by all the established institutions. All these professors and politicians and industrialists and
military, all the big people. They led us to a disastrous
war. They led us to humiliation. So we don't want any of them. And then you have this nobody,
a corporal, with no money, with no education, with
no titles, with nothing. And he tells people, I'm one of you. And this made him, this was one reason why he was so popular. And then the story he told, when you look at stories
and the competition between different stories
and between stories, fiction and the truth... The truth has two big problems. The truth tends to be
complicated and the truth tends to be painful. The real story of, let's
talk about nations. The real story of every
nation is complicated and it contains some painful episodes. We are not always good. We
sometimes do bad things. Now, if you go to people and you tell them a complicated and painful story, many of them don't want to listen. The advantage of fiction
is that it can be made as simple and as painless
or attractive as you want it to be because it's fiction. And then what you see is that politicians, like Hitler, they create
a very simple story. We are the heroes. We
always do good things. Everybody's against us.
Everybody's trying to trample us. And this is very attractive. One of the things people don't understand about Nazism and fascism, we teach in schools about fascism and Nazism as this ultimate evil, the ultimate monster in human history. And at some level this is wrong, because it make people,
it actually exposes us. Why? 'Cause people hear, oh,
fascism is this monster. And then when you hear
the actual fascist story, what fascists tell you is always very beautiful and attractive. Fascists are people who come and tell you, you are wonderful. You belong to the most
wonderful group of people in the world. You are beautiful, you are ethical. Everything you do is good. You have never done anything wrong. There are all these evil
monsters out there that are out to get you. And they are causing all
the problems in the world. And when people hear that, you know, it's like looking in the mirror and seeing something very beautiful. Hey, I'm beautiful. We've
never done anything wrong. We are victims. Everybody is... And when you look and you
heard in school that fascism, that fascists are monsters,
and you look in the mirror, you see something very
beautiful and you say, I can't be a fascist because
fascists are monsters and this is so beautiful, so it can't be. But when you look in the fascist mirror, you never see a monster. You see the most beautiful
thing in the world. And that's the danger. This is the problem, you know,
with Hollywood's, you know, I look at Voldemort in
Harry Potter, who would like to follow this creep?
- Yeah. - And you look at Darth
Vader, this is not somebody you would like to follow. Christianity got things much
better when he described the devil as being very
beautiful and attractive. That's the danger, that you see something is very beautiful. You don't understand
the monster underneath. - And you're right precisely about this. And by the way, it's just a small aside, it always saddens me when people say, how obvious it is to them that communism is a flawed ideology. When you ask them, try to put your mind, try to put yourself in the
beginning of the 20th century and see what you would do. A lot of people will say, it's obvious that it's a flawed ideology. So I mean, I suppose to
some of the worst ideologies in human history, you could say the same. And in that mirror, when you
look, it looks beautiful. - Communism is the same. Also, you look in the communist mirror, you are the most ethical,
wonderful person ever. It's very difficult to
see Stalin underneath it. - So "Homo Deus," you also write, during the 19th and 20th centuries, as humanism gained
increasing social credibility and political power, it sprouted two very different offshoots, socialist humanism, which encompassed a plethora of socialists and communist movements,
and evolutionary humanism, whose most famous
advocates were the Nazis. So if you can just linger on that, what's the ideological connection between Nazism and communism
as embodied by humanism? - And humanism basically is, you know, the focus is on humans, that they are the most
important thing in the world. They move history. But then there is a big
question, what are humans? What is humanity? Now, liberals, they place at the center of the story individual humans. And they don't see history as a kind of necessary collision between big forces. They place the individual at the center. If you want to know, you
know, there is a bad, especially in the US today, liberal is taken as the
opposite of conservative. But to test whether you are liberal, you need to answer just three questions. Very simple. Do you think people should
have the right to choose their own government or
the government should be imposed by some outside force? Do you think people should have the right to the liberty to choose
their own profession or either born into some
cast that predetermines what they do? And do you think people
should have the liberty to choose their own
spouse and their own way of personal life instead
of being told by elders or parents who to marry and how to live? Now, if you answered yes
to all three questions, people should have the liberty
to choose their government, their profession, their
personal lives, their spouse, then you're a liberal. And most conservatives are also liberal. Now, communists and fascists,
they answer differently. For them history is not,
yes, history is about humans. Humans are the big heroes of history, but not individual humans
and their liberties. Fascists imagine history as a clash between races or nations. The nation is at the center. They say the supreme good
is the good of the nation. You should have 100%
loyalty only to the nation. You know, liberals say, yes, you should be loyal to the nation, but it's not the only thing. There are other things in
the world, the human rights, there is truth, there is beauty. Many times, yes, you
should prefer the interests of your nation over other
things, but not always. If your nation tells
you to murder millions of innocent people, you don't do that, even though the nation tells you to do it. To lie for the national interest... You know, in extreme
situations, maybe, but in many cases, your loyalty
should be to the truth, even if it makes your nation looks a bit, not in the best light,
the same with beauty. You know, how does the fascists determine whether a movie is a good movie? Very simple. If it serves the interest of the nation, this is a good movie. If it's against the
interest of the nation, this is a bad movie. End of story. Liberalism says, no,
there is aesthetic values in the world, we should judge movies not just on that question whether they serve the national interest, but
also on artistic value. Communists are a bit like the fascists, instead that they don't place
the nation as the main hero. They place class as the main hero. For them history, again,
it's not about individuals, it's not about nations. History is the clash between classes. And just as fascists
imagine in the end only one nation will be on top, the communists think in the
end only one class should be on top. And that's the proletariat. And same story, 100% of your loyalty
should be to the class. And like if there is a
clash tag between class and family, class wins. Like in the Soviet Union,
the party told children, if you hear your parents say something bad about Stalin, you have to report them. And there are many cases
when children reported their parents and their
parents were sent to the Gulag. Like, and you know, your
loyalty is to the party, which leads the proletariat to victory in the historical struggle. And the same way in communism, art is only about class struggle, and
movie's good if it serves the interest of the proletariat. Artistic values? There
is nothing like that. And the same with truth. Everything that we see now
in fake news, you know, the communist propaganda
machine was there before us. The level of lies, of disinformation campaigns
that they orchestrated in the 1920s and '30s and
'40s is really unimaginable. - So the reason these two ideologies, classes of ideologies failed
is the sacrifice the truth, not just failed, but did a lot of damage, is sacrifice the truth
and sacrifice the beauty. - And sacrifice of hundreds
of millions of people. Disregard, again, for human suffering. Like, okay, for, in order
to, for our nation to win, in order for our class to win, we need to kill those
millions, kill those millions. That was an ethics, aesthetics,
truth... They don't matter. The only thing that matter
is the victory of the state or the victory of the class. And that's the, liberalism
was the antithesis to that. It says, no, not only it's, it has a much more
complicated view of the world and both communism and fascism. They have a very simple view of the world. There is one, your loyalty, 100% of it should be only to one thing. Now, liberalism has a much
more complex view of the world. It says, yes, there are
nations, they are important. Yes, there are classes,
they are important. But they are not the only thing. There are also families,
there are also individuals. There are also animals. And your loyalty should be
divided between all of them. Sometimes you prefer this,
sometimes you prefer that. That's complicated. And, but,
you know, life is complicated. - But also, I think
maybe you can correct me, but liberalism acknowledges
the corrupting nature of power, when there's a guy at the top, sits there for a while, managing things, he is probably gonna
start losing a good sense of reality and losing the
capability to be a good manager. It feels like the communist
and fascist regimes don't acknowledge that
basic characteristic of human nature, that power corrupts. - Yes. They believe in infallibility. - Yeah.
- They're, in this sense, they're very close to being religions. In Nazism, Hitler was
considered infallible, and therefore you don't
need any checks and balances on his power. Why do you need to balance
an infallible genius? And it's the same with the Soviet Union with
Stalin and more generally with the Communist party, the Party can never make a mistake, and therefore you don't
need independent courts, independent media, opposition
parties, things like that. Because the Party is never wrong. You concentrate the same way, 100% of loyalty should be to the Party, 100% of power should be
in the hands of the Party. The whole idea of liberal democracy is embracing fallibility. Everybody is fallible. All people or leaders or
political parties or institutions. This is why we need checks and balances, and we need many of them. If you have just one, then this particular check itself could make terrible mistakes. So you need, say, you need a press, you need the media to serve
as a check to the government. You don't have just one
newspaper or one TV station. We need many, so that they
can balance each other. And the media's not enough. So if you have independent courts. You have free academic
institutions. You have NGOs. You have a lot of checks and balances. - So that's the ideologies
and the leaders. What about the individual people, the millions of people
that play a part in all of this that are the hosts of the stories that are the catalyst and the
sort of the components of how the story spreads. Would you say that all of
us are capable of spreading any story, sort of the Solzhenitsyn idea of that all of us are
capable of good and evil. The line between good and evil
runs the heart of every man. - Yes. I wouldn't say that
every person is capable of every type of evil,
but we are all fallible. There is a large element... It partly depends on the
efforts we make to develop our self-awareness during life. Part of it depends on moral luck. You know, if you are born as a Christian German
in the 1910s or 1920s, and you grow up in Nazi
Germany, that's bad moral luck. Your chances of committing
terrible things, you have a very high chance of doing it. And you can withstand it, but it'll will take tremendous effort. If you are born in Germany after the war, you are morally lucky
that you will not be put to such a test. You will not need to exert
these enormous efforts not to commit atrocities. So there is an, this is
just part of history. There is an element of luck. But again, part of it
is also self-awareness. And you asked me earlier
about the potential of power to corrupt. And I listened to the
interview you just did with Prime Minister Netanyahu
a couple of days ago. And one of the things that most struck me during the interview that
you asked him, you asked him, are you afraid of this
thing, that power corrupts? He didn't think for a single second. He didn't pose, he didn't
admit a tiny little level of, you know, a doubt or... No. Power doesn't corrupt. It was, for me, it was a
shocking and a revealing moment. And it kind of dovetails with
how you began the interview, that I really liked your
opening gambit, that, kind of... No, really, you kind
of told him, you know, lots of people in the
world are angry with you. Some people hate you. They dislike you. What do you want to tell
them, to say to them? And you gave him this kind of platform. And I was very, what will he
say? And he just denied it. He basically denied it. You know, he had to
cut short the interview from three hours to one
hour because he had hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets demonstrating against him. And he goes and saying,
no, everybody likes me. What are you talking about? - But on that topic, you've said recently that the Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, may go down in history as the
man who destroys Israel. Can you explain what you mean by that? - Yes. I mean, he is basically
tearing apart the social contract that held this
country together for 75 years. He's destroying the foundations
of Israeli democracy. You know, I don't want to go too deep, and unless you want it, because I guess most of our listeners, they have bigger issues on
their minds than the fate of some small country in the Middle East. But for those who want to
understand what's happening in Israel, there is really
just one question to ask. What limits the power of the government? In United States, for instance, there are lots of checks
and balances that limit the power of the government. You have the Supreme Court, you have the Senate, you have the
House of Representative, you have the President,
you have the Constitution, you have 50 states,
each state with its own Constitution and Supreme Court
and Congress and Governor... If somebody wants to pass a
dangerous legislation, say, in the House, it will have to go through so many obstacles... Like if you want to pass
a law in United States, taking away voting rights from Jews or from Muslims or from African-Americans, even if it passes, even
if it has a majority in the House of Representatives,
it has a very, very, very small chance of becoming
the law of the country. Because it'll have to pass again through the Senate, through the President, through the Supreme Court and all the federal structure. In Israel, we have just a
single check on the power of the government. And that's the Supreme Court. There is really no difference
between the government and the legislature,
because whoever there is, there are no separate
elections like in the US. If you win majority in the
Knesset, in the Parliament, you appoint the government. That's very simple. And if you have 61 members of Knesset who vote, let's say, on a law to take away voting
rights from Arab citizens of Israel, there is a single
check that can prevent it from becoming the law of the land. And that's the Supreme Court. And now the Netanyahu government is trying to neutralize or take over the Supreme Court, and
they've already prepared a long list of laws. They already talk about it. What will happen the
moment that this last check on the power is gone, they are openly trying
to gain unlimited power. And they openly talk about
it, that once they have it, then they will take away the rights of Arabs, of LGBT people,
of women, of secular Jews. And this is why you have
hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. You have air force pilots saying, we stopped flying. This is unheard of in Israel. I mean, we are still living
under existential threat from Iran, from other enemies. And in the middle of this, you have air force pilots
who dedicated their lives to protecting the country. And they're saying, that's it. If this government doesn't
stop what it is doing, we stop flying. - So, as you said, I just did the interview
and as we were doing the interview, there's
protests in the streets. Do you think the protests
will have an effect? - I hope so very much. I'm
going to many of these protests. I hope they will have an effect. If we fail, this is the end of
Israeli democracy, probably. This will have repercussions far beyond the borders of Israel. Israel is a nuclear power. Israel has one of the most advanced cyber capabilities in the world, able to strike basically
anywhere in the world. If this country becomes a fundamentalist and militarist dictatorship,
it can set fire to the entire Middle East. It can, again, have
destabilizing effects long, far beyond the borders of Israel. - So you think without the
check on power is possible that the Netanyahu government
holds on to power... - Nobody tries to gain unlimited
power just for nothing. I mean, you have so many problems in Israel, and Netanyahu talks so much about Iran and the
Palestinians and Hezbollah. We have an economic crisis. Why is it so urgent at this moment, in the face of such opposition, why is it so crucial
for them to neutralize the Supreme Court? They're just doing it for the fun of it? No, they know what they are doing. they are adamant, again, we
are not sure of it before. There was a, like a couple of months ago, they came out with this plan to take over the Supreme Court,
to have all these laws. And there were hundreds
of thousands of people in the streets, again, soldiers saying they will stop serving, a general strike in the economy. And they stopped. And they started a process
of negotiations to try and enrich a settlement. And then they broke down, they stopped the negotiations
and they restarted this process of legislation
trying to gain unlimited power. So any doubt we had before, okay, maybe they changed their purposes. No, it's now very clear. They are 100% focused on
gaining absolute power. They are not trying a different tactic. Previously they took,
they had all these dozens of laws that they wanted
to pass very quickly, within a month or two,
they realized, no, this is, there is too much opposition. So now they're doing what
is known as salami tactics, slice by slice. Now they're trying to,
one law, if this succeeds, then they'll pass the
next one and the next one and the next one. This is why we are now
at a very crucial moment. And when you see, again, hundreds of thousands
of people in the streets almost every day, when
you're seeing resistance within the armed forces,
within the security forces, you see high tech companies
say, we will go on strike. You know, it's our private
businesses, high tech companies. I think it's almost unprecedented for a private business
to go on strike because what will economic success
benefit us if we live under a messianic dictatorship? And again, the fuel for
this whole thing is, to a large extent, coming from
Messianic religious groups, which, just the thought, what happens if these people
have unlimited control of Israel's nuclear arsenal and Israel's military capabilities
and cyber capabilities. This is very, very scary. Not just for the citizens of Israel. It should be scary for people everywhere. - So it would be scary
for it to go from being a problem of security
and protecting the peace to becoming a religious war. - It is already becoming a religious war. I mean, the war, the conflict with the
Palestinians was for many years a national conflict, in essence. Over the last few years,
maybe a decade or two, it is morphing into religious
conflict, which is again, a very worrying development. When nations are in conflict, you can reach some compromise. Okay, you have this bit of
land, we have this bit of land. But when it becomes a religious conflict between fundamentalists,
between messianic people, compromise becomes much more difficult because you don't compromise on eternity. You don't compromise on God. And this is where we
are heading right now. - So I know you said it's
a small nation somewhere in the Middle East, but
it also happens to be the epicenter of one
of the longest running, one of the most tense conflicts and crises in human history. So at the very least, it serves as a study of how
conflict can be resolved. So what are the biggest obstacles to you to achieving peace
in this part of the world? - Motivation. I think it's easy to
achieve peace if you have the motivation on both sides. Unfortunately at the present juncture, there is not enough
motivation on either side, either the Palestinian or Israeli side. Peace, you know, in
mathematics you have problems without solutions, you
can prove mathematically that this mathematical
problem has no solution. In politics, there is no such thing. All problems have solutions
if you have the motivation. And, but motivation is the big problem. And again, we can go into the reasons why, but the fact is that on neither side is there enough motivation. If there was motivation, the
solution would've been easy. - Is there an important
distinction to draw between the people on the
street and the leaders in power in terms of motivation? So are most people motivated and hoping for peace and the leaders are
motivated and incentivized to continue war? - I don't think so.
- Or the people also? - I think it's a deep
problem. It's also the people. It's not just the leaders. - Is it even a human
problem of literally hate in people's heart? - Yeah, there is a lot of hate. One of the things that happened
in Israel over the last 10 years or so, Israel became much stronger
than it was before, largely thanks to
technological developments. And it feels that it no
longer needs to compromise. That again, this is, there
are many reasons for it, but some of them are technological. Being one of the leading powers in cyber, in AI, in high tech, we have developed very
sophisticated ways to more easily control the Palestinian population. In the early 2000s, it seemed that it is becoming
impossible to control millions of people against their will. It took too much power, it spilled too much blood on both sides. So there was an impression,
oh, this is becoming untenable. And there were several
reasons why it changed, but one of them was new technology. Israel developed very sophisticated surveillance technology
that has made it much easier for Israeli security forces to control 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank against their will, with a lot less effort,
less boots on the ground, also less blunt. And Israel is also now
exporting this technology to many other regimes around the world. Again, I heard Netanyahu
speaking about all the wonderful things that Israel
is exporting to the world. And it's true, we are
exporting some nice things, water systems and new kinds of tomatoes. We are also exporting a lot of weapons and especially surveillance systems, sometimes to unsavory regimes, in order to control their populations. - Can you comment on, I think you've mentioned
that the current state of affairs is the defacto
three class state. Can you describe what you mean by that? - Yes. For many years, the
kind of leading solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the two-state solution. - Can you describe what
that means, by the way? - Yes. Two states within,
between the Jordan River, and the Mediterranean,
we'll have two states. Israel is a predominantly Jewish state, and Palestine is a
predominantly Palestinian state. Again, there were lots of discussions where the border passes, what happens with security
arrangement and whatever. But this was the big solution. Israel is basically abandoned
the two-state solution. Maybe they don't say so
officially, the people in power, but in terms of how they actually, what they do on the
ground, they abandoned it. Now they are effectively
promoting the three class solution, which means
there is just one country and one government and one power between the Mediterranean
and the Jordan River. But you have three classes
of people living there. You have Jews, who enjoy
full rights, all the rights. You have some Arabs who
are Israeli citizens and have some rights. And then you have the other
Arabs, the third class who have basically no civil rights and limited human rights. And that's, again, nobody
would openly speak about it. But effectively, this is the
reality on the ground already. - So there's many, and I'll speak with the
Palestinians who characterize this as a defacto one state apartheid. So you agree with this?
- I would take issue, I would take issue with
the term apartheid. Generally speaking as a historian, I don't really like historical analogies because there are always differences. Key differences. The biggest difference
between the situation here and the situation in
South Africa in the time of the apartheid is that
the black South Africans did not deny the existence of
South Africa and did not call for the destruction of South Africa. They had a very simple goal.
They had a very simple demand. We want to be equal citizens
of this country. That's it. And the apartheid regime was, no, you can't be equal citizens. Now in Israel-Palestine, it's different. The Palestinians, many
of them don't recognize the existence of Israel, are not willing to recognize it. And they don't demand to
be citizens of Israel. They demand, some of them
to destroy it and replace it with the Palestinians state, some of them demand a separate state. But you know, if the
Palestinians would adopt the same policy as the
black South Africans, if you have the Palestinians coming and saying, okay, forget about it. We don't want to destroy Israel. We don't know a Palestinian country. We have a very simple
request, very simple demand. Give us our full rights. We also want to vote to the Knesset. We also want to get the
full protection of the law. That's it. That's our only demand. Israel will be in deep-deep
trouble at that moment, but we are not there. - I wonder if there will
ever be a future when such a thing happens, where everybody,
the majority of people, Arab and Jew, Israeli and
Palestinian, accept the one state solution and say,
we want equal rights. - Never say never in history. It's not coming any time
soon from either side. When you look at the long term of history, one of the curious things you see, and that what makes us different, human groups from animal
species, you know, gorillas and chimpanzees,
they're separate species. They can never merge. Cats
and dogs will never merge. But different national and
religious groups in history, even when they hate each
other, surprisingly, they sometimes end by merging. If you look at Germany, for instance, so for centuries you had
Prussians and Bavarians and Saxons who fought
each other ferociously and hated each other. And there are sometimes
also different religions, Catholics, Protestants, you know, the worst war in European history, according to some measures, was not the Second World
War or the First World War. It was the 30 years war, waged largely on German soil, between Germans,
Protestants and Catholics. But eventually they united
to form a single country. You saw the same thing,
I don't know, in Britain. English and Scotts for
centuries hated and fought each other ferociously,
eventually coming together. Maybe it'll break up again, I don't know. But the power of the kind of
forces of merger in history, you are very often influenced
by the people you fight, by the people you even hate more than by almost anybody else. - So if we apply those ideas, the ideas of this part of the world, to another part of the world
that's currently in war, Russia and Ukraine, from
what you learned here, how do you think peace can
be achieved in Ukraine? - Oh, this can be achieved
any moment. It's motivation. In this case, it's just one person. You just, Putin just
need to say, that's it. You know, the Ukrainians,
they don't demand anything from Russia, just go home. That's the only thing they want. They don't want to conquer
any bit of Russian territory. They don't want to change the
regime in Moscow, nothing. They just tell the Russians,
go home. That's it. And of course, again, motivation. How do you get somebody like
Putin to admit that he made a colossal mistake, a human
mistake, an ethical mistake, a political mistake in starting this war, this is very, very difficult. But in terms of what would
the solution look like? Very simple. The Russians
go home, end of story. - Do you believe in the
power of conversation between leaders, to sit down
as human beings and agree, first of all, what home means? Because we humans draw lines. - That's true. I believe in
the power of conversation. The big question to ask is
where, where do conversations, real conversations take place? And this is tricky. One of the interesting things
to ask about any conflict, about any political system is where do the real conversations take place? And very often they don't
take place in the places you think that they are. But think about American politics. When the country was founded
in the late 18th century, people understood holding
conversation between leaders is very important for the
functioning of democracy, we'll create a place for that. That's called Congress. This is where leaders are
supposed to meet and talk about the main issues of the day. Maybe there was a time, sometime in the past when
this actually happened, when you had two factions
holding different ideas about foreign policy or economic policy, and they met in Congress
and somebody would come and give a speech and the
people all on the other side would say, hey, that's interesting. I haven't thought about it.
Yes, maybe we can agree on that. This is no longer happening in Congress. Nobody, I don't think there is any speech in Congress that causes
anybody on the other side to change their opinion about anything. So this is no longer a place where real conversations take place. The big question about American democracy is is there a place
where real conversations, which actually change people's
minds, still take place? If not, then this democracy is dying also. Democracy without conversation
cannot exist for long. And it's the same question
you should ask also about dictatorial regimes. Like you think about Russia or China. So China has the Great Hall of the People, where the representatives,
the supposed representative of the people meet every now and then, but no real conversation
takes place there. A key question to ask about
the Chinese system is, behind closed doors, let's say,
in a public bureau meeting, do people have a real conversation? If Xi Jinping says one
thing and some other big shot thinks differently,
will they have the courage, the ability, the backbone to
say, with all due respect, they think differently and
there is a real conversation? Or not? I don't know the answer. But this is a key question. This is the difference, you know, between an authoritarian
regime can still have different voices within it, but at
a certain point you have a personality cult. Nobody dares say anything
against the leader. And when it comes again to Ukraine and Russia, I
don't think that if you get, if you somehow managed to get Putin and Zelensky to the same room, when everybody knows that they
are there and they'll have a moment of empathy, of human connection and they'll have a... No, I don't think it can happen like that. I do hope that there are
other spaces where somebody like Putin can still have
a real human conversation. I don't know if this
is the case. I hope so. - Well, there's several
interesting dynamics and you spoke to some of them. So one is internally, with advisors, you have to have hope that there's people that would disagree, that would have a lively
debate internally. Then there's also the thing you mentioned, which is direct communication between Putin and Zelensky in
private, picking up a phone, rotary phone, old school. That's, I still believe
in the power of that. But while that's exceptionally difficult in the current state of affairs. What's also possible to
have is a mediator like the United States or some other leader... - Yeah.
- Like the leader of Israel or the leader of another nation that's
respected by both, or India, for example, that can have first of all
individual conversations and then literally get
into a room together. - It is possible. I would say more generally
about conversations as it goes back a little
to what I said earlier about the Marxist view of history. One of the problematic
things I see today in many academic circles is that
people focus too much on power. They think that the whole
of history or the whole of politics is just a power structure. It's just struggle about power. Now, if you think that
the whole of history and the whole of politics is only power, then there is no room for conversation. Because if what you have is a struggle between different powerful interests, there is no point talking. The only thing that
changes it is fighting. My view is that, no, it's not
all about power structures. It's not all about power dynamics. Underneath the power
structure there are stories, stories in human minds,
and this is great news, if it's true, this is good
news because unlike power, that can only be changed
through fighting, stories can, sometimes, it's not easy, but sometimes stories can
be changed through talking and that's the hope. I think, you know, in everything from couple
therapy to nation therapy, if you think it's power
therapy, it's all about power, there is no place for a conversation. But if to some extent it's
the stories in people mind... If you can enable one
person to see the story in the mind of another
person, and more importantly, if you can have some
kind of critical distance from the story in your own mind, maybe you can change it a little, and then you don't need to fight. You can actually find a
better story that you can both agree to. It sometimes happens in
history, you know, again, French and Germans fought for
generations and generations, now they live in peace,
not because, I don't know, if they found a new planet they can share between France and Germany
so now everybody has an enough territory. No, they actually have less territory than previously because they lost all their overseas empires. But they managed to find a
story, the European story, that both Germans and French
people are happy with. So they live in peace. - I very much believe in
this vision that you have of the power of stories. And one of the tools is
conversations. Another is books. There's some guy that
wrote a book about this, power of stories. He happens to be sitting in front of me. And that happened to spread
across a lot of people. And now they believe in the
power of story and narrative. Even a children's book,
too. So the kids... I mean, it's fascinating how that spreads. I mean, underneath your
work there's an optimism. And I think underneath
conversations is what I try to do is an optimism. That it's not just about power struggles, it's about stories, which
is like a connection between humans and together, kinda evolving these
stories that maximize, or minimize suffering in the world. - Yeah, this is why I also, I think I admire what you are doing, that you're going to talk
with some of the most difficult characters
around in the world today. And with this basic belief
that by talking maybe we can move them an inch, which is a lot when it comes
to people with so much power. Like I think one of the
biggest success stories in modern history, I
would say, is feminism. Because feminism believed
in the power of stories, not so much in the power of
violence, of armed conflict. By many measures, feminism has been maybe the most successful social
movement of the 20th century and maybe of the modern age, you know, systems of oppression, which were in place throughout the world
for thousands of years. And they seem to be just natural, eternal. You had all these religious movements, all these political revolutions, and one thing remained constant, and this is the patriarchal system and the oppression of women. And then feminism came
along and, you know, you had leaders like
Lenin, like Mao, saying that if you want to make
a big social change, you must use violence. Power comes from the barrel of a gun. If you want to make an omelet,
you need to break eggs, and all these things. And the feminists said, no, we won't use the power of the gun. We will make an omelet
without breaking any eggs. And they made a much better omelet than Lenin or Mao or any of
these violent revolutionaries. I don't think, you know, that... They certainly didn't start
any wars or built any gulags. I don't think they even
murdered a single politician. I don't think there was
any political assassination anywhere, by feminists. There was a lot of violence against them, both verbal but also physical. And they didn't reply by waging violence. And they succeeded in changing
this deep in structure of oppression in a way which
benefited not just women, but also men. So this gives me hope that it's not easy, in many cases we fail, but it is possible sometimes
in history to make a very, very big change, positive change, mainly by talking and
demonstrating and changing the story in people's minds,
and not by using violence. - It's fascinating that
feminism and communism and all these things
happen in the 20th century. So many interesting things
happen in the 20th century. So many movements, so many
ideas, nuclear weapons, all of it, computers. It's just like, it seems
like a lot of stuff like really quickly percolated. And it's accelerating. - It's still accelerating. I mean, history is just
accelerating, you know, for centuries and the
20th century, you know, we squeezed into it the
thing that previously took thousands of years. And now, I mean, we are
squeezing it into decades. - And you very well could be
one of the last historians, human historians, to have ever lived. - Could be. I think, you know, our
species, homo sapiens, I don't think we'll be
around in a century or two. We could destroy ourselves
in a nuclear war, through ecological collapse,
by giving too much power to AI that goes out of our control. But if we survive, we'll probably have so
much power that we will change ourselves using
various technologies so that our descendants will no longer be homo sapiens like us. They will be more different
from us than we are different from Neanderthals. So maybe they'll have historians, but it will no longer be human historians or sapiens historians like me. I think it's an extremely
dangerous development. And the chances that this will go wrong, that people will use the new technologies trying to upgrade humans, but actually downgrading them. This is a very, very big danger. If you let corporations and armies and ruthless politicians
change humans using tools like AI and bioengineering, it's
very likely that they will try to enhance a few human
qualities that they need, like intelligence and discipline, while neglecting what are
potentially more important human qualities like compassion, like artistic sensitivity,
like spirituality. If you give Putin, for instance, bioengineering and AI and
brain computer interfaces, he's likely to want to create
a race of super soldiers who are much more intelligent
and much more stronger and also much more
disciplined and never rebel and march on Moscow against him. But he has no interest in making them more compassionate or more spiritual. So the end result could
be a new type of humans, a downgraded humans who
are highly intelligent and disciplined, but have no compassion
and no spiritual depth. And this is one, for me, this
is, you know, the dystopia, the apocalypse, that when people talk about the new technologies and
they have this scenario of, you know, the Terminator,
robots running in the street, shooting people, this
is not what worries me. I think we can avoid that. What really worries me is
using the corporations, armies, politicians will use the new
technologies to change us in a way which will destroy
our humanity or the best parts of our humanity. - And one of those ways could
be removing the compassion. Another way that really
worries me for me is probably more likely is a "Brave
New World" kind of thing that sort of removes the flaws of humans. Maybe it removes the diversity in humans. And makes us all kind of
these dopamine chasing creatures that just kind
of maximize enjoyment in the short term. Which kind of seems like
a good thing, maybe, in the short term, but
it creates a society that doesn't think, that doesn't create, that just is sitting there enjoying itself, at
a more and more rapid pace, which seems like another
kind of society that could be easily controlled by a center of power. But the set of dystopias
that we could arrive at through this, to rely on
corporations to modify humans is vast and we should
be worried about that. So it seems like humans
are pretty good, as we are. All the flaws, all of it together. - We are better than anything that we can intentionally design at present. - Yeah.
- Like any intentionally designed humans, at the present
moment, is going to be much, much worse than us. 'Cause basically we don't
understand ourselves. I mean, as long as we don't
understand our brain, our body, our mind, it's a very, very bad idea to start
manipulating a system that you don't understand deeply and we don't understand ourselves. - So I have to ask you
about an interesting dynamic of stories. You wrote an article two years ago titled, "When the World Seems
Like One Big Conspiracy: How understanding the structure of global cabal theories can
shed light on their allure and their inherent falsehood." What are global cabal
theories and why do so many people believe them? 37% of Americans, for example. - Well, the global cabal
theory, it has many variations, but basically there is
a small group of people, a small cabal that secretly
controls everything that is happening in the world. All the wars, all the
revolutions, all the epidemics, everything that is happening is controlled by this very small group
of people who are of course evil and have bad intentions. And this is a very well known
story that it's not new, it's been there for thousands of years. It's very attractive, because
first of all, it's simple. You don't have to understand everything that happens in the world, you just need to understand one thing. The war in Ukraine, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 5G technology, COVID-19, it's simple. There is this global cabal. They do all of it, all of it. And also it enables you to
shift all the responsibility to all the bad things that are happening in the
world to this small cabal. It's the Jews, it's the
Freemasons, it's not us. And also it creates this
fantasy, utopian fantasy. If we only get rid of the small cabal, we solved all the problems of the world. Salvation. The Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, the war in Ukraine, the epidemics, poverty, everything is solved just by
knocking out this small cabal. So, and it's simple, it's attractive, and this is why so many people believe it. It's, again, it's not new.
Nazism was exactly this. Nazism began as a conspiracy theory. We don't call Nazism a
conspiracy theory because, oh, it's a big thing, it's an ideology. But if you look at it,
it's a conspiracy theory. The basic Nazi idea was,
the Jews control the world, get rid of the Jews, you solved
all the world's problems. Now, the interesting thing
about these kind of theories, again, they tell you that
even things that look to be the opposite of each other, actually they are part of the conspiracy. So in the case of Nazism, the
Nazis told people, you know, you have capitalism and communism, you think that they are opposite, right? Ah, this is what the
Jews want you to think. Actually, the Jews control both communism, Trotski, Marx were Jews, blah, blah, blah. And capitalism, the Rothschilds, the Wall Street, it's all
controlled by the Jews. So the Jews are fooling everybody, but actually the communists
and the capitalists are part of the same global cabal. And again, this is very
attractive because, ah, now I understand everything
and I also know what to do. I just give power to Hitler.
He gets rid of the Jews. I solve all the problems of the world. Now, as a historian, the most important thing I
can say about these theories, they are never right, because the global cabal
theory says two things. First, everything is
controlled by a very small number of people. Secondly, these people hide themselves. They do it in secret. Now,
both things are nonsense. It's impossible for people
to control, a small group of people, to control
and predict everything because the world is too complicated. You know, you look at a
real world conspiracy. Conspiracy is basically just a plan. Think about the American
invasion of Iraq in 2003. You had the most powerful
superpower in the world, with the biggest military, with the biggest intelligence services, with the most sophisticated, you know, the FBI and the CIA and all the agents. They invade a third rate country,
a third rate power, Iraq. With this idea, we'll take
over Iraq and we'll control it, we'll make a new order in the Middle East. And everything falls apart.
Their plan completely backfires. Everything they hope to achieve,
they achieve the opposite. America, United States is humiliated. They cause the rise of ISIS. They wanted to take out terrorism. They created more terrorism. Worst of all, the big
winner of the war was Iran. You know, the United
States goes to war with all its power and gives Iran a
victory on a silver plate. The Iranians don't need to do anything. The Americans are doing
everything for them. Now, this is real history. Real history is when you
have not a small group of people, a lot of people
with a lot of power, carefully planning something,
and it goes completely out of, against their plan. And this we know from
a personal experience, like every time we try to plan something, a birthday party, a
surprise birthday party, a trip somewhere, things go wrong. This is reality. So the idea that a small
group of, I don't know, the Jewish cabal, the Freemasons, whoever, they can really control
and predict all the wars? This is nonsense. The second thing that is
nonsense is to think they can do that and still remain secret. It sometimes happens in
history that a small group of people accumulates a lot of power. If I now tell you that
Xi Jinping and the heads of the CCP, the Chinese
Communist Party, they have a lot of power. They control the military,
the media, the economy, the universities of China. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is, obviously, everybody
knows it. Everybody knows it. Because to gain so much power,
you usually need publicity. Hitler could not, Hitler
gained a lot of power in Nazi Germany because
he had a lot of publicity. If Hitler remained unknown,
working behind the scenes, he would not gain power. So the way to gain power is
usually through publicity. So secret cabals don't gain power. And even if you gain a lot of power, nobody has the kind of
power necessary to predict and control everything
that happens in the world. All the time shit happens that you did not predict and you did not plan
and you did not control. - The sad thing is there's
usually an explanation for everything you just said that involves a secret global cabal. That the reason your
vacation planning always goes wrong is because you're not competent. There is a competent small group, that ultra competent small group. I hear this with intelligence agencies. The CIA are running everything. Mossad is running everything. - You see, I mean, as historian, you get to know how many
blunders these people do. They are so, and they're capable, but they're so incompetent
in so many ways. Again, look at the Russian
invasion of Ukraine. Before the war, people thought, oh, Putin was such a genius and
the Russian army was one of the strongest armies in the world. This is what Putin thought,
and it completely backfired. - Well, a cabal
explanation there would be, there's a NATO driven
United States military industrial complex that
wants to create chaos and- - So they put a gun to
Putin's head and told him, Vladimir, if you don't
invade, we shoot you. How did they cause put into invade? - It's the thing about conspiracy theories is there's usually a way
to explain everything. - You can explain, it's
kind of a religion. You can always find
explanation for everything. And, you know, in the end,
it's intellectual integrity. If you insist on whenever people confront you with evidence, with finding some very, very complicated explanation for that too, you can explain everything. We know that. It's a question
of intellectual integrity. And I will also say another
thing, the conspiracy theories, they do get one thing right,
certainly in today's world, I think they represent an
authentic and justified fear of a lot of people that
they are losing control of their lives. They don't understand what is happening. And this I think is not
just a legitimate fear. This is an important fear. They are right. We are losing control of our lives. We are facing really big dangers, but not from a small
cabal of fellow humans. The problem with many of
these conspiracy theories that yes, we have a problem
with new AI technology, but if you now direct the
fire against certain people, so instead of all humans
cooperating against our real common threats, whether it's the rise of AI,
whether it's global warming, you are only causing
us to fight each other. And I think that the
key question that people who spread these ideas,
I mean many of them, they honestly believe, it's not malicious, that they honestly
believe in these theories, is do you want to spread,
to spend your life spreading hate towards people or do you want to work on more constructive projects? I think one of the big differences between those who believe
in conspiracy theories and people who warn about the dangers of AI, the dangers of climate change. We don't see certain
humans as evil and hateful. The problem isn't humans, the problem is something outside humanity. Yes, humans are
contributing to the problem, but ultimately the enemy
is external to humanity. Whereas conspiracy theories usually claim that a certain part of humanity
is the source of all evil, which leads them to
eventually think in terms of exterminating this part of humanity, which leads sometimes to
historical disasters like Nazism. - So it can lead to hate, but it can also lead to a
like cynicism and apathy that basically says, it's
not in my power to make the world better. So you don't actually take action. - I think it is within the
power of every individual to make the world a little bit better. You know, you can't do everything. Don't try to do everything. Find one thing in your areas of activity, a place where you have
some agency and try to do that and hope that other
people do their bit. And if everybody do
their bit, we'll manage. And if we don't, we don't,
but at least we try. - You have been part
of conspiracy theories, I find myself recently becoming part of conspiracy theories. Is there a device you can give
of how to be a human being in this world that values truth and reason while watching yourself become
part of conspiracy theories? At least from my perspective, it seems very difficult
to prove to the world that you're not part
of a conspiracy theory. I, as you said, have interviewed Benjamin
Netanyahu recently. I don't know if you're aware, but doing such things will also, you know, pick up a new
menu of items that you're, new set of conspiracy
theories you're now a part of. And I find it very
frustrating because it makes it very difficult to respond, because I sense that people
have the right intentions. Like we said, they have
nervousness, a fear of power. - Yes.
- And the abuses of power. And... As do I. So I find myself in a difficult position that I have nothing to show
to prove that I'm not part of such a conspiracy theory. - I think ultimately you can't, we can't. I mean, you know, it's
like proving consciousness, you can't, that's just the situation, whatever you say can
and will be used against you by some people.
- Yeah. - So this fantasy, if I only say this, if I only show them that,
if I only have this data, they will see I'm okay.
- Yeah. - It doesn't work like that. I think to keep your
sanity in this situation, first of all, it's important
to understand that most of these people are not evil. They are not doing it on purpose. Many of them really
believe that there is some very nefarious, powerful
conspiracy which is causing a lot of harm in the world. And they're doing a good
thing by exposing it and making people aware of
it and trying to stop it. If you think that you
are surrounded by evil, you are falling into the same rabbit hole, you are falling into the same
paranoid state of mind, oh, the world is full of
these evil people that... No, most of them are good people. And also I think we
can empathize with some of the key ideas there,
which I share, that yes, it's becoming more and more
difficult to understand what is happening in the world. There are huge dangers
in the world that we are, existential dangers to the human species, but they don't come from a small cabal of Jews or gay people or
feminists or whatever. They come from much more diffused forces, which are not under the control
of any single individual. We don't have to look for the evil people. We need to look for human
allies in order to work together against, again, the
dangers of AI, the dangers of bioengineering, the
dangers of climate change. And when you wake up in the
morning, the question is, do you want to spend your
day spreading hatred or do you want to spend your
day trying to make allies and work together? - Let me ask you kind
of a big philosophical question about AI and the threat of it. Let's look like at the threat side. So folks like Eliezer
Yudkowsky worry that AI might kill all of us. Do you worry about that
range of possibilities where artificial intelligence
systems in a variety of ways might destroy human civilization? - Yes. You know, I talk a lot about
it, about the dangers of AI. I sometimes get into
trouble because I depict these scenarios of how AI
becoming very dangerous. And then people say that I'm
encouraging these scenarios. But I'm, you know, I'm
talking about it as a warning. I'm not so terrified of
the simplistic idea, again, the Terminator scenario of robots running in the street shooting everybody, I'm more worried about AI
accumulating more and more power and basically
taking over society based, taking over our lives, taking power away from us
until we don't understand what is happening and we
lose control of our lives and of the future. The two most important things
to realize about AI, now, so many things are being said now about AI, but I think there are two things that every person should know about AI. First is that AI is the
first tool in history that can make decisions by itself. All previous tools in history
couldn't make decisions. This is why they empowered us. You invent a knife, you
invent an atom bomb... The atom bomb cannot
decide to start a war, cannot decide which city to bomb. AI can make decisions by itself. Autonomous weapon systems can decide, by themselves, who to kill, who to bomb. The second thing is that
AI is the first tool in history that can create
new ideas by itself. The printing press could print our ideas, but could not create new ideas. AI can create new ideas
entirely by itself. This is unprecedented. Therefore, it is the first
technology in history that instead of giving power to humans, it takes power away from us. And the danger is that it
will increasingly take more and more power from us
until we are left helpless and clueless about what
is happening in the world. And this is already beginning to happen in an accelerated pace. More and more decisions, about our lives, whether to give us a loan,
whether to give us a mortgage, whether to give us a job, are taken by AI. And more and more of the
ideas, of the images, of the stories that surround
us and shape our minds, our world are produced, are created by AI, not by human beings. - If you can just linger on that, what is the danger of that? That more and more of
the creative side is done by AI, the idea generation, is it that we become
stale in our thinking? Is that that idea generation
is so fundamental to like the evolution of humanity? - That we can't resist the ideas. To resist an idea, you need to have some vision
of the creative process. - Yeah.
- Now this is a very old fear. You go back to Plato's cave, so this idea this idea that
people are sitting chained in a cave and seeing shadows
on a screen, on a wall, and thinking this is reality. You go back to Descartes and he has this thought experiment of the demon. And Descartes asks himself, how do I know that any of this is real? Maybe there is a demon who is creating all of this and is basically
enslaving me by surrounding me with these illusions. You go back to Buddha,
it's the same question. What if we are living
in a world of illusions, and because we have been living
in it throughout our lives, all our ideas, all our desires,
how we understand ourself, this is all the product
of the same illusions. And this was a big philosophical question for thousands of years. Now it's becoming a practical
question of engineering, because previously all the
ideas, as far as we know, maybe we are living inside
a computer simulation of intelligent rats from the planet Zerco. If that's the case, we
don't know about it. But taking what we do know
about human history until now, all the, again, stories, images,
paintings, songs, operas, theater, everything we've
encountered and shaped our minds was created by humans. Now increasingly we live in
a world where more and more of these cultural artifacts will be coming from an alien intelligence. Very quickly we might
reach a point when most of the story stories, images,
songs, TV shows, whatever, are created by an alien intelligence. And if we now find ourselves
inside this kind of world of illusions, created
by an alien intelligence that we don't understand,
but it understands us, this is a kind of, you know, spiritual enslavement that
we won't be able to break out of because it understands us, it understands how to manipulate us, but we don't understand
what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs. - So if there's a set of AI
systems that are operating in the space of ideas that
are far superior to ours and we're not almost able
to, it's opaque to us, we're not able to see through, how does that change the
pursuit of happiness, the human pursuit of happiness? Life. Where do we get joy if we're surrounded by AI systems that are doing most of the cool things humans
do much better than us? - You know, some of the things, it's okay that the AIs will do them. Many human tasks and jobs, you know, they're drudgery, they are not fun, they are not developing us
emotionally or spiritually. It's fine if the robots
take over. I dunno. I think about the people in
supermarkets or grocery stores that spend hours every day just, you know, passing items and charging you the money. I mean, if this can be
automated, wonderful. We need to make sure that
these people then have better jobs, better means
of supporting themselves and developing their social abilities, their spiritual abilities. And that's the ideal
world that AI can create. That it takes away from
us the things that, it's better if we don't do
them and allows us to focus on the most important things
and the deepest aspects of our nature, of our potential. If we give AI control
of the sphere of ideas, at this stage, I think it's very, very dangerous because
it doesn't understand us. And AI at present is mostly
digesting the products of human culture. Everything we've produced
over thousands of years, it eats all of these cultural products, digests it, and starts
producing its own new stuff. But we still haven't figured
out ourselves, in our bodies, our brains, our minds, our psychology. So an AI-based on our
flow and understanding of ourselves is a very dangerous thing. I think that we need, first of all, to keep developing ourselves. If for every dollar and
every minute that we spend on developing AI, artificial intelligence, we spend another dollar and another minute in developing human consciousness, the human mind will be okay. The danger is that we spent all our effort on developing an AI at
a time that we don't understand ourselves, and
then letting the AI take over, that's a road to a human catastrophe. - Does this surprise you how well large language models work?
- Yes. - I mean, has it modified
your understanding of the nature of intelligence? - Yes. I mean, you know, I've
been writing about AI for, I don't know, like eight years now. And engaged with all these
predictions and speculations. And when it actually came, it was much faster and more
powerful than I thought it would be. I didn't think that we would have in 2023 an AI that can hold the
conversation that you can't know if it's a human
being or an AI, that can write beautiful texts, I mean, I read the texts written
by AI and the thing that strikes me most is the coherence. You know, people think, oh, it's nothing. They just takes ideas from
here and there words from, and put it, no, it's so coherent. I mean, you read in not sentences, you read paragraphs,
you read entire texts. And there is logic. - Yes.
- There is a structure. - It's not only coherent, it's convincing. - Yes.
- And the beautiful thing about it that has to do with your work, it doesn't have to be true
and it often gets facts wrong, but it still is convincing, and it is both scary and beautiful. - Yes.
- That our brains love language so much that we don't need the facts to be correct. - Yes.
- We just need it to be a beautiful story.
- Yeah. And that's been the secret of politics and religion for thousands of years. And now it's coming with AI. - So you, as a person who has written some of the most impactful words
ever written, in your books, how does that make you
feel that you might be one of the last effective human writers? - That's a good question. - First of all, do you
think that's possible? - I think it is possible. I've seen a lot of
examples of AI being told, write like Yuval Noah
Harari and what it produces. - Has it ever done better
than you think you could have written yourself? - I mean, on the level
of content of ideas? No. There are things I say,
I would never say that. But when it comes to the,
you know, I mean, there is, again, the coherence and
the quality of writing is such that I say, it's
unbelievable how good it is. And who knows, in 10 years, in 20 years, maybe it can do better, even on, according to certain measures
of, on the level of content. - So that people would be able
to do like a style transfer, do in the style of Yuval
Noah Harari write, anything. Write why I should have ice cream tonight. And make it convincing. - I don't know if I have
anything convincing to say about these things. - I think you would be surprised. I think you'd be surprised. That could be an evolutionary biology explanation for why... - [Yuval Noah Harari] Yeah.
Ice cream is good for you. - Yeah. So, I mean that
changes the nature of writing. - Ultimately I think it goes back... Much of my writing is
suspicious of itself. I write stories about
the danger of stories. I write about intelligence, but highlighting the
dangers of intelligence. Ultimately, I don't think that... In terms of power, human power comes from
intelligence and from stories. But I think that the
deepest and best qualities of humans are not intelligence
and not storytelling and not power. Again, with all our power,
with all our cooperation, with all our intelligence, we are on the verge of
destroying ourselves and destroying much of the ecosystem. Our best qualities are not there. Our best qualities are non-verbal. Again, they come from
things like compassion, from introspection, and introspection from my experience is not verbal. If you try to understand
yourself with words, you will never succeed. There is a place where you need the words, but the deepest insights,
they don't come from words. And you can't write about it. But that's, again, it
goes back to Wittgenstein, to Buddha, to so many
of these sages before, that these are the things
we are silent about. - Yeah. But eventually you have to
project it, as a writer, you have to do the silent introspection, but projected onto a page. - Yes. But you still have to warn people. You will never find the
deepest truth in a book. You will never find it in words. You can only find it in, I
think, in direct experience, which is nonverbal, which is preverbal. - In the silence of your own mind. - Yes.
- Somewhere in there. - Yes.
(Lex laughing) - Well, lemme ask you
a silly question then, a ridiculously big question. You have done a lot of deep
thinking about the world, about yourself, this
kind of introspection. How do you think, if
you, by way of advice, but just practically speaking, day to day, how do you think about difficult
problems with the world? - Mm. First of all, I take time off. Like my, the most important thing I do, I think as a writer, as
a scientist, I meditate. I spend about two hours every
day in silent meditation, observing as much as
possible, non-verbally, what is happening within
myself, focusing, you know, body sensations, the breath. Thoughts keep coming up, but I try not to give them attention. Don't try to drive them away. Just let them be there in the background, like some background noise. Don't engage with the thoughts, because the mind is constantly producing stories with words. These stories come
between us and the world. They don't allow us to see
ourselves or the world. Like for me, the most shocking thing, when I started meditating
like 23 years ago, I was given the simple
exercise to just observe my breath coming in and
out of the nostrils, not controlling it, just observing it. And I couldn't do it for
more than 10 seconds. I, for 10 seconds would try to notice, oh, now the breath is coming
in, it's coming in, it's coming in. Oh, it stopped coming in and
now it's going out, going out. 10 seconds, and some memory would come, some thought would come, some story about something that happened last week or 10 years
ago, or in the future. And the story would hijack my attention. It would take me maybe five
minutes to remember, oh, I'm supposed to be observing my breath. If I can't observe my own breath because of these stories
created by the mind, how can I hope to understand
much more complex things, like the political situation in Israel, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If all these stories keep coming, I mean, it's not the truth, it's just the story your own mind created. So first thing, train
the mind to be silent and just observe. So two hours every day. And I go every year for a
long retreat between one month and two months, 60 days
of just silent meditation. - [Lex Fridman] Silent
meditation for 60 days? - Yeah. To train the mind, forget
about your own stories, just observe what is really happening. And then also on other,
throughout the day, have an information diet. People are, today, many
people are very aware of what they feed their body,
what enters their mouth. Be very aware of what you feed your mind, what enters your mind. Have an information diet. So for instance, I read long
books, and I prefer, like, you know, I do many interviews. I prefer three hours interviews
to five minutes interviews. The long format is in,
it's not always feasible, but you can go much, much deeper. So I would say an information diet. Be very careful about
what you feed your mind. Give preference to big
chunks over small... - To books over Twitter. - Yes. Books over Twitter, definitely. And then, you know, when
I encounter a problem, a difficult intellectual
problem, then I give it, I let the problem lead me where it goes and not where I want it to go. If I approach a problem
with some preconceived idea, solution, and then try to
impose it on the problem, and you know, just find confirmation bias. Just find the evidence
that supports my view. This is easy for the mind to do. And you don't learn anything new. - Do you take notes? Do you start to concretize
your thoughts on paper? - I read a lot. Usually I don't take notes.
Then I start writing. And when I write, I write
like a torrent. Just write. Now it's the time, you read. You wanted meditation. Now it's the time to write,
write, don't stop, just write. So I would write from
memory and I'm not afraid of formulating, say, big ideas, big theories and putting them on paper. The danger is once it's
on paper, not on paper, on the screen, in the computer,
you get attached to it. And then you start with
confirmation bias to build more and more layers around it. And you can't go back. And
then it's very dangerous. But I trust myself that
I have to some extent the ability to press the delete button. The most important button
in the keyboard is delete. - Yeah, yeah.
- I write and then I delete. I write and then I delete. And because I trust
myself that I'll have the, every time I come to press
delete button, I feel bad. Like it's a kind of pain.
Hey, I created this. It's a beautiful idea
and I have to delete it? - But you're still brave
enough to press delete? - I try and hopefully
I do it enough times. And this is important
because in the long term, it enables me to play with ideas. I have the confidence to start
formulating some brave idea. Most of them turn out to be nonsense. But I trust myself not to be attached, not to become attached to my own nonsense. So it gives me this room for playfulness. - I would be amiss if I didn't ask, for people interested in hearing
you talk about meditation, if they wanna start meditating, what advice would you
give on how to start? You mentioned you couldn't hold it for, you couldn't hold your
attention on your breath for longer than 10 seconds.
- Yes. - At first. So how do they
start on this journey? - First of all, it's a difficult journey. It's not fun, it's not recreational, it's not kind of time to relax. It can be very, very intense. The most difficult thing, at least in the meditation
I practice, vipassana, which I learned from a
teacher called S. N. Goenka, the most difficult thing
is not the silence, it's not the sitting for long hours. It's what comes up. Everything you don't want
to know about yourself. - Yeah.
- This is what comes up. So it's very intense and difficult. If you go to a meditation retreat, don't think you're going to relax. - So what's the experience
of a meditation retreat when everything you don't
like comes up for 30 days? - It depends what comes
up. Anger comes up. You are angry.
- Yeah. - For days on end, you're
just boiling with anger. Everything makes you angry. Again, something that happens right now or you remember something
from 20 years ago and you start boiling with, it's like, I never even thought about this incident, but it's somewhere, it
was somewhere stored with a huge, huge pile
of anger attached to it. And it's now coming up and
all the anger is coming up. Maybe it's boredom. You know, 30 days of meditation,
you start getting bored, and it's the most boring thing in... Suddenly no anger, no,
it's the most boring... Another second and I scream. I mean, and boredom is one
of the most difficult thing to deal with in life. I think it's closely related
to death. Death is boring. You know, in many movies
death is exciting. It's not exciting. When you die, it's,
ultimately, it's boredom. Nothing happens. - It's the end of exciting things. - And many things in the world
happened because of boredom. To some extent people start
entire wars because of boredom. People quit relationships,
people quit jobs because of boredom. And if you never learn
how to deal with boredom, you will never learn how
to enjoy peace and quiet. Because the way to peace
passes through boredom. And from what I experienced
with meditation, I think, maybe it was the most difficult, maybe at least in the top three, like much more difficult
say than anger, or pain. When pain comes up, you feel heroic. Hey, I'm dealing with pain. When boredom comes up,
it brings it, you know, with depression and
feelings of worthlessness. And it's nothing, I'm nothing. - The way to peace is through boredom. David Foster Wallace said the key to life is to be unborable. - Which is a different perspective on what you're talking to. Is there truth to that? - Yes. I mean, it is closely related. I would say... Like I look at the world
today, like politics. The one thing we need
more than anything else is boring politicians. We have a super abundance
of very exciting politicians who are doing and saying
very exciting things. And we need boring politicians.
And we need them quickly. - And yeah, the way to
peace is through boredom. That applies in more ways than one. What advice would you
give to young people today in high school and college? How to have a successful life? How to have a successful career? - What they should know it's
the first time in history nobody has any idea how the world would look like in 10 years. - Yeah.
- Nobody has any idea how the world would look
like when you grow up. You know, throughout history, it was never possible
to predict the future. You live in the Middle Ages, nobody knows maybe in 10
years the Vikings will invade, the Mongols will invade,
there'll be an epidemic, there'll be an earthquake, who knows? But the basic structures
of life will not change. Most people will still be peasants. Armies would fight on
horseback with swords and bows and arrows and things like that. So you could learn a lot from
the wisdom of your elders, they've been there before, and they knew what kind of
basic skills you need to learn. Most people need to learn how to sow wheat and harvest wheat or rice
and make bread and build a house and ride a horse
and things like that. Now we have no idea,
not just about politics. We have no idea how the
job market would look like in 10 years. We have no ideas, no idea what
skills will still be needed. You think you are going
to learn how to code because there'll need a
lot of coders in the 2030s? Think again. Maybe AI
is doing all the coding. You don't need any coders. You are going to, I don't know, you learn to translate languages. You wanna be a translator? Gone. We don't know what skills will be needed. So the most important
skill is the skill to keep learning and keep changing
throughout our lives, which is very, very difficult. To keep reinventing ourselves. It's a deep, again, it's in
a way a spiritual practice. To build your personality. To build your mind as
a very flexible mind. If traditionally people
thought about education, like building a stone house
with very deep foundations, now it's more like setting
up a tent that you can fold and move to the next
place very, very quickly. 'Cause that's the 21st century. - Which also raises questions about the future of education. What that looks like. - Yeah.
- Let me ask you about love. What were some of the challenges? What were some of the lessons about love, about life that you learn
from coming out as gay? - In many ways it goes
back to the stories. I think this is one of
the reasons I became so interested in stories
and in their power, was I grew up in a small
Israeli town in the 1980s, early 1990s, which was very homophobic. And I basically embraced
it. I breathed it. Because you could hardly
even think differently. So you had these two
powerful stories around, one, that God hates gay people
and that he will punish them for who they are or for what they do. Secondly, that it's not God, it's nature. That there is something
diseased or sick about it. And these people, maybe
they're not sinners, but they are sick, they are defective. And nobody wanted to
identify with such a thing. If your options, okay,
you can be a sinner, you can be a defect, but what do you want? No good options there. And it took me many years
till I was 21 to come to term with it. And one of the things,
I learned two things, first about the amazing
capacity of the human mind for denial and delusion
that an algorithm could have told me that I'm gay
when I was like 14 or 15. Like if there is a good
looking guy and girl walking, I would immediately focus on the guy. But I didn't connect the dots. Like I could not understand
what was happening inside my own brain and my own
mind and my own body. Took me a long time to realize,
you know, you are just gay. - So that speaks to the
power of social convention versus individual thought. - It's virtually this is the
power of self delusion that, you know, it's not that I knew
I was gay and was hiding it. I was hiding it from myself successfully. That I don't understand how
it is possible, looking back, I don't understand how it is possible, but I know it is possible. I knew and didn't know at the same time. And then the other big lesson
is the power of the stories, of the social conventions. Because the stories were not true. They did not make sense
even on their own terms. Even if you accept the
basic religious framework of the world, that there is a good God that created everything
and controls everything. Why would a good God
punish people for love? I understand why a good
God would punish people for violence, for hatred, for cruelty. But why would God punish people for love, especially when he created them that way? So even if you accept
the religious framework of the world, obviously
the story that God hates gay people, it comes not
from God, but from some humans who invented this story. They take their own hatred. This is something humans do all the time. They hate somebody and they
say, no, I don't hate them. God hates them. They throw
their own hatred on God. And then if you think about
the scientific framework that said that, oh, gays,
they are against nature. They are against the laws of nature. They're, and so forth. Science tells us nothing can exist against the laws of nature. Things that go against the laws
of nature just don't exist. There is a law of nature
that you can't move faster than the speed of light. Now you don't have this
minority of people who break the laws of nature by going
faster than the speed of light. And then nature comes, nah, that's bad. You shouldn't do that.
That's not how nature works. If something goes against
the laws of nature, it just can't exist. The fact that gay people
exist me, and not just people. You see homosexuality among many, many mammals and birds and other animals. It exists because it is in
line with the laws of nature. The idea that this is sick,
that this is whatever, it comes not from nature, it comes from the human imagination. Some people, or for whatever
reasons, hated gay people. They said, oh, they go against nature. But this is a story created by people. This is not the laws of nature. And this taught me that
so many of the things that we think are natural
or eternal or divine, no, they're just human stories. But these human stories
are often the most powerful forces in the world. - So what did you learn from your, just a personal struggle of journey through the social conventions to find one of the things that makes
life awesome, which is love? So like what it takes to kinda strip away the self delusion and the pressures of social convention, to wake up. - It takes a lot of work, a lot of courage and a lot
of help from other people. This kind of, again, heroic idea, I can do it all by
myself, it doesn't work. Certainly with love, you need
at least one more person. And I'm very happy that I found Itzik. We lived in the same small Israeli town. We lived on two adjacent
streets for years. Probably went to school
on the same bus for years without really encountering each other. In the end, we met on one
of the first dating sites on the internet for gay
people in Israel in 2002. - You're saying the internet works? - Yes. And I said-
- For love? - Bad things or dangers about
technology and the internet. And there are also, of
course, good things. And this is not an accident. You have two kinds of
minorities in history. You have minorities which are
a cohesive group like Jews, that yes, you're a small,
being born Jewish in, say, Germany or Russia or whatever. You are born in a small community. But as a Jewish boy, you
are born to a Jewish family. You have Jewish parents,
you have Jewish siblings, you are in a Jewish neighborhood,
you have Jewish friends. So these kinds of minorities, they could always come
together and help each other throughout history. Now, another type of minority, like gay people or more
broadly LGBTQ people, that as a gay boy, you are usually not born
to a gay family with gay parents and gay siblings
in a gay neighborhood. So usually you find
yourself completely alone. For most of history, one of the biggest problems
for the gay community was that there was no community. How do you find one another? And the internet was a wonderful thing in this respect because
it made it very easy for these kinds of diffused communities, so diffused minorities to find each other. So me and Itzik, even though we rode the
same bus together to school for years, we didn't meet
in the physical world, we met online, because
again, in the physical world, you don't want to identify, in a Israeli town in the
1980s, you ride the bus, you don't want to say, "Hey, I'm gay, is there anybody else gay here?" That's not a good idea. But on the internet we
could find each other. - There's another lesson in
there that maybe sometimes the thing you're looking for
is right under your nose. - Yeah. A very old lesson and a very
true lesson in many ways. So you need help from
other people to realize the truth about yourself. So of course, in love, you
cannot just love abstractly. There is another person
there, you need to find them. But also, you know, we were one of the first
generations who enjoy the benefits of gay liberation, of the very difficult
struggles of people who are much braver than us in
the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, who dared to question social conventions, to struggle at sometimes a terrible price. And we benefited from it. And more broadly, we spoke earlier about the feminist movement. There would've been no gay liberation without the feminist movement. We also owe them a for, you know, starting to change the gender
structure of the world. And this is always true. You can never do it just by yourself. Also, I look at my journey in meditation. I could not have found... I mean, the idea of going
to meditation retreat. Okay. But I couldn't discover meditation by, I couldn't develop the
meditation technique by myself. Somebody had to teach me this way of how to look inside yourself. And it's also a very important
lesson that you can't do it just by yourself. That this fantasy of complete autonomy, of complete self-sufficiency,
it doesn't work. You hear, it tends to be a very
kind of male macho fantasy. I don't need anybody. I can be so strong and
so brave that I'll do everything by myself. It never works. - You need friends, you need a mentor. You need the very thing
that makes us human is other humans.
- Absolutely. - You mentioned that the
fear of boredom might be a kind of proxy for the fear of death. So what role does the fear of death play in the human condition? Are you afraid of death? - Yes. I think everybody
are afraid of death. I mean, all our fears come
out of the fear of death, but the fear of death is
just so deep and difficult. We can't, usually we
can't face it directly. So we cut it into little
pieces and we face just little pieces. Oh, I lost my smartphone. That's a little, little, little
piece of the fear of death, which is of losing everything. So I can't deal with losing everything, I'm dealing now with
losing my phone or losing a book or whatever. Somebody, I feel pain... That's a small bit of the fear of death. Somebody who really doesn't fear death, would not fear anything at all. There will be like anything that happens, I can deal with it. If I can deal with death, this is nothing. - So any fears is a
distant echo of the big fear of death? Have you ever looked at it
head on, caught glimpses, sort of contemplated as the stoics do? - Yes. I mean, and when I was a teenager, I would constantly contemplate
it, trying to understand, to imagine, it was a very, very shocking and moving experience. I remember, especially in
connection, like with, you know, with national ideology, which
was also very big strong in Israel, still is. Which again comes from the fear of death. You know that you're going to die. So you said, okay, I die,
but the nation lives on, I live on through the
nation, I don't really die. And you hear it, especially on Memorial Day,
day for fallen soldiers. So every day they'll be in school Memorial Day for fallen
soldiers who fell defending Israel in all its different wars. And all these kids would
come dressed in white. And you have this big
ceremony with flags and songs and dances in memory
of the fallen soldiers. And you get the impression, again, I don't want it to sound crass, but you got the impression
that the best thing in life is to be a fallen soldier. Because even then, yes, you
die, everybody dies in the end. But then you'll have all
these school kids for years and years remembering you and celebrating you and you don't really die. And I remember standing in
these ceremonies and thinking, what does it actually mean? Like, okay, so if I'm a fallen
soldier, now I'm a skeleton. I'm bones under this, in
this military cemetery, under this stone. Do I actually hear the kids singing all these patriotic songs? If not, how do I know they
do it? Maybe they trick me. Maybe I die in the war and
then they don't sing any songs. And how does it help me? And I realized, I was
quite young at the time, that if you are dead, you can't
hear anything because you, that's the meaning of being dead. And if you're dead, you
can't think of anything. Like, oh, now they're
remembering... Because you are dead. That's the meaning of being dead. And it was a shocking realization. - But it's a really
difficult realization to keep holding in your mind. Like it's the end.
- I lost it over time. I mean, for many years, it was a very powerful fuel, motivation for philosophical, for
spiritual exploration. And I realized that the
fear of death is really a very powerful drive. And over the years,
especially as I meditated, it kind of dissipated, and today sometimes I find
myself trying to recapture this teenage fear of death
because it was so powerful. And I just can't. I try
to make the same image. I don't know. It's... - There's something
about the teenage years. - Yeah, I always thought that the adults, there is something wrong with the adults. - Yeah.
- Because they don't get it. - Yeah. Like I would ask my parents
or teachers about it and they, oh yes, you die in the end. That's it. But, and on the other hand, they're so worried about other things. - Yeah.
- Like there'll be a political crisis or an economic problem or a personal problem, like
with the bank or whatever. They'll be so worried. But then about the fact that
they're going to die, ah, we don't care about it. - That's why you read Camus and others when you're a teenager, you really worry about
the existential questions. Well, this feels like
the right time to ask the big question. What's the meaning of
this whole thing, Yuval? And you're the right person to ask, what's the meaning of life? - Meaning of life?
- Yes. - Oh, that's easy.
- What is it? (both laughing) - So what life is, if you
ask what the meaning of life, what life is, life is feeling
things, having sensations, emotions, and reacting to them. When you feel something
good, something pleasant, you want more out of
it, you want more of it. When you feel something unpleasant, you want to get rid of it. That's the whole of life. That's what is happening all the time. You feel things, you want the
pleasant things to increase. You want the unpleasant
things to disappear. That what life is. If you ask what is the
meaning of life in a more kind of philosophical or spiritual question, the real question to ask what
kind of answer do you expect? Most people expect a story. And that's always the wrong answer. Most people expect that
the answer to the question that what is the meaning
of life will be a story, like a big drama, that this is the plot
line and this is your role in the story. This is what you have to do. This is your line in the big play. You say your line, you do your
thing... That's the thing. And this is human
imagination. This is fantasy. To really understand
life, life is not a story. The universe does not
function like a story. So I think to really understand life, you need to observe it
directly in a nonverbal way. Don't turn it into a story. And the question to start
with is what is suffering? What is causing suffering? You know, the question,
what is the meaning of life? It'll take you to fantasies and delusions. We want to stay with the reality of life. And the most important
question about the reality of life is what is suffering
and where is it coming from? - And to answer that non-verbally, so the conscious experience of suffering. - Yes. When you suffer, try to
observe what is really happening when you are suffering. - Well put. And I wonder if AI will also
go through that same kind of process, on its way- - And if we develop consciousness or not, at present, it's not, it's just words. - It will just say to you,
"Please don't hurt me, Yuval" (both laughing) Again, as I've mentioned to
you, I'm a huge fan of yours. Thank you for the incredible work you do. This conversation's been a
long time, I think, coming. It's a huge honor to talk
to you. This is really fun. Thank you for talking today. - Thank you. I really enjoyed it. And as I said, I think the
long form is the best form. - (laughs) Yeah. I loved it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Yuval Noah Harari himself. "How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such
as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that
the order is imagined." Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.