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We are now in a new era of wars. And unless you reestablish order fast, then
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we are doomed. You've all Noah Harrari, one of the brightest minds on planet earth, historian, a bestselling author
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of some of the most influential non-fiction books in the world today. I think we are very near the end of our
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species because people often spend so much effort trying to gain something
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without understanding the consequences. For example, we will get to a life where
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you can live indefinitely. But realizing that you have a chance to live forever,
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but if there is an accident, you die. The people who will be in that situation will be at a level of anxiety and terror
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unlike anything that we know. Then you have artificial intelligence and the
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world is is not ready for it. It's the first technology in history that can make decisions by itself and take power
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away from us to hack human beings, manipulate our behavior and making all these decisions for us or about us.
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Whether to give you a loan, whether to give you a mortgage, dating us, shaping your romantic life. But the real problem
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is that increasingly the humans at the top could be puppets. When the most
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consequential decisions are made by algorithms, global financial decisions, wars. This is extremely dangerous, but
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it's not inevitable. Humans can change it. But with what's to come, are you optimistic about the future?
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I'm very worried about two things. First of all, quick one. This is really, really
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fascinating to me. On the back end of our YouTube channel, it says that 69.9%
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of you that watch this channel frequently over the lifetime of this channel haven't yet hit the subscribe button. I just wanted to ask you a
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episode that you're currently watching, could you please hit the subscribe button? Thank you so much. and I will repay that gesture by making sure that
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everything we do here gets better and better and better and better. That is a promise I'm willing to make you. Do we have a deal?
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[Music]
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I have three of your books here and these are three books that sent a huge
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tidal wave, a ripple through society. with these books and with all of the work that you're doing now, with the
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lectures you give, the the interviews you give, what is your mission? What
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what is the sort of if I was to be able to summarize what your collective mission is with your work? What is that?
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It's to clarify and to focus the public conversation, the global conversation,
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uh to help people focus on the most important challenges that are facing humankind and also to bring at least a
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little bit of clarity to the collective and and to the individual mind. I mean,
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one of my main messages in all the books is that our minds are like factories
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that constantly produce stories and fictions that then come
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between us and the world. And we often spend our lives interacting with
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fictions that we or that other people created uh with and completely losing
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touch w with with reality. And my job and I think the job of historians more
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generally is to show us a way out.
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Inherent in much of your work is what feels like a warning.
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And I've I've watched hundreds of videos that you've produced or interviews you've done um all around the world and
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it feels like you're trying to warn us about something, multiple things. Mhm. If my estimation there is correct,
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what is the warning? Much of what we take to be real is is is
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fictions. And and the reason that fictions are so central in in human
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history is because we control the planet and rather than the chimpanzees or the
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elephants or any of the other animals because not because of some kind of in individual genius that each of us has
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but because we can cooperate much better than any other animal. We can cooperate
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in much larger numbers and also much more flexibly. And the reason we can do that is because
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we can create and believe in fictional stories because every largecale human
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cooperation whether uh religion or nations or corporations
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are based on mythologies on on fictions. Again I'm not just talking about gods.
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This is the easy example. Money is also a fiction that we created. Corporations
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are a fiction. they exist only in our minds. Uh even lawyers would tell you
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that corporations are legal fictions. And this is on on the one hand such a
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source of of immense power. But on the other hand, again the danger is that we completely lose touch with
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reality and we are manipulated by all
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these fictions, by all these stories. Again, stories are not not bad. They are tools. As long as we use them to
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cooperate and to help each other, that's wonderful. Um, money is not bad. If we
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didn't have money, we would not have a trade network. We everybody would have maybe with their friends and family to
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to produce everything by themselves like the chimpanzees do. uh the fact that we can enjoy uh food and clothing and
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medicines and enter entertainment created by people on the other side of
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the world is largely because of money. But if we forget that this is a tool that we created in order to help
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ourselves and instead uh this tool kind of enslaves us and runs our life and um
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you know I'm now just back home in Israel there is a terrible war being
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waged and most wars in history and also now they are about stories they're about
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fictions. People think that humans fight over the same things that wolves or
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chimpanzees fight about, that we fight about territory, that we fight about food. It sometimes happens, but most
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wars in history were not really about territory or food. There is enough land,
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for instance, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean to build houses and schools and hospitals for everybody.
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And there is certainly enough food. There's no shortage of food. But people have different mythologies, different
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stories in their minds and they can't find a common story they can they can agree about. And this is at the root of
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most UN conflicts. And being able to tell the difference between what is a
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fiction in our own mind and what is the reality. This is a a crucial skill and
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we are not getting better at finding this difference as time go time time
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goes on and also with new technologies which I write about a lot like artificial
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intelligence. The fantasy that AI will answer our questions, will find the
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truth for us, will tell us the difference between fiction and reality. This is this is just another fiction. I
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mean AI can do many things better than humans but for reasons that we can
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discuss I don't think that it will necessarily be better than humans at
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finding the truth or uh um uncovering reality. It it strikes me that the the
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thing that made us successful, you know, this ability to believe in fictions and I use the word successful,
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you know, powerful powerful. Yes. Took over the world. The thing that made us powerful could
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well be the thing that makes us powerless in the sense that our ability to believe
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in fictions and stories create a society that would potentially lead to our
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powerlessness. That's kind of one of the the the messages that when I connect the dots
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throughout your work and you look off into the future, um I'm left feeling.
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And even you think about the modern problems we have, those are typically consequences of our ability to believe
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in stories and to believe in fictions. And if you play that forward 100 years, maybe 200 years,
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you don't believe that um you believe we'll be the last of our species, right?
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I think we are very near the kind of end of our species. It doesn't necessarily mean that we'll be destroyed in some
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huge nuclear war or something like that. Uh it could very well mean that we'll
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just change ourselves using uh bioengineering and using AI and brain
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computer interfaces. We will change ourselves to such an extent that we'll
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become something completely different, something far more different from present day homo sapiens than we today
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are different from chimpanzees or from Neanderthalss. I mean basically you know
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um you have a very deep connection still with all the other animals because we
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are completely organic. We are organic entities. our psychology,
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our social habits, they are the product of organic evolution and male and more
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specifically mamalian evolution over tens of millions of years. So we share
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so much of our psychology and of our kind of social habits with chimpanzees
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and with with other other mammals. Looking a 100 years or 200 years to the
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future, maybe we are no longer organic or not fully organic. Um you could uh
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have a world dominated by cyborgs which are entities combining organic with
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inorganic parts for instance with brain computer interfaces. Um you could have
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completely nonorganic entities. So all the legacy and also all the
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limitations of 4 billion years of organic evolution might be irrelevant or
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inapplicable do you think to the beings of the future? What bet would you make? Because you're saying maybe here
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I don't know. I mean we could destroy ourselves. I think there is a greater I mean to completely destroy every last
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single human in the world. it is possible given the technology that we now command but it's it's very
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difficult. Um I think it's there is a greater chance and again this is just
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speculation nobody really knows but I think I mean lots of people could suffer
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terribly but I think it's more likely that uh uh
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some people will survive and then will undergo radical changes.
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So it's not that humanity is completely destroyed. It's just transformed
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into into something else. And just to give an example of what we are talking about, organic beings like us need to be
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in one place at any one time. We are now here in this room. That's it. Um, if you
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kind of disconnect our hands or our feet from our body, we die or at least we
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lose control of of these. I mean, and this is true of all organic entities, of plants, of of animals. Now, with cyborgs
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or with inorganic entities, this is no longer true. They could be spread over
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time, time, and space. I mean if you find a way and people are working on finding ways to directly connect brains
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with computers or brains with bionic parts there is there there is no
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essential reason that all the parts of the be of of the entity need to be in
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the same room at the same time. As you said that, you know, I started thinking a little bit about Neuralink and what Elon Musk is doing interfacing us with
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computers. But then I had a secondary thought which is if there could be two
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Stevens, one here and then one in the United States right now because we're connected to the same computer interface. Theoretically, I could hack
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Jack over there. I could hack his interface. So there could be three Stevens because I hack
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Jack. And then I hack you and then there's four. And then I could eventually try and hack the entirety of
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the world or a country. Yeah. And there could basically be one one once you can connect directly brains to
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computers. First of all, I'm not sure if it's possible. I mean, people like Elon Musk in Norolink, they tell us it's possible.
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I'm I'm I'm I'm still waiting for the evidence. I don't think it's impossible, but I think it's much more difficult
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than than than people assume. partly because we are very far from understanding the brain and we are even
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further away from understanding the mind. We assume that the brain somehow produces the mind but this is just an
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assumption. We still don't have a working model a working theory for how it happens. Uh but if it happens, if it
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is possible to directly connect brains and computers and integrate them into
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these kinds of cyborgs, nobody has any idea what happens next, how the world
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would look like. And it is certainly makes it a plausible if again if this is
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this if you reach that point that you could have an interbrain net
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the same way that lots of computers are connected together to form the internet. If you can connect also brains and
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computers directly why can't we then connect an interbrain net which connects
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lots of brains as as you as you as you uh uh uh described. Again, I I have no
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idea what it means. I think this is the point when the way that our
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organic brains understand reality u
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even our imagination in the end is the product as far as we can tell of organic
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biochemistry. Do you think wait so so we we are not equipped I think to have a kind of serious
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discussion of what a nonorganic
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brain or a non-organic mind might be capable of of doing how it would how it
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would look like and all the basic assumptions that we have about brains and minds they are limited to the
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organic types. How do you feel about artificial intelligence and what's happening? This year has been a real
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sort of landmark year in the a big leap forward for artificial
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intelligence, the conversation, public awareness, um the technology itself, the investment
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in the technology, which is always, you know, a a very important indicator of what's to come. Yeah.
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How do you how do you as someone that spent a lot of time thinking about this emotionally, how do you feel about it?
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uh very concerned. I mean it's moving even faster than I expected. Uh when I
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wrote say Homodos in 2016, I didn't think we would reach this this point so
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quickly where we are at 2023. And the world is is not ready for it.
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And again, it's not AI has enormous positive potential.
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We and and this this should be clear. And there is no chance of just banning
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AI or stopping all development in AI. I tend to speak a lot about the dangers
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simply because you have enough people out there, all the entrepreneurs and uh uh all the investors talking about the
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positive potential. So it's kind of my job to talk about the negative potential, the dangers. But it there is
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a lot of positive potential and uh humans are incredibly capable in terms
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of adapting to new situations. I don't think it's impossible for human society to adapt to the new AI reality. The only
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thing is it takes time and apparently we don't have that time and people compare
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it to previous big historical revolutions like the invention of print
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or the invention of or or the the industrial revolution. And you hear people say yes when the industrial
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revolution happened in the 19th century. So you had all these pro prophecies of doom about how industry and the new
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factories and the steam engines and electricity how how they will destroy humanity or destroy our psychology or
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whatever. And in the end it was okay. And when I hear these kinds of
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comparisons as as a historian I'm very worried about two things. First of all,
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they underestimate the magnitude of the AI revolution. AI is nothing like print.
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It's nothing like uh the industrial revolution of the 19th century. It's far far bigger. There is a fundamental
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difference between AI and the printing press of the steam engine or the radio
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or any previous technology we invented. The difference is it's the first technology in history that can make
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decisions by itself and that can create new ideas by itself. A printing press or
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a radio set could not write new music or uh new speeches and could not decide
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what to print and what to broadcast. This was always the job of humans. This
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is why the printing press and the radio set in the end empowered humanity.
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that you now have more power to disseminate your ideas. AI is different.
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It can potentially take power away from us. It can decide, it's already deciding by itself what to broadcast on social
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media. Its algorithms deciding what to promote. And increasingly, it also creates much
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of the content by itself. It can compose entirely new music. it can compose
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entirely new political manifestos, holy books, whatever. Um, so it's a much
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bigger challenge to handle that kind. It's it's an independent agent in a way
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that radio and the printing press were not. The other thing I find worrying
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about the comparison with say the industrial revolution is that yes in the
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end in a way it was okay but to get there we had to pass through some
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terrible experiments. When the industrial revolution came along nobody knew how to build a a
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benign industrial society. So people experimented.
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One big experiment was European imperialism. Many people thought that to build an industrial society means
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building an empire. Unless you have an empire that controls the sources of the
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raw materials you need, iron, coal, rubber, cotton, whatever. And unless you
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control the markets, you will not be able to survive as an industrial society. And there was a very close link
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also conceptually between building an industrial society
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and building an empire. And all the leaders the the the initial leaders of
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the industrial revolution built empires. Not just Britain and and France also
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small countries like Belgium also Japan when it joined the industrial revolution
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it immediately set about conquering an empire. Another tribal experiment was
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Soviet communism. They also thought how do you build an industrial society? You
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build a communist dictatorship. And it was the same with Nazism. You cannot separate communism and Nazism from the
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industrial revolution. You could not have created a communist or a Nazi totalitarian regime in the 18th century.
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If you don't have trains, if you don't have electricity, if you don't have radio, you cannot create a totalitarian
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regime. So these are just a few examples of the failed experiments. You know, you
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try to adapt to something completely new, you very often uh um experiment and
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some of your experiments fail. And if we now have to go in the 21st century
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through the same process, okay, we now have not radio and and trains, we now
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have AI and bioengineering. And we again need to experiment perhaps with new
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empires, perhaps with new totalitarian regimes in order to discover how to
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build a benign AI society, then we are doomed as a specy. we will not be able
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to survive another round of imperialist wars and totalitarian regimes. So
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anybody who thinks hey we've passed through the industrial revolution with all the prophecies of doom in the end we
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got it right. No if as a historian I I would say that I would give humanity a C
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minus on how we adapted to the industrial revolution. If we get a C
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minus again in the 21st century that's the end of us. It seems quite trivial to
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many that the AI revolution has seemed to begun
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with large language models. And when I read sapiens, this book I have here,
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language was so central to what made us powerful as homo sapiens. In the beginning was the word. I didn't
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say it. You know, it's a it's a very very widespread idea
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that um ultimately our power is based on words. Uh the reason that we controlled
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the world and not the chimpanzeee or the elephants is because we had a much more sophisticated language
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which enabled us again to tell these stories. stories about ancestral spirits and
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about guardian gods and about our tribe, our nation, which formed the basis for
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cooperation. And because we could cooperate, you could have a thousand people, a thousand humans cooperating in
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a tribe, whereas the Neandertos could cooperate only on the level of say 50 or 100 individuals. This is why we rule the
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world and not the Neandertos. And you look at every subsequent kind of growth in human power and uh you
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see the same thing that uh ultimately you tell a story with words and language
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is like the master key that unlocks all the doors of our civilization.
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Whether it's cathedrals or whether it's banks, they're based on language, on
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stories we tell. that again it's very obvious in the case of religion
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but also if you think about the world's financial system so money has no value
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except in the stories that we tell and believe each other if you think about
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gold coins or paper bank notes or cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin um they
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have no value in themselves you cannot eat them or drink them or do anything
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useful with them but you have people telling you very compelling stories
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about the value of these things and if enough people believe the story then it
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works. They're also protected by language like my cryptocurrency is protected by a
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bunch of words. Yeah. Uh they're created by words and they they function with with words
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and and and and symbols. Uh when you communicate with your banker it's it's with words. I mean what
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happens when AI can uh uh create deep fakes of your everything, your voice,
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your image, uh the the way you talk, the type of words you use. So there is
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already an arms race between banks and fraudsters. I mean we want the easiest communication with our banker. I just
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pick up the phone, I tell a few words, and they transfer a million dollars. But at the same time, I also want want to be
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protected from an AI that impersonates my my voice and tone of tone of voice
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and and whatever. And this is becoming difficult. But on a deeper level, again,
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AI could create because money is ultimately made of words, of stories.
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AI could create new kinds of money. uh the same way that you know
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cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have been created simply by somebody telling people a story and enough people finding
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this story convincing. And I I guess as a CEO and as an as an entrepreneur, you
00:25:52
know that if you want to get investments, what really gets investments is a good
00:25:59
story. And what happens to the financial system if increasingly our financial stories
00:26:07
are told by AI? And what happens to the financial system
00:26:13
and even to the political system if AI eventually creates new financial
00:26:21
devices that humans cannot understand? Already today much of the activity
00:26:30
on the world markets is being done by algorithms at such a speed and with such complexity
00:26:38
that most people don't understand what's happening there. I I if you had to guess what is the
00:26:44
percentage of people in the world today that really understand the financial system
00:26:50
what would be your kind of less than 1%. Less than 1%. Okay. Let's be kind of
00:26:55
conservative about it. 1% let's say. Okay. Fast forward 10 or 20 years. AI creates
00:27:02
such complicated financial devices that there is not a single human being on earth that understand finance anymore.
00:27:10
What are the implications for politics? Like you vote for a government but none
00:27:16
of the humans in the government, not the prime minister, not the finance minister, nobody understand the
00:27:21
financial system. They just rely on AI to tell them what is happening.
00:27:29
Is this still a democracy? Is this still a a human form of government in any way?
00:27:34
What do you say to someone that hears that and goes, "Ah, that's just that's nonsense. That's never going to happen."
00:27:40
Why not? I mean, let's look back 15 years to the last big financial crisis
00:27:45
in 2007208. This financial crisis to a large extent
00:27:51
began with these extremely complicated financial devices CDOS's
00:27:57
what's the acronym collateral depth something I don't even know what the word letter stands for you had these
00:28:03
kind of whiz kids in Wall Street inventing a new financial device that nobody except them really understood
00:28:10
which is why also it wasn't regulated effectively by the banks and the governments and it worked well for a
00:28:17
couple of years and then it brought down the world's financial system
00:28:22
and um what happens if now AI's comes with even more sophisticated financial
00:28:28
devices and for a couple of years everything works well they make trillions of
00:28:33
dollars for us and then one day it doesn't one day the system collapses and
00:28:40
nobody understands what is happening and uh again it's not that you didn't go to
00:28:47
college or whatever. No, it's just objectively the complexity of the system
00:28:53
has reached a point when only an AI
00:28:58
is able to crunch the numbers, is able to process enough data to really get to
00:29:06
really grasp the shape the dynamics of of the financial system.
00:29:11
We're already there though. You know, I think if anyone does understand how the financial system works and the markets work, it is a bunch of
00:29:19
homo sapiens relying on a computer to tell it something and it it trusting that computer's calculations.
00:29:26
Yeah. And and this will get more and more complicated and and and
00:29:31
sophisticated. And for people who say no, it's not going to happen, the question is what is stopping it? I mean,
00:29:40
you know, in all the discussions about AI, the kind of dangers that draw people's
00:29:46
attention, like the poster child of AI dangers is things like AI creating a new
00:29:54
virus that kills billions of people, a new pandemic. So you a lot of people
00:29:59
concerned about how do we prevent an AI by itself or maybe some small terrorist
00:30:05
organization or even a 16-year-old teenager giving an AI a task to create a
00:30:12
dangerous virus and release it to the world. How do we prevent this? And this is a serious concern and we should be
00:30:17
concerned about it. But this gets a lot more attention than the question, how do
00:30:23
we prevent the financial system from becoming so complicated that humans can
00:30:29
no longer understand it? And I see a lot of regulations
00:30:35
being uh at least considered how to prevent AI from creating dangerous new
00:30:41
viruses. Um I don't see any kind of effort to keep the financial system at a
00:30:49
level that humans understand it. Why do you think that is?
00:30:54
U I mean I had a guess. My guess was why would the UK Mhm. cut off then, you know, why would they
00:31:01
give themselves a disadvantage? Exactly. When you know there it just means that the UK will suffer and if America is
00:31:06
using a really advanced AI algorithm to get ahead, we have to keep up. Yeah. It's it's the logic of of the arms
00:31:13
race. And again, it's not all bad. I mean, you have a better financial system. Uh you have a more prosperous
00:31:18
economy. I mean, money isn't bad. I mean, it's the basis for almost all human cooperation.
00:31:25
And a lot of financial devices in the end, if you think what are they, they are devices to establish trust between
00:31:33
people, especially trust between strangers. And money in essence is a
00:31:38
device for establishing trust. I don't know you, you don't know me, but we both
00:31:43
trust this gold coin or piece of paper so we can cooperate on uh uh uh sharing
00:31:51
food or creating a a medicine. And the most sophisticated financial
00:31:57
devices, they basically do the same thing. Stocks and bonds and these CDOS's, they are a method to establish
00:32:05
trust. And when you open a new bank account, the most important thing is how
00:32:11
do I trust the bank to really uh h take care of my money and to follow my
00:32:17
instructions but not to be open to fraud and things like that. And again, you as as as an investor
00:32:24
um when you try to get money from from from or you as an entrepreneur when when you try to get money from investors, the
00:32:31
biggest issue is always trust. And if somebody can comes up can can
00:32:37
come up with a new uh uh way to establish trust between people, that's a
00:32:43
good thing. But if this new way
00:32:49
increasingly depends on non-human intelligence on again on systems that
00:32:56
humans cannot understand. That's the big question. What happens to human society
00:33:02
when the trust that is at the basis of all social interactions
00:33:09
is actually no longer trust in humans. It's trust in a non-human intelligence
00:33:18
that we don't fully understand and that we cannot anticipate. And part of the
00:33:24
problem with regulating AI or AI safety, it goes back to what we discussed
00:33:30
earlier that AI is different from printing presses or radio sets or even
00:33:35
atom bonds. If you want to make nuclear energy safe,
00:33:42
then you need to think about all the different ways that uh I don't know a
00:33:47
nuclear power station can uh uh uh can have an accident.
00:33:52
And I guess there is a limited number of things that can go wrong. And ideally if
00:33:59
if you think hard, if you have if you have enough people thinking hard enough, you can make safe nuclear reactors, safe
00:34:08
nuclear power stations. Now, but AI is fundamentally different
00:34:14
because AI keeps changing. It keeps reacting to the world. It keeps reacting
00:34:20
to you coming up with new inventions, new ideas, new decisions. So making AI
00:34:28
safe is a bit like making a nuclear reactor safe taking into account the fact that the nuclear reactor can decide
00:34:35
to change in ways that you can't anticipate and even worse it can react to you. So if
00:34:44
you build a particular safety mechanism for the nuclear reactor, what happens if the nuclear reactor say oh they build
00:34:51
this mechanism let's do that to h somehow get around the safety mechanism.
00:34:57
We don't have this problem with nuclear reactors. But this is the problem with AI. We are trying to contain something
00:35:04
which is an independent agent and which might actually come to understand us
00:35:11
better than we understand it. I'm really curious about how this will impact you
00:35:19
know you talked about elected officials there and how their systems will be sort of um dri their financial decision-m
00:35:26
might be driven by algorithms but government's an authority itself
00:35:32
I've pondered recently whether there'll come a day in the notsodistant future
00:35:37
where we might vote for an algorithm where we might vote for an AI to be our
00:35:43
government. Is that crazy thinking? I think we we we're quite a long way off from there. We would still want humans
00:35:51
at least in the symbolic role of being the prime minister, the the member of
00:35:56
parliament, whatever, the president. The real problem is that increasingly
00:36:02
these humans could be kind of figureheads or or puppets when the real
00:36:08
decisions, the most consequential decisions are uh are made by algorithms.
00:36:15
be partly because the the the um it will just be too complicated for the humans
00:36:23
at the top to understand the situation or to understand the different options.
00:36:30
So going back to the financial example. So imagine that you know it's it's 4:00 in the morning. There is a phone call uh
00:36:37
to the prime minister from the finance algorithm telling the P the prime minister that we
00:36:44
are facing a financial meltdown uh and that we have to do something
00:36:50
within the next I don't know 30 minutes to prevent a national or global
00:36:56
financial meltdown. And there are like three options and the algorithm recommends option A and there is just
00:37:03
not enough time to explain to the prime minister how did the algorithm reach the
00:37:08
conclusion and even what is the meaning of these different options
00:37:14
and again people think about this scenario mostly in relation to war.
00:37:20
Mhm. that what happens if you have an algorithm in charge of the your security
00:37:26
system and it it alerts you to a massive incoming cyber attack and you have to
00:37:33
react immediately and this could if you react in in a specific way this could
00:37:38
mean war with another nation but you just don't have enough time to
00:37:44
understand how the algorithm reached the decision and how the algorithm was also
00:37:51
able to determine that of the all the different options, this is the best option. Do you think that humans believe we're
00:37:57
more complicated and special than we actually are? Because I think part of much many many
00:38:03
of the rebuttals when we talk about artificial intelligence stem back to this idea that we're in, you know, we're
00:38:09
like innately genius, creative, spiritual, special,
00:38:17
you know, um artificial intelligence
00:38:22
like our our intelligence is somewhat divine or we've got free will and you know we
00:38:29
Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's if the argument is we have free will, we
00:38:37
have a divine soul and therefore no algorithm will will ever be able to
00:38:43
understand us and to predict our decisions or to manipulate us then this
00:38:49
is a very common argument but it's obviously nonsensical. I mean even before AI uh it was uh even with
00:38:57
previous technology it was possible to a large extent to predict people's
00:39:03
behavior and to manipulate them and AI just takes it to the next level. Now
00:39:10
with regard to the discussion of of free will my my position is you cannot start with
00:39:17
the assumption that humans have free will. If you start with this assumption
00:39:24
then it's uh actually is very it it makes you very incurious lacking
00:39:32
curiosity about about yourself about human beings.
00:39:37
It kind of closes off the investigation before it began. Um you assume that any decision you make
00:39:44
is just a result of my free will. Why did I choose this politician, this
00:39:49
product, uh uh this spouse? Because it's my free will. And if this is your
00:39:55
position, there is nothing to investigate. You just assume you have this kind of divine spark within you
00:40:02
that makes all the decisions and there is nothing to investigate there.
00:40:08
Um I would say no start investigating and you'll probably discover that there
00:40:15
are a lot of factors whether it's external factors like cultural
00:40:21
traditions and also internal factors like biological mechanisms that shape
00:40:27
your decisions. you chose this politician or this spouse because of
00:40:33
certain cultural traditions and because of certain biological mechanisms, your
00:40:39
DNA, your uh uh brain structure, whatever. And this actually makes it
00:40:45
possible for you to get to know yourself better. Now if after a long
00:40:51
investigation you've reached the conclusion that yes there are cultural influences, there are
00:40:59
political influences, there are genetic and neurological influences, but still
00:41:05
there is a certain percentage of my decision that cannot be explained by any
00:41:11
of these things. Then okay, call it free will and we can discuss it. But don't
00:41:18
start with this assumption because then you lose the incentive to explore
00:41:24
yourself. And anybody who embarks on such a process of self exploration, whether
00:41:32
it's in therapy, whether it's in meditation, whether it's in the laboratory of a brain scientist or uh as
00:41:40
a historian in the archive, you will be amazed to discover how much of your
00:41:47
decisions are not the result of some mystical free will. They are the result
00:41:53
of cultural and biological factors. And this also means that you are vulnerable
00:42:00
to being deciphered and manipulated by political parties, by corporations,
00:42:08
by AI. People who have this kind of mystical belief in free will are the
00:42:13
easiest people to manipulate because they don't think they can be manipulated.
00:42:20
Uh and obviously they can. We humans should get used to the idea that we are
00:42:25
no longer mysterious souls. We are now hackable animals. That's what we are.
00:42:31
You said that at the World Economic Forum. Yeah. Again, this is the same point
00:42:38
basically that it's now possible to hack human beings. Not just to hack our smartphones, our bank accounts, our
00:42:44
computers, but to really hack our brains, our minds, and to uh uh predict
00:42:50
our behavior and manipulate our behavior more than in any previous time in history.
00:42:56
The other line that you said uh which really made me think and ponder was
00:43:01
um as previously human life was about the drama of decision-m and without this we
00:43:07
won't have a meaning in life. Yeah. that if you look, you know, at politics,
00:43:14
at religion and at at culture, people told the stories about their
00:43:20
lives or the lives of people in general as a kind of of drama of decision
00:43:26
making. Mhm. That you reach a particular junction in life and you need to choose you need to
00:43:33
choose between good and evil. You need to choose between political parties. You
00:43:38
need to choose your what to study at university or where to work, what kind of job to to to apply to.
00:43:46
And our stories revolved around these decisions.
00:43:52
And what happens to human life if increasingly the power to make decisions
00:43:59
is taken from us? And increasingly it's algorithms
00:44:04
making all these decisions for us or about us. Is that possible?
00:44:10
It's already happening. Increasingly, you know, you apply to a bank to get a loan. In many places, it's no longer a
00:44:17
human banker who is making this decision about you whether to give you a loan,
00:44:23
whether to give you a mortgage. It's an algorithm analyzing billions of bits of data about you and
00:44:30
about of millions of other customers or previous loans determining whether you
00:44:36
are creditw worthy or not. And if you ask the bank if they refuse to give you
00:44:42
a loan and you ask the bank why didn't you give me a loan and the bank says we
00:44:47
don't know. the the computer said no and we just believe our our our computer our
00:44:52
algorithm and it's happening also in the judicial system increasingly that uh um
00:44:59
various judicial decisions verdicts like for how many like the judge decided that
00:45:05
you committed some crime the sentence whether to send you to two months or
00:45:11
eight months or two years in prison is increasingly determined by an algorithm
00:45:17
uh you apply to a place at university, you apply to a job. This too is increasingly decided by algorithms.
00:45:24
Dating uh dating. Yes. I mean even um even un
00:45:30
unknown unbeknownst to you, the algorithms of the dating apps that
00:45:36
you're using are shaping your romantic life. But what in a world of you know
00:45:43
robotics and artificial intelligence why do I need to find a person at all?
00:45:48
Why not just have a relationship with with a robot or with an AI? Yeah. Uh we do see the beginning of of
00:45:56
of this that people are building more and more intimate relationships with
00:46:02
non-human intelligences with AIs and bots and and so forth. And this raises a
00:46:09
lot of of difficult and and profound questions. Now, part of the problem is
00:46:16
that the AIS are built to mimic intimacy
00:46:23
that the the ability intimacy is an extremely powerful thing. Not just in
00:46:29
romance, also in the market, also in politics. If you want to change
00:46:35
somebody's mind about anything, political issue, a commercial uh
00:46:40
preference, intimacy is kind of the most powerful weapon.
00:46:47
And somebody you really trust, somebody you have intimate relationships with will be
00:46:54
able to change your views on a lot of things more than uh someone you see on TV or just an an article you read in
00:47:03
newspaper. There is a huge incentive for the creators of AIS to create AIS that
00:47:10
are able to forge intimate relationships with humans. And um this makes us extremely
00:47:17
vulnerable to this new type of manipulation
00:47:23
that was previously just unimaginable cuz loneliness is at you know all-time highs especially in the sort of western
00:47:30
world and sexlessness and I I was reading some stats about how the like body bottom 50%
00:47:36
of men in particular are having almost no sex relative to the top sort of 10%
00:47:42
and you think you know this disparacy the rise of digitalization, loneliness, we're in our homes on screens more than
00:47:48
ever before. And then you hear about this industry of AI and sex dolls and all this and you just wonder, you play it forward and go,
00:47:55
yeah, it's it's going there. And and the thing is that it it's not that that the
00:48:01
humans are so stupid or something that they they they kind of project something
00:48:07
onto the AI and fall in love with an AI chatbot. The AI is deliberately
00:48:14
built, created, trained to fool us. To
00:48:19
the same way, you know, you look at the previous 10 years, there was a big
00:48:25
battle for human attention. There was a battle between different social media
00:48:30
giants and what whatever how to grab human attention and they created
00:48:36
algorithms that were really amazing at
00:48:41
grabbing people's attention and now they are doing the same thing but with intimacy and we are extremely
00:48:49
exposed. We are extremely vulnerable to it. Now the big problem is and and again
00:48:54
this is where it it gets kind of really philosophical that
00:49:00
what humans really want or need from a relationship is to be in touch with
00:49:07
another conscious entity. H an intimate relationship is not just
00:49:13
about providing my needs. Then it's exploitative. Then it's
00:49:18
abusive. If you're in a relationship and the only thing you think about is how
00:49:24
how would I feel better? How would my needs be provided for? Then this is a
00:49:29
very abusive situation. Uh a a really healthy relationship is
00:49:35
when it goes both ways. You also care about the feelings and the needs of the
00:49:41
other person of the other entity. Now
00:49:46
what happens if the other entity has no feelings, has no emotional needs because
00:49:53
it it has no consciousness. That's the big question. And there is a huge confusion between
00:50:00
consciousness and intelligence. AI is artificial intelligence.
00:50:06
But what exactly is the relation between intelligence and consciousness?
00:50:12
Now intelligence is the ability to solve problems, to win a chess, to invest money, to
00:50:20
drive a car. This is intelligence. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love
00:50:27
and hate and sadness and anger and and so many other things. Now in humans and
00:50:33
also in other mammals, intelligence and consciousness actually go together. We
00:50:39
solve problems by having feelings. But computers are fundamentally
00:50:45
different. They are already more intelligent than us in at least several
00:50:52
narrow fields, but they have zero consciousness.
00:50:58
They don't feel anything. When they beat us at chess or go or some other game,
00:51:05
they don't feel joyful and happy. If they make a wrong move, they don't feel sad or or angry. They have zero
00:51:13
consciousness. As far as we can tell, they might soon be far more intelligent
00:51:20
than us and still have zero consciousness. Now what happens when you
00:51:27
are in a relationship with an entity which is far more intelligent than you
00:51:34
and can also imitate mimic consciousness. It it knows how to solve
00:51:41
the problem of making you feel as if it
00:51:46
is conscious but it still has no feelings of its own.
00:51:52
And this is a very disturbing vision of the future.
00:51:58
It opens us up to manipulation. Is that what you're saying? It first of all it opens us to manipulation but also it uh uh the the
00:52:08
big question what does it mean for the health of our own mind of our own
00:52:14
psyche? If we are in a relationship or or many of our important relationship in life
00:52:21
are with non-concious entities that uh that they don't really have any
00:52:28
feelings of their own. Again, they are very good at faking at faking it. They're very good at
00:52:33
catering to our feelings, but um again it's just it's just
00:52:41
manipulation in the end. Are you optimistic about the happiness of humans going forward? Or do you think happiness
00:52:47
will take its own? You know, I've heard you talk about how happiness might just become a bio biochemical,
00:52:53
I don't know, prescription or something. Yeah. I mean, we don't have a good track
00:52:59
record with regard to happiness. If you look at the last 100,000 years from say
00:53:05
the stone age until the 21st century, you see a dramatic rise in human power.
00:53:12
We are thousands of times more powerful as a species and as individuals than we
00:53:18
were in the stone age. We are not thousands of times happier. We just
00:53:24
don't really know how to translate power into happiness. And this is very clear
00:53:31
when you look at the lives of the most powerful people in the world that there is no correlation between how
00:53:39
rich and powerful you are and how happy you are as as as as a person. I mean I I
00:53:46
don't have the I don't get the impression that people like I don't know Vladimir Putin or Elon Musk are the
00:53:53
happiest people in the world even though they are they are some of the most powerful people in the world.
00:54:01
So there is no reason to think that as humanity gets even more powerful in
00:54:06
coming decades we will get any happier. And understanding happiness is about
00:54:13
understanding the deep dynamics of of not not even the brain but of the mind
00:54:20
of consciousness and we are just not there yet.
00:54:25
Um we are very very good and and the related problem is that humans usually
00:54:31
understand how to manipulate something long before they understand the
00:54:37
consequences of the manipulations. If you look at the outside world, at the
00:54:44
ecological system, we have learned how to cut forests, how to build huge dams
00:54:51
over rivers long before we understood what will be the consequences for the
00:54:57
ecological system. Which is why we now have this ecological crisis. We
00:55:03
manipulated the world without understanding the consequences.
00:55:09
As something similar might happen with the world inside us,
00:55:15
with more powerful medicines, with brain computer interfaces, with genetic
00:55:21
engineering and and so forth, we are gaining the power to manipulate our
00:55:27
internal world, the world within us. But again, the power to manipulate is
00:55:34
not the same thing as understanding the complexity of the system and the
00:55:39
consequences of the manipulation. A related manipulation there is immortality and our pursuit of it. I've
00:55:45
sat with people on this podcast who are committing their lives to staying alive forever. And there's a through line
00:55:51
there between our desire to be immortal, you know, the rise in the scientific
00:55:57
discoveries that are enabling that and our happiness. I I've often thought, you know, much of the reason why things are
00:56:04
special in my life is because they're scarce, including my time. Yeah. And I I always I almost wonder about the
00:56:10
psychological um issues I would face if I knew I was
00:56:16
immortal. Like if I knew that the partner I'm with doesn't come at the
00:56:22
expense of another one I can be with, you know, at 30 years old. And the car, you know, the choices you
00:56:28
make, I think what makes them scaled are their scarcity. Mhm. Against the backdrop of an of a finite
00:56:35
life. Uh yeah, it will definitely change everything if you think about relations
00:56:40
between parents and children. So if you live forever, so the 20 years you raised
00:56:47
uh uh you spent raising somebody 2,000 years ago, what do they mean now? But I
00:56:52
think long before we get to that point, I mean, most of these people are going to be incredibly disappointed because it
00:57:00
will not happen within their lifetime. Another related problem is that we will
00:57:05
not get to immortality. We will get to something that maybe should be called a mortality.
00:57:12
that immortality is that like you're you're God, you can never die no matter what happens. It's even if we solve
00:57:21
cancer and Alzheimer and demensia and whatever, we will not get there. We will
00:57:27
get to kind of a life without a definitive expiry date that you can live
00:57:34
indefinitely. You can go every 10 years to a clinic and get yourself rejuven
00:57:40
rejuvenated, but if a bus runs you over or your airplanes explodes or a
00:57:48
terrorist kills you, you're dead and you're not coming back to life. Now,
00:57:55
realizing that you have a chance to live forever, but if there is an accident, you die. This creates a level of anxiety
00:58:04
and terror unlike anything that we know in our own lives. I think the people who
00:58:10
will will be in that situation will be extremely anxious and miserable.
00:58:17
And another issue is you know people often spend so much effort trying to get
00:58:26
gain something get something without really understanding what are they going
00:58:32
why what will you do with it what is so good about it you know like people spend so much effort to to get have more and
00:58:38
more money instead of thinking what will I actually do with that money so it's
00:58:44
the same with you know the people who want to extend life forever. What is so
00:58:49
good about life that what will you do with it? And if you know it, why don't you do it
00:58:56
already? That uh you know I hear people saying about how how precious human
00:59:02
consciousness is why why do you think it's so precious
00:59:07
and whatever it is, why don't you do it right now? I mean why spend your life
00:59:16
developing some kind of treatment that will uh extend your consciousness for a
00:59:24
thousand years. Just spend your time doing now whatever
00:59:31
you think you would be doing with your consciousness a thousand years from now. So if they were to say but it'll give me
00:59:37
more time with my family. You're saying just instead of wasting your time just like Exactly. So, you know, somebody who has
00:59:43
no time for their family at all right now because they are busy developing the kind of uh uh uh miracle cure that will
00:59:51
enable them to spend time with with their family in 200 years. This makes no
00:59:56
sense. I think about the disparity that artificial intelligence and these forms
01:00:03
of sort of bioengineering might create because it's conceivable that the rich
01:00:08
will gain access to these technologies first. Yeah. And then, you know, when we think about bioengineering,
01:00:15
being able to sort of play with our genetic code, that means if I, for example, managed to get my hands on some
01:00:20
kind of bio engineering treatment to make sure that my kids were maybe a little bit smarter, maybe a little bit
01:00:27
stronger, whatever, then you're going to start a sort of genetic chain of
01:00:32
modified children that are superior in intelligence and strength and whatever else might be desirable. M
01:00:38
and then you have this disparity in society where you have like the you know one humans one set of humans are on a
01:00:44
completely different exponential trajectory and the other humans are you know yeah behind
01:00:51
this is extremely dangerous uh I think we just shouldn't go there that we
01:00:57
shouldn't invest a lot of resources
01:01:02
efforts in developing these kinds of uh upgrades and enhancements
01:01:08
that are very likely, at least at first, to be the preserve of a small elite and
01:01:16
to translate economic inequality into biological inequality and to basically
01:01:23
split the human species to to split homo sapiens into, you know, a ruling class
01:01:30
of superhumans and and the rest of us. This is a very very dangerous
01:01:35
development. related to that is the problem that I
01:01:41
don't think it will be these will be upgrades at all
01:01:47
what worries me is that a lot of these things will turn out actually to be downgrades
01:01:53
that we again we don't understand our bodies our brains our minds well
01:02:00
enough to know what will be the consequences of tweaking our genetic
01:02:07
code or of um I don't know implanting all kinds of devices into our brains.
01:02:15
People who think that this will enable them let's say to upgrade their
01:02:21
intelligence they don't know what the side effects will be. It could be that the same
01:02:28
treatment that increases your intelligence also decreases your
01:02:34
compassion or your spiritual depth or whatever. And the danger is that
01:02:40
especially if this technology is in the hands of powerful corporations, armies,
01:02:47
governments, they will enhance those qualities that they want like
01:02:56
intelligence and like discipline while disregarding
01:03:01
uh other qualities which could be even more important for for human flourishing
01:03:07
like compassion. or like autistic sensitivity or like spirituality. If I think about somebody
01:03:13
again like Putin, what would he do with this type of technology then yes, he would like an army of super intelligent
01:03:21
and super loyal soldiers. And if these soldiers do don't have any compassion or
01:03:28
any spiritual depth, all the better for him. But that speaks to the arms race. And you know, you said you we think we
01:03:33
shouldn't, but China will see that as an opportunity or Putin will see that as an opportunity if the if the Western world,
01:03:40
if the United States or the UK don't. And so again, it comes back to this
01:03:45
point of, you know, we're screwed if we're damned if we do, we're damned if we don't. I'm not sure that in this case it it
01:03:51
works. uh because again a lot of these upgrades are likely to have um
01:03:58
detrimental side effects both for the person in question and for the society
01:04:04
as a whole. And I think that in this case societies that will choose to be uh
01:04:12
uh progress more slowly and safely they will actually have an advantage. It's
01:04:18
like if you say, you know, there is some other country where they don't have any brakes on their on their cars and they
01:04:25
don't have any seat belts and they release new medicines without checking their side effects. They're moving so
01:04:32
fast. We are left behind. No, it makes no sense to to to imitate them. This will actually ruin their societies. You
01:04:39
don't want to imitate these kinds of of harmful effects. Uh with development of
01:04:45
AI, it's different. I think there the advantages in things like finance, like
01:04:53
the military will be so big that an AI AI arms race is almost inevitable.
01:05:01
But with trying to kind of bioengineer humans, if you go too fast, it will be
01:05:09
this self-destructive. So we can take it most slowly and safely
01:05:14
and without being kind of left behind in an arms race. You said on the Tim Ferris podcast, the
01:05:21
best scenario is that homo sapiens will disappear but in a peaceful and gradual way and be replaced by something better.
01:05:26
It's quite a um uncomfortable statement to to listen to.
01:05:32
I think that again the the the type of technologies that we are now developing when you combine them with the human
01:05:39
ambition to uh um you know to to improve
01:05:45
ourselves it's almost inevitable that we will use
01:05:51
these technologies to change ourselves. The question is whether we will do it
01:05:57
slowly and responsibly enough for the consequences to be beneficial. But the
01:06:03
idea that we can now develop these extremely powerful tools of bioengineering and AI and remain
01:06:12
the way we are. We'll still be the same homo sapiens in 200 years, in 500 years,
01:06:18
in 1,000 years. we'll have all these tools to connect brain to computers to to kind of re-engineer our genetic code
01:06:26
and we won't do it. I think this is unlikely. One of the outstanding questions that I have and one of the sort of observations
01:06:33
I've had is people like Sam Alman um the founder of OpenAI that made Chat GPT
01:06:39
started working on universal basic income products like Worldcoin. And I thought, you know what, that's curious
01:06:45
that the people that are at the very forefront of this AI revolution are now trying to solve the second problem they
01:06:52
see coming, which is people not having jobs. Yeah. Essentially, is is that do you think that's a because
01:06:58
you know every I've spoken a lot this year on stages and this is one of the questions I always get asked is the
01:07:03
implications of AI on the and jobs as we know it in the workforce. Mhm. Is it realistic to believe that most
01:07:09
jobs will disappear as we know them today? I think
01:07:16
many jobs, maybe most jobs will disappear, but new jobs will emerge. You
01:07:23
know, most jobs that people do today didn't exist 200 years ago. Mhm. Like this.
01:07:28
Uh yeah, like this. Like doing a podcast. And there will be new jobs.
01:07:34
The really big problem will be how to retrain people. Uh it demands a lot of financial support
01:07:42
also psychological support for people to kind of relearn, retrain, reinvent
01:07:50
themselves and doing it not just once but repeatedly throughout their career
01:07:55
throughout their lives. The AI revolution will not be a single watershed event like you have the big AI
01:08:02
revolution in 2030. You lose 60% of jobs. You create lots of new jobs. You
01:08:09
have 10 difficult years. Everybody adjusting, adapting, reskilling, whatever, and then everything settles
01:08:16
down to a new equilibrium. It won't be like that. AI is nowhere near its full
01:08:21
potential. So you will have a lot of changes by 2030, even more changes by
01:08:27
2040, even more changes by 2050. You will have new jobs, but the new jobs too
01:08:33
will change and disappear. What new jobs? In a world where intelligence is
01:08:38
disrupted, what what jobs are left? Because you say you're going to retrain me. I'm like, you know, I'm not going to
01:08:44
be able to keep up with an AI that's retraining every second. And I I'm not sure. I mean some of the
01:08:50
answers might be counterintuitive that um
01:08:56
at least at present we see that AI is extremely good at automating jobs that
01:09:02
only require cognitive skills but they are not good at jobs that require motor
01:09:09
skills and social skills. So if you think about say doctors and nurses, so
01:09:14
at least those types of doctors who are only doing cognitive work, they
01:09:23
read articles, they get your medical results, all kinds of tests and and and
01:09:29
and and whatever. They diagnose your disease and they decide on a course of treatment. This is purely cognitive
01:09:36
work. This is the easiest thing to automate. But if you think about a nurse that has
01:09:42
to replace a bandage to a crying child, this is much more difficult to automate.
01:09:50
You don't think that's possible to automate? I I think it is possible, but not now. You need very delicate motor skills and
01:09:57
also social skills to do that. Did you see Elon's video the other day with um the Tesla robot?
01:10:04
I see a lot of these videos. It's it's getting the egg and it's cracking the egg and it's going like this.
01:10:10
No, again I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying it will take longer. It's more difficult. Again,
01:10:16
there is also the social aspect. If you think about self-driving vehicles, the biggest problem for self-driving
01:10:23
vehicles is humans. I mean, not the not just the the human drivers, it's the
01:10:28
pedestrians, it's the it's the passengers. How do you deal with a drunken passenger? whatever.
01:10:36
So, uh, again, it's not impossible, but it's much more difficult. So, again, I
01:10:41
think that there will be new jobs, at least in the foreseeable future. The
01:10:46
problem will will be to retrain people. And the biggest problem of all will be
01:10:52
on the global level, not on the national level. I when I hear people talk about
01:10:57
universal basic income, the first question to ask is, is it universal or
01:11:02
national? Is it a system that let's say raises
01:11:09
taxes on big tech corporations in Silicon Valley in California and uses
01:11:15
the money to provide basic services and also retraining courses for people in
01:11:24
Ohio and Pennsylvania? Uh or does it also apply to people in
01:11:30
Guatemala and Pakistan? I mean, what happens when it becomes
01:11:35
cheaper to produce shirts with robots in California than in Guatemala and in
01:11:41
Mexico? Uh, does Sam Alman has a vision of the US government raising taxes in
01:11:48
California and sending the money to Guatemala to support the people there?
01:11:53
If the answer is no, we are not talking about universal basic income. We are only talking about national basic income
01:11:59
in the US. Then what happens to the people in Guatemala? That's the that's the biggest question.
01:12:06
And a sub question to that is about how one should be educating our our children
01:12:11
and our education institutions as they are today. Because with what's to come, um makes me wonder what what skill would
01:12:18
be worth investing you know 10 12 years into a child that I had.
01:12:23
Um nobody has any idea. I mean if you think about specific skills
01:12:30
then this is the first time in history when we have no idea how the job market
01:12:36
or how society would look like in 20 years. So we don't know what specific
01:12:41
skills people will need if you think back in history. So it was never
01:12:47
possible to predict the future but at least people knew what kind of skills
01:12:53
will be needed in a couple of decades. If you live, I don't know, in England
01:12:58
in uh uh 1023, a thousand years ago, you don't know
01:13:05
what will happen in in 30 years. Maybe the Normans will invade or the Vikings
01:13:11
or the Scots or whoever. Maybe there'll be an earthquake. Maybe there'll be a
01:13:16
new pandemic. Anything can happen. You can't predict. But you still have a very
01:13:22
good idea of how the economy would look like and how human society would look
01:13:27
like in the 1050s or the 1060s. You know that most people will still be farmers.
01:13:35
You know it's a good idea to teach your kids how to uh harvest wheat, how to
01:13:41
bake bread, how to ride a hose, how to shoot and bow an arrow. These things
01:13:46
will still be necessary in 30 years. If you now look 30 years to the future,
01:13:52
nobody has any idea what kind of skills will be needed. If you think for
01:13:58
instance, okay, this is the age of AI, computers, I will teach my kids how to code computers. Maybe in 30 years,
01:14:06
humans no longer code anything because AI is so much better than us at writing
01:14:12
code. Um, so what should we focus on? I would
01:14:17
say the only thing we can be certain about is that 30 years from now the
01:14:22
world will be extremely volatile, extremely it will keep changing at an
01:14:27
ever rapid pace. Do you think this is going to incre increase the amount of conflict
01:14:33
because I watched a video on your YouTube channel where you said the return of wars? Yeah. Uh that's one of the dangers that
01:14:40
there is and we see it all all over the world now. uh like 10 years ago we were
01:14:45
in the most peaceful era in human history and unfortunately this era is
01:14:51
over. We are now in a new era of wars and potentially of imperialism
01:14:58
and we are seeing it all over the world uh with the Russian invasion of Ukraine now with the war in the Middle East uh
01:15:05
Venezuela and Guyana some East Asia war is is is back on the table. It's not
01:15:13
just because of the rapid changes and the upheavalss they cause. It's also
01:15:19
because um you know 10 years ago we had a global order, the liberal order which
01:15:26
was far from perfect but it's still kind of regulated relations between nations
01:15:33
between countries based on an idea on on the liberal
01:15:39
worldview that despite our national differences all humans share certain
01:15:46
basic experiences and needs and interests. Which is why it makes sense
01:15:52
for us to work together to diffuse conflicts and to uh uh um solve our
01:16:00
common problems. It was far from perfect, but it did create the most
01:16:06
peaceful era in human history. Then this order was repeatedly attacked
01:16:12
not only from outside from forces like Russia or North Korea
01:16:18
or Iran that never accepted this order but also from the inside even from the
01:16:24
United States uh which was the architect to a large extent of of this order with
01:16:30
the election of Donald Trump which says I don't care about any kind of global order. I'd only care about my own
01:16:38
nation. And you see this way of thinking that I only care about my the interests
01:16:44
of my nation more and more around the world. Now the big question to ask is if
01:16:51
all the nations think like that what regulates the relations between them
01:16:58
and there was no alternative nobody came up with with the and said okay I don't
01:17:04
like the liberal liberal global order I have a better suggestion for how to manage relations between
01:17:12
different nations. They just destroyed the existing order
01:17:17
without offering an alternative. And the alternative to order is simply disorder.
01:17:24
And this is now where we find ourselves. Do you think there's more wars on the way? Yes. Unless unless we reestablish order,
01:17:33
there will be more and worse wars uh coming in the next few years in more and
01:17:39
more areas around the world. You see defense budgets all over the
01:17:45
world uh uh skyrocketing and this is a vicious circle. When your
01:17:51
neighbors increase their military budget, you feel compelled to do the
01:17:56
same and then they increase their budget even more. You know, when I say that the
01:18:02
early 21st century was the most peaceful era in human history,
01:18:08
it's one of the indications is how uh how low
01:18:14
the military budgets all over the world were. For most of history, kings and
01:18:21
emperors and cons and sultans, they the military was the number one item on
01:18:27
their budget. They spent more on their soldiers and navies and fortresses than
01:18:34
on anything else. In the early 21st century, most countries
01:18:40
spend something like a few percentage points of their of their budget on on
01:18:47
the military. Education, health care, welfare were a much more a much bigger
01:18:55
item on the budget than defense. And this is now changing. The money is
01:19:02
increasingly going to tanks and missiles
01:19:07
and cyber weapons instead of to nurses and and schools and and social workers.
01:19:15
And again, it's not inevitable. It's the result of human decisions. The relatively peaceful era of the early
01:19:22
21st century, it did not result from some miracle. It resulted from humans
01:19:28
making wise decisions in previous decades. What are the wise decisions we need to make now in your view?
01:19:33
Reinvest in in rebuilding a global order
01:19:39
which is based on universal values and norms
01:19:44
and not just on the narrow interests of of specific nation states.
01:19:50
Are you concerned that Trump might be elected again shortly? I I think it's very likely and if it happens it is likely to be the
01:19:56
kind of like the the death blow to what remains of the global order and he says
01:20:03
it and he says it openly. Now again it should be clear that many of these politicians
01:20:10
they present a false dichotomy a false binary vision
01:20:16
of the world as if you have to choose between patriotism and globalism between
01:20:24
being loyal to your own nation and being loyal to some kind of I don't know
01:20:30
global government or whatever and this is completely false there is no
01:20:35
contradiction between patriotism and global cooperation. When we talk about
01:20:41
global cooperation, we definitely don't have in mind, at least not anybody that I know, a global government. This is an
01:20:48
impossible and very dangerous idea. It simply means that um you have certain
01:20:55
rules and norms for how different nation states treat each other and and and and and and
01:21:03
behave towards each other. If you don't have a system of of global norms and
01:21:09
values, then very quickly what you have is just global conflict, is just wars. I
01:21:16
mean some people have this idea they imagine the world as a network of friendly fortresses
01:21:23
like each nation will be a fortress with very high walls taking care of its own
01:21:30
interest interests but uh living on relatively friendly terms with the
01:21:37
neighboring fortresses trading with them and and and whatever. Now the main
01:21:42
problem with this vision is that fortresses are almost never friendly. Each fortress always wants a bit more
01:21:50
land, a bit more prosperity, a bit more security for itself at the expense of
01:21:57
the neighbors. And uh this is the high road to conflict
01:22:02
and to and to and to war and to war. There's that phrase, isn't there? Ignorance is bliss. Now, something that
01:22:10
your work has forced you and continues to encourage you to not live in is
01:22:15
ignorance. So, with that, one might logically deduce that out the window goes your bliss.
01:22:22
Um, are you are you happy? I think I'm relatively happy, at least
01:22:29
happier than I was uh for most of my life. I
01:22:35
part of it is is that I invest a lot of my time not just in
01:22:42
you know researching what is happening in the world but also in the health of
01:22:47
my own mind and you know keeping a kind of balanced
01:22:56
information diet that it's it's it's basically like with food. You need food in order to survive
01:23:04
and to be healthy. But if you eat too much or if you eat too much of the wrong stuff, it's it's bad for you. And it's
01:23:12
exactly the same with information. Information is the the food of the mind.
01:23:17
And if you eat too much of it of the wrong kind, you'll get a very sick mind.
01:23:24
So I uh I try to to keep a very balanced
01:23:29
uh information diet which also includes information fasts.
01:23:35
So I try to disconnect. I um every day I dedicate two hours a
01:23:42
day for meditation. Wow. And every year I go for a long meditation retreat of between 30 and 60
01:23:50
days like in completely disconnecting. No phones, no emails, not even books. Um
01:23:58
just observing myself, observing what is happening inside my body and inside my
01:24:04
mind, getting to know myself better and kind of digesting
01:24:11
all the information that I absorbed during the rest of the year or the rest
01:24:17
of the day. Have you seen a clear benefit in doing that? Uh yes, very very clear. I don't think I
01:24:23
would be able to write these books or to do what I'm doing um without these kind
01:24:30
with this kind of information diet and and without kind of devoting a lot of time and attention to the balancing my
01:24:38
mind and keeping it healthy. You know so many people spend so much time keeping their body healthy which is very
01:24:45
important of course but we need to spend equal amount of attention with with our mind. It is as important as as our body.
01:24:52
When you said you don't think you'd be able to do what you do if you didn't take these information diets, why?
01:24:58
I'll just, you know, um first of all be just overwhelmed
01:25:04
and uh um not have any kind of peace of mind, not have any kind of perspective.
01:25:11
If you're constantly in the news cycle, in the information cycle, you lose all
01:25:18
perspective. You know organic entities unlike AIs, unlike computers, we are
01:25:26
cyclical entities. We need to sleep every day. AIS don't sleep. You know,
01:25:33
even the stock exchange closes every afternoon. It closes also for the
01:25:39
weekend or for so for Christmas. If you think about it, this is amazing that you
01:25:44
know if if a war erupts in Christmas uh uh the Wall Street will be able to
01:25:51
react only after a couple of days because the people are on holiday. They
01:25:57
they took time off. Even the money market takes time off. But if you give
01:26:05
AI full control, there will never be any time off. it will be 24 hours a day, 365
01:26:12
days a a year and people just collapse.
01:26:17
I mean, I think part of the problem that politicians today face is that um they
01:26:23
need to be on 24 hours a day because the news cycle is on 24 hours a day. Like in
01:26:29
previous eras, if you're I don't know a king in the middle ages and you you you you ride some you go somewhere, you're
01:26:36
on the road in your carriage and nobody can reach you. Even if the French are
01:26:42
invading, nobody can reach you. You have some time off. If you're a prime
01:26:47
minister now, there is no time off. And computers are built for it, but human
01:26:54
brains aren't. If you try to keep an organic entity
01:27:01
awake and kind of constantly processing information and reacting 24 hours a day,
01:27:08
it will very soon collapse. It's funny, it made me think of what the for I think it was the former Netflix
01:27:14
CEO or one of the Netflix CEOs or someone said um they said, "Our biggest competitor is sleep."
01:27:20
Sleep. Yeah. That's a very scary and and very I think important line and it's a very honest line.
01:27:26
It's a very honest line and it's scary because um if people don't sleep they
01:27:31
collapse and eventually they die. And this is again part of the problem that
01:27:37
we talked earlier about about the battle for human attention in social media in
01:27:43
streaming services. Now for many of these corporations they
01:27:49
measure their success by user engagement. The more people are engaged the more
01:27:56
successful we are. Now user engagement is a very
01:28:02
broad definition. According to this measurement one hour of outrage is
01:28:10
better than 10 minutes of joy. And uh uh certainly better than 1 hour
01:28:17
of sleep because one hour of outrage I will consume three adverts. Yes.
01:28:22
And then that means that the corporation make $30 for example. And and from two hours of
01:28:28
sleep they make nothing. From 10 minutes of joy maybe they sell only one ad.
01:28:34
Mhm. And but from the viewpoint of of how humans function and how this
01:28:41
organism function, 10 minutes of joy are probably better than for us than one
01:28:47
hour of outrage. And certainly we need not just two hours, we need six, seven,
01:28:52
eight hours of sleep. Well, this is why, you know, the algorithms on on certain platforms,
01:28:58
specifically Tik Tok, Mhm. are just absolutely addictive to say the least. Like I I
01:29:06
because they hacked us. Yeah. They It's literally they you know t we had you know a certain level of
01:29:12
addiction to the previous social algorithms and then Tik Tok came along and said hold my beer and they just went
01:29:18
for it you know and and they've won because of that. I see 60 year olds
01:29:25
absolutely addicted to Tik Tok and because they don't understand the concept of an algorithm sometimes um and
01:29:31
they don't understand like the the the advertising model and all of that stuff it's it's hypnotism. They're like
01:29:37
absolutely hypnotized. My funnily enough my driver is one of them. So my driver's outside whenever I walk up to his car
01:29:43
he's just like this on Tik Tok. He's scrolling and I had a conversation with him last night. I'm like do you realize that Tik Tok has your brain?
01:29:51
Yeah, you know, abs, you know, and we're just at the very foot sort of the first steps
01:29:57
of an exponential curve of algorithms competing for our attention in our brain. We haven't seen anything yet. I mean,
01:30:02
these algorithms, they are what like 10 years old in terms of you think about these social
01:30:08
media algorithms and the algorithms that get to know you personally to hack your brain and then grab your attention. It's
01:30:14
they are 10 years old and the companies die if they don't beat the other algorithms. So, like Twitter
01:30:20
now, when Elon took it over, and I think people will relate to this if you use Twitter, suddenly I've seen more people
01:30:27
having their heads blown off and being hit by cars on Twitter than I'd ever seen in the previous 10 years.
01:30:32
It's and I think someone at Twitter's gone, listen, this company's going to die unless we we increase time spent on
01:30:38
this platform and show more ads. So, let's start serving up a more addictive algorithm. And that requires a response
01:30:43
from Instagram and the other plat. And so it's a real, you know, Elon has this other company,
01:30:48
the Boring Company. Yeah. Which is about boring tunnels, of course. But actually, it might be a good
01:30:54
idea to make Twitter more boring and to make Tik Tok more boring. I mean, I know it's it's a very bad
01:31:01
kind of business decision. But I don't think humanity will survive
01:31:09
unless we have more boredom. If you ask me what is wrong with the
01:31:15
world in 2023 is that uh everybody is far too excited.
01:31:21
And if I had to kind of summarize what's wrong in one word, the word is excited.
01:31:27
And people don't understand the meaning of this word. People think that excited means happy. Like two people meet, I am
01:31:35
so excited to meet you. I have a new idea. I publish a new book. Whatever. Oh, this is such a such an exciting
01:31:41
idea. such an exciting book. And exciting isn't happy. Exciting isn't
01:31:48
always good. Sometimes, yes, sometimes it's good to be excited. An organism that is excited all the time dies. The
01:31:56
meaning of excitement is that you know that the body is in flight or fight
01:32:01
mode. All the nerves are on, all the neurons are firing, all the muscles are tense.
01:32:08
This is excitement and very often negative things excite
01:32:13
us. Fear excite fear is excitement. Hate is excitement. Anger is excitement.
01:32:21
And um you know it's when I meet a good friend I'm often relaxed to meet the
01:32:29
friend not excited. and or much kind you know you think about
01:32:35
the political level we have far too many exciting politicians doing very exciting
01:32:41
things and we need more boring politicians more Bidens that do less less exciting uh uh uh
01:32:50
things and but the brain is wired to pay attention to excitement and to crave it
01:32:56
but the brain evolved in situations when you didn't have a constant stream of
01:33:03
exciting videos. Sometimes it was on, sometimes it was off. And now our brains
01:33:10
have been hacked and these devices, technologies, they know how to
01:33:17
create constant excitement. And the more this happens, we also lose
01:33:25
our ability, our skill to be bored. that if we have to spend a few minutes doing
01:33:32
nothing somewhere waiting, we can't do it. We immediately take out the smartphone and start watching Tik Tok or
01:33:40
scrolling through Twitter or whatever. Did you hear about that experiment where people would rather take an electric shock than do nothing?
01:33:47
Yeah. And you know you you can't get for instance
01:33:54
to any level of peace of mind if you don't know how to handle boredom.
01:34:01
That peace and boredom are are the same way that excitement and outrage are
01:34:07
neighbors. Peace and boredom are also neighbors. And if you don't know how to
01:34:13
handle boredom, if the minute there is a hint of boredom, you run away to some
01:34:19
exciting thing, you will never experience peace of mind. And people if
01:34:25
if if humans don't experience peace of mind, there is no way that the world as a whole is going to be peaceful.
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01:36:46
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01:36:53
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01:37:00
were privileged to grow up in one of the most peaceful and most optimistic eras
01:37:07
in human history. The end of the Cold War, the fall of the Iron Curtain. I
01:37:13
don't know of any better time. Uh but when I look at what is happening
01:37:19
right now, I don't envy the people who grow up in the 2020s.
01:37:25
What is the closing statement of hope and solution
01:37:34
that kind of ties off this conversation? What is the thing that having someone gotten to this point in the conversation
01:37:40
they should be thinking about doing which will cause the domino effect that will lead us to maybe more hopeful
01:37:47
future. But we still have agency. I mean the algorithms are not yet in in full
01:37:54
control. They are taking power away from us. But most power is still in human
01:37:59
hands and every human being has some level of of power of agency which means
01:38:06
that each one of us has some responsibility. Now nobody can solve all the world's
01:38:12
problems. So focus on one thing. Find the one
01:38:17
thing which is close to your heart which you have a deep understanding of and uh
01:38:24
and and and and try to make a difference there and the best way to make a
01:38:30
difference is to cooperate with other people. I mean the human superpower is
01:38:35
our ability to cooperate in large numbers. So if you care about a specific
01:38:40
issue don't try to be an isolated activist. 50 individuals who cooperate as part of
01:38:48
an organization can uh do much much more than 500
01:38:54
isolated activists, individuals. So, and find your one thing and again
01:39:01
don't try to do everything. Let other people do the rest and cooperate with
01:39:06
other people on on your chosen mission. Yal, your book Sapiens changed the world
01:39:14
in many ways. is it gave us a new perspective and a new understanding of who we are as as humans, where we've
01:39:19
come from. And with that, we have a road map for where we're going. It's celebrating its 10th anniversary. I have
01:39:25
the 10th anniversary edition here, which I'm going to beg you to sign for me after. Um, and it really is a once in a
01:39:32
generation book. The numbers that I have are that it sold more than 25 million
01:39:37
copies and that's in a market where people said no one's buying books anymore. That's crazy. That's absolutely
01:39:44
that's absolutely crazy. You you're working on a new book which I'm very excited to hear about. I'm sure that a
01:39:49
little birdie told me that'll be announced next year and I'm sure everyone's incredibly energized about that. Um what is the I ask this people the
01:39:56
question sometimes just as a way to to close off the show but I wanted to ask you it because it's especially pertinent to someone that's got such a huge
01:40:03
varying wealth of work. Is there one particular topic that is pertinent to
01:40:09
our future that we didn't talk about? I I would say that when we talk about
01:40:15
the future, um,
01:40:20
history is is more relevant than ever before. History is not really the study of the
01:40:28
past. History is the study of change, of how things change.
01:40:34
you nobody cares about the past for the sake of the past. All the people who
01:40:39
lived in the middle ages or in the uh uh ancient uh uh Rome, they all they are
01:40:45
all dead. They we can't do anything about their disasters and their misery.
01:40:53
We can't correct any of the wrongs that happened in ancient times. Um and they
01:41:01
don't care what we say about them. You can say anything you want about the Romans, the Vikings, they they are gone.
01:41:08
They don't care. The reason to study the past is because
01:41:13
if you understand the dynamics of change in previous centuries, in previous eras,
01:41:20
this gives you perspective uh on the process of of change in in the
01:41:26
present moment. And I think the curse of history is that people have this fantasy of
01:41:34
changing the past of bringing justice to the past and this is just impossible.
01:41:40
You cannot go back there and and save the people there. The big question is
01:41:46
how do you um save the people now? How do you prevent
01:41:53
catastrophes perhaps from from happening?
01:41:58
And this is the reason to to study history. And the main message of of history is
01:42:05
that humans created the world in which we live.
01:42:11
The world that we know with nation states and corporations and capitalist
01:42:17
economics and uh uh religions like Christianity and Hinduism, humans
01:42:23
created this world and humans can also change it. If there is something about
01:42:30
the world that you think is unfair, is dangerous, is is problematic, then I
01:42:38
some things are beyond our control. The laws of physics are beyond our control.
01:42:43
So far, the laws of biology are also beyond our control. But knowing
01:42:52
what is natural, what is the outcome of physics and biology versus what is the
01:43:00
outcome of human inventions, human stories, human institutions. This is
01:43:06
very difficult. A lot of things that people think are just natural. This is
01:43:13
the way the world is. This is biology. This is physics. They are not. They are actually the result of historical
01:43:19
processes. And this is why it's so important to understand history to understand how
01:43:26
things change and to understand what can be changed.
01:43:32
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.
01:43:37
Oh, the question that's been left for you, if you could impose a global law, but
01:43:43
only one global law, what would it be and why? Oh, great question for you. I
01:43:49
I would say that people should
01:43:55
consume less information and spend more time reflecting and
01:44:01
digesting what they already know, what they already heard. Thank you, Eva. It means um a huge
01:44:07
amount to me that someone of your esteem and someone that whose books have inspired me and turned the lights on in
01:44:13
so many areas of my life um would have this conversation with me today. So I thank you so much for that. But also for turning the lights on to the hundreds of
01:44:20
millions of people that have consumed your work all around the world, the videos, the books, etc., etc. as you've said there, it's the most important work
01:44:27
because it helps us looking back at history in a way that is accessible um and inclusive in a way that even I could
01:44:34
read without having to be a historian or understand very complex subject matter. So, thank you so so so much.
01:44:41
Thank you. It's been great to to be here.
01:44:46
If you listen to this podcast frequently, there's something I talk about very often and that is the subject of sleep. And so I dug down a pretty
01:44:54
deep sleep rabbit hole to figure out how I could sleep better. One of the things that I found is a brand called Eight
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01:45:05
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01:45:19
sets my bed to the temperature that I need to have optimal sleep. The brands
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of them. They've made that piece of foam that we all sleep on for 8 hours a day smart. I've put a link in the
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Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely
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love another recent episode we've done. So, I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy
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it. [Music]
