Interview with Yuval Noah Harari | VPRO Documentary

[Music] and then we can start so welcome mr harari or may i say yuval yuval is fine perfectly yuval i'm honored and excited to have the opportunity this evening to uh to pick your brain but also hopefully to get to know you a little better um get to know the man behind the books and the lectures and and i understand i'm just in time because before we started this interview told me that coming sunday you're leaving for your your annual of the grid retreat meditation i'm going for two months meditation yeah but it's also two months of not talking at all complete silence i'm not talking to people and no phones and no computers no books no writing no nothing yeah you know to detoxify the mind yes so no talking so don't hold back now you can still you can still talk you get every opportunity in the next what 90 minutes um and without i mean i didn't want to dive too deep right away into the details of meditation because i hope we'll yeah we'll get to that later probably but i i did wonder what you missed the most when you're away for those sexy is it is it your husband yes oh no no no no i wanted i wanted to give you three options oh okay okay but it's really nice that you said yes right away now i want to say is it your husband your cell phone or your dog i don't have a cell phone uh it's it's definitely my husband i mean my dog is currently he's 14 and he has cancer and he seems to be in his last days so it's it's really kind of i hope he'll he'll wait until i come back from the meditation retreat he's doing well now he's taking these cannabis drops i mean he's not taking it we're giving it to him wait you're giving weed to your dog not weed it's you know it's the extract the the medicinal no and we just kind of sprayed on on his food and he and it really improves his condition really it seems there is no placebo effect with dogs that would be funny though placebo effect in dogs that you're telling him this really works and then he thinks yeah you're right yeah yeah yeah so 60 days of non-talking um and we are now we are we're setting off on a journey through your head basically and and through your life and to do so we've asked you to pick a handful of uh movies tv series that are meaningful to you in one way or another um and i happen to know that watching tv series is one of the main hobbies of you and your husband that's right are you typical binge watchers no i mean he tends to be more of a bingy type i tend to be like um we need to digest this episode before we move to the to the next one so there is often a conversation around it so we often end up watching two episodes in a row okay so not the whole season in one night when we just yesterday night we watched the first episode of succession of the new oh the new third season it's amazing i mean it's so good it's like shakespeare for the 21st century i haven't gotten a chance yet i had to watch all the the the movies that you are going to discuss this evening yeah um how about we take a look at the first clip you selected it's an educational children's cartoon series from late 70s i think the early 70s early 70s i watched this in the like late 70s early 80s when i was four or five years old and it kind of completely blew my mind yeah we were born in the same year 1976 76 yeah i also watched it as a kid um it's uh i mean when i watch it now i'm surprised again and again that some of the things i write today in my books and i think that oh this is something i just thought about like today or or this year and then i watch it and i know it was already there when i was like five years old it was on tv you basically plagiarized it yes maybe unconsciously unconsciously unconsciously yes from your child because it's a series about the history of humanity it's originally french entitled lom which means once upon a time men um why why why do you want to kick off with it without giving away the full story it inspired my my love of history and as i said it really blew my mind that you know i mean to as a kid trying to understand the world why is the world the way it is and then you watch it and it tells you that the world wasn't always like this it was completely different and how things keep changing over time and um it i think it shaped to to large extent my view of the world and um it has i think i i don't know you know it's difficult to put a number on it but i i credit it to some extent with my becoming a historian wow so basically this is the origin of yuval oh as historian yes as historian wow once upon a time men first of all pretty harsh scene for a vegan i wasn't vegan then no you're no not as a kid and well the the cat's let out of the bag this is where you got your information from millions of readers all over the world wonder where does he get his information from at least some of it i mean watching it now i mean again it's i mean it's so sexist there are no women there but there's just this one woman who does nothing throughout the whole thing except cooking they hand out the food they hang out the food and that's it even even in the 70s history was written by men yes still still um but but still i mean it's it's such a rich show because what makes it so good for you you know it com it starts with evolution which you know growing up in in israel in the 1980s was not obvious we still don't really teach evolution in in school so you know watching this kind of a powerful image or a powerful narrative that sticks in the mind and also you know the basic understanding that humans are animals that still most people reject most people around the world today yeah and so you were not taught that as a young boy no i mean we were taught the bible okay i mean i come from a secular family and i went to a secular school but still in a secular school in israel you learned like tons and tons of bible you don't learn evolution but you don't learn anything about dinosaurs or fossils or you know dinosaurs kids live dinosaurs you probably hear about dinosaurs but you know the whole process of evolution and where we human beings came from an ancient human species maybe it was mentioned here and there but you get far more bible than that but what did you think then when you watched this you're like wait a minute no one's telling me about this i'm not sure i mean you know i mean the world is so complicated when you're five i mean it's still complicated even today just to make sense of it and you get so many different points of views and stories that don't really add up so it took me many many years to integrate the different narratives that i heard from different places yeah and also to discard some of these narratives like to understand that the bible is just it's not the the history of humanity it's just a story that some humans invented 3 000 years ago and became extremely powerful and successful but it's it's just a story and your parents did not at least did not forbid you no absolutely no no again i came from a secular family yeah they were very much in favor of this but um again you go to school and and until today you learn mainly israel history and jewish history again you learn an awful lot of bible but even in history class it's mostly you know you don't know anything about china you don't learn anything about i don't know the agricultural revolution you learn something about the roman empire but mostly what did the romans do to us and then you run out above the french revolution it's mainly about what happened to the jews in the french revolution so every country has their tunnel vision right yes absolutely i in lower school school i learned about you know how great the east india comes from right yeah so but this to you was a source of proper information and you didn't really maybe didn't realize it back then but you realize it later yes it's kind of an alternative understanding of the world that with time became more and more convincing and powerful and rich yeah and it's accurate as i understand you right it's as accurate as an animation series for for little kids can be of course it's not i mean if you go now to the latest findings then no it's not 100 accurate but as an initial view of of evolution and history it's it's surprisingly good sufficient yeah and it raises some of and many cases in many cases when you deal with with kind of these big narratives the real question is what are the questions that okay the answers that are being given they are corrected over time you have new archaeological findings and new historical theories and so forth that you know people in the 70s didn't know that neanderthals and homo sapiens had sex and even had children together they thought they were two different they saw there were two different species and then the neonatals disappeared and this is what you see in in in the episode now we know from genetic evidence that yes something like 50 000 years ago some neanderthals had sex with some sapiens and most of us have some neanderthal dna it's like two percent two percent three percent percent something like that yeah now because i wanted to to quote something from this particular episode because the voiceover says chances are slim crow magnum men descended from neanderthal men since the two lived side by side for five thousand years cousin or conqueror cro-magnon men did win out in the end so obviously now we don't we don't call it cro-magnon men yeah i mean anymore the the the terminology changes some of the details change but what i said is is again the questions are the important ones yeah but does this clip give us any clues on why we came to conquer the planet first of all again it asks the question why did our species of humans conquer the planet yeah which is a very important question first of all to realize that there were different species and secondly to uh this basic question of why we dominate the planet yeah we got different answers to it but did we get an answer in this scene you think yes and it's it's basically still beyond what they giving sapiens that it's cooperation you have the scene when there is the mammoth group the the group of mammoths and the bands join together in order to cooperate to hunt the mammoth and this is also the the answer that i gave in sapiens that the real secret of success of our species our source of power is not that we are individually smarter or more creative nothing like that it's that we are the only mammals that are capable of cooperation in large numbers you know chimpanzees and and elephants and and wolves and dogs they can cooperate in small numbers they are impacts yeah so the chimpanzees can cooperate say 50 chimpanzees and hammer chimpanzees because cooperation among them depends on intimately knowing each other chimpanzees also hunt but to go hunting with you i need to know you personally what kind of chimpanzee are you are you nice can i trust you now the the thing about homo sapiens we have this amazing ability to cooperate with complete strangers and this is why we can cooperate basically in unlimited numbers if you look at the world today so at least in the economic sphere we have a network of cooperation of almost eight billion people like this shirt that i'm wearing it was produced by somebody in vietnam or guatemala that i've never met but this network of cooperation brings me my shirt yeah and this goes back to uh tens of thousands of years ago when sapiens first acquired this ability to cooperate in large numbers and this is our this is why we managed to uh push aside or exterminate the neanderthals that we actually neanderthals had bigger brains than us and individually they were physically probably more powerful and also intellectually there are reasons to think that they were not inferior to us but they did not cooperate as well as far as we know they couldn't they cooperated on the level of bands of say again 20 50 neanderthals sapiens could cooperate in hundreds and thousands and it doesn't just mean that you know this image of a big battle that a thousand sapients versus 50 neanderthals it's much more than that it's networks of exchanging information exchanging ideas if you discover a new herb that can cure an illness then you tell it to all the other bands in in the area and if somebody discovers a new method to to produce a knife or to hunt a mammoth or anything else the origin of mouth-to-mouth advertising exactly and and this is the the deep source of our power the ability to cooperate in very large numbers it's funny how you mentioned the word battle because uh i um i want to suggest we go uh to the next clip as a historian you initially specialized in medieval military history uh more specifically logistics logistics i was like my master's thesis was like the most boring thing in the world it was about medieval logistical systems of how do you feed an army on the march how many calories does it does medieval nights consume and how much further each host eats and what you get the further and like if you go on a campaign and you need to bring photos for the horses so you have a cart and you put the fodder in it but then you need horses to pull the cart for something boring you make it sound pretty exciting you know i worked on it for like two years um in this regard you want us to show a military battle yes from the hbo series game of thrones i'm not even going to try to explain who's fighting whom if you didn't see the show i've watched all the episodes because i'm a fan but even i i mean get frustrated sometimes by keeping uh you know track of who's who when who's battling who's trying to kill whom etc um all you need to know or all the viewer needs to know is that there's the one guy the handsome jon snow he's talking to some other guy he's the leader of the more the wildlings the wildlife the scots basically who live on the north an artistic posse and then some other you know power driven king barges in and and tries to take over game of thrones why did you take us to the continent of westeros and particularly to the scene well i mean as i said originally i specialized in medieval military history and even more specifically in logistics and you know i watch this and i live i i like game of thrones very much but i i i sit and cringe you know because this is so unscientific what you see here is they're in the middle of nowhere somewhere in the frozen north and suddenly out of nowhere appears this huge army of stannis baratheon and surprises them and this is just absolutely impossible i mean i'm watching it and i'm thinking how did they supply the horses where did they get the fodder it's the food yeah the food for the horses for the men usually in the medieval army the the the most common way is to just rob the villages you pass through a country and you just take the the the bread the chickens the eggs the fodder to feed your army but there are no villages they are in the frozen north so the other in this situation what medieval armies do is you bring a supply train with you but the supply train is very slow and it's you know it's it's pulled by oxes and and by by by horses and things like that it's very difficult to move the huge army through this kind of territory they've never been there so they they shouldn't they don't know the land and if they try to move a huge army with its supply train there is no way that the native wildlings would have missed it i mean how can they be surprised sitting on the crouch watching your favorite series and then cringing because it's not accurate is that correct in a way because it's something that is very close to home medieval logistics i get it but it's like watching the muppet show and then getting angry because frogs can't actually talk no but but but it's it's kind of you know to it conveys a a deeply wrong view i mean what people often don't understand about history is the logistics it's how complicated it is to do simple things like move an army and this is for instance what feeds into conspiracy theories you know the biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that they underestimate the complexity of the world like they imagine that you can control the world by you know you get a bunch of billionaires sitting in around the table like this just a few rothschilds yeah and and they release epidemics and they start wars and the logistics doesn't work because yes you can start a war there is no way you can predict the outcome uh you know a real conspiracy is something like the american invasion of iraq that went completely off the tracks because there were no weapons of mass destruction no no not just that i mean you have the biggest superpower in the world invading this third the third rate country and it goes completely in an unexpected direction the countries which probably benefited most from the american invasion is iran yeah this is how it really happens in history because on the ground things get messy and the plans you make in your head oh we land in the port and we i'll move my huge army over the frozen ice and surprise them it just doesn't work in in practice because oh but what the horses don't have enough to eat yeah and therefore you do accept the fact that there's actually ice zombies and dragons i don't like the ice zombies and dragons but i you know but that's okay so this is kind of this is the the the stick let there be ice zombies but um but at least have a proper you know view on a proper display of how armies move yes because this is something for me which is more basic to understand the complexity of historical processes and it has a bearing on how people understand events today yeah but you know zombies people see it on television and hopefully they know that there are no zombies but when they see the movement of armies they tend to think well this is this is much more accurate than zombies and they they kind of they kind of use this to understand how military events actually happen in the world whether in the middle ages or today yeah and this distorts our understanding of history it is portrayed or it is uh described as a medieval it's said in medieval times or it has this medieval yes feeling absolutely evil feel that's that's what i was looking for but what what makes it medieval the castles and the swords and you know the technology is basically medieval the outlook all the kind of chivalrous culture and you have kings and you know certainly in europe when you think in terms of of an ill-defined time or legend time or primordial time it's always the middle ages if you when you think about the smurfs the smurfs are basically in the middle ages they live in the village and there is the noblemen in the castle uh and if i was writing an article this would be the headline the smurfs are actually in no but i think this is this is well known you know because you don't see greek a greek city with all kinds of elections and the forum and then no usually legend time is the middle ages that is so funny never realized because most of our legends except for you know for the bible and stuff they come from the middle ages familiar storytelling for us too as well yeah all the children's fairy tales they are about princesses and princes not about consoles and praetors yeah yeah let's move on to another fairy tale money the biggest of them all um the big short the true story about how the financial crisis of 2007 2008 was triggered by the united states housing bubble um one unique aspect of this film is that some actors break the so-called fourth wall to directly address the audience and explain complicated financial products um such as um what's it called cdo cdus something like that synthetic cdos disconcerting to say the least um this guy the investment advisor says society values me very much how come people put so much faith and money into into an obvious pipe dream well that's the basis of the whole of history of the whole of society when we talked earlier about how we rule the world and not the neanderthals because we can cooperate in very large numbers including with complete strangers like the people who made this shirt now the next question is what makes it possible how come we can do it and the chimpanzees can't and the answer is stories fictional stories at the basis of every large-scale cooperation there is a fictional story now it's very clear in the case of religions that you know a billion people can cooperate and build cathedrals and synagogues or go on on crusades and jihads because they all believe the same fictional story that if you die in this holy war after you die you go to heaven and uh you you the virgins you want yeah and you know for millions of years you'll enjoy all the best things no chimpanzee will ever believe that you can't convince a group of chimpanzees to go fight another group of chimpanzees by telling them yeah you know if you die you get to chimpanzee heaven and there you have lots and lots of bananas and coconuts and whatever you want no chimpanzee will believe that in the same way i cannot convince the chimpanzee to give me all his bananas and say for a piece of paper in a week you'll get the double the banana not in a week no right now i'll give you this green piece of paper if you give me your banana yeah no chimpanzee will agree no but humans agree to it this is why we can have trade networks this is why i can wear a shirt that somebody on the other side of the world has produced because we all believe i mean the greatest story ever told is not the bible it's not about god's it's not no the greatest story ever told is money you know then the biggest nobel prize in literature that should be awarded is not to the people who write books it's to the people who create money uh it's the only story everybody believes do we know who invented money first of all we need to understand what money is and and it's a wonderful way that they presented it money people think that money is materialistic you know it's kind of matter it's it's but money is actually one of the most spiritual or mental things in the world it doesn't exist anywhere except in our imagination in our mind it's completely non-materialistic and it's actually made of trust you know the equation basically is money equals trust the thing you make money out of is trust so initially there wasn't a lot of trust between people between strangers so the first type of money that we know about for sure was created in ancient mesopotamia around five thousand years ago and it was just barley grain oh burly yeah great um food and this was the first money because people didn't trust each other enough or the system so the money was something you can actually eat yeah it makes sense yeah i mean if everything i know like the the global financial meltdown okay i have my barley i'll eat it um but then the next stage was gold and the amazing thing about gold gold has absolutely no value whatsoever except in the mind you can't eat it you can't eat it you can't make useful things from it you know iron you can make an axe you can make a plow you can make a knife gold is a very soft metal it's not good for any of these things the only thing you make of it is status symbols like crowns and jewelry and and statues of your gods and money so it's putting your trust not in the gold but actually in other people because the value of the coin comes from the fact that other people also value it and then it moved to paper that oh well why do we need this this cumbersome gold yeah you can just shift it it's so heavy yeah yeah it's much easier it's the same principle the the the value of the p it has no value in itself it's just if everybody believes the story that that the bankers come and tell us you know this green piece of paper it's worth a banana if you believe it and i believe it and the people in the supermarket believe it it works i can go to the supermarket give this worthless piece of paper and get a banana and then it moved to the next stage which is digital most money today in the world is not even paper if you take all the papers and coins it's less than ten percent it's only basically data in computers being moved around like how did this shirt get to me i moved some bits in a computer from this file to that file you ordered it online and yeah and the people got paid and digitally and you know during the current crisis governments have have created trillions not millions trillions of euros and yens and and dollars and how do they do it it's not like in the 1920s that you have printing presses working all day no you did that the president just goes to this guy and tells me okay go into the file in the computer and whatever it's written i don't know five trillion delete the five and write six and that's it and that's also what we see happening in the big short right there is a myth and then we start piling up other myths on top of it they're creating money out of nothing just by this kind of system of trust which most of the time works until it doesn't yeah and we were watching the clip and then you also said to me like this was actually the first time i understood yeah what's a synthetic cdo it brought down the global economy there was another scene in the big short that struck me and because we discussed earlier this evening how you were you were brought up in a more secular family right but the school you went to was you had there was bible study yeah it was also a secular school it was a secular school but the bible was the bible was everywhere yeah because there's a scene in the big short um um where the the rabbi complains too we saw stephen gorilla also in this scene his character is mark baum and then the rabbi complains to mark baum's mother that mark baum as a young boy is trying to find inconsistencies in the word of god i mean does it sound familiar to you is that something you did as a boy um yes i mean i it's i mean from quite an early age i understood that uh the bible was not exactly the the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth i remember it was lauren amber like six or seven and i was asked maybe it was in class maybe it was by some family gathering i mean who who who was the first the first person the first people and the person expected i would say adam and eve because this is what we learned in in school in in bible and i said the kingman because i just read that about you know this was back in the in the 80s and i just read this i don't know this book that said that the discard discussed the kingman the kingman the archaeological fighting from china that was like 1.7 million or 1.5 million years old and then you know that it's much older than adam and eve of course so what was the response of your teachers um they're actually quite amused really yeah i mean the amount of bible we got is nothing in comparison to what you get in a religious school in an orthodox in an orthodox school yeah i get it yeah but still i mean you grew up in israel history-laden country too much history too much history it's a it's a country suffering for from far too much history and you were a teenager during the first intifada right that's just like 1987. december 87. went on for five six years and um and and your father worked as a he worked as a in in an arms in the in the weapons industry like i don't know like i don't know a quarter of israelis are working the weapons yeah so but but how did these things influence you back then i was very much interested in military history again this was my my expertise in university at first was medieval military history and the crusades and things like that yeah um so uh did you think it influenced your choice of studies for example the the focus on military issues yes very much so uh and it kind of grounds you you know i guess if i grew up in the netherlands i would have a very different view of the world if you grew up in the middle east uh you you tend to kind of have um a darker view of of humanity and of human history because the the violence and the cruelty and also the stupidity is is all around you it's on your doorstep yeah there are people killing each other over you know not over food which makes sense in some way but over fictional stories that other people invented you know i i i teach in jerusalem one of the most famous cities in the world and you go around jerusalem and it's you know it's just a regular place you have stones and you have trees and you have dogs and cats and cars it's just an ordinary place but then in their minds people create a second layer of reality and superimpose it on top of the stones and trees and in cars and they walk around and they see angels and demons and paradise and hell and all these things and uh they live in in this second reality i mean one of the clips that we thought of showing and we didn't show in the end is is the matrix about this kind of futuristic idea that people will live inside a virtual reality sometimes in the future when ai and computers will become more developed but people have been living in virtual realities for thousands of years everything around us is basically virtual reality in a way yes again there is the physical reality of course of the stones and the trees and the animals but on top of that we impose our fictions our our virtual realities our inventions whether it's money or whether it's nations or whether it's all these religious mythologies and most of the time what we see and what kind of moves us is the is the virtual reality it's not real if the coral reefs or or the amazon rainforest which is this amazing creation of of nature which took millions of years to create and which really sustains our life if this gets destroyed people basically do nothing but if some i don't know the western wall or el akhtar mosque or some other of these you know buildings that we built are just you know a thousand or two thousand years ago and which are not really necessary for our existence if somebody would touch one stone there you will all hell will break loose and what does that prove that fictions are far more powerful than reality in shaping human history and politics and economics in the competition between fiction and truth fiction at least politically usually wins because the truth is just too painful and too complicated and we don't only come up with fictional stories about the world around us um we also create them within ourselves yes and to illustrate this you wanted to show another animated clip this time from a disney pixar movie inside out a wonderful one of the best movies i've ever had it's your favorite or very but like at the very top of my list it's about a girl named riley and we're starting at the beginning of the story right after riley's birth is there do we need any more context anything we need to know it's i would say it's kind of taking everything disney has done previously and just tears it to bits and throws it away and here is a completely different way to understand humanity let's have a look one of your favorites yes yeah but in in 21 lessons for the 21st century you you write about inside out most viewers might well have missed both its neurological meaning and its sinister implications what are the sinister implications it basically says you know most disney movies they tell you look inside yourself and you'll find your authentic true core and who you really are and things like that follow your heart follow your heart and and all these advices and here you look inside and you realize that riley is basically just a big robot controlled by not a single spark like a soul or a spirit but by a very complicated neurobiological mechanism which doesn't have a single self or a single core you have all these different and sometimes conflicting uh forces which are personified here as joy and sadness and disgust and fear but basically and you know the movie it just starts things gets complicated there is a problem and they go to basically explore riley's brain what's happening in there and they never discover a core self they just discover more and more complicated biological mechanisms and the implications you know they are shattering that first of all that you have no idea what's happening inside and secondly that as you explore you realize that there isn't just a single self there is a whole bunch of conflicting forces and mechanisms which is very much in line with what modern science tells us but something that most humans refuse to accept and certainly most disney movies don't give you that impression so that that's what amazed you that all of a sudden disney turned around a corner and like something gave us a different view yes and you know i mean this is not so important the the importance is that this is suddenly a new view that is being given to kids about who they are and what makes them function yeah there is no little riley inside riley and that's what you would have expected exactly when you first see it like the very first second you think that okay joy is riley's soul yeah but then you realize no joy isn't riley's soul joy is just one element one of the captains in the mothership exactly um and so riley also her riley does not um have one little riley inside of her telling what she wants exactly what she needs or it also says something about free will i guess um you you never get any sense of free will no i mean the riley is just being controlled by the conflict between these forces inside her and they keep changing and they keep changing and a very crucial message of the movie is that none of them is the real riley again the whole problem i don't want to ruin the movie for those who didn't see it but the whole problem is that joy thinks that she is the real riley and sadness she is an intruder or something and the kind of uh uh big epiphany of the movie is to realize no joy isn't riley it's all these forces together that shape and control riley the idea of giving up a soul or a self or free will i mean that's you you already mentioned for for many people that's that's very hard i mean what's left for us as humans if we have to give up the idea of the self of the free will to explore the reality i mean you know my main problem is with the idea of free will and the self it makes us extremely incurious about ourselves if my decisions just reflect my free will whatever that is then there is nothing to explore why did i choose to agree to do this show why did i choose this shirt why did i choose this movie oh it's my free will end of story but once you give up the the this assumption you start really investigating what are the many causes or or processes roads towards the shape exactly that shape our desires what are they calling like the next thought that comes up in in my mind where did it come from why this thought now i think we arrived at the chapter of meditation here as well right exactly how you do it but if we stick to the metaphor the inside out metaphor and we so we we take a look inside your head in a disney way there's then joy who loves watching series with her husband and then there's anger who's angry at what animal cruelty and then there's disgust disgusted at the historic historical inaccuracies in game of thrones um what do these characters do when you meditate they do their thing and my meditation is not about trying to control them or stop them it's about just you know observing what's happening but who's observing them then that's the classical question um nobody's really observing them it's just a process of observation there isn't a self-standing aside there is just uh whatever is is is a process not an entity now there is no point in kind of trying to get too much philosophical or whatever it's all about the experience but when i went for the first time to meditation retreat the instruction was extremely simple at first just obs just feel the breath coming into your nostrils and going out of your nostrils that's it just do that whenever your mind wanders away just bring it back and i couldn't do it for more than 10 10 seconds and you know 10 seconds the mind goes somewhere it takes me five minutes to realize i lost touch with the breath and bring it back and that's something you can train and this gets better over time but that's not the point the point is you realize something very very important about yourself that you have no control or very full control over the mind and that you don't really understand what's happening there that's the really shocking thing but you credit meditation for handling fame and adoration uh how how does sitting still for two hours a day and and breathing contribute to not becoming a self-righteous douchebag with a guru complex which you're not obviously i hope not clear i hope not i don't know um because you know and it's the better you get to know your mind it's much of it is about getting to know your own weaknesses and getting to know the stories that keep repeating in your mind you know like a nation has a national mythology and a religion has a religious mythology each person has personal personal mythology who am i where did i come from what are my strengths and weaknesses and whatever and usually it's just a mythology and also people putting you on a pedestal is one of those mythologies is that what you're saying or it it could become very easy i mean we like our myth to be fluttering and what's more flattering than you know all these people telling you that you're so smart and that you're like this and you're like that it you know it immediately goes to the head and if if you don't have a kind if if you don't really make the effort to observe what's happening inside very easily you create a tempo of yourself in your mind and you put a statue of yourself like this beautiful god in in in the mind and you get so much attached to it and then the moment somebody criticizes you in some i don't know tv show or in some newspaper or in in a blog you get so upset how can they criticize i'm such an important person and i do so many good how how do they dare criticize me and this is because you become attached to this mythology that that that you created in your mind yes you created it with materials from outside we always do that but does it still affect you criticism or not at all yes it does yeah right i mean meditation is not a magic no i mean that's that's the point about meditation people think that meditation is about getting rid of stuff the stuff i don't like about myself whether it's my anger or whether it's my uh irritation or selfishness or whatever i'll get rid of it and yes things change but the really key the the really important thing is not to get rid of stuff is to get to know yourself better and especially to get to know the stuff you don't like about yourself because it's easy to get you know we all know the stuff we like about ourselves uh let's move on to the obvious next question namely if humans are computers because you just called riley a a computer can computers become humans and yeah and what does that even mean the answer might be in the next movie her um the story is set in the near future where the main character is lonely and he falls in love with his operating system called samantha kind of like a sexy siri or a sexy alexa in her yeah she said this is an ai and she it says that she's embarrassed um is she really and what would that imply there's so much to unpack in in this scene it's just amazing um maybe let's start somewhere else i mean sure as a historian i'm interested in the past but also in the future even the distant future because it's it's part of our identity what makes who we are is not just the past it's also the future and i have this very strong sense that you know we have deep down we are much we are not just you know belong to a nation or religion all these things are very shallow religions nations all of them are just you know like 5 000 years old and much more deep is our biological uh identity which we saw with riley all these emotions and and the body they go back not 5 000 years they go back tens of millions of years like the the love between a mother and a child this is something that's been around for hundreds of millions of years the breath which we talked about earlier is hundreds of millions of years i still share that with with reptiles hey you breathe i breathe we are the same thing and then i look to the future and maybe in a couple of decades earth will be populated or even dominated by entities that are not organic that they don't breathe they don't have emotions like that the potential of a.i is much much bigger than any historical revolution it's really a biological revolution since the you know for four billion years all of life was organic and this is at least an idea of inorganic life forms that's the biggest thing that happened on earth in four billion years and it might happen in our lifetime now the biggest question when it comes to ai ai is artificial intelligence yes and the big question is will it have consciousness emotions feelings the difference between intelligence and consciousness is intelligence is the ability to solve problems whether it's playing chess or diagnosing a disease or a math problem consciousness is what do you want that's intelligence consciousness is the ability to feel things like love and hate and pain and pleasure yeah now in humans and other animals they go together we solve problems by having feelings computers so far they have more and more intelligence but zero consciousness when a computer beats me in chess the computer doesn't feel happy no he calculated all the moves yeah so it's a completely different kind of intelligence now nobody knows maybe the biggest question about the the future is whether uh we will have super intelligent beings without any consciousness dominating the planet or whether we will have or maybe artificial consciousness yes like we saw in in here because that's why i asked the question about about her about samantha being embarrassed because yes such a thing of the conscience yes now we don't know we there is it's possible i mean there is no scientific reason why consciousness must be limited to organic biochemistry and carbon based life forms and can't exist in silicon based life forms because we're also little computers ourselves it's just in the bio in a way yeah but so far we don't see any artificial consciousness i mean most science fiction movies about a.i are not about ai they are about ac artificial consciousness the moment every movie focuses on is the moment the computer of the robot gains consciousness and then either the the man falls in love with the computer or the computer falls in love with the human or they try to kill each other or something like that yeah that will take over the planet and then kill all the yes but so far it's science fiction there is no indication that computers are developing consciousness at present a far more frightening scenario is that we will have super intelligence without consciousness the same way that airplanes fly faster than birds without developing feathers so computers will become more intelligent than us far more intelligent without having any feelings any emotions and they will dominate is there a difference between a darwinian evolution and the ai evolution yes first of all the iranian evolution until today was organic yeah and this is not organic and also darwinian evolution is evolution by natural selection here we have intelligent design yeah so not the intelligent design of the creationists in the bible a real intelligent design we are designing the ai and then the ai will design maybe the next generation of ai so it's a completely different kind of process but if if ai is taking over um no let me let me rephrase this question i'm a human i am a conscious human being we still don't know if a.i will have a conscience yes um besides that but like riley i'm driven by joy anger fear and that's what motivates me so what motivates then an ai if it's not controlled by humans it develops its own maybe non-conscious motivation it's it you know air is machine learning you don't program it you build the basic thing and then it learns learning it's it's learns and it develops and you don't understand you know it's it's it's very practical today when you apply to the bank for a loan and the bank basically lets an algorithm decide your fate and and the algorithm says no don't give this lady a loan and you ask the bank why not what's wrong with me is it my face is it is it my the gender the race whatever the bank says we don't know the algorithm said no and we don't unders even the people who designed the algorithm don't understand the decision that it is making and what's even more kind of frightening is as we saw in in this clip it's it it's on the verge of having the ability to hack human beings i mean if riley is this kind of spiritual self with free will computers can't hack us can't understand us but we if we are basically a very complex biological process then with enough data and enough computing power we are very close to the point when computers can hack human beings can understand my emotions my likes my dislikes better than me not perfect you can never have something you don't need a hundred percent you just need to know people better than they know themselves and this is quite easy because most people don't know themselves very well so just imagine what happens when we start as soon as the algorithm knows what i want better than i than i know you're a puppet it can manipulate you it can press your emotional buttons and this is what is happening now with our smartphones and all these you know algorithms on social media is that why you don't have a smartphone uh that's one of no that's one of the reasons that basically it's to keep my my time yeah and you know over the last 20 years the most the smartest people in the world and the best technology in the world has been working on the problem of how to hack human beings and control them through the screens and so those are the smartphones i'm no match to them if i give them access they win yeah so i try to limit their access in that way in that way yeah her is also about the basic human need of being understood finding someone else who totally gets you yeah to feel loved and the thing that's also the common thread in the australian netflix series please like me created written performed by uh josh thomas i absolutely loved this series i i i watched it like four or five times cried my eyes out at the end um why did it appeal to you um well first of all i think it's one of he's one of the funniest people on the planet today it's a very unique josh josh thomas it has a very unique sense of humor it gets it it takes time to grow on you i mean the first time i watched the first episode and closed the tv and said i'm not watching that and after a couple of weeks or months i tried again and gave it a chance and it kind of it takes time and um it's it's just such i i never saw something like this on television it was just you know so real in a way and what makes it so real for you um [Music] the the way that the people behave and uh and again in this kind of deep existential sense of humor it's not like funny haha funny it's i think very kind of uh mixture going again back to riley when joy and sadness mix together and you get a kind of this is really how life is it's not like in the comedies it's a gray area yeah and it's not black and white it's not haha or laughing it's everything combined yeah and we really see that in this in this scene we meet josh at the zoo with his mom rose and her friend hannah and so there's josh and then there's a cute arnold in um please like me so romantic why did you choose this particular scene i like it very much it's in a zoo it's kind of it's part of nature um is you it's no no nature no i mean that what's happening between them yeah okay it's it's natural it's part of nature like the meerkats and like this dolphin or whatever you mean them getting them kissing yeah they're getting together the romance and we talked about you know our deep biological identity and you have all these rituals and you have national rituals and religious rituals and these rituals are very shallow they go back you know like two thousand years five thousand years like i think about my bar mitzvah so bar mitzvah people had for like three thousand years top now romance and your first kiss and like having this click with somebody this is a biological drama a biological ritual which goes back tens of millions of years and it's such a deep thing and it's like your entire body is like some new button is is being pressed and um it's an indian it connects everything we talked about in about the previous clips like and i came out as as gay when almana is 21. now samantha the ai from her she could tell me that i was gay when i was i don't know 13 or 14. it should have been written on my forehead but people don't know themselves well so i didn't know i i i still it's still one of the kind of foundational insights i have about human beings remembering myself at 15 that it should have been absolutely obvious because you think coming out at age 21 is quite late and i because i read that you regret it coming out it's not so much about whether it's late or it's i'm trying to understand how how how did i miss it i think i'm an intelligent person and you know it was just it was not that you stayed in the closet for other people but you stayed in the club by yourself you were hiding from yourself yes and this ability of the mind not to know something so deep so important and again should have been so obvious this it's it's it's really mind-boggling that we can do these things and it also connects to these stories that the the fictional stories i mean why does it happen so one of the most basic explanations is because you know again growing up in israel in the 1980s ask you when are you going to get a girlfriend uh of course you almost you never hear about gay people if you hear anything it's always terrible things like it's against nature or it's against god oh and that's why you found the zoo and the nature thing important exactly and then it takes a very long time to realize no it's not true it's just a story that some people invented 2 000 years ago because basically everything humans do is nature exactly i mean you can't break the whole thing about homosexuality being unnatural it's a misunderstanding of what nature means you can never do something unnatural but it's just also the stupid argument that people who hate homosexuals in the first place use it's not a real they don't really think that it's they think it no i mean you have all these rabbis in israel that would go around and say no this is it's not just the bible it's nature and um i i believed it to some extent for many years and to understand that what nature actually is you cannot break the laws of nature the laws of nature are not like the laws of the country that the government has a rule that you can't drive more than 90 kilometers per hour and i try anyway you drive 120 a police officer stops you and gives you a ticket this is not how nature works that there is a rule against moving faster than the speed of light you do it anyway it's unnatural so a galactic police officer comes along and gives you a ticket no and it doesn't work like that to be sex enrollments if homosexuality was against nature it just couldn't exist you know things against nature are for example driving faster than the speed of light you don't need human rules against them they just can't happen impossible it's impossible yeah so i want to go back because i love the way you explain the feeling of getting your first kiss as like a button being pressed and then you feel it all over when when do you do you want to tell me about you it wasn't such a good it wasn't a bad experience but it wasn't such a good experience either was it a bad kiss or what was it um it was kind of an anti-climax you hear about it so much and uh again it's part of the kind of the damage of being in the closet for so long that you kind of you you don't allow things to take the more natural course and then you know all these characters in the head that we saw in in riley they get completely messed up and they are kind of tied in notes within notes it takes you years to untangle these notes so what should have been you know a kind of playful and wonderful and natural ritual or biological drama gets this complicated social cultural religious toxic mix there was too much pressure you you yourself put too much pressure on it yeah conflicting expectations and too much pressure and misunderstandings and um you know there was after i came out so there was a time that i felt that finally i've solved it like there was this one piece of the puzzle in like i don't understand life and here i have this missing piece of the puzzle yeah because how did you realize you were gay at 21 was it it was a process of a few a few months and and the movie also played i remember actually this one movie maybe i should have shown this uh it was 1997 and there was this film festival in jerusalem and there was this movie called the canadian movie french lilies and it was kind of some had some had very explicit gay scenes and i remember walking out of the cinema and saying i'm gay that's that's the kind of i mean it wasn't again we this is mythology we embellish things when we tell them to make them simpler it was a process of of several months but it's also a beautiful example of what art can do to you right yeah but it was a moment of crystallization but then it kind of you know it was a false enlightenment like i had a feeling for some time that that's it i had this whole life this feeling that i don't understand life and the social system and what's going on and because i miss this critical piece and now i can create the puzzle of life of yourself yes and you know everybody everybody already did it because they are straight and they have it easy and now i i finally cracked it that's it and it took like one or two years to realize nah it it it was an important thing it was a very good ever but it's it's it didn't solve everything there's still pieces missing there's still a lot of pieces missing life is still messy yeah and you mentioned the algorithm that that an algorithm could have have told you sooner or later yeah by you know just watching what happens to my eyes when i walk on the beach in haifa and there is a sexy guy and a sexy girl walking hand in hand in swim swimsuit where do my eyes go i mean it should have been very simple for an ai to figure it out but is that for you a a frightening future is it a positive thing because i mean it depends what you do with it but it also depends where you live right if you live in iran yeah then you're yes that's a very problematic thing that you know that they know about even before you do and that's the thing about hacking humans throughout history dictatorial governments always wanted to hack human beings to be able to know what you think what you feel you know stalin gives a speech everybody smiles and claps their hands but stalin wants to know what you really think yeah but they didn't have the technology they have the technology now the technology is there and it's not just it's it's all the time you know again in the soviet union the kgb couldn't follow you 24 hours a day they didn't have enough agents and even if they had an agent on you the agent would write paper reports that somebody a human being needs to read it's impossible to analyze all that now with ai and smartphones and sensors and cameras and microphones and all that you can literally follow everybody 24 hours a day you don't need human agents we carry the agent in our pocket or whatever and you don't need human analysts to go over the data you have ai so it's for the first time in history it's possible to follow everybody all the time and follow even what's happening under the skin and to hack humans now it's and to find out their preferences their secret loves their everything what you like to get to know you better than you know yourself yeah but ironically science did help you find love right because i read that you you met your husband through a dating site that's also an algorithm yeah i'm not against technology i think that every technology can be used for good or for bed a knife can be used to kill a person or to save a person's life if you're a surgeon on an operating table or to chop salad for a bet that you play baseball with yeah exactly so again i met my husband online who who decided that he actually was the one was that you or was that the algorithm or was it no no it was me i think that dating apps they have a misunderstanding most dating apps misunderstanding of of humans too many dating apps understood humans as consumers of mates like you have the perfect mate out there and the dating app just needs to give you you you're a consumer and this is a product you consume so they bring you the product and you try on it this one is is is too dull and this one is like this and give me another product and this is an internal misconception because humans are not consumers of mates they are producers of relationships the difficult part starts after you meet the person it's not about meeting mr right it's about doing the hard work of actually creating a relationship which is something an app cannot do for you the hard work you have to do yourself is what you're saying yeah it's also funny how you're avoiding the term soulmate in this case because there's no such thing in your world right yes so you know i mean we need an app to help us create better relationships because you know we need to change ourselves there is no mr right there is no perfect person but somebody who is good enough and then to start the real difficult work of building the relationship there is no mr right yeah yeah and again it's it's it's something very basic about how technology treats us whether it kind of constricts us or whether it gives us opportunities i watched another interview with you where you told that you i know you don't have children and i heard you say in an interview that you're you and your husband not planning to no no no me since ever since i was a young girl i always felt a calling deep from within that i really really really wanted to become a dog owner i never wanted kids either it never crossed my mind if i didn't know that people have kids i would never have thought about it myself that somebody would do such a thing yeah and on the other hand now and then not very often i'm like maybe am i missing out on the only possible meaning i feel that i don't understand life in the world well enough to take responsibility for bringing somebody into this mess and for being kind of you know the salesperson of life maybe i mean if it was easier to adopt it's almost impossible for a guy couple to adopt kids in israel if it was possible to adopt then this is an option but just the possibility that i'm totally responsible for bringing somebody into this mess which i don't understand if i understood it then okay and then also being perhaps totally responsible for their death this is too much for me it's this is also a good example of the puzzle the piece is missing in the puzzle and you're not knowing yeah what mess you're bringing them into yeah speaking of the mess we are bringing children into we started off this evening what was it 700 000 years ago with a clip from once upon a time men and you you wanted to show another yes clip from the same series the children cartoon series we're fast forwarding to the past century and how it all ends it's always nice to end an interview on a positive note thank you for that um do you have anything to add or are you gonna leave us with this no i think that this is a warning it's not a prophecy uh history is not realistic like all your books right they're not prophecies it's not all prophecies we don't know how the world will look like in 2050 it depends on our actions we still have agency we have power we have more power than really than ever before we sometimes just like the wisdom to use it in in the right way yeah the power of our imagination there's hope but we need to you know we need to get our act together we need to get our act together but it's totally within our power to create a really good world thank you so much for this interview thank you i really enjoyed it a little hope at the end of this evening and i will never look the same way to game of thrones and the smurfs ever again thank you so much thank you [Music] you

Channel: vpro documentary

Views: 92,829

Keywords: Yuval Noah Harari, interview Yuval Noah Harari, Yuval Noah Harari interview, Yuval Noah Harari about money, Yuval Noah Harari about history, Yuval Noah Harari conversation, Janine Abbring Yuval Noah Harari, Wintergasten, VPRO Documentary, Documentary Yuval Noah Harari

Id: ScJf3jWIGUE

Length: 70min 7sec (4207 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022