Mayim Bialik and Yuval Noah Harari in conversation

hi my name is nico i'm the founder of toa and i'm thrilled and honored to be hosting this leaps talk today with professor yuval noah harrari and dr mayam bialik two inspiring minds that i do not think need a lengthy introduction i do want to thank south by southwest online and leaps by buyer the impact investment arm of buyer for making this conversation today possible so mayam i've been a great fan of your work ever since you stepped into our geeky world as a character on big bang theory and enjoyed your podcast series very much um the alex breakdown and you've actually done something that few have you been a best-selling author you've been an award-winning actor and also someone who holds a phd in neuroscience and you've been switching back and forth between these two worlds tv comedy and science and i wonder what are some of the surprising parallels between these two worlds um thank you for that lovely introduction it's really an honor to be here um with both of you um you know i obviously one of the one of the nicest things about my life in academia which you know was 12 years for my undergrad and graduate work was that no one really cared what i look like and of course there's you know the patriarchy will follow you everywhere and as a woman scientist obviously we have different challenges but um you know for the most part i i lived a very um you know private life in terms of what was between my ears was the most important thing that i was you know producing uh in my science career surprisingly though you know um ego exists everywhere and many people i think would be very surprised to know that there are personalities in academia and in particular in the sciences that are not strikingly different from you know the kind of powerhouse producer types that i also interact with so there there is a lot of ego there is a lot of jockeying for position and the fact is and i guess you know as a neuroscientist who specialized in um you know neuropsychiatric issues it's nice to know that there are problematic people in every field you are not immune from that simply because you're a scientist or a very you know wealthy successful producer type yuval in your books sapiens homodeos and 21 lessons for the 21st century you share fascinating insights into our past while exploring the future the success of those books was staggering and you just released a graphic novel actually uh of sapiens surprisingly to me doing some research on you as one of the world's most pre-eminent writers out there you say that you prefer tv over novels how come well i do read novels also but yes i most of the time prefer tv um you know basically humans are storytelling animals we think in stories and tv is an amazing tool to create and to convey stories maybe the most powerful tool of our time and um you know my mission also as as a writer and the creator is to reach as wide an audience as possible and tv can often do that better than novels so i i i don't i i'm i'm at least not surprised by my by my preference and i assume comedy is part of the mix yes certainly comedy is definitely part of the mix especially if you're dealing with power there is nothing that challenges power better than humor it's one of the most effective weapons against it to start out i want to talk to you about changes we've been experiencing tremendous changes of course throughout the pandemic in our lives can you both share one thing that you believe will not change in our lifetime let's start with mayam there are many things but i think um you know at the risk of sounding um you know controversial i think you know human connection and um you know the the fact that you know as humans yes we are we are wired for adaptation and we are wired for spontaneous mutations to occur and for you know incredible evolution to occur but um as as mammals as primates as homo sapien sapiens um i would argue that um human touch and and human interaction uh of a non of a non-technologically based variety uh is something that um you know i think is is thankfully irreplaceable but i could be totally wrong i think that you are you're absolutely right this is also what came first to my mind um people will still hug i think just you know just as aids didn't kill sex kovid won't kill hugging we will hug uh after after after all this is over it won't change and y'val the introduction of almost any transformative idea in the past has been met with wonder but often also with rejection and with fear one idea that i find recurring in all your books is that you stress that one thing that humanity can always count on is change so i wonder why then are we still afraid of it of change and of innovation first because it's inconvenient to start again to learn new things it's it's not easy and secondly it's it's very often dangerous if you look at biology then i guess that 99 of mutations are bad for you it's a very very small percentage which actually improves things most startups fail uh even if you look at revolutions in history so at least the more radical revolutions almost always at least at first bring more misery than happiness it's it's usually the moderate revolutions that are that do better humans just are unable to just to completely rethink and reinvent the world so if they try to change too much too quickly it's always a disaster you know you compare the bolshevik revolution in 1917 to the american revolution so-called revolution of of the late 18th century and one of the reasons the american revolution did much better is because it tried to change to change much less and when you look at the broad sweep of history so especially if you're a kind of you know the average person many of the big revolutions that we today celebrate in hindsight they did not improve the life of the ordinary individual to take one of the biggest examples the agricultural revolution the shift from living as hunter-gatherers to living as farmers this was a good idea if you were a king or a high priest or something like that but for the average farmer it made life much harder the average farmer let's say in ancient egypt or in medieval china worked much harder than ancient hunter-gatherers she or he got a worse diet in return they suffered much more from diseases most of the infectious diseases and epidemics in history they started with agriculture they did not bother at all the hunter-gatherers and on top of all that you had to deal with all the social and political inequality that emerged with agriculture that wasn't there before so if you're living at the beginning of the agriculture revolution and you are apprehensive about these new ideas and new gadgets you are absolutely right to be apprehensive about them mayan what about our brain makes it actually hard to process um and accept new ideas and has there been a new idea a technological invention that you can think of that you changed your mind about um well you know i think i'm gonna kind of give the the neurosci the neuroscientific version of yuval's answer which is that you know while our brains again are highly adaptive um and and geared towards learning and geared towards incorporating new experiences ultimately we do seek the path of least resistance and um you know the the notion you know it's it's a very it's a very simplified concept but the notion of a pleasure principle does apply to how we sort of gear our our understanding of the world and you know i think we can see that in our individual responses which also are highly variable you know if you if you bring a new piece of technology to me versus my 15 year old versus my 12 year old you're going to get a very different set of reactions i remember my father of blessed memory when um when the internet became a thing and my father was a first-generation american you know staunch new yorker and he was talking to me and my my then husband and and he said yeah i don't think this thing's gonna take off like they think it will and you know um my father passed six years ago and you know it was just in time because i think it would have completely blown his mind you know to see what really what how much the world has changed even just in the past six years i will say and it is a funny example but it's a true one um i didn't grow up yuval and i are essentially the same age i was born in 1975 and um you know i grew up in a home that was uh modest you know we rented a house with one bathroom till i was 16 and my brother was you know almost 20 and we didn't have a lot of money and i remember the first time i saw a microwave it must have been you know 1986 i don't know something like that and i remember i was at a wealthy friend's house because i was i was bussed to to schools in nicer neighborhoods than the neighborhood i grew up in that was the magnet programs of the 70s and 80s and i remember she showed me how you can take a mug of water and put it in this thing and you know you'd think she had just landed from another planet to tell me this and you know the water got hot and we made hot cocoa you know and i went home to my like first generation you know american parents and i said you'll never believe what just happened and it took years for us to get you know a microwave a dishwasher um and while that's a funny example that's the notion that i think many of us have especially if we're not in the tech innovation sphere and um we're experiencing new things that's how astounding it is to me i just taught my mother what venmo is and you know besides learning english i don't know if there's anything more exciting to her than venmo yuval as long as there's been scientific inquiry i assume there's been misinformation disinformation conspiracy theories what does history teach us about how to combat this headwind to scientific innovation and building acceptance for transformative technological advancement and scientific advancements in general well you know science and conspiracy theories and fake news and so forth they are not really contradictory they exist side by side because in order to control in order to manage any human society science is never enough science tells us the truth or the the approximation of the truth about the world but the truth almost never unites people you cannot run for elections on a platform saying e equals mc square or i mean you can run on that platform nobody almost nobody would vote for you to unite people either politically religiously socially you need to tell them a story and the story doesn't need to be true at all many of the most successful stories in human history or fictions religious fictions nationalist fictions economic fictions and it's still good enough and people can can keep both things at the same time they can be extremely scientific and rational and logical when they come to solve a particular technical problem and to be completely irrational and without almost any critical faculties when they are evaluating the basic mythologies and stories of their society of their movement but we sometimes have the hope that if people shut down their prefrontal cortex when dealing with these basic stories of their politics or whatever then it means that they will be ineffective in other fields so we don't need to fear them but it doesn't work like that unfortunately humans have this ability to selectively switch on and off they're kind of critical and rational faculties and therefore you throughout history you find this dual track cooperation and similarly people have this misguided notion i i remember that when the internet just came along people had this idea that oh we just now share more information so this will inevitably lead to greater freedom and scientific thinking and russian and it didn't happen because information isn't the truth information fiction is also information fake news is also information and it's not new you look for example at the print revolution in early modern europe so the big blockbusters of the late 15th and early 16th century european book markets they were not the scientific books of people like copernicus and galileo they were uh do it yourself witch hunting manuals this was the big race of of that time uh all kinds of ridiculous conspiracies about witch hunting which led to you know tens of thousands of people mostly women being tortured and murdered in terrible ways and this was powered by this new mass communication technology of print you know the same way that people say today it's true i saw it on youtube so imagine some town in 15th century or 16th century germany that they are going witch hunting and the leader says it's true i read it in a book how can you doubt something that you read in a book and it took a long time for people to realize look just because it's written in a book it doesn't mean it's true so we are now in the same situation with these new technologies and i hope that our learning curve would be a bit quicker than with print um i did want to just kind of jump in and and note that yes while the prefrontal cortex is um you know the seat of um a lot of initiatory behaviors but also what we kind of consider uh judgment and you know a phineas gage being the most common example of what happens when the prefrontal cortex is damaged um you you often get a a significant shift in kind of who a person is in terms of their ability to make judgments about behavior about ethics um but just again for for full transparency you know this illustrates the the complexity and the difficulty with kind of connecting brain science to the human experience as a linear connection because what is involved in in suppressing uh you know as you've all pointed out what is involved in suppressing uh logic and reason and you know for for modern purposes kind of you know having a heart and not having a a cold kind of um perspective that is driven by your own personal uh goals that's a much more complicated integration of not only you know neuroanatomy but the complete integration of our social constructs like the cultural construct it all gets mushed in there so again i totally know that you didn't think that the prefrontal cortex can be turned off but i did feel like i needed to jump in yeah it's really a metaphor of course but i would be interested to hear what do you think happens in a brain what happens there when again the same person can be the most rational in in in some aspects and you know completely uncritical with dealing with other issues and again the the thing is extremely important issues like you can spend days and days and years um you know preparing something extremely rationally based on an idea which you spent almost no time investigating um no i i think what we're talking about you know is is really a distinction be between brain and mind um you know in in in the most broadest terms uh you know the notion of what's going on in the brain i'm i'm happy to look at you know functional mri studies all day about where the ethical seat is in the brain and and even that you know just like there's not remember when when we got so excited about genetics you know in the 80s and 90s we thought oh where's the gene for this where's the gene for that and it turns out it's tens of thousands of interactions and there's there's so many positive feedback loops negative feedback loops in the brain you know this is the super highway of superhighways so when you take really any rational concept it doesn't exist in isolation you know tucked into a neuroanatomical structure that's not something we can dissect out and while there are regions of the brain as you know as we all know and have known for better part you know of this century at least there are regions that we can say this does that and this does that oh and if we you know lesion this in a monkey like oh we're gonna see this right but when it comes to these very very complicated interplays of as i said the social the social construct the cultural concept the patriarchy misogyny all these things um the the pressures of an environment the pressures of a community and the individual variation in the individual then you're going to see an interplay that there is no equation for but the ability to to think broadly creatively compassionately in a way that moves forward the things that you know a liberal society holds true that is infinitely more complicated and i do believe and you know as a scientist who also is a person of faith this is the unexplainable and you can call it divine or you can call it mysterious you can call it the soul but that's really where this intersection comes in it's not simply about the structures i know that they are now working on all these kinds of gadgets that want people when they are making decisions in an irresponsible or an irrational way for instance let's say that you are a stock trader and you are dealing every second with millions of dollars so your bank or investment theme or whatever they would like you to put this head hat on which monitors your brain activity and once you start making decisions in a capricious way uh that you're not thinking things through a light bulb lights up a red light bulb stop trading now let's say that this can be done so first i would like to hear your opinion can it actually be done and if it can be done do you think that the same hat will then be used also when the same investment banker is listening to a political speech or to a religious sermon he will take or she will take the hat from work also to church or to the political rally and put it on and when it lights red oh something is going on here there there are absolutely ways for us to um you know from a neuroscience from an electrophysiological perspective be able to say there are patterns of activity uh that can indicate a certain trajectory for decision making a hundred percent we're also we have to keep in mind we're speaking in a statistical realm right now you know it's um it gets into very shady and ethically shady very very complicated territory be because of exactly all the reasons you you pointed out um you know the would i love to make every person i've ever dated wear this hat would i love to wear that hat when i'm dating a person sure but you know this is a much more i think complicated conversation about what we can expect technology to do uh what what it's supposed to do and also where it is allowed to fill in the blanks of what you know what i was raised is called cycle you know the that sort of internal you know street sense knowledge that something is right or wrong but i think especially you know i especially here in america the concepts of right or wrong are even so fuzzy right now and we're seeing that specifically in this past year with how we talk even about covid how we talk about vaccines how we talk about what's going on with the planet um so i'll i'll leave it at that and just say that you've all if you'd ever like to yeah yuval if you'd ever like to have a further conversation i could talk about that funny you know cap that that that people want to wear all day um i guess with covet we're all finding ourselves having some type of discussion with family with friends sort of you know defending the truth whatever the truth is according to you well and and sort of fighting the fake news um just referencing the youtube video that you did on sort of asking people or sharing your plan to actually take the covet vaccination what led you to do that and go out into the public into the open to talk about it and should more people of prominence do so the reason that i chose to uh be public to you know almost the million followers that i have on youtube um is i i was a late vaccinator my children were were vaccinated on a different schedule than other people and the fact is because i'm a public person yes people knew that i wrote a book about our experience as parents called beyond the sling at that time my children were not vaccinated for a lot of reasons that really are no one's business and um what happened was and i'm sure this is you know not surprising to anyone the internet you know took this notion that my children at the time of that writing were not vaccinated and they're kind of spread this notion that mayam is an anti-vaxxer and mayan bialex should have her children taken away from her and mayambi alex should not be allowed to hold a phd from ucla um the fact is my children are vaccinated um now and the the level of hysteria people had surrounding the fact that a public person might have delayed vaccinations was also astounding to me i decided to make a video because i never have spoken um about this um overtly publicly because of the lack of discourse uh surrounding it and there are a few issues and vaccines are definitely one of them where there are many people who do not want to have a conversation the other is circumcision interestingly which is you know for another time and topic but what i decided to do was make a video about um my decision and kind of finally say once and for all that it's okay to be skeptical about the financial components of the pharmaceutical industry it's okay to ask questions of what's in the vaccine it's okay to ask what the efficacy is of any vaccine it's okay to wonder why there are vaccines that are used now that didn't used to be used and it's okay to ask why we used to get a dozen shots and now many children get upwards of two dozen and sometimes three dozen it's okay to ask those questions in a functioning society that is based on intellectual progress and and a compassionate level of communication we are allowed to have those conversations we're also allowed to receive information so that's kind of what i was trying to balance to say it's okay to be skeptical and it's okay to ask questions it's also not okay to not even know what you're talking about and be fighting with other people about it you know i advocate for people getting educated and in my case that means rolling up our sleeves and yes also getting a flu vaccine this year which is not something i typically do i am a hippie who tends to believe that the immune system can and will uh produce immunity and getting the flu is something we we have done many times in this house we had h1n1 that was not fun either but um this virus is different it's indiscriminate in ways that we don't fully understand and it should be treated as such so we're shifting gears to the next section and uh yuval one thing i was really hoping to ask you for quite some time being sort of from the startup and tech world and always listening to the silicon valley founders uh talking about uh how moral automation may actually lead to a new renaissance era of creativity and um self-actualization um for everybody do you see historic parallels in the way that this vision um is being promised and sold to us uh it's always the same thing i mean whenever and somebody comes up with a new idea for a technology for a social system whatever then obviously they are going to present it in the most positive and optimistic way and uh yeah we have to be careful about it because it often backfires you look at the promises made at the dawn of the internet era in the 1990s and i'm specifically talking about the social and political consequences that people said this will bring a new era of democracy and tolerance and cooperation because people will be able to share information and get to know each other and now it sounds extremely extremely naive so um you know that's that's basically my job as a historian and as a philosopher yes if you are if you have a startup or if you're an entrepreneur or you're developing a new technology obviously you are going to focus on the most positive scenarios and there are positive scenarios it's the truth and then it becomes the job of people like me to present the other side that there are also dangers i don't think there is a single technology in history which has only a positive potential you know a knife can be used to cut salad it can be used to operate as a surgeon on somebody and save their lives and obviously it can be used to murder people the knife is you know can do with it it doesn't tell you what to do with it it's the same with the mass communication technologies we have seen in the 20th century something like radio can be used to broadcast a range of different musical tastes and political opinions and so forth and it can also be monopolized by a government to brainwash a population um and create a totalitarian regime the radio doesn't care what what you do with it it doesn't tell you what what to do with it so this is something that we constantly need to remind the innovators and the people who are at the forefront of these developments i think for example that it's almost outrageous that today in order to be a doctor you need in most universities in most countries you need to take a course of several courses in medical ethics you won't be able to get your certificate as a physician unless you have some knowledge some background in medical ethics but to be a coder you don't need any ethics even though the coders are now the ones who are shaping the entire society the algorithms that they are they are not just coding algorithms they are coding entire societies entire economies and i think that you know every day that passes that we don't make it an obligatory requirement you want to work in silicon valley as a coder wonderful but as part of of your course of studies you must take ethics for coders and if i may just ask one follow-up on eval and then mim i'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this if we compare the last 20 years to maybe what is about to happen in the life sciences world right we sort of went through 20 years of high-tech development in the technology field and now and there's this expectation of a similar dynamic in the life sciences field what you all would you hope that we had learned from those 20 years of technology evolution to be carried over to life science innovation um basically not to be so naive and not to focus you know you develop something do this thought experiment think about the politician or the leader you are most afraid of in your country or in the world and now think what he or she would do with the thing you are developing and just take some time off from your lab work to just have this little thought experiment and then go back to the to the lab and maybe do things a little differently because we do have choice uh the way that we develop technology it's it's up to us you know for the last 20 years you had some of the most the smartest people in the world working on the problem of how to make people click on ads and how to make people click on links and they solved it unfortunately they solved it and now we see the consequences but normally you know it's you know there are so many problems in science and technology that the smartest people in the world can dedicate years of their life to solving so why focus on this problem how to make people click on ads you could have worked on something else so as an example you can work on developing apps for uh tracing government corruption like i want an app on my smartphone if i had a smartphone on my husband's smartphone that you enter the app you fill in the name of a politician you press a button and within two seconds you get a list of all the friends and family members of that politician that he or she appointed to various jobs in the administration or whatever i want this kind of app why don't why don't i have it somebody could also want an anti-virus for the mind yeah this is a this is a much bigger project and this links to to to this to what you were mentioning the developments in in in the life sciences the last 20 years we saw an immense revolution in uh information technology but the real big thing will come when the revolution in infotech will merge with an equivalent revolution in biotech that the will it will really become possible to hack not just my smartphone and email but to hack my brain to gather immense amounts of data on my body on my brain and to hack that and to prepare for this kind of world which is coming sooner i think that many people realize we need an antivirus for the brain for the mind even today you think about something like fake news fake news basically uses our own weaknesses against us if the hackers if the bots they discover by monitoring you that you already have a bias against a particular group of people so they will show you fake news about that particular group because you have an irresistible urge to click on it what did they do this time and you will easily believe the fake news because you have this pre-existing bias so i want a anti-virus for the brain that serves me not some corporation that also gets to know me and knows that i have this bias against this group and warns me watch out you are being manipulated and maybe even be authorized to block these kinds of manipulations because you know we we don't we should come to terms i think with the fact that we as a human being i know very little about myself i have this notion this illusion of free will that i completely control my life my decisions my opinions i know myself i control my life and that's not the case so much of our opinions and decisions are the result of processes within us and outside us that we don't understand and we need help in this era of protecting ourselves from these new kinds of manipulations and and i am just just one one thing that i would like to pick up upon uh something that that uh yuval was sort of referencing too um i i read your quote from yuval he said science can't answer everything and it certainly can provide us with a response to ethical dilemmas what then is the role of scientists and engineers when it comes to ethical questions things like bias for example and of course i'd be also interested to hearing uh sort of your vision for uh you know ethical uh life science and and general scientific developments to come there's a lot here and there's so much i want to respond to and what you've all just said but um you know i i think i think it's important to um you know to see all of these kinds of decisions that we make again within the lens of of of individual human variability and i think you know as you've all said like there's we can't have this expectation um that there that there is a way that we're going to react behave or process um but you know it's it's very hard not to think of it kind of in the lens of you know in particular what's been going on in the united states you know we have a very very divided um we have a very divided country and israel is no uh you know no stranger to divided countries uh but the notion that um you know science should in any way be compromised by by any sort of outside influence is is particularly troubling and i think that's very troubling for scientists in particular um i i think what i will say um you know the the cloning is the first time you know i remember that um this notion of ethics was sort of introduced to me and and and cloning happened even before you know i i began my academic career and you know it's it's so interesting just to see again the variability and there were people who received cloning you know with a ticker tape parade practically and then there were those of us who were very very very very nervous about the implications of it and for me you know i i've seen that over and over and i likely will continue to see it over and over and you know my my specialty is not innovation and technology in neuroscience it's you know it's neuropsychiatry and obsessive compulsive disorder and interactions with humans and you know the fact is just witnessing what technology has done you know for the basis of the future of life science dating um and and that sort of interaction i think has been an astounding example of you know wonderful ways that the world can get smaller and also some really really complicated implications of that um so i'm gonna i'm gonna leave it at that because i so enjoyed yuval's explanation of all of this um and like i said i just also appreciate um you know being able to have a sense of humor about the absurdity um you know of a lot of these trends and yuval you talk about sort of three core threads one being nuclear destruction the second being the ecological climate crisis yeah and then thirdly the tech and sort of bioengineering and you say that the third one is maybe the most complicated one because it's the only one where there's no agreement on what the actual goal is um so i wonder what are the competing goals um and how can we find alignment on them is cooperation what you talk about a lot also in your books is that going to solve it even though we may have never seen question cooperation on that large scale ever before in humankind yeah it's it's a prerequisite if you want to uh regulate something like bioengineering you need a global agreement otherwise it won't work let's say the united states bans all genetic manipulation of human babies let's see but other countries don't follow this policy they have an aggressive policy of genetic experiments on humans or trying to create superhumans very soon even the us will be forced or tempted to break its own ban because it wouldn't like to stay behind if if these technologies really i mean if it doesn't work if it's just science fiction then nobody cares but if it does work if you are able to create more disciplined soldiers in that way if you are able to create smarter scientists in this way then nobody would like to stay behind so it will it will have a bioengineering arms race and similarly if you think about something like ai and this is not a future scenario we are already now in the midst of an accelerating a.i arms race whether it's in the production of autonomous weapons what is known as killer robots but also in many other fields and the only possible way to really regulate and slow down this arms race is through global cooperation now again i'm not very hopeful i mean i don't see many signs that we are moving in that direction but i just don't see any possibility of regulating something as explosive as a.i unless you get the americans and the chinese and the europeans and the russians to agree on some basic framework and much of it also seems to be driven in a way by sort of our endless want for continued economic growth i wonder what are your thoughts around it is this sustainable or will we maybe need to have a total reset also around that thinking of um you know what is sustainable growth i am not the one to speak to it i'm certain but i will say you know i'm used to being the downer at parties but it sounds like yuval is the one who really like he has a perspective that is honestly you know much more helpful i think to answer that question so i i defer to him um at present our economy is based on growth this is the number one goal of any every government in the world it doesn't matter if it's an authoritarian or democratic or jewish or islamic they all want to see economic growth honestly speaking most of the money in the world is based on the expectation of future growth most of the money in the world now really has no cover it's nothing it's just an expectation for future profits for future growth if you now stop all economic growth in the world zero growth that's it not for a month not for a year that's it then the economy won't stop it will completely collapse it's like i don't know an airplane or a bicycle they can't just stop if they stop they fall if you think about the immense increase in the value of companies like tesla and uber and all these tech giants many of them hardly make any money it's all expectations for future growth if you don't have that the economy will collapse similarly in the political field most political capital is expectation for future growth in the middle ages it was different the expectations from kings in the middle ages was basically change nothing keep things as they are but in the modern world the expectation is for improvement now if you're i don't know let's say if you're the prime minister of india and you now come to the 1.2 1.3 billion people in india and you tell them that's the end of the line folks we are not going to grow any more if you're living in some shank on a on on a shanty town near mumbai that's the way it stays because there is no longer any economic growth then you have political uh catastrophe because the whole political system is based on the expectations that if we choose the right person and we have the right policies things will improve so i think the real question is how do we sustain economic growth without destroying the ecological system can we do it can we create new better technologies that will allow economic growth in the sense of improving for example the daily life of the average indian without destroying the ecosystem because again it's very obvious that with present day technology if every indian and every chinese and every nigerian will enjoy the same standout of living as the average american that's the end of this planet or at least the conditions for sustaining human civilization so how to find a a cleaner way a better way to grow that's the big question a question to both of you um you are both obviously with the working comedy mayam with her podcast the alex breakdown yuval just releasing a graphic novel of sapiens like mentioned before you're experts at taking complex information and breaking it down into digestible pieces that are interesting to a wider audience i wonder what can the science community what can innovators out there learn from how you use storytelling in your work let's start with you maya you know obviously as a as an employed actor um i you know i'm less focused on sort of communicating large concepts i'm i'm an entertainer you know and while i hope that what i do also has meaning and heart um you know i work on a television show called call me cat and it's on fox and you know we're we are the warm chocolate chip cookie of television right now is how we look at ourselves so um you know the the work that i choose to do as an advocate for stem you know the work that i try and do in support of technology that is safe and secure and again compassionate for lack of a better word that's sort of where i put more of my ethical decision-making about what i participate in um i do have a podcast it's called miami alex breakdown which is trying to break down concepts of mental health in terms of a larger understanding of the connection between mind and body the significance and scientific basis of things like meditation um and you know that really came out of a year of of covid where many people were experiencing things that they had never experienced before as someone who's been open about my mental health struggles and that of you know my family and many families i sort of have chosen to use that as a way to you know to try and equalize and and normalize some of this conversation you know i will say before i turn it over to to you all um you know one of the things that i've seemed to balance in my career not just my acting career but you know in my public presence which you know is it's uh several million you know people that i have the ability to reach through facebook and through instagram and through twitter um and through youtube and now through a podcast um you know i've always i've always attracted people from quote both sides whatever those sides might be and that's actually a road that i try and stay right in the middle of not because i want all the viewers and you know what i do in this portion of my life you know is that's not my money maker that's where my heart and my time and and literally my the work of my passion is um but the notion is you know we've really lost we've lost nuance and i've seen that in my lifetime we've lost the ability to understand subtlety to understand nuance both in comedy and in science and also in politics and also in technology so i feel like this is you know i get to do my part with with my abilities as a as a trained you know neuroscientist who then raised children um and returned to acting because i was running out of insurance you know that's sort of like all of the the the different plates that i spin um but my my overarching hope is that i can try and you know do my part to return a notion of civility to discourse whatever it is we're speaking about um so uh i i will leave it at that and hope that answers it yeah i think what miami is doing is really wonderful and i hope that most scientists will take inspiration from her the same way that we have actors who are politicians or politicians who are actors scientists also need to be a part of that game we need to reach the general public and to reach general public you need to be good at storytelling now this is not a job of most scientists we need just you know some of them but even if you don't become a full-time actor you just as a scientist you take this responsibility you devote five percent of your time to doing things to reach the general public write wikipedia entries uh every now and then go on a radio show whatever this is can be extremely helpful provided that we remember again the basic thing that humans think in stories not in statistics and mathematical models and so forth so we need to find this way to bridge how to take the complex very complex ideas and theories of science and translate them into stories that people can relate to and people can understand that's the big challenge if if we as scientists don't do it it simply leaves the arena open for far less responsible people to feel this vacuum so i hope that maybe scientists and scholars who are watching us will take inspiration and have this idea to try and contribute something uh to this building this bridge between the citadels of science and the general public and lastly yuval i wanted to get something um optimistic out of you today um are we better off today than we were a hundred years ago and what are you personally hopeful for for the future as humans we are absolutely better off the planet is in a worse in a worse situation and animals are in a worse situation but humans it's the best time ever to be a human being we are not just more powerful but we are healthier we are more peaceful than ever before you know for the first time in human history violence kills fewer people than accidents you have a much much higher chance of dying because you ate too much junk food than because somebody shot you or blew you up and this is a huge achievement and it's not just a technological achievement it's a moral and political achievement so i think this should give us hope that uh and and again this should i'm not saying it to be complacent then okay we can relax we've got it no it's actually make us more responsible people who say that no things are as bad as they ever were this is extremely not just depressing it makes well if everything people have been trying to do for centuries have not accomplished anything then it's probably hopeless maybe there is some law of nature that the level of violence in the world is constant whatever you do you save some here it it blows up there but no when you realize that things can actually improved it makes you more responsible and i'll just finish by commenting on on the covet situation that we i have been i mean on the scientific level we are in a better position to deal with this virus than with any previous epidemic in human history if we don't do it it's a political failure it's not a law of nature so i hope that this will make us more responsible if we fail to stop this epidemic in future epidemics it's not because of the laws of nature it's be it's because we are suffering from a political lack of wisdom that was his most optimistic answer and i loved it and miam to conclude um as we're reaching the end what are you hopeful for or what makes you hopeful there's a lot that i think you know 2020 in particular has has shown us and i think there's a lot uh that's been exposed you know for many of us about um you know in particular in in the country that i live in about inequality and and larger issues that um many of us have known about and many have not you know simply spoken about my hope is that you know the conversations also around who has access to this vaccine will open up larger conversations about who has access to mental health care who has access to um having a voice you know i think that there are much larger conversations that can and should come out of what we've been through um i i'm hopeful about that i i generally am very cynical and very protective um and you know as a person also who um who is a vegan you know and who makes choices that um i hope even in small ways do have an impact on our planet and and um you know and even the climate um i'm i'm also hopeful that we continue to have those kinds of conversations as well thank you so much mayam another thing you share with you val um by the way and the veganism so i want to thank both of you um i think we probably would have needed another five hours um to get through half of the other questions that we have prepared but um we're really thankful for your time um i want to thank south by southwest i want to thank leebs and i want to thank all the people behind the scenes that made this possible today so thank you very much and stay healthy everyone thank you thank you so much

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 238,965

Rating: 4.8793073 out of 5

Keywords: SXSW, Yuval Noah Harari, Mayim Bialik, innovation, technology, internet, leapstalks, change, Tech Open Air

Id: efohpI3sOCI

Length: 54min 35sec (3275 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021