The 2 Most Important Skills For the Rest Of Your Life | Yuval Noah Harari on Impact Theory

everyone thanks for tuning in to this episode which is sponsored by our friends inaudible enjoy well I think this is maybe the most important thing to know about living right now in the 21st century that we are now hackable animals that we have the technology to decipher what do you think what you want to predict human choices to manipulate human desires in ways which were never possible before everybody welcome to impact theory our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams all right today's guest is one of the most profound thinkers of our time a two-time winner of the Polanski prize for creativity and originality his books have sold over 12 million copies and been translated into more than 45 languages sapiens his seminal book on the history of mankind spent six months on the Sunday Times bestseller list and also made him in number one New York Times bestselling author his work has been recommended by countless luminaries including Bill Gates Richard Branson Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama he's won a litany of awards including the Society for military histories monk Otto Award for outstanding articles on military history and the 2017 handel's Blatz German economic Book Award for the most thoughtful and influential economic book of the year additionally he's one of the most sought-after and influential speakers in the world he's given multiple TED talks on hot-button issues relating to the human race and in 2018 he was invited to give the mainstage keynote speech on the future of humanity at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos he is a PhD from Oxford is a tenured history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in addition to his many books he's also written for such prestigious global outlets as the Financial Times the New York Times The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian so please help me in welcoming the man who does a yearly 60 day silent vapp asana meditation retreat the bestselling author of 21 lessons for the 21st century you've all nowa her are we'll have you on the show thank you good to be here good very excited so I've been obsessively reading your books since sapiens came out and just really really blown away and behind the scenes there's a guy here named chase somewhere who you will have to meet today who has just been an absolute champion for your books internally because of the way that you really frame the historical and where we're going in a way that becomes very accessible for today and who we are and that I think is the cool nexus of 21 lessons is that you're really attacking how does this all make sense how is the past inform where we are and how does where we are today inform where we're actually going to go and as a company that's making fiction content and dealing in sci-fi and things like that these ideas are really really important to us for creating guides on how to be essentially and the idea that I wanted to start with is your notion of some of the things that are happening technologically become a little bit dangerous because you can hack a human and if you get explain what you mean by hacking a human and then how do we end up hacking ourselves in a positive way well I think this is maybe the most important thing to know about living right now in the 21st century that we are now hackable animals we have the technology to decipher how humans or what do you think what you want to predict human choices to manipulate human desires in ways which were never possible before basically to hack a human being you need two things you need a lot of data especially biometric data not just about where you go and what you buy but what is happening inside your body and inside your brain and secondly you need a lot of computing power to make sense of all that data now previously in history this was never possible nobody had enough data and enough computing power to hack human beings even if the KGB of the Gestapo followed you around 24 hours a day eavesdropping on every conversation you had watching everybody you meet still they did not have the biological knowledge to really understand what's happening inside you and they certainly didn't have the computing power necessary to make sense even of the data they were able to collect so the KGB could not really understand you could not really predict all your choices or manipulate all your desires and so forth and but now it's changing what the KGB couldn't do corporations and governments today are beginning to be able to do and this is because of the merger of the revolution in biotech we are getting better in understanding what's happening inside us in the body in the brain and at the same time the revolution in Infotech which gives us the computing power necessary when you put the two together when Infotech merges with biotech what you get is the ability to create algorithms that understand me better than I understand myself and then these algorithms cannot just predict my choices but also manipulate my desires and basically sell me anything whether it's a product or a politician and that so that's what you're calling hacking that you're hitting me with the right emotional message at exactly the right time based on my biometric data mm-hmm yeah this is one of the things you can do then you can predict you can manipulate you can eventually also re-engineer or replace if you really hack a system you really understand how it functions then usually you can also reengineering or you can completely replace it and again one of the dangers that we are facing to during the 21st century is that computers and AI would be able to replace humans in more and more tasks and maybe push millions of humans out of the job market as a result all right so I I fully understand the dangers and we will talk about some of what we were talking about off-camera which is we've got this whole story called nyan phew we're exploring that notion of what happens to what you've called the useless class when they're pushed out of the job market and what does that do economically but going just staying with the the notion of the hack ability for a second so it's funny as you were describing it and I know you bring the sense of like there's some like real significant problems we need to take a very serious look at and I get almost giddy with excitement because I have potentially delusional levels of optimism I'm very open to that no I agree I mean the thing about this ability to hack humans is that it has also potentially tremendous positive consequences and this is why it's so tempting if it was only bad then it was B which would have been like an easy deal to say okay we don't want that and let's stop researching or going in the direction but it is extremely tempting because it can provide us for example with the best health care in history something which goes far beyond anything we've seen so far this can mean that maybe in 30 years the poorest person on the planet can get a better health care from her or his smartphone then the richest person today gets from the best hospitals and the best doctors the kind of things you can just know about what's happening in your body is nothing like we've seen so far know that that's really extraordinary and if you had to take the positive look and say okay we have this ability let's just say it's already there we've got all this biometric data it's kicking off how would you encourage people to leverage that to empower themselves and I'll use an example that I found profoundly interesting from your book so you said that growing up that it was unclear to you that you were gay but that now Stanford has developed an algorithm that essentially can look at three or four photos of somebody's face and predict with 91% accuracy whether or not they're gay which seems impossible but if that's true the level of data that we could give ourselves about are like deepest most hardwired desires there would be a level of clarity there that seems useful how would you encourage people to use that well it's a very good example I mean the Stanford algorithm actually there is a lot of problems with that research and let's put it aside but first key message from from that is how little people actually know about themselves and one of the most important things in my life and also in I think in my scientific career was the realization of how little I know about myself and humans in general there was so many important ideas and important facts we don't realize about herself I was 21 when I finally realized that I was game which is you know when you think what it it's it's absolutely amazing I mean it should have been obvious at age you know 16 15 and an algorithm would have realized it very quickly and you can build algorithms like that today or in a few years you just need to follow your eye movements like you you go on the beach or you you look at the computer screen and you see an attractive guy an attractive girl and just follow the focus of the eyes world with the eyes go and whom do they focus on should be very easy and such an algorithm could have told when I was 15 that I was gay and the implications are really mind-boggling when an algorithm knows such an important thing about you before you know it about yourself now it can go in all kinds of directions it really depends on where you live and what you do with it in some countries you can be in trouble now with the police in the government you might be sent to some reaction facility in some countries like with you know surveillance capitalism so maybe I don't know about myself that I'm game but coca-cola knows I'm gay because they have these algorithms and they want to know that because they need to know which commercials to show me let's say coca-cola knows that I'm gay and I even know about myself that they know it and Pepsi doesn't coca-cola will show me a commercial with a shirtless guy drinking coca-cola but Pepsi will make the mistake of showing the girl in the bikini and next day without my realizing why when I go to the supermarket when I go to the to the restaurant I will order coca-cola not Pepsi I don't know why but they know so they might not even share this kind of information with me now if the algorithm does share the information with me again it's it a lot depends on context one scenario is that you're 15 years old you go to a birthday party of somebody from your class and somebody just heard that there is this cool new algorithm which tells zeros sexual orientation and everybody agrees it will be a lot of fun to just have this game that everybody takes turn with the algorithm and and everybody else looking and seeing the results would you like to discover about yourself in such a scenario this this can be quite quite a shocking experience okay but even if it's done in like complete privacy you know it's it's a very deep philosophical question what does it mean to discover something like that about yourself from an algorithm what car what does it mean about human life about human identity we have very little experience with these kinds of things you know from very ancient times all the philosophers and saints and sages tell people to get to know yourself better it's one of the maybe the most important thing in life is to get to know yourself better but for all of history this was a process of self exploration which you did through things like meditation and maybe sports and maybe out and contemplation and all these things what does it mean when the process of self self exploration is being outsourced to a big data algorithm and the philosophical implications are our quite mind-boggling it's interesting so let's talk about that so the implications your outsourcing the self-discovery process to me that sounds so profoundly useful because all day the people that write in to me they're asking basically one essential question how do I find the thing that I love because I tell people you need to develop a passion in your life I don't think you find it I think you develop it but they need to start from an area of real interest it needs to be actually something that at a hardwiring level they're just they get that response so then their next question is like how right how do I get into that how do I discover the thing that triggers me like that and if I discover then how do I develop it into a passion if you had an algorithm something that were able to use the more manipulative techniques that you were talking about that coca-cola's doing or whatever but give it to you in a way that can move you in a desired direction so I'll give you a specific example that you give in the book so talking about how let's say there was an algorithm that knew you just broken up with somebody new that you were in the grips of heartache because they're they're reading your BIOS thing we all do ha in fact give it to us that that example that you put so the biometrics they're reading you the it's the song it knows what songs to pick yeah I mean something is as simple as choosing music so you you were just dumped by your boyfriend or girlfriend and the the algorithm that controls the music that you listen to chooses the songs that are the best fit for your current mental state and of course this brings up the question of what is the matrix what do you actually want from the music do you want the music to uplift you or do you more want the music to kind of connect you to the deepest level of sadness and depression and ultimately we can say that the algorithm can follow different kinds of instructions if you know what kind of emotional state you want to be in you can just tell the algorithm what what you want and it will do it if you are not sure you can tell the algorithm follow the recommendation of the best psychologist today so let's say you have the five stages of grief so okay walk me with music through this five stages of grief and the algorithm can do that better than any human DJ and what we really need to understand in in this regard is that what music and most of art plays on in the end is the human biochemical system at least according to the dominant view of art in the modern Western world we had different views in different cultures but in the modern Western world the idea of art is that art is above all about inspiring human emotions it doesn't necessarily have to be joy great art can inspire also sadness can can inspire a anger can inspire fear it can be a whole palette of emotional states but out is about inspiring human emotions so the instrument artists play on and whether it's musicians or poets or movie makers they're actually playing on the homosapiens biochemical system and we might reach a point quite soon when an algorithm knows this instrument better than any human artist a movie or a poem or a song that will not move you that will not inspire you might inspire me and something that will inspire me in one situation might not inspire me in another situation and as time goes on and the algorithm gathers more and more data about me it will become more and more accurate in reading my biochemical system and knowing how to play on it as if it was a piano like okay you want joy I press this button and out comes the perfect song the only song in the world that can actually make me joyful right now that's so interesting to me alright so right now real world you can snap your fingers and you can have one algorithm that's tied to one biochemical process in your life for real what would you want to monitor and get that feedback on now that's easy I mean a healthcare if there is like something seriously wrong in my body that I don't know about like I don't know cancer or something I would like the algorithm to find that out I don't want to wait until I mean the usual process is that it has to go through your own mind you can't outsource it I mean today when you need to diagnose cancer there are exceptions but in most cases there is a crucial moment when you feel something is wrong in my body and you go to this doctor and that doctor and you do this test and that test until they finally realize okay we just discovered you have cancer in your liver or whatever but because it relies on your own feelings in this case feelings of pain very often it's quite late in the process by the time you start feeling pain usually the cancer has spread and maybe it's not too late but it's going to be expensive and painful and problematic to treat it but if we can you know outsource this don't go through the mind through through my feelings I want an algorithm that with biometric sensors is monitoring my health 24 hours a day without my being aware of it it can potentially discover this liver cancer when it is just a tiny just a few cells are beginning to to to split and to spread and it's so easy and cheap and painless to take care of it now instead of two years later when it's already spread and it's it's a big problem so this is something that I think almost everybody would sign on to and this is the big temptation because it comes with the whole other B the long tail of dangers I mean this algorithm that the the healthcare system knows almost everything about you so one of the biggest battles in the 21st century is likely to be between privacy and health and I guess that health is going to win most people will be willing to give up a very significant amount of privacy in exchange for far better health care now we do need to try and enjoy both worlds to create a system that give us a very good health care but without compromising our privacy keeping there yes you can use the data to tell me that there is a problem and then we should do this order to solve it but I don't want this data to be used for other purposes without my knowing it whether we can reach such a balance and like you know have-your-cake- and-eat-it-too that that's a big political question yeah yeah that's that is very crazy and very exciting for somebody like me who definitely airs on the side of wanting the health care you've talked really powerfully about story about how stories like money which I don't think most people think of as a story as being you know these tremendous things that control all of our lives that point us all in the same direction that gives us sort of a common code by which to live how can people take control of the story that they tell themselves about themselves which I find to be one of the most important stories that you engage in yes how our identity is really just a story which we constantly construct and and embellish I mean you can say that the entire human mind is a machine that constantly produces stories and especially one very important story which is my story and different people have different specialize in different genres some people build their stories a tragedy some people build their stories a comedy or a drama but in the end the self is a story and not a real thing and on the one hand with all the new technologies you get better and in better abilities to construct yourself but already today a lot of the work which previously was done in the brain in the mind of constructing my identity my story has been outsourced to things like Facebook that you build your Facebook account and this is actually outsourcing it from the brain and you are busy maybe four hours every day just building a story and becoming extremely attached to it and and publicizing it to everybody and you tend to make this fundamental mistake you think it's the wreck this is really me and so that a mistake I'm actually really curious first of all if you take something like the profile that people create about themselves in in Facebook or Instagram it should be obvious it doesn't really reflect your actual existence your actual reality both in reality now to reality like the percentage of time you smile in your Instagram account is much bigger than the percentage of time you smile in real life and you know you go on some vacation and you post the the images from the vacation so usually you're smiling in your in your swimming suit on the beach with your girlfriend and boyfriend holding and this cocktail and everything looks perfect and everybody's so envious but actually you just had a nasty fight with your boyfriend five minutes ago and then this is the image that everybody else is seeing and thinking oh they must have such wonderful time and afterwards like a year later of two years later you look back and this is what you see and you forget what was the actual experience like what what is the role of truth in a story that we tell ourselves about ourselves very little do you think there should be more there should there should definitely be more and wanting an outcome if we were like I'm really gonna make sure that the story I tell myself is objectively true it's going to be very very painful and difficult I think it is worth the effort but it's just very difficult we constantly we constantly edit the this story just like the news on TV are edited and just like you know it's a bit making a movie like you watch the movie in the cinema and everything is so seamless like this is the story it flows and then when you actually see how a movie is produced this is insane like you have this tiny bit of a scene you repeat it 50 times and sometimes you know you shoot this scene this scene scene 2 comes after a scene 1 but actually it was filmed long before that so sometimes you you you feel the breakup of the lovers before you film the the first meeting for all kinds of of scheduled reasons and location so the the end result is completely seamless and perfect but it is actually made up from all these tiny in tiny disconnected bits that have been you know this is from here and this is from there and we somehow glue it together and it looks good and it's the same with the story of our life it's all kinds of bits and pieces and only when you tell it to yourself or to somebody else it kind of makes sense the cost of trying to stick with the reality as it is is very very high it's very difficult it demands a lot of effort and it is often very painful because you have to acknowledge many things about yourself that you don't want to acknowledge them people have this fantasy of going to some retreat and just taking out a week or two off from life to really observe inside to really explore Who am I what is my authentic self and they have this fantastic notion that I will be able to finally connect to my inner child and I will discover my true vocation in life and I will discover all these wonderful things about me and when you actually do it the first thing you usually encounter is all the things you don't want to know about yourself there is a reason that that that you don't want to know them I think it's worth the effort but it's a very very hard task all right on that there's so many studies that talk about the more delusional somebody is self delusional the more likely they are to be happy you've said one of the big questions is a historian you're trying to answer is as we've moved forward as a you know a species of society have we actually gotten happier so there is some importance it sounds like that you place on happiness so why then would you want people to do that hard work of facing the reality is recognizing the things about themselves that they don't necessarily want to recognize is that because you think it leads to more happiness I think that ultimately it is worth the price I mean delusions come at a very high price also and not just to yourself but to people around you to the world as a whole I mean ultimately this leads to things like wars and like genocide and like an emperor and you know I come from Israel I come from the Middle East so I am surrounded by millions of people who are killing each other because of all kinds of fictional stories in delusions that they believe in so sometimes it's an important defensive mechanism it's very difficult to live just with the raw truth all the time but the price of delusion and the price of not being able to tell the difference between fiction and reality it ends up and eventually it adds up to things like genocide and war that sounds like a pretty extraordinary price to pay yeah I will agree with you there in 21 lessons is what do we do when we're faced with being put out of work that we are one of the useless class and we have to do this reinvention at a career level you're living longer your career life is 50 60 70 80 years whatever that looks like in a time where every seven to ten years like it's just it's a completely new world what do you think the human capacity for that level of reinvention is well that's a very important question-it has little to do with immortality because even without immortality we are heading in the direction even if people if the lifespan remains as it is 80 years every 10 years you have another big shock I mean people one of the things many people don't realize about the AI revolution and the automation revolution they imagine it is some kind of one-time event we have the big AI revolution in 2025 you have all these truck drivers and taxi drivers and doctors and whatever losing their jobs you have a few difficult years of adjustment and then eventually you have the new brave new world of AI with a new equilibrium and this is an extremely unlikely scenario because we are nowhere near the maximum potential of AI the speed in which it develops is only likely to accelerate so what we are really going to face is a cascade of ever bigger revolutions in the job market and in many other areas of life relationships politics and so forth so you have a big disruption in 2025 you have an even bigger disruption in 2035 an even bigger one in 2045 and and so forth and if you look say at a job market so ok you were a truck driver and they no longer need you but there is new demand for yoga teachers so you somehow reinvent yourself at age 40 I'm no longer truck driver nominate your teacher it's very difficult you somehow do it 10 years later no need of yoga teachers thank you very much we now have these amazing applications connected with biometric sensors to your body they know exactly what you're doing with every tiny muscle as you do this posture of that posture no human yoga teacher can compete with that you're out of job you have to reinvent yourself again as a designer of virtual world games and you do it somehow but 10 years later you have to do it again because this too has now been automated and even if you get support from the government and there is all these education for the for adult system the really big question is again it's psychological do do we as human beings have the mental stability and the emotional intelligence necessary to reinvent ourselves repeatedly and you know when you're 20 what you're doing is basically to reinvent yourself or to invent yourself for the first time and it is very difficult when you're 30 it's even more difficult but you sometimes but you somehow do it but when you get to be 40 50 60 it becomes more and more difficult you have more to let go of I have invested so much in building this career this personality these skills to give it all up and start again from from a new it's so difficult so I don't know what whether we can do it yeah that is the question that I think will ultimately be forced to answer and that brings me to education so what do you think that if we're talking to somebody who's 18 right now they're trying to decide do I go to college yes or no should they go to college and if they go to college what should they be studying that's a very difficult question the first thing they should realize is that nobody really knows nobody really knows how the job market would look like in 2040 so they should be suspicious of all these kinds of advices by people who pretend that they know what the job market would need in 20 years the best investment I would say is in emotional intelligence and in mental balance and these kinds of skills of how to keep changing throughout your life how to keep learning throughout your life now how do you learn that that's very very difficult we don't have a college degree in mental flexibility but these are the most important so whatever you choose you can go to law school you can go to ballet school but you should keep in mind that much of what I'm learning might be irrelevant in in 20 or 30 years so whatever else I'm doing I should also invest in developing my emotional intelligence my mental balance my ability to keep changing and learning and reinventing throughout my life so maybe to give an image or a metaphor if in the past education was like building a stone house with very deep foundations now I would say that education is more like a constructing a tent that you can fold up and move to another location very quickly and easily that's a great analogy so given that it's so hard to predict the future you've talked a lot about the power of science fiction and science fiction writers walk us through that why what is the role that a science fiction writer can play or storytellers filmmaker whatever the case may be our lives in the 21st century more than anything else are going to be new technologies especially in AI and biotechnology and most people their understanding of these technologies and their potential for good or for bad it really comes from science fiction the political system so far has done an awful job in understanding and preparing us for these kinds of developments there is almost no talk in the political arena about AI and biotechnology the scientific community is of course very deeply engaged with it but most people don't read articles in science or nature and even if they tried it would be very difficult for them to understand the professionals are gone and all that the statistics and so forth so that most people actually get their education about what's coming from science fiction and this mean at least I think so that science fiction is now the most important artistic genre and it should also be the most responsible and one of the problems we sense fiction is it's so far it is done as social jobs some novels and TV series and films are really amazing in the way they explore what's what could what could happen are ranging like some of my favorites are my all-time favorite is brave new world by Aldous Huxley which was written back in the early 1930s and I think is the most prophetic and profound I totally understand alright so before I asked my last question tell these guys where they can find you online I have a website why in Harari dot-com and they can find me on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all the usual places awesome my last question is what is the impact that you want to have on the world I want to bring more clarity to the public conversation on what's happening in the world I think that too much of the public discussion is focused either on the wrong issues or is extremely confused and unclear and people are flooded by enormous amounts of information which they don't know how to make sense of and what I I see my mission is bringing clarity to the public discussion especially in terms of focusing people's attention on the most important questions I try to give some answers to but I don't care a lot if people don't agree with me about the answers about the solutions the important thing I think is to agree about the questions and I would end by saying there are three big challenges to humankind in the 21st century there are nuclear war climate change and technological disruption and these should be the first three items on the political agenda of every country this is not the case right now I would like it to be the case Yuval thank you so much for joining me thank you that was incredible all right guys when I say that you're going to learn just an absolute metric ton of stuff from this man dive into his first three books they are absolutely extraordinary you will learn so much about where we've come from where we're going and where we are today that it will give you the ability to look at yourself in a totally new way to understand yourself not even just at the operating system level but like at the kernel level it was so fascinating to see him walk us through that entire lineage it's unlike anything that I've read before and reading the books as a trilogy and understanding how they all work together is is breathtaking so I highly highly highly encourage that and the fact that he's out there in a populist way getting people to ask these questions I think is so critical and he throughout go back to the beginning of this episode he threw out some amazing business ideas without I think even meaning to but I thought wow somebody could actually run with these and they would be extraordinary and that's just the way his mind works he really is one of the most profound thinkers of our time dive in he's accessible and that is one of the most beautiful things and remember he's a historian so the way that he's putting this all in context is is truly extraordinary and once you understand things at why they are the way they are then it just brings a whole new ability to see through the lies fake news the stories we tell ourselves all of the just natural human attachments to really come to an understanding of the way the world actually is and once you understand that then you can begin to move in a way that makes sense and allows you to reach your own goals all right if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care camp activist I credit my success to voracious reading and I mean I read a lot but when I say that I read something I actually mean that I listen to it because I'm a ridiculously slow reader audio books through audible have literally been a life changer for me because of audible I'm able to read faster learn in transitional moments like when I'm cooking working out or writing car now as you know it's that time of year when everyone is thinking about thoughtful gifts so please think about getting audible for somebody that you love so that they can accelerate their learning and for the holidays we have a very special offer for our community right now for a limited time you can get three months of audible for just six ninety-five a month that's more than half off the regular price just go to audible.com forward slash impact theory or text impact theory to five hundred five hundred to get started all right use the link and information in the description below and get started to day enjoy and be legendary everybody thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're gonna get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 790,997

Rating: 4.790904 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Yuval Noah Harari, Yuval Noah Harari Tom Bilyeu, Yuval Noah Harari Impact Theory, Homo Deus, Sapiens, 21 lessons for the 21st century, yuval noah harari ted, yuval noah harari interview, yuval harari

Id: x6tMLAjPVyo

Length: 41min 1sec (2461 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018

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[u/Lacrimosa7]

Highly recommend reading this guy’s books. Very insightful.

[u/eternal_serenity]

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