Yuval Noah Harari and Jared Diamond in conversation

it's really great to hear both of you like one thing that I was thinking about it I would like to start asking is whether you guys are on social media do you use like the Internet do you have a cell phone what do you do about it well I I try to use technology without being used by it so to use it smartly I I'm not against technology it might sound like some of the things I say but there is kind of a division of labor between you know engineers and interpreter and tempra NORs while developing the new technologies they for obvious reasons tend to emphasize all the wonderful promises and the positive potential and then it becomes the tasks of historians and philosophers and social critics to speak mainly about the dangers because somebody has to do it but I think we need overall a balanced approach so I certainly use social media the Internet has been a wonderful thing in my life I met my husband in a dating site online 17 years ago so I don't regret that so yeah I think a balanced approach is the best thing that makes a lot of sense what about you Jared is this working yes so because I am 40 years older the new vowel I do not use social media at all my wife and one of my twin sons forced me four years ago to get this marvel of Technology a cell phone I like the rubber bands what are they for cell phone broke I use the cell phone to make calls I never turn the cell phone on except when I want to receive calls I've not learned how to operate its camera but I have learned to take down emails from my cell phone and that's all that I do with a cell phone I have personal experience of the the negative negative effects of Technology I'm not opposed to technology my secretary as scriber and uses computers and I'm happy to have piano and other pieces of technology but because of my fieldwork for fifty-five years on the island of New Guinea New Guineans do not did not have technology they didn't have cell phone they didn't have writing when I first went to New Guinea and the consequence is that all communication in New Guinea is face-to-face its most communication for us here is not face to face it's words on a screen but New Guineans communicate with each other always face to face and the result is that they're very good at understanding other people five year old New Guineans are good at bargaining New Guinea villagers who've never been out of their village can out bog and oil company lawyers who come in from around the world so I'm really impressed by the social skills associated with not becoming dependent on technology and with the loss of social skills often associated with dependence on indirect communication it's a challenge how to get the advantages of technology without paying the price of lots of communicative skills yeah I was watching Bill Gates documentary on Netflix recently and one of the things that struck me was precisely the fact that he only read books and the documentary doesn't show him using technology or almost at all so I was asking myself whether it takes a billionaire not to use technology anymore can we afford not to use technology anymore maybe in the future only billionaires will actually be able to do that not sure what do you think well in a way not having a smartphone is kind of the new status symbol I mean I don't have a smartphone and you know if you if you don't have a smartphone you're really important somebody else is carrying of course the smartphone for you if I need to reach you but it means that you are unreachable which was always the ultimate status symbol in a way if you have a smartphone it means that you have a boss either a professional boss at work or maybe a family boss like your children or your parents whoever needs to know where you are all the time and you know when my came came home from work like 30 years ago 40 years ago when they stepped into the the house that was it their workday was over there was no way for their boss to get hold of them and want something but now many people find that they are constantly in work because of the smartphone and they can't tell their boss no I don't want it so I think we need again we need a balanced approach we need to use a technology this technology but we also need to build sanctuaries for people for teenagers for for grownups that places and times when they are completely unreachable that it's not just a status symbol of the super rich and powerful that they have these sanctuaries maybe you should connect everybody and then after that teach them how to disconnect I think that's a great idea how do you feel about it Jarrett well it's it's a challenge to get the benefits out of technology because that no doubt that there are enormous benefits and to minimize the disadvantages because I'm married to a clinical psychologist I see firsthand something that some of you may have seen but many of you may not know about there is now a specialty of clinical psychology which consists of detoxifying people who are addicted to their electronic media yeah seriously they were psychologists who specialized in this and so someone who recognizes that they are checking their cell phone every two minutes and they're checking in in the in the in the evening and their the cell phone is next to them while they're making love in the evening they recognize that they've got a problem so there are psychologists who take away such a debts for the weekend the addict leaves all the electronic devices in the pile of the door and for the first couple of hours they are undergoing withdrawal literally withdrawal like a heroin addict and then the the clinical psychology then helps them to deal with it withdrawal and then how to figure out when to turn the device on when to turn the device off both of you guys wrote books that actually touched millions of people and your ideas have like a circulated around the world and I'm curious about what is it about your formation your education what was the moment in which you guys maybe had this Eureka moment and you basically were capable of synthesizing this idea that touched so many people so what about your education that actually led you to be here today for me it was really reading your book and it's not really I was doing my PhD in Oxford on you know a typical peach the history subject which was the memoirs of soldiers from the late Middle Ages and early modern period not the stuff of bestsellers and in my spare time I read Guns Germs and Steel and I said to myself hey you can actually write such books and it can be scientific books it's not like the world is divided into these I don't know science fiction and and thrillers and things like that and then these tiny professional scientific monographs about very very limited subject you can actually be scientists who writes from a macro perspective and it took me quite a few years to realize how to actually do it but this was the really the moment that to change it for me that's me I wonder what book you read like like you vowel it also took me quite a few years and there was a background to it my mother was a teacher and a pianist and a linguist my father was a physician and so I grew up with science and languages and music and my mother taught me to read when I was three years old so I had lots of interest when I was grown but in academia you're expected to specialize and so I got my PhD on the physiology of the gallbladder here and I became the world's expert on the gallbladder but from my childhood a background of interest in a lot of things to be to feel that the rest of my life was going to be devoted to the gallbladder felt confined there were two crises for me because again because my being older than you valve it could not be from reading reading you well there are two things that happen within short succession I'm in 1985 I received a fellowship called the MacArthur Fellowship MacArthur fellowships are batch of fellowships for which you don't apply and they they give you five years of support to do anything that you want I got a phone call from the head of the McArthur fellowship program who began the phone call with a single sentence I'm calling to tell you Jared Diamond that you've received this fellowship which gives you this amount of money for the next five years and there are also health benefits and disorder all in a single sentence and at first I was highly excited because there was lots of money and the result then surprised that paradoxically was that for one of only two times in my adult life I've got seriously depressed really depressed but one of the those few times was after I got the announcement of MacArthur award because of when what it meant to me was that the foundation thought that I was capable of doing more than gallbladder research that I had not been living up to my potential and that they expected me to do things and I began thinking what bigger things could I do and then the second wakeup was the birth of my twin sons in 1987 recognizing that that the year 2050 when I certainly will be dead my son's own can be alive in 2050 and their world their future is not going to depend upon gallbladders but it's going to depend upon history and geography so that those two things were the stimulus for my starting to write the book for the general public to convey the excitement of science and what we can do about it to the general public my first book was the third chimpanzee and that was followed by Guns Germs of Steel which had a wonderful by-product fantastic thanks for sharing that I would like to talk about mental health but in a second and I think it's really important to mention these issues but before I do that there is a Brazilian Paul company called data folia and they asked Brazilians whether they think the earth is flat or round and it's funny because seven percent of Brazilians as July of this year think that the earth is flat and four percent I'm not sure so we are talking here about twenty two million people actually believe in in Brazil that the earth is either flat or they don't really know how it is do you think reality is under attack because you mention a lot about the power of storytelling and narratives and maybe Umberto Eco was right when he was basically saying that social media and the Internet allow the invasion of the idiots that's the expression that he used a little bit before he died so IRA losing control of the narratives and storytelling and what should we do about it well the problem is not new I think it's if you had the same survey 500 years ago you would have much higher percentages so we are making progress yeah propaganda fake news I'm not a new thing they've been with us always and on a deeper level the thing is that human power does not really depend on knowing the truth in many many cases the real UN power depends on cooperation on large-scale cooperation and unfortunately or not it is often easy to make people cooperate based on a fictional story then based on the truth because the truth and this goes back to the issue of crisis the truth is often complicated unflattering difficult to deal with whether were as fictional stories tend to be easier to grasp and tend also often to flatter us like blaming somebody else for our problems and take an example say of an atom bomb what do you need in order to build an atom bomb on the one hand you need truth scientific truths if you are working on the basis of a wrong theory of physics you think e equals mc2 the third you won't be able to build an atom bomb yeah so on the one hand you need the truth and even the most dictatorial and lunatic regimes in the world but it comes to building nuclear weapons they suddenly want the scientific truth but it's not enough to have a true physical theory to build an atom bomb you also need millions of people cooperating you need notice the physicists you need the miners and the engineers and the peasants and farmers who grow the food that the workers are in millions of people now how do you get millions of people to cooperate not by explaining to them the theory of relativity it's a very bad not bad but it's it's it's not going to work you won't get millions of people cooperating by trying to explain to them the theory of relativity here fictional stories tend to be far far more effective and we have seen it throughout history and it's also true today in many cases when it comes to uniting people and cooperating fictional stories easily trump the truth very good how do you feel about that the the flagrant example in the United States of which I'm aware is not belief in a flat earth I just don't know how many Americans believe in a flat earth but there are lots of Americans more than in Europe who do not believe in evolution although the major factor biology is evolution you can no more understand biology if you don't accept the fact of evolution then you can understand physics if you don't believe in atoms and yet it's not just that a majority of Americans don't believe in evolution is that the majority of American biology teachers do not believe in evolution which is shocking the trend at present under the current administration in acceptance of fat facts is is backwards the the current administration talks about alternative facts or fake facts it's making a [Music] political living out of denying reality just to give you a Dana example to give you the flavor this is not the most important example but we recently had a hurricane a bad hurricane which came up the east coast of the United States and threatened Florida in the Carolinas for some reason president Trump believed that that hurricane was also going to threaten the state of Alabama which is about a thousand kilometers from the East Coast and so Trump announced that the hurricane was a threat to Alabama and this had various consequences the u.s. weather bureau then was was obliged to to announce that for fear that Alabamans would run out of that houses enclosed in the house the weather bureau chief in alabama announced no there's no threat to to Alabama from the hurricane but then the national government told the head of the weather bureau to shut up and to retract that statement it's very striking then that that scientists working for the government be told that they cannot tell elementary truths and that they should not contradict elementary falsehoods such as that a hurricane is going to affect Alabama a thousand kilometers who so in the United States at present the situation paradoxically is getting worse rather than better good what worries me is not only about being they were flat or not but also vaccines so in Brazil we've been seeing like the resurgence of smallpox and also in other places so I really worry about these narratives and how people spin them but let me move to another subject which is automation in the end of jobs right so you you talk a lot in houma deals about the emergence of the useless class and you also mention the very well-known study by Osborn and Frey from Oxford that basically say that 47 percent of jobs risk being automated in the next few years so basically these are jobs that machines will do and probably you humans will be staying out of the picture I want to play the devil's advocate because right now we don't really see it happening so if you look at the United States which has one of the highest levels of automation employment rate is unemployment rate is actually three point seven percent now while Brazil that ranks really low in the automation readiness index by the economist has a twelve percent unemployment rate right now so is it really happening is this something that is going to happen in the future because what I'm afraid is that I we don't see right now any signs that automation is actually replacing human work and actually these most automated countries the cost of labor is actually going up how do you feel about that well of course nobody knows exactly the timetable but the key elements to consider is first of all the AI revolution is something like four or five years old it takes time it's not that within it one of the other that the distance from the laboratory were the breakthrough are being made till it impacts the factory of the office it takes time mm-hmm so we will see it unfolding and not just in one year it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions because AI is nowhere near its full potential so it's not like we'll have a big AI revolution say in 2020 or 2025 and then we have a couple of rough years and then everything settles down no we are about to eat a slope which is will get worse and worse as AI becomes better and better so that's one issue the second issue is that it's not that jobs will be completely eliminated some jobs will disappear some jobs will change and some new jobs will emerge and the big issue will not will actually be retraining people to fill the new jobs and here the rich countries which are leading the automation revolution they have a huge advantage because they will reap most of the benefits from the AI revolution and they already reach anyway so they will have the resources to retrain their workforce so I don't think we'll see huge unemployment in the United States or in Germany or Japan the huge unemployment will be in Guatemala and Indonesia and Bangladesh just think what happens to the textile industry in Central America or in Southeast Asia once it becomes cheaper to produce a shirt in New York than in Guatemala we're quite close to that point you won't see unemployment in New York actually employment in New York or San Francisco will even go higher because there is more money there is more demand for software engineers there is more demand for yoga teachers to teach the software engineers yoga the unemployment will be in Guatemala it will be in Bangladesh in these places and the danger is that the AI revolution will result in something like the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century extreme inequality between some countries which are dominate the global economy and other countries which completely collapse because their main asset of cheap manual labor becomes irrelevant and this also leads to political domination we are likely to see we are beginning to see what could be called data colonialism when to control a country you don't need to send in the armies you just need to gather the data from the country just imagine say Brazil in 20 years or 30 years when the entire personal medical financial history of every journalist every politician every judge every mirror in Brazil is held by somebody in San Francisco Beijing everything every little sexual escapade you had at age 20 somebody there knows it because they have the data they don't need to send in soldiers the data is enough to control these countries from afar this is good and I don't think it's good at all and actually I have to say we are on the same boat because I am also concerned about these issues but I would like to see how you would respond to that and I like your response a lot that was good Jared what's your perspective there's this this is no scenario in which the rich countries have the benefits and the big advantage and that scenario is a possible one but there's another scenario which is quite possible I would say the chances are 49% that the scenario that I'm about to tell you will happen and that is that suppose we don't get on to a sustainable economy in the next several decades we failed and we're no longer able to support a first world society and we would lapse we have to relapse to the Stone Age who is going to be able to master the art of living in the Stone Age not Americans not Europeans not Japanese the people who will master life in the Stone Age of the people who who have experience of it within their lifetimes with a grandparents lifetime New Guineans and here in Brazil on Amazonian Native Americans who've been using stone tools relatively recently one may say this is a far-out scenario why worry about her well the fact is the theory is substantial risk that our ability to support a complex first world metal tool based society is not going to Safari on Daffy you decades and if so it doesn't mean that everybody in the world is gonna be dead if we have a nuclear holocaust yes everybody in the world will be dead but if we fail to develop a sustainable economy the human species is not going to go extinct those humans who survive will be the New Guinean my New Guinea friends one of my New Guinea friends made the last trip to the stone quarry in the late 1970s there are still stone tools around there my New Guinea friends still know how to farm the 79 varieties of sweet potatoes I don't have the faintest idea how to farm sweet potatoes in the United States 98% of Americans are not farmers 2% of Americans are farmers but in New Guinea until recently 100 percent of people were farmers so an alternative scenario a worst-case scenario is that within several decades it's not the rich countries that will have the benefits it's the poor countries namely the poor countries that most recently were operating in the Stone Age very interesting comment on that that one of the features of history is often that Easter is terribly unfair and it often happens in history that the rich caused problems that then the poor pay for and the rich are maybe hurt a little but they are in the position to survive it better like we saw in the financial crisis that the bankers who caused much of the crisis they were least hurt by it and people in far-off places that had nothing to do with the responsibility they pay the most now I think that in a catastrophic scenario like that the kneestr will be a huge advantage to people who are in a way closest to the Stone Age but the vast majority of poor people in developing country are not these tribal societies which still have the survival skills they are the people who work saying the textile mills and they never found they don't know how to produce texture they don't know how to produce stone - they know how to drive two hours in a bus to some polluted factory and work there for 10-12 hours and then take the bus back home and in case of a major crisis they are likely to suffer even more than the rich people say in San Francisco or in London and it's something the case of a really extreme like nuclear war one of one frightening scenario one problem is that a major crisis will only accelerate dangerous technological developments like we saw in the two world wars that as long as things are relatively calm people don't like to take risks with extreme technologies but if say a major that we don't get a handle over the climate crisis and thinks that TV right rapidly this will cause people to look for extreme solutions and therefore I think that a climate crisis will not slow down developments in AI and biotechnology it is likely only to accelerate them and to cause people to not take to give up the precautions oh we are facing existential crisis anyway so yes it's very dangerous to start experimenting in genetic engineering it's very dangerous to develop these new super AI but we are in a crisis so we have to do it and I think part of the reason why elites in the world today are not doing enough to combat the climate crisis the ecological crisis is that either consciously or at least subconsciously in the back of their mind they say yes that's a big problem but not when the flood comes we will build a technological arc yes the poor people in the favelas they will suffer but not us we will probably have the resources and the technological expertise to protect ourselves from the worst outcomes and this is why the elite are not as alarmed as they should be yeah joe yeah it's an interesting question to which I can throw in something from from personal experience it is true flagrantly in the United States that lots of rich people perceive correctly that at present and for the foreseeable future they can escape the consequences of bad things going on in the world and other people are going to to suffer there's a question when will rich people in the United States start taking problems seriously and a bitter answer is they will start taking problems seriously when they see that their own personal safety is a threat I had a Maria not my wife and I we had a dramatic example of that in the year that was 1993 Los Angeles is a city with unequal distribution of wealth they are the rich areas like Beverly Hills and there are poor areas like downtown and when Marie and I in fact in 1993 were on an airplane going to a reunion of MacArthur Foundation fellows in Chicago we arrived in Chicago checked into the hotel and friend said turn on the television and you're not gonna like what you see and what had happened we turned on the telly what had happened was the the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles Rodney King riots were riding that broke out in the downtown area of Los Angeles as a result of the beating of the draw crime call Rodney King riots spread and there was concern that the riots would spread to devily hills what could the police do to protect the rich people in Beverly Hills if the riot has started rampaging at the Beverly Hills there was absolutely nothing that the police could do what the police actually did do was in the United States we have these yellow pieces of plastic tape if the police want to pose on the street they put a yellow band a plastic tape across the street and so the police put yellow bands a plastic police tape across the main boulevards and Beverly Hills well naturally if the rioters that spilled out into Beverly Hills the police state would not have held them up in fact the Rodney King riots petered out without reaching Beverly Hills but the conditions that spewed the rather Rodney King riots have gotten worse in Los Angeles and my expectation is that it's just a matter of time before there are more riots and the next time there are big riots and Los Angeles the rioters will come to Beverly Hills and the rich people in Los Angeles will feel the consequences and we'll see whether that wakes them up or whether instead they resort to protecting themselves even more desperately just following up on that but switching gears a little bit these global problems like nuclear war technological disruption global warming what do you guys think it's the role of education to prevent all that and the reason I ask is I was in China until two days ago I spent four months in China this year and I was really shocked to see the Pisa results for shine China Pisa is the global exam that measures the grades and the 10% worst students in China are equal to the 10% best students in Brazil for instance and this is really shocking and China as you guys know has lifted 750 million people out of poverty which is the largest emergence of a population in history and education played a really important role on that and just to wrap up this I also saw recently a research done on behalf of Lego by the Harris group they asked United States Kids and Chinese kids from 8 to 12 years what they wanted to be when they grew up and the answer of the Chinese kids were astronauts in the answer of the us kids were youtubers so basically what can we expect out of that let me give you two pieces of the answer to that um one piece I don't have I've little experience of China myself I have more experience of Japan through my Japanese relatives and let me contrast the educational systems in the United States and in Japan particularly as regards what to do about areas where educational performance is poor both in the United States and in Japan rural areas with low population density the students tend to be poorer students Japan and the United States deal with that in opposite ways Japan has a higher teacher to student ratio in rural areas that's the say in areas where the students are doing poorly the Japanese provide more teachers in order to try to equalize academic performance within Japan in the United States instead for example in California the United States sends fewer teachers to areas with poor academic performance which means that the poor the uneducated become even more uneducated which is bad sign for the United States the other thing that I wanted to the other example that I wanted to mention as regards education is knowledge of geography because I'm a geographer and I'm associated with National Geographic Society the National Geographic Society every year or two carries out surveys around the world of people's knowledge of geography and there are 12 countries test is one of which is always the United States then there's Mexico and Iceland various other countries year after year Americans score the lowest one next to the lowest in the knowledge of geography but the examples of how poor our knowledge of geography is I think will shock you most Americans of course most Americans cannot locate Afghanistan or Somalia on a map although American troops have gone into Afghanistan and Somalia but whose us to know we are Afghanistan and Somalia are worst yet most Americans cannot locate New York City on the map and worst of all the biggest geographic feature of the globe is the Pacific Ocean if you close your eyes and throw darts at random you you're more likely to hit the Pacific Ocean than anything else but the majority of Americans cannot identify the Pacific Ocean how do you feel you've all about education and the role to prevent this topic futures well I think that the key thing connects back to the issue of jobs and automation that as the job mark is going to be more and more volatile that jobs appear disappear change and people will have to basically reinvent themselves several times during their lifetime the old model that you'll most as a young person you mostly learn and then as an older person you mostly rely on the skills and knowledge you acquired in your early years this is going to be an obsolete model you'll have to retrain yourself reinvent yourself repeatedly and and our educational systems in most of the world are not built for that the key skill is not learning any particular historical fact or geographical fact of physical equation the key skill is how to keep learning and changing throughout your life and what to do when you encounter an unfamiliar situation in many cases you know tests in school so you learn throughout the year certain things and you have the impression that every answer has a right and every question has a right answer in the test at the end of the year asked you and you need to give the right answers and this gets you in in the frame of mind that yes there are these right answers out there and I just need to learn them whereas especially for the 21st century the key is how to deal with the unknown so the best test at the end of the you you learn something during the geography the test at the end of the you shouldn't be about something you already know it should be or given a new question in geography and the issue is how do I go about gathering information distinguishing reliable from unreliable information what is the method that I'm using this would be the most important skill for the 21st century unfortunately most educational systems I don't know about China I'm not focusing on that so this is a very serious issue and the second thing is that when we talk about Christ's developing crisis which will hit in ten years twenty years thirty years the educational system is really the forefront of all that because what you teach kids today in school should be relevant to the world of twenty years from now not to today if you're a six-year-old students in a school what you learn should be relevant to 2040 not to 2020 so this is maybe the first arena or front when we have to take very seriously the question how would the world look like in 2014 because we can't wait until 2040 to see we have to teach the young generation today this is an extremely important message especially for Brazil at the moment and a mission that I would like to talk about mental health and you for instance mention in your books that the overall health of humans have improved dramatically so vaccination and everything that we have accomplished to expand the perspective of human life and to keep a good health that's all truth and I think we can see that but there is one area in human life that I don't think we have improved and that's precisely mental health actually I think this situation is pretty much decreasing I think you all teach and you give talks and when you speak to younger people today especially people going to college at right now there's an epidemics of depression anxiety and so on is this a challenge that we should be worried about what should we do about it like how do we approach this with medicines with media information how do we go about that yeah I think you're completely right that whereas there has been a huge improvement in kind of physical health yeah with vaccinations and so forth in mental health there is no improvement there is even a decrease it results from various things maybe above all that our minds are not adapted to the 21st century they are much more adapted to the Stone Age and the accelerating rate of technological and social and economic change create immense stress for the mind again gun box is a job market change is always stressful and as you get older it usually becomes more difficult so inventing yourself at age 20 is very difficult but to reinvent yourself again at age 30 again at age 40 again at age 50 this is something that many people just at present don't have the psychological stamina to do so there are the burden of stress and mental dysfunction is likely only to increase unless we take countermeasures ranging from better medicines to creating like we mentioned before sanctuaries that you have these times and places when you can really relax I mean again if you're a kid in school so previously something happened in school which was very stressful like other kids bullying you when you went back home at least you had sanctuary in your home now you don't have sanctuary the bullying can continue 24 hours a day VR all the screens and smartphones and so forth and just shutting down the phone is not even that is hardly a solution because then you have the form or the fear of missing out you know that so many important things are happening among your friends and if you are not there it increases the danger for you so how to create these sanctuaries is something we need to think about and it goes all the way to relying on things like meditation yeah that we have thousands of years of traditions of helping people cope with with these things and I think we don't need to think in binary terms I read you meditate two hours a day is that correct I try to meditate two hours every day and go every year for a long retreat of between 30 and 60 days of the personal meditation mm-hmm I know most people can't afford it but I think every person does that help you to me it helps very much but you know different things work better for different people yeah I wouldn't comment anything as a kind of panacea that oh this is the solution to all the world problem many people are different different things work that different for work for different people if somebody finds that meditation doesn't help but sports works much better then invest in that Jared you mentioned that you had to cope with depression and I think many people actually most people will have to deal with that at any point in their lives how was that experience important for you and how do you feel about this whole mental health problem interesting complicated a question where I think we have to be careful in jumping to an apparent conclusion that may not be correct comparing New Guinea my experience of New Guinea with Western world the most obvious thing in traditional New Guinea societies is the shorter life spans not just the shorter life spans that that people whose age you can figure out by reference to some dateable events even if they didn't have a birth register people just age much more rapidly because they have a much harder life when I go into a New Guinea village and they ask they ask how old you last time I was there I said eighty-one and I remember in in one Indonesian village when when I said my sets in my age they said responded certain Gomati which an Indonesian means half-dead so the fact is that that in New Guinea villages a few people live into their seventies or eighties they are the repository of knowledge but most relatively few people live past 50 and they are in much worse condition physically I was tempted to to believe that mental health is considerably worse in our society than in traditional New Guinea society they adjust are not the studies so I asked physicians out there what is mental health why in New Guinea we don't don't know rigorously what mental health is life because we don't have the the tools for interviewing New Guineans about mental health scales one can look around in a village and try to gauge for yourself my first impression is that most people are happier certainly there the loneliness that is endemic in epidemic in our society doesn't exist in New Guinea where you spend your life with the people that that you grew up with but many traditional societies are severely repressive to children a child suicide isn't surprisingly common in some societies whereas child's child suicide is virtually unknown in Western society all which means that we we just don't have the daughter I'm tempted to say that mental health is much better in traditional societies but that may not we are heading to the end of our conversation I'd like to ask you a final question because we are in Brazil Brazil is a developing country I believe an important one I think we play a role that is much more important than we Brazilians realize not only because of the Amazon but I think like because of us being a large democracy and so on what advice would you give to Brazil in the moment we are living today keeping in mind that Brazil is a democracy and we have the Amazon which is a national issue but that torches directly also in global interests so what what kind of advice would you guys give us ma my advice would be to be honest and to take a perspective beyond a couple of years my concern without knowing Brazil well is that the United States has no monopoly on dishonesty there are some very basic things about how to how to operate in the area like Brazil a tropical rainforest tropical rainforests have their own hydrological cycle and if you cut down the forest you end up with drought so if you cut down forests and convert the forest to soybean plantations initially you get you get a lot more soybeans you get more cattle ranches but then you get less rain and you're gonna get less soybean production less cattle productions well it's my concern is that the is that a short term perspective is being taken at the highest levels of and that in a relatively short runners can be very bad for Brazil I would emphasize the importance of keeping Brazilian democracy well functioning you know s all over the world there is now a growing disbelief or less faith in democracy but in the long run the huge advantage of democracy is its flexibility that sometimes authoritarian regimes they can make quicker decisions because you need to compromise less you need to consult less with different groups and different people so it seems that they can make things work faster but the big problem of authoritarian regimes is that when they make mistakes and everybody make mistakes all regimes all people all parties make mistakes in a democracy when you make a mistake it's easier to acknowledge it even if the ruling party doesn't acknowledge it their citizenry can replace them so you can change course you know for eternal regimes usually when the regime makes a mistake it never acknowledges it it blames it either own enemies outside or traitors within and the conclusion the regime reaches is that it meets even more power because yes things are we promised wonderful things we didn't accomplish them not because we made a mistake but because there was traitors and enemies so the solution is to give us even more power and if again that things still don't improve again they will say it's because the traitors are really really powerful so we need even more power and we know from history where this is leading so no matter what the difficulties are it's very important to remove to remember this crucial advantage of democracy that it is better in acknowledging its mistakes and trying something else and that usually is worth all the downsides of the democratic regimes well I think everyone feels that we could be keeping this conversation for hours and hours that was great thank you so much for your presentations and for talking with me and guys please help me thank both of them for this amazing talk thank you

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 141,121

Rating: 4.8979988 out of 5

Keywords: yuval noah harari, jared diamond, sapiens, technological disruption, upheaval, brazil

Id: VLXHnGVp7ZU

Length: 50min 51sec (3051 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/collapse2050]

In 2010 Jared Diamond said we would collapse by 2030 if we didn't get our shit togehter. Now hes saying 2040?

[u/MrIvysaur]

Yuval*

Sorry!

[u/Nefertirri]

I was thinking about this today that primitive peoples would be best suited to survive collapse, then I remembered that no humans would be surviving around the equator and even these peoples environments will be rapidly changing, making their long held knowledge obsolete.