Yuval Noah Harari in conversation with Judd Apatow

duvall is a historian philosopher and the best-selling author of sapiens brief history of humankind homo dias a brief history of tomorrow and as i mentioned earlier 21st less 21 lessons for the 21st century judd is one of the most sought after comedic minds in the industry has directed produced and written many of the biggest comedy films and hit tv shows of the last two decades i am ted habdigaber founder and producer of the series thanks to those of you who sent in questions that i will ask towards the end of the event i will let you take it from here judd all right well it's uh it's great to be here speaking with you welcome thank you it's it's good to be here and thank you for inviting me uh i uh i'll show the book right off the bat which i i couldn't have enjoyed more uh sometimes you read a book and you think i should read more books like this and you realize that i've mainly been reading self-help books uh my entire life i'm usually just trying to stay sane and most of my reading involves that but i i i really loved it and it uh you know just to start from the self-help angle for a moment uh my therapist always says that you know what what's happening most of the time with me emotionally is that when uh you know early man was uh evolving uh so much of of the brain evolved from a sense of i need to know where the bear is that's going to try to kill me and as a result i am wired to remember bad stuff because if i don't remember where the cave is that has the bear i'm going to die and that in a modern world we are wired to be in the woods or to be hunting and so much of the problems that we have as people that we have emotionally is because all of our wiring is built for another way of life can you speak to that yeah completely this is one of the most basic insights of history and of evolution that we still have stone age bodies and stone age brains and minds but we live in a post-industrial society in the 21st century and so many of our problems result from this mismatch i mean one of the most common examples is is with food that if you ask yourself how come we like so much to eat sugar and fat and all the things that are bad for us and i mean it seems unreasonable why would our body crave things that are not good for it it's simply because in the stone age they were good for you i mean if you go in the african savannah and you find a tree full of ripened figs the correct thing to do in order to survive is to eat as many of them as quickly as possible if you eat just two or three figs and you say no i'm watching my weight and i'll i'll come back tomorrow you come back tomorrow it's empty because the baboons next door ate everything and this is still the the kind of program that our body runs and when you open the door of the fridge and you see the chocolate cake the body still reacts as if you are in the african savannah and just found a tree full of figs and yeah it's um go explain to the body that this is the 21st century well explain it to my wife who's mad at me for eating the entire cake she doesn't get it this is all helpful for the fight that we have because i've always had that urge and i never understood it which was if no matter how much someone puts on the plate i will finish it and i have a feeling like you have to finish it i don't know why but i actually feel bad if i if i don't finish it but also i think it applies so much to our general sense of anxiety that we all are built to be looking for a predator and and life it doesn't really work that way and it feels like we do live in a world where everybody is overreacting all the time um to some extent yes even though it should be said that we are also living in the most peaceful era in human history it may not look like it from the news and you know i i live in israel i live in the middle east so i know perfectly well there are still conflicts around but still it's the most peaceful society that humans have ever managed to create with all the exact anxieties with all the worries you think about l.a i mean how many people live in la like a couple of millions right like five six seven million something to think that you can cram millions of people into such a small place and they all live together and most of the time they don't kill each other that's a remarkable achievement and especially as you don't know most of these people in the stone age the basic mechanism was that you trust the people you know intimately your band members you go hunt together and forage together when you know them for years so you trust them anybody you don't know personally is a stranger a potential threat very difficult to trust you go on a busy street maybe you meet more people in one hour than our ancestors met in their entire lifetime and they are all strangers and you just trust that they won't pull a knife and kill you on the spot and that's an amazing achievement so we are not completely enslaved by our stone age legacy yeah and when you see what happened you know this week in the united states you know with the elections and what's happened the last few years people talk a lot about tribalism and how people have this instinct to group together or group together in ideologies you know how do you look at what happened in the last few years uh you know through a historical lens well there are a couple of things i mean first of all people confuse the kind of uh you hear a lot of people say that nationalism or tribalism is in our genes or it's part of our genetic and biological makeup because humans are social animals and this is a complete mistake humans are social animals that's true but we are programmed to feel part of a very small group of people who we know intimately this is the key for millions of years humans and our ape ancestors we lived in very small communities where everybody knows everybody else the amazing thing about a nation like the united states today or like israel or like china or any other nation is that this is not a small intimate community if if i look at israel it's a small country we just have something like 8 million citizens but still i don't know 99.9 of these people and still i can feel a bond with them and that's completely different from stone age bands the big project of modern nationalism which is a completely new project is to make millions of strangers trust one another and not just trust one another but actually care about one another and nationalism is often you know blamed from wars and so forth but it's also one of the best things that humans ever manage to come up with because it does the feeling of patriotism and national solidarity does enable millions of strangers to cooperate effectively to you know you pay taxes so that somebody you never met and you will never meet in your life on the other side of the country will have good health care and education that's nationalism and that's wonderful one of the worrying things when i look at the us today is that this is collapsing you know with all the talk about the rise of nationalism you look around the world today you actually see the collapse of nationalism of these kinds of national bonds many leaders who portray themselves as nationalists they are actually on purpose dividing their society they have this confusion they think that nationalism is about hating foreigners and because i hate foreigners so much i'm a good nationalist but nationalism is not about hating foreigners it's about loving your compatriots and we don't have enough of that you know if you have a president who at least according to reports paid 750 dollars in taxes a year and he's a president and he's a billionaire he pays 750 in taxes that's anti-nationalism i mean the most basic thing to you know to pay your taxes honestly so that somebody on the other side of the country will get a good health care education that's how you show your nationalism not by inciting hatred against foreigners or by waving a flag or something yeah when you see you know 70 million people you know watch what's happened in the united states over the last uh almost four years you know decide that they're all for it and let's let's let's do more let's do more of this uh you know and for me you know it shows a certain amount of uh lack of compassion for for other people or understanding of you know the the struggles that other people have how do you interpret that that support at at this moment with somebody who certainly their ability to take care of them is questionable you know what do you think unites them and also just historically you know what is the precedent for supporting someone you know in the midst of a pandemic where you know most people would agree for whatever reasons it's not being managed in in a good way well i'm not an expert on us politics or society and as a historian i know it's dangerous when you move from describing events to describing the motivation of people especially when it's people from a different culture from a different background that's very very shaky territory you tend to imagine all kinds of motivations which maybe are not there and the best thing is just to ask i didn't i didn't vote in the elections i'm not american but to ask trump supporters why did you vote for him after these four years and listen to what they say uh that that's a better cause of action than to ask israeli historian why all these people i mean you know i have my theories but yeah if you ask me no i mean if you ask me about the roman empire then you know the romans are dead so if you ask why did you support julius caesar i mean we can't ask them so let's ask the historians here you're talking about people who are alive and maybe are your neighbors so the best is to just again i can say many things about it but we have to be careful about imputing imputing is that a word about may i just invented it about um assuming that the motivation is is x and sometimes you're just projecting something onto these people i i thought what was so interesting just as a storyteller is uh you know when you you write in the book about stories and the necessity for stories and part of that is how religion began when people were suddenly in groups not of 150 people but thousands of people or millions of people and that these stories in religion kept order that suddenly the rules for society and how we treated each other and what would happen if we didn't you know was all in these religious stories and and that's what kept everything from uh falling apart uh and it does feel like in this moment that is a bit of what we're dealing with which is half the country believes in one story and half the country believe in another basically it's it's almost like that in politics i mean people humans are storytelling animals our identities are based on the stories we believe and you can almost never inspire people to political action by just telling them scientific facts if you go around telling people e equals m c square the most basic equation in physics who is going to vote for you okay so e equals mc square so what um to really inspire people you need some story some mythology which might be closer or less close to the truth very often in history you see completely fictitious stories which have nothing to do with the truth and they are still very successful politically in uniting and inspiring people and that's just a basic fact of history that this is how humans work we need to come to terms with it um you know um in any country not just the us also in israel also in poland in brazil if you go and tell people the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth is your political platform nobody almost nobody would vote for you or at least you would never get to be president or prime minister um again we do need the truth for some things but let's take an example building an atom bomb you know you want to build an atom bomb now you know two things to do it first of all you do need a truthful scientific theory if you try to build an atom bomb with a wrong a false scientific theory it won't work it will fail so you need good physics but that's not enough because to build the bomb you need millions of people to cooperate you need people to mine uranium and you need mathematicians to calculate all kinds of equations and you need engineers to put it all together and you need farmers to grow wheat to feed all the rest of them and millions of people to cooperate and for that you need a story and the story can be a complete myth it can be a religious myth it can be a nationalist myth it can be an economic myth uh but that what what actually succeeds in uniting millions of people towards the common goal yeah and we see this in our country when you know trump comes down the stairs and says you know the mexicans are sending their rapists he's beginning a story a type of propaganda to unite people into fear that only he can solve it but the other story he tells is i don't pay my taxes because i'm smart and he's you know he's training people to distrust the government and then to distrust uh the media uh so that you know all these stories end with you only can trust me to to solve all of your problems i um i wonder uh you know when you when you put together a book like this so this is the graphic version of of your book um you know talk a little bit about your interest in just getting people excited about history and young people excited about history i mean when i read it i i thought well i'm ashamed of how little i know i have my lack of knowledge shame which i've always had uh generally uh but uh i also was excited about the fact that your work is so popular and i know that you know part of the result of this type of work is people understanding how we work as a global community what our motivations are how we got here and hopefully it leads to people making better decisions about lifting each other up because the the the ultimate result of all of this knowledge that you put out there is if we're if we're not in it together if we don't support each other we can't actually solve the gigantic challenges and problems that are in front of us can you just speak to your motivations for why you're historian and and how you feel about writing these books well i think this book in particular graphic novel i would say is a populist project you know populism is now in the news all the time it doesn't have to be right-wing authoritarian leaders it can also be scientists i mean the idea is to bring science to the people don't confine it to the university don't confine it you don't need a phd or even a bachelor degree in history or in economics or in biology to understand this stuff this is kind of the inheritance of all humans they should all have access to this kind of knowledge and for that scientists need to make an effort when we talk among ourselves when i speak with other professors for history or economics or biology or whatever so you know you talk a lot in terms of numbers and statistics and models and things like that but people think as i said in stories and to reach the wider audience you need to translate the latest findings of science into an accessible story that anybody can read and understand and even enjoy you don't need to go to college or to university for that and that you know it's uh most scientists don't engage with this kind of of project and it's it's it's okay i mean if everybody would do it and who will be in the laboratory is doing the research so it's it's part of my job to do this kind of translation in my previous books i wrote you know popular science but it was still kind of very academic 500 pages words footnotes here and there an image but it's it's it's you know for many people it's it's inaccessible in the in the graphic novel i teamed up with two very gifted artists uh danielle and david and together we decided to kind of break all the academic conventions and it's not uh just you know the the the old text with illustrations it's quite a completely fresh fresh approach let's experiment with different ways of telling science and telling history and it was really a fun project you know one chapter is like a detective movie like we have a chapter about the disappearance of the large animals of the planet more than 10 000 years ago about half of the big animals of the world disappeared now until ten thousand years ago in america in what is the usa you had mammoth and mastodons and horses and camels and lions and whatever and they all disappeared quite suddenly what happened so we tell this as a detective story we created this fictional character detective lopez and she goes not only around america but around the whole world investigating the disappearance of the large animals she's on the trails of the worst serial killers in the history of the world yeah who did it and you know it's it's still science it's still loyal to the basic ideals of the facts and the latest evidence but it's sold in a completely different way yeah no it's very i thought that the book was very entertaining and that every chapter has a you know a different uh style and a different uh approach to getting information across in a way that normally is much uh drier and uh and it's funny i think that the book is really hilarious at times in in the way it's it's using these devices to make this information uh you know more interesting to young people i think it really really works and it does seem like it must have been very fun to you know come up with the you know you know using either a reality show for i don't know i don't know what is your experience but i always thought it was kind of bad manners to laugh from your own jokes yeah yeah but when working on this book i found myself like in front of the computers just laughing from my own jokes which you know it's not something to be proud of but it happened well i think part of it is uh you know trying to convince the audience why they should care and i i you know i felt that throughout the book which is uh you're using humor and different storytelling devices to remind people you know this is how we you know this is how we got here this is why we behave this way and that this is you know the most vital information i think just like a lot of people in the united states young people don't understand civics they don't even understand how the country works and you know when we have all these problems suddenly they realize oh i don't even understand the electoral college i don't know where it came from i don't know why they created it and there seems to be such a you know but i mean the electoral the the electoral ecology is really complicated i mean you st you need to start with even simpler things you know like what are corporations yeah like the entire economy the entire world to a large extent is being managed by corporations whether it's facebook and google or toyota mitsubishi and general motors and most people don't even know what is the cooperation we are often work for them they shape our lives and yet and this is the reason i mentioned because there is a chapter on this in the book and when you really get into it it's an extremely complicated thing to understand what a cooperation actually is because again it's just a story it's just you know in our minds in our imagination google doesn't exist anywhere in the physical or biological world it's not like a mountain or an animal an elephant or whale that is just no it's a story created by the greatest storytellers in the world lawyers just as ancient humans had their shamans and priests who told stories and the stories that the shaman told created demons and ghosts and spirits and fairies and created them in the mind of the people it's exactly the same thing with lawyers google is a fictional story it's what lawyers call illegal fiction they tell a story and you know just as the shamans created ghosts the lawyers today create these corporations and they are extremely powerful and to understand that is such an important thing in order to understand how the world functions yeah and then with something like facebook they try to create an identity to tell that story we're the people that help you chat with your friends and we're just about us all connecting and doing good for the world and then slowly people understand wait a second all their algorithms take advantage of all the ways we hate each other and they make more money when we're online and we're online longer when it's something that aggravates us or makes us angry and suddenly this thing that's meant to make us all friends we realize oh and uh it's making people kill each other on the other side of the world it's affecting elections and then they're out front going no we're still the people who are trying to make us all chat and look we have instagram we're like the instagram share share your photos with your friends we're the nice people and you see the collapse of this uh you know false uh identity that they create to seem harmless when in fact they're selling your information to people uh you know uh i was seeing i was watching a documentary and they said you know when you don't pay for something you're the product you know you're being sold and it feels like that seems to be what's happening with social media right now which is the story of it is people are on to it they don't know what to do about it like oh youtube's so friendly but like oh no it it sends me to the darkest stuff they kind of make more money from the darkest stuff or at least yeah i mean i mean the the interest is to keep you on the platform as long as possible and unfortunately the best or easiest way to keep people on the platform is to press the anger button or the hatred button or the fear button if you see a headline that makes you really angry then you click on it to see what what did he do this time but if you see a headline which is just you know some boring calm stuff every day then you won't click on it so it's not even i mean there is no intention to deliberately increase tensions and extremism and so forth it's just a by-product of trying to keep more people more time on the platform and i think one of the other key things is that people have this confusion especially in places like silicon valley that the more information flows the more people are connected and know the truth but information and truth are completely different things just by making more information flow you don't necessarily increase truth a lot of the information throughout history that have flowed between people has nothing to do with the truth and you see it not just with the current revolution in information technology but also in previous revolutions for instance when print came to europe from east asia in the late middle ages and early modern period 15th century rootenberg gutenberg creates the first printing press in europe so people have this fantasy that printing and the lower cost of books spread education and spread science and you often hear that the print revolution brought about the scientific revolution actually when you look at what is published in europe at that time the biggest best sellers they are not copernicus and galileo and newton the biggest bestsellers behind the bible and the religious books are things like um do-it-yourself witch hunts one of the first big best sellers of of europe after print was a book called malayos maleficarum in english that means the hammer of the witches which is a do-it-yourself guide to identifying and killing witches something everybody needs to have at home of course and it's you know it sells like like hot cakes and people take this and read and starting witch hunts and the the big period of witch hunts is not the middle ages people associate me with chunks with the middle ages no the really big period for witch hunts is the early modern period fueled to a large extent by this print revolution so just by inventing a new means to communicate and to spread information in itself this doesn't guarantee truth or science or harmony or anything like that and and is that also related to our primal instinct to always be looking for threats and to be looking for what might harm us and so we're just in that stance generally and so maybe in the next generation it's mine com for it's hitler on the radio or you know rallies that people are just looking for someone to say who's going to hurt us and what can we do about it before it happens um yeah i mean as i said if you want to grab people's attention then pressing the feel button or the hatred button is is the easiest way to do it because it kind of short secrets your entire brain like we are built evolutionarily in such a way that if there is a threat to our life it immediately overrides everything else yeah this is a basic survival mechanism so if you're scanning the your facebook feed your local bookstore in the 16th century and you see a headline or a title which basically tells you your life is in danger then your attention goes there and it overrules it overrides everything else and you know we we need to make the effort both to regulate it on a collective level and also to strengthen ourselves our own mind to resist these tendencies yeah i do think that people are just beginning to understand how their minds work and how they work with modern technology i have two daughters and we have to talk about this all the time how are the gadgets making you feel why are you on it right now do you even want to be on it you know what what is your relationship with the addiction to it but because uh i remember years ago um in the early ages maybe i'll say yes please i'll suggest one one more thing about what to do about it um [Music] we also have to keep kind of a balanced mind yes there are these dark forces but there are also counter forces our allies in the human psyche in the human mind and comedy and humor are one of the best antidotes and this goes back also to the african savannah when somebody in a in a hunter-gatherer band became a bully or began kind of oppressing other people the one of the best way to take this person down a notch was humor to ridicule to satirize and you see it like even today anthropologists uh say that in a hunter-gatherer society when somebody goes and hunts i don't know a big deer and comes back everybody is of course happy that this person brought the big deer but they are concerned that this will make this person arrogant and he will kind of become their little dictator so they immediately ridicule and belittle him and that's a very important function it's not in modern tv that you have these satire shows and comedies because all the way back to the beginning of human history that comedians and and satirists and humor have ever i mean when you're confronted by some big dictator there is nothing like humor to bring this person down which is one of the reason why one of the first things they do the dictators is to have censorship of of comedy and of humor and and of these things and so the so the the evolutionary beginning of comedy was uh you know a force to maintain order in some way and and so instead of killing the arrogant guy they would mock the arrogant guy like there was there must have been a moment like what do i either have to beat this guy up or i can say this to him and and just in evolution it just seems to work better to not murder every guy who was being a pain in the ass exactly i mean it's it's it's much better for everybody uh if you can deal with it with a joke and not with a knife or is with an axe to the head um and yeah and it's it's it's a very uh important and the thing about it it draws attention it's contagious the the laughter yeah and it it works immediately to kind of deflate the balloon and you see you know in history there are maybe two kinds of humor the dark side of humor is when you make fun of the weak that you tell and this is also very common that you tell jokes about the weakest members of society um and that's not dangerous that's that's the easy stuff and it only contributes to greater inequality in society humor is at its best also in terms of of contribution to society when you make fun of the people at the top so like you go back to the middle ages i'm a medievalist so this is why i always go back to the middle ages the best medieval humor is jokes about priests and church people there is nothing like you you want good medieval jokes it's all the jokes about the priests and the pope and because they are the big shots and um from this first circle it's a very important force for equality for bringing the mighty a little bit down to the level of everybody else and what was the purpose of you know court gestures and people who serve those functions in society also in a way a code gesture is somebody who under the protection of humor and comedy is allowed to say things that if anybody else said them they will just chop off his head so it's another mechanism to um again a little to to uh level the playing field that you will be able to tell the big emperor something that the big emperor needs to hear but everybody is afraid of saying so you have the code gesture um again an example of the middle ages when in one of the many battles between the french and the english in the hundred years war i think it was luis the english it was a novel battle between navies and the brit in the english navy won a great victory lots of friendships drowned with all the people so everybody was so afraid to tell the french king that they lost so they gave the task to the court gesture who told the king uh that wonderful your troops have just learned to speak the language of the fish and and the king god got the message and uh can you talk a little bit about your interest in uh meditation uh and how you know it affects your life and and also allows you to do this work uh that you do i i was reading that you you know you seem to have a very uh um you know challenging two hour a day meditation schedule is that what you're doing like an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening and and can you talk about how you came to that and how it affects your life and and your work so first it's not challenging i mean i find it relaxing um it's not kind of when i meditate i don't there is no goal it's just observing what's happening right now so in this sense it's the most relaxing part of the day or at least most of the time i came to it when i was doing my phd in in history and the friend recommended that i i was also very much concerned about the big questions of life uh but who am i what's the deal here what's the meaning of life and i read so many philosophy books and couldn't find any good answers and he told me you will never find the answers just in reading books and if there were answers in books you would already know them you've read so much so try something else and it didn't sound very convincing to me but i would kind of desperately and i said okay why not and i went to this meditation with rit we passed on a meditation and the very first night i was really struck by you know it was a very very simple instruction on the face of it the instruction was just you know sit down close your eyes focus your entire attention on your breath just feel the breath coming into your nostrils and the breath going out that's it what that is what we need to do for an hour now and you know it's not even a breathing exercise it's not like you try to control the breath and you can fail yeah it's not like somebody told you you must breathe through the right nostril if you breathe through the left nostril you're a failure in meditation no it was just just note is it now coming in or is it now going out and i was absolutely struck by the fact that i couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds before my mind would just wander off to some memory some fantasy some worry and for five minutes i would roll in that before remember oh i need to observe my breath and within a very short time i understood something that i didn't understand after years in university and reading books which is that i have almost no control over my mind and i know very very little about what's actually happening within me within my mind and this was a very shocking and humbling experience but it kind of opened the way to a completely new kind of investigation and practice which is not based on reading and writing and things like that but really on just you know you just directly observe what is happening the key idea is it goes back to what we discussed earlier of stories and fictions that the mind is like a factory which constantly manufactures stories and these stories come between me and the world most of what i see in life when i look at u.s politics when i look at the global economy when i look at my own body most of what i see is the stories generated by my own mind they are just overpowering and the key instruction of this kind of many kinds of meditation but this kind of vipassana the key instruction is forget about let go of all these stories just try to observe what is actually happening right now if you can't observe the breath coming in and out of your nostrils because your mind is too busy involved in some story how do you expect to understand u.s politics without your own stories getting in the way and this what connects me back to my job as a historian you know when i meditate i don't have any historical insights i don't think at least hopefully i don't think about the roman empire or whatever but it gives it trains the mind to develop this ability to put aside the stories that i generate and thereby have a clearer vision of whatever it is i'm investigating and do you is there a spiritual aspect to it for you i know sometimes when i write or i deal with you know creative people you know we talk a lot about you know sometimes the writing just appears or an idea comes to you or for bob dylan it's almost like the songs were written somewhere else and he's he's just writing them down and i was talking to a friend yesterday about you know universal creativity or the feeling that you're tapping into you know the universal creativity in somebody do you have any beliefs in those areas or has your made you believe in any type of you know uh interconnectivity or magic or anything like that no i'm not that that kind of guy um i do see it as a spiritual practice but my definition of spirituality is spirituality is when you have a big question and you are willing to follow it wherever it takes you no matter how painful or difficult or what you need to give up along the way this is for me the spiritual quest you can ask a question like who am i or again what is good or what is the meaning of life or whatever can be many many things and you're willing you know religion which i think is in a way the opposite of spirituality religion is when you ask a question somebody gives you an answer and says you have to believe that answer no more questioning this is religion spirituality is when you are willing to follow that question wherever it takes you and very often it takes you to to question many things that you took for granted in life and you know the origin of the term spirituality again a little history kind of insight what is it why spirituality it actually comes from dualistic religions about 2 000 years ago that they told people a story that the entire world you see around you is the material world but you don't belong to this material world there is another way it's called a dualistic religion because it believes in the separation of reality in two different realms like matter and spirit so the story goes that you actually are as you belong to the world of the spirits and you somehow fell into this material world around you and your mission in life the spiritual quest is to get liberated from this material realm and get back to the spiritual realm and the quest involves questioning the reality this is not everything you take for granted it's not it's not real you need to question it and go beyond it in order to get back to your real place the the world of the spirits and so spiritual quest in this sense is a kind of journey where you are willing to question the most basic assumptions of the world around you now in the original dualistic sense it's to question the world of matter the body the the the the the stones the houses around you but in a more metaphorical or broader sense is the willingness to question the major beliefs of the day it could be capitalism it could be religion very often again this is the clash between religion and spirituality that religion tells you you must believe and the spiritual quest tells you no if you really want to know the truth you have to liberate yourself from these religious preconceptions and biases too yeah and and so much of our our conflict comes from you know people or nations uh you know going to war with each other over these ideas protecting their boundaries or you know trying to keep their population uh as one religion and so you know sadly the result is often the opposite of why we we need religion yes i mean again religion can be a force for both good and evil historically speaking we know a lot of examples for from both sides of both both good and bad things but in essence as a historian the key thing is to understand religion is not created in heaven and remains as some kind of eternal truth religion is created by human beings on earth it changes all the time and it's up to humans what to do with it you know we now have all these arguments about islam whether islam is a religion of war or peace and the truth is that islam is whatever muslims make of it if you have muslims that make it a religion of war it would be a religion of war if you have muslims who make it a religion of peace it will be a religion a religion of peace it has no unchanging essence that this is true islam if you go back again to the middle ages so you see that back then the world of islam was much more tolerant than christianity people were fleeing christian europe was the most intolerant area in the entire world you had religious persecutions and religious refugees fleeing western europe to find a safe and tolerant haven in the muslim middle east like my husband he comes from a family of of egyptian jews his parents came from cairo and but their family name is rodriguez now rodriguez is not a very egyptian name right the spanish name actually his ancestors they lived in spain and in 1492 they were expelled from spain in under the catholic kings in one of the starkest example of religious intolerance in that period and they fled and found a tolerant safe haven in egypt so today it's the reverse today you have millions of people fleeing religious wars and persecutions in the middle east trying to make their way to europe but it's not something essential about the nature of christianity and the nature of islam it's what people make of these religions and they change a lot over time yeah i uh i mean i relate to it in a sense when i was a kid you know uh my family's jewish but for whatever reason they didn't practice and they they had no interest in it whatsoever uh and the my parents i used to say the only religion they taught me was nobody said life was fair and that that was the mantra in the household there really was an absence of it that i was left to have to try to fill and and i uh you know i'm not sure if i've ever fully filled it but i was more attracted to buddhist ideas and and the only idea that really ever made any sense to me is just you know the dalai lama is saying you know my religion is kindness and and for me the simplicity of that is the only thing i can follow i you know when buddhism gets into you know past lives and reincarnation my brain just got outside but you know have trouble uh getting there with it uh not that i wouldn't want to but i just i you know i have a hard time uh you know believing in those ideas although i'm not close to those ideas or any ideas really because i do find uh that the world is so uh uh it's such a miracle that anything's possible i have a friend pete holmes who has uh who's a great comedian and he's very religious and he says you know a lot of people say you know how could you believe in heaven how can you believe heaven exists and he always says well why does this exist you know we're on a rock flying around the sun at thousands of miles and hours like isn't it weird that this is here and i i've always believed that that almost anything seems possible as we we learned more about science uh and and you know you're you also write about the future and you know what may happen as a result of the advance of of technology where what does your mind go when you think about what is possible with all we are learning about the rules of the universe well you know possible almost everything is possible it's uh it's a question not just of you know enumerating possibilities but finding evidence when you look at the past then the key is to find actual evidence for your stories or your uh models just saying it's possible yes everything is possible it is possible that we are all in a simulation inside a computer operated by a teenage nerd on the planet zircon it is possible um but okay what do you do with that so when i look to the future i think that we are very very close to the end of the story that uh the the graphic novel depicts it's the beginning of that story 70 000 years ago humans were just another insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of africa we didn't have a big impact on the world you know we had some impacts like gorillas like woodpeckers like jellyfish okay you had sapiens doing a few a few things then you had this big explosion of humans learning how to cooperate in larger and larger numbers thanks to stories and fiction and taking over the world and creating more and more sophisticated tools and technology and now we are almost at the end of that particular story because we are on the verge of creating technology to change the basic rules of the game of life you know for not just for 70 000 years but for four billion years since the very beginning of life on earth all life forms were subject to two sets of rules two sets of laws you had the laws of natural selection about how evolution functions and you had the laws of organic chemistry because all life was organic whether you're an amoeba or a tyrannosaurus rex or a potato or a homo sapiens you are made of organic stuff and you evolve by natural selection and we are almost at the end of this because now with the rise of artificial intelligence and bioengineering we are about to break both sets of rules bioengineering means that instead of natural selection increasingly it will be intelligent design not of some god but of our intelligent design which will determine the future course of evolution and the rise of artificial intelligence implies that we might be on the verge of creating the first inorganic life forms and after 4 billion years of organic life that's a complete game changer and from this perspective um you know i my guess is that in 200 years and that's a conservative estimate i would say in 200 years planet earth will be dominated by entities which are far more different from us than we are different from neanderthals or from chimpanzees you know the the the characters in the graphic novel they travel in time uh from here to the stone age and you meet people who are just like you not in their technology but their bodies and minds are the same but you travel 200 years to the future and our imagination cannot grasp it because even our imagination is the product of organic chemistry which is about to reach the end of its dominion and so i should freeze my brain so that they can bring back my consciousness is that what you're trying to say that i should just why would they bother exactly i know it does feel like do you ever feel like it's like a weird moment in time that we live in because we're right on the cusp of when they're gonna figure out so much and so you know i always think yes there'll be a future where maybe half my body will be bionic or my consciousness will somehow be uh you know put into a computer uh and i would i could live on as half of a robot half computer and i think different people have different instincts about how they feel about that i'm ready to check out i don't need to be it won't be us we are whether you like it or not we are just missing the train i know yeah a baby born today he or she will have to deal with the full force of of these revolutions we are probably going to check out before the really big revolution hits yeah i'm happy about that personally unless you believe in reincarnation well exactly well maybe i maybe i'll be so happy to check out and then suddenly like i'm back all right i'm half a robot now it all worked out for me um uh ted were we going to take some questions from yes and i have some questions you guys are ready sure yeah uh several questions about the pandemic the first one is could you please put the coronavirus pandemic in a historical context given humankind ongoing destruction of the earth's ability to sustain human life well as a pandemic as pandemics go in history this is a relatively mild one it's not the black death it's not the terrible epidemics that destroyed 90 of the population of america after the europeans conquered it mortality rates are very very low compared to these previous catastrophes also um in this pandemic we have the scientific knowledge to control it which is really almost the first time in history during the black death which killed up to half his population of europe and asia nobody understood what was happening now it took just two weeks to identify the virus the coronavirus and sequences genome we have all the scientific knowledge we need to overcome this but we don't always have the political wisdom to do it i think the coronavirus epidemic is a mixture of an amazing scientific success with terrible political incompetence first of all on a global level that even almost a year after the beginning of the pandemic there is no global leadership there is no global plan of action of how to control and stop not just the epidemic but also the economic crisis and also on the level of different countries you see that some countries have done very well whether it's new zealand or taiwan some countries like the us and like brazil have done disastrously um to put it in in context of the current trajectory of humanity the bad news is that again this is a relatively small threat to humanity the ecological crisis is much bigger the rise of artificial intelligence is much bigger if we cannot unite in the face of covet 19 what are the chances we will be able to unite in the face of the much more difficult challenges of artificial intelligence or ecological collapse that that's the big worry and that's is where i would put the covet 19 pandemic in in larger context there's a follow-up question to that uh historically speaking are there any positive outcomes post-pandemic what are your thoughts on possible possible positive impact from the coven-19 epidemic at least in recent generations quite often pandemics lead to a jump in scientific knowledge and in investment in public health you saw it with the big cholera epidemics of the 19th century and early 20th century which led to the establishment of public water systems and sewage systems and public hygiene which saved hundreds of millions of lives in subsequent decades so hopefully we would see the same thing happening with kovid that humanity got this huge shock and especially the economic system got this huge shock hopefully it will prompt a lot more investments in not just fighting epidemics but building a better healthcare system for the entire world because we now realize that even a healthcare disaster on the other side of the world could very quickly lead to medical and economic disaster at home whether this will actually happen i don't know it's not a prophecy but that's my main hope there is a chance it's just a chance it's not a prophecy there is a chance that covet is actually the last big pandemic again it's not that there won't be any more new viruses or pathogens but that because of the current shock new systems of early warning and treatment will be put in place so humanity will not be caught off guard again we can't stop the evolution of new viruses and bacteria and so forth but we now have so much scientific and technological knowledge that if we combine it with the right political wisdom this could be the last big pandemic i guess what what all this relates to is if we feel like corporations and all this new technology will ultimately be for good or will some of our worst instincts lead us to disaster so for instance you have corporations in the united states and they align themselves with the evangelical community and you wouldn't assume that corporations are religious but as a strategy they find they found a way to align with certain religions to get voters to vote in people who will support and so ultimately does it lead to we got a vaccine and maybe the the people who believe in corporations and uh their innate goodness are proven correct or are we on the road to some other disaster which is you know like what we're seeing with social media how it's changing how people feel about things we don't we don't know i guess yeah it can go both ways and i would just again emphasize there is nothing wrong with allying yourself with churches or religious movements it depends on the values and practice of these movements i don't know you see pope francis for example talking about the dangers of climate change and talking about the dangers of ecological collapse and i would be all in favor of cooperating with the catholic church on that particular front on other things i have issues with the church but i you know if again the key thing in history is is human cooperation and you can't always choose your allies and it's uh it's dangerous to kind of you know rule out in advance certain people it has to be you know practical if you can unite with people to advance a good cause then then do it do you find that you know as someone who's become very famous for your books you know there's always usually just a few historians that the world gets to know very well are you also having people challenge your ideas or are you in the center of you know uh hotly contested debates about everything that you're saying what what is the the world of competitive historianism like right now for you um well it's not very competitive because you don't have a lot of other historians out there yes uh it's not wall street you know and um yeah it is challenging because 10 years ago i was an anonymous professor for medieval military history and now i'm talking about skovid and about artificial intelligence and and whatever but i think historians have a lot to contribute to humanity we can't predict the future that absolutely should be clear we have no ability to predict the future really the best thing about history is that it opens new possibilities not narrows them predicting the future is usually is you have a couple of possibilities and you try to focus on on just one which you think will happen history does the opposite thing it shows you more possibilities which you haven't thought about before usually people have this kind of linear thinking we think about the last 10 or 20 years and we extrapolate to the future with history you can look back thousands of years and you realize that the last 10 or 20 years were unique they are always unique and history never moves in a straight line so it's always a mistake to assume that we'll just see more of the same again this is not the ability to to foretell what will actually happen but it broadens the mind to include more possibilities and this is what i see as my job as a historian to provide a kind of of map and i don't think that history is just the past i think history is the study of change not the study of the past and change also includes the future so it's mapping all the roads we have traveled in the past but also the different roads that we might travel in the future and just does doing this work make you optimistic as a person are you like for all you studies does it make you like people you know what is your you know your feeling as a human being about us as uh human beings you know you see the extremes which you don't normally see in your everyday life uh you see the extremes of the worst crimes and the worst stupidity that humans are capable of even if it happened generations or thousands of years ago but you also see amazing acts of charity and wisdom which again you don't encounter in in daily life so it instead of making me more optimistic or pessimistic it kind of broadens the spectrum i can be far more pessimistic because i remember some of the terrible really terrible things that humans can do but also there is more space for optimism because you see that um you know it not always ends badly as i mentioned in the beginning we are now for instance living still in the most peaceful era in human history so um i don't think in a fixed i don't know law of via the conservation of violence there is always the same level of violence in the world and if you have a couple of years of peace you will pay for it by a big explosion of war after after that no i don't think there is there is such a law you see that throughout history some places are very violent some places are very peaceful it doesn't necessarily always even out which means that if we act wisely we can make the world a more peaceful i have a couple more questions um what do you envision as the ultimate education system or philosophy of the future how do you evaluate self-directed education based on say play intrinsic motivation pursuing passions social and emotional intelligence and apprenticeships which which had been a feature of hunter-gatherer societies versus the current institutionalized compulsatory education systems that most prevalent modern industrialized societies have but it's a big question and i'm not an expert on education i would say that um when it comes to life skills which for most people i think are much more important than having a phd or a college degree this is the kind of thing that you learn best by living and by apprenticeships and buy relationships you don't need to go to college to learn empathy or to learn curiosity so this is something that is and should be accessible for for all people when you talk about a specific subject like history or like biology or economics or whatever then we have no choice but to rely to some extent on institutions because nobody can research everything by himself or herself it's just impractical you know i as a historian when i write to say the graphic novel i rely on the findings of so many other people i rely on archaeologists i never conducted an archaeological expedition in my life i rely on geneticists i don't know how to extract dna and how to sequence dna and so forth so if i told myself i have to research everything by myself it would never work now the question is who do you trust and if i know somebody personally i can trust them but again you can't know everybody personally so the real trust that we need in those fields are in institutions universities archives journals if trusting institutions break down then science collapses completely to tell people go and do your own research it's impossible i mean how can one person just by oneself go and excavate all the archaeological sites in the world you need to believe somebody so you i for instance i have faith because i i know the mechanism behind it i have faith in scientific journals that what is being published there you know it's not a gospel truth could be mistakes but there are also self-correcting mechanisms so i trust these kinds of institutions and so far i don't see something that can replace them and our final question um the questioner assumes you've read rutger bregman's book humankind um having read that has it altered uh your overall view of humanity in your mind are humans born with a stronger propensity for kindness or cruelty and jokingly adds what do you think of the idea that we really are homo puppies i've read the book it's a very good book highly recommended i find many of the arguments convincing but i again generally it's humans are both i i would avoid the extreme of pessimism and optimism about human nature we have examples of both and um i think that that somewhere there he has this famous parable that somebody explains to a young person that inside you you have two wolves one good and one evil fighting against each other and the person asks so who wins and they tell him the one you feed so yes we have both good and very bad tendencies within ourselves as most animals have and we have some measure of control which tendencies we feed you know you look at social media so you can sit for an hour every day and feed your fear and your hatred and your anger and they will become bigger or you can sit for one hour or every day and i don't know meditate and feed your kindness to that extent it's up to you who wins well with that uh that brings us to an end of a fascinating conversation thank you judd for joining us again and uh chatting with yuval again yuval's new book is sapiens a graphic history the birth of humankind volume one it is available wherever books are sold

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 134,048

Keywords: yuvalnoahharari, graphicsapiens, sapiens, historyofhumankind, graphichistory, judd apatow

Id: J7AoqJKgNfk

Length: 75min 24sec (4524 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020