Yuval Noah Harari on The Story of Sapiens, The Power of Awareness, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show

hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is tim ferriss welcome to another episode of the tim ferriss show my guest today many of you will know the name and those who don't will know much more about him shortly professor yuval noah harari is a historian and best-selling author who is considered one of the most influential public intellectuals in the world i know that's setting a high bar but his popular books might ring a bell sapiens a brief history of humankind homo deus a brief history of tomorrow and 21 lessons for the 21st century have sold 27 and a half million copies roughly in 60 languages i'll let that sink in for people 27.5 million copies that is a lot of square footage or that's a cubic cubic feet cubic meters they've been recommended by barack obama chris evans bill gates and many others he's also behind sapiens a graphic history which we'll talk about a brand new graphic novel series in collaboration with comic artists david van der meulen i think co-writer and daniel casanave the illustrator this beautifully illustrated series is a radical reworking of his book sapiens subtitle a brief history of humankind the series will be published in four volumes starting with volume one the birth of humankind which is available now his website y and harari h-a-r-a-r-i dot com you can find them on facebook twitter instagram on twitter harare underscore yuval we'll link to all the rest of them at tim.blog podcasts this episode is brought to you by peak tea that's p-i-q-u-e i have had so much tea in my life i've been to china i've lived in china in japan i've done tea tours i drink a lot of tea and 10 years plus of physical experimentation and tracking has shown me many things chief among them that gut health is critical to just about everything and you'll see where tea is going to tie into this it affects immune function weight management mental performance emotional health you name it i've been drinking fermented poo air tea specifically pretty much every day 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actually worked it worked much better than i could have imagined and i'm very very happy so to find your perfect sofa check out allform.com tim that's a-l-l-f-o-r-m-com tim all form is offering 20 off all orders to you my dear listeners at allform.com tim make sure to use the code tim at checkout that's allforum.com tim and use code tim at checkout at this altitude i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake can i answer your personal question now i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoscopy you've all so nice to finally see you it's good to be here thank you for inviting me so we're going to start in a unusual place perhaps okay and that is with correcting my pronunciation on a word m m-o-s-h-a-v how do you pronounce that and what does it mean oh that's actually a kind of mistake on wikipedia it's a mushaf now it's some it somehow got around that i live in a moshov which is some kind of socialist collective community less radical than the kibbutz but one of the experiments of socialists in israel like decades ago and it's just not true i mean i live in a kind of middle class suburb of tel aviv so this is an example for those listening of something that some people call the wikipedia echo effect because i i tried to correct it so many times and it's just i i gave up it's it's it's stronger than right so at some point it got into wikipedia then it ended up in the guardian then other people cite the guardian and it just will not go away so it just keeps coming back so let's go to something that i think is more of a first-hand report and it's it's a paragraph from your wonderful profile i should say answers to questions in tribe of mentors which is my last book from a few years ago and here's the paragraph i'd like to read and then we'll explore it since the first course in 2000 i began practicing vipassana for two hours every day and each year i take a long meditation retreat for a month or two it's not an escape from reality it's getting in touch with reality at least for two hours a day i actually observe reality as it is while for the other 22 hours i get overwhelmed by emails and tweets and funny cat videos without the focus and clarity provided by this practice i could not have written sapiens and homo deus so the missing piece here is the first course would you be open to describing how you ended up going to your first vipassana experience um yeah i mean i was doing my phd at oxford at the time about medieval military history and i was also looking for the meaning of life and reading lots of philosophy books and thinking a lot and then nothing really clicked and the friend nagged me for about a year to try a meditation retreat instead of reading all these books and finally i gave up and said okay i'll i'll try i'll see how it is and it was really fascinating because you know the the very first evening the instructions that i was given by the meditation teacher was very very simple instructions i mean i guess many people heard them that you just focus your entire you sit down you close your eyes and you just focus your entire attention on your nostrils on your nose and you just feel try to feel whether your breath is coming in or whether your breath is going out sounds like the simplest thing in the world it's not even a breathing exercise like you don't need to control the breath just to just let it be what it is and just feel what it does and i couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds like most people that you know for 10 seconds i would be focusing on my nostrils on my breath and after 10 seconds my mind would run somewhere like to some memory some story some something i forgot to do something that happened years ago and i would roll in that for for minutes before realizing that hey i i'm missing my breath and come back and this was an extremely humiliating and important experience because it made me realize for the first time in my life that i have almost no control over my mind that you know i was doing my phd at oxford i thought it was i was a very intelligent person very smart and you know my mind is my my tool and i have absolutely no control over it i give it this very very simple task and it can't do it and also you realize how overwhelming the stories that the mind produced are and over time this was not on the first night but gradually over time it made me realize that you know if you can't focus on the simple reality of your breath coming in and out of your nostrils without being overwhelmed by some story generated in your mind then how can you hope to understand i don't know the financial system of the world the geopolitical system what's happening in israel in the middle east much much bigger things if you can't do that i mean no matter what i try to do these stories generated by the by my own mind get between me and reality and most of my life i just spend on these stories so it was ever since then it's one of my main practices in in life is how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the stories that your mind generates why did your friend nag you for a year was this a friend who was nagging everybody to go to a class and the teacher as i understand it maybe it was in video or or maybe in person s n goeink i didn't know the lifespan did they nag you because there's something about you that told them you would benefit in particular or was it a general nagging i think i mean i think this guy was nagging everybody in a good way i'm still good friends with him i i think he because i was really looking hard to understand life to understand what's happening here then he thought i would be a good candidate and then he was absolutely right now vipassana clicks for some people it doesn't click for others some people gravitate to transcendental meditation and repeating a mantra other people might find a different type of mindfulness practice but it clicked for you what did the before and after look like if we let's just say go back to that point in time your first experience and then we flash forward six months what had changed six months later or or how did your perception of the world change some things changed dramatically most things didn't i mean you have this kind of false enlightenment experience that you think you realize something very deep and now everything is going to change and over time you realize that the deep patterns of yourself of your own mind are much much stronger than one course of meditation or practice of six months and it's a it's a very long way and again for some people it doesn't click at all i mean when i came out of my first course i thought oh that's easy i mean every you can set anybody there it will have the same effect later on i realize it's it's it doesn't work like that different things work for different people over time they're changing on so many levels i'm not sure which of these levels is most interesting to you or to our listeners so i can talk on on several of them you know everything from simple simple kind of peace of mind and better mental health to a big change in my working methods in my professional life i don't think as i wrote in this that passage you read i don't think i could have written sapiens or homo deus or any of these other books without the practice of meditation because you need a tremendous amount of focus to do something like that and you need to be able to see through the mass of details and you know you try to summarize the whole of human history in 500 pages the most important button on the keyboard is delete um that's the big thing i mean what i mean are so many important things what is really important that's the big question and i don't think i could have done it without the kind of sharp focus that the meditation gives so many people have heard of sapience certainly there was a point in silicon valley when it first came out and nearly all of my friends seemed to be reading this same book and i think there's a sort of revisionist grand delusion among many readers that sapiens came out and then like the snap of the fingers 20 million copies or however many millions of copies were sold worldwide in 60 languages now that doesn't seem to to match the story exactly what was the title of the original english version of sapience and how many copies did it sell yeah it was a long story i mean the original english version was titled from animals into gods and it sold it was a self-publication on amazon and it sold something like 2 000 copies they now go for i don't know thousands of dollars or something because there are rare collector items but yeah it was a it was a long way it was a long way and you brought in then at at that point a number of professionals i believe maybe it was your your husband who found yeah i mean literary agent that was the main thing i mean i have i'm i think i'm quite a good writer but i have very little skills in terms of publication negotiations or anything to do with the business side of life and i tried for some time for maybe a year or two to find a publisher by myself and it was a complete failure and then my husband came in and he has much much better business skills than i do and he like immediately fired the agent that we were working with at the time and kind of let's go back to zero and he was the one that found uh the best literary agent in israel deborah harris and she opened a lot of doors for us and we worked on it for i think we kind of we did the translation again in several several because originally it was in hebrew and several rounds of editing and uh eventually something like three years or more than three years after the hebrew version the real english version came out in 2014 what were the biggest changes that were made aside from the title i'd be curious to hear the story of sapiens the title itself but what were some of the changes that were made in the editing process before the grand debut of the new version if anything i don't know if it was just fine-tuning tuning nothing major changed i mean the all the major themes and ideas were already there in the hebrew version uh we just really redo the translation and edit it and i mean shortening here and there if a few things but but there was no major revision to the content it was mainly issues of style and the entire kind of uh business approach of who to work with and how and you correct me if i'm wrong because you never know what you read on the internet the degree of uh veracity but that it was based on lectures you had given previously yeah is that true that's that's correct i i gave like uh for five six years previously i was giving a course at the hebrew university which was basically introduction to the history of the world and at some point uh after working on it for a couple of years i began handing out my notes to the students because i wanted them to focus on what i was saying and be part of the discussion instead of just scribbling down whatever i say so i told them forget it i mean you don't need to write anything i'll give you my notes and and then the notes started circulating not only among the students of the class but also other students at the university and this kind of gave me the idea that well maybe there is a larger audience for this and i began working on turning these lecture notes into into a book again it was a long way but a lot of the major ideas were there in the in the lecture notes and i wanted to hear more about this because i've seen in some books that i've quite enjoyed like zero to one by peter thiel and his his co-writer also came from lecture notes originally at stanford yeah it's a good method because the students take no um you know when you write when you write a book and it's only you and the screen and the computer the computer suffers everything whatever you write the computer is fine with it it's too long it's it's incomprehensible it's boring the computer doesn't care but the students give you immediate feedback i mean if you stand in class and you and you talk and you see that the students have lost interest then that's a sign or they just don't understand what you're saying and the great thing about this course it wasn't really an introduction to first-year students and and israeli students and you know if if it was i don't know in oxford then maybe it wouldn't work but israeli students they tell you exactly what they think about you and what you say so i got immediate feedback about everything and maybe the most important feedback is that and i was trying to explain the really basic concepts of human history what is religion what is money what is capitalism and you need you know when you talk with professors or doctors you can talk in a very very complicated way so nobody realizes including yourself that you don't really know what you're talking about but with first-year students you have to use very simple language and that's a big challenge the simpler the language the bigger the challenge it really shows you and your listeners whether you know what you're talking about or not you can't hide behind professional jargon and very complicated uh i don't know language and so so it was uh it forced me like i was trying to explain what is money and i had to go back again and again to to the to the core ideas and to the lecture notes and ask do i really understand what i'm talking about if i really understand i should be able to make it simpler i should be able to give a straightforward example it makes me think quite a bit about uh richard feynman the physicist who was very very esteemed teacher and felt very similarly that that professionals could hide behind labels right pointing at the bird and knowing the name is very different from understanding the bird and if you have to describe it in simple terms it's a real challenge of of competence and clarity as a teacher you mentioned the term suffering and i again want you to fact check me but it seems to me in doing homework and reading your work that you are very attuned to suffering whether that is in the animal world whether that is in the human experience whether that is in your own experience say with the endless cloudy days in oxford at one point could you speak to how you developed that sensitivity if if i'm not imposing that on you uh because i mean you i'm looking behind you right now and people might not be watching this video but you have some calligraphy behind you which is uh i believe it's foshin which is like buddhist heart or buddhist mind somebody gave you a present and they hang out there right yeah it's beautiful it's beautiful so that's what that's what it says okay and suffering and the concept of suffering is is also central to a lot of buddhist thought yeah could you speak to how you think about suffering or why that is is something that you're so cognizant of yeah i realized both in my personal life and in my work as a historian that this is the big question i mean the big question is not the meaning of life and the big question is not how you satisfy some god or how you achieve this or that goal the the big question is how you liberate yourself and others from suffering and this is also i think the main theme of human history is most historians are focused on the question of power if you take most history books and also most economic books and and so forth they are about power they are not just you know a guide to how to get power but about them the history of power conflicts about power between two kings between two kingdoms between two gods between two religions between two classes these are most history books are about that and it's an important part but it's it's not the bottom line i think the bottom line okay what does all this mean in term of happiness and suffering so okay so the roman empire rose to power did it actually make humans happier did it make them more miserable if it had no noticeable effect on say average happiness in the world what does it matter whether they want or lost and in my work i try to always keep both of these perspectives at the same time the perspective of of of power and of suffering especially because you know humans are very very good as a species not all humans but as a species we are very good in acquiring more power but we are not good at all in translating power into happiness and for me the big paradox of history is that it's obvious we are thousands of times more powerful than people in the stone age but it's not clear whether we are at all happier than they were maybe we are happier a bit but not thousands of times more happier so something is wrong you know it's like a car which you know you you press the fuel pedal with all your strength but your gear is in neutral i mean we have so much power and it doesn't move anywhere and it's also often the case in your personal life that you can achieve so much and then you know you look inside and you ask am i actually happier than i was 10 years ago or 20 years ago and maybe not and one of the things i also realized personally and you know collectively as a historian is that we just don't understand suffering very well one of the main problems is that people think that with regard to suffering it's obvious what suffering is the big problem is how to make it how to make it disappear i know that i don't know pain is suffering or i don't have enough money that's that's the cause of my suffering so now let's focus on on getting more money or getting a medicine and the mistake is that you don't really understand the deep causes and mechanisms of suffering you see just part of it yeah obviously pain is suffering that's true but there is much more to it and if we spend a little more time on understanding the deep mechanisms of misery and dissatisfaction in life then we can act far more effectively in in trying to alleviate it can you speak to the the test of suffering to determine what entities are real and what are not what illusion and what are not i mean i shouldn't say illusion maybe abstractions the main way that humans gain power is through collective cooperation as individuals we are not particularly powerful animals in a match between the human and chimpanzee the chimpanzee will easily win the big advantage of humans we can cooperate basically in unlimited numbers thousands millions today even billions cooperate together chimpanzees can't cooperate more than say 50 or 100 that's about the limit and then you know what enables us to cooperate in very large numbers these are this is our ability to invent and believe in fictional stories and fictional entities all the big heroes of history almost all of them are fictional entities that exist only in our imagination only in the stories that we create nations gods money corporations states the only place they exist is in the stories that we invent and tell as they are they are not physical or biological realities again the united states or israel the only place it exists is in the story that millions of people believe and it's the same with money it has you know money has absolutely no objective value but as long as millions of people believe in the story about the dollar or the story about the euro it works now when you say that sometimes people go to the other extreme and think that what you're saying is that nothing is real that the entire world is just one big illusion but that's not the case i mean there is still reality there are still chimpanzees and elephants and humans and there is a very very simple test to know whether the hero of the story that you are telling is a real entity or a fictional entity invented by humans and existing only in their imagination and that is the test of suffering that a human being can suffer a cow can suffer an elephant can suffer but a nation can't if a nation loses a war it doesn't suffer it has no mind it can't feel pain or sadness or fear the soldiers who are fighting for the nation the citizens in that nation now being conquered by some other nations they can suffer a lot of things but the nations can't suffer it should be obvious and it's the same as corporations even if the corporation loses a billion dollar it doesn't suffer it if it goes bankrupt it doesn't suffer because it again it has no mind can't feel pain can't feel anything so it's you know it's a very very simple test that we should remind ourselves from time to time what is real in the world and what are these fictional stories now i'm not against the stories we need them they are the basis for cooperation but we should always remember we created them as tools to serve us we shouldn't be enslaved by them if a story enables people to cooperate well and thereby improve their lives that's wonderful but once you forget it's just a story and you begin entire wars just in order to protect to defend the owner of the nation or to increase the profits of the corporation something went wrong just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by linkedin jobs the colorful days of fall are now upon us are your small businesses needs evolving changing with the times certainly true for me and my team and despite the current uncertainty in the world having the right people on your team can wrap you in feelings of security and peace of mind like a warm blanket it's never been more important to find and hire the right people linkedin has an active community of professionals more than 690 million members worldwide and when your business is ready to make that next hire linkedin jobs can help you find the right person quickly by matching your role with qualified candidates getting started is easier than ever with new features to help you find qualified candidates quickly manage job posts and contact candidates from one simple view on linkedin.com's familiar website it's super easy identify strong candidates with their efficient rating system to easily get your job in front of more qualified professionals and now you can also do all of this from your mobile device so when your business is ready to make that next hire or if you just want to check it out find the right person faster with linkedin jobs you can pay what you want and get the first fifty dollars off just visit linkedin.com tim all caps tim again that's linkedin.com tim to get 50 off of your first job post terms and conditions apply what is the story if there is one or stories that you have around money yourself i was reading the new yorker profile not from not too long ago and you probably know the paragraph that i might be thinking about where you and your husband might relate to money differently what are the stories that that you have for yourself in your life money but in essence money is just trust it's the most successful and universal system of mutual trust that humans ever came up with and therefore i don't think it's bad you know it's very common for historians and philosophers and people like that oh manny it's the source of all evil in the world i don't think so it sometimes it causes a lot of bad things but in itself it's a wonderful thing it's just a system of mutual trust that you know fifty thousand years ago to trust somebody you need to know them personally you need to know their personality what they did in the past they like you they don't like you and that makes it very very hard to cooperate in large numbers because you can't know a lot of people personally and it also makes it particularly hard to cooperate with strangers and foreigners that you don't know now you look at today i can go to a supermarket and a complete stranger that i never met in my life would give me food that i can actually eat which was grown by a couple of other people on the other side of the world and was transported from that field or plantation to the supermarket by a bunch of other people none of us knows so how do we cooperate so effectively how do we trust each other um money makes it possible and money is really it's just trust you know in the beginning money was uh and because people didn't have a lot of trust then money had to be made from something with an objective value which doesn't depend just on on human belief so the first money that we know about was simply grain you paid for things with grain and grain you know you can eat them if nothing works but gradually people that the trust increased and today most money in the world is just digital data being passed between computers most money is not even bank notes and coins it's i don't know like five percent or something of the of the money is is physical money most of it is just digital when during this crisis in the recent year uh governments and banks in the u.s in europe elsewhere created trillions of dollars they didn't even bother to print the money you just have some official in some bank goes into the computer adds a zero somewhere you have a trillion new dollars emerging out of nothing and it works i mean it works because people have so much trust in the banks in the governments not only of their own country that's the amazing thing i mean you'd have thought well you can only use the money of your government no you think about even i don't know islamic fundamentalist isis they hated america they hated american politics american culture american religion but they had nothing against american dollars when they conquered i don't know mosul and enter the banks they didn't burn the dollars that were there they took them they used them so that's amazing that you can have such a level of trust even between complete enemies and in my personal life um therefore i don't have a negative attitude towards money um i think for me i i'm also i i'm not chasing it a lot but for me the best thing about money is not to think about it i'm now much wealthier than i was 10 years ago you know just a young professor back then not that i was ever poor but i'm not much more wealthier and the the thing i like most about my wealth today is that i simply don't have to think about money i go to the supermarket and i i don't know in israel pineapples are very expensive so if i wanted pineapple i just i i don't even look at how much it costs i just oh i want the pineapple okay let's take it you've mentioned the alleviating of suffering and getting a better understanding first of defining the problem as opposed to just rushing to solutions and getting a better understanding of suffering are there ways in which your life in contrast to say not thinking about money has been complicated or made harder to navigate with the tremendous success of sapiens and becoming more publicly visible in other words was it as as just an example easier to find sort of tranquility and connection with bodily sensations as a way to integrate yourself back at oxford compared to today no but i have 20 years of experience now in doing that so i don't know maybe if i remained an anonymous professor of medieval history it i would have much deeper experiences of meditation today maybe not it's impossible to know i still have time you know i'm i'm not so busy i have now a large team like again thanks to my husband to kind of set it up we now have a team of 15 people working for us so i get something like i don't know 15 20 emails a day that's it and like this conversation i didn't have to do anything i just had to come like two minutes before it started and just put like plug myself in and that's it somebody organized everything so um i'm not extremely busy i i still have two hours every day to meditate i still go every year for a long retreat of say 30 days or 40 or 60 days something like that um yeah i mean i i think a lot there are a lot of things to think um but i thought a lot even before that so i mean the the content of my thoughts changed but i don't think the intensity changed one of the things i realized for now being this famous public intellectual and meeting all these famous people and leaders is that everybody is is basically the same when you are prime minister or president of a superpower you can't be more uh worried than when you run a small business it's impossible it's you know it's the same brain it's the same mind so if you have a small shop and you're the only worker maybe and it's now corona time and and you have to shut it down and you have to pay uh your remote gauge and whatever you worry about it all day it's basically the same with a prime minister or president that worries about the economic crisis of a war it's yeah of course objectively they have to be much more worried but they can't they have the same brain that you have so it really depends on you know maybe they are even far less worried than you are if you are an extremely neurotic person i don't know if woody allen had a small shop and i think he would be much more worried about his shop than certain presidents and prime ministers today in the world are worried about their countries [Laughter] so i read uh i've read a quote from you this is in the new york times if if i was a superpower my superpower would be detachment uh feel free to correct that if need be but assuming there's some grain of truth to that could you expand on that please yeah i think it is true that i i can keep a kind of distance from situations from development in in my personal life or in in world history and even though i have my opinions and on my preferences i have a certain ability to to keep a distance and say look at things from from different angles and um also it makes me very skeptical about my own positions but maybe maybe i just don't know maybe i'm wrong about it um it could have been you know debilitating that i can't like how can you write the history of the world if you're not sure about what you're saying but actually i find it i i just don't take myself a hundred percent seriously so okay so maybe i'll write something and it's nonsense so okay uh that's when i wrote sapiens initially i had no idea what would be a big success so i was kind of i had this defense that i thought nobody's going to read it like maybe my students at university would read it and maybe a couple of other people but that's it so you know i can write what i want basically and later on when i became very successful it was the other way around then that you know it doesn't matter anymore that if i'm if if i write something and it's not um and i'm not 100 sure about it then i can take the hit then okay so people will find out that i wrote something wrong and and that's fine that's part of the business i mean if you really want to uh write these kinds of big books you have to accept to some extent that you will make mistakes and that um you will not get everything right if you want if you're a perfectionist then it's better to write the history of kind of one battle in the middle ages that then you're on safer grounds this is going to seem like a strange question perhaps and if it goes nowhere that's totally fine but i'm curious what do your close friends come to you for when it comes to advice like what type of advice do your friends come to you for is there any any pattern to it or any particular standout it depends on the friends i think i have a core of very good friends that go with me for years i mean from long before i i think that since i became kind of famous i made maybe just one or two new good friends almost all my good friends are with me from years back and i have different relationships with each of them it's like each one of them holds a different part of my inner world or of my life and i hold different parts of the world so you know they don't come from it to me for advice about history that's for sure maybe they'll ask me well what do you think will happen in the u.s elections and i said i don't know but i mean some if something really big happens i don't know when they uh during the the height of the of the terrorist wave in the world so they would come and at least some of them and i would say look for a big historical perspective this is not so important you know every person that dies in a terrorist attack is the entire world destroyed but looking at the big picture from the history of the world this is a very small affair i mean i can explain to you why terrorism gets so much attention it's basically theater these people are experts in theater not in war and they are very good at it so they get so much attention but you don't need to worry that the terrorists will take over the world it's not going to happen uh most of the things you know it's like somebody's breaking up with their boyfriend girlfriend somebody is just having a lousy day at work and the the usual things the usual stuff what would they say your superpower is if if you said it's detachment which we could dig further into but is are there any other observations that they would have if if we gave all of your closest friends two drinks and we said okay you've all superpower what is it what might they say first they will say different things because they know different angles of me right i think some of them will say i suppose that i'm a good listener partly because i talk so much during my with my my work that like when i meet these friends i like to be quiet and just let somebody else do the talking for a while which is a very good thing because very very often when people come to you for help they just want you to listen they don't want you to solve their problems they don't you know it often happens that comes somebody comes you know with a problem and you don't have patience for them so you think what is the fastest way to get rid of them to end this phone call i'll find the solution of their problem then they'll go away and this really is the last thing they want they really just want to complain and for somebody to listen to them and i'm quite good at it right you spend all your words during the day and then you can you you have the space to listen uh yes how do you relate to happiness yeah i usually prefer to talk about suffering or misery uh because happiness is is far more difficult to nail down i mean when you're miserable you know it when you're happy when you think you're happy you're quite often just deluding yourself it's not so easy to really understand what's happening there you know it really goes down to the level of the body this is something that i i know for meditation when you have a pain somewhere in your body it acts like a magnet they just draws their attention there there is no way you can miss it and you try to to observe other things and you can't it's just you and it gets drawn back to the painful sensation in the knee in the stomach wherever it is but when you have pleasant sensations in your body they have usually the opposite effect they throw you out you kind of float a couple of feet above the ground i mean sometimes people come in meditation and they say i never have any pleasant sensations in the body i just have pain and that's it's never the case what's true is that when you have pleasant sensations you don't notice them because the usual effect of feeling something very pleasant it throws you out you start kind of imagining hey what if i win the lottery and i'll have a million dollars i'll do that i'll do that and you you lose connection with what at the time that you're having these very pleasant thoughts you're having very pleasant sensations in the body but you don't notice it and um it's it's i find it it's it's harder to work and to see what's actually happening there but it's i would it's even more important than kind of noticing and working with with the painful sensations i mean most in the end most of our i would say the the really difficult problems they begin with the pleasant sensations that um you know we become so attached to them that the moment they are gone most of the time people don't have very painful experiences most of the time if you are dissatisfied it's because you are missing or craving for some very pleasant experience which is just not there and you're not willing to settle for the kind of ordinary boring thing that you do have i want to rewind to your description of your current life compared to your just say pre-fame life which seems to be similar in many ways you've been able to preserve the space to do what you do best you have this team you have this this husband is very good at saying no you have personal assistants who are very good at saying no and to many people listening who have achieved some modicum of success i think they will listen with great envy because very often whether they are artists whether they are business people what made them successful is often the first thing to get crowded out by the new attention and success that they receive aside from luck because perhaps there was some luck and chance involved in meeting the person who then became your husband were there any decisions or are there any decisions or frameworks or anything at all that has helped you to preserve the space that you have i think a very important decision was to keep the meditation first that like when i plan my day when i plan my year it's the first thing i put in the calendar is the meditation which reads and everything else has to find space around that and that was a very it was a conscious decision and a very important decision that that really worked and in in a bit similar way also to keep time for my old friends to keep time for my family and understanding that this is kind of a marathon race and not a sprint but okay something very important happens the new book is coming out there is a there is a lot of important things so okay so i can i can change my routines for a while but over the long run you have to keep these kind of basic blocks intact this was a very conscious decision in my case uh it worked also to kind of remember what's really important for you in life for me i think maybe you know on the personal level i really want to understand life to understand the world what's happening i noticed quite early that most of kind of the big events that i'm participating in like conferences and and so forth and the important people i meet they don't really contribute much to that they don't seem to understand their life or have to have some particular insight in the big conferences they never talk about these things you know they talk about the global economy they talk about climate change they talk about they are important things but in on the deeper level of what's actually happening here it's um i won't get any answers from from there you know it's i don't think it's a coincidence that you look at the whole span of human history and almost none of the important political leaders of humankind made a significant philosophical contribution to human thought you have a few exceptions i don't know marcus aurelius or something like that but generally speaking you would have thought that from their vantage point they see something that ordinary mortals don't they maybe they reach the top because they have some very keen insight into human nature and if they have some kin inside they keep it very very secret [Laughter] who are some of the people you respect could be past or present for really seeing or seeking what is going on on the deeper levels i i can tell you i mean some of the names of thinkers and writers that influenced me great let's start there yeah so i mean charles taylor the canadian philosopher really influenced me a lot his book the sources of the self is i think one of the most important books i read in life one of the most difficult books also i mean if people take this as a kind of reading recommendation they should be warned it's it's really tough going it's a very big book very dense but if you make it it's really worth it oh of course i was very influenced by my meditation teacher essen goenka again not necessarily by any books he wrote or just by by the the guidance i mean i remember sitting in my first week past and of course and and having this this guy really gets it he really understands what's what's happening uh this was something quite surprising for me to see that some of my good friends have some insight into what's happening here i i can give a list of of books that influenced me i'm not sure if this is kind of the unanswered the question but we are free free to meander this is we don't have constraints one of the problems i realized it's that it's extremely difficult to share the really deep insights you have about life that very often they are in a non-verbal level and in any case my impression is that most of the inner world of most humans is never shared they never talk about it because they don't even have the words and don't have the audience i mean most of what happens to you deep down during the day your spouse probably doesn't know your parents don't know your children don't know your friends don't know even you don't know if you don't really make the effort one of them qualities of great art not just writing but different kinds of art that it really gives words that you know you feel something for many maybe for years and you have no idea how to communicate it and then you read a phone or you see a tv show and yes this is exactly what i'm feeling and i never knew how to communicate it so that's why it's also very difficult to kind of know you meet somebody and you don't really know what's going on inside them and to what extent they understand or don't understand their life or life in general so it's very very hard to say well you also underscore something that i've thought about a lot recently which is it's quite unfair to expect other people to understand you fully when you don't understand yourself fully on your own it's quite quite an unfair expectation of people sometimes this is a basic expectations because because we have trouble understanding ourselves we have this hope that somebody will lend us a hand and we have the experience at least most of us if we came from loving families that when you were kids there were people there like our parents who did exactly that for us even on the most banner level that you know a child is crying and uh the mother would say well you're just tired just go to sleep and you you figure out well you should know that you're tired but no i mean it's amazing that sometimes people are tired or hungry or whatever and they don't know it and then somebody who really understands and comes come to simple just go to sleep and in in my writing i engage a lot with the issue of the future of ai and surveillance and i think one of the key fantasies with ai in surveillance is that um the algorithms will do that for us that will this well this ties into one of the books that has had a big impact on you if i remember correctly right i mean the aldous huxley and brave new world yeah brave the world i i it really had really really deep impact on me um because i i think he really got it and that he the interesting thing about brave new world it's kind of you know it's on the surface it's a dystopia but when you kind of ask yourself why what's wrong with brave new world it's very difficult to say it to find out i mean everybody seems to be satisfied everybody seems to be happy there is a system in place that understands you very very deeply and make sure that you'll never be in great pain or never never suffer any any great misery and it's it's a very in in distance you know 1984 like it's it's brother book 1984 it's a very simple book in this sense that 1984 describes a terrible terrible dystopia the only question is how do we avoid getting there but bravely well do you read it and at least for me i kind of think okay so what's what's really wrong with it and it's not easy to answer this question yeah the the sort of uncanny feeling that something is not quite right that you can't put words to it's very similar to the feeling of something that is quite right that you can't put words to that then gets reflected in good art it can go both ways yeah and a number of the things that i read in preparation for this from various profiles there's one that said you prefer television to novels there was another that gave the example might have been the same profile of you swimming as part of your routine in the summer and listening to non-fiction books via headsets but they're i guess they're resonant they deal with the vibration of the yeah this is a really nice gadget i i came across and i i tried to listen through like usual earplugs and water would sit in somehow all the time and would ruin it and then finally i came across this gadget that you can just put it on your forehead and some in some mysterious way it works better and you actually hear better than when you put it in your ears so yeah i would swim back and forth back and forth listening to i don't know i i listened to say to shoshanna zubov's surveillance capitalism while swimming back and forth in my pool with the with the dolphin headset for the resonance that's amazing so i'll it's a forehead headset perhaps do you recall what type it is by any chance i know this is getting into the minutia if not we can figure it out i can go and look for it if it's very important and it's just it's just in the in the next room so like it will take me a second if you want oh yeah let's yeah sure let's let's grab it why not okay i don't want to say this is the most important thing in the world but i'm curious i'll take it it'll take a minute so uh it's a this is how it looks by the way oh wow all right so it's connected to the dorsal snorkel that goes across the forehead so you don't have to rotate yes and i don't have to pull this like my put my head back and forth all the time from the water yeah it's by finis duo finish finis all right we'll we'll find it and put it in the show notes thank you for grabbing that in those examples in these profiles it seems like you are not consuming much written fiction but brave new world is fiction yeah fast becoming reality and maybe also like you said philosophy disguised as science fiction are there other fiction books that you have found to have an impact on you or your thinking or do you do you consume much in terms of quite similar yeah it's quite similar to brave new world i think hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy i also great i also list it as a philosophy book um you know i think that and it had an impact on not just on on my thinking but on my on on how i write or work that i'm not saying it is a kind of uh i don't know metaphor or something that these are they are philosophy books they just are written in a different way uh the and this is one of the ideas that gave me the inspiration to kind of turn sapience into a graphic novel which we might discuss later on if if we have the time that you can play with the form i think that aldous huxley when he came to write brave new world he had these philosophical issues he wanted to discuss and maybe i'm inventing money maybe it wasn't like this at all but my impression is that he thought well it will actually be easier and more interesting and engaging instead of uh you know having these formal logical arguments and instead of having these thought experiments which philosophers love so much why not have an entire book which is one long thought experiment and see where it takes me and i think that the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is basically something similar that it explores a lot of deep philosophical issues but in a much more fun way than your typical philosophy book i could not agree more i just literally a few weeks ago listened to hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy narrated by stephen fry who's an incredible narrator for the first time and you're right that it has so many what otherwise could be very sterile thought experiments and concepts yeah embedded into this entertaining narrative and i remember one line they're talking about the i want to say he's the president of the galaxy or something yes that's what people brooks that's right people brock's and they they talk about how successful he was and how people have the mistaken notion that the job of the president is to wield power but that's not the job of the president it's to distract from those who are wielding power and just these short nuggets contain so much to chew on and it's it's really an effective way of providing people with footholds in a way yeah toeholds it's the same with tv like i think that black mirror at least some of the episodes in black mirror are some of the best discussions that i i've seen of certain dangerous tendencies in in current technology i mean some episodes are just fun uh i don't know like sanjani pero i think it's a it's an extremely good episode but it describes the reality which is so far away from us that it's it's not really relevant to any of the discussions here but you look at if you start nosedive about and you know maybe the chinese got the idea for their social credit system from nosedive but it's such a powerful and important episode of you look at um how was it called the one with the cartoon figure that became president that almost became a a mp uh the the blue bear something and you know this is before trump this was before this whole wave and they this was so prophetic it was really amazing when i watched it for the first time in 2013 i thought what were they talking about and then i watched it later like five years later that these guys are just geniuses i mean how did they see it coming yeah it's very it's it's a real sweet spot of a near-term or not-too-distant future kind of technological extrapolation i love black mirror i and i always encourage people to watch at least three episodes because i would say maybe one out of three or one out of four just completely miss uh for me they don't kind of sort of strike a chord so you have to your sample size has to be a few episodes and you'll usually strike on something uh do you have any other we are going to talk about sapient graphic history because i have a lot of questions about it before we get there i have two actually i'll stick with one question before we get there and that is any other television series could be documentaries also or movies that you think are intelligent examples of philosophy or thought experiments in disguise again going back to the usual suspects of science fiction i thought that hair was a very intelligent and you know low key exploration of some of the potential of of ai i don't like these movies when the robots rebel and kill everybody i mean this is such it's implants the wrong fears and it encourages the wrong discussions i don't think that in the next 20 or 30 years the robots are going to rebel and kill everybody but there are other dangers much more so i mean or less subtle whether it's the job market whether it's surveillance and what it will do to politics or whether it's you know changes in in human relationships and i thought that her was a very in in this way a very intelligent uh movie that avoided the usual traps and it goes back exactly to what we were discussing earlier that we have a deep yearning that somebody out there in the world would really understand us like we go about life and we hope that our parents would understand us our teachers our lovers our kids somebody please understand me and for many people it never happens and to some extent somebody understands them but there are many hidden corners within themselves that they are unable to communicate and maybe they don't understand them fully and there is nobody out there that reaches out and and kind of engages those corners in them and there is now a technology on the rise which could fulfill that dream and this is extremely attractive and extremely frightening at the same time and harry spot on i mean what happens when there is an algorithm that constantly observes you not just what you do but also what's happening inside your body and really understands your personality your moods your likes your dislikes you know you come back home from work and you're grumpy and your husband doesn't notice it but the computer does notice it i mean and what kind of world is it what kind of relationships will there be when computers and objects understands you better than the people in your life and that's a fascinating and frightening uh question and i think a very realistic question we are very unlike the robots rebelling and killing everybody the moment that your smart refrigerator knows you better than your husband is not very far in the future [Laughter] and you know this is we we should be talking more about that and i would like to see more movies more tv shows more science fiction novels that explore uh these kinds of questions yeah if if you haven't read any of ted chang's work c-h-i-a-n-g he has a he has a a compilation of short stories called exhalation okay and he has another collection of short stories i think you would absolutely love them one of his short stories was turned into i believe it was a rival about the protagonist who's this female linguist who decodes the the graphic language of these aliens who arrive on earth and it's about temporal perception it's these are really really really incredible stories so ted chang c-h-i-a-n-g-n exhalation i think i think you'd enjoy it let's talk about sapiens of graphic history well before we get to that i just want to say that the word understand and the concept of understanding is also fraught with difficulties and i think that that is part of what ai will also demonstrate that knowing quite a few people who work on ai what does it mean for let's just say a computer or a refrigerator to pass the turing test so effectively that you feel understood well it's not i i don't believe they'll be conscious i don't believe that we are near the point when they will have consciousness and if by understand you mean the kind of inner feeling that we have when we understand that that's not the case i think we are not near there but understands in the sense that able to predict our behavior and response right unconsciously in a way which will be more appropriate than the people around us that's what what i mean by it yes it's a weaker definitely i'm not thinking about the conscious experience of understanding it's about just predicting could be manipulating but most importantly just a kind of reacting to us in a way that we will find appropriate more appropriate in the way that you know we will get so used to having these computers and robots that are very attuned to how we feel that we might become even more irritated with the humans who don't feel who don't react who don't understand how we feel and don't react in in the right way and part of the problem is that so many people like everybody are often self-centered so i don't get what my husband is feeling because i'm too focused on my own my own feelings one of the reasons that computers could be better than humans in this is that they don't have feelings the refrigerator doesn't have any expectations in life from you he had no dreams no phantom nothing so the refrigerator can be a hundred percent focused on what you feel it has no feelings of its own so it can't be insulted can't be angry nothing sounds like you have an episode of black mirror to write [Music] but and to to that point on some level we were talking about philosophy disguised as fiction or thought exercises embedded into say black mirror in a way that are not just fascinating but also prophetic in some respects sapien's a graphic history i want to talk about this because i actually have a long history with graphic novels and comic books i wanted to be a penciller a comic book penciller for about 12 years and used used to be an illustrator a long time ago and then i lived in japan in high school went to a japanese school and in japan unlike in the us there is a long rich history of comic books and graphic novels for adults and also comic books and graphic novels for teaching difficult concepts telling history and these are extended expansive collections of graphic novels and i've seen how effective it is because i i read some of these when i was in japan on the history of judo and other things and i would not have consumed 500 pages of pure text certainly not in japanese and i think it's an incredibly powerful format how and why did you decide to take sapiens and create this piece of art but also an effective vehicle for perhaps teaching in a different way actually the initiative didn't come from me it came from david and danielle the two artists who collaborated with me on this project they came up with the idea they brought some initial suggestions and i really liked it it connected to something that i did want to do for a long time which is to reach new audiences i see my main job today as bringing science and history to more people people who wouldn't necessarily read a traditional science book even if it's popular science they still won't read it like 500 pages of text with footnotes it's it's that they won't touch it but they might connect to a graphic novel and yes it is for adults and teenagers i mean many people in the west have the idea that comics are for kids but no it's it's just a different medium it's a different language it enables you to do i mean some things you can't do you need to you know cut down the text but there are many things you can do much better in a graphic novel certainly to show things like you know the much of the graphic novel is about the life of hunter gatherers so you can just show it in images instead of long descriptions an image is worth a thousand words in many cases it also enabled us to and for me it was i know the most fun project i ever worked on because it was okay let's take all the academic conventions of how you write history and throw them aside let's experiment so it's kind of a series of experiments in how to tell history so you know one part about the evolution of different human species the sempians neanderthals and so forth it's taught like a reality tv show that there are different competitions between different human species then you have an entire chapter about the how humans caused the extinction of many of the large animals of the world as they spread from africa over the world and this is told as a detective movie we created this fictional detective detective lopez like sherlock holmes or agatha kind of a person and she goes around the world and investigates the worst serial killers in history who killed all these big animals and the the invention of the first religions is told according to the conventions of superhero action movies so we created this superhero superheroine doctor fiction who embodies the human ability to invent fictional stories and mythologies and it was really fun working with david and daniel on that and just saying well why not we can try that we can do that it's allowed it also forced me and actually all of us to answer many questions which we can just ignore in the text when you draw you have to draw specific things when you write you can write in obstructions when you draw you can't draw obstructions so if for instance you talk about the connection between homo sapiens and neanderthals and we now know that some sapiens and neanderthals had sexual relations and even had children because most of us today still carry some neanderthal genes in our dna now in a book you can just write that sapiens had sex with neanderthals end of story but in a graphic novel if you want to draw it you have to make some decisions i mean who is the man and who is the woman is it a neanderthal man with the sapience woman or the other way around and what about skin color what about hair color hairstyle all these questions you can't draw a general human it must have some skin color must have some hair color so we have to go back to the literature the scientific literature and investigate and sometimes you find answers sometimes you don't and then you have to take into account all the ideological and political issues of race and gender and so it's it's a huge huge thing to engage with all these and i i found it that it's not like okay let's just take sapiens and add some illustrations it's a completely fresh project how did you problem solve when there was a conflict or some tension between the literature and what might dictate a drawing and the sort of political sensitivities that exist today how did you how did you think about that or think through those types of decisions we had a lot of discussions about these things and you know it was a balancing act you can't ignore science just for the sake of being politically correct on the other hand you have to be aware of the political implications of the choices you make i mean you can't hide behind scientific objectivity because there is no such thing as a completely objective narrative just choosing what is the opening scene and what is the ending scene it doesn't come from reality it comes from your political ideological or religious beliefs in reality the real reality it has no beginning and end no historical event had a beginning and an end and no historical event had a focus you know it's even easier to think about it in terms of movies when you watch a movie let's say about the second world war so the camera is somewhere and something is in the focus of the of the shot something is on the side and many things are don't you don't see them at all now in reality there is no camera there is no camera hanging above planet earth the camera of history which points in a particular direction and this is the center of events and this is the the sidelines you know you can tell the second world war with uh churchill is the main hero uh hitler and stalin appearing on some uh a few a few scenes and millions of chinese that died in the war never appearing at all and you can do an entire world war two movie just about a single chinese village now both are true and what do you choose is not forced on you by the reality it reflects very often political and ideological and also artistic choices now when you go back to the stone age it's even more complicated because there are so many things we just don't know i mean the the basic things we don't know what family structure was like you have all these discussions about what is the natural human family and lots of people believe well you know it's obvious it's a man a woman two and a half kids and a dog this is a traditional family this was always the case but we know that even in recent history this was not always the case it's not the case today in many countries close to 50 of children don't grow up in such a family today you go back to the middle ages it's not the structure of everybody you go to biology to other apes chimpanzees don't live like that gorillas don't live like that orangutans don't live like like that so how did humans live 50 000 years ago and the answer is we don't know we have evidence from the stone age we have tools but the tools don't tell you what was the family structure uh you have cave paintings but one of the interesting things about cave painting we've found found thousands and thousands of cave paintings from the stone age there is not a single image of a family there are a lot of mammoth there are lots of horses there are lots of eye backs there are some humans also mostly stick figures but there isn't a single image from the stone age that you can say look that's how they depicted a family and what does it mean why do people draw all these elephants and never bother to draw their own family i don't know what it means but it's it's interesting and it gives us as the uh you know a lot of autistic freedom about how to deal with these issues so like i don't know we have this uh one scene about neanderthals and you know neanderthals had a big revolution in the last 10 years of course they are dead but our understanding of them has completely changed in the last 10 years because of so many new evidence we have both from genetics but also from artifacts and archaeological records and whereas 20 years ago maybe they were still these archetypical cave people primitive and brutal and and things like that now they have a very positive image we have not only because we have their genes in our dna but also because we have evidence that they took care of of of wounded people of elderly people of disabled people they had a much more sophisticated technology and maybe even art and culture than we assumed so we have we depicted in the graphic novel this change in image in this scene that you see these two neanderthal guys sitting in the office of a pr consultant and the pr consultant has on the wall this old-fashioned image of a neanderthal a brutal neanderthal with a big stick dragging a female by by the hair and there was a big x over this image and the pr consultant says well you know this was a good brand for the 19th century but this is a 21st century you need to lighten up your brand and the two neanderthals say yes well you know actually we two are gay so obviously we don't have any evidence that they were they were gay neanderthals i mean our scientific understanding of sex and gender today indicates that it's very likely that there were gay neanderthals but if you ask for the smoking gun show me a grave from 50 000 years ago with two men together only then i believe then of course we don't have this but actually we hardly have and we don't have a lot of direct evidence for sex in the stone age we have a lot of indirect evidence like from genes so we know that sapiens and neanderthals had sex but maybe also the war cases of a sapience men having sex with a neanderthal men could be no evidence in the genes of course but could it have happened maybe and uh we have this autistic license that we can show that it makes sense well also i mean this is maybe going down a rabbit hole but if you look at the behavior of of chimpanzees and others i mean there's there's some evidence to suggest that that type of interaction certainly exists yeah i mean if if you're looking at the current day precursors in a sense what is your hope for these graphic novels and they're coming out in four volumes what do you anticipate or hope the spacing to be of those of those oh we hope for one every year um the main challenge is the drawing i mean this is danielle's job and i draw like a five-year-old kid i mean they can't depend on me for anything when it comes to the drawing and it takes a lot of time to draw you know these hundreds of images and also it goes back and forth because here daniel draws an image a couple of images and send them and then we go no the archaeological evidence indicates that actually the spear points were not like you depicted and then i mean the the the political issues that okay we we need a more balanced gender relations in this image and and it goes back to daniel and he needs to do to draw it again and it takes a long time so i guess it will be one volume each year and the big hope that it will reach new audiences that may not read you know a 400 page text about the history of humankind but would be interested and would find it fun and engaging when it's sold in a graphic novel i've seen the graphic novel and it's really well done i i have to say you know i've i've read i have probably 5 000 to 10 000 comic books that i've saved and poly bagged over the years and i've collected everything from sandman in the u.s to dozens of different graphic novels in japan it's very well done so i mean yeah you and your team deserve a lot of credit for that i'd love to ask a question about your mission statement now i don't know if you would call it a mission statement maybe it is so this is from the new yorker profile from this year and it describes how your mission statement reads as follows and this is on a bulletin board in your office keep your eyes on the ball focus on the main global problems facing humanity learn to distinguish reality from illusion care about suffering and i guess there there was previously embrace ambiguity but that got scratched out yes so could you explain the origins of this mission statement please oh it's a couple of mission statements you know as as we expand our team it becomes more difficult to get everybody on the same page to make sure that everybody you know each person has a different personal and professional background and so when it was just me or just my husband and me there was no need to write down these official mission statements but when you have 15 employees then it's it becomes important and we had a long discussion and uh like a back and forth also with all the employees and we came up with these as several kind of general guidelines to to keep in mind and maybe the most important thing is that we see our task as helping to focus the global conversation on the most important issues because one of the big problems of the 21st century is people are flooded by enormous amounts of information it's not like in the past when information was scarce and the problem was how to get it now it's the opposite and you just don't know what to pay attention to and it also goes back to my practice of meditation of how to stay focused and it's kind of link the personal practice with the global project of again we don't see ourselves as providing solutions but just kind helping to steer the global conversation in the most important directions you have such a historical context for determining the relative weight to assign to different events or phenomena in the world as indicated or described in the example of terrorist attacks and their sort of cultural or i shouldn't say cultural but historic significance like yes they're horrible yes the theater and graphic nature of it is very compelling to the human psyche which would also be true of say a shark attack right if a 12 year old boy were attacked by a shark on the east coast of the united states it would be in every newspaper and there would be a huge response probably dramatic over harvesting of sharks so on and so forth but in the sweep of human history its importance is is close to zero negligible what are some of the more important the main global problems facing humanity from your perspective well as we speak i think the three big ones are nuclear war which you know people tend to connect with the cold war yeah there was something there about nuclear weapons but they were still here and i don't think we'll see a nuclear war in the next few months but if tensions in the world continue to grow then it will become again a major issue and it is an existential issue other things can't destroy us but nuclear war can so we have to keep it in mind all the time the second big thing is ecological collapse it's not just climate change that gets most of the headlines lately it's many other things also like loss of biodiversity and destruction of habitats and so forth but generally speaking yes we are seeing uh we are in where is nuclear war you know it's just a future possibility maybe it will happen maybe it won't happen ecological collapse is already began it's all around us and it threatens again it's an existential danger it threatens the foundations of our civilization i guess that some people will survive it but if things really go bad with the economic and political implications of it it could cost the lives of billions of people and the third big one and i think most complicated is technological disruption the consequences of disruptive technologies especially artificial intelligence and bioengineering it's the most complicated challenge because you know with nuclear war and climate change and ecological collapse you can disagree whether it's true or not but everybody agrees what needs to be done about it to stop it nobody thinks that having a nuclear war is a good idea nobody thinks that climate change is a good idea maybe some people deny it but they don't say it's good now with technological disruption it's much much more complicated because it has a lot of positive potential a lot of people positively wish to see greater and faster technological disruptions and there is no agreement whatsoever about what we should do with technologies like ai or like bioengineering the dreams of some people are the nightmares of other people so it's very complicated again like like ecological collapse it's not a future scenario it's already happening all around us and i think the pace is such that it may to some people it sounds like crazy but i strongly believe that given the technologies we are now developing within a century or two at most our species will disappear the i don't think that in in the end of the 21st 22nd century the earth will still be dominated by homo sapiens i think given the immense powers of technologies we are developing there are two scenarios only one scenario which is the that the technology will destroy humanity and i think it's less likely but still possible the more likely scenario is that it will change humanity in a profound way that we will use ai and bioengineering to change homo sapiens and to create new kinds of beings that will be much more different from us than we are different from neanderthals or from chimpanzees to give just one example i think it is possible that we will create the first inorganic life forms after four billion years of organic evolution so again it's not a destruction of our species it's the changing of species into something else but what kind of thing it will be we have to be extremely careful about that it won't necessarily be a better version of us it could be much much worse could you give a bit more detail around the new inorganic life form and in your mind's eye if we change for the worse in some tech enabled way deliberately or by accident what might that look like to you well i started with the second question of what it could look like you know you could use whatever technology to increase the efficiency of people the intelligence of people at the price of things like autistic sensitivity or like spiritual depth i mean if you ask armies if you ask corporations if you ask governments what do you need from your employees from your soldiers there was oh we want people to be more efficient we want people to reach to be more logical we want people to be more disciplined and if you have the technology then you engineer such people even if it comes and it always comes i mean usually when you improve something it tends to come at the price of something else and things like i don't know spiritual depth what kind of army needs its soldiers to have spiritual depth so if you leave it to the corporations and armies it's very likely that once you have a technology to change humans it will i would say downgrade them and not upgrade them it will make them more efficient soldiers or employees or whatever but it will make them kind of poorer beings lesser beings so that's about just one scenario of what does it mean to downgrade people now with regard to inorganic life forms you know for four billion years everything on the planet was all lifeforms were organic whether it's a bacteria or a mammoth or a tree or a human it's organic it obeys the laws of organic chemistry now with the rise of a.i we might have a chance again i'm going to be agnostic about it i'm not sure but it is possible that in a couple of decades we will be able to create either completely inorganic beings or at least part organic part in organic cyborgs and this will be if it happens it will be the biggest revolution in the history of life since the beginning of life much much bigger than the creation of mammoth or the creation of mammals or humans because it's a completely different game once you're no longer subject to organic chemistry we can't even begin to imagine what it means because our imagination is the product of organic chemistry so if you have a kind of intelligence which is not or based on organic chemistry you know it can be anything if you look over the next so you're talking about the i guess the the 22nd century and the prevalence dominance or existence of homo sapiens if we look over the next 50 years just to choose an arbitrary time frame of nuclear war ecological collapse or these unforeseen accidents or mistakes of high technology which scares you the most or which do you worry about the most i worry most about the third because of what i said earlier that it's the most complicated that it's not enough to be kind of i don't know good and wise to deal with the first two it will be very hard to deal with the first two as it is but the third one is really complicated because there is no agreement on on the goal with the first two at least there is an agreement on the goal and and then that that makes it very very complicated also you know the first two nobody is actively working to make it happen sooner and even the people who deny climate change they are not in favor of climate change they just say it's not really doesn't happen but with ai and bioengineering there are some of the most powerful people and organizations and governments and corporations in the world they are extremely busy making it happen faster and it's also we don't have a framework even to think about it properly so uh as a thinker and a politician i think this is where i can contribute the most is in trying to entangle this kind of completely new threat just a few more questions then i'll i'll let you get going because i know we're separated by quite a few time zones when you are thinking about these threats perhaps hearkening back to your times reading aldous huxley's work and here we're talking about brave new world and not island right very different descriptions although some parallels when you feel the potential for these various types of collapse or disaster what keeps you going where do you find the light it's a good question uh you know if if you're able to deal with your own mortality as every person has to on some level then you should be able to deal with the potential mortality of your entire species i mean it's still part of biology as individuals come and go nations come and go also entire species come and go 99 of the species that evolved on planet earth are gone for one reason or another homo sapiens also is not internal uh and even the best scenario i don't think homo sapiens will be around in two or three hundred years the best scenario is that homo sapiens will disappear but in a peaceful and gradual way and be replaced by something better i don't think there is any chance whatsoever that people like us will just continue to have lives like us in 200 years that they will be in 200 years a professor of history sits sitting and having a podcast talk with somebody it's not going to happen i mean that the changes are going to be too big so maybe it goes back again to the practice of meditation and the realization that uh change is the only certainty in in life so you might as well tune into the changes so that you're at least aware that you're responding to your reactions to things outside and not the outside itself well you've all this has been a lot of fun for me i think it's nice to connect with you and of course i will link to everything in the show notes for people the volume one of your series sapiens of graphic history is out now volume one can be found and i'll include links to that in the show notes for everyone at tim dot blog slash podcast your website is y and harare uh facebook is prof.uval.noaa.harari twitter harare underscore uval instagram you've all underscored noah underscore ferrari and i'll provide all of those so people don't have to remember them is there anything else that you would like to say to my audience ask of the audience suggest to the audience before we wrap up uh no just thank you for your time i know that time and attention are the most valuable resources today for most people so i hope you benefited from investing them in listening to us likewise and i i can certainly speak for myself and saying that i enjoyed it quite a lot and definitely check out ted chang exhalation i think i love it i have a bunch of notes for things that i will be checking out and to everyone listening until next time thank you for tuning in hey guys this is tim again just a few more things before you take off number one this is five bullet friday do you want to get a short email from me would you enjoy getting a short email from me every friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and five bullet friday is a very short email where i share the coolest things i've found or that i've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that i've discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird that i've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as i do it could include favorite articles that i've read and that i've shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short it's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend so if you want to receive that check it out just go to four hourworkweek.com that's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one and if you sign up i hope you enjoy it this episode is brought to you by all form if you've been listening to this podcast for a while you've probably heard me talk about helix sleep and their mattresses which i've been using since 2017. i have two of them upstairs from where i'm sitting at this moment and now helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas they 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Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 39,765

Rating: 4.9179735 out of 5

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, angel investor, ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast, Yuval Noah Harari, bone conduction headphones, power of awareness, yuval noah harari sapiens, yuval noah harari interview, yuval noah harari 2020

Id: jJxFiPRQbjs

Length: 105min 12sec (6312 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020