Yuval Noah Harari & Rutger Bregman: YES Online Conversations

dear friends good evening good afternoon good morning this is our first year's online conversation in 2021 and i really want to hear this for me this is uh so to say the intellectual inauguration of the year yalta european strategy decided to ignite these conversations for three main reasons first the mankind now in the center of big crisis and big threats and i'm afraid that huge maybe even much bigger threats ahead of us i mean threats related to climate change technological disruptions and maybe much more severe pandemics second we believe that mankind needs an action plan and number three as yes we think that uh we need we need a global conversation global brainstorming on such an action plan with participation of the best thinkers on the planet and today with us we have really two extraordinary thinkers two great historians philosophers no harare and ruger bregman they wrote fantastic books including sapiens and humankind and i hope that today's conversation will contribute in shaping an agenda for sapiens and humankind for nearest future and will help to take a broad look on where we come from who we are and where we are going and very important that zombie mountain badass agreed to moderate this conversation i'm really honored and thrilled i keep it short because we have only one and a half hours and it's definitely not enough to make an agenda for the mankind that's why zany the floor is yours thank you victor thank you to the yalta european strategy thank you for putting on this conversation like you victor i am immensely excited to hear this conversation i mean a conversation between two really remarkable individuals brilliantly original thought-provoking thinkers and writers i think both of you draw insights from the grand sweep of history with what i might say is swashbuckling confidence uh your outstanding writers both of you um and not surprisingly you've both been immensely successful and and victor has has given a summary of your of your best sellers um so he set the bar high he says we're going to have the intellectual inauguration of the year so it's up to the two of you to to come up with and live up to that he said a very high bar um but i am delighted to to be able to listen in on and to gently steer the conversation between two such brilliant minds um just a couple of housekeeping things i'm sure many of you will have questions please do type in the questions there's an ability to do that on your screens in front of you and i will try and weave them into the conversation as and when appropriate and we may come to some more questions at the end but what i thought i'd do to try and kind of live up to the schema that victor has laid out of laying out an agenda for the future is first to get a sense from the two of you of the past because you do have very different views of the past and how we should interpret it and then equipped with that i think i'd like to look forward and see where you think we are heading and why don't we start with you on the assumption and this may be a rash assumption but on the assumption that absolutely everybody listening to this has read youval's books and the possible assumption that they may not yet have read your latest book because it's only been out it's very likely yeah so you you wrote humankind you obviously you shot to fame with uh your book utopia for realists um where you became a global phenomenon almost overnight uh last year you came out with humankind a hopeful history perhaps you can set us our conversation off by giving a kind of brief um summary of why you are hopeful of human rights you know one of the big questions that both historians and philosophers and i think both yuval and me have been interested in for such a long time is what makes human beings special why did we conquer the globe what is our secret superpower um for a very long time we like to believe that you know it must have been god's plan that we were chosen by some kind of god and that were sort of the pinnacle of his creation now obviously when the enlightenment came in the scientific revolution people started to come up with a different explanation they said well um maybe it wasn't the gods who chose us but maybe we're the product of evolution and we're just the smartest of all the animals we have these huge brains this incredible cognitive capacity and that distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom now the problem there is that if you do an intelligence test and you let say a human toddler compete with a pig or um or a chimpanzee for example quite often the animals win so individually humans are not that impressive so we have to come up with a different explanation what is it that really distinguishes us why do we build cathedrals and spaceships why have we conquered this globe and i think that it is our capacity to work together to cooperate you could even call it in the words of one evolutionary anthropologist survival of the friendliest this this friendliness is really our secret superpower uh the scientific term for this is uh self-domestication theory so the idea is that over the millennia we sort of domesticated ourselves for a very long time it was actually the friendliest among us who had the most kids and so had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation and i think it's really important that people know this that science has arrived at a different a new more hopeful view of human nature because that has major implications for how we organize everything basically how we do democracy how we you know design our workplaces our schools etc etc but that's sort of the short summary of what i'm thinking about so so it is i think you've almost underplayed the optimism which imbues your book that that it's and it's homo puppy not homo economicos or indeed homo sapiens it's homo puppy is your world view uh yuval you wrote on the cover of um rutgers book the following commendation you said humankind challenged me and made me see humanity from a fresh perspective so i'm going to ask you to respond to that just before you do i wanted to raise the stakes even more for you uh by saying that i just noticed that less than an hour ago uh president zielenski tweeted that he is glad that hariri at uvo will be at the yes ukraine today humanity needs to overcome not only covet 19 but mostly our inner demons our own hatred our greed and ignorance and on the tweet goes so the stakes are high you have um people who can change the world listening well i mean i i really admire that the book humankind i really enjoyed it and it did change my perspective on on our species i completely agree that our secret superpower is the ability to cooperate in very large numbers i'm not sure that friendliness is what enables us to cooperate in very large numbers friendliness is key for cooperation in small numbers 10 people 50 people 100 people but when you try to get a million people to cooperate or when you try to get to get eight billion people to cooperate against a virus against a pandemic i don't think that the friendliness in us which is real is the key to that um i believe that uh it's our storytelling capacity it's the ability to convince millions sometimes billions of people to believe in the same story and um it doesn't even have to be a true story uh to put it in a provocative way i would say that we control the the planet and not the chimpanzees because we believe a lot more fictions a lot more nonsense than the chimpanzees so let me go back and before we go forward um and and how the impact of the pandemic and so well let's go right back because i think you both you differ somewhat you both acknowledge that something important happened um when when the neanderthals the era was ended and homo sapiens kind of took over but i think you have different interpretations of how and why that happened and it feeds into your narrative you are about the power of storytelling and rudka into your power your yours about i think sedentary agriculture and property rights more but can you both give a sense of what happened at that very early period that shaped your view of kind of how societies are organized what can you first yeah i think my my view of human pre-history is maybe a little bit more hopeful and optimistic than juva's is so there's this long debate for example about violence and war in our history when did it start or has it always been with us have we always you know been uh quite violent and i am on the side of the uh the optimists or the hippies i would say i think that really if you look at the the most recent anthropological and archaeological evidence that you see that there's very little evidence for warfare for the biggest part of our our history you know when we were nomadic and to gatherers you know that's that's basically around 95 of our history and that it was really with the moment that we became sedentary and sort of invented civilization that basically everything went downhill you know from that moment on we got hierarchy we got the patriarchy we get all these infection diseases like the plague and measles and covet 19 etc etc so that's really um sort of our original sin or as jared diamond once called it uh the biggest mistake in all of human history um and indeed if you want to ask the question why are we the ones that who who have survived sort of why not the neanderthals every uh and that they're what's really key there is is indeed our our capacity to work in bitter bigger groups and it's just it's not just the storytelling i mean i i do agree with yuval that that's incredibly important and um and especially as these stories became bigger i would say though that the role of of power is very important here as well you know the italian philosopher machiavelli once said that all the unarmed prophets throughout history they've failed and the armed prophets they've been successful because it's much easier for someone to you know to get to believe your story if there's a man with an ak-47 standing behind you right so it's it's also with the power of money we don't just believe that because uh well we just all agree to believe in the power of the dollar but if you don't pay your taxes well then they lock you up so we don't you have an option of not believing so so yeah i'll turn to you in a second but let me just push you a bit on that because you said something quite striking just then you said the moment we invented civilization that everything started to go downhill yeah um do you really believe that do are you harking back to some kind of nirvana of you know free pre-civilizational living well look we've obviously made incredible progress in the last 200 years so obviously i wouldn't want to go back and live in an american together that would be that would be quite silly but it is i think important to recognize and i think yvonne and i really agree on that is that initially civilization and agriculture were were not really good for the vast majority of people you know it really meant that you had to basically um suffer uh and or or or you know be a slave to some kind of landlord what is your expression love you history is what like one percent of the population has been doing while 99 of people has been working on the fields i think that's really important to keep in mind and that there's there's quite a lot of evidence that before that when we lived as nomadic and together is well life wasn't obviously perfect and you have for example very high child mortality but if you could choose you know between alive as a farmer of or as a nomadic forager i would really choose the latter you vow what what how do you see that turning point yeah i generally agree and i think that um the huge disagreements about what happened before agriculture are less relevant here partly because we don't have a lot of evidence so uh it's it's very hard to decide on these matters and partly because you know i mean when i am described as the opt as the pessimist here and radgor is as the optimist i'm not sure i mean we are living in civilization a very big one and we can't go back so if you see civilization as the root of all evil i think you're more pessimistic than i am i think that i mean practically there is no way back now again to to come to the present crisis of the world it is important to realize that epidemics are the results largely of civilization and agriculture hunter-gatherers in the stone age did not suffer from epidemics probably at all i mean almost all infectious diseases come to us from domesticated animals or from animals that we trade and keep in cages and so forth and they spread because we live in dense unhygienic large towns and cities with networks of trade and and communication so hunter-gatherers did not suffer from these things even if by some chance a virus jumped from some wild bat to a hunter-gatherer 30 000 years ago it would have infected this person maybe 20 other persons and that's it there would be no epidemic epidemics started with civilization but that doesn't really help us to deal with the present crisis because whatever the solution is to the covey 19 crisis going back to living as pneumatic hunter-gatherers is not the solution so i i i would say that i basically agree with the view expressed in humankind that human nature isn't evil and isn't the source of our problem humans are basically kind and friendly the problem is that when you get millions of people together into large-scale societies you have emergent phenomena like violence like hierarchies like exploitations like slavery and just knowing that the nature of individuals is kind and friendly is again it's important but it doesn't give us the solution for how to create better large-scale societies we'll we'll turn in a second to the to the actual present day but let's just keep on building the scaffolding of your two positions and i think that's um you've you've put it extremely well the the the challenge to you i think is one that you know we have eight billion people on the planet now so it might be nice to think about and let's let's assume you're right that you know the basic nature of humankind is much more like homo puppy than than anything else and we're nice charitable friendly types one there's a lot of us now and two do you think that the consequences of more people and the consequences of the negative consequences that we have seen throughout history where groups of people have done horrible things are inevitable or are something that can be avoided well look i i completely agree that you could you can wonder like who cares about nomadic and together we obviously can't go back um and uh well who cares if they were nice and relatively friendly and lived in these egalitarian societies i would say though that it's still important because our view of human nature tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy um you know on the one hand you can look at ideas and scientific theories and question you know their validity based on the evidence that we have and and sort of you can look at the debate and look at where is the scientific consensus and what do people think now about how humans in general behave and then i think it's relevant to know that indeed a lot of the sort of the selfish theories or the theories about human selfishness have gone down so for example we now know that when there's a small emergency or or a big emergency someone's drowning or attacking the street uh based on camera evidence we now know that in around 90 of all cases people help each other and that's good to know i think that's helpful to know i guess one other aspect that i think you differ and you're you're agreeing too much with i want this to be a debate so we can't help you too much i think we are approaching the areas of of these agreements of disagreement so so one i think is whether you are at heart uh analysts observers and chroniclers of the human condition and human history or whether you have a view that it is changeable and you have a sort of an activist mentality a social scientist mentality that things can be changed where do you put yourself in that no i definitely think that things can be changed i mean even if human nature is the kind of given i mean leaving aside issues of changing it with with new technologies and the whole point is that you can take these individual building blocks individual humans and and families and built out of them completely different kinds of societies so i again i agree that the the the question of human nature is important but it's it doesn't dictate how societies and civilizations actually look like and maybe i'll give a concrete example that you know when when we talk about for instance the possibility of establishing democratic regimes democratic systems in in different parts of the world so it's good to know that originally democracy or some kind of a very egalitarian system in which everybody gets a right to vote was characteristic of all human societies ancient hunter gatherers bands were the most democratic systems that ever existed there was no place for a hierarchy or for a dictator if some bully came around the the at the last resort people could vote with their feet they could just go away there was nothing this bully could do to them there was you know there is no land there is no money there are i mean to survive you need your personal skills in climbing trees and running after gazelles and your network of friends and you can just take that and go somewhere else so these were the most democratic systems that ever existed now once you see the emergence of agriculture and cities and kingdoms democracies actually become impossible except in a very local sense until the 18th century you don't see any large-scale democracies even the ancient examples like athens and rome and the other ancient democracies they were all confined to single cities within athens you had a sort of democracy for 10 of the population not women not slaves but 10 still had a democracy but only within athens elsewhere athens was an empire it was simply impossible to have a large-scale democracy because you did not have the communication and transportation systems necessary you couldn't have a public debate about the policies of the roman empire in the entire roman empire because communication was just too slow and people were not educated enough only in the 19th century with the emergence of new technologies and new systems of communication and education large-scale democracy becomes possible so again human nature did not change human nature was the same basically in an ancient hunter-gatherer band 20 000 years ago it was the same in ancient athens two thousand something years ago it was the same in the roman empire and it's the same today but the technology and the systems that combine these people into a political structure this changed and this continues to change also in the 21st century so that hold that thought because i want to come right back to that when we get uh to looking forward but how do you respond to that i mean i suspect you would agree with that that that the the ways in which you can obviously communicate interact have affected the potential for moving from your hunter-gatherer societies to where we are now yes absolutely and obviously technology helps us to do democracy in a way that simply wasn't possible um even decades ago i think that the internet also gives us a lot of new possibilities what i think i'm interested in i guess here to well to to look at the example of democracy there's now a new movement of um so-called deliberative democracy where the idea is that if you treat citizens not as these apathetic individuals who only you know vote every four years after they've watched cnn for long enough um but actual people who are interested and engaged in politics and maybe want to take some responsibility themselves as well then you could do democracy in a completely different way so there's the example of participatory budgeting for example that a lot of cities around the globe now do where a big part of the city budget is basically devoted to um to be spent by so-called big citizen assemblies and everyone can join um also the idea of sortition is really interesting obviously the original greek idea as they practiced it in athens is that everyone would become a politician um now in a while i think that that would be a really healthy idea as well to move away from sort of the rule of the career politicians but that yeah sort of everyone knows or a politician in in in his or her social circle um i think all these ideas depend on a more hopeful view of human nature because if you really believe that people are just selfish and lazy then obviously that's not going to work and that's how you're going to treat people in your that's the kind of behavior that you're going to get out of them if you turn it around and if you have a what i think is a more realistic view of what people can do i think you can get very different kind of behavior so let's let's turn now to the present i i you've agreed more than i hoped you would but um i i think i think everybody listening will have a sense of your different perspectives and what goes very much the hopeful side of human nature i i suspect you while you are more of an observer of of kind of the evolution that that has happened maybe if i can clarify i think that um you would have a greater disagreement if we brought somebody who thinks that humans are by nature bad and evil and tend to violence and so forth and this is not the kind of disagreement that we have i think our main disagreement is not about the nature of individual people it's about the nature of large-scale societies and i you can say that i'm a bit more pessimistic or somewhat more pessimistic because i think that despite the basic good nature of individuals when you get to the level of large-scale societies you again it's not inevitable i'm not completely pessimistic i'm not saying everything is lost whenever you get a million people together you get dictatorships and genocide and slavery no i don't think that but i um i'm i don't think that a positive outcomes are inevitable either it can go either way and for much of history it went in a very negative direction only in the last 200 years or so do we see real deep sustained progress in large-scale human societies until say around until say the 19th century you have immense technological development the power of humankind goes up dramatically but the conditions of individuals humans don't improve improve you don't see any clear moral or ethical improvement so over the long run the evidence is not is i would say is not very optimistic and in the yes in the last two centuries for various reasons we can discuss we see sometimes improvement but as i look to the future uh my main fear is that you know in the 21st century given the power we have and the challenges we face we can get it right nine out of ten times if we get it wrong once that may be the end of us our margins of error grow slimmer and slimmer and when i look back in human history um it makes me a bit pessimistic yes if i can say something about this annie because i think this really gets at the heart of it you know in a way you can say that we're dancing on top of a volcano right now um indeed when you look at things like climate change or or maybe the threat of ai or the the extinction of species it's really the question how if we're basically going to survive you know for the next couple of centuries um i i think it's important to make the distinction between hope and optimism here optimism is is i think a form of complacency where you say oh look at all these wonderful graphs poverty is going down climate or child mortality is going down we're richer we're healthier life is better than ever don't worry be happy and i think that makes people lazy the difference with hope is that hope sort of is is about the possibility of change it shows you that things can be different and this is why i like history so much by the way history basically teaches you that there's nothing inevitable about the way we structured our economy in society right now it cannot quite radically change but there's a real responsibility here for us as well um one of the chapters in sapiens um has the title there's no justice in history and and i can't agree more because there's i mean there's no i don't believe there's a god that will you know reward the people who have suffered in this life in an afterlife there's no karma there's no cosmic balance or anything so if there is justice then it has to come from people and and how do we how do we create that justice how do we actually change the world well i also agree it often starts with telling different stories so there's a real responsibility here um and maybe that's that's where our sort of approach is a little bit different is that you you've all you're sort of like the intellectual high up in the sky looking down on people you know and trying to deconstruct all their stories and their ideologies well maybe my perspective is more from maybe the bottom up and i i'm trying to tell this different story that might you know change how people behave because if they would actually believe in it that people are not angels but fundamentally decent or at least pretty good then i think that could have really positive consequences and may even help us to survive in the next couple of centuries but then maybe again to to kind of uh i i know that zany and maybe many of the viewers won't want more disagreement here more kind of clash of mines maybe again to try to to to pinpoint it that who's to blame i mean if human nature is basically decent we are homophobic we are friendly so how do you get slavery and genocide and the nazis and the gulags and all that where what is the problem yeah well that's obviously the big question that hangs over my book um and when you cast away this sort of the simplistic explanation that says oh people are just evil and civilization is a thin veneer then obviously you have to think much harder about you know where where does all this all these war come from all these all these atrocities and and you you could even say that in a way humans are the cruelest species in in the whole animal kingdom right there are no penguins that go in wars against each other or commit genocides or all these kind of horrible things so i think what you need is obviously a very layered explanation and there's not like this i mean libraries full of books have been written about it but one really important thing to point to point out here is this sort of the dark side of friendliness or the dark side of the fact that we've domesticated ourselves um we are incredibly groupish we are incredibly tribal we just want to be liked that's maybe the biggest problem of humanity we just want to be part of a group we don't want to be alone and on the one hand that's our secret superpower because it helps us to operate um but sometimes it also really puts us against one another i think one really interesting phenomenon that psychologists have discovered is that during wars for example most soldiers sort of average drafted soldiers are not motivated by ideological hatred or something like that but by comradeship they just don't want to let their friends down um i'm not saying this to comfort people i think it's actually very very disturbing that that we're often on the wrong side of history and we we think we're just helping our friends um but that is that is the reality and that's it's also the big paradox i guess in my my view of human nature is that even though we're we've evolved to be friendly and to work together we're definitely not heroes and we find it very hard to go against our own you know i'm for the past couple of months i've studied um resistance fires in the netherlands during the second world war and there's this one man called arnold dallas who built this huge underground network um to help jews hide from the nazis and he built this um this network in new london which was one of the two places in all of europe together with le chambon that you may know in in france that received the you know they all received the yad fashion award as the righteous among the nations and um this guy arnold daois is the opposite of homer puppy you know he was a total pain in the ass he always got into fights with everyone people really disliked him he was a sort of he was a son of a preacher with communist sympathies before the war his life was a total failure then the second world war started and he did what no one else could you know because he really had the the courage to um to do something there um so that's i recognized that paradox and i recognized that problem is that um and especially you know if times get tough um if if we're moving for example away from democracy and into authoritarian regimes that asks so much more of people then it's not good enough to be just friendly or decent anymore life really asks more of you then so i'm going to stop you there because i think in the in in the last 10 minutes you have given a very clear uh sense of the slight difference between your two approaches and now i want to get concrete and forward looking um because i think we'll we'll bring your two big picture approaches onto trying to understand where we're now headed and i guess the first question is um how do you see the last year the pandemic having challenged your own world view and how big a deal do you think it will be when you know the bregman and the yuval harares of the 22nd century are writing their books is this a paragraph is it several pages what scale of change have we been through uh you value first well the scale of changes is too early to say i mean we're in the middle of it still and whenever you're in the middle of something it looks like the biggest thing that ever happened but there is a chance that in 50 60 years people will hardly remem remember it and when you look back at uh the i i don't know the 1918 influenza which killed more people than the first world war and it was hardly remembered and um you know there is not a i don't think a single great work of art about the 1918 19 19 influenza epidemic um it all depends on still on the decisions that we take in the coming weeks and months i think the main lesson i will take from the last year looking from a very broad perspective is that it has been a year of tremendous scientific success and political failure i mean compared to any previous epidemic in history we have done better and faster in understanding the epidemic and understanding what to do about it you know when the black death spread nobody had any idea what was happening how to stop it and you know cures and vaccines nobody even thought about it in 1918 1919 the best scientists in the world at the time tried to find the pathogen causing the epidemic and failed most of the counter measures they suggested were ineffective and all the attempts to uh produce a vaccine or futile with kovi 19 it took only two weeks to correctly identify the virus and develop tests to know who has got it quite quickly within a few months we understood or the scientific community understood what countermeasures are best to stop the chains of infection and within a year less than a year we have several effective vaccines that's an amazing scientific success humankind has never been more powerful in its struggle against pathogens we are much stronger than the virus but the scientists are not politicians it's not their job they give us the tools now it's the job of politicians to use these tools and it has been a year of tremendous political failure both on the level of particular countries while some countries have been quite successful in stopping and containing the epidemic you look at many other countries the usa brazil the uk come to mind and leaders adopted disastrous policies even more so on the global level a year after the more than a year after the beginning of this pandemic there is no global leadership there is no global plan of action of how to deal either with the virus itself or with the economic consequences we are now in the midst of a vaccine arms race which is you know it's uh countries are treating it like um sports competition who is the winner in vaccinating the largest number of citizens in your country without realizing that if you vaccinate only your people in your country it doesn't give you real protection because you know if you vaccinate a hundred percent of israelis or or people in in the uk and there is a new mutation in brazil or south africa or india or anywhere which makes the vaccine ineffective then you will have a new wave of infection as long as you allow the virus to continue to spread in anywhere in the world it puts everybody in danger and you know this is basic science but unfortunately it's far from basic politics so that i i would say again from the broad perspective we have never been so successful scientifically but politically uh it's been a very disappointing year would you agree with that that's a very clear way of putting it scientific success and political failure so let me say why i'm a little bit more optimistic or hopeful i should say um i think one very striking moment was in the beginning of the pandemic in april i believe when the financial times sort of what is it the business paper of the of the world basically published an editorial well after the of course publish this editorial where they said that you know it's probably time to so quote reverse the policy direction of the last 40 years and think about ideas that used to be dismissed as unrealistic and unreasonable only just like five years ago and have not really moved into the mainstream now obviously ideas that i personally really care about such as a universal basic income but also a higher taxation on the rich is really on the agenda now and um sort of reimagining the role of the state you know for 40 years we've talked about the state as at best sort of the the helper or the assistant of the all-powerful great markets right and that the state the job of the state was just to get people a good education and have nice fiscal um policies etc and then just to get out of the way that basically was it and then you're in the midst of a pandemic and you realize hey wait a minute it's actually quite useful to have a well-financed well-functioning government and indeed if you want to mobilize against big threats such as in pandemic um then yeah you sort of need that leviathan right and i think israel is demonstrating here how how you should do it right or how quickly you can do that if you actually have proper functioning systems there um i think that's really um a shift in the in the zeitgeist we're seeing here um there they're really many examples of that also of thinkers that have moved into the mainstream obviously we've all heard about economists like thomas piketty for example that suddenly became you know his book went went viral i'm not sure whether we all read it but um somewhere on this bookshelf at least um but there are many uh more i think important examples of this shift in economics and that's very different from i would say 2008 with the financial crash when there also seemed to be this big crisis but then we didn't really have an alternative and therefore i think that 2020 i mean it's obviously not this big turning point like the first world war the second world war but it may be similar to let's say the the oil crises of of the 1970s that really did inaugurate the end of um keynesianism you know the the rule of the power or of the ideas of john maynard keynes and inaugurated the era of neoliberalism and i think that era may end that well that that sets us up we're going to come to the economic side of that in just a second and the policy ideas but first i wanted to go back to where you've asked started uh where you said this has been a triumph of science um which i think we can all agree on but it's also been a year where we've seen a tremendous acceleration of the technological forces and the technological forces that you describe in your book which with some fear and trepidation i think in in in terms of the pace at which the 21st century technologies are going to be changing the way we live work communicate with each other and thomas from carlisle actually asked this question a similar question which is that the pandemic has been an accelerator of pre-existing disruptive trends obvious in technology it's also true in healthcare but as picasso said before any great creation there must be destruction what risks do you see for countries with economies built on the strengths of the industrial revolution and what would you do to advise those countries to mitigate those risks so i think question one do you agree that this has accelerated the forces yuval that you wrote about before the pandemic does it make you more or less um you know i would say you were quite pessimistic in your book are you more or less pessimistic about that and what does it mean for existing economies well i think it's it's um i'm not sure about the world acceleration because it implies that this was inevitable in any case and it's just happening faster so it's more than just acceleration it's kind of deciding on a lot of you know a lot of very important decisions about the shape of the world the shape of the economy the shape of the education system are being made very very fast under the pressure of this pandemic and this is you know it's i mean it's quite dangerous um many of the scenarios that i i outlined before the pandemic i didn't outline them as a prophecy but just as a possibility maybe it will happen i hope not and now many of these things are actually happening not just faster but they are becoming legitimate we are seeing that digitalization of more and more areas of life like this very conference that you know a year ago two years ago it would be unacceptable i mean if they invited me to the alta european uh forum and i would say well i'll do it but i'll do it from home for my computer they would say no no no you have to come in person i mean are you kidding from your computer who does that and now that's that's acceptable and i'm fine with it i'm glad that at the end of of of this event um i'm at home and no hotels and airports and airplanes and so forth and i think planet earth is also happy about that to some extent but um you know shifting the entire educational system online that's a huge decision and if you think about something like the the new surveillance systems this is really frightening this crisis has legitimated not only in authoritarian regimes but also in many democracies new practices of mass surveillance and um this is likely at least some of that is likely to stay with us even after the crisis is over and you know during the crisis there is no time to have a a deep public debate about it decisions are just being made very very fast so looking back from the future if people do remember covered 19 in 50 years it is possible that they will remember it as the watershed moment when the world really turned digital and when mass surveillance became a normal and legitimate part of everyday life all over the world and and that's cause for concern if i may add something here i guess we've also seen like the real limits of digitalization um for example in the field of education for a long time it was quite fashionable to say you know that everything will go digital and then everyone can see the best talks by the top professors from the world on youtube and that lots of professors around the globe would be out of a job because they wouldn't be able to compete with this you know the superstar professor i think what we've actually seen in the last couple of months is that physical contact actually seeing each other is incredibly important for proper education that we are still a very physical creature we haven't uploaded our brain into the cloud just yet um that's that's i think also one of the the lessons here and um i absolutely agree with you about sort of the how worrying this this trend of mass surveillance is even though i would also say that some of the stories about i don't know companies like cambridge analytica hijacking our brains is you know not very believable um if you for example look at the evidence of the effectiveness of online advertising well quite often these these algorithms can't even distinguish the you know the gender of people right with the data set of cambridge analytica for example i think that a huge uh part of that was just hype and a lot of companies make a lot of money these days with talking about machine intelligence and ai while they just have some dumb algorithm that doesn't really understand the world but maybe maybe in the future maybe in the future though but i think that a lot of a lot of that promise hasn't materialized yet and it's not it's not about to quite see there's an interesting question from ariel cohen that i think fits into this conversation which is the the the question about the current conflict between facts and fiction so the fake news argument those who believe if you look at what's happened on the vaccine and so forth it's been a tremendous year as you say for science and for belief in experts and belief in scientific progress on the other hand it's been a year where there's been an extraordinary practical consequence of the development of conspiracy theories and fake news and all of that when you see those two together yuval you know which of those will be the more permanent phenomenon do you think which is the more powerful i think it goes together i mean people have this mistaken assumption that truth and fiction cannot coexist that you cannot believe the experts and at the same time believe in all kinds of ridiculous conspiracy theories but again i mean history indicates that this is not not the case and humans have the ability to believe in the most nonsensical stuff in some areas and to turn to science and experts when they need to do something practical i mean to take an extreme example if you think about adolf eichmann developing or preparing the timetables for the trains taking people from the netherlands or from hungary to auschwitz and designing the gas chambers and how how it all work these are extremely rational people they rely on the latest technology on the latest science on experts they don't want any uh fluffy uh fake news and at the same time when it comes to their motivation why do they do all that it's because they believe a completely nonsensical saudi scientific uh theory which is at its heart is a conspiracy theory about the jews controlling the world now it's the same person with the same brain with the same mind but again when listening to a speech by hitler it's as if they shut down the prefrontal cortex and their critical powers of evaluation and then the rational thinking and then once they get their mission okay you you plan the timetable for the trains pump the prefrontal cortex goes back to action and is very meticulous and rational and and mathematical and so forth and we sit in so many again i mean if you think about the september 11 attacks the same people when they adopted whatever theories they had i mean if i do this i'll go to heaven and get so and so many virgins and whatever it's the same people who were extremely rational and meticulous about planning the actual attacks and what often people don't realize is that to accomplish big things whether for good or bad in history you need both you need both truth and fiction let's say you want to build an atom bomb now to build an atom bomb you need the truth of physics if you if your theory of physics is wrong you will not be able to build an atom bomb at the same time nobody is going to come together to help build the bomb just because you tell them e equals m c square that motivates nobody that's not an elections logo e equals mc square you need some religious mythology you need some political ideology you need some economic theory to convince people hundreds of thousands of people to cooperate to build the atom bomb not just the physicists the engineers the technicians the people who grow the food to feed the engineers and the technicians and the mythology the theory the ideology that you use to unite them it doesn't need to be true at all it can be a bunch of fake news it can be complete nonsense and it can happen again the same people can be extremely rational when dealing with some things and still believe the worst fake news in other matters to give one last example i mean currently from the usa you know i hear many kind of you know liberals and democrats accusing a lot of republicans of believing fake news and conspiracy theories and being irrational and so forth but even these democrats would agree that when it comes to gerrymandering to gerrymander election uh um counties how do you call it like counties extremely rational relying on the latest sociological and economic and whatever tools being very uh capable in differentiating reliable from unreliable data so there is this kind of widespread common assumption the truth will prevail in the end because the people who tend to believe fake news and conspiracy theories and so forth they don't know how to organize how to manufacture new weapons whatever and that's just not the case humans are able to hold both in fact to succeed you usually need both so what that's that's the challenge for someone of your optimistic persuasion which is how do you harness those capacities that uval has talked about in pursuit of uh positive ends if you will and you and you mentioned earlier that you thought actually the last year might be such a galvanizing force that it might have changed people's expectations of government and people's expectations of social change can you lay out in what areas that you think you expect that and why given what you've us just said so let's first say in general that if you go back like 30 years um to um well the early 90s then it was quite fashionable to be a cynic in the west i think cynicism was was quite popular so you have bands like nirvana singing oh just entertain us or you had the movie fight club with brad pitt you know who said oh we're just buying stuff we don't need to uh what is it impress people we don't like that's modern life after the fall of the berlin wall this is what capitalism is you know this is the end of history there's nothing left to fight for we don't have ideals whatever we're just enjoying our life and indeed if i um would ask my fellow students this is like just 10 12 years ago um whether they ever protested in the streets or something like that only a very small minority would say yes i did if you asked that question in in universities in the u.s or the uk and the netherlands are probably in israel as well um did you protest it you participate in a demonstration then i think around what is it 50 would say yes i did so um that's that's that's a that's a genuine shift here we've seen the black lives matter movement which is the biggest protest movement in the history of the united states we see the climate justice movement with greater thunderberg which really has a genuine influence on politicians and policymakers in in europe you can see it with the green deal you know this is the problem with europeans we're not very good at coming up with our own slogans and language you know we just steal them from the americans but in terms of actual plans i think europeans are doing a better job often than now than the americans so yes that things like that do give me hope um yeah it sort of becomes more fashionable to actually believe in something to um to believe that things can be different and they don't have to be this way let's just stick with climate because that is an area where i think when people are looking for optimism from the last year they say well we've seen what can happen when a low probability or relatively low probability event happens what about the thing that we know is inevitable if we don't act do you think yuval do you share what goes view that maybe there has been a shift in our collective desire to do something about climate change or is this all still you know lots of talk that will go away the minute we can start flying in airplanes again um i don't know we'll have to wait and see i mean at present it's actually gone down on the agenda of most countries yes i mean maybe there is some reduction in in uh emissions because there are no less fewer airplane airplanes flying but uh for the foreseeable future the economic consequences of this crisis will i think dominate uh politics in many countries and this is not necessarily good news for for climate change i mean conceptually yes it warns people look even something not just low probability but also um in terms of mortality it's relatively um it's not an extremely deadly virus it's not the black death and look what it's doing to the world so now just try to think what will be the implications of a much bigger problem like climate change also conceptually it shows that um and here i completely agree with your outgo that it shows you that you can change things on a massive scale that i mean again you can stop all flights you can lock down entire countries you can actually do that and life goes on in some way and this i would say may make us more open to radical ideas about how to deal also with climate change if i can add something to that you know what i'm worried about is that even people on say the progressive side of on politics who really worry about climate change i think they often still underestimate just how much that needs to be done um it's become quite fashionable to talk about you know mobilization and to make the comparison with what the united states and what the united kingdom did during the second world war you know completely transformed their economy for the purpose of building as many tanks and grenades and and machinery to to win the war um but i don't think people fully understand what kind of sacrifices that would mean you know sacrifices in terms of wealth so how high does taxation need to go well in the during the war in the post-war period we have marginal tax rates that went as high as 90 percent for many people that's that's unbelievable but that's actually doable you can uh you can um have very high rates of tax and capitalism can still work quite well or even better actually but are we willing to pay that price um during the second world war there was for example also the victory speed uh vehicles couldn't go faster than 35 you know to save petrol um in a in a way they also had to limit civil liberties freedom of expression was limited in the united states there was this this man sort of the jeff bezos of of the us back then who didn't really comply with government regulations and he was dragged out of his office there was a famous photo of that now imagine jeff bezos now being dragged out of his office in amazon by the us government because he doesn't do enough about climate change you know i think we're quite far removed from that from that point yeah aren't there just just to push both of you a bit more on this i mean one two two factors i suspect are going to be very central one is what role the united states plays because it is you know still it's the world's biggest economy the the approach in terms of serious amounts of money public money for investment in innovation and r d would would change the shape of the global debate but the second is surely the relationship between the us and china which leads us to the sort of geopolitical consequences of the last year there is no way that the world will tackle climate change unless those two countries work together to to make progress i think that's sort of somewhat incontrovertible so the question then is do you think actual cooperation between the superpower of the 20th century and the aspirant power of the 21st is more or less likely because that surely helps need is a way of shaping whether we should be more or less hopeful and and where are you both on that on the sort of geopolitical consequences of the pandemic and and whether it makes a a kind of geopolitics that is more or less dangerous you are well i don't know i hope they can cooperate i agree that without a cooperation between the usa and china it will be probably impossible to tackle not just climate change but the other major uh threats and challenges we face like the rise of artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies [Music] we didn't see a lot of cooperation over the last year they've been mainly blaming each other and spreading this information and so forth so it it didn't raise my my hopes um one thing that does raise my hopes is that you know traditionally in history this kind of situation almost inevitably led to a great power not just competition to a great power war but over the last few decades we have seen a remarkable reduction not just generally in human violence and international wars but especially in wars between great powers there has not been a war between two great powers since the middle of the of the 20th century the second world war maybe if you if you count the korean war and um this is not because of accidents this is because of deep changes in the nature of the international system in the nature of economics and technology maybe the most important change is that once you have nuclear weapons and today you even you we are developing equally destructive weapons of of different kinds a great power war is mutual suicide and this was never before the case in history again there are reasons to be a bit less optimistic now because you know with nuclear weapons it was obvious that if you start a nuclear war everybody is going to lose everybody is going to be destroyed with the new arms race in areas like cyber technology and ai and and so forth there is a temptation that maybe i can win it that when the other guy presses the button nothing happens because i hacked their system the cold war confrontation between the ussr and the usa the nuclear confrontation it was like a chess game that you know it's very cold and rational and you can see forward if we do this they will do that in the current situation one of the frightening things about the new technologies is that they pour mist over the entire battlefield you really have no idea what you can do and what the other side can do you can never really be sure that in the moment of truth if you press the button things will actually work and this raises that the possibility that somebody will miscalculate or perhaps will calculate correctly that they can win this thing so one of the dangers we are facing is that great power conflict can be back on the table and again looking at what happened over the last year we have to be extremely worried because the basically the whole world went online the whole world became digital if you think what a full-scale cyber war looked like could look like in 2019 it would have been devastating but you could survive it now with everything moving online we are far more exposed to the dangers of cyber war just imagine that that's it the internet in your countries is down everything is down and uh especially in in a now in the in the coveted world or post-covered world i mean nothing works all the money is gone i mean i can't communicate i mean i don't even know how to how to do anything so in a way i mean some people came out of of 2020 with the impression that hey we are more resilient than we were in the past if during the black death or during the spanish influenza of 1918 you close down all the schools there is no education there is nothing you can do the school is shot what can you do now we are more resilient yes the physical school is shut down but we can continue school online but actually it also makes us far more vulnerable just try to imagine a cyber war full-scale cyber war under the present conditions okay that's that now you've got me feeling very gloomy i need some optimism um you know do you well actually i'm gonna because we're we're getting quite close to running out of time and i want to move on and i think this is an area where you will be much more optimistic which is has there been a political shift in favor of an idea that you have long argued for which is that of universal basic income and it's a question that irena berkova has also asked you know and she wants to know in fact what you well your views on this are but do you sense that we have moved to a world where that kind of discussion is one that is very real and present and we could actually see a really serious change in the nature of welfare states well the the amount of change in the discussion around basic income has really been fascinating to witness you know just uh six seven years ago when i first started writing and and speaking about the idea it's obviously a much older idea right goes back like 200 years but back then it was pretty much forgotten and many people here in the netherlands assume that i was talking when i said basic income they assumed that i was talking about the basic salary of bankers on top of which they receive all their bonuses that's they said you want higher basic salaries for bankers what are you talking about um but that's obviously very different now i mean we've seen policy makers and politicians around the world who are interested in the concept we've seen experiments around the globe um there's really a trend in that direction now i don't think it will happen sort of in an instant that some country will say okay let's implement ubi let's have a basic income let's abolish poverty i think it will happen much more gradually that we can transform our welfare systems in the direction make them more basic in commish you know make them a bit remove condition conditionalities make it a little bit more universal etc so um in that sense i'm quite optimistic and i think that kovit has accelerated things because governments around the globe have basically been giving people free money you know uh hundreds of dollars and um i think that act in itself signifies a certain amount of trust because if you really believe that most people would spend it on drugs or alcohol or whatever then you wouldn't do it but they have done it and we found that actually it works pretty well and that most people um you know spend spend the money on reasonable things because that's obviously one of the great things about money is that people can spend it on things they need instead of on things that some self-appointed experts think they need you but what's your take on this because it seems to me that this is a really interesting area and you you spoke of how people have become accustomed to much greater intrusion from government in the pandemic and you know maybe this is a pivotal moment also in terms of people's expectation of what kind what is provided by government what the state should do is this a kind of 1945 moment i mean that's that's kind of what happened in the uk right the welfare state was born after the second world war is that are we in that kind of a moment now yeah i think we are much more open now to the idea that governments should provide more services should increase the budgets of public services especially healthcare and also even ideas like ubi and um you know interestingly you see it even in right-wing and conservative parties i mean trump and boris johnson also experimented exactly with with these things so i i do think there is a shift in uh the zeitgeist around that again to say something a bit less optimistic um my problem is with the notion of universal in universal basic income almost always people actually mean national basic income not universal basic income nobody is saying okay we'll tax the rich in california to pay basic income to people in guatemala and one of the problems again looking at the specific case of what coveted 19 is doing to the world there is a lot of talk about how we will emerge from this crisis so somebody says it will be a u shape uh curve somebody says no it will be a v shape and i don't know who it who it was who said no it will be a k shaped um k in the sense that some countries will become much more rich and powerful thanks to all everything that happened in the last year they will actually emerge from the crisis in a far better condition than they entered it this is especially the countries that are leading the revolutions in areas like digitalization and other countries many countries they will be the downside half of the k they might see their economies completely collapse as things are digitalized and automated many countries that depend on traditional production lines or tourism and so forth they might completely collapse and we will see an accelerating inequality on a global level and it will be much more difficult to bridge to close this inequality even then the inequality that opened in the 19th century with the industrial revolution so we will see countries like the usa and china becoming far richer and more powerful dominating the world economy and also the the the political future of the world more than ever before while other countries basically going bankrupt and becoming new kinds of colonies of of these new imperial forces so again universal basic income i think we'll see more of that in countries certainly in europe even in the us the big question is what will happen in brazil in south africa in indonesia in these countries let me just follow on with that um to try and i if you are right and it's again a very gloomy perspective but we have this this this global fissure between the the countries that grow richer and stronger and the those that are completely left behind do you sense a greater sense of global solidarity or less i mean one of the striking things about the pandemic has been it's been very national you know there's been a very clear sense that this is done one country for each for itself um do you therefore expect that the post-pandemic world will be a an even less sort of sense of global solidarity or more it's up to us i mean i think in your book word there is this parable of the two wolves that live inside us the good wolf and the bad wolf and the question which wolf will win in this internal struggle it's the wolf you feed so um i don't think there is an inevitable outcome to the present crisis i think we have options and i hope we made we make good choices i mean there in many ways this crisis should increase global solidarity i mentioned before the fact that everybody should realize that our health even if we are completely selfish it's in our interest to protect the health care of every human being on earth imagine it like you have a war between the humans and the viruses the front line passes through the body of every human being on earth and if the front line is breached anywhere in the world in china in brazil in the uk it puts everybody in danger a virus that jumps from some animal to a human in some remote village might be in wall street or beverly hills or london within a few days so again not out of any altruism out of your own self-interest you should provide protection and good basic health care to everybody in the world and another thing is that this pandemic has been a truly global experience people all over the world despite many differences of course in some essential ways you know people all over the world share the same experience it's like you know in in the u.s when when people can today ask each other where were you on september 11 well were you where kennedy was assassinated and everybody have this shared experience so cover the the covered year is really one of the most extreme shared experiences that ever happened to humanity so vodka do you think that shared experience um will lead to a positive outcome do you sense more of the likelihood of that than nouveau does well look we historians always say that we find it hard to predict the past now obviously predicting the future is even more difficult than that um i think my most important point here would would also be that so we are the stories that we tell ourselves so cynicism is i think another form of laziness that could also become a self-evident prophecy and it's really about sort of recognizing the potential within human nature we're obviously not born as cosmopolitans obviously not uh you could even say we're born as cenops you know we have these really tribal rupees tendencies but there's also the possibility within human nature to overcome that uh for example there's there's been numerous studies within psychology that if people have more diversity in their life you know meet more people from different backgrounds then they um they become a little bit more of that cosmopolitan um and then if you look at younger generations um there's there's very interesting evidence from from peer review research for example that young people right now both in europe and the us are not only the most highly educated uh uh generation this world has ever seen but also the most ethnically diverse and the most progressive um i think that's that's significant you know in a way where where today we're still ruled by politicians and elites who were children from the cold war basically who saw the world in black and white terms capitalism versus communism um market versus the state um and they became a little bit complacent especially after the end of the soviet union and follow the berlin wall but now there's a new generation coming that looks at this world in a very different way and things that some things are politically possible that were you know as seen as completely impossible 10 years ago is all that going to happen i have no idea uh but i think there is more than enough reason to be helpful now okay well i'm going to end sorry you will go ahead if i have a minute or two to to add something so just i would shift the kind of line the debate it's not kind of nationalism versus cosmopolitanism i think that nationalism and globalism can go together that your national interests should make you cooperate in things like stopping pandemics or preventing climate change and what really worries me when i look at the world right now is not a clash between nationalism and globalism it's the collapse of nationalism in many countries around the world and the us is a prime example but it's not the only one to have a real cooperation on a global level you don't need to overcome nationalism you actually need to have good healthy self-confident nationalism and what we are seeing and i don't really understand why but in country after country we are seeing the collapse of national communities into warring tribes americans now hate and fear each other far more than they hate and fear anybody else on earth the chinese or the russians or them anybody and i'm seeing it in my home country of israel i'm seeing it in brazil and i don't really understand why but i would say this is the real thought line it's not a clash between nationalism and cosmopolitanism and globalism something is happening to national communities that makes them kind of collapse and we need them to be self-confident and strong to be able to cooperate so i that's really interesting and it leads us to what is going to be my penultimate question because we have 10 minutes left and i want to end with a penultimate question that is a little um downbeat and then an upbeat one to end on and the downbeat one comes actually from victor backstrom who is asking what do you see as the single largest geopolitical risk in the next few years to come and what could it be what could be a potential trigger point eg technology ideology religion clash between rich and poor disbelief in the state choose one of them what is the biggest thing that you are worried about rootka oh i'm definitely the most worried about what we're doing basically to our to the living planet to our environment um when it comes to the impact of technology i think we just have to be a bit more agnostic we just don't know yet as i said you know there was this incredible hype around what algorithms are capable of on cambridge analytica and if you really go into that often it's i think rather unimpressive what they can actually do um online advertising you know obviously facebook wants us to believe that they're incredibly good at controlling our behavior that's what all marketeers say you know i'm the best i can influence people to do to buy whatever i want them to buy but if you look at the actual evidence you know from economists for example psychologists very limited the effect of it is very very small um but when it comes to climate change i mean it's it's so clear that it's simply not sustainable our lifestyle and it's and it's not clear yet if we're gonna make this this transition what we have to do and the science is quite clear we have to do something that has never been done before in peace time totally transform the way we live everything we do now how we eat how we travel how we live the houses that we that we build everything everywhere it's all driven by fossil fuels and that's simply not sustainable so um and and that you don't really um we don't really need more knowledge about that right we've known that for 30 years so or even longer than that and and that's what i'm most worried about that's very clear so that's your answer to um to victor's uh what's the post-pandemic challenge uva what is yours what's the single most important i'm much more worried about the technology because i think if we manage the technology correctly it can also solve the climate problem and if we mismanage it um it it will cause an even faster deterioration i mean with the climate we have i don't know 10 20 30 years with the technology it moves much faster i again i'm also more more afraid of what the technology can do already today to take an example close to home if you're wondering for example why israel's geopolitical position has become much stronger in recent years and you know with the opening to the united arab emirates with the fact you don't hear much about the israeli-palestinian conflict anymore there are several reasons for that but the number one reason i would say is technology israel in recent years last five six ten years has perfected new surveillance technology that enables it to control millions of people millions of palestinians extremely effectively with very little overt military force or bloodshed and this is why its position is much stronger and this is why a lot of countries are opening they want the technology and this is not a future scenario it's happening right now and the technology has been exported not just from israel but from also other countries all over the world i think the power of these new technologies of surveillance and control is immense we haven't really seen anything yet and uh if we see if if we are entering an ai arms race it will basically guarantee the worst outcome that there is no way to regulate these disruptive technologies and instead of using them to overcome climate change they will increasingly be used to enslave humankind so that's my main fear so that's your sobering main fear so now the last question to both of you and i'll go first to you you val you've told us what your main fear is what is top of your to-do list what should what is the most important thing to be done to ensure that this worst outcome doesn't happen and assume you were you know able to affect political change and could get one or two things done to minimize that risk what would it be well in the immediate future i would say to have a global plan to deal with the pandemic and with the related economic crisis not just in order to overcome this immense problem but also because this will lay a foundation of trust for cooperation on other fronts like the potential ai arms race and climate change i think that without global cooperation we can't really achieve much on any of these fronts so you would it would be a push for global cooperation and ritka the last word is yours what would you have has top of your to-do list well you know let me tell you this this little anecdote i think two years ago i was invited to go on a book tour in uh korea to talk about my previous book utopia for realists and um what happens is that you go there you fly in from and then you're on the in the airport you go to the taxi to the hotel and you do your first interview and i remember very well the moment that a journalist asked me some question about korean politics um and i heard myself starting to formulate an answer and then i realized what am i doing i know absolutely nothing about korean politics so this is sometimes the problem is that as a writer you at some point you start to overestimate all your knowledge and that especially happens when people start to ask you the question but what should i do you know what's the solution to all my problems here's the thing i believe that once you update your view of human nature once you look at humans in a different way you can do things in a in a quite different way so in my book i give a couple of case studies and examples of how you can reorganize education maybe can that you can get rid of the hierarchical school system and rely more on the intrinsic motivation of kids you can also restructure the workplace you know work more in self-directed teams um have basically a lot less hierarchy and a lot less inequality and things may even work better you can reimagine how democracy is done etc etc but these are just examples because i don't know what happens if a lot of millions of people around the world have a little bit more helpful view of human nature i'm i'm pretty sure that it will have profound implications but as a writer i don't know sort of what all the effects will be because people will have to find that out in their own life it sounds to me as the top of your to-do list is to have everybody read your book because then they would have an understanding that would be a little bit dumb maybe people start with yuval's book first but that's why you got that one i i am i am i am jesting i'm teasing you but um that is i think a wonderfully upbeat place and both of your to-do lists i think are excellent one is one is more ambitious than the other but certainly having a having which goes upward and sunny view of human nature and yuval's call to global cooperation seemed to me to be uh an excellent place to end on i'm not sure we have lived up to the intellectual inauguration of the year but i have had a fascinating time listening to the two of you i hope all of you watching have enjoyed this um the discussion will be put up on youtube so please do tell anybody who you think might be interested it is wonderful to hear two such swashbuckling minds um give us a sense of where the world has come from and some sense of where it is going thank you all very much indeed thank you thanks

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 185,248

Keywords: yuval noah harari, rutger bregman, sapiens, humankind, evolution, science

Id: xp9h3rdUVgI

Length: 88min 13sec (5293 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021

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Harari and Bregman discuss their different views about whether humanity is inherently good/friendly, lessons from COVID-19, geopolitics including the relationship between USA and china, universal basic income, nationalism, their most pressing concerns for the next decade and their solutions.