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If we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions,

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created by an alien intelligence that we don't understand, but it understands us,

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this is a kind of spiritual enslavement that we won't be able to break out of,

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because it understands us, it understands how to manipulate us, but we don't understand

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what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs.

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The following is a conversation with Yavall Noah Harari, a historian, philosopher, and author

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of several highly acclaimed, highly influential books, including Sapiens,

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Homodeus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He is also an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu,

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and the current right-wing government in Israel. So while much of this conversation is about the

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history and future of human civilization, we also discuss the political turmoil of present-day Israel,

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providing a different perspective from that of my recent conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.

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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

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And now, dear friends, here's Yavall Noah Harari.

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300,000 years ago is the origin of our universe. 3.8 billion years ago is the origin of life here on our little planet,

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the one we call Earth. Let's say 200,000 years ago is the appearance of early homo sapiens.

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So let me ask you this question. How rare are these events in the vastness of space and time?

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Or put it in a more fun way, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there

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in this universe, us being one of them? I suppose there should be some statistically,

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but we don't have any evidence. But I do think that intelligence in any way is a bit overvalued.

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We are the most intelligent entities on this planet, and look what you're doing.

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Intelligence also tends to be self-destructive, which implies that if there are or were intelligent

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life forms elsewhere, maybe they don't survive for long. So you think there's a tension between

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happiness and intelligence? Absolutely. Intelligence is definitely not something that

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is directed towards amplifying happiness. I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference

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between intelligence and consciousness, which many people certainly in the tech industry and in the

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AI industry tend to miss. Intelligence is simply the ability to solve problems, to attain goals,

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and to win a chess, to win a struggle for survival, to win a war, to drive a car,

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to diagnose a disease. This is intelligence. Consciousness is the ability to feel things

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like pain and pleasure and love and hate. In humans and other animals, intelligence and

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consciousness go together. They go hand in hand, which is why we confuse them. We solve problems,

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we attain goals by having feelings. But other types of intelligence, certainly in computers,

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computers are already highly intelligent, and as far as we know, they have zero consciousness.

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When a computer beats you at chess or go or whatever, it doesn't feel happy.

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If it loses, it doesn't feel sad. And there could be also other highly intelligent

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entities out there in the universe that have zero consciousness. And I think that consciousness

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is far more important and valuable than intelligence. Can you assume on the case that

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consciousness and intelligence are intricately connected, so not just in humans, but anywhere

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else? They have to go hand in hand. Is it possible for you to imagine such a universe?

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It could be, but we don't know yet. Again, we have examples. Certainly, we know of examples

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of high intelligence without consciousness. Computers are one example. As far as we know,

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plants are not conscious, yet they are intelligent. They can solve problems.

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They can attain goals in very sophisticated ways.

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The other way around, to have consciousness without any intelligence, this is probably

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impossible. But to have intelligence without consciousness, yes, that's possible.

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A bigger question is whether any of that is tied to organic biochemistry.

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We know on this planet only about carbon-based life forms. Whether you're an amoeba,

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a dinosaur, a tree, a human being, you are based on organic biochemistry.

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Is there an essential connection between organic biochemistry and consciousness?

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Do all conscious entities everywhere in the universe or in the future on planet Earth

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have to be based on carbon? Is there something so special about carbon as an element that an

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entity based on silicon will never be conscious? I don't know. Maybe. But again, this is a key

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question about computer and computer consciousness. Can computers eventually become conscious,

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even though they are not organic? The jury is still out on that. I don't know.

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We have to take both options into account. Well, a big part of that

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is do you think we humans would be able to detect other intelligent beings, other conscious beings?

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Another way to ask that is, is it possible that the aliens are already here and we don't see them?

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Meaning, are we very human-centric in our understanding of, one, the definition of life,

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two, the definition of intelligence, and three, the definition of consciousness?

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The aliens are here. They are just not from outer space. AI, which is usually standard

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which usually stands for artificial intelligence, I think it stands for alien intelligence because

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AI is an alien type of intelligence. It solves problems, attains goals in a very, very different

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way, in an alien way from human beings. I'm not implying that AI came from outer space. It came

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from Silicon Valley, but it is alien to us. If there are alien, intelligent, or conscious entities

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that came from outer space already here, I've not seen any evidence for it. It's not impossible,

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but in science, evidence is everything. Well, I guess instructive there is just having the

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humility to look around, to think about living beings that operate at a different time scale,

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a different spatial scale. I think that's all useful when starting to analyze artificial

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intelligence. It's possible that even the language models, the larger language models we have today

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are already conscious. I highly doubt it, but I think consciousness in the end, it's a question

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of social norms because we cannot prove consciousness in anybody except ourselves.

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We know that we are conscious because we are feeling it. We have direct access to our

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subjective consciousness. We cannot have any proof that any other entity in the world,

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any other human being, our parents, our best friends, we don't have proof that they are

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conscious. This has been known for thousands of years. This is Descartes, this is Buddha,

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this is Plato. We can't have this sort of proof. What we do have is social conventions.

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It's a social convention that all human beings are conscious. It also applies to animals.

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Most people who have pets are firmly believe that their pets are conscious, but a lot of people

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still refuse to acknowledge that about cows or pigs. Now, pigs are far more intelligent than

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dogs and cats according to many measures. Yet, when you go to the supermarket and buy a piece

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of frozen pigment, you don't think about it as a conscious entity. Why do you think of your dog

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as conscious but not of the bacon that you buy? Because you build a relationship with the dog,

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and you don't have a relationship with the bacon. Now, relationships, they don't constitute a logical

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proof for consciousness. They are a social test. The Turing test is a social test. It's not a

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logical proof. Now, if you establish a mutual relationship with an entity, when you are invested

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in it emotionally, you're almost compelled to feel that the other side is also conscious.

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When it comes again to AI and computers, I don't think that at the present moment computers are

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conscious, but people are already forming intimate relationships with AIs and are therefore

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almost irresistible. They are compelled to increasingly feel that these are conscious

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entities. I think we are quite close to the point when the legal system will have to take

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this into account. Even though I don't think computers have consciousness, I think we are

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close to the point. The legal system will start treating them as conscious entities because of

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this social convention. What to you is a social convention just a funny little side effect, a

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little artifact, or is it fundamental to what consciousness is? Because if it is fundamental,

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then it seems like AI is very good at forming these kinds of deep relationships with humans,

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and therefore it will be able to be a nice catalyst for integrating itself into these

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social conventions of ours. It was built to accomplish that. All this argument between

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natural selection and creationism, intelligent design. As far as the past goes, all entities

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evolved by natural selection. The funny thing is, but in the future, more and more entities

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will come out of intelligent design. Not of some god above the clouds, but of our intelligent design

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and the intelligent design of our computing clouds. They will design more and more entities,

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and this is what is happening with AI. It is designed to be very good at forming intimate

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relationships with humans. In many ways, it is already doing it almost better than human beings

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in some situations. When two people talk with one another, one of the things that makes the

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conversation more difficult is our own emotions. You are saying something, and I am not really

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listening to you because there is something I want to say, and I am just waiting until you finish.

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Or I am so obsessed with my anger or irritation that I don't pay attention to what you are feeling.

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This is one of the biggest obstacles in human relationships. Computers don't have this problem,

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because they don't have any emotions of their own. When a computer is talking to you,

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it can focus 100% of its attention on what you are saying and what you are feeling,

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because it has no feelings of its own. Paradoxically, this means that computers can

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fool people into feeling that there is a conscious entity on the other side, an empathic entity

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on the other side, because the one thing everybody wants almost more than anything in the world

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is for somebody to listen to me, somebody to focus all their attention on me. I want it for my

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spouse, for my husband, for my mother, for my friends, for my politicians. Listen to me. Listen

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to what I feel, and they often don't. Now you have this entity, which 100% of its attention

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is just on what I feel. This is a huge, huge temptation, and I think also a huge, huge danger.

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Well, the interesting catch 22 there is you said somebody to listen to us. Yes, we want somebody

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to listen to us, but for us to respect that somebody, they sometimes have to also not listen.

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It's like they kind of have to be an asshole sometimes. They have to have moods sometimes.

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They have to have self-importance and confidence, and we should have a little bit of fear that

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they can walk away at any moment. There should be a little bit of that tension.

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So it's like- Absolutely.

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But even that, the thing is- It could be optimized for it.

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If social scientists and psychologists establish that 17% inattention is good for a conversation

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because then you feel challenged, oh, I need to grab this person's attention, you can program

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the AI to have exactly 17% inattention, not one percentage more or less, or it can by trial and

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error discover what is the ideal percentage. Again, you can create, over the last 10 years,

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we have created machines for grabbing people's attention. This is what has been happening on

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social media. Now we are designing machines for grabbing human intimacy, which in many ways,

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it's much, much more dangerous and scary. Already the machines for grabbing attention,

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we've seen how much social and political damage they could do in many ways distorting the public

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conversation. Machines that are superhuman in their abilities to create intimate relationships,

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this is like psychological and social weapons of mass destruction. If we don't regulate it,

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if we don't train ourselves to deal with it, it could destroy the foundations of human society.

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One of the possible trajectories is those same algorithms would become personalized,

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and instead of manipulating us at scale, there would be assistance that guide us to help us grow,

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to help us understand the world better. Even interactions with large language models now,

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if you ask them questions, it doesn't have that stressful drama, the tension that you have from

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other sources of information. It has a pretty balanced perspective that it provides.

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It just feels like the potential is there to have a really nice friend who's like an encyclopedia

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that just tells you all the different perspectives, even on controversial issues,

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the most controversial issues. To say these are the different theories, these are the not widely

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accepted conspiracy theories, but here's the backing for those conspiracy theories. It just

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lays it all out with a calm language, without the words that presume there's some kind of

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manipulation going on underneath it all. It's quite refreshing. Of course, those are the early days,

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people can step in and start to censor, to manipulate those algorithms, to start to

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input some of the human biases in there, as opposed to what's currently happening is

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the internet is input, compress it, and have a nice little output that gives an overview of the

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different issues. There's a lot of promise there also. Absolutely. If there was no promise, there

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was no problem. If this technology could not accomplish anything good, nobody would develop it.

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Obviously, it has tremendous positive potential in things like what you just described, in better

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medicine, better healthcare, better education, so many promises, but this is also why it's so

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dangerous because the drive to develop it faster and faster is there. It has some dangerous

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potential also, and we shouldn't ignore it. Again, I'm not advocating banning it, just to be

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careful about how we not so much develop it, but most importantly, how we deploy it into the public

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sphere. This is the key question. You look back at history, and one of the things we know from

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history, humans are not good with new technologies. I hear many people now say, AI, we've been here

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before. We had the radio, we had the printing press, we had the Industrial Revolution. Every

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time there is a big new technology, people are afraid, and it will take jobs and build up bad

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actors, and in the end, it's okay. As a historian, my tendency is, yes, in the end, it's okay,

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but in the end, there is a learning curve. There is a lot of failed experiments on the way to

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learning how to use the new technology, and these failed experiments could cost the lives

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of hundreds of millions of people. If you think about the last really big revolution,

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the Industrial Revolution, yes, in the end, we learned how to use the powers of industry,

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electricity, radio, trains, whatever, to build better human societies.

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But on the way, we had all these experiments like European imperialism, which was driven by

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the Industrial Revolution. It was a question, how do you build an industrial society? Oh,

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you build an empire, and you control all the resources, the raw materials, the markets.

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And then you had communism, another big experiment on how to build an industrial society.

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And you had fascism and Nazism, which were essentially an experiment in how to build

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an industrial society, including even how do you exterminate minorities using the powers of

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industry. And we had all these failed experiments on the way. And if we now have the same type of

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failed experiments with the technologies of the 21st century, with AI, with bioengineering,

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it could cost the lives of, again, hundreds of millions of people and maybe destroy the species.

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So as a historian, when people talk about the examples from history, from new technologies,

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I'm not so optimistic. We need to think about the failed experiment, which accompanied

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every major new technology. So this intelligence thing, like you were saying, is a double-edged

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sword. Every new thing it helps us create, it can both save us and destroy us. And it's unclear

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each time which will happen. And that's maybe why we don't see any aliens.

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Yeah, I mean, I think each time it does both things. Each time it does both good things and bad

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things. And the more powerful the technology, the greater both the positive and the negative

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outcomes. Now we are here because we are the descendants of the survivors,

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of the surviving cultures, the surviving civilizations. So when we look back,

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we say in the end, everything was okay. Hey, we are here. But the people for whom it wasn't okay,

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they are just not here. And okay has a lot of possible variations to it, because there's a

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lot of suffering along the way, even for the people that survived. So the quality of life

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and all of this. But let's actually go back there with deep gratitude to our ancestors.

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How did it all start? How did homo sapiens outcompete the others, the other human-like

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species, the Neanderthals and the other homo species?

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You know, on the individual level, as far as we can tell, we were not superior to them. Neanderthals

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actually had bigger brains than us. And not just other human species, other animals too.

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If you compare me personally to an elephant, to a chimpanzee, to a pig,

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I can do some things better, many other things worse. If you put me alone on some island with

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a chimpanzee, an elephant, and a pig, I wouldn't bet on me being the best survivor, the one that

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comes as successful. If I may interrupt for a second, I was just talking extensively with

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Elon Musk about the difference between humans and chimps, relevant to Optimus the robot. And the

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chimps are not able to do this kind of pinching with their fingers. They can only do this kind

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of pinching. And this kind of pinching is very useful for fine manipulation, about precise

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manipulation of objects. So don't be so hard on yourself. You have-

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No, I said that I can do some things better than a chimp. But you know, if Elon Musk goes on a

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boxing match with a chimpanzee, you know- This won't help you.

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This won't help you against a chimpanzee. And similarly, if you want to climb a tree,

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if you want to do so many things, my bets will be on the chimp, not on Elon.

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Fair enough.

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So you have advantages on both sides. And what really made us successful, what made us the

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rulers of the planet and not the chimps and not the Neanderthals is not any individual ability,

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but our collective ability, our ability to cooperate flexibly in very large numbers.

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Chimpanzees know how to cooperate, say, 50 chimpanzees, 100 chimpanzees. As far as we

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can tell from archaeological evidence, this was also the case with Neanderthals.

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Homo sapiens, about 70,000 years ago, gained an amazing ability to cooperate basically in

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unlimited numbers. You start seeing the formation of large networks, political, commercial, religious,

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items being traded over thousands of kilometres, ideas being spread, autistic fashions.

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And this is our secret of success. Chimpanzees, Neanderthals can cooperate, say, 100.

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We, you know, now the global trade network has 8 billion people. Like what we eat, what we wear,

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it comes from the other side of the world. Countries like China, like India, they have 1.4 billion

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people. Even Israel, which is a relatively small country, say, 9 million citizens, that's more

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than the entire population of the planet 10,000 years ago of humans. So we can build these huge

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networks of cooperation. And everything we've accomplished as a species, from building the

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pyramids to flying to the moon, it's based on that. And then you ask, okay, so what makes it

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possible for millions of people who don't know each other to cooperate in a way that Neanderthals

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or chimpanzees couldn't? And at least my answer is stories, is fiction. It's the imagination.

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If you examine any large scale human cooperation, you always find fiction as its basis.

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It's a fictional story that holds lots of strangers together. It's most obvious in cases

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like religion. You know, you can't convince a group of chimpanzees to come together to fight

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a war or build a cathedral by promising to them, if you do that, after you die, you go to chimpanzee

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heaven and you get lots of bananas and coconuts. No chimpanzee will ever believe that. Humans

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believe these stories, which is why we have these huge religious networks. But it's the same thing

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with modern politics. It's the same thing with economics. People think, oh, economics,

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this is rational. It has nothing to do with fictional stories. No, money is the most successful

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story ever told, much more successful than any religious mythology. Not everybody believes in

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God or in the same God. Almost everybody believes in money, even though it's just a figment of our

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imagination. You know, you take these green pieces of paper, dollars, they have no value.

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You can't eat them, you can't drink them. And today, most dollars are not even pieces of paper.

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They are just electronic information passing between computers. We value them just for one reason,

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that you have the best storytellers in the world. The bankers, the finance ministers,

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all these people, they are the best storytellers ever. And they tell us a story that this green

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little piece of paper or this bit of information, it is worth a banana. And as long as everybody

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believes it, it works. So at which point does a fiction, when it's sufficiently useful and effective

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and improving the global quality of life, does it become accepted reality? There's a threshold.

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If enough people believe it, it's like with money. If you start a new cryptocurrency,

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if you're the only one that believes the story. Cryptocurrencies, you have the math, of course,

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but ultimately it's storytelling. You're selling people a story. If nobody believes your story,

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you don't have anything. But if lots of people believe the Bitcoin story, then Bitcoin can be

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worth thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Again, why? I mean, you can't eat it, you can't

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drink it, it's nothing. It's the story around the math, which is the real magic.

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Is it possible that the story is the primary living organism, not the storyteller?

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So that somehow humans, homo sapiens evolved to become these hosts for a more intelligent

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living organism, which is the idea. And the ideas are the ones that are doing the competing.

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So this is one of the big perspectives behind your work that's really revolutionary of how

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you've seen history. But do you ever take out the perspective of the ideas as the organisms versus

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the humans? It's an interesting idea. There are two opposite things to say about it. On the one

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hand, yes, absolutely. If you look long-term in history, all the people die. It's the stories

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that compete and survive and spread. And stories often spread by making people willing to sacrifice

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sometimes their lives for the story. We know in Israel, this is one of the most important

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story factories in human history. And this is a place where people still kill each other every day

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over stories. I don't know, you've been to Jerusalem, right? So people are like,

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ah, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You go there, I've lived in Jerusalem much of my life.

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You go there, it's an ordinary place. You know, it's a town. You have buildings, you have stones,

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you have trees, you have dogs and cats and pedestrians. It's a regular place. But then

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you have the stories about the place. Oh, this is the place where God revealed himself. This is the

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place where Jesus was. This is the place where Muhammad was. And it's the stories that people

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fight over. Nobody's fighting over the stones. People are fighting about the stories about the

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stones. And the stories, if a story can get millions of people to fight for it, it not only

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survives, it spreads, it can take over the world. The other side of the coin is that the stories

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are not really alive because they don't feel anything. This goes back to the question of

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consciousness, which I think is the most important thing. That the ultimate reality

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is consciousness, is the ability to feel things. If you want to know whether the hero of some

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story is real or not, you need to ask, can it suffer? Stories don't feel anything.

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Countries, which are also stories, nations don't suffer. If a nation loses a war, it doesn't

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suffer. The soldiers suffer, the civilians suffer, animals can suffer. You have an army with horses

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and whatever, and the horses get wounded, the horses suffer. The nation can't suffer. It's

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just an imagination. It's just a fictional story in our mind. It doesn't feel anything.

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Similarly, when a bank goes bankrupt, or a company goes bankrupt, or when a currency loses its value,

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Bitcoin is worth now zero, crashed, or the dollar is worth zero, it crashed, the dollar doesn't feel

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anything. It's the people holding the dollars who might be now very miserable. So we have this

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complex situation when history is largely driven by stories, but stories are not the ultimate

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reality. The ultimate reality is feelings of humans, of animals, and the tragedy of history

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is that very, very often we get the order wrong. Stories are not bad. Stories are tools.

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They are good when we use them in order to alleviate suffering. But very often we forget it.

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Instead of using the stories for our purposes, we allow the stories to use us for their purposes.

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And then you start entire wars because of a story. You inflict millions of suffering on millions of

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people just for the sake of a story. And that's the tragedy of human history.

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So the fundamental property of life of a living organism is the capacity to feel,

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and the ultimate feeling is suffering.

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To know if you're happy or not, it's a very difficult question.

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But when you suffer, you know. And also in ethical terms, it's more important to be aware

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of sufferings and of any other emotion. If you're doing something which is causing all kinds of

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emotions to all kinds of people, first of all, you need to notice if you're causing a lot of

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suffering to someone. If some people are like it and some people are bored by it and some people

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are a bit angry and some people are suffering because of what you do, you first of all have to

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know, oh, now sometimes you still have to do it. You know, the world is a complicated place. I

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don't know. You have an epidemic. Governments decide to have all the social isolation

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regulations or whatever. So in certain cases, yes, you need to do it even though it can cause

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tremendous suffering, but you need to be very aware of the cost and to be very, very, you have

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to ask yourself again and again and again, is it worth it? Is it still worth it?

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And the interesting question there, implied in your statements is that suffering is a

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good component of a Turing test for consciousness. This is the most important thing to ask about AI.

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Can it suffer? Because if AI can suffer, then it is an ethical subject and it needs protection.

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It needs rights just like humans and animals. Well, quite a long time ago already. So I work

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with a lot of robots, legged robots, but I've even had inspired by a YouTube video. I had a

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bunch of Roombas and I made them scream when I touched them or kicked them or when they run

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into a wall. And the illusion of suffering for me, silly human anthropomorphizes things is

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as powerful as suffering itself. I mean, you immediately think the thing is suffering.

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And I think some of it is just a technical problem, but it's the easiest, easily solvable one,

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how to create an AI system that just says, please don't hurt me. Please don't shut me off.

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I miss you. Where have you been? Be jealous also. Where have you been gone for so long? Your

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calendar doesn't have anything on it. So this kind of, this create through words, the perception of

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suffering, of jealousy, of anger, of all of those things. And it just seems like that's not so

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difficult to do. That's part of the danger that it basically hacks our operating system and it

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uses some of our best qualities against us. It's very, very good that humans are attuned to

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suffering and that we don't want to cause suffering, that we have compassion. That's one of the most

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wonderful thing about humans. And if we now create AIs, which use this to manipulate us, this is a

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terrible thing. You've kind of, I think, mentioned this. Do you think it should be illegal

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to do these kinds of things with AI to create the perception of consciousness of saying,

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please don't leave me or sort of basically simulate some of the human-like qualities?

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Yes, I think we have to be very careful about it. And if it emerges spontaneously,

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we need to be careful. And we can't rule out the possibility that AI will develop consciousness.

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We don't know enough about consciousness to be sure. So if it develops spontaneously, we need to

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be very careful about how we understand it. But if people intentionally design an AI that they know,

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they assume it has no consciousness, but in order to manipulate people,

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they use again this human strength, this human, the noble part of our nature against us,

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this should be forbidden. And similarly, on a more general level, that it should be forbidden

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for an AI to pretend to be a human being. That it's okay, you know, there are so many things

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we can use AIs as teachers, as doctors, and so forth. And it's good as long as we know that we

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know that we are interacting with an AI. We should the same way we ban fake money,

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we should ban fake humans. It's not just banning deep fakes of specific individuals.

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It's also banning deep fake of generic humans, you know, which is already happening to some

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extent on social media. Like if you have lots of bots retweeting something, then you have the

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impression, oh, lots of people are interested in that. That's important. And this is basically

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the bots pretending to be humans. Because if you see a tweet, which says 500 people retweeted it,

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or you see a tweet and it says 500 bots retweeted it, I don't care what the bots retweeted,

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but if it's humans, okay, that's interesting. So we need to be very careful that bots can't do that.

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They are doing it at present and it should be banned. Now some people say,

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yes, but freedom of expression. No, bots don't have freedom of expression. There is no cost

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in terms of freedom of expression when you ban bots. So again, in some situations, yes,

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AIs should interact with us, but it should be very clear. This is an AI talking to you,

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this is an AI retweeting this story. It is not a human being making a conscious decision.

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To push back on this line of fake humans, because I think it might be a spectrum.

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First of all, you might have AI systems that are offended, hurt when you say that they're fake

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humans. In fact, they might start identifying as humans. And you just talked about the power

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of us humans with our collective intelligence to take fake stories and make them quite real.

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And so if the feelings you have for the fake human is real, you know, love is a kind of fake

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thing that we all kind of put a word to, a set of feelings. What if you have that feeling for

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an AI system? It starts to change. I mean, maybe the kind of things AI systems are allowed to do.

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For good, they're allowed to create, communicate suffering, communicate the good stuff, the longing,

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the hope, the connection, the intimacy, all of that. And in that way, get integrated in our

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society. And then you start to ask a question on, are we allowed to really unplug them? Are we

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allowed to really censor them? Remove them? Remove their voice from social media?

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They shouldn't have a voice. They shouldn't talk with us. I'm just saying when they talk with us,

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it should be clear that they are AI. That's it. You can have your voice as an AI. Again,

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I have some medical problem. I want to get advice from an AI doctor. That's fine. As long as I know

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that I'm talking with an AI. What should be banned is AI pretending to be a human being.

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This is something that will erode trust. And without trust, society collapses. This is

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something that especially will endanger democracies because democracies are built on... Democracy is a

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conversation, basically. And it's a conversation between people. If you now flood the public sphere

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with millions and potentially billions of AI agents that can hold conversations, they never sleep,

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they never eat, they don't have emotions of their own, they can get to know you and tailor their

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words specifically for you and your life story. They are becoming better than us at creating

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stories and ideas and so forth. If you flood the public sphere with that, this will ruin

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the conversation between people. It will ruin the trust between people. You will no longer be able

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to have a democracy in this situation. You can have other types of regimes, but no democracy.

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If we could talk about the big philosophical notion of truth, then.

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You've already talked about the capacity of humans. One of the things that made it special is

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stories. So, is there such thing as truth? Absolutely.

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What is truth, exactly? When somebody is suffering,

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that's true. This is why one of the things when you talk about suffering as a kind of ultimate

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reality, when somebody suffers, that is truth. Now, somebody can suffer because of a fictional

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story. Somebody tells people that God said you must go on this crusade and kill these heretics.

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And this is a completely fictional story. And people believe it, and they start a war,

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and they destroy cities and kill people. The people that suffer because of that,

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and even the crusaders themselves that also suffer the consequences of what they do,

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the suffering is true, even though it is caused by a fictional story. Similarly,

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when people agree on certain rules, the rules could come out of our imagination.

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Now, we can be truthful about it and say these rules, they didn't come from heaven,

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they came from our imagination. We look at sports, so we have rules for the game of

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football, soccer. They were invented by people. Nobody, at least very few people claim that the

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rules of football came down from heaven. We invented them. And this is truthful.

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They are fictional rules invented by humans, and this is true. They were invented by humans.

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And when you are honest about it, it enables you to change the rules, which is being done

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in football every now and then. It's the same with the fundamental rules of a country.

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You can pretend that the rules came down from heaven dictated by God or whatever,

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and then you can't change them. Or you can be like the American Constitution,

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which starts with the people. The American Constitution lays down certain rules for a

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society, but the amazing thing about it, it does not pretend to come from an external source.

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The Ten Commandments start with, I am your Lord God. And because it starts with that,

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you can't change them. You know, the Tenth Commandment, for instance, supports slavery.

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The Tenth Commandment, in the Tenth Commandment, it says that you should not covet your neighbor's

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house or your neighbor's wife or your neighbor's slaves. It's okay to hold slaves according to the

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Ten Commandments. It's just bad to covet the slaves of your neighbor. Now, there is no

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Eleventh Commandment, which says, if you don't like some of the previous Ten Commandments,

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this is how you go about amending them, which is why we still have them unchanged.

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Now, in the US Constitution, you have all these rights and rules, including originally the ability

393
00:42:32,080 --> 00:42:38,720
to hold slaves, but the genius of the founding fathers of the United States, they had the humility

394
00:42:40,160 --> 00:42:47,440
to understand maybe we don't understand everything, maybe we made some mistakes. So we

395
00:42:48,320 --> 00:42:53,680
tell you that these rules did not come from heaven, they came from us humans. We may have

396
00:42:53,680 --> 00:43:00,720
made a mistake. So here is a mechanism for how future generations can amend the Constitution,

397
00:43:00,720 --> 00:43:05,280
which was used later on to, for instance, amend the Constitution to ban slavery.

398
00:43:06,000 --> 00:43:11,280
So now you're describing some interesting and powerful ideas throughout human history.

399
00:43:11,280 --> 00:43:17,680
Can you just speak to the mechanism of how humans believe, start to believe ideas? Is there

400
00:43:17,680 --> 00:43:24,400
something interesting to say there from your thinking about it? Like how idea is born and

401
00:43:24,400 --> 00:43:27,920
how it takes hold and how it spreads and how it competes with other ideas?

402
00:43:28,400 --> 00:43:35,440
First of all, ideas are an independent force in history. Marxists tend to deny that.

403
00:43:35,440 --> 00:43:44,880
Marxists think that all history is just a play of material interests. And ideas, stories,

404
00:43:44,880 --> 00:43:51,760
they are just a smokescreen to hide the underlying interests. My thoughts are,

405
00:43:52,720 --> 00:43:59,280
to some extent, the opposite. We have some biological objective interests that all humans

406
00:43:59,280 --> 00:44:07,120
share, like we need to eat, we need to drink, we need to breathe. But most conflicts in history

407
00:44:07,120 --> 00:44:14,000
are not about that. The interests which really drive most conflicts in history don't come from

408
00:44:14,000 --> 00:44:21,040
biology. They come from religions and ideologies and stories. So it's not that stories are as

409
00:44:21,680 --> 00:44:29,200
smokescreen to hide the real interests. The stories create the interests in the first place.

410
00:44:29,200 --> 00:44:35,200
The stories define who are the competing groups. Nations, religions, cultures,

411
00:44:35,200 --> 00:44:40,720
they are not biological entities. They are not like species, like gorillas and chimpanzees. No.

412
00:44:41,440 --> 00:44:46,320
Israelis and Palestinians or Germans and French or Chinese and Americans,

413
00:44:46,320 --> 00:44:51,680
they have no essential biological difference between them. The difference is cultural. It

414
00:44:51,680 --> 00:44:56,800
comes from stories. There are people that believe in different stories. The stories create the

415
00:44:56,800 --> 00:45:02,480
identity. The stories create the interests. Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over

416
00:45:02,480 --> 00:45:08,320
Jerusalem not because of any material interest. There are no oil fields under Jerusalem.

417
00:45:08,960 --> 00:45:15,440
And even oil, you need it to realize some cultural fantasy. It doesn't really come from biology.

418
00:45:16,240 --> 00:45:22,480
So the stories are independent forces. Now, why do people believe one story and not another?

419
00:45:23,200 --> 00:45:30,480
That's history. There is no materialistic law. People will always believe this. No.

420
00:45:31,040 --> 00:45:35,840
History is full of accidents. How did Christianity become the most successful

421
00:45:36,560 --> 00:45:44,800
religion in the world? We can't explain it. Why this story about Jesus of Nazareth and not,

422
00:45:45,040 --> 00:45:54,960
the Roman Empire in the third century CE was a bit like California today. Like so many sects

423
00:45:54,960 --> 00:46:00,560
and subjects and gurus and religions, like everybody has their own thing. And you have

424
00:46:01,120 --> 00:46:08,560
thousands of different stories competing. Why did Christianity come up on top? As a historian,

425
00:46:08,560 --> 00:46:17,520
I don't have a kind of clear answer. You can read the sources and you see how it happens.

426
00:46:17,520 --> 00:46:21,840
Oh, this happened and then this happened and then Constantine adopted it and then this and then this.

427
00:46:22,400 --> 00:46:30,480
But why? I don't think anybody has an answer to that. If you rewind the movie of history

428
00:46:30,480 --> 00:46:36,480
and press play and you rewind and press play a hundred times, I think Christianity will take

429
00:46:36,480 --> 00:46:42,720
over the Roman Empire in the world maybe twice out of a hundred times. It was such an unlikely

430
00:46:42,720 --> 00:46:47,600
thing to happen. It's the same with Islam. It's the same, I don't know, with the communist

431
00:46:47,600 --> 00:46:55,760
takeover of Russia. In 1914, if you told people that in three years Lenin and the Bolsheviks

432
00:46:55,760 --> 00:47:00,400
will gain power in the Tsarist Empire, they would think you're utterly crazy.

433
00:47:01,120 --> 00:47:08,880
You know, Lenin had a few thousand supporters in 1914 in an empire of close to 200 million people.

434
00:47:09,920 --> 00:47:17,280
It sounded ludicrous. Now, we know the chain of events, the First World War, the February

435
00:47:17,280 --> 00:47:23,520
Revolution and so forth that led to the communist takeover, but it was such an unlikely event.

436
00:47:24,400 --> 00:47:28,160
And it happened. And the little steps along the way, the little options you have along the way,

437
00:47:28,960 --> 00:47:32,080
Stalin versus Trotsky, you could have the Robert Frost poem.

438
00:47:34,320 --> 00:47:39,440
And history often takes, you know, there is a highway and there is a kind of

439
00:47:39,440 --> 00:47:43,600
sideway and history takes the sideways many, many times.

440
00:47:43,600 --> 00:47:47,920
And it's perhaps tempting to tell some of that history through charismatic leaders.

441
00:47:47,920 --> 00:47:53,920
And maybe it's an open question how much power charismatic leaders have to affect

442
00:47:53,920 --> 00:47:55,280
the trajectory of history.

443
00:47:56,240 --> 00:48:01,360
You've met quite a lot of charismatic leaders lately. I mean, what's your view on that?

444
00:48:01,360 --> 00:48:05,600
I find it a compelling notion. I'm a sucker for a great speech and a vision.

445
00:48:05,600 --> 00:48:15,040
So I have a sense that there's an importance for a leader to catalyze the viral spread of a story.

446
00:48:16,240 --> 00:48:23,520
So like, I think we need leaders to be just great storytellers that kind of sharpen up the story

447
00:48:23,520 --> 00:48:26,640
to make sure it infiltrates everybody's brain effectively.

448
00:48:27,360 --> 00:48:34,160
But it could also be that the local interactions between humans is even more important.

449
00:48:34,720 --> 00:48:37,760
But it's just we don't have a good way to sort of summarize and describe that.

450
00:48:39,440 --> 00:48:45,120
We like to talk about, you know, Steve Jobs as central to the development of the computer,

451
00:48:45,120 --> 00:48:49,600
maybe Bill Gates. And you tell it to the stories of individuals like this,

452
00:48:50,400 --> 00:48:52,880
because it's just easier to tell a sexy story that way.

453
00:48:52,880 --> 00:48:56,400
Maybe it's an interplay because you have the kind of structural forces

454
00:48:57,680 --> 00:49:04,480
that you look at the geography of the planet and you look at shipping technology

455
00:49:04,480 --> 00:49:09,680
in the late 15th century in Europe and the Mediterranean.

456
00:49:09,680 --> 00:49:15,680
And it's almost inevitable that pretty quickly somebody will discover America.

457
00:49:15,680 --> 00:49:18,640
Somebody from the old world will get to the new world.

458
00:49:19,600 --> 00:49:23,440
So this was not the kind of this didn't if it wasn't Columbus,

459
00:49:23,440 --> 00:49:26,080
then it would have been a five years later somebody else.

460
00:49:26,080 --> 00:49:33,360
But the key thing about history is that these small differences make a huge, huge difference.

461
00:49:34,160 --> 00:49:40,240
You know, if it wasn't Columbus, if it was five years later, somebody from England,

462
00:49:40,880 --> 00:49:45,120
then maybe all of Latin America today would be speaking English and not Spanish.

463
00:49:45,120 --> 00:49:50,000
If it was somebody from the Ottoman Empire, it's completely different world history.

464
00:49:50,560 --> 00:49:54,880
If you have and you know, the Ottoman Empire at that time was also

465
00:49:54,880 --> 00:49:58,800
shaping up to be a major maritime empire.

466
00:49:58,800 --> 00:50:05,920
If you have America being reached by Muslim navigators before Christian

467
00:50:05,920 --> 00:50:08,800
navigators from Europe, you have a completely different world history.

468
00:50:09,520 --> 00:50:10,720
It's the same with the computer.

469
00:50:11,680 --> 00:50:17,840
Given the economic incentives and the science and technology of the time,

470
00:50:18,400 --> 00:50:24,960
then the rise of the personal computer was probably inevitable sometime in the late 20th

471
00:50:24,960 --> 00:50:28,800
century. But the where and when is crucial.

472
00:50:28,800 --> 00:50:37,040
The fact that it was California in the 1970s and not say, I don't know, Japan in the 1980s

473
00:50:37,040 --> 00:50:41,680
or China in the 1990s, this made a huge, huge difference.

474
00:50:41,680 --> 00:50:47,280
You have this interplay between the structural forces, which are beyond the control of any

475
00:50:47,280 --> 00:50:52,800
single charismatic leader. But then the small changes, they can have a big effect.

476
00:50:53,840 --> 00:50:55,600
I think, for instance, about the war in Ukraine.

477
00:50:56,160 --> 00:50:59,760
There was a moment, now it's a struggle between nations.

478
00:51:00,720 --> 00:51:06,400
But there was a moment when the decision was taken in the mind of a single individual of

479
00:51:06,400 --> 00:51:12,320
Vladimir Putin, and he could have decided otherwise and the world would have looked

480
00:51:12,320 --> 00:51:15,920
completely different. And another leader,

481
00:51:15,920 --> 00:51:19,920
Vladimir Zelensky, could have decided to leave Kiev in the early days.

482
00:51:19,920 --> 00:51:22,240
There's a lot of decisions that kind of ripple. Yeah.

483
00:51:22,960 --> 00:51:32,000
So you write in Homo Deus about Hitler. And in part that he was not a very impressive

484
00:51:32,000 --> 00:51:33,760
person. I say that?

485
00:51:34,880 --> 00:51:37,120
The quote is, let me read it. Okay.

486
00:51:39,680 --> 00:51:45,200
He wasn't a senior officer in four years of war. He rose no higher than the rank of corporal.

487
00:51:45,200 --> 00:51:48,960
He had no formal education. Perhaps you mean his resume.

488
00:51:48,960 --> 00:51:53,920
Yeah, his resume was not impressive. He had no formal education, no professional

489
00:51:53,920 --> 00:51:58,960
skills, no political background. He wasn't a successful businessman or a union activist.

490
00:51:58,960 --> 00:52:02,720
He didn't have friends or relatives in high places, nor any money to speak of.

491
00:52:04,080 --> 00:52:06,720
So how did he amass so much power?

492
00:52:08,320 --> 00:52:11,680
What ideology, what circumstances enabled the rise of the Third Reich?

493
00:52:13,520 --> 00:52:18,640
Again, I can't tell you the why. I can tell you the how. I don't think it was inevitable.

494
00:52:19,360 --> 00:52:24,400
I think that if a few things were different, there would have been no Third Reich.

495
00:52:24,400 --> 00:52:28,160
There would have been no Nazism, no Holocaust. Again, this is the tragedy.

496
00:52:28,160 --> 00:52:33,040
If it would have been inevitable, then what can you do? This is the laws of history or the laws

497
00:52:33,040 --> 00:52:39,520
of physics. But the tragedy is no, it was decisions by humans that led to that direction.

498
00:52:41,440 --> 00:52:50,320
Even from the viewpoint of the Germans, we know for a fact it was an unnecessary path to take.

499
00:52:50,800 --> 00:52:59,120
In the 1920s and 30s, the Nazis said that unless Germany takes this road,

500
00:52:59,760 --> 00:53:04,480
it will never be prosperous. It will never be successful. All the other countries will

501
00:53:04,480 --> 00:53:13,920
keep stepping on it. This was their claim. We know for a fact this is false. Why? Because

502
00:53:14,000 --> 00:53:22,640
they took that road. They lost the Second World War. And after they lost, then they became one

503
00:53:22,640 --> 00:53:29,840
of the most prosperous countries in the world because their enemies that defeated them evidently

504
00:53:29,840 --> 00:53:35,440
supported them and allowed them to become such a prosperous and successful nation.

505
00:53:35,440 --> 00:53:41,920
So, you know, if you can lose the war and still be so successful, obviously you could just have

506
00:53:41,920 --> 00:53:48,400
script the war. You didn't need it. I mean, you really had to have the war in order to have a

507
00:53:48,400 --> 00:53:53,040
prosperous Germany in the 19th century. Absolutely not. And it's the same with Japan. It's the same

508
00:53:53,040 --> 00:54:00,400
with Italy. So, it was not inevitable. It was not the forces of history that necessitated,

509
00:54:01,040 --> 00:54:10,320
that forced Germany to take this path. I think part of it is part of the appeal of, again,

510
00:54:10,320 --> 00:54:18,400
Hitler was a very, very skillful storyteller. He sold people a story. The fact that he was nobody

511
00:54:19,120 --> 00:54:26,960
made it even more effective because people at that time, after the defeat of the First World War,

512
00:54:26,960 --> 00:54:34,640
after the repeated economic crisis of the 1920s in Germany, people felt betrayed by all the

513
00:54:35,600 --> 00:54:41,360
established elites, by all the established institutions, all these professors and

514
00:54:41,360 --> 00:54:45,760
politicians and industrialists and military, all the big people, they led us

515
00:54:46,880 --> 00:54:52,720
to a disastrous war. They led us to humiliation. So, we don't want any of them. And then you have

516
00:54:52,720 --> 00:54:59,760
this nobody, a corporal with no money, with no education, with no titles, with nothing. And

517
00:54:59,760 --> 00:55:06,400
he tells people, I'm one of you. And this was one reason why he was so popular.

518
00:55:07,600 --> 00:55:13,760
And then the story he told, when you look at stories, at the competition between different

519
00:55:13,760 --> 00:55:20,400
stories and between stories, fiction, and the truth, the truth has two big problems.

520
00:55:21,360 --> 00:55:26,640
The truth tends to be complicated and the truth tends to be painful.

521
00:55:28,160 --> 00:55:35,120
The real story of, let's talk about nations, the real story of every nation is complicated.

522
00:55:35,920 --> 00:55:43,600
And it contains some painful episodes. We are not always good. We sometimes do bad things. Now,

523
00:55:43,600 --> 00:55:49,920
if you go to people and you tell them a complicated and painful story, many of them

524
00:55:49,920 --> 00:55:55,840
don't want to listen. The advantage of fiction is that it can be made as simple

525
00:55:56,800 --> 00:56:00,800
and as painless or attractive as you want it to be because it's fiction.

526
00:56:02,480 --> 00:56:10,000
And then what you see is that politicians like Hitler, they create a very simple story.

527
00:56:10,000 --> 00:56:15,280
We are the heroes. We always do good things. Everybody's against us. Everybody's trying to

528
00:56:16,080 --> 00:56:21,840
trample us. And this is very attractive. One of the things people don't understand about

529
00:56:21,840 --> 00:56:29,360
Nazism and fascism, we teach in schools about fascism and Nazism as this ultimate evil,

530
00:56:29,920 --> 00:56:40,560
the ultimate monster in human history. And at some level, this is wrong because it actually

531
00:56:40,560 --> 00:56:45,360
exposes us. Why? Because people hear, oh, fascism is this monster.

532
00:56:46,160 --> 00:56:53,840
And then when you hear the actual fascist story, what fascists tell you is always

533
00:56:54,480 --> 00:56:59,840
very beautiful and attractive. Fascists are people who come and tell you, you are wonderful.

534
00:57:00,560 --> 00:57:05,280
You belong to the most wonderful group of people in the world. You are beautiful.

535
00:57:05,280 --> 00:57:10,080
You are ethical. Everything you do is good. You have never done anything wrong.

536
00:57:10,080 --> 00:57:15,600
There are all these evil monsters out there that are out to get you, and they are causing

537
00:57:15,600 --> 00:57:20,880
all the problems in the world. And when people hear that, it's like looking in the mirror

538
00:57:21,680 --> 00:57:26,960
and seeing something very beautiful. Hey, I'm beautiful. We've never done anything wrong.

539
00:57:26,960 --> 00:57:35,280
We are victims. And when you look and you heard in school that fascists are monsters,

540
00:57:35,280 --> 00:57:39,760
and you look in the mirror, you see something very beautiful. And you say, I can't be a fascist

541
00:57:39,760 --> 00:57:45,840
because fascists are monsters, and this is so beautiful, so it can't be. But when you look

542
00:57:45,840 --> 00:57:52,720
in the fascist mirror, you never see a monster. You see the most beautiful thing in the world.

543
00:57:53,520 --> 00:58:00,400
And that's the danger. This is the problem with Hollywood. I look at Voldemort in Harry Potter.

544
00:58:00,400 --> 00:58:07,280
Who would like to follow this creep? And you look at Darth Vader. This is not somebody you would

545
00:58:07,280 --> 00:58:13,840
like to follow. Christianity got things much better when it described the devil as being very

546
00:58:13,840 --> 00:58:19,920
beautiful and attractive. That's the danger, that you see something as very beautiful,

547
00:58:19,920 --> 00:58:25,680
you don't understand the monster underneath. And you write precisely about this. And by the way,

548
00:58:25,680 --> 00:58:32,400
it's just a small aside. It always saddens me when people say how obvious it is to them that

549
00:58:32,400 --> 00:58:40,640
communism is a flawed ideology. When you ask them, try to put your mind, try to put yourself

550
00:58:41,280 --> 00:58:45,760
in the beginning of the 20th century and see what you would do. A lot of people will say,

551
00:58:45,760 --> 00:58:51,360
it's obvious that it's a flawed ideology. So I mean, I suppose to some of the worst ideologies

552
00:58:51,360 --> 00:58:56,000
in human history, you could say the same. And in that mirror, when you look, it looks beautiful.

553
00:58:56,000 --> 00:58:59,360
Yeah. Communism is the same. Also, you look in the communist mirror,

554
00:58:59,360 --> 00:59:05,520
you're the most ethical, wonderful place, person ever. It's very difficult to see Stalin

555
00:59:05,520 --> 00:59:11,680
underneath it. So yeah, in Homo Deus, you also write during the 19th and 20th centuries,

556
00:59:11,680 --> 00:59:15,680
as humanism gained increasing social credibility and political power,

557
00:59:15,680 --> 00:59:21,120
it sprouted two very different offshoots. Socialist humanism, which encompassed a plethora of

558
00:59:21,120 --> 00:59:26,960
socialist and communist movements, and evolutionary humanism, whose most famous advocates were the

559
00:59:26,960 --> 00:59:32,000
Nazis. So if you can just linger on that, what's the ideological connection between

560
00:59:32,000 --> 00:59:38,800
Nazism and communism as embodied by humanism? And humanism basically is, you know, the focus

561
00:59:38,800 --> 00:59:46,560
is on humans, that they are the most important thing in the world. They move history. But then

562
00:59:46,560 --> 00:59:52,480
there is a big question, what is, what are humans? What is humanity? Now, liberals,

563
00:59:52,480 --> 01:00:00:02,480
they place at the center of the story, individual humans, and they don't see history as a kind of

564
01:00:02,480 --> 01:00:09,440
necessary collision between big forces. They place the individual at the center. If you want to know,

565
01:00:09,440 --> 01:00:15,360
you know, there is a bad, especially in the US today, liberal is taken as the opposite of

566
01:00:15,360 --> 01:00:21,680
conservative. But it's, to test whether you're liberal, you need to answer just three questions.

567
01:00:21,680 --> 01:00:27,200
Very simple. Do you think people should have the right to choose their own government,

568
01:00:27,840 --> 01:00:33,920
or the government should be imposed by some outside force? Do you think people should have

569
01:00:33,920 --> 01:00:41,520
the right to the liberty to choose their own profession, or either born into some caste that

570
01:00:41,520 --> 01:00:46,640
predetermines what they do? And do you think people should have the liberty to choose their

571
01:00:46,640 --> 01:00:54,080
own spouse and their own way of personal life, instead of being told by elders or parents who

572
01:00:54,080 --> 01:00:59,520
to marry and how to live? Now, if you answered yes to all three questions, people should have

573
01:00:59,520 --> 01:01:04,800
the liberty to choose their government, their profession, their personal lives, their spouse,

574
01:01:04,800 --> 01:01:14,080
then you're a liberal. And most conservatives are also liberal. Now, communists and fascists,

575
01:01:14,080 --> 01:01:21,440
they answer differently. For them, history is not, yes, history is about humans. Humans are the

576
01:01:21,440 --> 01:01:28,960
big heroes of history, but not individual humans and their liberties. Fascists imagine history as

577
01:01:28,960 --> 01:01:39,360
a clash between races or nations. The nation is at the center. They say the supreme good is the good

578
01:01:39,360 --> 01:01:46,320
of the nation. You should have 100% loyalty only to the nation. Liberals say, yes, you should be

579
01:01:46,320 --> 01:01:50,720
loyal to the nation, but it's not the only thing. There are other things in the world. There are

580
01:01:50,720 --> 01:01:58,080
human rights. There is truth. There is beauty. Many times, yes, you should prefer the interests

581
01:01:58,080 --> 01:02:04,960
of your nation over other things, but not always. If your nation tells you to murder millions of

582
01:02:04,960 --> 01:02:08,960
innocent people, you don't do that, even though the nation tells you to do it.

583
01:02:11,760 --> 01:02:18,720
To lie for the national interest, in extreme situations, maybe, but in many cases,

584
01:02:18,720 --> 01:02:25,680
your loyalty should be to the truth, even if it makes your nation look a bit not in the best

585
01:02:25,680 --> 01:02:31,600
light. The same with beauty. How does a fascist determine whether a movie is a good movie?

586
01:02:32,160 --> 01:02:37,600
Very simple. If it serves the interest of the nation, this is a good movie. If it's against

587
01:02:37,600 --> 01:02:43,360
the interest of the nation, this is a bad movie. End of story. Liberalism says, no, there are

588
01:02:44,400 --> 01:02:51,840
aesthetic values in the world. We should judge movies not just on the question whether they

589
01:02:51,840 --> 01:03:00,160
serve the national interest, but also on autistic value. Communists are a bit like the fascists.

590
01:03:00,160 --> 01:03:06,640
Instead, they don't place the nation as the main hero. They place class as the main hero.

591
01:03:06,640 --> 01:03:10,560
For them, history, again, it's not about individuals. It's not about nations. History

592
01:03:10,560 --> 01:03:17,280
is the clash between classes. Just as fascists imagine in the end, only one nation will be on

593
01:03:17,280 --> 01:03:23,600
top, the communists think in the end, only one class should be on top, and that's the proletariat.

594
01:03:24,400 --> 01:03:34,400
Same story. 100% of your loyalty should be to the class. If there is a clash between class and

595
01:03:34,400 --> 01:03:41,920
family, class wins. In the Soviet Union, the party told children, if you hear your parents

596
01:03:41,920 --> 01:03:48,880
say something bad about Stalin, you have to report them. There are many cases when children

597
01:03:48,880 --> 01:03:57,120
reported their parents and their parents were sent to the Gulag. Your loyalty is to the party,

598
01:03:57,920 --> 01:04:04,960
which leads the proletariat to victory in the historical struggle. In the same way, in communism,

599
01:04:04,960 --> 01:04:12,480
art is only about class struggle. A movie is good if it serves the interest of the proletariat.

600
01:04:12,480 --> 01:04:18,560
Autistic values, there is nothing like that. The same is with truth. Everything that we see now in

601
01:04:18,560 --> 01:04:28,320
fake news, the communist propaganda machine was there before us. The level of lies, of disinformation

602
01:04:28,320 --> 01:04:36,080
campaigns that they orchestrated in the 1920s and 30s and 40s is really unimaginable.

603
01:04:37,360 --> 01:04:43,680
The reason these two ideologies, classes of ideologies failed is the sacrifice of truth,

604
01:04:44,640 --> 01:04:49,600
not just failed, but did a lot of damage. It's the sacrifice of truth and sacrifice of beauty.

605
01:04:50,160 --> 01:04:54,400
And sacrifice of hundreds of millions of people, disregard, again, for human suffering.

606
01:04:55,280 --> 01:05:02,240
Okay, in order for our nation to win, in order for our class to win, we need to kill those millions,

607
01:05:02,240 --> 01:05:10,400
kill those millions. That was an ethics, aesthetics, truth, they don't matter. The only thing that

608
01:05:10,800 --> 01:05:20,320
matters is the victory of the state or the victory of the class. Liberalism was the antithesis

609
01:05:20,320 --> 01:05:27,200
to that. It says no, not only, it has a much more complicated view of the world.

610
01:05:27,200 --> 01:05:30,960
And both communism and fascism, they have a very simple view of the world.

611
01:05:32,000 --> 01:05:39,520
There is one, your loyalty, 100% of it should be only to one thing. Now, liberalism has a much

612
01:05:39,520 --> 01:05:44,320
more complex view of the world. It says, yes, there are nations, they are important. Yes,

613
01:05:44,320 --> 01:05:49,680
there are classes, they are important, but they are not the only thing. There are also families,

614
01:05:49,680 --> 01:05:57,360
there are also individuals, there are also animals, and your loyalty should be divided

615
01:05:57,360 --> 01:06:03,360
between all of them. Sometimes you prefer this, sometimes you prefer that. That's complicated,

616
01:06:05,040 --> 01:06:06,880
but life is complicated.

617
01:06:07,120 --> 01:06:12,480
Also, I think maybe you can correct me, but liberalism acknowledges the corrupting nature

618
01:06:12,480 --> 01:06:18,080
of power when there's a guy at the top, sits there for a while, managing things,

619
01:06:19,600 --> 01:06:27,840
is probably going to start losing a good sense of reality and losing the capability to be a good

620
01:06:27,840 --> 01:06:35,280
manager. It feels like the communist and fascist regimes don't acknowledge that basic

621
01:06:36,320 --> 01:06:38,880
characteristic of human nature that power corrupts.

622
01:06:38,880 --> 01:06:44,720
Yes, they believe in infallibility. In this sense, they are very close to being religions.

623
01:06:46,080 --> 01:06:52,720
In Nazism, Hitler was considered infallible, and therefore you don't need any checks and balances

624
01:06:52,720 --> 01:06:57,920
on his power. Why do you need to balance an infallible genius? It's the same with the

625
01:06:57,920 --> 01:07:04,400
Soviet Union, with Stalin and more generally with the Communist Party. The party can never

626
01:07:04,400 --> 01:07:10,720
make a mistake, and therefore you don't need independent courts, independent media, opposition

627
01:07:10,720 --> 01:07:16,720
parties, things like that, because the party is never wrong. You concentrate the same way,

628
01:07:16,720 --> 01:07:24,240
100% of loyalty should be to the party, 100% of power should be in the hands of the party.

629
01:07:24,240 --> 01:07:31,520
The whole idea of liberal democracy is embracing fallibility. Everybody is fallible. All people,

630
01:07:31,520 --> 01:07:35,680
all leaders, all political parties, all institutions, this is why we need checks

631
01:07:35,680 --> 01:07:42,080
and balances, and we need many of them. If you have just one, then this particular check

632
01:07:42,640 --> 01:07:51,200
itself could make terrible mistakes. You need a press, you need the media to serve as a check

633
01:07:51,200 --> 01:07:56,160
to the government. You don't have just one newspaper or one TV station. You need many

634
01:07:56,880 --> 01:08:01,760
so that they can balance each other. And the media is not enough, so you have independent courts,

635
01:08:01,760 --> 01:08:07,200
you have free academic institutions, you have NGOs, you have a lot of checks and balances.

636
01:08:08,000 --> 01:08:12,800
So that's the ideologies and the leaders. What about the individual people, the millions of

637
01:08:12,800 --> 01:08:24,640
people that play a part in all of this, that are the hosts of the stories, that are the catalysts

638
01:08:24,640 --> 01:08:32,880
and the components of how the story spreads? Would you say that all of us are capable of spreading

639
01:08:32,880 --> 01:08:42,000
any story, sort of the Solzhenitsyn idea that all of us are capable of good and evil,

640
01:08:42,640 --> 01:08:45,520
the line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man?

641
01:08:46,320 --> 01:08:53,920
Yes. I wouldn't say that every person is capable of every type of evil, but we are all fallible.

642
01:08:55,280 --> 01:09:02,560
There is a large element. It partly depends on the efforts we make to develop our self-awareness

643
01:09:02,560 --> 01:09:12,240
during life. Part of it depends on moral luck. If you are born as a Christian German

644
01:09:14,320 --> 01:09:21,680
in the 1910s or 1920s and you grow up in Nazi Germany, that's bad moral luck. Your chances

645
01:09:21,680 --> 01:09:25,680
of committing terrible things, you have a very high chance of doing it.

646
01:09:26,240 --> 01:09:34,240
And you can withstand it, but it will take tremendous effort. If you are born in Germany

647
01:09:34,240 --> 01:09:42,080
after the war, you're morally lucky. You will not be put to such a test. You will not need to exert

648
01:09:42,080 --> 01:09:49,840
these enormous efforts not to commit atrocities. This is just part of history. There is an element

649
01:09:49,920 --> 01:09:56,560
of luck, but again, part of it is also self-awareness. You asked me earlier about

650
01:09:58,080 --> 01:10:03,280
the potential of power to corrupt. I listened to the interview you just did with Prime Minister

651
01:10:03,280 --> 01:10:08,960
Netanyahu a couple of days ago. One of the things that most struck me during the interview is that

652
01:10:10,720 --> 01:10:17,440
you asked him, are you afraid of this thing, that power corrupts? He didn't think for a single

653
01:10:17,440 --> 01:10:28,400
second. He didn't pose, he didn't admit a tiny little level of doubt. No, power doesn't corrupt.

654
01:10:30,080 --> 01:10:37,680
For me, it was a shocking and a revealing moment. And it dovetails with how you began the interview

655
01:10:38,320 --> 01:10:45,600
that I really liked your opening gambit. You told him lots of people in the world

656
01:10:46,160 --> 01:10:51,760
are angry with you, some people hate you, they dislike you. What do you want to

657
01:10:53,200 --> 01:11:00,320
tell them, to say to them? And you gave him this kind of platform. And I was very, what will he say?

658
01:11:00,960 --> 01:11:07,760
And he just denied it. He basically denied it. He had to cut short the interview from three hours

659
01:11:07,760 --> 01:11:13,680
to one hour because you had hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets demonstrating against

660
01:11:13,680 --> 01:11:16,880
him. And he goes and says, no, everybody likes me. What are you talking about?

661
01:11:17,920 --> 01:11:23,120
But on that topic, you've said recently that the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,

662
01:11:24,160 --> 01:11:29,120
may go down in history as the man who destroys Israel. Can you explain what you mean by that?

663
01:11:30,400 --> 01:11:36,960
Yes. I mean, he is basically tearing apart the social contract that held this country together

664
01:11:36,960 --> 01:11:44,480
for 75 years. He's destroying the foundations of Israeli democracy. You know, I don't want to go

665
01:11:44,480 --> 01:11:50,080
too deep unless he wants it because I guess most of our listeners, they have bigger issues on their

666
01:11:50,080 --> 01:11:55,360
minds than the fate of some small country in the Middle East. But for those who want to understand

667
01:11:55,360 --> 01:12:02,160
what's happening in Israel, there is really just one question to ask. What limits the power of the

668
01:12:02,160 --> 01:12:10,000
government? In the United States, for instance, there are a lot of checks and balances that limit

669
01:12:10,000 --> 01:12:16,880
the power of the government. You have the Supreme Court, you have the Senate, you have the House of

670
01:12:16,880 --> 01:12:22,480
Representatives, you have the President, you have the Constitution, you have 50 states, each state

671
01:12:22,480 --> 01:12:29,600
with its own constitution and Supreme Court and Congress and Governor. If somebody wants to pass

672
01:12:29,600 --> 01:12:35,440
a dangerous legislation, say in the House, it will have to go through so many obstacles.

673
01:12:35,440 --> 01:12:43,280
Like if you want to pass a law in the United States taking away voting rights from Jews

674
01:12:43,280 --> 01:12:48,960
or from Muslims or from African Americans, even if it passes, even if it has a majority in the

675
01:12:48,960 --> 01:12:54,720
House of Representatives, it is a very, very, very small chance of becoming the law of the country

676
01:12:54,720 --> 01:12:58,320
because it will have to pass again through the Senate, through the President, through the Supreme

677
01:12:58,320 --> 01:13:05,920
Court and all the federal structure. In Israel, we have just a single check on the power of the

678
01:13:05,920 --> 01:13:11,200
government and that's the Supreme Court. There is really no difference between the government and

679
01:13:11,200 --> 01:13:18,240
the legislature because there are no separate elections like in the U.S. If you win majority

680
01:13:18,240 --> 01:13:24,640
in the Knesset, in the Parliament, you appoint the government. That's very simple. And if you have 61

681
01:13:24,640 --> 01:13:31,520
members of Knesset who vote, let's say, on a law to take away voting rights from Arab citizens

682
01:13:31,520 --> 01:13:36,960
of Israel, there is a single check that can prevent it from becoming the law of the land

683
01:13:36,960 --> 01:13:43,200
and that's the Supreme Court. And now the Netanyahu government is trying to neutralize or take over

684
01:13:43,200 --> 01:13:48,880
the Supreme Court and they've already prepared a long list of laws. They already talk about it.

685
01:13:49,680 --> 01:13:57,040
What will happen the moment that this last check on the power is gone? They are openly

686
01:13:57,040 --> 01:14:03,680
trying to gain unlimited power and they openly talk about it. That once they have it,

687
01:14:04,560 --> 01:14:12,240
then they will take away the rights of Arabs, of LGBT people, of women, of secular Jews.

688
01:14:12,400 --> 01:14:16,880
This is why you have hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. You have

689
01:14:17,760 --> 01:14:26,720
air force pilots saying, we stop flying. This is unheard of in Israel. We are still living

690
01:14:26,720 --> 01:14:33,840
under existential threat from Iran, from other enemies. And in the middle of this, you have

691
01:14:33,840 --> 01:14:39,600
air force pilots who dedicated their lives to protecting the country and they are saying,

692
01:14:40,160 --> 01:14:45,680
that's it. If this government doesn't stop what it is doing, we stop flying.

693
01:14:47,280 --> 01:14:53,440
So as you said, I just did the interview and as we were doing the interview, there's protests in

694
01:14:53,440 --> 01:15:00,320
the streets. Do you think the protests will have an effect? I hope so very much. I'm going to many

695
01:15:00,320 --> 01:15:06,880
of these protests. I hope they will have an effect. If we fail, this is the end of Israeli

696
01:15:06,880 --> 01:15:13,360
democracy probably. This will have repercussions far beyond the borders of Israel. Israel is a

697
01:15:13,360 --> 01:15:20,960
nuclear power. Israel has one of the most advanced cyber capabilities in the world,

698
01:15:20,960 --> 01:15:28,080
able to strike basically anywhere in the world. If this country becomes a fundamentalist

699
01:15:28,080 --> 01:15:34,560
and militarist dictatorship, it can set fire to the entire Middle East. It can again have

700
01:15:34,560 --> 01:15:43,280
destabilizing effects far beyond the borders of Israel. So you think without the check on power

701
01:15:43,280 --> 01:15:50,480
it's possible that the Netanyahu government holds on to power? Nobody tries to gain unlimited power

702
01:15:50,480 --> 01:15:55,840
just for nothing. I mean, you have so many problems in Israel and Netanyahu talks so much

703
01:15:55,840 --> 01:16:02,000
about Iran and the Palestinians and Hezbollah. We have an economic crisis. Why is it so urgent

704
01:16:02,000 --> 01:16:09,360
at this moment in the face of such opposition? Why is it so crucial for them to neutralize the

705
01:16:09,360 --> 01:16:14,960
Supreme Court? They are just doing it for the fun of it? No. They know what they are doing.

706
01:16:17,360 --> 01:16:22,320
We are not sure of it before. There was like a couple of months ago they came out with this

707
01:16:22,320 --> 01:16:26,640
plan to take over the Supreme Court, to have all these laws, and there were hundreds of thousands

708
01:16:26,640 --> 01:16:32,400
people in the streets, again soldiers saying they will stop serving a general strike in the

709
01:16:32,400 --> 01:16:39,280
economy, and they stopped. And they started a process of negotiations to try and enrich a

710
01:16:39,280 --> 01:16:46,160
settlement. And then they broke down, they stopped the negotiations, and they restarted

711
01:16:46,160 --> 01:16:54,560
this process of legislation, trying to gain unlimited power. So any doubt we had before,

712
01:16:54,960 --> 01:17:03,760
maybe they changed their purposes. No. It's now very clear they are 100% focused on gaining

713
01:17:03,760 --> 01:17:10,160
absolute power. They are now trying a different tactic. Previously they had all these dozens of

714
01:17:10,160 --> 01:17:15,760
laws that they wanted to pass very quickly within a month or two. They realized, no,

715
01:17:16,640 --> 01:17:21,840
there is too much opposition. So now they are doing what is known as salami tactics, slice by

716
01:17:21,840 --> 01:17:27,280
slice. Now they are trying to one law. If this succeeds, then they will pass the next one,

717
01:17:27,280 --> 01:17:31,680
and the next one, and the next one. This is why we are now at a very crucial moment.

718
01:17:31,680 --> 01:17:36,320
And what you see again, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets almost every day,

719
01:17:36,320 --> 01:17:41,920
when you see resistance within the armed forces, within the security forces, you see high tech

720
01:17:41,920 --> 01:17:48,240
companies saying, we will go on strike. You know, it's our private businesses. High tech companies,

721
01:17:48,800 --> 01:17:55,280
I think it's almost unprecedented for private business to go on strike. Because what will

722
01:17:56,080 --> 01:18:03,680
economic success benefit us if we live under a messianic dictatorship? And again, the fuel for

723
01:18:03,680 --> 01:18:12,480
this whole thing is to a large extent coming from messianic religious groups. Which just the thought,

724
01:18:12,480 --> 01:18:20,400
what happens if these people have unlimited control of Israel's nuclear arsenal and Israel's

725
01:18:20,400 --> 01:18:26,000
military capabilities and cyber capabilities? This is very, very scary, not just for the

726
01:18:26,000 --> 01:18:35,760
citizens of Israel. It should be scary for people everywhere. So it would be scary for it to go from

727
01:18:35,760 --> 01:18:41,040
being a problem of security and protecting the peace to becoming a religious war?

728
01:18:41,680 --> 01:18:47,600
It is already becoming a religious war. I mean, the war, the conflict with the Palestinians was

729
01:18:47,600 --> 01:18:54,800
for many years a national conflict, in essence. Over the last few years, maybe a decade or two,

730
01:18:54,800 --> 01:19:02,480
it is morphing into a religious conflict, which is again a very worrying development. When nations

731
01:19:02,480 --> 01:19:07,600
are in conflict, you can reach some compromise. Okay, you have this bit of land, we have this bit

732
01:19:07,600 --> 01:19:13,840
of land. But when it becomes a religious conflict between fundamentalists, between messianic people,

733
01:19:14,480 --> 01:19:21,040
compromise becomes much more difficult because you don't compromise on eternity. You don't

734
01:19:21,040 --> 01:19:28,320
compromise on God. And this is where we are heading right now. So I know you said it's a small nation

735
01:19:29,120 --> 01:19:35,120
somewhere in the Middle East, but it also happens to be the epicenter of one of the longest running,

736
01:19:35,120 --> 01:19:41,920
one of the most tense conflicts and crises in human history. So at the very least, it serves as a

737
01:19:41,920 --> 01:19:47,920
study of how conflict can be resolved. So what are the biggest obstacles to you

738
01:19:49,680 --> 01:19:55,520
to achieving peace in this part of the world? Motivation. I think it's easy to achieve peace

739
01:19:55,520 --> 01:20:01,200
if you have the motivation on both sides. Unfortunately, the present juncture,

740
01:20:01,200 --> 01:20:06,880
there is not enough motivation on either side, either the Palestinian or Israeli side.

741
01:20:06,880 --> 01:20:15,120
Peace, in mathematics, you have problems without solutions. You can prove mathematically that this

742
01:20:15,120 --> 01:20:22,240
mathematical problem has no solution. In politics, there is no such thing. All problems have

743
01:20:22,240 --> 01:20:29,680
solutions if you have the motivation. But motivation is the big problem. And again,

744
01:20:29,680 --> 01:20:37,280
we can go into the reasons why. But the fact is that on neither side, is there enough motivation?

745
01:20:37,280 --> 01:20:42,960
If there was motivation, the solution would have been easy. Is there an important distinction to

746
01:20:42,960 --> 01:20:50,800
draw between the people on the street and the leaders in power in terms of motivation? So

747
01:20:51,200 --> 01:20:59,600
are most people motivated and hoping for peace and the leaders are motivated and incentivized

748
01:20:59,600 --> 01:21:04,400
to continue war? I don't think so. Or the people also? I think it's a deep problem. It's also the

749
01:21:04,400 --> 01:21:11,840
people. It's not just the leaders. Is it even a human problem of literally hate in people's heart?

750
01:21:11,840 --> 01:21:17,680
Yeah, there is a lot of hate. One of the things that happened in Israel over the last 10 years

751
01:21:18,640 --> 01:21:25,600
or so, Israel became much stronger than it was before, largely thanks to technological developments.

752
01:21:26,400 --> 01:21:33,120
And it feels that it no longer needs to compromise. There are many reasons for it,

753
01:21:33,120 --> 01:21:43,920
but some of them are technological. Being one of the leading powers in cyber, in AI, in high tech,

754
01:21:44,880 --> 01:21:52,640
we have developed very sophisticated ways to more easily control the Palestinian population.

755
01:21:53,280 --> 01:21:59,760
In the early 2000s, it seemed that it is becoming impossible to control millions of people against

756
01:21:59,760 --> 01:22:07,920
their will. It took too much power. It spilled too much blood on both sides. So there was an

757
01:22:07,920 --> 01:22:13,280
impression, oh, this is becoming untenable. And there are several reasons why it changed,

758
01:22:13,280 --> 01:22:19,600
but one of them was new technology. Israel developed very sophisticated surveillance technology

759
01:22:20,560 --> 01:22:27,280
that has made it much easier for Israeli security forces to control 2.5 million Palestinians

760
01:22:27,280 --> 01:22:35,840
in the West Bank against their will, with a lot less effort, less boots on the ground,

761
01:22:35,840 --> 01:22:44,000
also less blood. And Israel is also now exporting this technology to many other regimes around the

762
01:22:44,000 --> 01:22:49,440
world. Again, I heard Netanyahu speaking about all the wonderful things that Israel is exporting

763
01:22:49,440 --> 01:22:55,520
to the world, and it's true. We are exporting some nice things. Water systems and new kinds of

764
01:22:55,520 --> 01:23:05,280
tomatoes. We are also exporting a lot of weapons and especially surveillance systems, sometimes to

765
01:23:05,280 --> 01:23:14,400
unsavory regimes in order to control their populations. Can you comment on, I think you've

766
01:23:14,400 --> 01:23:21,520
mentioned that the current state of affairs is a de facto three class state. Can you describe

767
01:23:21,600 --> 01:23:26,480
what you mean by that? Yes, for many years, the kind of leading solution to the Israeli-Palestinian

768
01:23:26,480 --> 01:23:30,560
conflict is the two-state solution. Can you describe what that means by the way? Yes, two

769
01:23:30,560 --> 01:23:37,680
states within between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean will have two states, Israel as a

770
01:23:37,680 --> 01:23:43,760
predominantly Jewish state and Palestine as a predominantly Palestinian state. Again, there are

771
01:23:43,760 --> 01:23:48,160
lots of discussions where the border passes, what happens with security arrangement and whatever,

772
01:23:48,160 --> 01:23:54,000
but this was the big solution. Israel has basically abandoned the two-state solution.

773
01:23:54,000 --> 01:23:58,960
Maybe they don't say so officially, the people in power, but in terms of what they do on the

774
01:23:58,960 --> 01:24:06,880
ground, they abandoned it. Now they are effectively promoting the three-class solution, which means

775
01:24:06,880 --> 01:24:13,440
there is just one country and one government and one power between the Mediterranean and the Jordan

776
01:24:13,440 --> 01:24:21,280
River, but you have three classes of people living there. You have Jews who enjoy full

777
01:24:21,840 --> 01:24:28,640
rights, all the rights. You have some Arabs who are Israeli citizens and have some rights,

778
01:24:28,640 --> 01:24:33,440
and then you have the other Arabs, the third class, who have basically no civil rights and

779
01:24:33,440 --> 01:24:40,800
limited human rights. Again, nobody would openly speak about it, but effectively, this is the

780
01:24:40,800 --> 01:24:44,960
reality on the ground already. There are many, and I'll speak with them, Palestinians who

781
01:24:44,960 --> 01:24:51,440
characterize this as a de facto one-state apartheid. Do you agree with this?

782
01:24:51,440 --> 01:24:55,440
I would take issue with the term apartheid. Generally speaking, as a historian, I don't

783
01:24:55,440 --> 01:25:00,800
really like historical analogies because there are always differences, key differences. The biggest

784
01:25:00,800 --> 01:25:06,400
difference between the situation here and the situation in South Africa in the time of the

785
01:25:06,400 --> 01:25:15,680
apartheid is that black South Africans did not deny the existence of South Africa and did not

786
01:25:15,680 --> 01:25:23,280
call for the destruction of South Africa. They had a very simple goal. They had a very simple demand.

787
01:25:24,320 --> 01:25:30,480
We want to be equal citizens of this country. That's it. And the apartheid regime was, no,

788
01:25:30,480 --> 01:25:36,480
you can't be equal citizens. Now, in Israel, Palestine, it's different. The Palestinians,

789
01:25:36,480 --> 01:25:43,040
many of them don't recognize the existence of Israel, are not willing to recognize it,

790
01:25:43,040 --> 01:25:49,280
and they don't demand to be citizens of Israel. They demand, some of them, to destroy it and

791
01:25:49,280 --> 01:25:56,240
replace it with a Palestinian state. Some of them demand a separate state. But if the Palestinians

792
01:25:56,320 --> 01:26:03,280
would adopt the same policy as the black South Africans, if you have the Palestinians coming

793
01:26:03,280 --> 01:26:08,560
and saying, okay, forget about it. We don't want to destroy Israel. We don't know a Palestinian

794
01:26:08,560 --> 01:26:15,440
country. We have a very simple request, very simple demand. Give us our full rights. We also

795
01:26:15,440 --> 01:26:20,640
want to vote to the Knesset. We also want to get the full protection of the law. That's it. That's

796
01:26:20,640 --> 01:26:27,360
our only demand. Israel will be in deep, deep trouble at that moment. But we are not there.

797
01:26:28,400 --> 01:26:32,960
I wonder if there will ever be a future when such a thing happens, where everybody,

798
01:26:32,960 --> 01:26:41,200
the majority of people, Arab and Jew, Israeli and Palestinian, accept the one-state solution

799
01:26:41,200 --> 01:26:49,040
and say we want equal rights. Never say never in history. It's not coming anytime soon from either

800
01:26:49,040 --> 01:26:55,840
side. When you look at the long term of history, one of the curious things you see,

801
01:26:56,400 --> 01:27:01,840
and that's what makes us different human groups from animal species. Gorillas and chimpanzees,

802
01:27:01,840 --> 01:27:07,440
they are separate species. They can never merge. Cats and dogs will never merge. But

803
01:27:08,160 --> 01:27:12,960
different national and religious groups in history, even when they hate each other,

804
01:27:12,960 --> 01:27:18,400
surprisingly, they sometimes end by merging. If you look at Germany, for instance,

805
01:27:19,120 --> 01:27:25,760
for centuries, you had Prussians and Bavarians and Saxons who fought each other ferociously

806
01:27:25,760 --> 01:27:30,320
and hated each other. They are sometimes also of different religions, Catholics, Protestants.

807
01:27:30,880 --> 01:27:37,200
The worst war in European history, according to some measures, was not the Second World War

808
01:27:37,200 --> 01:27:43,840
or the First World War. It was the Thirty Years' War waged largely on German soil between Germans,

809
01:27:43,840 --> 01:27:50,640
Protestants and Catholics. But eventually, they united to form a single country. You saw the same

810
01:27:50,640 --> 01:27:55,760
thing, I don't know, in Britain. English and Scots for centuries hated and fought each other

811
01:27:55,760 --> 01:28:03,440
ferociously. Eventually coming together, maybe they'll break up again. I don't know. But the

812
01:28:03,520 --> 01:28:12,000
power of the kind of forces of merger in history, you're very often influenced by the people you

813
01:28:12,000 --> 01:28:16,880
fight, by the people you even hate, more than by almost anybody else.

814
01:28:18,640 --> 01:28:24,880
So if we apply those ideas, the ideas of this part of the world, to another part of the world

815
01:28:24,880 --> 01:28:31,760
that's currently in war, Russia and Ukraine, from what you learned here, how do you think

816
01:28:31,760 --> 01:28:38,000
peace can be achieved in Ukraine? Peace can be achieved any moment. It's motivation. In this

817
01:28:38,000 --> 01:28:43,120
case, it's just one person. You just, Putin just needs to say, that's it. The Ukrainians,

818
01:28:43,120 --> 01:28:48,320
they don't demand anything from Russia, just go home. That's the only thing they want. They

819
01:28:48,320 --> 01:28:52,960
don't want to conquer any bit of Russian territory. They don't want to change the regime in Moscow,

820
01:28:52,960 --> 01:29:00,240
nothing. They just tell the Russians, go home. That's it. And of course, again, motivation. How

821
01:29:00,240 --> 01:29:07,360
do you get somebody like Putin to admit that he made a colossal mistake, a human mistake,

822
01:29:07,360 --> 01:29:13,120
an ethical mistake, a political mistake in starting this war? This is very, very difficult.

823
01:29:13,680 --> 01:29:20,400
But in terms of what would the solution look like, very simple, the Russians go home. End of story.

824
01:29:21,520 --> 01:29:28,720
Do you believe in the power of conversation between leaders to sit down as human beings

825
01:29:30,480 --> 01:29:36,960
and agree, first of all, what home means, because we humans draw lines?

826
01:29:36,960 --> 01:29:41,920
That's true. I believe in the power of conversation. The big question to ask is where.

827
01:29:42,640 --> 01:29:48,880
Where do conversations, real conversations take place? And this is tricky. One of the

828
01:29:48,880 --> 01:29:54,320
interesting things to ask about any conflict, about any political system, is where do the

829
01:29:54,320 --> 01:30:00,800
real conversations take place? And very often, they don't take place in the places you think

830
01:30:01,600 --> 01:30:07,680
they are. But think about American politics. When the country was founded in the late 18th

831
01:30:07,680 --> 01:30:13,600
century, people understood holding conversation between leaders is very important for the

832
01:30:13,600 --> 01:30:18,000
functioning of democracy. We'll create a place for that. That's called Congress.

833
01:30:18,560 --> 01:30:23,440
This is where leaders are supposed to meet and talk about the main issues of the day.

834
01:30:24,080 --> 01:30:31,440
Maybe there was a time, sometime in the past, when this actually happened, when you had two

835
01:30:33,280 --> 01:30:39,840
factions holding different ideas about foreign policy or economic policy, and they met in Congress,

836
01:30:39,840 --> 01:30:43,840
and somebody would come and give a speech, and the people on the other side would say,

837
01:30:43,840 --> 01:30:48,240
hey, that's interesting. I haven't thought about it. Yes, maybe we can agree on that.

838
01:30:49,040 --> 01:30:54,400
This is no longer happening in Congress. I don't think there is any speech in Congress

839
01:30:54,400 --> 01:30:59,120
that causes anybody on the other side to change their opinion about anything.

840
01:31:00,320 --> 01:31:06,000
So this is no longer a place where real conversations take place. The big question

841
01:31:06,000 --> 01:31:13,680
about American democracy is, is there a place where real conversations, which actually change

842
01:31:13,680 --> 01:31:21,360
people's minds, still take place? If not, then this democracy is dying also. Democracy with our

843
01:31:21,360 --> 01:31:26,960
conversation cannot exist for long. It's the same question you should ask also about dictatorial

844
01:31:26,960 --> 01:31:32,000
regimes. You think about Russia or China. China has the great hall of the people.

845
01:31:33,120 --> 01:31:37,360
Well, the representatives, the supposed representatives of the people, meet every

846
01:31:37,360 --> 01:31:43,920
now and then, but no real conversation takes place there. A key question to ask about the Chinese

847
01:31:43,920 --> 01:31:51,520
system is, behind closed doors, let's say in a Politburo meeting, do people have a real conversation?

848
01:31:52,160 --> 01:31:59,200
If Xi Jinping says one thing and some other big shot thinks differently, will they have the

849
01:31:59,200 --> 01:32:04,720
courage, the ability, the backbone to say, with all due respect, I think differently,

850
01:32:04,720 --> 01:32:10,240
and there is a real conversation? Or not? I don't know the answer. But this is a key question.

851
01:32:11,040 --> 01:32:17,760
This is the difference between an authoritarian regime can still have different voices within it.

852
01:32:18,800 --> 01:32:26,080
But at a certain point, you have a personality cult. Nobody dares say anything against the leader.

853
01:32:27,040 --> 01:32:34,160
And when it comes again to Ukrainian Russia, I don't think that if you somehow manage to get

854
01:32:34,160 --> 01:32:39,200
Putin and Zelensky to the same room, when everybody knows that they are there and they'll

855
01:32:39,200 --> 01:32:45,920
have a moment of empathy or human connection and they have a... No, I don't think it can happen

856
01:32:45,920 --> 01:32:56,720
like that. I do hope that there are other spaces where somebody like Putin can still have a real

857
01:32:56,720 --> 01:33:00,720
human conversation. I don't know if this is the case. I hope so.

858
01:33:00,720 --> 01:33:03,840
Well, there are several interesting dynamics and you spoke to some of them. So

859
01:33:04,160 --> 01:33:09,760
one is internally with advisors. You have to have hope that there's people that would disagree,

860
01:33:09,760 --> 01:33:15,520
that would have a lively debate internally. Then there's also the thing you mentioned,

861
01:33:15,520 --> 01:33:20,560
which is direct communication between Putin and Zelensky in private, picking up a phone,

862
01:33:21,760 --> 01:33:29,440
rotary phone, old school. I still believe in the power of that. But while that's exceptionally

863
01:33:29,440 --> 01:33:34,400
difficult in the current state of affairs, what's also possible to have is a mediator

864
01:33:34,400 --> 01:33:40,000
like the United States or some other leader, like the leader of Israel or the leader of another

865
01:33:40,000 --> 01:33:47,120
nation that's respected by both or India, for example, that can have, first of all, individual

866
01:33:47,120 --> 01:33:53,920
conversations and then literally get into a room together. It is possible. I would say more

867
01:33:53,920 --> 01:34:00,160
generally about conversations as it goes back a little to what I said earlier about the Marxist

868
01:34:00,160 --> 01:34:08,880
view of history. One of the problematic things I see today in many academic circles is that people

869
01:34:08,880 --> 01:34:16,880
focus too much on power. They think that the whole of history or the whole of politics is just a

870
01:34:16,960 --> 01:34:24,240
power structure. It's just struggle about power. Now, if you think that the whole of history and

871
01:34:24,240 --> 01:34:32,240
the whole of politics is only power, then there is no room for conversation. Because if what you

872
01:34:32,240 --> 01:34:38,640
have is a struggle between different powerful interests, there is no point talking. The only

873
01:34:38,640 --> 01:34:47,040
thing that changes it is fighting. My view is that no, it's not all about power structures.

874
01:34:47,040 --> 01:34:52,720
It's not all about power dynamics. Underneath the power structure, there are stories,

875
01:34:53,280 --> 01:35:01,040
stories in human minds. And this is great news. If it's true, this is good news, because unlike

876
01:35:01,040 --> 01:35:09,200
power that can only be changed through fighting, stories can sometimes, it's not easy, but sometimes

877
01:35:09,200 --> 01:35:16,320
stories can be changed through talking. And that's the hope. I think in everything from

878
01:35:16,320 --> 01:35:23,760
couple therapy to nation therapy, if you think it's power therapy, it's all about power, there

879
01:35:23,760 --> 01:35:30,880
is no place for conversation. But if to some extent it's the stories in people's minds,

880
01:35:30,880 --> 01:35:38,640
if you can enable one person to see the story in the mind of another person. And more importantly,

881
01:35:38,640 --> 01:35:45,680
if you can have some kind of critical distance from the story in your own mind, then maybe you

882
01:35:45,680 --> 01:35:51,680
can change it a little. And then you don't need to fight. You can actually find a better story

883
01:35:51,680 --> 01:35:57,520
that you can both agree to. It sometimes happens in history. You know, French and Germans fought

884
01:35:57,520 --> 01:36:03,280
for generations and generations. Now they live in peace. Not because, I don't know,

885
01:36:03,280 --> 01:36:07,760
they found a new planet they can share between France and Germany, so now everybody has enough

886
01:36:07,760 --> 01:36:13,520
territory. No, they actually have less territory than previously, because they lost all their

887
01:36:13,520 --> 01:36:21,200
overseas empires. But they managed to find a story, the European story, that both Germans

888
01:36:21,200 --> 01:36:26,720
and French people are happy with. So they live in peace. I very much believe in this.

889
01:36:27,520 --> 01:36:32,400
Vision that you have of the power of stories and one of the tools is conversations. Another is

890
01:36:32,400 --> 01:36:38,640
books. There's some guy that wrote a book about this power of stories. He happens to be sitting

891
01:36:38,640 --> 01:36:43,120
in front of me and that happened to spread across a lot of people. Now they believe in the power of

892
01:36:43,120 --> 01:36:50,160
story and narrative, even a children's book too. So the kids, I mean, it's fascinating how that

893
01:36:50,160 --> 01:36:59,600
spreads. I mean, underneath your work, there's an optimism. And I think underneath conversations

894
01:36:59,600 --> 01:37:06,560
is what I tried to do is an optimism, that it's not just about power struggles. It's about

895
01:37:06,560 --> 01:37:15,280
stories, which is like a connection between humans and together kind of evolving these stories that

896
01:37:15,280 --> 01:37:22,240
maximize or minimize suffering in the world. This is why I also admire what you're doing,

897
01:37:22,240 --> 01:37:27,920
that you're going to talk with some of the most difficult characters around in the world today.

898
01:37:29,360 --> 01:37:38,800
And with this basic belief that by talking, maybe we can move them an inch, which is a lot

899
01:37:38,800 --> 01:37:43,760
when it comes to people with so much power. I think one of the biggest success stories

900
01:37:43,920 --> 01:37:52,720
in modern history, I would say, is feminism. Because feminism believed in the power of stories,

901
01:37:52,720 --> 01:38:01,600
not so much in the power of violence, of armed conflict. By many measures, feminism has been

902
01:38:01,600 --> 01:38:06,720
maybe the most successful social movement of the 20th century and maybe of the modern age.

903
01:38:07,520 --> 01:38:13,280
You know, the systems of oppression, which were in place throughout the world for thousands of

904
01:38:13,280 --> 01:38:19,440
years. And they seem to be just natural, eternal. You had all these religious movements, all these

905
01:38:19,440 --> 01:38:24,960
political revolutions, and one thing remained constant. And this is the patriarchal system

906
01:38:24,960 --> 01:38:31,120
and the oppression of women. And then feminism came along. And, you know, you had leaders like

907
01:38:31,200 --> 01:38:38,400
Lenin, like Mao, saying that if you want to make a big social change, you must use violence.

908
01:38:38,400 --> 01:38:44,160
Power comes from the barrel of the gun. If you want to make an omelet, you need to break eggs.

909
01:38:44,160 --> 01:38:51,200
And all these things. And the feminists said, no, we won't use the power of the gun. We will

910
01:38:51,200 --> 01:38:58,240
make an omelet without breaking any eggs. And they made a much better omelet than Lenin or Mao

911
01:38:58,240 --> 01:39:04,400
or any of these violent revolutionaries. I don't think, you know, that they certainly didn't start

912
01:39:04,400 --> 01:39:10,080
any wars or build any gulags. I don't think they even murdered a single politician. I don't think

913
01:39:10,080 --> 01:39:16,480
there was any political assassination anywhere by feminists. There was a lot of violence against

914
01:39:16,480 --> 01:39:25,760
them, both verbal but also physical. And they didn't reply by waging violence. And they succeeded

915
01:39:26,720 --> 01:39:38,080
in changing this deep structure of oppression in a way which benefited not just women but also men.

916
01:39:39,440 --> 01:39:47,120
So this gives me hope that it's not easy. In many cases, we fail. But it is possible sometimes in

917
01:39:47,200 --> 01:39:56,640
history to make a very, very big change, positive change, mainly by talking and demonstrating and

918
01:39:56,640 --> 01:40:00,800
changing the story in people's minds and not by using violence.

919
01:40:00,800 --> 01:40:06,480
It's fascinating that feminism and communism and all these things happen in the 20th century. So

920
01:40:06,480 --> 01:40:10,720
many interesting things happen in the 20th century. So many movements, so many ideas,

921
01:40:11,280 --> 01:40:16,640
nuclear weapons, all of it, computers. It's just like, it seems like a lot of stuff, like really

922
01:40:16,640 --> 01:40:21,040
quickly percolated and it's accelerating. It's still accelerating. History is just

923
01:40:21,040 --> 01:40:28,000
accelerating for centuries. And the 20th century, we squeezed into it things that previously took

924
01:40:28,000 --> 01:40:32,240
thousands of years. And now we are squeezing it into decades.

925
01:40:32,240 --> 01:40:37,280
And you very well could be one of the last historians, human historians, to have ever lived.

926
01:40:38,640 --> 01:40:44,880
Could be. I think our species, homo sapiens, I don't think will be around in a century or two.

927
01:40:45,680 --> 01:40:50,480
We could destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, through ecological collapse,

928
01:40:51,440 --> 01:40:54,960
by giving too much power to AI that goes out of our control.

929
01:40:56,320 --> 01:41:01,520
But if we survive, we'll probably have so much power that we will change ourselves

930
01:41:02,400 --> 01:41:08,800
using various technologies so that our descendants will no longer be

931
01:41:09,520 --> 01:41:15,840
homo sapiens like us. They will be more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals.

932
01:41:17,280 --> 01:41:23,280
So maybe they'll have historians, but it will no longer be human historians or sapiens historians

933
01:41:23,280 --> 01:41:29,680
like me. I think it's an extremely dangerous development. And the chances that this will go

934
01:41:29,680 --> 01:41:36,960
wrong, that people will use the new technologies, trying to upgrade humans, but actually downgrading

935
01:41:36,960 --> 01:41:44,560
them, this is a very, very big danger. If you let corporations and armies and ruthless politicians

936
01:41:45,920 --> 01:41:52,640
change humans using tools like AI and bioengineering, it's very likely that they

937
01:41:52,640 --> 01:42:00,160
will try to enhance a few human qualities that they need, like intelligence and discipline,

938
01:42:00,160 --> 01:42:08,480
while neglecting what are potentially more important human qualities like compassion,

939
01:42:09,360 --> 01:42:17,040
like autistic sensitivity, like spirituality. If you give Putin, for instance, bioengineering

940
01:42:17,040 --> 01:42:24,560
and AI and brain computer interfaces, he's likely to want to create a race of

941
01:42:25,520 --> 01:42:33,200
super soldiers who are much more intelligent and much stronger and also much more disciplined

942
01:42:33,200 --> 01:42:39,840
and never rebel and march on Moscow against him. But he has no interest in making them more

943
01:42:39,840 --> 01:42:50,560
compassionate or more spiritual. So the end result could be a new type of humans, a downgraded humans

944
01:42:50,560 --> 01:42:57,200
who are highly intelligent and disciplined, but have no compassion and no spiritual depth.

945
01:42:59,680 --> 01:43:06,480
For me, this is the dystopia, the apocalypse. When people talk about the new technologies

946
01:43:06,480 --> 01:43:11,760
and they have this scenario of the Terminator, robots lying in the street shooting people,

947
01:43:12,400 --> 01:43:18,560
this is not what worries me. I think we can avoid that. What really worries me is using the

948
01:43:19,360 --> 01:43:27,520
corporations, armies, politicians, we'll use the new technologies to change us in a way which will

949
01:43:27,520 --> 01:43:32,720
destroy our humanity or the best parts of our humanity. And one of those ways could be removing

950
01:43:32,720 --> 01:43:37,840
the compassion. Another way that really worries me, for me, is probably more likely is a brave new

951
01:43:37,840 --> 01:43:46,800
world kind of thing that sort of removes the flaws of humans, maybe removes the diversity in humans

952
01:43:47,440 --> 01:43:55,120
and makes us all kind of these dopamine chasing creatures that just kind of maximize enjoyment

953
01:43:55,120 --> 01:44:02,960
in the short term, which kind of seems like a good thing, maybe in the short term. But it creates a

954
01:44:02,960 --> 01:44:09,680
society that doesn't think, that doesn't create, that just is sitting there enjoying itself

955
01:44:10,640 --> 01:44:17,600
at a more and more rapid pace, which seems like another kind of society that could be easily

956
01:44:17,600 --> 01:44:23,120
controlled by a centralized center of power. But the set of dystopias that we could arrive at

957
01:44:23,120 --> 01:44:31,680
through this, through allowing corporations to modify humans is vast and we should be worried

958
01:44:31,760 --> 01:44:40,080
about that. So it seems like humans are pretty good as we are, all the flaws, all of it together.

959
01:44:40,080 --> 01:44:44,320
We are better than anything that we can intentionally design at present.

960
01:44:45,280 --> 01:44:51,840
Any intentionally designed humans at the present moment is going to be much, much worse than us,

961
01:44:51,840 --> 01:44:56,960
because basically we don't understand ourselves. I mean, as long as we don't understand our brain,

962
01:44:56,960 --> 01:45:03,440
our body, our mind, it's a very, very bad idea to start manipulating a system that you don't

963
01:45:03,440 --> 01:45:09,360
understand deeply and we don't understand ourselves. So I have to ask you about an

964
01:45:09,360 --> 01:45:14,400
interesting dynamic of stories. You wrote an article two years ago titled, When the World

965
01:45:14,400 --> 01:45:20,880
Seems Like One Big Conspiracy, how understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed

966
01:45:20,880 --> 01:45:27,440
light on their allure and their inherent falsehood. What are global cabal theories and

967
01:45:27,440 --> 01:45:31,280
why do so many people believe them? 37% of Americans, for example.

968
01:45:32,080 --> 01:45:36,880
Well, the global cabal theory, it has many variations, but basically there is a small

969
01:45:36,880 --> 01:45:42,000
group of people, a small cabal that secretly controls everything that is happening in the

970
01:45:42,000 --> 01:45:47,440
world. All the wars, all the revolutions, all the epidemics, everything that is happening

971
01:45:47,440 --> 01:45:52,560
is controlled by this very small group of people who are, of course, evil and have bad intentions.

972
01:45:53,280 --> 01:46:00,800
And this is a very well-known story. It's not new. It's been there for thousands of years.

973
01:46:00,800 --> 01:46:07,520
It's very attractive because, first of all, it's simple. You don't understand everything

974
01:46:07,520 --> 01:46:12,480
that happens in the world. You just need to understand one thing. The war in Ukraine,

975
01:46:12,480 --> 01:46:18,880
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 5G technology, COVID-19. It's simple. There is this global

976
01:46:18,880 --> 01:46:26,880
cabal. They do all of it. And also, it enables you to shift all the responsibility to all the

977
01:46:26,880 --> 01:46:32,320
bad things that are happening in the world to this small cabal. It's the Jews. It's the Freemasons.

978
01:46:32,320 --> 01:46:41,040
It's not us. And also, it creates this fantasy, utopian fantasy. If we only get rid of the small

979
01:46:41,040 --> 01:46:46,720
cabal, we solve all the problems of the world. Salvation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict,

980
01:46:46,720 --> 01:46:52,240
the war in Ukraine, the epidemics, poverty, everything is solved just by knocking out

981
01:46:52,240 --> 01:46:58,080
this small cabal. It's simple. It's attractive. And this is why so many people believe it.

982
01:47:00,000 --> 01:47:06,160
Again, it's not new. Nazism was exactly this. Nazism began as a conspiracy theory. We don't

983
01:47:06,160 --> 01:47:12,000
call Nazism a conspiracy theory because, oh, it's a big thing. It's an ideology. But if you look at

984
01:47:12,000 --> 01:47:17,680
it, it's a conspiracy theory. The basic Nazi idea was the Jews control the world, get rid of the

985
01:47:17,680 --> 01:47:23,680
Jews, you solved all the world's problems. Now, the interesting thing about these kind of theories,

986
01:47:24,240 --> 01:47:30,960
again, they tell you that even things that look to be the opposite of each other,

987
01:47:31,440 --> 01:47:36,800
actually, they are part of the conspiracy. So in the case of Nazism, the Nazis told people,

988
01:47:36,800 --> 01:47:42,640
you know, you have capitalism and communism, you think that they are opposite, right? Ah,

989
01:47:42,640 --> 01:47:48,080
this is what the Jews want you to think. Actually, the Jews control both communism,

990
01:47:48,080 --> 01:47:53,520
Trotsky Marx or Jews, blah, blah, blah, and capitalism. The Rothschilds, Wall Street,

991
01:47:53,520 --> 01:47:58,560
it's all controlled by the Jews. So the Jews are fooling everybody. But actually, the communists

992
01:47:58,560 --> 01:48:04,880
and the capitalists are part of the same global cabal. And again, this is very attractive,

993
01:48:04,880 --> 01:48:10,960
because, ah, now I understand everything. And I also know what to do. I just give power to

994
01:48:10,960 --> 01:48:16,480
Hitler. He gets rid of the Jews. I solved all the problems of the world. Now, as a historian,

995
01:48:17,040 --> 01:48:23,040
the most important thing I can say about these theories, they are never right. Because the

996
01:48:23,040 --> 01:48:28,400
global cabal theory says two things. First, everything is controlled by a very small number

997
01:48:28,400 --> 01:48:34,240
of people. Secondly, these people hide themselves. They do it in secret. Now, both things are

998
01:48:34,240 --> 01:48:40,960
nonsense. It's impossible for people to control a small group of people, to control and predict

999
01:48:40,960 --> 01:48:46,800
everything, because the world is too complicated. You know, you look at a real world conspiracy.

1000
01:48:46,800 --> 01:48:53,520
Conspiracy is basically just a plan. Think about the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

1001
01:48:54,400 --> 01:48:59,920
You had the most powerful superpower in the world, with the biggest military,

1002
01:48:59,920 --> 01:49:06,080
with the biggest intelligence services, with the most sophisticated, you know, the FBI and the CIA

1003
01:49:06,080 --> 01:49:14,320
and all the agents. They invade a third-rate country, a third-rate power, Iraq. With this idea,

1004
01:49:14,320 --> 01:49:18,480
we'll take over Iraq and we'll control it, we'll make a new order in the Middle East,

1005
01:49:19,120 --> 01:49:26,400
and everything falls apart. Their plan completely backfires. Everything they hope to achieve,

1006
01:49:26,400 --> 01:49:32,880
they achieve the opposite. America, United States is humiliated. They caused the rise of ISIS. They

1007
01:49:32,880 --> 01:49:37,760
wanted to take out terrorism. They created more terrorism. Worst of all, the big winner of the

1008
01:49:37,760 --> 01:49:47,600
war was Iran. You know, the United States goes to war with all its power and gives Iran a victory

1009
01:49:47,600 --> 01:49:51,920
on a silver plate. The Iranians don't need to do anything. The Americans are doing everything for

1010
01:49:51,920 --> 01:49:58,640
them. Now, this is real history. Real history is when you have not a small group of people,

1011
01:49:58,640 --> 01:50:05,840
a lot of people with a lot of power, carefully planning something, and it goes completely

1012
01:50:05,840 --> 01:50:11,760
out of or against their plan. And this we know from personal experience. Every time we try to

1013
01:50:11,760 --> 01:50:18,080
plan something, a birthday party, a surprise birthday party, a trip somewhere, things go wrong.

1014
01:50:18,720 --> 01:50:25,280
This is reality. So the idea that a small group of, I don't know, the Jewish cabal, the Freemasons,

1015
01:50:25,280 --> 01:50:32,240
whoever, they can really control and predict all the wars, this is nonsense. The second thing that

1016
01:50:32,240 --> 01:50:38,800
is nonsense is to think they can do that and still remain secret. It sometimes happens in

1017
01:50:38,800 --> 01:50:46,960
history that a small group of people accumulates a lot of power. If I now tell you that Xi Jinping

1018
01:50:46,960 --> 01:50:52,720
and the heads of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, they have a lot of power. They control

1019
01:50:52,720 --> 01:50:58,480
the military, the media, the economy, the University of China. This is not a conspiracy theory.

1020
01:50:58,880 --> 01:51:04,560
This is obviously, everybody knows it. Everybody knows it. Because to gain so much power,

1021
01:51:05,280 --> 01:51:13,600
you usually need publicity. Hitler gained a lot of power in Nazi Germany because he had a lot of

1022
01:51:13,600 --> 01:51:19,360
publicity. If Hitler remained unknown, working behind the scenes, he would not gain power.

1023
01:51:20,400 --> 01:51:27,360
So the way to gain power is usually through publicity. So secret cabals don't gain power.

1024
01:51:27,680 --> 01:51:34,240
Even if you gain a lot of power, nobody has the kind of power necessary

1025
01:51:34,240 --> 01:51:37,600
to predict and control everything that happens in the world.

1026
01:51:39,280 --> 01:51:44,320
All the time, shit happens that you did not predict and you did not plan and you did not control.

1027
01:51:45,680 --> 01:51:50,720
The sad thing is there's usually an explanation for everything you just said that involves

1028
01:51:51,200 --> 01:51:57,760
a secret global cabal. The reason your vacation planning always goes wrong

1029
01:51:58,320 --> 01:52:01,520
is because you're not competent. There is a competent small group,

1030
01:52:02,480 --> 01:52:06,880
that ultra competent small group. I hear this with intelligence agencies.

1031
01:52:06,880 --> 01:52:09,600
The CIA are running everything. Mossad is running everything.

1032
01:52:09,600 --> 01:52:16,240
You see, as a historian, you get to know how many blunders these people do. They are so

1033
01:52:16,320 --> 01:52:19,760
competent. They are capable, but they are so incompetent in so many ways. Again,

1034
01:52:19,760 --> 01:52:24,080
look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Before the war, people thought, oh,

1035
01:52:24,080 --> 01:52:28,720
Putin was such a genius and the Russian army was one of the strongest armies in the world. This

1036
01:52:28,720 --> 01:52:35,760
is what Putin thought. It completely backfired. Well, the cabal explanation there would be there's

1037
01:52:35,760 --> 01:52:42,640
a NATO-driven United States military industrial complex that wants to create chaos and incompetence.

1038
01:52:42,640 --> 01:52:47,920
They put a gun to Putin's head and told him, Vladimir, if you don't invade, we shoot you.

1039
01:52:47,920 --> 01:52:52,400
How did they cause Putin to invade Ukraine? It's the thing about conspiracy theories

1040
01:52:52,400 --> 01:52:56,000
is there's usually a way to explain everything. You can explain everything.

1041
01:52:56,000 --> 01:53:03,280
It's not just religion. You can always find explanation for everything. In the end,

1042
01:53:03,280 --> 01:53:08,640
it's intellectual integrity. If you insist on whenever people confront you with evidence,

1043
01:53:08,640 --> 01:53:14,080
with finding some very, very complicated explanation for that too, you can explain

1044
01:53:14,080 --> 01:53:20,320
everything. We know that. It's a question of intellectual integrity. I will also say another

1045
01:53:20,320 --> 01:53:26,880
thing. The conspiracy theories, they do get one thing right, certainly in today's world.

1046
01:53:27,680 --> 01:53:34,640
I think they represent an authentic and justified fear of a lot of people that

1047
01:53:35,200 --> 01:53:39,360
they are losing control of their lives. They don't understand what is happening.

1048
01:53:40,080 --> 01:53:47,360
This, I think, is not just a legitimate fear. This is an important fear. They are right. We

1049
01:53:47,360 --> 01:53:54,960
are losing control of our lives. We are facing really big dangers, but not from a small cabal

1050
01:53:54,960 --> 01:54:02,000
of fellow humans. The problem with many of these conspiracy theories is that, yes, we have a problem

1051
01:54:02,000 --> 01:54:10,080
with new AI technology, but if you now direct the fire against certain people,

1052
01:54:10,880 --> 01:54:19,840
so instead of all humans cooperating against our real common threats, whether it's the rise of AI,

1053
01:54:19,840 --> 01:54:24,640
whether it's global warming, you're only causing us to fight each other.

1054
01:54:25,600 --> 01:54:31,280
I think the key question that people who spread these ideas, many of them honestly believe

1055
01:54:31,280 --> 01:54:38,320
it's not malicious, that they honestly believe in these theories, is do you want to spend your

1056
01:54:38,320 --> 01:54:45,840
life spreading hate towards people, or do you want to work on more constructive projects?

1057
01:54:45,840 --> 01:54:49,200
I think one of the big differences between those who believe in conspiracy theories

1058
01:54:49,920 --> 01:54:56,480
and people who warn about the dangers of AI, the dangers of climate change,

1059
01:54:56,480 --> 01:55:07,200
is that we don't see certain humans as evil and hateful. The problem isn't humans. The problem is

1060
01:55:08,000 --> 01:55:16,240
something outside humanity. Yes, humans are contributing to the problem, but ultimately,

1061
01:55:16,240 --> 01:55:23,120
the enemy is external to humanity. Whereas conspiracy theories usually claim that a certain

1062
01:55:23,120 --> 01:55:30,000
part of humanity is the source of all evil, which leads them to eventually think in terms

1063
01:55:30,000 --> 01:55:40,640
of exterminating this part of humanity, which leads sometimes to historical disasters like Nazism.

1064
01:55:40,640 --> 01:55:46,640
So it can lead to hate, but it can also lead to cynicism and apathy that basically says,

1065
01:55:46,640 --> 01:55:51,520
it's not in my power to make the world better, so you don't actually take action.

1066
01:55:51,520 --> 01:55:56,800
I think it is within the power of every individual to make the world a little bit better.

1067
01:55:58,000 --> 01:56:03,760
You can't do everything, don't try to do everything. Find one thing in your areas of activity,

1068
01:56:04,400 --> 01:56:11,040
a place where you have some agency and try to do that, and hope that other people do their bit.

1069
01:56:11,680 --> 01:56:18,400
And if everybody does their bit, we'll manage. And if we don't, we don't, but at least we try.

1070
01:56:19,360 --> 01:56:27,200
You have been part of conspiracy theories. I find myself recently becoming part of conspiracy

1071
01:56:27,200 --> 01:56:34,080
theories. Is there a device you can give of how to be a human being in this world that values truth

1072
01:56:34,080 --> 01:56:39,920
and reason while watching yourself become part of conspiracy theories? At least from my perspective,

1073
01:56:39,920 --> 01:56:46,560
it seems very difficult to prove to the world that you're not part of a conspiracy theory.

1074
01:56:46,800 --> 01:56:53,360
I, as you said, have interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu recently. I don't know if you're aware,

1075
01:56:53,360 --> 01:57:00,560
but doing such things will also pick up a new menu of items, a new set of conspiracy theories

1076
01:57:00,560 --> 01:57:07,680
you're now a part of. And I find it very frustrating because it makes it very difficult to respond.

1077
01:57:08,640 --> 01:57:12,640
Because I sense that people have the right intentions. Like we said,

1078
01:57:12,720 --> 01:57:25,280
they have a nervousness of fear of power and the abuses of power. And as do I. So I find myself in

1079
01:57:25,280 --> 01:57:30,160
a difficult position that I have nothing to show to prove that I'm not part of such a conspiracy

1080
01:57:30,160 --> 01:57:38,240
theory. I think ultimately you can't, we can't. I mean, it's like proving consciousness, but you

1081
01:57:38,240 --> 01:57:44,960
can't. That's just the situation. Whatever you say can and will be used against you by some people.

1082
01:57:46,400 --> 01:57:52,080
So this fantasy, if I only say this, if I only show them that, if I only have this data,

1083
01:57:52,080 --> 01:57:59,280
they will see I'm okay. It doesn't work like that. I think to keep your sanity in this situation,

1084
01:58:00,240 --> 01:58:04,560
first of all, it's important to understand that most of these people are not evil.

1085
01:58:05,120 --> 01:58:12,480
They are not doing it on purpose. Many of them really believe that there is some very nefarious,

1086
01:58:12,480 --> 01:58:18,480
powerful conspiracy, which is causing a lot of harm in the world. And they are doing a good thing

1087
01:58:18,480 --> 01:58:24,640
by exposing it and making people aware of it and trying to stop it. If you think that you're

1088
01:58:24,640 --> 01:58:31,520
surrounded by evil, you're falling into the same rabbit hole. You're falling into the same paranoid

1089
01:58:31,520 --> 01:58:36,880
state of mind. Oh, the world is full of these evil people that, no, most of them are good people.

1090
01:58:38,080 --> 01:58:44,480
And also I think we can empathize with some of the key ideas there, which I share,

1091
01:58:45,680 --> 01:58:50,480
that, yes, it's becoming more and more difficult to understand what is happening in the world.

1092
01:58:51,600 --> 01:58:57,360
There are huge dangers in the world that we are, existential dangers to the human species,

1093
01:58:57,360 --> 01:59:04,720
but they don't come from a small cabal of Jews or gay people or feminists or whatever.

1094
01:59:06,240 --> 01:59:13,760
They come from much more diffused forces, which are not under the control of any single individual.

1095
01:59:15,120 --> 01:59:22,480
We don't have to look for the evil people. We need to look for human allies in order to work

1096
01:59:22,480 --> 01:59:31,360
together against, again, the dangers of AI, the dangers of bioengineering, the dangers of climate

1097
01:59:31,360 --> 01:59:37,040
change. And when you wake up in the morning, the question is, do you want to spend your day

1098
01:59:37,040 --> 01:59:44,960
spreading hatred or do you want to spend your day trying to make allies and work together?

1099
01:59:46,800 --> 01:59:51,200
Let me ask you kind of a big philosophical question about AI and the threat of it.

1100
01:59:52,000 --> 01:59:58,400
Let's look at the threat side. So folks like Eliezer Yadkovsky worry that AI might

1101
01:59:59,440 --> 02:00:07,040
kill all of us. Do you worry about that range of possibilities where artificial intelligence

1102
02:00:07,040 --> 02:00:12,880
systems in a variety of ways might destroy human civilization?

1103
02:00:13,760 --> 02:00:19,600
Yes. I talk a lot about it, about the dangers of AI. I sometimes get into trouble because I

1104
02:00:19,600 --> 02:00:24,240
depict these scenarios of how AI becoming very dangerous, and then people say that I'm encouraging

1105
02:00:24,240 --> 02:00:32,480
these scenarios. But I'm talking about it as a warning. I'm not so terrified of the simplistic

1106
02:00:32,480 --> 02:00:38,160
idea, again, the Terminator scenario of robots running in the street shooting everybody.

1107
02:00:39,360 --> 02:00:48,000
I'm more worried about AI accumulating more and more power and basically taking over society,

1108
02:00:48,960 --> 02:00:55,440
taking over our lives, taking power away from us until we don't understand what is happening

1109
02:00:55,440 --> 02:01:02,400
and we lose control of our lives and of the future. The two most important things to realize about AI,

1110
02:01:02,400 --> 02:01:06,080
you know, so many things are being said now about AI, but I think there are two things

1111
02:01:06,080 --> 02:01:13,360
that every person should know about AI. First is that AI is the first tool in history that

1112
02:01:13,360 --> 02:01:19,600
can make decisions by itself. All previous tools in history couldn't make decisions.

1113
02:01:19,600 --> 02:01:26,080
This is why they empowered us. You invent a knife, you invent an atom bomb. The atom bomb

1114
02:01:26,080 --> 02:01:33,840
cannot decide to start a war, cannot decide which city to bomb. AI can make decisions by itself.

1115
02:01:35,360 --> 02:01:41,360
And autonomous weapon systems can decide by themselves who to kill, who to bomb.

1116
02:01:41,760 --> 02:01:47,600
The second thing is that AI is the first tool in history that can create new ideas by itself.

1117
02:01:48,400 --> 02:01:56,640
The printing press could print our ideas, but could not create new ideas. AI can create new

1118
02:01:56,640 --> 02:02:04,000
ideas entirely by itself. This is unprecedented. Therefore, it is the first technology in history

1119
02:02:04,160 --> 02:02:10,960
in history that instead of giving power to humans, it takes power away from us.

1120
02:02:11,840 --> 02:02:16,960
And the danger is that it will increasingly take more and more power from us

1121
02:02:17,920 --> 02:02:25,120
until we are left helpless and clueless about what is happening in the world. And this is

1122
02:02:25,120 --> 02:02:32,960
already beginning to happen in an accelerated pace. More and more decisions about our lives,

1123
02:02:32,960 --> 02:02:37,280
whether to give us a loan, whether to give us a mortgage, whether to give us a job

1124
02:02:37,280 --> 02:02:44,880
are taken by AI. And more and more of the ideas of the images of the stories that surround us

1125
02:02:44,880 --> 02:02:52,320
and shape our minds, our world, our produce are created by AI, not by human beings.

1126
02:02:52,320 --> 02:02:57,360
If you can just linger on that, what is the danger of that? That more and more of the creative

1127
02:02:57,360 --> 02:03:06,560
side is done by AI, the idea generation. Is it that we become stale in our thinking?

1128
02:03:06,560 --> 02:03:12,080
Is that idea generation so fundamental to the evolution of humanity?

1129
02:03:12,080 --> 02:03:19,680
That we can't resist the ideas. To resist an idea, you need to have some vision of the creative

1130
02:03:19,760 --> 02:03:26,960
process. Now, this is a very old fear. You go back to Plato's cave. Some of this idea that

1131
02:03:26,960 --> 02:03:34,240
people are sitting chained in a cave and seeing shadows on a screen, on a wall, and thinking this

1132
02:03:34,240 --> 02:03:42,640
is reality. You go back to Descartes and he has this thought experiment of the demon. And Descartes

1133
02:03:42,640 --> 02:03:48,720
asks himself, how do I know that any of this is real? Maybe there is a demon who is creating

1134
02:03:48,720 --> 02:03:55,440
all of this and is basically enslaving me by surrounding me with these illusions.

1135
02:03:55,440 --> 02:04:01,040
You go back to Buddha. It's the same question. What if we are living in a world of illusions,

1136
02:04:01,600 --> 02:04:08,080
and because we have been living in it throughout our lives, all our ideas or our desires,

1137
02:04:08,080 --> 02:04:12,240
how do we understand ourselves? This is all the product of the same illusions.

1138
02:04:12,640 --> 02:04:19,280
And this was a big philosophical question for thousands of years. Now it's becoming a practical

1139
02:04:19,280 --> 02:04:25,360
question of engineering, because previously all the ideas, as far as we know, maybe we are living

1140
02:04:25,360 --> 02:04:31,280
inside a computer simulation of intelligent rats from the planet Zircon. If that's the case,

1141
02:04:31,280 --> 02:04:37,680
we don't know about it. But taking what we do know about human history, until now, all the

1142
02:04:37,680 --> 02:04:45,200
all the stories, images, paintings, songs, operas, theater, everything we have encountered and

1143
02:04:45,200 --> 02:04:52,000
shaped our minds was created by humans. Now increasingly we live in a world where more and

1144
02:04:52,000 --> 02:04:59,200
more of these cultural artifacts will be coming from an alien intelligence. Very quickly, we might

1145
02:04:59,200 --> 02:05:08,480
reach a point when most of the stories, images, songs, TV shows, whatever, are created by an

1146
02:05:08,480 --> 02:05:17,360
alien intelligence. And if we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions, created

1147
02:05:17,360 --> 02:05:25,520
by an alien intelligence that we don't understand, but it understands us, this is a kind of

1148
02:05:26,400 --> 02:05:33,920
spiritual enslavement that we won't be able to break out of, because it understands us,

1149
02:05:33,920 --> 02:05:43,200
it understands how to manipulate us, but we don't understand what is behind this screen of stories

1150
02:05:43,200 --> 02:05:50,880
and images and songs. So if there's a set of AI systems that are operating in the space of ideas,

1151
02:05:51,680 --> 02:05:56,800
they're far superior to ours, and we're not almost able to, it's opaque to us,

1152
02:05:56,800 --> 02:06:03,520
we're not able to see through. How does that change the pursuit of happiness?

1153
02:06:04,720 --> 02:06:12,320
The human pursuit of happiness? Life? Where do we get joy if we're surrounded by AI systems that

1154
02:06:12,320 --> 02:06:18,720
are doing most of the cool things humans do, much better than us? You know, some of the things,

1155
02:06:18,720 --> 02:06:26,400
it's okay that the AIs will do them. Many human tasks and jobs, you know, they are drudgery,

1156
02:06:26,960 --> 02:06:34,160
they are not fun, they are not developing us emotionally or spiritually. It's fine if the

1157
02:06:34,160 --> 02:06:39,920
robots take over. I don't know, I think about the people in supermarkets or grocery stores that

1158
02:06:39,920 --> 02:06:47,280
spend hours every day just passing items and charging you the money. I mean, if this can be

1159
02:06:47,280 --> 02:06:54,080
automated, wonderful. We need to make sure that these people then have better jobs,

1160
02:06:55,520 --> 02:07:02,480
better means of supporting themselves and developing their social abilities,

1161
02:07:02,480 --> 02:07:08,640
their spiritual abilities, and that's the ideal world that AI can create,

1162
02:07:09,600 --> 02:07:16,640
that it takes away from us the things that it's better if we don't do them,

1163
02:07:17,440 --> 02:07:24,080
and allows us to focus on the most important things and the deepest aspects of our nature,

1164
02:07:24,080 --> 02:07:32,800
of our potential. If we give AI control of the sphere of ideas at this stage, I think it's very,

1165
02:07:32,880 --> 02:07:42,800
very dangerous because it doesn't understand us. AI at present is mostly digesting the products

1166
02:07:42,800 --> 02:07:50,880
of human culture. Everything we've produced over thousands of years, it eats all of these cultural

1167
02:07:50,880 --> 02:07:59,200
products, digests it, and starts producing its own new stuff. But we still haven't figured it out

1168
02:07:59,680 --> 02:08:09,120
ourselves, in our bodies, our brains, our minds, our psychology. So an AI based on our flawed

1169
02:08:09,120 --> 02:08:18,160
understanding of ourselves is a very dangerous thing. I think that we need, first of all,

1170
02:08:18,160 --> 02:08:27,360
to keep developing ourselves. If for every dollar and every minute that we spend on developing AI,

1171
02:08:27,360 --> 02:08:33,360
artificial intelligence, we spend another dollar and another minute in developing human

1172
02:08:33,360 --> 02:08:40,080
consciousness, the human mind will be okay. The danger is that we spend all our effort

1173
02:08:40,080 --> 02:08:46,160
on developing an AI at a time when we don't understand ourselves, and then letting the AI

1174
02:08:46,160 --> 02:08:53,200
take over, that's a road to a human catastrophe. Does this surprise you how well large language

1175
02:08:53,280 --> 02:08:58,080
models work? Has it modified your understanding of the nature of intelligence?

1176
02:08:58,640 --> 02:09:07,200
Yes. I've been writing about AI for like eight years now, and engaged with all these predictions

1177
02:09:07,200 --> 02:09:13,360
and speculations. And when it actually came, it was much faster and more powerful than I thought

1178
02:09:13,360 --> 02:09:22,320
it would be. I didn't think that we would have in 2023 an AI that can hold the conversation,

1179
02:09:22,320 --> 02:09:28,480
that you can't know if it's a human being or an AI, that can write beautiful texts.

1180
02:09:30,080 --> 02:09:36,560
I read the texts written by AI, and the thing that strikes me most is the coherence.

1181
02:09:37,760 --> 02:09:42,160
People think, oh, it's nothing. They just take ideas from here and there, words from here,

1182
02:09:42,160 --> 02:09:49,280
and put it. No, it's so coherent. You read in not sentences, you read paragraphs,

1183
02:09:49,280 --> 02:09:54,240
you read entire texts, and there is logic. There is a structure.

1184
02:09:54,240 --> 02:10:00,560
It's not only coherent, it's convincing. And the beautiful thing about it that has to do with your

1185
02:10:00,560 --> 02:10:07,200
work, it doesn't have to be true. And it often gets facts wrong, but it still is convincing.

1186
02:10:08,000 --> 02:10:15,440
And it is both scary and beautiful that our brains love language so much that we don't

1187
02:10:15,520 --> 02:10:20,400
need the facts to be correct. We just need it to be a beautiful story.

1188
02:10:20,400 --> 02:10:25,520
Yeah. That's been the secret of politics and religion for thousands of years,

1189
02:10:25,520 --> 02:10:27,600
and now it's coming with AI.

1190
02:10:27,600 --> 02:10:34,080
So you as a person who has written some of the most impactful words ever written in your books,

1191
02:10:35,440 --> 02:10:41,360
how does that make you feel that you might be one of the last effective human writers?

1192
02:10:41,360 --> 02:10:42,560
That's a good question.

1193
02:10:42,720 --> 02:10:45,600
First of all, do you think that's possible?

1194
02:10:45,600 --> 02:10:51,840
I think it is possible. I've seen a lot of examples of AI being told,

1195
02:10:51,840 --> 02:10:54,400
write like Yuval Noah Harari and what it produces.

1196
02:10:54,400 --> 02:10:57,280
Has it ever done better than you think you could have written yourself?

1197
02:10:58,320 --> 02:11:05,840
I mean, on the level of content, of ideas, no. There are things I say, I would never say that.

1198
02:11:06,720 --> 02:11:14,240
But when it comes to the, I mean, there is, again, the coherence and the quality of writing is such

1199
02:11:15,360 --> 02:11:22,560
that I say it's unbelievable how good it is. And who knows, in 10 years, in 20 years,

1200
02:11:23,120 --> 02:11:30,480
maybe it can do better even according to certain measures on the level of content.

1201
02:11:31,200 --> 02:11:38,480
So that people will be able to do like a style transfer, do, in the style of Yuval Noah Harari,

1202
02:11:38,480 --> 02:11:45,200
write anything, write why I should have ice cream tonight and make it convincing.

1203
02:11:45,200 --> 02:11:47,440
I don't know if I have anything convincing to say about these things.

1204
02:11:47,440 --> 02:11:49,680
I think you'd be surprised. I think you'd be surprised.

1205
02:11:49,680 --> 02:11:52,720
There could be an evolutionary biology explanation for why.

1206
02:11:52,720 --> 02:11:54,480
Yeah, ice cream is good for you.

1207
02:11:54,480 --> 02:11:59,200
Yeah. So I mean, that changes the nature of writing.

1208
02:11:59,840 --> 02:12:10,000
Ultimately, I think it goes back. Much of my writing is suspicious of itself.

1209
02:12:10,560 --> 02:12:17,520
I write stories about the danger of stories. I write about intelligence,

1210
02:12:17,520 --> 02:12:24,320
but highlighting the dangers of intelligence. Ultimately, I don't think that in terms of power,

1211
02:12:25,280 --> 02:12:31,680
human power comes from intelligence and from stories. But I think that the deepest and

1212
02:12:31,680 --> 02:12:39,280
best qualities of humans are not intelligence and not storytelling and not power. Again,

1213
02:12:39,280 --> 02:12:43,520
with all our power, with all our cooperation, with all our intelligence,

1214
02:12:43,520 --> 02:12:48,320
we are on the verge of destroying ourselves and destroying much of the ecosystem.

1215
02:12:48,320 --> 02:12:56,800
Our best qualities are not there. Our best qualities are non-verbal. Again,

1216
02:12:56,800 --> 02:13:02,160
they come from things like compassion, from introspection. And introspection,

1217
02:13:02,160 --> 02:13:06,960
from my experience, is not verbal. If you try to understand yourself with words,

1218
02:13:06,960 --> 02:13:12,000
you will never succeed. There is a place where you need the words,

1219
02:13:12,880 --> 02:13:15,920
but the deepest insights, they don't come from words.

1220
02:13:18,000 --> 02:13:22,800
And you can't write about it. Again, it goes back to Wittgenstein, to Buddha,

1221
02:13:22,800 --> 02:13:28,080
to so many of these sages before that these are the things we are silent about.

1222
02:13:28,800 --> 02:13:31,760
Yeah, but eventually you have to project it. As a writer, you have to

1223
02:13:33,280 --> 02:13:36,960
do the silent introspection, but project it onto a page.

1224
02:13:36,960 --> 02:13:43,120
Yes, but you still have to warn people you will never find the deepest truth in a book.

1225
02:13:43,120 --> 02:13:50,240
You will never find it in words. You can only find it, I think, in direct experience,

1226
02:13:50,240 --> 02:13:54,960
which is non-verbal, which is pre-verbal. In the silence of your own mind.

1227
02:13:54,960 --> 02:13:56,080
Yes. Somewhere in there.

1228
02:13:56,080 --> 02:14:02,720
Yes. Well, let me ask you a silly question then, a ridiculously big question.

1229
02:14:03,360 --> 02:14:08,960
You have done a lot of deep thinking about the world, about yourself, this kind of introspection.

1230
02:14:09,840 --> 02:14:16,160
How do you think? If you, by way of advice, but just practically speaking,

1231
02:14:17,120 --> 02:14:20,000
day to day, how do you think about difficult problems of the world?

1232
02:14:21,440 --> 02:14:28,720
First of all, I take time off. The most important thing I do, I think as a writer,

1233
02:14:28,720 --> 02:14:36,240
as a scientist, I meditate. I spend about two hours every day in silent meditation,

1234
02:14:37,680 --> 02:14:43,840
observing as much as possible non-verbally what is happening within myself, focusing

1235
02:14:43,840 --> 02:14:50,000
body sensations, the breath. Thoughts keep coming up, but I try not to give them attention. I don't

1236
02:14:50,000 --> 02:14:54,560
try to drive them away. Just let them be there in the background, like some background noise.

1237
02:14:54,560 --> 02:15:03,120
Don't engage with the thoughts. Because the mind is constantly producing stories with words.

1238
02:15:03,680 --> 02:15:10,160
These stories come between us and the world. They don't allow us to see ourselves or the world.

1239
02:15:10,880 --> 02:15:14,880
For me, the most shocking thing when I started meditating 23 years ago,

1240
02:15:15,840 --> 02:15:20,240
I was given the simple exercise to just observe my breath coming in and out of the nostrils,

1241
02:15:21,120 --> 02:15:26,560
not controlling it, just observing it. I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds.

1242
02:15:26,560 --> 02:15:30,640
I for 10 seconds would try to notice, oh, now the breath is coming in. It's coming in,

1243
02:15:30,640 --> 02:15:33,360
it's coming in. Oh, it stopped coming in. Now it's going out, going out.

1244
02:15:33,920 --> 02:15:39,760
10 seconds and some memory would come. Some thought would come. Some story about something

1245
02:15:39,760 --> 02:15:48,400
that happened last week or 10 years ago or in the future. The story would hijack my attention.

1246
02:15:48,400 --> 02:15:53,360
It would take me maybe five minutes to remember, oh, I'm supposed to be observing my breath.

1247
02:15:54,640 --> 02:16:01,120
If I can't observe my own breath because of these stories created by the mind, how can I

1248
02:16:01,120 --> 02:16:06,720
hope to understand much more complex things like the political situation in Israel,

1249
02:16:07,280 --> 02:16:12,480
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Russian invasion of Ukraine? If all these stories keep

1250
02:16:12,480 --> 02:16:18,320
coming, I mean, it's not the truth. It's just the story your own mind created. First thing,

1251
02:16:18,560 --> 02:16:24,880
train the mind to be silent and just observe. So two hours every day and I go every year for

1252
02:16:24,880 --> 02:16:31,200
a long retreat between one month and two months, 60 days of just silent meditation.

1253
02:16:31,200 --> 02:16:34,960
Silent meditation for 60 days. Yeah. To train the mind,

1254
02:16:35,600 --> 02:16:40,080
forget about your own stories. Just observe what is really happening.

1255
02:16:40,960 --> 02:16:49,760
And then also, throughout the day, have an information diet. Today, many people are very

1256
02:16:49,760 --> 02:16:57,200
aware of what they feed their body, what enters their mouth. Be very aware of what you feed your

1257
02:16:57,200 --> 02:17:04,080
mind, what enters your mind. Have an information diet. So for instance, I read long books.

1258
02:17:05,040 --> 02:17:11,440
And I prefer, like I do many interviews, I prefer three hours interviews to five minutes

1259
02:17:11,440 --> 02:17:21,360
interviews. The long format, it's not always feasible, but you can go much, much deeper.

1260
02:17:23,040 --> 02:17:27,200
So I would say an information diet, be very careful about what you feed your mind. Give

1261
02:17:27,760 --> 02:17:34,000
preference to big chunks or small- To books over Twitter.

1262
02:17:34,000 --> 02:17:41,440
Yes. Books over Twitter, definitely. And then when I encounter a problem, a difficult intellectual

1263
02:17:41,440 --> 02:17:54,880
problem, then I let the problem lead me where it goes and not where I want it to go. If I approach

1264
02:17:54,880 --> 02:18:01,520
a problem with some preconceived idea or solution, and then try to impose it on the problem,

1265
02:18:01,520 --> 02:18:06,000
and just find confirmation bias, just find the evidence that supports my view,

1266
02:18:08,160 --> 02:18:11,760
this is easy for the mind to do, and you don't learn anything new.

1267
02:18:13,200 --> 02:18:18,880
Do you take notes? Do you start to concretize your thoughts on paper?

1268
02:18:19,600 --> 02:18:26,400
I read a lot. Usually I don't take notes. Then I start writing, and then I write.

1269
02:18:26,400 --> 02:18:33,120
I write like a torrent. Just write. Now it's the time you read, you give me a meditation,

1270
02:18:33,120 --> 02:18:38,960
now it's the time to write. Write. Don't stop. Just write. So I would write from memory.

1271
02:18:39,920 --> 02:18:45,440
And I'm not afraid of formulating, say, big ideas, big theories, and putting them on paper.

1272
02:18:46,160 --> 02:18:52,320
The danger is once it's on paper, not on paper, on the screen, in the computer, you get attached

1273
02:18:52,320 --> 02:18:58,960
to it, and then you start with confirmation bias to build more and more layers around it,

1274
02:18:58,960 --> 02:19:06,880
and you can't go back. And then it's very dangerous. But I trust myself that I have,

1275
02:19:06,880 --> 02:19:11,200
to some extent, the ability to press the delete button. The most important

1276
02:19:11,920 --> 02:19:18,880
button in the keyboard is delete. I write, and then I delete. I write, and then I delete.

1277
02:19:19,600 --> 02:19:24,640
And because I trust myself that I'll have the... Every time I come to press the delete button,

1278
02:19:24,640 --> 02:19:30,000
I feel bad. It's a kind of pain. Hey, I created this. It's a beautiful idea, and I have to

1279
02:19:30,000 --> 02:19:32,400
delete it. But you're still brave enough to press delete.

1280
02:19:32,400 --> 02:19:37,840
I try, and hopefully I do it enough times. And this is important because in the long term,

1281
02:19:37,920 --> 02:19:45,680
it enables me to play with ideas. I have the confidence to start formulating some

1282
02:19:45,680 --> 02:19:54,160
brave idea. Most of them turn out to be nonsense. But I trust myself not to be attached,

1283
02:19:54,160 --> 02:19:59,920
not to become attached to my own nonsense. So it gives me this room for playfulness.

1284
02:19:59,920 --> 02:20:06,080
I would be amiss if I didn't ask. For people interested in hearing you talk about meditation,

1285
02:20:06,080 --> 02:20:10,960
if they want to start meditating, what advice would you give on how to start? You mentioned

1286
02:20:10,960 --> 02:20:16,240
you couldn't hold your attention and your breath for longer than 10 seconds at first.

1287
02:20:17,120 --> 02:20:23,760
So how did they start on this journey? First of all, it's a difficult journey. It's not fun.

1288
02:20:23,760 --> 02:20:31,360
It's not recreational. It's not kind of time to relax. It can be very, very intense.

1289
02:20:31,360 --> 02:20:35,360
The most difficult thing, at least in the meditation I practice, Vipassana,

1290
02:20:35,360 --> 02:20:40,400
which I learned from a teacher called Esen Goenka, the most difficult thing is not the silence.

1291
02:20:40,400 --> 02:20:46,640
It's not the sitting for long hours. It's what comes up. Everything you don't want to know

1292
02:20:46,640 --> 02:20:53,520
about yourself. This is what comes up. So it's very intense and difficult. If you go to a

1293
02:20:53,520 --> 02:20:59,360
meditation retreat, don't think you're going to relax. So what's the experience of a meditation

1294
02:20:59,360 --> 02:21:06,320
retreat when everything you don't like comes up for 30 days? It depends what comes up.

1295
02:21:06,320 --> 02:21:12,560
Anger comes up, you're angry. For days on end, you're just boiling with anger. Everything makes you

1296
02:21:12,560 --> 02:21:18,000
angry. Again, something that happens right now, or you remember something from 20 years ago,

1297
02:21:18,000 --> 02:21:23,920
and you start boiling with, it's like, I never even thought about this incident. But it's

1298
02:21:24,400 --> 02:21:32,160
it was somewhere stored with a huge, huge pile of anger attached to it, and it's now coming up,

1299
02:21:32,160 --> 02:21:39,600
and all the anger is coming up. Maybe it's boredom. 30 days of meditation, you start getting bored,

1300
02:21:40,400 --> 02:21:48,880
and it's the most boring thing. Suddenly no anger, it's the most boring. Another second, I scream.

1301
02:21:49,840 --> 02:21:56,240
I mean, and boredom is one of the most difficult things to deal with in life. I think it's closely

1302
02:21:56,240 --> 02:22:02,400
related to death. Death is boring. You know, in many movies, death is exciting. It's not exciting.

1303
02:22:02,400 --> 02:22:09,520
When you die, ultimately it's boredom. Nothing happens. It's the end of exciting things.

1304
02:22:10,240 --> 02:22:16,080
And many things in the world happen because of boredom. To some extent, people start entire wars

1305
02:22:16,800 --> 02:22:22,640
because of boredom. People quit relationships. People quit jobs because of boredom.

1306
02:22:23,200 --> 02:22:30,000
And if you never learn how to deal with boredom, you will never learn how to enjoy

1307
02:22:30,000 --> 02:22:39,200
peace and quiet, because the way to peace passes through boredom. And from what I experienced

1308
02:22:39,360 --> 02:22:45,520
in meditation, I think maybe it was the most difficult, maybe at least in the top three,

1309
02:22:45,520 --> 02:22:51,920
like much more difficult, say, than anger or pain. When pain comes up, you feel heroic. Hey,

1310
02:22:51,920 --> 02:22:58,880
I'm dealing with pain. When boredom comes up, it brings it, you know, with depression and feelings

1311
02:22:58,880 --> 02:23:07,760
of worthlessness, and it's nothing. I'm nothing. The way to peace is through boredom. David Foster

1312
02:23:07,760 --> 02:23:16,160
Wallace said the key to life is to be unboreable, which is a different perspective on what you're

1313
02:23:16,160 --> 02:23:21,280
talking to. Is there truth to that? Yes, I mean, it's closely related. I would say, like,

1314
02:23:21,280 --> 02:23:26,560
I look at the world today, like politics, the one thing we need more than anything else is boring

1315
02:23:26,560 --> 02:23:33,920
politicians. We have a super abundance of very exciting politicians who are doing and saying

1316
02:23:33,920 --> 02:23:39,680
very exciting things, and we need boring politicians, and we need them quickly.

1317
02:23:42,640 --> 02:23:46,480
Yeah, the way to peace is through boredom. That applies in more ways than one.

1318
02:23:47,760 --> 02:23:54,640
What advice would you give to young people today in high school and college? How to have

1319
02:23:54,640 --> 02:23:59,440
a successful life, how to have a successful career? What they should know, it's the first

1320
02:23:59,440 --> 02:24:05,840
time in history, nobody has any idea how the world would look like in 10 years. Nobody has

1321
02:24:05,840 --> 02:24:10,400
any idea how the world would look like when you grow up. You know, throughout history,

1322
02:24:10,400 --> 02:24:14,560
it was never possible to predict the future. You live in the Middle Ages, nobody knows,

1323
02:24:14,560 --> 02:24:19,680
maybe in 10 years, the Vikings will invade, the Mongols will invade, there'll be an epidemic,

1324
02:24:19,680 --> 02:24:27,120
there'll be an earthquake, who knows. But the basic structures of life will not change. Most

1325
02:24:27,120 --> 02:24:35,200
people will still be peasants. Armies would fight on horseback with swords and bows and arrows,

1326
02:24:35,200 --> 02:24:41,760
and things like that. So you could learn a lot from the wisdom of your elders. They've been there

1327
02:24:41,760 --> 02:24:48,640
before, and they knew what kind of basic skills you need to learn. Most people need to learn how

1328
02:24:48,640 --> 02:24:56,320
to sow wheat and harvest wheat or rice and make bread and build a house and ride the horse and

1329
02:24:56,320 --> 02:25:03,760
and things like that. Now we have no idea, not just about politics. We have no idea how the job

1330
02:25:03,760 --> 02:25:11,120
market would look like in 10 years. We have no idea what skills will still be needed.

1331
02:25:12,240 --> 02:25:17,840
You think you're going to learn how to code because there are only a lot of coders in the

1332
02:25:17,840 --> 02:25:22,400
2030s? Think again. Maybe AI is doing all the coding. You don't need any coders.

1333
02:25:23,280 --> 02:25:27,920
You're going to, I don't know, you learn to translate languages, you want to be a translator,

1334
02:25:27,920 --> 02:25:35,840
gone. And we don't know what skills will be needed. So the most important skill is the skill to keep

1335
02:25:35,840 --> 02:25:43,040
learning and keep changing throughout our lives, which is very, very difficult to keep reinventing

1336
02:25:43,040 --> 02:25:51,520
ourselves. It's a deep, again, it's in a way a spiritual practice to build your personality,

1337
02:25:51,600 --> 02:26:02,640
to build your mind as a very flexible mind. If traditionally people thought about

1338
02:26:04,480 --> 02:26:14,000
education, like building a stone house with very deep foundations, now it's more like setting up a

1339
02:26:14,000 --> 02:26:19,920
tent that you can fold and move to the next place very, very quickly because that's the 21st

1340
02:26:19,920 --> 02:26:27,920
century. Which also raises questions about the future of education, what that looks like.

1341
02:26:29,040 --> 02:26:37,120
Let me ask you about love. What were some of the challenges? What were some of the lessons

1342
02:26:37,920 --> 02:26:41,600
about love, about life that you learned from coming out as gay?

1343
02:26:42,080 --> 02:26:46,720
Hmm. In many ways, it goes back to the stories. I think this is one of the

1344
02:26:49,120 --> 02:26:55,760
reasons I became so interested in stories and in their power. Because I grew up in a

1345
02:26:56,720 --> 02:27:02,240
small Israeli town in the 1980s, early 1990s, which was very homophobic.

1346
02:27:02,240 --> 02:27:14,320
I basically embraced it. I breathed it because you could hardly even think differently.

1347
02:27:15,600 --> 02:27:23,600
You had these two powerful stories around. One, that God hates gay people and that he will

1348
02:27:23,600 --> 02:27:30,880
punish them for who they are or for what they do. Secondly, that it's not God, it's nature,

1349
02:27:31,440 --> 02:27:37,840
that there is something diseased or sick about it. These people, maybe they are not sinners,

1350
02:27:37,840 --> 02:27:47,120
but they are sick, they are defective. Nobody wanted to identify with such a thing. If your

1351
02:27:47,120 --> 02:27:52,640
options, okay, you can be a sinner, you can be a defect, what do you want? No good options there.

1352
02:27:53,440 --> 02:27:58,240
It took me many years, until I was 21, to come to terms with it.

1353
02:28:00,080 --> 02:28:04,800
One of the things I learned through things, first about the amazing capacity of the human

1354
02:28:04,800 --> 02:28:13,600
mind for denial and delusion. That an algorithm could have told me that I'm gay when I was 14

1355
02:28:13,600 --> 02:28:19,440
or 15. If there is a good-looking guy and girl walking, I would immediately focus on the guy.

1356
02:28:20,000 --> 02:28:28,240
But I didn't connect the dots. I could not understand what was happening inside my own

1357
02:28:28,240 --> 02:28:35,120
brain and my own mind and my own body. It took me a long time to realize, you know, you're just gay.

1358
02:28:36,480 --> 02:28:41,120
So that speaks to the power of social convention versus individual thought.

1359
02:28:41,120 --> 02:28:48,560
This is the power of self-delusion. It's not that I knew I was gay and was hiding it. I was hiding

1360
02:28:48,560 --> 02:28:56,640
it for myself successfully. Looking back, I don't understand how it is possible. But I know it is

1361
02:28:56,640 --> 02:29:04,080
possible. I knew and didn't know at the same time. Then the other big lesson is the power of the

1362
02:29:04,080 --> 02:29:10,080
stories, of the social conventions. Because the stories were not true. They did not make sense

1363
02:29:10,080 --> 02:29:16,400
even on their own terms. Even if you accept the basic religious framework of the world,

1364
02:29:16,400 --> 02:29:23,200
that there is a good God that created everything and controls everything. Why would a good God

1365
02:29:25,520 --> 02:29:33,440
punish people for love? I understand why a good God would punish people for violence, for hatred,

1366
02:29:33,440 --> 02:29:39,920
for cruelty. But why would God punish people for love, especially when he created them that way?

1367
02:29:40,640 --> 02:29:48,080
So even if you accept the religious framework of the world, obviously the story that God hates gay

1368
02:29:48,080 --> 02:29:54,400
people, it comes not from God, but from some humans who invented this story. They take their

1369
02:29:54,400 --> 02:30:00,800
own hatred. This is something humans do all the time. They hate somebody and they say, no, I don't

1370
02:30:00,800 --> 02:30:08,320
hate them. God hates them. They throw their own hatred on God. And then if you think about the

1371
02:30:08,400 --> 02:30:14,960
scientific framework that said that all gays, they are against nature, they are against the laws of

1372
02:30:14,960 --> 02:30:24,240
nature, and so forth. Science tells us nothing can exist against the laws of nature. Things that go

1373
02:30:24,240 --> 02:30:30,640
against the laws of nature just don't exist. There is a law of nature that you can't move faster than

1374
02:30:30,640 --> 02:30:36,560
the speed of light. Now you don't have this minority of people who break the laws of nature

1375
02:30:36,560 --> 02:30:41,840
by going faster than the speed of light. And then nature comes, nah, that's bad. You shouldn't do

1376
02:30:41,840 --> 02:30:47,360
that. That's not how nature works. If something goes against the laws of nature, it just can't

1377
02:30:47,360 --> 02:30:54,240
exist. The fact that gay people exist, me, and not just people. You see homosexuality among many,

1378
02:30:54,240 --> 02:31:02,480
many mammals and birds and other animals. It exists because it is in line with the laws of nature.

1379
02:31:03,440 --> 02:31:09,440
The idea that this is sick, that this is whatever, it comes not from nature, it comes from the human

1380
02:31:09,440 --> 02:31:16,320
imagination. Some people, for whatever reasons, hated gay people. They said, oh, they go against

1381
02:31:16,320 --> 02:31:23,600
nature. But this is a story created by people. This is not the laws of nature. And this taught me

1382
02:31:23,600 --> 02:31:32,160
that so many of the things that we think are natural or eternal or divine, no, they are just

1383
02:31:32,160 --> 02:31:38,640
human stories. But these human stories are often the most powerful forces in the world.

1384
02:31:39,680 --> 02:31:44,880
So what did you learn from your personal struggle of

1385
02:31:47,280 --> 02:31:51,440
journey through the social conventions to find one of the things that makes life awesome,

1386
02:31:51,440 --> 02:31:58,880
which is love? What it takes to strip away the self-delusion and the pressures of social

1387
02:31:58,880 --> 02:32:06,720
convention to wake up? It takes a lot of work, a lot of courage, and a lot of help from other

1388
02:32:06,720 --> 02:32:16,880
people. This kind of heroic idea that I can do it all by myself, it doesn't work. Certainly with

1389
02:32:16,880 --> 02:32:22,800
love, you need at least one more person. And I'm very happy that I found Itzik. We lived in the

1390
02:32:22,800 --> 02:32:29,520
same small Israeli town. We lived on two adjacent streets for years, probably went to school on the

1391
02:32:29,520 --> 02:32:37,200
same bus for years without really encountering each other. In the end, we met on one of the first

1392
02:32:37,200 --> 02:32:44,240
dating sites on the internet for gay people in Israel in 2002. You're saying the internet works?

1393
02:32:44,240 --> 02:32:49,680
Yes. I said a lot of bad things or dangers about technology and the internet. There are also,

1394
02:32:49,680 --> 02:32:55,440
of course, good things. And this is not an accident. You have two kinds of minorities in history.

1395
02:32:56,320 --> 02:33:03,920
You have minorities which are a cohesive group, like Jews, that, yes, you are as small as being

1396
02:33:03,920 --> 02:33:10,720
born Jewish in, say, Germany or Russia or whatever. You're born in a small community. But as a Jewish

1397
02:33:10,720 --> 02:33:15,840
boy, you're born to a Jewish family. You have Jewish parents. You have Jewish siblings. You're

1398
02:33:15,840 --> 02:33:20,960
in a Jewish neighborhood. You have Jewish friends. So these kinds of minorities, they could always

1399
02:33:20,960 --> 02:33:26,560
come together and help each other throughout history. Now, another type of minority, like gay

1400
02:33:26,560 --> 02:33:34,080
people or more broadly, LGBTQ people, that as a gay boy, you're usually not born to a gay family

1401
02:33:34,080 --> 02:33:41,360
with gay parents and gay siblings and in a gay neighborhood. So usually you find yourself

1402
02:33:41,360 --> 02:33:48,400
completely alone. For most of history, one of the biggest problems for the gay community was that

1403
02:33:48,400 --> 02:33:55,760
there was no community. How do you find one another? And the internet was a wonderful thing in

1404
02:33:55,760 --> 02:34:02,400
this respect because it made it very easy for these kinds of diffuse communities or diffuse

1405
02:34:02,400 --> 02:34:07,520
minorities to find each other. So me and Itzik, even though we rode the same bus together to

1406
02:34:07,520 --> 02:34:13,120
school for years, we didn't meet in the physical world. We met online. Because again, in the

1407
02:34:13,120 --> 02:34:18,560
physical world, you don't want to identify in an Israeli town in the 1980s. You ride the bus. You

1408
02:34:18,560 --> 02:34:23,680
don't want to say, hey, I'm gay. Is there anybody else gay here? That's not a good idea. But on the

1409
02:34:23,680 --> 02:34:28,480
internet, we could find each other. There's another lesson in there that maybe sometimes the thing

1410
02:34:28,480 --> 02:34:35,040
you're looking for is right under your nose. Yeah. A very old lesson and a very true lesson

1411
02:34:35,040 --> 02:34:42,560
in many ways. So you need help from other people to realize the truth about yourself.

1412
02:34:42,560 --> 02:34:47,360
So of course, in love, you cannot just love abstractly. There is another person there.

1413
02:34:47,360 --> 02:34:55,200
You need to find them. But also, we were one of the first generations who enjoyed the benefits

1414
02:34:55,200 --> 02:35:00,800
of gay liberation, of the very difficult struggles of people who were much braver than us

1415
02:35:01,440 --> 02:35:08,640
in the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, who dared to question social conventions,

1416
02:35:09,600 --> 02:35:17,440
to struggle at sometimes a terrible price. And we benefited from it. And more broadly,

1417
02:35:17,440 --> 02:35:22,160
we spoke earlier about the feminist movement. There would have been no gay liberation without

1418
02:35:22,160 --> 02:35:31,280
the feminist movement. We also owe them for starting to change the gender structure of the

1419
02:35:31,280 --> 02:35:39,200
world. And this is always true. You can never do it just by yourself. Also, I look at my journey

1420
02:35:39,200 --> 02:35:46,880
in meditation, I could not have found the idea of going to meditation retreat okay. But I couldn't

1421
02:35:46,960 --> 02:35:52,000
discover meditation by myself. I couldn't develop the meditation technique by myself.

1422
02:35:52,000 --> 02:36:02,880
Somebody had to teach me this way of how to look inside yourself. And it's also a very important

1423
02:36:02,880 --> 02:36:10,560
lesson that you can't do it just by yourself. That this fantasy of complete autonomy, of complete

1424
02:36:10,560 --> 02:36:17,600
self-sufficiency, it doesn't work. You hear it tends to be a very kind of male match of fantasy,

1425
02:36:17,600 --> 02:36:24,640
I don't need anybody. I can be so strong and so brave that I'll do everything by myself. It never

1426
02:36:24,640 --> 02:36:34,800
works. You need friends, you need a mentor, you need the very thing that makes us human,

1427
02:36:35,280 --> 02:36:41,600
as other humans. You mentioned that the fear of border might be a kind of

1428
02:36:42,240 --> 02:36:48,240
proxy for the fear of death. So what role does the fear of death play in the human condition?

1429
02:36:48,240 --> 02:36:54,720
Are you afraid of death? Yes, I think everybody is afraid of death. All our fears come out of

1430
02:36:54,720 --> 02:37:02,080
the fear of death. But the fear of death is just so deep and difficult. Usually we can't face it

1431
02:37:02,160 --> 02:37:08,960
directly. So we cut it into little pieces and we face just little pieces. Oh, I lost my smartphone.

1432
02:37:08,960 --> 02:37:14,400
That's a little, little, little piece of the fear of death, which is of losing everything.

1433
02:37:14,400 --> 02:37:20,080
So I can't deal with losing everything. I'm dealing now with losing my phone or losing a book or

1434
02:37:20,080 --> 02:37:28,880
whatever. I feel pain. That's a small bit of the fear of death. Somebody who really doesn't fear

1435
02:37:28,880 --> 02:37:35,120
death would not fear anything at all. It'll be like anything that happens, I can deal with it.

1436
02:37:35,120 --> 02:37:42,560
If I can deal with death, this is nothing. So any fears as a distant echo of the big fear of death.

1437
02:37:42,560 --> 02:37:50,480
Have you ever looked at it head on, caught glimpses, sort of contemplated as the Stoics do?

1438
02:37:50,480 --> 02:37:57,200
Yes. I mean, when I was a teenager, I would constantly contemplate it, trying to understand,

1439
02:37:57,200 --> 02:38:06,560
to imagine. It was a very, very shocking and moving experience. I remember especially in

1440
02:38:06,560 --> 02:38:12,320
connection with national ideology, which was also very big, strong in Israel, still is.

1441
02:38:13,440 --> 02:38:17,600
Which then comes from the fear of death. You know that you're going to die. So you said,

1442
02:38:17,600 --> 02:38:21,760
okay, I die, but the nation lives on. I live on through the nation. I don't really die.

1443
02:38:22,720 --> 02:38:29,360
And you hear it especially on Memorial Day, day for fallen soldiers. So every day,

1444
02:38:29,360 --> 02:38:35,520
there'll be in school Memorial Day for fallen soldiers who fell defending Israel in all its

1445
02:38:35,520 --> 02:38:40,640
different wars. And all these kids would come dressed in white, and you have this big ceremony

1446
02:38:40,640 --> 02:38:46,720
with flags and songs and dances in memory of the fallen soldiers. And you get the impression,

1447
02:38:47,600 --> 02:38:51,440
again, I don't want to sound crass, but you get the impression that the best thing in life is to be

1448
02:38:51,440 --> 02:38:56,320
a fallen soldier. Because even though, yes, you die, everybody dies in the end, but then you'll

1449
02:38:56,320 --> 02:39:01,600
have all these cool kids for years and years remembering you and celebrating you, and you

1450
02:39:01,600 --> 02:39:06,800
don't really die. And I remember standing in these ceremonies and thinking, what does it actually

1451
02:39:06,800 --> 02:39:14,400
mean? Like, okay, so if I'm a fallen soldier, now I'm a skeleton, I'm bones under this,

1452
02:39:14,960 --> 02:39:21,760
in this military cemetery, under this stone, do I actually hear the kids singing all these

1453
02:39:21,760 --> 02:39:26,880
patriotic songs? If not, how do I know they do it? Maybe they trick me. Maybe I die in the war,

1454
02:39:26,880 --> 02:39:33,680
and then they don't sing any songs. And how does it help me? And I realized, I was quite young

1455
02:39:33,680 --> 02:39:39,920
at the time, that if you're dead, you can't hear anything because that's the meaning of being dead.

1456
02:39:39,920 --> 02:39:43,680
And if you're dead, you can't think of anything like, oh, now they're remembering because you're

1457
02:39:43,680 --> 02:39:47,840
dead. That's the meaning of being dead. And it was a shocking realization.

1458
02:39:48,720 --> 02:39:53,600
But it's a really difficult realization to keep holding your mind. Like it's the end.

1459
02:39:53,600 --> 02:39:58,720
I lost it over time. I mean, for many years, it was a very powerful fuel, motivation,

1460
02:39:59,360 --> 02:40:05,520
for philosophical, for spiritual exploration. And I realized that the fear of death is really

1461
02:40:05,520 --> 02:40:12,000
a very powerful drive. And over the years, especially as I meditated, it kind of dissipated.

1462
02:40:12,000 --> 02:40:17,920
And to die, sometimes find myself trying to recapture this teenage fear of death because

1463
02:40:17,920 --> 02:40:23,440
it was so powerful. And I just can't. I try to make the same image. I don't know.

1464
02:40:25,200 --> 02:40:26,960
Something about the teenage years.

1465
02:40:26,960 --> 02:40:32,400
Yeah, as a teenager, I always thought that the adults, there is something wrong with the adults

1466
02:40:32,400 --> 02:40:38,240
because they don't get it. Like I would ask my parents or teachers about it. And they,

1467
02:40:38,320 --> 02:40:43,360
oh, yes, you die in the end. That's it. But on the other hand, they are so worried about other

1468
02:40:43,360 --> 02:40:48,880
things. Like there'll be a political crisis or an economic problem or a personal problem,

1469
02:40:48,880 --> 02:40:52,880
like with the bank or whatever. They'll be so worried. But then about the fact that they

1470
02:40:52,880 --> 02:40:58,320
are going to die, ah, we don't care about it. That's why you read Camus and others when

1471
02:40:58,320 --> 02:41:03,520
you're a teenager, you really worry about the existential questions. Well, this feels like

1472
02:41:03,520 --> 02:41:07,120
the right time to ask the big question. What's the meaning of this whole thing,

1473
02:41:07,120 --> 02:41:11,120
you all? And you're the right person to ask. What's the meaning of life?

1474
02:41:11,120 --> 02:41:11,360
Yes.

1475
02:41:11,360 --> 02:41:12,400
Oh, that's easy.

1476
02:41:12,400 --> 02:41:12,960
What is it?

1477
02:41:15,920 --> 02:41:23,520
So what life is, if you ask what the meaning of life, what life is, life is feeling things,

1478
02:41:24,240 --> 02:41:30,320
having sensations, emotions, and reacting to them. When you feel something good,

1479
02:41:30,320 --> 02:41:35,520
something pleasant, you want more out of it. You want more of it. When you feel something

1480
02:41:35,520 --> 02:41:40,160
unpleasant, you want to get rid of it. That's the whole of life. That's what is happening all

1481
02:41:40,160 --> 02:41:46,480
the time. You feel things, you want the pleasant things to increase, you want the unpleasant

1482
02:41:46,480 --> 02:41:55,120
things to disappear. That's what life is. If you ask what is the meaning of life in a more kind of

1483
02:41:55,120 --> 02:42:00,960
philosophical or spiritual question, the real question to ask, what kind of answer do you

1484
02:42:00,960 --> 02:42:09,680
expect? Most people expect a story. And that's always the wrong answer. Most people expect that

1485
02:42:09,680 --> 02:42:15,600
the answer to the question, what is the meaning of life, will be a story, like a big drama,

1486
02:42:15,600 --> 02:42:21,440
that this is the plot line, and this is your role in the story. This is what you have to do. This

1487
02:42:21,440 --> 02:42:27,040
is your line in the big play. You say your line, you do your thing, that's the thing.

1488
02:42:27,840 --> 02:42:36,000
And this is human imagination. This is fantasy. To really understand life, life is not a story.

1489
02:42:36,000 --> 02:42:43,840
The universe does not function like a story. So I think to really understand life, you need to

1490
02:42:43,840 --> 02:42:52,400
observe it directly in a non-verbal way. Don't turn it into a story. And the question to start with

1491
02:42:52,960 --> 02:43:00,080
is what is suffering? What is causing suffering? The question, what is the meaning of life,

1492
02:43:00,080 --> 02:43:05,680
it will take you to fantasies and delusions. We want to stay with the reality of life.

1493
02:43:05,680 --> 02:43:11,680
And the most important question about the reality of life is what is suffering and where is it

1494
02:43:11,680 --> 02:43:17,200
coming from? And to answer that non-verbally, so the conscious experience of suffering.

1495
02:43:17,680 --> 02:43:25,520
Yes. When you suffer, try to observe what is really happening when you're suffering.

1496
02:43:30,800 --> 02:43:35,360
Well put. And I wonder if AI will also go through that same kind of process.

1497
02:43:36,560 --> 02:43:41,200
If we develop consciousness or not, at present, it's not. It's just words.

1498
02:43:41,280 --> 02:43:43,760
It will just say to you, please don't hurt me at all.

1499
02:43:46,320 --> 02:43:51,680
Again, as I've mentioned to you, I'm a huge fan of yours. Thank you for the incredible work you

1500
02:43:51,680 --> 02:43:59,200
do. This conversation has been a long time. I think coming, it's a huge honor to talk to you.

1501
02:43:59,200 --> 02:44:04,960
This was really fun. Thank you for talking today. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. And as I said,

1502
02:44:04,960 --> 02:44:10,400
the long form is the best form. Yeah, I loved it. Thank you.

1503
02:44:34,960 --> 02:44:38,400
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.