84. Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life Is Meaningless and Amazing

My guest today is you've all Noah Harari altar of the Blockbuster book sapiens which tells the entire history by species in under 450 Pages. Savings took the World by storm, selling over 23 million copies and having been translated into 65 languages. This is your story is a human being. What does it mean to be human?

Welcome to people. I mostly admire with Steve

Levitt, sapiens path to success was an extremely unlikely one. At the time, he wrote it Harare was a completely unknown historian of the Middle Ages, lecturing at Hebrew University. In Israel, the book was originally written and published in Hebrew for years passed. Before it was even released in English and yet it became one of the most influential non-fiction books of the 21st century. What makes the ideas in the book so powerful and compelling.

I think I want to find that out today.

You've got what a pleasure getting to meet you. It's absolutely amazing that you write such intelligent books and you get people to read them.

It's part of the job. It's not about speaking up. It's about being heard. So you need to think how you express yourself in a way that is understandable.

So I've heard the story that if it weren't for your deep insecurities around public speaking, the book sapiens might never have come to be a set. A true

In a way. Yes, because it came out of the course I gave it to University and I just would write everything that I have to say during the lecture. Because I wasn't so secure internet as a lecturer. And these lecture notes, they eventually became the book. So

I've also heard that your reaction to reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond Back in the day, when you were a PhD student, was something like I could write a book like that?

Well, maybe not I at first, but it is possible.

Both write books like that. I was doing my PhD on the Memoirs of an autobiographical writings of soldiers from the 15th and 16th century, quite a narrow subject matter. And suddenly I read this book and I realize that it is possible to look at history from such a broad perspective. So we didn't immediately occurred to me that I could do it, but at least somebody could do

it. When I read Guns, Germs and Steel.

Till my reaction was, how is it possible that anyone could know enough and have enough confidence to write such a book? I think it's very unusual to have your mix of apprehension in some domain say like public speaking. And what must be extreme self-confidence to feel like you can write the entire history of

mankind. I'm not sure. We'd self-confidence, at least. When I wrote sapiens, I didn't take myself out of the

Object too seriously because I didn't think that many people would read it. It came out of this University course right, word in Hebrew originally, interesting and I was struck by the fact that there was no book in Hebrew which tells the history of the world to the Israeli audience. So I said the must be some people in University in colleges that could use that. So I write for them and there is no competition because there was no other book available and I thought, yeah, I might make some turbo.

Mistakes. But that's fine. I mean, who's going to read it anyway?

Obviously, despite the fact that you wrote this for a very small Israeli audience, things really worked out for you. Not only sold a ton of copies but I think people actually read sapiens after they buy it which isn't always the case. I first learned about the book from Danny Kahneman and he had purchased it in the UK because after Israel, it went to the UK and he told me that

What's the most important book of the decade, and that he had read it twice and he said I've only read a few books twice in my entire life. So like Danny, I've also read sapiens twice and I love it but be completely honest. I'm surprised anyone else loves it because it violates Stephen Dubner 's first, two laws of Storytelling. So Dubliners first law is that every good story has a person at the center of it and individual, you can't tell a good story.

Story about an idea or an event. Unless there's some personality to keep the audience captivated and Dubner. Second law of Storytelling is that people only want to read stories, they don't want facts or hypotheses or settle arguments. They want stories and unlike almost every other popular nonfiction book that people read sapiens is almost completely devoid of characters. Yes, or stories about people, this must have been a conscious decision on your part,

right? Yes. There is a hero.

Which is us. So in some way, doesn't violate these laws. I think that I wrote it and many people maybe read it with yourself as the main character. This is your story is a human being. What does it mean to be human?

Do I get that? But it's still surprising to me that people have that much creativity should actually be able to inject themselves into what you've done

part of the job of writing the whole office.

Story in 400 pages of 500 pages, is get to the point quickly. You don't take people on very long rides, you immediately show them the destination and many of the destinations you reach our quite shocking. If we talked about neanderthals, you immediately begin with the idea that actually Thomas APNs and Neanderthals not only had sex, but actually had children together and you

Controlling your mind, this family scene of, you know, a neanderthal mother is sapiens father and a child. And then you take this kind of extremely provocative scene, and you carried forward and you ask questions about what would the Catholic church say about the souls of Neanderthals? Because the Catholic church for instance, says the chimpanzees. Don't have souls. When they die, that's it. They don't go to heaven or hell. So what about Neanderthals

If you say that neanderthals don't have a soul, then just imagine it that your dad has a soul. He goes to heaven, your mom doesn't. She's a neanderthal. She doesn't have a soul so you can push it in the direction of saying. No, no neanderthals also had Souls. But this is a slippery slope because as you move further back in the Eeveelution Airy story you eventually reach the chimpanzees and the dogs and everybody else. Yeah so you make a very long story.

Very, very short and provocative or similarly to move to the field of the economics. There is a short chapter on money and right at the beginning, like the main message that money is simply trust, it's not made of matter. It's not gold, it's not paper. It's just an idea in our mind and not just any idea is trust, trust between people, that's money. So that's shocking to the people who have used to think about money is evil, right? And

also to the die-hard capitalists like money very much. It's also shocking to realize that it's just a completely fictional story in our minds. It's not the laws of nature and therefore, also all this idea that you can have a completely free market economy without any regulations without any government intervention. No, you can't. Because the most basic thing, like money it is based on people trusting each other and if

You

don't have some kind of coats of parliament's of governments of religions that helped to establish trust between people. You will not get a market, you will get complete

chaos. What you think? It's a social construct, right money can exist, unless everyone agrees that money is going to serve this purpose, and we're all kind of brainwashed. And maybe I'm not even aware of the fact that we're part of the social contract to accept money. It's interesting. You use word fixin to describe that.

Yes, because social

Act or social construct their abstract and complicated ideas. And again, you need to make it clear. It's not some abstract, social construct. It's simply a story that somebody is telling us and going back to this know that you must have a person at the center of the story. That's not true. The most successful Story Ever Told is the story of money. How does it work money? You have these big storytellers like the chairperson of the Federal Reserve and the finance ministers and all these people.

And they tell us that one dollar equals the banana. It's not true. In any objective sense, you can't eat dollars, you can't drink them. It's just a story that somebody told us that a dollar is the collab inanna, and it works provided. That enough people believe in the story. It's not a true story. About some objective biological fact, viruses exist, whether we believe in them or not. Even if you don't accept the story,

he's about viruses, they can still kill you, right? It's not the same with money. If one person stops believing in the dollar, nothing happens, but if millions of people stopped believing in the dollar, it is appears it loses. All its value and it didn't happen to the dollar so far. But it did happen to quite a number of other currencies throughout

history. Right before the financial crisis I was scheduled to fly to Europe to give a talk to a bunch of clients of a big Icelandic.

And we had a call ahead of time. And I said, hey, are you at all worried about what's going on? The u.s. Is it all? No, no, not at all. It's no problem whatsoever. Everything's great, where we are and then two or three days passed and they said, hey, we decided given the unrest. We're not going to have this conference after all, but per our contract, we agreed that we would pay you if the conference got cancelled, so we will still pay your fee. So, on Monday, I receive a wire transfer

On this Icelandic bank and on Tuesday the bank no longer existed. It literally disappeared in exactly what you're talking about. That Iceland had built an enormous financial sector around trust, but didn't actually have a government or an economy of a size that could reinforce. The Trust In the case of people got spooked and they went to the bank of England and said, hey would you support us? And just say yes. We're for real and you'll balance up and they said no and they literally disappeared and it probably the best timing.

I've ever had in my entire life. Maybe you broke the

bank. I know the last

check that this Bank round was, to me.

So we're tumble characters the easiest character to build into any book is yourself. The author, personal stories from your own life so Jared Diamond Malcolm Gladwell, Robert sapolsky they frequently insert themselves into their books but to the best of my recollection, you yourself. Do not make a single appearance and sapiens

in the later books, a few times. But in sapiens, no, this is because my line of research, as I mentioned earlier, was originally

Autobiographical texts of these soldiers from the 15th and 16th century and later I did my other research on Military Memoirs and Military autobiographies until the twentieth century and it's just inoculated me against the autobiographical urge to inject yourself into the story. So many books, even books that don't present themselves as an autobiography. When you dig, you learn that actually it is an outer Barrel.

Undeclared. Autobiography, I was too familiar with the traps and the dangers involved in writing something which is too much based on the author's own experiences.

But I would say your personality Creeps in on a few topics. I know, for instance, that you don't eat a whole lot of meat. Yeah. And it's really clear when you write about the modern meat industry that you write from the perspective.

Of someone who doesn't approve of the methods being used now, of course, many people don't, but do you consider that autobiography or that such this common sense?

Obviously My Views enter my books, how can you write? Otherwise but even just in terms of trying to influence people it's best if you don't do it in a kind of in-your-face attitude, yes, I share a lot about the suffering of animals, but my decision in sapiens was simply to give them

their proper place in history without animals. You can't really understand the Agricultural Revolution. You can't understand ancient economic systems. You can't understand military history. The whole says the cows, the chickens. They are there. And they are also sentient beings. So they were also influenced by it and I just give them their proper place in the story.

Many of you point, you make, I think are obvious, but no one ever, really talks about them or thinks about them, which I think are the best.

Points to make because it doesn't take a lot of convincing as soon as I see it on the page I'm convinced but it's not part of my reality. Otherwise then it's just a gift you have of seeing the obvious when others somehow aren't seeing it.

I think that's part of the job of building, a bridge between the scientific community and the general public. When I wrote sapiens my impression was that I'm just saying what I was taught as a student, in my first year, in the history Department.

University. I didn't feel that there was anything there which was a new revelation to the scientific Community or to Scholars of history. And then a lot of readers, they pointed out what I thought were the most banal statements and they said this was the most profound thing I've read. And even this thing that money is just a social construct of just a fictional story. Everybody knows it in Academia, it's just almost taken for granted.

But you never talk about it. Yeah, and when you do talk about it, it turns out that for many people, it's extremely

The thing that I find so dick tip about your writing is the tone that you bring to it. Your voice is it's a little bit cranky in a way that allows you to make statements. That would seem outrageous out of context but within the flow of the narrative, they make a reader say, yeah, that's so right now, I'm bookmarked a couple of examples. Here's one from sapiens you, right? As far as we can tell from a

The scientific Viewpoint human life has no meaning. Do you want to talk about? What you mean? When you say human life has no meaning,

when you ask, what is the meaning of life? Before you even attempt, an answer, I would say the first step is to think, what kind of answer would be acceptable to me, and the answer is a story. We are storytelling animals, we think not in facts, not in statistics, not in

equations. We think in stories people sometimes think about the cosmos is one big drama and they ask themselves. What is my role in the drama? Or what is the role of humankind in the drama? And the meaning of my life? Is my part in the drama. It's like there is this big Hollywood production and I'm one of the actors I have a role in the drama and this will be the meaning of my life and on my deathbed.

I would feel complete and satisfied. I've done my share and the shocking realization is that this entire approach is completely misguided. Because reality itself, the universe, the laws of physics, they don't work like a story, uh, like a drama, the laws of nature. Don't care about us. If planet Earth, explodes, tomorrow morning and all life on it disappears, physics wouldn't care planets and stars explode, all the time throughout the Universe.

Zeus and the universe just goes along with its business. So the answer is, there is no drama and you have no role to play in it. Some people may get very depressed because of that, so life has no meaning. Yes, but I don't think that the main question in life is the question of meaning. I think that the main question in life is the question of suffering. What is suffering? Where is it coming from? And how can we be liberated from it? And even the depression of the suffering that you experience from

Meaningless. That's where the question arises. What is happening there? Why should you feel miserable that you are not part of some big Cosmic drama. What's wrong with me? It's not the mission from the cosmos. It's something immediate you suffer and you don't want to suffer. What could be more simple than that? It's here. I know

the way that I disabused myself of this idea that I was at the center of the universe and everything was there to serve me.

Me is, I took an undergraduate course from e.o., Wilson in The Young biologist at Harvard, good for you. And the basic point of that course, is that you have no meaning. Any individual is worthless and it could have been demoralizing and depressing, but it was just the opposite. Because I was really haunted by a pervasive fear of death. As a teenager, I was just terrified of death. And I sat in that big Auditorium listening to e.o. Wilson,

And by understanding I was meaningless, I was able to shed this fear of death. Now what he did do, you know, Wilson did do along the way to look, you mean nothing but the thing is to the people around you, you actually mean something, they don't matter either, but to the people around you, you matter. And so his basic view is just be nice to people around you and when you're free of being the center of the story about the universe, it's liberating to be free of that and just to be able to

to do your daily things without those

I remember when I was 13 or 14 at school, we have the ceremony for the fallen soldiers, who died during the wars of Israel on Memorial Day and everybody dressed in white shirts and you have this big ceremony and you bring flowers and you sing songs and so forth and ID. So it must be wonderful to be a fallen soldier. Because now, you have meaning in life, all these school children will be singing songs in your owner for millions of years.

And then I turn a know that that's not possible. I know that the universe is like 14 billion years old. It will probably go on for at least. Let's say 14 billion years more, I know history. There is no way that there will still be a state of Israel and the Jewish people forget about a million years from now, a thousand years from now, it's very unlikely on it. Even simpler level, you're dead. How do you know that people of singing songs in your owner, once you're dead? It's not.

Like you're lying in the ground and you can hear the songs coming from above.

So you talk about Judaism but you speak like a Buddhist. Have you found that tip serve your life. Purpose is better than Judaism

04 better from a very early age. I just couldn't accept the Jewish story because it's completely false, from historical perspective, you look at every religion, every National mythology and it's always centered on us. I look at Judaism which is the region of my people, which is also the

Basis for Israeli nationality. And what is the role of the Chinese in the world? They have no role in Judaism, who cares about these 1.5 billion people. Obviously, the 15 million Jews. They are the center of the story and then you go to China. And, of course, the Chinese of the main Heroes of the cosmic drama and people in New Guinea, they have no role to play and Buddhism. It, it was not studying it, it was really practicing meditation. One way to understand meditation.

Is the instruction, just forget about all the stories in your mind and just observe what is actually happening. You have the Mind constantly producing stories and leave them aside and try to observe reality. The first time I went to a meditation. Course, the first instruction given was to just focus. All of your attention on your breath coming in and out of your nostrils. Just note. Now, the breath is coming.

And it's still coming in. It's still coming in. Oh, it stopped coming in now, it's going out, it's going on in many meditation tradition. This is like the most basic training and it was so profound because you don't need to do anything, you have no role. You're just observing what's happening? And the shocking thing was that I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds before my mind would run away somewhere. Where would it run to a story? I would remember something from the past I would fantasize about

something in the future, I would imagine something. My mind couldn't be with reality for even ten seconds. So meditation for me, is really the practice of trying to connect to reality and not to the stories, we constantly create

and it sounds like for you, that turns out to be more profound than just about anything else. Do you have a way of explaining? Why that meditative practice is

Your life. What's so bad about stories? It's not bad, it's just something else just the ability to get some perspective. You realize, how useful how beneficial it is, whether it is in a relationship, whether it is with regard to politics, whether it is with regard, to economics, to be able to tell the difference between what is actually happening. And what is just a story that I'm creating an imposing on reality? Most

Ins. This skill is underdeveloped. And the other thing is that we are constantly in touch with the greatest mystery in the universe, the moment of Consciousness. That's the greatest mystery in the universe, the most ordinary moment in your life, you have stuck in traffic in your car. The traffic is not moving, you're annoyed. This is the most amazing thing in the universe. It's in many ways, more amazing.

And solar systems and black hold, we don't understand how can anything in the universe, be annoyed, how can anything be conscious? How does some electricity and poor man's and whatever? How does it produce a subjective experience of being annoyed thinking about it from a different perspective? It's like maybe there is a planet. When the atmosphere is just LSD and the beings there, they constantly live in a

Psychedelic world, and they take some magic mushroom to experience being annoyed in a traffic jam. And it's just blows their mind. Because for them this is unfamiliar and being able to be amazed by the most familiar thing. I think this is very very important.

You're listening to people, I mostly admire with Steve Levitt and is conversation with you've all Noah

Harari. After this short break, they'll return to talk about why the

Agricultural Revolution was a fraud.

Hey Steve. So I listener John wrote us and response to a recent episode with Sal Khan where he talked about the con World School an online high school. He is launching in conjunction with ASU next fall, the school is fairly self directed for students. They will have a daily seminar where they discuss issues of the day with classmates. They'll use Khan Academy for coursework

and they may provide some peer tutoring Sal really believes that the students coming into the school are going to be the future

world leader.

She has a lot of

Hope and confidence in these students. But John, our listener doesn't think these students are going to be representative of the average student. And that this school while transformational will really be transforming, the students who are already. The most motivated, a lot of listeners wrote in, with a version of this question. How do you think this model could actually work for the average

student? And not just the highly gifted. I think that's just an incredibly important question that John is asking. First of all, I would never work on this.

I don't think cell would work on it. If we didn't think this could be transformational across the entire range of students, not just for some self motivated students. And the reason I think it will be is because the idea of Mastery learning, so getting away from giving a tests and grades to actually focus, in letting kids learn material at their own speed, and that idea is so critical. It's important for kids at the top, but it's also really important for the kids at the bottom essentially are

Current school system, serves kids in the middle pretty well, but the kids that are both above and below the middle. Well, the ones above, they get bored. The ones that are below, they get left behind. So, ultimately, I think this idea of Mastery learning will be incredibly powerful for the kids who may be needed the most who are struggling in the current school system. But that's to be proven. And actually when sale and I talked about this idea at first, my vision of it was to take it's a to the Chicago public schools to a set of

Kids who weren't thriving in the current system and sale said, look, you could do that. But that's hard, that's really hard. How about we try to prove it on a set of kids that are a little bit easier. First, we cut our teeth on that and then we go after this tougher group. So he convinced me, that's the right way to do it. But ultimately, I would not be involved in this. If I didn't think that in the end that the kids who are struggling this couldn't be transformational for them. Maybe more transformational for

Them. And the kids who are at the top?

I think it's great to that.

It's actually happening. People talk a lot about changing education but this is something that's actually going into effect and there's a lot of Hope with it. That's because when sale and I talked in January it was an idea and it is crazy. That come August, it's going to be reality. So again, my idea was selves to start a physical school and the timeline for starting a physical School

It is two to three years. You have to find the building, get the charters and all that. It's really a tribute to sail that he managed to get this thing up and running. In six months, we have a lot of Partners at risk. And usually, we are always running twice as fast as our partners are, we had to Sprint to keep up with Helen his team. So that's been really fun from our

perspective. Well, thank you to everyone who wrote in about the con World school. If you have a question, we can be reached at Pima at Freakonomics.com. That's Pi MAF.

Dynamics.com Steve. And I read every email that is sent and we look forward to reading

In the second half of my conversation with you've all Noah

Harari. I want to discuss a

few more of his most striking ideas. But also, I want to delve into the aspects of his writing that I find most puzzling.

Let me give another quote. This one is back from sapiens again, the Agricultural Revolution was history's. Biggest fraud, my hunch is that listeners to this podcast? You haven't read your books when they hear that sentence. They probably find it jarring because we're talk to celebrate the Agricultural Revolution, not to think of it as being a

fraud, but if you look at it from the Viewpoint of middle-class people in the west today than agriculture is wonderful, we have all these apples and bread and pasta.

And steaks and eggs and whatever. And also if you look at it from the Viewpoint of an ancient Egyptian, pharaoh or a Chinese emperor, wonderful I have this huge Palace and all these servants and whatever. But if you look at it from the Viewpoint of the ordinary peasant in ancient Egypt or ancient China, their life was actually much worse than the life of the average hunter-gatherer before the Agricultural Revolution.

First of all, they had to work much harder our body and our mind evolved for millions of years to do things like climbing, trees, to pick fruits, and going in the forest to sniff around for mushrooms and hunting rabbits and whatever. And suddenly you find yourself working in the field all day, just digging irrigation ditch hour after hour, day after day or taking out weeds or whatever, it's much more difficult to the body. We see it in the

It's all the problems in ailments that these ancient Farmers suffered from, it's also far more boring. And then the farmers didn't get a better diet in return. Pharaoh, or the Chinese emperor, they got the road, the ordinary present. They actually ate a file, worst diet than hunter-gatherers. It was a much more limited diet, hunter-gatherers. They ate dozens hundreds of different species of fruits and

And vegetables, and nuts, and animals, and fish, and whatever. Most ancient Farmers. If you live in Egypt, you eat wheat and wheat, if you live in China, you eat rice and rice

if lucky, if the crap doesn't fail.

Yeah, exactly. If you're lucky, if you have enough and then because this is monoculture most fields of just rice. If suddenly, there is a drought, there is a flood, there is a new plant disease. You have family farmers were actually more in danger of famine.

And hunter-gatherers because they relied on a much more narrow economic base. If you're a hunter gatherer and there is a disease that kills all the rabbits, it's not such a big deal, you can fish more, you can gather more Nats but if you're a herder and your goat herd has been decimated by some plague, that's the end of you and your family. And then in addition to that you have many more diseases in the days of covid. It's good to remember the fact that most infectious diseases

Started with the Agricultural Revolution because they came from domesticated animals and they spread in large permanent settlements as a hunter-gatherer. You wander around the land was 50 people or so you don't have cows and chickens that live with you. So your chances of getting a virus from some wild chicken is much smaller and even if you get it you can in fact only a few other people and you move around all the time. So I Genie.

Conditions are ideal. Now if you live in an ancient Village or town, you're in very close proximity to a lot of animals. So you get more diseases and if you get a virus to infect, the whole town, and the neighboring towns and Villages, through the trade networks, and you all live together in this permanent settlement with your sewage. With your garbage, people in the Agricultural Revolution, they tried to create Paradise for humans, they are

Actually, created Paradise for germs.

I like that.

At one point you make the interesting observation that the better you know of particular historical period. The harder it becomes to convince yourself that you truly understand why things happen, one way and not another and at the people living through events they're the most clueless of all the people for understanding the implications so acknowledging. How clueless we are about our own times. I'd nonetheless like to get your guesses as to how

History will view covid-19.

I get this question a lot and unfortunately I always have to say that it depends on the decisions that we are making right now. History is never deterministic. So you have a crisis like covid-19 and how historians in 100 years would look at events. Simply depends on the choices. We make up till. Now what I can say is that covid has been an amazing scientific Triumph coupled

With political failure, never in history was Humanity. So powerful in the scientific tools, it had to deal with a pandemic with the black death, it killed between a quarter and a half of the population between China and Britain and nobody understood what was happening for years and years. It was punishment from God, it was black magic. It was astrology, his covid. It took something like 2 weeks to identify the virus, correct?

It took a couple of more weeks, or months to understand how it spreads and what would be the most effective countermeasures and then within a year scientists developed, not one, but several effective vaccines. It was an amazing scientific

success and produce them at scale.

It's a miracle, absolutely. But this makes the political failure. Only more depressing, only more tragic, because it was a political failure. The scientist they just produce the tools.

It's the job of politicians to decide what to do is these tools. Now some politicians in some countries they did a good job but in many countries it was a failure and when you look at the global level, it was a global failure. And even now we don't have a plan for the next pandemic. The other things in the long run, generally, pandemics have a smaller impact on History then other catastrophes like Wars. You compare the first world war to the Spanish, influenza of 1918 1919.

Any more people died from the flu but until covid people hadn't even thought about it and its impact was really far smaller the first world war shaped the modern world. Even you think about something like art. So many new art forms came out of the trenches. So many great works of art. If you think about poetry, like Wilfred Owen, if you think about painting like Otto Dix, you think about entire artistic movements.

The Spanish influenza. Nothing. There is no famous poem. There is no famous painting. There is no artistic genres that came out of it and that's true. Even if you could at the Black Death it was maybe one of the biggest catastrophes in human history Europe before and after the Black Death there are of course differences but there was no regime change in any country. You have the same political systems. You have the same economic systems before and after maybe because we are programmed to it evolutionarily

We are perhaps better at dealing with diseases, then we are with man-made catastrophes like walls.

So I've had 70 or 80 guests on this podcast, and I have to say it was harder to prepare to talk to you than any of the other guests. I've had it. Most of the time it's easy for me to get a sense of what people are about, what they believe in. But in your case, despite the fact that you make a strong statement, we've already established that most of the time you don't resolve

All things, you don't tie things up with pretty bows and pick a winner among competing theories. So let's take this idea of progress, someone like Steve Pinker or most Economist for that matter. They would see progress as necessarily good, okay. But from what you've just said about, hunter-gatherers is clear that you say, look there's an argument that the progress we made going from being hunter-gatherers through the agriculture Revolution. That was not all

good, not for most people know. I mean you start seeing real

Progress for most people only in the 19th

century. Exactly. We live in a world in which progress has been amazing. Something evidence. It's so obvious. A longer life expectancy cell phone life is

great. Right? You don't

disagree that we have been amazing, beneficiaries of progress.

Yes. Over the last 200 years, there have been some terrible things happening and there are still terrible things happening. I live in the Middle East, I know this perfectly well, but looking at the law,

Spinoff history at least since the Agricultural Revolution, the early 21st century has been until now the best time to be a human being, not the best time to be a cow or a chicken but the best time to be a human being despite covid. You are more protected from infectious diseases that any previous time in history, since the beginning of Agriculture. Then you look at famine the only famine that still exists and we see it now very painfully with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The only

The famine that still exists is political family. Absolutely, if a person anywhere on Earth, still dies from lack of food. It is only because of political reasons we have the power to prevent it which we did not have in the Middle Ages or in the ancient world and then you have violence and here. I agree. Generally with Steven Pinker and other researchers that the recent decades have been the most peaceful era in human history again in not completely peaceful. You don't.

Three mind may live in Israel. I

know this perfectly well

but compared to any previous time in recorded history, human violence is at its lowest. But there is a big caveat. This is not a prophecy for the future. This is only an observation of the last few. Decades. Humans have built institutions in order to deal with famine and plague and War institutions. Like the World Health Organization like universities and their medical research institutions.

Like trading institutions, United Nations, international law, it was not a miracle. It was humans building institutions. And if we stopped, maintaining these institutions, then war and plague and famine will come back in an even worse for them than ever before. It's like building a dam over a river and saying, hooray, we now have control of the river and then you stopped maintaining the dam. And there is a crack

And another crack and the dam collapses, and there is a terrible flood. And this has been happening over the last five, six years since the middle of the 2010s, you see a Continuum deterioration in the maintenance of all these institutions and began with the very countries, which were the leaders in building the global order. Britain, the United States in 2016 with brexit, and with the isolationist policies of Donald Trump.

They declared we no longer support this project and looking at what happened over the last few years with the pandemic, now is the war and the food crisis. Unfortunately, we are seeing the institutions collapsing and plague, and famine and War coming back. It's not too late to save the dam that is holding the river, but we don't have much time and frankly, I don't see that the leading

Countries of the world are doing enough to save the global order.

So we just talked though about how in the last 200 years. Progress has been amazing scientist, been at the heart of transforming human life, at least for the better, but you have deep concerns about the future of Science and where we're going in your final Vision. Essentially, humans no longer exists because of

of scientific progress. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes, it can happen in a couple of ways. Some better than others. I'm given the pace of technological and scientific progress today. I think it's very unlikely that they will still be Homo sapiens like you and me in 200 years or 300 years, but it can happen in different ways. The worst way is that we will just destroy ourselves in some nuclear catastrophe or whatever. I don't think this is very likely, but it's possible. Then there is another

A frightening scenario that we will use the immense powers of bioengineering and artificial intelligence and so forth to try and upgrade ourselves or try and create and use super specie and because we don't really understand the consequences of what we are doing, it will be a downgrade. If you give, for instance, two armies and B corporations, the power to re-engineer humans, they are likely to try and

amplify those human qualities that they deem the most useful to them qualities, like intelligence and discipline. You want, highly intelligent and highly disciplined employees and soldiers. Other human qualities, like, compassion, like artistic, sensitivity, spirituality, most armies and most corporations. They don't need spiritual employees or soldiers.