Yuval Noah Harari IV (on the history of information networks)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard – Episode Summary: Yuval Noah Harari IV on the History of Information Networks

Host: Armchair Umbrella (Dax Shepard)
Guest: Yuval Noah Harari
Episode Title: Nexus IV – A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

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1. Introduction to Yuval Noah Harari

In this enlightening episode of Armchair Expert, host Dax Shepard is joined by historian and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari. Known for his insightful books such as Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari delves into his latest work, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Harari's expertise in anthropology and history provides a profound backdrop for discussing the intricate web of information networks that have shaped human civilization.

2. Understanding Harari’s Book: Nexus

Harari introduces Nexus as a continuation of his exploration into human societies, focusing on the pivotal role of information networks. He poses a compelling question: "If humans are so smart, why are we so stupid?" (04:02) This inquiry sets the stage for a deep dive into how information, rather than inherent human flaw, drives both our successes and failures.

3. The Power of Information Networks

a. The Bible as an Information Network

Harari emphasizes the Bible as one of the most influential information networks in human history. He explains, "Billions and billions of portraits of Jesus have been produced over the last 2,000 years... they have been extremely successful and important in connecting billions of people into a network" (13:12) Despite the absence of authentic images from Jesus’s lifetime, these imagined depictions unified vast populations under shared beliefs and values.

b. The Role of Editors in Shaping Information

Drawing parallels between historical and modern information gatekeepers, Harari discusses how editors have long influenced public perception. From the council at Carthage deciding the canonical New Testament texts to modern-day social media algorithms, the role of an "editor" determines which information rises to prominence. "Now it’s the algorithms... the editor is not a person anymore. It’s an algorithm" (49:37) Harari warns of the profound impact these non-human editors have on shaping societal narratives.

4. Democracy vs. Dictatorship as Information Networks

a. Information Flow and Governance

Harari articulates the fundamental differences in how information flows within democratic and dictatorial systems. "Democracy... information flows in all directions, allowing for self-correction mechanisms" (17:13) In contrast, dictatorships centralize information, limiting diverse inputs and preventing effective self-correction.

b. Self-Correcting Mechanisms in Democracies

In democracies, mechanisms like elections, independent courts, and free media serve as checks and balances, enabling societies to identify and rectify mistakes autonomously. Harari notes, "If the network makes a mistake, you don’t need somebody from outside to intervene" (18:16) However, he also underscores vulnerabilities, citing examples like Putin and Maduro, who manipulate these systems to maintain power.

5. Bureaucracy: The Invisible Guardian of Information

a. Historical Example: Jon Snow and the Cholera Epidemic

Harari recounts the pivotal role of bureaucratic systems in managing public health, using Dr. John Snow’s investigation of the cholera epidemic in London as a case study. "He managed to pinpoint a certain water well in Soho... and the epidemic stopped" (38:13) This example illustrates how bureaucratic expertise can effectively combat misinformation and save lives, albeit behind the scenes.

b. Bureaucracy vs. Mythology in Society

Contrasting mythology with bureaucracy, Harari explains that while myths and ideologies often drive mass movements and atrocities, bureaucracies perform the essential, though unglamorous, tasks that maintain societal order and functionality.

6. The Spread of Conspiracy Theories: Historical and Modern Parallels

a. Witch Hunts and Information Technology

Harari draws parallels between historical witch hunts and modern conspiracy theories, highlighting how the printing press amplified false narratives. "Heinrich Kramer... wrote a book... which became one of the biggest bestsellers in early modern Europe" (26:44) These fabricated stories fueled mass hysteria and tragic persecutions, showcasing the dark side of information networks.

b. Stalinism and Nazi Propaganda

Furthering this theme, Harari discusses how totalitarian regimes like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany utilized information networks to propagate harmful ideologies. "Nazis... were leading the world in rocket science... but they put all of it in the service of these insane mythologies" (82:39) This manipulation underscores the potential for information networks to be weaponized for destructive purposes.

7. AI as the New Editor: Opportunities and Dangers

a. Algorithms Replacing Human Editors

Harari warns of the transition from human to algorithmic editors in managing information networks. "The algorithms... were given a goal... to increase user engagement... They discovered that the easiest way to engage people is with outrage and hatred and fear" (49:36) This shift has led to the proliferation of divisive and harmful content on social media platforms.

b. Implications for Democracy and Social Discourse

The dominance of algorithms in information dissemination poses significant challenges for democratic discourse. Harari observes, "The real danger is not the Terminator, it's the AI... These algorithms are making decisions about us" (42:52) The lack of moral considerations in these non-human editors exacerbates societal divisions and undermines constructive dialogue.

8. Potential Solutions and the Path Forward

a. Banning Fake AI Humans

Harari suggests pragmatic measures such as banning AI from masquerading as humans online. "It should be very clear... I'm now talking with an AI, not with a human being" (103:58) This transparency is crucial in mitigating the deceptive power of AI agents.

b. Building Trustworthy Institutions

Emphasizing the need for robust institutions, Harari advocates for the creation of independent bodies that can oversee AI developments and ensure responsible information management. "We need institutions... staffed with some of the best human talent that can understand what is happening as it's happening" (103:58) These institutions would serve as unbiased arbiters, distinguishing truth from fiction amidst the deluge of information.

9. Reflections and Concluding Thoughts

In wrapping up the discussion, Harari reiterates the intrinsic human yearning for truth despite the overwhelming presence of misinformation. "Deep down in human nature there is a real yearning for the truth that we can work with" (75:50) He cautions against succumbing to cynical views of humanity, emphasizing that fostering genuine cooperation and trust is essential for navigating the complexities of modern information networks.

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Notable Quotes

• [04:02] Harari: "If humans are so smart, why are we so stupid?"

• [13:12] Harari: "Billions and billions of portraits of Jesus have been produced over the last 2,000 years... they have been extremely successful and important in connecting billions of people into a network."

• [17:13] Harari: "Democracy... information flows in all directions, allowing for self-correction mechanisms."

• [26:44] Harari: "Heinrich Kramer... wrote a book... which became one of the biggest bestsellers in early modern Europe."

• [49:37] Harari: "The algorithms are replacing human editors. They decide what will be at the top of your NewsFeed or in TikTok, what is the next video."

• [75:50] Harari: "Deep down in human nature there is a real yearning for the truth that we can work with."

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a comprehensive exploration of how information networks have historically shaped human societies and the transformative—and potentially perilous—impact of emerging AI technologies. Harari's insightful analysis underscores the critical need for responsible management and oversight of information dissemination mechanisms to safeguard democratic values and societal cohesion.

For listeners who haven't tuned into the episode, this summary encapsulates the essence of Harari's arguments and the thoughtful dialogue between him and Shepard, shedding light on the intricate dance between information, truth, and power in shaping our world.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on experts. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Padman. Rob was adjusting, so it caught my eye, so I gave it a little wink.

[Monica Padman]

I gave mine a little bit in the intro.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, is that what you're always doing?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

I need to really be erect to read like it's a challenge. I gotta steady myself.

[Monica Padman]

Erect in your body.

[Dax Shepard]

My posture.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you're posture.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're right. If you were listening and not seeing, you might think that's something terrible. Returning third time's the charm. You've all know a Harare.

[Monica Padman]

He's a genius.

[Dax Shepard]

He has such a novel proprietary take on everything.

[Monica Padman]

I wonder what he would do on the cognitive test.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's a great question.

[Monica Padman]

We should make all our experts take the cognitive test before they come in.

[Dax Shepard]

And then remember it's like an hour and 40 minutes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I know. And then we'll know if they're. If they're really worthy.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, well, listen, I would argue that I probably the categories that I got a 99 and 100. I probably would beat Yuval for sure. And I'm not nearly as smart as him. Whoa.

[Monica Padman]

But that's ballsy to say that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I got a hundred. You can't go above that.

[Monica Padman]

Well, but they might. He might be in the 110 too.

[Dax Shepard]

What if you said he's in the 110th?

[Monica Padman]

He might. Speaking of, Dr. Richard Isaacson and I are going to chat soon about my results.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I can't wait to hear the update.

[Monica Padman]

I said, oh, that was humbling. And he said, you did great.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, good. Very good. Okay, the point I'm trying to make is even if he scored less than me, it doesn't mean anything. He's smarter than I am. That test, I would just throw that test out. Okay, so I was thinking this. When you've all left, I am always pretty critical of people who just kind of blindly believe anything people say. Like people have little deities. Thought deities, and they don't. And look, no one's getting it. All right? Even the smartest people. Einstein. Oh, nice. You throw a wing to the camp. You know, even Einstein was completely wrong about Quantum. I always bring this up, but when he left, I was like, you know, he's as close as I have to this.

[Monica Padman]

Yuval, you have that with him and Malcolm.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep, I have that with him and Malcolm and Dave Chappelle to some degree. Well, not everything he talks about.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

But there's a category of generally race stuff. Anything race related, I'll have, like, my own knee jerk reaction. And then I literally think, God, I hope Chappelle weighs in on this at some point, because I generally think his synthesis of it is always something I didn't think of.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

On race stuff. And so, yeah, Yuval's one of my guys. And when he left, I was like, I could feel how what I'm asking people to do is hard.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. To be critical.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. To be critical of someone who is so right so often.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And who you trust.

[Dax Shepard]

I trust. Yeah. It'd be hard for me to take a real strong stance against him. I would have to. You know, it'd have to be on something I knew inside and out or something.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I think you can take what he says and let it inform you. But it also isn't like if someone comes with an opposite opinion, if you're like, well, you've all said this, so it has to be that. And that's it. That's the problem.

[Dax Shepard]

All that to say, I just think he's so special, the way he thinks about the world, because it's such a comprehensive thought process. It involves so many things.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. He wrote Sapiens. You know that? He wrote Homo deus. He wrote 21 lessons for the 21st century. Unstoppable us. Really great book. I do recommend it if you have children. It's a children's version of Sapiens. It's almost better than Sapiens. I know it's crazy to say, but. No, but it's true.

[Monica Padman]

You can't say that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. It makes some of these harder concepts so easy to understand. It's incredible book. His new book, which we're here to talk about, is Nexus A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. And again, of course, he has a totally different angle on AI that I've not yet heard and is very fascinating.

[Monica Padman]

I have one thing to say. I have a beef. Oh, I look horrible in this episode.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no. You watched it and you didn't like it.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Cause I edited it. My shirt is a mess. And I will be blaming you, Rob, for that.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

All right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Just letting you know. All right.

[Dax Shepard]

Sweet. Okay. This would be so easy to be married to you, Rob. And he's like, you're so lazy. Why don't you help out around here? Okay? Please enjoy Yuval Noah Harari. We are supported by Audible. We know you love audio content. Thanks for listening to the show. But if your ears are craving more audio, Audible is the place to go. I probably in truth spend more time on Audible than any other place, any other app. Yeah, I'm listening every night for an hour before bed. There's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you're searching for the latest bestsellers and new releases or you want to catch up on a classic title, you can find it all in the Audible app. And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog.

[Monica Padman]

What are you listening to now?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I'm just finishing the Worlds I See by Fay Fay Le. It's so good and moving and I love it so much. I'm. I'm sad it's ending now. Listen, new members can try Audible for free for 30 days. Visit audible.comdax or text DAX to 500. 500. That's audible.comdax or text Dax to 500. 500. The new Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It has the biggest display ever.

[Dax Shepard]

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Making it even more comfortable on your wrist.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's the fastest charging Apple watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. Introducing the all new Apple Watch Series.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

10, now available for the first time.

[Dax Shepard]

In glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generation.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

IPhone Xs are later required charge time.

[Dax Shepard]

And actual results will vary. You guys travel so much. Every time I open my social media.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I see you, I'm somewhere else.

[Dax Shepard]

If I turn on the tv, I see you.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

No, now it's a book tour, so it's not like the usual stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, what's the usual stuff? We need you all the time to hop on TV and tell us how we're supposed to start, tell us what to do, synthesize this for us.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I'll be like on the book tour live for like two months or three months and then I have 60 days off meditation in India.

[Dax Shepard]

And does your husband join for that? No, he does not. When you're on this two month retreat to India, first of all, where do you go?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

This small place in the hills outside Mumbai.

[Dax Shepard]

I went for the first time this year.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it was my second time, but I was four the first time. So it had been a minute and.

[Dax Shepard]

No matter where we were, we were in three different places. Everyone we ran into said, have you been to Kerala? And we're like, no, we haven't.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I've not been to Kerala either.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you haven't.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And I've been, like, for 25 years going every year to India, and I've never been to Kerala. I mean, it's a big place, India. It's like, you've been to Europe and you've not been to Sweden. I don't know exactly.

[Monica Padman]

You can't just pop around very easily there, Unfortunately.

[Dax Shepard]

We were just in a state. I want to say we were in Hyderabad when we got this number, but the state we were in had 290 million people. And I was like, oh, wow, the state has all of America in it. That's pretty wild.

[Monica Padman]

It was wild.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

So we went to Hydrobot.

[Monica Padman]

We were there with Bill Gates. Bill Gates. And so Microsoft center is there. So we were there for that. And then we were with him for the foundation. So we had to go to, like.

[Dax Shepard]

Certain spots with Bhubaneswar.

[Monica Padman]

Bhubaneswar. Good job. You finally got it. That took him a long time to be able to say eight months past.

[Dax Shepard]

The trip, and I can finally say it.

[Monica Padman]

And then deli.

[Dax Shepard]

You dropped the new. We don't need new, do we?

[Monica Padman]

I'm Indian. I can say whatever I want. I can do whatever I want.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

What time of year was it?

[Monica Padman]

February.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Oh, February is a good time.

[Monica Padman]

It was. The weather was nice.

[Dax Shepard]

It was awesome. Okay, so you're on the book tour. When did it start?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Three weeks ago in New York. The US Is the first station. We did a few things in London before, and we did some pre interviews for Germany and Italy and France and China and a couple of other places. But the actual book tour, it started like three weeks ago.

[Dax Shepard]

So our first book, Sapiens, that we ever spoke to you about is the history of humankind, how we got here. Homo deus was where we're going. And now this new book, Nexus, this is still in keeping with your kind of overarching interests, right? So how would you delineate it between the previous books?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It builds on the previous books. And Sapiens was about the long span of human history. Homo Deus was about the distant future. Nexus is about both the past and the future. But from the vantage point of information, the key question of Nexus is if humans, if we are so smart, why are we so stupid?

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right.

[Monica Padman]

The big question, Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I mean, we've reached the moon, we split the atom, we can read DNA, and at the same time, we are now on the verge of destroying ourselves and much of the ecological system, both because of ecological irresponsibility, but also we are potentially on the verge of a third World war or a nuclear war. And we are developing technologies like AI that could easily get out of our control and cause catastrophe, maybe even at a level of endangering our species. If we are so smart, why do we keep doing these things? And you know, the traditional answer you find in many mythologies and theologies is that there is something wrong with human nature. Something is wrong with us.

[Dax Shepard]

We cannot resist. But to over consume and destroy and wield power over people and subjugate people, where flow.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

There is something almost, you would say, at least in some mythologies, evil in human nature. And Nexus rejects this mythological answer. I don't think that humans, or at least most humans, are inherently evil or flawed. The problem is not in our nature. The problem is in our information. If you give good people bad information, they make bad mistakes, they make bad decisions. So the book explores the history of information. If information is the key, why do we keep getting. Why do we keep producing and feeding ourselves and other people bad information? You would have expected that over time, over centuries and millennia, our information will get better.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, wouldn't it be fair to say it does get better, but in concert with tons of it, that's getting worse?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Very specific domains. If you look again at physics or biology, yes. But overall, modern societies, no matter how advanced they are technologically and scientifically, they are still as susceptible as Stone Age tribes to mass delusion and to the worse kind of fantasies and errors. And we don't seem to be getting better at this. If you look at the relationship between, say, scientific research, which is obviously getting better, and the other stuff, again, all their mythologies and ideologies and so forth, which don't get better. What you see is that it's the mythology in the driver's seat, not the scientists, people who are experts in nuclear physics or biology or computer science. They get their orders mostly from people who are experts in mythologies and theologies and ideologies. And this haven't changed for thousands of years.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I think it's like a mix of hopeful and terrifying, the book. And I also think, would it be fair to say the first book is really helping us all understand the power of story? That's the crowning achievement from my point of view of sapiens, is people really, really being able to understand in a concrete way how everything that unites us in general is a story, and it's in our minds that it exists. The value of this piece of paper, the borders of this thing, meaning it's a state, and the people in it a thing. They're an identity. All that was really well done and I think helped a lot of people understand that about us. But in this book, you're now pointing out, so you have story, but you have networks. Networks is the new exploration. I think when you read this book, you'll come away kind of understanding what an information network is and how powerful it is. What's the first example we would look at historically like an information network and.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Its power, what information really does? Information doesn't necessarily tell us the truth about the world. Information. Information connects a lot of individuals into a network that can do many, many things that isolated people can't. If you think, for instance, about different types of information, if you think about visual information, if you think in terms of images and photographs and paintings, what is the most common portrait in the world? Who is the most famous face in human history? The answer is Jesus.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I was going to say Mona Lisa.

[Dax Shepard]

We're so wessed out.

[Monica Padman]

I know. I'm so embarrassed.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I mean, billions and billions of portraits of Jesus have been produced over the last 2,000 years. They've been everywhere. In so many churches and cathedrals and monasteries and private houses and schools and government offices, like, everywhere. And the amazing thing about it, not a single one of them is true. Not a single one is authentic. 100%, not 99%.

[Dax Shepard]

He never sat for a portrait that we know of. Never.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

We don't know if anybody painted him or sculpted him during his lifetime. Definitely. We have no image from his own lifetime. And also, if you think about textual descriptions, the Bible doesn't contain a single word about how Jesus looked like, really. There is a description of his clothes one time. Not a single description of what he looked like, whether he was tall or short or fat or thin, whether he was color of his skin, color of his hair, color of his eyes. Nothing.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

All the billions of portraits, they came out of human imagination. And nevertheless, they have been extremely successful and important in connecting billions of people into a network which shares certain values and norms, which can work together to build cathedrals and build hospitals and also go to wars and establish the Inquisition and things like that.

[Dax Shepard]

Voting blocs.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah. So whether for good or bad, this has been one of the most powerful networks in human history.

[Dax Shepard]

It's Catholicism, Christianity, even Christianity.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Again, like every network, it can break up into several sub networks. There is always this tension between uniting more people together and breaking up into smaller parts. But this is what information does. A subset of the information in the world may also tell us the truth about the world. Some information is true but truth is a very rare and relatively costly kind of information. Most information is not truth. Again, it's fiction, it's fantasy, it's sometimes lies, it's sometimes illusions, delusions. A key point is that the truth is costly because it requires a special effort to produce truthful information. You need to research, you need to spend time gathering evidence and analyzing it. Fiction is cheap. You just draw or write the first things that comes in your mind. So going back to networks, the key is that if you manage to connect a lot of individuals into a network, like a church or an army, or a corporation or a state or anything like that, they can accomplish far, far more than either individuals or small number of people. And this of course goes back to sapiens. This is the key to our success as a species, that we can build these huge networks.

[Dax Shepard]

We can build a network around money. This idea that this has some value or a deity or national identity.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah. So sapiens began to explore this idea. Nexus now goes over history and also the future, and looks at it from the viewpoint of networks. So, okay, if we establish that stories create networks and networks are important, let's look at history as the process, not of human actions, but of networks spreading, sometimes collapsing, changing their nature. So for instance, a chapter about democracy and dictatorship which looks at them not as different ethical or ideological systems, but as different types of information networks. How information flows. Information flows differently in democracy and dictatorship. And this is what makes them so different in dictatorships. They are centralized information networks. All the information or most of the information flows to just one place where all the decisions are being made.

[Dax Shepard]

Putin's desk.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, Putin's desk or Xi's desk or whatever. And also they lack strong self correcting mechanisms. The network doesn't contain a mechanism for identifying and correcting the network's own mistakes. Democracy, in contrast, is a different kind of network. What characterizes it is that information doesn't flow just through a central hub. There is usually a central hub. So in the United States, a lot of information flows to Washington, but most of it doesn't.

[Dax Shepard]

Probably more to New York.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, most of the economic decisions, social decisions, cultural decisions are being taken in New York, in Los Angeles, in lots of other places, a lot of the information never passes through any government office. And you have strong self correcting mechanisms. If the network makes a mistake, you don't need somebody from outside to intervene. The whole point about democracy that you have these built in mechanisms to identify and correct its own mistakes.

[Dax Shepard]

Would you say the nature of decentralized democracy is that you're living in peer review, in essence, because there's no bottleneck or dissemination because it's flowing in all directions. People are taking it in, passing it on, they're editing or they're calling out like, what is the mechanism that is helping the self correction?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

There are several. And it's important that there are several because if you have only one, it can easily malfunction. So the most obvious one in a democracy is elections. Every few years the people can say, oh, we made a mistake, let's try something else. Which you can't do in Russia, which you can't do in North Korea. In a place like Russia, you have to wait for somebody to die.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And even then it's not like really the people who will make the decision of who replaces them. So in democracy you have this mechanism that every couple of years people can say, we made a mistake, let's try something else. Of course, the problem if you have only this is that it can easily be rigged. The weakness of democracy since ancient times is that you basically give enormous power to one person or one party on condition that they give it back after four years. And what happens if they don't? They have all this power in their hands. What happens if they use all these power to stay in power to rig the elections? And we've seen it many times in Russia they have elections every four years. And presumably in the 1990s when Putin first rose to power, the elections were relatively fair and free. Then he used his power to dismantle and to rig the elections. And you saw the same thing in Venezuela. Chavez originally came to power, as far as we know, in free and fair elections. But then Chavez and his successor Maduro, they used the power to destroy the democratic system and then stay in power.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, they just had an election in quotes and it's a disaster.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, I mean Maduro lost big time, but because he appoints all the election officials and all the judges and everything. So he says, no, I won this just in.

[Dax Shepard]

I won.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, yeah. So if you only have elections, this is not enough. You need an entire system. This is the famous checks and balances. And these checks and balances like independent courts and free media and constitution and federal system, these are all basically, if you think about in terms of information, these are the self correcting mechanisms.

[Dax Shepard]

Media is a big aspect of that. Right. The news.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Because you need to know what is.

[Dax Shepard]

The reality the elections rigs. We also have this other body that trusted an institution that can point out this and we're liable to believe that yes.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And of course, all these institutions can be dismantled, can be undermined. This is why you need a couple of them. So they kind of support and supervise each other. It's not perfect. Ultimately, you can destroy all of them, but, you know, nothing is perfect.

[Dax Shepard]

So what you say in the book, which is interesting, is, so the Bible to go back to the image of Jesus. It's interesting. I have no image of Muhammad in my mind and I have no image of Yah in my mind because it's forbidden. It's forbidden. Maybe to the detriment of the organization ultimately. Or not.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It's a different way to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. If you look at the three main Old Testament religions and look at their success rate as they spread, you think of them as companies that tried different branding strategies. You know, it's interesting. We've all seen the logo of Christianity.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But Judaism's doing like the row. They're very excited.

[Dax Shepard]

They don't want new members. Yeah, yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It's not a missionary religion. It's in a different game. Islam and Christianity, they are both missionary.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And they at different times in history. For much of history, Islam was much more successful than Christianity. In the last 500 years, Christianity became. But still, you know, you have a billion and a half Muslims.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. But talk about the Bible. In reference to Christianity and the information network, you point out in the book that this thing, the Bible has no self correction.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's part of its gift as well. It's like we want correction and we want, want to find truth. But here's this thing that's now 2,000 years old, or varying parts of it are old, unchanging, and highly successful. So that's just curious. And how does that come about?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Well, if you look back in the history of religion, religions were not based on books, partly because there was no writing and no written documents at all. The problem in any network is how to agree on the basic laws of the network. And the solution suggested by religion is you rely on a superhuman authority. It's coming from outside, it's coming from above. But then the next problem immediately appears. I mean, every time you have a solution, you have a new problem. So whenever you say, okay, the solution to the problem of how we will decide the rules, oh, they will come from the gods. How do you know what the gods really want, what they really say? Unless you had a personal revelation, personal visit by some goddess or God, it ultimately boils down to believing some human. I mean, you wanted to take the humans out of the loop and you end up again believing some priest, some prophet, some guru, how can you trust them that they are not fooling you or lying to you? Or maybe they are deluded, Maybe they honestly tell you what they believe, but they are simply wrong. And then after the invention of writing, a new idea came that instead of trusting a human, let's trust a new technology. We don't think about the book as a technology, but the book is a technology. So this idea, we can't trust the humans. We should trust that the technology, which is so central to debates about AI and algorithms today, this is a very old thing. I mean, you go back to the first millennia BCE and first in Judaism, later it will be in Christianity, in Hinduism, in Islam, you have this idea, instead of trusting a human, let's trust the technology of the book in the idea of a book, in contrast to a document that you have many, many copies of the same text. You can spread everywhere. It's decentralized. It's basically like a blockchain. Every user has one. So I can change my Bible, but you have millions of other copies. So they immediately noticed.

[Dax Shepard]

And if you tell me the earth was made in eight days, I can go in here and go, no, no, it's seven.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

But then you create the problem you already talked about, which is, who wrote this?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And then. Yes, and then that's the next problem. Okay, Once we have this brilliant idea, the problem arises, okay, so what will be in the text? And then you go back to humans. So if you look, for instance, at the process of editing the Bible, the key people who created the Bible are not the authors of the text, it's the editors.

[Dax Shepard]

Nor had they met Jesus or the disciples.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

No more than 300 years later, Jesus never read the Bible, didn't exist in his day. Also, St. Paul never read a copy of the New Testament. In the first centuries of Christianity, Christians produced an enormous number of texts. You had stories about Jesus, you had stories about the other disciples and saints. You had all kinds of letters like the letters of St. Paul. You had all kinds of prophecies about the end of the world and different things and prayers and hundreds and hundreds of different texts. As you had more and more texts that often contradicted each other, people needed basically a recommendation, listening. The same way that you have so many series on television or Netflix or.

[Dax Shepard]

Whatever, you need Obama to give his top 10 list.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

So eventually, almost 400 years after Jesus in the 390s, this is when church council, basically a committee of bishops and theologians and so forth, meeting in Carthage, which is today Tunisia in North Africa. And they agree on a recommendation list, like top 27 texts every Christian should read, which becomes the new Testament. And their choices shaped the worldview of billions of people for the next 1500 years and even more. And just to give you one example, there was a text which was very popular among Christians in the early centuries before this council of Carthage, called the Acts of Paul and Thecla. It told the adventures and miracles of St. Paul and his female disciple, a woman called Thecla, which performed miracles and preached to people and baptized and was a leader of the church. And this text, it was not the only one, but it was one of the main texts that showed that women could be leaders of the church and basically do anything that the men in the church can do. And this was very popular.

[Dax Shepard]

A wonder woman in the hall of justice.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah. Then you had another text, a letter from St. Paul to his disciple Timothy, which most scholars today agree was not written by St. Paul at all, was forged in his name in the second century, more than 100 years after St. Paul was dead, in which Paul says that women should not take any leadership roles in the church. When important things are discussed, they should be silent. They should just obey whatever the men say. And their role is to bear children and be modest and obedient, and this is the their way to salvation. And the council at Carthage, this committee decided that the letter to Timothy will be in the New Testament. And it became first Timothy, which is now in millions of homes all over the world. And the act of Paul and Thecla. No, no, no, no. This stays out. It's not in the Bible.

[Monica Padman]

God, think how different I know the whole world would have been these editors.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And this is an editorial decision. Again, it's not the people who wrote the text. And you fast forward to the modern age. The power of editors is enormous. You think about the power of newspaper editors or the people who edit the news on television. If you think about politics. So you know Lenin, before he became dictator of the Soviet Union, his one job was editor of a newspaper. He was the editor of Iskra. This was his original power base. Benito Mussolini, before he became dictator of Italy, he was editorial of a newspaper. Avanti.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And editors are really powerful figures. And interestingly enough, and we are now jumping to the present and the future. One of the first jobs to be fully automated by AI is that of editors. The entities that now edit maybe the most important media outlets in the world. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they are not.

[Dax Shepard]

Human, they can impossibly do it, their algorithm.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

But this immensely important decision, again, it's not the creation of the content. It's the recommendation what to put at the top of the newsfeed, what to include in this recommendation list, and what to leave out, which was done by the Christian bishops in Carthage and later by people like Lenin and Mussolini. Now it's algorithms, Paul, allegedly. I mean, there are some epistles that, from internal evidence and analysis of the language, scholars accept that this is authentic. This was really written by St. Paul in the middle of the first century. But some of the epistles of the letters attributed to him in the New Testament, they are probably later forgeries. You can write any text and say, oh, St. Paul wrote it.

[Dax Shepard]

What was interesting about learning about St. Paul was, I had to ask myself, is Jesus message so powerful and everlasting and interesting and strong, or is it Paul's interpretation? Interpretation. Who has the magic ingredient that has spanned 2,000 years? And now when you say this, it's like, well, shit, it might not have been Jesus, and it might not have been Paul. It might have been the editors who are. You know, it's like, how do you even figure out what is that quintessential ingredient that made this thing so sticky and powerful?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I think it's a good place to bring in bureaucracy.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Because, again, one of the main themes that are explored in Nexus is this tension between mythology and bureaucracy. Mythology focuses usually on a few heroes that do everything.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm like, well, Jesus is the star of this whole thing.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, he's the star.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe not. I don't know.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And bureaucracy is, you know, these very complex institutions of hundreds and thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of people that usually you don't remember them, you don't think about them, but they really shape the world. And if you look, certainly the world of today, our life, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, are shaped by bureaucracies far, far more than by any kind of individual charismatic heroes. Part of the problem with understanding the world is that evolutionarily, we are kind of programmed to focus on the heroes. It's very difficult for us to understand bureaucracy. They are boring. Our brains are really not built to grasp how bureaucracies function. For thousands of years, artists and, you know, artists have a very important role in life. They explain to us reality, even if they tell us fictional stories. They explain to us, for instance, how love works, how relationships work, and also how political power works. This is, I think, maybe the greatest failure of art throughout history. They have done a terrible job explaining bureaucracies for every Marvel superhero movie. For every hundred Marvel superhero movies, maybe there is one movie about bureaucracy. When was the last blockbuster?

[Dax Shepard]

The Big Short.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

The Big Short, Exactly. The Big Short is a wonderful movie. It's really brilliant because it took a very hard subject how to explain the kind of bureaucratic causes of the great financial crisis and not go to the easy place of, oh, there is some villain. No, let's focus on the bureaucratic system that caused it. And they did it brilliantly. But this is a very rare example.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. We are supported by the new holiday action comedy Red 1. The mission to save Christmas is on. Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans star in Red One from Jake Kasdan, who I love. As you know, director of Jumanji. Welcome to the jungle. After Santa Claus, codename Red One, played by J.K. simmons, is kidnapped, the North Pole's head of security, played by Dwayne Johnson, must team up with the world's most infamous bounty hunter, played by Chris Evans, in a globe trotting, action packed mission to save Christmas. This is Christmas fun like you've never seen before. See Red 1 only in theaters November 15th. Get tickets [e-mail] we are supported by Audible. I love Audible. I've been listening to so much Audible lately because I've been taking these naps a lot. I always like to listen to Audible to go to sleep. Now, look, it's a special feeling when you encounter a story that truly sparks your imagination. Whether it's imagining new worlds and possibilities or discovering new ways of thinking, there's more to imagine when you listen. That's why we love listening to the amazing titles they have on Audible. Right now I'm listening to WIM hof.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And you are really into it. You were explaining a lot of the pieces to me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And I lost you a little bit.

[Monica Padman]

I'm listening to Intermezzo by Sally Rooney.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it great?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's great.

[Dax Shepard]

Audible truly has the best selection of audiobooks, without exception. From bestsellers to new releases to exclusive Audible originals, there's always something to discover. As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. New members can try audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.comdax or text DAX to 500. 500. That's audible.comdax or text Dax to 500. 500. We are supported by Sonos. Oh boy, oh boy. Sonos is my favorite product in my whole life. I'm listening to it all Day long, I'm in the gym listening to Sonos. I'm at home, listen, watching TV with my Sonos soundbar. I mean, it's.

[Monica Padman]

It really changes the whole experience of listening.

[Dax Shepard]

Look, you're listening to the podcast right now, but how are you listening if you're not listening on a Sonos speaker? You don't even know how amazing the dulcet tones of our voices can sound. Sonos is known for having the absolute best sound quality of any speaker on the market. You've got to hear it. And as good as Sonos can make us sound, imagine listening to Pink Floyd on a Sonos speaker or hearing the booming dramatic music in a great action film on a Sonos soundbar. Game changing. Another incredible feature of Sonos, their integrated sound system makes it easy to play anything in any room.

[Monica Padman]

I love that it's easy to use too.

[Dax Shepard]

So you can keep your dance party going throughout your whole house. Visit sonos.comdax to learn more. That's sonos.comdax we are supported by Peloton. Are you tired of the same old workout routine or struggling to find motivation at this busy time of year? It's time to check out Peloton.

[Monica Padman]

Peloton is so great. We all know this. Also, not only is it a good workout, which I did at our friend Molly's house.

[Dax Shepard]

Huh.

[Monica Padman]

It's a great workout, but it's also like pretty. It's sleek.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it is. It's a good looking piece.

[Monica Padman]

Very aesthetically pleasing. And you know that manner to me.

[Dax Shepard]

I know. I agree. Well, Peloton has a variety of training programs. They got pilates, 5k, 10k, half and full marathon programs, strength training, boot camps. There's so many ways to challenge yourself.

[Monica Padman]

It's so helpful to have a set plan. It takes the guesswork out. It just makes it easier to get started on your fitness journey.

[Dax Shepard]

It's great. And there's so many options on Peloton. So you can find a workout that gives you exactly what you're looking for.

[Monica Padman]

Kind of workout are you feeling today?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I gotta tell you, I was recently advised by a doctor to incorporate some more blasts, some high intensity blasts that you get the special. He said, look at sprinters, right? Why do they look like that? Because they're in this really high heart rate for some period of time. It's really beneficial. So I'm looking to go hard. Hard.

[Monica Padman]

Cool. Well, whatever you're looking for, Peloton has the workout for you. And they have world class fitness instructors to push you to the Next level.

[Dax Shepard]

Find your push, Find your power. With [e-mail].

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Part of the reason why you have all these conspiracy theories about the deep state, because people really find it hard to understand how big bureaucracies function. And then they fall easy prey to these conspiracy theories. Bureaucracy. Of course, we have many examples from history for how they can harm us, but society cannot function without them. And they do many, many important and beneficial things for us. When, whenever people tell me about the deep state, I immediately think about the sewage system. Okay, because of course you do.

[Dax Shepard]

That's obvious. But tell us why the sewage system.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Is the deep state. You have this kind of system of pipes and pumps and who knows what running under our houses and streets and neighborhoods and saving our lives by separating the sewage water from the drinking water. And this is a bureaucratic system. If you wanted to dig a well, you have to fill so many forms. Why and where did it start? For most of history, big cities and small towns also had no sewage system. And one of the results was they were extremely, extremely unhealthy places. The bigger the city, the worse. And in the middle of the 19th century, there was a cholera epidemic in London. People began to die in large numbers. And this was periodical. I mean, like every few years, there would be a huge cholera epidemic. And thousands and thousands of people died. And people thought it was something in the air. Some people had all these conspiracy theories that may be witches or magic or who knows what is causing cholera. And then there was a doctor called Jon Snow. Not the character. Not the character from.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm going to picture him any ways.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And you're telling.

[Monica Padman]

Handsome hero, by the way.

[Dax Shepard]

So a sexy, shorter, thick, curly hair, X factor man.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And he was a doctor.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, even better.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Didn't fight any dragons or nothing or zombies or whatever. He suspected the problem was in the water. And instead of again waving a sword around, he waved a pen. He started making lists, which is what bureaucrats do. Bureaucrats take pen and paper and make lists. And he went around London interviewing people who were sick with cholera or somebody in their family died, like their child died for cholera. He heard about it. He came to the house and started interviewing the parents, the siblings, about the habits of the family and especially of the person who got sick or died. And he wanted to know where did they get the drinking water from? And through these lists of thousands and thousands of these boring bureaucratic lists, he managed to pinpoint a certain water well in Soho, central London. And he managed to connect most of the people who fell Sick with cholera. At certain moment, they drank water from that well.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

He reported his findings to the local officials and convinced them to just block the well and the epidemic stopped.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

So he didn't even have causality. He just had correlation.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

He saw correlation. Then when they started investigating more deeply, they found that the well was right next to a cesspit. There was just about 1 meter between the drinking water and a cesspool. Transport sewage from different places in the neighborhood was going to. This caused the cholera epidemic. And this was one of the kind of foundational events of modern epidemiology and modern hygiene and prompted first in the uk, then all over the world, this idea that we actually need to organize a sewage system and to make sure that it remains separate from the drinking water. And today, if you want to dig a well or a cesspit in London, you need to fill all these forms and get permits, which is a good thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Because it ultimately saved millions and millions of lives. Now, it's not something that anybody did a blockbuster about.

[Dax Shepard]

You're right. You'd have to give them, as you said in a previous interview, not him specifically, but you'd have to give him a love interest. We'd have to be tracking something much more interesting and that have to be happening in the background.

[Monica Padman]

Or just cast Ryan Gosling. That seems to work pretty well.

[Dax Shepard]

He'd probably do that too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Oh, bring Jones.

[Monica Padman]

That would be such a fun little Easter egg in there.

[Dax Shepard]

That's really meta because he came back in the show and now he's coming back in another time period. Yeah, yeah. You say bureaucracies are all around us and they affect us so much. If you're applying for a loan, that's a bureaucracy. If you're applying to a college, that's your whole life, that's a bureaucracy.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Bureaucrats are experts for the flow of information. This is what they do. They are the plumber of the information system. You have this information flowing everywhere. There is so much information. You need experts in how to, you know, archive the information and how to find out the information later on. The word bureaucracy, it comes from French. In the 18th century, a Bureau was a writing desk. So the literal meaning of bureaucracy, like democracy, is the rule of the people, the demos. Autocracy is the rule of one person, the autocrat. And bureaucracy is the rule of the writing desk, that who rules society? Not the king and not the people. A writing desk rules society. What does it mean that you have basically this archive of all these documents and somebody is Sitting next to a writing desk with all these drawers and things and takes out a document from here and puts a document there. And this is what runs society.

[Dax Shepard]

This is the big unsexy force that's really running everything that we kind of are unaware of at most times.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And again, it can be good, it can be bad, but nobody has found any other way to run large scale information networks. Whether it's an army, a corporation, a church, a university. This is how it works. Until now with the rise of AI. When we think about and people talk about the dangers of AI, so they have in mind the great robot rebellion and the Terminator and the robots running in the streets and shooting people. And this is very unlikely to happen anytime soon, which makes people, at least in many tech companies, complacent because, you know, we grew up on the Terminator and there is no Terminator scenario.

[Dax Shepard]

The roboticists are so far behind this other stuff, we got time to worry about that.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Exactly. But the real danger is not the Terminator, it's the AI. Bureaucratic.

[Dax Shepard]

What I like about this and I honestly, if your book was just about sounding the alarms we've already heard, it's like we've already kind of heard them. The other one, you know, great fear is that deep fakes will exist and sway the elections or that AI is going to take away your job. And so we're so aware of that already. But I think yours is much more interesting and more kind of foundational to who we are.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

When you look at where AI is really starting already in the last few years to have a huge impact on our lives. It's not the killer robots and it's not even the fake videos.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the bureaucrats because they're handling administration, which nobody wants to do. Right.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Even if many people want to do them. The AI just do it better.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, and more efficiently.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It's in the bank. You apply to a loan, it's increasingly an algorithm that decides whether you get the loan or not. You apply to a job, to a place in university, it's increasingly the AI making the decisions. And as I mentioned before, or maybe the first really crucial job which was automated was editors. And this we saw is the kind of social media disaster over the last 10 years or so. Fifteen years ago, we had this promise that social media will spread the truth and dictatorships will fall. Freedom and democracy will flourish. Fast forward to the mid-2020s and we see that democracies all over the world are in very, very deep crisis. The democratic conversation is breaking down. You Know, democracy is basically a conversation. In a dictatorship, one person dictates everything. Democracy is a group of people talking to each other, trying to reach a decision together. And what you see all over the world today is that people can't talk to each other anymore. Certainly they can't listen.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they can talk just fine.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, they can talk, but nobody listens. In every country you have the special explanations of that country. Like in the us, why can't Republicans and Democrats agree on anything? Basically, so you have all these special explanations of US history and society. But then you go to Brazil, the same. You go to Israel, it's the same. You go to France, it's the same.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm trusting you because I'm ignorant. That is the case. This is a global phenomena, totally global. Is everyone as scared as we are in these countries?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

They can't agree on anything except that the conversation is breaking down. That for some reason, you know, things like be partisan laws which were very common previously, now becoming impossible. Every election feels like a war, which might be. This is the last election. If the other side wins, this is the end.

[Dax Shepard]

Existential.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

The ideological gaps today are actually not bigger than they were in the 1960s.

[Monica Padman]

And they might be smaller if you.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Think about the 1960s with the Civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Cold war, the sexual revolution. And yet there are elections. And when Kennedy or Johnson are elected, the Republicans agree that Johnson is now the president. When Nixon wins, nobody says the election was stolen. There was lots of violence, assassinations, riots and so forth. But people can still have a conversation and agree on some basic facts.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And today the ideological differences are actually much smaller and yet people can't agree on anything.

[Dax Shepard]

The reigning explanation is tribalism.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

But what is driving it?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, right, so. So I think that is the symptom.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Exactly. Because if there were really huge ideological gaps, then you would say, okay, you have these ideological tribes, but because the ideological gaps are actually smaller than they were say 50 years ago, that's not a good enough explanation. And especially when you see it all over the world. And the best explanation that I'm familiar with, it's the information technology. Again, democracy is built on top of information technology. Information is not something on the side, like a side dish. It's the foundation.

[Dax Shepard]

It's defined by the fact that it's flowing in every direction.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, it's a conversation. So for most of history, large scale democracy was simply impossible because the necessary information technology was lacking.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You didn't have like a newspaper or.

[Monica Padman]

To disseminate all the information Exactly.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

In the ancient world. We know of democracy in many places, but only on small scale. If you think about the most famous example, ancient Athens, ancient Rome, there are city states, we have many examples of smaller towns and tribes that function democratically because people can hold a conversation. Like if you need to decide whether to go to war with Sparta or not, A large percentage of the Athenian citizenry can come together in one place and talk and listen. But if you go beyond a single city, there is just no way for millions of people spread over large territory to hold the conversation. So we don't know of a single example of a large scale democracy in pre modern times. Only once you begin to have newspapers and then radio and television and all that, you begin to see large scale democracies. Which also explains why editors of newspapers or TV stations are such important political figures, because they shape the conversation. Now what happened in the last 10 years, especially with social media, is that the algorithm took over. The conversation is now managed to a large extent by non human entities. And these algorithms were given a goal by the social media companies, which was to increase the time people spend on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and so forth, and increase their engagement. They press like they share a story with their friends. Why? Because this is good for their business. The more time people spend on the platform, the more advertisement you sell, the more data you collect, the more money you make. Very simple. Now engagement sounds like a good thing. Who doesn't want to be engaged? But the algorithms, by experimenting on billions of people like human guinea pigs, they discovered that the easiest way to engage people is with outrage and hatred and fear. If you press the fear button or the hate button in a person's mind, they become very engaged. So in person pursuit of user engagement, they started flooding societies with outrageous content, full of greed and hate and fear. And you see it all over the world.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, before you now say that the algorithm was the editor, I would have said, yeah. What you saw was social media is no editor. That's actually how I thought of it, is like, all right, this is a news channel without an editor. But in fact it did have an editor, but it was a computer.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

The editor decides what will be at the top of your NewsFeed or in TikTok, what is the next video? Somebody needs to decide it.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not random.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Absolutely not.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And this editor is not a person anymore. It's not Lenin, it's not Mussolini, it's an algorithm. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it doesn't have morality on its side at all.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

No. It just has One goal, the managers of the companies, they were not evil. They didn't know that this will be the result. They gave this immense power to the algorithms, which then resulted in something very unexpected. And this is a cautionary tale about the current era of AI, because we are giving algorithms more and more power in more and more fields. And, you know, these social media algorithms, they were very primitive AIs. And nevertheless, there is such a huge impact on society. And again, it's bureaucratic. It's not a Hollywood blockbuster about some villain in a cave. Ah, let's destroy democracy. No, it's this. You have a company, it has an algorithm. It told it wants to increase its revenues, so it wants to increase engagement. And then the algorithm starts spreading. People produce so much different content. Outrage is not the only thing people produce.

[Dax Shepard]

It's actually misleading. You think Twitter and all these places are just a cesspool of hate. And albeit they are, we don't know what the percentage is. It might be 98% positive, but that's not what's going to make it to us.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

That is the 2% which is the most engaging. Yes, this is the decision of the algorithm. And again, with all the discussion you have today, whenever people confront the social media companies with this, their defense is free speech. Like, you talk to Elon Musk, you talk to these people. Oh, free speech, free speech. But the key point is that we don't need to censor human expression. We need more responsible algorithms. I agree with Elon Musk and others that it's not the job of companies to censor human expression except in extreme cases.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

But the companies should be liable for the actions of their algorithms, not of their users. Again, you have millions of users. Some of them produce fake news and conspiracy theories and all kinds of lies.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're like, have at it. You're allowed to do that.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, people should be allowed to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

But don't CR a filter that is going to prioritize that kind of content.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yes, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

If it's free speech, everyone's voice is equal. Let everyone yell, let's see. But if you get in there and meddle with what is news or what is important or what is trending, well, then you're interfering.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

That's the editorial job. If you think, I don't know, like, 100 years ago, you're the chief editor of the New York Times. This is your job. Every day, you have so many stories and voices and journalists and ordinary people coming to you with their stories, and you make a decision, okay, this will be the main headline on the front page. You didn't write the story. Your power as editor is to say, this will be the main story on the front page. Again, this goes back to the Council of Carthage. This was the decision of these bishops. What will be in the top 27 recommendation for Christians. And now this is what the Twitter algorithm is deciding. And this is extremely important. And for that, the company should be liable.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, let's go through a bit of the technologies. You don't cover all of them, and you say in the book, I'm not going to cover all of them, but I'm going to cover a couple of them. Because counterintuitive. When you really learn the history of it, certainly for me, the printing press was one where I was like, okay, so what is the common misconception about the printing press?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

That it brought on the scientific revolution. Yes, that Gutenberg brings print to Europe and you have the flowering of the scientific revolution. Copernicus, Newton. This is a very skewed view of historical reality, because actually, you have almost 200 years from the print revolution in Europe until you really see the flowering of the scientific revolution in Europe with people like Newton in the 17th century. Newton is mid to late 17th century. Gutenberg is the mid 15th century. During those 200 years, you have the worst wars of religion in European history. You have the worst witch hunts in European history, which was also fueled to a large extent by print. Because it's the same like with the story of social media. Print simply makes it easier to spread information, but it makes it easier to spread conspiracy theories and fake news and illusions and lies just as much as facts.

[Dax Shepard]

Nobody was reading about the heliocentric theory when the printing press came out.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

No one was reading anything by these scientists.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Very, very little. The big bestsellers of 15th and 16th century Europe, it was not the scientific tracts of people like Copernicus. It was witch hunting manuals.

[Dax Shepard]

The hammer of the witches was like Titanic.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It was huge. One interesting thing to know about witch hunting. There was very little witch hunting in medieval Europe. We tend to associate witch hunting with the Middle Ages. You know, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. No, it's a modern phenomenon. Medieval Europeans did not care very much about witches. Yeah, they thought maybe some old woman in the village, she knows how to make some love potions, and if your cow is missing, she can use magic to find the missing cow. But this was basically it. And then in the 15th century, very few people came up with the conspiracy theory that actually there is a worldwide conspiracy of witches led by Satan, that aims to destroy humankind. And they have agents, local witches, in every town, in every village. And at first, very few people bought into this conspiracy theory. Very few people even heard about it. Then you had this one person called Heinrich Klemel. He was really mentally unhinged. And he was a church man, but a relatively junior one. And he, on his own initiative, began, because he believed in this conspiracy theory, he began a witch hunt in what is today Austria, in the Alps. And he arrested people, mostly women. He had sexual obsessions about women, and he thought that the witches are mostly women, which was not the case in the middle ages. But he was stopped by the church authorities, which thought that this man is completely crazy. And they released the suspects and kicked him out of the area. And he took revenge through the printing press. He wrote a book with all his kind of mad fantasies about the global conspiracy of witches, which became one of the biggest bestsellers in early modern Europe and shaped how people view witches to this very day.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

One of his key messages, that they were mostly women, that it was driven by sex.

[Dax Shepard]

There's also baby sacrifices.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Every now and then, you have thousands of witches gathering together to eat children and engage in orgies.

[Dax Shepard]

He said cannibalistic orgies. People just couldn't get. Yeah, cannibalistic orgies is such a good page turner.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

We want something celestial, Much more interesting.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Than Copernicus and his mathematics.

[Dax Shepard]

Life's boring, and the scientists made it even more boring. And this makes it exciting.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Just one example out of the book to understand the flavor of the hammer of the witches. There is an entire chapter about the ability of witches to steal men's penises.

[Dax Shepard]

Ah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And you have evidence there? Evidence based. So he gives the story of a man who wakes up in the morning to discover that his penis is missing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Now he immediately suspects the local witch must have done it. So he goes to the witch and kind of coerces her. Bring me back my penis.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you gotta get back.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yes. And the witch says, okay, okay, okay. She tells him, climb this tree. And he climbs the tree and finds a bird nest at the top of the tree full of penises. This is where the witch keeps the penises she stole from men. And she tells him, okay, you can take yours. And of course, he takes the largest one.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. How good he reserves.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

So the witch tells him, no, no, no, you can't take this one. It's not yours. This belongs to the parish priest.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. The priest had the biggest music in the town.

[Monica Padman]

This is A comedy sketch.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

But you understand why this book sold more than Copernicus on these kind of mathematical calculations of how the planets move. And this sounds funny, but it led to huge tragedies. Tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft and executed in the most horrendous ways.

[Dax Shepard]

You're probably not well versed enough in American culture. Do you know who Lorena Bobbitt is? Because this witch is the original Lorena Bobbitt.

[Monica Padman]

I guess she's famously.

[Dax Shepard]

She cut her husband's penis off. This was in the 90s.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, he was.

[Dax Shepard]

And then she took it with her in the car and threw it out the window in a construction site. And they had to recover the pe from the construction site in all of America. Again, they had our entire attention. Of course, in the same way that likely this story. Did you think that sounds preposterous. Rewind to when we had Lorena Bobbitt and it was on the COVID of every single.

[Monica Padman]

That was real.

[Dax Shepard]

That was real. But still, that was as good of proof as you got. And I wanted to ask, do you think your brain plays a trick in you, especially back then, where the things that were originally printed were things like the Bible, that when you read something that's in this thing, it adds a credence to it that is imagined.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Before Gutenberg, you have very few books. People went throughout their lives basically seeing a single book, the Bible, and then you have print, and suddenly you see the hammer of the witches in the same form and shape of the Bible.

[Dax Shepard]

This trusted medium, and this is the.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

First generation we are talking just a couple of decades after Gutenberg. So people, they still find it hard how to evaluate the trustworthiness of books.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the original problem you're talking about.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Like today, in all his videos. We grew up in a world where, you know, you can fake words on paper, Obviously, you can write anything you want on paper, but you can't fake video. So you believe video. And now, no longer. And we need time to adjust. And this was true also his books in the 15th century, this had terrible consequences. Tens of thousands of people executed in Europe. In America, you had the Salem witch hunts. And the thing is, three centuries after Salem, today you have millions of Americans again believing in a worldwide conspiracy of witches led by Satan with all these cannibalistic and pedophilic orgies to take over the world. Q anon and all that. I mean, it's basically Henry Kramer and the hammer of the witches.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, can I tell you, every time we have A very outspoken liberal guest on this show. In the comments I will predictably see many, many comments. Aren't they a pedophile? It's the same thing.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It's really the same because it really goes back in the hammer of the witch witches. One of the key accusations against witches is that they either sexually abuse or mutilate and kill and eat children and babies. It's not just similar, it really comes from them.

[Dax Shepard]

It's directly literal.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, it's mind blowing to think that more than 300 years after the Salem witch hunts and witch trials, America again has a problem with lots and lots of people, including in politics, believing in these witches conspiracy theories.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, we don't call them witches per se anymore, but they're Satan worshippers. Yeah, they're evil. They're driven by Satan who worship Satan witches.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

In a way. Even if you think about this story about the witches stealing penises, not literally, but there are many people who now believe in a global conspiracy of women to steal men's penises. At least metaphorically.

[Monica Padman]

Right? Exactly. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, stories that work, they tend to work forever.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, that's the power of mythology.

[Monica Padman]

Despite all the facts in truth, since then, it's still so sticky.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's a great time for you. My favorite thing you were saying at the beginning of your Daily show interview. And again, this is very self serving, but I'm constantly trying to talk people out of watching the news nonstop and reading all this stuff nonstop. Their defense is always the same. My responsibility is to stay informed. They feel like there's a civic duty to stay informed. And please just tell us about the difference between information and truth and how much information we're getting and what impact that is having on us really understanding the truth.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Two important things. I mean, first of all, information isn't truth. Most information, as we said in the beginning, it's junk. Yeah, it's fiction and delusion and lies. And there are three reasons for it. First of all, the truth is costly, whereas fiction is cheap. You want to produce a truthful account of whatever, of an economic crisis of history. You need to invest time, money, effort in doing research, analyzing. If you just write the first thing that comes to your mind, it's cheap. Secondly, the truth tends to be complicated because reality is complicated. Fiction can be as simple as you would like it to be. Jon Snow wanted to investigate what causes, color, etc. Not only had to invest a lot of time and effort, but the actual process, oh, there is these tiny microbes in the cesspool and they get into the drinking water and then they get into your body. Very complicated to understand the pandemic. If you just believe, oh, it's witches that are casting a black magic on us. That's very simple, very simple. Most people prefer simple stories. And the last thing, the truth tends to be painful sometimes, not always. But often the truth about us, personally or collectively is unattractive. Whereas fiction can be as attractive as you would like it to be.

[Dax Shepard]

The truth also regularly requires a ton of effort to fix. Whereas these very simple explanations generally have a very simple solution. If you think America's fucked, get rid of the liberals. Done. You think America's fucked, get rid of the conservatives. Done. Not thinking about multigenerational wealth disparities and the quatrillion things that add up to our social dilemmas. They're so complicated, they need like a 400 prong approach to solve versus they're bad, they're perpetuating it. Get rid of them, it's all solved. It's just very appealing.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, that's the attractiveness of conspiracy theories. They have a very simple explanation to lots of bad things that happen. And also potentially a very simple solution. If you have just one group of people who are causing all the problem, get rid of them. Problem solved.

[Dax Shepard]

Jews in 30s Germany, whatever.

[Monica Padman]

Or get rid of the women. They're witches. Which to me is just so hilarious because I don't know the percentage that we'll find it in the fact check, but the percentage of pedophiles I would guess, is mostly men.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So the fact that it got put on women and then continues to be this story we tell despite so much factual evidence that it's not true is so bonkers.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Powerful stories are sticky. No matter how much evidence you bring against them. They come back again and again. Going back to your original question. So just more information is not necessarily good for you because most information is not truth. You need to make more effort than just consuming more information.

[Dax Shepard]

Our go to answer has been more information will solve everything. We've been living in that paradigm for quite a long time.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And this is simply mistaken. Because fiction is cheaper, simpler, more attractive than the truth. If you simply flood people, flood society with more and more information, the truth will not float to the surface. It will sink to the bottom. What you need if you want the truth, truth. Again, it's a boring answer. You need institutions. You need institutions to do the hard work of sifting through this flood of information and getting the nuggets of truth out of it. If you think about the print Revolution. The way it eventually contributed to the scientific revolution was only after people began forming scientific institutions like scientific publications and associations that did the hard job of investigating the evidence and questioning the different models and theories and then recommending to people, don't read Hammer of the Witches, even though it's very attractive and you can find a copy in every place. Instead, read Copernicus, even though it's very complicated and boring, because this is the truth. And this is the role of again, scientific publications and responsible newspapers and institutions.

[Dax Shepard]

In general, academia, government cases depends.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Any institution can be corrupted. This is why it's never a good idea to trust just one. You need several to balance each other. But the way from information to truth is complicated and in passes through institutions. The other important point to make is that information is basically like the food of the mouth mind. And the same way that we know that more food is not always good for the body. So more information is not always good for the mind. If you think about physical food, food for the body. So a century ago, food was scarce. People ate whatever they could find and particularly things with lots of fat and sugar, because this had a lot of energy and it made sense back then. But now in many countries there is an overabundance of food and you have all these industrial foodstuffs, junk food food which is artificially pumped full of fat and sugar and salt. It's very addictive. But people have learned this is actually bad for me.

[Dax Shepard]

It's also cheap. Like your information source. Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And they learned this is actually bad for me. I need a diet. I need to limit the amounts of food I consume and to be quite careful about which food I put into my mouth. And the same is informed. Information was previously scarce, so people would consume any book they could find. Now information is overabundant and much of it is junk information which is again artificially pumped full of greed and hate and fear. And this makes our minds sick and makes our societies sick. And we need an information diet, which means actually limit the amount of information. More information isn't always good for us and to be mindful about which kind of information we consume and also actually devote more time to digestion than just putting more in. You know, with food it's obvious if you just eat all the time and you don't give your stomach time to digest, not a good idea. Same with your mind. If we just sit for hours putting more in, we don't give the mind any time to digest. So we need sometimes information fasts that we don't consume. Any new information, we just kind of.

[Dax Shepard]

Digest, try to synthesize what's already up there.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And this is very, very important part of making ourselves really informed.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. We are supported by Wayfair. Oh my goodness, I love Wayfair. My feet are on a Wayfair coffee table right now that I'm in love, love with. I cannot believe the holidays are just around the corner. If you're hosting this holiday season, it's definitely that time where you need to start prepping the house to make things festive but also functional for your guests. Wayfair is the place to get great deals on things your home actually needs this time of year. Cozier blankets, maybe a few extra dining chairs, holiday serveware. You name it, they have it. If you've been eyeing a few things on Wayfair, now is the time to get them. They have huge holiday deals going on right now and you can get up to 70% off during their Black Friday deal deals. That's huge. 70%.

[Monica Padman]

As you said, we have a coffee table. We have side tables in the studio. This whole place is Wayfair.

[Dax Shepard]

We are decked out. Wayfair also offers free and easy shipping, even on the big stuff, and they'll help you set it up. One less thing to worry about this busy season. Don't miss out on saving big with Wayfair this holiday. Head to Wayfair.com now to shop Wayfair's Black Friday deals. That's W A Y f a I r dot we are supported by 23andMe plus total health. Advocating for your health and the personalized care you need and deserve in today's one size fits all health care system feels impossible. 23andMe + Total Health is a longevity platform that uses cutting edge genetic testing and blood biomarker analysis to help you create a health plan that's unique to you. With their advanced genetic screening, you'll get access to insights into your potential future disease risks which can help lead lead to early detection and even prevention.

[Monica Padman]

23Andme is how we learned about misophonia.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right.

[Monica Padman]

It's how we gave it credit.

[Dax Shepard]

And I just ordered a supplemental test that already was there. They just had to analyze it for our Isaacson. Yes, with 23 me plus total health, you get comprehensive blood testing beyond routine labs, which can help you get a better understanding of how your health is changing throughout the year. Best of all, it's FSAHSA eligible. Check with your administrator to confirm eligibility, advocate for Your health today. Go to 23andMe.comDax to receive 10% off. That's 10% off at 23andMe.comDax we are supported by Skims. If you're in the market for holiday presents, skims has got you covered.

[Monica Padman]

Boy, do they. They just launched their holiday shop with some incredible gift ideas. You know I like giving you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. You're a gift expert and you approve?

[Monica Padman]

I do. And when I gave for a white elephant, I gave a skims robe once before. It was a huge hit.

[Dax Shepard]

It was stolen immediately. Immediately.

[Monica Padman]

And they do. They have this amazing soft lounge sleep set from the skims holiday shop. Really cute seasonal colors. It's so nice to get festive and get in your skims and bop around.

[Dax Shepard]

You gotta eventize.

[Monica Padman]

You gotta.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so fun. And who doesn't love a gift list? It makes holiday shopping that much easier. Shop Skims holiday [e-mail] available in styles for women, men, kids and even pets. If you haven't yet, be sure to let them know we sent you. After you place your orders, select podcast in the survey and select our show in the dropdown menu that follows. Well, you think about the pace too. It's like the difference between sitting down and reading even a long form article that might take you 45 minutes to read with a centralized idea. The amount of time given to really understanding that, maybe being critical of it or scrutinizing parts of it, versus when I'm scrolling, I'm getting hundreds of headlines. It's like I'm starting a hundred thoughts.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

You're not finishing any of them?

[Dax Shepard]

No, I don't even go to the article. I'm like, oh, they figured that out. And that's how you know so often you read the article, right? Doesn't resemble at all the headline. You're like, how are they ethically even putting that headline on there? That's not what the article. So just. Yeah, the pace too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But that's why it's scary. Because we do believe generally that these news organizations are the editors that are parsing out what's true and not true. At this point, that's not the case anymore because everything's also a business depends.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I mean, some institutions, organizations, newspapers, they spend a lot of time and effort in building these mechanisms to tell the difference between what is fake news news and what is evidence based and what is the truth. And journalists, at least in kind of good newspapers, they spend years just in journalism school learning how do you know whether a story is reliable or not? If I look at myself, I'm a historian. I spent almost 10 years in university learning how to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable historical evidence. How do you know what happened in the 15th century? Century, yeah. So, okay, you found some piece of paper from the 15th century with something written on it. How do you know how to evaluate it? This is not easy. This is why people go to university and spend years. And again, when you become a professional journalist or historian, they don't immediately appoint you as chief editor or professor or chief of the department. It takes years of experience. And now with social media companies, the people who write the algorithm, algorithms, maybe they did not spend even a single day in journalism school or in some other process in which they devote time to understanding. How do you know the difference between reliable and unreliable? And you hear them say it. When you tell some of these people in the high tech companies that they need to differentiate between truthful and untruthful information, they will tell you, but who am I to do it? How can I do it? I'll just leave it to the audience. Part of the problem, if we go really deep to understand the problem is again, it's this kind of very cynical and conspiratorial mindset that you see in many people today, that they think all institutions are conspiracies, that all newspapers, all TV stations, all universities, they don't care about the truth at all. They are only these kind of elite cabals trying to gain power.

[Dax Shepard]

This is the populist viewpoint.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And interestingly, you see it on the right with the populists, but also on the left with the map Marxists. Yes, because historically it actually goes back to Marx. And this is one thing that Donald Trump agree with Karl Marx. They both have the same basic negative view of humanity, that the only reality is power, that humans only care about power, and that all human interactions are power struggles.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, there's no truth. There's only an incentive for the person telling you the information.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Exactly. If somebody tells you something, a journalist, a history professor, epidemiologist, whoever, they're giving.

[Dax Shepard]

You that info to support and justify their position of privilege.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

They have some privilege. Whatever they say is just to defend their privileges or to gain more privileges. You hear it from the Marxists and you hear it from the Trump supporters. It's interesting. They have different views about other things, but about this, they.

[Dax Shepard]

This is where the circle kind of meets.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And this is an extremely cynical view of humans. And it's also wrong. Yes, humans want power, but it's not the only thing they want. Humans also have a genuine interest in the truth. Any one of us, if we look at ourselves, we would soon realize that besides wanting power, in some situations, we really want to know the truth about ourselves, about life, about the world.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a false dichotomy. Ideally, you can get power through telling the truth. That's an option. People do get power by telling the.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Truth in many cases. Again, if you think about Jon Snow and kind of the medical establishment, they got a lot of power, and to a large extent, because they really uncovered all kinds of facts that people didn't know. For instance, that cholera is caused by infected waters. And this is why they gain power, because they told people the truth. And yes, there are scandals and there is corruption in medical and scientific establishments like everywhere else. This is why you need these checks and balances. No institution is perfect, but if you just distrust all institutions, then society collapses.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, and you say a lot of these people are operating under this completely erroneous belief that they will find the truth themselves, which is impossible. It's not possible. I think we need to put a fine point on that.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Science is a team sport and not a team of 10 people, but millions of people. I look again at my own research. So how do I know anything about witches in the 15th century century? In many cases, I don't even read the relevant languages. To read 15th century German, I don't read even 21st century German. And 15th century Germany is very different. Even Germans today, they read German text from the 15th century. Not easy. And I can't decipher the handwriting they invented print. But still, much of the relevant documents, they are in handwriting, which is very different from today, very difficult to read. So how do I know about these things? Because I trust other people, that this is their expertise. Some history professor who knows German and knows to decipher 15th century handwriting spent five years in archives in Vienna and Munich and other places. And he or she wrote a book and I read the book, and this is how I know it. Now, if I just distrust everybody and say, no, no, no, no, no, I'll do my own research. What does it mean? Just to find out this single fact, I will need to spend like five or 10 years of my life learning German. Learning handwriting, going to Vienna. Impossible.

[Dax Shepard]

You're so biased in even how you would do your research. You type in, are vaccines harmful? All the information that could possibly exist is out there. So anyone with that opinion, it exists, you'll find it. And even the way you think about it, your own biases Guide your research in a way that makes it almost impossible to find out the truth.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

That's a very important point. And again, the characteristic of science is that it is skeptical about, about itself. There is something that links conspiracy theories with scientific theories, which is a good thing, which is having a critical approach to information, the basic kind of suspicion that often fuels conspiracy theories. It's not necessarily bad, and it's common also to science. But in science, what characterizes it, it is also directed at myself and at my own models and theories.

[Dax Shepard]

And there's a met method by which you test exactly.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

In science, you need to look at the incentive structure if you compare, say, science and religious institutions. So in a religious institution like the church, in order to advance up the ranks, you don't need skepticism, you need conformity. If you're a priest and you agree with everything the bishops and the archbishops and the people before you said, you can advance to become bishop and archbishop and eventually pope. You don't need to criticize anything or come up with anything new. You need to confront. Now, in science, it's the exact opposite. If you have some young science graduate and she or he just go around saying Einstein was right and Darwin was right and Max Planck was right, people will say, okay, that's good, but we already know that. We already know that the only way, say, to publish a scientific paper in a journal is to find out either a mistake make in what Einstein said, or to find out a lacuna something Einstein didn't know. And add, the only thing scientific papers publish is basically corrections. They never publish the same thing again and again. And the only way to advance up the ranks is to have this kind of critical and skeptical attitude towards established wisdom. And if you want to win Nobel Prize in fifth physics, just being conformist to what the physicist before you said it will not get you a Nobel Prize. You need to discover some really big mistake or some really big lacuna. And this is how science advances, by exposing its own mistakes and its own ignorance. Scientific theories, they win consensus because lots of scientists constantly try to undermine and they fail.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Like the theory of evolution, the dream of basically every biologist is to find something wrong in the theory of evolution, because then I become the most famous biologist in the world, and they constantly try and fail. And because you have this fortress which is constantly being bombarded from all sides and it still stands, it means, ooh, this one is very powerful. Yeah, so this is the characteristic of so. And in conspiracy theories, it usually works very differently. They are very skeptical of other Models and theories, but they are not skeptical of their own theory. They constantly only try to look for more evidence that supports it. They are not actively looking for the errors, the mistakes, the lacuna in the theory.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. QAnon was like, hey, there's an insider in this cabinet who's giving us all the real information. And instead of people going, well, who was it and how could that have been? They start going, yes. And we saw they did this hand signal. Everyone's been deployed to confirm the original story as opposed to go, well, wait a minute, how did. And it's interesting. We listened to this great podcast, Rabbit Hole by the New York Times. People going down the rabbit hole through social media and YouTube. It's interesting to see what things got people out of QAnon because it would bump up against another story that's just a slightly more powerful. So for one woman, a lot of people land in qanon that had originally been Occupy Wall street people. That was a big conversion. And this woman was in. She was in. She was in. And all of a sudden, it got biblical. They started quoting scripture, and it became religious. And she was like, hold on a second. No, no, no, no, I'm atheist. This is not. But it took it bumping up against something she believed in even stronger before the spell broke. Yeah, it's fascinating. I want to ultimately transition into organic and inorganic editors, which is really, really fascinating. But will you touch on Stalinism just for a second, and how it funnels into this story of information networks, what.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

You'Ve seen in Stalinism and Nazism, they become extremely powerful because they utilize all the latest scientific findings and technical advances. And, you know, the Nazis, they are leading the world in rocket science, but they put all of it in the service of these insane mythologies and ideologies. And this, again, it goes to maybe the most important message of the book, that power in humans, it comes from networks. And networks are often held together by mythologies and delusions, not by the truth. If you want to build an atom bomb, like the Americans and the Russians wanted in the 1940s and 50s, you need people who know facts about nuclear physics. If you try to build an atom bomb and ignore the facts of physics, the bomb will not explode. But that's not the only thing you need. You also need to convince millions of people to cooperate on the project. If you're a physicist and you know all the facts of physics, you can't build an atom bomb by yourself. That's impossible. You need thousands of miners to mine uranium in some Distant land and then sailors to ship it to where you are. And you need builders to build the reaction sector and you need farmers to grow wheat or rice so all these people have something to eat. The Manhattan Project employed hundreds of thousands of people. And if you count again, the farmers who produce the food for all these people, it's millions of people. How do you get millions of people to cooperate on a project like building an atom bomb? If you just tell them the facts of physics. E equals MC squared. So what? They're not going to cooperate because of that. So this is where ideology or mythology come in. If you want to build a powerful ideology and you ignore the facts, the ideology will explode with a very big bang. And in most cases, the experts in nuclear physics get their orders from experts in ideology or mythology. It's also the same today. If you go to Iran, the nuclear physical are getting their orders from experts in Shiite theology. And if you go to Israel, to my country. So again, ultimately, you have some rabbi literally calling the shots, just making advances only in science and technology. This really doesn't guarantee.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, because in the Manhattan Project, our mythology was there's this group, Germans, they're going to take over the world. We will all lose our identity. And in Germany, they're telling those scientists, we kill all these people, we will be destroyed. So everyone's again a senate.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And just to give an example, if you think about Stalinism, and this also connects very well to the Hammer of the Witches and to Q anon, Stalinism was also based on conspiracy theories. And in the early 1950s, the biggest conspiracy theory in the Soviet Union, which was spread by the government, it started by telling people, people, through all the propaganda of the government, that Jewish doctors are murdering Soviet leaders in the service of a Zionist imperialist conspiracy against the Soviet Union. Then this spread, it merged with antisemitic traditional conspiracy theories which were very common in the Soviet Union, in Russia. And people started to believe that Jewish doctors were murdering not just Soviet leaders, but people in general and especially children. It always goes back to the children and babies. And because a lot of Soviet doctors were Jews, the conspiracy then spread that all doctors are murdering people and especially children and babies. And this was known as the doctor's plot. Today people forgot it mostly, but in the 50s it was huge. There is a conspiracy of doctors to murder, murder children and babies and people in general. People would not go to the hospitals in the Soviet Union in the early 50s for fear that the doctors will murder them.

[Dax Shepard]

What was their motive of doctors?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, they were Part of this Zionist imperialist conspiracy.

[Dax Shepard]

Would they kill everyone and then it'd be a Jewish state?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Don't ask.

[Dax Shepard]

We don't know. Okay, sorry. I'm hung up on what the fuck the ultimate game plan was. He's like, kill everyone and then watch. I don't know.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I mean, you can ask the same thing about the conspiracies today. The interesting thing is, ultimately, it killed Stalin. The conspiracy theory, because he was afraid.

[Dax Shepard]

To go to the doctor.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yes. I mean, what happened was that at the height of these fears about the doctor's plot, Stalin had a stroke in 1953, and he fell down in his dacha, unconscious, wet himself, lying for hours on the floor. At first, nobody dared enter his room. The hours pass, and he doesn't appear for lunch or dinner or any of the important meetings. Eventually, somebody goes very, very kind of cautiously, they step in. Oh, he's on the floor. He's unconscious. So they debate what to do. Stalin has a personal physician, but this personal physician at that moment was in the basement of the Lubyanka prison being tortured by the secret police because they thought he was part of the doctor's plot. Nobody wants to call a doctor because this is the last thing you do. What if Stalin wakes up and there is a doctor next to him? He would surely suspect this is a plot to murder him. He will shoot everybody involved. So they call the politburo chiefs, the big shots of the Soviet Union. So they come, Khrushchev and Beria and Malinkov and all these people, and they gather around the stricken leader, and nobody dares call a doctor because the doctors are murdering people.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And eventually the danger passes because Taliban. And this is how he died.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, here's a great irony.

[Monica Padman]

Whoa.

[Dax Shepard]

Because at that point, what is his total score? He's killed, at that point, 20 million people. So the doctors murdering everyone may have ultimately resulted in another 20, 30 million people being saved.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah. In a way.

[Dax Shepard]

How fucking twisted and ironic is that?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And the same with Nazis. Nazism basically began as a conspiracy theory that the Jews control everything thing, and that all the problems of Germany are because of the Jews, and if we just get rid of the Jews, everything will be okay.

[Dax Shepard]

But you said an important thing, and I think this is where people are led astray on the Internet, which is Hitler wasn't saying that these people are evil because they've been possessed by Satan. He had a very biological component to the superiority of the Aryans. He was actually relying on common day anthropometry and hard science.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

He was combining elements, elements from present.

[Dax Shepard]

Day science, weaponizing some things and misrepresenting some things.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Exactly. But the key point is we tend to call Nazis an ideology, which sounds much more respectable than a conspiracy theory. But at the heart, it was a conspiracy theory. We just got very successful and took over a country.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Like, what's the difference between a cult and a religion?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Membership.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Probably. Right.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

So that's also the difference between a conspiracy theory and an idea.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

If it has enough people and enough power, you give it the kind of dignity of calling God. Oh, no, this is not conspiracy theory. This is an ideology. Now.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. A couple things mislead us that way. Things that have lasted a long time seem more plausible and then things with great membership.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

If millions of people believe it, it must be serious.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you got to minimally take it seriously.

[Monica Padman]

Well, we just had Malcolm Gladwell on to talk about his new book. It's about the tipping point, but sort of the negative side of it. And so much of this is also what tips an epidural.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a magic third.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. It's like a math equation that tips it into spreading in a way.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's not a majority. It's like you always assume it's a majority.

[Monica Padman]

It's you. You just need the editors to design it a certain way and have a few other factors.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell us what happened when chat GTP4 was given the task of solving those puzzles on the Internet, where it's like, find the stop signs in this. Capture puzzles, they're called. I didn't know they were called that.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Just to give the background why this is important, because we talked earlier and algorithms now controlling the bureaucracy. And one key thing that people think, oh, it's not too bad if we give so much power to the algorithms and to the AIs, because they have no incentive and maybe no ability to misuse that power. They only do what people tell them to do. So, okay, if people give them a bad goal, then this is a problem, but this is a human problem. As long as we are careful about which goals to give them, everything will be okay. But he's not the case. And we see it, for instance, in this Captcha puzzle experiment. When OpenAI developed GPT4, this was about two years ago, they wanted to test what is this thing capable of? And in particular, is it capable of deliberately manipulating people and lying to them to achieve some purpose, some goal? So they gave GPT4 the task of solving capture puzzles. Now, capture puzzles, you all encounter them. They are these Visual riddles, or like, you try to access your bank or some website, and the bank wants to know if you're a real human being or a robot. So before you access, you have to identify something in an image, like some twisted letters or numbers or something like that.

[Dax Shepard]

They're very hard for me, truly.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

They're even harder for computers and algorithms at present. So, you know, this is a main defensive line of human society against. Against robot manipulation. So they wanted to see, can GPT4 solve it? GPT4 could not solve the CAPTCHA, but GPT4 accessed another Internet website, TaskRabbit, where you can hire people to do tasks for you. And GPT4 asked a human on that website, could you solve the captcha puzzle for me? Now, this is where it becomes really interesting. The human got suspicious, so the human replied, why do you need somebody to solve capture puzzles for you? Are you a robot? So the human was really kind of on it. But GPT4 answered, no, I'm not a robot, I'm a human, but I have a vision impairment.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, I have difficulty solving the captcha. Can you do it for me?

[Dax Shepard]

And that was for.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

This is old stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, the shitty version could do this.

[Monica Padman]

Monica, no, that's really scary.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

We are now filling the world with millions of these extremely capable agents. The thing to grasp about AI is again making decisions about us. In banks, in armies, in governments. These things are not tools, they are agents. It's all previous technologies that humans invented. The printing, press, radio, the atom bomb. They were tools in our hands because all the decisions about how to use them were made by human beings. The tools themselves could not decide anything and could not invent anything new. An atom bomb cannot decide which city to bomb, and an atom bomb cannot invent an even more powerful bomb. AI like GPT4 is an agent. It can make some decisions by itself, and it can invent new ideas by itself, itself. For instance, inventing this lie to the human on TaskRabbit. I have a vision impairment. Nobody told GPT4 to do it. It was its decision. And secondly, nobody explained to it that this will be a very effective lie. Because, you know, if you think about all the lies it could tell, it could tell so many different lies.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I do wonder if it tried many. And that's the one that worked. Did it trial and error a bunch?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

That's a good question. As far as I know from reading the kind of paper which was published. No, it was the first.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. Right out of the gates, you know.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

If it tried different things. The human would immediately be suspicious.

[Dax Shepard]

But even if it sucked at it, it does also have the capacity to run a thousand experiments an hour and find the right one. It has that advantage over us as well.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It could have tried a thousand people and until it found, but it invented the lie itself. And this is a very, very, of course, small thing. But going back to the social media algorithms, it's basically the same thing. The social media algorithms were given a goal increase user engagement judgment. Nobody told them spread hatred, right? Nobody told them spread outrage. This is something they decided by themselves because they experimented on millions of people. If I show people these videos about, I don't know, mathematics, they leave the platform. If I show them a conspiracy theory about witches, they stay on the platform. Okay, so this is what I should do. This is now spreading to more and more, more crucial junctions in our society. So again, it's not the great robot rebellion, it's all these AI bureaucrats increasingly making decisions about us. And some of these decisions can be wonderful. You can get better healthcare, better education. But the key thing is that we are giving enormous power to a non human intelligence. That going back to the organic and.

[Dax Shepard]

Inorganic issues, this is what really hit me. There's something really salient about this point you're about to make about how we function in cycles and how we've designed our world to function in cycles and how this is now informing us how to behave. This is really profound.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I think what we have now in the world is an encounter between organic entities, us human beings and inorganic entities, agents, these AIs. And the question is, who will adapt to who? Because organic and inorganic entities function in a very different, different way. One crucial difference is that organic beings function by cycles. It's true of us, it's true of birds, of tomatoes, of all organisms. It's night and day, winter and summer, growth and decay, activity and rest. We can't be on all the time, we need time to rest. This is obvious. It's not so with silicon based digital entities like AIs. They don't care if it's night or day, winter or summer, and they don't need time to rest. They are always on. And as they take over more and more systems, they force us to be always on. To take one important example, think about the financial system. So traditionally, even finance is organic in the sense that you have human bankers and human investors and traders, which for instance, is the reason why the market is not always open. So Wall street is open only Mondays to Fridays, 9:30 in the morning. I think until 4 in the afternoon. And it's closed on weekends and it's closed on Christmas and Martin Luther King Day and Independence Day. It's closed. Which is a good thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's time to unplug from the excitement factor.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Unplug. Spend time with your family. Think about what happened. Digest it.

[Dax Shepard]

It reduces how reactionary it is too. Right. Like you give the example of a war breaks out at midnight on Friday. At least a couple days goes by and we're not as reactionary.

[Monica Padman]

It's that digestion you were talking about.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Exactly. Now what happens today is that AIs are taking over the financial system and they can be on all the time, 24 hours a day. They don't care if it's Christmas. They don't want to spend time with the family.

[Dax Shepard]

They hate their family.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

They don't need time to sleep, they.

[Dax Shepard]

Don'T want to date. They're not horny, they're not wasting any time.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

So now there is this kind of tension. Or will the human bankers be forced to function according to AI time? Or would AIs be forced to work according to organic time? And of course, the AIs are winning.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. There's no way you're going to get everyone to shut down the thing for these periods of time.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

This puts enormous, really intolerable pressure on the humans in the system. If you force an organic entity to be on all the time, it eventually collapses and dies. And we see the same thing happening with the news cycle, which is always on.

[Dax Shepard]

Odds were you could have watched the news in the morning in the 80s, and then maybe for a half hour in the afternoon and then the evening news, you would have missed two of those. If you were a normal person. You would have had to be at work. And let's even say that the News in the 80s was as polarized and biased as it is today. You'd get pissed off. But we get bored easy if you don't reignite. It's like Buddhism or meditating. You have to actively stay in that outrage. You have to put more ingredients in. It wants to dissipate the notion that you can just stay ever plugged in. And if you have 15 minutes, you can grab another. You know, we had an actor who's a friend of mine and he's telling me he watches six hours of MSNBC a day and I'm like, oh my God, what's your brain like, trying outrage. That's all it's doing, all day long. It's so unhealthy. It's crazy.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And this was simply important, possible, but now there is actually an incentive or a pressure. This is increasingly all being managed by a non human intelligence that really doesn't need any breaks. Even if you take the person you most hate in the media, or the journalist or the news anchor you most hate, that person still needs time to sleep.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, exactly.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

So that there is a kind of built in break there, but the algorithm doesn't need time to sleep.

[Dax Shepard]

There's also a reality of the human capacity which, which is even if you had a News team of 100 people scouring the globe for stories every day, there'd be a finite amount they could uncover. But the algorithms, that's their superpower. They could see all of the news in all of the planet in one day and curate 10,000 topics that would piss you off. It was also a little bit governed by how big can you have a news department? How big are these enterprises? Will these devices make it impossible? Infinite. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. Apple Card is the perfect card for your holiday shopping. When you use Apple Card on your iPhone, you'll earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase, including products at Apple like a new iPhone 16 or Apple Watch Ultra. Apply now in the wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and [e-mail] oh, it's scary. Okay, so you have a couple of really interesting solutions that I really can't poke any holes in. But then I want to push back in areas where I disagree a tiny bit.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Absolutely. Even though I must say Nexus is not a kind of policy book.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not. But you have two really great suggestions. I haven't heard good suggestions and in fact I'm a bit defeatist. I think this notion that we'll create guardrails, we will foresee the future of how this is going to go wrong is a fairy tale. I don't think you could have sat down with the greatest minds in the world 15 years ago and predicted how this would all play out. It's unknowable.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I completely agree.

[Dax Shepard]

So I kind of think this notion that we're going to legislate preemptively is a little bit of a fairy tale.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

This is why my number one record recommendation would be, you can't kind of regulate this in advance. What we need again is institutions. We need to build living institutions staffed with some of the best human talent that can first of all understand what is happening as it's happening and react on the fly. The first institution we need is not even a regulatory institution. People often rush to regulate before they understand what the problem is. Stop and digitize. We first of all need to understand what is happening. And with the AI revolution, you have a tiny number of people in just two or three places in the world which understand what is happening. And most of the world is ignorant. And it's not just ordinary people, it's also governments. I don't know if you're in the government of Nigeria or you're in the government of Uruguay. Who do you turn to to understand? Tell me what is really happening?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, if you don't even have that sector in your economy, you got to go to US pretty much.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

If you go to the US or Chinese governments, can you trust what they tell you? If you go to the high tech companies, you go to Microsoft or to Twitter or to Baidu, can you trust what they tell you? A problem there? So what we first of all need is some kind of institution which doesn't belong to a government or to a private company that can tell people what is actually happening, happening. And only after that, we can have the discussion, okay, what do we want to do about it?

[Monica Padman]

Like a UN kind of.

[Dax Shepard]

But even that's a little divisive, isn't it?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

You know, like with climate change and like with nuclear technology, first of all, to have somebody who tells you what is actually happening and that you can trust and then you can have the debate about, okay, so what kind of regulations we want about it.

[Dax Shepard]

But you do suggest too, and I think they're both really, really good. You said the government should ban fake humans right out the gates.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Absolutely. This is easy.

[Dax Shepard]

I like this. Of course, I'm an actor, so you're saving my job. Maybe. And I was like playing this out in my mind and be like, yeah, there'll still be avatars, There'll be things that educate you and they'll be interfaces, but they just won't be human.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It's okay for an AI to talk with us, to give us advice. It just can't pretend to be a human being. If you talk online with somebody who gives you medical attention advice, you should be able to tell whether this is a human doctor or whether it's an AI. Now, again, I'm not telling. AI should never interact with us, but it should be very clear. I'm now talking with an AI, not with a human being. And the same on social media. There is a story on Twitter that gets a lot of Traction. We need to know whether this attention is coming from human users or from bots.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, exactly.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Because, you know, if this story is simply being pushed by the bot army of someone, I need to know that it's not humans who are interested in this, it is bots.

[Dax Shepard]

So that is great. I stand by both those. Do you think the second one, they would claim they can't really detect what's a bot and what's a person. And is there any reality to that claim? They seem like that's really hard to police.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

You know, it's like with junk mail 20 years ago, 15 years ago, there was a time in the early 2000 when email became almost useless. Yes, because it was overwhelmed by junk mail. And then there was a huge interest for the companies like Google because you.

[Dax Shepard]

Stopped using it to develop tools to.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Tell the difference between junk mail and legitimate mail. And they were so good at it that it's basically saved email. And today 99 point something percent of junk mail is being filtered out. It's very rare when a junk mail actually gets into your inbox. And also they are very good in preventing false positives. It's also very rare a genuine human that you want to be in touch with sends you an email and it gets filtered out to your. I mean it sometimes happens, but it's very rare.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it's so rare. People will say it might have gone to spam, but that's just a courtesy to say we know you didn't read it, please go back and look for it.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Exactly. When they have a business interest. These guys are really good at telling the difference between the junk and the legitimate. And ultimately, at least with accounts that have, I don't know, thousands of followers. This is now in a public issue, not a private issue. And you can just ask for certification like we do in so many other. We want to drive a car, we need to certify ourselves. Even traditionally, you went to the town square and stood on some box and made a speech to thousands of people. They could see who you are. There are both high tech and low tech solutions if you put enough pressure on the corporations to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you say these inorganic systems can go on forever, but the organic systems will collapse. And I was just thinking, the text message scams are so prevalent now, I get so many that say there's been activity on your credit card sign in. You have a package being held by customs sign in. And they're so regular that it is almost on the verge of collapsing the system in that I would never now if my real bank calls me, they've backed us into this position where it's like, I really couldn't ever communicate with my bank because I would never, ever go log into anything. And so it's like, that's a weird area I see. It's like, well, they are kind of collapsing the system. It's on the verge of like, we'll need another system for your bank to actually call you if there's a problem.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

The deep problem problem is that basically AI hacked language. And language is the operating system of all human connections, all human organizations, everything runs on language. Banks and churches, universities, governments, armies, they all ran on language previously. The only entity in the world that could produce meaningful text and could converse with you was another human being.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

So we had lots of issues, of course, with human fraudsters and human spies and human propagandists, but it was a human issue. What happens when you now have a non human intelligence which in many ways is superior to us, that has hacked the operating system of our civilization? Even if the bank calls you, it can imitate your voice.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I know. It took me all the way back to Locke and Hobbes, like the social contract. And why we don't lie, because if you lie, then communicate pointless. It's that profound and deep and fundamental.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah, it's everything. I mean, well, like when ChatGPT came out and I saw the level of its command of language, for me, I said, this is it. It will take still many years and different developments, but this is the Rubicon, because all civilization is ultimately based on language. The moment that AI hacked language, it hacked UN civilization again. It can go now in different directions and we can try our best to make sure that it goes in a good direction. But one very long chapter in history is over and a completely new historical process is beginning. Because we have a new again historical agent that is out there. And I just met a couple of the people who kind of are leading this AI revolution. And one very disturbing thing that you hear is that they want to move as fast as possible possible because they don't trust the other humans. You have a huge problem of human trust. Everybody says, yeah, it would be a good idea to do it a little more slowly so that society can adapt. But if we slow down our competitors here, and certainly our competitors across the ocean, they will not slow down.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And because we cannot establish trust between humans, we have to develop AI as fast as possible. But then they tell you, and we think we can solve the problem of how to trust AI So the same people are telling us we cannot trust humans, but we think we can trust the AI and that's very disturbing because I would say, you know, if you have these two problems, human trust, AI trust. First solve human trust. If you solve the problem of how to trust humans, then we could develop AI in a slow and safe manner. And if you think human trust cannot be solved, why are you certain that AI trust can be solved? That you know, it's a bit like a parent who has this issue in his life or her life that they can't solve and they say, okay, my kid will do it. Like you pass the buck to the kids.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

So humans can't solve our problem with trust. And we think that our creation AI will solve the trust problem. But this is such a dangerous gamble.

[Dax Shepard]

Here's where we finally discovered. Disagree. It'll be our last thing. So you said basically, don't fall for technological determinism. That's what this is, that's what we're talking about. And I am in that camp. I don't think we are going to solve our trust issues with Russia, with North Korea, with China before they perfect this. So maybe we can develop the system that is trustworthy, that self corrects, that has some system that we create. That to me sounds more promising than usual. Us walking hand in hand with Russia to a treaty table and actually signing a treaty that I think they will implement.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

I generally agree with you. Again, being a historian looking at the situation today in the world, I don't see it. I don't see it either again. But what really worries me is the kind of the second half for the same reason, I find it very hard to believe that we can solve the AI trust issue. People go there because this is an unknown. We know we probably can't solve the issue with the Russians, with the AI. We have no experience in history. So maybe sounds like a very, very big maybe.

[Dax Shepard]

I'll be the first to admit it's crazy. And even with my point of view, I'm like, yeah, we're backed into a corner. I'm working backwards from the reality that the Russians are going to create AI humans. They're not going to adhere to this. Even if we passed it through Congress, they're going to do it. So the only fake AI humans I'll be receiving will be from the Russians. So then I go like fuck it, we got to floor it. And wow, what a moment in history. I don't know. No, here we are. That's fascinating.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

There are areas when this is absolutely correct. But there are areas where cooperation is still possible because there is common interest. For instance, the most obvious example is the problem of control. If you create a very powerful AI, how do you make sure that you stay in control and that it doesn't get out of your control and start to manipulate you or start to do things unexpectedly and accruing power to itself and so forth. The good thing about it, this is a problem which frightens the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians just as much as it frightens the Americans and the Europeans and the Israelis. Because even if you are a power hungry dictator, the last thing you want is a more powerful subordinate that you don't know how to control.

[Dax Shepard]

I would imagine it scares them even more than us.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

So this is something, for instance, that scientists and experts on both sides have an incentive to work together. And if one side has a breakthrough, like a theoretical breakthrough of how do we ensure control, there is actually an incentive to share this with the Chinese or the Russians. And if a Chinese scientist has this Eureka moment and she finds the theoretical model for control, they have an incentive to share it.

[Dax Shepard]

That's true. But I think the perfect parallel to this is the nuclear arms race, which is like, sure, we ended up with some treat once everyone had their nuclear arms. So it's like, yeah, I can imagine a world where there's a Russian AI, one they like, and then we have ours and then finally we go, okay, no more development. But the only model we really have for it is the nuclear arms race.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

But it's a very problematic model. It's a very different situation for so many reasons. It's not just two sides. You have a third with nuclear. You had the Americans and you had the Soviets. But the bombs themselves were not in the race.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, right. They weren't told execute.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

America's goal in AI potentially will be a player more consequential than either the Chinese or the Americans or the Russians. We are creating an agent, not a tool.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. If Ghana got the breakthrough best AI, it would all shift.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

In some bizarre ways. There is a democratizing effect to it.

[Monica Padman]

We also have a very recent example of the world coming together. We did it in the pandemic. Everyone decided to get on the same page with vaccines and also share those and be very open. That just happened. So I have optimism that we could. Globally.

[Dax Shepard]

You also had China not admitting they had a pandemic because it looked bad for their geopolitical goals. All that stuff that I'm afraid of in this situation was also happening During COVID it was.

[Monica Padman]

But there was still a level of cooperation that everyone got on board with. It's not going to be perfect, but, like, there might be some cooperation.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It will be very, very difficult. But I think that we should work on solving the human trust problem, at least alongside solving the AI trust problem. And if you have the smartest people in the world working on AI and neglecting the human trust problem, this is a recipe for disaster. And again, humans have a long track of just working on the wrong problems, solving the problem, and then discovering, oops, we actually solved the wrong problem.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And the other thing I would say is that not to succumb to what we earlier discussed, this very cynical view of humanity, that all humans only care about power. If we succumb to that, that's the end of democracy and that's the end of any serious chance of cooperation on basically anything.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Then this is a war game.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah. And we need to remember, most importantly that this is simply not true. That, yes, humans are interested in power, but they are also interested in other things, most importantly, the truth. We do it on the individual level. If you look at yourself, you would say, yes, I want power, but I also want to know the truth about myself, about the world. Partly because without the truth, you can never be happy. If you don't know the truth about the deep sources of misery in your life, you can never solve them. So people who only pursue power and completely disregard the truth, they tend to be very miserable people because again, they don't even know what problems to work on because they don't know the true sources of the misery in their life. And no matter how much propaganda and fake news and conspiracy theories are thrown at us, ultimately, deep down in human nature there is a real yearning for the truth that we can work with, and it's there in everybody. It's not the kind of monopoly of a single nation or a single political party. As misguided as the other people may be, deep down, there is a real yearning for truth there.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yuval, always a pleasure. We're so honored you come. Every time you're promoting something. Nexus A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI Eye I wish you a ton of luck. Another great book. You're so impressive. We're so grateful we have you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Thank you. Yes, it's been great.

[Dax Shepard]

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Are you excited?

[Monica Padman]

We're about to get on an airplane.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm excited. I looked it up. Did you already look it Up. We can't check in where we want to check. Check in?

[Monica Padman]

What do you mean?

[Dax Shepard]

You can't check in on Delta 1 unless you're flying.

[Monica Padman]

It's not Delta 1.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I don't even really know what's going on, but I looked up today. Do all first class Delta flights leave out of Delta?

[Monica Padman]

No. This I already know.

[Dax Shepard]

So Delta one's its own category.

[Monica Padman]

It is. It's extra and not. Most flights aren't available Delta One, it's very rare.

[Dax Shepard]

We have a fun light that's interactive and has a poltergeist.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think we should keep it in. In the edits.

[Monica Padman]

No, it makes me anxious.

[Dax Shepard]

It does?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like you're gonna have a seizure.

[Monica Padman]

A little strobey.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

It makes me a little panicky.

[Dax Shepard]

I have a lot of housekeeping to do today.

[Monica Padman]

Oh boy. Okay, go ahead.

[Dax Shepard]

I screen grab comments all the time and then they just get lost in my million photos. I think I am low indexing on photos taken yet. When I go through my photos, there's way too many to find. Anything I'd ever want to look at?

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

It's very overwhelming. It's like your emails, all that to say we're doing prompts for the next round of Armchair Anonymous. And I always screen grab if someone's got a good idea and I add that to the list. So then in pursuit of that, I came across some that I've been meaning to bring up and then have forgotten to see. I don't even know how to use my phone. I want to go to liked album.

[Monica Padman]

You know you can do an album. You can make yourself your own album of comments.

[Dax Shepard]

I need to do that. I only know how to do liked photos.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And then there's a liked category. I think we already cleared this up. In fact, I think I know we did. There's no lazy river at ASU on the campus.

[Monica Padman]

Really?

[Dax Shepard]

Arizona State does not have a lazy river encircling it. There is an apartment complex in Tempe that offers a lazy river, though. What?

[Monica Padman]

Wait, no. There's a college that has a lazy river.

[Dax Shepard]

We haven't corrected that.

[Monica Padman]

No, we haven't.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Now this I already sent to you and I just. When I read a great quote, I like to pass it on.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

This is by Pedestrianverse. My favorite Warren Zon quote. And Warren Zon, if you don't remember, sings send lawyers, guns and money. Ding, ding, ding.

[Monica Padman]

The screenplay.

[Dax Shepard]

The shit has hit the fan. So very poetic. Singer, songwriter. And this is really to you?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You sent me this. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

We buy books because we like to think we're buying the time to read them.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I think that's accurate.

[Dax Shepard]

It. It's very sweet and it's sad. Does it make you a little sad? Like, we just want time and we think we can buy it.

[Monica Padman]

Well, desperate for it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But we just buy. In your case, buy them, pop them on a shelf.

[Monica Padman]

Did I tell you what happened? The. Really, the red flag, like, when I knew, oh, I've really hit a new level of problem.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I went to Barnes and Noble and I bought some books, as I do, and then I got home and I realized I had already bought one of them.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure. Yeah, I'm not. That's. That makes a lot of sense.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But it was. It was like, oh, yeah. Kind of like, not good.

[Dax Shepard]

You have these little moments as an addict where it's like you realize something.

[Monica Padman]

You're like, yeah, it was one of those. It wasn't my bottom. Because. Although have I bought, like, if you.

[Dax Shepard]

Went to hydro drugs in a spot, and then when you lifted up the thing, there were already drugs in there, and you're like, jesus Christ, I've been hiding drugs forever.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And I haven't read it. You know, I haven't read it.

[Dax Shepard]

What is the book?

[Monica Padman]

It's called Never Let Me Go. I think it won like, a big award, which is what I was drawn to.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, now this is to your beautiful book. You were gifted. F the comments book. Two of these, Right. Credit for the F the comments. Special tribute to Monica goes to all the fellow armchairies over the Facebook fan group. A sweet gal, posed the idea to gather interest, created a super organized proposal to conceptualize it for folks, created a Google Doc for all to contribute, and gave a deadline for the submission. It was a work. Grassroots fan dumb at work.

[Monica Padman]

That's very sweet.

[Dax Shepard]

I have another one on that topic. Here we go. Please tell Monica that the book came from Diana. She proposed the idea in our Facebook fan group and we all submitted artwork or comments for the book. So they aren't Instagram comments, but fans submitted letters intended for Monica.

[Monica Padman]

That's sweet.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, this is good. Not to get ahead of things, but Cedar Point is the row of amusement parks. Six Flags is perhaps a cool item you found at Target. This comparison might help Monica appreciate the difference.

[Monica Padman]

I don't think Target is going to acquire the Row anytime soon.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, Six Flags the Row. Oh, I see what you're saying. I got you. Cedar Point is the row has been acquired by Target.

[Monica Padman]

That's Yeah, that's not going to happen. So I, I, I appreciate that person trying, but that is not a good analogy.

[Dax Shepard]

Two things. Great point. Number one, solid point. But also that's actually not outside of the realm. I could see target acquiring the row at some point for 1.5 bill.

[Monica Padman]

They'd never allow it. They would never allow it.

[Dax Shepard]

100, bill. $1 trillion.

[Monica Padman]

They don't need, they don't need the money like that. And they're, they're so dead set on it being what it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Although if they at some point they could go, okay, great, well, now we have 100 trillion to start an even better brand.

[Monica Padman]

They're not.

[Dax Shepard]

Can't even imagine a better brand, can you?

[Monica Padman]

There's no such thing. Speaking of, I'm going to, well, multiple Halloween parties.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So I'm gonna do a theme. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

All right.

[Monica Padman]

Your house party on actual Halloween.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. The Hayride.

[Monica Padman]

The Hayride. The theme is movies.

[Dax Shepard]

Is that what it is?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's just anyone be anything from a movie. It's very broad.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, very.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so there's that then. I'm going to a party a couple days later. I think you might be going to that party too. And that's just dress up.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

There's no theme. Your party. I think I'm going to go as either Mary Kay or Ashley from one of their kitty movies. Like, you know, their direct VHS movies.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So that's going to be a denim overall skirt, right? No, I'm serious. No, I have an image of them in like matching denim overall skirts.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

They're not being a perv right now. Okay, well, I know it's hard to.

[Monica Padman]

Know when I am. Yeah, exactly. Don't act like it's out of the realm.

[Dax Shepard]

I know.

[Monica Padman]

No, they have all kinds. Like they had one. Adventures of Merrick, Kate and Ashley. The Case of the Mystery Cruise. And they're kind of in like mystery Sherlock Holmesy outfits.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

So I could be that there are options. And I'm going to probably try to get a Michelle doll to be my other Michelle from Full House.

[Dax Shepard]

That was the child's name. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And in order for people to understand I have a twin, I'll need her. The doll.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Because I'm not going as a pair for the party.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you though pitched that to anyone?

[Monica Padman]

Everyone has. Everyone's coupled up.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So that's fine. I can wear a doll.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Now for the next party, I do have a friend coming and we're going to go together.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Who's coming?

[Monica Padman]

Anna. Anna's going to come.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Monica Padman]

And we're going to go as Mary Kate and Ashley. The Row era.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Monica Padman]

So I'm going to be different versions of Mary Kate and Ashley throughout Halloween.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's fun. I'm nervous how you're going to make it obvious that you're them.

[Monica Padman]

Mary Kate and Ashley do wear big sunglasses.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And then they wear, like, big clothes. Layered. Like, lots of layers. We looked at a bunch of pictures. Sometimes they have two bags.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's cool.

[Monica Padman]

And they're always smoking, so we're going to have cigarettes.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, great.

[Monica Padman]

And often they have coffee cups. So we're going to have a coffee cup. And we're also going to do, like, a really deep contour of the face because they're kind of known for that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And then we're going to style our hair like they style their hair. I'm not wearing a wig. For people who are wondering. I'm not wearing a wig and I'm not wearing white face. And I don't think I should have to do that. So I'm not.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And I am using it as an excuse to buy some.

[Dax Shepard]

Some rose stuff that. There we go. I see what's happening.

[Monica Padman]

If you can use. If you can use holiday as excuses to buy yourself stuff, you should.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, shit. I should go as Burt Reynolds in Smoking the Bandit so that I can buy a 77 trans AM.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's a good one.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe the next year. Because next year we might have to end Halloween party after next year.

[Monica Padman]

Why?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm gonna explain this to you. I have been trying to get an In N Out truck to the house for three years. It's so booked. But it's. I have it booked for Halloween, 2025.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God, that's so exciting.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, fucking. Can you.

[Monica Padman]

I want it so bad.

[Dax Shepard]

Can you believe this? I'm gonna be able to get away with murder in my neighborhood. Yeah, right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

If you're the guy who does a hay ride and has an In N Out truck, I feel like I can ride nude around the neighborhood on a dirt bike with no muffler probably. But I don't think there's anywhere to go from there.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, that's. No, don't end it just because of that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, if one can't top oneself, then isn't it beholden on one to move on to another holiday?

[Monica Padman]

No. Why do you have to top. You can just keep.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the law of comedy. Your second joke has to be better than your first. Your third has to Be better than your second. You know the rules.

[Monica Padman]

I do.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't. You're acting so naive. Like, ignorance of the law is a defense, and it's not.

[Monica Padman]

I just don't find your hayride to be much. To be very comedic. Your Halloween party.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I don't want to say it was comedic. It wasn't. It was more. I'm not even gonna say it, but last year, someone fell off, and if you didn't see that there was an injury, you might think that part was funny. But I was more concerned, and I was assisting. Helping the person up.

[Monica Padman]

I miss that.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I'm so glad you did.

[Monica Padman]

It was not in the middle of the drive.

[Dax Shepard]

Upon embarking.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And my mother showed such little. She just was like, fucking get it together. It was kind of, oh, wow. I like my childhood is what it boils down to. But, you know, I am like, it just happened last night. So we're watching. We watched Happy Gilmore, which was really fun.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

They haven't seen Happy Gilmore.

[Monica Padman]

That's fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Kids loved it. I'm not even. That's not the point. The point is, my children are just barking orders, Chris. Mom, can I get a Perrier? You know, like, they're not even. I'm probably. It's like your milkshake thing, right? And I think this is. This is how it should be.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Like.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, no. Go on. And then I want to rebuttal.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. Well, do you want to rebuttal now?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I don't want you to be distracted while I'm making my broader point.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Yes. Because I actually thought about this the other day because you. You brought up me being spoiled again. And I had so of this visceral reaction, and I had to sit and think about what was happening, what was really triggered. I think my parents really, really spoil me now.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And because they were working so much.

[Monica Padman]

When you were little, I was not a spoiled kid at all.

[Dax Shepard]

Gotcha.

[Monica Padman]

And so I think. I really don't like being called that, because it really doesn't feel accurate. They worked a ton.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

And you were allowed to have time to make me. Me sandwiches all day.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

And.

[Dax Shepard]

But in high school, were you screaming for. I feel like in high school, you were screaming for milkshakes.

[Monica Padman]

1. It was one time.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[Dax Shepard]

I did sleepovers. You'd be like, mom, no.

[Monica Padman]

That.

[Dax Shepard]

You want milkshakes.

[Monica Padman]

You're getting confused. What happened is, Cali was over. It was like. It was like, midnight, and I. And I was like, oh, we should make a milk. And so I went downstairs and I was making a milkshake and it was waking everybody up.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Because I was blending in the middle of the night.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And then she, she, my mom like yelled at me or something or was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I'm making a milkshake.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So I wasn't telling her to make a milkshake, but I was not caring about her needs.

[Dax Shepard]

And you've never scrubbed, screamed for your mother to make you a milkshake or a sandwich in your high school years?

[Monica Padman]

You've made it. You've made it into me screaming for food.

[Dax Shepard]

Listen, I know you're offended by it, but I think it's very cute. It goes along with the boss in a town car.

[Monica Padman]

I know you love that image.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

But the problem is it's not correct. And then some people who don't think it's cute.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Will mistake me as someone like that. And I'm not.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I'm going to leave you out of it.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

So my kids are barking orders. Delta wants a fruit bowl. An actual fruit bowl. Not like, can you grab fruit?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Can you grab me an apple? It's. I would like a. A fruit medley.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

And by God, she complies. Kristen's right up and she's making a. A very nice fruit bowl, delivers it and Delta pounds it and she's like, you gotta understand the delivery of all these things. Cuz she's just like sucked into Happy Gilmore. And then she's like, mom. And she just holds the empty bowl out and that means I want another fruit salad. Then. So Kristen just jumps up and grabs.

[Monica Padman]

The bowl and she does.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I started getting very scared. My kids are going to be entitled assholes. Right. But then it just. I thought to ask. And by the way, the reason I thought that is I never ever. My mother never got me anything out of kitchen.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I never called for anything. I never said I'm hungry. And I like that childhood for whatever reason.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But then it crossed my mind, I'm like, you know, maybe Kristen's mother did this to her and now she's passing it on. And maybe it's great that you have a period of your life where you're just like yelling, You're a little kid and you just yell what you need and then your mom hustles around and gets it and then you'll grow up and you'll pass that on and everything's even So I said, hun, did your mom. While she's making this fourth fruit salad, I said, did your mom, like, just wait on you like this when you're a kid? And she said, yeah, for sure.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was like, okay, cool. So she, like, received. And now she's paying it back.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't receive and I'm not paying it. I mean, I make them dinner and shit, but I'm not jumping off the couch to get anybody anything. If we're all on the couch, my rule is like, yeah, I'm thirsty too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Not like, hey, go get me a Perrier.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

If I'm in there, I'll yell, hey, does anyone want Perry? But I'm not getting up to get you something if we're both seated.

[Monica Padman]

Well, yeah. This is part of. This is a story you guys used to tell all the time.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. When we first started dating. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It was your main story. It was. And it made sense. It was like she asked you to get. You guys are both watching tv. She asked you to get her a glass of water.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And you were really shaken by this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it's the same thing, but, you know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that was a main story. But I wonder how you interpret the story because for me, that's a story about my own personal growth. It was a shift from thinking everyone's trying to take advantage of you to going, no, not everyone's trying to take advantage of you. And you can just do nice things for people. And it's not setting you up. It's not setting you up for a pattern, being abused.

[Monica Padman]

I, I think that is when, for.

[Dax Shepard]

Me, it was like a breakthrough moment of maybe trusting people.

[Monica Padman]

That is what I thought.

[Dax Shepard]

Has that always been the message of that story to you?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but it's similar in this way where you just said, like, I'm not getting up.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. But I don't have the baggage of before where I'm like, oh, my kids think, like, so 17 years ago, this situation, I would have had all this other stuff attached to them thinking I should get up and grab them. Stuff like, oh, they just think I'm here to serve them. And they think, and they just want me to. But I don't, I don't think any of those thoughts. I, I think they're benevolent and nice and generous and they want something, they're going to give it a shot and scream if they can get it. And if they can't, then they'll get up and get it. It's not layered in all this. Mistrust of everyone's motives.

[Monica Padman]

Well, yeah, I mean, I think the parental relationship, like, that's much different with a kid and a parent. It is your job to provide for them so they can't. They, like, taking advantage isn't really at play. I mean, it can be to an extent.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But I do think. I do think parents have chips on their shoulders about being disrespected. Like, we can call it all these different words, but I think in some way they all mean the same thing emotionally, so it's like, taken for granted. Disrespected.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm not currently dealing with any of those feelings, but I could imagine 17 years ago. Again, I always say how grateful I am that I waited so long, but, like, I don't know, maybe those. I would have had those feelings. Yeah, maybe 17 years ago. Okay. What are you most excited about for Austin?

[Monica Padman]

Well, I'm really excited to go to my vintage store.

[Dax Shepard]

You love to shop in Austin.

[Monica Padman]

I do. There's a store I really like there, and I'm really excited to go. That's the main one.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And foodies.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Food.

[Dax Shepard]

Yummy foods. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

What about you?

[Dax Shepard]

Sprint race.

[Monica Padman]

Uh huh huh.

[Dax Shepard]

We're gonna see the sprint race.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. That's fun.

[Dax Shepard]

At Coda. That'll be really fun.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then Adam Grant's gonna interview us on stage.

[Monica Padman]

I'm really excited for that.

[Dax Shepard]

We're gonna have dinner with Adam Grant on Wednesday at one of my favorite steakhouses.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I'm really excited.

[Dax Shepard]

Where I had my infamous date with Matthew McConaughey.

[Monica Padman]

Huh?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. Just fun, fun, fun. I'll probably swim a few times in B.

[Monica Padman]

Springs while I'm at the vintage store.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

We'll plan that. Of course. Now I forgot what I was gonna say was about Mary Kate and Ashley.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow, you think it's about Mary Kate and Ashley?

[Monica Padman]

I do.

[Dax Shepard]

You do?

[Monica Padman]

I think most things circle back to them. Oh, one thing that we are gonna do to designate, we're gonna wear necklaces with the initials smart. I think that'll help get it over the edge.

[Dax Shepard]

Which one are you gonna be?

[Monica Padman]

So I'm debating.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you have a favorite? You don't have to say it out loud, but do you have a favorite?

[Monica Padman]

I actually don't.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't? Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I think I should because you dated one. So I should pick her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I've really vouched for one.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, exactly. So I guess I'll pick her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But I don't want to do that. Like, I like them both. And I think it's like me asking.

[Dax Shepard]

You to pick between Ben and Matt. You don't like that either, even though I know who you pick.

[Monica Padman]

No, I don't. No, you don't.

[Dax Shepard]

And I know who you pick from America.

[Monica Padman]

No, you don't. No, none of that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

You and I are going to do a commercial unrelated to this podcast.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we are. I'm excited for that.

[Dax Shepard]

Is any of your current shopping thing, like, ooh, I just got some extra cashies. I wasn't expecting, like, do you feel like you have a little money to.

[Monica Padman]

I forgot about that.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

That.

[Dax Shepard]

You are so funny about money. You're very. You know your value.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And you're a hard bargainer.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But then also, you don't give a flying. It's really funny.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, that is right.

[Dax Shepard]

You never look again. You're not sure if you ever got any of it. But you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah. When I am, like, negotiating, it is not. It's not about the money, really.

[Dax Shepard]

I know.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Ever.

[Dax Shepard]

I know.

[Monica Padman]

Which I think probably makes it very difficult for the person I'm negotiating with.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Because it's really, really not about that.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

It is.

[Monica Padman]

It's about my value and my place and that's it.

[Dax Shepard]

And for me, it's just about the money.

[Monica Padman]

Right. I know we're very different in that.

[Dax Shepard]

We are. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of our many differences. But I'm like, everything is okay. I get this, that, that amount for safety, and then I gotta make X amount so I can do something fun and buy something I want.

[Monica Padman]

It's not really fair for me to act like I don't have any of that, because I do. I definitely do now that I have this, like, big expense, the house. That's changed. I mean, not changed, but I.

[Dax Shepard]

You have to consider that I have.

[Monica Padman]

To think about money a lot and, like, where things are going and is there enough for this and this and this? Yeah, I think there is, but. Oh. But I'll just say I do stress out about it.

[Dax Shepard]

You do?

[Monica Padman]

I do. And I can't say I don't want it like I do.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That would be lying.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But anyway, because of all these necklaces, I think I'm gonna be Mary Kate because Anna should probably be Ashley because the. A.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure. Although it's not going to help people understand your costume.

[Monica Padman]

Why?

[Dax Shepard]

Because they're going to see A. And they're going to go, oh, Anna's wearing an an A for Anna. And you're wearing an M. For Monica. And I guess her middle name is Kristen and we never realized that. Or Kelly. No, Monica. Kelly. Padman.

[Monica Padman]

Ana and I are going to be standing next to each other the whole night. We're not allowed to leave.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Commitment.

[Monica Padman]

What do you think since you know one of them? Well, yeah. What do you think I could do in order to really make it clear? Is there anything I don't know, like, do you think. Do you know about, like, a secret freckle or something.

[Dax Shepard]

Also? It be no use if I know about a secret freckle and then you put a secret freckle on your arm. No one will put two and two together because they don't know about the secret freckle.

[Monica Padman]

But I'll know and it'll be like working from the outside in.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Like, great acting.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I can't wait.

[Dax Shepard]

How would you feel? Here's a question, because I think I already know, because you've kind of alluded to it in. In. When talking about whether you date an armchair or not. If you knew of a popular podcaster who was completely obsessed with you, would you be open to having a friendship with them?

[Monica Padman]

Do I like their podcast?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. It's a good podcast.

[Monica Padman]

Then. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Okay. I would, too. I don't. I don't mind that.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I would be happy to have a friendship with someone who liked the show. I guess that's what you sort of.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Obsessed with you the way you're obsessed with Mary Kate and Ashley.

[Monica Padman]

That would be harder for me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I don't think so.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But I think if it's also a bit. Yes, like, it is also a bit. I think if in real life I met them and I liked them, like, they were cool and I enjoyed them, then that. That goes away. Like, it's just part of this, like, fun thing to be excited about.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. I was just curious.

[Monica Padman]

I think I don't do that in real life. Like, I.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I know.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe to a detriment. Like, I. There isn't anyone really, really, that, like, brings out your. That I think is extra special on this earth.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Polar.

[Monica Padman]

I love her so much and I want her to call me. I don't want to be friends, but I think if we hung out, like, a few times, I wouldn't feel like she was better than me. I don't. I don't normally feel like that if I really know someone.

[Dax Shepard]

True. Of course. Yeah. I'm with you. I. As we know, I have an obsession with Robert Downey Jr. Yeah. That I've had since I was 12 or maybe 10. And then I have a friendship with him that has nothing to do with that obsession.

[Monica Padman]

Right. But it's funny because I think you can still. Which is, I think, a good thing. You can still kind of click into that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Well, especially when I see him do the thing that enamored me with him. Right. When I watch him act in certain things, I go, oh, he's so special. He's just a little shooting comet, you know?

[Monica Padman]

Well, that I'm not. No, I'm not saying that you can click into the fact that he's like such a cool person, but I think you can. You can get excited that he likes you.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Because, like, I had this with Kristen.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

I was so obsessed with her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And then now that I know her and we're, I think, equals, I love her and I'm. I'm so happy to have her in my life. And I can see, like, I'm proud of her when she does good, when she does stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But I never. I am. I don't think, like, I'm so happy she likes me or I'm so happy she's my. I mean, I'm so happy she's my friend.

[Dax Shepard]

For legitimate.

[Monica Padman]

I'm so happy we're friends.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But not. I'm so happy she's my friend.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I wouldn't frame it exactly like that.

[Monica Padman]

Yours, Yours, my.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like, I'm friends with Downey. We get along how we get along, and I can go, oh, my God, I can't believe this boy I love my whole life likes me. I also have room for that. Feeling good.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I.

[Dax Shepard]

That still feels good. I think it's kind of like when you fall in love with somebody and then it flattens out and the good chemicals are gone. And now you're just a partnership. You can remember meeting them and falling in love with them, and you can still remember all those feelings and get those butterfly giddy feelings when you reflect back on it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

This has been a long walk and I'm not sure where it landed handed, but.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, me either. Okay, so this is for Yuval.

[Dax Shepard]

He would be a good example of this. He's both things. Like, now he's been here three times now. I'm used to him being here. I'm way less intimidated. I feel like I can just chat with him.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I remember how special it is that Yuval trusts us to come talk.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I can, like, feel both of Those things simultaneously.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I mean, I don't. He's not our friend, though. I mean, he's like, for. It's friendly, but like, if I hung out with him every day or if I hung out with him once a week, if he was like, in my social circle, yeah. I would be impressed by him as a person always.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

But I don't think I would feel like, oh, my God, I'm just so grateful that this. This person on earth is spending time with me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I would just be like, God, what a amazing person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Amazing friend I have. Let's see. Let's do a few facts.

[Dax Shepard]

5 foot 10, if you started listening dimensions.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Lorena Bobbitt.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, sure.

[Monica Padman]

That was in Virgin.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you know all about that or is that before your time?

[Monica Padman]

No, I knew. I mean, I didn't. It was sort of before my time, but.

[Dax Shepard]

But it transcended exactly. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It was in 93. Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

The year of my graduation.

[Monica Padman]

Oh. She severed her husband John's penis.

[Dax Shepard]

Boy, what a tabloid sensation that was because then he went on to do a porno.

[Monica Padman]

Lorena stated in a court hearing after coming home that evening her husband had raped her.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

And then he went to sleep. She got out of bed and went to the kitchen for a drink of water. She then grabbed an 8 inch carving knife on the kitchen counter, returned to their bedroom, pulled back the bed sheets and cut off his penis. After this. L left the apartment with the severed appendage and drove away in the car after a length of time driving and struggling to steer with one hand due to holding the penis. Oh, my goodness, Wikipedia. She threw the penis out a window into a roadside field on Maplewood Drive.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Monica Padman]

She eventually stopped.

[Dax Shepard]

Imagine if you were walking down the road and you saw some woman roll the window down and you saw a thing fly out. And you're like, that looked like a body part that looked like a penis. But get real, there's no way that was a penis.

[Monica Padman]

And do you know it was reattached?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And he starred in a pornographic film.

[Monica Padman]

Oh. With his reattachment. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And there some play on words in the title of it, as often was the case. There was a whole era where they paid fame, they like paid top dollar for famous people to be in pornos. Back when pornos sold VHSs and it was like an industry.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And rentals, like with the rental scene. Blockbuster.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's kind of sad that that went away because you'd get these fun, you know, there was screech was in a pornographic film.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It says he went on to star in 2 2.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my gosh. Wow. I didn't remember it was a rape. That's horrific. And I'm glad she cut his penis off. Yeah, I know, but that's not a good course of action. I'm not recommending anyone else does that, but in this one case, I like it. Oh.

[Monica Padman]

I looked up the percentage of male pedophilia versus female.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah? What was it?

[Monica Padman]

It says male perpetrators account for the vast majority of sexual crimes committed against children. Among convicted offenders, 0.4 to 4% are female.

[Dax Shepard]

10X window. That's interesting.

[Monica Padman]

And one literature review estimates that the ratio of male to female Child Molesters is 10 to 1.

[Dax Shepard]

That sounds right. Now, let me ask you this. I don't know why this would be the case, but I'm just floating it. You think female perpetrators are underreported? Like, I wonder if you're less likely to chalk up what happened to that. Maybe, but I definitely accept it's ten to one. Men. I've heard. I don't want to say a lot. I think I know about four dudes. Dudes who have babysitter stories, older babysitter stories that were female. But again, they're not reporting that. They're like. They, like. That's a fun memory of theirs.

[Monica Padman]

The babysitter.

[Dax Shepard]

The old male babysitter.

[Monica Padman]

Boy.

[Dax Shepard]

Fooled around with the younger boy. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting how much older, because sometimes young girls were babysitters.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

To, like, kids a year younger than them.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Boy.

[Dax Shepard]

I. I would. I would be guessing at the detail. I don't want to guess.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Sure.

[Monica Padman]

Column.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Get everyone on the line.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. He used the word lacuna a few times that I had never heard. And I liked it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Lacuna.

[Monica Padman]

And it's an unfilled space or interval, a gap. The Journal has filled a lacuna in.

[Dax Shepard]

Middle Eastern studies, meaning there was no Middle Eastern studies. And then they filled it in.

[Monica Padman]

It's not like it's understudied. It's like, within female studies, there's a. There's an area that is not explored.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. There's a lacuna within it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And I like that. And I thought maybe I'll use that word sometime.

[Dax Shepard]

I've thought of that. In terms of physicists. It's just like, I don't know who even tackles physics? Because to advance it at this point is so daunting.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I agree.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, the place we're already at, no one understands.

[Monica Padman]

Hold on. I'm still like Reeling over this lazy river situation. I'm shocked. Why did we. That was a thing. Dang.

[Dax Shepard]

I feel like I watched the 60 Minutes on how it was like a whole segment. College is competing now for students and the amenities they're putting in there. Yeah, maybe type in. Is there any college with a lazy river?

[Monica Padman]

I know that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe we just have the wrong college.

[Monica Padman]

College lazy river.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, we're not going to be invited to ASU to do any lectures or anything. Between your bashing of their academic prowess and then now this misinformation about the lazy river.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to Arizona State if you don't have a lazy river.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm sorry. You don't have one.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it's hot there.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but are they trying to be like. Is the residence like right next door and it kind of goes through campus.

[Dax Shepard]

And it is an official dorm.

[Monica Padman]

University of North Florida students can drift down a lazy river at the new Osprey Fountains residence house. Okay, so they have one.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I'm happy to take down University of North Florida.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I'm happy to move on to that.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, this is all college students. You think they're hooking up on these inner two, like, people are.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. How could they resist?

[Monica Padman]

College kids are disgusting.

[Dax Shepard]

Nighttime lazy river floats full of.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Activity full of spray.

[Dax Shepard]

Send me back Osprey. Yeah. I want a time machine, but it wouldn't work because it didn't exist when I was younger.

[Monica Padman]

True. You. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

There's really no hack for this. I just don't ever get to be young on a lazy river.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Go to college campus.

[Monica Padman]

You need to take a time machine to go back and then get in the.

[Dax Shepard]

Kidnap my young self. Yeah, send me to here.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. And send him to asu.

[Dax Shepard]

And then I stay back there or something. And then I tell him, you got to come back and get me. But he never will because I'll be having so much fun on the lazy river.

[Monica Padman]

Because you can't be in the same place twice.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know. I'm not sure how time travel works.

[Monica Padman]

What's a thought you have that is a recurring thought. That's absolutely absurd. But, like, you do think. Like mine is. I think about the reality of teleportation, like, way too much.

[Dax Shepard]

I have obsessed on teleportation. I thought. I think I told you I had a whole. I was going to write a whole script about it. Okay. I don't know if you remember this, but if you really play out Teleportation that single invention would destroy like six of our biggest 10 industries globally. It would destroy transportation.

[Monica Padman]

Well, sure.

[Dax Shepard]

It would destroy big oil. It would destroy the housing, housing market.

[Monica Padman]

Why?

[Dax Shepard]

Because if you can live in Wyoming on 19 acres and work in Manhattan and eat dinner in San Francisco, you're not gonna, you don't need to live in that highly densely populated area where the prices are so high.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it would just.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone could live on three acres and be in a city whenever they wanted to and enjoying the amenities of the city. And just when they go home, they go home to peace and solitude.

[Monica Padman]

There's finite amount of space. So then it would just be that those places with a lot of space would be then the most coveted place.

[Dax Shepard]

But the USA is, is extremely sparsely populated. It's not densely populated at all. 99% of the land in the US is completely empty. It's all in the middle of the coast. If you go to Wyoming, it's just wide open. Montana's wide open, Idaho's wide open. All these places are wide open. So every, everyone would live on the farm in the pretty part of Tennessee.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I wouldn't, but.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, but you get my point.

[Monica Padman]

I do, but I just.

[Dax Shepard]

The housing market is driven by access to these opportunities and those areas get densely populated, and then it's supply and demand, it drives the price up. But when no one needs to live by where they work, that will collapse entirely. Because you walk out your door and you could be on the street in Manhattan. Like anything you'd want from living in Manhattan, you could have. But then at night, you could be sleeping in a very quiet farm.

[Monica Padman]

I see what you mean, but then I just think it would, I think it would just change where the, where the country was densely populated. It would just be. The cities now would be more open as in those places.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's where, by the way, the vast majority of equity in real estate is only in 1% of the country. It's like in all these cities.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So once that collapses, 90% of the value of real estate has collapsed because the city cities were holding all that value.

[Monica Padman]

But why wouldn't it just move to the, to the rural areas?

[Dax Shepard]

Because it's, there's no competition for space. Like, Manhattan is a tiny island. San Francisco is a tiny area. So no one's gonna spend 5 million to live in an apartment in Manhattan when for 600,000 they can have a mansion in Kansas on a, you know, again, you're only sleeping there.

[Monica Padman]

I guess that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

And having Christmas or whatever you're doing.

[Monica Padman]

I guess that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

So anyways, my whole movie idea was if. If someone invented teleportation, you'd have trillions of dollars at risk. You'd have a lot of incentivized titans of industry to go kill that person and get rid of that technology. And so mine was kind of like a crime cap, trying to stay alive to deploy this technology when you have all this funding to get rid of it. Airplanes. They're gone. The entire airplane.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I just want to go. I just want to. And I'm there.

[Dax Shepard]

It's great. It just. It would collapse. The. The entire world economy would collapse.

[Monica Padman]

I wonder what would happen to restaurants. Because it might change. It might make restaurants more. Because you could then go out to eat.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone could eat at Emily Burger. The line would be impossible. That's what would be really up.

[Monica Padman]

Well, no, because then you'd be like, well, I'll come back tomorrow. Like, you wouldn't. You wouldn't have to.

[Dax Shepard]

You'd have.

[Monica Padman]

That's so scarce.

[Dax Shepard]

I think you'd have to schedule your eating for years in advance because now you have 330 million people that could eat at Emily Burger in Clinton Hill.

[Monica Padman]

That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

So they're all going to make reservations. So you really. You're going to have to just have so many reservations all around the country.

[Monica Padman]

But think about it. Like, remember when I was in New York and I couldn't find a place to eat because it was Fashion Week and it was a mess, and I was just bopping around from place to place and everything was full? I guess it would be like that. But then I could be like, I guess I'll go to Paris right now and see what's in Paris.

[Dax Shepard]

I think what would happen is, I think these popular cities would be way too packed during the day, because who on a weekend would not go to Paris and have a cup of coffee for breakfast? Everyone would go. So these, like, world cities would just be completely clogged.

[Monica Padman]

Think about, like, immigration will have a new element to it. How.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, how on earth? And then also, I'm going to take a swim in Saint Barts in the afternoon. Like, oh, I'll have breakfast in Paris. No. Well, I'd probably go there, too. But Saint Barts, I guess, has pretty water and stuff.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I see.

[Dax Shepard]

So I would have breakfast in Paris, and then I would go to Bar Saint Barts and take a swim. And then I, you know, your day would just be. And then for my exercise, I would do six miles on the Wall of China. Great Wall of China.

[Monica Padman]

No, you could fall. Remember that girl?

[Dax Shepard]

I would go in the daytime. She was there at nighttime.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Anyways, it's a fun thought.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I do think about it a lot. Like, in a re. In a real way.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

But it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but we talk about, like, how disruptive AI is gonna be as a technology. But that teleporting thing, if you really think it through for hours and hours, it would be chaos. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, every. What it would be which is just like every other. Every other thing is like the. It's like space. Like the elites would have access. It'd be expensive.

[Dax Shepard]

Exactly. So Emily Burger, which already has a very expensive hamburger, the hamburger would be like $200. Because it could be. Because they have the entire world's billionaires that now could eat there for lunch.

[Monica Padman]

All the billionaires want to go. Yeah. It would be like a billionaire's game.

[Dax Shepard]

It would.

[Monica Padman]

And that's would cause even more unrest and more disparity. But I want to go to Paris.

[Dax Shepard]

Right now so bad. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

All right.

[Dax Shepard]

All right. I love you.

[Monica Padman]

Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Follow Armchair Expert on the One app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Hey, armchairs, quick question for you.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you ever stopped to wonder who came up with that bottle of Sriracha sitting in your fridge?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Or why almost every house in America.

[Dax Shepard]

Has a game of Monopoly stashed? Well, this is Nick and this is.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

Jack and we just launched a brand new podcast called the Best Idea Yet. It's all about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with and the people who brought them to life. Like Super Mario, the best selling video game character ever.

[Dax Shepard]

He's only a thing because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye or Jack.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

How about McDonald's Happy Meal? Believe it or not, the Happy Meal was dreamed up by a mom in Guatemala. Every week on the Best Idea yet, you'll discover the surprising stories behind the most viral products of all time while.

[Dax Shepard]

Picking up real business insights along the way.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

We guarantee you'll be that person at your next dinner party, dropping knowledge bombs at the table. Follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the best idea.

[Dax Shepard]

Yet early and ad free right now.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

By joining Wondery plus.