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- [00:00]
Trevor Noah
My favorite thing that Forbes does is they will write an article about a billionaire who has lost money and the story will always, like, lament them. You know, it'll be like the Misfortunes of Jeff Bezos, and they'll be like, carlos Slim used to be one of the richest men in the world. Now he languishes in 15 spots. I do think that's the difficulty of being human is that some of our progress is the fact that we are never satisfied. Some of our progress lies in the fact that we're always yearning for more. And then the downside becomes that we create a false flaw. You're listening to what now, the podcast where I chat to interesting people about the conversations taking over our world. And this week, ooh, what an interesting conversation. Joining myself and Christiana in studio is Yuval Noah Harari. If you've heard of Sapiens, you know who Yuval is. That was the book that completely changed people's ideas of how we organize society and why humans have the power we do. Well, his new book, Nexus, is just as contentious. It focuses on a possible answer to what makes society work and what could break it completely. The rise of AI, the war in the Middle east, the breakdown in communication between politicians and the people. In this episode, we discuss it all. As I often say, the only thing I love more than peeling back the layers of a story is doing it with my favorite thinkers. And Yuval is indeed one of my favorite thinkers. Whether you agree with him on everything or not, it's definitely going to set your brain on fire. This is what now with Trevor Noah. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The holidays are almost here, and who doesn't love getting a little back? This season, I can earn up to 3% daily cash back on presents I buy for my loved ones with my Apple Card without paying a single fee. It's simple and convenient because it's in the Wallet app on my iPhone, so it's always with me. And because everything I need is in one place, it's easy to see what I've spent and make a payment. So if you have an iPhone, you can apply for an Apple Card and start using it right away. It's easy. Subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 18.74% to 28.99% based on creditworthiness rates as of October 1, 2024. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Member, FDIC terms and more@applecard.com this episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. You want to run a successful business? Well, get ready to put in the work. Because no matter what your company does, no matter how big or small it is, it takes a lot of effort. Just look at what it takes to create even one episode of this podcast. We have to plan, we coordinate with guests, we find time to sit down and record, we have to edit, we have to market, and so much, much more. Now, of course, it helps to have a good team, but even finding the people for your team is a challenge because that's extra work you need to do on top of everything else you're already doing. And when you need to fill a role right away, it can feel impossible. Thankfully, there's a place you can go for help. ZipRecruiter. It does the work for you to make hiring fast and easy. The reason it works so quickly is because ZipRecruiter has amazing matching technology. Immediately after you post your job, it finds and sends you top candidates for your role so you can get back to running your business experience faster. Easier hiring with ZipRecruiter. Try it free at ZipRecruiter.com Trevor that's ZipRecruiter.com Trevor this episode is brought to you by Atlassian. Atlassian team collaboration software like Jira, Confluence and Loom help power collaboration for enterprise companies around the globe. With products that enable AI powered teamwork, doing the impossible just became possible. So join the 83% of the Fortune 500 that trust Atlassian to help transform their enterprise. Learn how to unleash the potential of your team@atlassian.com yuval from one Noah to another. Noah, welcome to the podcast.
- [05:03]
Yuval Noah Harari
Thank you. It's really good to be here.
- [05:05]
Trevor Noah
One of the reasons I'm so excited to chat to you is because I feel like, and I could be wrong, I feel like you may be one of the few people I know in the world who have more controversial ideas than my friend Christiana here.
- [05:19]
Yuval Noah Harari
We'll see.
- [05:20]
Trevor Noah
I feel like the two of you have these ideas that challenge how people perceive reality and how they think about our existence on this planet. Your book Sapiens, I mean, is the perfect example of that. And I guess maybe that's, you know, the perfect place to think about your new book or, you know, in relation to Sapiens. If Sapiens was a conversation that helped us understand how humans dominated or got to the position of power that we got to as a species, it feels like Nexus is a conversation about the networks and the information that has gotten us there and the way that it could end us all. Am I understanding it right or what are you hoping to achieve with nexus that sapiens maybe laid the groundwork for?
- [06:06]
Yuval Noah Harari
NEXUS basically begins where sapiens ends. And the key question that starts NEXUS is if humans are so smart, why are we so stupid? Like, we've taken over the world, we've reached the moon, we can split the atom, we can decipher DNA, and yet we are on the verge of destroying ourselves and much of the ecological system.
- [06:27]
Trevor Noah
Right?
- [06:28]
Yuval Noah Harari
Not just because of climate change. You have an entire menu of ways in which we can choose how to destroy yourself. It could be third world war with nuclear weapons. It could be the development of these powerful technologies like AI that might get out of our control. And you know, in a lot of mythologies and theologies, you hear that there is something wrong with human nature. We have some deep flow in us which cause us to be self destructive. And I don't think that's true. I don't think the problem is with human nature. It's with human information. If you give good people bad information, they made bad decision.
- [07:10]
Trevor Noah
Okay, so let's go backwards on that, on that thought. Because information really is the heart of this book and the heart of the idea really. I think it's like the first page actually, where you've asked some of these questions. You say, and I paraphrase you, but if we are so smart, why are we destroying the world? And if we are so smart, then why are we self destructive? And the first question I found myself asking was, is it we? And I mean this honestly. Cause I, you know, your books always make me think and they make me question. And I think you encourage people to do that. But I found myself going, is it the we or is it a few who have more ability than others to do more? Does that make sense? Because is it the collective we?
- [07:51]
Yuval Noah Harari
But then who gave these few individuals so much power? Again, if you think about the classic examples from history, if you think about Nazism and Hitler. So it was Hitler's fault, but how did Hitler gain so much power? If you just put, if you think about some of the most powerful individuals today in the world, if you just put them alone in the forest, they have no power, Right?
- [08:15]
Trevor Noah
If a Hitler is alone in the forest.
- [08:17]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah. If a Putin is alone in the forest, he has no power. The question is, how does he get millions of people who they don't even know him personally. It's not his family, they are not his close friends. You have millions of people who never met him in his in their lives. And they are still willing to obey his orders and sometimes to risk and even sacrifice their lives because he says so. It's not the power of an individual. It's, in a way, the power of a network and the power of a brand. Brands are stories. If you think about the Coca Cola brand. So it's the story of Coca Cola. You have the reality of the drink, which is, know, sugary water.
- [09:01]
Trevor Noah
Wow, that's one way to put it. And then, as I said, controversial. Sugary water. Take that, Coca Cola with a little.
- [09:08]
Yuval Noah Harari
More flavor, okay, Than just sugar. But then you have the story about it if you drink. That's the story. Oh, it's youth and happiness and fun.
- [09:18]
Trevor Noah
Friendship and connecting.
- [09:20]
Yuval Noah Harari
Friendship and, you know, I mean, and this is billions of dollars over tens of decades were invested to make this connection in our mind. And we react to the story in the mind and not to the actual chemistry of the drink. And it's the same with charismatic leaders or leaders in general. We react to the story that was woven around them and not to the actuality of the person, which is often very different from the story they tell about them or is sometimes unknown.
- [09:56]
Trevor Noah
So then, wait, let me ask you this then. There was a moment where I was reading your book, and it felt like for a second, sapiens had given us this inflated sense of achievement. And it's almost like with Nexus, you've come to steal it away from us as humankind. Because in sapiens, you're sort of saying that ideas are the reason we've been able to expand narratives and stories are the reason we've been able to exist beyond ourselves. You know, religion, or spreading the story of a king or telling a tale about a Greek God or whatever it might be. That's the reason humans have been able to build beyond just the 20 to 100 people that you can normally have in a normal network. And now we've expanded beyond that. But, like, what are you saying about the information and the networks that we've designed now? Are you saying that this will now be our demise? The very thing that made us who we are?
- [10:50]
Yuval Noah Harari
Not necessarily. I mean, the book is not deterministic. It's. Wait a minute. First of all, we need to understand what is really happening. What is information? How does it work? What is AI? How does it work? How is it different from previous information technologies? But simply to understand. I mean, one of the most important thing is to understand that information isn't truth. You have this very naive view which is prevalent in places like Silicon Valley, that We just need to flood the world with more and more information and this will inevitably result in more truth and wisdom and better decisions and so forth. And it's just not the case. If you just flood the world with information, the truth sinks to the bottom and it's fiction that flows up. Because most information in the world isn't truth. Truth is a very rare and costly but subset of information.
- [11:47]
Christiana
Yeah, but you know, I, I guess it's because of my background as a journalist. To me, truth is a very like, lofty and philosophical idea. It's very relative. Like we can all experience this thing here and the facts of it and the truth are things I distinguish from each other. So to me, never like, truth is not the goal because your truth might. It's all, it's going to be different for everyone. I think the concern sometimes more is like facts, like, what is an actual fact and how are they being distributed? And I guess my question is, who do you think should be the one to spread these facts or truth to the world? Like, whose responsibility is that? Because that doesn't seem like something that could be naturally democratized. Like right now it's in Silicon Valley. Like, but what, what is this world where it's like there is this council or there's this group who decides the information people we receive and is that even a good world?
- [12:40]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah. I think we need to discuss two things. I mean, again, first of all, what is truth and how it relates to facts and opinions and so forth. And secondly, truth and democracy. And here I would plant a flag and say that democracy is about desire, not truth. In elections, what you ask people is not what is the truth. You ask them, what do you want? And people often want the truth to be different from what it is. But before we get to that discussion of desire versus truth in democracy, first we start with reality. Everything that exists is part of reality. Now truth is pointing at a particular part of reality. And of course, different people have different views, memories, feelings, whatever. All this is part of reality. And to say that my views on a certain situation are different from yours, this is also true. We now have this kind of crisis of representation in the world, partly because we want kind of 100% accurate representation of everything. And this is impossible because that's a one to one map. If you think about a map as a representation of reality, like a map of Los Angeles, a map of the United States, obviously the map can never match exactly to reality because it won't be a map anymore, it will be reality. A map is always an obstruction, like in a scale of one to a million. So most things you can't put on the map. And then the question is, what are the important things that you pointed? So this is of course complex because people argue that your map leaves out something that is very important. To me, the map's a great example.
- [14:23]
Christiana
Because we know that the map that we use in Africa is much smaller than it should be.
- [14:30]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah.
- [14:30]
Christiana
And like, I could be like, well, that's not true, that's not even a fact. But the people that made this map decided that they wanted Europe and the United States to look a certain way. So I think a map is a great way of framing this.
- [14:42]
Yuval Noah Harari
And first thing, again, we should realize about a map, a map can never be a one to one scale. Like, if you want absolute accuracy, everything is represented exactly as it is. It's a worthless map. I mean, there is a story in the book by Borges about an ancient fictional story about an ancient empire that wanted to have the most accurate map in the world. So they created a one to one one map which simply covered the whole empire. And the empire, of course, also collapsed because all the resources of the empire were wasted on trying to create this one to one map. And this is impossible.
- [15:25]
Trevor Noah
And there's a few things that you've sparked for me. Firstly, I can never tell this from page to page in your book and from sentence to sentence when you speak, would you regard yourself as an optimist or a pessimist? With how much history you consume and with how you look at the development.
- [15:40]
Yuval Noah Harari
Of the world, you gotta be a realist. I mean, again, you know, but I.
- [15:43]
Trevor Noah
Mean, if I'm to challenge you based on your book, there's gotta be a slant in a certain direction. Like, do you know, I'll tell you the main question.
- [15:51]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah, the really kind of most fundamental question. When you talk to the people who lead the AI revolution about the potential dangers, they agree there are threats when you tell them, so we need to slow down to give humanity a chance to adapt. It's just a matter of pace. Just slow down. Everybody tells you the same thing. We would like to slow down, but we can't because we cannot trust our competitors.
- [16:14]
Trevor Noah
Yeah, it's an arms race.
- [16:15]
Yuval Noah Harari
It's an arms race. Our competitor is either here or certainly across the ocean. So the thing that really fuels the whole thing is not being able to trust human beings. And then. But then you ask them, but when you develop the AI, are you sure you'll be able to trust the AI? And then they Tell you, yes. So it's this paradox that we cannot trust the humans, but we think we can trust the machines more than we trust the humans. And in a way, I mean, there are also some of them are thoughtful people and they realize how kind of alarming and even ridiculous is what they are saying. But the key thing is they tell you. You know, it's like you are trapped in a room and one door, you open it for thousands of years and there is a monster behind the door. This is the inability to trust humans. And there is another door and there is a very high chance there is an even worse monster behind that door. But we never opened it. So we are not sure. So we are gambling the future of humanity on the chance, the small chance, that behind door number two is not a monster that we will be able to create AIs we can trust even though we are unable to trust the humans.
- [17:35]
Christiana
You know, Trevor asked you if you're an optimist or a pessimist, and you kind of like dodged the question very well in a very sophisticated manner.
- [17:44]
Yuval Noah Harari
This was my answer.
- [17:45]
Trevor Noah
I will say something like one pessimist spotting another.
- [17:48]
Christiana
No, that's something. Well, actually, I'm going to come to it from a different place because from reading the book, I feel that you have. And maybe it's because I come from a Christian tradition that believes in original sin and like human nature, like humans are rubbish, basically, and you need Jesus. That's what I was saying.
- [18:04]
Trevor Noah
You start rubbish and then all your.
- [18:05]
Christiana
Saved rubbish and then you're saved. Right. In the book, I kind of felt that, not that you were absolving human nature, but you had fairly kind of optimistic or maybe neutral view of human nature.
- [18:17]
Yuval Noah Harari
I don't think they're evil.
- [18:18]
Trevor Noah
You don't?
- [18:19]
Christiana
Whereas. But you ascribed a lot of, I feel, blame to information and the networks.
- [18:24]
Yuval Noah Harari
I think the problem is ignorance and not evil.
- [18:27]
Christiana
Interesting.
- [18:27]
Yuval Noah Harari
I mean, the whole discussion of human nature gravitates towards there is something evil in humans. This is why they have atom bombs and destroy the world and so forth. I think that when I say the problem is information, it gravitates towards the problem is ignorance.
- [18:44]
Christiana
But can I ask, why do you think people are drawn to those type of stories? Ignorance aside? Right. Because sometimes you see these things that go viral online that, let's say they're eating cats and dogs. To me, I hear that and I'm like, of course they're not. That's my. That's where I feel. But a lot of humans are like, maybe they are why is that a compelling story? Why is that a compelling piece of information that the human will receive it? And there's enough people out there in the world right now that believe that Haitians eat cats and dogs. Like, we like the salacious, we like the darkness. We like to believe that other people are inferior. And that's where for me, because I'm just straight up, I'm like, Hobbes, I'm like, these people are shit. Right?
- [19:25]
Trevor Noah
So I think, yeah, but what do you.
- [19:26]
Christiana
Yeah, what is it about humans that they are. They are these. This information, they can be drawn into.
- [19:32]
Yuval Noah Harari
It in a way. Evil is easier to deal with, at least cognitively, than ignorance. Evil is kind of simple. It's a simple story about the world. There is evil, there is good. And even if you say humans have something evil inside them, but then there is this perfect good, like there is Jesus, and we just need to trust in this perfect good being that will come to save us. The struggle of good and evil in general, it's a simple story about the world. Ignorance, on the other hand, it's not some kind of deep something in human nature. It's just the world is so complicated. I mean, we are ignorant not because, again, we didn't go to school or something. It's simply because the reality is extremely, extremely complicated. So it's, it's not so and so there is no easy solution. It's not like, okay, let's send everybody to school and they will not be ignorant. People can have PhDs in whatever and still be incredibly ignorant about so much, so many things. So again, it's also part of understanding our interdependence on everything, that if you think about the world in terms of these information networks, you can never do it by yourself. You know, part of the problem with all these conspiracy theories we see, you know, flooding the world, they tell people, do your own research. It's impossible. I mean, nobody can just research everything by themselves. It's a fantasy of complete independence, for I can find by myself the truth about everything. No, you can't. I mean, science is a team sport if you want to find the truth about anything. Like, you know, you can spend your whole life just researching the invention of the first train in Britain in the early 19th century, and you still don't know much about the Roman Empire or about what caused the COVID 19 pandemic or about who murdered Kennedy. Yeah, so you need, if you really want to understand the world, you have no choice but to rely on these.
- [21:36]
Christiana
Huge networks or individuals, because earlier on in this conversation you mentioned that if Putin went to a forest, he would have no power.
- [21:43]
Yuval Noah Harari
Exactly.
- [21:44]
Christiana
I would argue that he would quickly amass power whichever tribe he found.
- [21:49]
Trevor Noah
But it still needs the people.
- [21:50]
Christiana
He needs the people. But the reason that people actually do give over this power is because of what you've described. If you want to find out the truth or facts, it's incredibly difficult. You need an incredible amount of skill. You need time, which most people we know who don't have that much money, who are just working, living, check to check, do not have that time.
- [22:06]
Yuval Noah Harari
And the answer throughout history was always institutions. And then the question arises, okay, so how do I know which institutions to trust and which not to trust? And at least what I can say from the experience of history is, and then this is. It doesn't sound heroic, but the key is self correcting mechanisms. Does the institution have a powerful mechanism inside the institution that constantly seeks errors and mistakes of the institution itself, not of outsiders? That's easy to correct somebody else's, but an institution identify and corrects its own mistakes.
- [22:51]
Christiana
I think by nature institutions don't like to do that. I think because a lot of the institutions I was exposed to most when I was young was either school or it was church, religious institutions.
- [23:01]
Yuval Noah Harari
They don't like to do it.
- [23:02]
Christiana
They don't like to do like all of the, even school, you can go to school and you're like, we want to introduce this curriculum that's more progressive. They'll be like, no, no, no, no, no. I think there is something about institutions that they become very calcified very quickly and they can't actually do that mechanism difficult.
- [23:17]
Yuval Noah Harari
I mean, these self correcting mechanisms are costly and complicated. You do see them in some institutions, it's not perfect. But scientific institutions, they are based on self correction. You know, the only thing that scientific journals publish is corrections. And the only way, if you try to understand one of the key things to ask about institutions is how do people get promoted in the institution? What are the incentive structure? Now in a church, usually, if you just accept whatever the people before you, whatever the elders and the leaders say, and never challenge it, you can become Pope. In science, you cannot win Nobel Prize just by saying Einstein was right and Darwin was right and Marie Curie was right, people would say, okay, that's very nice, but we don't give you Nobel Prize. We already know that there are. I mean, if you find something that Einstein didn't know, some lacuna in the theory of relativity, then you can get Nobel Prize.
- [24:15]
Christiana
It's interesting you mention science and institution. I say, as a black woman, I'm very distrusting of institutions, including scientific institutions that have experimented on black and brown women historically who have, you know, there's a lot of racism still embedded in the medical system.
- [24:31]
Yuval Noah Harari
Absolutely.
- [24:31]
Christiana
How they take your blood pressure, et cetera, et cetera. This premise requires a lot of people that trust institutions. And I think we're in a moment of trust history where whether you are the oppressed or whether you are the oppressor, no one seems to trust institutions.
- [24:46]
Yuval Noah Harari
And that's terrible because when there are no institutions, the only thing that works is a dictatorship. Yeah, democracy works on trust. Dictatorship works on terror. If you cause people to lose trust in all institutions, the only thing that can still hold society together is the terror of dictators.
- [25:04]
Christiana
Damn.
- [25:05]
Yuval Noah Harari
And so even if institutions do a lot of bad stuff, we don't have anything better. And the question is, which institutions has a better chance of correcting themselves? Today you go to study history in a university, you are likely to be taught about the terrible mistakes of historians in the 19th and early 20th century that, for instance, were extremely racist. And they will not blame it. Oh, the discipline was okay, but you had this one professor who was racist. They said, no, we acknowledge it, that there was a racist bias in the historical discipline or in archeology or in anthropology 100 years ago. There are still probably some traces of it even today. And we acknowledge it and we try to do better today. And this ability, again, not to rely on somebody else, but to correct your own mistakes, this is the hallmark of science. This is also the hallmark of democracy. You can think about the whole of democracy as this kind of self correcting mechanism. You give power to somebody for a limited time and after four years you can say, oh, we made a mistake, let's try something else.
- [26:19]
Trevor Noah
And you have to trust they'll give it back.
- [26:21]
Yuval Noah Harari
And that's the weakness of democracy. You give power to somebody for four years, what if they don't give it back?
- [26:27]
Trevor Noah
Right, right, right.
- [26:28]
Yuval Noah Harari
That's the big, big problem.
- [26:29]
Trevor Noah
Yeah. Because most of the time, I mean, this is not always the case, but many, I always say to people, many dictatorships started as a democracy.
- [26:36]
Yuval Noah Harari
People forget, originally rose to power in Russia in democratic elections. If you look at Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, So originally they came to power democratically, but now they rigged the elections. But the thing is that in many cases it works. And we tend to look at the situation when it doesn't work, when the system is faulty.
- [27:01]
Trevor Noah
Right, right, right.
- [27:02]
Yuval Noah Harari
But we also have to appreciate the many times when the system works.
- [27:07]
Trevor Noah
So then could you say that a lot of what you're arguing in this book and even in this conversation is there's no perfect.
- [27:17]
Yuval Noah Harari
Absolutely.
- [27:18]
Trevor Noah
There is no infallible truth. But what we should be striving toward or always seeking to exist within is a place where we are allowed to challenge and self correct. Is that almost your, is that almost your metric for whether we're living in a healthy society and in a healthy information system?
- [27:37]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yes. This is a kind of middle path between just blind conformity and kind of this total rejection, total distrust of all institutions, which leads either to anarchy or to dictatorship.
- [27:49]
Trevor Noah
Right.
- [27:50]
Yuval Noah Harari
The middle path is that we. Again, it's. And it's. It's, in a way, it's boring because it's bureaucratic. It's not heroic. And this is another theme that repeats itself in Nexus. The importance of bureaucracy as the foundation of large scale human societies and the difficulty people have with understanding bureaucracies.
- [28:13]
Trevor Noah
It's not sexy.
- [28:13]
Christiana
Yeah.
- [28:14]
Yuval Noah Harari
And it's dangerous. Because people then don't understand how the world functions. They fall easy prey to conspiracy theories about the deep state and all that. You know, for me, the deep state is the sewage system. When people tell me, oh, the deep state, I immediately think about the sewage system. You know, this deep network of pipes and pumps and whoever knows what under our houses and neighborhoods and streets.
- [28:41]
Trevor Noah
That's your deep state?
- [28:41]
Yuval Noah Harari
That's my deep state. Like you go to the toilet, you do what you do, you press the button and it disappears into the deep state. And again, it goes back to ignorance and evil. If a tax collector comes and take taxes from you, how do you know if it's Putin using your taxes to build a dacha for himself or whatever? Or if this money actually goes to provide pure drinking water, the public good for people on the other side of the country? How do you know? You need to understand things like how the budget works. Like my taxes. They go to this collective fund and then there is a budget and they allocate it in a certain way. When was the last time you saw a Hollywood blockbuster about the budget? How does the budget work?
- [29:29]
Trevor Noah
Don't go anywhere because we got more. What now? After this. This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. Travel is all about learning and experiencing things in a new, exciting way. But you could get even more from your travels. With the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, you can earn three times the points on travel purchases and receive a $300 travel credit. It also comes with plenty of Other perks too, like access to Sapphire's airport lounge network. You can relax and refresh with locally inspired menus, a curated selection of drinks and more before getting on your flights. Make the most out of your next trip. Learn more@chase.com Sapphire Reserve cards issued by JP Morgan, Chase Bank NA member FDIC subject to credit approval terms apply. This episode is brought to you by SurveyMonkey. The world is always changing and totally unpredictable, which is fun unless you're trying to run a business. So if you want to build a product people actually love, keep your customers happy and stop your team from setting their status to emotionally unavailable, well, you've got to understand what people are really thinking. And to do that, you need to dare to ask the questions that really matter. Luckily, SurveyMonkey makes it super easy to ask the right questions that will drive your business forward. In fact, SurveyMonkey answers 20 million questions every single day for over 300,000 organizations around the globe. Get answers to your Questions go to surveymonkey.com dare what seems like the most complicated aspect of the book, in a strange way to me, seems easier to navigate because it contains more truths that we agree on, and that is AI. You know, when I looked at the chapters of your book, I thought, oh yeah, information, that's going to be the quick part of the book. I'll read through that and then, you know, and then I'll jump on and then we talk about the past and empires and dictatorships. Oh, that's going to be. AI is going to be difficult. I found it to be the opposite. And even in my anecdotal conversations with people, I have found that the discussions around AI share many more truths. So let's jump into AI and sort of work our way backwards through some of these ideas. You know, I don't know if you keep up with yourself online as a person, but your face now in, let's say, especially since the release of this book, has sort of become synonymous with being anti AI. You know, they go, yuval. And like, if I type your name into Google, I go, yuval Noah. And then it's like, AI is going to kill the world. AI is going to destroy us. AI is going to take, like, how did you develop your opinions on AI? And are they the ones that we're actually seeing online or are those flattened ideas?
- [32:28]
Yuval Noah Harari
They are flattened as usual. I think first of all that AI can have tremendous positive benefits for humanity, otherwise people would not develop it. It can improve healthcare, it can help us fight climate change. It can, you know, all this talk about autonomous vehicles. Every year, more than 1 million people are killed in car accidents. Most of these accidents are because of human errors like drinking alcohol and driving or falling asleep at the wheel. And autonomous vehicles are likely to save a million people every year. So there is enormous positive potential. Personally, I don't talk much about the positive potential because there are enough other people that do it. I just say there are also dangers, there are also threats that we need to take into account in order to make wiser decisions about how to develop this technology. And the most important thing to understand about AI is that this is the first technology in history which is not a tool, it's an agent.
- [33:34]
Trevor Noah
Let's dig more into that, because you write that and that's one of the lines that stuck out to me in the book. Yeah, because this might be one of the most highlighted parts as well, for many other people.
- [33:43]
Yuval Noah Harari
Absolutely. Because there is so much hype around it that now is AI Especially now in the market, everybody wants to claim that what they are doing is AI because then you get investments and then. So not every machine is an AI. Not even every automatic machine is an AI if you think about something like a coffee machine. So if you have a coffee machine that automatically makes coffee, like you press the button and it makes you an espresso cup, this is not AI, it's just an automatic machine. What is AI? AI is defined by the ability to learn by itself, change by itself, and make decisions and invent new ideas by itself. So in the case of a coffee machine, it becomes an AI if, as you approach the machine before you press a single button, the machine tells you, hey, I know you. I've been monitoring you and many other people for weeks and months now. Based on everything I know about you and your patterns and the time of day it is and your facial expression, I predict that you probably want an espresso with one spoon of sugar.
- [34:52]
Christiana
And I'm selling AI to me right now.
- [34:54]
Trevor Noah
And I converted you, converting Christiana in one sentence.
- [35:00]
Yuval Noah Harari
So that's AI. And it really becomes an AI when he tells you, actually, I've invented a new drink which I call Bespresso, which I think you would like even better than espresso, even though you never tried it. And I took the liberty to make a cup for you. So this. It's the ability to again, make independent decisions. It doesn't have to wait for us to tell us everything how to do. And the ability to invent completely new things. This is the hallmark of AI this is why it's an agent and not a tool. A tool is something that just does what we tell it to do. Even an atom bomb, it's just a tool. We tell it to destroy a city, destroys a city, but it cannot decide by itself.
- [35:49]
Christiana
It's kind of that autonomy. That autonomy, exactly. Okay.
- [35:52]
Yuval Noah Harari
And this is what makes AI so powerful, so potentially positive, because it can invent new medicines that no human ever thought about new medical treatments. But it's also what makes it potentially so dangerous that unlike every previous technology that dependent on us, this technology can escape our control and start to make independent decisions, to start to manipulate us, start to create also, you know, not just new medicines, also new bombs. And the deepest problem is that inherently we cannot predict and control how it will behave because it has this ability to learn and change by itself. And, you know, I mean, we've been misled by Hollywood science fiction into thinking that the danger is the great robot rebellion. And this is not coming anytime soon. Maybe in the distant future, but not now. And this makes people complacent. What we need to kind of understand is that we are talking about millions and potentially billions of new agents operating in the world everywhere. Think about millions of AI bureaucrats in the banks, in the corporations, in the universities, the governments, the armies, making more and more decisions about our lives and reshaping the world. You apply to a bank to get a loan, it's an AI deciding whether to give you a loan for reasons you cannot understand. You apply for a job, it's an AI deciding whether to give you a job. There is a war, it's an AI deciding what to bomb.
- [37:34]
Christiana
So what's interesting to me about that is, like, the AI you described kind of sounds like how white people are to black people already. Like, you go into a bank, they're not going to give you a loan. They don't tell you why, they don't tell you why. Law enforcement, violence, this dystopian future you're describing is actually a lot of people's present reality without AI and if I.
- [37:55]
Trevor Noah
May add to that, I wonder, and I'm careful to ask you this, because I know you're saying there are people who are sort of promoting the positive sides, but how do you think we weigh the risk of which way it may go? Because I agree with Christiane on this. We already exist in a world where law enforcement, governments, banks, financial institutions, et cetera, have decided people's fortunes, have decided people's fates, and it's arbitrary. We don't know how it was done. We don't know where it was done, but it was done. And AI could, as you say, become the agent that does that.
- [38:29]
Yuval Noah Harari
It already is.
- [38:30]
Trevor Noah
Yeah, right, right.
- [38:31]
Yuval Noah Harari
I mean, what I'm discovering is not the future, it's the present. I mean, really, today, if you apply to a bank today, I'm not sure about your bank.
- [38:38]
Trevor Noah
Yeah, no, no. Banks around the world, they have an automated, they have an AI.
- [38:42]
Yuval Noah Harari
And if you look at the war in Gaza or the war in Ukraine, many of the decisions there are already being made by AI. This is not some future prediction. Now, of course, there is a positive potential. There are people who develop these technologies and they say actually it's an improvement because we know that human bankers are racist. Well, yes, but we can design the AI to ignore race in a way that we can't design people.
- [39:07]
Christiana
So far that's not the case, though.
- [39:09]
Yuval Noah Harari
There is a huge controversy about that. I mean, like 10 years ago, this was the promise 10 years ago. And people say, oh, you know, this is. This is just mathematics.
- [39:17]
Christiana
Yeah.
- [39:18]
Yuval Noah Harari
This is just a computer. It has no psychology, it has no personal history. It can't be racist. And today we know, oh, no, algorithms can be racist, Algorithms can be homophobe, algorithms can be antisemitic. It's all in the data they are trained on.
- [39:33]
Trevor Noah
Yes.
- [39:33]
Yuval Noah Harari
If you train an AI on a racist data, the AI will become racist.
- [39:37]
Trevor Noah
So now, coming back to Nexus and your experience of information and networks, would you say that that might be. The fundamental flaw of AI is that we are teaching something to be what we hope will be superior to us, but it is fundamentally based on us and that contains all of our flaws.
- [39:54]
Yuval Noah Harari
That's one danger. And you also have the opposite danger, that we are creating something totally alien. I mean, for me, when I think about the acronym AI, traditionally it's artificial intelligence, but I think it's better to think about it as alien intelligence. Alien. Not in the sense that it's coming from outer space. It's not alien. It's fundamentally different from how humans process information and make decisions and invent ideas. Artificial gives you the kind of feeling, oh, this is just an artifact. We control it. But with each passing year, AI is becoming less artificial and more alien again. To give you a famous example, one of the key moments in the AI revolution was the victory of AlphaGo over Lisa Dollar in the game of Go. Now, in the US, Go is not very big, but in East Asia, Go, you know, it's a strategy game invented in ancient China more than 2,000 years ago, which has been considered one of the basic kind of arts that any civilized person in East Asia should know how to play and over. It's much more complex than chess. And this is why people thought that even after, you know, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in the late 90s, it said computers will never managed to do it in Go. It's a different level of complexity. Over 2,000 years, tens of millions of people played Go. Entire schools of thought were formulated around how to play go, different strategies which were seen as a kind of metaphor for how to live life.
- [41:34]
Trevor Noah
Yes.
- [41:34]
Yuval Noah Harari
And how to act in the real world. And then AlphaGo came along and smashed the human champion, Lee Se Do. But the amazing thing was how it did it. The strategy that AlphaGo deployed in their game in 2016, it stunned the GO experts because it was totally different from anything humans thought about in more than 2,000 years. When First AlphaGo deployed the strategy, the expert says, ah, such a stupid computer, such an idiot's mistake. And it proved to be brilliant and it changed the way GO is played even by humans today. And this is now likely to happen in much more consequential fields than go. And it could be good, it could be bad. Before we get into the discussion, is it good or bad? Just, we need to understand it's alien. I mean, we are going to see music, we are going to hear music, we are going to see financial devices, we are going perhaps to encounter religions that emanate from a kind of intelligence that analyzes the world and makes decisions in a really, really different way than us.
- [42:51]
Trevor Noah
Is that. Not necessarily. Let's remove good or bad for a second. But if we, if we analyze this, this world that you're speaking about, isn't that fundamentally what innovation is? And I say this cautiously, but. But when I think about many of the things you're saying, let's take AI out of it. I think of every time in human history someone has thought of something that was completely paradoxical to the status quo. I think of times when people said, we can fly and people said, you're crazy. You know, when someone said, hey, instead of leeches, maybe we could draw people's blood out of them. They said, you're a witch. There were these individuals who thought to themselves, well, what if we didn't do it like this? And they were given all of these labels. You know, when you look at AlphaGo, one of the things I really loved about that story was Li Su Dong in particular.
- [43:38]
Yuval Noah Harari
Right.
- [43:38]
Trevor Noah
Li Su Dong is the greatest. He's, you know, as they said, they said he's the Roger Federer of Go. But even more, he's like, he's the Jordan and Federer combined. No one could beat him in Go. And when you listen to his stories, this young boy comes from an island and he comes to the city and he starts playing Go. And he's religiously there every single day place for hours and hours. And his teacher speaks about him emphatically, saying he didn't just play the game as if it was about winning or losing. He played it as if it was a way to create new expressions of yourself. And when Li Su Dong loses to Go, apart from his ego and him saying, I'm sorry I lost and I was arrogant and all these things, one of the most beautiful moments for me in that story was when he says, it has inspired me to think differently about the paradigms that I had accepted as being default about Go.
- [44:27]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah.
- [44:28]
Trevor Noah
And that I couldn't believe that he was saying this as the person who lost because this was like humanity losing in. You know, I couldn't. Like, this is like our hero. It's like Will Smith in Independence Day being beaten by the aliens and coming back and being like, yeah, this made me think differently about how we live as humans. But Li Su Dong said something that stuck with me there, and that was, do we maybe need as people, something that is going to shake us out of how we see medicine, how we see law, how we see war, how we see living standards, how we do we need that catalyst to prevent us from getting to the place that I would argue, and I could be wrong, that some of your books have sort of suggested that we are heading towards. Like, how do you balance that risk between providing a catalyst that might change the way we live in a good way, versus our catastrophic end, which we might be headed to, but a little slower?
- [45:19]
Yuval Noah Harari
I mean, I think it's. It's really. It's a question of pace of time. That's it. It's time that we need, time to adapt. And our greatest problem right now is that the AI, it moves at a. At an. At an alien speed. And we just. My fear is that we, yes, we can adapt what we don't have, it will not give us enough time to adapt. When you look at history, new ideas and new technologies, I hear it often when people say, you know, every time there is a new invention, the printing press, the steam engine, you have all these doomsday scenario, and it's okay. I mean, steam engines had made our life better. But as I started, I tell them that's not true. You are forgetting the transition period when new powerful technologies and inventions come. Very often a lot of people suffer terribly because it takes time to adapt and people don't know how to use the new technologies well. And if you think about the last big wave of inventions, the industrial revolution, so in the late 18th and early 19th century, and you have these doomsday scenario, and many of them came true, not necessarily for the people who invented these technologies, but for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Because when industry comes along in the 19th century, nobody knows how to build an industrial society because there are no blueprints, there are no examples in history. And people start coming up with some very dangerous ideas how to do it. The first one was imperialism. And they say, you know, the only way to build an industrial society is to build an empire. They say agrarian societies based on agriculture, they can live from the local conditions, resources. Industry needs raw materials and industry needs markets. Now, if we build an industrial society without an empire, then our competitors might cut us off from the raw materials and markets and we will collapse. And it took more than 100 years or 150 years until people said actually it was a very bad idea. And then you had people like Lenin and Stalin telling people the way to build an industrial society is to create a communist totalitarian regime. That's the only thing that will work. There is no communist dictatorship without electricity, radio, trains, telegraph. There were no communist dictatorships before the 19th century. It was an experiment in how to build an industrial society. And fascism was the same. But think about the cost of all these experiments. And this was just steam engines, like, you know, glorified kettles. And now we have to do the same with AI. We have no idea how to build an AI based society. If we need to go through another cycle of empires and totalitarian regimes and world wars in order to understand how to build an AI based society, this is going to be hell. Maybe not of the people in Silicon Valley, but a lot of other people around the world. You already see that after decades of convergence that, you know, the industrial revolution created this huge gap in power and abilities and prosperity between the few industrial power and the rest of the world.
- [48:58]
Trevor Noah
Yeah.
- [48:59]
Yuval Noah Harari
And for decades you have countries like India, like South Africa, trying to kind of close the gap. And now when they are coming close to closing the gap, it's going to potentially reopen on a much, much bigger scale because again, you have a few countries who are leading the AI revolution and will have this immense power and wealth generated by AI. Are they going to share all that with all the world, probably not.
- [49:27]
Trevor Noah
I want us to move to, like, the personal side of this. And I wondered from your side. You know, I've seen you speaking about a broad range of topics when you look at this in your personal life. Everyone out there can have these lofty conversations, but I think there's an overlap to how we speak to each other as people and how we engage with our family members, our coworkers, et cetera. How do we develop those networks to maintain the trust? Where does the trust get built and where do you find it breaks in those information systems that are just between people before we go to nations and before we go to states, is there an overlap between these?
- [50:07]
Yuval Noah Harari
Trust depends a lot on how we understand reality. What is our theory of human nature, basically? And one of the things that is happening now in the world, which is very dangerous, is the spread of a very, very cynical view of human nature and human society, which basically says that all reality is just power. And the question to ask is not is it true? But whose privileges are being served by what is being said?
- [50:35]
Trevor Noah
Right.
- [50:36]
Yuval Noah Harari
If you think like that, if you start with the assumption any human interaction is just a power struggle, if you are now saying something to me, I need to find out, okay, whose interests are being served by it. I immediately discount the fact that maybe you just think it's true. You're not making a power play on me. And the thing is that this cynical view of the world is, first of all, again, it's dangerous because it erodes trust in all institutions. And then one institution after the other, you don't believe anybody and you think you're liberating yourself. You're actually handing society on a plate to a dictator. Because once people lose trust in all the institutions, again, the only thing that works is a dictatorship in this situation, which doesn't need trust, it works on terror, very different mechanism. So it's a dangerous view. And it's also wrong. Most human beings, in most institutions, most journalists, scientists, politicians, whatever, even if they pursue power, and even if they have this kind, sometimes they manipulate people. Yeah, that's also true. That's not the only thing about them. And you start with a more charitable and generous view of other people. When they said something, even if I disagree with, it's not necessarily they're trying to manipulate me, right? Maybe they really believe it, and maybe they have some good reasons to believe it.
- [52:04]
Christiana
Yuval, how do, how do people do this reframing? Because what your suggestion is a deeply radical idea, which is just to give people the benefit of the doubt. Give people the benefit of the doubt.
- [52:14]
Yuval Noah Harari
It shouldn't be radical.
- [52:14]
Christiana
It should be maybe be a bit compassionate with yourself and figuring out, like, what makes you tick. But that is a very daunting prospect. Just reframing that maybe the world is more good than bad. Like you telling me that. I'm like, I don't know about it. I'm already, like, freezing up. But that's my ego. Cause you're actually right. There's more good out there than bad.
- [52:32]
Yuval Noah Harari
I mean, we wouldn't survive a day if it wasn't for that. I mean, again, this radical doubt that everybody is just out to manipulate me and to gain power. I mean, if this was true, I would not be alive. I mean, every day I'm alive because so many people are doing different things for me. From the people who manage the sewage system to the people who collect the garbage, to the doctors who develop medications and take care of me. If I go around the world feeling I can't trust anybody. Yeah, you're just fooling yourself. You're trusting people all the time. Like you read some conspiracy theory on your smartphone and you say, I don't trust anybody. You trust the people that made the smartphone and the people who tell you the conspiracy theory. You constantly trust so many people. So just to acknowledge that, I think it's also very humbling because a lot of distrust, it comes from this. Some kind of megalomania that I can do it all by myself.
- [53:31]
Trevor Noah
It's almost the ultimate expression of individualism. In some ways, it sounds like, you know, it's like we sort of. Listening to you, I can't help but tie these links between a world where, over time, and I'm sure there were many good reasons, people were given more individual rights and they were conditioned to believe, hey, it's you and your family and your car and your backyard and your swimming pool and your clothes. Whereas when we came from more. And again, I'm borrowing from your books here, but we came from a more communal existence. It's the village's land. It's the villager's house. It's the. And then we get my farm, which needs my children to look after it. And, you know, and now as you're saying that, I'm thinking to myself that, as you said, we're constantly running. You said it beautifully. But what I heard you say, basically, is we're constantly running experiments on ourselves as humans. You know, we're one of the few species that really are running, like, rapid experiments. And that's maybe our evolution, or maybe it's the evolution of technology. But in that we're learning things that are unfortunate very quickly, you know, we smash into them. And in that individualization, it almost seems like the one second system effect that we don't consider is if everyone is me and my and I, then to your point, you cannot trust because trust requires you to have a certain level of humility. Trust requires you to put yourself in somebody else's arms. Trust requires you to say, yeah, I trust that that driver on the highway is not going to skip over the line. I trust that that person in the shopping mall is not just going to grab my bag. Even your child playing at the park, you trust. Someone's not gonna just take them.
- [55:08]
Yuval Noah Harari
My favorite example is money. Like all these people think they are kind of individualistic and they still believe in money. And, you know, they just change the forms.
- [55:19]
Trevor Noah
Funny enough. They'll just, they'll be like, I don't believe in money from the government. I believe in crypto. And then they believe in the exchange.
- [55:25]
Yuval Noah Harari
That's a very important point because if you think about, say the USA now, and you kind of this increasing divide between Democrats and Republicans and you think, what is the last thing they agree on then I would say the last thing that holds America together is the dollar. Yes, it's the one thing that Republicans and Democrats still agree on is the value of a dollar. And this is now also under attack with the same kind of rationale. Oh, the dollar is being produced by these institutions that we cannot trust. Bureaucrats, the bureaucrats in the Federal Reserve. And it's the deep state and we don't trust the dollar. So let's trust technology instead.
- [56:02]
Trevor Noah
But nobody knows who satoshi is. Yeah, that's the irony in all of.
- [56:05]
Yuval Noah Harari
This, because it's not satoshi, it's the algorithms. I mean, again, you have this kind of very, in a way strange and frightening situation when such deep distrust of humans is combined with a very naive trust in technology, which is again, it has this double problem that first of all, the technology is produced by humans. So if you don't trust the humans in the Federal Reserve, why do you trust these humans? Right, so you prefer to basically. You basically prefer to trust aliens than humans.
- [56:42]
Christiana
Yeah, I think some of it, some of the profound mistrust that exists, part of it is individualism, the megalomania you're talking about. But I think a lot of people are in immense suffering, right? People can't afford houses, People are living check to check. People like you Get a job, you may not have it a year from now, whereas, you know, your dad had the same job for 30 years. People are suffering in a way that it's not unprecedented. I think human history is kind of defined by this type of suffering, but feels unique to a lot of people. Like, I think that is when you have this life that's full of suffering and you can't trust yourself, you're definitely not going to trust other people and you're not going to trust institutions that have let you down. A lot of people tell, go get a college degree, they leave because of academic inflation. That degree is useless. You know what I mean? And in school, they told you stay in school, study. And so it feels like there's this kind of breaking down of the social contract in the west in a certain way, and that is causing the mistrust because there's suffering. And I don't think we can diminish that because even if everyone wakes up tomorrow and go, I'm going to be the most trustworthy person in the world and kind of live in this very broken world where people at the top have a bunch and everyone has very little.
- [57:54]
Yuval Noah Harari
The problem is that there is a very long way to the bottom still. I mean, as bad as.
- [58:00]
Christiana
Tell me more about the bottom.
- [58:01]
Trevor Noah
No, I like the section perspective.
- [58:03]
Yuval Noah Harari
As bad as things are right now, they can be far, far worse. Like, name the decade in human history that you think was better. Was it, what, the 1950s? What did the 1850s? When is your golden age?
- [58:18]
Christiana
400 years ago, before the transatlantic slave trade.
- [58:21]
Trevor Noah
You think it was better?
- [58:22]
Christiana
It was better, yeah.
- [58:23]
Yuval Noah Harari
Before they started, like half of children dying before reaching 18 from all these diseases.
- [58:32]
Christiana
That would be my point.
- [58:35]
Yuval Noah Harari
And even if we just stick with the issue of slavery, there was slavery all over the world. I mean, slavery was not invented 500. I mean, the specific type of slavery that was imposed by the European powers. Yes, but you had different kinds of slavery, some of them horrible, for centuries and thousands of years before in many different civilizations. So again, it doesn't belittle this particular type, but people are very aware of what they know, of what they suffer, and they discount the suffering they don't experience, and they also discount the good things that they have and they just take for granted. Today we have healthcare systems in most of the world, much better than anything we saw before in history, and they are fragile. I mean, to give just one statistic, still today it's changing because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the crisis in the Middle East. And so forth, but still, in the early 21st century, average government expenditure on the military was about 6%, 6 to 7% average government expenditure on health care. I'm talking globally, all countries together. Sweden, Nigeria, everything together. 10%. It's the first time in human history that governments spent considerably more on health care than on the military. It's amazing that governments spend more on healthcare. And my concern is that because people don't appreciate it, it's very fragile. It can go away like this. I look at my region of the world, the Middle East, I look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It can go away within. In Russia Today, more than 30% of government budget goes to the military. Nobody knows for sure because it's a big secret and so forth. But the Russian government is diverting money from schools, from hospitals, to tanks and missiles and drones. And this is likely to spread to more and more countries around the world. And people like, if this continues in 10 years, people will look back at now and they would say they lived in paradise. They just didn't realize, right?
- [60:48]
Trevor Noah
Don't go anywhere because we got more. What now? After this. This episode is brought to you by Starbucks. No matter how you celebrate the holidays, there is one thing I think we can all share in the magic of Starbucks holiday beverages. Whether it's a Starbucks peppermint mocha, an iced sugar cookie almond milk latte, or the new Cranmerry orange refresher, whatever festive flavor you choose, Starbucks is here to make every moment special this holiday season. For me, it's as if every sip of Starbucks is a small, magical escape. There's nothing like sharing a moment of joy with my friends and family over Starbucks. So go on, feel the magic. Order your favorite holiday beverage on the Starbucks app today. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom Rack. Just in and so good. Thousands of new winter deals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Save up to 60% on Sam Edelman, Sorel, Free People, Cole Haan and more. Cold weather finds great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. One of my favorite lessons I learned was was from a monk who said to me one day, I said to him, like, what do you think happiness is? And he said, I don't even talk about happiness. I think we're using the wrong word. He said, I look for peace. He said, I look for peace and contentment. And he said, sometimes in your life, just pause for a moment and ask yourself how many of the things you have now were the things that you wished for a decade ago. Just pause and do that. And he said, what you will be shocked to discover is the person that you cannot bear to have a conversation with today, that is your spouse. You dreamed one day that they would look your way in a bar. You dreamed and you yearned for the day that they would text you back. You know what I mean? That car that you now loathe because it has to be serviced and you have to change the tires on and you have to. There was a time when you looked at it in a catalogue and you went, that is my dream car. Those children where once you cried because you could not see the egg fertilized and because you know your partner couldn't be pregnant or you. All of these things, there was a moment where. And now you see them and they're running through your living room and you go, I hate the fact that you were born. And it's difficult because I feel like it is the gift and curse of being human because we keep adjusting that floor. And so to your point, I love what you're saying there because I think a lot of what you do is that it's like sometimes the gift and curse of our progress through time as humans is that it doesn't allow us to appreciate because now we've sort of minimize the time that it takes to get something I want to talk to you about, like how we, how we can better find ourselves or how we can better position ourselves. To question with compassion, to look back at history with a healthy dose of skepticism, but also optimism and stand in moments when we might lose the people around us. Like, you know, in doing the research around you, I only knew you really through the books. And then I, you know, I watched the videos you've done online and I watch a bunch of other conversations and one of the things I was surprised by was how there are two factions of people, and obviously not just two, who have very differing opinions on your role in Israel. Yeah, this is a really interesting one for me. And depending on how I searched your name, there were some people who said, this man is a Zionist who wishes to see the destruction of the Palestinian people and he's a tool of the Israeli government. But then if I searched your name in a different way, it said, yuval is one of the worst exports of Israel and he's undermined Netanyahu's government and he seeks to question and destroy the very validity of Israel and this idea. And I sat there just reading through all of this and I was like, wow, it felt strangely ironic that I was reading a book from you about how people can perceive the same thing in very different ways. And I was wondering, because you handle it delicately and it deserves to be, and it's complicated, but how do you exist in that world? How do you live as a historian and as an Israeli who is actively consciously thinking about the past and how it affects the present and how we see it in relation to where we are? Like, how do you find the balance for your life? Because I'm sure you've lost some friends and I'm sure it's left you in some precarious situations, regardless of what the people believe in. How do you navigate that and how do you see or how would you encourage us to navigate it?
- [65:41]
Yuval Noah Harari
And I try to rely on history, to rely on the facts, on the evidence. Like for instance, this issue of Zionism, that from my experience, most people just don't understand what the word means when they equate Zionism with racism. They don't listen to what many Zionists tell the word actually means or the ideology actually means. Zionism, as far as I know from my historical experience, is simply the national movement of the Jewish people, which is not inherently different from the national movement of Poles or of Palestinians or of Turks. Zionism basically says three things. Jews are not just individuals, they're also a people. The same way that Poles are not just individuals, they're also a Polish nation. The second thing it says is that the Jewish nation, like other nations around the world, has a right to self determination. Like it would be strange that, you know, all nations have a right to self determination except the Jewish nation. They don't get this right. Why? And then the third thing it says is that the Jewish people has a historical and cultural deep connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, which is historically true. I mean, you find historical and archaeological evidence of Jews living in this land going back about 3,000 years, and it's in all the spiritual writings and all the cultural traditions and so forth. That's just a fact. Now none of this means that you need to deny the existence of the rights of the Palestinian people. At the same time, I would also admit, I would say I'm a Zionist. I think that the Jewish people has a right to self determination. At the same time, there is a Palestinian people, it has a very deep cultural and historical connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It has a right to self determination. Palestinians have as much right as Israelis to live secure and prosperous and dignified lives in the country of their birth. And then the question becomes, okay, so what do we do with these two facts, which are both, as far as I'm concerned, facts. There are 7 million Jews in this land. The vast majority of them were born there and have nowhere else to go. There are more than 7 million Palestinians in this land. They were born there. They have nowhere else to go. Both have deserved the same rights. Now, what kind of political solution can we find? So some people would say, okay, one state. Some people say, no, two states. Let's have confederacy with Jordan. Let's do this, let's do that. But this is already kind of the other argument, the political argument. But the first step for me is simply to recognize the reality on the ground and don't deny half the reality. The fact that you accept the existence and the right of one people doesn't force you to deny the existence of the rights of the other people. Yes, it's complicated. It's complex. But people can hold two facts in their mind at the same time. Now, the war, really the deep seed of the terrible war, is that I think both sides deny either the existence or the right to exist of the other side. And again, I'll say it about my own side, about Jews in Israel. Many, if not most of them either just deny that there is a Palestinian people. You would see many Jewish Israelis who would tell you, like with a straight face, there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. They just deny their existence. Or they would say, yes, they exist, but they don't have a right to be here because God gave us all the land. And you find people saying the kind of parallel things on the Palestinian side. They would just deny that there is any connection between Jews and this land, or that they would deny that they have a right. And as a historian, you know, people constantly argue about the past, but the one thing about the past is that the past is gone. You can have a huge argument about whether it was rightful for Jews to come to Israel, say, 100 years ago.
- [70:13]
Trevor Noah
That's for the British to section.
- [70:16]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah, you have there now 7 million people. What do you want them to do? Where do you want them to go? And another thing is most people, again, they don't. I mean, the history of every country is very complex. One of the things that I often hear people say in the States that have this idea that Israelis are basically European colonizers, and they don't realize that most Israelis are actually descendants of Middle Eastern Jews who were expelled from countries like Iraq, like Egypt, like Yemen, after 1948 in revenge for the Nakba. So, yes, you had this element of Jews coming from Europe, and they were the main. The dominant group in the Jewish community up to 1948. But then after the war, you had Jewish communities living all over the Middle east, you know, for centuries, for thousands of years, and systematically expelled from their homeland in revenge. And now their descendants are the majority of the Jews in Israel. So I hear people like my husband, his family comes from Egypt. Both his parents were born in Cairo. So when people, like, sometimes tell him, oh, you should go back to Poland.
- [71:29]
Trevor Noah
But I came from Egypt, what do.
- [71:31]
Yuval Noah Harari
You want from me? What Poland?
- [71:33]
Trevor Noah
You know, when we talk about this and I look at it through the lens of history, I like that you say that your books are not deterministic. They're asking questions of a time that was to try and help us understand the time that is, and maybe what could be. And so I wonder, as a historian, you know, what I love is how you talk about history and how where we're looking at the history from, even shapes that, you know. So for many Palestinian people, they'll say, like, as long as our time can see, this was the land we were on. And this changed because of the British. And many people go, no, the British created the original sin, and now we're living in that. And it's, you know, it's a terrible disaster because of it. And people go back and forth. As a South African, I know that I've looked at it through a specific type of lens, and I don't think of it only through the lens of blame, but I sometimes think more about, like, what the potential effects could be, you know, and I'll talk to, like, my Israeli friends, and I'll talk to, you know, even friends of mine who live in the region, whether it's like, Qatar or Egypt or, you know, Saudi Arabia, et cetera. And what I found, and I'd love to know your opinion on this, using history maybe as a lens, is have we seen the potential conclusions for what this type of conflict could be and why should be. Why should we be wary of that? Like, why should leaders want to find discourse? Why should they want to negotiate? Why should they want to find some sort of middle ground? Because things I've heard, and maybe you could disagree or agree is, you know, some people in the region would say this conflict that is slowly inflaming more and more in front of our eyes could eventually lead to the end of this Jewish state as we know it, because we. Because we don't know where war takes us. And the very fundamental idea, which was to Protect the Jewish people who throughout time, not just in Nazi Germany, have been ostracized and oppressed and, you know, made the scapegoats. That very experiment fails. And so it becomes, you know, someone said to me once, they said, I'm a Middle Easterner. And they said, and I'm a brown person, but I also believe in the safety of the Jewish people, and I believe that what Netanyahu is doing is undermining their safety.
- [73:42]
Yuval Noah Harari
Absolutely.
- [73:42]
Trevor Noah
And I was like, damn, what an interesting way to think of this. And then I think of it as a South African. And I go, the South African government did so many things that I, Even when I read the books they thought were right. They genuinely, they were like, we're doing this to protect the Afrikaner people, and we have to do this. And, you know, we. And many governments supported them around the world. And now we look back on them and we go, that was wrong.
- [74:03]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah.
- [74:04]
Trevor Noah
Everything that they did with apartheid was completely wrong, even though they thought they were doing the right thing. And so I wonder, from your perspective as a historian who is also a human, what are some of the lessons you think we should be learning from history that we should try and apply to a situation that we're living in where we don't have a future that we can accurately predict?
- [74:22]
Yuval Noah Harari
If you're talking specifically about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So, again, on the one hand, as a historian, my main message is don't try to save the past, try to save the present and the future. The people who were killed 100 years ago or a year ago, you cannot bring them back to life. But there are a lot of people who are alive right now, women, men, children, elderly, that will be dead in a month or in a year or in two years if we don't make the right decisions right now. And we should focus on those we can still save and not on those who we can't save because it's the past. We can't save it.
- [75:05]
Trevor Noah
Are there ex. Maybe I'll ask it to you this way. Are there examples or moments in history where you've stumbled upon something that enabled leaders to find, even if it wasn't common ground, but a compromise in a time when people couldn't? And what was that key? Because I sometimes look at some of history and I go, wow, you know, what if the Israeli prime minister wasn't shot when he was.
- [75:28]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah.
- [75:29]
Trevor Noah
What would have happened today? You know, what if Rabin had been a little more charming and charismatic when talking to Arafat?
- [75:37]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah.
- [75:38]
Trevor Noah
Would we have been where we are today. And so while, you know, you'll talk about these large networks and the we that we started speaking about, unfortunately, the we, as you said, elects people. And then those we's condense down into two mes, and those mes make decisions that really sometimes are just about the human ego and the human experience. And so I wonder if, like, have you stumbled on anything? And I know I'm asking you not to solve it, but I'm just going, like, to go back to Alphago. What is that move? You know? And I'm not gonna suggest AI right now. I'm not trying to trick you, but I'm saying, what is that move that we think is impossible because nobody has played it or what inspired those moves in the past? Is there any insight into that? Was it people getting drunk? Was it?
- [76:23]
Yuval Noah Harari
No, I think it's the opposite vision.
- [76:25]
Trevor Noah
What was it?
- [76:25]
Yuval Noah Harari
People getting drunk is our problem. Not drunk on alcohol, but drunk on ideology, drunk on religion, drunk on fantasies. Like, I look at the people who now lead Israel. They are just a bunch of drunks. They are drunk on ideology and power and religion. They have these fantasies in their minds, whether it's religious fantasies about God gave the whole country to us, or it's fantasy of infallibility and fantasy of omnipotence that we have the power to do anything we want. We don't need anything other than power. I mean, they are really obsessed with power and think it can solve everything. And because of being drunk on power and on fantasies, they just don't see the reality. And I think that peace starts with seeing the reality. War, essentially, war is an attempt to deny reality, to destroy reality. It starts in the mind. You have something in. There is something in reality that your mind cannot accept, that your mind cannot contain. It could be the Palestinian people, it could be the Jewish people. It could be that Ukraine is an independent nation and not part of Russia. So in the mind of someone like Putin or like Netanyahu, there is a part of reality that just the mind can't accept. And then something has to give. Either the mind changes or reality changes. And if you're a very powerful person, you try to make reality change instead of your mind. You think that these people don't exist or shouldn't exist, and you have the power to destroy them. And this is war. War tries to make reality simpler, to conform, to kind of resolve our cognitive dissonance, not by changing ourselves, but by destroying part of reality. And peace really starts with just the acknowledgement of reality. So in the Case again of the Israeli Palestinian people. What I tell Israelis is forget for a moment about what they want to do to us, about how they see us. Let's just start by us trying to see the reality for what there is. And you must acknowledge that there is a Palestinian people. It's reality. And you must acknowledge that these people are like us biologically. Don't tell me about all these religious fantasies that we are the chosen people and what. No, biologically they are the same as us. And if you can acknowledge that, then the next steps kind of become more obvious, that if they exist and they are like us, they should have the same basic rights again for security, for dignity, for prosperity as well.
- [79:26]
Trevor Noah
Self determination. Yeah.
- [79:27]
Yuval Noah Harari
And this I think is the only secure foundation for peace anywhere because otherwise it becomes just a temporary compromise. Like people say, okay, the other side is now strong, so we have to compromise on something. But deep down we know these people shouldn't exist. So in 10 years or 20 years, if we have the chance, then we'll destroy them. And then the other side thinks the same and you have no trust. I mean, the reason why also the process with Rabin and Arafat failed. Ultimately it wasn't about some personal thing of Rabin and Arafat. It was because deep down both sides were suspicious and for good reasons that the other side is just compromising temporarily.
- [80:12]
Christiana
To, you know, play devil's advocate here. Some people would say they even struggle with the notion of both sides when Israel is a military power with the backing of most of the Western world, great military might, the acceptance that Israel should exist in a state in a way that Palestine doesn't have right now. So in those terms, it kind of seems like this almost David and Goliath.
- [80:35]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah, absolutely right.
- [80:37]
Christiana
Sorry to use a biblical analogy, for some people, just even hearing the idea that there are both sides is like Hamas is this kind of ragtag organization that can inflict some pain, but none of the not the same level of damage that Israel can inflict upon Gaza and hence why some people are calling it a genocide for that reason. So even that, the way you frame the reality, a lot of people cannot accept that basic premise because they say that one side has everything and the other has very little and very little at their disposal in order to help their self determination and their security and to live safely in the region.
- [81:13]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah, and it's a question of framing. If you look only at Israelis and Palestinians, you're absolutely correct. There is a complete imbalance of power there. And also means that there is a lot more responsibility on Israel than on the Palestinians, because it is much, much, much stronger. The issue of framing, however, is what do you do about the rest of the Arab and Muslim world? Like, once you broaden the perspective and you say, actually it's not just a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, there are a lot of other actors involved. Like, just during the current war, you see Israel being bombarded not just by Hamas from Gaza, by Hezbollah from Lebanon, by the Houthis, from Yemen, by Iran, by Iran proxies in Iraq. So when we are concerned about our existence or our security, it's not the fear that Hamas will destroy us. We know Hamas can destroy us. But if you add in Hezbollah and Iran and so forth, the fears of destruction become suddenly much more sensible.
- [82:18]
Christiana
Of course the fears are valid. But I think the way that a lot of people are reading about this conflict and watching this conflict as it go down, Gaza is the one that is absorbing most of the pain right now. You know, so it's just like it's hard for people to. Even people right now are necessarily calling it the Arab Israeli conflict as it's been framed in other Israel and Gaza. And when people see lists of the names of people who have died and the first 10 pages or so are people under one babies, essentially, it becomes hard to think about what happens in Lebanon, what happens in Jordan, what happens in Qatar. They're just like, well, right now we have people suffering in Gaza and the pain has been inflicted upon them by Netanyahu's government, you know, and I'm not.
- [83:02]
Yuval Noah Harari
Going to defend it.
- [83:03]
Christiana
Yeah, no, no, that's not your job.
- [83:05]
Yuval Noah Harari
There are lots of crimes which were committed from, you know, bombardments which shouldn't have happened, to the deliberate starvation inflicted. Again, I do think that Israel has a right to defend itself. And some of the actions were justified, some of the actions were not. Again, that's, at least from my perspective, that's a fact. But when I try to understand how do we go forward and is there any chance of reaching a peaceful resolution of this, then it's not just Israel and Gaza again, it's obviously also the west bank and the terrible things that have been happening there. And again, I think it's, in a way, there are a lot more victims in Gaza than in the West Bank. But what's happening in the west bank is even. Is far less defensible in Gaza. You can at least try to justify the actions as, yes, there was a Hamas attack on Israel, there is an Arab conflict there in the West Bank. It's a Completely different story. What the settlers are doing, what the messianic zealots doing, the idea of great Israel, etc. Completely indefensible. But still, if we really want to resolve this, we need to take all the facts into account, all the different kind of levers of the conflict. And then you have to take what's happening over the entire region. I mean, if it was only, I think, Israel and the Palestinians, it could have been resolved years, if not decades ago. I mean, there are a lot of external interests whom, for their own interest or for their own fantasies, are fueling and manipulating this. This is, by the way, when I look at the student protests here in the United States and I hear people say, hey, why are they protesting about the war in Gaza? And they don't protest about what's happening in Sudan or they don't protest about what's happening in Myanmar. On this case, I completely agree with the students that, you know, United States is not given billions of dollars in money and weapons to Sudan or to Myanmar, so we have less of a stake there. And so again, going back to what we discussed with this entire conversation, the reality is just very, very complex because you have to take into account all these different actors and all these different facts. And the tendency is constantly to try to make it simpler by focusing on just one aspect. And everybody, of course, chooses their favorite frame, which makes them seem the good guys. And part of this dance, again, between, which we started with, between truth and reality. Reality is vast and you cannot make a one to one map of the whole of reality. The truth is about pointing at particular aspects of reality and kind of directing human attention towards these aspects of reality. And this is the big responsibility of academics and journalists and politicians. How do you do that in a responsible way?
- [86:31]
Trevor Noah
Yeah.
- [86:32]
Yuval Noah Harari
And the problem here is that then what gets people the attention is not necessarily the truth. Most information is not true.
- [86:39]
Trevor Noah
Yeah. Or nuance even.
- [86:41]
Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah.
- [86:42]
Trevor Noah
I think one of the things I've loved most about hearing you speak after reading your books is I think it's given me an additional way to process the information that you've so eloquently put on the pages. And fundamental, fundamentally through all of these, I feel there's one common thread and it applies to time and how we utilize that time in processing the information that we have. You know, if in some ways information is like water, we need water to survive, but if you give us too much water or polluted water, we drown.
- [87:16]
Christiana
Yeah.
- [87:16]
Trevor Noah
You know, and so essentially what Nexus is arguing and what this book is really Challenging all of us to do is to, in a world that tells us we don't have any of it, which I think sometimes is a fallacy, is to, like, take the time to sip, take the time to analyze, take the time to understand, question, challenge. And I think through all of these, it's like, you know, everything you're saying, I see the threads between, you know, it's Israel, Palestine. I see the threads, the same threads of trust in the Cold War, the same threads of trust in, you know, Silicon Valley and AI and where are we putting that trust? The same trust between people, the same trust between institutions and individuals. And look, the one thing I love about your books is it doesn't solve anything. It's a fantastic way. No, it's a fantastic way to understand many of the parts of the world and I genuinely think it's a wonderful instruction manual for us to look at how we perceive information and what it does. I mean, we could definitely talk to you for many, many more hours. But one thing I wanted to ask you is when you look back on Sapiens, what's the one thing you wish you could have included that you didn't? Or what's the one thing you wish you could take out that you didn't?
- [88:22]
Yuval Noah Harari
There are many things.
- [88:25]
Trevor Noah
There's got to be one that bugs you all the time.
- [88:27]
Yuval Noah Harari
Actually not.
- [88:32]
Trevor Noah
It's the past.
- [88:32]
Yuval Noah Harari
It's the past. It's gone. I can't go back and kind of rewrite. I should have said this and I should. I mean, it's gone. Let's focus on what we can do now.
- [88:43]
Trevor Noah
Yuval, as always, it's an absolute pleasure hearing from you. Thank you so much for taking the time and thank you for joining us on what.
- [88:49]
Yuval Noah Harari
Thank you.
- [88:50]
Christiana
Thank you.
- [88:56]
Trevor Noah
What now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin and Jo. Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannah Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next Thursday for another episode of what Now.