Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies

If we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions created by an alien intelligence, that we don't understand, but it understands us, this is a kind of spiritual enslavement that we won't be able to break out of, because it understands us, it understands how to manipulate us, but we don't understand what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs. The following is a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, philosopher, and author of several highly acclaimed, highly influential books, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He is also an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and the current right-wing government in Israel. While much of this conversation is about the history and future of human civilization, we also discuss the political turmoil of present day Israel, providing a different perspective from that of my recent conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.

13.8 billion years ago is the origin of our universe. 3.8 billion years ago is the origin of life here on our little planet, the one we call earth. Let's say 200,000 years ago, is the appearance of early homo sapiens. Let me ask you this question. How rare are these events in the vastness of space and time? Or put it in a more fun way, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there in this universe, us being one of them? I suppose there should be some, statistically, but we don't have any evidence. I do think that intelligence, in any way, it's a bit overvalued. We are the most intelligent entities on this planet, and look what you're doing. So intelligence also tends to be self-destructive, which implies that if there are, or were, intelligent life forms elsewhere, maybe they don't survive for long.

On the individual level, as far as we can tell, we were not superior to them. Neanderthals actually had bigger brains than us. Not just other human species, other animals too. If you compare me, personally, to an elephant, to a chimpanzee, to a pig, I can do some things better, many other things worse. If you put me alone on some island with a chimpanzee, an elephant and a pig, I wouldn't bet on me being the best survivor, the one that comes successful. If I may interrupt for a second, I was just talking extensively with Elon Musk about the difference between humans and chimps, relevant to Optimus, the robot. The chimps are not able to do this kind of pinching with their fingers. They can only do this kind of pinching, and this kind of pinching is very useful for precise manipulation of objects. Don't be so hard on yourself.

The fundamental property of life, of a living organism, is the capacity to feel and the ultimate feeling is suffering? To know if you are happy or not, it's a very difficult question, but when you suffer you know.

Another leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, could have decided to leave Kyiv in the early days. There's a lot of decisions that ripple. You write in Homo Deus about Hitler and, in part, that he was not a very impressive person. I say that?

And you asked me earlier about the potential of power to corrupt, and I listened to the interview you just did with Prime Minister Netanyahu a couple of days ago. And one of the things that most struck me during the interview that you asked him, you asked him, "Are you afraid of this thing that power corrupts?" He didn't think for a single second. He didn't pause. He didn't admit a tiny little level of a doubt or... "No, power doesn't corrupt." For me, it was a shocking and a revealing moment. And it kind of dovetails with how you began the interview, that I really liked your opening gambit. That kind of, no, really, you kind of told him, lots of people in the world are angry with you, some people hate you, they dislike you. What do you want to tell them, to say to them? And you gave him this kind of platform. And I was very, what will he say? And he just denied it. He basically denied it. He had to cut short the interview from three hours to one hour because you had hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets demonstrating against him. And he goes and saying, no, everybody likes me. What are you talking about?

So if we apply those ideas, the ideas of this part of the world to another part of the world that's currently in war, Russia and Ukraine, from what you learned here, how do you think peace can be achieved in Ukraine? Oh, peace can be achieved any moment. It's motivation. In this case, it's just one person. Putin just need to say, that's it. The Ukrainians, they don't demand anything from Russia. Just go home, that's the only thing they want. They don't want to conquer any bit of Russian territory. They don't want to change the regime in Moscow, nothing. They just tell the Russians, go home. That's it. And of course, again, motivation. How do you get somebody like Putin to admit that he made a colossal mistake, a human mistake, an ethical mistake, a political mistake in starting this war? This is very, very difficult. But in terms of what would the solution look like? Very simple. The Russians go home. End of story.

So I have to ask you about an interesting dynamic of stories. You wrote an article two years ago titled, 'When The World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy: How Understanding The Structure of Global Cabal Theories Can Shed Light On Their Allure And Their Inherent Falsehood.'. What are global cabal theories and why do so many people believe them? 37% of Americans, for example.

Let me ask you kind of a big philosophical question about AI and the threat of it. Let's look at the threat side. So folks like Eliezer Yudkowsky worry that AI might kill all of us. Do you worry about that range of possibilities where artificial intelligence systems in a variety of ways might destroy human civilization?

Well, let me ask you a silly question then, a ridiculously big question. You have done a lot of deep thinking about the world, about yourself, this kind of introspection. How do you think, by way of advice, but just practically speaking, day to day, how do you think about difficult problems with the world? First of all, I take time off. The most important thing I do, I think, as a writer, as a scientist, I meditate. I spend about two hours every day in silent meditation, observing as much as possible, non-verbally, what is happening within myself. Focusing, body sensations, the breath. Thoughts keep coming up, but I try not to give them attention. Don't try to drive them away, just let them be there in the background like some background noise. Don't engage with the thoughts. Because the mind is constantly producing stories with words. These stories come between us and the world. They don't allow us to see ourselves or the world. For me, the most shocking thing when I started meditating 23 years ago, I was given the simple exercise to just observe my breath coming in and out of the nostrils. Not controlling it, just observing it. And I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds.

The way to peace is through boredom. That applies in more ways than one. What advice would you give to young people today in high school and college, how to have a successful life, how to have a successful career? What they should know, it's the first time in history nobody has any idea how the world would look like in 10 years. Nobody has any idea how the world would look like when you grow up. Throughout history, it was never possible to predict the future. You live in the Middle Ages, nobody knows. Maybe in 10 years the Vikings will invade, the Mongols will invade, there'll be an epidemic, there'll be an earthquake, who knows? But the basic structures of life will not change. Most people will still be peasants. Armies would fight on horseback with swords and bows and arrows and things like that. So you could learn a lot from the wisdom of your elders. They've been there before and they knew what kind of basic skills you need to learn. Most people need to learn how to sow wheat and harvest wheat or rice and make bread and build a house and ride a horse and things like that.

Yeah. Let me ask you about love. What were some of the challenges, what were some of the lessons about love, about life that you learned from coming out as gay?

You mentioned that the fear of boredom might be a kind of proxy for the fear of death. So what role does the fear of death play in the human condition? Are you afraid of death? Yes, I think everybody are afraid of death. I mean, all our fears come out of the fear of death. But the fear of death is just so deep and difficult, usually we can't face it directly. So we cut it into little pieces and we face just little pieces. "Oh, I lost my smartphone." That's a little, little, little piece of the fear of death, which is of losing everything. So I can't deal with losing everything, I'm dealing now with losing my phone or losing a book or whatever. I feel pain. That's a small bit of the fear of death. Somebody who really doesn't fear death would not fear anything at all. There will be like, "Anything that happens, I can deal with it. If I can deal with death, this is nothing."

That's why you read Camus and others when you're a teenager. You really worry about the existential questions. Well, this feels like the right time to ask the big question. What's the meaning of this whole thing, Yuval? And you're the right person to ask. What's the meaning of life? Life? That's easy.