Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life Is Meaningless and Amazing | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 84

thank you my guest today is Yuval Noah Harari author of the Blockbuster book sapiens which tells the entire history of our species in under 450 pages savings took the World by storm selling over 23 million copies and having been translated into 65 languages this is your story as a human being what does it mean to be human like welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt sapient's path to success was an extremely unlikely one at the time he wrote it Harari was a completely unknown historian of the Middle Ages lecturing at Hebrew University in Israel the book was originally written and published in Hebrew four years passed before it was even released in English and yet it became one of the most influential non-fiction books of the 21st century what makes the ideas in the book so powerful and compelling I want to find that out today [Music] Eva what a pleasure kidding to meet you it's absolutely amazing that you write such intelligent books and you get people to read them it's part of the job it's not about speaking up it's about being heard so you need to think how you express yourself in a way that is understandable so I've heard the story that if it weren't for your deep insecurities around public speaking the book sapiens might never have come to be is that a true story in a way yes because it came out of the course I gave it to University and I just would write everything that I have to say during the lecture because I wasn't so secure as a lecturer and these lecture notes they eventually became the book so I've also heard that your reaction to reading Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond Back in the day when you were a PhD student was something like I could write a book like that well maybe not I at first but it is possible to write books like that I was doing my PhD on the Memoirs or autobiographical writings of soldiers from the 15th and 16th century quite a narrow subject matter and suddenly I read this book and I realized that it is possible to look at history from such a broad perspective so we didn't immediately occur to me that I could do it but at least somebody could do it when I read Guns Germs and Steel my reaction was how is it possible that anyone could know enough and have enough confidence to write such a book I think it's very unusual to have your mix of apprehension in some domains say like public speaking and what must be extreme self-confidence to feel like you can write the entire history of mankind I'm not sure it's self-confidence at least when I wrote sapiens I didn't take myself of the project too seriously because I didn't think that many people would read it it came out of this University course right was it in Hebrew originally interesting and I was struck by the fact that there was no book in Hebrew which still the history of the world to the Israeli audience so I said there must be some people in University in colleges that could use that so I write for them and there is no competition because there was no other book available and I said yeah I might make some terrible mistakes but that's fine I mean who's going to read it anyway obviously despite the fact that you wrote this for a very small Israeli audience things really worked out for you you not only sold a ton of copies but I think people actually read sapiens after they buy it which isn't always the case I first learned about the book from Danny Kahneman and he had purchased it in the UK because after Israel it went to the UK and he told me that it was the most important book of the decade and that he had read it twice and he said I've only read a few books twice in my entire life so like Danny I've also read sapiens twice and I love it but be completely honest I'm surprised anyone else loves it because it violates Stephen dubner's first two laws of Storytelling so dubner's first law is that every good story has a person at the center of it an individual you can't tell a good story about an idea or an event unless there's some personality to keep the audience captivated and depner's second law of Storytelling is that people only want to read stories they don't want facts or hypotheses or subtle arguments they want stories and unlike almost every other popular non-fiction book that people read Sapient is almost completely devoid of characters yes or stories about people this must have been a conscious decision on your part right yes there is a hero which is us so in some way doesn't violate these laws I think that I wrote it and many people maybe read it with yourself as the main character this is your story as a human being what does it mean to be human so I get that but it's still surprising to me that people have that much creativity to actually be able to inject themselves into what you've done part of the job of writing the whole of history in 400 Pages or 500 pages is get to the point quickly you don't take people on very long rides you immediately show them the destination and many of the destinations you reach are quite shocking if we talked about neanderthals you immediately begin with the idea that actually Homo sapiens and Neanderthals not only had sex but actually had children together and you conjure in your mind this family scene of you know any animal mother is sapien's father and a child and then you take this kind of extremely provocative scene and you carry it forward and you ask questions about what would the Catholic church say about the souls of Neanderthals because the Catholic church for instance says that chimpanzees don't have souls when they die that's it they don't go to heaven or hell so what about neanderthals if you say that neanderthals don't have a soul then just imagine it that your dad has a soul he goes to heaven your mom doesn't she's in Yamato she doesn't have a soul so you can pushed in the direction of saying no no no no neanderthals also had Souls but this is a slippery slope because as you move further back in the evolutionary story you eventually reach the chimpanzees and the dogs and everybody else yeah so you make a very long story very short and provocative or similarly to move to the field of Economics there is a short chapter on money and right at the beginning like the main message that money is simply Trust it's not made of matter it's not gold it's not paper it's just an idea in our mind and not just any idea is trust trust between people that's money so that's shocking to the people who are used to think about money as evil right and also to the die-hard capitalists who like money very much it's also shocking to realize that it's just a completely fictional story in our minds it's not the laws of nature and therefore also all this idea that you can have a completely free market economy without any regulations without any government intervention no you can't because the most basic thing like money it is based on people trusting each other and if you don't have some kind of codes of parliaments of governments of religions that help to establish trust between people you will not get a market you will get complete chaos what you think it's a social construct right money can exist unless everyone agrees that money is going to serve this purpose and we're all kind of brainwashed and maybe I'm not even aware of the fact that we're part of the social contract to accept money it's interesting use the word fiction to describe that yes because social contract or social construct they are abstract and complicated ideas and again you need to make it clearer it's not some abstract social construct it's simply a story that somebody is telling us and going back to this law that you must have a person at the center of the story that's not true the most successful Story Ever Told is the story of money I mean how does it work money you have these big storytellers like the chairperson of the Federal Reserve and the finance ministers and all these people and they tell us that one dollar equals a banana it's not true in any objective sense you can't eat dollars you can't drink them it's just a story that somebody told us that a dollar is equivalent China and it works provided that enough people believe in the story it's not a true story about some objective biological fact viruses exist whether we believe in them or not even if you don't accept the stories about viruses they can still kill you right it's not the same with money if one person stops believing in the dollar nothing happens but if millions of people stop believing in the dollar it disappears it loses all its value and it didn't happen to the dollar so far but it did happen to quite a number of other currencies throughout history right before the financial crisis I was scheduled to fly to Europe to give a talk to a bunch of clients of a big Icelandic bank and we had a call ahead of time and I said hey are you at all worried about what's going on in the US and said oh no not at all it's no problem whatsoever everything's great where we are and then two or three days passed and they said hey we decided given the unrest we're not going to have this conference after all but per our contract we agreed that we would pay you if the conference got canceled so we will still pay you your fee so on Monday I receive a wire transfer from this Icelandic bank and on Tuesday the bank no longer existed it literally disappeared in exactly what you're talking about that Iceland had built an enormous financial sector around Trust but didn't actually have a government or an economy of a size that could reinforce the Trust In the case that people got spooked and they went to the bank of England and said hey would you support us and just say yes we're for real and you'll balance up and they said no and they literally disappeared and it's probably the best timing I've ever had in my entire life maybe you broke the bank I know the last check that this Bank Route was to me [Music] so we're talking about characters the easiest character to build into any book is yourself the author personal stories from your own life so Jared Diamond Malcolm Gladwell Robert sapolski they frequently insert themselves into their books but to the best of my recollection you yourself do not make a single appearance in sapiens in the later books a few times but in sapiens no this is because my line of research as I mentioned earlier was originally on autobiographical texts of these soldiers from the 15th and 60th century and later I did my other research on Military Memoirs and Military autobiographies until the 20th century and it's just inoculated me against the autobiographical urge to inject yourself into the story so many books even books that don't present themselves as an autobiography when you dig you learn that actually it is an autobiography Undeclared autobiography I was too familiar with the traps and the dangers involved in writing something which is too much based on the author's own experiences but I would say your personality Creeps in on a few topics I know for instance that you don't eat a whole lot of meat yes and it's really clear when you write about the modern meat industry that you write from the perspective of someone who doesn't approve of the methods being used now of course many people don't but do you consider that autobiography or that's just common sense obviously My Views enter my books how can you write otherwise but even just in terms of trying to influence people it's best if you don't do it in a kind of in your face attitude yes I share a lot about the suffering of animals but my decision in sapiens was simply to give them their proper place in history without animals you can't really understand the Agricultural Revolution you can't understand ancient economic systems you can't understand military history the horses the cows the the chickens they are there and they are also sentient beings so they were also influenced by it and I just give them their proper place in the story many of your points you make I think are obvious but no one ever really talks about them or thinks about them which I think are the best points to make because it doesn't take a lot of convincing as soon as I see it on the page I'm convinced but it's not part of my reality otherwise then it's just a gift you have of seeing the obvious when others somehow aren't seeing it I think that that's part of the job of building a bridge between the scientific community and the general public when I wrote sapiens my impression was that I'm just saying what I was told as a student in my first year in the history Department with the university I didn't feel that there was anything there which was a new revelation to the scientific Community or to Scholars of history and then a lot of readers they pointed out what I thought were the most banal statements and they said this was the most profound something I've read like even this thing that money is just a social construct or just a fictional story everybody knows it in Academia it's just almost taken for granted but you never talk about it yeah and when you do talk about it it turns out that for many people it's extremely revolutionary [Music] the thing that I find so addictive about your writing is the tone that you bring to it your voice is it's a little bit cranky in a way that allows you to make statements that would seem outrageous out of context but within the flow of the narrative they make a reader say yeah that's so right so I bookmarked a couple of examples here's one from sapiens you write as far as we can tell from a purely scientific Viewpoint human life has no meaning do you want to talk about what you mean when you say human life is no meaning when you ask what is the meaning of life before you even attempt an answer I would say the first step is to think what kind of answer would be acceptable to me and the answer is a story we are storytelling animals we think not in fact not in statistics not in equations we think in stories people sometimes think about the cosmos as one big drama and they ask themselves what is my role in the drama or what is the role of humankind in the drama and the meaning of my life is my part in the drama it's like there is this big Hollywood production and I'm one of the actors I have a role in the drama and this will be the meaning of my life and on my deathbed I would feel complete and satisfied I've done my share and the shocking realization is that this entire approach is completely misguided because reality itself the universe the laws of physics they don't work like a story or like a drama the laws of nature don't care about us if planet Earth explodes tomorrow morning and all life on it disappears physics wouldn't care planets and stars explode all the time throughout the Universe and the universe just goes along with its business so the answer is there is no drama and you have no role to play in it some people may get very depressed because of that so life has no meaning yes but I don't think that the main question in life is the question of meaning I think that the main question in life is the question of suffering what is suffering where is it coming from and how can we be liberated from it and even the depression or the suffering that you experience from feeling meaningless that's where the question arises what is happening there why should you feel miserable that you are not part of some big Cosmic drama what's wrong with it it's not a mission from the cosmos it's something immediate you suffer and you don't want to suffer what could be more simple than that it's here and now the way that I disabused myself of this idea that I was at the center of the universe and everything was there to serve me is I took an undergraduate course from EO Wilson the biologist at Harvard good for you and the basic point of that course is that you have no meaning any individual is worthless and it could have been demoralizing and depressing but it was just the opposite because I was really haunted by a pervasive fear of death as a teenager I was just terrified of death and I sat in that big Auditorium listening to EO Wilson talk and by understanding I was meaningless I was able to shed this fear of death now what he did do you know Wilson did do along the way he said look you mean nothing but the thing is do the people around you you actually mean something they don't matter either but to the people around you you matter and so his basic view is just beating beating people around you and when you're free of being the center of the story about the universe it's liberating to be free of that and just to be able to do your daily things without those obligations I remember when I was 13 or 14 at school we have the ceremony for the fallen soldiers who died during the wars of Israel on Memorial Day and everybody dressed in white shirts and you have these big ceremony and you bring flowers and you sing songs and so forth and Heidi so it must be wonderful to be a fallen soldier because now you have meaning in life all these school children will be singing songs in your honor for millions of years and then I thought no no that's not possible I know that the universe is like 14 billion years old it will probably go on for at least let's say 14 billion years more I know history there is no way that there will still be a state of Israel and a Jewish people forget about a million years from now a thousand years from now it's very unlikely on an even simpler level your dad how do you know that people are singing songs in your honor once you're dead it's not like you're lying in the ground and you can hear the songs coming from above so you talk about Judaism but you speak like a Buddhist have you found that to serve your life purposes better than Judaism oh far better from a very early age I just couldn't accept the Jewish story because it completely false from a historical perspective you look at every religion every National mythology and it's always centered on us I look at Judaism which is the religion of my people which is also the basis for Israeli nationality and what is the role of the Chinese in the world they have no role in Judaism who cares about these 1.5 billion people obviously the 15 million Jews they're the center of the story and then you go to China and of course the Chinese are the main Heroes of the cosmic drama and people in New Guinea they have no role to play and Buddhism it was not studying it it was really practicing meditation one way to understand meditation is the instruction just forget about all the stories in your mind and just observe what is actually happening you have the Mind constantly producing stories and leave them aside and try to observe reality the first time I went to a meditation course the first instruction given was to just focus all of your attention on your breath coming in and out of your nostrils just note now the breath is coming in it's still coming in it's still coming in oh it stops coming in now it's going out it's going out in many meditation tradition this is like the most basic training and it was so profound because you don't need to do anything you have no role you're just observing what's happening and the shocking thing was that I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds before my mind would run away somewhere where would it run to a story I would remember something from the past I would fantasize about something in the future I would imagine something my mind couldn't be with reality for even 10 seconds so meditation for me is really the practice of trying to connect to reality and not to the stories we constantly create and it sounds like for you that turns out to be more profound than just about anything else do you have a way of explaining why that meditative practice is so powerful in your life what's so bad about stories it's not bad it's just something else just the ability to get some perspective you realize how useful how beneficial it is whether it is in a relationship whether it is with regard to politics whether it is with regard to economics to be able to tell the difference between what is actually happening and what is just a story that I'm creating and imposing on reality most humans this skill is underdeveloped and the other thing is that we are constantly in touch with the greatest mystery in the universe the moment of Consciousness that's the greatest mystery in the universe the most ordinary moment in your life you're stuck in traffic in your car the traffic is not moving you're annoyed this is the most amazing thing in the universe it's in many ways more amazing than solar systems and black hole we don't understand how can anything in the universe be annoyed how can anything be conscious how does some electricity and hormones and whatever how does it produce a subjective experience of being annoyed thinking about it from a different perspective it's like maybe there is a planet when the atmosphere is just LSD and the beings there they constantly live in a psychedelic world and they take some magic mushroom to experience being annoyed in a traffic jam and it's just blows their mind because for them this is unfamiliar and being able to be amazed by the most familiar thing I think this is very very important you are listening to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with Yuval Noah Harari after this short break they'll return to talk about why the Agricultural Revolution was a fraud [Music] hey Steve so our listener John wrote Us in response to our recent episode with Sal Khan where he talked about the Khan World School an online high school he is launching in conjunction with ASU next fall the school is fairly self-directed for students they will have a daily seminar where they discuss issues of the day with classmates they'll use Khan Academy for coursework and they may provide some peer tutoring Sal really believes that the students coming into the school are going to be the future world leaders he has a lot of Hope and confidence in these students but John our listener doesn't think these students are going to be representative of the average student and that this school while transformational will really be transforming the students who are already the most motivated a lot of listeners wrote in with a version of this question how do you think this model could actually work for the average student and not just the highly gifted I think that's just an incredibly important question that John is asking first of all I would never work on this I don't think Sal would work on it if we didn't think this could be transformational across the entire range of students not just for some self-motivated students and the reason I think it will be is because the idea of Mastery learning so getting away from giving a test and grades to actually focus and letting kids learn material at their own speed and that idea is so critical it's important for kids at the top but it's also really important for the kids at the bottom essentially our current school system serves kids in the middle pretty well but the kids that are both above and below the middle are the ones above they get bored the ones that are below they get left behind so ultimately I think this idea of Mastery learning will be incredibly powerful for the kids who maybe need it the most who are struggling in the current school system but that's to be proven and actually when sale and I talked about this idea at first my vision of it was to take it say to the Chicago public schools to a set of kids who weren't thriving in the current system and sales said look you could do that but that's hard that's really hard how about we try to prove it on a set of kids that are a little bit easier first we cut our teeth on that and then we go after this tougher group so he convinced me that's the right way to do it but ultimately I would not be involved in this if I didn't think that in the end that the kids who are struggling this couldn't be transformational for them maybe more transformational for them than the kids who are at the top I think it's great too that it's actually happening people talk a lot about changing education but this is something that's actually going into effect and there's a lot of Hope with it that's true because when sale and I talked in January it was an idea and it is crazy that come August it's going to be reality so again my idea with sales to start a physical school and the timeline for starting a physical school is two to three years you have to find the building get the charters and all that it's really a tribute to Sal that he managed to get this thing up and running in six months we have a lot of Partners at risk and usually we are always running twice as fast as our partners are we had to Sprint to keep up with sale and his team so that's been really fun from our perspective well thank you to everyone who wrote in about the con World school if you have a question we can be reached at Pima at freakonomics.com that's Pima freakonomics.com Steve and I read every email that is sent and we look forward to reading yours foreign in the second half of my conversation with Yuval Noah Harari I want to discuss a few more of his most striking ideas but also I want to delve into the aspects of his writing that I find most puzzling [Music] let me give another quote this one is back from sapiens again the Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud my hunch is that listeners to this podcast who haven't read your books when they hear that sentence they probably find it jarring because we're taught to celebrate the Agricultural Revolution not to think of it as being a fraud but if you look at it from the Viewpoint of middle class people in the west today then agriculture is wonderful we have all these apples and bread and pasta and steaks and eggs and whatever and also if you look at it from the Viewpoint of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh or a Chinese emperor wonderful I have this huge Palace and all these servants and whatever but if you look at it from the Viewpoint of the ordinary peasant in ancient Egypt or ancient China their life was actually much worse than the life of the average hunter-gatherer before the agriculture revolution first of all they had to work much harder our body and our mind evolved for millions of years to do things like climbing trees to pick fruits and going in the forest to sniff around for mushrooms and hunting rabbits and whatever and suddenly you find yourself working in the field all day just digging irrigation ditch hour after hour day after day or taking out weeds or whatever it's much more difficult to the body we sit in the skeletons all the problems and ailments that these ancient Farmers suffered from it's also far more boring and then the farmers didn't get a better diet in return pharaoh of the Chinese emperor they got the reward the ordinary present they actually ate a far worse diet than hunter-gatherers it was a much more limited diet hunter gatherers they ate dozens hundreds of different species of fruits and vegetables and nuts and animals and fish and whatever most most ancient Farmers if you live in Egypt you eat wheat and wheat if you live in China you eat rice and rice if you're lucky if the crop doesn't fail yeah exactly if you're lucky if you have enough and then because this is monoculture most fields are just rice if suddenly there is a drought there is a flood there is a new plant disease you have famine farmers were actually more in danger of famine than hunter-gatherers because they relied on a much more narrow economic base if you're a hunter-gatherer and there is a disease that kills all the rabbits it's not such a big deal you can fish more you can gather more gnats but if you're a herder and your goat heard has been decimated by some plague that's the end of you and your family and then in addition to that you have many more diseases in the days of covet it's good to remember the fact that most infectious diseases started with the Agricultural Revolution because they came from domesticated animals and they spread in large permanent settlements as a hunter-gatherer you wander around the land with 50 people or so you don't have cows and chickens that live with you so your chances of getting a virus from some wild chicken is much smaller and even if you get it you can infect only a few other people and you move around all the time so hygienic conditions are ideal now if you live in an ancient Village or town you're in very close proximity to a lot of animals so you get more diseases and if you get a virus you infect the whole town and the neighboring towns and Villages through the trade networks and you all live together in this permanent settlement with your sewage with your garbage people in the Agricultural Revolution they tried to create Paradise for humans they actually created Paradise for germs I like that [Music] at one point you make the interesting observation that the better you know a particular historical period the harder it becomes to convince yourself that you truly understand why things happen one way and not another and that the people living through events they're the most clueless of all the people for understanding the implications so acknowledging how clueless we are about our own times I'd nonetheless like to get your guesses as to how history will view covet 19. I get this question a lot and unfortunately I always have to say that it depends on the decisions that we are making right now history is never deterministic so you have a crisis like covid-19 and how historians in a hundred years would look at events simply depends on the choices we make up till now what I can say is that kovit has been an amazing scientific Triumph coupled with political failure never in history was Humanity so powerful in the scientific tools it had to deal with a pandemic with the black death it's killed between a quarter and a half of the population between China and Britain and nobody understood what was happening for years and years it was punishment from God it was black magic it was astrology or his covet it took something like two weeks to identify the virus correctly it took a couple of more weeks or months to understand how it spreads and what would be the most effective counter measures and then within a year scientists developed not one but several effective vaccines it was an amazing scientific success and produced him at scale it's a miracle absolutely but this makes the political failure only more depressing only more tragic because it was a political failure the scientists they just produced the tools it's the job of politicians to decide what to do with these tools now some politicians in some countries they did a good job but in many countries it was a failure and when you look at the global level it was a global failure and even now we don't have a plan for the next pandemic the other things in the long run generally pandemics have a smaller impact on History than other catastrophes like Wars you compare the first world war to the Spanish influenza of 1980 1919 many more people died from the flu but until coveted people haven't even thought about it and its impact was really far smaller the first world war shaped the modern world even you think about something like art so many new art forms came out of the trenches so many great works of art if you think about poetry like Wilfred Owen if you think about painting like Auto dicks you think about entire artistic movements the Spanish influenza nothing there is no famous poem there is no famous painting there is no autistic genres that came out of it and that's true even if you look at the Black Death it was maybe one of the biggest catastrophes in human history Europe before and after the Black Death there are of course differences but there was no regime change in any country you have the same political systems you have the same economic systems before and after maybe because we are programmed to it evolutionarily we are perhaps better at dealing with diseases than we are with man-made catastrophes like Wars but foreign I've had 70 or 80 guests on this podcast and I have to say it was harder to prepare to talk to you than any of the other guests I've had most of the time it's easy for me to get a sense of what people are about what they believe in but in your case despite the fact that you make strong statements we've already established that most of the time you don't resolve things you don't tie things up with pretty bows and pick a winner among competing theories so let's take this idea of progress someone like Steve Pinker or most Economist for that matter they would see progress as necessarily good okay but from what you've just said about hunter-gatherers it's clear that you say look there's an argument that the progress we made going from being hunter-gatherers through the Agricultural Revolution that was not all good not for most people no I mean you start seeing real progress for most people only in the 19th century exactly we live in a world in which progress has has been amazing some of the evidence that's so obvious a longer life expectancy cell phone life is great right you don't disagree that we have been amazing beneficiaries of progress yes over the last 200 years there have been some terrible things happening and there are still terrible things happening I live in the Middle East I know this perfectly well but looking at the long span of history at least since the Agricultural Revolution the early 21st century has been until now the best time to be a human being not the best time to be a cow or a chicken but the best time to be a human being despite kovid you are more protected from infectious diseases than any previous time in history since the beginning of Agriculture then you look at famine the only famine that still exists and we see it now very painfully with the Russian invasion of Ukraine the only famine that still exists is political famine absolutely if a person anywhere on Earth still Will dies from lack of food it is only because of political reasons we have the power to prevent it which we did not have in the Middle Ages or in the ancient world and then you have violence and here I agree generally with Stephen Pinker and other researchers that the recent decades have been the most peaceful era in human history again not completely peaceful you don't have to remind me I live in Israel I know this perfectly well but compared to any previous time in recorded history human violence is at its lowest but there is a big caveat this is not a prophecy for the future this is only an observation of the last few decades humans have built institutions in order to deal with famine and plague and War institutions like the World Health Organization like universities and their medical research institutions like trading institutions United Nations international law it was not a miracle it was humans building institutions and if we stop maintaining these institutions then war and plague and firemen will come back in an even worse form than ever before it's like building a dam over a river and saying hooray we now have control of the river and then you stop maintaining the dam and there is a crack and another crack and the dam collapses and there is a terrible flood and this been happening over the last five six years since the middle of the 2010s you see a continuing deterioration in the maintenance of all these institutions and we began with the very countries which were the leaders in building the global order written the United States in 2016 with brexit and with the isolationist policies of Donald Trump they declared we no longer support this project and looking at what happened over the last few years with the pandemic now is the war and the food crisis unfortunately we are seeing the institutions collapsing and plague and famine and War coming back it's not too late to save the dam that is holding the river but we don't have much time and frankly I don't see that the leading countries of the world are doing enough to save the global order so we just talked though about how in the last 200 years progress has been amazing science has been at the heart of transforming human life at least for the better but you have deep concerns about the future of Science and where we're going in your final Vision essentially humans no longer exist because of scientific progress is that a fair assessment yes it can happen in a couple of ways some better than others and given the pace of technological and scientific progress today I think it's very unlikely that there will still be Homo sapiens like you and me in 200 years or 300 years but it can happen in different ways the worst way is that we will just destroy ourselves in some nuclear catastrophe or whatever I don't think this is very likely but it's possible then there is another frightening scenario that we will use the immense hours of bioengineering and artificial intelligence and so forth to try and upgrade ourselves or try and create a new super species and because we don't really understand the consequences of what we are doing it will be a downgrade if you give for instance to armies and big corporations the power to re-engineer humans they are likely to try and amplify those human qualities that they deem the most useful to them qualities like intelligence and discipline you want highly intelligent and highly disciplined employees and soldiers other human qualities like compassion like artistic sensitivity spirituality most armies and most corporations they don't need spiritual employees or Soldiers with a very deep sense of compassion or a deep sense of artistic Beauty and if the result will be a race of superhumans who are highly intelligent and highly disciplined but they lack compassion and they lack artistic sensitivity and they lack spiritual depth this will be a terrible catastrophe especially as this is kind of permanent it's very difficult to go back if you think about the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century whatever harm they did in the end you can go back to basics to the human body to the human mind Hitler Stalin Mao they tried to create a new man but they failed because they didn't have the technology the stalins of of the 21st century they will have the technology and this is extremely frightening so I think you've absolutely proven the point that I started this part of our conversation with which is it is extremely hard to understand your take ethics so I'm just curious is it a conscious thing do you say look I don't know the answer the world is complex and my job is to let people try to make their own choices and I think that this is something I got from meditation that meditation is not about solving problems it's just about observing if you're in a complicated situation then meditation is just looking at it straight and saying it's complicated again don't come up with a story that simplifies it sometimes there are simple things in history but very often things are complicated there are very few big Revolutions in history which are all good or all bad and it's very dangerous if you focus overwhelmingly on just one side you have to give the full picture and the full picture is bound to be complicated and yes this is one of the biggest kind of challenges in writing especially Popular Science for the general public the style should be simple should be accessible but the message shouldn't if the life you're living best-selling author jet Setter voice for reason in a troubled world is that a life you dreamed of no it just happened to me it was never kind of part of my dreams to do these things it's really the kind of topics that I'm engaging with like I went to history partly because I don't like mathematics it's too accurate in too many numbers the furthest thing for me is computer science and I find myself suddenly talking much of my time about Bitcoin and blockchain and artificial intelligence and the dangers of AI and all these problems in computer science to a much lesser extent than you my life trajectory followed a similar path I was minding my own business being a mild-mannered economic professor and we wrote for economics got a lot of attention it opened lots of doors I was caught in a tide I was given opportunities and without thinking hard about them I followed them and and I've had an amazing life I'm not complaining but I wish that I had used more forethought and had controlled the flood waters more effectively rather than just being swept along do you also have that feeling or do you feel like you're in exactly the right place I invest a lot of time and effort in meditation which for me is training the mind and then I trust my trained mind to make better choices and I don't spend an awful lot of time trying to very consciously deliberate on like pros and cons of every decision no I prefer to dedicate that time to meditation and so far this assumption proved itself that then the mind will just be able to make better decisions do you ever think about slipping back into a private life does that have appeal to you well I try to keep a lot of my time a lot of my life private and I take every year a long Meditation Retreat between one month and two months that I just completely disconnect I know it's a privilege most people don't have the ability to disconnect for two months or one month but even for a few hours it's extremely important I get to meet a lot of politicians and business leaders and they often asking for advice and one thing I tell them is to take time off to disconnect one of the worst problems of leaders today in many fields is that previously they had built into their schedule same time off because of the limitations of communication technology in the old world now there is none you are always connected there is immense pressure on you and it's extremely dangerous I think that the people at the top they have a commitment to the public to take good care of their minds and part of this is to disconnect and detoxify their mind and also they need a private life again one of the frightening things I see now especially in democracies is the way that the people at the top especially politicians are denied a private life that anything they say at any moment Canon will be used against them and as a public speaker I know that when I speak in public I have to make a very big effort to concentrate and to be very aware of what I'm saying but then when I'm off record I can let my mind rest and part of resting is saying stupid things same things you don't think about carefully the mind of every person is full of garbage I think this is a basic human right you have a right to say stupid things in private as a gay man if a politician tells a homophobic joke in private to some friends and somebody records it and it's now on YouTube and Twitter and whatever I don't care I care what this leader says in public if in public he or she tell a homophobic joke this is very bad because this is inciting hatred among Millions I care about their policies but what they say in private it's not my business some people think the opposite that finally we get to hear what they really think this is their authentic self what they say on stage this is something that some spin doctor told them to say but they really think this comes out in private and that's a very dangerous Direction because I don't want authentic leaders I want responsible leaders politics is not psychoanalysis I don't want somebody who stands there and just gives me his stream of Consciousness anything that comes up in the mind immediately comes out of the mouth that's authentic and that's bad we need people who have a barrier a war between the mind and the mouth and think very carefully about what they say because it's a big responsibility and then they should have the Privacy to go somewhere and just say stupid and terrible thing things that's you know just being human [Music] when I talk with authors I often find that all their interesting ideas are already in their books and that can still make a great podcast episode because most listeners won't have read all the author's books but it's a little disappointing for me because I usually have read their books so I don't get anything new out of it you've all definitely did not fall into that category yes we talked a lot about his books but what I found most striking is that whatever new topic we touched on he had something to say that really sticks with me like on covid the idea that the brutal flu pandemic of 1918 had little lasting cultural impact compared to the world wars or at the end of our conversation the idea that people including politicians should be able to say stupid things in private you fall as a guest I'd love to bring back in the future are there other guests you'd like me to bring back guess where you felt like there was much more that I didn't cover or where you were just left wishing for more if so then send us an email the address is pima freakonomics.com that's p-i-m-a at freakonomics.com I've got a list of guests I'd like to bring back but before I start actually asking I want to be sure my picks and your picks match in two weeks I'll be back with a new guest Victoria gross named The World trivia champion in 2021 and a regular on the TV game show the chase there's a knitting writer I like who once described herself as being a very big name in some very small rooms and I think that's an excellent description of this community can you describe your Jeopardy experience I defeated a 19 day Champion which is the second longest streak to that point on Jeopardy I remember you know chugging a Red Bull right before my first game and then chugging some chamomile tea before my second game to try to kind of calm myself down thanks for listening and we'll see you soon people I mostly admire is part of the free Ze Radio Network so includes radio no good questions and Freakonomics MD all our shows are produced by Stitcher and renbot radio Morgan Levy is our producer and Jasmine Klinger is our engineer we had help from Alina Coleman our staff also includes Neil Carruth Gabriel Roth Greg Ripon Rebecca Lee Douglas Zach Lipinski Julie canfer Eleanor Osborne Ryan Kelly Emma Terrell lyric bowditch Jacob Clementi and Stephen Dubner our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra to listen ad free subscribe to Stitcher premium we can be reached at Pima at freakonomics.com that's p-i-m-a at freakonomics.com thanks for listening foreign Danny said I've read your book and I said what did you think and he said I think it's going to change the future of humanity but not for the better Network inside of everything Stitcher [Music]