Interview With Yuval Noah Harari: Masters in Business (Audio)

with Yuval Noah Harari. If that name sounds familiar, he is the author of a book on human history called Sapiens. I can't begin to tell you how many people have raved about this book, and whether it's Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, UH, or Danny Kaneman or go down the list. I've had a number of guests. When we get to

the books segment, that's that's the book they recommend. Uh. It's it's really a fascinating history and and a very counterintuitive history of the development of the human species and why we have succeeded so well. It isn't necessarily our intelligence, It isn't necessarily our adaptability. According to Harari, it is our ability to cooperate with each other and to tell stories, myths and stories are at the core of what allows

human cooperation to succeed. It's a fascinating conversation. Uh. We talk about his new book Hamodeus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, which I have not yet read, but the people I know who have read loved it, and so it picks up, it picks up with the last book left off. I think you'll find this really a fascinating conversation. We he's in the midst of doing a nationwide tour. They're creating a documentary film or or some sort of a series on this. So we got him in and out in

less than than an hour. So this is a relatively fast show. So with no further ado, here is my conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholtz on Boomberg Radio. My special guest today is author you've all Noah Harari. You should know his name, and if you don't, you will soon. Harari specialized in medieval history and military history, studying at the Hebrew University

of Jerusalem. He completed his doctorate of All Places at Jesus College in Oxford, and he is the author of two of the most fascinating books you will come across um in the next few years. His first book, Say Biens, A Brief History of Human Kinds, was one of those books that very quietly caught an audience. It was on the summer reading list for Barack Obama and Bill Gates. That's all it really took for the book to go viral. His new book, Homo Dais, A Brief History of Tomorrow,

comes out shortly. You've all, Noah Harari, Welcome to Bloomberg. Hello, it's good to be here. I'm fascinated by your book and a quick story I read. Was reading a book called Last Day Ape Standing and it was really a good name Darwinian history of human kind. And a friend said, how are you enjoying that book? I said, I'm liking it. He goes, I have a book you're gonna love, and he was right. He gave me Sapiens. I love the story, I love the background about this. But let's let's jump

right into a little discussion of of Homo sapiens. A hundred thousand years ago, Homo sapiens were just one of a number of different human species, all competing for supremacy. Today, Homo sapiens dominate the planet. What made Homo sapiens so different and so successful? Oh, we are the only mammal that can cooperate in very large numbers and do so very flexibly. We tend to think that our superiority comes out of some individual ability like we have we are

smarter than everybody else or whatever. But on the individual level, we are not superior to chimpanzee is Our real advantage is the unique ability to cooperate in very large numbers. If you cram a hundred thousand chimpanzees into Yankee Stadium or into Wall Street, you get chaos. You cram a hundred thousand humans there, and you get very sophisticated networks of cooperation. And all our achievements are based on large scale corporation. Now what made this possible? Why are we

the only ones that can cooperate in large numbers? It's because we are the only ones that can tell fictional stories and believe them. At the basis of every large scale human cooperation, you always find a fictional story about gods, about nations, about money, corporations, all kinds of things that

exist only in our own imagination. You cannot convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after you die, you go to chimpanzee heaven and there received lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds. Chimpanzee wouldn't believe that humans believes our stories, which is why we cooperate better than them. So the power of myth, the power of storytelling, is what led to human cooperation. Exactly as I said, check any large scale human cooperation.

There is always some fiction at the basis. It's easiest to comprehend it in the context of religion, but it's the same with political and economic corporation. And money is probably the most successful fictional story ever told. So why is money fictional? Because money has no objective reality. It's not like a coconut or a banana. Um, It's only

value comes from stories that people tell about it. The consensus of this piece of paper has value, and that piece of paper doesn't exactly that the group consensus is a fiction. In other words, yeah, I mean, I'm not I'm not saying that fiction is wrong or we should stop believing in fictional stories. There are the basis of our society, but I am pointing out that it's all

based on stories and our belief in the stories. If if it were up to me, I would give the Nobel Prize in Literature to the person of the Federal Reserve, not to the usual suspects who get the get the prize. I still, I still like your concept of a hundred thousand chimpanzees in Wall Street. I don't know if the chaos would be very different than what we are actually,

I think it will be much worse, much worse. So here's a quote about money of yours that come straight from the book that I think is absolutely fascinating, and it puts the concept of faith based belief and money into some context. The sum total of money in the entire world is sixty trillion dollars. Add up all the cash, it up all the paper money and coins, and it's only six trillion dollars of all money in the world exists only on computer servers. Therefore, money is a faith

based object. And even the six trillion that are in paper, I mean the paper is worth nothing. Really. You can't eat it, you can't drink it, so it is it too, is based on on faith. And even gold was based on faith, on on on belief because you can't do anything with gold. I mean again, you can't eat it, and it's a very soft metal, so you can't even make useful implements out of it. You can't kill somebody with a sold made of gold. Um, So it's really

all based on trust. The real material from which money is made is not gold or paper. It's made of trust. It's the most sophisticated mutual trust system ever created. It's the only system really that managed to be completely universal. Not everybody believes in God, and not everybody believes, say, in human rights, but everybody believes in money. I mean, even if you think about I don't know, Sama bin Laden. He hated American politics and culture and religion. He had

no objection at all to American dollars. You reference that even something as ancient as the Roman Empire collected taxes at one point, at their peak, they had a hundred million people paying them taxes. Is that number right? A hundred million people paying them Roman Empire some form of taxation, yes, I mean you had a hundred million people in the empire as it's the need. Of course, not everybody pays taxes,

you have families or only one person pays, but generally speaking. Yes, they collect the taxes from the entire Mediterranean basin, from tens of millions of people. That's amazing. I'm Barry rid Hilts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is you've all Harari. He is the author of the book Sapiens, A Brief History of Human Kind, And let's jump right into this. And and there's so much in this book that is so fascinating and so counterintuitive.

And yet when you think it through, you start to say to yourself, maybe maybe he's right. Let's talk about the agricultural revolution began around twelve thousand years ago, and you say, surprisingly, the pursuit of an easier life leads to more hardship. Now, I think of the pre agricultural era as as short, nasty, and brutish. You never know when your next meal is coming from. You're you're constantly at at the mercy of the weather, of of other animals,

of other bands. But I assume that agriculture allows you to have a home and roof of your house, And you're saying that just makes things worse. Yeah, for most people, it made things worse. If you're a king or a high priest. Life is very nice in ancient Egypt. But if you're a simple peasant, life is actually much harder. First of all, is a peasant you work harder than

your hunter gatherer ancestors. Our bodies and our minds evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in adaptation to living as hunter gatherers, going to the forest to look from mushrooms or hunt hunt rabbits, and suddenly you find yourself all day working very hard on very monotonous and boring jobs like bringing water buckets from the river or harvesting the corne. Even today you have hundreds of millions of people working in much more difficult and boring jobs than

our ancestors in the Stone Age. In exchange, you've got a much worse diet. Hunter gatherers eight dozens of different kinds of animals and plants and mushrooms and tever, so they had a very rich and balanced nutrition. Usually peasants subsisted on a very monotonous diet. If you live in ancient Egypt, you basically eat wheat unless you're faero. If you live in China, you eat rice for breakfast, rice for lunch, and if you're lucky, you have enough rice

left for dinner. In addition, peasants suffered far more from infectious diseases because almost all infectious diseases humans suffer from actually came from domesticated animals. Hunter gatherers had very few infectious diseases. There were tiny bands roaming around, not enough to to sustain an epidemic. You start seeing epidemics of infectious diseases only with agriculture. And if this is not enough, peasants suffered far more from social exploitation and political inequality

than hunter gatherers. Inequality both between classes and between genders. So I'm not saying that life was paradised as unter gatherers. You had many difficulties, but all in all, the life of the average person got worse instead of better as a result of the agricultural revolution. Only around the nineteenth century you begin to seem real improvement in the life

of the average person. And even today, as I said, there are hundreds of millions of people around the world whose life is much more difficult and much more grim than the life of hunter gatherers twenty years ago. I'm also fascinated by the book I didn't realize it was first published in Hebrew in two thousand and eleven, and then it didn't come out in English until what What was the process? How did it go from a Hebrew book to something that was published now globally. Well, Um,

I rewrote it in English. It's not really translation, it's rewriting it. Um. And I changed many of the example polls from things from Israeli and Jewish history, two things with more international familiarity I used. I got a lot of feedbank from the Israeli audience about all kinds of things in the book. So I had the opportunity to change things and update things, and I had to find a publisher, which wasn't easy. Uh So it took three

years to to make the transition. Really and now it's we have something like fifty translations all over the world. That's quite that's quite fascinating. You mentioned agricultural lead lead to communicable disease because you have people working close together. What about the rise of cities and urban population centers. We always think of that as a positive or at least historically that's been portrayed as a positive. Look. We have culture, we have learning, we have knowledge, you're saying

not so much. Well, that depends on your viewpoint and on your metric. If your viewpoint it's say, I don't know the upper a class in Athens in the fifth century b c. And you measure progress by the sophistication of your philosophy or your theater, then yes, it was an amazing development. But if you think about it from the viewpoint of a slave woman, uh, working to death in some field that belongs to Socrates, then it looks a bit different, to say the very least. Um, let's

talk about cognitive dissonance, one of my favorite phrases. I always think of that phrase as a negative of of somebody who was so wrapped up in their own bubble they can't get out of their own way. But but again, very counterintuitively, you describe it differently. Quote. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it probably would have been

impossible to establish and maintain any human culture. Explain that that that's quite an interesting assertion. Well, in contrast to the laws of nature, which have no contradictions. Humans have not been able to come up with any system of laws or values or views which is completely coherent and consistent. So unless we had this ability of cognitive dissonance, we could not have had any culture or any human human

generated a code book. And to give a few examples, if you think, for example, about the monoteistic world view, so people believe in a single, all knowing and omnipotent God, but somehow they also manage to believe in an independent satan or devil, and to blame the devil for all kinds of bad things that happen in the world and exxonerate the all knowing and all powerful God. Now this is a contradiction, but people do it similarly in in

in today's culture. If you go to a hospital, or if you go to the department of biology, then human and are basically these biochemical machines. And there is no such thing as free will in today's biology. But then you leave the hospital or the biology department and you go to the law department or to the courts, Suddenly free will comes out of nowhere. And our entire legal system is built on the assumptions that yes of course humans have free will. How else can you hold them

responsible for crimes and other bad actions? Exactly, And there is a contradiction there, but um, we kind of managed to go away around the contradiction, and we think in different ways when we are in the hospital or when we are in the courtroom. I'm very rid Holts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is you've all Noah Harari. He is the author of two highly regarded books. The first is called Sapiens,

A Brief History of Humankind. The next is called Homo Daeous, A Brief History of Tomorrow. We were talking earl Elier about how gold isn't especially valuable intrinsically. You can't eat it, you can't wear, you can't use it as a tool. But some of the things you reference in in some of the books are quite fascinating. The first was that the fact that Mediterranean people believe that gold had some value ultimately lead to Indians and Africana's believing that gold

had some value. How did that mechanism work well? Um, in order to believe that something is valuable, it's you don't need to believe it yourself. It's enough if somebody else believes in it, because you know that you can trade it for things that you consider valuable. If suddenly, I don't know, aliens from outer space would invade Earth and it turns out that they have there is a huge market for onion pills on their planet, immediately the

price of onion PILs on Earth will skyrocket. We can't do we don't need these things, but we can sell it to the aliens and get in exchange. I don't know what urani or or robots or whatever they produce. So suddenly you have reason to value this. And this is what happened with gold in many places when Europeans, for instance, reached America or Polynesia. So some of the local people they just couldn't understand why are these strange white people so obsessed with a nice shining metal, but

that you can't really do anything with it. So so once trade connects to different regions, they're supply and demand naturally leads to prices equalizing. Is that pretty much what happened? Pretty much? Yes, So so let's jump a little bit towards your your writing process, because I'm I'm fascinated the book Sapiens is a serious piece of work that looks like there was an immense amount of research and thinking

that went into it. How does your your writing process begin, How did you start, how did you conceptualize the book initially? And what led to it? Actually, I it came out of a course that they gave in the Hebrew University as a professor, as a professor to first your students about trying to summarize the whole of history to first your students. And I gave it for several years, and I had the opportunity to test all kinds of ideas

on the students and see the reaction. Uh. If they were very bold, then I understood, Okay, something is I should change something here. Instant feedback. Yeah. If they asked a lot of questions, maybe I should talk more about this issue. If something is unclear, I should find an example or some other way of explaining this difficult point.

I generally think that at least in history. Um, if first your students cannot understand what you're saying, you're probably either you don't understand yourself what you try to teach them, or you're saying it in the wrong way. I mean, I don't know. In quantum mechanics, it's not the same. I mean, there are good reasons why, even very good ideas, you cannot explain it to first few students. But in history, I think it almost all cases you should find a way to be able to to to explain it to

first few students. How long did it take you to write sapiens Um, either the first or the second time? The Hebrew edition, it took me like six years or so, and then you had another two years for the English edition. And I know people who when they write, they'll do all their research for two years and then they'll sit down and write, and other people research and then write and research and then write. And what was your what was your process like? It sounds like you were pretty interactive,

pretty dyning. It was very dynamic and interactive. It was not like, Okay, I'll read all these books and then I'll sit for one year and just write it down. It was very interactive and then fluid and changing all the time. And Homo Days seems almost like Sapiens Part two. Here's the history looking act. Now let's look forward and trying and imagine where this leads to. Is that how that was conceived and and when did you start thinking, Hey,

I could continue this this process. It actually also came about in an interactive manner because after I published Sapiens, I gave all these interviews and went and gave these talks and seminars, and in many places most of the questions were actually about the future. It was like, Okay, you now wrote a book about the whole past of humankind. What can you say based on that on where we

might be heading? Talk too? So my thinking went more and more to the future, and I began to give talks and to write articles more about the future, until at one point I said, hey, actually, heavier enough material for a new book. I'm very ridults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Juval Harari. He is the author, most recently of Homo Days, A Brief History of Tomorrow, and and let's jump right in because this is really a fascinating discussion.

I want to start with a quote. Science no surprisingly little about the mind and consciousness. Why is that because the only mind you can observe directly is your own. In science, if you investigate any phenomenon, it's very important to have direct observation of it. If you write about someone culture, people will tell you, okay, go to some more and and investigate it for yourself. If you write about business, it's good if you can observe business people

or have direct business experience. But with the mind, you just can't access the mind of anybody except yourself. You can access the brain, but the brain isn't the mind. The brain is all these synopses and neurons and electrochemical reactions, and scientists assume that this is the substrate for the mind, but it's not the mind. The mind is the subjective experiences, the experience of love and hate and joy and pain.

And you can see the behavior of other people, but you can't feel the love of the hate that somebody else feels. So if you want to research that, you can only research your own mind. And this is extremely difficult because you it's very difficult to be objective and

systematic when you try to observe your own mind. So let me push back on that a little bit, because lots and lots of what we've been learning about the brain recently have been teaching us that much of what we previously thought of as the mind is really a combination of, as you said, biochemical reactions. We've seen in APHASIAX people lose the ability to read, but they can still write, They get they can't speak some folks, but

they can saying. And what we used to think of as part of the personality is really part of the biomechanics that exist. So so let me ask a related question and I'll use another one of your quotes. There's zero scientific evidence that, in contrast to pigs, sapiens have souls. So I have to ask a question, what is the soul?

And how can we, as you said, objectively measure it? Well, Um, the soul, at least in the Christian version, is some unchanging essence which is your true self, and it remains completely without change from birth to death and hopefully even beyond death. We have absolutely no evidence that such a thing exists. Uh. And it stands really in direct contradiction to the theory of evolution, which is why there we so much objection and hate red even to the theory

of evolution. We which no other scientific theory receives so much, so many objections and hatred as the theory of evolution. If you think about it, why I mean, the theory of evolution is actually quite simple in contrast to other theories like quantum mechanics or relativity. But nobody has an objection teaching relativity to kids. Maybe the kids object, but but not nobody else. So what's wrong with the theory

of evolution? And I think that what's really bugs people about the theory of evolution is that if you understand it, you understand own no souls because something unchanging cannot come out of an evolutionary process. Let let me push back on that in two different ways, and I'm fascinated by

your description. First, if we go back to um Copernicus and moving from the geocentric conception of the solar system to the heliocentric, and even then it will the Sun was the center of the universe, not just our solar system. The Church pushed back fiercely on it for reasons similar to what you're suggesting. If you go to the Old Testament, if God created the heavens and the Earth, then the earth is the center of everything, and moving that to

the Sun changes it. But why would evolution if it's merely competition amongst the fittest and passing your genes along and so we end up with a bigger set of antlers or a longer tail, or more plumage or whatever it is. Why would that change our conception of the soul because there are no genes for souls um and it's it's if you really understand what soul means, then the idea that and every lasting, unchanging thing could emerge

out of small genetic change is extremely improbable. I mean, the big question is when did souls first emerge in the process of evolution? Homo sapiens have souls? Did Homo erectors have souls? Did the ancient ancestor of all humanids and chimpanzees have sold When exactly was the magical moment when a small genetic change led to the emergence of an everlasting entity. So the pushback is, oh, you have it wrong. It was six thousand years ago when mankind

was created. And that's from Whence comes all the younger you're describing. Yeah, again, if you subscribe to that, then you can hardly argue with it from a scientific perspective. And again I'm pulling a quote from your book, and I love this data. According to a two thousand and twelve Gallops survey, a mere fifteen percent of Americans believe that we evolved through natural selection, while forty six percent believe that God created humans in their current form sometime

during the last ten thousand years. And your conclusion and is this is why education has essentially zero impact on religion or creative creation beliefs. Fair statement. I wouldn't put it in such an extreme way and in all cases, but it's certainly true that people's beliefs are far more influenced by their community identity and by the religious affiliation than they are by facts being taught in classrooms, either

in in in in schools or in colleges. Uh. The idea that many scientists hold that we just need to tell people facts and this will change their beliefs, it doesn't work like that. In Homo sapiens. Usually beliefs come before facts, especially when you're talking about children who are usually given a religious education in quotes, when they're too young to really be able to debate the merits, the

pros and cons. It's I don't want to use the word in doctrination, but you're you're drumming something into a kid's head before they really have the capacity to objectively evaluate it. That is that a fair statement? Yeah? And and even more so, what we need to realize that people think in stories, not in facts, not in numbers, not in statistics. We are in storytelling animal and watch better than the biblical stories. They are the they are the art types of all our literature and and all

our myths and all our story talent. Yes, and and you cannot fight a good story just with facts. It won't work. It almost never works. I mean, you know, with all the hype currently around post truth and fake news and all that. I mean, fake news have been around for thousands of years. Just think of the Bible, UM, and the idea that okay, we can fight fake fake news with with with with facts. Um. History tells us a very different story. So let's talk about historical knowledge.

I love this observation. You have knowledge that does not change behavior is useless, But knowledge that changes behavior quickly loses its resonance. So explain that now that changes behavior quickly loses its resonance relevance? How is that that it could either be useless or quickly irrelevant? Because once the knowledge you have changes the way in which you behave, um, the world changes and your knowledge is no longer updated. I mean, the best example is what's happening in in

trade and markets and the stock exchange. Let's say that you that you predict that, um, I don't know, in one year the price of oil will be a hundred dollars more than it is today. What will be the immediate result of that knowledge. The result will be that the price of oil will jump today to your to the level you predict, and then it will change. All the data and all the all the calculations, and nobody knows what it will be year from now. I mean.

This is how predictions about the future change the present, and then the future becomes different from what you predicted. So you talk a lot about the future. You don't make such very explicit forecasts, but sometimes you paint a somewhat frightening picture. What do you think is going to happen in terms of robotics and the transference of human consciousness perhaps into machines. Does just mean in the future people might be able to live forever. What what does

that say about the future of of humanity? Well, there is the science fiction version, which usually says that computers will develop consciousness, and then you have the usual storyline of either humans falling in love with computers or computers rebelling and trying to exterminate humankind. And this is like of science fiction, and this is not science because all these storylines confuse intelligence with consciousness. Uh, there are very

different things intelligence and consciousness. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like joy and sadness and pain and pleasure. Um. Now, we have seen amazing development in artificial intelligence, but so far there has been exactly zero development in artificial consciousness. And there is absolutely no reason to believe that computers are anywheren near developing consciousness. We've been speaking with Juval Harari

discussing his most recent book, Homo Days. You can find either Sapiens or Homodeus in any of the finer bookstores or Amazon or on SoundCloud. Be sure and check out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com. Follow me on Twitter at rid Halts. We love your comments, feedback and suggest questions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I'm Barry rid Holts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Hey guys, let me ask you a question, do you have trouble finding

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cloth dot com Custom Shirts made Smarter. Welcome to the podcast. You've all thank you so much for doing this. I've had Sapiens. I mentioned I really enjoyed Last Ape Standing,

which is what led me to Sapiens. And uh, the book I was reading at the time is really very much an evolutionary history of of of various primates and why were there twenty eight and with a survivor you took a very very different approach, not a purely evolutionary approach, and I think people who who are familiar with the book, and that includes people like Mark Zuckerberg and UM. I interviewed Danny Kheman and it was the book he recommended to people, UM. Bill gates the number of people UM,

who are highly regarded. Who recommends the book recommended the book must be deeply satisfying because you have a wonderful fan base. UM. Yes, it's it's fun when what do you write suddenly reaches so many people. So so let's jump into our standard questions we ask all of our guests. UM, you have a historical background. You studied history and then became an academic. Is that what you did before you

started writing books. Yeah. I was a specialist in medieval military history, and so you're familiar familiarity, familiarity you can edit that your familiarity with the way the peasant class lad lead their lives really comes from true history, not just a distorted Uh. Yeah, I think that UM. As a medievally historian, I bring a kind of novel perspective to discussions about cyborgs and artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.

That that makes that makes a whole lot of sense. UM. Let's talk about some of your early mentors who influenced you early in your career. I had a very important influence from my supervisor in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Benjamin Cadara, who was all so a specialist in the Crusades and in the Middle Ages. But to encourage me to really think big about about history. Um, how do you go from I'm kind of fascinated from uh, Jerusalem

Hebrew University to Jesus College in Oxford. That's a that's sort of an interesting juxtaposition between the two. Now you know Jesus was in Jerusalem, so I guess he was. That makes that makes so you just basically said, all right, if I follow Jesus, follow up this path. Um. Who influenced your approach to history? What other historians did you find? Um, really changed the way you looked at at history. Actually

not just historians, but people from other disciplines. I mean there was Jared Diamond, whose book Guns, Germs and Steel gave me again this this this insight that you can actually right a very big history of human kind discussing the most funder mental questions of human existence from scientific perspective. And Jared Diamond was originally a specialist in birds, uh really and an ornithologist. And another big influence was France Duvau,

who specializes in primates, in chimpanzees and and bonobos. And I read his book Chimpanzee Politics, Uh, and it changed, It completely changed the way I understand not just chimpanzee politics, but also human politics. That's interesting. One of my favorite Ted videos is somebody who works with um bonobos and other chimpanzees. And if you give them a task to do, and there two chimps next to each other, or two bonobos and caids always the grapes and the that's fan,

that's him. That's so you give one one of cucumber for doing a task, and you give the other a cucumber, and they're fine. You give the first one of cucumber, and then you give the second one a grape. Cucumbers are essentially water and tasteless. Grapes are sweet and delicious. The first pinobo gets very upset at the lack of fairness, the lack of justice. That I didn't realize that was the person you're referring to. That's a fascinating TED talk

and that's a wonderful video. UM, let's jump into uh some books we you referenced um, guns, germs and steel. What other books have you read and enjoyed? What books have you used for research? And so many? Give us a few By the way, the single most common question I get from listeners are what what books does your guests like? Get from your especially authors, tell me what they're reading, because people love a good book recommendation. We'll start with two Sapiens and Homo daous and that will

keep you busy for a couple of hours. Let's let's talk about some more. So A very big influence when I wrote Tomodos was Donny Khanman's Thinking Fast and Slow. UM. Another big influence was Brave New World by Ando Huxley, which I think is the best science fiction book of

the twentieth century, and certainly the most prophetic. I mean, he was writing in the nineteen thirties, at the time of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, and he basically envisioned not in ninety four world of Secret Police and then Stop and things like that, but he envisioned a consumerist society in which happiness is the highest value and you try to um to change people with with drugs and

with bioengineering. And the really interesting thing about Brave New World is that, in contrast, too, it's never really clear whether it's dystopia or utopia UM. And I think it's it's the most profound science fiction book of the twentieth century. I think it's also the most profound discussion of the themes of happiness and suffering that came out of the West in the in the twentieth century. The that's a high bar. The most profound science fiction book of the

twentieth century. Um, certainly in in many people's top ten, to say the least. How about how about something um? Uh, nonfiction? Well, you mentioned Kaneman. What else have you read that? What are you reading right now? That's always a good question. Right now, I'm actually listening, not reading as an audio book to book called The Gay Gay Revolution about the history of gays and lesbians in the US from the

nineteen forties to the two thousands. I'm now in the mid nineteen seventies, do things of becoming optimistic a little? And the name of that book again, I'm see if I could get the author's name, The Gay Revolution. Let's see who wrote the Gay Revolution? Uh, Lillian Faderman. Yes, the Story of the Struggle. Oh, and that's a relatively new book that just came out, um in September of this past year. Quite interesting. So I assume you do

a lot of reading and a lot of research. What do you do for relaxation, What do you do outside of the office when you want to just kick back a little bit? Well, I usually take my dog for a walk in the woods for an hour a day, and I meditate. I do the Passana meditation for two hours every day repeated. What type of meditation V Passana meditation? The pass which I learned from a teacher called Essenoenko. And I go every year for a long retreat of

thirty to sixty days of meditation. Really, um, I just I was in November December. Actually heard about the Trump election only at the end of December because I entered the meditation, which read in early November, and had no contact with the outside world until the end of December. Well, aren't you lucky? Um? A bit pass A V I P A S S A exactly the meditation two hours

a day. That's a lot of meditation, um, I think. Actually, you know, um, For me, it's a it's a way to really get in touch with reality as it is. I mean to see what is really happening here and now, and for almost all the day, I'm being distracted by emails and twits and funny cat videos and whatever. So at least for two hours every day, I'm really in touch with with reality. That that that's quite quite fascinating. And you mentioned you take your dog for a walk

for an hour a day if I have the time. Yes, what what type of dog do you have? A large mongrel from the street who adopted us a few few years ago. Really that that's quite fascinating. And where are you living these days? Are you here? Are you still know?

I'm still in Israel. I live midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in a small village, which also is is kind of influences my worldview because I'm, you know, half thinking about Tel Aviv and all the high tech and all the these things, and half thinking about Jerusalem and all the religions and loads the past and law tech here. And that, by the way, that hybrid between historical and religious um thought and high tech and modernity is very

much reflected in what you write. I'm certainly no book critic, but it's clear that those are two major influences on your thought process, and that's a somewhat unusual hybrid. Yeah, I think I bring a lot of um of thinking about religion and philosophy to the discussion of what's happening in Silicon Valley. I think the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not Jerusalem. It's

Silicon Valley. Why why is that that that's a fascinating comera, Because this is where the new religions of the twenty one century will come from, not from the Middle East. They will come from Silicon Valley and from from such places. When you say, when you say new religion, you mean Apple and Google and Facebook, or that that those are our new deities, that they were produced. Yes, I think

that they don't produce just gadgets and tools. They produce new ethics, they produce new new philosophies, and eventually they'll even produce new techno. Religions are religions that promise that make all the old promises, will give you prosperity and happiness and peace and eternal life, but here on earth with the help of technology, not after you die, with

the help of supernatural beings. Professor Scott Galloway use it n why you and and he describes Netflix as the operating system of joy, not that far off from what you're referring to the technology moving us into the next phase of of religious worship. So within within the book, you discuss animals a lot, how we've humanized animals, and a number of people have said, hey, this book has

made me want to become a full on vegan. Tell us what we misunderstand about animals and about our relationship and roll with them relative to uh to to the way we've managed to dominate the entire planet as a species. Um, you're a vegan, right, yeah, I'm I'm I'm I I turned. I became vegan as a result of writing these people because all the research I've made about the agricultural revolution and then the industry revolution made me realize the really

terrible way that we are treating other animals. Um, it made me realized, first of all, that there is no scientific consensus that other animals, all mammals, all birds, they have consciousness, they have feelings, they have emotions, they can feel pain, they can feel fear, they can feel depression.

It's not unique to Homo sapiens. And we are three think them in industrial farms as if they were just machines for producing meat and milk and eggs, And it's not just you know, the slaughter of animals, how they live, is really the worst. And it's through even more of the dairy industry then of the meat industry. I mean, where does milk come from? Um, But cows don't give milk to humans. The only reason a cow produces milk is because it first gives birth to a calf, and

it produces the milk for the calf. So in the dairy industry, you get the cow pregnant, then she gives birth to a calf, You take away the calf, slaughter it, and eat it, and then you milk the cow for all she's worth, and then you get her pregnant again and again and again, until after five years she's completely worn down and she's also going to the to the slaughterhouse. So the entire dairy industry is actually built on break king the most fundamental emotional bond of the mammal kingdom,

the bond between mother and offspring. This is the foundation of the dairy industry. To break the bond between the mother cow and the calf. All the milk is coming from there. And when I realized that, uh, pretty horrific yet, was that I don't know how to stop it, but I don't want to be part of it. And that turned you pretty much into a into a vegan. Yes, that that's quite quite amazing. So our last two questions are our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests.

You work with students. If if someone who is a millennial or a recent college grad were to come to you and say, I'm thinking about going into authorship or studying history or being a professor, and they come to you for career advice, what would you say to them. I would say to them that nobody has any clue how the job market would look like in UM, so we really don't know what to teach the young people, whether in school or in college, in terms of careers.

It's quite obvious that what most of what they are learning will be completely irrelevant by the time there are forty or fifty, so they will have to reinvent themselves again and again and again throughout their lives. UM which is why I think the most important skill they must have is the ability to keep learning and to keep reinventing themselves throughout their lives, not to build this stable identity that will serve them from now until they die.

They have to somehow um find it in themselves, the ability to keep changing. And this is an extremely tall older because you know, when you're fifteen or when you're twenty, your whole life is changed. Everything you do is just to invent yourself. But when your volt your fifty, usually you don't like to change very much, but you will have to in the twenty one century if you want

to stay relevant. And our final question, what is it that you know about human history, evolution, consciousness that you wish you knew ten or twenty years ago when you began your work in this field. UM, I love the long, thoughtful pause that we actually know far, far less than we think we in terms of the human collective. Um, it's not that we've got the general picture and we just have a few islands of ignorance. It's just the opposite. We have an ocean of ignorance with a few islands

that we know what's happening there. But the basic stuff, the really basic stuff, we still don't understand it. In particular, we are very, very far from understanding the human mind and the riddle of consciousness. And this is very dangerous because in the twenty one century we're going to get these really amazing powers of manipulation, not just about the outside world, but also about the world inside us. We're going to get the power to manipulate, to engineer our

own bodies and brains and minds. And the danger is that because we don't really understand the mind, we will you misuse these powers. Uh In the world outside, we've used our immense powers in such a way that now we're facing an ecological collapse because we will. We knew how to control the forests and reavers, we didn't understand what this was doing to the ecosystem. The same thing

may happen to the world inside us. We'll start manipulating our bodies and brains with very little understanding of what this is doing to our internal ecosystem, and the result might be a mental collapse. That's fascinating. Thank you, you've all we have been speaking to you. Val Noah Harari, author of the New York Times best selling book Sapiens and the new book Homodaeus, A Brief History of Tomorrow.

If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and look up an intro down an inch, and you could check out any of the other hundred and forties such conversations we've had on Apple iTunes. I would be remiss if I did not thank my recording engineer, Medina Parwana, my booker Taylor Rigs, and my head of research, Michael bat Nick. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I'm Barry Retults.

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