YUVAL NOAH HARARI: Our AI Future Is WAY WORSE Than You Think | Rich Roll Podcast

most people around the world are still not aware of what is happening on the AI front it can invent medicines and treatments we never thought about but it can also invent weapons that go beyond our imagination you're changing the basis of everything it's no wonder there is an earthquake in the structure that is built on top of it I got news for you people the rise of the Machines is already upon us so what exactly do we need to understand about the rapid Ascent of artificial intelligence what does this revolution augur for the future of

the human species to gain Clarity amidst the confusion I'm joined today by Yuval Noah Harari a world-renowned historian and mega best-selling author whose Landmark books on the history and future of humanity have sold an astonishing 45 million copies and made him the public intellectual of our time this is the first time that we are basically about to enter a nonhuman culture the big question is whether we will force it to slow down or it will force us to speed up until the moment we collapse and die his latest book and the terrain for today's conversation

is Nexus an absolutely essential read that makes quite a compelling case for why artificial intelligence will be the biggest disruption in the history of civilization AI can make decisions they they are not just Tools in our hands they are agents creating new realities it's very difficult to appreciate the dangers because the dangers they're kind of alien in the Hollywood scenario you have the Killer Robots shooting people in real life it's the humans pulling the trigger but the AI is choosing the [Music] targets thank you for coming I appreciate you being here today I'm excited to

unpack what I think is a a really uh revelatory book a very important book that speaks to perhaps the most vital issue of our time and in reflecting upon it I was thinking back on homod deas which came out in 2015 yeah and in that book you address AI uh but at that time it was as if you were sounding an alarm on a future story uh that had yet to be had yet to be written yeah and perhaps it came off a bit Cassandra you know in that moment and I'm curious as we find

ourselves now in 2024 eight nine years later it's as if not only are we you know kind of on the cusp of this new Revolution we're mired in it in a way that perhaps even is far more intense than even you predicted at that time yeah I mean things have been moving much much faster than I think any of us predicted and you know in 2016 AI was like this tiny Cloud on the horizon that might arrive in decades or even centuries and here we are in 2024 and the storm is kind of upon us

and I think maybe the most important thing is is really to understand what what AI is because now there is so much hype around AI that it's becoming difficult for people to understand what is AI now everything is AI you know especially in the in the markets in in the investment World they attach the tag AI to just about anything in order to sell it so you know your coffee machine is now a coffee machine is an AI coffee machine and your shoes are AI shoes and what is AI so you know the key thing

to understand is that AIS are able to learn and change by themselves to make decisions by themselves to invent new ideas by themselves if a machine cannot do that it's not really an AI so a coffee machine that just makes you coffee automatically but by a pre-programmed way and it never learns anything new it's just an automatic machine it's not an AI it becomes an AI if as you approach the coffee machine the machine before you press any button addresses you and says to you I've been watching you for the last weeks or months and

based on everything I've learned about you and your facial expression and the time of day and so forth I predict you would like an espresso so I already took the liberty to make a cup for you he made the decision independently and it's really an AI if it then tells you actually I've invented a new machine a new beverage a new drink that no human ever thought about before I call it bestpresso and I think it's better than espresso you would like it more and I took the Liber to prepare a cup for you then

it's really an AI something that can make decisions and invent new ideas by itself and therefore by definition something that we cannot predict how it will develop and evolve and for good or or for bad it can invent medicines and treatments we never thought about but it can also invent weapons and dangerous strategies that go beyond our imagination you characterize AI not as artificial intelligence but as alien intelligence you give it a different term can you explain the difference there and why you why you've landed on that word yeah traditionally the acronym AI stood for

artificial intelligence but with every passing year AI becomes less artificial and more alien alien not in the sense that it's coming from out of space it's not uh we create it but alien in the sense it analyzes information makes decisions invents new things in a fundamentally different way than human beings MH again artificial is from artifact it give us the impression that this is an artifact that we control and this is misleading because yes we designed the kind of baby AI we we gave them the ability to learn and change by themselves and then we

released them to the world and they do things that are not under our control that are unpredictable and in this sense they are alien and again I mean humans are organic entities like other animals we function organically for instance we function by Cycles day and night summer and winter we sometimes active sometimes we need to rest we need to sleep AIS are alien in the sense that they are not organic they function in a completely different way not by cycles and they don't need to rest and they don't need to sleep and now as they

take over more and more parts of reality parts of society there is a kind of tgof War of who would be forced to adapt to whom would the inorganic AIS be forced to adapt to the organic cycles of the human body of the human being or would humans be pressured into adopting this kind of inorganic lifestyle and starting with the simplest thing that a I are always on but people need time to be off so if you think even about something like the financial markets traditionally if you look at Wall Street it's open only Mondays

to Fridays 9:30 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon it's off for the night it's off for the weekends it takes vacations on Christmas on Independence Day and now as algorithms and AIS are taking over the markets they're always on and this puts pressure on human bankers and Investments and so forth you can't take a minute off because then you're left behind so in this sense they are alien not in the sense that they came for Mars to understand artificial intelligence and to understand what is actually happening and where we're heading the thesis of

of this latest book requires us to understand the nature of information itself and the formative ways in which the evolution of information networks are inext from the evolution and progress of humankind so I'm curious about how you discovered that lens into kind of understanding the nature of artificial intelligence and why it's important to contextualize what is occurring right now through that perspective it's actually something I began exploring in in previous books the ideas is that uh information is the most fundamental stratum most fundamental basis of human society and of human reality cuz the human superpower

is the ability to cooperate in very large numbers if you compare us to chimpanzees to elephants to hyenas individually there are some things I can do in the chimpanze con and vice versa uh our big Advantage is not on the individual level the really big Advantage is that chimpanzees can cooperate in you know a few dozen chimpanzees like 50 chimpanzees can cooporate maybe a 100 but with humans with Homo sapiens there is no limit we can cooperate in thousands in millions in billions if you think about the World Trade Network like the food we eat

the shoes we wear everything we consume it sometimes come from the other side of the world so if you have 8 billion people cooperating and this is our big advantage over the chimpanzees and all the other animals what makes it possible for us to cooperate with millions and billions of other human beings it's information information is what holds all these large scale systems together and to understand human history is to a large extent to understand the flow of information and I'll give an example if you think for instance about the difference between democracies and dictatorships

we tend to think about it as a difference or as a conflict between values between ethical systems democracies believe in Freedom dictatorships believe in hierarchies things like that and which is true as far as it goes but on a deeper level information flows differently in democracies and dictatorships it's a different shape a different kind of an Information Network in a dictatorship all decisions are made centrally dictatorships come from dictate one person dictates everything Putin dictates everything in Russia Kim junun dictates everything in North Korea so all the information flows to a single Hub where all

the decisions are being made and sent back as orders so it's a very centralized Information Network a democracy on the other hand if you look at it in terms of you're in alter space looking at the flow of information in the United States you will see several centers in the country Washington the political Center New York the Financial Center Los Angeles the maybe autistic Center but there is no single Center that dictates everything you have several centers and you also have lots and lots of smaller hubs and centers where decisions are constantly being made private

corporations private businesses voluntary associations individuals making lots of decisions constantly exchanging information without that information ever having to pass through the center through Washington or even even through New York or even through Los Angeles so just looking you don't know anything about the values of the people you just imagine you're in outer space on in some spaceship or satellite just observing the flow of information down below the planet you will see that North Korea is very different information flow than the United States and this is crucial to understand and when you look at thousands of

years of history and how history changes and different regimes rise and fall understanding what kind of information technology is available is a key to understanding which political systems or economic systems win for most of History a large scale democracy like the United States was simply impossible if you think about the ancient world the only examples we know of democracy are small city states like Republican Rome or like ancient Athens or even smaller tribes we don't have any example of a large scale democracy of millions of people spread over a vast territory that function democratically now

we know the stories for instance about the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Caesars of the Emperors of the autocrats but it's really not the fault of Augustus Caesar or Nero or any of the other Emperors that Rome became an autocratic Empire simply there was no way that the information technology necessary to maintain a large scale democracy which is bigger than just the city of Rome like the all of Italy or the all of the Mediterranean democracy is a conversation and how can millions of people spread over thousands of kilometers Converse

and decide whether to go to war with the Persian Empire what to do about the immigration crisis on the danu with all these Germans trying to get in you can't have a conversation because you don't have the information technology and you know if it was just the fault of Caesar that Rome became an autocratic Empire we should have seen some other examples of a large scale democracy in India in China somewhere but nowhere we only begin to see large scale democracies in the late modern era after the rise of new information Technologies which were not

available to the Romans like the printed newspaper and then the Telegraph and the radio and television and so forth once you have these Technologies you begin to see large scale democracies like the United States and one final Point why is it so important to understand this once you understand that democracy is actually built on top of Information Technology you also begin to understand the current crisis of democracy because you know now all over the world not just in the US we have a crisis of democracy and to to a large extent this is because there

is a new information technology social media algorithms AIS and it's like you know you're changing the basis of everything so there it's no wonder there is an earthquake in the structure that is built on top of it so we have this idea that the Advent or the Improvement of information systems and information technology is part and parcel of the empowerment of democratic systems across the world but built into that is this sort of indelible misconstrual of information this assumption or presumption that more information is better and leads to truth and knowledge and wisdom uh and

your book kind of puts the lie to that and tells a very different story around not only the definition of information but its purpose yeah I mean information isn't truth information is connection it's something that holds a lot of people together and unfortunately what we see in history that it's often much easier to connect people to create social order with the help of Fiction and Fantasy and propaganda and lies than with the truth so most information is not true uh the truth is a very rare subset of the information in the world the problem of

Truth is that the truth first of all is costly whereas fiction is very cheap if you want to write a truthful history book about the Roman Empire for instance you need to invest a lot a lot of energy time money you need to study Latin you probably need to study Greek ancient Greek you need to do archaeological excavations and find these ancient whether inscriptions or Pottery or weapons and analyze them very cost ly and difficult to write a fictional story about the Roman Empire very easy you just write anything you want and it's there on

on the on the page or on the Internet the truth is often also very complicated because reality is complicated you want to give a truthful explanation for why the Roman Republic fell or why the Roman Empire eventually fell very complicated whereas fiction can be made as easy as as simple as possible and people tend to prefer simple explanations over complicated ones and finally the truth can be painful unattractive we often don't want to know the truth about ourselves whether as individuals which is why we go to therapy for many years to know the things we

don't want to know about ourselves and also on the level of entire nations you know each nation has its own Dark episodes its own skeletons or cemeteries in the closet that people don't want to know about a politician that you know in an election campaign would just tell tell people the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth is unlikely to win many votes uh so in this competition between the truth which is costly and complicated and sometimes painful and fiction which is cheap and simple and you can make it very attractive fiction tends

to win and if you look at you know the the the large scale systems networks in history they're often built on fictions not on the truth maybe I I give one example if you think about visual information like portraits paintings photographs um so what is the most common portrait in the world what is the most famous face in the history of humanity it is the face of Jesus I mean there are more portraits of Jesus than of any other person in the history of the world billions and billions produced over centuries in Cath and churches

and homes and fully 100% of them are fictional there is not a single authentic truthful portrait of Jesus anywhere uh we have no portrait of him from his own lifetime uh the Bible doesn't say a single word about how he looked like there is not a single word in the Bible whether Jesus was tall or short uh dark hair or blonde or bold nothing all the images and you know it's one of the most famous faces in history it all comes from the human imagination and it's still very successful in inspiring people and uniting people

could be for good purposes you know charity and building hospitals and helping the poor but could also be for bad purposes Crusades persecutions inquisitions but either way the the immense power of of a fictional image to unite people and going looking what's happening today in the world so you have these you know big tech companies and social media companies that they tell us that all information is always good so let's remove all restrictions on the flow of information and flood the world with more and more information and more information would mean more truth more knowledge

more more wisdom and this is simply not true most information is actually junk if you just flood the world with information the truth will sink to the bottom it will not rise to the top again because it's costly and complicated and you look around we have this flood of information we have the most sophisticated information technology in history and people are losing the ability to hold a conversation to talk and listen to one another you know in the United States Republicans and Democrats are barely able to to talk to each other and it's not an

American phenomena you see the same thing in in Brazil in France in in the Philippines all over the world because again the basic misconception is that more information is always good for us it's like thinking that more food is always good for us and most information is junk information yeah and what's Curious to me about all of this is that on some level what you're saying is there's nothing new about this there is this idea that suddenly we found ourselves in a post-truth world and part of what you're saying is it's kind of always been

that way but the qualitative difference right now is not by definition these platforms that allow us to share information as much as it is the algorithms that Empower them that make the decisions about what we're seeing and when we're seeing it yeah I mean this is maybe the first place you see the power of AIS to make independent decisions in a way that reshapes the world when I said earlier that you know AI can make decisions and AI they are not just Tools in our hands they are agents creating new realities so you may think

okay this is a prophecy for the future a prediction about the future but it's already in the past because even though social media algorithms they are very very primitive AIS you know the fair generation of AIS they still reshaped the world with the decisions they made in social media on Facebook Twitter Tik Tok all that the ones that make the decision what you will see at the top of your news feed or the next video that you'll be recommended It's Not a Human Being sitting there making these decisions it's an AI it's an algorithm and

these algorithms were given a relatively simple and seemingly benign goal by the corporations the goal was increase user engagement which means in simple English make people spend more time on the platform uh because the more time people spend on Tik Tok or Facebook or Twitter or whatever the company makes more money it sells more advertisements it harvests more data that it can then sell to third parties so more time on the platform good for the company this is the goal of the algorithm now engagement sounds like a good thing who doesn't want to be engaged

but the algorithms then experimented on billions of human guinea pigs and discovered something which which was of course discovered even earlier by humans but now the algorithms discovered it the algorithms discovered that the easiest way to increase user engagement the easiest way to grab people's attention and keep them glued to the screen is by pressing the greed or hate or fear button in our minds you show us some hate filled conspiracy theory and we become very angry we want to to see more we tell about it to all our friends us their engagement goes up

and this is what they did over the last 10 or 15 years they flooded the world with hate and greed and fear which is why again the conversation is breaking down very hard to hold a conversation with all this hate and fear yeah it's a function of unintended consequences that on some level is no different than Nick bostrom's you know alignment problem you know thought experiment about paper clips like this is the exact same thing and I think it speaks to not only human ignorance but human hubris around this powerful technology I think you know

you talk so much about stories and how indelible they are in terms of crafting our reality but one of those stories is we know what we're doing we can handle it we understand the consequences we know the downside here and we're making sure that what we're putting out into the world is is safe and consumer friendly when you know on some level they know it's not but Al they have no idea you know what will become of it as a result and so we're just in this Frontier this unregulated Frontier where anything goes at the

moment yeah I mean I think it's important what you said that these are kind of unintended consequences like the people who manage the social media companies they are not evil they didn't set out to destroy democracy or to flood the world with with hate and and and so forth um they just really didn't foresee that when they give the algorithm the goal of increasing user engagement the algorithm will start to promote hate and one of the first places that let me just interject quickly on that though now that they know that that's the case it's

not as if they're backtracking that's true they're EXA they're not exactly regulation friendly at the moment no absolutely not so all right sorry go ahead you're right now they know and they are not doing nearly enough but initially when they started the whole ball rolling they really didn't know and one of the places you saw it for the first time this was you know eight years ago when I published homo this was happening I I didn't pay attention to it either in Myanmar bur Burma the country formerly known as Burma Facebook was basically the internet

and and cly the biggest social media uh platform and uh in the 2010s the algorithms of Facebook in Myanmar they deliberately spread terrible conspiracy theories and fake news about the rohinga minority in Myanmar which led to an ethnic with of course it was not the only reason there was deep-seated hatred towards rohinga much before but this kind of propaganda campaign online on Facebook contributed to an ethnic cleansing campaign between 2016 and 2017 2018 in which thousands of rohinga were killed tens of thousands were raped and hundreds of thousands were expelled you now have close to

a million rohinga refugees in in Bangladesh and elsewhere and this was fueled to a large extent by this conspiracy theories and fake news on Facebook and at the time the executive of Facebook had no I mean they didn't know even the rohinga existed it's not like it was a conspiracy of Facebook against them for the Hall of Myanmar a country where Facebook had Millions and millions of users they by 2018 this is after they got reports of the of the ethnic cleansing campaign they had just a handful of humans trying to kind of regulate uh

the actions of millions of users in the algorithms and they didn't even speak boures like when the algorithm chose okay I I'll show people this hatefi conspiracy theory video in buor nobody in Facebook headquarters spoke bmes they had no idea what the algorithm was promoting the key thing is is not to absolve the humans from responsibility it's to understand that even very primitive AIS and we were talking about you know like eight years ago MH not things like CHP to still the the decisions made by these algorithms to promote certain content had far reaching and

terrible consequen quences in Myanmar they were not just producing conspiracy theories they were producing their millions of users producing you know cooking lessons and biology lessons and sermons on compassion from Buddhist monks and conspiracy theories and the algorithms made a decision to promote the conspiracy theories and this is just kind of a warning of look what happens with even very primitive AIS and the AIS of today which are far more sophisticated than 2016 they too are still just the very early stages of the AI evolutionary process and we can think about it like the evolution

of of animals until you get to humans you have 4 billion years of evolution you start with microorganisms like amibas and it took billions of years of evolution to get to dinosaurs and mammals and humans now AIS are present at the beginning of a parallel process the CH GPT and so forth they are the amibas of the AI world but AI evolution is not organic it's inorganic it's digital and it's millions of times faster so where it took billions of years to get from amibas to dinosaurs it might take just 10 or 20 years to

get from the AI amibas of today to AI T-Rex in 2040 or 2050 maybe even less maybe even less we're talking about I don't think our brains are are organized properly to really comprehend The Accelerated speed at which this is self-learning and iterating and improving upon itself like just it's a compounding thing that is astronomical meanwhile trillions of dollars are being spent to build these server Farms with these Nvidia chips and there's so much power required to keep these things going they're talking about nuclear I mean this is like this is a whole new world

and yet in talking about it it still feels somewhat like an academic exercise because for myself or somebody who might be watching or listening their experience with AI comes in the form of chat GPT or some of these helpful tools like I like my algorithm it shows me the kind of products that I want to buy without having to search for it and a simple example would be preparing for this podcast like I listen to your book on audiobook and I'm doing what I usually do pulling up a bunch of tabs and you know like

just collating a bunch of information on you and the book and the message that you're putting out but I did something I had never done before which is I got a PDF of Nexus and I uploaded it to a tool called notebook LM M and that tool then synopsized the entire book and created a chat bot where I could ask it questions about your book and ask it to elaborate on certain Concepts and it will even create a podcast conversation between two people about the subject matter of the book so even this conversation is at

risk right irrelevant and I'm like wow that's kind of a a remarkably helpful tool and it's easy to to you know just not really appreciate or connect with the downside risk and power of these tools and where they're leading us so I think what I'm saying is I guess the point I'm trying to make is consumers like all of us we're we're being lured into a Trust of something so powerful we can't comprehend and are ill equipped to be able to kind of cast our gaze into the future and imagine where this is leading us

absolutely I mean part of it is that there is enormous positive potential in AI it's not like it's all doom and gloom there is really enormous positive potential if you think about the implications for healthc care that you know AI doctors available 24 hours a day that know our entire medical history and have read every medical paper that was ever published and can tailor their advice their treatment to our specific life history and our blood pressure our genetics it it can be the biggest revolution in healthcare ever if you think about self-driving Vehicles so every

year more than a million people die all over the world in car accidents most of them are caused by human error like people drinking and then driving or falling asleep at the wheel or whatever uh sell driving vehicles are likely to sell save about a million lives every year this is amazing you think about climate change so yes developing the AIS will consume a lot of energy but they could also find new sources of energy new ways to to harness energy that could be our best shot at at preventing ecological collapse uh so there is

enormous positive potential we shouldn't deny that we should be aware of it and on the other hand it's very difficult to appreciate the dangers because the dangers again they are kind of alien like if you think about nuclear energy yeah also had positive potential nuclear cheap nuclear energy but people had a very good grasp of the danger nuclear war anybody can understand the danger of that with AI it's much more complex because the danger is not straightforward the danger is really I mean we we've seen the Hollywood science fiction scenarios of the big robot Rebellion

that one day the big computer or the AI decides to take over the world and kill us or enslave us and this is extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon because the AIS are still a kind of very narrow intelligence like the AI that can summarize a book it it doesn't know how to act in the physical world outside you have AIS that can fold proteins you have ai that can play chess but we don't have this kind of General AI that can just find its way around the world and build the robot army and and

whatever so people it it's how to understand so what's so dangerous about something which is so kind of narrow in its abilities and I would say that the danger doesn't come from the big robot Rebellion it comes from the AI bureaucracies already today and more and more we will have not one big AI trying to take over the world we will have millions and billions of AIS constantly making decisions about us everywhere you apply to a bank to get a loan it's an AI deciding whether to give you a loan you apply to get a

job it's an AI deciding whether to give you a job you're in court you're found guilty of some crime the AI will decide whether you go for 6 months or 3 years or whatever even in armies we already see now in the war in Gaza in with the war in Ukraine AI make the decision about what to bomb um and in the Hollywood scenario you have the Killer Robots shooting people in real life it's the humans pulling the trigger but the AI is choosing the targets is telling them what to this is much more complex

yeah then the standard scenario every point of connection with bureaucracy then becomes turned over to an algorithm that makes decisions in a black box without the opportunity for rebuttal or conversation right so we we're Outsourcing all of these decisions and creating like an autocratic diaspora of decision makers right and that in turn like you can imagine over time like what emerges from that is is like a godhead or a Pantheon of gods where there's an authoritarian regime that's dispersed across this in which we are relenting our agency over to these machines and trusting that they're

making the right decisions but not knowing how those decisions are being made even the engineers who are creating the algorithms don't know and there's something you know kind of innately terrifying about that again it's not authoritarian in the sense that there is a single human being that is kind pulling all the levers no it's it's the AI like the bank has this AI that decides who is qualified to get a loan and if they tell you we decided not to give to give you a loan and you ask the bank why not and the bank

says we don't know I mean computer says no I mean the algorithm says no we don't understand why the algorithm says no but we trust the algorithm and this is likely to spread to to more and more places the key thing is it's not that the bank is hiding something from you it's really that the AIS make decisions in a very different way than human beings on a basis of a lot more data so if the bank really wanted to explain to you why they refused to give you a loan like let's say there is

a law the government passes a law of a right to an explanation if the bank refused to give you a loan you can apply they must give you an explanation so the explanation well people fear that it will be kind of I don't know racist bias or homophobic bias like in the old days that the algorithm so that you're black or you're Jewish or you're gay and this is why I refuse to give you a loan it won't be like that I mean the bank will send you an entire encyclopedia in millions of pages saying

this is why the computer refused to give you a loan the computer took into account thousands and thousands of data points about you each one based on statistics on millions of of PR previous cases and now you can go over these millions of pages if you like and if you want to challenge okay but but it's not the kind of old style racism or whatever sure a new version of the terms and conditions that we just click on without reading right except uh extrapolated hundredfold um in addition to that with all of these data points

I can't help but think that that you know these these machines the veracity of the information that these machines provide us with is only as reliable as the data sets that it has been provided with and and right now we're tipto into a situation where the internet is being uh rapidly degraded because it's being populated more and more by AI content now when you go to Google and you search the first thing you see is a is sort of an AI kind of summary of your query as opposed to links and this in turn is

undermining the business model of Legacy Media and all forms of media right so as those continue to die on the vine more and more of the internet will be a result of AI generated content and then it becomes a recursive thing in which it's feeding upon its own inputs to make decisions and you know with that like you can imagine a degradation of the data set upon which it is making those decisions exactly even if you think about something like music so AI that now creates music it basically ate the whole of human music like

for thousands of years humans produced music or art or theater whatever within a year the current AI just ate the whole of it and digested it and start now creating new music or new texts or new images and the first kind of generation of AI texts or music um this is based on on previous human culture but with each passing year the AIS will be eating their own products because as you know the human share in music production or the human share in text production or image production will go lower and lower most images most

music will be produced at least to in part by Ai and this will be the new food that the AI eats and then you have exactly what you describ this recursive pattern and where it will lead us we have no idea I mean another way to think about it this is the first time that we are basically about to enter a non-human culture like humans are our cultural entities we live cun inside culture like all this music and art and also finance and also religion this is all part of culture and for tens of thousands

of years the only entities that produced culture were other humans so all the songs you ever heard were produced by humans all the religious mythologies you ever heard came from the human imagination now there is a an alien intelligence a non-human intelligence that will increasingly produce songs and music mythology Financial strategies political ideas even before we rush to decide is it good is it bad just stop and think about the meaning of living in a nonhuman culture or a culture which is I don't know 40% or 70% non-human it's not like going to China and

seeing a different human culture it's like really alien culture here on Earth yeah my human mind bristles at that I start thinking about like this this bias I have around the originality of human thought and emotion and this kind of assumption that AI will never be able to fully mimic The Human Experience right there's something indelible about what it means to be human that the machines uh will never be able to fully replicate and when you talk about you know information the purpose of information being to create connection a big piece there is intimacy like

intimacy between human beings so information is meant to create connection but now we have so much information and we're feeling very disconnected so there's something broken in this system and I think it's driving this loneliness epidemic but on the other side it's it's making us value like intimacy maybe a little bit more than we were previously uh and so I'm curious about where intimacy kind of fits into this you know posthuman World in which culture is being dictated by machines I mean human beings are wired for that kind of intimacy and I think our radar

or our kind of ability to you know identify it when we see it is part of what makes us human to begin with maybe the most important part um I think the key distinction here that is often lost is the distinction between intelligence and Consciousness that intelligence is the ability to pursue goals and to overcome problems and obstacles on the way to the goal the goal could be a self-driving vehicle trying to get from here to San Francisco the goal could be increasing user user engagement and an intelligent agent knows how to overcome the problems

on the way to the goal this is intelligent and this is something that AI is definitely acquiring in at least certain Fields AI is now much more intelligent than us like in playing chess much more intelligent than human beings but Consciousness is a different thing than intelligence Consciousness is the ability to feel things pain pleasure love hate uh when the AI wins a game of chess it's not joyful if there is a tense moment in the in the game it's not clear who is going to win the AI is not tense it's only the human

player which is tense or frightened or anxious the AI doesn't feel anything now there is a big confusion because in humans and also in other mammals in other animals in dogs and pigs and horses and whatever intelligence and Consciousness go together we solve problems based on our feelings our feelings are not something that kind of evolution decoration it's the core system through which marals make decisions and solve problems is based on our feelings so we tend to think that Consciousness and intelligence must go together and in all these science fiction movies you see that as

the computer or robot becomes more intelligent then at some point it also gains Consciousness it falls in love with the human or whatever and we have no reason to think like that yeah Consciousness is not a mere extrapolation of intelligence a qualitatively different thing yeah and again if you think in terms of evolution so yes the evolution of mammals took a certain path a certain Road in which you develop intelligence based on Consciousness but so far what we see is computers they took a different route their Road develops intelligence without consciousness I mean computers have

been developing you know for 60 70 years now they are not very intelligent at least in some fields and still zero Consciousness now this could continue indefinitely maybe they are just on a different path maybe eventually they will be far more intelligent than us in everything and still will have zero Consciousness we'll not feel pain or pleasure or love or hate you know the same way that if you think about birds and airplanes so airlanes did not become like birds airlanes don't fly using feathers and so forth they fly in a completely different way it's

not like that at a certain point when the airplane flies fast enough suddenly the the feathers will appear no and it could be the same with intelligence and Consciousness that it will be more and more intelligent without feelings ever appearing now what adds to the problem is that there is nevertheless a very strong commercial and political incentive to develop AIS that mimic feelings to develop AIS that can create intimate relations with human beings that can cause human beings to be emotionally attached to the AIS even if the AIS have no feelings of themselves they could

be trained they are already trained to make us feel that they have feelings mhm and to start developing relationships with them why is there such an incentive because intimacy is on the one hand maybe the most cherished thing that that the human can have uh you know I was just on on the way here we were listening to Barbara ston singing are people who need people are the luckiest people in the world that intimacy is not a liability it's not something bad that oh I I need this no it's it's the greatest thing in the

world but it's also potentially the most powerful weapons weapon in the world if you want to convince somebody to buy a product if you want to convince somebody to vote for a certain politician or party intimacy is like the Ultimate Weapon I mean so far in history there was a big battle for attention how to grab human attention also we talked about earlier in social media how how to get human attention and there were ways like I don't know in Nazi Germany Hitler could Force everybody to listen to his speech on radio so he had

command of attention but not of intimacy there was no technology for Hitler or Stalin or anybody else to mass produce intimacy now is AIS it is possible technically to mass produce intimacy you can create all these AIS that will interact with us and they will understand our feelings because again feelings are also patterns You can predict a person's feelings by watching them for weeks and months and learning their patterns and facial expression and tone of voice and so forth and then if it's in the wrong hands it could be used to manipulate us like like

never before sure it's our ultimate vulnerability this beautiful thing that makes us human becomes this uh great weakness that we have because as these AIS continue to self iterate their capacity to mimic conscious and human intimacy uh will reach such a degree of fidelity that it will be indistinguishable to the human brain and then humans become like these unbelievably easy to hack machines who can be directed wherever the AI you know chooses to direct them yeah it's not a a prophecy we we can take actions today to prevent this uh we can have regulations about

it we can for instance have a regulation that AIS are welcome to interact with you humans but on condition that they disclose that they are AIS if you talk with an AI doctor that's good but the AI should not pretend to be a human being you know I'm talking with an AI I mean it's not that there is no possibility that AI will develop Consciousness we don't know I mean there could be that AI will really develop conscious to such a degree of fidelity does it even in terms of like how human beings interact with

it does it matter for the human beings no I mean again this is the problem I mean because we don't know if they really have Consciousness or they're only very very good at mimicking Consciousness so the key question is ultimately political and ethical if they have Consciousness if they can feel pain and pleasure and love and hate this means that they are ethical and political subjects they have rights that uh you should not inflict pain on an AI the same way you should not inflict pain on a human being that what they like what they

love might be as important as what human beings desire so they should also vote in elections and they could be the majority because you know you can have a country 100 million humans and 500 million AIS so do they choose the government in this situation now you know in the United States interestingly enough there is actually an open legal path for AIS to gain rights it's one of the only countries in the world where would this is the case because in the United States corporations are recognized as legal persons with rights until today this was

a kind of legal fiction like according to US law Google is a person it's not just a it's a person and as a person it also have freedom of speech this is the Supreme Court ruling for 2010 of Citizen United now until today this was just legal fiction because every decision made by Google was actually made by some human being an executive a lawyer an accountant Google could not make a decision independent of the humans but now you have AIS so imagine the situation when you incorporate an AI now this AI is a corporation and

as a corporation US law recognizes it at a as a person with certain rights like freedom of speech now it can earn money it can go online for instance and offer its services to people and earn money then it can open a bank account and invest its money in the stock exchange and if it's very smart and very intelligent it could become the more the richest person in the US now imagine the richest person in the US is not a human it's an AI and according to us slw one of the rights of this person

is to make political contributions donations this was the main reason behind citizen United in in 2010 so this AI now makes billions of dollars of contributions to politicians in exchange for expanding AI rights so and the legal path is in the US is completely open you don't need any new law to make this happen uhhuh that's like a that's a plot of a movie yeah when you know we in La yeah I mean wow that's so wild to contemplate what are the differences in the ways in which the Advent of this powerful technology is impact

ing Democratic systems and authoritarian systems so both systems have a lot to gain and have a lot to lose again the AI it's it's the most powerful technology ever created it's not a tool it's an agent so you have millions and billions of new agents are very intelligent very capable that can be used to create the best healthcare system in the world but also the most lethal army in the world or the worst secret police in the world if you think about authoritarian regimes so throughout history they always wanted to monitor their citizens around the

clock but this was technically impossible even in the Soviet Union you know you have 200 million Soviet citizens you can't follow them uh all the time because the the KGB didn't have 200 million agents and even if the KGB somehow got 200 million agents that's not enough because you know in in the Soviet Union it's still basically paper bureaucracy the secret police if a secret agent followed you around 24 hours a day at the end of the day they write a paper report about you and send it to KGB headquarters in Moscow so imagine every

day KGB headquarters is flooded with 200 million paper reports now to be useful for anything somebody needs to read and analyze them they can't do it they don't have the analysts therefore even in the Soviet Union some level of privacy was still the default for most people uh for technical reasons now for the first time in history it is technically possible to annihilate privacy a totalitarian regime today doesn't need millions of human agents if he wants to follow everybody around you have the smartphones and cameras and drones and microphones everywhere and you don't need millions

of human analysts to analyze this o of information you have ai and this is already beginning to happen this is not a future prediction in many places around the world you begin to see the formation of this totalitarian surveillance regime it's happening in my country in Israel Israel is building this kind of surveillance regime in the occupied Palestinian territories to follow everybody around all the time and also in our region in Iran since the Islamic revolution in 1979 they had the hijab laws which says that every woman when she goes out walking or even driving

in her private car she must wear the hijab the head scarve and until today the regime had difficulty enforcing the hijab laws because they didn't have you know millions of police officers that you can place on every street a police officer if a woman drives without a headscarf immediately she's arrested and fine or whatever in the last few years they switched to relying on an AI system Iran Is Now crisscrossed by uh surveillance cameras with facial recognition software which recognizes automatically if in the car that just passed by the camera the facial recognition software can

identify that this is a woman not a man and she's not wearing the hijab and identify her identity find her phone number and within half a second they send her an SMS message saying you broke the hijab LW your car is impounded your car is confiscated stop the car and by the side of the world this is daily occurrence today in Teran and isan and other parts of Iran and uh this is based on AI and it's not like the there is a report that go to the court and some human judge goes over the

data and decides what to do the AI like immediately decides okay the car is confiscated and this can happen in more and more places around around the world like even in the US you know for for if you think about all the debate about abortion without going into the debate itself the people who think rightly or wrongly but they think that abortion is murder they have a very strong incentive to build a similar surveillance system for American women you know to stop murder mhm like you can build this surveillance system that can identify yesterday you

were pregnant today you are not what happened in between so it's not just a problem you know for Iran or for the Palestinians or the Chinese this this can come to the US as well and to prevent them from crossing state lines things like that yeah yeah like okay you went from I don't know Texas to California you you were pregnant you came back you're not pregnant what happened in California so it feels like AI is this incredible tool to consolidate power uh around authoritarian regimes but it also has its its pitfalls too like it's

not the perfect tool it also frightens the autocrats uh because the one thing that human dictators always feared most was not a democratic Revolution the one thing they feared most is a powerful subordinate that they can't control and that might manipulate them or take power from them if you can look at the Roman Empire not a single Roman Emperor was ever toppled by a democratic Revolution never happened but many of them uh lost their life or their power to a subordinate you know a general that rebelled against them a provisional Governor their brother their wife

that took power from them this is the greatest fear of every dictator also today and so if you think about AI so if you're a human dictator and you now give this immense power to an AI system where is the guarantee that this system will not turn against you and either eliminate you or just turn you into a puppet I mean what we also know about dictators it's relatively easy to manipulate these people if you can whisper in their ear because they are very paranoid and the easiest people to manipulate are the paranoid people and

we have our AI Corporation in the United States that can deploy billions of dollars towards Bots and whatever else to you know create that paranoia or you really just need to hack one person you know to to for an AI to take power in the US very complicated it's such a distributed system like okay the AI can learn to manipulate the president but it also needs to manipulate the Senators and the Congress members and the state Governors and the Supreme Court like what would the AI do with the Senate phili Buster it's difficult but if

you want to take power in a dictatorship you just need to learn to manipulate a single person so uh the dictators are not all happy about the AIS and we already beginning to see it for instance with chatbots that they are very concerned because you know you can design a chatbot which will be completely loyal to the regime but once you release it to the internet to start interacting with people in real life it changes I mean remember what we talked earlier that AI is defined by the ability to learn and change by itself so

even if you if Putin creates like the the Putin's chatbot that always says that Putin is great and Putin is right and Russia is great and so forth but then you release it to the real world it starts observing things in the real world for instance it notices that you know in Russia the invasion of Ukraine is officially not a war it's called a special military operation and if you say that it's a war you go to prison for up to I think 3 years or something like that because it's not a war it's a

special military operation now what do you do if a very intelligent chatbot That You released you know connects the dot and says no it's not a special military operation it's a war would you send a chat Bo to prison what what can you do and you know democracies of course also have a problem with chatbot saying things we don't like they can be racist they can be homophobic whatever but the thing about democracy it has a relatively wide margin of Tolerance even for anti-democratic speech dictatorships have zero margin for dissenting views so they have a

much bigger problem with how to control these unpredictable chant points over the last decade of Hosting this podcast my mission has been to engage in what I consider to be critically important conversations about the things that matter most in life while I'm immensely grateful for the growth of this show I've also come to realize that my voice alone is not enough this Mission cannot be a solitary Endeavor so I wanted to find a way to help amplify other meaningful voices and the result is voicing change media this beautiful Consortium of thinkers of storytellers artists and

Visionaries all committed to fostering meaningful exchanges intentionally curated for those committed to the path of self-discovery together we're creating a space of growth a space of understanding where every exchange has the potential to enrich our lives and catalyze profound personal and planetary change visit voicing change. media to learn more And subscribe how are you interpreting uh the current moment given that we're on the cusp of an election here in the United States and you know there's a lot of discourse around the existential threat to democracy that we may be facing uh what role is AI

playing in this what should we understand about the impact of this technology on us as Citizens and voters at present I don't think that AI has again social media has of of course a huge impact on the political discourse and thereby on the results of the elections but I don't see AI really kind of changing or manipulating the elections in November it's too close the big question is whoever wins the elections maybe the most important decisions that person has to make will be about AI because of the extremely rapid Pace that this technology is is

developing you know you look at what CH GPT was a year ago you look at what things are now in in in 2024 what will be the state of AI in 2027 2028 so you know I watched the presidential debate most people their main takeaway was about the cats and the dogs it's the most memorable thing for the debate I mean you know whoever wins maybe we'll have to make some of the most important decisions in history about the relations uh I if if you're worried about immigration it's not the immigrants that will you know

replace the taxi drivers it's the immigrants that will replace the bankers that you should be worried about and it's the AIS not somebody coming from south of of the border and who do you trust to make these momentous decisions now and if you see think specifically about the threats to democracy so one thing we learned from history is that democracies always since again ancient Athens they always had this one single big problem or weakness that democracy is basically a kind of a deal that you give power to somebody for a limited time time period for

four years on condition they give it back and then you can uh make an a different Choice like we tried this it didn't work let's try something else this ability to say let's try something else this is democracy and it's B on that you give power and you expect to get it back after years transfer at the end of that term if you give power to somebody who then doesn't give it back they now have the power they have the power to also stay in power that was always the biggest danger in democracy so for

me the in the issue in the US elections it's you can discuss the economic policies the foreign policies you like this you like that there is discussion to be had but you have your one person Donald Trump and that has you know you have a record from the previous time that this person doesn't want to give power back and he is willing to go a long way including potentially inciting violence to uh avoid giving power back and you want to give him so much power that doesn't sound like a very a very good idea so

for me this is the kind of the number one issue in the elections everything else is is of marginal importance in comparison yeah I mean I think it challenges our our our predels around the stability of democracy and is forcing us to really embrace the fact that it is a delicate Dynamic that is you know informed by Collective action by the people and in reflecting upon you know this technology also uh you know the story of technology is one in which our ability to legislate around it and regulate it always falls you know way behind

the pace of advancement and now we're in a situation where the pace of advancement is like nothing we've ever seen before which calls into question our ability to not only you know kind of put guardrails around it but to even understand what is actually happening the history of Information Systems is one of collective human cooperation and yet we're in a a situation right now where it feels like cooperation is being challenged not only nationally here in the United States but internationally and so as we kind of begin to talk about how we're going to triage

this or or find Solutions like where do you land in terms of our capacity to collectively come together as a global Community to figure out Solutions and then put them into motion so that we don't tiptoe into some kind of dystopia so there is a lot to unpack here so first of all when we think about cooporation as we said earlier this was always our biggest Advantage as a species that we cooperate better than anybody else we can construct these even Global networks of trade that no other animal even understands like if you think about

I don't know horses so horses never figured out money they were bought and sold but they never understood what are these things that the humans are exchanging and this is why horses could never unite against us or could never manipulate us because they never figured out how the system works that one person is giving me to another person in exchange for a few shiny metal things or some pieces of paper AI is is different it understands money better than most people like most people don't understand how the financial system really works and financial AIS inin

in Tech they already surpass most human beings not all human beings but most human beings in their understanding of money so we are now confronting again millions of and billions of new agents that potentially can use our own systems against us that they computers can now collaborate using for instance the financial system more efficiently than humans can so the whole issue of cooporation is is is changing and computers also learn how to use the communication systems to manipulate us like like in social media so they cooperating where we are losing the ability to cooperate and

that should raise the alarm now and the thing that it's very difficult to understand what is happening if we want humans around the world to cooperate on this to build guard rails to regulate the development of AI first of all you need humans to understand what is happening secondly you need the humans to trust each other and most people around the world are still not aware of what is happening on the AI front you have a very small number of people in just a few countries mostly the US and China and a few others who

understand most people in Brazil in Nigeria in India they don't understand and this is very dangerous because it means that a few people many of them are not even elected by the US ciitizen they are just you know private companies they will make the most important decisions and the even bigger problem is that even if people start to understand they don't trust each other like I had the opportunity to talk to some of the people who are leading the AI Revolution which is still led by humans it is still humans in charge I don't know

for how many more years but as of 2024 it's still humans in charge and you meet with these you know entrepreneurs and business tycoons and politicians also in the US in China in Europe and they all tell you the same thing basically they all say we know that this thing is very very dangerous but we can't trust the other humans if we slow down how do we know that our competitors will also slow down whether our business competitors let's say in here in the US or our Chinese competitors across the ocean and you go and

talk with the competitors they s the same thing we know it's dangerous we would like to slow down to give us more time to understand to assess the dangers to debate regulations but we can't we have to rush even faster because we can't trust the other Corporation the other country and if they get it before we get it it will be a disaster and so you have this kind of paradoxical situation where the humans can't trust each other but they think they can trust the AIS because when you talk with the same people and you

tell them okay I understand you can't trust the Chinese or you can't trust open AI so you need to move faster developing the super AI how do you know you could trust the AI and then they tell you oh I think that will be okay I think we've figured out how to make sure that the AI will be trustworthy and under our control so you have this very paradoxical situation when we can't trust our fellow humans but we think we can trust and layer on top of that is an incentive structure of course that further

engenders distrust in this arms race right like the prize goes to the Breakthrough developers and those will be rewarded and remunerated in ways that are you know perhaps unprecedented right so absolutely so the breakthroughs and what's on the other side of that is is so enticing that any discourse around regulation or anything else that might slow it down becomes not only a national security threat but also an entrepreneurial threat right so everything is motivating rapid acceleration uh at the cost of transparency and Regulation and all these other things all these checks and balances that that

we really need right now and I don't know like you know how you're feeling about this but it it leaves me a little cold and and pessimistic like you're a historian like the the story of humankind is is all gas no breaks you know like let's just we're plowing forward and we'll deal with the consequences when they come like we're not wired adequately to really appreciate the long-term consequences of our Behavior we're we're kind of you know looking right in front of us and making decisions based on how it's going to impact Us in the

immediate future and and very little else yeah I mean throughout history the problem is people are very good at solving problems but they tend to solve the wrong problems like they spend very little time deciding what problem we need to solve like 5% of the effort goes on choosing the problem then 95% of the effort goes in solving the problem we we we focus on and then we realize oh we actually solved the wrong problem and it just creates new problems down the road that we now need to and then we do it the same

again and you know wisdom often comes from Silence from taking time from slowing down let's really understand the situation before we rush to make a decision and you know it starts on the individual level that so many people for instance think oh my main problem is in life that is that I don't have enough money and then they spend the next 50 years making lots of money and even if they succeed they wake up at a certain point and said oops I think I it shows the wrong problem I think it wasn't yeah I need

some money but it wasn't the my main problem in life and we are perhaps doing it collectively as a species the same thing you know you go back to something like the Agricultural Revolution so people thought okay we don't have enough food let's produce more food with agriculture we'll domesticate wheat and rice and potatoes we'll have lots more food life will be great and then they domesticate these plants and also some animals cows chickens pigs whatever and they have lots of food and they start building these huge agricultural societies with towns and cities and then

they discover a lot of new new problems they did not anticipate for instance epidemics hunter gatherers did not suffer almost any infectious diseases because most infectious diseases came to humans from domesticated animals and they spread in the dense towns and cities now if you live in a hunter gatherer band you don't hold any chickens or pigs so it's very unlikely some virus will jump from a wild chicken to you and even if you got some new virus you have just like 20 other people in your band and you move around all the time maybe you

infect five others and like three die and that's the end of it but once you have these big agricultural cities then you get the epidemics people thought they were building Paradise for humans turned out they were building Paradise for germs and human life expectancy and human living conditions for most humans actually goes down if you're a king or a high priest it's okay but for the average person it was actually a bad move and the same thing happens again and again throughout history and it can happen now on a very very big scale uh with

AI in a way it goes back to this issue of organic and inorganic that organic systems are slow they need time and this AI is an inorganic system which accelerates beyond anything we can we can deal with and the big question is whether we will force it to slow down or it will force us to speed up until the the moment we collapse and die I mean if you force an organic entity to be on all the time and to move faster and faster and faster eventually it collapses and dies one of the things I

heard you say that that really struck me was this uh it's a quote if something ultimately destroys us it will be our own delusions H so can you elaborate on that a little bit and how that applies to what we've been talking about yeah I mean the AI at least of the present day they cannot Escape our control and they cannot destroy us unless we allow them or unless we kind of order them to do that we are still in control but because of our you know political and mythological delusions we cannot trust the other

humans and we think we need to develop these AIS and uh faster and faster and give them more and more power because we have to compete with the other humans and this is the thing that could really destroy us and you know it's very unfortunate because we do have a track record of actually being quite successful of of building trust between humans it just takes time I mean if you think about again the long Arc of human history so these hunter gatherer bands tens of thousands of years ago they were tiny couple of dozen individuals

and even though the next steps like agriculture they had their downside again like epidemics people did learn over time how to build much larger societies which are based on trust if you now live in United States or in some other country you're are part of a system of hundreds of millions of people who trust each other in many ways which were really unimaginable in the Stone Age like you don't know 99.99% of the other people in the country and still you trust them with so much I mean the food you eat mostly you did not

go to the forest to hunt and gather it by yourself you you rely on Strangers to provide the food for you most of the tool you use are coming from strangers your security you rely on police officers on soldiers that you never met in your life they are not your cousins they are not your next door neighbors and still they protect your life so yes if you now go to the global level okay we still don't know how to trust the Chinese and the Israelis still don't know how to trust the Iranians and vice versa

but it's not like we are stuck while we were in the Stone Age we've made immense progress in building human trust and we are rushing to throw it all away because uh it just again it takes time it will not happen tomorrow yeah I mean I think it's urgent that we find a way back to repairing some institutional trust right like that has been degraded in recent times and I think without that uh we stand very little chance as a democratic Republic of surviving and solving these kinds of problems absolutely if if you ask in

brief what is the key to building trust between millions of strangers the key is institutions because you can't build a personal intimate relationship with millions of people so it's only institutions whether it's courts or uh police forces or newspapers or universities or healthc Care Systems that build trust between people and unfortunately we now see this uh again another epidemic of distrust in institutions on both the right and the left it is fueled by a very cynical worldview which basically says that the only reality is power and humans only want power and all human interactions are

power struggles so whenever somebody tells you something you need to ask whose privileges are being served whose interests are being Advanced and any institution is just a elite conspiracy to take power from us so journalists are not really interested in knowing the truth about anything they just want power and the same for the scientists and the same for the judges and if this goes on then all trust in institutions collapses and then Society collapses and the only thing that can still function in that situation is a dictatorship because dictatorships don't need trust they are based

on terror so people who attack institutions they often think oh we are liberating the people from these authoritarian institutions they are actually Paving the way for a dictatorship and the thing is that this view is not just very cynical it's also wrong humans are not these power crazy demons all of us want power to some extent that's true but that's not the all truth about us humans are really interested in knowing the the truth about ourselves about our lives about the world on a very deep level because you can never be happy if you don't

know the truth about your life are because you will not know what are the sources of misery again you will focus on your life if you don't know the truth you waste all your life trying to solve the wrong problems and this is true of also of journalists and judges and scientists yes there there is corruption in every Institution this is why we need a lot of Institutions to keep each one another in check but if you destroy all trust in institutions what you get is either Anarchy or a dictatorship and again it's a good

exercise every now and then to stop and think about how every day we are protected by all kinds of Institutions like when people talk with me about the Deep State you know this conspiracy about the Deep State I immediately think about the sewage system the sewage system is the Deep State it's a deep H system of tunnels and pipes and pumps which is the state built under our houses and streets and neighborhoods and saves our life every day because it keeps our sewage separate from our drinking water you know you go to the toilet you

do your thing it goes down into the deep state which keeps it separate from the drinking water uh if I can tell one historical anecdote where did it come from so you know after Agricultural Revolution you have big cities they are Paradise for germs hot beds for epidemics this continues really until the 19th century London in the 19th century was the biggest city in the world and one of the most dirty and polluted and a hot bed for epidemics and in the middle of the 19 century there is a cholera epidemic and people in London

are dying from cholera and then you have this bureaucrat medical bureaucrat Jon Snow not the guy from Game of Thrones a real Jon Snow who did not fight dragons and zombies but actually did save millions of lives cuz he went around London with lists and he interviewed all the people who got sick or who died if somebody died from Colorado he would interview their family tell me where did this person get their drinking water from and he made these long lists of hundreds and thousands of people and by analyzing these lists he pinpointed a certain

well on Broad Street in SoHo in London where everybody almost everybody who got sick on colera they had a zip of water from that well at a certain stage and he convinces the municipality to disable the pump of the of the well and the epidemic stops and then they investigate they discover that the well was dug about a meter away from a cesspit and one water sewage water from the cesspit got into the drinking water and today if you want to dig a well or a cesspit in London or in Los Angeles you have to

fill so many forms and to get all these bureaucratic permits and it saves our lives and how does that relate to this idea of the deep state I'm trying to tether those two Notions together again the people who believe the conspiracy theories about the Deep State they say that all all these State bureaucracies they are Elite conspiracy is against the common people trying to take over power trying to destroy us and in most cases no the people in this you know to manage a seage system you need plumbers you also need bureaucrats again you need

to apply for a license to dig a well and it is managed by all these kind of state bureaucrats and it's a very good thing because again there is corruption in these places sometimes this is why we keep also courts you can go to court this this is why we keep newspapers so they can expose corruption in the cities in the municipalities sewage department but most of the time most of these people are honest people who are working very hard every day to keep our sewage separate from our drinking water and to Keep Us Alive

and by extrapolation there are all of these bureaucracies that are working in our interest in invisible ways that we take for granted exactly basically right you've often said Clarity is power power and I think your superpower is your ability to kind of stand at 10,000 ft and look down on Humanity in the planet and identify what's most important in these macro trends that help us make sense of what's Happening Now and I'd like to kind of end this with some thoughts on how you cultivate that clarity through meditation and your you know very kind of

like profound uh practice of mindfulness and information deprivation I should say right yeah information fasts yeah starting maybe is with the idea of an information fast so I think this is important today for every person to go in an information diet that this idea that more information is always good for us it's like thinking that more food is always good for us it's it's not true and the same way that the world is full of junk food that we better avoid the world is also full of junk information that we have better avoid information which

is artificially filled with greed and hate and fear information is the food of the mind and we should be as mindful as what we put into our minds as of what we put into our mouths but it's not just about limiting consumption it's also about digesting it's also about detoxifying like we go throughout our life and we take in a lot of junk whether we like it or not that fills our mind and I I meditate two hours every day so I can tell you there is a lot of junk in there a lot of

hate and fear and greed that I picked up over the years and it's important to take time to Simply digest the information and to also detoxify to kind of let go of all this hatred and and anger and fear and and uh and greed which is in our minds so I began when I was doing my PhD in Oxford a friend recommended that I go on a Meditation Retreat or vasana a meditation and for a year he kind of nagged me to go on and I said no this is kind of mystical mambo jumbo I

don't want to to to and eventually I went and it was amazing because it was the most remote thing for mysticism that I could imagine uh because I it was a 10 days Retreat and on the very first evening of the retreat the teacher Essen goenka the only instruction he gave he didn't tell me to kind of visualize some godess so do this man nothing he just said what is really happening right now bring your attention to your nostrils to your nose and just feel whether the breath is going in or whether the breath is

going out that's the only exercise like a pure observation of reality what amazed me was my inability to do it like I would bring my attention to the nose and try to feel is it going in is it going out and after about 5 Seconds some thought some memory some fantasy would arise in the mind and would just hijack my attention and for the next two or three minutes I would be rolling in this fantasy or memory until I realize hey I actually need to observe my breath and I would come back to the Breath

Again 5 seconds maybe 10 seconds I will be able oh now it's coming in it's coming in oh now it's going out it's going out and again some memory would come and hijack me and I realized first that I've I know almost nothing about my mind I have no control of my mind and my mind is just like this Factory that constantly produces fantasies and Illusions and delusions that come between me and reality like if I can't observe the breath going in and out of my nostrils because some fantasy comes up what hope do I

have of understanding AI or understanding the conflict in the Middle East without some mindmade illusion or fantasy coming between me and reality and for the last 24 years I have this daily exercise of I devote two hours every day to just what is really happening right now I sit with closed eyes and just try and focus let go of all all the mindmade stories and feel what is happening to the breath what is happening to my body the reality of the present moment I also go for a long Meditation Retreat usually every year of between

30 days and 60 days of meditation uh because again one of the things you realize there is so much noise in the mind that just to calm it down to the level that you can really start meditating seriously it takes three or four days of continuous meditation just so much noise so long Retreats they enable to have this really deep observation of reality which is impossible most of life we spend like detached from reality two hours a day that's a commitment even in the midst of all the book promotion craziness you're able to find came

here I I usually do one in the morning one in the afternoon or evening what a beautiful thing and obviously your ability to think clearly and write so articulately about these ideas is very much a product of this practice absolutely I mean without the practice I would not be able to write such books and I would not be able to deal with the kind of all the publicity and all the interviews and you know this roller coaster of positive and negative feedback from the world all the time I would say one one important thing this

is not necessarily for everybody because I meditate and I have meditator friends and so forth I mean different things work for different people there are many people that I wouldn't recommend to meditate two hours a day or to go for a 10 days Meditation Retreat because they are different their body their minds are different for them perhaps going on a 10 days hike in the mountains would be better for them perhaps devoting two hours a day to music to to say playing or to creating or going to to psychotherapy y would have better results humans

are really different in many ways from one another there is no one size fits all so if you never try meditation absolutely try it out and and and give it a real chance it's not like you go for like a few hours and it doesn't work okay give it up like give it a real chance but keep in mind that again different minds are different um so find out what really works for you and whatever it is that's the important part whatever it is invest in it I have to release you back to your life

uh but maybe we can end this with just a a concise thought about what it is that you want people to take away from from this book like what is most vital and crucial for people to understand about what you're trying to communicate but information isn't truth truth is a it's it's a costly a rare and precious thing it is the foundation of of knowledge and wisdom and of nine beneficial societies you can build terrible societies without the truth but if you want to build a good society and you want to build a good personal

life you must have a a strong basis in the truth and it's difficult again because most information is is not the truth and invest in it it's worthwhile uh to have a practice whatever it is that gets you connected with reality that gets you connected with the truth thank you for for coming here today uh I really appreciate you taking the time to share your wisdom and experience I think uh Nexus your latest book is as I said at the outset a crucial vital book that everybody should read uh we're entering into a very interesting

time and we are well advised to be as best prepared as we possibly can and uh I appreciate the work that you do um and thank you again you've all thank you I only graced the surface of the outline that I cre so hopefully you can come back CU I got a million more questions I could have talked to you for hours next time I'm in La I'll be happy to thanks man appreciate it cheers peace that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's

guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive my books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. roll.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment this show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this

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