Making Bureaucracies Sexier with Yuval Noah Harari | What Now? with Trevor Noah Podcast

my favorite thing that that Forbes does is they will write an article about a billionaire who has lost money and the story will always like lament them you know it'll be like the misfortunes of Jeff Bezos and they'll be like caros slim used to be one of the richest men in the world now he languishes in 15 spots I do think that's a that's the difficulty of being human is that some of our progress is the fact that we are never satisfied some of our progress lies in the fact that we're always yearning for more

and then the downside becomes that we create a false flaw you're listening to what now the podcast where I chat to interesting people about the conversations taking over our world and this week ooh what an interesting conversation joining myself and Christiana in studio is Yuval Noah Harari if you've heard of sapiens you know who you is that was the book that completely changed people's ideas of how we organize society and why humans have the power we do well his new book Nexus is just as contentious it focuses on a possible answer to what makes Society

work and what could break it completely the rise of AI the war in the Middle East the breakdown and communication between politicians and the people in this episode we discuss Guss it all as I often say the only thing I love more than peeling back the layers of a story is doing it with my favorite thinkers and Yuval is indeed one of my favorite thinkers whether you agree with him on everything or not it's definitely going to set your brain on fire this is what now with trevan NOA [Music] you all from uh one Noah

to another Noah welcome to the podcast thank you it's really good to be here I one of the reasons I'm so excited to chat to you is because I feel like and I could be wrong I feel like you may be one of the few people I know in the world who have more controversial ideas than my friend Christiana here like I feel we'll see I feel like the two of you have these these ideas that that challenge how people perceive reality and and and they think about our existence on this planet um your book

sapiens I mean is is the perfect example of that and I guess maybe that that's you know the perfect place to think about your new book or you know in relation to sapiens if sapiens was a conversation that helped us understand how humans dominated or got to the position of power that we got to as a species it feels like Nexus is a conversation about the networks and the information that has gotten us there and the way that it could end us all am I understanding it right or or what what are you hoping to

achieve with Nexus that that sapiens maybe laid the groundwork for yeah Nexus basically begins where sapiens ends and the key question that that starts Nexus is if humans are so smart why are we so stupid H like we've taken over the world we've reached the moon we can split the atom we can decipher DNA and yet we are on the verge of destroying ourselves and much of the ecological system right uh not just because of climate change you have an entire menu of ways in which we can choose how to destroy ourself it could be

third world war with nuclear weapons it could be the development of these powerful Technologies like AI that might get out of our control and um you know in a lot of mythologies and theologies uh you hear that there is something wrong with human nature we have some deep flow in us which cause us to be self-destructive and I I don't think that's true I don't think the problem is with human nature it's with human information if you give good people bad information they made bad decision okay so so so let's go let's go backwards on

that on that thought because information really is the heart of of this book and the Heart of the idea really I think it's like the first page actually where you've asked some of these questions you say and I paraphrase you but if we are so smart why are we destroying the world and if we are so smart then why are we self-destructive and the first question I found myself asking was is it we and and I I I mean this honestly cuz I you know your books always make me think and they make me question

and I think you encourage people to do that but I found myself going is it is it the we or is it a few who have more ability than others to do more does that make sense because is it the collective we but then who gave these few individuals so much power again if you think about the classic examples from from history if you think about Nazism and Hitler so it was Hitler's fault but how did Hitler gain so much power if you just put if you think about some of the most powerful individuals today

in the world if you just put them alone in the forest they have no power right if a Hitler is alone in the forest yeah if a Putin is alone in the forest he has no power the question is how does he get millions of people who they don't even know him personally it's not his family they are not his close friends you have millions of people who never met him in his in in their lives and they are still willing to obey his orders and sometimes to risk and even sacrifice their lives uh because

he says so um it's not the the power of an individual it's in a way the power of a network and the power of a brand brands are stories if you think about the Coca-Cola brand so it's the story of Coca-Cola you have the reality of the drink which is you know sugary water wow that's one way to put it and and then as I said controversial sugary water take that Coca-Cola with a little more flavor okay sugar but then you have the story about it if you drink that the story oh it's it's it's

Youth and happiness and fun friendship and connection and friendship and you know I mean and this is Young billions of dollars over tens of of of decades were invested to make this connection in our mind and we react to the story in the mind and not to the actual chemistry of of of the drink and it's the same with with with charismatic leaders or leaders in general we react to the story that was woven around them and not to the actuality of the person which is often very different from the story they tell about them

or sometimes unknown so then wait let me let me ask you this then there was a moment where I was reading your book and it felt like for a second sapiens had given us this inflated sense of achievement and it's almost like with Nexus you've come to steal it away from us as humankind because because in your in your in in sapiens you're sort of saying that ideas are the reason we've been able to expand narratives and stories are the reason we've been able to exist Beyond ourselves you know religion or spreading the story of

a king or telling a tale about a Greek god or whatever it might be that's the reason humans have been able to build Beyond just the 20 to 100 people that you can normally have in in a in a in a normal Network and now we've expanded beyond that but like what are what are you saying about the information and the networks that we've designed now are you are you saying that this will now be our demise the very thing that made us who we are not necessarily I mean the book is not deterministic it's

wait a minute first of all we need to understand what is really happening what is information how does it work what is AI how does it work how is it different from previous information Technologies uh but simply to understand I mean one of the most important thing is that to understand that information isn't truth you have this very naive view which is prevalent in places like Silicon Valley that we just need to flood the world with more and more information and this will inevitably be result in more truth and wisdom and better decisions and so

forth and it's just not the case if you just flood the world with information the truth sinks to the bottom and it's fiction that flows up because most information in the world isn't truth the truth is a very rare and costly subset of information yeah but you know I I guess is because of my background as a journalist to me truth is a very like lofty and philosophical idea it's very Rel we can allience and the of it and the truth of things are disting from so to me never like truth is not the goal

cuz your truth might it's all it's going to be different for everyone I think the concern sometime more is like facts like what is an actual fact and how are they being distributed and I guess my question is who do you think should be the one to spread these facts or truth to the world like whose responsibility is that because that doesn't seem like something that could be naturally democratized like right now it's in Silicon Valley like but what what is this world where it's like there is this Council or there's this group who decides

the information people re we receive and is that even a good World MH yeah I think we need to discuss two things I mean again first of all what is truth and how it relates to facts and opinions and and so forth and secondly truth and democracy yeah and uh here I would plant a flag and say that uh democracy is about desire not truth mhm in elections what you ask people is not what is the truth you ask them what do you want and people often want the truth to be different from what it

is wow so but but before we get to that discussion of Desire versus truth in in democracy first we start with reality everything that exists is part of reality now truth is pointing at a particular part of reality and uh of course different people have different views memories feelings whatever ever all this is part of reality and to say that my views on a certain situation are different from yours this is also true we now have this kind of crisis of representation in the world partly because we want kind of a hared percent accurate representation

of everything and this is impossible because that's a onetoone map if you think about a map as a presentation of reality like a map of Los Angeles a map of the United States obvious ly the map can never match exactly to reality because it won't be a map anymore it will be reality a map is always in an obstruction like in a a scale of one to a million so most things you can't put on the map yeah and then the question is what are the important things that you pointed um so this is of

course complex because people argue that your map lives out something that is very important to me that's why the map's a great example because we know that the map that we use Africa is much smaller than it should be and like I could be like well that's not trueth that's not even a fact but the people that made this map decided that they wanted Europe and United States to look a certain way so I think a map is a great way of framing this and the first thing again we should realize about a map a

map can never be a onetoone scale like if you want absolute accuracy everything is represented exactly as it is yeah it's it's a worthless map I mean there is a story in the book by by by bores about an ancient a fictional story about an ancient empire that wanted to have the most accurate map in the world so they in so they created a onetoone one map which simply covered the whole empire and the Empire of course also collapsed because all the resources of the empire were wasted on trying to create this onetoone map and

this is impossible and there's a few things that you've sparked for me um first firstly I can never tell this from page to page in your book and from sentence to sentence when you speak would you regard yourself as a as an optimist or a pessimist with how much history you consume and with how you look at the development of the world a realist I mean again you know but but I mean if I'm to challenge you based on your book there there's got to be a slant in a certain direction like do you you

know I'll tell you the main question the really kind of most fundamental question when you talk to the people who lead the AI Revolution about the potential dangers they agree there are threats when you tell them so we need to slow down to give Humanity a chance to adapt it's just a matter of pace just slow down everybody tells you the same thing we would like to slow down but we can't because we cannot trust our competitors yeah it's an arms race it's an arms race our competitors either here or certainly across the ocean so

the the the the the thing that really fuels the whole thing is not being a able to trust human beings and then but but then you ask them but when you develop the AI are you sure you will be able to trust the AI and then they tell you yes so it's this Paradox that we cannot trust the humans but we think we can trust the machines more than we trust the humans and in a way I mean there are also some some of them are thoughtful people and they they they realize how how kind

of alarming and even ridiculous is what they are saying but the the key thing is they tell you you know it's like you trapped in a room and one door you open it for thousands of years and there is a monster behind the door this is the inability to trust humans and there is another room door and there is a very high chance there is an even worse monster behind that door but we never opened it so we are not sure so we are gambling the future of Humanity on on on the chance the small

chance that behind door number two is not a monster that we will be able to create AIS we can trust even though we are unable to trust the humans you know it Trevor asked you if you're an optimist or a pessimist and you kind of like dodged the question very well very in a very sophisticated manner this was my answer this my answer something one pessimist spotting another no something well this well actually I'm going to come to it from a different place cuz from reading the book I feel that you have and maybe it's

cuz I come from a Christian tradition that believes in original sin and like human nature like humans are rubbish basically and you need Jesus that's why I rubb start rubbish and then you're saved right in the book I kind of felt that not that you were ABS absolving human nature but you had Fairly kind of optimistic or maybe neutral view of human nature I don't think they're evil whereas but you ascribed a lot of I feel blame to information and the networks I think the problem is ignorance and not evil interesting I mean the the

the whole discussion of human nature gravitates towards there is something evil in humans this is why they have atom bombs and destroy the world and so forth I think that when when I say the problem is information it gravitates towards the problem is ignorance but can I ask why do you think people are drawn to those type of stories ignorance aside right cuz sometimes you see these things that go viral online that let's say they're eating cats and dogs to me I hear that and of course they're not that's my that's where I feel but

a lot of humans are like maybe they are why is that a compelling story why is that a compelling piece of information that the human will receive it and there's enough people out there in the world right now that believe that Haitians eat cats and dogs like we like the salacious we like the darkness we like to believe that other people are INF furier and that's where for me I'm cuz I'm just straight up I'm like Hobs I'm like these people are right so yeah but what you yeah what is it about humans that they

are they are these this information they can be drawn into it in a way evil is easier to deal with at least cognitively than ignorance evil is kind of simple it's a simple story about the world there is evil there is good uh uh you can and and even if you say humans have something evil inside them but then there is this perfect good like there is Jesus and we just need to trust in this perfect good being that will come to save us the struggle of Good and Evil in general it's a simple story

about the world uh ignorance on the other hand it's not some kind of deep something in human nature it's just the world is so complicated I mean we are ignorant not because again uh uh we didn't go to school or something it's simply because the reality is extremely extremely complicated so it's it's not and so there is no easy solution it's not like okay let's send everybody to school and they will not be ignorant people can have phds in whatever and still be incredibly ignorant about so much so many things so again it's it's also

part of understanding our interdependence on on everything that if you think about the world in terms of of these information networks you can never do it by yourself you know part of the problem with all these conspiracy theories we see you know flooding the world they tell people do your own research it's impossible I mean nobody can just research everything by themselves it's a fantasy of complete complete Independence for for I can find by myself the truth about everything no you can't I mean science is a team sport if you want to find the truth

about anything like you know you can spend your whole life just researching the invention of the first train in Britain in the early 19th century and you still don't know much about the Roman Empire or about uh what caused the covid-19 pandemic or about who murdered Kennedy yeah so you need if you really want to understand the world you have no choice but to rely on these huge networks or individuals because earlier on in this conversations you mentioned that if Putin went to a forest he would have no power I would argue that he would

quickly amass power with whichever the tribe he found but it still needs the people he needs the people but the reason that people actually do give over this power is because of what you've described mhm if you want to find out to truth or facts it's incredibly difficult you need an incredible amount of skill you need time which most people we know who don't have that much money who are just working living Check to Check do not have that time and the answer throughout history was always institutions and then the question arises okay so how

do I know which institutions to trust and which not to trust and uh at least what what I can say from the experience of history is and and then this is it doesn't sound heroic it's but the key is self-correcting mechanisms does the institution have a powerful mechanism inside the institution that constantly seeks seeks errors and mistakes of the institution itself not of Outsiders that's easy to correct somebody else's but an institution identify and corrects its own mistakes I think by Nature institutions don't like to do that I think cuz a lot of institutions I

was exposed to most when I was young was either school or it was church religious institutions they don't like to do it they don't like to like all of the even school you can go to school and you're like we want to introduce this curriculum that's more Progressive they'll be like no no no no no I think there is something about institutions that they become very calcified very quickly and they can't actually do that mechanism difficult I mean these self-correcting mechanisms are costly and complicated you do see them in some institutions it's not perfect but

scientific institutions they are based on self-correction you know the only thing that scientific journals publish is Corrections M and the only way if you try to understand one of the key things to ask about institutions is how do people uh uh get promoted in the institution what are the insentive structure now in a church usually if you just accept whatever the people before you whatever the elders and the leaders say and never challenge it you can become Pope in science you cannot win Nobel Prize just by saying Einstein was right and dvin was right and

Marie K was right people would say okay that's very nice but we don't give you Nobel Prize we already know that they I mean if you find something that Einstein didn't know some Luna in the theory of relativity then you can get Nobel Prize it's interesting you mention science and institution I say as a black women I'm very distrusting of Institutions including scientific institutions that have experimented on black and brown women historically who MRE who have you know there's a lot of racism still embedded in the medical system how they take your blood pressure etc

etc this premise requires a lot of people that trust institutions and I think we're in a moment of TR history where whether you are the oppressed or whether you are the oppressor no one seems to trust institutions and that's terrible because when there are no institutions the only thing that works is a dictatorship yeah democracy works on trust dictatorship works on Terror if you cause people to lose trust in all institutions the only thing that can still hold Society together is the terror of dictators damn and uh so even if institutions do a lot of

bad stuff we don't have anything better and and the question is which institutions are has a better chance of correcting themselves today you go to study history in a university you are likely to be taught about the terrible mistakes of historians in the 19th and early 20th century that for instance were extremely racist and they will not blame it oh the discipline was okay but you had this one Professor who was racist they said no we acknowledge it that there was a racist bias I'm in the historical discipline or in archaeology or in anthropology a

100 years ago there are still probably some traces of it even today and we acknowledge it and we try to do better today yeah and this this ability again not to rely on somebody else MH but to correct your own mistakes this is the hmark of science this is also the homework of democracy you can think about the whole of democracy as this kind of self-correcting mechanism you give power to somebody for a limited time and after four years you can say oh we made a mistake let's try something else and you have to trust

they'll give it back and that's the weakness of of democracy you give power to somebody for 4 years what if they don't give it back right right right that's the big big problem yeah because most of the time I mean this is not always the case but many I always say to people many dictatorships started as a democracy people for originally Rose to power in Russia in Democratic elections if you look at Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela so originally they came to power democratically but now they Rigg the elections and and that that's that but

the thing is that in many cases it works um and we tend to to to look at the at the situation when it doesn't work when the the system uh is faulty right right right but uh we also have to appreciate the many times when the system works so then could you could you say that a lot of what you're arguing in this book and even in this conversation is there's no perfect absolutely there is no there is no infallible truth there but what we should be striving toward or always seeking to exist within is

a place where we are allowed to challenge and self-correct is that almost your is that almost your metric for whether we're living in a healthy society and in a healthy information system mhm yes this is a kind of middle path between just blind Conformity yeah and kind of this total rejection total distrust of all institutions which leads either to Anarchy or to dictatorship right the middle path is that we again it's and it's it's in a way it's boring because it's bureaucratic it's not heroic and this is another theme that repeats itself in in in

Nexus the importance of bureaucracy as the foundation of large scale human societies and the difficulty people have with understanding bureaucracies it's not sexy yeah and and and it's dangerous because people then don't understand how the world functions they fall easy prayer to conspiracy theories about the Deep State and all that you know for me the Deep state is the seage system when people tell me oh the Deep State I immediately think about the seage system you know this deep network of pipes and pumps and whoever knows what and there are houses and neighborhoods and streets

that's your deep State that's my deep State like you go to the toilet you do what you do you press the button and it disappears into the deep State and again it goes back to ignorance and evil if a tax collector comes and take taxes from you how do you know if it's Putin using your taxes to build a data for himself yeah or whatever or if this money actually goes to uh uh provide a a a Pew drinking water right the public good for people on the other side of the country how do you

know yeah you need to understand things like how the budget works like my taxes they go to this Collective fund and then there is a budget and they allocate it in a certain way when was the last time you saw a Hollywood Blockbuster about the budget how does the budget work don't go anywhere cuz we got more what now after [Music] this what seems like the most complicated aspect of the book in a strange way to me seems easier to navigate because it contains more truths that we agree on and and that is AI mhm

you know when I when I looked at the chapters of your book I thought oh yeah information that's going to be the quick part of the book I'll read through that and then you know and then I'll JP on and then we talk about the past and Empires and dictatorships oh that's going to be AI is going to be difficult I found it to be the opposite and even in my anecdotal conversations with people I have found that the the the discussions around AI share many more truths so so let's let's let's jump into Ai

and sort of work our way backwards through some through some of these ideas you know I I don't know if you keep up with yourself online as a person but your face now in let's say especially since the release of this book has sort of become synonymous with being anti- AI you know they go Yuval and like if I type your name into Google I go Yuval Noah and then it's like AI is going to kill the world AI is going to destroy us AI is going to take like how how did you develop your

opinions on AI and are they the ones that we're actually seeing online or are those flattened ideas of flattened as usual I I think first of all that AI can have tremendous positive benefits for Humanity otherwise people would not develop it um it can improve health care it can help a fight climate change it can you know just all all these talk about autonomous vehicles every year more than 1 million people are killed in car accidents most of these accidents are because of human errors like drinking alcohol and driving or falling asleep at the wheel

and autonomous vehicles are likely to save a million people every year so the there is enormous positive potential personally I don't talk much about the positive potential because there are enough other people uh that do it I just say there are also dangers there are also threats that we need to take into account uh in order to make wiser decisions about how to develop this technology and the most important thing to understand about AI is that this is the first technology in history which is not a tool it's an agent let's let's dig more into

that because you write that in you know that's one of the lines that stuck out to me in the book it might be one of the most highlighted part as well for many other people absolutely because there is so much hype around it that now is AI especially you know in the market everybody wants to to to claim that what they are doing is AI because then you get Investments and then so not every machine is an AI not even every automatic machine is an AI if you think about something like a coffee machine so

if you have a coffee machine that automatically makes coffee like you press the button and it makes you an espresso Cup this is not AI it's just an automatic machine what is ai ai is defined by the ability to learn by itself change by itself and make decisions and invent new ideas by itself so in the case of a coffee machine it becomes an AI if as you approach the machine before you press a single button the machine tells you hey I know you I've been monitoring you and many other people for weeks and months

now based on everything I know about you and your patterns and the time of day it is and your facial expression I predict that you probably want an espresso with one spoon of sugar selling AI to me right now and I con you're converting CH Cristiana in in one one sentence so so that's that's that's Ai and it really becomes an a I when it tells you actually I've H invented a new drink which I call bestpresso which I think you would like even better than espresso even though you never tried it and I took

the liberty to make a cup for you so this it's the ability to uh again make independent decisions he doesn't have to wait for us to tell us everything how to do and the ability to invent completely new things this is the whole mark of AI this is why it's an agent and not a tool a tool is something that just does what we tell it to do even an atom bomb it's just a tool we tell it to destroy a city destroys a city but it cannot decide by itself it's kind of that that

autonomy about okay and uh this is what makes AI so powerful so potentially positive because it can invent new new medicines that no human ever thought about New medic treatments but it's also what makes it potentially so dangerous that unlike every previous technology the dependent on us this technology can escape our control and start to make independent decisions to start to manipulate us start to create also you know not just new medicines also new bombs and the the deepest problem is that inherently we cannot predict and control how it will behave because it has this

ability to learn and change by itself and you know I mean we've been misled by Hollywood science fiction into thinking that the danger is the great robot rebellion and this is not coming any anytime soon maybe in the distant future but not now and this makes people complacent what we need to kind of understand is that we are talking about millions and potentially billions of new agents operating in the world everywhere think about millions of AI bureaucrats in the banks in the corporations in the universities the governments the armies making more and more decisions about

our lives and reshaping the world you apply to a bank to get a loan it's an AI deciding whether to give you a loan for reasons you cannot understand you apply for a job it's an AI deciding whether to give you a job there is a war it's an AI deciding what to well so what's interesting to me about that is like the AI you describe kind of sounds like how white people are to black people already like you go into a bank they're not going to give you a loan they don't tell you why

they don't tell you why law enforcement violence and like this dystopian future you're describing is actually a lot of people's present reality without Ai and if I may add to that I I I wonder and I you know I'm careful to ask you this because I know you're saying there are people who are sort of promoting the positive sides but how do you think we weigh the risk of which way it may go because I I agree with Christian on this we already exist in a world where law enforcement governments um Banks you know financial

institutions Etc have decided people's fortunes have decided people's Fates and it's arbitrary we don't know how it was done we don't know where it was done but it was done and AI could as you say become the agent that does that it's it's already is the agent I mean what I'm discovering is not the future it's the present I mean really today if you apply to a bank today I'm not sure about your bank the world they have automated they and if you look at the war in Gaza or the war in Ukraine many of

the decisions there are already being made by AI this is not some future prediction now of course there is a positive potential there are people who develop these Technologies and they say actually it's an improvement because we know that human Bankers are racists but we can we can design the AI to ignore race in a way that we can't design people so far that's not the case though there is a huge controversy about that I mean like 10 years ago this was the promise 10 years ago this people oh you know this is this is

just mathematics this is just a computer it has no psychology it is no personal history it can't be racist and today we know oh no algorithms can be racist algorithms can be homophobe algor algorithms can be anti-semitic it's all in the data they are trained on yes you train an AI on a racist data the AI will become racist so now coming back to coming back to Nexus and your experience of information and networks would you say that that might be the fundamental flaw of AI is that we are teaching something to be what we

hope will be superior to us but it is fundamentally based on us and that contains all of our flaws that's one danger and you also have the opposite danger that we are creating something totally alien I mean for me when I think about the acronym AI additionally it's artificial intelligence but I think it's better to think about it as alien intelligence alien not in the sense that it's coming from out of space not alien it's it's fundamentally different from how humans process information and make decisions and and and invent ideas artificial gives you the kind

of feeling oh this is just an artifact we we control it but with each passing year AI is becoming less artificial and more alien uh again to give you a famous example one of the key moments in the AI Revolution was the victory of alpha go yes over Lisa doll in the game of Go yeah now in the US go is not very big but in East Asia go you know it's it's it's a strategy game invented in ancient China more than 2,000 years ago which has been considered one of the basic kind of Arts

that any civilized person in East Asia should know how to play and over it's much more complex than chess and this is why people thought that even after you know deep blue defeated Kasparov in the late 90s it said computers B never manage to do it in go it's a different level of complexity over 2,000 years tens of millions of people played go entire schools of thought were formulated around how to play Go different strategies which were seen as a kind of metaphor for how to live life and how to act in the real world

and then Alp go came along and smashed the human Champion Le Leisa do but the amazing thing was how it did it the strategy that alpago deployed in in their game in 2016 it stunned the go experts uh because it was totally different from anything humans thought about in more than 2,000 years when First Alpha go deployed the strategy the expert says Ah such a stupid computer such a an idiot's mistake and it proved to be brilliant and it changed the way go is played even by humans today and this is now likely to happen

in much more consequential Fields than go um and again it could be good it could be bad before we get into the discussion is it good or bad just we need to understand it's alien I mean we are going to see uh music we are going going to to hear music we are going to see Financial devices we are going perhaps to encounter religions that emanate from a kind of intelligence that analyzes the world and makes decisions in a really really different way than us is that not necessarily let's let's remove good or bad for

a second but if we if we analyze this this world that you're speaking about isn't that fundamentally what Innovation is and I say this cautious but when I think about many of the you're say let's take AI out of it I think of every time in human history some has thought of something that was completely paradoxical to the the the status quo I think of times when people said we can fly and people said you're crazy you know when when someone said hey instead of leeches maybe we could we could draw people's blood out of

them they said you're a witch there were these individuals who thought to themselves well what if we didn't do it like this and they they were given all of these labels you know when you look at Alpha go one of the things I really loved about that story was lisong in particular right lisong is the greatest he's you know they said they said he's the Roger Federal of of go but I even more he's like he's the the Jordan and federal combined no one could beat him in go and when you listen to his story

he this young boy comes from an island and and he comes to the city and he starts playing go and he's religiously there every single day plays for hours and hours and his teacher speaks about him emphatically saying he didn't just play the game as if it was about winning losing he played it as if it was a way to create new expressions of yourself and when lisong loses to go apart from his ego and him saying I'm sorry I lost and I I was arrogant and all these things one of the most beautiful moments

for me in that story was when he says it has inspired me to think differently about the paradigms that I had accepted as being Default about go yeah and and that I couldn't believe that he was saying this as the person who lost mhm because this was like Humanity losing in you know like I couldn't like this is like our hero it's like Will Smith in Independence Day being beaten by the aliens and coming back and being like yeah this made me think differently about Al about how we live as humans but lisong said something

that stuck with me there and that was do we maybe need as people something that is going to shake us out of how we see medicine how we see law how we see War how we see living standards how we do we need that Catalyst to prevent us from getting to the place that I would argue and I could be wrong that some of your books have sort of suggested that we are heading towards like how do you balance that risk between providing a catalyst that might change the way we live in a good way

versus our catastrophic end which we might be headed to but a little slower I mean I think it's it's really it's a question of pace of of time that's it it's it's it's time that we need time to adapt and our greatest problem right now is that the AI it moves at a at an an alien speed and we just my fear is that we yes we can adapt what we don't have it will not give us enough time to adapt when you look at history new ideas and new technologies uh I I hear it

often when people say you know every time there is a new invention the printing press the steam engine you have all these doomsday scenario and it's okay I mean steam engines had made our life better but as a stor and I told them that's not true you are forgetting the transition period H uh when new powerful Technologies and inventions come very often a lot of people suffer terribly because it takes time to adapt and people don't know how to use the new technologies well and if you think about the last big wave of inventions the

Industrial Revolution so in the late 18th and early 19th century and you have these Dooms day scenario and many of them came true not necessarily for the people who invented the these Technologies but for hundreds of millions of people around the world because uh when industry comes along in the 19th century nobody knows how to build an industrial society because there are no blueprints there are no examples in history and people start coming up with some very dangerous ideas how to do it the first one was imperialism and they say you know the only way

to build an industrial society is to build an Empire they say agrarian societies based on agriculture they can live from the local uh uh uh conditions yeah resources industry needs raw materials and Industry needs markets now if we build an industrial society without an Empire then our competitors might cut us off from the raw materials in markets and we will collapse and it took more than 100 years or 15 years until people said actually it was a very bad idea and then you had uh people like Lenin and Stalin telling people um um the way

to build an industrial society is to create a communist totalitarian regime that's the only thing that will work there is no Communist dictatorship without electricity radio trains Telegraph there no communist dictatorships before the 19th century it was an experiment in how to build an industrial societ society and fascism was the same but think about the cost of all these experiments and this was just steam engines like uh you know glorified kettles and now we have to do the same with AI we have no idea how to build an AI based society if we need to

go through another cycle of Empires and totalitarian regimes and world wars in order to understand the how to build an AI based society this is going to be hell maybe not to the people in Silicon Valley but a lot of other people uh around the world you already see that after Decades of convergence that you know the Industrial Revolution created this huge gap in in power and abilities and prosperity between the few industrial power and the rest of the world yeah and for decades you have countries like India like South Africa are trying to kind

of close the gap and now when they are coming close to closing the Gap it's going to potentially reopen on a much much bigger scale because again you have a few countries who are leading the AI Revolution and will have this immense power and wealth generated by AI are they going to share all that with all the world probably not I I want us to move to to like the personal side of this yeah and I wondered from from your side you know I've seen you speaking about a broad range of topics when you look

at this in your personal life you know everyone out there can you know have these lofty conversations but I think there's an overlap to how we speak to each other as people and how we engage with our family members our co-workers Etc how do we develop those networks to maintain the trust like where does the trust get built and where do you find it breaks in those information systems that are just between people before we go to Nations and before we go to States is is there an overlap between these um and Trust depends a

lot on on how we understand reality what is our theory of human nature basically and um one of the things that is happening now in the world which is very dangerous is the spread of a very very cynical view of human nature and human society which basically says that all reality is just power and the question to ask is not easy true but whose privileges are being served by what is being said right uh if you think like that if you start with the Assumption any human interaction is just a power struggle if you're now

saying something to me I need to to find out okay whose interests are being served by it I immediately discount the fact that maybe you just think it's true you're not making a power play on me and um the thing is that this cynical view of the world is is first of all again it's dangerous because it erodes trust in all institutions and then one institution after the other you don't believe anybody and you think you're liberating yourself you're actually handing Society on a plate to a dictator because once people lose trust in all the

institutions again the only thing that works is dictatorship in this situation which which doesn't need trust it works on terror very different uh uh mechanism so it's a dangerous View and it's also wrong most human beings in most institutions most journalists scient politicians whatever uh even if they pursue power and even if they have this kind sometimes they manipulate people yeah that's that's also true that's not the only thing about them um and you start with a more charitable and generous view of other people when they said something even if I disagree with um it's

not necessarily they're trying to manipulate me right maybe they really believe it and maybe they have some good reasons to believe it you how do how do people do this reframing cuz what you're suggesting is a deeply radical idea which is just to give people the benefit of the doubt give people the benefit of the doubt should be radical maybe be a bit compassionate with yourself and figuring out like what makes you tick but yeah that is a very daunting Prospect just reframing that maybe the world is more good than bad like you telling me

that I'm like I don't know about I'm already like freezing up but that's my ego cuz you're actually right there's more good out there than bad I mean what wouldn't survive a day if it wasn't for that I mean again this radical uh uh doubt that everybody is just out to manipulate me and to gain power I mean if this was true I would not be alive I mean every day I'm alive because so many people are doing different things for me from the people who manage the sewage system to the people who collect the

garbage to the doctors who develop uh uh medications and then take care of me if I go around the world feeling I can't trust anybody yeah you're just fooling yourself you're trusting people all the time like you read some conspiracy theory on your smartphone you say I don't trust anybody you trust the people that made the smartphone and the people who tell you the conspiracy theory you constantly trust so many people so just to acknowledge that I think it's also very humbling because a lot of distrust it comes from this some kind of megalomania that

I can do it all by myself it's it's almost the ultimate expression of individualism in some ways it sounds like you know it's like we sort of listening to you I can't help but tie these links between a world where over time and I'm sure there were many good reasons people were given more individual rights and they they were conditioned to believe hey it's you and your family and your car and your backyard and your swimming pool and your clothes whereas when we came from more and again I'm borrowing from your books here but we

came from a more communal existence it's the villagers land it's the villagers house it's the and then we get my father B which needs my children to look after and you know and now as you're saying that I'm I'm thinking to myself that as you said we we we're constantly running I you said it beautifully but what I heard you say basically is we're constantly running experiments on ourselves as humans you know we're one of the few species that really are running like rapid experiments and and that's maybe our Evolution or maybe it's the evolution

of Technology but but in that we're learning things that are unfortunate very quickly we we we you know we smash into them and in that individualization it almost seems like the one second system effect that we don't consider is if everyone is me and my and I then to your point you cannot trust because trust requires you to have a certain level of humility trust requires you to put yourself in somebody else's arms trust requires you to say yeah I trust that that driver on the highway is not going to skip over the line I

I trust that that person in in the shopping mall is not just going to grab my bag I TR these are even your child playing at the park you trust someone's not going to just take them my favorite example is money like all these people think they are kind of individualistic and they still believe in money and um you know they just Chang the forms funny enough they'll just they'll be like I don't believe in money from the government I believe in crypto but they believe in the exchange that's that's a very important point because

if you think about say the USA now and you kind of this increasing divide between Democrats and Republicans and you think what is the last thing they agree on then I would say the last thing that holds America together is the dollar yes it's the one thing that Republicans and Democrats still agree on is the value of a dollar and this is now also under attack with the same kind of rationale oh the dollar is being produced by these institutions that we cannot trust bureaucrats the bureaucrats in the Federal Reserve and it's the Deep State

and we don't trust the dollar so let's trust technology instead nobody knows who Satoshi is that's the irony in all of this because it's not Satoshi it's it's it's the algorithms I mean again you have this kind of very in a way strange and frightening situation when such deep distrust of humans is combined with a very naive trust in technology MH which um is again it's it has this double problem that first of all the technology is produced by humans so if you don't trust the the the humans in the Federal Reserve why do you

trust these humans right so you prefer to basically you you basically prefer to trust aliens than humans yeah I think some of it some of the profound mistrust that exists part of it is individ individualism the Megalania you're talking about but I think a lot of people are in immense suffering right people can't afford houses people are living Check to Check people like it's you get a job you may not have it a year from now whereas you know your dad had the same job for 30 years M people are suffering in a way that

it's not unprecedented I think human history is kind of defined by this type of suffering but feels unique to a lot of people like I think that is when you have this life that's full of suffering and you can't trust yourself you're definitely not going to trust other people and you're not going to trust institutions that have let you down a lot of people would tell go get a college degree they leave because of academic inflation that degree is useless you know what I mean and in school they told you stay in school study and

so it feels like there's this kind of breaking down of the social contract in the West in a certain way and that is causing the mistrust because there's suffering and I I I don't think we can diminish that because even if everyone wakes up tomorrow I'm going to be the most trustworthy person in the world and kind of live in this very broken world where people at the top have a bunch and everyone has very little the problem is that uh there is a very long way to the bottom still I mean as bad as

things are right tell me more about the bottom no I like the perspective as bad as things are right now they can be far far worse like name the decade in human history that you think was better was it what the 1950s was it the 1850s when is your golden age 400 years ago before the transatlantic slave trade you it was better it was better yeah before they was kind of like half of children dying before reaching 18 from all these diseases that would be my point and even if we just stick with the issue

of slavery there was slavery all over the world I mean slavery was not invented five I mean the the specific uh uh uh type of slavery slavery yeah that was uh uh imposed by the European powers yes but um you had different kinds of slavery some of them horrible for centuries and thousands of years before in many different civilizations so again it doesn't little this particular type but people are very aware of what they know of what they suffer and they discount the suffering they don't experience and they also discount the good things that they

have and it just take for granted today we have healthc Care Systems in most of the world much better than anything we saw before in history and they are fragile I mean to give just one statistic in the still today it's changing because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the crisis in the Middle East and so forth but still in the early 21st century average government expenditure on the military was about 6% 6 to 7% average government expenditure on health care I'm talking globally all countries together Sweden Nigeria everything together uh 10% it's the

first time in un history that governments spent considerably more on healthc care than on the military it's amazing that government spend more on Healthcare and my concern is that because people don't appreciate it it's very fragile it can go away like this I look at my region of the world the Middle East I look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine it can go away within in Russia Today more than 30% of government budget goes to the military nobody knows for sure because it's a big secret and so forth but the the the Russian government is

diverting money from schools from hospitals to tanks and and missiles and drones and this is likely to spread to to more and more countries around the world and people like if if this continues in 10 years people would look back at now and they would say they lived in Paradise they just didn't realize it right don't go anywhere cuz we got more what now after this one of my favorite lessons I learned was was um was from a monk who said to me one day I said to him like what do you think happiness is

or and he said he said I don't even talk about happiness I think we're using the wrong word he said I look for peace he said I look for peace and contentment and he said sometimes in your life just pause for a moment and ask yourself how many of the things you have now were the things that you wished for a decade ago just pause and do that and he said what you will be shocked to discover is the person that you cannot bear to have a conversation with today that is your spouse you you

dreamed one day that they would look your way in a bar you dreamed and you yearned for the day that they would text you back you know what I mean yeah that that car that you now loathe because it has to be serviced and you have to change the tires on and you have to there was a time when you looked at it in a catalog and you went that is my dream car those children where once you cried because you could not see the egg fertilized and because you know your your your partner couldn't

be pregnant or you all of these things there was a moment where and now you see them and they're running through your living room and you go I I hate the fact that you were born and and it's it's difficult because I feel like it is the gift and curse of Being Human because we keep adjusting that floor and so to your point I love what you're saying there because I think a lot of a lot of what you do is that it's like sometimes the gift and curse of our progress through time as humans

is that it doesn't allow us to appreciate because now we've sort of minimized the time that it takes to get something I want to talk to you about like how we how we can better find ourselves or we can better position ourselves to question with compassion to look back at history with a healthy dose of of of skepticism but also optimism and and stand in moments when we might lose the people around us like you know in doing the research around you I only knew you really through the books and then I you know I

watched the videos you've done online and I I I watch a bunch of other conversations and one of the things I was surprised by was how there are two factions of people and obviously not just two MH who have very differing opinions on your role in Israel yeah this is a really interesting one for me mhm and depending on how I searched your name there were some people who said this man is a Zionist who wishes to see the destruction of the um the Palestinian people and he's a tool of the Israeli government but then

if I searched your name in a different way it said Yuval is one of the worst exports of Israel and he's undermined netanyahu's government and he seeks to question and destroy you know the very validity of Israel and this idea and and I sat there just reading through all of this and I was like wow it's it it felt strangely ironic that I was reading a book from you about how people can perceive the same thing in very different ways and and and I I was wondering because you you you handle it delicately and I

you know it is it deserves to me and it's complicated but how do you exist in that world like how do you live as a historian and as an Israeli who is actively consciously thinking about the past and how it affects the present and how we see it in relation to where we are like how do you find the balance for your life because I'm sure you've lost some friends and and I'm sure it's it's left you in some precarious situations regardless of what the people believe in how how do you how do you navigate

that and how do you see or how would you encourage us to navigate it and I I I try to to to to on History uh to rely on on the facts on on the evidence like for instance this issue of Zionism that for my experience most people just don't understand what the word means they uh when they equate Zionism with racism they don't listen to what many zionists tell the the word actually means or the ideology actually means Zionism as far as I know from my historical experience is simply that national movement of the

Jewish people which is not inherently different from the national movement of Poes or of Palestinians or of Turks Zionism basically says three things Jews are not just individuals they're also a people the same way that poles are not just individuals they're also a Polish Nation M the second thing it says is that uh the Jewish Nation like other nations around the world has a right to self-determination like it would be strange that you know all nations have to self-determination except the Jewish Nation they don't get this this right why and then the third thing it

says is that the Jewish people has a historical and cultural deep connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan which is historically true I mean you find Historical and archaeological evidence of Jews living in this land going back about 3,000 years and it's in all the spiritual writings and all the cultural traditions and so forth that's that's just a fact now none of this means that you need to deny the existence of the rights of the Palestinian people at the same time I would also admit I would say I'm a Zionist I think

that the Jewish people has a right to self-determination at the same time there is a Palestinian people it has a very deep cultural and historical connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River it has a right to self-determination Palestinians have as much right as Israelis to live secure and prosperous and dignified lives in in the country of their birth and then the question becomes okay so what do we do with these two facts which are both as far as I I'm concerned facts there are 7 million Jews in this land the vast

majority of them were born there and have nowhere else to go there are more than 7 million Palestinians in this land they were born there they have nowhere else to go both have deserve the same rights now what kind of political solution can we find so some people would say okay one state some people would say no two states let's have Confederacy with Jordan let's do this let's do that but this is already kind of the other argument the political argument yeah but uh the first step for me is simply to recognize the reality on

the ground and don't deny half the reality the fact that you accept the existence and the right of one people doesn't force you to deny the existence of the rights of of the other people yes it's complicated it's complex uh but people can have can hold two facts in in their mind at the same time now the war really the Deep seed of of the terrible war is that uh I think both sides deny either the existence or the right to exist or of the other side and again I'll say it about my own side

about Jews in Israel uh many if not most of them either just deny that there is a Palestinian people you would see many Jewish Israelis who would tell you like with a straight face they just there is no such thing as a Palestinian people they just deny their existence or they would say yes they exist but they don't have a right to be here because God gave us all the land and you find people saying the kind of parallel things on the Palestinian side they would just deny that there is any connection between Jews and

this land or that they would deny that they have a right and as a historian you know people constantly argue about the past but the one thing about the past is that the past is gone uh you can have a huge argument about whether it was uh uh um rightful for uh uh Jews to come to Israel say 100 years ago the British section yeah you have there now 7 million people what do you want them to do what do you want them to go and another thing is most people again they don't I mean

the history of every country is very complex one of the things that I often hear people say in the states that have this idea that Israelis are basically European colonizers and they don't realize that most Israelis are actually descendants of Middle Eastern Jews who were expelled from countries like Iraq like Egypt like Yemen after 1948 in Revenge for for the nakba yeah so yes you had this element of Jews coming from Europe and they were the main the dominant group in the Jewish Community up to 1948 but then after the war you had Jewish communities

living all over the Middle East you know for centuries for thousands of years and systematically expelled from their Homeland in Revenge and now their descendants are the majority of the Jews in Israel so I hear people like my husband his family comes from Egypt both his parents were born in Cairo so and people I like sometimes tell him oh you should go back to Poland but I came from Egypt what do you want from me what Poland it's you you know when when when when we talk about this and I I look at it through

the lens of History I like that you say that your books are not deterministic they're asking questions of a time that that was to try and help us understand the time that is and maybe what could be and so I wonder as a historian you know what I love is how you how you talk about history and how where we're looking at the history from even shapes that you know so for many Palestinian people they'll say like as long as our time can see this was the land we were on and this changed because of

the British and many people go no the British created the original sin and now we're living in that and it's you know it's a terrible disaster because of it people go back and forth as a South African I know that I've looked at it through a specific type of lens and I I don't think of it through only through the lens of blame but I sometimes think more about like what the potential effects could be you know and and I I'll talk to like my Israeli friends and I'll talk to you know even friends of

mine who live in the region whether it's like Qatar or Egypt or um you know Saudi Arabia Etc and what I found and I'd love to know your opinion on this using history maybe as a lens is have we seen the potential conclusions for what this type of conflict could be and why should be why should we be wary of that like why should leaders want to find discourse why should they want to negotiate why should they want to find some sort of middle ground because things I've heard and maybe you could disagree or agree

is you know some people in the region would say this conflict that is slowly inflaming more and more in front of our eyes could eventually lead to the end of this Jewish States as we know it because we cuz we don't know where War takes us and the Very fundamental idea which was to protect the Jewish people who throughout time not just in Nazi Germany have been ostracized and oppressed and and you know made the scapegoats that very that very experiment fails MH and so it becomes you know someone said to me once they said

I'm a middle easterner and they said and I'm and I'm a brown person but I also believe in the safety of the Jewish people and I believe that what Netanyahu is doing is undermining their safety and I was like damn what an interesting way to think of this and then I think of it as a South African and I go the South African government did so many things that I even when I read the books they thought were right they genu they were like we're doing this to protect the Africana people and we we have

to do this and we we you know we we and and many governments supported them around the world and now we look back on them and we go that was wrong yeah everything that they did with apart was completely wrong even though they thought they were doing the right thing and so I wonder from your perspective as a historian who is also a human what are some of the lessons you think we should be learning from history M that we should try and apply to a situation that we're living in where we don't have a

future that we can accurately predict um if you're talking specifically about the Israeli Palestinian conflict so again on the one hand as a history in my main message is don't try to save the past try to save the present and the future the people who were killed a 100 years ago or a year ago you cannot bring them back to life but there are a lot of people who are alive right now women men children elderly that will be dead in a month or in a year or in two years if we don't make the

right decisions right now and we should focus on those we can still save and not on those who we can't save because it's it's it's the past we can't save it um other examp maybe I'll ask it you this way are there examples or moments in history where you've You' you've stumbled upon something that enabled leaders to find even if it wasn't common ground but a compromise in a time when people couldn't and what was that key because I I sometimes look at some of history and I go wow you know what if the Israeli

Prime Minister wasn't shot when he was yeah what would have happened today you know what if you know Rabin had been a little more charming and charismatic when talking to Arafat would we have been where we are today and so while you know you'll talk about these large Network and the we that we started speaking about unfortunately the wi as you said elects people mhm and then those Weis condense down into two M's and those Miis make decisions that really sometimes are just about the human ego and The Human Experience and and so I wonder

if like have you stumbled on anything and I know I'm asking you not not to solve it but I'm just going like to go back to Alpha go what is that move you know and I I'm not going to suggest AI right now I'm not trying to trick you but I'm saying saying what is that move that we think is impossible because nobody has played it or what inspired those moves in the past is there any insight into that was it people getting drunk was it no I think it's the opposite Vision I me people

getting drunk is our problem not drunk on alcohol but drunk on ideology drunk on on on religion drunk on fantasies like I look at the people who now lead Israel they are just a bunch of drunks um they again they are drunk on on ideology and power and religion they have these fantasies in their minds whether it's religious fantasies about God gave the whole country to us or it's its fantasy of infallibility and fantasy of omnipotence that uh we have the power to do anything we want we don't need anything other than power I mean

they are really obsessed with power and think it can solve everything and because of being drunk on on on Power and on fantasies they just don't see the reality and I think that peace starts with seeing the reality War essentially war is an attempt to deny reality to destroy reality it starts in the mind you have something in there is something in reality that your mind cannot accept that your mind cannot contain it could could be the Palestinian people it could be the Jewish people it could be that Ukraine is an independent nation and not

part of Russia so in the mind of of someone like Putin or like netan there is a part of of of reality that just the mind can't accept and then something has to give either the Mind changes or reality changes and if you're a very powerful person you try to make reality change instead of your mind you think that these people don't exist or shouldn't exist and you have the power to destroy them and This is war war tries to make reality simpler to conform to kind of resolve our cognitive dissonance not by changing ourselves

but by destroying part of reality and peace really starts with just the acknowledgment of of reality so in the case again of the Israeli Palestinian people I I I I what I tell Israelis is forget for a moment about what they want to do to us about how they see us let's just start by us trying to to see the reality for what there is and you must acknowledge that there is a Palestinian people it's it's it's reality and you must acknowledge that these people are like us biologically don't tell me about all these religious

fantasies that we are the chosen people and what no biologically they are the same as us and if you can acknowledge that then the next steps kind of become more obvious that if they exist and they are like us they should have they have B the same basic rights again for security for dignity for Prosperity as self determination yeah and uh this I think is is the only secure foundation for peace anywhere because otherwise it it becomes just a temporary compromise like people say okay the other side is now strong so we have to compromise

on something but deep down we know these people shouldn't exist so in 10 years or 20 years if we have the chance then we'll destroy them and then the other side thinks the same and you have no trust I mean the reason why also that the process with Rabin and Arafat failed ultimately it wasn't about some personal thing of Rabin and Arafat it was because deep down both sides were suspicious and for good reasons that the other side is just compromising temporarily to you know play devil's advocate here some people would say they even struggle

with the notion of a both sides when Israel is an you know a military power with the backing of most of the western world yeah um great military might the acceptance that Israel should exist in a state in a way that Palestine doesn't have right now so in those terms it kind of seems like this almost David and Goliath absolutely right sorry to use biblical analogy it for some people just even hearing the idea that there are both sides is like hamaz is this kind of rag tag organization that can inflict some pain but none

of the not the same level of damage that Israel can inflict upon Gaza and hence why some people are calling it a genocide for that reason so even that the way you frame the reality a lot of people cannot accept that basic premise cuz they said that one side has everything and the other side has very little and very little at their disposal in in order to help their self-determination and their security to live safely in the region yeah and it's a question of framing if you look only at Israelis and Palestinians you're absolutely correct

there is a complete imbalance of power there and also means that there is a lot more responsibility on Israel than on the Palestinians because it is much much much stronger the issue of framing however is what do you do about the rest of the Arab and Muslim world like once you broaden the perspective and you say actually it's not just a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians there are a lot of other actors involved like just during the the the current War uh you see Israel being bombarded not just by Hamas from Gaza by hisbah from

Lebanon by the hutis from Yemen by Iran by Iran proxies in in in Iraq so when we are concerned about our existence or our security it's not the fear that Hamas will destroy us we know Hamas can't destroy us but um if you add andah and Iran and so forth the the fears of Destruction become suddenly much more sensible oh of course the fears are valid but I think the way that a lot of people are reading about this conflict and watching this conflict as it go now Gaza is the one that is is absorbing

most of the pain right now you know so it's just like it's it's hard for people to even people right now AR necessarily calling it the Arab Israeli conflict as it's been framed in other years Israel and Gaza and when people see lists of the names of people who have died and the first 10 pages or so are people under one your babies essentially it it becomes hard to think about what happens in Lebanon what happens in Jordan what happens in Qatar they're just like well right now we have people suffering in Gaza and the

pain is being inflicted upon them by netanyahu's government you know and I'm not going to defend it no no that's not your job there are lots of uh crimes which were committed from you know bombardments which shouldn't have happened to uh um the the the deliberate starvation inflicted um again I do think that Israel has a right to defend itself and some of the actions were Justified some of the actions were not um again that's that's at least as from my perspective that's the fact that and uh but when when when I try to understand

how do we go forward and is there any chance of uh reaching a peaceful resolution of this then it's it it's not just Israel and Gaza again it's obviously also the West Bank and the terrible things that have been happening there and again it's I think it's in a way there are a lot more victims in Gaza than in the West Bank but what's happening in the West Bank is even is far less defensible in Gaza we can at least just try to justify the actions as yes there was AAS attack on Israel there is

an an AR conflict there in the West Bank it's a completely different story what the settlers are doing what the Messianic zot IDE Israel completely indefensible uh but still if if you if we if we really want to resolve this we need to take all the facts into account all the different kind of lares of of the conflict and uh and then you have to take the what's happening over the entire region I me if it was only I think Israel and the Palestinians it could have been resolved years if not decades ago yeah I

mean there are a lot of external interests who uh for their own interest or for their own fantasies are fueling and manipulating this this is by the way when I look at the student protests here in the United States and I hear people say hey why are they protesting about the war in Gaza and they don't protest about what's happening in Sudan or they don't protest about what what happening in Myanmar on on on this case I completely agree with the students that you know United States is not given billions of dollars uh in in

money and weapons to Sudan or to Myanmar so we have less of a stake there and uh um so again going back to what we discussed through this entire uh uh conversation um the reality is just very very complex because you have to take into account all these different actors and all these different facts and the tendency is constantly to try to make it simpler by focusing on just one aspect and everybody of course chooses their favorite frame which makes them seem seem the good guys and part of this dance again between which we started

with between truth and reality reality is is is is vast and you cannot make a onetoone map of the whole of reality the truth is about pointing at particular aspects of reality and kind of directing human attention towards these aspects of reality and and and this is the big responsibility of academics and journalists and and and politicians how do you do that in a responsible way yeah and the problem here is that then what gets people the attention is not necessarily the truth most information is is not true yeah or Nuance even yeah mhm I

think one of the things I I've Loved most about hearing you speak after reading your books is I think it's it's given me an an an additional way to process the information that you've you've so eloquently put on the pages and fundamental fundamentally through all of these I I feel there's one common thread and it applies to time and how we utilize that time in processing the information that we have you know if in some ways information is like water we need water to survive but if you give us too much water or polluted water

we drown you know and so essentially what what Nexus is arguing and what this book is really challenging all of us to do is to in a world that doesn't tells us we don't have any of it which I think sometimes is a fallacy is to like take the time to sip take the time to analyze take the time to understand question Challenge and I think through all of these it's like you know everything you're saying I I I see the threads between you know it's Israel Palestine I see the threads the same threads of

trust in the Cold War the same threads of trust in you know Silicon Valley and Ai and where are we putting that trust the same trust between people the same trust between institutions and individuals and uh look the one thing I love about your books is it doesn't solve anything um it's a fantastic way no it's a fantastic way to understand many of the parts of the world and I genuinely think it's a it's a wonderful instruction manual for for us to look at how we perceive information and what it does I mean we could

definitely talk to you for many many more hours but one thing I wanted to ask you is when you look back on sapiens what's the one thing you wish you could have included that you didn't or which what's the one thing you wish you could take out that you didn't the many things um there's got to be one that bugs you all the time actually not oh wow really no I mean again it's it's the past it's the past it's gone I can't go back and kind of rewrite and they should have said this and

they should I mean it's gone let's focus on on on on what we can do now EV as always it's an absolute pleasure hearing from you thank you so much for taking the time and uh thank you for joining us on thank you thank you [Music]