Yuval Noah Harari on The Story of Sapiens, The Power of Awareness, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show

1. 0:00 – 6:42

   Guest setup, new graphic novel series, and show kickoff (plus early correction theme)

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

      Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today, many of you will know the name, and those who don't will know much more about him shortly. Professor Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and bestselling author who is considered one of the most influential public intellectuals in the world. I know that's setting a high bar, but his popular books might ring a bell. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century have sold 27 and a half million copies, roughly, in 60 languages. I'll let that sink in for people, 27.5 million copies. That is a lot of square footage, or [laughs] I say cubic, cubic feet, cubic meters. They've been recommended by Barack Obama, Chris Evans, Bill Gates, and many others. He's also behind Sapiens: A Graphic History, which we'll talk about, a brand-new graphic novel series in collaboration with comic artists David Vandermeulen, I think, co-writer, and Daniel Casanave, the illustrator. This beautifully illustrated series is a radical reworking of his book Sapiens, subtitle A Brief History of Humankind. The series will be published in four volumes, starting with Volume 1: The Birth of Humankind, which is available now. His website, Y-N Harari, H-A-R-A-R-I, .com. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. On Twitter, Harari_Yuval. We'll link to all the rest of them at tim.blog/podcast. [upbeat music] This episode is brought to you by Pique Tea. That's P-I-Q-U-E. I have had so much tea in my life. I've been to China, I've lived in China, in Japan. I've done tea tours. I drink a lot of tea, and 10 years plus of physical experimentation and tracking has shown me many things, chief among them that gut health is critical to just about everything, and you'll see where tea is gonna tie into this. It affects immune function, weight management, mental performance, emotional health, you name it. I've been drinking fermented pu-erh tea specifically pretty much every day for years now. Pu-erh tea delivers more polyphenols and probiotics than you can shake a stick at. It's like providing the optimal fertilizer to your microbiome. The problem with good pu-erh is that it's hard to source. It's hard to find real pu-erh that hasn't been exposed to pesticides and other nasties, which is super common. That's why Pique's fermented pu-erh tea crystals have become my daily go-to. It's so simple. They have so many benefits that I'm gonna get into, and I first learned about them through my friends Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose. Pique crystals are cold extracted using only wild-harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. I often kickstart my mornings with their pu-erh green tea, their pu-erh black tea, and I alternate between the two. The rich, earthy flavor of the black specifically is amazing. It's very, very ... It's like a, a, a delicious barnyard, [laughs] very peaty if you like whiskey and stuff like that. They triple toxin screen all of their products for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold contaminants commonly found in tea. There's also zero prep or brewing required, as the crystals dissolve in seconds, so you can just drop it into your hot tea, or I also make iced tea and that saves a ton of time and hassle. So Pique is offering 15% off their pu-erh teas for the very first time exclusive to you, my listeners. This is a sweet offer. Simply visit piquetea.com/tim. That's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A .com/tim. This promotion is only available to listeners of this podcast. That's piquetea.com/tim. The discount is automatically applied when you use that URL. You also have a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so your purchase is risk-free. One more time, check it out, Pique Tea, that's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A, .com/tim. [upbeat music] This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. And now Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas. They just launched a new company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now, and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L sectional couch, and I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric, they're all spill, stain, and scratch-resistant, the sofa color, the color of the legs, the sofa size, the shape to make sure it's perfect for you and your home. Also, Allform arrives in just three to seven days, and you can assemble it all yourself in a few minutes. No tools needed. I was quite astonished by how modular and easy these things fit together, kinda like Lego pieces. They've got armchairs, love seats, all the way up to an eight-seat sectional, so there's something for everyone. You can also start small and kinda build on top of it if you wanted to get a smaller couch and then build out on it, which is actually in a way what I did, because I can turn my L sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then with a separate ottoman in a matter of about 60 seconds. It's pretty rad. So I mentioned I have all these different things in this room. I use the natural leg finish, which is their lightest color, and I dig it. I mean, I've been using these things hours and hours and hours every single day. So I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in store sounds risky, you don't need to worry. Allform sofas are delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping, and you get 100 days to decide if you wanna keep it. That's more than three months, and if you don't love it, they'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund. Your sofa frame also has a forever warranty. That's literally forever. So check it out. Take a look. They've got all sorts of cool stuff to choose from. I was skeptical, and it actually worked. It worked much better than I could have imagined, and I'm very, very happy. So to find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com/tim. That's A-L-L-F-O-R-M .com/tim. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at allform.com/tim. Make sure to use the code Tim at checkout. That's allform.com/tim, and use code Tim at checkout. Optimal, minimal At this altitude, I can run flat-out for a half-mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question? No. We'll just see what happens.

   2. YHYuval Noah Harari6:22

      A cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show

   3. TFTim Ferriss6:35

      Yuval, so nice to finally see you.

   4. YHYuval Noah Harari6:37

      It's good to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

   5. TFTim Ferriss6:39

      So we're gonna start in a unusual place perhaps.

   6. YHYuval Noah Harari6:42

      Okay.

2. 6:42 – 8:34

   The “moshav” Wikipedia echo effect and how misinformation sticks

   1. TFTim Ferriss6:42

      And that is with correcting my pronunciation on a word. M-O-S-H-A-V. How do you pronounce that, and what does it mean?

   2. YHYuval Noah Harari6:50

      M-O-S-H-A-V. Oh, that, that's actually a, a kind of mistake on Wikipedia. It's a moshav. [laughs]

   3. TFTim Ferriss6:57

      [laughs]

   4. YHYuval Noah Harari6:58

      No, it's some- it somehow got around that I live on a m- on a moshav, which is some kind of socialist collective-

   5. TFTim Ferriss7:04

      [laughs]

   6. YHYuval Noah Harari7:05

      ... uh, community. Less radical than the kibbutz, but one of the experiments of socialists in Israel, like, decades ago, and it's just not true. I mean, I live in a kind of middle-class suburb of Tel Aviv.

   7. TFTim Ferriss7:17

      [laughs]

   8. YHYuval Noah Harari7:19

      [laughs]

   9. TFTim Ferriss7:19

      So this is an example, for those listening, of something that some people call the Wikipedia echo effect.

   10. YHYuval Noah Harari7:25

       Yes.

   11. TFTim Ferriss7:26

       Because I actually-

   12. YHYuval Noah Harari7:26

       I, I, I tried to correct it so many times, and it's just, I, I gave up. It's, it's, it's stronger than me.

   13. TFTim Ferriss7:31

       Right. So at some point it got into Wikipedia, then it ended up in The Guardian, then other people cite The Guardian, and it just will not go away.

   14. YHYuval Noah Harari7:38

       Yes.

   15. TFTim Ferriss7:38

       So it just keeps coming back. So let's go to something that I think is more of a firsthand report.

   16. YHYuval Noah Harari7:43

       [laughs]

   17. TFTim Ferriss7:44

       And it's, it's a paragraph from your wonderful profile, I should say, answers to questions in Tribe of Mentors, which is my last book from a few years ago. And here's the paragraph I'd like to read, and then we'll explore it. "Since the first course in 2000, I began practicing Vipassana for two hours every day, and each year I take a long meditation retreat for a month or two. It's not an escape from reality, it's getting in touch with reality. At least for two hours a day, I actually observe reality as it is, while for the other 22 hours I get overwhelmed by emails and tweets and funny cat videos. Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens and Homo Deus." So the missing piece here is the first course. Would you be open to describing-

   18. YHYuval Noah Harari8:30

       Hmm

   19. TFTim Ferriss8:30

       ... how you ended up going to your first Vipassana experience?

3. 8:34 – 12:21

   First Vipassana retreat: discovering how little control he had over attention

   1. YHYuval Noah Harari8:34

      Um, yeah. I mean, I was doing my PhD at Oxford at the time about medieval military history, and I was also looking for the meaning of life [laughs] and reading lots of philosophy books and thinking a lot, and then, then nothing really clicked. And a friend nagged me for about a year to try a meditation retreat instead of reading all these books, and finally I, I gave up and said, "Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll try. I'll see how it is," and it was really fascinating because, you know, the, the, the very first evening, the instructions that I was given by the meditation teacher was very, very simple instructions, I mean, I guess many people heard them, that you just focus your entire... You, you sit down, you close your eyes, and you just focus your entire attention on your nostrils, on your nose, and you just feel, try to feel whether your breath is coming in or whether your breath is going out. Sounds like the simplest thing in the world. It's not even a breathing exercise, like, you don't need to control the breath, just to, just let it be what it is and just feel what it does. And I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds, like most people. That, you know, for 10 seconds I would be focusing on my nostrils, on my breath, and after 10 seconds my mind would run somewhere, like to some memory, some story, some- something I forgot to do, something that happened years ago, and I would roll in that for m- for minutes before realizing that, hey, I, I, I'm missing my breath, and, and come back. And this was an extremely humiliating and important experience because it made me realize for the first time in my life that I have almost no control over my mind. That, you know, I was doing my PhD at Oxford, I thought it was... I was a very intelligent person, very smart, and you know, my mind is my, my tool, and I have absolutely no control over it. I give it this very, very simple task, and it can't do it. And also you realize how overwhelming the stories that the mind produce are. And over time, this was not on the first night, but gradually over time it made me realize that, you know, if you can't focus on the simple reality of your breath coming in and out of n- of your nostrils without being overwhelmed by some story generated in your mind, then how can you hope to understand, I don't know, the, the financial system of the world, the geopolitical system, what's happening in Israel, in the Middle East, i- much, much bigger things if you can't do that? I mean, no matter what I try to do, these stories generated by th- by my own mind get between me and reality, and most of my life I just spend on these stories. Um, so it was, ever since then, it's one of my main practices in, in life, is how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the stories that your mind generates?

   2. TFTim Ferriss11:38

      Why did your friend nag you for a year? Was this a friend who was nagging everybody to go-

   3. YHYuval Noah Harari11:42

      [laughs]

   4. TFTim Ferriss11:43

      ... to a class? And the teacher, as I understand it, maybe it was in video, I w- or I don't- or maybe in person, S.N. Goenka.

   5. YHYuval Noah Harari11:49

      Yes.

   6. TFTim Ferriss11:49

      I don't know the lifespan.

   7. YHYuval Noah Harari11:50

      Mm-hmm.

   8. TFTim Ferriss11:51

      Did they nag you because there was something about you that told them you would benefit in particular?

   9. YHYuval Noah Harari11:57

      Hmm.

   10. TFTim Ferriss11:57

       Or was it a general nagging among their friends?

   11. YHYuval Noah Harari11:59

       I think, I mean, I, I think this guy was nagging everybody [laughs]

   12. TFTim Ferriss12:02

       [laughs]

   13. YHYuval Noah Harari12:02

       In a good way. I'm still good friends with him. I, I, I think he, be- because I was really looking hard to understand life, to understand what's happening here, then he thought I would be a good candidate, and then he was absolutely right.

4. 12:21 – 14:46

   What changed (and didn’t) after starting meditation—and how it enabled long-form writing

   1. TFTim Ferriss12:21

      Now, Vipassana clicks for some people It doesn't click for others.

   2. YHYuval Noah Harari12:25

      Mm-hmm.

   3. TFTim Ferriss12:25

      Some people gravitate to transcendental meditation and repeating a mantra. Other people might find a different type of mindfulness practice, but it clicked for you. What did the before and after look like? If we, let's just say, go back to that point in time, your first experience, and then we flash-forward six months, what had changed six months later, or, or how did your perception-

   4. YHYuval Noah Harari12:45

      Um

   5. TFTim Ferriss12:45

      ... of the world change?

   6. YHYuval Noah Harari12:47

      Some things changed dramatically. Most things didn't. I mean, you have this kind of false enlightenment experience-

   7. TFTim Ferriss12:54

      [laughs] Yeah

   8. YHYuval Noah Harari12:54

      ... that you think you realized something very deep, and now everything is going to change. And over time, you realize that the, the deep patterns of yourself, of your own mind, are much, much stronger than one course of meditation or practice of, of six months. And it's a, it's a very long way. And again, for some people, it doesn't click at all. I mean, when I came out of my first course, I thought that, "Oh, that's easy. I mean, ev- you can send anybody there and it will have the same effect." Later on I realized it's, it's, it doesn't work like that. Different things work for different people. Over time, there are changes on, on so many levels, I'm not sure which of these levels is most interesting to you or to our listeners, so I c- I can talk on, on, on several of them. You know, everything from simpl- simple kind of peace of mind and better mental health to a big change in my working methods, in my professional life. I don't think, as, as, as I wrote in this, that passage you, you, you read, I don't think I could have written Sapiens or Homo Deus or any of these other books without the practice of meditation, because you need a tremendous amount of focus to do something like that, and you need to be able to see through the mass of details, and, you know, you try to summarize the whole of human history in 500 pages. [laughs] The most important button on the keyboard is delete.

   9. TFTim Ferriss14:27

      [laughs]

   10. YHYuval Noah Harari14:29

       Um, th- that's the big thing. I mean, what... I mean, there are so many important things. What is really important? That, that's the big question, and I don't think I could have done it without the kind of, uh, sharp focus that the meditation gives.

5. 14:46 – 17:47

   The long road to Sapiens: early English title, self-publishing, and getting professional help

   1. TFTim Ferriss14:46

      So many people have heard of Sapiens. Certainly there was a point in Silicon Valley when it first came out, and nearly all of my friends seemed to be reading the same book. And I, I think there's a sort of revisionist grand delusion among many readers-

   2. YHYuval Noah Harari15:03

      Mm-hmm

   3. TFTim Ferriss15:04

      ... that Sapiens came out, and then, like the snap of the fingers, 20 million copies or however many millions of copies were sold worldwide in 60 languages. Now, that doesn't seem to, to match the story exactly. What was the title of the original English version-

   4. YHYuval Noah Harari15:20

      Hmm

   5. TFTim Ferriss15:20

      ... of Sapiens, and how many copies did it sell?

   6. YHYuval Noah Harari15:23

      [laughs] Um, yeah, it was a long story. I mean, the original English version was titled From Animals Into Gods, and it sold... It was a self-publication on Amazon, and it sold something like 2,000 copies. They now go for, I don't know, thousands of dollars or something [laughs] because they're rare collector items. [laughs]

   7. TFTim Ferriss15:43

      [laughs]

   8. YHYuval Noah Harari15:43

      But yeah, it was a, it was a long way.

   9. TFTim Ferriss15:47

      It was a long way. And you brought in then at, at, at that point, a number of professionals. I, I believe maybe it was your, your husband who found-

   10. YHYuval Noah Harari15:57

       Yeah, I mean, uh-

   11. TFTim Ferriss15:57

       ... the literary agent

   12. YHYuval Noah Harari15:58

       ... th- that was the main thing. I mean, I, I have... I- I'm, I think I'm quite a good writer, but I ha- I have very little skills in terms of publication, negotiations, or anything to do with the business side of, of life. And I tried for some time, for maybe a year or two, to find a publisher by myself, and it was a complete failure. And then my husband came in, and he has much, much better business skills than, than I do, and he, like, immediately fired the agent that we were working with at the time, and kind of, "Let's go back to zero." And he was the one that found, uh, the best literary agent in Israel, uh, Deborah Harris, and she opened a lot of doors for us. And, uh, we worked on it for, I think we kind of f- we did the translation again in, uh, several, several... Because originally it was in Hebrew. And several rounds of editing and, uh, eventually something like three years or more than three years after the Hebrew version, the real English version came out in 2014.

   13. TFTim Ferriss16:59

       Hmm. What were the biggest changes that were made, aside from the title? I'd be curious to hear the story of Sapiens, the title itself, but what were some of the changes that were made in the editing process-

   14. YHYuval Noah Harari17:12

       Mm

   15. TFTim Ferriss17:12

       ... before the grand debut of the new version, if anything? I don't know if it was just fine-tuning the language.

   16. YHYuval Noah Harari17:17

       Um, it was fine-tuning. N- Nothing major changed. I mean, the, the, all, all the major themes and ideas were already there in the Hebrew version. Uh, we just really re- redo the translation and edit it, and I mean, shortening here and there a, a few things, but, but there was no major revision to the content. It was mainly, uh, issues of style and the entire kind of, uh, business approach of, um, who to work with and how.

6. 17:47 – 21:28

   Turning lectures into a book: students as a “no-bullshit” editorial board

   1. TFTim Ferriss17:47

      And you, correct me if I'm wrong, 'cause you never know what you read on the internet, the degree of [laughs] veracity, but that it was based on lectures you had given previously.

   2. YHYuval Noah Harari17:58

      Yes.

   3. TFTim Ferriss17:58

      Is that, is that true?

   4. YHYuval Noah Harari17:59

      That's, that's correct. I, I gave, like... Uh, for five, six years previously, I was giving a course at the Hebrew University, which was basically introduction to the history of the world. And at some point, uh, after working on it for, for a couple of years, I began handing out my notes to the students because I wanted them to focus on what I was saying and be part of the discussion instead of just scribbling down whatever I say. So I told them, "Forget it. I mean, you don't need to write anything. I'll give you my notes." And, and then the, the notes started circulating, not only among the students of the class, but also other students at the university, and this kind of gave me the idea that, well, maybe there is a larger audience for this. And I began working on turning these lecture notes into, into a book. Uh, again, it, it was a long way, but a lot of the major ideas were there in the, in the lecture notes.

   5. TFTim Ferriss18:54

      And I, I wanted to hear more about this because I've seen in some books that I've quite enjoyed, like Zero to One by Peter Thiel-

   6. YHYuval Noah Harari19:05

      Mm-hmm

   7. TFTim Ferriss19:05

      ... and his, his co-writer, also came from lecture notes originally at Stanford.

   8. YHYuval Noah Harari19:10

      Yeah. It, it's a good method because the students take no bullshit. Um-

   9. TFTim Ferriss19:16

      [laughs]

   10. YHYuval Noah Harari19:16

       You know, when you write, when you write a book and it's only you and the screen and the computer, the computer suffers everything. Whatever you write, the computer is fine with it. It's too long, it's, uh, it's incomprehensible, it's boring, the computer doesn't care. But the students give you immediate feedback. I mean, if you stand in class and you st- and you talk, and you see that the students have lost interest, then that's a sign. Or they just don't understand what you're saying. And the great thing about this course, it was an really an introduction to first-year students, and, and Israeli students. And, you know, if, if I, if I, if it was, I don't know, in Oxford, then maybe it wouldn't work. But Israeli students, they tell you exactly what they think about you [laughs] and what you say. Very-

   11. TFTim Ferriss19:58

       [laughs]

   12. YHYuval Noah Harari20:00

       So I got immediate feedback about everything, and maybe the most important feedback is that... And I was trying to explain the really basic concepts of human history. What is religion? What is money? What is capitalism? And you need... You know, when you talk with professors or doctors, you can talk in a very, very complicated way so nobody realizes, including yourself, that you don't really know what you're talking about. But with first-year students, you have to use very simple language, and that's a big challenge. The simpler the language, the bigger the challenge. It really shows you and your listeners whether you know what you're talking about or not. You can't hide behind professional jargon and very complicated, uh, p- I don't know, language. And so, so it was, uh... It forced me. Like, I was trying to explain what is money, and I had to go back again and again to, to the i- to the core ideas and to the lecture notes and ask, "Do I really understand what I'm talking about? If I really understand, I should be able to make it simpler. I should be able to give a straightforward example."

   13. TFTim Ferriss21:16

       It makes me think quite a bit about, uh, Richard Feynman, the physicist, who-

   14. YHYuval Noah Harari21:21

       Mm-hmm

   15. TFTim Ferriss21:21

       ... was very, very esteemed teacher, and felt very similarly, that, that professionals could hide behind labels, right?

   16. YHYuval Noah Harari21:28

       Yeah.

7. 21:28 – 26:25

   Why suffering is his core lens: power vs. happiness in history and in life

   1. TFTim Ferriss21:28

      Pointing at the bird and knowing the name is very different from understanding the bird. [laughs] And if you have to describe it in simple terms, it's a real challenge of, of competence and clarity as a teacher. You mentioned the term suffering, and I, I, again, want you to fact-check me, but it seems to me in doing homework and reading your work that you are very attuned to suffering-

   2. YHYuval Noah Harari21:53

      Mm-hmm

   3. TFTim Ferriss21:53

      ... whether that is in the animal world, whether that is in the human experience, whether that is in your own experience, uh, say, with the endless cloudy days in [laughs] Oxford at one point. Uh, c- could you speak to how you developed that sensitivity, if, if I'm not-

   4. YHYuval Noah Harari22:14

      Mm-hmm

   5. TFTim Ferriss22:14

      ... imposing that on you? Uh, because I mean, you... I'm looking behind you right now, and people might not be watching this video, but you have some calligraphy behind you, which is, uh, I believe it's Fosheen, which is, like, Buddhist heart or Buddhist mind. And suffering is-

   6. YHYuval Noah Harari22:26

      Actually, I don't know. It's, Somebody gave me-

   7. TFTim Ferriss22:27

      Okay

   8. YHYuval Noah Harari22:28

      ... a present, and I hang it there.

   9. TFTim Ferriss22:29

      All right.

   10. YHYuval Noah Harari22:29

       I, uh, I- [laughs]

   11. TFTim Ferriss22:30

       It's... Yeah, it's beauti- it's beautiful. So that's what it, that's what it says.

   12. YHYuval Noah Harari22:33

       Okay.

   13. TFTim Ferriss22:33

       And suffering and the concept of suffering is, is also central-

   14. YHYuval Noah Harari22:37

       Mm-hmm

   15. TFTim Ferriss22:37

       ... to a lot of Buddhist thought.

   16. YHYuval Noah Harari22:39

       Yeah.

   17. TFTim Ferriss22:40

       Could you speak to how you think about suffering or why that is, is something that you're so cognizant of?

   18. YHYuval Noah Harari22:46

       Yeah, I, I realized both in my personal life and in my work as a historian that this is the big question. I mean, the big question is not the meaning of life, and the big question is not how you satisfy some god or how you achieve this or that goal. The, the big question is how you liberate yourself and others from suffering, and this is also, I think, the main theme of human history, is most historians are focused on the question of power. If you take most history books, and also most economic books and, and so forth, they are about power. They are not just, you know, a guide to how to get power, but about then the history of power, conflicts about power between two kings, between two kingdoms, between two gods, between two religions, between two classes. These are... most history books are about that. And it's an important part, but it's, it's, it's not the bottom line. I think the bottom line, okay, what does all this mean in term of happiness and suffering? So okay, so the Roman Empire rose to power. Did it actually make humans happier? Did it make them more miserable? If it had no noticeable effect on, say, average happiness in the world, what does it matter whether they won or lost? And in my work, I try to always keep both of these perspectives at the same time, the perspective of, of, of power and of suffering, uh, especially because, you know, humans are very, very good, as a species, not all humans, but as a species, we are very good in acquiring more power, but we are not good at all in translating power into happiness. I mean, for me, the big paradox of history is that- It's obvious we are thousands of times more powerful than people in the Stone Age, but it's not clear whether we are at all happier than they were. Maybe we are happier a bit, but not thousands of times more happier. So something is wrong here. You know, it's like a car, which, you know, you, you, you press the fuel pedal with all your strength, but your gear is in neutral. I mean, we have so much power and no- we doesn't move anywhere. And it's also often the case in your personal life that you can achieve so much, and then, you know, you look inside and you ask, "Am I actually happier than I was 10 years ago or 20 years ago?" And maybe not. And one of the things I also realized personally and, you know, collectively as a historian, is that we just don't understand suffering very well. One of the main problems is that people think that with regard to suffering, it's obvious what suffering is. The big problem is how to make it, h- how to make it disappear. I know that, I don't know, pain is suffering, or I don't have enough money, that's, that's the cause of my suffering, so now let's focus on, on, on getting more money or getting a medicine. And the mistake is that you don't really understand the deep causes and mechanisms of suffering. You see just part of it. Yeah, obviously, pain is suffering. That's true, but there is much more to it. And if we spent a little more time on understanding the deep mechanisms of misery and dissatisfaction in life, then we can act far more effectively in, in trying to alleviate it.

   19. TFTim Ferriss26:15

       Can you speak to the, the test of suffering-

   20. YHYuval Noah Harari26:19

       Hmm

   21. TFTim Ferriss26:19

       ... to determine what entities are real and what are not, what-

   22. YHYuval Noah Harari26:23

       Yeah

   23. TFTim Ferriss26:23

       ... are illusion and what are not?

8. 26:25 – 31:23

   Fictional entities, cooperation at scale, and the “test of suffering” for what’s real

   1. YHYuval Noah Harari26:25

      I mean-

   2. TFTim Ferriss26:25

      I shouldn't say illusion, maybe abstractions.

   3. YHYuval Noah Harari26:27

      Uh-huh. The main way that humans gain power is through collective cooperation. As individuals, we are not particularly powerful animals. In a match between a human and chimpanzee, the chimpanzee will easily win. The big advantage of humans, we can cooperate basically in unlimited numbers, thousands, millions, today even billions cooperate together. Chimpanzees can't cooperate more than, say, 50 or 100. That- that's about the limit. And then, you know, w- what enables us to cooperate in very large numbers, these are, this is our ability to invent and believe in fictional stories and fictional entities. All the big heroes of history, almost all of them, are fictional entities that exist only in our imagination, only in the stories that we create. Nations, gods, money, corporations, states, the only place they exist is in the stories that we invent and tell, as they are n- they are not physical or biological realities. Again, the United States or Israel, the only place it exists is in the story that millions of people believe. And it's the same with money. It has, you know, money has absolutely no objective value, uh, but as long as millions of people believe in the story about the dollar or the story about the euro, it works. Now, when you say that, sometimes people go to the other extreme and think that what you're saying is that nothing is real, that the entire world is just one big illusion. But that's not the case. I mean, there is still reality. There are still chimpanzees and elephants and humans, and there is a very, very simple test to know whether the hero of the story that you're telling is a real entity or a fictional entity invented by humans and existing only in their, in their imagination, and that is the test of suffering. That a human being can suffer, a cow can suffer, an elephant can suffer, but a nation can't. If a nation loses a war, it doesn't suffer. It has no mind. It can't feel pain or sadness or fear. Uh, the soldiers who are fighting for the nation, the citizens in that nation now being conquered by some other nation, they can suffer a lot of things, but the nations can't suffer. It should be obvious. And it's the same with corporations. Even if the corporation loses a billion dollar, it doesn't suffer. It g- if it goes bankrupt, it doesn't suffer, because it, again, it has no mind, can't feel pain, can't feel anything. So it's, you know, it's a very, very simple test that we should remind ourselves from time to time what is real in the world and what are these fictional stories. Now, I'm not against the stories. We need them. They are the basis for cooperation, but we should always remember we created them as tools to serve us. We shouldn't be enslaved by them. If a story enables people to cooperate well and thereby improve their lives, that's wonderful, but once you forget it's just a story and you begin entire wars just in order to protect, to defend the honor of the nation or to, uh, uh, increase the profits of the corporation, something went wrong.

   4. TFTim Ferriss29:59

      Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. The colorful days of fall are now upon us. Are your small business' needs evolving, changing with the times? Certainly true for me and my team. And despite the current uncertainty in the world, having the right people on your team can wrap you in feelings of security and peace of mind like a warm blanket. It's never been more important to find and hire the right people. LinkedIn has an active community of professionals, more than 690 million members worldwide, and when your business is ready to make that next hire, LinkedIn Jobs can help you find the right person quickly by matching your role with qualified candidates. Getting started is easier than ever, with new features to help you find qualified candidates quickly. Manage job posts and contact candidates from one simple view on linkedin.com's familiar website. It's super easy. Identify strong candidates with their efficient rating system to easily get your job in front of more qualified professionals. And now you can also do all of this from your mobile device. So when your business is ready to make that next hire, or if you just wanna check it out, find the right person faster with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want and get the first $50 off. Just visit linkedin.com/TIM, all caps T-I-M. Again, that's linkedin.com/TIM to get $50 off of your first job post. Terms and conditions apply. What is the story, if there is one-

9. 31:23 – 35:50

   Money as trust—and how wealth changed his daily mental load

   1. YHYuval Noah Harari31:23

      Mm-hmm

   2. TFTim Ferriss31:23

      ... uh, or stories that you have around money yourself? I was reading The New Yorker profile-

   3. YHYuval Noah Harari31:29

      Mm

   4. TFTim Ferriss31:29

      ... not, from not too long ago, and you probably know the paragraph that I might be thinking about, where you and your husband might relate to money differently. What are the stories that, that you have for yourself in your life-

   5. YHYuval Noah Harari31:40

      About?

   6. TFTim Ferriss31:41

      ... money?

   7. YHYuval Noah Harari31:42

      Well, in essence, money is just trust. It's the most successful and universal system of mutual trust that humans ever came up with, and therefore, I don't think it's bad. You know, it's very common for historians and philosophers and people like that, "Oh, money, it's the source of all evil in the world." I don't think so. It... Sometimes it causes a lot of bad things, but in itself it's a wonderful thing. It's just a system of mutual trust, that, you know, 50,000 years ago, to trust somebody, you need to know them personally. You need to know their personality, what they did in the past, they like you, they don't like you, and that makes it very, very hard to cooperate in large numbers, because you can't know a lot of people personally, and it also makes it particularly hard to cooperate with strangers and foreigners that you don't know. Now, you look at today, I can go to a supermarket, and a complete stranger that I never met in my life would give me food that I can actually eat, which was grown by a couple of other people on the other side of the world, and was transported from that field or plantation to the supermarket by a bunch of other people none of us knows. So how do we cooperate so effectively? How do we trust each other? Um, money makes it possible. And money is really, it's, it's just trust. You know, in the beginning, money was, uh... and, and because people didn't have a lot of trust, then money had to be made fr- from something with an objective value, which doesn't depend just on, on human belief. So the first money that we know about was simply grain. You paid for things with grain. And grain, you know, it, you can eat them if, if nothing works. But gradually, people... The, the trust increased, and today, most money in the world, it's just digital data being passed between computers. Most money is not even banknotes and coins. It's, I don't know, like 5% or something of the, of the money is, is, is physical money. Most of it is just digital. When during this crisis i- in recent year, uh, governments and banks in the US, in Europe, elsewhere, created trillions of dollars, they didn't even bother to print the money. You just have some official in some bank, goes into the computer, adds a zero somewhere, and you have a trillion new dollars emerging out of nothing. And it works. I mean, it works because people have so much trust in the banks, in the governments, not only of their own country. That's the amazing thing. I mean, you'd have thought, well, you can only use the money of your govern- no. You think about even, I don't know, Islamic fundamentalist, ISIS. They hated America. They hated American politics, American culture, American religion, but they had nothing against American dollars. When they conquered, I don't know, Mosul, and entered the banks, they didn't burn the dollars that were there. They took them. They used them. So that's amazing, that you can have such a level of trust even between complete enemies. And in my personal life, um, therefore I don't have a negative attitude towards money. Um, I think for me, I, I'm... also, I, I'm not chasing it a lot, but for me, the best thing about money is not to think about it. I, I'm now much wealthier than I was 10 years ago. I was ch- you know, just a, an, a young professor back then. Not that I was ever poor, but I, I'm now much more wealthier, and the m- the, the thing I m- I like most about my wealth today is that I simply don't have to think about money. I go to the supermarket, and I, I, I... I don't know. In Israel, pineapples are very expensive. So I... if I want a pineapple, I just... I, I don't even look at how much it costs. I j- I just, oh, I want a pineapple. Okay, let's take it.

   8. TFTim Ferriss35:40

      You've mentioned the alleviating of suffering and getting a better understanding, first of defining the problem, as opposed to just rushing to solutions-

   9. YHYuval Noah Harari35:49

      Mm-hmm

10. 35:50 – 38:58

    Fame, teams, and protecting deep work: putting retreats first and staying grounded

    1. TFTim Ferriss35:50

       ... and getting a better understanding of suffering. Are there ways in which your life, in contrast to, say, not thinking about money, has been complicated or made harder to navigate with the tremendous success ... of Sapiens and becoming more publicly visible? In other words, was it, as, as just, uh, an example, easier to find sort of tranquility and connection with bodily sensations-

    2. YHYuval Noah Harari36:17

       Mm

    3. TFTim Ferriss36:17

       ... as a way to integrate yourself back at Oxford compared to today?

    4. YHYuval Noah Harari36:22

       No. Mm-mm. But I have 20 years of experience now in doing that.

    5. TFTim Ferriss36:26

       Yeah.

    6. YHYuval Noah Harari36:26

       So I don't know, maybe if I remained an anonymous professor of medieval history, I, t- I, I would have much deeper experiences of meditation today. Maybe not. Uh, it's impossible to know. I still have time. You know, um, I'm not so busy. I have now a large team, like, again, I'm... and thanks to my husband to kind of set it up, we now have a team of 15 people working for us. So I get something like, I don't know, 15, 20 emails a day, that's it.

    7. TFTim Ferriss36:57

       Yeah.

    8. YHYuval Noah Harari36:57

       And like this conversation, I didn't have to do anything. I just had to come, like, two minutes before it started, and just put, like, plug myself in, and that's it. Somebody organized everything. So, um, I'm not extremely busy. I, I still have two hours every day to meditate. I still go every year for a long retreat of, say, 30 days or 40 or 60 days, something like that. Um, yeah, I mean, uh, I, I think a lot. There are a lot of things to think. Um, but I thought a lot even before that [laughs] . So, uh, I mean, the, the, the content of my thoughts changed, but I don't think the intensity changed. One of the things I realized from now being this famous public intellectual and meeting all these famous people and leaders, is that everybody l- is, is, is basically the same. When you are prime minister or president of a superpower, you can't be more, uh, worried than when you run a small business. It's impossible. It's t- you know, it's the same brain, it's the same mind. So if you have a small shop, and you're the only worker maybe, and it's now corona time, and, and, and it... y- you have to shut it down, and you have to pay, uh, your mortgage, and, and, and whatever, and you worry about it all day, it's basically the same with a prime minister or president that worries about the economic crisis of a war. It's... Now, of course, objectively, they have to be much more worried, but they can't. They have the same brain that you have. So it really depends on, you know, m- maybe they are even far less worried than you are. If you're an extremely neurotic person, I don't know, if Woody Allen had a small shop-

    9. TFTim Ferriss38:43

       [laughs]

    10. YHYuval Noah Harari38:44

        And [laughs] I think he would be much more worried about his shop than certain presidents and prime ministers today in the world are worried about their countries.

    11. TFTim Ferriss38:55

        [laughs]

11. 38:58 – 44:47

    Detachment, skepticism about certainty, and what friends value most in him

    1. TFTim Ferriss38:58

       Yes. I, I read a, I read a quote from you, this was in The New York Times, you know, "If, if I was a superpower, my superpower would be detachment."

    2. YHYuval Noah Harari39:07

       Mm-hmm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss39:07

       Uh, feel free to correct that if need be, but, uh, assuming there's some grain of truth to that, uh, could you expand on that, please?

    4. YHYuval Noah Harari39:15

       Yeah, I think, I think it is true that I, I can keep a kind of distance from situations, from development in, in, in my personal life or in, or in, in, in world history. And even though I have my opinions and, uh, my preferences, um, I have a certain ability to, to keep a distance and say... look at things from, from different angles. And, um, also it, it makes me very skeptical about my own positions, that maybe I, maybe I just don't know, maybe I, I'm wrong about it. Um, it, it could have been, you know, debilitating that I, I can't, like... Uh, how can you write the history of the world if you're not sure about what you say? But actually, I find it... I, I just don't take myself 100% seriously [laughs] . So, okay, so maybe I'll write something and, and it's nonsense, so okay. Uh, w- that, that's... I... Uh, when, when I wrote Sapiens initially, I had no idea it would be a big success. So I was kind of... I had this defense that, uh, I thought, "Al- almo- no- nobody's going to read it. Like, maybe my students at university would read it, and maybe a couple of other people, but that's it. So may- you know, I can write what I want, basically." And later on when, when I became very successful, it was the other way around, then, that, you know, it, it doesn't matter anymore [laughs] that, that if I'm, if, if, if I write something and it's not, um, and I'm not 100% sure about it, then, uh, I can take the hit. Then, okay, so people will find out that I wrote something wrong, and, and that's fine. That's part of the business. I mean, if, if you really want to, uh, write these kinds of big books, you have to accept to some extent that you will make mistakes and that, um, you will not get everything right. If, if you, if you want... If, if you're a perfectionist, then it's better to write the history of kind of one battle in the Middle Ages. Then, then you're on safer grounds.

    5. TFTim Ferriss41:24

       This is gonna seem like a strange question perhaps, and if it goes nowhere, that's totally fine. But I'm curious, what do your close friends come to you for when it comes to advice? Like, what type of advice-

    6. YHYuval Noah Harari41:38

       Mm

    7. TFTim Ferriss41:38

       ... do your friends come to you for? Is there any, any pattern to it, or any-

    8. YHYuval Noah Harari41:43

       It, it-

    9. TFTim Ferriss41:43

       ... particular standout?

    10. YHYuval Noah Harari41:44

        It depends on the friends, I think. I have a core of very good friends that go with me for years, I mean, from long before. I, I, I think that since I became kind of famous I made maybe just one or two new good friends. Almost all my good friends are with me from, from years back. And I have different relationships with each of them. It's like w- each one of them holds a different part of my inner world or of my life, and I, I hold different parts of, of their world. So, you know, they, they don't come for me, to me for advice about history, that's for sure. [laughs]

    11. TFTim Ferriss42:24

        [laughs]

    12. YHYuval Noah Harari42:24

        Like, maybe they'll ask me, "Well, what do you think will happen in the US elections?" And I say, "I don't know." Uh, but, [laughs] I mean, some- if, if something really big happens, I don't know, when the, um... During the h- the, the height of, of the, of the terrorist wave in the world. So they would come and I... At least some of them, and I would say, "Look, look, from a big historical perspective, this is not so important. You know, ev- every person that dies in a terrorist attack is the entire world destroyed, but looking at the big picture from the history of the world, this is a very small affair. I mean, I can explain to you why, uh, terrorism gets so much attention. It's basically theater. Uh, these people are experts in theater, not in war, and they are very good at it, so they get so much attention. But you don't need to worry that the terrorists will take over the world. It- it's not going to happen." Uh, most of the things, you know, it's like somebody's breaking up with their boyfriend, girlfriend, somebody's just having a lousy day at work, and the, the, the usual things.

    13. TFTim Ferriss43:27

        The usual stuff. What would they say your superpower is? If, if you said it's detachment-

    14. YHYuval Noah Harari43:33

        Mm

    15. TFTim Ferriss43:33

        ... which we could dig further into.

    16. YHYuval Noah Harari43:35

        [laughs]

    17. TFTim Ferriss43:35

        But is, are there any other observations that they would have? If w- if, if we gave all of your closest friends-

    18. YHYuval Noah Harari43:41

        Oh

    19. TFTim Ferriss43:41

        ... two drinks and we said, "Okay, Yuval-

    20. YHYuval Noah Harari43:44

        Mm

    21. TFTim Ferriss43:44

        ... superpower, what is it?" What might they say?

    22. YHYuval Noah Harari43:47

        First, they will say different things because they know different angles of me.

    23. TFTim Ferriss43:52

        Right. Mm-hmm.

    24. YHYuval Noah Harari43:52

        I think some of them will say, I suppose, that I'm a good listener, partly because I talk so much during [laughs] my, with my, my work, that, like, when I meet with friends, I like to be quiet and just let somebody else do the talking for a while, which is a very good thing because very, very often when people come to you for help, they just want you to listen.

    25. TFTim Ferriss44:12

        [laughs]

    26. YHYuval Noah Harari44:13

        They don't want you to solve their problems. They don't... You know, it, it often happens that come- somebody comes, you know, with a problem, and you don't have patience for them, so you think, "What is the fastest way to get rid of them? To end this t- phone call? I'll find the solution to their problem, then they'll go away." And this really is the last thing they want. They really just want to complain and, and for somebody to, to listen to them, and I'm quite good at it. [laughs]

    27. TFTim Ferriss44:39

        [laughs] Right. You s- you spend all your words during the day, and then you can-

    28. YHYuval Noah Harari44:43

        Yes

    29. TFTim Ferriss44:44

        ... you, you have the space to listen.

    30. YHYuval Noah Harari44:45

        Uh, yes.

12. 44:47 – 51:02

    Happiness is slippery: pleasant sensations, craving, and why misery is easier to identify

    1. TFTim Ferriss44:47

       How do you relate to happiness?

    2. YHYuval Noah Harari44:49

       Yeah, I usually prefer to talk about suffering or misery, uh, because ha- happiness is, is far more difficult to nail down. I mean, when you're miserable, you know it. When you're happy-

    3. TFTim Ferriss45:00

       Right

    4. YHYuval Noah Harari45:00

       ... when you think you're happy, you're quite often just deluding [laughs] yourself.

    5. TFTim Ferriss45:04

       [laughs]

    6. YHYuval Noah Harari45:05

       It's not so easy to really understand what's happening there. You know, it, it really goes down to the level of the body. This is something that I, I know from meditation. When you have a pain somewhere in your body, it acts like a magnet. They just draws the attention there. There is no way you can miss it, and you try to, to observe other things, and you can't. It's just, you know, it, it gets drawn back to the painful sensation in the knee, in the stomach, wherever it is. But when you have pleasant sensations in your body, they have usually the opposite effect. They throw you out. Uh, you, you kind of float couple of feet above the ground. I mean, sometimes people come in meditation, and they say, "I never have any pleasant sensations in the body. I just have pain." And that's... It's never the case. What's true is that when you have pleasant sensations, you don't notice them because the usual effect of feeling something very pleasant, it throws you out. You start kind of imagining, "Hey, what if I win the lottery and I'll have a million dollars? I'll do that. I'll do that." And you, you lose connection with what... At the time that you're having these very pleasant thoughts, you're having very pleasant sensations in the body, but you don't notice it. And, um, it's, it's... I find it, it's, it's harder to work and to see what's actually happening there, but it's... I would... It's even more important than kind of noticing and working with, with, with the painful sensations. I mean, most... In the end, most of our... I would say the, the really difficult problems, they begin with the pleasant sensations that, um, you know, we become so attached to them that the moment they are gone, m- most of the time people don't have very painful experiences. Most of the time if you are dissatisfied, it's because you are missing or craving for some very pleasant experience which is just not there, and you're not willing to settle for the kind of ordinary, boring thing that you do have.

    7. TFTim Ferriss47:16

       I want to rewind to your description of your current life compared to your, just say, pre-fame life-

    8. YHYuval Noah Harari47:23

       Mm-hmm

    9. TFTim Ferriss47:23

       ... which seems to be similar in many ways. You've been able to preserve the space to do what you do best, and you have this team. You have this, this husband who's very good at saying no.

    10. YHYuval Noah Harari47:34

        [laughs]

    11. TFTim Ferriss47:34

        You have personal assistants who are very good at saying no. And to many people listening who have achieved some modicum of success, I think they will listen with great envy because very often, whether they are artists, whether they are businesspeople, what made them successful is often the first thing to get crowded out by the new attention and success-

    12. YHYuval Noah Harari47:59

        Mm

    13. TFTim Ferriss47:59

        ... that they receive. Aside from luck, because perhaps there was some luck and chance involved in meeting-

    14. YHYuval Noah Harari48:07

        Mm

    15. TFTim Ferriss48:07

        ... the person who then became your husband, were there any decisions or are there any- ... decisions or frameworks or anything at all-

    16. YHYuval Noah Harari48:15

        Mm-hmm

    17. TFTim Ferriss48:15

        ... that has helped you to preserve the space that you have?

    18. YHYuval Noah Harari48:19

        I think a very important decision was to keep the meditation first, that, like, when I plan my day or when I plan my year, it's the first thing I put in the calendar, is the meditation retreats, and everything else has to find space around that. And that was a very... It was a conscious decision and a very important decision that, that really worked. And in a, in a bit similar way, also, to keep time for my old friends, to keep time for my family, and, um, understanding that this is kind of a marathon race and not a sprint. But okay, something very important happens, the new book is coming out, there is a ve- there is a lot of important things, so, okay, so I, I can, I can change my routines for a while. But over the long run, you have to keep these kind of basic blocks intact. Thi- this was a very conscious decision. In my case, uh, it worked. Also, to kind of remember, mm, what's really important for you in life. F- for me, I think maybe, you know, on, on the personal level, I really want to understand life, to understand the world, what's happening. I noticed quite early that most of kind of the big events that I'm participating in, like conferences and, and so forth, and the important people I meet, they don't really contribute much to that. They don't seem to understand the life or, or have to... Some particular insight. In the big conferences, they never talk about these things. You know, they talk about the global economy, they talk about climate change, they talk about, uh, they are important things, but in, on, on the deeper level of what's actually happening here, it's, um, I won't get any answers from, from there. You know, it's... I don't think it's a coincidence that if you look at the whole span of human history, and almost none of the important political leaders of humankind made a significant philosophical contribution to human thought. You have a few exception, I don't know, Marcus Aurelius or something like that. But generally speaking, you would've thought that, uh, from their vantage point, they see something that ordinary mortals don't. They... May- maybe they, they reach the top because they have some very keen insight into human nature, and if they have some keen insight, they keep it very, very secret. [laughs]

    19. TFTim Ferriss51:02

        [laughs]

13. 51:02 – 57:24

    Art, language, and deep insight: influences, Brave New World, and fears around AI ‘understanding’

    1. TFTim Ferriss51:02

       Who are some of the people you respect, could be past or present, for really seeing or seeking what is going on, on the deeper levels?

    2. YHYuval Noah Harari51:17

       Hmm. Well, I, I, I can tell you, I mean, some of the names of thinkers and writers that influenced me.

    3. TFTim Ferriss51:24

       Great. Let's start there.

    4. YHYuval Noah Harari51:25

       Um, yeah, so, I mean, um, Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, really influenced me a lot. Uh, hi- his book, The Sources of the Self, is, I think, one of the most important books I read in life. One of the most difficult books also. I mean, [laughs] if people take this as a kind of reading recommendation, they should be warned, it's, it's really tough going.

    5. TFTim Ferriss51:49

       [laughs]

    6. YHYuval Noah Harari51:49

       It's a very big book, very dense, but if, if you make it, it's, it's really worth it. O- of course, I was, uh, very influenced by my meditation teacher, S. N. Goenka. And again, not necessarily by any books he w- he wrote or j- just by, by, by, by the, the, the guidance. I mean, I, I remember sitting in my first vipassana course and, and, and having this feeling, "This guy really gets it. He really understands what's, what's happening." Uh, th- this was something q- quite surprising for me to see that. Some of my good friends have some insight into what's happening here. I, I, I can give a list of, of books that influenced me. I'm not sure if, if this is kind of the... Answers the question, but-

    7. TFTim Ferriss52:36

       Well, I-

    8. YHYuval Noah Harari52:37

       No, it, it's-

    9. TFTim Ferriss52:37

       We, we, we are free, free to meander. This is... We don't have tight constraints

    10. YHYuval Noah Harari52:41

        I, I think that one of the problems I've realized, it's that it's extremely difficult to share the really deep insights you have about life, that y- very often they are in a non-verbal level. And in any case, uh, um, my impression is that most of the inner world of most humans is never shared. They never talk about it because they don't even have the words and don't have the audience. I mean, most of what happens to you deep down during the day, your spouse probably doesn't know, your parents don't know, your children don't know, your friends don't know, even you don't know, if you don't really make the effort. One of the qualities of, of great art, not just writing, but different kinds of art, that it really gives words that, you know, y- you feel something for many... Maybe for years, and you have no idea how to communicate it. And then you read a poem or you see a TV show and, yes, this is exactly what I'm feeling, and I never knew how to communicate it. So that's why it's also very difficult to kind of know, um, you meet somebody and you don't really know what's going on inside them and to what extent they understand or don't understand their life or life in general. So it, it's very, very hard to say.

    11. TFTim Ferriss54:16

        Well, you also underscore something that I've thought about a lot recently, which is it's quite unfair to expect other people to understand you fully when you don't understand yourself fully-

    12. YHYuval Noah Harari54:28

        [laughs]

    13. TFTim Ferriss54:28

        ... on your own. [laughs] It's quite an, uh, quite an unfair expectation of people sometimes.

    14. YHYuval Noah Harari54:35

        This is a basic expectations because, because we have trouble understanding ourselves, we have this hope that somebody will lend us a hand, and we have the experience, at least most of us, if we came from loving families, that when you're kids, there were people there, like our parents, who did exactly that for us. Even on the most banal level, that, you know, a child is crying, and, uh, the mother would say, "Well, y- you're just tired. Just go to sleep." And you, you figure out, well, you should know that you're tired, but no. I mean, it's, it's amazing that sometimes people are tired or hungry or whatever, and they, and they don't know it, and then somebody who really understand them comes and says, "Well, just go to sleep." And i- in, in my writing, I, I engage a lot with the issue of the future of AI and surveillance, and I think one of the key fantasies with AI and surveillance is that, um, the algorithms will do that for us, that there will-

    15. TFTim Ferriss55:42

        Well, this, well, this ties into one of the books that has had a big impact on you, if I remember correctly, right? I mean, the Aldous Huxley and-

    16. YHYuval Noah Harari55:49

        Yeah

    17. TFTim Ferriss55:49

        ... Brave New World.

    18. YHYuval Noah Harari55:51

        Yeah, Brave New World, I, I, it, it really had a really, really deep impact on me, um, because I, I think he really got it. [laughs]

    19. TFTim Ferriss55:59

        [laughs]

    20. YHYuval Noah Harari56:01

        And that he... The, the interesting thing about Brave New World, it's kind of, you know... It's, on the surface, it's a dystopia, but when you kind of ask yourself why, what's wrong with Brave New World, it's very difficult to say it, to find out. I mean, everybody seems to be satisfied. Everybody seems to be happy. There is a system in place that, um, understands you very, very deeply and makes sure that you'll never be in great pain or never, never suffer any, any great misery. And it's, it's a very... In, in this sense, you know, 1984, like, I know it, it, it's brother book, 1984, it's a very simple book in this sense, that 1984 describes a terrible, terrible dystopia. The only question is, how do we avoid getting there? But Brave New World, you read it, and at least for me, I kind of think, okay, so what's, what's really w- wrong with it? And it's not easy to answer this question.

    21. TFTim Ferriss57:06

        [sighs] Yeah, the, the sort of uncanny feeling that something is not quite right that you can't put words to. It's very similar to the feeling of something that is quite right that you can't put words to that then gets reflected in good art. It can go both ways.

    22. YHYuval Noah Harari57:24

        Yeah.

14. 57:24 – 1:10:30

    Science fiction as philosophy: swimming audiobooks, Black Mirror, Her, and realistic AI risks

    1. TFTim Ferriss57:24

       In... A number of the things that I've read in preparation for this from various profiles, there's one that said you prefer television to novels. There was another that gave the example, might have been the same profile, of you-

    2. YHYuval Noah Harari57:36

       Mm-hmm

    3. TFTim Ferriss57:36

       ... swimming as part of your routine in the summer and listening to nonfiction books-

    4. YHYuval Noah Harari57:40

       Yes

    5. TFTim Ferriss57:40

       ... via, via headsets, but they're... I guess they're resonant. They deal with the vibration of the skull-

    6. YHYuval Noah Harari57:47

       Yeah, I mean-

    7. TFTim Ferriss57:47

       ... or the, the jaw bone

    8. YHYuval Noah Harari57:48

       ... it is, it is some really nice gadget I, I, I came across. And I had... I tried to, to listen through, like, usual earplugs, and water would seep in somehow all the time and w- would ruin it, and then finally I came across this gadget that you can just put it on your forehead, and some, in some mysterious way, it works better, and you actually hear better than when you put it in your ears. Uh, so yeah, I would swim back and forth, back and forth, listening to... I don't know. I, I, I listened, say, to Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism while swimming-

    9. TFTim Ferriss58:19

       Mm-hmm

    10. YHYuval Noah Harari58:20

        ... back and forth in my pool. [laughs]

    11. TFTim Ferriss58:22

        [laughs] With the, with the dolphin headset for the resonance. That's amazing. So I'll... The... It's a forehead headset perhaps. Do you recall what type it is by any chance? I know this is getting into the minutia. If, if not-

    12. YHYuval Noah Harari58:34

        Um-

    13. TFTim Ferriss58:34

        ... we can figure it out later

    14. YHYuval Noah Harari58:34

        ... I can go and look for it if it's very important. I-

    15. TFTim Ferriss58:37

        [laughs]

    16. YHYuval Noah Harari58:37

        It's just, it's just in the, in the next room, so, like, it, it will take me a second if you want.

    17. TFTim Ferriss58:41

        Oh, yeah. Let's... Yeah, sure. Let's, let's grab it. Why not?

    18. YHYuval Noah Harari58:44

        Okay. Just a minute.

    19. TFTim Ferriss58:45

        I don't want to say this is the most important thing in the world, but I'm curious.

    20. YHYuval Noah Harari58:47

        Well, I'll, I'll take it... It'll take a minute. [grunts] So, uh, it's a... This is how it looks, by the way.

    21. TFTim Ferriss58:57

        Oh, wow. All right. So it's connected to the-

    22. YHYuval Noah Harari59:00

        Yeah, it connects-

    23. TFTim Ferriss59:01

        ... sort of dor-

    24. YHYuval Noah Harari59:01

        Yeah

    25. TFTim Ferriss59:01

        ... dorsal snorkel-

    26. YHYuval Noah Harari59:03

        Exactly

    27. TFTim Ferriss59:03

        ... that goes across the forehead so you don't have to rotate.

    28. YHYuval Noah Harari59:05

        Yes, and I don't have to-

    29. TFTim Ferriss59:06

        Or it doesn't get pulled to the side

    30. YHYuval Noah Harari59:06

        ... like my, my, put my, uh, head back and forth all the time-
15. 1:10:30 – 1:24:25

    Reinventing Sapiens as a graphic history: experimentation, visuals, and the hard choices of depiction

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:10:30

       ... or thought exercises embedded into, say, Black Mirror, in a way that are not just fascinating, but also prophetic in some respects. Sapiens: A Graphic History, I wanna talk about this-

    2. YHYuval Noah Harari1:10:42

       Mm-hmm

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:10:42

       ... because I actually have a long history with graphic novels and comic books. I wanted to be a penciller, a comic book penciller, for about 12 years.

    4. YHYuval Noah Harari1:10:50

       Hmm.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:10:50

       And used, used to be an illustrator a long time ago. And then I lived in Japan in high school, went to a Japanese school, and in Japan, unlike in the US, there is a long, rich history of comic books and graphic novels for adults-

    6. YHYuval Noah Harari1:11:06

       Mm-hmm

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:11:06

       ... and also comic books and graphic novels for teaching difficult concepts, telling history, and these are extended, expansive collections of graphic novels, and I've seen how effective it is.

    8. YHYuval Noah Harari1:11:18

       Hmm.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:11:19

       Because I, I read some of these when I was in Japan, on the history of judo and other things, and it... I would not have consumed 500 pages of pure text, certainly not in Japanese, and I think it's an incredibly powerful format. How and why did you decide to take Sapiens-

    10. YHYuval Noah Harari1:11:37

        Hmm

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:11:37

        ... and create this piece of art, but also an effective vehicle for perhaps teaching in a different way?

    12. YHYuval Noah Harari1:11:48

        Well, actually, the initiative didn't come from me, it came from, uh, David and Daniele, the two artists who collaborated with me on this project. They came up with the idea. They wrote some initial suggestions, and I really liked it. It connected to something that I did want to do for a long time, which is to reach new audiences. I see my main job today as bringing science and history to more people, people who wouldn't necessarily read a traditional science book. Even if it's popular science, they still won't read it. Like, 500 pages of text with footnotes, it's, it's... They, they, they won't touch it. But they might connect to a graphic novel. And yes, it's, it is for adults and, and teenagers. I mean, many people in the West have the idea that comics are for kids, but no, it's, it's just a different medium. It's a different language. It enables you to do... I mean, some things you can't, you, you need to, you know, cut down the text, but there are many things you can do much better in a graphic novel, certainly to show things, like, you know, the, much of the graphic novel is about the, uh, life of hunter-gatherers, so you can just show it in images instead of long descriptions. An image is worth a thousand words, in many cases. It also enabled us to... And for me, it was, I n- I don't know, the most fun project I ever worked on because it was, "Okay, let's take all the academic conventions of how you write history and throw them aside. Let's experiment." So it's kind of a series of experiments in how to tell history. So, you know, one part about the evolution of different human species, the Sapiens, Neanderthals, and so forth, it's told like a reality TV show, that there are different competition between different human species. Then you have an entire chapter about the, how humans caused the extinction of many of the large animals of the world as they spread from Africa over the world, and this is told as a detective movie. We created this fictional detective, Detective Lopez, like Sherlock Holmes or, or Agatha Christie kind of a, a, a person, and she goes around the world and investigates the worst serial killers in history. Who killed all these big animals? And the, the invention of the first religions is told according to the conventions of superhero action movies. So we created this superhero, superheroine, Dr. Fiction, who embodies the human ability to invent fictional stories and, and mythologies, and it was really fun working with David and Daniel on that, and just saying, "Well, well, why not? We can try that. We can do that. It's, it's allowed." [laughs] It also forced me, and actually all of us, to answer many questions which we can just ignore in the text. When you draw, you have to draw specific things. When you write, you can write in abstractions. When you draw, you, the, you can't draw abstractions. So if, for instance, you talk about the connection between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and we now know that some Sapiens and Neanderthals had sexual relations, and even had children, because most of us today still carry some Neanderthal genes in our DNA. Now, in a book, you can just write that Sapiens had sex with Neanderthals, end of story. But in a graphic novel, if you want to draw it, you have to make some decisions. I mean, who is the man and who is the woman? Is it a Neanderthal man with a Sapiens woman or the other way around? And what about skin color? What about hair color, hair style? All these questions, you can't draw a general human. It must have some skin color, must have some hair color. So we have to go back to the literature, the scientific l- literature, and investigate, and sometimes you find answers, sometimes you don't. And then you have to take into account all the ideological and political issues of race and gender and, and so it's, it's a huge, huge thing to engage with all this. And I- I- I found that it's not like, "Okay, let's just take Sapiens and add some illustrations." It's a completely fresh project.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:16:03

        How did you problem solve when there was a conflict or some tension between the literature and what might dictate a drawing, and the sort of political sensitivities that exist today? How did you, how did you think about that or think through those types of decisions?

    14. YHYuval Noah Harari1:16:21

        We had a lot of discussions [laughs] about these things.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:16:24

        [laughs]

    16. YHYuval Noah Harari1:16:26

        And, you know, it was a balancing act. You can't ignore science just for the sake of being politically correct. On the other hand, you have to be aware of the political implications of the choices you make. I mean, you can't hide behind scientific objectivity, because there is no such thing as a completely objective narrative. Just choosing what is the opening scene and what is the ending scene, it doesn't come from reality. It comes from your political, ideological, or religious beliefs. You know, reality, the, the real reality, it has no beginning and end. No historical event had a beginning and an end, and no historical event had a focus. You know, it's even easier to think about it in terms of, of movies. When you watch a movie, let's say, about the Second World War, so the camera is somewhere, and something is in the focus of the, of the shot. Something is on the side, and many things are, don't, you don't see them at all. Now, in reality, there is no camera. There is no camera hanging above planet Earth, the camera of history, which points in a particular direction, and this is the center of events and this is the, the, the sidelines. You know, you can tell the Second World War with, uh, Churchill as the main hero, uh, Hitler and Stalin appearing on some, uh, a few, a few scenes, and millions of Chinese that died in the war never appearing at all. And you can do an entire World War II movie just about a single Chinese village. Now, both are true, and what do you choose is not forced on you by the reality. It reflects, very often, political and ideological and also artistic choices. Now, when you go back to the Stone Age, it's even more complicated because there are so many things we just don't know. I mean, the, the, the basic things. We don't know what family structure was like. You have all these discussions about what is the natural human family, and lots of people believe, "Well, you know, it's obvious. It's a, a man, a woman, two and a half kids and a dog. This is a traditional family. This was always the case." But we know that even in recent history, this was not always the case. It's not the case today. In, uh, many countries, close to 50% of children don't grow up in such a family today. You go back to the Middle Ages, it's not the structure of everybody. You go to biology, to other apes, chimpanzees don't live like that, gorillas don't live like that, orangutans don't live li- like that. So how did humans live 50,000 years ago? And the answer is, we don't know. We have evidence from the Stone Age, we have tools, but the tools don't tell you the, what was the family structure. Uh, you have cave paintings, but in- one of the interesting things about cave painting, we, we've found, found thousands and thousands of cave paintings from the Stone Age. There is not a single image of a family. There are lots of mammoth, there are lots of horses, there are lots of ibex. There are some humans also, mostly stick figures, but there isn't a single image from the Stone Age that you can say, "Look, that's how they depicted a, a, the, a family." And what does it mean? Why do people draw all these elephants and never bother to draw their own family? I don't know what it means, but it's, it's interesting, and it gives us as the, uh, you know, a lot of artistic freedom about how to deal with these issues. So like, I don't know, we have this, uh, one scene about Neanderthals, and, you know, Neanderthals had a big revolution in the last 10 years. Of course, th- th- they are dead, but our understanding of them has completely changed in the last 10 years because of so many new evidence we have, both from genetics but also from artifacts and archeological records. And whereas 20 years ago maybe, they were still these archetypical cave people, primitive and brutal, and, and things like that. Now, they have a very positive image. Uh, we have... Not, not only because we have their genes in our DNA, but also because we have, uh, evidence that they took care of, of, of wounded people, of elderly people, of disabled people. They had a much more sophisticated technology and maybe even art and culture than we assumed. So we have, we, we depicted in the graphic novel this change in image in this scene that you see these two Neanderthal guys sitting in the office of, um, a PR consultant, and the PR consultant has on the wall this old-fashioned image of a Neanderthal, a brutal Neanderthal with a big stick, uh, dragging a female by, by the hair, and there was a big X over this image. And the PR consultant says, "Well, you know, this was a good brand for the 19th century, but this is the 21st century. You need to lighten up your brand." And the two Neanderthals say, "Yes. Well, you know, actually, we two are gay." [laughs]

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:21:37

        [laughs]

    18. YHYuval Noah Harari1:21:38

        So obviously, we don't have any evidence that they were, there were gay Neanderthals. I mean, our scientific understanding of sex and gender today indicates that it's very likely that there were gay Neanderthals, but if you ask for the smoking gun, "Show me a grave from 50,000 years ago with two men together, only then I believe," then of course we don't have this. But, uh, we, we hardly have, um, uh, we, we don't have a lot of direct evidence for sex in the Stone Age. We have a lot of indirect evidence, like from genes, so we know that Sapiens and Neanderthals had sex. But maybe also there were cases of a Sapiens man having sex with a Neanderthal man. Could be. No evidence in the genes, of course, but could it have happened? Maybe. And, uh, uh, we have this artistic license that we can show that. It, it makes sense.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:22:32

        Well, also, I mean, this is maybe g- going down a rabbit hole, but if you look at the behavior of, of chimpanzees [laughs] and others, I mean, there's, there's some evidence to suggest that that type of interaction certainly exists.

    20. YHYuval Noah Harari1:22:44

        Yeah.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:22:45

        Uh, I mean, if, if you're looking at the sort of current day precursors, in a sense. What is your hope for these graphic novels? And they're coming out in four volumes. What do you anticipate or hope the spacing to be of those, those volumes?

    22. YHYuval Noah Harari1:22:58

        Oh, we hope for one every year. Um, the main challenge is the drawing. I mean, this is Daniel's job, and I draw like a five-year-old kid. I mean, they can't depend on me for anything when it comes to the drawing. And it takes a lot of time [laughs] to draw, you know, these hundreds of, of images. And also, it goes back and forth because he, Daniel draws an image or a couple of images and send them, and then we go, "No, the archeological evidence indicates that actually the spear points were not like you depicted." And then, I mean, the, the, the, the political issues that, okay, well, we, we, we need a more balanced gender relations in this image. And, and you, it goes back to Daniel, and he needs to, to, to draw it again, and it takes a long time. So I guess it will be one volume each year. And the big hope that it will reach new audiences that may not read, you know, a 400-page text about the history of, of humankind but would be interested and would find it fun and engaging, uh, when it's told in a graphic novel.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:24:02

        I've seen the graphic novel, and, uh, it's really well done, I, I have to say. You know, I've, I've, I've read... I have probably 5,000 to 10,000 comic books-

    24. YHYuval Noah Harari1:24:12

        [laughs]

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:24:12

        ... uh, that I've saved and polybagged over the years. And I've collected everything from Sandman in the US to, uh, dozens of different graphic novels in Japan.

    26. YHYuval Noah Harari1:24:24

        Mm.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:24:24

        Uh, it's very well done.

    28. YHYuval Noah Harari1:24:25

        Thank you.

16. 1:24:25 – 1:31:28

    Team mission statement, focusing global attention, and the ‘big three’ threats to humanity

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:24:25

       So, I mean, you, yeah, you and your team deserve a lot of credit for that. I'd love to ask a question about your mission statement.

    2. YHYuval Noah Harari1:24:33

       Mm-hmm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:24:34

       Now, I don't know if you would call it a mission statement, but maybe it is. So this is from The New Yorker profile from this year.

    4. YHYuval Noah Harari1:24:42

       Mm-hmm.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:24:43

       It describes how your mission statement reads as follows, and this is on a bulletin board in your office, "Keep your eyes on the ball. Focus on the main global problems facing humanity. Learn to distinguish reality from illusion. Care about suffering." And I guess there, there was previously, "Embrace ambiguity," but that got scratched out.

    6. YHYuval Noah Harari1:25:02

       [laughs] Yes.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:25:03

       So could you explain the origins of this mission statement, please?

    8. YHYuval Noah Harari1:25:09

       Oh, it's, it's a couple of mission statements. You know, as, as, as we expand our team, it becomes more difficult to get everybody on the same page, to make sure that everybody... You know, each person has a different personal and professional background. And so when it was just me or just my husband and me, there was no need to write down these official mission statements. But when you have 15 employees, then it's, it's, it's becomes important. And we had a long discussion and, uh, like a back and forth also with all the employees, and w- we came up with these as, as several kind of general guidelines to, to keep in mind. And th- th- r- maybe the most important thing is that we see our task as helping to focus the global conversation on the most important issues, because one of the big problems of the 21st century is people are flooded by enormous amounts of information. It's not like in the past when information was scarce and the problem was how to get it. Now it's the opposite, and you just don't know what to pay attention to. And it also goes back to my practice of meditation, of how to stay focused, and it's kind of link the personal practice with the global project. Um, of... Again, we don't see ourselves as providing solutions, but just kind... helping to steer the global conversation in the most important directions.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:26:41

       You have such a historical context for determining the relative weight to assign to different events or phenomena in the world.

    10. YHYuval Noah Harari1:26:55

        Mm-hmm.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:26:55

        As indicated or described in the example of terrorist attacks and their sort of cultural, or I shouldn't say cultural, but historic significance. So like, yes, they're horrible.

    12. YHYuval Noah Harari1:27:05

        Mm-hmm.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:27:06

        Yes, the theater and graphic nature of it is very compelling to the human psyche, which would also be true of, say, a shark attack, right?

    14. YHYuval Noah Harari1:27:14

        Mm-hmm.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:27:14

        If a 12-year-old boy were attacked by a shark on the East Coast of the United States, it would be in every newspaper and there would be a huge response, probably dramatic overharvesting of sharks, so on and so forth.

    16. YHYuval Noah Harari1:27:26

        Mm-hmm.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:27:26

        But in the sweep of human history, its importance is, is close to zero, negligible. What are some of the more important, the main global problems facing humanity from your perspective?

    18. YHYuval Noah Harari1:27:39

        Mm-hmm. Well, a- as we speak, I think the three big ones are nuclear war, which, you know, people tend to connect with the Cold War. Yeah, there was something there about nuclear weapons, but they are still here, and, uh, I don't think we'll see a nuclear war in the next few months. But if tensions in the world continue to grow, then it will become again a major issue, and it is an existential issue. Other things can't destroy us, but nuclear war can, so we have to keep it in mind all the time. The second big thing is ecological collapse. It's not just climate change that gets most of the headlines lately. It's many other things also, like loss of biodiversity and destruction of habitats and so forth. But generally speaking, yes, we are seeing... Uh, we are in... Whereas nuclear war, you know, it's just a future possibility. Maybe it will happen. Maybe it won't happen. Ecological collapse is, is already began. It's all around us, and it threatens... Again, it's an existential danger. It threatens the foundations of our civilization. I guess that some people will survive it, but, uh, if it, if things really go bad, with the economic and political implications of it, it could cost the lives of billions of people. And the third big one, and I think most complicated, is technological disruption. The consequences of disruptive technologies, especially artificial intelligence and bioengineering. It's the most complicated challenge because, you know, with nuclear war and climate change and ecological collapse, you can disagree whether it's true or not, but everybody agrees what needs to be done about it to stop it. Nobody thinks that having a nuclear war is a good idea. Nobody thinks that climate change is a good idea. Maybe some people deny it, but they don't say it's good. Now, with technological disruption, it's much, much more complicated because, uh, it has a lot of positive potential. A lot of people positively wish to see greater and faster technological disruptions, and there is no agreement whatsoever about what we should do with technologies like AI or like bioengineering. The dreams of some people are the nightmares of other people, so it's very complicated. Again, like, like, uh, ecological collapse, it's not a future scenario. It's already happening all around us. And I think the pace is such that it may... To some people, it sounds like crazy, but I strongly believe that given the technologies we are now developing, within a century or two at most, our species will disappear. The w- I don't think that in, in the end of the 21st cen- uh, 22nd century, the Earth will still be dominated by Homo sapiens. I think given the immense powers of technologies we are developing, there are two scenarios only. One scenario, which is the, uh, that the technology will destroy humanity, and I think it's less likely, but still possible. The more likely scenario is that it will change humanity in a profound way. That we will use AI and bioengineering to change Homo sapiens and to create new kinds of beings that will be much more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals or from chimpanzees. To give just one example, I think it is possible that we will create the first inorganic life forms after four billion years of organic evolution. So again, it's not a destruction of our species, it's the changing of species into something else, but what kind of thing it will be, we have to be extremely careful about that. It won't necessarily be a better version of us. It could be much, much worse.

17. 1:31:28 – 1:45:00

    A post–Homo sapiens future: downgrading humans, inorganic life, and making peace with change

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:31:28

       Could you give a bit more detail around the new inorganic life form?

    2. YHYuval Noah Harari1:31:35

       Mm.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:31:35

       And in your mind's eye, if we change for the worse in some tech-enabled way-

    4. YHYuval Noah Harari1:31:41

       Mm-hmm

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:31:41

       ... deliberately or by accident, what might that look like to you?

    6. YHYuval Noah Harari1:31:45

       Well, I'll start with the second question of what it could look like. You know, you could use whatever technology to increase the efficiency of people, the intelligence of people, at the price of things like artistic sensitivity or like spiritual depth. I mean, if you ask armies, if you ask corporations, if you ask governments, what do you need from your employees, from your soldiers? They will say, "Oh, we want people to be more efficient. We want people to reach to be more logical. We want people to be more disciplined." And if you have the technology, then you engineer such people, even if it comes, and it always comes at... I mean, usually, when you improve something, it tends to come at the price of something else. And things like, I don't know, spiritual depth, what kind of army needs its soldiers to have spiritual depth? So if you leave it to the corporations and armies, it's very likely that once you have a technology to change humans, it will, I would say, downgrade them and not upgrade them. It will make them more efficient soldiers or, or employees or whatever, but it will make them kind of poorer beings, lesser beings. So that's about just one scenario of what does it mean to downgrade people. Now, with regard to inorganic life forms, you know, for four billion years, everything on, on the planet was org- all life forms were organic. Whether it's a bacteria or a mammoth or a, a tree or a human, it's, it's organic. It obeys the laws of organic chemistry. Now, with the rise of AI, we might have a chance... Again, I'm, I tend to be agnostic about it, I'm not sure, but it is possible that in a couple of decades, we will be able to create either completely inorganic beings or at least part organic, part inorganic cyborgs, and this will be... If it happens, it will be the biggest revolution in the history of life since the beginning of life. Much, much bigger than the creation of mammoth or the, the creation of mammals or humans, because it's a completely different game. Once you're no longer subject to organic chemistry, we can't even begin to imagine what it means because our imagination is the product of organic chemistry. So if you have a kind of intelligence which is not or- based on organic chemistry, you know, who, uh, it, it can be anything.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:34:13

       If you look over the next... So you're talking about the, I guess, the, the 22nd century and the prevalence, dominance, or existence of Homo sapiens. If we look over the next 50 years-

    8. YHYuval Noah Harari1:34:25

       Mm-hmm

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:34:25

       ... just to choose an arbitrary timeframe, of nuclear war, ecological collapse, or these unforeseen accidents or, uh, mistakes of high technology, which scares you the most, or which do you worry about the most?

    10. YHYuval Noah Harari1:34:43

        I worry most about the third because of what I said earlier, that it's the most complicated, that it's not enough to be kind of, I don't know, good and wise to deal with the first two. It will be very hard to deal with the first two as it is, but the third one is really complicated because there is no agreement on, on the goal. With the first two, at least there is an agreement on the goal, and, and then that, that makes it very, very complicated. Also, you know, the first two, nobody is actively working to make it happen sooner, and even the people who deny climate change, they are not in favor of climate change. They just say it, it's not real, it doesn't happen. But with AI and bioengineering, they're some of the most powerful people and organizations and governments and corporations in the world, they are extremely busy making it happen faster, and it's also... We don't have a framework even to think about it properly. So, uh, as a thinker and a politician, I think this is where I can contribute the most is in trying to entangle this kind of completely new threat.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:35:56

        Just a few more questions then I'll, I'll let you get going, 'cause I know we're separated by quite a few time zones.

    12. YHYuval Noah Harari1:36:01

        [laughs]

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:36:02

        When you are thinking about these threats, perhaps hearkening back to your times reading Aldous Huxley's work-

    14. YHYuval Noah Harari1:36:10

        Mm-hmm

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:36:10

        ... and here we're talking about Brave New World and not Island, right?

    16. YHYuval Noah Harari1:36:13

        Yeah.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:36:13

        Very different, uh, descriptions, although some parallels. When you feel the potential for these various types of collapse or disaster, what keeps you going? Where do you find the light?

    18. YHYuval Noah Harari1:36:29

        Hmm. It's a good question. Uh, you know, if, if, if you're able to deal with your own mortality, as every person has to on some level, then you should be able to deal with the potential mortality of your entire species. I mean, it's still part of biology. Yes, individuals come and go, nations come and go. Also, entire species come and go. 99% of the species that evolved on planet Earth are gone for one reason or another. Homo sapiens also is not eternal. Uh, again, e- even in the best scenario, I don't think Homo sapiens will be around in 200 or 300 years. The best scenario is that Homo sapiens will disappear, but in a peaceful and gradual way, and be replaced by something better. I don't think there is any chance whatsoever that people li- like us will just continue to have lives like us in 200 years, that there will be, in 200 years, a professor of history sit- sitting and having a, a podcast talk with somebody. It, it, it's not going to happen. I mean, the, the, the, the changes are going to be too big. So, uh, maybe it goes back again to the practice of meditation and the realization that, uh, change is the only certainty in, in life.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:37:52

        So you might as well tune into the changes-

    20. YHYuval Noah Harari1:37:55

        Yeah

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:37:55

        ... so that you're at least aware that you're responding to your reactions-

    22. YHYuval Noah Harari1:37:58

        [laughs]

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:37:59

        ... to things outside, and not the outside itself. Well, Yuval, this has been a lot of fun for me.

    24. YHYuval Noah Harari1:38:04

        Thank you. For me too.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:38:05

        It's nice to connect with you. And of course, I will link to everything in the show notes for people. The volume one-

    26. YHYuval Noah Harari1:38:12

        Mm-hmm

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:38:12

        ... of, uh, your series, Sapiens: A Graphic History, is out now. Volume one can be found, and I'll include links to that in the show notes for everyone at tim.blog/podcast. Your website is Y.N. Harari. Uh, Facebook is prof.yuval.noah.harari. Twitter, harari_yuval. Instagram, yuval_noah_harari. [laughs] And I'll provide all of those so people don't have to remember them. Is there anything else that you would like to say to my audience, ask of the audience, suggest to the audience before we wrap up?

    28. YHYuval Noah Harari1:38:48

        Uh, no, just thank you for your time. I know that, uh, time and attention are the most valuable resources today for most people, so I hope you benefited from investing them in, in listening to us.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:39:00

        Likewise. And I, I can certainly speak for myself in saying that I enjoyed it quite a lot. And definitely check out Ted Chiang, Exhalation. I think you'll love it.

    30. YHYuval Noah Harari1:39:09

        I will.

Episode duration: 1:45:12