Yuval Noah Harari: This Election Will Tear The Country Apart! AI Will Control You By 2034! The Dark Truth Behind Meta & X!

30:59And this is, again, as an adult, you can learn all the theories and you can educate yourself that this is not true, but still very deep in your mind. If there is a part that is just these people are disgusting, these people are dangerous. And we saw it throughout history. How many different movements have learned how to use this emotional mechanisms to motivate people? We sit down at a very interesting time, Evol, because two quite significant things have happened in the last, I think, year, as it relates to information and many of the things we've been talking about, one of them is Elon Musk bought Twitter and his real mandate has been this idea of free speech.

31:51And as part of that mandate, he's unblocked, a number of figures who are previously blocked on Twitter. A lot of them write leaning people, that were blocked for a variety of different reasons. And then also this week Mark Zuckerberg released basically a letter publicly. And in that letter, he says that he regrets the fact that he cooperated so much with the FBI, the government, when they asked him to sense the things on Facebook. One particular story he says he regrets doing that. And it looks like if you read between what he's saying, well, he actually says it explicitly. He says, we're going to push back harder in the future if governments or anybody else asks us to censor certain messaging.

32:31Now, what I'm seeing is that Twitter, which is one of the biggest social networks in the world, and meta, the biggest social network in the world, have now taken this stance, and effectively they're going to let information flow. They're effectively going to go for this free speech narrative. Now, as someone that's used these platforms for a long time, specifically X or Twitter, it is crazy how different it is these days. There are things that I see every time I scroll that I never would have seen before this free speech position. Now, I'm not taking a stance whether it's good or bad. It's just very interesting.

33:05And there's clearly an algorithm that is now really, like if I scroll, if I go on X right now, I will see someone being killed with a knife. I reckon within 30 seconds. And I will see someone getting hit by a car. I will see extreme Islamophobia potentially. But then I'll also see the other side. So it's not just something I'll see all of the sides. And when you're talking earlier about like, is that good for me? I had a flashback to my friend this weekend with my birthday. So my friends were together just looking over at him, mindlessly scrolling these like horror videos on Twitter. As he was sat on my left thinking, God, he's like frying his dope mean receptors.

33:42I just, I just, this whole new like free speech movement. What is your take on that this idea of free speech in the world, you know? Only humans have free speech. But don't have free speech. The tech companies are constantly confusing us about this issue because the issue is not the humans. The issue is the algorithms. And let me explain what I mean. If the question is whether to ban somebody like Donald Trump from Twitter, I agree this is a very difficult issue. And we should be extremely careful about banning human beings, especially important politicians from voicing their views and opinions.

34:21However much with dislike, the opinions or them personally, it's a very serious matter to ban any human being from from platform. But this is not the problem. The problem on the platform is not the human users. The problem is the algorithms and the companies constantly shift the blame to the humans in order to protect their business interests. So let me unpack this. Humans create a lot of content all the time. They create hateful content. They create sermons on compassion. They create cooking lessons, biology lessons, so many different things, a flood of information. The big question is then what gets human attention?

35:05Everybody wants attention. Now, the companies also want attention. The companies give the algorithms that run the social media platforms a very simple goal. Increase user engagement. Make people spend more time on Twitter, more time on Facebook, engage more, sending more likes and recommending to the friends. Why? Because the more time we spend on the platforms, the more money they make. Very, very simple. Now, the algorithms made a huge, huge discovery. By experimenting on millions of human guinea pigs, the algorithms discovered that if you want to grab human attention, the easiest way to do it is to press the fear button, the hate button, the greed button.

35:56And they started recommending to users to watch more and more content full of hate and fear and greed to keep them glued to the screen. And this is the deep cause of the epidemic of fake news and conspiracy theories and so forth. And the defense of the companies is we are not producing the content. Somebody, a human being, produced a hate -filled conspiracy theory about immigrants. And it's not us. It's like a bit like, I don't know, the chief editor of the New York Times publishing a hate -filled conspiracy theory on the front of the first page of the newspaper. And when you ask him, why did you do it?

36:42Or are you blaming? You look what you did. He said, I didn't do anything. I didn't write the piece. I just put it on the front of the New York Times. That's all. That's nothing. It's not nothing. People are producing immense amount of content. The algorithms are the kin makers. They are the editors now. They decide what gets viewed. Sometimes they just recommend it to you. Sometimes they actually ought to play it to you. Like you do chose to watch some video. At the end of the video, to keep you glued to the screen, the algorithm immediately without you telling him, the algorithm, without you telling the algorithm, the algorithm ought to place some kind of video full of fear or greed just to keep you glued to the screen.

37:31It is the algorithm doing it. And this should be banned or this should at least be supervised and regulated. And this is not free freedom of speech. Because the algorithms don't have freedom of speech. Yeah, the person who produced the hate -filled video, I would be careful about banning them. But that's not the problem. It's the recommendation, which is the problem. The second problem is that a lot of the conversations now online are being overrun by bots. Again, if you look for instance at Twitter X as an example, so people often want to know what is trending. What which stories get the most attention.

38:17If everybody's interested in a particular story, I also want to know what everybody's talking about. And very often, it's the bots that are driving the conversation. Because a particular story initially gets a lot of traction, a lot of traffic, because a lot of bots retreated. And then people see it and think they don't know its bots. They think it's humans. So they say, oh, lots of humans are interested in this. So I also want to know what's happening. And this draws more attention. This should be forbidden. Bots are very basically, you cannot have AI's pretending to be human beings. This is fake humans.

38:58This is counterfeit humans. If you see activity online and you think it's human activity, but actually it's bot activity, this should be banned. And it doesn't harm the free speech of any human being because it's a bot. It doesn't have freedom of speech. I was thinking a lot about what you said about these algorithms are actually running, running the world. And I mean, yeah, so if the algorithms are deciding what I see based on what I spend my time looking at because they want to make, you know, the platforms want to make more money. And if I have a innate sort of predisposition to spend more time focused on things that scare me.

39:38Yeah. Or then you just have to give me a couple of years. And every year that goes past, I'll become more fearful. More sinful forces your own weaknesses. I mean, it's like the food industry. So the food industry discovered we liked food with a lot of salt and fat in it and gives it more to us. And then it says, but this is what the customers want. What do you want from us? It's the same thing, but even worse with these algorithms that because this is the food for the mind. Yes, humans have a tendency that if something is very frightening or something feels them with anger, they focus on it and they tell all the friends about it.

40:21But to artificially amplify it, it's not, it's just, it's just not good for our mental health and social health. It is using our own weaknesses against us instead of helping us deal with them. Is it fair to say now this is me just jumping to conclusions a little bit, but is it fair to say that in a world where you remove restrictions around blocking certain characters, right wing characters that are their messages, maybe based on immigration, etc. You remove those restrictions. So they're all allowed on every platform. And then you program the algorithm to be focused on revenue that eventually more people will become right wing.

41:01And I say that in part because it's a right wing narrative to say that immigrants are bad and that, you know, I'm not saying that the less are innocent because they're absolutely not. But I'm saying that the fearful narratives, the fear seems to come more from the right in my opinion, like especially in the UK, it was the fear comes from immigrants and these people can take your money and all these kinds of things. I think the key issue is to not to label it as a right or left issue because again, democracy is a conversation and you can have a conversation only if you have several different opinions.

41:41And it's, I think it should be okay to have a conversation about immigration that people should be able to have different opinions about it. That's fine. The problem starts when one side vilifies and demonizes. Anybody who doesn't think, and you see it to some extent from both sides, but in the case of immigration, so you would have these conspiracy theories that anybody who supports immigration, for instance, they want to destroy the country. They're part of this conspiracy to flood the country with immigrants and to change its nature and whatever. And this is the problem that democracy, once you believe that people who don't think like you, they are not just your political rivals.

42:33They are your enemies. They are out to destroy you. They intend to destroy your way of life, if you're a group, then democracy collapses because there can be no way between enemies, democracy doesn't work. It works if you think that the other side is wrong, but there are still essentially good people who care about the country, who care about me, but they have different opinions. If you think that they are my enemies, they try to destroy me, then the election becomes like a war because you are fighting for your survival. You will do anything to win the election because your survival is at stake.

43:15If you lose, you have no incentive to accept the verdict. If you win, you only take care of your tribe and not of the enemy tribe. What if you don't believe the election is legitimate? Then democracy can't function. This is again, the democracy can't exist in just any, it's like a delicate plant that needs certain conditions in order to survive and to flourish. One condition, for instance, is that you have information technologies that allows a conversation. Another condition is that you trust the institutions. If you don't trust the institution of elections, it doesn't work. And a third condition is that you need to think that the people on the other side of the political divide, they are my rivals, but they are not my enemies.

44:08Now, the problem with what's happening now with democratic conversations is because of this tendency to go to more and more and more extremes, it creates the impression that the other side is an enemy. And this is a problem not just for the right, also for the left, that on both sides you see this feeling that the other side is an enemy and that its positions are completely illegitimate. And if we reach that point, then the conversation collapses. And it should be possible to have complex conversations and discussions about difficult issues like immigration, like gender, like climate change, without seeing the other side as an enemy, which was possible for generations.

45:01So why is it that now it seems to just become impossible to talk with the other side or to agree about anything? We have a big election in the United States this year. Very big one. Do you think a lot about it? Yes, yes, I mean, it seems like a very native to be a coin toss, I mean, like 50 -50. You know, elections become really an existential issue. If there is a chance, they will be the last elections. If one side is intense to simply change the rules of the game, if it comes to power, then it becomes existential. Because democracy works on the basis of self -correcting mechanisms. That this is the big advantage of democracy over dictatorship.

45:54In a dictatorship, a dictator can make a lot of good decisions, but sooner or later they will make a bad decision and there is no mechanism in a dictatorship to identify and correct such mistakes. My Putin. Yeah, there is just no mechanism in Russia that could say Putin made a mistake. He should go, he should let somebody else try a different course of action. This is the great advantage of democracy. You try something, it doesn't work, you try something else. But the big problem is what if you choose someone who then changes the system neutralizes its self -correcting mechanism and then you cannot get rid of it anymore.

46:36This is what happened in Venezuela. Originally, Shalvez and the Shavista movement came to power democratically. People wanted to, let's try this. Now in the last elections a couple of weeks ago, evidence is very clear that Maduro lost big time, but he controls everything, the election committee, everything, and he claims, no, I won. They destroyed Venezuela. It's a country which was one of the richest countries in South America before and they just can't get rid of the guy. Surely that will never happen in the West. Don't say never in history. History can catch up with you, whoever you are. That's one of the illusions we can.

47:26Venezuela was part of the West in many ways still is. This is one of the illusions we live under, we think that that can never happen to the UK or the United States or Canada, these sort of quote unquote civilized nations. According to some measurements, democracy in the United States is quite new and quite fragile. If you think about it in terms of who gets to vote, for instance. So it would be, I don't know what are the chances, but even if there is a 20 % chance that a Trump administration would change the rules of the game of American democracy in such a way as to make it, for instance, by changing the rules about who votes or how do you count votes.

48:17That it will become almost impossible to get rid of. That's not that that's not out of the possible historical terms. Do you think it's possible that Trump will do that? Yes. I mean, you saw it on the 6th of January. I mean, the most sensitive moment in every democracy is the moment of transfer of power. And the magic of democracy is that democracy is meant to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. But as I said, like you choose one party, you give them a try. After some time, if people say they didn't do a good job, let's try somebody else. And you know, we have people who hold in the United States, they hold the biggest power in the world.

49:03The president of the United States have enough power to destroy human civilization. All these nuclear missiles, all these armies, and he loses the election. And he says, okay, I did that, Paul, this power. And I let the other guy try. This is amazing. And this is exactly what Trump didn't do. He, from the beginning, I mean, even from 2016, he refused, they asked him directly, if you lose the election, will you accept the results? And he said, no. And in 2020, he did not hand power peacefully. He tried to prevent it. And the fact that he's now running again, and I think, to some extent, the lesson he got from the Sixth of January, is that I can basically get away with anything, at least with my people, with my base, that it was like a test, a try.

49:59If I do this extreme thing, and they still support me afterwards, it basically means they will support me no matter what I do. I'm wondering in a world of such a fragile democracy, when information flows and networks are disrupted by something like AI, if misinformation and disinformation and the ability for me to make a video, I could make a video right now of Donald Trump speaking and saying something in his voice. I could help that video go viral. Like, how do you hold together democracy and communication? When you don't believe anything that you're seeing online, just to the start of this now.

50:40So I haven't seen anything yet. This is just really the first baby steps. I'm going to play a video on the screen right now so people can see. And first listening, you'll just hear it. I'm going to play a video that I was over there in the corner of the room made of me speaking in this chair. And it wasn't me, and I didn't say it, and I wasn't in this chair. Hey there, this is AI Steve. Do you think I'll be able to take over the die of a CEO one day? Leave your comments below. And it sounds exactly like me. I don't call. And it's not me. And I wonder this with most of us get our political information and our information generally now from social media.

51:15Yeah. And if I can't believe anything that I'm seeing because it's all easy to make some kid in Russia in that bedroom can make a video of the Prime Minister here. I don't know where we get our information from anymore. How we verify. The answer is institutions. We've been in this situation many times before in history. And the answer is always the same institutions. You cannot trust the technology. You trust the institution that verifies the information. Think about it like with print that you can write on a piece of paper anything you want. You can write the Prime Minister of Britain said and then put something into the mouth of the Prime Minister.

51:57You can write anything you want. And when people read it, they don't believe it. They shouldn't believe it just because it's written that the Prime Minister has said it doesn't mean that it's true. So how do we know which pieces of paper to believe as an institution? We would believe or greater chance we will believe if on the front page of the New York Times or of the Sunday Times or of the Guardian you will have the British Prime Minister said open quotation marks blah blah blah because we don't trust the paper or the ink. We trust the institution of the Guardian or the Walls Regional or whatever.

52:37With videos, we never had to do that because nobody could fake them. So we trusted the technology. If we saw a video we said this has to be true. But when it becomes very easy to fake videos, then we revert to the same principle as with print. We need an institution to verify it. If we see the video on the official website of CNN or of the Walls Regional that we believe it because we believe the institution backing it. And if it's just something on TikTok, we know that any kid can do that. Why should I believe it? So now we are in the transition period. We are still not used to it. So when we see a video of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, the video still gets to us because we grew up in a time when it was impossible to fake it.

53:31But I think very quickly people will realize you can't trust videos.

53:38You can that the question is will we be able to produce, to create, to maintain trust where the institutions fast enough to save the democratic conversation? Because if not, if you can't believe anything, this is the ideal for dictators. When you can't trust anything, the only system that works is a dictatorship. Because democracy works on trust, but dictatorship works on terror, on fear. You don't need to trust anything in a dictatorship. You don't trust anything. You fear. For democracy to work, you need to trust, for instance, that some information is reliable, that the election committee is impulsual, that the courts are just.

54:26And if moment more institutions are attacked and people lose trust in them, then then then then democracy collapses. I'm going going going back to to information. So one option is that the old institutions like newspapers and TV stations, they will be the institutions that we trust to verify certain videos. Or we will see the emergence of new institutions. And again, the big question is whether will be able to develop trust in them. And I specifically say institutions and not individuals, no large -scale society, especially not a democratic society, can function without trust where the bureaucratic institutions and all those bureaucratic institutions, B .A .I.

55:21That's the big question. Because increasingly, A .I .s will be the bureaucrats. And what do you mean by bureaucrats? What's the word bureaucrat? What does that mean? Oh, that's a very important question because human civilization runs on bureaucracy. B .A .I .s are essentially officials in government that try. Not just in government. I mean, the origin of the word bureaucrat, it comes from French, from the 18th century. And bureaucracy is means that the rule of the writing desk is to rule the world or to rule society with pen and papers and documents. Like the example we gave in the very beginning about ownership.

56:00So there are you own a house because there is a document in some archive that says that you own it. And a bureaucrat produced this document. And if you now need to retrieve it, then this is the job of a bureaucrat to find the right document at the right time. And all big systems run on it. Hospitals and schools and corporations and banks and sports associations and libraries, they all run on these documents and the bureaucrats who know how to read and write and find and file documents. One of our big problems is that it's difficult for us to understand bureaucratic systems because there are a very recent development in human evolution.

56:51And this makes us suspicious about them and we tend to believe all kinds of conspiracy theories about the deep state and about what's going on in all these bureaucracies. And it's really complicated and it's going to be more complicated as more of the decisions will be made by A .I. bureaucrats. And A .I. bureaucrat means that decisions like how much money to allocate to a particular issue will no longer be made by a human official. It will be made by an algorithm. And when people decide why when people ask why is the switch system broken? Why didn't they why didn't they give enough money to fix it?

57:37I don't know. The algorithm just decided to give the money to something else. Why will bureaucracies be run by A .I. over people? Like why will at some point a nation decide that in fact A .I. can it's better at making these decisions? Of our stuff first of all it's not a future development. It's already happening. More and more of the decisions are being made by A .I .s. And this is just because the amount of information you need to take into account are enormous. And it's very difficult for humans to do it. It's much easy for the A .I .s to do it. All these people you know bureaucrats, lawyers, accountants, it sounds like I always wonder you know what a human's going to be left to do.

58:21In your book you say that A .I. is going to far A .I. is going so far beyond human intelligence that it should actually be referred to alien intelligence. I think it goes so far beyond human intelligence. It's my assumption that most of the work that we do is based on intelligence. So even like me doing this podcast now, this is me asking questions based on information that I've gathered based on what I think I'm interested in but also based on what I think the audience will be interested in. And compared to A .I. I'm like a little naked. Do you know what I mean? If an A .I. has an IQ that is 100 times mine and source of information that is that million times bigger than mine, there's no need for me to do this podcast.

59:05I can get an A .I. to do it. And in fact an A .I. can talk to an A .I. and deliver that information to a human. But then if we look at most industries like being a lawyer, accountancy, I mean a lot of the medical profession is based on information. Driving, I think that's the biggest employer in the world is the profession of driving, whether it's delivery or whatever it is. Where are humans belong in this complex? Anything which is just information in information out is ripe for automation. These are the easiest jobs to automate by being a coder. Like being a coder or again like being an accountant, at least certain types of accountants, lawyers, doctors, they are the easiest to automate.

59:51If a doctor, the only thing they do is just take information in all kinds of results of blood tests and whatever. And they information out, they diagnose disease and they write a prescription, this will be easy to automate in the coming years and decades. But a lot of jobs they require also social skills and motor skills. If your job requires a combination of skills from several different fields, it's not impossible, but it's much more difficult to automate. So if you think about a nurse that needs to replace a bandage to a crying child, this is much, much harder to automate than just a doctor that writes a prescription.

1:00:37Because this is not just data. The nurse needs good social skills to interact with the child and motor skills to just replace the bandage. So this is harder to automate. And the will, even for people who just deal with information, there will be new jobs. The problem will be the retraining and not just, you know, retraining in terms of acquiring new skills, but psychological retraining. How do you kind of reinvent yourself in a new profession and do it not once, but again and again again, because it's the AI revolution unfolds. And we have tested a very beginning of it. We haven't seen anything yet.

1:01:21So there will be all jobs disappearing, new jobs emerging, but the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. And then there'll be a new wave of new jobs. And people will have to reinvent themselves for five, six times to stay relevant. And this will create immense psychological stress. So many of the big companies are also working at the same time on humanoid robots. There's this humanoid robot race going on. And by humanoid robots, I mean, Tesla have their humanoid robot, the name is called Optimus, which they're developing and it'll cost, you know, X thousands of pans. And I watched a video that recently where it can do quite delicate sort of motor skilled based stuff.

1:02:00So probably clean the house. It can probably work on the production line. It can probably put things in boxes.

1:02:08And I just wonder when we say, you know, people are going to lose their jobs in a world where you have humanoid robots and you have intelligence that's beyond us. And you combine the two where the humanoid robots are very, very intelligent. I don't know what. I'm like, where did the unemployed go to to find these new professions? Obviously, it's difficult to forecast the new professions of the future, history tells us that. But I can't figure out what the new professions are. I mean, my girlfriend does breath work. I guess the breath work part is quite easy to disrupt. But then she takes women away for retreats and Portugal and stuff.

1:02:43So I'm like, okay, she's going to kind of be safe because these women are going there to connect with humans and to be in this little special place offline, intentionally. So retreats, you'll probably be fine. Anything that, you know, there are things that we want in life, which I'll not just about solving problems. Like I'm sick. I want to be healthy. I want my problem solved. But there are many things that we want to have a connection. Like if you think about sports, robots or machines can run much faster than people for a very long time now. And we just had the Olympics and people are not very interested in seeing robots running against each other or against people because what really makes sports interesting in the end is the human weaknesses and the ability of humans to deal with their weaknesses.

1:03:40And human athletes still have jobs. Even though in many lines like running, you can have a machine run much faster than the world champion. I thought about it the other day. And another example is priests. Like one of the easiest jobs to automate is the priesthood of at least certain religions because you just need to repeat the same texts and gestures again and again in specific situations. Like if you have a wedding ceremony, then you know, the priest just needs to repeat the same words and there you are, you're married. Now we don't think about priests as being in danger of being replaced by robots because what we want from a priest is not just the mechanical repetition of certain words and gestures.

1:04:31We think that only another frail, flesh and blood human who knows what is pain and love and who can suffer, only they can connect us to the divine. So most people would not be interested in having the wedding conducted by a robot. Even though technically it's very easy to do it. Now the big question of course what happens if AI gains consciousness, this is like the trillion dollar question of AI consciousness. And then all bets are off. But that's a different and very, very big discussion, I mean, whether it's possible how would we know and so forth. Do you think it's possible? We have no idea.

1:05:17I mean, we don't understand what consciousness is. We don't know how it emerges in the organic brain. So we don't know if there is an essential connection between consciousness and organic biochemistry so that it can't arise in an inorganic silicon based computer. There is a big confusion. First of all, it should be said again between consciousness and intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to reach goals and solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate. Humans and other animals we solve problems through our feelings. Our feelings are not something on the side.

1:06:05They are a main method for how to deal with the world, how to solve problems. Now, so far computers, they solve problems in a completely different way than humans. Again, they are alien intelligence. They don't have any feelings. When they win a game of chess, they are not joyful. When they lose a game, they are not sad. They don't feel anything. Now, we don't know how organic brains produce these feelings of pain and pleasure and love and hate. So this is why we don't know whether an inorganic structure based on silicon and not carbon, whether it will be able to generate such things or not. That's I think the biggest question in science and so far we have no answer.

1:06:59Isn't consciousness just like a hallucination? Isn't it just like an illusion that I think I'm conscious because I've got a circuitry which tells me that I am effectively. It tells me through a bunch of feelings and things that I'm conscious. I think I'm looking at you now. I think I can see you. The feeling is real. Even if we are all it's like the matrix. It's the only real thing in the world. There is nothing and everything else is just conjunction. We only experience our own feelings. What we see, what we smell, what we touch. This we actually experience. This is real. Then we have all these theories about why do I feel pain?

1:07:42Oh, it's because I stepped on a nail. There is such a thing in the world as a nail at whatever. It could be that we are all inside a big computer on the planet, zero -con run by super intelligent mice. If I spoke to an AI, I can get an AI to tell me that it feels pain and sadness. That's a big problem because there is a huge incentive to train AI's to pretend to be alive, to pretend to have feelings. We see that there is a huge effort to produce such AI's. In truth, because we don't understand consciousness, we don't have any proof even that other humans have feelings. I feel my own feelings, but I never feel your feelings.

1:08:26I only assume that you are also a conscious being. Society grants this status of a conscious entity to not only to humans, but also to some animals, not based on any scientific proof, but based on social convention. Most people feel that their dogs are conscious, that their dogs can feel pain and pleasure and love and so forth. Society accepts most societies that dogs are sentient beings and they have some rights under the law. Now, even if AI has no feelings, no consciousness, no sentience whatsoever, but it becomes very good at pretending to have feelings and convincing us that it has feelings, then this will become a social convention.

1:09:21That people will feel that their AI friend is a conscious being and therefore should be granted rights. There is even already a legal path for how to do it. At least in the United States, you don't need to be a human being in order to be a legal person. It's funny because you mentioned you kind of alluded to the fact jokingly that we might just be in a simulation. It was one of you like, well, maybe we're just in a simulation, but it could be. And it's funny because in a world of AI, I think my belief in that as a possibility has only increased. This is in fact just a simulation because I've watched us go from when I was born, not really having internet access to now being able to kind of speak to this alien on my computer that can like now do things for me and having virtual reality experiences, which are sometimes quite indistinguishable when I fall into the trap of believing that I am inside squid games, because I've got this headset on.

1:10:21And you play it forward and you play it forward and you play it forward and you imagine any rate of improvement. Then I hear the arguments for simulation theory and I go, you're not probably, if you play this forward a hundred years, you know, like at the rate we're on, the rate of trajectory we're on, then we will be able to create information networks and organisms that don't in like a laboratory or in a computer that don't necessarily realize, yeah, they're in the computer, especially with like what's going on with? It's already happening. To some extent, you know, these information bubbles that more and more people live inside them, it's still not the whole physical world.

1:11:05But you get the same event and people on say different parts of the political, political spectrum, they just can't agree on anything. They live in their own metrics. And you know, when the internet came along for the first time, the main metaphor was the web, the worldwide web. A web is something that connects everything. And now the main metaphor, which is the simulation theory is representing this new metaphor, the new metaphor is the cocoon. It's a web that turns on you and then closes you from all sides. So you can no longer see anything outside. And there could be other cocoons with other people in there.

1:11:53And you have no way to get to them. Yeah. Nothing that happens in the world can connect you anymore because you're in different cocoons. You've only got to look at someone else's Twitter or X or Instagram. It's just a reality. It is so different. I, do you know what I was talking about over the weekend? My friend was at my left scrolling. He clicked on the discovery section, which is where you find new content. And I looked down at his phone and was like, it's all livable football. It's like the entire feed is livable. And my entire feed is completely different. And I was just thinking, wow, he lives in a completely different world.

1:12:32Because he's a livable fan. I'm a Manchester United fan. And yeah, just to think about that, like to think that when you open your phone and many of us are spending up to nine hours a day on our mobile phones, you're experiencing a completely different window into a completely different world than I am. And this was, you know, this is a very ancient fear because for it's a Plato wrote exactly about that in the most famous parable, I think, from Greek philosophy, is the allegory of the cave in which Plato imagines a theoretical scenario, an imaginary scenario of a group of prisoners chained inside a cave with their face to a blank wall in which shadows are being projected from behind them.

1:13:21And they mistake the shadows for reality. And he was basically describing, you know, people in front of screen, just mistaking the screen for reality. And you have the same thing in ancient India with Buddhists and Hindu sages talking about Maya, which is the world of illusions. And the deep fear that maybe we are all trapped inside a world of illusions that the most important thing that we think in the world, the wars we find, we find wars over illusions in our mind. And this is now becoming technically possible. Like previously, it was these philosophical thought experiments. Now, part of what is interesting as a historian about the present era is that a lot of ancient philosophical problems and discussions are becoming technical issues.

1:14:26Yes, you can suddenly realize Plato's cave in your form. So scary. I find it really scary because you're right. I think right now, some people might say that they have some kind of grasp over the ranking system or why something shows up when I search here or whatever. But as these intelligence aliens become more and more powerful, it's of course, we would have less understanding because we're like handing over the decision making. In some industries, they are now completely the king makers. Like, I'm here on a book too. I wrote Nexus. So I go from podcast to podcast from TV station to TV station to talk about my book.

1:15:06But the entities, I'm really trying to impress of the algorithms. Because if I can get the attention of the algorithms, the humans will follow. You know, that's our yeah, we are basically kind of carbon creatures in a silicon world. I used to think we were in control though. And I feel like the silicon's in control. I wish control is shifting. That's that's that's we are still in control to some extent. We are still making the most important decisions, but not for long. And this is why we have to be very, very careful about the decision we make in the in the next few years. Because in 10 years, in 10 in 20 years, it could be too late.

1:15:57By then, the algorithms will be making the most important decisions. You talk about a couple of big dangers you see with the algorithms and AI and the sort of shift and disruption of information. One of them is this alignment problem. Which how would you explain the alignment problem to me in a way that's simple to understand. So the classical kind of example is a thought experiment invented by the philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2014, which sounds crazy, but you know, bear with it. He imagines a super intelligent AI computer, which is bought by a paperclip factory. And the paperclip manager tells the AI, your goal, the reason I bought you, your goal, your entire existence, your here to produce as many paper clips as possible.

1:16:52That's your goal. And then the AI conquers the entire world, kills all the humans and turns the entire planet into factories for producing paper clips. And it even begins to send expeditions to outer space to turn the entire galaxy into just paperclip production industry. And the point of the thought experiment is that the AI did exactly what it was told. It did not rebel against the humans. It did exactly what the boss wanted. But of course, it was not the strategy it chose was not aligned with the real intentions, with the real interests of the human factory manager who just couldn't foresee that this will be the result.

1:17:41Now, this sounds like outlandish and ridiculous and crazy, but it already happened to some extent. And we talked about it. This is the whole problem with social media and user engagement. In the very same years that Nick Bostrom came up with this thought experiment in 2014, the managers of Facebook and YouTube, they told their algorithms, your goal is to increase user engagement. And the algorithms of social media, they conquered the world and turned the whole world into user engagement, which was what they were told to do. We are now very, very engaged. And again, they discovered that the way to do it is without rage and with fear and with conspiracy theories.

1:18:31And this is the alignment problem. When Mark Zuckerberg told the Facebook algorithms increase user engagement, he did not foresee and he did not wish that the result will be collapse of democracies, wave of conspiracy theories and fake news, hatred of minorities. He did not intended. But this is what the algorithms did because there was a misalignment between the way that the algorithm, the goal that was defined to the algorithm and the interests of human society. And even of the human managers, of the companies that are deployed these algorithms. And this is still a small scale disaster because the social media algorithms that created all these social chaos over the last 10 years, they are very, very primitive AI.

1:19:36This is like the amoeba's of if you think about the development of AI as an evolutionary process for this is still the amoeba stage. The amoeba being the very simple. The very simple life forms, the beginning, like the single cell life form. We are still in evolutionary terms, organic evolution. We are like billions of years before we will see the dinosaurs and the mammals or the humans. But digital evolution is billions of times faster than organic evolution. So the distance between an AI amoeba and the AI dinosaurs could be covered in just a few decades. If chat GPT is the amoeba, how would the AI tyrannosaurus rex would look like?

1:20:27And this is where the alignment problem becomes really disconcerting. Because if so much damage was done by giving kind of the wrong goal to a primitive social media algorithm, what would be the results of giving a misaligned goal to a T -rex AI in 20 or 30 years? The issue with the harder this is, you know, some people might think, okay, just give it a different goal. But when you're dealing with private companies who are listed on the stock market, there really is only one goal that keeps that. Exactly. So one of the platforms has to say, you know, the goal of this platform is to make more money and to get more attention.

1:21:14Because also it's mathematically easy. And there is a huge, huge problem in how to define for AI's and algorithms, the goal in a way they can understand. Now, the great thing about make money or increase user engagement is that it's very easy to measure it mathematically. One day you have a million hours being watched on YouTube, then next a year later it's two million. Very easy for the algorithm to see, hey, I'm making progress. But let's say that Facebook would have told its algorithm, increase user engagement in a way that doesn't undermine democracies. How do I measure that? Who knows what is the definition for the robustness of democracy?

1:22:04Nobody knows. So defining the goal for the algorithm as increase user engagement, but don't harm democracy almost impossible. This is why they go for the kind of of easy goals which are the most dangerous. But even in that scenario, if I told, if I'm the owner of a social network and I say increase user engagement, but don't harm democracy, the problem I have is my competitor who leaves out the second part and just says increase user engagement is going to beat me. Because they're going to have more uses, more eyeballs, more revenue, advertisers are going to be happier, then my company is going to invest as a good app.

1:22:41That's a question because there are two things to take into consideration. First of all, you have governments. Governments can regulate and they can penalize a social media company that defines goals in a socially responsible way. Just as they penalize newspapers or TV stations or or or car companies that are behaving in an anti -social way, the other thing is that humans are not stupid and self -destructive. That if we we would like to have better products in the sense of also socially better products. And I gave earlier the example with food diets. I think how much yes, the food companies they discovered that if they feel a product artificially with lots of fat and sugar and salt, people would like it.

1:23:39But people discovered that this is bad for their health. So you know, for instance, a huge market for diet products and people are becoming very aware of what they eat. The same thing can happen in the information market. The cost. Those like 80 to 70 % of people in the US have like chronic disease and are at least in life expectancy now. It looks like it's going the other way a little bit in the Western world. And it's just feel like with policing consumption of goods like alcohol, nicotine, food seems much more simple than policing information and the flow of information. Beyond, you know, beyond racism or like inciting violence, I don't know how you please.

1:24:30Hey, we already covered that the two most basic and powerful tools are to hold companies liable for the actions of their algorithms. Not for the content that the users produce, but for the actions of the algorithms. I don't think we should penalize Twitter or Facebook. If somebody posts a racist post, I would be very careful about penalizing Facebook for that. Because then who decides what is racism and so forth. But if the algorithm of Facebook deliberately spreads some racist conspiracy theory, that's the algorithm. That's not even a free speech. How do you say racist conspiracy theory there?

1:25:18Okay, so now we get to the difficult conversation, but this is something that we have the codes. And I would be very careful about having the codes judge on the content of the production of individual users. But when it comes to algorithms deliberately routinely spreading a particular type of information, like a conspiracy theory, we can involve the codes. The key issue is who has liability. That it's the company that is liable for what the algorithm is doing and not the human individual liable for what they are saying. And another key distinction here is between private and public. Like part of the problem is the erasure of the boundary between the two.

1:26:10I think that humans have a right to stupidity in private. That in your private space, with your friends and with your family, you have a right to stupidity. You can say stupid things. You can tell racist jokes. You can tell homophobic jokes. It's not good. It's not nice, but your human being, you're allowed to do that. But not in public. I mean, even for politicians, like as a gay person, if the prime minister tells a homophobic joke in private, I don't need to care about that. That's his or her business. But if they say it in public on television, that's a huge problem. Now traditionally, it was very easy to distinguish private from public.

1:26:57You are in your private house with a group of friends. You say something stupid. That's private. It's not nobody's business. You go to the town square and you stand on a pedestal and you shout something to thousands of people, that's public. Here you can be punished if you say something racist or homophobic about rages. But it was easy for you to know. Now the problem is you go, let's say on WhatsApp, you think you're just talking with two of your friends and you say something, you really stupid. And then it gets viral and it's all over the place. And I don't have an easy solution for that. But one one measure, which is adopted by some governments, is for instance, that people who have a large following, they are held to a different standard than people who don't.

1:27:54Even on the most basic thing of identifying yourself as a human being, we don't want that everybody would have to get some certification from the government to talk with their friends on WhatsApp. But if you have 100 ,000 followers online, we need to know that you are not a bot, that you're actually human being. And again, this is not covered by freedom of speech because bots don't have freedom of speech. It's slippery slope right because I've gone back and forth on this argument anonymity and whether it's a good thing or a bad thing for social networks. And the rebuttal that I got when I lent to the side of, um, ideeing people is that like to a territory in governments or use that as a way to basically punish the people who were speaking.

1:28:40That's a totally telling government of doing it whether we like it or not. Yeah. It's not a question that if the British do it, then the Russians will say, okay, so we'll also do it. The Russians are doing it anyway. Well, Americans start to do it. Well, they start to, if someone speaks out against Trump and he has access to their identity and information, can he go look at them and get them arrested? If we reach that point, when the courts will allow such a thing, then we are in very deep trouble already. And what we should realize is that we're the surveillance technology. Now in existence, a totalitarian government has so many ways to know who you are that it's, that's not the main issue.

1:29:25Right? You talked about the platforms being responsible for the consequences. Yes. In the UK over the last month, we've had, I don't know if you've heard that we've had the riots. I think it was all triggered originally when there was news that broke that a someone had murdered some young children. Yes. I know as a confusion or sort of a misinformation around that person's religion. And that meant that people pro - So that's an excellent example because if I personally privately say to just two of my friends, I think the person who did it is X. I don't think we should be persecuted for that. I could say it in a private living room and it's the same thing if I say it on WhatsApp or on Facebook.

1:30:10But if a Facebook algorithm picks up this piece of fake news and starts recommending it to more and more users, then Facebook is liable for the action of its algorithms. You should be able to take it to court and say the algorithm deliberately recommended a piece of fake news. And again, if the fake news was produced by an influencer with a million followers, then it's also his, he is also liable for that. But if a private individual in a private setting said something which is not true, it's fake news. And then an algorithm deliberately spread it. The main fault is with the algorithm and the people who should be in jail are the managers of the company that owns this algorithm and not the individual who uttered the words.

1:31:12Going back to the riots issue, let's say that I don't know the Guardian, on the day of the riots decided to pick up a piece of this fake news and publish it on its front page. And they now take the editor of the Guardian to court and he said, but I didn't write it. I just found this piece of fake news and decided to put it on the front page of the Guardian. Now, it would be obvious to us that the editor did something very, very, very wrong. And he might or she might have to sit in jail. And it's not the problem of the person who originally produced the piece of fake news. If you're the editor of one of the biggest newspaper in the country and you decide to publish something on your front page, you had better be very, very sure that what you're publishing is the truth, especially if it can incite to violence.

1:32:09How would a social network owner know that? How would they be able to verify that everything is true at that scale? Not everything. But if for instance, something is likely to lead to violence, the very third, it's a precautionary principle. First of all, do not know how. Again, I'm not asking Facebook to censor the piece of fake news. I'm only asking it, don't get your algorithms to spread it on purpose in order to get user engagement and make a lot of money. If you are not sure about it, just don't spread it. It's as easy as that. How does it know it's fake news versus it thinking that it's actually really important life saving news?

1:32:54So for example, that's the responsibility of the company. Like, how does the editor of the Guardian know all of the financial times or of the Sunday times? How do they know if something is true? And if something should be published on the front page, if you are now managing a social media company, you are managing one of the most powerful newspapers in the world. And you should have the same kind of responsibilities and the same kind of expertise. If you have no idea how to judge whether an algorithm should recommend something to millions of people, you're in the wrong business. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

1:33:34This is going to be a social media company. If you don't know what should be shown to millions of people. One of the, it's very pertinent because obviously, Mark Zuckerberg's letter that he wrote this week says, I was approached by the FBI who told me that Russia were trying to influence the elections. And they were given some information that there was this laptop story, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, who's Joe Biden's son, he had this laptop story, which Facebook didn't know if it was real or not. And they thought maybe it was a Russian plant. I, Russia, had put the story there to try and make sure Joe Biden didn't win the elections.

1:34:11So Facebook deprioritized it, stopped it going viral and suppressed it. Turns out it was a real story. And it wasn't fake. And Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets suppressing it because it was in fact a real real story. And in suppressing it, he kind of influenced the election to some degree. So so complicated to the point that I just complicated to run a big media company. If it's complicated to run the World's True Journal or Fox News. And then what happens if the FBI comes to Fox News or comes to the World's True Journal and tells them, look, there is this story planted by the Russians. Don't encourage it.

1:34:53And later on, it turns out that it was wrong. Could happen. And as the manager of the World's True Journal, you need to deal with it. And do trust the FBI under what conditions sometimes they should. Sometimes they should be suspicious. I feel like you can end up in jail. Through the editor of the World's True Journal, you can end up in jail either way because either way you're influencing elections. And if you influence it. But that's the business. I mean, the real problem is when you have extremely powerful people like Zuckerberg or Elon Musk that pretend that they don't have power, that they don't have influence, that they don't shape shape elections.

1:35:31We know for centuries that the owners and editors of newspapers, they shape elections. And therefore, we hold them to certain standards. And now the owners and managers of platforms like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, they have more power than the New York Times or the Guardian or the World's True Journal. And they should be held to at least the same degree of accountability. And they're sick. That, oh, we have just a platform. We just allow everybody to publish what they want. It doesn't work like that. And we don't accept it with traditional media. So why should we accept it? That's the whole trick of these tech companies that again, we have thousands of years of history.

1:36:19And they tell us, oh, it doesn't apply to us. Like if you have a traditional industry like cars, it's obvious to everybody. You cannot put a new car on the road unless you made some safety checks to make sure the car is safe. You cannot put a new medicine in them on the market or a new vaccine on the market without safety. That's obvious, right? But when it comes to algorithms, no, no, no, no, no, that's a different set of rules. You can put any algorithm you want on the market. You don't need any safety rules. And even more basic than that, you think about something like theft. You have the 10 commandments, don't steal.

1:36:57And you know, people know, yes, you shouldn't steal until it comes to information. Oh, no, no, no, it doesn't apply to information. I can take your information and without your permission, do all kinds of things with it and sell it to third parties. And this is not stealing. Don't steal doesn't apply to my line of business. And this is one that tech giants have been doing in many cases over the last decade or two, telling us that history doesn't apply to them. That all the wisdom that humanity gained in a very painful way over centuries and thousands of years of dealing with dictatorships and with whatever, it doesn't apply to the new technology.

1:37:40And it does. It does apply. Do you ever feel tempted to just log off and just like go live in a field somewhere, maybe like a desert, maybe just create a little bit of a cult? And I do it every year. I really, yeah, I take a long meditation retreat of between 30 days and 60 days. Like this year, I plan in December after the book tour is over to go 60 days from a meditation retreat in India and just completely disconnect. No smartphone, no internet, not even books or or writing paper, just just information fast. Why? It's good for the mind. Again, like with food, too much in isn't good for us. When it's time to digest and to be toxifying.

1:38:25And it's true of the mind as well. If you just keep bombarding it with more, it's you get addicted to the wrong things. You develop bad habits and you need, or at least I need, time off in order to really kind of digest everything that happened and to decide what I want and what I don't want, what kind of habits, addictions I should try to be rid of. And also to get to know my own mind. When the mind is constantly bombarded by information from outside, you, it's so noisy, you cannot get to know it because there is so much noise. But when the noise goes away, then you can start to understand what is the mind?

1:39:29How does it function? How does it work? Where do thoughts come from? What is fear? What is anger? When you're boiling with anger because of something you just, you now read, you are focused on the object of your anger, but you can't understand the anger itself, the anger controls it. When you have an information fast, you can just observe what happens to me when I'm angry? What happens to to my mind, to my body? How does it control? And this is more important than any angry story in the world. To understand what anger actually is. It's very, very difficult. How many times do people stop and just, you know, try to get to know their anger?

1:40:17And not the object of the anger. This is what we do all the time. We kind of replay. We heard something terrible that the politician we don't like, like I don't know, somebody's angry about Trump. So he would replay it again and it always said like this, it is like they will do this, you will do that. And you don't get to know your anger that way. If you're someone running a business today, that means you're probably operating in a world that doesn't sit still. Tariffs and trade policies are dynamic. Customer expectations shift constantly and the pace of innovation is relentless. So your margin of error is becoming increasingly smaller.

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1:41:57Better use of your space with bims and totes built to last. Whatever your story, we've got the gear to keep it organized and protected at the all depot. How doers get more done? So interesting. I was playing out the scenarios on my head as you're speaking of this future where there's almost these two species of human. You have one species of human who are connected to the information highway through the internet, through the neural link in their brain. That's just like they're hooked. And the algorithm is feeding them information and they're acting upon it and they're feeding it. And then you have this other group of people who decided to reject that, who didn't get the neural link, who aren't trying to interface with AI.

1:42:39And that are living in tried and some jungle somewhere. And I like my girlfriend said this to me many years ago, she's going, I think there's going to be a split. And I kind of like, you know, whatever. But now I'm like, I can see why as things get more extreme, you go, you know what, I'm going to make a decision here. And especially when I saw the neural link that Elon Musk's working on that allows you to control computers with your brain. I sat on the computer to control your brain also. Yeah, it goes both to your right. And she didn't think about that. But I just imagined, and this is a question for everyone listening.

1:43:10If there's you and me and I have the chip in my brain that now humans have in their brain that they're using to control computers with, I am a different species to you. Because I can control the, I can control my card downstairs. I can control the lights in this room. I can, I can ask my brain questions and get the answers. My IQ becomes 5 ,000. Yours is still 150 or 200. It was probably 250. But I'm a different species to you. I have such a huge, competitive advantage over you. But if you don't get the chip, then you're screwed. That's speciation. Yeah. Again, on a small scale we saw it before in history, there are the people who adopted the written documents and the people who rejected it.

1:43:54And they are not with us anymore. Because the people who adopted the written document, they built these kingdoms and empires and they conquered everybody else. And we are in danger of the same thing happening. And this is not a good thing. Because it's not like life was better for the people with the documents. In many cases, life was better for the hunter -gatherers who lived before. So what's the solution? If I had to, you know, having read your book, brilliant book, Nexus, a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI, what is the solution? How do we stop the alignment problems?

1:44:37That's all becoming paper clips, the social chaos, the misinformation, the silicon car energy talk about in the book. How do we stop these things just drying our world? Is that hope? Are you optimistic? The key is cooperation, is connection between humans. I mean, the humans are still more powerful than the AI's. The problem is that we have divided against each other. And the algorithms unintentionally are increasing the divide. And then this is the oldest rule of every empire is divide and rule. This was the rule of the Romans, of the British Empire. If you want to rule a place, you divide the people of that place against one another and then it's easy to manipulate and control them.

1:45:23This is now happening to the entire Union species with AI. That just as we had kind of, you know, the the iron curtain in the Cold War, now we have the silicon curtain, dividing not just China from the US, but also Democrats from Republicans, also one person from another person, and all of us from the AI's, which increasingly make the decisions about all that. We still have the power for, I don't know, five years, ten years, twenty years to to to make sure it doesn't go in dystopian direction. But for that, we need to cooperate. Are you optimistic? I try to be a realist. I mean, the last few, I mean, I just came from Israel and I saw a country destroying itself for no good reason whatsoever.

1:46:12It's a country that just pressed the self -destruct button. And for no good reason. And it can happen on a global scale, which you mean, and press the self -destruct button. It's not just the war between Israel and Palestinians, but Israeli society turning against itself, greater and greater division and animosity. And it's like a dark hole of anger and of violence, which is sucking more and more people in, you know, all over the world, you now feel the shock waves from this dark, dark hole in the Middle East. And there is no good reason. There is no objective reason, if I'll say something about the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

1:47:01There is no objective reason for it. It's not like there is not enough land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River that people have to fight for the little land there is or that there is not enough food. There is enough food for everyone to eat. There is enough land to build houses and hospitals and schools for everyone. Why do people fight because of different stories in their minds? They have these different mythologies that God gave this whole place just to us. You have no right to be here. And they fight over that. And this is a local original tragedy. It can happen on a global scale.

1:47:42And if something ultimately destroys us, it will be our own delusions. Not the AIs. The AIs, they get their opening because of our weaknesses, because of our delusions. You've all thank you so much for writing a book. I think this book is one of the most well timed books that I've ever come across because of everything that's happening in the world right now. And it really helped me to understand that the problem isn't necessarily me versus you. If you're on the other side of the aisle, the problem is information, the networks of information that we consume, who's controlling those networks of information.

1:48:20Somebody is manipulating us to be on different side, not just to be on different sides, but to see each other as enemies. And right now that's a person, but it might not be. It might not be a person. No. And understanding that I think helps us focus on the root cause of issues that are sometimes hard to identify. I think the problem is my neighbor. I think it's not person with different color skin. But actually, if you look one level deeper, it's the information networks and what I'm being exposed to that are brainwashing me and creating those stories. And as you talk about in your previous book, stories are ultimately what are running the world.

1:48:55And it's wonderful that Nexus is just a wonderful book at a wonderful time helps us to access this knowledge of the power of information and how it impacts democracy and relationships and society and business and everything in between. In a way that I hope will lead to action. And I think that is something to be optimistic about. Yeah, ultimately, I think most humans are good. Good people. When you give people bad information, they made bad decisions. The problem is not with the humans. It's with the information. Amen. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves the question for the next guest.

1:49:40Not now. They're going to be leaving it for. Oh, okay. And the question that for you is what does it mean to be strong? Oh.

1:49:55To accept reality as it is. To deal with reality without trying to hide it, disappear it, put a veil over it. So interesting. I think you're right. I think you're right. Certainly not the answer I would have given. But you know, you come to the end. What would you say? Oh, what would I say? I guess I probably would have spoken to like perseverance in the face of a lot of different difficulties. And one of those is in is information. But it's just that that idea of like persevering towards whatever your subjective goal is in the face of an in spite of a variety of different difficulties. Maybe that's strength.

1:50:49So that could be raising a kid or it could be going to Jim or whatever. But I like your definition as well because I think it's much more important in the times we find ourselves in. And there's on it, honestly, if it's as a podcast, you sometimes feel like you're caught right in the middle of it. Because I think everyone's trying to figure out if I'm like on the right wing, on the left wing, if I believe this, if I endorse every guest that I sit with, and you almost have to try and remain impartial. But it's very, very difficult to for people to understand that because they want you to fit somewhere.

1:51:24And they want to. Because that's weakness. I mean, you have a lot of people who claim to be very strong, yeah, admire strength is a value. Yeah. But they can't deal with parts of reality that don't fit. Into their worldview or their desire. Yeah. And they think that strength is I have the strength to just make these parts of reality disappear. Yeah. And no, this is weakness. And I am sorry for going back to that, but this is also the war. Like what is war is trying to disappear a part of reality that you don't like in this case and in our people. I don't like these people. I don't think they should be in reality.

1:52:08So I try to make them disappear. And people say, oh, he's a very strong leader. He's not. He's a very weak leader. That a strong leader would be able to acknowledge, no, these people exist. They are part of reality. Let's now find out how do we live with them. Amen. Yobuk Nexus, a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI is a must read for everybody that listens to this podcast and has any interest in these subjects at all. It's endorsed by two of my favorite people, Mustafa, Solomon, but also Stephen, Brian, Rory Stewart, he's a great person as well. And it's endorsed for a very good reason because it's a completely mind expanding book written from someone who only writes exceptional culture shifting books.

1:52:51So I'm going to link it below. I highly recommend anybody that's listening to this conversation. And that's interesting in this subject matter to go and get this book right now. It's available right now for pre -order. And then it's shipping in five days from now when it releases. So be the first to read it and hopefully be the first to understand and action some of the things that you learn in this book. Yobuk, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.