From the Archive: Yuval Noah Harari on The Story Behind Everything

22:47It's much more difficult for the body and it's very boring to the mind. Even today, the jobs of hundreds of millions of people around the world are far more boring than going to the forest to look for mushrooms.

23:02James Altucher:And you mentioned earlier that the hunter-forager brain might have even been bigger than the brain we have now. Do you think if we took a hunter-forager baby from like 40 ,000 years ago and like a zero-year-old and brought him or her here and raised him, do you think it would be a smarter person? That's a good question. We're not sure. I mean, what you do know is that in order to survive as a hunter-gatherer, you needed superb skills, both physical and mental. You relied on other people, of course, but without superb skills of your own in many different fields, you couldn't survive. You needed to know how to track animals, how to find mushrooms, how to make shoes, how to take care of injury, how to cooperate with other people effectively, many things.

23:51Today, you need to know foul less. I, for example, I teach history at university. I need to know history and that's about it. Everything else, I take my salary from the university, I go to the supermarket, I buy it. I don't know how to prepare my own food. I don't know how to make my own clothes. I don't know how to take care of my health. I mean, for all that, I rely on other people. As a collective, we obviously know far more than people in the Stone Age. As individuals, we probably know far less.

24:25James Altucher:So now I want to get into, you know, so in the second book, or in the first book, you bring us all the way to here. You get through the agricultural revolution and the rise of kingdoms and empires and everything's there to sort of, A, support some kind of story like religion or nationalism or whatever, and that leads to wars and battles for resources. You make one interesting point, or many interesting points, but after the scientific revolution and after the wars of the 20th century, war itself is diminishing now. Because as you point out, it's not like China would invade Silicon Valley for its silicon.

25:02James Altucher:It's now everything's ideas and it's much more abstract, the resources we have. Yeah, you see a decline in international violence. I think due to two main reasons. First of all, nuclear weapons have transformed war between superpowers into collective suicide, which is why we didn't have any such war since 1945. And secondly, there is a change in the nature of the economy from a material-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. The main assets in the past were material, like gold mines or wheat fields. And these are the kinds of things you can conquer through violence. You invade, say, in the mid-19th century.

25:44So the United States invades California, takes it away from Mexico, and hey, we now have all these gold mines. We are richer. It makes sense to wage war. Today, more and more, the main asset is knowledge. The source of wealth of California today is the knowledge in the minds of engineers and technicians and CEOs, and you just cannot conquer it by force. if the Mexicans reinvade to reconquer California, let's say they succeed somehow, they won't gain anything. I mean, there are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley. The wealth is in the minds of the engineers and you cannot conquer it by force. So there are still places in the world where you have a lot of violence.

26:28These tend to be the places where the economy is still old-fashioned material economy like the Middle East. Oil fields, I mean, it still made sense for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait because the wealth is in the ground. It's oil and you can conquer it. But generally speaking, there is a decline in human violence.

26:48James Altucher:What about like terrorism? So you mentioned in Homo Deus that terrorists are almost by definition weak because they don't have the resources to take over a country, for instance. So they're trying to more create fear than death. Yes. But what if a terrorist organization, what if technology becomes so simple for nuclear weapons or for biological warfare that terrorists are able to get a hold of that technology. You don't really seem to be that worried about that in the next phase. That would be a game changer. I mean, once you have weapons of mass destruction in the hands of tiny groups accountable to nobody, that's a game changer.

27:22And that's a very big threat. So far, we haven't reached that point. So far, terrorism has been mainly a psychological menace. Terrorists function by capturing our imagination, turning our imagination against us and causing us to overreact. This is the way terrorism functions. In a way, a terrorist is like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so small and weak, it cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? The fly finds a bull, gets into the ear of the bull and starts buzzing. The bull becomes so enraged that it, you know, it loses its temper and destroys the China shop.

28:08This is what happened in the Middle East over the last 15 years. Al-Qaeda could never have destroyed Iraq by itself. It got into the ear of the United States, and the United States went wild and destroyed the Middle Eastern China shop for Al-Qaeda. This is how terrorism functions. And if you want to fight terrorism, you should start with your own imagination. You should free your imagination from being captured by terrorists. That's the most effective way to fight terrorism.

28:38James Altucher:Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at altitra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

29:00James Altucher:you know that is really interesting what you just said about freeing the imagination i'm gonna i'm gonna hold on to i'm pinning that to my mental wall here and we're gonna get back to that so now next steps you in in homo deus you kind of go in two directions one is you talk about how humans could take the next step by using technology to improve their lifespans, their happiness, and their powers, what are capable of doing. But then there's another direction too, which is that it might not be humans at all we're dealing with 500 years from now because data is becoming so powerful. Now we're going from humanists to dataists, that the needs of data might be more important than the needs of humans.

29:42James Altucher:And I saw some criticism's like oh that's not how artificial intelligence works and yet people i i think a lot of that the the those comments are wrong in the sense that look at what we do on amazon we don't now look for what our friends are recommending amazon has all these algorithms that uses that sees what millions of recommendations are and says based on what your browsing history is and other people's browsers you might like these books yes so so already we're kind of allowing giving up our humanism, our right to privacy, for instance, for the needs of data, for the needs of big data. So let's start on the first one, how we could become superhumans and what's happening in that direction.

30:24Well, I mean, given the advances in bioengineering and brain-computer interfaces and so forth, I think it's very likely that within a century or two, Homo sapiens will disappear and be replaced by a completely different kind of being. Something which will be more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals.

30:43James Altucher:But it seems like that would be largely because of sort of some sort of biological engineering. Yes. But those super Homo sapiens will probably still be able to mate with current Homo sapiens. It wouldn't be necessarily a DNA change, unless maybe it would be. We don't know. It could go in the direction of just biological engineering. Just as Homo sapiens 70 ,000 years ago, a small change in DNA leading to a small change in brain structure was enough. to transform an insignificant ape into the ruler of the world. So a few more changes in DNA, causing a few more changes in brain structure, who knows what the consequences will be.

31:22James Altucher:And your point is that we now, because we now are starting to get the actual ability to change our own DNA structure, that could happen quickly. That is one possibility. Another possibility is that we will start connecting brains and computers and create cyborgs so that after 4 billion years of organic evolution, we will start seeing non-organic or partly inorganic life forms on Earth. And this is not science fiction. It's beginning to happen. Yeah, you give several examples, actually. Like you give the example, the one that was amazing, the woman who wears a transcranial helmet, there's a before and after.

32:00James Altucher:She has to go into some shooting simulator. The first time, she's afraid. She doesn't shoot everything. The second time, it's like she's a female Rambo. Yes. And just destroys everything and was in total flow the whole time. So she doesn't realize what's happening. Yeah, I mean, so you have things like connecting the brain to a bionic hand. And you have things like these helmets that you stimulate the brain to create all kinds of mental states and abilities that otherwise you can't have. So this is another direction of humans and machines or humans and computers merging. In many science fiction movies, you have this, the robots are rebelling and trying to kill the humans.

32:44But it's more likely we'll see a wedding than a war, that humans and robots or humans and computers will emerge to form cyborgs, which will have very different abilities and a very different emotional world than what we today have. So we are not talking about exterminating humans. We are really talking about changing or upgrading them into something different.

33:08James Altucher:But it's very interesting because you point out how this might change the current story we live under. So let's say our umbrella story is humanism. So it seems like there's always these kind of umbrella stories and then stories within stories within stories. So let's say our big story right now is humanism versus theism. So humanism suggests that all humans are created equal. We have human rights. I would say that theism, like monotheism, says that authority comes from God. Humanism says, no, authority comes from humans. Authority comes from human feelings and free choices. Whenever you have a problem in life, you don't ask God, you don't ask the Pope, you don't ask the Bible, you ask your feelings.

33:57You want to know who should be president of the US? You don't ask the Pope or the Bible, you ask people. How do you feel about it? What do you think? In humanist politics, the voter is the highest authority. There is no authority higher than the choices of the voter. In economics, what is humanist economics? It's an economics in which the customer is always right. You want to know what is a good product? You ask the customer. If the customer likes it, it's a good product. Same in ethics. What's good, what's bad? Human feelings. If something makes you feel good and it doesn't make anybody else feel bad, nothing can be wrong with it.

34:35Like in the past, you had all these religious doctrines against homosexuality. What's so wrong with two men loving each other? Oh, God said it's a sin, so it's bad. And then humanism comes along and says, we don't care what God said. Let's ask human feelings. I mean, do you love him? Yes. Do you love him? Yes. Is anybody hurt by this? No. So what could be wrong with it? Very simple. Now, the next phase, what we see in the 21st century, is that human feelings are losing their authority. And instead, we see the rise of a new authority, which is data. You have a problem in life. You don't ask your feelings.

35:17You certainly don't ask God. You ask Google or Amazon and their algorithms. They know you better than you know yourself.

35:24James Altucher:So will it ever be, though, when you say this wedding of kind of AI and robotics with humans, would you ever see a situation where there's kind of a new elite classism where the billionaires who first make it to the finish line of this wedding of technology and biology, will they be the ones who kind of decide human history at some point? Yes, this is one of the big dangers in the 21st century of creating a very unequal society in which a tiny elite not only controls most of the power and wealth, but also has the ability to upgrade itself. And in a way, for the first time in history, to translate economic inequality into biological inequality.

36:15So you have different biological costs, and the rich are really better. They have superior abilities compared with the poor. In the past, the aristocracy always imagined that it was superior, but it wasn't true. There was no real difference in ability between the king and the peasant. In the future, this might become a realistic possibility that the son of the billionaire will actually be superior in capabilities to the son of a working class person.

36:52James Altucher:Do you see this as something that, you know, you think is likely to happen? Or like, where do you kind of see the next steps in terms of both anti-aging, superior happiness, superior abilities, and so on? Like, how will it kind of unfold? Because it's already sort of unfolding, as we mentioned. Yeah, I mean, so far still, it's mainly economic, but it might become biological inequality. You see a larger and larger difference in life expectancy between the rich and the poor. It might reach a point when the rich can live indefinitely, young and beautiful forever, maybe not forever, but indefinitely.

37:33James Altucher:Well, you mentioned in the book that so far, medical technology hasn't really advanced the cap on life expectancy. So like roughly the cap is, let's say, 90 years old. I mean, some people, there's outliers and so on. And then even, you know, hundreds of years ago or perhaps 70 ,000 years ago, the cap was also 90 years old. So do you think that cap will for the first time ever increase? There is a likely possibility that again, not in 10 or 20 years, but in 50 or 100 years, it would be possible to increase human life expectancy. And once you can do that, you can increase it almost indefinitely.

38:12If you have the technology to live to be 150, it's probably enough to make it to 1 ,000. Because you will need to learn how to rejuvenate the human body or how to connect effectively organic and inorganic parts. And once you have that, there is really no time limit. So again, it's not a certainty and it's much more difficult than some people imagine. but it's not impossible that, say, within a century, it will be possible to extend human life indefinitely if you have enough money to allow yourself to pay for all the expensive treatments.

38:52James Altucher:And, I mean, even though all the Malthusian predictions of doom because of overpopulation have proven false, do you think there is a danger if everybody starts living to 500 that there's an overpopulation issue? I think there are much bigger problems. First, it won't be available for everybody, for the 8 billion people on the planet. And if you have such kind of technology, then resources are not a problem. You could basically almost, you know, the amount of energy in the universe is almost infinite. It's just a question of capturing it. The really big problem will be social and political. Just imagine the amount of anger that immortality for a few rich will create.

39:39Throughout history, death was the great equalizer. The poor always comforted themselves that, yeah, things are unequal now, but in the end, the rich will also die. Just think how much anger there will be if the poor continue to die, but the rich have the money to live young and beautiful indefinitely. And from the side of the rich, you'll have immense anxiety. Because you could still die. They can't bring you back from the dead. They can extend your life, but they can't bring you back. So if you have an accident, if a bus runs you over, if a terrorist blows you up, you're dead. Just think how much anxiety to know that if you're careful and lucky, you can live forever.

40:26But if you're unlucky, that's it. You miss forever. I mean, today people are willing to take risks. Like I flew here from Israel. It's dangerous. I go to, I don't know, I go to India to climb the Himalayas. It's dangerous. Yes, but I'll die anyway. So I take risks. If you think that you have a fighting chance of living indefinitely, you won't be willing to take any risks. And you will be, I mean, Woody Allen would look like the least neurotic person in the world compared to the levels of anxiety we're talking about.

41:01James Altucher:Says one Jew to another. So the next thing you talk about in terms of the technological or biological engineering of humans is happiness. And you talk about two opposing stories and which one we're sort of leaning towards. There's sort of this kind of quasi-Buddhist story of, okay, a key to happiness is to just crave less things. This is the third noble truth in Buddha's four truths. or we could just biochemically take pills that increases dopamine all the time in our brains. Yes. And society is, of course, leaning towards the latter. Yeah. But there's the argument that, you know, these neurochemicals, no one's ever really figured out how to make it non-addictive and how to slow down the metabolism of them and so on.

41:48James Altucher:Do you think that's an area we will possibly conquer? That's a very, I mean, I think this is the path we are heading towards and it's a very, very dangerous path because we don't understand ourselves well enough to start manipulating our internal systems. Over the last thousands of years, we've gained the power to manipulate the world outside us to control the animals, the forests, the rivers, but we didn't really understand in depth the ecological balance. So we used our power in an unwise way and now we are facing an ecological collapse. We push the ecological system out of balance with all our manipulations.

42:31James Altucher:And it's because it happened so slow. It's the same thing as you mentioned in the agricultural revolution. Things happen so slow, it seems good at first. All these improvements, the steam engine seemed good at first. And then you realize 300 years later, uh-oh, but we can't go back. And the thing now is that we are starting to gain control of the world inside us. to control our bodies, our brains, our minds in the way that we previously tried to control forests and rivers. But we don't have a good understanding of our internal system, especially of our minds. So the danger is that all these internal manipulation will end up with an internal ecological disaster, will face a kind of mental breakdown, just as today we face an ecological breakdown.

43:20Because we have the power to manipulate, we lack the understanding of how complex the system is and how it keeps balance and how it actually functions.

43:33James Altucher:And then I guess another strand of this is an economic breakdown in the sense that, so in Homo Deus, you talk about kind of this move from humanism to a new story of dataism. And at the same time, that could mean, of course, the collapse of almost every industry. So if we're all driving around self-driving cars, that's going to eliminate 90 % or more of the automotive industry, the insurance industry, the real estate industry. All these industries are potentially going to collapse, making data valuable, but not humans. And so what happens then? Like, how do things unfold from there? because that does, I mean, even Elon Musk talked about this in a speech the other day, you know, calling for a universal basic income.

44:18James Altucher:But how does this realistically play out? We don't know. I mean, what we do know is that the job market in 30 years will be completely different from what it is today. Many, even most jobs that exist today will not exist in 2050. But they're not going to be like, it's not like factory workers are suddenly going to be, robotic scientists. That's the problem. I mean, previously, people say, oh, we've been there before, fear of automation. But what we saw previously, okay, you didn't need farm workers because you held all the tractors. So people moved from being agricultural laborers to being factory hands.

44:58And then you had automation in the factories. So people moved from working in a factory to being a cashier at Walmart. The next stage is going to be far more difficult. working in the field, in a factory, as a cashier in Malta, in Walmart, these are all low-skilled jobs. It's relatively easy to switch from one to the other. But when you look to the future, people say, ah, we won't need cashiers and taxi drivers and insurance agents, but we will need many software engineers. So this is what everybody will do. But there is a problem there. It's very difficult for a 50-year-old unemployed cashier from Walmart to reinvent herself as a software engineer.

45:43It was easy, relatively, to move from the field to the factory to Walmart. It's going to be very, very difficult to move from Walmart to Silicon Valley.

45:54James Altucher:So it's going to be interesting to see, you know, as, I mean, it's not like you give one set of predictions in Homo Deus. You present all these possibilities that all seem very realistic. And it's all based on what is currently happening, which is why you see people like Elon Musk talking about it, why Bill Gates is recommending your books and so on. And it's all based in the reality right now and the directions we've been going. So, you know, A, I wanna recommend Sapiens and Homo Deus. These are just brilliant books I've already recommended. I've written an article of 40 books that have changed my life and Sapiens was, I believe, number one on the list.

46:28James Altucher:So I've already been recommending your books in a huge way, but Homo Deus also, just a remarkable book. One final question, which is given all of this thought that you've put into it, and I can't, you must have read like 10 gazillion books to do the research on this. Like it seems like, you know, every battle in history and every archaeological will remain ever discovered. But given all the thought and energy you've put into this, how have these thoughts and discoveries and theories changed your own life? Like how do you try to make your current life better given the knowledge you have and that you're sharing with people?

47:01I sit for meditation two hours every day.

47:04James Altucher:I noticed your acknowledgements to Esa and Goenka, so Vipassana meditation. Exactly. I do Vipassana meditation. I start and finish every workday with one hour of meditation. And I go every year to sit a long meditation retreat of 30 to 60 days. And for me, you know, it gives me balance and peace and calmness and really the ability to find myself in this ever-changing and hectic world. So it's almost like you separate yourself from all of the stories. The stories are the things that are constantly running through all of our heads. Yes. But when you sit in meditation, you kind of are almost putting a little distance between the stories and who maybe biologically you are.

47:51Yeah, the whole idea of meditation is forget about all the stories in your mind. Just observe reality as it is. what is actually happening right here, right now. And you start with very simple things, like you observe the breath coming in and out of your nostrils, or you observe the sensations in your body, oh, there is heat, there is sweat, there is some movement here. And this is reality. And, you know, over the last century, people, I mean, for all of history, people have been given more and more importance to these stories, imaginary stories, and they have been losing the ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality.

48:35And for me, meditation is one of the best ways to kind of regain this ability to really tell the difference, what is real and what is just a fictional story in my mind.

48:49James Altucher:I think even, so meditation obviously is a great way to practice separating out those stories from reality, but even having a healthy skepticism and just saying, just asking yourself, where is the fiction in this situation? Even if in relationships or in ethics or in any sort of philosophy, I think that's an initial practice somebody can do who's listening to this, who's not an expert meditator, for instance. Definitely. I mean, to really, what is real? That's a very difficult and very important question. Becoming, I think, ever more difficult because our fictions are becoming so much more sophisticated and so much more enticing and powerful that it's so difficult.

49:32I mean, one good place also to start, if you're not sure whether something is real or just a fiction created by humans, you can always ask yourself whether it can suffer. Something that can suffer is real. Like the nation is a fiction created by humans. It cannot suffer. People say that, I don't know, Germany suffered a defeat in the First World War. But this is a metaphor. Germany cannot suffer. It has no mind. It has no consciousness. It doesn't feel anything. German people as individuals, yes, they can suffer. Horses in the war, they can suffer. Chickens can suffer. But Germany cannot suffer.

50:11Similarly, if a corporation goes bankrupt, the corporation doesn't suffer. It cannot. It has no mind. But the employees, they can suffer. So it's not the only test, of course, but it's one very simple test that you can always ask about these big entities, corporations, nations, gods, so forth. Can they suffer?

50:32James Altucher:Well, Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, I've been waiting to have this conversation for probably five years. So thanks so much for coming on the show. And I highly, highly recommend the books. And good luck. Thank you.

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