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Speaker 1: order your first custom shirt today. This is Masters in
Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. This week. On
Speaker 1: the podcast, I sit down for really a fascinating conversation
Speaker 1: with Yuval Noah Harari. If that name sounds familiar, he
Speaker 1: is the author of a book on human history called Sapiens.
Speaker 1: I can't begin to tell you how many people have
Speaker 1: raved about this book, and whether it's Bill Gates or
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg, UH, or Danny Kaneman or go down the list.
Speaker 1: I've had a number of guests. When we get to
Speaker 1: the books segment, that's that's the book they recommend. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's it's really a fascinating history and and a very
Speaker 1: counterintuitive history of the development of the human species and
Speaker 1: why we have succeeded so well. It isn't necessarily our intelligence,
Speaker 1: It isn't necessarily our adaptability. According to Harari, it is
Speaker 1: our ability to cooperate with each other and to tell stories,
Speaker 1: myths and stories are at the core of what allows
Speaker 1: human cooperation to succeed. It's a fascinating conversation. Uh. We
Speaker 1: talk about his new book Hamodeus, A Brief History of Tomorrow,
Speaker 1: which I have not yet read, but the people I
Speaker 1: know who have read loved it, and so it picks up,
Speaker 1: it picks up with the last book left off. I
Speaker 1: think you'll find this really a fascinating conversation. We he's
Speaker 1: in the midst of doing a nationwide tour. They're creating
Speaker 1: a documentary film or or some sort of a series
Speaker 1: on this. So we got him in and out in
Speaker 1: less than than an hour. So this is a relatively
Speaker 1: fast show. So with no further ado, here is my
Speaker 1: conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. This is Masters in Business
Speaker 1: with Barry Ridholtz on Boomberg Radio. My special guest today
Speaker 1: is author you've all Noah Harari. You should know his name,
Speaker 1: and if you don't, you will soon. Harari specialized in
Speaker 1: medieval history and military history, studying at the Hebrew University
Speaker 1: of Jerusalem. He completed his doctorate of All Places at
Speaker 1: Jesus College in Oxford, and he is the author of
Speaker 1: two of the most fascinating books you will come across
Speaker 1: um in the next few years. His first book, Say Biens,
Speaker 1: A Brief History of Human Kinds, was one of those
Speaker 1: books that very quietly caught an audience. It was on
Speaker 1: the summer reading list for Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
Speaker 1: That's all it really took for the book to go viral.
Speaker 1: His new book, Homo Dais, A Brief History of Tomorrow,
Speaker 1: comes out shortly. You've all, Noah Harari, Welcome to Bloomberg. Hello,
Speaker 1: it's good to be here. I'm fascinated by your book
Speaker 1: and a quick story I read. Was reading a book
Speaker 1: called Last Day Ape Standing and it was really a
Speaker 1: good name Darwinian history of human kind. And a friend said,
Speaker 1: how are you enjoying that book? I said, I'm liking it.
Speaker 1: He goes, I have a book you're gonna love, and
Speaker 1: he was right. He gave me Sapiens. I love the story,
Speaker 1: I love the background about this. But let's let's jump
Speaker 1: right into a little discussion of of Homo sapiens. A
Speaker 1: hundred thousand years ago, Homo sapiens were just one of
Speaker 1: a number of different human species, all competing for supremacy. Today,
Speaker 1: Homo sapiens dominate the planet. What made Homo sapiens so
Speaker 1: different and so successful? Oh, we are the only mammal
Speaker 1: that can cooperate in very large numbers and do so
Speaker 1: very flexibly. We tend to think that our superiority comes
Speaker 1: out of some individual ability like we have we are
Speaker 1: smarter than everybody else or whatever. But on the individual level,
Speaker 1: we are not superior to chimpanzee is Our real advantage
Speaker 1: is the unique ability to cooperate in very large numbers.
Speaker 1: If you cram a hundred thousand chimpanzees into Yankee Stadium
Speaker 1: or into Wall Street, you get chaos. You cram a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand humans there, and you get very sophisticated networks
Speaker 1: of cooperation. And all our achievements are based on large
Speaker 1: scale corporation. Now what made this possible? Why are we
Speaker 1: the only ones that can cooperate in large numbers? It's
Speaker 1: because we are the only ones that can tell fictional
Speaker 1: stories and believe them. At the basis of every large
Speaker 1: scale human cooperation, you always find a fictional story about gods,
Speaker 1: about nations, about money, corporations, all kinds of things that
Speaker 1: exist only in our own imagination. You cannot convince a
Speaker 1: chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that
Speaker 1: after you die, you go to chimpanzee heaven and there
Speaker 1: received lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds.
Speaker 1: Chimpanzee wouldn't believe that humans believes our stories, which is
Speaker 1: why we cooperate better than them. So the power of myth,
Speaker 1: the power of storytelling, is what led to human cooperation.
Speaker 1: Exactly as I said, check any large scale human cooperation.
Speaker 1: There is always some fiction at the basis. It's easiest
Speaker 1: to comprehend it in the context of religion, but it's
Speaker 1: the same with political and economic corporation. And money is
Speaker 1: probably the most successful fictional story ever told. So why
Speaker 1: is money fictional? Because money has no objective reality. It's
Speaker 1: not like a coconut or a banana. Um, It's only
Speaker 1: value comes from stories that people tell about it. The
Speaker 1: consensus of this piece of paper has value, and that
Speaker 1: piece of paper doesn't exactly that the group consensus is
Speaker 1: a fiction. In other words, yeah, I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that fiction is wrong or we should
Speaker 1: stop believing in fictional stories. There are the basis of
Speaker 1: our society, but I am pointing out that it's all
Speaker 1: based on stories and our belief in the stories. If
Speaker 1: if it were up to me, I would give the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize in Literature to the person of the Federal Reserve,
Speaker 1: not to the usual suspects who get the get the prize.
Speaker 1: I still, I still like your concept of a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand chimpanzees in Wall Street. I don't know if the
Speaker 1: chaos would be very different than what we are actually,
Speaker 1: I think it will be much worse, much worse. So
Speaker 1: here's a quote about money of yours that come straight
Speaker 1: from the book that I think is absolutely fascinating, and
Speaker 1: it puts the concept of faith based belief and money
Speaker 1: into some context. The sum total of money in the
Speaker 1: entire world is sixty trillion dollars. Add up all the cash,
Speaker 1: it up all the paper money and coins, and it's
Speaker 1: only six trillion dollars of all money in the world
Speaker 1: exists only on computer servers. Therefore, money is a faith
Speaker 1: based object. And even the six trillion that are in paper,
Speaker 1: I mean the paper is worth nothing. Really. You can't
Speaker 1: eat it, you can't drink it, so it is it too,
Speaker 1: is based on on faith. And even gold was based
Speaker 1: on faith, on on on belief because you can't do
Speaker 1: anything with gold. I mean again, you can't eat it,
Speaker 1: and it's a very soft metal, so you can't even
Speaker 1: make useful implements out of it. You can't kill somebody
Speaker 1: with a sold made of gold. Um, So it's really
Speaker 1: all based on trust. The real material from which money
Speaker 1: is made is not gold or paper. It's made of trust.
Speaker 1: It's the most sophisticated mutual trust system ever created. It's
Speaker 1: the only system really that managed to be completely universal.
Speaker 1: Not everybody believes in God, and not everybody believes, say,
Speaker 1: in human rights, but everybody believes in money. I mean,
Speaker 1: even if you think about I don't know, Sama bin Laden.
Speaker 1: He hated American politics and culture and religion. He had
Speaker 1: no objection at all to American dollars. You reference that
Speaker 1: even something as ancient as the Roman Empire collected taxes
Speaker 1: at one point, at their peak, they had a hundred
Speaker 1: million people paying them taxes. Is that number right? A
Speaker 1: hundred million people paying them Roman Empire some form of taxation, yes,
Speaker 1: I mean you had a hundred million people in the
Speaker 1: empire as it's the need. Of course, not everybody pays taxes,
Speaker 1: you have families or only one person pays, but generally speaking. Yes,
Speaker 1: they collect the taxes from the entire Mediterranean basin, from
Speaker 1: tens of millions of people. That's amazing. I'm Barry rid Hilts.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My
Speaker 1: special guest today is you've all Harari. He is the
Speaker 1: author of the book Sapiens, A Brief History of Human Kind,
Speaker 1: And let's jump right into this. And and there's so
Speaker 1: much in this book that is so fascinating and so counterintuitive.
Speaker 1: And yet when you think it through, you start to
Speaker 1: say to yourself, maybe maybe he's right. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: the agricultural revolution began around twelve thousand years ago, and
Speaker 1: you say, surprisingly, the pursuit of an easier life leads
Speaker 1: to more hardship. Now, I think of the pre agricultural
Speaker 1: era as as short, nasty, and brutish. You never know
Speaker 1: when your next meal is coming from. You're you're constantly
Speaker 1: at at the mercy of the weather, of of other animals,
Speaker 1: of other bands. But I assume that agriculture allows you
Speaker 1: to have a home and roof of your house, And
Speaker 1: you're saying that just makes things worse. Yeah, for most people,
Speaker 1: it made things worse. If you're a king or a
Speaker 1: high priest. Life is very nice in ancient Egypt. But
Speaker 1: if you're a simple peasant, life is actually much harder.
Speaker 1: First of all, is a peasant you work harder than
Speaker 1: your hunter gatherer ancestors. Our bodies and our minds evolved
Speaker 1: for hundreds of thousands of years in adaptation to living
Speaker 1: as hunter gatherers, going to the forest to look from
Speaker 1: mushrooms or hunt hunt rabbits, and suddenly you find yourself
Speaker 1: all day working very hard on very monotonous and boring
Speaker 1: jobs like bringing water buckets from the river or harvesting
Speaker 1: the corne. Even today you have hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: people working in much more difficult and boring jobs than
Speaker 1: our ancestors in the Stone Age. In exchange, you've got
Speaker 1: a much worse diet. Hunter gatherers eight dozens of different
Speaker 1: kinds of animals and plants and mushrooms and tever, so
Speaker 1: they had a very rich and balanced nutrition. Usually peasants
Speaker 1: subsisted on a very monotonous diet. If you live in
Speaker 1: ancient Egypt, you basically eat wheat unless you're faero. If
Speaker 1: you live in China, you eat rice for breakfast, rice
Speaker 1: for lunch, and if you're lucky, you have enough rice
Speaker 1: left for dinner. In addition, peasants suffered far more from
Speaker 1: infectious diseases because almost all infectious diseases humans suffer from
Speaker 1: actually came from domesticated animals. Hunter gatherers had very few
Speaker 1: infectious diseases. There were tiny bands roaming around, not enough
Speaker 1: to to sustain an epidemic. You start seeing epidemics of
Speaker 1: infectious diseases only with agriculture. And if this is not enough,
Speaker 1: peasants suffered far more from social exploitation and political inequality
Speaker 1: than hunter gatherers. Inequality both between classes and between genders.
Speaker 1: So I'm not saying that life was paradised as unter gatherers.
Speaker 1: You had many difficulties, but all in all, the life
Speaker 1: of the average person got worse instead of better as
Speaker 1: a result of the agricultural revolution. Only around the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century you begin to seem real improvement in the life
Speaker 1: of the average person. And even today, as I said,
Speaker 1: there are hundreds of millions of people around the world
Speaker 1: whose life is much more difficult and much more grim
Speaker 1: than the life of hunter gatherers twenty years ago. I'm
Speaker 1: also fascinated by the book I didn't realize it was
Speaker 1: first published in Hebrew in two thousand and eleven, and
Speaker 1: then it didn't come out in English until what What
Speaker 1: was the process? How did it go from a Hebrew
Speaker 1: book to something that was published now globally. Well, Um,
Speaker 1: I rewrote it in English. It's not really translation, it's
Speaker 1: rewriting it. Um. And I changed many of the example
Speaker 1: polls from things from Israeli and Jewish history, two things
Speaker 1: with more international familiarity I used. I got a lot
Speaker 1: of feedbank from the Israeli audience about all kinds of
Speaker 1: things in the book. So I had the opportunity to
Speaker 1: change things and update things, and I had to find
Speaker 1: a publisher, which wasn't easy. Uh So it took three
Speaker 1: years to to make the transition. Really and now it's
Speaker 1: we have something like fifty translations all over the world.
Speaker 1: That's quite that's quite fascinating. You mentioned agricultural lead lead
Speaker 1: to communicable disease because you have people working close together.
Speaker 1: What about the rise of cities and urban population centers.
Speaker 1: We always think of that as a positive or at
Speaker 1: least historically that's been portrayed as a positive. Look. We
Speaker 1: have culture, we have learning, we have knowledge, you're saying
Speaker 1: not so much. Well, that depends on your viewpoint and
Speaker 1: on your metric. If your viewpoint it's say, I don't
Speaker 1: know the upper a class in Athens in the fifth
Speaker 1: century b c. And you measure progress by the sophistication
Speaker 1: of your philosophy or your theater, then yes, it was
Speaker 1: an amazing development. But if you think about it from
Speaker 1: the viewpoint of a slave woman, uh, working to death
Speaker 1: in some field that belongs to Socrates, then it looks
Speaker 1: a bit different, to say the very least. Um, let's
Speaker 1: talk about cognitive dissonance, one of my favorite phrases. I
Speaker 1: always think of that phrase as a negative of of
Speaker 1: somebody who was so wrapped up in their own bubble
Speaker 1: they can't get out of their own way. But but again,
Speaker 1: very counterintuitively, you describe it differently. Quote. Cognitive dissonance is
Speaker 1: often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact,
Speaker 1: it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to
Speaker 1: hold contradictory beliefs and values, it probably would have been
Speaker 1: impossible to establish and maintain any human culture. Explain that
Speaker 1: that that's quite an interesting assertion. Well, in contrast to
Speaker 1: the laws of nature, which have no contradictions. Humans have
Speaker 1: not been able to come up with any system of
Speaker 1: laws or values or views which is completely coherent and consistent.
Speaker 1: So unless we had this ability of cognitive dissonance, we
Speaker 1: could not have had any culture or any human human
Speaker 1: generated a code book. And to give a few examples,
Speaker 1: if you think, for example, about the monoteistic world view,
Speaker 1: so people believe in a single, all knowing and omnipotent God,
Speaker 1: but somehow they also manage to believe in an independent
Speaker 1: satan or devil, and to blame the devil for all
Speaker 1: kinds of bad things that happen in the world and
Speaker 1: exxonerate the all knowing and all powerful God. Now this
Speaker 1: is a contradiction, but people do it similarly in in
Speaker 1: in today's culture. If you go to a hospital, or
Speaker 1: if you go to the department of biology, then human
Speaker 1: and are basically these biochemical machines. And there is no
Speaker 1: such thing as free will in today's biology. But then
Speaker 1: you leave the hospital or the biology department and you
Speaker 1: go to the law department or to the courts, Suddenly
Speaker 1: free will comes out of nowhere. And our entire legal
Speaker 1: system is built on the assumptions that yes of course
Speaker 1: humans have free will. How else can you hold them
Speaker 1: responsible for crimes and other bad actions? Exactly, And there
Speaker 1: is a contradiction there, but um, we kind of managed
Speaker 1: to go away around the contradiction, and we think in
Speaker 1: different ways when we are in the hospital or when
Speaker 1: we are in the courtroom. I'm very rid Holts. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special
Speaker 1: guest today is you've all Noah Harari. He is the
Speaker 1: author of two highly regarded books. The first is called Sapiens,
Speaker 1: A Brief History of Humankind. The next is called Homo Daeous,
Speaker 1: A Brief History of Tomorrow. We were talking earl Elier
Speaker 1: about how gold isn't especially valuable intrinsically. You can't eat it,
Speaker 1: you can't wear, you can't use it as a tool.
Speaker 1: But some of the things you reference in in some
Speaker 1: of the books are quite fascinating. The first was that
Speaker 1: the fact that Mediterranean people believe that gold had some
Speaker 1: value ultimately lead to Indians and Africana's believing that gold
Speaker 1: had some value. How did that mechanism work well? Um,
Speaker 1: in order to believe that something is valuable, it's you
Speaker 1: don't need to believe it yourself. It's enough if somebody
Speaker 1: else believes in it, because you know that you can
Speaker 1: trade it for things that you consider valuable. If suddenly,
Speaker 1: I don't know, aliens from outer space would invade Earth
Speaker 1: and it turns out that they have there is a
Speaker 1: huge market for onion pills on their planet, immediately the
Speaker 1: price of onion PILs on Earth will skyrocket. We can't
Speaker 1: do we don't need these things, but we can sell
Speaker 1: it to the aliens and get in exchange. I don't
Speaker 1: know what urani or or robots or whatever they produce.
Speaker 1: So suddenly you have reason to value this. And this
Speaker 1: is what happened with gold in many places when Europeans,
Speaker 1: for instance, reached America or Polynesia. So some of the
Speaker 1: local people they just couldn't understand why are these strange
Speaker 1: white people so obsessed with a nice shining metal, but
Speaker 1: that you can't really do anything with it. So so
Speaker 1: once trade connects to different regions, they're supply and demand
Speaker 1: naturally leads to prices equalizing. Is that pretty much what happened?
Speaker 1: Pretty much? Yes, So so let's jump a little bit
Speaker 1: towards your your writing process, because I'm I'm fascinated the
Speaker 1: book Sapiens is a serious piece of work that looks
Speaker 1: like there was an immense amount of research and thinking
Speaker 1: that went into it. How does your your writing process begin,
Speaker 1: How did you start, how did you conceptualize the book initially?
Speaker 1: And what led to it? Actually, I it came out
Speaker 1: of a course that they gave in the Hebrew University
Speaker 1: as a professor, as a professor to first your students
Speaker 1: about trying to summarize the whole of history to first
Speaker 1: your students. And I gave it for several years, and
Speaker 1: I had the opportunity to test all kinds of ideas
Speaker 1: on the students and see the reaction. Uh. If they
Speaker 1: were very bold, then I understood, Okay, something is I
Speaker 1: should change something here. Instant feedback. Yeah. If they asked
Speaker 1: a lot of questions, maybe I should talk more about
Speaker 1: this issue. If something is unclear, I should find an
Speaker 1: example or some other way of explaining this difficult point.
Speaker 1: I generally think that at least in history. Um, if
Speaker 1: first your students cannot understand what you're saying, you're probably
Speaker 1: either you don't understand yourself what you try to teach them,
Speaker 1: or you're saying it in the wrong way. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know. In quantum mechanics, it's not the same.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are good reasons why, even very good ideas,
Speaker 1: you cannot explain it to first few students. But in history,
Speaker 1: I think it almost all cases you should find a
Speaker 1: way to be able to to to explain it to
Speaker 1: first few students. How long did it take you to
Speaker 1: write sapiens Um, either the first or the second time?
Speaker 1: The Hebrew edition, it took me like six years or so,
Speaker 1: and then you had another two years for the English edition.
Speaker 1: And I know people who when they write, they'll do
Speaker 1: all their research for two years and then they'll sit
Speaker 1: down and write, and other people research and then write
Speaker 1: and research and then write. And what was your what
Speaker 1: was your process like? It sounds like you were pretty interactive,
Speaker 1: pretty dyning. It was very dynamic and interactive. It was
Speaker 1: not like, Okay, I'll read all these books and then
Speaker 1: I'll sit for one year and just write it down.
Speaker 1: It was very interactive and then fluid and changing all
Speaker 1: the time. And Homo Days seems almost like Sapiens Part two.
Speaker 1: Here's the history looking act. Now let's look forward and
Speaker 1: trying and imagine where this leads to. Is that how
Speaker 1: that was conceived and and when did you start thinking, Hey,
Speaker 1: I could continue this this process. It actually also came
Speaker 1: about in an interactive manner because after I published Sapiens,
Speaker 1: I gave all these interviews and went and gave these
Speaker 1: talks and seminars, and in many places most of the
Speaker 1: questions were actually about the future. It was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you now wrote a book about the whole past of humankind.
Speaker 1: What can you say based on that on where we
Speaker 1: might be heading? Talk too? So my thinking went more
Speaker 1: and more to the future, and I began to give
Speaker 1: talks and to write articles more about the future, until
Speaker 1: at one point I said, hey, actually, heavier enough material
Speaker 1: for a new book. I'm very ridults. You're listening to
Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today
Speaker 1: is Juval Harari. He is the author, most recently of
Speaker 1: Homo Days, A Brief History of Tomorrow, and and let's
Speaker 1: jump right in because this is really a fascinating discussion.
Speaker 1: I want to start with a quote. Science no surprisingly
Speaker 1: little about the mind and consciousness. Why is that because
Speaker 1: the only mind you can observe directly is your own.
Speaker 1: In science, if you investigate any phenomenon, it's very important
Speaker 1: to have direct observation of it. If you write about
Speaker 1: someone culture, people will tell you, okay, go to some
Speaker 1: more and and investigate it for yourself. If you write
Speaker 1: about business, it's good if you can observe business people
Speaker 1: or have direct business experience. But with the mind, you
Speaker 1: just can't access the mind of anybody except yourself. You
Speaker 1: can access the brain, but the brain isn't the mind.
Speaker 1: The brain is all these synopses and neurons and electrochemical reactions,
Speaker 1: and scientists assume that this is the substrate for the mind,
Speaker 1: but it's not the mind. The mind is the subjective experiences,
Speaker 1: the experience of love and hate and joy and pain.
Speaker 1: And you can see the behavior of other people, but
Speaker 1: you can't feel the love of the hate that somebody
Speaker 1: else feels. So if you want to research that, you
Speaker 1: can only research your own mind. And this is extremely
Speaker 1: difficult because you it's very difficult to be objective and
Speaker 1: systematic when you try to observe your own mind. So
Speaker 1: let me push back on that a little bit, because
Speaker 1: lots and lots of what we've been learning about the
Speaker 1: brain recently have been teaching us that much of what
Speaker 1: we previously thought of as the mind is really a
Speaker 1: combination of, as you said, biochemical reactions. We've seen in
Speaker 1: APHASIAX people lose the ability to read, but they can
Speaker 1: still write, They get they can't speak some folks, but
Speaker 1: they can saying. And what we used to think of
Speaker 1: as part of the personality is really part of the
Speaker 1: biomechanics that exist. So so let me ask a related
Speaker 1: question and I'll use another one of your quotes. There's
Speaker 1: zero scientific evidence that, in contrast to pigs, sapiens have souls.
Speaker 1: So I have to ask a question, what is the soul?
Speaker 1: And how can we, as you said, objectively measure it? Well, Um,
Speaker 1: the soul, at least in the Christian version, is some
Speaker 1: unchanging essence which is your true self, and it remains
Speaker 1: completely without change from birth to death and hopefully even
Speaker 1: beyond death. We have absolutely no evidence that such a
Speaker 1: thing exists. Uh. And it stands really in direct contradiction
Speaker 1: to the theory of evolution, which is why there we
Speaker 1: so much objection and hate red even to the theory
Speaker 1: of evolution. We which no other scientific theory receives so much,
Speaker 1: so many objections and hatred as the theory of evolution.
Speaker 1: If you think about it, why I mean, the theory
Speaker 1: of evolution is actually quite simple in contrast to other
Speaker 1: theories like quantum mechanics or relativity. But nobody has an
Speaker 1: objection teaching relativity to kids. Maybe the kids object, but
Speaker 1: but not nobody else. So what's wrong with the theory
Speaker 1: of evolution? And I think that what's really bugs people
Speaker 1: about the theory of evolution is that if you understand it,
Speaker 1: you understand own no souls because something unchanging cannot come
Speaker 1: out of an evolutionary process. Let let me push back
Speaker 1: on that in two different ways, and I'm fascinated by
Speaker 1: your description. First, if we go back to um Copernicus
Speaker 1: and moving from the geocentric conception of the solar system
Speaker 1: to the heliocentric, and even then it will the Sun
Speaker 1: was the center of the universe, not just our solar system.
Speaker 1: The Church pushed back fiercely on it for reasons similar
Speaker 1: to what you're suggesting. If you go to the Old Testament,
Speaker 1: if God created the heavens and the Earth, then the
Speaker 1: earth is the center of everything, and moving that to
Speaker 1: the Sun changes it. But why would evolution if it's
Speaker 1: merely competition amongst the fittest and passing your genes along
Speaker 1: and so we end up with a bigger set of
Speaker 1: antlers or a longer tail, or more plumage or whatever
Speaker 1: it is. Why would that change our conception of the
Speaker 1: soul because there are no genes for souls um and
Speaker 1: it's it's if you really understand what soul means, then
Speaker 1: the idea that and every lasting, unchanging thing could emerge
Speaker 1: out of small genetic change is extremely improbable. I mean,
Speaker 1: the big question is when did souls first emerge in
Speaker 1: the process of evolution? Homo sapiens have souls? Did Homo
Speaker 1: erectors have souls? Did the ancient ancestor of all humanids
Speaker 1: and chimpanzees have sold When exactly was the magical moment
Speaker 1: when a small genetic change led to the emergence of
Speaker 1: an everlasting entity. So the pushback is, oh, you have
Speaker 1: it wrong. It was six thousand years ago when mankind
Speaker 1: was created. And that's from Whence comes all the younger
Speaker 1: you're describing. Yeah, again, if you subscribe to that, then
Speaker 1: you can hardly argue with it from a scientific perspective.
Speaker 1: And again I'm pulling a quote from your book, and
Speaker 1: I love this data. According to a two thousand and
Speaker 1: twelve Gallops survey, a mere fifteen percent of Americans believe
Speaker 1: that we evolved through natural selection, while forty six percent
Speaker 1: believe that God created humans in their current form sometime
Speaker 1: during the last ten thousand years. And your conclusion and
Speaker 1: is this is why education has essentially zero impact on
Speaker 1: religion or creative creation beliefs. Fair statement. I wouldn't put
Speaker 1: it in such an extreme way and in all cases,
Speaker 1: but it's certainly true that people's beliefs are far more
Speaker 1: influenced by their community identity and by the religious affiliation
Speaker 1: than they are by facts being taught in classrooms, either
Speaker 1: in in in in schools or in colleges. Uh. The
Speaker 1: idea that many scientists hold that we just need to
Speaker 1: tell people facts and this will change their beliefs, it
Speaker 1: doesn't work like that. In Homo sapiens. Usually beliefs come
Speaker 1: before facts, especially when you're talking about children who are
Speaker 1: usually given a religious education in quotes, when they're too
Speaker 1: young to really be able to debate the merits, the
Speaker 1: pros and cons. It's I don't want to use the
Speaker 1: word in doctrination, but you're you're drumming something into a
Speaker 1: kid's head before they really have the capacity to objectively
Speaker 1: evaluate it. That is that a fair statement? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: and even more so, what we need to realize that
Speaker 1: people think in stories, not in facts, not in numbers,
Speaker 1: not in statistics. We are in storytelling animal and watch
Speaker 1: better than the biblical stories. They are the they are
Speaker 1: the art types of all our literature and and all
Speaker 1: our myths and all our story talent. Yes, and and
Speaker 1: you cannot fight a good story just with facts. It
Speaker 1: won't work. It almost never works. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: with all the hype currently around post truth and fake
Speaker 1: news and all that. I mean, fake news have been
Speaker 1: around for thousands of years. Just think of the Bible, UM,
Speaker 1: and the idea that okay, we can fight fake fake
Speaker 1: news with with with with facts. Um. History tells us
Speaker 1: a very different story. So let's talk about historical knowledge.
Speaker 1: I love this observation. You have knowledge that does not
Speaker 1: change behavior is useless, But knowledge that changes behavior quickly
Speaker 1: loses its resonance. So explain that now that changes behavior
Speaker 1: quickly loses its resonance relevance? How is that that it
Speaker 1: could either be useless or quickly irrelevant? Because once the
Speaker 1: knowledge you have changes the way in which you behave, um,
Speaker 1: the world changes and your knowledge is no longer updated.
Speaker 1: I mean, the best example is what's happening in in
Speaker 1: trade and markets and the stock exchange. Let's say that
Speaker 1: you that you predict that, um, I don't know, in
Speaker 1: one year the price of oil will be a hundred
Speaker 1: dollars more than it is today. What will be the
Speaker 1: immediate result of that knowledge. The result will be that
Speaker 1: the price of oil will jump today to your to
Speaker 1: the level you predict, and then it will change. All
Speaker 1: the data and all the all the calculations, and nobody
Speaker 1: knows what it will be year from now. I mean.
Speaker 1: This is how predictions about the future change the present,
Speaker 1: and then the future becomes different from what you predicted.
Speaker 1: So you talk a lot about the future. You don't
Speaker 1: make such very explicit forecasts, but sometimes you paint a
Speaker 1: somewhat frightening picture. What do you think is going to
Speaker 1: happen in terms of robotics and the transference of human
Speaker 1: consciousness perhaps into machines. Does just mean in the future
Speaker 1: people might be able to live forever. What what does
Speaker 1: that say about the future of of humanity? Well, there
Speaker 1: is the science fiction version, which usually says that computers
Speaker 1: will develop consciousness, and then you have the usual storyline
Speaker 1: of either humans falling in love with computers or computers
Speaker 1: rebelling and trying to exterminate humankind. And this is like
Speaker 1: of science fiction, and this is not science because all
Speaker 1: these storylines confuse intelligence with consciousness. Uh, there are very
Speaker 1: different things intelligence and consciousness. Intelligence is the ability to
Speaker 1: solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like
Speaker 1: joy and sadness and pain and pleasure. Um. Now, we
Speaker 1: have seen amazing development in artificial intelligence, but so far
Speaker 1: there has been exactly zero development in artificial consciousness. And
Speaker 1: there is absolutely no reason to believe that computers are
Speaker 1: anywheren near developing consciousness. We've been speaking with Juval Harari
Speaker 1: discussing his most recent book, Homo Days. You can find
Speaker 1: either Sapiens or Homodeus in any of the finer bookstores
Speaker 1: or Amazon or on SoundCloud. Be sure and check out
Speaker 1: my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com. Follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at rid Halts. We love your comments, feedback
Speaker 1: and suggest questions right to us at m IB podcast
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg dot net. I'm Barry rid Holts. You're listening
Speaker 1: to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Hey guys, let
Speaker 1: me ask you a question, do you have trouble finding
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Speaker 1: cloth dot com Custom Shirts made Smarter. Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: You've all thank you so much for doing this. I've
Speaker 1: had Sapiens. I mentioned I really enjoyed Last Ape Standing,
Speaker 1: which is what led me to Sapiens. And uh, the
Speaker 1: book I was reading at the time is really very
Speaker 1: much an evolutionary history of of of various primates and
Speaker 1: why were there twenty eight and with a survivor you
Speaker 1: took a very very different approach, not a purely evolutionary approach,
Speaker 1: and I think people who who are familiar with the book,
Speaker 1: and that includes people like Mark Zuckerberg and UM. I
Speaker 1: interviewed Danny Kheman and it was the book he recommended
Speaker 1: to people, UM. Bill gates the number of people UM,
Speaker 1: who are highly regarded. Who recommends the book recommended the
Speaker 1: book must be deeply satisfying because you have a wonderful
Speaker 1: fan base. UM. Yes, it's it's fun when what do
Speaker 1: you write suddenly reaches so many people. So so let's
Speaker 1: jump into our standard questions we ask all of our guests. UM,
Speaker 1: you have a historical background. You studied history and then
Speaker 1: became an academic. Is that what you did before you
Speaker 1: started writing books. Yeah. I was a specialist in medieval
Speaker 1: military history, and so you're familiar familiarity, familiarity you can
Speaker 1: edit that your familiarity with the way the peasant class
Speaker 1: lad lead their lives really comes from true history, not
Speaker 1: just a distorted Uh. Yeah, I think that UM. As
Speaker 1: a medievally historian, I bring a kind of novel perspective
Speaker 1: to discussions about cyborgs and artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.
Speaker 1: That that makes that makes a whole lot of sense. UM.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about some of your early mentors who influenced
Speaker 1: you early in your career. I had a very important
Speaker 1: influence from my supervisor in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Speaker 1: Benjamin Cadara, who was all so a specialist in the
Speaker 1: Crusades and in the Middle Ages. But to encourage me
Speaker 1: to really think big about about history. Um, how do
Speaker 1: you go from I'm kind of fascinated from uh, Jerusalem
Speaker 1: Hebrew University to Jesus College in Oxford. That's a that's
Speaker 1: sort of an interesting juxtaposition between the two. Now you
Speaker 1: know Jesus was in Jerusalem, so I guess he was.
Speaker 1: That makes that makes so you just basically said, all right,
Speaker 1: if I follow Jesus, follow up this path. Um. Who
Speaker 1: influenced your approach to history? What other historians did you find? Um,
Speaker 1: really changed the way you looked at at history. Actually
Speaker 1: not just historians, but people from other disciplines. I mean
Speaker 1: there was Jared Diamond, whose book Guns, Germs and Steel
Speaker 1: gave me again this this this insight that you can
Speaker 1: actually right a very big history of human kind discussing
Speaker 1: the most funder mental questions of human existence from scientific perspective.
Speaker 1: And Jared Diamond was originally a specialist in birds, uh
Speaker 1: really and an ornithologist. And another big influence was France Duvau,
Speaker 1: who specializes in primates, in chimpanzees and and bonobos. And
Speaker 1: I read his book Chimpanzee Politics, Uh, and it changed,
Speaker 1: It completely changed the way I understand not just chimpanzee politics,
Speaker 1: but also human politics. That's interesting. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: Ted videos is somebody who works with um bonobos and
Speaker 1: other chimpanzees. And if you give them a task to do,
Speaker 1: and there two chimps next to each other, or two
Speaker 1: bonobos and caids always the grapes and the that's fan,
Speaker 1: that's him. That's so you give one one of cucumber
Speaker 1: for doing a task, and you give the other a cucumber,
Speaker 1: and they're fine. You give the first one of cucumber,
Speaker 1: and then you give the second one a grape. Cucumbers
Speaker 1: are essentially water and tasteless. Grapes are sweet and delicious.
Speaker 1: The first pinobo gets very upset at the lack of fairness,
Speaker 1: the lack of justice. That I didn't realize that was
Speaker 1: the person you're referring to. That's a fascinating TED talk
Speaker 1: and that's a wonderful video. UM, let's jump into uh
Speaker 1: some books we you referenced um, guns, germs and steel.
Speaker 1: What other books have you read and enjoyed? What books
Speaker 1: have you used for research? And so many? Give us
Speaker 1: a few By the way, the single most common question
Speaker 1: I get from listeners are what what books does your
Speaker 1: guests like? Get from your especially authors, tell me what
Speaker 1: they're reading, because people love a good book recommendation. We'll
Speaker 1: start with two Sapiens and Homo daous and that will
Speaker 1: keep you busy for a couple of hours. Let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about some more. So A very big influence when
Speaker 1: I wrote Tomodos was Donny Khanman's Thinking Fast and Slow. UM.
Speaker 1: Another big influence was Brave New World by Ando Huxley,
Speaker 1: which I think is the best science fiction book of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, and certainly the most prophetic. I mean,
Speaker 1: he was writing in the nineteen thirties, at the time
Speaker 1: of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, and he basically envisioned
Speaker 1: not in ninety four world of Secret Police and then
Speaker 1: Stop and things like that, but he envisioned a consumerist
Speaker 1: society in which happiness is the highest value and you
Speaker 1: try to um to change people with with drugs and
Speaker 1: with bioengineering. And the really interesting thing about Brave New
Speaker 1: World is that, in contrast, too, it's never really clear
Speaker 1: whether it's dystopia or utopia UM. And I think it's
Speaker 1: it's the most profound science fiction book of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: I think it's also the most profound discussion of the
Speaker 1: themes of happiness and suffering that came out of the
Speaker 1: West in the in the twentieth century. The that's a
Speaker 1: high bar. The most profound science fiction book of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. Um, certainly in in many people's top ten,
Speaker 1: to say the least. How about how about something um? Uh, nonfiction? Well,
Speaker 1: you mentioned Kaneman. What else have you read that? What
Speaker 1: are you reading right now? That's always a good question.
Speaker 1: Right now, I'm actually listening, not reading as an audio
Speaker 1: book to book called The Gay Gay Revolution about the
Speaker 1: history of gays and lesbians in the US from the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties to the two thousands. I'm now in the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen seventies, do things of becoming optimistic a little?
Speaker 1: And the name of that book again, I'm see if
Speaker 1: I could get the author's name, The Gay Revolution. Let's
Speaker 1: see who wrote the Gay Revolution? Uh, Lillian Faderman. Yes,
Speaker 1: the Story of the Struggle. Oh, and that's a relatively
Speaker 1: new book that just came out, um in September of
Speaker 1: this past year. Quite interesting. So I assume you do
Speaker 1: a lot of reading and a lot of research. What
Speaker 1: do you do for relaxation, What do you do outside
Speaker 1: of the office when you want to just kick back
Speaker 1: a little bit? Well, I usually take my dog for
Speaker 1: a walk in the woods for an hour a day,
Speaker 1: and I meditate. I do the Passana meditation for two
Speaker 1: hours every day repeated. What type of meditation V Passana meditation?
Speaker 1: The pass which I learned from a teacher called Essenoenko.
Speaker 1: And I go every year for a long retreat of
Speaker 1: thirty to sixty days of meditation. Really, um, I just
Speaker 1: I was in November December. Actually heard about the Trump
Speaker 1: election only at the end of December because I entered
Speaker 1: the meditation, which read in early November, and had no
Speaker 1: contact with the outside world until the end of December. Well,
Speaker 1: aren't you lucky? Um? A bit pass A V I
Speaker 1: P A S S A exactly the meditation two hours
Speaker 1: a day. That's a lot of meditation, um, I think. Actually,
Speaker 1: you know, um, For me, it's a it's a way
Speaker 1: to really get in touch with reality as it is.
Speaker 1: I mean to see what is really happening here and now,
Speaker 1: and for almost all the day, I'm being distracted by
Speaker 1: emails and twits and funny cat videos and whatever. So
Speaker 1: at least for two hours every day, I'm really in
Speaker 1: touch with with reality. That that that's quite quite fascinating.
Speaker 1: And you mentioned you take your dog for a walk
Speaker 1: for an hour a day if I have the time. Yes,
Speaker 1: what what type of dog do you have? A large
Speaker 1: mongrel from the street who adopted us a few few
Speaker 1: years ago. Really that that's quite fascinating. And where are
Speaker 1: you living these days? Are you here? Are you still know?
Speaker 1: I'm still in Israel. I live midway between Jerusalem and
Speaker 1: Tel Aviv in a small village, which also is is
Speaker 1: kind of influences my worldview because I'm, you know, half
Speaker 1: thinking about Tel Aviv and all the high tech and
Speaker 1: all the these things, and half thinking about Jerusalem and
Speaker 1: all the religions and loads the past and law tech here.
Speaker 1: And that, by the way, that hybrid between historical and
Speaker 1: religious um thought and high tech and modernity is very
Speaker 1: much reflected in what you write. I'm certainly no book critic,
Speaker 1: but it's clear that those are two major influences on
Speaker 1: your thought process, and that's a somewhat unusual hybrid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I bring a lot of um of thinking
Speaker 1: about religion and philosophy to the discussion of what's happening
Speaker 1: in Silicon Valley. I think the most interesting place in
Speaker 1: the world from a religious perspective is not Jerusalem. It's
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. Why why is that that that's a fascinating comera,
Speaker 1: Because this is where the new religions of the twenty
Speaker 1: one century will come from, not from the Middle East.
Speaker 1: They will come from Silicon Valley and from from such places.
Speaker 1: When you say, when you say new religion, you mean
Speaker 1: Apple and Google and Facebook, or that that those are
Speaker 1: our new deities, that they were produced. Yes, I think
Speaker 1: that they don't produce just gadgets and tools. They produce
Speaker 1: new ethics, they produce new new philosophies, and eventually they'll
Speaker 1: even produce new techno. Religions are religions that promise that
Speaker 1: make all the old promises, will give you prosperity and
Speaker 1: happiness and peace and eternal life, but here on earth
Speaker 1: with the help of technology, not after you die, with
Speaker 1: the help of supernatural beings. Professor Scott Galloway use it
Speaker 1: n why you and and he describes Netflix as the
Speaker 1: operating system of joy, not that far off from what
Speaker 1: you're referring to the technology moving us into the next
Speaker 1: phase of of religious worship. So within within the book,
Speaker 1: you discuss animals a lot, how we've humanized animals, and
Speaker 1: a number of people have said, hey, this book has
Speaker 1: made me want to become a full on vegan. Tell
Speaker 1: us what we misunderstand about animals and about our relationship
Speaker 1: and roll with them relative to uh to to the
Speaker 1: way we've managed to dominate the entire planet as a species. Um,
Speaker 1: you're a vegan, right, yeah, I'm I'm I'm I I turned.
Speaker 1: I became vegan as a result of writing these people
Speaker 1: because all the research I've made about the agricultural revolution
Speaker 1: and then the industry revolution made me realize the really
Speaker 1: terrible way that we are treating other animals. Um, it
Speaker 1: made me realized, first of all, that there is no
Speaker 1: scientific consensus that other animals, all mammals, all birds, they
Speaker 1: have consciousness, they have feelings, they have emotions, they can
Speaker 1: feel pain, they can feel fear, they can feel depression.
Speaker 1: It's not unique to Homo sapiens. And we are three
Speaker 1: think them in industrial farms as if they were just
Speaker 1: machines for producing meat and milk and eggs, And it's
Speaker 1: not just you know, the slaughter of animals, how they live,
Speaker 1: is really the worst. And it's through even more of
Speaker 1: the dairy industry then of the meat industry. I mean,
Speaker 1: where does milk come from? Um, But cows don't give
Speaker 1: milk to humans. The only reason a cow produces milk
Speaker 1: is because it first gives birth to a calf, and
Speaker 1: it produces the milk for the calf. So in the
Speaker 1: dairy industry, you get the cow pregnant, then she gives
Speaker 1: birth to a calf, You take away the calf, slaughter it,
Speaker 1: and eat it, and then you milk the cow for
Speaker 1: all she's worth, and then you get her pregnant again
Speaker 1: and again and again, until after five years she's completely
Speaker 1: worn down and she's also going to the to the slaughterhouse.
Speaker 1: So the entire dairy industry is actually built on break
Speaker 1: king the most fundamental emotional bond of the mammal kingdom,
Speaker 1: the bond between mother and offspring. This is the foundation
Speaker 1: of the dairy industry. To break the bond between the
Speaker 1: mother cow and the calf. All the milk is coming
Speaker 1: from there. And when I realized that, uh, pretty horrific yet,
Speaker 1: was that I don't know how to stop it, but
Speaker 1: I don't want to be part of it. And that
Speaker 1: turned you pretty much into a into a vegan. Yes,
Speaker 1: that that's quite quite amazing. So our last two questions
Speaker 1: are our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests.
Speaker 1: You work with students. If if someone who is a
Speaker 1: millennial or a recent college grad were to come to
Speaker 1: you and say, I'm thinking about going into authorship or
Speaker 1: studying history or being a professor, and they come to
Speaker 1: you for career advice, what would you say to them.
Speaker 1: I would say to them that nobody has any clue
Speaker 1: how the job market would look like in UM, so
Speaker 1: we really don't know what to teach the young people,
Speaker 1: whether in school or in college, in terms of careers.
Speaker 1: It's quite obvious that what most of what they are
Speaker 1: learning will be completely irrelevant by the time there are
Speaker 1: forty or fifty, so they will have to reinvent themselves
Speaker 1: again and again and again throughout their lives. UM which
Speaker 1: is why I think the most important skill they must
Speaker 1: have is the ability to keep learning and to keep
Speaker 1: reinventing themselves throughout their lives, not to build this stable
Speaker 1: identity that will serve them from now until they die.
Speaker 1: They have to somehow um find it in themselves, the
Speaker 1: ability to keep changing. And this is an extremely tall
Speaker 1: older because you know, when you're fifteen or when you're twenty,
Speaker 1: your whole life is changed. Everything you do is just
Speaker 1: to invent yourself. But when your volt your fifty, usually
Speaker 1: you don't like to change very much, but you will
Speaker 1: have to in the twenty one century if you want
Speaker 1: to stay relevant. And our final question, what is it
Speaker 1: that you know about human history, evolution, consciousness that you
Speaker 1: wish you knew ten or twenty years ago when you
Speaker 1: began your work in this field. UM, I love the long,
Speaker 1: thoughtful pause that we actually know far, far less than
Speaker 1: we think we in terms of the human collective. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not that we've got the general picture and we
Speaker 1: just have a few islands of ignorance. It's just the opposite.
Speaker 1: We have an ocean of ignorance with a few islands
Speaker 1: that we know what's happening there. But the basic stuff,
Speaker 1: the really basic stuff, we still don't understand it. In particular,
Speaker 1: we are very, very far from understanding the human mind
Speaker 1: and the riddle of consciousness. And this is very dangerous
Speaker 1: because in the twenty one century we're going to get
Speaker 1: these really amazing powers of manipulation, not just about the
Speaker 1: outside world, but also about the world inside us. We're
Speaker 1: going to get the power to manipulate, to engineer our
Speaker 1: own bodies and brains and minds. And the danger is
Speaker 1: that because we don't really understand the mind, we will
Speaker 1: you misuse these powers. Uh In the world outside, we've
Speaker 1: used our immense powers in such a way that now
Speaker 1: we're facing an ecological collapse because we will. We knew
Speaker 1: how to control the forests and reavers, we didn't understand
Speaker 1: what this was doing to the ecosystem. The same thing
Speaker 1: may happen to the world inside us. We'll start manipulating
Speaker 1: our bodies and brains with very little understanding of what
Speaker 1: this is doing to our internal ecosystem, and the result
Speaker 1: might be a mental collapse. That's fascinating. Thank you, you've
Speaker 1: all we have been speaking to you. Val Noah Harari,
Speaker 1: author of the New York Times best selling book Sapiens
Speaker 1: and the new book Homodaeus, A Brief History of Tomorrow.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and look up
Speaker 1: an intro down an inch, and you could check out
Speaker 1: any of the other hundred and forties such conversations we've
Speaker 1: had on Apple iTunes. I would be remiss if I
Speaker 1: did not thank my recording engineer, Medina Parwana, my booker
Speaker 1: Taylor Rigs, and my head of research, Michael bat Nick.
Speaker 1: We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us
Speaker 1: at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I'm Barry Retults.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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