Inventing Society with Yuval Noah Harari

How did humans come to create society? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Yuval Noah Harari, historian and author of “Sapiens” & “Unstoppable Us,” discuss our species’ ability to cooperate, the role of artificial intelligence, and more.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for joining us on this episode of StarTalk. Today, I've got my one-on-one conversation with historian Yuval Noah Harari. You know him from his widely read books, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and other books. In this conversation, it ranges widely. We talk about AI and what role it has played and will play. We talk about what glue holds together societal institutions, not only of government, but of the financial system. How stories that we tell each other are what we just have to believe in order for any of this to work in the first place.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just how tentative and how balanced on a pinhead civilization is. Well, this guy's an expert in it all. We don't leave any stones unturned in this episode of StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're featuring a conversation. We do this every now and then when the guest is so accomplished and has so much to say

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and is into such interesting subject matter that we devote the entire episode to just a one-on-one conversation. And today, that's going to be with Professor Yuval Noah Harari. And he is a professor of history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And you may know him as the author of some hugely bestselling books. Sapiens, A Brief History of Mankind, Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and just recently, a new book called Unstoppable Us.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How Humans Took Over the World. That's a kid's book. Oh my God, illustrated kid's book for tweens aged eight to 12. Looking forward to that. Anyhow, Yuval, welcome to StarTalk.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's good to be here.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So what made you write a children's book? Were you fed up with adults? You said, let me get to where, you know, the next generation, because I'm giving up on the adults.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  No, it's, you know, it's kind of broadening the horizons. And basically, kids want to understand who they are. And as a historian, I think that who we are is shaped to a large extent by history. If you start with things like the games you play. So you play basketball or baseball or football. It comes from somewhere. The food that we eat. If you like to eat chocolate, for instance, then you have a bit of Olmec civilization in you because it was the Olmecs that discovered how to make chocolate.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Olmecs from Mexico, yes.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  From Mexico, something like, I don't know, 4,000 years ago. And if you go all the way down to your basic emotions. So if you wake up in the middle of the night afraid of a monster under the bed. This is actually a historical memory from millions of years ago when humans lived in the African savanna. And there were indeed monsters that came to eat kids in the night. If a lion came to eat you and you woke up and ran away, you survived. So understanding who we are from the games we play and the food we eat down to our emotions and feelings. This is really understanding history.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, as an historian, I mean, that's the lens through which you're observing the world. And that's great because that'll highlight certain elements of our conduct, of our habits.

• 3:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That have a deep roots that I think we don't always notice or appreciate. So thanks for making that admission statement. But what do you mean by how humans took over the world? What do you mean by that?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  But you know, we now control this planet to a large extent. We control the future, the fate of almost all the other animals, of the evolution of life itself. The lions, the elephants, the whales, they now depend on us. And this is quite strange, because if you look at us individually, as an individual, I'm not stronger and not even much smarter than a chimpanzee or an elephant or the whale. And so how did we come to dominate this planet to such an extent? This is the big question that interests me as a historian.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Of course, it links with other, with other scientific disciplines. You can't really understand history without understanding biology. And you know, biology is built on top of chemistry and physics. So it's all links together.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, Yuval, I'm kind of thinking that you are much smarter than a chimp and elephant in a way. Even if it's not true, I want to think that.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  I'm not so sure, because you know, if you do a real test, not a test like in school. I mean, if you give me and an elephant a test in school, then obviously, I mean, I'll do better. But if you put me and an elephant or a chimp or a pig on a deserted island and we have to survive for a month or a year, find our food, get away from predators, whatever. This is a real test. I wouldn't place my bets on me.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're going to ask where's the nearest Quick Mart to get some food, right?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, for most of what we need for our survival today, we depend on other people, maybe on the other side of the world, which we don't even know. We don't know how to get our own food, how to get our, build our shelters, whatever. This is really what makes us so special, that we can cooperate in these large trade networks and economic.

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, special or vulnerable? Right? Because I think every, not a day goes by when I see a bird flying high or a squirrel running under, underfoot. And I say to myself, they don't need shopping centers or cars or su- supply chains. And if the supply chain goes out and humans would starve and the squirrels will just keep, keep about their way and the birds will continue to fly. So I, I do think about that often. And I think about how susceptible we may be to societal collapse.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. We are very fra- I mean, we are extremely powerful and we are extremely fragile at one and the same time. It does not contradict each other. It often goes together. When you build something really big and powerful and complicated, it's also very brittle at the same time. You see it also with human societies, that the, the bigger they are, the more susceptible they are to all kinds of crises that don't really threaten a small hunter-gatherer band.

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what would you say over the years, you know, when I think of human history, I think of maybe since agriculture, of course, it goes farther back. But the, the part of our history that, where we were settled and had cities and states and this sort of thing, um, was it one thing that empowered us to take over the world? Or was it multiple things?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Hmm. I think it's, it's one essential thing. When if you look at all, uh, the, the big human achievements, I don't know, flying to the moon, for instance.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's for me, that's up there. Yeah, okay.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that one. Yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  It's, it's all based on large-scale cooperation. How did humans get to the moon? It wasn't Neil Armstrong by himself flying there. It was millions of people cooperating to build the spaceships and to do the math and to provide the food and the special clothing and everything.

• 8:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and the funding and the funding.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And the funding. Absolutely.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I, I, I try to soften, I mean, as much as I love Neil Armstrong, the fact is, I try at every turn to remind people that this was the work of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers and an agency and the will of an assassinated president and a, I mean, you just add it all up. It's, you're, you're right on to say that.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is no singular achievement anywhere. Anything big, anything that big is hugely cooperative. But continue, I interrupted.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's true of getting to the moon. It's true of building the pyramids. It's true of all the big achievements of humanity. And then you ask yourself, the big question becomes, why are we capable of cooperating on such a large scale? When chimpanzees or elephants or pigs can't. I mean, if you take a thousand chimpanzees and cram them together into a mall or into a sports stadium.

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a funny picture, just to imagine, right?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  I mean, you get chaos.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. They're not building anything. You're absolutely right.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  So, and so this is the really big question of what makes it possible for us to cooperate. And the answer here, at least my answer, is quite surprising. It's the ability to invent and believe fictional stories. Because underneath every large-scale cooperation, at the bottom, you always find some kind of fictional story. Not a scientific truth, not necessarily mathematical calculations, but a fictional story.

• 9:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, maybe if I, not to put words in your mouth, but maybe a better word there would be a bit of mythology that you want to believe in. Because when I think, when people use myth as the opposite word of truth, I think it undervalues what roles myths have played historically. You know, we don't say, well, Zeus is false. You know, that's not the idea. The idea is there are lessons there in the myths that have been handed down over time. So, but go on. All right, so what's an example of a myth or falsehood that we all buy into?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  It's not a lie, it's not false. And I tend not to use the word myth. I prefer fiction because it's not just religion. I mean, the obvious example is, of course, religion, that you get millions of people to cooperate on a project. Could be to build a cathedral or a hospital or go to wage a crusade because they all believe in the same mythology. But it's much broader than that because our economic system is also based on fictional entities. If you think about corporations, if you think about money, money is not an objective entity. Money is not like a black hole or a star that is an objective entity that you can discover.

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not an object. It's a concept, really, right?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you think about the value of money, the value of money comes from stories that people tell and believe each other. The greatest storytellers in the world are not the people who win the Nobel Prize in Literature. It's the people who win the Nobel Prize in Economics. They tell the really powerful stories, the really, the stories that everybody believes. You know, not everybody believes in the same god or in any god, but everybody believes in money. And if you think about it, it's strange because no other animal knows, even knows that something like money exists. If you give, I don't know, a pig, you give an apple in one hand and a pile of a million dollars in new notes in the other hand,

• 11:50Speaker 01

  the pig would obviously choose the apple. And the chimpanzee does the same and the elephant. Nobody, besides us, nobody knows that something like money exists in the world. So the value of money doesn't come from the paper. I mean, most money in the world today is not even paper. It's just electronic data moving between computers. And so where is the value from? It's from stories we believe. If you think about new currencies, like cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, I mean, that's a very good and current example. You tell a story about something and if enough people believe it, it works. I mean, you and I, we agree to accept money for what we do, like lectures or books or whatever. Why?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  I mean, we can't eat the money that people give us, but we believe that if we go to a supermarket and give this to the cashier, we can get an apple. And why do they, why do they agree to accept the, the, the money? Because they also believe that if they go to a, a shoe store and give this money to the salesperson, they will get shoes. And as long as everybody believes in this story, it works. And this is fiction.

• 12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this good or bad? I mean, you're saying we're at risk of the belief system collapsing and thereby taking the entire monetary system with it? Are we really ever at risk of that? And isn't money just a more convenient form of barter?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Um, first of all, yes, we are at risk of, of the whole thing collapsing. It happens from time to time in history. That, I mean, inflation that everybody's not talking about to some extent is that, that the value of the money is not what we were told it is. And inflation can sometimes hit, you know, thousands of percents, millions of percents, and eventually the money becomes worthless. You have these images from certain periods in history, like in Germany, the 1920s.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wheelbarrows of money.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, really. And people use it, I don't know, as toilet paper because it's, it lost all its value. So that, that's, that's a real danger.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I actually own a, own a Deutschmark from the Weimar Republic and the number billion is written out in zeros on it. And I just have it, I just stare, you know, billion, that's, we, we deal in billions in astrophysics, but not, not in buying a loaf of bread. And so it was just, I just stare at it and I say, wow, this actually happened.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that in, in, in 1946 in Hungary, they had the worst inflation ever in history that we know about, and they have their banknotes with quintillions.

• 14:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quintillions, oh my gosh, okay, I got, I gotta get one of those, okay. Yeah, it's billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions, yeah, that's, that's getting up there. But, but so, all right, is it, um... Do you have a better idea? Do you think money should be replaced by something else? That has a greater tangibility to it?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  I'm not saying it's bad. And when I say something, something is fiction.

• 14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're observing this fact.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  It's just that something that we invent in order to cooperate better. Money enables strangers all over the world to cooperate with each other. Again, the food we eat, the clothes we get. We don't need to go to the forest to collect it and hunt it and gather it. We rely on people on the other side of the world. The big question in the economy is how do you trust strangers? That's the biggest economic question of all. It's trust. And money is really just trust. Money is not made of gold or paper or anything. Money is just trust. And it's the job of bankers and finance ministers and so forth is to build trust between people. It's not bad.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  And again, to take another example, you think about, I don't know, the laws of football or basketball. They are also fictional. They don't come from physics or biology. They're not written in our DNA. They are not coming from heaven. People invented these rules. They are quite arbitrary and fictional rules that exist only in our own imagination. And there is nothing bad about it. This is what enables people to cooperate in.

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, with that analysis, which I don't see how there's a rational rebuttal to it. Although to say it's fictional kind of makes you feel a little uneasy because it creates a worry factor that wasn't there before you used that word. But is there a way now that you've analyzed it as such? Is there a way to move forward and say, I can improve on this? Or I can add a little tangibility where there wasn't before? To provide, therefore, a layer of stability that previously was undrained.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  I think it just becomes less and less stable as history progresses. We are moving.

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's our podcast. Thank you for.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  No, I mean, you look at history. I mean, the pace of change just keeps accelerating.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  And the pace of economic change, technological change, political change. I mean, the good thing about realizing that something is just fiction is that you can, if it's unfair, if there is a problem, you can change it. I mean, if you think that the basic laws governing our society, they are natural laws, like the laws of physics, or they are absolute eternal truths coming from God, then even if something seems unfair, what can you do? These are just the laws of nature or laws of God. But if you realize, no, this is just some inventions that came out of the human imagination, and we can improve on them. So then you get something, I don't know, like the US Constitution.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  The laws are not presented either as coming from God or as reflecting the laws of nature. They are just we, the people, decided on them. And therefore, we can change them. And you have changes, luckily, over the last 250 years.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, there's a quote from George Washington where he's commenting on the Constitution. He says, "You know, I'm not quite sure how this is gonna work, but at least there are provisions to modify it going forward."

• 18:08Speaker 01

  The amazing, I think that's the amazing thing about the US Constitution, which was very new. Because most societies in history until that time, they claimed that their basic laws are eternal, unchangeable, because they come from either God or the laws of nature.

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or no, or the king, or a king, right.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  But the king was again, why is he king? Because God said he should be king.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course, right, that helps out. It helps out when God made you king, that's right. We've got to take a quick break, but when we come back, more of my one-on-one conversation with historian extraordinaire Yuval Noah Harari when StarTalk returns.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, continuing my one-on-one conversation with historian Yuval Noah Harari. Let's get right back in.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  And you know, one of the interesting things about, I mean, I'm, you know, thinking about physics and astrophysics, that for most of history, astrophysics was very closely linked to politics. It was the same story, the story of the heavens and the stars and the creation of the universe, it was intimately linked to the political story of why is this guy the king and gives us all the commands, and which was also a great burden to science, because whenever you tried to change what people thought about the origins of the universe, for instance, it had immediate political implications.

• 20:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And something like the US Constitution was very new, because it says, "No, these laws have nothing to do with astrophysics. They have nothing to do with the creation of the universe. It's just some laws, some things we thought about. We thought that these are good laws." But we are aware that we might be ignorant to some extent, that we are not perfect, we are just humans, so we also include a mechanism to amend these laws. And you know, nowadays, it's very common to say a lot of negative stuff, the founding fathers of the US and so forth, and there are a lot of things to criticize them about. For instance, that they talk about liberty, but they hold slaves.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  But the good thing you can say about them, they provided a mechanism for their descendants to improve on what they did. Which is more than you can say about almost any previous

• 21:06Speaker 01

  political elite or rulers in human history, which tended to say, "These laws, they are not our invention. They came from somewhere else, and they are never to be changed."

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So realizing this, it's almost as though you, with your analysis and your thinking and your writings, you're parting the curtains and you're seeing behind the curtains and say, "Here's the machinery that's making this work in the way it does." But let me ask you, is there a way to hijack these facts to intentionally destabilize civilization? Just as there are ways to fully surf it and take it into the future to make things better?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  It's inherently destabilizing. I mean, when you realize that the laws governing our society, they are not eternal, and they are just the imagination of people. They are our creation. This destabilizes society for good and also for bad. I mean, because it's harder.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're on a knife's edge. That's what you're really saying. That doesn't feel comfortable to be there.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  I mean, does the world feel comfortable to you nowadays?

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm more comfortable in space, by the way.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The universe is fine. It's Earth that's [__] up, okay? So you write about AI in Homo Deus.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone I know, myself included, have an ever-evolving sense of what AI is versus what it can be or should be. Where are you right now on AI? As a force operating on the stability of civilization?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yes, I would say the most important thing to realize about AI is that it's the first technology in human history. It's the first tool in human history that can take power away from us. Because it can make decisions on its own, potentially. All previous human inventions, if you think about even nuclear bombs. Nuclear bombs, to some extent, yes, we can destroy ourselves. But they empower humanity because a decision, what to do with a nuclear bomb, it's always done by a human. I mean, who decided to drop the bomb on Hiroshima? It wasn't a bomb. It was the president of the US, Truman. It was the chiefs of staff. The humans deciding. Now, AI is different from any previous invention in history

• 23:32Speaker 01

  because it can make decisions by itself about its own usage. An autonomous weapon system, a killer robot, can decide to kill people, can decide maybe to start a war without having to depend on human authorization. And it can also increasingly make decisions about us. And this is no longer science fiction. Increasingly, if you apply to a bank to get a loan, if you apply to some company to get a job, increasingly, it's an AI that decides whether to give you the loan, whether to give you the job or not. And this will, and we are just, you know, the first tiny baby steps of AI. We haven't seen anything yet.

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but for many people, that sounds scary. But if it's authentic AI, if it's authentic AI, then it is whatever decision you would have made as a banker, except it's a better decision than you would have made, a more accurate, a more precise, a more authentic. I think that the worry factor is if AI runs off on its own, I guess, right? Rather than just doing what we do, but better.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  The question is, what is better? I mean, we already know, I mean, it's just been a few years and we already know that AI can be terribly biased. People thought, in the dawn of the AI age, that AI at least will not suffer from racism, from antisemitism, from homophobia.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so it just means it's not there yet. It's artificial stupidity and not artificial intelligence.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 25:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the early versions are not yet AI. They're A sub I, right? So, so I get that.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  But, I mean, it's not, I mean... You can improve it, of course, like you can try and improve humans, but there is no guarantee there. And you have no guarantee that the next generations of AI would be better and not worse.

• 25:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would hope that AI bankers in 2007 would have known to not give loans to people who thought they could then pay. And then the whole economy wouldn't have collapsed because the artificial intelligence is smarter than the bankers. Why can't anybody think about the good side of this?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  There are a lot of good things it can do. Otherwise, there will be no temptation. And I'm not against developing and using AI. I think that we need to do it. We just need to do it very, very carefully because it's a game changer. It's not just that it's able to potentially make decisions about us. It also threatens, and this is something that really scares me. It threatens to completely annihilate human privacy in a way which was unthinkable before, which makes us completely kind of transparent and dependent.

• 26:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, we're kind of already that. I mean, we're on route to that. I mean, if the KGB of the 1960s had access to the surveillance we have today in the United States, they would...

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, we... You know, I grew up here in the United States and I remembered in the 1960s and 70s, we're free and we don't, you know, we distinguished ourselves by how much our government did not try to invade our privacy. And now they know everything about you at all times.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  And that's the scary thing. I mean, throughout history, you had people, organizations like the KGB, who wanted to know everything about everybody, but they just couldn't on a technical level. I mean, there are 200 million Soviet citizens in the 1960s. The KGB doesn't have 200 million agents to follow everybody around. And even if the KGB had all these agents, the big problem is analysis. Every day, you get 200 million reports on what each Soviet citizen did. Who is going to analyze that and make sense of the information?

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the tandem challenge of excess information, right? That when does excess data, when does data become information? And information become knowledge? Yeah.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  And now the problem is on the way to being solved. And that's very dangerous because you don't need 200 million agents. You carry the, people carry the agents on them. It's the smartphones.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They do it willingly.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you take it everywhere.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You paid a thousand dollars to give them your fingerprint, your biometrics, everything.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Everything. And also the problem of analysis is solved. You don't need human analysts to go over all this mountain of data. You have AI, you have machine learning.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yuval, you're bumming me out here. Okay, I just want you to know.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  I, I, I think we need to be, it's a really scary scenario and it's real. I mean, you look at countries like China, like North Korea. I look at what's happening in Israel, in the occupied territories, and it's no longer science fiction. I mean, there are governments which are actually building these total surveillance regimes where everybody is being monitored all the time. And AI is making that possible. And the decisions, the then the system takes about people, they are not necessarily in the best interests of these people. I'm not, I'm not saying it's inevitable. We can use AI to do good things in, in, in medicine, in economics, in many fields.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  But we have to be aware of the immense dangers because we are playing here with a completely new entity that nothing like that ever existed in history.

• 29:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An existential threat. That's right. That's right. We got to take our second and final break from this conversation. One on one with historian and man about civilization Yuval Noah Harari on StarTalk.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back for our third and final segment in my one on one conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. And we're gonna find out just what the future of civilization will bring us. So Yuval, let me drag you into my part of my world here. How does your thinking, how is your thinking influenced by the knowledge that in this same society and civilization exist people who are engaged in rampant science denial or rampant misinformation or disinformation, especially via channels on the internet? How does that plug in to your thinking about the past, present, and future of civilization?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Well, if things are bad in physics and biology, they're even worse in history.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Anyway, it was always like that. I mean, history usually was so important politically that it was never left to the historians. And most people, they were kind of flooded with just disinformation about the history of the nation, of humanity. So it's not a new phenomenon. And as we just said a few minutes ago, for many years, it was the same with astrophysics. That it's dangerous from the viewpoint of the church or of the kings to allow people to do scientific research on certain subjects because it could undermine their power.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  And this problem of disinformation, it's, we see it throughout human history.

• 31:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not uniquely bad, is what you're saying? That's curiously a good fact. But you don't see it getting worse or being in a position to needlessly destabilize society?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  I think about things like the witch hunts in the Middle Ages or in the early modern period. So you don't have any Facebook or Twitter or anything like that? With much more basic communication technology, you have somebody coming and saying that the old lady on the edge of the village, she's actually a dangerous witch in communion with Satan, and she's the fault why there has been a hailstorm that destroys people's crops. And within a few hours, you have a mob of villagers with pitchforks who are burning this poor old lady to death. And this is, you know, fake news and conspiracy theories and disinformation.

• 31:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole thing.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  The whole thing.

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we should be glad that medieval humans didn't have the internet, because it would have been much worse. Is that what you're saying?

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, what's really scary is undermining the basic trust in institutions. Because institutions are what is holding human society together. The thing with institutions is that they are brittle, as we spoke in the beginning of our conversation. And also, it's difficult to build trust in them, because they are this kind of... It's much easier to trust an individual. One of the reasons why you see the rise of these dictators and strongmen today all over the world?

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I hypothesized that it was because anyone with active memory of the rise of fascism that led into the Second World War is no longer alive. And so people are thinking, hey, this is a good idea. Let's keep an elected leader head for life. And are they reading history? Or you surely have maybe another explanation for it. But that was my simplest accounting for this rise of sort of dictator elected officials.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I completely agree with you, that it's kind of, you know, fascism serves as a kind of inoculation, as a vaccination against this danger. And it's now the effect is decreasing, because most of the people who experienced it firsthand are no longer among us. So again, people think, hey, maybe it's a good idea. But the reason that even a hundred years ago or today, that people are attracted to that kind of system is because something very deep in our humanity, we find it easy.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  To connect, to trust an individual human being much more than we find than to trust an institution.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a whole psychological thing going on there, yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, to to kind of trust something abstract like Congress.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you can't. Compared to a charismatic leader, there's no contest.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No contest. I mean, here we had, remember the Jonestown massacre?

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When was that, from the 70s? You know, Congress could never tell people, "Everyone, kill yourself today." No, it would say, "Fuck you, no." But a charismatic leader has that power over us. That can't be good.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Uh, no, but it's very human.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, no, no, well, yeah, but is that your excuse? I mean, come on, what is civilization but the attempt to have us behave in some way that transcends our basal urges? That's what civilization is, isn't it?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yes, and and it's very difficult.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sometimes we fail at it.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, again and again, you kind of fall back down on our on our basic human instincts and human nature, even when they are not very good for us. I don't know, you you think of even something as simple as food, that why do we kind of indulge on food which is not good for us? Because in the Stone Age, it made sense. I mean, if you find, if you're walking around the savanna in the Stone Age and you find something sweet, like a tree full of ripened fruit, the most sensible thing to do is eat as much of it as possible. Because it's rare, and if you eat just one fig and go away and think, "Okay, I'll come back tomorrow, I'll eat another one," you come back tomorrow, everything is gone. The baboons ate everything.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Now, you you you fast forward to today, you open your refrigerator, you see a nice chocolate cake, you see, "Hey, I have to eat as much as possible before the baboons get it." And this is your kind of Stone Age. I mean, the the the deep part of your mind, of your body, doesn't know that we are living in a modern civilization. For the deepest part of our mind, we are still in the savanna. And it's a constant struggle to bridge this gap between where we came from and the kind of reality that we are inhabiting right now.

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in the few minutes we have left, tell me about Sapienship. What is that?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  It's a social impact company that my husband and I have established a few years ago. The aim is to change the conversation, to change the global conversation, focus the attention of people on the most important challenges that humanity is facing right now. So it's things from the ecological danger to the rise of disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how about, what's the future of war in this?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  The future of war depends on us. I mean, it's not deterministic. The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, they have been. I mean, even though there's localized violence and things. I did the math on this. Between 1939 and 1945, 1,000 people were killed per hour in the service of the Second World War. For every hour over those six years. And so, and people say today, "Oh, it's violence and this." It's like, have you really looked back at this? When 50 million people died, and add that to the First World War. So I'm all with you here. Maybe there's something good we're doing, and we need to find out what that is and do more of it. The fact that we haven't had a world war in 70 years.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, there have been, again, there have been violence. I come from the Middle East. I know this perfectly well, but less than in any previous time in history. The best place to see it actually is in the government budgets. But for most of history, the number one item on every budget is the military. Like defense, the army, the navy. More than 50% of the budget of every king and emperor goes to that. In the last few years, last few decades, it has been, on average, just 6% all over the world. You take the whole world together. It's just about 6% of government budget. This is what enabled the resources to go to healthcare.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Economic growth, oh my gosh.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Public healthcare, education, welfare, this is what made it possible. Now, if we go back to this, if because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, if because of the disintegration of the global order.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we regress, if we regress.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, this means that the money that should go to teachers and nurses and schools would instead go to tanks and missiles, and everybody would feel it. Not just people in Ukraine or people in the Middle East, even in the, in all the other regions of the world. People will be hit immediately, directly. This is a huge danger. The other thing is, if we go back to an era of war, it means we have no chance of dealing with climate change. We have no chance of regulating dangerous technologies like artificial intelligence.

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Becomes a complete distraction, yes, yeah, completely. So, do you see any contemporary science developments that, that give you hope for the future? Science, technology, that sort of thing?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not just the science. It's ultimately the people who are making the decisions. One good thing that I see is despite the impression that there is, that science is under attack, that is all these conspiracy theories and fake news and so forth. I mean, there is more trust in science than in any previous time in history. I looked at the COVID pandemic, for instance, and you compare COVID to what happened during the Black Death. It's a completely different situation. Yes, you had all the anti-vaxxers and all the conspiracy theories about COVID, but ultimately, almost all the governments in the world, they relied on science. I even, you even see the Pope telling people, "Don't come to church." Why? Because the doctors said so.

• 40:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Plus, they stopped sharing in a Catholic mass. You share, in a traditional Catholic mass, you share the chalice with the wine in it, and everyone drinks from the same. So they said, "Wait, let's pull back on this one."

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They did make mid-course corrections to the rituals.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and which is admirable. I find it a very good sign. I mean, with all the differences, you see that also the mullahs in Iran and the rabbis in Israel and the Catholic priests, they, most of them, at the time of the pandemic, they accepted the authority of science. And when the scientists said it's a bad idea to gather thousands of people together in church or synagogue to pray, they went with it. So we shouldn't kind of, I think it's very important to appreciate the progress that has been made. Otherwise, you become kind of the fittest, that it's hopeless.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  And you also don't make the effort to preserve the achievements that we already made.

• 41:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But because you're blind to them if you're only focusing on what was not working. Because you're right, we've come so far, even just in the past hundred years, that to ignore what we did right is to deny any efforts to do more of that going forward, to possibly solve many more of our problems.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 41:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Yuval, this has been a delight to have you on. I mean, we all know your books over the years, and it looks like you're still at it.

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I keep wondering, we need more problems in the world so Yuval can write another book?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. We have enough problems. I mean, there are other things to write books about besides problems.

• 41:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Am I thinking about it the wrong way? Your publisher would delight in the fact that I'm thinking about it in that way, I'm sure. So thanks for being on StarTalk and good luck with your new children's book, Bring Them Into the Fold, have them thinking about this from the beginning. And that's always a good sign. You can never go wrong by reaching down into that age group, because they're going to be running the world eventually. They're going to inherit the world that we hand over to them. And I'm a little embarrassed by what we're giving them, so.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, it's our job to do our best to give them a better world. And then it's their job in a couple of years.

• 42:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for being on StarTalk.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's all the time we have. This has been my one-on-one conversation with Yuval Noah Harari.

• 42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Historian extraordinaire on StarTalk. Thanks for joining us. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.