#477: Yuval Noah Harari on The Story of Sapiens, Forging the Skill of Awareness, and The Power of Disguised Books

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari (@harari_yuval https://twitter.com/harari_yuval) is a historian and bestselling author who is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today. His popular books—Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316117/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow https://www.amazon.com/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow/dp/0062464310/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-21st-Century-Yuval-Harari/dp/0525512195/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20— have sold 27.5 million copies in 60 languages. They have been recommended by Barack Obama, Chris Evans, Janelle Monáe, Bill Gates, and many others. The Guardian has credited Sapiens https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/29/why-brainy-book-became-publishing-phenonmenon with revolutionizing the nonfiction market and popularizing “brainy books.” He is also behind Sapiens: A Graphic History https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Graphic-History-Birth-Humankind/dp/0063051338/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, a new graphic novel series in collaboration with comics artists David Vandermeulen (co-writer) and Daniel Casanave (illustrator). This beautifully illustrated series is a radical reworking of his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The series will be published in four volumes starting in fall 2020 with Volume 1, The Birth of Humankind https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Graphic-History-Birth-Humankind/dp/0063051338/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which is out now. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today, many of you will know the name, and those who don't will know much more about him shortly. Professor Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and bestselling author who is considered one of the most influential public intellectuals in the world. I know that's setting a high bar, but his popular books might ring a bell. Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century have sold 27.5 million copies, roughly, in 60 languages. I'll let that sink in for people. 27.5 million copies. That is a lot of square footage, or cubic feet, cubic meters. They've been recommended by

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  Barack Obama, Chris Evans, Bill Gates, and many others. He's also behind Sapiens, A Graphic History, which we'll talk about, a brand-new graphic novel series in collaboration with comic artists David Van der Mullen, I think, co-writer, and Daniel Casanova, the illustrator. This beautifully illustrated series is a radical reworking of his book Sapiens, subtitle, A Brief History of Humankind. The series will be published in four volumes, starting with Volume 1, The Birth of Humankind, which is available now. His website, ynharari harari.com. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. On Twitter, harari underscore Yuval. We'll link to all the rest of them at tim.blog/podcasts.

• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peak Tea. That's P-I-Q-U-E. I have had so much tea in my life. I've been to China. I've lived in China, in Japan. I've done tea tours. I drink a lot of tea. And 10 years-plus of physical experimentation and tracking has shown me many things. Chief among them, that gut health is critical to just about everything, and you'll see where tea is going to tie into this. It affects immune function, weight management, mental performance, emotional health, you name it. I've been drinking fermented Pu'er tea specifically, pretty much every day for years now. Pu'er tea delivers more polyphenols and probiotics than you can shake a stick at. It's like providing the optimal fertilizer to your microbiome. The problem- With good Pu-erh is that it's hard to source.

• 2:12Tim Ferriss?

  It's hard to find real Pu-erh that hasn't been exposed to pesticides and other nasties, which is super common. That's why Peak's fermented Pu-erh tea crystals have become my daily go-to. It's so simple. They have so many benefits that I'm going to get into. And I first learned about them through my friends, Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose. Peak Crystals are cold extracted using only wild harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. I often kick-start my mornings with their Pu-erh green tea, their Pu-erh black tea, and I alternate between the two. The rich, earthy flavor of the black specifically is amazing. It's very, very, it's like a delicious barnyard. Very peaty, if you like whiskey and stuff like that.

• 2:54Tim Ferriss?

  They triple toxin screen all of their products for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold, contaminants commonly found in tea. There's also zero prep or brewing required, as the crystals dissolve in seconds. So you can just drop it into your hot tea, or I also make iced tea, and that saves a ton of time and hassle. So Peak is offering 15% off their Pu-erh teas for the very first time, exclusive to you, my listeners. This is a sweet offer. Simply visit peaktea.com/tim. That's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A.com/tim. This promotion is only available to listeners of this podcast. That's peaktea.com/tim. The discount is automatically applied when you use that URL. You also have a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so your purchase is risk-free.

• 3:39Tim Ferriss?

  One more time, check it out. Peak tea, that's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. And now Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas. They just launched a new company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now, and it's entirely Allform furniture.

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

  I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch, and I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric. They're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant. The sofa color, the color of the legs, the sofa size, the shape to make sure it's perfect for you and your home. Also, Allform arrives in just three to seven days and you can assemble it all yourself in a few minutes. No tools needed. I was quite astonished by how modular and easy these things fit together, kind of like Lego pieces. They've got armchairs, love seats, all the way up to an eight-seat sectional, so there's something for everyone. You can also start small and kind of build on top of it if you wanted to get a smaller couch and then build out on it, which is actually in a way what I did because I can turn my L-sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then with a separate ottoman in

• 5:04Tim Ferriss?

  a matter of about 60 seconds. It's pretty rad. So, I mentioned I have all of these different things in this room. I used the natural leg finish, which is their lightest color, and I dig it. I mean, I've been using these things hours and hours and hours every single day. So, I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in-store sounds risky, you don't need to worry. Allform sofas are delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping, and you get 100 days to decide if you want to keep it. That's more than three months, and if you don't love it, they'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund. Your sofa frame also has a forever warranty that's literally forever. So, check it out. Take a look. They've got all sorts of cool stuff to choose from. I was skeptical, and it actually worked. It worked much better than I could

• 5:49Tim Ferriss?

  have imagined, and I'm very, very happy. So, to find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com/tim. That's A-L-L-F-O-R-M dot com slash tim. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at allform.com/tim. Make sure to use the code TIM at checkout. That's allform.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole-body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with

• 6:30Tim Ferriss?

  me on the road. So, what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole-food sources. Nutrients in a single scoop AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Now would be the appropriate time.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 7:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yuval, so nice to finally see you.

• 7:34Speaker 02

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

• 7:36Tim Ferriss?

  So we're going to start in an unusual place, perhaps.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:40Tim Ferriss?

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

• 7:48Speaker 02

  M O S H A V. Oh, that's actually a kind of mistake on Wikipedia. It's a Moshev. Now it's some, it somehow got around that I live on a Moshev, which is some kind of socialist collective community, less radical than the kibbutz, but one of the experiments of socialists in Israel like decades ago. And it's just not true. I mean, I live in a kind of middle class suburb of Tel Aviv.

• 8:16Tim Ferriss?

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

• 8:22Speaker 02

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

• 8:29Tim Ferriss?

  So at some point it got into Wikipedia, then it ended up in The Guardian, then other people cite The Guardian and it just will not go away. So it just keeps coming back. So let's go to something that I think is more of a firsthand report. And it's, it's a paragraph from your wonderful profile, I should say, answers to questions in Tribe of Mentors, which is my last book from a few years ago. And here's the paragraph I'd like to read and then we'll explore it. Since the first course in 2000, I began practicing Vipassana for two hours every day, and each year I take a long meditation retreat for a month or two. It's not an escape from reality, it's getting in touch with reality. At least for two hours a day, I actually observe reality as it is, while for the other 22 hours, I get overwhelmed by emails and tweets and funny cat videos.

• 9:13Tim Ferriss?

  Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens and Homo Deus. So the missing piece here is the first course. Would you be open to describing how you ended up going to your first Vipassana experience?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I was doing my PhD at Oxford at the time about medieval military history. And I was also looking for the meaning of life and reading lots of philosophy books and thinking a lot, and then nothing really clicked. And a friend nagged me for about a year to try a meditation retreat instead of reading all these books. And finally, I gave up and said, "Okay, I'll try, I'll see how it is." And it was really fascinating, because, you know, the very first evening, the instructions that I was given by the meditation teacher was very, very simple instructions, I mean, I guess many people heard them, that you just focus your entire, you sit down, you close your eyes,

• 10:15Speaker 02

  and you just focus your entire attention on your nostrils, on your nose, and you just feel, try to feel, whether your breath is coming in or whether your breath is going out. Sounds like the simplest thing in the world. It's not even a breathing exercise, like you don't need to control the breath, just to, just let it be what it is and just feel what it does. And I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds, like most people. That, you know, for 10 seconds, I would be focusing on my nostrils, on my breath, and after 10 seconds, my mind would run somewhere, like to some memory, some story, some, something I forgot to do, something that happened years ago, and I would roll in that for minutes before realizing the, "Hey, I'm missing my breath," and come back.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  And this was an extremely humiliating and important experience, because it made me realize for the first time in my life that I have almost no control over my mind. That you know, I was doing my PhD at Oxford. I thought that I was a very intelligent person, very smart. And you know, my mind is my tool. And I have absolutely no control over it. I give it this very, very simple task and it can't do it. And also you realize how overwhelming the stories that the mind produced are. And over time, this was not on the first night, but gradually over time, it made me realize that, you know, if you can't focus on the simple reality

• 11:44Speaker 02

  of your breath coming in and out of your nostrils without being overwhelmed by some story generated in your mind, then how can you hope to understand, I don't know, the financial system of the world, the geopolitical system, what's happening in Israel, in the Middle East, much, much bigger things if you can't do that. I mean, no matter what I try to do, these stories generated by my own mind get between me and reality. And most of my life, I just spend on these stories. So it was ever since then, it was one of my main practices in life is

• 12:28Speaker 02

  how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the stories that your mind generates?

• 12:35Tim Ferriss?

  Why did your friend nag you for a year? Was this a friend who was nagging everybody to go to a class? And the teacher, as I understand it, maybe it was in video or maybe in person, S N Goink, I don't know the lifespan. Did they nag you because there was something about you that told them you would benefit in particular? Or was it a general nagging?

• 12:56Speaker 02

  I think, I mean, I think this guy was nagging everybody. In a good way, I'm still good friends with him. I think because I was really looking hard to understand life, to understand what's happening here.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Then he thought I would be a good candidate and then he was absolutely right.

• 13:18Tim Ferriss?

  Now, Vipassana clicks for some people, it doesn't click for others. Some people gravitate to transcendental meditation and repeating a mantra. Other people might find a different type of mindfulness practice, but it clicked for you. What did the before and after look like? If we, let's just say, go back to that point in time, your first experience, and then we flash forward six months, what had changed six months later? Or how did your perception of the world change?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Some things changed dramatically, most things didn't. I mean, you have this kind of false enlightenment experience, that you think you realize something very deep, and now everything is going to change. And over time, you realize that the deep patterns of yourself, of your own mind, are much, much stronger than one course of meditation or a practice of six months. And it's a very long way. And again, for some people, it doesn't click at all. I mean, when I came out of my first course, I thought, oh, that's easy. I mean, you can send anybody there, it will have the same effect. Later on, I realized it doesn't work like that. Different things work for different people. Over time, there are changes on so many levels.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  I'm not sure which of these levels is most interesting to you or to our listeners, so I can talk on several of them. You know, everything from simple kind of peace of mind and better mental health to a big change in my working methods, in my professional life. I don't think, as I wrote in that passage you read, I don't think I could have written Sapiens or Homo Deus or any of these other books without the practice of meditation, because you need a tremendous amount of focus to do something like that.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  And you need to be able to see through the mass of details. And you know, you try to summarize the whole of human history in 500 pages. The most important button on the keyboard is delete.

• 15:26Speaker 02

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

• 15:43Tim Ferriss?

  So many people have heard of Sapiens. Certainly, there was a point in Silicon Valley when it first came out, and nearly all of my friends seemed to be reading the same book. And I think there's a sort of revisionist grand delusion among many readers that Sapiens came out and then, like the snap of the fingers, 20 million copies, or however many millions of copies were sold worldwide in 60 languages. Now, that doesn't seem to match the story exactly. What was the title of the original English version of Sapiens? And how many copies did it sell?

• 16:21Speaker 02

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

• 16:44Tim Ferriss?

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

• 16:55Speaker 02

  That was the main thing. I mean, I have, I'm, I think I'm quite a good writer, but I have very little skills in terms of publication, negotiations, or anything to do with the business side of life. And I tried for some time, for maybe a year or two, to find a publisher by myself, and it was a complete failure. And then my husband came in, and he has much, much better business skills than I do. And he, like, immediately fired the agent that we were working with at the time, and kind of, let's go back to zero. And he was the one that found the best literary agent in Israel, Deborah Harris, and she opened a lot of doors for us. And we worked on it for, I think, we kind of, we did the translation again,

• 17:40Speaker 02

  and several, several, because originally it was in Hebrew. And several rounds of editing and eventually something like three years or more than three years after the Hebrew version, the real English version came out in 2014.

• 17:57Tim Ferriss?

  What were the biggest changes that were made aside from the title? I'd be curious to hear the story of Sapiens, the title itself, but what were some of the changes that were made in the editing process before the grand debut of the new version? If anything, I don't know if it was just fine tuning the language.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  It was fine tuning and nothing major changed. I mean, all the major themes and ideas were already there in the Hebrew version. We just really redo that retranslation and edit it and I mean, shortening here and there a few things, but but there was no major revision to the content. It was mainly issues of style and the entire kind of business approach of who to work with and how.

• 18:44Tim Ferriss?

  And you, correct me if I'm wrong, because you never know what you read on the internet, the degree of veracity, but that it was based on lectures you had given previously. Is that true?

• 18:56Speaker 02

  That's that's correct. I gave like for five, six years previously, I was giving a course at the Hebrew University, which was basically Introduction to the History of the World. And at some point, after working on it for a couple of years, I began handing out my notes to the students because I wanted them to focus on what I was saying and be part of the discussion instead of just scribbling down whatever I say. So I told them, forget it, I mean, you don't need to write anything, I'll give you my notes. And then the notes started circulating not only among the students of the class, but also other students at the university. And this kind of gave me the idea that, well, maybe there is a larger audience for this.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  And I began working on turning these lecture notes into into a book. Again, it was a long way, but a lot of the major ideas were there in the in the lecture notes.

• 19:50Tim Ferriss?

  And I wanted to hear more about this because I've seen in some books that I've quite enjoyed, like Zero to One by Peter Thiel and his co-writer, also came from Lecture Notes originally at Stanford.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good method because the students take no bullshit. You know, when you write, when you write a book and it's only you and the screen and the computer, the computer suffers everything. Whatever you write, the computer is fine with it. It's too long, it's incomprehensible, it's boring, the computer doesn't care. But the students give you immediate feedback. I mean, if you stand in class and you talk and you see that the students have lost interest, then that's a sign. Or they just don't understand what you're saying. And the great thing about this course, it wasn't really an introduction to first-year students and Israeli students. And you know, if it was, I don't know, in Oxford, then maybe it wouldn't work.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  But Israeli students, they tell you exactly what they think about you and what you say. So I got immediate feedback about everything. And maybe the most important feedback is that, and I was trying to explain the really basic concepts of human history. What is religion? What is money? What is capitalism? And you need, you know, when you talk with professors or doctors, you can talk in a very, very complicated way, so nobody realizes, including yourself, that you don't really know what you're talking about. But with first-year students, you have to use very simple language. And that's a big challenge. The simpler the language, the bigger the challenge.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  It really shows you and your listeners whether you know what you're talking about or not. You can't hide behind professional jargon and very complicated, I don't know, language.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  So it was, it forced me, like I was trying to explain what is money? And I had to go back again and again to the core ideas and to the lecture notes and ask, do I really understand what I'm talking about? If I really understand, I should be able to make it simpler. I should be able to give a straightforward example.

• 22:13Tim Ferriss?

  It makes me think quite a bit about Richard Feynman, the physicist who was very, very esteemed teacher and felt very similarly that professionals could hide behind labels, right? Pointing at the bird and knowing the name is very different from understanding the bird. And if you have to describe it in simple terms, it's a real challenge of competence and clarity as a teacher. You mentioned the term suffering and I again want you to fact check me, but it seems to me in doing homework and reading your work that you are very attuned to suffering, whether that is in the animal world, whether that is in the human experience, whether that

• 22:55Tim Ferriss?

  is in your own experience, say with the endless cloudy days in Oxford at one point. Could you speak to how you developed that sensitivity if I'm not imposing that on you? Because I mean, I'm looking behind you right now and people might not be watching this video, but you have some calligraphy behind you, which is, I believe it's pho-shin, which is like Buddhist heart or Buddhist mind.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Somebody gave me a present and I hang it there.

• 23:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's beautiful. So that's what it says. And suffering and the concept of suffering is also central to a lot of Buddhist thought. Could you speak to how you think about suffering or why that is something that you're so cognizant of?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  I realized both in my personal life and in my work as a historian, that this is the big question. I mean, the big question is not the meaning of life. And the big question is not how you satisfy some gods or how you achieve this or that goal. The big question is how you liberate yourself and others from suffering. And this is also, I think, the main theme of human history is most historians are focused on the question of power. If you take most history books and also most economic books and so forth, they are about power. They are not just, you know, a guide to how to get power, but about the history of power.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Conflicts about power between two kings, between two kingdoms, between two gods, between two religions, between two classes. These are most history books are about that. And it's an important power, but it's not the bottom line. I think the bottom line, okay, what does all this mean in terms of happiness and suffering? So, okay, so the Roman Empire rose to power. Did it actually make humans happier? Did it make them more miserable? If it had no noticeable effect on, say, average happiness in the world, what does it matter whether they won or lost? And in my work, I try to always keep both of these perspectives at the same time. The perspective of power and of suffering.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Especially because, you know, humans are very, very good as a species, not all humans, but as a species. We are very good in acquiring more power, but we are not good at all in translating power into happiness. And for me, the big paradox of history is that it's obvious we are thousands of times more powerful than people in the Stone Age. But it's not clear whether we are at all happier than they were. Maybe we are happier a bit, but not thousands of times more happier. So something is wrong here. You know, it's like a car, which, you know, you press the fuel pedal with all your strength, but your gear is in neutral.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  I mean, we have so much power and it doesn't move anywhere. And it's also often the case in your personal life that you can achieve so much. And then, you know, you look inside and you ask, am I actually happier than I was 10 years ago or 20 years ago? And maybe not. And one of the things I also realized personally and, you know, collectively as a historian is that we just don't understand suffering very well. Uno de los principales problemas es que la gente piensa que con respecto al sufrimiento es obvio lo que es el sufrimiento. El gran problema es cómo hacerlo desaparecer.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Sé que, no sé, la dolor es sufrimiento, o no tengo suficiente dinero, esa es la causa de mi sufrimiento, así que ahora vamos a enfocarnos en obtener más dinero o en obtener una medicina. Y el error es que realmente no entiendes las profundas causas y mecanismos del sufrimiento. Ves solo parte de ello, sí, obviamente la dolor es sufrimiento, eso es verdad. Pero hay mucho más a eso. Y si pasamos un poco más de tiempo en entender los profundos mecanismos de la miseria y la des satisfacción en la vida, entonces podemos actuar mucho más efectivamente en tratar de aliviarlo.

• 27:12Tim Ferriss?

  ¿Puedes hablar del test del sufrimiento? Para determinar qué entidades son reales y qué no son, qué son ilusiones y qué no son. O no debería decir ilusión, tal vez abstracciones.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  La forma principal en que los humanos ganan poder es a través de la cooperación colectiva. Como individuos, no somos animales particularmente poderosos. En un partido entre un humano y un chimpancé, el chimpancé ganará fácilmente. El gran advantage de los humanos es que podemos cooperar básicamente en números ilimitados. Milones, millones, hoy incluso miles de millones cooperan juntos. Los chimpancés no pueden cooperar más de, digamos, 50 o 100, ese es el límite. Y luego, ya sabes, lo que nos permite cooperar en números muy grandes es nuestra habilidad de inventar y creer en historias ficticias y entidades ficticias. Todos los grandes héroes de la historia, casi todos ellos, son entidades ficticias que existen solo en nuestra imaginación, solo en las historias que creamos.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Naciones, dioses, dinero, corporaciones, estados. El único lugar donde existen son las historias que inventamos y contamos. Son no realidades físicas o biológicas. De nuevo, Estados Unidos o Israel, el único lugar donde existen es en la historia que creen millones de personas. Y es lo mismo con el dinero, ya sabes, el dinero no tiene absolutamente ningún valor objetivo.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  But as long as millions of people believe in the story about the dollar or the story about the euro, it works. Now, when you say that, sometimes people go to the other extreme and think that what you're saying is that nothing is real, that the entire world is just one big illusion. But that's not the case. I mean, there is still reality. There are still chimpanzees and elephants and humans. And there is a very, very simple test to know whether the hero of the story that you're telling is a real entity or a fictional entity, invented by humans and existing only in their imagination.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  And that is the test of suffering. That a human being can suffer, a cow can suffer, an elephant can suffer, but a nation can't. If a nation loses a war, it doesn't suffer. It has no mind. It can't feel pain or sadness or fear. The soldiers who are fighting for the nation, the citizens in that nation now being conquered by some other nations, they can suffer a lot of things. But the nations can't suffer. It should be obvious. And it's the same with corporations. Even if the corporation loses a billion dollar, it doesn't suffer. If it goes bankrupt, it doesn't suffer because, again, it has no mind, can't feel pain, can't feel anything. So it's, you know, it's a very, very simple test

• 30:07Speaker 02

  that we should remind ourselves from time to time, what is real in the world and what are these fictional stories. Now, I'm not against the stories. We need them. They are the basis for cooperation. But we should always remember we created them as tools to serve us. We shouldn't be enslaved by them. If a story enables people to cooperate well and thereby improve their lives, that's wonderful. But once you forget it's just a story and you begin entire wars just in order to protect, to defend the honor of the nation or to increase the profits of the corporation, something went wrong.

• 30:56Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. The colorful days of fall are now upon us. Are your small businesses' needs evolving, changing with the times? Certainly true for me and my team. And despite the current uncertainty in the world, having the right people on your team can wrap you in feelings of security and peace of mind like a warm blanket. It's never been more important to find and hire the right people. LinkedIn has an active community of professionals, more than 690 million members worldwide. And when your business is ready to make that next hire, LinkedIn Jobs can help you find the right person quickly by matching your role with qualified candidates. Getting started is easier than ever with new features to help you find qualified candidates quickly.

• 31:39Tim Ferriss?

  Manage job posts and contact candidates from one simple view on LinkedIn.com's familiar website. It's super easy. Identify strong candidates with their efficient rating system to easily get your job in front of more qualified professionals. And now you can also do all of this from your mobile device. So when your business is ready to make that next hire, or if you just want to check it out, find the right person faster with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want and get the first $50 off. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim, all caps, T-I-M. Again, that's LinkedIn.com/Tim to get $50 off of your first job post. Terms and conditions apply. What is the story, if there is one, or stories that you have around money yourself?

• 32:24Tim Ferriss?

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

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Well, in essence, money is just trust. It's the most successful and universal system of mutual trust that humans ever came up with, and therefore, I don't think it's bad. It's very common for historians and philosophers and people like that, "Oh, money, it's the source of all evil in the world." I don't think so. Sometimes it causes a lot of bad things, but in itself, it's a wonderful thing. It's just a system of mutual trust, that 50,000 years ago, to trust somebody, you need to know them personally. You need to know their personality, what they did in the past, they like you, they don't like you, and that makes it very, very hard to cooperate in large numbers, because you can't know a lot of people personally.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  And it also makes it particularly hard to cooperate with strangers and foreigners that you don't know. Now, when you look at today, I can go to a supermarket, and a complete stranger that I never met in my life would give me food that I can actually eat, which was grown by a couple of other people on the other side of the world, and was transported from that field or plantation to the supermarket by a bunch of other people, none of us knows. So how do we cooperate so effectively? How do we trust each other? Money makes it possible. And money is really, it's just trust.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  You know, in the beginning, money was, because people didn't have a lot of trust, then money had to be made from something with an objective value, which doesn't depend just on human belief. So the first money that we know about was simply grain. You paid for things with grain, and grain, you know, you can eat them if nothing works. But gradually, people, the trust increased. And today, most money in the world is just digital data being passed between computers. Most money is not even banknotes and coins. It's, I don't know, like 5% or something of the money is physical money. Most of it is just digital. When during this crisis in the recent year,

• 34:49Speaker 02

  governments and banks in the US, in Europe, elsewhere, created trillions of dollars, they didn't even bother to print the money. You just have some official in some bank goes into the computer, adds a zero somewhere, and you have a trillion new dollars emerging out of nothing. And it works. I mean, it works because people have so much trust in the banks, in the governments, not only of their own country, that's the amazing thing. I mean, you'd have thought, "Well, you can only use the money of your government." No, you think about even, I don't know, Islamic fundamentalist ISIS. They hated America, they hated American politics, American culture, American religion, but they had nothing against American dollars.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  When they conquered, I don't know, Mosul and entered the banks, they didn't burn the dollars that were there, they took them, they used them. So that's amazing that you can have such a level of trust even between complete enemies. And in my personal life, therefore, I don't have a negative attitude towards money. I think for me, I'm also, I'm not chasing it a lot. But for me, the best thing about money is not to think about it. I'm now much wealthier than I was 10 years ago. I was, you know, just a young professor back then. Not that I was ever poor, but I'm now much more wealthier.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  And the thing I like most about my wealth today is that I simply don't have to think about money. I go to the supermarket and I, I, I don't know, in Israel, pineapples are very expensive. So if I want a pineapple, I just, I don't even look at how much it costs. I just, oh, I want a pineapple, okay, let's take it.

• 36:37Tim Ferriss?

  You've mentioned the alleviating of suffering and getting a better understanding first of defining the problem as opposed to just rushing to solutions and getting a better understanding of suffering. Are there ways in which your life, in contrast to, say, not thinking about money, has been complicated or made harder to navigate with the tremendous success of sapiens and becoming more publicly visible? In other words, was it, as just an example, easier to find sort of tranquility and connection with bodily sensations as a way to integrate yourself back at Oxford compared to today?

• 37:19Speaker 02

  No, but I have 20 years of experience now in doing that. So I don't know, maybe if I remained an anonymous professor of medieval history, I would have much deeper experiences of meditation today, maybe not. It's impossible to know. I still have time. You know, I'm not so busy. I have now a large team, like, again, thanks to my husband to kind of set it up. We now have a team of fifteen people working for us. So I get something like, I don't know, fifteen, twenty emails a day, that's it. And like this conversation, I didn't have to do anything. I just had to come like two minutes before it started and just put like plug myself in and that's it. Somebody organized everything.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  So I'm not extremely busy. I still have two hours every day to meditate. I still go every year for a long retreat of say thirty days or forty or sixty days, something like that. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot, there are a lot of things to think. But I thought a lot even before that. So, I mean, the content of my thoughts changed. But I don't think the intensity changed. One of the things I realized for now, being this famous public intellectual and meeting all these famous people and leaders, is that everybody is basically the same. When you are Prime Minister or President of a superpower,

• 38:49Speaker 02

  you can't be more worried than when you run a small business. It's impossible, it's, you know, it's the same brain, it's the same mind. So if you have a small shop and you're the only worker maybe, and it's now Corona time and you have to shut it down and you have to pay your mortgage and whatever, you worry about it all day. It's basically the same with a Prime Minister or President that worries about the economic crisis or a war. It's, yeah, of course, objectively, they have to be much more worried, but they can't. They have the same brain that you have.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  So it really depends on, you know, maybe they are even far less worried than you are. If you're an extremely neurotic person, I don't know, if Woody Allen had a small shop, and I think he would be much more worried about his shop than certain Presidents and Prime Ministers today in the world are worried about their countries.

• 39:55Tim Ferriss?

  I read a quote from you. This was in the New York Times. If I was a superpower, my superpower would be detachment. Feel free to correct that if need be, but assuming there's some grain of truth to that, could you expand on that, please?

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it is true that I can keep a kind of distance from situations, from development in my personal life or in world history. And even though I have my opinions and my preferences, I have a certain ability to keep a distance and say, look at things from different angles. And also, it makes me very skeptical about my own positions. Maybe I just don't know, maybe I'm wrong about it. It could have been debilitating that I can't like...

• 40:56Speaker 02

  How can you write the history of the world if you're not sure about what you're saying? But actually, I find that I just don't take myself 100% seriously. So, okay, so maybe I'll write something and it's nonsense. So, okay. That's... When I wrote Sapiens initially, I had no idea it would be a big success. So, I was kind of, had this defense that I thought, nobody's going to read it. Like, maybe my students at university would read it, and maybe a couple of other people, but that's it. So, you know, I can write what I want, basically. And later on, when I became very successful, it was the other way around, then that, you know, it doesn't matter anymore.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  That if I write something and it's not... And I'm not 100% sure about it, then I can take the hit.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Then, okay, so people will find out that I wrote something wrong, and that's fine, that's part of the business. I mean, if you really want to write these kinds of big books, you have to accept to some extent that you will make mistakes and that you will not get everything right. If you're a perfectionist, then it's better to write the history of kind of one battle in the Middle Ages, then you're on safer grounds.

• 42:21Tim Ferriss?

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

• 42:41Speaker 02

  It depends on the friends, I think. I have a core of very good friends that go with me for years. I mean, from long before. I think that since I became kind of famous, I made maybe just one or two new good friends. Almost all my good friends are with me from years back. And I have different relationships with each of them. It's like, each one of them holds a different part of my inner world, or of my life, and I hold different parts of their world. So, you know, they don't come to me for advice about history, that's for sure. Maybe they'll ask me, "Well, what do you think will happen in the US elections?" And I say, "I don't know."

• 43:26Speaker 02

  But, I mean, if something really big happens, I don't know, during the height of the terrorist wave in the world, so they would come, and at least some of them, and I would say, "Look, from a big historical perspective, this is not so important." You know, every person that dies in a terrorist attack is the entire world destroyed, but looking at the big picture from the history of the world, this is a very small affair. I mean, I can explain to you why terrorism gets so much attention. It's basically theater. These people are experts in theater, not in war, and they are very good at it, so they get so much attention. But you don't need to worry that the terrorists will take over the world.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  It's not going to happen. Most of the things, you know, it's like somebody is breaking up with their boyfriend, girlfriend, somebody is just having a lousy day at work and the usual things.

• 44:24Tim Ferriss?

  The usual stuff. What would they say your superpower is if you said it's detachment, which we could dig further into, but are there any other observations that they would have? If we gave all of your closest friends two drinks and we said, okay, Yuval, superpower, what is it? What might they say?

• 44:44Speaker 02

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

• 44:49Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  I think some of them will say I suppose that I'm a good listener, partly because I talk so much during my work, that like when I meet with friends, I like to be quiet and just let somebody else do the talking for a while, which is a very good thing because very, very often when people come to you for help, they just want you to listen. They don't want you to solve their problems. They don't, you know, it often happens that somebody comes, you know, with a problem and you don't have patience for them. So you think what is the fastest way to get rid of them? To end this phone call, I'll find the solution to their problem, then they'll go away. And this really is the last thing they want. They really just want to complain and for somebody to listen to them. And I'm quite good at it.

• 45:37Tim Ferriss?

  Right, you spend all your words during the day and then you can, you have the space to listen.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:43Tim Ferriss?

  How do you relate to happiness?

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I usually prefer to talk about suffering or misery because happiness is far more difficult to nail down. I mean, when you're miserable, you know it. When you're happy, when you think you're happy, you're quite often just deluding yourself. It's not so easy to really understand what's happening there. You know, it really goes down to the level of the body. This is something that I know from meditation. When you have a pain somewhere in your body, it acts like a magnet. They just draws their attention there. There is no way you can miss it. And you try to observe other things and you can't. It's just you know, it gets drawn back to the painful sensation in the knee, in the stomach, wherever it is.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  But when you have pleasant sensations in your body, they have usually the opposite effect. They throw you out. You kind of float a couple of feet above the ground. I mean, sometimes people come in meditation and they say, "I never have any pleasant sensations in the body. I just have pain." And that's, it's never the case. What's true is that when you have pleasant sensations, you don't notice them because the usual effect of feeling something very pleasant, it throws you out. You start kind of imagining, "Hey, what if I win the lottery and I'll have a million dollars? I'll do that, I'll do that." And you, you lose connection with what, at the time that you're having these very pleasant thoughts, you're having very pleasant sensations in the body,

• 47:17Speaker 02

  but you don't notice it. And it's, it's, I find it, it's harder to work and to see what's actually happening there. But it's, I would, it's even more important than kind of noticing and working with, with the painful sensations. I mean, most, in the end, most of our, I would say, the, the really difficult problems, they begin with the pleasant sensations. That, you know, we become so attached to them that the moment they are gone, most of the time, people don't have very painful experiences. Most of the time, if you are dissatisfied,

• 48:00Speaker 02

  it's because you are missing or craving for some very pleasant experience, which is just not there. And you're not willing to settle for the kind of ordinary boring thing that you do have.

• 48:12Tim Ferriss?

  I want to rewind to your description of your current life compared to your, just say, pre-fame life, which seems to be similar in many ways. You've been able to preserve the space to do what you do best. You have this team. You have this, this husband who's very good at saying no. You have personal assistants who are very good at saying no. And...

• 48:36Tim Ferriss?

  To many people listening who have achieved some modicum of success, I think they will listen with great envy because very often, whether they are artists, whether they are business people, what made them successful is often the first thing to get crowded out by the new attention and success that they receive. Aside from luck, because perhaps there was some luck and chance involved in meeting the person who then became your husband, were there any decisions or are there any decisions or frameworks or anything at all that has helped you to preserve the space that you have?

• 49:16Speaker 02

  I think a very important decision was to keep the meditation first, that like when I plan my day or when I plan my year, it's the first thing I put in the calendar is the meditation retreats. And everything else has to find space around that. And that was a very, it was a conscious decision and a very important decision that really worked. And in a bit similar way also to keep time for my old friends, to keep time for my family and understanding that this is kind of a marathon race and not a sprint. But okay, something very important happens. The new book is coming out. There is a lot of important things.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  So, okay, so I can, I can change my routines for a while. But over the long run, you have to keep these kind of basic blocks intact. This was a very conscious decision. In my case, it worked. Also to kind of remember what's really important for you in life. For me, I think maybe, you know, on the personal level, I really want to understand life, to understand the world. What's happening? I noticed. Quite early, that most of the big events that I'm participating in,

• 50:44Speaker 02

  like conferences and so forth, and the important people I meet, they don't really contribute much to that. They don't seem to understand the life or have to have some particular insight. In the big conferences, they never talk about these things. You know, they talk about the global economy, they talk about climate change, they talk about, they are important things. But on the deeper level of what's actually happening here, it's, I won't get any answers from there. You know, I don't think it's a coincidence that you look at the whole span of human history and almost none of the important political leaders of humankind made a significant philosophical contribution to human thought.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  You have a few exceptions, I don't know, Marcus Aurelius or something like that. But generally speaking, you would have thought that from their vantage point, they see something that ordinary mortals don't. They, maybe they reached the top because they have some very keen insight into human nature. And if they have some keen insight, they keep it very, very secret.

• 51:59Tim Ferriss?

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

• 52:15Speaker 02

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

• 52:21Tim Ferriss?

  Great, let's start there.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I mean, Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, really influenced me a lot. His book, The Sources of the Self, is, I think, one of the most important books I read in life, one of the most difficult books also. I mean... If people take this as a kind of reading recommendation, they should be warned, it's really tough going. It's a very big book, very dense, but if you make it, it's really worth it. Of course, I was very influenced by my meditation teacher, Asen Goenka. Again, not necessarily by any books he wrote, or just by the guidance. I mean, I remember sitting in my first Vipassana course and having this feeling,

• 53:08Speaker 02

  this guy really gets it. He really understands what's happening. This was something quite surprising for me, to see that. Some of my good friends have some insight into what's happening here. I can give a list of books that influenced me. I'm not sure if this is kind of the answers the question, but...

• 53:33Tim Ferriss?

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

• 53:39Speaker 02

  One of the problems I realized is that it's extremely difficult to share the really deep insights you have about life. That very often, they are in a non-verbal level. And in any case, my impression is that most of the inner world of most humans is never shared. They never talk about it because they don't even have the words and don't have the audience. I mean, most of what happens to you deep down during the day, your spouse probably doesn't know, your parents don't know, your children don't know, your friends don't know, even you don't know, if you don't really make the effort.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  One of the qualities of great art, not just writing, but different kinds of art, that it really gives words, that you know, you feel something for many, maybe for years, and you have no idea how to communicate it. And then you read a poem or you see a TV show, and yes, this is exactly what I'm feeling and I never knew how to communicate it. So that's why it's also very difficult to kind of know. You meet somebody and you don't really know what's going on inside them and to what extent they understand or don't understand

• 55:09Speaker 02

  their life or life in general. So it's very, very hard to say.

• 55:13Tim Ferriss?

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

• 55:28Tim Ferriss?

  Quite an unfair expectation of people sometimes.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  This is a basic expectation because because we have trouble understanding ourselves. We have this hope that somebody will lend us a hand. And we have the experience, at least most of us, if we came from loving families, that when you're kids, there were people there, like our parents, who did exactly that for us. Even on the most banner level, that, you know, a child is crying and the mother would say, "Well, you're just tired. Just go to sleep." And you figure out, "Well, you should know that you're tired," but no. I mean, it's amazing that sometimes people are tired or hungry or whatever, and they don't know it. And then somebody who really understands them comes and says, "Well, just go to sleep."

• 56:18Speaker 02

  And in my writing, I engage a lot with the issue of the future of AI and surveillance. And I think one of the key fantasies with AI and surveillance is that

• 56:35Speaker 02

  the algorithms will do that for us.

• 56:38Tim Ferriss?

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

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, Brave New World, it really had a really, really deep impact on me. Because I think he really got it.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  That he...

• 57:01Speaker 02

  The interesting thing about Brave New World, it's kind of, you know, it's on the surface, it's a dystopia, but when you kind of ask yourself, "Why? What's wrong with Brave New World?", it's very difficult to say it, to find out. I mean, everybody seems to be satisfied. Everybody seems to be happy. There is a system in place that understands you very, very deeply and makes sure that you'll never be in great pain or never suffer any great misery.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  And it's a very... In this sense, you know, 1984, like, it's a brother book, 1984. It's a very simple book in this sense, that 1984 describes a terrible, terrible dystopia. The only question is, how do we avoid getting there? But Brave New World, you read it, and at least for me, I kind of think, "Okay, so what's really wrong with it?" And it's not easy to answer this question.

• 58:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the sort of uncanny feeling that something is not quite right, that you can't put words to. It's very similar to the feeling of something that is quite right, that you can't put words to, that then gets reflected in good art. It can go both ways. A number of the things that I've read in preparation for this, from various profiles, there was one that said you prefer television to novels. There was another that gave the example, might have been the same profile, of you swimming as part of your routine in the summer and listening to non-fiction books

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:37Tim Ferriss?

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

• 58:45Speaker 02

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

• 59:19Tim Ferriss?

  With the dolphin headset for the resonance. That's amazing. So it's a forehead headset, perhaps. Do you recall what type it is by any chance? I know this is getting into the minutia. If not, we can figure it out later.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  I can go and look for it if it's very important. It's just in the next room, so it will take me a second if you want.

• 59:38Tim Ferriss?

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

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Okay, just a minute.

• 59:42Tim Ferriss?

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

• 59:44Speaker 02

  I'll take a minute.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  So this is how it looks, by the way.

• 59:54Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow. All right. So it's connected to the dorsal snorkel that goes across the forehead, so you don't have to rotate.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  Yes, and I don't have to put my head back and forth all the time from the water. It's by Phinis Dual. Phinis, F-I-N-I-S.

• 1:00:13Tim Ferriss?

  All right, we'll find it and put it in the show notes. Thank you for grabbing that. In those examples, in these profiles, it seems like you are not consuming much written fiction. But Brave New World is fiction.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  I think it's philosophy, but...

• 1:00:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, fast becoming reality, and maybe also, like you said, philosophy disguised as science fiction. Are there other fiction books that you have found to have an impact on you or your thinking? Or do you consume much in terms of fiction?

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  Quite similar. Yeah, it's quite similar to Brave New World. I think Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

• 1:00:51Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great book.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  I also listed it as a philosophy book. You know, I think that, and it had an impact not just on my thinking, but on how I write or work, that I'm not saying it is a kind of, I don't know, metaphor or something, that these are, they are philosophy books. They just are written in a different way. And this is one of the ideas that gave me the inspiration to kind of turn Sapiens into a graphic novel, which we might discuss later on if we have the time, that you can play with the form. I think that Aldo Saxley, when he came to write Brave New World, he had these philosophical

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  issues he wanted to discuss, and maybe I'm inventing, maybe it wasn't like this at all. But my impression is that he thought, well, it will actually be easier and more interesting and engaging, instead of, you know, having these formal logical arguments, and instead of having these thought experiments, which philosophers love so much, why not have an entire book, which is one long thought experiment, and see where it takes me? And I think that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is basically something similar, that it explores a lot of deep philosophical issues, but in a much more fun way than your typical philosophy book.

• 1:02:20Tim Ferriss?

  I could not agree more. I just, literally a few weeks ago, listened to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, narrated by Stephen Fry, who's an incredible narrator, for the first time. And you're right, that it has so many, what otherwise could be very sterile thought experiments and concepts, embedded into this entertaining narrative. And I remember one line, they're talking about the, I want to say he's the president of the galaxy, or something along this.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, Zappo Babel Brooks.

• 1:02:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's right, Babel Brooks. And they talk about how successfully it was, and how people have the mistaken notion that the job of the president is to wield power, but that's not the job of the president, it's to distract from those who are wielding power. And just these short nuggets contain so much to chew on, and it's really an effective way of providing people with footholds, in a way, toeholds.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  And it's the same with TV, like, I think that Black Mirror, or at least some of the episodes in Black Mirror, are some of the best discussions that I've seen of certain dangerous tendencies in current technology. I mean, some episodes are just fun. I don't know, like San Juan y Perro, I think it's an extremely good episode, but it describes a reality which is so far away from us that it's not really relevant to any of the discussions here. But you look at, if you saw it nose dive about, and you know, maybe the Chinese got the idea for their social credit system from nose dive. But it's such a powerful and important episode.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  Or you look at, how was it called? The one with the cartoon figure that became president, that almost became MP, the blue bear or something. And you know, this was before Trump, this was before this whole wave. And this was so prophetic, it was really amazing. I mean, when I watched it for the first time in 2013, I thought, what are they talking about? And then I watched it later, like five years later, that these guys are just geniuses. I mean, how did they see it coming?

• 1:04:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's very, it's a real sweet spot of near term or not too distant future, kind of technological extrapolation. I love Black Mirror, and I always encourage people to watch at least three episodes, because I'd say maybe one out of three or one out of four just completely miss. For me, they don't sort of strike a chord. So you have to, your sample size has to be a few episodes, and you'll usually strike on something. Do you have any other, we are going to talk about Sapiens graphic history, because I have a lot of questions about it. Before we get there, I have two, actually, I'll stick with one question before we get there, and that is, any other television series, could be documentaries also, or movies,

• 1:05:18Tim Ferriss?

  that you think are intelligent examples of philosophy or thought experiments in disguise?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Again, going back to the usual suspects of science fiction, I thought that hair was a very intelligent, and you know, low key exploration of some of the potential of AI. I don't like these movies when the robots rebel and kill everybody. I mean, this is such... It implants the wrong fears and it encourages the wrong discussions. I don't think that in the next 20 or 30 years, the robots are going to rebel and kill everybody. But there are other dangers, much more subtle, I mean, or less subtle, whether it's the job market, whether it's surveillance and what people do to politics,

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  or whether it's, you know, changes in human relationships. And I thought that "Her" was a very, in this way, a very intelligent movie that avoided the usual traps. And it goes back exactly to what we were discussing earlier, that we have a deep yearning that somebody out there in the world would really understand us. Like, we go about life and we hope that our parents would understand us, our teachers, our lovers, our kids. Somebody, please, understand me. And for many people, it never happens. And to some extent, somebody understands them, but there are many hidden corners within themselves that they are unable to communicate, and maybe they don't understand them fully,

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  and there is nobody out there that reaches out and kind of engages those corners in them. And there is now a technology on the rise which could fulfill that dream, and this is extremely attractive and extremely frightening at the same time. And "Her" is spot on. I mean, what happens when there is an algorithm that constantly observes you, not just what you do, but also what's happening inside your body, and really understands your personality, your moods, your likes, your dislikes? You know, you come back home from work and you're grumpy, and your husband doesn't notice it, but the computer does notice it. I mean, and what kind of world is it?

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  What kind of relationships will there be when computers and objects understand you better than the people in your life? And that's a fascinating and frightening question, and I think a very realistic question. We are very, unlike the robots rebelling and killing everybody, the moment that your smart refrigerator knows you better than your husband is not very far in the future.

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  And you know, this is, we should be talking more about that. And I would like to see more movies, more TV shows, more science fiction novels that explore these kinds of questions.

• 1:08:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if you haven't read any of Ted Chiang's work, C H I A N G, he has a compilation of short stories called Exhalation.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:08:35Tim Ferriss?

  And he has another collection of short stories. I think you would absolutely love them. One of his short stories was turned into, I believe it was Arrival, about the protagonist, who's this female linguist who decodes the graphic language of these aliens who arrive on Earth. And it's about temporal perception. It's, these are really, really, really incredible stories. So Ted Chiang, C H I A N G, and Exhalation. I think, I think you'd enjoy it. Let's talk about sapiens graphic history. Well, before we get to that, I just want to say that the word understand and the concept of understanding is also fraught with difficulties. And I think that that is part of what AI will also demonstrate, that knowing quite

• 1:09:18Tim Ferriss?

  a few people who work on AI, what, what does it mean for, let's just say, a computer or a refrigerator to pass the Turing test so effectively that you feel understood?

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Well, it's not, I, I don't believe they'll be conscious. I don't believe that we are near the point when they will have consciousness. And if by understand you mean the kind of inner feeling that we have when we understand that that's not the case, I think we are not near there. But understands in the sense that able to predict our behavior and response.

• 1:09:51Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Unconsciously, in a way which will be more appropriate than the people around us. That's what, what I mean by it. Yes, it's, it's a weaker, definitely. I'm not thinking about the conscious experience of understanding. It's about just predicting, could be manipulating, but most importantly, just a kind of reacting to us in a way that we will find appropriate, more appropriate than the way that, you know, we'll get so used. To having these computers and robots that are very attuned to how we feel, that we might become even more irritated with the humans who don't feel,

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  who don't react, who don't understand how we feel and don't react in the right way. And part of the problem is that so many people, like everybody, are often self-centered. So I don't get what my husband is feeling because I'm too focused on my own feelings. One of the reasons that computers could be better than humans in this is that they don't have feelings. The refrigerator doesn't have any expectations in life from you. You had no dreams, no fantasy, nothing. So the refrigerator can be 100% focused on what you feel. It has no feelings of its own, so it can't be insulted, can't be angry, nothing.

• 1:11:15Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like you have an episode of Black Mirror to write.

• 1:11:20Tim Ferriss?

  And to that point, on some level, we were talking about philosophy disguised as fiction, or thought exercises embedded into, say, Black Mirror in a way that are not just fascinating, but also prophetic in some respects. Sapiens of Graphic History, I want to talk about this because I actually have a long history with graphic novels and comic books. I wanted to be a penciler, a comic book penciler for about 12 years, and used to be an illustrator a long time ago. And then I lived in Japan in high school, went to a Japanese school. And in Japan, unlike in the US, there is a long, rich history of comic books and graphic novels for adults,

• 1:12:03Tim Ferriss?

  and also comic books and graphic novels for teaching difficult concepts, telling history. And these are extended expansive collections of graphic novels. And I've seen how effective it is because I read some of these when I was in Japan on the history of judo and other things. And I would not have consumed 500 pages of pure text, certainly not in Japanese. And I think it's an incredibly powerful format. How and why did you decide to take Sapiens and create this piece of art, but also an effective vehicle for perhaps teaching in a different way?

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  Bueno, en realidad, la iniciativa no me llegó. Llegó de David y Daniel, los dos artistas que colaboraron conmigo en este proyecto. Ellos llegaron con la idea, trajeron algunas sugerencias iniciales y me gustó mucho. Se conectó a algo que yo quería hacer durante mucho tiempo, que es llegar a nuevos oyentes. Veo mi trabajo principal hoy como traer ciencia y historia a más gente. Gente que no necesariamente leería un libro de ciencia tradicional. Incluso si es ciencia popular, todavía no lo leerán, como 500 páginas de texto con notas de rastro. No lo tocarán. Pero podrían conectarlo a una novela gráfica.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Y sí, es para adultos y adolescentes. Quiero decir, muchas personas en Occidente tienen la idea de que los cómics son para niños. Pero no, es solo un medio diferente, es un idioma diferente. Te permite hacer, quiero decir, algunas cosas que no puedes hacer, necesitas, ya sabes, reducir el texto. Pero hay muchas cosas que puedes hacer mucho mejor en una novela gráfica. Ciertamente, para mostrar cosas, como, ya sabes, gran parte de la novela gráfica es sobre la vida de los cazadores. Así que puedes solo mostrarlo en imágenes en lugar de largas descripciones. Una imagen vale mil palabras en muchos casos. También nos permitió, y para mí fue, no sé, el proyecto más divertido que he trabajado.

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  Porque fue, okay, vamos a tomar todas las convenciones académicas de cómo escribes historia y dejarlas de lado. Vamos a experimentar. Así que es una serie de experimentos en cómo contar historia. Así que, ya sabes, una parte sobre la evolución de diferentes especies humanas, los sapiens, los neandertos y así sucesivamente. Se cuenta como una serie de TV de realidad. Que hay una competencia diferente entre diferentes especies humanas. Luego tienes un capítulo entero sobre cómo los humanos causaron la extinción.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Of many of the large animals of the world, as they spread from Africa over the world. And this is told as a detective movie. We created this fictional detective, Detective Lopez, like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie kind of person. And she goes around the world and investigates the worst serial killers in history, who killed all these big animals. And the invention of the first religions is told according to the conventions of superhero action movies. So we created this superhero in Doctor Fiction, who embodies the human ability to invent fictional stories and mythologies. And it was really fun working with David and Daniel on that.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  And just saying, well, why not? We can try that. We can do that. It's allowed. It also forced me, and actually all of us, to answer many questions which we can just ignore in the text. When you draw, you have to draw specific things. When you write, you can write in obstructions. When you draw, you can't draw obstructions. So if, for instance, you talk about the connection between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. And we now know that some sapiens and Neanderthals had sexual relations and even had children, because most of us today still carry some Neanderthal genes in our DNA. Now, in a book,

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  you can just write that sapiens had sex with Neanderthals and the story. But in a graphic novel, if you want to draw it, you have to make some decisions. I mean, who is the man and who is the woman? Is it a Neanderthal man with a sapiens woman or the other way around? And what about skin color? What about hair color, hairstyle? All these questions, you can't draw a generally human. It must have some skin color, must have some hair color. So we have to go back to the literature, the scientific literature, and investigate. And sometimes you find answers, sometimes you don't. And then you have to take into account all the ideological and political issues of race and gender, and so it's a huge, huge thing to engage with all this.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  And I found that it's not like, okay, let's just take sapiens and add some illustrations. It's a completely fresh project.

• 1:17:00Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  We had a lot of discussions about these things. And, you know, it was a balancing act. You can't ignore science just for the sake of being politically correct. On the other hand, you have to be aware of the political implications of the choices you make. I mean, you can't hide behind scientific objectivity because there is no such thing as a completely objective narrative. Just choosing what is the opening scene and what is the ending scene, it doesn't come from reality. It comes from your political, ideological, or religious beliefs. You know, reality, the real reality, it has no beginning and end.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  No historical event had a beginning and an end, and no historical event had a focus. You know, it's even easier to think about it in terms of movies. When you watch a movie, let's say about the Second World War, so the camera is somewhere and something is in the focus of the shot, something is on the side, and many things are, you don't see them at all. Now, in reality, there is no camera. There is no camera hanging above planet Earth, the camera of history, which points in a particular direction, and this is the center of events and this is the sidelines. You know, you can tell the Second World War with Churchill as the main hero, Hitler and

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  Stalin appearing on some, a few scenes, and millions of Chinese that died in the war never appearing at all. And you can do an entire WWII movie just about a single Chinese village. Now, both are true, and what do you choose is not forced on you by the reality. It reflects, very often, political and ideological and also artistic choices. Now, when you go back to the Stone Age, it's even more complicated because there are so many things we just don't know. I mean, the basic things. We don't know what family structure was like. You have all these discussions about what is the natural human family.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  Lots of people believe, "Well, you know, it's obvious. It's a man, a woman, two and a half kids, and a dog. This is a traditional family, this was always the case." But we know that even in recent history, this was not always the case. It's not the case today. In many countries, close to 50% of children don't grow up in such a family today. You go back to the Middle Ages, it's not the structure of everybody. You go to biology, to other apes. Chimpanzees don't live like that. Gorillas don't live like that. orangutans don't live like that. So how did humans live 50,000 years ago? And the answer is, we don't know.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  We have evidence from the Stone Age, we have tools, but the tools don't tell you what was the family structure. You have cave paintings, but one of the interesting things about cave paintings, we've found thousands and thousands of cave paintings from the Stone Age. There is not a single image of a family. There are lots of mammoths, there are lots of horses, there are lots of ibex. There are some humans also, mostly stick figures. But there isn't a single image from the Stone Age that you can say, "Look, that's how they depicted a family." And what does it mean? Why do people draw all these elephants and never bother to draw their own family? I don't know what it means, but it's interesting.

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  And it gives us, you know, a lot of artistic freedom about how to deal with these issues. So like, I don't know, we have this one scene about Neanderthals. And, you know, Neanderthals had a big revolution in the last 10 years. Of course, they are dead, but our understanding of them has completely changed in the last 10 years because of so many new evidence we have, both from genetics, but also from artifacts and archaeological records. And whereas 20 years ago, maybe, they were still this archetypical cave people, primitive and brutal and things like that, now they have a very positive image.

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  We have, not only because we have their genes in our DNA, but also because we have evidence that they took care of wounded people, of elderly people, of disabled people. They had a much more sophisticated technology and maybe even art and culture, we assumed. So we have, we depicted in the graphic novel, this change in image. In this scene, that you see these two Neanderthal guys sitting in the office of a PR consultant. And the PR consultant has on the wall this old fashioned image of a Neanderthal, a brutal Neanderthal with a big stick dragging a female by the hair. And there was a big X over this image.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  And the PR consultant says, "Well, you know, this was a good brand for the 19th century, but this is the 21st century. You need to lighten up your brand." And the two Neanderthals say, "Yes, well, you know, actually, we two are gay." So, obviously, we don't have any evidence that they were gay Neanderthals. I mean, our scientific understanding of sex and gender today indicates that it's very likely that there were gay Neanderthals. But if you ask for the smoking gun, "Show me a grave from 50,000 years ago with two men together, only then I believe," then of course, we don't have this. But we hardly have, and we don't have a lot of direct evidence for sex in the Stone Age.

• 1:23:05Speaker 02

  We have a lot of indirect evidence, like from genes. So we know that sapiens and Neanderthals had sex. But maybe also there were cases of a sapiens man having sex with a Neanderthal man? Could be. No evidence in the genes, of course, but could it have happened? Maybe. And we have this autistic license that we can show that it makes sense.

• 1:23:29Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:42Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  We hope for one every year. The main challenge is the drawing. I mean, this is Daniel's job and I draw like a five-year-old kid. I mean, they can't depend on me for anything when it comes to the drawing. And it takes a lot of time to draw, you know, these hundreds of images. And also it goes back and forth because he, Daniel, draws an image or a couple of images and send them. And then I go, no, the archaeological evidence indicates that actually the spear points were not like you depicted. And then, I mean, the political issues that, okay, we need a more balanced gender relations in this image. And it goes back to Daniel and he needs to draw it again, and it takes a long time. So I guess it will be one volume each year.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  And the big hope that it will reach new audiences that may not read, you know, a 400-page text about the history of humankind, but would be interested and would find it fun and engaging when it's sold in a graphic novel.

• 1:24:59Tim Ferriss?

  I've seen the graphic novel and it's really well done. I have to say, you know, I've read, I have probably 5,000 to 10,000 comic books that I've saved and polybagged over the years and I've collected.

• 1:25:15Tim Ferriss?

  Everything from Sandman in the US to dozens of different graphic novels in Japan. It's very well done.

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:25:22Tim Ferriss?

  So I mean, you and your team deserve a lot of credit for that. I'd love to ask a question about your mission statement. Now, I don't know if you would call it a mission statement, maybe it is. So this is from the New Yorker profile from this year. And it describes how your mission statement reads as follows. And this is on a bulletin board in your office. Keep your eyes on the ball. Focus on the main global problems facing humanity. Learn to distinguish reality from illusion. Care about suffering. And I guess there was previously embrace ambiguity, but that got scratched out.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:26:00Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  It's a couple of mission statements. You know, as we expand our team, it becomes more difficult to get everybody on the same page. To make sure that everybody, you know, each person has a different personal and professional background. And so when it was just me or just my husband and me, there was no need to write down these official mission statements. But when you have 15 employees, then it becomes important. And we had a long discussion and like a back and forth also with all the employees. And we came up with this as several kind of general guidelines to keep in mind.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  And maybe the most important thing is that we see our task as helping to focus the global conversation on the most important issues. Because one of the big problems of the 21st century is people are flooded by enormous amounts of information. It's not like in the past when information was scarce and the problem was how to get it. Now it's the opposite and you just don't know what to pay attention to. And it also goes back to my practice of meditation of how to stay focused. And it's kind of link the personal practice with the global project of, again, we don't see ourselves as providing solutions.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  But just kind of helping to steer the global conversation in the most important directions.

• 1:27:38Tim Ferriss?

  You have such a historical context for determining the relative weight to assign to different events or phenomena in the world, as indicated or described in the example of terrorist attacks and their sort of cultural or I shouldn't say cultural, but historic significance. Like, yes, they're horrible. Yes, the theater and graphic nature of it is very compelling to the human psyche, which would also be true of, say, a shark attack, right? If a 12-year-old boy were attacked by a shark on the east coast of the United States, it would be in every newspaper and there would be a huge response, probably dramatic overharvesting of sharks,

• 1:28:22Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:28:36Speaker 02

  Well, as we speak, I think the three big ones are nuclear war, which, you know, people tend to connect with the Cold War. Yeah, there was something there about nuclear weapons, but they are still here. And I don't think we'll see a nuclear war in the next few months. But if tensions in the world continue to grow, then it will become again a major issue, and it is an existential issue. Other things can destroy us, but nuclear war can. So we have to keep it in mind all the time. The second big thing is ecological collapse. It's not just climate change that gets most of the headlines lately. It's many other things also, like loss of biodiversity and destruction of habitats and so forth. But generally speaking, yes, we are seeing, we are in, whereas nuclear war, you know,

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  it's just a future possibility. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won't happen. Ecological collapse is already began. It's all around us. And it threatens, again, it's an existential danger. It threatens the foundations of our civilization. I guess that some people will survive it. But if it, if things really go bad, with the economic and political implications of it, it could cost the lives of billions of people. And the third big one, and I think most complicated, is technological disruption. The consequences of disruptive technologies, especially artificial intelligence and bioengineering.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  It's the most complicated challenge. Because, you know, with nuclear war and climate change and ecological collapse, you can disagree whether it's true or not, but everybody agrees what needs to be done about it, to stop it. Nobody thinks that having a nuclear war is a good idea. Nobody thinks that climate change is a good idea. Maybe some people deny it, but they don't say it's good. Now, with technological disruption, it's much, much more complicated because it has a lot of positive potential. A lot of people positively wish to see greater and faster technological disruptions. And there is no agreement whatsoever about what we should do with technologies like AI or like bioengineering.

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  The dreams of some people are the nightmares of other people. So it's very complicated. Again, like ecological collapse, it's not a future scenario. It's already happening all around us. And I think the pace is such that it may, to some people, it sounds like crazy, but I strongly believe that given the technologies we are now developing, within a century or two at most, our species will disappear. I don't think that in the end of the 21st, 22nd century, the Earth will still be dominated by Homo sapiens. I think, given the immense powers of technologies we are developing, there are two scenarios only.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  One scenario is that the technology will destroy humanity. And I think it's less likely, but still possible. The more likely scenario is that it will change humanity in a profound way. That we will use AI and bioengineering to change Homo sapiens and to create new kinds of beings that will be much more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals or from chimpanzees.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  To give just one example, I think it is possible that we will create the first inorganic life forms after 4 billion years of organic evolution. So, again, it's not a destruction of our species, it's the changing of species into something else, but what kind of thing it will be, we have to be extremely careful about that. It won't necessarily be a better version of us, it could be much, much worse.

• 1:32:24Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give a bit more detail around the new inorganic life form? And in your mind's eye, if we change for the worse in some tech-enabled way, deliberately or by accident, what might that look like to you?

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  Well, I'll start with the second question of what it could look like. You know, you could use whatever technology to increase the efficiency of people, the intelligence of people, at the price of things like autistic sensitivity or like spiritual depth. I mean, if you ask armies, if you ask corporations, if you ask governments, what do you need from your employees, from your soldiers? They will say, "Oh, we want people to be more efficient. We want people to be more logical. We want people to be more disciplined." And if you have the technology, then you engineer such people, even if it comes, and it always comes, I mean, usually when you improve something, it tends to come at the price of something else.

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  And things like, I don't know, spiritual depth, what kind of army needs its soldiers to have spiritual depth? So, if you leave it to the corporations and armies, it's very likely that once you have a technology to change humans, it will, I would say, downgrade them and not upgrade them. It will make them more efficient soldiers or employees or whatever, but it will make them kind of poorer beings, lesser beings. So that's about just one scenario of what does it mean to downgrade people. Now, with regard to inorganic life forms, you know, for 4 billion years, everything on the planet was, all life forms were organic, whether it's a bacteria, or a mammoth, or

• 1:34:08Speaker 02

  a tree, or a human, it's organic, it obeys the laws of organic chemistry. Now with the rise of AI, we might have a chance, again, I tend to be agnostic about it, I'm not sure. But it is possible that in a couple of decades, we will be able to create either completely inorganic beings or at least part organic, part inorganic cyborgs. And this will be, if it happens, it will be the biggest revolution in the history of life since the beginning of life. Much, much bigger than the creation of mammoth or the creation of mammals or humans, because it's a completely different game. Once you're no longer subject to organic chemistry,

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  we can't even begin to imagine what it means, because our imagination is the product of organic chemistry. So if you have a kind of intelligence which is not based on organic chemistry, you know, it can be anything.

• 1:35:10Tim Ferriss?

  If you look over the next, so you were talking about, I guess, the 22nd century and the prevalence, dominance or existence of Homo sapiens. If we look over the next 50 years, just to choose an arbitrary timeframe, of nuclear war, ecological collapse or these unforeseen accidents or mistakes of high technology, which scares you the most? Or which do you worry about the most?

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  I worry most about the third because of what I said earlier, that it's the most complicated, that it's not enough to be kind of, I don't know, good and wise to deal with the first two. It will be very hard to deal with the first two as it is. But the third one is really complicated because there is no agreement on the goal. With the first two, at least there is an agreement on the goal. And then that makes it very, very complicated. Also, you know, the first two, nobody is actively working to make it happen sooner. And even the people who deny climate change, they are not in favor of climate change. They just say it's not really, it doesn't happen.

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  But with AI and bioengineering, there are some of the most powerful people and organizations and governments and corporations in the world, they are extremely busy making it happen faster. And it's also, we don't have a framework even to think about it properly. So as a thinker and a politician, I think this is where I can contribute the most, is in trying to entangle this kind of completely new threat.

• 1:36:53Tim Ferriss?

  Just a few more questions, then I'll let you get going, because I know we're separated by quite a few time zones. When you are thinking about these threats, perhaps hearkening back to your times reading Aldous Huxley's work, and here we're talking about Brave New World and not Ireland, right? Very different descriptions, although some parallels. When you feel the potential for these various types of collapse or disaster, what keeps you going? Where do you find the light?

• 1:37:27Speaker 02

  It's a good question.

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  You know, if you're able to deal with your own mortality, as every person has to on some level, then you should be able to deal with the potential mortality of your entire species. I mean, it's still part of biology. Yes, individuals come and go. Nations come and go. Also, entire species come and go. 99% of the species that evolved on planet Earth are gone for one reason or another. Homo sapiens also is not internal. Again, even in the best scenario, I don't think Homo sapiens will be around in 200 or 300 years. The best scenario is that Homo sapiens will disappear, but in a peaceful and gradual way,

• 1:38:13Speaker 02

  and be replaced by something better. I don't think there is any chance whatsoever that people like us will just continue to have lives like us in 200 years. That there will be in 200 years, a professor of history sitting and having a podcast talk with somebody. It's not going to happen. I mean, the changes are going to be too big. So maybe it goes back again to the practice of meditation and the realization that change is the only certainty in life.

• 1:38:49Tim Ferriss?

  So you might as well tune into the changes.

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:52Tim Ferriss?

  So that you're at least aware that you're responding to your reactions to things outside and not the outside itself. Well, Yuval, this has been a lot of fun for me.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:39:02Tim Ferriss?

  It's nice to connect with you. And of course, I will link to everything in the show notes for people. The volume one of your series, Sapiens, A Graphic History, is out now. Volume one can be found, and I'll include links to that in the show notes for everyone at tim.blog/podcast. Your website is ynharari. Facebook is prof.yuval.noa.harari. Twitter, harari underscore Yuval. Instagram, Yuval underscore Noah underscore Harari. I'll provide all of those so people don't have to remember them. Is there anything else that you would like to say to my audience, ask of the audience, suggest to the audience before we wrap up?

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

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

• 1:39:57Tim Ferriss?

  Likewise, and I can certainly speak for myself in saying that I enjoyed it quite a lot. And definitely check out Ted Chang Exhalation. I think you'll love it. I have a bunch of notes for things that I will be checking out. And to everyone listening, until next time, thank you for tuning in.

• 1:40:16Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the Esoteric as I do, it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny

• 1:41:00Tim Ferriss?

  bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. And now Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas. They just launched a new company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional

• 1:41:43Tim Ferriss?

  stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch. And I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric. They're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant. The sofa color, the color of the legs, the sofa size, the shape to make sure it's perfect for you in your home. Also, Allform arrives in just three to seven days and you can assemble it all yourself in a few minutes. No tools needed. I was quite astonished by how modular and easy these things fit together, kind of like Lego pieces. They've got armchairs, love seats, all the way up to an eight-seat sectional. So there's something for everyone. You can also start small and kind of build on top of it if you wanted to get a smaller couch and then build out on it, which is actually in a way what I did because I can

• 1:42:27Tim Ferriss?

  turn my L-sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then with a separate ottoman in a matter of about 60 seconds. It's pretty rad. So I mentioned I have all of these different things in this room. I use the natural leg finish, which is their lightest color, and I dig it. And I've been using these things hours and hours and hours every single day. So I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in-store sounds risky, you don't need to worry. Allform sofas are delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping. And you get 100 days to decide if you want to keep it. That's more than three months. And if you don't love it, they'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund. Your sofa frame also has a forever warranty. That's literally forever. So check it out. Take a look.

• 1:43:11Tim Ferriss?

  They've got all sorts of cool stuff to choose from. I was skeptical and it actually worked. It worked much better than I could have imagined and I'm very, very happy. So to find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com/tim. That's A L L F O R M dot com slash tim. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at allform.com/tim. Make sure to use the code TIM at checkout. That's allform.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Peak Tea. That's P I Q U E. I have had so much tea in my life. I've been to China. I've lived in China, in Japan. I've done tea tours. I drink a lot of tea and 10 years plus of physical experimentation and tracking has shown

• 1:43:56Tim Ferriss?

  me many things. Chief among them, gut health is critical to just about everything. And you'll see where tea is going to tie into this. It affects immune function, weight management, mental performance, emotional health, you name it. I've been drinking fermented Pu'er tea specifically pretty much every day for years now. Pu'er tea delivers more polyphenols and probiotics than you can shake a stick at. It's like providing the optimal fertilizer to your microbiome. The problem with good Pu'er is that it's hard to source. It's hard to find real Pu'er that hasn't been exposed to pesticides and other nasties, which is super common. That's why Peak's fermented Pu'er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. It's so simple. They have so many benefits that I'm going to get into. And I first learned about them through my friends, Dr.

• 1:44:41Tim Ferriss?

  Peter Attia and Kevin Rose. Peak Crystals are cold extracted using only wild harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. I often kickstart my mornings with their Pu'er green tea, their Pu'er black tea, and I alternate between the two. The rich, earthy flavor of the black specifically is amazing. It's very, very, it's like a delicious barnyard. Very peaty, if you like whiskey and stuff like that. They triple toxin screen all of their products for Heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold contaminants commonly found in tea. There's also zero prep or brewing required as the crystals dissolve in seconds. So you can just drop it into your hot tea, or I also make iced tea, and that saves a ton of time and hassle.

• 1:45:23Tim Ferriss?

  So, Peak is offering 15% off their Puget teas for the very first time, exclusive to you, my listeners. This is a sweet offer. Simply visit peaktea.com/tim. That's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A dot com forward slash tim. This promotion is only available to listeners of this podcast. That's peaktea.com forward slash tim. The discount is automatically applied when you use that URL. You also have a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so your purchase is risk-free. One more time, check it out. Peak tea, that's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A dot com slash tim.