Will AI Kill Democracy? | Yuval Noah Harari

Today on a special in-person recording of Bankless we welcome special guest and best selling author, Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval is best known for his book Sapiens, and today, he is introducing ideas from his next book Nexus. We go deep down the history rabbit hole and explore the question, if human beings are so wise, why are we so self destructive? ------ 🎬 DEBRIEF | Ryan & David Unpacking the Episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-the-yuval-noah-harari-interview ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/61?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Start 00:08:07 The World of Information Networks 00:10:59 Truth vs Information 00:21:28 Tribal Consequences 00:25:05 Naive View Of Information 00:34:27 Populist View Of Information 00:44:54 Inventing New Mechanisms 00:53:33 A Brief History Of Information Networks 00:58:43 The Most Successful Story Ever Told 01:05:13 Story vs Information Network 01:12:29 Story Of Debt Clay Tablets 01:14:53 Entering the Age Of AI 01:20:50 Self Correcting Mechanisms 01:25:35 The Potential Of Crypto ------ RESOURCES Yuval: https://www.ynharari.com/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

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

• 0:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where today we explore the future of humanity? Think that's what it was.

• 0:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's always been what Yuval talks about, actually.

• 0:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Ryan Chant Adams. I'm here in person with my co-host, David Hoffman, and we are here to help you become more bankless. Guys, we have Yuval Noah Harari on the podcast today. And this was a special episode for us because Yuval was like one of the founding, his book Sapiens was probably one of the founding documents, let's say, for the Bankless podcast.

• 0:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's right. I think there's a lot of just Yuval influence across all Bankless content, I would say.

• 0:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  100%. And like for my own part, his ideas around money being a story, being intersubjective reality kind of got me into crypto in the first place. He's got a new book called Nexus that just came out.

• 0:51David Hoffman?

  His third book.

• 0:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  His third book. And so we read that and prepped for this meeting. It's all about information networks and how that is like a superset of the story and the document and ledger.

• 1:01David Hoffman?

  Stories scaled. I would say it's stories scaled with technology is how I would define it.

• 1:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stories scaled with with technology. And I think, of course, you know, we think cryptocurrency, property right systems like Ethereum and also Bitcoin, other crypto assets are one of the most interesting stories.

• 1:16David Hoffman?

  Some of the greatest stories ever told.

• 1:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  A new intersubjective reality. So we got to that at the end, but we really started with his kind of thesis on information networks and what those actually are, the lens of them. He's got an idea of how they could go right and how they can go poorly in a couple of different directions. So we talk about all of that. What kind of stuck out for you in this episode?

• 1:37David Hoffman?

  I think the biggest thing is that there's this idea that I think most people share, and I think probably ideas that we've shared on the Bankless podcast, that technologies that help scale information are good, fundamentally good. And we've talked about this most frequently with the printing press. The printing press allowed for data to proliferate, for information to proliferate, and then this created better outcomes, good outcomes. And I think, I mean, I think I still believe that, but Yuval wants to come in and say.

• 2:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's got a but, doesn't he?

• 2:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but first. They make very bad outcomes. And he's also advocating that as we go into like, what is perhaps the next version of the printing press? We have the internet now, but now we have this AI thing, which is going to be a very novel, challenging type of information network. That first, we're going to have to go through the but phase before we come out through the good phase. And that's a nuance that I don't think that we've shared very much from the Bankless podcast before.

• 2:34David Hoffman?

  No, we haven't. We also haven't done an in-person debrief anytime. So that's of course, the episode that David and I record after the episode. I'm really excited to talk to you.

• 2:42David Hoffman?

  Debrief on the couch, buddy.

• 2:45David Hoffman?

  So if you are a Bankless citizen, you've got the Bankless Premium feed that's available for you, and you can go catch that episode now. So I guess, without further ado, this is Yuval Noah Harari. But before we get to that, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our recommended exchange to go get your intersubjective reality.

• 3:05David Hoffman?

  To start your crypto story.

• 3:07David Hoffman?

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• 3:50David Hoffman?

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• 4:32David Hoffman?

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• 4:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are very excited to do an in-person conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. He is a writer, he is a philosopher, he is a historian. He's got a new book called Nexus. And I think Yuval, I gotta start, I was telling you this off air, but I gotta start by actually thanking you. Because you've written one of probably the top 10 books for me. And it was actually my entry point into this podcast, into meeting David, into actually starting my cryptocurrency journey. It was Sapiens. And that book really transformed the idea of money to me. This idea of creating intersubjective realities. The power of myth and storytelling and just the mental model of human beings as like these storytelling apes

• 5:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  was incredibly powerful for me, just like in general. So I want to start by just thanking you and then also welcoming you to Bankless.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's good to be here.

• 5:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's talk about your newest book. It expands on your last two, I would say. It's called Nexus. And I want to start with a question you kind of begin the book with and you also conclude it with, which is, if human beings are so wise, why are they also so self-destructive?

• 6:04Speaker 03

  So I think this is one of the key questions of history and also now of politics. We've named our species Homo sapiens, the wise human. And we are obviously the smartest animal on the planet. We've reached the moon, we split the atom, we can read DNA. And at the same time, we are now on the verge of destroying ourselves and much of the ecological system. And we have an entire menu of ways how to do it. Whether ecological collapse or nuclear war or the rise of artificial intelligence that could endanger us. And you know, in many mythologies and theologies, the answer to the question, why are humans so self-destructive? Is that there is something wrong in our nature.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Which is why we have to rely on some god or some messiah outside ourselves to save us from ourselves. And I don't agree with this answer. The answer that I present in Nexus is that the problem is not in our nature. The problem is in our information. Most humans are wise and good, but if you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions. They make self-destructive decisions. And what we have seen through history is that the quality of our information doesn't improve over time.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Because information isn't truth and isn't knowledge and isn't wisdom. And you know, the truth is a very rare and costly kind of information. And we've been flooding ourselves for thousands of years with mostly junk information and fictions and fantasies and delusions. And this is why even very sophisticated, modern societies, if you think about the Soviet Union, you think about Nazi Germany, they were still as susceptible to fall victim to mass delusion as any Stone Age tribe.

• 8:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's talk about seeing the world, because I think your book really sees the world through this specific lens, which is the lens of information networks specifically. And so your entire thesis for this book is it's not nature, it's networks that are the problem, in particular, information networks. I think when people first come across that phrase, information networks, they might think of something, like you mean it in a much broader way, because they might think of like their corporate IT policy or like network diagrams or something like.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  A religion is also an information network.

• 8:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  OK, explain that.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Held together by information, by holy books like the Bible or the Quran, by mythological stories, by commentaries on the holy book, by images. This is what, if you think about what are some of the most successful information networks in history, so Christianity and maybe more specific. Specifically, the Catholic Church comes to mind. It's probably the biggest and oldest institution in the world. It's been going for close to 2,000 years. You have more than 1 billion members all over the world. And what holds it together, it's information.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  And again, it comes in various forms, not only the Bible, but also church law and dogma and images and church music. These are all types of information. And interestingly enough, again, most of this information is not the truth. If you think, for instance, about, you know, the most famous face in history, the most, the most common portrait in history is the face of Jesus. Over the last 2,000 years, humans have produced billions and billions of portraits of Jesus. They are everywhere, in churches, cathedral, houses, and not a single one of them is an authentic likeness.

• 10:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's no way he looks like that.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Because there, no portrait from his own lifetime has survived, if anybody even bothered to make a painting of him at the time. And the Bible doesn't say a single word, word, about how he looked like. Not a single word in the Bible. Was he tall or short, fat or thin, blond or black-haired or bald? Nothing, absolutely nothing. All these images of Jesus, they are the product of our imagination. They're all fictional. And nevertheless, they have been extremely effective in connecting together billions of people all over the world over centuries,

• 10:46Speaker 03

  enabling both good things, like building hospitals and charities and so forth, and also bad things, like crusades and inquisitions and whatever. And this is an information network.

• 10:59David Hoffman?

  Let's unpack a little bit the difference between truth and information. Do you see truth as a subset of information?

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:08David Hoffman?

  And information is much grander. Unpack that, that difference for us. How is there information out there that exists? And then how is that separate from what is true?

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, there is enormous amount of information in human societies, in nature. The truth is a very, very small subset of that information. Most information in the world doesn't even attempt to tell the truth. I mean, the truth is something that points at reality. Something that tries to point at an aspect of reality.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  And most information doesn't attempt to do it. The function of most information is not to tell us the truth, but to connect different individuals into a network. Information is connection. Thing, for instance, about a paradigmatic case is music. About music, there is not even, it's not even reasonable to ask, is it true or not? There is no such thing as true music, and there is not such thing as fake music. There has been a lot of bad music throughout history, definitely, but there is no fake music. You know, with all this talk about fake news, what is fake music? It doesn't mean anything.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  What music does is connecting lots of people together. You go to church, and you have this church music and change church hymns, and you sing along with all the other congregation. It connects you together. You're a soldier on a military parade, and you have these drums and these trumpets, and you march together. It forms, it takes a lot of individuals. And military music helps turn a lot of single individuals into a cohesive military unit. You think about clubbers going to a club or to a party. The music connects them. But there is simply no, it's illogical to ask, but is it true or not? The music. Right.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Now, there are some kinds of information that claim to tell us something about reality. They are not trying to construct a new reality, like a military unit. They're trying to tell us something about reality. Like, there is a piece of military intelligence that tells us there are now 1,000 Russian soldiers attacking a position in Ukraine.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  This is an attempt to point a finger at reality. And it could be true or false. Maybe there are a thousand Russian soldiers there. Maybe there are just 500, maybe there are 10,000. So here the question of truth arises. And most of this kind of information is not true. Most of this kind of information that try to point at reality is lies and fictions and delusions and illusions. Why? Because the truth is costly. Whereas fiction is very cheap. If you want to produce a truthful report about a military action in Ukraine,

• 14:14Speaker 03

  or about what happened in the Roman Empire in the time of Jesus Christ, or about the economic situation of a corporation, you need to invest a lot of time and effort and money. It's costly. If you just write the first thing that comes to your mind, you just write fiction, that's very easy. You don't need to do any research. And in addition to that, even if you went to the trouble and did all the research and produce this costly and rare type of information, a truthful account, it has two main big disadvantages in the market of information compared to fiction.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  First, the truth tends to be complicated. Because reality is complicated. That's part of the cost you pay. It's complication. It's complication. It's very complicated to understand a pandemic, to understand a war. It's so complicated. And people, most of the time, we don't like complicated story. We like simple stories. Now, the truth has to be complicated, because most of the time reality is, fiction can be as simple as you would like it to be. So this is, again, one very big advantage of fiction. Simple. The other thing is, the truth tends to be... Not always, but sometimes painful. Whether it's the truth about myself individually, like this is why we go to therapy,

• 15:42Speaker 03

  to realize how we hurt the loved ones in our life, how we hurt ourselves. It's not something nice often to learn about ourselves. It could be, I don't know, the CEO of a corporation who learns truthful but painful things about his or her corporations and policies, that they made mistakes, that they are failing, whatever, all the way to the level of a nation that, you know, in an election campaign, a politician who would tell people the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the history of our nation is unlikely to win many votes that way. Because every nation, whether Israel or the United States or Russia or India,

• 16:26Speaker 03

  has a lot of skeletons, sometimes entire cemeteries in the closet that people don't like to acknowledge. So again, the truth is costly, it's complicated and it's often painful. Whereas fiction is cheap. It's simple, can be made simple and can be made as attractive as you would like it to be. So in a completely kind of free market of information, if you flood the world with information, the truth will not flow to the surface.

• 16:59David Hoffman?

  I'm reminded of Brandeis's law in internet culture where the bullshit asymmetry principle is easier to produce bullshit than it is to produce truth.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  That's a much more...

• 17:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Brandeis's law.

• 17:11David Hoffman?

  Brandeis's law, yeah.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  A much more way to explain what it took like 10 minutes.

• 17:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, no, no.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  You said it like...

• 17:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love that.

• 17:19David Hoffman?

  The stories are helpful.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  It's absolutely true.

• 17:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  The idea that there is an economic cost, like almost like a proof of work, a proof of truth to truth certainly rings true. Okay, so we've got the idea of information. We're separating that from truth. Truth is a particularly expensive form of information, but it's also a valuable form of information.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's scale back out. Let's talk about information networks like once again. Why do humans create these information networks? What does it help us do? Is there some sort of scale we can achieve with these things? Like, why have we created them in the first place?

• 17:54Speaker 03

  They are much more powerful. You know, a country with a million people in it cooperating...

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Can do many, many things that a small tribe with just 200 members cannot. You know, if you go back to ancient times. So if you live in a small tribe with just a couple of hundred people and there is drought. So your small territory is hit by drought, there is nothing to eat, you die of hunger. But if you are a member of a much larger network of a million people, spread like in, I don't know, ancient Egypt or whatever, spread over thousands of kilometers. So if drought hits one part of the country, you can rely on other parts of the country to provide you with food.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  And similarly, if, if there is a war and you are attacked by the neighboring tribe, if it's just 500 people in your tribe that needs to defend themselves, obviously, it's much more difficult than if you can call on the national army that is recruited from a population of a million people. It's the same with ideas. If each tribe is for just, just for itself, then you know, 500 people, every now and then, somebody comes up with a new idea, which benefits the other 499 persons in the tribe. But if you have a million people in a network, there are many more ideas, new ideas of whether new medicines or new weapons that somebody thought about.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  And you can share this with all the other members of the information network. This is the big advantage of our species. If you think about our, our kind of humans, Homo sapiens, a hundred thousand years ago, the world was home to at least five other human species. The most famous are the Neanderthals, but there are others. And Homo sapiens did not have bigger brains. The Neanderthals apparently had even bigger brains than us. And on the individual level, there is no indication that our species was superior to Neanderthals. Even today, if you compare us to chimpanzees, yes, there are some things I can do and a chimp can't, and, and vice versa.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  There are many, many things that a chimpanzee can do and I can't. And if it would be like a, a fair fight, you put us both on a lonely island and we have to struggle for survival, I would definitely put my bets on the chimpanzee. You know chimpanzees 10 times stronger than the average human. So why do we control the world and not the chimpanzees or the Neanderthals? Because chimpanzees and Neanderthals, they could cooperate only at a level of, say, 100 individuals more, top. Homo sapiens have learned to cooperate in unlimited numbers. Thousands and then millions and today billions.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  And when in the Stone Age, if it's a competition between 50 Neanderthals and 500 sapiens, the sapiens win easily. And if it's today a competition between 50 chimpanzees and 8 billion sapiens, who cooperate at least in some fields like science, like the global trade network, you can say that all 8 billion humans on the planet today, they cooperate in some ways. So it's obvious why we control the planet. And it's because we can construct this really big sophisticated networks of cooperation. And these networks are fueled by information.

• 21:29David Hoffman?

  I think this is also part of the sapien story that I think connected me and Ryan, where after reading this idea that it's this shared story that humans have, was like kind of now seeing the matrix. Like, once you wake up to that fact, just the reality of how humans cooperate is just like fundamentally changed once you perceive this idea of it's all coordination through communication, through data. Maybe you could also talk about the consequences that result once these information networks grow larger and larger. A tribe with a shared story of 200 people has different levels of consequences versus when there's 8 billion people here.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Obviously, if a tribe of a few hundred, a key point to understand is that to create, whether it's tribes or modern nations or churches, you don't do it with the truth. You usually do it with some kind of fictional or mythological story. It's most obvious in the case of religion, but it's also true in the economic sphere. I guess we'll talk about it later, but money is a fiction. Money is not something that points at reality. Money is like music. It's a fictional story that as long as many people believe it, we can all dance together to the same monetary tune.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  And again, it's very effective in terms of large-scale cooperation. But the danger is that you're connecting people with fictions and occasionally with delusions and lies. And this can have very dangerous consequences. And we see it again, like in the 20th century, that you can create an extremely powerful and sophisticated information network like the Soviet Union, which is held together by extremely delusional ideas about humanity and society and economics. And again, when you have immense power in the service of mass delusion,

• 23:33Speaker 03

  what you get is things like the Gulags and things like an extreme totalitarian system that crushes the spirit and sometimes the lives of hundreds of millions of people. And this has happened again and again throughout history, and we don't see any improvement over time.

• 23:56David Hoffman?

  We only, we only see improvement in scale. We don't see improvement in quality.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  Which makes the danger bigger.

• 24:02David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  You know, if you had, if a Stone Age tribe had some delusion about the tribal spirit or whatever, so the consequences were limited. Maybe a couple of hundred people could be killed or there would have been some small-scale ecological disaster. But to, in the 20th century and even more so in the 21st century, when we have nuclear weapons and AIs and industrial technology, the consequences can be millions and millions of dead people and even the annihilation of human civilization itself. For most of history, even if you think about, I don't know, the Roman Empire or the Mongol Empire. Genghis Khan could not destroy human civilization.

• 24:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  It could cause massive slaughter, but eventually people would pick up the pieces and start again. With the type of technology we have developed over the last hundred years, if we make a big mistake, or if some of us make a big mistake, this could be game over.

• 25:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  You sort of wonder what Genghis Khan would have done with the nuclear launch codes. When you replay that counterfactual in history. Let's not do that. We're gonna go through kind of a brief history of these information networks in a second. But before we do, there's another thing I think we want to set up that you set up in your book, which is, I'll call these the two villains of the book. These are kind of negative attractor basins, or like failure modes for when, how information networks can go wrong. And so the first villain is the naive view of information. And these aren't actual villains, these are idea villains, let's say. And the second is kind of the populist view of information networks. Let's define both of those things, because I think it's going to be a recurring theme

• 25:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  as we talk about the history of these information networks. So what is the naive view of information, and why is it wrong?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Well, the naive view, which is kind of the semi-official religion of places like Silicon Valley, is that more information is always good for us. That information is truth, or information is the raw material of truth. So if you just produce more and more information, if you just flood the world with more information, this will result necessarily, inevitably, in a rise in knowledge and wisdom, and life would improve. And this is simply wrong. This is a misunderstanding. As we said earlier, most information isn't truth. So, and again, information in a completely kind of free market of information, the truth is likely to lose to fiction.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Because fiction has these inherent advantages. It's cheaper to produce, it's more simple, and it's more attractive.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  And it's no coincidence that, you know, we now have the most sophisticated information technology in history and people are losing the ability to talk with each other. You look at politics, let's say in the United States, you can disagree about many, many things, but one thing that Democrats and Republicans, I think, could agree on is that the conversation is simply breaking down. Yeah. That people can no longer agree on even basic facts, that people can no longer hold a reasoned debate and listen to each other. So we have this seemingly paradox, that the most sophisticated information technology in history and a breakdown in the conversation. And if you think, oh, this is just unique American phenomena because of this unique

• 27:31Speaker 03

  social or political condition of the US, no. You see, the same thing is happening in Brazil, the same thing is happening in France, the same thing is happening in the Philippines. So the problem is not in the unique politics or social situation of a specific country, but of the underlying information technology, which is based on this naive view that we just need to increase the volume and speed of information and everything would be okay. And again, this is a lesson that should have been learned many, many centuries ago, because every time a new information technology appears, you see the same thing. I hear people in Silicon Valley give these historical examples, like the way that the

• 28:15Speaker 03

  print revolution led to the scientific revolution. This is nonsense. The print revolution did not lead to the scientific revolution. At least about 200 years had to pass between Gutenberg and his printing press in the middle of the 15th century, until you see the flowering of the scientific revolution in the 17th century. What you have in between is a period when Europe is flooded with new information coming from the printing press, but most of it is junk and it leads to the worst peak of the wars of religion in Europe in the 16th and 17th century, with the Thirty Years' War

• 29:00Speaker 03

  being probably the worst war in European history until the World Wars of the 20th century. You see the peak of the witch hunt craze. Witch hunting, which we associate often with the Middle Ages, it's actually a modern phenomenon, which has a lot to do with the De print revolution. Europeans in the Middle Ages didn't care very much about witches. But after print came along, a conspiracy theory appeared, that there is a global conspiracy of Satan worshipping witches, which tries to destroy human civilization. And some of the biggest bestsellers of early modern Europe advanced this conspiracy theory. It was not, people did not read Copernicus

• 29:45Speaker 03

  and with his complicated mathematical calculations about astronomy. This was boring. They preferred, I mean, the biggest bestseller was a book called The Hammer of the Witches. And just to give you a flavor of what this book was like, there was a chapter in The Hammer of the Witches, again, biggest bestseller in late 15th century Europe, about how witches steal penises from men. So this is like 1500s fake news? This is 1500, the QAnon fake news. QAnon. And it's like, so they're like, they bring evidence. Like, the author, Heinrich Klemel, was a completely deluded and mentally unstable person,

• 30:30Speaker 03

  but he shaped the world with the printing press, with his book. He tells the story of a man who wakes up in the morning to discover that his penis is gone.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  Nightmare scenario. Nightmare scenario. So he goes to the village witch, because he suspects that she stole his penis. And then the village witch, he manages to kind of coerce, so bring me back my penis. And she says, okay, okay, okay, climb this tree. And you find a bird's nest at the top of the tree. So he climbs the tree, finds a bird's nest. In the bird's nest, he finds a lot of penises that the witch stole from different men in the village. Of course. And she said, okay, you can take yours. But he wants to take the biggest one. Natural. So she tells him, no, no, no, no, you can't take that one. This one belongs to the parish priest. Now, this was number one bestseller. Was this meant to be a story or is this meant to be truth? This is supposed to be truth. This was supposed to be truth.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  This is supposed, there is a dangerous conspiracy of Satan worshipping witches. They kill children. They have these cannibalistic OGs. They worship Satan. They summon hellstorm. If, like, the last hellstorm in the village that destroyed your crops, this was because of the witches. I mean, very entertaining, though. I would read that book. It led to the murder of tens of thousands of people in the most unspeakable way. This, this, this was the fuel of the great Europe, of the big European witch hunts. When, you know, people were burned at the stake, tortured. Like, one case, which I explore in, in Exodus, is the case of the Pappenheimer family.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  A family in Munich, in Germany, around 1600, that was arrested for allegedly being witches. And you have a mother and father and three children. And they start the inquisition, the interrogation of the family, by taking the youngest member, a boy, 10-year-old boy, Hansel, and torturing him until, in, in, in unspeakable ways, until he incriminates his mother, saying, yes, she is a witch. And then with this confession from the 10-year-old boy under torture, they break the other family members and then they execute all of them, including the 10-year-old boy, as, as witches. So, you know, you, you read The Hammer of the Witches and sometimes you feel like laughing because of all the nonsense in there.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  But then you need to remember, people took it extremely seriously. And, you know, in, in, in, it reached eventually also America. You know, the Salem witch hunts, one of the kind of founding scenes of, of American history, it starts with, with the, these, these books that spread these outrageous ideas that people took seriously.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  So this is all in a very long answer to what is the naive view of information. The naive view of information, let's invent a printing press. It would print a lot of books. The books will spread information. People will become wiser. No, if the, in a competition, in a free market between Copernicus, with his mathematical equations about how the moon and the earth are moving, and the hammer of the witches, with all these conspiracies about Satan worshipping cannibalistic witches that steal penises from men, it's obvious who is going to be the best seller. So if it's only about, if you don't have any mechanism to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable information,

• 33:59Speaker 03

  and to give a leg up to the reliable information, then flooding the world with more information is not a good idea.

• 34:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  So more information is not necessarily more truth, and certainly won't be more truth unless there's some sort of mechanism, institution, something that pays the economic cost to translate that truth into, or translate that information into truth and get a picture of reality. Okay, let's park that idea, because I think we'll come back to it throughout the rest of our conversation. Let's go to the other end of the spectrum, which is if we have, there is a naive view of information out there, which is like more is better. There's another view of information out there that you think is equally kind of like wrong-headed, which is the populist view of information. And so what is the populist view of information?

• 34:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  I get the sense that this has to do with kind of like the idea that information is power. It's all about power dynamics. So explain that, and why is that incorrect?

• 35:00Speaker 03

  The populist view, which you hear on both the right and the left, it's also in a way the Marxist view. It's one thing that people like Donald Trump agree with Karl Marx on, is that information is just a weapon in a power struggle.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Whereas the naive view is very, very naive, this populist and Marxist view is very, very cynical.

• 35:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  It tells us that humans are... The only thing humans care about is power. Any human interaction is a power struggle. So whenever somebody says something, this is just a weapon. They are trying to get something by saying it. If a scientist, or a journalist, or a judge, or anybody says something about anything, asking whether it's true or not is a mistake because nobody is interested in the truth. No journalist cares about the truth. No scientist cares about the truth. These are all conspiracies of various elites and various cabals that want to gain power. And they use truth claims. They claim to be telling the truth, but they are not interested in it.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  So every time you read an article in a scientific newspaper, every time you read, you hear something on the news, you need to ask whose interests are being served, whose privileges are being advanced. You don't ask, is it true? Because there is no truth. And this is a view, again, interestingly enough, you hear it on the extreme left, all the way from Marx to Foucault to the people who follow them, and you hear it on the right.

• 36:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  I would say, Yuval, I feel like there's probably people listening who are shaking their head, yeah. Like, because what you just said, this cynicism, David and I call it often like the spirit of nihilism, is kind of the spirit of the age, really. I mean, people are like, yeah, of course, it's like that. These are all power games and power...

• 36:57Speaker 03

  I will tell these people, start by looking at yourself. Are you a power-hungry demon, obsessed only with power? Is power the only thing that interests you in life?

• 37:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not my good days.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Yes, people are interested in power to some extent. That's true. In every institution, in every family, in every relationship, to some extent, there is a power struggle. But is this the only thing that happens? Is this... Your view of humanity is so... Dark and cynical. If you look at yourself, you would say, no, I'm not like that. Yes, I want power to some extent, but I'm also deeply interested in the truth. I want to know the truth about myself and the world. And this is essential for for human well being, for human happiness. You can never be happy if you don't know the truth about yourself, about your life. And starting from there, I think we should be more generous with our fellow human beings,

• 37:54Speaker 03

  even if they are journalists or scientists or work in some government department. They are, to some extent, they are all like me. They are all interested in the truth. And if you have this nihilistic view, that no, everybody is just interested in power, then this leads to societal collapse. Because you cannot trust any institution. You cannot trust your doctor, you cannot trust anything you hear on the news. So who do you trust? Like if everything is just a manipulation to gain power on you, who can you trust? And the idea that I don't need to trust anybody. I just need to be completely autonomous and self reliant.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  This is a complete delusion. We are, as animals, we are interconnected. We depend, you know, on the rain and the sun. We depend on the plants and the bees and the animals for our food, for our oxygen. We depend on fellow human beings. If we are injured, we need doctors and nurses to take care of us. When we are young, we need elders and parents and community members to take care of us. These fantasies that I can be completely independent from everything in the universe. No, you can't. And again, this is destructive for our well being. It doesn't mean you need to trust everybody.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Yes, there are power struggles in the world. There is corruption. This is why institutions, we need first of all several institutions to balance each other. It's good when you don't have just one newspaper in the country. It's good that you have several independent media outlets that can identify and correct each other mistakes and balance them. The hallmark of a really good institution is that it has strong self-correcting mechanisms. Nature is built on self-correction. If you think about how an organism functions, how a child learns to walk. So yes, you get instructions from outside, like you make a wrong move, your parents, your elders might correct you. But this can only go so far.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Ultimately, you need to be able to identify and correct your own mistakes. You make a step, you fall down, you acknowledge your mistake, you try something else, until you get it. Now, if you look at human history, you see institutions with weak self-correcting mechanisms and strong self-correcting mechanisms. And I would advise trust institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms. How do you know? Ask them if they ever make a mistake. An institution that never admits mistakes is a very dangerous institution. Don't trust it. And if you compare, for instance, a church with a scientific discipline or with a scientific journal.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  So a church is usually built on the assumption of infallibility. We never make any mistakes. Our holy book doesn't contain a single error. It doesn't contain a single lacuna. All the information humans need, all the truth humans need is in there. And there is no way to correct it. If you think about the Bible, for instance, there is no way in the Jewish or Christian religion to correct mistakes in the Bible. To take an extreme example, maybe. In the Ten Commandments, the tenth commandment endorses slavery. People often don't think about it, but there is an endorsement of slavery in the Ten Commandments.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Commandment number ten says that you should not covet your neighbor's field, or ox, or slaves, which implies that God is perfectly okay with people owning slaves. He's just angry if you covet the slaves of your neighbor. No, no, no, no, this is not good. Now, and even though we've changed our views on slavery since the Iron Age, since the first millennium BCE, when this text was written, there is no mechanism in the Bible to make any change, any amendment in the text. This in contrast to, for instance, the US Constitution, which also originally endorsed slavery,

• 42:16Speaker 03

  but the US Constitution included a mechanism to correct its own mistakes. It's not, it's not an easy mechanism, but it's there. And therefore, the amendment to the Constitution later banned slavery. There is no eleventh commandment in the Bible that says, "Well, you know, if there is some mistake in the Ten Commandments, if you have a two-third majority, you can change it." No mechanism. Now, if you go now to science, science is all about these amendments and corrections. Scientific journals only publish corrections. They don't, you know, if Einstein already said something, there is no point repeating it.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  You would publish a new article in a journal of physics only if you either discovered a mistake in Einstein's theories, or you discovered a lacuna, something that Einstein missed, didn't know that you expand on, on, on his theories. And it's baked into the incentive structure of the institution. It's very important to understand the incentive structure of institutions. In a church, for instance, or in a political party, you usually advance up the ranks by agreeing to what the elders before you said. If you start as a parish priest, you can get all the way to being pope

• 43:41Speaker 03

  without deviating a single inch from what the popes and theologians and bishops before you have said. You just confirm, yes, they're all correct. Everything is correct, you can become pope. In science, it doesn't work like that. The only way to get tenure and a professorship and eventually maybe a Nobel Prize is by publishing new articles and books. And, you know, publish or perish. And the only way that a prestigious scientific paper, like Nature, or Science, or Cell, would agree to publish your paper is if you uncovered a mistake in a previous theory, or you uncovered a lacuna.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  If you publish a paper that says Einstein was absolutely correct, you will not get a Nobel Prize for that. We know that, we know. So the basic incentive structure of scientific institutions is constantly putting pressure on the members of the institution to expose mistakes and lacunae in the institution's models and theories. And this is something that gains my trust.

• 44:54David Hoffman?

  So, Yuval, the naive view of information that you call it, you're refuting this idea that when we invented the printing press, the commonly understood idea that when we invented the printing press, we were able to produce a Cambrian explosion of information. And that was not the thing.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  No, we did produce a Cambrian explosion of information, most of it was junk.

• 45:12David Hoffman?

  Right, which was not, and it wasn't the new information that brought us to the scientific revolution.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  No, I mean, to get to Newton, you need these new scientific institutions that took 200 years to form. Newton appears at the same time that you have these first scientific publications, that when they publish something, they ask not how many people would buy this. But what evidence do we have that this is true? And what new knowledge? What corrections and lacunae are exposed by this new book by Newton?

• 45:50David Hoffman?

  Right, so you're not advocating for more information. You're actually advocating for new mechanisms, new institutions, which is a very hard thing to advocate for. I think that's been kind of like the big meta problem of humanity since inception, I would say. How do you propose to overcome this problem? How do we invent new mechanisms? Or how have we done it in the past?

• 46:15Speaker 03

  First of all, we start by having a more accurate view of information networks and of the flow of information in society. On the one hand, we avoid this naive view that we don't need any mechanisms because we just need more information and everything else will write itself from there. And also avoiding the cynical view that, oh, any institution we create, any mechanism we create, it is just going to be this kind of power mechanism to enrich a small elite. So let's get rid of all these institutions and definitely not create new ones. So we need this middle path. And creating good institutions is an extremely difficult

• 46:59Speaker 03

  and very often unheroic and boring thing to do. Well, if you think, what are these institutions? So think about, I don't know, New York City, how it functions. So one of the things that enable New York City to function is the sewage system. And I think the sewage system is a very good example of a good institution, but something that is difficult to create and to maintain. When I hear people talk about, you know, the deep state, I think about the sewage system. This is the deep state, you know, a system of pipes and pumps running under our houses and streets and in the dark and protecting our lives.

• 47:39David Hoffman?

  And also full of shit.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  And full of shit and protecting our lives.

• 47:43David Hoffman?

  Not glamorous.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Not glamorous at all. And where does it start? You know, if you go back to London in the 19th century, there is no kind of organized sewage system.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  And London in the 19th century, uh, one, maybe the biggest city in the world, the richest, but full of epidemics.

• 48:00David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Cholera, dysentery. And there was a big cholera epidemic in London in the middle of the 19th century. And, uh, people thought it was something in the air. But one scientist, a doctor, John Snow, he thought that it was in the water. Now, how do you decide whether it's in the air or in the water? You can invent all kinds of theories and what... John Snow was a bureaucrat. He was a scientific bureaucrat. He said, "Okay, I'll make lists." He goes around London. Every time he hears about a new case of cholera, he runs to the place and interviews the person, or if the person is dead, he, he, his, his or her family. Where do you get your drinking water from?

• 48:43Speaker 03

  And he has these lists upon lists of cholera patients and the source of their drinking water. And based on this very patient and boring and bureaucratic work, he manages to identify a certain pump in Soho, in the center of London, as the epicenter of the epidemic. Most of the cholera patients, one way or the other, they drank water from that well, from that pump. And he convinces the city officials in London to shut down the pump, the pump, and the epidemic stops. And then they inquire further and they discover that somebody dug a cesspit

• 49:25Speaker 03

  a meter away from the well of drinking water. And a sewage from the cesspit was, uh, uh, sipping into the drinking water. And today, if you want to dig a well or a cesspit in London, you have to fill so many forms. You know, you have to go to this government office and fill these forms and get these permissions and there are inspectors and whatever. And this is bureaucracy and it saves our lives. Sometimes, it sometimes also, you know, can kill us or make our life miserable. But without a functioning, and you know, it's a huge system.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  You have so many thousands of engineers and workers working there under, under the ground in fixing and discovering leaks in the sewage system. And you need, they need to get paid. So you need accountants to make sure that they get paid and you need tax, tax collectors because well, you get the money to pay all these, all these sewage workers. And this is an institution. It's not glamorous. You know, part of our problem, I think, is with art. Artists love mythology, they hate bureaucracy. If you think about, you know, all these Marvel superhero movies. So it's, it's basically mythology. It's, it's heroes and gods.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  When was the last time you saw a Marvel movie about bureaucracy? Like a super accountant that defeats the bad guys by forcing them to fill all these forms and discovering tax evasion and whatever. It's very difficult to create a good movie or TV series about bureaucracy. Because really, biologically, if you go back to the Stone Age, there is no bureaucracy, there are heroes. If you live in a small tribe in the Stone Age, so you have heroes, the people who kind of fight against the other tribe or who killed the mammoth in the last hunt. And you have the guardian spirits, the gods, and this is the center of the mythology.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  And we are, we carry millions of years of, of this baggage of hero worshiping. And in the Stone Age, there were no, no bureaucracies. This is a very, very new creation. So we are not programmed to be interested in it, even though if you live in a modern society, then bureaucracy has a much bigger impact on your life than these superheroes. If you think about, you know, the government budget, what an important thing, the government budget determines what the quality of the healthcare and education and the roads and the bridges. And when was the last time you saw a TV series or a movie about the government budget?

• 52:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's so interesting, I think, about that story of the bureaucrat who figured out the epidemic outbreak is it sort of demonstrates what you've been talking about, which it would have been very easy for that bureaucrat to read the Hammer the Witches, and we saw this epidemic outbreak and just say, oh, there's more witches to burn.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's get them.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Let's find the witch and burn her, and the epidemic will be over.

• 52:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. He did the costly thing of actually finding out the truth and figuring out what reality is, and we all reap the benefits of that. So as we're going through the rest of this conversation, I feel like there's a one thing that your books often do for me is like they unlock mental models. And so we've got a mental model of the naive view of information. The thing that maybe starts to solve that is self-correcting mechanisms. We've got that piece. And we've got another mental model of the populist view of information, which is too nihilistic. It's too cynical. I mean, look at what we've created. If that was true, we could never have a city like New York City or a nation state. So that

• 53:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  clearly also can't be true. Now, what I'd like to do is go through back in history. And you said one of the things earlier in our conversation that one of the most useful things we can actually do is understand our information networks. So I want to go back in history so that we can anticipate and take some lessons into the next information network, which is basically the network that we're living in, the computer age.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  But before we get there, let's do a brief history of information networks. And for me, there was a game Yuval I used to play all the time. It's called Civilization.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. I don't know if you've ever played this.

• 53:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 53:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Basically, you start with some land and some resources, and your civilization has to unlock a tech tree. And so at each stage of progress, you might unlock something like mathematics. And mathematics leads to physics, and that eventually leads to, you know, nuclear reactors and that kind of capability. And that's sort of how I see, that's my mental model for your books. It's basically like you're talking about these information network upgrades that humanity has unlocked to allow them to coordinate and scale civilizations. So let's talk. About the first, and this was uh like kind of in your book Sapiens, really, which was like the original Homo sapiens technology that came about through language.

• 54:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that is really the story.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is the original information network that set our species apart from the Neanderthals and the chimpanzees and the entire animal kingdom. When did humans start telling stories?

• 54:48Speaker 03

  We don't know for sure, but the evidence points at around seventy thousand years ago, sixty, seventy thousand years ago, that we start seeing larger numbers of Homo sapiens cooperating. And at the same time, we start seeing art, new kinds of art, like cave paintings. And we start seeing evidence of religion, like complex burials. And we don't have any written evidence, of course, so we are not sure. But before about seventy thousand years ago, there were Homo sapiens, but like Neanderthals, they only cooperated in very small groups, like fifty people. How do you know that? From archaeology.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  You look at the tools made by Homo sapiens and Neanderthals for about a hundred thousand years ago. You see that the tools are mostly made from local material. Material from like you find a stone knife. It's made from locally available stones. But then fifty thousand years ago, in Homo sapiens archaeological sites, you start seeing tools that are made from stones and seashells and other material from hundreds of kilometers away. You know, with seashells, it's easy to know what, like you find an archaeological site in the center of Europe, and there is a seashell from the Mediterranean.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  But today, with with advanced chemistry, even if you find like a flint knife, you can tell exactly where the flint was sourced. And you see that it's sometimes sourced from three hundred kilometers away, a thousand kilometers away. So this indicates some kind of trade or exchange between different human bands.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Now, how do you exchange or trade flint with people you don't really know? People from another band? You don't see chimpanzees do it. You don't see evidence for that with Neanderthals. We think about trade as something natural. "Oh, of course, it's good for me, it's good for you, let's trade." If that was so, why is it that no other animal except Homo sapiens trades? Because interest is not enough. You need trust. In order to trade with somebody, you need to trust them. Now, the biggest question in trade and in much of human history is how do you trust strangers? It's easy to trust your own band members, family, friends. How do you trust strangers?

• 57:21Speaker 03

  And this is where stories come. Stories are a technology to create trust between strangers. Like, "I believe in this big spirit, you believe in the same spirit. I don't know you personally, but because we both believe in the same spirit, I trust you." And how do I know that you believe in the same spirit as me? Maybe you have some kind of distinctive headgear that indicates that you believe in the same spirit as me. So now, if you look on the streets of New York, you will see it. People going with different funny hats. And the hats telling like two Jews that never met in their life, they immediately know, "Oh, he's also Jewish." Why? Because he has the same funny hat that I'm wearing.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  So I can trust him or her, which means that there is a basis also for economic cooperation. And it's no wonder that, you know, you look at the American dollar. It's not the Stone Age, it's also the modern era. You look at the US dollar, what's written on it in God we trust? There is no dollar without some god or some mythology. So like in China, they don't have gods, so they have Chairman Mao on all their renminbi. And in Mao, we trust. He's the ancestral spirit. And if I trust Mao and you trust Mao, we can cooperate.

• 58:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's what's so fascinating about these stories. You have this concept of the difference between subjective reality and intersubjective reality. And I think that's a really important differentiation. So subjective reality would be something that, a reality inside of my own head as an individual. But what Homo sapiens does, what we do as humans, is we create these intersubjective realities, these stories that we share and we all believe collectively together. And we use these to coordinate on things. Exactly. And when you say stories, I just want to make this clear. You're not just talking about mythologies, fairy tales, this type of thing. You think of, like, a corporation is a story. Yeah. Money, as you were talking about earlier in the episode, is also a story.

• 59:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Why? Because it's an intersubjective reality. We all believe the dollar is valued at whatever, you know, CPI, the price I can purchase this basket of goods for, because, why? We all believe it.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. It has no objective value. I mean, you can't eat or drink a dollar. There is nothing useful you can do with it. But as long as everybody trusts it, you can go to a complete stranger and give them a dollar bill and get a piece of bread or an apple that you can eat. And, you know, you look at the United States today, and one of the last stories that still connects everybody is the story of money. You know, Democrats and Republicans can hardly agree about anything, but they still use the same money. And they still use the same price system. They can still agree on the price of a gallon of gasoline.

• 1:00:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  They don't even think about questioning it. So it's not like one party's like, we're going to create our own, you know, unit and it's going to be called...

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  The Republican dollar and the Democratic dollar and we can't... What would happen if this would be the case? I mean, then we really see societal collapse. If people can no longer trust even the... And in many ways, money is the most successful story ever, ever told, because it's the one story that almost everybody believes and agree on. And if this goes, then it's really chaos.

• 1:00:51David Hoffman?

  So there's two aspects of a good story that I want to get your take on. One is scale. One reason why money is such a good story is because it scales.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  Successful, I mean, good or not depends what you do with it, but it is very successful.

• 1:01:05David Hoffman?

  Right, very successful, yes. And so one aspect, one successful aspect is that how far can the scale? If you take a dollar to basically any country in the world, you can generally trade it for what it's worth.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15David Hoffman?

  Successful story. And then there's also an idea of like how aligned with truth that story may or may not be. Perhaps the Constitution of the United States is a story that's more aligned with reality than a religious document. How do you think about like the qualitative nature of like whether these stories are good or not?

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  You know, the basic question is whether the consequences are harmful, whether it creates more misery and suffering and violence in the world, the story? Or whether the story helps us to alleviate suffering? So again, you think about a religious story. It can be used for both purposes. You can use religious ideals and mythologies in your stories about Jesus in order to inspire people to be more compassionate, to donate to charity, to build a hospital. And then it doesn't matter if what they tell you about Jesus is true or not, or if the image, the portrait of Jesus that hangs in your house,

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  whether it's a true liking of the actual man who lived in the Galilee like 2,000 years ago or not, doesn't matter. If it inspires you to help people, then it's a good story. But you can use exactly the same story to start a religious war, to persecute minorities, to start an inquisition, a witch hunt. And then that's terrible. And the story can go, usually the story can go both ways.

• 1:02:53David Hoffman?

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• 1:05:13David Hoffman?

  We've been talking about information networks, and this is the subject of your most recent book, Sapiens, talks about stories. How do you differentiate between story and information network? Are these the same things? Are they different somehow?

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Story is just one, it's kind of the original information technology of Homo sapiens. But after that, we came up with additional information technologies. For instance, the written document.

• 1:05:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, we're ready to unlock the next the next step in the tech tree then, which is the document.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  The document.

• 1:05:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  So we had stories, and that was fantastic. And then, when did the document, when did sort of, I guess, the written story or the written word come about? When did we first see that?

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  The written word appears when human societies grow big, and there is a lot of boring information that doesn't fit into the kind of mold of stories. And this is something like taxes.

• 1:06:06David Hoffman?

  Bad story. I don't enjoy that story.

• 1:06:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  David hates that story.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  You can use a very inspiring mythological story to explain to people why they need to pay taxes, why they need to pay the church or the king or whatever. But to actually have a taxation system, it's not enough to have this mythological story. You need very long lists of who owns what and who owes what, and she already paid her taxes and he didn't, and so he has to also to pay a fine. And this is a lot of data, which is in the shape of a list, not of a story. And even though it's crucial to our existence if you live in a large society, it's just boring. It's boring as in,

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  I'm sometimes thinking of something objective about the way the human brain functions. Because we evolved for millions of years as mammals and apes in social communities, we are very interested in the kind of dramas of heroes and villains and the struggle. But we never had, until a few thousand years ago, to deal with a taxation system. So even though it's extremely important, you know, if they had a recitation on television of the tax records of the United States, who would watch it?

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  And so you can't do a taxation system just with stories. And this is where documents were invented. Documents were invented, the written document was invented not in order to write mytho, to write down our mythologies. This came much later. It was invented to write down ownership.

• 1:07:48David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  And to write down taxes. And the original invention was very simple in technological sense. It was basically just playing with mud. The first writing system developed in Mesopotamia, what is today Iraq, about 5,000 years ago. It's on clay tablets and clay is just mud, really, just a glorified name for a certain kind of mud. And they discovered that if you take a reed or a stick and make imprints in, in, in the mud, you can preserve these boring lists instead of in your brain that can't hold them. And this is the birth of the written document. And it leads to a major revolution, social, political, economic.

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  If you think about ownership again, what does it mean to own a field? If you live in a society without written records, then to own a field means that all the neighbors in your community agree that this is your field and they don't graze their goats there and they don't pick fruits there without your permission. So ownership is a communal affair. It's a communal agreement, which means on the one hand that it limits individual rights. You can't sell your field to somebody else unless the community agrees. Because the community defines ownership. It also limits the power of distant authorities, like a king in some distant capital.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  The king can't know who owns what field in every distant village because there are no records. So it's very difficult to build these centralized authoritarian kingdoms.

• 1:09:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the information didn't span very well.

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's again, it's, it's, it's an agreement between a couple of neighbors. How would the king know who owns what and how much tax everybody should pay? Then you have the written document. And ownership changes its meaning. Now to own a field means that there is a piece of dry mud. Which says that this field is mine. And today it's the same. To own a field or a house today means that there is a piece of paper or there is some electronic data which says that this field is mine. That's it. This is ownership. Now, on the one hand, it potentially increases individual rights

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  because now I can sell my field to somebody without getting the permission of my neighbors. I just, he or she gives me, I don't know, some gold and I give them this piece of mud or this piece of paper and now they own the field. That's it. So this increases individual freedom. At the same time, it also increases the power of distant authorities because now the king can know who owns what. In thousands of distant villages, he has an archive with all these dry pieces of mud recording who owns what. And this is the basis for a taxation system

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  and he can tax everybody and pay bodyguards and soldiers. And you see the rise of the first centralized authoritarian kingdoms and empires in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt around the same time. So like with every information technology, it's very important to realize it usually goes both ways. The same technology can liberate us and the same technology can enslave us depending on what we do with it.

• 1:11:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  It can either liberate us or save us, but it certainly does.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Or enslave us.

• 1:11:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Enslave us, but it certainly doesn't either case scale us. You know, like in terms of our capability and our power. I want to dive into that a little bit more because as you can imagine, like on Begless, we are pretty much obsessed with this story of what you just described of kind of like money and property rights. And to see how it originated, where we had these stories that were kind of myths and that translates from human to human very easy. You can recall it. You hear a good story. You want to tell someone else. You know, you can memorize it. What documents unlocked for us was all of the boring side of things. And so one of our first writing technologies that we created in Sumeria is the cuneiform tablets and the ledger.

• 1:12:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so from that, from these lists, from this ledger, we essentially are able to create new intersubjective realities like property rights, like credit. Oh, how do I, you owe me something. Usually it would be in a small tribe setting. It would be reputational. Okay. You know, Yuval owes me such and such because I did Y favor, right? But now we can record this sort of ownership in some sort of centrally managed bureaucratic ledger. And that indeed is incredibly important. I think one example of this I loved from your book, and I'm wondering if you could kind of share the story here, is the old Assyrian documents.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so they would literally, and this is an example of taking an intersubjective reality and translating it to some physical form. But they would have debt tablets, would they not? And if you pay your debt, they would actually like

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  Break the tablet.

• 1:12:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. How did that work? What's that?

• 1:13:01Speaker 03

  So if you took a loan for somebody, then your debt is that there is a clay tablet that says you own that person at 10 pieces of silver. And this is the debt. The debt is this clay tablet. And if you pay back the loan, then in all the Syrian dialect, they would say that the document is killed. The debt is killed. And they would actually physically take the clay tablet, which records the debt, and break it. And so the debt is now dead. That's over. No more debt. Now, what happens if the dog ate the debt?

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  Like, an Assyrian merchant kept your debt, this clay tablet in his house, and the dog came and ate it. It also died. That's it. There is no more debt. And what happens on the other hand, if you repaid the loan, but for some reason you forgot or you couldn't break the document, then you still own it.

• 1:14:10Speaker 03

  And again, it may seem, sound strange to us, but think today, again, a simple thing like money. If you have a five-dollar bill and the dog ate it, that's it. These five dollars are gone. So the debt is not something that, it's not that you have the document and the document points to something in reality. There is a debt out there in the world and the document simply points at it. No, the document is the debt. And if you destroy the document, there is no more debt. And this is happens many times. You see it in rebellions, in popular revolts throughout history. One of the first thing that the rebels do is to destroy the central archive. Because they know if we burn all these papers that record our debts, the debts are gone.

• 1:14:56David Hoffman?

  So Yuval, we're entering into a new era of storytelling. I use ChatGPT almost every single day. And when I prompt it, it spits me back information. It spits me back out data, which I then generally kind of assume is truth unless it's especially critical and I gotta go double check it. But these are the new mediums that we are now operating in, in the 21st century. And so we have all of these lessons that you have taught us from the past in Sapiens and now also in Nexus, about the ways that, you know, information networks scale, either for better or for worse. Can you carry this lesson forward into this age of AI? Where we now have these new technologies, which are fantastic at processing information in one particular way.

• 1:15:40David Hoffman?

  But we're still going to run into some of these very same similar problems that we've run into in the past. What are your concerns about as we run into this age of like silicon and AI?

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  Well, the key thing to understand about AI, it's the first technology in history, which is not a tool, it's an agent. I mean, everything we created before,

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  tablets of clay or printing presses or radio sets or atom bombs, these were tools that we decide what to do with them. AI is not a tool, it's an independent agent. The very definition, how do you know, like today, everything is, they say it's AI. How do you know if something is really an AI? If it can make decisions by itself and create new ideas by itself? And this has enormous positive potential. It could lead to the best healthcare system in history, to the best education system in history, to the best transportation system in history. You know, if you replace human drivers with self-driving vehicles,

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  I guess you could save a million people every year. Because every year, about 1.2, 1.3 million people die in car accidents. Most of them are caused by human error, like a driver drinking alcohol and driving or falling asleep at the wheel. This is something AI won't do. So it has enormous positive potential. It also has enormous negative potential. Because, and this goes back to the issues of power, we are losing power. Every previous technology gave humanity more power. This is the first technology that potentially takes power away from us because it increasingly makes the decisions about us and shapes the world according to its view of the world, not according to our view of the world.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  If you think, for instance, about ownership. So AI is not going to be one big computer somewhere. It's going to be millions, maybe billions of agents everywhere. Think about millions of AI bureaucrats in every government office and corporation and university and whatever. And these AI bureaucrats making decisions about us. So what does it mean that I own a house? It means that some AI says that I own the house. How does the AI decide whether I own it or not? I have no idea.

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  Part of the problem with the rise of AI is that, and again, I'm not talking about this Hollywood science fiction scenario of robots shooting people. It's about the AI in the government office or in the corporation that decides who owns what. And it will be increasingly difficult for human beings to understand how the AI decides things, because it's inherently an alien intelligence. The acronym AI, it traditionally stood for artificial intelligence, but I think it's better to think about it as alien intelligence, not alien in the sense of coming from outer space, alien in the sense that it's, it's makes decisions and creates idea in a fundamentally

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  different way than the organic brain of human beings. It can process immense amounts of data, it can think on, on, on a mathematical level, which is simply impossible for human beings. It's relentless, it's tireless, it never needs to rest, or to sleep, or to go hang out with friends, if you think about the financial system, for instance. So, um, this is the, the, the playground, the ideal playground for AI is finance, because it's a purely informational and mathematical realm. In, you know, in self-driving vehicles, every year they say, next year, and it's still not

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  coming, because it's very difficult for an, an, an, an AI to interact with a physical, the messy physical reality of a New York street, very difficult. But the New York Stock Exchange, it's perfect for AIs, it's just data, data in, data out. So what happens when AI takes over finance? What happens if, uh, which is happening all around us? What happens if it starts creating financial devices that no human being is capable of understanding, because they are just mathematically orders of magnitude more complex than the human brain is capable of handling?

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  So again, it's not necessarily bad, but it means that we are losing control, we are losing, if, if today, I don't know, maybe 1% of humanity understands the financial system, and I think this is a huge overstate, overestimate, in 10 years, it could be zero. That because of AI, the financial system just becomes so complicated, that it doesn't matter how smart you are, or where you went in, to college, or whatever, it's just beyond the human capacity.

• 1:20:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  You talk about some of the downstream effects that we've seen in the early stages of these AI agents and making decisions for us. And of course, in the other previous manifestations of information technology-like stories and writing, it was all human to human, making the decisions in the network. Now we have another entrant, which is some AI making decisions. And you talk about this idea of social media engagement algorithms being sort of the dress rehearsal for future AI agents. And basically, they are trained to just give you the most engaging piece of content that will capture your eyeballs for just like one more minute, one more minute. And we've sort of seen how that's gone. It's created a lot of fast food style content for us. So we've got that problem as kind of a dress rehearsal.

• 1:21:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then we also have another problem as we enter this computer digital age, which is mass surveillance.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a huge, huge problem.

• 1:21:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  You take the Soviet Union in the 1930s and you just extrapolate that forward. Imagine if Stalin had the capabilities of AI agents and all of this digital data and the ability to kind of like monitor you. So there are these two almost attractor basins. There's kind of the chaos and anarchy type of attractor basin. If you just let things go wild and you have this naive view of information. And then there's kind of maybe the autocracy attractor basin of mass surveillance and how terrifying that can be. But since we've learned earlier in this episode, you think the way out is basically self-correcting mechanisms. I guess my question to you is, all right, we're in this computer age now. What types of self-correcting mechanisms can we add to this process?

• 1:22:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, no one's working on it. There's not necessarily a market incentive to create a new scientific institution as we did in the wake of the printing press. But like, what can we do? Do you have any ideas here for what type of self-correcting mechanisms might work? And how we should go about even finding out what they are?

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  And the answer is boring, which is institutions. Because again, I mean, there are various regulations we can think about today and which can we can discuss, like forbidding AIs to pretend to be humans. That's a very, very important regulation we need yesterday. But these specific regulations are not going to be enough. Because we are just at the very beginning of the AI revolution. We haven't seen anything yet. I mean, if you think about writing, so we are now in ancient Mesopotamia. When the first geek thought about putting a stick on a piece of mud and say, eh, this can make some imprint here.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  I mean, and, and, and you, you have thousands of years of developments ahead of you with, with writing. And we are in an analogous situation right now. That chat GPT and all that, this is the first primitive generation of AI. But the AI revolution moved much, much faster than the writing revolution. And so we can't anticipate what will be the threats and opportunities of AI in 10 years. So we need living institutions staffed by the best human talent and also the best cutting edge technology that can understand the new threats and opportunities as they develop

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  and react to them on the fly. We can't anticipate in advance. If you think you can anticipate in advance what, how AI will develop, it is not AI. It's still basically limited to your brain capacity. A real AI is something that can learn and change by itself. Yes, we created the first, it's like, you know, you, you, you, you have a baby. So yes, in, in one way you created this baby. But a baby means something with a capacity to learn and change by itself in ways that the parents cannot anticipate and control. And this is now the situation with, with, with AI.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  So there is no alternative, speaking from a historical experience, to the difficult and boring job of either updating existing institutions or creating new institutions that will be able to deal with it. Just putting trust in pure technology is very dangerous. It's, it's, it's, it assumes that the technology is infallible. The technology will never make any mistake. And this is terrible. I mean, and the basic assumption about AI, AI is extremely powerful, but it's not infallible.

• 1:25:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know you've all, we don't have much time left in this conversation. We've gotten kind of to the endpoint of where we are in modern history and the recognition that we need self-correcting mechanisms and sort of new institutions, probably that the old institutions in the computer age won't help us out very much. Governments are slow, they're difficult, they might do the wrong thing. So the question that humanity is faced with is what are these new institutions? There is a class of bottom-up mechanisms and institutions that I feel like classically liberal democracies have depended on previously. These are things like the US Constitution, of which you speak very highly of in your book, right? Enshrinements of freedom of speech. What is freedom of speech?

• 1:26:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that is a self-correcting mechanism for societies. Or, you know, things like markets, free markets, and the ability to sort of, if this market is not serving you, then you exit. We also think that encryption can be part of the bulwark against digital surveillance. If every citizen had the ability to encrypt all of their data, well, then third-party totalitarian dictatorships couldn't actually extract it from them and spy on them. This is kind of the project, really, of cryptocurrency. And what we think we're doing with Ethereum, Bitcoin, these other things, is creating decentralized currencies, decentralized property right systems, ledgers, that can be another

• 1:27:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  avenue to express this self-correction mechanism into the future and into the digital age. I know you're not an expert on that entire project, but what do you see in the potential of cryptocurrency, at least at this point in time? It certainly is, I think you would acknowledge, an interesting intersubjective reality, the way that Bitcoin has grown from nothing to, you know, $1.3 trillion today. But what else do you see as the potential here?

• 1:27:27Speaker 03

  I think the key two points is to keep the humans in the loop and to avoid this kind of trench wall for mentality. That you see, and this is because of the type of information network that we now live in, that almost every important subject very quickly become politicized and polarized. And you have to immediately decide I'm for or against it, and have very strong views and like a forty fire position, and it's trench warfare. And my basic views, I don't know yet. It's too early. It's definitely a very powerful tools, new tool that we have, with cryptocurrencies and blockchain and so forth.

• 1:28:11Speaker 03

  Based on historic experience, my guess is that it can be used for good or for bad. And if you think about blockchain, for instance, so it sounds democratic, like fifty-one percent of users basically decide what reality is. But our users are not humans. What if you have a blockchain system in which the government has fifty-one percent of users, as is the case in some countries today in the world? So this is, this is, then it becomes a tool of totalitarian surveillance and control like never before in history. At the press of a button, the government can change the past if it is fifty-one percent of users.

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  So, and don't rush to conclusions. And because the technology, every technology is fallible. This kind of technological utopianism, we just need to find the right gadget, and it will solve the problem of all these fucked up humans. That's, that's, that's again going back to these ancient mythological stories, that something is wrong with human nature, so we need intervention from outside humanity. We need some god, we need some magician, some spirit that will save us from ourselves. And that's a very dangerous and irresponsible idea.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  I wouldn't trust any of these kinds of magic technologies to, to by itself solve all the problems, because technology itself is, is fallible.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  So we need to construct a system in which humans are still in the loop. And they are able, if we create, I don't know, some cryptocurrency and we put a lot of trust in it, a lot of weight on it, and something goes wrong, there is still a human institution that can identify, look, this is going in a very dangerous direction, and we need the ability to change it or to stop it. And if you only trust the technology, that's very dangerous because we don't have a lot of experience with these new technologies. So to anticipate in advance where it will be in five years with humans, yes, with all

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  their problems and faults and weaknesses, at least we have, you know, thousands of years of experience with them. So we know what to beware of and how to handle it. I wouldn't throw away all this experience and then just put all my bets on a new and really untested technology.

• 1:30:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Eval, this has been fantastic. And I know you take the longest view of history here. So you're going to let this crypto blockchain experiment play out a bit more before you weigh in. I'll share a personal hope, which is that your next book, you know, eight years from now, six to eight years from now, I don't know what your writing schedule is on, but hopefully by that time, we have some more proof cases for the self-correcting ability, the way to check basically AI centralization forces with blockchain tech. So we'll see about that. I think there'll be a world of centralized blockchain technology and decentralized technology, and the decentralized one is the thing to pay attention to. So maybe I'll end with kind of your impassioned plea at the end of this book, which is we

• 1:31:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  need to do the hard work to commit ourselves to the rather mundane work of building institutions with self, strong self-correcting mechanisms. And the idea from your book that I took away was if you fix the information networks, you can fix the world. Eval, thank you so much for being with us on Bankless.

• 1:31:48Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:31:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cheers.