Making Sense - Sam Harris - #201 — A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari

00:00:00.000 i am here with yuval noah harari yuval thanks for joining me again thank you for inviting me again

00:00:25.500 i think the last time we spoke i think it was we did a live event in san francisco which i really

00:00:31.680 enjoyed and then we had done a one podcast before that but now the the entire world has been pushed

00:00:37.560 off a cliff since we last met so uh first before we get into big picture topics how are you doing

00:00:45.200 how are you weathering the pandemic for we are fine i think i mean me and my husband we are self

00:00:50.420 isolating in our house and uh you know it's difficult because we can't meet our family and

00:00:56.260 friends and so forth but uh we haven't lost our job our business didn't collapse we're actually

00:01:01.220 working harder than ever yeah many of our friends and family members have lost their jobs or businesses

00:01:06.540 so we know we are one of the lucky ones yeah yeah it's a it's it's a difficult time and you know you

00:01:13.120 look ahead and i'm less worried about the epidemic itself but the economic and political consequences

00:01:19.240 could be really catastrophic if we don't get a handle on it so it's yeah it's quite a worrying

00:01:25.100 time that's what i want to talk to you about israel has been pretty aggressive in their handling of

00:01:31.760 this right if i'm not mistaken how would you compare israel to the rest of the developed world

00:01:37.520 in terms of how they've responded well you know if you measure just in terms of uh how many sick

00:01:43.460 people how many dead people then we are doing very well but in in other terms the situation is quite

00:01:50.380 quite bleak i mean the economic crisis is is very severe the political situation is is even worse

00:01:57.700 we i mean it started way before the the coronavirus it's been a very tumultuous year politically

00:02:07.100 with three elections and when when this crisis began the unelected prime minister tried to use

00:02:15.240 the excuse of fighting coronavirus to shut down the elected parliament and rule basically as a dictator

00:02:22.140 with emergency decrees luckily this was averted there was enough pushback from the media from the public

00:02:28.320 and from the political parties so parliament was reopened and some kind of democratic balance was

00:02:34.260 reinstated but we still don't have a government and lots of frightening things happening like giving

00:02:42.000 the secret police the authority to set up surveillance of israeli citizens again on the

00:02:49.780 excuse of uh fighting the epidemic i'm not against surveillance i just don't think that this should be

00:02:55.860 in the hands of the secret police yeah yeah well so most of our listeners will be familiar with your work

00:03:02.180 just to remind people you you have written now three books that have been especially influential

00:03:08.720 sapiens homo deus and 21 lessons for the 21st century and your background is is as a historian but you

00:03:17.480 bring a really wonderful interdisciplinary approach to big questions of human life and the maintenance of

00:03:26.520 civilization and where is all this going and this includes really everything that human beings could

00:03:33.420 conceivably care about and yeah i mean there's just so much here that is in your wheelhouse in terms of

00:03:40.300 the kinds of things that we need to change maintain struggle to re-envision i mean many people are viewing

00:03:48.640 this pandemic apart from all the obvious pain that is producing and will produce economically and politically

00:03:55.000 many of us are viewing it as a an opportunity to really reset society on some basic level if we can seize

00:04:04.140 this opportunity so i guess before we get to any of the silver linings we might find here let's

00:04:10.320 wade into the darkness what problems has this pandemic exposed in your view just across the board

00:04:18.040 politically technologically socially and obviously you know epidemiologically but just how how are you

00:04:25.140 viewing this as a dissection of all that we haven't put right in society maybe the biggest problem has to

00:04:34.900 do with the situation of the international system we are seeing a complete lack of global leadership a

00:04:41.540 complete lack of there is no global plan of action either to fight the epidemic itself or to deal with

00:04:49.560 the economic crisis in previous cases like this in in the last few decades the united states has taken up the

00:04:56.660 role of global leader whether it's in the ebola epidemic of 2014-15 or whether it's in the global financial

00:05:02.760 crisis of 2008 now the u.s has is kind of an anti-leadership position trying to undermine the few

00:05:11.620 organizations that like the world health organization that are trying to organize some kind of global

00:05:17.400 response and this is not something new this is a continuation of u.s policy of the last of the last few years

00:05:24.800 basically in i think in 2016 the united states in the election united states came to the world and said look

00:05:31.480 we resign from the job of global leader we just don't want it anymore from now onwards we care only

00:05:37.660 about ourselves america has no longer any friends in the world it has only interests and the whole thing

00:05:44.080 of america first and you know now america is first in the number of dead people and sick people and very

00:05:51.700 few would follow american leadership not only because of the record of the last few years but also because

00:05:58.180 the world has also lost faith in american competence i mean you look at the way that the united states is

00:06:04.700 dealing with the epidemic at home and you say well maybe it's a good thing they are no longer leading

00:06:09.540 the world yeah and there is nobody really to fill the vacuum left by the u.s so you know we do we do see

00:06:17.560 some level of global cooperation in especially in the scientific field with the sharing of information

00:06:23.920 and common efforts to understand the epidemic to understand the best ways to treat it to isolate

00:06:31.680 people to develop a vaccine so there is there is some hope there but generally speaking the level of

00:06:38.760 international cooperation is far far lower than would have been expected or could have been hoped for

00:06:46.440 and again this is not something new this is a legacy of the changes that not only in the u.s but all over

00:06:54.200 the world in the last few years we've seen the rise of extreme nationalism and isolationism and a whole

00:07:00.840 discourse of telling people that there is an inherent contradiction between nationalism and globalism

00:07:10.040 between loyalty to your nation and global solidarity and leaders not not only trump but also bolsonaro and

00:07:18.860 the right in the right-wing parties in in europe telling people that of course you have to choose

00:07:23.680 national loyalty and reject globalism and now we are paying the price for it the thing is that

00:07:30.480 really there is no contradiction between nationalism and globalism because nationalism is not about hating

00:07:37.140 foreigners it's about loving your compatriots and there are many situations like a pandemic in which

00:07:44.020 in order to really take care of your compatriots you have to cooperate with foreigners yeah so there is

00:07:49.640 no contradiction here you know if the i don't know if the french invent the first vaccine against

00:07:54.820 coronavirus i would like to see american patriots coming and saying no no no no no we won't take this

00:08:01.380 vaccine it's a foreign vaccine it's a french vaccine we are waiting until there is a patriotic

00:08:06.920 american vaccine and only then we take it yeah this is obviously nonsense i'm sure i could find you

00:08:12.720 those patriots they're in my twitter feed yeah and so so this is one level the international level

00:08:19.040 and of course we are seeing a lot of problems also internally in many countries and basically this is

00:08:26.180 again a kind of the the payday for developments that began long before coronavirus internal divisions

00:08:33.400 within countries whether it's in india where you have all these conspiracy theories that hindu extremists

00:08:40.040 are blaming the epidemic on muslims saying that this is a muslim conspiracy that you have coronavirus

00:08:46.720 terrorists deliberately spreading the virus among hindus or what you see in in the u.s and in several

00:08:54.900 other countries when there is just not enough trust in public authorities to have a common consistent

00:09:03.660 policy you know in normal times a country can function or a government can function when only

00:09:10.680 half of the population believes it you know you have a situation when you have a leader half of the

00:09:15.820 population says i would believe anything this person says if he says that the sun rises in the west and

00:09:22.080 sets in the east i'll believe it and you have the other half saying i won't believe a single word

00:09:26.860 this person is saying if he says that two plus two equals four i start doubting it yeah and as bad as it is

00:09:34.480 it can function for a while in kind of normal times but in a pandemic you need the cooperation of a hundred

00:09:42.900 percent of the population you can't deal with it with just 50 percent so this makes it much much more

00:09:49.680 difficult to deal with this emergency yeah well so i mean there's so many threads here we can pull at

00:09:55.580 and the whole tapestry starts to move where you started with this failure of of u.s leadership you

00:10:03.540 know i find it especially depressing i mean it's a kind of national humiliation which is compounded by

00:10:10.100 the fact that something close to half of american society either doesn't care about it or is so delusional

00:10:18.080 to think that we've distinguished ourselves well during this crisis and this is you know part of

00:10:23.400 the personality cult of trump obviously but it's also it's this pervasive mistrust of institutions

00:10:31.380 which you have just flagged i mean the fact that the media is so despised and mistrusted and again

00:10:37.720 trump has a something to do with that but you know it's other institutions science and scientists

00:10:43.560 any dependence or integration with the rest of the world i mean as you point out there is this notion

00:10:52.020 that there's a zero-sum contest between national pride and a more cosmopolitan integration with

00:11:00.000 the rest of the world but the problem it seems is that there there really are some tensions here

00:11:06.360 that are hard to balance and understand and if you don't trust the media and if the media is

00:11:14.980 pitched into a perpetual frenzy of reaction to all of the assaults on truth that come out of you know

00:11:23.820 trump's mouth and the administration there really are like genuine failures of sense making

00:11:30.440 that should kindle doubt there's no one who's more alarmed by trump than i am but when i see the

00:11:38.180 the miscalibrated attacks on him in our best newspapers you know even i can see that the media

00:11:45.280 sometimes gets it wrong and all of this is being amplified on social media where we really have

00:11:51.500 people just unable to come in contact with a common reality and i'll just give you a couple of

00:11:57.380 examples here that come to mind as you were speaking i mean so there you know this is a point

00:12:01.660 you've made in many of your books that you know global problems require global solutions right we're

00:12:07.800 not going to have an american solution to climate change we're not going to have an american solution

00:12:12.000 to a global pandemic but there is this tension between globalization and self-sufficiency which has

00:12:18.940 been exposed quite painfully by this pandemic just look at the supply chain the fact that we can't even

00:12:25.180 produce q-tips anymore on demand because we're so reliant on china to produce them and when you look

00:12:31.780 at that reliance in the context of the very real political tensions between you know in this case

00:12:37.980 america and china it seems right to be concerned about outsourcing our infrastructure to them when in an

00:12:45.880 environment where they can turn hostile in a moment the extreme example would be if china produced all of

00:12:51.780 our bullets right and just imagine what a war with china looks like when they won't supply us with

00:12:55.680 bullets a concern of that sort doesn't have to be motivated by xenophobia or isolationism there

00:13:01.960 so anyway yeah so please uh try to thread that needle for us no i mean again i think that people when

00:13:10.520 they say the world globalization or globalism they mean so many different things some people they think

00:13:17.200 mainly about the economic implications and supply chains and having all these multinational corporations

00:13:24.540 becoming far more powerful than nation states and having zero obligations to citizens in any country

00:13:33.180 because they can just avoid paying taxes with all kinds of tricks and so forth and this is a kind of

00:13:39.740 globalization that i personally i'm not very fond of and i think it's perfectly sensible for countries to

00:13:45.560 try and have better control of their essential supplies and certainly it's very important that

00:13:52.260 big corporations would pay their taxes in the centers of their activities and you know i mean you wouldn't be

00:13:59.180 able to function without sewage systems and without police and without schools so you definitely need to

00:14:06.080 not everything is in the cloud yeah there are many things in the ground and you should pay for them

00:14:11.140 for me when i think about globalism and globalization that the main thing is really about the sharing of

00:14:17.800 information the sharing of knowledge the having common values and common interests and this should be

00:14:25.620 that this shouldn't can be it can be separated from the economic issues and i think that again if you look at

00:14:35.560 what's happening in a place like the united states i really don't think this is a clash between nationalism

00:14:42.380 and globalism really what's happening in the u.s and in britain and in several other many other countries

00:14:49.200 is actually the unraveling of nationalism itself there is a lot of talk about the rise of nationalism in

00:14:56.280 recent years but as a historian i see really in a very different light usually the best sign that you are seeing

00:15:04.260 an upsurge of nationalism is a lot of conflicts between nations like a century ago the first world war

00:15:12.960 was an indication that nationalism is really on the rise when you look at the world of the last few years

00:15:19.560 you actually see few conflicts certainly violent conflicts between countries the main conflicts are

00:15:26.540 actually within countries what's unraveling is the kind of internal national community i think it's fair to

00:15:33.700 say that today americans hate and fear each other far more than they hate and fear the russians or the chinese

00:15:41.800 the biggest fear is their neighbors or their metaphorical neighbors and this is not a sign of an upsurge of

00:15:50.480 nationalism similarly if you look at that brexit and the debates in britain there then the chances of the brit of the

00:15:58.520 the brits starting to come to blows within themselves i think of far higher than a war between britain and

00:16:05.360 france so i wouldn't really talk about an upsurge of nationalism it's more a crisis so and trying to

00:16:13.400 redefine what it what it means and and how important it is now personally i think it's and understood in the

00:16:20.980 right terms nationalism has been one of humanity's best ideas or best inventions ever again not if you

00:16:30.540 think about it as hatred of foreigners that's that's the extreme sort of nationalism but it doesn't have to

00:16:35.900 go in that direction in essence nationalism is really loving your compatriots and enabling millions of

00:16:43.780 people who don't really know each other to cooperate and to take care of each other we are social

00:16:50.640 animals but for hundreds of thousands of years society meant a very small circle of people you

00:16:58.260 actually know personally intimately you know their names their personality you meet them all the time

00:17:04.660 and this is kind of in our genes to care about a group of say 50 people or 150 people nations are a

00:17:15.360 very very recent emergence or invention in human evolution only the last few thousand years maybe

00:17:22.960 5 000 years maybe a bit more and the remarkable thing about nations is that you cooperate and you care

00:17:30.140 about millions of millions of complete strangers people that you have never met in your life you will

00:17:36.440 never meet them in your life you don't know them but still you're willing for example to pay taxes

00:17:42.120 so that a stranger in a different part of the country would have health care or would have good education

00:17:49.980 and that's the the really good side of nationalism and i think we should cherish that and protect that

00:17:57.980 again without falling into the trap that to be a good nationalist you should also hate the foreigners

00:18:04.800 who are not part of our nation no in as i said in many cases to really take care of your compatriots

00:18:10.180 especially in the 21st century you need to cooperate with the foreigners yeah i think that's a great

00:18:15.260 distinction and i share this concern about the breakdown of social cohesion especially in the united states

00:18:22.040 where i'm i'm most in touch with it so this brings us to politics and you actually had an op-ed in the

00:18:28.020 new york times not long ago that um i wanted to reference because you say some things there which

00:18:34.380 either i'm not sure i agree with or at least there's a further distinction i would want to make here and

00:18:40.280 so actually this i'm now quoting you you write elections are not a method for finding the truth

00:18:46.100 they are a method for reaching peaceful compromise between the conflicting desires of different people

00:18:51.080 you might find yourself sharing a country with people who you consider ignorant stupid or even

00:18:55.760 malicious and they might think exactly the same of you still do you want to reach a peaceful compromise

00:19:01.580 with these people or would you rather settle your disagreements with guns and bombs so as it stands i i

00:19:06.740 totally agree with that and this is you know as a method for resolving you know conflicting desires and this is

00:19:13.540 what elections are about but we could even say this is what politics generally is about and you know

00:19:18.780 even democracy is is solution for that or when it works it's a solution for that but then you take

00:19:25.400 issue with an analogy that richard dawkins used when he was objecting to the brexit referendum he just

00:19:31.940 thought this was absolutely absurd you know asking the people of britain who you know most of whom had to go

00:19:36.540 google what is brexit after they had voted one way or the other so now quoting richard he says

00:19:41.800 you might as well call a nationwide plebiscite to decide whether einstein got his algebra right

00:19:47.600 i think richard you know in his defense he even absented himself from voting on brexit he said listen

00:19:52.720 i don't you know i'm a biologist i don't understand brexit so you know it just matters what the effect of

00:19:57.180 this is going to be so then you distinguish you know reconciling competing desires from a search for

00:20:04.280 truth here and you're obviously aware of some of the difficulties i i'm tempted to point out here but

00:20:10.400 my concern is that there's there's really no bright line between truth and desire when one

00:20:16.660 considers the consequences of misinformation and especially the kind of misinformation environment

00:20:21.960 we're now living in because you know people want what they want very often you know or even always

00:20:28.600 because they think certain things are true and if they knew they were wrong about specific things

00:20:34.220 they very likely wouldn't want what they currently want i mean othello wants you genuinely wants to

00:20:40.600 kill desdemona and he actually strangles her with his own hands but that's only because he was

00:20:46.200 misinformed about her and that's why it's a tragedy and what i see ourselves living through right now is a

00:20:51.800 tragic dimension to our politics where you have people who are genuinely misinformed about sources of

00:20:58.540 economic pain or climate science or whatever it is and they're supporting politicians and policies

00:21:06.420 that seem in the end guaranteed to frustrate their real interests and you know this obviously connects

00:21:12.700 to populism and other political phenomenon so help me think this through yeah i mean to some extent

00:21:19.480 you're absolutely right i would just say that in the case of othello it's wrong to strangle

00:21:24.520 your sweetheart even if she did indeed do what what you think what iago said she did i mean uh i think

00:21:32.780 the tragedy is elsewhere in this case it's not a problem of misinformation but it's tragic for him

00:21:37.980 when you take his point of view of it the reason why it's a tragedy for the character of othello is that

00:21:41.920 really he he has been fatally misled to take a life and to ruin his own i i i i don't want to go

00:21:48.800 into that rabbit hole it will occupy the rest of the hour i think yes i i would say that the big

00:21:53.940 problem is you know telling people that i know your real interests better than you know them

00:22:00.040 and uh you're misinformed so let me tell you what are your real interests i mean sometimes that that's

00:22:07.740 the case but it's a very shaky ground for a political system a very dangerous ground to have this kind of

00:22:18.360 paternalistic attitude that that i really know what your interests are better than you and of course

00:22:25.860 many people are misinformed but that's true of everyone especially you know to to understand

00:22:31.980 desire is something very different from understanding the truth and part of the problem in society

00:22:40.240 is that where i where i stand really distorts my my vision of other people and and of the social

00:22:51.060 structure so when it comes to again saying what are the true desires or the best desires of people

00:22:59.780 i would be extremely careful about granting this to any privileged group i think that yeah when it comes to

00:23:09.120 economics economists are much better informed than any of us and yes they make mistakes of course but

00:23:15.900 everybody makes mistakes and they have a mechanism for self-correction to some degree so once you define

00:23:22.680 a particular goal and you have an argument about what is the best economic means to get there then yes

00:23:29.980 i don't think you should put it to a plebiscite or to an election you should go to the experts

00:23:34.400 but when it comes to actually defining the goal what is the goal of society i think it's extremely

00:23:42.080 dangerous to to trust experts with with the definitions of the basic goals of society they lack

00:23:51.120 really too much information and their vision is distorted by their own self-interests and we know it's

00:23:58.620 from so from so many cases in history again i mean it's a kind of a choice between two problematic

00:24:05.800 roads but i i would i think the less that that uh having a kind of privileged elite saying that i know

00:24:15.960 i i i'm in a better position to understand your true desires than you are that's far more dangerous

00:24:22.440 i would say and it's becoming more dangerous in the 21st century and this was my maybe my main point in

00:24:29.500 the in the new york times article because of the new technologies for hacking human beings i mean we

00:24:36.840 have we have had these discussions for thousands of years going back to ancient greece and india and china

00:24:44.340 exactly these issues of do can we trust people to really know what's good for them

00:24:52.440 and i don't think that a lot has changed since uh the times of socrates or buddha or confucius

00:24:59.560 but now things are changing because we suddenly have a completely new technology

00:25:05.220 to hack human beings to understand humans better than they understand themselves to understand human

00:25:13.680 desires to know what i want better than i know it and also of course to manipulate what i want it goes

00:25:21.440 together and then you know the question of what i really desire becomes more complicated than ever

00:25:26.640 than ever basically i would say that to to hack a human being you need three things you need a very

00:25:34.280 good understanding of biology especially things like brain science you need enormous amount of data

00:25:40.360 and you need a lot of computing power until today nobody ever in history had any of these things

00:25:50.020 if you are stalin in the 1950s or 1940s you can't you don't know enough biology you don't really

00:25:56.820 understand what's happening in the human body you don't have enough data on every individual you

00:26:01.860 can't place a kgb officer to follow each and every soviet citizen you don't have 200 million kgb agents

00:26:09.500 and even if you had then the question would be who would follow the 200 million kgb officers of course

00:26:14.920 and you don't have even if you have all these agents following people you don't have the computing

00:26:22.580 power to make sense of all the information they gather basically you have an agent following me

00:26:28.060 writing a paper report about what i did today and then another human being has to read this report

00:26:34.660 and process it and reach some conclusions and that's absolutely impossible now for the first time in

00:26:41.640 history it is becoming feasible for the new stylings of the 21st century you don't need 200 million human

00:26:48.380 agents you have sensors you don't need human analysts to read paper reports you have artificial

00:26:55.360 intelligence that can go over all this immense data and analyze it and you are having more and

00:27:02.020 more biological insight into what is actually happening in the human body and brain you put all that

00:27:08.020 together you get the ability to know what people want better than they know it better than they would

00:27:14.200 admit to themselves i often give the personal story of my own experience was coming out was realizing

00:27:21.860 that i'm gay only at the age of 21 now if you ask me when i was 15 uh who do you want to have sex with

00:27:28.900 then i wouldn't say with with a guy even though this is probably what i really wanted i i didn't

00:27:35.900 understand it about myself as silly as it sounds i mean how can you not know it the fact is i didn't

00:27:41.000 know it when did google know it yeah if google could know it when i was i guess 12 it was should have

00:27:48.700 been very obvious you just collect not a lot of data on where my eyes go i don't know when i'm on

00:27:55.200 the beach and you could easily have told years before i understood it what are my true sexual

00:28:01.020 desires now what does it mean to live in a world when it's you know it's not the human elite it's not

00:28:09.680 the nobel prize winners it's not the professor within the universities that know my desires better than me

00:28:15.600 uh you could have a non-human system that systematically hacks all of us and knows our

00:28:23.240 real desires or our deep desires better than us and therefore can also manipulate us in ways which

00:28:30.300 were completely impossible in in previous ages and i would say this is the biggest challenge

00:28:37.680 to to democracy again the challenge of misinformed people voting for the wrong politician you know

00:28:47.420 it's it's a problem but it's a very old problem i mean the greeks have dealt with it with moral i

00:28:53.180 know sometimes more success sometimes less but it's not a new problem yeah that the new technology

00:28:58.260 creates a completely new kind of problem that i don't know what is the answer to to this issue

00:29:04.120 yeah well i share your concern about the effect of technology and where all that's headed that's

00:29:11.020 obviously a big conversation but i i'm still stuck on this on the the very low tech hacking of the

00:29:18.320 human mind which happens reliably in so many places and it's right in the in the spot we're speaking

00:29:24.820 about here which is the politically utterly reliable response of so many people to being told

00:29:33.920 that they're wrong that they don't want they don't want what they think they want that they don't

00:29:38.680 understand reality enough to even know what they want on specific points and this knee-jerk

00:29:44.920 revulsion now that this produces against expertise and you know hierarchies of information and a kind of

00:29:53.660 misreading of of the ethics and pragmatics of error correction right so like when the new york times

00:29:59.900 admits a mistake from one point of view that's proof that there's no difference between the new york

00:30:05.680 times and breitbart say or you know any other non-journalistic source of information and there's

00:30:11.940 just a repudiation of all distinctions in information space that can allow us to reliably

00:30:19.640 curate good ideas and better data and this is just strikes me as a genuinely difficult intellectual

00:30:28.160 problem in certain cases where i mean just take the you know our response to covid it's very hard to

00:30:34.180 know what is true what is real what should be motivating and our desires are truly common i mean

00:30:40.880 very few people want to die or have other people die unnecessarily and very few people want to see the

00:30:47.580 economy collapse you know so we're anchored to the same desires but we have a we have very different

00:30:53.280 perceptions of reality and the thing that that i find troubling is this reliable manipulation of people

00:30:59.800 and you know trump is the ultimate example of this but basically he manages to sell himself as a non-elite

00:31:06.120 person right so he's standing shoulder to shoulder with the common man you know even though everything

00:31:11.220 in his life is gold-plated and has his name on it he isn't a member of the elite and in truth he isn't

00:31:17.720 actually because he really is an ignoramus and a deeply uncurious person who has never had much use

00:31:24.600 for institutional knowledge but what we have here is a an ability to convince tens of millions of people

00:31:31.920 with a single tweet that real institutions are completely bankrupt whether it's the press or medicine or

00:31:41.360 science in general and what you need to do is just keep poking a stick into the machinery of any fact

00:31:50.340 based discussion and maybe you all just want to drink bleach or pour it into your lungs or i mean it's

00:31:55.800 just it's like there's nothing nothing is impossible now to promulgate as information so anyway that's that's

00:32:04.340 kind of chaos is something i'm still stuck with as we stumble into a another presidential election

00:32:09.640 i have two thoughts i mean first of all the good the good news is that in this emergency

00:32:18.100 we have seen a lot of trust in science and in scientific authorities even from unexpected

00:32:25.580 quarters i mean given the record of the recent years with so many attacks on science and on scientific

00:32:34.120 institutions it's really amazing for me to see that in this emergency in most places most people

00:32:42.580 they ultimately trust the scientific authority more than anything else and you know the clearest cases

00:32:50.100 for me are what's happening with religion in this crisis yeah that you know in in israel they close down

00:32:56.480 the synagogues they don't allow people to go to the wailing wall they don't allow people to go to

00:33:01.820 gather to pray in iran they shut down the mosques uh the pope is telling the faithful to stay away from

00:33:09.440 the churches and all because the scientists said so you know you look at the black death and uh it was

00:33:16.340 a completely different story back then yeah so we have i mean you know i'm a medievalist so for

00:33:22.680 medievalist it's usually easy to be a bit optimistic about the present right because our baseline is so low

00:33:29.100 so you know i look at the black death yeah i look at the black death in the 14th century i look at the

00:33:33.880 covid 19 crisis and i say wait ah well we have made some progress in the last 500 years not only in

00:33:41.260 scientists being able to really understand the epidemic but also in the trust that people have

00:33:46.920 in these institutions and you know in in when the black death spread and the king of france he asked

00:33:53.520 the medical faculty of the university of paris the most prestigious university to write a treatise

00:33:59.400 get your best minds on this and tell me what's happening and they got the best minds of the

00:34:05.680 faculty of medicine in the university of paris and they published their report and according to them

00:34:12.440 the problem was basically astrological that as far as i remember saturn mars and jupiter were in a

00:34:20.720 particularly bad conjuncture which has caused the corruption of the air on earth and this is what's

00:34:29.400 causing the mortality of about between a third and half of the population now there were people who

00:34:36.060 disagreed in the university of paris and the minority report was that actually it was the fault of

00:34:43.400 earthquakes that released toxic gases from from the both of the earth and this is what is killing the

00:34:51.640 people and of course you had the conspiracy theory of the day which was that the jews have poisoned

00:34:57.520 the wells so you had a wave of pogroms uh against the jewish communities all over europe

00:35:03.180 i think we have made some progress since then yeah and you're forgetting the the blasphemers who had

00:35:10.360 their tongues cut out because blasphemy who had to be part of this problem yeah and another thing

00:35:16.220 about about the several of the points you raised that yes we have some common desires like we don't

00:35:22.180 want to die we don't want the economy to crash but another very common desire to people all over the

00:35:28.720 world from all walks of life is to be right that it's very important for people to be correct

00:35:35.780 in their fundamental beliefs in in life it's very very difficult to admit that you're wrong

00:35:41.560 people would do terrible things to others and to themselves just not to admit that i've made a

00:35:47.600 mistake i i'm wrong and you know especially when it comes to the deep stories that give meaning to life

00:35:54.620 our mind is a factory creating stories that give meaning to life and for many people the worst thing

00:36:04.380 that can happen to you ever is to find out that the story that you created or that somebody else

00:36:10.740 created and and you you you you've you have adopted and for years this has been the bedrock

00:36:16.940 of how you understand your life and this is what gives meaning to life to admit that this story is

00:36:26.160 fictional it's it's full of errors it's full of mistakes many people would prefer to die

00:36:32.100 than to do that or would prefer to drink bleach than to do that and that's also very very deep

00:36:40.280 in the human psyche in human uh in human nature in human history and you know there are so many

00:36:47.960 examples of the terrible things that people would do just to prevent admitting that they made a mistake

00:36:55.420 so in in this sense i'm it's it's not so surprising what's happening and again the situation compared

00:37:04.460 to the middle ages even here we've made substantial progress yeah in in in our ability ability and

00:37:12.860 willingness to put these stories to the test yeah okay so on the topic of progress let's imagine

00:37:20.700 what sort of further progress we might make in the aftermath of this or as we even just process this

00:37:27.300 problem because you know the next 12 months or optimistically perhaps 12 months between now and

00:37:34.620 a vaccine there's a fair amount of uncertainty as to just what normal life might be like and even

00:37:41.800 after a vaccine even even if one were magically delivered in a much shorter time frame than that

00:37:47.360 their economic consequences we'll be living with and just an opportunity to rethink how we live

00:37:55.060 individually and collectively and and there's a potential rewriting of norms and certainly an

00:38:01.700 improvement to institutions that we could envision i'm tempted to ask you how you're you're envisioning or

00:38:08.600 hoping for a post-covid world with respect to certain variables one variable that has been on my

00:38:17.080 mind for several years at this point but its importance seems quite heightened now and i think

00:38:23.680 in the next year we it's going to dominate many other concerns and it's the issue of of wealth inequality

00:38:30.600 and the remedies for that and the acknowledgement of it as a problem and and redistribution or something

00:38:37.780 else as a remedy and the way in which it interacts with you know political polarization and populism and

00:38:43.420 all of this i think is going to come to a boil fairly soon because it's being exacerbated by how

00:38:49.700 people are affected by this pandemic do you have any thoughts about wealth inequality that it's bad

00:38:55.940 it's it's i agree that it's getting worse and i think we have we have a choice here i mean generally i

00:39:01.500 don't think that the future is inevitable or that the future that there is one one obvious outcome to

00:39:08.300 this crisis this crisis gives us a lot of choices to make difficult choices but also opportunities to

00:39:14.460 to change the way the society is built and it all depends on the decisions on the political decisions

00:39:21.240 that we are taking we will take in the next 12 months as you say and which is why i my basic

00:39:28.360 understanding of the covid 19 crisis it's not a health care crisis it's above all a political crisis

00:39:34.480 we can deal with the virus again it's not the black death we have the scientific knowledge and the

00:39:40.520 technological tools to overcome the epidemic itself the real problems are in the realms of economics

00:39:47.080 and politics and here nothing is inevitable it's all a matter of political choices so i hope that

00:39:53.680 people and the media would focus less on the you know the latest statistics about the number of sick

00:39:59.160 people or the number of ventilators in the hospitals and focus more on the political decisions

00:40:04.820 for example governments are distributing enormous amounts of money and it's a very big question who

00:40:12.500 gets what i mean is this money being used to save failing corporations because of their mistakes which

00:40:20.200 were made long before this epidemic is it being used to finance enterprises whose managers and owners

00:40:27.720 are friends with this minister or that minister is it used to save small private businesses

00:40:33.440 restaurants travel agents hotels whatever that's a political choice that we need that we need to

00:40:41.780 supervise very very closely and we have to do it now you know i mean people are so overwhelmed by this

00:40:49.000 crisis but in this situation of chaos people who have tunnel vision have an immense advantage

00:40:57.340 if the only thing you care about in life is getting more power or getting more money this is a perfect

00:41:04.040 opportunity for you whereas many other people are confused and uncertain because they're honestly

00:41:10.940 looking for a way to come out of the crisis improve the situation of the population solve the economic

00:41:17.020 difficulties if the only thing you focus on is getting another billion dollars this is a very easy time

00:41:24.260 to do it if you have the right connections so i hope that the public in different countries

00:41:31.220 would really monitor would be aware that uh that this is happening and you can't wait until the crisis is

00:41:40.060 over to look back and see what has been done it has to be done in real time if you wait until 2021

00:41:48.140 it's basically like coming to a party after the party is over and the only thing left to do is to

00:41:54.080 wash the dirty dishes i mean the trillions are being divided distributed right now in 2021 there will be

00:42:01.380 nothing left to distribute so we have to really you know there is a lot of talk of surveillance

00:42:07.300 these days and people mostly think about monitoring individuals whether they are sick or not and who you met

00:42:14.400 and where you where you went to break the chains of infection but we at the same time we need very

00:42:20.840 close surveillance of who is making the decisions and who is getting what and the same way it's uh it turns

00:42:29.600 out to be quite easy to follow all of us around and see what we do it should be equally easy to follow

00:42:38.040 the government and see to whom it gives the money what are your thoughts about the future of education

00:42:45.080 because you still work as a professor part of the year don't you yeah i still teach at university now

00:42:50.620 i'm doing it online with zoom which works better than i imagined uh it has its difficulties but yeah i

00:42:58.760 continue to teach three courses right this is something i commented on in my last podcast but this

00:43:04.480 for me was indicative of just how crazy and distorting financial incentives can be an environment where

00:43:13.720 certain ethical decisions are seem to me to be crystal clear where you you have harvard university

00:43:20.640 which has the largest endowment of any college i think probably in the world certainly in the united

00:43:25.800 states has 40 billion dollars firing its non-essential staff because of the pandemic

00:43:32.720 and also taking government money which now they've been forced to give back under embarrassment it seems

00:43:39.900 to me that that's a symptom of something just a lack of connection to the what should be the real

00:43:45.980 mission of an institution like harvard or certainly to the values of the institution and i think many

00:43:53.420 people are experiencing a fairly hard reset in in just how they think about the role of a university

00:43:58.860 and the economics of it obviously i mean the cost of education has gone up faster than inflation for

00:44:06.240 many many years and you have even among those who have succeeded in life you know by economic standards

00:44:13.420 the common experience the ubiquitous experience of the most fortunate people in our societies coming out of

00:44:20.640 their period of education with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt

00:44:26.720 for which alone among all the debts in human life can't be discharged in bankruptcy at least in the united

00:44:32.660 states what could education look like if i told you two years from now education is very different

00:44:41.160 what do you think the main differences would be oh i'm i'm i'm teaching at university but i'm not

00:44:48.220 really an expert on education so i it's a bit difficult for me to say i mean what i am experiencing at

00:44:54.260 first hand is this shift to online teaching which is likely to continue to some extent even after the

00:45:03.460 crisis is over this can lead to all kinds of dangerous directions you know a lot of the experience

00:45:11.740 of going to college doesn't happen in class it happens during the break time i mean yeah very often

00:45:18.640 even in harvard i hope i don't insult anybody but even in harvard or oxford or in my university in

00:45:24.720 jerusalem very often the most important lessons are being taught during the break times

00:45:30.320 yeah and with teaching courses online at zoom of course there are break times but you're alone in

00:45:37.940 your home you don't meet the other students for a chat in the cafeteria and i think that whatever

00:45:45.000 happens to education we should always remember the very central role of the community and of the

00:45:52.520 social interaction and find ways to preserve it even give it a more central role more importance

00:46:00.000 and also you know any process that undergo digitalization really changes its its nature and

00:46:11.220 again becomes much more open to surveillance and monitoring you know if you went to the university

00:46:20.940 of leipzig in east germany in 1980 so probably i don't know a quarter of the students were stasi agents

00:46:28.460 or stasi informants and you knew that whatever you say in class whether you are the professor or one

00:46:33.980 of the students it will be reported to the stasi and this wasn't very nice experience of course

00:46:39.040 but again as i mentioned before the stasi couldn't really analyze effectively all the enormous amounts

00:46:47.080 of information that it got from all these agents there is a wonderful film i think it's called

00:46:52.980 life of others or something like that yeah it was a great film yeah yeah so anyway there was this

00:47:00.320 inability to process all the data now when university goes online and i teach my students in zoom i tell

00:47:10.880 them that you have to take into account that everything i say and everything you say is being recorded

00:47:16.460 and being stored somewhere and unlike in leipzig in 1980 it's being analyzed it could be analyzed

00:47:24.400 by ai which means that you have to be much more careful not necessarily about you know political

00:47:31.940 issues it's more the fear that your entire life will become one long job interview that whatever you do

00:47:43.040 whatever you say at any moment during your life in class or in break down or in break time could come

00:47:50.980 to haunt you in five years or ten years when you apply for some job and an ai is going over your entire

00:48:00.060 record not only your marks at the end of the year but over everything and based on that they decide

00:48:09.240 whether they want you or not it's a question not only of your marks it's really a question of your

00:48:14.080 personality of the way you interact and so you know the thought of your entire life everything you do at any

00:48:22.440 moment is actually part of a job interview and also part of what goes into the system to decide whether to

00:48:30.640 accept you to university in the first place because maybe everything you did in school was also monitored and

00:48:37.820 analyzed this is one of the on the one hand one of the most promising areas in education because the

00:48:46.500 the promise the prize is to have an education system that knows you personally and is caters to your

00:48:55.680 unique individual strength and and and weaknesses and you know it's not a teacher with 30 students who

00:49:04.840 who aims at the lowest common denominator it's a system that really knows you better than any teacher

00:49:13.340 better even than than your parents and doesn't necessarily i mean many people are afraid that this

00:49:19.020 will just kind of amplify your pre-existing tendency but no not necessarily it can actually challenge you

00:49:24.940 more than any human teacher in the world i don't know you want to develop your music musical tastes

00:49:33.500 it will know the exact amount of triggers of new genres of music to introduce you to and will even know

00:49:43.080 the right moment to do it will follow your emotional state and will discover will know when you're most

00:49:49.660 open to learn about a new autistic genre so there are enormous promises but then there are also enormous

00:49:58.460 dangers and i think like with democracy also with education this is the the biggest question how would

00:50:07.060 we deal in the educational system with these new abilities to hack human beings on the surveillance side

00:50:13.980 isn't china already pushing pretty far in this direction with their social credit score system yeah yeah

00:50:21.380 that's that's the dystopian side of it yeah yeah i mean again it has a utopian side and a dystopian side

00:50:27.720 dystopias usually don't happen unless they also have a utopian side you need a really big carrot in order to

00:50:36.200 convince people to go in that dangerous direction and with the new surveillance technology there are enormous

00:50:42.640 positive promises otherwise there would be you know no no real danger i mean who would like to do it

00:50:48.420 if it's not really good for anything you must know nick bostrom's argument about what he calls

00:50:54.060 turnkey totalitarianism when you look at various forms of existential risk and you sort of just imagine

00:50:59.200 that the not too far future where we discover that certain technologies are just so easily used to destroy

00:51:09.480 millions of lives and they can't be uninvented that we now need a system of massive surveillance and

00:51:16.340 very quick intrusion into people's lives to make sure those technologies aren't used let's say it

00:51:21.120 becomes just trivially easy for anyone to weaponize a a new virus that spreads like measles and has an

00:51:28.520 80 mortality rate well then in the presence of that knowledge and that technology well we need to know what

00:51:34.900 what you're doing with your hands at all times yeah yeah yeah it is easy to see how we could get

00:51:41.700 ourselves into a predicament like that yeah that that's you know that's the really kind of dystopian

00:51:46.960 scenario there are all kinds of middle-of-the-way dystopias on the way there i mean one of my favorite

00:51:54.120 scenarios is is simply that authority shifting by a lot of small steps imperceptibly from humans to

00:52:01.800 algorithms and humans basically just going along with that because uh it's more convenient it's

00:52:09.100 easier it has a lot of advantages and if they wake up at a certain point and realize that they that this

00:52:16.480 is very dangerous it's already too late to reverse it and actually one of my favorite scenarios is this

00:52:23.160 is happening to the chinese communist party i mean we tend to think about computers taking over and the

00:52:29.520 danger of all these technologies usually in a democratic setting like what will happen to the

00:52:34.320 u.s if facebook wants to become the the dictatorial government but it's interesting to think what could

00:52:40.320 happen to the chinese communist party if it gives too much power to the algorithms how one of the most

00:52:46.700 important functions within the chinese communist party is to decide who gets promoted you know at least

00:52:53.360 in the lower and middle ranks of the of the party appointments are really by merit i mean far more than

00:53:01.780 saying the united states or in or in many in many democracies but then the question is how do you know

00:53:08.640 who really has done well in his or her previous job and should be promoted and at present you have all

00:53:16.860 these thousands upon thousands of party officials who are collecting and analyzing data but it's

00:53:24.180 extremely tempting to just give it to an algorithm which of course he the algorithm will not choose

00:53:29.520 the politburo members or the next chairman of the of the chinese communist party but he he it will be

00:53:37.420 given the power the authority to increasingly make decisions about the lower ranks of the party and i have

00:53:45.240 this vision that one day the politburo members wake up and realize that the party has been taken over

00:53:51.580 by the values of the algorithm that appointed all the lower ranks and it's it it's it's not what they

00:54:00.940 wanted it's not what they envisioned and it's too late to resist it some jewish software engineer will

00:54:06.260 be blamed for hacking the uh the chinese communist algorithm in the end no the funny it doesn't have to be

00:54:14.460 human hacking yeah it's just you know you have machine learning that you set it certain goals

00:54:20.140 at the beginning you know like with bostrom's paperclip yeah thought experiment but on a more kind of

00:54:26.600 human level but yes the the algorithm was given certain parameters a certain matrix to to to make the

00:54:34.500 decisions and it learned on the way and eventually it created a party very very different from what the big

00:54:41.740 bosses wanted yeah there's no doubt that something like that is happening either algorithmically or

00:54:50.000 just by the happenstance of the technology we're producing i mean if you just look at what the effect

00:54:55.360 of social media on all of us it does have the character of a psychological experiment that no one

00:55:01.640 has really designed we've all submitted to it and it's having it whatever effect it's having

00:55:07.260 and we're occasionally worrying about it but you know succumbing to it all the while it's not planned

00:55:14.940 in advance okay so finally how do you view the prospects of the role of religion changing and

00:55:23.960 maybe i know you have some thoughts on the way our attitude toward death might also shift here in the

00:55:29.580 in the near term how are you thinking about it our existential concerns and the the institutions that

00:55:35.460 tend to minister to them if we start with death and its connection to religion then you know for most

00:55:42.540 of history certainly in my favorite period of the middle ages death was omnipresent and the basic

00:55:49.080 attitude to death was kind of learned helplessness or resignation that god decides when and why we die

00:55:58.980 and we humans have very little ability to outsmart death or to postpone death and that's in a world

00:56:07.980 well you know at least a third of children never made it to adulthood because of childhood diseases or

00:56:15.100 malnutrition and in which when an epidemic like the black death came along nobody had any real idea

00:56:21.760 what was happening what was happening what was killing people and what could be done about it

00:56:25.700 so death was extremely important to people it was really the i would say the main source of meaning in life

00:56:35.160 was death the most important event in your life which gave meaning to everything you experienced

00:56:42.740 happened after you died only after you died you were either saved or damned only after you died you

00:56:51.460 really understood what this was all about so basically in a world without death there is no heaven there is

00:56:59.100 no hell there is no reincarnation so religions like christianity and islam and hinduism and so forth just

00:57:06.040 make absolutely no sense and what happened over the last few few centuries is really amazing in the way

00:57:13.800 that our attitude to death has changed and this is to a large extent i would say the result of the

00:57:18.860 scientific revolution when science came along and especially the medical sciences and started to

00:57:24.680 really understand why people die what is causing epidemics what is causing infectious diseases and so forth

00:57:31.820 and human life expectancy jumped by you know from under 40 to over 80 in the developed world today

00:57:38.840 two things happened first of all death became a far less important part of life the meaning of life

00:57:47.240 at least for many people and for many ideology no longer comes from what happens to us after we die

00:57:52.780 if you look at most modern ideologies they have completely lost interest in what happens to us after we die

00:58:00.120 i mean if you ask yourself if you ask yourself what happens to a communist after he or she dies or what

00:58:06.240 happens to a feminist after he or she dies i mean nobody even talks about it it's no longer so important

00:58:14.560 and our basic attitude now is that death is increasingly just a technical problem if people die it's because

00:58:25.160 not of divine will and not because of some the forces of nature it's because of human failure

00:58:31.560 if the if humans die in some accident then we search who to blame or who to sue because obviously somebody

00:58:39.020 made a mistake and you see it now with this uh pandemic i mean it's our attitude more in most of the

00:58:45.680 world is very different from the black death we don't raise our hands to god and implore him to do

00:58:52.160 something and tell ourselves that this might be a punishment from god from our misdeeds no we assume

00:59:00.140 that humans have the power to overcome this to contain epidemics and if we still have an epidemic it's

00:59:07.620 because somebody made a mistake somebody screwed up big time if you compare i don't know the situation

00:59:14.340 in new zealand to the situation in the u.s you don't tell yourself well this is probably an indication

00:59:20.580 that god loves the new zealanders and wants to punish the americans no we say that there was a

00:59:27.740 difference in the policies of the different governments and if the situation in the u.s is

00:59:32.220 really bad then somebody made a mistake and the only question is who so our basic attitude uh which we now

00:59:40.860 see in in this epidemic is a mixture i mean from resignation we've shifted to a mixture of anger and hope

00:59:50.280 if somebody dies we are angry because we assume it's some kind of human mistake and uh also we have

00:59:59.800 hope that as in the case of this epidemic everybody's hoping for the vaccine yeah everybody's asking when

01:00:05.920 the vaccine will be ready not if the vaccine will be ready yeah even in the context where there's no

01:00:13.680 obvious human error even if we were all behaving impeccably we were all new zealand we would view

01:00:20.000 the the absence of a vaccine here as a problem to be solved by human ingenuity it's not something to

01:00:27.200 be prayed for basically all of human misfortune on some level becomes an engineering problem to be

01:00:33.820 solved yeah and the fact that we haven't solved it is just because we're in this contingent place

01:00:38.600 in human history where we just haven't produced the requisite knowledge yet to solve it but clearly

01:00:45.600 the path forward is a matter of producing that knowledge not waiting for some invisible agent to

01:00:51.660 sort out our lives for us yeah and even more so we would tend to see it as a political issues

01:00:57.340 a political issue in things like budgets that yes we we we lack the knowledge but we lack the knowledge

01:01:04.480 because we didn't invest the money in the right places right and we would check the records of past

01:01:09.680 years and why did we spend so much money on i don't know researching diets and didn't spend that money

01:01:15.640 on researching viruses and producing vaccines so we we would go the extra step of saying even this

01:01:23.900 even the amount of knowledge we have is really the result of making the right or wrong political

01:01:30.600 decisions where to invest our our resources yeah so that that's about death and religion is of course

01:01:37.480 tied to that what we've seen over the last uh few centuries is that the role of religion shrank

01:01:44.240 dramatically again i know that many people today don't see it or or think it's it's going in the

01:01:51.420 reverse religion is becoming more important but when you look at the big picture

01:01:55.920 the roles the the the places where people turn to religion have really really shrank over the last

01:02:05.320 few centuries in the middle ages medicine was above all the realm of religion and religious leaders

01:02:14.000 if you read many of the sacred texts of humanity you find that very often religious leaders a very big

01:02:22.860 part of their job is to be healers yeah i mean i think that most of what jesus does is heal people

01:02:29.460 he's more a doctor than uh you know a spiritual guide and today even the religious people they go to the

01:02:38.860 doctor not to the priest or the rabbi or the mullah when something goes wrong medically only when all hope

01:02:46.160 is lost only when the doctor says there is nothing to be done then okay you pray i mean it can't it can't

01:02:52.860 harm so why not but uh medicine has shifted from the realm of religion to the realm of science and this has

01:03:01.640 happened to many other areas of activity similarly if there is not enough rain so you turn to the

01:03:08.420 engineers and you turn to the agronomists to find a solution maybe the salinized water from the ocean

01:03:16.100 maybe produce new strains of wheat that can grow with less water all kinds of things in in the time of

01:03:23.860 the bible or the middle ages you would turn to the priest to to pray for rain and the basic reason why

01:03:30.780 this shift happened is simply because science has proved itself far superior in healing people and

01:03:38.040 solving droughts and things like that and the reason for that and that really brings us back to the

01:03:44.160 beginning of our conversation is that science is far more willing to admit mistakes and try something

01:03:51.420 else the big expertise of a lot of religious leaders is not healing and not solving droughts

01:04:00.260 but it's uh finding excuses they have been like the world champions in finding excuses like there is

01:04:09.100 no rain so you do the rain dance and and there is still no rain so the shaman or the priest would give

01:04:16.480 you a very good excuse why despite dancing the rain dance there is still no rain that's the real

01:04:24.340 expertise yeah of a lot of religious leaders and over centuries people simply realized that uh science is

01:04:34.060 becoming better and better at healing people religion is becoming better and better at finding excuses

01:04:39.980 and if you really want to heal your disease then you go to the doctor and that's why the importance

01:04:48.300 the scope of religion has shrunk except in one place where it's still extremely important and this is in

01:04:56.120 defining our identity and giving meaning to life defining who are we and who are they and what is the meaning

01:05:06.620 of my existence this is somewhere that science has little to offer so religion is still extremely important

01:05:15.160 and i don't think that this will change dramatically in the wake of covid 19 or in the coming decades

01:05:22.000 religions will change that's for sure i mean religions constantly change throughout history

01:05:27.080 they claim they are eternal that they are unchanging that christianity today is the same as it was a thousand

01:05:33.340 years ago in the time of jesus but the fact is they constantly adapt to new economic and political and

01:05:41.480 technological realities uh and they are quite good at it otherwise they wouldn't have survived and this

01:05:47.000 will continue to happen in the 21st century too has there been anything about this experience that has

01:05:54.680 altered your priorities personally at this point with respect to your career or your personal life or just

01:06:02.760 how you spend your time moment to moment it certainly reminded me like so many other people of the of the

01:06:10.280 importance of social connections and intimate relations with people with friends with family

01:06:17.020 it's what i really miss most in in the present situation is you know just meeting friends

01:06:25.160 not via zoom or some other online gadget or or the telephone yeah for me that that's the main thing i have

01:06:35.880 been thinking about many of the issues of the day long before this crisis erupted yeah so uh in in this

01:06:44.520 sense um i i kind i kind of came to it prepared or baked or half-baked yeah also many people know this about

01:06:54.040 you perhaps not everyone but you you're somebody who's had a very long-standing meditation practice and you

01:07:00.520 spend a lot of time regularly on retreat and so on some level you have been preparing for this kind of

01:07:08.680 disruption in your life as you know i have for a very long time and i almost feel perversely lucky to

01:07:16.120 be this comfortable in this kind of circumstance just psychologically yeah i mean my practice has been of

01:07:23.720 enormous help in in this uh emergency and you know after i after spending 60 days in silent

01:07:31.880 meditation without any phones without talking to anybody for two months so the last two months have

01:07:38.600 been you know it's it's it's far easier i mean you can read you can pick up the phone and talk with

01:07:43.320 somebody so it's but but still i mean one of the things that make it possible for me to go on these

01:07:49.960 meditation retreats is knowing that my loved ones my husband my friends my family they are safe yeah

01:07:58.200 and that the world is generally doing okay now it's it's it's very very different i mean i look at

01:08:04.840 what's happening to the world and uh there are a lot of things to worry about yeah so i don't have the

01:08:10.040 kind of you know peaceful cocoon that i have in the meditation retreats well yuval it's been great to get

01:08:17.880 you back on the podcast your voice is as ever relevant it's hard to imagine what could have

01:08:23.000 conspired to make it more relevant but all of those dials have been turned to 11 it seems so it's um

01:08:29.400 really a great pleasure to speak with you again so thank you for your time thank you for inviting me

01:08:33.960 and uh thank for everybody listening and let's hope do it again after this emergency is over and there is

01:08:40.200 something else on the horizon yeah we'll have to talk about meditation someday we've promised that

01:08:45.320 three times in a row and and we can never get to it so next time yeah there is always something more

01:08:50.440 urgent

Making Sense - Sam Harris - May 01, 2020

#201 — A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari

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