YouSaid · the spoken record

Yuval Noah Harari

lines on the record
186
first
2023-07-17
most recent
2023-07-17
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “You know, the question what is the meaning of life, it will take you to fantasies and delusions. We want to stay with the reality of life. And the most important question about the reality of life is what is suffering and where is it coming from?”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The real question to ask what kind of answer do you expect? Most people expect a story. And that's always the wrong answer. Most people expect that the answer to the question, what is the meaning of life will be a story, like a big drama, that this is the plot line and this is your role in the story. This is what you have to do. This is your line in the big play. You say your line, you do your thing. That's the thing. And this is human imagination. This is fantasy To really understand life, life is not a story. The universe does not function like a story. So, I think to really understand life, you need to observe it directly in a nonverbal way. Don't turn it into a story. And the question to start with is what is suffering? What is causing suffering?”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So, what life is if you ask what the meaning of life, what life is, life is feeling things, having sensations, emotions, and reacting to them. When you feel something good, something pleasant, you want more out of it. You want more of it. When you feel something unpleasant, you want to get rid of it. That's the whole of life. That's what is happening all the time. You feel things, you want the pleasant things to increase. You want the unpleasant things to disappear. That what life is. If you ask what is the meaning of life in a more kind of philosophical or spiritual question,”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Like there'll be a political crisis or an economic problem or a personal problem like with the bank or whatever. They'll be so worried. But then about the fact that they are going to die, we don't care about it.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, the fireburner. I always thought that the adults there is something wrong with the adults because they don't get it. Like I would ask my parents or teachers about it. And they yes, you dine the end. That's it. And on the other hand, they are so worried about other things.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I lost it over time. I mean, for many years, it was a very powerful fuel motivation for philosophical, for spiritual exploration. And I realized that the fear of death is really a very powerful drive. And over the years, especially as I meditated, it kind of dissipated. And today, I sometimes find myself trying to recapture this teenage fear of death because it was so powerful and I just can't. I tried to make the same imaginary, I don't know, it's...”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Do I actually hear the kids singing all these patriotic songs? If not, how do I know they do it? Maybe they trick me. Maybe I die in the war and then they don't sing any songs. And how does it help me? And I realize I was quite young at the time that if you're dead, you can't hear anything because that's the meaning of being dead. And if you're dead, you can't think of anything like, oh, now they're remembering because you're dead. That's the meaning of being dead. And it was a shocking realization.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And you hear it especially on Memorial Day for foreign soldiers. So every day they'll be in school Memorial Day for fallen soldiers who fell defending Israel in all its different wars. And all the kids would come to rest in white and you'll have this big ceremony with flags and songs and dances in memory of the foreign soldiers. And you get the impression again I don't want it to sound crass, but you get the impression that the best thing in life is to be a falling soldier because even though yes, you die, everybody dies in the end, but then you'll have all these cool kids for years and years remembering you and celebrating you and you don't really die. And I remember standing in these ceremonies and thinking, what does it actually mean? Like, okay, so if I'm a foreign soldier, now I'm a skeleton, I'm bones under this military cemetery, under this stone.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yes, I mean, and when I was a teenager, I would constantly contemplate it trying to understand, to imagine it was a very, very shocking and moving experience. I remember especially in connection like with national ideology, which was also very big, strong in Israel. Which again comes from the fear of death. You know that you're going to die, so”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yes, I think everybody are afraid of death. I mean, all our fears come out of the fear of death. But the fear of death is just so deep and difficult. We can't, usually, we can't face it directly. So we cut it into little pieces and we face just little pieces. Oh, I lost my smartphone. That's a little, little, little piece of the fear of death, which is of losing everything. So I can't deal with losing everything. I'm dealing now with losing my phone or losing a book or whatever somebody, I feel pain. That's a small bit of the fear of death. Somebody who really doesn't fear death would not fear anything at all. There would be like anything that happens, I can deal with it. If I can deal with death, this is nothing.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And it's also a very important lesson that you can't do it just by yourself, that this fantasy of complete autonomy, of complete self-sufficiency, it doesn't work. You hear, it tends to be a very kind of male match of fantasy. I don't need anybody. I can be so strong and so brave that I'll do everything by myself. It never works.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And more broadly, we spoke earlier about the feminist movement, there would have been no gay liberation without the feminist movement. We also owe them for starting to change the gender structure of the world. And this is always true. You can never do it just by yourself. Also, I look at my journey in meditation. I could not have found meditation, I mean, the idea of going to meditation retreat okay, but I couldn't discover meditation by, I couldn't develop the meditation technique by myself. Somebody had to teach me this way of how to look inside yourself.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “A very old lesson and a very true lesson in many ways. So you need help from other people to realize the truth about yourself. So of course in love, you cannot just love abstractly. There is another person there. You need to find them. But also, you know, we were one of the first generations who enjoy the benefits of gay liberation, of the very difficult struggles of people who are much braver than us in the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, who dared to question social conventions, to struggle at sometimes a terrible price, and we benefited from it.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “That there was no community. How do you find one another? And the internet was a wonderful thing in this respect because it made it very easy for these kinds of diffuse communities or diffuse minorities to find each other. So me and Etsy, even though we rode the same bus together to school for years, we didn't meet in the physical world, we met online. Because again, in the physical world, you don't want to identify in an Israeli town in the 1980s. You ride the bus, you don't want to say, hey, I'm gay. Is there anybody else gay here? That's not a good idea. But on the internet, we could find each other.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yes, and I set up bad things or dangers about technology and the internet. There are also, of course, good things. And this is not an accident. You have two kinds of minorities in history. You have minorities which are a cohesive group like Jews. That yes, you're as small as being born Jewish in, say, Germany or Russia or whatever, you're born in a small community. But as a Jewish boy, you're born to a Jewish family. You have Jewish parents. You have Jewish siblings. You are in a Jewish neighborhood. You have Jewish friends. So these kinds of minorities, they could always come together and help each other throughout history. Another type of minority, like gay people or broadly LGBTQ people, that as a gay boy, you are usually not born to a gay family with gay parents and gay siblings in a gay neighborhood. So usually you find yourself completely alone. For most of history, one of the biggest problems for the gay community”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It takes a lot of work, a lot of courage, and a lot of help from other people. This kind of, again, heroic idea that I can do it all by myself, it doesn't work. Certainly with love, you need at least one more person. And I'm very happy that I found Itzik, who lived in the same small Israeli town. We lived on two adjacent streets for years. Pavli went to school on the same bus for years without really encountering each other. In the end we met on one of the first dating sites on the internet for gay people in Israel in 2002.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “The idea that this is sick, that this is whatever, it comes not from nature, it comes from the human imagination. Some people, for whatever reasons, hated gay people, they said, oh, they go against nature. But this is a story created by people. This is not the laws of nature. And this means me. That so many of the things that we think are natural or eternal or divine, no, they are just human stories. But these human stories are often the most powerful forces in the world.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Things that go against the laws of nature just don't exist. There is a law of nature that you can't move faster than the speed of light. Now you don't have this minority of people who break the laws of nature by going faster than the speed of light. And then nature comes, nah, that's bad. You shouldn't do that. That's not how nature works. If something goes against the laws of nature, it just can't exist. The fact that gay people exist, me and not just people. You see homosexuality among many, many mammals and birds and other animals. It exists because it is in line with the laws of nature.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Punish people for love. I understand why a good God would punish people for violence, for hatred, for cruelty, but why would God punish people for love? Especially when he created them that way. Even if you accept the religious framework of the world, obviously the story that God hates gay people, it comes not from God, but from some humans who invented this story. They take their own hatred. This is something humans do all the time. They hate somebody and they say, no, I don't hate them. God hates them. They throw their own hatred on God. And then if you think about the scientific framework that said that, oh, gays, they are against nature, they are against the laws of nature and so forth. Science tells us nothing can exist against the laws of nature”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “This is the power of self delusion that you know it's not that I knew I was gay and was hiding it I was hiding it for myself successfully that I don't understand how it is possible looking back I don't understand how it is possible but I know it is possible I knew and didn't know at the same time And then the other big lesson is the power of the stories, of the social conventions because the stories were not true. They did not make sense even on their own terms, even if you accept the basic religious framework of the world, that there is a good God that created everything and controls everything. Why would a good God”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And nobody wanted to identify with such a thing. If your options, okay, you can be a sinner, you can be a defect, what do you want? No good options there. And it took me many years until I was 21 to come to terms with it. And one of the things I learned two things. First, about the amazing capacity of the human mind for denial and delusion That an algorithm could have told me that I'm gay when I was like 14 or 15. Like if there is a good looking guy and girl walking, I would immediately focus on the guy. But I didn't connect the dots. Like, I could not understand what was happening inside my own brain and my own mind, my own body. Took me a long time to realize, you know, you're just gay.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “In many ways it goes back to the stories. I think this is one of the One of the reasons I became so interested in stories and in their power was I grew up in small Israeli town in the 1980s, early 1990s, which was very homophobic. And I basically embraced it. I breathed it because you could hardly even think differently. So you had these two powerful stories around one that God hates gay people and that he will punish them for who they are or for what they do. Secondly, that it's not God, it's nature, that there is something diseased or sick about it. And these people, maybe they're not sinners, but they are sick, they are defective.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “To build your personality, to build your mind as a very flexible mind. If traditionally people thought about education, like building a stone house with very deep foundations, now it's more like setting up a tent that you can fold and move to the next place, very quickly. Because that's the 21st century”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “About politics. We have no idea how the job market would look like in 10 years. We have no idea what skills will still be needed. You think you're going to learn how to code because they'll need a lot of coders in the 2030s? Think again. Maybe AI is doing all the coding. You don't need any coders. You're going to, I don't know, you learn to translate languages, you want to be a translator, gone. We don't know what skills will be needed. So the most important skill is the skill to keep learning and keep changing throughout our lives. It is very, very difficult to keep reinventing ourselves. It's a deep, again, it's in a way a spiritual practice.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “They should know it's the first time in history nobody has any idea how the world would look like in 10 years. Nobody has any idea how the world would look like when you grow up. You know, throughout history it was never possible to predict the future. You live in the Middle Ages, nobody knows maybe in 10 years the Vikings will invade, the Mongols will invade. There'll be an epidemic. There'll be an earthquake. Who knows? But the basic structures of life will not change. Most people will still be peasants. Armies would fight on horseback with swords and bows and arrows and things like that. So you could learn a lot from the wisdom of your elders. They've been there before and they knew what kind of basic skills you need to learn. You most people need to learn how to sow wheat and harvest wheat or rice and make bread and build a house and ride a horse and things like that. Now we have no idea, not just...”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yes, I mean, it is closely related. I would say I look at the world today, like politics, the one thing we need more than anything else is boring politicians. We have a super abundance of very exciting politicians who are doing and saying very exciting things and we need boring politicians and we need them quickly.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Things and many things in the world happen because of boredom to some extent, people start entire wars because of boredom. People quit relationships. People quit jobs because of boredom. And if you never learn how to deal with boredom, you will never learn how to enjoy peace and quiet. Because the way to peace passes through boredom. And again, from what I experienced with meditation, I think maybe it was the most difficult, maybe at least in the top three, like much more difficult, say, than anger or pain. When pain comes up, you feel heroic. Hey, I'm dealing with pain. When boredom comes up, it brings it with depression and feelings of worthlessness. And it's nothing. I'm nothing.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Depends what comes up. Anger comes up, you're angry. For days on end, you're just boiling with anger. Everything makes you angry. Again, something that happens right now, or you remember something from 20 years ago and you start boiling with, it's like I never even thought about this incident, but it's some it was somewhere stowed with a huge, huge pile of anger attached to it and it's now coming up and all the anger is coming up. Maybe it's boredom. You know 30 days of meditation you start getting bored and it's the most boring thing. Suddenly no anger second. I mean, and Boldom is one of the most difficult things to deal with in life. I think it's closely related to death. Death is boring. In many movies, death is exciting, it's not exciting. When you die, it's ultimately it's boredom. Nothing happens.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “First of all, it's a difficult journey. It's not fun. It's not recreational. It's not kind of time to relax. It can be very, very intense. The most difficult thing, at least in the meditation I practice, vipassana, which I learned from a teacher called Sengoenka, the most difficult thing is not the silence. It's not the sitting for long hours. It's what comes up. Everything you don't want to know about yourself. This is what comes up. So it's very intense and difficult. If you go to a meditation retreat, don't think you're going to relax.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And this is important because in the long term it enables me to play with ideas. I have the confidence to start formulating some brave idea, most of them turn out to be nonsense. But I trust myself not to be attached, not to become attached to my own nonsense. So it gives me this room for playfulness.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I write and then I delete. I write and then I delete. And because I trust myself that I'll have the, every time I come to press delete button, I feel bad. It's a kind of pain. Hey, I created this. It's a beautiful idea and I have to delete it.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I read a lot. Usually I don't take notes. Then I start writing and then I write like a torrent. Just write. Now it's the time you read meditation. Now it's the time to write. Write. Don't stop. Just write. So I would write from memory. And I'm not afraid of formulating, say, big ideas, big theories and putting them on paper. The danger is once it's on paper, not on paper, on the screen, in the computer. Get attached to it, and then you start with confirmation bias to build more and more layers around it, and you can't go back. And then it's very dangerous. But I trust myself that I have, to some extent, the ability to press the delete button. The most important button in the keyboard is delete”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yes, books over Twitter definitely. And then, you know, when I encounter a problem, a difficult intellectual problem, then I give it, I let the problem lead me. Where it goes and not where I want it to go. If I approach a problem with some preconceived idea, solution, and then try to impose it on the problem, and you know, just find confirmation bias, just find the evidence that supports my view. This is easy for the mind to do. And you don't learn anything new.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “To train the mind, forget about your own stories, just observe what is really happening. And then also throughout the day, have an information diet. People are today, many people are very aware of what they feed their body, what enters their mouth. Be very aware of what you feed your mind, what enters your mind. Have an information diet. So, for instance, I read long books. And I prefer, like, you know, I do many interviews. I prefer three hours interviews, two five minutes interviews. The long format is not always feasible, but you can go much, much deeper So, I would say an information diet. Be very careful about what you feed your mind. Give preference to big chunks over small”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “If I can't observe my own breath because of these stories created by the mind, how can I hope to understand much more complex things like the political situation in Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Russian invasion of Ukraine? If all these stories keep coming, I mean, it's not the truth, it's just the story your own mind created. So first thing, train the mind to be silent and just observe. So two hours every day and I go every year for a long retreat between one month and two months, 60 days of just silent meditation.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I was given this simple exercise to just observe my breath coming in and out of the nostrils, not controlling it, just observing it. And I couldn't do it for more than 10 seconds. I for 10 seconds would try to notice, oh, now the breath is coming in. It's coming in. It's coming in. Oh, it stopped coming in. Now it's going out, going out. 10 seconds and some memory would come. Some thought would come. Some story about something that happened last week or 10 years ago or in the future. And the story would hijack my It would take me maybe five minutes to remember oh, I'm supposed to be observing my breath.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “First of all, I take time off. The most important thing I do, I think as a writer, as a scientist, I meditate. I spend about two hours every day in silent meditation. Observing as much as possible nonverbally what is happening within myself, focusing body sensations, the breath, thoughts keep coming up, but I try not to give them attention. I don't try to drive them away. Just let them be there in the background, like some background noise. Don't engage with the thoughts because the mind is constantly producing stories with words. These stories come between us and the world. They don't allow us to see ourselves or the world. Like for me, the most shocking thing when I started meditating like 23 years ago.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Yes, but you still have to warn people. You will never find the deepest truth in a book. You will never find it in words. You can only find it, I think, in direct experience, which is non-verbal, which is pre-verbal.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Our best qualities are not there. Our best qualities are non-verbal. Again, they come from things like compassion, from introspection. And introspection, for my experience, is not verbal. If you try to understand yourself with words, you will never succeed. There is a place where you need the words. But the deepest insights, they don't come from words. And you can't write about it. Again, it goes back to Wittgenstein, to Buddha, to so many of these sages before that these are the things we are silent about.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Ultimately, I think it goes back. Much of my writing is suspicious of itself. I write stories about the danger of stories. I write about intelligence but highlighting the dangers of intelligence. Ultimately, I don't think that in terms of power, human power comes from intelligence and from stories. But I think that the deepest and best qualities of humans are not intelligence and not storytelling and not power. Again, with all our power, with all our cooperation, with all our intelligence, we are on the verge of destroying ourselves and destroying much of the ecosystem.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I mean on the level of content of ideas, no, there are things I say I would never say that. But when it comes to the, you know, I mean, there is, again, the coherence and the quality of writing is such that I say it's unbelievable how good it is. And who knows, in 10 years, in 20 years, maybe it can do better according to certain measures on the level of content.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yes, I mean, you know, I've been writing about AI for eight years now and engaged with all these predictions and speculations. And when it actually came, it was much faster and more powerful than I thought it would be. I didn't think that we would have in 2023 an AI that can hold the conversation that you can't know if it's a human being or an AI that can write beautiful texts. I mean, I read the texts written by AI. And the thing that strikes me most is the coherence. You know, people think, oh, it's nothing. They just takes ideas from here and there, words, and put it. No, it's so current. I mean, you read not sentences. You read paragraphs. You read entire texts. And there is logic. There is a structure.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “If for every dollar and every minute that we spend on developing AI, artificial intelligence, we spend another dollar and another minute in developing human consciousness, the human mind will be okay. The danger is that we spend all our effort on developing an AI at a time when we don't understand ourselves And then letting the AI take over that's a road to a human catastrophe.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “If we give AI control of the sphere of ideas at this stage, I think it's very, very dangerous because it doesn't understand us. And AI at present is mostly digesting the products of human culture. Everything we've produced over thousands of years, it eats all of these cultural products, digests it, and starts producing its own new stuff. But we still haven't figured out ourselves in our bodies, our brains, our minds, our psychology. So an AI based on our flawed understanding of ourselves is a very dangerous thing. I think that we need, first of all,”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “You know, some of the things, it's okay that the AIs would do them. Many human tasks and jobs, you know, it's the drudgery. They are not fun. They are not developing us emotionally or spiritually. It's fine if the robots take over. I don't know. I think about the people in supermarkets or grocery stores that spend hours every day just, you know, passing items and charging you the money. I mean, if this can be automated, wonderful. We need to make sure that these people then have better jobs, better means of supporting themselves and developing their social abilities, their spiritual abilities. And that's the ideal world that AI can create, that it takes away from. The things that it's better if we don't do them and allows us to focus on the most important things and the deepest aspects of our nature, of our potential”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Now increasingly we live in a world where more and more of these cultural artifacts will be coming from an alien intelligence. Very quickly we might reach a point when most of the stories, images, songs, TV shows, whatever are created by an alien intelligence. And if we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions created by an alien intelligence that we don't understand, but it understands us, this is a kind of spiritual enslavement that we won't be able to break out of because it understands us, it understands how to manipulate us, but we don't understand what is behind this screen of stories and images. And songs.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “And this was a big philosophical question for thousands of years. Now it's becoming a practical question of engineering because previously all the ideas, as far as we know, maybe we are living inside a computer simulation or intelligent rats from the planet Zircon. If that's the case, we don't know about it. But taking what we do know about human history until now, all the stories, images, paintings, songs, operas, theater, everything we have encountered and shaped our minds was created by humans.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “We can't resist the idea is to resist an idea, you need to have some. Some vision of the creative process. Now, this is a very old fear. You go back to Plato's cave, so this idea that people are sitting chained in a cave and seeing shadows on a screen, on a wall, and thinking this is reality. You go back to the cart and he has this thought experiment of the demon. And Descartes asks himself, how do I know that any of this is real? Maybe there is a demon who is creating all of this and is basically enslaving me by surrounding me with these illusions. You go back to Buddha. It's the same question. If we are living in a world of illusions, and because we have been living in it throughout our lives, all our ideas, all our desires, how we understand ourselves, this is all the product of the same illusions.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “and more and more of the ideas of the images of the stories that surround us and shape our minds, our world, our produce, are created by AI, not by human beings.”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “The second thing is that AI is the first tool in history that can create new ideas by itself. The printing press could print our ideas, but could not create new ideas. AI can create new ideas entirely by itself. This is unprecedented, therefore it is the first technology in history that instead of giving power to humans, it takes power away from us. And the danger is that if it will increasingly take more and more power from us until we are left helpless and clueless about what is happening in the world. And this is already beginning to happen in an accelerated pace. More and more decisions about our lives, whether to give us a loan, whether to give us a mortgage, whether to give us a job or taken by a”

    2023-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source