Your Life Will Change Forever: War, AI, Power, History & Humanity's Future | Yuval Noah Harari

If you're a Chinese emperor like 2,000 years ago, one of your biggest problems in life is that if you give too much power to your ministers and generals, they might rebel against you, the will to power, and want to kill you and your family and establish their dynasty. And they found a solution. Which is based on bioengineering. Now, you can ask, bioengineering 2,000 years ago in China? Yes, it's called castration. Wow. Castration is bioengineering. You take a man, you cut something off, you get a different kind of man that is perfectly fit for the purposes of the emperor. know they did that. Yeah, you you eunuchs. I knew eunuchs existed. I didn't know they were generals. You had eunuch generals and eunuch ministers because they posed much less of a threat. They can't establish their own dynasty. Wow. And you had in There were periods in Chinese history when most of the imperial administration was eunuchs. Do you have a dark view of humanity? Like, you know, you you want a government job? Yes, just give us your testicles and we'll give you a government job. And this was not just China. You see the same thing happening in in the Byzantine Empire, in the caliphate, in the Islamic caliphate, because this was kind of bioengineering of 1,000 or 2,000 years ago that again, you need this this special kind of human which has intelligence and discipline, but doesn't pose the threat of establishing their own dynasty. That's the solution. So, Wow. was very limited. But you you had other, you know, you have the I know that the Christians they also have a problem with with humans as they are. Because humans are not very good in obeying all the kind of uh uh uh dictates of of Christianity. So, they try to change humanity, but they fail. They don't have the ability to really intervene deep inside the human genome, the human brain. Like Christianity doesn't like sex very much. It doesn't have It doesn't have It has a negative view of sex. But what to do? I mean, you can't change the human sexual urge. They tried a lot of times. But even monks and nuns did not always keep their vows of chastity. You have popes with children. So, Christianity had a very big trouble like overcoming this sexual urge of humans. And um you know, you you fast forward to the future, what would some fundamentalist religious regime, Christian or Muslim or whatever, do with genetic engineering? They can What I often say is that the people who develop the technology, they usually think about the good usages. We will use this to cure disease. We will use this to to improve people's lives. But you also need to take a moment, think about the politician you most hate in the world, or think about the religious movement or the ideological movement that which was the worst in history from your perspective, and take a few minutes to think, what would they do Yeah. With the technologies that I'm developing right now? It It doesn't mean we stop all technological development, but it means that we have to be very careful, especially about thing about something like genetic engineering, which is to some extent irreversible. We We have never seen like something like that in history. That the Chinese emperor, they could create eunuchs, but it was just one generation. They could not create an entire kind of new specie of human eunuchs. It doesn't work. But now it could be done. So, that's one very big danger. And And the other big danger it it it comes from AI. Because AI also is something completely new in human history. It's the first time that we invent something that can take power away from us. Going back to the will to power. Every previous invention in history gave more power to humans. Because even if the tool was extremely powerful, an atom bomb, the decision how to use it always remained in human hands. It was not the atom bomb that decided to uh to bomb Hiroshima. It was Truman. And the the the the American army. It was human beings. So, even a nuclear bomb actually empowers humanity. AI is the first invention that breaks this. Because it can make decisions by its own. That's the whole idea. So, it potentially can take power away from us. We already see it beginning to happen. Uh you know, increasingly you apply to to to to the bank to get a loan. And the bank says no. And why not? Because the algorithm said no. And you apply for a university or you apply for a job. And increasingly it's an AI making a decision about your life. And we will see it in more and more areas. Now, again, it's not all bad. It can improve many decision-making processes. It can uh really improve medicine. But we should be aware of the danger when this technology is in the wrong hands. Or when we don't understand its its true potential. Because another new thing about AI, and I think we talked about this the last time I was here, so I I won't go into too much details, it's it could eliminate human privacy completely. Throughout history, again, emperors and kings and popes always dreamt about following people all the time and and and and watching them, supervising them. They They couldn't do it. They didn't have the technology. What do you think? So, I've I've heard you say that imagine that North Korea gets a hold or a government like gets a hold of a device that can read effectively your mood. So, when you see a poster of the supreme leader and you have anger, up, cool, you're arrested and you're locked away. What What is the real-world response to that? Like, how do we Like, do you have a The response is it's political. I mean, I mean, don't get there. But you know that other countries are going to do it. So, there's going to be the tragedy of the commons. This is where I like I get into the hey, I'm optimistic. I'm living my life. I'm trying to create beautiful things. But at the same time, in the back of my mind, I'm like, humans are never going to stop. Like, we're never going to stop. The tragedy of the commons is real. And so, whatever solution we put in place has got to deal with the tragedy of the commons. Yes. I mean, again, this is where I'm not optimistic because the only way to really regulate a technology like AI is through international cooperation. Yeah. If you think about, you know, autonomous weapon systems, which are extremely dangerous, if only America bans them, but the Chinese or the Russians keep developing them, then very soon America will say, "Hey, we don't want to to be left behind. We have to do it also. We don't want to do it, but we have to do it." So, the only way you can regulate it is through some kind of international agreement, cooperation. And as international tensions in the world just increase, then I'm not optimistic at all about the potential to regulate this technology. Within certain within a country, you can regulate it to some extent. You can protect people's privacy. For instance, you can have laws that say that if somebody collects my private information, they can only use it to help me, they cannot use it to manipulate me or to sell it to a third party. Now, this is obvious because we have these kinds of laws about so many other things. Like with my personal doctor, it's known for for years, for generations, that you have this exactly these kinds of laws. My personal doctor has a lot of very private information about me. And he or she use it in order to help me. They are not allowed to use it to manipulate me or to sell it to some political party or to some corporation. So, why is Facebook allowed to do it? So, this should be very very simple. That's one defense of our privacy. Another thing that we can regulate is that we should never allow all the information to be concentrated in one place. Whether this one place is a government agency, or whether this one place is a corporation, this is the high road to a dictatorship. Somebody that has all the information of all the people, they basically control everybody. You know, I mean, even you think about it on a global scale. That you think in 20 years you have some country that somebody in in China or somewhere have the entire personal records of every politician, every judge, every journalist, every military officer in that country from the time they were little. Like every illness they had, every sexual encounter, every bribe they took. They know that. This is no longer an independent country. This has become a kind of data colony. To control the the colony, you don't need to send soldiers in to to to to police people, you just take the data out. And if you have enough information, you can control this country by remote control from from from from afar. So, I I think we need to have regulations against these kinds of things. And and it can be done. And similarly when you think about the the new developments like the metaverse, we have to think very very carefully about what's happening there. Again, I'm I'm a historian so I always look at things from a very long-term perspective. But we know this. This has been a fantasy of humans for thousands of years. It really goes back to ancient philosophical and religious debates about what is a human being. You know, you go back to early Christianity. So you have two camps. You have one camp which says humans are embodied beings. The body is in the center. Which was the old Jewish view. You are not your mind. You are not spiritual entity a soul. You are a body. In the book of Genesis, God creates Adam and Eve from clay. And they don't exist before that. They exist only as bodies. In the New Testament, Jesus rises from the dead in the flesh. And when he preaches to people about the kingdom of God, he means a physical kingdom here on earth with physical bodies with biological bodies. So this was one view as humans are bodies, are biological entities. And then there was the other view which which was influenced by Greek philosophy and so forth and which increasingly became dominant which says no, humans are not bodies. Humans are an immaterial soul or spirit trapped within a physical body. The body is bad, is evil, is corrupt, is dirty, is ugly. The soul is completely pure and spiritual. We're back to narratives. Which of those narratives do you believe? I I'll get to that in in a moment. I'll just complete my thought that what we see now in the metaverse is exactly this argument being replayed. That is can we uh as as as humans just shift to the immaterial realm of the metaverse and leave our biological bodies behind? Or is it impossible or even dangerous to try and separate our kind of mental existence from our bodily and and and physical existence? give you a little bit of hope for some of the people working in the metaverse. So, I am very grounded in biology. So, the things that I'm interested in with that very much coexist. Now, will it be interesting for a entirely virtual species to uh inhabit? Maybe. That could be cool, but that doesn't help us. So, even people thinking about uploading their consciousness, I've thought through that one a lot. Uh it would be a copy of me, but it wouldn't be me. So, all of the sadness of death and all that that I would be hoping to avoid by doing that doesn't help. Maybe it kind of gives the same sense of having a kid, but it wouldn't by any means save me from having to deal with death. So, but the metaverse is still really interesting to me. Now, I'm a person when I say I'm grounded in biology, I'm talking about understanding the microbiome and how wildly that influences my thoughts. And am I just a shell for microbes? Maybe. And so, like I'm I take a very very grounded approach to that. Now, having said that, so hopefully that gives you a little bit of optimism. Not everybody's trying to divorce from the body. It's I think of it most of the day Well, that I would caution against. you know, increasingly your social life, your job is increasingly in the metaverse. The biology of the situation will make that a disaster. So, I would highly as somebody developing in the metaverse, I will highly caution people against that because you have to feed your microbes. You have to love and bond and there's there's so many things that we pick up on. Anyway, I totally see how it it derails, but if people are talking about like, "Hey, you can't ignore the body. This is a very real thing. You have to pay attention. This is a fun place to visit. You can't live there." Um hopefully we can avoid some of the nonsense that comes along with like social media where nobody even talked about let's talk about how this becomes deranging cuz social media has been incredible in my life. I don't have an addictive personality so that probably helps. So, it's very easy for me to go. I spend a little bit of time on it. What time I do spend is incredibly empowering because I have trained the algorithm to give me useful things, not things that compare me to other people and make me feel terrible. Uh so, it's like, you know, you have to be very thoughtful about stuff like that. So, my hope is that we get a little bit wiser. Of course, not everybody will. But, it really does come back to this idea of narrative. Like, I tell myself a narrative about what the virtual space is. It's going to keep me I think from hitting the major roadblocks. I'm sure there will be things I can't anticipate yet. But, the the thing that I want to make sure that we touch on is I am not religious, but I worry that the thing that you're talking about where we have to be thoughtful about gene editing and we have to come together as a big cooperative. I don't know how that happens without a without something filling the god-like hole in all of our brains where we want some grand meaning, something that we can orbit around. But, but there is no there is no god's hole in our brain. Interesting. I mean, the people think don't worry about God is dead at all. Doesn't phase you. I mean, we managed without him for many periods in history and And been doing quite well in in recent generations without him. I think that some people connect God and morality. How do we come together then as a huge species, like as one planet to fight the big things? What's the big narrative we all revolve around? I think the big narrative is the biological narrative. That we are all Homo sapiens. That we are all have the same basic experiences. That we all want to fall in love. That we all have very deep ties with our family members. That we all we don't want to be sick. It's we don't like pain. That we don't want to die. That we're afraid to die. I mean, these are things that are common to all humans. You don't need God for them. And also very important, you don't need God for morality. Some people say that and it was common in history to have this argument that even if God doesn't exist, we have to believe in him because without God people will just kill and murder and rape and and we now have empirical evidence that this is absolutely not true. I don't think it breaks down like that. I think people are missing something more subtle with that. I'm just playing with these ideas. Please don't I hope it doesn't come across like I think I know, but I feel like the thing is more subtle. So, I haven't believed in God since I was like 15. Mhm. So, I totally get as I've never felt compared compelled to steal, murder, rape. None of that like none of that entered my mind. But when I look at sort of the broad sweep of humanity, I realize that people will fall in line with whatever the sort of dominant philosophy of their tribe is. So, by way of example, I'm I feel almost ridiculous bringing this up to you cuz you're a historian and I'm very much not, but the thing that stopped the conquistadors from coming up and taking over what we now think of as America, the thing that originally stopped the Americans from coming across uh the Comanches tribe, I believe is the name. And so, how did they become the tribe when all the other Native American tribes were falling by the wayside and getting relegated to reservations, why didn't they? Because of sheer brutality. And reading the book Empire of the Summer Moon was utterly fascinating when he was like they were the only tribe that fought on horseback instead of riding the horse to the fight and getting off. And so, they were able to just bring this level of viciousness that we've seen throughout history in all different kinds of tribes and peoples. But hearing it described, you realize, oh, it was actually really effective. So, thinking of yourself as a warrior, um treating the other people as the other that you need to stop them, kill them, torture, maim, whatever. You kill all adults, you take either the women and the ki- adult males, you take women and and children, but if they're infants then you kill them too because it's too much of a hassle. It's like it's actually effective, but it's super gnarly. And so, what is the thing that given how many times we've seen that, whether it's the Nazis stopped it. I mean, the conquistadors did the same thing and they believed in God. So, God doesn't stop these kind of terrible things from happening. 1,000% agree. So, that's why I said God-shaped hole. I'm trying to figure out what that cuz it isn't God. I want to be very clear on my stance. I mean, we need morality. That's that's certainly true. So, how do we make that like a thing that everyone's like, yeah. Because as you were describing uh getting everybody to recognize the biology of it. So, I have said a thousand times, on my tombstone I want them to put you're having a biological experience. That like you and I could not agree more about like I want that to work. I just don't think it will. And so, how or maybe this, how do we make you're having a biological experience so cool and so infectious that it propagates and and people come together. Mhm. Um You know, first of all, with regard to the example you gave, so yes. Throughout history, viciousness was an effective way to build empires, but now with nuclear weapons, it's only a way to destroy all of us. So, the same way that AI is a game changer and the same way that genetic engineering is a game changer, nuclear weapons were also a game changer. That uh you can no longer conquer the world by force. The only thing you will achieve is the annihilation of everything. Just to be clear really fast on that, all I'm saying is that they became the tribe not by being genetically superior, by having a belief system that made them unstoppable. Yes. So, and and this now becomes more and more dangerous to have this kind of of of belief system. Um we need I mean, again, if if if you have a lot of people in the world, different groups, with this kind of belief system, you end up with World War III. And with the type of weapons we now have, not just nuclear weapons, but also increasingly AI and and robotics and so forth, this is the end of humanity. Unless the thing, the belief system, that's powerful is one of beauty. I just don't know how to make beauty contagious in the way that the will to power is contagious. Mhm. Well, I don't either, but one thing that makes me hopeful is that you don't see a kind of constant level of violence throughout history. You do see periods of peace and periods of war. We just we we have just experienced, as I said earlier, uh some of the most peaceful decades in human history. So, this this makes me hopeful. And um we need to find ways to connect people. I don't think God is a good way because different people have different gods. And you know, coming from Israel, both sides believe in God. But he tells them different things. And he tells the Jews that Jerusalem is yours, and he tells the Muslims Jerusalem is yours, and then they fight over it. And the tragedy is that it's a completely unnecessary conflict. You know, if it was some kind of objective necessity, like you have two people alone on an island, there is the last apple or the last piece of bread, whoever gets it survives, the other dies, then I say, "Okay, you know, this is a situation when conflict is maybe is inevitable." But this is not the case in my country. There is enough food, there is enough territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River to feed and to house everybody. Humans usually don't really fight about objective biological things the same way that wolves or chimpanzees fight. They don't really fight about territory. They fight about fantasies in their minds. That both sides have a fantasy about Jerusalem, which is just incompatible with the the story, with the mythology of the other side, and this is what they fight about. About the fantasy in their in their mind. I mean, going back to the to the metaverse in a way. When you go to Jerusalem, I've I've I've I teach there at the Hebrew University, so it's a place like with biological glasses of of an ape, you see, it's just like every other place. You have trees, you have stones, you have buildings, it's the same like Los Angeles, like any other place. But then you put on a different set of glasses, you put on religious glasses, and you see ancient shells, and you see divinity, and you see sacred stones, and sacred trees, and everything is sacred. You know, a sacred place is a place plus a story about the place. And this is at the bottom of most conflicts in the world. Also, you look at again the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Is it about territory? Russia is the biggest country in the world. They need more territory? This is the thing they need, more territory? No. It's about the fantasies in in the head. I think that the more we come back to the level of of again of the body, of biology, the more common ground that we have. 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Check out betterhelp.com/impacttheory to get 10% off your first month. You go to narrative again from religions like Christianity that the body is the source of all the bad things in life. And the mind, this is a kind of the more spiritual, more beautiful, better part. And most of the time, it's the opposite. That on the level of the body, we can relate to every other human being in the world because biologically we are the same. What creates this huge distance between us is the fantasies that the mind imagines and and produces. So, I I think that again, if if I have hope for the for humanity in the 21st century, is actually getting a little away from our from thinking too much, from from the mind, and grounding ourselves a little more in our body. Some of the things that are happening technologically become a little bit dangerous because you can hack a human. And if you can explain what you mean by hacking a human, and then how do we end up hacking ourselves in a positive way? Well, I think this is maybe the most important thing to know about living right now in the 21st century, that we are now hackable animals. We have the technology to decipher how humans or what you think, what you want, to predict human choices, to manipulate human desires in ways which were never possible before. Basically, to hack a human being, you need two things. You need a lot of data, especially biometric data, not just about where you go and what you buy, but what is happening inside your body and inside your brain. And secondly, you need a lot of computing power to make sense of all that data. Now, previously in history, this was never possible. Nobody had enough data and enough computing power to hack human beings. Even if the KGB or the Gestapo followed you around 24 hours a day, eavesdropping on every conversation you had, watching everybody you meet, still they did not have the biological knowledge to really understand what's happening inside you, and they certainly didn't have the computing power necessary to make sense even of the data they were able to collect. So, the KGB could not really understand you, could not really predict all your choices or manipulate all all all your desires and so forth. And but now it's changing. What the KGB couldn't do, corporations and governments today are beginning to be able to do. And this is because of the merger of the revolution in biotech. We are getting better in understanding what's happening inside us, in the body, in the brain. And at the same time, the revolution in infotech, which gives us the computing power necessary. When you put the two together, when infotech merges with biotech, what you get is the ability to create algorithms that understand me better than I understand myself. And then these algorithms can not just predict my choices, but also manipulate my desires and basically sell me anything, whether it's a product or a politician. And that So, that's what you're calling hacking, that you're hitting me with the right emotional message at exactly the right time based on my biometric data? Mhm. Yeah, this is one of the things you can do. Then you can predict, you can manipulate, you can eventually also re-engineer or replace. If you really hack a system, you really understand how it functions, then usually you can also re-engineer it or you can completely replace it. And again, one of the dangers that we are facing today in the 21st century is that computers and AI would be able to replace humans in more and more tasks and maybe push millions of humans out of the job market as a result. All right. So, I I fully understand the dangers and we will talk about some of what we were talking about off camera, which is we've got this whole story called Neon Future, where we're exploring that notion of what happens to what you've called the useless class when they're pushed out of the job market, and what does that do economically? But, going just staying with the the notion of the hackability for a second. So, it's funny, as you were describing it, and I know you bring the sense of like, uh there's some like real significant problems we need to take a very serious look at, and I get almost giddy with excitement because I have potentially delusional levels of optimism. I'm very open to that. No, I agree. I mean, the thing about this ability to hack humans is that it has also potentially tremendous positive consequences, and this is why it's so tempting. If it was only bad, then it was it would have been like an easy deal to say, "Okay, we don't want that, and let's stop researching or going in that direction." But, it is extremely tempting because it can provide us, for example, with the best health care in history. Something which goes far beyond anything we've seen so far. This can mean that maybe in 30 years the poorest person on the planet can get a better health care from her or his smartphone than the richest person today gets from the best hospitals and the best doctors. The kind of things you can just know about what's happening in your body um is is nothing like we've seen so far. Yeah, no, that that's really extraordinary, and if you had to take the positive look and say, "Okay, we have this ability. Let's just say it's already there. We've got all this biometric data. It's kicking off." Um how would you encourage people to leverage that to empower themselves? And I'll I'll use an example that I found profoundly interesting from your book. So, you said that growing up that it was unclear to you that you were gay, but that now Stanford has developed an algorithm that essentially can look at three or four photos of somebody's face Mhm. and predict with 91% accuracy whether or not they're gay, which seems impossible. But, if that's true, the level of data that we could give ourselves about our like deepest, most hardwired desires, there would be a level of clarity there that seems useful. Um, how would you encourage people to use that? Well, that's a very good example. I mean, the Stanford algorithm, actually there is a lot of problems with that research and and let's put it aside. But, the first key message from from that is how little people actually know about themselves. And um, one of the most important things in my life and also in I think in my scientific career was the realization of how little I know about myself and humans in general. There was so many important ideas and important facts we don't realize about ourselves. I was 21 when I finally realized that I was gay, which is, you know, when you think about it, it's it's absolutely amazing. I mean, it should have been obvious at age, you know, 16, 15. And an algorithm would have realized it very quickly. And you can build algorithms like that today or in a few years. Um, you just need to to follow your eye movements. Like you you go on on on the beach or you you look at the computer screen and you see an attractive guy and an attractive girl and just follow the focus of the eyes. Where do the eyes go and whom do they focus on? Should be very easy. And uh, such an algorithm could have told when I was 15 that I was gay. And the implications are really mind-boggling. When an algorithm knows such an important thing about you before you know it about yourself. Now, it can go in all kinds of directions. It really depends on where you live and what you do with it. In some countries, you can be in trouble now with the police and the government. You might be sent to some reeducation facility. In some countries, like with, you know, surveillance capitalism, so maybe I don't know about myself that I'm gay, but Coca-Cola knows I'm gay because they have these algorithms. And they want to know that because they need to know which commercials to show me. Let's say Coca-Cola knows that I'm gay, and I even know it about myself. They know it and Pepsi doesn't. Coca-Cola will show me a commercial with a shirtless guy drinking Coca-Cola, but Pepsi will make the mistake of showing a girl in a bikini. And next day, without my realizing why, when I go to the supermarket, when I go to the to the restaurant, I will order Coca-Cola, not Pepsi. I don't know why, but they know. So they might not even share this kind of information with me. Now, if the algorithm does share the information with me, again, it's it it it all depends on context. One scenario is that you're 15 years old, you go to a birthday party of somebody from your class, and somebody just heard that there is this cool new algorithm which tells you your sexual orientation. And everybody agrees it will be a lot of fun to just have this game that everybody takes turn with the algorithm and and everybody else looking and then and then and seeing the results. Would you like to discover about yourself in such a scenario? This this can be quite quite a shocking experience. Okay, but even if it's done in like complete privacy, you know, it's a it's a it's a very deep philosophical question. What does it mean to discover something like that about yourself from an algorithm? What kind What does it mean about human life, about human identity? Um we have very little experience with these kinds of things. You know, from very ancient times, all the philosophers and saints and sages tell people to get to know yourself better. It's one of the maybe the most important thing in life is to get to know yourself better. But for all of history, this was a process of self exploration, which you did through things like meditation and maybe sports and maybe art and contemplation and all these things. What does it mean when the process of self self exploration is being outsourced to a big data algorithm? And the philosophical implications are quite mind-boggling. It's interesting. So, let's talk about that. So, the implications you're outsourcing the self-discovery process, to me that sounds so profoundly useful because all day the people that write in to me, they're asking basically one essential question. How do I find the thing that I love? Cuz I tell people you you need to develop a passion in your life. I don't think you find it. I think you develop it. But they need to start from an area of of real interest. It needs to be actually something that at a hardwiring level, they're just they get that response. So, the their next question is like how, right? How do I get into that? How do I discover the thing that triggers me like that? And if I discover it, then how do I develop it into a passion? If you had an algorithm, something that were able to um use the more manipulative techniques that you were talking about that Coca-Cola is doing or whatever, but give it to you in a way that can move you in a desired direction. So, I'll give you a specific example that you give in the book. So, talking about how let's say there was an algorithm that knew you just broken up with somebody, knew that you were in the grips of heartache, cuz they're they're reading your biometrics. they're watching your your your heart. give it to us. That that example that you you put. So, the biometrics they're reading you. The it's the song. It knows what songs to pick. Yeah, I mean, something as as simple as choosing music. So, you you were just yet dumped by your boyfriend or girlfriend and the the algorithm that controls uh the music that you listen to chooses the songs that are the best fit for your current mental state. And of course, this brings up the the question of what is the metric? What do you actually want from the music? Do you want the music to uplift you? Or do you want the music to kind of connect you to the deepest level of sadness and depression? And ultimately, we can say that the algorithm can follow different kinds of instructions. If you know what kind of emotional state you want to be in, you can just tell the algorithm what you what you want and it will do it. If you're not sure, you can tell the algorithm follow the recommendation of the best psychologist today. So, let's say you have the five stages of grief. So, okay, walk me with music through these five stages of grief. And the algorithm can do that better than than any human DJ. And what we really need to understand in in this regard is that what the music and most of art plays on in the end is the human biochemical system. At least according to the dominant view of art in the modern Western world. We had different views in different cultures. But in the modern Western world, the idea of art is that art is above all about inspiring human emotions. It doesn't necessarily have to be joy. Great art can inspire also sadness, can can inspire anger, can inspire fear. It can be a whole palette of emotional states, but art is about inspiring human emotions. So, the instrument artists play on, and whether it's musicians or poets or movie makers, they're actually playing on the Homo sapiens biochemical system. And we might reach a point quite soon when an algorithm knows this instrument better than any human artist. A movie or a poem or a a song that will not move you, that will not inspire you, might inspire me. And something that will inspire me in one situation might not inspire me in another situation. And as time goes on and the algorithm gathers more and more data about me, it will become more and more accurate in reading my biochemical system and knowing how to play on it as if it was a piano. Like, okay, you want joy? I press this button and out comes the perfect song, the only song in the world that can actually make me joyful right now. That's so interesting to me. All right, so right now, real world, you can snap your fingers and you can have one algorithm that's tied to one biochemical process. In your life for real, what would you want to monitor and get that feedback on? Now, that's easy. I mean, a healthcare. If there is like something seriously wrong in my body that I don't know about, like, I don't know, cancer or something, I would like the algorithm to find that out. I don't want to wait until I mean, the usual process is that it has to go through your own mind. You can't outsource it. I mean, today when you need to uh cancer, there are exceptions, but in most cases, there is a crucial moment when you feel something is wrong in my body. And you go to this doctor and that doctor and and you do this test and that test until they finally realize, "Okay, we just discovered you have cancer in your liver or whatever." Um but because it relies on your own feelings, in this case feelings of pain, very often uh it it it's quite late in the process. By the time you start feeling pain, usually the cancer has spread, and maybe it's not too late, but it's going to be expensive and painful and problematic to treat it. But if we can, you know, outsource this, don't go through the mind, through the through my my feelings, I want an algorithm that with biometric sensors is monitoring my health 24 hours a day without my being aware of it, it can potentially discover this liver cancer when it is just a tiny just a few cells are beginning to to to to to split and to spread. And it's so easy and cheap and painless to take care of it now instead of 2 years later when it's already spread and it's it's it's a big problem. So, this is something that I think almost everybody would sign on to. And this is the big temptation. Because it comes with the whole other with a long tail of dangers. I mean, this algorithm that the the the health care system knows almost everything about you. So, one of the biggest battles in the 21st century is likely to be between privacy and health. And I guess that health is going to win. Mhm. Most people will be willing to give up a very significant amount of privacy in exchange for far better health care. Now, we do need to try and and enjoy both worlds to create a system that give us a very good health care, but without compromising our privacy. Keeping the Yes, you can use the data to tell me that there is a problem and and and we should do this or that to solve it, but I don't want this data to be used for other purposes without my knowing it. Whether we can reach such a balance and like, you know, have your cake and eat it, too, that that's a big political question. I have a hypothesis. I know you don't believe that history repeats, but that humans do have a biology. We have a nature. Humans are like something. And I think there's two things man, and this is like a random entrepreneur stabbing in the dark here, but I've engaged with people enough that I'm pretty confident that I'm on the right track. I think there's two things that lead to this kind of thing where we're fighting over something that in the end really isn't that important. One, some people need to be chased by a lion. So, without an extrinsic real danger that forces you to be like, "Yo, we may not see eye to eye, but you can help me keep my family safe, and in return I will help you keep your family safe." Without that, that impulse to protect or whatever goes awry or just that they can't handle boredom. Something we talked about briefly before we started rolling. And then there the other thing is Nietzsche's will to power. And I did not understand the culture war until I started reading about Nietzsche and the idea that we have we want to It can manifest beautifully. We want to get better. We want to improve. We want that control over our life to to manifest what we could be. But then there's also the toll booth person that isn't going to let you through if you don't have exact change because they can. And that they get to feel that sense of, "Okay, I matter. I I have some control over the world." And that desire to have power Mhm. coupled with there's nothing real to fight against puts humans in a very weird situation where they will pick up on minor things and we just run in opposite directions so that we have the expression of the will to power. Now, I am new to Nietzsche so I do not claim to fully understand him. But it seems like he saw it as a pretty broad spectrum. Yeah. Could be a beautiful thing. It could be an ugly petty thing. So I don't want to paint it with like these dark overtones and wolves howling in the background. But like that it can manifest in a pretty ugly way. I I completely agree that much of what we see now is not an ideological battle. It's uh certain politicians uh who as you say that what what is driving them is power, not ideology. And they're using um divisive uh uh issues. You know, the the way to gain power is to take a certain issue and politicize it. And the they they are searching for issues that can get people enraged. That can and and then harnessed harnessed this energy to to get to power. So a lot of the issues that you know, people are fighting over if they were depoliticized they could have been solved much more easily. But you take these issues and you turn them into these big ideological battles and then nobody wants to to back down and become this tribal affair. And this is the the the the way that these leaders uh uh ride to power. And and again, we see it so many times in history. It's really terrible. I think that the job of leaders should be actually to heal the community, to bring it together. And this is why also I think that, you know, many people today say that that we see the resurgence of resurgence of nationalism all over the world. But actually much of the world you see a crisis of nationalism and the resurgence of tribalism, of tearing nations into their components and destroying actually the national community. Like I said before, nationalism when when it is understood correctly, it's a force for good in the world. The basic kind of message of nationalism is uh the the the ability to care about people you don't know, which is amazing. You know, from a biological perspective, we are kind of programmed to care about a very small number of people that we know personally, our family, our friends, and to prefer them over everybody else. And the big task of nationalism is to come and say and say to us, "No, there is a much larger community of people that you need to care about. So, for instance, you take money away from your family and you give it to build a healthcare system. This is These are taxes so that strange people that you never met in your life on the other side of the country, you'll never meet them, but because you're a good patriot and you care about them, you pay your taxes honestly so that they get some basic healthcare or education or a sewage system. And um similarly, like you now, I don't know, you're a mayor or you're a prime minister or something, and you need to appoint somebody for a job, and you have two options. You have your cousin, which is not qualified at all, but he's your cousin, man. And you have like a very qualified person who is a stranger. Millions of years of evolution are screaming in your ear, are you an idiot? Give it to your cousin. But patriotism tells you no, you should give the job to the qualified person because they would do a better job for the community. And that's that's the the the the the the the the good side of of of nationalism. And what we see now in many parts of the world is politicians who describe themselves as nationalists, but they are actually not trying to create uh uh harmony in the national community. They don't strengthen the national community. They tear it apart. They deliberately look for any crack, for any wound in kind of the national body. Hey, here there's a problem. This is something that people don't agree on, and instead of trying to heal it, they kind of poke their finger into it and try to enlarge it as much as possible to inflame it because this is their ticket to power. And in this way they destroy the national community and uh uh turn the nation into warring tribes. And then they place themselves at the head of one tribe and tell people you have to follow me, otherwise the other tribe will destroy you. And you're completely right. This is simply uh uh the the will to power. It works. We see unfortunately in many parts of the world we see that it is working. Not just in the US. I mean the elections this this week in Brazil, the elections uh next week in my country in Israel, it's exactly the same. Instead of leaders who are trying to heal the national community, you see leaders that try to destroy it and get power by kind of leading just one tribe. Yeah, this is why like I'm a super optimistic guy. As I was saying before we started rolling, like when it comes to AI, the metaverse, all that stuff, you're going to have to slap me back to reality because I'm so optimistic. But on this, I am pessimistic only because when I look at the human animal and the way that we're wired and what biology tells us to do, I don't see it feels like a positive feedback loop that has been magnified a thousandfold by social media. And so now information is coming at us so fast, it's memeified, so it becomes very easy to digest. Yeah. I have a level of confusion because so much is coming at me. If I feel insecure, nothing from a biology perspective, nothing is more intoxicating than the certainty of righteous indignation. So the reason that somebody can acquire power by poking at something is they're telling me exactly how to feel about something very concrete. And so it's like, you should hate those people because they have guns. You should hate those people because they believe in abortion. You should hate those people because on and on and on. Yeah. And so it now in all of my confusion, I have absolute certainty. And through a weird quirk of evolution, that calms my mind and distracts me from all the like internal emotional turmoil that I was having. And it's like the only way that I see that running its course so that we it's like labor. Once a woman goes into labor, there is no stopping it. She's either going to die or she's going to give birth to a child. Those are your two options, there's nothing in between. Yeah. Because you're you're in that positive feedback loop. I feel like and Lord knows I want you to tell me that we're not, but I feel like we're in a positive feedback loop right now of people racing away from each other. Mhm. And the only way that they will come back to the middle is through enough suffering. And every war proves that after a while, you just don't want to fight anymore. And you've seen too many people die and it's like, "Oh my god, this is so horrible. Now I'm willing to compromise. Now I'm willing to come back to the table." And if you see a way out of this, because I am a big believer in Nelson Mandela. When I read Long Walk to Freedom, that changed me at some deep fundamental level. Where he was like, "Hey, they imprisoned me for 27 years. And what's my answer when I come back out to find what I've heard you refer to as a middle way?" So, way number one is to remain oppressed. Clearly, he wasn't prepared to do that. Way number two is to become the oppressor. And he was like, "You give up your humanity when you become the oppressor." So, he's like, "You might be in power, but you give something up that's not worth giving up." The third way, the way in the middle, is to heal people, to bring them back together. And so, I'm like, if he can do that, like none of us have an excuse. But I don't think that we can. I think he was such a freakishly rare human. I just don't know who we turn to. Well, I'm less optimistic about the metaverse and all that, and we'll discuss this in in a minute. But but I'm more optimistic We can trade optimisms. Well well well, yeah, I'm the opposite. I'm more optimistic about I mean, not like terribly optimistic, but a little more optimistic All right, let's hear it. about our chances, you know, kind of politically and and and and so forth. I mean, first of all, I look at the long-term process of history. Uh we started tens of thousands of years ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago, as isolated bands. I mean, 100,000 years ago, you have humans living in small hunter-gatherer bands of a few dozen individuals. And over history, you see that the direction is very very clear. Humans find ways to trust more and more strangers, to come together into larger and larger groups even though kind of evolution evolutionarily it makes no sense. I mean we are programmed to trust just a very very small number of individuals that we know personally and yet we have nations we have countries of hundreds of millions of people. If we have a trade network which covers basically the entire globe. So humans find ways how to to to to overcome these tendencies and to develop trust. And when you look specifically even at the issue of of violence and war the last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history. Now I know there have been conflicts and and and wars in the last few decades. I come from Israel you don't need to tell me I I lived in the Middle East all my life but when you look at the statistics it's the most peaceful era in human history. It's an era when humans had more chance to die from eating too much than from human violence. In most of the world it became unacceptable for one country to just invade and conquer its neighbors because it's it's it's stronger. Um you see it in the in the state budgets maybe in in better than in any other place. For most of history the number one item on the budget of every king and sultan and emperor is the army. The army the navy the fortresses the military. In recent decades the average expenditure of governments all over the world together the average on the military is about 6%. Wow. That's amazing because this is what enabled the resources to shift to again education welfare uh health care. Most countries spend much more on education health care and welfare than they spend or than on the military. You can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want. All you need is discipline. I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion-dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through. If you want better health, stronger relationships, a more successful career, any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University. Join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things. Tap now for a free trial and get started today. And that tells us that it's possible. Now, we shouldn't be complacent and think that oh, this is now that's it. We have peace. We can just relax. No, peace didn't come from some change in the laws of nature or because of divine intervention. It came because people countries built good institutions, not just on a national level, but on the international level. Since 1945, countries have built a rule-based international system, which had many problems, but still managed to provide more peace than in any previous era. This is now in question. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and other developments are so frightening because they endanger the biggest achievement of of of humanity. Uh this era of relative peace. You know, if if if Putin is allowed to get away with what he's trying to do in Ukraine, then you will see defense budgets all over the world skyrocket. Already now, lots of countries, Germany, Japan, countries in Europe are doubling, tripling their defense budgets. It's basically like, you know, you had the biggest the biggest taboo in the international system was you cannot invade another country and conquer it just because you're stronger. And he's now breaking this taboo. And everybody around the world is watching to see what will happen. It's like in a school when you have a bully who picks on a on a smaller kid and starts beating him. And all the kids are watching what will happen. If the bully gets away with it, nobody intervenes, if they then it's clear to everybody, that's it. The laws of the school, the norms of the school have changed. Now everybody knows this can happen. If on the other hand, people intervene, the bully is stopped, you give support to to to the to the to the victim, then the norm actually gets strengthened. People realize, hey, you can't do that. And this is not what is happening. Uh dictators and regimes all over the world are watching to see what will happen in Ukraine. Um so far Putin is not getting away with it. There's been massive support from for Ukraine from the West. The Ukrainians themselves are fighting more bravely and efficiently than anybody could have imagined. And this also goes back to to to kind of where my optimism about what's happening inside nations come from. You look at Ukraine. Um Ukraine is a very new country, just, you know, 30 years since it's gained its independence from the Soviet Union. It It's made of different ethnic groups. You have people speaking Russian, people speaking Ukrainian, you have Jews and and so forth. And it was uh under the most intense kind of disinformation campaign coming from Russia trying to divide the Ukrainians against themselves, trying to do exactly that, to tear apart the fabric of the Ukrainian society, of Ukrainian nation, and turn, you know, Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers against each other. And they completely failed, the Russians. Putin gambled, one of the reason what happening in the in the war, Putin gambled that the moment his tanks would enter Ukraine, Ukraine would just collapse, Zelensky would run away, the Ukrainian army would surrender, and lots of Ukrainians would, you know, throw flowers on the Russian tanks. And it didn't happen. The Ukrainians actually came together. Um Zelensky didn't flee. The Ukrainian army didn't surrender, and people threw Molotov cocktails on on the Russian tanks. And you know, Zelensky himself, he is Jewish coming from a Russian-speaking family. Now, if if if Ukraine had fallen victim to this kind of tribalism, then the Ukrainians would would would think that, well, he's Russian-speaking, he's Jewish, he's not really Ukrainian, we can't trust him. But he became this national hero. And I think that I hope that more countries around the world would learn from from this example that uh uh nationalism doesn't mean that you hate minorities or you hate your neighbors. No, it means that that people come together. That's an interesting take on nationalism that I I've thought a lot about because I grew up in the '80s when it was it was self-evident that you loved America. I mean, that was certainly the prevailing thing. To be against America was like punk rock. Like, it was so anti, it was like way outside the pale. And now that's become so commonplace that it isn't even punk rock anymore. It's like it's it is I don't know that it's the dominant voice, but it's a big enough voice that it isn't uh uncommon to bump into And the amazing thing, you see it from both sides. It's not like you say, "Okay, these kind of extreme radical lefties." You also see it on the right that people are against the federal government, against the FBI, against the postal office. Like anything that smells of of of of of the state and they they have all these conspiracy theories about the deep state. And you know you know what the what the deep state really is? The deep state is the sewage system. You know, somebody built this system under our houses and streets and towns and it's a good system. You know, you go to the toilet, you flush down what you've done and it it's gone somewhere and it's take being taken care of. If there was no sewage system, we would you know, we would die of cholera. Because somebody needs to take care to separate say the drinking water from the sewage system. That you don't get germs in your drinking water. And who is this somebody? This is the job of of the government. This is the job of the state. And and that's the deep state. And when you see that people are kind of turning even against that. And again, it's coming from from both sides. This is this is so unfortunate that humanity has managed on many levels to reach this you know amazing achievements. Whether it's the most peaceful era in history, whether it's building sewage systems so that we don't get cholera epidemics. And then people take it for granted. And then people just neglect it. That you know, it's like living in a house that everybody inhabits, but nobody wants to repair. And eventually it falls down. And like you said, then people then people realize what what what what they missed. Like when you have a war and you see people dying and suffering around you, then you look back and you say actually we had it so good before. How do we get back there? And hopefully we we realize in time what we can lose and we don't get into the war in the first place. And it feels to me as a historian that we are kind of at the edge of the precipice. Like we've climbed up. We've been so far below in the jungle, in kind of this conflict for survival with violence and disease and poverty. And we've climbed up to the top or to to a very high place. But we are still at the edge precipice. We can fall down all the way down very, very quickly, within just a few years. Mhm. And and and and people don't really realize it. Yeah, so you just made me think of Oppenheimer's quote, "I am become death, destroyer of worlds." We're living in a a really We're living in an amazing time. I wouldn't want to live at any other time, but it is a moment of that requires deep reflection on the stories that we tell ourselves. So, I know that as you look at the long arc of history, you think a lot about Okay, the reason that humans become the most dominant predator this world has ever seen is not because we're the strongest, fastest, sharpest teeth, claws, whatever. It's because we could organize flexibly in groups via the stories that we effectively bond over and come together over. And when we were talking about fascism, communism, and liberalism, when I first heard you talk about that, you said, "These These are the dominant stories Yeah. that over history people have been fighting over." So, you have the story of Mhm. the state is the only thing that matters and that that what life is going to be is an eternal struggle between warring states. One will violently conquer all the rest, and then there will finally be peace. So, it's like, "Hey, as Germans, we're that We're the one. Like it's us. Like all we have to do now is take over like it was meant to be. Then communism, same idea. It's the story that the only the state matters, but the way that we get there is by distributing everything equally. And then liberalism, the story and you said World War II ended the idea of fascism. Uh the Cold War ended the idea of communism. Liberalism actually worked, but it's still tearing itself apart. And so then the question becomes why. Okay, so now if we're on this precipice and it's this incredibly important moment where we've got the potential for gene editing, which you've said could destroy all of humanity. We've got the potential for AI or AI's here, man. Anybody that doesn't recognize like how like now that we're using it in our own business on both the the traditional content side, so what we're doing now will be tremendously influenced by our ability to find our audience using AI. And then on the other side so we're building in the metaverse. So who's designing those shirts? It's largely humans, but now they're being augmented with AI. You can literally type something and it will give you a design. It's insane. That's today. So it becomes a question of what story are you telling yourselves? Now, I think the thing cuz you and I agree on a lot, but if I had to guess on the thing that maybe makes me slightly more pessimistic than you is I believe ultimately the collective is a reflection only of the individual. And I do think that even if you want collective change, it has to spring forth from the individual. Now we get into the deep complexities of what that looks like. So when you have somebody like a Nelson Mandela who can actually as an individual sway the collective okay, that's very special. And so there's clearly a relationship. It's not an individual in isolation. We're not whatever 7.4 billion individuals in isolation. It's very much the way that I say it is we are both the shout and the echo. So, you are what you do, and you are the reflection that comes back from other people about how they feel about what you do. And you can never disentangle those. So, I don't think the human mind is designed to disentangle those two things. They are effectively one in the same. But the thing that gets in there, the way that we're able to take all of these variables and make sense out of it is through a narrative, which then deeply simplifies this incredibly complex world. And so, my the thing that I cling to as hope on this precipice is that people take the responsibility to tell themselves a narrative that brings people back together. Yeah. That's the only path I see forward. And so, my thing is as somebody with a platform, I think a lot about is that Go ahead. No, but but there is a narrative. There is I actually this is the main story that I tell in in in my new book, Unstoppable Us, um which is aimed at at kids, but to give them the understanding that their identity is closely connected to all the other people in the world, and actually even beyond people, to to other animals. Because if you want to understand who you are, so you know, you get these kind of national stories, which are important, but they are so limited. Because nations have been around for just something like 5,000 years. You know, the oldest nations in the world like Egypt, they go back 5,000 years. Most nations go back just a couple of hundred years. And each of us is made of bits and pieces that came from all over the world for from the whole of history. You know, it starts with the food that we eat, that if I like to eat chocolate, and chocolate was discovered by the Olmecs in Central America something like 4,000 years ago. So, this is a bit of Olmec in me that I like chocolate. And I like my chocolate sweet. And sugar was domesticated in New Guinea, something like 8,000 years ago. So, I have a bit of New Guinea in me that I like I like sugar. And um going much much deeper, like our most basic emotions. You know, as a kid, I sometimes would wake up in the middle of the night afraid there was a monster under the bed, and I would call my mom. Mom, there is a monster. And where is this coming from? This is not Jewish culture. This is not Israeli invention. This is coming from millions of years of evolution. It's actually historical memory. Tens of thousands of of years ago, when we lived in the wild, there were actually monsters that came in the night to eat children, lions and cheetahs and so forth. And if you continue to sleep, the lion eats you. If you wake up and call your mom, you could be saved. And again, calling your mom, where is this coming from? Moms are not a Jewish invention or an American invention. Again, all mammals and all birds have a very close connection between mother and offspring. I mean, this is the very definition of of being a mammal. You know, mammals means that, you know, you have I don't know, you have turtles. So, the mother turtle, she would just climb at night from the ocean, dig a hole, lay eggs, cover it, go back to the ocean. That's it. My job is done. Best of luck to you. Now, as as a mammal, all mammals eat their mother. Like you're born. Crazy way to say it, but yeah, it's true. She not only carried you in her womb, after you're born, she actually feeds her feeds you from her body. Mhm. And if something happens in the connection between mother and child, you don't survive. And this is so basic in who we are. And you know, as a Jewish kid you should know that it's the same with Muslim kids. And it's the same with Russian and Ukrainian kids and it's the same with American and Mexican kids. So there's this is something very very deep in us that connects all of us. And I think this is a basis for a a narrative for the 21st century because we now face also collective challenges that threaten the existence the humanity of all of us and then it's not just nuclear war and climate change it's also what you mentioned. I see new technologies like genetic engineering and to some extent also AI as existential dangers to all of us and that we should unite to face. Is genetic engineering the one that freaks you out the most? Um it it depends because it's it's it's it's it develops much more slowly than AI. Mhm. So in terms of like what it can do then genetic engineering is probably the most frightening. Germline only or do you not want people even messing with their own? At this stage we just don't understand our body and our brain and our mind well enough to start messing with it. Mhm. You know basically if you give corporations and armies and governments the technology to start changing the human body so they will start changing uh uh uh kind of developing upgrading the human qualities that they need. Yeah. They want discipline. They want intelligence. Like armies want disciplined and intelligent soldiers. So they will try to mess with our genes with our body to make us more disciplined and more intelligent. Now other things like compassion or like spirituality they don't want that. You know, Putin needs disciplined and intelligent soldiers to to fight his war. He doesn't want compassionate soldiers or spiritual soldiers. So, even without trying to to to to eliminate these qualities, just by focusing on what they want, we might get kind of highly intelligent and highly disciplined humans who lack compassion and lack any spiritual depth. And the terrible thing about that is that it will not be a temporary uh uh change. It could go on for generations. If you look back in history, so figures like Hitler, like Stalin, they also tried to re-engineer humans. But, they uh it it it it it it did a time limit. Like with education and with uh uh uh mass political control, they could for a few years change the uh uh characteristics of entire populations. Like brainwash them with Nazi ideology or or or communist ideology. But, eventually when they fell, you get back to to the to to to ground zero. You get back to this body, to this brain. They didn't manage to change it. So, over time, we can start again. But, once you give these kind of regimes the ability to actually change the human body, like permanently, maybe even germline, then their uh uh legacy can last indefinitely. They can create a new human species. Um you've talked really powerfully about story, about how stories like money, which I don't think most people think of as a story, um as being, you know, these tremendous things that control all of our lives, that point us all in the same direction, that give us sort of a common code by which to live. How can people take control of the story that they tell themselves about themselves, which I find to be one of the most important stories that you engage in. Yes, so our identity is really just a story, which we constantly construct and and embellish. So we You can say that the the entire human mind is a machine that constantly produces stories, and especially one very important story, which is my story. Uh and different people have different specialize in different genres. Some people build their stories a tragedy, some people build their stories a comedy or as a drama, but um in the end I did the self is a story and not a real thing. And on the one hand, with all the new technologies, you get better and and better abilities to construct yourself. But already today, a lot of the work which previously was done in the brain and in the mind of constructing my identity, my story, has been outsourced to things like Facebook. That you build your Facebook account, and this is actually outsourcing it from the brain, and you are busy maybe for hours every day just building a story and becoming extremely attached to it and and publicizing it to everybody. And you tend to make this fundamental mistake, you think it's it's the This is really me. And um so so Why is that a mistake? I'm actually really curious. First of all, if you take something like the profile that people create about themselves in in Facebook or in Instagram, it should be obvious it doesn't really reflect your actual existence, your actual reality, both inner reality and outer reality. Like, the percentage of time you smile in your Instagram account is much bigger than the percentage of time you smile in real life. And, you know, you go on some vacation um and you post the the the images from the vacation. So, usually you're smiling in your in your swimming suit on the beach with your girlfriend and boyfriend holding and this cocktail and everything looks perfect and everybody is so envious. But, actually you just had a nasty fight with your boyfriend 5 minutes ago and then this is the image that everybody else is seeing and thinking, "Oh, they must have such such wonderful time." And afterwards, like a year later or 2 years later, you look back and this is what you see. And you forget what was the actual experience like. What What is the role of truth in the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves? Very little. Do you think there should be more? There should There should definitely be more. And what would be the outcome if we were like, "I'm really going to make sure that the story I tell myself is objectively true?" It's going to be very very painful and and difficult. I think it is worth the effort, but it's just very difficult. We constantly uh we constantly edit the the story. Just like the news on TV are edited and just like, you know, it's a bit like making a movie. Like, you watch the movie in the cinema and everything is so seamless. Like, yeah, this is the story. It flows. And then, when you actually see how a movie is produced, this is insane. Like, you have this tiny bit of a scene, you repeat it 50 times, the and and sometimes, you know, you shoot this scene this scene scene two comes after scene one, but actually it was filmed long before that. So, sometimes you you you film the breakup of of of the lovers before you film the the first meeting for all kinds of of schedule reasons and locations. So, the the end result is completely seamless and perfect. But, it is actually made up from all these tiny tiny disconnected bits that have been, you know, this is from here and this is from there and we somehow glue it together and it looks good. And it's the same with the story of of our life. It's all kinds of bits and pieces. And only when you tell it to yourself or to somebody else, it kind of makes sense. The cost of trying to stick with the reality as it is is very very high. It's very difficult. It demands a lot of effort. And it it it's often very painful because you have to acknowledge many things about yourself that you don't want to acknowledge them. People have this fantasy of I don't know, going to some retreat and just taking out a week or two of from life to really observe inside, to really explore who am I, what is my authentic self. And they have this fantastic notion that I will be able to finally connect to my inner child and I will discover my true vocation in life and I will discover all these wonderful things about me. And when you actually do it, the first thing you usually encounter is all the things you don't want to know about yourself. There is a reason that that that you don't want to know them. I think it's worth the effort, but it's a very very hard, uh, task. All right. On that, there's so many studies that talk about the more delusional somebody is, self-delusional, the more likely they are to be happy. You've said one of the big questions as a historian you're trying to answer is, as we've moved forward as a, you know, a species, a society, have we actually gotten happier? Mhm. So, there is some importance it sounds like that you place on happiness. So, why then would you want people to do that hard work of facing the realities, recognizing the things about themselves that they don't necessarily want to recognize? Mhm. Is that because you think it leads to more happiness? I think that ultimately it is worth the price. I mean, delusions come at a at a very high price, also. Um, and not just to yourself, but to people around you, to the world as a whole. I mean, ultimately, this leads to things like wars and like genocide and like and you know, I come from Israel, I come from the Middle East. So, I am surrounded by millions of people who are killing each other because of all kinds of fictional stories and delusions that they believe in. So, sometimes it's an important defensive mechanism. It's very difficult to live just with the raw truth all the time. But, the price of delusion and the price of not being able to tell the difference between fiction and reality, it adds up. And eventually it adds up to things like genocide and war. That sounds like a pretty extraordinary price to pay. Yeah, I would agree with you there. Um, in 21 Lessons is, what do we do when we're faced with being put out of work, that we are one of the useless class, and we have to do this reinvention at a career level? You're living longer, your career life is 50, 60, 70, 80 years, whatever that looks like, in a time where every 7 to 10 years, like it's just it's a completely new world. What do you think the human capacity for that level of reinvention is? Well, that's a very important question. It has little to do with immortality because even without immortality, we are heading in that direction. Even if people if the lifespan remains as it is, 80 years, um every 10 years, you have another big shock. I mean, people one of the things many people don't realize about the AI revolution and the automation revolution, they imagine it as some kind of one-time event. We have the big AI revolution in 2025. You have all these truck drivers and taxi drivers and doctors and whatever losing their jobs. You have a few difficult years of adjustment. And then eventually, you have the new brave new world of AI with a new equilibrium. And this is an extremely unlikely scenario. Because we are nowhere near the maximum potential of AI. The speed in which it develops is only likely to accelerate. So, what we are really going to face is a cascade of ever bigger revolutions in the job market and in many other areas of life, relationships, politics, and so forth. So, you have a big disruption in 2025. You have an even bigger disruption in 2035 and even bigger one in 2045 and and so forth. And if you look say at the job market, so okay, you were a truck driver and they no longer need you, but there is new demand for yoga teachers. So, you somehow reinvent yourself at age 40. I'm no longer a truck driver, now I'm going to be a yoga teacher. It's very difficult. You somehow do it. 10 years later, no need of yoga teachers. Thank you very much. We now have these amazing applications connected with biometric sensors to your body. They know exactly what you're doing with every tiny muscle as you do this posture or that posture. No human yoga teacher can compete with that. You're out of job. You have to reinvent yourself again as a designer of virtual world games. And you do it somehow. But 10 years later, you have to do it again because this too has now been automated. And even if you get support from the government and there is all these uh education for for adult uh a system, the really big question is again, it's psychological. Do Do we as human beings have the mental stability and the emotional intelligence necessary to reinvent ourselves repeatedly? And you know, when you're 20, what you're doing is basically to reinvent yourself or to invent yourself for the first time. And it is very difficult. When you're 30, it's even more difficult, but you sometime but you somehow do it. But when you get to be 40, 50, 60, it becomes more and more difficult. You have more to let go of. I've invested so much in building this career, this personality, these skills to give it all up and start again from from a new, it's so difficult. So, I don't know whether whether we can do it. Yeah, that is the question that I think will ultimately be forced to answer. And that brings me to education. So, what do you think that if we're talking to somebody who's 18 right now, they're trying to decide, do I go to college, yes or no? Should they go to college? And if they go to college, what should they be studying? Um that's it's a very difficult question. The first thing they should realize is that nobody really knows. Nobody really knows how the job market would look like in 2040. Sure. So, they should uh be suspicious of all these kinds of advices by people who pretend that they know what the job market would need in 20 years. But, the best investment I would say is in emotional intelligence and in mental balance and these kinds of skills of how to keep changing throughout your life. How to keep learning throughout your life. Now, how do you learn that? That's very, very difficult. Uh we don't have a college degree in mental flexibility. But, these are the most important tools. Uh so, whatever you choose, you can go to law school, you can go to ballet school, but you should keep in mind that much of what I'm learning might be irrelevant in 20 or 30 years. So, whatever else I'm doing, I should also invest in developing my emotional intelligence, my mental balance, my ability to keep changing and learning and reinventing throughout my life. So, maybe to give an image or a metaphor, if in the past education was like building a stone house with very deep foundations, now I would say that education is more like uh constructing a tent that you can fold up and move to another location very quickly and easily. Uh that's a great analogy. Um so, given that it's so hard to predict the future, you've talked a lot about the power of science fiction, science fiction writers. Um walk us through that. Why What is the role that a science fiction writer can play or storyteller, filmmaker, whatever the case may be. Uh our lives in the 21st century, more than anything else, are going to be new technologies, especially AI and biotechnology. And most people, their understanding of these technologies and their potential for good or for bad, it really comes from science fiction. The political system so far has done an awful job in understanding and preparing us for these kinds of of of development. There is almost no talk in the uh political arena about AI and biotechnology. The scientific community is, of course, very deeply engaged with it, but most people don't read articles in science or nature, and even if they tried, it would be very difficult for them to understand the professional jargon and and all that the statistics and and and so forth. So, the most people actually get their education about what's coming from science fiction. And this means, at least I think so, that science fiction is now the most important artistic genre. And it should also be the most responsible. And one of the problems with science fiction is that so far it has done a so-so job. Some novels and TV series and films are really amazing in the way they explore what's what could what could happen, uh ranging like my some of my favorites are my my all-time favorite is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which was written back in the early 1930s, and I think it's the most prophetic and profound. So, given what's happening in the world right now with things being automated, going to AI, what are three things, let's say, that people can do to make sure that they're poised to thrive in this time of massive change. Mhm. First of all, I mean, that's what everybody's saying, but it's true, is that you have to embrace change. That the idea that you can learn something in your youth, a profession, uh a way of life, and it will just be there for the rest of your of your life, which was the situation for most of history, this is this is no longer the case. We have to keep learning and keep changing throughout our lives. Otherwise, we will be left behind. So, that's one one key principle. Related to that is that um maybe the most important quality to survive and flourish in the 21st century is to have mental flexibility. Not just to keep learning and changing again and again, also to keep letting go. Um part of what makes it difficult to learn new things that we hold on. Like, you know, I spent so many years learning something, and now the world has changed, and um I I just don't want to let go. And letting go, maybe like I'll give an example of how deep it goes. Like, it's not just what you learn in college or what you learned in kindergarten, it's even what you learned as a baby, as a toddler, like learning how to see Mhm. or learning how to walk. And what does that mean? That I have I have to relearn how to see and walk? Well, um as virtual reality improves, and you know, with all the talk of the metaverse and so forth that we'll discuss later on, increasingly, it's likely that there will be many more activities shifting from the physical biological world that we know into a new reality, a virtual reality, which has different physical and biological laws. Even the laws of physics there are different. So, whether you want to interact socially there, or maybe you have a job in virtual reality, in the metaverse, or maybe you design you you you have a new job designing fashion, designing shirts for virtual reality, because people want to look good there. You need to forget how physics and light and gravity works here, because it works in a different way in in in in that reality. So, just what does it mean? Like, I'm now 46. Let's say I have a new job designing fashion for the metaverse. How can I, at age 46, kind of forget what it what it means to see and learn from scratch how to see things? Are you optimistic that adults can do that? Humans have an amazing ability to to adapt and to change. You know, it's often said that AI is nowhere near its uh uh um full capabilities, but human beings, too, are nowhere near their full full capabilities. We really have no idea what we can still do, what our mind can can can still do. If you think about jobs again, so, you know, the biggest change in the job market of the 21st of the 20th century, looking at the previous century, it didn't come from any technological invention. It actually came from unlocking the potential of half the human species, women, which were barred from so many jobs because people thought they were incapable of doing that, and they didn't have the education and training and so forth, and the feminist revolution and the changes in gender relations just completely changed the job market, and you didn't need to genetically engineer uh uh women's DNA or to kind of connect them to some new device. No, the potential to be presidents, to be judges, to be journalists, to be scientists was always there, but it wasn't tapped. It And And it's it's To a large extent, I hope, we'll see something similar in the 21st century, that yes, we have all these new challenges, but uh we also have this uh uh amazing untapped potential within us. But this links to the to the third thing, which is we can't do it alone. Like placing all do it alone or individuals can't do it alone? Individuals can't do it alone. Like placing all the responsibility on individuals, the world is changing, now it's your job to adapt, to to to change yourself, to learn, it doesn't work like that. Um it's too much for an individual to do just by themselves. Uh we'll probably have uh uh will require organizations, governments to step in to make sure that people are not left behind. You know, just retraining people. You lose your old job to a computer or a robot or a self-driving vehicle. There are new jobs. I don't think there'll be a problem of just an absolute lack of jobs. Old jobs disappear, but new jobs emerge. The really difficult thing will be the transition. And the transition, first of all, you need some kind of financial assistance. Like you lost your old job, you need to retrain for a couple of months for a new profession, maybe. Who is going to support you during this this time? So just as in the 20th century, governments built this huge infrastructure for educating the young schools and colleges and so forth, will now need to build another infrastructure to educate and to retrain people in the 40s and 50s. Do you see that as one last thing is that they'll also need psychological help. That's what I see. Again, because it's going to be extremely stressful. To kind of invent yourself when you're 16, this is what you do when you're 16. But when you're you're 46, you want to take it easy. I don't want to start all over again. So it's psychologically very very stressful. And I think that we we will have to to see more government support uh for mental health just to cope with the immense stress of of the 21st century. Do you know the learn to code meme? The learn to code Oh, learn to code. So people are getting booted off of social media for saying it. It's one of those things that took me so by surprise. So anybody I think that spends enough time contemplating, okay, AI, what's the future? I'm sure we'll get into data harvesting and stuff like that. You really do that begin to understand that the future belongs to the technically savvy. Mhm. And if you are a 46-year-old truck driver, it's sort of the classic example cuz that's, you know, going the way of the dodo, and it's, you know, not something that requires a high degree of education or necessarily even a ultra high IQ. Not saying that drivers don't have a high IQs, I'm just saying it doesn't necessarily max your IQ to do that job. And so when people say, okay, if the future belongs to the technically savvy, we know drivers are going to, you know, be without that job, then they should learn to code to get a new job. Mhm. And my instinct was, yes, that's absolutely true. And I came to that debate super late. And so by the time I got there, people were already getting banned off social media for saying it. And I was like, wait, what? So, going back, I couldn't understand why telling the individual that you're going to be a participant in this, I'm not opposed to I think it's a great idea for governments to create a safety net. I think it's a bad idea for governments to drag you across the finish line. And I think that ends in tyranny every time. So, where do you see, because it will be hard and there will be people left behind, I don't see any way around that, and nature, so curious to see if you agree with this, nature does not care. Nature will leave you behind in a heartbeat. Mother nature is more than happy to obliterate people, watch an entire generation get eaten by a change, doesn't care. Mhm. So, how do we without incapacitating the people that have to relearn and do this very difficult thing, how do we encourage them to move forward without either abandoning them on one side or dragging them forward on the other? Mhm. Well, you know, first of all, I have to say that I'm not sure that coding is such a safe job, because coding too could be automated. Maybe, you know, you you could you could also we'll also need a lot of therapists, we'll need community organizers, we'll even need philosophers, because a lot of these new questions, they actually suddenly the big tech companies need people who understand deep philosophical questions because they become technical questions. You need a lot of people in the in the taking care of of other people. You know, it's um in a way, it's easier to automate the job of a coder than the job of a nurse. Like, coding is in the end, it's just data, it's just information, it's just information coming in and out. So, I can see more easily how you automate the job of a computer scientist, at least some of these jobs, than the job of a nurse who needs to replace a bandage or to give an injection to a screaming child and and things like that. Partly because it demands a much wider range of abilities. It's not just Of course, a nurse needs to understand information and to analyze information and so forth, but also needs motor skills. Also needs social skills. And the combination of these skills, this is much harder to automate. So, I wouldn't place all my bets on on something like coding. Governments are essential. Again, partly because in many countries, you know, I think about I don't know you mentioned truck drivers, also textile workers. You imagine you think about many countries in Latin America. That they don't have a a high-tech sector. They have a textile industry. Lots and lots of people working in textile, producing shirts. And suddenly all of this is automated. It's cheaper to produce shirts in California than in Mexico or in Guatemala. And in addition to that, there is an entirely new line of of of of textile industry, which is virtual shirts. Like I spend hours in virtual reality, I want to look good, the latest fashion in virtual reality. And somebody needs to design it. Now, how do you take again, a 40-year-old unemployed textile worker from Guatemala and turn her or him into a designer of virtual shirts? Um so, without government support, and in this case, I mean, these countries could Well, even they can't afford it. They will have to get support from the richer countries. Otherwise, we are facing a global uh uh uh catastrophe. So, I'm not saying that governments can't will force people to do something. It's, you know, like with with basic education for young people. I mean, you can you can still fail. You can still drop out, but at least you're given the chance. Uh and and then whether you use this chance that you're given wisely or not is is is up to you. But, I think most of the successful systems in history, they they're complex. They don't place all the responsibility just on individuals because then a lot of people uh left behind, not because uh of even their fault. It's just they weren't given the the the proper opportunity. Uh on the other hand, trusting only governments, then you get these kind of communist nightmares that we definitely don't don't want to try this this this mistake again. Yeah, that to me is the problem. And when I look at the culture war right now, which, quoting you again, uh you said, this is a paraphrase, but I'm going to get really close. So, by all means, if I say anything wrong, jump in. But, you said, uh if Putin had waited 5 or 10 years to invade the Ukraine, the West probably would have imploded on its own, and he could have gotten away with it. And I was like too impatient. Wow, that is that is it feels terrifyingly accurate. So, the way that the West is tearing itself apart right now, I find deeply distressing. So, the reason that that ties into this for me is that there there is a necessary tension between and I'll I don't know if you'll agree with this, but by all means, jump in if you don't. There's a necessary tension between the left and the right, and I think the left and the right are evolution's solution to you if you're a social creature, you want to try to help everybody. But, as you try to help everybody, there's the free loader problem. And so, you get people that will take advantage of the system. So, you need people on the other side that demand personal responsibility. But, if you only have personal responsibility, that will also lead to tyranny. So, you have tyranny on both sides. And so, what you need is the tension in the middle. Mhm. But, you can't have the tension if each side thinks that the tension is the problem. If they're both trying to be right and they're trying to silence the other side. That feels like the core problem of the West is that we no longer realize, "Oh, it's good that not everybody's on my side." Whatever side you're on. Because if everybody were on my side, we wouldn't have the tension. We'll have tyranny. Yeah. Is that how you see it? Or is there something more nuanced? No, I I think the the good thing about democracy is that you have multiple voices and you don't see the other people as as your enemies. You can think that they are mistaken. You can even think that they are stupid, but they are not evil. You know, they are not your enemies. Once people in a democracy start seeing their political rivals as as their enemies and as people who are trying to destroy the way of life, democracy just cannot survive in this situation. Uh you can have a civil war. You can have a dictatorship. But, you cannot have a democracy. Because, you know, if if if if Americans think that the other side, the other Americans are their enemies out to to destroy them, then they will do anything to win the elections because this is now like a war and they have no incentive to accept the result if they lose. Um and that's that's the biggest danger. I think that the not just the United States, but many countries in in the West are facing. That increasingly people are seeing the their neighbors, the people in in in the other state in in in the other town as as their enemies. It's not so clear why this is happening. Mhm. Because actually the ideological differences today are much smaller Okay. than they were 50 years ago or 100 years ago. Before you finish that, can I set something up? I'd never heard anybody talk about this before. I know where you're going. Okay. So, you you said this is this is all you. I thought this is so brilliant. It gave me a way to understand what's happening. You said in the 20th century there were three big ways of viewing the world. You had fascism. Mhm. You had um communism and you had liberalism. Yes. Explain the three because the punchline is where you're going now, which is why didn't people go with liberalism? But uh please explain the three and then we can get into why liberalism is breaking down because I actually don't understand why. Mhm. Well, uh that that that's that's a lot to explain in in in brief. But basically fascism is says that the state is the only the state and the nation are the only thing that matters. Mhm. Um there is not nationalism in itself is a force for good. Nationalism, when it's understood correctly, it means simply that you love the other people in your nation and you're willing to make some sacrifices for them, for instance, to pay taxes so they that they get good health care. Mhm. When it's good, nationalism is about love, not about hating foreigners or minorities. Uh fascism is when somebody says that the nation is the only thing that matter. Individuals, uh groups, they don't matter at all. Everything should serve the needs of of the nation of the state. Uh the truth is whatever helps the nation. Um good is whatever is good for the nation. Even even beauty, like films and and art and so forth, on it's political. A good film is a good that advances the interest of the nations. That's it. And anybody who opposes this is a traitor and should be eliminated. This is kind of the the basic world view of of fascism. You know, the symbol of fascism is that the word fascism, it means it comes from from from Latin for fasces, that is it's it's a kind of bundle of of reeds or bundle of of of small kind of twigs. Which is very strange. I mean, why is the symbol of one of the most evil and ferocious movement in history a bundle of twigs? What What what's the sense there? And the idea is that each twig by itself is nothing. Mhm. It's it's it's easy to break it. It's nothing. But you know, you take a lot of twigs together, you can't break them. So, that's the message of of fascism, that you're nothing in yourself as an individual, but the group as a whole, it's it's it's the only thing that matters. And then communism is actually a variation on on that. It also has no regard for for the individual. It thinks more in terms of class. It's not so much the nation, which is in the center, it's the class to which you belong, which is at the center. And the hero of communism is not the nation, it's the working class. But again, to make a very long story short, it's the same idea. This is why also you see that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, they constantly copy each other. Because the it's at the basic level, there is the same idea that individual human beings count for nothing. And it's only the interests of the collective which are important. Mhm. And liberalism says that no. That we put Yes, we need also collective action, collective cooperation. Um again, to build a health care system, to build an education system, people need to cooperate. But still at the center we have the individual. And you know, there is a very simple test to test yourself whether you're liberal. So, you know, the word liberal is just as fascism comes from this fasces, this bundle of of reeds, and communism from communal, everything together. So, liberalism is from from liberty, freedom. And answer just four simple question. Do you think people should have the liberty to choose their own government? Do you think people should have the liberty to choose their own religion? Do you think people should have the liberty to choose their own profession? And do you think people should have the liberty to choose their own spouse? Mhm. If you answer yes to all four questions, congratulations, you're liberal. And again, it sounds like what who who will object? But for most of history most people objected. Like you know, you had the American Revolution against the the King of England. And the whole idea of monarchy is that people don't get They don't have the liberty to choose their own government. There is a king appointed by God or who whatever, and this is the government. And similarly in the Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany, people don't get to choose the government and to replace the government. Similarly, if you think about profession, so in a communist society, you don't get to choose your profession. The Communist Party tells you that you now go to the farm to raise cabbages, and he now goes to the factory to produce cars. And we tell you how many cabbages to produce or what kind of cars to produce. And if you go, I don't know, to the Middle Ages, so again, you don't have any liberty to choose your profession. If you're a born to a peasant family, you'll be a peasant. If your father was a cobbler, you'll be a cobbler. That That's it. You have no choice there. And of course, when it come to choosing your spouse, same thing. It doesn't matter who you love. It matters what your elders tell you, what your church tells you, what the nation needs. Um and today, the in the big ideological war of the 20th century, liberalism came came on top. And when I said earlier that actually the the the ideological differences that I see today in the United States or in the West as a whole, in in the world as a whole, are much smaller than 50 years ago or 100 years ago, because almost all people are liberal. Even the conservatives who hate, who think liberal artists is terrible, I hate these liberals, they're liberal. In in the in the long-term historical sense, so of course, we we know these hot hot-button issues, like abortion, like gun control, and and these things. And and and there you have arguments, but underneath it all, there is much deeper and more widespread ideological agreement than anything we've seen 50 years ago or 100 years ago. Even, you know, these kind of of of hot-button subjects like abortion, right? Gay gay marriage. They're actually the aftershocks of the big bang of the 1960s, of the sexual revolution. The really big argument about these issues were in the 1960s. The gap there was was much much bigger, and in the end, almost everybody accepted the liberal position. You know, in in in in the in the 1950s, universities could expel students from university if they had sex before marriage. Wow. This was Sex before marriage? This is And who wants to go to to back there? I mean, you know, a divorce was kind of was unthinkable. Uh marriage between a white person and a black person was legally prohibited. So crazy. And this was, you know, 50-60 years ago. Mhm. So, I'm not saying that there are no ideological differences remaining or that there are no kind of of of of of debates, but if people could step back and look at the long-term view, they would be amazed how close actually Republicans and Democrats in the US are. You know, Republicans today are far more liberal on uh say LGBT rights than Democrats were in the 1960s. So, um and another I think people should ask themselves, okay, we have these remaining disagreements. Is it a good enough reason to destroy the American Republic over that? Mhm. To destroy basically Western civilization over that. So, you know, you think about the the American Civil War. And people today, some people say, okay, we are approaching another Civil War. Imagine a high school student in 100 years having to write an an a test about American history, and they get two questions. What was the first Civil War about? That's easy, slavery. What was the second Civil War about? Is there anything as as clear as salient that you can It was about that. Mhm. It was about gun control? It was about whether transgender people can go to the to the to the same toilet or not? What what was it about? And I think that the tragedy of what's happening now in the US and in much of the West is that um again, the ideological differences are are of a small on the ground, but they are very big in people's imagination. People have fantasies about what the other side is planning to do, which are completely divorced from reality. You know, in the 20th century, you didn't need to fantasize what the these communists want to do. They told you. That you listen to to somebody like Lenin or Stalin, they tell you. We want to completely abolish private property. It's not a fantasy in the minds of some liberals that this is what the communists want to do. The same thing with the fascists. You just need to to listen to Hitler. He literally detailed everything he wanted to do. I'm going to do this and this and the Jews were a problem and we're going to do this. I was like, "What?" I could not believe he published all of that. Yeah. It was in the open. 40 years of power. Insane. It was in the open. And now much of the kind of gap is mostly in the imagination of people. And the tragedy is that in history, you can get terrible terrible wars. I'm not saying all everything that I I said now is not like it's not going to be a civil war. It's not going to not going to be civil strife in the No. The tragedy of history is that very often, you get terrible things happening for without any good reason at all. It often when you when you look back, you ask, "What was this all about?" Like you think about the wars of religion in Europe in the 19 in in the 16th and 17th century, which by the way was part of the reasons of people fled Europe to come to the United States. And Protestants and Catholics killing each other by the millions. Like a third of the population of Germany died in the 30 years war between protestants and Catholics a third of the population and you look back today even as a as as as a as a protestant or a Catholic and you ask yourself what was this about and it's completely incomprehensible to the people back then it looked like the most important things in the world like whether you believe in this theological view or that theological view whether you do the mass in in in in in with this ritual or we like a very big issue whether it was whether you give the the ordinary Christians during mass only the holy bread or also the wine and you look back yeah are you going to have a big war over that yes they did have a very very big war over that and also people sometimes have big wars over fantasies in their minds we have now just an example you know with the Russian invasion of Ukraine um so Putin had all these fantasies in in his mind for instance that NATO is threatening Russia you know very simple question name the country which was about to invade Russia in 2022 but the Germans were about to invade Russia have you been to Germany lately do you think these people what they want to do in life is going to invade Russia do you think the French want to invade Russia Napoleon will come out of his grave and lead the the grand army against Moscow this is complete fantasy but fantasies often shape history and cause people to do you know terrible things If you want to learn more about this topic check out this interview. Well we've got building blocks and that's interesting like our cars will soon drive ourselves and our Amazon delivery trucks will just come without people and they'll be running on electricity just enjoy what's about to happen and embrace it so if you can afford to, invest in it. If not, be curious.