Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about the Covid-19 pandemic and its future implications. They discuss the failures of global leadership, the widespread distrust of institutions, the benefits of nationalism and its current unraveling in the U.S., politics as a way of reconciling competing desires, the consequences of misinformation, the enduring respect for science, the future of surveillance, the changing role of religion, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
I think the last time we spoke, I think it was we did a live event in San Francisco, which I really enjoyed.
And then we had done one podcast before that.
But now the entire world has been pushed off a cliff since we last met.
So first, before we get into big picture topics, how are you doing?
How are you weathering the pandemic?
We're fine, I think.
Me and my husband, we are self-isolating in our house.
And, you know, it's difficult because we can't meet our family and friends and so forth.
But we haven't lost our job.
Our business didn't collapse.
We're actually working harder than ever.
Many of our friends and family members have lost their jobs or businesses.
So we know we are one of the lucky ones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a difficult time.
And, you know, you look ahead.
And I'm less worried about the epidemic itself, but the economic and political consequences could be really catastrophic if we don't get a handle on it.
So it's quite a worrying time.
That's what I want to talk to you about.
Israel has been pretty aggressive in their handling of this, right, if I'm not mistaken.
How would you compare Israel to the rest of the developed world in terms of how they've responded?
Well, you know, if you measure just in terms of how many sick people, how many dead people, then we are doing very well.
But in other terms, the situation is quite bleak.
I mean, the economic crisis is very severe.
The political situation is even worse.
I mean, it started way before the coronavirus.
It's been a very tumultuous year politically with three elections.
And when this crisis began, the unelected prime minister tried to use the excuse of fighting coronavirus to shut down the elected parliament and rule basically as a dictator with emergency decrees.
Luckily, this was averted.
There was enough pushback from the media, from the public and from the political parties.
So parliament was reopened and some kind of democratic balance was reinstated.
But we still don't have a government and lots of frightening things happening, like giving the secret police the authority to set up surveillance of Israeli citizens, again, on the excuse of fighting the epidemic.
I'm not against surveillance.
I just don't think that this should be in the hands of the secret police.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so most of our listeners will be familiar with your work.
Just to remind people, you have written now three books that have been especially influential—Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
And your background is as a historian, but you bring a really wonderful interdisciplinary approach to big questions of human life and the maintenance of civilization and where is all this going.
And this includes really everything that human beings could conceivably care about.
There's just so much here that is in your wheelhouse in terms of the kinds of things that we need to change, maintain, struggle to re-envision.
Many people are viewing this pandemic, apart from all the obvious pain that it's producing and will produce economically and politically, many of us are viewing it as an opportunity to really reset society on some basic level, if we can seize this opportunity.
So, I guess before we get to any of the silver linings we might find here, let's wade into the darkness.
What problems has this pandemic exposed, in your view?
Just across the board, politically, technologically, socially, and obviously, you know, epidemiologically.
But just how are you viewing this as a dissection of all that we haven't put right in society?
Maybe the biggest problem has to do with the situation of the international system.
We are seeing a complete lack of global leadership, a complete lack of There is no global plan of action either to fight the epidemic itself or to deal with the economic crisis.
In previous cases like this, in the last few decades, the United States has taken up the role of global leader, whether it's in the Ebola epidemic of 2014-15 or whether it's in the global financial crisis of 2008.
Now, the U.S.
is kind of in an anti-leadership position, trying to undermine the few organizations, like the World Health Organization, that are trying to organize some kind of global response.
And this is not something new.
This is a continuation of U.S.
policy of the last few years.
Basically, I think in 2016, The United States in the election.
The United States came to the world and said, look, we resign from the job of global leader.
We just don't want it anymore.
From now onwards, we care only about ourselves.
America has no longer any friends in the world.
It has only interests.
And the whole thing of America first.
And you know, now America is first in the number of dead people and sick people.
And very few would follow American leadership, not only because of the record of the last few years, but also because the world has also lost faith in American competence.
I mean, you look at the way that the United States is dealing with the epidemic at home, and you say, well, maybe it's a good thing they are no longer leading the world.
And there is nobody really to fill the vacuum.
left by the US.
So we do see some level of global cooperation, especially in the scientific field, with the sharing of information and common efforts to understand the epidemic, to understand the best ways to treat it, to isolate people, to develop a vaccine.
So there is some hope there.
But generally speaking, the level of international cooperation is far, far lower.
than would have been expected or could have been hoped for.
And again, this is not something new.
This is a legacy of the changes that not only in the U.S., but all over the world in the last few years, we've seen the rise of extreme nationalism and isolationism and a whole discourse
Of telling people that there is an inherent contradiction between nationalism and globalism, between loyalty to your nation and global solidarity, and leaders, not only Trump, but also Bolsonaro and the right-wing parties in Europe telling people that, of course, you have to choose national loyalty and reject globalism.
And now we are paying the price for it.
The thing is that really, there is no contradiction between nationalism and globalism, because nationalism is not about hating foreigners.
It's about loving your compatriots.
And there are many situations like a pandemic, in which in order to really take care of your compatriots, you have to cooperate with foreigners.
So there is no contradiction here.
You know, if the, I don't know, if the French invent the first vaccine against coronavirus, I would like to see American patriots coming and saying, no, no, no, no, no, we won't take this vaccine.
It's a foreign vaccine.
It's a French vaccine.
We're waiting until there is a patriotic American vaccine, and only then we take it.
Yeah.
This is obviously nonsense.
I'm sure I could find you those patriots.
They're in my Twitter feed.
Yeah, and so this is one level, the international level.
And of course, we are seeing a lot of problems also internally in many countries.
And basically, this is again a kind of the payday for developments that began long before coronavirus, internal divisions within countries.
Whether it's in India, where you have all these conspiracy theories that Hindu extremists are blaming the epidemic on Muslims, saying that this is a Muslim conspiracy, that you have coronavirus terrorists deliberately spreading the virus among Hindus, or what you see in the US and in several other countries
When there is just not enough trust in public authorities to have a common consistent policy you know in normal times.
A country can function or a government can function when only half of the population believes it.
You know, you have a situation when you have a leader, half of the population says, I would believe anything this person says.
If he says that the sun rises in the West and sets in the East, I'll believe it.
And you have the other half saying, I won't believe a single word this person is saying.
If he says that two plus two equals four, I start doubting it.
Yeah.
And as bad as it is, it can function for a while in kind of normal times.
But in a pandemic, you need the cooperation of 100% of the population.
You can't deal with it with just 50%.
So this makes it much, much more difficult to deal with this emergency.
Yeah, well, so, I mean, there's so many threads here we can pull at, and the whole tapestry starts to move.
Where you started with this failure of U.S.
leadership, you know, I find it especially depressing.
I mean, it's a kind of national humiliation, which is compounded by the fact that Something close to half of American society either doesn't care about it or is so delusional as to think that we've distinguished ourselves well during this crisis.
And this is part of the personality cult of Trump, obviously.
But it's also, it's this pervasive mistrust of institutions, which you have just flagged, and the fact that the media is so despised and mistrusted.
And again, Trump has something to do with that.
But, you know, it's other institutions, science and scientists, any dependence or integration with the rest of I mean, as you point out, there is this notion that there's a zero-sum contest between national pride and a more cosmopolitan integration with the rest of the world.
But the problem, it seems, is that there really are some tensions here that are hard to balance and understand, and if you don't trust the media, and if the media is pitched into a perpetual frenzy of reaction to all of the assaults on truth that come out of, you know, Trump's mouth and the administration.
There really are like genuine failures of sense-making that should kindle doubt.
There's no one who's more alarmed by Trump than I am, but when I see the miscalibrated attacks on him in our best newspapers, you know, even I can see that the media sometimes gets it wrong, and all of this is being amplified on social media where and all of this is being amplified on social media where we really have people just unable to come in contact with a common I'll just give you a couple of examples here that come to mind as you were speaking.
This is a point you've made in many of your books, that global problems require global solutions, right?
We're not going to have an American solution to climate change.
We're not going to have an American solution to a global pandemic.
But there is this tension between globalization and self-sufficiency, which has been exposed quite painfully by this pandemic.
Just look at the supply chain, the fact that we can't even produce Q-tips anymore on demand because we're so reliant on China to produce them.
And when you look at that reliance in the context of the very real political tensions between, you know, in this case, America and China, It seems right to be concerned about outsourcing our infrastructure to them in an environment where they can turn hostile in a moment.
The extreme example would be if China produced all of our bullets, right?
Just imagine what a war with China looks like when they won't supply us with bullets.
A concern of that sort doesn't have to be motivated by xenophobia or isolationism.
No, not at all.
So anyway, please try to thread that needle for us.
Again, I think that people, when they say the word globalization or globalism, they mean so many different things.
Some people, they think mainly about the economic implications and supply chains and having all these multinational corporations becoming far more powerful than nation states and having zero obligations to citizens in any country because they can just avoid paying taxes with all kinds of tricks and so forth.
And this is a kind of globalization that I personally, I'm not very fond of.
And I think it's perfectly sensible for countries to try and have better control of their essential supplies.
And certainly it's very important that big corporations would pay their taxes in the centers of their activities.
And you know, I mean, you wouldn't be able to function without sewage systems and without police and without schools.
So you definitely need to, not everything is in the cloud.
Yeah.
There are many things in the ground and you should pay for them.
For me, when I think about globalism and globalization, the main thing is really about the sharing of information, the sharing of knowledge, the having common values and common interests.
And this should and can be separated from the economic issues.
And I think that, again, if you look at what's happening in a place like the United States, I really don't think this is a clash between nationalism and globalism.
Really what's happening in the U.S.
and in Britain and in several other, many other countries is actually the unraveling of nationalism itself.
There is a lot of talk about the rise of nationalism in recent years, but as a historian I see really in a very different light.
Usually the best sign that you are seeing an upsurge of nationalism is a lot of conflicts between nations.
Like a century ago, the First World War was an indication that nationalism is really on the rise.
When you look at the world of the last few years, you actually see few conflicts, certainly violent conflicts, between countries.
The main conflicts are actually within countries.
What's unraveling is the kind of internal national community.
I think it's fair to say that today Americans hate and fear each other far more than they hate and fear the Russians or the Chinese.
The biggest fear is their neighbors or their metaphorical neighbors.
And this is not a sign of an upsurge of nationalism.
Similarly, if you look at Brexit and the debates in Britain there, then the chances of the Brits starting to come to blows within themselves, I think, are far higher than in war between Britain and France.
So, I wouldn't really talk about an upsurge of nationalism.
It's more a crisis, trying to redefine what it means and how important it is.
Personally, I think it's understood in the right terms.
Nationalism has been one of humanity's best ideas or best inventions ever.
Again, not if you think about it as hatred of foreigners.
That's the extreme sort of nationalism.
But it doesn't have to go in that direction.
In essence, nationalism is really loving your compatriots and enabling millions of people who don't really know each other to cooperate and to take care of each other.
We are social animals, but for hundreds of thousands of years, society meant a very small circle of people you actually know personally, intimately.
You know their names, their personality, you meet them all the time.
And this is kind of in our genes to care about a group of, say, 50 people or 150 people.
Nations are a very, very recent emergence or invention in human evolution, only the last few thousand years, maybe 5,000 years, maybe a bit more.
And the remarkable thing about nations is that you cooperate and you care about millions of complete strangers, people that you have never met in your life, you will never meet them in your life, you don't know them, but still you're willing, for example, to pay taxes So that a stranger in a different part of the country would have healthcare.
Or would have good education.
And that's the really good side of nationalism.
And I think we should cherish that and protect that.
Again, without falling into the trap that to be a good nationalist, you should also hate the foreigners who are not part of our nation.
No, as I said, in many cases, to really take care of your compatriots, especially in the 21st century, you need to cooperate with the foreigners.
Yeah, I think that's a great distinction, and I share this concern about the breakdown of social cohesion, especially in the United States where I'm most in touch with it.
So this brings us to politics.
And you actually had an op-ed in the New York Times not long ago that I wanted to reference because you say some things there which either I'm not sure I agree with or at least there's a further distinction I would want to make here.
And so actually, I'm now quoting you.
You write, elections are not a method for finding the truth.
They are a method for reaching peaceful compromise between the conflicting desires of different people.
You might find yourself sharing a country with people who you consider ignorant, stupid, or even malicious.
And they might think exactly the same of you.
Still, do you want to reach a peaceful compromise with these people, or would you rather settle your disagreements with guns and bombs?
So as it stands, I totally...
I agree with that, and this is, you know, as a method for resolving, you know, conflicting desires, and this is what elections are about, but we could even say this is what politics generally is about, and, you know, even democracy is a solution for that, or when it works, it's a solution for that.
But then you take issue with an analogy that Richard Dawkins used when he was objecting to the Brexit referendum.
He just thought this was absolutely absurd, you know, asking the people of Britain who, you know, most of whom had to go Google What is Brexit after they had voted one way or the other?
So now, quoting Richard, he says, you might as well call a nationwide plebiscite to decide whether Einstein got his algebra right.
And I think Richard, you know, in his defense, he even absented himself from voting on Brexit.
He said, listen, I don't, you know, I'm a biologist.
I don't understand Brexit.
So, you know, it just matters what the effect of this is going to be.
So then you distinguish, you know, reconciling competing desires from a search for truth here, and you're obviously aware of some of the difficulties I'm tempted to point out here, but my concern is that there's really no bright line between truth and desire when one considers the consequences of misinformation, and especially the kind of misinformation environment we're now living in.
Because, you know, people want what they want very often, you know, or even always, because they think certain things are true.
And if they knew they were wrong about specific things, they very likely wouldn't want what they currently want.
I mean, you know, Othello genuinely wants to kill Desdemona, and he actually strangles her with his own hands.
That's only because he was misinformed about her, and that's why it's a tragedy.
And what I see ourselves living through right now is a tragic dimension to our politics, where you have people who are genuinely misinformed about sources of economic pain or climate science or whatever it is, and they're supporting politicians and policies They seem, in the end, guaranteed to frustrate their real interests.
And, you know, this obviously connects to populism and other political phenomenon.
So help me think this through.
Yeah, I mean, to some extent, you're absolutely right.
I would just say that in the case of Othello, it's wrong to strangle your sweetheart, even if she did do what you think, what Iago said she did.
I mean, I think the tragedy is elsewhere.
In this case, it's not a problem of misinformation.
But it's tragic for him.
When you take his point of view of it, the reason why it's a tragedy for the character of Othello is that, really, he has been fatally misled to take a life and to ruin his own.
Yeah, I don't want to go into that rabbit hole.
It will occupy the rest of the hour, I think.
I would say that the big problem is, you know, telling people that I know your real interests better than you know them.
And you're misinformed, so let me tell you what are your real interests.
I mean, sometimes that's the case, but it's a very shaky ground for a political system, a very dangerous ground to have this kind of paternalistic attitude that I really know what your interests are.
Better than you.
And of course, many people are misinformed, but that's true of everyone, especially, you know, to understand desire is something very different from understanding the truth.
And part of the problem in society is that where I stand really distorts my vision of other people and of the social structure.
So, when it comes to, again, saying what are the true desires or the best desires of people, I would be extremely careful about granting this to any privileged group.
I think that, yeah, when it comes to economics, economists are much better informed than any of us.
And yes, they make mistakes, of course, but everybody makes mistakes.
And they have a mechanism for self-correction to some degree.
So once you define a particular goal and you have an argument about what is the best economic means to get there, then yes, I don't think you should put it to a plebiscite or to an election.
You should go to the experts.
But when it comes to actually defining the goal, what is the goal of society?
I think it's extremely dangerous to trust experts with the definitions of the basic goals of society.
They lack really too much information and their vision is distorted by their own self-interests.
And we know it from so many cases in history.
Again, I mean, it's kind of a choice between two problematic roads.
But I think that having a kind of privileged elite saying that I'm in a better position to understand your true desires than you are, that's far more dangerous, I would say.
And it's becoming more dangerous in the 21st century.
And this was maybe my main point in the New York Times article, because of the new technologies for hacking human beings.
I mean, we have had these discussions for thousands of years, going back to ancient Greece and India and China, exactly these issues of can we trust people to really know what's good for them?
And I don't think that a lot has changed since the times of Socrates or Buddha or Confucius, but now things are changing because we suddenly have a completely new technology To hack human beings, to understand humans better than they understand themselves, to understand human desires, to know what I want better than I know it, and also, of course, to manipulate what I want.
It goes together.
And then, you know, the question of what I really desire becomes more complicated than ever.
Basically, I would say that to hack a human being, you need three things.
You need a very good understanding of biology, especially things like brain science, you need enormous amounts of data, and you need a lot of computing power.
Until today, nobody ever in history had Any of these things.
If you're Stalin in the 1950s or 1940s, you don't know enough biology.
You don't really understand what's happening in the human body.
You don't have enough data on every individual.
You can't place a KGB officer to follow each and every Soviet citizen.
You don't have 200 million KGB agents.
And even if you had, then the question would be who would follow the 200 million KGB officers, of course.
And you don't have, even if you have all these agents following people, you don't have the computing power to make sense of all the information they gather.
Basically, you have an agent following me, writing a paper report about what I did today, and then another human being has to read this report and process it and reach some conclusions.
And that's absolutely impossible.
Now, for the first time in history, it is becoming feasible for the new Stalins of the 21st century.
You don't need 200 million human agents.
You have sensors.
You don't need human analysts to read paper reports.
You have artificial intelligence that can go over all this immense data and analyze it.
And you are having more and more biological insight.
Into what is actually happening in the human body and brain you put all that together you get the ability to know what people want better than they know it better than they would admit to themselves i often give the personal story of my own experience is coming out was realizing that i'm gay only the age of twenty one.
Now, if you ask me when I was 15, who do you want to have sex with, then I wouldn't say with a guy, even though this is probably what I really wanted.
I didn't understand it about myself, as silly as it sounds.
I mean, how can you not know it?
The fact is, I didn't know it.
When did Google know it?
If Google could know it when I was, I guess, 12, it should have been very obvious.
You just collect not a lot of data.
on where my eyes go, I don't know, when I'm on the beach.
And you could easily have told, years before I understood it, what are my true sexual desires.
Now, what does it mean to live in a world when it's, you know, it's not the human elite, it's not the Nobel Prize winners, it's not the professors in the universities that know my desires better than me.
You could have a non-human system that systematically hacks all of us and knows our real desires or our deep desires better than us and therefore can also manipulate us in ways which were completely impossible in previous ages.
And I would say this is the biggest challenge.
to democracy.
Again, the challenge of misinformed people voting for the wrong politician, you know, it's a problem, but it's a very old problem.
I mean, the Greeks have dealt with it with moral, I know, sometimes more success, sometimes less, but it's not a new problem.
Yeah, that the new technology creates a completely new kind of problem that I don't know what is the answer to this issue.
Yeah, well, I share your concern about the effect of technology and where all that's headed.
That's obviously a big conversation, but I'm still stuck on the very low-tech hacking of the human mind, which happens reliably in so many places.
It's right in the spot we're speaking about here, which is The politically utterly reliable response of so many people to being told that they're wrong, that they don't want what they think they want, that they don't understand reality enough to even know what they want on specific points.
And this knee-jerk revulsion now that this produces against expertise and, you know, hierarchies of information and a kind of misreading of the ethics and pragmatics of error correction, right?
So, like, when the New York Times admits a mistake, from one point of view, that's proof that there's no difference between the New York Times and Breitbart, say, or, you know, any other non-journalistic source of information.
And there's just a repudiation of all distinctions in information space that can allow us to reliably curate good ideas and better data.
And this just strikes me as a genuinely difficult intellectual problem.
In certain cases where, I mean, just take the, you know, our response to COVID.
It's very hard to know what is true, what is real, what should be motivating, and our desires are truly common.
I mean, very few people want to die or have other people die unnecessarily, and very few people want to see the economy collapse, you know.
So, we're anchored to the same desires, but we have a, we have very different perceptions of reality, and The thing that I find troubling is this reliable manipulation of people.
Trump is the ultimate example of this, but basically he manages to sell himself as a non-elite person, right?
So he's standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the common man, even though everything in his life is gold-plated and has his name on it.
He isn't a member of the elite, and in truth he isn't actually, because he really is an ignoramus and a deeply uncurious person who has never had much use for institutional knowledge.
But what we have here is an ability to convince tens of millions of people with a single tweet That real institutions are completely bankrupt, whether it's the press or medicine or science in general, and what you need to do is just keep poking a stick into the machinery of any fact-based discussion
And maybe you all just want to drink bleach or pour it into your lungs or, I mean, it's just, it's like, there's nothing, nothing is impossible now to promulgate as information.
So anyway, that's, that's kind of chaos is something I'm still stuck with as we stumble into a, another presidential election.
I have two thoughts on that.
I mean, first of all, the good, the good news is that in this emergency, we have seen A lot of trust in science and in scientific authorities, even from unexpected quarters.
I mean, given the record of the recent years with so many attacks on science and on scientific institutions, it's really amazing for me to see that in this emergency, in most places, most people, they ultimately trust the scientific authority more than anything else.
And, you know, the clearest cases for me are what's happening with religion in this crisis.
That, you know, in Israel, they closed down the synagogues.
They don't allow people to go to the Wailing Wall.
They don't allow people to gather to pray.
In Iran, they shut down the mosques.
The Pope is telling the faithful to stay away from the churches.
And all because the scientists said so.
You know, you look at the Black Death, and it was a completely different story back then.
Yeah.
So we have, I mean, you know, I'm a medievalist.
So for medievalists, it's usually easy to be a bit optimistic about the present.
Right.
Because our baseline is so low.
The 14th century.
So, you know, I look at the Black Death.
Yeah, I look at the Black Death in the 14th century.
I look at the COVID-19 crisis, and I say, wait, well, we have made some progress.
in the last 500 years, not only in scientists being able to really understand the epidemic, but also in the trust that people have in these institutions.
And you know, when the Black Death spread and the King of France, he asked the medical faculty of the University of Paris, the most prestigious university, to write a treatise, get your best minds on this and tell me what's happening.
And they got the best minds of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris, and they published the report.
And according to them, the problem was basically astrological.
That, as far as I remember, Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter were in a particularly bad conjuncture, which has caused the corruption of the Earth And this is what's causing the mortality of about between a third and half of the population.
Now, there were people who disagreed in the University of Paris, and the minority report was that actually it was the fault of earthquakes that released toxic gases from the bowels of the earth, and this is what is killing the people.
And, of course, you had the conspiracy theory of the day, which was that the Jews have poisoned the wells, so you had a wave of pogroms against the Jewish communities all over Europe.
I think we have made some progress since then.
Yeah.
You're forgetting the blasphemers who had their tongues cut out because blasphemy had to be part of this problem.
Yeah, and another thing about several of the points you raised, that yes, we have some common desires, like we don't want to die, we don't want the economy to crash, but another very common desire to people all over the world from all walks of life is to be right.
That it's very important for people to be correct in their fundamental beliefs in life.
It's very, very difficult to admit that you're wrong.
People will do terrible things to others and to themselves just not to admit that I've made a mistake.
I'm wrong.
And, you know, especially when it comes to the deep stories that give meaning to life.
Our mind is a factory.
Creating stories that give meaning to life.
And for many people, the worst thing that can happen to you ever is to find out that the story that you created or that somebody else created and you have adopted.
And for years, this has been the bedrock of how you understand your life.
And this is what gives meaning to life.
To admit that this story is fictional, it's full of errors, it's full of mistakes.
Many people would prefer to die than to do that, or would prefer to drink bleach than to do that.
And that's also very, very deep in the human psyche, in human nature, in human history.
And, you know, there are so many examples of the terrible things that people would do just to prevent admitting that they made a mistake.
So in this sense, it's not so surprising what's happening.
And again, the situation compared to the Middle Ages, even here we've made substantial progress in our ability and willingness to put these stories to the test.
Yeah, okay, so on the topic of progress, let's imagine what sort of further progress we might make in the aftermath of this, or as we even just process this problem.
Because, you know, the next 12 months, or optimistically, perhaps, 12 months between now and a vaccine, there's a fair amount of uncertainty as to just what normal life might be like.
And even after a vaccine, even if one were magically delivered in a much shorter time frame than that, there are economic consequences we'll be living with and just an opportunity to rethink how we live individually and collectively.
And there's a potential rewriting of norms and certainly an improvement to institutions that we could envision.
I'm tempted to ask you how you're envisioning or hoping for a post-COVID world with respect to certain variables.
One variable that has been on my mind for several years at this point, but its importance seems quite heightened now, and I think in the next year it's going to dominate many other concerns, and it's the issue of wealth inequality and
The remedies for that and the acknowledgement of it as a problem and redistribution or something else as a remedy and the way in which it interacts with, you know, political polarization and populism and all of this, I think, is going to come to a boil fairly soon because it's being exacerbated by how people are affected by this pandemic.
Do you have any thoughts about wealth inequality?
That it's bad.
I agree that it's getting worse.
And I think we have a choice here.
I mean, generally, I don't think that the future is inevitable, or that there is one obvious outcome to this crisis.
This crisis gives us a lot of choices to make, difficult choices, but also opportunities to change the way that society is built.
And it all depends on the decisions, on the political decisions that we will take in the next 12 months, as you say.
Which is why my basic understanding of the COVID-19 crisis, it's not a health crisis, it's above all a political crisis.
We can deal with the virus.
Again, it's not the Black Death.
We have the scientific knowledge and the technological tools to overcome the epidemic itself.
The real problems are in the realms of economics and politics.
And here, nothing is inevitable.
It's all a matter of political choices.
So I hope that people and the media would focus less on the latest statistics about the number of sick people or the number of ventilators in the hospitals.
And focus more on the political decisions.
For example, governments are distributing enormous amounts of money.
And it's a very big question.
Who gets what?
I mean, is this money being used to save failing corporations because of their mistakes, which were made long before this epidemic?
Is it being used to finance enterprises whose managers and owners are friends with this minister or that minister?
Is it used to save small private businesses, restaurants, travel agents, hotels, whatever?
That's a political choice that we need to supervise very, very closely.
And we have to do it now.
You know, I mean, people are so overwhelmed by this crisis, but In this situation of chaos, people who have tunnel vision have an immense advantage.
If the only thing you care about in life is getting more power or getting more money, this is a perfect opportunity for you.
Whereas many other people are confused and uncertain because they're honestly looking for a way to come out of the crisis, improve the situation of the population, solve the economic difficulties.
If the only thing you focus on Is getting another billion dollars.
This is a very easy time to do it if you have the right connections.
So I hope that the public in different countries would really monitor, would be aware that this is happening.
And you can't wait until the crisis is over to look back.
And see what has been done.
It has to be done in real time.
If you wait until 2021, it's basically like coming to a party after the party is over.
And the only thing left to do is to wash the dirty dishes.
I mean, the trillions are being divided, distributed right now.
In 2021, there will be nothing left to distribute.
So we have to really, you know, there is a lot of talk of surveillance these days, and people mostly think about monitoring individuals, whether they are sick or not, and who you met and where you went to break the chains of infection.
But we, at the same time, we need very close surveillance of who is making the decisions and who is getting what.
And the same way it turns out to be quite easy to follow all of us around and see what we do, it should be equally easy to follow the government and see to whom it gives the money.
What are your thoughts about the future of education?
Because you still work as a professor part of the year, don't you?
Yeah, I still teach at university.
Now I'm doing it online with Zoom, which works better than I imagined.
It has its difficulties, but yeah, I continue to teach three courses.
This is something I commented on in my last podcast, but this for me was indicative of just how crazy and distorting financial incentives can be in an environment where certain ethical decisions seem to me to be crystal clear.
You have Harvard University, which has the largest endowment of any college, I think probably in the world, certainly in the United States, It has $40 billion, firing its non-essential staff because of the pandemic, and also taking government money, which now they've been forced to give back under embarrassment.
It seems to me that that's a symptom of something, just a lack of connection to what should be the real mission of an institution like Harvard, certainly to the values of the institution.
I think many people are experiencing a fairly hard reset in just how they think about the role of a university and the economics of it, obviously.
I mean, the cost of education has gone up faster than inflation for many, many years.
And you have, even among those who have succeeded in life, you know, by economic standards, the common experience, the ubiquitous experience of the most fortunate people in our societies coming out of their period of education with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, for which alone among all the debts in human life can't be discharged in bankruptcy, at least in the United States.
What could education look like if, I told you two years from now, education is very different?
What do you think the main differences would be?
I'm teaching at university, but I'm not really an expert on education, so it's a bit difficult for me to say.
I mean, what I am experiencing at first hand is this shift to online teaching, which is likely to continue to some extent even after the crisis is over.
This can lead to All kinds of dangerous directions.
You know, a lot of the experience of going to college doesn't happen in class.
It happens during the break time.
I mean, very often, even in Harvard, I hope I don't insult anybody, but even in Harvard or Oxford or in my university in Jerusalem, very often the most important lessons are being taught during the break times.
And with teaching courses online at Zoom, of course there are break times, but you're alone in your home.
You don't meet the other students for a chat in the cafeteria.
And I think that whatever happens to education, we should always remember the very central role of the community and of the social interaction and find ways to preserve it, even give it a more central role, more importance.
And also, you know, any process that undergoes digitalization really changes its nature and, again, becomes much more open to surveillance and monitoring.
You know, if you went to the University of Leipzig in East Germany in 1980, so probably, I don't know, a quarter of the students were Stasi agents or Stasi informants.
And you knew that whatever you say in class, whether you are the professor or one of the students, it will be reported to the Stasi.
And this wasn't a very nice experience, of course.
But again, as I mentioned before, the Stasi couldn't really analyze effectively all the enormous amounts of information that it got from all these agents.
There is a wonderful film I think it's called Life of Others or something like that.
Yeah, it was a great film.
Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, there was this inability to process all the data.
Now, when university goes online and I teach my students in Zoom, I tell them that you have to take into account that everything I say and everything you say is being recorded and being stored somewhere.
And unlike in Leipzig in 1980, it's being analyzed and could be analyzed by AI, which means that you have to be much more careful.
Not necessarily about, you know, political issues.
It's more the fear that your entire life will become one long job interview.
That whatever you do, whatever you say at any moment during your life, in class or in break time, could come to haunt you.
In five years or 10 years, when we apply for some job, and an AI is going over your entire record, not only your marks at the end of the year, but over everything.
And based on that, they decide whether they want you or not.
It's a question not only of your marks, it's really a question of your personality, of the way you interact.
And so, you know, the thought of your entire life, everything you do at any moment is actually part of a job interview.
And also part of what goes into the system to decide whether to accept you to university in the first place, because maybe everything you did in school was also monitored and analyzed.
This is one of the on the one hand, one of the most promising areas in education, because the promise, the prize is to have an education system that knows you personally.
It's not a teacher with 30 students who aims at the lowest common denominator.
strength and weaknesses.
And it's not a teacher with 30 students who aims at the lowest common denominator.
It's a system that really knows you better than any teacher, better even than your parents.
Many people are afraid that this will just kind of amplify your pre-existing tendency, but no, not necessarily.
It can actually challenge you more than any human teacher in the world.
I don't know, you want to develop your musical tastes, it will know the exact amount of triggers of new genres of music to introduce you to and will even know the right moment to do it.
It will follow your emotional state and will discover, will know when you're most open To learn about a new autistic genre.
So there are enormous promises, but then there are also enormous dangers.
And I think, like with democracy, also with education, this is the biggest question.
How would we deal in the educational system with these new abilities to hack human beings?
On the surveillance side, isn't China already pushing pretty far in this direction with their social credit score system?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the dystopian side of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, again, it has a utopian side and a dystopian side.
Dystopias usually don't happen unless they also have a utopian side.
You need a really big carrot in order to convince people to go in that dangerous direction.
And with the new surveillance technology, there are enormous positive promises.
Otherwise, there would have been, you know, no real danger.
I mean, who would like to do it if it's not really good for anything?
You must know Nick Bostrom's argument about what he calls turnkey totalitarianism.
When you look at various forms of existential risk and you sort of just imagine that the not-too-far future where we discover that certain technologies are just so easily used to destroy millions of lives, and they can't be uninvented, that we now need a system of massive surveillance and very quick intrusion into people's lives to make sure those technologies aren't used.
Let's say it becomes just trivially easy for anyone to weaponize a new virus that spreads like measles and has an 80% mortality rate.
Well then, in the presence of that knowledge and that technology, well, we need to know what you're doing with your hands at all times.
Yeah.
It is easy to see how we could get ourselves into a predicament like that.
Yeah, that's the really kind of dystopian scenario.
There are all kinds of middle-of-the-way dystopias on the way there.
I mean, one of my favorite scenarios is simply that authority shifting by a lot of small steps imperceptibly from humans to algorithms.
And humans basically just going along with that because it's more convenient it's easier it has a lot of advantages and if they wake up at a certain point and realize that this is very dangerous it's already too late to reverse it.
And actually, one of my favorite scenarios is this is happening to the Chinese Communist Party.
I mean, we tend to think about computers taking over and the danger of all these technologies, usually in a democratic setting, like what will happen to the U.S.
if Facebook wants to become the dictatorial government.
But it's interesting to think what could happen to the Chinese Communist Party if it gives too much power to the algorithms.
One of the most important functions within the Chinese Communist Party is to decide who gets promoted.
You know, at least in the lower and middle ranks of the party, appointments are really by merit.
I mean, far more than, say, in the United States or in many democracies.
But then the question is, how do you know who really has done well in his or her previous job and should be promoted?
And at present, you have all these thousands upon thousands of party officials who are collecting and analyzing data, but it's extremely tempting to just give it to an algorithm.
Which, of course, the algorithm will not choose the Politburo members or the next chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, but he, it, will be given the power, the authority, to increasingly make decisions about the lower ranks of the party.
And I have this vision that one day the Politburo members wake up and realize that the party has been taken over by the values of the algorithm that appointed all the lower ranks, and it's not what they wanted, it's not what they envisioned, and it's too late to resist it.
Some Jewish software engineer will be blamed for hacking the Chinese communist algorithm in the end.
No, the funny thing is, it doesn't have to be human hacking.
It's just, you know, you have machine learning, that you set certain goals at the beginning, you know, like with Bostrom's paperclip thought experiment, but on a more kind of human level, that yes, the algorithm was given certain parameters, certain Matrix to make the decisions and it learned on the way and eventually it created a party very very different from what the big bosses wanted.
Yeah, there's no doubt that something like that is happening either algorithmically or just by the happenstance of the technology we're producing.
If you just look at what the effect of social media on all of us, it does have the character of a psychological experiment that no one has really designed.
We've all submitted to it, and it's having whatever effect it's having, and we're occasionally worrying about it, but succumbing to it all the while.
It's not planned in advance.
Okay, so finally, how do you view the prospects of the role of religion changing?
And maybe, I know you have some thoughts on the way our attitude toward death might also shift here in the near term.
How are you thinking about it?
Our existential concerns and the institutions that tend to minister to them.
If we start with death and its connection to religion, then you know for most of history, certainly in my favorite period of the Middle Ages, death was omnipresent and the basic attitude to death was kind of learned helplessness or resignation.
That God decides when and why we die and we humans have very little ability to outsmart death or to postpone death.
And that's in a world where, you know, at least a third of children never made it to adulthood because of childhood diseases or malnutrition.
And in which, when an epidemic like the Black Death came along, nobody had any real idea what was happening, what was killing people, and what could be done about it.
So death was extremely important to people.
It was really the, I would say, the main source of meaning in life was death.
The most important events in your life, which gave meaning to everything you experienced, happened after you died.
Only after you died, you were either saved or damned.
Only after you died, you really understood what this was all about.
So basically, in a world without death, there is no heaven, there is no hell, there is no reincarnation.
So religions like Christianity and Islam and Hinduism and so forth just make absolutely no sense.
And what happened over the last few centuries is really amazing in the way that our attitude to death has changed.
And this is, to a large extent, I would say, the result of the scientific revolution.
When science came along, and especially the medical sciences, and started to really understand why people die, what is causing epidemics, what is causing infectious diseases, and so forth, and human life expectancy jumped by, you know, from under 40 to over 80 in the developed world today, two things happened.
First of all, death became a far less important part of life.
The meaning of life, at least for many people and for many ideologies, no longer comes from what happens to us after we die.
If you look at most modern ideologies, they have completely lost interest in what happens to us after we die.
I mean, if you ask yourself what happens to a communist after he or she dies, or what happens to a feminist after he or she dies, I mean, nobody even talks about it.
It's no longer so important.
And our basic attitude now is that death is increasingly just a technical problem.
If people die, it's because not of divine will and not because of some forces of nature, it's because of human failure.
If humans die in some accident, then we search who to blame or who to sue, because obviously somebody made a mistake.
And you see it now with this pandemic.
I mean, our attitude in most of the world is very different from the Black Death.
We don't raise our hands to God.
and implore him to do something and tell ourselves that this might be a punishment from God from our misdeeds?
No!
We assume that humans have the power to overcome this, to contain epidemics, and if we still have an epidemic, it's because somebody made a mistake.
Somebody screwed up big time.
If you compare, I don't know, the situation in New Zealand to the situation in the U.S., you don't tell yourself, well, this is probably an indication that God loves the New Zealanders and wants to punish the Americans.
No, we say that there was a difference in the policies of the different governments, and if the situation in the U.S.
is really bad, then somebody made a mistake, and the only question is who.
Basic attitude, which we now see in this epidemic, is a mixture.
I mean, from resignation, we've shifted to a mixture of anger and hope.
If somebody dies, we are angry, because we assume it's some kind of human mistake.
And also, we have hope that, as in the case of this epidemic, everybody's hoping for the vaccine.
Everybody's asking when the vaccine will be ready, not if the vaccine will be ready.
Yeah.
Even in the context where there's no obvious human error, even if we were all behaving impeccably, we were all New Zealand, we would view the absence of a vaccine here as a problem to be solved by human ingenuity.
It's not something to be prayed for.
Basically, all of human misfortune on some level becomes an engineering problem to be solved.
And the fact that we haven't solved it is just because we're in this contingent place in human history where we just haven't produced the requisite knowledge yet to solve it.
But clearly the path forward is a matter of producing that knowledge, not waiting for some invisible agent to sort out our lives for us.
Yeah, and even more so, we would tend to see it as a political issue in things like budgets.
Yes, we lack the knowledge, but we lack the knowledge because we didn't invest the money in the right places.
And we would check the records of past years, and why did we spend so much money on, I don't know, researching diets, and didn't spend that money on researching viruses and producing vaccines?
So, we would go the extra step of saying even this, even the amount of knowledge we have is really the result of making the right or wrong political decisions where to invest our resources.
So, that's about death and religion is of course tied to that.
What we've seen over the last few centuries is that the role of religion shrank dramatically Again, I know that many people today don't see it or think it's going in the reverse, that religion is becoming more important.
But when you look at the big picture, the roles, the places where people turn to religion have really, really shrank over the last few centuries.
In the Middle Ages, medicine was above all the realm of religion and religious leaders.
If you read many of the sacred texts of humanity, you find that very often religious leaders, a very big part of their job is to be healers.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that most of what Jesus does is heal people.
He's more a doctor than, you know, a spiritual guide.
And today, even the religious people, they go to the doctor, not to the priest or the rabbi or the mullah, when something goes wrong medically.
Only when all hope is lost, only when the doctor says there is nothing to be done, then okay, you pray.
I mean, it can't harm, so why not?
But medicine has shifted from the realm of religion to the realm of science.
And this has happened to many other areas of activity.
Similarly, if there is not enough rain, so you turn to the engineers and you turn to the agronomists to find a solution.
Maybe desalinize water from the ocean.
Maybe produce new strains of wheat that can grow with less water.
All kinds of things!
In the time of the Bible, over the Middle Ages, you would turn to the priest to pray for rain.
And the basic reason why this shift happened is simply because science has proved itself far superior in healing people and solving droughts and things like that.
And the reason for that, and that really brings us back to the beginning of our conversation, is that science is far more willing to admit mistakes and try something else.
The big expertise of a lot of religious leaders is not healing and not solving droughts, but it's finding excuses.
They have been like the world champions in finding excuses.
Like, there is no rain, so you do the rain dance, and there is still no rain, so the shaman or the priest would give you a very good excuse why, despite dancing the rain dance, there is still no rain.
That's the real expertise of a lot of religious leaders.
And over centuries, people simply realized that science is becoming better and better at healing people, religion is becoming better and better at finding excuses, and if you really want to heal your disease, then you go to the doctor.
And that's why the importance, the scope of religion has shrunk except in one place where it's still extremely important and this is in defining our identity and giving meaning to life.
Defining who are we and who are they and What is the meaning of my existence?
This is somewhere that science has little to offer, so religion is still extremely important.
And I don't think that this will change dramatically in the wake of COVID-19 or in the coming decades.
Religions will change, that's for sure.
I mean, religions constantly change throughout history.
They claim they are eternal, that they are unchanging.
That Christianity today is the same as it was a thousand years ago in the time of Jesus.
But the fact is they constantly adapt to new economic and political and technological realities.
And they're quite good at it.
Otherwise, they wouldn't have survived.
And this will continue to happen in the 21st century, too.
Has there been anything about this experience that has altered your priorities personally at this point, with respect to your career or your personal life or just how you spend your time moment to moment?
It certainly reminded me, like so many other people, of the importance of social connections and intimate relations with people, with friends, with family.
It's what I really miss most in the present situation is, you know, just meeting friends, not via Zoom or some other online gadget or the telephone.
Yeah, for me, that's the main thing I have been thinking about many of the issues of the day long before This crisis erupted.
So, in this sense, I kind of came to it prepared or baked or half-baked.
Yeah, also, many people know this about you, perhaps not everyone, but you're somebody who's had a very long-standing meditation practice, and you spend a lot of time regularly on retreat.
And so, on some level, you have been preparing for this kind of disruption in your life, as, you know, I have for a very long time, and I almost feel perversely lucky to be this comfortable in this kind of circumstance, just psychologically.
Yeah, my practice has been of enormous help in this emergency.
And, you know, after spending 60 days in silent meditation without any phones, without talking to anybody for two months, so the last two months have been, you know, it's far easier.
I mean, you can read, you can pick up the phone and talk with somebody.
But still, I mean, one of the things that makes it possible for me to go on these meditation retreats is knowing that my loved ones, my husband, my friends, my family, they are safe, and that the world is generally doing okay.
Now, it's very, very different.
I mean, I look at what's happening to the world, and there are a lot of things to worry about, so I don't have the kind of, you know, peaceful cocoon.
that I have in the meditation retreats.
Well, Yuval, it's been great to get you back on the podcast.
Your voice is as ever relevant.
It's hard to imagine what could have conspired to make it more relevant, but all of those dials have been turned to 11, it seems, so it's really a great pleasure to speak with you again, so thank you for your time.
Thank you for inviting me, and thank you for everybody listening, and let's hope to do it again after this emergency is over and there is something else on the horizon.
Yeah, we'll have to talk about meditation someday.
We've promised that three times in a row and we can never get to it, so next time.
